(via carol-kara-dnvers on tumblr)
pocket repaired with safety pins, leisure TILLED
ss if an ICEAGE
instead of
Necronomicon for a LECTOR
but i have no sense of fear,
any more than the wizard of LATVIA
thinking about the fallen
this clouds the good manners of an EGOIST
Graywyvern
his rank would DERATE
SEAMY
landscapes · EERIE
absence of ARENA
in our minds these are the MINOR
plague YEARS
time to check out all our virtual CARTS,
a million species come to say ALOHA
time to find out whether our republic
has morphed into a harsher show, more ROYAL
whatever we thought we were doing comes to grief
among mere slaughters, as the permafrost THAWS
Graywyvern thinks it's time? it isn't time,
the calaveras chant, amidst swift SALSA
in a savage YEAR
scant dinero, EURO;
fenced-off AREA
fellowship of the ROAD
with quicksilver VIER
a brush seldom IDLE
learn the ropes or ELSE
this last turquoise of REEF
swimmingpool feed HOSE
hail to the chief ORCA
mind lays scar on SCAR
invests with Wyndham EARL
some tower-set BASH
calavera's HAHA
chemical ACNE
throttles the ARIA
lingers the ARIA
though now add a SIGH
hole in ground i BLAB
divest of Trojan LICE
the best it's ever BEEN
hyphen for a DASH
someone else's SINS
will come to try this HASP
(via @jeffreyford8)
Gyron, two-wheel car of the future.
the sky full of arrayed flying HAFTS
halcyon · with a purely notional AZURE
rounds of tsantsa golf
call it FUGUE
whatever seems to happen
those fiery fountains of noise will TRUMP
from the real future
Graywyvern with his crimson messenger SEEPS
these days, it seems to be, more than anything we need unity in the face of the threats to our democracy. in particular, though i usually am highly critical of the democratic party myself, i have begun to realize that a lot of the attacks on particular candidates may very well originate with russian troll farms; therefore, i am presenting this meme as a reply to all such stories, facebook or elsewhere. not to be construed as an insult, but rather as a caution:
One of my co-workers at the bookstore clued me in to the fact that there actually was a first "Easter Egg" (or hidden message in video games), & it has a story behind it. This reminded me irresistibly of the Cynewulf rune signature. (Well, what i said was Caedmon...) Farther afield, of course, makers of ghazals (& also, e.g. troubadours--"I am Arnaut who gathers the wind") have a designated place to put their takhallus (nom de plume). But Cynewulf's is probably the Ultimate Easter Egg. He used, in order, the things that each rune named, as words in his poem.
This is also like Alfred Hitchcock appearing in so many of his movies as a cameo. Nowadays, this sort of thing is much more sophisticated.
I never accepted the revised numbering of Star Wars. For me, the first three, as they came out, will always be the Trilogy. (--And you know, those versions have since gotten pretty hard to revisit. How 1984)...!) Likewise, i prefer the Blade Runner i first saw in the theater, not the "director's cut" (1992). When they put together a more linear (& presumably more authentic) Metropolis (2001)--i still liked the old one, though it didn't make that much sense... And now, as i have discovered, they're fucking with Hamlet.
I mean, it's one thing to issue a better translation of Remembrance of Things Past (Kilmartin, 1981). Even though i'm never going to read it (i read the old one while riding cross-country on a Greyhound bus--& long maintained that's the only way to do so), if i were younger & about to embark on such an adventure, why would i want to bother with anything but the best possible representation of the original? I remember when they decided that they would issue a new edition of Ulysses (Gabler, 1984), correcting many typos that had crept into it during the printing process (i mean, would you want to proofread James Joyce?): even though that one itself seems to have become controversial (if Wikipedia is any indicator). I figured Joyce with typos is--just another run through the author's mania, except this time by the hand of chance. They say the 1990 (et seq) Pevear & Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky are way better; this actually tempts me. (I'm not a refusenik on everything.)
It was a good thing to restore Emily Dickinson's dashes (1955). I'm not sure (do i have to be?) about sprucing up the Sistine Chapel (1994). I definitely didn't need the "original On the Road scroll" (2008) or the "Little Review Ulysses" (2015). But i do detect a pattern--perhaps it's just that so many people are living today, & running out of original things to do: they start prying into the monuments of the past. They start tampering, perfecting, going after the uttermost authenticity.
Some things become altered permanently. (Can we really go back to a pre-2014 Marion Zimmer Bradley?) Others, well, there'll always be retro. I found out about the recent Shakespeare controversies only because my wife went back to school & was required to buy the whole Norton Shakespeare. It boasted three different versions of Lear. --Not long after that, naturally, the two Hamlets made their separated debut.
I can see their reasoning. What we had for over a hundred years was a Franken-hybrid, that "Shakespeare never wrote and no audience in his time saw performed." I'm not down on the whole task of manuscript-scholarship. But in our collective imagination (just as with the original Star Wars trilogy), something happened--& it can't un-happen. Our connection to the past was imperfect, but our response wasn't wrong.
The ever-more-phildickian path our culture has embarked upon, tearing up the road as it goes, asks of us not to remember where we have passed. Like Facebook, it gets harder & harder to just find out what happened yesterday. Recent scholarship on the Tao te Ching has even suggested that "Lao Tzu" never existed (Allegro, anyone?). I'm sure there's some kind of Phantom-Time-Hypothesis apocalypse brewing even as i write: certainly a lot of Sixties revisionism--almost entirely undertaken out of reactionary zeal--has blurred the meaning of that Cultural Revolution forever for those who never knew it. Our own time, so full of partisan strife, doubtless will be revised by the winners--if there are any.
And the Cheshire Cat smile of disappeared-Lao Tzu grins its immortal enigma.
(via)
(sergei sharov, "temptation of saint anthony" (1969) via via cardboard cutout sundown via feuilleton)
"The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair, though its reputation says otherwise." (via blckdgrd)
Chesterton used as the title of one of his poems, the made-up word "Plakkopytrixophylisperambulantiobatrix," which is unexplained in any of the places that cite it. My own thought is that it is one of those graeco-latin coinages that define "donnish humor." We have a Greek root (plag- which becomes plakk- in combination) that means "cross-" & a Latin word that seems to mean " female spitter" then the construction "o-phyl-is" which could mean "of the tribe of" & then the rest of the word takes a long Latin word for "walking through" (the gerund or noun derivative) & then, i suppose, the English root "bate" with another feminine agent-ending, so i get: a female who restrains walking through, of the tribe of cross-spitters.
