Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1067

A bundle of wind will blow God’s underwear all over the blue grass. Do you even know how to eat a horse? You fry it up in pig fat and add a lot of salt; then you watch a movie with your dad. “But if you’re not a spaceship, how can I ever fall in love with you?” “The truth involves innumerable shakes bullied into phantoms of the inconceivable – / trepanning the subconscious,” that is, “I’ve got only one memory: Hamlet’s yawn – / a song to be cutting up with a pair of scissors,” “Male & female we unmask the ghoon to an inch of his core/ & I warn’t myself as I opened the door.” Who would win in a fistfight, Romney or Obama? Wait, so like, there are other people out there having fantasies about checking the world into the psych ward? Such human-technology relations are often simple – seeing through eyeglasses, nailing with hammers, negotiating doorways while wearing long-feathered hats. See? – I have no horizon! Examples of me penetrate as far as atmosphere. It appears to vanish. In some tales Kutkh is explicitly created by a Creator and lets the dawn onto the earth by chipping away at the stones surrounding her. In others he creates himself (sometimes out of an old fur coat) and takes pride in his independence from the Creator. In some, Kamchatka is created as he drops a feather while flying over the earth. In others, islands and continents are created by his defecation, rivers and lakes out of his waters. The difficult volcanic terrain and swift rivers of Kamchatka are thought to reflect Kutkh’s capricious and willful nature.

#154
FINDING YOUR OWN NAME
 Finding your own     level of hell     with cultural signifiers glowing in
         the lamplight
giving a safe     suntan     both opaque and transpárent-in-a started 
          picture
of-your-fírst  -  bánd in a hip commúnity-where áll will be one - 
         foréver-in-a whóle-new-cán
better-than-a-dog with a túrnip-and-a bée in the building collecting
         money-for-the-French - overcapacitátion-of-a-secret stár on a 
         favorite yacht on a ledgelike evening
telling your stories through me

and so on. Push your face up against the window on a dark night & a rain of silent fleamarket objects drifts down slowly through this space like the index of some unreliable past: ashtrays of all types & sizes; geranium in a terracotta pot; thousands of 45rpm records; stones off a beach; money & playing cards; the dustjackets of library novels 1956; black French knickers waist 24; cheap tickets all colours; suits, hats & shoes; bruised cricket ball, seams worn; a porcelain globe five inches diameter bearing a complex design of leaves & tendrils in delft blue; small chest of drawers, veneered; bicycle tire, gentleman’s silver cigarette case, national insurance card: all gravityless & wreathed in Christmas lights like strands of weed underwater. One night you hear Frank Sinatra behind a door to another room. Go the next night, nothing. You turn up your collar in the rain. The card in the window says open but the door is always closed. Ask around, no one remembers seeing the owner. No dust on anything. Open book, indelible pencil on a bit of string. “Sign in here.”

[Note: Sources: Laura Tanne, “The Loot”, as quoted in Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW & The Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture; Gahiji Abafu, “The World Around Me” (tr. Matthew Savoca), at New World Poetry, 29 Aug 012; William Keckler, “But …”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 29 Aug 012; Noel Black, “Lord Jim Thompson”, “Huckleberry Finnegans Wake,” in Uselysses, as quoted in Josh Cook, “Black declares, in an almost off-handed way, that poetry can’t do anything important”: A Review of Noel Black’s Uselysses”, at Harriet, 29 Aug 012; Kyle Kramer, “QUESTION OF THE DAY - WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIST FIGHT, OBAMA OR ROMNEY?”, at Vice, 29 Aug 012; Bookbat, at The Bookbat, 29 Aug 012; JBR; Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology; Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, “Kindness”, in Situations, Sings; Wikipedia, “Kutkh” (another animal god for Rebecca Loudon); Jackson Mac Low, “#154”, in 154 Forties, as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Jackson Mac Low: A Poem from 154 Forties, with the Foreword by Anne Tardos”, at Jacket2, 29 Aug 012; JBR; M John Harrison, “Little Shop of Anxieties”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 28 Aug 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1066

