I love GKC & have read about half (?) of his immense output. I think he is more of a genuine zen master than anything like the churchgoers who constituted Xtianity in his time (& after). I disgree with him continually, but he's way more than the sum of his opinions. Tβπ Mππ Wβπ π€ππ Tβπ’ππ πππ¦, wow.
It's not pointless if it's soothing.
"Reminded of Edmond Jabès:
'Man is within man like the kernel in the fruit, or the grain of salt in the ocean.
And yet, he is the fruit. And yet, he is the sea.'
(A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
"Tanith’s actual originals were written in longhand, in a kind of shorthand she invented."
“Pretty Love, I must outlive you
Pretty Love, I must outlive you;
And my little dog Llewelyn,
Dreaming here with treble whimpers,
Jerking paws and twitching nostrils
On the hearth-rug, will outive you,
If no trap or shot-gun gets him.
Parrots, tortoises and redwoods
Live a longer life than men do,
Men a longer life than dogs do,
Dogs a longer life than love does.
What a fool I was to take you,
Pretty Love, into my household,
Shape my days and nights to charm you,
Center all my hopes about you,
Knowing well I must outlive you,
If no trap or shot-gun gets me.”
—Millay
"Media is one of the Seven Mountains..."
EPIGRAM
To gather appeals to me, though as it happens,
all of the things i gather are not mine.
Frodo writes The Lord of the Rings.
“Barking dogs will be choosers” —@borkenaesop
“On Thought in Harness
My falcon to my wrist
Returns
From no high air.
I sent her toward the sun that burns
Above the mist;
But she has not been there.
Her talons are not cold; her beak
Is closed upon no wonder;
Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek
Of me, that quake at the thunder.
Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.”
—Edna St Vincent Millay
Songbirds 2026, Waka Anthology.
"vellum pact in ruins
time eats words into riddles
meaning slips sideways"
—underablacksky.bsky.social
Exploring an Underground Nuclear Bunker.
“I do not know if it is legitimate to speak of the end of man; but I am certain of the fall of all the fictions by which we have lived until today.” —πβπ πππππ‘ππ‘πππ π‘π πΈπ₯ππ π‘
"I miss my school and my friends I feel bad since when I came here to this Place, because I have been here too long.” —a 9-year-old detained at Dilley via (thread)
“XLII
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.”
—Edna St Vincent Millay
The novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.
"The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element..."
"best things dying"
all the best things
still leave me in a mood
clouds i would be rid
the clank of the machines
Sahara dunes
periscope until
our island landfall splash
wish by bloody wish
the hoops of fate unfurl
too pellmell
with the best things dying
"I like materiality and history too much, the nitty gritty of it bumping up against the cold estrangement of quiet nights, marmoreal, snow that is nowhere close now to the white of quarried Paros stone. I want a table of exports from the quarry. I want to see how much everyone paid for them against the fluctuating worth of the Lydian stater on an axis over time." —A V Marraccini via
The Wiki page for "dark fantasy" doesn't include any mention of Tanith Lee.
IT’S JUST THAT I’M NOT REALLY INTO POLITICS.
"What happened was slower and less deliberate: over years, certain writers proved capable of surviving rereading, and others did not. The books that remained were those that addressed me seriously, without hauteur, concerned with how we conduct ourselves. I did not know I was applying a test until I noticed the results." —Anthony Brown via
It measures about 150,000 light years from side to side.
"Not Rattling
Scaly on a shelf · of square-laid stonework,
coiled by a bush, basking in the sun,
we can’t see your tail · on this cool morning
or hear it either · in the early stillness.
Taking its time, your tongue flicks slowly,
testing our purpose, tasting the peace."
—David B. Ring at FGR
"Sweeping up glass from my car that was stolen, on a dark overcast day the day before i go on vacation"
This spot might have been Dallas.
By the sparseness of its green.
That dusty churning has left
No enduring enigma.
Once a pilgrim tarried here
And carved her many a poem.
Poem upon poem, till the mass
Towered like sable coral...
