( via / via )

On the Marionette Theater.

The House.

"And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars" —Swinburne

"Once the stone itself can be copied at will, the story is no longer part of the value. The story is the value."

( me / via )

"Punk ain't really distortion and mohawks..."

"The frontier is the edge of civilization where we test our grit, are rejuvenated through a healthful primitivism, and feel big." —Dan Sinykin paraphrasing William Cronon via

Loving book restoration video.

Käthe Kollwitz self-portrait in pastels.

( via / via )

Does your cat ever fall off the kayak?

"Homage: Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,
the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,
the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried
up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, falling
at noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street."

—Ishion Hutchinson

We don't know what happened after that.

“It is one thing to talk of literature as a medium through which we convey our awareness, or indeed our conviction, of an inveterate human condition of guilt or anxiety; it is another to be possessed by a sense of language itself as a manifestation of empirical guilt.” —Geoffrey Hill via

When 3M scientist Kris Hansen discovered that a chemical the company produced was in the blood of the general public, her bosses questioned her work.

( via / via )

Fiction books that point us back to our essential human nature.

"I hope death isn’t as close as he sounds. I can hear the glottal stop in his gloat, the ping of sun on a blade fresh from the stone." —Joseph S Furey

"It is not a person in the human sense, but it is a person of another order."

"Caw

Whose branch this is I think you know.
By how my (question-marks as) claws inscritch the bark.
How my worry-work along this bough
runs back and forth (and copper-keen) and evermore;
I got mocked and nicked No-Fly Bird

not for nothing.

Not for nothing have I picked this oak.
Though not thicktrunk-ancient as some angel-oak,
it’s sure the highest of our high so suits my lack.
—Charred wings won’t lift; I’ve got no glide
nor span to speak of. Ain’t this my beat : my usual limb.
Ain’t this pecking (carking) pulse

my far and wide."

—Atsuro Riley via

There's no handle.

( me / via )

Greatest Female Poets.

"Last Words

Forgive me for not writing sober,
I mean sooner, but I almost don't
dare see what I write, I keep mating mistakes,
I mean making, and I'm wandering
if I've inherited what
my father's got.
I first understood it when he tried
to introduce me to somebunny:
'This is my doctor,' he said,
then didn't say more, 'my daughter.'
The man kindly nodded
out the door.
I thought: is this dimension
what I'm headed for?
I mean dementia.
Not Alzheimer's, but the kind he has,
possessive aphasia: oh that's good,
I meant to say progressive.
Talk about euthanasia!
I mean euphemasia,
nice words inside your head not there,
and it's not progress at all.
No, he's up against the boil
after years now of a sad, slow wall
and he's so hungry,
I mean angry.
Me too. I need to get my rhymes in
while I still mean. I mean can."

—Mary Jo Salter via Maryann Corbett

"...that strange, devious and slippery personage, crawling with indefinable nationalities who is called, or claims to be called, Ivan Illich.."

Poetry is when language enters hauntedness. (via)

A good selection of rhetorical terms with examples. (Via.)

( via / via )

"Trumpism is far from gone. But when it does go, we won’t notice that it’s gone."

"The health of a culture can be measured in terms of how many new and interesting things are breaking through and gaining some amount of traction." —Charlie Jane Anders via

Clay tablet mail.

dormitating* dire turd
adroit at sprawl folly
       sundowning
   with the flag heft
fleas rummaging · on the bitter road

await queued pantomime
pundits all wage blood for
       theocrats
   & bandit chiefs
fleas rummaging · on the bitter road

---------------------------------------------------------
* Barnes word: repeatedly falling asleep

How to Write for Money.

( me / via )

The Last Command (1928). ☆☆☆☆

      "battlefield Fillmore"

being of sound mind · multiply beset
   advantageously placed
stocked with precedents · proveable saws
   comments not allowed
have walked away· from those i could save
   have sidestepped quicksand
for the sake of my shoes · chaperoned pills
   & poverty
to the bridge of unmaking · in the vale of glycerine tears
   package a pittance
witness little · less admit
   be one of the winners left
whose accounts may vary · but fadge consensus
   it was all the fools

Recordings of "Quiet Village".

"Visiting Philadelphia once, Terry Gilliam, the film director and former Python, was out in the city when he suddenly heard the Monty Python theme playing in the street. Is this a joke? he thought for a moment. Do they know that I’m here?

And then he realised that no one was playing the Monty Python theme: they were playing the Liberty Bell March..." —Alexander Fayne via

"Elyot (c. 1490-1546) was mocked in his time as an inkhornist—one who uses far too many loanwords."

