( via/ via )

Falcon Heavy.

"When he told Oppenheimer the news, his reply was, 'That's impossible.' Oppenheimer then went to the blackboard and proceeded to prove mathematically that fission couldn't happen. Someone must have made a mistake." --American Prometheus

Starfish Ophiura sp. and Eocrinoid Fossil.

"The Candle a Saint

Green is the night, green kindled and appareled.
It is she that walks among astronomers

She strides above the rabbit and the cat,
Like a noble figure, out of the sky,

Moving among the sleepers, the men,
Those that lie chanting green is the night.

Green is the night and out of madness woven,
The self-same madness of the astronomers

And of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,
The topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,

That sees above them, that sees rise up above them,
The noble figure, the essential shadow,

Moving and being, the image at its source,
The abstract, the archaic queen. Green is the night."

--Wallace Stevens

"People keep saying that but there’s nothing complicated about it. It’s simple. What’s happening is evil."

( via / via )

Leading or supporting?

"Trappist exoplanet"

1.
tired of unreachable dust
dust that has a voice

souvenirs of the carnival
Lao Tzu in concrete

all the maskless people

2.
tired of unreachable dust
in the plenitude of powdermilk
three rings for the whiteface in mufti
disavowed when the sun came up

always-at-the-point-of-clabbering milk
waste basket fills itself in a matter of hours
light falling away strongly from the bright angles

3.
tired of unreachable dust
& palpable void

"A good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle."

“Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.”

- Daniil Kharms, 1930 (via @aliner)

2023 in pixels.

( via / via )

⚛️THORIUM.

"What the past few months have shown is that the two societies that have taken the right lessons from the history of the twentieth century are Ireland and South Africa." --@_ryanruby_

.●.

"The Weeping Burgher

It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech —
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart —
My hands such sharp, imagined things."

--by Wallace Stevens

An extreme setup.

( via / via )

"Against redemption, salvation, quick-fixes, and resolution, poetry permits the irredeemable."

"wispy clouds
loop and curl over
the river
for the time being
we break eye contact"

--an'ya

"Some of Georges Simenon's best novels are his romans Américains..."

"The pigeons rose with a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled.” --Delmore Schwartz

An annual walk which is often terrible.

( via / miekal )

The Rise of Capitalism.

"One of my heroes when I was kid growing up in Wisconsin Rapids was a man named Reuben Lindstrom who mostly lived on the streets, rarely ever spoke, and was a local legend because he had converted a bike to ride on the train tracks. I have many memories of seeing him buzzing down the tracks with his dreads flapping in the wind. By city officials he was considered a nusiance and at one point run out of town and another time he was detained by the public health service and his long long dreads were shaved off. There were always rumors that he was a mad inventor but only recently I discovered that he had actually filed a patent for a wind driven vehicle in 1939.

This in itself is remarkable, but what I find more remarkable is that 70 years later International Truck files several patents for wind driven energy generation, which cite Reuben's patent from 1940. Crazy stuff, I can't quite get my mind around it. Here's a man that was so far ahead of his time yet he was ridiculed and outcast, tho most of the kids I knew back then probably secretly admired him.

"Although this trained automotive mechanic chose to exclusively ride a bicycle for the rest of his life, he powered the two wheeler with a small gasoline engine. Whenever he required its aid, which was seldom, he’d pull the rope and start the engine and off he’d go.

He also 'rode the rails.' Reuben welded two flat steel pieces on each end of a telescoping steel rod. He then drilled holes in those flat pieces and inserted two large U-bolts in them. He secured one U-bolt end to a stud he had welded to a flanged steel wheel that turned easily on greased bearings. He secured the other end of the rod’s U-bolt to the bike’s top cross bar."

I saw him often in Rapids when I was a kid, but never had the courage to talk to him. My dad told me that when he was a young kid, Reuben used to come to his school and play marbles with the kids, that would have been in the 40s.

There were many rumors that he eventually felt unwelcome in Rapids and for a while lived in the caves at Devil's Lake. (This mind you, if only a rumor)

He eventually moved to Madison, but I never realized he lived on Willy St, or maybe the halfway house on Baldwin. The first two photos by photographer Jack Greene are of Reuben from 1982. The best thing is the photo includes a caption in Reuben's own words.

