Monday, June 30, 2014

the unseemly fickleness of retrogression


The Oddie Refractor II.

"Let It Go" in Lojban.

"...never in my darkest nightmares did I dream of encountering Plutonium kun." --Spike Japan

Big Eyes.

"He is falling, but the future will catch him. No: the future is falling, too. The future, too, is a kind of falling." --Lars Iyer, Nietzsche and the Burbs blog

"The infographics at the link show how many bombings, assassinations, prisoner rescues, and other military operations took place during the reporting period."

"We pay Lushootseed with our mind. We give it our mind. That’s how you pay the language."

"I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there's more difference than you would imagine to be possible." --Chesterton

"...as I was reading this book, I kept on thinking of illegal people as a hyperobject..."

       "The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die."

--Tennyson


The view from Voyager I.

Trapeze: "Jury".

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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

plastiglomerate


(from Boss Architecture Flickr Group via darklyeuphoric on tumblr)

I'm Helping.

"That saw their trees' rich amber tears distill" --Hoole's Ariosto

Yearning for Impossible Escape.


"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." --Oscar Wilde @BestOscarWilde

Two moves by Geller.

"Lord in heaven, folks. Those dystopic SF novels were warnings, not how-to manuals." --@KameronHurley

The carrot hack.

"More than that, however, I’m disillusioned with much of the Internet, while fully cognizant that little of Spike could have been written without it. I’m tired of the Internet’s stalkers and spammers, the rule of its lynch mobs and witch hunters, the whinnying of its millions of saloon-bar donkey-bores, betraying their unthinking ignorance with every bray, and the incivility it engenders, even in mild-mannered me; tired of the degradation of art to “content”, monetized or not; tired of the ten thousand tech bloggers panting to live-blog the release of the latest phablet (a word which, if you haven’t already encountered it, is coming very soon to your lexicon, like it or not); tired of the grin given me by Jeff Bezos, who, having donned cassock and surplice, is about to administer, gleefully, the last rites to the book on its deathbed, tired of his “fulfilment center” warehouses, tired, so tired already of his Kindle I bought to research this piece, loathing everything about it from the fatuity embodied in its Paperwhite name (paper, at least the paper books are printed on, is not white, it’s ivory to cream) to its assassination of the integrity of the page to the way it froze a fortnight out of the box; tired of the relentless destruction (156,000 US Postal Service jobs gone in the last five years) and the absence of meaningful creation; tired by the erasure of the past, by the all-pervasive decontextualization, and by the way so much is written, stripped down, in C. K. Ogden’s Basic English; tired by the 250 milliseconds, less time than the 400 milliseconds it takes to blink, that will dissuade people from visiting a website if has a quicker loading peer; and tired by the way the Internet panders tirelessly to our false new twin idols of convenience and cheapness. I’m tired of mindless technophiles and technosnobs, such as this writer in the January 26th Economist, and their laughable visions of progress:

      'The iTV, which may be controlled by via gestures and voice commands as well as via iPads and iPhones, could be a digital hub for the home. It would let people check whether their washing machine has finished its cycle while they gossip on Facebook and watch their favourite soap.'

But above all, I’m tired by the Orwellian undertones the telescreens of the Internet are beginning to assume. I could go on; indeed, I could go on at book length, but I’ll leave you, obliquely, with this:

      'There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.'

   1984, George Orwell" --Spike Japan blog (thanx Xian!)

"Sadly, the beloved animal is said to have died tragically during one of the gatherings at the castle: the moose drunk a bit too much beer at a banquet and fell down the stairs."


(via "Journey to the Center of Google Earth")

"Hollywood films, in general, either tell us a truth we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in." --William Goldman

Shime: the meme.

"The not-seer cannot unmake." --Jose Garcia Villa

Ten scifi epics set in non-Western worlds.

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Monday, June 16, 2014

eruv, argal a gravure

New Horizons taking off.

"They who piddle and patter here in collars and tailed coats . . . . I am aware who they are . . . . and that they are not worms or fleas" --Walt Whitman @TweetsOfGrass

"Street View even sees ghosts."


"It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face at St James's, to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, 'ere Mercy is to vanish with them?" --Lawrence Sterne

The River Runs Uphill.


"Northeast of Tactical Road; southeast of Tactical Road South."

"The origin of the vampire belief lies in insomniacs. There is something not quite nice about us." --Robert Aickman

Lowrider car combat.

"The gold of authority is bright
With the glitter of attrition."

--Servasius (tr Rexroth)

Untruthiness & his friends.

"I’ll flip you for a dinosaur, my sweeties,
When Uncle Pete lets Usher eat our Wheaties."

