( via / me )

"Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation."

"The Exiles (Ode III ['To Edward Upward, Schoolmaster'] from The Orators)

What siren zooming is sounding our coming
Up frozen fjord forging from freedom
   What shepherd's call
   When stranded on hill,
   With broken axle
   On track to exile?

With labelled luggage we alight at last
Joining joking at the junction on the moor
   With practised smile
   And harmless tale
   Advance to meet
   Each new recruit.

Expert from uplands, always in oilskins,
Recliner from library, laying down law,
   Owner from shire,
   All meet on this shore
   Facing each prick
   With ginger pluck.

Our rooms are ready, the register signed,
There is time to take a turn before dark.
   See the blistering paint
   On the scorching front.
   Or icicles sombre
   On pierhead timber.

To climb the cliff path to the coastguard's point
Past the derelict dock deserted by rats,
   Look from concrete sill
   Of fort for sale
   To the bathers' rocks,
   The lovers' ricks.

Our boots will be brushed, our bolsters pummelled.
Cupboards are cleared for keeping our clothes.
   Here we shall live
   And somehow love
   Though we only master
   The sad posture.

Picnics are promised and planned for July
To the wood with the waterfall, walks to find[,]
   Traces of birds,
   A mole, a rivet.
   In factory yards
   Marked strictly private.

There will be skating and curling at Christmas — indoors
Charades and ragging; then riders pass
   Some afternoons
   In snowy lanes
   Shut in by wires.
   Surplus from wars.

In Spring we shall spade the soil on the border
For blooming of bulbs; we shall bow in Autumn
   When trees make passes,
   As high gale pushes,
   And bewildered leaves
   Fall on our lives.

[We are here for our health, we have not to fear
The fiend in the furze or the face at the manse;
   Proofed against shock
   Our hands can shake;
   The flag at the golf-house flutters
   And nothing matters.

We shall never need another new outfit;
These grounds are for good, we shall grow no more,
   But lose our color
   With scurf on collar
   Peering through glasses
   At our own glosses.

This life is to last, when we leave we leave all,
Though vows have no virtue, though voice is in vain,
   We live like ghouls
   On posts from girls
   What the spirit utters
   In formal letters.

We shall rest without risk, neither ruler with rod
Nor spy with signals for secret agent
   Tasteless for fruit
   Too nervous for feat
   Spending all time
   With the Doc or the Jim.]

Watching through windows the wastes of evening,
The flare of foundries at fall of the year.
   The slight despair
   At what we are,
   The marginal grief
   Is source of life.

In groups forgetting the gun in the drawer
Need pray for no pardon, are proud till recalled
   By music on water
   To lack of stature.
   Saying Alas
   To less and less.

Till holding our hats in our hands for talking[,]
Or striding down streets for something to see.
   Gas-light in shops.
   The fate of ships
   And the tide-wind
   Touch the old wound.

Till the town is ten and the time is London
And nerves grow numb between north and south
   Hear last in corner
   The pffwungg of burner
   Accepting dearth.
   The shadow of death."

--WH Auden [bracketed changes are lines added, as it appears in Poems (1934)]

"Sante is also offering a casually self-lacerating sketch of that familiar persona, the cooler-than-thou male aesthete-intellectual who cares for large social forces, smaller cultural ephemera, and not much between."

"Word of the Day: FLURRIGIGS (n. pl.) showy yet useless adornments or finery [19thC dial.]" --@HaggardHawks

Decolonizing your algorithm.