Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 899

Necrocracy is oil. Disturbingly short beings in yellow fluorescent hazard suits and black visors greet you. Are they aliens? Mutated future humans? Children? Children aliens? And so on. Videos are embedded in reflective cubes. I can add two and two, to and to, too and too, and it makes perfect sense but is of no help. What? So. Ever. A worm ate a leaf and crawled in an eye / Then crawled out the mouth as a butterfly. WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! Mine is grey blue. The man who invented fire was a woman, actually. Every day, here or there in the world, on the edge of the ocean or elsewhere, a little boy climbs onto a chair and sits down in front of a plate of macaroni or a bowl of noodles. Authorities gang up on Harpo. One sister says to the other, “My handwriting isn’t better than yours, just more readable.” Later I would voyage along several of the dotted lines, from the Chott el Djerid between Algeria & Tunisia to Yuma, Arizona, in the wake of Old Shatterhand, Hadji Halef Omar & Winnetou. People, turn off all artichokes. Entire villages are marching past me carrying enormous Ogoh Ogoh demons. ‘They did to have not break’, ‘is so joint to yet not did’ and ‘don’t flew foregone alterior nail up.’ ‘You get triple points if you guess the connection’ might be an echo of ‘To Pollen’s’ ‘or does that tell you enough, resilient brotherhood.’ Yet for not tell is possible as cannot be in a world by zero frequency across bounded separation its fringe charge return con- tour, biplane rotation never breviate over its own pitch, or ‘there is no place void of being, for the void id nothing; but that which is nothing could not exist; so then being is not moved; it is impossible for it to go anywhere, if there is no void.’ And by the line of correction if the void is nothing, is nothing what by self-likeness the void is and so by necessity to have this field; of being; and is it full or empty or changing through time and if hardly can be spoken of this as what also is, must that also set limit to thought itself and is the limit finite or would be. If the void does not exist it must be full of non-existence, out to the brim which must exist in its location since not all is void, thus it is the void is not nameless but at its natural frequency else generic within limitless non-existence it could not be named, into its proper non-being. The song of birds that do not sing, because there are none where else would they sing, not from distance nor migrancy, the not-song is from not-being and not merely not there nor not-possible not silentness failing rapt upon attentive deaf ears. “My sunshine parlance would be donative adoring laterally, raise spirits in water egg cancelled, the tense ever deceptive never topaz febrile shift.” But where will I get the helicopter? Who will make my dress out of garbage bags? And where will I find the good-sized rock for our game of rockball? How will we climb to the ridge of the glacier? Who will dig the trench to the fuel pump? And where will we get the kleig lights? It all tastes of the jammy fingers that last handled these headphones. Suppose the sea spider in its mind always climbs a sleek ladder, but a good bugler plays only once in her endless life. Mutts older than Jehovah wield gray flags laden with garlic, onions and primitive communism. The wind chill factor measures the cold based on temperature and wind speed. Most of the workers sensed the real life.

[Note: Sources: Timothy Morton, “Necrocracy”, at Ecology without Nature, 30 Dec 012 (on an exhibit by Marina Zurkow); Pierre Joris, “ENUMERATION (‘ADD)”, in Read: A Journal of Inter-Translation: 2007; Dan Beachy-Quick & Srikanth Reddy, “Mobius Crowns”, in Conversities; Christopher Higgs, Manuela Draeger, In the Time of the Blue Ball, Wayne Koestenbaum, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, as quoted in Higgs’ “Playing catch up with the stacks [2]”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Mar 012; Charles Alexander, “Pushing Water 14”, in Read: A Journal of Inter-Translation: 2007; Pierre Joris, “Karl May (1842-1912)”, at Nomdics, 30 Mar 012; Del Ray Cross, “mdcxix”, at Anachronizms, 30 Mar 012; Nathan Myers, “Noise, silence, and violence during Balinese New Year”, at Matador Network, 30 Mar 012; J H Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats, and John Armstrong, as quoted in Armstrong’s “Kazoo Dreamboats – why bother?”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 30 Mar 012; Elizabeth Bachinsky, “I Want to Have a Chuck and Di Party Like My Parents Did in the Yukon in the 80s”, Adam Sol, “Note Found in a Copy of Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Matt Schumacher, “The Sea Spider Suppositions”, as quoted in Camille Martin, “Arc Poetry Magazine: ‘In the badlands of the vernacular ...”’, at Rogue Embryo, 30 Mar 012; Ivan Peledov, as quoted in “Ivan Peledov – 4 poems”, at Gobbet, 30 Mar 012; Eileen Tabios, “Orphaned Algebra (#64)”, in Eileen Tabios and j/j hastain, the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA, at Marsh Hawk Press; Rick Wiggins, “Now Entering Manual Breathing Mode”, at livedeadcat press, 30 Mar 012]

