steve barbaro

{ 11 / 14 / 2024 ~ 11:22 pm }

to an extent this is an expression of a recurrent historical tendency toward millenarianism, but I think it also captures something about how AI hype/doomerism functions as/is a product of climate disavowal: it provides an excuse to abdicate moral decision making.

extremely engaging contemporary poetry project-object ... pretty next-level honestly cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/06...

read this story by @perfidiousscript.bsky.social !!! goes so hard ... goes like crazy ... genuine dalliance with divinity

No, that's not a cloud, it's a wildfire I can see from where I live.

i "grew up" listening to 90s rap & i love all that stuff but.. i hate the constant lifelong reprise-worship of those same albums over & over.. reminds me of boomers who ingest nothing much beyond the same ~500 monocultural "classic rock" songs their whole ass lives

The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded like a not quite convincing attempt to reconstitute the actual bodily consistency of whoever was in fact (apparently) speaking.

you can stop wandering when things stay perpetually good, which is to say never

neuroaesthetics?! yeah OK whatever buddy that's just me whenever i open a window … & find myself piqued by the stray Western Avenue exhaust fumes wafting through the trees

Jason Fuhrman with a kind, thoughtful, episode on his Youtube channel about 'The Veldt Institute' www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGat...

even more pleasurable than reading a friend's book & finding the book to be a very great book—emailing said same friend to tell them their own book is indeed a great book & being assured that the book in fact could well have been a substantially better book ... the true literary empyrean ☁️ ✍️ 🌀

armed conflicts more than doubled in the last 15 years

From the archives, 2024: "The White Album" is, technically, I think, both autofiction and novelette, on Tokyo’s seasons and the lives of salarymen, published in new_sinews Issue 8, edited and designed by @illepitaph.bsky.social, in inimitable style. www.newnewsinews.com/issue8/album

1 of the most fundamental & indeed dismal discrepancies of the current moment—believing, namely, that you are expressing something essential & even "actionable" ... while functioning, for all intents & practical purposes, as mere data

ive been working on this poem "Shitty Fascist-Adjacent Wackass & Even Indeed Quite Precious Quote-Unquote Flash Fiction" for so long ... i hope to share my poem "Shitty Fascist-Adjacent Wackass & Even Indeed Quite Precious Quote-Unquote Flash Fiction" w/ friends quite soon :)

The know your enemy podcast interviewed an entrepreneur presenting as disillusioned fascist, is this the third time? such fucking marks those guys

the AI email gmail is suggesting i send is actively referencing text from another recent email i sent, but assuming wrongly that this potential email's sendee knows the sendee of the other email that the AI's referencing ... does gmail-AI believe email 2 be a function of inherently cozy community ??

Thank you @pw.org for including me in Literary MagNet! It was a lot of fun to talk about some of the great literary magazines I’ve had the honor to work with. www.pw.org/content/lite... @graywolfpress.bsky.social @diggingpress.com @new-sinews.bsky.social @talkvomit.bsky.social

read a bit from PLANE OF CONSUMMATE FINITUDE last night here in Chicago—been some months since the last time ... perhaps you might be interested in a copy! or else (alas) simply let this message slide down your timeline oblivionwardly :) newnewsinews.com/plane

You can now read "Eulalio Salmantino, 1921-2000" in the spring issue of @exactingclam.bsky.social: www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-20... Very grateful to Guillermo and Jacob.

The speeding; staring. Incessantly consummated sprawlscapes. Fastfood signage looming crypto-crucifixially. Long drive after long self-un-fulfilling drive down earsearing arteries.

