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In the House of the Hangman 324

Che Guevara and I met again at the annual conference in Wichita. We set to scavenging the pre-conference breakfast platters, pouring ourselves some black coffee and catching up on business. Over the course of conversation, Che became alarmingly introspective and by the time we finished our cups he made this observation: “While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness: that of a solitary being seeking harmony with the world.” At first I was taken aback, confused as I was by his statement, but it all started to make sense as the day progressed. Indeed, later that night in my motel room I was consumed with Che’s insights: “Profuse reclaim from a scrape or belt, funnel do / axial parenthood block the mustard dots briefly / act forward...”; “Assuming banishment for lost time back across nullity...”; “Pacify rag hands attachment in for muted /

counter-march or locked in going to drainage...” Do not adjunct your set! Do not change that diode! But by all means take the next exit at Market Street if you want to ride into the sunset of a fading empire and its Western Sizzler buffet of fandangoed gallows haunted bible-belt funhousery. Do not Pascal. Do not collect toe wonder doll wars, as the propane runs out, and families try to subsist on Froot Loops, and the re-po squad turns up to haul away the Ford F-150 Raptor. Meanwhile, in their last remaining refuge from harsh reality, TV, they glimpse the likes of Jamie Dimon, Chloe Kardashian, and Jay-Z emerging from limos on their way to the 14th International Graduate Conference in Philosophy at the University of Essex, ‘PHILOSOPHY IN CRISIS’, where they will discuss the following: ♣ Does the study of philosophy need to be justified? ♣ What are the implications and epistemological effects? Or put still another way

in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend just watching the ads. December 2010. A high metallic wire. Content exceeds phrase. > White tonal light < to never be get outside of its value theories of transmission noise > as in / listen Target A, the holding centre < it was a hunger strike, or listen I abhor my country < ok. And all others. But what else could worship mean but to remain? In the barren prairie. In the worldwide Gobi. In the worst ice. We need unity. To build unity, you cannot accept that someone else’s job is expendable or that someone else’s rights should be lost. Today, instead of watching a movie like a normal family, we preformed random acts of kindness by handing out roses to strangers in the freezing cold. No one would take them. Happy New Year. In 2011 we could use a little more feathers and glitter while we’re blocking the streets and throwing whatever ain’t tied down at the cops. Just saying. Oh. And another thing. Can anybody find my man Richard a bottle of cold duck?

[Note: Sources: Caleb Puckett, Grant Matthew Jenkins, as quoted in an email from Mark Young/Otoliths, “Out from Otoliths — ‘Market Street Exit’ by Caleb Puckett”, rec’d 31 Dec 010, 6:18 a.m.; JH Prynne, as quoted in Robert Potts, “through the oval window”, at Guardian, 10 Apr 04; James Howard Kunstler, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “The Moment of Convulsion (James Howard Kunstler)”, at I cite, 31 Dec 010; JBR; Nina Power, “philosophy in crisis” (posting a CFP), at Infinite ThØught, 31 Dec 010; Clay Shirky, as quoted in Joshua Benton, “I have found the cognitive surplus, and it hates pigs”, at Nieman Journalism Lab, 29 Dec 010; FML. various, at FML: your everyday life stories; Sean Bonney, “after Rimbaud (by any means necessary)”, “from the department (after Rimbaud)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 10 Dec, 3 Sept 010; JBR; Peter O’Leary, “Somnia”, at Woodland Pattern; Mark Serwotka, as quoted in Richard Seymour, “The workers, united”, at Lenin’s Tomb, 31 Dec 010; Sina Queyras, “Happy New Year”, at Lemon Hound, 31 Dec 010; JBR, after Richard Lopez, “a bottle of cold duck”, at Really Bad Movies, 30 Dec 010; Bonney, O’Leary and Prynne are suggested by Mark Scroggins, “year’s end iii”, at Culture Industry, 31 Dec 010]

In the House of the Hangman 323

Be that as it may. “People love to eat such foods as buffalo wings whether they have been fried, baked, or even bar-b-qued. People love to eat shrimp in the same manner. The only thing missing is the best of both worlds, buffalo wings and shrimp as a single unit.” I call patent. Is it really true that “Where there is grief, there is little fiction, and where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief”? And this is what I didn’t want, as “my animator” picks up battery fluid. She has a beautiful, amazing sense of pacing when it comes to the surfaces and depths: topographical aesthetics perhaps. I don’t know really what I mean by this, or whether the cracks should be bridged. But glass fiber, MPC, micro-glitches, deliciously placed spoken-word samples, expansive organs, flickers of late wonky electronica and aqua-crunk, classic boom-bap drums, deep ambience, and swelling strings can do it if you want. See this pigeon? It’s a true

