bewitching mystery

(via the guardian)

"Send light back through looking for what else color might become" --Rusty Morrison

Proposed Titles for Sun Poems.

(from The Hands of Orlac, via 8tracks dot com)

Cry Isis.

"Prophetic dreams are the prerogative of the melancholic." -Lisa Robertson

Under a Crimson Sun.

(via Arhus University tumblr-search)

"He dressed in black, like some English Johnny Cash, except for a pair of lurid socks—fuchsia and acid yellow were favorite colors..."

cthulhucene

(via national geographic)

"The best part is doing what I deeply care about all the time, and the worst part is that I never get home from work, and it’s never done, and it follows me everywhere."

"Did you mean cthulhu scene?"

Yokai.

"Like homeless ghosts, the social reality of these photographs haunts Detroit and America, signifying a despair so deep that abandonment is the only method left to represent their loss." --Vince Leo on Little Brown Mushroom blog

"This is a pitifully sad way of doing intellectual history."

Cynefin.

"We’re encouraged to lose our possessions."

"...you get used to living among palimpsests." --The Recognitions

"No, this epoch is defined by the frightening weirdness of being impossibly bound up with other organisms."

List of Summons Who Servers are Not Named After

      “Counting Ghosts”

  1.
Sun-seldom, stone declivity,
one among a host on CLEAR ALE DAY;
graffiti on one side i focus with difficulty
walls slide-veering off: ALL ARE DECAY

& beyond, bright, where things are being ripped up
before they can be rebuilt, by ARCADE ALLEY.

  2.
invisible dragons coil on the weather radar
elliptical Metalachi
stream of bats flowing up into the twilight
jittery particles almost without sound
somewhere a counter clockwise drain
Google Street View 2010
did that construction
ever finish

  3.
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
an order traced by silver fires
the Great Telescope
Number 4 in the General Catalogue

consumed by firenado fury
now known as Gliese 667
on the wall: “DYMO
           666
           6”
on the dumpster: “SMOG”
Batman explored the shores of Port Phillip
famous twilight          world of eternal dusk
jasyan
“N ZCHEM          et in Arcadia
RiDSliTMD”

consumed & reborn

  4.
smell of hot wet metal, spita
a ring of tomatoes
eruv
star bouncing in the telescope
the drive ahead, visualized
while it is dark out still
counting ghosts
& ghosts of ghosts
the white coffee cup coming almost clean
my page shredded even in the typewriter
steeled to torture but not this
through pedestrian-thronged streets a jellyfish walking
flash atop faint towers in the rain

thoughts that would explode
any other head
here find benign abode

thoughts that would explode
gathered on the road
of ecstasy & dread

thoughts that would explode
any other head

Cold wind from the dead,  EURUS,
this bright morning,    ULEMA
says. I pry lids with     REBAR
apart, wage word      UMAMI
on a Serengeti of      SARIN.

Zilcrino.

Tripping with Allah.

they call me MISTER therion

sometimes there is a thread
& a movement like a voice

other times the sky
holds no such thing

as edges, forms, or clear signs

Inside the Favelas.

"Perhaps, Paglen speculated, these future deep-sea squid with their extraordinary powers of sight honed precisely for focusing on tiny points of light in the darkness might drift up to the surface of the ocean on calm nights to look upward at the stars, viewing a scene that will have rearranged into whole new constellations since the last time humans walked the Earth. And, there, the squid might notice something..." --bldgblog

(via slate)

the axe of the apostles

(via Al Jazeera)

"With Badiou, we can say that philosophy passes into terror whenever it attempts to banish the anti-philosopher..." --Larval Subjects blog

Green Modernism

suppose ev'ry Street View
had its timeline
& we could spot

our dead in their rounds
still like us unable to heed

"Since kitschadelic pop already exists in the world, abundantly, what does simulation-kitsch actually add by way of surplus value?" --Simon Reynolds

They didn't read out loud.

"...if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs." --Werner Herzog (via Saladin Ahmed on twitter)

The Geep.

klesperantosaurus

"Japanese Maples

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone."

Clive James

The Dark Learning.

"...if you leave a running app such as Nike+ or Runkeeper on your bedside table while you sleep at night, you will wake up to see that the app reports that you ran a significant distance, without doing anything." --bldgblog

The Feculent Teens.

convalescent serum

(via via metafilter)

Marxist Noir.

"Vince Neil’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, As Transcribed by Josh, in a Crowded Hotel Bar One Afternoon, Being a Poem Spoken in the Future, During the Upcoming AWP Conference of 2014, in Seattle, Washington

1.

