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Backpfeifengesicht .

"Variations on a Theme by Joyce

The war is in words and the wood is the world
That turns beneath our rootless feet;
The vines that reach, alive and snarled,
Across the path where the sand is swirled,
Twist in the night. The light lies flat.
The war is in words and the wood is the world.

The rain is ruin and our ruin rides
The swiftest winds; the wood is whorled
And turned and smoothed by the turning tides.
--There is rain in the woods, slow rain that breeds
The war in the words. The wood is the world.
This rain is ruin and our ruin rides.

The war is in words and the wood is the world,
Sourceless and seized and forever filled
With green vines twisting on wood more gnarled
Than dead men's hands. The vines are curled
Around these branches, crushed and killed.
The war is in words and the wood is the world."'

--Weldon Kees

"...women’s sports are kept separate from men’s not to protect women from always losing to men, but rather to ensure that no man ever loses to a woman."

"Pleasing as it would be to blame the whole unfolding calamity on Trump, Musk, and the squadron of billionaire looters they so ably represent, I would maybe not be so presentist, whatever the impressive breadth of the new horrors. The expressed conviction that the greatest goods of civic life belong by right to the winning classes, and to everyone else go the knockoff approximations, actually precedes our present-day authoritarian vandals by decades." --Peter Coviello via

"Not until 1946 did the scholar Maria Guarnieri compare the authorless text with certain Inquisition documents to make an ironic discovery: the church-approved book called The Mirror of Simple Souls was the same work for which Marguerite 'called Porete' had been executed by church authorities in 1310." And: "…for everything that one can say or write about God, or what one can think about him, which is more than saying, is more like lying than it is like telling the truth."