the book of silence & burning

"When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and when a patriot would save her, he taxes them.' --Hillaire Belloc

Six myths about neurodiversity.

To resurrect the thinker is not like remembering to be kind, but takes a similar effort.

oligarden

(via vaporwave-gif on tumblr)

"The person was a civilian status.
He had no part in the creation
Of a mass grave near his home."

I said if writing a poem is like juggling, translating a poem is like juggling a live animal.

sermuncle from ragpicker lorenzo

(via agk42 on tumblr)

"I normally hate the winter. I’m from Oregon, not the Midwest. But I was really, really excited when it snowed this November. For reasons I’m not entirely sure about—might be that I’ve been in the Midwest too long. But I think it was also because I was so freaked out about climate change this summer that I was just happy to see that it could still snow."

Morning coolness; a Ferron new to me.

Zao Wou-ki article.

cricket in a cage

(via doctor-autobot on tumblr)

"I’m absolutely fine with the idea of cultures going underground when their mainstream life ends. It happened to disco, and it’s happening to intelligent discourse, but they always come back refreshed and reformed."

"The history of twentieth-century art may someday appear to have been simply a death struggle with the museum." --Hugh Kenner (1971)

Mark Borchardt. (After we saw American Movie--at the Inwood (i think)--Melanie went home & ordered a copy of Coven--on VHS.)

garbled closed-caption normalcy

"The guards are asking the younger children or the older children, 'Who wants to take care of this little boy? Who wants to take of this little girl?' and they’ll bring in a two-year-old, a three-year-old, a four-year-old."

Even though Sinofuturism is partly a spoof, and chaohuan ('ultra-unreal') devised originally as a self-description, i think there is something highly relevant in these loose notions, & not only in regards to modern-day China. When i go to Twitter to see pics & up-to-date weather info on the possibly-devastating storm-in-progress, this feels "ultra-unreal"; people (like Balam Acab, one of my own favs) who vault from Youtube obscurity into instant (sub-)cultural celebrity without ever even touring or playing live; being casually ignored as a matter of course in favor of one's smart phone during conversation; identical cars shaped like space capsules creeping through unending street repairs at 15 MPH; seeing self-published instabooks on the shelf at Half Price; feeling nostalgia for some cultural moment of only seven years ago (vaporwave); designer steetwear (on the Sunday morning show); "drip of the month" (don't ask); Third Wave coffeehouses; nobody much wanting CDs or DVDs anymore; Facebook cyberwarfare; customers coming into our bookstore holding up a picture of the book they want; drone footage used on TV; cancer too slow to worry us anymore; tattoos ceasing to be a class signifier because everyone's got them... These seem chaohuan to me. I only lack the vocabulary to talk about them. (It's WAY past PoMo, that's for sure.) Maybe doctor-autobot & his friends can say... I thought Cassini Diskus might cover it for awhile. How long ago 2016 seems.

Selfie factories.

slow turkey

(via melody doss on fb)

"One professor at the 134th MLA convention in January asked us to imagine an MA seminar with eight students in it. Of those eight, four will drop out, two will go on to complete PhDs and then find work outside academia, one will suffer as a short-contract academic worker, and the last will find work as a traditional tenured faculty member." (via aldaily) --I find all this mildly amusing: i don't really have a dog in this fight. The tradition i identify with, is something else. I belong with the lovers of books, & only with them (--which nilpertains what is said about the books by people who read them for reasons other than enjoyment).

The economics of extinction.

rota, lever, revelator

("reunion clandestina" by juan luis jardi, via)

Richer than English.

Yes, our complaints are disordered--which neither validates, nor invalidates them.

"And for the most part, as Perry Anderson observed, by the early 21st century French philosophy had gone the way of French cinema: the way of nostalgia, safe formulas, and whatever special effects could be pulled off in the absence of adequate funding."

dust-caked floss

Arduity on Kreiden.

"Inhabitant of deep disastrous night" --Pope's Odyssey, I.

"Given what Wolfson says about the Jewish tradition—that one can find philosophical approaches that are comparable in content and orientation to Heidegger’s—why do we insist on prioritizing Heidegger?"

on being commanded to have no duration

(notre dame vi 360 visio on fb)

The poet and the monk. (via opalina salas on fb)

"Whom young Orestes to the dreary coast
Of Pluto sent, a blood-polluted ghost." --Pope's Odyssey

The death of book blogging.

exclamation point & the mysterians

"It’s cherrypicking from each decade and smashing them together to new weird nostalgic hybrids. It’s this Frankenstein thing, like corporate consumer fetishism mixed with American nostalgia."

"challenge is to type out "fin de siecle" without auto-correct changing it to 'fun sieve.' " --@JoyceCarolOates

Tarot card cinema.

crown of nurdles

(at the norwegian resistance museum, photo by geof huth on fb)

Nine sci-fi subgenres.

A snail civilization that builds a mountain of salt.

"...rock ‘n’ roll can also be seen as a safety valve, in a sense, a way of containing these inchoate powers, which is how Throbbing Gristle saw it, as a system of control."

beidu judouga

Liu Cixin interview. (thread)

Naming is overrated. I could name nothing--& still tell all i have to say.

black site placement

(via tvneon on tumblr)

Uzogara.

"For no one in this world can reach his goal;
The greatest or the lowest of our race,
We all wake partway through our dream: the start
Is here, the end is in another place."

--Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (tr Blackmore & Blackmore, 2001), "The Melancholy of Olympio"

fun sieve

(via)

Conditions change; & we scramble to maintain our share of normalcy, until the focus has shifted entirely to keeping up appearances in the face of changes so momentous we dare not give them a name.

