Saturday, December 18, 2004

"Thrift"

A squalid abyss of light
follows, wolf
to my planward thoughts; and Xanadu
flows frigid music.

Roiling coiling marrow-road of magnolia
without a thirst in this world
or door to carol:

what song thrusts past shadowy my way
full of frith
and swift, tumultuously craggy argot?


“At a towering concrete crucifix, planted between the church and the street, women with upraised arms pray indiscriminately to ‘Jezy’ (Jesus) or to ‘Bawon’ (Baron Samedi), the Vodou god of death and sexuality. For many Haitians, Jesus and the Baron are the same divine person sharing the same cross.” --Donald J Cons*ntino, Vodou Things (1998)

Th* Unconscious Civilization.

Friday, December 17, 2004

Almost a R*volution.

*dgar G. Ulm*r.

I want to watch Top Chimp try this, if God is so big on him. (via M*tafilt*r)




As my significant half points out, the Carpenters' song "Goodbye to Love" is a kind of zoomar: its composer Richard Carpenter has admitted being inspired by the title of a fictitious song in the 1940 film Rhythm on the River, in which Bing Crosby plays a composer who has a hit song referred to, though never heard, within the film.

"Abtar Ibtida"

Putrid pathways sang a glitch
rollchair stock is up. Faring dragon

if Dubyabacks go to Norad arroyo
now, iron rook

at acornfall star.
Support our insanity, O lungfish droog.

My soul is my own
raghdirst. Crystal tobacco

and orthography kills and acid
storp pidgin.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

"The Wind Suffers

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living name.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the old rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the willful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying."

--Laura Riding

Download a pdf of my IPOMO*A at this location.

Whit* Mughals.



Sunday, December 12, 2004

On my victrola- *ast Asia Trav*logu*.

A horror-w*st*rn-romanc* nov*l: Th* Cowboy and th* Vampir* by Hays & McFall.

"But the longevity of modernism does show what happens when the prophesied resolution of drastic social and psychological anxiety is postponed--what unsuspected capacities for ingenuity and agony, and the domestication of agony, may flourish in the interim." --Susan Sontag, Und*r th* Sign of Saturn (1980)





‘Dream of Evil

A gong’s brown-golden tones no longer loud--
A lover wakes in chambers growing dimmer,
His cheek near flames that in the window glimmer
Upon the stream flash rigging, mast and shroud.

A monk, a pregnant woman in the crowd;
Guitars are strumming, scarlet dresses shimmer.
In golden gleam the chestnuts shrink and simmer;
The churches’ mournful pomp looms black and proud.

The evil spirit peers from masks of white.
A square grows gloomy, hideous and stark;
Whispers arise on islands in the dark.

Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.
Siblings eye each other, trembling in the park.’

--G*org Trakl, Song of th* W*st (tr R Firmag*1988)