Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1319

Horacio throws down a little Das Racist: “I’m in outer space reading Frankfurt School treatises / That curl the common man into fetuses / Nietzsche told me that the nostril’s where the genius is / Bossy just saucing like its falafel where my penis is / Soap em with Falafel like O’Reilly thought a Loofah was / Hitting they chalupa up / First I get real smart, and then I stupid up / Drop it and scoop it up, haters is dookie butts.” So I read a review that called one perfume “god's marmalade” (I try it and it's true). So I think to myself “Stasis in darkness, the substanceless blue pour of tor and distances, god’s marmalade, how one we grow, born of a dispute over the continued use of the name of the name Perfect Bound.” Everyone I know reads Hart Crane. (much laughter) Damn it! I mean I … Requisite! I definitely recommend Hart Crane! Shout out to Hart Crane! (monkey noises and grunts) The monkeys like Hart Crane! … Hey, even bats and whales do! What’s the very next country you’d like to go to? I’d kind of like to go hang out in England. I want to go hang out with … (indecipherable). One hundred seventy infinity hundred! Well how could they? Their calendars are date calendars & their winter. One hundred infinity thirteen times. So everyone wants to know SUM TOTAL. Won’t it make the mind berzerk? I will say the phantom washes in a pie tin. On the solid Chrome Diopside, of which with me you shared, we got messed up, really so like tonal disarray, subaquatic, I mean, for the next hour we held the eels in our hands, watched their hearts pump and gills flap inside their translucent bodies, marveled as they propelled themselves up the sides of the glass. And then the map grew back. The leak is full of baby fat. From each according to the jittery picnic whiplash, to each according to the virtual divot dalliance apex stuck in wet rabbit. “But I am a dancer, for 0ush read flush, I delete your echo chamber throat wail like radiation from a god.” I posed for one of those inevitable portrait series of burlesque dancers without makeup (The Truth Behind The Mask!). As I shivered in my sequined G-string, I stared at the photographer’s past portraits. Drag queens. Fetish stars. Performance artists with butterflies for lashes and 8-inch waists. Could that be right? Only two people have ever gotten angry when I drew their pictures: a Moroccan religious fundamentalist and a New York City cop.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Das Racist, “Rapping 2 U” as quoted in Horacio Castillo, FB post, 7 May 013 ( Urban Dictionary: “When after a long night of partying you go to the bathroom the next morning and your butt explodes into the toilet causing nasty toilet water to come splash your underside ... That my friend is dookie butt ...”); Anne Gorrick, email rec’d 7 May 013 1:18 PM PDT (the lines she mangles – improves, actually – are Sylvia Plath, “Ariel”); Aidan Semmens, blurb for Molly Bloom; Edmund Berrigan, “Cross Examination (side b)”, in Can It!; Brent Cunningham, “Anatomie of Sleep (Division 1, Section 6)”, at onedit 4; Justin Katko, “Shield of the Coloured Meat Glass, Unbroken”, in Songs for One Occasion; Nicola Twilley, “glass (of) eels”, at Edible Geography, 7 May 013; Sandra Simonds, “Fairytale Landscape Made from the Leak”, in Mother Was A Tragic Girl; Kevin Davies, “Karnal Bunt”, in Comp.; Jefferson Toal, Kaloki Poems (and errata strip); Molly Crabapple, “Why Draw Pictures?”, at Vice, 7 May 013; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1318

