Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 852

Blue Wind, transparent watercolor over wove paper cutouts pasted on wove paper with watercolor and black chalk; Spontaneous Confusion, silver discs, metal plates, and wires on Masonite; Creación de la aves. Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke / & bank stuff. The liver feels really sharp in me. Crafty Fileep, get your SUV and drink its gasoline. Have a Q-tip. My aunts and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, were part of a century-long wave of migration that occurred as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, then fell, around the time of World War I. In the hinterland of what was then part of Greater Syria, the shadows of countless Cokboys. If you know this thing in true. Real ghost throat. If you say Hi. It was to heavy in like that to be so good on the hills. If it was a scale in like standing up, it was clever off to the ground in this calls for help. It was a cow who has milk to drink into the crane. On to the table. Radios for fun to roast in those plates [repeat 11 x]. I used to be a boat rower in times in dreams at least to be freaky. Be on your on. So this won't wreck and destroy your things to be. My body sometimes just collapses; my bad joints give and I just fall and I never know when or how it will happen and it did, just after I saw the sky-watchers, just after I’d seen a movie where sky-watchers are indicative of the end of the world. Officials in key parts of the Obama administration are increasingly convinced that sanctions will not deter Tehran from pursuing its [alleged] nuclear programme, and believe that the US will be left with no option but to launch an attack on Iran or watch Israel do so ... mostly there is Kirsten Dunst dragging heavy gray yarn attached to her ankles & wrists, through a field, in a wedding dress. 1 HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE. 2 NO THIS IS THE FIRST TIME. There was a chair on stage as an important prop, sometimes it was suspended in air, sometimes lowered on wires. I know events have horizons and can melt. In 1420, when London was a backwater, Nanjing was the world’s largest city, and Ming China “had an incontrovertible claim to be its most advanced civilization.” The Emperor tasked 2,000 scholars with creating “a compendium of Chinese learning” that “filled more than 11,000 volumes,” which was “surpassed as the world’s largest encyclopedia only in 2007 … by Wikipedia.” A man paints the Mona Lisa using burger grease. I pass a store that sells swords and fencing equipment. Across the street a store advertises old fox fur coats and second-hand mink. It is raining. I have to ring two bells and pass through two gates in order to get to the lobby, where there are three elevators and no directory. Some people’s credit cards won’t have expired by 2019. The replicants will have returned to earth by then to find their creator and lengthen their lives. IF YOU FLY, you know the drill: Empty your pockets, remove your laptop from your hand luggage, have your passport open to the picture page — and be ready to produce a letter from your healthcare provider explaining any discrepancy between your perceived sex and the sex on your ID. “Geology became war or apocalypse; the view from the top of the mountain became a panorama over battlegrounds upon which competing armies of rock, stone and ice had warred for epochs, with incredible slowness and unimaginable force.” The key to the motel room was a metaphor, right? / & the bloodred sunset folded into the muffled / roar of the surf / like the voice of God echoing in an empty / 24 oz. Tecate can / smeared with lipstick. Flipping out wd be one alternative. That crackles up from the wreck. It simply spreads out before you, a field. Space assumes the form of a bubble whose limits are entirely plastic. I am (Always / Often / Rarely / Never) see-through. I am always breaking the LNC. First quantum jiggles detected in solid object. Transgenic plants are created having incorporated into them a luciferase enzyme gene and a corresponding luciferin substrate gene. These genes are regulated such that for a certain amount of time after dark, these genes are expressed resulting in bioluminescence. Different luciferin / luciferase combinations may be utilized for these transgenic plants, depending on the desired wavelength and the plant species transfected. In this recent iteration there were tattered, paint-splattered stuffed animals, dolls, figurines, masks, plastic crates, stools and ephemera of all kinds. The parking lot contained a forlorn fleet of archaeopteryges. WHEN YOU GO TO NEW YORK / STAY AT THE BUCKINGHAM. I find myself alone on a street. I try in vain to cross. Nessus the centaur. A woman takes my arm and says to me: “Womb hypercomplex.”

