Semiotic
Poetry: “Dark Woods, Dark Water”
This wood burns a dark
Incense. Pale moss drips
In elbow-scarves, beardsFrom the archaic
Bones of the great trees.
Blue mists move overA lake thick with fish.
Snails scroll the border
Of the glazed waterWith coils of ram’s-horn.
Out in the open
Down there the late yearHammers her rare and
Various metals.
Old pewter roots twistUp from the jet-backed
Mirror of water
And while the air’s clearHourglass sifts a
Drift of goldpieces
Bright waterlights areSliding their quoits one
After the other
Down boles of the fir.
— Sylvia PlathTags: nature, sylvia plath, woods
“His Face All Red” + “The Book of Soil”
Click the image above to be taken to a wonderful Web comic/story, titled His Face All Red, by Emily Carroll – an eerie, dark, surreal, well-crafted, and intriguing modern fairy tale.
This is an absolutely amazing piece of papercraft genius, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The Book of Soil is an experimental book-/paper-making project from designer and illustrator Teagan White.
Click the link below to see more pages from the book.Tags: blood, book-making, bugs, illustrations, modern fairy tales, papercraft, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, Web comics, wolves, woods
Prose Poetry: “A Diagram of Partial Anatomy”
(ref.) Other personal accoutrements may include:
orthodontic wires (to torture the teeth into place,) wigs (no use in scalping,)
hearing aids (if the batteries are any good,) bandages (to hold back blood, await platelets,) false lashes (to avoid eyes from across the room, screw these on and shut out the vision of yourself,) dentures (eventually bear all responsibility for every word you spit,) breathing tubes (may you never need your air boiled through a tank,) spectacles (small mirrors, the oedipal glass of self-reflection,) acrylic nails (frequent, unmotivated tapping,) glass eyes (adopted children, never loved right and there for all the wrong reasons,) shackles (to cage you without bars, to be moderately free, to be moderately dead,) piercings (general atonement,) wedding rings (precious metal is selling at all-time highs,) gold teeth (same principle,) sutures (a stitch in deep time,) plaster casts (to mend what’s broken, we ought to be buried in them,) and chewing gum (as a courtesy to the rest of us.)– from “A Diagram of Partial Anatomy” by mildlyspineless
Tags: anatomical-themed, parenthetical
“Sandman” Adaptation for TV
Warner Bros. TV is adapting The Sandman graphic novel series into a show [article]. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I’m kind of looking forward to it nonetheless, whenever it airs. I can’t help thinking it might turn out better if it was being made by HBO or something, though.
I was super obsessed with Sandman in high school. It was kind of an epiphany for me. It was and still is the most profound, intellectually and visually interesting, artistic, and endearing thing in the comic book world that I’ve ever found. My favorite members of the Endless are Dream, Death, and Delirium; I see myself in each of them. I hope that they find actors who somewhat fit the roles for the Endless. I particularly think it’s important that they find an actress who suits my idea of what Death should look like, for some reason.
Tags: graphic novels, neil gaiman, tee-vee, the endless, the sandman
Poetry: Obsolete Angel
“Obsolete Angel”
by Renee Ashley
from The Various Reasons of Light“ This one can’t fly: he’s got
stubby wings, he’s old
as space or time; he’s gone
to fat. And now he even
disregards the omens that he never
should have learned to read
at all: blistered skies,
the sticky secrets
in the bowels of toads.
He’s used up his store
of magic, he’s half-blind,
but he’s crusty
as good bread and willing:
in the moonlight,
he struggles up the shadows
towards god, hears
the wheezing orchestration
of embodied lives
– he always sings low
his one hoarse note,
always tumbles down to where
we save him again
and again he falls
like a hailstone
from some heaven
and we will save him.”I’m in an odd mood tonight.
Fairy Tales, Fables, and Ghost Stories [001]
Fox spirit stories are really common in East Asian mythology, and I’m sure this story exists elsewhere in another form, but this particular version of the story I took from the novel Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller.
“…a big fox visits a country school. It is late at night and the students have decided to sleep in the schoolroom because it is too dark to walk home. All but one of the hundred students have fallen asleep when the one awake hears a soft guttural voice counting pairs of shoes outside…all the way to one hundred.
