( via / via )

Taking the Keys Away from Grandpa.

ransom,
Resonulo,
out of all the unseen
Borgesian roses one that
bites back

Spot the bun.

"The fact of the matter is that America is the most powerful and wealthy civilization in the history of the world, yet a great many of its citizens spend an inordinate amount of time surrounded on all sides by cheap drywall and drop ceilings, along with the ever-present headache inducing buzz of fluorescent lights... and in these spaces largely useless tasks are performed, often under surveillance, hour after hour, day after day. " —Aaron Lange via

THE MOST HEAT EXTREME EVENT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.

A guy filmed a Soyuz launch from a distance so close it should be impossible, since safety zones usually clear the pad for kilometers around.

[image or embed]

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 7:12 AM

( via / via )

Limits (or Good-byes).

Some of us golf, some of us putt-putt.

I hate to say this, but that's kind of awesome.

gibbous
our derangement
ask clanker clarify
what will become of these wights so
carbon

You win the internet today!

We used to make so much cool stuff with our hands

[image or embed]

— Solomon (@solomonrmissouri.com) October 1, 2026 at 8:00 AM

( me / via)

One of Ensor's Masks.

moon split
in the black sky
like the sura foretold
a thing that never happened to
earthlings

"I was the managing editor of The Atlantic when we published this article. It ultimately led to the end of my career..."

"Lionesses keep the male lions in check out in the wild. I’d love to see women doing similar things here in society." —@mouthyrenegade.bsky.social via

The School that Became a Grave.

( me / via )

"The author/artist who is the subject of dethroning is a stand-in for some larger transgression."

"John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett were all on GWBush 2000 'Florida Recount' team." —@jfallows.bsky.social

"The Calvinists' biggest mistake was that they were insufficiently fatalistic."

form, the
pentagram that
can capture a spirit
or with its vacancy evoke
Maya

"In 1946, Germany ran out of Nazis."

( via / me )

"No, I am not nestled comfortably in my given lifeworld, or any particular sect at all, but have rather dawned the metaphorical2 trench coat of the spiritual gumshoe and adopted an investigator’s approach to the divine, appreciating the colors, but still compelled by something to glimpse the White Light itself.."

cold, limp
the honey toast
the hospital served me
yet it was a first glimmer
of home

"Another day spent fruitlessly searching for the Black Library in Weychester Cathedral."

"It really says something when both of my therapists are saying that the sense of dread is fully justified and the best I can do is tune out what isn't an immediate threat to my well being."
—@gnome-artificer.bsky.social

HOLDMESE / MOON FLIGHT (1975).

( via / via )

Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Angel of Death Following Two Lovers.

"In scenes that are far too reminiscent of a Patricia Highsmith short story for my liking, it turns out that our dishwasher was broken by a slug - yes, a slug - climbing in through the external waste pipe and then sitting on the motherboard." —@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

New definition of surrealism just dropped.

Oh. wow. Another sonnet.

trill ghosts
haunt our halfway
unregarding tree-lined
repositories of parked cars
today

Five Vintage Fountain Pens for Beginners.

( via / via )

"For those curious about Cervantes’s autobiographical verse plays about his time in Algiers (a source text for my historical novel forthcoming next year, Cervantes in Chains), this is a modern English translation."

the day
shrouded & wet
asudden · elsewhere floods
are tugging parked cars awry, here
green throbs

Authored first full-length Manx language novel.

"Because of the difficulty of obtaining whale song and the absolute proliferation of birds, scientists are shifting their attention toward the actual language of the birds." —Damon Rolnick via

Cubist Cthulhu.

( via/ me )

"And Now I Know It."

It’s hard to square re-enchantment with generational trauma.

Leaves.

"that's so agentic"

maddest October
without any help from me
dashboard lights embellish
labyrinth of Ixtab
chess grognard grass-fed
& graying rogue mogul

"In 1994, a scholar named Deborah Harkness was researching her doctoral thesis on John Dee’s conversations with angels. She was working through dense British Library scans, following the paper trail of Dee’s documented conversations, and she came across a strange uncatalogued manuscript."

( via / via )

Texas. Not what you think!

blood bus'ness
zarf
rotkohl spiel

moon-mad aisle
loud woods
stage voice

If i had to do it over again i'd be a puppeteer in Prague.

"Automated moderating has decided that Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders is adult content." —@evacide.bsky.social

"That sentence is so peak 2026." —@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social (thread)

"At first light each had to find their own again and put it on. The word for that morning is kinuginu 後朝, once written 衣衣. ."

