The dialogue between Mar Benjamin Shamoun and Shimko the Kurd remains unresolved to this day. As far as I know, anyway, I don’t share any genealogical ties with Nebuchadnezzar, never having visited “Graceland”. “The volatility smile is not symmetrical.” Next to this person’s name was "taxidermist" in parentheses. The oil-loving microbes seem to have lost their appetite. Would a person want to know what a field knows of the snakes? I think of my retirement savings, I think business as usual. The Dingo that kills the bird, which makes the land ocher through its blood. Rebuilding a ton of stuff: converting Amiga MODs I made on the 3000 to work with emulators, building a SN76488-based VCO/LFO/noise generator into the DDD1 (triggered by the DDD1 trig out, basically adding a Cosmic Disco Slap to a digital drum machine) after I finally install the clock mod and the bends, finish hooking everything up to the new computer (the SP808ex does s/pdif in and out now; it’s amazing how much cleaner it sounds), setting up the TG77 for just intonation (been messing with Riley-style wolf fifths a lot lately), actually doing those voice recordings I was talking about earlier. So, when the Journal announced that Juergen Teller was having a show of some of his new work, entitled Irene im Wald, at their tiny Williamsburg gallery space, I decided I’d ride my bike ten blocks and check it out. On the way there, I had many questions: Would my dude Juergen be there himself? Would the beer be cold? How many children under the age of ten who dressed better than me would be there? Upon arrival, I quickly found my answers to be, in order, no, no, and a shit-ton. Through the membrane – the single-mindedness of repetition – the needle flies, bereft of thread, of& decay. The sign – is the quietest razor of darkness. Outside of the forest, you find: you weren’t outside. A rusty rat crossing the street. A soft, interminable twilight, and above it the night lights burning. The room in which we lived was almost eighteen meters long. In the mornings, on streets billowing steam, I went around the corner, bare foot but for sandals, to drink a cup of hot milk and eat cheese pastry. I was on the phone with Arda when I crossed border into Grape Town. That's the nickname of the little town tucked into the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. Its real name is a little more boring but just as factual: North East. It's in Erie County. First chance I got, I got off the interstate and headed north toward the lake. The speaker is “sick with / sincerity” yet “mass texts” are rendered “a / worse feeling / than hearing / “time is a waste of #Poetry”” but “RunningOutOfXanax” and “#y’all” and “#Instagram” are immortalized on the printed page. But what of affirmative nomadology and the slow-motion general strike? These lines are from The Tao of Wu, a wisdom-volume by the RZA, which includes an intro by a Shaolin monk, koans, lyrics, analyses of numerology, chess moves, kung fu movies, and the story of a suitably myth-sized life. Or this is a black velvet painting of Adorno and Paul, sitting across a table and thumb wrestling at the Spanish Moon, which is just down the street from the No Future Nightclub; when we speak of Daddy Longlegs, for example, whose Daddy was he? So the young man went inland and became a qivigtoq, a hermit, “a ghost who may never return home.” It was said that qivigtoqs become supernaturally strong. They learn the speech of animals, and they are nalussaertok, aware of everything. Norman Bates: You — … you eat like a bird. Marion Crane: [Looking around at the stuffed birds while eating] And you’d know, of course. Norman Bates: No, not really. Anyway, I hear the expression ‘eats like a bird’ … it-it’s really a fals-fals-fals-fals-fals-ity. Because birds really eat a tremendous lot. But I-I don’t really know anything about birds. My hobby is stuffing things. You know … taxidermy.
[Note: Sources: Sotère Torregian, “(Actual) Poem Sent to Miss Skala Hassan, of Kurdistan (Iraq), Writing a Dissertation ‘On Elvis’”, “Lecture: To the Université de Paris – VII (in Absentia)”, in On the Planet without Visa: Selected Poetry and Other Writings, AD 1960-2012; Lillian Chew, as quoted in William Fuller, “Restatement of Truths”, at Chicago Review; Anne Gorrick, FB post, 13 Sept 012; Matt Staggs, “OM NOM NOM! Oil-Loving Bacteria Help With Deepwater Horizon Clean-Up”, at Disinformation, 13 Sept 012; Mathias Svalina, “Metal”, in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (eds. Joshua Corey and G C Waldrep); Timothy Morton, “Dipesh Chakrabarty Liveblog 7”, at Ecology without Nature, 13 Sept 012; Darren Bauler, “MPA Updatumery”, at Theater of Diminished Faculties, 13 Sept 012; Christian Storm, “I WENT TO THE JUERGEN TELLER OPENING AND HAD AN OK TIME”, at Vice, 13 Sept 012; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “Arkadii Dragomoshchenko: Paper Dreams, for Jerome Rothenberg”, at Jacket2, 1 Jul 012; Brent Cunningham, “from Bird & Forest”, in Corey and Waldrep; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “FROM PHOSPHOR” (tr. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova), at Postmodern Culture, v.3 n.2; Jono Tosch, “Dog Tired in Cleveland”, at Oil Changes, 13 Sept 012; Melissa Broder, and Sophia Le Braga, I Don’t Want Anything To Do With the Internet, as quoted in “I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET…”, at Harriet, 13 Sept 012; JBR, but see U of Minnesota Press, and Keith Ansell Pearson, blurbs for Eugene W Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike; James Guida, “It Was Written: Books By Rappers”, at n+1, 13 Sept 12; JBR, with hat tips to Little Feat and Ernst Bloch, and a nod to Jared Schickling; Eliot Weinberger, “Ice”, as quoted in John Latta, “Hermit”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 13 Sept 012; Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (found somewhere on the web 13 Sept 012; for Anne)]
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