Zeitgeist Spam

Democracy doesn’t matter to the defenders of ‘economic freedom’

Quinn Slobodian for the Guardian

With the Noose Around My Neck 144

The Prototypes, then, are Air Jordans (late nineties models) disassembled into their constituent pieces and then remade into masks remarkably like those made by Northwest Coast First Nations peoples of, for instance, killer whale, raven, the forest giantess D’sonoqua, and frog. In other words, the sea

 

                                    which no one empties

           

                                                                        is also an ashtray

 

            Remove the rug, replace it with the floor, sit, pluck splinter, spit ...

 

            I must’ve been thinking of

            Something ... the guys who

            live in the parking

            lot,

 

            Carbon

            contacts that conduct electricity

 

            Bloodshot

            moustache. There are four born

            every minute, six,

            eleven. he is two of them.

            They circle warily

           

            As a person, you can [own a plant]

            It is stored in the [reptile superego]

            Fully retractable &

            [A state in which only the] underground pipes are visible

 

And the more people would have found a sweet intimacy with the active essences, and the more people would have worked to render it perfect. This would draw daily an amount of new active monads. This would be the happiness of heaven while living, like the sublime movement of the wings which raise the body of the ethereal not the material but the ethereal eagle, and like the air which carries the objects less dense and less strong than the material of the its invisible gases. This rupture may be more or less complete. They [the infinite essences] would have absorbed it entirely. But they must not stare when they manage  

 

            Whatever they are occasionally liable to do

            It is often easy to pursue them once in a while  

            And in a way there is no repose

            They like it as well as they ever did  

            But it is very often just by the time  

            That they are able to separate

            In which case in effect they could

 

But since everything has already happened, I decide I will press forward with the attempt. From studying its shape and looking at my own car, I decide it is a liner for the inside of the fender. The word fender is short for “defender.” The bird spends its life in flight, ranging over thousands of miles of water, sleeping and feeding in motion, landing only to breed. Eventually the transmitter battery dies, and the albatross path goes blank.

 

            Developed world, is this why your libraries full of tears?

 

            It’s been a long summer and the drought is spreading.

 

            Not a single store has a fan to sell.

 

            It’s been a long summer and the fires are spreading.

 

            The linguistics faculty never heard from me again.

 

            Developed world, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

 

            I can’t stand my own mind.

 

            Developed world, when will you end the human war?

 

            I don’t feel good, don’t bother me.

 

            When will you be worthy of your millions of refugees?

 

            She was afraid of the giraffe but wanted to embrace the lion.

 

            Then we went to the Pergamon Museum.

 

            Developed world, my queer shoulder has been dislocated.

 

            26 Euros, 5 pounds, 40 dollars, and 76 cents.

 

Meanwhile, in Brazil, Paulo Paulino Guajajara, an indigenous forest protector, was killed, shot in the face by an illegal logger, leaders of the Guajajara tribe said Saturday. Federal police will investigate blah blah blah in order to “bring those responsible for this crime to justice,” said Sergio Moro, the justice and public security minister. Bolsonaro just laughed and licked the still-wet blood on his hands. “It’s dee-licious,” he said. “It reminds me of one of those Chick-fil-A sandwiches.” Wanna hear something else, almost as good? On April 6, a man was arrested at the Kmart in Key West, Florida, after returning purchases for refunds. There was just one problem: the packaging he returned didn’t contain the original products. According to the police report, his bait-and-switch scam included two coffee makers — a Keurig ($153.99) and a Hamilton Beach ($54.99). Inside the returned Keurig box was a deflated basketball, and a old used coffee machine was stuffed into the other box. The man denied the charge he was booked on. In a rambling, vague explanation, he stated: ‘There’s an attorney, and I believe that he’s found some other people, relating to the store, who are involved. That’s all I can say right now.’ What at first seems unusual is that this shoplifting suspect, Andrew Francis Lippi III, is rich. A week before his Kmart arrest, he paid $8m for an island in the Florida Keys. Kabinet Bangoura, the Kmart loss prevention manager who scanned hours of surveillance video to build the case, is blunt about Lippi’s motivation: ‘Millionaires think they’re above the law and can get away with anything.’ That’s not just one person’s theory. The study results are remarkably consistent: the rich tend to be unethical and are more likely to cheat and steal than the poor are. In one experiment, the drivers of luxury cars were less likely to obey the right-of-way laws at a busy four-way intersection than the drivers of cheaper or older model cars. Then there’s the grim and troubling ‘candy experiment,’ where researchers observed wealthy people remove twice as much candy from a jar that had been earmarked for children than people of more modest means did. But what about this? In Oakland a church is being demolished, the boards are being pried from the studs, carefully stacked, incrementally hauled away, presumably to be reused. The graceful, though somewhat squat, arched windows, empty of panes (which were of plain, not stained, glass) having been removed, lean against the side of a truck. The reader is not apt to read this as a speculative passage, she is likely instead to take it as straightforward description, accurate to what it purports to represent. What about this: uninviting squat commercial buildings, cheap motels, copy shops, and then a stretch of Indian restaurants and a cluster of sari shops line the street from end to end. Or this: A man approaches, his feet and legs encased in armor made of shining silver scales. The front edges of his armored boots are decorated with curling silver claws much as the prow of a ship might bear a masthead in the form of a nymph whose long curls blow out over the waves. I want to know the world as it is, not as I see it, he says, but how is it? Real shadows are subject to the time of day, and to the position of the sun. Last night we went to the Buffalo Wild Wings on 75th & 59 with a party of 18. Upon being greeted, my husband Justin told the host that we had a party of 15. After he realized that he miscounted, my husband walked over to the tables to where the host was setting up and told him we actually had 18. A couple minutes went by and the host went up to my husband and asked, “what race are you guys?” My husband asked him why it mattered and the host responded that a table with 2 of their “regular customers” were next to where we were to be seated and he didn’t want us sitting there because he’s “racist.” “Us” being a group of minorities, mostly consisting of African Americans ... so of course, we don’t give him the satisfaction and told the host we’ll sit where they set us up. We knew right away who it was because the guy was staring at us the entire time and giving us looks as we were being seated. As we sit, our waiter greets us and gets some drinks & app orders started. After a few minutes we notice that an employee is talking to the “racists table” and approaches us and communicates to Justin and Marcus “these seats are reserved and we will have to move your group.” The guys politely tell him that we’re not moving and request to speak to the manager ... he says he’s one of the managers. So of course we left. Fuck racists. Not literally, of course, that’s sick. All networks have links and nodes. In the example of a forest, trees are nodes and fungal linkages are links. Scale-free means that there are a few large nodes and a lot of smaller ones. And that is true in forests in many different ways: You’ve got a few large trees and then a lot of little trees. A few large patches of old-growth forest, and then more of these smaller patches. This kind of scale-free phenomenon happens across many scales. Systems evolve toward those patterns because they’re efficient and resilient. If we think of my forest, and the networks I’ve described, that design is efficient for transmitting resources among trees and how they interact with each other. In our brains, scale-free networks are an efficient way for us to transmit neurotransmitters. There’s something so amazing that shouldn’t be about networks between and within trees having similar properties to the networks in our brains. But since we’re pathetic humans we have to ask, when we look at these things

 

            Does it have a neural network?

            Is there communication?

            Is there perception and reception of messages?

            Does it change behaviors depending on what it’s perceiving?

            Does it remember things?

            Does it learn things?

 

Those are all hallmarks of intelligence. Plants do have intelligence. They have all the structures. They have all the functions. They have the behaviors. And just ask Wendy Burk. They talk. So I kept reusing the same images with different captions. But there is one instance in which I use the same caption with different images. That caption is “the same door.” Doors came up not only because they were shut, but because someone was struggling to get out of the room. Staying inside was also a problem because the TV, phone and microwave seemed to be emitting high-pitched whines. I still wasn’t 100% myself, but just being in that crowd felt like a great victory. At the Tavern Books table, I picked up a poetry collection with a striking title: The Fire’s Journey. As I paged through it, I read these words:

 

            I cast myself in a hollow of shadow

            from the highest contour of the blood

 

            from the skin to the light entering through dawn

            climbing up through the syllable

 

I looked at the cover again: The Fire’s Journey by Eunice Odio. I’d never heard of her. A quick search on my phone revealed a stunning, movie star face: long dark hair framing a high forehead, eyebrows like black wings above fierce, luminous eyes. A visionary. However, her biography told a different story. Born in 1919, Odio was “the mother of Costa Rican poetry in the twentieth century.” But her work never saw publication in her home country until after she’d died, alone and undiscovered for days, in Mexico City at age 54. There were only a few examples of her work on the Internet, despite an impressive publication record. The book I’d just been reading was making its English language debut, the first volume of a 456-page epic that Odio had completed in 1957. As a poet myself, I felt desperate to know this brilliant, neglected woman — and how she’d come to that tragic end. Back home in Brooklyn, I obsessively Googled. I ordered anthologies of Latin-American poetry and source books of Spanish-American women writers. As I researched Odio, I was shocked to discover many other talented female poets who’d suffered similar fates. Paging through one anthology I found the work of Delmira Agustini, shot by her estranged husband (who then turned the pistol on himself) in a hotel room in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1914.  She was only 27. She’d published her first collection at 21 and was praised by critics of the time (for her beauty as much as for her work). Her poem “Lo inefable” (“The Ineffable”) struck me:

 

            Have you never endured a star like a white dwarf

            inside you that gives no light but entirely consumes?