In the House of the Hangman 898

Where are your triglycerides? All tactical probe-heads are contaminated by the fog. WE UNDERSTAND RELATION BY TRACING THE FISSURES. They dress up in the sirens of cars which can go 100 miles per hour, and in pressurized bottles, and in dresses with patterns or no rhyme or reason, in dresses no less shiny than neon on those evenings in summer when I don’t know who [or what] high above us is quietly scything the crops. “Pink slime.” The boy soprano enters the doughnut-world. Clattering out across the snow to buy a paperknife, clutching a flier ... The bobcat poses in a tripod of rifles. The field is floodened. What does the deer do, now? An accidental electrocution, a wavering plane, you came to find the one who hunts angels for their feathers and buy pens from him and then he folded water into an abacus with ink made of musk spices and rosewater in an alphabet, white of the eye, outer covering of the almond: tooooooooooof! I TOO have been to Candyland. I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say. The dragon tree turned purple and crystalline in furs. It makes sense to choose one’s teacher carefully. I have proof we all wear rags. Everybody Crunk. He packed his magic eight balls fastidiously. This may just be the best bot on Twitter since the Bot Lebowski. I’m ushered on stage by two Maori dancers, channelling spirits to beat back their nerves. The ballroom is stunning — beautifully lit, big screens in every direction, a podium bracketed by clear “Obama-style” teleprompters. I’m wearing a rental tux with a bright tangerine waistcoat and bowtie. A marine scientist compliments me because, surely, I must have known that’s the colour certain fish turn to avoid predators. The crumpled tin tends to stay that way. The vinyl looks the same as ever, slick, flaccid and a little disagreeable. The hole and the mound are only two things. The parts and divisions are either radial or concentric. The abatised orifice is like a strange and dangerous object. So is a flaccid, flamingo switch draped from two points. If a hamburger were painted it would retain something of the traditional anthropomorphism. George Brecht and Robert Morris use real objects and depend on the viewer’s knowledge of these objects. The Noisy Jelly Kit comes with molds, mixes and makeshift electronics. Is everything a little bit okay? I bought a Versace tie and went dancing in a t-shirt, I walked out of the club, it was dawn, there was a soccer parade. So you are the clearest, loneliest tall glass, and you are free, and you are paler than a milieu of pale teenage girls scrubbing, condensing massively into a huge tear, you are the advert for the glass you are drinking from, is this the glass you are drinking from, is this that glass. Though entirely silent, the score bristles with notation: from long, angst-filled tacets to jittery quintuplet rests. The counting is tricky, and with any but the most accomplished pianist it can detract from the work’s potential for emotional outpouring; according to the composer’s headnote, the piece is to be played with as much heartfelt expression as desired — always, all the way through [“tutto il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al fine!”]. If you get a chance, sit near the projectionist; even after only eight minutes you’ll never forget the nervous clack and twitter of the shutter, blinking like a blinded Cyclops in the noonday sun … Wölfli apparently just slapped a hundred of the construction-duty grinding wheels inside record covers (safe to 5100rpm if you can crank the player that fast, but try only at your system’s risk).

[Note: Sources: JBR; Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia; Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing; Eugen Jebeleanu, “Secret Weapon”, in Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (tr. Matthew Zapruder and Ralph Ioanid); Ralph, “Lean, Finely Textured Beef = Pink Slime (Video)”, at Disinformation, 29 Mar 012; (“… is a food additive consisting of animal by-products treated with ammonia gas to kill bacteria. The treatment makes the by-products legally fit for human consumption. The material is not approved for sale by itself (WHAT?!?), but is used to add to ground beef and other products.); Joyelle McSweeney, “Developed Nation”, “Toy Bed”, at Perihelion; Impossible Mike, “An Arab Melancholia”, at HTMLGIANT, 29 Mar 012 (on Abdellah Taïa, An Arab Melancholia); Patrick Kosiewicz, “Silk Road”, at October Babies, 28 Feb ??year??; phaneronoemikon, “Agarinklifael”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 29 Mar 012; Anthony Madrid, book title, and “I TOO have been to Candyland”, at Poetry Foundation; Debrah Morkun, “Iota Pigeon of the Morning”, at PEN, 29 Mar 012; @Perfect_FarFrom, An Xiao, “Pentametron Pulls Together Iambic Verse from Twitter”, at Hyperallergic, 29 Mar 012; Robin Esrock, “Robin Esrock: The Mystery of the Explorer’s Club”, at Matador Network, 29 Mar 012; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”, at Daum.net, 10 May 010; An Xiao, “Play With Your Food... and Make Music”, at Hyperallergic, 29 Mar 012 (on the work of Marianne Cauvard and Raphaël Pluvinage); Del Ray Cross, “mdcviii”, at  Anachronizms, 29 Mar 012; Chad Reynolds, “Buenos Aires”, as quoted in “Friends Read Friends’ Poems #2: Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney on Chad Reynolds’s ‘Buenos Aires’”, at HTMLGIANT, 29 Mar 012; Amy De’ath, “Tall Glass”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Geoffrey Hill, Amy De’Ath and Love (poetry)”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 29 Mar 012; Craig Dworkin, “Unheard Music”, at Context 23]

In the House of the Hangman 897

We are after the disaster of the semioclasm. As soon as I go outside I’m in five different streets at once. Just as I walk onstage, Jack, smirking like a game-show host, walks onstage holding giant quotation marks made of painted blue cardboard. Of course it will not be the same spider each time but one in a sequence of spiders. I have lain here screaming for five days! It is a real pleasure to shatter the supercilious peace of these barked mammals. (Jessica Smith and I were just chatting about the senselessness of “Kill your darlings”. Why not fill your poems with darlings only?) Night's cruellest magic / Renders its metaphors possible; myself, improbable colored patches. I dreamed I called you on the telephone / to say: Be kinder to yourself / but you were sick and would not answer. Now the high winds make me feel restless. I think of how, at the age of nine, I walked through the Shivalik foothills, barefoot. A snake slid over my foot. Tiny frogs fell from the sky when it rained, and I gathered them, from puddles, in my cupped hands. I walked deep into the trees. I climbed the hill. I lay inverted above the village below, my hair flowing into a stream. Brittle dreambooks powdery gold pages / Copper scrolls scratched w/ sigils … For a while you are not okay and then you are more okay and then you are not okay again, or between the states of okay and not okay, this is pretty reasonable, I think, right now. I was okay this weekend until I found out about Shaima Alawadi and you know, that should never happen to anyone, to anyone, but I have friends who look like Shaima Alawadi and I think about those friends and the fact that there is no way for any of us to keep safe the people we love, and some awful things are harder to take than other awful things. Taking account means an event inflecting the arc of its becoming as a function of its feeling the influence of other events, either in its initial conditions or en route. An electron is an occasion of experience for Whitehead. It ‘takes account’ of the electromagnetic field of the nucleus of the atom in the dynamic form expressed as its orbit and in its quantum character (the unity of the dynamic form expressed as its orbit and energy level). The electron registers the’‘importance’ of its fellow creatures of the nucleus, and expresses it in the dynamic unity of its own pathmaking. The trees along a river take account of the surrounding mountains in how they are able to take in the rain washing down from them, negotiating with their shadows for their growth, or availing themselves of the mountain’s protection from the wind. The life of a tree is a ‘society’ of occasions of experience whose taking-account of other events — weather events, geological events, the earth’s gravitation, the sun’s rising and setting —contributes to a continuing growth pattern. Tree rings are one of the ways in which this growing lived abstraction is seen for itself. Our taking in the pattern at a glance is a semblance of a life. But even outside any encounter with human perception, the electron, the mountains, the tree involve perceptions. They are perceptions in themselves: they are how they take account, in their own self-formative activity, of the world of activity always and already going around. The horrible greed and bad table manners of the doctors at this hotel continues apace. Sincere looking faces thrust themselves towards badly handled forkfuls of sausage, the lips protruding. Millionaires slurp coffee hunched like cornered animals over their ceramic cups. Cease playing harmonicas, you lizards! Decide what you want of my heart most particularly, eagle, and take it. I defy you! Eat on. Have not all beautiful things become real on Wednesday? To be sure the furniture is wrinkled, take for example that backing beeping truck.