albino. Incandescent. I’m most terribly sorry my absurd politics scores you the mother of all vinegar. Let the atrocious images haunt us. You can go ahead & punch in your PIN. And watch hummingbirds. “For the structure of an infinite, unchanging and homogeneous space—in short, a purely mathematical space—is quite unlike the structure of psychophysiological space.” They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere. Wait until the moon is out. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you’re not standing in an open field. “I Need a Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. And keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. A lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it. That fluffy non-matter did not exist was not a help. Light cannot round a corner. Questions do not just happen out of you. At night, I can see many suns. The snowflakes clot and plummet like

barges. The woman with silver hair seemingly hewn seasonally; pearl earring evoking a control button; heavy shuttered eyelids, triple thick and accordion bunching like chins; soft freckled jowls shuddering opposite her vehement headshakes as she disagreed with her companion. A. wanted to shoot the snow. Concerning things we have mentioned from the beginning the ulterior mouth of the word was pressed against celestial gnaw all along, the beam starts as a featureless clump and pauses as fanged noumena. Why doesn’t he speak from his own insanity? He would love to have a t-shirt of the dueling secateurs cover of The Speculative Turn. It’s the Stockholm Syndrome, Jodi, broken people can learn to like anything. Where did I read about Rae Armantrout’s first acid trip? She watched her body being colonized … via her pores or something … by an interminable legion of tiny American flags …

[Note: Sources: JBR; Nicola Twilley, “This Exemplary Embodiment: The Year in Food Patents”, at GOOD, 27 Dec 010; JBR; Samuel Johnson, as quoted by Seamus Heaney, in Mike JohnDuff, “The perfectly made-up thing”, at Working Notes, 30 Dec 010; Jack Kimball, untitled, at Pantaloons, 22 Dec, 8 Dec, 15 Dec 010; Johannes Goranssön, “Claire Denis”, at Montevidayo, 30 Dec 010; blurb for Blue Ducks, at Records on Ribs, via Ben Woodard, “Alternate download for The Speculative Turn”, at Speculative Heresy, 30 Dec 010; Susan Sontag, Erwin Panofsky, as quoted in at Benedikt Ledebur, “The paradox of the real in art”, at in|ad|ae|qu|at; David Brazil, “Understanding The Material Practices of Glamour”, at Elective Affinities, 22 Dec 010; “Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing”, at WFMU, 30 Mar 09; Laura Moriarty, untitled, at Ultravioleta Docs, 12 Oct 08; Chris Vitiello, untitled, at the delay, 5 Dec 010; Lissa Wolzak, A Defence of Being – Second Ana, at Esther Press, 1 Dec 010; JBR, tho fanged noumena is Nick Land; Nada Gordon, “I don’t understand”, at Ululations, 30 Dec 010; Graham Harman, “another thing about The Speculative Turn”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 30 Dec 010; JBR, re Jodi Dean, “Crawling backwards on an escalator (from critique to communism)”, at I cite, 27 Dec 010, in which she seems to say that “alienation is not the problem …” because lots of people like their jobs … she’s an expert, and I’m just a guy, but liking/hating one’s job has nothing to do with anything, especially not alienation, at least not the Marxist meaning of alienation, unless I’m completely nuts … ; JBR (I actually did read this just a day or two ago … can’t for the life of me …)]

In the House of the Hangman 322

CLOVE PLASTIC SNEER POLLEN MESSIAH FEATHER.
The extremely clear rain blank
the extremely dark dark blank           the glass that stands on the table. They leap up, rush storming toward us: along with locomotives, car tires, vacuum cleaners. “Wassup?” nods the spotlight, “Yo!” sing the telephone wires, winding along angsty roads. “Dancing tigers!” Car tires, stockings, cough drops. Don’t’cha love it? 2 Hs meet an O – squeeeawk! Outside jazz. “That morning she went to the tattoo artist...” etc. We all carry the sparkling diamond oar. I didn’t think of John Wayne but of John Wayne on fire. Ants crawling on a

crucifix. Emperor Nero’s Loupe – a 2000 Year Old Aquamarine Lens. When we look down that assemblage of lobes and stalks seems to be one thing, even if it looks nothing like our ID photo. • move your mouse; • press the spacebar; • tap the arrow keys; • move the visible lattice up, right, down, or left; • tap the A and Z keys to zoom in and out; • type a pair of coordinates into the navigation box at the bottom and press enter to move anywhere – anywhere at all – in the sea of (con)text. “Gregor Samsa is a humble young man who supports his unemployed parents and teenage sister by working as a traveling fabric salesman til he wakes up late for work one morning and discovers that he has inexplicably become an adorable kitten.” That’s not a