[Note: Sources: captions to Kay Sage, Blue Wind, Spontaneous Confusion, Remedios Varo, Creación de las aves, in In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (eds. Ilene Susan Fort, Tere Arcq, with Terri Geis); Sean Bonney, “newsflash. May 2010 …”, in Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud; Filip Marinovich, “Live From The Kaukasus”, in And If You Don’t Go Crazy I’ll Meet You Here Tomorrow; Anthony Shadid, House of Stone, as quoted in Abbas Raza, “Anthony Shadid: Hose of Stone”, at Three Quarks Daily, 19 Feb 012; JBR, but see Jerome Rothenberg, “Cokboy: Part One”; Christopher Knowles, “HOW COULD I SEND YOUR MESSAGE TO YOU”, “THE MORNING HAS BEEN BROKEN”, “YOU KNOW THAT”, “RADIOS FOR FUN”, “PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM”, as quoted in John Gallaher, “Christopher Knowles – Philip Glass”, at Nothing To Say And Saying It, 16 Aug 010; JBR (Knowles does repeat the line 11x); Carina Finn, “weathering melancholia”, at Blah Blah B*tCh3$zz, 19 Feb 012; CLG News, “US officials: Iran sanctions will fail, making military action likely 19 Feb 2012”, email rec’d 19 Feb 012 approx 1:42 AM PST; Tony Lopez, “Robert Wilson in Manchester”, at Tony Lopez, 19 Feb 012; In 1420, LA Review of Books’ review of Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, and Hrag Vartanian, as quoted in Vartanian’s “Required Reading”, in Hyperallergic, 19 Feb 012; John Yau, “What comes after ‘Paintant’?”, at Hyperallergic, 19 Feb 012; Keph Senett, “Canadian flight regulation bans transgender passengers”, at Matador Network, 2 Feb 012; Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, as quoted in Nicola Masciandaro, “Immortal: Mountains of Might”, at Bergmetal, 19 Feb 012; Kevin Opstedal, “A Wave Pattern Cut In Stone”, at Ukulele Feedback, 19 Feb 012; Pearlblossom Highway, 19 Feb 012; Traci Lynn Matlock, “To the Receptive”, at The Noumenon Revelation, 19 Feb 012; JBR, but see the Morton post, following (LNC = Law of Non-Contradiction); “First quantum jiggles detected in solid object”, at New Scientist, 28 Jan 012, via Timothy Morton, “Another Blow against Correlationist Quantum Theory”, at Ecology Without Nature, 18 Feb 012; Patent no. 7049483, at Google Patents, via William Keckler, “Golden Rice”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 18 Feb 012; John Yau, “Paint It Black, Blacker and Blackest”, at Hyperallergic, 18 Feb 012; Tom Clark, “Not Necessarily a Rest Stop”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 18 Feb 012; Eugene Jolas, “Sleep in Ur (Dream-Scenario)”, in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (eds. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley); Raymond Queneau, “Dream (1925)” (tr. Tim Conley), in Rasula and Conley; Mihail Cosma, “News Flash” (tr. Jed Rasula), in Rasula and Conley]

Bright futures

Reblogged from I cite  

IBM launches new form of day-wage labour

IBM (International Business Machines) was once considered a pioneer in the field of computer technology. Now the US-based conglomerate—employing more than 400,000 people worldwide—is a pioneer of a modern form of global day-wage labour. And Germany is serving as a pilot project for a radical reorganization of its existing work structures around the world.

According to an internal corporate strategy paper, obtained by Spiegel magazine, IBM will be reduced to a core workforce. Of the more than 20,000 employees in Germany, at least 8,000 will lose their permanent jobs and be replaced by flexible external workers.

The programme, called “liquid,” provides for outside workers to be hired flexibly as required. The hiring of external IT experts and other specialists is to take place via a specially created Internet platform, in the form of a so-called Cloud.

Up to now, the IT industry has regarded the Cloud as the delivery of computing as a service, with the infrastructure, hardware and software existing on internationally networked servers, effectively invisible to the user, hence, “in the Cloud.” Access is usually via the Internet. The purpose of cloud solutions is to lower costs because resources are ready at any time, but paid for only as they are used at the time needed.

This model is now to be applied broadly to people. Those currently employed as permanent staff by IBM will in future become free-lancers in an international “talent cloud.” To be part of this cloud they will have to obtain quality assurance certification as specified by IBM. It will not just be IBM, but also other businesses that will access this human cloud.

Spiegel compares the "talent-Cloud” with Facebook. As in social networks, the profiles of IT professionals—including scores (“Likeability”) and references from previous employers—will be visible for interested companies.

Positive scores—including the timely payment of credit card bills—and self-financed training courses at IBM would increase the “digital reputation” of an IT specialist.

“Personnel organised in a ‘cloud,’” the magazine quotes from the IBM document, “would receive international employment contracts, in order to circumvent restrictive regulations in their home country.” The “globalized employment contracts” would last only for the duration of individual projects. Thus, the company would reach a state “achieved long ago by the financial markets”: it could “do away with part of the national regulations.”

