( via / via )

"Spying an obtuse looking plastic media contraption emblazoned with the promotional artwork of a film referenced by a bunch of TV shows and suddenly feeling nostalgia for a time that you were never actually alive to witness."

The only way to read it, with those covers & some dirt weed.

"Theory: vinyl made a come back because Ikeas Kallax storage units fit vinyl records perfectly."
—@pauljholden.com

Ringsend.

( via / me )

Owl Impersonator.

Confirmed woolgatherer here. I can waste four hours without half trying.

"And they say perfect criticism doesn’t exist."

Sharp dressed men.

( via / via [couldn't find a good pic of the richardson store] )

View from China Beach.

"stark wind of divestiture"

barricade of coral
cadence in small follies
my go-path ungathered
ganch of empty hallways

did i read to the end

The Jewel.

Antonioni was liminal before Liminal was Liminal.

Night Walking.

( via / via )

"My advisor mentioned casually, that we would have to purchase reprints of our own papers if we wanted copies available to mail out when requests came in.."

The only loser they have any use for is Robert E. Lee.

"... the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms."

"canned cocktail"

speltered Bialetti
Counter Reformation
Segway down Biscayne sidewalk

ascend pylons sandaled
vertigo gaunt featured
gorge crossed by a motorbike

tourbillon speed bumps

A Forgotten Myth.

( via / via )

"It matters who owns the ground on which we build, how the rules of the game are structured, and that we remember there are other games we can play together, less destructive and all-consuming than the winner-takes-all nightmare that has been presented as reality itself around here lately."

"The Timberstacks

They have such character—they are unlike
the mounds of raw materials you find
in quarries, construction sites—for the timberstacks
were once alive.

Today they mount each other’s pyres; tonight
their silhouettes
blazing through dusk…

Their rough-hewn pyramids
shoulder the glyphs with which they speak to me—
though what is it they say?

Of all the fates they couldn’t understand,
in this at least they find
themselves so closely packed,
more closely packed than in the deepest jungle;
and they need only whisper
to each other.

But what is it they say?"

—Huck via

Crystallize.

"What the classical writers were doing is what we have largely lost. They were not 'tolerating' tsuyu. They were not 'waiting it out.' They were treating the season as a guest in the room, with its own habits, and behaving accordingly." —Tōan via

"And with every step one takes, every corner turned and door stepped through, one gets farther from a way out, risking getting lost and becoming an unwilling inhabitant of a space impossible to inhabit."

( via / via )

If u think abt it 'The Yellow Wallpaper' was kind of the first entry in the Backrooms universe.

"Detail a terror retaliated." —Anthony Etherin

"Today’s upper and middle class have willingly chosen to conduct much if not all of their monetary and social commerce in this virtual environment. This can be understood as people adopting cartoon identities, and living part of their lives in a cartoon world."

in cheese coma, in chemtrails
feral karaoke
      back to some
   semblance of grid
the napkins creased · regions crosshatched

have not missed much of
militeledildonics
      bullet holes in
   high ancient walls
somewhere whited by · whilom bomb dust

library books buried

Gertrude Stein.

( via / via )

The wealthiest one percent are now responsible for more deaths than all geological hazards combined.

"siege by all candies"

whirlwind tardy tolling
we tell ourselves fables
thick heat among threatshapes
authorship conniption

go as we had giddy
nor Gehenna fended

The Stolen Child.

"poem is a tool for finding out, not a vessel to fill with the known" —@eireannmor.bsky.social via

The Man Who Mastered Time.

( via / via )

A gothic, dieselpunk spectacle.

"I saw both the AIDS documentary We Were Here and the feature film Milk (about assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk) in the Castro, films in which the theater itself appears, and to be inside a theater that is inside the movie you are watching is a wonderful Moebius strip-Russian doll of an experience. " —Rebecca Solnit via

Importunate Void.

"the building, barking & biting book"

the ghostly dryght · drizzles in subfusc
places once · a plan might have tarried
meanwhile mannikins · mightily arrayed
in the sky scrollop · redshift & shuffled off

Double tanka.

( via / me )

It's Complicated.

