Snake Plissken's Letter to Sallie Mae Student Loan Services

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The entirety of your case, which asserts that ‘I now owe a sum of money because I spent what I had borrowed on the terms of an agreement I signed according to which I would repay it’, rests on the mistaken assumption that the five instances of “I” in this sentence correspond to the same
  From the desk of Snake Plissken July 14, 2025 Dear Sallie Mae Student Loan Services, I have received your notice informing me that the current outstanding balance on my student loan account is $377,394.91. In fact, contrary to the insinuations you have made (“If you have changed your permanent residence, please be sure to update your account…”) that imply my non-payment is a consequence of mere absent-mindedness, I have received every notice sent previously over the past forty years, ever since I finished my Master’s Program in Critical Humanities, with a minor in Demolitions, at the age of 41.  I had hoped that my decision to knock out all electricity in the developed world a decade after I received the diploma as well as my later decision, after the Madagascar debacle, to kick off a premature peak oil crisis,… Read More...

A film in the catacinema

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The ocean froze. Montage was exciting and vacant. The movement of history was expressed through the three-way cross-cutting of pin stripes, the melting of glaciers, and a dog trying to ride a skateboard. Many workers went on strike and struck out toward the sea. Why should we stay at the factory gates, they sang, if
The vault went dark and stayed that way.  A pitch dark, such that neither nose nor hands were visible.  There were, like every time, a few echoing giggles, a couple whoops to hear the sound bounce off the dome.  The dark lasted and some were bored.  A man called out get on with it, already! to the laughter of others, and another said at least give us a little popcorn, for chrissakes! The dark lasted without reply.  By degrees, however, it became clear that this was not the same dark that had been there before.  It was a queer darkness.  Unright somehow, as though it was not the dark of lights that were not switched on but of an illumination obscured and crowded out.  A blotted light.  The audience stopped moving, stopped murmuring.  And the dark began to rustle, because… Read More...

Glossary

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Arrested on numerous occasions: bank robbery, impersonating a doctor, impersonating an ambulance driver, armed bank robbery, insurance fraud, assaulting an officer, impersonating a cruise ship captain...
NOTES ON FORM: Horror/horrifying/horrible: Horror is the wracking contradiction between material and the categories of abstraction, undergone by a subject, impelled by a confrontation with the horrible. Horror is the moment in which the incompatibility of material and categories roars, creeps, or seeps, not into view, but against view. Such that materials - such as a pile of flesh, the recognition that you are in fact eating the pile of flesh that was your husband, an endless plateau, awaking in the grave - and categories - such as the body, free will, nature, finitude - collide like trains. This is not an illumination but a darkness that demands the recalibration of categories and which threatens, forever, to lack the possibility of doing so. ‡ Horrible means simply that which might provoke such a confrontation: not mute material, but material already… Read More...

The Noonday Shadow

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First, they are run you over, then they insist on not polishing their ornament. Such is the ultimate sign of luxury: to have a $320,000 ornament, supported by a mass of ramming weight and speed, and to let it get rusty.
  BREAKING NEWS! In Spain, the Angel of History moonwalked into the torched present. Elsewhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_jzYC2DQmY He did exactly what they tell you to do. Also, one wakes up to a screen that, when clicked, tells you how "Ces derniers ont fait usage de grenades lacrymogènes afin de forcer les barrages qui empêchaient l'accès au mont et ainsi disperser les manifestants. Ceux-ci ont répliqué par des jets de pierres." and, when unclicked, will remind you that, should you so desire to entirely forgo the realms of human sociability in the name of recycling, you can make a lovely hat from previously-used aluminum tinfoil. The aluminum foil in which stones to be thrown come packaged, of course.     ---- POINT OF DEPARTURE “Biologists have prepared ‘red books’ of extinct or endangered species; ecologists have their ‘green books’ of threatened habitats. … Read More...