Baffler Newsletter New email subscribers receive a free copy of our current issue. Baffler Newsletter New email subscribers receive a free copy of our current issue. Baffler Newsletter New email subscribers receive a free copy of our current issue.
That shallow and putrid trough we call the Mississippi River That shallow and putrid trough we call the Mississippi River American Heartworm Ben Metcalf , June 1998
As “money,” Bitcoin fulfills essentially none of money’s functions; as “currency,” its massive volatility has made it all but unusable. As “money,” Bitcoin fulfills essentially none of money’s functions; as “currency,” its massive volatility has made it all but unusable. Zealots of the Blockchain David Golumbia , March 2018
Found in Translation Toothache, Bleeding, Farewell Miljenko Jergović A personal history of the Siege of Sarajevo
Cascade Cindy Juyoung Ok This has been the season we splayed in rooms rewarded to us for an interlude by the ruse of others, well and coldly lit. You played a long, sometimes fitful song while my insides turned within me, the tissue outside its place, blood the wrong color. Ache has forged a lack of precision, I noted roughly as I laid and, too, I weighed less, worried chore-like that these ragged words might slip, be burdened with young meaning and I would be left to console my personal science, a fold of languages. The issue of the raged cells executed a regular cycle as they became reworded, displayed, and unaided again in bed I misread teaching for tending. Rebellion made rifts elsewhere when my edges disordered within or yours bloomed into orbit, time to lounge, to long, to lang around as ages riven.
Sadacre Vi Khi Nao Your face is standing near the door of my sadness, inside a house made of nothing, pressing against the plexiglass of the shooting range of my depression, in goggles & determination the surround sound of the bullseye target, the bullet of amnesia, the grenade of memory—Fall stains, ochre sorrow and turquoise pain and then the umbrella catches the rainshower— of melancholy. You are lost in your thoughts: I was just a door you couldn’t unlock and the clouds hover over us like tàu vũ trụ, its aluminum façade a second mirror or lake for our hidden sky that night I refused to make love to the five different fires of mania or to a reticent patio sitting alone in a sphinxlike forest— all the appliances in this vacant house are charged to a wall, plunging ennui into the abyss of my nearly empty expression, a depravity of modernity, & beyond it, the inevitable void, the illusions of subsistence cleaving ethos by ethos into a vocal cord outsung by an un-sonic veil—a fog of damnation: it’s not a polar bear crying into a pinecone, but a bush hushed by loneliness, hallucinations, & despondency & insulated from the turbine of painkillers & antidepressants, I am standing against the basin of time, near an Android phone— a device that can’t mirror the higher strata of my subconscious an electronic ruler to post-measure history against history: If a smartphone has to announce to the world that it is smart It’s like telling an ego that its self-image belongs to the number zero, whose magnitudes are reduced to a disarrangement of binary codes: she/her, their/them, he/him, she/him, he/her, their/she, it/they, and who is right to say: gender isn’t an emotional game of Tetris a collapsing playground of incongruency, sadder than conformity? Our psyche is walking around in an anthropogenic beauty parlor waking up gas stations, spas & saunas, lawnmowers, nail salons by driving a bipolar drone called being human into a polar bear whose coat is a sad case of dandruff and thinks that hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy is a kind of climate change or an interactive 3-D simulator only seen in war zones.