typo, it’s a symptom. According to a study by Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley, the top 1 percent of earners captured 2/3 of all economic growth between 2002 and 2007. The most recent census statistics show a continued march in the same unbalanced direction. The bottom 20 percent of the population—which earned 5.4 percent of national income in 1967—earned just 3.4 percent of it in 2009. The highest 20 percent went from 41.5 to 49.4 over the same period. The Gini Index—the standard measure of income inequality—ticked up again between 2008 and 2009, from .451 to .458. According to the CIA World Factbook, this figure puts the United States ahead of Russia and Turkey in inequality, and on par with Mexico and the Philippines.

[Note: Sources: a bunch from Typo 7. Michael McClure, “After the Solstice”, in Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems (ed. Leslie Scalapino); Jenny Tunedal, “A Chapter” (tr. Rika Lesser), at Typo 7; Henry Parland, “The Revolution of Things” (tr. Johannes Göransson), at Typo 7; Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History; Jan Sjölund, “The Daisy” (tr. Kristi Sigler), at Typo 7; Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain LXIV (tr. Rika Lesser), at Typo 7;Michael Robins, “My Life as an Edge of the Lawless Frontier”, at Typo 6; Pensum, “ants crawling on a crucifix”, at However Fallible, 24 Dec 010 (on the Smithsonian’s removal of David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly from its Hide/Seek exhibit); email from Pricegems rec’d 29 Dec 010 03:03:09 PST; Shelley Jackson, “Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl”, at MIT Communications Forum; Nick Monfort and Stephanie Strickland, “Sea and Spar Between”, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, at Dear Navigator, 1:2/3; “Kafka meets kittens? 2011 will bring the ‘Meowmorphosis’, at LA Times, 29 Dec 010; JBR;Jacob Weisberg, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “Inequality (excerpts from Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine)”, at I cite, 29 Dec 010]

In the House of the Hangman 321

Covered in birth, you are fearful. The moment of birth is fearful in the sense of awe fear. You sit there all day long and don’t want to move, afraid your feet could hurt the dust, a poetry generator. It’s all because the key witness in the case won’t show up to testify. Number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? … What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? “Medea sings a skin language” “restored to pieces / hung in trees” “birds birds birds / the word

birds flies around / look at you / look at you” “singing danger meat” “prosody arrays what wheat / we have” “how the nightingale orphaned / of her tongue” “words come up but / she's taken the genital idea” “Let's ram away” “tails spread like a fan of knives” “whose thicket / whose thicket” “let go your breath / and aching things” “choral ardor / coming up from air” Then I saw another place - a mill filled with gears and swinging pendulums. And I saw a King and Queen walk into that room and, the King took his sword and beheaded the Queen, and the Queen rose up without a head and decapitated the King, and their blood rolled in rivers

out of the mill and across the state. From that blood grew many black castles, and the dead stood up in their graves and clawed their way out of the earth to live in those black castles...Snowflakes under a microscope. Some look like ruins of an alien city. In line with this uncanny formulation the darkness of the lived moment therefore coincides in its total depth with the essential, but not here-existing mode of existence of the goal-content itself, which was once intended by the mythological term God. “FROM THE NON-BEGINNING OF THE WAVE to the endlessness IS A GOLDEN LION watching the black fly on its paw.”

[Note: Sources: Ginger Stickney, “Wonderfully Made”, at Green Tea Ginger, 28 Dec 010; Liu Xiaobo, “WAIT FOR ME WITH THE DUST”, as quoted in in Pierre Joris, “Liu Xiabobo [sic] @ 55”, at Nomadics, 28 Dec 010; Nick Monfort and Stephanie Strickland, “Sea and Spar Between”, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, at Dear Navigator, 1:2/3; Hannah Weiner, “Weeks 50”, in Weeks, at Scribd; Fiona Templeton, The Medead, as quoted in Robin Tremblay-McGaw, “Fiona Templeton: Medea sings a skin of air”, at X Poetics, 22 Dec 010; Jesse Glass, The Lost Poet, as quoted in Paul Sutton, “Theatre of the Absurd: No Poetry Without Drama” (a review of Glass’s Lost Poet), at Stride Magazine, Nov 010; Phillip Torrone, “Snowflakes under the microscope”, at Make: Technology on Your Time, 25 Dec 010; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (trs. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul Knight); Michael McClure, Swirls in Asphalt 48, in Michael McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems (ed. Leslie Scalapino)]

