( me / via )

Server.

"‘byzantine’ as we all know is not a true descriptor, but instead a label used ex post facto by mediaeval scholars for the eastern half of the roman empire for the period after the mother city fell; now the people of the byzantine empire would not have understood the concept of ‘byzantine’ but instead always thought of themselves as roman, calling themselves rhomaioi; but you’ll notice that the word rhomaioi is not a latin term but greek; the byzantines were essentially romanised greeks;" —M E Rothwell via

Teach Phyllis Wheatley.

Columbia's · fallen can't get up
      outside there's
   setters barking
whirlpool of pangs · posh nimbus
wheels of death · dealing out hickeys
      fake wood grain
   the weak fulcrum
between the red sky · & erosion

"...the erosion of savoir-faire (how to make) and savoir-vivre (how to perceive, judge, and live with culture), and how under contemporary capitalism these functions are externalized into systems that destroy attention and taste."

( via / via )

Into Ghede.

      "Duckreturn in 2026"

pick my own pocket · with enough time
      stray boxes
   physical books
that candy you liked · in the lurk trenches
will come back in style · under blue skies

Overland from London to Venice..

"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much."

—Carlyle

"Our contemporary logos-ecosystem (so to awkwardly speak), and our global collection of readerly and writerly circles and scenes, often seem shaded and defined not by poets themselves, but by commentators of various species : reporters, observers, influencers, promoters, gamblers, professors, doctors of Religion, marketers, accountants, budget analysts, trend analysts, prognosticators, pontificators, and doctrinaire axe-grinders of many quasi-literary guilds. Those who are intent on advancing various theoretical potpourris of Old or New, the Great or the Transgressive, and so on."

( me / via )

Wishing has no place here.

"When the market no longer needs workers in large numbers, it loses even the instrumental reason to sustain the institutions that restrain its tendency toward moral corrosion." —Charlie McGill via

"The modernist creator would approach his craft Janus-faced, looking backward even as he moved forward, and with every step, he would produce something novel, indeed wholly original."

"The Dry Heart

The world where the dead live is a dry heart.
Every world is a heart, a rhythm spherical,
A rhythm of impossible intentions
That yet sings itself, imagining heard music.
The world where the dead live is a silent choir.
It does not hear itself, it sings itself not.
Its will has frozen into memory,
Black as still blood, without flow.
To the painless sorrow of death it throbs.
The world where the dead live is a heart alive
In a body once alive.
The dead move neither into heaven nor hell.
Their afterwards is their before.
The world where the dead live is a dry heart,
The same heart as always, even dry."

—Laura (Riding) Jackson

"Surely Cavafy is the most important 20th century poet to publish primarily in zine form."

( via / via )

"What is most threatening about conversion is its (perceived) irreversibility and totality."

"Tired of bitter rest (Mallarmé)

Tired of bitter rest where my laziness offends
A glory for which I once fled the adorable
Childhood of rosewood under the natural
Blue, and seven times more tired of a harsh pact
To dig by evening a new pit
In the avaricious and cold ground of my brain,
Gravedigger without pity for infertility,
-What shall I say to this Dawn, O Dreams, visited
By the roses, when for fear of its pallid roses,
The vast cemetery unites the empty holes? -
I want to abandon the voracious Art of a cruel
Country, and, smiling at old reproaches
Which my friends make to me, the past, the genius,
And my lamp that however knows my agony
Imitating the Chinese with a clear and fine heart
To whom pure ecstasy is to paint the end
On his cups of snow to the delighted moon
From a bizarre flower that perfumes his transparent
Life, the flower which he smelled, child,
Being grafted onto the blue filigree of a soul.
And death as the only dream of a wise man,
Serenely, I am going to choose a young landscape
That I would paint again on a cup, distracted,
A line of thin and pale blue would be
A lake, amid the sky of bare china,
A clear crescent lost in a white cloud
Dips its calm horn in the icy waters
Not far from three big emerald eyelashes, the reeds"

—Jim Hanson 04/25/2008 via

"For them, these principles were linguistic, such that a proper understanding of the laws of language could shed light on the course of history."