Of the latter heroes I was most
supine, handed out
warnings to women who were pregnant
or were likely to become pregnant,
hope tucked bloodless
into saddlebag, neither hunter
nor borrower, sometimes
referred to myself as It—
as in charity is
its bird machine—a strap-on fashioned
out of bits of the foregone cross
coming at me from the future
in the tiniest and the most
lineal of dreams, my preferred
haruspex pondering
her retirement and my new
address as quickly
dirty as the last, in times of war
immune to alarum,
at least fifteen minutes away
from sword and armor, the valves of my heart
opening and closing slowly
like the wings of a new butterfly
at rest upon the battlements
of overweening Troy, and all
the maidens and immortals

2.

and the handful of princes who,
in those days, took time away
from their own troubled narratives
to stop and save me from myself or from
the ancient boy-scout Death
are now themselves long dead
by natural and/or
mythological causes. Don’t mention it
they seemed to say with their great
careful bodies
as they turned them from me in departure.
Don’t mention it and drifted leonine
and smooth toward the assault
on their promised
constellations and perhaps
the foreign-funded rebellions
of their homicidal children,
got upon or beneath majestic animals
and graduate students, ears crisp
but not always white
as snow. And where was I—year
of the jellyfish, cossacked,
bowing feastless
before capital—when they
in their turn required me

3.

and I heard them cry out for me
from the dust that their fallen bodies made
in the dust, even better
and taller destroyers looking down
upon them, their lives an end-note
of snuffed out goat-bone, free-range
angels slumped out
on conveyor belts, felled
by slotting bolt in a rusty hank
of factory-light, and by the transitive property
and a million miles away
a flower of blood popping
from the dashboard
of my Camaro? No, you haven’t

4.

heard all of this before,
dirtlings. Moreover
there’s something not quite real
about sex dolls. They can’t
be strangled to death

5.

and the conditions for such
an act, the aura of its chance, like
gravity, makes the minimalism
of the vestibule
a possibility. If you don’t like
the vestibule, then what about
the service elevator, where tonight we’ll strangle
down so easily? Also, the zombie prostitutes
and hustlers, who have laid up
like sandwiches
for hours beneath heat lamps
in order to trick me, with their customized
temperature, that they are living beings to kiss
when they arrive at my hotel door
is one of those bad dreams
spoken of, above. In those days
of the dream, and of the various
kingdoms of conscience, I was set on taking
only baths, as in the shower
it was too easy to cry
over the specifications, and kept track
of war and politics
as one does the deeds
of distant cousins. Who’s the blond
is what I said to myself, then, when I saw
my picture, for the first time
in the record store, wearing my stage-clothes
and the wig of Viking sex-goddess

6.

on the cover of the first album
and winking back up
into my face. It was the me
before, it was the me
pictured, and then it was the me
confused and aching for me
after realizing I was me, that it
was me, that charity was
its bird machine, that its soul
had been lifted from out of its body
as if borne up between
the teeth of a giant
black wolf. Like a lot of goddesses
I spent much of my youth
avoiding rape. It wasn’t a soul, really,
but how else, like a penitent, to talk
about the way the wolf
was eating it? I don’t think it’s true
that you owe a debt to those
who’ve saved your life, that your life is theirs
until the favor is returned. The chance
at favor rarely comes
unless you’re in the movie
of favor, and no matter, as once
someone saves you
they can no longer exist
truly for you, you a check
in the win column, it is like they are suddenly

7.

a whale now, shooting between
exoplanets, it is like making out
with a galleon, it’s a problem to have
a decent conversation or a lunch
with those who have
delivered you. If you’re not into
the vestibule, then what do you think
about the Holy Roman Empire? And when
the witches say be you full of Jove
then be you full of Jove. Don’t make me repeat myself
in front of the poets. Who wouldn’t want to stay

8.

the same size forever and in successive contexts, so much better
the love object dead
than alive and unable to speak to me normally
in the manner of things
that marry with the other things
and without debit. I can’t go on, Josh,
unless I’m told if that bartender
is a woman or what? And this is also why
I will refuse to save the rest of you,
you Richards and you Kimberleys, notebooks
holstered, chipping like you said
at the lexicon. But also I would
like to focus on another you, that’s right

9.

