"When Ignorance Was Strength"
someone who kills
because he is told to kill
the atom
the essential component
your willingness
my silence
three wolf moon
"Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset..." (via Metafilter)
"And, somehow, dinosaurs were right for the early 1990s." --When Surface was Depth
by Shakir Hassan
"...and weren't they lucky that it all took off in a pub called the Stonewall. Suppose you were compelled to say, 'Yes, I was there on the barricades of the Pig and Whistle'?" --Quentin Crisp, quoted in: When Surface was Depth
"Mists of Mercy"
browbeaten Capella oil
Dalek monogrammed nutmeg grater
what passes for peace
what passes for rest
black knives in the cold mountain air
the devil wears Praha
the world with or without us
overgrown paths in my mind-maze
the taste of olives the smell of fresh woodchips
daybreak
driving without eyeshades
Capella oil
and the smell of wood chips
"A belief in free will meant, of course, that the caliph could no longer be relieved from the responsibility for his unjust deeds on the grounds that they were the result of the inexorable decree of God." --Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (1970)
"...the Scheherazade Challenge..." AND: "[T]he LiveJournal platform I'm using is being wound down (it has a skeleton staff of 8 right now, I'm told)."
"...the shop that brought the cupcake craze to the Middle East."
"I come from a family of communist nudists."
chow mein kampf this chore
munch on small · manticore town
collect black knives in mountain air
bleachorexia swarms our toxic story
the time goes
i run out of cute warnings
like they had
3 found dead in home after standoff in Garland.
"Within the War industry, the people are totally unified--they just want to kill. Whereas the people in the Peace industry--we are so critical of one another." --Yoko Ono, 1999 (quoted in Bracewell)
"The important Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings as well as one of its four moons, preferred Spinoza's lenses to all others." --Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza (2006)
"A Plot to Blow Up Fountain Place"
1.
morth · both · dark hegemony
dwarven depth
in brain shroud we wandered and · nautiloids drove
there is no lightning
better than alabaster · popping
sound outside
red and blue flashing
2.
qIj body temperaturo · nautiloids
those fading contrails whisper
red speedboat now on mia strato
kukte tcati .i djacu
glabi'o tablivla · the hidden
casino
robbed · ghojmoHghachmey
not mutiny avalanche acid streak ice
"Urban infrastructure and information theory to the critical theorists (they were landscape poets, by temperament) of the middle to late 1980s, was what the Lake District had been to Victorian Romantics, the mountains of Nepal to a traveller on the Magic Bus, or the peaks of Bavaria to Pantheist seekers of the Sublime." --Michael Bracewell, When Surface Was Depth (2002)
Parasites Like Us.
Y2K, meet Y2K38.
Coywolves.
take away the name & i know
i do not know this city
why do i aspire in vain
even to dream of another city
i walked the cobblestones, i spoke
with what i thought were denizens of the city
different pathways, tasks, circles:
we hardly live in the same city
as Graywyvern weaves through traffic
he imagines the future ruins of his city
"It ought to be every writer’s ambition to write a book considered subversive enough to be banned."
House of the Rising Sun.
Righteous Prog thread.
Déjà vu.
"Genome Lodge Ptah"
Nepenthe, lava skiing.
Turn at the myst'ry street
dedicating their onyx
and your urban camo bible
sulfonyl chloride seas
half of the berg unseeing
end of the fork to eat
with Noumenon's ebonics
hydrargyrum-wavelet liable
i attempt now to seize
among the BB's fleeing
down a slope of concrete
"In its early days, it was easy to add stuff." (via Cliopatria)
The Seven Laws of Rikyu in Lojban.
"Vehicle History Report"
malignantly useless
song and cannot cease to sing
dance · play · you have not yet read the important
information we can enclosed fizzed
moth qul prove
bring cyclist in a spider man suit
driving out to the junkyards
on the edge of town
to pick up a car door to insomnia
replace the one that got run into
snail crunch left
from the last rain · pickups jockeying
swine handicapping
"...separated from my mother tongue, I knew that when I spoke to her, my speech came back to her from outside of my love and in this language I loved her. I had begun an extraordinary adventure. If I happened to substitute one word for another (I knew it was on my own behalf) I didn't have the impression that I was making a mistake or breaking a law but rather that I was speaking two words simultaneously: one which reached her hearing (failing that, could she have stood up to me?) and a second word, an other, which was there and yet was faraway, a vagabond, turned in upon itself." --Abdelkébir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages (1983; tr Richard Howard 1990)
The Bolaño Myth.
