thee istsfor manity reader

a natural tyrant

I have well trod ways of going off the rails. I have multifoliate multivariances and polyvalencies of texts. I have Brakhage films and John Cage bubblegum. I’m gonna chew chew chew ’til my teeth get numb. I have the eyeless in Gaza player piano bolweevils in exploding plastic shades. I have a plastic covered couch and a take ‘n tape cassette player. I have gutted all my victual fish and lived a livestock week in panoply and cornucopia. I have called upon Mr. Pharmacist to make my life more bittersweet but he only succeeds at distanat quasar sounds. Oh please be here because I am, and I don’t really want to go there where you’re not. That’s impossible, that’s im… that’s impossible, that’s im-poss-i-ble… you’re in Nova Scotia but I’m not…

Rimsky-Korsakov was lying in an arroyo under the noonday sun. His eyes blistered. His lips chewed away by ravenous coyotes, who were now digging deep into his viscera. He hummed a new melody he thought he might be able to develop into an operetta. One of the coyotes had offered to write the libretto in a picaresque style reminiscent of Count Von Yorga Difibrio of Romania. Korsakov thought Sikorsky would be excellent in the lead, as he had a tin ear and leaden lungs.

“Yes, Sikorsky it is…”

This was the day she started to write again. It didn’t matter much what she wrote, just that she did… and so she wrote this…

“Practice an art for love and the happiness of your life—you will find it outlasts almost everything but breath.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

flarfish 21: weltschmerz tehillim

After gaining massive support for her Weltschmerz EP

Time also meant organization and as if The prevalent feeling

was one of Weltschmerz – a bonafide interest in the other’s

slight distortion

“You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO… Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.”
— Sol Lewitt

(click on the play button above and watch my short film “tunnel tuner” above)

a volley of musketry

carnival barker maladapter
man with a green suitcase
adopting english weaponry
full of bugs that need nesting
bugs in search of warm human

blood

blood of the loveless
viral blood
utter chaos

critical focal acuity
customary sexual freedoms
factions dividing our town

like a vial of bacteria
like an ampule of virus
like an angry pathology reticulating

thru a red medium

“The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux”
— James Joyce

Keeper of The Doomsday Clock

I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock. I know what will happen to us. I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you. I’ll keep you in the dark. I stopped the hands on the Doomsday Clock at 11:59. When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock, that I might set the pendulum in reverse. But you said our fate was sealed and it was fatal. I was drawn to that. I was afflicted. I set the works in motion once more, the cogs thunder. I have chosen this minute.

“You must write. It’s not enough to start by thinking. You become a writer by writing. It’s a yoga.”
— R.K. Narayan

Flarfish 10: woman shadow of a doubt

(english to spanish to esperanto to english translation)

He told the woman with progressive brightness

That a crazy white hat should be a trick of the shadows

Shadow of a Doubt … ALL STORES … you’ve searched:

Clock

She had been sitting for some time when a shadow came.

Behind her … I have no doubt that her liberality is right

Represented … girl emerges from behind the shadows

Perhaps it was a reasonable assumption in 1887, though

An apprentice sorcerer who discovers the mastery of his

Tragedy of the woman’s shadow of charity, or rather the loss of it

Bill has no doubt that he is cursed – he can not seem to die

“You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages. So write. Just write. Try to turn off that voice of doom that paralyzes you.”

— Harlan Coben

Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story

(a found and a cut-up poem)

I.

X.’s home was a shambles:

piles of amber eyes,

clouds of fleas and other debris,

the ritual heads against our legs;

red bodies were discovered –

strong and sharp –

in the refrigerator’s freezer

relying on a stethoscope,

crowbar and chisel to make a hole

beyond salvation

II.

Has anyone seen

I could eat your heart 

    for dinner

with such conviction…

you?

probably be scared

“I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
— Jack Kerouac

Flarfish 16: mumpsimus earwig

I’m about to die of pleurisy…

Take a moment to note the reading and book…

For two days I have had these lines stuck in my head…

Don’t worry about me around these here parts, but I do want…

The lack of substantive posts continues at a furious pace…

The Mumpsimus ….

No Country for The Affirmation…

this weekend after I learned of the massacre by Old Men…

Earwig So Fey Reading This Weekend Mandarins …

 Both words are derived from insects…

A canopy is, literally…

a bed with mosquito netting about my experiences with carpenter ants… 

earwigs, wasps, skunks, raccoons, and a host of other pests…

Win Bigly? A superlative …

A mumpsimus is a person who holds tight to error in the face of fact…

A mumpsimus is…

Earwig is used to getting her own way…

An orphan left on the doorstep of St. Earwig Home for Children. 

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.”
— Julia Cameron

Like Drinking Molasses

He woke up that night aposiopetic. He spoke in fits. He spoke in starts that ended abruptly.

Just as a thought was gathering steam he’d hit a wall and become suddenly silent. He didn’t even taper off, it was sharp and severe.

“Good morning, hun, would you— wep— I though we might—wep— I’d like to— wep— I don’t know what is—wep—“

He felt a globule of fear expand in his throat, becoming a vise and sitting like acid in his neck…

The night became an ellipsis…

He caught it… He was sick now… His life would be different from here on out…”

And all he could manage was:

“I voted Republican… wep… I’m a Methodist now… wep… I converted online… wep…”

“If you write every day, you’re going to write a lot of things that aren’t terribly good, but you’re going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.”

— Nicholson Baker

flarfish 33: palindromic grimalkin serpentear

The old snake-charmer, The iron queen,

the river winds across

a wide plain squiggles along your ear, staying

in place by

Having a barn cat will make your life

on the farm much easier

This earring flips up and the long conjugation

has never been easier

one of the main characters in fiction the great

Mowmowsky roared

and plunged in anguish folded his arms

and scratched himself

Each day say to yourself that you are the best,

the strongest,

and the most awesome character in the book

series: taco cat

“You may as well be who you are.”

— Grace Paley

flarfish 30: Orphic quiriquiqui

gallo quiquiriqui, as the Spanish nursery-
language calls him,

has a lone collection of everybody’s essays
in Europe expressed in

that passage of monotheism, it became a secret
of the priests;

nevertheless, in the Orphic Hymn
it is very explicitly stated:

quipsome quipsomeness quipster quipsters
quip

The cock, gallo quiquiriqui, while more or less
ranged high on

his wife Sonia and others, cofounded the art
movement.

“…Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city…”

— W.H. Auden / “The Fall of Rome”