Monday, July 25, 2016

perfect chess


(image by sidney sime, via @HarrySKeeler)

"After Freud, it is no longer possible to be an Epicurean or a Spinozist because of the dimension of the unconscious, desire, and jouissance."

Lynette Roberts: “THESE WORDS I WRITE ON CRINKLED TIN

To the green wood where I found my love:
To the green wood where I held my love:
To the green wood now my love is gone.

I follow death that stands on my breath;
My heart cut out by the timeless scythe,
All grievous foliage stifling and still,
I carve two marks on the bark’s rough edge
To convince my grief he came here once,
Whose spirit shivers the polar tree.

To the green wood where the woodcock flies:
To the green wood where the nightjar hides:
To the green wood with red eyes of a dove.

The young jays spring and curious,
Who peck eyes from the lamb’s sweet face,
Resemble too well my heartless step;
For he loves me and I love another,
I love another, and yet he still loves me,
He loves me still, yet I love another.

To the green wood where the green air fades:
To the green wood fluid with icy shades:
To the green wood afraid I follow fast
Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;
Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer’s Spruce:
The pond that drew the young child in:
Through darkening leaves, a nightingale
Sobbing in the sunniest season,
“My love, my love, do I love the other?”

To the green wood where I found my love:
To the green wood where I held my love:
To the green wood now my love is gone.”

--from Poetry magazine, December 1952

"Grief Vacation/ Brexit wounds."


(via bruce sterling on ello)

Number 50,000.

"Yes, we'll say. Satire. It was the closest thing we had to truth." --@NeinQuarterly

"Liberal Democracy tells a story about itself and the progress of humanity that, if we accept it, makes it nearly impossible to understand how Fascism could ever happen again."

"Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When a writer disappears, unless he’s J. D. Salinger, no one goes looking."

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Tuesday, July 19, 2016

ashgabat 23, 24


23.
Wasted snudge, early in the stankface century,
fossicking proplyds for a speck of iron;
cars of kodokushi all environ
an open pit in the midst of the wax penitentiary.
LI NI’U LU’O swarms in my vetust half-bakery.

Still, by many tricks of the light I’m jazzed;
i want to watch it all go down, if razzed
by my sense of danger, most of the threat’s pure fakery
actually proffered: intellectual spinach
to shake it off, ten dark meridians west of Greenwich.

"It’s not a Thousand­ Year Reich we celebrate but an eternal Kingdom of Man Triumphant..."

24.
Xagvar, dew-sparkle, anorexic image,
something that only happens to other people.
Hurling Slurpees from one opulent steeple
as if removed from this vast herpes scrimmage;
gerkamenknocken jabberwocky costs a bundle.

Lulz, though not by far dyvocla groovy,
totentanz, not only in a movie:
rickety boardwalk lit by wheelchair trundle
down to the edge, Charon of haggles serpentine
still we try our best to win: the smell of turpentine.

Subtext of kawaii. (thanx, Melanie!)

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ashgabat 21, 22


(syrian refugees offering an airbnb experience via new-aesthetic on tumblr)

21.
Unless rebirth has taught us other symmetry
each shadow hurls from one grown too irate.
Worlds & memes & warring systems gyrate
unmindful of our instruments’ telemetry
oblivion that would break the heart of the stoutest Druid

must surely scar its untormented cortex
& though i cruise among them in the Vortex
i feel my will to persevere more fluid
than when i was an arch Young Turk of thirty:
& when i stoop to hoist a thought-foe, i feel dirty.

Bouzingo in English

22.
Vile Khurbn, where the maps of hist’ry don’t.
Salient fleas, called lords in the usual jargon.
Aibeu iyoh AZI AGIAR bargain
reaches us where smaller murrains won’t
& leaves like scattered water bottles each cadaver

to come. My fellow wastrels, be less thievish;
my fellow locusts, try to be less peevish.
It doesn’t end when the poet ends his palaver.
Shall we find frith within a sizzling orchard?
Shall we gain truth when the hostile witnesses are tortured?

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ashgabat 19, 20


(new-aesthetic on tumblr via eric hu on twitter)

19.
So outrage overload pitches its tent in crumple
etching its reflective shiver in uniform
whence my regrets derive expressive cuneiform
to deliver, watching continents gliding rumple:
green & red & white & black, the rest is frippery.

Here in this uncouth chair unwilling fixture,
i juggle figures, conjure up a mixture
of sentiments wry, disgusted, sore & slippery
but cannot jouk jalopythrist. So smooth
the sheer descent, & what you see can little soothe.

Return of the dreaded Pass Key Sensor??

