"Whoever wanted a perfectly receptive climate for what they write?" --@mjohnharrison at mstdn
stealing from
all the sick people
industry
made of elves
days it looks like it could rain
& it never does
Saturday, July 27, 2024
raindrop amid caws
on this wan subfusc morning
alone the glass marks
while other drops are waiting
for me to stride out crowless
"Long ago, you were a fly, gawking with your compound eye, wondering at the giant world—now that smallness is a memory, many lives away, but when you see the pixels you remember insect play" --@ctrlcreep
Potential vorticity. (via feuilleton)
"The snail got to Toad’s house and gave him the letter from Frog. Toad was very pleased to have it." --@FrogandToadbot
"And this dry river was the site of a wedding
between an aspen forest and the moon."
Vladborn vale · belated
virulence to steer by
in the soft light laughing
lessons from gun thunder
trail of entrained venom
trustworthy no further
scalded wharf hands wielded
where we were most ghostly
adroit dream of melting
drones on as a bonus
north star or tenth ninepin
the nape-stamp of a vampire
what is your walking-t'ward
two leers lapped in clownwhite
the claim to clown hardwired
foundered name fortywatt
Sad monkey swept upstream on this afternoon's flood tide.
"That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. Perhaps it would have fewer gods, she thought as she watched the moon vanish over the horizon, leaving her in the darkness of the ninety-seven stars." --Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016)
Friday, July 26, 2024
"Across the sleeping earth
I’ve borne this white account."
"Unlike Shackleton and Scott, oaks don't keep diaries." --Ursula LeGuin
"With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured or both." (via @jorie_graham)
"The Moons of Darwin
Warden of this moon!
What infernos doom
fond whim to reason?
What inner moods of
faith soon drown me?
I fathom no wonders,
own no shard of time:
from now on death is
no minter of shadow.
Moons fade in worth
with dreams of noon."
--@christianbok
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* more on the "old" ε Indi Ab. The video. "It is worth noting that in Niven's 1973 novel Protector, epsilon Indi has a gas giant named Godzilla." Shipwreck on Epsilon Indi. Named "Andoria" (among others) here.
My eyes see black and white...
Farewell
Fieldfare
To the dregs that sap our will
Farewell
To the churning wall
To the silent wildfire
Farewell
Fieldfare
"The durable moon determines/ what I do not have."
"when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains" --Robinson Jeffers
"Because fieldfare birds leave Britain at the end of winter, ‘Farewell fieldfare!’ is a 14th century expression used to celebrate the end of an unpleasant experience, or the departure of a disagreeable person." --@HaggardHawks
"April comes
and now you are gone,
you, who told your guardian angel
each year on your birthday,
not yet"
--Michael Dylan Welch
Thursday, July 25, 2024
If You Think You Know How This Ends, You Haven't Been Paying Attention.
Brutalist cities
scarecrow · werifesteria
what is a patriot
but someone who loves the food
of the place he grew up in
Brutalist cities
i wander · knowing no one
in a light drizzle
the language a ghost to me
i must become that scarecrow
"It’s really cool when people call something a ‘moonshot’. One of the last great Germanic compounds. Though it’s recent, originally meaning the launching of a spacecraft on its way to the moon, it would make a perfectly good Old English word: *mōnsċot." --@wylfcen
"Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot." --Ulysses
One Scene Wonders: Anne Bancroft Getting into the Game of Malice.
"Migratory Motions of My Greater Emotions (palindrome)
Mood tides, send as ESP
any Speed;
spiral, lift serotonin;
let up warm saps;
trap misery gyres;
impart spasm raw;
put El Niño to rest;
fill a rip’s deep synapse sadness;
edit doom."
--@SpoonerRhythms
"That’s what war failed to achieve..." (via @zeeshanjaanam)
You will say, those days we kept on getting killed
by hunger, bombs, sniper-fire & flames;
while others were concerned & angry, limbs
blown off children counted the ways peace failed.
You will be right. Beyond, in the chattersphere
great heart & small resolve vied for the stage
that was only, after all, its own mild siege.
You will say you died because we didn't care.
I have no words in answer, more to accuse
the long & blatant building of a cage
that i myself paid taxes for. Your refuge
shrinks like the yet-untrodden part of the maze.
You will say, in that distant ever-after,
forgiveness may be then: from other eyes.
"If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you."
I just wish we could run things without resorting to gameliness. It's kind of like those 18c rakes who were so addicted to gambling they'd bet on literally anything. What does that have to do with choosing a leader? We've already inserted Advertizing into every transaction, & pretty much Surveillance too. I would like to just put Competition into its own place, like the Olympics, for the people who crave the emotions of that; & remove it from everything else...but i'm dreaming.
"Five years ago I started putting Fernando Pessoa's poetry into Scots."