 

 Those lines described exactly how I’d felt during my breakdown. In the same book I came across this biographical note for Alfonsina Storni: “Depressed and in bad health, she walked into the sea in October 1938.” She was 46. Pages later, I read the lyrics to “Gracias a la vida” (“Here’s to Life”) by Violeta Parra, born in Chile in 1917. The version in the anthology was co-translated by Joan Baez. An activist like Baez, Parra had collected and performed Chilean folk songs. She toured Europe for four years, introducing her audiences to regional singers and local customs. In 1963 she founded a performance space in Santiago called La Carpa de La Reina — the Queen’s Tent. The following year, she became the first Latin-American artist to have a solo exhibition of her paintings, sculptures and arpilleras (patchwork pictures constructed from scraps of cloth and burlap) at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre. Unfortunately, the public’s response to the Queen’s Tent was not positive. Feeling abandoned, Parra shot herself in the head in 1967, in the space she’d created. I had to close the book. I was reminded, of course, of Plath and Sexton, but I’d personally known poets like that. My best friend Lydia Tomkiw passed away in 2007, alone like Odio, of alcoholism. We’d met in a college poetry class, back in Chicago. Together, we plotted our rise to literary fame, sent work out, and gave readings. We’d even hatched a scheme to kidnap Allen Ginsberg, to get ourselves on the cover of Time magazine. (When we met him at a reading, and told him about our idea, he was all for it. Too bad we didn’t have a plan.) During my breakdown, poetry had sustained me. Now, I realized, I had a debt to repay. I got up and Googled Delmira Agustini’s face, printed the image, and pasted it in the anthology next to her selection. I did the same with Odio, Storni and Parra. I read their work, stared into their eyes, and made notes. Be always conscious of your wings. In the house of keeping still, all is hollow-eyed, and groaning. What is the sound the stars make, rushing through the sky?

 

            what I remembered best

            were accidents

            of quiet brightness

            

            at dawn all in black

            high on mescaline

           

            and now I am

            passing back into the rocks

            into the god of the rocks

 

            my unborn eye

 

            the one-eyed sky

 

Long Bones knows the face it sees. Long Bones runs long fingers through the cat-fur, forehead first, against the grain, suffers the cat-eyed gaze a while. Darkness in the Dark is not surprised. And this, of course, is where certain technical problems of explorations explicitly become part of a social exploration, whether the ‘social’ is simply the consideration of performance space and what is brought into it (where it is brought out into), or whether it’s seen to resonate more widely. In other words, the Red Mesa programme note’s gestures towards landscape, history and the like are deliberate gestures, and introduce a tension between quote unquote machinic and quote unquote natural, between the empty and the populated, at least hinting at the removal of human presence in the interests of a fetishized slash genocidal sublime, so that a phrase like “magnificence and geometric purity,” used to describe the Painted Desert, comes up against “often-filmed Monument Valley” etc. All this building to some chunky left-hand thunders, ending with a kind of ‘main theme’ restatement, dying away. Then he crouched in his closet and removed a lacquered case. He placed the case on his drafting table and undid the ritual of latches and ribbons. Two flicks of the scroll rollers, and there, spread in front of her, was China, the half of her no more real than a fable. Chinese words tumbled down in columns, swirling like tiny flames. Each ink stroke shone as if she had just made it herself. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could write like that. But her father could, if he wanted. After the flowing words came a parade of men, each a chubby skeleton. Their faces laughed but their skin sagged. They seemed to have lived for hundreds of years. Their eyes smiled at the best joke in creation, while their shoulders bowed under the weight of a thing too heavy to bear. “Who are they?” Her father studied the figures. “These men?” His lips tightened like the smiling figures. “Luóhàn. Arhat. Little Buddha. They solve life. They pass the final exam. He turned her chin toward him. When he smiled, the thin gold edge of his front tooth flashed. “Chinese superhero!” She wriggled free from his hand and studied the men. One sat in a small cave. One had a red sash and earrings. Another paused on the edge of a high cliff, with crags and fog trailing off behind him. One leaned against a tree, as Mimi would lean against her mulberry the next day, telling her sisters. Her father pointed at the dream landscape. “This China. Very old.” Mimi touched the man under the tree. Her father lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips. “Too old for touch.” She stared at the man, whose eyes knew everything. “Superheroes?” “They see every answer. Nothing hurt them anymore. Emperor come and go. Communism, too. Little insect on a giant dog. But these guy?” They were where they were, crossing streets, speaking, lifting tunics, reading, grazing, and where they weren’t, they were not. Honey and milk, ample flocks, hosts of angels, altars founded on bedrock, libraries, libraries of candelabras, and their gods were where they were, and scribes were who they were, and when they weren’t elsewhere, they wrote records of what went on: the revealing and the concealing, eating and excreting, revealing and sealing, needing and willing, revealing and re-reading, they had no memories of birth or learning. They could not remember rainbows, names changing, rainbow cloaks, dreams in Goshen, pyramids, cattle dying, hail, darkness, congealed water, loaves from the sky, cylindrical fires within cloud cylinders, ambushes, gold, rocks, thunder, clouds, rocks, wrath, purity; spies, giants, milk, honey, wrath, bronze serpents, trumpets, miasma, snails, water, rocks, so she said, “the hole he felt in his head was the place that;” or, “the desert that;” or, “I would, but.” Jerusalem then slept and the trees slept. Cherubim fell off cornices, asleep, landing softly in the roots of a treestump. The veil also fell. The goat to be killed fainted. In his sleep Solomon painted branches that gave actual apples; the paint dreamt of the snail that gives such turquoise, such scarlet; and the snail dreamt of its mother’s thigh, it’s grim in the dim rebar covering the coast. In the hotels’ wheels covering the sea, in the flotation chamber, the gunnysacks, it’s funny there ...

 

            frying potatoes

            in a football helmet ...

 

            insectile math

 

[If they thought the answer “time machine,” they ought do their own damn remembering, dreaming for one damn once]. There ghosts here, though. And an insistence on blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood. After that, bleeding seemed redundant, so we didn’t — no one wrote us up, we kept on keeping on. We documented our suspended hemorrhaging. As if by priority, suppressing bleeding superseded simply not bleeding. Management wouldn’t be accountable for their (re)actions at our accounting on their account. To relieve ourselves the red pressure, we trickled in surreptitious intervals. It now appears MetaGen was undaunted by this setback. According to an anonymous letter allegedly penned by the whistleblower and included with the released document cache, MetaGen’s internal position was that “the government, the military, and the general public continue to underestimate the underlying technology’s vast potential for long-term returns.” The letter continues: The Pacific Islands are basically gone. Bangladesh lost two-thirds of its land mass. Miami? Osaka? Rio de Janeiro? Underwater. I was assigned to the Busan office before the tsunamis took the city, then the peninsula. Seeing the ocean levels rise by the day and with no government solution forthcoming, I truly believed in our mission, truly believed that MetaGen’s gamble on amphibious capabilities (for civilian rather than military use) would give humanity a fighting chance at survival. But what we’re doing here no longer feels like that. Here are some preliminary notes: Okay. The gluey flower lowered to the pavement in Maya Deren’s short film. No, the long, white monkey-flavored arm. The animal emits a soft blue light as it pounces on something also blobby and blue, an outward problem of dimensionality and an inner one of verisimilitude. All of this is a kind of undisclosed compositional material, like a score that was never set to music. Which is to say that the two monsters would vomit into each other’s mouths and then they’d eat the sofa they were sitting on. The leg, which would normally be retracted ... the monster would have this mechanism to extend it and then it would wrap around and ... I think of the hairy little hairs

 

            On my head,

            Millions of little

            Secret trees

            Filled with dead

            Birds,

            That won’t stay

            Dead.

 

            Come, help flatten a raindrop.

 

It’s hard to argue with such plainspoken observations. But the more I think about it, the crazier I feel. The radio and the newspapers and the TV keep talking about the fibres growing through everyone’s skin, and as much as I keep on scratching the fibres are simply not there. Of course you’d say that, people tell me, you’re part of the problem, you’re in league with the fibres. And then my blood pressure rises, and the hair thins out around my temples, and I realise that one day soon I’m going to die. I came here so that the. I came before being dried. I measured that year in sequence of vivid dreams of it. Because you think that you’re people.

 

                        Cross the silver mesh path there.

                         Turn off the law.

                         I’m not part of your growth chart, saying this life is compelled.

            I have the unconditioned, in a heap in my pocket.

                                   

                                                   *   *   *

 

            I’ve done this so many times.

                        How did you learn it?

                        It’s in my genes. It's in my global genes.

                        There were once jaguars everywhere around here.

                        If I find your soul do you want it?

 

                                                   *   *   *

 

                        It floats within.

              

                        He has a big face; his eyes are closed.

 

                            How do you know?

 

                            It stands between

                            the king and queen

                            of swords.

 

               There are no rooms here. There are no beds.

 

                              The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins:

 

                                    light grey whiteness of fog against invisible ridge

 

                                    song sparrows lined up on fence in right foreground

 

Thailand has said that as of 1 December, a ban will take effect on the use of the following farming chemicals:

 

• chlorpyrifos, an insecticide made popular by Dow Chemical that is known to damage babies’ brains;
• Syngenta’s paraquat, a herbicide scientists say causes the nervous system disease known as Parkinson’s that has been banned in Europe since 2007;
• and Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide, which is linked to cancer and other health problems.

