Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 860

I’d back down if I were you, he shot a clown once. How can you relax? “Do you want to go to McDonald’s? Do you want to go to Chili’s? Do you want to go to Outback? Do you want to go to Miami Subs Grill? Do you want to go to the Container Store? Do you want to go to Sharper Image? Do you want to go to Hooters? Do you want to go to Chi-chi’s? Wait, Chi-chi’s is out of business. Do you want to go to Kenny Rogers Roasters? Do you want to go to Denny’s? Do you want to go to Great Clips? Do you want to go to Taco Bell?” Moods rev. Moods rev in any set of coordinates, like fog in d-flat. Water swims to more water. “The neck’s broken. The brain is useless. We need a new brain.” “You ever see Star Wars? ... It’s very accurate,” to quote Sun Ra. I can’t really say that I ‘get’ the azaleas, just that I’m passing them. Space feeds off itself and feeds off the space beside it, knitting bloated yards together in strungtime, fetusfat, crawlanimals, Peacebeaten, snotcrow, wax girl, scratch hare, shock-muffled, crampgrip, meager fields all the way up to the small hut that had put its roots down at the foot of the bent, brooding Gloam Shell. The mountains were somewhat loose, loose from worry, like teeth in a cancer mouth. In the river fold a poisonous mush was boiling. The end was nigh. In the fjord the whales bawled and blustered, hit their plate lobes against each other in ringing thrust. The perverse nature continued to take place, and through the fibers the hideous lymph spread. You can kind of chew it. The space here seems hungry from being overfed, then starved. So now, come here and meet your plague-mom: After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. BMB: Will you read the Lindsay Lohan section from your sensational chapbook E!? BK: I have only read this in public once, at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. But if the Bambi Muse babies want me to, I will. It’s the most misunderstood section of E! — people just gloss over it. But LL’s stolen necklace is the link between Dynasty’s catfight and Anna Nicole’s clown face demise. ‘You know / you know you know. It’s all uncertainty / and your neck. You walk slowly / in a calm voice.’ And you listen to your app: “Take a picture of a cloud. If there are no clouds, improvise as you see fit.” Then there are social practices like asking passersby if they’ve seen a rabbit in the area. “Locate the light source illuminating your path — the moon, the sun, the stars, or streetlights. Notice the shadows and colors it creates. Wait for a change in light before you continue.” His shot appears sideways, confused, perhaps because he’s struggling to find some other source. That answer lies further beyond, in the glow of bright lights from elsewhere in the city reflecting off the smoggy atmosphere. Why? What is being sold there? And of wolves in the hills? Or your car is / Blocking my driveway / If you don't move it NOW I'll call / And have it towed, Jim I'm sorry, I didn't mean what I said, I just thought I did, we don't have, I need to get 1 lb ground beef / Turn left / Under the olive trees. NOW who's Pythagoras? But streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they’re given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the throughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway). My foot is in your hand and oh now it’s in your mouth. There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this.

[Note: Sources: Temperance Brennan, “The Glowing Bones in the Old Stone House” episode of Bones; There is No Year, as quoted in Sparks’ “While the World Was Sleeping: A Review of Blake Butler’s There is No Year and Nothing”, at Big Other, 28 Feb 012; Camille Martin, “Twin Cicadas”, “Snipe Hunt”, at 17 Seconds; JBR; Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931), epigraph to Sean Moreland, “‘another brain’: An interview with Sandra Ridley”, at 17 Seconds; Sun Ra, and Dana Ward, as quoted in Dana Ward and Karen Weiser, “On Affinity, a conversation”, at POM² 4; Blake Butler, and Aase Berg, as quoted in Butler’s “The Tiny Massive Lardfields of Aase Berg”, at Vice, 28 Feb 012; Gregory Sherl, “Sexy Sexy”, at Night Train 9.2; Bambi Muse Babies and Kate Durbin, as quoted in Bambi Muse, “The Baby Kate Interview”, at Bambi Muse, 28 Feb 012; Emily Pettit, as quoted in John Ashbery, SPD blurb for Pettit’s Goat in the Snow; JBR, but see following; An Xiao, Cary Peppermint, as quoted in An Xiao’s “Where Psychogeography Meets Mobile Phones”, at Hyperallergic, 28 Feb 012 (on the Indeterminate Hikes + app); The Book of a Thousand Eyes, as seen in various sections on various pages at Poets.org; Carolyn DeCarlo, “My foot is in your hand …”, as quoted in “Jackson Nieuwland + Carolyn DeCarlo”, at Everyday Genius, 28 Feb 012; Zachary Schomburg, as quoted in SPD blurb for Schomburg’s Fjords Vol. 1]

In the House of the Hangman 859

O bitter damned night! you again! must I yet
pluck out my unreal teeth
undress my unlaughable self
put to sleep this melancholy head?
I am nothing without the laughing sickness.