What made him think the phone was ringing? He often spoke a tentative greeting into it, as if he expected it was trying to ring. Or suppressing a ring – someone was trying to reach him. Does him index me? We do not see the real motion, for it speeds thru space, along with the whole family. I had a dream last nite I was supposed to recite Brian Kim Stephans’s poems somewhere and I couldn’t find them. You were in it! That’s all I can remember. Should I cook up that spaghetti? Any day now, billions of cicadas with bulging red eyes will crawl out of the earth after 17 years underground and overrun the East Coast of the USA. I guess it’s not quite like take care fake bear torque cake, and yet that’s why they got take care fake bear torque caked so young. I thought plantings was paintings, as in These garments are handmade with illegal paintings. They isolate small islands inside themselves. On each island a small village. In a room in one village a man is writing: … the removal of the pulp from the root of my rotting tooth followed by a round of oral surgeries which were themselves followed, ultimately, followed one could say inevitably, followed one could say inexorably by the extracting of my ruined tooth, the lancing of the enormous boil on my scrotum by the top-ranked specialist in the city, framed magazine covers on his office walls showed his dignified face captioned with the phrase Top-Ranked Specialists … What’s the setting for a grape sherbet poem / that’s also about a haunted baby? Want a slim core? How moist. The unseen particle – Did it interpose a screen that subdued the light, & is this yet another screen? I was at the end of some tether – & the tangible life, not alienate those, morning under effort, harassed or late, I’m brushing my teeth to get your blood out of my mouth ///////////////////// don’t worry. I’m starting to sell some fucked-up shit on ebay so that I can buy some more fucked-up shit on ebay. It’s a vicious circle, and a sign that I probably need help. Regardless, my decapitated, possibly-haunted broken robot is already at $46 and that pays for at least a dozen lightly-used glass eyeballs. Also, the shipping is $25 in the US (it’s crazy heavy because of the motor on the bottom) or free if you just want the dismembered head. The final stanza in the 1962 version reads: Patriarchs till now immobile / In heavenly wools / Row off as stones or clouds with the faces of babies. [Humpback whales suspend themselves upside down and perpendicular to the direction of sea currents before they begin to sing.] Like the six-frame drift of sound from an image that repudiates wilful disbelief. Like value unsynced from the going rates. All I know is I no longer fear extraterrestrials because they consider us a protected species and that’s pretty cool! But in order to reach the infield, we first had to fight our way through a tunnel that smelled like a rotting asshole — the air was filled with cigar and cigarette smoke, vomit, and bourbon. Caitlin asked me if we were in hell. Naturally, people started chanting “USA! USA! USA!”, which really pissed her off. “I hate this weird communism stuff. Why are they doing this? Do they want to feel powerful by hearing their own voices? Are they doing this by default? What does USA! USA! have to do with anything?” She told me all of this while holding an imaginary microphone. In this sadness we are not alone. In this happiness, together. Straight, long, trees are stripped, are best, for electric lines, the hardware, bolts, and crossbar easily attacked, smoking, the transformers films coasted through madmen. Ibn Battuta received gifts as he traveled, some of which were people, and animals, the very things that still exist today.

[Note: Sources: Aaron Kunin, Grace Period: Notebooks 1998-2007 (back cover); JBR; Edmund Berrigan, “The Movements of Stars & Galaxies”, in “San Francisco Diary”, and in “Cross Examination (side a)”, in Can It!; Seth Borenstein, “Eastern US to be overrun by billions of cicadas (Update)”, at phys.org, 6 May 013; JBR, but see next; Heidi Lynn Staples, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake, at Caketrain; JBR, but see next; Anne Gorrick, “An Extended Environment with Metrical and/or Dimensional Properties”, at e^.ratio; JBR, but see previous (I read island as village – now I can understand confusing plantings and paintings, they look somewhat alike but island and village?? I need to take a nap, I think); Robert Risman, A Textbook Case; TV ad seen out of the corner of my eye; something I overheard (where? IRL? TV? TV. Sports Center! In relation to a home run, of all things); C J Martin, “Untitled #17, 5-4-13”, at Rhyme Eats the Words, 6 May 013; James Ganas, “how much”, at pop serial 4; Jenny Lawson, “Fun with Ebay”, at The Bloggess, 6 May 013; anonymous, and Sylvia Plath, “Sheep in Fog”, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Sheep in Fog’ Drafts to Be Sold”, at Harriet, 6 May 013 (the stanza quoted here was cancelled and replaced by another in the final version); David Seymour, “David Seymour: With Love, Jan”, at Lemon Hound, 6 May 013; John Sakkis, “Fight the Future”, at Tarpaulin Sky, ? May 013; Amira Asad, “The Kentucky Derby… On Acid!”, at Vice, 6 May 013; Lanny Quarles, “AIRPLANE. 1974. (The Quack or Tooth Puller)”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 6 May 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1317

