Robotic Badz Maru. (via R*b*cca Blood)


   "Diaspora"

Zabalam
wag · aboard · bailing slipshod
damp ambush twinkling fall again bank
abroad wolf walking
crystal adorn ibis fang · with blood silk snort

agony · is flood wisp spurt



Taking th* Brim.


Sappho again.


Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. (via Cursor dot org)

"The Carthaginians, in one of their campaigns against the Sicilian Greeks, had seized and carried away a valuable statue of the Grecian Apollo. This god of the vanquished had been selected as a gift worthy of the acceptance of the mother city, and had been placed at the footstool of Moloch in his Tyrian temple. The Grecian god, in this state of degradation, was naturally suspected of rejoicing at the approach of his [soldier] countrymen; and the morbid feelings of some Tyrians deluded them so far, as to lead them to imagine that he had appeared to them in their sleep, and announced his intention to desert. This case was brought before the magistrates, who could not discover a more effectual mode of allaying the popular apprehensions than by binding the disaffected statue, with golden chains, to the horns of Moloch’s altar."

--Th* Lif* and Actions of Al*xand*r th* Gr*at by the R*v. John Williams (1829)


   taciturnity
fatidic · scry silt stars dull
   braying and nitwit
story my oft fails · attic
pilgrim · adit with occult


"Fashion Muslims, that's all we need!"


"The worst-case scenario is three to five years before anybody finds it inhabitable."


"The O. E. D. ...is perhaps the 19th-century epic, as the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is that of the 18th."

--K*nn*r


Kar*n X has a hom* pag* now!

"To Virgilius, the Latins that could exist are as significant as the one that does."

--Vivi*n Law


   "The Enemy (From Baudelaire)

Naught but a long blind tempest was my youth,
  Sun-shot at times; the thunder and the rain
Have worked their havock with so little ruth
  That in my garden few red fruits remain.

Now have I reached the autumn of my thought,
  And shovel and pick must use some soil to save
From out the ruins that the rain hath wrought
  Where all around great pits gape like the grave.

Who knows if these last flowers of my dreams
Shall find beneath this naked strand that streams
  The mystic substance which their strength imparts?

O misery! misery! Time eats our lives,
  And that dark Enemy who gnaws our hearts
Grows by the blood he sucks from us, and thrives."

--J C Squir*



"Faithfullest, for I am infidel." --Jos* Garcia Villa


2M1207b facts. Also, GQ Lupi b.


"In medieval Ages the grammar, and even more the vocabulary of a specific language was not strictly defined."

with wraiths of Uuchathon · joust
this mission · this blindfold storm

aroma of rain · fury
afar · don't stop · last shadow

floppy and choking music
to gallop · traik Xanadu




(via solarsyst*m dot nasa dot gov)



Attanasio.


Look at it.


CRCL.


A*thicus Ist*r. His alphab*t. Kiboshing griffins. 3stonia as an island. "...a Menippean work tends to the farrago, the chaotic compilation, and makes use of satiric, paradoxical, and sometimes even polyphonic elements that may undermine each other, but also in this unconventional way set up a concordia discors through which a "search after the ultimate truth" takes place."

"Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question." (via M*tafilt*r)



"Search, wretched on, all round about the shores
Thy seaboard, and then look within thy bosom,
If any part of thee enjoyeth peace!"

--Longf*llow's Purgatorio, VI.


'He was in fact we hear an enthusiastic musician, a tragic poet too--how good, matters little; for in this art, more than in others, it somehow happens that everyone finds his own work excellent; so far I have never known the poet (and I have been friends with [notoriously bad poet] Aquinius) who did not think himself the best...'

--Tusculan Disputations V. xxii.



   "Floating Casino"

quadrant scant of frith · pilgrims of a storm
crow still porous church · pilgrims of a storm

nothing sort for thirst · churns a dolphin road
grind a song in charcoal · pilgrims of a storm

city lost its ghosts · fragrant with iron scrollwork
grimly blur all signs · pilgrims of a storm

bringing coffin loam · lungfish strand and poor
slag suborbital argot · pilgrims of a storm



"While the 9/11 “My Pet Goat” episode was certainly illuminating, it’s not certain what might have worked out better that day had the president dropped the book and taken action. But his failure to grab the reins in the hurricane catastrophe for three days this week probably doomed hundreds, or more, to death."

'It is by no means inappropriate that our instructors, particularly Sulpita and Istrius, thought of man by the name of lesser world, for within himself he contains everything the visible world is made of: earth in his body, fire in his soul, water in his fluidity, and air in the swiftness of his thoughts; the sun in the radiance of his wisdom, the moon in the uncertain and unstable conditions of wealth and youth, a blossoming meadow in the nobility of his virtues and the equanimity of his mild temper, mountains in the heights of generosity, hills in the succession of the family line, valleys in the humbling experiences of tribulation, fruit trees in the fruits of largess; barren trees, rugged places and mucky bogs, thorns and thistles in his evil ways and insatiable greed, snakes and cattle in simplicity and prudence, and the teeming, surging sea in the storm-tossed depths of the heart of man and in reason itself.'

--Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, transl. in: Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century by Vivi*n Law (1995)


V*rgil (D*vil May Cry). (via M*tafilt*r)


"They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us.".

A yaron and a half, prior.

   "Dirge at the Edge of Woods

Gold shed upon suckling gold,
The time of the bole blackens,
Of the dark mounted through dapple,
While in the sealed apple
The seed cradled toward cold.
Put by from an elm in its years
Now its gilded of days,
Over turf’s dishevelment;
Where all which is green sickens,
All the fresh shall be sere.
And it is but for a time
Those embered veinings blaze
A year’s delirium;
Or neared of other space,
Unportioned azure shall close
One of more, and which is,
One which goes.
Let the little pupils that will,
Of vision, gaze for salt
To whet their gazing, wit
In one weather is high
From burrow and lair, by
Nether providences’ default
An all’s accrued.
And apposite, beyond
Such primer beholdings, has
Its long accounting known
The beetle’s morsel thus
Was rich, and the slug’s bed on
The oak’s generations, deep
Over the lark’s bones.
In slough of Edens fast
Wit in one weather shall stand,
While millennia nibble at
The sensual apple
Toppled it net,
Plenty in the palm of the hand,
And the fallen not fallen, not lost
From out its certitude--
For our unbeggaring
Has been gross. Few and late
To cherish an immoderate
Wish, hope’s calculus,
Love’s hope; few to miss,
From natural tally thrust,
In the lime-girdled space
Of choice, where alone
Man can abandon what
Is only his own;
And in cold and tarrying
Their rearisers sleep:

While to the granite cheek
Light’s purples bring
Infinite their ministering,
And past our finial
And ragged crests, to keep
Time’s ambient stood,
Propose horizons from
Their shadowy quarries; while,
In an unwandered wood,
Or under the indifferent foot,
Is let fall, let fall a fruit,
Through eternal leisures down,
For but time’s unravelling."

--Léoni* Adams

(via Talking Points M*mo)


"We've been a generator of human and cultural energy for centuries, but all this bounty brought the city no careful engineering, no thought for its future, no worldwide cry of help for its inevitable demise." --Andr*i Codr*scu (via wood_s lot)


"There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.
There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes."

--Plath


"I think we saw a paradigm shift."

Work on the 17th Street levee, which breached on Monday night, came to a halt earlier this summer for the lack of $2 million.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana told the Times-Picayune in June of last year."



   "Of a Lost Dynasty"

pallid rasp flaring
sloppy rich

odynacusis druid fall as
spawning offal clasp ¿walking arroyo tilt?

indigo ogganition
astonish flap

pools apart spoil ryotwar/.
grind wind across which




(via ibiblio dot org)



Soft air and a loud bug; shadowy and now gold.


Part II.

Th* Duplications.



(via w*b dot tiscali dot it)


   "The Hurricane

Lo, Lord, thou ridest!
Lord, Lord, thy swifting heart

Nought stayeth, nought now bideth
But's smithereened apart!

Ay! Scripture flee'th stone!
Milk-bright, Thy chisel wind

Rescindeth flesh from bone
To quivering whittlings thinned--

Swept, whistling straw! Battered,
Lord, e'en boulders now outleap

Thy drum's gambade, its plunge abscond!
Lord God, while summits crashing

Whip sea-kelp screaming on blond
Sky-seethe, dense heaven dashing--

Thou ridest to the door, Lord!
Thou bideth wall nor floor, Lord!"

--Hart Cran*

Khurbn chill gurgling
grasp abolish and scroll shorn
with slow click against

full frolic ogham black lilt
infirm agonist ogling


"...we may learn humility from the luckless scholar who saw reason to approach the linear B script by way of Basque, and eventually derived elegiac poems from what are now taken to be storehouse inventories. His book was published, in 1931, by the Oxford University Press."

--Hugh K*nn*r


King L*opold's Ghost.


DON'T BUY GAS TODAY


Gucumatz
gurgling ichor cusp
smart rats stomp

Tzolkin aglow burst
briskly against flint


"And tell me this, you medievalist simps, you delusional, retrograde dipshits -- how is it possible that you became privy to such timeless truths -- that the mind of the "One True God" is available to you, and that God's words and wishes resonate through yawning millennia to be understood only by you -- and you alone?" (via wood_s lot)


NOr Blogs. (via Th* Guardian)

'INTO THE FURROWS
of heavenacid in the doorcrack
you press the word
from which I rolled,
when I with trembling fists
the roof over us
dismantled, slate for slate,
syllable for syllable, for the copper-
glimmer of the begging-
cup's sake up
there.'

