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cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Matthew King
@cincinnatusc.bsky.social
410 followers 320 following 940 posts
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane
birdsandbeesandblooms.com
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cincinnatusc.bsky.social
I was curious who the "professor at an elite Canadian university" might be, so as I do occasionally when I'm looking for something very specific I ventured into the swamp of google search and... this is the low-key wildest stew of bullplop I've seen the google bot come up with yet:
The phrase "little to sustain a reader's interest" is a critical assessment used by the American poet Pearl Kazin in her 1957 review of Caitlin Thomas's book, the memoir Leftover Life to Kill. Kazin's review, published in The New York Review of Books, was generally negative and dismissive of the book's literary merit, in which Caitlin Thomas chronicled her life following the death of her husband, the celebrated poet Dylan Thomas. Kazin felt that the content, primarily focused on Caitlin's grief, alcoholism, and subsequent affairs, offered "little to sustain a reader's interest" beyond the initial shock value or association with her famous late husband. Caitlin Thomas later published another memoir, Double Drink Story (1973), which also dealt with her life with Dylan and her struggles with alcoholism. These works have since been re-evaluated by some readers for their raw honesty and insight into the dynamics of a turbulent, often alcohol-fueled, artistic life.
November 7, 2025 at 4:12 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
This, from Nabokov's Pnin (which I'm taking another slog at; I might've titled this little book By the Way: Detours from Excursions (it begins after all on the wrong train)), reminds me of a thing that happened in a Merleau-Ponty seminar with my eventual PhD supervisor, which I think of often:
And at six, Victor already distinguished what so many adults never learn to see--the colours of shadows, the difference in tint between the shadow of an orange and that of an avocado pear.
November 6, 2025 at 1:41 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
I guess serious people who aren't part of the Thielverse are expected not to take Yarvin's elves/dark elves/hobbits thing seriously but I think (bracket the Tolkien stuff if it helps) it actually explains why people (like Krugman here, from his substack today) keep missing the mark on this stuff:
In any case, what’s remarkable and depressing is how successful so-called “populists” have been despite their obvious contempt for the little people.
November 4, 2025 at 5:00 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
In related news: what
Screenshot of Merriam-Webster dot com top lookups, showing "abecedarian" at #1 and "abecedaria" at #6
October 29, 2025 at 11:17 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Today's Paris Review poem of the day: so much going on that I didn't notice until the last line that it's an abecedarian, which I gotta say is a heckuva feat (even given that I was reading it in my e-mail on my phone with line breaks messed up, probably a necessary condition but still) to pull off
Catherine Bowman Twins of a Gazelle Which Feed Among the Lilies Antlers butting against the full moon. Bellies lolling on my belly. Creamy chestnut crania in convex cones. Dogs they follow me around in circles. Everything I do they mimic. When I laugh they laugh, when I cry they howl. Fins breakwater, slice the waves that make up my body. Galactopoietic forms that feed the Milky Way. Hunchbacks girdled to the chest for life. Interwoven compartments of lobules containing a network of tubes. Joined to the tubes of each lobe are ducts and all ducts lead to the nipple. Knots for tongues to untie. Lazy-boy recliners for lips to sit on. Mushroom explosions taped to the chest. Naked reminders of the death cup cloud. O mammilla O Papilla. Quivering wolf snouts nose through my dreams. Rats on a whiskered basso-relievo. Sleep on your back they point to the stars. Two points earned at birth. Nightpoints to stick to a crying baby. U x 2. Vaulted cupola. Baldheaded misers hoarding the mammon. Women lie topless, side by side on the beach, from A-flat to C-sharp to 3-D. Xylophones for the sun to play on. Yes, to say. Yes Zeugma. Zucchetto. Zoo. From issue no. 109 (Winter 1988)
October 26, 2025 at 10:34 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
1) A less enjoyable aspect of your team doing well is it gets covered by journalists who don't otherwise sports
2) Showing once again that *every time* something you have particular knowledge of is reported on in the let's say generalist media you will find at least one thing wildly factually wrong
Screenshot of a paragraph in a Toronto Star article about celebrity fans and this year's World Series: "For Canadian-born Michael Bublé, the matchup is stirring up some tension: Dodgers star and former Jay Shohei Ohtani walks up to the plate to the tune of his hit song, 'Feelin’ Good.'"
October 24, 2025 at 4:43 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only.
Blue Jays centre fielder Daulton Varsho robbing a home run: his back is making an indentation in the padding on the fence, his feet are in the air with the ground not visible in the picture, and the ball is about to settle into his glove, which is well above the top of the fence.
October 20, 2025 at 3:40 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
True fact: Chris Murphy and Patrick Pentland made these guitars in shop class in 1985
Two grey-haired men with angular red guitars (one is a bass guitar) playing on stage as part of a rock n roll band
October 19, 2025 at 12:47 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
I wonder how long people have been saying that "discovering things you didn't know you knew" is an, if not the most, important thing about writing poetry. (The screenshot is Stephen Dunn's blurb on a poem of his that appeared in Rattle in 2002, which was the POTD a couple of days ago.)
Stephen Dunn “The poetry that ends up mattering speaks to things we half-know but are inarticulate about. It gives us language and the music of language for what we didn’t know we knew. So a combination of insight and beauty. I also liken the writing of it to basketball—you discover that you can be better than yourself for a little while. If you’re writing a good poem, it means you’re discovering things that you didn’t know you knew. In basketball, if you’re hitting your shots, you feel in the realm of the magical.”
October 5, 2025 at 2:58 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Not that it makes much difference in the world but it is at least a balm to my aching brain that the Wiki article is very clear about this off the top
Introduction to the Wikipedia article for "Rapture": The Rapture, a non-biblical concept contrived in the 1830's by John Nelson Darby, is an eschatological position held by some Christians, particularly those of American evangelicalism, consisting of an end-time event when all dead Christian believers will be resurrected and, joined with Christians who are still alive, together will rise "in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air." Excerpt from Wikipedia article for "Rapture": The idea of a rapture as it is defined in dispensational premillennialism is not found in historic Christianity and is a relatively recent doctrine originating from the 1830s.
September 23, 2025 at 4:02 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Back in another century I took a Frankfurt School course in which we were supposed to write a short precis of each week's reading, so naturally (!) I did mine in sonnet form. Here's the one I did (with a few of the clunkier clunks de-clunked a bit just now) for Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin: "Theses on the Philosophy of History" To make the course of history explode, To seize a moment, wrench it out of time, Restore it in an unexpected mode— Arresting revolution is a crime Against that stepwise progress offering No hope of ultimate redemption but A mere succession of events that bring Us closer to an empty end. And what The angel sees we'd best to pay no mind, Lest we confuse ourselves with gods and add In future—to which angels must be blind— More of the same catastrophe we've had: If past presents as just one long mistake We’ll naught but nothing of the future make.
September 17, 2025 at 6:48 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
"Left adventurism" is a term I learned way back when as certain activists defended themselves against possibly phantom accusations of it, dunno if I ever looked at the seminal Lenin piece but anyway wouldn't have been so interested at the time that it's meant in the sense of adventitious roots
Screenshot of the beginning of “Adventurism” by Vladimir Lenin, from marxists.org: When Marxists say that certain groups, are adventurist, they have in mind the very definite and specific social and historical features of a phenomenon, one that every class-conscious worker should be familiar with. The history of Russian Social-Democracy teems with tiny groups, which sprang up for an hour, for several months, with no roots whatever among the masses (and politics without the masses are adventurist politics), and with no serious and stable principles.
September 16, 2025 at 8:43 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Our cat was designed by Alex Colville
A lean tabby cat draped over the top of a bookcase such as to apparently defy rules of perspective
September 16, 2025 at 7:00 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Saw someone somewhere objecting to some homicide being referred to as an "assassination" and so of course I had to look up the etymology and it turns out strictly speaking an assassination is killing your enemies in a hashish-induced frenzy
Screenshot of eymology of "assassin" from the Online Etymology Dictionary: assassin (n.) 1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via medieval French and Italian Assissini, Assassini, from Arabic hashīshīn (12c.), an Arabic nickname, variously explained, for the Nizari Ismaili sect in the Middle East during the Crusades, plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).They were a fanatical Muslim sect in the mountains of Lebanon at the time of the Crusades, under leadership of the "Old Man of the Mountains" (which translates Arabic shaik-al-jibal, name applied to Hasan ibu-al-Sabbah). In Western European minds 12c.-13c. they had a reputation for murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish, but there is no evidence that the medieval Ismailis used hashish.
