CXXX
Luxorious ruins, tombs with a view, and nestled, cheek by jowl, around a privy pork
Luxor from Arabic al-quṣūr (القصور), “the palaces,” plural form of qaṣr (قصر), itself a loanword from the Latin castrum, “fortified camp.”
c.f., q.v. Seville’s ‘Alcázar’ from the Hispano-Arabic Alqáşr meaning “royal house” or “room of the prince,” with or without fortifications.
To nestle, from Old English nestlian “build a nest,” from nest.
Figurative sense of “settle (oneself) comfortably, snuggle.”
Comes into common use mid 16th century.
Nestling’s for the birds.
Next!
How many apes does it take to build an apiary?
None of your beezness!
Bur-log-esque
A comely vineland of the blind
A crony island of the Mine!
Denunce soblime as sea or not to see
Wi-fi upon ye!
Selfie stick: the new pilgrim’s staff
The Nars.
Something like the Blues, but different in qualities.
Symptoms of The Nars (aka Nars Syndrome) include, but are by no means limited to, a fixation on one’s image and an inability to restrain one’s performative impulses. E.g.: throwing one’s arms wide on the Brooklyn Bridge bike and pedestrian lane. Result: terrific Instagram® of you clocking a passing cyclist with the Freedom Tower in the background.
Some epidemiologists are reluctant to define The Nars as a pathology, citing it as a near-universal condition with no clear-cut cause. Others, however feel that a genuine public health crisis is at hand, and insist that the difficulty of addressing the syndrome clinically should not serve as an excuse for hiding one’s selfie – I mean head – up one’s bum – I mean in the sand.
Loves of a Kosmonaut
Torres y Flores, LLC
Alchemical, al the time
Fugitive, refugee, refusé
And the great migrations flux on
Current and undercurrent
Tide and tendency
Tendentious and (l)uxurious
Borne along on the tide of fluxury
Of the full Crow Moon
Sap Moon
Crust Moon
Worm Moon
Insurgent spring
There are trade unions
But mostly betrayed unions
I was a Red Fire Monkey
But not, o so not, for the FBI
Alchemical, al the time
Shibbolilith
Throwing lions to the Xtians
I wuz a prisoner of the Times
Apocrypha now!
Why is the past so tense?
History, herstory, whatever the gender – they’re stories
And the future is speculation
Whereas right now the hub is empty and the wheel can move in all directions.
One of our vacuums is missing
Alt.: One of our vacua is missing
But how does one determine such a thing?
And as for the wind, does it blow or suck?
Give me a vacuum strong enough and a firm place to stand and I will suck up the world! Unless Nature abhorts my scheme…
AMOQ = Another Manifestation of Qi
As in running
The paisley pattern in printed textiles, derives, as it turns out, from the ancient Mir-i-bota, or leaf pattern used in many Iranian and other Oriental rugs. It was also used extensively in Persian shawls, from whence it migrated to Kashmir, and thence to Europe.
Who, whoever said that elephants
Were stronger than mules?
Come to the park and play with us
There aren’t any rules, in Paisley Park
The girl on the seesaw is laughing
For love is the color this place imparts
Paisley Park
Admission is easy, just say you believe
And come to this place in your heart
Sang Prince, oncet
Cognitive diffidence
GRANDMA KNOWS BEST
Vindicated at last: a scientific study has proven that Grandma Moses and other “primitive” painters were right: things in Nature do have outlines around them.
In a stunning rebuke to Da Vinci and Giorgione, the newly released report demonstrates conclusively that objects are surrounded by a fine, dark, measurable substance which researchers call “the border.”
“How so many generations of artists could have made such a gigantic error in seeing, and how they could have glossed over the absence of so essential an element of reality in their work remains a mystery,” said Fred Newberger, head of the MIT team that conducted the study.
Harry Van Nostrand, Chief Curator of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that while the study was persuasive, the institution would need more time to evaluate its full implications. But Maurice Villefraud, his counterpart at The Louvre, confirmed that he had already assembled a task force to both assess and remediate the defects in the museum’s signature works. “Something,” he said, has been missing from the Mona Lisa. “It has always bothered me, others have been troubled too, and at last we know what it is.”
