Saturday, March 25, 2006

Rogu* M*ssiahs.


alas
(via ti*rklinik-ob*rhaching dot d*)


   "On Fearing's Plate

efficaciousness
of the animal cry

does it pierce the hearts of gods
does it pierce the hearts of men
does it make a shadow

in the long rays of dawn"

--I. N. Martillac: 3l*ctric Harmoni*s (1987)



"There existed at the time a gramophone record of one of Stalin's longer speeches. It ran to eight sides, or rather seven, because the eighth consisted entirely of applause." --Amis


"Ninurta, the light of the gods, entered the gloom."

--"The Myth of Zu," in: Th* Anci*nt N*ar 3ast ed. J B Pritchard


"Something dramatic is happening."


Friday, March 24, 2006

alas
Soul Flow*r Union: 3l*ctro Asyl-Bop (via br*ast dot co dot jp)


"I daresay in times to come it will seem a freakish luxury to have had such elaborate selves.
   It was." --Rasolnikov


"Pound thought war was a crock because it never put at risk the true ringleaders. You could say the same for capitalism." --ibid


Th* Sioux com* through.


"I'm not abashed that my efforts have gone for nothing. That's what it means to be part of a struggle with non-imaginary stakes." --ibid


"We haven't evolved beyond the reach of revolution. We're just pathetically unworthy of one." --ibid


"Somehow I have failed to learn patience. Whenever I see the face of G------, I want to leap through the television and strangle him with my bare hands. Hell, he's not even a pumpkin-head: he's the grin some joker carved on the face of the pumpkin." --ibid


"We were laughing at a silly joke and suddenly she turned and asked coyly, “Are you Sanafir or Shanakil?” I stood there, puzzled. ‘Sanafir’ is the Arabic word for “Smurfs” and ‘Shanakil” is the Arabic word for “Snorks”. I didn’t understand why she was asking me if I was a Smurf or a Snork."


"So readily thieves; so unwillingly learners. Who says this terrible system wasn't, in its own way, highly successful?" --op cit


...atningas · stalk...


Thursday, March 23, 2006

"Devout Republicans are not so much impervious to truth, as haptonical to it. It goes right through them like a damn neutrino; there's nothing solid there for it to hit." --Rasolnikov, op cit


"What can one say of the rightwing commentariat? That cumulatively, they formed one huge franken-Goebbels? That they quislinged their entire liberal education, their inborn gift of gab, and their hard-grubbed media luminosity for a cause so foul they dared not look down the road toward its least distant consequence? The pity of America is not that it went fascist. The pity's that so many intelligent people cheered and aided the process." --ibid


Diabolical Building.


"I broke at last with the radicals. Their despair ran so much deeper than mine. I had a good idea what real change was going to take: and I saw what little we had to work with. But they could not see past their own smarting incompetence." --ibid


"Humanism's time isn't over: it has yet to arrive. And it calls for midwives, not black-clad mourners. We need courage for the least little thing. We won't get it from reading blogs." --ibid


"The really interesting part of our long travail will start only after all the ammunition has been used up by those who imagine violence can save them." --ibid


"My love will rip a hole in the ceiling."


Wednesday, March 22, 2006

' "We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it." ' --Yasmina Khadra, Th* Swallows of Kabul (tr J Cull*n 2004)


"If you do retail for any time at all, you soon learn to recognize (at a distance, without a word being spoken) a certain category of customer: the ones who, out of some innate shortfall of gumption, want only for the product they seek to be placed firmly in their two hands. They won't look for it. You wonder if they ever conceive of such a thing.
   Friends, this bunch invented gods." --Maroon*d Among Los*rs


"Neo-Khuzdul has triconsonantal roots."


"...the word roof has a different meaning for a carpenter and for a refugee." --Richard Wall, Wittg*nst*in in Ir*land (2000)


A 78 in 2006. (thanx P*t*r!)


Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Raki is not arak; nor is it arrack.



   "Back to Goodthink"

night rain lamp mimics kiosk
kalavinka myth kiosk

Dubyashchina dragoman
swift slugs abolish kiosk

hollow kingly ruinous
arachnid kiss wry kiosk

crystal and rotor voids wink
wisp iron tomb Moloch kiosk

lightning Grinchus outpours urn
swoops run you only kiosk



Upcoming Ramanujan film. (via robotwisdom)


"Though all our iconography would have it otherwise, the problem of our time--the Twentieth Century and its infernal legacies--is not a problem of humans who are evil. It is the problem of ideologies that don't work, that can't work; and of the humans--literally innumerable--who keep refusing to admit this." --3va Rasolnikov, Maroon*d Among Los*rs (2004)


Pinoy.


Al Aaraaf.


Monday, March 20, 2006

Carrington.
alas
(via ircruis* dot com)


   "Almanzor"

Vanish nirvana divan
writhing liaison divan

lungfish down did rain afraid
with all of his frost divan

slow and coruscating blood
tubular pillbug divan

ink stomp of cold spoons Grinchus
crisp to crystal words divan



"Siegfried. How? do you rhyme too?

Isbrand. Sometimes, in leisure moments
And a romantic humour; this I made
One night a-strewing poison for the rats
In the kitchen corner."

--D*ath's J*st-Book


"And sitting in his dark tower, an ancient and powerful evil, spoken of only in legend, watches and waits for the signs that his true reign is near."


Sunday, March 19, 2006

"Over and over again, for the last nearly 40 years, we have shown just how well we’ve mastered this economically worthless skill."


"[The] leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously." --L*nin's Tomb (p. 203), quoted in Amis op cit


   "Galaxy 666"

Fractal in a cloud caftan
paintball folds basalt caftan

a soft vacant horizon
hurls my anagram caftan

shown a jinn diapason
Grinchus jigs polka caftan



"Self-destruction may feel like rebellion in a society where weakness and doubt are increasingly looked upon as suspect behaviors."