Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 490

Number twenty-nine. The color of young light. A hiding place for the stone-pale full moon, loud ruin, musical old age. “You look like a beach angel.” Cupiditas is not a relationship. Voice-over. Receive node. How will my children live? Monkey Robot Pirate Ninja Zombie. Out in Jardim Gramacho, Tiaõ got inspired by the political texts he found in the waste and founded a co-op to improve the lives of his fellow catadores. Libidinal flows, drive mechanisms, connections, energy exchangers. The aestheticization of holism+atomism+anarchy lacquers over the significant cracks between these forms of thinking. I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do so. Plate 2: The solitary death of the Woolworth building. Whut choo lookin at mofo? Leni Riefenstahl called and she wants her totalitarian back-lighting back. And to think it all started with Superman! Oy … inject the Normative Cookie with radioactive steroids. My 2-year-old daughter’s attempting to eat the plastic foam nuggets out of the palm tree pots in the hotel lobby. It is a form of the unconscious … A restaurant a bar a plane taking off cars going by in the 20^th century. “First the workers are cleared off the land, then the sheep arrive.” It is time to modify Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, which still brilliantly articulates the paradoxes of politicized identity. “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” she writes. Deep Ecology buries the dead too fast (reducing everything to an expression of Gaia). Meanwhile clouds of radioactive waste haunt the world. So while we campaign to make our world “cleaner” and less toxic, less harmful to sentient beings, our philosophical adventure should in some ways be quite the reverse. We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess we’re in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing “hauntology”. A house of bread. A house of beans. A house of paper in a deserted factory using all available lighting. Numbers 1-18. Plan of the house of illness. Cabinet of the solar plexuses. Dr Mortimer’s watch-tower. The room of eyes. The shooting range for the enemy. The enemy’s hiding places. The hall of bellies. The bosom room. Smell. Word. Sound. Image. The chamber of the hands. The vaults of the head. The suite of the hearts. The enemy’s secret paths. Wednesday. Thursday. First prize: a giant clamshell. The decorations include superb woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons, plasterwork and painted ceilings and murals by Louis Laguerre, and there is a fine collection of portraits. Jack’s liver is fucked. What kind of person goes home? Look in mirror. See long curly lashes on one eye.  

[Note: Sources: Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access” 29, 28, 27, 26, 25 in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Alexander Baras, “The Theater of Herodas Atticus” (tr. Nanos Valaoritis), in An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry (eds. (tr. Nanos Valaoritis and Thanasis Maskaleris); Travelocity commercial seen on USA 29 May 011 approx 2:30 PM PST; Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (tr. Michael Hardt); Mark A Rayner, “How to Play Monkey-Robot-Pirate-Ninja-Zombie (moropinzee)”, at The Skwib, 15 May 011 (a “new version of rock-paper-scissors, or Rochambeau, as it is sometimes known.”); “About”, at Waste Land Movie, via Tom Beckett, “Waste Land”, at l’amour fou, 29 May 011 (Jardim Gramacho, outside Rio de Janiero, is the world’s largest garbage dump); Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (trs. James Gussen, Lili Porten) (on Lyotard); Timothy Morton, “Self-Organization, Nature, Anarchy”, at Ecology without Nature, 29 May 011; Gertrude Stein, epigraph, Louise Bourgeois, “He Disappeared Into Complete Silence”, Adrian Piper, “Political Self-Portraits”, Bernadette Mayer, “Memory”, Alison Knowles, “A House of Dust”, Unica Zürn, “The House of Illnesses”, Erica van Horn & Laurie Clark, “Docking Competitions”, Bhanu & Rohini Kapil, “India Notebooks (excerpt from Schizophrene)”, Hannah Weiner, “Pictures & Early Words”, in It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work By Women Artists & Writers (ed. Lisa Pearson); Stephen Augustine, “The Endless Thread 4.0”, at The STaugustine Bunker Pagoda’s Endless Thread, 30 Jan 010; Adam Mansbach, “Tragedy in a minor key gets most of us to hum along”, at Boston.com, 21 Feb 010; Karl Marx, as quoted in Timothy Morton, “First the workers are cleared off the land, then the sheep arrive”, at Ecology without Nature, 29 May 011; Richard J Locksley-Hobson, “Timothy Morton”, at The Hauntological Society, 29 May 011; JBR (Jack is one of Omo Bob & family’s cats)]

In the House of the Hangman 489

“I can’t remember when the world turned slowly, so I’ll just lay here with the lights turned out again.” The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. RIP, Gil Scott-Heron. Somebody calls, coffee? And we crash and bang into each other, thinking we have a guest. Sometimes we hold hands just to reassure ourselves that they haven’t moved in. And the dead? Well—the dead haven’t exactly gone away, but we can’t escape them either. Just last week someone dug a hole in his crawlspace, and up came a fish, mummified, perfectly preserved. Have you been enjoying the recent extreme weather events? After having asserted, i.e., that the concept of humanity cannot be a political concept or the basis for a politics, Schmitt goes on to try to show that in fact, wherever this concept is put forward in the pursuit of war (and there would be so many examples today), it is a lying rhetoric, an ideological disguise tending to mask and smuggle in nation-state interests. Demented Panda and Koki thus walked down the street with three other sentient beings in tow, talking loudly, sometimes, like the baby, laughing and delighting in the sun which was often accompanied by a cool breeze, and sometimes, like the dogs, getting in each others’ way and then being annoyed and snippy with each other or with the world at large. Would an AI program tightly coupled to the net like this consider itself strictly individuated? Do cyborgs – or uploads – dissolve their souls? Could a networked robot say ‘I’ and mean it? The twins are not only fused at the head (craniopagus), their brains are connected by a ‘neural bridge’. The twins’ brains, or a twin-brain? Krista likes ketchup, Tatiana doesn’t, which the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape some off her tongue even when she wasn’t eating it. “It’s like they are one and two people at the same time.” What pronoun captures that?

[Note: Sources: Charles Jensen (?), at Kinemapoetics; Oliver de la Paz, “RIP Gil Scott-Heron”, at Oliver de la Paz, 27 May 011; Paul Lisicky, passage cut from his The Burning House, as quoted in his “Up Came a Fish”, at Paul Lisicky Mystery Beast, 26 May 011; JBR, but see John Buell, “Osama and the Culture Warriors”, at The Contemporary Condition, 28 May 011; Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign Volume 1 (tr. Geoffrey Bennington); David Buuck and Juliana Spahr, “A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities”, at Tarpaulin Sky 17; Nick Land, “Connectivity”, at Urbanatomy, 27 May 011 (concerning conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan)]

In the House of the Hangman 487 & 488

I never knew this. I never knew that legs could ooze liquid as if they have become my mother’s eyes and she cries all the time through tiny holes and blisters in the skin. “Against this plagiary of resemblance – do you want this?” in the cold train that crosses the rice fiends and separates everything “you want this, you think this is love?” I’m going to look at my circuitry book I found at a thrift shop. Soldiers are needed to guard the borders. Borders are needed for the existence of soldiers – soldiers and borders in order to prevent the sun and poetry from doing their jobs. These clowns came from a game, but not much more is known about them. My stomach is full of fingernails. I’m moving to New Mexico in July. Sleep brings me insects and reptiles … without conviction I go down the endless steps. My primary concern is the weather won’t be shitty enough. Eggs are nice, silent vessels; if it could be arranged that I could sometimes hang out inside an egg, once a week, working up to every-other day, I would probably do it. Eyeball tattoo, a seahorse disappears among the gears of a sunken minivan. Phone lines are now jammed with lamb shit. My prosthetic body is big and hulking and smells of paint. But my stump is slim and sensitive. Just like Tom, I worry about my spouse, children, grandchildren, and polis. The connection with Aristotle is interesting, since A. develops the LNC (and the unexplained taboo against violating it), at the same time as not restricting the notion of hymen (hands are for clapping, ducks are for swimming etc.)

[Note: 487 & 488 are inseparably intertwined. Sources: Elisabeth ??, “Her father’s beads”, at Sixth in Line, 15 May 011; Milo di Angelis, “The Train Corridor” (tr. Lawrence Venuti), in The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (eds. Luigi Ballerini, Beppe Cavatorta, Elena Coda and Paul Vengelisti); Alanna Risse, “Watching the Deadlines roll by”, at Alanna Risse, 24 May 011; Nikiforos Vrettakos, “Borders and Soldiers” (tr. Thanasis Maskaleris), in An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry (eds. Nanos Valaoritis and Thanasis Maskaleris); “A Circus Around Here”, at sMAC Thoughts, 14 Mar 011; Brittany Wallace, “there is something dark about your sexuality”, “dear diary”, at This Is A Bad Idea, 23 Mar and 24 May 011; Phillipe Soupault, “The Swimmer” (tr. Paul Auster), in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry (ed. Paul Auster); Evelyn Hampton, “Retreat”, at Lisp Service; Darren Angle, “THE METEOR HEADED FOR THIS TOWN OBEYS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS”, at dewclaw 3; dewclaw 3; Shelley Jackson, “THE DIVORCE”, at dewclaw 3; JBR; Tom Beckett, “untitled (I’m pissed off …)”, at l’amour fou, 27 May 011; Timothy Morton, “Hymens and Logic”, at Ecology without Nature, 27 May 011 (LNC = the Law of Non-Contradiction)]

In the House of the Hangman 486

You’ve been leading me / Beside strange waters. Dwelling made of not knowing which way to turn, a decision is a small apocalypse. Hard night long pole night without stars, abyss fed by a fish tank of monsters … Where where where the animal who warned me of floods / Where where where the bird who led me to honey / Where where where … and here is another road, its contour again drawing a vista far to the left, maybe this could ;mean a new direction, you can see a mile-wide Braque in Utah via Google maps. The noumena: a few lines by Michael Palmer. And a torn-up scratched-up photo of a woman’s palm-up hand. I didn’t take notes so I don’t have all her examples, but one slide featured the Samira Harris/Samsung collaboration, “Everyone Is Art”, which re-composes Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” through 2, 000 faces of women and men. What is the sound of one face flapping? “The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hard mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass.” An ethical way of being requires constant rhetorical vigilance. Strange lifeforms on the beach and strange plants. Black sand. Beatitude is the mode of being in which one achieves a maximum of active power or force of existing, and the minimum of reactive passions; the mind becomes a cause of its own ideas, and the body that of its actions in relation to an infinite milieu. Leonora Carrington extending her hand to a hyena; behind her is a unicorn, drinking milk from a high-heeled shoe ... I built a chrysalis out of bone shards, petals and dissolve into the grass. A basalt feature. A wreckage of peonies. Feel vaguely embarrassed. The water came up over the edge. This is, I understand, how some animals see things. How astronauts gazing back at the citizens of the world see, looking back at us all shaking their heads, “no, no, no.” It’s hidden behind the butter dish in the fridge.

[Note: Sources: Bruce Cockburn, “Strange Waters”, an image, and Hélčne Frichot, “On Finding Oneself Spinozist: Refuge, Beatitude and the Any-Space-Whatever”, in Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (eds. Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith and Charles J. Stivale), at wood s lot, 27 May 011; Aimé Césaire, Elizabeth Bachner, Lazlo Krasznahorkai, as quoted in Bachner’s “DWELLING MADE OF NOT KNOWING WHICH WAY TO TURN: READING AIMÉ CÉSAIRE”, at Bookslut, May 011; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on Traci Lynne Matlock, “The Republic of Dreams”, at The Noumenon Revelation, 27 May 011; Dale Smith, and Jennifer Richards, as quoted in Smith’s “Johanna Drucker at TILTS”, at Possum Ego, 27 May 011; Gary Barwin, “Music for Writers 4: The Sound of One Face Flapping and the Slow Unfolding of Prisoner Time”, at Lemon Hound, 27 May 011; Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, as quoted in John Latta, “Finish Up”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 27 May 011; Timothy Morton, “Fields and Rainforest”, at Ecology without Nature, 27 May 011; Bhanu Kapil, tweets, as seen at Harriet, 27 May 011, approx. 3:55 PM PST; The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys, 27 May 011]

100,000 Poets for Change

Michael Rothenberg asked me to post this. I am happy to oblige.

A Global Event — September 24^th, 2011

Poets around the world are planning individual events to take place simultaneously on September 24th in a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote social and political change. 

So far, 132 US cities representing 35 countries have signed up to make this global initiative a success through poetry readings, political demonstrations, community picnics, awareness events, parades, and more!

    Is your city, state, country on the list?

    Do you want to participate in an event?

    Want to organize something in your area?

 

For event details and locations visit

100 Thousand Poets for Change at:

 www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange

(We are adding new cities and countries daily)

 Write us at walterblue@bigbridge.org

 if you are interested in creating an event in your town!!

Join Us!

