( via / via )

"Mallarmé himself formulates this criticism: he is at an impasse because he has the wrong ptyx. The great enigma that he poses to later poets, and on which we must meditate indefinitely, is therefore the following: where can we find the right ptyx?" (via Google translate)

"Grodek

At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound
Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister’s shadow falters through the diminishing
   grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of
   autumn rises.
O prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more
   monstrous pain,
The unborn grandchildren."

—Wright & Bly's Trakl

The author explaining the text.

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

― Simone Weil via @lizamazel.bsky.social

For the first time in 600 years.

( via / via )

"Price had supposedly sworn off making horror movies after The Fly (1958) because he claimed he couldn’t keep a straight face on set."

"Ship of Theseus, but it's just the leftovers you keep recooking with new additions throughout the week." --@benwurgaft.bsky.social

Angels in a Parking Garage #4.

"HEPTONSTALL OLD CHURCH

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys
And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space
And set it in men's heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones
Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose."

--Ted Hughes

Mallarmé as theatre critic.

( me via )

Paranoid.

chemtrail cakewalk bulk mail
crisp shapes on the trystbeams
sniper snap
ensnared dero doldrum

blazed trail emptytrickle
truest view
crisp husk by crisp husk claims
a cruel book of hookmarks

"In order to create a definitive reproduction he decided that the original metal sorts, lying on the riverbed, would have to be examined."

"That's Donald Trump, children. He's the man who killed Big Bird." —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social

My two wolves.

( via / via )

(Don't Fear) The Reaper.

The neurotic symptoms of physicalized conflict, surround us in lieu of an intelligible world.

Drawers We Don't Open.

tin creeping
into my clasp
throws glitter
fritters away this frozen
steep hurl again snaps the hasp
& crapulous tin creeping

Vietnam.

( via / me )

Was the 2024 election stolen? A knowledgeable answer.

mottled shade early
on the turn from the feed road
aria joining

Doomsday.

"Whenever these LLM guys say they think AGI/artificial superintelligence is in the works it's like hearing someone say that their next toaster is going to break the land speed record" —@ianboudreau.com

"This makes me so, so sad, like watching a school burn."

( via / via )

Melting Ginger.

"I think if once a year a man would read a summary of the twelvemonth, he would get in ten minutes a digest of all that might be necessary to know, and what is more to the point, he would have to his credit a clear profit of two hundred hours at the very least, and two hundred hours rightly employed are sufficient for the acquirement of such a knowledge of a foreign language as will permit a man to make love in it gracefully." —Mr Incoul's Misadventure

"...nothing but symbolic lines on the map..."

"Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat

Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

--Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957)

Wild Peaches. (via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social)

( via/ via )

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.

"Self-portrait

A lens of crystal whose transparence calms
Queer stars to clarity, and disentangles
Fox-fires to form austere refracted angles;
A texture polished on the horny palms
Of vast equivocal creatures, beast or human:
A flint, a substance finer-grained than snow,
Graved with the Graces in intaglio
To set sarcastic sigil on the woman.

This for the mind, and for the little rest
A hollow scooped to blackness in the breast,
The simulacrum of a cloud, a feather:
Instead of stone, instead of sculptured strength,
This soul, this vanity, blown hither and thither
By trivial breath, over the whole world's length."

--Elinor Wylie

Hot Wasp Summer.

"No bastard son of sea-froth deified
With all his arrows could twist half the pains
That pinion me as I am swept inside
And sprawl, half drowning, through your inner veins."

--Jack Spicer via

Jinkx on J K. (The only "J-K" we know around here is J-K Huysmans.)

( via / via )

Vast UFO mags cover gallery.

"Another book-case was filled with the French poets, from Villon to Soulary. The editions were delicious, a pleasure to hold, and many of them bore the imprint of Lemerre. Among them was the Fleurs du Mal, an unexpurgated copy, and by it were the poems of Baudelaire's decadent descendants, Paul Verlaine and Mallarmé." --Edgar Saltus, Mr Incoul's Misadventure (1887)

5 Geek Social Fallacies.

crawlspace frass · smock-adjacent smurf
windmill whaletrap · wielder evokes
in linked letters · lines that balance
as we tiptoe · on the tall wire
no rage-riddle · safer than cropduster field
no highway · in the camp-encrusted miles
so yet bear witness · in a minor way
leave crawlspace frass · on the tall wire shaking

W.H. Auden on his use of alliterative meter in The Age of Anxiety.

( via / via )

Let the games begin.

spiral gilded gapspark
gurgling a trig function
hands in the city
rain before it reaches
the runway fades murdered
hands in the city
these dark rooms of durance
in the dirge flow argent
hands in the city
vermilion
vermilion saudade

A Jester's Pretence.

