February 2012
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Stagflation
Such preoccupations divert attention away from wider abstract social or political concerns and onto a continual anxious self-surveillance. This constant precariousness and restless mobility, compounded by a dependence upon relentlessly updating market-driven technology and the scrolling CGI of digital media, together suggest a sort of cultural stagflation, a population revving up without getting...
October 2011
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Jorum
The mood of the Ball changed. The dancing was more serious now. Margot’s eyes sparkled from the jorums of champagne she had drunk. She felt Horace’s delicately Game Hen-flavored breath on her cheek. I will give him what he wants, she decided. Tonight.
- from “The Policeman’s Ball”, Donald Barthelme
September 2011
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Caisson
Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral:...
August 2011
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Gorse
The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and...
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Bollard
There was only one way out: the strip of pavement on the far side of Belinda Road. It led past the black bar with no name to the bridge and then away along Coldharbour Lane. Separated from the road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel - one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me.
- from Remainder, Tom McCarthy
1 tag
Semaphore
I’d watched lots of American football on TV after the accident, in hospital late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d found it hypnotic: how the endlessly repeated static line-ups sprung into moving set pieces which the coaches signalled in from the touchlines by semaphore. Sometimes there’d even be two people semaphoring, one of them sending fake signals to confuse the...
September 2010
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Schist
Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and crossed his big back yard and climbed outside stairs of his big garage, the weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest Philadelphia.
from The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
August 2010
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Dashiki
Her father had a John Henry fixation. Some sixties guy catching that nationalist fever, getting radicalized by Frantz Fanon, save up for a dashiki, revolutionary consciousness. Latches on to the steeldriver as an ideal of black masculinity in a castrating country. Issues, daddy issues.
from John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead
July 2010
2 posts
June 2010
1 post
April 2010
2 posts
January 2010
1 post
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Drumlins
“Drumlins formed when hard rock under the glacier slowed down its forward movement. Tripped by the obstruction, the glacier dumped part of its load of rock and dirt. Most of it piled up just upstream of the obstruction - up glacier, toward the source of the creeping snow and ice - forming a blunt slope, while the downstream tail tapered to ground level. Drumlins in Scotland often occur in...
December 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Bluebottle
“As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.”
- from “Bookshop Memories,” George Orwell
1 tag
Plinth
“I had once actually gone out on a date - last year - and I had prepared for it by falling into a trance in a lingerie store and buying a forty-five dollar black Taiwanese bra padded with oil and water pouches, articulated with wire, lifelike to the touch, a complete bosom entirely on its own, independent of any wearer, and which when fastened to my particular chest looked like a dark...
November 2009
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Obsidian
Listen, the oak loses a leaf by the minute, each with a rust-bruise, speckled, like a moth’s wing, one camouflage burning inside another at the edge of one’s body: obsidian blown in the hourglass of a wrist - your bones were never enough for me. from “Since Judgement Is Also A Storm” - Christian Hawkey
October 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Budgerigar
“Nobody told me it was a fucking real budgerigar.”
- Keith Richards, upon accidentally shooting Ronnie Wood’s pet budgerigar. from Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards, Mark Blake
1 tag
Muscadines
No lamp was burning as I read, A voice was mumbling, “Everything Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines, The melons, the vermilion pears Of the leafless garden.”
- from “The Reader” - Wallace Stevens
September 2009
1 post
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Sabots
“The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.”
- from Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
August 2009
10 posts
1 tag
Cirri
“The blue sky is glassy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims. The traffic is nothing like Boston.”
- from Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
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Peccary
“Deeper in the jungle, there were peccaries and spider monkeys, giant anteaters and harpy eagles, while in this unlikely outpost of air-conditioned Newtonian civilisation, something was preparing to leave the plant.”
- from The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton
1 tag
Weir
Which is where the law comes in, the bailiff, as others see me, as I see myself when I wake, finding myself in this six-foot forteen- stone of flesh with letters after my name, in boots, in a company vehicle, patrolling from the headwaters to the weir, with all my qualified faculties on these fish.
from Dart – Alice Oswald
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Embarcadero
“I take the Manasquan jug-handle and loop down around to the small embarcadero fronting the River Marina, where banners are still up from the annual striper derby in September, an antique fair and last summer’s Big Sea Day on the beach. All is familiar – the Mouzakis Paramount Show Boat Dock and the lowly Manasquan itself, red BAR warmly glowing through the early-evening rain.”
- from The Lay...
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Anorak
“I lost count of the anorak-clad sages who told me at the Sundance Festival that the era of the small, independently financed film is over. With the crash, the argument goes, there’s less risk-money. Audiences want reassurance, and that’s supplied by the Hollywood majors. So we can expect a long, safe moment in which we take refuge in the local multiplex. The ultimate marriage of convenience of...
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Spinnaker
I picked a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing?
from “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” – Robert Lowell
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Jacaranda
“Instead, I bought myself an antique rocking-chair, jacaranda wood and cane – beautiful crude 19th century Brazilian style, almost whittled. There was a pair, one for a man and one for a woman.”
- from Elizabeth Bishop in letter to Robert Lowell, June 5, 1956 in Words On Air
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Clematis
The humpback in his small, washed cottage Under the spokes of the clematis. Is there no great love, only tenderness?
from “Mystic” – Sylvia Plath
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Frillback
“I also see Frillbacks, which are just odd enough to be strangely beautiful. They become my favourite breed of the show. Their feathers are coiled like a corkscrew, looking as if they were dipped in Jheri curl.”
- from Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird, Andrew D. Blechman
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Cornice
“And in Lerida there were old crumbling buildings upon whose cornices thousands and upon thousands of swallows had built their nests.”
- from Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell