Pachimon postcards

what was Henry Roth up to?

In Mercy of a Rude Stream he quotes more than once a Talmudic saying to the effect that you are not required to finish, but you are not allowed to stop, either. Life, unlike fiction, has neither crisp beginnings nor redemptive endings. It endures, as Roth did, until it doesn't...

Happy Bloomsday Y'all
Ulysses

The Green Apple Core: Poem of the Week by Laura Moriarty

8. The Imaginary Community

Real as thought
When thought

Plain as paint or
Audible sings

In tones that
In times which

These darknesses
Seem light

As among beings
Or notes between them

When us means both
Many letters

Between us
This commerce

As fast as light
Sets the tone

Webern's Bagatelles
The dark light again

As with yourself
Though (I am) not there with

But aware of (you) on
The edges of everything

To be read as if
Our lives depended upon

Knowing there is one
Are ones who know

YouTube - Anton Webern: Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-13)

Roy Arden

Isola di Rifiuti: Dorn / Prynne

It is quiet out there now—the taste of dog
raised on Friskies, a revolutionary food,
a predator’s windfall—the Spam of concocted dogs,
the moral equivalent of chicken soup. But
a dog like that is rarely let out, therefore
such an encounter is deep in the books.
Verisimilitude rules the Dog world. The scent of dog
permeates the cabin, Old Smokers, off the weed for years,
take it in, the original southern, State Narcotic.
Too big to ban: too bad to smoke.

fine essay on Paul Verhoeven's prophetic Starship Troopers --

When some brave soldiers capture the “brain bug” at the end, it’s a
hollow triumph, because it’s a senseless war they’re biologically and
militarily doomed to lose. For the suckers going for citizenship, their
greatest hope is to sacrifice a limb or two, and get back home;
otherwise, the best and the brightest can expect the high honor of being
ceremonially jettisoned into the vast nothingness of outer space...