Eruption of Sarychev Peak, from space.
"And it was almost like when you hear thunder. It’s that shiver, you just go into a siege mentality when you hear thunder. It’s almost like you’re at war and hear the guns, you’ve got that atmospheric awareness that comes from hearing a sound that powerful, but that distant." —Will Bevan (Burial) via
To my Children, Fearing for Them.
"Perhaps Porter is the only painter more rewarding through a screen than in the flesh."
"When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift." —Sam Kriss via
"...submitting to prestigious magazines feels a bit like gambling addiction."
"gut dragged through too many intersections"
febrifuge obelisk
follower, streaks lengthened
time of light
concrete tarried
again & i go · trailing words
clip-on shades lost shrapnel
eyeless in Gilead
pure cerulean eyewash
new cars over battered roads
"This power of suggesting intolerable tragedy at the heart of the trivial is used with a skill little less than miraculous in 'The Waste Land,' and the power is the more moving because of the attendant conviction, that this terrible resembling contrast between nobility and baseness is an agony in the mind of Mr Eliot of which only a portion is transferred to that of the reader." —Elinor Wylie via
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” —Wendell Berry via @dudleyzopp
"voice"
something new or something grave
never are there welcome tidings
riddles in the night engrave
something new or something grave
thugs bulldoze the sacred grove
spontaneous my files self-editing
something new or something grave
never are there welcome tidings
"We forget the land..."
"America is outsourcing its genocide. It is using the Subcarpathian Ruthenian model."
velvet dark
cancer school
noise play steals
rhino bog
looks out
"Did you know that one of the best-selling versions of The Tale of Genji is a re-translation of Arthur Waley’s English back into Japanese?" —William Lambert via
Wendell Berry on good artists.
"Now come, and forth into the great salt sea
Launch a black ship"
—Bryant's Iliad
Tokens of the Glass Bead Game.
"the lion's share"
in the depths of Mordor
in the mirror-world
hyaline
grade psychosis
rounding up · riddle bloggers
cave enforcement carsick
A deep dive into The Green Carnation.
lu ku'i ki'u rna vau li'u tcita tu'e fu'eka'ebopo'i
te'o te'a vei
ka'o pi' ir pai ve'o
su'i pa du no
fu'omu'o tu'u poi jbopemci poi selgicfanva fi de'e .i zoi .zy.
"But why?"
e to the (
i times pi) power,
plus 1, equals zero.
12-22/31-90 revised 5-24-91
.zy. vau via
"The familiar picture of an independently existing material universe composed fundamentally of objects possessing determinate properties and interacting causally in space and time, with consciousness appearing very late as an inexplicable consequence of sufficiently complicated arrangements of matter, is no longer persuasive." —After the Collapse via
"The literary canon seems to allot each century an average of one or two essayists for remembrance."
"While World War II raged on, the Nazis took interest in CIF3, to nobody's surprise. The stuff could be used as an incredibly effective chemical weapon that was also cheap to produce. In particular, CIF3 would make for perfectly destructive flamethrowers and bombs. They started churning the stuff out by the tons before deciding it was far too unstable and reactive to handle. Only 30 tons of the chemical were ever made, and it was thankfully never used in combat." —Joanie Faletto via
"Night at the Turn of August into September" (after Kees)
pale cerulean to pearl
this place where fever rooms
with an acrid bouquet
when Venus was a girl
she dreamed of this locked door
we knock on together
years of dispelled splendor
world so plainly downward
let the swerve show its face
star's discarded lovers
high in duskglow aflame
still can count themselves blessed
pale cerulean legends
populate the dead stars
"...fire/ that consumes the world without/ lighting it."
"Schrödinger's Senator"
all these tracks ixnay
after crystal distance
carillon
ode protocol
loco torpedo · pastoral
all these words waxing
like the wan old moonface
empty front
i still turn at
"Thinking of that time Wendell Berry was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference on hunger. He looked around at the audience & remarked (I'm paraphrasing here): 'I see a lot of well-fed people.' " —@the-big-quiet.bsky.social
"There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places and desecrated places."
