( via / via )

Should be the end of the "Sirius used to be red" myth, but of course it won't be.

"A Pastiche For Eve

Unmanageable as history: these
Followers of Tammuz to the land
That offered no return, where dust
Grew thick on every bolt and door.
And so the world
Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair.

Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog,
Who shines alike on mothers, lesbians, and whores.

What are we governed by? Dido and Carrie
Chapman Catt arrange themselves as statues near
The playground and the Tivoli.
While warming up the beans,
Miss Sanders broods on the Rhamnusian, the whole earth worshipping
Her godhead.
Later, vegetables in Athens.

Chaste in the dungeon, swooning with voluptuousness,
The Lady of the Castle weds pure Christ, the feudal groom.

Their bowels almost drove Swift mad.
'Sad stem,
Sweet evil, stretching out a lion's jaws,' wrote Marbode.

Now we cling together in our caves.
That not impossible she
That rots and wrinkles in the sun, the shadow
Of all men, man's counterpart, sweet rois
Of vertew and of gentilness.
.
.
The brothel and the crib endure.

Past reason hunted.
How we die! Their pain, their blood, are ours."

--Weldon Kees (via PoetrySoup)

Not just the Dogons. Obviously the most eminent use of Sirius in literature is The Sirian Experiments, & a close second with the hilarious Wasp. In poetry, we can mention Merwin's book, though i have to say none of these is really about the star... Also (thanks for the Auden!).

"Sirius is too young to remember." --Basil Bunting (maybe the only poet who knew his astronomy--since Omar)

"...dynamical simulations suggest that stable orbits exist around both stars at circumstellar distances up to more than half the binary system's closest separation of 8.1 AU." This one thinks out to 7 AU is okay. My Sirius rundown from 2016 (plus bonus wombat) According to my old notes, B was a late-B star of 2.95 mass (or more) in a circular orbit at 8 AU; my calculation yielded a maximum orbit around A of 2.3 AU & 1.9 AU around B. But obviously these planets would have been disrupted e.g. by the formation of a planetary nebula--not to mention the changing of the stellar orbits.

( via via @proximasan / via )

5-square-ordered poem in rhime.

“I am steel; I am a druid.
I am an artificer; I am a scientific one.
I am a serpent; I am love; I will indulge in feasting.
I am not a confused bard drivelling…
I am a cell, I am a cleft, I am a restoration,
I am the depository of song; I am a literary man…
I am a bard of the hall, I am a chick of the chair.”

–Book of Taliessen III. in: William F Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868)

The Star Sirius. (However, Sirius is not 10 times brighter than the sun, but 25 times brighter.)

"XII

I escape from a feint, fluf for fluf.
A projectile I know not where it will fall.
Incertitude. Tramontation. Cervical articulation.

Zap of a horsefly that dies
in mid-air and drops to earth.
What would Newton say now?
But, naturally, you’re all sons.

Incertitude. Heels that don’t spin.
The knotted page, factures
five thorns on one side
and five on the other. Ssh! Here it comes."

--Cesar Vallejo, Trilce (tr C Eshleman, 1992)

Hey There Boys.

( via / via )

Caverns.

“Life-size is too Large

To the microscopy of thinking small
(To have room enough to think at all)
I said, ‘Cramped mirror, faithful constriction,
Break, be large as I.’

Then I heard little leaves in my ears rustling
And a little wind like a leaf blowing
My mind into a corner of my mind,
Where wind over empty ground went blowing
And a large dwarf picked and picked up nothing.”

–Laura (Riding) Jackson

They call me Thinks the way I work the loom.

"There is no community in England; there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a dissociating than a uniting principle. ...It is community of purpose that constitutes society. Without that, men may be drawn into continguity, but they still continue virtually isolated. ...in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact." --Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845)

Aside on the Catabolic Dispensation.

( via / via )

Riding the frog.

"A person’s INFENCIBILITY is their unsuitability for military service or combat." --@HaggardHawks

🪐🪐🪐.

"EACH MAN HIS OWN CHIMÆRA

Beneath a vault of livid sky, upon a far-flung and dusty plain where no grass grew, where not a nettle or a thistle dared raise its head, men passed me bowed down to the ground.

