Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 840

Then again, tendencies (like beliefs) are no more than “a broken vase, glass; a broken body, parts,” he said last night, a tiramisu between us. For instance, my hand is in the furnace of these leaves: here lies the baby, the baby in which we will create more babies to fill the void, to fill what void. Keats returns. His tiny claws pick dog bones from his teeth, gorse and sage. There is moss on Mount Sentinel. He took my PS3. O morning, awoke to ripen the fruits of my muscles … I feel like a white rifle! I feel weak! No one is wearing sunglasses; it’s pitch dark out except the lights on behind industry. The spotlights were on and I realized the lights above me were on and I had once read an astrological interpretation of my birthday that suggested I needed to hang pictures of the sea in my dwelling and heavy dark curtains if I was to get any sleep. It will stare back at you with the largest eyes relative to body size of any mammal — eyes that shimmer in the daylight like peeled grapes. Surely such eyes — which are as big as the tarsier’s brain — When I lose and gain weight, I pose in the mirror to see if I can still collect rain in the crevices of my clavicle. This loan shark says, make them pay, beat them until they pay everything, but don’t beat them so hard that they can’t keep paying. That loan shark says, if you don’t make an example of this one, the others won't respect you. Beat them to death. And it is between these two poles that the bankers, ratings agencies, and EU leaders oscillate. Today is Umbrella Day, ladies — “Princess Hijab asserts, her dressing up of billboards is a symbolic act of resistance meant to reassert a ‘physical and mental integrity’ against what she calls the ‘visual terrorism’ of advertising.” Comfort is business in Motel Six. I find much that is interesting about unzipping wet opium. “I must have been a sea-bird streaking through the azure sky of his daydream; in just the same way spirits are said to commune across cultures, time, and continents, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island felt cosmically intended for me.” Where’s my triple latté disinfectant? Now I have to research Egyptian pyramid texts, some Chinese potsherds from 4800 bc which have the earliest bit of chinese writing on them (a pictograph which appears to indicate a group of people worshipping a tree – I happen to like tree worshippers), Bill Griffiths’ work on early medieval British magic runes, Hildegard of Bingen’s “universal egg”, as Jerry calls it (I call it a vagina, but then again I am writing today on Juliet Cook’s chapbook Thirteen Designer Vaginas, so I could be seeing things (the cover of Cook’s chap has strategically situated rhinestones pasted on – I'll let you guess what itty-bitty-bit of female anatomy they represent, so anyway, I ... uh ... I ... uh – maybe it is a universal egg, after all ... ); Ikkyu, Dr Schreber's memoirs, and Phil Dick’s book on his visionary experience. Not to mention Ulli Beiers work on New Guinea and Africa ... So working with Jerry is a wild and exciting ride, too. Anyway, anyway, to our collaboration. Two things to note: 1) I had to skip a line of Lynn’s, “about how it formed”, because I wasn't sure if “it” was actually a noun – you will discover as we work how bad I am at certain things, and the real nitty-gritty of parts of speech is one of them – I should have had Latin beaten into me long ago! So I used the next line, with noun “anecdote.” 2) I cheated a little, by adding mention of Whitney Houston, which I couldn't really help, since she was such an icon of beauty, pro and con. Plus, her death struck me as a real beauty anecdote. If that cheating bothers you, let me know.

[Note: Sources: Traci Lynn Matlock, “In Lieu of a Voyeur”, at The Noumenon Revelation, 11 Feb 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Record Gender”, at Boys With Short Hair, 11 Feb 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Gave Them What The Are Owed”, at Boys With Short Hair, 11 Feb 012; Cynthia Arrieu-King, “Box”, “Manifesto: Sight”, at Revolutionesque; Abbas Raza, “Tree-Dwelling Primate Called Tarsier Sends and Receives Ultrasonic Calls”, at   3 quarks daily, 11 Feb 012; Katie Jean Shinkle, “The Velvet Queen in Sternum”, at Phoebe 41.1; Richard Seymour, “Scenes from the class struggle in Greece”, at Lenin’s Tomb, 10 Feb 012; Hello Giggles Team, “Don’t Leave Home Without It”, at Hello Giggles, 10 Feb 012; Lara Glenum, “Princess Hijab! (or, Pageantry as Code Scrambler)”, at Montevidayo, 10 Feb 012; Jack Kimball, “Comfort is business ..”, at Pantaloons, 10 Feb 012; Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!!, as quoted in Roxane Gay, “The Tension of the Likeable Unlikeable”, at HTMLGIANT, 10 Feb 012; JBR; Del Ray Cross, “mdlxxxiii”, at Anachronizms, 11 Feb 012; Now I have to research … let me know: JBR, email to Anne Gorrick, 12 Feb 012 sent approx 10:59 AM PST]

In the House of the Hangman 839

And even if you must select a tiny, ultra-radical minority within the Black Bloc and pretend their views are representative of anyone who ever put on a hoodie, you could at least be up-to-date about it. It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date. And your comment about Black Bloc’ers hating the Zapatistas is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen. “Whatever else we know, we know there isn’t time to bullshit”, to quote the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I was raised in the American area of a pervasive gas called anti-intellectualism and the only meaningful idea permitted was entrepreneurial capitalism or racism racism in the land-fill strained water running off the mountains or sexism sexism in my preparations for living better living through elemental carcinogenics like plastics they are a part of me but to me it’s queerness queerness has meant the development of an anyway bravery. Remember Bobby, the last Kantian in Nazi Germany? 8      the infinity symbol stood up straight. Mother Courage. How do you say a pox on the shoe lord who just evicted me? There’s pink glue between our vertebrae – I’m increasingly coming round to the Jonathan Meades view that the only school that matters is the school of talent and my definition of talent is anything that I wish I’d done myself (talent) or anything that is so good that I know I’d never be able to match it (extreme talent). I’m not suggesting this as a universally applicable tendency but it works for me because it’s something I recognise and don’t need to rationalise. For example, I really do wish that I’d thought of placing Black Beauty in Baghdad as a central feature of a poem about American foreign policy but I know that I’ll never be able to write something like Book V of the Faerie Queen, Book II of Paradise Lost, The Anathemata, Celan’s Aschenglorie …

• we would press the bleeding tissue on our horses faces / and mystify the names of the children in front of their pretty mothers;
• our mother died a virgin my eyelids are still black after the rain;
• and we would receive silence from god’s glands / and spread it on our faces; i feed my brothers with my own gleaming body and myself with dusty semaphores;
• I ran to the lake with my knees uselessly wet / people with torn eyes mostly walk around at night / shirley spat rain under my skirt;
• these love bites your family jewelries my son;
• sometimes i urinate rain even though i am not a catholic;
• you see me now as I was in your garden twenty years ago, as long as it is pretty he said;
• ‘I love pudding’ – me too, he cum; / those noises are insects tickling the mold on your tits / vinegar was injected in the cells, then a foxtrot.

But fuck me. Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus is on The SyFy Channel! Croc am tearing up Orlando. Thank you Word. Croc’s … undocumented, probably. No, not probably: candidates are asked their position on sea monsters, on people being eaten in the night, people resorting to eating people, which we hear is starting to occur where food supplies have been consumed or decimated by the sea monsters’ fire-breathing progeny. I have always tended to work obsessively on one topic at a time. For the past 6 months, that topic has been ancient tragedy. According to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, tragedy is the rendering spectacular of the political situation of the city. Seneca’s world is dark, paranoid, intense and claustrophobic. It’s a lot of fun! And there’s ‘smeared makeup’, an unpleasantness about Euripides. Nick and I were students together during the wild years at Essex University in the late 1980s. Before that, there was THE TANGANYIKI LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC.

[Note: Sources: David Graeber, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “David Graeber: Concerning the Violent Peace Police. A Response to Chris Hedges (nplusone)”, at I cite, 9 Feb 012; Sara Jane Stoner, “About a Sentence”, at Revolutionesque; JBR, but see Emmanuel Levinas, "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights"; Filip Marinovich, “NASTY PARHESSIASTES”, at Revolutionesque; Purdey Krieden, “Purdey Krieden on the Claudius App (2)”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 9 Feb 012; JBR (I thank MS Word for changing Croc is to Croc am; strange strange strange …); Brad Liening, “Clash of the Titans”, at Revolutionesque; Simon Critchley, “Readings”, at The Believer, 6 Feb 012; JBR; Paula Cisewski, “THE TANGANYIKI LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC OF 1962”, at Revolutionesque]

In the House of the Hangman 838

Agit Disco. Are whales slaves? Say again that my eyes are auriferous. A necklace is a chain of events. Neutrinos have a specified spin, but not much else. The epicenter of our experience. There’s usually a melancholy to the urban park, he says, but this one is different. We should bring our thinkers here, W. says. The security guard cracks a joke. Please forgive me — it appears I’ve ruined your welcome mat. I’m losing focus, distracted by the newsfeed on the computer screen, hitting refresh. My hair, purple in this sun, has not been touched, but the wind has grazed it a little, and I’m only collecting the shards of collateral damage. James Turrell is not god. Fireworks are not so good as art, unless you have the resources of the Chinese Communists. Charles and Ray Eames should work for Target. John Altoon and Mark de Suvero are not African-Americans. I will never see another boring representation of an old performance. But using a Tesla coil when you’re twenty and it’s 1967 … Filling a room with water, clustering balloons around the lights and hanging chains from the ceiling always works. I feel like we blush and become nervous if we see an artist showing their heart. Cool, come on in it said. It was a fence around a strip club. The stairs we collide on make us the bruised people we see in mirrors yet we don’t go there to pay homage. I’m drawing this picture of you because I can’t help it. What happens when the unfathomable / intangible and the logical / mechanical intersect? Robots designed to tap into the spirit world — that’s right, giggle at the atrocious accents of the poor trapped in the holds with their tiny cooking stoves and hunks of burlap to sleep in – thus, considering everything very carefully, in the sweet light of the ceremonial axes, in the run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness, we must make a decision as to whether we should proceed, or go back, in the latter case enjoying the pathos of eradication, in which the former case reading an erotic advertisement which begins, How to Make Your Mouth a Blowtorch of Excitement, attempting, during the pause, while our burned mouths are being smeared with fat, to imagine a better sentence, worthier, more meaningful, like those in the Declaration of Independence, or a bank statement showing that you have seven thousand kroner more than you thought you had – “Guten Tag, Ludwig!” – “I am sorry to inform you that the Bauhaus no longer exists, that all of the great masters who formerly thought there are either dead or retired, and that I myself have been reduced to constructing books on how to pass the examination for police sergeant” – and Ludwig falls through the Tugendhat House into the history of man-made objects; Isabelle, as I recall, did not like her fortune. It began: Tienes que relacionarte con el dolor. Roughly: you need to get in touch with your pain. I remember Isabelle kept asking if she could re-read the runes. I think Soleida told her it wasn't possible. Earlier in the day, a friend reported seeing a hawk with icicles beneath its wings. You knock on my head to get my attention. You are an alien but you don’t think it’s weird being an alien because you’ve been an alien your whole life. I think That’s a long time being an alien and you nod your head that looks like a plastic bag filled with mashed potatoes because you know what I’m thinking because you’re an alien. I think of Damascus. Some girl in all black says No matter how paranoid you are, you’re not paranoid enough. I’m like Hold on, let me take some Adderall and then say that to me again. Rhythmically we are very into a primal feel, stomps, pulses etc, which are the rhythms that are naturally wired in all of us. The use of negative space within bounce is also a mantra. The emphasis is on feeling that point where sound is not happening within a beat, making silence the groove. At least until new dinosaurs.