The travail is long, lonely;
And ragged his fedora.
If for a moment he rests,
It is not to ask the way.
Through this glad abandonment
A wind gives north to the flesh.
"the internet is straight up not interesting anymore as either a fictional subject or a modality by which fiction is produced sorry" —@katewagner.wehwalt.net
Canon RP Full Spectrum Infrared Sensor 665nm Sensor filter Canon RF 14-35 f4L lensv.
"behind faminebuilt walls" —Finnegans Wake
The Bunny gives Us a Lesson in Eternity.
jouk carpentersklaatu
accord derelict board games
faminebuilt walls
eyes dilated ophthalm
inscape in the task capers
faminebuilt walls
saffron-soft the glimmer
Everyone awaits the Superb Owl.
eyes dilated · by the good garbles
not cold not hot just dead lawn
crazy mirror · marked down
A Boston Dynamics does some gymnastics.
"Mirrors in silent
Passage, grim recognition
Of these wasted days."
—@rayhourigan.bsky.social
My life would be complete. Can we 3D print this?
Verner Panton, Copenhagen, Denmark 1971.
"UNIVERSE
a total zoo;
a black catacomb of foamy topology;
galaxy jambalaya"
—@lukebradford.bsky.social
Glad i wasn't on drugs watching that.
"I think a reasonably frequent experience for junior academics is a life wherein they were the smartest person in the room in most rooms they were in (even some pretty fancy rooms) up until The Great Filtration suddenly puts them among a bunch of other people with the same life experience." —@lastpositivist.bsky.social
me: it's why one kaiju meets another & they immediately start fighting
Japanese Godzilla vs Space Godzilla poster.
"A Batman film or TV show but it’s just Bruce Wayne doing business deals and living his life. Batman always off screen." —@steg68.bsky.social
me: that's what being a poet is like
"broken in the strong places"
1.
glitched recording glaiveswap
glue of tomies, wheezing
canal's mudroom mangled
in the midst swerve dusk-fervor
dreich suicidaire meant
dark windows of spurned parking
2.
shadow project prying
through pressed mistakes' gleam-seeming
any word sends surcease
of sand's empty urn-churning
shells litter where shapes moved
shrill branches the dead mansion
"VIII
We lean in the full moon as would a circle of gods
passing a window. Together our voices rise in song.
To those below, our lamp is mistaken for a star.
But the true stars lie at the bottom of the bowl.
Her voice spirals to me from the other side of moons.
Her expression tells me of secret springs, jewels, ice.
How long will I stand alone against broken walls?
Once I watched how a star fell behind her blue gown.
There is no message that will satisfy the mystery I sense.
Even secret letters from my home arrive here torn open."
—Ghazals of Ghalib (tr William Hunt)
"Epstein has given us an extraordinary portal through which we can now see how hostile state influence, criminality and the impunity of the billionaire class are intimately enmeshed. That’s the piece I still want to write. But we can’t understand any of this until we realise that Epstein isn’t just a doorway, he’s also a mirror." —Carole Cadwalladr via
Streets of Minneapolis, Irish folk version.
(endwords of Shakespeare XXV)
Ferry of years, whose course swerves look at stars
uncomprehendingly, you may not boast
of many sure arrivals, sandy bars
aplenty; yet here i am and almost
free. This wild foray into darkness spread
around me, upon toxic waters, i [eye]
have learned to call home. Here a brave child is buried;
on such officious caravan i'll die.
Not as shark's teeth bear the only fight,
is a tart will welded to fate: small complots foiled
provide what squalls and tides cannot requite,
soft nor runic sheaves on which have toiled
sad eyes, spiralling scurry of dwarves belov'd
the more its young squawk-polyps are removed.
How Clear Channel Killed Radio.
Japanese Godzilla vs Mothra poster.
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.
It was a dream, and dreams do not prolong:
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song.
And you who mince the litany of wrong
Come into lands where none prevaricate.
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.
Cats to blame for octopus deity enshrinement delay.
