( via / via )

A joke about the first edition of the Iliad, & the real megillah...which starts around $3K. (Oh, you want the Greek first edition? That one sold at Christie's for $89,000 (in 1994).

"Sometimes I wonder whether alien space vessels are inherently fuzzy & out-of-focus (that would be terrifying)." --@neiltyson

"From nine spools is your Lachesis-woven thread."

"If You Fall Asleep at the Wheel

It’s not the noise but the air.
It’s not the traffic or the heat but the clouds.
It’s not the lightning or the rain but the thinking.
It’s not the insomnia but the night terror.
It’s not the pain but the swelling.
It’s not the mask. It’s the tear."

--Not Charles Bernstein

Also, "Labelye went over-budget and over-deadline, struggling to get his new caisson technology to work, losing in total five boats over the course of the building with horrifying casualties among the workmen..." Scholars writing for other scholars in a dead language is not so different, after all, from poets writing poems that can only be understood rightly by another poet.

( via / via )

"Like Dillon, I am a partisan of creative criticism, but when I am told that something is unkillable by argument, I reach for my revolver."

"across the street

shadows of
the black iron gate...

my shadow
reminds me
im lonely"

--@senryuchest

"I wanted, hammer in hand, to crack nostalgia like a geode and find the jagged little crystals of possibility growing again in the dark."

"Christopher Nolan’s attention to detail in Oppenheimer was so thorough I’m giving him a hall pass on this one:

July 16, 1945, 5:30am Los Alamos, New Mexico is in full dawn of summer twilight. But cinematically, the atomic explosion looks more striking against the dark of night" --@neiltyson

I enter the debate.

( via / via )

Self-portrait.

"It's fascinating and depressing how both the entertainment industry and higher education have become dominated by a parasitic class of managers who are just blatantly hostile to the fundamental missions of the institutions and workers they are supposed to represent." --@reluctantlychad

"Black metal’s political sentiments are then marked by paradox: a hatred for the world, yet a hatred that disavows – nay, flees from – any mention of explicit politics."

"flood plain
inch by inch shorter
the bulrushes
like this long bridge we
once built between us"

--an'ya

Alien Life.

( via / via )

Zhuangzi in Carcosa

fishhook orb
not outwitted
years i looked
the other way
my zither
lizard-headed
learned to wind
a complex cord
fishhook orb
not outwitted
isopleth
turbulent sea

"So in Hanson’s estimation, healthcare is not about health but about signaling loyalties and values. Healthcare is meant to show you care."

"Blaspheme when sowing cummin; that is the way to make it grow well." --Stobaeus

"This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically."

( via / via via feuilleton )

Haiku market news & deadlines.

"Thomas Ligotti on Philosophy

'All the systems and speculations of philosophy— The Will, the Thing-in-itself, the Ubermensch, the concept of Nothingness, and so on, are merely characters in a series melodrama.' " --@alien_ecologies

Fluid Forms Beyond the Utopia.

"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire"

He retired to the sea.
There he found what he needed:
a surf-screen to shine his thoughts on,
a solitude wide and dark enough and seamless;
rocks to build the theater physical.

Only the gulls saw stone pile upon stone,
like the identical days of his stone exile
converging to a point just short of the sun
the round irregular walls.
He said the tower would give him a place to write
in the peace he'd sacrificed everything for,
but his typewriter's mute, and the tower continues to rise.

(1981)

Allegory.

( via / via )

Intercept.

"no shade

but

the hawk’s shadow"

--R G Rader

The story of Halyx & the Mefi thread that led me to it (via a newer Defunctland thread).

Of course, "Halyx" is really a biostimulant based on hyaluronic acid of high molecular weight (1.0 – 1.5 x 106 Dalton), produced by bacteria Streptococcus equi, formulated at a concentration of 40 mg/2ml in a physiological buffer, sterile, biodegradable and isotonic.

"Now there’s a whole new group of fans wearing shirts buying the vintage posters from Disneyland and even making their own fan art and merchandise based on the characters. After a recent rewatch of the documentary, and seeing that original artwork, I began to wonder how it would look if the band was brought back in animated form."

