Zeitgeist Spam

And After the Rally, Beck and His Gazillion Best Buds Stopped at the Golden Arches and Ate Their God

"Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. ... the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald's hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. ...

Here is Day 1:
Here is Day 94:

Here is Day 137, which actually looks like things have improved in the 43 days since the picture above:

... Check out the whole progression here."

[Note: Source: lifted almost in its entirety from Morgan Clendaniel, "McDonald's Hamburger's Don't Age", at Good, 27 Aug 010]

Hundreds of Thousands of Saps Descend on Washington

"Beck exhorted the crowd to "recognize your place to the creator. Realize that he is our king. He is the one who guides and directs our life and protects us." He asked his audience to pray more. "I ask, not only if you would pray on your knees, but pray on your knees but with your door open for your children to see," he said."

That'll keep em from looking behind the curtain, he thought, dreaming of the extremely large check that was waiting for him ...

[Note: Sources: 1st paragraph: Philip Elliott and Nafeesa Syeed, Associated Press Writers, "Beck: Help us restore traditional American values", at Yahoo!, 28-9 Aug 010; 2nd paragraph: reality]

In the House of the Hangman 172-177 (Boston 9-14)

It is enough to make one sweat one’s animal. Feckless

moral code Eames chairs for shamans

the long sweet swindle glass of kosher wine without the glass.

It is well known that this movement

is not and could not

be absent from the Aristotelian corpus.

What I need right now

is a

random word generator, cooking the bodily-political processes.

How will this messianic, utopian and Romantic ferment

articulate itself

with historical materialism? If the overthrow of the bourgeoisie ‘is not completed by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signaled by inflation and poison-gas warfare) all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the fuse must be cut.’

The fucking King of Saudi fucking Arabia? Say

what? If I was from the fucking farm, maybe, but I’m from Dublin. Hexagram 404 is close enough: “Discordant folly encountered at daybreak

at the foot of the mountain”.

If I had stayed in Boston

one more day

I could have seen Yichen Chiu and Anderson Silva.

[Note: Sources: 172. Clayton Eshleman, “Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D’Audoubert”, in The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader; Robert Kelly, Fire Exit, 10. 173. Éric Alliez, Capital Times (tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele). 174. JBR; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (trs. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight). 175. Michael Löwy, and Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, as quoted by Löwy, in L’s Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (tr. Chris Turner). 176. JBR; memory-quote of something said a number of times by Ray (Colin Farrell) in In Bruges; Alan Worn, title of an architectural project, I think; stumbled across via Google Reader 26 Aug 010, but the link led nowhere; I assume the blog post had been deleted. 177. Yichen emailed me (27 Aug 010) after we’d left for Marblehead; Silva was in town for a UFC convention]

In the House of the Hangman 169-171 (Boston 6-8)

Makes your ears pop / Semen-flavored Snapple. The brightness no one is relying on, the thirty hour work day in the summer of the candy-cane road inside the ‘O’. When I get home I just want to jump in the pool with the network guys. I didn’t worry. If you vomit your pouches & buttons muzzle

umt pok

what the devil was she doing standing in the doorway? Tony Penrose bit Picasso. I was trotting along and suddenly / it started raining and [kept on raining] / and you said it was hailing / but hailing hits you on the head / umt pok glodd et cet.

Somehow the voice of Henri Bergson suddenly emanating from iTunes? No doubt, right now there’s a black hole devouring a solar system that contains a planet with a rich ecosystem and that includes

emerging intelligent octopus life that will soon enter the space age and everyone should read his new book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. I hope to say something more about it later. I confess that the only other book of his that I've really read was the one on neoliberalism. So I don't know if his development of an analysis of capitalism out of a footnote in the

Grundrisse is new. At first I was reluctant to embrace the basic point--which seemed to entail a rejection of the determining role of the mode of production. But after reading the whole thing, I think I've been convinced that mode of production entails multiple interrelating spheres of activity (he identifies 7; Marx has 5; the different spheres strike me as descriptive and overlapping, guides for thought, rather than clear-cut analytical categories).

