pylons for Cylons

<-London (via wikipedia)

"What distinguishes us from our predecessors is our offhandedness with regard to Mystery. We have even renamed it: thus was born the Absurd..." --E M Cioran, All Gall is Divided (1952; tr Howard 2012)

"Gravity's Rainbow is just so beautiful because it's very multidimensional. I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual. I wanted to make an opera of that book, actually, and I wrote to him and asked him if that would be OK (I actually found him; he's quite reclusive). And he wrote me this funny letter. He said, 'You can do it, but you can only use banjo.' " --Laurie Anderson

"Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety." --Cioran, op cit

<-from On Beyond Zebra (via wikipedia)

Who is Cleo Birdwell?

"A philosophical vogue is as irresistible as a gastronomic one: an idea is no better refuted than a sauce." --ibid

"To understand The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) as representative of some kind of 1950s reality would be the equivalent of someone going to our theaters and concluding that vampires walk the streets of Seattle." --Jessica Crispin

"Even Cioran, who praised friends for being “marginal” and was accustomed to suicidal phone calls that came in the middle of the night, requiring hours of consolation, found Celan hard to take." --Benjamin Ivry

(via, via Sheri Morgan on Fb)

Black Angel's Death Song. Beck weighs in.

"Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man is set in a prison. Before writing the novel, Elkin had never visited a prison or researched was it was like to be in prison. After he published the novel, he had the opportunity to teach creative writing to convicts in a prison. So finally he had a chance to see what a real prison what like. His comment: 'I like my prison better.' " --Thomas Ligotti

Magic grinds the wound, bringing invalidity

"Did he have the faintest notion that he was a sort of guru to the wreckers of civilization?"

(via language log)

The philosopher as presently defined, is one whose job it is to pile tiddlywinks on the tiddlywinks already piled.

"Space Oddity" by the Langley School Music Project.

"...his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history..." --Patricia Lockwood

Television conspiracy theories.

<-Tokyo Skytree, via neojaponisme)

"...(now one of the most popular tattoos in Turkey)..."

"Richter...suggests comparing the list of governors who refuse to expand healthcare for the poor, Medicaid, with the list of states fighting to preserve slavery. The surprising similarity shows that there is in fact a culture war going on..." --Marek Ostrowski via Watching America

"It's not that I don't think we're doomed and our culture insipid. I do."

Space-girl dance.

ferreteria

"The greatest panic I've ever felt was at an Umbanda rite in Brazil when I sensed that the others present weren't actually people." --Jim Harrison, Just Before Dark
(1991)

Nastaliq.

(via)

"The literary world is one of those unintentionally comic movies they used to make about voodoo and zombies." --ibid

Hauntology resurrected.

A jar of vinegar set out for gnats.

Hsigo.

another cancerstory
i hear & put out of mind

the wine flows
the guests grow fewer

squirrel drey badger sett

(via)

"These hopeless characters lived in times when writers were like gods, dwelling in the mountains as desperate hermits or loopy aristocrats. In those days they wrote with the sole purpose of communicating with the dead..." --Enrique Vila-Matas in Isola di Rifuti

The Book of Lamentations.

Street Apes of Jakarta. More.

a fistful of slosh

"He feels the breaking surge and howling wind,
But most he feels the tempest in his mind." --Hoole's Ariosto

1.
clouded wish
for chiming uppermost
shadowless
onslaught of shadows

2.
the old songs
so full of pity
not quite skidding
in the morning drizzle

my good moves & my bad
swell the one record
which is not a map
of injury
of green yellow or red precipitation
of words taken up & then laid aside
as insufficient

to the moment's loss

3.
on the salt plain
spook-companioned
no coilname blurt
& there will be looking back
from a peace vantage

though none of this
will have been saved

(via io9)

"We cannot accept the currently popular blend of German Idealism, mathematics, empirical science, and Halloweenish mood music as the future of continental thought." --Graham Harman

"Maggot Brain" covered by Gov't Mule.

"The last days of empire are carnivals of folly." --Chris Hedges

amoeba car

Head East. (via Arthur Decker on Fb)

"Althusser manifestly suffered from a severe form of bipolar disorder, yet most persons with this condition do not share his painful sense of nonbeing, become murderers, or develop a bleak version of materialistic philosophy." --L.A. Kirshner

Movie of The Man in the High Castle?

<- artist's impression of newly discovered exoplanet GJ 504b (via) (A.k.a. "Sakura", "Genesis", "Galt's World" (ugh!), or possibly "Zeeba"; this is only 5 light years from 70 Virginis...which now has its own prezi)

"Marx's vampires are much more well known; the werewolves have on occasion been noted, but they to a much less degree, quantitatively and qualitatively with regard to sustained analysis." --The Hour of the Machine blog

"Alfred Hitchcock shot murder scenes like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes." --Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times (2005)

Dog Horoscopes.

<- Chinese palindrome ("huiwen") poem by Su Hui, known as "Picture of the Turning Sphere" or "Star Gauge" & originally stitched in five colors of thread, on silk. "Interesting that she was a contemporary or near-contemporary of Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius..." says M Hendryn on Language Hat. It can be read so many ways, in part or whole, it is like a poetic fractal, or a labyrinth of syllables (not to be compared with letter-unit palindromes in a Western alphabet, of course). A picture of Su Hui. Of the 5000 poems she is said to have written, only this one survives (the same link leads to the jpeg of a translation, from this book.). A whole anthology of such poems.

Trippy Vesta animation.

"...there are/ still songs to sing beyond/ mankind." --Joris's Celan

Subway (Epilogue).

And for many, it does both.

<- Christopher Nevinson, "London, Winter" (via wood_s lot)

"With forty-one distinct crimes to David's charge, the killing of nine hundred thousand women and children, the houghing of thousands of horses, all of which is set down in infallible Holy Writ, his record is very bluggy." --Elbert Hubbard

Miley Kali.

"Those sweets which, after days elaps'd, dispense" --Hoole's Ariosto* (1785)

"Their wreck deem'd certain--each the public cares
Forgets, and to preserve his life prepares." --ibid

painting by Brian K Jones (pic by Hampton Burwick)

Precrime.

"...safety behind the cloaks and masks and thousand-named mists of Venezia." --Against the Day

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (*Scott called him: "The noble transmuter of the gold of Ariosto into lead." --Life and Genius of Ariosto)

invincibles

(via)

"The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathematics." --Against the Day

Sounds of the Space Age (flexidisk).

"The virtual architecture of dread defines the affective climate of early 21st century urbanism....Exorcising this dread has been a central objective of cultural hackers." --Steve Goodman

Legobot.

"...he had decided to write all his papers in Latin, which no one had done since Euler." --ibid

The clouds of Kepler-7b.

"...the past has already lost its war with the future; it doesn’t understand this yet..." --Eleanor Saitta

Militarized insects.

Offworld Glaciology.

Ravished by the Triceratops. (via supergee)