I think there's two legitimate Halyx swag items here. The pin.

"The cargo cult humanities. An ongoing disenchantment with humanist methodologies and a corresponding desire to import new, readymade 'ways of seeing' from other disciplines. Which are credulously attributed with 'reality-seeing' powers far in advance of what they can actually do." --@ghostofchristo1

Halyx on Youtube. Tribute band. Halyx Rising. Another song about Halyx.

It's also a mouthwash, an ottoman, & a video game...

( via / lanny quarles in ireland )

Dwellers of the Cubicles, Meet your new Manager.

"The longing imps grasp tomes of old
And rant therefrom each damned one's name."

--Betelguese

"This novel--whose plot and character development, frankly, aren’t much to write home about--does have one distinction..."

   Baharnoth
falls ahead dark
   orb anthem

to stagger where
   uffish walg

Pavane.

( via / via )

Just minted 👽.

nothing but a name
a fishhook in the air
a stubbornly ripe bend

∿ 𝗣𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 ∿∿∿.

Watched the Sinéad documentary with Melanie. Gradually i realized: backward, priest-ridden IRELAND has abortion now & America DOESN'T.

Also seemed to confirm my surmise that she was on the spectrum.

One Sings, the Other Doesn't. ☆☆☆☆

( via / via )

"More and more rationalists and fellow-travelers were yearning to address personal existential crises alongside global existential risks...They even had a word for such impulses... They called it 'pica,' after a compulsion that causes people to eat dirt or other non-food objects, and that is often a sign of nutritional imbalance."

"There's a strong founding father element in game creation, chunks of code that turn up over and over, appearing on your screen as wooden crates, railway sidings, rusted metal sheds; vaguely identifiable South West Seaboard US cityscapes: but that doesn't completely explain it. Why are the games so sure?, I wondered, somewhat spooked. The Apocalypse mooted in Fall Out isn't seriously 'Nuclear'. It could just as well have been Zombie Plague that did the damage. 'Nuclear' is a convention, a shorthand. It covers a lot of things, the intractable truth about how we got where we are now. What we see ahead, and how poor in solutions we find ourselves." --Gwyneth Jones on Livejournal, 9/2013

Crystal lion.

"X.

Pristine and ultimate stone of groundless
adventure has just died
soul and all, October lodging with child.
From three months of absence, ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitred monodactyl, dies laughing.

How behind they oust pairs
of opposites. How number peeks
from under every avatar.

How whales plunge to doves.
How the latter cleave their beaks
cubiquitous to the third wing.
How we saddle up, before monotonous haunches.

We tow ten months toward ten,
toward one more beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three of absence.
And gestation's nine.

There is not the slightest violence.
The patient sits up
and seated preens tranquil pomades."

--Magda Bogin's Trilce

BRSF57.

( via / via )

"Finnegans Wake can indeed not be translated, it can only be rewritten..."

"Posthumous Letter to Thomas Merton

Unlike you who discovered solitude
To be 'Forerunner of the Word of God',
I search and find it no more than the soul's
Chafing against itself like any dog
Rubbing its mangy rump against a tree.
I might have asked you how to bridge the gap
Between our two alonenesses, between
Yours, self-elected, freely chosen, and
Mine blindly blundered into from the womb,
At first not even seen for what it was,
And then, once recognized, raged at, kicked at,
And cursed. Perhaps there is a gulf between them,
The gulf dividing mind to which God is
A harmony, from mind to which God seems
The discord, shattering tidy tunes of thought,
Yet no, devout monk though you were, your God
Was not a mystery emasculated,
Poked at through barbed wire meshes of the creeds,
Led out well-groomed and curried for the faithful
To adulate from their safe vantage point.
Now that your words have smoked away to silence,
I dare not put an answer on your tongue,
As though a devotee had stuffed your mouth
With speeches that you never made. I only
Write you these lines, less poem than presumption,
Addressed in care of my bewilderment.
I ask you, self-styled marginal man,
Do not we sufferers always inhabit
The edges of the world as pioneers
To prove how much humanity can bear
And still be human, experimenters in
The bloody laboratory of our lives.
Taking and testing every pain tossed from
The pulsing cosmos, fragments we reshape,
As best as the materials allow,
To buttress God's cathedrals build from chaos?"

