"How I wish this milestone anniversary could have been a time to take stock, to admit to the failures and tragedies of the past as well as the achievements, and begin a process of self-reflection, reconciliation, and restitution with those who have been so badly harmed, as well as looking forward with realism and hope for all people..." —Beth Adams (The Cassandra Pages) via
Turangalîla live. (i'm guessing—in Venezuela?)
"phronema"
phalanx of Faust-glisters
on fire with new choirbench
small thing fit for comprehension
tiny honorarium
"Triumphant disaster was the sign under which the members of the Frankfurt School lived their lives."
"America keeps trying to get me to go to her birthday party and I’m like no girl u need to go to the hospital" —@audipenny.bsky.social
"A summer with Tarkovsky and Munch and ruins of time; with relics and writing on writing and the body as erotic trace and films that bring one face to face with the elemental and corporeal dialectic of memory and anamnesis; each a text on its own within an immanence of longing."
—@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
"Mediterranean
The days fly by but the moments traipse.
Sing it, cicada, summer's daemon:
How air is singed till the sun's semen
Incinerates the mother of grapes.
Drifyting glints on a brackish splash
Are seeds of coal in the sea's brazier,
As breakers stir the everywhere azure
Into an ecstasy of ash."
—@andrewfrisardi
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
FOURTH OF JULY POEM
Enough done gone boom already.
“Those very philosophers even in the books which they write about despising glory, put their own names on the title-page.” —Cicero, pro Archia poeta
“Departed am I who loathe the snow/ of my summers” --Robot X, 1627.
"offering to the gods of ughten"
anastomosing noclips
i nab, cadence-laden
cold thicket
caroling in
scratches on umber · anyhow spell
mist signpost mastic
mutter frosty nutjob
night pool slip
flung reflections
anastomosing noclips
"Blood
It burns with buried light. It is a soil
rich with iron brought to melting point
and cooled to the clandestine warmth
of lanterns. Spread thin, it is as tenuous
as testimony from a blanching face;
yet testimony nonetheless,
this stream that carries like a folded note
your family name. One day that stream could be
the ink with which you sign your life away.
Still, let us take a moment to exalt
the oneness of your scarlet ocean’s salt
tenacity—it circles even now…
A crime that it should ever end in billows
pooling, crawling across the floor, a tarred
ghost. Ironic that the tide should end
almost as slow, and almost the shade
of sundowns."
—Huck Astley
" 'Shall we ever be able to face it?' said Robin.
'No, we shall not. That will be our solution,' said Andrew."
—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brothers and Sisters
Save the Carbon-Based Lifeforms.
"Love is weird; objecthood is weirder. " —@avmarraccini
"Preakness"
yankee doodle yard farm
yielding to thegn brainwash
yammering smooth smilers
build children in cages
empty field of eldritch
orbiting drone boneyards
great fireworks gratify
ogre of gilt bogus
in the pooldim turquoise
hush awaits cicadas
1661 Punica in heroic couplets. (via)
" 'Work on good prose has three steps,' writes Walter Benjamin, 'a musical one when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.' He omits a crucial step: a cinematic one when it is edited." —Lucy Sante via
six-cylinder days
mild consent this vintage
smashed nothing
in its inning
within my gaze's · galloping ambit
sky of burning scorn
scribble with ache driblets
list projects
posey
rarefied waltz
jolt pizzazz
riddle's jagged midpoint
that great broken stretch
in the cicadas' song
Aurora Australis from the International Space Station.
This is what the internet is for.
"full steam at the sociopath factory"
warning lights ignore
on a perfect mild morning
in early July:
car will pass despite the lights
red here here & also here
"Oft in His troubled Sleep, rising by Night,
With horrid Cries His Servants Hee'd affright;
Who found Him, bath'd in Sweat, His future War
To wage, and beat with Rage the empty Air."
—Ross's Silius Italicus, I.
"It seems to me that being a werewolf means living with an exaggerated version of the fear that you did something embarrassing while you were drunk, while the horror of being a vampire is that you’re compelled to meet a hard deadline every single day." —@liamthegrownup
"Sea-Fever
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over."
—John Masefield
"Full of finesse in plotting and misrule,
Mercury one day tried to pull the wool
Over Apollo's eyes, fleecing His herd,
And promised, if he wouldn't say a word,
Old Battus would receive one well-bred bull.
This luckless wretch knew how to turn a tool
To his success, but wasn't the sharpest tool;
The guileful God came back to test his word,
Full of finesse.
He promised him an easy pocketful
Of copper coins to pay his debts in full
And buy new shoes if he would say a word,
But he said more than He had wanted heard.
Of animals, the worst to be's a fool
Full of finesse."
—Alex McKeown via
Courage is the only form of faith that is real. The rest is attachment to words.
"I’ve just realized what SmackDown I mean Substack reminds me of: when I release jillions of newborn ladybugs into my raised tomato beds." —@elmosemiosis
"some version of the past"
expert cough
frigid draft dredging
elixir North
endorse arch parchment
brisk schedule
a peek of pale turquoise
skedaddle off
perne crystalline turnip
cake cantrip
our hands free & our gaze far
Africa is our home
savannah where the trees thinned
& some of us learned to run
high up in a glass cage
words fill the air
that first spoke from spread-out bands
in Africa, in Africa
In my family there were cats raised from kittenhood by humans, & stray cats that adopted us; the former had more distinct personalities, & i came to understand without thinking about it too much that having a personality is an adaptation to being among humans, & only that.