Permanent employees—with social security protection, guaranteed salary, paid vacations and sick leave, etc.—would be transformed into modern day-wage labourers, hired just for one project or contract for a limited time, sometimes by one firm and sometimes by another. “Such a system, where workers compete globally for temporary jobs using Internet platforms,” ​​comments Spiegel, means, “companies such as IBM would make huge savings and increase efficiency significantly.”

via www.wsws.org 

New Friends (and an old one ...)

A few images from a visit fo LACMA, In Wonderland ...

In the House of the Hangman 851

[SHOP] × × spiral Un’nanakuru Yayoi Kusama
une nana cool Limited Shop

Period:

2012.02.15-19

Venue:

Showcase

Third series of FUN FUN WEEK Artist Series on sale, shop limited line of popular underwear Un’nanakuru Yayoi Kusama from simple and stylish design.

“FUN FUN WEEK” as the most popular non-wire bra has an easy to use properly.

Third series of Artist Series began in 2011, and appeared in the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and Yayoi Kusama held in a large retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Prior to the official release date of February 24, limited time to open the shop in the spiral.

February 15 ~ 19 (Wed) (Sun) 11:00 ~ 20:00 session 
Venue: Showcase (Spiral 1F)
5-6-23 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062 〒 ACCESS MAP

Product line-up
“pumpkin, squash, pumpkin,
“Love Forever”
“Body Festival”

(4 Size The size of 1,2,2.5,3) 4,515 yen Ladies Bra
Shorts (M, L) ¥ 2,100
Men's Shorts (M, L) ¥ 2,730

※ Book layaway item is not available.
※ will be made ​​up to two times Number one in the purchase of a.

Contact:
Customer Center 0120-307-056 Wacoal une-nana-cool.com/ “I’m the one who does it all and this is why I’m in a wheelchair. I have been doing this hard labour all of my life and it has hurt my joints. That’s the right approach - to suffer for your art.” Yeah, but still. I wanna look like her when I grow up. The title of my lecture this afternoon is Zappa: Hegel, or, Not Again (Again). When the Po-Jama People me about this talk in November last year, I thought “The vines streak upward, large grotesque pods grow under the leaves and flop off on the ground near the big switches and into the canyon.” Errol Slick came up to me and said, He'd got what I was saying about the moment in “Andy” at 3:17 when the tectonic plates of the counter-rhythms slip and you stare into an infinite abyss of rattling bones, ourselves viewed as we now view the dinosaurs. Today, in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake. Incidentally, it’s not just that he was burned to death. It’s that he was in a dungeon for over a decade before that and was tortured for much of that time. Among the heresies for which he was burned, my favorite is surely “that the Devil will be saved.” There is no gravity on Aos. And no one who has green blood can survive in that limnosphere of light. That is, some people still get Downtown Vegas confused with the Strip. That is, «Your sewage goes into pipes laid in 735 B.C.» Squatting in this swamp with wet lumpy present stuck to my legs as many as there are. I can’t keep up with this future in a tic tic tic. Frogs leap up and take my fingers in their mouths. This weather is a real city it oceans wider. I scrape the pineal glands of live civet cats for a living. As I try to count the stars I get hungry, and instead of trying one of the cool local joints that line the sidewalks, I duck into the comforting salami / cheese of Subway and make too-friendly idle chatter with the Sandwich Artist. The cars are shinier here, like seriously shiny. Bridget said that the cars would be shinier but I thought she was trying to illustrate some larger metaphor about the staggering glamor and obvious wealth of the place, but no — the cars are just shinier. “This grass is wired to the hilt and produces electricity day and night.” The neighbors are beset with rodents. When I see them I ask, how is the infestation? They nod. It is fine. Over every duende falls the shadow of a greater duende. Holy moly!

[Note: sources: “Event Schedule”, at SPIRAL; Yayoi Kusama, as quoted in Anita Singh, “Yayoi Kusama: dear Damien Hirst, the spots were my idea”, at The Telegraph, 7 Feb 012; JBR; Ben Watson, Frank Zappa, booklet accompanying Uncle Meat(1969), as quoted in Watson’s “Ben Watson: Zappa: Hegel, or, Not Again (Again)”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 15 Feb 012; Graham Harman, “also the anniversary of Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 17 Feb 012; Aimee Nezhukumatahil, “ToBS R2: ‘lyric essays’ vs. middle age white male self published sci fi novel pt 1 of 4”, at HTMLGIANT, 17 Feb 012; JBR; Josh Heller, “Zappos CEO seeking to revitalize downtown Vegas”, at Matador Network, 17 Feb 012; Chiara Barzini, as quoted in Derek White, “ToBS R2: trolling for spelling errors in blog posts vs Sewage Treatment Technologies”, at HTMLGIANT, 17 Feb 012; Jenny Sampirisi, “Croak”, at PEN, 17 Feb 012; JBR (because of a Facebook comment by Anne Gorrick); Joshy Washington, “Feeling really uncool on Sunset Blvd”, at Matador Network, 17 Feb 012; a New Scientist article, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Electric Landscapes”, at BLDG/BLOG, 17 Feb 012 (“The techniques under study in Holland currently involve a specially designed electrode that can harvest excess electricity from plant life.”); Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Make Time To Travel Through It”, at Boys With Short Hair, 17 Feb 012; Jerome Rothenberg, “Coda, With Duendes”, in Rothenberg’s “Reconfiguring Romanticism (53): The Construction of Poems for the Millennium & the Poems It Engendered (Part One)”, at Poems and Poetics, 17 Feb 012]