"When I encounter the word 'dopamine,' I stop reading." —@bibletranslation

"...kill quotas flash in boxes..."

( via / via )

Let it Ride.

"I just read online that Andrew Tate announced at some point that he refuses to sleep with vaccinated women.

And people still have the audacity to say vaccines don't work." —@mossandmatchsticks

What are the great artworks about tiredness?

plague psithurism
plucked chrysanthemumchance
plenary misreading
plucked from the punk headlines

"While the systems that govern us...are premised on rationality, the world they operate in is completely irrational..."

( via / via )

A23a R136a1.

      "track lighting at 6 a.m."

wavescrolloped · wearyshore
      emergent
   div pavilion
burnt-umber surface · sapphire fathom'd
the keep shattered · shareable still
      outside, rain
   in packs rustles
wavepentagrammed · roninshore

Burrowing Owl on the ground.

"I think something is gained in Bulgakov through his expansion of the fundamental options from two to three and mapping on the antinomies of philosophy to the Trinitarian persons."
—Naucratic Expeditions via

The Berkeley Town Hall Reading.

( via / via )

Brevity, a sonnet sequence.

"The dawn is not off the sea, and Odysseus’ ships
have not yet passed the islands. I must watch them still."

—D H Lawrence via

Big Borges.

unskull grin · the scarcest window
      days of vast
   disaster sprawl
focus on tiny · tenable sprig
the tires soft · for a road full of edges
      flowing tongs
   to string tinsel
thousand year old clock · clicks out throngs
i await word · scribbled over
      tailfins swarm
   in bright guesswork

The Gallop.

( me / via )

Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas.

      "query letter"

   putting the plant out
that knows neither hand nor war
   only this sunshine

nor i the new equinox
earth in its tilting squanders

Coqueluche.

"In 1913-14 Noguchi was invited to lecture at Oxford on Hokku (haiku) at the invitation of Robert Bridges, the poet laureate..." —Dr Jonathan E Wilson via

It’s That Bird (Again) .

( via / me )

A poem about A23a.

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." - Hélder Câmara via @thecolfax.bsky.social

Revisiting Tennyson as he looks out at the sea.

      Mallarmé: Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx

Her chaste nails so highly dedicating their onyx,
   Anguish, this midnight torchbearer, saves
   many an evening's reverie burned with the phoenix
   otherwise bound for no crematory vase.
On the sideboards, in the empty parlor: ptyxless,
   gewgaw-banned resounding banality
   for the Boss is gone to dip tears from the Styx,
   only that--and Nothing will thus be honored...
Near the northerly vacant casement, gilt
   convulses as per perhaps the setting
   from unicorns bucking fire against an elf;
   she, late nude of the mirror, however,
   into the vacuum by those edges held
   abides among twinklings presently the Seven.

A YouTube channel called Universal Ambients. They make long ambient tracks inspired by historical art that depicts a particular place in a particular year..

( "hide and seek" by pavel tchelitchew / via )

The Trump Doubloon.

crows once in a movie · now live crow lives
orange bowl · bouquet of gravel
      threats entering
   the mild airspace
meagry footpath · on the philosophers' walk
beware of scents ebbing · savor felth
      argle
   antelucan
with shades shaking · by a short taper

"Some centuries after Yunus lived..."

"In Cameroon, gender is organized on the lines of the concepts of wet and dry." --Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look at Time (1999)

Ghost Cities

( me / via )

With God on Our Side.

“To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals.”
—Seamus Perry in the London Review of Books

Homemade Godzilla short.

bark like mad · above destruction
      crannog's fierce
   precarity
bright sun's roar · rampaging ruin
cybertruck sabaoth · pale cerulean

"With constant internet access turning us into baleen whales, swimming through the internet, jaws agape, constantly filter feeding the polluted waters abounding, how can we be careful of what data we ingest, what language invades us when we are so constantly immersed in it?"