My father’s got it, my grandfather had it;
surely my Uncle Fez will get it, but me, me,

ay, for me, mathematics is able to map universality and bring the labyrinth of the universal continuum – in its different modalities, global-regional reflexivity, general openness and particular designations – into focus. And it is universality through which (a true-to-the-universe) knowledge can mediate the abyssality or depth of an absolutely open and reflexive universe: Universality → Knowledge → Abyssality. The triadic commutation systematically reveals the reflexive web of the universe (from the universe to the universe, or universe-for-itself), which can be traversed by trans-modal, trans-regional and synthetic-analytic passages. The web of the universal and open continuum, thus, illuminates the continuous and reflexive passage ‘Universality → Abyssality’ in terms of real alternatives (Universality → … → Abyssality). Here, real or true-to-the-universe alternatives should be understood as free transits, transformations, twists, syntheses and relations to the open which simultaneously factor in particularities of local fields and an unrestricted conception of globality inexhaustible by any collection of multitudes or regional horizons. The logic of (real) alternatives, accordingly, is concerned with free expressions of the Universal in all its global-local horizons and through various relational and modal webs. Reflexivity of the universe, therefore, should be thought in terms of free expressions of the Universal, or more accurately, in terms of alternative passages through which the universe traverses back-and-forth between global and local horizons. In other words, reflexivity is the modally and relationally unbound universe-for-itself. Global cloud heights have dropped. I’m arguing that it lives up to its promise billing itself as an “ambient novel.” I roamed around the mall, lost. I don’t need any of this. I do not subscribe to commodity fetishism. I am a consumer in the most basic sense of the word: I like to consume food. I pulled out my smart phone (which disproves my theory about not subscribing to commodity fetishism) and looked for a highly-rated restaurant. Only one place popped up that is both highly rated and in the $ section. I set my tray down and ate my food and watched people walk by:

        Africans were eating gelato.
        A short woman was carrying a fat baby.
        Arab grandparents were smiling at me as they waited for their children.
        White dudes in beanies with beards tried to look like DJ Khaled.
        A dreadlocked caucasian pushed his twins.
        A bald mall security guard mean-mugged me.
        Lovers held hands.
        An old man with authentic sailor tattoos walked behind Persian men in
        sports coats.
        A Korean baby walked between her father and her grandmother.
        An old Russian man wearing a fedora stopped for a moment to gaze at his
        reflection in a waterfall.

I found a married priest in the snow

And not knowing what it was or why it was there, I ate a tart and gutted it
as if a Lieutenant

To me, up to my polished gun holsters in bladder, the brandy was a surprise

I drank it in like the cunning wink of an exploding butterfly

on the lip
of a teacup while God upstairs puts a bag over His head
& gasses the house

My phone told me to walk 3-miles in a reverse C-shape to the complex. I decided to deviate. I trespassed along a channel. I watched egrets and other birds I’d never seen before fly around their habitat, now limited to the tiny buffer zone between the highway and the suburban sprawl of the Real Housewives of Atlantis.

This is excellent – it’s what caught my eye on the first reading.

12.

• bellying wave;
• the intentionality of the prefab;
• march ends;
• muscular crusts;
• shuttling into silhouette;
• extrapolating that the agape of the Greek;
• any sparks of chant;
• let night be an allegory;
• a clef signifying the displacement of free play;
• the Beethoven;
• time is function of a concept of collusion;
• “missing a composer” won a continent.

Yesterday a dream that someone says the narrator delivered voice: It was exactly one day before the start of the war with the powerful state Eskimos. What kind of war? What time? I have imagined such a performance. Such a force kiss! On an island in a pond in a recreation area near a castle made ​​of fiberglass, but the products are not cheaper –

[Note: Sources: Gregory Corso, “Zizi’s Lament”; JBR; Reza Negerastani, “Fernando Zalamea: a prologue and a seminar”, at eliminative culinarism, 14 Jul 011; Jason Major, “The Sky Is Falling, Scientists Report”, at Universe Today, 23 Feb 012 (“Researchers at a href="http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa"> The University of Auckland have reported a decreasing trend in average global cloud heights from 2000 to 2010, based on data gathered by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The change over the ten-year span was 30 to 40 meters (about 100 to 130 feet), and was mostly due to fewer clouds at higher altitudes. It’s suspected that this may be indicative of some sort of atmospheric cooling mechanism in play that could help counteract global warming. A steady reduction in cloud heights could help the planet radiate heat into space, thus serving as a negative feedback in the global warming process.”); Nicholas Grider, “Insomnia and the Aunt”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Feb 012 (on Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt); Josh Heller, “Trespassing in Orange County”, at Matador Network, 27 Feb 012; Sean Lovelace, “Power and the Glory by Graham Green”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Feb 012; phaneronoemikon, “Garden Club of America”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 27 Feb 012; John Armstrong, “The Emily Dorman Problem Part One”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 27 Feb 012 (concerning Emily Dornan, “Towards a New Critical Vocabulary” at The Claudius App 1); Dmitri Prigov, various (tr. Google), at Prigov, 30 Jul 06, 15 Jul 06, 14 Jul 06, 16 Dec 05, 20 May 05]

In the House of the Hangman 858

The horses that take me to the end of my mind were taking me now. What is the body of? Dance of windowpane and chair on carpet. We were always trying to go for bigger air or nail a more technical trick that seemed ever elusive. Pendant crustacean joey wombat JOEY WOMBAT? (WILLOW!!!!) menial hammer nail system flash up to the going off the nail is in the nail , beat down the secular transparency hey, yeah YOU. A perforated disk glued to an old cassette player motor interrupts ambient light and makes tones on a tiny optical diode connected to an amplifier. In terra cotta piano tones, the most important least thing speaks. Begraddled and begraggled till stiff with symptoms, I wish you love in the opaque range, said the Angelina, Only aliens understand the need. The ship lands in colour, on the farm, on the red parkway towards the Academy paint. All these usual sense of tepid parties parts the waifs. O how can you
     not love them all
flash screen
                        at how can
not be totalement

…

If you are looking for the perfect anthropodicy
the perfect anthropodicy is damage. …
ethic speak is what toddlers talk about to spiders. Detroit gets this. Detroit carries itself with a benighted grace and is gathering together in the deserted avenues and empty warehouses of its post-metropolis. But what I want to say is: Let’s get fated together. Let’s get ‘behung with icicles’ [bihongen hrimgicelum, Seafarer, l. 17]. This is blue like valium
                                    blue bust>…<megaseme
<<noodlefuck
            jumboflex<>nanoblock

while the field held in abjection
shadow transnational clown net
eat a tulip
harbour a scorpion.

Language on the window is backwards here, and inside

the glass the small cries or clicks of things might be taken as the

spirits of the flowers, in the Garden of the Ungathered … The magic, I’m sure, is simply the tininess. And the two old ones gave each other back their wigs, shook hands, began to glow in the dark, and sleep was not permitted for three long years. Your being flows out from your teeth. Iron used to be a word for hard in the equators of the uncrying people.

[Note: Sources: Parmenides, as quoted in Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation by Stanley Lombardo; Skip Fox, “Sic Transit”, at Midway Journal, Aug 07; Charlie Capen, as quoted in Good German, “The Testicle Umbilical Cord”, at Disinformation, 26 Feb 012; Jonny Liron, “knife to throat …”, in Better Than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries (ed. Chris Goode); Ranjit Bhatnagar, “instrument-a-day 26: optical siren”, at moonmilk, 26 Feb 012; In terra cotta … least thing speaks Allen Bramhall, “Sign This When You Have a Minute”, at Simple Theories, 26 Feb 012; Josh Stanley, “Earth”, in Goode; Eileen A Joy, “Oceanic Sorrow: An Elegy for Detroit”, at Punctum Books, 26 Feb 012; Mike Wallace-Hadrill, “Oxytocin Nasty”, in Goode; Araki Yasusada/Kent Johnson, as quoted in Barry Schwabsky, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, at Hyperallergic, 26 Feb 012 (a review of Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada (ed. Bill Freind); Nada Gordon, “dollhouse”, at Ululations, 26 Feb 012; Kim Rosenfield, “from Tràma”, as quoted in Michael Kelleher, “Aimless Reading: The R’s, Part 22.1 (Kim Rosenfield)”, at Pearlblossom Highway, 26 Feb 012; Tom Clark, “Insula”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 26 Feb 012; JBR; Jerome Rothenberg, “IN MEMORIAM JACKSON MAC LOW: A Third Night Poem”, at EOAGH 2; JBR; Tomas Weber, “It’s raining in Cochambaba”, in Goode]

In the House of the Hangman 857

Now: a lap around the Torquemada Speedway. They figure that if you just start moving, then you’ll eventually move in some significant way, and that if you just start saying then you’ll gradually say something. Like there’s somewhere to go and / or something to say. “BRAVO! BRAVO!” Just let that sink in for a moment. I was dumbstruck. I had seen them sleep. But this mechanistic view is no longer congruent with anything. Things don't carry on “in” time and space, like cogs in a clock. Time and space emerge from things themselves: planet Earth emits a gigantic spacetime vortex. The region “in front of” things is inhabited by time, space, causality — it is the aesthetic dimension, it just is how things appear, their form, morphē. Which is a line I think by St John Perse, which is a line I think by Ariana Reines. Who thought the sweep of the feeling was a wonderful sweep. Who needs to insert the herbs. Did you bring the duck? GOODBYE. GOODBYE lit irremediably by 2 fraudulent infinities. A man yawns. An ostrich dies. Pez-dispensing Hallmark cards trespass my frozen propane you’ll have to pardon my art deco why question the front teeth of the spatula at Denny’s, sizzlin’ skillets starting at 4.99. Tarzan has a greenhouse where he grows spice for his meals and medicine for his injuries and nerve things. He swims in a subterranean pool where a crystal dragon lifts its being into clarity. The animal provides illumination. Its name is legion. Its name is Ducasse. Its name is Maldoror. He sees the face of Dante in a slope of ice. Come back in fourteen billion years. Come back in seven million reincarnations. We’re boarding up the whole area until it’s choked with vines thick as twenty minotaur thighs. Hark! The herald angels sing. Three quarks for Muster Mark. Mark ordered a cheeseburger, I ordered a Pliny The Elder. Unlike many, I have never been able to read House Of Leaves or to take it the least bit seriously. I think Brandon’s Catullus is more like the book of the last few years or 3. What's Brandon’s favorite ice cream? I think it's chocolate, you should buy him a pint. Bett said, “The land is generous,” and I felt this deeply, like I could wander into the night without getting lost, or maybe technically-objectively lost in that I wouldn’t know where I was, but not lost … “Speck-likeness doesn’t have to be bad.” We threw the egg into the fire so it would become eternal. The fire was sentient. I watch the smoke emerging from the heads of the people who had gathered around the flame. “And, therefore, I adore…” Back up. “How will I be able to speak except timidly, like this: life is itself for me. Life is itself for me, and I don’t understand what I am saying.” How do we read a book that insists, “It should never be necessary to turn a page when reading”?

