Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1130

A piece of magic butcher paper. I’d like to see us imitating whales’ beautiful, moving, mysterious speech. There’s always a time lapse in reading; and so we are all the silhouettes of each other’s ideas of fireflies. Except: we aren’t all silhouettes of each other’s ideas of fireflies. Sometimes we cease to be apart and begin to be together in a way that is (and is not) like a dump cake. I am bothered by our inability to escape from frames, and so the cover art disturbs me. (And so we clap and clap and clap but the house lights never come on in the concert hall and eventually all the musicians have loosened their bows, emptied their spit valves, packed; the stage has been struck, mopped, and we are clapping and clapping and waiting for the lights and they never come on and so we just sleep in our chairs for the rest of forever.) Oh nooooooooooooo! Not Funtown. But: “Please, don’t cry. Talk is only architecture.” Might some funny bits actually get funnier in translation? In George Saunders’s “Pastoralia,” a character is paid to impersonate a cave man at a theme park, his employers providing a freshly-killed goat to roast daily, until one morning he goes to the usual spot and finds it “goatless.” Among the many possible renderings, Saunders’s German translator chose ziegenleer, a lofty-sounding melding of “goat” and “void” with no exact equivalent in English. My grandmother’s hands are pure rocks. Suddenly he said something about totemism to the woman. She knew he liked to photograph banana plants. A Japanese planted a banana on Basho’s grave. She remembered it when she heard her partner speak about the totem. (The woman looked Japanese but was probably an Indian.) Because Basho means banana plant in Japanese. Speaking only for myself, Lebbeus is a canonical figure in the West — and I mean a West not of aristocratic intrigue, dominating armies, and regal blood-lines but of travelers, heretics, outsiders, peripheral exploratory figures whose missives and maps from the edges of things always chip away at the doomed fortifications of the people who thought the world not only was ownable, but that it was theirs. Lebbeus Woods is the West. William S. Burroughs is the West. Giordano Bruno is the West. Audre Lorde is the West. William Blake is the West. For that matter, H.P. Lovecraft is the West — like in BAD HISTORY: It is a beautiful gray ironic day, with forecasted clouds in the depthless background to complement the bold relief of our vacant enterprise. These vertical lines simply partition the competing claims of our orchestrated interests, held in on all sides by work cycles of habit and stability. Then our private spheres burgeon out until even we are redeemed! Each sphere comes complete with a view, but that view will never get around this corner. Under the oversized roof of the world, trade in materials has fashioned a culture for all – Home is where
xxxxxxxxxxxxx I hide out, guns drawn
xxxxxxx waiting for Adobe Flash Player
xxxxxxxxxxxxx or a phone call to slip
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx abstract money out of my abstract
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx image of myself. Tried to define
xxxxxxx a tree and realized
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I don’t know much about
xxxxxxxxxxxxx whose definitions I’ve been
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx borrowing to steal some fire-
xxxxxxx breathing into a complacent
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx system just for getting
everything over with.
What would Captain Kirk do? oh, oh, fuck you, fuck you, bitch … [Goddess abruptly discards God’s huge hard-on.] GODDESS: a moneyshot. what gumption. Children die, never mind, let’s. jam. iklwa! mm iklwa! ah up an atom ahah / ah ah ah / one, two, a million.

[Note: Sources: JBR, re: gift from Bhanu Kapil rec’d via mail, 30 Oct 012; Marya Berry via Michael Joseph, FB post, 30 Oct 012; J M Gamble, and Joel Brouwer, And So, as quoted in Gamble’s “25 Points: And So”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Oct 012; Anne Gorrick, FB comments, 30 Feb 012; Jascha Hoffman, as quoted in “Lack of Goat”, at Languagehat, 30 Oct 012; Leticia Luna, “Firefly”, in Wounded Days and Other Poems (tr. Toshiya Kamei); Sérgio Medieros, “A TOTEM …” in Vegetal Sex (tr. Raymond L Bianchi); Geoff Manaugh, “Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012”, at BLDG/BLOG, 30 Oct 012; JBR; Barrett Watten, Bad History, as quoted in Michael Kelleher, “Aimless Reading: The W’s Part 7 (Barrett Watten), at Pearlblossom Highway, 30 Oct 012; Mark Wallace, “Home is where I hide out”, as quoted in “Vertaallab 36 Mark Wallace – Home is where I hide out”, at ooteoote, 28 Dec 012; “N P Snow”, Get Gay!, at Bad Press]