'I used to work around the railroads in Canada, roundhouses, locomotives, steam days then you know. I've been here in Madison I guess six years. They're doing a lot of fixing up on Williamson Street. I don't know how it's all going to end up. They used to have two railroads side by side here, you know.'

He died in 1988 at the age of 91 and is buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. --miekal and in Forgotten wisconsin on fb

"...if American democracy ends by suicide with him as the implement of choice it'll be like somebody suffocating themselves with a whoopie cushion, i.e. the dumbest possible way to go."

"Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks."

--Wallace Stevens

Zombies.

( me / via )

THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY.

three times threading the needle
three dooms averted
flog me with a wet noodle
three times threading the needle
the homepage now rot-nodal
further defeats soon provided
three times threading the needle
three dooms averted

Postcard from Patti Smith to Robert Mapplethorpe, 1969.

"The Argonautica is the first heist movie (or epic, whatever), with an elaborate team of people with different skills (boxing, music, strength, etc.)" --@ae_stallings

Imagination II.

( via / via )

Hometeam.

“How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life; that from now until the end of my days I would bear the painful malady within myself?” --Andrei Tarkovsky

Don't be afraid of the Devil Comet.

"The Death of a Soldier

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction."

--Wallace Stevens

That ol' Devil Comet.

( via / via )

Waves & mist.

      "Fragestellung"

   Apophis rides roughshod
   beribboned stern kernel
   grep shifgrethor pathos
   agroof with global loofah
   Durkin's Attack dictates
   dirt bike Helicon scramble
Apophis' piffle-apocalypse clytes
   on the sky-high skull-pile

Complex landscape.

"As Robert observed, Frank had a way of 'reducing a specific and rather complex siytuation to its central irreducible Fragestellung [formulation of a question].' " --Bird & Sherwin, American Prometheus (2005)

Introduction to Shifgrethor.

( via / via )

Prosody Note.

"Radovan Karadzic, the 'butcher of Srebernica,' was a physician-poet and one of the last oral composers in the tradition studied by Milman Parry in his quest to understand Homer. Karadzic was performing epic poems with a stringed instrument, the guzla, when captured." --@AmitMajmudar

Migration.

"SUPPLICATION

The sea took a sailor to its deep,--
His mother, unsuspecting, goes to light

a tall candle before the Virgin Mary
for his speedy return and for fine weather--

and always she cocks her ear to windward.
But while she prays and implores,

the icon listens, solemn and sad, knowing well
that the son she expects will no longer return."

--CP Cavafy (tr Rae Dalven)

𝘛𝘙𝘈𝘚𝘏𝘞𝘈𝘝𝘌 4.

( via / via )

Peter Gunn.

"On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon."

--Wallace Stevens

"Roland Berrill, the founder of the MENSA organization, came up with the idea for the Royal Fez tarot deck. He hired artist Michael Hobdell to execute the artwork. Hobdell died shortly after completing the project, and Berrill died before his original print run of 500 decks was marketed. Eventually, around 1970, the decks were collected and marketed by Rigel Press, Ltd. Subsequently, US Games and AGMueller released a non-limited edition (in 1975) that remained in print for several years. Berrill's deck was supposedly based on a legend that tarot cards were a remnant of secret societies that once existed in Fez, Morocco. Indeed, the black and white backgrounds of the images could suggest Moroccan landscapes, architecture and culture. However, the featured images are undeniably lifted by Waite and Smith's work."

"The historical sense of castles is so entrenched that most will assume any spirit of the stair must be former royal prisoner or warden. Of course, it's just as likely the ghost of a visitor from 1959 who fell to their death before they installed the guide ropes." – C. Josiffe (via @HooklandGuide)

Storm Sepia Symmetry.

( via / via )

The Fire that Consumes All before It.

   I recently tried to make a list based on books i made comments on in letters & blog entries, & came up with 50, 31 of them rereads (something i've started doing since Covid). It's hard for a new book to hit me as strongly in a year that i reread Moby-Dick, Libra, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Kaputt, Doktor Faustus, Dhalgren, 3 collections of Aickman stories, 4 books by R A Lafferty, & Gwyneth Jones' Aleutian trilogy, but i found Priestdaddy the funniest book i've read in a long time (not that i go out of my way to find funny books), & Dombey and Son a great unheralded Dickens. The strangest by far was Betelguese: a Trip through Hell by De Esque (which i read online). The most surpising was Sinclair Lewis's Oil! (basis for the movie There Shall Be Blood) that i really wasn't expecting to like. The most disappointing was Lisa Robertson's Anemones. Not that much poetry, alas, but Seiferle's translation of The Black Heralds has to be mentioned. Also the Sackvilles' translation of the Duino Elegies, & Merwin- The Shadow of Sirius (reread).