"The lens proclaims mendicity but its light comes from the abyss."
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through."
– Paul Valéry, Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941) via @EverySongIveEve
Square colliding with a circle.
"Respectable feelings and near companies
Companies on a feeling, bowing
mists and waiting delays
You will lend yourselves knowledge in a
pail of red
Like a blue bank
The babblers of a powerless Swede
will lean on
themselves, believed, appeared
What recurrent sense will that
be?
You will see your greed
You would be an exercise
You will cry, 'I will long for
to will wander utterly'
What would the pioneer
taste without arm to see?
You who will bury your wilderness like
a great year
Right as pioneer, more right than
intensity
Muscles would turn
to sinews
Bang
You will give yourselves hate
in books of
nonsense, hate skillful as a muscle
You will be seldom
good for all that is not full
Whenever you will
fuck yourselves, paying, heaving,
near as a muscle.
Such people bears no relation
to nation, wink, blaze, knight-errant"
--Robot X, 1104
The Love of Myrrhine and Konalis illustrated by Frank Mechau.
"jstor hounded Aaron Swartz to death for making its articles accessible to people who actually wanted to read them, and now it's giving them away to scammers who want to make sure nobody ever reads at all." (via @mcmansionhell)
"there once was a fella named vance
who embraced every odious stance
and yet his chief vice
his life's needed spice
was a sofa he sought to romance"
--@mobydickenergy (via @lolgop)
silent fountain feeling
silent feeling fountain
fountain silent feeling
fountain feeling silent
feeling silent fountain
feeling fountain silent
I recreated the Salk Institute in Minecraft.
"Everything smells like blood." --@hind_gaza (via @ae_stallings)
"The shows are immersive, dramatic crowd-pleasers, but they are also playful, ironic, even occasionally postmodern in their building out of intellectual property." (An example of what i call the "Manic Pixie Detective".)
tenfold-talion spreadsheet
talking Darkest Bowmore
worst of the warped timelines
wool pulled over own-eyes
Driving sacrificial victims into the fiery mouth of Baal.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
eyeball world a wobble
wangles out of angstroms
hail as if to hoof there
our hairy moon no chairlift
some of us assess what's
serious hard cardboard
the rest gambol romcom
& rust-for-brains trainwrecks
"Evangelicals seem these days to be ppl with so little faith in their own faith that they can only imagine it flourishing by force." --@mckenziewark
"All skins are shed at length..."
"READING, England (AP) — European climate agency: Last Sunday was the hottest day on Earth in all recorded history." --@seungminkim (via @joshtpm)
Bibi took a day off
to bask in some applause
the only place he'd find it
where lawyers bark at laws
killer without a cause
outside's another matter
let's hope we got enough
tear gas & riot gear
for the I-C-J's stern guff
killer without a cuff
Bibi left with promises
that the Yankees got his back
killer on ego-crack
bombing kids & talking smack
"Come
Oh come.
Thou vault of amethyst, enormous night.
Oh come.
Thou gold-embroidered cloth on fragrant bread.
Oh come.
Thou granary of stars with sifting seeds of light.
Oh come.
Thou serpent, copper dark, who spray's life's venom in the dead.
Oh come.
Ecstatic melody that soars above the everyday.
Oh come.
I want to seize you with my lips before I die.
Oh come.
My red-brown rose so rare and far away.
Oh come.
Thou velvet mouth of dew so filled with spices sweet and dry.
Oh come.
Gray, monumental tower that fled into the barren night.
Oh come.
I crouch with barn-owls on a broken window's sill.
Oh come.
Thou stony law that crumbling sank from sight.
Oh come.
And I will raise the shattered tablet on some somber hill.
Oh come.
Thou magic ring, round-woven with mysterious signs.
Oh come.
And close my head in quietness, my brow in sleep.
Oh come.
Blue-rushing spring that breaks an iris out of every vine.
Oh come.
Thou weeping rainbow, fringed with grass and flowing deep.
Oh come.
My child. Oh come, oh come, my child.
Oh come.
My hollow drumbeat deadens me no more.
Oh come.
And if you will not come, then take me in a tempest blowing wild.
Oh come.
And cast my dust upon a distant shore."
--Gertrud Kolmar (tr Henry A Smith)
Les chat de La Méditerranée. (via @joycecaroloates)
"Till the end of my life, I will never forget that people I once considered friends or at least friendly acquaintances were not capable of seeing the Palestinians as humans like us. It's unforgivable." --@cprazevedo
"Hello Kitty is not a cat." (via @ZeroSuitCamus)
A Hyphen is a Ripple on the Surface of the Sea.
“ 'When you think about newborn babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?' "
- Vassily Grossman, Life and Fate (t. Robert Chandler) see also Adorno (via @aliner)
"...Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow--
In your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you--
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.
Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
from the terrible shipwreck of a star--
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
the falling stone
and the flag of smoke."
--Nelly Sachs (tr Hamburger, Mead et al, 1967)
Discovering ancient megaliths and arcologies in the magnetic dust on my hard drive.
"poppy petals
falling, quietly, gently
when they are ready"
--Etsujin (via @bashosociety)
"The wheel turning away from itself..."
"He might have been deeped in the Oaze!
Or
by the brumous numen drawn on
or
in preclear visibility
by the invisible wind laboured"
— David Jones, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘢 (via @Isidro_Li)
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
"When the article came out, Dallas was 'fifth in the country for per capita [book] sales'."
"kuebiko- a state of exhaustion inspired by senseless tragedies and acts of violence, which force you to abruptly revise your expectations of what can happen in this world, trying to prop yourself up like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams yet powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.
In Japanese mythology, Kuebiko is the name of a kami deity, a scarecrow who stands all day watching the world go by, which has made him very wise but locked in place." --The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
"At the time, it was the HQ for community radio station KCHU."
coughsilence · eye-shine of catdark
kuebiko · battening
restless leg · rubber flashback
bookstores earlier ogled
angled up · bruise brightens
quiet in the freeway lee
sleep as far · as a sled of dogs
their rough trail unmelting
focus far · what it leaves
cliffside in the last gold
St Jacob the Patriarch gets a sneak peek at the Son of God on a golden ladder.
manyjolt hejira
jade brush at the hastescrawl
dawn-togs clad & clattered
cleaned all night in dreaming
a close shave is sharpened
pale shout in the dark nave
"Has the great evil woven round my soul
A spell of Pandemonium, and a shroud
Framed of the glooms and horrors that surround
His gleaming palace-home, like smoke round fire,
That I should feel thus namelessly immersed,
Baptised in horrent shadows and dim dreads?
Why do I feel so lonely in the world?
Is the great charnel tenantless, and I
The one sole living thing amid its bones,
Its faded velvets, and its rotten biers?"
--J Stanyan Bigg
If you did not know what WCNSF stands for.
Monday, July 22, 2024
rain gaping Dionysus' indigo agony
fade spurious · with antique egg
idiom figment
polecat ink
byssus
ask
sump
ashen wisp antique addlepate
fictive Ogpu bask
rasp aggry
doomster
ink
myth
offers fallback odds
fester asp
apart
junk
brisk
siliqua
doldrum
dusk
us
swarming
lit
stink
white
sain
snows
Red, green, purple, black liquid grid.
"we live in the land of left on lights" --@numinousobject
"The preservation of the Belmont is now in motion." (via willis winters in dallas filth)
"All the gods know is destinations." --Plath
"Eventually, John Dee acquired it and added it to his collection of magical objects..."
night thunder thought delves
thwarted grayly bailiff
there is noise-fed fazing
before hymn can simmer
the turquoise looms lurkless
alarm's silence-tarmac
zombie i'll be zealous
zeroing-in tinfoil
Sunday, July 21, 2024
suffocate
gunfire of uffish
goat ichor
ballasted
stool repenting agnostic
lungfish anvil oft
"It was noted that she could pronounce Czolgosz’s name with the greatest of ease."
"And be these juggling fiends no more believed
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope."
--Macbeth V.8
"There may have been garage rock bands before, but this took what acts like The Sonics were doing and made it much nastier than anyone had ever intended." (via @tribe_xx)
"The women of America don't have time for this."
"Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken." ["o'er" maybe?]
--Macbeth IV.3
This space is but a tempest fraught
with peace-shards; scarce the cusps of make
things happen. Though you muster them like hawk
seldom the spiral down for freight,
& what we get instead spoils rage with fright.
Ah, the winding down
t'ward some chaotic reckoning:
squid-scrimmage, clash of clowning
with bystanders likely getting broken.
I want to hide beyond the sweep of Occam.
I want a boring voting-day.
I want the right pretender howling dragged away.
"I Did This to My Vocabulary
The moon is my alibi. My tenders throw hissy fits.
My scalp’s at the foot of the precipice.
My lume is spento, there’s a creep in my cellar.
You can stand under my umbrella, Ella.
Who put pubic hair on my headphones?
Who put the ram in Ramallah?
I’m just sitting here spinning my spinning wheels—
where are the snow tires of tomorrow?
The llama is burning! My heart is an ovary!
Let’s chase dawn’s tail across state lines,
sing 'Crimson and Clover' over and overy,
till wonders are taken for road signs.
My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle.
The boys like the girls who like heavy metal.
On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom,
on Motörhead, Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem . . ."
--Michael Robbins in Poetry
The Roman Pool at Hearst Castle.
"Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not check thee. Wear thou thy wrongs;
The title is affeered."
--IV.3