You must go to La Paloma Café and wave your pained face over a big steaming bowl of menudo. It is an emergency. Your soul calls for it, prays to it, waits for the red spirit of the menudo God to bless you and save you from the big mescal death. You must get into your car to drive a couple of miles down Paisano Street on a day when everyone else is in church praying. They listen to the Padre. Not you. Your stomach moves like a dying river. The parachute jump provides the lunatic with safe means of experiencing normal life. Is it true that you already have an apartment with a view of the Île de la Cité? Vous avez la derrière dans la beurre – which I believe means some folks sure do land on their feet. The crater was much larger, the suspect dimple much farther off, than had been apparent from the ridge. The ground sank by a grotesque staircase, of such scale that which each shelf a new basement story was achieved. The journey took eight decades. “Why were you in that blood?” Ogres love the hills, the dalekmite will be laced down on us, guest clinamen, the membrane of the perfume-grenaded Spectre General for frothing. What’s the best book you’ve read recently? Coleman Barks’s translations of Rumi are always wonderful, especially “A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings.” For instance: 

I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer
and find myself chased by a hog.
I say one must not travel during the holy month.
Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.

Today is Karl Marx’s birthday. Next door, they are feeding the google kids. We – instead – are arriving late. The ripe force bows down sunflowers and branches of the apple tree. I think

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
        sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
        Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
        box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
        pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
        of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
        surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
        machinery. …

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A-1 steak sauce makes anything taste better. I no longer eat meat, but I don’t want to waste that A-1. I can tell you (I was somewhat surprised) it tastes fabu on jellybeans. Especially the black ones. It should be a dessert course. Three black jellybeans, a few squiggles of A-1, a Japanese garden arranged on a tiny tuffet of rice. (Estimates currently put the figure at between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars) I fall down when you say this: “only ‘we’ can touch us” / not ghosts nor thieves, nor passers by. So to bed and screaming of mandrakes, as lulltide in the secret bay.

[Note: Sources: Ray Gonzalez, “Mama Menudo”, as quoted in email from Lapham’s Quarterly, “Back Matter: Hangover Cure”, rec’d 5 May 013 approx 7 AM PDT; Jim Dine, “World’s Fair News”, in Diary of a Non-Deflector; James Schuyler, letter to Kenneth Koch, 1 Apr 1969, in Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991 (ed. William Corbett); Francis Crot, Xena: Warrior Princess: The Seven Curses; Megan Sword and Timpani Skullface, “Fragments and Remixes”, in Superior City Song; anonymous interviewer and Robert Bly, as quoted in “By the Book: Robert Bly”, at New York Times, 5 May 013; Aindriu McFehin, FB post, 5 May 013; Maged Zaher, The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me; Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Verdant Heart”, in Plant Poems; JBR; Allen Ginsberg, “Sunflower Sutra”; the way rmutts, “The Medium of Contingency & Soft Dogma”, at Blandiloquent, 5 May 013 appeared in my Google Reader; line from trailer for Fast & Furious 6; William Keckler, “Lies”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 5 May 013; Albert Mobilio, “Star Search: Heaven’s Map for Getting Lost”, at Hyperallergic, 4 May 013; Mahmoud Elbarasi, “Stillborn Somewhere”, in St. Beaumont Conservative Club; Tom Jenks, Items, at if p then q]