 

Thailand joins dozens of countries that have already banned or are planning bans on paraquat, chlorpyrifos and/or glyphosate. The US isn’t one of them. US regulators parrot industry talking points as they insist that dietary exposures to pesticides are nothing to worry about and say any risks to farm workers can be mitigated with proper training, protective clothing and other measures. It’s certainly not surprising that the Trump administration is working to protect whatever bring profits to big corporations. The US is especially upset about a glyphosate ban, arguing that it could limit hundreds of millions of dollars in Thai imports of US grains, which are often laced with glyphosate residues. Outraged Thai officials say they have been forced to “clearly explain” to US officials that Thailand’s priority is the health of Thai consumers. “Our job is to take care of the people’s health,” the public health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, told the press. It may be disgraceful, but it’s certainly not surprising that the Trump administration is working to protect this shit. Chlorpyrifos was scheduled to be banned two years ago from US agricultural use but when Trump came into office the EPA decided to delay any action until at least 2022. The agency is currently updating its risk assessment of paraquat, seeking public comments through 16 December; but it appears poised to allow continued use. And earlier this year the EPA affirmed that it continues to find no health risk associated with glyphosate. One example of Trumpista fealty was laid out in an internal Monsanto consultant’s report made public through litigation against the company. The report quotes a White House policy adviser as saying: “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation. We are prepared to go toe-to-toe on any disputes they may have.” What kind of shit human being either works for or still votes for these people? The winter was early, with storms and rain squalls, the bats threw themselves against the house, emblems torn loose, blindly fluttering around the symbiosis of banking, and latifundia, we heard them thumping against the colourful panes of the windows above the stairs, and the dull thuds mingled with the crackling of the wood burning in the fireplace. We had no medications for calming the mentally disturbed, nor could we use pain-killing injections since many of the patients had dysentery, and the hygienic equipment was inadequate, so the issue of the importance of one’s own personhood sounded almost ludicrous. Technicians had supplied a roof antenna for the radio receiver, a Telwas so, as I already understood, because nothing could impress us from the outside, from above so long as we were prisoners, any attempt to grant us a vista could only be awkward, we wanted no rations, no doled-out patchwork, we wanted the totality, and this totality was not to be a traditional thing, it had to be newly created. This was a groping, we did not yet know what our discoveries would be, all we understood was that in order to make sense it had to come out of us. Coppi’s father, having deposited his briefcase on the table, took out the folded wrinkled paper, a bottle, a two-part sandwich holder, he washed up at the sink, coffee was put on, Coppi’s father, bare-chested, scrubbed his throat and face, then put on a woolen jacket with a row of embroidered stag heads in front. In the evenings, my arms are seven feet long, said Coppi’s father, when I walk, my hands drag down on the ground. This image captured all the art and literature that had come close to us during our growing up. At the factory loading ramp, Coppi’s father had shoved, pulled, and lugged crates for eight hours, ordnance parts were packed in them, and Coppi’s mother, at the Telefunken Works, had built manoeuvring devices for war planes. Every delivered item, every package was accompanied by a checklist naming all the people involved in the procedure, which could make each one personally liable. A loosened screw, a few grains of sand in the gears, a missing or misplaced wire, those were the concrete things by which to measure the results of reading, of looking at a picture. But then again we stumbled on things that did not reveal an immediate political impact and yet had disturbing and, we felt, important qualities. If books or paintings of this sort, especially when decried as degenerate by the new rulers, were removed from public collections, then we felt all the more strongly about including them in the registers of sabotage acts and revolutionary manifestations. Heilmann joined us after reading us his translation of Rimbaud’s Un Saison en enfer at Gleisdreck Station on the way back from night school. Both sides are correct, said Heilmann, the lunge that yanks the ground out from under our feet as well as the effort to establish a solid basis for investigating simple facts. Most people are too remote from such inquiries, said Coppi’s father, to see any necessity in them, your words fly past them. There was a humming in the ears. It would have been presumptuous to try and talk about art without hearing the shuffling as we shoved one foot in front of the other. Every metre toward the painting, the book, was a battle, we crawled, pushed ourselves forward, our eyelids blinked, sometimes this squinting made us burst out laughing, which helped us forget where we were going. And the thing then shown to us when we viewed a painting was a web of threads, shiny threads, clotting into lumps, flowing apart, shaping into fields of brightnesses, darknesses, and the switch-gears of our optic nerves marshaled the oncoming storm of tiny luminous dots into messages that could be deciphered. Once, when we had sat down on the bench in the front yard of the house, the landlady, Frau Goldberg, came and asked us to leave the yard, because first of all, she said, we were paying only for the apartment and not the garden, and secondly the bench was not meant for Jews. When I indignantly tried to reply, my mother held me back and, standing up, pressed my arm hard against her body. While pulling me into the house, she said that after being called a Jew several times because of her dark hair, she had now declared herself a Jew, which, however, made it difficult for her and Father to find another apartment in Warnsdorf. So she had to knuckle under to the owner of the house, who made it clear to her at every chance she got that she was allowing her to stay here as a favour and that soon, the day was just around the corner, she would get what was coming to her. During one of my last days in Warnsdorf I saw what that could mean. On the edge of town, coming from Saint George’s Valley, near a gravel pit, where the road passed through the so-called Kirchenbusch, I heard the shrieks and laughter of a group of children and adolescents. At first I thought they were playing a game and I slowly walked on, but then I noticed that in their midst a man was lying in the shingle, uttering rattling sounds, and as I came closer, I saw that it was Eger Franz, who was being called names, village idiot or Yid, a harmless, mentally challenged day labourer. His face was covered in blood, his mouth foaming, he rolled around convulsively amid the teenagers who kept kicking him and smashing sticks into his head. Driving his tormentors away, I picked him up and carried him to the Fiala Nursery in Niedergrund, where help soon came. I later heard that he had died as a result of his injuries. His young murderers, whose identities were known, were never called to account, it was announced that he had fallen during an epileptic fit and fractured his skull ... which reminds me, that by the time I made it to the Mariposa Grove, Wawona was lying dead on the ground. But even sideways, its great radial cylinder of collapsed trunk still reached way above my head. A thing estimated to be about as old as Socrates lasted roughly one human lifetime after humans decided to cut a tunnel through it. Perhaps it’s my overactive imagination, but there may be some metaphor in that! At least the Park Service decided to leave Wawona where it fell. There may be orders of magnitude more life in a dead tree than there is in a living one. Related to this is the research of Patricia Westerford, regarding which one reads: It will take years for the picture to emerge. There will be findings, unbelievable truths confirmed by a spreading worldwide web of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia, all happily swapping data through faster and better channels. Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green. Tolkien, by the way, was indeed an inspiration in some of this. His Ents must surely be among his most spectacular creations. Slow to anger, slow to act. But once they get going, you want them on your side.

[Note: Sources: Jeff Derksen, “From the »Commodification of Everything« to »Everything Is Being Made Cultural«”, at Springerin 3 (the Prototypes are sculptural works by Brian Junger); Kevin Davies, Pause Button; Louis Riel, “A System of Philosophical Theology”; Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation; Allison Cobb, “Car Part”, “The Albatross”, in Plastic: An Autobiography; Athena Farrokhzad, “A Letter to Europe” (tr. Jennifer Hayashida), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 1 Nov 019; JBR; “Brazil Amazon forest defender shot dead by illegal loggers”, at Al Jazeera, 3 Nov 019; JBR; JBR; Rene Chun, “Rich robbers: why do wealthy people shoplift?”, at Guardian, 4 Nov 019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “From ‘Positions of the Sun’”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 13 Oct 019; Mary Vahl, Facebook post quoted in Jay Connor, “Buffalo Wild Wings Employees Fired After Racist Seating Incident”, at The Root, 4 Nov 019; JBR; Suzanne Simard, quoted in Brandon Keim, “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees: Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed”, at Nautilus, 31 Oct 019 (hat tip Donna!); JBR (see Wendy’s fabulous book Tree Talks); Sara Ahmed, “The Same Door”, at Feminist Killjoys, 31 Oct 019; Sharon Mesmer, “Flood the World with Beauty”, at American Poetry Review, vol. 48 no. 06; Lucie Thésée, “Poem”, “Rapture: The Depths” (trs. Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau), at Circumference, 14 Apr 014; David Grundy, “Cage / Lockwood / Ferrari: Xenia Pestova Bennett (piano), City University, Tuesday 29th October 2019”, at Streams of Expression, 5 Nov 019; Richard Powers, The Overstory; Joel Newberger: “Bamidbar”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Joel Newberger: ‘Bamidbar’ (In the Desert) from HEXATEUCH, 2019”, at Poems and Poetics, 30 Oct 019; Eleni Sikelianos, The California Poem; Douglas Kearney, “A Natural History of Inequality”, at Haunt Journal, Nov 018; Son Kit, “Anthropiscine War Machine Appendix I & II”, in “Interjection Calendar”, at Montez Press; Bhanu Kapil, “Notes Towards the Feminine Monstrous: 7 pm”, at THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES Bhanu Kapil's always-never: blog, 30 Oct 019; JBR; Bob Kaufman, and Tony Leuzzi, quoted in Leuzzi’s “The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman”, at The Brooklyn Rail, Nov 019; Sam Kriss, “The war against the Jews”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 8 Nov 019; Alice Notley, “Remember What I Came Here to Do to This World Very Little Actually”, “from In the Pines”, at Lyrik-Line; Stephen Ratcliffe, “11.9”, at Temporality, 9 Nov 019; Carey Gillam, “Thailand wants to ban these three pesticides. The US government says no”, at Guardian, 10 Nov 019; JBR; Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (translator not specified, probably Joachim Neugroschel), at Krisis Munter Press, Sept 010; JBR; Richard Powers, quoted in Bradford Morrow, “An Interview: Richard Powers”, at Conjunctions (originally printed in Conjunctions 34)]

The Sweet Janes – Greta’s Song (Demo-Version)

Athena Farrokhzad | A Letter to Europe

Europe, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. Europe, 260 Euro and 76 cents January, 2018.

I can’t stand my own mind.

Europe, when will you end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your Christ complex.

I don’t feel good, don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

Europe, when will you retire? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your millions of guest workers?