--Vassar Miller, If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough (1974)

"We conclude that Betelgeuse should currently be in a late phase (or near the end) of the core carbon burning. After carbon is exhausted in the core, a core-collapse leading to a supernova explosion is expected in a few tens years." (Something else i've been waiting to see for decades.) Some pushback.

"Perhaps the effect even of Shakespeare's poetry might have been yet greater, had he not counteracted himself; and we might have been more interested in the distresses of his heroes, had we not been so frequently diverted by the jokes of his buffoons." --The Rambler, 156.

Little Talks.

( via / via / via )

"I think it will be agreed that this Latin translation rings better than the original. It is laden with more gravitas, and more pietas."

"Jersey City has made several strong bids for fame, with but moderate success, but its claim to distinction at last is firmly established. Nothing like this possibly could have come from any other place." --Los Angeles Herald 4-18-1909 (via)

Just ampersanding.

"Entanglement

Among vetch and dandelions,
hollow shells, inhabitants gorged
by blackbirds whose songs tremble
in summer’s heat, you emerge -
wrap around my calves, bind
my arms, entwine my throat, caress
my neck, my ears – insidious
as haar that creeps in from the sea
to steal the sun. Overhead, siren
insistence of oystercatchers, while
beneath the hawthorn bush
a magpie tilts its head. Across
years and continents,
we cannot decohere."

--Marian Christie

"Betelgeuse is continuing to behave mysteriously."

( via via @ruralmodernism / via )

9 Examples of Brutalism in Film.

"Poem

I first loved you
second to
your gentleness

like the blind who
divide their lives into
dark and dark I
have you and your gentleness

as a detail in a painting frames that painting
in the often
memory, your face
is surrounded by your eyes
unafraid
of the grays of gentleness

but better than your gentleness
I love your harshness

the harshness
when you talk about that prison capitalism
when you vow never to stop fighting

never

until each woman and man is free
until each woman and man is in the custody

of their gentleness"

--Bill Knott

"The reason why [ə̃] is written with the number 2, is because Waldon believed the number 2 resembles a nose.."

"...there is another way of handling the novel, with a readerly focus not on obstruction but on flow. To read Finnegans Wake by, as it were, defocusing one's readerly attention, much as one does when looking at one of those 'Magic Eye' pictures that used to be so popular ten years ago or so. Read after this fashion the novel moves considerably more rapidly, with its organising principle not one of compacted verbal pointillisme but rather of drunkenness, where words gets slurred and people utter unintentional malapropisms and yet still get broadly understood..." --Adam Roberts's introduction to Pervigilium Finneganis

"Volapük couldn't stop thinking about Poliespo."

( via / via )

Visit Tinkinswood & other virtual sites in Wales. (via stephanie burgis on mastodon)

"man ruins man: verse

as we cease our ruin,
we inure our anomie.
we are our own ruse."

--@primearepo (via @marian_v_o)

Ingordigiousness & others.

   Delft city
affordance death
   maintain frith
cam'ra ready
the MiG bloody

   Delft city
unstrung guitars
   my dead dears
for the Party
darb Vivaldi

   Delft city
ev'rything cracked
   cellar bricked
grenade caddy
cash confetti

sip from Delft

Alien Octopus Attack.

( via / via )

Today's Pixel Rug.

grugprab amid ease · burns
stipple the far hills
a cheery little ditty

as we prepare for work

doesn't hurt to check
in '91 i was thirty-three
crumb-profligate as old toast
nothing compares

pearls from the long-ago

countdown at my own desk
the tie that ev'ry day i tied
& shortwave in the truncate eve,
cassettes on a boombox
& half of what i made i didn't keep

Fossil Field.

"I miss being able to judge someone based on their CD collection" -- @dreamthievin@mstdn.party

You are Everything.

( via / via )

Little Magazines.

On twitter as at the coffeehouse i shouldn't mistake for the Commons what is, after all, only a place of business.