It was the first fare of the cabdriver’s shift. A young man hailed him at the corner of Second Avenue and East 24th Street, wanting to go to 42nd and Second. It was 6 p.m. on Tuesday; the traffic was dense. Once the fare, Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student who had been recently trailing Marines in Afghanistan, settled in the back, he started asking friendly enough questions: Where was the driver from? Was he Muslim? The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, 44, said he was from Bangladesh, and yes

he was Muslim. Mr. Enright said, “Salaam aleikum, how’s your Ramadan going?” He told him it was going fine. Then, he said, Mr. Enright began making fun of the rituals of Ramadan, and Mr. Sharif sensed this cab ride might not be like any other. “So I stopped talking to him,” Mr. Sharif

said. “He stopped talking, too.” As the cab inched up Third Avenue and reached 39th Street, Mr. Enright suddenly began cursing at him and shouting “This is the checkpoint” and “I have to bring you down” and “I have to bring the king of Saudi Arabia through!” or something and he drew a Leatherman and, reaching through the opening in the plastic divider, slashed Mr. Sharif’s throat. When Mr. Sharif turned, he said, Mr. Enright stabbed him in his face, on his arm and on his thumbs.

[Note: Sources: 169. Jim Behrle, “Adjunct Blues”, in Succubus Blues; Dana Ward, Roseland; Alli Warren, “Another Mule in the Stable”, in Acting Out; Michael Carr, Jess Mynes & Aaron Tieger, “Bravo Two Zero”, in Necco Face; Aaron Tieger, The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger; Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist (tr. David Coward); Kate Kellaway, “Tony Penrose: ‘With Picasso, the rule book was torn up’”, at Guardian.co,uk, 22 Aug 010; Frank O’Hara, “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” (about which I thought after Geof Huth wrote (25 Aug 010 6:02 pm) that he is a “deadline poet.”). The Behrle through Tieger: sample poems at Editions Louis Wain; I just (5 pm 25 Aug 010) rec’d an email from them about the Alli Warren title. 170. Graham Harman, “the voice of Bergson”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 26 Aug 010; Levi R Bryant, “The Ecological Thought: A Reply to a Critic”, at Larval Subjects, 26 Aug 010; Jodi Dean, “read David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism”, at I cite, 25 Aug 010. 171. N. R. Kleinfeld, “Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim, Then Stabs Him”, at New York Times, 26 Aug 010, via Graham Harman, “throw the book at him”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 26 Aug 010]

A Cyberstrategy for Neoliberal Lunatics

"With little fanfare, the Pentagon is putting the finishing touches on a new strategy that will treat cyberspace as a domain of potential warfare -- and apply instant "active defense" to counterattacks that, in theory, could shut down the nation's transportation and commerce.

Even though it deals with a distinctly 21st-century problem, the strategy has echoes of the Cold War: America's closest allies would be drawn into an early-warning network of collective cybersecurity; private industry would be mobilized in a kind of civil defense against attackers; and military commanders would be given authority to respond automatically to electronic invaders.

In place of "massive retaliation" against attackers whose country of origin may be unclear, the strategy proposes an alternative concept of deterrence based on making America's infrastructure robust and redundant enough to survive any attack. The Department of Homeland Security would oversee this hardening of infrastructure, with help from the National Security Agency.

William J. Lynn III, the deputy secretary of defense, explained the new approach, known as "Cyberstrategy 3.0" within the Pentagon, in an interview this week and in an article that appears in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. The formal policy should be completed by December, he said; meanwhile, the Pentagon's new "Cyber Command" will have responsibility for "active defense" starting Oct. 1.

Lynn's proposals are provocative. But the strategy could be costly and perhaps cumbersome, and it involves threats that aren't well understood by the public -- even by many of the companies that could be targets of attacks. So the first order of business should be more public information: Everyone needs to understand the risks of attack, and the costs and benefits of mobilizing against it.

Talking with Lynn, I was struck by the gap between the way defense experts see cyberspace -- as a source of potentially crippling assault -- and the public's view of an Internet that is a generally benign companion. Although Lynn speaks of cyberspace as a "domain" that can be protected, such as airspace, it may be closer to the oxygen we breathe.

The Pentagon is already recruiting allies on cybersecurity. Lynn has shared ideas with America's longtime partners on signals intelligence -- Britain, Canada and Australia. He plans to meet with a wider circle of NATO allies next month. One topic will be surveillance against cyberattacks -- a sort of Internet version of the old "DEW Line" radar network or the undersea listening devices that monitored Soviet submarines.

