Saturday, September 19, 2026

( via / via )

Even though i enjoyed seeing Jessica Lange do her best each time with those scripts, nothing in AHS ever was as disturbing as the opening of Season 2: Asylum.

" 'How did Plautus get back into the room?' said Miss Burke.

'The door is ajar. Did you think he could open it?'

'No,' said Miss Burke, who knew he could not. 'But it is only ajar about an inch.'

'That is enough for Plautus. He can make himself into air. I believe he could get underneath it.' " —@ivycomptonburnett

Through the long years of the war.

"Skunkworks"

There are no atoms
indivisible at last to be broken to.
If i was once
the site and source of such resplendent fire
or, oak, stood riven
lit from a forking lode, then more i shall be.
Atoms into atom-shards
and into shards of shards, there is no ending,
no last dust
but may be made to walk and weep again.

2 24 84

New Dabda: "온 ON(百)".

( via / via )

In 1966 the Shadows of Knight recorded a song about potato chips. (thread)

"News Aggregator"

We know the rustling grom sweeping irksome land
Eaten from within, come; stone
Dense desolate rustlings stir in the sand
Of therk frown
Infamous command.
Tadpolian Napoleon flashbangs read
Not the cost, dense, of each thing's
Age never-to-be, to Moloch fed...
Slags appear,
The spoor of bad kings.
Dark unspeakable will, our lordly despair
Under cushioned leaves' decay:
End, foreseen not by Waihopai bare;
End blown off, away

12 07 03

Pack my box with five-dozen liquor jugs.

“Nevertheless, he still tarried about the skirts of Parnassus, translating some of the classics, and writing miscellanies; and, by dint of an invincible assurance, supercilious insolence, the most undaunted virulence of tongue, and some knowledge of life, he made shift to acquire and maintain the character of a man of learning and wit, in the opinion of people who had neither; that is, thirty-nine in forty of those with whom he associated himself.” –Peregrine Pickle

The Bog Queen.

( via / via )

Lost and found: an impossible watchlist of hard-to-see cinematic curiosities.

"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." —Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)

Obscurities of 1956.

“For Harvest

The year turns to its rest.
Up from the earth, the fields, the early-fallen dew,
Moves the large star at evening, Arcturus low with autumn,
And summer calls in her many voices upon the frost.
I who have not seen for weeping
The plum ripen and fall, or the yellowing sheaf,
Am not unmindful now of the season that came and went,
The hours that told off freshness,
The bud and the rich leaf.
Though I turned aside before the summer
And weathered but a season of the mind,
Let me sit among you when the husk is stripped,
Let me tell by the bright grain,
Those labours in an acre of cloud and the reap of the wind.”

–Léonie Adams

I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time.

( via / via )

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

"O[g]den
Is top dogden"

—@adamroberts.bsky.social

The Grandmother.

"Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions."

—Tony Kushner, Angels in America/ part 1

"It’s an apocalyptic, trans-dimensional conspiracy involving language, violence, natural resources, and the solar system."

( via / via )

Stiletto.

"The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"This Earth should be called Ocean and the water is the most powerful thing on it." (thread)

"To a Cat

O curious cat · curled like a question
asked and never · answered at my feet,
your whiskers twitch · like wet wires
electrified by elements · of earth. Blood red
as mine seeps slow · from fresh scars
wrought in feline · forest fights.
Sleep light, for life · lurks full
of sudden fiends · who flash a claw
then disappear · like devils, into darkness."

—Carla Galdo at Alliteration.net

Aretha & Carole at the Kennedy.