"The Sublime

To stand upon a windy pinnacle,
Beneath the infinite blue of the blue noon,
And underfoot a valley terrible
As that dim gulf, where sense and being swoon
When the soul parts; a giant valley strewn
With giant rocks; asleep, and vast, and still,
And far away. The torrent, which has hewn
His pathway through the entrails of the hill,
Now crawls along the bottom and anon
Lifts up his voice, a muffled tremulous roar,
Borne on the wind an instant, and then gone
Back to the caverns of the middle air;
A voice as of a nation overthrown
With beat of drums, when hosts have marched to war."

—W S Blunt

Eventide.

“Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.” —Loren Eiseley

"Let’s not get forced into the mirrored casket of greatness."

( via / via )

"They laugh at the right moments..."

"Taking in Masonic lore, peculiar hidden pubs, the drab prosaic horror of new build suburbs, trees that evoke dread and wonder; crumbling churches and the food, drink and cultural morays of lesser travelled Holloway backstreets (he has a real thing for Holloway and Camden Town), The London Adventure is also a (perhaps, the) foundational work of early psychogeography, less working guidebook in the mode of, say, The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher (1962) or Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) and more akin to the playful, verbose, cog twisting world of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) (and on which Machen’s London Adventure was a firm influence)." —Harry Sword via

Nichols Canyon.

"stormaganza"

on the dwaleroad Macbethish
benthic spiralling keelhaul
cafe au lait fine constant
affordances arm's tie-off
consolationmaxxing
car flying flags

Walk Like an Egyptian.

( via / via )

"The paradox of artistic creation, always both transgressively reactive to, and proactively prior to, time."

"dwalm psalmody"

diaphanous grade grubbing
grown under umber floors
true color trickster
Tralfamadore mooring
hawseholes of wayback

capybara werewolf
firewall & crawl highwire
this space never spanned yet
bespoke wheel of newsreels
hawseholes of wayback

Minty fresh.

"Two decades later in 1971, when Caedmon Records was sold to the Raytheon Corporation, you could tell that the light was failing already for American literary LPs." —Paddy Bullard via

"And then went down to the ship..."

( via real japanese aesthetics / via )

"What was once called 'the lost decade' became 'the lost two decades,' then 'the lost three decades.' It has become the dimness we live under."

"Most of that was wasted effort. We taught about tools that disappeared within a few scant years. We provided FAQs for platforms that were merged, bought out, enfolded, obviated, obliterated. We evangelized, however skeptically, about techniques and technologies that we thought had potential, that we thought could serve as an alternative to dominant corporate bloatware, that we felt were the next new thing or were the new enduring standard. Much of the time, we were wrong. Even when we were right about the possibilities, we were wrong." —Timothy Burke via

Visit.

"perfect future"

outfoxed the slavering wolves
of the Lord's cerulean

kilnfaced intricate waves
outfoxed the slavering wolves

abandoned at final wharves
forsaken by heroin

outfoxed the slavering wolves
of the Lord's cerulean

I Remember Poetry.

( via / via )

The forest will eat us all in the end.

"The Sun Over Athens

A broad bight and a bonny city,
streets and smoke and the sea curving,
a deed dreams over downcast houses,
a stroke sings about speltered gables,
a sword sighs about splintered doorposts;
the guns gaze and gant, thinking,
the night nods in the narrow corners,
the dark dwalms on the droning crannies,
the guns gaze together watching.

The streets stir and the stones are warming,
the houses can hear the hidden warning,
the guns gaze together watching.

The sun streams from the sky above them,
a hot hammer, higher than shrillness,
a slight stroke, a strait piercing,
sheer shining, shafts and standing,
sure shafts, a sheer hammer.
Good ground and gleaming water
for an era's anchors, ancient shelter,
room for riding and right water
for an era's anchors, an ancient roadstead,
for an era's anchors, ancient haven
for an era's anchors, war wanes in it
and wheels elsewhere to whip the water.

A lee and a long one, and a long story
looming along it, learning and battles,
through change unchanging, chains go roaring
link and link, linger and tauten,
howl through hawseholes in history's shelter,
hurry through hawseholes in history's roadstead.
Drab drift from them as they drag the water,
ships and sheer to their sheering anchors,
grey like gulleys over grey water.
Arrayed like the rocks in ranging colours,
the colour of coastlines creeping by them,
grasp the ground and give to leeward.