In the House of the Hangman 485

Yo no se. A tiny snout’d weevil the color of a Carthusian liquor, struck of a sudden by a sketchy mental depict of a Spinozan pinball machine, solenoids wildly firing, beyond tilt, “love : reason :: eyes : mind”, echoes: yo no se. Les attractions sont proportionnelles aux destinées—a line rejecting the mere encumbrances of “point,” “point,” “point.”) W. went to a lecture on dolphins recently, he says. Turns out they’re not intelligent after all. They made a terrible mistake, trying to communicate with them for all those years. There was no point at all; they’re quite stupid. They’re related to sheep, dolphins, W. says They’re ungulates, basically. They're sheep who decided to go back into the water. Of course, he was always sceptical about dolphins, W. says. When was the last time you saw a dolphin cathedral? When did you last meet a dolphin philosopher? ‘Vot-vot’, he says. And then something’s happening on Sunday that I can’t remember (anyone?), and then on Monday some of us are meeting to discuss Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young Girl. I believe in quantity as an esthetic value. With that as background, last night's NATO attack on Tripoli is inexplicable. Oh, gender, wherefore art thou? I remember a black Fog / inside so / Combed through, trapped / And willingly the / “Heart with Snowflake.” The scores and scores of / Incidental music. “My coat would be so bloodied I could wiggle out of my coat!” The government banned the chicken pill for chickens and women. Two unwrapped chocolates and a lemon gad about the table. I shall plump for witnessing Napangati’s painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, then going downstairs to witness Joyce and David’s piece—almost the exact same piece, in a different mode. Salt, for example. ‘There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?’ Who's that?, I ask him. – ‘Black Sam again. It’s like something from a Malick film’, W. says. And then, ‘What would your saying be?’, he asks. But he knows the answer. God. Is that what remains of socialism? The right of the middle class to two weeks off? No, my brothers, the revolution will not we. On the contrary: if the revolution happens, we will make to us. If I am fully actual how can I ever stand up (I’m currently sitting) and walk across the room? “The sensation was like / gagging on sea water, or like all of the saliva / of prehistory being concentrated in your mouth.”  Chickadee chirps echoed against it but seemed fake like a nature tape loop. Charles Darwin is Greta Garbo dressed in Seaweed. A dead lamb lies covered in ash near Kirkjubaearklaustur 260 km (162 miles) from Reykjavík. (What the “stunned structure” is, I do not know. It would seem a little pompous and vain if it’s the earth itself.) The words appear without introduction. No “he says”, no quotation marks. Blind Lemon Jefferson. i want to be done. i want to be moved. i want to wake up in a new room, in a new square of sunlight, with a new life budding all around me. “Not a cricket / Ticks a clock.” “Brrrrruuuumm, brruuuuuum.” “PARTICULARS RELATED TO THE INFORMATION NOT CONTAINED HEREIN CONSTITUTE THE FORM OF THIS ACTION.” Many elements ‘combine to form a fragile structure that supports itself, though one alteration could destroy the existing configuration and create a new one’. Please Adjust. It’s also precarious, and though physically transparent it’s, also, quite deliberately, not ‘clear’.

[Note: Sources: John Latta, and Louis Zukofsky, as quoted in Latta’s “Lethargy and Heap”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 26 May 011; Lars Iyer, “Dolphins”, “Vagrant Sayings”, at Spurious, 26 May 011 (vot-vot = all Lenin could say after his terminal brain disease kicked in); Michael Cross, “Memorial Day Weekend Madness!”, at The Disinhibitor, 26 May 011; Geof Huth, “I Don’t Care About Health”, at dbqp, 26 May 011; Cynthia McKinney, “NATO: A Feast of Blood”, as quoted in Linh Dinh, “CYNTHIA MCKINNEY in Libya under NATO Attack”, at Detainees, 26 May 011 (“Whatever the military objectives of the attack (and I and many others question the military value of these attacks) the fact remains the air attack was launched a major city packed with hundreds of thousands of civilians.”); Ginger Stickney, “Oh, Gender, Wherefore Art Thou?”, at Green Tea Ginger, 26 May 011; Cedar Sigo, “Seriously Underdressed”, “SPEEDWAY”, as quoted in Ron Silliman, “Cedar Sigo is a Frank O’Hara for the 21st century …”, at Silliman’s Blog, 26 May 011; Alli Warren, “the government banned …”, at ..., 26 May 011; JBR, ekphrasis on the photo found just below the preceding quote; Timothy Morton, “Australia, New Zealand Departure”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 May 011;Levi R Bryant, “Potentiality and Onticology”, at Larval Subjects, 26 May 011; NMMP, “Sobre los Miopes Indignados”, at Indecidibles, 25 May 011 (tr. Google); Jennifer Moxley, Coastal, and John Latta, as quoted in his “Jennifer Moxley’s Coastal”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 25 May 011; phaneronoemikon, “In a Landscape Fonssagrives is Clamming [A Retort of Sorts] [...]”, at jellybean weirdo with electric snake fang, 26 May 011; caption to photo embedded in “Captured: Grimsvoetn Volcano Erupts in Iceland”, at Denver Post pLOG, 24 May 011; Stephen Mitchelmore, and Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer (tr. Ralph Manheim), as quoted in Mitchelmore ‘s “Three steps not beyond: Peter Handke’s trilogy of thresholds”, at  This Space, 25 May 011; Angela Simione, “forward”, at Blackland, 24 May 011; Aram Saroyan, Taylor Mead, Christine Koslov, as quoted in Katie Geha, “Become Your Own Yawn”: Information and the Dial-a-Poem Poets”, at Poetry Foundation; “Seeing Through Objects: a group discussion in the context of Corban Walker’s exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale”, as quoted in Graham Harman, “Croatian & Irish Pavilions”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 26 May 011]

In the House of the Hangman 484

Claudette Colbert is her spirit animal. Somewhere in Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel mentions a bone in the throat. This listing is for 1 found bobcat bone (1st joint toe bone) on a jump ring and ball chain. These charms are great to mix with my other crystal. One of those looks like a HUGE toad skull. Bone Grinder, Bone Crusher, Bone Grinder / Bone. Every time you score a hit, Toad Man will leap over you, so slide under ... you’ll ride a grasshopper robot across a huge spike pit .... Go down and right to reach an outside section filled with spinner robots and Bone Joes. EMILY THE STRANGE SABBATH AIR FRESHENER NEW ... Black Marble Mortar Pestle Herb Grinding Stone Kitchen Celestial Sun & Moon Round HUGE Rug Pagan Gothic Wicca … Three Legged Toad on Bagua - Gold Coloured - Feng Shui Feng Shui Chinese Wall Scroll. The unit of measuring resistance is called ohm. The chairs were at odd angles. Even today, the color blue has a mediatic veto in chroma key resolution. And rogue objects – lone, Jupiter-sized planets expelled from forming solar systems – drift in the empty void between the stars. So, to unlock all that canine potential Hitler set up a Tier-Sprechschule near Hanover and recruited “educated dogs” from throughout the Reich. ‘Twas there that Airedale Rolf mused on religion, learned foreign tongues and asked a noblewoman, “Canst thou wag thy tail?”

[Note: Sources: Sonya, untitled, at because the internet is serious biz, 19 May 011; JBR, but see Levi R Bryant, “Dark Objects”, at Larval Subjects, 24 May 011; a few bits found at Google results page after searching “spirit animal bone”; a few bits found at Google results page after searching “HUGE toad skull. Bone Grinder”; a Google search result found after searching “light comes in and covers us it is heavier than darkness and harder to shake”, a line in Geof Huth, “365. In the Realm of Being”, at 365 ltrs, 24 May 011; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access” 30, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Wolfgang Ernst, as quoted in Jussi Parikka, “Signals, not Signs”, at Machineology, 25 May 011; Lester Haines, as quoted in Levi R Bryant, “Rogue Objects”, at Larval Subjects, 25 May 011; William Lee Adams, “How Nazi Scientists Tried to Create an Army of Talking Dogs”, at Yahoo! News, 26 May 011 (Tier-Sprechschule = Animal Talking School) (We’re supposed to laugh, but we have titanium-toothed canine Navy SEALS …) ]