This would be a whole lot funnier if I were the police. Try not to let the Hole disturb you, remember, it is not necessarily the cancelled flight. Schtum. Aren’t you at least glad I am not as far away as landscape? Aren’t you at least … as landscape? The drought is pretty much worldwide. “The environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities.” You will not know your own voice it will be the only voice you do not recognize. You are most like those you walk down the aisles in Wal-Mart with: a horrifying discovery for some people. Who did I spend my time with in Fern? Chavela Vargas and Frida Kahlo. When the giant foot & the giant leg hammered my car into flat steel, I set out. Do you say “ow” when you’re alone? Why else am I riding into the desert with a president’s head on my head and last call puke on my diamond shoes? I’m too young to be placated. In the parable an army searches for active yeast & other placebos. Peanut butter cannot breed new life. Proceed to check out the pacifist in a clown suit. They say that if you look in the trees in the enchanted forest of Oz, you can see one of the stagehands who hung himself. Still the sky is yellow and completely with us, as if at birth. That is, we

continue living

terrified by pincers

diluted with water (and lined with marrow

in the tall

potatoes

most of the nation ignored. What is that sound making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers? What happens when we sleep without waking up according to the normal cycles of sunlight, moonlight, starlight? In the atrium at the top of the hospital, I had an experience of vertigo so intense that I had to sit, for some time. There, I pulled a card. It was an owl with violet eyes. The hospital is a unicorn. Logic and vertigo do not balance each other out in this public space. The Taliban National Convention in Tampa? Delete. Delete. Delete.

[Note: Sources: Tomas Weber, “from Hole”, in Better than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries (ed. Chris Goode); JBR, but see next; Chris Mahoney, as quoted in James Cusick, “We’ll make a killing out of food crisis, Glencore trading boss Chris Mahoney boasts”, at The Independent, 23 Aug 012; Feng Sun Chen, “from Groceries (list b.)”, at So and So 4; see photo embedded in untitled past at Suzy X, 28 Aug 012; Nate Pritts, “The Amazing Human Race”, at So and So 4; Elisa Gabbert, “War Is Like Go”, at So and So 4; Joe Hall, “Slush Altar”, at So and So 6; Suzy X, “I’m not too young to be angry”, at Suzy X, 28 Aug 012; Craig Foltz, “G Is For Glissade”, at So and So 6; JBR (reference to a hilariously terrifying anti-Darwinist video seen on FB); Bucky Sinister, “THE GRAY SIDE OF THE MOON”, at The Rumpus, 2 Dec 012; JBR; Tom Raworth, Eternal Sections, at Green Integer; JH Prynne, “Landing Area”, in Poems; JBR; Katarzyna Krakowiak, Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, as described in Geoff Manaugh, “As If Dilating With The Secret Knowledge Of Great Powers”, at BLDG/BLOG, 28 Aug 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Notes on delirium, hospital architecture and narrative”, at Was Gertrude Stein A Punjabi?, 28 Aug 012; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1065

Sometimes when I am alone in the dark, and the universe reveals yet another secret, I say the names of my long, lost sisters, forgotten in the books that record our science --