Europe, why are your libraries full of tears?

It’s been a long summer and the drought is spreading. Not a single store has a fan to sell. Soon you’ll no longer have a liveable climate or any welfare. I fantasize about the walls that will greet you when disaster strikes.

Europe, repeat after me: Football players can be French who are African who are French. It isn’t complicated. Everyone seems to understand the consequences of colonialism, except you, the cause.

Europe, you are an avocado that rots before it ripens. You are a bomb shelter with room only for the landlord. You have a self-image made of Teflon, nothing sticks.

You are an oversized blot of shame on the map.

Europe, 63 years before Lampedusa, Césaire wrote that you were impossible to defend. How many dead in the Mediterranean this week? Each refugee who crosses your borders is a declaration of war.

The wretched of the earth want the prosperity they created.

Europe, when will you Brexit yourself?

You are burqa bans in France, minaret bans in Switzerland, refugees’ jewelry seized in Denmark. You are Italy’s minister of the interior quoting Mussolini. You are asylum-seekers on leashes in Hungary. The worst is still Denmark.

Denmark is an open door not broken down enough.

One day, I’ll lock up Denmark with all of Greenland’s starving polar bears. One day, I’ll steal Denmark’s cars out of their garages. One day, I’ll make a ghetto plan out of Lars Løkke Rasmussen. One day, I’ll exact revenge for all the burned-down refugee housing. One day, you’ll beg all Roma for forgiveness. One day, the synagogue guards will be redundant. One day, Dublin will simply be the name of one of your capitals.

Europe, one day I’ll eat pastries with Shora and Miriam and Hanna. No one will raise an eyebrow when we enter the finest bakery. No one will address us in English. We will stir our cups with exquisite little spoons. We will let our daughters order everything they see. No one will look away when we ask for high chairs. No one will sigh when the children spill.

Europe, every day white people spit after us on the subway. They seriously believe that the seats are their birthright.

Europe, you don’t seem to have recovered from the black plague.

Europe, it’s the Muslims. It’s the Muslims and the Jews and the Roma and the Africans. And the ones who look like Muslims and Africans, but aren’t. And the ones who were Jews, but did everything to hide it.

Europe, when will I write my poems with the confidence of a mediocre white man? How many did you sacrifice at Guantánamo Bay? When will Palestine compete in the Eurovision Song Contest? When will your borders stop hounding the Ural Mountains? When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

Europe, how can so many of your nations be monarchies? Do you think this is a fairy tale? How long will you pretend that Robespierre never existed?

Erasmus is the worst thing to happen to my university education. I occupied Université Denis Diderot and slept with everyone north of the river. The linguistics faculty never heard from me again.

Mina and Bahar have left, I don’t think they’ll come back.

Europe, I pissed myself when the Greek truck driver drove off the road. But he just wanted to show me an ancient temple.

You love Aristotle, but you hate Greeks. You love counting, but you hate Arabs. You love Sigbjørn’s poetry, but you hate Sami. You love decorating your balcony, but you hate your neighbors. You love handcuffs, but you hate sex.

Europe, what will follow you? No wonder Ötzi had an ulcer.

Europe, it’s been a long time since I longed for Gertrude on rue des Fleurus. The avant-garde is just empire wagging the dog. Picasso painted Guernica and said: A bull is a bull and a horse is a horse.

Your machinery is too much for me. You make me want to go on an all-inclusive. There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Europe, 20 years ago we hated the word multicultural because it made us into difference. Now we plead with you to welcome the other.

Europe, repeat after me: Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome. Fremde, étranger, stranger. Glüklich zu sehen, je suis enchante. Happy to see you, bleibe, reste, stay.

It occurs to me that I will never become Europe. I am talking to myself again.

Europe, I used to be a Communist when I was a kid, I’m not sorry. I sold newspapers in the school hallways. My biology teacher always bought one, even though he was on the right. He said the eastern bloc was important to maintain balance.

Europe, an iron curtain comes down when I write this. I long for the fifth Internationale. To what year should I attribute the betrayal of Social Democracy? When I walk along Landwehrkanal, Rosa Luxemburg whispers that she is freezing.

Europe, in spite of everything, Rilke and Shelley are truly great poets. Sacré-Cœur has a magnificent view and Transylvania an unreal shade of green. In spite of everything, I feel sentimental when the Donau sparkles. In spite of everything, I am worried that the North Sea will conquer Rotterdam. In spite of everything, I have Googled fun facts about Albania. In spite of everything, I feel closer to the shots in Sarajevo than to my own history. In spite of everything, there is a place in Slovenia called Jerusalem. That’s where the crusaders settled when they couldn’t make it all the way.

Europe, you cannot separate la mission civilisatrice from Christianity, Christianity from feudalism, feudalism from industrialism, industrialism from capitalism, capitalism from barbarism.

I understand why Romanticism followed the Enlightenment. I understand why Marie Antoinette was sick of bread. I understand why Michelangelo took the Sistine job. I always confuse Versailles with Vichy and Weimar with Waterloo. I understand why it rained in Verlaine’s heart.

Europe, one day the Lagos conference will take place and Africa will redraw your borders.

Nigeria gets the Baltic states, except Lithuania, which goes to Angola. Algeria wants Poland, minus Warsaw. Cameroon takes everything between Normandie and Gibraltar. The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo agree on the rest. The official languages of Europe are Lingala, Kikongo, and Swahili. No one wants the Nordic countries, their forests have burned to the ground. The citizens captured as slaves and sold on the docks of Gothenburg. Although the journey is short, many die at sea. Those who survive spread across the continent, ending up mostly in southern Sudan and Eritrea. Half of them quickly die of domestic diseases. But the children can work, and twenty-five Nordic generations are raised in slavery. No one wants England, but Botswana finally offers. After a vote, Scotland and Wales fall to Somalia. The only free European nation is the united Ireland.

I had no idea the song by the Cranberries was about the IRA. Europe, it’s not me, it’s not my family.

It would have been better if the spinning jenny had never been invented. It would have saved us a lot if Marx and Engels had come out.

Europe, some of those who want to close the borders to protect workers’ wages are the children of May 68, who have forgotten that workers have no homeland. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I hope those who were burned at the stake had a deal with Satan. I hope Galileo Galilei is laughing scornfully in his sky. I hope seal fat really cures whooping cough. I hope Jessie gets to import as much as she needs. I hope Jelinek uses the money to buy an island. I hope the Czech Republic doesn’t spend its coffers on lighting the monuments of Prague. I hope no Christian Democratic parties meet the threshold for Parliament.

I hope partisans still live in the mountains. I hope they eye fascists like you eye rabbits.

I hope Amy Winehouse rises from the dead and sings at my funeral. I hope Freud names your condition after Marine and her father: The Les Pens Complex.

Europe, most Swedish party leaders identify with Pippi Longstocking. But they resemble Bambi’s mother’s killer.

Every day we ask ourselves if we should get dual citizenship so we have a way out. Or will we be deported.

I hear more and more people talk about Portugal. I know a bluff when I see one.

I was eight years old when the war in Yugoslavia broke out. I was nine when I got Bosnian classmates. I couldn’t understand that they were refugees like us, even though they were European. In Belgrade, Tito’s mausoleum is to the right of the Iranian embassy. Enna still says that she speaks Serbo-Croatian. Our smallest common denominator is baklava. Europe, the award for lousiest food culture goes to you this year too.

Europe, I have marched for abortion rights in Barcelona. I have dreamed of my body run over by tanks. I have seen the empty chairs in the square in Kraków. But instead of visiting death camps I want to read Victor Klemperer. Europe, words can be like very small doses of arsenic.

Europe, when fascists murder children you raise national flags. Europe, I can make historical connections until the end of time. But the big difference between now and then is four million Soviet soldiers. The difference between the Winter War and now is 80 degrees.

Europe, it really is the era of forgetting. I will either end up like Ulrike Meinhof or like Italy in the World Cup. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I’m angry at Communism because it fucked up the dream of Communism.
I’m angry at the Swedish Academy because they gave feudalism a bad name.
I’m angry at Iceland because language is not dirty laundry.
I’m angry at Orpheus because he wasn’t patient.
I’m angry at Luther because he never took a vacation.
I’m angry at Gabriel because he isn’t moving to Bagarmossen.
I’m angry at Putin because of this judo business.
I’m angry at Merkel because she is no angel.

Europe, those who never would have voted for Labour are now campaigning for Corbyn. I had high hopes for Syriza, and I’m still hoping for Podemos. Even though they share a slogan with Obama.

Europe, I took my daughter to Zoologischer garten. She was afraid of the giraffe, but wanted to embrace the lion. Then we went to the Pergamon Museum. I wanted to show her the gate that bears her name. She fell asleep in the stroller and all I could think of was the sacking of Babylonia.

Europe, I refuse to participate in any conversation about terrorism that doesn’t begin with the war for oil. I’m going to plant weapons of mass destruction at 10, Downing Street. Europe, how many of us were in the streets in 2003? How many did you still murder?

Europe, no matter how many times we call London the Middle West and the US the Far West, you act as though these are the glory days of King Leopold.

Europe, when will the white man release his burden?

I still haven’t told you what you did to our parents in the 1990s. I haven’t explained why I have laser pens in my bag.

Do you remember the white hands on lapels?

Do you remember those who toasted in the bars of Madrid when Pinochet had a heart attack? Do you remember those who pulled their hair out when Milošević died in a cell? Do you remember those who danced in the streets of London when Thatcher had a stroke? Do you remember grandmother’s petrol blue head scarf? Do you remember me with braids in my hair?

