( via / via )

"...self-employment wasn’t a career choice so much as a diagnosis."

" Only heroes could survive in the maelstrom, and only idiots would want to." —Nero Wolfe via

"It no longer feels like an emergency. It feels like weather."

Unclench Yourself.

( via / via )

"Then I reflected upon its peculiarities, and told myself: The gods that built this place were mad."

"The uncanny allure of whimsy conjoined with doom, sad Christmases, playground loneliness."

"What gives a person born in 2005 nightmares from 1994?" —Carol Grant via

"The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to the horror of the void."

( via / via )

"It’s a small lie for any single individual to make, but because the lie is so widely distributed throughout the entire corporate world right now, it’s totally destructive, and gives leadership a wildly false read on their ROI."

"It's worth noting that the people selling AI have no problem with the idea of a conscious, sentient entity that exists only to do uncompensated work for them--an entity to which they have no ethical obligations, and one whose wishes or needs are of absolutely no interest; a consciousness which can be called into existence or snuffed out as thoughtlessly as you would turn a light switch on or off. That is exactly what they think of you too." —Sing or Swim via

Sad Heart.

"metallic red owlclip"

crew Gilligan's Island
gully ullage
gerdanlouk-lit · endgame

   think of the dry season
empty bookcase · in the garage
hail Gilligan's Hamlet

haruspicial dishpan

"Having failed to un-brainwash myself, I thought about how to proceed."

( via / via )

"We live our lives as if we are telling ourselves a story. And we live surrounded by the stories of others."

   golden leaves against
slate gray sky after so much
   staring at pixels

"One also need not be canceled to be problematized, but being problematized is, I think, an inevitable byproduct of having been canceled."

" 'Chasm' feels like the correct word to describe what is left behind, because what has been done to the future, in a process that still seems nowhere near its conclusion, is essentially an extraction of possibility." —Julian Brant via

Early DALL-E was honestly the pinnacle of AI and it should have never been allowed to move beyond this point.

( me / zao wouki )

Sudden Jock Pointe Shoe Ekphrasis.

"Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time really at its center, in the same way all humans imagine themselves to be situated at the center of the world. This illusion of perspective situates us in the center of space; a similar illusion falsifies the sense of time in us; and again another similar illusion arranges the whole hierarchy of values around us. This illusion even extends to our sense of existence, because of the intimate connection between the sense of value and the sense of being within us. Being seems less and less concentrated the further it is from us." —Simone Weil via

"I think it’s only natural that vaporwave – at its heart a hauntological form of pastiche – will be embracing and exploring new subjects of nostalgia as it evolves. ."

      "Basil Clench"

   turquoise hum
hasty gurgle
   ascian grid
of the doomed days
   old crimes hilch
in the hopper
   polaroid
trapped entity

"I forgot to turn off the electric. Would you mind doing it for me please."

( me / via )

"Australia has 2 great loves and both of them float."

auburn brown interview
iron Denebola bedrock
redbrick corridor crackling

cry, halcyon highway,
tranche of troubled auburn

Personalized license plate.

"The CSS encryption layer that Hollywood spent the entire 1990s defending in federal court was bypassed transparently in the background by a library called libdvdcss, written by a Norwegian teenager in 1999, now bundled inside every modern media player on every operating system." —Patrick Quirk via

First masterpiece of the 21c.

( via/ me )

Processing.

"Heidegger, who admired Celan's work, tried to make him feel welcome in Freiburg. He even asked a book-dealer friend to go around all the bookshops in the city making sure they put Celan titles in their windows so the poet would see them as he walked through town. This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice." --Sarah Bakewell, The Existentialist Cafe (2016)

Poor Bastard.

"sounds"

never enough slackness
all needs seek fulfillment

incidental music
festers on the vine

dim fluorescents dowsing
derelict ricochet

pickled whispers

Pantoum.

( me / via )

In the Nursing Home.

“Reckless Biscuits” (Vancouver Island)

You don’t see many crows around here
they prefer the really remote areas
of extreme latitude, and ageless brooding forest…
where, interlacing their severe discourse,
the silence becomes another orator
mor baroque than the rest, whose necessary lapses
—a leaf’s fission, a breeze rattling dry branches—
are awaited often for days, among the treetops.

Mothra's rainbow wings.

I enjoy the technology in old movies (dial phones, great cars, manual typewriters) & the obsolete pop culture & defunct slang in books, as interesting in themselves. I've spent enough time in certain periods that there's not much that gets past me anymore. This is a good thing to have.

Flight was never an option.

( florine stettheimer / me )

"This industry will die and our souls with it if all you do is endlessly devalue the next generation of artists and their fans.."

