Fast ways

(Bonestell's Pluto)



(Pesek's)

"Poe may have gained his knowledge of Al Araf only from Moore's notes to the 'Second Angel's Story' in the 'Loves of the Angels'; but it is probable that he had also read the rather obscure reference in chap. vii of the Koran as translated by [George] Sale and an interesting passage, too long to quote here, from Sale's 'Preliminary Discourse,' sec. IV." --William B. Cairns (footnote 1). (Mutazilites.)

(via Designspiration dot net)

"Halley postulated that the Earth we walk on is a hollow shell about 500 miles thick, with two inner concentric shells and an innermost core, about the diameters of the planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury. These sheels are separated by atmospheres, and each has its own magnetic poles. The spheres rotate at different speeds, thus accounting for long-term magnetic field variations. Halley did wonder whether clay and chalk beds of the outer crust are sufficient to prevent the oceans from leaking inside, but he was sure that 'the Wisdom of the Creator has provided' some way to prevent this." --Donald E Simanek

(via black-cat-studios dot com)

The neon seas of Pluto.

"...dim star-dials/ By the peoples of Pluto wrought..." (Clark Ashton Smith)



The Plutonian Drug.



Kasumi PV.

(via The Predictability of Stupidity)

Larva tacos.

"...when antimatter costs in the neighborhood of $100 trillion per gram..."

Dreams about Arms

(via onetinyhand.com)

"XLVII

CILIATED REEF WHERE I WAS BORN
according to the chronicles and folders
with familiar lips illustrated
in second grace.

Ciliated archipelago, you lose your island to the depths,
         to the bottom, my archipelago!
You put up with the calls
of the highway, the way they try us out
and we don't give in for anything.

Noticing the closed eyelids,
unfeathered little grownups, devouring blue bonbons,
old rats start cackling.
Their eyelids closed, as if, when we're born
always wasn't time yet.

The altar goes, the candle so
nothing happens to my mother,
and for me who'll be with the years, if God
wanted, Bishop, Pope, Saint, or perhaps
just a headache of sacred columns.

And those tiny hands that boat themselves
grasping something floating,
not caring to hold on.
And it's 1 already."

--from David Smith's translation of Trilce (1973)

As if that weren t enough to give you the cool

(via American Samizdat)

"Under that sea, a hydrocephalic cry..." --W H Auden

"There was a lot of dismay out there, and not nearly enough ambulances." --Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)

77 Hotels in Kota Kinabalu

(via Father Theo's Blog)

The new movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is so clearly an artifact of the present moment, even in its faithfulness to its Cold War period detail, that i call it a hauntological monument. We revel in the squalor of postwar Great Britain; the crudeness of the tactics of espionage in that era makes us more tinglingly aware of how far we have come in surveillance abilities now; and that paranoia echoes our present one in curious & not-always-ironic ways.

Matt's been there.

Badly reproduced photos as used in books of a certain era--between the exquisite engravings of the Victorians, & the better quality pictures that soon followed. A troubling interlude: & i imagine our crazy quilt of webpage presence to become something just as era-delimited, & as brief. Melodrama out of technological degradation. The glitch as hero.

A long new addition to the sometimes inconsequential, long running hauntological blogosphere. (More.) I like it that the Ghost Box label brings together Algernon Blackwood (e. g. not the superstar HPL but a "jiaya" or lesser avatar of him) and brutalist-modern architecture (to me: the paneláks on the perimeter of Prague).


(via)

Their citing of British films of the Sixties leads me directly to these-

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) --haunting as claustrophobia, or else: the ghost you don't believe in is the one that gets you

X the Unknown (1956) --which went directly into my subconscious as a child: dark shapes moving in the night, inexorably

Night of the Demon (1957) --a classic, of course; & a textbook example of how to handle the Epiphany of the Monstrous

Then there's Whitney's funeral. Having completely fictionalized her character, the service was capped by Tyler Perry (who knows how to please an audience) assuring everyone that Whitney was right this minute in Heaven. Her very public struggle with addiction sits like a gorilla on the very front row, & this circus of denial is only a sideshow to the greater circus of denial that comprises our civilization teetering on the brink, mesmerized by tiny screens.

The mutilated forms of star names as used in old scifi pulps (since immortalized in Star Trek, of course). --Find a way to refer to modern, significant stars by an altered but recognizable form of their names e.g. "Four Melbourne" for Gliese 667 Cc. Kepler-22b as "87.01 Cygnus"...

My longpoem Spaceship to Pluto has finished (which began here). Wandering inside a desert of assorted things-ending. Never quite getting there.