Strewn like the stones on the stern horizon,
strewn like stones on the stern horizon.
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? southward.
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? southward.
The sun stands in the sky above them--
history's hill and high marble,
scree and stones and scarred ridges,
highland, haven, headland, island,
a bright and brightness and broad curving.

Oil and island, and old fathoms,
oil in isles, an old harbour,
islands, oars, an old haven.
Hymettus here, Hymettus eastward,
Hymettus hiding hollow and upland,
Salamis seaward, Salamis yonder,
Salamis stretched in a smirr from the water;
straying stour, the smoking Piraeus,
rough with rubble, rienged by blasting,
a dark door to undeafened ages,
soundless strokes the sun hammers.

The sun strides, the sun goes westward,
the sun stands, the sun goes westward,
the sun circles, the sun goes westward;
ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and pillars between them,
Attica, Attica, Attica, rounded.
Hymettus, Hymettus, Hymettus eastward.
The sun circles, the sun goes westward.

The streets are stirring, the stones grow warmer;
the houses can hear the hidden warning;
the guns gaze together watching;
the batteries breathe the breath around them,
from bomb and blast, blare and screaming,
shock and shaking, shackled roaring,
tearing and tracer, tracks and curving,
sky and scarlet, skirting and climbing,
night and nothing, night and concussion,
roaring, recoil, rending and fuming.
The guns gaze together watching.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and the pillars between them;
history's harbour, history's fathoms.
War watches and wanes above them
war waits and wanes around them
war waits and watches near them.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and pillars between them;
a lee for learning, a long story,
a long lee, a low island.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
the guns gaze together watching.
The sun stands, the sun goes westward.
War wavers and watches in it.

A sword swaivers that swept in the darkness;
the houses can hear the hidden warning,
the guns gaze together watching.
Link and link linger and tauten,
chains in the channels of churning hawseholes,
drab like doom drift to leeward,
hulls and heel as they hear their anchors,
ships and sheer to their sheering anchors,
strife and steering, stream and hazes,
seas and steering, steering and heeding,
trails and tracks, tracer, skylines,
wakes and watching, wan mantles,
smoke in a smirr, smoke in a mantle,
wavering in wisps, wandering outward,

Ancient haven, history's harbour.
History's hill and high marble,
plain and port and pillars between them,
a broad bight, a barren hillside,
a broad bight and a bonny city;
streets and smoke and the sea curving.

—George Campbell Hay

While Reading Lucille Clifton.

"Nothing says 'dying civilization' like gladiator fights at the capitol for the emperor’s amusement." —@detroitbreakdown.bsky.social

Hay: "What Song is Ours".

( via / via )

"What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved."

"During the dictatorship, record companies or musicians had to submit every song that they were doing to the government censors to be approved. So to get around that censorship, they would use homophones. There’s a really well known song by Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil called ‘Cálice’ which, written down, is the word for ‘chalice’, but spoken it sounds exactly the same as ‘shut your mouth’ or ‘shut up, keep your mouth closed’. But no, it’s pretending to be a song about a chalice!" —Zoë Perry via

" Every one of them asked me to do the same thing: keep them anonymous, and don’t let this go quiet."

"the gift"

a sky-god land-drawn giant cat
discovered for the world anew
becomes a meme though clue escapes
unriddling for these toxic apes
bitterly i among them marooned

a shipwrecked sailor’s message left
for saucer cats should they return
who once had sense to spurn the joint
seeing its prizes disappoint
bitterly i among them marooned

From our porch to yours.

( via / via )

"The image is based on a pun: the Greek for 'wax,' kērós, is phonologically similar to kēr (chest), which in pre-literate Greece, was regarded as the repository of sense impressions, memory and understanding. Socrates, of course, is waxing philosophical here."

screwworm wormwood loyal
wilderness of cesspools
throatvise easing · cerulean
   books i barely remember
diamond in the flesh weeping · wilderness
under ruined fluorescents

"When many varied things are deemed beautiful, some championed widely, others deeply appreciated by a handful of devotees, some rising through the layers of time to be reconsidered beautiful, others deemed harmful falling away, then I feel the pivot of ‘what behaviour is this causing?’ can allow a fluid, see-sawing of effects, none going too far."