I Want To Look Like Her When I Grow Up

In the House of the Hangman 850

I’M NOT

WRITING

A

GROCERY LIST

THIS

IS

PURE WAR – lambs with five legs, horned humans, leviathans, mermaids and – “monstro” (I show) – a mother, with the unconscious force of her imagination, may imprint the foetus in her womb – startled by a horse, she might give birth to a horse-headed child. Your sweaty party dress and my sweaty party dress lasted a few minutes until the tomato was gone some day they will disambiguate you our dinosaurs ruled. Martin Amis, Nigel Thrift, Jussi Parikka. Closer in comparative evolution to red bread mold than the fruit fly is / pyramid schemes make us sad. “We have seen the ghost of René Guénon, cadaverous & topped with a fez (like Boris Karloff as Ardis Bey in The Mummy) leading a Funereal Thanatosis Noise band in blackfly-chants through the world of the Consensus. Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres knows that a world comes to an end every instant. And every instant also gives birth to a world – a present in which all impossibilities are renewed in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture.” It’s an experiential trap street — an infinite loop — a deliberate cartographic error trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. He looks like a recombo DNA project aimed at tailoring people for high-speed burrowing … The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn’t quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. “My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ...very large white pillows ...” The zipper is broken open. Maybe the broken zipper is my mouth. A fake bird called Broken Zipper Wing. This could be a naturally beautiful. I could be a homeless pygmy goat, gnawing fallen apples by the side of the road. I could be learning how to moonwalk from an online tutorial. Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice. Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth? Because Hello Kitty is the ghost of surplus value. Or, as Evan Calder Williams argues in a post about laughter and realism, “What we need now is a better sense of the real divide to be drawn, between the realism effect and affective realism, between what we’ve inherited as the ‘look’ of realism and what actually nails down and pins, like a shaking butterfly of the present, the feel of our historical moment.” That is, what Hello Kitty brings to the table is a metonymic capacity to evoke the amorphous ideas that currently structure the social whole.

[Note: Sources: JBR, but see Catherine Meng, I’m Not Writing Pure War This Is A Grocery List, at Dusie; Marina Warner, “monsters, magic and miracles”, at Times Literary Supplement, 6 Feb 012 (A review of Wes Williams, MONSTERS AND THEIR MEANINGS IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE: Mighty magic); CA Conrad, “Anoint Thyself”, at Dusie 11; JBR (the last three authors whose names showed up in my Google Reader; Amis, humorously enough, because he’s the author of the nonfiction Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines); Dana Teen Lomax, “Lullaby”, in Rx, at Dusie 11; Hakim Bey, as quoted in Adam Robbert, “Reasons to like Hakim Bey”, at Knowledge Ecology, 16 Feb 012; Geoff Manaugh, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Security By Bending GPS Geography”, at Disinformation, 16 February 2012; William Gibson, Neuromancer, as quoted in Brian Joseph Davis, The Composites, 14 Feb 012; Georgia O’Keefe, epigraph to Marthe Read, zaum alliterations, at Dusie 11; Juliet Cook, “Semi-Extraneous Consort”, in Soft Foam, at Dusie 11; Cathy Davidson, as Quoted in Alex Reid, “the professorial user interface”, at alex reid/digital digs, 16 Feb 012; a Guardian article, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Toy Protest Banned In Russia”, at Disinformation, 16 Feb 012 (“Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be ‘citizens of Russia’”); Ben Gabriel, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream”, at The New Inquiry, 16 Feb 012]

