( michael puttonen on fb / via )

Norman Lear & the Power of Television. (thanx Melanie!)

"Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds." —Audre Lorde, in conversation with Adrienne Rich, 1979 (via @brandonshimoda)

Roland Kirk with the Mothers of Invention. (via aetherphonica)

"In the rites they practiced and in the myths they constructed about themselves, the Aztecs painted their universe as a harsh and supremely unsatisfactory place whose secret and diabolical workings they and only they had the fortitude and determination to face." --This Tree Grows Out of Hell

The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption. (via mefi)

mna'n

( via / me )

Contact Signal.

"as the ambulance
slaloms between slowing cars
love in urgency
barely dodges between blocks
but perhaps it will save you"

--@catbake

This is How I Move Tiny Squares.

Stringing beads. Each bead a syllable.

Some of them are radioactive.

Digital Truth.

( via / via )

Sun Spore.

"For a second I thought it was odd that threads doesn’t just automatically download itself onto our phones and then I remembered — you have to invite vampires in" --@jordandavispoet

Douglass read by James Earl Jones.

   throat chakra
Croatoan
   moth · mathom
storm schism chart
   wax ukase
dry caoutchouc scrape

Pixel waves on a black sea.

( via / lanny quarles on fb )

Rotating cells.

   naufragia page
hum of broken calx agate
sip fallow apogee pang

Skull Figure.

"LABYRINTH (Palindromes)

Daedalus, nine pass….
I, Minos, add a son.
I miss a peninsula, dead.

Spool's end: Air, an isle….
Vary. A way ravels in
Ariadne’s loops."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"There’s no comparable data set going back before 1979, but given what we know about global temperature trends, it’s not out of the question these were the warmest globally averaged days in centuries, and perhaps even in the 100,000-plus years since the onset of the last ice age."

( via )

Duke of Zuke.

"... Wittgenstein, from whose formidable talents came a house, a sewing machine, and an airplane propeller as well as the books for which he is honored, said toward the end of his anguished life that he had always wanted to write a poem but could never think of a poem to write." -- Guy Davenport, from the introduction to Ronald Johnson's Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses via @octopus_grigori

Lucinda's muse.

"long heat wave
somewhere a black bird flies
one feather cooler"

--an'ya

GN 🥱🥱.

( via / via )

Squishy driving video.

"MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN;
OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
(Palindrome by Pairs)

Refine research,
to see law,
then omen,
thaw —
else to char
serene fire…."

--@Anthony_Etherin

w4ter f4lls (v2).

"Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Then the ground slides away from under our feet. But not for long." --Shestov

Widerruf.

( me / via )

The Stranger Song.

"I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there's more difference than you would imagine to be possible." --G K Chesterton

Spiders on Drugs.

"The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die."

--Tennyson

It's 1:28 am EST.

( in search of pagan hollywood on fb/ me )

A 400-year-old puzzle about sphere packing, solved.

   is that Jupiter
or Venus? - dualities
   warring in our eyes

how, once, beneath all the stars
i walked without any light.

Golden Earrings.

"...Ah, my good friend,
I was a poet once, and thought strange things,
Very strange things. How I would walk alone
And mutter in my going, dare the heavens
As thus! clap sudden hand upon my brow,
Hold up a finger and cry hist! to the air,
Walk you a mile bareheaded in the rain,
Stop, gaze the ground, stamp like a bull, and sigh,
Sigh like a painted Boreas! or in fierce
Obstetric frenzy of the labouring Muse,
Collar the astonished wayfarer with 'Sir,
Your tablets!' scare the woodman's hut with calls
For pen and paper, or make eloquent
The graphic bark of beech. Ah, those days when
I courted Sophonisba, long ago,
And we two loved the moonlight and wrote verses!
It melts my very heart to think on't!"

--Sydney Dobell, Balder--Part the First (1854)

Continuum #126.

