( via / via )

"Have we gone from H. G. Wells to Yevgeny Zamyatin in two short years?"

those without · the talent of empathy
learn to fake it · when others are looking
we should let them show · their ice to the world
a handicap · but nothing to reward
nothing to be proud of · & give power for

"To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years."

"For aeons, the confident quickly wound up dead unless they knew what they were doing, so we evolved to equate seasoned confidence with competence. But today, there is rarely a price for being wrong, so our attraction to confidence now attracts us to the most confidently idiotic."
—@gurwinder

First the war news, then the weather.

( via / via )

The Hexadecimalist Heresy.

"But Love is gone; and Silence seems to grow
Along the misty road where we must go."

—Lord de Tabley via

Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-Flat Major, K. 447: 1. Allegro.

"podcast"

Sharkhenge going up · vifgage twirl
lemming camel's eye · carousel lurch
in the nugatory night · shards gathered
i call puzzle · blazoned way
digital thong · therblig perne
old TV show · telltale colors
things explode · in the plural dark
& cold vertigo · throughout the land

Fushitsusha 不失者 @ St John-at-Hackney 5/10/2012.

( via / noealzii on tumblr )

"The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder."

"News from Paris

Down through Venetian blinds the morning air
Sifts from a sky where peach and azure fuse;
Street noises enter too, and in a distant square
A regimental band plays Sambre et Meuse.

It is Felicity: she sits and reads once more
The Gothic script of the West-Easterly Divan;
Her silver shoe just touches the waxed floor,
And pot pourri transcends the vase from old Japan.“

—Charles Spear

146 moons.

"The age of a need to manufacture consent is coming to a close. All they need to manufacture now is confusion." --Eris @discordiareview on subst

Vidar just quietly prepares for the end of the world.

( me / via )

"Philosophy can no more do without reason than music can do without silence."

"Once a sign of technical limitations, pixel art in video games now serves the same purpose as black-and-white film in movies. It signals that a game is both low budget and highbrow"
—@varaxes

Monitoring the Situation.

a faint whistle sipping
in suq antelucan
bunched-up sleep battles
barely delivered serve

the rich coffee scratches
cranchneed & brawl-folly
outside war is waiting
& work of foist-moisture

rumble-of-tires Rorschach
rista made of thirst traps

Philosophy & Theory Roundup - March 6, 2026.

( via / via )

"The post-historical period in which aesthetics become what only theory can determine has turned out to be another period in history, another finite chapter in the narrative that gets tiresome at times but never ends."

"recusatio"

the merry prank rolls on
or generational curse
as loss upon swift loss
overflows the urn—
world plated on a terrapin

tornado-warned, we dine
on just-downed albatross
wary of knocks from ICE,
frogs fallen on the lawn
world plated on a terrapin

& it's to you i sing
O turtle of our crunch
ignore vast monkey wrench
our great wheel of dung
world plated on a terrapin

a little longer wobble
as i creep t'ward dust
no poet of holocaust
but daedalist of bubble
world plated on a terrapin

sober as lidless judge
the canteen's out of ether
this spectacle takes another
sort to clock its siege
world plated on a terrapin

i only will joke & whine
& parse shades of giving up
fell squibs of queasy stripe
or even waxwing pun

worldplay to don a terror pen

Be hard like Avvakum.

"I wonder if there is a 'Tao of Polycrisis' where no crisis is ever confronted and resolved. Rather, the ever-renewing crises gently compost the older crises, which fade from awareness, because their victims are mostly dead" —@bruces.bsky.social

Top 15 Weird-Folk Albums.

( via / me )

The Mandé Variations.

"I finally saw this [One Battle after Another] and can best describe it as an ABC After School Special for the Weather Underground." —@pagesandframes

Four Walls. (via)

squirrel outside
in dead flowerbed
brown on brown

Too hard to train.

( via / via )

Preview of coming attractions.

“The Prisoner

I walked along the winding road;
It was high summer; on one side
Behind pale foliage sinuously flowed
The hand-sown wheat in rustling pride.

Grey sprawling stone, before me towered the school;
I touched the chapel-corner through the hedge,
Traced dimly in the window’s painted pool
Three mitres and the shield with rope and wedge.

Deep peace! Yet there was panic terror shut inside;
The bronze bells rolled and reeled in flowing tide.
Against that shock time buckled to resist,
And no sound pierced the loneliness, no voices cried;
Only the great towers trembled in the pouring mist.”

—Charles Spear

Robber uses Google translate to announce hold up at Ecuadorian restaurant in New Jersey.

"The real body count is how many people are in therapy because of you." —@justmackenzie

Why I Like Strange Books.

( via / via )

What Kind of Times are These.

"Obsessions are the most durable form of intellectual capital."

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick via @jacobwren.bsky.social

"Being online enough to tell which gen z slang terms..."

