"The world's scientific community united yesterday to launch one of the strongest attacks yet on creationism, warning that the origins of life were being "concealed, denied or confused"."


Nix and Hydra.

"...hammer blows the empire sought to deflect by a variety of retreats: into diplomacy, safer territory, nostalgic fantasy, or selfishness. People moved to carve themselves out a place in an enterprise which struggled, first to maintain the status of a lofty power, then against disintegration..." --ibid


which sussuration
companions

rituals of holding on
as a land falls away

in this light
a pallid hair a black

all i am saying
now unsaid



'Do nothing which is of no use.' --Musashi

(via stomptokyo dot com)


"When pashas themselves stooped to criminality, it could not be long before criminals, in their turn, were being made pashas, and in the provinces by the end of the eighteenth century it was often unclear who was the bandit and who the governor, so complex and negotiable had Ottoman rule become." --ibid


   burnish Guiron crown
unknown nimbus ascian shorn
   again ruinous
i proof morning indigo
across brooding corundum

"What's the point of music that doesn't move forward?"


"The author, feeling that such a gross case of blundering required some excuse or explanation, accounted for the misprints by asserting that the devil drenched the manuscript in the kennel, making it almost illegible, and then obliged the printer to misread it."


"I'd rather be in Lojbanistan."

Cool pix.


Chis*nbop tutorial. Plus.


Frappr Lojban map.

Did our song fail too?


"Too many people owed their living, not to the real world, but to the sham of it, from the Sultan down, in his sham omnipotence; through the government, with its pretence of controlling the empire; the janissaries in the guise of soldiers, the ulema, in the sham of everlasting Islamic victory; governors, in the sham obedience from which they derived their legitimacy. Thousands of people came to work in the palace every day, but only about twenty of them performed significant tasks." --ibid


Guiron ruinous · wisp croons sot
and brumous gulch · big indigo

for Guiron asks · twinkling distant
is apart · scroggy origin



Books going.

(via slash slash daily dot gr**ncin* dot com)


   "The Clowns

The last of our frail schemes falters
Amid acrimony and hideous confusion
And at once our nemesis strides onstage,
Clad in burning hideous motley.

Rain, or something like; and the soft swirl
Of remembrance."

--S*molina Pilchard


"Darker and darker did the empire seem: more impenetrable its gloom; more helplessly reserved and secretly bewildered its functionaries; more groping and local its arrangements." --op cit

"It is a cover of the Clash's "Rock the Casbah" — the verses translated into Arabic, the choruses left in English, and the whole thing decorated with the standard trappings of Arabic pop."


   "FIELD — ALL YEAR — OUT OF THE WINDOW

to W. Woroczylski

behind my back — it seemed — were islands:

of the terror-idea! —

as if a certain chill
was spread — for a year of this life:

were they places — I wondered — in pure form:

of mind and genius — of a certain illness? —

what did they mean?
Expectation of Blows:

or of iron — of yekhs:

now innate? —

the same — as
distant islands:

in the garden: of July freshness! . . — and was it from nearby disaster
ever more clearly they were! . . they were:

as there — in their office! — where a feeble liquid:

seeming to penetrate
to the depth
of the race:

to the terrible fire! —

once dripped:

from beneath their dark-blue clothing

1968
[yekh: shout of beaters]"

--G*nnadi Aygi (via Languag* Hat)


Mohawk bot.

Air poison rank color crimson.


   "...The works
Of Thomas Lovell Beddoes fall open
And are sick and alive, books of iron, and faintly gilded
In the dim light of the early nineteenth century." --April Gall*ons


On my victrola- Flashback: Spanish V*rsions of Classic [80's] Hits


   marfim Viras · rig basalt
stiff of gallop · crystal do sky
   ink stomp of cold · Viras light
crystal grow.? · rig profound abort
Viras spy dust · ruinous aught
      atomic gorp · moon


"It was then [1683]. according to legend, that the city bakers saved Vienna: for early one morning, standing beside their bread ovens, they heard the tell-tale noise of Turkish tunnellers, and alerted the defence in the nick of time; which feat they commemorated by baking little crescent [i. e. Islamic] buns, or croissants." --Lords of th* Horizons

"If they cannot find out that shodan is intransitive, something well known in Persian grammar for thousands of years, you wonder what other assertions they are swallowing.."


   1.
Livid Viras · avoidy sing
idolatry avid · silk prat
fathoms asking tall · ovoid bowl
bin adorn · Gyaos is tin
ontological · igniting

   2.
Vilk admit rolm · glimpsing raucous
storm crag Aymara · fault ivy
Viras adjoining · is tin glut
skull sprawl brink · wash stiff of gallop
atomic shadow · gorp smoking



Old story. (via 3t*raz)


"In short, Drizzt taught me all I needed to know to be an immigrant in a strange land."

"Is it really true that we English-speakers can only experience The Others through literature in translation?"


"And let's not overlook the Universal Translation Project which actually has an Esperanto to Klingon translation system available..."

"This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church." --G K Ch*st*rton


Hazard chimps lug Barugon
Clown divs push us Barugon

And if folk illusion fails
Still worship toad Barugon

Burning visions assail us
In this soft kiln Barugon

Angry and without good tricks
All always food Barugon



"I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell's Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, "They really love their motorcycles."."