"somewhere between
the crow follows
an old poem"

—@poemexe.com

"As far as I can tell this is because the more aggressively authoritarian style of politics he has embodied this time around has i) rendered ridiculous some of the anti-woke talking points, and in any case ii) forced the chattering classes into a broad alliance against him."

( via / via )

Some pretty good sonnets.

Our next door neighbor has put up a big Gadsden flag on its own flagpole.

"You'll sing a long time before Mothra shows up."

redshift growing gridlock
aggrieved bad reprievedark
yesterday frost yearning
useless against trucebreak
hallowed alone lilac
liftoff into flintlock
ruins-prowled arroyo
redshift growing rowboat

Szechuan.

( via / via )

Wild tide.

Kehlsteinhaus

unleashes kin
hunkiest shale
sulk is heathen

thin husk leash
silk hush eaten
i nuke healths

Smiling Faces Sometimes.

I thought for awhile they were playing Einstein on the Beach, but it turned out to be Koyaanisqatsi. This set me off remembering days when i had checked out the boxed set of records, & listened to them obsessively, hour after hour, day after day; you could not really understand the subtle modulations except in such dosage. (Like a TV show you watch so much you begin to notice continuity flaws in the set from episode to episode.) and the meaning i got from this piece was a most curious one: a mild, despairing elation, not some ultimate deliverance from words (& because of words, from the human), but perhaps the simple perception that they have been left behind & are in fact already not needed anymore... The work itself, a time capsule from the future, stood like a big sphinx of quartz (pangram: "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz"), square in our certain path--& yet there was no fear in it.
   It is the only truly Buddhist work, i think, in Western music.

(2003)

Eras Are.

( via / via )

Rockets at night.

"I doubt whether there are many individuals living who have literally gobbled up books as I have--a book a night--sometimes two, occasionally three when not too thick! Science, fiction, art, religion, philosophy, even trash, too!"—@harryskeeler.bsky.social

"Time cannot heal the division between the hauntological and the notion of Progress that seeks to hide the bones of its graves."

"ordinary staircase"

Gadsden flag flies flaunting
flimsy atop homestead
beside our own anchored
ugly as a dogleg

ICE goons can be gainsayed
goofy Fox lies nixclicked
how then poet handle
a harsh shade beside him?

Anatomy of Musical Snobbery.

( via / via )

"Every day of my professional life has involved sitting with another Cassandra who no one else would believe."

"viral showerhead"

the land almost emptied
asks now for a brisk name

names are so much nicer
than never-staunched reiving

always in passive voice

As imperceptibly as Grief.

"The firebrand gleams, and kindles Discord's torch" —Royston's Lycophron

Three Books from a Box.

( via / me )

Colossus.

"And iron clouds shall canopy the globe" --Royston's Lycophron

Alexandria.

"Moonshine

To think
I must be alone:
To love
We must be together.

I think I love you
When I'm alone
More than I think of you
When we're together.

I cannot think
Without loving
Or love
Without thinking.

Alone I love
To think of us together:
Together I think
I'd love to be alone."

—Richard Murphy

Ode to Billie Joe.

( via / via )

Tinariwen thread with extra pun.

gateclank haunted
through the gaunt gray morn
thud the washer warps its
waggish darg rebellion
icy tendrils reach
khaki comfort level
carrier wave roving
called the wind recurrent
unsneck my woad snafu
icy tendrils snatch

Children of Sanchez.

"When Toad woke up in the morning, he put the hat on his head.

It was just the right size."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

The trampoline bear.

( via / via )

While Wither lives.

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."

—Noam Chomsky via @drjackbrown.bsky.social

Brother Rat Fink.

dragonhoard of hassles
rehearsed skinny sauna
the rubble mall riddled
with ruthless snaste fistcraft
dreamrouse that is drastic
dredging hinky decades

The light at the end of the frog.

( via / me )

The elves wrote AV.

to binge headlong birdlime
blithe tsunami glomming
swift stasis that stuffs me
starker with the markdowns
bleaker with the meek deaths

Tuvalu unaliving
a letter strewn jet-black
all that nailgun nonsense
inert wall of Hertzsprung
chart of the fires choiring

" 'The longing for freedom is ineradicable,' [Brandeis] wrote. 'It will express itself in protest against servitude and inaction unless the striving for freedom be made to seem immoral'."

“The most useful IT skill is being able to identify which cables hunt with venom, and which cables strangle you to death” –@ctrlcreep

This code playground never fails to spark joy.

( me / via )

"Twin Peaks is my comfort show: not because it makes me feel better, but because it assures me the world is worse and that I am not alone in noticing."

