"They genuinely believe that the war is won and lost IN THE MEDIA. The American media, that is. Their partisan selves are so thoroughly embedded in the culture-jamming electioneering of the Rovist personality cult the GOP has become that they genuinely don’t recognize the difference between actually achieving peace and a non-doomed secular democracy in Iraq, and just being able to plausibly claim that peace on American TV." (via Atrios)



(via **cs dot cwru dot *du)

"...This patient must be now trephined,
   Let all the others go;
To-morrow when the sun is up
   My magic I'll them show.'

Two men the epileptic bore
   And laid him on a trunk,
And when the wretch was coming round
   He showed some signs of funk.

No questions put they to the man;
   The doctor cleared his throat,
Then, bringing flints from out his hut,
   Took off his hairy coat.

A crowd had gathered all around,
   To watch the bloody deed;
Their curiosity was stirred
   To see his devil freed.

With sharp flint flake the surgeon made
   A cruciform incision;
The blood did spurt, the wound did hurt,
   The crowd laughed in derision.

The two assistants pressed the flaps
   To stop the blood from running;
The Medicine-Man did scheme and plan,
   He was so full of cunning.

He scraped the pericranium,
   Until the skull was bare;
Then scratched the bone with a sharp stone,
   it did not matter where.

He scraped that bone and scratched and scraped--
   The scratches made a groove,
The groove a basin-like ellipse.
   The patient did not move.

The fact was this, when he came round
   So rotten did he feel,
He fainted when he found himself
   The centre of such zeal.

The hollow soon became a hole,
   'Twas all but through the bone,
His diploë, you well might see,
   But still he made no moan.

The inner table only now
   Protected his soft brain,
One final scrape and he did make
   That hole a window-pane.

The devil stirred within his skull
   And, with a fearful yell,
Escaped from out its prison-house
   To seek its own in hell."

--Thomas Wilson Parry (1918), in: Richard Rudgl*y, Lost Civilizations of the Ston* Ag* (1998)



"More than 200,000 riders of all ages, ethnic origins and economic levels come together on DART's buses and trains each day, and the poems are there for all to enjoy."


"The giraffe is now the tallest statue of anything in Texas..."

   "Bush at the Grave of Mohandas Gandhi

We watch, as from those hands such flowers fall,
how things have learned to walk which ought to crawl."

--Victor V*rmis

"The sounds of shooting and explosions usually begin at dawn, at least that's when I first sense them, and they don't really subside until well into the night."


"Two months later my friend sheepishly came over to my apartment with 10 hour long video tapes of a Pakistani television broadcast of the life of Ghalib. He had received the package from his dad with a note that he was to sit with me and watch the whole thing, translating the entire 10 hours."



“When I complete my forty-eight-volume encyclopaedia, all the great ideas and words that ever need to be uttered will have been said; I will fill that unbelievable gap in one stroke; every one of them will be utterly bewildered.”


"That's the flip side of the Mad Max scenario; the supposed return of pastorality , where there are no TVs and everyone eats goat cheese. But this delusion doesn't have any more to do with the way things are going to be than the dystopian apocalyptic view. Those are like psychic tumors, stress reactions, visions of powerlessness. What we really need is some way to make sense of our predicament and to empower people to control their own destiny." --Bruc* St*rling, in: Acros th* Wound*d Galaxi*s


"As I approach East Broadway station, suddenly the carriage fills with sane people. Tall, thin people who talk to each other warmly and animatedly, people who look poised and intelligent, people who look as if they live in groups and realize that society is all about obligation, and achievement comes collectively. They're the Americans of the future, and they're Chinese."

"The screaming of men is angel whispers."

--Sayings of Asmoday


"To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." (via wood_s lot)


"Then the internet comes along, and all of a sudden, you have this central place where anyone, anywhere in the world can type Gary Numan into a search engine and find me and find out what’s going on."


"She says she sometimes wrote Lithium for Medea during the drug rush after injecting cocaine, taking care to do so in her kitchen, so the blood could be easily wiped off the linoleum, instead of in the living room, where it might stain the rug."

(via ianandmanda dot typ*pad dot com slash blog)


   "Orison of the Salamanders

Albino wolves drowse
tonight, albino wolves.
Succeeding waves
on a beach of black glass
whose pauses exend
from the start of my life
to its end.
Albino wolves drowse;
rabbits dig.
Madness is the promised land
sometimes & when it digs
all the way thru
to here,
I sit & cannot say a thing
amidst thousands
of blind hands,

albino wolves."

--Camil* M**sh, Axis Cookbook (2004)



Acad*my Award Nomin**.


My Favorit* Hijab Stor*.


Stairway to Downfall.

"Intellectual progress, artistic creativity, the ecvolution of rational thought and technical change came to a virtual standstill during the Empire, and in some areas ground was actually lost. Instead the arts of copying, compilation, and technical virtuosity flourished." --Paul Zank*r, Th* Pow*r of Imags in th* Ag* of Augustus (1988)


"I'll never understand the kind of writer who genuinely advances the proposition that life is a dream or fiction. To me that's the voice of privilege, whether it's money, class, sex, color, or what have you. Most of us can't find refuge in anything so false." --Joanna Russ,in: Across th* Wound*d Galaxi*s


"The whole idea of going from your own world to an alien world makes sense only if you're not an alien in your own world." --ibid

Claymation Kitty.


   "Samarra"

drift Karnak sands
around my walking twigs, and quartz Latin sands
which
sigil sands
murmurous of black suns long malign
murmurous hubbub sands
rain, ruins this town will turn into
run with wolf sands
ghost skirmish occurs again, clogs my sight this
sands
pallid fall
drift Karnak harsh sounds of abort sands
my morning run and roil
Orion's arm pharming black iron sands