[Note: sources: JBR, but see email from Omo Bob, rec’d 25 Feb 012 approx 10:23 AM PST; They figure … say something: Chris Vitiello, “Let me tell you how awful Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s work was”, at The Delay, 17 Feb 012;JBR; Nicholas Manning, “Review of Marthaler’s ± 0, Théâtre du Chatelet”, at The Newer Metaphysicals, 25 Feb 012; Timothy Morton, as quoted in Tom Beckett, “Interview with Timothy Morton”, at Ask / Tell, 25 Feb 012; Ariana Reines, “FER DANS NOTRE COEUR”, at Ariana Reines, 25 Feb 012; JBR; AFLAC ad seen on ion 25 Feb 012 approx 3:24 PM PST; Sampson Starkweather, “A Fantastic Grave — a transcontemporation from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil”, “VIII from Trilce — a transcontemporation of Vallejo”, at Sink 1; Denny’s ad seen on Sky Sports News 25 Feb 012 approx 4:30 PM PST; John Olson, “Tarzan on Mars”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 25 Feb 012; The Rejection Group, “Welcome Back”, at Nothing To Say & Saying It, 12 Nov 010; “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; John Sakkis, “Books read 2011”, at Both Both, 25 Feb 012; JBR, but see previous; Jackie Wang, “Into the Valley of the Bomb: Soundtrack for New Mexico”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 25 Feb 012; Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (tr. Ronald W Sousa), as quoted in Aaron Apps, “The Passion According to G.H.”, at Locusts & Timespots, 23 Feb 012; JBR; Jeff T Johnson, and Tan Lin, as quoted in Johnson’s “SEVEN CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES AND OBITUARY 2004. THE JOY OF COOKING Tan Lin”, at Sink]

Galileo's Finger

In the House of the Hangman 856

Hole, hole, hole, hole, hole, hole, hole. They found it in the basement of this place when they were making it into a theater. Silence. Silence. Pause in which we see both SHOE and BOOT listening attentively but also still trying to be inconspicuous. Oh, electric wires overhead, tell me — / Oh, electric wires in my head, / … / All the hours of my day … / Your brain is floating in oxytocin. There’s the us, yes. Pardon the ESL, but “Do you want to go to the cinema?” No major cities in flames. (Pluck an apple, pluck a breast, ah! the good life.) The music creates the world’s “ought”. Oh! Oh! I forgot the best line of the night! Ok, so I really forgot but I’ll give it a try. “The first thing I saw when I walked into work this week was Geert-Jan dipping wired circuit boards into salt water.” The air was redolent of hot plastic and the low sizzle of possibility underlay everything. It was like the day they released the Nike Air Foamposite One NRG Galaxy. Was she Princess Toadstool or Princess Peach? Oh Pandora! Your teeth whose tiny feet are pink as alabaster and fragrant as soap, God is the excess of our collective earwax. “Please reattach the orifice if / I’m ever to hold your love.” Why was the orifice detached in the first place? Who did the detaching? Ah, the em-dash has never been used to greater effect. Electrons entered the picture as temperatures dropped, and the afterglow is what we now know as the CMB.

A.      DO THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL

1.              (thinking thinking)  

Touch Screen to Begin

2.              (thinking loving)   

3.              which you totally nailed

4.              (loving thinking)  

5.              (loving loving)

Get Off the Rug! You too!

Tighten the intercushioned radical sympathectonomy. The water goat head hangs from the water goat tree, my hairy black iris, alu alu, “TO SEE MANY SHE HAD THE EYES OF INSECTS.” … the snail … now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high-stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennae trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings. I flex on your neck, High Stepper. Perhaps I should be thinking about fire-walking, religious healing, or orbit-pilgrimage. How flammable I am, like an ineradicable line of Greek. So it was your plan, Furyan?

