( via / oil painting by me )

The Last Evening of May.

"Whatever the painting communicates, it does silently and wordlessly, and what I understand it with is similarly silent and wordless. Can one then speak of ‘understanding’ at all? Yes, for intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine." —Sven birkerts via

Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku.

Manifesto on Ice.

( via / via )

Illustrated letters.

"dork catnip"

mindstained dawnlights tarry
turn in at the stern cutout
vacuole my workplace
away with drab habits
mindstained lost myst'ries
mud quarry & dark font

"Even as they stretched Victor Turner’s original anthropological concept to its breaking point, the young and extremely online who were redefining it in realtime were also breathing new life into the term, responding not only to quarantine, but a host of anxieties and longings about the real but ephemeral, everywhere-and-nowhere digital space we dwell in."

"Two hands in their circular mimicry of pursuit cannot dissemble the face behind them that in deadly earnest hunts us down." —𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑂𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑘 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑢𝑚

"Chamberlain conducted his residency [...] as a form of trickster performance art, at one point circulating a famous memo to the baffled (and eventually hostile) think tank staff reading 'I’m searching for ANSWERS. Not questions! If you have any, will you please fill in below, and send them to me in Room 1138'."

( via / me )

How Could a Stadium Sink?

"Chateaubriand is unpopular. I think it certain that now nobody reads him but me." —Lisa Robertson

Liminal Poem for Martin Gardner.

i write this
not even for me
& justice
that plant in need of repotting
pliant tinned ever-pit
finny manifesto
forcibly downed corsned

All hail the squeegee.

( via / via )

More than Words.

"Woundrous

I misplaced wondrous
in the wound between
bone-stuck fatigue
and bus-window rain,
the street-priest's bray,
and rattle of keychains.

It resurfaced
inside a cracked apple,
skin learning
the smalltalk of
bruises,
the pop of juice
under thumbnails
coaching other colours."

—@theevilstuna.bsky.social

Fall of the Rebel Angels.

"I am for whatever can augment, annex, entangle, unmap. Opacity resembles the densely figured world, so extreme in its reversals and feints and equivocations, in its curious knotting of sensual and mental phenomena." —Riverwork

Bournemouth.

( via / via )

就職氷河期世代 employment ice age generation. [Shuushoku hyoukaki sedai]

"If Weil urges attention it’s never merely for attention’s own sake but for the sake of a world liberated from the myths that would make truth a matter of well-meaning rather than participation in a community of reason." —Taycross (2020) via

Art-rhinos.

"buttercore"

memesqualor Fillmore
murder absurd distant
wordporous apparel
& squamous memesqualor

those for whom thinking is downfall
travel a sour road

Rhinoceros (1974).

( via / via )

"She lays out the necessity of impossible demands because, for Weil, impossibility is not a refutation but a kind of evidence."

      "mirage niche"

the skies cleared · above Mar-a-Lago
   craveworthy dronedrop
our store jaunts · jugular whiplash
   smoky cravings relished
rubber bandfast · car key holder
   pale cerulean gibbet
black cherry soda · shrill mockingbird
   Walmart whisker shadow

"Because they were killed in an effort to suppress a movement within the party that took power, their deaths were never publicly discussed as a martyrdom or even a loss."

"Lost languages are living their own lives." —Lisa Robertson

Zerlegebetrieb.

( via / me )

Open source alternative to Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

"A book's melancholy purpose, I considered, is to never remain itself, but to enter ongoing metamorphosis in the hands of strangers." —Riverwork

"And people wonder what good a philosophy degree is."

   bruiseblood solider
in fixed sequence make entry
   O planet Poitrine

the troubled eye dominant
houselights on in the ughten

"We live here now, the hyper-real, the representational as primary field of encounter."

( me / via )

Gods of Norse.

"chryscrossalis"

matutinal worddribble
dryght of grue etins
to grind human femurs
quibble at the grab bag
indexical coal mine
catalogue the dog days

The Strands of Future.