For some reason i'm thinking of Avram Davidson again. (A vintage paperback of The Island Under the Earth recently fell into my hands.) Davidson is haunted by Classical Literature to an extraordinary degree for a 20c author. But rather than just imitate them, he actually uses their thought processes & their tools, so if you read this for identifying allusions (which it invites) you risk missing out on his whole game.

Welcome to the Greenhouse. A haunting future, or rather, futures.

Let's not forget Miéville's Collapse essay. He's the real philosopher of all this. "...two iterations of the same problematic – that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants, chaotic and nihilist and stained with human rebukes."

Four anagrams of "we made good ruins": a guided newsroom, a disowned morgue, a wooded resuming, a winged dormouse. (Kind of says it all.)

"Ghosts only appear when they have something to say..."

"All over America men were drifting like Sargasso weed in a vast dead sea of ruined industry." --Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours (1975)

(via UK Daily Mail 2-20-12)

"...the crying of humanity...."

This Is The Floating

Grade 6 C (photo by Katie Maris Almond)

Bavarian Gentian (via Claude@Munich's Photostream)

with our the coordinator who is up for the

(via Artificial Owl)

"Can Painting Be Saved?"

"He tried to explain that this Japanese monster movie [Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)] was actually a remake of the classic chick flick Roman Holiday (1953), both movies featuring a stylish princess visiting another country who meets a working-class protagonist who becomes sweet on her, although, despite having some adventures together, the two at the end must part..." --Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)

Fragments from a History of Ruin.
Atemporality and Ruin Porn. (via Metafilter) Which gave me this Spengler quote: "What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place?"

"...executioners were allowed to marry only executioners' daughters and executioners' sons were forced to follow in the bloody footsteps of their fathers." --Angelo Ripellino, Magic Prague (1973; 1994 tr.)

More. "Those pieces of the Berlin Wall that have been preserved are often those which are decorated with striking graffiti art or poignant messages in permanent ink. Someone standing in front of one of these recontextualised fragments, someone who was entirely ignorant of the aftermath of World War II, would be alerted that there was something remarkable about the slab of concrete in front of them by the way it was displayed, disembodied, outside a museum or a bank, but their experience of the Wall would be materially different from someone who was familiar with what the Berlin Wall meant in the quarter century between its construction and fall."

"We see now, as our forebears never could, where this overweening enterprise was leading--to the ruin of humankind, or of as much of humankind, at least, as has cast its lot with Biz. Civ. But a ruin, let us admit it, that is altogether fitting and proper, a thoroughly merited ruin, which we are obliged to inhabit as becomes decaying gentry. That is to say, with as much style as we can muster, with whatever pride we can still pretend to, and with, most importantly, a perfect nonchalance." --Thomas Disch, On Wings of Song (1979)

Qu'ran 16:9. "And Allah's is the direction of the way, and some (roads) go not straight. And had He willed He would have led you aright." (Pickthall)

Also, according to Bruce Sterling (1999): "If you want mail to get through to Turkish Cyprus, it should be fake-addressed to 'Mersin 10, Turkey.' "

A Refusal to Anatomize Hauntology, By Fire, In a Belated Year

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." --Faulkner


Lapsang Souchong, Lojban 'smoke tea' DANMO TCATI, the most evocative of drinks (except maybe Laphroaig)--brings to mind the Steppes, & the Silk Road. A thousand years lost to historiography, to the annals of discrete nations, A language, a script, a syncretic religion now utterly forgotten, even as artifacts. The voice of erasure. Tannu Tuva (1921-1944).



Robot X: the first computer poetry on a par with our own. Will it destroy poetry-by-poets, at some future date? Or is it only the secret history of our own time? A scripture for the cognoscenti. Those hipsters of eclipse, in second-hand suits.

Hüzün. When we are done with this "empire" thing.

Ruth Welcome. Also The Third Man.



The Japanese visual kei (i say "clockpunk") band Versailles. Were you expecting Balam Acab?

Zarmina tourism. I still believe!

The Spasmodic School of Poetry. Beddoes. Don't bother, they already said it all.



On Becoming a Dodo. De te fabula narratur.

Westgate...which survived Katrina.



Ern Malley was one of us.

Croatoan. Gippius. Murnau. Tobey.

The Conqueror Worm (victor vermis). Sometime during the fifth or sixth Palin Administration.

"Totally disreputable," as Tim Harding says of 1. N-QR3, or irremeably compromised, like the abductee-directed North Korean flick Pulgasari.

(via club Tokyo)

"1381.

I suppose the time will come
Aid it in the coming
When the Bird will crowd the Tree
And the Bee be booming

I suppose the time will come
Hinder it a little
When the Corn in Silk will dress
And in Chintz the Apple

I believe the Day will be
When the Jay will giggle
At his new white House the Earth
That, too, halt a little--"

(Emily Dickinson)