"In Memoriam is an entire cemetery for a single corpse." --Divagations (tr Barbara Johnson, 2007)


headlights flickering
as they pass a wrought-iron fence;
gray Friday morning

perfidulo from waho
trivalent cephalopod


"Then, as it were, relieving the poet, the critic who studies him, in turn, must stand firm against those miseries and horrors, these disquieting shocks of reality--he must pick up the poet's verses, all twisted where disaster has struck him, and he must carry them further, like Drummond, to where there is tranquillity and leisure enough for him to point out what form and what sense the poet had tried to give them, to supply by his own judicial comments the straightness and the soundness they lack." --Edmund Wilson, "A Preface to Persius" (1927), from The Shores of Light


Geocities Foreclosure Bailout Plan. (No, i don't think this is satire...but maybe it should be.)


Magenta Soul Whip. (via Isola di Rifuti)


The Precariat. (via Supervalent Thought)


"(One revelation was that the classic chunk of schmaltz about a fallen woman, “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” was actually composed on a bet, as a parody, to see how treacly a song the composer Harry Von Tilzer could write.)"