( via )

"What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved."

" Every one of them asked me to do the same thing: keep them anonymous, and don’t let this go quiet."

( via / via )

"The image is based on a pun: the Greek for 'wax,' kērós, is phonologically similar to kēr (chest), which in pre-literate Greece, was regarded as the repository of sense impressions, memory and understanding. Socrates, of course, is waxing philosophical here."

"When many varied things are deemed beautiful, some championed widely, others deeply appreciated by a handful of devotees, some rising through the layers of time to be reconsidered beautiful, others deemed harmful falling away, then I feel the pivot of ‘what behaviour is this causing?’ can allow a fluid, see-sawing of effects, none going too far."

"They are not mirrors reflecting reality without distortion but maps whose usefulness lies in what they preserve and what they ignore. Science advances not by escaping analogy but by refining it: not certainty replacing metaphor, but better metaphors replacing worse ones." —Aran Canes via

"At 11, following her mother’s suicide, she’d resolved never to talk again – a stricture she (mostly) observed, she claimed, into her twenties. 'They used to think I was crazy,’ she later said.."

( via / via )

"We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them."

"Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden." —Samantha Cole via

Certain Flowers.

"CASSEROLE (Anagrammed Lines)

The perfect casserole:
Cereal of the spectres.
Ether of secret places."

—Anthony Etherin

"But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is'“a frying pan full of diamonds' and 'humorous like a crotch sparkle.' It is 'like lickable mink'..."

( david hockney via hedley thorne / via )

Rothko in Florence.

"two things i know about saturday"

consuming & producing phantoms
fainting of hunger
outside the restaurant
witticisms about cancer
in the darkest, coldest hour of the night

hand in hand we ford

Symbol.

"OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA" —@danhon.com

Interesting angle on the classical music biz which, i see, is not unlike the others..

( via / zao wou-ki )

"They gave a very high—indeed, a dominating—place in their minds to religion. It played as large a part in the life of the seventeenth century as sport does now." (via Dear Sweet Filthy World)

"guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one." —@lolennui.bsky.social

The Sun Over Athens.

"Screwworm Monument"

Maybe we should let the fucker stand.
As a reminder: once Beelzebub
in semi-human hair & human flab
sat grinning, & dismayed the mappemunde...
Or call 'em screwworms, pests we let persist
and some allied with, angling for reward,
or this was elder evil, now unhid—
America's unaliving, ably sourced.
The game we gave our futures to had spoken.
Screwworms & screwworm follies & screwworm hates
(so many hates!)—as Foxslop sugarcoats,
Lincoln's eclipsed by some bad dream from Bacon.
—Well, at last they did themselves unravel,
since no one else seemed ace at screwworm removal.

Mural of Greta Thunberg.

( via / via )

"In Japan, where company-centered life has long been the norm, young people who live from day to day on part-time work alone are called 'フリーター freeter'."

"decrypted summons"

dark-encrusted footsteps
staycation cakewalk
planet after planet
plummets along songlines

forest-green grog spills
Graywyvern bent driving
summer with sword stands grimly
degraded shell, sell-by date;

bergamot tea, tire gauge

Kierkegaard to His Shadow Near a Stream.

"My worry—I don’t know if it was Celan’s, too—is, if we follow his metaphor to the end, whether there will be a human-inhabited island left when the bottle is finally washed ashore. Or a homo sapiens able to read such messages." —Pierre Joris via via Fabienne Ziegler

"No matter how far back one goes, one finds a reference to the yet earlier (usually lost) works, the bitter legacy of argument, and, without fail, the Vedas ever at hand and ever distant, the way a mountain range seems both unreachable and unavoidable when viewed from the foothills."

( via / via )

Why Does AI Love "Not X, But Y" So Much?

"...we went to see Akhmatova’s dacha. It was a small hut, I am not even sure, it had a sewerage or water system. Maybe it was the reason why Robert Frost, who went to Leningrad to see her, was not allowed it under pretext that she was sick. She even didn’t know about his wish to see her or that she was sick. Anyway, Frost was persistent for Kennedy’s brother was a prominent Slavist and wanted Frost to see 'the great poet Anna Akhmatova.' Authority decided to invite Akhmatova and Frost to the more fashionable summer house of some unknown to Akhmatova academic. Akhmatova told about this meeting to her friend, Galina Kozlovskaya:

We are sitting in the wicker armchairs on the terrace and two poets talk. I ask him, —Do you publish Pushkin in your country?