Each bore upon his back a great Chimæra, heavy as a sack of coal, or as the equipment of a foot-soldier of Rome.

But the monster was no dead weight. With her all-powerful and elastic muscles she encircled and oppressed her mount, clawing with two great talons at his breast. Her fabulous head reposed upon his brow, like a casque of ancient days whereby warriors struck fear to the hearts of their foes.

I questioned one of the wayfarers, asking why they walked thus. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor his companions, but that [Pg 126]they moved towards an unknown land, urged on by irresistible impulse.

None of the wayfarers was discomforted by the foul thing which hung upon his neck. One said that it was part of himself.

Beneath the lowering dome of sky they journeyed on. They trod the dust-strewn earth—earth as desolate as the dusty sky. Their weary faces bore no witness to despair; they were condemned to hope for ever. So the pilgrimage passed and faded into the mist of the horizon, where the planet unveils itself to the human eye.

For some moments I tried to solve this mystery; but unconquerable Indifference fell upon me. And I was no more dejected by my burden than they by their crushing Chimæras." --Baudelaire, tr Guy Thorne

Blood Roses.

( via/ via )

The Making and Unmaking of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's UFO.

the scuba breath mastered
except for now & then
dust caked
on the hood of another car
is that Saharan dust

the history of shadow traces
the geography of road kills

Little Red Corvette.

When i think of essays such as the one i just linked to on being "collapse aware", it's not so much that i want to answer them, as that they evoke a counterpoint which for me is summed up in a piece of music (you can furnish your own examples) or a poem like this:

"Night

The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken
Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
Out of the slack, the slow west
Sombering its torch; a ship’s light
Shows faintly, far out,
Over the weight of the prone ocean
On the low cloud.

Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow,
Peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining.
Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings
And the ocean accepts her glory. O soul worshipful of her
You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always,
And the film of waves above that takes the sun takes also
Her, with more love. The sun-lovers have a blond favorite,
A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter,
Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes. Quietness
Flows from her deeper fountain; and he will die; and she is immortal.

Far off from here the slender
Flocks of the mountain forest
Move among stems like towers
Of the old redwoods to the stream,
No twig crackling; dip shy
Wild muzzles into the mountain water
Among the dark ferns.
O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon
The blasphemies of glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the fretfulness
Of cities, the cressets of the planets, the pride of the stars.
This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens,
The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children,
The earth’s orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire
Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night
What? Not a spark? What flicker of a spark in the faint far glimmer
Of a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the Bedouins
Wandered from at dawn . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs tempted
Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain
Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance.

The tide, moving the night’s
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength
To the outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time.

O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward?
Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,
Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think silence.
The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.
And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately
Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,
The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory
Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.
And I and my people, we are willing to love the four-score years
Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.
Have men’s minds changed,
Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul
Broken the surface? A few centuries
Gone by, was none dared not to people
The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,
And death is no evil."

--Robinson Jeffers

Plague Checkpoint.

( via / via )

Restless dark waters.

My share of the Earth. If the total amount of arable land is 5.34 million square miles & the total population is 8 billion, then each person's individual portion is 1/1500 of a square mile, or 136 feet on a side. That's a little bigger than the average house lot (18496 sq ft vs 13896). (Not that it would really be feasible for one person to farm that size lot & live only on what they grew.) If the world GNP is $146 trillion, then each person's share is $18,250, or $50 a day. But note that this is a snapshot of an ongoing process, there are a lot of non-liquid assets (such as the instruments of production); plus a large portion of the world's wealth is devoted to keeping things separate, as much as maintaining lines of passage (transportation & communication, both highly wasteful in our present dispensation). That is to say, the world economy is a structure of both walls & gates. I can imagine that removing walls & gates would free up a lot of wealth... What is the point of such utopian calculations? Maybe only to suggest that the problem is not that the world is poor: its wealth is unevenly distributed.

Closing Hours. (via neon city burning on tumblr)

"Why pretexts seekest thou, and bandiest
Thy bootless bickerings?" --Mooney's Hosidius Geta

"The chief interest of the piece is in the proof it supplies of the popular knowledge of the text of Virgil at that time; it also illustrates the utter want of true poetical feeling which could make such an undertaking possible." More cento links (some may be broken).

