( via / via )

"Voronezh, the first part of which is voron, meaning raven, sinister bird, and the second part is ezh, hedgehog, whose sharp spines are like a killer's knife."

"His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays."

"There was a line of perfect boards, ready to be made into something. There was a door, warped and fallen into the street. There was a boardroom, where meetings went on so long that no one knew what decision had been made. In my apartment, the tulips have reached the stage of paper. When they hear music, they will turn from purple to yellow. They will become a tent in which I have always remembered sheltering. It is cold, and yet I shelter. The panorama is of the river, and on the river there is sailing, and the sails fill the river, and the sails are gone."
—@salrandolph

"He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death."

( via / me )

Sequence.

"Things that are inevitable: aging, growing less attractive, infirmity, disease and disorder, death, not getting what we want, the disappointment and boredom that are core to adult life

Things that are not inevitable: poverty, war, homelessness, disenfranchisement, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation

Our culture acts like it’s the exact opposite, and so naturally many people are miserable."
—@freddiedeboer

I’m glad to know about this i suppose but it is one of the most depressing things i’ve ever read.

"Echoes of Love

The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.

Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,

discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?"

—Isabel Chenot

"Cain needed somewhere he could lick his wounds. So he invented the city —."

( via / me )

"...Powys wrote a novel that he was sure would garner him the Nobel Prize: A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932. It is his best novel, but instead of the Prize he received only a lawsuit, from a man in Glastonbury who claimed to have been identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the novel. The ensuing settlement devoured all of Powys’s royalties from the novel..."

"to paint anything other than the witches' sabbat at the witches' sabbat"

violet's shroud shrinking
shirked ghost trio
burning through ten of my nines
shadow boxing blindfold

"...the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul."

"Then the sitcom – and Bernard Black in particular – became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I’d raised enough cash; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour." —Joseph S Furey via

"Today we live in the future she warned us about."

( me / via )

Yay Oxiana.

" ' My God!' he bit out.'“Of all the stinkingly unlucky arrests I could have made at this particular time--the arrest of Karl Imhoff--alias "Professor Waldemar Unruh"--alias "Paramoecium Pete"--alias "Amoeba Ambrose"--alias "Herr-Doktor Heinrich Zonenblink"--alias--' "
—@harryskeeler.bsky.social

Poems for Your Hands.

"UMAMI (Palindrome)

I’m a muse
to note,
raw at last:
salt, aware
to notes umami."

—@anthonyetherin

Browsing is one of life’s great pleasures, i’ll never understand how people just let go of it without a second thought.

( me / via )

Psalm 88 “Flowers cut will sing their clime”.

"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) via

"One might, were one inclined to the pejorative, term him ‘a think tank dorkwad’. A tankwad, if you will."

"I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!" —Ada Palmer via

The Road to Plano Rona.

( via / via )

INTERNALATIONAL DICTIONARY OF NEOLOGISMS.

"Every time I’m in Union Square I think about how Tammany Hall, the seat of power for New York for decades, is now a Petco" —@cooperlund.online

Lebenserfahrung.

"clepsydra"

barrel-jeweloid
jazzy typeface fuseblown
Polish cold war neon
colder in here & cheerless

gas higher the whole world
hurrying pellmell hellward
barrel jewel the password
jester at monsoon fun'ral

mahogany milch · amass skypoints
      angst surfing
   the swift Imbolcs
at the right temp · i can gulp this starbucks
no eye on · Monday's urnclock
      Karg Island
   has been hours
in the barrel sun · of a jewel burn

internet out Biscayne
ill among flung robots
sky array of scare-drones
scumbled with pallid humbug

somewhere Substack tickles
salvo orc & elvish
handkerchief worn threadbare
threatens to pull wool up

      threatens to
   pull stark rank on
starbucks napkin · sonnet annuls

Waltzfrieze.

( me / via )

Every single patient.

“Clearancing DeLillo”

The names, somehow the blessèd names continue
In sonorous emptiness, down furrowed canyons,
Names for things long flown on fragrant pinions;
Believe it. Swift incarnadined Danube
Carried off America too, we huddle
Some pier with flickering clouds & dimming screens
Screaming for Daddy, shipwreck, or the needle.
We are the lucky ones.
Later, there will be monuments anew;
Records. Not the stories we’d have told,
But honest accounts. On these i sometimes brood.
A bard without a theme, without a role,
Chattering as this tutelary venue,
Burning house, collapses: words continue.

The Translator, Working Late.

"Don Fitch recalls that early zines were called fanmags, but Louis Russell Chauvenet (who's still publishing) coined fanzine about 1942 and it became the common usage, sometimes abbreviated to zine." —"Zine History" at Zinebook

At some point, backpacking became a curated experience.

( me / via )

Font Nerd.

Reluctant to bother to fill in the crosswords of a TV mystery show--clue, clue, clue. If i like how it ends, i'll go back.

Ritual & Enormity.

"thirlshoon"

to cut cancer research
more cash for that fascist
mild winter with furl doors
wailing silence-thudbrink

I knew i’d find some real Philosophy on Substack if i just kept looking.

( me / via )

Shifty square.

"playing war with the neighbor kids"

in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
decipher street struggles
stern with turnip carveface
the lanai full of photons
in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
ferry's rage to be drydocked

Scrabble.

"The word love 'resists being a word, almost successfully' " —@oldoldoldoldnew

Bang Bang.

( via / via )

Song of the Rider.

"You know how in a library no one’s trying to sell you anything?

That’s how the internet was." —@butisitart.bsky.social

China and the Future of Science.

taking Kharg Island
like a little bitch
blood splashes

at night in the empty kitchen
low sussuration in my ears

"White collar work and even the halfway point of an email job prove elusive; the tedious application processes function as force fields repelling the narrator. There’s a sense of middle class decline, of an educated man whose education has proved largely worthless, working jobs that would seem “beneath” him, even as he tries and often fails to romanticize their working class elements."

( me / via )

"...in every age God speaks in the language of Empire.."

stool without rafter beams · marriage
   my shadow on the kitchen door
the exhaustion · from rendering significance
   out of chicken scratchings
on a silicon screen · turquoise saucer
   parataxis of the moon

Two haiku by Masaoka Shiki.

"A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organizes iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history. By the time the war began, the discourse had already become magnetized." —Kevin Baker via

Harry Smith in the Record Changer.