😔🫂

aye

time is nothing but not amenable

revisiting the "the ongoing, the potentially sustainable" (as described by stephanie burt) given that today's yet another day in the ritual cycle.

time is nothing but not amenable: chalcedony.rocks/2025/01/20/time-is-nothi...

Out of Edward Foster’s 1994 _Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews_, Susan Howe talking about “abolishing categories” and poetry as “a different way of knowing things.” I admire her upfront curiosity and pragmatic clarity (see the prose introductions—“to anchor the poem”—to some of her books).

serrulata spontanea

serrulata spontanea: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/31/serrulata-spo...

the petals are sitting wrong in the charcoal. the old lombardy poplar is busy whispering for me to come pay my respects, goading me for my inability to sketch the blossoms from memory.

to draw the outline of your figure in my mind

to draw the outline of your figure in my mind: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/31/to-draw-the-o...

two pairs of black blundstone brand boots, one dress pair, one work pair, shot from above, on top of a table covered with a grocery store circular. a can of huberd's shoe grease, a shoe brush, and a screwdriver appear at the edge of the frame.

anyway, we've all been there, dog

two pairs of blunnies

> boots sigh, dust-
> rags erase thick scar-
> work, interlacing
> lore and evidence.

two pairs of blunnies: chalcedony.rocks/2024/09/12/two-pairs-of-...

#theauldshite

a still from kalil haddad's "his smell", of the protagonist's silhouette against a neutral background of an apartment's interior)

🍿 his smell (dir. kalil haddad, 2024)

« the physical odour and the metaphysical reality are symbolically reciprocal…smells are often evaluated, therefore, by the positive or negative value of the remembered context. » (anthony synott, “a sociology of smell”, can. rev. of soc. & anth., 1991)

a reversed summer, take 2

a reversed summer, take 2: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/18/a-reversed-su...

When I think about how best to read a poem aloud, I try to be present in the poem. To remember where I was emotionally, psychologically—when I composed it, which is to put me closer to where I had been when what incited me to write it happened. Tracking it through all that's passed between the multiple points. But then, as I'm reading it, I must also be aware of who I am, the body I'm in, the conditions under which I've come to be present where I am in that body, and the bodies of the audience there with me as well. To be proprioceptive of a place I remember in a body from long ago, while I mean to know this one now.&10;&10;"GET AWAY" is a difficult thing to say when your body is an invita-tion, even one you didn't make. If I say, "GET AWAY," who says it? After all, I knew the time, the pale moon's fullness, how dense the thicket.&10;&10;There is a timbre I associate with these moments. It is one I know. One I remember. One l've learned over years of practice for nothing at all. For something that will probably never happen. I'm thinking thinking thinking thinking of a word and the skin is coming off me. My mouth a drawerful of cutlery.

« “GET AWAY” is a difficult thing to say when your body is an invitation, even one you didn’t make. If I say, “GET AWAY,” who says it? After all, I knew the time, the pale moon’s fullness, how dense the thicket. »

📚douglas kearney, optic subwoof (wave books, 2022)

a reversed summer

a reversed summer: https://chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/16/a-reversed-summer/

an illustration of one of the closing shots of uncle gyüri in tarr's "werckmeister harmonies" looking into the eye of the whale. drawing by michael tawa, from his book _Atmosphere, Architecture, Cinema_

The media infrastructure approach is especially resonant in the case of the Prince of Whales, whose message was inseparable from its materiality, and whose means of transmission was a continent-wide assemblage of trains, railroads, and human and animal labor teams.&10;And, as the foregoing narrative demonstrates, the whale itself was constantly remediated: the whale was transformed through death and putrefaction and also through Newton and Engelhardt's various attempts at arresting putrefaction through freezing, chemical treat-ment, and taxidermy. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin theorized remediation as a way of understanding new digital media, but their ideas enable new understandings of the whale show as well.[48] Bolter

and Grusin describe remediation as "the representation of one medium in another."4 In the case of the whale show, the whale was part of the original medium that was remediated, in pieces and over time, into ice, salt, moss, chemicals, wood, steel, and new organic material that emerged through the body's putrefaction. Another integral component of the whale-show-as-medium was the complex transportation network that transmitted it across the country and the structures of display that were built anew at every stop along the way.

Remediation has a "double logic," according to Bolter and Grusin, demonstrating "our culture's contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy": immediacy offers "the transparent presentation of the real," and hypermediacy invokes "the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves."50 The whale show demonstrated both imperatives fully: it allowed visitors a rare experience of immediacy through sensory contact with a far-fetched specimen. And, at the same time, the whale show offered visitors a chance to revel in the whale's hypermediacy: the logistics of the whale's transport from the north Atlantic all the way to Chicago and points beyond was a topic of constant promotion. Remediation is arguably a characteristic of many or even all cultural forms (and Bolter and Grusin acknowledge a genealogy for digital remediation going back at least several hundred years).51 What made Newton and Englhardt's whale special is that it offered immediate sensory experience with a pelagic creature who had been otherwise insensible, a whale that lived outside of human habitation and whose rendered whale oil had been circulated if not invisibly, then "inconspicuously," to use Nicole Shukin's word, through ordinary consumer spaces distant from the coast. Its hyper-mediacy was no less wondrous-its transportation halfway across the continent, and the almost occult, death-defying powers Newton and Engelhardt claimed in their efforts to halt its putrefaction.

🍿 werckmeister harmonies, (dir. béla tarr, 2000)

« the whale itself was constantly remediated…transformed through death and putrefaction and also through various
attempts at arresting putrefaction through freezing, chemical treatment, and taxidermy. »

jamie l. jones, “fish out of water”

when we sing to her, sometimes she sings back; when she sings to us, we sing backup

the loss of my sinister

the loss of my sinister: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/14/the-loss-of-m...

we make hay out of the light inside the cabin: reedy, aching culms of chartreuse rattling sympathetically with each bump and wending in the rails.

Is there a possibility that laundry can be redeemed as an art, a cultural form? If there is an aesthetic of cookery, can there be an aesthetic of the care and cleaning of clothing! Certainly, laundering metonymizes an inherent pleasure in comfort, cleanliness as declared good, frequently emblematic of health or wealth or sexual continence. Nothing is so charming as the well-scrubbed child dressed in clean clothes, a physical embodiment of innocence and hope. But the conjunction between theoretical and practical activity does not fit well with the work's metaphorical import.Yes, there is beauty observable in the "random ballet" (Busch 1999, 69) of the clothesline, but can that beauty inscribe the dead weight of tired arms lifting and pegging dozens of wet sheets?

Laundry persists as a metaphor for secrets, and tied to its degenerate reputation is laundry's implicit association with the erotic. Of course, because laundry deals with the most private and suggestive articles of apparel, it rubs elbows with fetishism. Further, the physical situation of women washing has traditionally been seen as a site of opportunity (Odys-seus again!): "Wherever women were found in isolation, there was the potential for rendezvous. Throughout history, the place where laundry gets done-be it by the creek or in a freestanding shed-has been the province of a courtship" (Busch 1999, 62). And so, doing the laundry came to be associated with sexual experimentation and freedom. "Typical meeting places for women alone, like public laundries and spinning rooms, were feared to give rise to slander and intrigue and secret liaisons" (Warner 1994, 35). In the laundry, stories were produced and reproduced. This space, then, can be read as imaginatively dangerous, breeding a miasma of fictional and sexual exhalations. In contemporary terms, too, the laundromat (Margaret Atwood's novel The Edible Woman [1969], the film My Beautiful Laudrette [1985]) becomes a safe place for cruising: "just by glancing at a woman's wash, [a man] could discern the relevant facts of her life" (Busch 1999, 63).

« is there a possibility that laundry can be redeemed as an art, a cultural form? if there is an aesthetic of cookery, can there be an aesthetic of the care and cleaning of clothing! »

aritha van herk, “invisibled laundry,” signs 27(3), 2002

a donkey, a chicken, a rat, and a bunny

a donkey, a chicken, a rat, and a bunny: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/14/a-donkey-a-ch...

recalcitrance as virtue

recalcitrance as virtue: chalcedony.rocks/2026/03/13/recalcitrance...

📝

when you're mean to me this is who you're being mean to

🍿 numbskull revolution (dir. jon moritsugu, 2026)

https://youtu.be/Pj-LgDCJl0E

"dude, trust me. let’s get skullfucked now."

conceptual art: continuum from genius to bullshit. where it lands depends on the state of the artist. DV with lofi greenscreen lands this squarely in "hyperpop cinema."

always already working out the kinks

crack slowly and see

i promise i will make sure to bring the 🚩📐📻 on my next visit

yeah, but i don't know if i'll be welcome as i am largely protocol neutral

didn't alterotics do that

something like that, as a way to reduce noise without removing content,

i knew you were anisotropic

Ozu, Pickles, and Rice Bran (Part 1) This is the part 1 of the 3-part series (part2, part3).

> jealousy is associated with the state of the pickle ‘not willing to be separated each other’. ... ‘Jealousy’ is [also] expressed as ‘yakimochi’, which is a ‘baked rice cake’ ... used like “he is baking a rice cake”

"ozu, pickles, and rice bran (part 1)", www.enic-cine.net/ozu-pickles-...

reports of flarf's demise are greatly exaggerated