In the House of the Hangman 1316

Like Tibetan monks they say, “Go on the party plane where even the turbulence / Is turbo-fun. So’s the skin seared by fun sun. It’s like a bardo ‘cept you won’t be sick and the food’s out of sight.” Shake / Ass in that stationary way and refuse to be moved / I will not be moved! They’ll say things like that. OK. Content yourselves with having to contend / With interminable omnipotent party planning. And she also theorized that what happens to me has something to do with my face, with my cheeks in particular, the way I beam and smile and have round cheeks. She said “you are like a doll with round cheeks, like a cabbage patch doll!” We asked the limo chauffeur who he was / chauffeuring and he wouldn’t tell us and rolled up / his window / That state where – where they are hiding / with a rubber gloved hand – where perhaps because of the self’s dissociation from it-self – all interaction a total empathy with everything, the sex on Ambien, the lubricant, the red / blindfold cowboy bandanna, the counter- / top interlude of artificial sapphire powder dawn’s / sky mimicked when the lamp was turned off / you could see thru the slivers of the blinds and / again hear the fucking birds as you fell asleep, I say ekphrastic too because this part reminds me of Chris Kraus’ wonderful book I Love Dick (which I may well never actually read). “And-and-and. And is or isn’t sincerity just a denial or not a denial of complexity I mean is or isn’t complexity just a denial or not a denial of sincerity?” ‘Yeah, well,’ said the peach modestly. ‘You know — the days go by.’ And the bunnitaur walks blind towards the little yellow prairie dogs, I mean, would not a phatic poetics complete Schlegel's vision of a buffo’s sprezzaturan irony? Is not the lineage, as well as the grotesque, illuminated, the moment one recognizes in Socrates the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for his enlarged photographs of shoppers strolling the aisles of American supermarkets? One of his poetic shopping lists had been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Goldin+Senneby’s new project for CCA originates in Sweden, the home country of this artistic duo, circa 1780, when mineralogist August Nordenskiöld was secretly employed by King Gustav III to pursue a little alchemy. Nordenskiöld was attempting to produce gold, which in the king’s view was necessary to boost the country’s wealth and sustain a war against Russia. Nordenskiöld’s covert agenda however was to make his discoveries available to all; ultimately aiming to abolish the tyranny of money. Or I read — thumbing through pages of “tender accuracies” — out of On the Nameways: Volume One (2000), Coolidge’s “Another Backyard Deviance”:

Grotesques
are men with giant pins
in their travels
…

…
I know
I got one
immersed in prefab steel
…

…

…

…

…

…

And: (“the best of the hard / to catch”) the two inevitably seem to belong together (“you have to keep”) …

[Note: Sources: JBR; Brandon Brown, Kidnapped, at Duration Press; Kathy Bloomberg-Rissman, in conversation, 3 May 013; Anne Boyer, “nyc (3)”, at *, 3 May 013; Jerimee Bloemeke, 25¢ CASH, and Jared Joseph, “25¢ CASH”, at HTMLGIANT, 3 May 013; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, as quoted in Del Ray Cross, “mcm”, at Anachronizms, 3 May 013; Lanny Quarles, “The Haloed World of the Hermit Society of the Body”, at Jellybean Wierdo With Electric Snake Fang, 3 May 013; JBR; Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot, as seen in Kenning Editions catalogue, n.d; “Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry”, at e-flux, 3 May 013 (re Goldin+Senneby: VWAP); John Latta, Clark Coolidge, William Carlos Williams, as quoted in Latta’s “Notebook (James Schuyler, Mark Twain, Clark Coolidge, &c.), at Isola di Rifiuti, 3 May 013]

UC Davis Dozen Case Resolved, Protestors Walk!

Reblogged from Harriet:

 

This just in: The Davis Dozen (AKA The Banker’s Dozen) walk! Poet and University of California-Davis professor Joshua Clover and the eleven UCD students charged with a possible 11 years in prison and a million dollars in fines for protesting a campus branch of USBank–we were following this when all went down last January–are free to move on with their lives. According to the press release: “The resolution comes in advance of a trial that Assistant District Attorney Michael Cabral was seemingly anxious to avoid, perhaps unwilling to burn further County funds on another failed effort at political repression. Each protestor accepted an infraction ticket and nominal community service.” The rest of the statement on the matter:

Last January and February, numerous protestors peacefully blockaded the campus offices of USBank. The branch shuttered its doors and abandoned the sweetheart deal through which it purchased captive customers from the university. Twelve students and staff were selected arbitrarily for the hyperbolic charges. Evidence gathered via subpoena now shows a national network of high-priced attorneys, public relations executives, security professionals, and corporate administrators deployed, not to protect bank or university community, but to exact as much punishment as possible. In the end, the UC administration, the bank, and the DA did not get their wish.

Evidence also shows that the prosecution was largely driven by the university’s top administrators who, which despite having high-salaried in-house counsel, elected to spend considerable public money on private attorneys. One upscale San Francisco firm was retained solely to avoid exposure of any internal documents regarding UCD’s relations with the bank, and to conceal the administration’s dossiers on students, staff, and faculty. Like the DA and police, the university seemed motivated by the need to send a message regarding the risks of protest — a message sometimes written in pepper spray.

In this case, the message turned out to be: no convictions, no bureaucratic revenge, and no bank. The absurd case is now history. The questions of the university’s increasing entanglement with finance; the catastrophe of student debt; and the systematically brutal, excessive, and wasteful criminalization of protest remain very much of the moment.