Aganice of Thessaly, 
Hypatia, 
Hildegard, 
Catherina Hevelius, 
Maria Agnesi 

-- as if the stars themselves remember, or were a rarely executed move in chess, a rarely seen animal, an event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Mix a little Goose in this juice, your serious plans, your prudence, your moisturizer, dog years, cat years, hibiscus and hipbone, coral, glory poured out like a pasture. The sky above Tampa, where the Republican National Convention is happening this week, looks like a foreboding movie trailer. The kind of clip that opens up with long, still shots of hurricane clouds approaching some abandoned-esque-ish urban landscape before a quick cut to exploding cars. What do I need the street for? Ray Charles on piano. One half of one room is where I live. Love? Fills the window with light every morning. But I do not see it. Today I do. Last night I saw Greta Garbo one instant. Miss Lollipop is full of pain this morning. Her wing bone in the back. Her legs are black and blue. She ran her hands over me showing me where the pain is. We sat up all night listening to jazz … Her history as far as I know it consists of 8 arrests … She lives in the Broadway Hotel with an Armenian piano player. Insane in the Brain. We tested our cockroach leg stimulus protocol on the squid’s chromatophores. The results are both interesting and beautiful. The video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the caudal fin. We used a suction electrode to stimulate the fin nerve. “There was a tiny baby goat in a carriage / and the inside of the carriage was yellow. / The wicker had been painted or maybe / there was a blanket / and both goat parents were standing / by the car. …”

[Note: Sources: Caroline Herschel, letter, in “Aganice – 1875 BCE”, at Women Philosophers; JBR; Anne Gorrick, “An amnesia prayer (after “Folio #1” as suggested by Google)”, at The Altered Scale, 27 Aug 012; Kyle Kramer, “MY RAP TUMBLR GOT ME KICKED OUT OF AN RNC EVENT”, at Vice, 27 Aug 012; John Weiners, 797 Scott Street, as seen at Green Integer; Cypress Hill, and Paloma T. Gonzalez-Bellido et al, as quoted in Greg Gage, “Insane in the Chromatophores”, at Backyard Brains, 23 Aug 012 (“Chromatophores are pigmented cells that come in 3 colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore is lined with up to 16 muscles that contract to reveal their color”); Leopoldine Core, as quoted in a Mitch Taylor FB post, 27 Aug 012]

Says It All (hat tip Tom Ball)

In the House of the Hangman 1064

Metal shards ignored like old slaves. The sound of electricity. A cat is red and she is a mutant driving an eggplant Cadillac. Love Stories Suck! is grafitti’d on a traffic line. It will be whole when stones lie differently. Things work on us by tapping into what (for lack of a better term) I’ll call the human inorganic. When we eat, as we must, we should at least eat as the Hesse story imagines the wolves do, unelevated, amid the eaters. All bodies can only pretend to be upright; all are down here, constitutively. ‘Geography is not allowed to be taught in the prisons, nor history, nor physics. At Al Quds University there was no faculty of law before 1993. He says, Give me your end, he explains that this means give me your hell. Palestinians say this whenever they ask for a lighter. Lighting a cigarette is a big deal in Palestine.’ Later you said good-bye / One shovel of Newport Beach dirt over me / Where olive tree clouds over green plots / Lean toward a lake reservoir entirely covered for fear of poisoning. / … / Bogost tells us that a unit operation is always fractal, that a unit is never an atom, but a set, a grouping of other units that act together as a system ..., and that it names a phenomenon of accounting for an object. It is a process, a logic, an algorithm if you want, by which a unit attempts to make sense of another. He explicates it in detail: “In Badiou’s terms, it is the sense of a situation rather than the counting-for-one that establishes it. In Whitehead’s terms, it is a prehensive capability. In Husserl’s terms, it is noesis divorced of consciousness, cogitation, intention, and other accidents of human reasoning. In Lingis’s terms, it is the inner formula by which a thing invites its exploration. Since objects are all fundamentally different from one another, each one has its own approach, its own logic of sense making, and through this relation they trace the real reality of another, just as the radiation around an event horizon helps an astronomer deduce the nature of a black hole. ‘Unit operation’ names the logics by which objects perceive and engage their worlds.” “I have some [additional] comments, but I’m too busy with my psychedelic hula hoop and the hurricane …” What am I laughing at? / There are things I have come to destroy / Without intending to / Without any consciousness of / … / the way a virus reads code. The threaded / slats good dog are / tightening til they buckle. Now, / / from where the pressure is derived / … / the Summer oil rains for weeks / … / I said: don’t interrupt, but / / strapped by then to the gurney / and the room sung back. I should go walk around a mountain or go to the bookstore and look at cover designs or go buy sloppy revealing t-shirts at Goodwill or something; probably the mountain. To enter true life, now, with good hearts in our brains, a rotisserie holding the musk of relief beams or chains of sunlight bowing on the crotches of some of the plenty. Just a twang of salt. So you are the queen of darkness, he says. Hunh, I say. Couldn’t I be the collector of light? But he has a point. If the light is not destroyed, shouldn’t it be shining out of me prism-like?