Aesthetic Vibes.

"Tridentine gloze"

1.
days of content providing
slow decay of fireworks
garage coolth forever
like a place in the mind
amble into toastcrunch
a setting
the desert at sunup
equations come to life

2.
it matters little where i go
across the uncomplaining earth
the ice that forms upon the brow
comes from the air & thither flies
there is no sun to limn my path
there is no book to tell me how
there is no final bourn or prize
& yet it matters that i know
but were i one to share the gleam
would be to tarry in my vow
erasing the words that make it so
& throwing fathoms in my eyes
a thousand birds here ride the wires
nor are they silent in their watch
& when one leaves another joins
& all that noise remains as one

Rain running down an array of spheres.

( via / via )

Black Metallic.

"The Place Of The Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation."

--Wallace Stevens

3 x PSY15.

"CONQUERING AN EMPIRE (Palindrome)

No due,
fleets war....

Did I rule Rome?

No, no, troops!

In Italy,
my Latin
is poor-to-none.

More lurid,
I draw steel,
feud on...."

--@Anthony_Etherin

KEBAB 🥙.

( via / José Flores Ventura in RUPESTREWEB Grupo de interacción en arte rupestre on fb via miekal and )

The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane.

"During my research into my father's past I found that between 1870 and 1940 about five hundred anarchist periodicals were published in the United States. That virtually no trace remains of that vast number of publications and the even vaster number of people behind them shows how utterly anarchists have been erased from American history." --Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022)

Arbitrage.

"The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care."

--Wallace Stevens

A Poem for Europa.

( via / via )

Merry. (via)

"disruption"

the will not to vary
from one's set purpose
anxiomaniac charge

do we go
all at once or single file

Our shadows hum against the earth.

“A candle extinguished is a sun that dies. The candle dies even more gently than a star of the sky. The wick bends; the wick blackens. The flame has swallowed its opium from the shadow that embraces it. And the flame dies a good death; it dies in its sleep.” (Bachelard) via @dreamsofbeing_

The only contemporary artist influenced by elephant art.

( via / via )

Grasshopper into landscape & back again.

   The whole "people with..." construction is one of those things that has kind of backfired, especially in a time when so many people seem to think fixing words is a good substitute for fixing reality, but the real culprit in this case is Autism Speaks, whose strategic use of "people with" has been seen to mask not just the wish to do away with autistic people (from the viewpoint of horrified parents who dream only of having a "normal" kid) but also the abusive treatment--even to the point of torture--known as Applied Behavioral Analysis, or "ABA" (nowadays soft-pedalled but still not disavowed by them). So we have a situation where the only organization most laypeople have heard of, is despised by the majority of the group they are supposed to be dedicated to helping. --But i'm not one of those who feel that using the "wrong word" should be equated with the very worst crimes, just by internet flimflam. There's plenty of real villains running around loose, without the need for virtue-policing the people of good will.

I've stopped paying much attention to the so-called "spectrum" community online. They went overboard about the "A-word" (Asperger's); they got all hot & bothered about "high-functioning" & "low-functioning" (which i proposed to call "more affable "& "less"); & when the hashtag #ActuallyAutistic started being used as a weapon & hostilities commenced between the Doctor-diagnosed & the Self-diagnosed, i said, "This is like one of those movies where people in a lifeboat want to fight with each other instead of fighting for survival. But real lifeboat people don't do that. Only: people who don't yet realize they're in a lifeboat."

Helplessly Hoping.

"Poor withered rose and dry,
   Skeleton of a rose,
Risen to testify
   To love's sad close:

Treasured for love's sweet sake,
   That of joy past
Thou might'st again awake
   Memory at last."

— Robert Bridges (via @isidro_li)

"...the work some praise/ And some the Architect..."

( me / via )

"The Calvin Klein brand was a heady mix of white sand, cloudless skies, stress-less luxury and urgent passion."

   Apophis
spring for uplift
   thrown witness
is as sputtered
   frisk bilk end

For a Poet.

