( via / via )

"Writers, who must be read in order to survive, have generally responded to this cultural schism—recently schematized by Anna Kornbluh as the rift between form and immediacy—by either embracing a first-person approach, which values authenticity, reliability, and mundanity (you can’t read, but neither can I), or by embracing craft (I can read better than you)."

"Shadows in the yard,
Quink-blue and gradually
shifting, like those eels we used to see
above the weir, thick
whipcords of lust
and instinct, surging
headlong through the mystery of grass."

--John Burnside - 'Aubade (In Memoriam J.P.)' via @timesflow

One of the most intense heatwaves in African temperature history.

nothing at all new
nothing at all learned
a fly in my chardonnay
nothing at all new
no need to deny
what can't be said aloud
nothing at all new
nothing at all learned

The Mud that Lingers.

( via / via )

"Her films overflow with the strangeness and plasticity of sexed and gendered bodies, simmering with promises of corporeal liberation and its attendant dangers."

plaster still supplies · plaintively its chirr
this solstice simmering · unsaying the password

Therefore.

"I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people."

- David Graeber (via @EverySongIveEve)

Campus of scientific research and technological applications built in the north coast of egypt in the 90s.

( via / via via Mefi )

"This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies." (via Mefi)

"The Old English for ‘to slay a dragon’ was 𝘥𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘤𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘯—which, if it survived to today, would be ‘to quell (a) drake’." --@wylfcen

Bus stop.

"Song of the Horseman

Córdoba.
Remote and lonely.

Jet-black mare and full round moon,
With olives in my saddle bags.
Although I know the road so well
I shall not get to Córdoba.

Across the plain, across the wind,
Jet-black mare and full red moon,
Death is gazing down upon me,
Down from the towers of Córdoba.

Ay! The road so dark and long.
ay! My mare so tired yet brave.
Death is waiting for me there
Before I get to Córdoba.

Córdoba.
Remote and lonely."

--Garcia Lorca (tr Roy Campbell) [Lojban translation]

Last light on the broken shore.

( via / via )

Pastel Dingbat.

"To Juan de la Cruz at the Summer Solstice"

a simmering sound · descends in slow waves
through the thick heat · that stymies thought
cold-capsuled · cars press in clumps
with prim purpose · or pressing need

if any story stirs · these stubborn roundheads
it's not wicker witchcraft · or wise Jehovah
but the yodelling yahoos · of yore whose horse
could melt miles away · in the middle of nowhere

"He finds a way back into the dream-corridors of the clinic in a vain search for Vallejo; hiding in an empty room, he witnesses an apparently significant conversation but cannot hear it through the window."

"Intelligence is like exams. You always think the chap sitting next to you knows more than you do." --The Tailor of Panama

From the Zothique cycle.

( via / via )

"Stars and blossoming fruit trees..."

"There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world." --Mary Ruefle (via @neonpajamas)

Quietly working away.

"Evening Song

At evening, when we walk on dark trails,
our bleached selves appear before us.

Thirsty
we drink from the pond’s white water,
the sweetness of our mournful childhood.

Weary, we rest beneath the elderberry
to behold the dawning gulls.

Spring clouds rise above the town’s dark thoughts—
mute, the monks’ nobler days.

As I took your tiny hands
your round eyes gently broke upon me.
This was long ago.

And yet, when darker songs descend upon the soul,
you appear—a whiteness—in your friend’s autumn landscape."

--Georg Trakl. Translated by Eric Plattner

The Wood at Midwinter.

( via / via )

How the Solar System moves.

“The Face in the Mirror

Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring
From wide, uneven orbits; one brow drooping
Somewhat over the eye
Because of a missile fragment still inhering,
Skin deep, as a foolish record of old-world fighting.

Crookedly broken nose—low tackling caused it;
Cheeks, furrowed; coarse grey hair, flying frenetic;
Forehead, wrinkled and high;
Jowls, prominent; ears, large; jaw pugilistic;
Teeth, few; lips, full and ruddy; mouth, ascetic.

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion."

--Robert Graves via

Solstice hare.

A few hundred years & no trace of paint or the oil companies will remain, just Stonehenge & the angry sky.

"He watches a lot of opera DVDs, thinks about his ex-girlfriend, wanders the city, and begins conversing with an angel, Leo-Eric Fu, whom he meets at cafes to discuss loneliness, life and the koans of Celan."

( via / me )

Net Zero.

"...nothing is more predictable than the media's parrotting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because quite frankly, dears, in the news game these days, we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel." --The Tailor of Panama (1996)

Elbruz Speaks.

   rattle of membranes
in the trees unseen · not yet
   caraway Dog Days

"Above all, don't lie to yourself."

( via / via )

Frutiger Aero aesthetic.

"BOOK I, 'Society Saved' 15: Confrontations

Speak, you cadavers! Who was it that slew you?
Whose hands puts these blades to your chest to plunge through you?
You first, in the shadows there, newly deceased
Your name?—It’s Religion. —Your killer? —The priests.
—You, your names? —Modesty, Reason, Truth, Virtue.
—And who was it cut all your gullets? —The Church—You?
—I am the faith of the Public. —Who stabbed you?
—The oath. —You there, sleeping in blood, stained red through?
—Justice was my name. —By which stabber gored?
—The Judge. —And you, Giant, without sheath or sword
Your bright-burning halo blacked out by much mud?
—I’m Austerlitz. —Who killed you? —The army did."

--Victor Hugo tr Adam Roberts via

Sunset after Rain.

"I am a graveyard hated by the moon."

— Charles Baudelaire (translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay) via @Isidro_Li

The Joke.

( via / via )

"I love (and hate) how often I discover incredible women artists by accident, while researching their artist husbands."

"It is to my mind futile to protract the tale of classical Roman poetry beyond the first century of the Christian era simply because after that date there were so many rifacimenti of classical meters and conventions. Such copyings are forgeries, stereotyped retracings, continuation of gallery favorites and museum pieces--they betoken only that sublimation of sitzfleisch which is the opposite of genius." --The Romanesque Lyric

"This was the only time in my entire academic career when a teacher did not assign his own work as assigned reading."

pallid fields · of frozen nitrogen
   star-studded daytime sky
those hills no human · will hike in the cold
   my heart flutters among

we imagine it matters · what monicker we bestow
   just as we jostle for lines
some man in a suit · once slashed on a map
   in the arrogance of empire

"Seems like it carries on the spirit of Y2K design, but in an even more complex, biomorphic & advanced direction."

( via / via )

"At first it feels like you’re being shot with a BB gun full of cat food..."

"Snarlwit, I know
the thrash of your hatchling
knives,

none shouldered the wind
steeper than I,

like none other
the hail drove through
my trim cantled
skull."

— Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley) via @isidro_li

Don't fall for it.

"If we called biodiversity an art museum or a historic site maybe then the unaccountable corporations would get in trouble for defacing it?" --@bethsawin

"Every unhappy coal mine is unhappy in its own way. Some are so noxious, the canaries suffer from asthma and can no longer trill. Some are so poisonous, the canaries die by the bushel."

( via / via )

Medieval to-do list.

"There was a tweet a while back that was like 'People want to be in communities but keep finding themselves in audiences' that I think about a lot and feel like there's a connected experience of being born to make art but forced to make products" --@LauraKnetzger

"‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11' ."

"TV night
a plot simpler
than my own"

--Jim Kacian (via @frogpondjournal)

"Her monologues are moments of cohesion, synthesis, when the fragments of everything you have ever heard and seen and read begin to surge on a uniting stream. And suddenly she is able to speak, to write."

( me / via )

"That was my first experience of criticism. I didn’t know it was criticism at the time."

         “Sidecar Lit Dash Wrench Light”

The winter of the world · witness inglenook
With protected terror · catch corpse-scent
      The mole gallows
      Lays virtual garland
      Color of the sky
      Is cry of skua

My camera obscura · is cagmag skill
The green aisles graithe · with aggressive cold-shoulder
      Hourly shieldcrack
      Voice of the shadow
      Watch my back
      To finish the book

Unequally arked · ylespil pairing
The slow sliding past · of slagheap mountains
      Utterly lucky
      Contingent lackey
      Color of the sky
      Is cry of skua

(words: inglenook- a cozy place by the fireplace; skua- seagull; cagmag- a diseased shjeep; graithe- to make ready, equip; ylespil- hedgehog)

"WE’RE ALMOST 200 pages into Night Film, the second novel from Marisha Pessl, before anyone actually sits down and watches a movie."