I have books on high shelves, i have books on low shelves. I even have a few big, heavy books that take both hands to lift. And i have books in boxes i have to uncover from a stack of other book boxes. I get plenty of exercise with my books. (That’s not even counting the miles i have browsed in used bookstores.)

No, it's because their cell phones kept getting smaller & smaller.

"Rust

Riding in the backs of cars
At night wrapped up in the illusion
Of getting out as light pollution
Drowsily gives way to stars

How often have I put my trust
In one-time strangers at the wheel
And prayed that I could make the toll
With coins like hubcaps dark from rust?

Time, perhaps, to turn my attention
Away from the buckshot-riddled sky
And study with somnambulant eyes
The unknown figure riding shotgun"

—@huckastley

Call Me When You Win the War.

( via / via )

The Tube Train.

"Word Made Flesh

Word whose breath is the world-circling atmosphere,
Word that utters the world that turns the wind,
Word that articulates the bird that speeds upon the air,

Word that blazes out the trumpet of the sun,
Whose silence is the violin-music of the stars,
Whose melody is the dawn, and harmony the night,

Word traced in water of lakes, and light on water,
Light on still water, moving water, waterfall
And water colours of cloud, of dew, of spectral rain,

Word inscribed on stone, mountain range upon range of stone,
Word that is fire of the sun and fire within
Order of atoms, crystalline symmetry,

Grammar of five-fold rose and six-fold lily,
Spiral of leaves on a bough, helix of shells,
Rotation of twining plants on axes of darkness and light,

Instinctive wisdom of fish and lion and ram,
Rhythm of generation in flagellate and fern,
Flash of fin, beat of wing, heartbeat, beat of the dance,

Hieroglyph in whose exact precision is defined
Feather and insect-wing, refraction of multiple eyes,
Eyes of the creatures, oh myriadfold vision of the world,

Statement of mystery, how shall we name
A spirit clothed in world, a world made man?"

—Kathleen Raine

This drama is ancient history.

"The Russian propaganda weapon is not built only to persuade you.

It is built to exhaust you. To stuff up your brain."

—Gavril Ducu via

Patti & Allen.

( via / via )

Glory, Glory. (thx Melanie!)

"The moment of absolute clarity comes just when you stub your toe upon the bed." —Will G. via

Pastures of Plenty.

"LUCIFER (Palindrome by Pairs)

Seraphic one,
my divine sire,
fate fires
in ivy, demonic phrase."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world."

( via / via )

"Microtonal virtuosos have been going viral a lot recently: Maddie Ashman, Bryan Deister."

"pith helmet"

passage to Nineveh
packaged in pale cerulean
sputter on layaway
Crashsound gold-vermilion
anchors aweigh

pirates on holiday
ransack the wealth of ages
bent heads pursue their play
careless of broken edges
anchors aweigh

passage to Nineveh

Whimsy & Stettheimer.

"I write poetry so I can leave behind these frail, brittle memory cicada shells"
—@poemakontsa.bsky.social

The Alien Within.

( via / via )

Sanskrit itself is a creole langauge which formed when Indo-Aryan-speaking male migrants moved into the subcontinent.

"i love it when the clock strikes 10:30 every morning and the usual sites publish their 3 infuriating news stories that will drive all discourse today like zookeepers raising the enclosure's gate and letting the seals get into the day's bucket of chum" —@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com

Mad Magazine from 1991. (With Crumb in the replies!)

"Weimar solutions"

pale cerulean window
trauma porn
kilnforward courier
catalogue page wedgekrieg
stone lion in styrofoam
it could still rain
pale Ramones
Beethoven's Ninth bone-house
bright trapdoor, trucks both lanes
seeing the web
when i see nothing

"It’s a great time to be writing. What could be better for any art form than to be called upon to rise to the occasion of an emergency, let alone a moment of civilisational crisis?" (—Jorie Graham)

( via / via )

The Nod.

      "Mieterscham"

Renner burning runway
rista of Creek Canyon
      swart go-juice
   assuages theft
labyrinth learned · sienna contrails

eye in the sky scurry
scaffold & dull laughtrack
self-wheeled to the wharf cliff
      overpass
   blinking portal

you will find · no friendzone
outside Emathia

"...when I look at the women from my past who became escorts and those who became marketing managers I don’t feel bad about my allegiances at all."

"O miseranda domus, toto nil orbe videbis
Tutius Emathia."

—Pharsalia VI.819-820

"Ah wretched Race! to whom the world can yield
No safer refuge, than Emathia's Field."

—Rowe's Lucan

Outside stairway drizzled on.

( via / via )

When a TV station in Iceland accidentally aired an episode of Teletubbies with subtitles from the Sopranos 👌🏼.

"...the sort of jokes that Italians make about the Venetians and the Tuscans are rather similar to the jokes that the English make about the Scottish, for whom beer is a soft drink and for whom, as a Scottish friend of mine once told me:

'the word fuck’s like a comma.' " —Alexander Fayne via

You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.

      "bread too wide for the toaster"

no better mammal now
that i should not have squandered
      depths unsounded,
sheets i might have written on.

but fragrant hours arrive,
replete with puzzling auras:
      no stern kairos'
green noise posed which red did solve.

where would forgiveness come,
if not from finding further wrongs
      & broken lungs
along the road of fire-slalom.

Canada Geese.

( via / via )

Early Morning Road.

     "Moonrise, June 19, 1876

I woke in the midsummer not-to-call night
     in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe
    of a fingernail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit,
    lovely in waning but lustreless
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow
    of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp yet clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him
    entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight,
    unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me
    eyelid and eyelid of slumber."

—Gerard Manley Hopkins via @rhunedhel.bsky.social

"For as long as the city has existed, appalled visitors have fantasised about all of this collapsing."

"I’ve never done pay-per-view, but I’d pay to watch his name removed from the Kennedy Center live" —@beinghelpish.bsky.social

Pride flag made from real nasa imagery .

( via / via )

Stairway.

"His sense of the discourse around ‘the Great LPs’ in popular music is that there is a conventional main-stream canon – Beatles, Stones, male singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell, their ilk – curated by magazines like Mojo, Rolling Stone and Record Collector, that gets all the public attention and discussion, and that makes all the money for record dealers. Floating above the public canon, however, there is an entirely separate shadow-canon of records, quite thoroughly understood and acknowledged by the collector-initiates, but listened to and known about by almost nobody else.

This is what has happened to the literary canon as well." —Paddy Bullard via

"Beowulf is dense with them. By my count, there are at least 129 kennings.."

inscrutable electronica
on this bridge late at night
in this blazing noon reverie

spring was a dream
even as it fed us

"...crunchy, creepy, almost like the vocoder fucked around with a Ouija board and didn’t close the bridge quick enough. I became enamored."

( via / via )

Stray goose adoption.

"The Parnassians

Sons of islands, who in sensuous, tropic
minds— luxuriant, remote, and feral—
mined for words like Madagascan beryl.
Prowling jungle thoughts, they tracked their topic:
human vanity, the lush, entropic
bloom of desperate life, and beauty’s peril,
studied with an eye austere and sterile,
distant, God-like, ruthless, microscopic.
Life, a fever dream of El Dorado,
foredoomed quest for false desiderata,
these conquistadors made it their motto:
Lose thyself in savoring the data.
Make thy art only an obbligato
harmonizing Nature’s cruel sonata."

—Elijah Perseus Blumov via

Carnival of Wonders.

"As per habit, I keep compiling my cluttered index as I read, with whatever filched pen comes to hand. Consciousness is a latecomer, an annotator, an infinite index in stolen ink." —Riverwork

"Camp is gender without genitals."

( via/ via )

" The fighters will reportedly walk to the Octagon from the Oval Office. And replacing the grass afterwards, just the grass, will cost American taxpayers around 700,000 dollars."

"More than in the original French, I felt I could taste Montaigne in Florio, whose text emanated notes of clove and saddle leather and woodsmoke." —Lisa Robertson

"I found David Lynch on a Kansas two lane."

"Remembering the Ancient Ways on the Rivers of Chu (3)

The wild wind ruffled my belt of orchids,
A sudden rain sprayed my magnolia oar.
The souls of Qu and Song have gone to darkness,
The desolated hills and rivers mourn.
Now shadowed clouds invade the evening scene,
The sea-line trees fade into the falling tide.
I’d pluck some winter herbs as offerings,
But no bright gods will take my sacrifice."

—Ma Dai via

My first exposure to this was arriving in the middle of a dramatization on BBC on my garage sale vacuum-tube shortwave radio & it was one of the strangest aesthetic experiences of my life.

( via / via)

Inverted.

      "Postcarity"

dragon kingdoms · in the cold stories
half-light gray · still gravel
faint voices · in single file
   enter the heart of the lamp

Quattuor. Plus.

"Thought could be the binding medium, but I still don't know what thinking is. A kind of inner voice? A night sky that supports or constellates my fragments? A loom with its four direcfions, which contain what? Is thinking a textile?" —Riverwork

Whitman & Thoreau.

( 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.

"What Voyager 1 Saw Before It Died"

zuihitsu, glimmer-rue:
prop comedian
punk rock pet groomer truck
the philosophers of my youth
whom i hardly knew then
& less so now
move slowly my face burning
try not to frighten the rabbit

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).