xenolith the bifurcated lentils. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

"I am a writer living in a time when passively issuing books into the world is a foolish thing. Someone, everyone, needs to attend to the social space of reading..."

Oh look, someone has posted a pic of the Troll of the Aurora Bridge (in Seattle). (It's the fourth one.) And yes, that's a real Volkswagen in its hand.

Posted by michael at 11:36 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031908 "I also think that tidally locked planets, because of their extremes, would have a broader HZ than planets with more equitable conditions over their entire surface. Because it’s difficult to freeze the sub-solar point of a tidally locked planet or melt the antisolar point, they would resist runaway greenhouse or freezing out."

Without the social there is no hymning our pogibation, there is only the song of this or that escape. I can imagine thermonuclear explosions, but not the survival of the social. And yet: many of us are singing this non-survival.

Conspiracy theory. (via Supergee)

The right to kill civilians.

This one kinda snuck up on me.

Posted by michael at 11:35 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031808 Our sleep is not disturbed by the cries of the tortured,
nor does our small talk touch on the cries of the tortured.

You do not find in the wailing of our song
not even a little bit, the cries of the tortured.

Do any of those there, not prisoners,
go home and recollect the cries of the tortured?

Yet now in ev'ry trill of the Mardi Gras
i only hear, despairing, the cries of the tortured.

"I believe we're watching the early death throes of the American Empire."

Posted by michael at 11:34 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031708 "Pantoum: Clogs"

Heavy smoke drifting t'ward the road
trees flush with white blooms
when the goshawk strikes
light breaking through thick cloud
mild winter morning

heavy smoke drifting t'ward the road
silence in the sanctuary
wait for the greeny arrow

no more resurrections
array of high goshawks
no more quarter

Kalpa Imperial. Labels: lj 031608

Cepheid · candle
trickle of water down
down flickering shadow
in the charterhouse
cackling donut
forest green wool coat curtsey
an office
like a dentist's office
vie Nyarlathotep

as from a great height
the pen drops from my hand

One morning i took time out to find the location of the new Chess Club on a map, and even drove by it, and stopped, but i didn't go in.

"Snaffle the Batcuffs"

Pallor of flowering trees,
Normandy, suasivious addict
breaks edict;
Diana of the Crosshairs wends her night jazz.
Mirror cyanic
of the jade road to Canaan.
Biological evolution's canon
does not know these, mutable or Yaanek,
nor the faith

to rely on math.

Posted by michael at 11:33 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031508

"Tai2a Hodag" (Pessoa XXXV.)

Under the swift wave the sasquatch sad
has given up the color blue.
Dancing guano and i am glad, yea, glad
our creeping disjunct minds too well construe
profound from grope a carnival bewail,
pungent profound of purlieu acid bewailed.

It was a night when the planets unseen fail
to rise; the minaret's ululation failed
to mask: tufts of mist were pouring, it
must have been in 'One or Double-Nought.

Not a paradox meant for rusty wit.

And solid basalt was our all-kaput lot,
till high amidst the hazard-storm you stood
and said: Again we'll play, though not for blood.

Herewith endeth the sequence entitled "The Gallant Gallstone of Fortran IV." by Lois Cook.

Posted by michael at 11:32 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031408 (cover art by Robert McGinnis)

"Blondeshell Equinox" (Pessoa XXXIV.)

The fisher takes you, and his hooks are blind
with desire. A fact-filled sustenance gives birth
in howling Jishcha to divs, dreams, and mankind;
so let it be with Caesar. Groundstalworth
your footing in the creek-bed, garter curtail
you ride with kimchee ammo, tax-exempt.

Flowstone knows, quern severe and Israfel [fail]
a cat with crossed legs chuckles. Trilobite contempt
to heed but why? Too late. A fardel lacking
in heftable coherence, fall & cause-
way in one. You peel away the backing;
find air, air. Is there besides the shows
of force, force? No way. There’s no one there
the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

Posted by michael at 11:31 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031308

"Pirates Versus Ninjas" (Pessoa XXXIII.)

The last of the happy noise-makers advance
across hissing cinders. Watch your back.
The labyrinth of night, plant filigree chance,
mouths at Ground Zero yelp the lack.
Sound of rainfall. Gunfire. One over nought;
prayer that's painted on the gallows screens.

Lost--i have lost this morning's thought
dome that once for me was ways and means,
tennis shoes in the dryer. Honks confer
among themselves, and what it is they give
pelf the mad pasta, frowning bedposts err
and my numbers go negative.

I have a hunch like psychedelic Gumby [be]
i shall be stretched, not broken. Blessèd be.

Thread on music from Soviet Georgia.

Don't Think I've Forgotten.

Posted by michael at 11:30 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031208

"I Have Certain Knowledge" (Pessoa XXXII.)

Nightly the realm of otherness appears,
homeland & deconstruction. Cardboard is
the scenery; swerving Sxwaixwe skidmarks hears
on the winds of passage. Sluggish methane seas [sees]
where a jellyfish the size of a house still floats. You touch
the wall of sleep which filleth, foldeth all
cerulean, svelte, too filch to story such
at the caltrops muezzin's call.

Swirl the leaves therefrom. What does it mean
to outlive one's matrix? What's undergone
to survive this shipwreck? Outré mien
among the tall gray lozenges sans explanation
in your heart a palpable hit,
in your mailbox Gog and Magog's writ.

Wit. For most of human history, jokes ending in mutilation have been the very pinnacle of wit.
In some places they still are.

Posted by michael at 11:29 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031108

"My Stretch in the Service" (Pessoa XXII. deux)

The ghost dance takes the revellers, to a man;
our flange illusions grow not one day older.
I didn't clip any fruit carts. Muggy scan
in vain; and the ashes of my coilname moulder
in the Kaisersaal. When green tea icecream's twin
rains, and fire absorbs the scarab's god,
the dogs go: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin [sin]
until my small abode
expands to meet the limit of my eye [I]
and all these corridors jasmines lose
things are more like they were & the rest would try
red numbers, good and bad, beige walls use
our deaths to make a pointillist recalls
green tea seeping slowly through beige walls

Apollo and Electric Prunes (via tenser)

Posted by michael at 11:22 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 031008

"Respitory & Disaster" (Pessoa XXX.)

Bare black branches dangling skeins of untruth;
the turtle turns on its own.
The smell of tar the gleam of turquoise cubefruit
as traffic through construction t'ward unknown
goals crawls. Our robots scan the skies; [sky's]
our autumn swords gavotte in freezing rain.
I watch the biohazard sign, and lies
on television surge. The clang of pain
covers ev'rything. A tale told ill
is black ice forming. We had only hoped
the worst would miss us, we did not yet feel
united with the murk in which we groped:
this human malaise, 5sycei wound for measure's [measures]
bourn, tar cuisine and turquoise pleasures.

"A Good Dull Mule" (Pessoa XXXI.)

When in the chronicle of wasted time
the under-kingdoms rage of consciousness
a moment or an age, their cardboard clime
finds one who scoffs, essentially countryless.
Where paper-blurrers run the show, there's scant escape.

Steel were the shapes i dreamed;
upon such stith as clouds i wrought each shape.
Despite the stigma of print, my rathe slates gleamed
as truculent as sweet. Will be remembered
march in formation troops, or wrecks conceived
at launch? Steel shapes appear, as recently dead
as words i cast on the wind, fast disbelieved.
How few are they who understand him yet
olive corduroy walls choose not to get.

Posted by michael at 11:20 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030908

"Crow Vending Machine" (Pessoa XXIX.)