In the House of the Hangman 849

Thugs on the throne could have been Gus and Tina, Disco / rulers from B’klyn. The mirrors copulate at length. The didactic is with us always. In one case, he poured liquid silver into the ears and mouth of an opponent. Lipsync nonfiction. I don’t know where my horse is now. I am correct and circular and softly made of everything. Oh Miss Gada-Nigi do not contemplate the stars. The perfect weather in Poussin’s Spring is far more alarming than the storm in his Winter. Your body is a long silk bag / full of lightweight batteries / arranged on the floor / so it touches the floor / in the maximum number of places / … / and there are weekends and desires / gestating in your throat / pink and hairless / like mammals. Wild! Comics, people, is where the real philosophy is being done today. The careerist linguaphiles like Žižek and the rest are fun to read, and they have important things to say, but it doesn't take an intellect the size of the sun to analyze and diagnose the problem. Life is fucked, because it is outrageously complex and more or less physically a bad idea. It's sad, but incredibly funny really. Thought-provoking anyway. And I do sort of dig Mallarmé’s prissy Aesthete's ‘impotence’ and meta-theory. Everyone is trying their best, but the crotch, the crotch is what will deck the monster of the ages, not that sad old grey mashed up piece of chewing gum called the human brain. Doh! Being is an affect of a particular local organic complexity / singularity. Our institutions will have to reflect an infinite assymetry slash singularity approach if any of our collective ‘imperational’ designs are ever to be ‘corrected’ ... or it could just be that Tinguely and Deleuze had it right, All machines in fact run, or work, as a part of their own general non-functionality. My hands are staple removers with metal fangs. But thou, old ragpicker, who come in the enchanted morning, I have given thee a noble name, I have named thee Dostoevsky. Looking again at ‘The conception of the event after the event runs slowly thru the cloud cover’ I realise that I omitted the bold type emphasis probably because this is used in conjunction with exclamation marks which raises the question of whether bold type increases emphasis or is being used to give a different kind of exclamation and whether or not two exclamation marks would have had the same effect. “The camp was built, intentionally, on the sandy soils of western Poland, along the banks of the Bóbr River. And sand is difficult to tunnel through. Very difficult.” The tongue is important. But who thinks about a tongue? It’s just there. It’s not like a penis. Spaceship earth. If earth is a spaceship why doesn’t it have levers and buttons? And the light turns green. I’m not exactly sure what the app is for, but I think that’s the point. The upside-down breast turns into a suction cup, used to attach things to a window, memorabilia, or something stained-glass, perhaps. Cloaca and Beethoven, putridity of a monster gray gas tank. WARNER’S SUGAR. SURF BATHING. Retain a bit of syrup (as I liked to do with my blankie.) What I keep meaning to say is almost edible … brain waves. Everyone must eat but only scarcity is allowed in the control society. Left behind by fate, the world made relatable through a few names. My right tonsil looks like an ovary. James knows that "have you guys met yet?" really means "introduce yourself and then ask her her name in front of me because I've forgotten it and I don't want to look like a dick by asking her her name again, we've been hanging out for too long at this point …” We couldn’t get the prisoners out of the burning prison because we couldn’t find the guards with keys. Are these the last days of Zomia? What’s in your little black bag? A gigantic fertilizer plant and an automatic controlling device for example a growing.

[Note: Sources: Cara Benson, “excerpt from… ‘Funny. Considering how heated it was’”, at Dusie; José Rivas Panedas, “Café” (tr. Jed Rasula), in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (eds. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley); Ian Hamilton Finlay “from Interpolations in Hegel”, “from Detached Sentences on Weather in the Manner of William Shenstone”, in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (ed. Alec Finlay); Daniel Nester, “The Arbor and lipsync nonfiction”, at We Who Are About to Die, 15 Feb 012; Jaime Birch, book title, and “Eight I ams”, in I don’t know where my horse is now, at Dusie; Jaroslav Seifert, “Miss Gada-Nigi” (tr. Dana Loewy), in Rasula and Conley; Heather Christle, “The Small Husband”, in Christle’s What is Amazing, as seen at Wesleyan University Press; phaneronoemikon, “WTF revisited…”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 15 Feb 012; Juliet Cook, “Red Shrink Wrap”, in Post-Stroke, at Dusie; Max Jacob, “Rue Ravignan” (tr. John Ashbery), in Rasula and Conley; John Armstrong, “Emily Critchley, 5 Poems on Blart 2”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 15 Feb 012; Michael Welland, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Liberation terroir: The Great Escape (1963)”, at BLDG/BLOG, 15 Feb 012; John Olson, “On The Tip Of My Tongue”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 15 Feb 012; An Xiao, “LACMA Lets You Play Exquisite Corpse on Your iPhone”, at Hyperallergic, 15 Feb 012; Shira Dentz, “U”, in black seeds on a white dish; Charles Galwey, “Stadium Concert”, in Rasula and Conley; Sarah Fox, “Fata Morgana”, at The Altered Scale Blog, 15 Feb 012; Thom Donovan, “What We Are Doing”, at Wild Horses of Fire, 15 Feb 012; John Sakkis, “Books Read 2011”, at Both Both, 15 Feb 012; JBR (paraphrasing a fireman at the prison in Comayagua, Honduras, where over 350 prisoners burnt to death 14 Feb 012); JBR, but see Frank Jacobs, “The Undiscovered Country”, at Opinionator/NY Times, 14 Feb 012; Shelli Victorino, “What’s in your Little Black Bag?”, at Hello Giggles, 15 Feb 012; Harold Abramowitz, “Electrical Appliance”, at Joyland Poetry, 9 Feb 012]

Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons (I've bolded the most important bit)

Reblogged from Huffington Post:

As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for "challenging corrections budgets." In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

In the House of the Hangman 843-848

When the plague spread to towns they didn’t know how to stop it; even quarantine didn’t work. There was a wink of tampering in the seven granules. A cross-check against catalogues of astronomical catalogues tells you that no known body in the Solar System should have these coordinates and drift. But these were the local animals. Did you know Slippery Easel or Marked Man? In other words, to do philosophy of mind properly, we need to study the multiple ways in which subjects develop as a result of different social practices. Suddenly, TINY SPINOZA and his Filipino wife, EXASPERANZA, storm in. ……. EXASPERANZA: Shelly, you look fabulous, just fabulous. For SPINOZA, all beings, including stones, are to some degree animate. It has a very helpful bibliographical essay at the end entitled ‘Reading the New Thassology.’ My key does not fit the reptile door : my key is basted with rust and grease : the thought of entry makes it molt a commodity that damages its traders : light, more light the magpies call : and are blinded. In her book On Beauty, Elaine Scarry claims, “at the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.” It may seem like a stretch to go to the airport looking for beauty, but suppose that in the midst of hustling from security checkpoint to departure gate you could actually achieve such a sensation? Of course, the problem is that such an experience can arrest you, and make forward motion suddenly difficult: you’ve been radically decentered, and are no longer in control of your own body. This isn’t the best state, perhaps, to be traveling in. But maybe, with practice, it could inspire a different form of air travel, one more open to contingency and flux. On the other hand, didn’t Isabelle Allende say, Erotica is using a feather. Pornography is using the whole chicken. A hand clasps a beam of wood. Your request is being finalised. Air pressure drops. Driving to Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians.” And the percolator joins in. Fixate on a vowel. A slideshow of well-washed atmospheres. A capsule or a frond. Tomahto is another day. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks.

I’M NOT

WRITING

PURE

WAR

THIS IS A

GROCERY LIST

I fink u freeky and I like you a lot. Zef is decked out hoopties with fur on the dash. And you’re sitting in this little fishing village in the bottom of the world, and it feels like almost like it’s like too-fast-too-furious, WWE, WWF. A kid wearing a 50 Cent t-shirt in North Africa for me is fokken zef. Apocalyptic poverty style. Zef is next level shit. Now a verbum absconditum was spoken to me, and my ears as if by stealth received the veins of its whisper. In the horror of the vision by night, when deep sleep is wont to hold men, fear seized me, and trembling, and all my bones were shaken. Trump Baja’s slogan is Owning here is just the beginning. “The beginning of what?” Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a living mineral / For there is silver in my mines and I bless God that it is rather there than in my coffers. We’re gonna use these first, bunny. You can open your eyes. Close em. Now close em. I wish you could go on the waterslides. But you’re pregnant. If you’re pregnancy, your heart’s bad, if you have a broken bone, or a back condition. I read the signs! Yep. You can’t. Your other – your baby down here. Why aren’t you pooting, then, or does it hurt? She does. The clown needs some medicine … The inclusion of the tulips does however throw up a number of questions: What are the tulips determined to do? How does a tulip show that it is determined? If the tulips have emerged from ‘heaven’s side door’ then which planet is it that they are marching to the figurative edge of? Are we meant to assume that the planet is our own? Why did only some of the tulips leap of the edge of the planet? What did the others lean into or against? Were the tulips, like bad angels, expelled from heaven or did they leave of their own accord? How does a tulip (determined or not) get to be in heaven? I only have soy sauce and milk and Malabah lotion in my refrigerator. Wittgenstein kept his tweets in a box.

