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In the House of the Hangman 1327

Yes, you’ve become new / Yes, you delete / How text and image confront each other / To see and think acquire byproducts / You say here / A pause in flora / The detachable head / I am here now / A pause with fauna / Pulverized / With and without safety / Awake / … / This little pill dissolves and distributes itself … / Nothing is costly when money isn’t applicable / / You know what that means / You are sparkly sparkly / … / The sound of a rotary phone / Then its downloaded ringtone / … / / (Hyphenated for your pleasure) / One cycle includes all the content you’ll ever need / A scarf in a box / A tongue in the mouth / You corrupt the billboard by paying it no mind / But the font remains a seduction / I’ll steer away from the sentence and off the storyline altogether / There’s enough furniture to let you know you’re in a room / … / The balding of an empire approaches / Proceed with undauntitude. It’s the Hegel age – you know it and I know it. It’s been the Hegel age for the past 200 hundred years, but only recently have we come to realize that in all the recent attempts to “overcome Kant” there is no overcoming Kant like the Hegelian overcoming of Kant. Thus Hegel is back (because he never left). But the problem with Hegel is, well, he’s too Hegelian –I mean, when Carmen Electra sings “I’ve got a bigger dick than you,” she’s not speaking literally, right? (Someone asked her, and she said, “No”). This is a story that won’t get lasting attention because of the small number of dead workers, but the roof collapsed in a Cambodian shoe factory, killing 2 workers and injuring at least 9 others. As Jalal Al-I Ahmad put it, about 50 years ago, “I speak of ‘occidentosis’ as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it. Let us seek a diagnosis or this complaint and its causes – and, if possible, its cure.” There is sometimes a miniscule playing card on the floor, it is facedown & blue with stars and you will never turn it over. To complain of money will ruin your conversation; if you do not complain of money there is probably something wrong with your life. Perhaps you should call money “green zinnias.” “For a few hundred more green zinnias …” You sap. If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language games lose some of their importance, while others become more important. Deer polish their antlers on fruit trees, like a human polishing apples on hir hair. Human hair hung from the lowest limb will keep out the deer. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. Where was I … and the river ripe with messages in corked vials (an old one of mine for Kansas still kicking — hope it makes it through the dam), veer along that hacksaw ridge, through a floppy pack of crows, and up into the vedas, the agrapha and jive, huh’s and sleeptalk, stupid questions, wrong directions, goodbyes at the stations, over slang slicks, past the Cellini cluster (the well-oiled flurry in a dark alley that paralyzed thieves), suitcases and silos full, hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo stirring gravel in kames, burps after passenger pigeon, sounds only Mavis Staples makes, last words, casual dismissals, calling dogs, summing ups (the hairball got ’em).

[Note: Sources: Niko Vassilakis, “deceive yourself further”, FB post, 16 May 013; JBR, but see Geof Huth, FB post, 16 May 013 (“The word ‘dauntitude’ has just been used. — at Society of American Archivists” (Geof tells me it was used [by Jackie Dooley] in a moment of goofiness …)); : Mikhail Emelianov, “How to Fake Your Way Through Hegel”, at Perverse Egalitarianism, 9 Jun 012, via Aindriu Macfehin, FB post, 16 May 013; JBR, but see next; Sarah Kurchak, and Carmen Electra, as quoted in Kurchak’s “Carmen Electra’s Got a Bigger Dick Than You”, at Noisey/Vice, 16 May 013; Erik Loomis, “Cambodian Shoe Factory Collapse”, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, 16 May 013; JBR, but see next; Jalal Al-I Ahmad, OCCIDENTOSIS: A Plague From the West (tr. R. Campbell), at Multiworld; Alice Notley, “The Prophet”, Ron Silliman, Ketjak, Mary Ruefle, “The Beautiful Is Negative”, Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Merrill Gilfillan, “Mouth of the Whosis”, as quoted in John Latta, “Wrong”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 16 May 013]

Guy Debord Limited Edition Action Figure Giveaway (UK only, but still ...)

Reblogged from Rhizome (Hat tip to Sam):

To mark the launch of McKenzie Wark's new book The Spectacle of Disintegration, Verso Books have offered Rhizome readers in the UK a chance to win a 3D printed Guy Debord action figure.

3D-printed Guy Debord action figures (2012). Produced by McKenzie Wark, design by Peer Hansen, with technical assistance by Rachel L.

The figure is part of a limited edition run of 200 made by Wark, who was inspired to delve into maker culture because of Debord's own investment in craft as evidenced in the twelve handcrafted issues of Internationale Situationniste. (You can read more about this in Brendan Byrne's recent interview with Wark on Rhizome). It's important to note that you can also make your own Debord figure based on Wark's 3D model, which will be released under a Creative Commons license.

The questions, which were supplied by Verso, are after the jump. They are not to be taken lightly...

The prize will go to first person with all correct answers to the quiz below.  Two runners up will receive a complimentary copy of the book. The competition is open to UK residents only; entrants must email [enquiries AT verso.co.uk]. Please put SPECTACLE COMPETITION in the subject line or your entry may not be counted.

1.The Critique of Everyday Life is a seminal book that opened up a whole line of critical thinking about the small, everyday situations outside of the factory walls and beyond the official political sphere. Who wrote it, and in what year was it first published?

2. McKenzie Wark calls the experience of the everyday in our time the disintegrating spectacle. He is adding a fourth kind of spectacle to the three described by Guy Debord. Writing in the 60s, Debord thought both sides of the cold war were just variants of spectacle. Later, he thought that states such as France and Italy had combined elements of both into a third kind. What were the names Debord gave to these three variants?

3. The Surrealist leader André Breton wrote a poem, published after World War II, dedicated to the famous utopian writer Charles Fourier. Breton’s poem starts out with the narrator noticing a flower placed beneath his statue. During the Occupation, the Germans melted it down to use the copper for munitions. On which Paris street was that statue?

4. Debord’s comrade Raoul Vaneigem was rather more influenced by Surrealism, and via Surrealism by Charles Fourier, than some other Situationists. He even edited a paperback edition of Fourier’s ‘queer theory’ manuscript, The New Amorous World. What was the name of the Fourier-inspired utopia Vaneigem wrote about in 2005?