[Note: Sources: JBR (I got disaster from Blanchot and semioclasm from Barthes; for John Armstrong); Joseph Lease, “Enjoy Your Symptom”, in Testify; Lyn Hejinian, “Now in bed suddenly I remember having rescued …”, “One wouldn’t say of something that moves,” in The Book of a Thousand Eyes; Frank O’Hara, “Oranges: 12 Pastorals”, “Second Avenue”, in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (ed. Donald Allen); Elisa Gabbert, and John Ashbery, “The Dolors of Columbine”, as quoted in Gabbert’s “‘The Dolors of Columbine’ by John Ashbery”, at The French Exit, 28 Mar 012; Adrienne Rich (i.m.), “For the Dead”, in “Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012”, at Feminist Philosophers, 28 Mar 012; JBR; Bhanu Kapil, “Breathing: How to Live on Wednesdays”, at Was Gertrude Stein a Punjabi?, 28 Mar 012; David Meltzer, When I Was a Poet, as quoted in Patrick James Dunagan, “When I Was a Poet”, at HTMLGIANT, 28 Mar 012; The Rejectionist, “Progress Report”, at The Rejectionist, 28 Mar 012; Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event, as quoted in Adam Robbert, “Massumi”, at Knowledge Ecology, 28 Mar 012; Timothy Morton, “Loathing”, at Ecology without Nature, 28 Mar 012]

RIP Earl Scruggs

RIP Adrienne Rich

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb    disgraced    goes on doing now diagram the sentence 2007

Bobby Rush, Democratic Congressman from Illinois goes on the floor of Congress, takes off his jacket and sports a hoodie.

Reblogged from EgbertoWillies.

Some Days The News Is Also Good (Hat tip Omo Bob)

reblogged from NPR:

Alan Lomax's Massive Archive Goes Onlline

12:01 am

March 28, 2012

by JOEL ROSE

 

EnlargeShirley Collins/Courtesy of Alan Lomax Archive

Alan Lomax (right) with musician Wade Ward during the Southern Journey recordings, 1959-1960.

Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It's part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet.

Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the '90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren't quite sure how to tackle the problem.

"We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible," says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the '80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.

Hear An Interview With Alan Lomax On 'Fresh Air'

"For the first time, everything that we've digitized of Alan's field recording trips are online, on our website," says Fleming. "It's every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music."

"Alan would have been thrilled to death. He would've just been so excited," says Anna Lomax Wood, Lomax's daughter and president of the Association for Cultural Equity. "He would try everything. Alan was a person who looked to all the gambits you could. But the goal was always the same."

 

Throughout his career, Lomax was always using the latest technology to record folk music in the field and then share it with anyone who was interested. When he started working with his father, John Lomax, in the '30s, that meant recording on metal cylinders. Later, Alan Lomax hauled giant tape recorders powered by car batteries out to backwoods shacks and remote villages.

Lomax wrote and hosted radio and TV shows, and he spent the last 20 years of his career experimenting with computers to create something he called the Global Jukebox. He had big plans for the project. In a 1991 interview with CBS, he said, "The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind."

He imagined a tool that would integrate thousands of sound recordings, films, videotapes and photographs made by himself and others. He hoped the Global Jukebox would make it easy to compare music across different cultures and continents using a complex analytical system he devised — kind of like Pandora for grad students. But the basic idea was simple: Make it all available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Lomax was forced to stop working when his health declined in the '90s, and he left the Global Jukebox unfinished. Now that his archives are online, the organization he founded is turning its attention to that job.

The Association for Cultural Equity is housed in a rundown building near the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan. Most of Lomax's original recordings and notes are now stored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. But Fleming says the New York offices still exude the DIY vibe they had when Lomax was working there — right down to the collection of castoff chairs and desks, none of which seem to match.

"There was never any money in it for Alan," says Fleming. "Alan scraped by the whole time, and left with no money. He did it out of the passion he had for it, and found ways to fund projects that were closest to his heart."

Money is still tight. But that never stopped Alan Lomax, and it hasn't deterred Anna Lomax Wood, either.

"He believed that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field," she says. "Not that they're all alike. But they should be given the same dignity, or they had the same dignity and worth as any other."

Almost 10 years after his death, his heirs are still trying to make his vision a reality — one recording at a time.