( me / via )

"Rather than engage in the task of describing the world anew, a world equally if not more complex in its social arrangements than half a century ago, this revivalism lulls us into a depoliticising stasis." (via @saintsoftness)

"Every trade has a little charlatanism in it; ours has much." --Anatole France

A Japanese Buddhist Monastery.

In earthquake lands, one & one-storey only;
four years of caked-up dust, is it?--I can't tell,
in haiku or a cento paradelle:
a stony silence, broken just as stonily.

Now others have at times seen me more nesh
nor have i chosen, not at all, these ways;
as if in shelter sought from fiercest blaze,
my hunger & the dark's own hungers mesh.

And this has been some little good i've done
when all the mad ambitions are driven off,
though i will rest not even then to gauge

this tower against the sun...
A rampart made half faith & half of scoff,
a tunnel out, itself one further cage.

The journey continues.

( via / "dover gliffs: ASEMIOTIC diogram" by de villo sloan on fb )

"Arde, mas retoña la yedra..."

"THE CONSOLATION OF BITTERNESS

When I know well the cards I’ve got will lose,
and somebody I’ve hated, taking hold
of all the chips, will leave me grief and booze,
when I feel mean and desperate and old,

when I can see quite clearly nothing’s flawless
but, up close, there are pocks and flecks and tatters,
and there’s no hope, no happiness, no solace
for fools who work at anything that matters,

when I’m convinced that there are no safe havens,
no loves, no pals, and nowhere left to turn,
and now’s high time to talk of rats and ravens
and whether I’d prefer a grave or urn,

then the asthmatic burr in me that sings
from cussèd spite blesses the mess of things."

--Aaron Poochigian

"do not fear artificial intelligence
fear natural stupidity" --@MuseumofCrypto

Like a Rolling Stone.

( via / via )

Around the black lightning planet.

"Dylan : Joni Mitchell had an album out called 'Blue'. And it affected me, I couldn't get it out of my head. And it just stayed in my head and when I wrote that song I wondered, what's that mean ? And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that's what happened, y'know.

Craig : It's not the same 'blue' as in 'it's all over now baby blue' ?

Dylan : No, no. That's a different blue." --1978 interview

아름다운 강산.

"Since my heart must bear its weight of grief
And feel the burning fire now of pleasure,
And fall from virtue to so base a measure,
I’ll tell how I’ve lost all that had value.
And how my spirits wither in the leaf,
How heart knows little life and greater war;
And if Death did not delight me more,
How I’d make Love weep for pity too.

But now the time of folly is upon me,
I change from out my fixed opinion
Into the contrary condition,
So that I show not how I am aggrieved:
There where I am deceived,
How through my heart a lover passed,
And in her passing all I had was lost." --via ["Poi che di doglia cor conven ch’i’ porti"]

Tangled Up in Blue. Then i started wondering again about that "Italian poet" (when he sang it in Ft Worth around 1980, i almost jumped out of my skin that he added "or maybe it was Charles Baudelaire"). One discussion with lots of data. I myself don't believe it was Petrarch, but it could have been Cavalcanti. It's true that D. himself was not averse to obscurantism, but there's no good reason to be so oblique--as if he called Shakespeare "an Elizbethan playwright" (but it might make sense for John Webster)...

( via / via )

Green townhouse.

vatranxisda
ai qayenqa yauno
busai qabqa rah mas rin

( 'i troll/ in the sound garden/ and the road does not err' )

miss ȁ̷͙͓͚̠͌̀̓̀̒͂̈͝ų̷̘͖͕̻̙̪̰̩͊̓͊̀̐̿̌̚͝t̸̹́̽́̈́̐͝͠u̸̢̯͙̰͂̽̿̍͒͊͐͠ṁ̷̧̺̝̩̩̍ͅṅ̸̲̰̃͛̆͐̂̚͘?.