Anyone could have known that a coal and steel union wasn’t for the proletariat. Anyone knows the workers only have their shackles to lose. Anyone could have told the residents of Lesbos that the dykes already won.

Europe, I think I would like Queen Kristina. But I’m not sure Queen Kristina would like me.

Of all who have lived here, Spartacus is my favorite.

Nothing we learned in school corresponds with reality.

I want Öcalan to become head of the EU Commission. I want your history to end in filth and mud. I want our history to end like the movie Pride. I want the labor movement to walk hand in hand with the queer activists, the queer activists to walk hand in hand with the undocumented, the undocumented to walk hand in hand with their children, the children to walk hand in hand with their rabbits, the rabbits to have water bottles for the children in their backpacks.

I want Cambodia’s farmers to burn our paper money. I want to forget that it is for my freedom of choice that the world is split asunder. I want transnational adoption to be banned. I want my children to belong to someone else.

Europe, Clichy is burning, Brixton is burning, Husby is burning. My eyes burn when I read the newspaper. Will you let your emotional life to be run by the media magnates of the right? There was greater freedom of the press during the Viking era than during your democracies. Europe, you are totally brainwashed by liberal editorial pages.You wouldn’t know your own ruin if it smothered you.

Europe, I read Allen Ginsberg as a child, I confess everything.

Europe, you managed something no one else could pull off. You killed my brothers.

Europe, where have you misplaced love? What have you done with your little specter? Where have you hidden your geraniums? When will you be stopped in security? When will you be tried at the Hague? When will you listen to refugees rather than journalists who go undercover as refugees?

Europe, is this correct?

My daughter is the great-grandchild of Ukrainian Jews who fled pogroms, grandchild of Iranian and Argentinian Communists who fled dictatorships, children of tired Swedes who hope they can stay.

Europe, it’s those fucking Danes.

The Denmark’s power mad, she wants to eat us alive. One day I will start a BDS movement against Denmark. One day I will drive a stake through Denmark’s heart. One day Denmark will be hacked up by the magpies of the Faroe Islands. One day only halal sausage will be served in Denmark. One day I will take apart Denmark like it’s Legoland.

Europe, I refuse to give up my obsession. I refuse to come to the point. I refuse to buy the Berlin Wall. I’ve said nothing about the millions of poor who live in your flower pots. I’ve said nothing about your prisons. I’ve said nothing about how Ylva sang me to sleep that night. I’ve said nothing about how family ties will be dissolved.

I’ll save Chernobyl and Chechnya for another occasion.

I hope my feelings about Denmark shine through.

Europe, stop pushing I know what I’m doing. I’m sick of your insane demands. Let a woman live. How can I write a holy litany in your hopeless mood?

The plum blossoms are falling here too.

You should have seen me come to Pasolini. You should have seen me triumph over windmills.

Europe, my queer shoulder has been dislocated.

It’s the final countdown.

 

TRANSLATED BY JENNIFER HAYASHIDA

Brazil Amazon forest defender shot dead by illegal loggers (yet more blood on MoneyWorld/aka The Commodification of Everything's hands)

 

Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a member of the Guardians of the Forest group, has died after being shot in the face.

(via Al Jazeera)

 

 

An indigenous forest defender has been killed and another wounded after they were ambushed by illegal loggers in Brazil's Amazon forest, according to authorities.

Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a leader of an indigenous group seeking to protect the Arariboia indigenous reserve in Maranhao state from incursions, was shot in the face while on a hunting trip, leaders of the Guajajara tribe said on Saturday.

Federal police will investigate Paulino Guajajara's killing in order to "bring those responsible for this crime to justice", said Sergio Moro, the justice and public security minister.

An indigenous leader in the area said the forest guards had previously received threats and wore protective vests while on patrol.

"We informed federal agencies of the threats but they didn't take any action," Sonia Guajajara, leader of Brazil's pan-indigenous organisation APIB, said.

A logger also died in the attack on Friday night in the northeastern state, according to FUNAI, a state agency that represents indigenous interests.

'Increase in violence'

It comes amid an increase in invasions of reservations by illegal loggers and miners since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office this year and promised to open up protected indigenous lands to economic development.

"The Bolsonaro government has indigenous blood on its hands," APIB, which represents many of the country's 900,000 native people, said in a statement on Saturday.

"The increase in violence in indigenous territories is a direct result of his hateful speeches and steps taken against our people," APIB said.

Sonia Guajajara said the government was dismantling environmental and indigenous agencies, and leaving tribes to defend themselves from invasion of their lands.

"It's time to say enough of this institutionalised genocide," she said in a post on Twitter.

'I'm scared at times'

The Guajajaras, one of Brazil's largest indigenous groups with some 20,000 people, set up the Guardians of the Forest in 2012 to patrol the vast reservation.

The area is so large that a small and endangered tribe, the Awa Guaja, lives deep in the forest without any contact with the outside world.

In an interview with Reuters news agency in September, Paulino Guajajara had said protecting the forest from intruders had become a dangerous task, but his people could not give in to fear.

"I'm scared at times, but we have to lift up our heads and act. We are here fighting," he had said at time.

"We are protecting our land and the life on it, the animals, the birds, even the Awa who are here too," added Paulino Guajajara, who was in his twenties and leaves behind one son.

"There is so much destruction of Nature happening, good trees with wood as hard as steel being cut down and taken away.

"We have to preserve this life for our children's future." 

"He was undocumented. Now he's exposing detention center abuse" (he's also my son-in-law) (hat tip Dan Slive)

Tom Wong, a UC San Diego professor, has surveyed 600 asylum seekers and says the president’s policy is ‘sending people to die’

Sam Levin in San Diego for the Guardian

Tue 29 Oct 2019 17.49 EDT First published on Tue 29 Oct 2019 06.00 EDT

 

 Tom Wong, a UC San Diego professor, is uncovering the abuse immigrants face in overcrowded detention facilities. Photograph: Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications

Tom K Wong’s world shattered at age 16 in 1998 when his parents told him he was undocumented. The Riverside, California, teenager thought his life was over.

Now 37, Wong is one of the prominent scholars in the US on immigration, most recently uncovering abuses inside detention centers in his latest University of California, San Diego research. The political science professor, whose family migrated from Hong Kong when he was two and overstayed their visas, released groundbreaking research on Tuesday on asylum seekers, exposing violence and suffering at the border as the Trump administration is escalating its crackdown on migrants.

Wong surveyed more than 600 asylum seekers affected by Donald Trump’s controversial “remain in Mexico” policy, which has forced tens of thousands to return to Mexico while their cases advance. Roughly, 85% reported that immigration detention facilities failed to provide adequate food and water and that they were unable to sleep due to overcrowding, cold temperatures and other conditions. Only 20% reported being able to take care of basic hygiene, such as showering and brushing their teeth.

More than half said they faced verbal abuse inside detention, with some saying they also suffered physical abuse. Roughly 25% also had their property seized when taken into detention, including important documents and cash that was not returned to them, he said.

A majority said they were forced to return to Mexico without any further investigation of the violence they might face there, which Wong said was a direct violation of the policy.

While waiting in Mexico, one out of four said they were threatened with physical violence, and more said they ended up homeless.

Asked about Wong’s research, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said the agency “provides safe, humane, clean, professionally run and appropriate conditions of confinement” and access to legal and translation services. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, which also detains migrants, said it “takes allegations of mistreatment of individuals in our facilities seriously” and that employees found to violate standards “will be held accountable”.

Wong talked with the Guardian about his non-traditional academic career, the crisis at the border, and how he uses his PhD to fight back. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you tell me what it was like to discover you were undocumented?

My parents told me I couldn’t go with my high school basketball team to Canada. Then they told me I couldn’t get a driver’s license. I couldn’t get a job. And there was just a cascade of no, no, no. And finally my parents said it’s not because we don’t want you to do these things, it’s because you can’t. All my hopes and dreams about growing up were literally shattered in a single moment. And it was during a time when there wasn’t the undocumented youth movement, so I wasn’t able to find other students.

I grew up in a predominantly Latino neighborhood, and before I found out I was undocumented, California was becoming a ground zero for this emerging anti-immigrant movement. I remember there were policy debates with the white kids on one side, the brown kids on the other, and me feeling like I had little understanding. But everything that was being said negatively toward my Latino classmates actually applied more directly to me.

How did you overcome this and become an academic?

I barely graduated high school after learning I was undocumented, because at the time I thought, what’s the point? But I got married when I was 19 and I was able to adjust my immigration status. I paid for a summer politics class, and I thought if this professor can make a living teaching, maybe I can do the same.

It took me years to realize I bring a different perspective to the study of immigration, politics and policy, that my history is my comparative advantage. It’s a perspective that helps me ask questions that others don’t. It took me a while to talk about my experience of being undocumented, because my parents’ immigration status was still tenuous. But they’re fine now, and I’m able to speak out.

What has been most shocking to you about your findings on what happens to asylum seekers?

Some findings were simultaneously shocking, but also very expected since we’ve heard anecdotal reports. There were over 200 incidents of verbal abuse, dozens of instances of physical abuse and even property being taken away. I heard of someone losing their life savings.

The findings about language access also really stuck out. Individuals are getting instructions about critically important steps in languages that they don’t speak: often Central American asylum speakers who speak an indigenous language by default are given instructions in Spanish. In San Diego, there are a lot of different languages – Asian Indians seeking asylum who speak Hindi were given instructions in English or Spanish. I find it hard to believe that we as a country can’t find a Hindi speaker. This is a basic due process tenet.

What do we now know about the conditions people face when they are forced to return to Mexico?

So many have experienced or been threatened with physical violence while waiting. Despite the handshake agreement between the United States and Mexico that Mexico is responsible for the humanitarian needs of these asylum seekers being returned, we areputting people in harm’s way by returning them to Mexico.

