In the House of the Hangman 1142

And yet, what Richard Feynman knew about science, Orson Welles knew about film, and and Rilke knew about life, might indeed be true of love as well — ‘ah, yes, there goes my love again, what will it bring forth this time? What havoc will it wreak?’ There are seven doors left to pass through, the seven doors passed through and the thousand and one trials, perhaps we will be delivered (if that makes any sense), in the citadel I place my soles in José Rizal's footsteps, I would never describe a cloud as “fluffy”, the man with his ribs exposed says, these are my ribs. Head belonging to ammonia, these are my ribs. These are my ribs, but why. Feeling free in the zendo a professional lifeguard reads the blurbs on the back of your self-published book. Mallarmé reference TK, he reads aloud, having flipped to a page at random. “Oh fuck,” you say, “is that actually in there?” Taking the book to look, you see that your placeholder text has accidentally made it into print, you’d meant to insert a Mallarmé reference here but I guess you never got around to it … “Fuck,” you say again, handing the book back to the guest, who wears an eyepatch and has a fake parrot sewn to his shoulder and teeters as if wearing a pegleg though looking down it’s true he has two sturdy legs. The next song comes on shuffle and it begins with an church bell, the kind that bongs the time in stately patient bongs but the bongs are sped here so it seems to be 4,000 o’clock at night. And Boldt seizes on this and goes mad with it. Her Goldie Hawn is hundreds of feet tall and becomes a veritable city-destroying sea Kali. Once in a while I still move my hands and feet. But my penis, old twisted compass needle, still points towards Romania. “May shit fall upon you from a biplane.” OK. Few depictions of fire rocks are content to leave them in lithic solitude, to add nothing anthropomorphic. Yet a surprisingly nonhuman representation appears in the bestiary of Harley 3244 (f. 60). “Five evenly separated red and orange stones, glowing like embers, are distributed along a light green mountainside.” These fire rocks sparkle with a promise of vitality on the slope of that verdant hill, but they have not yet ignited into story. Some lapides igniferi are neither fully human nor fully petric, creating a jarring hybridity as faces peer from lithic chunks. The bestiary held by Gonville and Caius offers two dark stones with petals like petric flowers against a monochrome background, yielding the impression that the rocks are moving towards each other across space or sky. In the centers of these stones are intricate and expressive faces, one male and one female, each uneasily eying the other as flames begin to erupt. They seem keenly aware of the explosion about to arrive ... and yet they remind me of Anne Harris’s suggestion that fire stones might also laugh. So my universe, my universe structured by the fabric of the signifier, was collapsing. I could no longer claim, as Barthes’ claimed in The Fashion System, that language, the signifier, was a “primary modeling system”, i.e., a system that diacritically structured everything else. I had learned many truths from critical theory, semiotics, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, as well as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Lacan, and Žižek. I wanted to and want to preserve these things. But I needed a theoretical framework strong enough to both preserve these things and to take account of non-signifying entities such as writing technologies, ocean currents and wind patterns, satellites, microbes, the growing cycles of rice, high energy diets, and other material processes. OK. The poor nameless supplicant, who, we gather, works at a humongous company, spends a lot of his time walking around the corridors of the office building, an act which is presented for the first time as: “the only course now available to you is to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organization of which you are an employee,” and which variously becomes, through its (at least) seventeen iterations: organization which toys with you ... of which you are an exploitee ... of which you are obviously not the brightest star ... which pays you a pittance while grinding away the best years of your life ... that provides your meagre means of subsistence ... that is your sole horizon ... to which you owe everything ... to which you feel proud to belong ... where you eat your heart out ... The flamingos spoke soundlessly: We must reclaim our pink from Hello Kitty.

[Note: Sources: Marie Popova, and Judith Butler, “Doubting Love”, as quoted in Popova’s “Philosopher Judith Butler on Doubting Love”, at Brain Pickings (for Geof Huth), 12 Nov 012; Amina Saïd, “I live here in the basement of the Gare de Lyon”, “flames of sunset on Manila Bay” (tr. Marilyn Hacker), in Aditi Machado, “Aditi Machado reviews Amina Saïd’s The Present Tense of the World: Poems 2000-2009”, at Asymptote; Yiyun Lee, as quoted in Claire Wigfall, “A conversation with Yiyun Li”, at Asymptote, Oct 012; Brandon Shimoda, “The Grave on the Wall”, as quoted in Steve Karas, “Your Portal to Innovative Poetry and Prose: Review of Fence, Summer 2012”, at the review review, 12 Sept 012; quilty, “my breasts on your lathe”, at good jobbbbbbbbb, 12 Nov 012; JBR; Kevil Killian, on Lindsey Boldt, Overboard, in “Attention Span 2012 | Kevin Killian”, at Third Factory / Notes to Poetry, 10 Nov 012; MARGENTO, “from Europe. A Gypsy Epithalamium”, at Asymptote, Oct 012; William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, as quoted in Alex Kalamaroff, “The Weave and Werve of Words in William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, at HTMLGIANT, 12 Oct 012; JBR; Jeffrey Cohen, “Fire Rocks”, at In the Middle, 12 Nov 012; Levi R Bryant, “Why OOO?”, at Larval Subjects, 12 Nov 012; JBR; Kevin Hyde, and Georges Perec, as quoted in “Kevin Hyde reviews Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. Translated from the French by David Bellos”, at Asymptote, Oct 012; Chang Hui-Ching, “War Among the Insects” (tr. Lee Yew Leong), at Asymptote, Oct 012]

Comments

[Omo Bob]

But my penis, old twisted compass needle, still points towards Romania...

[john]

And it always will! (Great line, isn't it?) It's by Margento, in case you want to track more of his stuff ...

[Amanda]

All right, I'll elaborate. It is petfcerly sustainable to have a world where some areas have high standards of living while others have low standards of living. Here are a few possible cases:1. The low standard of living area has a culture in which a high standard of living is not valued, for whatever religious or political reasons.2. The low standard of living area has a culture in which people are not educated, and therefore are outcompeted for resources by higher standard of living areas.3. The low standard of living area is kept that way by a dictatorship (of whatever type) that finds people easier to control that way.Assuming that everyone wants a First World standard of living and will inevitably proceed there if not stopped by resource constraints is just cultural imperialism. It's the flip side of the same unthinking "our way is obviously better and everyone wants to be like us" that encourages us to try to export our culture to everyone and try to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.If, for instance, people take up the project that you're advocating on giving up on growth, some people are going to take it up before others. Unless it occurs due to a world-wide crash, there are some areas that are going to have a "low standard of living" because they choose to. Of course this gets into definitional questions of what makes a low standard of living access to free, high-quality medical care, or access to a car? But those definitional questions are themselves cultural.In short this sustainability list smells like the U.S. 1970s. It doesn't even mention women's rights, the largest single factor in limiting population growth. You might want to look up what happened to the Sierra Club in 2004. ( to start.) Clueless buy-in to right-wing tropes doesn't help.

[Natalja]

Hi Mary the only hard part is finding some of the ineiedrgnts. The recipe is almost as easy as making PB & J. Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season!