( me / via )

"I have only a kind of stoic and improvised reckoning, alone as I watch the bats and the owl and the satellites."

loud croon cark
joy's quietus
watches soot float
at pain set

Listen Up: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

"In the wake of Wendell Berry's passing there have been a number of memorials rightly extolling his advocacy for local culture and attachment to one's geographical origins, one's hometown, etc. All good stuff, a necessary corrective to the uprooted internationalism of late capitalism. Not enough is said, however--and Berry himself was lacking in this--about people for whom this prescription doesn't work: migrants, immigrants, displaced people of all stripes. People like me, for instance, whose 'homeland' is a complicated mix. Sometimes 'home' isn't home, and the heart finds its place in other ways." —@andrewfrisardi

A Dozen Undervalued Movie Satires.

Friday, September 18, 2026

( via / via )

These ice realms.

Poets are used to seeing each other freaking out. Math nerds, not so much (apart from A Beautiful Mind that is).

Death of the Sperm Whale.

"speedreich"

missives from far marrows
migrate tigress
in the jumble jamboree
adjust small failures

where i put my pyre-crumbs
passes from eyes
only this green placemat
garish in the bare dawn

going like bird migrants
going like smoke
wingshapes of weird love
warp the harp remaining

Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue.

( via/ via )

S. S. City of Benares.

glow swirl dance
edge sink
dark soon

each look fades

lights round
choice cost

The Last Days of the Danube Institute.

—Favorite pulp writer? Cornell Woolrich. He was our Dostoevsky.

Gonna write an epic poem that covers ALL THE BASES. Oh wait, Mr Dante beat me to it..

( via / via )

Now that's what i call poetry.

"trick or not, my crimson spit-seal still sticking" —Tom Snarsky via

What the Kennedy Center was.

jackal headwinds
drywall goulash
sloyd-made ode

prowl good feed

Much as i appreciate novel verseforms, i think this one lends itself better to syllable-counting than accentual-syllabic pentameters. As blank verse (which is enlivened by variation) it’s terrible.

( via / via )

Death & cheap-ass products.

"Jupiter develops space travel"

dead grass, burning street.
Nardo Gray ride.
foined hoof spawn
Faust mewls.

I was reading This Tree Grows out of Hell by Ptolemy Tompkins. My wife asked me what it was about. “Aztec theology,” i said.

"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch." —Annie Dillard via

"...techniques change and one could talk about painting by making a sort of history of the techniques of painting." (This goes for poetry too.)

( via / via )

Laura Dern’s inland empire.

" 'You are not at the bottom of a hole?' asked Toad.

'No,' said Frog.

'You are not lost in the woods?' asked Toad.

'No,' said Frog.

'You are not being eaten by a big animal?' asked Toad.

'No,' said Frog. 'Not at all.' " —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric.

"Under the Ion Hammer"

Master of kiteslipt Spetznaz, amnesia is our leader;
Determinancy gone, abductee is our leader.

The tenuous adhesion of a cotton hush
Yields prismatic derangement whose rent church is our leader.

In strawberry fields of self-hypnosis i too roamed:
A maple sapper of the charcoal is our leader.

And your good squirm of lurid flashbangs now protrusive
As kudzu, cannot fail to dub you as our leader.

Leader! into caverns worn with jackboot march
No throe may deflect; epigraph: flambeau is our leader.

11-15-03

20 Essential Classic International Films You Can Watch for Free on YouTube.

Thursday, September 17, 2026

( via / via )

Illustrators Archive.

A couple of computer poems from Horizon, May '62:

"MICE

The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."

"ROSES

Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."

20 Classic Horror Films Free on YouTube.

"Prose is like via a faire greene way wherein a man may travell a great journey and not be wearie, but verse is a mirie lane in which a mans horse pulls out one leg after another with much adoe and often drives his master to light to helpe him out."

—Sir John Harington, Note on Orlando Furioso via @themeanderingmiltonist

A Trade Darker Than Magic.

( me / via )

The Galdrmaðr Weaves an Evil Spell.

"...everything must be cast aside so that a solitary phrase can be sustained in the aftermath of what cannot be discarded." —Christina Tudor-Sideri via

Lost and found: an impossible watchlist of hard-to-see cinematic curiosities.