"THE EUROS FOR IDIOMS: Slovenia vs Serbia

🇷🇸 A fairly savage Serbian curse translates to 'may your wife give birth to a centipede so you spend your life working for shoes'

vs

🇸🇮 An UNBELIEVABLY savage Slovene curse goes as follows… 'I hope your tractor breaks'

--@AdamCSharp

"But this conception of the inviolable creator feels rather retrograde in a postmodern world where fan fiction and re-blogging have been fully absorbed into the cultural conversation, and where The Author has been dead for decades."

( via / via )

Sociology of Philosophies.

"powdery almost-full moon, lying like a crushed Valium on an apricot velvet eiderdown" --@calcourtesan (via @minxmarple)

"For years there was certain songs I couldn’t hear without crying, just because they were so beautiful they made my heart flay open bright orange like an overripe persimmon.

branches brimming · the burnt curbside
wafture wends · to my worn carsill
at the laggard light · cool winds carry
& the rock radio · renders it passage

is all i would ask · in the ancient matrix
crows curry · a crew without plans
branches bundled · from the brutal skyfare
the two tribes traik under · tutor & raven

"This short novel by Duras, the only book I have read in all the languages I know, this little novel whose effects one cannot truly explain; the magnetism, the arousal, the sadness—a deep sadness that comes from nowhere and everywhere; the shock and the collision between author and character and reader."

( via / me )

"By 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent."

i must seek out
where the bombs are made
that impossible airt
i must seek out
what handier art
for the human mind?

i must seek out
where the bombs are made

75 neglected/not-well-enough-known but extremely excellent books.

I think a lot of Heath Ledger in 𝐷𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝐾𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 comes from Robert Mitchum in 𝑁𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟.

The Wizard. (thx KNON!)

( via / via )

"The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical."

"thinking about how Adorno spoke of the german language after Auschwitz (the impossibility of poetry and even criticism) and what Gaza means now, even for the English language" --@AriaAber

More table scraps from Jean Paul.

the same incense · after all those years
crusty cup · an end to new music
wrestle the slow roads · around the temple
   cicalatide · cicalatide
cull faith's works · & the strenuous season
crushed like Cruithne · on hard palate henceforth

Clarinet Sonata 1. 2. 3. 4.

( via / via )

"This is the pilgrim's plight--to look the fool while raving towards magic."

"WAITING AS DISPERSION

Observation completes it (chided for not registering a Mercedes) cars in the street to me volumes
at best, Lowell’s sliding by like fish, we’re yet aquarial in museums the Hockney bat room they were
felt, appliqué on kidblue walls with red light on, all the lights reversed gels Sortileges
and old-fashioned striped barber aprons did not come to mind for the b&w Rake set why are we
(modular fireplace block set flame dumb as Diamond wood matches now less per box) to be a dance, hello to ash
as a touch of purple in a blonde (with red plastic hairclips like mussels on pasta) appeals,
marchioness contralting’s sword hitting the w hard. . .people in beards and shorts run.
It’s the brands that are hard, no reason to retrieve or notice as in nurseries, garden shops the gravel suffers
kettledrum burlap trees nothing (the presumption) where it will be and sand
in piles for putting aerating maybe but not likely any displayed pot rose
fasces and peaches or plum labeled the thin whippy branch denuded, showroomed cars
tea in my cup for a third coffee, hideous penciled portrait obscured today by a hanging plant without (much) style.
Aquamarine I haven’t thought of in so long as a birthstone for me, lapis and so on lumped by Hall as
junk stones, Saturnian, and for astrologers ivory counts as a stone."

--Gerald Burns

"As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive."

"But the greater the creator the more derelict the regions where his powers fail him; all about their fertile lands are deserts where not a blade of grass grows, swamps where the foot sinks deep in mud." --Virginia Woolf

You're sweet, but in that dangerous kind of way.

( via / via )

"They have to assume that these are not real people."

"And the psychedelic and spotted scarlet toadstool
Which he gulped at one go down his gullet--it engendered
Leprechauns in his brain..."

--Artorius

"Why can't I simply be here, like a stone?"

chapeflash tops the tinchel
a townie not clownwhite
you merge mouths with targe-shade
a moth that time limes at
battery of bedlam

Stone Canyon Nocturne.

( via / via )

"When I got there the dead opossum..."