[Note: Sources: Ray Bianchi, “The Canal Street Swing Bridge”, at Moria 14, issues 2,3,4; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on a photo by Traci Lynn Matlock, at The Body As Conduit, 26 Aug 012; Sarah Kelly, “it will be whole …”, in Better Than Language: An Anthology of New Modernist Poetries (ed. Chris Goode); Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency”, Karl Steel, “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse”, in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), at Punctum Books; Steve Willey, “from Slogans”, in Goode; James Houlihan, “BOOK OF J”, at Moria 14, issues 2,3,4; S C Hickman, “Object Relations: The Theory of Operational Closure”, at Dark Chemistry, 26 Aug 012; Catherine Daly, FB comment, 26 Aug 012; JBR; Timothy Thornton, “from Jocund Day”, in Goode; I should go walk … mountain: Bookbat, “Music blogging is always anxiety blogging …”, at The Bookbat, 26 Aug 012; Eric Amling, “Infinity Why Not”, at So And So 6; Abby Beckel, “I Dream of Owls?, at So And So 6]

In the House of the Hangman 1063

The end result of all this, via (  )hole theory, is openness which allows the Outside to get in, equated to the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. The terrifying thing about this kind of openness, butchering from within, is the more one tries to ward it off, the more open one becomes. Pushed onto a frame of acetate scream words under plate glass then let it pass turning tacks into date palm oases washing the skins in salt-water brilliance and vacuum pumps in an oxygen tent. The smoke curls up just as cool as at the cinema, a trailing beef with love. Shook under rasp. Endless refineries darken skies that were once sulfurous but got over it. We think the sea is invulnerable & we are wrong. Somewhere you’re eating breakfast or hanging from my mind’s bridge. Like, I’m standing in the street’s puddle & something insidious springs from damp ankles to grind if I tell you what I fear it’s easier. I sleep the blah carcass KO’d beneath the appeasement brochure. I don’t want charity you fucks I want communism. From the bottom of a well comes my voice, hailing a taxi: “Get Me Out Of This Shambles, This Oubliette!” I feel crammed-in on a plane because there is no room for me to lift my arm, there, to hail a cab. In a cab there’s no room to hail a cab, either, but then you're already in one, it’s ridiculous. They are countless, my dear, all those Animal Gods. This emptiness is only a special condition of what there is, the hypotenuse of egg yolk, if only TV could get natural for one codeine second. It does, and is. Kaleidoscope sic is the shit. Variously described as wind gods and, more recently, as ‘were-monkeys’ and ritual clowns, these statues may actually represent howler monkeys in their quality of musicians. If you are looking for the perfect anthropodicy / the perfect anthropodicy is damage. What is most important is that you do not reason yourself into any position, and when the child screams your name before its head comes off you are able to both respond and not respond and to understand the one you must do and do do and the fire with which you are involved takes and gives and seizes. Have you seen the Omophoto of the hot dog squirting ketchup right between the eyes, stalwart soldiering in the direction of the skid? Glorious autosarcophagy! The smell of cut grass and petrol. Spit in kazoos. I have reached thuh purpling skin. Total muzzleflash. A fat parrot bleeding Tipp-Ex. Down to spikes: here the milk lines twist. This is more than blood and mitochondria.

