“Bindschädler,
at three, four, five one lives off the images, the thoughts one has inherited,
as a dowry for life. — At sixty-three, -four, -five one walks along a river of
a Saturday, declares it North American, feels its gray, orange, yellow tones as
Indian tones, hallucinates a canoe on it, with the last Mohican inside, crowned
with two, three colorful feathers. And one understands, glancing at the oaks by
the river, that the Germanic tribes revered oaks. And one looks back on the
decades of duties fulfilled as a citizen,” Baur stumbled, “that is, on decades
when one produced shoes for example, rifles, made bricks, tiles, bicycles,
cars, television sets, and so forth, or made oneself useful in some other way,
focusing on punctually observing the start of the workday, the end of the
workday, above all the start. And one remembers having tried to keep body and
limbs clean all those years, the dirtying oneself that comes from inside and
that comes from outside, from the street for example, from the lathe, from jam,
to get rid of it, also the dirt between the toes and other parts. And you think
of the Eau de Cologne you poured in your left hand to spread on your cheeks,
neck, nape, forehead. And you think of the Eau de Cologne you poured in your
right hand to spread on your cheeks, neck, nape, forehead. You see again the
clothes that you put on, all those years; you see particularly the pants, and
of these especially the legs, which couldn’t be too long or too wide …” A night
in which all cows are black still has cows. If I see one more arty photograph
of a supposedly anonymous ranch house I’ll scream. The whole feng shui flutters
around me. Hell, it’s time we listen to our hickish selves more clearly, most
clearly. Look into my eyes, amiga, and speak. Heaven is already here, if you
want it. Good Lawd, that cheap beer must be kickin’ in. A portly dude eases a
buck into the juke box, prods Los Tigres del Norte to sing, “Salierón de San
Isidro, procedentes de Tijuana.” This is a Korean-American owned bar, by the
way. Here, a plate of rice and bulgogi is only $3.99. She says, “I actually
have never read Ana Božičević, although I hear she is good. What do you
recommend by her? Also, still thinking about siluteas, have you ever seen this image by Francesca Woodman?
Her photographs are amazing. What about Capitalism and Schizophrenia? ‘An economy is a system of apparently
willing but actually involuntary exchanges. A family, for example, is really a
shop front, a glass plate open to the street.’” Anyone who can
pick up a frying pan owns death. Although I have always been interested in
the Anthropocene, my fascination with its artifacts grew when I accepted a
teaching position in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University
and moved to “The Mountain State” — or what West Virginia’s former governor and
now senator, Joe Manchin, has lovingly called “The Extraction State.” Here, it
is obvious that not only have the surface and ecology of mountains changed
because of deforestation, but entire topographies have morphed in a geologic
instant as a product of large-scale mountaintop removal mining (MTR).
[Note: Sources:
Gerhard Meier, Isle of the Dead (tr.
Burton Pike) (muchas gracias Omo Bob); either Timothy Morton or Mikhail Emelianov, as
quoted in Emelianov’s “On Sheer Madness of Tim Morton”, at Perverse Egalitarianism,
23 Nov 012; Carol Diehl, as quoted in Hrag Vartanian, “Required Reading,
at Hyperallergic, 23 Dec 012;
Bianca
Stone, “Pulling the Sun”, as quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Bianca
Stone Poem”, at HTMLGIANT, 23 Dec 012; Linh Dinh,
“The End”, at Detainees, 23 Dec 012; JBR; Ivy Johnson,
Johnson quoting Deleuze & Guattari, Bhanu Kapil,
“Tribal solstice”, at Was Jack Kerouac a
Punjabi?, 23 Dec 012; William S Burroughs, as quoted in “Christmas Countdown:
#07”, at The Other Room, 19 Dec 012;
Erika Osborne, Exposing The Anthropocene: Art And Education
In The ‘Extraction State’”, in Making the
Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (eds.
Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse)]