In the House of the Hangman 1129

The pills help a little — my blue and red friends. They don’t demand a thing. Like a nurse saying: Shhh, sugar, it’s ok to go away now, retreat if you need to. I’ll make sure the lights get switched off; I’ll keep watch on this dark city til dawn. It is far from clear what it means to “face Gaia”. What are the instruments — always local and partial — that are sensitive enough to Gaia’s components for the limited technical and emotional apparatus of assembled humans? St Christopher you’re not strong enough to carry the world! The calculation of the Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge Probabilities is accomplished by statistically evaluating a large set of SLOSH model runs based on the current NHC official forecast, and taking into account historical errors in official NHC track and intensity forecasts. Currently, the graphic displays probabilities of storm surge of 5 feet or greater above normal tide levels. If I were writing a novel right now there would be a big storm in it, and the emergency rations would be gluten-free chocolate chip coconut cookies. I mean, the ancestor Dong-gsum Mi-la sngon-mo, born miraculously, kills a nine-headed ogre, from whose body the land of gLing is born. He fathers eighteen heroes who arrive in gLing. Indra chooses his youngest son, Don-grub, to rule gLing. Dying, Don-grub is reborn as a bird, and then as Gog-bzang lha-mo, and is called Kesar / Kyesar. Kesar married Brug-gu-ma (‘a fragment of grain’) and becomes king of gLing. Kesar journeys to China where he marries the emperor's daughter, ‘g.Yu'i dKon-mchog-ma. Kesar defeats the giants of the north, assisted by the giant’s wife Dze-mo.’ While he is away, the King of Hor kidnaps ‘Brug-gu-ma. On his return, Kesar vanquishes him, and brings her back to gLing. “Then I called Naught, a raw food tapas bar, because the bathroom sink counter had the name of a different god/prophet painted on every fourth tile and “ALL IS ONE” inlaid around the basin. Then I called all the strip joints that charged a stage fee. Then after that, the human resources department of a popular Vietnamese restaurant chain, demanding an end to bubble tea as a hyper modern equivalent to absinthe and a barrier to real revolution because the equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of ...” I would be excited if the power went out. I can imagine darkness and candles and the technical world pulling away, as if in a car. The door slams, rain on windows, tires, tail lights, Twitter disappearing. Alone at a gas station on Long Island. So I read more news. The water will probably come up into the streets, with shit in it, near the Morgan L. There are probably guys smoking pot and playing guitar by the station, even now. The recession continues. We shrink and the holidays rise like condos. Manic lights in Manhattan, months after the storm. The oceans become acid. “For the confirmation of this a fresh Manifestation was given me, by the appearance of a Head that was all as of Fine Gold transparent, with a pair of Wings only joining to it. Under each of which Wings there were seven Eyes all fiery and piercing. Upon which this first Salutation greeted me, saying, “Tho’ thy corporeal Eyes be Dim, these Eyes are come to make up that Impediment, whose Properties to thee shall be into the Worlds and Regions to see that to mortal sight all hidden be.” Then Immediately I felt as if this Head and Wings did clasp themselves about the Vital part of my Heart. From whence it was said, The pure in Heart should be all seeing; and the Ears fixed in the Golden Head should become the true Hearing.” Out of a desire to understand, I began collecting maps and putting them on the walls. Gift shop maps with sea monsters on them and beveled, unfamiliar coastlines, cold war maps with the Soviet Menace spreading like leprosy. Pink East Germany. Red China. Maps of Pangaea and Gondwanaland from back before the seams pulled apart when we were still all one big continent — Deep Time, where countries turn to silt, silt turns to stone and we can now tell time by comparing the rates of nations collapsing — Biostratigraphy? Patriastratigraphy? Following the law of superposition, one thing always follows another: map of the Trail of Tears, bike map, subway map, and one I drew when I was twelve and wrote “Della’s world” in scented marker at the top.

[Note: Sources: Kate Durbin, “Our Marilyn(s): Interview”, in The Ravenous Audience; Bruno Latour, “Abstracts”, as quoted in “Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures, February 2013”, at ANTHEM, 29 Oct 012; “Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge Probabilities (2 - 25 feet). 3. Methodology”, at National Weather Service National Hurricane Center; JBR, comment appended to an Arielle Guy FB post, 29 Oct 012; JBR; phaneronoemikon, “Farrah-Wife Go Back to Gling!”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 29 Oct 012 (this is Wikipedia’s Lower Ladakh version of The Epic of King Gesar); Vanessa Veselka, Zazen, as quoted in “Then I called Naught …”, at The Bookbat, 29 Oct 012, and “PEN Literary Awards 2012: Vanessa Veselka, Zazen”, at PEN, 29 Oct 012; Erik Stinson, “American Standstill”, at HTMLGIANT, 29 Oct 012; Jane Lead, The Signs of the Times, as quoted in “A Head All of Fine Gold Transparent – Ahistorical Approaches to Prophecy and Vision”, at The Eyeless Owl, 23 May 011, via Darren Bauler, “The Mountain Peaks of Prophecy”, at Theater of Diminished Faculties, 29 Oct 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1128

