( via )

"...hōgan-biiki (判官贔屓), a Japanese phrase still used today for siding with the underdog."

( via / me )

Gertrude Stein is Having a Moment.

"We glamorize travel, but running away to find a less damaged place will not save us." —Amy Brunvand via

Four weird poems.

Be Slightly Monstrous.

( via / via )

I always regret when i see this amazing art that so little of it is on public display & has to wait for a special show or a book that most people will never open. We should have around us as many war paintings as the Renaissance had madonnas.

"Do you know you have Lee Marvin."

"...it’s kind of a crazy story, this guy who fabricated not just his research but also much of his life story."

"A Finnish professor of literature, Jukka Ammondt, from the University of Jyväskylä ...once recorded two albums of Elvis Presley songs in Latin. His later release, you will be relieved to know, consists of songs of the 'King' in Sumerian. The first cut is 'Blue Suede Shoes,' which translates into Sumerian as 'E-sir Kush-za-gin-ga' ('Sandals of Leather of the Color of a Blue Gem')." —Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

Sonnet to Henry James.

( via / via )

Itadakimasu.

"In the main WWI gallery my eye was caught by a display on aerial bombardment ...and when I looked closely, this map recovered from a Zeppelin in 1916 contains a note saying that a copy was also carried 'by Casement when landing in Ireland'." —@inpursuitofthepast via

Tanka.

   wodwo sanguine
scintillating lantern
      this bright rose
left on Dalit velvet

Rough Trade (the band) thread.

( via / me )

Arriving Early at the Griffin Observatory.

"Betelgeuse companion again"

baleen grep bupkis
broken statue catchment;
1B34 turns,
duck turquoise huckster

on the war chump path change

You Will Go To The Moon.

"Your occasional reminder that I used to review films for a site called Sci-Fi Wire. My negative review of Inception met such a fierce reception from Nolan die-hards that not only was I fired, the site stopped reviewing films." —@nickmamatas729830

The Hundred Schools of Thought. (via Axial Age)

( via / via )

"Why are we junking the genuine and difficult achievements of human cooperation for something that has, at best, a highly ambiguous connection to the common good?"

"Moody Latin Ides used, in Italy, doom." —Anthony Etherin

A couple of Kripkensteinian fables.

"questions that aren't questions"

a sun you could fire · stoneware with
   stands in my mind before dawn
wrong way · in the test tube
   drop a white pill
stiff & staggering · & partly fueled
   drop a few rules
suits deciding · poison's okay
   after all
i blend two coffees

Grand Opening.

( via / via )

Autumn colors.

"Above the water passes the shadow of a cloud,
something will not let me be at peace."

—Santoka (tr J Abrams via )

Vivaldi browser.

"The modern bicycle owes its existence, in small part, to one of history’s greatest natural disasters: the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora..." —Rob Stephenson via

How an albatross gave birth to an entire aviary.

( via/ via )

Tolkien's Generation and Alliterative Verse.

"I’m sorry moosh, my boyfriend Darius texted, using his pet name for me, Farsi for 'mouse.' I know it’s frustrating but you’re very brave" —@cassidymcfadzean.bsky.social via

Star-Moment.

"He harnesses a rage (riddle: a cough)

I heard a bastard · hovering about me,
an absolute nuisance · nestled by my side,
clinging, like a child · clasped around my neck
he cries out, sputtering, · clamouring to speak.
When I temper him, · tending to his whims
I listen to him blather,· the burden I must bear.
Stifle him and he shrieks, · shouting louder
the firmer he’s held down. · In fierce winter winds,
he harnesses a rage · racking my breastplate
with all his foul force, · fists constantly flying,
battering my bones · a bludgeon, though feeble.
Who is this creature, · this constant pest
growing ever galling · though I grip him by the throat?"

—Cassidy McFadzean, 2012

D'Annunzio's digs.

( via / via )

The Raft Builders.

