📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00343 ◊ they said ◊ J. Bruce Fuller
they said
they said blood is made in the bones but oil comes from the gulf
and when the storms rock the rigs the chaplain takes confessions
and the boys cross themselves all night
they said big dan got blown up and burned all over
and now he lights his cigarettes with his ring finger
they said the settlement money is long gone
they said when the rigs catch fire some boys jump
they said them boys burn and even the water can’t put em out
—J. Bruce Fuller
—found in How to Drown a Boy (2024)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00342 ◊ Camargue ◊ Kenneth Rexroth
Camargue
Green moon blaze
Over violet dancers
Shadow heads catch fire
Forget forget
Forget awake aware dropping in the well
Where the nightingale sings
In the blooming pomegranate
You beside me
Like a colt swimming slowly in kelp
In the nude sea
Where ten thousand birds
Move like a waved scarf
On the long surge of sleep
—Kenneth Rexroth
—found in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1966; this poem from section titled “Gödel’s Proof – New Poems 1965”)
DJotD 20240324
Teacher: Can you name a country with no ‘R’!
Student: No way!
🔗 Karl Wallinger, Who Sang With World Party and the Waterboys, Dies at 66 - The New York Times
As a songwriter and instrumentalist as well, he blended pop and folk influences into music that helped define college radio in the 1980s and ’90s.
The Waterboys were something else. RIP.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00341 ◊ [Twilight Comes] ◊ Wang Wei
[Twilight Comes]
Twilight comes over the monastery garden.
Outside the window the trees grow dim in the dusk.
Woodcutters sing coming home across the fields.
The chant of the monks answers from the forest.
Birds come to the dew basins hidden amongst the flowers.
Off through the bamboos someone is playing a flute.
I am still not an old man,
But my heart is set on the life of a hermit.
---Wang Wei (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
---found in One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year (1970; this poem ca. 750)
Sudden, acute health issue may be snapping me out of my lethargy enough to make some much needed changes. Fortuitious suffering you might say.
🔗 Man Pretending to Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” Envious of Man Pretending to Read “Infinite Jest”
Local man and ostentatious snob William Huller was struck with an intense wave of envy as he pretended to read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow” in a local cafe after spotting another man pretending to read “Infinite Jest” nearby, exasperated sources report.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00340 ◊ [a detail in] ◊ Chase Berggrun
[erasures from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)]
—Chase Berggrun
—found in RED (2018)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00067 ¶ from Speak, Memory ¶ Vladimir Nabokov
The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected”). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird’s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
—Vladimir Nabokov
—found in Speak, Memory (1947)
DJotD 20240322
You know what the first rule of passive-aggressive club is?
You know what, never mind. Forget it.
DJotD 20240320
Doctor: “I have some bad news and some very bad news.”
Patient: “Well, might as well give me the bad news first.”
Doctor: “The lab called with your test results. They said you have 24 hours to live.”
Patient: “24 HOURS! That’s terrible!! What could be worse? What’s the very bad news?”
Doctor: “I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00339 ◊ Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale ◊ Dan Albergotti
Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
—Dan Albergotti
—found in The Boatloads (2008)
Swelling turned out to be an abscess. In a most unfortunate place for everyone. Incised, drained, and packed. Then packed again thanks to a gauze-on-gauze situation. Antibiotics and med changes are wreaking havoc. I’m sliding down to a dark(er) place.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00338 ◊ fear of needles ◊ Danez Smith
fear of needles
instead of getting tested
you take a blade to your palm
hold your ear to the wound
—Danez Smith —found in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017)
I live a mere ~2150 miles (3460 kilometers if you use that rational system) from my birthplace. Not a great distance, but in the context of spending 33+ years only 200 miles away, it feels a bit greater.
Media entities have this ludicrous trend of disclosing that they have used “AI” on some article or the other. If that is the case, they should disclose they used Google Docs or Microsoft Office and their built-in “grammar” and “spelling” and other features.
I’m less negative about AI than many, but this is an unbelievably facile take by Dave Winer. It just might be that there’s a difference between spelling or grammar errors and AI inventions and hallucinations.
Source: Dave Winer’s Links (March 19, 2024; I can’t find a permalink)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00337 ◊ Sky Window. Armageddon ◊ Beth Ann Fennelly
Sky Window. Armageddon
The square’s astrological glass dome:
a man scans to confirm the known
unknown, but discovers a thirteenth sign,
overlooked stars that are burning
to be recognized. All history is out
of line, fate’s lacking. In the cracked,
unnatural sky, bears and lions
hurl against their cages, Orion pierces
the wine bag of heaven, and Pisces
thrashes his tail against the dome,
but the astrologer, unable to right
the fish bowl, drowns in his own dream.
—Beth Ann Fennelly
—from “Windows of Prague”
—found in A Different Kind of Hunger (1998)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00066 ¶ from The Burden of the Gospels ¶ Wendell Berry
The theefe commeth not, but for to steale and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might haue life, and that they might haue it more abundantly.
—found in The Bible (John 10:10; 1611 King James Version)
To talk about or to desire more abundance of anything has probably always been dangerous, but it seems particularly dangerous now. In an age of materialist science, economics, art, and politics, we ought not to be much shocked by the appearance of materialist religion. We know we don’t have to look far to find people who equate more abundant life with a bigger car, a bigger house, a bigger bank account, and a bigger church. They are wrong, of course. If Jesus meant only that we should have more possessions or even more “life expectancy,” then John 10:10 is no more remarkable than an advertisement for any commodity whatever. Abundance, in this verse, cannot refer to an abundance of material possessions, for life does not require a material abundance; it requires only a material sufficiency. That sufficiency granted, life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance.
—Wendell Berry
—from “The Burden of the Gospels”
—found in The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (2005)
My attempts to take a photo of the swelling and infection in my groin, would make the worst Only Fans ever.
DJotD 20240319
You ever wonder why Waldo from Where’s Waldo wears a bright striped shirt?
Because he doesn’t want to be spotted.