Being by Calvary's caucuses unsatisfied
a chore is a jar of totems. Remember this
when you are old and gray. A dream denied
darendarong and vulpine hammer miss.
Being by Calvary's tentacles now sated
progging despair like a bedraggled maroon aye-aye
our onset for awhile abated
our great asbestos moth has flown away.

Bands of sunlight through the trees, dread hours
awaiting the one.
Haywire, doff these superhero powers
and tread the path of sibylline inaction.
Foodies swell the final act
in re-pursuit of Zubenelg, in fact.

Moby Grape links.

"Four years ago..."

Posted by michael at 11:19 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030808

"The Curse of Eyes" (Pessoa XXVI.)

Overcast Monday, half an hour's error
and toppling buzzards harvest the inchmeal lie.
A tissue, a tissue; trembling the ebon mirror
that brings lit landscapes forth, to teach thereby
how power here is sovran good. One knows
of exceptions. One may risk one's solidness
on saying so. Semaphor poesy shows
ruined cities, dark red radar, this place
that holds me like a bloodstain. Holds me, and yet
bids me travel along the astral strange

in search of heraldry. But one could get
caught up in effects, still, and never change
basic causality. One dies. The true
measure withholds itself; its Argus you know.

The Atrocity Exhibition. (via Cursor)

"Not Going to Rehab" (Pessoa XXVII.)

Radint waialand lion dreams, the unsurpassed [past]
dynamic intensity of the corrections field today.
Soundbyte ricochet. Shoemaker's cloven last.
Sometimes i feel like a stowaway
on the Titanic, looking out late if ever
on the iceberg rushing up. Black night now
crossing Pineland, swerving. The toxic river
shines. Waialand. Record turnout. Flow
my tears the policeman's beard is have to, none
of the above. Through all corrosive fates
set the controls for the heart of the sun
baby, this is the last of all blind dates
and this we keep with the grizzly of a market bear
and there is more than fear to fear

Hallelujah. (via Metafilter)

"Pink and Gray" (Pessoa XXVIII.)

A chore is ajar. Sulfur and brimstone hiss,
eclipse my teak and lapis lazuli dream.
A sciamachy lost the date of this
whose squib quotiety largens, it would seem.
Gladdened, he flutters. Thunder plain disclosed
i write; the song hides. What sort of feel
does tomorrow have; its shadow interposed
between our tasks and soliloquy so real?

A madman is to lie awake.
The concrete latifundia made some things
impossible to say, though you can take
into your own two hands. Imagining's [imaginings]
a chore. Out of the first colossal curse
of a raven's jeer · emerged a universe

Posted by michael at 11:18 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030708

"The Final Push" (Pessoa XXV.)

Vetust oblivious boomerang Cadillac [lack]
Geronimo, for the first and only dwelling
time, time's flight to now and going back
on strong wings lifted high, the high compelling.
Vertigo and trilobite eyes. My truth
the road that winds into jungle from Harrar [are]

cries ascend from the smouldering field of youth.

An owl with a snow-white underbelly. Ignore.
This lamplit sphere, contained within a glance,
knows nothing but the lore of captive things;
the clink of dishes, a cold rain countenance
play requiem on ghostly scrannel strings.
All is as it was before, but we
are suddenly without reality.

"If your router trusts my router, and my router trusts Evil Bad Guy's, then YOU trust Evil Bad Guy too."

A vending machine for crows.

Posted by michael at 11:17 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030608 "Fake Holocaust Wolf Memoir" (Pessoa XXIV.)

Lozenge melted into subtle stars
drawn up into a syringe, up and away--
these things the organs remember, in their jars.

Thoobing waialand the last good day
will leave no trail.
Grasping with gnarled hands at the mad past
a sorry xerox, grainy, gray and pale,
not much to take with you across that vast
Plutonian taiga, terrible to reach.

Lozenge again to dull the greasy after.
Desert under in then; end bleed; speech
mutiny, and silence barks death's laughter.
Gone on before us is the only one who knows,
nor is there compass where this needle shows.

Astonishment: the Wolfgang Puck vending machine (in the basement of SMU's Fondren library) has the first automatic coffee i have ever tasted, that's drinkable. Labels: lj 030508

"How to Write a Haček" (Pessoa XXIII.)

The desert crossing, day by burning day,
your eyes fixed on some intel horizon;
who are we kidding? Doors made breakaway,
on miniature wings, glist'ning in the sun.
Sourdough bread, splintering. Trapped on standby
oTcTpaHeHie fruit juicy red quintessence

That is not dead which can eternal lie

Jesuit rugby dead opossum presence
dead the jade and dead the active evil
closer to the light

When your country's going to the devil

But i wanted to get this right:
over the torn-up streets i roll, to get
this right, if i can nothing else effect.

Before it's all over and done with, i want to hear this said just once on TV: that our systems had safeguards against everything, except leaders who were venal enough to destroy it for short-term gain, and a populace stupid enough to want to hand it over to them.

Posted by michael at 11:16 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030408 "Meander" (Pessoa XXII.)

By diamondlight, the undercover policeman
returns not wiser, maybe a little older
to the scene, with wary verses that don't scan.

Ev'rything has changed. The walls that moulder
bear diff'rent logos, Heraclitus' twin
says nothing ever dies, the groundhog's god
is shadow. Now, a viral Saracen [sin]
enters the rank abode.

Orange klones, a troubled sky, and i
smell tar i cannot see. When poets lose
the sense of being in a voice, they sometimes try
to find another they can use;

the guard at midnight half-recalls
a whisper through the walls, a whisper in the walls.

How come you never see Dick Cheney and Yog Sothoth in the same room at the same time?

Posted by michael at 11:14 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030308

"Garden of Allah" (Pessoa XXI.)

The Zombie Apocalypse might be well worth seeing,
if only for the frenzy of the shapes.

The wizard is a human being
or human frame o'er which his magic drapes.
Rise from the wrist, O kestrel slithy teach.

I; for folk for rim mutiny sense
mutiny mutiny bleed. Day/- Rain reach

The wizard is a lost intelligence
the introverted obelisk omitted.
You should have known.

Fish on fire, their tidings benefitted
with white phosphorus. Crystal do them shown
Podkayne commoners grope desert aright

the laughing of the leaping parasite. [sight]

More Lovecraftian than any of the nominally-Mythos films: Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.

A Dandy in Aspic.

Posted by michael at 11:13 AM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 030208

Thursday, November 05, 2009 "Habitation of Dalmations" (Pessoa XX.)

Admixture of straw. Incendiary rebirth.
Into the realm of hungry ghosts you come
naked and twittering, full of the absent earth.

So long were you away, away from home.

And questions that no stuffed-straw scarecrow fields
arrive by ev'ry channel of turbid sense.
No use to fight the pain, no use to yield.

Where vict'ry is a laughable pretence

the beast that runs beside me · you were lost
before the ship set sail · your hands forgot
the secret of how to fix · jib halyard tossed
corrugated mongrelization thought
and what is behind thought · acrobat adobe
the octopus frontier, astringent, frothy. [thee]

Qantara thread on Metafilter.

Posted by michael at 4:01 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 0330108

"Free Fire Zone" (Pessoa XVIII.)

Fear, & fear's black fleet, would soon benight
where guessing into ghostly world blur-blends
instant asp scripts. Ridden by spurs so light
he of Phthia plummets to selfsame ends
and churns the hubble bubble's [bubbles]
chambers of vainglorious dividend-nought.

