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Matthew King

@cincinnatusc.bsky.social

390 followers 310 following 860 posts

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane birdsandbeesandblooms.com

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 2d

Pic of the week: Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower
birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/10/13/s...

Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower

Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower. Photo taken near Marmora, Ontario. Copyright Matthew King. E-mail [email protected] to inquire concerning use or purchase.

birdsandbeesandblooms.com

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 1d

I'm really not sure anyone has ever been a greater genius at anything in baseball than Josh Naylor is at stealing bases

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 1d

Eddie Zosky??

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 2d

It's the Crow and the buffalo of Lear's Radical Hope, except these guys can vote for people who promise to make the buffalo never go away

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 2d

I don't think you fully appreciate what a political problem carbon emission reduction is unless you spend a weekend in the country and see how many gasoline and diesel motors guys fire up in a day
For these guys threatening to take away their fossil fuels is pretty much cultural genocide

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 2d

Pic of the week: Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower
birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/10/13/s...

Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower

Striped Sweat Bee with Cosmos Flower. Photo taken near Marmora, Ontario. Copyright Matthew King. E-mail [email protected] to inquire concerning use or purchase.

birdsandbeesandblooms.com

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 4d

"Man Wearing Baseball Cap at Coffee Shop"

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 4d

Ok ok I am now the poet laureate of your nephews and cousins and I am not familiar with the lid on my brain ha ha yeah sorry for not throwing five innings in relief--perfect I will get there by giving up on a true friend of mine obvs I had to put my finger in a few things to say I KNOW the Bulgarian

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 7d

Anyway, one of those things I probably would have tuned into back in the old magazine rack days (which for me ended right around the time this was becoming a thing), ah well

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 7d

But I'd venture (among other things) even talking about the possibility of nuke use, incl the need to do stuff to prevent it--which used to mean left-coded hippie protests, now means right-coded airstrikes etc.--makes some people feel like nothing else (incl climate change) is really that big a deal

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 7d

When the possibility of nuke use in Russia/Ukraine became a hot issue I felt like there's some inclination in some people to be ok with nuke use because it makes a lot of other problems--especially climate change--irrelevant
In some way these things must be related but hard to say how

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 7d

Somehow did not know until today that concern with catastrophic electromagnetic pulses, from either nukes or the sun, more or less explicitly as opposed to concern with climate change, became a right-coded thing 1-2 decades ago (linked article is from 2016, to be clear)

pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

Conservative media sustain alarm about a possible electromagnetic-pulse catastrophe

National Review and others emphasize an “existential threat” in an EMP from a high-altitude nuclear burst—but solar activity stirs the fear too.

pubs.aip.org

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 7d

Went out to find one of my feeders empty but for an acorn, can only suppose a blue jay wishes to trade me this fine acorn for some seeds

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 8d

Pic of the week: Drinking Up the Cosmos
birdsandbeesandblooms.com/2025/10/06/d...

Drinking Up the Cosmos

Drinking Up the Cosmos: photo of bumblebee in pink cosmos flower taken near Marmora, Ontario. Copyright Matthew King. E-mail [email protected] to inquire concerning use or purchase.

birdsandbeesandblooms.com

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 8d

Happy to be back in the place where there is talking about strawberries all of the time, with three light? dark? poems about squirrels and chipmunks, including one stupid chipmunk

talking-time.bsky.social @talking-time.bsky.social · 9d

The sixth day of our fifteenth issue includes new poetry by Lavana Kray, Matthew King and Rushika G. Ramani, and The art of writing #121: an interview with Sheila Murphy
talkingaboutstrawberries.blogspot.com

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 9d

The faint disappointment of discovering the microbrew bottles you've been using an opener on are actually twist-offs

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 9d

A very good team, man.

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 9d

Mmyup

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

When you see the odd European hornet around here you get why God says he's gonna send hornets ahead of the Israelites to drive out their enemies, being used to our native bald-faced hornets you're like eh that's not so tough

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

The one death-trap paper topic I ever offered (among others, nobody took it) was: is Aristotle right that there can be no knowledge of unique individuals? (I thought somebody might want to say "*I'm* a unique individual and *I* know me!")

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

And then on the other hand "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", which I see is the translation of Nagel's title, really takes the question of what it's like to be a bat right off the rails, you'd think the French would all be pragmatists talking like that

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

It struck me recently that the English idiom "what is it like", which we use where other languages more usually use "how is it" equivalents to ask about natures of things, just casually unreflectively gets at Plato's whole problem about "forms": things are what they are in relation to other things

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

I say "was" because prose has obviously largely ceded that ground, but not entirely: years ago I saw Rick Salutin saying, re another columnist saying they hadn't written on some topic bc they hadn't decided what they thought about it yet, that that's exactly why he wants to write about something

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

In the tradition going back at least to Montaigne, that was an, if not the most, important thing about writing essays. In both form (as I was saying at the other place a year or two ago) and content, over the last century+, poetry has taken over what used to be the higher terrains of prose.

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

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.”

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 10d

Ok this ad I just heard with a guy talking about tooth senSITivity pretty much confirms the suspicion I've been developing the last couple of years that it's now a thing for words in ads to be pronounced weird to get your attention