5. The great art historian T. J. Clark, who was briefly a member of the Situationist International, once recalled a demonstration in London which found him on the steps of the National Gallery in London. He and his friend debated there which painting within they would feel obliged to consign to the flames should the people ever storm through those illustrious portals. The masterpiece that Clark would have chosen was painted by whom?

6. The Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti pulled off a stunning prank in Italy, by publishing The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy. Purporting to be from some insider to ruling circles or someone cognizant of ruling opinion, it argued that there was no harm in admitting Communists into government, as the Communists were not a revolutionary party, but were already acting in the interests of power in keeping workers in line. Under what name was the Real Report issued?

7. Next to Guy Debord, René Viénet is the best known Situationist film maker. His détourned films have a lightness and charm all of their own. His film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? uses a martial arts film as its raw material, and by gently moving a few minutes of film around and dubbing the actor’s voices into French, Viénet turns it into a critique of the Stalinization of the left during ’68. Who directed the film on which Can Dialectics Break Bricks? is based?

8. Debord’s ‘70s films Society of the Spectacle and Refutation of All Judgmentswere a quantum leap forward in complexity over his earlier cinema work, in part due to the resources of his new patron, Gerard Lebovici. Who was the film editor with whom Debord worked on these films, and who was the other famous French director with whom she worked?

9. Besides being Guy Debord’s second wife, Alice Becker-Ho wrote some very interesting books on the influence of Romani language on the ‘jargon’ of the dangerous classes, and as an important source for words not only in French but in other European languages. According to her glossary of jargon, what is the meaning of the word ‘baron’?

10. Besides his many accomplishments in the arts of writing, editing, cinema, and revolution, Guy Debord was also a game designer. On the writings of which military theorist did he claim to have based The Game of War?

11. Who was the member of the Situationist International who thought the SI should attempt détournements of porn and comics? Who praised Latin American militants for taking over an electronic BBS system? Who advocated fake issues of well-known periodicals? Who thought any militant thinker should be as capable of making a film as writing an article?

12. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale had the holograph manuscript of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle on display for a while. Did that manuscript and other items from Debord’s papers end up being sold by Alice Becker-Ho to the Beinecke, or somewhere else?

In the House of the Hangman 1326

I suspect that Latour himself didn’t think this is what the principle of irreduction means. After all, all of his actual analyses speak against this as he perpetually carries out reductions. What does Latour actually say? He says, “[n]othing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (The Pasteurization of France, 158). It’s the second part of the proposition that’s important. When he refuses reduction he’s challenging bad sociology. Like the mathematician, he’s saying you have to show your work. Somewhere or other he gives Freudian dream interpretation as an example of virtuous reduction. What’s good about a Freudian dream interpretation? It shows all the transformations (the dream-work) that lead from the dream-thought to the manifest content of the dream. It doesn’t just say “dream x means y”, but shows how the thought or repressed desire gets elaborated into y. Similarly, in the domain of Marxist social theory, it’s not enough to say “capitalism causes r”. You have to show all the mediations and mechanisms by which we get from the dynamics of capitalism to a particular social phenomenon. We have to show our work. As you gaze at the flowers its molecules yawn. You flick away the cigarette, take out a flask, swig, hand it to Blanchot. Still have a key to this place? you ask. Whiskey sprays from Blanchot’s nose, he guffawing, doubled-over choked. Klein was an artist and an expert in Judo, another variety of falling. He stated to have once claimed the Earth’s atmosphere by signing his autograph on the sky. In 1960, Klein leapt out of a window. Most admirable is the individual bicycling along obliviously in the background of the famous photograph, potentially an allusion to Breughel’s (if it’s Breughel’s) “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”; you know the Auden poem. Once, while vomiting repeatedly, McCarthy stuck a Barbie doll up his own rectum, and so on, until the audience had reached its threshold. They all left. (Grad students had to clean up the room, BTW, which must have been grand.) But we pick up the thread again and find that Solito, the former Anuncio, was “oh to Anuncia’s ah.” Or, as Petrarch had it, in 27, I worked in a museum   but got the sack           for writing poems       about Iraq / & reprimanded on trains / I – a harper in a harp trio from Harpenden – / All the outrage that can be mustered          worked up       then wiped off / & abundant                     in town planners & waxed lemons … [a thousands-year old Mayan pyramid was just bulldozed in Belize because a developer wanted gravel for a road …] He did, Graham, but later he came to a slightly different position: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living -- especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.” I mean, “In Star Trek: Enterprise, a 4th season 3-episode arc dealt with Dr. Arik Soong and his augmented test tube children that were remnants from the 1990s Eugenics War. An augment named Udar was shunned by his siblings because he didn’t possess all of the same superior abilities that the rest were engineered with. He was nicknamed Smike by because of his perceived shortcomings and was eventually killed by his ‘brother’ Malik in the episode “Cold Station 12”. Udar was played by actor Kaj-Erik Eriksen, and Dr. Arik Soong was played by Special Guest Star Brent Spiner.”

[Note: Sources: Levi R Bryant, “Latour’s Principle of Irreduction”, at Larval Subjects, 15 May 013; Garrett Strickland, “Limitary”, at HTMLGIANT, 15 May 013; Sean Lovelace, “The Art of Falling”, as quoted in Christopher Higgs, “Authors on Artists: Sean Lovelace on Falling”, at Bright Stupid Confetti, 15 May 013; JBR; Paul E Nelson, and Nathaniel Mackey, Anuncio’s Last Love Song, as quoted in Nelson’s “Notes on Anuncio’s Last Love Song (Nate Mackey)”, at Paul E Nelson, 15 May 013; JBR, but see next; Petrarch, “27” (tr. Tim Atkins), in Petrarch; JBR (I saw this numerous places but didn’t note them …); JBR, but see next; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (tr. EB Ashton); JBR, but see next; Wikipedia entry for Nicholas Nickleby (hat tip to Graham Jefcoate, to whom I was also speaking about Adorno)]

In the House of the Hangman 1325

Itzok you are not making me dizzy you are making me a dangerous / light bulb there are two octosyllabics but don’t disperse yourself / over the language don’t disperse yourself with such a force / that the language actually disperses itself / the language here is a very ANCIENT clay / you’re skidding the brakes you’re a hat but I need no hat / because I’m directly in this bright hallway this ought to be / the description of the situation but that’s not what this is all about / and yet it is exactly what this is all about / The tense is uncertain: the changes that occur in the dream are like the flushes of color that pass through the skin of a dying fish or over the face of an enraged person / No matter whom we asked, no one could tell us the composition of dirt. We were the sum of mirror splashes, running water, clay silt, and heavy nocturnal words (we are you) on whose spherical surfaces the crystalline sweat of a file of moons stood out like an August wind marching through gardens / But doesn’t visibility block our view? / A cloud hurries as it calms the speed of mountains / I will begin walking through your body soon / It is a long walk, I promise / I will be quiet / as a Discovery Channel gladiator / slave awarded wooden freedom sword / refusing it to plunge / back into sex star status / How does sand feel about insects / as companions? / [She] / revealed to me / her bliss / by the blue fluid / that fell from her mouth / Looking at the sea / you always say: / Kanchenjunga / You observe birds for hours, I even caught you / working out their nervous / birdy hops (you explained to me later that it is / good for a stiff spine) / Something like the calm rush / of a slow winter descent into Keflavik / after a rough flight, when the night / turns to night but the sun is a sliver / on the lip of the horizon. When the city / is the base for what looks to be / the crabbed face of the Sea of Tranquility / “You’re not stagnating,” “it’s for a purpose,” “they spelled your name right,” “rut,” “hell,” “middle of nowhere,” “best friend,” “strumpet,” “poser,” “should I stay or should I go,” “do you ever fucking think of me at all,” “sez who,” “is there a GOD,” “sex” (Player 1) and “you haven’t given up,” “there is a roof over your head,” “this”, “pet,” “couch,” “lookout point,” “do I think too much,” “did I look stupid,” “did anyone notice,” “did anyone notice,” “did I look stupid,” “why do I think so much,” “are we there yet,” “space” (Player 2) / Our skin melts, so anyone can look into anyone’s intestines. Toilets also overflow in dreams … Now, I throw salt at you — what little is left of you — / map, blowback, direction, matches, viscosity, molten, liquid, rings, rays, salt, coal, flowers, copper, earth, brick, chart, pressure, tissues, volcanic, feathers, hair, permabuilt, sun, buckle, built (the story in her ear), north, magnetic seas, clay sand and silt, sediment, fractures, cave formation, orogeny, plate tectonics / They, singing, dancing, wind. Words / Dust, sky. Dream. She. Threads / necklace clamp. Waist, neck, an hour, / air, time leaves, the lake, tree / bark, her left hand, blue, belly, bosom / A halo, the master, hats, things, / tasks, foreheads, smugglers, highway / face, hand, footsteps, a stone, the earth, / the gold boxcar / Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed / Adrenaline-drenched on a bench at Waikiki calls in airstrike on imaginary phone. The youngish man in Bob Marley shirt at Zippy’s carries a cane; a scar runs below his right ear down to his shoulder. (Lyndon Johnson’s appendectomy.) But for the tourists, no low-tech genocide museum. The bucolic field that once was Dachau, before Dachau became the local industry. The first symptom of PTSD is often a TRO / The woman on the 30-year pile of refuse was naked, surrounded by cat corpses / This past is sampled and is again / The right one, the one they choose for you at amazon.com, given your history of commodity fetishism / What remains is husk; there are vats of it in the markets, promising a cure to the disease that sits atop your tongue / But now you can talk back / A man with a lantern buried the tail of a gored ox in reddened wool / Now, 34 is presented as [a copyrighted] “instinctive scribble.” It wasn’t the copyright, it was the technology, that stopped me from cutnpasting it in to this poem.

[Note: Sources: Tomaž Šalamun, “World Touch Venice” in “Good Day, Itzok”, in On the Tracks of Wild Game, Barbara Einzig, Distance Without Distance, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Chinese Sun (tr. Evgeny Pavlov), Lyn Hejinian, the book of a thousand eyes, as quoted in TC Marshall, “CATS IN THEIR HATS: a review of six books”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Sandy Macintosh, “On the Shinnecock Canal”, as quoted in Neal de la Flor, “Cemetery Chess: Selected and New Poems by Sandy McIntosh”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; JBR; Discovery Channel … sex star status and Stephanie Strickland, Zone : Zero, Elizabeth Robinson, Counterpart, as quoted in Djelloul Marbrook, “Ahsahta, rising to the challenges”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; JBR; Gregor Wroblewski , “KANCHENJUNGA”, “IF SHE WAS STILL SIPPING WINE WITH YOU”, as quoted in EE Nobbs, “A Marzipan Factory – new and selected poems by Gregor Wroblewski, translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Richard Lopez, “Reykjavik”, as quoted in Eileen Tabios, “THE GRAPEVINE by Richard Lopez”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Genevieve Kaplan and Marjorie Tesser, as quoted in Kaplan’s “The Important Thing is...Card Game by Marjorie Tesser”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Kim Hyesoon, “When the Plug Gets Unplugged”, in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, as quoted in Judith Roitman, “THREE BOOKS by KIM HYESOON, Trans. by Don Mee Choi”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Carrie Hunter, “the precipice of jupiter by erica lewis & mark stephen finein”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Carrie Hunter, “The Recitation of Forgetting by Franck André Jamme”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Susan M Schultz, as quoted in Eileen Tabios, “Memory Cards by Susan M. Schultz”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Eric Baus, “Gored Ox”, as quoted in rob mclennan, “Scared Text by Eric Baus”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; Eileen Tabios, “ITEMS by Tom Jenks”, at Galatea Resurrects 20; JBR]

GALATEA RESURRECTS #20 (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT) is up. Read my review of the wonderful Sandra Simonds

... is fresh!  You can see the entire issue at http://galatearesurrection20.blogspot.com/ .  I'll also cutnpaste the Table of Contents below for your convenience.

Happy Reading!

Eileen Tabios

Editor, Galatea Resurrects

GR #20 Table of Contents

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION  

By Eileen Tabios   

NEW REVIEWS  

T.C. MARSHALL reviews CHINESE SUN by Arkadii Dragomoschenko; DISTANCE WITHOUT DISTANCE by Barbara Einzig; THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND EYES by Lyn Hejinian; ON THE TRACKS OF WILD GAME by Tomaž Šalamun; THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS OF ORPHANED ALGEBRA by Eileen Tabios and j/j hastain; and ON THE PLANET WITHOUT VISA: SELECTED POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS, AD 1960-2012 by Sotère Torregian  

Neil de la Flor reviews CEMETERY CHESS: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS by Sandy McIntosh  

Eileen Tabios engages MERIDIAN by Kathleen Jesme  

Laura Madeline Wisemen reviews SALEM IN SÉANCE by Susana H. Case  

Djelloul Marbrook reviews Ahsahta Press and seven of its books: GALLOWGLASS by Susan Tichy; WORK FROM MEMORY by Dan Beachy-Quick; THE LAST 4 THINGS by Kate Greenstreet; ZONE: ZERO by Stephanie Strickland; PLEASURE by Brian Teare; SANCTA by Andrew Grace; and COUNTERPART by Elizabeth Robinson  

Eileen Tabios engages CLARITY AND OTHER POEMS by Thomas Fink  

j/j hastain engages  AFTER SWANN  with text by Marthe Reed, animation by Yeon Choi and music by joshua carro. Directed and produced by Keith Horwick  

E.E. Nobbs reviews A MARZIPAN FACTORY—NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Grzegorz Wroblewski, translated byAdam Zdrodowski  

Eileen Tabios engages THE ROMANCES AND OTHER POEMS by Micah Cavaleri  

Tom Beckett reviews RECALCULATING by Charles Bernstein  

Rhoda Rosenfeld and Edric Mesmer engage SEVEN CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES AND OBITUARY 2004. THE JOY OF COOKING by Tan Lin  

Eileen Tabios engages ROUNDING THE HUMAN by Linda Hogan  

Patrick James Dunagan reviews WESTERN PRACTICE by Stephen Motika  

Carrie Hunter engages MERRY HELL by Sara Larsen  

Thomas Fink reviews “ONLY TO PRY”, a poem in TINY GOLD DRESS by John Godfrey  

Eileen Tabios engages THE GRAPEVINE by Richard Lopez  

Neil Leadbeater reviews THE WHITE MUSEUM by George Bilgere  

Genevieve Kaplan reviews THE IMPORTANT THING IS … CARD GAME by Marjorie Tesser  

Eileen Tabios engages WAXWINGS by Daniel Nathan Terry  

Neil Leadbeater reviews THE LOST COUNTRY OF SIGHT by Neil Aitken  

Judy Roitman reviews three books by Kim Hyesoon, all translated by Don Mee Choi: ALL THE GARBAGE OF THE WORLD UNITE, MOMMY MUST BE A FOUNTAIN OF FEATHERS, and PRINCESS ABANDONED  

Eileen Tabios engages RENEGADE // HEART by Lisa M. Cole   

Melissa Fry Beasley reviews ELVIS PRESLEY’S HIPS & MICK JAGGER’S LIPS by Susana H. Case  

Eileen Tabios engages BRUSHSTROKES AND GLANCES by Djelloul Marbrook  

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews WARSAW BIKINI and MOTHER WAS A TRAGIC GIRL, both by Sandra Simonds  

Eileen Tabios engages ALL THIS FALLING AWAY by Tim Armentrout  

Neil Leadbeater reviews EDGE EFFECTS by Jan Conn  

Eileen Tabios engages ARSENIC LOBSTER: POETRY JOURNAL 2013, Issues 26, 27 & 28, Editor Susan Yountz  

Carrie Hunter engages THE PRECIPICE OF JUPITER by erica lewis and mark stephen finein  

Carrie Hunter engages THE RECITATION OF FORGETTING by Franck André Jamme  

Eileen Tabios engages MEMORY CARDS by Susan M. Schultz  

rob mclennan reviews SCARED TEXT by Eric Baus  

Eileen Tabios engages THE BODY DOUBLE: A LONG POEM by Jared Harel  

G.E. Schwartz reviews LIFE SENTENCES: APHORISMS & REFLECTIONS by Michael Perkins  

Eileen Tabios engages IN MIXED COMPANY by Caleb Puckett & Friends, edited by Walter Ruhlmann and co-edited by Caleb Puckett  

Jeff Harrison engages THE MORPHINE POEMS by Bobbi Lurie  

Sally Deskins reviews SPRUNG by Laura Madeline Wiseman  

Eileen Tabios engages WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish  

Neil Leadbeater reviews LIFE’S A BEACH by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan  

Eileen Tabios engages AT THE TURNING OF THE LIGHT, VISIBLE BONES and ONE BIRD FALLING, all by CB Follett  

jim mccrary reviews BLAME FAULT MOUNTAIN by Spencer Selby  

Eileen Tabios engages MODULATIONS, ADDENDA and THE READER, all by Márton Koppány  

Nicholas T. Spatafora engages LAST CALL AT THE TIN PALACE by Paul Pines and PRESENT TENSE by Anna Rabinowitz  

Eileen Tabios engages PRIOR by James Berger

Eileen Tabios engages ITEMS by Tom Jenks  

ESSAY  

“Getting Past the ‘Lyric Block’ & the Individual as Ego: Poetic Method in John Clarke’s In the Analogy” by Bruce Holsapple  

FEATURED POET … IN ILOCANO!  

Luisa A. Igloria  

FEATURED POET ... IN TAGALOG!

