( me / me )

Friday's Notes.

"...with highly recommended books, new and old, appearing on social media like a stampede of cupcakes. Even if the books are put through one's highly developed filter, it is still impossible to keep up, leading to bingeing or starvation reading patterns, equally unhappy. Reading Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New, the second chapter of Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy, it's not difficult to regard this as the modern reader's contrapasso, the concept that a soul's punishment in Hell corresponds to the sin it committed on earth. " --Steve Mitchelmore at This-Space blog

Night Taxi.

"never alone
even though in the flesh
you are absent

for your spirit's not lost
it's where a seabird flies"

--an'ya

"Now, if you’re wondering how you managed to live through the 2000s and the early 2010s and never hear the phrase ‘Frutiger Aero,’ it’s because it didn’t exist back then."

( me / me )

"The plan is to meet Meaghan at Wolski’s, a 116-year-old bar currently filled with Republicans, journalists, locals, and federales. She texts me that it 'feels like fucking Saigon in 1968.' But this is America in 2024, so the flight keeps getting delayed."

lies told to the dead
& never taken back
invisible doors unsneck
new ways of being sad

for now the collapse delayed
that was never much at issue
azure ivies enlace you
& your dream of Euclid

"Occasionally, I will also leave something on his headstone, usually a small plastic frog."

"Witless archangels playing pitch and toss" --J Stanyan Bigg

"The unnerving (for me) scenario has the world populated with people who have only slight memory resources, and the lack turns them away from a sense of personal, and maybe cultural, history. Without developed memory, there is no sense of precedent; there is just the stimulus field of the moment."

( via / me )

Fantasy Brutalist painter.

"Shostakovich liked Jesus Christ Superstar so much that he went to watch it two nights in a row" --@tambourine

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1241.

I die of thirst beside the fountain.
None of us has tried the fountain.

At night the fountain glows within;
dark bits of flotsam ride the fountain.

The desert-builders hedge their words
but drink, however wide the fountain.

The grotto seemed today run dry.
Just to be sure, we pried the fountain.

Let Graywyvern whisper deep
and you yourself provide the fountain.

Castle Hill, Huddersfield.

( me, AI from a photo by JR Compton / via )

secret㊙️sauce - The Photoshoot.

mazed in the churning merger
cool gray keening
moth's course
scuttle · prongscamper
i stumble on the staid grass

The Forest Never Sleeps.

"those aren't red flags, they are green flags accelerating away from you" --@nathanpmyoung

"He may never have consciously admitted it, but his work reflects the fact that his city on a hill was constructed by the deaths of Indians, slaves, factory workers, and natives of places thousands of miles away."

( laura ostteen in dallas filth / @ememess )

Escher in Corsica.

"rituals are to time what home is to space: they render time habitable - byung-chul han" --@jsmnkk

"Started making fake Chick tracts..."

wounded by wuss mishap
in the war-churn story
write with colored inkpens
alternating gunfight
one among key panics
Ixion-scree torwright

ƧΣᄂFIΣMΛПIΛ 😽🤳.

( via / me )

Insect 4.

"The Black Art

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren't enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.”

–Anne Sexton via chris bourke on fb

"To know this is forgiveness."

" 'So she forgets your wisdom and wit, Plautus.'
'I do not see how a cat can have wit.'
'Oh, he has made several bright remarks to me this morning,' said Miss Wolsey. 'He came into my room in quite a facetious spirit. I could hardly keep up with him.' "

--@icomptonburnett

"What's the use of the taste of coffee?"

( via / via )

Ludic Capitalism.

"But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; so keep looking--keep looking--for anybody named Whisperwell Jenkins may well have hidden your sleepwalking-filched stuff in a weird place." --@HarrySKeeler

The Nest.

1.
spongy
lawn echoing
sphagnum sup on a lamp
mystic signs for me to fetch through
vigils

2.
vigils dim
Ogpu pilloried
slate askew
odorous
light ampule wobble aggry
spurious curseword

3.
legacy dawn dugout
dappled tumble capture
monoprint once preening
problematized wise guy

imperfections ample
austere eye on clearance
the browse brim horizon
broods among swart hungers

nosebleed seat this season
sizzlebane & chirr waning
no windshield block blanches
bloody rags run cudgelled

bystander staunch henchman
to stuff you'd busk roughly
folio-proof fiefdom
affordance turned mortal

4.
dreamwork swerving swamp gas
swullocking ice dicebox
after paper · piffle
appalls one who bundles
zero & its zindiqs
shazam nightly plighted

Puggle.

( me / via )

Surviving Suburbia.

spurious Payne's gray
how supple just the same
impossible subject
spread on all the edges
cover them with care
ithyphallic catsup
name anagrammed not
the Beloved's, or loosely
nenuphar largo

"What recommends itself, then, is the idea that art may be the only remaining medium of truth in age of incomprehensible terror and suffering."

"infuriating to see men suggesting that the purpose of older women is to assist in raising children when their true purpose is to solve crimes." --@SketchesbyBoze

"wind like the turning pages of a grimoire..."

( me / via )

HeatDeath.

"Exalify, v. to remove otherness" --@fantasticvocab 11-18-22

Catching the evening news.

still the stridulation · of a strict schedule
these beige & cerulean · eructations
hopeless without the hest · of a higher glower
i turn to music · to remind me
   of non-battlefield engagements

A new analysis of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone published today in Nature shows it is likely to have come from NE Scotland, at least 750km from its current location. More.

( me / via )

Rainy Afternoon.

   endemic
where the door sticks
   flag fallen
off globes & maps
   learn new ways
to wield corners
   the mask hangs
figure amount

"After being absent for a considerable amount of time, Loewe relates in his 'Dictionary of the Circassian Language (Containing All the Most Necessary Words for the Traveller, the Soldier, and the Sailor, with the Exact Pronunciation of Each),' the scholar returned to the sultan, 'hopeless of success and carrying in his hand a bag of pebbles. "There," said he, shaking the bag. "I can give you no better imitation than this of the sounds of the language spoken by that people".' "

"Joyce used to read me Finnegan's Wake [sic]. I'm in it but I don't know exactly where, and I'll be damned if I'll go and look for it." --Djuna Barnes

The Financial Interceptor.

( via / via [thread] )

The Great Curve. (via @lizhand)

"How is your devastation today?
Are you searching for new images for it? Have they become your only means to reverse or stop the horror? To catalog Remembrance? To take down the criminal with an eternity of shame? Because this worked before? Did it?" --@FadyJoudah

Ronald Grump.

bricked-up reliquary · bradykinin
   orange cone colonnade
reverse limerence · laggard goalpost
   i am lost in the summerlands

Feeding the demon.

( via / via )

"All the things that used to make me think I was a legitimate human being are now like a wagonload of dead skin I am carting around."

"a deer
crying in the rain
then heard no more"

--Buson via @bashosociety

たまゆら.

"As we traverse the icy Alps with lights in the night that we should not be frightened by the abysses and the long journey: so fate surrounds us with night and only hands us torches for the next part of the way that we should not be distressed at the crevices of the future and the distance of our destination." --Jean Paul: A Reader ed. T J Casey (1992)

Druid festival at Stonehenge, 1815.

( me / via )

Why Did the Process Between Pilate and Jesus Last Only Two Minutes?

"we have more professional philosophers now than ever before but the number of wandering sages is CRITICALLY LOW" --@beingandslime (via @helenreflects)

Find Me.

"RUINS (Palindrome by Pairs)

By ruins,
trees rest,
in ruby."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Evening Lake.

( me/ via )

Gas mask thread.

Rewatching The Shining for the first time in many years, i feel confirmed that i only like the parts without Nicholson in it. While his is a bravura performance, a little of it goes a long way; & the trope of The Chase is for me irredeemably trite, even when framed in the most unequal terms & filmed ravishingly (Night of the Hunter). What Kubrick does so well, here, (as in 2001 & others, e.g. Eyes Wide Shut ) is Liminality. His camerawork & editing render what would otherwise be quite an enticing environment, both uncanny & laden with secrets. And he underscores it with the most frenzied Goblinesque imaginable. In fact, he seems to describe a dialectic between the two: whenever there is Liminality, there is also the threat of violence erupting (which movies have conditioned us to expect). --It is also interesting, that at more or less the same time, Liminality was bring reimagined as sunny (Chinatown), & political (All the President's Men), though it had existed since silent movie days (Murnau the supreme invoker of liminal states & places). So Goblincore & Liminalcore are each incomplete without the other. Question: is there another way to complement one or both of them?

Pixel deer gif.

“Lacking sun, know how to ripen in ice.”

~ Henri Michaux via @holdengraber

Travelogue II.

( via / me )

"More and more Azrael was arriving too late for the world." (via @mjohnharrison)

"The sound of an iPhone falling out of someone’s pocket and hitting the floor is such a specific sound. And I hear it so often." --@EverySongIveEve

Paula Rego’s affecting images in her abortion series.

"The cool air, rocks me as waves; on the sandy bed, of the sun at my back.

Crimson-flecked, the forest fills my sight; the grand horizon, of the autumnal sea.

Decades on, I am still not ready; but the fall wind smells, of rising tides."

--@AmericanSijo

"He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there."