What do you think is most important for the public to understand about the impact of Trump’s policies on asylum seekers right now?

This administration wants to see net zero refugee admissions, which we are getting close to. This is a core part of the agenda. It’s not just in disregard of international and domestic law, but it’s in disregard of the fact that so many of the asylum seekers who are being turned away are seeking protection from persecution. It’s an agenda that is blind to the experiences of these families. The inevitable result is that people will be sent to circumstances where they will likely die.

What do you hope is the impact of your work and your findings?

I used to believe in facts swaying public opinion. But I fear we are in a political moment where the ability to select which facts to consider true is making the work we do less important. Now it may be very difficult to move public opinion when opinions are formed on such a visceral level.

But facts still matter. The truth still matters, because what is happening now is the administration is often acting first, and then the courts are litigating later. So even if the public is less and less swayed by the facts on the ground, judges still are.

Were there moments in your career where you found academia unwelcoming?

It can be strange having lived through something and then hearing about that subject through the perspective of somebody who studies the topic, but doesn’t have that personal connection. But I do quantitative work, and at the end of the day, the data speak much louder than my own personal background.

What’s the hardest part of doing academic work that is relevant to urgent policy matters?

A lot of academics are just scared about being wrong and being publicly wrong. But I believe in the importance of the work, and that means I need to be confident that I can stand by it. A few years ago I thought my bar was peer review in an academic journal. Now I understand my bar to be that as well as, “Can this pass muster with a federal judge or can this withstand a deposition from attorneys for the Department of Justice?”

What effect does the work have on you personally?

It’s often miserable. It’s difficult to hear. It’s difficult to interact with people, to see women and little kids who are the ages of my own children in shelters in Mexico, not knowing what’s going on. It is difficult to not internalize it. But I believe in the work. If it’s not me, I’m afraid there won’t be others who step up. Because it’ll be too easy for those others who want to step up to then step out after really understanding how difficult it is to have these conversations.

How do you think we can get out of this crisis moment?

We have to know our immigration policy past. Every generation gets to decide for itself, whether it embraces diversity through our immigration system or pushes it away by closing our golden door. We are defining for this generation how we are answering the question of what it means to be a nation of immigrants. And we have done that historically. And in some periods in our history, we have closed our doors to immigrants, and in other periods we have opened them again. This is cyclical. It is difficult to live through, but this has been a cyclical part of our immigration policy past.

Every four years we as a country get to collectively answer whether or not we still believe in this idea that we are a nation of immigrants. In 2020, we will get to vote.

Downpresser Man / Where you gonna run to?

With the Noose Around My Neck 143

Forget the selfie! We can see a child’s shovel and pail in the foreground and some seashells beside them. And we can see a “Vacancy” sign in a window of a building off to the right. The rubble is minutely textured. Attention to the miniscule (which has provided science with its own province of sublimity) might stand as a counter to a concomitant awareness of orders of magnitude that include atrocity, war, capitalism, and perhaps ———— though it may be mortality’s saving grace ————. One can’t look directly at the sun, either, of course; everything one has forgotten is in it. Near a set of keys, a hammer lies on the table beside a paper napkin. A stuffed animal ———— a brown nubbled dog with splay and floppy limbs ———— on its side in a chair; over the back of the chair a black leather jacket is draped. Lot a things like that, around us like jawbones. Take this little poem of Lyn Hejinian’s, for example

 

            wilt

 

            unnamed button

 

            store it all

 

 

Other ages accumulate value, becoming valuable in their own right. The ages, here given in alphabetical order, include:

 

            The Avian Age

            The Age of Ends

            The Age of Facades

            The Feline Age

            The Age of Games

            The Age of Herpetology

            The Age of Immediacy

            The Age of Justification

            The Martial Age (aka the Age of War)

            The Martian Age (also known as the Age of Origins)

            The Age of Meteorology (sometimes confused with the Avian Age; see above)

            The Musical Age (with a period of harsh timbres and unmelodious atonality

            following a long period of harmony and preceding a period of

            rampant percussion)

 

So yes, the deity who arose from my mind was a dancer. That is, moved to a rhythm with prehensile feet-big brown toes, a few hairs there. You’re dancing on me said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see. So fucking what? she said. I am the goddess of all things. I am about to give birth to beauty, migrants, savage light of every kind. Everything kind of sprang up right away, forwards and backwards: earth time, a human invention, is slower than bacterial time and faster than my own time, which only does beats. I had many pairs of shoes at that time but principally some black leather t-straps with flat soles; also a type of medium heel, but these were decorated with sequined florettes, pale chartreuse outer-leaf design and scarlet petals. I took them off one night after dancing; The people go everywhere, in the first days, out of curiosity; though now we are frantic, they say. For example the desertification of Africa pushes us towards the garbage-clogged Middle Sea. Did I create the dragonsnake film guy? My breasts are covered with blood, you can film that, I say. Or is it light, infrared, of some dead star over there? You really have blood on your breasts! No, it’s just red light, he says. The creation is intense, I remind him, when I’m in it I reflect red. Blood’s of such interest to you, them — they did a lot of killing to become themselves, the people, not that they had to. They just have to poke a needle in an eyeball, don’t they? The people have words; they use them to pretend with. There is no such thing as pretending, it’s all real! No nothings real — you can say shit like that. You can say anything; you can believe anything, to the depths of your soul, or not. The people have lost their first concentration; they do what they do, dumb fucks. Are all art works interchangeable? This is a rubellite, a kind of tourmaline, red, with hexagonal long prismatic crystals. And here’s a most beautiful form, the face of a worn boulder beige with a trace of rust color, you can find these on many planets. Not exactly a species. I’m peaceful with them. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there so there’s a lot of sand that they can play with. Say what? We have to have a lot of shootouts, the filmmaker says, against a scary chemical sky. He says, I intend plenty of desolation, pylons in flames; dams crumble. Engineers are the real artists, aren’t they? A True Record & some vaguely symbolic verse foreshadowing the glorious failure of empire-building. A fable for the present spectre of open water atop the world. Journals of Roote Gatherers who encountered ————, seeking The Garden of Cyrus. Authentic account of Alchemical Plants & Beastes & thinges of Greate Otherness, of yce as Heraclitean fyre. Spring wind on the sea lipwatching birds re-enter the sky. FRAGMENTARY records of a Roote Gatherer, practiced of alchemical craft & in the spiritual use of fruit trees, Vines, & where the air is of a metalled nature, full wild of Iron which must be consumed into the land and into the sea the same (red shells & white shells, dark sand) Hand-studied in platonic solids, Vedic science & the mathematics of Islamic Spain. The portrait of my hands pressed against the Cosmic Egg — through the very skin of the

 

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the skin of the skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

            skin of the

 

With regard to the matter in question, first of all, the violence of which we speak is non-particulate, which is to say that it is not a matter of its intermingling with some imagined counterpart or moving from a state of high concentration to low. The concentration is both constant and incalculable precisely in its being non-particulate. At stake is an ambience that is both more and less than atmospheric. In this regard, diffusion might be said imprecisely to name something that the intersection of gravitation and non-locality only slightly less imprecisely names. It is a pouring forth, a holding or spreading out, or a running over that never runs out and is never over; a disbursal more than a dispersal; a funding that is not so much founding as continual finding of that which is never lost in being lost. It is the terrible preparation of a table for a feast of burial and ascension ... This is the aporia that some might think I seek to fill and forget by invoking black art. Jazz does not disappear the problem; it is the problem, and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem. Is a problem that can’t be solved still a problem? Is an aporia a problem or, in fact, an avoidance of the problem, a philosophically induced conundrum predicated upon certain metaphysical and mechanical assumptions that cannot be justified? Let’s imagine that the latter is true,

           

            I like warm air

            going over

            my skin,

 

            billions

            of world

            systems,

 

            you look like

            a television set

            sitting on

            a refrigerator,

 

            what’s going on

            in here,

            it looks like

            everyone is

            underwater,

 

            sucking mud

            sucking mud

            sucking mud

            sucking mud,

 

            I’m standing

            in the hall,

            I pushed

            the button,

            and I’m waiting

            for the elevator;

 

“The development of the five senses is the work of the entire history of the world up to now.” — Karl Marx. A change in vision is a change in form. A change in form is a change of reality. Which is as much as to say that governments by nature (including post-revolutionary governments once they’re in power) have had little actual use for the concept of an ongoing & open-ended revolution. But that’s all the more reason for the poets to get on with it. “& if thou wdst understand that wch is me, know this: all that I have sd I have uttered playfully — & I was by no means ashamed of it.” (JC to disciples, The Acts of St. John) By using our site you accept these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, you must not use our site. We may make changes to our site or to these Terms from time to time. We may at any time suspend or withdraw our site or any items offered on our site. If you are interested in buying an item on our website, you must first register your interest by completing and submitting the registration form on our site by 11:59pm (on the closing date stated on the registration form. You must provide all the details required by that form, including your answer to the tie-breaker question (which must be no more than 50 words). Applications will be grouped by the item selected and by time-period (relating to the date and time they are received by us). One or more time periods per item will be selected at random by an independent third party and only applications received during the selected time-period(s) will proceed to vetting. An independent judge will examine the tie-breaker questions and select those applications which the judge finds to be the most apt (in the sole opinion of the judge). Blue acara, blue alert, blue andalusia, blue eyed yellow macaw, blue anemone, blue angel, blue ant, blue asbestos (crocidolite), blue ash, blue ashes, blue baby, blue baby operation, blueback, blueback mullet, blueback salmon, blueback trout, blue bag, blue ball, blue basic lead sulfate, blue bass, bluehead, bluebear, bluebeard, bluebeard tongue, blue beech, bluebell, bluebells of scotland, blueberry, blueberry ash, blueberry maggot, blueberry root, blueberry thrips, blue bice, bluebill, blue billy, blue bindweed, blue birch, bluebird, blue biskop, blue-black, blue blazer, blue blazing star, blue blindness (tritanopia), blueblood, blueblossom, blue bonset, blue bonnet, blue book, blue bottle, blue brant, blue bream, bluebreast darter, blue-breasted quail, blue birch, blue brush, blueback, blue bug, blue bull, blue bunch grass also bluebund fescue bluebunch wheatgrass, blue bur, bluefish, bluecap, blue cardinal flower, blue catfish or blue channel fish, blue cheese, blue chip, blue coat, bluecoat boy, bluecoat school, blue cod, blue cohosh, blue collar, blue comb, blue copperas, blue copper ore, blue coral, blue crap, blue crane, blue creeper, blue crevally, bluecup, blue curls, blued, blue daisy, blue dandelion, blue darner, blue darter, blue devil, blue dicks, blue discharge, blue disease, blue doe, blue dog, blue dogwood, blue duck, blue duiker, blue earth, blue elder, blue ensign, blue-eye, blue eyed babies, bluets, blue-eyed grass, blue-eyed Mary, blue faced booby, blue false indigo ...

 

& there are a few more

(show ended here)

 

Result: when the right neurons were isolated, the rats managed to stabilise their memories and succeed at the spatial test the next day. This substantially changes how we understand the cortex. In other words, all plastic waste could become new, high-quality plastic through advanced steam cracking. These allegations of child abuse against Customs and Border Protection go on for tens of thousands of pages. Each bright and airy greenhouse contains plants that used to, but no longer, grow wild in New York City, arranged in regimented grids of tabletop planters and vitrines.

 

            <basking in the sun at the hospital>

 

            Sick person who vomited blood

 

            Person with rotten ear

 

            Person with eyeballs, open

 

            Person in worn down shabby shirt

 

            Patient leaning on wall

 

                        Lean diagonally

 

                        Belly crumbling

 

                        Attention to the left hand (cover eyes)

 

            Yakubyōgami [god of pestilence] in a 3m clump of hair

 

                                    Viewed from above

                                                           

            Hyakki Yagyō (night parade of one hundred demons] of hair

 

            Maikubi [entity of dancing heads] in the form of Gaki [hungry ghost]

 

            On the tatami, chicken with a fist shoved into its mouth runs this way and that

 

The fountain is connected to an underground river. The fountain’s water runs through the boy’s tear ducts, continuously. A way to abrade and observe the linear time that abrasion also brings, which is to say, the body that was not here but is here because this was here: “This consciousness is like breathing.” This consciousness is like the bear in the following photo.

Which ... perhaps ... who can be sure? brings us to Thomas Moynihan, and his theory of Spinal Catastrophism, which can be summarized by the following conditional statement: if human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Moynihan’s mode of “theory fiction” explores spinal colonies of proto-minds, the retroparasitism of the CNS, the nineteenth-century medical diagnosis of post traumatic ‘railway spine,’ and Elizabeth Taylor’s lost gill-slits. How, exactly, does animal make itself, then? Where some media studies theorists would respond with “animal makes itself” through reticulated and intermedial agential artifacts, and where political science might pose cultural cleavages and striated ethnic lines manipulated by political entrepreneurs, Moynihan imbues the spine with a kind of accented sociotechnical and electronic intelligence. “Could all observable structure, then, be some astronomically distributed and rarefied ‘neurosystem,’ some Dysonian Organprojektion? physics itself the externalized ‘nervous array’ of computational behemoths and their ongoing interaction?” Within this belated cosmogony of the spinal cord-cum-megalith, environment and thought are enraptured, or, as César Vallejo put it, my meter measures two meters; my kilo weighs a ton. So now I have pretty much the whole of Silver Apples, broken into samples, 10 seconds here, a minute and a half there, 15 minutes in another there. So L says

 

            An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there.

            It broke.

            It didn’t hurt.

            It was cold.

 

So C says

 

            May I take some of your sugar if you’re not using it?

 

So L says

 

            An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there; it broke, it didn’t hurt.

            It was cold.

            So I went home to wash my hair, and I found my mother there.

 

So C says

 

            I’m going to take two packets of your sugar, if you don’t mind.

 

C proceeds to take four. So L says

 

            An egg fell on my head this morning while I was sitting over there; it broke.

            It didn’t hurt; it was cold.

            So I went home to wash my hair.

            And I discovered my mother there, with her lover.

 

So C says

 

            Thank you so much.

 

So L says

 

            They were slapping each other.

 

So C says

 

            Excuse me?

 

So L says

 

            My mother and her lover.

 

So C says

 

            Excuse me!

 

So L says

 

            Yes?

 

So C says

 

            Did you say an egg fell on your head?

 

So L says

 

            This morning, while I was sitting over there.

 

So C says

 

            Where did it come from?

 

So L says

 

            I don’t know.

            That’s the great mystery.

 

Alternatively, we could say that the trolley problem is responsible for the destruction of a significant portion of the Brazilian rain forests. I’m sure someone has written about this somewhere. However, if we shift our conceptual vision a bit, perhaps we could say that the trolley experiment raises not so much a question of what we should do in this situation and what normative principles should decide our course of action, but rather what constitutes an agent in ethics. We tend to focus on the operator of the trolley.  The operator, we think, is the ethical agent and we will determine our duties and the moral worth of whatever action is chosen based on what the operator chooses. But what if the operator is not the proper unit at which to identify agency in this thought experiment? What if the true agent in this scenario is not the operator, but the operator + the trolley + the switch + the tracks? In other words, what tends to get lost in the discussions of the trolley theory I’ve encountered is the trolley and the tracks.  Afterwards we went to a party for Marlene Dietrich at ‘Le Club’ ... I did get about 30 seconds of the great woman’s unconcentrated attention.  Mostly she sat at a table discussing business with three tycoon-looking men ... She asked me to join them, which gave me ample opportunity to observe her lovely chin, cheek, eyelashes, and back of head, after which I hied myself to the bar where there was

 

            light coming into blue whiteness of sky above ridge

            shadowed towhee standing on corner of redwood fence

            ridge being there in these same words every morning

            shadowed swell lines moving toward mouth of channel

 

In the years since, I have often reflected on this moment. Why, I wonder, was the term “undead object” so problematic? Not only does it allow you to bring in the baroque complexities of the Greimasian or semiotic square with its brain-melting negation of negation in the form of that which is neither living nor non-living, but it also evokes all those great horror movies directed by people like Romero and Raimi. What’s not to love? Yet, as I have come to understand, those archaeologists were profoundly right. The characterization of ruins and drift as undead objects misses the entire point and profoundly mischaracterizes the being or nature of things. Suddenly I was transported back to a moment in my childhood. I couldn’t have been older than twelve at the time. Like many USAmericans, I spent time in a suburban housing development. It was built on old farm land. Former corn fields, to be precise. At the edge of the development was an old, abandoned farm house. It was filled with all sorts of mysterious things. For some reason, rusting razor blades could be found all over the place. Tattered curtains blew in the wind. There were boxes of long forgotten dish soaps and canned coffees that you could no longer find in stores. Here, there would be a rotting comb. There, there would be an old shoe or piece of infant clothing. Over there would be some rotting mail or an old phone book. To be sure, many of the artifacts indexed their domestic origin, yet they were arranged in a way that made no domestic sense. It was as if human time had stopped and the home had been overtaken by another, inhuman time. Which is why, as the Bible in Gullah has it Matthew 5:9 and John 13:34-5, Dey bless fa true, dem wa da wok haad fa hep people lib peaceable wid one noda, cause God gwine call um e chullun. Oona fa lob one noda. Same fashion A done lob oona, same fashion oona fa lob one noda. Ef oona da lob one noda, ebrybody gwine know dat oona me ciple dem. It was in that context that, sitting in my hotel room in India in 2005, or maybe 2006, something caught my eye on the television. I don’t remember the detail or even the programme (perhaps it was BBC World News), but it was about sea-level rise and the effect on islanders in the Pacific Ocean. A man, possibly from Tuvalu, was standing in the sea up to his knees, his trousers rolled up to just above the water-line, and he was pointing at the ground beneath the waves and speaking. The subtitles read: ‘this is my ancestral land. My father and my grandfather lived here, but there is nothing of it left for me.’ That image and his words have stayed with me. A light went on in my head and it made me wonder about sea-level rise in the past: not the recording of it, but the human experience — what it felt like, what affect it had. I have thought about it a lot since and nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Something. Fourth hook down on the drop-line there was a dark shape. The boy stopped pulling and sat back on his heels. The swell was small that day and it was more than three metres from the platform down to the sea. The boy watched as the shape stretched and buckled beneath the grey water. ‘Strange fish,’ he said to no one. The wind was blowing in from the west – consistent, ten or eleven metres per second by the feel of it — droning through the platform’s pipes and grilles and pushing the sea into hard ridges. The North Sea shifted from horizon to horizon, like a tarpaulin being dragged over rough ground. It looked sluggish but, under the surface, currents ripped and surged. It was hard to imagine the sheer tonnages hauling past every minute, every second. The boy wound the line around the railing until it was secure, then took hold of the hanging length, lifted it a few inches and let it fall. He moved it from side to side, but the hook was lodged. He’d have to pull it up. He moved the line again. It was heavy, whatever it was. He hoped his line wouldn’t break. It had taken him a long time to get that length of cord. How long? Months? Years? He looked out at the horizon as if it would give him an answer, but couldn’t even pick out where the grey of the sea became the grey of the sky. It was good cord. That was all that mattered. And a hundred miles offshore it wasn’t easy to get hold of good cord. Could you even get proper fishing line any more? The wind squalled and worked itself through the seams of his overalls. Who could he ask? The old man wouldn’t know. He didn’t know. And there was no one else out there. He stood up, set his feet shoulder-width apart and pulled his sleeves down over his hands. He moved his hands slowly and kept the rest of his body very still, as if trying to steady himself against the motion of sea and sky. His legs were planted almost a metre apart and his sleeves barely covered his wide, calloused palms. Of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but names are relative, and out in the grey some kind of distinction was necessary. He took hold of the line and, using the rail as a fulcrum, began to haul it up out of the water. As soon as the load broke the surface the line tightened and rasped through his sleeves. He stopped for a moment and let the wind smooth the edges of the pain, then carried on pulling until the fourth hook was level with the platform. He looked down over the rail. It was a load of junk as usual — a greasy mass of netting and plastic, streaming and reeking. The whole thing was tangled into a dense lump, along with an oilcan, some polystyrene, and what looked like a burnt-out panel from a door. The boy tied off the line, straightened his back and blew lightly on his palms. ‘Good catch,’ he said. Beside him, the thick steel support rose twenty metres to the rig. Above the rig’s squat rectangular housing, the blades of the nearest turbine turned slowly in the washed-out sky. All around, to every horizon, the blades of the wind farm turned. His alternative world includes “Ohlone” and related uses such as “Ohlonian spring” and “these Ohlone shores” (the latter phrase appearing in “Redwood Highway,” the long opening poem in Becoming Visible (1981)). This, I believe, refers to the Bay Area or some part of it; as Lamantia once wrote, “my specific re-name for the micro-bioregion I am re-inhabiting, OHLONIA.” He also references “Shasta,” by which, to quote the poem with that title, he appears to reference an area “from Suisun Bay north to the Rogue River,” and which he implies is adjacent to “Frisco,” which, in turn, is a “diplomatic zone between Shasta and southern empires of regrettable memory.” This too presumably derives from the Planet Drum worldview, as that organization (and Peter Berg in particular) used the appellation “Shasta Bioregion” often, including in the mailing address for its San Francisco post office box. More specific to Lamantia, I believe, is his re-imagining of Telegraph Hill, on whose slope he lived during the last decades of his life, as “Bear Hill” and “Avian Hill.” The names imply a hoped-for return of animals of the kind found there before arrival of the European: a prophesied place,