"My friend told me that three things did well back then: monster fiction, erotica, and stuff about Trump…so I figured I could write the book for the Kindle store: a combo monster fiction/ erotica/ Trump book." —J D Boehninger via which reminds me of Bennet Cerf's "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" joke. (I did my own set of variations on the Vampire Mystery Cat books.)
"An interior decorativeness seems clearly to me to be the superior, enlightened mode by which to give a destiny to ourselves." --πβπ π΅πππ ππ π·ππ ππ’πππ‘
Rough seas and high tides this morning out on the seafront.
"A Word Meaning the Typical Death of Your Sort of Person"
The rushed and reckless work
that wears my infamy
is yet not mine to shirk
even as it flies me.
Here are the ruinous tools
your hand may not unclasp;
these, the rowdy accruals
from sleep and leisure reft.
And no one finds it weird
that makers wield such lurk
as casts them under the wheels
of rushed and reckless work.
(2007)
"Odin's kin"
saying was hard · saying to keep, harder
it had to be true · trained on a stone
thirty stern generations · & we're still finding
those letters scratched · then inked in
red pigment · or real blood
the thought of it · ogles the thin mind
of a misfit furious · to feel skin-powerful
but these rune wielders · woned before "race"—
winter & the sea · & dire war
were the real powers · in wolf-puissance
& if you could hack it · survive hungers
of the deepest kind · you were Odin's kin
Lights are shining looking north from Beaver!
" 'The only person in jail at the moment for the crimes of so many men is a woman.'
Paddy O'Connell, Newsnight.
(During a discussion about the Epstein Files)." via @stevechalke.bsky.social
In fact, the stones have even been described as the social media of the Viking Age.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that it took three quarters of a century for art history to start telling that the best surrealists were the women surrealists.
"the terrible mountain of needles"
fingerprint smudge focussed
alarm jumps the gun
array of teas with time dwindles
ev'ry edge its snag—
& in the stories
a snag is only framed
by what it will lead to
or keep
from happening
Onibaba. ☆☆☆
"igva"
fountainpenny fetching
before twilight's scrollop
golfangstentourage roil
the rest is blurred distance
scanning the spines skymeal
no score only anvil
the void pounds pulselike
perigee missed warwound
course of action issued
esters retrieve hover
the bombs that are bounding
the bergs orgone crowded
watch spires as they spangle
this spoor captured otchkies
left cairn where the crows lean
carouse bottom feeders
golden flow of flensing
fleer at the cries browsing
go back to safe bubble
barmecidal storm-shield
ashes-of-roses rune field
My gear for the fall of westciv.
"They are passing under the Brooklyn Bridge. There is a humming whine of electric trains over their heads, an occasional violet flash from the wet rails. Behind them beyond barges tugboats carferries the tall buildings, streaked white with whisps of steam and mist, tower gray into sagged clouds." —Manhattan Transfer
Secondary representation in bonobos.
"where the caressive dusts,
the residue of furnaces
upholster the gossamer
festoons of intestate spiders
for nuptial furniture"
—Mina Loy, "Property of Pigeons"
"stochastic pacifist"
the car glass is cursive
& caves to a knave's fist
winter walg too porous
widderguess in gridlock
specters despair, victim
to spirefall or choler
bounded bane a wood tick
busily scrolls gizmo
"The asterisk may open a poem by parsing the space between the notebook and the dream."
"Variations on a Theme by Joyce
The war is in words and the wood is the world
That turns beneath our rootless feet;
The vines that reach, alive and snarled,
Across the path where the sand is swirled,
Twist in the night. The light lies flat.
The war is in words and the wood is the world.
The rain is ruin and our ruin rides
The swiftest winds; the wood is whorled
And turned and smoothed by the turning tides.
--There is rain in the woods, slow rain that breeds
The war in the words. The wood is the world.
This rain is ruin and our ruin rides.
The war is in words and the wood is the world,
Sourceless and seized and forever filled
With green vines twisting on wood more gnarled
Than dead men's hands. The vines are curled
Around these branches, crushed and killed.