Nor is this the first time in recent history that The Louvre has responded decisively to a “real world” challenge generated from outside its doors. During the period of prolonged drought in Darfur, the museum removed, without fanfare, excessive moisture from the eyes of its 18th century oil portraits, notably those by the artist Vigeé Le Brun, in solidarity with atmospheric conditions in the Western Sudan. Conservators later restored the works to their prior condition. “We were glad to help allay the suffering,” said Mr. Villafraud’s predecessor, Guillaume Oudebord…
Chaîne kinematique, mon amour
Civic Fame; Love of Glory; Spirit of Commerce; Genius of Electricity; Pomona, Goddess of Abundance: why do you stand there like statues? Unfreeze, move your limbs and bodies, save us!
In-car-nation
If you hear a (Deng Xiao) ping! in your engine, it’s only a matter of time before she throws a rod
Out of the petit boudoir and into the hotbed of class struggle!
Look behind. You’re not there
Look ahead. Not their either
Nowhere to be found
Or not to be
Don’t break my harp!
Loss of proprioception in the individual leads, col tempo, to fantastic social imbalance
Give me a lever long enough and a firm place to stand, and I will move yo’ mama
What happens when social life itself becomes an assault on the organism?
In my clinic I frequently saw people who were misdiagnosed and treated ineffectively because of the tendency to try to reduce dysfunction to one factor that can be understood by modern imaging equipment, so that obvious alternative possibilities were overlooked. For example, numbness in the hands is a problem often attributed to a disc problem in the neck. Because many people over the age of thirty have a bulging disk in the neck that shows up on and MRI or X-ray, the assumption is that the disc is the problem, when far more often it is muscular and fascial imbalances causing neck and shoulder tightness that impinge on the thoracic inlet. [Tom Bisio, The Art of Ba Gua Zhang. New York: Internal Arts International, 2015. p. 96]
Folks sho’ do love to whup up them konflix!
Books to write: The Social Consequences of Personal Imbalance.
Or maybe, The Social Dementions…
Nonsense, Ari, there’s nothing Nature loves more than a good suck
I said hi, babe,
Take a walk on the hey line
Through her smile two silver fillings winked. The blue roses smelled of bluing. Jerking back his pupils, Shterer remarked that in a game of checkers it was possible for both players to win: when one tried to capture the other’s pieces, while the other played giveaway. For all that, our theoretician didn’t notice that one of the pieces had already been touched.
A quarter of an hour after the first aphorism an outside observer might have acquainted himself with the theory of time’s cuts as set forth in the batting eyes of the lady from across the river.
As applied to love, the theory went like this: memory, “unrolling its long scroll,” may, like a reel of film, be edited. One may cut bits out of both time and the reel and dispense with the longeurs. Thus if one were to make cuts between a woman’s first meeting with her first lover and her first meeting with her second, her third, and so on, that is, if one were to leave what was purest, most sincere, and deeply embedded in memory, the film real onto which we had transposed this series of spliced-together first meetings would show us the woman – with the speed of a roulette ball skipping from number to number – whirling from embrace to embrace and aging before our eyes. To a lawyer, of course, this would recall the article in the Criminal Code dealing with mass violence. Try editing the superfluous out of anything at all, leaving only what is essential , and you’ll see it won’t be to your…
An hour after that last aphorism Shterer was persuaded of its cruel accuracy. Whereas an outside observer…actually, in situations like this such people are superfluous.
The next day Shterer surveyed his pupil for the first time: bending his eyebrowless forehead over his arithmetic book, the boy tugged at his bushy hair as though trying to pull the unknown quantity out of his head; the lamplight shone through his small red ears.
“Just like Ichy’s,”* thought Shterer.
Inside Shterer’s “I” it felt like an unheated room.
[Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Memories of the Future,” in Memories of the Future, Joanne Turnbull, trans. New York: NYRB, 2009, pp. 153-154]
Don’t mourn, pollinate
Tensintegrity, mon goose
The fire monkey reddens with good humor.
Who else is laughing?
In tensintegrity (tension-integrity), a term coined by Buckminster Fuller, when a structure is compressed, or put under tension, the compressive force is distributed equally throughout the structure. When compression is released, the structure springs back to its original form.
