Russell and Whitehead somewhat notoriously didn't get very far with that project. Moreover, it just pushes things back a step: why should I think that propositional logic is English (or French) by other means? (Certainly I don't think that “∧” is “and”.) I am not afraid as I descend, step by step, leaving behind the salt wind blowing up the corrugated river, “cross-section of a slave ship/ diagram of a humiliated/ mind high-resolution image/ of a shredded lung/ color slides of refugee camps” – “wailing/ newsprint, breakfast, trains”; “guernican/ mouth in bleak December” – “Thickly lies/ the impasto”; “tiny magnet/ which for the purposes of drawing/ particles together will have to do.” How does it feel? he gloats and everyone roars but none of us knows. Iraqi writer Haider Saeed delivered another barely audible speech, warning the people of Tunisia to beware. “The collapse of tyranny does not mean the success of democracy, and we have Iraq before us as a bitter example.” Yes! There are blue poles of distant light and yes, circulating dishes of transparent light. Here I am thinking of Keston Sutherland’s essay “Vagueness, Poetry.” Interrogating Pound’s idea that good art is “the art that is most precise,” Sutherland writes, “Impossibility is not just a faded watchword echoing the 1960s campus occupations of ‘Utopian’ vocab. It is the absolute target concept. Since then, for a quarter of a century, the Empire of Living Money has progressed everywhere. Dolly had the time to be born and die (of premature senescence.) ONE can now sell you your eternal cat, at the reasonable price tag of US$ 50,000. MAN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE NEXUS! Which prevents even midget trucks from roaring thru the monolithing celebrations. As for humane expression …” Can you keep a secret? You have to have magnificent cloudy markings or naturally long-winded lips: so, if the cyborg can (or will soon be able to) be “in fact as in fiction” – which in the end rings of “on earth as in heaven” and calls for a serious amen – it is because there are passages between these worlds, repertoires, and practices, between various modalities that attempt to a give a meaning to experience. I mean, is D+G Deleuze & Guattari or Dolce & Gabanna, and if so why so and what would it mean for it to be otherwise? It’s thin and blue, this milk intended for my daughter’s mouth. Some folks say, “The grammar of pleasure already belongs to, like, dead languages.” To quote half of Berkson’s “The Cloud of Knowing”, “From then on, I knew I could sell people anything,” the artist lately known as Jeff Koons beamed. (“The carnage over, now for the music.”) (“A little while ago, a strange incident took place.”) I like being strapped to the skeleton needled at HEAVEN AND EARTH UNDERGROUND and could surface in a KING TUBBY’S shoot-’em-up. From a place like that Adventure drew through Chew-Gum Forest, by Lolly-Pop Copse, up Sun-Up Hill. I have a strong request that the soundtrack to the world include more hand claps, please; It’s a riddim ting; I don’t mean applause. A person can gaze inwardly with all the intensity he can muster, and repeat to himself ‘this pain’, ‘this pain’, as he concentrates upon his pain, but he will not thereby be able to know which pain is in question unless this provides him with a basis for identifying the pain with a pain conceived of as an element of the objective order – which means a pain conceived of as the pain of this or that person in the objective order. Thence I slept & thought travelled & syllogized & smoked & now and then a Cosm passed then a third, then a ninth every day a new new record. “I don’t need sound to talk to me.” My nurse told me about a man she treated whose body manufactured too many platelets, enough to clot his blood right in his blood vessels. Labor scab, you owe me for the drinks drunk. Yes, this all happened—it happened on the Sun— I remember standing outside in my fake silk nightgown, watching the moon light me up. The proposal here, then, is to create an app that will vibrate mobile devices when SNEWS sends out a supernova alert. Fuck making the invisible hertzian rain visible. It’s just the pitter-pattering of @justinbieber’s followers. Physicalize and spatialize an interstellar neutrino super-hurricane instead. Tell us when trillions and trillions and trillions of neutrinos, birthed by one of the universe’s greatest shows, are passing through our bodies, though without so much as a single one of those particles interacting with an atom. Then replace the vibrations into chimes when telescopes finally see the star’s spectacular death.
[Note: Sources: Ben Wolfson, “Russell and Whitehead”, comment appended to Timothy Morton, “Should Computer “Languages” Qualify as Foreign Languages for Ph.D.s?”, at Arcade, 25 Jan 011; Sue Hubbard, “Eurydice”, as quoted in “Restoration Of The Much Loved Waterloo Poem by Sue Hubbard”, at Art Daily, 19 (?) Jan 011; Adrienne Rich, as quoted in Sara Marcus, “‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,’ by Adrienne Rich”, at SFGate, 23 Jan 011; William Matthews, “DYLAN AND THE BAND, BOSTON GARDENS, 1974”, as quoted in Ron Slate, “on New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews, ed. by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly (Red Hen Press)”, at On the Seawall, 19 Jan 011; “Iraqi poets praise, warn Tunisians”, at AFP/Google Hosted News, 22 (?) Jan 011; Kit Robinson, “Modern Living”, at Shampoo 38; Keith Tuma, “After the Bubble”, at Chicago Review, Autumn-Winter 2010/11; Thierry Bardini & Marie-Pier Boucher, “THE METAPHORMATTED HUMAN: BIO-ARTISTIC PRACTICES OF THE HUMAN NEXUS”, at Parrhesia 10; Robert Glück, “from I Boombox”, at Shampoo 38; AJBR; Benjamin Friedlander, “MY VAGINAL LIPS ARE SEALED”, at OnandOnScreen, Winter 011; JBR; Kate Daniels, ‘Disjunction’, at The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 Jan 011; JBR; Tada Chimako, as quoted in David Burleigh, “Mirrors are nothing but eyes”, at The Japan Times, 16 Jan 011; JBR; Bill Berkson, “The Cloud of Knowing”, at Shampoo 38; Steve Dickison, “from Wear You to the Ball”, at OnandOnScreen, Winter 011; Julia Budenz, The Gardens of Flora Baum, at Poetry Porch 2; Arielle Greenberg, “Three Pear Trees”, at OnandOnScreen, Winter 011; JBR; Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, as quoted in Quassim Cassam, Self and World;Brent Cunningham, “from Journey to the Sun”, at Shampoo 38; John Cage, as quoted by Ron Silliman, at Silliman’s Blog, 26 Jan 011; Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay, at Guardian.uk, 23 Jan 011; Rodney Koeneke, “Jazz Impressions of Gazprom”, at Shampoo 38; JBR; Rachel Finkelstein, “Gated Away”, at Shampoo 38; Alexander Trevi, “Supernova Early Detection System”, at Pruned, 26 Jan 011]
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