( via )

Les Châtiments.

"His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter’s." —Mary Shelley via

Street art in Seattle's Pike Place.

      "ODE: Glencliff vifgage"

fast food suicide
diagnosed sayonara
      sing liftoff
   engines en pointe
don't talk about the Wall · from where it can see you

fake news suicide
system fnords persisting
      what's to do
   with porn ruin
on fumes from the bonfire · of the inanities

lemmingward apex predator
hapax leguminatrix
      words dissolve
   on the brisk wind
i can't tell you anything · in the winedark confessional

books i made unburdened
by likelihood hoodwink
      cloud swallows
   in a clear sky
pull the curtains to · lower the blind

whiteknuckle boredom
order of nine angles
      puissant sludge
   slathered-on whelm
forgot my jacket · in the gen'ral exodus

mad ascent of mousetrap
monstrous recap pawnstorm
      purulent
   pockets of change
dust of tires · settles on ev'ry term

become cartoon camwheels
curtailed as boss flosses
      wander bright
   empty hallways
ever unfolding · echoing footsteps

open package forwarded
to this Galapagos post

The Loud Literary Lamas.

( via )

A Song of the Petrel.

"carceral blessing"

angular realm sundering
honeyshine
upon a violet plate

fulsome praise for the narcissist
for anyone else an insult

"hough I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter."

"They had already made sure they all knew I was videotaping, pointing me out to each other as they prepared to leave. Then, as they drove their unmarked vehicles slowly through our street, windows tinted dark, every single one of them slowed down as they passed me. One agent put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them directly at me. “I’m watching you.” Another leaned forward and made a heart with his hands as he drove past. Another blew kisses at me. These were armed federal agents who had just descended on a residential neighborhood in masks and tactical gear, taken people away, terrified families, and now they were driving away laughing and trying to taunt a woman who had dared to stand on the sidewalk and record them." —Heather Delaney Reese

Venus i never prayed to.

( via / via )

Sirius is Too Young to Remember.

"The unique thing about Nabokov is that he practiced the writing of fiction as a form of sorcery. " —Thomas Ligotti via

Wagner looks at The Backrooms.

"carceral crossing"

mentat citadel querning
acquire celerity
with morning's flow
questions asked of objects
in the fair field of incidence
a cup a chair what chalice holds
of dismal cherishing

"Arday was less Don Quixote than Great Gatsby..."

( via / via )

"No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky."

without the noise, my twin
would these blank pages fill
churning lack of will
to let world in

long tumbling to rest
car at speed will shake
flashlight's circle lake
no alkahest

runing toxic fun
can rescue not much more
cold on this coldest shore
the noise my twin

Virga III.

"...the real pièce de résistance here is the dazzling four-minute fragment from the otherwise lost The Case of Lena Smith, discovered by Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi in a Chinese junk shop in Dalian in 2003." —Jonathan Rosenbaum via

The Woodpecker.

( via / via )

On translating the Daodejing.

"What would an expression be, after all, absent a deep scan of the vast expanses and histories of the expresser’s interior terrain, in search of things legible? " —Brian Leli via

I Go Among Trees.

"surface enough"

broken circus in my head
distance made of paper folds
amber fluid find
gray overcast sky watch
hoick lest reel stick
soot drool cough prowl
broken circus in my head
circle broken that contained
tattoed climb-back
surface enough like talking

Kingsnorth on Wendell Berry.

( via / via )

Elena Ferrante a hoax?

      "ODE: now, daystar"

failpyre parch averted
pullulating rulesnags
      frogboil slope
   dumbbell antheap
haywire stooge would crown · stop it

   an hour
that is an hour gone
hangs still in the air

guess Waldo brillig
brandish malign sinus
      chainpull blanch
   blurry outline
storm brink veldt · all void stodge goose

sloom among slime tunnels
tantamount to fountains
      foist vespers
   starved pool ace knows
hook hand writes · dowff fistdodge

skyey amerce caseload
custom sort of trustbreach
      cold plummet
   as cloud ooze flows
soft gleetcoil · glaze nook sighs

Eruption of Sarychev Peak, from space.

"And it was almost like when you hear thunder. It’s that shiver, you just go into a siege mentality when you hear thunder. It’s almost like you’re at war and hear the guns, you’ve got that atmospheric awareness that comes from hearing a sound that powerful, but that distant." —Will Bevan (Burial) via

To my Children, Fearing for Them.