In the House of the Hangman 320

Hello! Hello! The clouds are doused in gasoline. Hello! I need to focus my eyes, or perhaps let them go out of focus completely. It’s a big empty universe, averaging only five atoms per cubic meter. Cymbalta is interesting in that it has an S stereocenter, but turns polarized light to the right in a polarimeter. It is also interesting in that it made me feel like I was drunk for the first couple days, hung over for the next week, and horribly social and chatty for the entire month. Unfortunately, it also prevented me from sleeping for more than three hour stretches. You don’t need to hug a rainbow to want 31 miles per gallon. Savella, then. The problem is the two stereocenters and the cyclopropane. Milnacipran is the (1R, 2S) enantiomer. I am not deep enough into organic chemistry to know how various cyclics tend to function in

complex pharmaceutical compounds, but I do know that cyclopropanes are under a lot of tension, and I just don’t trust them enough to want them floating around where they don’t exist naturally. Would you trust this guy in your synapses?
Automatic background check. My arms shake and I can’t walk worth shit. It’s “not golden like a bar of gold / (an ingot) / or golden like honey / or paint on a football helmet. / It’s another kind of gold.” It’s a very pink Philip Guston kind of gold. Like in The Paw. The paw is white but. “The tension of awkwardness.” The drinks are like exotic aquariums, each contains a mysterious underwater

world. As for the monsters themselves, there were obviously lots of them I had forgotten about in the past 27 years, but the two I liked best were the blink dog (which can simply teleport out of harmful situations) and its mortal enemy the displacer beast (a kind of tentacled puma that always appears 3 feet away from its true position, in a random direction). The point is, we’ve been looking for consciousness in the wrong place, as a bonus prize for being highly evolved. What an absurdly anti-Darwinian notion. Instead, I wonder, why not look for consciousness lower down? Thus I'm happy to report that fruit flies exhibit decision-like behavior. Bacteria talk to one another. Slime molds solve mazes, and look at this website devoted to plant cognition, for real.

[Note: Sources: Chad Sweeney, “Wednesday”, as quoted in Kate Angus, review of Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek, at Coldfront; David Sewell, and Michael Earl Craig, “After a Terrifying Nap”, in Sewell’s review of Craig’s Thin Kimono, at Coldfront; James Richardson, “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home.”, as quoted in John Deming’s review of Richardson’s By the Numbers, at Coldfront; Alysa Joaquin, “Better Living Through Chemistry”, at Particles of Insight, 25 Dec 010 (an extraordinary post); Mitsubishi commercial, during “Independence Day” approx. 8:10 p.m., 26 Dec 010 and a commercial for some online paranoiacs-r-us-type service, just after; JBR; Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness, as quoted in Ian Bogost, “Awkwardness”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 27 Dec 010; Albert Gross (Zoe Beloff), “The Banquet”, in The Adventures of a Dreamer; Graham Harman, “on the disappearance of quaint prose”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 27 Dec 010; Timothy Morton, “Plant Cognition”, at Ecology without Nature<, 26 Dec 010 (the website mentioned is Plant Cognition)]

In the House of the Hangman 319

Or maybe she could. But she isn’t. Am I? to for one letter never fabulousa Fubbles! a foolows if of an other until will not and an letter ur fll a, e, (◙      debris) coo coo voodoo way, is, if, its, it’s fay a way in«to plot the dots of newly-hatched clusters of weather bombs because all of it was already too screwed up to have to deal with that if democracy and yes, we all ended up on the I don’t know what kind of shitty epiphany list, it was sort of like we’ll never find out if our nerves are solar emanations, if the page is parasitical on the secretions of my brain eternity is me, in the middle of the study, weighing on an invisible scale an entire harvest of potatoes ♩♩♪♪ upper limit leaves (air
         ?
), lower limit dirt (water?

?). & telescopes at the caravan grounds.             
            ‘
the lightbulb’
Beyond sleep and death objects exist in a twilight state of polypsychism. This forgotten work Ernst abandoned when the war came used to be called “Eight Rubber Bands Stretched in the Queen’s Butter Before Her Black Stocking Was Removed by the Winter Wind.” Next thing you know he runs off with a reality star named Shonda. Which is a line from Killers. Every moment of the day is equally bizarre, it was savage mammal action, of the human kind, but artistic, and therefore a little mellow in the nutshell, transformed pre-trance formations, the first I’d ever heard of yet The Gleam keep returning to the source—in tears like a

hungry lion. You can read Epictetus or drive your Toyota Echo into a lamppost. You can watch a movie about angels or lose your way in the valley of sexual dependency. You can teach a person to swim. And then I said Nah, Earth’s bits of little blackness are just places where the whites of our eyes have rolled back. It’s like the condom has tightened, you see. It’s like nobody’s home to hammer the plow into a new set of teeth. We, too, have one life and live it terribly, like fake Elvises. I can see why you equated space with red and time with blue. Let there be 4 & 6. Everybody’s here in Prada sackcloth, listening to the elephant music of the playground’s rusted swings. Your spiritual life, by contrast, were it a plant, would not be native to some rain forest, but to an immense desert. The philosopher measures the injury caused by this puncture wound. Which only itches. A conflagration roving down the hill. Breathing it in. Now this is air.

[Note: Sources: A lot of stuff from Reconfigurations 4. JBR; Michael Basinski, “TRAILERS”, at http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/2010/11/michael-basinski-trailers-piglets.html Reconfigurations 4; Iain Britton, “That Otherness”, at Reconfigurations 4; Chus Pato, “that’s it, they killed me”, “the battle”, “i, Davinia”, in m-Talá (tr. Erín Moure); JBR; uMichael Farrell, “lower limit growl”, at Reconfigurations 4; S C Hickman, “Graham Harman and Polysychism: OOO: Casino Metaphysics; or The Interior Life of Objects”, at Dark Chemistry, 25 Dec 010; Ray Gonzalez, “THREE UNFINISHED MASTERPIECES”, at Reconfigurations 4; the movie Killers and JBR; Stan Apps, This Club Will Have Anyone (randomized); Stan Apps, This Club Will Have Anyone; Halvard Johnson, “Humoreske”, at Reconfigurations 4; Robert Mukiibi, “THE PLANET WONDERS”, at Reconfigurations 4; Piotr Gwiazda, “Ohio and West”, at Past Simple 9; Nicole Mauro, “Going Rogue (When I Heard the Song of What I See) by Sarah Palin, Emily Dickinson, and Nicole Mauro”, at Delirious Hem, 18 Dec 010; NTom Christopher, “Historia”, at Past Simple 9; Jason Mashak, “How to Know the One”, at Past Simple 9; Catherine Borders & Lily Robert-Foley, “Telephone”, at Reconfigurations 4; Ewa Chrusciel, “Triangular Sketches”, at Omnidawn Publishing Blog, 15 Dec 010; Brandon Brown, “Catullus 64”, at Peacock Online Review; Donald Revell, “Can’t Stand It”, as quoted in Tim Erickson’s review of Revell’s The Bitter Withy, at Chicago Review, Autumn/Winter 10/11; Joseph Donahue, “Corpse Flower”, at Past Simple 9; Elizabeth Robinson, “The Previous Poem”, “Reach”, at Peacock Online Review; Nada Gordon, “Welt”, at Ululations, 26 Dec 010]

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In the House of the Hangman 318

Now, what about the premises -- the claims that are not the conclusions of any argument? Where did they come from? (The premise factory?) The green piano? I was walking up a steep snowy hill in the dark and saw a great display of the Geminids. A voice said: as though a chord were struck. I’m fast, I’m clean, I work long hours, you have to to stay in this business. The others have been so busy with the grounding of the event of the moment of the clearing of the lighting of the whateverbeing that they forgot to read Einstein or anything after him ... Still, one might be pierced by the things one can see, and touched by the things one can’t. Rest your hands on a vibrating machine: car, fan, washing machine or dryer, anything with a motor that vibrates. Take notes after a few minutes, spontaneous notes, write with one hand still on the machine. Rest your cheek and other body parts against the machine, close your eyes and allow a low hum to build deep inside your body. Deepen the hum and allow it to rise. Open your mouth

to release it. Take notes with your forehead against the vibrating machine. What is a favorite song from your childhood? Hum that song (don’t sing the words) with eyes closed with as much of your body pressed against the machine that you can manage. HUM HUM HUM THIS SONG LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER. This day can’t end without the purchase of a deck of playing cards, a stuffed, two foot tall velour dinosaur, books, and/or a new T mobile cell phone, as mine is held together with duct tape and rubber bands, and some music by Eartha Kitt.
The cherry trees produce berries
in a duck egg, little boys become pregnant
in labyrinths, and 200 women have appeared
carrying rifles and riding deer through the untouched forests
of the island on which we first heard the song

called “Motionless History.” I’m not sure why the dread
now. We are often inappropriate presences
thanks largely to the chance that
I saw — reflected in lake water, an eye white as the
isms and outcomes of the Renaissance, the oil of the Arabs
It’s sudden to look at someone sitting in their car looking back at you, which reminds me: What? You didn’t ask for a recording of Baudrillard singing his poems with musical accompaniment? Sure you did! That’s how the market works. Supply and demand. Check out UbuWeb. “Wet Paint,” says the sign on the railings. Which is the closest we’re going to get to prophecy—everything here’s still waiting to dry, including the Google Car itself, with its horrible insect eye. Is there still a private life for plants? Chus Pato might be a better poet than I, but she could not be writing this.

[Note: Sources: Cian Dorr, review of James Ladyman, Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; Janine Pommy-Vega (i.m.), “Note”, “C.O.”, in The Green Piano; Timothy Morton, “Zeilinger and Philosophers”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Dec 010; Robin Tremblay-McGaw, “Rob Halpern: ‘Becoming a Patient of History’”, at X Poetics, 15 Dec 010; CA Conrad, as quoted by Bhanu Kapil, and Kapil herself, in her “Christmas”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Dec 010; Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist, as quoted in Aaron Angello (?), “Poetic and Ethical Responsibility in a Time of Crisis: Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist”, at (con)temporary poetry & poetics, 15 Dec 010; Rusty Morrison, “within the”, as quoted in Ryan Winet, “046.1: Rusty Morrison:: within us & purely & being overturned & the instant alone & end”, at The Offending Adam; Orhan Pamuk, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Orhan Pamuk on Europe”, at Nomadics, 24 Dec 010; Amy King, “I’m into You”, at Past Simple 9; JBR; “Getting What You Asked For”, at Harriet, 22 Dec 010; Ross Sutherland, “Poem looked up on Google Streetview”, as quoted in Rachel H, at “London Poetry: Poem Looked Up On Google Streetview By Ross Sutherland”, at Londonist, 14 Dec 010; Theun K, “A private life for plants”, at The Institute for Augmented Ecology, 29 Nov 010; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 317

I meant: savage [anthropomorphic] rains are attacking San Diego in Southern California. Like, someone said, “Please go see Apitchatpong,” and I loved it. [Which ones did you see?] The first one I saw was Tropical Malady. [That was the first of his I saw, too, and it’s a very strange film to see with no preconceptions.] I had no preconceptions. All of his films fold in half. I love the way it echoes without echoing too specifically. Very LSD, that film. Deeply primordial. But instead of footprints in the frosted static there’s only the other hand, which loses the hammer in the grass. By then / there was no going back, so he sprayed / the turtle’s head with Raid / and wrapped it in up a bath towel / and threw it into the garbage bin … It feels like I’m stepping on a bag of marbles when I say this. So Melodie and her husband (I think he’s her husband) made Falling Water out of gingerbread. Is love possible, your question was hanging over my tranquility, yes, whose and whose, eating at the mountain when the moon sits on it? Sabes que, hombre? The desire to keep my living expenses low became reckless. I would carry into the store a bag, a plastic bag from W.F., and I’d place it in the cart and, as I’d shop, I’d place things in the bag, and I’d place of course many many groceries outside the bag, but there were certain items, certain expensive items, that I’d place in the bag—such as sirloin steaks and blueberries (for a while they cost 5.99 a carton). I’d drink an expensive ginseng tea. There was this hot sauce I’d steal, pure extravagance of course and I knew I had turned sloppy, yet I knew… [You know the thief’s main virtue is modesty? A modest thief never…] That’s

right. [I’m guessing. I’m guessing.] Mayakovsky in Vermeer’s kitchen, reading the email, about some dude named Davidovits … earned German Doctor Degree in Chemistry … world expert in ancient cement and archaeology … member of the International Association of Egyptologists, President of the Institute for Geopolymers and Consultant to the European Union Commission … honored by French President. His latest book is entitled Why the Pharaohs Built the Pyramids with Fake Stones: The Construction of The Great Giza Power Plant. At the heart of which a room with a rhomboid skylight, full of ‘seemingly miscellaneous [seemingly] found objects’, of course there’s something not-quite-right about the ambience. Within a few weeks, yo         u can beco       me a co          llege graduate!- Fo        llo     w Yo           UR Dreams- Live a better life … This is a rare chance. Now all I have to do is quietly wait for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern, thinks M, but what are the odds that’s going to happen? And yet … and yet … as Issa put it, let us wear the bees’ hat. “The artist goes back to the fish.” There is always a monkey in the works and that particular primate is clu, the program designed by old man flynn, which went rogue and now runs ‘the grid’ like 5:00 shadow and morning breath. Three dancers in the park roll their T shirts to their ribs, flip onto their hands. Have you noticed how common the handstand is? For everyone speaks about violence. Or, as Frank Stanford put it, “In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot”: old and small: that is how my body left me, it’s an apartment much larger than the