[Note: Sources: Agit Disco (ed. Mute), at Metamute.org; Timothy Morton, “Are Whales Slaves”, at Ecology without Nature, 8 Feb 012 (“A California federal court is to decide for the first time in US history whether amusement park animals are protected by the same constitutional rights as humans.”);Erika Jo Brown, “Making Life Better As We Live It”, “Epithalamium”, at Ilk 2; Lars Iyer, “‘They Were Not Enemies of Thought’”, at Spurious, 8 Feb 012; Gina Myers, “Response”, “Hold It Down”, at Ilk 2; Noelle Kocot, “The Sun at 10 o’clock”, at Revolutionesque; Geoff Tuck, “Time for Pacific Standard Observations”, at Notes on Looking, 8 Feb 012; Ted Powers, “from Please Light Up”, at Ilk 2; Valerie Ross, “‘Here, Listen to My Underpants’: The Robot Psychics of India”, at Discover, 3 Feb 012; JBR; Meena Alexander, “Autobiography”, at Revolutionesque; Donald Barthelme, “The Sentence”, at Lemon Hound, 8 Feb 012; Michael Kelleher, “Aimless Reading: The r’s, Part 14.1 (Soleida Ríos)”, at Pearlblossom Highway, 8 Feb 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Driving Home”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 8 Feb 012; Janey Smith, “The Wall Vanishes”, at Ilk 2; Gregory Sherl, “Hard Science”, at Ilk 2; Flatlander (member of the band Death Grips), as quoted in Traci Lynn Matlock, “Where Sound Is Not, Silence Is”, at The Noumenon Revelation, 8 Feb 012; Nate Pritts, “Exit Strategy”, at Ilk 2]

In the House of the Hangman 837

It’s this jumbled arrangement of symbols and navigation confusion that has come to define Punk’s work over the years. In those days men had to have a memory for many things. “Work Number 227: the lights going on and off,” was precisely that: an empty room in a gallery, in which the lights were turned off for five seconds, then turned back on for five seconds, ad infinitum. “Poetically Mundane Scottish Minimalist Lands in Chicago.” I liked getting lost in the golden balloons in Dallas, tho. That is, gimme lick my battery mutha / gotta face so cute he gonna slice / all y’all up in yr cars / all y’all shitheel sons inna circle / pit gotta give some wuv / / for widdle ol hims in hi- / fidelity hardcore cluster- / fuck mister funny ha ha wanna / gimme gimme gimme back my baby / see she sucking down on soba / noodles at the all ages show. Welcome to Peek-a-Boo Castle. My tribe gnaws on the radio. Sunflowers have the hospital surrounded. Everything I wear smells like the mountains. My spirit animal’s the dictionary bathed in wite-out. So the chief of research for Fuji Electronic Industries constructs special instruments which translate electrical output into modulated sounds so she can listen to the cactus.

And we sailed, and we sailed
And we sailed, and we sailed
And we sailed, and we sailed
... sailed to Caledonia

And we sailed, and we sailed,
And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
Away from Denmark
Way up to Caledonia
Away from Denmark
Way up to Caledonia

And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
All around the world
And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
Looking for a brand new start

And we sailed
And we sailed, and we sailed
All around the world, a brand new start

Looking for a brand new start
Looking for a brand new start
Looking for a brand new start

And we sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed
And we sailed
Away from the Golden Gate
Way up to the New York City

Er, ah, er, ah,

GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOOR!
GOOOOOOOOOR! 
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!;
Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee!
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR! RAHR!
RAHRIRAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!

In the dream, Bonny wanted a career change and so General Noriega, via Vanessa Place, arranged for her to work at the "Dafar Quadrant" -- a new region of Africa invented in a post-apocalyptic era: our current era (now.) There were candelabras with chipped cream-white paint and blue ribbons; I was able to read three palms a day. Upper corner: two long division signs, one blank, one with numbers. Upper right: a faucet, below which a stain becomes a river. A cross (a plus sign?), zigzags, trails, through thick dark dirt below a sky of white canvas. Lower left, directly below the arithmetic symbols, the algebraic / amorous A + B. Sleep well, Señor Tapies.

er, ah, er, ah

Descend into the fact mine. We have no canaries, but a superscript hovers near each head, th or nd or nth or st. We cannot be absent for the test — the test is today, and the test is tomorrow. “In this state-sponsored, state-devouring pageant, contestants suffer beauty to its furthest extreme. They are the anorexic, the surgically eradicated, “That girl dressed up like a little girl dressd up like a big girl,” the diseased, the corpses. Beauty isn’t an aesthetic so much as a condition. It is programmed for its own destruction, and it will make you sick. It will kill you. This is why the contestants must perform gender as the decaying excess of culture revealed on the body.” I am teaching, now – the Women and Madness class – and really enjoyed rereading Freud's case studies this weekend – that Freud, he is SUCH A TRIP. A trip and a half, as what’s his name used to say, over chicken and waffles. These 42,000 year-old seals are painted by Neanderthals. By many accounts, the wounds seen on the bodies in Port Said were expertly inflicted mortal wounds, as if from the hands of trained killers. Reportedly there were also many cases of deliberate facial disfigurement. I’ve never heard of football hooliganism at this level, and neither have you. I couldn’t sleep, so after doing some odds and ends I went out. Still dark, no traffic yet on the main road beside the sea. As I reached the kerb, two foxes trotted by, following the white line. They noticed me and the smaller flashed off towards the beach. The larger paused, regarded me calmly, then, like Lvoff, seemed to be making a point about the heaviness of the air around airports. A waffle lives in the universe / like your ass in juicy velour. / What determines your ass you ask? / The construction of the bevatron in Berkeley. / The naughties of quaranta / of the tenera of rapit2a / of his vostra Zed il donkey / the one of localizzo of riflessione I gave convolusis / I gave them a cut of the dulie. The Koch brothers and their employees were the single largest oil and gas donors to the committee with jurisdiction over Keystone XL. Henry Miller’s books are the most important poems I wrote one night. But Beauty is only skin-deep. Beauty is skin-deep, Ike and Tina would sing. Did you know a full 90% of the dust in a house is made up of human skin? Can you imagine the sheer quantity of exfoliated beauty tossed in the garbage every day? Now I know my gums can catch fire and glow. Can you imagine the sheer quantity of exfoliated beauty tossed in the garbage every day? That inversion, that joyful inversion of the theme in the manic depressive Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations, wow. Words do not add up to it. °°+[3|_|))|-|A +v 4l R:(]-[4r|) |||60|)$4vE +|-|E Q|_|EE|\|@@@@@@@@@ |\|:(|-|0[_$0|\| @@@@@@@@@B°B - 4r(|-|EvEQ|_|E °fL:|\/|4S4|\/||_|R4:[)E4+|-|:|\| 1 P°S+P3+3r 0~+OOL3|\/|E4|\| $+REE+s|_|6L'/ |\/|4RL°|\|J°sEP|-|.|3e|_|'/s :HPPàQ, 1966|)4l4: - L4|\/|4bmp_:nk4sCiiDj4vier gamesman yms easygo:ngman pc endoderm gh lighthouse ign°r4n+captain pray girls spot meeting i force fascinate knew|3°|\|\|:e&c |'/de|\/|4|\|D4L4micke'/ s+4rgka dizzy qe minutemanINCLUDING SUNDAYS & HOLIDAYSmandala mix xw anita ilc azimuth zqt platonic vtpope'/ Edeleteinv:sible & slow4+4R/s<|_|[[endoderm gh lighthouseétoile filanteE |\| [eRp0l:cEshedir fedders practicable franca od aitken yws sergeant ez commnwealth ff illusion aej definitive siinded the event and hadinexpedient yl jockglassware cookiecondemnatoryian cult crater compacter euthanasia moines bestial aseptic quasiorder acquire landdiscriminate bipartite penury picnicking pin hornbeam frozen apocrypha leer term beebe boyarexemption implosion car'/6r4n+on 4sCiiD. Now that's one of those things that bring tears to my eyes. Then it turns into jazz! Pimp my Nietzsche!

