Saturday, September 10, 2005

" "The men of my islands are all a bit mad," William said proudly. "Let us look in the other case."
   "Virgil."
   "What is he doing here? What Virgil? The Georgics?"
   "No. Epitomae. I've never heard of it."
   "But it's Virgil of Toulouse, the rhetorician, six centuries after the birth of our Lord. He was considered a great sage..."
   "Here it says that the arts are poema, rethoria, grama, leporia, dialecta, geometria. ...But what language was he writing?"
   "Latin. A Latin of his own invention, however, which he considered far more beautiful. Read this; he says that astronomy studies the signs of the zodiac, which are mon, man, tonte, piron, dameth, perfellea, belgalic, margaleth, lutamiron, taminon, and raphalut."
   "Was he crazy?"
   "I don't know...those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions." "

--Th* Nam* of th* Ros*


Th* Oth*r China Mi*vill*.


Distant Dark Stars.


"The real war is in the air, civilian. We're just skirmishing on the macrolevel."

--Gr*gory F**l*y, Th* Oxyg*n Barons (1996)


"...his favorite foods are apples, yams, corn, and peppers."


Friday, September 09, 2005

Robotic Badz Maru. (via R*b*cca Blood)


   "Diaspora"

Zabalam
wag · aboard · bailing slipshod
damp ambush twinkling fall again bank
abroad wolf walking
crystal adorn ibis fang · with blood silk snort

agony · is flood wisp spurt



Taking th* Brim.


Sappho again.


Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. (via Cursor dot org)


Thursday, September 08, 2005

"The Carthaginians, in one of their campaigns against the Sicilian Greeks, had seized and carried away a valuable statue of the Grecian Apollo. This god of the vanquished had been selected as a gift worthy of the acceptance of the mother city, and had been placed at the footstool of Moloch in his Tyrian temple. The Grecian god, in this state of degradation, was naturally suspected of rejoicing at the approach of his [soldier] countrymen; and the morbid feelings of some Tyrians deluded them so far, as to lead them to imagine that he had appeared to them in their sleep, and announced his intention to desert. This case was brought before the magistrates, who could not discover a more effectual mode of allaying the popular apprehensions than by binding the disaffected statue, with golden chains, to the horns of Moloch’s altar."

--Th* Lif* and Actions of Al*xand*r th* Gr*at by the R*v. John Williams (1829)


   taciturnity
fatidic · scry silt stars dull
   braying and nitwit
story my oft fails · attic
pilgrim · adit with occult



"Fashion Muslims, that's all we need!"


"The worst-case scenario is three to five years before anybody finds it inhabitable."


"The O. E. D. ...is perhaps the 19th-century epic, as the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is that of the 18th."

--K*nn*r



Kar*n X has a hom* pag* now!


Wednesday, September 07, 2005

"To Virgilius, the Latins that could exist are as significant as the one that does."

--Vivi*n Law


   "The Enemy (From Baudelaire)

Naught but a long blind tempest was my youth,
  Sun-shot at times; the thunder and the rain
Have worked their havock with so little ruth
  That in my garden few red fruits remain.

Now have I reached the autumn of my thought,
  And shovel and pick must use some soil to save
From out the ruins that the rain hath wrought
  Where all around great pits gape like the grave.

Who knows if these last flowers of my dreams
Shall find beneath this naked strand that streams
  The mystic substance which their strength imparts?

O misery! misery! Time eats our lives,
  And that dark Enemy who gnaws our hearts
Grows by the blood he sucks from us, and thrives."

--J C Squir*



"Faithfullest, for I am infidel." --Jos* Garcia Villa


2M1207b facts. Also, GQ Lupi b.


"In medieval Ages the grammar, and even more the vocabulary of a specific language was not strictly defined."


Tuesday, September 06, 2005

with wraiths of Uuchathon · joust
this mission · this blindfold storm

aroma of rain · fury
afar · don't stop · last shadow

floppy and choking music
to gallop · traik Xanadu



alas
(via solarsyst*m dot nasa dot gov)



Attanasio.


Look at it.


CRCL.


A*thicus Ist*r. His alphab*t. Kiboshing griffins. 3stonia as an island. "...a Menippean work tends to the farrago, the chaotic compilation, and makes use of satiric, paradoxical, and sometimes even polyphonic elements that may undermine each other, but also in this unconventional way set up a concordia discors through which a "search after the ultimate truth" takes place."


Monday, September 05, 2005

"Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question." (via M*tafilt*r)



"Search, wretched on, all round about the shores
Thy seaboard, and then look within thy bosom,
If any part of thee enjoyeth peace!"

--Longf*llow's Purgatorio, VI.


'He was in fact we hear an enthusiastic musician, a tragic poet too--how good, matters little; for in this art, more than in others, it somehow happens that everyone finds his own work excellent; so far I have never known the poet (and I have been friends with [notoriously bad poet] Aquinius) who did not think himself the best...'

--Tusculan Disputations V. xxii.



   "Floating Casino"

quadrant scant of frith · pilgrims of a storm
crow still porous church · pilgrims of a storm

nothing sort for thirst · churns a dolphin road
grind a song in charcoal · pilgrims of a storm

city lost its ghosts · fragrant with iron scrollwork
grimly blur all signs · pilgrims of a storm

bringing coffin loam · lungfish strand and poor
slag suborbital argot · pilgrims of a storm



"While the 9/11 “My Pet Goat” episode was certainly illuminating, it’s not certain what might have worked out better that day had the president dropped the book and taken action. But his failure to grab the reins in the hurricane catastrophe for three days this week probably doomed hundreds, or more, to death."


Sunday, September 04, 2005

'It is by no means inappropriate that our instructors, particularly Sulpita and Istrius, thought of man by the name of lesser world, for within himself he contains everything the visible world is made of: earth in his body, fire in his soul, water in his fluidity, and air in the swiftness of his thoughts; the sun in the radiance of his wisdom, the moon in the uncertain and unstable conditions of wealth and youth, a blossoming meadow in the nobility of his virtues and the equanimity of his mild temper, mountains in the heights of generosity, hills in the succession of the family line, valleys in the humbling experiences of tribulation, fruit trees in the fruits of largess; barren trees, rugged places and mucky bogs, thorns and thistles in his evil ways and insatiable greed, snakes and cattle in simplicity and prudence, and the teeming, surging sea in the storm-tossed depths of the heart of man and in reason itself.'

--Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, transl. in: Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century by Vivi*n Law (1995)


V*rgil (D*vil May Cry). (via M*tafilt*r)


"They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us."
.