To cranch, to lounge Epona Shi'a troubles
already i forgot
smell of a cold front pushing through the pylons stand
more elegy than otherwise
in the rippling mists i come to take your hand
what we are is nothing · raven's eyes
the fury of the consecrated past,
telegraphed descent to a waste so vast

"Fake Folk" as a movement.

"Space Food Sticks" (Pessoa XIX.)

Bronzer-abuse, fringefoot tracks not separate
in the deep gaze. Lilac retrofit
only if hazily, boulder-squeaking fate
O Goddesse pitie love and pardon it.

The still apartment, dreamed? So one may fare. [fair]
Since Thursday? From the air, another thought
as long i lay awake and heard a bear
rummage. This the land you always sought?
Derelict, the shape of mockery
not now the beauty found in ugliness;
molten. What clean sunlight more? I call thee
a long way down the line. These wars replace
the rumbling in the walls, though not for long.
Did you want stillness? Then you have it. Were you wrong?

Ann Quin.

Posted by michael at 4:00 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022908 ALIGN=top ALT="alas"> "Kullervo departs for the War" by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Kalevala Day.

"Newcomer Intake Center" (Pessoa XVII.)

Death is certainly an egoist.
It brooks no peer. Melodies unhealthy [thee]
as a pack of Marlboros do exist;
their heft skews the very hazard-biome.
Humming, the one that took our Misthome is,
like a raisin in the wind. Antlers unsever
from the skull. Typo-squatting made this
heart sing. I want to bite you allover
and over again, raisin in the wind, four-door
Buick of unholy thirsts, not
for the first time high and dry, a blackamoor [more]
trail. It was the outcome ev'ryone thought
their squirming swerved from, but this zaqqum fruit
returned like clockwork, or a feral truth.

"Not many Americans would eat a cheeseburger in front of a starving African child. But is it OK to eat the cheeseburger behind the child's back, out of sight of the child? How far must we get from the starving child to make it OK?"

Posted by michael at 3:59 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022808 "Persistent Cough" (Pessoa XVI.)

Raise paisley hymns that miss the point
the future of a land that might have been.
Creative tortures never disappoint.

When it comes, as it must, in unsuspected mien;
when it comes, oh lord, the majesty that was
at best, half-dreamt: and seldom now recalled,
so we will go down damned at the stringent pass.
Begin today to learn & not be galled.

Warming by noon, my mind's blue plates staved in
by tenderness, a boon beyond enjoying.
Our fortress is our grief. Our medicine [sin]
to put an end to readier destroying.

And ours is for tomorrow to reprove,
when these brisk eidolons no longer move.

Hanta Yo.

"Is Nazi poetry an oxymoron? Not a bit of it, posits Bolaño. On the contrary, it’s all too possible." (via Silliman)

Posted by michael at 3:58 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022708 "Enduring Freedom" (Pessoa XV.)

The earth from our dino tread has not quit trembling
yet. IngSoc, Ain Soph vie tough-loving
us purchasers-to-be. The sky's dissembling
azure, while the last dense nowls want proving,
prepares, doubtless, something worth a look
down a dank bomb-shelter for. Habsiyya's worth
notwithstanding, you must heft the Book
of RoboDobermans first; no second birth
in chockfull battle-rattle to husband hopes...
Just deen. A learner yells molt, this as proof
as night-glimpsed revenant. Finchineer who gropes
amidst this circus minefield, who gulps scoff
from the Wolf's own teat, you'll snavvle Pharisee
redemption, but you'll never hoick from me.

The Lurker in the Lobby.

Posted by michael at 3:57 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022608

"Commandment-Withdrawal" (Pessoa XIV.)

The wounded self protests from night till morn,
from early light to latest, not to know
the world beyond its little room & born
to whist & echo, battens in that glow.

For i have sweated in its steely grasp,
nor far from edged demesnes have dared to stray.
The Wanderer of Wastes is but a mask
too poignantly betrayed one hapless day.

Clown of a mind to understand the whole
sham shindig, i have watched no lamp attract
inquiry so mothly doomed as soul
survival. What falls up, what accidents detract,

and stories tell it not. The lightless stretch
on Royal wears the skid marks of my outreach.

Posted by michael at 3:56 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022508 (via Metafilter)

"Triumph of the Will" (Pessoa XIII.)

A thousand paisley hymns in passive voice;
i lock my keys in the office, perchance to dream
on the job is not so swift. The happy noise

of humans breaking what was made by them.

Such alibis as vampires call the soul.
In winter, rain. Smells from nowhere. Love
even of something appalling. Light, all
this light. A thousand paisley hums to prove

the taut antithesis of consciousness

and having made our peace with fear itself
a grassy knoll in fancy dress
hazarding a broken poem for zero pelf
the mad sums yearn to prove thee
and all the blue sparks fading love thee.

Posted by michael at 3:55 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022408 "Earlyish" (Pessoa XII.)

Outrage upon the velocipede of skid road
sea and sky the same. Ravens detect
salvage; clouds more leisurely unload.
The cough moves from suspect to glum suspect
and towers fade into mist, though darkly near.
These letters i can't read, what do they spell
at each lorn crossroad? Gallows hovering there,
with only their tribunals much invisible.

Cars come at me from ev'ry side. I'd thought
to be there already. Sxwaixwe hoards his take
across the table: what more do i got?
Steal this smoke; steal what i forsake
and what i'm running from;
catenary days lift shofar to the goaf alone.

"To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an 'already' that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss." --Paul Auster , writing on Royston's Lycophron in: "The Invention of Solitude," Collected Prose (pp 107-110)

Posted by michael at 3:54 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022308

"Uzbek Imbolc Limbec" (Pessoa XI.)

Redolent fire sands recover course
out of shapeliness, out of napalm pomade.
Cubes, domes, and death cults promise worse
in ravelling rockets, now we pour the Kool-Aid.
If ever a super hero has lost heart
it is because of this. As chaos grows
and desert realms in which each shares a part,
the solidest presence is the one who goes.
You will have tomorrow remembered this.
Jahiliyyah and stupefaction drive;
the tower rises from the rain-crypt. Is
charity enough? A ladder's skies
yearn. The dead, with customary skill,
would annotate this holocaust of will,

"I want to spit in the face of every writer who first obtains permission and then writes." --Mandelshtam

Posted by michael at 3:53 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022208

"Like the flakes of gold in the chinks of some faded masterpiece, the Orientalism of Poe is so sparingly dispersed--an almost imperceptible touch, here and there--that none save a connoisseur is able to feel what the loss would have been, if that touch had not been given." --Norman Douglas

"Ash City Grill" (Pessoa X.)

Guernica is the ticking of Argus asleep,
reveille in the vampire-walking day.
The fulvous pulpit where the poppies sleep
is mine, is always mine, whatever you say.
Delusions that leave cinders in their wake
have brought us scads of nondelusive pleasure
wherefore these toppling opposites mistake
cats with MySpace pages for right measure
and Solomon song. One-armed semaphor [for]
launches a vast conspiracy of joy
buzzards. Here, where catnip's scriptures flower
there's really nothing to enjoy
and nothingness absorbs the monkey-picked heart
into its own, my sanguine counterpart.

"An interior decorativeness seems clearly to me to be the superior, enlightened mode by which to give a destiny to ourselves." --The Book of Disquiet

"...'as if' (slovno) a notion inseparable in the Russian from 'the word' itself (slovo)." --Sidney Monas, in: Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (tr Raffel & Burago, 1973)

Posted by michael at 3:52 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022108

"Lives don't come any more interesting than Bern Porter's." (via wood_s lot)

Lunar Escape Ambulance Pack. (via Centauri Dreams)

"Alien Casualty Blog" (Pessoa, IX.)