20.
Touchsecurity earthbound, gunfire skyey,
the dead & the wounded fall, one sans capture
hypothetical. Projectile rapture
struts rude puissance. Camping in Hawaii
before the moon has set & in a hammock, lounge.

Green stirring stick as frenzies culminate
in pointless, random death while bloggers fulminate;
peace is not a pattern we can scrounge,
to some vague phenotype like leeches loyal,
incapable of reason, we are now screwed royal.

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ashgabat 17, 18

17.
“Quisling clinic,” sly hooch fluctuate Milton
crumbs of entropy as folds the pantry
around the scaffold never yet a gantry
asleep in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hilton.
Gateshelf, passport to Orcus for all & fucking sundry,

yield in good time (soon) to the lure of the ruby
followed by ilka dolt & ev’ry booby,
bloodstained ruse among reasons tart or thundery.
Quislings remembered now if sunward notable,
toasted with draft of elegy imperfectly potable.

Crampton text.

18.
Rancid copperhead gun, a pile of crawfish
to hunker down, the path by the cemetery rigid
liquid slowthrough, Google Maps, but frigid
as being there was not, nor then standoffish
the elements in the hour’s cassowary cincture.

Slovio Eid I tell, two-timed indignant
when fate that sent such gift sent bill malignant...
SuSmo’ jaqtaH... House of floatpig tincture,
as sprinkler-drip unveils a stolen picture
occult as infix in a crisp jboku’ile stricture.

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ashgabat 15, 16


"The word it, for example, means 'dog' in both Uzbek and Turkish--but in Uzbek it means a regular dog, whereas in Turkish it means a contemptible, low-down cur. ...Conversely, the standard Turkish future-tense verb ending exists in Uzbek, and is also a future-tense ending, but with a pompous or literary-heroic connotation." --Batuman, op cit

15.
Open cess-tsunami with manxome strength
strumming the blue haiku with a sharpened bludgeon
flinch at a rolling bough, the sky’s high dudgeon
mirroring our toits below, at length
you get to look away. But those in the ant-gold cavern

fall from high-powered bullets, sent by fascist
airwaves. Car cow-catcher for the brashest
bloatmobile, else decreation tavern;
Aceldama our bivouac, fantasy, option
& flings an orphan army’s perfectly clear adoption.

Trung Nguyen coffee.

16.
Paisley paved the citadel of a mutant.
List’ning to the thunder in bed, limulus
to repair when, oppressive greenhouse stimulus
& hyposubjectivity bobblehead-nutant.
X-sistemo, self-oblivion, gourd stupendous,

The gear of road repair but none in faith,
words not better than no-words, fuming wraith
unponding, khejzawul with thrust tremendous
from Rattenkrieg applied hysteria muscular:
quibbles to make philosophy’s owltide more crepuscular.

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Monday, July 18, 2016

ashgabat 13, 14


13.
My war bonnet, dinosaur-feathered, daubed with poison
yields Yorkie squee on the qeh oube banister.
Der Zor, within a tiny metal canister,
can parkour all your klones, & enclaves foison.
Crogor card, great fezz, surcease of raku cark in the kiln

arwedha jumble, not kintsugi perjury
is still out. Truth is but elective surgery
& one must often swear in the jargon of Milne
each facet of the Blindness, each scrag-figment
since sanguinary iron is the sole decorous pigment.

Chagatai AKA "Old Uzbek" or "ancient Uyghur".

14.
Nobody home & riding on a gurgle
the failure rate of all our new equipment
sun’s rays or dark upon each fresh arms shipment
& all the love your lucky lips can burgle
repair deferred inside a rarely-done-well medium

a claustrophobic spelunks the cave of Plato
to live or die amounts to one potato
elsewhere, while here our foe is download tedium
a suitcase full of boxes & dirt, wet tissue;
an enthusiast with a simple message, single issue.

"Because the Mongols were too ignorant to make swords, they carried wooden sticks. In Samarkand, scholars were drinking tea from special porcelain teacups that rang different musical tones when you tapped them with a spoon. Genghis Khan destroyed every one of these teacups, the secret of whose craftsmanship has been lost forever." --Batuman, op cit

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ashgabat 11, 12


(pic by camille rose garcia)

11.
Kairos update, caught in aisling combat,
furnishes at once exquisite turmoil
& fragrance owing to dislustred sperm oil
got to have strong arms to wash a wombat.
As city air grows ever more divine mundungus

moons of Pluto wield quadruple indemnity
waiting triple digit advent solemnity.
Otherkin pledge allegiance to a fungus,
rantallion morning, later shrink to have
courtesy of, in time, some of that Raven Stone salve.