“Ovis bobat / Canis latrat / Lupus ululat…” which means something like “the sheep bleats / the dog barks / the wolf howls …” etc. These lists are interesting for many reasons; among other things, they often break open our ideas of what exactly constitutes an “animate” nonhuman agent in the first place; for instance, fire and running water among things that make sound. So join us on “HALO Island” for a groundbreaking, multi-jurisdictional counterterrorism event that will educate and train the entire range of national security stakeholders, from government agencies and elite military special operations units to law enforcement and emergency responders. A few of the featured training sessions will include: Islamic Literalist Ideology by Joe Butta, Low Light Operations by Ken Good, Patron Saints of the Underworld by Roberto Almonte’, Extremist Mindset in South America by Clare Lopéz, and Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy. Due to the location, exhibitors and sponsors have the freedom to hold demonstrations that would normally be banned at other venues. “And we know the antelopes to that. The chateau schoolmates have provided the antelopes. We need to throw out the tablespoon.” The Total Click. / … / Their chastised colon prolapses so hard the ground / Snaps. / … / The currys of the future / Will be made of different types of shit” the total click was exactly / The shit it meant. The things I do for no blood in me, / Throqt – 9[…] gong […] white bees / or bovine fqlling so / hqrd to their knees The field snaps. Lek. Meal. Condiment bread. Breqd. “What is this present to which I belong?” This was the question asked by Foucault recalling Kant’s writing on the Enlightenment. We else have rocks for shoes without spanning indices that lead to set functions with overtones. Then the houses of the painted scenery topple down like the terrible drunkards and bury you. Only your hand can be seen jutting from under the steaming debris. The hand still moves a little, then the curtain falls. Meanwhile, a “pain vaccine” is being developed that will block intense pain for months at a time. I'm not quite sure how that would work, given that everyone's heard that story about their friend’s older brother’s buddy who took so much ketamine he couldn’t feel his arms snapping in half as he went on a car-flipping spree in Jersey, but this is the military we’re talking about here, so I guess anything is possible. Concerned by the situation, Stalin and the chief of his secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, have instated a committee to investigate the new political situation in Germany. The chairman of a committee reports as follows: By the end of 1934, Hitler’s power was unchallenged. Toward the end of the year, just before Christmas, he made a radio announcement that he had resigned and that he had been succeeded by Martin Heidegger. As soon as Hitler had finished speaking one could hear the sound of applause. Then Heidegger held his first big radio speech. We have studied gramophone records of the speeches and it is beyond doubt that those were indeed Hitler and Heidegger’s voices. Neither did we find any indications that Hitler may have been confused or drugged. The next day, Heidegger held his second big speech. That is the speech in which he nominated Walter Benjamin as Vice-chancellor. According to reliable witness reports, Benjamin had been present at the conversations between Heidegger and Hitler during December. We do not know how many times they talked. During this period, Benjamin was also in constant contact with the other Jews, notably Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and a few others. The Jews has been written as a play, a “talmudic tragicomedy,” and the two actors that mediate between Stalin — who has abolished theater — and Heidegger’s Germany — where they are slowly killing off theater — represent so to say the “survivors” of the death of theater itself, a theater, that, and this becomes clear at several points in the novel, we should read primarily as Athenian classical tragedy. The only real tragedy, according to Benjamin. Several indications can be found concerning the nature of this tragedy: except for the God of the Jews, it features several “ancient goddesses” and “royal gods and goddesses.” When Benjamin, just after explaining that Heidegger no longer speaks, says that he is going to fetch him to ask him what he thinks, he recounts: First there are only ancient goddesses. Then the royal gods and goddesses arrive. The royal gods are always worried about the ancient goddesses. They are trying to take away the old goddesses’ power or act as if they already have done so. There are theater plays about that. […] There are also ancient theater plays in which people think that they have an alliance with a royal god but as soon as a single ancient goddess appears they abandon the royal god. Sometimes the royal gods take revenge on them, at other times the ancient goddesses. They eat their children and their children eat them. Sometimes there is screaming because somebody notices that he was wrong. Thus, The The Jews takes place, as it were, in a situation that we could identify as after tragedy. That is, no longer under the sign of myth but under the sign of history. Both communism and fascism have abandoned tragedy. But Hitler has been sublated into Heidegger whereas Stalin later dies after a circumcision, being succeeded by the Rabbi of the recently conquered city of Jerusalem (that is, Moscow) and Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish district in Siberia that Stalin established in 1934. Heidegger’s mother is in despair. At the end of the meeting where Hitler hands over power to Heidegger in the presence of Benjamin and Jewish actors she says: “Nobody knows how I feel today. […] My husband is in the book, my son sits next to me, silent. Nobody knows how I feel. […] I can scream but I won’t do it. […] I could yell and cry.”

[Note: Sources: Jonathan Hsy, “Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism”, at In the Middle, 28 Oct 012; “Join HALO Corporation in San Diego”, at HALO, and EMH Events (“The HALO Corporation is a California based organization founded by former Special Operations, National Security, and Intelligence personnel. HALO exists to provide safety and security for those in need and to improve: force protection, all aspects of security, humanitarian aid, and disaster response.” They are taking over the resort we came to in order to celebrate Kathy’s 60^th birthday; I’d love to have a press credential); Susan M Schultz, “Anne Romney on throwing out the public education system +6”, FB comment, 28 Oct 012; Jow Lindsay, “DOG PUKE”, in DPHAX, at Bad Press; workshop description, as quoted in Stuart Elden, “Foucault and the critique of our present – seminars”, at Progressive Geographies, 28 Oct 012; Allen Bramhall, “The laugh of salsa …”, at Simple Theories, 28 Oct 021; Robert Walser, Answer to an Inquiry (tr. Paul North), as quoted in Michael Kelleher, “Aimless Reading: The W’s, Part 5 (Robert Walser)”, at Pearlblossom Highway, 28 Oct 012; Theo Kindynis, “Woohoo, It’s The Future of War!”, at Vice, 26 Oct 012; Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, and Nachoem Wijnberg, Die joden, as quoted in van Gerven Oei’s “Heidegger’s Mom and the Joke of Democracy: Fictional Notes on the Political”, at Berfrois, 24 Oct 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1127