Doxologies of shredding idleness
gift me with mem'ries made of anime
porn and gossamer targe. Kid glove stress
the melting latticework of the Used-To-Be.
The iron birds looked disapproval, Procyon lair
on the curdled horizon; watch the virtual action
ye mighty and despair,
for all these pimp the kingdom of distraction
and castles made of thousand
blank refusals, more profane the more
they conjure thee by underhand.
We learn. The vapor trails of power
construct; perfect pharaohs perfect pyramids bring
to this our only fake repurposing.

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.

Trek lyrics.

Posted by michael at 3:51 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 022008 (via exoplanets.org

"Goldenseal" (Pessoa VIII.)

Philosopher & delver of the undermasks,
bug washed down the drain. Forgetting when
forgetting is salvation. Nothing unmasks
like sciamachy. Minotaur tholins' plain
rains mainly on the groundlings of the masque, [mask]
and secret prisons harvest prion eyes.
Soliloquy. This is the work, the task:
with fecklessness the Gordian knot unties
what holds back those who long for other faces
and diff'rent latifundia of losing.

My patience is gone. Grimalkin wryly grimaces.
The storms have come, heedless of further causing,
to shake the house with morning thunder, masking
haply explosions. Why fear mere unmasking?

"All the long moonlight nights I dream'd of Ule,
And in the dark half of the month, my heart was there."

--Frederick Tuckerman

Obama 7-27-04.

The Classical Gas Video. (thanx Melanie!)

Posted by michael at 3:50 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021908

"Popes of the Ghetto" (Pessoa, VII.)

In the burning shadows where my heart dwells grieve thee
hatching midnight tentacles, relic thought
in overfishing cataract who believe thee
not. A suburb crag or two, the desire to not
finish, pallid moths instead of stars:
i seldom quaff as such. Panic survived
even its regimentation in fragrant bars
of Betelgeuse. The Portuguese believed
in ground fog. Hull of maroon contains the world;
bury the chains, your serfdom coif born covering
a Klingon Wicca lament, sunken otherworld.
No clinic gawk, silken with discovering,
now. One day a dearth of borders may
growl, too, past this totems of dismay.

Sock it to Me.

Queen of the Dalits.

Posted by michael at 3:48 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021808

Liberal Fascism: the response.

Spartacus Roosevelt Hour podcast. (via Metafilter)

"The Tall Official Carriage Comes on a Visit" (Pessoa, VI.)

Thwart-victorious catchinnations skilled
issue swords that roar with vatic heat,
and Nyarlathotep's grip is dead dust swilled
in brilliant autumn days of pointing feet. [feat]
Paint with orchid-oil. Your gathered shapes have turned
turtle. Branches cover your eyes. Short measure
and little recourse, crimson-glowing spurned.
Here is Bulging Void who throve on pleasure;
On-Thundering Cube who mongered hate.
I'd have you know a thrifty motionless sentiment
comes from viewing these splinters so sedate
they flicker out with boyg's last jibe. Violent
men know this. Awhile has flamed our river
no clang-radiance fails to sport for ever.

Giant crystal hidden in Earth's center.

"We are not there yet. But it is already another country."

Posted by michael at 3:47 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021708 "No Clinic Gawk" (Pessoa, V.)

This paralytic dance demands suave action,
Vanilla Mint Listerine. Fierce sleet, sleep-need
tear at the slates. In lieu of sweet distraction,
cancer. See, i learn to stint my greed
according to the measure of my mint task:
broken out windows? cardboard squares will do.
Shoes disintegrating fast? Don't ask.
Ilka eight-ball scratch has got its cue-
shipment, spare and necessary muse;
violent, if it must be.
And still i lack disasters i can use,
as columns of smoke transfix infinity
out the limo windows where we're driven
blindfold and humming canticles to heaven.

"Almost any sort of poetry writing or poetry life counts as countercultural in a manifestly postliterate society. But that doesn't mean we get to reclaim avant-garde status..." (via Silliman)

The world as a drawer of broken things.(via Dumbfoundry)

Posted by michael at 3:46 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021608

"A Date with Asteroid 134340"

the word 'failure'
removed after the first edition
gift of isinglass
in Texas Lithuania Salamanders

this morning the smell
of rain on the wind
why shouldn't a thousand years

frail stalking word
cars without hubcaps
pale turquoise

A language too beautiful to lose. (via Cursor) "...[w]aasabiik, which describes the way moonlight will winkle on the water on an almost still night."

"mille hominum species et rerum discolor usus" --Persius V. ('Men's types are legion, polychrome their use of things.' --tr Guy Lee & William Barr, The Satires of Perseus)

"Lament of the Brazen Camels

At the end of the third month, out of office and poor,
I went to the eastern suburbs in search of flowers.
Who was it wrote a farewell song to spring?
The brazen camels lament on the banks of the Luo.

South of the bridge are many riders on horseback,
The northern mountain is girdled with ancient graves,
While men are quaffing cups of wine.
The camels sit and mourn ten million springs.

Useless to toil away in this life of ours.
It's only a wind-blown candle in a bowl.
Tired of seeing peach-trees smile again,
The brazen camels weep as night comes on."

--Li He (tr Frodham, 1983)

Affected Provincial. (via Metafilter)

Posted by michael at 3:45 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021508

"The Repture" (Pessoa IV.)

Gather leaves like chirg Lönnrot,
story all the pungent dead.
Green tea & a precise thought
ash-floats, on the glory fled.
Wear yet our broken beauty
legends coil in readiness;
where swerving is a duty
so's harrowing deathlessness.
Tweak a tune from the bent saw
nightly. If they fell, what blame
outlasts the foundation flaw
in lands those, only in name?
A ghost dance, for what will be
that's swathed now in secrecy.

"Dallas was not, of course, deep South, but it was deeper than one might suppose. Early in the 1920s when I was about five or six years old, the Ku Klux Klan had a mammoth night parade there. My father, mother, sister, brother, and I saw it from my father's office on the fifth floor of a building on Main Street in the center of town. ...It frightened me to look down from such a height. I saw hundreds of sheeted figures and the fiery torches which many of them carried. I am sure that I had not the remotest notion of the meaning of the parade." --Thomas F Gossett, in new (1997) introduction to Race: the History of an Idea in America (1963)

"… And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife had found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me

'Now you shall die, and none shall know.'

And the fool looking down believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulder,
the naked stars,

Each one remembering." --The Naked Stars

Posted by michael at 3:44 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021408 "Next idea: Cloverfield as metaphor for the [L]ong [E]mergency."

"Significant amounts of public funds have been spent on replacing the stolen signs."

A novel based on Orlando Furioso.

What hope is there in entertainment?

"Grothendieck's Prime"

into the science fiction years we never bargained for
two weeks equals a month · we know ev'rything
ev'ry hair on your head is counted faithfully
by our robot servants who constantly anticipate
what will please us most
they told me to end this poem with something positive

K's choice.

"La Segadora"

the gossamer sagas of bloggers
a gnawing, like tireless Nidhhoggr's:
jahiliyyah's noise
all discourse destroys,
Dog Fireman Flasher Robot Valentine.

The Great Klingon Haiku and Limerick Contest. (What, not in Klingon?) Various translations. Visions of Victory, the chapbook anthology. Some hex tables. Youtube is not neglected. Rumors of Klingon Wicca. "Famed for her Klingon poetry, as well as her arguments with nIchyon about whether or not it should rhyme and scan..." More on Klingon Wicca."As Wicca is the only major religion that has no devil or war god, one wonders how it can be combined with a fictional people who glorify war and battle." I can envision them as having the same relation to mainstream Paganism, as Mexican Catholicism has to Christianity. (--And what might they do with a myth like Starhawk's?)

Posted by michael at 3:43 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021308 (via whatwouldthembido dot blogspot)

"As gestures of support, the Lummi Nation sent intricately carved healing poles to the 9/11 sites in New York in 2002, Pennsylvania in 2003 and the Pentagon in 2004."

"Teensy Llama Roller"

rood of Ubar · abject
noun · rippling shadows remain
through the half-blind erg time
iceberg hurtling · profane meld
sniffling · on the battlefield

Cult movie downloads. (via Metafilter)

Posted by michael at 3:41 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021208 (from Get Your War On)

"One day Baudelaire was listening to a group of persons expressing contempt for an ugly old idol which someone had dug up. 'Beware,' said Baudelaire, 'it might be the true God.' " --John Garber Palanche, Gautier and the Romantics (1926)

what pink dusk calls · the fountain in the dark
winds' presage squalls · the fountain in the dark

i prowl lined shelves · in search of words that bite;
without stone walls, · the fountain in the dark

fifty twisters · ride the ballot wake
like mercury falls · the fountain in the dark

like mercury falls · and dun gallium rapids
phalanx of dolls · the fountain in the dark

and Klingon Islam · voices rend the night
by shades crossed, sprawls · the fountain in the dark

Wry-Blue Loves.

The only Emperor is the Emperor of White Phosphorus. --sayings of Asmoday

Posted by michael at 3:40 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 021108 (via Orcinus)

"...these four melancholic writers [Kemal, Koçu, Tanpınar, Hısar] ...knew enough to realize that in Turkey they would never achieve a voice as strong and authentic as Mallarmé's or Proust's. But after long deliberation they found an important and authentic subject: the decline and fall of the great empire into which they were born." --Orhan Pamuk, I˙stanbul (2004)

"In 1971 the Matica even suggested that, if the language of command in the army was to be 'Serbian,' then sailors ought to obey commands in 'Croatian' on the grounds that 80 per cent of the Yugoslavian army operated in Croatian waters..." --Language and Nationalism in Europe

"Warfare Lite" (Pessoa III.)

Lost in the sacred dark, by the stone bridge, be.
Shadow filigree drapes. Your heart made whole
by barren fiat. There, where i am me,
the body is a prayer from cap to sole. [soul]
Honk at the one at the head of the line, unseeing.
Fighter tamed by sun in the aftertime,
go softly now. You've had your fill of being,
and finding all your fruits consumed by rime;
a morning drive across this ruined world.
In the aftertime, plant soldiers that are wise
with wounding. Hey, into the Zone we're hurled
only a moment, dodge by mad surmise,
and find by hap if looth at all. O rage
for certainty, let gallows-mistletoe assuage. Labels: lj 021008

"Midway the Stable Place

Below the southern, seaward ledges, where,
Such is the heavy weathering away,
No flower grows, no silence hearts the air,
Each rock gives slowly from its utmost bay.
There comes the day's calthumpian, all afleer,
In his midwaste quotidian King Lear.

His great moonface rumridden and windshot,
His voice the cleaving of the wind to sea,
He drives full speed head on and sets his pots
In his own image and without a lee,
Safe in the backwash of the ledge at bay,
An act of God who does not die this day.

It is midwaste of breaking and the foam,
Midblack the upward curve, the flecking lace,
There always order gives disorder room,
There always midlight is the stable place.
There in the blossoming of waywardness,
O stalwart Lear, you eddy and confess."

--R P Blackmur

"Man his own nature never yet could sound,
He knows not whence he is, nor whither bound.
Atoms tormented on this earthly ball,
The sport of fate, by death soon swallowed all..."

--Voltaire's "Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake" (tr John Morley)

"Last Song

I will blow my last song to the moon's dingy door
Hastily sealed; I will blow my song through the slit,
Through the cobwebbed crevice between the door and the floor
Where hairy old moon-spider grandmothers nod and knit
I will blow my last song.

Then some night when the wind rustles velvety thick
With moist yellow jasmin-stars, and the smell of rain
Drifts an impatient silver, the door will click
Dreamily ajar, and misty with moon-spider skein
My last song will blow down."

--Joseph Auslander, Sunrise Trumpets (1924)

Posted by michael at 3:39 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020908

Dream of Life. (thanx Melanie!)

"Violet Dusk

Autumn dusk, violet...
Two poplars, in the background, in silhouette:
--Apostles in vestments of violet--
The whole town violet.

Lazy, frivolous people in the street;
The whole crowd looks violet,

From the tower, war-lords in the plain, long-haired;
Forefathers pass in troupes of violet,
The whole town violet."

--George Bacovia

Our momentary feat, of putting everyone on wheels, rendered unthinkable else, & the cornerstone of every philosophy. Stubborn music, among the mute and uncontested winds.

"Super Fat Tuesday" (Pessoa II.)

Bring the waking dream severe delight
and closed eyes fled from out this severed scene (seen)
will rise and gather sustenance from insight.
Our Rubicon has not yet flown. Take sunscreen
into the valley (which is a state of being);
take ammo of truth (all you believe, is lies).
There's Aceldama beyond all dime foreseeing
and i did not invent these trilobite eyes,
up a creek and cased in concrete dreadnought:
i drove through, and took all night. You see,
i only found out late.
Ignore this rot.
The Way Through came in a dream, and said to me,
"Only lately forgotten, nor buried deep,
are those we've wronged, and this is why we weep."

Posted by michael at 3:37 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020808

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to rhyme "decomposing" in English?"

"Caliphs that trembled midst the splendid pomp" --Voltaire's Zaïre (tr W F Fleming, in: Seven Plays by Voltaire, 1988)

In another life, i would be: a contemporary painter, in the space art style of the 50s & 60s, of imaginary space probes & robot landers.

"The Loss of the Circumflex"

acorn sculpture · porn groan
snapdragon · tsarist octave

tubular · slope
spelunker at mundungus · crystal

be sport · go bravely
and again try · for raging angst

as indigo fallout · spools
adjunct bricolage · sail agonist lorn

"To stir the wits, to make ink flow in floods and the pen acrobatic, there is nothing like solitude. No one not in the business can understand how populous it is. No one not in the trade can understand how loquacious its phantoms become. They have their defects. They poison you for the realities of life. None the less, to be worth his syndicate an author must evoke them. He must play with hallucinations as Mithridates did with drugs. But he must play alone." --The Pomps of Satan

Posted by michael at 3:36 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020708

Strange Fruit.

"In the 8th century the collection of poems and stories related to the ayyam, the 'days' or battles of the pre-Islamic tribes, were studied with almost as much love and veneration as the traditions of the Prophet himself, and the world of the pagan Arabian nomad became as integral to the history of Islam as the works of the classical pagan authors did to the Christian intellectual tradition." --Hugh Kennedy, in: Interpreting Late Antiquity

"The Emperor, Being Divine"

Now and then
the pain in my heart
for awhile sleeps
for awhile dreams
the tap-tapping of acorns on the sidewalk
under gray growing darker
still the deserted street

Another squid thread.

End of an epoch.

One ringy-dingy...

Posted by michael at 3:35 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020608

"Moose and Squirrel are Dead" (Pessoa rhymes, I.)

