ilx posts with striking imagery

on the road reimagined as a guy running thru sussex

great writing

10. It is the end of summer and it is outside even though you can feel the chill in the evenings.
9. Everyone gets cold at the same time and there is not enough jackets
8. For some reason, this is the last night everybody will be together for a long time.
7. There is more whiskey than everyone can drink
6. All the whiskey gets drank.
5. The sky stays clear and bright even though it is very very late.
4. There is nobody else for miles.
3. There is a frisbee or a football or something but everbody is idle and it just gets tossed around lazily.
2. No food is organised but somehow the cupboards seem to throw up various combinations of junkfood and everybody knows some really gross way of eating everything that somehow makes it even more delicious.
1. It is fun, there is barely enough floor space to sleep and in the morning everyone rolles up their trousers and wades in knee deep in the edge of the river but there is not so much time left because by the afternoon everyone must be somewhere else.

― I know, right?, Saturday, August 16, 2008 6:32 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow, that and NickB's above are both great

damn nickB you should write a novel

― u2 removal machine (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 12:23 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Guh, IKR post is great too, thread keeps delivering.

stratification stuff - like the tabbing into social, personal, &c, & this, too - always makes me worry that something could be lost, like finding things in your junk mail, but then maybe this could be an example of computers being smarter than us, truly intuitive, capable of the perfectly mathematical organisation we haven't the server space to perform, that they detect the waning enthusiasm of our epistolary prose in e-mails it took us days to respond to, they assess the decreasing frequency of our exchanges with addresses suffixed with the domain names of our old employers, & that there is a digital intercession, filing somebody essentially unimportant out of sight, & what's more leaving us with an alibi, an inbox malfunction, filtering out high school friends, filing the details for flights we'd be better off missing where we won't see them. inbox as a kind of guru, a better you, severing contact with your brother-in-law, repeatedly reminding you of how well dan is doing, how beaming his children are, how bright the caribbean is, cutting you off from what's toxic, increasing the brightness of the display when your ex writes, erratically capitalising the perfunctory check-in e-mails you send to your dead-end copywriting job until they breach basic standards & leave you set adrift, necessarily spurned & catalysed into meaningful action. i requested an invite, i requested an intervention, i need to be organised, i need to be oriented, hope for inbox is all i have, some kind of systemisation to order the mess of loose ends i call an inbox right now.

― schlump, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 9:21 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Perhaps those who reduce people’s worries and fears to mere bigotry should go back to first principles, and consider whether, in such laissez-faire conditions, free movement has been of most benefit to capital or labour. They might also think about the dread spectacle of people from upscale London postcodes passing judgment on people who experience large-scale migration as something real.

― everything, Wednesday, 22 October 2014 22:10 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

where is the imagery in that post

cmon schlump, kinda feel like you are oscar-baiting us now

i think i see some burning crosses

xp

I was kind of thinking about starting a "the kind of ilx posts that there are" thread, because, for example, it seems like there's pretty much always someone who skateboards into the thread, reminds us that if you hate obviously enjoyable thing you hate fun, throws up a hang loose sign and skateboards off into the sunset.

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Saturday, October 11, 2014 12:10 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gr8 post

yeah I mean what sort of loser wouldn't like it. peace

daylight savings hoos

*hangs loose*

THE PERFECT RELATIONSHIP

COMPLETELY CODEPENDENT
HATE EVERYONE ELSE
NO OTHER FRIENDS
LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE GOING ON
EVER
ANY MOMENT SPENT APART IS POINTLESS BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS AWFUL AND YOU HATE THEM
"WHY ARE YOU NOT MY LOVER OR AS GOOD AT BEING THE ONLY PERSON I DON'T HATE AS MY LOVER" YOU SAY
YOU SPEND THOUSANDS ON YOUR WEDDING AND DON'T INVITE ANYONE
NO ONE ELSE SHOULD EXIST
YOU BOTH BECOME STUCK IN A ROUTINE YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF
IT IS SO HARD TO LIVE
IT IS SO HARD TO GO OUTSIDE
YOU SOMETIMES WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR LIFE BEFORE THIS
WHAT WAS THERE
THERE WAS JOY??
YOU THINK MAYBE THERE WAS JOY WAS IT THERE?
WHERE DID IT COME FROM
IT WAS DIFFERENT YOU FEEL IT WASN'T LIKE THIS
YOU WANT TO TRY THAT AGAIN
THOSE PEOPLE YOU KNEW ARE ALL A TRAIN AWAY
WILL IT FEEL DIFFERENT AGAIN WILL IT FEEL NEW AGAIN
WHERE SHOULD WE GO FOR DINNER
LET'S JUST GET DELIVERY

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Wednesday, November 5, 2014 3:31 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

welp that describes my last relationship

― jenny holzer, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 3:31 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jenny Holzer would be a good ilxor

The sad happy couple's wallpaper is those words in a Barbara Kruger pattern

instant classic:

I got IA at whole foods last time because they had a big ad on the outside of the store that said something like "Shop like an idealist." and I was imagining these rich Manhattan fucks literally fancying themselves more moral and idealistic people because they spent their banking pay checks on raw juices. I quickly got the idea out of my head, figuring it was a strawman. But then behind me in the coffee line there was this impossibly cheerful and tall and thin woman wearing that vaguely global village style of hippie yuppie clothing and she actually reached her hand up to the sky and did these soulful, dance like gestures, while waiting in line to order coffee, like she was saluting her friend the sun.