[Note: Sources: Paul Charles Smith, “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials”, at Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream, 8 Sept 010; 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 & Anger: A poem for performance”, in Goode; Allen Bramhall, “Sky Dog on His Porch in Heaven”, at Simple Theories, 25 Aug 012; Julia Cohen, “The Ache Poem”, “The Ache Poem”, “The Ache Poem”, at BOMBLOG, 24 Aug 012; Jonny Liron, “If it were night …”, “In nauseous wailing …”, “Room Manoeuvre”, in Goode; JBR, addressed to various people on FB; Michael Benedikt, “Portland Taxis”, at Poets.org; JBR (the Animal Gods are for Rebecca Loudon); Jonty Tiplady, “Poem”, “Again Today the Polluters of the Year Announced”, “Love Is Better Than Language”, in Goode; JBR; Wikipedia, “Howler Monkey Gods”; Josh Stanley, “Earth”, in Goode (anthropodicy = “An attempt, or argument attempting, to justify the existence of humanity as good (contrast theodicy)” -- Wiktionary); JBR, but see untitled (Last Meal), at Omo Studios, 25 Aug 012; heila E Murphy, “haibun (‘Semblicity, the doctoral charade …’), at experiential-experimental-literature, 25 Aug 012; JBR (autosarcophagy = self-cannibalism); Linus Slug, “FrassBuik”, in Goode; Mike Wallace-Hadrill, “Oxytocin Nasty”, in Goode (Tipp-Ex = BIC Europe Group’s European brand of correcting products); Nat Raha, “Solstice Ode”, in Goode]

In the House of the Hangman 1062

The color of your underwear + the last thing you ate = your starship name. As Deborah Poe says, “I was born in the year of feeling.” The little girl in “Broken Heart” is an obvious reference to Banksy’s famous girl distressed that her heart-shaped balloon is flying away; this little girl’s lies in the street. How many dead, how many wounded, at the foot of the Empire State Building? I run into Walgreens for some Sudafed, get “carded,” pass the I.D., and pop two pills upon entering my “personal home-space.” Minor-meme “Die ok,” as left over by the erasing of ‘t’ and ‘c     e’ in Diet Coke, feels post-Nietzschean in some beginning to get-drowsy way. I like the non non-drowsy i.e. drowsy Sudafed. I like lying in my bed looking at my ceiling, the egg shell white brittle as the egg tempera paintings of Pompeii. Benjamin Noys posts a photo of a billboard reading Time For A Different State and I click like. Tho it makes me nervous. I mean, that word state. Name two of your obsessions. The doctor and nurses all agreed. There had been a dramatic increase in infections. It was most certainly caused by global warming, which is turning the clock on our planet back to the Eocene. What does it tell you that “Ain't No Fun?” is one of my top five favorite songs? For starters, it tells you that Snoop Doggy Dogg > Snoop Dogg > Snoop Lion. It tells you that being passed around by friends, and getting fucked by so many different cocks you loose count, is a totally hot and normal fantasy. Oh yeah and once in real life a boy asked if he could stick a chicken wing in my butt and take a picture to Photoshop a fake KFC ad. (I said no and can never look at a drumstick the same, thanks for ruining that, you fucker.) The consequence is a strange kind of existential state, in which exhaustion bleeds into insomniac overstimulation (no matter how tired we are, there is still time for one more click) and enjoyment and anxiety co-exist (the urge to check emails, for instance, is both something we must do for work and a libidinal compulsion, a psychoanalytic drive that is never satisfied no matter how many messages we receive). The fact that the smart phone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, ‘Fordist’ boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis. So I BALANCED a sword on my head, dropped to my knees and earnestly vowed I would never again APOLOGIZE on command. And putting that struggling cat in the hall is like trying to shove a bunch of feathers into the roaring face of an auditorium fan. The cat DEMATERIALIZES and reappears behind you. Ungatherable, a galaxy of swirling feline hydrogen. —And what do you think, Subhuti? Is this nouchi? —Bhagavan, yes, this nouchi. —And is it good, Subhuti? —Bhagavan, yes, it is good. “As David Harvey writes in Spaces of Hope, sickness — under capitalism — gets defined as the inability to go to work. Marnell is sick in more ways than one, as having a job makes her sick.” I cannot drown. As Lee Lozano writes, “Information is content. Content is fiction.” Now looking at it all again, I have to say, in terms of ‘Trug’, it would do one well to consider Bruno Latour’s ‘Practical Metaphysics’, so in that sense, the grotesque would then be that state of affairs in which trugness lends to human matter its flavor of ‘socratic irony’, but to push the thing further, the so-called ‘strength of the [epistemic] subject’ would be something like the equation ‘as one approaches infinity’, so that the understanding of the singularity is absolutely confounded by uniqueness, by the infinitesimality of reality, but further, of a break with the logic of language’s social continuity as ruled order, and an entrance into language as constructionism, or an infinitesimalleability which seems completely compossible with neurophysiological combinatorics, i.e. plasticity as the reverse-engineered ur-form of culture as subjectivity.

