Finished reading: Pike by Augie Machine 📚
This one surprised me by surprising me. At multiple points I was sure I knew where things were going and then it would take a different turn. Scifi, military, dragons, telepathy…fun, sometimes brutal, stuff!
Kramnik Banned from chess.com
Without trying to diagnose from afar, I’d wager that Kramnik is suffering from significant mental illness (though some of these behaviors go back a long way in slightly altered forms). The whole thing makes me sad, really, because Big Vlad is an amazing player, and has often been gregarious and good humored to an exceptional degree.
The increased paranoia, narcissism, and intensified persecution complex in a bubble largely of his own creation is sadly parallel to many of his age (I’m a few years older) and their political views and expression nowadays…as is this kind of reaction when caught, countered or rebuffed.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00351 ◊ A royal song on the beginning of spring... ◊ Fujiwara no Takaiko
A royal song on the beginning of spring by the Nijō Empress Consort
Spring has arrived
before the snow has gone;
perhaps now
the warbler’s frozen tears
will melt away at last?
—Fujiwara no Takaiko (translated by Torquil Duthie)
—found in The Kokinshū: Selected Poems (2023; this poem ca. 875)
DJotD 20240402
I wanted to use “beef-stew” as my password but the computer said it wasn’t stroganoff.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00350 ◊ Kubla Khan ◊ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
—found in Complete Poetical Works (1912)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00349 ◊ Setting the Scene ◊ Andrew Motion
Setting the Scene
Before I come to the trenches, let me tell you the village
is a ruin and the church spire a stump; every single house
has been devastated by shell-bursts and machine-gun fire.
I saw a hare advance down the main street a moment ago,
then pause with the sun shining bright red through his ears.
—Andrew Motion
—found in Laurels and Donkeys (2010)
DJotD 20240331
What did the doctor say to the dwarf in the waiting room?
You’re going to have to be a little patient.
DJotD 20240329
So, a fly with a bug on its back asks it, “Hey are you a mite?”
The mite says, “I mite be”.
The fly groans and says, “That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard!”
The mite replies, “What can I say, I came up with it on the fly!”
DJotD 20240328
What’s the longest word in the English language?
“Smiles.” The first and last letters are a mile apart!
DJotD 20240326
What’s blue and smells like red paint?
Blue paint.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00348 ◊ Caught Between So Many Surfaces ◊ Madeleine Barnes
Caught Between So Many Surfaces
To break. Une fille, une robe, une chemise. Edge of late winter;
a girl unfolding books into paper boats, the Seine sinking, rising.
She has no memory of hands underwater, pulling her to the surface.
A hoop of water opening above her. Consacrer: to sacrifice. Her father
shines his flashlight at nothing, calling into her footprints.
It comes from far away, the sound of his instructions,
Blesser la corps: watching every little crack converge.
Fisherman crowding the pier, a medic’s voice revolving.
Je ne regrette rien. Snowfall, dusk, debris, the shore, nothing else.
This calms her. Someone is rowing as close to her as their vessel
permits them. Someone is lighting a flare, taping off entrances,
opening and shutting an ambulance door. Someone is lowering
a helicopter, wondering if time of death has been called.
The day will come when she herself is a river.
She leans into herself with the force of a current rerouting.
She is prepared to present her body. The X-Ray fills with ice.
—Madeleine Barnes
—found in The Rattling Wall (Spring 2011; Issue 1)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00347 ◊ Door ◊ Olumide Manuel
Door
I do not know what hand opens dreams to dawns,
but I wake into the cry of the alarm. Sometimes
I’m out before it mouths. Then the bathroom door,
back & forth, & out the front door. There’s a door
in every greeting, so I greet my neighbours.
I greet the non-neighbours. I tip mama alakara
fifty naira, & when I’m not too winded away
in my morning woes, I toss the crumbs to strays—
I’m knocking doors that shouldn’t necessarily
open back to me. Somehow, I prefer the doorlessness
of Keke Napep to taxi doors or bus doors.
It reminds me of the one true love that shattered me
in the most comfortable penance-How we fell in
& out each other with unedged thorns,
doors absentia, wilding our bodies in full speed.
Arrows of clean delight, limbs oxbowed in floral wings.
Love, in full dramatic flight & crash.
So in every morning swing towards school
in Keke Napep, I hold the rail with my two hands,
sitting at the lip of its seats, where the lack of door
breezes the traffic teeth, & myself in subtle anticipation
of every possible ruin of a body. I shadow the entrance
of my exit, imagining my death like a true lover of life.
—Olumide Manuel
—found in Barrelhouse (Issue 24)
My mom would have been 68 today. Given how her health was when she died, it shouldn’t be too many more years before it will be reasonable to assume she’d have passed of natural causes. Maybe it will be easier at that point? Will I be able to forgive her then? And forgive myself?
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00346 ◊ Spacewalk ◊ Natalie Shapero
Spacewalk
Big deal, the solar system
is replete with rubble left over from its formation.
Join the club.
All my circulating garbage and nowhere
for it to go. I used to talk stuff out
with the dead, but now I can’t even
do that anymore. They stopped understanding
my references. They failed
to intuit tone. We are witnessing an age
of unprecedented divide
between this life and after; they only
want to be with their own.
I’d drown myself, but unfortunately
I can’t find the ocean, though it seems like just
a minute ago it was right here,
with its bread-knife fish and its
putty-knife fish and all its landed modules,
down from space.
Everybody, welcome home. I heard
they give each astronaut a pill
to end it all up there if needed. If the spacewalk
turns out bleakest.
Look around. You know what I want
to know. Do they get to keep it.
—Natalie Shapero
—found in Poetry Northwest (Winter & Spring 2024; Vol. XVIII, Iss. 2)
The revamped lichess broadcasts system for following tournaments is excellent. There’s nothing yet quite like the late, lamented Chess24, but this is the best out there now.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00345 ◊ [My Mother's Teeth] ◊ Victoria Chang
[My Mother’s Teeth]
My Mother’s Teeth—died twice, once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again on August 3, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth. But having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words in a ring around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I pass the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.
—Victoria Chang
—found in Obit (2020)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00344 ◊ Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat... ◊ Thomas Gray
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.
Still had she gazed; but ‘midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?
Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
—Thomas Gray
—found in The Complete English Poems of Thomas Gray (1973; this poem ca. 1747)
🔗 An interview with Mary Ruefle - Austin Kleon
Conducted via typewriter and the postal service
♟️ Magnus blunders a piece! He was low on time, but that is a colossal blunder. Weird game anyway…he took four minutes on move four even though it was a basic response, and five minutes more on move eight.