damn hamlets

Hungarian Goulash.

"Dancing and architecture are the two primary and essential arts." --Havelock Ellis

Reviewing Gadsby.

(photo by Tim Wetherell on facebook)

When snails lose their way.

"The black night-harrier carries
burning chalk to feed the flint."

Dallas Mad Men.

(photo by Jeffrey Davis)

Haraway again, on the age's accelerated grimace. (via wood_s lot)

a nonstop gilt ad pour

(via)

Messiaen in the New Yorker.

"I have set myself a goal, a
certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get there."

--Elizabeth Bishop

"A smart person could make a lot of money by inventing a Siri for Southerners." --Julia Reed (via languagehat)

" I am estimating that the giant Pluto snail is about the size of the Chicago Loop with a head height about one and a half times as tall as the Sears Tower."

" 'You get Bowie back but it means Scalia comes back with him,' said The Devil. I stared into his ice flame eyes. A crow screamed." --@pattonoswalt

Highsmith on giant snails.

"Human lips are snails, happy
to be laden with their breathing."

--Mandelshtam

Celan on Mandelshtam.

Platonov Anthropocene.

"A scant sixteen hours after the explosion of the Chelyabinsk bolide and the fall of five tons of meteoritic material to the ground in Siberia, (367943) Duende passed by at about 27,700 kilometers above the surface of the Earth." --Centauri Dreams blog

Vastness & Sorrow.

"...silent writing—that is, writing which does not explicitly signal its meaning or purpose." --Gilbert Alter-Gilbert on Writers No One Reads blog

stern nun pinata

(via Max Nuclear on Fb)

"The idea for Area X...came out of dental surgery. ...Dental surgery along with anger and grief over the BP Gulf Oil Spill"

'I possess a dignity and a power founded on ignorance and credulity; I walk on the heads of men who lie prostrate at my feet; if they should rise and look me in the face, I am lost; I must bind them to the ground, therefore, with iron chains. Thus have reasoned the men whom centuries of bigotry have made powerful. They have other powerful men beneath them, and these have still others, who all enrich themselves with the spoils of the poor, grow fat on their blood, and laugh at their stupidity. They all detest tolerance, as partisans grown rich at the public expense fear to render their accounts, and as tyrants dread the word liberty. And then, to crown everything, they hire fanatics to cry at the top of their voices: "Repeat my master's absurdities, tremble, pay, and keep your mouths shut." ' --Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary. 1764

(via yourmanforfuninrapidan)

Artists of Cassini Diskus. Stelios Faitakis. Lissa Wolsak. Porpentine. Jerry Hunt. Purdey Lord Kreiden. Depth. Javant Biarujia. Valenberg. Also: Chicxulub. The bright area on Pluto.

"I develop a fascination with the term terroir, which refers to particular aspects of a landscape and climate that affect the growing of wine grapes. In Authority, Control asks his assistant, Whitby, what the word means, and gets the answer, 'What doesn’t it mean? It means the specific characteristics of a place—the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage.' " --Jeff VanDerMeer, ibid

(map of Constantinople, via @HagiaSophia via Kelly Link on Twitter)

enact thin lot

Austere Curriculum.

"Valentinus the Heretic"

cokey moon
skitoma bekos syzygy smoke
book for an ashen ekphrasis will it work

amber map abet
next skitoma dollops ask
tsunami wynd azote my

agate mythogem
as Umma
looks akin wend ebony bonus

to skiffle afire so Brownian dancehall
snakepit fathoms us
who went in

went skiing apart who wrote
rat psalms with tsunami twilight sizzle plop
please rig stirious twilight rotate

Vimana Glooscap.

"I have found the strong skeleton beneath the golden flesh of the world, the iron in the marrow, and the deep green blood." --R A Lafferty

14-vowel haiku.

"A panther is killing procrastination." --@MagicRealismBot

The Chirp. (via @mcnees)

(pic by Michele Palazzo, via Tim O'Brien on Facebook--how Harvey-like)

Whoa! Ken Liu has a novel out!

(subway image by valenberg)

a lenten nip

(via valenberg on tumblr)

"...the faux-vintage photo will no longer be able to conjure the importance associated with physicality (another point made in part II) if the vintage look begins to be more closely associated with smartphones than old photos."

the red-assed baboon
is never far away.
frisks the will to power late or soon
the red-assed baboon;
& though we dream stars, dreams bring no boon;
& two or more who gather, turn caraway;
the red-assed baboon
is never far away.

Infected Mushroom.

We approach the apocalypse as a matter of style, b4ecause we have such a poor imagination for suffering.

"Jerry included the names of many obscure Texas towns in his composition titles, and at one point planned, but never composed, an opera based on the life of LBJ..."

(via)

"Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look" --Christopher Marlowe

Turkish prog realness.

O climb, Imbolc!

(via @coreyspowell)

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. (thanx, miekal!)

     "Oxblood"

cries of seagulls
out of the new sun
my messenger bag bouncing
creaking up the handicap ramp
of unfinished, dusty wood
on Imbolc

Tocharian.

When i grow up, i want to be a vintage clown.

a cubist nylon shirt

(Lyda Borelli in RAPSODIA SATANICA (1915), via In Search of Pagan Hollywood)

" There was in van Vogt’s writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else’s writing inside or outside science fiction."

"Winter in Durnover Field (Triolet)

Scene. -- A wide stretch of fallow ground recently sown with wheat, and frozen to iron hardness. Three large birds walking about thereon, and wistfully eyeing the surface. Wind keen from north-east: sky a dull grey.

Rook.--Throughout the field I find no grain;
The cruel frost encrusts the cornland!

Starling.--Aye: patient pecking now is vain
Throughout the field, I find . . .

Rook.--No grain!

Pigeon.--Nor will be, comrade, till it rain,
Or genial thawings loose the lorn land
Throughout the field.

Rook.--I find no grain:

The cruel frost encrusts the cornland!"

--Thomas Hardy

(via heavy dot com)

The truth is out there.

"The incomprehensible provokes the reader to acts of preternatural awareness." --Robert Kelly

Seussian Lovecraft.

"And what they hear as judgement, we will hear as grace. What they see as fire, we will see as glory. What they see as destruction we will know as creation." --Nietzsche and the Burbs

Pasha Noise refound.

Lincvolt, Neil Young's electric '59 Lincoln project.