Through the window, the boy sees the snout of a fox, but as it crawls through the window, it takes the shape of a beautiful young woman. The boy thinks he must be dreaming and rubs his eyes. He strains to see in the darkness and notices: the dirt from a newly dug grave lodged under her nails; the blood like lipstick staining her mouth; the glittering of a hunter’s eyes in the night.
The boy crawls away, hiding in a far corner of the room. He watches the fox girl count the students with a kiss that steals their breaths. With each kiss, a boy stops breathing and dies in middream.
When she approaches the corner where the youngest boy is hiding, he creeps back to his sleeping place. Sick with fear, he lies down among the dead bodies of his friends. When the girls reaches the end of the row of students, she growls. ‘Only ninety-nine! There is one missing. How can that be?’
She rushes outside to recount the pairs of shoes. One hundred. She counts again, to be absolutely certain, and all the while the boy inside tries not to move, tries not to breathe. After again finding exactly one hundred pairs of shoes, the fox girl turns toward the door to recount the boys. Just then, a cock crows. The demon drops to all fours and scampers into the nearby woods. The clever boy is saved, the only one out of a hundred to live.”
Tags: fairy tales, fox stories
“The History of Love”
I love this passage.
“My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath.
The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised by how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I’ve made a science of it. It’s not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It’s just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it’s been returned to me at the end of my life. I have to run them under the hot water, steam clouding the mirror, outside the rustle of pigeons. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine.
Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”
– from The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Prose Poetry: The Scars of Utopia
“ If you keep taking stabs at utopia
sooner or later there will be scars.Suppose there was a thermometer able to measure
contentment. Would you slide it underyour tongue and risk being told you were on par
with a thirteenth century farmer who lostall his teeth in a game of hide and seek? Would you
be tempted to abandon your portable conscience,the remote control that lets you choose who you are
for every occasion? I wish we cared moreabout how we sounded than how we looked.
Instead of primping before mirrors each morning,we’d huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.
As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in
pieces,that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven,
waiting for the rest of him to arrive, as if Godwas dismantling him like a jigsaw puzzle, but now
I understand we’re all missing something. I wishthere were Band Aids for what you don’t know, whisky
breath mints for sober people to fit in at wild parties.There ought to be a Smithsonian for misfits,
where an insomniac’s clammy pillow hangs overa narcoleptic’s drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic
displayed like a white picket fence designedto keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House
was made out of mood ring rock, reflectingthe health of the nation. And an atheist hour
at every church, and needle exchange programs,and haystack exchange programs too, and emotional
baggage thrift stores, a Mount Rushmore for assassins.I’m sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream
of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire,no asphalt, no rest stops, just a bunch of dead grass
with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.”- “The Scars of Utopia,” Jeffrey McDaniel
Poetry: Apocrypha
“Envy tastes like copper filings.
It settles into the stomach wall and plies
its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
Under fallopian awnings
they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
once, twice.Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
with rotted diamonds.
It claws and adores and kisses the edge
without guessing the center, cobbling a
hermetic path, yellow and grey,
down into the rickety basement door
of the second heart–
the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
while storm shutters screen against glass
threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
rooms of the interior.This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
the second heart murmurs
its beatific perversions
to the first.”from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente
Tags: apocrypha, catherynne m valente, poetry
Poetry: “Instructions” by Neil Gaiman
Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before,
Say ‘please’ before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted front door,
as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
The deep well you walk past leads down to Winter’s realm;
There is another land at the bottom of it.
If you turn around here,
you can walk back, safely;
you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She may ask for something;
give it to her. She
will point the way to the castle. Inside it
are three princesses.
Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve months sit about a fire,
warming their feet, exchanging tales.
They may do favours for you, if you are polite.
You may pick strawberries in December’s frost.Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where you are going.
See more after the cutTags: animals, children's poems, diamonds and toads, fantasy, illustrations, keith eric williams, little red riding hood, modern fairy tales, neil gaiman, poetry, wolf