"Queen Victoria, it is said, was so charmed by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that she sent for copies of everything its author had written. When the parcel reached the palace, it contained, to her dismay, copies of A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry and The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry." --introduction to Easton Press edition

A valediction for Beir Bua. (Wait--a cento paradelle!?)

( via )

###.

"And Xibalba is packed with tests, heaps and piles of tests." --Popol Vuh (tr Tedlock, 1996)

Inside, outside.

"Arranging my books by those that destroyed my vision, those that destroyed my future, and those that destroyed my vision of the future." --@NeinQuarterly

I Who Have Nothing.

( via / via / via )

Fragment_70.

"With one-seventh Earth gravity and 4.5 times terrestrial sea-level atmospheric density, humans on Titan would be able to strap on wings and fly like birds." --Robert Zubrin, Entering Space (1999)

New piece.

"There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight." --Lon Chaney

ORG/N/ISM.

( steve cruz on fb / via )

Vesta flyover animation.

"Charles Cayley proposed to her [Christina Rossetti]. But alas, this abstract and erudite man who shuffled about the world in a state of absent-minded dishabille, and translated the gospel into Iroquois, and asked smart ladies at a party 'whether they were interested in the Gulf Stream,' and for a present gave Christina a sea mouse preserved in spirits..." --Virginia Woolf

Two faces of a room.

"We cannot accept the currently popular blend of German Idealism, mathematics, empirical science, and Halloweenish mood music as the future of continental thought." --Graham Harman

Bioimechanical Steampunk.

( via / jesus chairez on fb )

To the Ends of the Earth. ⛥⛥⛥

"Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety." --Cioran

Erica T Carter and Human Parnassus.

"Real Life

Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving

Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,
Moving to country music & the heart

Is torn a little more because the song says the truth.
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen

To people, men & women, women & women,
Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound

To be broken somewhere along the line,
That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing

With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds
Across America

In the sap green of the tropics,
Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age,

At the white impossible ice hour, starving,
Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down,

Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire,
Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones

Of an Indian who died standing up,
Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset,

To live the thirty-six things
& never comes home."

--Lucie Brock-Broido

Who By Fire.

( me / via )

GIF.EXE #12.

"After [Hulagu] captured the Assassin eyrie of Maimundiz, almost the only inmate he spared was the celebrated astronomer Nasar ad-din Tusi, who had persuaded the wavering Grand Master that the planets favored surrender. To Tusi Hulagu entrusted the creation of an observatory on the plateau above Maragheh, which was soon bristling with the latest refinements of science and magic. By a pinpoint of sunlight through its dome a giant quadrant assessed the meridian altitudes of the sun, and an army of other instruments--armillary spheres, astrolabes, a dioptra for measuring the diameter of sun and moon--were built out under the stars. Even Chinese astronomers were recruited; and a library of four hundred thousand volumes, many salvaged from [the sack of] Baghdad, confirmed the observatory as the greatest of its time.

Within thirty years, using instruments more precise than those of Copernicus two centuries later, its scholars produced astronomic tables of an accuracy to supersede the calendar derived from Ptolemy. But Hulagu--addicted to alchemy and astrology--could not wait for Saturn to complete its thirty-year revolution. For him the heavens were the mind of God; they moved affairs below. And he would soon be dead. He demanded results within twelve years.

...Then the Ilkhanid dynasty fractured, and by 1340 the observatory lay in ruins. Some sixty years later, Ulug Beg, the astronomer-grandson of Tamerlane, wandered its ruins as a child, enchanted." --Shadow of the Silk Road

The commuter & the train.

"Now I do not even know
How to live or how survive,
In these dreadful days of evil,
In this last and fleeting age.
Must I make my home in wind,
Build my walls upon the water?"

--Runo 7, Kalevala (tr Eino Friberg, 1988)

"Maybe things felt this way in 1918, and that’s why contemporary accounts of the Spanish flu pandemic are so weirdly scarce."

( via / via )

All of a sudden, Utah.