"News was murderous gossip and men who could talk of nothing but news thought their preoccupation profound because of the solemnity of death and the horror of human pain; but in frivolous fashion, men who did not share this suffering were buying it to legitimise their old prejudices. The news of a day, properly contemplated, would make you wish not to see another day.
Newspapers knew this and weighted their material accordingly, this much civil war, this much marvellous meals with mince. It was for this shameless packaging that he craved a newspaper now."
—Debatable Land

"If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely."

“Shiver Theory

Go flotted turnip
& stutter the neverant pitchearth
no blown out reorderings for fake ediction
go basalt scrounge mortifier
soaked in sprite sort

folio ham is mighty yarn
a palfully selfaware bullet of bread crusts
wagering hugely on an empty veil

she was the soda we meant to tackle
matter-of-fact in a cage match

you can pretend yourself until final believing
bellying sort strung self-impaired

or be lucky enough never to believe your own story”

–Highway Rob

"No-one escapes Powell’s digs and perhaps no-one deserves to."

( me / via )

My People.

"punching down"

bilgewatch · thesterness ware
ort anxious · ill cerulean
swarm switchblades · swine's precipice

Screever's tortoise.

"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag."

Molly Ivins via @michiganpapa.bsky.social

Spferic Waves.

( via / me )

Panoramic Teleavia p111.

"Been thinking about Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) a bit recently for some reason. Here is my favourite crack of his. 'Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.' " —@davidstubbs.bsky.social

Let Us Try to Talk About Poetry.

       "runaway canal"

   shooter's wharf
cool copycat
   start lesson

broken issue
   swirl thunk

Take a moment to reflect.

( via / me )

Robot bunnies deployed in Florida to fight invasive pythons.

"nor dim Nimrod"

the long cretzal crossing
crinoid sunset answers
& we are caved warrens
who wage bitter dirtback

into Checkpoint Charlie
he's hung himself off-cam'ra
before he could be pardoned
tween pimp to the top suits

careful balance budged
vomit jauntily abaft
& feel first compunction
feasible lines measly

the chess guide churlish
don't say they are not vampires
don't say what they have a right to
tween pimp to the top suits
tween pimp to the top suits

"Later, when more than enough time had passed, one could say without worrying about sounding unreasonable that virtually all of us had seen what all of us had seen."

"Former US special forces soldier working for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Anthony Aguilar, recounts how a 5 year old Palestinian kissed his hands to thank him for the food he gave him. Seconds later, Israeli soldiers executed the starving child." --@youranoncentral.bsky.social via

Royd Moor wind farm near Penistone, South Yorkshire.

( via / via )

"This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness."

"My current favourite two-word anagram phrases:

1. Daemonic comedian.
2. Remote meteor.
3. Supersonic percussion.
4. Persistent prettiness.
5. Aristotelian retaliations.
6. Integral triangle.
7. Soapstone teaspoons."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social via

Yekermo Sew.

sculsh flapdragon scarp
discusses trick diction
grows boils in the gills
Garamond-veiled jail door

Siwarha glowworm
westering brisk questions
all this in orb house
uffish mirth we suffer

Best Mothra.

( via / via )

"What inspired you to depict digital infrastructure as a form of environmental ruin?" (via Mefi)

burning steering wheel instilling
stereo tentativeness & crisscross
wafflethoughts · where thesterness dances
thirlcap-behind & aileron-blinded

Medea's Apostrophe in Storm.

"I can't stop thinking about the TikTok practice of people commenting on videos by Palestinians in Gaza with the algospeak of trending keywords to boost the video's visibility on the FYP, 'labubu dubai chocolate taylor swift squishmallow' as solidarity codewords is real cyberbleak" —@lifewinning.com

ASCII balloon.

( via / via )

"I will leave movie thrillers/And watch caterpillars/Get born and pupated and larva’ed..."

"There were nights I had, all Scotsmen do, when I feared I was turning into a Scandinavian." —Debatable Land

Siwarha.

"magdalen

the darkest hour

the stars arisen asinine

tomb and I left opened to the altogether

am I to live among men abandoned I may learn to love again

adrift in Jerusalem

am I upon strewn palm"

—Gillian Allnutt

Scanning & splicing expired Kodachrome developed in coffee.

( via / via )

God's List of Liquids.

suasion's armies swim forth;
switch the hymnbooks, pitchfork
in the glassbright gloating
i glance back for traction
perilous path—worthless
to parse gather's arsenal—
long shadows & shingled
shipwrecks fling eclipse-dust

breakdown countdown brutal

Lehrer pranks the NSA.

Lead pipes is the new black.

Angstromdick ridonkulous.