"Being an American during the 250th Aniversary of the United States feels a lot like if the terrorists in Die Hard demanded that the hostages continue having their Christmas party."
—@quebecoiswolf.bsky.social

Land of Nobody.

( via / me )

Rocket blowing up.

"Were you the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane? Yes? Then you might be entitled to compensation" —@evangrillon

Oceanic feeling.

count anthills, fall of a leaf
labyrinth aspic eyeballs
black iron prison fizzing
cosmic ice cashcow
collective vivisector
their greed has no bounds
as their emptiness no cure

To the Fates.

( via / via )

"...the luminous translucency of pink Iranian onyx."

"When I call by habit
My cherished friends’ names
Always on this strange roll-call
Only silence answers me."

—Anna Akhmatova, 1943 via

Sea-Shell Murmurs.

"No, I’d love to hear your common sense view of the left-right political spectrum. Your generalizations are illuminating and not at all influenced by having lived your entire life in a nation ideologically committed to the preservation of capitalism." —@rmhaines

"Once the nervous system failed, the body spasmed and flung in different directions hoping to create subgenres of its study, but did this too soon in its infancy, and its reputation became mired in quackery and subsequently dismissed as unserious.."

( via / me )

Stushevatsya.

"Award-winning literary fiction in the 2020s is a set of established best practices and outcomes: the vivid sensory detail, the labor-landscape-memory entwinement, the identity-group narrator who matches the identity-group author (market segmentation and differentiated sales FTW, gotta get on that pastel-colored front table at the local indie bookstore!), the melodic voice that lingers long after the final line, the prose that pulses with restraint and quiet authority." —Oliver Bateman Does the Work via

Faculty Farewell.

"BUILD A SUN (Anagrammed Lines)

I build a sun. Feted, it rises.
Inside its beautiful reds,
in its dust, a blue fire dies."

—Anthony Etherin

"I have passed through the doorway of a broken branch."

( via / via )

Animal Crackers.

      "2002 XV93"

   page yellowed
in the yeckate
   rush of wings
weary counting
   Fimbulspring
cobble a few

   Fimbulspring
sprawls venomous
   rush of chords
no more rentchecks
   tiny screen
scraping a few

   tiny spring
for this clockpunk
   scribe's cherished
mode of dodging
   dismal thunk
narrates a few

   dismal thunk
the ongoing
   ravel reel
where ravens thrive
   page yellowed
gather a few
but only a few

"...one is sometimes shaken out of reveries of hanging with Fitz and Hem and the boys by the grim thought that it was all made possible by a million lying dead at Ypres and the Somme."

"In times of unthinkable destruction, the aesthetics of rarity need no more inflation." —Lisa Robertson

New McMansion Hell.

( via / via )

"The goal was never really to catch the violent few. The goal was to make everyone else aware that they were being watched, so they would police themselves and stay quiet."

"This period of awakening reached its culmination in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference when the Japanese proposed a clause affirming the equality of nations regardless of race. It was roundly rejected." —Naucratic Expeditions via

"That is not a country in decline. That is a country whose entire historical brand is collapsing in real time."

"vermiculite"

shipwreck in the dayroom
ruminate earth fathoms
a new coffee naff but
nugatory war games
thwart oracle's rede
famous car chase
chiselled autumn brown
antique pointy towers
      spiralling
   count in sixes
dun corridors · not well lit
Hollerith henchman · to the Road Runner wraith

Aw, that's cute.

( via / me )

"The three prime characteristics of liminality are ambiguity, hazard and opportunity."

"Waiting for the Storm

Breeze sent a wrinkling darkness
Across the bay. I knelt
Beneath an upturned boat,
And, moment by moment felt

The sand at my feet grow colder,
The damp air chill and spread.
Then the first raindrops sounded
On the hull above my head."

—Timothy Steele via

A Light Catcher.

"Dionysus is not the god of excess. He is the god of what cannot be contained."

— E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational via @armenikus

He’s going to have to explode into maggots, & even then, Mike Johnson will be running around the room with a broom & a dustpan.