( via / via )

That time i wanted to write Old English in runes.

"One thing not living in America has made really hit home is how much truly global cultural dominance is a thing of the past. I have not heard 'Choosing Texas' once in the urban Western European wild, I could not hum a single bar of it if you put a gun to my head. 40 years ago we had uncontacted island tribes full of Michael Jackson fans. It is more over than we can possibly imagine." —@ellecarroll

Ausonius' Nuptial Cento translated.

   “Song

I make my shroud but no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair,
With stitches set in even rows.
I make my shroud but no one knows.

In door-way where the lilac blows,
Humming a little wandering air,
I make my shroud and no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair.”

—Adelaide Crapsey

The skull is not optional.

( via / via )

I've always had a soft spot for yogh.

"CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever
One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead"

—WS Merwin

Some of the bigger fountain pen makers and their flagship pens.

It used to be accepted wisdom that the best poets were the earliest, & perhaps one day we will say this about film.

I don’t mind computer-made work that advertizes itself as such. I like elephant art & monkey art, too.

( via / via )

"...Ani DiFranco, whose folk has always had a punk’s bite, in songs where the personal and political are seldom on speaking terms with polite society. With Scot Fisher, her longtime manager and then president of Righteous Babe Records, she saved and restored a Gothic Revival church, turning it into the music venue Babeville."

"The Heian court, which could have had anything, named one of its colours kuchiba 朽葉. Rotting leaves. A dull brown-yellow, the colour of a path in November. Murasaki Shikibu dresses people in it. So does Sei Shōnagon. And because one word for decay was not enough, it came in three. Aka-kuchiba, the leaf gone red. Ki-kuchiba, gone yellow. Ao-kuchiba, the leaf that has begun to turn and still has green in it." —Renares via

Henri Michaux almost never dated his works....To solve the riddle of his artistic legacy, the expert committee currently preparing his catalogue raisonné had to design a custom software applying cognitive sciences and algorithms to map all the ink gestures and paper batches.

“The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried:
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.”

—Millay

"The twenty-four names describe a particular place — the basin of a river in northern China, at a latitude and in a dry continental climate that is not this wet archipelago strung along an ocean two thousand kilometers away.

So the names arrive already wrong."

( me / via )

Carapace.

"At Denicija’s grave
На гробот од Дениција

”Longing for her, I often sit in her shadow…” - Old Testament

Above me a grey cloud and a grey eagle
are discussing something,

and I think they're tipping you off
about me, Denicija.

Because whenever I saw a tower and a noonday poplar,
they were like your figure, Denicija.

Whenever I encountered the swelter of day and the swaying of wheat,
they were like your hair, Denicija.

Whenever I discovered a sunflower and a backlit embrasure,
they were like your eyes, Denicija.

Whenever I came across a sunset, whenever I cut a watermelon,
they were like your mouth, Denicija.

And all the measured multures, all the Kantarka pears
were like your breasts, Denicija.

Whenever a sweet and unfurled wing passed me by,
they were like your eyelashes, Denicija.

Whenever I plucked a piece of straw and an olive branch,
they were like your fingers, Denicija.

Whenever I opened a window and an unread book,
they were like your blouse, Denicija.

And all the abandoned spurs and stirrups
were like your earrings, Denicija.

Whenever I heard of raging hills and seas,
they were like your hips, Denicija.

Whenever I saw dandelions and ploughshares,
they were like your feet, Denicija.

And I saw what I saw, and I saw nothing
because all day long I ascend upon the souls of the dead,
all day long I descend through the rain and mist
and everywhere I arrive I'm always too late to reach you.

Afterwards I stand frozen, waiting where I think you'll pass by
and I leave every city gate standing open
at all times so that you can come back.

You peer out at me from both heaven and earth,
and in no way can I manage to tell you
that my death too began after yours
and that it is blessed to live, but even more blessed to die,
thinking only of you, Denicija."

—Petre M. Andreevski via

Never shall I forget that smoke.

"So, for example, when Bell lifts the veil off the mystery of the puddles through the device of Seathorpe’s own mad scientist’s journal, we are moving along through the preliminaries of the man’s life up to the point he began attempting to create life (using some form of electrolysis, it turns out) when we take a left and wander down a five page detour about the evils of flogging..." —Neglected Books via

Alas.

( via / via )

Emperor moth.

I fall into easy habits of browsing Substack, blogging, curating images; hours go by this way. It's just like an interminable session in the doctor's waiting room, in which all the magazines have been read over twice. We all are waiting for the Midterms, or Krasnov's cheeseburgers to clog his heart, or some other deus ex machina we don't really believe in. Stories would lead us to dream that six months from now all the Blue Meanies will be overthrown. By what, i ask. By more severe consequences.