Minaret fare, Octoberary outlook
burns me where the paradox transplants are.
With ulcer algid storm comes no bright book
but snow efts dancing. Better, now, by far
to follow through with less than sphingid will;
a carnival of sores arrayed. Abroad,
severe meld. A quaking in the still,
this battery is kaput and long ignored
bonks foregather in the erg Grob bridged.
You see them, oft, at eve. Violet-seeming
guru guano from these isles. Abridged
album. Oolong igloo soon from being
smudged. But let our Myanmar gorp's fez gleams
tarry at the hour the sasquatch dreams.

My World is Not of This Kingdom.

A dædal of my death--
I semble now that subtle worm uneath:
Which, prone to its own ill, can take no rest:
For, with strange thoughts possess'd,
I feed on fading leaves
Of hope, which me deceives
And thousand webs doth warp within my breast.
And thus in end unto myself I weave
A fast-shut prison-- No! but even a grave."

--William Drummond, in: Rare Poems of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (ed Linton, 1883)

Tank Man.

Temple of Humankind.

Posted by michael at 3:34 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020508

Here, where no joy is ever sure
And tired hands dissever,
I dream of raptures which endure

Here, where the sunlight and the mist
Are lost in night together,
I dream of rainbows that persist

Here, where October leaves the plain
And passes from the river,
I dream of Aprils that remain

Here, where the present joins the past
And dead things rise up never,
I dream of lightnings that shall last

--Edgar Saltus, Poppies and Mandragora (1926)

"Complain, as many an ancient Bard did,
How Genius is no more rewarded."

Argyle hummingbird, shoo......the New Jurassic is coming
Nine blue castles halloo......the New Jurassic is coming

Leaving whatever has curdled......to burden, pirates we frolic;
Steer like Mr Magoo......the New Jurassic is coming

Launch such caravan now......cfipyboi's ripe for a shaking
Hear Graywyvern kazoo......the New Jurassic is coming

"You can't turn all of your negative experiences into love, though it is sweet to try. But I'll be born again no more. The protection of S/M is no protection; being saved, by this mystery or by any other, will not save me." --Donna Minkowitz, op cit

Posted by michael at 3:33 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020408

"Thus when Salazar passed from the scene, critics were faced with a challenge: either the old Pessoa had to be reduced in stature or a new Pessoa had to be created." --Darlene Sadlier, op cit

"...two Pessoa films were released--Mensagem [Message], based on the poem, and Conversa Acabada [Conversation over]..." -ibid

"apple cider + theraflu"

Zuni ages
accord lock
radon i blare

bosk law yellow
AWOL leywalk
sober albino

dark cold roc
case gain

"Pessoa's first biographer tells us that Pessoa read Nordau's book as others read the Bible." --George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American literature (2000)

"And, if Mário António, the Angolese poet, is right, even the chambermaids in Lisbon now speak a different Portuguese from their mothers' because Fernando Pessoa wrote his poems." --Edwin Honig, preface to his Pessoa (1971)

"After publishing his group of 'Twelve Poems by Alberto Caeiro' in New Directions Annual 19, he [Thomas Merton] answered my letter, ...with the information that he...had mainly done the dozen to convince Suzuki that Pessoa had really created a Zen Buddhist in the heteronymic poet, Caeiro." --ibid hyonmu (via korea-np.co.jp/pk)

Posted by michael at 3:31 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020308

"Nor infant's moon dim horns the darkness cheer'd" --Mickle's Lusiad (1776)

"meat coma"

the trembling of the violet-beds
'with withoutness willed'
my niche in darkness sparkling
the leywalk into ishikoro

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.

"Had it but been clear
This would be another evening
Of no cuckoo cry,
I'd have settled down at once
To a night of needed sleep."

--Nôin Hôshi, in: Edwin A Cranston, A Waka Anthology (volume two, part A)

Posted by michael at 3:30 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020208
EROS/ION by mIEKAL aND & Maria Damon

Eros/ion is a self-eroding, unstable cenotaph indexing love lost by natural processes of decay, erosion, and circumstance, as well as by unnatural processes of violence and betrayal. Past and present, imagination and the everyday world of lived relationship, are re-activated in aesthetic exorcism. Immersion in a bed of intertexts and elemental cognates allows the emergence and working-through of delicate feelings long unexpressed. The collaborative process through which the text is produced mimics erosive eros, but in a sublimated haven of words-as-coils, connective tissue, articulated flesh, divided paths, collided intentions, dynamic misunderstandings and creative camaraderie. This proximation is a lifeline we walk from the woods to the kitchen, from the garden to the studio, alone and in pairs.

NTAMO, Helsinki, Finland. Leevi Lehto, publisher.
4.25" x 6.88", 97 pages, ISBN 978-952-215-024-0, Photography by CamillE Bacos,
price â‚¬ 13,31 plus mailing costs.

Can be ordered via Lulu.com

Original hypertext version can be read here:

â€œeros/ion is a beautifully designed instance of hypertext poetry in print. There are author-produced sequences that vary from the page sequences, but readers may find that they want to choose their own pathsâ€”such is the beauty and economy of the self-contained pages (lexia) that they resonate as deeply on their own as they do in relation to all of the others. As befits the form, themes include writing, text and textuality, desire, connectivity and â€˜erosive media.â€™"â€“Rita Raley

â€œAuthors: complex entanglement of empty cloth, desire of absent flesh or tantra descendent: body and name having fled, as if landscape curled around lovers, death, theory itself. oh this is beautiful! future anterior turned future interior, what has been subsequent lost in memory, death, faint reminiscence of technology. you say 'The End of History': i say, there is no end to it, commentary buries itself, every enunciation is already a problem. to be done with it, to be done with a sentence, is impossible. your impossibility is our death, our love, as if we cannot survive the year. there are no texts, no talk, no theory, no putative expression, there are only murmurs, and this is the way this book, this moment, works against itself, as if there were no (as if there were only) tomorrow.â€â€“Alan Sondheim

â€œThis book is delicious: replete with instances of intimacy offered in a context of restraint. Poised and riveting in its exquisite use of language, eros/ion embodies a sustained and generous miracle in collaboration.â€â€“Sheila E. Murphy

Maria Damon is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and â€œBagel Shop Jazzâ€: Selected Essays for Post-Literary â€œAmerica;â€ co-author (with mIEKAL aND) of Literature Nation and pleasureTEXTpossesssion; and co-editor (with Ira Livingston) of the forthcoming Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader.

mIEKAL aND is a longtime DIY cultural anarchist & the creator of an infoplex worth of visual-verbal lit, audio-art, performance ritual & hypermedia distributed by Xexoxial Editions. His hypermedia works reside at JOGLARS Crossmedia Broadcast. Since 1991, he has made his home at Dreamtime Village.
Posted by michael at 3:29 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020108 (2)

35 Sonnets. (The original is worth $27,000 by now!)

"Ricardo Reis arrives in Lisbon on a ship that began its voyage in Buenos Aires (p. 351), and throughout the novel is trying, in vain, to finish reading a book -- in English -- called The God of the Labyrinth, by the Irish writer Herbert Quain (p. 363), which he borrowed from the vessel's library and failed to return. Both book and writer are imaginary, but they have a previous existence in the pages of Borges..."

"He could have been to the gnosis what John of the Cross was to Catholicism, or Ibn Arabi to Sufism."

"Trilce X.

The pristine and last stone of groundless
fortune, has just died
with soul and all, October bedroom and pregnant.
Of three months of absent and ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitered monodactyl, laughs.

How at the rear conjunctions of contraries
destroy all hope. How under every avatar's lineage
the number always shows up.