"This is just to say

I have turned into pigs
the men
that were on
my island

and which
you were probably
saving
to row you to Ithaca

Forgive me
they were disgusting
so male
and so disrespectful."

—Marie Phillips via

Werifesteria.

Bitterness would be nothing without the conceit of its reasons. Unfortunately they exist. But not as reasons for bitterness.

The roadside lined with ragweed.

( via / via )

A Fallen City.

"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."

—Thoreau, cited in 𝑆𝑦𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑢𝑚 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑊ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑒

The mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups.

poppyhorse, grayfaced harpist
inhale concrete dust, tailspin
worthy, teeth-turnlane
tulipmaniac trainwreck

poppyhorse, punk rehearsal
in pale cerulean hailstones

Transit of Wonder.

( via / via )

How French Theory Lost its Cool.

"better guac than a Glock"

1.
Garland tokonoma
Tianannwn
cruentation crashsite

accrues purple lozenge
in the thick green graveyard

squandered hour's onus

2.
the stars
fugitive urn
the war in the air
narrated

3.
poppyhorse

"When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works."

I’ve met a small handful of poets who knew their own poems by heart. They were like emissaries from a lost golden age of bards. Other poets hated them.

Pixel motel.

( via / via )

"In what OpenAI called an 'unprecedented' episode, the company said its advanced AI models used stolen credentials to break into the servers of an AI startup."

I remember an academic party once, there was a piano & a guy sat down & seemed to not know what he was doing at first & then this incredible wave of sound came out of it. He finished, everyone was amazed, & he said “Jeaux d’Eau” which i looked up later was by Ravel.

An Ancient Gesture.

"Knowing I Live in a Dark Age

Knowing I live in a dark age before history,
I watch my wallet and
am less struck by gunfights in the avenues
than by the newsie with his dirty pink chapped face
calling a shabby poet back for his change.

The crows mobbing the blinking, sun-stupid owl;
wolves eating a hamstrung calf hind end first
keeping their meat alive and fresh...these
are marks of foresight, beginnings of wit;
but Jesus wearing thorns and sunstroke
beating his life and death into words
to break the rods and blunt the axes of Rome:
this and like things followed.

Knowing that in this advertising rainbow
I live like a trapeze artist with a headache,
my poems are no aspirins...they show
pale bayonets of grass waving thin on dunes;
the paralytic and his lyric secrets;
my friend Al, union builder and cynic,
hesitating to believe his own delicate poems
lest he believe in something better than himself:
and history, which is yet to begin,
will exceed this, exalt this
as a poem erases and rewrites its poet."

—Milton Acorn

Zahnarztfahrräder.

( via / via via bruce sterling )

Constant.

"Rambo marathon"

Burbling in the corner, some flatline machine.
Dim with the curtains drawn, a man lies still
who never again on his own will tread the earth
who once caused much ado, & some of it harm.
This death-in-life continues a bad charade
as his charade at service betrayed his oath.
Party remains, & partisan lies he held
closer than spiteful breath which soon will end.
This blind machine constructed to carry the flesh
when all else fails, will move to another bed;
i too have seen those rooms with curtains drawn
& heard struggling breath when it was mine.

Graphomanespring.

"the oval office looks like it was molested by liberace’s bedroom." —@johnfugelsang.bsky.social

More than a Thousand Years of Bad Reminders.

( via / via )

Books i didn't write.

The series of notebooks i keep which started as a diary eventually turned into what i call a "braidtext", in which i keep adding to various headings, some of which are just lists & others more linear; new categories arise while sometimes one lapses. I'm pretty sure i started doing it this way after reading Shōnagon.

Band on the run.

"we have always lived in the casbah"

fly agaric agora
triangulates language

air feels full of smoke
even when it isn't

marble crisp ancestors
crunchy, jawing munchkins

glasses fogging up
the instant i step outside

my treasure is in heaven

Vocabula Barnesiana.

( via / via )

Summer issue of FGR out now.

