Pictures

Self-Appalled

If you're water
I'm all thirst.

Invocation/posession

Sweltered venom sleeping got
I boil uncharmed in an
charmless pot.

Someone Threw Us a Treat

We say "thanks."

Hot

Steaming, lambasted, ruined. I wilt.

Let Me Out

Shakma Hates Doors - watch more funny videos

It's a day I want out of.

Just a Ditty

I begin to remember myself.

This Season, All the Rage

From "A Season in Hell," (Night in Hell) by Arthur Rimbaud:

I have just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. - Blessed, blessed, blessed the advice I was given! - My guts are on fire. The power of the poison twists my arms and legs, cripples me, drives me to the ground. I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry. This is Hell, eternal torment! See how the flames rise! I burn as I ought to. Go on, Devil!

I once came close to a conversion to the good and to felicity, salvation. How can I describe my vision, the air of Hell is too thick for hymns! There were millions of delightful creatures in smooth spiritual harmony, strength and peace, noble ambitions, I don't know what all?

Noble ambitions!

But I am still alive! - Suppose damnation is eternal! A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he? I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. This is the catechism at work. I am the slave of my baptism. You, my parents, have ruined my life, and your own. Poor child! - Hell is powerless against pagans. - I am still alive! Later on, the delights of damnation will become more profound. A crime, quick, and let me fall to nothingness, condemned by human law.

There, by the Tree in Shimmering

The light, translucent honeyed green. It's hot out. The birds are nearly immobile, except for one plaintive grackle. A breeze shakes the banana leaves, and a blue-black butterfly passes.

Demon Devourer

"You always knew it would end like this."
But, you see, there was never any other way.
It started with a particle, subatomic.
A thing too miniscule to matter
but matter has it's secrets.
Half-lives half lived in,
all imagined.
Every thing
has it's
shadow.

There's no knowing when
the real ache began.
Some primordial
dawn. Well before
the word was found.
Now it's much too late
to root it out. It's in
every atom.

Home

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

Richard Bach

Quote

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.

Sylvia Plath

Absence

Absence diminishes medeiocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Like Being in a Game

It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal.” kate atkinson

Listening Today-- Glenn Gould-- Goldberg Variations

Wikipedia's article on the variations.

Article: Making Anything Signify Anything

From an article at Cabinet Magazine examining Bacon's biliteral code:

At first glance, the photo looks like a standard-issue keepsake of the kind owned by anyone who has served in the military. Yet Friedman found it so significant that he had a second, larger copy framed for the wall of his study. When he looked at the oblong image, taken in Aurora, Illinois, on a winter’s day in 1918, what did Friedman see? He saw seventy-one officers, soon to be sent to the war in France, for whom he had designed a crash course on the theory and practice of cryptology. He saw his younger self at one end of the mysterious group of black-clad civilians seated in the center; and at the other end he saw the formidable figure of George Fabyan, the director of Riverbank Laboratories in nearby Geneva, where Friedman found not just his cryptographic calling but also his wife Elizebeth (flanked here by two other instructors from Riverbank’s Department of Ciphers). And he saw a coded message, hiding in plain sight. As a note on the back of the larger print explains, the image is a cryptogram in which people stand in for letters; and thanks to Friedman’s careful positioning, they spell out the words “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.” (Or rather they almost do: for one thing, they were four people short of the number needed to complete the “R.”)

Mad Honey and Other Strange Poisonings

From an article at Lapham's Quarterly, called "Death in the Pot":

Returning from an unsuccessful raid in Persia, Xenophon’s men raided beehives along the eastern edge of the Black Sea, acquiring a treasure trove of local honey. By day’s end, the raiding party was immobilized. They were like men “greatly intoxicated,” wrote Xenophon, whose army was suffering from nausea, inability to walk straight, and lethargy. Over three centuries later, the Roman general Pompey’s troops also encamped by the Black Sea and gorged themselves on the local honey. Pompey lost three squadrons to the enemy fighters who had deliberately placed honeycombs in the path of his troops.

So what is mad honey? It’s just honey, but it comes from bees feeding on some very poisonous flowering plants that flourish along the Black Sea (and elsewhere), notably rhododendrons. These plants contain a class of poisons called grayanotoxins that act directly on the nervous system. The classic symptoms range from tingling and numbness, dizziness and nausea, impaired speech and a loss of balance. Some victims report a sense of being surrounded by spinning lights, others complain of a tunnel vision. “Mad-honey poisoning” can also be fatal, as the compromised nervous system starts shutting down the lungs and heart.

Darkness Visisble

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

No light, but rather darkness visible. Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe, ...

Paradise Lost

All the Better to Eat You With

Back to Black

Making Sacred the Profane

“There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character.”

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

'80s Fix

The Damned Cover the Sex Pistols

Pretty Vacant

En Casa Hoy

"At least there will be a lot of opportunities to quote Jack Rebney, and not just about the flies."

Don't Mind the Maze

It's a rhizome in progress. It's evolving rather slowly just now, as I've tended it little. Like Sarah Winchester, I'll keep building to house my ghosts. It's probably in vain, the hope they'll inhabit pixels. They'll likely stay lodged like ice picks right in my brain. Until there comes a time when the ghosts get out of the machine.

