In the House of the Hangman 990 & 991

I remember you teaching me the difference between stink and stench ... You named one disgusting smell after another, saying “stench ... definitely ...” or “stink … a bad stink, but not bad enough to be a stench ...” - you were maybe 7^th  grade, me 5^th ... But what about that Korean woman who was inseminated orally while eating cooked squid? BLACK breathing BLACK at the window / Simultaneous / {{               }} Time lag; echo; digital interrupt. It’s true. Proust relaxes me. It’s those huge paragraphs. I wander the world in a robe of feathers whispering that something has vanished. It’s like trees. Even as a kid. Watch how the eyeball – I thought you said fireball – swallows the world. A box arrives in the mail and a hand comes out and pats you on the head. -=- -|*=- - -- -=|*=- - - Transmission static; horizon; stalled or circular thought. Everything’s a butterfly flickering over darkening flowers. THE CUPBOARD REMEMBERS THIS STORY IT HEARD ABOUT A GHOST THAT LIVED IN A PAMPHLET AND HOW IT SCARED ALL THE NOUNS. In hell there’s nothing but crocodiles and fathers. In Mexico the devil is handsome. “The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law.” So close your eyes and match your inhales to your excesses. Royal Baking Powder works best when you boil a pot of coarse-ground rust. The mountain gives birth / The mountain licks a mountain / The mountain’s litter sucks / … / This same mountain, all of a sudden, transforms itself into a much more challenging pile of historical remnants and suppressed trauma: there are at least two meanings for the word ‘hunch’. We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in automobile accidents or been struck by lightning, and their flesh might be first class. We only eat the living. Parliament’s been dissolved. “Egypt just witnessed the smoothest military coup,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, wrote in a Twitter post. “We’d be outraged if we weren’t so exhausted.” Hey, Ed, here’s a old dream for you: “The forest sprang up around me / there in the fertile valley where / I lay nakedly spelling the sleep / of flags.” I mean, “I take life like I take my gummy bears: head first.” “Any’a you drunken stiffs have a hair thing I can borrow?” I mean, “A hobo’s gotta live by the whimsicalities of chance, for example I keep my iPod on shuffle.” Now here is a cliffhanger to kill for! What can happen now? ‘Do not be so foolish [as to ask]. You are like the emulous dog in the fine old Dusseldorf fable who wished to be an octopus.’ Here I disagree with myself but as he is the host it would be impolite to say so. This, then, is where Eastern spirituality entered Bateson’s approach to psychiatry, as a means of expanding the discursive field beyond the modern self. And here it is interesting to bring in tow more English exiles to California, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. Watts was a very influential commentator on and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1950s, and he was also a consultant on Bateson’s schizophrenia project. Two of the project’s principals, Haley and Weakland, “took a course from Watts on the parallels between Eastern philosophy and Western psychiatry, back in the days when he was Director of the American Academy of Asian Studies I think the focus on Zen offered us an alternative to the ideas about change offered in psychiatry in the 1950s”. It makes sense, then, to see Zen as a constitutive element of the Batesonian approach to schizophrenia. And, interestingly, Bateson’s cybernetics also fed back into Watt’s expositions of Buddhism. In The Way of Zen (1957), Watts drew on cybernetics as “the science of control” to explain the concept of karma. His models were an oversensitive feedback mechanism that continually elicits further corrections to is own performance, and the types of logical paradox that Bateson took to illuminate the double bind. Watts also discussed the circular causality involved in the “round of birth-and-death,” commenting that in this respect, “Buddhist philosophy should have a special interest for students of communication theory, cybernetics, logical philosophy, and similar matters.” This discussion leads Watts directly to the topic of nirvana, which reminds us of the connection that Walter and Ashby made between nirvana and homeostasis. …

[Note: Sources: 990. Omo Bob, “Lesson”, email, rec’d 14 Jun 012, approx. 12:06 PM PDT; Charlie Jane Anders, “Cooked squid inseminates woman’s ‘tongue, cheek and gums’”, at io9, 14 Jun 012 (“According to a scientific paper from the Journal of Parasitology, a 63-year-old Korean woman “experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs.” She spat out the food in her mouth, but still had a “pricking and foreign-body sensation” in her oral cavity. When she went to the hospital, they removed a dozen "small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva.” Yes, the dead squid's spermatophores were still active, and they’d inseminated the woman's mouth.”); Myrian Moscona, Negro Marfil / Ivory Black (tr. Jen Hofer); Frances Richard, The Phonemes; John Olson, “An Exhilarating Book”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 14 Jun 012; JBR. 991. The Cupboard; Karl Parker, “What the Laughter Said”, Diana Maria Delgado, “Twelve Trees”, at Bibliomancy Oracle; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Mark Sheridan); JBR; Boni Joi, “Today We’re Going to Conjure a House”, at Brooklyn Rail, Jul 04; JBR; Dougal McNeill, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “‘The Landscape’s Gaze’: Dougal McNeill on Kim Hyesoon’s Holes”, at Montevidayo, 14 Jun 012; Suzanne Snijder van Wissenkerke, in conversation, 14 Jun 012; Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, as quoted in James K Stanescu, “Eating Grass-Fed Animals Will Not Save Us: Part 2 of 3”, at Critical Animal, 14 Jun 012; David K Kirkpatrick, “New Political Showdown in Egypt as Court Invalidates Parliament”, at New York Times, 14 Jun 012; JBR; Frank O’Hara, “Barbizon”, in an email from Ed Baker, rec’d 14 Jun 012, approx. 6:34 PDT; JBR; Tween Hobo, as quoted in Stephen Burt, “REVIEW: @TWEENHOBO”, at The Believer, 5 Jun 012; Michael Kelly, Ulrich Haarbürste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm, quoted in A D Jameson, “23 brief replies to Blake Butler & Elisa Gabbert & Johannes Göransson & Chris Higgs re: (dear god, what else?) the fucking New Fucking Sincerity”, at HTMLGIANT, 14 Jun 012; Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, as quoted in Kristi McGuire, “The Cybernetic Brain: Gregory Bateson, Zen Schizophrenia, and Captain Beefheart”, at The Chicago Blog, 13 Jun 012]

Comments

[Ed Baker]

now reduced to you and me and some erstwhile printed matter hav
ing a dis:cushion about a cute Korean girl with a blood-less military coup in her oral cavity ?!? does all of this fall under that Fair Use rule?
or do we do like the Lang Gang does ..lie,s=t=e=a=l, cheat, maim, ravage, plunder, make mayhem... sing, dance & go to the next poetry conclave and read it out loud... word for word ? speaking of "stench". wrote a 'shortie' to this awhile back

they've been in the shit so long
they can no longer smell the stink

[john]

Ed, I assume fair use; I also assume that by citing my sources I neither lie, steal or cheat. But I do claim maiming, ravaging, plundering, making mayhem, singing, dancing with great pride. I'm nothing but a dj rocking the beats via samples, or, more historically, a Hannah Hoch or John Heartfield, or even a Schwitters maybe, but not as abstract.

Yeah, I'm Hannah Hoch Heartfield.

As for the language poets, maybe I hadda be there, but I don't know why anyone hates them so much. If they were assholes, it was a long time ago. I've met some of them, and they seemed like nice people.

Of curse they, like you and me, are old farts now ...

[john]

Of curse ... a typo, but how apt.