Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 452

The film shows, at one point, inexplicable foam floating on the river and, at another, chemical fallout snow, falling in summertime. The souls of the dead return each year to visit their living relatives. Since there were no bones I suspect myself of white noise in an old jam jar so I leave my hole & a buried eye with no flicker of recognition. (C is the number of bits per second that can be reliably transmitted with bandwidth W and power P when combatting noise power N.) Fed up with the Miller translation of Hegel, Tamanya’s going to fetch the original German text in the Meiner edition. Logic: how absurd, that it should be in poetry, hiding there like a cat in a dry bath-tub. Haven’t we heard how bodies in text are obsolescent? General laughter over pictures, womblike spaces.  Beatrice wore a Stargate to the royal wedding (and remember, everything is an image for Deleuze, because when he says image it is, for him, and following Bergson, a way of saying a ‘slice of the world’). Worldslices, or images, come in many shades of actuality, and some are more actual and less virtual, or more virtual and less actual, than others. Envision psilocybin times champagne. La vita è bella. Outside the walls of Chinatown, past the protective greenbelt of Ping Tom Park, is the Great Swamp sopping up crumbling buildings, feral dogs and lost travelers. Click on this hand, which opens to this heart, which suspends canary red. Hit post and watch it spread across social networks. Whether or not it’s he who’s actually moving doesn’t occur to him until he stops, and feels a jolt of karma agitate his tender newborn system. I’m sorry to say I have to run now but will write you back later. Although very painful, it feels very healing to FINALLY be having this exchange ....... something we've owed each other for a long time. 40 years. “Communication felt as nakedness” part of the fragmented philosophy that appeared on that scrap of paper Colette Peignot told her lover Georges Bataille to get out of her purse as she lay dying, in agony, of TB. This is the moment of clairvoyance for Bataille that he will later mythologize, as he had just been writing he says the same identical sentence. And the monkeys we fired into space and the robots we fire into space carry love songs incised on golden disks for living glass aliens. This country, this terrible country, says W., shaking his head. What it does to people. What it might have done to him, were it not for his years in Canada! How it might have laid claim to him, if he’d spent his own childhood in the Midlands.

[Note: Sources: Adrian Ivakhiv, “Stalking the cinema stalking the world”, at immanence, 29 Apr 011; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 60”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Mary Kasimor, “the train”, in BlazeVOX 11; Claude Shannon's capacity formula for the white Gaussian noise channel, as found at Shannon Statue Dedications; Graham Harman, “Tamanya and the Science of Logic”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 29 Apr 011; JBR; Adam Fieled, “rom [sic] Apparition Poems (#547, #1654, #1604)”, at BlazeVOX 11; “Princess Beatrice and the hat that launched a Facebook page [Poll] [Updated to include, um, commentary]”, at LA Times, 29 Apr 011; Christopher Vitale, “Tips for Reading Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time-Image – Towards a Direct Imaging of Time”, at Networkologies, 29 Apr 011; Adam Katz, “from Nosegays for Nancy Nothingness  (1)”, at BlazeVOX 11; email from Knit Purl, “Newsletter: La Vita e Bella!”, rec’d 29 Apr 011 5:36 PM PST; Alexander Trevi, “Impossible Chicago #14”, at Pruned, 29 Apr 011; Andrea Scott, “The Boundless Abyss of Time”, at BlazeVOX 11; Chuck Richardson, “Digressions on a Recurring Dream”, in Dreamlands: 3 Fictions, at BlazeVOX; email from Sheila Siegel, rec’d 29 Apr 011 4:20 PM PST; JBR; Kate Zambreno, “a stab into the real”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 29 Apr 011 (deleted post); Andrew Haley, “Aliens”, at BlazeVOX 11; Lars Iyer, “There’s Nothing Wrong With You”, at Spurious, 29 Apr 011]

Big Boyz

In the House of the Hangman 451

I found a ranzgia; I found some viriditas. Your Gravatar profile stimulates my sensorium. Please click my “like” button one more time again. Critical Marxism is anything but determined. You look out at the purples and the tarmac and go “Huh, okay. This is my portion. I earned this mess.” From this we can conclude that even if there is only one universe (which now seems quite unlikely), and one arc of time in which it comes into and goes out of being—even if that is the case, entropy is not the telos or top object. I may have mentioned this before but there’s only one thing faster than a speeding object, and that’s a Barbie body with the head of Batman. It giveth twinks of excitement. When my feet were gone I rowed ashore, beached on the word, pure. We have entered a new stage; forsaking the drift of our former philosophic and religious tribulations we shall set off into the hinterlands. Guided by a sense of aphoristic play our minds will cross the boundaries of the groundless ground of this interminable Night School of Being seeking out the weird realism of a dark materialist view of existence that resides like a fractal thought our minds shift up and down the axis of a hyperdimensional spectrum in search of strange days seeking out kindred spectres to share our visions of a dark vitalism at the heart of this – this – this – like shamans – we shall ride the black horses of nihilism beyond nihilism where the transcendental real is by definition an impossible possible: that which resists words and meanings, but is the source of the scientist's desire to pursue his quest for ontic-epistemic knowledge and the poet's desire to conceive artifacts so well-wrought and convincing that they bring forth from the void those terrible objects from which all splendorous horrors spring! Yee-hah! So why does the birther conspiracy still have legs? The decline of symbolic efficiency. And oh yeah, racism. The pretzel says, “I was language for a second.” Huge fragrant bouquets descend from the rafters. I believe in clarity and find little use for coherence, there’s a cloud of yellow smoke I like drifting from the elevator. “I have no home in any place” trala trala like the cactus that has named itself Milarepa. Reaction to the charges brought against Alfie and the others yesterday has been, in the main, a combination of bewilderment and anger. The only places I can see where people haven’t responded in this way have been on an anonymous police blog and a similarly anonymous police forum, where posters are desperately trying to cling on to the fantasy of ‘rumours’ that Alfie was hit by a ‘concrete block’ and not by a police truncheon. It’s pathetic, but predictable and suitably cowardly that active (though nameless) cops would be so desperate that they would resort to such weaselly and baseless insinuations. Of course! I’ll maintain my Buddhist calm and detachment – that should annoy the bastards. Om Ah Hummmmmmmmmmm. Don’t swear so much. Aren’t we decorous? What is a culture? Imagine an elephant playing a harmonica or someone weighing out bones on the edge of the desert in Afghanistan. For a free trip to the moon, the human species is waiting in line, and so is the river. Is that One-eyed Mose hanging by his heels? No, that is the hanged man inventing the Taro. Are the dead really so fascinated by lovemaking? Yes, that is how they travel. I’m up at seven, go to the post office, send two Cuban alligators to Brussels. About a third of the leprosy cases each year in the United States are a result of contact with infected armadillos. These waves are somewhat or entirely nonlocally distributed. Below the size of an electron, for instance (10^-17cm), there is a vast ocean of .... what? Right down to the Planck length (10^-33cm) and lower (strings). It's possible that spacetime is an emergent property of objects larger than 10^-17cm. This means that objects below this scale are “everywhere.” 

[Note: Sources: JBR and Hildegard of Bingen, the latter as quot4ed in Sarah L Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation and Discussion (ranzgia = tongue; viriditas = greenness); Jean Vengua, “Dear Digital Poetry”, at Okir, 28 Apr 011; Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative; Michael Chaulk, “Michael Chaulk on First Books”, at Lemon Hound, 28 Apr 011; Alice Notley, “Portion”, “The Book of Lies”, in Culture of One; JBR (for Sheila Siegel); Timothy Morton, “Not Even Entropy Is the Top Object”, at Ecology without Nature, 28 Apr 011; JBR, practicing ekphrasis on the photo that appears at the foot of Lemon Hound; JBR; Marina Zurkow, “OOO For Dummies (Like Me)”, at Renatured, 2 Mar 011; Elizabeth Willis, “Arthur in Egypt”, in Turneresque; S C Hickman, “Journey of a Spectral Realist”, at Dark Chemistry, 24 Mar 011; JBR; Jodi Dean, “The Real Birth Certificate”, at I cite, 28 Apr 011; Nico Vassilakis, “The Colander”, in Text Loses Time; John Yau, “Peter Lorre Reminisces About Being a Sidekick”, in Borrowed Love Poems; John Gallaher, and JBR, “Steve Kowit’s Rules for Anti-Rules”, at Nothing to Say & Saying It, 28 Apr 011 (JBR is practicing ekphrasis on the photo embedded in this post); Sarah Fox, “Field Notes of an Advance Scout: Transubstantiation”, in Because Why; JBR; Nina Power, “piece on the student arrests”, at Infinite ThØught, 27 Apr 011; Nicholas de Monchaux, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Spacesuit: An Interview With Nicholas de Monchaux”, at BLDG/BLOG, 27 Apr 011; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 61”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; JBR; Etel Adnan, Seasons; Ira Cohen, “Imagine Jean Cocteau”, “From the Moroccan Journal – 1987”, “Insomnia on Duke Ellington Boulevard”, at Poet’s Brains Prove To Be Useful!; Gardiner Harris, “Armadillos Can Transmit Leprosy to Humans, Federal Researchers Confirm”, at New York Times, 27 Apr 011; Timothy Morton, “Some Outlines for Art in a Time of Hyperobjects”, at Ecology without Nature, 28 Apr 011]

In the House of the Hangman 450

This was where I came in. I, too, had been writing Khit Por poems but had become disillusioned with what I was doing, which was what everyone who called him/herself a Khit Por poet was doing, churning out the same emotions of personal pain and suffering in startling images. As an attempt to find something ‘new’, I translated some Post-Soviet Russians and introduced John Ashbery and the New York school. I received some flak for ‘importing’ decadent Americans. I came to be labeled ‘LP’, Language poet, and poets who were close to me and who also started ‘experimenting’ with LANGUAGE Writing were promptly labeled LP gang, with me as gang leader. Tho many things have yet to be framed, of course, for the world was once dusted with a fine powder, I love to watch them come out of the rain struggling with their octopi, getting the singe back. Their ideas weren't British ideas, or at least current British ideas. Their ideas weren’t hardheaded ideas, ideas that belong to the new reality. Ah, in another country, they thought, they would have been treated like gurus. In religious or recently religious countries, where they still revere philosophy. In Mediterranean countries, where they pour you wine and sit down with you to discuss ideas, how might they have been treated? In the countries of Eastern Europe - in political or recently political countries - where you can still discuss Marx over your Weissbiers, where Lenin and Trotsky are on everyone’s minds, wouldn't they have found allies and admirers? The next tether is close at hand. Keeping the ‘house of Satan’ cruciform in chaos. This dead girl is trying to hold your h h h h h her palm a pilgrim into the air, a vapour. Not bad, 7 months, two aspirin. A great meaning puts its fist through my steel plate door. Smart trees love the wind. I’ll go the whole world for additional percussion. My left middle finger is throwing a fit. A whole stanza. Then the leopard underwear sings an annoying melismata to all sextillion gassy stars, god sits in a bowl, we bake him: “I must selectively blossom hurtling toward the gold heart.” Of all Charles Dickens novels, I like Middlemarch best. Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister does not exist. To have dismantled love in order to become capable of a greater loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage… -- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 197. Dot dot dot. “Only homo necans can become homo sapiens." I was supposed to raise the water. My teeth were falling. So little pain really. Just open up, and let them. What does it take to make a happy ant? (You couldn’t run as fast as you wanted to when you were with it) I wrapped myself in melancholy, I sobbed in the shower, I went to the Whole Foods and sat outside in the 80-something heat and ate vegan egg rolls. I bought guacamole and almond milk chocolate ice cream. I think I'm getting my period. “Iron cloud, bronzed sunset, stolen dream. I wasn’t always a feverish lepidopterist chasing whistling chariots in a stadium. My wax lacked coherence, my human hairs glistened. …” I am anxious to know where I may apply for a license to kill Indians. My forefathers helped settle the west and it was their tradition to kill every Redskin they saw. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” they believed. I want to keep faith with my ancestors. I’m speaking, of course, about the Lublin Indians, for whom The only eye is pleasure-impotence (first as stick figure, then in full perspective). Rimbaud’s “Too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin” is probably pertinent. Place two hands on the table and repeat after me: What’s the deal with Sanka? Every act of creation is the self-portrait of a Chia Pet. I do not know what the inside of this thing looks like but I think it looks like a brain made of mozzarella cheese. OH MY GOD! I read a book about a boy who made friends with an ornithologist and went with him to a bird rookery and they found all the birds some of them still alive and faintly staggering and lying dead and dying with their wings chopped off. The island had been attacked by feather pirates. And another story about a native taking people on a raft from isle to isle and they hated him but he had a secret stash of water that he drank through a tube while the loathsome white people slept … I like Egyptian frescoes too … And to study all the alphabets. I was flying a mountain into a sunny patch.

[Note: Sources: Zeyar Lynn, “Language-oriented Poetry in Myanmar”, at Jacket 2, 27 Apr 011; Geoffrey Young, “Side by Side”, “The Whale”, in Subject to Fits; JBR; Dean Young, “Dead Dean”, in Skid; Lars Iyer, “Now and in Essex”, at Spurious, 27 Apr 011; Text Loses Time; Andrea Brady, “Chronic”, in Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination; Nada Gordon, “Idealic”, at Ululations, 27 Apr 011; Sarah Fox, “A Hole in the Asp”, in Because Why; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 63”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Blogger; Cengiz Erdem, “Nature, Culture and Lacan”, at Minimalist Ontolog, 27 Apr 011; JBR; Walter Burkert, as quoted in Tom Clark, “Homo Necans: Man the Killer”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 27 Apr 011; Kate Greenstreet, “Complications from a fall”, “due process”, in case sensitive; Elizabeth Willis, “Elegy”, in Turneresque; Dara Weir, “instant justice”, in Reverse Rapture; Kate Zambreno, “block”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 27 Apr 011; John Yau, “Peter Lorre Reminisces About Being a Sidekick”, in Borrowed Love Poems; Anon., as quoted in Caskey Russell, “Wild Madness: The Makah Whale Hunt and its Aftermath”, in Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (eds. Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt); JBR; Diane Ward, “Pronouncing”, “Nine-Tenths of Our Body”, in Never Without One; John Latta, “Clark Coolidge’s This Time We Are Both”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 27 Apr 011; Diane Ward, “Right”, in Flim-Yoked Scrim; Rod Smith, and Drew Gardner, in Gardner’s “Rod Smith’s new poem ‘What’s the Deal’”, at Overlap, 25 Apr 011; Michael Magee, Ish Klein, as quoted in Drew Gardner, “Abraham Lincoln, Issue #6, Edited by K. Silem Mohammad …”, at Overlap, 26 Apr 011; OH MY GOD! … alphabets: Michael McClure, as quoted in Drew Gardner, “for the BP oil spill anniversary, #181 from Michael McClure’s proto-Flarf book 15 Fleas …”, at Overlap, 24 Apr 011; Catherine Wagner, “Everyone in the Room Is a Representative of the World at Large”, in My New Job]

In the House of the Hangman 449

Luco asks: Why is the dog allowed freedom? What must the sunlight feel like soaking into his fur? Is the light blinding? Do lizards creep up and beg to be eaten? What does a bird song sound like so close? Does the grass feel like feathers? How does it feel to scoop pawfuls of dirt?  Is there a man in the tree back there? So many questions only the dog can answer, but I am loathe to ask. Imagine admitting to the dog that he has insight! Knowledge I cannot fathom. Experiences that would electrify. What I’ve been working on whenever Tamanya sits on my shoulder (like a parrot) and purrs (unlike a parrot) is Badiou’s Theory of the Subject. I think Luco would hate Tamanya. Yesterday, Poly Styrene died. My reference points are Zukofsky, Althusser and Spinoza. From anywhere in the city, you can look up and find eels slithering. Apple with tabouli is delicious. Then I am in the corner of a room lying on the floor with my feet pointing out diagonally towards the room’s center. The carriage driver is giving me advice I don’t remember. But later when it comes time to pay I pay in chapbooks and bracelets. The character called Kî is used as a symbol of being past or completed. Celestial objects perform their assigned duties, pinching a nerve in my neck. Play might be the earliest form of a negative, prior to the existence of the negative in language. Rock art’s obscure to the stupidos. I know what it says: BORN DEAD. I remember when all the animals in the zoo seemed to be roaring and howling. There is a beautiful strong wind and we shall have no Zeppelins. Yeah, je me souviens.

I am this song
Therefore,
You are very good, you can hear me.

Welcome to spiritual food
In summer, the grass on the basis that I sit

My language, my blood, plastic, earth, air, all the atoms
After their parents or grandparents were born, born
Parents

If you haven’t seen the video for “Chicken and Meat,” here it is. Be sure to keep an eye out for MC Kool AD reading Society of the Spectacle. Please keep both saws! I’m crying at work. Termites chow on currency, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Best wishes! I want the Internet to erase itself and for chords to work backwards and Sharpies to retract ink and entropy to reverse and the Sun to dim and for polygons to become more perfect. It seems as if al-Qaeda members were given Casio watches to repurpose as detonators. Then, Nadia and her sari. I woke up to her putting it on. Round and round and round. All six yards of it, as she told me. All six yards. All of it to hide two little holes? All the mysteries, answers, that lie there, waiting. Her vagina was tasty. It smelled, strongly. A little mole, to the side, a reward for the curious. Soft, powerful, sad, funny: wholly hers to give, whomever she wanted to connect with. But before I started becoming aware of these bodily holes, I had completely forgotten about them. Most residents stay to ride out the firestorm from their concrete bunkers. They only need to stock up on food and water for a week and, most critically, tap in to the city’s underground O2 network. A plate of oysters in the solemnity of a courtroom justifies nothing less than a thorough devotion to lavender, which is why I’m waiting for the elevator. Our very perceptions clothe the world in vignettes, ponytails and meaning, words exuberant as bamboo. Conversation is an art. A radio baked in music. Scoundrels around a fire. Just the name “valve” produces images in the mind of a Christian man that should. not. be. there. As if that were not enough, there are mechanical testicles and gay saunas around every corner. Not enough? Well this game introduces “gels” which help the innocent children slide through a glowing red sphincter.

[Note: Sources: Luco the cat, “Luco and Envy”, art Why is My Cat so Sad?, 26 Apr 011; Graham Harman, “a bit philosophy amidst the kitten posts”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 26 Apr 011; JBR; Tom Raworth, “Poly Styrene”, at Tom Raworth, 26 Apr 011; Timothy Cahill, “NOTE TO ACCOMPANY SELECTIONS FROM EXPOSÉS”, in “Timothy Cahill: Two Poems from Exposés”, at Poems and Poetics, 26 Apr 011; Alexander Trevi, “(Im)possible Chicago # 11”, at Pruned, 26 Apr 011; JBR; Nada Gordon, “dream”, at Ululations, 26 Apr 011; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 63”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Etel Adnan, Seasons; JBR; Janet Murray, as quoted in Timothy Morton, “Of Nips: Play and realism”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Apr 011; Alice Notley, “Bighorn”, in Culture of One; William Swan, Apocrypha of Being, as quoted in Martin Corless-Smith, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul; JBR; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, sort of, as quoted in NNNP, “Machine”, at Indecidibles, 25 Apr 011 (“I ran the first few lines of Whitman’s Song of Myself through all the possible combinations of Google Translate. From English I went to French, from French to Spanish, from Spanish to Chinese, Corean, Japanese, Malayan, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Then I translated it back to English. This is what turned out”); Matt Applegate, “People in the Street Eating Chicken and Meat”, at Prodigies and Monsters, 25 April 011; anon, as quoted in Laurie Perry, “Notes from the halfway place”, at Crazy Aunt Purl, 26 Apr 011; an old friend who shall remain nameless; “Termites eat millions at a bank in India”, at h Christian Science Monitor, 22 Apr 011; Nada Gordon, “Seven Twelfths: TETRACHORDS”, at Ululations, 25 Apr 011; Timothy Morton, “Al Qaeda Casio”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Apr 011; Haider Syed Shahbaz, “Holes”, at Indecidibles, 25 Apr 011; Alexander Trevi “(Im)possible Chicago #10”, at Pruned, 25 Apr 011; John Olson, “Mozart’s Birthday”, at The Jivin’ Ladybug; Ice van Winkle, “Is ‘Portal 2’ Safe for the Christian Family?”, at Christwire.org, 23 Apr 011, via Roberg Jackson, “Is This Real?”, at Algorithm and Contingency, 25 Apr 011]

In the House of the Hangman 448

A fucksaw’s a phallus attached to a chainsaw engine.  It boils down. It posits. A flat ontology’s ‘made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatiotemporal scale, maybe, but not in ontological status’. They progress as far as the cog. I guess these things evoke some collective memory of our nomadic past. Don’t we need some boys? I pledge allegiance to the lantern that I got from this dying purple alien. “In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon.” Buddha died of eating dodgy mushrooms, you know. (What a great way to go, by the way, encountering a strange lifeform … ) Actively engage blind spots. So what if coalitions are dangerous? There are 214 bridges over the Thames. As a techno-turntablist---and potential hermeneutist---of CaleNdarON ,,, I cut an approachto grasping this Toplay the turntable over the laptop, to scratch the binaries of nature/culture andmind/body through the manifold temporalities of Mayan numerology, and to facethe demands of the scriptual-logos proved deceptively exhaustive whilecatalysing a questioning of the script, the technology, and the techniques througha collision of historical records: the present-day turntablist clasping a livingmember of yesterday's avant-garde, ,,,  a landscape illuminated by falling stars is discovered to be watered from below by “networks of metal piping” that “mirrored the arrangement of flowers above.” As far away as Tonga and Samoa, people are still wearing facemasks. And toward the end of the book, where the flesh from the man’s back twists into birds and stars and butterflies and faces with thick lips and empty eyes, there is a story that the flesh readers call memory: here the flesh words tell of a man who falls out of an airplane, and when his bones splatter each shard of bone forms a country, and in each country there are men who have been destroyed but who have now been reconstructed as walking pieces of flesh formed into the former bodies they once possessed. The flesh men live in the bones and all day they cry for their loves, the loves they left behind, they loves who were forced to push them out of the airplanes by the bigger men with guns so that their last image of life, their last gasp of life, their last snatch of life would be death at the hands of those they love: this is the memory as it is written in the Book of Flesh. The fragmentary work – the need of the work itself to be fragmentary – then has a very different meaning depending on whether the work appears as a renunciation of the act of composition, i.e., an aggressive imitation of pre-musical language, or whether it appears as the pursuit of a new form of writing which makes the completed work difficult, not because it evades being finished but because.

[Note: Source: Hilary Malatino, “Etiologies of Transness and Empiricisms of Sexuality (or, what is the deal with J Michael Bailey)”, at Prodigies and Monsters, 24 Apr 011; Anarchist Without Content, and Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, as quoted in AWC’s “death to flat ontology”, at Anarchist Without Content, 21 Apr 011; Alice Notley, “Scars”, “Summer”, in Culture of One; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 64”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010;trailer for The Green Lantern, as seen on ABC 24 Apr 011 approx 1:34 PM PST; Marshall McLuhan, as quoted in “Here Be Dragon”, at Archive Fire, 4 Apr 011; Timothy Morton, “Vegan Status Report: De Luxe Edition”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Apr 011; Brenda Iijima, as quoted in Christopher Kondrich, “If Not Metamorphic by Brenda Iijima”, at CutBank, 17 Jan 011; JBR; Wu Tsang, “coalition is dangerous”, at CLASS, 19 Apr 011; Geoff Manaugh, “Fiction and the city”, at BLDG/BLOG (on a work by CJ Lim, Ed Liu, Maxwell Mutanda, and Tomasz Marchewka, in Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-half Dimensions), 24 Apr 011; tobias c van Veen, “Turn/Stile: Remixing Udo Kasemets’ CaleNdarON”, at Scribd; Momus (aka Nick Currie), “Scotland 24”, as quoted in Alexander Trevi, “Scotland 324”, at Pruned, 24 April 2011; Daniel Borzutsky, “The Book of Flesh”, as quoted in Lily Hoang, “Daniel Borzutsky’s ‘The Book of Interfering Bodies’”, at HTMLGIANT; Maurice Blanchot, “Ars Nova” (tr. Donald Schier), as found at wood s lot, 24 Apr 011]

In the House of the Hangman 446 & 447

What do you mean by the rheomode? Perpetual field of velvet horizon. At a slant is the unicorn’s mane. Centaur comes from water. Crickets audible over car noise. Mailman in blue shorts drops another book. Trash cans wait patiently. A rift of jet smoke splits the sky. The song continues: Two brides arise from the river, shivering and shining like pomegranate seeds. Tim’s Earth Day offering is “an abject object inside an abject object”: Serrano’s Piss Christ. (Perhaps here is the time. Perhaps now is the space.) Various tonalities bounce the horizontal. Dear 11 people: whose ocean is breaking apart in your eyes? My bugs are whining when u talk about the news. Sunlight is grime in your lake, in your disclosure. Hate me for my qtip city; bling is in the ocean. The shaman sea hates the cat in your shredded xmas. I spill my salad when your church lips are so strict. Take your whortle tail when I decide the budget. I am enjoying my meat, my lake and my feelings; witness. I am the floor of the sea; I am not a foot in her worst nightmare. Bling needs people who are willing; close your big fing. My whales are talking dramamine. After the Tibetan Buddhist dakini feast day Chinatown NYC I gave the cab driver a blessed tangerine. No monkey? No problem! The weeds we have in common are called yard. If you pass a dead squirrel or a pigeon, maybe, and you fail to place it in a bag or to call the city to see if it might require additional inspection by those schooled in disease, there will be consequences for flying this or any other scene. I wanted to say I’m sinuing down…because I’ve curled towards a corridor…smelling wood begin to cook…I’d doubt this soil’s freshly raked…but if it was it would smell more like this…Somebody uses an umbrella for sun…Pigeon shadows fly under me. The number of life blows may determine toughness through the fog. We know the gut contains many of the same neurotransmitters as the brain. A pencil-drawn dog gazes at a constellation of gold-star stickers; cut-out almonds descend upon a chart of raccoons, wolves, and other low-lying predators; Big Bird lowers its head and covers its eyes as a peasant girl smiles for her postcard portrait. My past lives as an animal rise up before me, replayed thru my dying consciousness. I have no concept of . . . any longer. I’m preserved this way. He mated with a Monkey Ghost and became one. We used to stand at the doorway of clubs listening for something that was very disturbing. You can touch a sparkle; it’s gritty, confirming your sense of touch. The man is told to say embarrassing things, to make inappropriate gestures, to get down on all fours, and walk like a dog. This hexagram reflects a situation in which any movement makes matter worse.

[Note: Sources: 446. John Goodbun, “Rheomode and Aesthetics; Towards a Science of Consciousness”, at Rheomode, 29 Mar 011, via Timothy Morton, “Bohm, Ecology, Aesthetics”, at Ecology without Nature, 23 Apr 011 (Goodbun: “a new verb-based form of language, which [David Bohm] called the rheomode (from the Greek flow). He hoped this might make it easier for us to see and conceive of a dynamic unfolding wholeness.”); Brenda Iijima, “Skyland”, at Poetry Foundation; Walter Benjamin, “Centaur”, in Early Writings 1910-1917 (ed. Howard Eiland); Lori Desrosiers, “From the Porch”, “That Pomegranate Shine”, at Fieralingue; JBR; JBR, and Timothy Morton, re: Morton’s “Happy Earth Day”, at Ecology without Nature, 23 Apr 011; Alan Davies, “WHAT GOES AROUND: review of Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea”, at O Books; Donna Kuhn, “My Stalker is in Your Text Den”, at Fieralingue; Marc Olmsted, “Dream-like New York Visit”, at Fieralingue; Fieralingue; Sheila E Murphy, “Theory Apart from Practice”, at Fieralingue; Roseanne Carrara, “Curses”, at Harp & Altar 8. 447. Andy Fitch, “Freshly Raked”, at Harp & Altar 8; Sharon Brogan, “04 january 2011”, at Fieralingue; Integral Options Café, 23 Apr 011; Jessica Baran, “Learning Again What We Think We Know: Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity”, at Harp & Altar 8; Barry Alpert, “A LETTER TO UNCLE BOONMEE & HIS RESPONSE via Apichatpong Weerasethakul”, “CHARLES BURNETT TALKED & ANSWERED QUESTIONS (modestly)”, at Fieralingue; Alice Notley, “Once Again”, in Culture of One; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access 55”, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010]

In the House of the Hangman 445

Huge pieces of rusted machinery, extracted from re-purposed buildings, lying scattered amongst and alongside outdoor sculptures, as if deliberately scrambling the boundaries … heavy metal remnants and intangible designs, exulting, cyclopean, stressed, and time-tortured … around and amongst these paleo-modernist dinosaur skeletons, an exquisite web of maximal dematerialization and near-transparency, high-bandwidth, intelligent, creeping … she likes to think the hills are filled with children / she blows a kiss across the mist / silos and highways / … describe the pain and the pain will lessen …  looking back she writes, “At Christopher’s funeral, and at his, at his, at his, at his and his. Circling around women with our arms linked, escorting them into the abortion clinic. Collecting knives from the men waiting to get into the shelter for the night. Watching the crack house burn. The bombing begins in five minutes.” Here, now, as ever, going out again / from Finis Terre, … /

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The last inhabitants’ blazing canoes
expose their nakedness to the last explorers.
This plot begins and ends with past.
But what we name the future follows on like ‘a three-game series raveling and unraveling the hajj of things drifting through you’. I hope Bhanu won’t mind if I quote her, too: “Mukhtaran Mai, I send you light.” The doors swing open and those exiting are greeted by a homeless man dancing a jig with
a look of confusion and desperation; out of breath and sweating profusely,
                                                                                   “please, lend
me your ears”/
and they watch, until a singing man with a violin turns the corner at the other
                                                                                     end of the
street causing the small crowd to look over. regretfully,
“if you could, the tale of a young man, not so different from you—”/
                                                                                     interrupted by the
sound of a plane through the sky on its way to Vegas, a pretty simple story,
                                                                                     actually. see,
I’m in love with this girl and she’s marrying this other guy/
as the crowd looks up to the noise, a blimp floats past, “eat at Ganesh’s” … And there's a footprint of a child, maybe eight-year-old, this very mysterious. We couldn't film it. We were not allowed, because it was deep in a recess of the cave. The mysterious thing is that next to this footprint, probably a boy, probably around eight years old, parallel to it runs the footprint of a wolf. And I was very, very puzzled: Did the wolf stalk the boy? Or did they walk together as friends? Or did the wolf leave its footprints 5,000 years later? It's stunning. The lapse of time is completely and utterly stunning. At first we thought it would be cool to plug a modified radio into their database and then listen in to the sonic broadcast of exoplanetary auroras all night long. Your roommates will think : just a fizzy shower of static from some lonely AM radio station. But no, it’s actually the gravitational whirligigs of exoplanets, exomoons, magnetic fields and ionized gases. Ambient drones for when you're writing or coding. But you know what? Screw the radio! What we actually want are subterranean listening chambers. Arecibo crossed with Roden Crater crossed with the Super-Kamiokande. Deep underground, these antechambers vibrate extraterrestrial landscapes — crackling and warbling, hissing and bleeping, UFOing and theremining, or however the translation matrix is rendering the chordfront of the electromagnetic storm. When I go to Holland everyone is wearing cowboy boots. Why do your bones lean left?

[Note: Sources: Nick Land, “Neomodernity”, at Urbanatomy, 22 Apr 011; Jen Benka, “Sentencing”, at EOAGH 3; JBR; Jen Benka, “For Muriel”, at HOW2 v.3 no.2; Nathaniel Tarn, “Gondwana”, at wood s lot, 22 Apr 011; John Ashbery, and Ed Barrett, as quoted in Ashbery’s SPD blurb for Barrett’s Down New Utrecht Avenue; JBR; Bhanu Kapil, “Mukhtaran Mai”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 22 Apr 011 (“Human rights groups have expressed outrage after most of those accused of the gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai, who was assaulted on the orders of a village council, were freed by Pakistan’s supreme court. Nine years after the gang rape, Mai’s struggle for justice ended with the court ordering five of the six accused to be freed. A distraught Mai, who has won international acclaim for her bravery in a deeply chauvinistic society, said that the release of the men had put her life in danger. Originally 14 had been accused of taking part in the rape, which was ordered in 2002 by village elders sitting as a traditional tribal court after Mai's brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan. The court judgment acknowledged that Mai had been raped, by upholding the sentence against one of the accused, Abdul Khaliq, but the outcome means that just one of the 14 men she believes were involved has been found guilty. Khaliq’s original death sentence had already been commuted to life in prison by a lower court. “I am scared these 13 people will come back to my village and harm me and my family,” Mai said, in her remote home in the south of Punjab province. “I have lost faith in the courts and now I am leaving my case to the court of God. I am sure God will punish those who molested me.” – Saeed Shah, “Pakistan court frees five alleged attackers in gang rape: Just one man convicted of assault on Mukhtaran Mai, after her nine-year struggle for justice”, at The Guardian, 21 Apr 011); Uyen Hua, “twenty women, making passing glances at James Woods”, at Shampoo 37; Werner Herzog, as quoted in Timothy Morton, “Sensual Objects are Nonlocal and Nontemporal”, at Ecology without Nature, 21 Apr 011; Alexander Trevi, “A Crater for Eavesdropping on Exoplanetary Auroras”, at Pruned, 21 Apr 011; Becky Peterson, “Clogs”, at Delirious Hem, 15 Apr 011; Rachel Gruskin, “Breathing Reason”, at Shampoo 37]

In the House of the Hangman 444

“It’s all arms, arms, arms. I think it works by my simply having the arms, they are what you need; you touch one, and it’s done. You’ve obtained mercy, which is what? Cessation of your suffering for a time. How do I have this ability? All I can say is I accepted the arms, the arms themselves. It’s contained in the leap from not having the arms to having them. Once you have them. That’s it.” You look away: the new love! You look back,—the new love! Pressure is applied on time, bending it. The curvature is imparted. When the drought reaches the valley, stories replace the river, yet there’s moss on the windowsill. Imagine you’re driving through a desert. You see some nice mountains. You assume they are two miles away at most so you park the car and start walking. Then three hours later the mountain patrol has to come and rescue you. You can’t scale your limbs to the limbs of the trees. And in the desert colors stay the way they are in the distance, violating atmospheric perspective (things bluer in distance). It's not green, either. You don't understand the color. There is so much water behind the dams. “The people are always pilgrims. This is the worst gutter medicine I’ve ever taken. I hope it’s working. All primitive types gamble away their very circuitry. But I’m not going to give myself up to anyone but the death fish.”  In conversation 2, one person said: “What about a footbath?”  We were discussing the disturbance of the endocrine system from frequent air travel. “There can be no sovereign music for your prefab amps and your cautious pride.” He is on the bearskin rug in the corner of the apartment, eating a violin bit by bit, and yearning for a salad. A gateway timeout occurred. The server / is unreachable. “Who cares? We work hard all day, then come home exhausted to catch a few hours of sleep. Clocks make no difference.” Where is Ai Weiwei? There is so much water behind the dams we have changed the earth’s rotation. Here is dreamed a universe in which pets are batteries. A crackling chrysalis split down the back like an ill fitting prom dress, revealing wings of wet pulp; shivering like a Chihuahua until the blood funnels through stiff tiny insect veins and I unfurl my majesty. Is there a term limit for divas? Is my application lost in the mail? Am I late for the coronation? Of course I am. So I peek through the curtains and giggle at the queen. Who can breathe through all that taffeta? But the truth is I want you to tighten my corset; make it so I can’t breathe. Atlantis! In the dark the holothurians eat and excrete and move on and eat, inching forward, thinking, sending out their mental flares in the hope that someone, something, anything will drop by and relieve the tedium of their biological fate, down there, at the bottom of the sea, with the calcified sponges, magnesium nodules, the crushed spines of sea urchins, the ghosts of coelenterates, unexploded torpedoes, skeletons of bathypterids and halosaurs, the hieroglyphic tracks of sea pens and ophiuroids, fecal coils, the waving arms of a burrowed brittle-star, manganese-encrusted dolphin teeth, the remains of a jettisoned crate of manila-envelope clasps, zeolite crystals, pillows of basalt, calcareous shells of pteropods, the sinister egg-casings of skates, the broken anti-matter locks from a crashed spaceship, the short-crested ripples of sand, and the scour moats forming in the globigerina ooze. The look of the moment is campesino chic. Look, I said, I couldn’t see what the heart’s a [illegible] nosing the neighborhood hurt for remains. At this we tremble in theory, in haste. At this we treble in hearing. The mouth dried with the residue of honey—sweet dust kicked up by birds with teeth. O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body … (Verlaine would later complain in a letter that the package cost him “2 francs 75 …”) Frightened, I go into a room cluttered with desks, / Look, I’m told, this was your classroom, / See on the walls the first images you looked at …

[Note: Sources: Alice Notley, “Then I Became Mercy”, “Living on Brackish Water”, in Culture of One; Arthur Rimbaud, “To a reason”, “Morning of Drunkenness” (tr. John Ashbery), at Poetry, Apr 011; Etel Adnan, Seasons; Timothy Morton, “Bill Fox on Desert Aesthetics (lecture notes)”, at Ecology without Nature, 21 Apr 011; Bhanu Kapil, “Conversations 1 to 9”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 21 Apr 011; The Rejection Group (Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Kasey Silem Mohammad, and Kent Johnson), as quoted in John Gallaher, “The Rejection Group Hits the Market”, at Nothing to Say & Saying It, 21 Apr 011; Amanda Montei, “Four Poems (1)”, at Delirious Hem, 18 April 011; Joseph Harrington, as quoted in an email from Wesleyan Press, “New Poetry from Joseph Harrington”, rec’d 21 Apr 011 9:14 AM PST; an Egyptian worker, as quoted in Graham Harman, “Daylight Saving Time cancelled indefinitely”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 21 Apr 011; JBR, re: Richard Lopez, “just a thought”, at Really Bad Movies, 21 Apr 011. China Miéville, “Marley & Me (Spoilers!)”, at Rejectamentalist Manifesto, 20 Apr 011; Cole Cohen, “Drag City: Some Sketches on Writing as Performance”, at Delirious Hem, 18 Apr 011; Eliot Weinberger, “Dreams from the Holothurians”, as quoted in John Latta, “Jeffrey Yang’s Birds, Beasts, and Seas”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 11 Apr 011; Carina Finn, “this is the girl of the moment”, at Delirious Hem, 18 Apr 011; Albert Min, “Look, I said, …”, at teatparty 17 Jan 011, via Geof Huth, “He Said It Was Min”, at dbqp, 20 Apr 011; John Ashbery, “Translator’s Notes: Morning of Drunkenness”, at Poetry, Apr 011; Yves Bonnefoy, “The House Where I Was Born” (tr. John T. Naughton), at wood s lot, 21 Apr 011]

In the House of the Hangman 436-443

436.

A tree has woven a basket. Not anyone is tall and very likely any more.

437.

His hand bobs in and out of her perm. “Die like a mad dog.” A Dutch bicycle hangs from the banging North.

438.

The citizens in their cars looked at the porcupines, thinking: What is wonderful? Are these porcupines wonderful? Are they significant? Are they what I need?

439.

I shall endeavor to show you how to solve the mystery of who it is has inherited the lake of fire.

440.

Destruction was my Beatrice. As I type, I hold in my hand Peterson’s translation of Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.

441.

Good literature often worried Gide. The red dots on my tie pricked the sky above. “Too much swill, Father, and I fear the womb will get murky, and the little one, when it emerges, will already be a sot.”

442.

In Latin there is a saying.

443.

Oh John I want your Shoes off and your Feet in the Sand and Your Eyes on the Water and your hair in the Fog     It’s Venice before the Mist burns off               It’s Vamping Weather             Blood Sucker             My little Mother Fucker     Cut to the Chase / / The Chase      Stock Footage  Bullit                        McQueen careens down Haight        Blues Bros Ackroyd chased by 127 cop cars          Schwartznegger [sic] Bond and Evil Kneival             The rain has stopped  The sun is out We’ve CUT  / / We’ve CUT to Venice Beach Yip Yip           Here they come                       Yip yip yip yip Screech                      Here’s an object with no name: it’s not a melon, not a screwdriver.

[Note: Sources: 436. Cal Bedient, “The Dead Put Up a Bad Fight”, “Basket and Ashes”, in Candy Necklace. 437. Laura-Anne Bosselaar, “In Pocatello”, “Mortal Art”, “Chanel No. 5”, “The Radiator”, in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. 438. Donald Barthelme, “Porcupines at the University”, in Forty Stories. 439. Stephen Todd Booker, “Knowledge”, “A Reflection: Of the Sky on Wheat and River”, in Tug. 440. Stephane Mallarmé, as quoted in Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance; 441. Maurice Blanchot, “Gide and the Literature of Experience”, in The Work of Fire (tr. Charlotte Mandell); Joan Miró, “Notebook of Poems, 1936-1939”, in his Selected Writings and Interviews (ed. Margit Rowell) (today is JM’s birthday!); Jeff Clark, “Some Information About Twenty-Three years of Existence (after Michaux)”, in The Little Door Slides Back. 442. Joshua Beckman, “In Latin there is a saying. Neither the tent”, in Shake. 443. Lee Breuer, La Divina Caricatura; Etel Adnan, Seasons]