In the House of the Hangman 896

I had the same situation with Rosa Luxemburg and again with Hildegard von Bingen. The line break is dead. Or is it? Thoreau is tied to the frogs, Thoreau is tied to the frogs, and the frogs are singing from the sink: Take a skein of silk wool. Take a jar of colored sand. “What needs to be mapped next?” On a global scale, more than 90% of the potential methane flux from sediments is recycled via microbial methane oxidation before reaching the water-sediment interface. I wanted to talk about Heather Christle’s What Is Amazing. But this is from Srikanth Reddy: It is always never a good time for a full medical report on Antigone. She is continually displaying new symptoms, new costumes, new customs, new systems. To begin with, there is the lost Antigone of Euripides. All that remains of her is a few scraps of text quoted by Aristophanes in The Frogs. Later comes Hölderlin’s Antigonä with her mouth like a floodlight. Then Brecht’s, with her mouth like a floodlight whose bulb has burned out. In Japan, Antigone after Antigone sprung up after the bomb. A Turkish Antigone speaks out for exploited cobalt miners. The Yoruban Tegonni makes masks herself. All these Antigones, however, suffer from the same burial disorder. They cannot tolerate the thought of the dead among the living. Hence the corpse sprinkled with dust at such great expense. Also, they cannot live among the dead. Thus the noose in the cave. There was no huge sign with the words “free donuts for art” outside, but Kenny Scharf’s green, glittery “Carzy Roy Al” golf cart parked on the pavement was enough of a clue for those truly in the know. During the period of the pop-up shop’s existence, Christian Marclay’s The Clock was playing. “I love chess, it’s a great game. If more rappers played chess, we would have greater lyrics.” To respond, I would like to take the attitude that Bataille wanted to take toward Nietzsche and that I, in turn, would like to take toward Nietzsche and toward Bataille himself (from whom I won’t dissociate Blanchot: perhaps you will be able to discern why). Nothing other than the attitude of thought toward any thinker: not to cite, not to study, but to learn by heart, that is, through this organ that, in order to understand, must take in and fall in love with. This is a commonplace, but it demands to be revived: such is also, and first of all, the sense in naming “Nietzsche” today without just naming some field in the history of philosophy. (But to be precise: this is not simply about philosophy.) Don’t all those colored pencils in the jar make you want to draw something? “If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.” To clear up any remaining ambiguity between the figures [there] is an inscription that reads: “abominable Tartars or Abominable Snowmen eating human flesh”. The gardens have many statues and small temples: carved metates hide the Costa Rican stone balls /which/ mutate all former samples of being into its being; trees part magically to admit visitors to the garden of television: lay your hands on svelte glass odalisques whose curved body screens cux such noyse as oimint ... Hanbledzoin, Inklianzanikshanas, Okidanokh, Lanny Quarles, following the intrusion paradigm. If it helps, go to sleep with a knife. Held to your chest BLADE DOWN. Now you won’t need too much hair for this step, just enough to fill a normal-sized white envelope. Bury it in the ground. The movement of water over sand / The movement of sand over wood / The movement of wind over water / Any metamorphosis initiates at an epithelial level. When was the last time you threw up on yourself & why not now. Mommy, can I have another fruit bat? So why not be horrified all the time?

[Note: Sources: Margarethe von Trotta, as quoted in Thilo Wydra, “Margarethe von Trotta on Hannah Arendt: ‘Turning thoughts into images’” (tr. Kevin White), at Goethe-Institut, Feb 012; Sina Queyras, “The line break is dead”, at Lemon Hound, 27 Mar 012; Endi Bogue Hartigan, “Dreamed Thoreau”, at PEEP / SHOW (hat tip to Anne Gorrick); Bhanu Kapil, “Incubation: Text 3: A Chrysalis”, at Was Gertrude Stein a Punjabi?, 27 Mar 012; Beth N Orcutt, Jason B Sylvan, Nina J Knab and Katrina J Edwards, “Microbial Ecology of the Dark Ocean above, at, and below the Seafloor”, in Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews 2011; John Gallaher, and Srikanth Reddy, Readings in World Literature, as quoted in Gallaher’s “AWP 2012 roundup! (Part 1)”, at Nothing To Say & Saying It, 27 Mar 012; Carren Jao, “It Was Donut O’Clock at Christian Marclay’s LA Screening”, at Hyperallergic, 27 Mar 012; The GZA, as quoted in Taji Ameen, “THE GZA GAVE A LECTURE AT NYU AND WE WENT”, at Vice, 27 Mar 012; Jean-Luc Nancy, “AN EXPERIENCE AT HEART” (tr. fragile keys), in “An experience at heart (by Jean-Luc Nancy)”, at fragile keys, 27 Mar 012; Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, “Questionably”, in Situations, Sings; Herman Melville, as quoted in Paul Metcalf, Genoa, as quoted in John Latta, “Paul Metcalf (Stray Notes)”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 27 Mar 012; phaneronoemikon, “SASER / SARACEN”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 27 Mar 012; Robby Rackleff, “The Five Point Program for the Financial Success of Young Professionals”, as quoted in “Robby Rackleff, Dina Kelberman, & Megan McShea”, at Everyday Genius, 27 Mar 012; Aryanil Mukherjee and Pat Clifford, as quoted in Thom Donovan, “The Mud Proposal // Withdrawn 1st draft”, at Wild Horses of Fire, 27 Mar 012; Blake Butler, “when was the last time you threw up on yourself & why not now”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Mar 012]