[Note: Sources: Mac Wellman, “The Devil’s Butthole: A Song”, and “Excerpt from 3 2’s, or AFAR”, as quoted in Trish Harnetiaux and Matthew Korahais, “MAC WELLMAN Explains, Or Doesn’t Explain, What Is Near And What Is Far”, at Brooklyn Rail, Oct 011; House, in “Chase” episode of House; blurb for Jordan Stempleman, No, Not Today, at Helicopter Press; JBR, but see the following; Fahad, as quoted in Nick Sturm, “Do you want to go to the cinema?”, at We Who Are About To Die, 24 Feb 012; Curtis White, “Crazy Wisdom: von Trier’s Melancholia”, at Big Other, 24 Feb 012; Geoff Tuck, “Staalplaat Soundsystem, teenagers and LACE”, at Notes on Looking, 24 Feb 012; JBR; Hrag Vartanian, “The Shoes That Almost Started a Riot”, at Hyperallergic, 24 Feb 012; Michele Morrow, “Ms February = Princess Peach”, at Hello Giggles, 24 Feb 012; phaneronoemikon, “Avenue of the Crenellated Mermaid Leaf”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 24 Feb 012; Amy King, and John Pluecker, as quoted in Pluecker’s “A Man Reads Men by the Lips of Women”, at HTMLGIANT, 24 Feb 012; JBR; Alasdair Wilkins, “Alternative dark matter particle could explain the universe’s lithium shortage”, at io9, 23 Feb 012 (CMB = Cosmic Microwave Background); Joyland Poetry, 24 Feb 012; Feng Sun Chen, “Echo”, in “TO SEE MANY SHE HAD THE EYES OF NSECTS”, at * Secret Amazon, 24 Feb 012; Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens”, as quoted in John Latta, “Its relation to a dozen others …”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 24 Feb 012; Sarah Law, “Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane”, “Perihelion”, “Madonna in Maestà”, and Melissa Flores-Bórquez, as quoted in Flores-Bórquez’s review of Law’s Perihelion, at Intercapillary Space, Feb 06; JBR (referencing Chronicles of Riddick)]

In the House of the Hangman 855

I can spell anesthesiologist but not marvelously and “… think that sugar is more important than simile.” I said like, in general, I hold out for some sorts of cultural specificity. Like maybe. He was asking me what I thought about specific issues like genital mutilation, especially female, I suppose. ‘Tis ack. & your car was wooden by enclosing it, a house chewing on a family. When you throw something, it goes right in the air. I have myself to thank you. Don’t even go there. Quite literally I stand in the littoral zone: a lens -- no an aqueous humor, my feet on the land below the high-water mark, my hand a glazed waver: hello light-purple lights, hello red spots, you've beaten the stars out tonight but you're struggling with the atmosphere. T or F: The past is damned to necessity. All your networks are all your contexts. Love must win. The panopticon was a nineteenth-century installation / performance art project. Allemann, page one, sentence one: I fuck babies. Allemann, last page, last sentence: Say nothing. Open Wide. And if you think the CString is bad, wait until you meet JeanPants Underwear! They see a scarab beetle scurry along the floor with a big robe, for this crossing, the eye is alert and intrigued. ‘He left behind many brilliant insights on his road to unsuccess. His failure was of a singular and spectacular kind.’ That bird that rubs its beak on the mountain (sometimes it's Fuji, sometimes Everest) only once a year, like a birthday … Codex Seraphinianus? I was in Milan say 10 yrs ago, saw a stack of about 50 copies, but it was part of an art show, and I didn’t know who to ask if they were for sale. In the same letter Porter quoted from memory a line of Wittgenstein that he felt central to his own view of aesthetics: “It’s hard to even fathom an imaginary creature as good this — presenting the world’s best animal, chameleons that lay golden eggs and can stand on a match tip. That is to say, every sentence is in order as it is.” Our morning hymn this is, and song at evening in feature full of folk saying scumbags! reptiles! the old folks just better stay at home or lose their reason too, mine and yours loaned against non-interest, souls implanted by necessity smooth turning upon an axle you’d not know was not granted its near life to be there, on-site in foam. We're looking for new things to paint from old issues of WEIRD MYSTERIES. The naked Maja must be washed with d’intelligent sponges, while Marjorie Perloff juggles flaming apples, GOOD LORD, DID I GET HYDROFLUORIC ACID ON MY SKIN! 1913 was also the year of the Trafalgar Square suffragette riot. Infinite Axiom: There is an other inside of me to whom I address this speech. He is on your side. Imagine me as a womb. Imagine my words as the uterine wall, as the sound of someone great and lovely breathing, the sounds of someone’s blood pumping, the sounds of some father lending his ear to my outer wall and listening closely. Imagine that you are a child. Imagine that you are a child inside of me. But do not imagine me as me. I am your child. That is, as Whitehead observes, the plane of immanence defended by flat ontology is a disjunctive diversity of multiplicities or what onticology calls objects or systems. In formal logic, an inclusive disjunction (P v Q) is true so long as one or both of the atomic propositions (P, Q) that compose it are true. Consequently, if P and& Q both exist then the disjunction P v Q will be true. Likewise if P exists and Q does not exist the disjunction P v Q will be true, and if P does not exist and Q does exist, the disjunction P v Q will be true. The only instance where P v Q will be false is where there P and Q both do not exist. Dragons are like opium smoke. But what about water dragons? Big waves, climbing up and up over a reef – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – the ‘Dustism’ of original inauthenticity” – “Black Infinity” – “The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity” – “What is a Hermeneutic Light?”

