"We were invited along with 170 others--writers etc--to the Kennedy inaugural. ...I wrote in the Kennedy guest-book, Robert lowell, happy that at long last the Goths have left the Whitehouse. Bobby Kennedy read it, and said, 'I guess we are the Visigoths,' " --Lowell, op cit

"Unreliable Car"

1.
to live without nourishment
in a world that makes no sense
the morning being dismantled
ashes dumped on a bed of sawdust
gray endures

and the final blur

2.
colder in the shadows

gotta keep watching
for when the lane dwindles
the ache in my throat
grows
why is there something
rather than nothing
i solved that one

the bridge
blazing with daylight
a harmonica
played with some no little asperity
the chrome apples
of the Bad Hesperides
why are there potholes
rather than roadway
i think i know that one
being vice president
of Boarded-Up Longtime
spray thrown up
from the car ahead glitters
like diamonds for half a second
we glitter
like diamonds for half a second
come talk to me
in the shadow of the huge giraffe sculpture

"A few years ago this would not have been such an interesting place. But now, most world leaders know the planet is in trouble."


The poetry of self promotion.


We actually got this one in.

"...i have just learned that the way to keep a coati, if you have one, out of mischief is to give him a hairbrush and he'll spend hours brushing his own tail." --Bishop, Words in Air


"Bride of the Bargain"

angry little cloud of fortune

how technology
is revolutionizing
the secrecy · planing lakes
vindu fegyselcni
my quotidian mistakes
pride & prejudice & teabaggers
hegemony cricket
in a cage
for the connoisseurs
of noise

"I didn’t know he had it in him, but Florian nailed the trajectory of a generation of current electronic music practitioners, who came of age in the long 80s afterburn of Industrial culture, were animated by rave’s psychotronic machine music and the systematic praxis of the first wave of post-war electronic music pioneers, and are now forwarding the march of digital sound out of the basements and the clubs and into the private gallery spaces of the 100 mile city."

"Rare Night Landing in Florida"

angelic restoration
sometimes the diamond
sometimes the coal
a film of Renoir painting
redbrick
whale for my spirit guide
the Trilithon knows
and everything
that could be otherwise
you have made
otherwise

the Trilithon knows
whale for my spirit guide


"...to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up...jerky, spastic, desperately flapping." --Susanne Antonetta, A Mind Apart (2005)


Update on the Methane Time Bomb AKA "Clathrate Gun". (via Metafilter) Six degrees of desperation. Hey Eocene!


Presentisms.


Songs of the Gorilla Nation.


"Dr. Willhunt: For those of you whose averages might drop considerably, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Mr. Bailey, I hear Vietnam is quite pleasant this time of year.

Harry Bailey: No, not really Dr. Willhunt. You see, it's the rainy season. And during the rainy season, we used to get these fantastic mudslides that would wash up all these shallow graves. So if you really want to enjoy yourself, I would go in the late summertime." --from Getting Straight (1970)


Conlang: the Movie. (via Matt Arnold)


'Reality Hunger'? Try 'reality anorexia'--!

"Hexagon Mahjongg"

and this world too
whose processes
ask us nothing
dialling every so often
by mistake · attention's triage
for what will further the grout
succession · racydri square
off against actual madness

in youth i pursued which buzz
would carry · the imperiled penny
grow Ialdabaoth


Göbekli Tepe. "First came the temple, then the city." (via Metafilter)


Odd and Invented Forms. (thanx to Mike Snider!)


"My sneaking suspicion is that this conflation of arbitrariness and contingency is actually based on a deeper conflation of deontic modality (obligation and permission) with alethic modality (necessity and possibility)."

"What the Winter Don't Know"

the house become a landscape lost to myself
in the dim rays of morning
in the one lit corner of the dark house
zdani
empty most of the time
bound on its own trajectory of change & decay
contingent otherwise wholly soapbubble
i start the coffee machine
without spilling a drop

perhaps i am only dreaming of this life
and i am really a plasticized corpse
on public display in a futuristic museum

"I want Baghdad to feel like home again."


They will call me cougar.


Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical.


A family epic about Global Warming: someone buys land in the high latitudes & waits.


"Someone like Hedy makes it impossible for us lesser mortals to say, 'I’m too old for this shit.'."


"Now, all art is impossible. That is its special function."

"Silent Debate"

Brother Awl of Grace
lead coffin

gain say 9n3 again purulent agate
at a raised way a frost tor

that certain & incomparable
green adage
raisins in the head
sinxa tu'a le jec datytsani

traffic comes to a crawl before the smoke
plume has declared itself a visible source;
aching to be freed of this, or home
finding out about it on the news.
Hemmed in, ignorant, all the further goals
blasted into insignificance
and we are only tired. The world's black fathoms
will not be plumbed today.

DANGER
CONFINED SPACE
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY

Dark Shadows + Fiona Apple fanmashup.


Courtesy name.


Volvelles.


Folk covers of Talking Heads.

Human activity is futile but it need not be trivial. Athletic competitions are trivial.

"In High Gondwanaland"

1.
emit garret tatter
ragtime · i'm a devout
choleric · kiaugh filter
cobbled out of baubles
corpuscular philosophy
and maenad reboot
lunrycukla bedysla te
makfa simsa sonralkamni
from this vantage
in the blitz
in the blitz margins
felspathic mentat
the hanging space heaters
in the temporary portable classroom
make a roar · but little heat
church incense
hidden folded in the icy air
fountain crackling
cerulean sky & deep shadows
the dead grass frosted
kid falls from a bus
potted bare saplings in the morning sun
in unison · glowing
burning log
and amber glow
missionary imposition
not
to hear my car breaking apart
pink Hello Kitty backpack
on the sidewalk
old man in urban camo
poring over the secondhand records
the shadowed canyons Downtown
and with the tops of the towers in light
monstrum monstruosum per monstrum monstruosiorem

the darkening ecliptic
the davening chull

2.
Lakewood. Aranjuez. Mutability.
Blue otchkies. Cessnas crashing.
Utterly. And bitterly.
Cobalt green. Crashsound regnant.
Plywood-windowed storefronts.
Siren from where. Utterly.

the city melts like spun sugar

Adagio. Islands of adagio.
Relict snow. 51 Pegasi c.


Freud--the film. More.


Music from the Golden Triangle. Also.


The Crystal Text.


Transit of HD 80606b.