In the House of the Hangman 482 & 483

A flower swallows by means of a spasm
premenstrual
jelly bone
tissue
unthinking the muscular. “I want to ride in the fur.” Everything’s shrunk, to 4x its size, a “large congregation of architecture.” My
breath-rate is a pair
of golden cymbals
clashing a steady
lovesickness,
my breath-rate is a pair of golden cymbals clashing a steady. “Perhaps it’s not a city,” he suggests. Perhaps something at least temporarily indescribable. So you order the three dollar coffee with a practiced ease—Grande, non-fat, sugar-free, vanilla latte. There’s been a major defeat a major crisis: Little / left of / / us here / on this / / mountain / of gold. A beep is a germ, a wink, a ticking intimacy, an auditory
pill to take for nerves
if you can take it—nerves ending and nerves beginning
all over again.
Where are you? I shouted at the air.
…
A truck in my brain backed up, beeping. I thought you said weeping. Strands
roughed it down the dawn road. Say I’ll be back. You never can tell. Tom’s posted a photo of men in funny heads with “META” painted on each nose. My frontiers are long and insecure. I AM SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE GIRL ... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “doh”, only their rustle. This is one beginning for a world, which is to say ... like “spirit truffles,” or attar of orgasms of fractals. A finger prodding you through an array
of channels and devices:
lab, factory, prison, school.
Into the time-period you go, the day would be big, halting, gracious, revocable … We’d be totally lined in pure silk, also in pure humming, and we’d be heading into the buildings with knowledge – that is, ephemeral knowledge, like leafage or sleeves or pigment. Ablation, abrasion, accumulation. We’ll just have to hold the sleepover-séance we’ve been joking about. “… so give me the super-freaky super-nunchuck from outer-space. let the death-scythe Carve my pain into my soul. but i didn’t have a death-scythe in my refrigerator, only a bottle of tooth-paste i could use …” NoH’AS FLOOD.

[Note: Sources: 482. Hazel White, “from Peril as Architectural Enrichment”, at Tarpaulin Sky 14, and as quoted in Bhanu Kapil, SPD blurb ;for Peril as Architectural Enrichment; John Latta, “Never Any End to Vila-Mata’s Never Any End to Paris”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 24 May 011; JBR;Ole Bouman, and Michael Maltzan, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and beyond”, at BLDG/BLOG, 24 May 011; Timothy Snediker, “the mosquitoes tip-toe around me”, at I like it all that way, 9 Jul 010; Chris Abani, “Coming to America – A remix”, at Tarpaulin Sky 14; Jordan Davis, Michael Palmer, and Dorothy Barresi, as quoted in Davis’ “Thread by Michael Palmer (New Directions, 2011) and American Fanatics by Dorothy Barresi (Pitt Poetry Series, 2010)”, at The Constant Critic, 22 May 011; Susan Maxwell, “Milkweed”, at Verse Daily; Jack Kimball, “untitled (I lower your voice. …)”, at Pantaloons, 24 May 011; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on a photo embedded in Tom Clark, “Walter Benjamin: Theory of Distraction”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 24 May 011 (photo captioned, “Leipzig Spring Fair, advertising. The opening of the spring fair! Despite severe economic depression, the spring fair began with a good start for buyers and sellers from all over the world. Original advertising figures in the Messezug Peter Street in Leipzig.” (tr. Google Translator)); Paul Killebrew, “Eponymous”, at Poetry Foundation.org, and “I AM SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE GIRL”, at Soft Targets 11. 483. Joseph Brodsky, “Part of Speech” (tr. by author), as seen at wood s lot, 24 May 011; Eileen R Tabios, blurb for j/j hastain, a womb-shaped wormhole, as quoted in Tabios’ “Within the Wormhole”, at The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys, 23 May 011; Lawrence Giffin, “Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane”, at Ugly Duckling Press; Lisa Robertson, “Lucite (a didactic)”, and Becca Klaver, in Klaver’s “‘We Feel Sartorial Joy’: Last Thoughts on SEAM RIPPER”, at Delirious Hem, 23 May 011; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access” 31, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; James Bellard, “This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism”, as quoted in “‘This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism’: LSU Student Arrested for Writing a Poem in Imitation of Johannes Göransson’s ‘Quite Disturbing’ Style”, at Tarpaulin Sky News, 24 May 011 (Bellard is a student of Lara Glenum’s. He writes, “Once I showed them the e-mail for the assignment, and they read about killing, terrorism, and dolls on Johannes’s site (Officer Morris was actually really good at reading poetry), they were obliged to release me. …”)]