Lynn's defense scheme would be "part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter." The first two are noncontroversial, but I asked him what he meant by "sharpshooter." He explained that if Cyber Command detected an incoming attack, it would instantly "quarantine the malicious code" by "diverting it into a place where it would be harmless." The challenge, he said, was to stop the attack without doing "collateral damage," such as disrupting global commerce.

Lynn wouldn't talk much about America's offensive weapons in cyberspace, except to say that "we have developed a wide range of capabilities." The United States is probably more vulnerable to such attacks than other countries because our economy is more wired. But Lynn rejected the idea of banning cyberweapons, through a new version of arms control, because it would be so easy for others to cheat.

In cyberplanning, the phrase "military-industrial complex" has special resonance. Since at least 2007, the Pentagon has been informing defense contractors about hostile penetrations of their networks. This has evolved into the "Enduring Security Framework," a partnership that includes CEOs of many of the big technology and defense companies. Lynn said the Pentagon is working with contractors to protect their systems from cyberattack.

An intriguing aspect of cyberstrategy is that it turns "globalization" inside out. A U.S. laptop maker that once would have boasted that its components were assembled in 50 countries must now worry about 50 points where an intruder could plant malicious code. The Defense Department calls this problem "supply chain vulnerability." Lynn said he hopes companies will monitor their plants and suppliers to reduce the risk that products sent to the United States are contaminated, but he conceded that "you can't build everything inside a fence."

In the debate about cyberstrategy, I hope officials will recognize the dangers of militarizing the global highway for commerce and communication. Of course we want to protect ourselves against threats. But as with human viruses, hostile computer bugs will evade our best efforts at quarantine. A new (and expensive) obsession with cybersecurity is not what this traumatized country needs."

[Note: Source: David Ignatius, "Pentagon's cybersecurity plans have a Cold War chill", at Washington Post, 26 Aug 010. Sad how the Obama and Bush regimes had/have the same imperial/totalitarian/capitalist mindsets. Let's manufacture a threat so we can clamp down AND make a fortune off it! Change our policies so we have fewer enemies? That's giving in to the terrists [sic]! Too bad the Post buys into 99% of it ... (tip o' the cap to Ed)]

[Note: Source: unidentified Netherlandish artist; also known as Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus (1475-1500), Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

Like the lips that never once closed, the buildings on both sides of the street at night, the sound of them being fed the night sky through their huge openings, as I raise my head, an old woman lying on the pavement is scraping off wads of gum. The whole

construction thus debuts through the birth of the first accident, which ceases to be similar to itself; it debuts through a dissonance and cannot debut otherwise. “In a cave I saw” “a film projected” “onto a rock wall” – “Father’s Uterus, or The Map” – the six-

day firestorm – and an eldritch eschatology. The stink of the ditches bothered us / they had to serve as our drains / now they are all dried up and there are no mosquitoes. My work’s more jagged now. Don’t let the thunderclap hit you on the way out. Fairyland over Cielo Drive, Highway 1, Route 66, East Side & West Side Highways, New Jersey Turnpike, Spaghetti Junction, and further up SKYLAB, the firmament, and the wind that always chooses silence, like the dead flowers torn from flabby flesh I mean the melodious soil.

This means, above all, to appreciate the field of negativity as a “garden of forking pathways”, a tissue of interwoven philosophical lineages, with branches extending to extra-philosophical domains. This means when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds. The time yield of water making its way down walls. Such a gesture can only mean what it means: I do not want to remain hungry and I am looking at your

mouth. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), “Every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.” The big man with the bad knee asked a LOT of questions, described by Michael McClure as follows: “This has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs’s Cities of the Red

Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey’s Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger--and it blows with the elegance of a horse--or a wolf ... Virginia Woolf!” Discerning a spectacle in the collisions of welcome returns a false note to the mystery—but the crowd is so large no strangeness is noted; want to buy Salinger’s toilet? Another big guy’s Bao Xishun, whose arms are so long he can “fish” deadly pieces of plastic flotsam from the stomachs of unfortunate whales.