—Wendell Berry via @emmaeli.bsky.social
"It is an emergency that calls for patience, and to be patient in an emergency is a hard requirement." --Wendell Berry
"An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars." --Wendell Berry
"The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having." --Wendell Berry in: The Poet's Work ed Reginald Gibbons (1979)
"The reason we need to have our certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have."
—Wendell Berry
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun a real journey.” —Wendell Berry via @bookbent.bsky.social
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
- Wendell Berry via @alinastefanescu
"Ask the questions that have no answers. / Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant, / that you will not live to harvest. / Say that the leaves are harvested / when they have rotted into the mold. / Call that profit. Prophesy such returns."
—Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” via @themeanderingmiltonist
"It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect—and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.” —Wendell Berry via @athornebrooke
Top hat never looked so suave.
“The bone-cage speared by lilies of the veldt” —Geoffrey Hill
"night of 3 moons"
waning days of don't-know
adorned with stern tinsel
adorned with stern tinsel
for awhile
feeling the furled quicksand
in the hour
this sweet broken circus
substitutes for scrutiny
substitutes for scrutiny
& shelter
feeling the furled quicksand
closer pressing
the next chapter nearing
necessary lessons
necessary lessons
unpacking
feeling the furled quicksand
pitter patter
Smells Like Team Spirit. (via Mefi)
"Päivän palindromi.
KILJUT RIEMUSTA
Tee ropisevana navan nauru,
anna vanana vesiporeet."
—@harricarlson.bsky.social
(Google translate:
SCREAM WITH JOY
Let laughter tumble from your navel,
let the water-jets flow in a stream.)
"If they want the Bible to be taught in school, then I want science to be taught in church."
—@designationsix.bsky.social
"I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes."
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
—Edsger W. Dijkstra via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"red tie in the sunset"
tinhorn blizzard-vesuvius
we'll go on cursing a long time dead
it's all our own faults
i know, i know
like cancer is
clown cancer
in the lightless realm
his rottenness seemed to shine
they so crave
to have
their pockets picked
to believe in a person who can heal their woe
pity of heroes
pity of lying there
i know it
on the gaudy battlefield
you don't think that girl is dead
who bit his dick
unmarked grave
in the rich man's desert
tumbleweeds
like wind-removed hairpieces
cross & recross hourly
tinhorn blizzard-vesuvius
"L B O R Z I E C N K G S E"
gibbous Blitzkrieg vinaigrette
grisaille on a tombstone
at sunrise
illegible
price of gas · in proud red
tire light again tontine
torn golden brailledark
my turn lane
a tattered thing
anyway forget · the isthmus scripture
Cabaret Voltaire rerun
in this roughshod fraudscape
Nine-Eleven
a sort of lime
greige thimble · holds all reason
gibbous Blitzkrieg vinaigrette
Is Forever Longer than Always?
"After walking about a quarter of a mile, the pair came to a hut, six feet high on stilts, and climbed up a ladder. Inside was the baba lao, a local spiritual leader. The baba lao was going to do a ritual designed to ensure a Nigerian scammer would make more money in his blackmailing or manipulation of an overseas victim, maybe back in the United States." —404media via
Allude my Wedded Dewy Medulla.
"The engine of human prosperity is not selfishness. It never was. It is cooperation at scale."
"the cold secrets"
waspforage werifesteria
waif of sense strafecatch
niveous
carnivorous
green tennis ball · in the crisp late grass
"In the comedies, everything comes right and then there is a stopping place that is not a true ending. The box that gives the comic story its shape is made, on purpose, too small. It cannot contain the true ending." —Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (2023)
Christopher Priest Did Philip K. Dick’s Reality Trick Better.
"Mordor Toblerone" is the name of my next band.
crazy masks of the world
& machine-made masks
vie among rubble
"thunder ale"
pobblebonk thick with petrichor
tilt evil blivet lit
parable blitz potsherd
runic noir
rents spiralling
imported consonants thwartsome
"quagmire vs quagspire" —@geofhuth.bsky.social
Tilt evil blivet lit.