[Note: Sources: a pseudo-poster-type-thingie (they probably have a name) seen on FB, 24 Aug 012; JBR; Deborah Poe, FB comment, 24 Aug 012; Daniel Larkin, “Made in Iran But on Display in New York’s Little Italy”, at Hyperallergic, 24 Aug 012 (on the work of Icy and Sot); JBR, bur see any of 100 news stories, 24 Aug 012); Jimmy Chen, “On Sacriledge [sic]”, at HTMLGIANT, 24 Aug 012; JBR (the photo was posted on FB); Tom Beckett, “Questions”, at l’amour fou, 24 Aug 012; John Olson, “My Summer Infection”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 24 Aug 012; Sophie Saint Thomas, “SHUFFLE AND SPLOOGE - THE LAST SPLOOGE”, at Vice, 24 Aug 012; Mark Fisher, as quoted in Breshvik, “Time Wars”, at Disinformation, 24 Aug 012; Body, 10 Jul 012; Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, as quoted in Cara Waterfall, “Art as reconciliation in Côte d’Ivoire”, at Matador Network, 24 Aug 012 (nouchi = “the urban slang spoken by young people in Abidjan” = the way Aboudia describes his paintings); JBR; Jane Hu, as quoted in Kate Zambreno, “As David Harvey writes …”, at Madame Bovary’s Disease, 24 Aug 012; Tom Raworth, A Serial Biography, in Earn Your Milk: Collected Prose; Lee Lozano, Journal, and phaneronoemikon, in his “Post-title”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 24 Aug 012 (Trug = deception)]

Last Meal (photo by Omo Bob)

