"57

My most. My most. O my lost!
O my bright, my ineradicable ghost.
At whose bright coast God seeks
Shelter and is lost is lost. O
Coast of Brightness. O cause of
Grief. O rose of purest grief.
O thou in my breast so stark and
Light. Me. Me. My own perfidy.
O my most my most. O the bright
The beatiful the terrible Accost."

--Jos* Garcia Villa


Goodby* Gut*nb*rg.

"Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability." (via M*tafilt*r)

"Mythologies are dodgy things. By 'mythologies' I mean nothing more than the picture languages that we invent to embody and make accessible to casual reference the deeper shared understandings which keep us intact as a group--so far as we are intact as a group.
   In an intact group the pool of shared understandings is like a shared bank account of the group wealth. Each member has instant access to the whole deposit. Since it is spiritual or psychological wealth, it does not diminish by being spent. Rather, the more lavishly it is circulated, the greater inner wealth and 'security' each single member feels to have. Intercommunication of those deeper shared understandings, through the tokens of the mythology that represents them, strengthens the unified inner life of the group.
   ...When the shared group understanding of all members is complete then a mere touching of the tokens of their mythology is enough for complete communication. Each verbal signal illuminates--with the voltage of the whole group’s awareness and energy--those members of the group who exchange it. ...In those circumstances, language can be said to be full of meaning. Hence the answer of the old Hopi woman to the Anthropologist who asked why Hopi songs are so short. 'Our songs are short' she said, 'because we know so much.' " --Hugh*s

Wishful thinking jabs a third-class twig.
Kidnap plutocrat.
Ostracism winds a hoary slag.
Kidnap pilgrim.

Plush offal would tallow your droshky
Waist-high. Wishful loom
Of folly origami distinct
From indigo...

Ugrian tinfoil amobng our thick
Napalm wings a swag.
What but folly crawling days blatant
With wintry snick

Grotto. It's a black fly in your Corvair.

Dim bulbs not so bad?

"The poet's only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is, and this in itself seems to be another gift that few poets possess. According to this sensitivity, and to his faith in it, he will go on developing as a poet, as Yeats did, pursuing those adventures, mental, spiritual and physical, whatever they may be, that his gift wants. Or he will lose its guidance, lose the feel of its touch in the workings of his mind, and soon be absorbed by the impersonal lumber of matters in which his gift has no interest, which is a form of suicide, metaphorical in the case of Coleridge, actual in the case of Mayakovsky.
   Many considerations assault his faith in the finality, wisdom and sufficiency of his gift. Its operation is not only shadowy and indefinable, it is intermittent. It has none of the obvious attachment to publicly exciting and seemingly important affairs that his other mental activities have and in which all his intelligent contemporaries have such confidence, and so it receives no immediate encouragement--or encouragement only of the most dubious kind, as a flagellant, questioning his illuminations, might be encouraged by a bunch of mad old women and some other half-dead gory flagellant." --Hugh*s

    "Jaguar Witch"

1.
song
turning roar soft
hour wind how ask was
sun color mud
go

2.
story
cold across
and shadow moon

3.
turning
shadow am
throw with plum
a thousand
shall

4.
story
cold across
and still moon

5.
your shadow falls
and i know you and
across this blind plain growing
blind with your cold shadow

and what shall i say to you
now what gain
you so far from anything
i could clasp or fail to

6.
will shall cannot moon
now told in small words
arrogantly this wisp
rock solid pass

no chiaroscuro
icy gnomon
and if dust hangs in our black sky
at all, it will not land

7.
do float not
a sad shard of risp
coign
kingdom
smoky crown

arrogantly this words

"Apparently a minor Polish poet named Karol Wojtyla died over the weekend. Wojtyla published poems as a young man in Poland and wrote a dissertation on the 16-century Spanish mystical poet Juan de Yepes (better known in the English-speaking world as Saint John of the Cross). He went on to become head of a large international organization, but never abandoned poetry altogether. He published several books of poetry using the pen name "Pope John Paul II." Among the admirers of Wojtlya's poetry was Polish Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who praised him for his "dogmaticism." Reaction to the death of this poet in literary circles was muted. Ron Silliman has pointed out that the great tragedy of Wojtyla's poetry was his inability "to make the turn to language." " --B*msha Swing


"When we speak of Chaucer as the ‘fountain undefiled’ of English poetry’s delicacy, or of Beowulf as the buried reservoir of English poetry’s strength, we are probably glossing over the fact that these two have spent so much of their time, to change the metaphor, like male and female spiders, trying to avoid or paralyze each other, and that the good moments have come only where they have managed an electrified, always precarious coupling." --Hugh*s, op cit

"In the sixties, the Yugoslav Serb poet Vasko Popa wrote a powerful cycle of poems about the Serbian national Saint: St Sava of the Wolves. The Serbs are St Sava's wolves. During the seventies he told me that whenever he gave a public reading in Yugoslavia, students would begin to shout out, demanding the wolf poems, and then when he read them would become wildly excited--so much that he was alarmed and puzzled. I asked him what he thought it meant and he said: 'I don't know. But I fear--very bad things.' " --T*d Hugh*s, Wint*r Poll*n (1994)

Two yarons now i'm doing this blog...