Joi Barrios

REVIEW OF A REVIEW  

Richard Kostelanetz engages Thomas Fink’s review of Fict/ions and This Sentence  

THE CRITICS WRITE POEMS  

Djelloul Marbrook  

Melissa Fry Beasley  

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE  

Kenneth Warren reviews BIBLIODEATH: MY ARCHIVES WITH LIFE IN FOOTNOTES by Andrei Codrescu

Lea Graham reviews VICTORY AND HER OPPOSITES by Amy England  

Amaranth Borsuk reviews FRACTAL ECONOMIES by Derek Beaulieu  

Lea Graham reviews HEAT LINES by Michael Anania  

Amaranth Borsuk reviews DOG EAR by Erica Baum  

Lea Graham reviews BELOVED IDEA by Ann Killough  

Richard Lopez engages RIMBAUD by Graham Robb  

Amaranth Borsuk reviews REVOLVER by Robyn Schiff

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A Catty Review by Iris McCrary

In the House of the Hangman 1324

A lot of my contemporaries have complained about the phantom product code. It simply disappeared. You can't even TOUCH those parts anymore. It feels as though I’m ‘slowly read[ing] all the notes on my coding notice’ but what it feels even more like is an element of uncanny sobriety in the face of it, which HAS to be that DOT from the previous book doesn’t it really. Trouble is right, the whole thing keeps changing. Every time I get my hands on a copy of this book I can feel him moving the lodged spoon in the door, which obviously doesn’t close. # I’m guessing you’ll want one. Everyone wants one. The documentary includes interviews with cooks, sociologists, nutritionists and educators who all seem to agree, Bolivians are not against hamburgers per se. Fast food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. The crowd of a few hundred people mostly looked on in silence; the RCYB (Really Confused Young Bourgeoisie, a Maoist grouplet) chanted, “Talk softly and privately (which also means publicly) by using the hands, as opposed to (or instead of) machines.” They called this beast Simon, or Sidoh; also they called it Alice in Chechnya, which I think was a reference to Alice in Chains, And it was in this way that I began to see the downside of having only one trick. You open up a lemonade stand and say, “I hear a crunch. It's our Honda bumping into the neighbors’ Honda.” You blow in, arms full of bags, inserted in place of a couple of feet of spaghetti, or like a shepherd for whom Troy still grieves. What they think about, waiting at the barriers, is the re-tinted movie, the one where the Ape Man knifes a rubber rhinoceros to the sound of his overdubbed war-cry. When they inspect the matrix they find a spider – black speck with shriveled bent legs – minted onto the emperor’s face a thousand times. Everyone knows air behooves a fire / where are my breakfast radishes / lazeabout who ‘society’ disparages – NUTS!! / sparrow pecking at begrimed gum / / some say an army of horsepeople / some say soon the handle wull fly right off / … / only the particulate matter / the very follicles / yeh / … / some say an army of horsepeople / but I say it’s [insert appropriate Sappho translation here]. Last Spring, members of the Cascadian School gathered for a discussion on abattoirs, illumination, and misanthropy. Our findings tended not to reveal anything we didn’t already suspect, which is as good an excuse as any for reconvening, one year later. And so Daniel, Nicola, Alex, and I have gathered here for four nights, to talk about mysticism. Our take-off point is a short text by Laruelle entitled “Du Noir univers”, published in 1988 in the journal La Décision philosophique. The text has four parts, and each of us have decided to speak alongside each of those four parts, on four consecutive nights, as if we were characters in a Sade comedy. Because the moral arc may be long, but its interruptions are constant. No need for a scuba suit now that it all floats on the surface, beginning with an apology and ending with a full shopping cart in front of Wal-Mart. We ate eggs in the hole for breakfast, then sweated them out later while trying to pitch a tent on the sidewalk outside the nail salon, saying, Fuck the prestige of elite institutions, this block is like a village. We didn’t really say that, and I didn’t really say this. The lion stores gold in its mouth and yawns at the sun.

[Note: Sources: Vytrvv Spiders, Amazon review of Keston Sutherland, Ode to TL61P; anonymous, and El Polvorin (blog), as quoted in “McDonald’s Closes All Their Restaurants in Bolivia”, at Worldtruth.tv, 24 Apr 013, via Gene Tanta, FB post, 14 May 013; “Celebrating Asian Pacific Heritage Month: Remembering the I-Hotel”, at Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here, 14 May 013; Anne Gorrick, “The Poem by Oppen, McPhee-ed”; JBR; Aaron Belz, “A Horse, Oh Gross”, “Badly Drawn Poet”, at esque 2; Tim Atkins, “Petrarch 225”, at Sunfish 3; Robert Sheppard, “from Fictional Poems: the work of René Van Valckenborch, supposedly translated from the Flemish by Martin Krol: ‘In the Complex’”, at Sunfish 3; Julian T Brolaski, “western fashion”, “some say an army of horsepeople”, at esque 2; JBR; Eugene Thacker, Amazon blurb for Dark Night of the Universe (Novo Pan Klub); JBR; Alan Gilbert, “The Carnivore’s Dilemma”, “The Alchemy of Morning”, at Esque 2]

In the House of the Hangman 1322 & 1323

Like in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, when armed storm troopers searching the planet Tatooine for “droids” (robots) are sent on their way by Obi Wan Kenobi, using his superior mental control of “the force”. But now everyone’s taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we’re all winning, and of course “kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!” Speaking of loving trees, Michael, the first time my brother tripped he ended up hugging a tree and sobbing because it was alive, just like he was. That was not “nature worship.” And I’m on the high end of being poor. Taylor Swift is something else. Recently I’ve been feeling that Taylor Swift is China. This means I have to go to Walgreens. It’s not just Taylor; I just closed my eyes for a moment and watched an animated version of one of my kidneys pass out. There it lies, gasping for breath. I feel like I get sucked into this debate where I have to argue that lots of different parts of the sex trade exist, over and over again. This will only take hours since it’s pleached with evergreens’ ruined parity, bacon of light & ballet out of the hat. A bed standing until now unnoticed by the wall rises up. And a reader standing unnoticed by the table begins to recite quickly and in a high voice, his voice at times falls, slides, cuts through the preceding sentences: zyu tsyu e sprum / redam / ugi tazh ze bin / tsy shu / beregam amerik ne uvidet’ shigunov / tse shu begu. The woman continues her speech on the background of flying objects and “figures” crossing the stage “unnoticeably.” After which “voices enter” to recite: narrow not wide / -a wire [provolka] breaks breaks falls / -not to catch up not to catch up / sarcha krocha bucha na vikhrol’ opokhromel etc. A piano remained when everybody died, as did coloured transistors from the planet Diagram. According to Johannes, “I write this for the mute actress and the dead girls and the Virgin Father who speaks in this mausoleum and Mother Machine Gun who carries my body through the tumultuous crowds. Sticky and stricken-out, I write this for people on posters. I write this for the breathers and bleeders. I write this with a geometry suggesting awkwardness. I write this as a punishment. I write this for those infested and luxurious and teeming. I write this for the people who are at war. I write this from hotel rooms and because I have a medical condition. The skin bleeds and pinches. It’s a ridiculous death I am living and I live it ridiculously in an economy of trickle-down disease. Speaking of dead children: There is no place for immigrants in utopia and all film-makers must be renounced. I could never grow up in a house like that. Unless I was a dead child. An embalmed child. A child that never vandalized his own do-wop body with surveillance equipment. I vandalize my do-wop body due to my modest self-control. Sometimes I want a room of my own, but mostly I just want a room without all this corpse-patterned wallpaper.”