( via / via )

Bela Lugosi's Dead.

dusty rose suede · holding sunsets
    the diagram smeared
Arkham
brume skittishly
charcoal ratcheted urn
and abdicate from pumpkin smoke
veldt Usk

dusty rose suede

Totem.

"FAMINE MOON

No omen, I’m a foetal stone.
I die, null, at a fate lit far —
die raw, one loss, Selene resewn
on woe. We lord a memo-star,
afar, at some mad role we own.
On, we, serene, less sole now are.
   I draft. I let a fatal lune.
   I die, not slate. O, famine moon!"

--@Anthony_Etherin

Allures (1961). ☆☆☆☆☆ (The great experimental works are ontological--they question the very foundations, in this case: what is time, what is narrative that the mind seeks to impose it; & what is being, that we imagine we have it?)

( me / via )

Our Lord and a furry angel of death having a civil conversation at sea.

"Word of the day is ‘swullocking’ (19th-century, from East Anglia): swelteringly, suffocatingly hot; mafting." --@susie_dent

Dark of the Moon.

marshalling fadewords · to fend off daylight
swullocking coursework · no end to the teaching
rock projectile · in the sparse grass
Cadillac fun'ral

Marian.

( via / via )

Today's experiment 🛝.

tinsel & otherwise untrue
names announced from the landscape
i tarry not
bite the wax whiplash
grow old in the understanding

Izgubljena.

"...to this day when you use a proper toilet in Anatolia you are said to do so a la franga, while a simple hole in the ground compels you to do your business a la turca..." -Justin Smith-Ruiu

Sun rising.

( via / via )

A few seconds of a bad dream.

"Frog was trembling. 'I am not afraid!' he shouted." --@FrogandToadbot

Sirikit Concerto.

Pursues me even in my dreams, this rain
of blood, & i'm alone with it come dawn.
A scuttling pair of claws, a paper crane
& all my neighbors gleeful with the con.
A yen to mind my last & turn cynic
answers, for it was us who taught bright bombs
could save a hamlet; huff that kinnikkinnik...
Such is my mild scourge or Moloch salaams
compiling. But the record-trail remains
& leads me deep into death's labyrinth
where i betimes must mount that stupid plinth
to check out just how far the treadmill's gains.

Covert machine translation.

( via/ via )

A Day in the Garden. (via @taimei_886 )

jade sojourn · where the jedburgh verdict
   lags its velocipede uphill
verdazurine inkjet · candle in a cold
   cathedral thrist again
i dream nada · drought ingot
   giraigun weakening
jedburgh sojourn

Waterloo 21:12:54.

It'd be better not to say "truth" at all, but stick with "insights" & "methodologies"...

continuum #204.

( via / via )

Sunrise at Avebury.

"But the secrets of such a book are not absolute: once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all true secrets." --Grimscribe

At the memorial to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

"An abandoned courtyard: an old tree:
A temple bell lying on its side:
The world I live in.

They win and we lose; we lose and they win.
Vines wrap around the rotting bones.

She knows he won’t come back from the army, but patches the clothes he left just in case."

--Eliot Weinberger via

Mind Blown.

( lanny quarles on fb / via )

The menhir of Roquinarc’h.

"Salvador Dali

The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring's
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
The children chasing butterflies turn round and see him there
With his hand in the well and my body growing from his head,
And are afraid. They drop their nets and walk into the wall like smoke.

The smooth plain with its mirrors listens to the cliff
Like a basilisk eating flowers.
And the children, lost in the shadows of the catacombs,
Call to the mirrors for help:
'Strong-bow of salt, cutlass of memory,
Write on my map the name of every river.'

A flock of banners fight their way through the telescoped forest
And fly away like birds towards the sound of roasting meat.
Sand falls into the boiling rivers through the telescopes' mouths
And forms clear drops of acid with petals of whirling flame.
Heraldic animals wade through the asphyxia of planets,
Butterflies burst from their skins and grow long tongues like plants,
The plants play games with a suit of mail like a cloud.

Mirrors write Goliath's name upon my forehead,
While the children are killed in the smoke of the catacombs
And lovers float down from the cliffs like rain."

--David Gascoyne

Time Became the Tide.

"I am sending you something here that will help against the little doubts that sometimes come to one; it is a piece of sycamore bark. You take it between the thumb and the index finger, hold it very tight and think of something good. But--I can't keep it from you--poems, and yours especially, are even better pieces of sycamore bark." --Celan to Nelly Sachs (1960)

"The movie may also dispel any skepticism about the finality of his decision to abandon his vocation, since it is hard to imagine a more thorough and systematic statement of intellectual despair." (via Mefi)