A blackout sonnet made from pages 2-3 of Moby Dick

Say, you are in the country; land of lakes.
Take to there the most absent-minded of men
plunged in his deepest reveries—on his legs,
if water be in all that region.

a metaphysical artist. He desires
the dreamiest, shadiest most enchanting bit
thus tranced, though pine-tree shakes down its sighs
eye fixed upon the magic stream fore him.

Why did he need a trip to Rockaway Beach?
Why s every boys soul crazy to go to sea?
Why d Persians hold the sea holy? Why d the Greeks?
Surely this is not without meaning.

Narcissus drowns in oceans. this is key.
Now, I am in the habit of going to sea.

This one is pretty bad! Melville is using self-consciously romantic, fussy language here, whose ironic spark, if it had one, is killed dead by the sonnet ray. The volley of questions that comes afterwards makes for more interesting poetry.

I am fond of blackout sonnets. Here is one I made from about the first page of Moby Dick:

Some years ago— having nothing on shore
I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever its November in my soul;
when I find my coffin knocking — I account

This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
I take to ship. Manhattoes, belted round
by wharves as Indian isles by coral
surround her waterward extreme down-town

where noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled
by breezes, out of sight, look at the crowds
the city dreamy Sabbath afternoon
like silent sentinels all around the town

look oer extremest limit of the land
as nigh the water as they possibly can

It's a fun word game that incentivizes a certain kind of close reading. I don't prioritize transforming the themes or narrative, but that could be a fun challenge.

Sorry, I'm too lazy to preserve the blackout format on this website. Too many html strikethroughs!

I heard about this on Garbage Day . (The quote is theirs, too.) Random, unfiltered iPhone videos, 2009-2012.

Some wordpresses by Cambridge classicists:
Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS), and its sequel Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems (VIEWS).

There's some conlang stuff too -- I found them via their post about the pictograms in Alien was recently dug up by The Rec Center.

Through VIEWS I found their friend the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets -- maybe my favorite page I found mucking around that day.

I met her at the NW Photo Center zine fair. I liked some of her porch portraits, and her still lifes (Jay Day's House).
As I paged through high school photos in her latest visual memoir project, she said "I was grunge before grunge."
Website is flikr and bandcamp and an interesting resume in 90s publishing.

A short story in the transmasculine fanfiction metatext subgenre, about being a slave to the algorithm. Distressing!

A "newspaper" that answers the question, what if one woman made her own personal local section of The Onion every week for 21 years? I love someone who can commit to a bit that much. JMN reminds me of Friday Night in West Ealing and You, single-page, weekly zines that I read when I was in Australia. Both of those are super offline and unavailable in the US so I'm stoked to find a similar-ish offering via tumblr and email. The weekly Poetry Corner also gives me the vibes of Nancy Kangas, who did joke poems and cartoons in Muse magazine when I was a kid (and went on to teach poetry to kids). I've been walking around all weekend tormenting my loved ones with read alouds.

Tie-in website for a John Oliver bit. Saving for posterity.

An intriguing museum-studies-adjacent academic article about T. Rex based legal conflicts.

An introductory spec fic reading list courtesy of Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors. I can vouch for the excellence of The Disposessed and Amatka, and The Calcutta Chromosome is great so far.