In the House of the Hangman 888-895

So here's the most recent version of the most recent track from “Doomed Shop!”, a proletarian collage-oratorio currently under construction. The libretto is boiled down from ‘The Defeat Of June 1948 [I mean 1848, maybe]’, part one of ‘The Class Struggles In France 1848-1850’. But I'm like, fuck, a word-cloud. The Lettriste Isidore Isou theorised two opposite yet complementary actions: ‘amplification’ and ‘chiselling-down’. To that end, we have gained permission from Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram to fill Conway Hall with new ears, and have been put in charge of distributing FREE TICKETS, providing a LICENSED BAR (to be run by Richard Thomas of Chocolate Sandwich and Resonance FM fame), running a BOOKSTALL and providing INTERVENTIONS by selected individuals between musical performances. We have also booked in improvised duets with T.H.F. Drenching (dictaphonist in Derek Bailey’s last quintet, Limescale) and Alan Wilkinson (the most raucous baritone sax player in Britain, if not the world) to get the show rolling. A three-way circuit: who / will start the striptease? I used to know a guy with two sets of teeth. It’s worth bearing in mind the accident was intrinsically off-centre. For silly automatic theory, answer yes. My body says yes, my house says yes, my tree on the horizon line behind my house says yes. “Zam Bonk Dip storms and tears up a storm in weather-forecasts for the animals and children and all world games brought to zero time, fears the reverse shot that the future could be – but this time we would know the names. It is perhaps one jingle song the whole book. It would be a bomb song a bang song but not a drumming more a primal knock, a knock, a yes, a recessive signal that first of all ... brings us a door. We have alighted. The drama and theatricals finish. The jumbo costumes he wears, the me-costumes (pigs, Popeyes, all automisrecognitions he took a shine to), the personal cartoon is over, never was so over, it wounds him constantly to become the forgotten vest, the storm in a psychic teacup turned cosmic solicitude and tendresse beyond world’s end. As if Life said You to him and he never forgot …” You might read the government’s imposition of gladiatorial child-killing tournament as a metaphor for meritocracy and student debt peonage or something, but the novel seems to go out of the way to stress the spectacle of the Hunger Games as what holds the dystopian future society together. What is centrally important about the Games is that they are broadcast. In other words, the state works (i.e. it reinforces its authority) by forcing people to do what they already at some level enjoy. Or perhaps: the state finds a way to extract power by taking on the responsibility for providing a kind of pleasure that people can’t pursue for themselves. It incites and gratifies pleasure so guilty that citizens end up enthralled; they get something they can’t admit they want but also enjoy too much (in some shameful, unacknowledged way) to organize to resist.  Or perhaps: the state stages an event so horrible that we have to imagine that someone else really enjoys this spectacle a great deal, and that is why they don’t rebel against it and stop it. We don’t realize that those same “someone elses” think we are that someone else who enjoys it and doesn’t rebel. So the fear of other people’s vicarious pleasure inhibits us, as does the fact that we can intuit their pleasure in something so wrong in the first place. The potentiality of vicariousness, which our own experience confirms, makes this system of control possible. From the puke, I could detect what looked to be an elfin head in profile with a Pinocchio nose. Or, I detected a headless figure groping its crotch. A bare light bulb, a hooded figure, a bulbous head, some pink-tint trash. Kate Zambreno will be shredding a duvet insert in my office. Update: there will be “three man-size pink objects.” Pink silk constructions. A shake. Speckled kelp? Herring and mustard? Captain Crunch? ‘Later’ became the archetypal opening for a J.G. Ballard story. It told us we were in the territory of aftermath. I can understand the title “untitled (wire/green wire/purple light)” because each of these things is present in the small sculpture, but I also note light reflected off the blue plastic numeral tag (numbered 453) and a white color from the top of a plastic utensil. A crystal teardrop at the bottom is a quiet, simple grace note and as such resembles the extended wire loop reaching out from the neighboring “untitled (newspaper).” Antagonist, never let
Go, never be the house-
Hold perfect soil and
Ideal climate, be a love
That does not know
How to know human
Genre crashed on
The purblind sea, how-
Ever austerely sun-
Sick, I made
Hare and eggs
Enraptured, trundled
One of my reveries even
Amidst a violet party
Decision to help
Force a whale
Under the point 
Of the green pencil
It will like pulsing
I don’t, well would
Do but how to
Achieve purblind
Handcrafting raw
Product. Lick the gag. “NG 6 fla”; “he m”; “the cryptic plot against / the earlobe”; “I’m freezing”; “?”; “clear”; “d rac”; “VVV”; “làm con búp”; “Esso”; “TH 5”; “yes”; “Taha Bidaywi /”; “shi”; “think this”; “  “; “garbage / burger continuity editing”; “...”; “ckfl”; “I don’t want to hear it” and “now for the product placement.” [Actual incidents may vary according to brain].