What to do.

dark night of the solenoid

(via)

The Blame Game confers a finality that mere cause-&-effect lacks.

Since I moved in.

fun for me in any of this

Pollen & climate change.

Hauntology has an opposite--denial--& a contrary: dialectical reintegration. Truth & reconciliation; reparations. Simply putting it in history books without further action is also denial--denial that there are continuing effects in the present.

on shingle mountain

Reopened. (via thea temple on fb)

After the weather, i feel shell-shocked & gun-shy. An overcast morning, though nothing's in the forecast: what are they hiding from me?

transit of venus during my lifetime

(via)

Cool tracking shot.

We claim to uphold the sanctity of the individual, but in practice our autonomy is highly contingent; only the will to coerce stands sovereign, in the world of bad hierarchies, bad faith, & bad reasons.

questionmark & the luminous emanations

(via mariahjennerxo on tumblr)

Never happened.

"Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarves" --Walt Whitman, via via brian clements on fb

Not a ladybug bloom.

microburst

Thread on library conversion, with food for thought on both sides.

As if this evolution had been accompanied by a readership.

Blue bandaid.

there are only shortcuts

(via)

Serious people are just getting on with their lives, while the crooks & clowns frolic, as if license forevermore had become the law.

Nurdle.

complete works of ultravox

(via michael puttonen on fb)

About Master Shen-Long.

Morninglight upon the newly-washed surfaces.

Brilliancy prizes.

"Detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) is standing in front of a police lineup with a witness to a convenience store hold-up who heard the robber singing the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 single 'I Want It That Way,' an R&B-ish ballad of easy virtue. In this breakup song, 'the way' the beloved 'wants it' is over, although the dirty-talk innuendo of 'I want it that way' is surely also intentional. The five Backstreet Boys take the solo in turns, begging the lover to stay. A surprising amount of straight-faced kink abides in the song structure: are all five of these singers dating the one who wants it this way? But even mentioning these complexities is liable to give the wrong impression, so little does'“I Want It That Way' obtrude them on the listener. It is formidably catchy and the last thing it demands is thought.

Back in the nineties, the song was way overplayed. If you are in your late thirties, there’s a chance you are hearing it in your head right now, with something like the mix of rapture and repudiation I was just mentioning. The Brooklyn Nine-Nine sketch dramatizes those mixed feelings. So that the witness can identify the robber, Peralta, who also looks to be in his late thirties, has the suspects in the lineup sing snatches of the song, trading the solo just as the original Backstreet Boys used to do. As he cues one suspect after another, Peralta starts to get into it, keeping a rhythm, bopping along. By the time the fourth suspect sings, the one-way glass Peralta stands behind is starting to look more like a production booth than a precinct observation room. In a state of aesthetic transport, he cues suspect number five, who sings the title line: 'I want it that way.' 'That’s him,' says the witness, now revealed to be, also, a victim. 'Number Five killed my brother.' " --Emily Ogden on 3 Quarks Daily blog

(via)

focused on what matters

A book signed by a blind man; book signed by a man without arms.

Boom! on DVD. Or rather...

on the nature of the transparent teeth of the deep-sea dragonfish

(pic via gordon hilgers on fb)

"There is, it seems, so much not to say and so little time left not to say it." --The Last Days of Publishing

"Le Dossier B (1995) is a peripheral Obscure World production, a 54-minute TV documentary which entangles the genuine history of 20th-century Brussels with an invented secret society who believe in the existence of a twin city, Bruzel, that intersects with the Belgian capital."

following greta thunberg

(pic by melanie pruit)

Bubble-projects. Like buildings i only take pictures of, without a thought of going inside.

Under the Sign of Sauron.

poet & facebook activist

"The sixth number of Caballo Verde was left on Viriato Street, the pages not yet collated and sewn. It was dedicated to Julio Herrera y Reissig--a second Lautréamont, produced by Montevideo--and the texts written in his honor by the poets of Spain were silenced in all their beauty, still-born, having nowhere to go. The magazine was to have come out on July 19, 1936. But on that day the streets were filled with shooting. In his African garrison an obscure general, Francisco Franco, had risen against the Republic." --Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (tr St Martin, 1977)

Latin poem on 9-11.

ailing franchise

Deciding books to get rid of is difficult precisely because it invokes the larger question of how much space do i need to take up in the world?

Existential thread.

lego & philosophy

"Somehow, her face, from which much flesh had been burned away, set me thinking of the eight Americans who immolated themselves in that era of protest. Is that so strange? If nothing is remembered of them, why should those who were consumed much more slowly have been noticed?" --Tom Engelhardt, The Last Days of Publishing (2003)

"It tells you everything about that moment that his plan left us effervescent, even though in any other time it would have seemed imprudent at best and lacking even a modicum of common sense at worst."

prairie creek tweet

In 1976 we did not understand the first thing about 1976. The things we thought were important turned out to be unimportant, & the things that would become important we were not even capable od seeing. And even the ones who did not like 1976 were no more correct about 1976 than the ones who were in favor of it. They were just wrong in a different way.

Shrubification.

badly formed thought

"Her first three novels had presented near-future visions of apocalypse; she had stopped writing them when it became less like fiction and too much like reportage." --Elizabeth Hand, "The Saffron Gatherers," Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume I (2007)

Latin's survival.

bad osprey box

A powerful new incantation, even the light of day seems different.

Gulf futurism.