( via / me )

It Only Ever Rhymes.

"For Arendt, modern technology makes it possible to imagine a world in which even our own actions, our own tools, become meaningless for us.

More than that. 'There is no reason to doubt our abilities,' she writes, and this is the height of the Cold War, to exchange the human condition for 'something we have made ourselves, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth.' " —James Duesterberg via

Titanic Men Going Home.

"the future is dog carts"

grugprab calaveras
enclosing Cape Canaveral

Chinese Shoegaze, shoggoths
in the Ghaybfeed bubble

margin-ebb, scurried
like scary mariachis

patches of sun, Sitzfleisch
Sumer never roomed in

Long gone facade.

( via / me )

Distant Sounds of Desolation.

"Weldon Kees in Mexico

He hardly ever spoke; we thought his name
was Robinson and watched him from afar
for fear of yanqui guile. When he first came
to town, he played piano at the bar—
some Friday nights—jazz riffs that blended
into weary talk—though soon he grew
more scarce. He drank more and the concerts ended,
which is what exile and tequila do.

One day his landlord said he didn’t know
if Robinson had skipped out on his rent.
We kept an eye out while the tide was low
and poked around the canyons when we went
out walking, but a search was never done.
We had no reason, and desired none."

—A M Juster via

Blessing in Disguise.

"Aeonian dooms and realm-deep rigors fill" —Clark Ashton Smith

OS/1 [frutiger aero, computer gaze, vaporwave].

( via / via )

Load-bearing.

"I was determined to meet the moment and took what I thought was a huge risk and told him my favorite Sonny solo was Three Little Words from Sonny Rollins on Impulse. Sonny was wearing shades, but when I said that he tilted his head down and made eye contact with me and said:

'Me too man, that was one of the good ones.'

Sail on Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, now and forever" —@nosoundleftbehind

'My Dream' by the Wolf Man.

pedestal-borne bastards'
burial still faring
finds my warmer welcome
of wear, elegy, kiteslip

cracks without light crater
this crown's glowing snowball,
wordstagger instead of
step intended; swindle

Cities in Dust.

( via / via )

"Their breath is agitation..."

hat-rabbit · of the silicon abacus
   not enough knives for
Frankenstein fries · teachers, poets, call-line operators
   at the State Fair

I think i fell into Tlön & never returned.

"I believe I identified the same voice of Claude in the recent papal encyclical about safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Somewhat ironic, considering." —@Linch via

Sonny Rollins top ten.

( via / me )

"The most important thing to understand about the pattern is that humans didn’t invent it. We just became its most powerful host."

I only read the footnotes.

"In a way, Beowulf is like the Sole Survivor. It too has come through great dangers to stand before us as the last witness to a world that no longer exists."

       "unstoppable future"

who is the exorcist
axiom of crip whiplash
      legacy
   illegible
window left open · active rain

subfusc Captain Kirk
brick catapult cupcake
       dark gray car
   various quirks
the water tower · paler than the sky

Lingco Amsace.

( via / via )

"The fact that Fowles was once very famous and is now mostly forgotten seems to back up his wise advice."

"Sabbath

There is an eye, there was a slit.
Nights walk, and confer on him fear.
The strangler tree, the dancing mouse
confound his vision; then they loosen it.
Henry widens. How did Henry House
himself ever come here?

Nights run. Tes yeux bizarres me suivent
when loth at landfall soft I leave.
The soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe,
shout commands I never heard.
They march about, dying & absurd.
Toddlers are taking over. O

ver! Sabbath belling. Snoods converge
on a weary-daring man.
What now can be cleared up? from the Yard the visitors urge.
Belle thro’ the graves in a blast of sun
to the kirk moves the youngest witch.
Watch."

—Robert Potts via

"Perhaps, even within the last few years, the conditions of experience have been so transformed by algorithms that perception is now ruled by a warped sense of time and flattened voice, as we navigate the violence flowing seamlessly within everyday life."

