He was as a god,
stepped out of eternal dream
along the boardwalk.
He looked at my girl,
a dream to herself and
that was the end of them.
They disappeared beside the sea
at Revere Beach as
I aint seen them since.
If you find anyone
answering their description
please let me know. I need them
to carry the weight of my life
The old gods are gone. What lives on
in my heart
is their flesh
like a wound,
a tomb, a bomb.
Billie, John Wieners
Monk meets Lautréamont on the night train to freedom. It is
one of many chance encounters that reveal a deep affinity be-
tween black life and culture and surrealism. Neither man would
have identified himself as a surrealist, although Lautréamont,
along with another nineteenth-century French poet named
Arthur Rimbaud, are considered the spiritual fathers of surrealism
before the movement was declared after World War I. And yet
they embody the basic principles of surrealism, a living, mutable,
creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end
to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom.
Freedom Dreams, Robin Kelley
- he makes the-crossroads-under-the-bluff-where-once-a-hailstorm-killed-a-cockerel read “Bluff’s Cross” and renders the-strand-where-the-yellow-periwinkles-gather-in-spring into “Yellowcove.”
- It is a necessary but unenviable part of his current task to distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here
- passed through a rent into another realm
Land, Maggie O’Farrell
- It made her cry out in something like pleasure, to see the peninsula there upon the page, as it had been, to look down upon it, as if she were up in the air, a bird, or a heavenly angel, and it seemed to her a brand of sorcery, to be presented with this version of the place
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Good Bones, Maggie Smith
Daoist philosophy argues against meritocracy and for the conditions that would make us better. (aeon.co)
7 Walks with Mark Brown by Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton.
France. 2024. 105 min.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson
still permeable to wonder
Grace is unearned.
Separation from what you love best, that is hell.
(Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar)
The present moment
is an explosion ,
a scission
of past and future
leaving
those valorous
disreputables ,
the ruins ,
sentinels
in an unknown dawn
strewn with prophecy .
Only the momentary
goggle of death
fixes the fugitive
momentum .
Time Bomb, Mina Loy
via Poetry and the Turning World: Technology, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar–quite enjoyable listening!(LRB)
Also, A World Where News Travelled Slowly, Lavinia Greenlaw and Honeycomb, Jorie Graham.
Juneteenth, the holiday that heralds the day in 1865 when those enslaved in Texas first learned that they were free, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
“the general strike of the slaves” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, 1935.
i.e. self-emancipation.
‘I wouldn’t pay it either’, Simon Skinner. (LRB) Jonathan Wilson’s history of the World Cup–a commercially dominant tragi-comedy.
Brazil – Haiti, 3 – 0