[Note: Sources: 167. Kim Hyesoon, “A Sublime Kitchen”, “I Scribble Away at a Letter”, in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (tr. Don Mee Choi); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, as quoted in Éric Alliez, Capital Times (tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele); Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette; a word I promised Geof Huth I’d use while we were standing by the checkout counter in Webs, waiting for the cashier to remove at least an inch of finger from her nose, 24 Aug 010; Hiromi Ito, “Father’s Uterus, or The Map”, “Trans-Population”, “A Poem for Ueno-San”, in Killing Kanoko (tr. Jeffrey Angles); Éric Alliez, Capital Times (tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele) (p. 170, concerning Geoffrey de Thierry, De sex dierum operabus); something Nancy Huth said (I think I got the “jagged” right) 24 Aug 010, over lunch, maybe?; K, 24 Aug 010, somewhere on route 9 between Amherst and Worcester; Claude Pelieu, Kali Yug Express (tr. Mary Beach), at Nomadics, 25 Aug 010. All print books quoted above bought at Amherst Books, 24 Aug 010. 168. Versus Laboratory, “Cutting the “Not”: Workshop on Negativity and Reflexivity, Friday 10 September 2010 - Sunday 12 September 2010” (in Maastricht), at Versus Laboratory, via Fabio Cunctator, “Negativity and Reflexivity”, at hyper tiling, 24 Aug 010; Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (tr. Marc Lowenthal); Richard Long, Gravity; Eileen Tabios, “I Do”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Maurice Blanchot, “The Madness of the Day” (try Lydia Davis), at scribd, via Shahar Ozeri, “Madness of the Day (Blanchot)”, at Perverse Egalitarianism, 24 Aug 010; Wade Davis, “Last of Their Kind: What Is Lost When Cultures Die?”, at Scientific American, Sept 010, via Peter Gratton, “The Last Man …”, at Philosophy in a Time of Error, 24 Aug 010; SPD blurb for Leslie Scalapino, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom; Ray DiPalma, “Obloquium & Committer of Tidings: Ten poems”, 1, at Jacket 40; Ron Silliman, untitled links list, at Silliman’s Blog, 23 Aug 010; back-cover blurb for Jake Chapman, Memoirs of My Writer’s Block. All print books quoted bought at Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

“Ideally, nothing should be shown but a horsefly and a trashcan. I wasn’t good and I wasn’t cute. No clumsy moon to chalk up the doorway. If your hand is on your knee, you didn’t put it there. Montaigne has a wonderful chapter about this.”

It’s all about fucking, observes Mr Niko Vassilakis of Seattle, Washington. Go ahead sneeze. The church where once spoke William Lloyd Garrison. Winged cocks in the shape of cherubim. Amphibian salamanders, cunning

serpents, venomous scorpions, slaughtered burros, bats and birds. After all, Dr Lakra is the grandson of psychoanalysts. Then B- went to bury the spine near the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

[Note: Sources: Robert Bresson, from a French television interview by Roger Stephane, 1966, as quoted in Tom Clark, “Robert Bresson: Cinema”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 22 Aug 010; Del Ray Cross, “dove love”, in Lub Luffly; Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “No Clumsy Moon to Chalk Up the Doorway”, in Selenography; John Olson, “Inclined”, in Backscatter: new and selected poems; something Mary May said as we drove by a church, 22 Aug 010; Abraham Cruzvillegas, “Health & Efficiency”, in Dr Lakra, Health & Efficiency; family legend; Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic Resonance and Morphic Fields: An Introduction”, at Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist and Author, Feb 05, via Fabio Cunctator, “Sheldrake and the Habits of Nature”, at hyper tiling, 22 Aug 010]