you with the feather in your teeth out there, you
breathing in the dark beyond
the mis en page, future you, first-person-
limited-omniscient, maybe living
in the lunar colonies, where you weigh
the pros and cons of making war
against the empire
of the planet Earth. You don’t
want to pay your taxes either,
and you are fortunate
to be reading this, thumbing it open in front
of your face, holding inside your chest
and hidden far from my eyes
the vulnerable power-core
of your secret wished-fors, time’s
quilted darling, why are you so strong
out there at the edge of minutes

10.

looking back at me
so dead? You vivid
and gazing out of the bright, blue windows
of Castle Fuck-Me, you considering all of this distraction
like it is wrist-watches
or the faces of the swept-
of-fish-free-seas of your former
home the Earth. You are all
that can be thought of, like a wedding reception
after the bride and groom
have retired for the night, so dangerous
and explicit. It’s not paranoia. The entire universe
is out to get you pregnant. Ramona, Ramona,

11.

why is it me
pretending to be Josh
this time around? Josh, writing up
his inaugural poem. Josh

12.

in the kitchen
with usura. I can feel it, the blood he donated
to me, yesterday, in the blood-
mobile, that blood skipping new
like a little colt inside me. Some people believe
that the name we give
to the planet Earth
is too plain, but the plain-ness of the title
makes the planet easier to miss. Another strategy
is to wear the same clothes, like
a uniform, day after day, so that those days
seem like one day
which will never end. You won’t believe it,
but I used to be alive
outside of books, in a life which crossed
uncomprehendingly
between two centuries:
in the first century, some things happened
which were too far away
and in the second, some things happened
which were too close. And once in there,
when I was young, more hungry
than patient, I thought I bit into
a carrot stick, but instead
and growling bit into my finger, both predator
and prey. Shame is a big part
of being eaten alive, and because of it
I have been dining at home now
for 1001 nights, not mature enough,
conceptually, to have
any dealings with the true
human body. Now I think you’re getting a better sense
of what my being is. Yes officer, I was angry.
All life not within my immediate survey
was a lie. Little horse, little horses,

13.

I swear the Earth
was still breathing when I left it."

--Josh Bell (via The Page

Apocryphal (or not?) Japanese auto-correct slang thread.

hypothetical representation of a language

(via)

The Planets that Never Were.

"There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history." --John Williams, Stoner (1965)

Louisiana Loses Its Boot.

"The wind was pursuing its career with extravagance, now it had one. The snow was driven to places which only this paranoid force could care to oppress so; though, to be striding forth in it was to assume the delusions of the storm itself, becoming the object of its hostility and thus abruptly render a validifying dimension to this manic phase of a reality which would, left to itself, blow itself out in senselessness. Therefore, to redeem these absurd extravaganzas, which is after all the way of a hero, requires a worthy goal; then the gratuitous violence threatens only that path, and as the wind rises, the more worthy the goal then, and the more heroic the journey." --The Recognitions

"It may be that every man is set upon the earth to find one new method of divination."

"Many think it is reviewing which needs to be reformed, but I believe the culprit is the species, which surrounds itself with lies, and calls the lies culture, the way squirrels build their nests of dead twigs and fallen leaves, then hide inside." --William Gass

Heaven's Countryland (thread).

(via bill knott art blog)

Dalpre City, Lojbanistan.

now check or drab chuck

"It is American culture that is principally responsible for the perpetuation of the concept of race well after its loss of scientific respectability by the mid-20th century."

"Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight." --Molly Crabapple

Byzantine palette.

"My fantasy football is the version where Americans have to find the countries we're currently bombing on a map before being allowed to play." --Saladin Ahmed

"The end of the world is like waking up inside something big (pages 118-19), which penetrates you to the cellular level and yet sticks to you and everything you know on Earth and everywhere: it is something like a wasp drowning in a jar of honey—the more you panic and resist it, the more stuck you become (page 30). And at the same time, you know that there are an endless succession of larger objects in which you are stuck: “we are always inside an object” (page 17). This is humiliating for humans, Morton tells us, and this is a good thing. Hyperobjects show us “there is no center and we don’t inhabit it. Yet added to this is another twist: there is no edge! We can’t jump out of the universe” (page 17)."

"The gamification of misogyny predates the internet, but right now, in this world full of angry, broken, lost young men convinced that women have robbed them of some fundamental win in life, it’s rampant." --Laurie Penny

Hearing Voices Movement.

(Rosetta's Comet juxtaposed with site of Mt Fuji for size comparison, via beta dot gadgetzz dot com)

"Today’s rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your own thoughts."

"Instead of rage and fury, the Fifth Horseman ‘non-linearity’ steals in on little cat feet." --Economic Undertow blog