How whales cut doves to fit.
How these in turn leave their beak
cubed as a third wing.
How we saddleframe, facing monotonous croups.

Ten months are towed toward the tenth,
toward another beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three months of absence.
and the nine of gestation.

There's not even any violence.
The patient raises up
and seated empeacocks tranquil nosegays."

--Eshleman's Vallejo

"I owe a debt of gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation, which made it possible for me to finish this work, and I cannot help thinking how strange it is to live in a world in which a great fortune made from Central and South American mines should then be devoted to fostering humane studies, some of which are bound to cast a harsh light on the making of such fortunes." --Robert Mezey, preface to his translation of Vallejo's Tungsten (1988)

Voting Democracy Off the Island.

Posted by michael at 3:28 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 020108 (1)

"The most famous version of the second anecdote is found in He Guangyuan's Jianjie lu from the Five Dynasties:
'One day, while riding on his mule, he suddenly came up with the verse: "The bird spends the night in the tree by the pool,/ the monk knocks at the gate under the moonlight." At first he wanted to use the word "shove"; then he wanted to use the word "knock." Without realizing it, he passed through half a city ward in this fashion. Those who observed him were astonished, but Jia Dao seemed not to see them. At the time Han Yu was serving as provisional Metropolitan Governor of the capitol. Han had a stern and punctilious disposition, and his awesome presence at that moment made itself felt on the great avenue. Passing the third avenue, the criers were clearing the way, but Jia Dao just went on writing characters with his hand. Only when he was suddenly pushed down from his mule by officials and dragged before the Metropolitan Governor did Jia Dao realize the situation. The advisers wanted to have him reprimanded, but Jia Dao responded, "I just happened now to come up with a couplet, but I haven't been able to get a particular word right. My spirit was wandering in the realm of poetry, and this is what led me to run into Your Excellency. I do not dare call your wrath down upon me, but I hope you might be kind enough to give this some consideration." Han Yu halted his horse, thought about it for a while, and said to Jia Dao, " 'Knock' is finer." ' " --Stephen Owen, The Late Tang (2006)

"Constructed-Language Ringtone"

don the dead husk of olden days
in order to act at all
we are the broken army
in the valley of cornucopia

a crying seagull
circling the parking lot
says as much

broken army, fight

Blood Done Sign My Name.

Posted by michael at 3:27 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 013108 (via Squatter City)

"...three of the four Beatles (Avalanchurus lennoni, Avalanchurus starri, Struszia mccartneyi), all five of the Sex Pistols (Arcticalymene rotteni, A. viciousi, A. jonesi, A. cooki, A. matlocki), and four of the Ramones (Mackenziurus johnnyi, M. joeyi, M. deedeei, M. ceejayi) have trilobites named after them."

"There is no denying that the mottoes and lyrical fragments of the Novels are of all Scott's work the most difficult part to edit. ...He had at last the frankness to avow that they were 'sometimes quoted from reading, or from memory, but in the general case were pure invention.' ...the artifice was bolder when he advanced to the invention of verse for Dr Isaac Watts and Sir David Lyndsay. Even here his invention did not end: he found at least a score of titles for non-existent poems from which he pretended to quote, and there is some suspicion that he also created a poet or two upon whom to father his fabrications." --J Logie Robertson, intro to The Poetical Work of Sir Walter Scott (1926)

fane shadowy, rising against gray
and vehicle t'ward
where we must be if we are at all
and to plant it here,
get the next driver to listen up...

Momus reconstructs a tender passage in his life--using PS3.

Posted by michael at 3:26 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 013008

New Borbetomagus. Reviewed.

"Questions God Asks Satan"

shinto mirrors arrive
on the scene blue ray
blue ray
minions anguish
again flickering fylfot

astatine who rose

Lamentation echoing
torn stronghold
shore of great stones
and fine sand
triangu;lar windowed
and cold smoky light
of morning over the wooden tables
deserted except for me
fog across the forest wall
echoing my steps strangely
so far from sanctuary
the hum
of the automatic paper towel dispenser
not a dentist drill

We Shot JR.

Posted by michael at 3:25 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012908

Schreckengost, famed industrial designer of toys, White House porcelain, dies at age 101

Artist and designer Viktor Schreckengost poses in the living room of his Cleveland Heights, Ohio home in this June 12, 2006 file photo. MARK DUNCAN
From Associated Press
January 27, 2008 5:57 PM EST
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Viktor Schreckengost, an artist and prolific industrial designer whose ubiquitous works ranged from familiar toys and White House porcelain to innovative trucks and even lawn mowers, has died. He was 101.

Schreckengost died Saturday while visiting family in Tallahassee, Florida, said Brenda Jackson of the Viktor Schreckengost Foundation on Sunday.

Schreckengost, a 2006 winner of the National Medal of Arts, was best known for his 1930s "Jazz Bowl" series, commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt for the White House. The electric blue and black porcelain bowls, inspired by the sights and sounds of New York City, became icons of the Art Deco era.

Schreckengost incorporated fine design into mass-produced goods in an effort to make aesthetically pleasing, functional items available to everyone. His industrial designs include bicycles sold by Sears, iconic children's pedal wagons, lawn chairs, sit-down lawn mowers and even American Limoges dinnerware.

"It's function. That's what I was always attracted to," Schreckengost told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. "You get to the basic form first and then the color and texture and all the other stuff added to it so it becomes very complicated, even though it appears simple."

His innovations spanned several industries. He helped design the first cab-over-engine truck in 1932 for the White Motor Co., which increased hauling capacity. He was lead designer for bicycles and toy pedal cars for the Murray Ohio Co. from 1938 to 1972, and designed printing presses for the Harris-Seybold and Chandler Harris companies.

Schreckengost was born in 1906 in Sebring, a commercial pottery town near Youngstown, Ohio. He studied ceramics at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, and taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the early 1930s.

During World War II, he joined the Navy, where he was recruited to develop a system for radar recognition which won him a commendation from the Secretary of the Navy.

On the Net:

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press (thanx, Melanie!)

Posted by michael at 3:24 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012808 (2)

"Pluto in Capricorn"

A fog upon the land
rows of birds
huddled on the sagging power lines
i see
an elderly Chinese couple
walking in new
American polyester
and the line
at Starbucks is long
this gray morning

Far-off deer cry.

Posted by michael at 3:23 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012808 (1)

"Gladiator Academy"

asking Ophite bones · dollop clack
silver ash · abort random truce
occupying court
idiot bench · spool clues burlap
amount dip into

agglutinate bask · image born
anthem Ogpu · teudisyu asp
stalking rennet · brume
as fovea · as stalking prang
military · sculpt

who above · fulcrum fluid twines
wangle · crystal skull
walk across scones · culprit issue

"Bloggers who constantly dog the mainstream media, or MSM, have been dubbed the Pajamahadeen."

Posted by michael at 3:22 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012708 (via, via Supergee)

"burlesque tom-toms of tabetic treason" --Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (tr Eshleman & Smith, 2001)

"The Book of Animated Violence"

from these miseries
hatches a miniseries
Jalg's tender ministries run
the Xedoc Codex
planet Algabal
The life without errors is happier.
abstract truck pilch
tsunami skimp
it should reach
brink anchor

thronging, largening
pagan daya

'and I saw my reflection
in the snow-
covered hill'
us ashen glowing
ziggurat skull
vast and lifted
starve tsimtsum
clasp of plunge
to assuage

"He [Pessoa] was also attracted to the 'mystery' that Teixeira de Pascoaes identified as central to the saudosista creed, or 'a face que a vida não desvendou ainda ao nosso espirito' [the face that life still has not unmasked to our spirit]." --Darlene J Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa (1998) From: Light of the World. (I may have already blogged about this...)

