All the wars, all the destruction of the 20c, & our society has learned only two things: how to politicize resentment, & how to monetize suffering.
"terroir of the abyss" (for Dolly)
listen to the winds of light
implicit in the ragged gloom
ev'ry other ray is crime
& fraught with loot
pealing from the belvedere
derelict & lavender foam
positions teem
this outcome has been seen before
listen to the winds
Moloch fed & feeding
sparks no joy
soon loud hoods
hide stain
"I dipped a toe into the new Lake America and now they have to wash me off with Dawn like those ducks" —@dly.bsky.social
"McDonald’s is to America as the aqueducts were to Rome."
"Texas’s drag ban was found to be unconstitutional this morning and one of the plaintiffs who brought the suit was an Austin-based drag queen who often impersonates Dolly
Dolly was named in the final judgement itself and after hearing about the lawsuit, she sent that drag queen a signed guitar" —@okie.gay
accidie takes practice
as smoky frames unspool
one carps at each momentous
application of the rule
"If Toki Pona is the toki pona, then Ithkuil is the toki ike."
"In December 2007 it was reported that the Volapük version of Wikipedia had recently jumped to 15th place among language editions, with more than 112,000 articles. A few months earlier there had been only 797 articles. The massive increase in the size of 'Vükiped', bringing it ahead of the Esperanto Wikipedia, was due to an enthusiast who had used a computer program to automatically create geographical articles, many on small villages." —Wikipedia
"1980 imagined by 1970"
Poliespo whispers
whakapapa dropsy
slithy threads
all-enthralling
Amontillado · in the Urals
my clown blasted clarion
clickbait stories tease my inlets
all manxome with calls to enlist
piping the hardest
just before they're trashed
slithy threads
just listen
Huysmans notes covering many (but not all) of the authors mentioned.
"...by the time I was 16, I was in love with the idea of Susan Sontag. And I probably wanted to be [her] too. I even bleached a stripe in my hair. It was more of an orange shade though, because I made it with a supermarket color." —A V Marraccini via (google translate)
Meet Invisible Sex. (thread)
"We live in an old chaos of the sun." —Stevens
(first fytte)
purple sun in a green sky
sweep of ogre seasons
this hazy morn mild & feldspar
motions of a dire poison
smoking hot heart-smithy
yet small effect shekelwise
invasion cards cryptic
crystal in retrospect
lavender clouds laden
with long withered songlines
yesterdays guest-gathered
one gust wrung from dung heap
travel means concern-tryst
almost trackless smackdown
follow the true fuel cell
affordances half-baffled
only from this lean land
headlights on at dread noon
monuments to weird winds
monsoon saga logjam
pickle chips my pocket
perishing shore story
Stetson from a stiff shelf
Asterion umgang
uphill walking homeward
herald of smoke broken
answer in the onset
ever same & devilled
pastel still but darkening
groundstalworth solitude
you leave little book piles
a breeze flutters bloodshot
world we will snarl on
wares we believe in
bluefaced strangers strung out
on stern wrong alphabets
purple sun in a green sky
(Continued here.)
The Little Garden of Walahfrid Strabo. Online. In Huysmans. Another version, 1966 (with complete facsimile).
Incense Burner in the form of a Praying Mantis.
"i'm not done though i'm done"
no one trauma · i crawled away from
no sifting down of ash
Rest in peace, Suleiman Mansour.
"THUNDER (Anagrammed Lines)
Ten horns united,
thunder intones
her intent sound."
—Anthony Etherin
"Suno is generating 7 million new tracks every single day."
“O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)”
— Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge” via @johnhealymurray
Sea level rise on vintage maps.
"all-vinyl DJ set"
crinoid yardang
worn plastic plates
whittled down umber
vague liripoop
crinoid yardang of thought
too breezy for the colonnades
"more cowbell"
crypt keeper
handshake, soot topsoil:
gulag wine
A Reading of "Twin Peaks: The Return".
“The shadowed balcony and crater sound was traitored by quiet billows, and a whole far level was not unusual!” —Hell of the Cyr
"Even art is entirely computer-mediated—and when the protagonist tries to make a sculpture without that mediation, it falls to bits." —Jo Walton on Don't Bite the Sun via
Annie Lennox at Freddy Mercury tribute.
