Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 685

Any country that complies with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s specifications for machine-readable passports can choose to introduce a gender “X.” The idea that plants are fully sentient beings is an increasingly popular opinion. But is it really any mystery why people would be protesting against Wall Street? The cuckoo is a - BANG - he was a big freak: my word verification word is emputy, a mix of empathy and empty. “Pretend instead that words can make a humanness between us.” Only in paintings, you reply. If you won’t arrest me for my manipulations of scale, I won’t play the game of large, docile eyes. One I know said to his son, So now we see you on television: you’re a celebrity now — O enchanting metonyms, you don’t know what you’re getting into: anyway, it cancelled my passport & I just took some, yeh, whatever — ok, say it again o enchanting ring of coins inside every nation’s sobriety slaughter / credit / passion & bleating knots of ring a ring of BANG – a clanking swarm of bottles. Lemon rind. A chicken wing in the mouth of a cat. You could still see the bullet-holes. And in this was a malign intent. It doesn’t mean you should, just because you can, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, just because you can’t. Look how dull and pathetic it is, bombers low to the ground carrying mass communities of flies in tight-skinned giant golems of panty hose. They float ominously down like spirits in comas and settle softly to release the plague of classicism. Painted boxes of broken pottery. It says on the side: We deliver! Who are you, and how did you get in my bankbook with all those t-shirt designs? If humans are blind, and made from masa, halfway through the apple / it has already turned brown, then “Emptiness is not just blah or nothing at all, it is endowed with all the qualities of a Buddha.” In Mystic Wall, 1989 (catalog 62), a figure, perhaps the artist’s alter-ego, stands in front of a wall bristling with these strange Carib symbols, and raises his hands. Love is the seed stuck in the throat of death. A leaf is nervous. This is the equal sign needled into audition. Crumbled octaves, fruit markets, xenography, petticoats, reservoirs where mathematical fluid and relics of social movements might no verb: cellular matter here primarily for networking, ancient wavelengths, electric liquids dense silence and barricades in city parks.

[Note: Sources: AP article quoted in Jacob Sloan, “‘X’ Now A Gender Option In Australian Passports”, at Disinformation, 28 Sept 011; James K. Stanescu, “A Post of Links”, at Critical Animal, 28 Sept 011; Liza Featherstone, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “Featherstone: Protesting Wall St.’s riches”, at I cite, 28 Sept 011; Sean Bonney, “The Commons”, as seen at Bad Press; JBR (re: a comment L appended to the Stanescu post above); Rusty Morrison, Robert Pinsky, as quoted in John Gallagher, “Rusty Morrison/Robert Pinsky”, at Nothing To Say & Saying It, 28 Sept 011; John Ash, “Ruin”, Cursed”, in The Parthia Stations; JBR; phaneronoemikon, “Nostrilla”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 28 Sept 011; Asa Benveniste, “Tabellae Linnaei 4”, in Throw Out the Life Line Lay Out the Corse; Timothy Morton, “Buddhism, Nihilism, Objects”, at Ecology without Nature, 28 Sept 011; Patrick Elliott “Alan Davie: An Introduction”, in Alan Davie: Work in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (ed. Patrick Elliott); Giles Goodland, “The return of the repressed …”, in What the Things Said; Tom Raworth, “Nothing to the Power of Language”, as quoted in cris cheek, “Sky Tails: An Encryption of Diespersal”, in “Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth”, in The Gig 13/14; Sean Bonney, “complaint registered March 18th 1871 …”, in “Sean Bonney (after Rimbaud”, at Intercapillary Space]

In the House of the Hangman 684

Hence birds are the mediators between earth and heaven; and stairs, passageways, quasi-deities. Duckbills copy the appearance of birds; bats fly in a birdlike way; and clumsy fowls could be called “degenerate angels.” The birds we are singing for — their gorgeous feathers, their lightbones — are half-birds: mysterious creatures, seeds in metaphysics. Lightbones: The light of a student-lamp / sapphire light / shimmer / the light of a smoking-lamp / / Light from the Magellanic Clouds / the light of a Nernst lamp / the light of a naphtha-lamp / light from meteorites / / Evanescent light / ether / the light of an electric lamp / extra light / / Citrine light / kineographic light / the light of a Kitson lamp / kindly light / / Ice light / irradiation / ignition / altar light / / The light of a spotlight / a sunbeam / sunrise / solar light / / Mustard-oil light / maroon light / the light of a magnesium flare / light from a meteor / / Evanescent light / ether / light from an electric lamp / an extra light / / Light from a student-lamp / sapphire light / a shimmer / smoking-lamp light / / Ordinary light / orgone lumination / light from a lamp burning olive oil / opal light / / Actinism / atom-bomb light / the light of an alcohol lamp / the light of a lamp burning anda-oil. In ‘When We Take Off Our Heads’ I repeat these words the most often:
when
we
take
off
our
heads
you
and
me. Many people of my general acquaintance felt crazy from the pre-New Moon, the ivy spliced into the electrical pole: a vegetal-magnetic mixture: It has taken centuries to say ‘orange nightfall.’ Or, as the song goes, We rose early / that morning to find eight rats / lying in a pile at our hotel door: eight / dead rats facing skyward on a rainy day / in the town where Vallejo was born. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? It (the universe? my hand?) appears to be Turtle-waxed, the glaze so commercial the glaze so commercial. The very important person is walking down the long line of people shaking hand after hand. Three quarters of the way down this line of people, the very important person comes upon a man in an overcoat and top hat. When the very important person sticks out his or her hand, the man in the overcoat and top hat does not in return stick out his own hand, but instead lifts his leg and deposits it in the hand of the very important person. Chaos silently ensues. The very important person is made speechless by the act. The man in the overcoat and top hat is speechless because it grants him, in this situation, all the power. Speaking truth to power is banal because it is ubiquitous. Everyone speaks truth to power these days. I prefer standing right there next to power, and giving it the silent treatment. And, as the man himself called the gesture handing power my leg. I mean, Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in 1871, just as the Paris Commune was being blown off the map. He wanted to be there. It’s all he talked about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world you have to point simple shit like that out. But then again, these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. Right now Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are yelling at each other. They have been yelling pretty much the whole movie. They are fighting some snakes with fire. I am listening to music on YouTube. I am listening to grouper, the track, um, I have to switch to the tab … it’s called “come softly.” I like this song and listening to it now with headphones while watching this movie I put on because I didn’t know what else to put on but I wouldn’t download this song to keep it. Seems like I should just listen to it online. My recent work argues the precise opposite. Life is marked by as much incoherence as possible. Death is reduction to consistency. For a thing to live is for it to be non-identical.

[Note: Sources: Xi Chuan, “Birds” (tr. Xi Chuan and Inara Cedrins), at Drunken Boat; JBR; Jackson Mac Low, “1ST LIGHT POEM: FOR IRIS -- 10 JUNE 1962”, at Grist; J A Tyler, “A review of J. A. Tyler’s Pangur Ban Party e-Book: When We Take Off Our Heads”, at We Who Are About To Die, 27 Sept 011; Bhanu Kapil, “Campus Circuit”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 27 Sept 011; Eduardo Chirinos, Reasons for Writing Poetry (tr. G C Racz), as quoted in E C Belli, “Eduardo Chirinos, Reasons for Writing Poetry”, at Words Without Borders; Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, as quoted in Camille Martin, “Traveling with Pessoa: ‘The universe isn’t mine: it’s me’”, at Rogue Embryo, 26 Sept 011; William Keckler, “What Really Matters”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 27 Sept 011; Matthew Simmons, “3 OBSERVATIONS ON SILENCE (FEATURING HARPO MARX)”, as quoted in his “Silence and Communication”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Sept 011; JBR; Sean Bonney (?), blurb for his Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, at AMM (Association of Musical Marxists); Blake Butler, “i’m kind of watching natural born killers”, HTMLGIANT, 26 Sept 011; Timothy Morton, “Objects, Consistency, Badiou”, at Ecology without Nature, 27 Sept 011]

In the House of the Hangman 683

The words “10-22-38 Astoria” are written on a microscope slide, which is placed on top of more sulfur and under a bright light. Nine harmonicas are confiscated between January and July. Nine harmonicas and one giant tennis ball. A magic wand. And some shaving cream. At night the danjiri are decked out in lanterns and sail slowly by. Beyond the visible landscape, within it, and all around it, there is only that brutal midsummer Petrified Forest light. Written upon it there is nothing. The way Jung said that people all over the planet suddenly seeing U.F.O.s in the fifties was a projection of a mandala into the sky. The projection of the human race’s desire for a healing wholeness. Way to go, K.D. Lang!

Hōhokekyo

Hōhokekyo

Kekyo kekyo kekyo kekyo, hohohōhokekyo

Hooooooo

Lay in an array of pixels

Fat, simulated proteins

so fast, so nimble, so aggressive, so lovely –like a shredded  insane glamorous shamanness-drag queen played by Jack Smith rattling an amber pillbottle holding his last two amphetamine pills like teeth over the heads of people waiting on a subway platform at 5 a.m. for the day’s first train … Peeling back my skin, you

expose my missing bones. Does the devil drink milk, and if not, after a gruesome package arrives? Then the moths. They like to linger in hot places like the
roof
of the car. The smaller ones cling to my hands as I water the
garden in the morning.

Hōhokekyo

Hōhokekyo

Kekyo kekyo kekyo kekyo, hohohōhokekyo

Hooooooo

I often thought I was mischained,

errata.

