Saturday, April 30, 2005

"His writing, as Schalkwyk points out, is full of labyrinthine cities and restlessly criss-crossed landscapes..." (via wood_s lot)

"I've also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, 'there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major' and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I'd like to do myself. I'd like to write like Tennyson but make it new." (via Hotel Point)


"Ay; strange and startling is the first hot tear
That we have shed for years; and which hath lain
Like to a water-fairy in the eye's
Blue depths--spell-bound in the socket of the soul.
Death brought it not--pain brought it not--nor shame;
Nor penitence--nor pity--nor despair:
Nothing but love could. For a fearful time
We can keep down the floodgates of the heart,
But we must draw them sometime; or it will burst
Like sand this brave embankment of the breast,
And drain itself to dry death. When pride thaws--
Look for floods!"

--F*stus


Spooky.


Friday, April 29, 2005

"Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on." --Al*xand*r Smith, Dr*amthorp


"For traditional Muslims, the converse of tyranny was not liberty but justice." --B*rnard L*wis, What W*nt Wrong? (2002)


"I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fugue."

--Plath


"Forthwith, in fell Gorgonian venom steeped." --Cranch’s V*rgil


"And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature." --Dr*amthorp


Booty.


Thursday, April 28, 2005

Phranc: Cap*d Crusad*r

   (spoken:) When Pope John Paul 2 · was in Japan
   He read a comic book there · about the life
   Of St Francis of Assissi · and said the Pope,
   "I think there should be · a comic book about me,
   So let’s call up Stan Lee."

(R, fast:) And move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call "The Pope"

They hired a Roman Catholic artist
And a Roman Catholic artist too
Every word and picture in this comic book
Is gonna be the truth

He was born in Poland
This comic book will tell
When the Nazis were invadin' em
Everything was going to hell
He was going to be an actor
Then he became a priest
Even after he joined the clergy
He wrote a couple plays

Wow, what a comic book
What a supreme pontifical release
Sixty four full color pages
Five hundred thousand copies
Wow, what a comic book
What a supreme pontifical release
Sixty four full color pages
Of infallibility

So move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call "The Pope"
Move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call John Paul


(from Folksing*r (1985)


"Orb of perdition! thou too shalt die out,
And thy red sheeted flames shall fail for aye.
Thy palpitating piles of ruin, hot
With ever active agony, and quick
With soul immortal, down whose midnight heights
The wrath of God in cataracts of fire
Precipitates itself unceasingly,
Shall rush into destruction as a steed
Rushes into the battle, there to die.
Thy quivering hills of black and bloody hue,
Death-breathing, shall collapse like lifeless lungs,
And end in air and ashes."

--F*stus


Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Got back my bout-rim*:


Falling swiftly into no blonde June
our Huygens went, and through three hours' stress
stonily gazed upon an orange moon,
one whose mystery sometime did obsess
a teenaged poet. Striped like coral snake
and cobweb-frail, those flailings now so moot
--yet still can freeze: one dream of yellowcake
found, with rippling waves, intact, a beaut.
And I will clasp it to myself, as Garbo
maybe no mighty secret withheld; but play
as if it might. I also as a hobo
piled stones upon a shore, my art for a day:
this gadget’s voyage, last and lingered rhinestone,
maroon clouds under, never-again cologne.


Arch.

B*ll*rophon discussion.

Spasmodics.


Tuesday, April 26, 2005



Umbrist imgrat · abuts frost
misgiving ostrich stash · zinc ammunition

ogmic · broil
tantrum sty · fallback

ubangi huzzahs sting · askant off
frabjous · sobornost

using · ithyphallic amps
ginormous asparagus · against

wisp · avant
gird and aglow so · isotopic strum grunt


My vocabulary did this to you.


In Axum...



"NEW DELHI—Thanks to widespread outsourcing of telephone-service jobs, a sixth caste has blossomed in India: the Khidakayas, a mid-level jati made up of technical-support workers."


     'Pessoa: Ah, Quanta Melancolia

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

What an anguish stripped of hope,
what grief that only tastes the end;
if nevermore returned the ship,
if in the street a blind man fell--
give it up, there’s nothing else.

Without content, without repose
not a single hour of mine
in which a soul finds full employment;
the blind man in the street succumbs,
the ship then dwindles out of sight.

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.'

(My translation.)


Fado on M*tafilt*r.


Monday, April 25, 2005

Dr*am Tim*.


"The Kalmyks did not have the same relationship with Lenin that other Russians did. He had been one-quarter Kalmyk; and when the Soviet Union fell, Bair said, rather than take down Lenin's statue, the Kalmyks had simply turned it so that it faced out into the steppe." --Th* Ch*ss Artist


    "TOMORROW

Now that the others are gone, all of them, forever,
And they have your answer, and you have theirs, and the decision is made,
And the river of minutes between you widens to a tide of hours, a flood of days, a gulf of years and a sea of silence;

If, now, there are any questions you would like to ask of the shapes that still move and speak inaudibly in the empty room,
If there are any diferent arrangements you would like to suggest,

Make them to the riverboats, whose echoing whistle will be a clear reply,
Speak to the seagulls, their effortless flight will provide any answer you may wish to hear,
Ask the corner chestnut vendor, ask the tireless hammer and pulse of the subway,
Speak to the family on the illuminated billboard, forever friendly, or to the wind, or to the sign that sways and creaks above the stationer's door."

--F*aring


Sunday, April 24, 2005

"Glenn had played more than four hundred tournament games, which I would come to understand was something like saying he had written four hundred sonnets, in public, while opponents who didn’t particularly like him tried to write better sonnets using the same words." --Th* Ch*ss Artist


Sidis in Dallas I slink · insalubrious nadir
dunks aggry lost long · and slushfund igloo skirmish

liquid ingots nab · kingdom island noctid
simoom asomatous looming · ulnar brouhaha ruinous


"Imagine Tom Delay as Pol Pot. I certainly can."