"They are not mirrors reflecting reality without distortion but maps whose usefulness lies in what they preserve and what they ignore. Science advances not by escaping analogy but by refining it: not certainty replacing metaphor, but better metaphors replacing worse ones." —Aran Canes via

"At 11, following her mother’s suicide, she’d resolved never to talk again – a stricture she (mostly) observed, she claimed, into her twenties. 'They used to think I was crazy,’ she later said.."

( via / via )

"We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them."

"Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden." —Samantha Cole via

Certain Flowers.

"CASSEROLE (Anagrammed Lines)

The perfect casserole:
Cereal of the spectres.
Ether of secret places."

—Anthony Etherin

"But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is'“a frying pan full of diamonds' and 'humorous like a crotch sparkle.' It is 'like lickable mink'..."

( david hockney via hedley thorne / via )

Rothko in Florence.

"two things i know about saturday"

consuming & producing phantoms
fainting of hunger
outside the restaurant
witticisms about cancer
in the darkest, coldest hour of the night

hand in hand we ford

Symbol.

"OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA" —@danhon.com

Interesting angle on the classical music biz which, i see, is not unlike the others..

( via / zao wou-ki )

"They gave a very high—indeed, a dominating—place in their minds to religion. It played as large a part in the life of the seventeenth century as sport does now." (via Dear Sweet Filthy World)

"guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one." —@lolennui.bsky.social

The Sun Over Athens.

"Screwworm Monument"

Maybe we should let the fucker stand.
As a reminder: once Beelzebub
in semi-human hair & human flab
sat grinning, & dismayed the mappemunde...
Or call 'em screwworms, pests we let persist
and some allied with, angling for reward,
or this was elder evil, now unhid—
America's unaliving, ably sourced.
The game we gave our futures to had spoken.
Screwworms & screwworm follies & screwworm hates
(so many hates!)—as Foxslop sugarcoats,
Lincoln's eclipsed by some bad dream from Bacon.
—Well, at last they did themselves unravel,
since no one else seemed ace at screwworm removal.

Mural of Greta Thunberg.

( via / via )

"In Japan, where company-centered life has long been the norm, young people who live from day to day on part-time work alone are called 'フリーター freeter'."

"decrypted summons"

dark-encrusted footsteps
staycation cakewalk
planet after planet
plummets along songlines

forest-green grog spills
Graywyvern bent driving
summer with sword stands grimly
degraded shell, sell-by date;

bergamot tea, tire gauge

Kierkegaard to His Shadow Near a Stream.

"My worry—I don’t know if it was Celan’s, too—is, if we follow his metaphor to the end, whether there will be a human-inhabited island left when the bottle is finally washed ashore. Or a homo sapiens able to read such messages." —Pierre Joris via via Fabienne Ziegler

"No matter how far back one goes, one finds a reference to the yet earlier (usually lost) works, the bitter legacy of argument, and, without fail, the Vedas ever at hand and ever distant, the way a mountain range seems both unreachable and unavoidable when viewed from the foothills."

( via / via )

Why Does AI Love "Not X, But Y" So Much?

"...we went to see Akhmatova’s dacha. It was a small hut, I am not even sure, it had a sewerage or water system. Maybe it was the reason why Robert Frost, who went to Leningrad to see her, was not allowed it under pretext that she was sick. She even didn’t know about his wish to see her or that she was sick. Anyway, Frost was persistent for Kennedy’s brother was a prominent Slavist and wanted Frost to see 'the great poet Anna Akhmatova.' Authority decided to invite Akhmatova and Frost to the more fashionable summer house of some unknown to Akhmatova academic. Akhmatova told about this meeting to her friend, Galina Kozlovskaya:

We are sitting in the wicker armchairs on the terrace and two poets talk. I ask him, —Do you publish Pushkin in your country?

The great American poet made a round eyes and said,

— Who? Never heard.