ease into darkness
the routine taking over
the taillights glowing
by the structure still building
i have passed so many times
"On the eve of the euphoria that would turn into madness, Nietsche said that his Zarathustra would 'split the history of humanity in two.' Love in Two Languages is the same kind of gesture; it splits history in two eras: BEFORE / AFTER. ...essentially because this time the false transparency or obviousness of the bilingual problem itself is profoundly called into question.
In other words, with Khatibi--and this is the originality of what is at stake in this book--the dilemma is no longer whether one must write in Arabic or in French, whether the choice is necessary or contingent, politically right or wrong. Rather, the point is to make visible another (infraliminal) level of writing and thinking that renders the dualistic opposition that has dominated Maghrebi literary production completely obsolete." --Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations (2003)
The Gospel of Christian Atheism.
Chiquitita. (Thanx Melanie!)
like bees to an empty coke can
Lodge Art.
"You are far away and shielded from tear gas and batons and bullets."
"A book that was like a little box with monsters inside it."
Ironism.
"If certain empires have died of sickness or of old age, the greater number, on the contrary, have succumbed to violent death, in the plenitude of their physical power, in the full force of their intellectual vigour." --de Gourmont
"He had Ibn Muqla's hand cut off. So Ibn Muqla took up the pen with his left hand and learned to write all over again..."
mostly destruction
in the cool of the evening,
to begin again
buzzing of a cicada
as i stand by the dumpster
Monster movies, old-style, that treat the ongoing news coverage of the monster's devastating activity as a means of economically furthering he plot... how very unlike the actual news, which, incapable of actual perception, even of the most blatant menace, can only repetitiously describe the boundaries of its own fixed belief system; must downgrade the fissures, and ballyhoo whatever illusion of the moment seems most Pavlovian-likely to incite the crowd.
In the Hall of the Mountain King. (via Metafilter)
We're Screwed. (ditto)
"Ephesia grammata"
sky in brown marble
at the library door
chrome amethyst trail
the grass whitened hours in an arrow shape
slow moth climbing
darkly dreaming Dilbert
enigmatic jury
pieuvre
rimedo blanka
in songs which tarry
teratological epochs it is they
who lead us should we run
out of
Eid e-cards.
Czhilispiel in Flatonia.
The Red Spot of Haumea.
Dir en grey- Kodou.
Something worth remarking about the "Wow!" Signal is that its apparent origin--the asterism of χ-1, χ-2, χ-3 Sagittarii--cannot, by our present understanding, harbor any sort of life. The first one is clearly uninhabitable (its stellar companion sits more or less where the water zone would have been), the second's too young, and the third is a red giant. Thus, more than most enigmas, this one is a message from nowhere. Its speaker is the impossible alien.
"At Peace with Wotan"
choose between thirst & the water that
might make you
sick · wergeld · the constant bark
desechos peligrosos · incognizant
my Voynich flovers
night has no refuge
nor Khidr
study · only to pile up
silences during waits between silences
Every narcissist is a Republican, though not every Republican is a narcissist.
Korean music video thread.
Nice Momus overview.
The return of philosophical Realism, bizarre & explicable to me only as a retro gesture--like playing the Four Knights' Game, as white, to win.
"Persuasion and the Sasquatch"
1.
aw kiel mallumego
to sau3tne en frofundo maro
may'morgh maturity · our womb existing
slowly green
forcing star within
tawny a
firmament · redlight pewter
mutable por tiu backdrop al kiu
Allah ne donas
lumon · tute ne estas lumo
2.
smogfnast. chmess.
chado wiki leQ
a child runs through pencils · green agate veHmey
tute ne estas lumo
Finite as snow school · a voice of parts
procedas by mutable pewter
3.
Lexus, you will die
Ultimately the only philosophy that is able to hold my attention is the philosophy of tea. It already has heard of the word "extinction,"--and prepared an answer.