( via / me )

"Perhaps Porter is the only painter more rewarding through a screen than in the flesh."

"When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift." —Sam Kriss via

A Fable + Mirror.

      "a darker trade than magic"

startsnarl at firenoon
      Sirius
   from circular
to orbit eccentric · wild ride

if you hang on · trudge in owl-light
sloyd conclave
handbook for moon death
seed vault
mesquite honey

"...submitting to prestigious magazines feels a bit like gambling addiction."

( via nightcafe / via )

Protect the weakest.

      "gut dragged through too many intersections"

febrifuge obelisk
follower, streaks lengthened
      time of light
   concrete tarried
again & i go · trailing words

clip-on shades lost shrapnel
eyeless in Gilead
pure cerulean eyewash
new cars over battered roads

I Go Among Trees.

"This power of suggesting intolerable tragedy at the heart of the trivial is used with a skill little less than miraculous in 'The Waste Land,' and the power is the more moving because of the attendant conviction, that this terrible resembling contrast between nobility and baseness is an agony in the mind of Mr Eliot of which only a portion is transferred to that of the reader." —Elinor Wylie via

A nightclub in Memphis.

( via / me )

Parting.

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” —Wendell Berry via @dudleyzopp

Digital camouflage shirt.

"voice"

something new or something grave
never are there welcome tidings
riddles in the night engrave
something new or something grave
thugs bulldoze the sacred grove
spontaneous my files self-editing
something new or something grave
never are there welcome tidings

"We forget the land..."

( me / via )

"America is outsourcing its genocide. It is using the Subcarpathian Ruthenian model."

velvet dark
cancer school

noise play steals
rhino bog

looks out

"Revolution is no longer an ends-justifies-the-means battle for liberation, but the liberty and grace to prioritize our comportment in the living moment."

"Did you know that one of the best-selling versions of The Tale of Genji is a re-translation of Arthur Waley’s English back into Japanese?" —William Lambert via

Wendell Berry on good artists.

( via / via )

Pupeo.

"Now come, and forth into the great salt sea
Launch a black ship"

—Bryant's Iliad

Tokens of the Glass Bead Game.

      "the lion's share"

in the depths of Mordor
in the mirror-world
      hyaline
   grade psychosis
rounding up · riddle bloggers

cave enforcement carsick

A deep dive into The Green Carnation.

( via / via )

"Chutes and ladders are just features of space without game pieces to rise and fall and take fate’s shortcuts or fall backs."

lu ku'i ki'u rna vau li'u tcita tu'e fu'eka'ebopo'i

te'o te'a vei
ka'o pi' ir pai ve'o
su'i pa du no

fu'omu'o tu'u poi jbopemci poi selgicfanva fi de'e .i zoi .zy.

"But why?"

e to the (
i times pi) power,
plus 1, equals zero.

12-22/31-90 revised 5-24-91

.zy. vau via

"Did you know that one of the best-selling versions of The Tale of Genji is a re-translation of Arthur Waley’s English back into Japanese?"

"The familiar picture of an independently existing material universe composed fundamentally of objects possessing determinate properties and interacting causally in space and time, with consciousness appearing very late as an inexplicable consequence of sufficiently complicated arrangements of matter, is no longer persuasive." —After the Collapse via

The Burial of the Old.

( via / via / via @maryanncorbett )

"The literary canon seems to allot each century an average of one or two essayists for remembrance."

"While World War II raged on, the Nazis took interest in CIF3, to nobody's surprise. The stuff could be used as an incredibly effective chemical weapon that was also cheap to produce. In particular, CIF3 would make for perfectly destructive flamethrowers and bombs. They started churning the stuff out by the tons before deciding it was far too unstable and reactive to handle. Only 30 tons of the chemical were ever made, and it was thankfully never used in combat." —Joanie Faletto via

The Last.

"Night at the Turn of August into September" (after Kees)

pale cerulean to pearl
this place where fever rooms
with an acrid bouquet

when Venus was a girl
she dreamed of this locked door
we knock on together

years of dispelled splendor
world so plainly downward
let the swerve show its face

star's discarded lovers
high in duskglow aflame
still can count themselves blessed

pale cerulean legends
populate the dead stars

"...fire/ that consumes the world without/ lighting it."

( oil painting by me / me )

Do Not Be Ashamed.

      "Schrödinger's Senator"

all these tracks ixnay
after crystal distance
      carillon
   ode protocol
loco torpedo · pastoral

all these words waxing
like the wan old moonface
      empty front
   i still turn at

To the Unseeable Animal.

