Qatlh klama
comment Blériot

mere anarchy
successful refuge of words

three chartreuse deck chairs
that wonderful day

things gone into storage

they crystal do them desert
a heavy dew has soaked the lawns
they were never more green

in the days of the mixed-speaking
in the days of the cephalopods



"I first heard of and became interested in Umm Kulthum when Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview that she was his favorite singer." --Paul Williams, The 20th Century's Greatest Hits (2000)


(a painting byRichard Hanson)

Truth Commission.


The Science News Cycle. (via Metafilter)


VB 10b.


"...music that can't be heard right without knowledge of a particular, isolated historical context..." (I was musing the other day about the artistic polarity of immediacy/interpretation. Of course, nothing exists at either pure extreme--not Abstract Expressionist painting without Existentialist theory, nor Ulysses with the pleasure of its sounds & their artful combining--but if conlanging is an art, it's an artform of the assemble-it-yourself variety. In order to appreciate a constructed language, you have to start learning it; & learn enough of it (& also enough of its predecessors & contemporaneous-peer languages) to form a sense of it as an object, at all, before you can begin to aestheticize it. --I realized that after modernism, poetry (one part of it) also took off in this direction--along with much else.

But if In the Land of Constructed Languages furnishes us with a groundwork for the first conlang-criticism, that can only be a good thing.

(And i want to find the polyvalent-logic answer to that polarity as well... Perhaps one can say that an artwork gives texture to the senses, meaning to the imagination, impetus to the emotions, and conceptual significance to the mind (=Jungian quaternity).

(What i have been (in a desultory, unsystematic way) doing with my poetry in recent years, follows a development that is analogous to the elaborate contextualizing of something on the order of classical Tamil poetry, in which the least gesture carries much significance precisely because of the density of its traditional background. Only, with mine, it is an ever-shifting background--melting, metamorphosizing from one imaginary-tradition to another; with my reading & everyday life poking through on occasion. I think of my blog as a kind of running commentary, though you would still have to guess at how the pieces connect up.

This, in lieu of a culture, or in spite of it.)))


Austerity Nostalgia.