Slashing through the third beaming emoticon, I think of exclamation points and begin to know that I’m the monster. There are fake Mt Fujis and real ones. I don't really think there was a real boy on the beach with Aschenbach. [Yep. That’s Joe Lieberman shaking hands with Captain Kangaroo at a hearing on soft-porn video games. I love America!] Is it true the Dalai Lama follows no one on Twitter? When do we begin hacking the super robo-farm? Leet = 1337. I first noticed it looking at CK, 1: what appeared to be scratches (as in an original glass plate from old fashioned photography) that when followed look like bits of image floating in a grey haze –I looked around and found a dollar bill laying against what must be a plaid tablecloth. But then I notice a black rend across the bill and I cannot tell which is more real, the rend or the bill. I also think that this scrape resembles the brittleness of old skin, and how when abraded it tears, and the fresh wound wells with dark blood. They throw dissected cows into vats of chemicals, or spit from windows onto random pedestrians, or make films of clowns using the toilet. Jackie Wang is more than right about “Karatagan Pahlawan.” Everything, everything has arrows in it to the end of the cube to the orange glow, anticipating the purloined sandwich. A friend reminded me that Nostradamus is also from Avignon, and that there is talk of a magnetized underground lake beneath the city, thought to be responsible for the anomalies of both Nostradamus’ own mentality and that of a number of the city’s present-day residents. Human indifference on the ocean floor weighs an eye opening inside three dogs a month. I mean, it is a beautiful day to speak the language of this century but according to the Talmud you must not take anything larger than a shoelace to this neon colored mutant hamburger. At one point, Manfred decides to shed his human form, and downloads his mind into a flock of pigeons – which gives a whole new literal meaning to the idea of “distributed intelligence.” The world is full and doesn’t ask for more. It’s a world where down-to-the-last-dime time travelers can choose between “Basilica donations or acetaminophen”; where toothless soothsayers skulk around beef recalls (as opposed to southern-style pig pickins); with a transmogrified Sally Field, “hair departed in buffalo tufts / intentions and glands in the wrong places”, bloodshot eyes leading astray the children of lost Roanoke colonists … One hears the linguistic sputterings of Porky Pig in that “plantar reflex, a pierhead, a prizewinning paulownia tree in the same pppattern bomb…” and, of course, one time I wanted you to call me so I held my blackberry to my forehead. Why? I was educated by Marxists in the late 1980s. They said: “Think about the circus.” We studied the circus; it was our first machine.
[Note: Sources: Elif Batuman, “Now I Am the Monster”, at My Life and Thoughts, 10 Jan 011; William Keckler, “Watching a Maker Die”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 10 Jan 012; William Keckler, “Ron Mueck: Boy”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 10 Jan 012; Gabriel Blackwell, “The North American Innovation Crash of 1993”, at Big Other, 10 Jan 011; JBR, but see William Keckler, “11 Statements About Yoko Ono”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 10 Jan 012; JBR; Alexander Trevi, “Hacking the Super Robo-Farm”, at Pruned, 10 Jan 012; “1337”, at Urban Dictionary (“Hacker ‘Sp33k’ for leet, or elite. Originating from 31337 “eleet”, the UDP port used by Dead Cow Cult, a hacker group, to access Windows 95 using Back Orifice, a notorious hacking program.” Trevi used the word “leet”; old man that I am, I had to look it up); “Eileen Quinlan, Constant Comment”, at Notes on Looking, 5 Jan 012; Graham Harman, “A Larger Sense of Beauty”, at Dialogica Fantastica; JBR, but see Jackie Wang, “Råså Suara Parahiangan Group – Karatagan Pahlawan: I could never be as much as this song. This …”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 10 Jan 012; Marc McKee, “Arrow”, at Aesthetix 2; Ben Mirov, “Arrow”, at Aesthetix 2; Chris Martin, “I Am Not a Cinematographer”, at Reading Between A&B; Graham Harman, “belated Avignon report”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 10 Jan 012; RC Miller, “Atlantic DNA”, at Gobbet, 10 Dec 012; JBR; Ariana Reines, “Good Morning!”, at Ariana Reines, 10 Jan 012; “Unorthodox” episode of Law and Order: SVU; Christopher Jobson, “The Future of Food”, at Colossal Art & Design, 10 Dec 012; Steven Shaviro, “The Singularity is Here”, at Shaviro.com (re: Charles Stross’s Accelerando); Joan Retallack, as quoted by Amy Berkowitz, at Books Read 2011; Lisa A Flowers, and Jeffrey Hecker, Rumble Seat, as quoted in Flowers’ “Mistletoe and Misanthropy Out On a Limb: Jeffrey Hecker’s Rumble Seat”, at HTMLGIANT, 9 Jan 012; Ariana Reines, “Permanent Water”, at The Rumpus, 9 Jan 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Bollywood Vibes”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 8 Jan 012]
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