"The elderly are like autumn leaves here, fragile and breakable. Adults are hamsters in a wheel." —Abubaker Abed via

"Kierkegaard’s discovery is that genuine commitment subtracts the ornament. Where the commitment is real, the mark disappears."

( via / via )

"But is there a difference between being depressed and merely being alive in 2026?"

"The past perfect always sounds like truth." —Riverwork

Some Seasonal Adjustments.

      "black frogs of Chernobyl"

cathedral of all-gargoyles
thristnidinghent benchmarks
      dim window
   crossed by shadows
i remember a bit · of the birth of that picture

tailights, sodium pavement
a slight sheen at the right angle
      wipers creak
   barely need them
no news yet · a duck in the dark crosses

"...this is the only object I own that has stayed with me my entire life."

( via / via )

"I feel much more expansive than I did a month ago, where my heart felt like a wasp’s nest hastily built in a drainpipe."

"lecture on the antichrist by one of the antichrists"

cloudbarricade cluebound
poised cluster of mustards
mad king to fall fiddling
our foul games die howling

"Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query."

"...nitrogen fertilizer must be created in factories and then added to the soil because it’s stripped out through industrial farming practices. That fertilizer is a compensation for the soil depletion, in the same way that social media is a compensation for our alienation from community and connection." —Rhyd Wildermuth via

"The deeper problem, to me, is that separating work and author tends to downplay the importance of historical context in the production of our ideas, precisely the context philosophy has so often tried to leave behind, in its attempt to reach the heavens of immortality."

( via / via )

"How can you lead without courage?"

"As the philosopher Mary Midgley once suggested, philosophers are best understood as plumbers: when the plumbing stops working, we call a plumber; when concepts no longer seem to work within our social framework, that is when we turn to philosophy." —@boredcalliope via

"My early impression is that 'turning benches into men' has a memetic resonance that will damage the lyrical mode and how we read it."

      "V. S. R."

Justice is a stranger to the world,
   as am i:
Justice never was, & i
shall never be.

How is it such strangers came to lodge
   here in Time?
On the road to what, were we
when the storm fell?

Justice did not come with me
   nor i with it.
If we approach, we pass as strangers.
—Strangers, who don't want to meet.

"...this belief in the value of pursuing a reading program of the classics was largely a social construct – a fad that arose in the twentieth centur."

( via / via )

I confess i’m in entire sympathy with Delany (one of my favorite writers) but i don’t agree with the one-size-fits-all reading list. Reading is, before anything else, nutrition. Therefore what i advocate—& not only for those who “want to become writers” (what a ridiculous aspiration)—is simply to read 500 books, half of them written before you were born.

"I Know This World is Not My Home

"The frenzy of the lilacs strikes
against my old man’s heart, and yet
I know this world is not my home,
where I have hidden for so long
with pain alone to pay my pains.
I know this world
is not my home, where greenness trills
its singing to the chasing clouds
that I have chased and not once caught.
I know this world
is not my home, whose fragrance fills me
and whose kind breath’s movement makes
what I cannot choose to unchoose.
I know this world. I know this world
is not my home."

—Alex Rettie via

"The entire crushing immensity was unconscious of itself, and the negligible thing on the floorboards was holding all of it inside a skull the size of a cantaloupe."

"Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Then the ground slides away from under our feet. But not for long." —Shestov

A language in which there is no word for 'I' (& other word-mysteries). More, just lately.

( via / screenshot from google streetview )

Tardy Comeuppance.

" I remember an interview I once read in which Allen Ginsberg was asked what a ‘hipster’ was. A hipster, he replied, was someone who could land on any street corner in the world and score some dope in minutes." —Sven Birkerts via

Several poor life decisions later.

sca   hori   zon   lpel
pell   s   mell   cirocco
cir   cle   rus   ft   t
der   fen   by
tos   Lai   ka   bach
the   to   power   will
sent   f   ences   astness
spi   Lar   ral   es

"I especially liked vaporwave that sounded like a broadcast or a TV playing at night. It gave me a mysterious, exciting feeling and reminded me of watching those VHS tapes as a kid."