The return of Belly.

12. Lanugo anorexic vampire, humid
days, the death of a car thief, AWOL article,
masterpiece of despair, painted on particle
borderline between spongy & tumid
against decline, waging effervescent ritual

terroir of mines, itinerant humbugs iterate
as human godlings hasten to obliterate
anything here before yesterday, crime habitual
as mindless, & the lizard-head zither’s amoeba
player rebounds, lithe as the hands of the Queen of Sheba.

"He [Timur] was declared to have been not only a military genius, but a great chess player, and even the inventor of a game called Perfect Chess, played on a 110-square board. ...each player has, in addition to the standard pieces, two giraffes, two camels, two siege engines, and a vizier." --Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

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ashgabat 9, 10


"If you asked me what it would be like to walk on the surface of Xena, I would ask you to image [sic] walking on a frozen lake in the dark of the new moon. That was Xena. My tiny, frozen, nearly invisibly lovely planet." --Brown, op cit

9.
Intaglio on a cube of frigid phosphorus
exactly as the hoar grimoaries stipulate,
little enough the flacks of frass manipulate
fallout in this Camelot on the Bosphorus
sunlight on the rufous pigments proves corrosive

voodoo bundle walking through dry gulch
autumn on a world devoid of mulch
but still has bugs. My rage, a thing explosive
but short-lived, is a measure of my ego
forlorn lost cry of the circling antelucan grego.

"Hope is an embrace of the unknown."

10.
Jestocost, Hadarac Deseret, stigma decent.
Recycled marmots, hydrofluoric acid
marooned where the apocalypse seems placid
of buried city layers, this most recent
crowds still with dreams & crowns the capybara bungle

Cooling, from hexagonal to cubic,
greetings, whether effigy or pubic
the latticework unwinds, encroaches jungle
maladies, till even those most fortunate
find dying ways & hazard melodies importunate

Pleasure in Ruins.

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ashgabat 7, 8


7.
Green stalwart dragonfly whom glistenings rankle,
here are surfaces shineless in abundance:
a wonderland of frosts, sheer redundance
in Nichtigkeit, & Charon bends no ankle
nor is there tinkling of a landing empty cartridge.

This floating-hill-strewn plain that we cross darkling
under the daytime stars aloof & sparkling
serves us up at once the ghost of a partridge
immanent, & like our faith, so massive
it blesses most the palmer clown who fares most passive.

Milestones.

8.
He dies of thirst beside the public fountain.
CMALYBOI BISLI scattered there so gruesome
wrathful deities arrive in twosome
edge-on eclipsing orbits, inshallah. Mountain
i saw a deer on, too a year we chose a president,

all as deer that the manxome spectacle capture
in lieu of reading hist’ry, praying for Rapture,
& on that mountain only eagles resident
my trail wound back. Making the exit formal
a cricket on the floor, to stomp on it is normal.

I review Dir en grey.

"...I was tempted to add an anagram of my own: 'The neat white elephant enthralls,' which rearranges as: 'The tenth planet is near the whale,' which obviously refers to the fact that Xena [now Eris] is in the constellation Cetus, the whale. Unlike Galileo, though, I resisted." --Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (2010)

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ashgabat 5, 6


5.
Egregore solidarity no guerdon
olentzaro faring chief executive
longpoem after longpoem squint-consecutive
beautiful visions of not-to-be, its burden.
teudib heavy to thole, & thick zipzygo mutiny

by light of brands, masked, zaibatsu rhythm
& once drew orbits via logarithm
That we have given since, full camera scrutiny.
Sprachregelung not yet bestows jark cairn
So what might still befall this snazzy floatpig bairn?

Serafini speaks.

6.
From beaten, becomes a biter. Vetust garment
of exceptionalism, its decrepit gallery
of triumphs. Clown soliloquy on salary
chases now a novel marque of varmint
through labyrinth’s quotidian fog until, like Quilp

to fall. Soliloquy returns, the chaffinch
captured in early Eighties on a half-inch
videotape, & rediscovered megilp,
to languish like a ne’er paroled old criminal
graffiti faint at first & fin’lly grown subliminal.

"Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible." --Susan Sontag

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ashgabat 3, 4


"Fermat was a good scholar, and amused himself by conjecturally restoring the work of Apollonius on plane loci." --A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

3.
Columbine black, or black & white for Ascot,
the infinite soapbox scalded like a lobster
ready to hand it off to the foremost mobster
or any other monster as a mascot:
here we are resplendent in the loco gunnery

if not today, tomorrow among its chosen,
not one of us revived should we get frozen;
shadows gather like a Monk Lewis nunnery
& Phlegethon moves t’ward its charcoal delta
& scoriac blowback follows the incandescent vuelta.