[Note: Sources: 888. T.H.F. Drenching, “T.H.F. Drenching: Doomed Shop! The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 21 May 011; “Potlatch Spectrum Tickets, & Why The AMM Says ‘Listen to Dumitrescu!!’”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 30 Oct 011. 889. Adam Fieled, “Three Sets of Teeth”, in When You Bit …; JBR. 890. John Wilkinson, “from ‘Sweetness & Light'”, at Barque Press; Jonty Tiplady, “Excerpt”, and S.W., blurb for Tiplady’s Zam Bonk Dip, at Barque Press. 891. Rob Horning, “Value-seeking surveillance and The Hunger Games”, at The New Inquiry, 26 Mar 012. 892. Brendan S Carroll, “Ackermann and Guston Go Toe-to-Toe, One Loses”, at Hyperallergic, 26 Mar 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Sonnet 91”, at Was Gertrude Stein a Punjabi?, 26 Mar 012 893. Paul Kincaid, “But years later”, at Big Other, 26 Mar 012; Geoff Tuck, “Some of B. Wurtz & Co.”, at Notes on Looking, 25 Mar 012. 894. Corina Cobb, Pro Magenta, as quoted in Ron Silliman, “Puzzlement is often a feature of my reaction to new work that is both powerful & mysterious: …”, at Silliman’s Blog, 26 Mar 012. 895. Keston Sutherland, “Sex Crater”, blurb for Stress Position, at Barque Press]