( via / via )

Detailed, rollicking Academy followup.

"I was given Leviathan

A gold ring through
his nose and a rope
to lead him by.

A fitting gift for a daughter
born after ten buried
in a collapsed house.

I weave lilies in the scales,
polish teeth to pearl,
sleep in the reptile curl
of his tail.

I teach Leviathan
to speak softly, as I do.
I am always afraid.

Now no one will come
close to me

walking along the sea
in the early morning
or descending dark."

—Renee Emerson in Persons of Interest

My Herrera y Reissig Translations.

To our tribunal the forests, we have as yet prepared no defense. We wanted to hold on to our words?

The robot dance revolution has begun.

( via / via [maybe ai?] )

A deep dive into Gorton font. (via Mefi)

"North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the US that is not on Google Maps Street View." —@404media.co via

"As the Romantic spirit spreads across the West, more and more people find themselves imprisoned in their own minds—stalking in circles like Rilke’s panther in his cage at the Jardin des Plantes—isolated, incapable of genuine community, increasingly miserable, and, as the mind circles round and round within its confines day after day unvisited by anything outside itself, increasingly and devastatingly bored."

"Ramón López Velarde: Wet Earth

Wet earth of liquid evenings when the rain
whispers and girls soften
under the redoubled pelting of the drops
of the roof terrace.

Wet earth of odoriferous evenings when
misanthropy toils up to the lascivious
solitudes of air and on them lights
with the last dove of Noah;
while the thunder crackles tirelessly
along the miry clouds.

We[t] evenings of steaming earth when I
acknowledge I am made
of clay, for the summer tears, beneath
the auspice of the light that is half gone,
the soul turns to water on the nails
of its cross.

Evenings when the telephone invites
naiads known for their knowingness,
who leave their bath for l[o]ve,
to strew their fatuous tresses on the bed
and to lisp, with perfidy and profit,
damp and panting monosyllables
as the fine rain harries the window-panes....

Evenings like an alcove under the sea,
its bed its bath;
evenings when a maiden
grows old in front of her extinguished hearth,
waiting for a swain to bring her a live coal;
evenings when on earth
angels descend to plough unerring furrows
on edifying fallows;
evenings of supplication and Pascal candles;
evenings when the squall
incites me to inflame
each frigid maiden with the opportune coal;

evenings when, my soul
oxidized, I feel
an acolyte of camphor,
slightly swordfish, slightly
Saint Isidore Labrador...."

—Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett via

Erasure poem.

( via / Left: Utagawa Kunisada’s bijin-ga inspired by The Tale of Genji. Right: Utagawa Hiroshige’s view of a famous cherry-blossom site in Edo. )

"Perhaps the most infamous story like this comes not from a filmmaker but from an unknown writer, most likely motivated by boredom to pen a story that grew far beyond anything they could have imagined. This is The Russian Sleep Experiment, a seminal work of digital folklore, and one of the most famous urban legends out there."

"Moonless night—wild geese soar high;
the steppe ruler flees into the dark.
Poised to send light riders in pursuit—
heavy snow fills bow and blade.

月黑雁飞高，单于夜遁逃。
欲将轻骑逐，大雪满弓刀。"

—Lu Lun via

"The naked ear only listens..."

"Indeed, I seem to have been cursed to be born into an era where every major world-historical decision on the part of the global ruling class has been comprehensively wrong." —Adam Kotsko via

"We carry a kind of generational trauma in this season." (pics above)

( me / via )

"By the turn of the 17th century, when Today’s Poem was composed — putatively though not definitely by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) — nobody had gone on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, situated in a Norfolk village near the North Sea coast, in over sixty years."

"the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it"
—@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Sun-Bird, Rye and Wheat.

huts in haunted cities
hurl into pitchdark flurries
socket to hold seldom
cyst breaking with mist-edge
huts in haunted cities
help me to find some shelter

"Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen."

