A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

  cool engraver guy on a 47 Workshop letterhead  Let there be the clack of the shuttle flying         forward and back, forward and                               back, warp, wearp, varp: “cast of a net, a laying of eggs”     from *warp- “to throw”             the threads twisted for strength                        that can be a warp of the will.       “O weaver, weaver, work no more,”               Gascoyne is quoted:       “thy warp hath done me wrong.”  — from At the Loom, Passages 2, Robert Duncan With apologies to Lionel Trilling for the title. I was v busy between the end of the year at our middle school + grad school term papers + a brief stint in county jail (free Palestine!) and I'm th...

SOB, SOB by Kerry James Marshall “For this too is what W. E. B. Du Bois might have us think of as the gift of black culture, the gift of blackness: the great chain of being come undone, life itself unfettered and moving in all directions, a window into the worlds that thrive at the underside of modernity." — Joshua Bennett , Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man [brief note]   i stealth edit posts all the time. this is a personal blog and im prone to typos + weird phrasing. god has already forgiven me for this. ive edited this post a lot tho, like much more than i normally would, and will probably keep working on it so its only fair that i make some mention of these frequent changes somewhere. ill do a second post if it gets bad enough, promise. we're all about works-in-progress here at A Most Majestic Fly Whisk! dictated. not read. — the management Hey y'all, hope everyone's been having a happy and restful (in that order) holiday season. My nieces j...

Little says more about the soul of America than the fact that one of its greatest painters was briefly  an anarcho-McCarthyist Sometime towards the beginning of the year, I came across an interesting counterpoint to some of the reconsiderations of lore and its functions that bloggers had been posting about in an anonymous blog comment. It was a little more elaborate (and a lot more insulting) but the heart of the argument went something like this: things like conventional gazetteers are useful for providing the same contextualizing depth that historians rely upon when studying or writing, without this you can't have a truly grounded world of play. The actual argument being made is not interesting imo - it's already been dealt with by Sandro's post above . What makes this idea worth exploring to me is that historians themselves are often unclear or weird or both about what they mean when they say "historical context." Maybe even unclear or weird in ways that so...

  Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Liza in High Cotton  by Romare Bearden (1978) It is this line that consummates the love, and it is this central spondaic foot that is the metrical consummation of the whole structure. The meter conducts the argument. The meter is the poem...It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.  -  Fussel's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form Way too short for the task at hand This is (partially) a response to a much older post written by Marcia B but the actual inspiration for it comes from her recent one analyzing the math of Long Live HD . I read it this morning, liked it, and moved on...until I picked up The Poem's Heartbeat  again over lunch. I've been studying it over the past couple weeks in an attempt to work out some prosodic characteristics for the mock-epic side of my current project, but in combination with the new post on...