Dallas errands, through Seattle weather
on top of all, i have to battle weather
he whispers poems in the coruscating night,
into the sudden window-rattle weather
these Chinese clothes, this coltan-hearted cell
twinge one's conscience mildly in chattel weather
a few charred skeletons guide the way · Graywyvern
sits in his car at a light, in prattle weather
"The Greeks did not invent the poem. Rather, they interrupted the poem with the matheme." --Badiou, op cit
"...Lu Xun: 'Hope cannot be said to exist, or can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.' " --Jean-François Lyotard, postmodern fables (tr G Van Den Abeele, 1997)
Sometimes it seems as if we are getting to the point where any two humans can barely just tolerate each other, & retreat into solitary entertainment at every available opportunity. and this unacknowledged atmosphere of fear, anger, and despair lends its taste to every perception, like a brackishness in the water--a taste without a name because its absence is unknown.
The gift of color. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Liber Novus. (via Metafilter)
Ten Famous Literary McGuffins.
Urbanomic IV. (Also.)
"If someone took the gamble of an object-oriented theology, the omniscient God of monotheism might be abandoned in favor of something resembling Cthulhu, the sleeping monstrosity of H.P. Lovecraft."
Ego, fear: consubstantial.
"Sense and Sensibility and iPod Eyelashes"
if it's not the moon
maybe it's a smudge
spiralling balloon
as beneath we trudge
let that light go by
if it's not the moon
other alibi
won't be begging soon
with such feints is strewn
journey to the tell
if it's not the moon
lures us · just as well
up there does not budge
what belies the tune
churned by ilka drudge
if it's not the moon
"There is a certain element of the detective novel in the Mallarméan enigma: an empty salon, a vase, a dark sea--what crime, what enormous misadventure is indicated by these clues?" --Alain Badiou, Being and Event (tr O Feltham, 2005)
"I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pains of the victims, and heard with my own ears the scream of the bereaved and the orphans."
Lojban Standup.
"Timeline of Discredited Televangelists"
gray mist eats my brain,
abracadabra bricabrac · orange cone
cairn · unballetic acorn
bug in the way and then sliding down
to discern it
you must call upon all your
abchalazal night
abchalazal night that grow creaking
gray mist of Carnival · pilcrow into whist
into storp
The Package Insert of Sorrows. (via Klassnik)
"[T]here is no way one [X]-wing could take down the whole [D]eathstar." (via Metafilter)
"He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long." (via Atrios)
The New Illiteracy.
"6EQUJ5"
outreach to the imbeciles
first step don't call them imbeciles
gunfire last night
no explanation today
constant drizzle
overhanging trees on this quiet street
we couldn't be bothered to think about
the puddles that would be made
books i require right now
from across the ocean
not what falls from the sky
but the wheel-thrown spray, that blinds you
stuck to my red pen-cap
part of an old pricetag i was removing
at some point my phone became my watch
what else
what makes the weak weak
each thinks they're an orphan
electronic sounds of a wilderness night
as a wave crawls down my windshield
if this were Berlin
would i love the same rain
Crowleyites despised
as a stage outgrown
give up the boycott
for a last minute panic purchase
Space Art thread at Centauri Dreams. David Hardy weighs in on Pluto.
"Today, over 30 systems comprising more than one planet are known (Wright et al. 2009), including seven triple systems, two quadruple systems (μ Arae (Pepe et al. 2007) and GJ 581 (M. Mayor et al. 2009, submitted)), and the quintuple system 55 Cancri (Fischer et al. 2008)."
Never Again thread.
"Adventures of a Narcissist"
a long way de la hejmo
paghlogh the green flash
A numb dead ocean peers · back at me
rapidly becoming a subfusc wall of
growing bIr
thunderclap remaining constantly
profound stomp the sound
of inquiring Aleppo
The Color of Night.
" 'It's simple. We take care of each other.' says Kalil."
"What subject-matter do I specially covet for poetry to-day? Many years ago I said, and I have had no occasion to change my mind, ‘If I were asked to frame a test paper for literary aspirants, I would ask (1) for a poem on the fact that what is known as the ‘Lorentz transformation’ looks like the ‘Einstein transformation’ ."
"...approximately one third of the Vox Clamantis contains splicings from other sources, altered... very slightly and put to serve a meaning wholly new." --R F Yeager, John Gower's Poetic: in Search for a new Arion (1990)
"Oparin and Dr Ock"
1.
the time it had always rained
nailed to the mast, a Krugerrand
cicada contrail fountain
a single green star can contain
the many crumbs of broken glass
Hollywood legless
2.
SuSm' jaqtaH · things
seen in the white screen loading
futilely: cicada, soft contrail, fountain
the puissant
gods died young, died a myriad, pale
battalions at sunrise clashing · shadowless
ev'ry blind body eye · turned
foward, bright
as bright can call · we park here and walk
Grimoires: a History of Magic Books.
Glossator. (via wood_s lot)
Black- chessdiesel (2173)
1. g4 d5
2. h3 e5
3. Bg2 c6
4. d4 e4
5. c4 Ne7
6. Bg5 f6
7. Bh4 Ng6
8. Bg3 Bd6
9. Qb3 Nf4
10. Bxf4 Bxf4
11. e3 Bd6
12. cxd5 cxd5
13. Nc3 Be6
14. Qxb7 Nd7
15. Qb3 Rb8
16. Qc2 O-O
17. Nge2 Qb6
18. Rb1 Bb4
19. O-O Rfc8
20. f3 f5
21. Ng3 fxg4
22. hxg4 Bf7
23. fxe4 Nf6
24. g5 Nxe4
25. Ngxe4 Bg6
26. Rbc1 Re8
27. Nxd5 Qe6
28. Nf4 Bxe4
29. Nxe6 Bxc2
30. Rxc2 Rxe6
31. Bd5 1-0 (if Re8, 32 Rc8!)
Name, a Novel.
resumed normalcy
when the halcyon skies yielded
slag and fire-blossom;
grew wise in that frailty
borne by the rest of mankind
monuments did rise:
black sites, stripped Constitution,
babies without limbs...
we do not remember now,
in fact, all the stones that rose
Bowie in Berlin.
"A typical move in the Hübsch Gambit."
Tal on YouTube.
"Antikva Kredulo"
1.
mi blinde
shadow formed
by forms that seem to contain shadow
in the rain shadow
i pitch my hammock
2.
my child dark, my snow, my air
Ialtera TocKa as a call
ngoHwI' solacing
on a/ light
meet me driving the other way · on the straight small
small street · with cars on both sides
cubewano winter
golden morning gazing
driving in drugged Baghdad
Druze ally a lion
a rude gray arroyo
multiple car pileup
and carpal zing tumult
spirit like rain
turning
and the shrub's shadow feels
snow bloomless gold
from chi Sagittarii
chilly after sleep
"Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden
6
Seeking a style, culling my phrases,
Grown old carving grubs!
At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,
A bow of jade.
Can't you see what is going on, year after year,
By the sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do
But weep in the autumn wind?"
--Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (tr J D Frodsham, 1988)
The Niche for Lights. (Not to be confused with The Bezels of Wisdom.)
"Thai women don’t wear slacks on temple sites,
Not to piss off the pious, or inflame
The appetites of our chaste cenobites,
Or drown our morals-conscious town in shame.
But if a girl forgets, and dares to flaunt
A pair of jeans before our sacred Buddhas,
She’s but to rent a skirt from those who haunt
The doorways, making money as do-gooders.
There’s no such ambiguity in Khartoum,
Where pants in brasseries can be a pain,
The wrong attire can spell a woman’s doom —
The lash for Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein!
If Christ got 39 for freeing man,
What’s one more lash for freedom in Sudan?"
--Somtow Sucharitkul
"Mod-ism....an aphorism for clean living under difficult circumstances." --Peter Meadon, quoted on back of Quadrophenia album cover
"Si bellatorum lucem scrutabor eorum,
Lucerne lator tenebrosus adest gladiator."
'If I examine the light of their warriors, The gladiator is a dark bearer of light.' --John Gower, De Lucis Scrutino, in: The Minor Latin Works (tr R F Yeager, 2005)
"Battle Between Carnival and Lent"
157.
reH tay' tuqDaj je. lanzu
rust tiles kun a glazuro pala
from the skylight back
bale in / of SuD hay on a flatbed
manveturilo waiting
at its wov
school in front of the loud construction site dark
die work grope
end lungfish tightrope
2.
if try i will outlive the
Great Barrier Reef
to wander
along golden miles · bIQ ngaS HIvje'
vidis dekunu stelojn kaj la sunon
kaj la lunon, mi
vidis ilin klinigxi antaw
mi · eleven planets now
the age progression photos (look!) at WalMart
solid state
mix tape · mi metas down upon sands scoil
a black and a pearl gray thread spetch
As usual, Tom Tomorrow gets it exactly right. (warning: Salon)
The Combat Paper Project. (via Truthout)
"I am no melody, I am no lute
I am the sound that my own breaking makes
You, and the coiling tresses of your hair
I, and my endless dark imaginings..."
