The day doesn’t pass but creates grooves in my body. To “reduce the living body.” [E.Grosz]. To reach the point at which: “life rubs up against matter, its inner core.” [E.Gr.] -- And thus to analyze nudity, in a text, as friction == as an example of bare life, from Agamben, but also -- the contact with membranes of all kinds -- plant, brush, nettles, ivy, asphalt, skin. Note for the second day, pre-sky. A woman making cassava bread outside her home in the village by sieving dried cassava pieces through a series of screens. A nineteen year old woman braiding the hair of the guy who worked at the museum garden, after embarrassing him by asking how long it had been since he’d had his hair braided. Specifically, I did not take a picture of the moment when he lifted his long-fingered hand to the side of his head in the fuzzy generator-fed light on the porch as if to say, oh, it’s been a long time. A Hindu crematorium with the stains of four different pyres along the sea dike, in Nickerie, just several hundred meters before a smoldering junkyard and then a few kilometers more before some of the most productive rice fields in the country. A quarter of a monkey (head, and half of the chest) that sat under a rounded dripping chunk of ice with air bubbles in it in the Maroon market in Paramaribo, to be sold as bush meat. Also not snapped: the leg of a deer-like animal, hoof still attached, laying in a metal pan beside the monkey fraction, nor the woman who sat selling them, looking at me to see if I’d take out my camera and shoot. She didn’t know I was taking a picture with my mind. Rainstorm that comes with heat que atonta (that stupefies), lack of wind, grey skies, one cold fat drop and then shhhhh, like 1,000 TVs all on static. It is always appropriate to walk slowly around a thing holding a twig of pear tree in your fingers lightly as if you’d gone to dowse the intentions of the Coming Beast (roll over, you’re snoring) in fact love is exactly like algebra but I can’t at the moment say why, can you, liberty has something to do with it, solving for two unknowns, but why in Arabic? Children wait for politics to be over. “And if they won’t give you bread, take it!” Today is Robert Smithson’s birthday. And each ran out from his moon-round engine room; / From his ancient lemon-scented Den flambé; [etc etc, I mean pages and pages] there’s a dance of saga in the disarray! [and dot dot dot] For heaps of perspiring bone [more dots, and yes] given my penchant for art installations that spatially actuate remote geographic data in (near) real-time — such as torch fountains that broadcast antipodean sunlight, plazas that quiver earthquakes a half a continent away, and quaint water features on city centers that mimic the fluctuating water levels of peripheral reservoirs — I couldn’t help but quickly add David Bowen's Tele-Present Waters to the archives. Sign here. Quiet. Don’t tell me the work’s too dear, that structure can’t be concocted of fur and claws, and talons and feathers, and I-beams and Moon-rays. Bernadette asks me on the phone, Are you still eating only grapes? Then I awoke wearing your arcopedicos deep in the Book of Days and sliding scale therapy. When Allen was dying, his penis disappeared inside his groin. If you’re a white cat with blue bird irises, though lovely, you’re bound to eat your eyeballs and go deaf. Now hear this, it’s noon and time to hunt for antelopes, and octopi. “The locus of agency is always an assemblage”, right? Squish! Crash! Chomp! A designer vagina might be just another docudrama punch line. Lulu called security. Butch detoxed the boxes. Lucky we’re born with springs.
[Note: Sources: Logan Ryan Smith, “This is affront you pig”, in Stupid Birds; Bhanu Kapil, “Nudity”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 2 Jan 012; Eileen Smith, “Taking more notes, fewer photos”, at Matdaor Network, 2 Jan 012; Robert Kelly, “Bliss”, Emma Goldman, as quoted in Vivian Gornick, “Emma Goldman Occupies Wall Street”, as seen at wood s lot, 2 Jan 012; Nada Gordon, “Asia”, at Ululations, 2 Jan 012; JBR; Alexander Trevi, “Simulant waves”, at Pruned, 2 Jan 012; Barbara Henning and Martine Bellen, “14 x 14 x 14”, at Peep / Show; Jane Bennett, as quoted in Sueyeun Juliette Lee, review of Cara Benson, (made), at Constant Critic, 17 Dec 011; JBR; Shopwiki, response to a google search for Drew Gardner’s “Twilight System Joy Mechanics”; Juliet Cook, “3 Designer Vagina”, in Thirteen Designer Vaginas; Karin Randolph, “The Deep”, in Either She Was]
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