Sexual Assaults In Military Rose To Over 26,000 In 2012: Pentagon Survey

Reblogged from Huffington Post:

By RICHARD LARDNER 05/07/13 10:49 AM ET EDT

This image released by the Arlington (Va.) County Police Department shows Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski. Krusinski, an Air Force officer who led the branch's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit has been charged with groping a woman in a parking lot. Arlington County Police said Monday, May 6, 2013, that they charged Krusinski of Arlington with misdemeanor sexual battery following an alleged assault about 12:30 a.m. Sunday in the Crystal City section of the county. [JBR note: I'm a nonviolent guy, but I'm glad to see the woman he assaulted kicked the shit out of his face ...]

WASHINGTON -- The sexual battery arrest of the Air Force officer who led the service's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit underscores how far the Defense Department has to go in addressing the plague of sexual crimes in the military, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told a committee hearing that a Pentagon report to be released later Tuesday reportedly estimates that, on average, there are more than 70 sexual assaults involving military personnel every day.

Authorities in Arlington County, Va., said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski was charged with groping a woman in a northern Virginia parking lot on Sunday. Krusinski was removed from his post in the sexual assault unit after the Air Force learned of his arrest. He started in the post in February

"While under our legal system everyone is innocent until proven guilty, this arrest speaks volumes about the status and effectiveness of (the Defense) department's efforts to address the plague of sexual assaults in the military," Levin said.

The Pentagon report says that the number of sexual assaults reported by members of the military rose from 3,192 to 3,374 in 2012, while the department estimates that as many as 26,000 service members were assaulted, based on anonymous surveys, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the report.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force's chief of staff, told the committee that he and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley were "appalled" by Krusinki's arrest. Although the case is being adjudicated by the Arlington County police, Welsh said the Air Force has requested jurisdiction.

A police report said that the 41-year-old Krusinski was drunk and grabbed a woman's breast and buttocks. The woman fought him off and called police, the report said.

The Arlington County Sheriff's office said Krusinski was released Sunday on a $5,000 personal recognizance bond. An arraignment is scheduled for Thursday.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has spoken with Donley about the matter and "expressed outrage and disgust over the troubling allegations and emphasized that this matter will be dealt with swiftly and decisively," Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement.

Two cases involving decisions by three-star generals to overturn guilty verdicts in sexual assault cases have outraged members of Congress and propelled a bipartisan push to change the military justice system to essentially strip commanding officers of their ability to reverse criminal convictions.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is holding up the nomination of Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, tapped to serve as vice commander of the U.S. Space Command, until the Missouri Democrat gets more information about Helms' decision to overturn a jury conviction in a sexual assault case.

Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, commander of the 3rd Air Force at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, overturned the conviction against Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, a former inspector general at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Wilkerson had been found guilty last Nov. 2 of charges of abusive sexual contact, aggravated sexual assault and three instances of conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman. The incident had involved a civilian employee.

