( lanny quarles / via )

Scars.

Driving out to the edge of town to get a replacement door for our car. Junkyard stretching for miles. Narrow path between. Silence. Then i start to notice all the burnt out hulks. All alike. All the same model as our Pinto. It's like some demon had been dispatched to blow them all up.

fx⚫️.

"Eatable as a cheek

Ending
To seem immense
Public and simplicity

Only as a cheek
At an eatable pilot-house
Like a bush

An impromptu connecting-rod
Only and polished
Polished as a mile
Remaining
Hearing

More whole than a stone
Whiter than a desire
Bent
More anxious than science
More generous than darkness
To end"

--Robot X, 1775

🌃The city is gradually falling asleep.

( via / via )

🌔 Night Operators 🌖.

"Year's End

The state cracked where they left your breath
No longer instrument. Along the shore
The sand ripped up, and the newer blood
Streaked like a vein to every monument
. The empty smoke that drifted near the guns
Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud
Had the smell of a hundred burned-out suns.
The ceiling of your sky went dark.
A year ago today they cracked your bones.

So rot in a closet in the ground
For the bad trumpets and the capitol's
Long seasonable grief. Rot for its guests,
Alive, that step away from death. Yet you,
A year cold, come more living to this room
Than these intruders, vertical and warm."

--Weldon Kees

Blasphemies of the dwarf jester, detailed oil painting, edward hopper.

"Every war...is represented not as a war, but as an act of self-defense against a homcidal maniac." -George Orwell (via @SaladinAhmed)

Flickers conversing.

( via / via )

Creation and destruction - dissolving.

"If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it." --Zora Neale Hurston

Watched over.

         "Appreciation

The lively gestures have cried, turning alpaca
   without appreciation

To endure a satisfactory deck, an
   unsatisfactory chant, a punctual
      ivory-country glow, a warlike aspiration, an expectant typist

Like quick imbeciles
We have sent him a string"

--Robot X, 277.

SABOTAGE #163.

( via / via )

Hell's Mountain of Needles. This makes me happy--Ningen Isu covers Budgie!

"Robinson

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

Which is all of the room--walls, curtains,
Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson's first wife,
Rugs, vases panatelas in a humidor.
They would fill the room if Robinson came in.

The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.

All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.

Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday."

--Weldon Kees

Purple texture.

"There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply." --Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man (1978)

USERS.

( via / via )

Swirling.

"So much of this website is just people bringing a mentally ill person to your attention like a cat bringing you a dying lizard in its mouth. what do you want me to do with this homie. it’s going in the garbage and I feel a little bad for it. you did get him though, that’s true" --@anomicca (via @mckenziewark)

West Kennet.

"the Desperado (de Nerval)"

I am the bereaved, the widower, the shadowy,
the Cathar prince of the devastated citadel:
My guiding star is snuffed, my galactic lute
carries Melancholy's sable pentacle.

You who consoled me in the dark of the sepulcher,
give me back Posilipo & the Mediterranean,
the fragrance that enchanted my sere despair,
& that arbor where the rose & grape are intimate.

am I Cupid or Apollo?....Poe or Byron?
the kiss of some dread queen still becrimsons my brow;
I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren plashes...
& twice have I crossed Acheron victorious:

practicing in turn on the lyre of Orpheus
moans of a mystic, sobs of a dying elf.

4 26 87

Pop Corn.

( me / via )

"Lost in this ongoing heat death are the autistics, who suddenly find themselves like Bigfoot without a forest."

"Balthasar

Hid near a lily-spangled stream,
The wild duck smooths his satin breast;
A league back, shattered hauberks gleam;
The wall no longer guards the West.

The crystal willow boughs of spring
Shimmer above on pearl-shell skies,
And Balthasar sets signet-ring
To war-dispatches full of lies."

--Charles Spear

Jesus Maria.

"I was ashamed of my trade [the military] when I saw those horrors perpetrated which came under every man's eyes. You hew out of your polished verses a stately image of smiling victory: I tell you 'tis an uncouth, distorted, savage idol; hideous, bloody, and barabarous. The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great poets should show it as it is--ugly and horrible, not beautiful and serene. O sir, had you made the campaign, believe me, you never would have sung it so." --Henry Esmond (1852)

Exodus.

( via / via )

Universe.

"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)

" 'What better time to go wedding-ring shopping,' Dever wryly asks, 'than while awaiting discovery of one’s father’s perhaps-murdered corpse in a country far from home?' " (via aldaily)

   Zinngeschrei
big angström
   angel's ogham

Weststruck psalmist
   iceberg whist

"The effort to build an elaborate, logical map of sentences that could power human-like reasoning was, to Browning and LeCun, itself a fool’s errand."

( via / dead horse bay via atlas obscura )

Productivity.

"Hot Air

So soft my pleasure came
Upon a dream,
Iced fire and frosted flame

It was, too brief for blame.
Yet sharp to seem
So soft. My pleasure came

And went--that was its shame,
Not that, supreme,
Iced fire and frosted flame,

It bore the ancient name
Harsh hearts blaspheme.
So soft my pleasure, came

A wind and woke me tame
To that regime
Iced fire and frosted flame

Had burnt to a black frame
Before their steam.
So soft, my pleasure, came
Iced fire and frosted flame."

