hiatus

Twitter.

Tumblr.

Webpage.

Deviant Art.

wayment for our old lifestyle

(via)

Audio Dunwich Horror.

"The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea." --The Rambler, 176.

Notes from the Edge Conference.

fall into spring may go
fleeing with the goats
gray boards weathering
thaumaturge on the run

fall into spring must pass
pillar here pillar there
where cars are burning
gray boards weathering

fall into spring will move
goldengrove unleaving
learning the scuba breath
thaumaturge on the run

Wayback.

"Each
partition travelled
by graysquadrons."

--Joris's Celan

Pixel snow.

(via)

murder board

(souhailbog on tumblr)

"He spent the end of his long life in Sicily, friend of the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse, who asked the poet 'what god is or what he is like.' Getting no immediate answer, the tyrant asked again the next day, and the next, until, exasperated with the poet, he asked why no response came. 'Because the longer I think about it, the fainter become my hopes of an answer,' Simonides said."

pastel love
made us stockpile
pearl Elvish
float pods Tvashtar
veldt ambush
vault ado weet

The hundred-year voyage.

foreverhome

(glitchphotography on tumblr)

A poem based on The Turn of the Screw by Isabel Nathaniel.

graysquadrons
obelisk-riddled
near an elevator

mannikins dance

the language changed
& i did not change

whacked with a tomahawk

ode to billy joel

(nurcotics via sweet-neon-lips on tumblr)

"...a section of Louis Couturat's essay 'The Principles of Logic' in Logic (1913) by Arnold Ruge et al, with a focus on univocity & reversibility in an artificial language, with examples from Ido..."

scramble
for space atop
Space Needle · sharing no
limelight for poetry those years
dark now

masking up, facing off

"Argon atoms make the sweetest pink."

"One sun is splendid; six suns would only be vulgar." --Tremendous Trifles

A440.

impala once i had
how the car has changed
in those twisted slippery years
in the cliffwalk stumble plunge

for only so much of it
i can account
a few risky ventures
some thoughtlessness

i did come in time to regret
but what is regret
when all about you burns
impala burns

impala for fuel
in a year like no other
Tlön
lowers its curtain

"You just assumed, if it was a Knoedler, that it wasn’t [fake]. That was the atmosphere."

"Men into stones therewith he could transmew,
And stones to dust, and dust to nought at all..."

--The Faerie Queene, I.7

"It occurred to him, he wrote, to write up a fake research, 'and get a little practice in turgid writing..' "

"here is the end
among vigorous young leaves
in the lake"

--@poem_exe

(anaklusmvos via sweetspider on tumblr)

rokkudaun basilisk

(noealzii on tumblr)

Ethno Deep Summer Mix.

So much badly designed software...reflects the utter stupidity of our time, but even more inescapably...or rather (i see, as i have been given software to try to fix) it shows us the unpleasant spectacle of a maybe a decent enough designer prevented from doing a good job & forced to do a bad job, because of external factors (haste, budget, unsympathetic management) that nilpertains the problem to be solved.

10 of Ekho's Anti-Racist Book Recs.

sound of an ice cream truck
where Westgate's fall holds court
sound of a car door shut
sound of releasing cork

my words to be ransomed slow
but not yet lost to search
back-into-pumpkin coach
years without thinking of her

Ochi Chernye. (via @JoyceCarolOates)

"How hard it is for the living to die
holding only memory, and then to study the minutes
how like a trumpet of the future it sounds."

--GPT-2

Jorie Graham epigraphs.

"And euermore in constant carefull mind
She fed her wound with fresh renewed bale.."

--The Faerie Queene, I.7

Vudu Ceremony on Mt Fuji.

(@BoschBot)

mi fanva

Kaldron on Monoskop.

     Pierre Loti i liked very much as i was mopping up the fringe & wake (or "sillage"--the waft of perfume a person leaves behind when they have gone) of Symbolisme. I had not yet encountered the concept of Orientalism but that was definitely a flavor i liked, not only because it was a gateway to various Eastern cultures themselves, but also because of the cultural misunderstandings of the 18th & 19th centuries, fruitful of a certain kind of writing which for me carried the charm of, say, anthropomorphic Disney animal cartoons.

Loti did them all: Japan, Turkey, Morocco, Tahiti... I have [a 30s "privately printed" copy of Ancient Manners (which was not uncommon in our local used book market in those days) &] a wonderful 1912 edition of Carmen Sylva (pic attached), a collection of essays including "Constantinople in 1890" & a couple on Marie of Rumania, who was (according to this) a personal friend. And i am pleased to just now have discovered (via, alas, Wikipedia) that his house was turned into a museum. (More about the house. A Loti collection online.)

The flavor of Loti's writing is, whenever he thinks about exotic women (which is frequently--the other kind, he sentimentalizes quite as much as any Victorian), very similar to the Japanese mood of iroke. From a modern point of view, it's more camp than erotic. I think of Ken Russell's Lair of the White Worm (even more than Salome). --Firbank, of course, is hiding in the arras.

"I have followed the moon from evening twilight to morning twilight; and I have gazed on the secrets of that Medusean face which she averts eternally from the earth." --@KlarkashT

Test pattern.

POSTSCRIPT. Oops! Ancient Manners (AKA "Aphrodite") is a different Pierre (Louÿs)--& mine is apparently the 1928 Whittaker Chambers translation, illustrated by Pogany... Obviously, iroke fits this Pierre better than the sailor (but not entirely, e.g. Madame Chrysanthemum...

why the water towers are not named

(@CrookedCosmos)

"THE ISLANDS (Anagrammed Lines)

The islands there are solemn.
Loneliness dreams the earth.
It's here laden shores lament.
Hear sea, tormented in shells."