( via / via )

The Political Implications of Art Creation.

"I am a very exceptional person and in a tragic position, and you will have to grasp it, or you are no good to me." --@icomptonburnett

The Naughty Bits.

   thunder churns
dull and adroit
   wears argent

actual whist lull
   or onset

Don't Fear the Reaper.

( via / suzie riddle on fb )

Here's mine.

fake termite a circle round
the moon jerking roulette wheel
blue chull crossed with shuffle socks
you loiter here & coin bubbles

portal most where sun lingers
a blur knowing furtive rest
avoided wreck coiled elsewise
the ruth that sand dunes wander

"I had always assumed that once the climate disasters got bad enough, we would get our act together..."

"I plan to obtain a frontal lobotomy, becoming, thus, a living vegetable, and thus able to write novels that will please the unwashed rabble." --@harryskeeler

Gallery.

( via / me )

Texas Sun.

"The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. They are either names of things which do not exist (for as there are things left unnamed through lack of observation, so likewise are there names which result from fantastic suppositions and to which nothing in reality corresponds), or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities." --Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 1

Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.

Blue Supermoon
bad nectarine
scalding dark in mid-September
lostness i remember
stalk the bind-rune
Blue Supermoon
myrrhy
parallax...

crisp close dark in mid-September
stillness i remember

PSY Cube #1.

( via / via )

Tedious Subtraction of Truths.

   myrrhy pyre
from gray whispers
   cyan up

lyric cringe pelt
   if grown lorn

Open Letter from Faculty.

"Etna da luz azul a Dante." --Juan Jose Arreola

Yesterday.

( via / via )

I am a Tongue of Spectral Void.

"This imminence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the esthetic fact." --Daniel Stern, The Suicide Academy (1968)

A Long Way On.

the parched soil cracking in deep fissures
at close of day
a filmmaker
who may or may not exist
a politician
causer of much harm
freezes before the cam'ra
& suddenly i pity him

Blossoming sphere.

( via / via )

"For some deeply human reason, the systems we currently build are unquenchingly thirsty for coercive resources to punish tiny acts of resistance to the inadequate and failing services they provide."

1.
when are the masks arriving?
the new castle
five hundred years old

used to be reachable
by a single-person walkway

available for birthdays

2.
anymore
not given shelter
to build

castles in the sky

3.
the pitch i would submit
is so thick
it drips a hundred years one drop
the pitch i would submit
is a corkscrew curveball
the pitch i would submit
is one
you will never hear
the pitch is the only part

that doesn't move

4.
steering wheel too hot to hold

"When face to face with one’s years, time becomes an overture for the events of the self."

"It's been a long time since the swindlers started from scratch." --Elias Canetti

"A ghost story that is also a jigsaw puzzle."

( via / via )

How to Paint republished.

"Science Fiction has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions, and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past..." --R A Lafferty, 1979

"I have battled for fresh mammoth..."

"A WALK

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one,
at the end of the path which I’ve only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—

and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a sign appears, echoing our own sign . . .
But what we sense is the wind against us."

--Rilke, 1924 (tr S Miller)

"Nevertheless, habitus is a step towards having something to do rather than a merely a set of responses to stimuli."

( via / via )

Optographic Animation.

maybe tonight the scroll is read
from feathery cirrus nastaliq
so high above our jumbled wreck
no one can tell what's crop from weed.

Adynaton.

"I placed a miniature bookcase on top of my desk and now instead of writing all I do is run my fingers along the spine of books." --@dreamsofbeing_

The Nostalghia.

( via / via )

Ring around the collar🫧.

"I hope you're keeping
some kind of record..."

--Cohen

Crossing my fingers for Moonlight Shadow! 🖤.

"Quiet

Since I took quiet to my breast
My heart lies in me, heavier
Than stone sunk fast in sluggish sand,
That the sea's self may never stir,
When she sweeps hungrily to land,
Since I took quiet to my breast.

Strange quiet, when I made thee guest,
My heart had countless strings to fret
Under a least wind's fingering.
How could I know I would forget
To catch breath at a gull's curved wing,
Strange quiet, when I made thee guest?