2.
Venetian blindfold blaspheme
blurry weather, scrub subfusc
hygge hatch conscription
halted in mid-falter

coign on the Third Coast
castaway villain moustache
blue & green fake getaway
gastro-pub for stubble

sterling the loss scar-count
spurious chromebright kitestring
amber dragonfly's rapture
rushing into flush mode

storms fugitive fathom'd
ferry to parts stared at
wreckage i call cookbook
calm amidst meme-pretzel

so go, army ortsweep
antheap-jostled earth-hostage
bombs are words that work
wearily dropped optics

3.
they thought they knew things they didn't know
nature has a special plan for them

Black Hours manuscript.

( via / via )

shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

"all things dwell in raking light"

1.
coiled virulence · Death's-Head moth
   teal cup on the table
the cracked column · of the cooling unit
   that the surd night come

   and the deep river ran on

river right & river wrong
Osage hazel hearse-hump
huge Pentagon grugprab
river of lies · filth river
   animation of golf
standing before · that oblong looming
   it was like the Coliseum
   who knows what i remember

and the deep river ran on

i think of'en · of the Strait of Hormuz
   like if your toilet's blocked
two miles wide · at one point
   two fuckin' miles
   in the Coliseum, slaves
died for others' amusement

and the deep river ran on

A diagram of Spectacle.

"If your god needs Pete Hegseth to usher in the eschaton, get a better god." —@seamripper

"This has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass."

( via / via )

Layout.

"shitposting on substack feels like invasive rats arriving in Hawaii" —@moultano

Herzog in the Forgotten Cave.

"white earwig"

mushroom dreams, the drastic
will drawn upon spillways
needle budged t'ward blindfold
abased chatter on platforms

molten display spirals
to spoil blurs where toils spring
chilled in the char-kitchen
don't sleep—sleep—let sleep perish

The Decline of Deviance.

( via / via )

Cover up.

   yearning that there should
again be the silhouettes
   burned into brick walls

& slow dying for millions
after the first, vaporized...

"The island was the physical node, but the network itself was the point. It ramified and in so doing connected everything."

I'm not a critic, i'm a sad epicure.

Robert Crumb, 1985.

( me / via )

A Brief Look into a Locked Room.

"Still am I faithful to the lonely faith.
Dreaming, alone and melancholy here..."

—Lionel Johnson via

"Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?"

“Memoriter

Ovals of opal on dislustred seas,
Skyshine, and all that indolent afternoon
No clash of arms, no shouting on the breeze;
Only the reeds moaned soft or high their empty rune.

The paladins played chess and did not care,
The crocus pierced the turf with random dart.
Then twanged a cord. Through space, from Oultremer
That other arrow veered toward your heart.”

—Charles Spear

Poem.

( via / via )

不失者 — あっち (fushitsusha – acchi).

"The Church of a Dream

Sadly the dead leaves rustle in the whistling wind,
Around the weather-worn, gray church, low down the vale:
The Saints in golden vesture shake before the gale;
The glorious windows shake, where still they dwell enshrined;

Old Saints by long dead, shrivelled hands, long since designed;
There still, although the world autumnal be, and pale,
Still in their golden vesture the old saints prevail;
Alone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind.

Only one ancient Priest offers the Sacrifice,
Murmuring holy Latin immemorial:
Swaying with tremulous hands the old censer full of spice,
In gray, sweet incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical:
To him, in place of men, for he is old, suffice
Melancholy remembrances and vesperal."

—Lionel Johnson

Behind his Resolute Desk.

Editors are like the doctors in old times who didn't wash their hands.

The Lady's Not for Burning.

( via / me )

A Short Introduction to Carnatic Music.

"if 500 people read your posts that means you’ve got about the same readership that Moby Dick had during Melville’s lifetime" —https://substack.com/@simsben1

My old review of The Skin.

funicular nescience
the same nab & tablet

behind a van vending
sky vanishment psyop

words to a quid welded
what next world unsnecks them

"The equivalent in not-quite contemporary English might be a four poster bed."

( me / via )

Every technological era gets its “retrowave” moment.

"SUMMER SOLSTICE AT STONEHENGE (Palindrome)

Sun!
In my halo,
open,
I mull its altar: All.

I plait its lost light.
I lag, emanating:
I lay a ray, align.

I tan a megalith gilt.

Solstitial pillar, at last illumine —
pool a hymn in us."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"A sort of innocent decadence follows."

Among the greatest works of impermanence is the idea of permanence.

DJ Regime Change.

( via / me )

Wood and Stone.

"The Sierra Nevada, groved with sequoia and blackjack pine and smelling like a hardware store run by sasquatch..." —Joseph S Furey via

When they bring "democracy".

said Housman to Huysmans
your swerves spared no crisis
said Huysmans to Housman
scant sense to those vows, man

"Each year the amount of energy in this ecosystem goes down. And people are desperate for some way of staving off the end."

( via / via )

When i assume my final form, it will be something like this.

"water cremation"

thunder, bombs fall, bone-deep
ballast of tryst-whisper
the ant scramble screen test
scrutiny through ruins
tumble of torn marble
attests skyey piehole
in the mild cured morning
moult vertigo legwork

Polymarket pulls nuke bets.

"Live music is at least 50,000-60,000 years old (Divje Babe flute)

Notated music is at least 3400 years old (Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal)

Recorded music is only 160 years old (Au Clair de la Lune)." —Dom Aversano via

The Exile's Song.

via / via )

The only explanation of poetry.