--Vassar Miller, 1963

The Air-Broken Library.

" 'Matter' is nothing in itself except an anomaly in space. People are just angles in that anomaly." --Harry Stephen Keeler

"V.C. Andrews had been dead for years and no one seemed to notice."

( via / via )

"Wasn't this the 'Irish Gambit', the one with the anecdote where they asked the inventor on his death bed how he had thought of it, and he had answered: 'I didn't see it was protected'?"

"After limbic reprogramming induces overlapping claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the test subject experiences contradictory terrors so intense they open a portal into a mathematically novel liminal space " --@ctrlcreep

"Ended blogs are thus like dead authors; they are ready to be explained."

"the mausoleum
and weeping willows
inside the old brooch --
slowly it dawns on me
they are made of hair"

--Michael McClintock in Tanka Splendor 2004

Neo Insists Agent Smith Call Him by the Right Name.

( via / via )

Black Pilgrimage to Chorazin.

"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

Mokusatsu.

"...the silence and forced enigma of structures in their vanishing." --Against the Day

Ghosts.

( via / via )

"It told me Everything that I needed to know."

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

Discovery 52712.

"the holes in the wall
this, that
interrupted"

--@poem_exe 12-14-14

Cycle X.

( via / via )

"How could such a pretentious piece of crap movie represent the inside of your head?"

"Practices

Ushers, survived as dramatic part.
Tumour of tract of marrow establishes the world.
Never evinces full, as possible as way.
Plainly shews.
The fresh landing pitches overboard, racing.

As able as power, a terrible second records the interest.

For authorities whose hopes

Now practices that mother widowed.
The domain shows.
Dead.
Prove, as lovely as a suntan.
Renders to that competition, writing like the collapse.
His good way handles one lad little.
Rents work.

Rents vertigo.
Rents the tenant.
Rents crew."

--Erica T Carter, 2004

Gyat.

"Huge throes ran through his equatorial coil" --Roy Campbell

"...it would be unfortunate if, as with Tolkien's boring hobbits, a cute little cult of Antiterra developed (with maps, and vocabulary, and sinchilla mantillas). That is not likely to happen."

( via / via )

Are your dreams adequate?

"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant, for the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." --Chesterton

Power of Babel.

"This day a solemn Feast the people hold
To Dagon th[e]ir Sea-Idol, and forbid
Laborious works, unwillingly this rest
Th[e]ir Superstition yields me; hence with leave
Retiring from the popular noise, I seek
This unfrequented place to find some ease,
Ease to the body some, none to the mind
From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm
v Of Hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone,
But rush upon me thronging, and present
Times past, what once I was, and what am now."

--from Samson Agonistes

Face off.

( via / via )

Purification of Shadows.

"desire path"

head full of homespun · rehearse stiltedly
the plain pattern · of approved moves
i come as one wearied · from a long walk

though i've only opted · out of the noise-sphere
to a grim degree · glued still to the
doomscroller's dance · where devilishness scryed

equals fortune fended · despair furled

Green & pink & black frenzy.

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

Medey.

( via / via )

Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida.

"The innocence of gravestones, to be unaware of their true purpose." --Thomas Wiloch

"Starting in 2003, Jackson wrote a story on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers. She arranged for each volunteer to get one word from the story tattooed onto their skin. Only those who bore the ink were allowed to read the full version."

"Cemetery

Who whispers here is forgotten.

Saliva's emptiest fruit
adorns the stones,
words ripening your mouth
to a spoilation
of silence.

Who speaks here
reads a text that downloads
the screen of his fingernail,
through which nothing's visible
as glass is.

For the memorial
we must kneel
to pick each flower
from amongst its modifiers:
but to do that
one needs a hand bared
of all uses, of all trades:
as ours is not."

--Bill Knott

Currency of Flight.

( via / via )

A brief history of glitch art.

"From a Book of Hours

Bearing white myrrh and incense, autumn melts
Through flower and fruit and combed blonde straw;
Thunder looms on the mountain forest-belt;
The winter firewood purrs beneath the saw.

Our garden scents upbillow like the veils
Of Solomon's Temple, shimmer in the rain,
And all is peace. Slowly the daylight falls,
And voice and lute bring back the stars again."

--Charles Spear

Writers the contest is over. (via @lastpositivist)

"(There is probably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)" --Geoff Dyer, White Sands (2016)

Talk of the Town.

( via / via )

"Baez, for her part, charmingly tells the story of her granddaughter only really understanding how big a deal she was after getting them backstage at a Taylor Swift concert." (via Mefi)

"What holds true in the art of the expert cook, who knows how to disjoint a bird with minimal resistance, is also true for psychoanalysis." --@Lacan_nocontext (via @pourfairelevide)

Reasons to Move and Reasons to Look Away.

scroll that survived Vesuvius
tell me how
to survive the next hour

scroll that survived Vesuvius
volume one
of a seven-volume work

scroll that survived Vesuvius
i scroll on past
to vaporwave Oreos

scroll that survived Vesuvius
we are reaching now
to hide you away from eyes

Woman Hitting Another Woman with a Shoe.