{ 1 / 24 / 2026 ~ 9:38 pm }

The bullshit asymmetry principle, or why Bannon's strategy to 'flood the zone with shit' is so hard to counter. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandol...

this is a jellyfish bruschetta acct now ... all about the jellyfish bruschetta & in fact *only* about the jellyfish bruschetta ... & if it's not about the jellyfish bruschetta sincerest apologies but—just can't fuck with it :(

neoliberal professionalism lives on in a weirdly pure form in the contemporary anglosphere poetry world ... some of whose constituents are frenetically publishing self-promoting organizing readings self-commemorating etc.. all of which actions (even more bizarrely) are often utterly bleh

almost finished reading DeWitt & Gridneff's YOUR NAME HERE—love the perspectival shifts ... the hyperclever cultural referents—well, i have lots of thoughts.. truly an E-Mail Novel ... seems to be present-tensely tackling a culture already ~20 years in the past; still, quite the dizzingly fun read

Susanna kneeling like Gabriel in an Annunciation and everybody with banderoles. What a weird Susanna and the Elders from Lorenzo Lotto, 1517. Florence, Uffizi.

{ 1 / 22 / 2026 ~ 12:28 pm }

The $1 billion OBBBA line-item for DOD "border operations" and the "temporary detention of migrants" is being used by the military as a slush fund to set up private-contractor infrastructure to treat the United States as a theater of military operations (Region 27) in coordination with DHS.

disturbing but not-un-enlightening to trace the increasing adjacency of "alt-lit" types to unabashed fascists on the other app ... not terribly surprising—if you just auto-concede to lacking any sort of intellectual substance let alone coherence, you're bound to default to the zeitgeist's toxicities

A poem of mine is the subject of the inaugural translation puzzle contest in N+1 Magazine’s Miss Translation column by Bela Shayevich Funnily enough, when I wrote it my first thought was that it could never be translated, and it’s been translated into more languages than any other poem I’ve written

characteristic sentence from my novel-in-progress: "One couldn’t help but think it was the very distinctive non-distinction which paradoxically if not-un-culture-specifically fueled the fame."

"We’re selling vibes, textures. A sunset on the hills in Chianti, riding a bike on an island in Sicily. Imagine us discussing it in parliament with an Italian accent: l’importanza del made in Italy. We use the English expression unironically. It’s aimed at Americans," Francesco Pacifico writes.

venetian bottleglass window +++ concomitant shadow

A lot of alt lit folks feel like raccoons in the dumpster of literacy. They have a certain nocturnal luster but you know they’d probably give a life-threatening illness to your pet

mint🌿🌿🌿

a high lyric fictive sequence ... as assuredly rhythmic as it is philosophically rich ... "Entries" by Zachary Gary ... new_sinews issue9 newnewsinews.com/entries

{ 1 / 27 / 2017 ~ 2:56:16 pm }

retrofuturistic diagnoses ... apportioned into clinically incisive increments ... "A Chronology of the Not Too Distant Future" by Lisa Hsiao Chen.. new_sinews issue9 newnewsinews.com/chronology

sending out some snailmail fiction submissions ... the paper; the staples ... the optimism ... the pagination! like it's ~2007

g.a.m.e. (genuine arcade machine entertainment) (1991) '..it looks like a coin operated arcade machine but is actually a system for home game consoles. users can connect up to 3 different video game systems & a vcr to the unit. it has a $2,500 suggested retail price.' archive.org/details/elec...

the gulfs the crags the roads the figs the teeth the peaks the magma the lizards the dirt the graves the cacti the snails the sheep

meticulously rhythmic tale of procuring employment ... full of booze & colors & mythic precision ... "Shortbread" by @zebulonhourse.bsky.social ... new_sinews issue9 newnewsinews.com/shortbread

{ 12 / 30 / 2025 ~ 8:30 pm }

‘On the night of 28 February 2004, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he found himself in the CAR.’ From the archive: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

Selinunte indeed—Greek colony on the southwest Africa-facing coast of Sicily. Dead ass city: twentysome decades. Monuments preserved as monumentally self-confusing debris. Ruins; wreckage. Fixity fixity fixity!

meandering poem-staggered-within-its-own-singular-poem-ness ... as inclusive as it is evasive ... "Blazes (Trails)" by Hannah Brooks-Motl ... new_sinews issue9 newnewsinews.com/blazes

Over 937,000 Tech Jobs Gone So Far in 2036 — Here’s Exactly Which Skills Are Now Untouchable.