Keynesianism for Babies
jackie wang
In the dream my professor has a super-genius baby that is monstrous looking. At 8 months the creature is already pining to read the canon. I try to explain The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to the baby. AK Press has just released a hardcover book called “Introduction to Heterodox Economics” with Marx’s visage emblazoned on the cover. Will it make a good baby book? No, this primer is far too basic for the baby. But why are they selling AK Press books at Walmart? Somehow the mother didn’t know there was something wrong with the baby, how unnerving I found its distorted face and big grey eyelids. But I feel it is my destiny to nurture the creature’s intellect, like the father of J. S. Mills. Yes I will feed the baby all the great works of political economy!
I dreamed that someone dreamed of a dead person on a gurney whose head was a roasted coconut with a smile frozen on it. It was the maraschino cherry eyes and icing smile of my dead grandma as an iHop pancake. I was inside the dreaming person’s dream—had she dreamed me?
Dream of the infernal subway, the man selling food and the woman hawking perfumes. Everyone was hustling because the economy had collapsed. Inside the station a woman sat on the floor, exhausted, while I meticulously examined her table of perfumes. In everything I sniffed I was looking for the scent of iris. There was an adulterated Guerlain that contained the scent of iris, but what was the base? Cedar wood? And who was I looking for? A stranger tried to help me find what I was looking for. But everywhere I went I was plagued by indecision. I had been separated from the group. Above the subway there were two food vendors selling carnival snacks. The first man had only three items: sausage dogs, giant ears of corn that were sliced in half, and mashed churros. The second vendor had pretzels. What would I get? A man passed me in line and ordered a hotdog.
Dreamed that Alex Jones called on his followers to attack everyone in Apple stores. I had a feeling that Asians would not be safe. I was trying to warn everyone that the white supremacists were about to rise up. The apple I ate tasted stringy. After several bites I realized that the apple was full of tiny elastic worms that I spit out into an empty drawer. The worms started to move in the drawer. I closed it quickly. Would the worms reproduce inside my guts? No, unless the apple contained a tapeworm. In the dream the tapeworm takes up residence in your mouth and becomes a second sentient tongue, more like a snake than a parasite. I was traveling so I had to get cash. The smoothie shop was about to be attacked by Alex Jones too.
Accoutrements
Jackie Wang
In the dream my dragnet brain is a perfect stenographer— everything I see is transubstantiated into words.
These gold rings—how many prisoners could be freed for the price of these rings?
I pull them off my fingers one by one and drop them on the table.
Take these, I tell the Black and Pink organizers. Are they solid gold?
Yes, they’re gold.
What is the weight of freedom?
The Ostrich Paradox
Jackie Wang
I had moved to New York but had not yet found a place to live. At some point I realized there was a route around the apartment complex that led to a coastal trail, a rocky seaside path through blooming flowers and mansions perched like the coast of northern Sardinia. The estates were covered in bright pink bougainvilleas. It was night. The waves were rising. Levees would have to be built to keep the water out. The keeper of the grounds told me about the elaborate tricks he used to convince the complacent residents that fortifications were necessary. You had to convince them that an imminent threat justified the construction project, otherwise they would resist it. “People are incapable of acting to prevent something that seems distant,” he said in dismay. Thus he had to fake a crisis to prepare for the real crisis to come. The grounds that he guarded looked like the Ringling Brothers estate in Sarasota, but this was NYC. It was as though Florida had a New York City skyline. But the skyscrapers looked distant. Gazing at the sparkling metropolis I wondered, Where would I live?
Dreamed that a young woman named Sally Porter had taken up residence in my shed office behind my parents’ house in Florida, beyond the brick wall, where the oak trees made a cave-like sanctuary, the Delphi of my childhood. She was good at growing plants, there were plants everywhere, I liked having them around but I could feel them slowly taking over.
My beloved dog, a wolf-like husky, kept me company, but I could see that the dog was dying. On the edge of the bed her breath became shorter and more strained until finally, at the moment of her death, she stopped breathing and fell off the bed. I wrapped the dog in a blanket and thought about where and how I was going to bury her, my only consolation now gone. I knew that my dog had been poisoned by Sally. Soon after the dog died a brown and white pig that looked like a mix of dog and swine, with a cartoonishly long snout for sniffing out ants, came trotting toward me to offer itself as my new consolation, my new companion. I knew this pig contained the soul of my dead dog, but I couldn’t figure out how to square that belief with the fact that the pig was born before my dog died. Did the soul hop from one mortal envelope to another? At some point I wanted to go home. The brick wall now had many gaps; it was a straight shot from the shed to my parents’ house. Nearby a neighbor was having a pool party. I jumped in on a noodle.