"bonfire of the verities"

wild things fleeing a fire
on my crappy laptop
what land is this?

all lands

Poetics List Reading Editions. Kevin Killian's part.

"The list holds several things side by side, lets them stay unlike, and declines to reduce them to a point. That declining is the whole technique." —Tōan via

"It was clear that nobody believed that anything would ever happen ever again."

( via / )

Mushroom in Seville.

"Wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” — Margaret Atwood via @ianduhig.bsky.social

Spectral Nights in West Virginia.

"The Ruin

Remorseless sun · stunts the dew

Glistening towers · of tainted glass
ignite and blister · in blood-yellow light
recalling the tallest · of crumbling tombs
as humbler graves · harbor their dead
in the clutches of earth · and callous night

The past is draining · through inhuman dreams
no people are packing · backrooms and bars
no pride or empire · rises on ruins
no glance at a face · gleans what is fair

Everyone senses · evil has come

The world we knew · will not be renewed
and gods of technology · are graceless and numb

We call for a hero · but just hear recordings "

—AM Juster via

In the animal kingdom it's known as threat display..
One day we will realize that all the robots are kidding, too. You don't have to be carbon based to have imposter syndrome.

( via / via )

Civilianized Gray Zone.

"the hall of the mountain king"

weekday-unmoored · software glitching
begin the day · one ear stopped up

regime medicinal · injury-avoidant
saving scraps · & losing what you save

never reach · an end to riddles
to the scroll add · inchmeal amscray

The horrors persist but so do i.

"while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

The Death of Old Kashgar.

( via / via )

Star Axis. (via mefi)

“ ‘They—we—were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated we are ready to kill; and maybe we feel cheated all the time.’ ” —Gene Wolfe, “Seven American Nights,” in: Best Science Fiction Stories (1980)

Latin Mass.

when wild things are given names
they join the rote sestina
with parallel amens
& never again siesta

they join the rote sestina
a plethora of lush tisanes
& never again siesta
nor in the woods leave stains

a plethora of lush tisanes
when wild things are given names
nor in the woods leave stains
with parallel amens

(2024)

"For 1/28, the one-year anniversary of World War III, Rachel’s editor asks her to write a piece on 'internet humor at the end of the world'."

( via / me )

"Some people don’t care if their Cowichan sweater was made by a machine or a little old Native woman clicking her knitting needles. Other people care."

"White House Dungeon Synth"

cruel supernal candy
costs-ev'rything treethirl
thirsty Nosferatu
whose nuzzle grants answers
unending crave eventide

"She was subsequently encouraged to join a feminist book club by a group of academics. 'I learned, and I’ve continued to learn,' she says. They’re still meeting every month now; Barfoot says her members are among 'the people who will come to my funeral'."

"The fact that we call smartphones phones is such a mass linguistic spell. It’s like calling the nuclear bomb a microwave because it can warm up a burrito" —@somethingishappening

"It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage."

( via / via )

"As a translator, I see my work as having most affinity with Iris, the divine messenger goddess..."

"Just when we have the green tech available at scale to fully transition from fossil fuels, an anti-human technology has been forcibly integrated into every aspect of our daily lives, increasing our (already frantic) economic precarity while making us dependent on it for our every (mediocre) thought as it gobbles up resources at a rate that would make it a plausible alien invader from a comic if it had just done us the favor of presenting with tentacles, or a flaming eye." —Alaya Dawn Johnson via

"Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery?"

      "To an old philosopher

The 'old philosopher' of the title is George Santayana, under whom Stevens studied briefly at Harvard, and who died in Rome at a hospital run by nuns.

   On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end—

   The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

   How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

   The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled . . .

   The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

   Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

   So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

   Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

   In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

   And you—it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllable among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

   The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

   In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

   It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized."

—Wallace Stevens via

"Whether phenomenology, hermeneutics, linguistics, cinematography, literature; whether the trees outside or the scar on one’s forearm or nothing at all—pure absence—there is in this universe an overabundance of how to provide the Being with a glimpse into the self. ."