Thou, quiet, hast no gift of rest.
The pain that at thy healing fled
More dear was to my heart than pride.
Now for its loss my heart is dead,
And I keep horrid watch beside.
Thou, quiet, hast no gift of rest."

--Léonie Adams

"...post-Brexit UK depicted as having become something like North Korea..."

( via / via )

"...if all of the communication is built upon past, prototypical experiences, then it would be difficult to imagine the origin and evolution of such a language."

"From Far, from Eve

From far, from eve and morning
   And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
   Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
   Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
   What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
   How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
   I take my endless way."

--A.E. Housman

"The biggest woodblock print I’ve ever done."

"SAW

I sat.
I lost
I was ill.
I was sent.
I was raw onyx,
a lag,
a wonder or rime.

Lost, solemn;
I was I & you.

Banal plan!
A buoy & I
saw in me
—lost sole,
mirrored now:
a galaxy;
no wars,
a witness,
a will.

I saw it,
so lit as I was."

--@MerlinaAcevedo

Got my Mojo Workin'.

( via / via )

"To create a parallel English-Tamarian corpus, first a Tamarian-to-English dictionary that captures the inferred meaning of each Tamarian utterance was required."

"But what do the fascists say?"

"Penelope, her weave unraveled."

   decrepit ship sets
out for the opposite shore
   all that hope · sinking

in a matter of hours
as thousands watch them flailing

should have learned to swim, they say

Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?"

( via / via )

"As is the Icelandic way, a hole is made in the house-wall, the corpse being pushed through it and the hole afterwards sealed. It was thought that if a corpse were carried through the front door its ghost would know how to come back inside and haunt the inhabitants."

bright & customary strength
among the interconnected tidepools
the sky whatever it is

hurtle to no reckoning
beyond a rearrangement of glyphs

Catch y’all on the flip side ✌️😵‍💫💖.

The only gameplan they have for human capital is strip-mining.

It feels like a dead mall in her.

( via / miekal and in asemic on fb )

Degenerate creatures having fun.

"the silence
at noon
wind in autumn
from the beggar's shack"

--@poem_exe 4-13-16

The war.

it is raw
material to hurl
against the rainfront of castle-melt

saltbane
for my snail palace

through the red-litten windows see

"John Hughes films that seemed sanitized at the time now look pretty edgy."

( via / via )

"I think most philosophers aren’t aware of just how rapidly the discipline of classics is imploding these days."

      "II: When Israel out of Egypt Came

When Israel out of Egypt came
   Safe in the sea they trod;
By day in cloud, by night in flame,
   Went on before them God.

He brought them with a stretched out hand
   Dry-footed through the foam,
Past sword and famine, rock and sand,
   Lust and rebellion, home.

I never over Horeb heard
   The blast of advent blow;
No fire-faced prophet brought me word
   Which way behoved me go.

Ascended is the cloudy flame,
   The mount of thunder dumb;
The tokens that to Israel came,
   To me they have not come.

I see the country far away
   Where I shall never stand;
The heart goes where no footstep may
   Into the promised land.

The realm I look upon and die
   Another man will own;
He shall attain the heaven that I
   Perish and have not known.

But I will go where they are hid
   That never were begot,
To my inheritance amid
   The nation that is not.

Where mixed with me the sandstorms drift,
   And nerve and heart and brain
Are ashes for the air to lift,
   And lightly shower again."

--A E Housman

"Crossword sonnets, infected sonnets, golden spades, stanzas copped from John Donne—there is plenty of formal innovation and imitation to be found in this month’s roundup.."

"A cat is the boundary between her and me..." --Eshleman & Barcía's Vallejo

Little Fugue in G Minor.

( via / via )

"This is as sane, cheery and level-headed an account of a nervous breakdown as you could ever hope to see."

"The fact is that Dante, by many expressions throughout the poem, shows himself to have been a notably bad climber; and being fond of sitting in the sun, looking at his fair Baptistry, or walking in a dignified manner on flat pavement in a long robe, it puts him seriously out of his way when he has to take to his hands and knees, or look to his feet; so that the first strong impression made upon him by any Alpine scene whatever is, clearly, that it is bad walking." --John Ruskin, qtd in Longfellow's notes to his Inferno.