.🟎.

"Midsummer

This starbreak is celestial air,
Just silver; earthlight, dying amber.
Underneath an arch of pallor
Summer keeps her brightened chamber.

Bright beauty of the risen dust
And deep flood-mark of beauty pressed
Up from earth in lovely flower,
High against my lonely breast;

Thou rhythm like the changing moon's,
The catch to which the waters play,
That as they kiss moon-silver sink,--
As soon to spurn the baffled clay;

Only before the waters fall
Is Paradise shore for gaining now.
The grasses drink the berry-bright dew;
The small fruits jewel all the bough.

Heart-breaking summer beyond taste,
Ripeness and frost are soon to know;
But might such color hold the west,
And time, and time, be honey-slow!"

--Léonie Adams

Daughter Isotope.

( via me )

2002: a Palindrome Story.

The labyrinth permuted from above
solves lostness by refusing to be known.
Misleading signs abound. Under the gun
to prove, we give the clown-car-wheel to Jove:
& ev'ry clown instructs you how to live
like any one of them has figured it out,
while industries of ostrich-ware badmouthe
complainants from a diff'rent Holy Writ...
You'd think there wasn't any crisis beyond
needing to be told the thing to do.
I carry a sprinkler to the yard's far edge
in triple-digit heat at close of day.
Some of the dead no watering can rescind;
some of our doom no swervy feint may dodge.

"A more sophisticated version of the Lung Puppy - the Lung Alpaca - was used by the prison service to patrol cell blocks in Scarfolk Gaol."

"the CIA wanted to personally fund me to write bourgeoisie domestic realism but i said no i’m too committed to questions of Form" --@bartlebytaco

"...this may well be the only time in history that a poem served as evidence in a criminal trial."

( via / via )

"By 2001, when I first made contact with George, I believe all of his published work was out of print..." Part 2. Part 3

"Mixing Rome and the snow in his song" --Mandelshtam (tr R Tracy)

Shibuya-kei is Dead.

"What Sappho conceived on one occasion on Mitylene is gone beyond reconstitution; the sole proof that she ever conceived it is a scrap from a parchment copy made thirteen centuries later; on an upper left-hand corner learning assisted by chemicals makes out a few letters; in Berliner Klassikertexte, V-2, 1907, pp. 14-15, type stands for those letters with perhaps misleading decisiveness:

.Ρ'Α[...
ΔΗΡΑΤ .[...
ΓΟΓ'ΓΥΛΑ .[...

...plus the beginnings of a dozen more lines: very possibly, so modern editions indicate, the irst aorist of the verb to raise (conjecturing ηρ α), and a word unknown, and the name of a girl of Sappho's. Or you can remember from Alcaeus and Ibycus ηρ, the contraction of springtime, and derive the unknown word from δηρος, too long, and write

Spring........
Too long......
Gongula......

heading the little witticism 'Papyrus' and printing it in a book of poems called Lustra as an exemplum for resurrection-men. And wait decades for someoe to unriddle it." --Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971)

37 Heaven. (Not to be confused with the magical number 137.)

( via / via )

CULTURE IS APPROPRIATION.

   Buffalo Soldier
in the belly of the Peacock
   heeds the speed zone

perilous in the long run
& writing notes to yourself

"When I was about twenty, I remember sitting in my room one night, annoyed with something my housemates were up to, and a bit bored with whatever my other friends were doing. It was one of those evening where you just feel aimless, off-balance, agitated. There was something gnawing at me, but I didn’t know what. Then, out of nowhere, a procession of sirens passed by my house. I mean there were fire trucks, police cars, a few ambulances, lots and lots of noise—sudden, alarming noise; then, nothing. It was dead silent for maybe a second or two before the sirens picked up again. This time they seemed to come from every direction, as though they were surrounding the house. But the pitch was off, all wobbly, a weird vibrato, like electronics trying to run on nearly-dead batteries. The sound wasn’t coming from the sirens at all. It was an animal sound. It was every dog in the neighborhood at once attempting to imitate the noise. None of them could do it quite right, but damn were they going for it. It felt simultaneously sad and triumphant. It was the exact moment I decided to be a writer."