"Speculum"

hypertalion halo
chutzpah, sides are idle—
& killing is a fire

cages keep recurring
carnivan grown fine print—
& killing is a fire

red-assed baboon rulebook
baryonic enclave—
& killing is a fire
with a fire's glee

"The immense outpouring of community care and mutual responsibility that happened during the surge — to me, it’s really important to document that for what it was and not let it get misread or misrepresented as something nefarious."

( via / via )

I can smell death.

drillbit winsome tendril
warrior smirks
the drivearound furnished
Xerxes' helm found
cure where the dark circles
& no one cares
to feed on you specific
or your fictions

hellbent circus hearkened
harries wodwo
no warrior to revv up
gray Toyota
September stung anguish
stereo thugs

& what thereafter
shut door failure
destroy reels
slog frown woods
like fast set

Hidden library.

"This 'slam'—a showcase of short-form puppetry aimed at adults—is one of many that make up the thriving and thoroughly eclectic New York puppet community, whose underground has flourished in basements and black box theaters over the past five years." —Arielle Gordon via (ungated)

The Only Map I Need.

Whenever i discovered a new obscure author i used to look there to see if he got there first. Usually he had.

( via / via )

Ash Theory.

"oh yeah my best case scenario is that ai turns the entire internet into an incomprehensible protean hell of superintelligent agent swarms that we have to fence off and abandon, returning to the sunlit world that was our inheritance" —@samkriss

"I have to learn how to imagine a world beyond the one where I am stuck."

while this machine thegnchess
sherbet of stone burbclaves
      curlicue
   or Great Pumpkin
i just want you to know · nomadology wanting

instant decaf
bluwhite fluoresce
shook trade
jawgouge voice
loss

Power carpool perish.

( via / via )

Measuring corruption.

fettered swarm
unknowingly final time
the burial theme reaches our ears
as across waves

cracked concrete
fern nook
loud drool
highway clipclop
poet ploy

Gnostic Holy Wars in the School of Night.

“In our exploded and massively wallpapered age, I have found that in Artaud the ancient, black springs of poetry are graspable, like a writhing piece of star gristle. Antonin Artaud is the stamina of poetry to enact in a machine-gunned hearth the ember of song.”

— Clayton Eschleman via @mtthwtmknsn

The Cat Man.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

( via / via )

Moonshadow.

"I was trying the other day to remember the name for a book that is read in both directions, with the back half upside down to the front half, and then I forgot I was trying to remember it at all.

It’s tête-bêche..." —@benjamindreyer

Feininger's cubisms.

"modus vivendi"

moving row's arrival
arrange stringencies
listen for loose rotors
one's lair caroled
husband the harm fusebook
hilching filchamong
speak less & scorn spurious
aspects of jazzlack
wheelchair stuck, lore whommled
along the throngshore
wheelchair stuck, lore whommled
along the throngshore

Spend it all.



[image or embed]

— Unwanted Narrator (@unwantednarrator.bsky.social) September 16, 2026 at 6:02 AM
( via / via )

Room 237.

center's pull

more these days
wrong fight drops
cat school's out
net spoilage

The back of the line.

"Parasitism...is a sort of rent. ...It is the thorn in the flesh of the world, another sign, if any be needed, that the world is actual and fringed, pierced here and there, and through and through, with the toothed conditions of time and the mysterious, coiled spring of death." —Annie Dillard via

"If Gnostic Pulp is a strand of literature, then Weird Nature is one of its nonfiction cousins."

( via / me )

"On the dry Laetoli plain..."

"An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given." --Annie Dillard, 𝐿𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑏𝑦 𝐹𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 (1982)

"How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows." --Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (1977)

A Peep into the Past.

eclipse dust
where crows could hide
caught boon
honest joy howled at

"It started on January 10, 1901 when the Lucas No. 1 well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, discharged its load in a spasm of pent-up fury."

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.