Hōhokekyo

Hōhokekyo

Kekyo kekyo kekyo kekyo, hohohōhokekyo

Tonight I left my stack and horn and crossed the street

Hōhokekyo

Hōhokekyo

Kekyo kekyo kekyo kekyo, hohohōhokekyo

Hooooooo

Why do I like it under the trees in autumn when everything is half dead? Sonata: a musical composition in contrasted movements
constellation
stardust
nuclear glow train, Yucca, Nevada
rotate the exhaust
on second thought
Did you make that: the sheep, yarn, afghan? birds, feathers, pillows, bookshelves, (trees,
nails etc.) the books on them, the slides (yes), their glass mounts, tray, projector? lamps,
record player, records (vinyl!), occasional tables, desk, chair, papers? their colors and
weights, sizes, like that candy wrapper? notes (perhaps), postcards, newspapers, my cane,
myself? on the other axis laterally
>with foreshortened forearms, push off
>silty bottom, settle 
>midway in sulfurous green.

[Note: Sources: Wikipedia, “Photocopier” (a description of the first-ever photocopy); JBR, but see Jacob Sloan, “Objects Confiscated From People Entering British Parliament”, at Disinformation, 26 Sept 011; Trane DeVore, “kishiwada danjiri (act II: the lantern parade”, at troutfactory notebook, 27 Jul 011; Tom Clark, “Petrified Forest: Some Glyphs”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 26 Sept 011; William Keckler, “Who REALLY Started the Planking Phenomenon? I Know.”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 26 Sept 011; Takako Arai, Joyelle McSweeney, as quoted in McSweeney’s “Report from Tokyo 4: My Supplement Sister, Takako Arai”, at Montevidayo, 26 Sept 011; Kenny Fries, “Beauty and Variations”, as quoted in “BEAUTY IS A VERB: The New Poetry of Disability”, at Cinco Puntos Press; SPD blurb for Re:Telling (ed. William Walsh), in SPD Fall 2011 catalog; SPD blurb for Persia Williams, Black Orchid Blues, in SPD Fall 2011 catalog; Jennifer Bartlett, “From a Paris Hotel Room”, and Joy Harjo, as quoted in Harjo’s, “Blown Away by Poet Jennifer Bartlett”, at Joy Harjo’s Web Log, 25 Mar 08; Molly Brodak, “I DON’T KNOW MYSELF AROUND HERE”, at La Petite Zine 27; Joe Aguilar, “Captivity #1”, as quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Joe Aguilar Poems”, at HTMLGIANT, 25 Sept 011; Norma Cole, “SPEECH PRODUCTION: Themes and Variations”, at Shampoo 24; Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto, excerpt from Waveform, at Wild Horses of Fire]

Quoth H P Lovecraft:

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’ ...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

[Note: letter to C.L. Moore, August 1936, as quoted in "And the Winner Is ...", at Driftglass, 24 Sept 011. Of course, there's regarding seriously and regarding as a serious threat]

In the House of the Hangman 682

Switch to watching reconstituted Walmart babies reared under / riding on promises of discounted groceries while latte foam falls from the sky. We set a pin in it, pureed to a rich mineral, fat & ectoplasmic. Clapped in wondrous neofassy, hypoplastic, one gets narrative, realizing that, no matter what one does or where one lives, steak sauce is one’s second skin. So we can be wide awake, dreaming at the same time, in reality, not in some abstract box separated from it. The exchange of temperature bent blades of grass. Sequence “Oxytocin Nasty” in 14 linked poems, generally playing out neurotransmitter, chemical, mind-altering material with milk and reward system and brutality. I asked the guy who made the “utopian experiments” sign what he had in mind. (The interview is on the audio segment.) He said he wanted to see a rebirth of 60s-style “intentional communities,” though more entrepreneurial this time, capable of supporting themselves through green business and cyberschemes. Judith Butler was so right to say that you have to inhabit what you parody. (Note on the alarming autophagy of all things spectacular: the pre-broadcast video features a happy gathering of young people raising what look like flaming rocks to the dark sky. Just to softly illuminate the night. “You know, like hope. Or something.”) A garuda is a bird that hatches from its egg and launches directly into outer space. We make clay figures and filled them with seedpods, dried berries. Once a year, I tell a lie. I invert myself, with others. Friend 1 asks if I am interested in having animal gut applied to my body and then to have a sensory exchange as the material dries.

[Note: Sources: Anna Ticehurst, “Open Season”, at Intercapillary Space; Francesca Lisette, ”Slingback Reciprocity”, at Intercapillary Space; Joe Luna, “Faith / Star”, “Erato”, at Intercapillary Space; Gene Tanta, Mircea Ivănescu “about a hair”, as quoted in Tanta’s “Gene Tanta on Mircea Ivănescu”, at Montevidayo, 26 Sept 011; Sean Lovelace, “wwword”, at HTMLGIANT, 25 Sept 011 (possibly quoting Damine Dressick, “Four Hard Facts about Water”); Timothy Morton, “A Question About the Brain Imagine”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Sept 011; Joshua Stanley, “The exchange of temperature unfelt bent blades of grass …”, at Intercapillary Space; Michael Peverett, “Better Than Language (2011 Anthology)”, at Intercapillary Space (whence comes the links I used to find the other Intercapillary Space bits); Doug Henwood, as quoted in Jodi Dean, “Doug Henwood on Occupy Wall Street”, at I cite, 25 Sept 011; Evan Calder Williams, “Good evening, everyone, and here is the latest news from Athens: Good night. (Also, watch out for floating torch lamps. We've had reports they're heading west.)”, at Socialism and/or Barbarism/, 25 Sept 011; Timothy Morton, “Buddhist Latour Litanies 2”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Sept 011; Bhanu Kapil, “Casual Alchemy”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 25 Sept 011]