[Note: Sources: Sandra Doller, and Kamau Brathwaite, as quoted in Doller’s “LIKE SUGAR LIKE”, at Omnidawn, 1 May 010, and “We Hunter the Excuser”, as quoted in Adam Robinson, “Sandra Doller, EXPLAIN YOURSELF!”, at HTMLGIANT, 18 Nov 09; Ben Doller, “big deference betwixt throwing things and throwing things away”, “Chickenstrips”, at La Petite Zine, and “Sattelite Convulsions”, at Poets.org; JBR; Christopher Vitale, “A Philosophical Love Poem: In Memoriam, Netta Scimecca 1924-2012”, at networkologies, 23 Feb 012; JBR, but see Hrag Vartanian, “Not Everything Is Performance Art People”, at Hyperallergic, 23 Feb 012, and Stuart Elden, “New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon”, at Progressive Geographies, 23 Feb 012; Urs Allemann, Babyfucker, and Lily Hoang, as quoted in Hoang’s “Babyfucker Blog Project: Lily Hoang”, at Give a Fig, 23 Feb 012 (deleted post); Kevin Farrell, “Why, CString, Whyyyy?”, at Unicorn Booty, 16 Apr 011; Henri Michaux, “Animals Fantastique” (tr. Paige Taggart), at Sink 9; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, as quoted in Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, “Semiotic Dubai: Peirce and Pop Architecture”, at The New Inquiry, 23 Feb 012; William Keckler, “that bird”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas, 23 Feb 012; JBR, but see Feng Sun Chen, “CODEX SERAPHINIANUS: INFINITE INSPIRATION”, at *, 23 Feb 012; William Keckler, “Fairfield Porter”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamss (The Sequel), 23 Feb 012; Disinformation, 23 Feb 012; J H Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats, or, on what there is, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Reading ‘Difficult’ Poetry with Success. Prynne, Hill and David Jones”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 23 Feb 012; phaneronoemikon: “Chandu, the Brigolure…”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 23 Feb 012; JBR, thinking of the Doller’s journal (there’s a YouTube Video in which Sylvia Pankhurst makes an appearance at 53 seconds); fragile keys, “Negligible Differences”, at Fragile Keys, 22 Feb 012; JBR; Levi R Bryant, “A-theology”, at Larval Subjects, 23 Feb 012; Timothy Morton, “Happy Losar”, at Ecology without Nature, 22 Feb 012; JBR;Reza Negarestani, Alisa Andrasek, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard, Alexander R Galloway, as quoted in Nicola Masciandaro, “Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium”, at The Whim, 22 Feb 012]

What a great thing!

Jhave Johnston's PennSound mashup with WEAVE

AL FILREIS

Working with our PennSound audio files, Jhave Johnston has created a prototype mashup machine that enables on overlay of poets’ sounds, with an option to turn on WEAVE, which senses silence (e.g. between lines or stanzas in a performance) and automatically intercuts from one short file segment to another, creating a flow of shifting voices. “I always figured,” says Charles Bernstein, my co-director at PennSound, “that once we had a substantial archive of sound files, the next phase would be for people to use them in novel ways.” “Reminds me,” says Michael S. Hennessey, PennSound’s editor, “of one of my favorite things to do with the site before we switched to the current streaming codec, which doesn't allow for simultaneous play: pull up a few author pages — best of all Christian Bök — and start layering tracks over his cyborg opera beatboxing.” Jhave adds: “My motivation for building it is similar to Michael's: a joy in listening to things overlap.”