In the House of the Hangman 1315

The image above doesn’t do anything; this piece is about the information that follows. Teaching myself how to use Processing’s PDF features (wow, super easy), I whipped up a visual representation of a million. Ever seen a million of anything? Want to? This is a link to a PDF file (117MB) with a million instances of letter "i". It’s also interesting to note that my computer was able to create this file in about two and a half minutes. Pretty fast for a million! So then I thought (in my very human inability to imagine very large numbers) I could make The Book of I that has one “i” for every person on the planet. Hah, yeah right. Here’s the math on that. One million took 150 seconds and made a file 224 pages long, that was 117 megabytes in size. The population of the USA is around 314 million as of July 4, 2012. That took my computer a little over 13 hours to produce. The file was 70,336 pages long and about 36GB in size. To do the full Book of I would mean approximately 7,080,000,000 instances of the letter “i”, which would take my computer 295 hours (that's 12.29 days for those of you keeping score at home), and would generate a file of 1,585,920 pages that would be around 828GB. Anybody want to download an almost Terabyte-sized PDF file? Turns out Henry James Predicted TMZ. _____________ about a “Princess Zucchini” — _______________________ — and how the beauty of these people is their ______________________: the olive eyes, the early marriages, the handsome men ... “Last winter, in ________________, I was struck with the queer incident of __________________ — (Sidebar! 1888 was already 16 official years into Impressionism; that year Gauguin was painting _________________ alongside Van Gogh, and Monet began his endless haystacks.) I mean ______________________. CA sez “We have displaced or made extinct so many other species of animals, insects and plants that we have actually lost track!” In the age of Emily Dickinson less than a billion humans ________________ roamed the open plains of ___________________. They are museums of fur and hooves. We love our _______________, they comfort and soothe us when _____________________. ONLY RULE: NO _________________. ;Do not fear LOOKING at these people. The kinds of people who show up will ___________ Look at how WEIRD our world can be! What are we ___________________? As much as 80% of __________________________, remember this detail. As soon as the hour is up, casually walk away WITHOUT TALKING!  NO TALKING! GO, ______________. Scientists in the US have created a robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile manoeuvres of the ubiquitous insects. The song is about a doe lifting up a knight’s head and carrying it to a lake ... Is this what Louise Glück was on about in, “The Red Poppy, when she wrote “The great thing / is not having / a mind”? And why, in “OK Fern”, Maureen McLane asks “Tell me what to do / / With my life”? It does everything a commercial is supposed to do. It begins with a cigarette flipping through the air in slow motion several times with Beefheart singing ‘Woe-is-a-me-bop.’ There are long silences, Beefheart finally appears doing his famed Hand and Toe Investment. Rockette Morton crosses the screen with a black sack over his head working an egg beater. The Captain kicks over a bowl of white paint in slow motion. Wild elephants sometimes stand silently at the bodies of dead companions and, later, stroke their sun-bleached bones as if embracing a memory.

[Note: Sources: Dan Waber, “The Book of I, by Dan Waber”, at logolalia, n.d., via Moribund Facekvetch (Gary Barwin), FB post, 3 May 013; JBR, a bit of the collab with Anne Gorrick, waiting her to fill in the blanks (sources used: Choire Sicha, “Henry James Predicted TMZ!”, at Slate, 3 May 013, CA Conrad, “(Soma)tic Poetry Ritual and resulting poem / EQUINOX EVE: Silent Meeting Group”, at MATTER, 1 May 013); Victoria Gill, “Robotic insect: World’s smallest flying robot takes off”, at BBC News, 2 May 013; Timothy Morton, “Secret Life of Plants Liveblog: Knowing (Maureen McLane)”, at Ecology without Nature, 3 May 013; Warner/Reprise letter, as quoted in Marc Campbell, “Banned Captain Beefheart TV Commercial: 60 Seconds The Networks Did Not Want You To See”, at Dangerous Minds, n.d. (in response to The National Association of Broadcasters, who banned the commercial, which was for Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby); Barbara J King, “How animals mourn their dead”, at New York Post, 28 Apr 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1314

At the far end of the graph near one of its steepest ravines, the student dogmatists now drew an offshoot line, around which they sketched a cluster of contemporary movements enclosed in misshapen bubbles reminiscent of tumors. At the center of this diseased area they placed a sickly green dot. This speck, they claimed, represented the full range of influence that we could realistically hope to exert on the greater culture. From the back row, ‘The simplest words are beginning to defeat me,’ W. says. ‘Maybe it’s mini-strokes,’ W. speculates’.

the crowds
evisceral subjects         sun-setting
in the sun
clashes waste 
                depopulating fray

afraid

hurled

_____________________

…

human or plastic

… 

because earth absorbs shock
waves

…

_____________________

…

the stones and gold
light

…

infiltrates

…

_____________________

…

the infant is born
into an aging infantry
…

____________________

…

gardens
are erasures

…

errant mutations
achieved

The uptrend continues on huge surge volume. Walk to polling station wearing a cock-ring now that you’ve inhaled an extraordinary amount. Phatic utterances serve the purpose of determining that the addresser and addressee have an open channel of transmission and reception. In the Cro-Magnons went, along its wet hide walls, / as if a flower in, way in, drew their leggy / panspermatic bodies, spidering over / bottomless hunches, groping toward Persephone’s fate: / to be quicksanded by the fungus pulp of Hades’ purple hair / the way a cave might leak perfume --