Georgian monuments.

"dinkum Hakenkreuz"

strands of realer things
but why give them the say-so
flavors flowing earthward

reflections of glass towers
the story sternly spurned
strands of realer things

far from the tall tumult
skeletons of gaunt grief
but why give them the say-so

why among fluorescents
& intangible ballast
flavors flowing earthward

Thristclangor splinterhymn.

Here it comes... the large coronal hole is almost directly facing Earth now, which means fast solar wind is 3-4 days away. In fact, NOAA SWPC has just issued a G1/minor storm watch for Oct 2. This means there are chances for mid-latitude auroral displays Thu and Fri nights. #heliophysics

[image or embed]

— Vincent Ledvina (@vincentledvina.bsky.social) September 29, 2026 at 12:44 PM

( via / via )

Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns.

werewolf antheap
watch slow loom
poising ark

whiteout deadweight

"I have separated the art from the artist..." (thread)

"I wound up looking at over one hundred ceiling fans for this small blog post, and I’m sure you’re all wondering which one is my favorite. I have to say it’s the 'Hanke 36.22' 6- Speed Dimmable Reversible Ceiling Fan With Led Lights And Remote Control" ($167)" —Kate Wagner via

I only know that summer sang in me.

( via / via )

"I will not tell you my poems thru this mechanical contraption. They come from me to you, direct."

"For much of the nineteenth century, many Americans refused to believe Native people or their ancestors had built the great earthworks spreading across the country. The builders were recast as Phoenicians, Israelites, Egyptians, Vikings or whatever lost Old World people happened to fit the theory." —Moundlore via

New MR James bio.

"B-road Stop

The storm
holds
its breath
at the crossroads.
wipers halt mid-swipe,
parked in a stale bracket of air.

A short reprieve
before the sky
drops
its
weight
onto the potholed junction."

—@thedevilstuna.bsky.social

"Lou Andreas-Salome, notably enough, would then become a muse for the great poet Rilke ...and of other intellectuals of Europe, including spurned playwright Frank Wedekind who may have immortalized Lou as an ultimately destructive femme fatale in the scandalous Lulu plays, a feminine poison figure that eventually made it into the silent film masterpiece Pandora’s Box (1929...)"

( me / via )

Contrail Trailcam.

"crow in a handmedown blazer"

Michaelmas alchemy
extras, stowed away, forgotten
eat breaks & what do you have to show?

splintery as all get-out
gate in the threatening morn

Play Munich for Me.

"Here the coelacanth awaited us in a large trellis-work cage that was hauled up from the depths. I observed its slow and measured movements, its primitive appearance, its sharp hooked teeth. Most of all I was conscious of its eyes. Definitely not your usual opaque fish eyes. These were alert, watching, waiting. The eyes of a predator, the eyes of man's ancestor." —Edwin Morrisby, Unpackaged Tours (1988)

"All I've ever wanted to be was a foot soldier of cinema."

( via / via )

Back in the Kalahari.

"Whales categorize vocal music by species; whale-song, human-song, mouse-song, parrot-song. But all instrumental music is called tool-song" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

New style icon.

      "nerves of steel"

fascination switchback
this is the final battle
riddled with gray grottos
   no cool change
   bushels ashchoice
too hard fetched · flaw proud
holy snakebite bilked

Barmecidal spider

Makes more & more sense all the time.

( via / via )

"As the 80s progressed Radio Werewolf also seemed to realise that there was more mileage to be gained from transgressive button pushing rather than just gigging their Rocky Horror organ-driven garage punk around California."

"HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

—-Gary Snyder via @alinastefanescu

Gobsmacked.

"these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

This is probably the first book devoted to the Ottoman night before gas lighting.

( via/ me )

One more marathon road trip and the book would write itself.

"One way of looking at the rise of the Male resentment politics is that we're still producing secondary males -- and, in fact, our system is producing more than ever -- but it's become increasingly difficult to find a way to get rid of them." —@braak.bsky.social via (thread)

One Ring-Tailed Roarer to Another.

"THE ART (Aelindrome in the Decimal Expansion of √2)
14142135623730950488

The art,
a losing sun,
as she emerges,
only a swan
to her suffering,
may be dark
as turns of sky.

Do seas turn
so dark, maybe,
suffering her
as wantonly?

So, emerge as she —
sung in a lost heart."

—Anthony Etherin, 2012

YOU WIN THE INTERNET TODAY.