In the House of the Hangman 681

There are 707 + 7 words in Un Coup de Dés. The Jennifer Lopez collection at Kohl’s. SVU Man-a-Thon on USA. Someone’s got to keep Tinkerbell here from shooting everybody. Freddy Krueger statue stolen in Chula Vista; head left behind. I’ll make my way over the Ice Age Trail, then thru the forest, and then back down to Devil’s Lake. A nun is crying very hard, near hiccupping. “At the end of one of the billion light-years of loneliness” — light years of loneliness? — is there oil and bloody garbage floating near the Milky Way? Is there a hearse with one flat tire in endless circuit, a cybernetic firefly, a bioluminescent billboard, a digital oyster farm, a rubblescape? Take the first section of “All Saints”: I made the mask / from scratch / also the wings / all by myself / in the shape of a sick child / or newly cut / grass / It was hard to stand up at first because the wings were so heavy but [I mean and] / the Milky Way sways its back / across all of wind-eaten America / like a dusty saddle tossed / over [the back of] a lunatic. On a screen in an empty room an automated stock market monitoring programme displays numbers falling rapidly. Containing 9’525 kilos of high explosives the MOAB was aimed at creating panic; civilians subjected to the constant aerial bombardment that took place in the Iraqi Winter of 03 suffer nervous disorders as a result of the noise to this very day. If there is proof God is deaf, it is because this noise could not be heard by the citizens of the invading countries. In ~’93 in ~5th grade, I think, there was a ‘meme’ at my school of throwing things at (or ‘simply’ hitting) ppl then saying ‘ricochet’. Next time I’m in Oakland I am going to visit the Black Box. I have a good excuse to visit because when I left the country I also loaned them a piece of original art (a painting of Buddha reclining on a settee in a garden that I bought from the homeless people art project in the Tenderloin district in SF on a grad school field trip) that I’d like back.

[Note: Sources: Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux on Mallarmé”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 24 Sept 011 (on Quentin Meillassoux’s Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé); Kohl’s ad I saw on USA, 24 Sept 011, approx. 2:53 PM PST, and ad for Burn Notice seen about 7 minutes later, during the SVU Man-a-Thon; Tony Perry, “Freddy Krueger statue stolen in Chula Vista; head left behind”, at LA Times, 23 Sept 011; Leon Niemoczynski, “trip next week to Northwoods / Northern Wisconsin”, at After Nature, 24 Sept 011; Evan Calder Williams, “Weep me deadly (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 3)”, at Socialism and/or Barbarism, 24 Sept 011; Adam Plunkett, Matthew Dickman, Katherine Larson, as quoted in John Gallaher, “This is the kind of criticism we need more of”, at Nothing To Say & Saying It, 24 Sept 011; Dan Beachy-Quick, “Poem”, as quoted in Brian Brodeur, “Dan Beachy-Quick”, at How a Poem Happens, 18 Sept 011; Alexander Trevi, “KERB-19”, at Pruned, 24 Sept 011; Mike Watson, “God Is Deaf: Five Meditations on Noise”, as quoted in his “God Is Deaf”, at Logical Regression, 24 Sept 011 (MOAB = Mother of All Bombs); Tao Lin, as quoted in David Fishkind, “Earlier today, Tao Lin tweeted an entirely non-meta tweet …”, at HTMLGIANT, 24 Sept 011; Diana Trimble, “The Time I Turned a Poetry Slam Into A Riot”, at 66witches, 24 Sept 011]

