( me )

Orbit movies.

"...what if the foundational problem with AI is that we’re trying to code wei instead of wu wei?"
—Callum Hackett via

Aspire to "unhinged".

"The kitchen smelled faintly of badgers and despair."

( me / via )

Lovers Atop the Empire State Building.

charmed terrible chamber
this time furnished i failed
chart no further

like a debt delved
'gainst no beginning
darkest ghost

my kindness would have carried

(2024)

"It seems like we’re racing toward a Singularity of AI enshitification, beyond which the enshitified world is hidden by the enshitificatory 'event horizon'."

"...The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud."

—TS Eliot via

Flagged as 97% AI.

( via / via )

Warning from Space.

“I only mean to figure in that late 20c anthology: among the 10 million minor poets.” —The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism

Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds.

"NOTHING IS SACRED (Anagrammed Lines)

Nothing is sacred:
the gods in cairns,
and gnostic heirs;
once-hiding stars
and echoing stirs....
Nights, scored in a
sigh constrained."

—Anthony Etherin

Writing every which way.

( via / via )

"Some of it’s made in the Soviet Union, countries that don’t exist anymore, in factories that don’t exist anymore."

spirulina smoothie
smaragdine glitchwarp
      filch silenced
   in the mask aisle
where the pipes hide · page refreshed
ranting to the robots
rocking the twilight workshop
      a sound might
   sunder this depth
spew spirulina · thick Paris green

"This literary lineage, this passing down from editor to editor, temporary imprint to temporary imprint, is the real history of book culture."

"you couldn’t write Lolita today because it’s narrated by an academic who can afford a car"
—@simsben1

Every former Confederate state.

( via / via )

Iron Horse.

"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

Circadian novels.

"CALL IT ALL NAMES, BUT DO NOT CALL IT REST

Go, death, give ground, for none of yours is here.
Weep with no sound, figures around a well.
Here gales knock down the chestnuts year on year,
And block with leaves the entry to the temple.
There the inscription no man's eyes can spell,
Archaic, in the forgotten character.
Sleeps near the nymph the font that christened her,
A shell unfastening to the vanished marvel.

Apart, life suffering in a tale of shadows,
Her patience lives, like light on infants' graves.
Rain drowns their names, the ground is full of echoes,
And there are rainbows buried in her naves.
Night cancels debts, the prince's and the slave's,
And one stays true, though quitted by his fellows.
The winter earth forsaken by the swallows
Rocks through blind storms their nest of cloistered waves.

The season's ritual offerings, fruit and leaves,
Die at her feet. Hazels in foliage dressed
Fall; but her tomb for men no increase gives.
Here for the thirsty no quick vats are pressed.
Yet her love's dayspring here breaks quietest,
Light for the doomed, and for the lost, reprieves,
Tthe ring-dove's changing light, heaven found through olives;
Call it all names, but do not call it rest.

Here where through trees death's voice, all-severing, blows,
Hung with stone tongues, the language of farewell,
Great doors are opened which no hand can close
And wide heaven flies into the bud's cold cell.
So is her sickness her last oracle
Where from its falling we may seed the rose
And her new joy from her remembered sorrows
Which time, being stony, has no tongue to tell."

—Vernon Watkins, Cypress and Acacia (1959)

"It hardly matters that generative AI systems are actually too incompetant to replace workers because the leaders making the layoff decisions are also incompetant and entirely delusional."

( via / me )

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 lot about Low.

( via / via )

Dramatic building.

"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

He thinks he's on the team.

"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

This Land is Your Land.

( via / oil painting by me )

"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

FOURTH OF JULY POEM

Enough done gone boom already.

Just because.

“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

1984 Dune.

( via / "hanuman" by cintra wilson via )

Nobody Here.

“Departed am I who loathe the snow/ of my summers” --Robot X, 1627.

2 video art pieces.

      "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

The Sheaves.

( me / via )

General Munro.

"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

"There’s another album called 2 Million something by S.N.R.T.M. – it’s a Moroccan signalwave album. When I saw that, I was like, 'Okay, I’ll make a Serbian signalwave album, just to represent my culture'."

" '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.

( via / unused cover design )

Peacock spiders.

"Love is weird; objecthood is weirder. " —@avmarraccini

Windy.

"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

Istanbul vista.

( via / via )

The Hard Problem of the Sky.

      "lowkey contumely"

vanilla ice cream · no great distance
   cumulus clouds · clamber up
with the day waning · the weathered fence
   only this cusp · sky divides
in the frigid draft · of a frown spoon

Winding streets in Prague.

"Cleanliness is not next to godliness. Diligence is." —@barnes

Tu vuo' fa' l'americano.

( via via )

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

Odd Man Out.

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.

( via / me )

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

City sunset in pixels.

"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.

Manchester Rain.

( via / via )

Lost in Architecture.

"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

Submerged Subconscious.

"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

A Structure of Darkness.

( via / me )

Sociology of Philosophies.

   "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

Road of Life.

Courage is the only form of faith that is real. The rest is attachment to words.

Auguries.

( via / via )

"What appear as crises of authorship, liability, governance, legitimacy, and consciousness may be different expressions of the same condition."

"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

Alliterative Shahnameh.

"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

The Crossroads of Hecate.

( via / via )

The Horizon That Wasn't.

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

" 'Meaning yes, but message no,' Ashbery once said. 'There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing'."

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.

"...Kant with his ‘Copernican act’, which consisted in the murder of the living, active I and the dissection of its corpse into two parts—with the aim of later assembling a whole body from the two dead halves."

( via / via )

"But over Faliero they just hung a black curtain. And when in the 16th century the room was redecorated after a fire, Faliero’s portrait was replaced by a painting of that black curtain..."

"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

Lovely night here in Texas.

( via / me )

15th Etheric Dialogue.

"starship picnic"

your mother's black ops outlive her
in the larval dawn
cracked cup of a dylanologist

Canceled.

"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

Golden Verses.

( via / via )

Where i was in '76.

" '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

Who dat?

"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

Our Hands in the Water.

( via / via )

Fables of Faubus.

   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.

Deserts.

"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

"Perhaps a better comparison is not to the old transplanted soul in San Francisco’s Chinatown, living out his days in a back room of his children’s dim-sum restaurant...but rather to the exiled Kurdish or Dagestani intellectual who spends his days in a brutalist Paris highrise apartment writing melancholy poems of the landscapes of his childhood."

( via / via )

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

Mama Meerkat.

( me / via )

I love writing because.

"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

Textured Fate.

Most of the movies i go to see would have been much better as claymation.

A View of Things.

( via/ via )

Sizz Culture. More.

"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

Darkness.

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.

( via / via )

Hyperlexia.

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

The Gulf of Araby.

"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.