[Note: Sources: Louis Doulas, “Jim Punk: exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s”, at Rhizome, 30 Jan 012 (hat tip, Sam B-R); Alli Warren, “Soap Rock”, at Lana Turner; Philip A Hartigan, “Poetically Mundane Scottish Minimalist Lands in Chicago”, at Hyperallergic, 7 Feb 012 (and JBR); JBR; Ben Kopel, “Turn Off My Face”, at La Petite Zine 28; title of a painting by Charles Irvin, as seen embedded in Michael Shaw, “Very Entertaining Interview with Charles Irvin on The Conversation”, at Notes on Looking, 7 Feb 012; Nick Sturm, “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!” , at Ilk Journal; Jacob Sloan, “Teaching A Cactus The Japanese Alphabet”, at Disinformation, 7 Feb 012; Van Morrison, “Listen to the Lion”; JBR; Michael McClure, “Ghost Tantra 1”, in Ghost Tantras; Bhanu Kapil, “Dreamed Vanessa Place contacted ‘General Noriega’”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 7 Feb 012; JBR, ekphrasis on a Tapies piece (i.m.); Patriia Lockwood, “Children With Lamps Pouring Out Of Their Foreheads”, at PANK, 6.08; Danielle Pafunda, and Joyelle McSweeney, as quoted in McSweeney’s “‘Gender is now just the decaying excess of culture revealed on the body.’: On Danielle Pafunda’s ‘Massacre/Mascara: On Johannes Goransson’s _Entrane to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate_’”, at Montevidayo, 7 Feb 012; Kat Zambreno, “occupations for women”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 7 Feb 012; JBR; Hrag Vartanian, “Earliest Known Paintings Discovered in Spain”, at Hyperallergic, 7 Feb 012; Graham Harman, “more cause for suspicion”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 7 Feb 012; Tom Raworth, “Still Life”, at Tom Raworth, 7 Feb 012; Christopher Schaberg, “It’s in the air”, at What Is Literature?, 6 Feb 012; Bill Luoma, “The Concept of Math”, “Some Math”, as quoted in Eileen Tabios, “A Waffle Lives in the Universe”, at The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys, 5 Feb 012; Robert Greenwald, “What The Koch Brothers Say Online But Won’t Say Under Oath”, at Disinformation, 7 Feb 012 (A Koch company website confesses to being among the “largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters” at the pipeline’s starting point in Northwest Canada); Adina Dabija, Radu Andriescu, Andrei Peniuc, as quoted in John Olson, “A Language At War With Itself”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 5 Feb 012 (a discussion of The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (eds. Doru Mugur with Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea); Timothy Morton, “groundhog”, at Ecology without Nature, 4 Feb 012; Jim Punk, “thz E4sy scr4(th …”, at ASCII-ink]

Tapies

In the House of the Hangman 836

We must speak the language of the ancient ones / … / making you a circle. This circle can turn invisible and it can beat up bad guys! This circle is like a laser shooting bad guys right in the stomach! This circle is named Dr. Defense and makes bad-guy-fighting tools and weapons. Dr. Defense jumps up and kicks giant robot bad guys and then flies through a window and explodes! Is that anger I now hear within the singing insects’ song? Tarzan is seen smiling — swinging from a tree. The others have stripped to their shorts and are waving their fist heavenward as the waters rise relentlessly. "What are kingdoms but great robberies?” I began what could be a lifelong tantrum, exchanging rational understanding for an undercurrent of slow purposeful clapping, as if my ideal coterie consisted of weary airline passengers. The sky at the end of the powerline withers away. I learned to play the pan flute — “It comes in threes,” my former mother-in-law would always caution whenever anyone in her immediate or distant vicinity died. To locomote is to dig a chain. Each tongue makes a different movement. Certain objects lose their sense once they are fixed. There is no way to cure these feats. No impossible way. It's like pig intestines, but just the lining, dear home sweet home, dear oxygen tank, dear boogers, dear dandelion tea. Once they are fixed they are flayed. The question is to know what there is, in an individual subject, that makes it to be a being. In our sensible experience, which is the only one we have, the most striking indication we have that a certain substance is there is the operations it carries and the changes which it causes. If we follow Aristotle thus far, we are entering with him a world entirely different from that of Plato: a concretely real and wholly dynamic world, in which being no longer is selfhood, but energy and efficacy. Hence the twofold meaning of the word “act,” which the medieval disciples of Aristotle will be careful to distinguish: first, the act which is the thing itself or which the thing itself is (actus primus); secondly, any particular action exercised by that thing (actus secundus). Now, if you take together all the secondary acts which a given thing performs, you will find that they constitute the very reality of the thing. “A hurricane came and caused the land to open. / Also fire, pestilence, and benevolent compassion. / Much later there was a terrible car accident. / Whatever or whatever climbed out of the wreck.” How I love you, you non-ickiness. I pull you close to me, sniffing your neck, detecting a whiff of your hairspray or perfume or something cosmetic! “The Whole is Always Smaller Than its Parts.” For me, to “aestheticize” something is the very opposite of being frivolous about it. ............They argue (the cognates) that a manifest Attached to shipment listing all colaterals and cogs, Codes and Codices for Mdme's Nothing Else Cockaigne Machine In fact are elegaic poems, that David sings for Jonathan, Gilgamesh for Enkidu. They inscribe themselves as Manifestos which proclaim their faith in algorythms of an Unknown field of force. They're cognizant and they can glow. They're coeternal and they rise to an occasion. Although they tell no story of their lives, their little trumpets blow. Evil is death warmed over Evil is live spelled backward Evil is lamb burning bright Evil is love fried upon a spit and turned in on itself Evil is sty in eye of universe hung upon a coughing horse that follows me at night wearing blinders Evil is green gloves inside out next to a double martini on a cocktail table. Here I was living an Edgar Allan Poe story, here, in Hollywood, near the source of so much in our culture (and in my own life), the flickering light of a million Hollywood movies good and crappy began here, I can imagine Kenneth Anger stalking these dark alleys, in a shop on this street Richard Hawkins once traded in the deviant paperbacks, star biographies and collectable books that began his career as an artist, from 1975 to 1985 I and a thousand other guys walked nearby streets at night, and now a genius artist was burying me – did she care? Would it matter? When my head was finally covered and my face disappeared under earth, I wondered if she would she ‘go all the way?’ and then walk off whistling and leave me. She whispered something in my ear that night, I can’t remember the words but I remember a delicious chill when she spoke to me, and then continued her mounding of earth to cover my body.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #19. Sources: JBR; Richard Wagamese, as quoted in SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for his Runaway Dreams; JBR; Peter Davis, “Poem Addressing Boys, Age 5″, as quoted in Mark Kerstetter, “A Review of Peter Davis’s Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!”, at Escape Into Life, 7 Jun 010; Barry Wallenstein, “Shades of Keat”, “Gazing at Raindrops”, at Jacket 37; St Augustine, as quoted in Alli Warren, “says Augustine of Hippo”, at …, 6 Feb 012; Jacqueline Waters, “Country of Lincoln-shaped Men”, White Zombie”, at Boston Review 27.1; Sheila Squillante, “It comes in threes”, at We Who Are About To Die, 6 Feb 012; Laura Wetherington, “We can be absolutely sure that death is born of something else (after Michelle Grangaud)”, “With a picture book we can imagine a past or a future without saying anything (after Jean-Marie Gleize)”, at Otoliths 6; JBR; Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, as quoted in Levi R Bryant, “Substance as Act”, at Larval Subjects, 6 Feb 012; Jon Woodward, as quoted in SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for Woodward’s Uncanny Valley; Joy Katz, and Johannes Göransson, as quoted in Göransson’s  “More Gaudy Possibilities: Sentimentality vs Intensity”, at Montevidayo, 6 Feb 012; Peter Davis, “The Long Goodbye”, at Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, 6 Feb 012; Bruno Latour, “The Whole is Always Smaller Than its Parts”, as quoted in Adam Robbert, “Navigating Datascapes With a Monadological View”, at Knowledge Ecology, 6 Feb 012; John Mathias, “Laundry Lists and Manifestos”, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Big Fat Hairy Vision of Evil”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Jerimee Bloemeke and the effective poetic list”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 6 Feb 012; Geoff Tuck, “Field Notes: Black Box, Alison O’Daniel, etc.”, at Notes on Looking, 6 Feb 012]

In the House of the Hangman 835

For, who can believe that a foreign mining company can be trusted to take care of our water? A place is a sound, and a way of hearing it. They found the boy / condor to un-find him. To change the meaning of a name is to change the world. Electric with a kind of headlong internal enjambment & melodically stuttering parataxis (modernist spasms of ecstasy run face-first into moral entropy), they vibrate at a pitch. Do I look strange in the smeared mayonnaise. This is the only poem I know of to make such cunning use of bukkake. Reader, do not dwell on it. Or, if you must, reflect on the term’s circulation vis-à-vis Facebook’s recent public offering. ♥ rating: Explicit score: 0. The leopard skin waits / at the corner for a yellow car. Cucumbers are rapidly beginning to resemble piano wire, even at room temperature. We have accepted seven packages from unknown persons and brought them on board several aircraft. The tree slice is turning like a disk and the tone arm is constantly being moved to the inside of the disk like on a regular record player. The difference is basically it’s just a camera and this camera is a modified camera, a very fast one, and the camera has just moved in and it waits until there is a tree ring passing the camera's field of view and then it is translated into a sound. Sometimes it is a series of piano tones, sometimes it’s just one sound and the melody is defined, for instance, by the rate of growth. In essence, I play the tree’s year rings. [SOUND OF TREE RINGS] [SOUND OF TREE RINGS BEING PLAYED] [SOUND OF A FIR TREE] [SOUNDS OF THE ASH TREE] [SOUND OF THE ASH TREE] [SOUNDS OF KNOTS IN FIR TREE] [SOUND OF THE WALNUT] [SOUNDS OF A TREE] [SOUNDS OF A SPRUCE TREE] [SOUNDS OF A COMMON SPRUCE]. The scientists who altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have agreed to suspend their research for 60 days to give other researchers around the world time to discuss the work and determine how to proceed. Hoop / shadowed ramp. Circus 4. Circus 5. My favorite’s the one where I bite “A Porcupine Named Fluffy”. O Eiffel Tower. Adieu Adieu Soleil cou coupé. Super Anahist cough syrup tastes as good as the syrup they put on ice cream. This is the real me. Now I need to wash my hair in pre-boiled chlorine. “Inside the cow it is a place / A cave red with light / As where men and women lit their early fires / … / At the center of this place is an invisible X …” What the hell were they thinking in Port Said? Dwarf – what is it? I will. Eat yourself right back on track. I don’t really listen to pop music now, not much anyway, it’s as if I can’t cathect in that direction anymore (same with football). My effort was pretty much to interrupt myself, like sticking smiley stickers all over the elephant beautiful beautiful. There is no more time to just want to go to the wind farm, we have to actually go there. In fact, and still on the fly, unedited, to what extent should poetry now be a form of total ecological critique and nothing else, one that makes eco-poetics look like micro-marbles on the burning hull of a volcano?

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #18. Sources: Cecilia Vicuña, “Letter to Michelle Bachelet”, “A response to Pascua Lama”, at Cecilia Vicuña.org; Patrick Pritchett, and Mark Scroggins, as quoted in Pritchett’s “Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles – Mark Scroggins”, at Writing the Messianic, 4 Feb 012; JBR; result of Google search “bukkake camelid”; Megan Volpert, ‘”definition”, “an accidental conspiracy”, “hegemony”, in seven poems from Megan Volpert's the desense of nonfense (Buffalo: BlazeVOX Books, 2009), at Megan Volpert.com; Bartholomaus Traubeck and Bruce Gellerman, “Turning Tree Rings Into Music”, at Living on Earth, 3 Feb 012, via Timothy Morton, “Tree Music”, at Ecology without Nature, 4 Feb 012; “Bird flu scientists to pause, discuss deadly strain”, as quoted in William Keckler, “I Say Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 4 Feb 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Animal”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 4 Feb 012;JBR; Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone”; Lew Welch, “Din Poem”, at EPC; Ariana Reines, “Truth or Consequences”, as quoted in James Pate, “Artaud’s Cruelty and Reines and Eshleman”, at Montevidayo, 4 Feb 012; JBR, but see Mahmoud Salem, “Numbers”, at Sandmonkey, 4 Feb 012; Stina Kajaso, “101”, at SONOFDAD, 4 Feb 012; Jonty Tiplady, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Interview with Jonty Tiplady, Part 1”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 4 Feb 012]

In the House of the Hangman 834

Audiences were escorted to the back of my house then garbed in white linens, plastics bags, maxi-pads, balloons, robes, and other white materials. I sewed my fingers together with redpink yarn, pie topping and a porcelain doll. Pluto had merely joined a larger and seedier gang of trans-Neptunian objects, named for a grab-bag of deadly personae, non-Western deities, and antiseptic numerals: Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, Quaoar, and 2007 OR₁₀. The dismal, icy Oort Cloud was now just one step removed from home. You see how life is. Think of the spheres as transparent and interpenetrating — not static shells. For more on RNA interference watch this video. Bees love Maryam. The time machine flickers. Tiny explosions devour the control panel. O Dark Beauty, I meet you at the cotillion where a graveyard dances with a shopping mall. Hi. My name is Violetta Tarasova. Confirm the registration and Sending me in a livechat. Which brings us back to Monsanto. We are living inside a snow globe right now. In just a few days blood is coming out of my nose and blood is coming out your nose. I go to bed and wake up with a bowl of sleeping pills and flute of champagne and a 16^th floor Hilton Hotel Lake Michigan view. The next pink thing I see I’m going to put in this poem. God bless America: an endlessly repeating background — like on The Flintstones — this was Barbie’s most expensive ensemble. Inside the Hyperobject We Are Always in the Wrong. On hot days I imposed a fast on myself & worked with laborers. Sure we were attacked by wolves, the chief among these being Philosophizing, but they did no harm. Less things fall from the sky than you would suspect and there are no words in the wall of the children's lettered building blocks. Remember The Princess and the Pea? She had fibromyalgia. Anyone who has ever chosen to sleep with Detroit will probably want them some eggs afterwards. This sharpshooter feeling is easy. Bo Diddley sets the tone: Announce yourself with a battle cry – as in “I am She-Ra!” “Egyptian Police shoot out activist’s right eye in Mansour Street clashes.” The salt is the part of my kidneys that has rats in it.

Q: does a garden have an audience

A: yes

“Buy it free,” like a symbolic share in Christiania, where a slab of tofu sizzles in a frying pan. My head mutates into a cabbage. A ghost walks through the Laundromat … smoking some hash. Its wings are scarlet and yellow and its eyes are blisters. It is sitting on a hippopotamus. Its antennas are raised. Its name is Max Jacob. It groans like metal groans in the hold of a sunken (sinking?) ship. Bach furnishes music like if you sit in a car that has been covered with snow the effect is enchantment. Here is a blurb from the back of the book: “temporary microarchitectures no bigger than a duct, an eyelash or a black radioactive grain which might collapse or reboot the Universe … But not here, not yet.” The trees are full of policemen, to quote Filip Marinovich. I saw the meat hook / the meat -- the butcher’s table -- slipping jewels into a carcass: images that always recurred, in other settings.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #17. Sources: JBR ekphrasis, and Jennifer Tamayo, “Read Coordinates”, at Jennifer Tamayo; Graham Harman, “Rogue Planets”; Anne Tardos, “The Pure of Heart”, at Anne Tardos; Maryam Henein, “What Is Monsanto Doing To Our Bees?”, at Disinformation, 3 Feb 012; Edgar Allan Poe, “Money Never Weeps” (tr. Chris Toll), as quoted in “Chris Toll”, at Everyday Genius, 12 Oct 010; Violetta, email rec’d 3 Feb 012 approx 3:15 PM PST; Dan and Dina, “Dina and Dan Cannot Leave Each Other”, at Boys with Short Hair, 3 Feb 012; JBR; David Trinidad, “From a Poem in Progress”, at Coconut 1; Timothy Morton, “Theory, Culture and Society Essay”, at Ecology without Nature, 3 Feb 012; Sam Truitt, “from The Song of Rasputin, Part 1”, at Boston Review 26.3; Erica “Sierra Pelona”, one of the Chronic Bitches at Ravelry; Jen Tynes, “Cleaving Poem”, “Buffalo Poem”, at Eleven Eleven Journal 2010; Kate Greenstreet, SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for Jen Tynes, Heron/Girlriend; Laura Kadnor, “5 THINGS I LEARNED FROM SHE-RA: PRINCESS OF POWER”, at Hello Giggles, 3 Feb 012; JBR; Graham Harman, “mostly bad news”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 4 Feb 012; Dawn Pendergast, “Hot Dog”, in Horse Less 10; Linda Russo, “Weeds”, at Horse Less 10; JBR, but see Jacob Sloan, “Denmark’s Anarchist Christiania Village Goes Legit Via Fake ‘Stock Shares’”, at Disinformation, 3 Feb 012; John Olson, “The Mathematics of Snow”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 3 Feb 012; Johannes Göransson, and Joyelle McSweeney, as quoted in Göransson’s “Forsla Fett/Transfer Fat – by Aase Berg”, at Montevidayo, 3 Feb 012; Jack Kimball, “Cutting off funding …”, at Pantaloons, 3 Feb 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Palmetry / Hypnosis / Palmistry: 2 Poets”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 2 Feb 012]

In the House of the Hangman 833

Does dark mean blank? I suppose I do believe in nothing, melted to its presences. That is, you may work in a mine where you see yourself in the rock and every day remove a piece as large as bones in owl droppings. Star exhaust / Have fun, we said for goodbye. Eat, little mushroom! They can hear you on fucking Saturn. Thanks to a friend, I recently read an impressive Walter Benjamin quote. 0100101110101101 stole a radioactive ride from Chernobyl and drove it to Manchester. “Copyright is boring,” they said. Dirk, do you agree? Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it. Then I realized that anyone’s life nowadays can be part of an artwork, willingly or unwillingly. Dieter says, “I wish I had collected the flies myself!” Eat, little mushroom, eat! I say, save the grotesque & it saves you. Wires and pipes make an aqueduct shape, the smell of cooking. A woman walks past undergrowth and trees: small, straight-backed, short hair, black t-shirt. What happened to the day? We eat an enormous, possibly local dish. Look, Doctor, I don’t really know how much of the sea, or my heart, is sea and how much is garbage. I would do it again. And then we used a hammer. Pounding and pounding. If only we could turn it into salt. We used our blood to make crosses on the missiles. Like upside-down flags. Surely I have ideals and uncoded momentum. I i.d. with your facts. And info from under the sea's bed. In Chapter 8 Žižek points out that the early – 50’s – Lacan tried to carry out a project under the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, which every “serious philosopher would undoubtedly dismiss as nonsense: namely, to bring together Heidegger (who defines “care” as the fundamental feature of finite Dasein) and Hegel (the philosopher of infinite Absolute Knowledge in which the Universal and the Particular are fully mediated).” He then points out that Lacan shifted from Hegel to Kant on the basis of the unknowability and inaccessibility of the Real as opposed to Hegel’s appreciation of the absolute and absolute knowledge. So far, so good. Oh, yeah. How I love — against each conspicuous lurch of the evident, or the summary — to repeat Paul Valéry’s Je suis l’instable. You look at the toaster and think taco. Da! Da! Da! You tap in the air for the volume control. Why did you order a dozen cantaloupes? Your mouth feels like an acrylic sweater. You don’t know what to do so you pet your ceramic cat. You blink and 3-D images hopscotch all around you. What? What? I am by a pond and a coyote is eating a frog. It’s amazing. The crown of my head pulses, then kills me, reminding me of the day when a prick of light domed out, embalming the city in a cathode white bubble that expanded, then popped, and faces volted to a million ticks, a rattling flash stunned labor in place, and a blistered wind raced inside, leaving us gaping. The “gyromodel.” The gyromodel depicts objects as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity. A singularity itself that’s modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of, well, there is one physical reality. And, simply put, atoms in the human body and solar systems in the universe move and behave in the exact same manner. The Earth is alive. It gets so confident it puts magenta high- / lights in its mane. / There was even a little / sway to its gait. But nobody understands how to clean the ganglia. Nobody knows how to thread it in the Rampant State. I was late by three hours, then by four, then five. Hair grows back thicker when you shave it. It’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. Peeing on a jellyfish sting will soothe the pain.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #16. Sources: Zach Savich, as quoted in Elizabeth Robinson, Spring 012 catalog blurb for Savich’s The Man Who Lost His Head; JBR; Zach Savich, “From ‘The Mountains Overhead’”, as quoted in Gregory Lawless, “New Poems by Zach Savich”, at I Thought I Was New Here, 13 May 010; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Letter on Harmony and Sacrifice”, at Abandoned Buildings, 31 Feb 012; Domenico Quaranta, Eva and Franco Mattes, Florian Cramer, “Eva & Franco Mattes: Attribution Art?”, at Art Pulse Magazine; Kara Dorris, “Fairytale: How Spring Comes to the Land of Snow & Icicles / (Dream Map)”, in PEN American Center, “The PEN Poetry Series: Kara Dorris”, email rec’d 2 Feb 012, approx. 12:44 PM PST; Kate Schapira, “Jiuxianqiao”, at Shampoo 28, and “Pacific Gyre”, at Poems for Living Waters; Allison Whittenberg, “Deconstruction”, at The Café Irreal 41; JBR; Jack Kimball, “Surely I have ideals …”, at Pantaloons, 2 Feb 012; Jared Schickling, “Conspiracy Against Poem”, at Interim 29; Peter Thompson, and Slavoj Žižek , as quoted in Thompson’s “Death and All: Lacan as a Reader of Hegel”, at Ernst Blog, 2 Feb 012; John Latta, “Making Do”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 2 Feb 012; Cathy Park Hong and Adam Shecter, “Forecast” (“A Visitation”, “Who’s Who”, “Composition of a Sunset”), at triplecanopy 15; Case Western Reserve Press Release, “New Theory of Life Claims to Unite Fields of Science”, at Astrobiology Magazine, 29 Jan 012 (“For more information, see ‘Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life,’ Life, Vol. 2:1-105 (2012)”); Sandra Simonds, “Solipsism as Maternal Instinct”, at Columbia Journal; Johannes Göransson, “Trauma”, at jubilat, vol.17 no.1; Piotr Sommer, “Overdoing It” (tr. Christian Hawkey and the poet), at jubilat, vol.17 no.1; Adam Dachis, “10 Stubborn Body Myths That Just Won’t Die, Debunked by Science”, at Lifehacker, 9 Jan 012]

In the House of the Hangman 832

Ten poems, pulled from the mud. Between real and fake wars, car commercials. CLOUD AS AN OPEN SET MAPS ONTO THE HILL. It is like being inside a parachute after landing — assuming survival —. From where I stood, it was one year after an Amtrak ride from West Virginia (when I carried two suitcases and some cigarillos) and one year before the Penske Craigslist rideshare to San Francisco (when I drove at 3:00 AM past the lights over Laramie, spooked by the ghost of Matthew Shepherd). Our living room was bare for the longest time. I looked for Thailand and found it was written by White people. I am not here to discuss these early photographic works, even though I thoroughly respect them. I personally am more interested in Huebler's work when it begins to take into account his own historical placement. This is most easily observed in his large-scale project, collectively titled Crocodile Tears, begun in 1981 but which Huebler sees as an outgrowth of his Variable Piece #70 of 1971 – loosely described as a proposal to “photographically document the existence of everyone alive.” I’m also doing a work about the “Land-O-Lakes” butter princess. That is, if I eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle / I could sit in the seat of rocks and razors / standing on one foot for ten years near the gingerlight / where the lees of my mind would fizz and

the insects are dead in the cupboard
and dead on the floor
and i left one over there
quivering
alongside a clot of strawberry jam.

Video footage shows the detective sergeant and five constables leaping from an unmarked car shouting “attack, attack”, before smashing baseball bats and a pickaxe handle into the side windows and windscreen of a Mini stopped in traffic. The plainclothes officers – all members of the Enfield crime squad in north London – then pull out the driver, Jonathan Billinghurst, and take him down on some trumped-up charge. I guess that’s what Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary meant when he said, "You might have 100 people in your gang - we have 32,000 people in ours …” slapping down cards in the chamber of snap reactions, then booting a ball around, boomadiboom, the fittings make one enormous clatter. All our bloodstreams saturated with nitrogen. To decompress safely is a daily trial. Whole families doze in neoprene. Today there was a radiation leak at the San Onofre nuclear reactor. Are these soldiers? “Last one on a match dies.” Hands and eyes glow, the spaces where bodies might be are tattooed with slash marks. Clearly they are landscapes but they are shattered and fractured, as if by PTSD. The best stories came from shock and loss, after we forgot what we were saying. Number of incense sticks I’ve burned today: 3. Number of episodes of Entourage I’ve watched: 2. Number of times I’ve walked around the block: 2. Number of peanut shell halves on the table: 47. Number of peanut shell halves lost: 1. Number of nervous breakdowns, bad: 0, not so bad: 27. If people could feed on themselves, which they can, even putrefaction would be saturated: state equals machine, but runs only by crashing. In winter, leaves are made of stitched and knotted hair. We’s ricochet. Not knowing how to get to the next minute is a festival. What was I saying? The other day, just as I was curling my fingers under the handle of the car door, it rained in Paris. Why would I like to buy a nice cool monotone? The cord fell behind the computer while I was on the phone with a woman in New Brunswick helping me to solve the problem with our modem. I couldn’t find it. It was hidden among the tangle of cords on the floor. She suggested I follow the cord from where it comes out of the wall. It worked. I found it. O Pestalotiopsis microspora! “Anyone alive today is assured that their old garden hoses and other polyurethane trash will still be here to greet his or her great, great grandchildren. Unless something eats it. The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and – even more surprising – do this in an anaerobic environment close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill…”

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #15. Sources: JBR, but see Miklos Radnoti, A Wiser, More Beautiful Death (tr. Solomon Rino), in SPD Spring 012 catalog; Linh Dinh, “Cheering On Dumb, Stupid Animals”, at Detainees, 1 Feb 012; Bin Ramke, “CLOUD AS AN OPEN SET MAPS ONTO THE HILLSIDE”, “HAUSDORFF SPACES”, at The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Nov 011; Jai Arun Ravine, as quoted in Barbara Jane Reyes, “Jai Arun Ravine: Behind the Poetry of [Thai word in Thai characters] and then entwine”, at Doveglion Press, 1 Aug 011; Mike Kelley (i.m.), “Shall We Kill Daddy”, at C³I, and Sérgio Bessa, “Interview With Mike Kelley”, at UbuWeb Papers; JBR; Ariana Reines, “from The Palace of Justice”, as quoted in Rusty Barnes, “Ariana Reines”, at Live Nude Poems, 9 Jul 010; Richard Seymour, “Gangs of London”, at Lenin’s Tomb, 1 Feb 012; Monika Rinck, “spending a fortnight in a diving bell” (tr. Alistair Noon), in “Sixteen Poems by Monika Rinck, trans. Alistair Noon”, at The Literateur, 16 Apr 011; Omo Bob, “Today there was …”, at Omo Studios, 1 Feb 012; Geoff Tuck, “Daniel Richter at Regen Projects”, at Notes on Looking, 1 Feb 012; Jordan Sanderson, “Where We Are”, at Phantom Limb 2; C Noah Pelletier, “There once was a boat from Nantucket”, at Matador Network, 1 Feb 012; Stacy Doris (i.m.), “Knot iii.VII”, at Poets.org; JBR, but see Christopher Jobson, “Tree Leaves Made of Stitched and Knotted Human Hair”, at Colossal Art and Design, 1 Feb 012 (on work by Jenine Shereos); Stacy Doris, “Bottleneck, being a limbus”, in Knot; John Olson, “Robert Creeley Rides a Camel Across Egypt”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 1 Feb 012; JBR, but see Majestic, “The Mushroom That Eats Plastic”, at Disinformation, 1 Feb 012 (“The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills. The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane. The common plastic is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. Once it gets into the trash stream, it persists for generations. Anyone alive today is assured that their old garden hoses and other polyurethane trash will still be here to greet his or her great, great grandchildren. Unless something eats it. The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and–even more surprising–do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill…”)]