 

            Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought

            Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought

            The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land

            Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojavé Ohlone

            Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers

            A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads ...

 

Another example of what a countermapping toward intimacy and intermingling might look like is Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo Terciario / The Tertiary, a response to the US-imposed austerity and debt crisis in Puerto Rico filtered through a queer, decolonial reading of Marx. In “second stage: productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist,” they write:

 

            if you undress on la noche de san juan,

            the memories of raped mermaids

            will sink into your sores

            and for the rest of your days you’ll have to sing

            poems dedicated to lost lungs.

 

            inverse evolution:

            let’s return to the sea.

            those who don’t know how to leave their loot on the sand

            will drown in the air.

 

In Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, in “Steady Summer,” we hear something similar:

 

            I don’t trust nobody

                        but the land I said

            I don’t mean

            present company

            of course

            you understand the grasses

            hear me too always

            present the grasses

            confident grasses polite

            command to shhhhh

            shhh listen

 

            [...]

 

            [...]

 

            [...]

 

Sadly, there have been numerous cases of invading armies committing war crimes over the last century; but it is rare indeed for the commander to openly declare ethnic cleansing and war crimes as the main objective of his military operation. But Erdoğan has stated explicitly and repeatedly that it is his intention to militarily erase the Kurdish population of over one million people that live in an arc across the Turkish border from Kobane to Derik and to replace that population with members of different ethnic groups. One year ago, similar declarations were made before invading Afrin, another Kurdish-majority region in Syria. Since then, the originally 95 percent Kurdish population of Afrin has been reduced to a minority, with thousands killed or driven from their homes and the Kurdish language banned in schools. The municipality is now governed by jihadist groups backed by Turkey. In other words, Erdoğan has declared his intention to violate three different key principles of international law clearly established in the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals: 1. the crime of aggression, 2. the crime of ethnic cleansing, 3. the crime of resettling populations in conquered territory — even now his forces are using NATO-supplied weaponry to illegally bomb churches, hospitals, cultural monuments and civilian infrastructure. Despite all this, the UN security council has failed to condemn the invasion and most national governments have taken no practical steps to stop it. Maybe because what has been happening in Rojava for the last seven years — the attempt to create a society based on bottom-up, direct democracy, the liberation of women, and ecological principles as essential to any conception of human liberation — is, ultimately, the real threat to authoritarians like, uh, the leaders of every country everywhere? and the real basis for their endless talk of “security concerns.” Anyone who dares attempt an experiment that puts justice for all at the heart of the liberation process must be punished so severely that no one will even think about doing it again. And so it was a turf war. As it has always been, really. They wanted to colonize all of Earth — Sun Ra would leap ahead and colonize space and the cosmos first, and he would dig beneath and colonize the mine, Agartha, the sun-terrestrial regions. He digs into language and frequency like a surgeon, he does not intend to dress any wounds or remove anything extraneous; however, he is there to turn what’s there into itself, to release false doctrine by re-imaging the present condition as the launch into eternal understanding that it is.

[Note: Sources: Lyn Hejinian, “From ‘Positions of the Sun’”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 13 Oct 019; JBR; Alice Notley, “Eurynome’s Sandals”, in Chicago Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (WINTER 2009), via JSTOR; Donald Trump, washing his hands of his abandonment of the US’s Kurdish allies in Rojava and the resultant Turkish invasion, 16 Oct 019; JBR; Arthur Allen, The Nurseryman, at SPD; \Fred Moten, Black and Blur, at Duke University Press; John Giorno (RIP), “Scum & Slime”, “Sucking Mud”, “Exiled in Domestic Life”, at BOMB, 1 Jul 1986; Jerome Rothenberg, “‘Revolutionary Propositions’ & ‘A Personal Manifesto’”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 17 Oct 019; “Conditions”, at Gross Domestic Product: The Homewares Brand from Banksy^TM; Eileen Myles & Anne Waldman, “from Polar Ode”, in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (eds. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad); “A new discovery: How our memories stabilize while we sleep”, at Science Daily, 18 Oct 019; JBR; “All plastic waste could become new, high-quality plastic through advanced steam cracking”, at Science Daily, 18 Oct 019; Gaby Del Valle, “These Allegations of Child Abuse Against Customs and Border Protection Go On for Tens of Thousands of Pages”, at Vice, 18 Oct 019; Louis Bury, “A Greenhouse for Extinct Flora”, at Hyperallergic, 19 Oct 019 (“Michael Wang: Extinct in New York continues at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governor’s Island until Oct. 31); Tatsumi Hijikata, Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (“Notebook written by Moe Yamamoto and translated by Sawako Nakayasu”); Bhanu Kapil, and Taylor La Melle, quoted in Kapil’s “Art and the After-life of Water”, at THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES Bhanu Kapil’s always-never: blog, 19 Oct 019; JBR; image: “The Other Avant Garde”, photo by Robert Rissman of an artwork he found in a restaurant and guesses to be by Robert McCauley; JBR; blurb for Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, at Urbanomic; Ekin Erkan, “Unveiling Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: The Spine Considered As A Chronogenetic Media Artifact”, at Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1, 2019; JBR; César Vallejo, Aphorisms (tr. Stephen Kessler); JBR; Morton Subotnick, quoted in Patrick Clarke, “INTERVIEW: Morton Subotnick And Lillevan”, at The Quietus, 15 Oct 019; Melisa Tiem, Best Life, quoted in Diana Khoi Nguyen, “Po(i)sed for Action: At the Intersection of Poetry and Drama, Part III”, at Harriet, 21 Oct 019; Levi R Bryant, “Cyborg Agency”, at Larval Subjects, 21 Oct 019; Frank O’Hara, unpublished letter to Larry Rivers, quoted in Andrew Epstein, “When Frank (O’Hara) Met Marlene (Dietrich)”, at Locus Solus, 19 Oct 019; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “10.21”, at Temporality, 21 Oct 019; Levi R Bryant, “Domestic Objects, Wild Things: Aletheia, Ruination, and Drift”, at Larval Subjects, 21 Oct 019; JBR; Matthew 5:9, John 13:34-5, at De Gullah Nyew Testament; JBR; Jim Leary, The Remembered Land Surviving Sea-level Rise After the Last Ice Age; Ben Smith, Doggerland; Steven Fama, “(Philip Lamantia Day – 2019)”, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 23 Oct 019 (Happy 92^nd, PL!); Philip Lamantia, “Meadowlark West”, at Poetry Foundation; Zaina Alsous, “An Ecopoetics for Take Back the Land”, at Harrietç, 23 Oct 019; JBR; “Call to Boycott Turkish Government Sponsored Academic and Cultural Institutions”, at Boycott Turkey; Harmony Holiday, “The First Angel of the Future: Sun Ra’s Heliocentric Poetics for After the End of the World”, at Harriet, 24 Oct 019]

from the New Testament in Gullah, a mashup of a bit from Matthew, a bit from John

Dey bless fa true, dem wa da wok haad fa hep people lib peaceable wid one noda, cause God gwine call um e chullun. Oona fa lob one noda. Same fashion A done lob oona, same fashion oona fa lob one noda. Ef oona da lob one noda, ebrybody gwine know dat oona me ciple dem.

As Real As It Gets: Beverley Guitar Watkins (1939-2019) (hat tip Donna Fleischer)