In the House of the Hangman 1061

That is, in front of the apartment, once, I saw a midget retouching the railing with a silver paint can. Don’t ring the doorbell. Get your own water. Someone you know could kill you. People have needed each other for a long time. I am a lesser pyramid beside the Pyramid at Giza. Sadly, in the middle of the first act in our debut and probably only live performance, I was stranded onstage by my supposed partner, the Grocer’s Wife, who broke the fourth wall mid-scene to chat with her friends in the audience, leaving me to frantically revise our planned business into a slapstick soliloquy. I think the trauma of this abandonment must still be raw because I don’t remember if we ever actually transformed into rhinoceroses as prescribed by Ionesco, though I suppose it must be so, if perhaps only offstage, under a big X over a little. People can be nice and people can be horrible. Which people do you mean? But addressing the saguaro is not the same as telling everyone about the nature of the future. It’s not the voice coming out of your forehead into the microphone, muah muah muah muah. Glocks, not birds, are dreams. Thus, the prospect of a GWAR show backed by cheap barbecue and 13 other loud, drunk, and belligerent bands was irresistible. “YOU FUCKING GHOST WHALE!” And high did those flags fly. If I remember correctly, Simone de Beauvoir actually responded to one of Sartre’s proposals with “Don’t be silly”. Doctor Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four inch-incision with one stroke of his scalpel - Figure 4. A woman attending a memorial service for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing at the Oklahoma State Fair Arena holds two teddy bears. The first lady of Illinois, Brenda Edgar, donated two thousand bears for those who had lost family members. April 23, 1995. Oh. This tumblr now has over 6500 followers. That’s only about FIFTEEN THOUSAND fewer than Feminist Ryan Gosling! Thank you, whoever and whatever you are. In May, a very special doll began showing up in stores in Gothenburg, Sweden. According to the package, it was supposed to have cerebral palsy. “The retard doll GIL. Treat her like a real retard!” the label read, while the Facebook page for the doll added, “She doesn’t swear, have sex, drink booze, or poop. So much better than a real retard.” Turns out the doll was created by the Gothenburg Cooperative for Independent Living (GIL). We called GIL spokesman Anders Westgerd (who happens to be wheelchair-bound himself). PS: We have no idea why GIL decided to send us this particular photo, but we promise that white creamy stuff on the doll’s face is just ice cream, not cum. Thank fucking God ... VICE: OK, why do this? Why make this doll? I want answers. Anders Westgerd: We came up with the concept for GIL because the members of our cooperative, myself included, were sick and tired of people treating us with prejudiced niceness, as if we were kids or had an inferior intellect. We wanted to do something that provoked people to think about how they treat us. I am sick and tired of people talking over my head, saying stuff like, “Should he really be drinking when he’s in a wheelchair?” Are you happy with how the doll has been received? Hasn’t it caused some confusion? I’ve been interviewed by most mainstream media in Sweden and even by the BBC, which is brilliant. We wanted to cause a stir, that’s why we made the retard doll. Are people pissed off with you for making jokes about the handicapped? I don’t consider the GIL doll a joke at all. It is a campaign to raise awareness about how wheelchair-bound people wish to be treated like everyone else, to start a discussion. How many dolls have you sold? I don’t have exact numbers but we’ve made 300 of them and the interest is so big we might have to make more. If you want to buy one you can just email us. Want more weirdness? Check these out: Smile and Say “Passion Gap”. Bananas in Pajamas Scare the Shit Out of Me. The Most Hilariously Paranoid Things You Can Buy on the NRA Website. Thank god it was just the muscle relaxant. She wasn’t stroking. She was just nodding, all fucked up.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Dan Boehl, “Intersection”, at ekleksographia 2; Farrah Field, “Amy Is off the Porch and into the World”, at The Awl, 26 Apr 012; Jared White, “I AM THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS”, at I Am a Natural Wonder, 24 Nov 010; Jared White, “rhinoceros”, at No No Yes No Yes, 31 Aug 011; Amelia Gillis, “Anonymous asked: When people say mean things to you are they just being facetious? you seem to do nothing but shower love all over tumblr. I don’t understand the hate”, at Intstructions, 23 Aug 012; Theodore Worozbyt, “Legume”, at Horse Less Review 12; Daniel Davis Snyder, “GWAR-B-Q 2012: GWAR HAVE COME FROM OUTER SPACE TO FUCK WITH YOU”, at Vice, 23 Aug 012; David, “Simone de Beauvoir said ‘no’ …”, at Dinu Lipatti’s Bones, 23 Aug 012; William S Burroughs, Nova Express; David Allen, “An Image from Oklahoma City”, at Journal of American History 94; JBR; Ariana Reines, “this tumblr …”, at Ariana Reines, 23 Aug 012; Milene Larsson, “SOME SERIOUS THOUGHT WAS PUT INTO THIS RETARDED DOLL”, at Vice, 23 Aug 012; JBR (re: Kathy on some new meds)]