My diaphragm is bones
on the Plutonian beach of Tanguy
if you want to look for them
the refrigerator-trucks full of corpses are there
halcyon day, the neighbor’s yard festive
glittering now, & later there will be lights
they walked across the Bering Strait
they did not know when they would get there
they did not know when they would get there
“For the rattling glory of ages to come,
For the high tribe of men,
At the feast of the fathers I have forfeited my cup,
And my joy, and my honor as well.
A wolfhound-age leaps up on my back,
But I am not a wolf by blood.
Better find me a coat of Siberian steppes
And stuff me inside, like a hat…
Let me no more look at the coward, at the mire,
At the bloody bones in the wheel,
Let the blue foxes blaze the whole night through
In their primordial beauty for me.
Lead me into the night, where the Yenisei flows
And the pine tree reaches the star,
Because I am not a wolf by blood
And only my equal will take my life.”
—Bernstein’s Mandelstam
"Who has no house now, will not build one." —Rilke via
Isn’t reviewing just like earnestly reading the face of an inaminate thing, to find out its thoughts? We look at everything as if it had a face—except each other. We look at each other as if we had no faces.
"Germany digs up more than 2,000 tonnes of live wartime ordnance every year."
the end that is most like ev'ry other end
the air filled
with its buzzing
like mosquitos unseen
till after you find you are bitten
"We are moving into a period of bewilderment..."
"Demo
No. Not from me. Never.
Not a step in your march.
not a vowel in your unison,
bray that shifts to bay.
Banners sailing a street river,
power in advance of a vote,
go choke on these quatrain tablets.
I grant you no claim ever,
not if you pushed the Christ Child
as President of Rock Candy Mountain
or yowled for the found Elixir
would your caste expectations snare me.
Superhuman with accusation,
you would conscript me to a world
of people spat on, people hiding
ahead of oncoming poetry.
Whatever class is your screen
I’m from several lower.
To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.
Nothing a mob does is clean,
not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police. The first demos I saw,
before placards, were against me,
alone, for two years, with chants,
every day, with half-conciliatory
needling in between, and aloof
moral cowardice holding skirts away.
I learned your world order then."
—Les Murray via
"He liked to tell the story of how he once skittered so fast across a frozen pond to escape a plane that was strafing his platoon, he couldn’t get back after the attack because the ice kept breaking when he tried to step on it again. They had to send a raft out to retrieve him." —Paul Tatara via
"Supposedly, the trend began in 2013 with Nardo Gray, a non-metallic gray on Audi RS 7 sedans." (Payne's Gray or Confederate Gray?)
Autotune voice = Mar-a-Lago face for singers.
Accidental backroomsy reflection.
"full moon over Plano"
Hormuz anosmia
natheless burning
archery
of boomerang
caudillo doom · where the wrecking ball nods
& those of us thrice cursed with
red-assed baboon schooners
live on for
principly spite
you bring back the music · not the affliction
droll bardic bileflux
bound to be groundless
as ignored
as Cassandra
once was · from a deity's command
"Neither tumbledown castle barricade/ Nor volcanistic basalt palisade.."
"the adjuvants"
motorcade trademark
Galilean long-days
catch shows on the wing
papertrail for traipsing
vortex of evil
fed by tiny refusals
the windshield looks clean
but not from the inside
hasten down the windmill
"Sometimes he would slaughter exotic animals from a safe and elevated platform. Sometimes he would fight gladiators who were armed only with wooden or dulled weapons." —Martin Longman via
Little magazines online archive.
"Come, ye gnomes and ogres..." —Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"Autistici"
bots faster than Bolt
beset Autistici
from Westworld
blackclad gunsel
(husbanding moolah · at the Moulin Rouge)
read, not scan, my runnings
redbrick agonist
drottslop seeks
volapukajxo breath · kale brillig
dreichly languish
aqua regia agents
icebergmasked in gas cans
from Westworld
wearily traik