On my victrola: Nils P*tt*r Molva*r- Khm*r

On my victrola: Das Rh*ingold.

    "The death of Cornstalk

Triune Algol: gull, blackbird, pigeon
time, or such sequence
as wings carry. Scatterlings, I cling
to skyey outlines
sight traced and sight wants to deliquesce."

--*lm*r Moriarty, H*r* is th* Information You R*qu*st*d (1966)


Saturn's
auroras; halos
whirl; convoy days.

Painting by Phil Smith.

    "cript"

Plutonian bildar,
wormy God wood.

Portion in this

and bloody whirlpools
and Pluto

crystal

Plutonian bildar,
wormy God wood.

    "Fading

So thorough the reticence
In a guise of "itselfness"
That as good goes in trance...
And when awakened berzerks
The dancers dream
Cutting sight for a One
Not dull or wide
But thin air spatials relaxed
To fears of this to that
Received as "Manna" truly hidden

Poison for the Prince sounding reek
That as chooser chooses the down
To fast chutes and the up of quick
Until horns blasting
He’s here...

Potentially for you in servitude
And then for self he’s less
For you, but here...comfort

Compassion on other becomes
Fire next time hardness
(Punitive measure) that sings
In the range of potential
The song of necessity bloom"

--Ovid Neal

A wiz of "hard" scifi, in Mission of Gravity, first thought up a story about a known world far from this solar bunch; it turns out, though, that that wobbling of 61 Cyg was spurious. At last our starry snooping did find a trio of actual worlds: around 70 Vir, 47 UMa, and 51 P*g.

Rob*rt Charl*s Wilson, in Blind Lak*, in part puts his story on a world of 47 UMa. I don’t know if an author past this, did that with any of our now known worlds. What if a story’s world is now thought "spurious"? Pnakotic is my word for this. "Goldilocks" (70 Vir) now’s too hot...

    "SO THAT'S WHO I REMIND ME OF

When I consider men of golden talents,
I'm delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I'm drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.

Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle,
Like Shakespeare. little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak.

I'm afflicted with the vanity of Byron,
I've inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I'm a sucker for a siren,
Like Milton, I've a tendency to mope.

My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.

Like Villon, I have debits by the carload,
Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.

In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however heinous--
Yet I only write like me."

--Ogd*n Nash

Osiris.



Hydrotoxic Spiral. (via *ric Francis.

Nmusysy and Paradisan Concult Posts.

Void.

How K**l*r Wrot* C*rtain of His Books. (via Mad Ink B*ard)

Sh*ila Murphy int*rvi*w*d.

Worldbuilding.

Shoggoth on th* Roof. (via M*tafilt*r)


Halcyon thrown among dull days
A glowing throng;
And find only promising nothing stays.
Is this my song?
Is this my scrimshaw ball a world
To lull a bard, if any would?

Blindly thrown among dull swords
And bloody whirlpools'
Logical golf, this crown of suds
In hazard spills.
An idol glooming far away,
Vagabond gondola don’t know why.

Tsathoggua isk
ray sting whom

sobbing Ogpu igloo cultivar
barb air tsunami sky frown

Ragnarok dyadic assist star bilm
and agnystic owl


    "The Flesh Failures

Crackling sounds of rain
through blinds intrude,
and mercy is a feeding tube.
Through dazzling shards of dark
a starker mood;
mercy is a feeding tube.
I sharpen it on stones
the stone gods approve.
Mercy is a feeding tube.
You hold me to a plan
of plenitude;
mercy is a feeding tube.
Among the sharks my hurl
is going good,
mercy is a feeding tube.
A clown knows all the gags
that pass for food:
mercy is a feeding tube.
Inoperable remorse
rolls dead eyes and lewd...
Mercy is a feeding tube.
Mercy is a feeding tube."

--*rnst kipling (va Abl*Mus*)

"Swinburne's influence upon modern paganism can hardly be overestimated..."  --Ronald Hutton, Th* Triumph of th* Moon (1999)


"If I could speak to a spider, I should find it quite impossible to convey to its limited intelligence any conception of our own human world. My obstacle would be its spiderism. Everything that I said would be translated into terms related to its spider-habits and spider-conceptions."  --Arthur Constanc*, Th* In*xplicabl* Sky (1956)


"Prim Hurd attends your call, & Palgrave proud,
Stonhewer the lewd, & Delaval the loud."

--Thomas Gray


    "Worshipful Company"

kingdom can
kingdom can
kingdom can fall
kingdom can
this dinosaur kingdom can fall
kingdom can
kingdom can
this dinosaur kingdom can fall
thingdom can
kingdom can
kingdom can rat
rat to rat do you think
kingdom can
kingdom can
that this dinosaur
that this dinosaur kingdom can fall