The level of magical thinking here is impressive: I’m supposed to have the ability to compromise the computers of people who argue with me in the comments sections of my blog by tricking them into downloading malware (the witch’s familiar!) and to have used this ability for the traditional evil-magic purposes of scrying, haunting, blighting and so on. ‘In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking,’ Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. ‘The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies and a rogue, university-funded team of geologists researching ever-lower levels of the earth, forcing themselves downward with separating devices that pin open rocky wounds to split whole landmasses along unanticipated

faultlines. Using these tools—terrain deformation grenades gone linear—they create islands in the earth's crust, like walled castles of geology, carving out new blocks in the landscape. As the saying goes, ‘on a large enough time scale everything is a blur’. The flux and flow of the kosmos, although not the whole story, is a major theme. There’s one exception: the first scene in the film, in which two women have rather disaffected and not obviously terribly satisfactory sex on a train; it does something almost unimaginable from the point of view of porn: it repeatedly interrupts the sex to show the landscape

through which the train is traveling.’ What is the systemic “core” of the hardcore continuum then? It’s a particular set of relations based around pirate radio, dubplates, raves and rave-style clubs, along with certain kinds of music-making technology. The system coalesced gradually, enjoyed a prime, but now may well be fading away or disintegrating as terrestrial broadcast pirate radio wanes in importance, while DJs increasingly move to digital formats and make a name for themselves with give-away mixes and podcasts on the web. Similar to the emergence of merchant trade and early capitalism in parallel with a waning feudalism, a new system, fully integrated with the web, eclipses the older one. But even in my rush to gullet-cram I was surprised that it actually managed to convey both burgerness and pizzaness in a single bite.

[Note: Sources: Dominic Fox, “Notes on a Scandal”, at Poetix, 21 Aug 010; Graham Harman, “early adulthood”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 21 Aug 010, quoting a bit from Robin Marantz Henig, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”, at New York Times Magazine, 18 Aug 010; Geoff Manaugh, “Car Jack Planet”, at BLDG/BLOG, 20 Aug 010; Michael ??, “Of Objects and Assemblages”, at Archive Fire, 11 Aug 010, as quoted in Levi R Bryant, “Split-Objects, Local Manifestations, Exo-Relations, and Regimes of Attraction “, at Larval Subjects, 21 Aug 010; Voyou Désœuvré, “Making Sure Sex is Boring”, at Voyou Désœuvré, 3? Aug 010; Simon Reynolds, “The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate”, at Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol 1, No 2 (2010) via Simon Reynolds, “caution: you are now entering a theory zone”, at Blissblog, 5 Aug 010; Robyn Lee, “A Look at Burger King's Latest Whopper Bar in NYC and Their New Pizza Burgers”, at A Hamburger Today, 18 Aug 010]

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, or does it mean that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for to restore windspeeds to sunfire the conscious garden where Siberian tribesmen circle in satire to their freak on the generations on the packed cells and dreaming shoots? According to Cudahy, the “super-bong,” composed of an intricate network of plastic tubing, a motor from a lawn mower, several five-gallon buckets of ice water and a fully functional antique pool table, was “so unbelievable, I couldn't hardly believe what I was

fuckin’ lookin’ at.” He took off his shirt, revealing a T-shirt underneath with the words “What do I know?” on them. Then he turns around to show us “What should I do?” And then all he did was read a poem that consisted of nothing but questions but what questions those were, uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence? Behold Modernauts. 1973, people: “It would be unfair to turn Gaza into a legend because we will end up hating her when we discover that she is nothing more than a small, poor city that resists. And when we ask, ‘What has made her into a legend?’ we will have to break our mirrors and cry if we have any dignity

or curse her if we refused to rebel against ourselves.” 2010: The lowering of labor costs in the US toward the levels that exist in Asia is at the heart of the Obama administration’s so-called “jobs” program. For sale the rusted artery of a galactic bulldozer replete with insignia, crowbar, and dreary motel curtains. The vomit can speak now … we are all under pressure to regress. My cup of piss has ignited and will soon be beamed elsewhere. And a whole future into a fifth an eyelash. They do not break through so unequivocally as say – hunger, the drive that is always left out of psychoanalytical theory. Luckily, Leo is pleased I’m going to law school, because he wants me to be able to decide what the law is.