In the House of the Hangman 680

This myth is yet another gift from Professor Barker, erstwhile reveler in and revealer of various cosmicomic secrets to the CCRU. It spins off Barker's Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma, in which every “Kurtz” “disappears” “up river” “into” the “vortical machine” around which “walks” the “delirial flatline” between “metal in the body” and the B-w-O (which used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious, tracing what was happening in all the different sound channels, like “the meat is learning to know the white darkness, the fog of absolute proximity, the ‘psyclone’”, beautiful. “It’s absurd to say that music doesn’t represent the real.”) Your Judd or Smithson stainless steel ocean. Isn’t the occupation unilateral? I go for the moody and unexpected. And I put my name in every ghazal. Am I fit for the scenario? Translucence is flushed downhill. Philosophy is only ever a fold of the present.  Perhaps because I’m a Jewess? “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent”. Scare quotes around actually. Pathological. Ripped out of a body, the heart. I wrapped it in red lettuce and sang to it. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. So fed up with eggshells, less fed up with tulips. Everything is so urgent. I mean, if silicon-substrate minds shift in stages, from dumb tools to super-intelligences, they can be confidently expected to pass through a period of synthetic cretinism. Is anybody preparing for that? Nowadays, many party members, cadres, “the morning the car turn around, turn the plate around noon, the afternoon shuttle turn around, turn the evening around the skirt.” For example, A Who “Sando,” not only corruption, bribery, and one night, thought it outrageous that night, under the cover name of overtime in the office, the office lights on, but actually go out and touches his mistress secretly rendezvous. Such a person, all day thinking about is how to get lost, how to play a woman, how to get a woman. They are reading, not outside, such as ”Mai-phase method,“ ”Liuzhuang phase method,“ ”physiognomy Danian Ye full,“ ” meat futon,“ ”Motome Heart Sutra,“ ”Golden Lotus,“ ”the official after,” “thick black school”, “Zeng technique employing people know,” “Chiang Kai-shek of the machine to seek,” “Confucius, Crown Way,” ”Official Pitch culture and unspoken rules,“ ”teach you how to climb clever work,“ ”Book of Changes,“ ”yin and yang, Feng Shui,“ “character and the official transport,“ ”Office Feng Shui,“ ”gossip financial officer transported through the solution,” “the official transport peach,” “China ancient monarch and his Machiavellian Danian Ye Guan,” “Yu-person operation emperors” and other pollution seventy-eight bad book. Reading this book, can not worship bankruptcy? Character can not go wrong? Unexpectedly, depression can blog? Integrity can not decay? But in some ways I almost prefer the simpler idea that maybe the speed of neutrinos rather than the speed of light is the upper limit. El Cellphone, why do hatchet-faced mens twist penguins like lemons into the knickers? Indra rides a burro down into the mine of balls where he finds an old head. Clinical fact! Did you fucking see that? Old boy Slavoj presumes to know clinical facts about lesbian relationships — and what a very specific word that is, too, clinical. Once considered a nuisance, now the homeless in their ghillie suits are welcomed ornamental additions to the city’s public spaces. Before a stinking mound dozing off on manicured lawns; now a Picturesque hermit cocooned in his wearable hermitage. Before a pitiful blot on the street you always try to avoid eye contact with; now a mobile micro-garden strutting its vegetal spectacle alongside beautifully landscaped medians and curbside mini-Edens. Before when they came together to commiserate, they were loitering; now it's a pop-up Versailles. You are introduced to the quarter-mile trail with a prelude for 300 Balinese wind chimes, followed by an adagio slalom of tuned bamboo pipes, which gives way to a reflective passage for suspended cellos and deckchairs and a pentatonic interlude of turbine-driven glockenspiels. It concludes, like a proper symphony, with a coda drawing together all the elements in a climax of either frenzied dissonance or a soft, extended diminuendo, depending on the weather conditions. There is perhaps also an indication here that a conceptual revolution is underway within the Air Force, where the earth itself —geological space — is seen as merely a thicker version of the sky. “Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?” “I'd love to.” ”Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world.” That goose is going to die. That dog is going to die. That snake is going to die. That sheep is going to die. That cow is going to die. That pig is going to die. That cat is going to die. That child is going to die. That rat is going to die. That duck is going to die. The tree is on fire.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Simon Reynolds, “Renegade Academia”, at Bourbakisme, 8 Aug 011; William Keckler, “Replicant Poetry”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 23 Sept 011; Yael Dayan, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Israeli Intellectuals back Palestinian Statehood in Tel Aviv Rally”, at Nomadics, 23 Sept 011; Jack Kimball, “I go for the moody …”, at Pantaloons, 23 Sept 011; Lars Iyer, “A Pickle in a Jar”, at Spurious, 23 Sept 011; Nada Gordon, “Myopic Hindsight”, at Ululations, 23 Sept 011; Anthony Scalia, as quoted in Peter Gratton, “Elden, Lithwick on the Killing of Troy Davis”, at  Philosophy in a Time of Error, 23 Sept 011 (Gratton too is struck by Scalia’s pathological scare quotes around actually …); JBR; Kirsten Kaschock, “Daughter Song”, at  Ahsahta Press; JBR; Del Ray Cross, “mcdlxxxvii”, at Anachronizms, 23 Sept 011; Nick Land and Jiang Jushi, as quoted in Land’s “Politics in the Age of Artificial Idiocy”, at Urban Future, 9 Sept 011; Graham Harman, “The Guardian’s piece on neutrinos”, at Object Oriented Philosophy, 23 Sept 011 (some researchers at CERN recently measured neutrinos exceeding the speed of light …); phaneronoemikon, “El Culophone and Chew-Pee…”, at  Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 22 Sept 011; unhaunting, “COMBAT ŽIŽEK”, at info what now, 22 Sept 011; Alexander Trevi, “Impossible Chicago #28”, at Pruned, 22 Sept 011; a Guardian article, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “On the Beach”, at BLDG/BLOG, 22 Sept 011; Geoff Manaugh, “Tunnel / Countertunnel”, at BLDG/BLOG, 22 Sept 011; Sophie, as quoted in Robert Moss, “ESSAY: Punch a Hole in the World”, at Wild River Review, as seen at wood s lot, 22 Sept 011; anon., as quoted in Graham Harman, “poem by a rebellious 10-year-old”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 23 Sept 011]

The vast majority of Israelis support Palestine's UN statehood bid: So what's Obama's problem???