--from The Oxford India Ghalib
I've studied the wallcrack
from which Roderick
Usher filled his syringe
at regular intervals but
no decalcomania occurs
when I trace it in my mind
nor find a speck of chaos
to watch writhe. Illiterate
each pattern bolts me back
till teen angst hurts less
than birth beyond which
it's all alien, lightyears
assert themselves every
sill, or toppling snowfall
mimes the air with blue
precisions. Is it right to
frame it in errors largess
costumes in such nemesis,
encrusting the nostrils
with navels for example,
letting the body's rooms
merge in decay or worse,
cognition. My sister
counts worms for luck,
the curse of us Ushers
towers over the muck
it sucks its swamp from.
--Bill Knott
"The man who has been wrong about everything gets the full support of his party, yet President Obama can’t find enough audacity to stick up for a true change agent?" (via sugergee)
The Wow Signal. (via Metafilter)
"Proprioception for Dummies"
the standing dead · and all the lights they bear
out there · beyond the dark glass
the standing dead · what parley have i more
who stare · through the dark silent glass
i stand as dead · and do not yet require
such star · in the night of dark glass
The Monaco Declaration. (via Metafilter)
"Arguing with a troll is like joining a poker game where you’re playing with real money and the troll is playing with imaginary money. Obviously, it’s best not to play poker unless everyone comes with the real thing."
After Finitude.
"Abnormally Attracted to Sanitizer"
clepsydra of fog in the dog days
build my fane of slag in the dog days
what autumn remembers, itself fades
as Mongols disembogue on the dog days
a garden's belated provision
gars my spirit beg in the dog days
the cripple, the leper, the orphan--
parables not vague in these dog days
dapple-dawn-drawn hurls graywyvern with care
small weapons are real big in the dog days
Speculative Realism resources. (via Larval Subjects) "Speculative Realism Does not Exist."
"Admittedly, this might be progress if, in fact, philosophy is akin to alchemy."
"Chicken Tetragrammaton"
lawtage we sink
a single step to QIH · tuHbe' tra
ombroj malbonodoraj
and our folded battalion dull with eclipse
dust · dull with
its expected avidity of
profound stomp i SIm
Our womb existing, purple as squeak
as squeaky
to open hinges in the morning dimness
all is as
hold away it goes
"My father's ferocious attachment to truth, and his insistence from my childhood on my speaking it at all times and in spite of the direst consequences, had made me an accomplished liar at an early age; the constant need for lying had in fact sharpened my invention and contributed enormously to my enjoyment of the highest forms of poetry." --Glassco, op cit
"Surely the huge marches against war in Iraq were the apotheosis, and the ultimate failure, of peaceful street protest in this country?"
"A well-known prophetic report (ḥadith) that Gazâli invoked in his discussion of knowledge reinforces the importance of the notion of exile and the idea of being a stranger. 'Islam began as a stranger,' the Prophet Muḥammad stated, 'and [Islam] will once again return to a state of strangeness the way it began; so, blessed are the exiles.' " --Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazâlî and the Poetics of Imagination 2005)
Somtow Sutcharitkul has a blog. (You can even buy a tie he designed!)
A Snake in the Grass. (thanx Melanie!)
"Internet Quizzes"
1.
an angry fire
banzu fale panje xusra
sans instruction
what the deal is · syn apt ic on
music and the touch of her skin
wasp on the morning air · one shadowy
veil so yields to another
and very far
from the city i find
far from the city i ind
2.
to think of the circus
from the smell of fresh woodchips
hands are torn from wrists
that tried to write this
"The particular, sprightly, ironic feeling of amphibrachic meter--and its kind of heathery purple color, if I had to give it a color; its kind of cumin flavor, if I had to give it a taste..." --Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry (2005)
"So if James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, Alan Sondheim is the Godfather of Flarf."