Then poet asked her,

— Tell me what do you sell?

Anna Andreevna was taken aback,

— Nothing…

—I sell the pine woods, they are good for making the pencils.

And Anna Andreevna tells us,

— Two poets were sitting: one—got all the fame, all the recognition, all the, so called adoration of the country. And I sit next to him, and fate is so different…"

—Larisa Rimerman via

One year ago.

deplorables' champion
bent-over footstool back stomp
all glory ever was

A Dragon Kingdom.

( via / me )

Who's Who? (via)

soot-blurry outpost
bagel ration
fridge fills up with handmedowns

far off
kaiju hammering cities

dyspeptic epic best left
to those of closer acquaintance
with the evidence

minstrel ration
soot-blurry outpost

Squat lobster zebra morphs.

"As for Elias, there is one example I’ve found of him existing pre-generative AI, as a time traveling mad scientist in the 1980’s trading card series Dinosaurs Attack!. And a real-life Elias that comes close to the stories told by LLMs did actually exist, Hamilton found—Elias Allen was a 16th century clockmaker in London." —Samantha Cole via

Colossus.

( via / via )

Lovely pixel streetlight.

"Style was a necessary sacrifice made to the exercise of power without limits, and a method for the liquidation of a refugee camp, however unexpected or ingenious, could never exhibit style. A longing for style remains, and the knowledge of its insurmountable absence." —Chapman Caddell via

What Did you Do During the War.

      "speech act"

turbo erasure · packin' parachutes
   in the thick hot welter
second or third time · the lane's decimated
   the turn, & the no-longer-turning
the signing-up circus

A Dead Summer Begs for You in Gaza.

( via / via )

Triolet.

      "density's child"

merch, interim mishmash
maze without abating
   whiplash conclave
      nameless plagues
the crunch beachhead · on the stained cusp

ditch problems of plenty
for problems dearth cobbles
   symbols splinter
      holey sieve
doomscroll darkens · the dry plain

things not solved by headscratch
scribble inane plainsong
   puzzle pieceswitch
      Titanic
chaise longue · guillontine rust

boredom's legions Bijoux
the bent lamp of Hamlin

Cambodian psych-pop cover of A Hard Day’s Night.

"Each of these explanations is being prepared now. Each of them is being seeded into the record now. Each of them will be deployed, at the appropriate time, by the appropriate person, through the appropriate journalistic intermediary, with the appropriate degree of plausible deniability. This is what an orbit does when it begins to anticipate that it will have to answer." —Mike Brock via

"The energy in the room is the energy of people who have been awake so long that the membrane between funny and terrifying has dissolved entirely."

( via / via )

"Nothing is fair in this world of madness."

"Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character." —Ann Kjellberg via

Modes of Askesis.

"prospectus for a solid dictionary"

screwworms in charge, scheduled
ice cathedral feeding
squidcrunk dachshunds
hovering wasp woven
the sky pressing down, screwworms
on the march

Even the dead trees are covered in concrete dust.

Johnson's Dictionary.

( via / via )

"The word apocatastasis crops up more than once!"

Chicxulub alarm
Calm cerulean smile
Bring the rainbow snarl
   Another time
Maybe we can furl the gleam

Love’s the luck that counts
War a crime that pays
Chicxulub allows
   These blue complaints
Spattered on the burning air

Oracle of dust & firestorm
Chicxulub alarm

"But today, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death, Pope Leo XIV will inaugurate the completed Sagrada Familia, just as promised."

"But it's not a strawberry anymore. It's just a chemical that kind of tastes like a strawberry. Soon enough, you forget what one actually tastes like. Or worse, you prefer the chemicals. Or even worse, you can't even find real strawberries anymore because the market is flooded with synthetic replacements. Or even worser, the real ones have long gone extinct because no one wanted to grow them anymore when the synthetic version was cheaper and more convenient. And whoop-dee-doo, you've erased about 500 individual human experiences and replaced them with a single, shared one. And that's just strawberries." —German via

"This particular line has been on my mind since before Shavuos. Today I almost felt disrespectful toward it. Then the fear returned and equilibrium was restored."