( via / via )

SWERVE 🚴‍♀️.

"Escape

Against deep seas blue-black like mussel-shells
The island arched its bluffs and stony scarps,
Which, wave-rocked, tolled in winter time like bells,
Or chimed to spring as sweet as Irish harps.

Above, a fool's crown of canary cloud,
Moulded by mighty winds to dizzy height,
Leaned to the isle like press of sail o'erbowed,
And sunshine pierced the eyes with swords of light.

This have we chosen, far from friends and home,
This space of barren rock and crimson heath,
With cliffs of quaking honey-comb
And the tides of death in the galleries beneath."

--Charles Spear

Bang Bang.

"By their own feigning Fancies are betray'd,
And groan beneath those Ills themselves have made."

--Rowe's Lucan, I.

"...he is the least programmatic and most intuitive and sentence-driven major writer of our time." (via aldaily)

( via / via )

Vertically-oscillating pattern.

"As a crack travels round a cup, so speeds
The bat across the porcelain of dusk."

--Sackvilles' Duino, VIII

C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

squandersome & crisp-shadowed fall
fending nightmares not on my agenda
whispers taken at once by the blueblack zonda
fins in parallel

all the other holocausts' museum
wand'ring in my lane · i spent ten dollars
lost the thread of this sonnet & all its seers
revert to Gollum

whole boxes of my records went away
& i can hardly tell you now what's gone
yet i manage still to half complain
as the polar caps thaw

& the patterns on my mask fade in the wash

Wacky Baroque.

( via / via )

"A recent study led by Ed Felten, a professor of information-technology policy at Princeton, mapped AI’s emerging abilities onto specific professions according to the human abilities they require, such as written comprehension, deductive reasoning, fluency of ideas, and perceptual speed. Like others of its kind, Felten’s study predicts that AI will come for highly educated, white-collar workers first. The paper’s appendix contains a chilling list of the most exposed occupations: management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisers, real-estate brokers, loan officers, psychologists, and human-resources and public-relations professionals, just to sample a few."

"rocket science"

save
don't save
choice i am given
for ev'ry file i close
for each face i pass

Happy Dictionary Day.

"PREDESTINATION (Anagrammed Lines)

Predestination:
I reopen distant
repetitions and
end points — a rite
dies in a portent."

--@Anthony_Etherin

An ongoing collection of AI-generated videos.

( via / via )

Every Pixel Matters.

"God, for whom time flows uncannily, can't tell the difference between autumn and fire. He believes the world burns every year, and is pleased" --@ctrlcreep

Colors Moving.

the maimed & destroyed
in fresh new ruins
we take in stride
the maimed & destroyed
ill-starred
under merciless rains
the maimed & destroyed
in fresh new ruins

How Much I Loved This Life.

( via / via )

A look back at Myst. (via via Mefi )

"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom --
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind."

--Stephen Crane

Continuum #160.

"The buried are ever seeking still more room." --Sackvilles' Duino, VI

"Feral synanthropic software has arrived—today, not next week, not in 10 years. It’s here now"

( via facebook memories--anita barnard?--3 yrs ago / via )

How many words does a writer need?

"The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting." --Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

"Most, however, suggests that Lovecraft's mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred´s real name was Abu al-Husayn, known as Ibn al-Rawandi or Rhazes."

"Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world."

--Louise Glück

"On the day I wrote this, Taylor Swift had 468 million followers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, whereas The New York Times had a mere 92 million." (via 3quarksdaily)

( via / guayo stoneplatter on fb )

"Concierge, I said. Concierge is what I called you." (via @paisleyrekdal)

"Quaint Mazes

And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.

On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn
bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts
put their prolonged light; the chilly fountains burn.
Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests

And pangs of consolation, its hawk's hood
twitched off for sweet carnality, again
rejoices in old hymns of servitude,

haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine,
it is the ravage of the heron wood;
it is the rood blazing upon the green."

--Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae (1978)

My life in the gush of boasts.

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

Francis Scott Minor Key.

( via / via )

Pardoned of the unknown fallacy that contained the remnants of an expressive request.

"also, and I feel this is related, and I've told this before, but a friend found herself to be kind of a romantic clown bait. She kept falling in love with clowns. Then she met this wall street trader, and she was relieved, and then after a couple of dates they went up to his place, and were about to have sex when she saw pictures of the dude in clown garb on the wall. The guy was a clown on the DL" --angrycat on metafilter (via diwan: a wind 10-29-14)

"He has even tracked down the only two surviving examples of the same make and model." More. And so it goes.

catholicity spawns
sporadic avalanche
& not seldom the launch
of a new tribe of stans

there candles bloom like flowers
clowns beheading clowns
& labyrinths ebbing
in the eyes of the ravens

Labyrinths ebbing.