The great American poet made a round eyes and said,

— Who? Never heard.

Then poet asked her,

— Tell me what do you sell?

Anna Andreevna was taken aback,

— Nothing…

—I sell the pine woods, they are good for making the pencils.

And Anna Andreevna tells us,

— Two poets were sitting: one—got all the fame, all the recognition, all the, so called adoration of the country. And I sit next to him, and fate is so different…"

—Larisa Rimerman via

One year ago.

deplorables' champion
bent-over footstool back stomp
all glory ever was

A Dragon Kingdom.

( via / me )

Who's Who? (via)

soot-blurry outpost
bagel ration
fridge fills up with handmedowns

far off
kaiju hammering cities

dyspeptic epic best left
to those of closer acquaintance
with the evidence

minstrel ration
soot-blurry outpost

Squat lobster zebra morphs.

"As for Elias, there is one example I’ve found of him existing pre-generative AI, as a time traveling mad scientist in the 1980’s trading card series Dinosaurs Attack!. And a real-life Elias that comes close to the stories told by LLMs did actually exist, Hamilton found—Elias Allen was a 16th century clockmaker in London." —Samantha Cole via

Colossus.

( via / via )

Lovely pixel streetlight.

"Style was a necessary sacrifice made to the exercise of power without limits, and a method for the liquidation of a refugee camp, however unexpected or ingenious, could never exhibit style. A longing for style remains, and the knowledge of its insurmountable absence." —Chapman Caddell via

What Did you Do During the War.

      "speech act"

turbo erasure · packin' parachutes
   in the thick hot welter
second or third time · the lane's decimated
   the turn, & the no-longer-turning
the signing-up circus

A Dead Summer Begs for You in Gaza.

( via / via )

Triolet.

      "density's child"

merch, interim mishmash
maze without abating
   whiplash conclave
      nameless plagues
the crunch beachhead · on the stained cusp

ditch problems of plenty
for problems dearth cobbles
   symbols splinter
      holey sieve
doomscroll darkens · the dry plain

things not solved by headscratch
scribble inane plainsong
   puzzle pieceswitch
      Titanic
chaise longue · guillontine rust

boredom's legions Bijoux
the bent lamp of Hamlin

Cambodian psych-pop cover of A Hard Day’s Night.

"Each of these explanations is being prepared now. Each of them is being seeded into the record now. Each of them will be deployed, at the appropriate time, by the appropriate person, through the appropriate journalistic intermediary, with the appropriate degree of plausible deniability. This is what an orbit does when it begins to anticipate that it will have to answer." —Mike Brock via

"The energy in the room is the energy of people who have been awake so long that the membrane between funny and terrifying has dissolved entirely."

( via / via )

"Nothing is fair in this world of madness."

"Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character." —Ann Kjellberg via

Modes of Askesis.

"prospectus for a solid dictionary"

screwworms in charge, scheduled
ice cathedral feeding
squidcrunk dachshunds
hovering wasp woven
the sky pressing down, screwworms
on the march

Even the dead trees are covered in concrete dust.

Johnson's Dictionary.

( via / via )

"The word apocatastasis crops up more than once!"

Chicxulub alarm
Calm cerulean smile
Bring the rainbow snarl
   Another time
Maybe we can furl the gleam

Love’s the luck that counts
War a crime that pays
Chicxulub allows
   These blue complaints
Spattered on the burning air

Oracle of dust & firestorm
Chicxulub alarm

"But today, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death, Pope Leo XIV will inaugurate the completed Sagrada Familia, just as promised."

"But it's not a strawberry anymore. It's just a chemical that kind of tastes like a strawberry. Soon enough, you forget what one actually tastes like. Or worse, you prefer the chemicals. Or even worse, you can't even find real strawberries anymore because the market is flooded with synthetic replacements. Or even worser, the real ones have long gone extinct because no one wanted to grow them anymore when the synthetic version was cheaper and more convenient. And whoop-dee-doo, you've erased about 500 individual human experiences and replaced them with a single, shared one. And that's just strawberries." —German via

"This particular line has been on my mind since before Shavuos. Today I almost felt disrespectful toward it. Then the fear returned and equilibrium was restored."

( via / via )

A Brief History of Russian Culture.