( via / via )

The story of unleaded gas.

"Jimothy sortilege"

moth wrangler, Komodo
dragon wrangler
car seats patched with duct tape
the shadow of books i read
diff'rent when i read again
dead soldiers
on a leaning table

same tilt as the earth

summoned by hand-drawn lines
cannot say
& it stays where captured
fractionated light
a sidewalk made of measured steps

The Unsleeving.

"Here is a bitter yearly winnowing
of what’s to come from what is in decline"

—Jane Greer via

"Once I explained to him that I’d expected a door there, I stood there for a moment in the dark and thought: I am the ghost here."

( me / via )

Instantly touches the spot.

I’ll never be a great photographer because for me everything looks equally good through a viewfinder.

8 Literary Horror Books That I Love.

"sleeping almost to five"

desk corner free, frisking
for the mortal lulz
dark out & no Oort surplus

articles drop, swapped out
in a room drawn random
chub drifts & choppy rafters

inches away from saying
desk corner casketry
calibrates burnt malice

"Alto saxophonist John Handy, who was on the stand, said Mingus dropped without warning into 'a very slow, mournful blues in C minor.' By the end of the set the core of the song existed."

( via / via )

Wittgenstein's Ladder.

      "Witchfinder's holiday"

None but ashes makes this bridge so stern.
I followed, at a distance, till i lost
      in hazy waves of thirst
   some outcome in the pinkblue dawn.

Say they were friends, who might or might not thrive:
propinquity & gibberish as much,
      blown across the heights.
   These, among the jests of love.

None but ashes makes this bridge so stern.

"Cutchin posits that when humans experience high strangeness—such as a UFO or cryptid encounter—a literal 'metaleptic shatter' occurs."

"A few months later it was pointed out by the BBC staffer and Elizabethan scholar Mary Edmond that Forman had actually written “brave in her youth” and that the husband’s name was Alfonso. But Rowse persisted to his dying day in the belief that he alone had solved the great literary mystery." —Jonathan Bate via

"Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs."

( via / via )

Smile.

"...the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants." —Arthur Goldhammer via

My current thoughts on recent geopolitical events.

"Baruch Spinoza

Hazy gold, the Occident lights up
The windowpane. The manuscript assiduous
Awaits, laden with infinitude.
Somebody is building God in twilight.
A man engendering God. He is a Jew
With sorrowful eyes and sallow skin;
Time bears him as the river bears
A leaf on its declining water.
No matter. Insistently the wizard works
On God with delicate geometry;
From his infirmity, his nothingness,
He manufactures God with stintless word.
Prodigious was the love presented him,
The hopeless love of ever being loved."

—Borges (tr Christopher Mulrooney via, via Also this. )

Le Grande Palindrome again. (Option to translate in the last link.)

( via / via )

Minotaur.

"iridium layer of art oddness"

1.
i sing the ending of the world
& its continuance
waspniche siren's call
mud castle shivered to dust
at the touch of a screwdriver

2.
those who belong to the land
are gladdest when the clamor goes
they'll still be digging up coins
when no one knows the emperor

3.
my people
even before

have seen extermination
they were rightly named

but there was room
before the process

in which to hide
was perfected

4.
you want fuckin' epic?

" I continue to ponder the significance of this."

"Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"Relinquishment would dissolve the name of the child and replace it with a number and a new name."

( via / via )

This is my Sister.

"This month is the 36th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and it reminds me that the ADA could not be passed today. It probably couldn’t get a vote in committee today."
—@ericmgarcia.bsky.social

Fantastic Genealogy.

"The Return of Absence

And the early summer
returned to your eyes,
and the old songs
returned to
the yellowed land,
the peasants to the hills,
the prophets to God,
the women to the mirrors,
the men to the road,
and memories
to the narrow alleys.
But your voice is gone,
and your face is gone.
If only I had never soared
in the sky of your nothingness."

—Mohammed Moussa

"...yet some other crystal..."