To pour out water from the stove,

From the stove-door
        Looking at face            looking at day
        Cut money                              knocking twenty times

West-straight Gate being carried running towards West-straight Gate

                    Y

                    Y

                    Y

The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve … by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the étale theta function, and log-shells.” I mean, Time uses a picture of a young woman taking a selfie to demonstrate how fucked up da youts are. But why pick on them? Why not use a picture of a 50 year old white male banker masturbating with the Reinhart and Rogoff paper into the mouth of a senator? Your bobbing head doesn’t count. / If unemployed, they'll count / You as no longer interested / In eating, drinking or sleeping / Under their sweating tonnage, as / They extract your last ounce. / … / Hey, do you parley Chinoise or whatever? / f*ck you! f*ck you! That’s all / The Chinese or whatever you need to know. / Here You Are Open Out. So we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break. Taylor acted in two of my films. I got to film him in his crumbling apartment in 2005, where he played his death scene in an episode of Electra Elf. He complained later that I'd cut the death scene down, but it was all there ... We used to go bar hopping; he always got free drinks and was treated as royalty in the most unexpected, chic places, filled with horrible people that he loved to be around. Why can’t I write a sonnet? / This is why: / My hair, purple in this sun, / Has not been touched … / Hamburger what is hamburger / what kinda meaning-cluster izzat / Buried candelabra also are still being discovered / so many greyhounds put to sleep after the race /  / Why can’t I write a sonnet? / This is why: / candelabra also are still being discovered / buried, so many greyhounds / put to sleep / Why can’t I write a sonnet? / My hair, purple in this sun, / Has not been touched, / … / … and I’m only collecting / The shards of collateral damage / the golden crayon the rusty axe the damp room / a pack of marked cards / hat and pigeon eggs / CO2’s over 400 ppm now. Whatever symphonic latitude is hand lettered; this is guaranteed so time is disguised as an inner harbor monument to cut the glare from a rose to furnace the pace a full position in another trace or matter; springs mutate so much the dark must be the opposite of done. Every day Mister T. wakes up inside a different person. That is why s/he gets up very early. Once s/he is completely naked s/he lays hir eyes on the mirror the way someone hangs hir coat on a hook. “The best way to feed the 9 billion people expected to be alive by 2050 could be to rear billions of common houseflies on a diet of human faeces and abattoir blood and grind them up to use as animal feed, a UN report published on Monday suggests. Doing so would reduce the pressure on the Earth’s forests and seas as food sources.” Scientists are actively working on pfarm ham, made synthetically in labs ... right beside disembodied synthetically grown chicken breasts. “‘Meet the meat’ is a phrase from Douglas Adams’ vision of a utopic scenario in which an animal has been engineered to desire offering itself for human consumption: ‘I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body? ... I’ve been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot of good meat there’. I think about a scene from an Amy Tan story in which the proverbial black sheep daughter returns home to tend an ailing parent whom she sacrificially feeds by making blood soup out of the flesh of her own arm. I wonder if human genetics have been inserted into any biovegetive matter (yet). Does anyone know this? I organize my elephant figurines / carefully on the windowsill, placing / a finger-space between them. The three bears (without italics) make another appearance at line 5 in the section which contains ‘the use value of a thing does not concern its seller as such, but only its buyer’. One of the more lyrical touches is ‘I want you to stare at me until our eyes trade sockets’, which is placed against

… repeat yourself at me: I am
at alone in all the world a mirror
forfeit to beauty: the love I am is anything
what I live for, skin and looking at
you dead now but like at your breath still
sharp at the flesh of desiring we ran
out from, liquid across the floor
they tore down years ago, live in your hand
my face, a stick of empty fingertips.

[Note: Sources: 1322. JBR; Tom Henri and John Hutnyk, “Contexts for Distraction”, at Journal For Cultural Research, 2013; JBR; Frank O’Hara, as quoted in “Frank O’Hara > Quotes”, at Goodreads; JBR, FB comment, 12 May 013; Michael Sikkema, FB comment, 12 May 013; Joshua Clover, “Red Country: On Taylor Swift”, at The Nation, 7 May 013; Del Ray Cross, “mcmix”, at Anachronizms, 12 May 013; JBR; Hadil Habiba, as quoted in Suzy Hooker, “Quotes of the Week–Special Doubleheader Edition”, at Tits and Sass, 12 May 013; Jack Kimball, “Sonnet”, at Pantaloons, 12 May 013; Aleksey Kruchonykh, and Gerald Janacek, as quoted in Janacek’s Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Futurism, at Monoskop Log; Allen Bramhall, “Little is Known of Mongolia”, at On Barcelona, 12 May 013; JBR; JBR, but see next; Johannes Göransson, Haute Surveillance, as quoted in John Yau, “‘There can be no immigrants in utopia’: On ‘Haute Surveillance’ by Johannes Göransson”, at Hyperallergic, 12 May 013; Gu Cheng, “Naming”, as quoted in Li Zhimin, “On Gu Cheng: Rise and Fall of a Fairy Tale”, at Epsians 3; Caroline Chen, “The Paradox of the Proof”, at Project Wordsworth, 9 May 013 (Concerns Shinichi Mochizuki’s possible proof of the ABC Conjecture); Zoe, “Time uses …”, at ‘punk rock’, 10 May 013; JBR (Reinhart and Rogoff are the authors of a paper used by policy makers to “justify” austerity measures (which of course needed no justification in the sociopathic minds of their implementers)). 1323. Linh Dinh, “War, Porn and Jive”, at OEN, 2 Feb 013; JBR; Lisa Samuels, “Here Are You Open Out”, at Revolutionesque, 31 Jan 013; Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons”, in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, at Minor Compositions; Nick Zedd, comment appended to “Legendary L.E.S. Artist, Actor Taylor Mead Dies”, at The Lo-Down, 9 May 013; Noelle Kocot, “The Sun at 10 o’clock”, at Revolutionesque, 5 Feb 012; Steve Carll, “ha! mb!...urg! er!”, in Hamburger; Christina Davis, “Sometimes A Bell Was Buried, So It Would Not Be / Scavenged By Men & Uses Other Than The Sacred”, at Revolutionesque, 5 Feb 012; Zvonko Karanović, “The Great Fatigue” (tr. Ana Božičević), at Revolutionesque, 5 Feb 012; JBR, but see Joe Romm, “Climate Sensitivity Stunner: Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 500 Parts Per Million the Arctic was 14^° Warmer!”, at Think Progress, 12 Feb 013; Jack Kimball, “Boining angry …”, at Pantaloons, 13 May 013; Katerina Iliopoulou, “Waking Up” (tr. K. Matsoukas), as quoted in Stephanos Papadopoulos, “Hurt Into Poetry: On Poetry and Greece”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 May 013; Brenda Iijima, FB post 13 May 013, and comments appended by Iijima and Erin Morrill; Gabby Bess, “Pink Plastic”, at Gabby Bess Blogs Here, 13 May 013; John Armstrong, and Keston Sutherland, Odes to TL61P, as quoted in Armstrong’s “Arduity: Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P: Ode 1”, at Arduity]