[Note: Sources: 843. Tony Lopez, “Darwin”, “Global Signals”, in Only More So; JBR; Vincent Zompa, “: Moonraker”, “A Motherfast Cloud”, in Moonraker, at Dusie; John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; Paul DiLella, Anchorwoman: Rise of the Mango Queen, at Brooklyn Publishers; Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization; Stuart Elden, “At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean”, at Progressive Geographies, 14 Feb 012 (on Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean); Jen Besemer, “from The Buttress (scales)”, at E·ratio 15. 844. Christopher Schaberg, “Airport (as) Art”, at What Is Literature, 14 Feb 012 (“Scarry goes on to add that ‘radical decentering might also be called opiated adjacency.’” These days it’s not a bad idea to fly a little “opiated”, since all one’s inputs are stressors, and the whole experience really is one of “contingency and flux”). 845. JBR; Isabelle Allende, as quoted in Robin Elizabeth Sampson, “FeatherLit Fledges”, at We Who Are About To Die, 14 Feb 012; Tim Wright, “Three Poems”, at E·ratio 15; James Sibley Watson, Tomato Is Another Day, as seen at The New Inquiry, 14 Feb 012. 846. Paul Virilio, epigraph, and Catherine Meng, I’m Not Writing Pure War This Is A Grocery List, at Dusie; Die Antwoord, “I Fink U Freeky”, as embedded in Claire Breukel, “The Anarchy of Die Antwoord”, at Hyperallergic, 14 Feb 012; “Anonymous asks …”, at Fok Yeah Yo-landi Vi$$er; Ninja, as quoted in Michael Mechanic, “Die Antwoord on Cultural Overload, Evil Boy, and the Meaning of Zef”, at Mother Jones, 11 Oct 010. 847. Job 4:12-3, as quoted in Nicola Masciandaro, “Abstract: Absolute Secrecy, or, On the Infinity of Individuation”, at The Whim, 14 Feb 012; Elizabeth Gumport, and Chris Kraus, as quoted in Gumport’s “Female Troubl”, at n+1, 14 Feb 012 (a review of Chris Kraus, Where Art Belongs); Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, as quoted in China Miéville, “Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a living mineral / For there is silver in my mines and I bless God that it is rather there than in my coffers”, at Rejectamentalist Manifesto, 14 Feb 012. 848. Riley, as quoted in Kate Durbin, E! Entertainment, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “Kate Durbin on Reality TV”, at Montevidayo, 14 Feb 012; John Armstrong, “Amy De’Ath and the determined tulips on The Claudius App (2)”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 14 Feb 012; Alicia Bones, “I don’t want to be a traveler forever”, at Matador Network, 13 Feb 012; Julie Joyce, as quoted in Elisa Gabbert, “A perfume mini-memoir from the fabulous Julie Joyce”, at The French Exit, 14 Feb 012; Melissa Broder, at HTMLGIANT, 14 Feb 012 (“La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are tweets. Pascal’s Pensées are tweets. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are tweets. Wittgenstein kept his tweets in a box.”)]