[Note: 1st of a series written in Boston. All sampled print books except for the Bloch – the book I’m actually reading straight through – were purchased there. Sources: Nina Power, “roundtable on capital cfp”, at Infinite ThØught, 20 Aug 010; Eric Mottram, “AGAINST TYRANNY : ELEGY 4”, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Against Tyranny”, at Nomadics, 20 Aug 010; Edwin Morgan (i.m.), untited (?), as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Edwin Morgan, 1920-2010)”, at Nomadics, 20 Aug 010; anonymous, “Stoner Regales Friends With Tale Of This One Bong He Saw In Iowa City Once”, at The Onion, 31 Mar 99, via Graham Harman, “Iowa City in The Onion”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 20 Aug 010; Geof Huth, “Avant Writing Symposium, Day 1”, at dbqp, 19 Aug 010 (this particular bit refers to Tom Beckett); Ian Bogost, “Modernauts”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 19 Aug 010; Mahmoud Darwish, “Silence for the Sake of Gaza,” as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Gaza: Between the Fence & a Hard Place”, at Nomadics, 19 Aug 010; Jodi Dean, “The assault on US workers’ wages”, at I cite, 19 Aug 010; John Olson, “Sale (after Rimbaud)”, in Backscatter: new and selected poems; TBrian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; Del Ray Cross, “The Sky Inside This Table”, in Lub Luffly; Joshua Marie Wikinson, “A Collating Light”, in Selenography; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (trs. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight); Stan Apps, “relationships.”, at Freewill Applicator, 19 Aug 010]

A Portrait of Geof Huth Preparing for His Next Poetry Performance

[Note: Source: unidentified Netherlandish artist; also known as Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus (1475-1500), Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

In the House of the Hangman 167 & 168 (Boston 4 & 5)

Like the lips that never once closed, the buildings on both sides of the street at night, the sound of them being fed the night sky through their huge openings, as I raise my head, an old woman lying on the pavement is scraping off wads of gum. The whole

construction thus debuts through the birth of the first accident, which ceases to be similar to itself; it debuts through a dissonance and cannot debut otherwise. “In a cave I saw” “a film projected” “onto a rock wall” – “Father’s Uterus, or The Map” – the six-

day firestorm – and an eldritch eschatology. The stink of the ditches bothered us / they had to serve as our drains / now they are all dried up and there are no mosquitoes. My work’s more jagged now. Don’t let the thunderclap hit you on the way out. Fairyland over Cielo Drive, Highway 1, Route 66, East Side & West Side Highways, New Jersey Turnpike, Spaghetti Junction, and further up SKYLAB, the firmament, and the wind that always chooses silence, like the dead flowers torn from flabby flesh I mean the melodious soil.

This means, above all, to appreciate the field of negativity as a “garden of forking pathways”, a tissue of interwoven philosophical lineages, with branches extending to extra-philosophical domains. This means when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds. The time yield of water making its way down walls. Such a gesture can only mean what it means: I do not want to remain hungry and I am looking at your

mouth. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), “Every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.” The big man with the bad knee asked a LOT of questions, described by Michael McClure as follows: “This has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs’s Cities of the Red

Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey’s Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger--and it blows with the elegance of a horse--or a wolf ... Virginia Woolf!” Discerning a spectacle in the collisions of welcome returns a false note to the mystery—but the crowd is so large no strangeness is noted; want to buy Salinger’s toilet? Another big guy’s Bao Xishun, whose arms are so long he can “fish” deadly pieces of plastic flotsam from the stomachs of unfortunate whales.

[Note: Sources: 167. Kim Hyesoon, “A Sublime Kitchen”, “I Scribble Away at a Letter”, in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (tr. Don Mee Choi); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, as quoted in Éric Alliez, Capital Times (tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele); Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette; a word I promised Geof Huth I’d use while we were standing by the checkout counter in Webs, waiting for the cashier to remove at least an inch of finger from her nose, 24 Aug 010; Hiromi Ito, “Father’s Uterus, or The Map”, “Trans-Population”, “A Poem for Ueno-San”, in Killing Kanoko (tr. Jeffrey Angles); Éric Alliez, Capital Times (tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele) (p. 170, concerning Geoffrey de Thierry, De sex dierum operabus); something Nancy Huth said (I think I got the “jagged” right) 24 Aug 010, over lunch, maybe?; K, 24 Aug 010, somewhere on route 9 between Amherst and Worcester; Claude Pelieu, Kali Yug Express (tr. Mary Beach), at Nomadics, 25 Aug 010. All print books quoted above bought at Amherst Books, 24 Aug 010. 168. Versus Laboratory, “Cutting the “Not”: Workshop on Negativity and Reflexivity, Friday 10 September 2010 - Sunday 12 September 2010” (in Maastricht), at Versus Laboratory, via Fabio Cunctator, “Negativity and Reflexivity”, at hyper tiling, 24 Aug 010; Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (tr. Marc Lowenthal); Richard Long, Gravity; Eileen Tabios, “I Do”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Maurice Blanchot, “The Madness of the Day” (try Lydia Davis), at scribd, via Shahar Ozeri, “Madness of the Day (Blanchot)”, at Perverse Egalitarianism, 24 Aug 010; Wade Davis, “Last of Their Kind: What Is Lost When Cultures Die?”, at Scientific American, Sept 010, via Peter Gratton, “The Last Man …”, at Philosophy in a Time of Error, 24 Aug 010; SPD blurb for Leslie Scalapino, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom; Ray DiPalma, “Obloquium & Committer of Tidings: Ten poems”, 1, at Jacket 40; Ron Silliman, untitled links list, at Silliman’s Blog, 23 Aug 010; back-cover blurb for Jake Chapman, Memoirs of My Writer’s Block. All print books quoted bought at Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

