(
via / me )
"Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation."
"The Exiles (Ode III ['To Edward Upward, Schoolmaster'] from The Orators)
What siren zooming is sounding our coming
Up frozen fjord forging from freedom
What shepherd's call
When stranded on hill,
With broken axle
On track to exile?
With labelled luggage we alight at last
Joining joking at the junction on the moor
With practised smile
And harmless tale
Advance to meet
Each new recruit.
Expert from uplands, always in oilskins,
Recliner from library, laying down law,
Owner from shire,
All meet on this shore
Facing each prick
With ginger pluck.
Our rooms are ready, the register signed,
There is time to take a turn before dark.
See the blistering paint
On the scorching front.
Or icicles sombre
On pierhead timber.
To climb the cliff path to the coastguard's point
Past the derelict dock deserted by rats,
Look from concrete sill
Of fort for sale
To the bathers' rocks,
The lovers' ricks.
Our boots will be brushed, our bolsters pummelled.
Cupboards are cleared for keeping our clothes.
Here we shall live
And somehow love
Though we only master
The sad posture.
Picnics are promised and planned for July
To the wood with the waterfall, walks to find[,]
Traces of birds,
A mole, a rivet.
In factory yards
Marked strictly private.
There will be skating and curling at Christmas — indoors
Charades and ragging; then riders pass
Some afternoons
In snowy lanes
Shut in by wires.
Surplus from wars.
In Spring we shall spade the soil on the border
For blooming of bulbs; we shall bow in Autumn
When trees make passes,
As high gale pushes,
And bewildered leaves
Fall on our lives.
[We are here for our health, we have not to fear
The fiend in the furze or the face at the manse;
Proofed against shock
Our hands can shake;
The flag at the golf-house flutters
And nothing matters.
We shall never need another new outfit;
These grounds are for good, we shall grow no more,
But lose our color
With scurf on collar
Peering through glasses
At our own glosses.
This life is to last, when we leave we leave all,
Though vows have no virtue, though voice is in vain,
We live like ghouls
On posts from girls
What the spirit utters
In formal letters.
We shall rest without risk, neither ruler with rod
Nor spy with signals for secret agent
Tasteless for fruit
Too nervous for feat
Spending all time
With the Doc or the Jim.]
Watching through windows the wastes of evening,
The flare of foundries at fall of the year.
The slight despair
At what we are,
The marginal grief
Is source of life.
In groups forgetting the gun in the drawer
Need pray for no pardon, are proud till recalled
By music on water
To lack of stature.
Saying Alas
To less and less.
Till holding our hats in our hands for talking[,]
Or striding down streets for something to see.
Gas-light in shops.
The fate of ships
And the tide-wind
Touch the old wound.
Till the town is ten and the time is London
And nerves grow numb between north and south
Hear last in corner
The pffwungg of burner
Accepting dearth.
The shadow of death."
--WH Auden [bracketed changes are lines added, as it appears in Poems (1934)]
"Sante is also offering a casually self-lacerating sketch of that familiar persona, the cooler-than-thou male aesthete-intellectual who cares for large social forces, smaller cultural ephemera, and not much between."
"Word of the Day: FLURRIGIGS (n. pl.) showy yet useless adornments or finery [19thC dial.]" --@HaggardHawks
Decolonizing your algorithm.