In the House of the Hangman 481

Now the warnings don’t seem to help much: we’re seeing more cases of tornadoes two miles in diameter and other crazy things like that, like the deal that was built on a satanic derivative structure called the CDO-squared. It’s at least possible no one’s ever read Joyce against Brentano while listening to Beethoven while getting his or her hands chewed up by a cat while rising temperatures slowly reveal the Arctic’s resources, making it the new frontier for an influx of businesses, workers and residents. Record the sounds of your boss’s after-lunch intestines, I mean, almost half of 18 to 25-year-old Spaniards are out of work, more than double the European Union average. I think This Is Not a Program would serve as a great companion piece to Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France, particularly Security, Territory Population, The Birth of Bio-Politics, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. I don't know whether we're replicating natural environments, or re-creating or simulating them, we’re landfill thinkers, W. says, landfill philosophers. Quack grass versus crab grass. Voices in the sky, as though magic, invisible hands turning on and off the knobs of fantastic radios, filling all space, criss-crossing, overlapping, penetrating each other, splitting up, superimposing, repulsing each other, colliding, crashing. (See, too, quitch, squitch, scutch, and couch grasses. See the somewhat coarser, taller Johnson grass.) (I like the ancient orthography, its ambivalence play’d out in excess: “Popo being an Island Scituate in the midst of the River.”) “Forget remembering along with your interforce rondure ’cause I’m selfmade in spring and cairn-headed, unembowered by overnight moria. This lets counselor affidation “swish” forward and backward passing thru the 1st position of the sprout.” This technique encodes the analogue wave form. I love it that Egypt has something called an “Illicit Profiteering Authority.” “To generate intellectual property where minds are cheap and sell it where knowledge is costly is crafty arbitrage.” While house sitting for friends in Philadelphia we collaborated on the following (Soma)tic exercise, playing Arthur Russell's CD World of Echo on repeat on all five floors from 9am to 9pm, taking scheduled breaks for food, conversation, and checking in for further fine tuning of the (Soma)tic maneuvers. BASEMENT: Windows covered, pitch black. On a little table covered with clothespins and pottery a small boom-box plays CD on repeat with bass controls set to maximum. A white candle to light when sitting down, blow out when leaving. The sink beside the table to slowly drip water on one hand while taking notes with the other. FIRST FLOOR: CD on stereo with balanced equalizer settings. All shades open. A chair sits by the front door. Open mail slot to peer at passing feet on the sidewalk. Every other page of notes should be nouns only, a page of nouns. SECOND FLOOR: CD on small stereo, volume low. Computer set to show videos of Arthur Russell and his cello. In bathroom the tub is filled with a mixture of water and jasmine flower infusion. Jasmine invokes the Muses. Take notes sitting in a chair by the tub while feet soak in the jasmine infusion. THIRD FLOOR: CD on large stereo, volume high, treble adjusted to maximum. Books on alchemy sit at the desk by the window. Take notes. UPPER LOFT: CD on third floor stereo carries up to the loft. At the end of the bed, facing the window which looks over the Philadelphia treetops and skyline. There are tarot cards and binoculars on the bed to better see the world. Take many notes. It’s Monday afternoon in the universe, all you perts pots and pans. You that bonged dolefully with benign crasher on yr head in old heroic dawns – you dream not – Hairbrush! Det! Wrench! Tont! What's happening on Io? The essence of jello is the essence of arrangement – sulfur plumes from a sea of magma – I mean beyond that X is awesome, and Y rocks. Now lissen up. I am admitting I have a security hole a disturbance of bubbles played on the E-flat trumpet, I mean, if, at a Cultural Studies symposium in the 1970s, one was asked innocently, “Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?”, this was a sure sign that one was in deep shit’, next stop Toad Suck: home of American Idol Kris Allen and an empire of school bus factories and mega-churches just brushing the Trail of Tears.