What Shouldn't Be

"What is this misbegotten thing?" he asked.

"It's stillborn and easily disposed," she replied.

"I can't be sure I'll keep my eyes."

"No matter. What's seen you can't unsee."

"At least I won't repeat it."

"Are you sure you can tend another pain?"

"I'll feed it every day, even when the memory fades."

"Absences can outgrow the former presence," she said. "Remember that."

"If I forget, something will remind me."

Something will always remind me.

Fate/Longing

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."


Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

The Fates, or Moirae, were the goddesses who controlled the destiny of everyone from the time they were born to the time they died. They were: Clotho, the spinner, who spun the thread of a person's life, Lachesis, the apportioner, who decided how much time was to be allowed each person, and Atropos, the inevitable, who cut the thread when you were supposed to die. Even though the other gods were almighty, and supposedly immortal, even Hera had reason to fear them. All were subject to the whims of the Fates. Ministers of the Fates were always oracles or soothsayers (seers of the future). The Fates were very important, but it is still unknown to who their parents were. There is some speculation that they might be the daughters of Zeus, however, this is debatable.
The Fates were often depicted as ugly hags, cold and unmerciful. But the Fates were not always deaf to the pleading of others. When Atropos cut the thread of King Admetus, who happened to be Apollo's friend, Apollo begged the Fates to undo their work. It was not in their power to do so, but they promised that if someone took Admetus' place in the gloomy world of Hades' domain, he would live. The king's wife, Alcestis, said she would take his place. But Hercules, who happened to be Admetus' guest, rescued her from the underworld, and Admetus an Alcetis were reunited.

From Encyclopedia mythica

Saturday

Futility

Oh, I have tried to laugh the pain away,
Let new flames brush my love-springs like a feather.
But the old fever seizes me to-day,
As sickness grips a soul in wretched weather.
I have given up myself to every urge,
With not a care of precious powers spent,
Have bared my body to the strangest scourge,
To soothe and deaden my heart’s unhealing rent.
But you have torn a nerve out of my frame,
A gut that no physician can replace,
And reft my life of happiness and aim.
Oh what new purpose shall I now embrace?
What substance hold, what lovely form pursue,
When my thought burns through everything to you?

(Claude McKay)

Spell to Win Your Lady's Heart

"Found among the effects of controversial artist Robert Lenkiewicz, who died five years ago aged 60, the "manuscript grimoire" provides an extraordinary number of conjurations, incantations, signs, portents, spells and folk remedies from the late 16th century.
The anonymous author describes how to use magic not only to find a lover, but also to help find treasure or even prevent theft and punish robbers.
According to the book, the best way to win a woman is for a man to "take a frog and put him in a pot and stop it fast," before advising him to bury the pot in an ant hill at a crossroads.
After nine days, two of the frog's bones should then be removed and placed in a stream or river of running water.
The extraordinary spell continues: "One of them will float against the stream.
"Make thee a ring, and take the part that swum against the stream and set it in the ring, and when you will have any woman put it on her right hand...she shall never rest till she hath been with thee."
Written between 1590 and 1620, the 30-page volume also includes illustrations of the planets with angel."


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464335/How-dead-frog-help-woo-lover.html#ixzz1S1brKT9R

In Dreams

"Hold fast your dreams. Within your heart Keep one still, secret spot Where dreams may go." Louise Driscoll

Fading/Becoming

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - ding-dong, bell.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Len Lye - Experimental Film

Len Lye (1901 - 1980) pursued a passion for experimentation and for creating new form throughout his whole career. His multifaceted practice included kinetic sculpture, photography, painting and poetry in addition to film making with and without a camera. He was one of the first non-Maori (Pākehā) artists from New Zealand to appreciate the art of Maori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, which he incorporated into his own expression.

In the 1930s Lye was commissioned by the visionary film unit at the General Post Office in London and made a number of commercials that are now seen as seminal in the history of moving images. He made his first 'direct' (camera less) film, A Colour Box by painting directly onto the film in 1935, and from then on continued to develop the technique by interfering with the film stock in various ways. More

RIP Cy Twombly

Happy Thoughts for a Sunny Day

Absence, Longing

Water, is taught by thirst.


Water, is taught by thirst.
Land -- by the Oceans passed.
Transport -- by throe
Peace -- by its battles told
Love, by Memorial Mold
Birds, by the Snow.


Emily Dickinson

Lines Written in Oregon

Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.
Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger.
And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –
Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.
Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.
Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).
Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.
Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.
And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;
Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.

Vladimir Nabokov

So Bad

Blue Skies

Love Song

I lie here thinking of you:—
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—
you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

William Carlos Williams

As e'er Beneath a Waning Moon was Haunted

On Looking Into The Eyes Of A Demon Lover 

Here are two pupils
whose moons of black
transform to cripples
all who look:

each lovely lady
who peers inside
take on the body
of a toad.

Within these mirrors
the world inverts:
the fond admirer's
burning darts

turn back to injure
the thrusting hand
and inflame to danger
the scarlet wound.

I sought my image
in the scorching glass,
for what fire could damage
a witch's face?

So I stared in that furnace
where beauties char
but found radiant Venus
reflected there.


 Sylvia Plath