"In this flat and watery land live a people who have been here for thousands of years, famous in Europe for their astounding ability with time and for their former civilisation which now lies in ruins, dwelt in by iguanas with blue tongues, covered in vines." —Charlotte du Cann via

Dusk.

"Blackout

What happened in the dark asphyxiates
years since: deserted knockdown, crawlspace hold,
socket jagged where the ceiling light snapped

off. Dead-end tunnel carved with hieroglyphs
commemorating those who took the dare
and entered, never seen again. Constrained

from oxygen the brain drifts out, then in,
flame guttering, moon dim through vagrant cloud.
Damp hands across the mouth pinch nostrils shut.

Some memories adhere as residue—
trace chemical or corrugated scab—
but faces disappear, as drainage ponds

beget and purge whatever thrives therein.
What happened in the dark stays dark because
you couldn’t look, but didn’t turn away."

—George Witte via

"I never imagined a time when I would look at long-term forecasts and say with confidence that there will be fuckery on a planetary scale over the next year."

( via / via )

Out of hatred for the ant.

"place names from eradicated peoples"

skint subfusc hours
ascribing libels
lakeside puppet show
shingle grit in flurries
sandy overpass salvo
wires span & tears tangle

The Sea of Ice.

"where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable" —Finnegans Wake

Sad & entirely predictable.

( via / via )

"We are feeling beings who sometimes think."

"His refusal of institutional catharsis, his Ligottian lucidity, his insistence on the tunnel without light, has not protected him from Carcosa. It has, if anything, prepared him for it, because it has stripped away every cover story that might have insulated him from the unmanaged condition that Carcosa represents." —Tristan via

Black Rock.

"idea of having fun"

Reich LaBrea · wrecked executive
human blurs · hideous prolixity

bagel inspected · for spots of mold
empty library · looming checkout

"The Baroque becomes pertinent when, in the very midst of the performance, and in full knowledge of its artifice, the viewer becomes convinced that the artifice in fact refers to some truth just beyond the camera’s glare."

( via / via )

"And a glamour of clangor · gored cloudward gaily."

      "the boss & the boss's boss"

assuage-least with the large glass
lambency now brink shambles
      umber wood
   whirls t'ward dial phones
stabbed with a decorative · wall dagger

farther from real, flailing
figments in the rigged show
      past midnight
   mustered symptoms
cold shining · in all ways shrunk

crookedly steer

Kronos &...Moondog?

"Sensing that the Singaporean authorities would never allow him to make a film about an expatriate pimp, Bogdanovich submitted a fake synopsis for romantic caper movie called Jack of Hearts (what the director called a cross between Love is a Many Splendored Thing and Pal Joey) to officials and shot the real film guerrilla style." —Andrew Nette via

"Just as people seldom think of water outside a desert, people seldom think as much about authenticity outside a twenty-first-century city."

( via / via )

I only take calls from this phone.

"If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." —Michel Foucault via

"The ballet does so via its asymmetry, its 'thick melange of instinct, sensuality and fate'..."

       "Oh Happy Day"

Delusion comes boxed in a sporange
of prejudice, folly's squeak-doorhinge,
   & craving for blood;
   we wade through the mire
of its downpour & pustulent persimmon.

If I May Ask It of the Dying.

( via / via )

Dating Advice fom Trakl. (Somewhat later:) Aside on mindfulness.

“ANGÉLIQUE

Have you seen Angélique,
What way she went?
A white robe she wore,
A flickering light near spent
Her pale hand bore.

Have you seen Angélique?
Will she know the place
Dead feet must find,
The grave-cloth on her face
To make her blind?

Have you seen Angélique… .
At night I hear her moan,
And I shiver in my bed;
She wanders all alone,
She cannot find the dead.”

—Adelaide Crapsey

Unmet Needs.

"And just as many people's facial expression is false, mine too can be false. But the hands with which I speak are truth incarnate, they are always unmasked—regardless of how often I paint my own portrait!" —Egon Schiele via

"The ways to not quite be present are infinite but the same cannot be said of the ways to be fully there."

( via / via )

"Yesterday I was at the desk when a man came in." (thread)

We’re going to need a bigger vocabulary for “cringe”.

Defragging was cool.

thicket of pretending
mackerel sky
the one needful word set

wending among dungheaps

Infinitives.