--Paul C*lan, Br*athturn (tr P. Joris, 1995)



Hidd*n in Plain Vi*w.


Chol*ra.


Typhoid.


Dys*nt*ry.

"Here's to marching the blitzkrieg bop." (via M*tafilt*r)


"Do you begin to remember the future? Then we must dream our dreams hastily."

--J*ff*rs, D*ar Judas


'I see them: Crab, Ram, Bull,
and all the world is only shell
whose pearl and opalescence
is my impotence,'

--Khl*bnikov


Khurbn chill
furl gray abtar and ichor

who will closing blast of furious
crisp allot igloo

from rapacious by gargling abolish at
ballroom crayfish ranch antics



"Fabre, by firing all the municipal cannon
under a piping tree, found out
cicadas cannot hear."

--Richard Wilbur


Th* Barb*r of Natch*z.

(via doyl*n*wyork dot com)



"Face it," said Aaker, "the United States is the Texas of the advanced countries."



'...in Hyrcania the populace support dogs for the benefit of the community, while the nobles keep them for family use; it is as we know a famous breed of dogs, but in spite of the cost, each householder procures animals in proportion to his means, to mangle him, and that they consider the best mode of burial.'

--Cic*ro, Tusculan Disputations I. xlv.


"According to the Miami Herald, when asked whether his proposed FEMA budget cuts were a problem, "the president walked away from reporters." "


"...a growing number of [National] Guard units are being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan..."


Global Warming Mak*s Strong*r Hurrican*s.


Top Chimp says it ain't so.

(via ssd dot noaa dot gov)

Mohicans. (via Languag* Hat)


On my victrola: Logan's Sanctuary soundtrack. For an imaginary follow up to Logan's Run. You would not think this synth sound was born in AD 2000, so Nixonian its vision; and this plot synopsis is a hoot, too. (Villainous "Cobol".) --As in Th* Tabl*ts, bogus actuality has its own strong pull, such that it's not hard at all for an auditor to allow this world to occur, although it hasn't and can't. And why not?
   But it only works with a sharp historical faculty.


"The art of divination by lightning distinguished eleven kinds of lightning..."

--von Cl*s-R*d*n, op cit


   "Crave we gems? No penury
Of their material round us! Pliant earth
And plastic flame--what balks the mage his birth
--Jacinth in balls or lodestone by the block?"

--Sord*llo, vi.

"If we consider the 1960s a decade during which creativity was more fashionable than ever before or since—seeming to concern the layman viewers of the Ed Sullivan show as much as professionals in the "creative industries"—it's because of a shock America received in 1957: the Sputnik shock."


"Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology."

--Thor*au, cited in Symposium of th* Whol*


"W* wish to inform you...."


"It is a 21st century irony that a virtual magazine reflects the realities of Iraq, whereas many "real" magazines and newspapers carry Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld fantasies."

"I read Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood over a period of one or two days. This act, by itself, had no particular extra significance, but I read the book while replaying Bob Dylan's album Blood on the Tracks over and over again. By the time I finished reading the novel, it had turned into a strange collaboration between O'Connor and Dylan, something I called Wise Blood on the Tracks."


Dismaying humidity. Plush squalor.


"For to offer Rosettian tosh as poetry 1911 was not to stride into eternal realms but to misconceive 1911."

--Hugh K*nn*r


A bit o' Flarf crit. (via Cami*rs d* Cor*y)


   "Anvil of Paint"

Ordinary sorrow turns · to fancy math in making's mirror;
coruscating waltz absaorbs · your burning rain in making's mirror.

Now among black shards i go · and though i'm only pasing through,
i want to know i took my blur · and taught it war in making's mirror.


Things fall, and stay as they land.


"In return, she has given the script her blessing."
(via Robot Wisdom)

To distinguish fraud from random nasty surplus is on occasion difficult.


"Enfold the scanty grey serge scapular"

--Sord*llo


   "Giant Slushworms"

A puny uncouth ailing vassal think
Docks, quitchgrass, loathly mallows no man plants
Form flatworm satisfaction in Xanadu,
Or amphibology unpacks a rainbow?

If i on occasion hazard my utmost music
That in this bloody coruscating waltz
A puny uncouth ailing vassal think
Docks, quitchgrass, loathly mallows no man plants?

Proconsul accruals watch a sloppy ingot
Triumph in uffish bardic sciamachy
But blindfold foundling may my sandcoil myrrh
Vanish shorn of stars should i aurora
A puny uncouth ailing vassal think.


Words fail this bard.


On my victrola: Gabor Szabo- "Go ask Alic*".


Invisibl* Citi*s Hot*l.