In the House of the Hangman 842

From the gramophones comes the metallic phoenix singing the oily atoms The Cosmogonic Multiplicity the null set suddenly everything becomes internal with not 5, but 6, 7, 8, 9 new senses (subtler ones) Scenes of Life at the Capital. Personally, I dig seeing confident folks downward-dogging in a public space. But while my body loves a postflight stretch, I’m far too shy to do a sun salutation in front of my co-passengers. I’ve never had the balls to do anything but a hurried pigeon pose in the handicapped stall. The DM market is a fancy organic version of Duane Reade. I steadfastly buy an anti-cellulite cream there, although – without bragging – I do not have cellulite. In the village where I used to live, there was nothing but a skyscraper, a paper mill and a little deli called ADEG. A stream of consciousness winds its way through the volley of selves below in the street sprung with gardens at the edges. A proportionally great force is in motion on the occasion of every great crime. Ah      merry shadow. The first one that caught me really hard is “Finding Something.” It goes, “I say moon is tempered horses in the dark because moon is the closest I can come to it. I sit in a via, the king’s telegrapher built on the hill where the ferry crosses …” I can’t remember, but it ends with “the arches of your feet … the fields where my heart is as delicate as crushed birds.” I love your technical sprawl. Such a fierce World Atmosphere. First thing in the morning I went directly into debt. Later that day we all met downtown for a bit of ringworm. And besides, I can’t drive until I’m six times more likely to have tumors with a mild case of laryngitis. But think down on it: is any body merely biological? At least our very own lost grail blows neither this way nor there. Here’s the swelling theme-music with its bombastic brass, a little like a cross between one of the more military English hymns and the Death Star overture; it all stains my ass like lead. Baby’s stealing water and then a year’s passed! And technically all reflections are diced vessels of air, no? This was in the summer, when I woke up in my apartment, and I had no idea. It had been this thing happening to me. But then it was over. But even over is an unsatisfactory term. It was complete. Or it felt complete. Except I hadn’t had time to notice this. No one did. We were all busy. Even I was helping, in an office far uptown. I sat beside an editor at a large desk pushed up against two large windows that looked over a park. The editor was a smallish crippled man. He hardly talked. They said he was steeped in mysticism. I asked them what was wrong. Why mysticism, how can anyone these days become steeped in mysticism. They laughed. It was obvious. Didn’t I know? He'd been struck by lightning. Can’t I work with someone who hasn’t been struck by lightning, I said. The numinous laundry and the echolocation clicks [this world rests on a folded plane baby you be x or y it doesn’t matter / X pulls the fabric and bunches it into a brain a rose these vector-guns go bang / / [butterflies are not interesting to dissect / they are filled with yellowish soft crap, buttery in consistency / their legs are thin as human hair / when I see a butterfly I try to feel a dumb fluttering inside my chest / where there is no room for flapping though there are valves that do / like many tiny tongues many tiny little forks and crotches … / / what fascinates me is body temperature. as D. says, heat is an intensive difference … it / cannot be divided … if I cut you in half with a huge knife … your heat would not / halve … So a few brief points. First, big data is like a coffee cup. It’s as real and true as the coffee cup. It’s a thing, an object. It’s out there. So who is Adele? Can you eat Cheese Cloth? Why would I ever use Regular Wash on the dishwasher if I have a Heavy Wash option? Pace is cruising, Ever’s no-hands standing, and when Soul wants to move he’s crawling around like a dog with a toy in his mouth. The last thing TYPOE exploded was a Mickey Mouse face (con permiso, claro) on a wall of a Christian school. He points to an oversized pink Barbie house and explains that’s the next thing to go. No other species decapitates. Is that true? No other species buries a 727 underground. (Messy, complex graphs.) (Nothing new compared to a year ago.) Bias plays in the size of your confidence interval. (I think of Janouch’s reported glimpse of a Kafka drawing “covered with strange minute sketches, in which only the abstraction of movement was empathized, of tiny men running, fighting and crawling, and kneeling on the ground.”)

[Note: Sources: Claire Goll, “Twentieth Century” (tr. Jed Rasula), in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (eds. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley); Nicolas Beauduin, “The City in Me” (tr. Tim Conley), in Rasula and Conley; Alain Badiou, various; Philip Whalen, book title; Anne Merritt, “San Francisco airport opens yoga room”, at Matador Network, 13 Feb 012; Doris Neidl, “Paper / memories of life”, at E·Ÿratio 15; Tim Trace Petersen, “Hydro-Powered turbines”, at E·Ÿratio 15; Friedrich Schiller, “The Criminal of Lost Honor” (tr. John Oxenford and C.A. Feiling), as quoted in Geoff Tuck, “On a Monday, if I’m Blue”, at Notes on Looking, 13 Feb 012; Hagiwara Sakutaro “Longing I Walk in a Crowd” (tr. Hiroaki Sato), in Rasula and Conley; Sam Herring, and Jack Gilbert, as quoted in C Noah Pelletier, “Interview with Future Islands”, at Matador Network, 13 Feb 012; Emil Bønnelycke (tr. Jed Rasula), “Century”, in Rasula and Conley; E·Ÿratio 15; Laurie Penny, “Enough of this royal deference”, at New Statesman, 13 Feb 012; Steve Gilmartin, “six poems from ‘Trilce: Mistranslations’”, at E·Ÿratio 15; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Write Through Affectation”, at Boys with Short Hair, 13 Feb 012; Lara Glenum, Ariana Reines, blurbs for for Feng Sun Chen, Butcher’s Tree, at Black Ocean; Feng Sun Chen, Ugly Fish, at Radioactive Moat 15; ; Alex Reid, ‘Big data and decision-making’, at alex reid / digital digs, 13 Feb 012; JBR; John Sakkis, “Recent Google Searches”, at Both Both, 13 Feb 012; JBR; Claire Breukel, “An Artist Who Celebrates Miami Style”, at Hyperallergic, 13 Feb 012; Jan Lauwereyns, “Two Diptychs”, at E·Ÿratio 15; JBR; JBR, but see An Xiao, “Artist to Bury an Airplane Underground and Call It Art”, at Hyperallergic, 13 Feb 012 (on a project by Christopher Buchel); John Latta, “Zero = Cipher (‘Noteth a place, and no thing availith . . .’)”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 13 Feb 012]