Friday 29 June 2012

Nightslide

Lousy with lumbar Acidulations
morosely the epexegetical virgin
coruscates leviathans into
the oriented passe-partout of a squill.


over crash Biscuits
diabolically-sided blue swains
drum evanescent halloos



Grasp ovoid particularities!
Thrust, spooning, between!
Filch squelches!



- Joseph Macleod.


Picture: "La Douleur" by Pablo Picasso (1902 or 1903)

Monday 25 June 2012


Ouled Nail dance, Algeria (1938).



"Motionless, facing one another like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting terrific muscular hiatus."

- William Faulkner (Sanctuary)

Picture: "Fighting for a Woman" by Franz Von Stuck (1905).

Saturday 23 June 2012

Sonnet

The pregnant toad in the sedge by the lake
swings her weak, white belly,
and, an asthma sufferer that she is, she just cannot extend
the springs of her earthbound legs.

Tongue-tied complaints are in her breathing,
her breast skin is tender and bare,
crusts of pus are gathered in the folds round her eyes,
those goggle eyes, like a pond rippled and flaccid.

Indifferent to the floating whine
of the evening mosquitoes, clinging to a stump
she was puffed up as carrion

and only the lingering attack of asthma,
racking the sticky shelter of her body
kept her tied to life on earth...

(1964 or 1965)

Translated by Richard McKane.

Picture: "Morning Glory, Toad, and Insects" by Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1660)


My new Leonid Aronzon page.



Thursday 21 June 2012


Dmitry Kazyuko (?).






may i feel said he. 

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

- e.e.cummings

Picture by Tom Poulton.

Monday 18 June 2012



Bola - Makamiba (Lamin Fofana Remix).

Caryatid.

Renege on the rock! Smash
the oppressor cave! Sashay
out onto the floor! Scorn the cornices—
see, from the beard of drunk Silenus
from the unique uproar of his blood
the wine dribble into his genitals!

Spit on the obsession with pillars:
ancient rheumatic hands quake toward
gray skies. Bring down the temple
by the yearning of your knees
twitching with dance.

Spill, spread, unpetal, bleed
your soft flowers through great wounds.
Dove-hauled Venus girds her loins
with roses—
see the summer’s last puff of blue
drift on seas of asters to distant
pine-brown coasts; see
this final hour of our mendacious
southern happiness
held aloft.

- Gottfried Benn

Picture: Yakshini, nude, in tribhanga standing posture. Padampet, Karimnagar District - Andhra Pradesh.

(image is not of a caryatid but the image, tribhanga form and Yakshini came to mind when reading the poem)

Friday 15 June 2012


"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."
- François Mauriac

Picture: "Bookshelves" by Guiseppe Maria Crespi (1725)

Tuesday 12 June 2012


Along the embankment, along the bridge, along
the whole soul, lined by the rainstorm,
the wind strains point-blank
at the gulf that got wild overnight.

White clouds race under black clouds,
snagging on sparkling spires,
and the flung open river
stirs chains like a shaman.

Oh my soul, freeze in this foul weather,
on the bridges along their railings,
and witch-like stir into me
this night, this north, this water.

There is such womanhood in these splashes
that it will yet lead me to suicide,
and it will suddenly open in the sad Baltic Grail
like an emptiness.

- Leonid Aronzon

Picture: "Out of the Rain, Iran" by Kian Elyassi Bakhtiari (2006).


Benjamin Brunn - Colour Tracks



Knyx Radio 12.06.12

Sunday 10 June 2012




The Tuba Trio - Essence - The Heat and Warmth of Free Jazz.
(final two parts missing at present but still great)

“ To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance" 

- Jean Genet, "The Thief’s Journal" (1949).

Picture: Les Krims (ca. 1970).

Saturday 9 June 2012



Yhancik - Selected Disintegration Works (CD rotted version of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II)

Thursday 7 June 2012


"During de Selby's Bartown days he had acquired some local reputation as a savant 'due possibly to the fact that he was known never to read newspapers'. A young man in the town was seriously troubled by some question regarding a lady and feeling that this matter was weighing on his mind and threatening to interfere with his reason, he sought de Selby for advice. Instead of exorcising this solitary blot from the young man's mind, as indeed could easily have been done, de Selby drew the young man's attention to some fifty imponderable propositions each of which raised difficulties which spanned many eternities and dwarfed the conundrum of the young lady to nothingness. Thus the young man who had come fearing the possibility of a bad thing left the house completely convinced of the worst and cheerfully contemplating suicide. That he arrived home for his supper at the usual time was a happy intervention on the part of the moon for he had gone home by the harbour only to find that the tide was two miles out. Six months later he earned for himself six calendar months' incarceration with hard labour on foot of eighteen counts comprising larceny and offences bearing on interference with railroads."

- from "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien.

Picture: "Student-Nihilist" by Ilya Repin (1883)


Monday 4 June 2012




"In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate."

- W.H. Auden (The Dyer's Hand)

Picture: "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel (1558)