"Thinking of that time Wendell Berry was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference on hunger. He looked around at the audience & remarked (I'm paraphrasing here): 'I see a lot of well-fed people.' " —@the-big-quiet.bsky.social

"There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places and desecrated places."

—Wendell Berry via @emmaeli.bsky.social

"It is an emergency that calls for patience, and to be patient in an emergency is a hard requirement." --Wendell Berry

"An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars." --Wendell Berry

"The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having." --Wendell Berry in: The Poet's Work ed Reginald Gibbons (1979)

"The reason we need to have our certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have."
—Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun a real journey.” —Wendell Berry via @bookbent.bsky.social

"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."

- Wendell Berry via @alinastefanescu

"Ask the questions that have no answers. / Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant, / that you will not live to harvest. / Say that the leaves are harvested / when they have rotted into the mold. / Call that profit. Prophesy such returns."

—Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” via @themeanderingmiltonist

"It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect—and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.” —Wendell Berry via @athornebrooke

"Yvor had reduced the worthwhile poets in English to five, one of whom was always Winters and three of whom were former pupils of his, while the fourth would be changed weekly and might be a poet no one had ever heard of.."

( via / via )

Top hat never looked so suave.

“The bone-cage speared by lilies of the veldt” —Geoffrey Hill, "Speech! Speech!" sect. 118

The Nerd Reich.

      "night of 3 moons"

waning days of don't-know
adorned with stern tinsel
adorned with stern tinsel
      for awhile
feeling the furled quicksand
   in the hour

this sweet broken circus
substitutes for scrutiny
substitutes for scrutiny
      & shelter
feeling the furled quicksand
   closer pressing

the next chapter nearing
necessary lessons
necessary lessons
      unpacking
feeling the furled quicksand
   pitter patter

Smells Like Team Spirit. (via Mefi)

( via / me )

"The emphasis is as much on these mostly ordinary people as it is on Plath, with the result that the book is as much about a time and a place - small town Devon in 1961-2 - as it is on a literary superstar."

"Päivän palindromi.
KILJUT RIEMUSTA

Tee ropisevana navan nauru,
anna vanana vesiporeet."

—@harricarlson.bsky.social

(Google translate:

SCREAM WITH JOY

Let laughter tumble from your navel,
let the water-jets flow in a stream.)

Gleipnir: To Bind the Wolf.

"If they want the Bible to be taught in school, then I want science to be taught in church."
—@designationsix.bsky.social

Views inside a real destructive scanning operation, if you want to know what a company scanning 2 million books per month really looks like.

( me / via )

"I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes."

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
—Edsger W. Dijkstra via @jacobwren.bsky.social

Tláloc effigy vessel.

"red tie in the sunset"

tinhorn blizzard-vesuvius
we'll go on cursing a long time dead
it's all our own faults
i know, i know
like cancer is
clown cancer
in the lightless realm
his rottenness seemed to shine
they so crave
to have
their pockets picked
to believe in a person who can heal their woe
pity of heroes
pity of lying there
i know it
on the gaudy battlefield
you don't think that girl is dead
who bit his dick
unmarked grave
in the rich man's desert
tumbleweeds
like wind-removed hairpieces
cross & recross hourly
tinhorn blizzard-vesuvius

Orc Triple Self-Portrait.

( via / via )

Mysterium Coniunctionis.

      "L B O R Z I E C N K G S E"

gibbous Blitzkrieg vinaigrette
grisaille on a tombstone
      at sunrise
   illegible
price of gas · in proud red

tire light again tontine
torn golden brailledark
      my turn lane
   a tattered thing
anyway forget · the isthmus scripture

Cabaret Voltaire rerun
in this roughshod fraudscape
      Nine-Eleven
   a sort of lime
greige thimble · holds all reason

gibbous Blitzkrieg vinaigrette

Is Forever Longer than Always?

"After walking about a quarter of a mile, the pair came to a hut, six feet high on stilts, and climbed up a ladder. Inside was the baba lao, a local spiritual leader. The baba lao was going to do a ritual designed to ensure a Nigerian scammer would make more money in his blackmailing or manipulation of an overseas victim, maybe back in the United States." —404media via

Allude my Wedded Dewy Medulla.

( via / via )

Lots of us learned classical music from watching old cartoons, so I’m going to identify the pieces that frequently popped up.

"The last time it was this dangerous to eat food there were no refrigerators."
—@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social

Your Loser World.

"in a crowded fire"

bloodcasual steer
melamine
sky cinnamon

& after all
no explanation needed

After the Flood.