( via / oil painting by me )

"... the uncanny is what keeps me most grounded in reading and writing. The best writers of the uncanny are often women writers of the short form..."

"waste & use"

the wind
from Sagittarius A
nothing you can sail on

the wind
i can understand
blows in days long ended

the wind
from Sagittarius A

"Vegemite is an espresso shot that punches you in the face, then steals your wallet."

"A break-the-state, twig-quick snap or a long divining" —Susan Briante via

Darkness.

( via / via )

To the Rain.

"Spencer Pratt is a rare instance in Los Angeles of something shitty not getting greenlit."
—@frankconniff.bsky.social

My Name is Ruin.

"margentian violet"

chaos of cobwebs · crowded inside
shrill pentangle
can rubble · rampike horizon
collect recipes
for when · ketamine scowls

My Revolution.

( via / via )

"Belugas demonstrate a high level of self-awareness and a sense of self."

      "Nascarborough Fair"

mylar ribbon rulebook
terrain of blank anguish
      brisk gaslight
   garish trestle
silenced cicadas · misspent odyssey

show of shaky pictures
krait Shalimar limerick
      hospital
   inhabit shapes
blink afar · final yardstick

nitrogen ice artwork
only courtroom portrait
      fist gaslight
   end of ergcreel
hiss kitchen · pendulum dumbfound

"The metamorphosis of indie as both a genre and a concept is inextricable from the evolution of the hipster as a cultural entity."

These [consciousness] arguments will not end until we get tired of using the words & start looking at the phenomena. (--my comment on this & 2 answers.)

"But now the world has made a self of its own."

( via / via )

"This portrayal of both sides of war, capturing both the military conquest and the human suffering brought by it, brought a storm of controversy to the Imperial capital during the exhibition of 1874."

"The crystalline structure he calls snow, ­mingling with the burning glow in which the angels of the First Order gather around God’s throne, is dust, scoured by the hour and the minute, as though with a divine scraper, from the flat plateau of the spiritual body we call the sky, like an animal grooming itself." —Alexander Kluge via

"We both loved philosophy and craft and craved ways to put those parts of our lives back together..."

beast rumorous · gray return
not my nemesis · scabilicious
sword's rust · & the pale light
ghost army · nowhere tryst
my words fall · feeding frenzy
of merle shadows · i call monster

"Albayzin was the perfect breeding ground for flamenco."

( jim roche on substack / via )

"I have gradually come to think that we might be best served by taking The Waste Land as a toboggan ride rather than, say, a step-by-step guide to forensic accounting."

   i would like to hear
the music made Confucius
   forget to take food

ten seconds in front of a
painting that staggered the world

"I’m usually an Ex Ponto person more, a later Donne in the Holy Sonnets sonnets with concerns both mundane, constant, and salvational."

"Through the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale"

—Charlotte Smith via

"The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south."

( oil painting by me / via )

Right-brained poems & Left-brained readers.

Although i am such a fogey i still use paper dictionaries (both Webster's 2nd unabridged & the 3rd) & my own head (complete with ambivalent spots) for grammar, this is splendidly nuanced. If only the rest of the mechanism were as linear! But as yet, they do not seem interested in ways of powering this renaissance that involve solar energy or water from comets, nor compensatory retraining along the lines of small-scale urban agriculture. Which might make it tolerable, if inartistic.

All my Enemies are Stupid.

"metal latch of a wooden gate"

despair in free fall · spiral elegy
mind's potholes · made manifest
wait for the man · with the Gadsden flag
to come by door to door · for a contribution
   sunset of small repairs
you will miss this so · when there aren't any

"We hear a lot about disenchantment but i think what is happening is also a different form of enchantment."

( via / me )

"He was used to dealing with madness because of his mother and Peter Orlovsky and any number of unbalanced friends, so he could show tremendous kindness and patience."

"Who kneel? Pooneel!"

mandarin tin can phone
resurrected banquet

trash pretend solutions
scrape the wax tablet

for awhile almost the bad guy
puddle reflected squirrel

lavender tea, tear-vase
terribly poured storeroom

vast hostage

"The crews who dug it signed nondisclosure agreements, nearly all of them, painters and carpenters and electricians and guards alike."

Of course moons dream. Moons dream planets.

"Its poems became difficult, ambiguous, so intricate and charged with meaning that they were totally incomprehensible." (via)