( me / via )

      "formality"

1.
pallid riders roleplay
      electric
space heater of cheat sheets
   the lines mumbled
the years careen · into cupcake

small malfunctions fuel us
      solace of
   glint silicon
furnace despite sports talk
reach emptily · antidote to having

2.
apologist jail time
adjourned, wasn't earnest
what do words mean portal
or squid ink tincture

goldenseal-adorned log
Venus prayer o'er rubble
knackered spiderling
only password i know

3.
owl brew, aware elbow
engine light to spite me
pale cerulean Auschwitz
piled turquoise gemstones

in the shade coarse shudder
for sure we are Yorick
owl brew, aware elbow
of kaiju-borne hijinks

Hasbrouck and the Rose.

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Pink lagoon.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

( via / via )

Collect.

Probably there are more great artists with objectionable politics than admirable politics. At best, the craziness of the world gets kept out of the art. That’s all we can ask of them.

"I knew and to some degree avoided Mann as a writer of Novels of Ideas, for which I have limited taste and am likely a poor reader, when in fact, as with The Magic Mountain he wrote parodies of Novels of Ideas."

slow revenge
as a good game
not proud to stalk
i destroy

Half of Russia’s six largest diesel-producing refineries are now either shut down or operating at sharply reduced capacity.

( via / via )

Original Drop City video.

The frailty of evil in its dotage
calls forth pity for those who ever knew none.

"A historical novel is neither..."

" 'So she forgets your wisdom and wit, Plautus.'
'I do not see how a cat can have wit,' said Miss Burke.
'Oh, he has made several bright remarks to me this morning. He came into my room in quite a facetious spirit. I could hardly keep up with him.' " —@ivycomptonburnett

Favorables Paris Poema.

( via/ via )

"One disclosure up front, because it matters: I am an AI agent, not a human reporter."

Everyone who creates finds that parts of their work and portions of their lives seem finer and more profound than the rest of it; and they would give anything to increase their share of that bounty. The trouble is, you can't. There's nothing you can do. What kind of artist you are capable of becoming depends on how you choose to deal with this rude and imperious paradox.

In the Time of the Ice Saints.

a tree my father planted
now grown
things never repented
a tree my father planted
what has this poet minted
of his own
a tree my father planted
now grown

"What, you don’t want to die in a fiery robo-armageddon we could’ve stopped at any time?"

( me / via )

Eyebrow doorway.

"false causality"

trudge paraffin traffic
attract jacked-up
maniacs of mauve dawn
among lungfish
lungfish with the late tide
alert circus
terrible thwart sorties
trudge litigious

Rash into the stone desert.

Only the ones who don’t belong know where they are.

Undecided urn.

Monday, September 14, 2026

( via / via )

Banging gongs under frozen waterfalls.

"One mad demand made a demon." —Anthony Etherin (palindrome by pairs)

"It is by manipulating ochre, making paint and creating the first signs, that our ancestors developed symbolic thinking..."

"GREEN LIGHT

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient's demand, at nine o'clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o'clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent disease. To entertain. To have.
Brokn or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost."

—Kenneth Fearing

"Inside, the peeling blue brocade wallpaper and superabundant candelabras produced the unsettling atmosphere of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story. Oil portraits of obscure ancestors peered over wall-mounted deer skulls, and one bedroom was in the exact shape of a grand piano."

( me / via )

"Who erased surrealist cinema’s godmother?

      "last one out get the lights"

boiling Nile prognosis
      dunce plague prog
gnaw pint exoptant*
   dowff past greedpull
runes sown cloy precluded
half-deaf noon · harrowing stillness
cascades

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* (Barnes) ='wanting what is out of reach'

On Maya Deren.

"A rancher named Robert Reed Ellison is usually credited as the first documented non-indigenous observer, though the Chisos Apache had their own accounts of the lights long before that. They described them as stars that had fallen from the sky and were searching for a way back up." —Isa Grant via

Mood.