--K Silem Mohammed

This War of Mine.

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Friday, June 13, 2014

plash lack


(by Andre Masson via toembracetherandom on tumblr)

"Today, many elderly Koreans can still be seen regularly heading off to the mountains in search of the remaining Japanese stakes, but as each year passes, fewer and fewer of the objects are found and removed."

Faithpunk and palindromes.

"nobody waits
at the flat rock of syntax"

--Clark Coolidge

"My mother died in 2007 from a morphine overdose, at which point I changed the spelling of my name from Anna, to Annah. This was a cathartic shift for me— a shift which symbolically allowed me to resist the life of being a Palindrome."

"Basho’s Bed

Set a ballade–
Be not sad.
No plan, I forego regret.
A wet I? Mere folly…

Dim, lacy moths, in a vigor, fall.
Ill at last, I move to (no regrets) a faded dale–
A glade, pools.
Some more go too?
No…

Jump! ol’ frog, or flop.
Mujo no oto1
…gero2…

Me, moss-looped, algael,
Added a faster gero note,
Vomit salt, all ill.
A frog, I vanish
To my calm idyll of eremite water
…gero gero…

Final pond –
A stone bed
All abates."

--Steven Fraser

("1. Mujo no oto. Japanese for ‘the sound of impermanence’. Mujo or impermanence is an important concept in Buddhism and central to Zen aesthetics. This phrase also references Basho’s original haiku, the final line of which is ‘mizu no oto’ – the sound of water.

2. Gero gero is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a frog’s croak, but is also used adverbially to describe vomiting. This pun was one of the inspirations for the poem.)

The three-hour word.


(via via Saladin Ahmed in twitter)

Sprachregelung.

"Pallaksch, pallaksch: faecal emergencies come, one after another, W. says. Toilet bowls are spattered. The gods, blind and deaf and mad, are screaming. The sky is darkening. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings ..." --Spurious; the hat.

"...many art-school grads were coming of age at a time when what felt most oppressive wasn’t consumer capitalism: It was the institutional codes and guild vocabularies in which they had been trained."

"Gas, alas, and Arkansas" --Gerard Nolst Trenité

" I doubt it’s going to be resolved any time soon."

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Monday, June 09, 2014

Silver Pockets Full


(via destruction-mode on tumblr)

The Tanks and the People.

"people's impulses have condensed into
uranium stored in a safe place"

--Bei Dao

Requiem for 9 Bleecker St.

"Really kind of wishing the baffling mass death thing had happened to mosquitoes instead of bees." --Saladin Ahmed on twitter

Lego Inferno.

"Go see the whales, the rainforests. There’s no guarantee we’ll save them all. Memorize this great world, the one we were born into. Tell others in the future. Their mistakes might be fewer if they know the greatness we once saw." --Bill McKibben in Orion Magazine

For all your Enochian supply needs.


(via @PicturesEarth via S Ahmed on twitter)

"Too, no one's story is complete until the person is dead, and the dead don't write memoirs."

"The story goes that one day, during a war of the Mongols against the imperial house of Sung, an important city fell into the hands of the foe. When Kia Se-tao received news of the disaster, he was found kneeling in the grass of a lawn and taking part in a cricket match. 'In this manner you look out for the interests of the nation !' he was reprimanded. He was not in the least disturbed, however, and kept his attention concentrated on the game." --Insect Musicians and Cricket Champions of China

Cli-fi.

"His toenails had been painted a glittery gold color, and there was also green paint under his fingernails."

"Hymn to the Moon

Luna, nul one,
Moon, nemo,
Drown word.
In mutual autumn
I go;
Feel fog rob all life;
Fill labor
Go, flee fog
In mutual autumn
I drown
Word; omen; no omen.
O, Luna, nul."

--Graham Reynolds

Sprachregelung.

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Monday, June 02, 2014

Pallaksch

The ghosts will always win.


(via via Stephen Evans iii. on Fb)

"I think poetry is a cold art with a big heart of all heat."

Durkin at last.

"If I gobbled up the wagon-ruts,
I'd be on my way."

--Paul Celan, in: Last Poems, tr Washburn & Guillemin (1986)

Hauntings & fUSION Anomaly.

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know." ~Ambrose Bierce

Concretism on soundcloud.

"When great trees fall in forests
small things recoil into silence"

--Maya Angelou

"I had a recurring dream about the Somerset town of Sedgemoor..."

Cabadath11.

"Fact: crunchy peanut butter was invented by Senator Joe McCarthy as a tool for killing dogs." --Scott Weinberg on twitter

Phrasebooks for the Silk Road.

Pallaksch.


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