Itzcuintli Dog With Me. I was not actually a fan of hers until this painting came to Dallas in a travelling show. I still think it is one of the scariest paintings I've ever seen (no photo does it justice). I think the little dog "represents" Death. Or maybe just her own death, that went everywhere she did.

"AIR, FROM THE OLD WELSH

Like seaweed under water,
The uneventful trees
Move at my window
In the mist of the morning.

If I could count the leaves
And multiply them by
The number of seasons left me,
And were every leaf a love,
There still would not be enough
To have before I die.

Ah, what stubborn stuff
I waken to find
In the cells of the mind
On the sills of the morning."

--Rolfe Humphries

"Sikun Labyrinythus," however, is a place on Titan. Which took me to a website for planetary placenames because, y'know, it's not enough just to go there...

( via / via )

A poem in which 70 Ophiuchi is invoked.

Palindrome: Kraken ARG: Ngranek ark.

"[T]he unnamed planet in the 1970 tv series UFO is described as being at a distance that well matches 70 Oph ("100 million million miles" = 17LY).."

“Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.” --@fvrmvn via @LeeBillings

You can still read about Jacob's Planet. (It was being taken seriously as late as 1943.) Others might think "See's Planet" is a better claim--who first calculated the orbit--, or until 1978 & Heinz, anyway...

I don't have handy my calculations about the farthest planet dynamically possible for each of the stars*, but i know i chose the solvent chlorine trifluoride because i had discovered it was a non-protonic solvent with a reasonably broad liquid range, & though UNLIKELY, could not be said to be IMPOSSIBLE**. The biochemical equation, i think, i came up with involved gaseous SiF4 (aka "tetrafluorosilane") & fluorosilicate-based life... The secondary sun, having been described as "violet" (like very few other stars) deserves something more exotic than, ahem "New Persia"--oh wait, that's 70 Ophiuchi A.

Just don't call it Sikun.

Scaling Ngranek.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* I see that it's somewhere around 4.8 AU for star B, or a maximum period of 10.9 years (so much for 17 or 18--!).
** The calculated planet would have a "year" of 401.6 days

( via / via )

"I reckoned that I had the largest trigram collection in the world outside the secret files of the National Security Agency."

"If his bouquet is composed of strange flowers, of metallic colourings and exotic perfumes, the calyx of which, instead of joy contains bitter tears and drops of aqua-tofana, he can reply that he planted but a few into the black soil, saturating them in putrefaction, as the soil of a cemetery dissolves the corpses of preceding centuries among mephitic miasmas. Undoubtedly roses, marguerites, violets, are the more agreeable spring flowers; but he thinks little of them in the black mud with which the pavements of the town are covered." --Life of Baudelaire

1979 Bell Jar. Not as bad as its reputation. ☆☆

closures still no remedy
only the name of one
wings of card & paraffin
sugar glass the humvee
sugar glass the humvee

ride without these wings
where such creatures go
narrowest arching bridge
to the next hour's close
to the next hour's close

strongest light i run t'ward
through the redbrick fingers
turnstile for isle hungers
honed on the only flint-word
honed on the only flint-word

"...nicknamed 'Kraken,' by some.."

( via / via )

Onomatopoeia.

loudly the cicalas purl
even unto September's maw
& faster blur
the headlines that appall

i thought i dodged a speedy pill
as i into some form return
even this din
brings a familiar swirl
to the late shadows that swell

i spent four lonely days in a brown jelly haze
loudly the cicadas purl
Plutonian Braille
among bright blurs

An old limerick of mine.

"There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply." --Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man (1978)

A new, heroick, limerick i just wrote.

( via / via )

"Wishing to keep the change he received after going to the store, Camus’s adolescent alter ego tells his grandmother that it had fallen into the latrine pit. Without a word, she rolls up a sleeve, goes to the hole, and digs for it."

"St Francis of Assisi...founded an Order which quickly began to participate in murder and massacre almost immediately after it was formed." --Simone Weil

The Primary Hourglass.

"Melody, abloom,
treads a dale
in gloomy March.

A season,
and he abandons
a search.

May, looming,
leads a dream
to a bloody elm."

--A Loris Abandons an Opera

Dalí Atomicus.