"In the afternoon heat, one feels language losing its ability to restore presence, becoming a form of administration of a traumatic, irreducible absence. Perhaps it is time for a return to the Economy of the Unlost." —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
2027 Nobel Prize in Literature.
worldlines i only intersect
as the seagull dips
bill to mail, marl caked
on the mismatched hubcap
so little it would take—
cars honk behind me
lowered electric window
along surd's worldline
"starship picnic"
your mother's black ops outlive her
in the larval dawn
cracked cup of a dylanologist
"In Julian Wolfreys’ Haunted Experience, something I often forget: 'Silence figures the aporia that love conjures at the heart of the self.' " —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
" 'Amtrak sucks' videos have enticed a growing community of 'foamers'—a term for train enthusiasts so passionate they’re said to foam at the mouth—who delight in watching content creators suffer every fresh indignity visited upon American rail." —Damage Magazine via
"the unauthorized burial"
the essential part fragile
framed leftovers roving
supply chain chapbooks
chiseled in cloud business
deliver lyre floorboards
literary pitbull
in the rivet vinyard
Not a Church Wedding
I never can remember the morning rain
so quietly does it become a mood,
& thence a land, where all things bent & dismayed
by Time’s oppression dwell in immaculate ruin.
The light indoors seems stronger, though unwell.
I wanna/ sit alone & contemplate the taste
of autumn, empire’s end, & death; i’d test
bounds, if but in parable, to wail
by a gray shore with the immaterial forms…
Usually i have to go somewhere, which forms
the context of this feeling, for the tarn
i leave behind, unvisited, its murk
& mists & dragging winds lacking my bark
to laze there, counterpoise,
—begins to churn.
"in tagalog, instead of saying 'whatever happens happens' we say 'bahala na si batman' which loosely translates to 'let batman handle it' and i think that’s beautiful" —@kmillz.lol
Pieces of long-lost Louis Sullivan.
"The ancestors you choose will determine the writer you become." —Eliot Weinberger via
Eating Lotos with Alfred.
"al-fustaq"
loadmanage lures · lichen
survive on Mars · watertower pale
against troubled sky
head & arm of Liberty · on a harsh beach
the opera singer · in a deserted square
the windshield dusted with sprinkles · at an idle overpass
"strong impetus nothing of the kind"
song of the garage door
not the sound of it opening
draw a map where you'll be going
always reuse a plastic bag
hoard of calibrations
all the lights of them scurried off
this veering t'ward earth
after so long above
not presented as conundrums
but perfect textures
look up from deep reading
at a high cold window
song of the garage door
Most of the movies i go to see would have been much better as claymation.
"An observation for literary sociology: in 'genre fiction,' a boarding school is a place where the protagonist learns the dark art of magic; in 'literary fiction,' a boarding school is a place where the protagonist learns the dark truth of eros. It’s like the difference between Jung and Freud."
—@johnpistelli
Oannes
a fishy story
dropped the onus
Oannes
would uplift in earnest
these dancing apes' telemetry
Oannes
a fishy story
IDK what everyone's talking about, the Great American State Fair looks great.
a summer that will end
takes up so little space
like carrying flints
as all the other mischiefs braid
in the downfall of bitumen
in the afternoon of the human
fireworks ply the welkin
our small faiths don't refurbish
i scrawl in Elvish
epic like misshapen gherkin
an end to summer
"Poems should echo and reecho against each other… They cannot live alone any more than we can.” —Jack Spicer via
Pretending to be a 6-foot bird so an orphaned baby doesn’t imprint on humans.
"An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends." —GK Chesterton
"Patronage
O for the days of assassin-dispatching, cousin-poisoning
Renaissance dukes with an ear for beauty in ottava rima,
Of big-spending cutthroat Borgias in papal regalia
Willing to lavish blood-slick ducats on the fine arts,
Kings with rotten teeth who hanged pickpockets from bridges
But paid their pet playwrights a living wage, sherbet-sipping
Sultans who shuttle between the harem and the mehfil,
O for my very own surveillance-state Caesar Augustus
Asking only that every so often a stanza liken him to Jove,
O for a dissolute aesthetic Pasha, or a Medici who gets me,
Or some Rilkean widow offering a rent-free seaside castle,
Anything but this committee of rivals and fossils,
Unpublishable judges with grudges in a coffee conclave
Glancing at my heart like a passport handed over
At heaven’s border, snug mediocrities with slovenly offices
Deciding whether I am fit to have a future here, the light
From my unwritten books still light years in the distance
Reaching me for now, though there’s no way to tell
If they’ve blinked out already, making way for the tenured night."
—Amit Majmudar via
Now that we know the backstory.
port marrowpall mimsy
swatch switchblade
massacre arch triumph
laughable swarm
drizzles in my eyes of sixty summers fled
same cicadas razz at me
“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…” —Aristocreon recovered from Vesuvius via
"Why would anyone in the EU invest here? The people are too stupid. There are maybe 100 smart people in the whole country. The only way to get something to work in this place is to send in a bunch of Germans to run it." (Sounds like Texas actually.)
"Frustration aside, Rimbaud’s procurement of weapons for Menelik II may have been his greatest contribution to modern African history. Scholars reckon that the guns he sold in 1887 likely helped the emperor defeat Italy in 1896 when the country’s troops tried to invade Ethiopia. As a result of the rout at Adwa, Italy signed a treaty recognizing Ethiopia as an independent nation."
—BuzzEthiopia via
"Oil is dead biomass in the same way that value is dead labor."
"urgentissimo"
pressure of crass pilcrow
plink stillicide roster
weathered wood fence angstrom
aware of spare changes
& the skyhigh fishhook
Putin's Ashes. (via)
a low broken place in the concrete
black dirt accumulates
in a sort of shape
a sort of story
classical when i turn the car on
It’s interesting to me how scifi doesn’t much talk about Tiptree anymore. She’s a double scandal & reveals too much about scifidom in her success & her failure. Malzberg probably did it best. He had an unmatched feel for all the people that being a professional writer destroyed.