( via / via )

Satirical Juggernaut.

"consolatio"

no justice
just us
steel mistress
no justice
all questions
be lost arts
no justice
just us

Hopkins short.

"It brings me masses of joy, and I don’t want to sound saintly, but if it can do that for me, then surely it can do it for other people who are not in the lucky position I am in to be able to read these things." —Richard Village via

"This is one of the most infamous attacks on avant-garde literature, proving Rexroth’s assertion that the PR was an establishment magazine and woefully out of touch.."

( via / me )

Forestiere Underground Gardens.

"Only the physical failure of solitude drove the spirit at first into society, as the moral failure of society may drive it later into solitude again." —Santayana

"I wanted to start a magazine because I was terrified of living a life of quiet desperation, of boredom, of unfreedom; and because I wasn't good at doing people pleasing things in the cultural fields in which I was then participating."

"musical journey"

antelucan blue flicker
flatiron bard effigy
curdled sky of div-scads
scowling engine warnlight
tailgating gets you nowhere

no cicada nods here
nor nibbling hare edgewise
flush of something simmers
celebrants shuffle roughshod
tailgating gets you nowhere

after the odd turncoats
beyond ill-planned gallows
pale cerulean stalwart
plasters the wrecked sectors
tailgating gets you nowhere

Tyndall effect.

( me / via )

"...autofiction (which used to be called romans à clef)..."

"kept across fathoms"

text: amended murksome
marred garden
spiral grown cathedral
dry choir
scars that were real, scored by
scant answers
not the real record
runes' tsunami
wrongly buttoned sweater

"It has a kinship with the saxophone."

"The wind that knocked our generation down
Was not a harvest."

—Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

British trains & snow, from 1963.

( via / via )

Suddenly Last Summer.

"Can we just decide that art is made by humans in the same spirit as we decided that champagne can only be made in Champagne?" —@kunstkijken

"Oftentimes, and on a clear day, it feels like the 1970s."

"ads that can read my mind"

insect carvers union
all dues
the invisible interviewer
doesn't want your secrets
the ring alarm gets reset
by a rabbit in the yard
the library takes your book
& puts it in special collections

"Ostermeier teases out the history of the stones and leaves us with a fractured snapshot of a troubled time and of a violent history that perhaps has yet to end."

( via ? via )

"He told the magazine that he might be the only ufologist who still did not know what UFOs were."

"ENVOY FROM D'AUBIGNÉ

Go book

go
now I will let you
I open the grave
live
I will die for us both

go but come again if you can
and feed me in prison

if they ask you why
you do not boast of me
tell them as they
have forgotten
truth habitually
gives birth in private

Go without ornament
without showy garment
if there is in you any
joy
may the good find it

for the others be
a glass broken in their mouths

Child
how will you
survive with nothing but your virtue
to draw around you
when they shout Die die

who have been frightened before
the many

I think of all I wrote in my time
dew
and I am standing in dry air

Here are what flowers there are
and what hope
from my years

and the fire I carried with me

Book
burn what will not abide your light

When I consider the old ambitions
to be on many lips
meaning little there
it would be enough for me to know
who is writing this
and sleep knowing it

far from glory and its gibbets

and dream of those who drank at the icy fountain
and told the truth"

—W S Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders (1970)

"Most of our students are functionally illiterate."

"The old become surface at a time when they are most deep, yet this is not something done to them." —Nocebo

"After 186 years in France, a 500-year old Aztec manuscript, the Azcatitlán Codex, has returned to Mexico..."

( via / via )

Otters put away their toys.

"Richard Slotkin, in his Bancroft Prize-winning study of the American frontier myth, argues that the captivity narrative did not just function as propaganda aimed at Native people. It functioned as self-absolution." —Renee Stonebraker via

Whence & Whither?

"blinking regatta"

after long rolling
oil well wheelpull
highway loop
car out

"...academics in permanent roles are like faraway stars, whose light takes years to reach us on earth. Looking at them, you’re looking into the past."

( via / via )

The Art of Making the Same Deal Again.

"crow road"

cicada dusk, gatesqueak
watering should be done
but it isn't · boxes of books
so many boxes of books
things finish in pantomime
or not at all
a kind of peace descends

No Need For Words.

"...the quality of her work persists and what we're really finding out is a large portion of her fan base doesn't understand camp" —@pavlovcat.myatpro.social via (thread)

"On 13th June, the day before Paris fell to the Germans, the Weil family hustled their way onto one of the last trains south, persuading the guards that the mass exodus required the presence of a medical doctor, Weil’s father."