"Before I took the road
Direction ravished my soul"

--Muir

Tooth Fairy Retribution Manifesto.

   to swarm entirely
unaware, pills on the path
   glint eBay debris
& it is as celebrants
that we shall be overwhelmed

A Comet's Destiny.

( via / via )

"Carl Jung visited the USA in 1909... In an appendix to his Memories Dreams Reflections there is a short letter to his wife dated Albany NY September 1909... He notes the advanced technology of this country compared to Europe but says it has come at a great cost. He then observes that men are better off than women. In closing he remarks that this country already contains the seeds of its own destruction."

Across mean years i lost my taste for sugar;
my childhood sank, thickly encased in sugar.

Go, i said, you have no further claim
on these poor bones, your kiss a waste of sugar.

The garden was a dream of riot run
in which we lay, our thirsts replaced with sugar.

City rose upon city, each droll layer
marked at the point its populace embraced sugar.

Graywyvern turned in the dappled labyrinth
to see ants hefting his pathway traced in sugar.

"The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences..." (via Mefi)

Building a case is the only human activity that has a 100% success rate.

"The revolving doors in Australia do, in fact, spin clockwise. Opposite from those in the USA."

via / me )

For those who like their fiction pulp.

"Of carnal ardour and of charm poetic
Was born the poison that infects the world."

--Antero de Quental (tr Roy Campbell)

"Surely I am evading my responsibilities..."

xalas qu lauleya
raxidi sava aju
aima yengo

( 'crow ectoplasm/ writes sign language/ among the clouds' )

"On hearing of the slaughter, Philip II of Spain supposedly 'laughed, for almost the only time on record'."

( via / via )

Silence.

list of my erring footsteps
list of the ones that went right
languages i should be using
languages i should refrain
ragged album
sleep didn't come to the sleeper
knowledge where knowledge was rife
two diff'rent colors of footwear
path in the forest of crumbs
ragged album
born of my erring footsteps
labyrinth drawn by myself
pattern ahead if you find it
nothing the leywalker owns
ragged album
on the moonglade shelved

Sliding diamond wall.

"...these gems are heavy with fate, not mere pretty trinkets." --Ithell Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes (1961)

GIF.EXE #41.

( @spaceliminalbot 3-3-21 / via )

Flowing insectoid presence.

"Libertarian-curious young people: when someone offers you a brick of Ayn Rand’s shit tell them it exceeds your rate limit." @Shteyngart

Sweet dreams, Fam! 👽.

nunieni auva
rah xayari auvada

ibeyoi
ralat

pevonjato
jula au nu rensocyigi

( 'these numbers/ aren't good numbers// action/ at a distance// in the last hour/ smeared glasses' )

Butterfly II.

feistiest pattern ahead

( via / via )

Killing it.

"we are vain and we are blind
I hate people when they're not polite"

--"Psycho Killer"

Swirl.

"Gratitude is first of all the business of him who helps, if the help is pure. It is only by virtue of reciprocity that it is due from him who is helped." --@simone_says_en

Crawling blur.

bornander bad sign

( via / via )

Plano Rona LP now on Youtube!

"The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed." --@GKCdaily

The Vengeance.

"idly I watch
the wren from my window
coming and going
and trilling -
last night there were stars like this"

--Doreen King in Tanka Splendor 2006

Hot Neptune.

( via / via )

"The tightly policed borders of the “human” have crumbled to reveal the ruins of the 'posthuman' desert, where the hybrid offspring of beasts, technics, and humans live among one another." (via Mefi)

   thrist shale prang
award ulnar
   walnut tinge

ash string asset
   warlock hails
from Porlock where

   walg flume veng
in a splash fed
   fishhook up

prang hand unlock
   fossick carl
art ichthys egg

Pain.

"evening moon
the sunrise measured
in a spiderweb"

--@poem_exe 8-19-19

Everything...Nothing....