Posted by michael at 3:21 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012608

"Fragments from the Unknown Gospel"

A little distance raised above the cars,
and watching them through branches bare and trembling,
i think: if they could understand the pickle,
without dissembling,
we all are in, what panic! There occurs
but seldom, ever anything even close--
personal cancer; Crashsound's urgent tickle;
a telling dose--
and then to take this matter of an emmit,
project it outward till it blot the stars,
and say: your colony now awaits the sickle...
nor narrowly stem it
except by at this hour's chicote, setting forth.

"The MOC is not particularly Morrocan, decidedly Unorthodox, and far too disorganized to be a Church. Inspired by the mad ravings of Hakim Bey, the sublime poetry of Jellalludin Rumi, the antinomian myth of Hassan-I-Sabbah, the heroic martyrdom of Noble Drew Ali, the transcendental bliss of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and myriad other shining threads, we wander the Garden of Forking Paths."

Posted by michael at 3:20 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012508

"Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act

As Wulfstan said on another occasion,
The strong net bellies in the wind and the spider rides it out;
But history, that sure blunderer,
Ruins the unkempt web, however silver.
I am not speaking of rose windows
Shattered by bomb-shock; the leads touselled; the glass-grains broadcast;
If the rose be living at all
A gay gravel shall be pollen of churches.
Nor do I mean railway networks.
Torn-up tracks are no great trouble. As Wulfstan said.
It is oathbreach, faithbreach, lovebreach
Bring the invaders into the estuaries.
Shall one man drive before him ten
Unstrung from sea to sea? Let thought be free. I speak
Of the spirit's weaving, the neural
Web, the self-true mind, the trusty reflex."

--Richard Wilbur, 1956

Painting a tortoise with nail polish is ill advised.

Bin Laden: peacenik.

Posted by michael at 3:19 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012408 (via This Modern World)

How to Have Theory in an Epidemic.

"Freud Wars"

soft folly · ogganition thoughts
match impact sidereal · brunt
silvery addict
diphthong · mundungus umgang amp
vast idiocy · rank ambit
abjection's versts creak

aggry · from rich assail afford
nicoderm aspic · is Bilal
flume · mesmerizing
can occult act forge · proper odds
optional fathoms · availing
Sith clack filial

no onus accruals brook · tank
swarm slippage · twist willowy stall
chug stab balcony
glowering · sculsh vintner ink
stoop posh palaces · offal stir
rest truth · if folk crush

Scientology glossary. (via Metafilter)

Arabic Mallarmé. (via Silliman)

So, a bunch of Portuguese books came into our store. My antennae went up. A thin volume of Pessoa was indeed included! And, hot on its heels, the collected Caeiro...

"...said by Pliny...to be able to speak all 22 languages of his subjects. I’ve never seen a list of what those languages are supposed to be." (--I've wondered that, myself.)

Posted by michael at 3:18 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012308 (from I Can Has Cheezburger, via Prentiss Riddle)

"It's very telling, I think, that the new Apple Air Mac has no CD drive."

The Effect of Living Backwards.

floss Laplacian impulse · dour
bunkum grip · tsarist shadowings
rasp amid obol flip · let us
stare for applause · all functional
scam akin indigo

"The wrong wisdom
follows you home."

--Nick O'Derm

Pharmako Gnosis.

Fumbled from the Wikipedia. Here too. Oh, here it is.

Posted by michael at 3:17 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012208 (via Centauri Dreams)

oblong cluster lichen · ashtray
stilts · serial prospect wither
ingot agama
atoll scurry · who will adorn
and ramble dord · frore amulet
cyst · stark whispering
latch isthmus · sad story often
ran without slipping · fine answers
again ignoring

Not persons.

Book scavenging thread on Metafilter.

Insecure At Last.

Posted by michael at 3:16 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: 0112108

Ferocious Romance.

mad ambergris · fissile accord
pavilion crawl with talc · into

after · for brisk otherness like
an itself-lost spool · is barcode

pluming among esters · ostrich
bulwark · accusingly shoplift

Posted by michael at 3:15 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 012008

My Tzolkin idea, of course, works even better for 55 Cancri f (also known, inscrutably, as Danzig)..! (More.)

proconsul crystal · hologram
Icarian fort · into psalms
such listering · tchidna or myth
as at failing glamour · shambles
to pluck · no ogham iridium

Posted by michael at 3:14 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 011908 (2) solitary hologram · flag
i stare past · crystal lycanthrope
who goes · flowering · goes against
crystal ransom · smoke of clasp fall

55 Cancri f--in the habitable zone. (via Centauri Dreams)

Bush in history. (via Cursor) "The most enchanted song stylist of presidential oratory since Peggy Noonan at her most Julie Andrews, Gerson is the Gerard Manley Hopkins of American exceptionalism..."

Trilobite cookies. (via Metafilter)

From Texas to Siberia.

Hell bugs. (via Metafilter)

Posted by michael at 3:13 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 011908 (1) "Let me stand at your verge,
Chasm, yet not be dismayed!"

--S. George

"Smart Lipo"

No. Osama soon
came to see his wrong;
hailed the Yankee boon,
curbed jihadi throng.

Osama soon declared
Earth shall see this done:
we were only scared.
Now we know we're one.

Evening in the Palace of Reason.

Who Built the Moon?

Online Rational Meaning. (via wood_s lot)

Posted by michael at 3:12 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 011808

"Shijo poetry makes wide use of the conventional symbols of the Chinese tradition. ...the Korean poets took them and shaped them to their own purposes, often using them in an ironical way. ...This sort of irony is at the heart of the shijo tradition, and it goes a long way toward defining the Korean sensibility." --Kvin O'Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo (2002)

"What Condition My Condition Is In"

Curviangular glyph, carved
on the threshold of an echo.
Prismatic ozmazome, drown
my dark finisecular ore:
a tapestry of justice swift
makes your ray dissolve.

"The Worst is Over"

tapestries pull down, draw
convoy fire way soon: road
of bad vowels. i know looming

bebop-wet snail foil; hook flaw lost
amidst vast weird roil. Go by plane
loudest nook, who saw veer
some coagulating dark.

"The Fountain in the Dark"

Coruscating flower,
galaxy not too close.
The pavilion

has struck camp,
its tidbits all eloigned.

Those gliding altars
like silken iron.

I pull out a chair to wait for you.
Warm marble to roll on.

Autism Planet discovers Cniglic.

Posted by michael at 3:10 PM No comments: Links to this post Labels: lj 011708 Unseen side of Mercury.

In a pitch dark alley
Where I stroll in darkness,
I raise my eyes and see a church,
Stiff-standing and remote.

Is there some mystery,
Some power or revelation?
Are you obliged, my knee, to genuflect?
I wonder what it is?

Night shimmers; a worm nibbles
At the tendrils of a vine.
Calling to Autumn, the vain and sullen
Cicada sings its song.

A pair is singing: intent on both,
I raise my eyes and see
That the church of my stroll
Has the form of an owl."

--José Martí, Major Poems (tr Philip S Foner, 1982)

"Blue racoons are weeping blood" --Li Ho (Li He)

P. A. O. Productions--photos and sound files from the Dallas art scene.

"Indeed, perhaps more than a maze of precepts about how to write, paint or compose, Symbolism was primarily a set of perspectives on reading and interpretation..." --Patrick McGuinness, intro to Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle (2000)
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