In the House of the Hangman 166 (Boston 3)

“Ideally, nothing should be shown but a horsefly and a trashcan. I wasn’t good and I wasn’t cute. No clumsy moon to chalk up the doorway. If your hand is on your knee, you didn’t put it there. Montaigne has a wonderful chapter about this.”

It’s all about fucking, observes Mr Niko Vassilakis of Seattle, Washington. Go ahead sneeze. The church where once spoke William Lloyd Garrison. Winged cocks in the shape of cherubim. Amphibian salamanders, cunning

serpents, venomous scorpions, slaughtered burros, bats and birds. After all, Dr Lakra is the grandson of psychoanalysts. Then B- went to bury the spine near the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

[Note: Sources: Robert Bresson, from a French television interview by Roger Stephane, 1966, as quoted in Tom Clark, “Robert Bresson: Cinema”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 22 Aug 010; Del Ray Cross, “dove love”, in Lub Luffly; Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “No Clumsy Moon to Chalk Up the Doorway”, in Selenography; John Olson, “Inclined”, in Backscatter: new and selected poems; something Mary May said as we drove by a church, 22 Aug 010; Abraham Cruzvillegas, “Health & Efficiency”, in Dr Lakra, Health & Efficiency; family legend; Rupert Sheldrake, “Morphic Resonance and Morphic Fields: An Introduction”, at Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist and Author, Feb 05, via Fabio Cunctator, “Sheldrake and the Habits of Nature”, at hyper tiling, 22 Aug 010]

In the House of the Hangman 165 (Boston 2)

The level of magical thinking here is impressive: I’m supposed to have the ability to compromise the computers of people who argue with me in the comments sections of my blog by tricking them into downloading malware (the witch’s familiar!) and to have used this ability for the traditional evil-magic purposes of scrying, haunting, blighting and so on. ‘In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking,’ Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. ‘The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies and a rogue, university-funded team of geologists researching ever-lower levels of the earth, forcing themselves downward with separating devices that pin open rocky wounds to split whole landmasses along unanticipated

faultlines. Using these tools—terrain deformation grenades gone linear—they create islands in the earth's crust, like walled castles of geology, carving out new blocks in the landscape. As the saying goes, ‘on a large enough time scale everything is a blur’. The flux and flow of the kosmos, although not the whole story, is a major theme. There’s one exception: the first scene in the film, in which two women have rather disaffected and not obviously terribly satisfactory sex on a train; it does something almost unimaginable from the point of view of porn: it repeatedly interrupts the sex to show the landscape

through which the train is traveling.’ What is the systemic “core” of the hardcore continuum then? It’s a particular set of relations based around pirate radio, dubplates, raves and rave-style clubs, along with certain kinds of music-making technology. The system coalesced gradually, enjoyed a prime, but now may well be fading away or disintegrating as terrestrial broadcast pirate radio wanes in importance, while DJs increasingly move to digital formats and make a name for themselves with give-away mixes and podcasts on the web. Similar to the emergence of merchant trade and early capitalism in parallel with a waning feudalism, a new system, fully integrated with the web, eclipses the older one. But even in my rush to gullet-cram I was surprised that it actually managed to convey both burgerness and pizzaness in a single bite.