"doom scrolling in bed ...
grandma's quaint fussing
no more"

--@coffeeandhai

"Konrad is teaching the script in Sierra Leone. His students are writing poems in it ..."

"But all were still as town-clocks, when the hands
Rest on the half-past two of summer days..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

If Saturn were as close to the Earth as the Moon is.

( via / via )

Activity on the Sun 17th June; through the eyes of the SDO.

"The white tip of a fox’s tail is called the CHAPE." --@haggardhawks

"At the edge of a deepening abyss..."

luciferase assay
echoes in dim Dallas
rehearsal by hearsay
fearsomely curse-footloose

"The greatest impact AI image generation has had to date..."

( via / via )

One congressman from Rhode Island.

someone painted Stonehenge
with spraypaint orange

for an issue that was huge
someone painted Stonehenge

when i make my hajj
nothing will discourage

someone painted Stonehenge
with spraypaint orange

Seduction Theory.

"My good friend Rebecca Solnit has written: 'Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection. Let us be fed by revolutionary joy.' " --@jhalifax

"As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting..."

( via / via )

High Desert, New Mexico.

"As a working class kid growing up in the north of England who was a voracious reader, I thought it impossible that someone like me could grow up to make a living out of writing books.

Turns out I was right."

--@davidmbarnett

"The old age and high equilibrium temperature yet remarkably low density of this planet (0.58 g/cm3) suggest that its gaseous envelope should have been stripped by high-energy stellar irradiation billions of years ago."

      "The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,
   The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
   The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
   To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
   Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
   For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
   In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say."

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Everybody reads the first paragraph.

( via / via )

"We might call Orwell’s English Socialists 'accelerationsts'." (via Mefi)

search whisperer which-way'd
& whommled · bad hombre
in the half light heartworm

herald of mome chromeplate
the right one awaited

I Shall Be Released.

Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was the original Evil Clown.

The Wine.

( via / via )

Seichi junrei.

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”

― Noam Chomsky

"...A disproportionate amount of chart-toppers come from the bleakest peripheries of the Industrial music subculture."

"The Commuter

   I’m careworn weary,
a faceless face ‧ in a flock of suits,
a sullen shield-wall ‧ shifting homeward.
From platform push ‧ to packed out train,
crumpled in carriage, I’m careworn weary,
enclosed by stress ‧ and collar white.
My neck abraded, I need escape,
bound to bosses – bondsman loyal
tied by necktie ‧ tightly knotted,
Oaths sworn to office ‧ unappreciated.
The rails rumble, a rhythmic dirge,
an uneasy echo ‧ of my empty life.
then brakes biting ‧ break the song-spell:
A squealing scream, shriek of ravens,
slows to standstill ‧ our steel paved journey,
this train of thralls, tired and jaded,
that wait for word ‧ of what is wrong.
The carriage carries ‧ its crowd nowhere.
I crave comfort. I’m careworn weary.
The guard gives ‧ a grim announcement:
an obstruction struck, stopping all routes.
Mute commuters ‧ make no complaint;
a broken body ‧ blocks the home-path.
My nerves ruined, I needed escape,
but the austere mortgage ‧ stopped beside me
with finger fetters ‧ fast round my throat.
Its threat a whispered, 'I know where you live.' "

--Martin Vine in Withowinde 177, p. 10, Spring, 2016 via

"Today, facsimiles of his instruments are showing up, and ensembles with no connection to his aesthetic or intentions are moving into the world, riding his coattails, diluting his oeuvre."

( via / via )

Heath-Stubb's Hafiz.

woofus tsantsa once more
in the wide gray tidepool
headlights alert lidless
the long vow-shot hours

all the lights seem antsy
oligarch merch moly
remember harsh homelands
headlights, dark in deadlock

branchsnap Grinch-strewn graveyard
growing in foe armsstrength

"We have neither the time nor the space to create a soul..."

"Did you kill the sparrow?
Then why is its song still in the tree?"

—Khaled Juma
▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎ (via @zeeshanjaanam)

Good old-fashioned creative coding.

( via / via )

"...we don't want this film inside our heads..."

"MERGING (Anagrammed Lines)

More winter seedlings —
more needless writing;
entire worlds seeming
to merge in wilderness...."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"I refuse to congratulate the congratulated."

“Take back the moon light path”

Games I play with the hangman
On the hangman’s time

Field with yellow wildflowers

Diaphanous_viaducts.