In the House of the Hangman 1321

Come out to show them / Like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them / Come out to show them, come out to show them, come out to show them / {*storm howls*} / Come out to show them, come out to show them, come out to show them … / (*echoes*} / {*guitar sound coughing fit*} Music (bad weed) / like open the brews up, and let some of the blues blood come out to show them / Like open the blues up / And let some of the blues blood come out to show them … When my time in the tub was up, I put my coat on and went outside to smoke a cigarette with Amanda Hess. Another woman asked what the red thing in my wig was. I said I had no idea, hoping that the flippant tone would make anyone listening think that I was in character as some kind of modern-day Marie Antoinette and distract them from the reality that I felt ignorant and was embarrassed about it. Then I threw my cigarette on the ground, put it out with my shoe, and went in search of someone who could help me answer this question. Molly, her assistant Melissa, and Laurie Penny were all absorbed in conversations. I spotted a man standing alone and he explained that the red thing is a statue that stands in the park where Occupy Wall Street began. I mean, gouged lawn, saucepan, smell of burnt sugar. Buried in the tangled plot is “a place called Hammertown, all white with snow, with a few low houses and some fishermen in fur-lined jackets hauling a long, pale hull along the shore.” Jennifer wants to get in on the ecstasy in the sky and ground, amongst the blue devils and pupas, splash!splash! in the oceanblue. Honk!Honk! “This is a non-violent direct action, you are not being held in this room, you are free to exit when you please. We no longer recognize your presidency at Cooper as legitimate and in so doing we commit to re-claim this office in the interim until a suitable administrative alternative is secured.” (My very favorite moment in that film, by the way, is not in Mead’s essaylet, and involves a Tesla Coil.) “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything / But” … “Life is so fucking complicated / for a simple country girl”. Like,

the big gimme five hand
extends leftward below the volcanic lake mirage bubo
a smaller gimme five hand (mirrored) faces the opposite direction
but grows from the larger gimme five hand’s
wrist

two blobs kiss
at the summit of the volcano
they’re blue

and a big jelly dong
which is really many stacked ufo’s
of molten enigmatite
“grid up” into a plume.

OMG DAVE WE HAVE TO BUY A TEAM OF CHICKENS RIGHT NOW. To pull our little red wagon. I’d do it myself & head for the coconut shy but I’ve got The Itis long gone now comorbid with the most intoxicating music of fairground at night reduced to diesel & syringes. As Ibn Darradj al-Qastalli put it, “In the folds of the stranger’s rags / many strange things are hidden,” like the hunger, we killed the spiny-tailed lizard and slept in the shade of wormwood, the chords played only wind for our sake til we soared around thru “My boy wears shark pajamas,” “Wash towels and rags / on Wednesdays,” “Jimmy Stewart laughs in the dream”, “You can sample cord blood / find rocket fuel there / Find rocket fuel in breast milk”, “Mash the sea / Evolve love / Keen / Coo”. Shimoda explains that the Japanese language includes a number of words derived from ones introduced by Portuguese Jesuits: “those for the underwear worn beneath a kimono; star-shaped candy; mummy; shaddock (fruit); sponge cake; cactus; caramel; quince; soap; marbles; flask; (cigarette) tobacco; and a certain type of small biscuit”, in which “We look at skulls and feel unsettled — skulls are right here.” “But I’m not trying to grab anything in front of me when I write a poem,” that one continues and concludes, “GET that kitty”, “Lost-shy petals on panes, / clipped minitalks, past thoughts — / little bitter teeth biting” — “bubbles weep in throats.” I sculpted a life-sized Orpheus face in air-dried clay, painted it with Dee’s Monad and other alchemical symbols, and buried it on a gentle slope of a field that would later become a housing development called Carriage Hills. If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn’t be able to carry since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face to face contact, the least number of things could go wrong.