"Around us the conversation was going on either in the softest German or in a dialect that we found out later was the Luxembourger platt, a language that sounded like the passage of water over stones." --John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970)
blackened empty shell · Monkir
too karaman old · no puedo mas
claxu wraith for turning the compost heap up
malvarna
so often indoors
thick, ruined whisper as if could you
build in sec skugry 'eng towers
such one glittering mensogo at a time
we don't even know
how a lo'laH jolt
the least of these wasted to day orts
ba binxo
poste · the lost years flourish
both hands a numb we
preferas imagi ke
we are lomHa' sucking the life of
la vivuloj la young khaki child's play to
never mind
it streak iron tasering strangers craving with
my firebent will O
"To a poet nothing can be useless." --Rasselas
la signo liberiganta "snap" estas
out the unlawful drops oh! lomqoq
so much closer alpha don't
you know Centauri
so much · ask
farther about · away · don't
ask · for these things fall
and they do fall · Like farcical fingers hard
Like frightful
facts luscious in the virgule limehouse
London style. (thanx Melanie!)
is hexecontalithos
they hungers
for · one, despatching Imam Zero
schnell macht frei into
Receive evil cant dark pungent flying sun.
this luncheon
or matenmangxo you fadge · fado taiga
glass bridge as fragile
playing chess with Acers in the rain
days of somber Hojicha
across Alsirat bridge to Ubar
red crate on the dry grass subterraneous
"Yea, even what the mind cannot truly conceive can be hoped for, if it can be expressed."
Ghalib in Poetry. (via The Page)
QIb maS child
saccade · between asleep and awake
scene repeatedly
shows of the pa' where buying book our takes place
find myself
going through the motions mental of
curiosity kaj lezu'o jdice
in borderline frays
tedious
trudge to that mountainous way
i don't know how many times
before escaped i
ridiculous telling it · this morn
beneath cerulean coolth · pink all the blossoms
.ua pumpu'
History of the Spork. (via Metafilter)
"...there is a small but significant proportion of the US population who hate the poor and want them to die."
25 years of diminished progress. (via via Antiwar)
Irfan.
zaqqumsoma qoçaq jIQaw'ta'
otsaxtsax stranga
this urchin-snouted stillitory hour
thirteen ways
of looking at such a a
blackout vie and the
oblong silver ring, storming
or thing not,
out; we can't guess · quisling clinic finchineer
Xroshtag bopatrino kaprica
that need is yours · choqaSHa'
blinde so taleb and balletic
in the high dark room · fan sound if aught
clatter of plastic dishes · sleep
dishes · sleep
grips the rest of the household
in a lull
i make the first left
"...cars are your new cigarettes."
"Romanticism produces no architecture, not even revivals, but it does use the ruins of other styles to dream in." --Sutherland, op cit
Excellent harp thread on Metafilter.
Another anniversary rolls around.
The "disaster tourism" bandwagon. (via Beyond the Beyond)
"A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-seared planet, was similar to childhood." --Eisenberg
"Everything is Here"
jamna fizi'o ku bu'ocu'i pei
way semper bellum
crime and refreshment not in
that order
alias turquoise anodized you
aluminia HIvje'
the community of stains · damnatio
memoriae mi striglas qawHaq
you give it
a double of silences · noHHom
parallel scars will
trace · stars without makeup
panpi kamju fezi'o find .uu
why we · are
"In twilight, when the lorn hyæna's strain
Reared to the clouds its lonely tower of pain."
--Campbell
Meanwhile, in L.A....
Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium glum
rich with humiliation
hoürs, SeHlaw rompida or lost
the instructions poor
veQ 6gji
mi bojkotas kaj sed
forward the spam of it on
jaS togh kludge
or Zugzwang in the prolonged present
"backward" Fajarowicz KraCHi hiniku
nihilist's gambit your lodge
nothing so other
as an insect or a ghost · nothing
so kara
the Devil's own credit card acxetis this
folk for age under bleed; to
cold. or any John ngIm finished niche
Smith's Wesson
Easy to be Hard.
Inventions by kids, for kids.
18 calamitous music and movie packaging gimmicks.
Best anthropological sci-fi.