[Note: Sources: Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot, as quoted in Kenning Editions Catalog, rec’d via mail approx April 013; JBR, but see next; Lars Iyer, Spurious, as quoted in Smyth’s “All My Friends: On Lars Iyer’s Trilogy”, at The Quietus, 7 Apr 013; E Tracy Grinnell, as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “E. Tracy Grinnell: from ‘body of war / songs’ with a note on the process – after Danielle Collobert”, at Jacket2, 30 Apr 013; Del Ray Cross, “mdcccxcix”, at Anachronizms, 2 May 013; K Silem Mohammad, “Towards a Poetics of the Phatic (Part 1)”, at Harriet, 2 May 013; Clayton Eshleman, “Silence Raving”, as seen at wood s lot, 2 May 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1313a

I mean, money is a kind of lettucy Vanessa Place, which makes a kind of sense on this anniversary of the Kent State massacre. Look at the word ‘struggle’ enough times and you suddenly see infinity, and as Baudelaire wrote, ‘There is no point as sharp as that of the Infinite.’ In any case, MJ, I like the image of you bopping Nixon on the bean with your handbag! Then another test was performed to measure the “level of assimilation”, in which participants answered questions such as “How long can you go without sleep?”, “How sharp are your teeth?” Or “If you try with all your win, you think you can move an object using only your mind?” And then measured their mood, their satisfaction with life and its absorption of the stories. Here there is an over / and then another over / and then an over there / and then an under / or a back / and then a leap / and then a gasp (nothing prepared us for that) / and then a back (or what feels (for the moment) like a back / and then a loop / and on / and over / and on. Good for you; go it boy! When are you leaving for the West? Have you memorized the Bhagavad-Gita yet? So you think Vedanta is more us than Catholicism, Anglo-, Roman-, or otherwise? Do answer me seriously; you know if there’s anything I approve of more than another it’s the sexy road to Heaven. I am swimming across a wide river when swords start falling from the trees. And now I must cross another river, the mud and hundreds of putrid chicken carcasses. And from the top of a termite mound the smokes of incense curl, “I dedicate my storage to you.” So ordained, the dedication occurred as a form of sacred logic. And bam, there are so many trees compared to me, I think, and something numinous and purple creeps out of and away from me, there is verve in the air I am grooving to. I mean, the coolest thing I learned today is Kierkegaard’s buried near Ben Webster.

[Note: Sources: Drew Gardner, as quoted in Anne Boyer, FB comment, 4 May 013; Sandra Simonds, FB post, 4 May 013 (in response to Place’s declaration that “poetry is a kind of money”); JBR (the killings took place on 4 May 1970); Norma Cole, SPD blurb for Jane Gregory, My Enemies; JBR, FB comment, 4 May 013; Alejandro de Pourtales, “Getting Into The Mind Of Another: Read Fiction Increases Empathy” (tr. Google), at pijama surf, 14 Sept 011; Alan Davies, “Nick Piombino’s Fait Accompli Blog 10th Anniversary”, at Harriet, 4 May 013; James Schuyler, letter to John Hohnsbeen, 15 Nov 1951, in Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991 (ed. William Corbett); U Sam Oeur, “Dream After Composing the Appeal of the Cambodian League for Freedom and Democracy”, “Sacred Vows” (tr. Ken McCullough), at Artful Dodge; Elizabeth Robinson, as quoted in “Tuesday poem #1 : Elizabeth Robinson : On Recovery”, at DUSIE, 9 Apr 013; Marcus McCann, “Tuesday poem #3 : Marcus McCann : from Winter of Weak Welcome”, at DUSIE, 23 Apr 013; JBR, but see Jeffrey Frank, “Rogue Philosopher, Great Communicator”, at NY Times, 2 May 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1313