[Note: Sources: Madvillian, “America’s Most Blunted”, at rapgenius (“The sample used here is the basis of the 1966 song “Come Out” by American composer Steve Reich. It is a recording of the voice of Daniel Hamm, involved in the Harlem Riot of 1964”) (Thanks, Horacio); version of previous, at lyrics.time; another version of previous, at metrolyrics (What you don’t know you don’t know); Stoya, “Art Is Just as Powerful as Protest”, at Vice, 9 May 013; JBR; Lisa Robertson, and Georges Perec, Life A Users Manual, as quoted in Robertson’s “Lisa Robertson on Peter Culley”, at Lemon Hound, 9 May 013; etsy blurb for Maia Elgin, Jennifer (which includes Elgin’s “Evil Things”); “LIVE: Students Occupy Cooper Union President’s Office”, at Occupy Wall Street, 8 May 013; Dale Carrico, “Taylor Mead: A Simple Country Girl”, at Amor Mundi, 5 May 06 (re the “Jim Jarmusch filmic-essaylet anthology Coffee and Cigarettes”; RIP Taylor Mead); Taylor Mead, A Simple Country Girl, as quoted in Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, “Throwaway Genius: A new book punctuates Taylor Mead — the ‘human poem’ 24/7”, at Tool Magazine; Lanny Quarles, “Basic Ideas of Culture As Music”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 9 May 013; Amy King via Jennifer Goodland, FB post, 11 May 013; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on image embedded in previous; Peter Hughes, Quite Frankly: After Petrarch: Canzoniere 1–28, Ibn Darradj al-Qastalli, Ahmad al-Majjaty, “Disappointment” (tr. Norddine Zouitni), as quoted in Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature (trs. Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour), Hoa Nguyen, As Long as Trees Last, Barry Schwabsky, Brandon Shimoda, Portuguese, Catherine Wagner, Nervous Device, Andrea Zanzotto, Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione, (eds. Anna Secco and Patrick Barron), as quoted in Schwabsky’s “Scrambled Sonnets, Prosthetic Limbs, and Little Bitter Teeth: Notes on Some Recent Poetry Publications”, at Hyperallergic, 11 May 013; JBR, but see Jennifer Goodland, FB comment, 11 May 013, and previous; Jesse Glass, FB post, 10 May 013; JD Bransford and MK Johnson, “Considerations of Some Problems of Comprehension”, as quoted in John Lely and James Saunders, Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation]

Poem List 2 (11 May 013, In the House of the Hangman 1319 forward)

In the House of the Hangman 1327

In the House of the Hangman 1326

In the House of the Hangman 1325

In the House of the Hangman 1324

In the House of the Hangman 1322 & 1323

In the House of the Hangman 1321

In the House of the Hangman 1320

In the House of the Hangman 1319

In the House of the Hangman 1320

“I brake for squid” responds to a comment made by one of my students during a discussion of Dickinson (informed, in part, by a parallel one of Kafka). While we examined a line, the student grew visibly frustrated. Exasperated, she exclaimed, “But we have no idea what comes before or after that poem. We don’t know the secret or imaginary poem she cut away.” Have some camphor. Bunny’s on the tin-can phone, all skyed, locked good, once the sprinkler turned on a cheap blue lace instead of a rat’s breadline. This is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his series of advertising smiles: the oral and nutritional equivalence of those half-open lips, teeth, tomato sauce, that hygiene based on detergents; the equivalence of death in the cavity of an evis­cerated car, at the top of a telephone pole and at the end of a wire, and between the glistening, steel blue arms of the electric chair. “It’s the same either way,” stupidity says, while sinking into itself and infi­nitely extending its nature with the things it says of itself; “Here or there, it’s always the same thing; what difference if the colors vary, if they’re darker or lighter. It’s all so senseless … How stupid this stupidity!” But, in concentrating on this boundless monotony, we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself – with nothing at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it – a flickering of light that travels even faster than the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever saying anything: suddenly, arising from the background of the old inertia of equivalences, the zebra stripe of the event tears through the darkness, and the eternal phantasm informs that soup can, that singular and depthless face. See the leaves     what leaves?     the leaves / on the ground, the black hand flapping / the brown hand spread as if to grasp / grasp what?     a paving slab    a street    a sweep / of air     then some cruddy music     and leaf / leaf flattens, is pressed     is what?    is the body. We were always beautiful. Always (LIKE TOASTERS OIL REBAR CLOUDS COTTON STEAMBOATS WYOMING BOEING 747-400 GLITTER COPYRIGHT LAUGHTER ELK GOOGLE GLASS AARDVARKS PREDATOR DRONES CATNIP MARRIAGE POLAROID WIND INK HATRED TIME MACHINES PLATINUM BLANKET BASKETBALL COBIA HOT WINGS). The hyoid bone is not articulated to any other. And as the plant grows older it realizes it will never be a tree. But where is the bride? MY EYE -- has freed me, turned me into object that has turned me into hyper-subject, unable and uninterested in resisting scrutiny, which is why it is fun to hunt. I am bringing home a self with a perpetual (if invisible) black eye. For [what] which more than any words cries deeplier? Thus, you want to get the atmosphere. The caption states, “Someone was smoking pot.” You can’t help but breathe deeply while reading that phrase, wanting to inhale the head of the world. Doesn’t revolt require lubrication and interruption – that’s why it’s sexy – to release the fish tank into its swerve? She kept saying “fungible,” and “sun-dried tomatoes happen upon the nicest plates of grass.” They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore. But what do I know about teaching? I think it was probably 2001. I was well into an upper-level course on modern poetry, reading the first volume of the Rothenberg-Joris anthology. I was also showing them paintings, playing a lot of music (Schoenberg, Antheil, et. al). I think I showed them Metropolis and probably Modern Times. A student said, “Professor Byrd, I love to listen you talk. You say all kind of interesting and crazy things. I tell my room mate about it, but what are we supposed to learn?”

[Note: Sources: Tom Beckett, “Heard from two of my favorite people today: Thomas Fink and Alex Gildzen. …”, at l’amour fou, 8 May 013; Olivia Cronk, “Note”, “Backyard Skin”, “Dumpling”, “Don’t get your debutante all shimmer”, at nanomajority 4; Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” (“The translation, by Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, has been slightly amended”), at Generation Online, via Benjamin Noys, FB post, 8 May 013; George Szirtes, “48.”, “Sealed With a Kiss”, at 3:AM Magazine, 7 May 013; Object Lessons; “Ducky”, in NCIS episode “Hometown Hero”; John Ashbery, “‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher …’”, Wallace Stevens, “Ghosts as Cocoons”, as quoted in John Latta, “Dirt”, as seen at wood s lot, 29 Apr 013; Traci Lynn Matlock, “(the affect is merely shadow)”, at The Noumenon Revolution, 8 May 013; JBR; Lauren Berlant, “The Game (4)”, at Supervalent Thought, 7 May 013; Sheila E Murphy, “Ghazal May 8”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 8 May 013; Anne Carson, “By Chance the Cycladic People”, at London Review of Books, 25 Apr 013 (“This poem was composed using the random integer generator.”); Don Byrd, FB comment, 8 May 013]