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Sunday, November 16, 2014

will never forget the time I was at the checkout of what is essentially the locally-owned chain version of Whole Foods in Eugene, Oregon (market of choice). ahead of me in line was a stock photographer's dream of a multigenerational hippie family: all dreadlocks and natural fibers. I'd noticed them earlier sort of drifting around the store, the children mostly unsupervised. As they went to exit after paying, a woman called out for one of the children: "Sativa!"

zachs post there not only recalls my last relationship but also my exs email style /:

D:

still not living up to this d/n, need to step my game up

like she was saluting her friend the sun.

dying

amazing post

a few weeks ago i saw a guy walking down cambridge heath road by himself. he had A Look that was arresting, it was like troo 70s, huge billowy flowing jeans with wide bellbottoms, a - yes - v-neck tee - and hair that looked like a bowl cut had been allowed to grow out for a couple of months. he was about 25 or so, just cutting through the world like a ship unmoored from time.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, November 18, 2014 9:55 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow

old but good, thx to Ned 4 revive

And as for 'Running From The Law' - that's a stone cold classic. One in a thousand rock bands ever write a rock song as classic as 'Running From the Law'. People dream fruitlessly about writing a song that good for every decade of their dismal lives, and die bitter, cursing their guitars, which, through the onset of the drugs administered to the dying, take on a haunting, ghostly aspect even as they lie abandoned in the corner of the room, half demon, half Donita, mocking them as they lie in their beds, screaming for even a tiny taste of the kind of inspiration that filled the rocking hearts of L7 as they wrote that classic fucking song. Yeah.

― moley, Thursday, September 29, 2005 4:35 AM (9 years ago)

i wonder whether if you're in a musical based on your life it eventually interferes with your memories, of everything depicted, like it's a few years later & you're remembering somebody you used to know or some night you first realised something about yourself & you can't remember if the whole thing happened just regularly in plain speech or melodically, surrounded by conspicuously fresh faced young people, under peppery torrents of synthetic rain

― schlump, Sunday, November 23, 2014 10:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of my favorite ilx posts of all time

second Ashton Marcus, the only poet I know of whose Collected Poems sequentially predicts the following century of poetric trends from modernist collage, deep image, confessional, New York school, and Language poetry. This was an amazing feat particularly because of Macus's autism, suggesting a complete and total inability to think in language. However, this languagelesness helped Marcus who, rather than focusing on authorship, put his efforts into brute force and randomly formed words together nonstop for 15 hours a day over 60 years, hoping that pure randomness would eventually produce poems other people would find comprehensible.
Aimless--Marcus's lack of popularity can IN FACT be directly explained by his autism, as Hugh Kenner explained in an essay in the Partisan Review. The contemporary poetry's emphasis on philosophy of language holds that language is symmetrical with cognition (cf Wittgenstein's limits of language being the limits of his world). This is a very self-aggrandizing view for poets to take and Marcus--like Temple Grandin--often held that language had little to do with cognition and that it is in fact possible to think without words, as toads and unicorns do. Because this is an inconvenient ideology, comparable to Eliot's fascism and Baraka's anti-semitism, the LANGUAGE poetry cabal has more or less excommunicated Marcus from the canon.

― ts smelliot, Tuesday, 21 June 2005 20:47 (9 years ago) Permalink

oh yes, the response:

Hmmmm. Not having read the work in question, I cannot form much idea of it from your description:
...randomly formed words put together nonstop for 15 hours a day over 60 years...

My first question would be: if this monstrous ouput was ever culled, who culled it and how? If the poet himself was unable to determine what was comprehensible to others, then I would suspect there's an editor lurking somewhere, whose judgement played a particularly critical role - tatamount to co-authorship. Just a suspicion.

Also, it has often happened that the then-current theory of poetics has excluded a contemporary poet from gaining exposure or approval, but a change in the next generation will rescue the poet's work and acclaim it to the skies. If Kenner is championing Marcus, then I would scarcely say he is being buried, but rather resurrected. Fashions do come and go. Cabals die off. In the end it is the poems that count most.

Also, having done some work with writing computer programs for generating language, I would greatly doubt that true randomness could result in effective poetry, however long it was allowed to run. Marcus must have had some sense of words and meaning, however peculiar it may have been.

I am especially interested in the question of editorial intervention, asked above. If Marcus was actually a random word generator, then he can't claim much credit for it.

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 21 June 2005 21:14 (9 years ago) Permalink

A little further reading would show that the amazing Ashton Marcus did not exist except as a hoax cooked up especially for that thread.

oh i was aware

I mentioned it for the benefit of others who would not know the thread. I think the OP was probably paying a somewhat casual homage to Jorge Luis Borges.

i can't even write posts that good about stuff that is real

i am especially fond of the indignation over the "language poetry cabal," as if more than 0.01% of the US population knew who charles bernstein was.

any phenomenological model that challenges their wittgensteinian premises is as threatening to the people who lord over the canon as "fascism or antisemitism"

just fwiw, i googled ashton martin one sentence into reading that post & the first result both disproves aimless's assertion about randomly generated language's poetic limitations, & vindicates ts smelliot's critical appraisal of marcus & the lyricism of his brutal & abstract language collisions-

Ashton Marcus (@AshtonMMarcus) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/ashtonmmarcus
The latest Tweets from Ashton Marcus (@AshtonMMarcus). PR/Social Media. Fashion+Beauty Addict. World Explorer. Fun Lover. Girl Power Enthusiast. Passion ...

twitter bots definitely produce some compelling poetry, although it's not, strictly speaking, randomly generated

fwiw aimless was right that ashton marcus's writing most likely wouldn't have been random either. smelliot says he couldn't "think in language" and yet he spent 15 hours a day wrestling with it. most likely he would have had some highly idiosyncratic way of relating to text, maybe one that critics couldn't access, but not something.

*not nothing

aim less
tree ship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNP-Wkgcyz4

ha ha

just fwiw, i googled ashton martin

Jon "What did I do now?" Dipshit, cease addressing me, or you *will* sequentially meet me and Brooklyn pavement.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I see what you did there