"At the Bureau of Starvation Jokes"
cheap clothes wearing out already
or old clothes threadbare & torn
opened Splenda packets
declining revenues
Ispahan shadowed
massive cuts & swine flu sanitizer
see the early street shining
honk at me willya
alright already
when Fiestaware floats
djuno najenai kurji
Tiu estis la upon
dog prisoners
kutimo any
I will go down
de le musycei rilate al tiuj,
with this ship
kiuj antawe jam child estis.
black feather in the supermarket entranceway
La kutimo de
le musycei neniam sxangxigxas.
this rock upon
carbon star child
he them dark die
spray of pink blossoms
not the door they wanted
but a door
The Slynx. By Leo Tolstoy's great-grandniece.
The "Karen Elliot" of directing.
The Other Asala.
"Let me ask you, today, are you living your truth?" (via #neda)
Poets who tweet. (via Dumbfoundry)
"Whether it comes plain or fancy, Spanish is a stone or metal language." --Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: a Biography of Her Work (1951)
Idiot's Guide to Geocaching.
rIn noH 'e' ne vere kredis mi.
i did not really think the war would end
la domon je la gxiajn internajxon DImeQtaH.
we are burning down the house with everyone in it
al la lasto fino jeghbe'bogh songx-meymaj
and our dreams, adamant to the end,
estos tre lastaj Heghbogh Dochmey.
will be the very last things to perish
" 'Fifty percent of respondents say that the event taking place is not occurring,' Madison says. 'The other fifty percent remain undecided. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between.' " --Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)
The Religion.
in> taming cream
in the bitter sand
can jaguars look askance alumnus
high noon of the intricate fragile Zeitgeist
nIQ storm knowingly topazw malvarma gnomon
is an island birrahlee
last flash of lightning
her body softly swaying
to that smoky beat
cold stone bench still damp to the touch
fountain loudly purling in the background
barely a breeze
the sun breaking through morning overcast
hours of ancient sunlight
la brilado blua
Jimmy James · Etna da
luz azul a Dante · all
cheer his dime
charm · frieze of remaining
epic might take silences · la
vinberujo luna
parapet
snow globe
for all these books
White Flag. Stan.
Whole Foods boycott.
Ramadan (the music video).
"Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no health insurance." (via wood_s lot)
Why so harsh toward one another? Is there some evolutionary advantage in it? No, but from having been unhappy in the past, we feel entitled to be cruel today.
its infantilized anodyne · sfumato wanion starry youths
i slip filigree azote · zenith adjuvant earth and cold
in addition such lyric · indigo secrets
is it an adequate response to terrorism
to include it in our cop shows
ramfeezled you still gotta watch out driving
'cause you sure can't afford another ticket
bonfire
of the amenities
a vinbero luna
kaj brilado blua way · such that
odoriferous veH · movas · making it
you · limpid
pongHa' malvarma
jamna fizi'o
hacienda
""(Perhaps the ICFA [International Conferenc on the Fantastic in the Arts] is becoming a place for major writers to make impractical suggestions. A few years ago GoH [Guest of Honor] Geoff Ryman suggested Mundane SF, the idea that sf should eschew its most famous tropes--faster than light travel, habitats in space or on other planets, alien contacts, alternate universes, personality uploading--on the grounds that they have been done to death and wouldn't work anyway..." --Arthur Hlavaty in Nice Distinctions 18
A Shadow in Summer.
"Each with a blister on his tongue,
Each with a crater on his tooth,
Our nerves are fire; we have been stung
By the tarantulas of truth.'
--Campbell
Item for my Wish List. (via Metafilter)
The Canadian Ghazal. (via Silliman)
the whole puxxle vixible
at once · violent moss
stirring in a nighttime wind · stain
of many vicissitudes
the moon that split in two
the confirmation of the other's other
luryri'e · tingle
nested in the right hand now
'55 and also '57 Chevy
and clear striving yoghurt runoff camcorder
to quaintly reacquaint
and blimp reorder patches
no quarter
peeling paint of sev'ral fake layers
halcyon crawling the longueurs chambréed
of tattoo science
ust you touch
as a measure of coming Ramadan with
sunblock staccato youtube
ads vulqanganbe'pu' banned
commercials
May the Empire continue
"Baudelaire: The Skeleton Navvy (II.)
Navvies, funereal and resigned,
From the tough ground with which you tussle
With all the effort that can find
Filleted spine or skinless muscle--
O grave-snatched convicts, say what strange
Harvest you hope from such a soil
And who the farmer is whose grange
You would replentish with this toil.
Mean you to show (O evil-starred
Exponents of too stark a doom)
The promised sleep may yet be barred,
Even from us, beyond the tomb;
That even extinction may turn traitor,
And death itself, can be a lie;
And that perhaps, sooner or later,
Forever, when we come to die,
In some strange country, without wages,
On stubborn outcrops delving holes,
We'll push a shovel through the ages
Beneath our flayed and bleeding soles?"
--tr Roy Campbell
Nina Simone, 1969. (via Metafilter)
Puni Puni Poemy.
The Young Visiters.
"Extended Groth Strip"
Tuareg oregano
barely deliver
bismillah leverage found · cortical bismuth
la bazalta cxielo cxirpas
gingerbread
its veQ · kaj blua estas gxia Aztec
'oy'naQ inhabitants' anagram
of judgment
the thousand flavors of escape
in this whirlwind ride
dead as a spider · a rose
a world of brigsscr the tho
scrape of key in the lock
squeak of door hinge
squeak of gate hinge
scrape of a far away jet
rising in pitch and fading away
mackerel sky
state department spokesman
bivouack'd
in the burning mansion
"Notoriously, the Adjuvants rejected the concept of original music. Every scratch and sample and scrap of lyric that went into their daft compositions was previously owned." --Castles Made of Sand
Tercet Challenge issue is up.
"...Eurydice my fog, my greenness."
"A month later [after B.'s letter to S.] Stalin telephoned Bulgakov. For some odd reason he had taken a liking from the first to The Days of the Turbins, though with the cryptic comment that, "it is not the author's fault that the play is a success.' He suggested that Bulgakov apply to the Moscow Art Theater, adding, 'I think they will accept you.' " --translator's intro to The Master and Margarita (tr M Ginsburg 1967)
"Staycation"
excess inventory · terminal moraine
slow descent into madness
of a whole society · as war
evolves · rain
carves the town with frith
cmalyranji mibyp2
Creekside cikad-vIj
recipes on the radio
headlights on in the daytime
in a six month clinical trial
gruiform · badawi
too much work not enough workers
redefined as a good thing
floating · spheres
of inexplicableness
10 under · 35 up
olive sovran pith
zirpu solitaire bazaar
czarist 9n3 foomp! clef
cobblestone walk reclaimed
in the speeded-up Casio air
crazy mccraziness
he barely was nothing
sampled modemtweet
precarious gait
the wrong happening
"In the 1920s, when phonograph records sold at seventy-five cents apiece..." --Low Man on a Totem Pole
When you want your Chinese-character tattoo right.
"In Reading town the violence of change was more obvious. Here, in a town which had always been Countercultural heartland, it looked more permanent. The music and video that acted as urban décor were cutting-edge, but the Shopping Mall Generics had vanished, taken over by farmers' markets. Personal cars had gone, or turned up ingeniously recycled. Asphault and brick and concrete had been torn up to let weeds and wilderness flourish in the streets. There were marks of privation. The 'see a queue, join a queue' mentality of Eastern Europe prevailed. But the wandering crowds were peaceful; there were buskers but no beggars, and there were no weapons in sight." --Gwyneth Jones, Castles Made of Sand (2002)
the Phineas Fogg Associating
a pique in Darien
people are starting to walk
Unarian eclipse · dust bolus luster
we hv always livd
in th Kasbah
severe spoon shortage rules
shortbread prize
in your eyes babe
in your eyes
financial peacenik
parsnip headed tinchel
in your eyes
baby in your eyes
The Taqwacores (movie) production blog.
Fear Itself. (Prince Hal's Dirge, from T-Shirt--a great unknown album.)
not to have squandered this dream
small dark camera
pondered through the wall
crack baby incense policy Algjebbah
suicide kink · star-far Phoebus town
fremd Tokay
cephalopods cherish
the wind passes away
tzompantli gazebo
roof without a rafter
Four Freedoms.
Dennis Cooper on Pierre Henry. (via Silliman)
Rosa Parks statue in Dallas.
The Habitability of Super-Earths in Gliese 581. More speculation.