"I gave Edith Sitwell a pocket air-raid siren & she lets it off when people ask her whether free verse is more truly poetic than rhymed." (Waugh, 1949) via @becimay via @ae_stallings

"Is this technically shoegaze’s third wave?"

( via / via )

"...Blue Cheer’s story only even began to re-surface during the Grunge-y, Sabbath-informed-in-a-Melvins-stylee St. Vitus-propelled early ‘90s, as a whole new generation of orphan rockers suddenly asked 'But whence sprung our current Mung Worship?' "

"To last, I hymn my hits a lot." --@Anthony_Etherin

"Literary criticism is when."

"rollcall of dictators"

delicate pink contrail
rollcall of dictators

the shoppingcart gone now
& i will never know

bird above the silhouetted wires
first flush of the new sun

new sun in its first flush seeping

There is something special about HIMARS launches.

( via / me )

Refraction of daisies.

tongsworth
fake bite-marks · instress
of the broken intersection
Aztec death whistle
yclept cassette disease

Underwater Cabaret. (via @openculture@toot.community)

"The clinkie was there, the dimbie, the woojie--in fact, everything, bar nothing." --@HarrySKeeler 6-19-14

Txtrs.anim.

( via / marcus gillespie via laura ostteen on fb )

"The series’ theme music, in which a ragtime-tinged orchestral cacophony abruptly changes to a triumphal contemporary march, was famous in its day."

"Give a writer a bare taste of success and he wants to do nothing more after that--but write more--and get more acceptances.

Till, of course, Old Man Death accepts him--in the magazine called 'The Grave'." --@HarrySKeeler 2-18-10

Red & green swirl.

   Cypress Waters wipeout
   warehoused saktra karats
   takwir yurt's heyoka
   yarrowfall dawns bronzely
   appear wire-strung pylons
   pallid raucous gawkers
this glebe glimmers in the glidepath
   safe are your louche secrets

Wet Pixels.

( via / me )

Sadok #66 🍀.

trace fading
in spite of kaiju probang
yaffled bugonia

O calavera xebec
Xibalba castaway

Burundi.

"To POWL is to leave work early to go to the pub." --@HaggardHawks

Griste II.

( via / via )

Red vs blue.

"The Blaze that from my Harim window breaks
With fright the Rabble of the Roadside takes;
And ev'n of those that at my Portal din,
Thousands may knock for one that enters in."

--FitzGerald's Attar

Tectonic flickering.

"The moon has
two
earths. We
are on
the other
one. The State
doesn't want us to know this."

--Charles Stein (via miekal and on fb)

Boxing day & eyeblink.

( via / via )

Snow in Sailor Moon.

"total war"

brimstone sillage
in the Uzzean lachrymatory
celadon Gulag tabard

elsewhere uffish floatpigs
legislate fathoms

wield my drogulus Werkzug

Peekaboo.

           "this other laughless rock
at the stone of division"

--The Anathemata, I.

Celestial Clash #2.

(via / via )

FitzGerald's Attar online.

I just realized The Man Who Was Thursday & The Conference of the Birds are the same story.

Public Disappearances.

ashes-of-roses nowness
silence stretches out its hands

the domdaniel walg hovers
with bright snide hauntology

"As an eighteenth-century owner has written on the title-page of a copy in the library of All Souls College, Oxford, next door to my own college in Oxford, 'Ingeniosè haud verè'— 'smart, but not true"."."

( via / via )

Clownopedia.

"The Rest I will Tell to Those Down in Hades

'Indeed,' said the proconsul, closing the book,
'this line is beautiful and very true.
Sophocles wrote it in a deeply philosophic mood.
How much we’ll tell down there, how much,
and how very different we’ll appear.
What we protect here like sleepless guards,
wounds and secrets locked inside us,
protect with such great anxiety day after day,
we’ll disclose freely and clearly down there.'

'You might add,' said the sophist, half smiling,
'if they talk about things like that down there,
if they bother about them any more.' "

--CP Cavafy (tr Keeley & Cherrard)

Composition 17.

"the holes in the wall
the rain falls of
hide and seek"

--@poem_exe 5-18-15

Christmas is 4 Ever.

( via / via )

Winter Nights.

"The worlds do die periodically. I wonder why nobody except myself has noticed this." --Past Master

Just Another One.

yan spana ozera       (off the usual route)
carini qoi le       (bright socks)
asen pendai       (good taste)
peisda             (laments)

qab jabemasti       (delicate road)

Out of Gaza.