( via / me )

Mary.

"The toad could not think of a story." —@frogandtoadbit.bsky.social

Nobel Prize speech. I had not previously read more than excerpts of this, but a student brought it in & it is really good.

On a sentence of Wittgenstein's.

( via / via )

Move Over, Darling.

"fox made of flowers"

ever anxious · in the rotten place
no bolt hole · no bugout kit
the front finds you · up to here in shadows

This light fraught with loiter.

"When she came last week, I wanted to explain that I had an online meeting. I didn’t know the Russian word, so I tried meeting. She looked puzzled and broke into a vigorous mime of someone waving a placard and shouting ‘Putin, Putin’, which took me by surprise. Next she tried a French word, démonstration, and the penny dropped. Meeting is Ukrainian (and perhaps Russian, too) for a demo – in the English sense; though actually the French word isn’t really démonstration (you use that for the demonstration of something, like a method or technique), but manif (for une manifestation). My husband tells me that meeting used to have this sense in French as well." —Virginia Moul via

Rain.

( via / me )

Knowledge.

They're grilling Grok right now as to whether to invade Venezuela, Greenland, or Lemuria next.

Selling the idea of freedom.

"idolatrous dotings"

the strange shapes of straying
strewn with bitter spindles
windows on the walled darkness
watch us find no purchase
enough years of yarrow
to use for maps whiplash
you learn some lame story
along with burnt fingers
then the full-flensed nightmare
follows with land gillslits
then your words gears gather
gallumph in blood headlines
poem without a pithy
pittance to close bus'ness
another excuse nattered
where nabbed subjects swelter
& strange shapes go shatter

Voting as Fire Extinguisher.

( via / me )

"...it was the Arkansas of it all that blew me away at first."

"ground offensive"

post-talion payback
porn—victimhood's rumble—
& i am tired, told of
tolls' murderous flurry
whereupon more melted
march difficult fictions
here mis'rable hostage
hurled lucrative glut-leagues
watches stern distractions
stilb brutal & fulcrum

Hengest Wants War Companions.

Robot offering to summarize Capitalist Realism for me.

"...anti-trans campaigns are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry."