( via / via )

"Information on semi-forgotten writers often is hard to find, but in Massie’s case it seems more than usually elusive." (via feuilleton) Archive.org has The Confessions of a Vagabond (1931) & The Incredible Truth (1958). Only the latter appears to be a novel. The movie can be found on Youtube.

"Most of the oppressively complete books that labor for our attention would benefit, we suspect, from a few reductive blows of the hammer." --John Updike

Cold.

glare in the dark garage
hail & farewell Corinna

a meeting of two solitudes
in my dream the miracle occurred

the machine calling now
an unforgettable laugh

on the road an old Barracuda

Record of the reading.

( via / via )

Rolling robot.

"IDLE DECLARATION

Til spun, we spool.
Lives drown in woe.
We fill an abyssal gap.
Art--as I told a sad lot--
is a trap, a glassy, banal
life we own in words' evil
loop, sewn up, slit."

--@poitevin

Reaction of opening, symmetrical.

"Always, in whatever I wrote--prose or verse--I have had a burning desire to be explicit; beset always, however carefully I had written, by the charge of obscurity." --Marianne Moore

The onion-domed towers of Saltair resort rise slowly from the waters of the Great Salt Lake, detailed oil painting, Salvador Dali.

( via / via )

Serenade in the Night.

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening”

--Angela Carter (via @ladyliminal1)

Ain't No Sunshine.

"To a Gazan child:

They didn’t find a place to bury you.
They carried you on their shoulders,
wandered through the neighborhood,
stopped at your childhood school
and the old park."

--@MosabAbuToha

Crush #81.

( planet of lalande 21185 by tomislav stimac via / another / yet another )

Imploring in fur-cuffed velvet...

"Speelunker & Argonaut"

candledrip-writ caption
cursing the bright hearses
too Zeno for tontine

attach critic hatchet
eerie lore · lyre feral

Rhexergon (i'll have to recalculate it for 13d, but that won't change the basic picture much). Drew opines. Wikipedia, usually reasonably up to date, lists a second planet as "confirmed" (since 2021) & a third as "suspected". Going there. This page wants to name the second planet "Pofu-pipya". This list remembers Rogue Queen but is heavy on computer games. (Is Zajdel still untranslated?) And then there's this.

On naming far off places: i have always assumed that, if there's a writer interested enough to use a real star in a story & gives a name to a madeup planet around that star, we can go with that name until the day comes that we actually go there. It becomes more complicated when more than one writer has treated a star, but that's not much different from cities that have been known by more than one name. If no one cares enough to devote a work of fiction to it, there's no reason not to use the scientific designation in the meantime.

"I suspect that Keats had this more recent discovery, just 5 years prior, in mind."

( Buchrückenmotiv / geof huth on fb )

"I failed to be taught to swim my whole teen years, then, as soon as I'd left school, discovered how to do it in an afternoon. Every time I write something now, it's that afternoon all over again." --@mjohnharrison

Saltair rises from the Great Salt Lake, detailed oil painting, Winslow Homer, Florine Stettheimer.

no immediate roadblock
the cartperson gone
sun struggling through
like a bruise blossoming
xylophone music
i anticipate a thunk
that doesn't come

PSY10 EDIT10 ALT.

( via / via )

10 things I still love that resemble indexes or lexicons or inventories in particular order.

"trebuchet"

1.
dark cold seas
vaster than Earth's
do we think about
unplumbed
bearing
dark cold hearts
we only think we see
to the bottom of

2.
Lalande 21185
fog as a planet
days-long sunrise
diffused
many-legg'd scramble
why should they not build

their ziggurats too

3.
harried by half-dreams
of the book i would write
just those few years
as a parable
parable of what though
something i could only lie about
ever after
like our other atrocities

Poem.

"I love not the myth of England, rather I love mythic England - all black dogs, hollow hills and sharp-toothed faeries. The myth of England as nation and mythical England are not the same - despite what folks in black shirts may claim. - #CLNolan, ‘Deathbed Letters’, 1937" --@hooklandguide

"Flat Earth theory is what you get..."

( via / "in the time of the cavemen" by hilde vandenhout in asemic )

Mickey Mouse menaced by clowns, detailed oil painting, Francis Bacon.

"there’s nothing wrong with me that six drinks and loudly denigrating the shoddy scholarship of my enemies in a crowded hotel bar can’t fix" --@kukukadoo

Mickey Mouse menaced by clowns, detailed oil painting, Edward Hopper.

"The Ordinary Women

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
They flitted
Through the palace walls.

They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded
The nocturnal halls.

The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.

And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil
As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study
The canting curlicues

Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.

The gaunt guitarists on the strings
Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight
Rose on the beachy floors.

How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins
Of the civil fans!

Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance
To the wickless halls.

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs
They flitted
Through the palace walls."

--Wallace Stevens

The Wise Men.

( Secret Ceremony / via )

Logging on...

"Green waves and wet gray rocks,
dune grass, a wind-blown wren,
and in my thoughts a vanished face
   I shall not see again.

Chill rains and charging seas,
ice floes along the shore —
in me a tide of loneliness
   for one who left before."

— Joseph Payne Brennan (via @isidro_li)

UFOnica.

"Mere mysteriousness is useless; the enigma must be clear to the author, not necessarily to us." --Marianne Moore

Juchewave.

( "The Disassembling Archives 35 | The Reflection of the Past is the Future" by geof huth on fb / via )

⛽️.

"Renaissassination." --@ALCrego_

Not the end of the world .

"sinking
slowly sinking
a red sun
becoming one
with the blue lake"

--an'ya

The Prisoner of Highland Park.

( me )

"That song has been with me through some pretty rough times."

"VII. A Swan

My robe is noiseless · when I roam the earth,
Or stay in my home, · or stir up the water.
At times I am lifted · o’er the lodgings of men
By the aid of my trappings · and the air above.
The strength of the clouds · then carries me far,
Bears me on its bosom. · My beautiful ornament,
My raiment rustles · and raises a song,
Sings without tiring. · I touch not the earth
But wander a stranger · over stream and wood."

--tr Cosette Faust (via)

Home_trip.

"Anthology-making, like sculpturing in marble, is in large measure an art of taking away." --John Updike

A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden.

( me )

Gonna Roll the Bones.

"Poetry is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals--a system of communication whereby a fox with a turkey too heavy for it to carry, reappears shortly with another fox to share the booty." --Marianne Moore

Pixel gas station sunset.

to have my fill of sleep
incendiary slope
whereon are built all measures
kitebind & kiteslip
& the tutelary fissures

Squad.

( via / via )

Black and Light.

"Poets of Planet X

   'Cuckoo singing
   together with a skylark
   a crisscross of
   voices'

   --Kyorai

This is an experiment

where is the center
of the flower
it is in every atom
it is in every atom

This is an experience
This is the National Security Broadcasting
System
This is a test
This is not an actual emergency

the Indians are dancing
on top of
a mountain
they are stopping the end of the world

live or die
black or white
day or night
they are dancing
in the shadows
they are healing
the wounds of the scars
they are singing the bad dreams
away

I am a feather
in the wind
I am looking
for a dove
in the claws
of an eagle
too full of final light
to fight
I am a feather
in the wind
I am looking
for an eagle
who flies for
the sun
too full of life
too sick of death
to hunger

in the city
he is the tune of concrete and streets
is an organ grinder
he is wise
he is an alcoholic
his monkey is nothing
from a zen monastery
the organ grinder
drinks up
the coins from
the tin cup
he is dying
the monkey is starving
he is smiling
he is singing the blues
about
lotta ways of dying'
the organ grinder
is grinding out
the end of the world
the monkey is
dancing it
away

with chalk & ink
slate & paper
bunsen burners & beakers
neuclear reactors & computers
presidents & big bad ass brass
punching out
the end of the
world

nobody sees
what a tree frog sees
he's a high leaper
a dreamer peeper
a winter sleeper
a blunder jumper
a rainbow bumper
he's a test tube
baby
he's a long drinker
a deep thinker
bottled in beer
he's hopping
away
the end of the world
he's your in & out
up
and down
walk jump
jump flying
dreamsinging
away
the end of the world

in the VA Hospital
Dr. McDonald Fuqaduc &
the follow the yellow line crew
examine
but it is hard to see
after so many times of seeing
this sort of
stuff
I mean
you just want to go home
& forget it

I mean
yeh it could be me
but
it's not

Doc
I'm blind
let's see now
got to get shoes for the kids
take an aspirin
Doc
I can't walk
car payment due $579.50 + insurance
it is your imagination
Doc
I'm an amputee
ahhhhh
there is the nurse
nice legs
if I put my hands in my pockets just right
uunhhh...right
back to government business
the Doc
stands there
looking like
St. Joseph the Aspirin
he remembers
his car payment
the nurse
he says
Quack

they are quacking
away
the end of the world
in the Veterans Hospitals
St. Joseph the Aspirin
is putting
back legs
leading the blind
quacking away
the end of the world

at the tent revivals
& full gospel missions
they are rock & holy rolling
shimmying & shaking
serpents writhing
with open Maranatha arms
toward the end of the world
in the cathedrals
they are stained glass
gothic and gaudy
genuflecting away
the end of the world

in the gay bars
in the hetero-anything goes
brothels
Yes
even in the psycho wards
they skip from
room to room
dodging the orderlies
who are playing
in the broomclosets
with fat and pugnacious
nurses
in the rehabilitation center
spastics
are meeting in toilet stalls
with Playboy magazines
jerking around and drooling
all over your world
somewhere in a back lot
in some RV camper
a midget and a hunchback
who feel astoundingly like flesh and blood
warmth and human
make love to the sound of calliopes
as if it were the end
of the world
Yes
even the latex generation
in their rubber suits
all those that can get one up
or wet one down
are making love
as if it were the end
of the
world

where is the center
of the flower
it is in every atom

where is the center
of the atom
it is in the universe

I am a feather
in the wind
I am looking

listen
poets of planet X
they say the wind & trees are singing
they say the sky is eyeing
they say the oceans are listening
they say the Earth is feeling
they say the man is dreaming
& there is no test
& there is no emergency
& the experiment
is a lovers gentle
urgings

& the Indians are dancing
on top of
a mountain
they are stopping
the end
of the world"

-- Sam Modica. Written in Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1974. Via Fb memories

GLSL funk.

"Hockey is a goth sport, it's cold, you run on knives & usually there is blood." --@DoththeDoth

Night..

( from Secret Ceremony [1968] / arika okrent on fb [in cappadochia] )

Heck yeah 17 followers 👍.

"I can remember exactly when it happened. I was walking to school on an autumn day, crisp, cool, the air filled with orange and yellow leaves, and I thought, It’s Bradbury weather." --Caitlin Kiernan. (via)

7eleven.

   paint with oozy poisons
   pastime later bated
   lanes closed for a cleansing
   clueless in Gehenna
   serrated quern sunrise
   socket counterclockwise
spindly despite spoof · standing
   dim shrouded dancers

Son of a Preacher Man.

( via / via )

A Puzzling Surprise Party for my Birthday.

   myrrh-hung ceremony
   maze without cinch wayzgoose

   concentric flame sumo
   soaks feathers of croak's source

   this bridge dodgy breaking
   this debride-work gurkha

forever arriving · rural churchyard's
   worn away letters

What are you getting for the night?

Listening to Daliborovo Granje while watching Secret Ceremony.

Secret Ceremony.

( via / via )

How did it feel to dream as a kid?

Sir Bedlam i name: animal debris.

"So the fact of tribes of believers itself is important to human society; the putative content of dogmas of belief is not."

"Winter Remembered

Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat, my center.

Better to walk forth in the murderous air
And wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing,
Because my heart would throb less painful there,
Being caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.

Which would you choose, and for what boot in gold,
The absence, or the absence and the cold?"

--John Crowe Ransom (via @joycecaroloates)

Mercator projection of a previously spherical animation.

( via / via )

Noir et Blanc.

flowers in the cold morning
strange bouquet
it's eight-fifteen

preparing
for a journey

tangle of caution tape

💤.

"Then from a Ruin where conceal'd he lay
Watching his buried Gold, and hating Day,
Hooted The Owl.—'I tell you, my Delight
Is in the Ruin and the Dead of Night
Where I was born, and where I love to wone
All my Life long, sitting on some cold stone
Away from all your roystering Companies,
In some dark Corner where a Treasure lies;
That, buried by some Miser in the Dark,
Speaks up to me at Midnight like a Spark;
And o'er it like a Talisman I brood,
Companion of the Serpent and the Toad.
What need of other Sovereign, having found,
And keeping as in Prison underground,
One before whom all other Kings bow down,
And with his glittering Heel their Foreheads crown?' "

--FitzGerald's Attar

VR World.

( via / via )

Gliding & counter-gliding angles.

"End As You Began (palindrome)

We dared —
Nude, born wordless,
ever up.

Amid a worn age,
buoy sadness.

End as you began —
Row a dim, a pure vessel.
Drown robed under a dew."

--@SpoonerRhythms

Teleology of the Bull.

"search engine optimization"

   head above
water for the
   moment · berth
with warmth mingled
   i drive slow
trying not to
   slip back down
back down there with
today's losses

The temple at Hiroshima, detailed oil painting, Max Ernst.

( via / via )

Long Exposure.

"dancing lemur"

by so many ways
is the world unmade

beach at St John
a casual word

clouds full of nightmare
our hearts the same

awaiting the tsunami
of a quake we started

What Happened Here?

"SLEEP (Palindrome)

O, sleep’s eyed....
I’m its sender.
I tap a tiredness —
timid eyes peel so."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Victorian Seinfeld.

( via / via )

Pandemonkium.