The war is in words and the wood is the world."
—Weldon Kees, The Fall of the Magicians (1947)
"To stir the wits, to make ink flow in floods and the pen acrobatic, there is nothing like solitude. No one not in the business can understand how populous it is. No one not in the trade can understand how loquacious its phantoms become. They have their defects. They poison you for the realities of life. None the less, to be worth his syndicate an author must evoke them. He must play with hallucinations as Mithridates did with drugs. But he must play alone." —Edgar Saltus, The Pomps of Satan
“When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net via @nonsuchbook.bsky.social
"Midway the Stable Place
Below the southern, seaward ledges, where,
Such is the heavy weathering away,
No flower grows, no silence hearts the air,
Each rock gives slowly from its utmost bay.
There comes the day's calthumpian, all afleer,
In his midwaste quotidian King Lear.
His great moonface rumridden and windshot,
His voice the cleaving of the wind to sea,
He drives full speed head on and sets his pots
In his own image and without a lee,
Safe in the backwash of the ledge at bay,
An act of God who does not die this day.
It is midwaste of breaking and the foam,
Midblack the upward curve, the flecking lace,
There always order gives disorder room,
There always midlight is the stable place.
There in the blossoming of waywardness,
O stalwart Lear, you eddy and confess."
—R P Blackmur
Industrial Sector before Dawn, 1942.
Valley View Mall remembered in one form or another.
"Here
Here, where no joy is ever sure
And tired hands dissever,
I dream of raptures which endure
Forever.
Here, where the sunlight and the mist
Are lost in night together,
I dream of rainbows that persist
Forever.
Here, where October leaves the plain
And passes from the river,
I dream of Aprils that remain
Forever.
Here, where the present joins the past
And dead things rise up never,
I dream of lightnings that shall last
Forever."
—Edgar Saltus, Poppies and Mandragora (1926)
Bezos prompt doesn't disappoint.
" 'Do not expect too much of the end of the world', she said." —@artsofexistence.bsky.social
When Thunderbird battled Whale.
"Stop callinge them 'data centers' and starte callinge them 'slop peripherals' "
—@levostregc.bsky.social
"And they work in the void of the word, like astronauts marooned on dead-end planets..."
"Trilce X.
The pristine and last stone of groundless
fortune, has just died
with soul and all, October bedroom and pregnant.
Of three months of absent and ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitered monodactyl, laughs.
How at the rear conjunctions of contraries
destroy all hope. How under every avatar's lineage
the number always shows up.
How whales cut doves to fit.
How these in turn leave their beak
cubed as a third wing.
How we saddleframe, facing monotonous croups.
Ten months are towed toward the tenth,
toward another beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three months of absence.
and the nine of gestation.
There's not even any violence.
The patient raises up
and seated empeacocks tranquil nosegays."
—Eshleman's Vallejo
"I am here today with a duty to the people who have not had the privilege of coming home."
Nice writeup & perspective on Jesse Welles.
"PACT
It is written in the skyline of the city (you have seen it, that bold and accurate inscription), where the gray and gold and soot-black roofs project against the rising or the setting sun,
It is written in the ranges of the farthest mountains, and written by the lightning bolt,
Written, too, in the winding rivers of the prairies, and in the strangely familiar effigies of the clouds,
That there will be other days and remoter times, by far, than these, still more prodigious people and still less credible events,
When there will be a haze, as there is today, not quite blue and not quite purple, upon the river, a green mist upon the valley below, as now,
And we will build, upon that day, another hope (because these cities are young and strong),
And we will raise another dream (because these hills and fields are rich and green),
And we will fight for all of this again, and if need be again,
And on that day, and in that place, we will try again, and this time we will win."
—Kenneth Fearing
Another anti-ICE singer with a bit of back story.
"Phantom nets of mauve and maureen joined them like three captured parrot fish, web of twain, chain of time." —Barefoot in the Head
Ian McKellen on Colbert. ("Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday.
It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor." —@matociquala.bsky.social)