In the House of the Hangman 854

Actually, I think my life is structured around the ramifications of orgasm, the sublimated bubblings and percolations of orgasm through cultural areas, pushed onto a frame of acetate through jam sponge in cerise collagen. And yes, it’s probably all too obvious to people that my philosophy, such as it is, got tacked on to “things that make me come” — either literally or figuratively — as an afterthought, a post-rationalisation that I nevertheless insist on. I know that money and success could easily have made me idiotic, just as poverty and failure did. Lesions come running thru hard sky. Many happy returns of the repressed. You’re all that I want and all that I need, and all that I have and want to need & need to have, and needs having to want that which by wanting slips out of need and into nothing, the softer part. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: creativity and collectivism. Ariel Pink recently suggested we collaborate, which means a lot to me, even if we never actually follow through on it. That is, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant moves from a conception of evil as privation, i.e., the absence of good, made popular by Augustine, to a notion of willed evil, i.e., evil positively chosen. According to Kant, “This evil is radical, since it corrupts the ground of all maxims.” Maxims being “the subjective principle of volition,” or the subjective imperative, as distinguished from the practical law, the objective principle of volition, or the categorical imperative. Our affirmative will to evil is thus the point at which the categorical imperative is fundamentally revealed as a maxim, not a given. For if the categorical imperative were a given, there would be no ability to choose to behave according to its principles, and therefore, as Joan Copjec has noted, Kant’s concept of radical evil also posits that “our only consciousness of the law is our consciousness of our transgression of it. Our guilt is all we know of the law.” That is, take Steven Zultanski’s Pad, a litany of every single thing in and constituting his apartment, and whether or not his dick can lift it. See the meaning fall off like so much gravy self referencing infested with the clot drizzling out the stigma [stigmata?] of my earnest urge, this form is barbed wire to be left and caught in a wing of $300 with which to go shopping. “And if cops are people too, then why are they cops?” Dreamt about Marabou Orient something or other ... A big golden chocolate cake with the taste of burnt curry and mixed Vicks cough drops. A tale of whoa! Whoop whoop! Do you remember Bo A Snake? You look like someone run you through a mangle. Mangle. Do not eat poop! And as a mass murderer with a large knife. Lets enjoy some animal testing while you suck on my eye ball and Oh meadow all hm hm hm hm by many kinds of hm hm hm hm hm hm hm. As Adorno says in Aesthetic Theory, we reenact what could not be felt the first time around. We sank together like paste rubies and artificial pearls — Highways empty. And there’s a ring around the tips. It’s OK and fresh when it comes to some pebbles. Tiptoe, quickly: to this rising iron dust. The rainbow sloth, like literature, suffuses and shatters your body. “The mask is what you use; it isn’t a fake, it’s a mask. Your senses love you; they evolved to be your mask – or you made them, didn’t you?” – unexpected lines of flight, it’s always capable of more (more, more) futures than we can anticipate, “a hunk of electromagnetic fur torn from the side of something still living and thrown.”

[Note: Source: Momus, as quoted in Marie Calloway, “The Rumpus Interview with Momus”, at The Rumpus, 24 Jan 012; Anna Ticehurst, “Sunbathing Under Surveillance Camera One”, in Better Than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries (ed. Chris Goode); Francesca Lisette, “Casebook: A History of Autonomy and Anger: a poem for performance (II. Counter-Statement)”, in Goode; Joe Luna, “a softer you”, in Goode; JBR; Vanessa Place, “A Poetics of Radical Evil”, at Lana Turner 3.2; Jonny Liron, not quite as quoted in Joe Luna, “Jonny Liron wants to be fucked, or GOING OVER THE TOP OF THE FLESH: an introduction to the pornography of poetry”, at All Over the Grid, 6 Jul 010; JBR; Ray Kelly, as quoted in “Portrait of the Artist as a Rookie Cop”, at The New Inquiry, 21 Feb 012; Stina Kajaso, “work related grievance” (tr. Google), at SONOFDAD, 21 Feb 012; Thom Donovan, “Someplace other than what he read (@ J2)”, at Wild Horses of Fire, 21 Feb 012; Jack Kimball, “Squeals and sequel …”, at Pantaloons, 21 Feb 012; Timothy Thornton, “Alarum, ‘Da Caccia’”, in Goode; Lucas de Lima, Alice Notley, Culture of One, Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene, as quoted in de Lima’s “Ecologies of Sensation: The Book(s) of Bhanu Kapil and Clarice Lispector”, at Montevidayo, 21 Feb 012]