Some inchoate thoughts on curvilinear transition.

4.
Dwarven woad grown Kafkaesque & dingy,
elenctic pox of tekke faunching cupid.
empire’s tachypath suits Stavrogin stupid
come fill the wormwood cup, & don’t be stingy.
Taiskdeaf colossus of roads athwart some sinking isthmus

with dark paper fast a-smoulder, its wake inedible,
& one among them finding the “view” incredible
& plenty of children winning slag for Christmas.
Forward, into the fog, some bug-borne plague
festering soon, at apocheir with futures vague.

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ashgabat 1,2


        ASHGABAT

1.
A blinding golden Jetztzeit (thul incorrigible!)
met me at the Metro with mint julep
qualms, & if it isn’t craze-for-tulip
lemmingtide, or world-turn t’ward our dirigible
timeline, then I follow the bouncing Occam dictum

& say it’s just the latest fiction puncture
when all along our choices made fate juncture
on time & under budget. What we victim
congeries can’t grasp, while yet we fortify
ourselves with brain-glue, now, is how these games still mortify.

The Slovio myth.

2.
Balefire, from which no button eyes recuperate;
mise-en-abyme, mirror that dolls find odious:
an islander from some place named melodious
has picked up soccer, though great waves vituperate,
on this our tiny home. Conventicle ever livid

or circular firing squad, the truth is harsh
you cannot face; we wade into a marsh
chasing methane lures seductive-vivid,
long shadows of morning, digging the clayey
wakefulness of watching ash drift down Pompeii.

Chaohuan.

"And ask not why, where reason never was." --George Meredith

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Tuesday, July 05, 2016

grypomachy

"2:55:43 PM Fenhl: did joyce use created languages in finnegans wake or did he just use various natlangs?
2:55:49 PM Dedalvs: Joyce did use Esperanto roots."

--Chat Log for LCC4 Day 1


(pic by Sheryl St Germain on Fb)

Night Gallery.

"Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness." --Adam Roberts

Feeling irresistibly drawn to crumbling buildings and abandoned places.


Fumes of Formation.

Do cu vanci le ba panje xusra

You are the evening of the future-spongy-asserter day.

My Lojban bumper sticker had faded to near indecipherability, but luckily i was able to order another from England. Now it is the only thing new on my dusty old Alero. Even if you know Lojban, it makes little sense. Where did it come from?

In the age of Google, few mysteries remain. There was a time when LOBYPRE were eagerly (some more than others, myself among the former) assembling one of those immaterial monuments, an English-language Wiki, about Lojban.

It was all interlinked (tunnelled, antlike–spongily), & somewhere between an educational channel & a nerd playground. So someone had programmed a computer to randomly generate (mostly-) grammatical utterances, & another program could turn any Lojban text into music (or rather, notes). Thus was born that curious Wiki entry, “Lojban Rock”. And the most famous line of that (one that appeared elsewhere in Lojban culture, as a kind of esoteric in-joke), was the line—immediately & perdurably mistranslated—about the evening of the “porous prophet”.

Even so, without Lulu, it probably would not have become a bumper sticker. Still, rather than a tshirt or coffee mug (or mousepad—there’s an artifact of a certain era), i chose to have that slogan printed to baffle the world from the rear of my car.

In the place i live, i really don’t want to invite trouble with something expressly liberal. On the other hand, if i were to encounter another LOBYPRE, I’d be embarrassed to speak. (Which has happened. Likewise my Esperanto, when in Prague.) It’s just not the way i’m accustomed to dealing with the language.

It is all too easy to say: learning a language means using it. And, it is true, for a short while i’d gleaned about sixty words of relatively speakable Czech. But I now know my true language talent is more like that of a bricoleur, or a maker of crossword puzzles. Is this a subset of poetry, or something else altogether?

Arimaspoi. Aristeas. "...even if a travel to Central Asiatic regions was not impossible in archaic times, this travel is only an unnecessary hypothesis for explaining Aristeas’ Arimaspea."


(via)

"Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well-educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson,Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished."

--Vince Vance, on Fb

2006 Shelley discovery (only just noticed by me). "In Europe too wild ruin rushes fast..."


(via news dot artnet dot com)

"After a long day of dancing, a little bit of early morning surrealism is exactly what Spongebob would suggest. Listen to the porous prophet."

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