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]