"To me alone, alone, is giv'n the Key
Of Love; of whose whole Mystery possesst,
When I reveal a little to the Rest,
Forthwith Creation listening forsakes
The Reins of Reason, and my Frenzy takes..."

--FitzGerald's Attar

"You who never arrived..."

"Cape Wrath

Not wrath as in rage, · but as reefing ships
from Viking hvarf, · a veering of sails
where turning tiderunners · tracked southerly
toward the lush lowlands, · allure of pastures.
Aiming-point, then, · intersection
maps are made from; · meeting of sea-paths
where gannet-strike · and stiff-winged gull
attempt the turbulence, · tracing white wakes
between kyle and keel, · cloud and breaker.

Nearby, the blunt, · abrupt cliff-falls
Define a finish, · failure of land-mass:
Insult to isobars · and Iceland's tundra
the hurt behind · of the high ness offers
a bare buttock · to the barren Atlantic,
gained from glaciers · to what good purpose?
This neb remains, · a node with its geos,
guillemots and seals, · its migrating flocks
whose vagrant convenience · these voes accommodate
indifferently on the dull edge · of the hour-glass.

One assumes easily, · searching guide-books,
some more spectacular spot · – spout, rainbow, crag
limitlessly colluding · down the long approach;
stacks striding ashore; · a stave in the weather
or whale-song’s witness; · wheel of sky-talons.
Instead, one stands · at an austerer somewhere:
an end leading East, · angles implying West
afford the furniture · of a flat summit,
a light-house lost · to its unlucky prospect.

Appropriate, perhaps, · that places one steers to,
orients of arrival, · don’t relish the intrusion
withdraw to a distance · where days are smaller,
views less violent, · less vivid the sunscapes:
the word here for humans · is too hard to compass.
And whatever they own · absolutely
eyes make out ill, · ail the inheritance;
no one can seize completely · the seen locale.

Turn away troubled, · reattempt the route,
pricked by disappointment, · by prehistory.
This meaningful wharf · was meant for others
earlier and more avid, · more energetic
whose justified journeys · joined to an ocean
whose bounds were unbroken, · whose bearings real,
whose atlas included · no anti-climax."

--Chris McCully in Withowinde 95, pp. 6-7, December, 1992

Absences.

( via / via )

"They get a number of about 530 light years, 25% closer than previous estimates."

"I BROUGHT TO ART

I sit and meditate. · I brought to art
desires and feelings-- · some things half seen,
faces or lines; · some indistinct memories
of unfulfilled loves. · Let me rely on her.
She knows how to fashion · a Figure of Beauty;
almost imperceptibly · rounding out life,
combining impressions, · combining the days."

--Rae Dalven's Cavafy

The Elements of Poetry.

"And which area is just a ten-foot-wide, cleared strip of land separating the plant from that big Durkins' Woods fronting it all along that side--and which woods once, so I've heard, were to have been a great dining-car plant, but didn't." --Murder in the Mills

🌞☕️ gm to proceduralism©️.

( via / via )

"The most serious international court hearing in 30 years and the party being accused of the worst crime you can commit is sending a clown."

"i'm making a new website. i feel bad for the old website" --@katefolk

Happy 1 day anniversary to Mickey Mouse being owned by the public!

"you were lost
to the night as quick
as this moth
when midsummer fog
stole her compass moon"

--an'ya

Composition 36.

( me / via )

"...this exhaustive and exhausting narrative set in 1942 is about 3D television, a canal across Nicaragua, the molecular structure of sugar, and 'etheric stresses due to halfwave-length-dephased hightension pulsations from meshworks'. Among other things."

"The Plot Against the Giant

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la…le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him."

--Wallace Stevens

Trees that remain stand like twisted sentinels.

“A poem's terrain is a landscape fashioned from absence and fragments.” --Alina Stefanescu

"A planet in the habitable zone would orbit the star in 2180 years."

( via / via )

Best close readings. (thread)

A billion seconds is about the lifespan of an African buffalo.

"...a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.."

"Strange Type

I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter."

--Malcolm Lowry

First 2024 Word Selection ☺️.

( via / via )

Reith Lectures.

   indigo redblue
haze pierced by powerline poles
   first day back at work

Concrete walkway stains and stalactites.

"Like the pre-dawn light,
Flickering like the cold sheen of a blade,
Brightly reflecting
The lashes and eyebrows of a girl
On its awesome surface
From the opposite bank,
Vividly reflecting
The lips and teeth of a youth
On its glistening surface..."

--Justin Smith-Ruiu, translating Kyys Debiliïe, an Olonkho epic from the Sakha or Yakut people of Northeastern Siberia (on his substack)

Cosmic Jewel.