In the House of the Hangman 887

There is always some black hole wire brush I comb my hair with. When I notice my spaghetti is made of steel, I crunch it with stone teeth donated by Inca gods, the ones who spent the night here on their way to Wisconsin. Charles Bronson, Death Hunt. I love the idea that, despite his debilitating illness, he fought back by sampling objects he found in his room, and it was really great to hear he was out, playing live, a while after that. Sadly, the interview never got used, but I still have the piece of scrap-paper with my scrawled notes / comments on it; one day I’ll post it; it's like some sort of weird brainmap. Allegorically, I read this as marking a cosmic neo-medieval future or destiny for the alpine sublime, rather than a regressive conceptual acceleration of romantic mountainism. Mr Cheney and his family do not know the donor’s identity, but “they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift”. We were working near some molten metal one day and a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood showed up. We had salt mines all over town / Living hand over fist. It was a man weak and crushed beneath this grey women’s wig. Who would ever remove both shoes in the Tenderloin, waiting outside LIFETIME BOOKS? “Everybody knows about dubstep, Dad.” The black egg of the solar plexus. Additional questions from the audience was sometimes clarification and in a subsequent attempt to find relevant applications discussed archeology, gender studies, park benches and nano-technology in biological perspective. That is, we pelicans sit up on the roof with the chimneys and the solar panels, borrowing each other’s sweaters and ignoring the allergies due to the changing of the seasons. Think about the place of sound (mantra) in the work: the conductivity of salt-water bodies. And here is the Sunday morning alcove, with the butcher's block of notebooks to the side, and the drum sewn by a Taos / Minnesota drum-maker, and Frida Kahlo, of course, the observer of our daily life. So at the next rehearsal you have to break into a jam, even though your guitarist has moved to Boston. Have you ever heard of the angel’s share? It’s the bourbon that evaporates as the barrel ages. Sorry, the page you were looking for on this blog does not exist. As Bridgewater puts it at the conclusion of this excerpt from Wypijewski’s piece: “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories [civil rights and reproductive rights], if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.” Sorry, the page you were looking for on this blog does not exist. In his spare time he considers million-dollar ideas, such as the Q-Pik, a toothpick on one end, and a cotton-swab on the other. This year, Glück is sipping his crème. What does a “vitalogian” have to do with stamped and metered flying fish? What do I think? I think women in Africa are doing a pretty badass job of organizing against genital mutilation and probably do not need a lot of paternalistic bullshit from the daughters of the people who looted their continent, and I think “worldwide subjugation of women” is a problematic sort of code for ISLAM IS COMING FOR OUR WOMEN when the religious terrorists I am actually concerned about are currently hijacking the legislature and running for president in the country I live in, and I don’t know if Jonathan Franzen actually hates women but he sure as fuck can’t write about them, or much else either; I am trying to think of a more relentlessly mediocre and unambitious well-known writer than Jonathan Franzen, and I can’t. I don’t even care whether he hates women; I care that he is boring. I don’t think you need to cut a woman up to hate her; apparently, these days, all you need to do is run for office. What I am trying to tell you, and maybe not very well, I am kind of a mess right now, this last week has left me kind of a mess, there is Trayvon Martin and Arizona and Mississippi and Florida and Kansas and Oklahoma and fuck I don’t even know any more, I lose track, I can’t look, what I am trying to tell you is that I wouldn’t dream of telling you not to be angry. And yeah. When I went back to the hotel that night I got in the elevator with a different businessman -- I think it was a different one; maybe not. They all look the same. I was wearing my favorite gloves, the ones with the skeleton hands on them. Both the businessman and I were very drunk. “Jesus,” said the businessman. “Those are some awful gloves.”

[Note: Dedicated to Kate Zambreno and The Rejectionist. Sources: Peter Davis, “Hitler’s Mustache: The Mustache Is a Riddle: Except It Can’t Be Answered”, in Hitler’s Mustache; Matt Applegate, “Death Hunt”, at Prodigies and Monsters, 25 Mar 012 (“With my written exams now finished and my oral exam on the horizon I thought I would commemorate my feelings of this liminal period with a gem from Charles Bronson’s oeuvre.” The film trailer is embedded); kek-w, “Polar Bear: ‘Beepers’”, at KID SHIRT, 25 Mar 012 (the interview was with Leafcutter John); Nicola Masciandaro, as quoted in TVA, “Interview with Nicola Masciandaro on Bergmetal (Part 1)”, at Notes From the Vomitorium, 25 Mar 012; “Dick Cheney recovers From Heart Transplant”, at Sky News, 25 Mar 012; K Silem Mohammad, “Scottish Hollywood”, at Shampoo 24; Cedar Sigo, “Hounds Tooth”, “Show Boat”, at Shampoo 24; Kieran, Simon Reynolds’ son, as quoted in Reynolds’ “We were playing chess …”, at Blissblog, 25 Mar 012; English translation of title of artwork by Wlaad Muta, in Darren Bauler, “Wladd Muta, The Black Egg of the Solar Plexus”, at theater of diminished faculties, 25 Mar 012; “En inblick i objektorienterad ontology” (tr. Google), at Tankspritt, 25 Mar 012 (a précis of a talk by Marcus Nilsson on object-oriented ontology); JBR; Kathleen Miller, “Dear Pelican”, at Shampoo 24; Bhanu Kapil, “Conversion Threshold”, at Was Gertrude Stein a Punjabi?, 25 Mar 012; Chris Stroffolino, “In Memory of My Rock Band”, at Shampoo 24; Jim Beam ad seen on ESPNHD 25 Mar 012 approx 6:15 PM PDT; text found in place of a deleted post at Esther Press; John Protevi, and Pamela Bridgewater, as quoted in Protevi’s “Feminism, Slavery, and Reproductive Rights”, at New APPS, 25 Mar 012;bits from contributors’ bios at Shampoo 24; “Dear Superior Person”, at The Rejectionist, 22 Mar 012; “Conference Call”, at The Rejectionist, 6 Mar 012]