focused on what matters

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

Boom! on DVD. Or rather...

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.

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.

tnglegloamy

The thought i should be somewhere else, making prose, where the action is.

runoff rivals chase

Discard studies.

“Meanwhile, to boost sales of Moby Grape, the label’s marketing executives organized a ‘poetry-writing contest’ in collaboration with the radio station KRFC, with the promise that the band would select a winning poem and then transform it into a song for their second album. ...The result was one of the band’s least-liked songs, ‘The Lake,’ as featured on the following year’s Wow/Grape Jam. As Don recalls, ‘We really picked a song called “Hairy Mary” …and the suits at Columbia found it very scary. They put the kibosh on the song we picked.’ “ --What’s Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?

Footnote: “During the Summer of Love, Los Angeles radio station 93-KHU Boss Radio also beckoned listeners to send in their poems to compete for the prize of writing a lyric for the Buffalo Springfield’s next album…becoming ’The Hour of Not Quite Rain’ on Buffalo Springfield’s third and final album, Last Time Around...” --ibid

opiophobia

"The idea of a messenger is a mistake, a necessary mistake." --Michael Cisco, Unlanguage (2018)

luftwafel

Hedgehog speech. (thread)

"The mysterious alternative Moby Grape were still merrily touring the Midwest, playing the Cellar in Arlington Heights, illinois, with the Nova Express opening on Friday, January 17, and Saturday, January 18. On the latter date, the mystery of the second Grape took an unexpected turn with a third Moby Grape performing at the same time at the Valley View YAK in Frankfort, Ohio." --Cam Cobb, What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?

opera shredder

Sino-grime explained.

Why is it so hard to understand that the magic is not in the paper trail but the one who made the paper trail?

a highway made of link-rot

Language-game & Group-mind. The former suggests gamelike goals (or at least gamelike outcomes). The latter is a way of being in the world. For saktra, it is a world of things,--among them, people. To the group-mind, things impinge or can be part of its purposes (or block them); otherwise they don't exist.

" These are the stakes. These are the fables on my street."

"In 1939, the German state came to knock on the study door of Hegel. He wasn't in, but the Nazis knew how to make even a dead man change his story." --Clive James, op cit

torrential caplock

The shadow of the group-mind begets the longing for the imaginary friend.

A woman who no longer exists.

valued Uvalde

Charles Morgan website.

The Woofus finds other beings too simple, too homogenous.

Philosophy diversity thread.

73. making friends with a haunted bridge

"...They move beneath deep arches back through time,
Recalling ecstasy in foxglove dells,
Homecoming cattle, or the silver chime,
Colder than salt-spring, of Bavarian bells."

--Charles Spear (1951)

"If London is a metropolis of pigeons, Tokyo is a megalopolis of crows."

at Tsvetaeva's grave
after the sun has gone
a surly groove
at Tsvetaeva's grave
the empty years grieve
replete with bad gain
at Tsvetaeva's grave
after the sun has gone

in the blue hour
shakin' hands with Charles de Gaulle
unless you see you don't
some of these February days
should end up in August
windy passage over sidewalk & mud
echoes of the blue hour
when nothing of the coming night could yet be known

"Fusha is for parroting the official line; Darja is for telling it like it is."

64. the five love languages of locusts

"In the eighties I helped organize a translation conference in New Orleans, for which Merwin was our major speaker. He and Paula were still unmarried, but I remember well how in love they seemed to be. I was a graduate student, 7 months pregnant, and went with my major professor to pick Merwin up. We took him to a lovely New Orleans restaurant. I was so excited: here was my favorite poet in the world and I was getting to show him around my birth city! That evening we went to check him in at a hotel on St. Charles. It turned out Clint Eastwood was staying there with his entourage, filming, I think, Tightrope. He had overstayed and now had the room Merwin was supposed to have. Our major speaker for the conference had no room. I saw Eastwood in the bar and went to talk to him, stupidly thinking he might be able to have two of his people double up so Merwin could have his room. After a probably too long appeal to him, he looked down at me and said, 'Who is W.S. Merwin?' Appalled, I explained who he was, at which point Eastwood said 'Get the f*** out of my face.' I went back to the lobby where the conference organizers were trying to obtain a room at another hotel for Merwin, who was sitting on a sofa with Paula looking all zen. He said I seemed sad, and asked me what was the matter. I explained the conversation with Eastwood, and when I had finished, he looked at me with quiet amazement and said, 'Who is Clint Eastwood?' " --Sheryl St Germain on Fb

Bad news about Baxter.

icebergmasked scirocco
carry to this room
crackle in the wires

ev'ry other car has
smoke of how to handle
is all we see

dead branches spied
through tinted glass
on a carpet stairwell

pyramid innermost room

"Though it was explicitly fiction and Oliver claimed he channeled the book from an entity named Phylos, the novel laid the groundwork for many of the legends still surrounding Mount Shasta."

62. basilisk memoir

"A schoolmaster searches for chocolate inside a crystal opera house." --@MagicRealimBot

"You can’t drive to The Lightning Field on your own, the desert terrain is rough, there are no markers, and it’s not on any maps."

IED, Light was.Nightlong:
edgelowered beigehome
purpose as never in studying
in killing
these lockdowns commemorate

meanwhile strangers topple
at behest of our drones

"George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984, saw a 9,500 percent increase in sales in the month following President Trump’s inauguration."

60. in the company of emojis

"...Endure/ vigil's identity with entrapment." --Geoffrey Hill

Even more Sharbat (thread).

" 'By having'...!"
MI-A-MI

part of the clasp broken
don't know when

sound of gulls
like nothing else on earth

Kindness is the only gift; if you don't give it to your kids you give them nothing. Every act of joining expresses the desire to be thought worthy of kindness. The rolls of the aspiring fill, yet the earth is a howling wilderness without that simple thing--rarer than diamonds, though rather more easily produced.

the glow of the new water dispenser
the very hungry president

hungry, very hungry
hungrier than anyone

we are lined up on the bank
of a river with teeth

Ishmael Reed on Hamilton. (via feuilleton)

55. L. A. snowman

Ŝot edet 7.

to name this password
even as it melts into glittery
phosphenes · too too solid
because of the sand which is there

devilishly difficult
windfall
at the tip of the isthmus
a volley

cascade of small sounds
underlines · the solıtude
in which a description
is absorbed
bats at hunt
above the frozen · plain

pearl
quagga
Riesling pour
semiotic
tiny patina
under new merriment
vexillolatry Rogained
Uqbar borborygmic
vitreous anger
wanhope whispers
xhezve
Ylf
(tsunami Nommo
suspiracle
ruinous
quigmare
puce)
quahog
rhinestone eyes
stirious fetch
take the money &
umbrageous subway stop
until we fight again
toom ibrik phen crib
Slobodan sludge
raps clack talc
quartz sphinx
pools
pools of methane
pools of methane rippleless
pools of methane rippleless on a waxen shore
pools of methane rippleless on a waxen shore i skirl
pools of nethane rippleless on a waxen shore i skirl elegy

Simulating Ummo.

34. the obedient atom

"I have believed in monsters, in ambition, in science, in nothing, in love, in the Beatles, and for a brief period of time, in mulching." --Stephen Tobolowsky

Pyrogeography.

superstitious
for the used quids · snowman
on the edge of the solar system
read a story of death
from the sky
murder but no myst'ry
mapleshde
same as saguaro
this pre-storm scramble
like before a super bowl

a froth of particles
in the headlights dancing
landfillhrmonic
gray killing time

you hurtle like a drunken-piloted drone
through all the depredations of the word
distant menaces here but mad absurd
& no one will believe it when they're shown

the mud-filled houses where the river rose,
the charred hulks standing in a field of soot
are pure anomalies--it snows a foot
in half an hour--never mind--we doze

& strnge new fascinations claim our time
who have no time to gether up the clues,
while those outside the narrtive must choose
what can & can't be told of their bleak thoughtcrime

what i have woven, Nightmare's sharks unweave;
& i'm denied the grace of pain alone,
as i hurtle like a drunken-piloted drone,
& even when i'm shown, i don't believe.

"You may as well face the fact Samantha, the whole burden of civilisation has fallen on us."

(via)

31. ten kinds of melted sunrise

Lost Coltrane album. "Coltrane’s music during that period, possibly encouraged by the cathedral-like room, became blimpier and churchier."

dirgewrixle solastalgia
voice can no longer reach
those notes · ice
on the famous peaks

but a bike from a car
but giving up straws

tears in the sea
necessary tears

these bright overcast
now typical skies

i love you so much
i wish it could help

if i knew then
what i know now

i would of kept the Buick

"...in the imaginary city of Lojbanistan called La Xagvar, where nonconforming Lojbanists are said to congregate, it is still the customary greeting to ask, 'What base do you count in?' "

(via aestheticneons on tumblr)

16. a lifetime of debt

Turquoise grove.

wobble of the jarred routine;
seems like utmost not to tip
what is this but troubled sleep
a burning bed to rumble in

as on the lucent cavern wall
flickers a thousand fancies' hent
whose urgings like bad conscience haunt
though moiling cark in parallel

& i, as if an agent, work
into my whispers, crash & snarl
of that great world whose makings hurl
beyond & above, in plumbless dark

oh let me in my own mind dwell
& to my own despair belong
if nothing better zephyrs bring
or t'ward this place, but vermin crawl

14. how to survive the loss of a chess match

Chaekgeori.

    storying pillbug
has no axe to grind · but this
    a skyey smashup
overly long in coming
    will not rescue us
be it Mueller or Caped One
    Jade Rabbit capers
& the permanent ice · creaks
    a mackerel sky
now as on that island grove
    moondust dissipates
at once · thoughts i'd fain write down
    crouched in a culvert
with the dragon's breath outside
    darkweb denizen
reaches out · a clearing in
    poolside brush sports chairs
when i go for a bucket
    of water to flush
dissident dancers tumble
    i download for free
some Croatian black metal
    one dancer signals
to the clown i brought with me
under a mackerel sky