Reblogged from Nomadics and (after the asterisks) The Guardian:

This from today’s edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (original article here):

Former MK Yael Dayan criticizes Israeli leadership for calling Palestinian bid at UN ‘unilateral,’ asking: ‘Isn’t the occupation unilateral?’

By Asaf Shtull-Trauring

Hundreds of Israeli intellectuals and academicians voiced their support of Palestinian statehood in a Tel Aviv rally on Thursday, urging PA President Mahmoud Abbas to forge ahead with his UN bid despite U.S. resistance.

About 300 people attended the event outside of Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall, which included speeches from former Labor MK Yael Dayan, writer Sefi Rachlevsky, 1968 student protest leader Daniel Cohn Bendit, Prof. David Harel, Prof. Yosef Agassi, Tal Harris from One Voice and others.
Speaking at the rally, Foreign Ministry director general Alon Liel described U.S. President Obama’s UN speech on Wednesday as a “knockout blow to Abu Mazen [Abbas].”

“An American elections speech which stated that the United States supported the rebels in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, and Bahrain, but not the Palestinians, since they face the State of Israel,” Liel said, adding that it was “painful to see a President like Obama giving Abbas – who had walked the diplomatic path for three years – a sort of black eye in the General Assembly.”

The former Foreign Ministry official also described a recent visit of several prominent Israeli writers to Abbas’ Ramallah office, where they urged the Palestinian leader: “Don’t buckle from under the pressure.”

“You were struck by Obama, but Obama no longer runs the world. There is a wide international community. Get off the floor, skip the Security Council, go to the General Assembly and get the 150 GA votes,” Liel said, adding that Abbas had to “demand that it will happen this time.”

“I’d like to see the state that will vote against Palestinian statehood. History will judge them, and that includes Israel,” the former official added.

Yael Dayan, speaking at the Tel Aviv event, said it was a disgrace that Israel was calling the Palestinian move a unilateral one, asking: “Isn’t the occupation unilateral?”

“Are both sides occupying? To both sides have similar infrastructures? Everything we have, the Palestinians don’t have. The Palestinians deserve to have everything we do.”

Speaking at the rally, Daniel Cohen Bendit urged social protest leaders to aid the Palestinian cause, saying: “I spoke with the leaders of the social protest leaders and they are wary to bind the two struggles. But there can be no solution to Israel’s social problems without ending the occupation.”

Prof. Galia Golan blamed the inability to strike a peace deal between Israel and the PA on the Israeli leadership, saying: “We could have reached an agreement since 1988 and it’s entirely our fault that we didn’t.”

***

It is the exact spot where the new sovereign state was declared. But the year was 1948 and the state was Israel.

Now new officers in the Israeli army are brought to Independence Hall on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as part of their education in the history of the Jewish state.

On the day before Mahmoud Abbas was expected to launch his bid for a Palestinian state, guide Amir Rimon 28, was lecturing a group of young soldiers under one of Rothschild's broad ficus trees.

"We come [here] to remind ourselves of the values on which our state was founded," he said. The Declaration of Independence, read by David Ben-Gurion 63 years ago, said Palestinians would be equals in the fledgling country.

"I think we need to recognise a Palestinian state. Many of the soldiers agree with me – it's 50-50," Rimon added. A recent poll conducted by the Hebrew University found that 70% of Israelis believe that if the UN votes in favour of a Palestinian state, Israel should accept the decision. This is not the position of the Israeli government.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists there can be no peace if the Palestinians follow a unilateral path at the UN. On Wednesday, President Obama threw his weight behind this position.

But on Rothschild Boulevard, alternative Israeli voices are being raised. More than 80 prominent Israeli intellectuals gathered outside Independence Hall on Thursday. They were led by author Sefi Rachlevski, to declare their support for a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders.

"We will have an affect because we represent the real Jewish Zionist heritage and what we're saying is obvious: Palestine, you don't need our permission to have a state. Negotiations on its borders can follow," said Rachlevski.

Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer was among signatories to the declaration. He argued that the establishment of two independent neighbouring states was the only solution, and that it is an outcome that would be supported by the majority of Israelis.

But he warned it would be met with an armed rebellion by the rightwing, nationalist orthodox minority: "The fear I have of is not so much that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will march to the 1967 borders. I am afraid of the violent orthodox who have openly established a separate entity [in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory]. They pose the real danger to Israel."

As the intellectuals launched their protest at Independence Hall, at the opposite end of Rothschild, a few dozen tents and a thriving herb garden were all that remained of Israel's summer of demos. This was the hub of a nationwide call for change that rallied thousands of Israelis.