apartment I lived in for all those years, ten, twenty, sixty plus. It takes a central inarticulateness as a kind of style sheet. Someone tells me tears aren’t clear anymore; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. More about eggs, or do I mean more about the apartment-body? It’s two meters high with two wheels underneath. And it’s made from sack bags and bamboo splints and wood chippings and grass seeds. Under the dinner table, you notice everyone is masturbating, even if it’s just hands gliding over knees. When the toast talks to you at breakfast and says, “you sir have no hope!,” then there’s an easy solution: yell “BORING” to keep judgment at bay -- Now that I’ve visited an étang I always had visited one -- I knew these swamps. You are here**. **The footnote is gone. Perelman asks Benson: Were you here when Chairman Mao visited in uh ’61? Benson: Chairman Mao? No, I missed him. I was in the city … It was a weekend. But what does it matter. “Wherever the red sun of Chairman Mao shines, there is light,” and I can see Chairman Mao’s presence. All hail to Tinguely! We need houses to live in. Fire burns as the novel taught it. I’m feeling more bingo than slot machine, I’m feeling more peanut oil than hand on forehead, more VALETH! than SHAREB! Today I look at the faces of passers-by and I think: it figures. The banks have the money to buy counter-revolution, this wino has no money. He's nice enough, so is that girl in the flamingo summer dress on wobbly heels. It’s September 12, possibly the prettiest day of the year. The blue has never been so pure around the chimneys — “Almost like—a cartoon!” says the dental hygienist.

[Note: Sources: among other things, bits from the authors of SPD’s 50 best-sellers of 2010, 2 from each row of cover thumbnails (noted as “(SPD)”). Brent Musburger, towards the end of the 3rd quarter of the Maaco Bowl (Boise St v Utah); JBR, play on K’s beastlike, which she inserted in Musburger’s purple prose, as she was utterly boggled by it; Nathaniel Dworsky and Darren Hughes, in conversation, as quoted in Hughes’ “Manifesting the Ineffable: A Conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky”, at MUBI, 2 Oct 08 (SPD); Elyse Fenton, “Clamor”, at Cleveland State University Poetry Center (SPD); Suzanne Buffam, “Two Hands”, at La Petite Zine (SPD); Rachel McKibbens, “The Day After the First Time We Ran Away From Home”, as quoted in Barbara Jane Reyes, “Rachel McKibbens, ‘Pink Elephant’ (Cypher Books, 2009)”, at Harriet, 20 Oct 09 (SPD); Zachary Schomburg, 1977-2050, at Verse Daily (SPD); JBR, re: Melodie, “Falling Water Gingerbread House”, at Garden Melodies, 14 Nov 010; Etel Adnan, “There”, at Electronic Poetry Review 1 (SPD); John Murillo, “Santayana, the Muralist”, at Reading Between A&B (SPD); Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, “Hot Sauce”, at Electric Literature (SPD); JBR; email from Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation [info@piramidasunca.org], “FOUR RESEARCHERS WHO FOREVER CHANGEDTHE WORLD OF THE PYRAMIDS”, rec’d 23 Dec, 3:20-something in the a.m.; JBR, out of the same email, conflating the work of Chris Dunn with that of Joseph Davidovits; JBR, ekphrasis re: Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, embedded in email from the Saatchi Gallery, “Saatchi Gallery Talk : New Directions in Contemporary Photography”, rec’d 23 Dec 6:09 a.m. (some of the language is derived from the Saatchi website’s description of Untitled VI); email from Emmett [Emmett@rsi.com], addressed to everyone at UCR whose first name is John, rec’d 23 Dec 12:43 a.m.; Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky”; JBR, riffing on “Julian Cowley, Some Liner Notes on Charlie Morrow, a Retrospective View” and Wyndham Lewis, as quoted in same, at Poems and Poetics, 23 Dec 010; Richard Lopez, “tron (legacy) 2010”, at Really Bad Movies, 23 Dec 010; Julie Carr, “Letter Box”, at Tarpaulin Sky, “59” from 100 Notes on Violence, at Ahsahta Press (SPD); Frank Stanford “In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot”, at Poetry Foundation.org (SPD); Adam Golaski, “Prologue (from Color Plates)”, at absent magazine 2 (SPD); Mark Sussman, “eugene marten”, at Mark Sussman.org (Marten is SPD); Alissa Nutting, “Wolf Rainbow (a.k.a. The Beautiful Actual)”, at La Petite Zine (SPD); JBR; “Architect lays egg on streets of Beijing”, at Archinect, 13 Dec 010; Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, review of CA Conrad, The Book of Frank, at Bookslut, May 09 (Conrad’s SPD); Alice Notley, “The Islanders Remember That There Are No Women and No Men”, at The Nation, 7 Apr 08 (SPD); Tisa Bryant, blurb for Renee Gladman, The Activist, at Krupskaya Books (Gladman's SPD); JBR; Steve Benson, “Views of Communist China”, in The Kenning Book of Poets Theater 1945-1985 (eds. Kevin Killian and David Brazil) (SPD); Kenneth Koch “The Construction of Boston”, in Killian/Brazil; Robert Farnsworth, “Fiction”, at From the Fishouse (SPD); Kaia Sand, “Déjà vu Love Boutique”, at Arthur; Bertolt Brecht “Das Badener Lehrstück Vom Einverständnis” (tr. Robert Grenier), in Killian Brazil; Michael McClure, “The Feast”, in Killian/Brazil; Phillip Lopate, “Allende”, at Poets.org]