“Sonnet
Say sad. Say sun’s a semblance of a bled
blanched intransigence, collecting rue
in ray-stains. Smirching pages. Takes its cue
from sateless stamens, flanging. Florid head
got no worries, waitless. Say you do. Say
photosynthesis. Light, water, airy bread.
What eats its source, its orbit? Something bad:
some plural petal that will not root or ray.
Sow stray. Salt night for saving, dreaming clay
for heap, for hefting. Originary ash
for stall and stilling. Say it will, it said.
Corolla corona, bliss-bane—delay
surge and sediment. Say instrument and gash
and ruminant remnant. Rex the ruse. Be dead.”
—Karen Volkman
improbable burger
greps the halls of Milgrim
some Instagram pogrom
nary a glum pilgrim
The year of three Moby Grapes.
"Every time I hear VU’s 'Waiting for the Man,' I can’t help but recall Burroughs’ disdain for the lyrics, which he expressed to Lou Reed: 'My god, what dealer is going to be wearing a straw hat?' " —R M Haines
"He was not a fan of science fiction and preferred not to read the works he was commissioned to paint..."
“The Manor Garden
The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.
You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig—
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History
Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string
Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.”
—Sylvia Plath, 1959
"The Satyr and the Saint, by Leonardo Bercovici
Subtitled 'A Novel of the Roman Film Colony,' The Satyr and the Saint is a spoof of the world of Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, and all the stars and denizens of Cinecitta. Bercovici learned about the Italian film scene after he was blacklisted from Hollywood in the early 1950s and moved to Europe to continue working as a screenwriter. The satyr of the title is Rudolfo Urbani, a renowned film director and rival of Casanova. Urbani hires a young Sicilian novelist whom he learns is still celibate in his late twenties — hence the saint. A satire about Italian manners and mores, it is definitely a candidate for further research." —Neglected Books via
Why 46 People Died Because of a Story That Never Made Sense.
"driven ev'ry kind of rig that's
ever been made"
—"Weed, Reds and Wine"
You Drink a Lot of Coffee for a Teenager.
"Pluto Demotion Day"
cat culdesac orca
calm lavender gin mill
Quixote
has it backwards
we must live · by the break of swevens
Trapezohedron pack mule
pearl-infinite buncombe
Quixote
has it backwards
being there · precedes set list
still a few mailbox nodes
necessary lessons
Quixote
has it backwards
Vesuvius blew · to get that blue note
Genocidal levels of suffering & death.
"the poet born for flowers tastes ashes"
cardhouse fluttering
kingdom of cut cardboard
derelict chastisements
with it still unsaid
bartered hours burn
the found bairn staring
in the ant-haunted desert
Oneday people are going to want to know what happened to us, & they aren’t going to get it from our novelists.
Compton-Burnett audiobook at Archive dot org.
" Set in 306 BCE, the story tells of a sculptor’s commission from the King of Macedonia, which is interrupted when the island is visited by 'the gods in a sky-chariot.' But the chariot is a spaceship and the gods are a pair of bug-like humanoid aliens, one of whom becomes the sculptor’s model for the now headless Winged Victory of Samothrace statue on display in the Louvre." —Sean Guynes via
thiefjubilee jewelbin
nard of stakes
adjust your sets Stetson
north forty surge
tidal blurry barstool
paint burlap
blunt gas price iceberg
way far pumpkin
fanebruised outcome
foghorn snag
veldt pinwheel
song spoiled why good
"Tokimeku does not specify joy. It specifies that the heart has been set going." —@thetokyohermit
Your timeline has been cursed.
“The book is our ghost story.”
—Riverwork, Lisa Robertson via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
The Revolutionaries Try Again.
coilname howdah, fetish wasp
stooge silo should squeal at all
It's August, Yet it Feels Like September.
Operation Spiderweb--the patch.
tarry among problems
oil shimmer
on umber coffee
wake up reversed
"To criticise Nick Land for being inhumane is as hollow as criticising him for being British; he’s uncannily proud of both crimes." —@hollowataraxia via
Revisiting The Wind and the Lion.
"...Carlyle ( ) wrote to say that his wife had read Sordello with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book." —G K Chesterton, Browning (1903)
Dr John selects (with many links).
"elegy for Boolean search"
lost in the slope stupor-
'petually whirled deadlock
labyrinth
doubly threadbare
Durkin saloon · orchidaceous
Makeshift Variation