"Jellyfish have survived all 5 mass extinctions which goes to show the best way to succeed in this world is to not have a brain or heart" —@nameshiv.bsky.social

Cromwell Textile Cloth.

"antidote to houseshame"

Styxcrossing a strange fold
stack pennies on the thin seesaw
gray spindly agreements
grasp the pathway's dodge-logic

ravens spiral spurning
transport bearing new dances
dying sun the real deal
don't you misconstrue it

Styxcrossing with stout hearts
alone, stained with brainstuff
pixels in bright pantomime
parallel to siege-Egypt

ravens settle rightful
rulers where the lens game ends

Monk Near the Sea.

( via )

"As a painter, it is positively embarrassing to admit how much I have learned about tone, value, proportion, mid-tones, composition, color theory and other art ABCs by watching the tattoo critiques on Ink Master."

"silence of the iambs"

Armageddon imgrat
only to pass grass burns
algorithms' riddle
rede from one stupider

dark green on burnt orange
graveside firelit conclave

night shaken & shapespoilt
shelter where the melt goes
the gift taken gaudily
gunfire a firm sermon

dark green on burnt orange
graveside firelit conclave

before sunrise sears with
sensible repentance
exact change at the zigzag
zoom laughing like glim rumors

Ducks eating peas from one of our best writers' hands.

“I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, some of us have not died. Some of us did not die [...] And what shall we do, we who did not die?”

—June Jordan via @zeeshanpathan.bsky.social

Mississippi Goddam.

( me / via )

The offing.

"did RFK release his spores or something everyone is sick" —@howlitzer.art

Alstroemerias.

"why wait"

lulzmaxxing from mayhem
shop now pay later

marksmanship its own riptide
abstract cat. wolf down innings
of angleworm bruise cloying
hot take on hot take on TikTok
stakes in my toolkit, oolong-
phaeic velocirapture

"We didn’t save movies from mediocrity. We made good taste a gated community and then wrote think pieces about how the gate is actually a door."

( via / via )

Everyone who goes to war should wear this helmet.

"fennec-eared larva"

riot more red neon
than ruin, dream brewer
scattered crumbs & crimson
increasing thirst, cursed thing
but welcome

Golgotha.

“ 'So it’s a Meow Wolf type thing'” I ask the hopelessly nerdy Chinese girl behind the counter.

She’s deeply offended. 'They actually copied us.' Her face says I might be intruding on her TikTok time." —Cairo Smith via

The Eightfold Year.

( via / via )

"It was painful to hear that man stand up there and gloat about the good job he felt his secret police force did in our city."

"They came to the top of a mountain. The shadow of a hawk fell over them."
—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"You like lists, because rather than being one big thing they are lots of little things, and you are also not one big thing but rather lots of little things."

What i warned you of
In my bloodstream sings
Though the paths remain
Where i mark my pain
And i teach my love
Cratered ways & things
That bite. No dry end,
Nor veils be the friend
Of this. I but wait
Creaking at a gate
And the ullage sings.

(2000)

"Nora, — the commonest of readers, — said, 'what’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book'."

( via / via )

"The whole city smells like weed and piss. DC also smells like weed, but only parts of it smell like piss."

“POEM

As a prison is most prison in
the tiny cracks in
its walls
I am most me in my pores

I lower my pores into the water
what will that net me
I open my pores to the air
what will that apprehend

now even those outer elements
dream of escaping
from the felony in each

of the body’s cells
the murderer
I pen within”

—Knott

Audio Gylfaginning.

"I maintain the firm belief that everything we've been suffering through since 2015 is directly tied to President Obama making fun of trump at a White House Correspondence Dinner. That was the catalyst for all of this pain and suffering." —bejamointhomas616.bsky.social

"Some pieces numb themselves with the aesthetics of mystery in order to guise their commitment to vagueness."

( via / via )

To bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus.

"LOST (Palindrome by Pairs)

On most
loyal ash
lay a lost
moon."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Selected experts.

      "study war some more"

   three evil old men
in five, ten years will be gone
   but their bombs fall now

mackerel sky, later storms
i will take due precautions

"Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference."

( me / via )

A bit on Emily Hahn, one of my favorite forgotten writers.

      "wolf blueberries"

some wild place left · solaceless
   from the turmoil go

Hey Siri.

"This is a place that supposedly receives three days of sunshine a year, has no jobs, alcoholism is the only past time, and eviscerated Soviet era buildings bookend concrete khrushevkas. The population here is overwhelmingly Russian, and they pray each day for a Russian invasion. It might improve things." —Jace Shugden via

"I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems."

( via/ via )

Lots of good thoughts on Dickens.

"...I knew you were not stasis
   bedded in the marl

...What we know
wouldn't
fill
a lemur's fist..."

—Diane Ackerman, "Neptune"

Refugees.

"Grandpa Fester"

razbliuto blood moon
as black ice writes crackling
double tap in turbid
tincture: Epstein unction

blood moon amid fathoms
of mild seiche-erasure

The Children Speaking from the Rubble.