In the House of the Hangman 316

Delete “combing … fluidize” from source note. Delete “you’re in a library … inner space” and “And so I ended … profoundly.” I am assuming one knows what it is to be a shaman. Also you don’t respect authority and it makes it impossible for you to use GPS. For the ache within you that may only be muted if your payments are timely deserves a stake in our urgency. For a California mall must be evacuated as a 5,000-strong flash-mob of singers organised by a local choral society causes the building to shake. For they still sell those National Parks Service pamphlets explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood. Squeeze my sex muscles into tiny steel pins. The sparks “weep” … in silence the rocks wake up again and burst slowly with a lot of space crying in

smells never imagined. Bowl for ceremonial flaying under halogen. It is clean. It is very clean. It is of epic dimensions. Which Harry Potter character am I? I love the political announcements: I pledge (before all my friends) to attend event X! Now I'm committed! (but my friends will understand if I can’t show up). I numbed out, saluting and unsaluting. Hypnogogy on the periphery, creeping in. The sweetness, the drugs – oh, we don’t have to dig deep to find, under the surface of the artificial paradise, the piles of skeletons. The Mordspiel is at work, and, as in a cartoon of a robber hiding in a cartoon cave, the commodities are now in motion. What only the Gods could once pluck is now cut, harvested, tapped, boiled and barged across the entire face of the godlessness. Which only goes to show that hophead

history is not merely a suburb. Did you know that they think that Richard the Lion-Hearted spoke no English? The story is that we’re all differently trying to screw in a lightbulb though we’ve rehearsed when it happens. And I’m only half acting that or else I’d give the fake instructions. I’ll be talking about hyperobjects. “immanence” has moved to WordPress. With the failure of the transcendental and Marxian mobilizations to effectively multidimensionalize Western reason, apologies to Pangaea, here we be with capes, spandex and big hair. Here we be with Hark! Here we be with heterology, light after breath. Grab a bite, both of you. I hold the central nervous system in [some] respect. An accident reconstructionist says new-car smell may have contributed to the accident.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Ben Fama, as quoted by Christie Ann Reynolds, in “Proust/Reynolds”, at The Corresponding Society, 9 Dec 010; Anselm Berrigan, “Primitive State”, as quoted in John Latta, “Sentence-ry”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 21 Dec 010; “Flash-mob singers spark California mall evacuation”, at BBC News, 21 Dec 010; Eliot Weinberger, “‘Damn right,’ I said”, at London Review of Books, 6 Jan 011 (a review of George W Bush, Decision Points); Kathy Acker, “The Birth of the Poet”, in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985 (eds. Kevin Killian and David Brazil); Angel Carmona, “V2 Poems”, as quoted in C T Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995; Brenda Iijima, “Tertium Organum”, in If Not Metamorphic; Nada Gordon, “Distraction”, in Killian/Brazil; Jodi Dean, “How Not to Be Critical”, at I cite, 22 Dec 010; Kenward Elmslie, “Quarks report”, in Killian/Brazil; Roger, “Too many notes - on the edge of crankitood”, at Limited, Inc., 22 Dec 010; Stephen Rodefer, “A & C”, in Killian/Brazil; Fiona Templeton, “Against Agreement”, in Killian Brazil; Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects in Miami”, at Ecology without Nature, 22 Dec 010; Adrian Ivakhiv, “immanence 2.0 reminder”, at immanence, 22 Dec 010; Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy; Tracie Morris, “Apologiy to Pangaea”, in her “Aurora Afro-Americana”, in )((ECO(LANG)(UAGE(READER)) (ed. Brenda Iijima); Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, “Sunflower”, in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (eds. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad); Myung Mi Kim, Commons, 318, in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (eds. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell); Alan Bernheimer, “Particle Arms”, in Killian/Brazil; Lloyd Alter, “‘New Car Smell’ May Have Caused Hit-and-Run On Cyclist in Vail”, at treehugger, 14 Dec 010]