In the House of the Hangman 853

So I say, “significant concentrations of glyphosate in the urine samples of city dwellers.” Miniature cars speed by at 240 scale miles per hour. As mimetic animals, they blend in with their surroundings so as not to be noticed, AND LOOK A LIGHT IS RUNNING ALONG THE ROPES, The Great Transparents. So what is this reading that Maurice Blanchot invites us to enact here, at once light and serious, a “joyful, wild dance,” fundamental (founding the work) in its very insouciance? Canada’s becoming an authoritarian petro-state, positioning itself as a resource colony for China. The hidden background medium governing any situation is more important than its foreground or surface content. The brilliance descending omnidirectionally is not a gravity-evading parachute, but striates the entire sky. How can there be such transparent bones? He’d sit and pick chicken groans from his soup. I was half expecting Lorca’s lobster and a mandibular insignia in my throat. I can also imagine the video. It would have a spacecraft powered by sparklers and roman candles. Liftoff or not? Oh no, Autotune. Worst I ever heard, though, was from a young waitress in State College. After she brought the food, I told her there was no fork. Her response: “And you’re like, ‘oh my God.’” Well, not quite. I actually know a person who has the very unlucky luck of having been struck by lightning on two different occasions while working as a ranger in the remote wilderness (the nails grew back, the teeth didn’t). It seems I’m a supporter of phony theology. But that, of course, begs the question. Fiber makes me sad. “The Hare Infects Dad with Rabies.” “Open the Voter.” A pink vacuum. Here the ‘fur in the milk’ cascades ‘flinches through the forest’ and breeds a mutant creature, ‘the hare wolf’. I thought you said finches. Workers disappear into the cloud. Climatologists drill core samples from rock. Did I ride upon an uneasy horse and see a dust storm blowing across the rocky plains of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture? Ever eat a blue heron? Next is going to be ammo. A shirtless boy covered in dust and carrying rocks upon his head. What does it mean, a cauterized topography? To salvage rocks the color of all else from all else the color of rock. In the row of sunflowers, Z-- licked the stem of one, its roughness cutting his tongue like at the end of a grinder, he is bleeding and putting a facial tissue to his tongue, dabbing it and pulling it away, blood mixed with saliva, he is bleeding from the mouth, swallowing the blood, the sunflowers are dead, their heads drooping toward the ground, they are black with no seeds, the hulls of seeds everywhere, Z-- is bleeding, holding his mouth, we are running now, there is no way back to the house. Recalling the subsequent (c. 1942) line out of “The Poems of Our Climate”: “The imperfect is our paradise. …” “Personally, I like words to sound wrong.” But when I read that the Dogma does not catch one in front of the Spurious, then my curiosity spurs (or perhaps to impale not know). That's because for me the present book is pure dime. And this feels more strongly than anywhere else in America, where the ignorant natives, not only did they sell Gin from Plymouth, but have already built “the Disneyland of Armageddon.” Which, lest thou forget, is not an event, but a battlefield. “UTTERLY BARBARIC JAPANESE NOISE!!! PLAY LOUD!”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Good German, “Is there herbicide in your urine?”, at Disinformation, 20 Feb 012 (“The analysis of the urine samples apparently found that all had concentrations of glyphosate at 5 to 20-fold the limit for drinking water. As well as being used increasingly widely in food production, glyphosate-based weedkillers often also get sprayed onto railway lines, urban pavements and roadsides. Disturbingly, the Ithaka Journal reports (in our translation), “The address of the university labs, which did the research, the data and the evaluation of the research method is known to the editors. Because of significant pressure by agrochemical representatives and the fear that the work of the lab could be influenced, the complete analytical data will only be published in the course of this year.” News of this study comes not long after the publication of a study confirming glyphosate was contaminating groundwater. Last year also saw the publication of two US Geological Survey studies which consistently found glyphosate in streams, rain and even air in agricultural areas of the US …”); blurb for Chris Burden, Metropolis II, at LACMA; Gloria Feman Orenstein, and Andre Breton, as quoted in Orenstein’s “Down the Rabbit Hole: An Art of Shamanic Initiation and Mythic Rebirth”, in In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (eds. Ilene Susan Fort, Tere Arcq, with Terri Geis); Tristan Tzara, “The Showmen” (tr. Mary Ann Caws), in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (eds. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley); Jonathan Littell, “‘Reading’? by Jonathan Littell” (tr. Charlotte Mandell), at This Space, 14 Feb 09; Todd Paglia, as quoted in Kim Murphy, “Canada Getting Tough on Oil Disputes”, in Los Angeles Times, 20 Feb 012; Graham Harman, “The Message Counter-Attacks the Medium: McLuhan, Heidegger, and Greenberg”, at University of Copenhagen, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication; Takashi Hiraide, “43” (tr. Sawako Nakayasu), at The The; George Kalamaras, “Affirmation”, in Your Ox-Head Mask As Proof; Timothy Morton, “Oh No, Autotune”, at Ecology without Nature, 20 Feb 012; Graham Harman, “‘fan base’”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 20 Feb 012; Trane DeVore, “visual spectrum: lightning exposure”, at troutfactory notebook, 21 Feb 012; Adam Robbert, “Santorum on Earth and Man”, at Knowledge Ecology, 20 Feb 012; Fiber One Snack Bar commercial, as seen on ion, 20 Feb 012 approx 6:45 PM PST; Aase Berg, poem titles, “Milk Hare”, and Joyelle McSweeney, as quoted in as quoted in McSweeney’s “Forest of Finches: Transfer Fat by Aase Berg: Now Available from Ugly Duckling”, at Montevidayo, 20 Feb 012; Julian Pryzboś, “Four Quarters” (tr. Bogdana Carpenter), in Rasula and Conley; JBR; JBR, but see “Bright futures”, at ZS, 20 Feb 012 (“IBM launches new form of day-wage labour”; needless to say, if you’re a worker it sucks); Justin Wadland, Forrest Gander, as quoted in Wadland’s “CORE SAMPLES FROM THE WORLD: Forrest Gander”, at Rain Taxi, Winter 011/012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan’s Father is Dead”, at Boys With Short Hair, 20 Feb 012; John Latta, and Wallace Stevens, as quoted in Latta’s “To sound wrong …”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 20 Feb 012; Lakis Fourouklas, review of Lars Iyer, Dogma (tr. Google), at Spurious, 20 Feb 012; JBR; MASONNA, promo sticker on inner mind mystique (1996), as quoted in Dave Maier, “That’s Not Music – That’s Just Noise”, at Three Quarks Daily, 20 Feb 012]