[Note: Sources: Graham Harman, “horrible tornado”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 May 011; Matt Taibbi, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “Taibbi on Timberwolf: the ass of the ass”, at I cite, 23 May 011 (another nail in the coffin of the reputation of Goldman Sachs … as if anybody gives a shit); Graham Harman, “also reading/listening to”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 May 011; JBR, but see Graham Harman, “one month ago today”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 May 011 (in which continues the saga of Tamanya); Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access” 32, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; William S Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, as quoted in Dan Lander, “Introduction to Sound By Artists”, at Sound Culture; Jodi Dean, “Protests continue in Spain as ruling Socialist Party suffers electoral defeat”, at I cite, 23 May 011; “Preliminary Thoughts on This Is Not a Program”, at Prodigies & Monsters, 23 May 011; Les Gilbert, as quoted in Virginia Madsen, ‘Notes Towards Sound Ecology in the Garden of Listening’, at Essays in Sound 2; Lars Iyer, “Landfill Thinkers”, at Spurious, 23 May 011; John Latta, “Doubt”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 23 May 011; Edgar Varèse, as quoted in Frances Dyson, “A Philosophonics of Space: Sound, Futurity and the End of the World”, at Sound Culture; Jack Kimball, “untitled (If you’re stagnant, you’re dead. …)”, at pantaloons, 23 May 011; John Potts, “Schizochronia: Time in Digital Sound”, at Essays in Sound 2; Graham Harman, “Ezz under interrogation”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 May 011; an article in the South China Morning Post, 22 May 011, as quoted in Graham Harman, “Hong Kong Article”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 May 011; CA Conrad and Thom Donovan, Arthur Echo, as quoted in Michael Cross, “Arthur Echo”, at The Disinhibitor, 23 May 011; Jack Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight; “Io: The Prometheus Plume”, at Astronomy Picture of the Day, 22 May 011; Allan Bramhall, “Gil Ott and Impermanence”, at Tributary, 18 May 011; JBR; Benjamin Friedlander, “Somebody Blew Up America”, in Citizen Cain; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the(mis)use of a notion, as quoted in Devorah Baum, Stephen Bygrave and Stephen Morton, “Hannah Arendt ‘After Modernity’”, in New Formations 71; Mark Spitzer, “Alchemy in Arkansas”, at Toad Suck Review, to which I was led by an email from Toad Suck Review, rec’d 23 May 011 approx 3:09 PM PST]

In the House of the Hangman 480

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I mean what’s the difference
between a bag of helium
and a bag of oxygen?
I give you my digital, my radial, my baldest baby
What’s your malfunction?

Cuauhtémoc Medina’s infinitely repeated stumble is only a joke, nothing more than a witticism.

That’s dope, that’s dope, back spins and rims
Hook a brother up?
Here at the flat cup and empty bubble gum wrapper.

The wind that went thru the head left it plural.

Vishnu is a wild boar
Hanuman the monkey, Freya the cat
At times Zeus is all eagle.
(“permission,” “field,” “return,” “made place,” “everlasting omen”) 

You’re eating gulab jamuns and there’s a besequined tapestry of a prince on an elephant. A tapestry of a besequined prince on an elephant. A tapestry of a prince on a besequined elephant. On the besequined tapestry is a princess on another elephant. On the tapestry is a besequined princess on another elephant. On the tapestry is a princess on another besequined elephant.

Youth is a time for potted plants.

In this way the whole world is becoming translatable into information.

With what pomp and circumstance the circus arrived orange and red
             in the dawn!
It was exhausted, cars and wagons, and it lay down and leaped
Forward a little bit, like a fox. Minnie the Rabbit shot a little wooden bullet
              at it.
And just then the elephant man came to his doorway in the sunlight and
              stood still.

Write a giggly ode about
Motherfuckers
when you’re done cleaning the lint trap.

Spiritus Mundi,
I swing you
in the direction of my people. I say, “Be off.”

So we spend all our time circling a shoe-print,
galloping along on a giraffe’s back,
crashing into our own circumstances
and brandishing swords that might be radio antennae
or second-hand golf clubs.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Christopher DeWeese, “THE HAPPY CLOUD”, at jubilat 19; Karla Kelsey, “16.1”, at jubilat 19; Rose Bloomberg-Rissman; Francis Alÿs, “What goes on in the street”, at Francis Alÿs | What goes on in the street; Afaa M. Weaver, “BACK SPIN OF HOPE”, at jubilat 19; Ron Padgett, “Reading Reverdy”, in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (ed. David Lehman); Carmen Bullousa, “Elysian Gardens” (tr. Geoff Hargreaves), in Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (ed. Mónica de la Torre and Michael Wiegers); Al Filreis, “The made place (PoemTalk #27) Robert Duncan, ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’”, at Jacket2, 14 Jan 010; “You’re eating gulab jamuns …”, at ideas in three dimensions, 31 Jan 010; Graham Harman, “more on the future of libraries”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 011; Kenneth Koch, “The Circus”, in Lehman; Robert Creeley, epigraph, and Benjamin Friedlander, “AIPAC”, in Citizen Cain; JBR, after cleaning the lint trap; Alan Baker, “The Book of Random Access” 33, in Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010; Eduardo Chirinos, “The Giraffe and Bus Derby” (tr. G.J. Racz), in Reasons for Writing Poetry]