In the House of the Hangman 1060

As they walked, they held each other by their two pinkies, curved in the form of hooks. Bang bang Citalopram. And the walk is a peaceful freeze full of heart-shaped fungi in tutu with dayglo, tongue stapled to the roof of the window inserts its kiss like a match gone out. I am where you are is. A white dolphin has been shoved in the pipes, in a parcel found on the underside of a spasming. What has tilt? That messes me up! Put mustard on the tortoise; try reading TRISM then dozing off. I was fixing to sing a poem about the multiverse so green, the stars just fanning away from each other — I couldn't hack it. After two minutes silence, you climb off the stage. Mutterings rise from the crowd, small at first, then louder, louder with outrage and discontent. I failed them, you think – I didn't do the one thing a poet could. In the next instant, though, it comes to you: the sweaty shame-filled silence you performed for those two minutes was in fact the right and only thing to say. It was the correct response, and yet they were right to be angry: rightly, you failed them, and they had the right to tear you to pieces. This is another thing a poet can do. It’s thrilling. Myth: when Eurydice dies, for a long time Orpheus refuses to play and sing. Fact: the opera singer Marian Anderson, who married a man named Orpheus, refused to sing for segregated audiences. I always feel the world’s about to end, that’s what W. likes about me, he says. I always think I’m going to be found out and shot. The biologists grow bored with the wild and want to study the angelic. The astronomers won’t trade their telescopes for microscopes, but the anthropologists are bored too, bored with Grace’s lunchbox and the way she doesn’t react to the dolls they throw into her room while she studies. They are happy to give up Grace if it means they can cancel their subscriptions to Tiger Beat, and so the biologists trade them gorillas who were growing suspicious anyway. Grace spots the biologists lurking in the bushes when she leaves for school. They army crawl across the grass as she walks to the bus stop. While she waits, the biologists hop over fences and pretend to be dogs, dogs that bark out field observations about her height and weight and whether or not her new haircut looks good. It’s not just some biologists. It’s all the biologists. “There were ants in the hearse!”, exclaimed the union delegate. “Oh, you, that’s enough, go and tell that to your flocks!” “I even wonder if there will be a few fine days for us”, murmurs the Prime Minister sitting in his bathtub, contemplating his little celluloid boats. “Those eyes undress you! Justice is done!”, yells another delegate. “I accuse!” grunts the doorman visibly drunk. The CEO continues … “Calm down, Gentlemen, calm down … popstars are committing grave errors, they confuse the mud of abundance with the gold of time … those new myths, uh, for better or worse, hey we have our own fantasies, don’t we? … I’ve seen Jose Canseco play baseball. I own a Jose Canseco coffee mug. Sometimes my pee smells like Cheerios.” Consider in this light what Derrida says in Aporias: “In order to be responsible and truly decisive, a decision should not limit itself to putting into operation a determinable or determining knowledge, the consequence of some pre-established order. … One must avoid good conscience at all costs.”

[Note: Sources: Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (tr. Bernard Frechtman); Marianne Morris, “Commitment: An Ode”, “Nepotism is for Careful Fuckheads”, “Art Will Save Your Life”, “Aquatic Mammal Poem”, in Commitment; Posie Rider, “(folk)”, “Water is Cooler!”, in City Break Weekend Songs; Colleen Hind & Pocahontas Mildew, “Trigger Warning”, in We Are Real: A History; phaneronoemikon, “The Nurburgring”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 22 Aug 012; JBR (TRISM is by Rebecca Loudon); Ana Božičević, “Buffet of Air”, “J’ACCUSE / I REFUSE”, at Poetry Society of America; Lars Iyer, Spurious; Adam Peterson, “Biologists Study Grace”, at Paper Darts; Claude Pélieu: Kali Yug Express (tr. Mary Beach), at Nomadics, 30 Aug 012; John Sakkis, “I’ve seen Jose Canseco …”, at Both Both, 22 Aug 012; Avital Ronell, and Jacques Derrida, as quoted in Ronell’s The Test Drive]