"Trumpism is far from gone. But when it does go, we won’t notice that it’s gone."
"The health of a culture can be measured in terms of how many new and interesting things are breaking through and gaining some amount of traction." —Charlie Jane Anders via
The Last Command (1928). ☆☆☆☆
"battlefield Fillmore"
being of sound mind · multiply beset
advantageously placed
stocked with precedents · proveable saws
comments not allowed
have walked away· from those i could save
have sidestepped quicksand
for the sake of my shoes · chaperoned pills
& poverty
to the bridge of unmaking · in the vale of glycerine tears
package a pittance
witness little · less admit
be one of the winners left
whose accounts may vary · but fadge consensus
it was all the fools
Recordings of "Quiet Village".
"Visiting Philadelphia once, Terry Gilliam, the film director and former Python, was out in the city when he suddenly heard the Monty Python theme playing in the street. Is this a joke? he thought for a moment. Do they know that I’m here?
And then he realised that no one was playing the Monty Python theme: they were playing the Liberty Bell March..." —Alexander Fayne via
"Elyot (c. 1490-1546) was mocked in his time as an inkhornist—one who uses far too many loanwords."
"His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter’s." —Mary Shelley via
Street art in Seattle's Pike Place.
"ODE: Glencliff vifgage"
fast food suicide
diagnosed sayonara
sing liftoff
engines en pointe
don't talk about the Wall · from where it can see you
fake news suicide
system fnords persisting
what's to do
with porn ruin
on fumes from the bonfire · of the inanities
lemmingward apex predator
hapax leguminatrix
words dissolve
on the brisk wind
i can't tell you anything · in the winedark confessional
books i made unburdened
by likelihood hoodwink
cloud swallows
in a clear sky
pull the curtains to · lower the blind
whiteknuckle boredom
order of nine angles
puissant sludge
slathered-on whelm
forgot my jacket · in the gen'ral exodus
mad ascent of mousetrap
monstrous recap pawnstorm
purulent
pockets of change
dust of tires · settles on ev'ry term
become cartoon camwheels
curtailed as boss flosses
wander bright
empty hallways
ever unfolding · echoing footsteps
open package forwarded
to this Galapagos post
"carceral blessing"
angular realm sundering
honeyshine
upon a violet plate
fulsome praise for the narcissist
for anyone else an insult
"hough I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter."
"They had already made sure they all knew I was videotaping, pointing me out to each other as they prepared to leave. Then, as they drove their unmarked vehicles slowly through our street, windows tinted dark, every single one of them slowed down as they passed me. One agent put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them directly at me. “I’m watching you.” Another leaned forward and made a heart with his hands as he drove past. Another blew kisses at me. These were armed federal agents who had just descended on a residential neighborhood in masks and tactical gear, taken people away, terrified families, and now they were driving away laughing and trying to taunt a woman who had dared to stand on the sidewalk and record them." —Heather Delaney Reese
Sirius is Too Young to Remember.
"The unique thing about Nabokov is that he practiced the writing of fiction as a form of sorcery. " —Thomas Ligotti via
Wagner looks at The Backrooms.
"carceral crossing"
mentat citadel querning
acquire celerity
with morning's flow
questions asked of objects
in the fair field of incidence
a cup a chair what chalice holds
of dismal cherishing
without the noise, my twin
would these blank pages fill
churning lack of will
to let world in
long tumbling to rest
car at speed will shake
flashlight's circle lake
no alkahest
runing toxic fun
can rescue not much more
cold on this coldest shore
the noise my twin
"...the real pièce de résistance here is the dazzling four-minute fragment from the otherwise lost The Case of Lena Smith, discovered by Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi in a Chinese junk shop in Dalian in 2003." —Jonathan Rosenbaum via
"What would an expression be, after all, absent a deep scan of the vast expanses and histories of the expresser’s interior terrain, in search of things legible? " —Brian Leli via
"surface enough"
broken circus in my head
distance made of paper folds
amber fluid find
gray overcast sky watch
hoick lest reel stick
soot drool cough prowl
broken circus in my head
circle broken that contained
tattoed climb-back
surface enough like talking
"now, daystar"
failpyre parch averted
pullulating rulesnags
frogboil slope
dumbbell antheap
haywire stooge would crown · stop it
an hour
that is an hour gone
hangs still in the air
guess Waldo brillig
brandish malign sinus
chainpull blanch
blurry outline
storm brink veldt · all void stodge goose
sloom among slime tunnels
tantamount to fountains
foist vespers
starved pool ace knows
hook hand writes · dowff fistdodge
skyey amerce caseload
custom sort of trustbreach
cold plummet
as cloud ooze flows
soft gleetcoil · glaze nook sighs
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
"a darker trade than magic"
startsnarl at firenoon
Sirius
from circular
to orbit eccentric · wild ride
if you hang on · trudge in owl-light
sloyd conclave
handbook for moon death
seed vault
mesquite honey
"...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..."