"For a while the far-right nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky —a nationalist of a decidedly non-Duginite, non-Eurasianist variety— was campaigning to eliminate the letter ы from the Russian language, on the grounds that it had entered the language in the first place through infection from Turkic Tatar — the letter in question is roughly equivalent to the modern dotless Turkish ı, the close back unrounded vowel that is the counterpart to the more familiar front vowel i." -Justin Smith-Ruiu on his substack

I: Illusion.

( via / via )

Darkwave.

"Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice." --@simone_says_en

It's finally raining💚🌧️🥳.

in the wasteland
in the heartland
in the heart of the wasteland
by no sign more than birdflight
you will know the way

pass authentication
pass the long dark night of the content provider
in the wasteland
in the heartland
in the heart of the wasteland

How long before it fades?

( via / via )

Zeroscope in a China Shop.

Socrates,
practice music
make peace with sundering ties
Socrates
swing not at piñatas
far from the land you seek
Socrates

practice music

Signifiers.

"i guess you could say i’m in a situationship. i’m on board the demeter and there’s a situation" --@kukukadoo

Discovery 52716.

( via / via )

Process.

22112 aelindrome: Lava elk: a Kalevala.

22112 aelindrome: Heat road, fado rathe.

Teaching Angels How to Fly.

through the eye of a needle
heat road, fado rathe
chase me with soggy noodle
through the eye of a needle
anabasis internodal
with pain & sorrow writhe
through the eye of a needle
heat road, fado rathe

Bugs.

( via / via )

it passed
without leaving
single dark sidewalk splotch--
elsewhere pummelling the ground with
our loss

🪟.

"We want fast answers. We're almost at the point where we don't care whether they are good answers or not, just as long as they are fast." --Annals of Klepsis

In Mallorca.

( via / via )

The Tapes - Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives.

" 'Fifty percent of respondents say that the event taking place is not occurring,' Madison says. 'The other fifty percent remain undecided. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between.' " --Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)

Egyptian Gods.

"The Stranger

Fond credos, wooden ecstasies!
We arrange a prison-temple

for the weak-legged little god
who might stamp the world to bits

or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.
We hang his shrine with bells,

aeolian harps, paper windmills,
line it with biscuits and swansdown.

His lack of culture we expected,
scarcely his disdain however--

that wild hauteur, as if
it were we who blundered.

Wildness we fret to avenge!
Eye that hasn't yet blinked

on the unquivering gold atmosphere
of its trance--that we know

must be trained away:
that aloof, consuming stare.

Otherness that confronts us
as the mere animal does not--

once this was original sin
beaten away with staves of holy writ.

Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault
of the little god still baffles.

All other strangers are forgiven
their strangerhood, but he--

how save the eggshell d from his
reaching hands, how loose

ourselves from the disinterested
blaze of his wide pure eye?"

--Adrienne Rich

"The Republic is a strangely familiar place—a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony—yet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig."

( via / via )

"Mencken had an answer, though it is doubtful that Gilman would have liked it..."

"over your roof
hanging low in the sky
this lenten moon
my temptress as it were
a wheel of sharp cheddar"

--an'ya

Muffler Men. Bounty!

"Climatizable air, tarots..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Burning.

( via / via )

Things to be looked at with a single eye.

"as a freshman i was assigned paradise lost and when i got to 'the mind is its own place' i thought ok if that’s true i can just hang out in my mind and don’t need to read this long stupid poem!!!!! this was not true

years later, reading and falling in love with it as a grad student, i was so mad at my younger self but glad to get a second chance—which is of course what PL is all about

i told this story to the undergrads in my milton class and they did not remotely care. going to follow up with them about it in 10 years" --@kukukadoo

The Sky Is An Elephant.

for this i saved myself
in black smoke swirling

nowhere will be safe
for this i saved myself

down the answers sift
all wisdom unavailing

for this i saved myself
in black smoke swirling

"This is not what our country will look like if the world fails to reduce emissions—this is our future even if we do."