--@AnthonyEtherin

Art inspired by Clark Ashton Smith.

things i did, but soon will do no more;
habits well-laid, but habits have their term,
     continue for awhile
     as rockets spent of fuel

the city itself scarce solider than this
persuades with what we knew & still recall
     but all of it is gone
     & all of us are done

fiery pollen

One falls into self-orthodoxies, & years of neglect do the rest.

Rain.

clarity to a point
then after that--blank mist

in which we're pent
clarity to a point

the hand vying to paint
cracks at the brink of almost

clarity to a point
then after that--blank mist

zone of irreversible strain

(newretronet on tumblr)

Ruins while you watch. (via feuilleton)

"...the incredible light nights that you get at 58 degrees north, the simmerdim as they call it in Scotland." --Sophie Grace Chappell, in: The Philosophers' Magazine

Mothra thread

quarantini PORES
maker of thwart OZONE
calf by smoke-ring ROPED
indigo ENEMA
i know you SEDAN
on the tongue road as TARTS
bees & birds ABORT
while kappas hurtle ROGUE--
noise & silence TRUCE
teabags in ransack STEEP

painted dove

(newretronet via lofiwave on tumblr)

The long tail of the Cathari.

"on the sundial
ripples with moonlight
a gift from edo"

--@poem_exe

New Otoliths.

just so i can say i did
i'll apply for this job
perilous indeed
just so i can say i did
going on two-lakh dead
to apply is to court the jibe
just so i can say i did

i'll apply for this job

scumfish

(@CrookedCosmos)

"If the weather is SCUMFISH then it is suffocatingly warm and humid." --@HaggardHawks

The Plague Givers.

Pain of being separated from painting. Pain of being separated from my other books. Pain of being separated from bookstores. From coffeehouses. From legitimate governance. Like being able to pick out the cries of individual birds in a quiet wilderness. There are so many things i didn't know i would be missing.

oldthinkers unbellyfeel woke

Golden age of Singapore music.

almost inaudible chirr
a dixie cup of milk

another life this scar
ghost labyrinth of silk

the night alive with stress
& wandering with ice

another star's to bilk
then back to endless flight

O Memnon meme

A miniature form.

threshgale chrome
graisk delve ostrich
churlish egg
bare Eloi lens
accuse while
from rooms amerce

vastationqarrtsilani

(warakami-vaporwave onn tumblr)

a hum over fields · charcoal burnoose
fantasia born of perfect java
hierophant's snide ziggurat
castaways on the mortal threshold
wrangle over wraiths, & vanish one by one

Darjeeling sets its course t'ward Alcor
as we blog about Abraxas
further bleach the returnless coral
huddle in Fermat's enigma
listen to a dove at dawn without mankind

through the jaws of death

(glitchblackmusic on tumblr)

menaced from a distance
grarnogtienta

alleyways in deep shadow
cracked & tilting concrete plates

plazas deserted
my clothes burning

diptherian
werifesteria

lose count of the laps

olisipo

(@taxcypcyp)

the birds all along were
here amidst empty hush

the grass its sev'ral strands

day of the windy werewolves

(@archillect)

to survive till November
on zaqqum
if without much faith

& I can't even think of it as karma
unless one "walking into checkmate"
& this fadeout, ghost by ghost

Earth's tenebrous guest
gives up stuff

sad face emoticon

nazmoudiq
was Uz agroof
Imlac sooth
but idyll bilk
squall twinkle
making us lunch

"In our countries, where we speak one language and write another, the price of pleasing the audience is costly. The poet has to find his precise equation as if he were walking on glass..."

half-sandwich regimen

(via susan polgar on fb)

Ganick interview. Another.

"The way we have lived for so long is there as a ghost pattern, fading slowly the way even a vivid dream fades away [as] the day gains momentum..." --@svenbirkerts

A night-time river road.

"MURDER OF CROWS (Triolet)

A murder, from a garden, rose
and left us in the dying light.
The sky is red now—no one knows
a murder from a garden rose.
It’s rare to see so many crows,
and now they’ve gone to gather night.
A murder from a garden rose
and left us in the dying light."

--Anthony Etherin

Reporting live from you know where.

(michael puttonen on fb)

Nowhere.

Won't cures eruct now?

    “Snake Eye

1.
Pyjamas, the first thing on the list
when they said hospital. You chose
the pattern yourself, whorls of snakes
in blue-greens, intricate.

I packed your bag crushing
the pyjamas under apples and books.
In pyjamas I do not know you.

In bed I wake.
The moon threads the curtains,
the brasseyes of the bed stare.
The dream-serpent wakes me.

2.
In the leaves of the jungle—
gummy greenness.
Netted against mosquitoes,
I watch the snake’s guerrilla

colours slide from under the Virgin’s
foot. No. I will not move the net
to look. In the fabric of your pyjamas,
in the cross-hatching of my skull,
he has found a home.

3.
In sudden winter
the house lies
down in snow.
Fear sloughs off
his skin and lodges
in my eye sockets;
the guest, shifteyed
ophidian, secures
his habitation.”

--Clairr O’Connor, in: Pillars of the House: an Anthology of Verse by Irish Women 1690 to the Present (ed. A A Kelly, 1987)