( via / me )

Heavenly Zen Sickness Supersessions.

"PERSISTENCE (Anagrammed Lines)

How can I persist
in a script whose
actions whisper?
How can I persist
now spirits ache?"

—@anthonyetherin

"What is criticism, if not a systematic attempt to understand why a certain type of aesthetic object resonates with a certain group of people at a specific time""

"When I was young, I aspired to literary eccentricity, and also had most of Soap and Benson logged. My literary heroes were Djuna Barnes and Carol Kane. I don’t see the point in denying half my self when I write, and in the spirit of Flann O’Brien’s policeman who was mostly bicycle, I am probably about half tv." —@jordandavis3

"These platforms should be scouring the earth for unique, unusual, genius-level talent. They should be like the minor leagues in baseball, where raw, unruly ability is nurtured and developed."

( via / me )

Southbound Train.

"Been reading articles about "transgressive art" this week, and all I keep thinking is... you sheltered motherfuckers, thinking 'taboo-breaking' art from the 1980s is anything but kitsch in 2026. Open your window. Take a good long look at the world you live in, and then tell me what moral codes still exist to be transgressed." —@burningambulance

"After her death, her stepson Thutmose III spent years systematically erasing her legacy."

"Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!
—As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Ægean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine,
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,—

The young light-hearted masters of the waves,—
And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the western straits, and unbent sails
There where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales."

—Matthew Arnold, ‘Scholar-Gipsy’, 231-250 via

"It’s a painting that makes me think. It seems to tell some truth about being in the world, about time and vision and eternity."

( me / via )

"This was left as a comment on my Note.

"You Too, Not Just Me

Never just me.
However you need,

however, I'll be.
Like smoke slid

in like previous whiskey,
fire wisps,

fire drowns.
And follows itself

into new form,
first

afraid it's too alike.
A fraud must

believe, too.
Then, forgetting

how unlikely.
A centaur's first street

fair, alone.
Then so lucky,

only a dream is so lucky.
Sometimes laughing

with others
who must sense

us, condensed,
frontbodied, pushing

soft walking
circles onto a ledge.

Imperceptible
where your face

turns into breath
and vanishes

in the home.
Can't matter

in the home.
Some fire

makes form
only folly,

however all three
follow us to take

your shape
down with mine."

—Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (2008)

American Diner Gothic.

"People are always looking for historical parallels, so here’s one. When WWI is taught is schools, the cause is typically described as the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip. I think this obscures the main instigator, Conrad Von Hotzendorf, an Austrian field marshal. He had wanted war with Serbia for years and had proposed war with Serbia 25 times in 1913 alone. He was delighted that the assassination provided him with an excuse.

It was his arrogant plan to march in and teach the Serbs a lesson which had more to do with getting the Great War going than anything else. He was also trash as a commander The Austro-Hungarians marched in with more than 400,000 men and suffered three humiliating defeats, one of the greatest upsets of the entire war. They incorrectly assumed they could crush Serbia before Russia joined, hoping to have it over in around six weeks.

What they got instead was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. What’s that old line about 'history doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes'?” —@twerbjebbins

A New Englishing of Pindar.

( via / me )

I'm asking ghosts.

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we’d all love one another." —Frank Zappa via @thecolfax.bsky.social

We could win their hearts and minds.

chlorinated noir
Nile-silvery pylon
lawndead window warn
rewards gliding border
in the green shrill grail
gruesome derrick sluice-ash

"The more we consume, the more anxiously we make lists, and hoard information, attempting to keep track of it all."

( me / via )

Last Night's Moon.

"Winter Wakened in My Heart

   On being diagnosed with heart failure.
   After the 14th century lyric, 'Wynter Wakeneth Al My Care.'

Winter wakened in my heart,
and its rhythm fell apart.
How much longer can I chart
the years I've left to live and breathe
as leaves turn green, then brown?
All seasons end in grief,

and yet they still must branch and flow,
Whether I'm here or gone below,
the sun will burn, the wind will blow
another hundred years or more,
though winter grows much colder,
and spring contains no cure.