Palestinian activists note that this unprecedented protest conspicuously ignored the occupation. It proved too divisive an issue for organisers to press upon.

Protest leader Dror Shalom, 35, insisted criticism of the occupation was implicit in their challenge to Netanyahu's rightwing government. The majority of people who protested in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, he said, would extend their calls for justice to Palestinians.

Shalom said: "Palestine is a country and it has been for years. We know where the Palestinian state will be, which is where it is now. We will have to evacuate a few thousand Israelis and that's it."

Shalom believed the majority of Israelis accept a Palestinian state is inevitable, whether it is declared unilaterally or reached through negotiations. Like Bauer, he identified the obstacle as Israel's powerful, nationalist religious lobby and its disproportionate influence over Netanyahu's rightwing government.

He added: "We love Israel and are worried about the direction it is headed. It was our intention at the last big protest to revise Israel's Declaration of Independence."

In the House of the Hangman 679

Purple drank, chopped and screwed. The language of corporate legalese begins to build toward the waterfall. Rockabilly hair and stretched tribal earlobes. X / is running out as we climb in / I jump up to the floor,’ etc. A girl secretly ‘places a button under her tongue.’ Something like a dissatisfaction with Wall Street, with global capitalism, with capitalist sovereignty, something that setting up a Tahrir Square in downtown Manhattan would begin to resolve. Re: The Alpha Omega Galaxy Freefall Generator (AOGFG), the flywheels keep turning, even though it seems impossible. Each flywheel becomes its own electricity generator, and to make more power all that is needed is to add more rotors. When he finished speaking he declared that a march was happening that very minute and took off by himself, declaring the march-of-one through a megaphone. Thanks for the archival photo of what, a quarter-million bison skulls. I can imagine drinking a “grain beverage”. I will spend hours looking for the grail of boots. I also think a line soon after this might be, “The desire to eat Moroccan olives naked.” I should put a “while” in there but I enjoy the ambiguity, tho The Big Disappointments do tend to loom over everything and I think so ruefully about how the world is a big disaster, just a big chaotic & agonistic open sore. I drove to the wrong town yesterday. This morning I went from a dead stop thru a red light into a line of cars making left turns. Why? Is today the end of summer? No, summer ends at 9:04 UTC on the 23^rd. The boat in the bottle stays there. Ok. Take a brief look at the star structure. A face emerges. What a beautiful ass it has. Someone said: “Dachsund. Is that how you say it?” A chorus of pronunciations of the word “Dachsund” filled the room. I felt less like a ragged bit of something, I wander the parking structures of downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise — one that promises to embody the historical moment. “Melons, clouds, and lighthouses scheme endlessly, plotting to take power over the cosmos.” Here’s a little myth: Though alien to the world’s ancient past, young blood runs similar circles. All those bones are born from four grandparents. Baby teeth and baby teeth all down the line. Jackets didn’t used to zip up. There wasn’t a single door. Just the energy pathways of acupuncture. Troy Davis. The fish ladders of Gmail. If I think of stones, mountains, streams, canyons, lakes, etc., as animals – as relatives – well, they are, and I do.

[Note: Sources: JBR, but see John Sakkis, “how you going to rate me …”, at Both Both, 21 Sept 011 (whence I “got” Rockabilly … earlobes); SPD blurb for Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Chinese Notebook (trs. John Sakkis and Angelo Sakkis); John Sakkis, as quoted in Kevin Killian’s review of Sakkis’ Rude Girl, and SPD blurb for same; JBR; Matt Applegate, “Watching Protest on Television” at Prodigies and Monsters, 21 Sept 011; JBR; phunkychic666, “British Inventor Claims Generator ‘Breaks The Laws Of Physics’” Disinformation, 21 Sept 011; JBR, but see photo captioned “A pile of American Bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer: photographer unknown, mid-1870s (image by Chick Bowen, 27 May 2011)” embedded in Tom Clark, “Bison Skull Pile”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 21 Sept 011; JBR; Nada Gordon, “equinox”, at Ululations, 21 Sept 011; JBR (UTC = Coordinated Universal Time is a time standard based on International Atomic Time (TAI) with leap seconds added at irregular intervals to synchronize with the  Earth’s rotation. UTC is conceptually different from Universal Time and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), but it can be used interchangeably where sub-second precision is not required. It may also be viewed as a compromise between TAI and a precise variant of Universal Time, UT1, because each second is as precisely the same length as atomic can determine (as with TAI), but remains within a second of UT1 — Wikipedia); Robert Mittenthal, “Afterword”, as quoted in Michael Cross, “More Wax World”, at The Disinhibitor, 21 Sept 011; Bhanu Kapil, “We wrote”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 21 Sept 011; SPD blurb for Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot; Graham Harman, “strategic vitalism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 21 Sept 011; JBR; Rachel Glaser, “Pee on Water”, as quoted in Hilary Plum, “‘The thing gleams from inside the book’: A conversation/dictionary with Rachel Glaser”, at Kenyon Review, 23 Aug 011; JBR; SPD blurb for Bill Luoma, Some Math; JBR; Levi R Bryant, “Strategic Vitalism and the Wilderness”, at Larval Subjects, 21 Sept 011; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 678