[Note: Sources: Dominic Fox, “Notes on a Scandal”, at Poetix, 21 Aug 010; Graham Harman, “early adulthood”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 21 Aug 010, quoting a bit from Robin Marantz Henig, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”, at New York Times Magazine, 18 Aug 010; Geoff Manaugh, “Car Jack Planet”, at BLDG/BLOG, 20 Aug 010; Michael ??, “Of Objects and Assemblages”, at Archive Fire, 11 Aug 010, as quoted in Levi R Bryant, “Split-Objects, Local Manifestations, Exo-Relations, and Regimes of Attraction “, at Larval Subjects, 21 Aug 010; Voyou Désœuvré, “Making Sure Sex is Boring”, at Voyou Désœuvré, 3? Aug 010; Simon Reynolds, “The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate”, at Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol 1, No 2 (2010) via Simon Reynolds, “caution: you are now entering a theory zone”, at Blissblog, 5 Aug 010; Robyn Lee, “A Look at Burger King's Latest Whopper Bar in NYC and Their New Pizza Burgers”, at A Hamburger Today, 18 Aug 010]

In the House of the Hangman 164 (Boston 1)

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, or does it mean that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for to restore windspeeds to sunfire the conscious garden where Siberian tribesmen circle in satire to their freak on the generations on the packed cells and dreaming shoots? According to Cudahy, the “super-bong,” composed of an intricate network of plastic tubing, a motor from a lawn mower, several five-gallon buckets of ice water and a fully functional antique pool table, was “so unbelievable, I couldn't hardly believe what I was

fuckin’ lookin’ at.” He took off his shirt, revealing a T-shirt underneath with the words “What do I know?” on them. Then he turns around to show us “What should I do?” And then all he did was read a poem that consisted of nothing but questions but what questions those were, uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence? Behold Modernauts. 1973, people: “It would be unfair to turn Gaza into a legend because we will end up hating her when we discover that she is nothing more than a small, poor city that resists. And when we ask, ‘What has made her into a legend?’ we will have to break our mirrors and cry if we have any dignity

or curse her if we refused to rebel against ourselves.” 2010: The lowering of labor costs in the US toward the levels that exist in Asia is at the heart of the Obama administration’s so-called “jobs” program. For sale the rusted artery of a galactic bulldozer replete with insignia, crowbar, and dreary motel curtains. The vomit can speak now … we are all under pressure to regress. My cup of piss has ignited and will soon be beamed elsewhere. And a whole future into a fifth an eyelash. They do not break through so unequivocally as say – hunger, the drive that is always left out of psychoanalytical theory. Luckily, Leo is pleased I’m going to law school, because he wants me to be able to decide what the law is.

[Note: 1st of a series written in Boston. All sampled print books except for the Bloch – the book I’m actually reading straight through – were purchased there. Sources: Nina Power, “roundtable on capital cfp”, at Infinite ThØught, 20 Aug 010; Eric Mottram, “AGAINST TYRANNY : ELEGY 4”, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Against Tyranny”, at Nomadics, 20 Aug 010; Edwin Morgan (i.m.), untited (?), as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Edwin Morgan, 1920-2010)”, at Nomadics, 20 Aug 010; anonymous, “Stoner Regales Friends With Tale Of This One Bong He Saw In Iowa City Once”, at The Onion, 31 Mar 99, via Graham Harman, “Iowa City in The Onion”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 20 Aug 010; Geof Huth, “Avant Writing Symposium, Day 1”, at dbqp, 19 Aug 010 (this particular bit refers to Tom Beckett); Ian Bogost, “Modernauts”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 19 Aug 010; Mahmoud Darwish, “Silence for the Sake of Gaza,” as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Gaza: Between the Fence & a Hard Place”, at Nomadics, 19 Aug 010; Jodi Dean, “The assault on US workers’ wages”, at I cite, 19 Aug 010; John Olson, “Sale (after Rimbaud)”, in Backscatter: new and selected poems; TBrian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; Del Ray Cross, “The Sky Inside This Table”, in Lub Luffly; Joshua Marie Wikinson, “A Collating Light”, in Selenography; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (trs. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight); Stan Apps, “relationships.”, at Freewill Applicator, 19 Aug 010]