All my dreams at once seem thwarted,
and my faith is long departed;
I see the end of all I’ve started—
my too-small measure on this earth.
I pray the seasons’ passage
my life may yet preserve."

—Lisa Barnett in March 2026 Persons of Interest

Did you know that George Santayana has a verse drama about Lucifer being gay for Hermes in space?

"The whale dissolved the man but not the wound the man was organized around" —@barnes7 via

On Probity.

( via / me )

The wrong AI nightmares.

I greatly appreciate anyone who fights against Illich’s long & deep erasure. He is much needed now, as he was formative to my own thought. Today i cannot agree with his ideas on gender, & only a little with his ideas on medicine (having sojourned myself within the mortality-machine lately), but i know that anyone smart enough to understand his earlier writings would not have gone on to the present-day gender-critical & antivaxxer psychopathy they might superficially seem to lead to.

Dirge without Music.

halcyon samite · insanity bistro
      we go forth
   on furtive gigs
can tune away · from all bodycounts
sweet music · of the deep past
      what we did
   in the poll booth
melts like lemon · Zyklon-B

"Real haiku" again.

( me / via )

The Other Shore of the Nile.

"taillights through Venetian blinds" (bivocalism)

Caesar
rends a leaden
paperback dream sérac
red hand dreaded, far swept fable
naked

Final Notations.

"With the joyful grips of my fingertips
I held the oozy gunwale tight."

—Sheridan LeFanu, "Beatrice", in: Poems (1904)

At the height of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan had an audacious idea: one universal script to unite every language in his realm.

( oil painting by me / via )

"When an old song passes through a living body, the song is brought to life, made material. The singer offers hospitality: she makes the song welcome in her body; she invites the song to take up residence in her memory; she shapes the song afresh in mind & breath."

" 'Is there a single word that one may practice throughout one’s life?'

The Master said, 'Perhaps it is shu — empathetic restraint.

What you yourself do not desire, do not impose upon others.'

子贡问曰：'有一言而可以终身行之者乎？'

子曰：'其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施于人。' "

~ Kongzi (孔子, aka “Confucius”, 551–479 BCE), Spring and Autumn period philosopher and teacher, from The Analects · Book XV: Wei Ling Gong (《论语·卫灵公》)" —@jianxu

"The work of becoming still, of sitting with what you do not know, is slow and humbling and has no algorithm.

"THE SHIRE (Bivocalism*)

In the shire,
winter nights,
we drink red wine
in frenzied inns.

We sip the finest bitter gins.
We find the gilded fire.

In the shire,
in the spring,
we sing the hills,
we drink the silver spires.

(*Only two vowels, which alternate throughout)"

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"...with a belly full of hope."

( via / via )

4/26/24 in Lincoln, Nebraska.

   a Grendel without
Beowulf · our high hall fears
   advent of sunset

so many nighttime prayers so
few the acts of resistance

Epigraph from Malina.

"The bat has functioned, across fifty years of philosophy of mind, as a license to stop asking."
—@barnes7 via

"Thick as a Brick" live.

( via / me )

"The thunder could have been anything."

"Let the unshaven Nazarite of stars
Unbind his wondrous locks, and grandame's earthquake
Drop its wide jaw; and let the churchyard's sleep
Whisper our goblins."

—Beddoes

"The current higher ed model, built around content delivery at a standard pace, around semester-long courses and take-home essays and the Carnegie Unit, was designed for a world where individual cognitive labor was the only way to process information and demonstrate learning. That world no longer exists.."

      "adaptogen"

gather clues · in the cold gloaming
      sixth floor perch
   impaired alloy
rig seasonal · decorations
sheer clutter · of wrecked machines
      Frutiger
   Aero flooring
styrofoam's triumph · styrofoam's revenge

"Magic can live in words, but it is not catchable in words.."