Rob Angeli
Bio
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
There are tears of things, and mortal objects touch the mind.
-Virgil Aeneid I.462
Stories (164)
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All About Goats. Content Warning.
GOATHERD CONTESTANTS both —Why do we not oh Mopsy you and I good fellows both convene together, you to blow the reeds and I to beat the verses: here in the mixed grove to sit between hazels and elms recording the cruel extinction of Daphnis that the nymphs enact weeping the various mourners’ rites with hazels and brooklets bearing testimonial witness?
By Rob Angeli3 years ago in Fiction
Sketch: Millennial Rage
Sketch again (Millennial rage the newest hottest voices): A present generation now of shepherd youth learning the ropes of herdsmanship, so spending lots of time singing songs and recanting incantations contemporary to their forbears that told infectious gossip about the newest hottest voices recollected in Past Song Fame. This once passed as the very definition of craftsmanship. They mourned the silence of the songbreakers so jaded and sick with plaints so sick of love thus no longer lovesick, reed-breakers, aulos-smashers, tibia crushers, flesh and blood and bone, and others gone with these reallocated land portions bringing many a Chloe and a Lycidas from the countryside into being city dwellers after being shoved out of their own fields and robbed by the Government of their precious Herds: thus runs progress and the industrial revolution and the august Caesars and all the rest. They would reflect on past tradition, the dead departed and those who ceased to sing and poetize for whatever reason, and recite their now-classic songs: success as seasons and as the seasons flow a series, they will renew, every present tense being cast of leaf and trunk and flowery field or grassy slope, succession without transition, a world of dead campestral memories, crying for next generation’s resurrection, like the seasons, the blooming, and the snow, in spiral plant sex orgies and hibernation, a texture of rampant rhizomes, there is no break in the Daisy-Chain: they observed Nature, and sang about What they saw via the marvel of mammalian senses, they were animists, decanting the vintage of leaf and trunk and fur and tooth, and sweet heat of mating season, in normalcy or inverted form, in season or just when-fuckin-ever in whatever place, whatever flower grove or bower; eternal fields not in being everlasting but in repeating themselves in degree of succession which was the resurrection in nature or in culture and not just the sentimental revival but Daphnis himself in his fragmentary songs preserved only as quotations in other writers and Rosalind’s invaluable and green-thumbed gardening tips she who was popularly called the Green Reaper (by apellation contrôlée) in the Thessalonically Heliconoid domaine she once in olden days would haunt (a dream-realm with gorgeously painted sceneries between the Tagus and the Euphrates in Euboican Hesperidicana land, New World, until she moved to Sicily with her Syracusan boyfriend in a paradise for good sheep and meek pastors once they get over Love and focus on the Works and the Days, and other useful agricultural DIY manuals: profligate in the land of Kent A Golden Aged Return (the Return on which many departed Herdsman rhythmed their strophes, the hoped-for Homecoming, fitting Subject, and all for the Season) expectant of the Green Thumb or the Reaper and the sexy sacred youth and maidenhead repeatedly reinvigorated tho constantly mowed down w/the sweeping swipe of that sickle.
By Rob Angeli3 years ago in Fiction
Arcadia in a Sicilian Painting
ARCADIA in a Sicilian Painting It was a thick grove of white poplars, flowering thorns and intricate thickets, in which a thousand amorous vines intertwined, and with tight lacing enwound. In the fields, that could be seen at a little distance, it seems that Mistress Nature wanted the earth to compete with the beauty of the stars of the sky by the variety of Her panoply of flowers. And it was there that the Springtime of the Fables unrolled Her painted carpets, for the gardens of Jupiter: or not otherwise than in the great stained-glass windows of variegated squares and triangles and such in mosaic, all seen in vast swaths of undulating change, and the sunflowers beam on the meadow.
By Rob Angeli3 years ago in Fiction
Redistribution of Land
REDISTRIBUTION OF LAND Roman Civil War(s) and the Pax Augustae [American Civil War and the Pax Romana]: Empire and Public Things: moveable herds and the great epochs of Manifest Shepherding, pumped-up by state funds, said to be truly destined. Elizabethan land redistributed, this dear dear land laid out for lease, rearrangement after the punishment pains of civil rebellion musketeers. Newly owned, the pastoral lay improved, and the wool industry booming once again. Cattle ranchers and shepherds, the war between—Spain and Britain and France—now a New World—Colonialization or the colonization by colonials, by apportioning, lot by lot, this Land, let out to lease like a tenement, carved out to...whom? the highest bidders? the favorites of the Chieftain? Beautiful for spacious skies. Can you still see the herdsmen with their droves of llamas and alpacas making their way past the potato-fields? What adjunct of grekkish-latino roots in English: relation with the Romances. America the Beautiful. What Republic? it seemed Manifest Destiny to be named TERRA NOSTRA ‘cause this land is your land, this land is my land, public lands in public hands, the seed and semen of the Feudal Way, Privates in Private hands: what private redistribution exploits as resource? but what’s the use of protest delimiting serfdoms. Your land and my land. Now it is I who sit here and play my reed in peace, and it is you who will have to go into urban exile. But we will switch places and roles, each in turn. But then again not a one of us owns this land on the contrary this dear land owns us all and is the ultimate devourer who will at last eat us up in great mouthfuls O devouring earth will swallow us up all for one and one for all which is why there will always be must always be someone to versify.
By Rob Angeli3 years ago in Fiction
The Great Sherry Heist. Content Warning.
The Great Sherry Heist: brings to sunny Cadiz the merry band of Whisk[e]y Hipsters (unaware of Tudor porn-shops). More Drakeries: man on man action surrounding the pretext of a plot involving the Sack of Cadiz (in so many ways).
By Rob Angeli3 years ago in Fiction