So this is a close approximation of what the precursor to jazz sounded like in the late 19th Century, bringing to mind Lorca's meditation in that same lecture: “The dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendant of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock, a descendent also of Descartes’ melancholy daemon, small as a great almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing.” I think of all those photos in “The Beautiful Blackboards at Quantum Physics Labs.” My mother, trying to tell me about her childhood in Port-au-Prince, never sure if she was French, Syrian or Haitian, and light enough not to thing of herself as black, always returned [in her stories] to the nuns at Sacré-Coeur: They never told us about the slave trade. I did not know about that. In the beginning, they said, there were some little light pygmies that were here. And they grew bigger and darker. I always wondered how they got so big and so black so fast. Ding Village is a township falling into decay, people drop dead everyday from the “fever.” HIV/AIDS has contaminated over half of the population, which has engaged in blood selling to raise money to develop the local economy and bring its residents out of poverty. Corrupt blood brokers, or blood heads, arise to compete with government blood banks, reusing needles and dirty cotton balls on young and old, men and women, alike. The Ding family is at the center of this – Ding Hui is a local blood head who has made his family rich on the backs of his neighbors; his 12 year-old son is murdered (poisoned by locals) as retribution for the many villagers that Ding Hui infected with disease, his brother is dying of AIDS, his mother died of exposure to hepatitis-contaminated blood, and his father, the unofficial town leader is begging Ding Hui to ask the town for forgiveness. Some energy will still come from the ocean surface, but some will now come from the pole-to-equator temperature contrast. This new energy source will enable Sandy to maintain its intensity, or maybe even increase it. This process is called ‘extratropical transition.’ It poses a lot of problems for forecasters. In the first place, the computer models aren’t that great at predicting exactly when it will happen. So predictions of intensity are uncertain, as the tropical cyclone may weaken before transition and then strengthen afterwards. On the flip side, printed in blue ink, is a poem entitled, Backbergia Militaris. It goes like this:

when the Borgias set out to do
in ever their closest
loved ones, with bullets
or Broadway shows, the deck
was stacked – this grayish
columnar head knows better

the terminal, dome-like cephalium
of orange-brown bristles
at the thought of anything less
than total self-destruct, controls
one half by blowing off limbs
in random cow fields

the little papery flower
contains a spoonful of curds
dried-up mother's milk
in a field of blasted spines

Mexico (Michoacán)

The poem is unsigned, but I am pretty sure that Jonathan Skinner wrote it, given his friendship with Michael Kelleher and his longstanding preoccupation with all things cactical. Then oh the Ann Coulter, bought by ® arrangement, with victory and assessment. Toggle switch of the amenities, and dying to deliver dying. The sweeping wet throb of pocked political unproven smears desperate changes in locked language. Swerve to emote, Ann Coulter. Let us explain your thinking in words of sensitively vacant syllables. A syllable is the part of the word that whistles. You lack syllables Ann of the forecast for rain in your ass. When you reached better, as others struggled, the world said, you are a better Ann Coulter than Ann Coulter, the smudge of some craven distinction.

[Note: Sources: Ian Keenan, “In 1996 the Rotterdam Conservatory …”, at Piri’ Miri Muli’, 27 Oct 012; JBR; Megan Garber, “The Beautiful Blackboards at Quantum Physics Labs”, at The Atlantic, 26 Oct 012 (re a project by Alejandro Guijarro); Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods; Shin Yu Pai, Goodreads comment on Yian Lianke, Dream of Ding Village; Climate Central, as quoted in Brian Merchant, “HUMANS BUILT A FRANKENSTORM FACTORY, AND NOW WE'VE GOT TO LIVE IN IT”, at Vice, 27 Oct 012; Michael Kelleher, “Aimless Reading: The W’s, Part 4.3 (Rosmarie Waldrop)”, at Pearlblossom Highway, 27 Oct 012; Allen Bramhall, “Judge Not Lest You Be Ann Coulter”, at Simple Theories, 27 Oct 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1126

At that time he traveled by bus. He crossed Goiás. Then he got a ride on the back of a small truck. Early afternoon or early morning he saw an Indian pulling out or planting manioc. No one should die in the memory of fish. No     no guardian will break my fall. I pass blood. Like a straw bird it follows me. I became alert and I was in a garden in Baghdad whose fence I had passed when I was a little kid … ok think this / … / with all your social nails / … / mundane and berserk, as any slave ship / October 2012: Blanqui is still in jail, and as the cosmological city plan becomes ever more compressed, all of us fixed into a collective table of anti-matter that no-one believes in, despite how much its wild flashing reminds us of Nezahualcóyotl’s “only the flowers are our shrouds.” What can make this matter. What can make me feel us. Make me feel this. What can make attention to excesses. What can make explicit disarray. What can make a relentless. In 2057, massive flood-control structures protecting New York City from the rising seas required a redirecting of the Hudson and East Rivers northeast, into Long Island Sound. The resulting dams — the construction of which triggered small earthquakes throughout New England — allowed for the draining of the old riverbed south and east of Manhattan, revealing the unearthly geological circumstances on which this archipelagic metropolis sits.

Hey you, hard-drive for the Ancient of Days —
so bring the scenery with you
(or is that backwards? Sarcophagus
midwife to gargoyles, as if all or something
for all tomorrow’s blogs and tweets?) —
were appropriate, you circle the time inside you,
either way, we salute thee, as worms salute
plant an asterisk next to a kiss,

the rain that drives them to sidewalks to drown
and it was going to be okay again, and the love
in the shapes of question marks and musical clefs
of which much was made settles closer, is a paw
cliffs. Clefts. Whatever it takes to shepherd us toward
against a wrist. Hasn’t finished yet,
grappa infused with stinging nettles and lemon peel,
through the bread-and-butter machine continues to churn out

or White Russians made with your mother’s milk
and liking things is like being a machine?
about her forehead, is as a poinsettia
number twenty-one is my hawk
in the breeze of Rockefeller Center. I don’t like
or sadness? number twenty-two is my window
a glacier telling me to hurry up, the ride down is precipitous.

[Note: Sources: Sergio Medieros, “THE DEATH RIVER…”, in Vegetal Sex (tr. Raymond L Bianchi); Leticia Luna, “Wounded Days” (III, IV), in Wounded Days (tr. Toshiya Kamei); Ghassan Zaqtan, “Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me”, “Alone and the River Before Me”, in Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (tr. Fady Joudah); Sean Bonney, “Cell 1 / Suite 3 / as in Crisis”, at Abandoned Buildings, 26 Oct 012; JBR; Sarah Dowling, “Sunshine Honey”, in Birds & Bees, at lulu; John Becker and Geoff Manaugh, as quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Lower Manhattan National Park”, at BLDG/BLOG, 26 Oct 012; Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 10 (tr. Kent Leatham), John Ashbery, “And the Stars Were Shining”, as seen at wood s lot, then interlineated by JBR, semi-a là Ted Berrigan (except for certain bits, which are from Sarah Dowling, epigraph and “Morning”, in Birds & Bees, at lulu]

In the House of the Hangman 1125

But “If you like to be looked at and I like to look at you, we may achieve an enjoyable interpersonal relationship. If you like to talk and I like to listen to you talk, this can be mutually rewarding. If you like to feel enclosed within a claustrum and I like to put my arms around you, we can both enjoy a particular kind of embrace. If you like to be supported and I like to hold you in my arms, we can enjoy such an embrace. If you like to be kissed and I like to kiss you, we may enjoy each other. If you like to be sucked or bitten and I like to suck or bite you, we may enjoy each other. If you like to have your skin rubbed and I like to do this to you, we can enjoy each other ... If you enjoy being hugged and I enjoy hugging you, it can be mutually enjoyable. If you enjoy being dominated and I enjoy controlling you, we may enjoy each other. If you enjoy communicating your experiences and ideas and aspirations and I enjoy being informed about the experiences, ideas and aspirations of others, we can enjoy each other. If you enjoy telling about the past and I enjoy hearing about the past, we may enjoy each other. If you enjoy speculating about and predicting the future and I enjoy being so informed, we can enjoy each other. If you wish to be like me and I wish to have you imitate me, we can enjoy each other.” Though “It is not uncommon that two individuals, both very sociophilic, may be incapable of a sustained social relationship because of varying investments in one or another type of interpersonal interaction. Thus you may crave much body contact and silent communion and I wish to talk. You wish to stare deeply into my eyes, but I achieve intimacy only in the dark in sexual embrace. You wish to be fed and cared for, and I wish to exhibit myself and be looked at. You wish to be hugged and to have your skin rubbed, and I wish to reveal myself only by discussing my philosophy of life. You wish to reveal yourself through your view of the nature of man, but I can externalize myself only through communicating my passion for the steel and tape of a computer that almost thinks like a man. You wish to communicate your most personal feelings about me, but I can achieve social intimacy only through a commonly shared high opinion about the merits of something quite impersonal, such as a particular theory or branch of knowledge or an automobile.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, as quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins”, at Terror Addict]

In the House of the Hangman 1124

Will it get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is. It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could be were it is. It could be a balloon. Oh these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends. It could get some wind for the sailboat. Batch catch hatch latch match patch watch snatch scratch. And Honz said. “Get those four balls away from the gearshift.” “I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘I don’t know’. I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘I don’t know’. I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘I don't know’. I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘I don’t know’. I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘I don't know’. I said, ‘Chris, who is Einstein?’, he said, ‘Let me think.’” 14 acoustic guitars, 31 dc motors, 300 m cable, fabric and computer, Neues Museum Weimar? And she said, “Line up at the door, and lob yourselves into the earth, and find what kind of stone it was,” and now we are sentenced to mine — not the stones themselves, but the color of their streaks, what scratches them and what they scratch, industrial uses, drillbit uses, The Universal Head Rivet, we are mining where they are typically found. The crow objects, “what of the mystic infinity of row upon row of orange stadium seating, bear stripped bride at the Trashcans even, for one side buttered the other?” Let us examine how this independent variability of the affect and feedback systems enables the emergence of motives more complex than any such a motivational system as the drive system could support. Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US–Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African flow into Europe; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, along with the embattled frontiers of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad or free Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as the Pearl River Delta has rapidly ascended to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai and the paradigmatic transformations of the Chinese metropolis also characterized by urbanities of labor and surveillance. “Oh, body, body,” says Lidia Yuknavich, describing what it feels like to read Junot Diaz - - rubbing her arms and legs. Then, I climbed the mountain at the end of the street. I climbed through the trees until I reached the red rocks. There, in the “earth blood,” as Lidia Y said the color red is, when you encounter it in rocks, I felt great waves of relief and arrival go through me. Then I saw the gong. I struck it so many times with a soft, padded mallet -- that two people came to investigate. I had disturbed a mid-term on Kierkegaard taking place in a nearby class! When Jeremy Lowry came round the corner I was pulling on my boots in the little chamber between the shrine room and the foyer, like the failed criminal that I am.

[Note: Sources: Christopher Knowles, libretto, Einstein on the Beach, and Robert Wilson, as quoted in Leo Chadburn, “Trainwreckin' Crew? Philip Glass' Einstein On The Beach At The Barbican”, at The Quietus, May 11th, 2012; Darren Bauler, “prostheticknowledge: Playa by Ruben Dhers”, at Theater of Diminished Facuties, 24 Oct 012; Patricia Lockwood, “Children With Lamps Pouring Out Of Their Foreheads”, “The Father Of The Fictional Alphabet”, at PANK 6.08; Judith Goldman, “winKing and bLinking”, in l.b.; or, catenaries; Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank); Teddy Cruz, Political Equator project, as quoted in Derek Gregory, “ASAP and experimental geopolitics”, at Geographical Imaginations, 24 Oct 012; Bhanu Kapil, “Lidia Yuknavich and the Gong”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Oct 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1123

So Nietzsche dreamed of becoming Bart Simpson, is what it boils down to. And balloons become car-sized anemones and quivering beasts. And ‘Bang Bang Boom,’ whose fleshy follicled tubes descend from giant booms in the trees. A single candle burns in the Merz Barn. The slide shows a blue-black darkness sprinkled with tiny lights. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have been sent to the gulag. One thousand, nine hundred and ten. Twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety three. Five. Five hundred. Three hundred and forty thousand. One hundred thousand. Six eight thousand. Four point seven percent. One point two percent. Three point eight percent. Three thousand one hundred and forty. Thirty one thousand. Fifty nine thousand. Six billion, eight hundred and eleven million. Seven hundred and eleven billion, four hundred and twenty one million. Eight hundred and seventy eight million. “I’m not really a super amper … I just started grad school so I was really overwhelmed with quantum mechanics and organic chemistry and … it was really heavy. Michael says ride the lightning! … I just want to calmly ride the lightning.” For every free coffee beauty privilege gets you, it also gets you a guy following you down the steps on the subway, saying he wants to work his tongue into your ass. I mean, I can’t decide whether to be more baffled at G. A. Kelly’s (outrageously unclear) paper on Hegel’s Master and Slave Dialectic or at the ending of the Adventure Time season finale right now. As I’m typing, I’m thinking about this: I accept that my interiority is culturally forged, and not very well forged. It’ll shift, alter, mutate. At the same time, I do experience my self as real, central, devouring, needy, and needful. I don’t believe in progress, but I do believe things happen. I’d love to upend the patriarchy, but I can’t guarantee anything better (whatever that means) would follow in the immediate aftermath. I’m a breeder who revolts against the body-as-property equations of state and love. Gloria Anzaldúa tells us to develop (or that some of us in that third space will necessarily develop) a “tolerance for ambiguity.” I say, let’s go further. Let’s develop a predilection for ambiguity. Let’s elect it. Let’s become especially skilled at occupying our conflicted terrain, at describing the negative space of the ambiguous by filling in everything around it. This is feminist, which is synonymous with existential or ontological. This is an ontological option that I’m pursuing. Failure abounds. Alexander Graham Bell wanted to call his daughter Photophone. Yes I certainly did. And King Philip sayeth unto me, re “the” Gagosian: “Far behind the artists’ assistants and the dealer’s minions are a slew of people who are employed to keep up appearances and therefore must remain especially invisible. Should they finally be seen, after all, buyers risk remembering that this is just a shopping mall like any other; that unwanted objects always gather dust after a while; that people earning minimum wage do in fact interact with priceless things; that people are not always white like gallery walls; and that walruses are not in fact ever pink.” But bloodlust, in its excess, is dull. Get out of here if you don’t know how to raise a child, how to save a child. And “swarm” is key. It’s a “frenzy mantic mania” (“Invincible Birth”) lexical field of energy, just now a magnet of living juice has been whirling the mental-affective plume. The other key characteristic of the poems of Meadowlark West is their use of allusions and references. It’s a big-time parade of allusions, and to use just a few examples from but one of the poems, they range from the familiar (Sor Juana and John Donne), to those that can be unlocked with a bit of research (“the massacres at Humboldt Bay in the nineteenth century,” “the red obsidian light of Church’s Cotopoxi,” and “Gilak in the Pomo legend,” for example), to a few which seem destined to remain mysteries (try “the collini lombardini,” and “the Canadian octophagic”). Sirens at doorways on rocks in place of gutted rooms … rollicking maypoles of imaginary Canaans forgotten in redwood dust … motorific cyclones a bridge of garnet almost granite … the bronze raindrop … the flocculent chance of onyx leaves … No one’s emotions are their own.

[Note: Sources: JBR, FB comment appended to Benjamin Noys FB post, 23 Oct 012 (Noys’ post: ‘Eternal recurrence is the punishment of being held back in school, projected onto the cosmic sphere: humanity has to copy out its text in endless repetitions.’ Walter Benjamin); Brian Merchant, “Like Alien Organs: A Chat With Jason Hackenwerth”, at Vice, 23 Oct 012; Charlotte Higgins, “Merz Barn faces closure: Lake District shrine to modern art where Kurt Schwitters worked on his last great dadaist project under threat after losing grant”, at The Guardian, 19 Oct 012 (“In a room of the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, there is a hint of what Schwitters did to scrape together a living: alongside the display of his avant-garde collages are figurative portraits he made (according to Hunter, he posted ads in the local shops – "portrait, one guinea, hands 10 shillings extra"). There is even a flower painting (he is the only major modernist, it transpires, to have won the Ambleside Flower Painting Competition). He sang dada songs in the White Lion in Kendal for pennies to pay for beer.”); Rachel Pastan, “Negotiating Utter Darnkess: What Is Contemporary?”, at ICA Miranda, 15 Oct 012 (Re Yayoi Kusama’s “Fireflies on the Water”); Miriam Elder, “Pussy Riot band members sent to remote prison camps”, at The Guardian, 22 Oct 012; Juliana Spahr, “Index for ‘Under Under …’”, at Swoonrocket, 23 Oct 012 (“Participants wrote the numbers by jumping up as high as they could. And they wrote them as large as they could. Attention was paid to the jump, not the writing.”); “a chemistry professor speaking about her first time surfing a 25-foot high or so wave, two miles out off the coast, and about an hour out of Santa Cruz. It was also the first time any woman surfed Mavericks”, as quoted in Sam Reiss, “Hi Shredability – Mavericks”, at Vice, 23 Oct 012; “vicemag: For every free coffee …”, at Stoya, 23 Oct 012; JBR; David Winters, “My mind can’t …”, at Dinu Lipatti’s Bones, 23 Oct 012; Danielle Pafunda, as quoted in H L Hix, “Danielle Pafunda on Occupying Our Conflicted Terrain”, at In Quire, 23 Oct 012; Garrett Caples, “Ordinary History America”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR, but see next; “1simulacrum1: The Gagosian Doesn’t Want you to See this Image”, at fakedaniels, 23 Oct 012; Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion, and Johannes Göransson, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, as quoted in Gene Tanta, “Lost and Found: American Hipster Poets as Urban Excess”, at The The, 23 Oct 012; Steven Fama, and Philip Lamantia, as quoted in Fama’s “¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ Viva Lamantia ! ! ! ! !”, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 23 Oct 012; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1122