September 13, 2025 at 5:37 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
In which an obstinate young groundhog provides disconfirming evidence for my hypothesis that maybe this cat head thing actually works
A groundhog standing on a bare patch of ground behind some squash plants; in the foreground a black cat head silhouette with clear glass eyes hangs from a metal sign hanger
September 1, 2025 at 4:05 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 31: from Leaving Howe Island by Sadiqa de Meijer (@sadiqademeijer.bsky.social), "These People"
These People Something is going very well for them. They have their houses with sound shingles and perimeters of grass. The breathtaking loads of groceries, complex carriages for babies. They keep their driveways sealed, their affections on leashes, tugged around the block. When they falter, they’re patched with inanimate joints and molars. You can set your clock by them. You can jog past their deafening tools and sense that your suit is curious. Even when their lenses darken, grow inscrutable. Their songs are private to their ears. They shear their conversations like their lawns, these people of the howeryou without awaiting answers. They refuse superstition, but dart from their doors to their automobiles as if the evil eye is in the trees. Unharmed, they wish to mean no harm. They will, when asked for directions, erase the ambush from their faces as if it was never there. They are what they say; they are okay.
September 1, 2025 at 5:40 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 30: from Midway by Kayla Czaga, "Thirteen Years"
THIRTEEN YEARS I never believed the story you told me about the girl who came into the bookstore you worked at and then drowned herself in the ocean a few days later. You said you’d avoided her pretty, desperate face in the aisles, had jokingly recommended Mrs. Dalloway when she cornered you for books about dying. The girl, Virginia Woolf, stones in both their pockets— it fit too well together. I assumed you were trying to tell me about yourself but had to use the girl to do it. That fall, you wrote a poem about the tide bearing her away like a bottle with a note curled up inside it. Our writing group loved that poem. I loved it too, even if I didn’t believe it. At the time, I wrote tiny poems, stripped to nouns and verbs, a kind of writing someone might admire but never love. We drank wine on beaches, then waded in. When water weighed down our tights, we tied them around our necks, sliced our bare feet on stones. Years later, I asked what had happened to that poem and you told me you’d tried editing it, but every line was bad. Every line? I doubted that the way I doubted the story itself and the others you’ve told before and since, brimming with coincidence, characters resurfacing as if in an epic novel. We live in separate cities now. Hundreds of people like the filtered images you share of your life while I post fewer and fewer photos. We’ve been friends for thirteen years and I don’t know how many times you’ve wanted to die. I want you to tell me this fact, awful as a body hauled in on the tide. Tell me the story you started years ago, about being cornered by yourself and laughing your way out of it. Maybe it’s me who needs passing encounters to mean something, who can’t just let stories squawk from far-off rocks. For thirteen years you’ve told me I’m too honest and I know you’re right. I go to the beach to watch the ocean’s great grey breathing and wonder which stones you would choose, knowing they’d be identical to my own.
August 31, 2025 at 3:49 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
The bio blurb:
Rob Ingraham “British poet Philip Larkin, responding to an interview question from The Observer regarding travel and the creative urge said, ‘A novelist needs new scenes, new people, new themes. The Graham Greenes, the Somerset Maughams, traveling is necessary for them. I don’t think it is for poets. The poet is really engaged in recreating the familiar, he’s not committed to introducing the unfamiliar.’ Once I understood that, everything else fell into place.”
August 30, 2025 at 4:35 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 29: from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin"
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN Later the white boy we once beat like a drum Died after crashing his Camaro around a bend Off Shop Road. He was an asshole. Ask the baby Black boys he bullied at Robert E. Lee Middle School Where the Robert E. Lee statue was painted white So often over the years it looked like someone Covered in a sheet of glue. I would not have liked To attend a middle school named after Emmett Till Or for that matter, any murdered black person. When I was the age of Emmett Till, I reckoned MLK was an old man at the age he was killed. I am old enough now to know the drum, though beaten, Is not an instrument of violence. Nor is a banjo Or whistle. I'm sorry I missed the white boy's funeral.