But it all seems very distant now, like when you’ve been up for four nights, finally get some sleep, and then you’re sitting there drinking a cup of coffee trying to remember what the hell you’ve been up to. Do you remember that feeling? I was thinking about Blanqui, right at the end of his life, sitting in his prison cell, knowing full well that what he was writing he was going to be writing for ever. An inside source gave Team 10 a picture snapped inside the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station showing plastic bags, masking tape and broom sticks used to stem a massive leaky pipe. The buzz left a yearning in the body of a boy. There are organs within desire. He chose to define “exploit” as a “heroic feat.” Akin to “building islands,” and keeping parts of his rice farm flooded, so migratory birds can have a place to “feed and breed”. For the sake of argument, there it is, in the form of garnished wages and recourse loans. Or the liquidation of assets gained over time (except those listed in Schedule C, such as residence situated on a farm owned and operated by the farmer at the time of retirement; cash on hand, say, $37; savings account, $263; checking account, $154; household goods, $2,000; pictures etc, $50; clothing, $330 … The man shifted the shells and said he’d give us a dollar if we could tell him which one wasn’t genetically modified. With my eyes closed, I can’t tell the difference between the taste of a red and a yellow raspberry. I can’t with my eyes open, either. The dead are doing a pretty slack job of burying the dead — then again, “Create a small sack like a fire-arrow ... if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.” Whoa. That is non-non-non-non-NON-Heinous! I mean, “The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages! It measures nearly 46 feet tall and 55 feet long and is shown being pulled by a tug boat only a fraction of its size.” “All of The Shining was shot with sets,” Göransson explains. “The snow was salt. It was 110 degrees inside the soundstage. The air was saturated with gasoline fumes. The cameramen and camerawomen wore gasmasks as they ran through the rooms chasing the little boy. There were antennae in the walls. The production crew built up an entire hotel inside. Nothing was fake.” It’s that voiceover I keep hearing. It explains to us the details of our austere and infested bodies. Including the New Jerusalem we enter into like rats. According to the voice, even the purest bodies are jerky and the deportations are extreme. Sometimes when I enter New Jerusalem I enter on a bier or a stretcher or the man with the metals has a swelling. My daughter burns her toys, and it smells like a war economy. I am blunted out. Just ordered Romulan Soup Woman tho (“Passing remarks, communiques, lineated critiques, speculative commentaries and inter-ludic disquisitions on science fiction, the culture industry, thermonuklearen terrors and crustaceous justitia from Jo Crot, Benjamin Friedlander, Samuel Solomon, Anne Boyer, Verity Spott, Amaranth Walton, Joe Luna, Caitlin Doherty, Boyd Nielson, Samantha Walton, Pierre Joris, Justin Katko, David Grundy, Peter Manson, Amiri Baraka, Andrew Spragg and Die Zwei Owens. Texts proceptually appropriated from Douglas Oliver, Neil Pattison, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Buckminster Fuller and James Warhola. Komix by Hiram Kruller. Komix from a North Korean manga primer on political economy. 84 pages.”) Don’t go in J Crew. It’s too depressing. Don’t go into Bloomingdale’s either. Look for the hot guys. Look for yourself in the hot guys. When I choked on the cupcake, I whispered, I’m dying. I am sitting at my desk & I’m sitting in outer space. Hyphen this, hyphen that. I had a dream last night about throwing a beer stein at my boss’s face. Theraflu makes me feel sexy.

[Note: Sources: Sean Bonney, “Letter on Time and Work”, at Abandoned Buildings, 1 May 013; Mitch Blacher, “Plastic bags, tape, broomsticks fix San Onofre leak”, at ABC 10 News, 30 Apr 013; j/j hastain, “MMXXX”, at Otoliths 29; Aileen Ibardaloza, “MMXXXVIII”, at Otoliths 29; Mark Cunningham, “[sort]”, at Otoliths 29; Franz Helm, sometime around 1530, as quoted in Alexis C Madrigal, “UPDATE! Cat Bombs More Prevalent Than Previously Thought”, at The Atlantic, 5 Feb 013; JBR; Dead Bill, in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey; Florentijn Hofman, and Geoff Tuck, as quoted in Tuck’s “The World’s Largest Rubber Duck Arrives in Hong Kong”, at Colossal, 1 May 013; Johannes Göransson, Haute Surveillance, and Blake Butler, as quoted in Butler’s “Sarcophagi Of Prisoners Covered In Cocaine”, at Vice, 1 May 013; JBR; Richard Owens, “Romulan Soup Woman (Damn The Caesars Suspended)”, at Damn the Caesars, 1 May 013; Marisa Crawford, “[untitled]”, “Interplanetary”, “Holiday Eyes”, and Krystal Languell, “Grrlsplain”, as quoted in Elizabeth Treadwell, “GRRRLSPLAINING/provenance & manuscripts: flash anthology no. 4”, at Secret Mint, 1 May 013]