‘How else is was still asleep as standing’? In the middle of the cups? A reference in ‘A Serious of Photographs’ to a ‘designer / carrier bag’ which becomes ‘later a bank mask & sex aid’, and then ‘later still a shield against nuclear sunburn’, reminds us that ‘We are prompted by the [still-ongoing] millennial twitch, the apocalypse packaged as a war game loop, to steel ourselves in search of some depiction of our heartbeat caribou and midriff clavichord. And she gets all of these red tarantula and burlesque and exertion organ-grinders and she brings all of this stutter and duodenums it on us.’ I mean, there is the vinegar of the left hand, and the vinegar of the right hand, which are incommensurable with the political right and left. I’m practically smelling marriageable, not-guilty, dyed a la carte live al fresco on a sea of Skittles, transplanted away from, now I am your waitress now, love lovely weather permitting. This is the sixth mass extinction. The message is blunt: if it’s on TV, and you disrupt it, the state can deprive you of your liberty for as long as it likes. Which was better – Avatar 1, or Avatar 2? Uncle Sam: The first one. I’m more a Court TV fan, than movies. I love Judge Judy. Statue of Liberty: Avatar 2 was much better, where they go from the dream into the dream into the dream. The guy from Titanic is good, I always like him. It was a little slow. At least in Titanic, the ship sunk. [Singing] I come from the land of ice and snow, where the grass is something, and a full moon beloooow. Profit on something that died and a shitload of votes (an entire drive) that you do not hear the smoke of. And you’re sitting there in his pretty broken wig and a lithium sweater with a big bat and thinking: (Pulls his beard) There was a time I would have lost my heart to a face like yours. [Suddenly the son grabs the knife from the soldier holding him and stabs young man in the stomach, she pulls out the knife without a drop of blood] In the center of the dream, a giant voudou botanica. My friend and I entered through a room of cheap plastic necklaces. You could choose between hundreds of chintzy floating necklaces, I mean islands of goddesses. See, they were all goddesses. To amplify the comparatively low-frequency parts of the vocalisations, he over-inflated what is known at the vestibular sac in his blowhole – which normally acts to stop water entering the lungs. And maybe that‘s something that cuts through or at least serves as a counterpoint to the stagnating slime. ― Like we should divorce Pakistan? ― Enjoy the present, as Ficino says in Avoid Activity‘s epigraph. And maybe it‘s a little bit like Stevens‘s quirked-out copacetic aesthetic? ― The dump is full / Of images. In the blossom of the brain, in so far as I am people, in terms of my churlishness in the context of a lowering sky of lifestyle, being a person moreover, being a person takeover, in identifying people (and whales are people) it helps to consider a person a salty brick. So venture cannibalism buys a modest truck. All of which argon acts like diatoms allowing mittens to fly in the wind. It’s Monday, uniquely one of the days we live. The truck stops here and the turnips resume their gravity. Have you ever seen one of Miroslav Tichy’s homemade cameras? … cardboard, bottle caps and rubber bands.

[Note: Sources: Google translation of Celan’s ‘wie anders sei noch geschlafen als stehend’, which in Michael Hamburger’s translation is ‘how else shall anyone sleep but standing’, and Google’s translation of what immediately follows in Celan’s poem; Robert Bond, and Iain Sinclair, as quoted in Bond’s “Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s «The Firewall»”, at Jacket 25 (which is where the 1st Celan bit comes from); Susan M Schultz, “Romney's latest ad +7”, FB post, 22 Oct 012; Susan M Schultz, “Rep. Todd Akin on Sen. McCaskill as a dog who plays fetch”, FB post, 22 Oct 012; JBR; Amy De’Ath, “To Be Not Stupid”, at PEN, 19 Jul 012; Matt Staggs, “Are We Facing the Sixth Mass Extinction?”, at Disinformation, 22 Oct 012; Nina Power, “The criminalisation of protest is part of the elite's class war: Trenton Oldfield’s sentence for disrupting the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race makes it clear which class is being protected”, at The Guardian, 19 Oct 012; Trent Moorman, “Presidential Debate Predictions: Uncle Sam Storm Trooper Boxer vs. Statue of Liberty”, at Vice, 22 Oct 012; Stina Kajaso, “Avada Kadaver”, at SONOFDAD, 22 Oct 012; JBR; Bett, “i dreamed about …”, at bett’s blog, 22 Oct 012; “Beluga whale ‘makes human-like sounds’”, at BBC, 22 Oct 012; Eirik Steinhoff, “‘Mr. Fuller has come to a dead end, and likes it’ (an interview with William Fuller)”, at Quid 20; JBR, but see Susan M Schultz, FB comment, 22 Oct 012 (apparently something Romney said during the debate 22 Oct 012, which I’m not watching (Giants/Cards, game 7 of NLCS)); Any De’Ath, “Lena at the Beach”, at Quid 20; JBR; Allen Bramhall, “In the Hall of the Mountain Vice-President”, at Simple Theories, 22 Oct 012; JBR and Arielle Guy, FB conversation, 22 Oct 012]

Beluga whale 'makes human-like sounds' (aka I may not like the way humans have arranged things much, but I do love this world)

Reblogged from BBC:

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech.

While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry.

But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below normal, in clipped bursts.

The researchers outline in Current Biology just how NOC did it.

But the first mystery was figuring out where the sound was coming from. The whales are known as "canaries of the sea" for their high-pitched chirps, and while a number of anecdotal reports of whales making human-like speech, none had ever been recorded.

When a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California surfaced saying, "Who told me to get out?" the researchers there knew they had another example on their hands.

Once they identified NOC as the culprit, they made the first-ever recordings of the behaviour.

They found that vocal bursts averaged about three per second, with pauses reminiscent of human speech. Analysis of the recordings showed that the frequencies within them were spread out into "harmonics" in a way very unlike whales' normal vocalisations and more like those of humans.

They then rewarded NOC for the speech-like sounds to teach him to make them on command and fitted him with a pressure transducer within his nasal cavity, where sounds are produced, to monitor just what was going on.

They found that he was able to rapidly change the pressure within his nasal cavity to produce the sounds.

To amplify the comparatively low-frequency parts of the vocalisations, he over-inflated what is known at the vestibular sac in his blowhole - which normally acts to stop water entering the lungs.

In short, the mimicry was no easy task for NOC.

"Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," said Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation and lead author on the paper.

"The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."