August 30, 2025 at 5:20 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
It gives me some odd pleasure when my book stacks organically merge like this
Two stacks of books and journals leaning into and meging with each other
August 30, 2025 at 2:27 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 28: from Wellwater by Karen Solie, "Smoke"
SMOKE The first morning on waking I thought it was fog, or mist, I thought it had rained, but the ground was dry. The second morning, the sun was red. At High Level, Fox Creek, the fires uncontained were born on the winds they made and so to expand their sphere of influence they burned a school. The gas and hydrocarbons found us 800 miles south where the sky was yellow. On the third day, by afternoon, actions were performed out of duty, not interest. When the red moon rose we drew the curtains. Disabused of an illusion we say the fog has lifted, the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled, and now we see, though what arises is not clarity but a new set of misgivings. Is this how the world will be and not just how it is? The blossoming apple shifted key from ode to elegy, knelt down inside itself into its halo of bees on the fourth day. Clearwater River Dene Nation, Island Lake, Île-à-la-Crosse, 500 miles south of the evacuations in the evening of this fifth day, we’re advised to stay out of what the smoke is, its particulate of houses, plants, animals.
August 29, 2025 at 5:18 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 27: from the @ghostcitypress.bsky.social microchap Rowhouse Song by Danielle McMahon (@dehm000.bsky.social), "gianna, gianna"
gianna, gianna 1987 sweet sweet summer has a name and it’s gianna marino the sleek teen queen of waverly st. gianna with the black-magic curls windswept gianna the girl forever homecoming and going gianna the wild-one who gave two for flinching caught gassing up the alley kids with candy-sweet smokes from the cornershop our folks cried o gonegirl o choirgirl fallen from such angelic heights but it was gianna always who called in the neighborhood kids in time for supper her orange-violet tones carried in the dusky afterglow it was gianna true that feral sunsetting screech-machine the rasp in her voice unheard of before this very summer gianna the teen dream perched rooftop laid out on her stripey beach towel that fourth of july in the blazing sun all the livelong day tanned herself a deep deep purple til her whole body became one big plummy bruise raven-like and violet-black silken with ooze across the alley we watched her poor old dad shoo her away with a kitchen-broom like some dark harpy her eyes straw-scratched and black hair full of splinters our folks said looks like she musta finally flew the coop flew the coop
August 28, 2025 at 4:39 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
The Tulo/Bautista Hey Whatcha Thinkin' Bout Meme except José is thinking about manscaping and stuff
August 27, 2025 at 1:28 AM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 26: from the book of smaller by rob mclennan (@robmclennan.bsky.social), "My father, at seventy-six"
My father, at seventy-six Uplifts. A series of holes in the narrative. Cardinals, sparrows, jays. The fence-line. Stories new, renew, and seemingly random. His three-legged dog. Cutter, diagonal across the back fields. His half-dozen grandchildren. How has your health? What did the doctor? Solo, he holds up the farmhouse. Imagine literally, literally. The remains of last century. A splendid memory of trees. Outside: the sun and rain insert into the ground. Replenish soybeans, corn.
August 26, 2025 at 9:46 PM
cincinnatusc.bsky.social
Sealey Challenge 2025, Day 25: from Soi-même by Victoria Spires (@victoriaspires.bsky.social), "Brain as radula"
Brain as radula But listen. I read your doctrine of access. A precision of breath. You send your chariots of air, bowling along the arms and across that oft-neglected nape, at the apex of which I am always found, in fistfuls. Let me forget, for a moment how words like pretty fluff against the teeth like pulled-apart cotton- wool, the wince of it, a repellant kind of pleasure. Consider it an experiment, windmilling into them head-first as though the power resided in the words themselves, not the space that opens in them when they worm loose from the place you draw them out from, tongue to gut. This is a soft war, not an impressment. Now, press these misgivings from me, I want them gone.
August 26, 2025 at 5:01 AM