He keeps repeating I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments ... So there’s this dream I used to have: I’m at this concert, some band I'm totally into – Hüsker Dü, or Mekons, or Oysterband, whatever – and for some reason one of the band members singles me out, and hauls me up on stage. And they hand me a guitar – a nice one, a vintage Strat or an ES 295 – & invite me to play along. And I play along, really well: I seem to know the songs, & after a number or two they invite me to take a solo, & it's really hot – you know, Bill Frisell hot, or Marc Ribot hot. Somehow I can hear the music in my head & translate it to my fingers. You know, like a real musician. Then there’s this other dream: Same as the first, up thru the “And I play along” bit. But I don’t play well – I play badly; I'm always a half-beat behind, I forget what key we're in, I'm lost on the bridges, I can't even – for god's sake – remember how to play an E-minor chord. You know, pretty much the way I play every day, but now in front of a whole bunch of people. And then there’s this third dream, in which, just before the very first beat, I remember that I don’t know how to play at all. I suppose you could call this postmodern but I prefer, in Latourian fashion, nonmodern. Basically, this approach would ask, “what happens when we recognize that communication is not fundamentally rational and controllable?” I mean, acting the pallet minus sex lags of autocorrelations included, the unincreasable isoareal pallet plunged in loss, to break on all the unanswerable love I have endured, to answer for alien genitals I have entered, the sonnets share this concern to an extent, as in Sonnet 4, “the volatile relations of production of hairspray, / the erotic arteries dying in my arms,” or Sonnet 2, “Zoophilia is best described as a love of animals / so mystic that neither objects to the physical, / employment law bound in a maché of dental / bills”. It’s late Spring, it’s September, and the spiraling sun leaves a glow across the thriving earth, and eight million reindeer head north loose through dark snow to mate with eight million zombies on ecstasy, zombies of course always standing in for the poor slobs who used to form the proletariat. They are fossilized and belonging. I mean, the shark teeth are fossilized and resemble snowflake obsidian, jasper, magnetite. Coincidences are just things we turn into. I keep them in a plastic tube for coins. An animal. Existence won't carry your hyphenates. Only too well. There is no merely. There is quarry. An ilk. Dying pine tree near the summit of Mount Tamalpais: photo by Hydrogen Iodide, 25 November 2005, is probably dead now. Where is all that sand coming from? The video conjures up an ambiguous dimension between chicken pox and high fashion, disease and design. It elicits thoughts about something we may call pharmaceutical or endogenous fashion: fashion that is swallowed as pills and surfaces to the skin from the inside, exuded, sweated out; fashion that emerges when you get goosebumps, or when you blush; fashion that itches and burns, tickles and swells. As in the time of strike there was quite a bit of garbage loose in the street not like an orangutan in the Rue Morgue but it eddied and whorled at the edge of the seductively weeping stream. So: what’s it going to be: landscapes that appear pristine to the eye, with oil pipes running underneath? Or wind farms, with their stark reminder that we have “chosen” certain ways of life? 2 for £10 on selected shoes; £5 for something beyond the edge of the frame. Some days, The Purple Cloud. Some days, a duet, Serge Gainsbourg & Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer, as quoted in Lars Iyer, “Tears in Rain”, at Spurious, 20 Sept 011; Mark Scroggins, “comfort zone”, at Culture Industry, 20 Sept 011; JBR (I’ve dreamt this dozens of times ...); Alex Reid, “ethos and the reputation economy”, at Alex Reid/Digital Digs, 20 Sept 011; Keston Sutherland, and Anonymous, as quoted in Anonymous’s “The Stats on Infinity”, at HTMLGIANT, 20 Sept 011; JBR; William Keckler, “Shark Teeth”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 20 Sept 011; photo caption in Tom Clark, “Madre (Life Notes)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 20 Sept 011; JBR; JBR, but see Alexander Trevi, “Mapping the Dark Geography of Sand”, at Pruned, 19 Sept 011 (on how Singapore grows, physically); “Endogenous Fashion”, at Organs Everywhere, 19 Sept 011; Joshua Clover, Chreia”, in Charles Altieri, “The Pleasures of Not Merely Circulating: Joshua Clover’s Political Imagination”, in American Poets in the 21^st Century: The New Poetics (eds. Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell); JBR; Timothy Morton, “Wind Farms and Aesthetics”, at Ecology without Nature, 20 Sept 011; JBR; Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horrors of Philosophy Vol. 1 (referencing the M P Shiel novel); Sign on a shop window in Islington, in a photo embedded in Nina Power, “oh yes”, at Infinite ThØught, 20 Sept 011; JBR; Patrick Wensink, “Screamin’ Jay and Serge Gainsbourg, together at last”, at We Who Are About To Die, 19 Sept 011 (a must-see video)]