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Da boyz and their dad.

In the House of the Hangman 1183

So I smoked and I drank and I translated Homer’s Neukia episode into Nahuatl — Auh Onitemoc Acallpa … Pound’s Homer through (Andreas) Divus into the language of the Yucatan, to give back a blood transfusion while I was … What the hell did I care about Cortez? Or even Fortun Ximenez, who was sent northward that he might discover the land of the female Caliphate (California), replete of course with gold, and thereupon conquer? Leaf split lengthwise / in the Southern California air / drifting through a hangover / “Fuck this place,” Fortun began … It began with a hundred ants among the roots and moved through such world into the spheres, constellations, and higher fields of life — the crystal and the ivy — presence and generation: my family would soon make a natural entry, feathers and shells, fragments of bone and bits of obsidian, picked up in tidal zones or the dirt of ruined cities. Time for built environment genomics. Don't underestimate the people at CERN, they see worlds fly by faster than anybody ... Specifically rendered, detail by detail: “an unmarked bottle of pink pills and a pink diary with a gold lock. The heavy curtains are drawn. The beige carpet is stained in various places and covered in clothing and other items, such as a half-eaten Eggo waffle with cinnamon and sugar on it. A dog bed: a basket with the dog’s name, Charlie, stamped in Sentimental font.” Instead of the walls there were kinds of short spikes. “How do you want to make it”. Besides that everything was okay. The bridge was out and the tunnels were closed and the elevators felt like they would snap from their legs and bodies and instead of gravity happening gravity would get completely pissed off and give up and throw something at a wall and nothing would come out of it. My third job was to quit my second job and the third job took up too much fleshwork. The flesh is like a kind of “Help, but, oh well.” The barren mountain stays on the barren mountain. Three pounds of ink stay in the intestines. Jadeite water stays in the teapot. Spring stays inside the hat. The big valley is a vast mother-of-pearl mirror. There walks the large dead swan. And there walk the mother-of-pearl children. Or the fragile founding / foundling clumps. They led the swan into a forest. Go now and eat that which you have taken from the swans. Then one ran up and cut a branch from the tree and grabbed a burning branch and stuck it into her throat. Until the swan’s flesh fell off in beautiful heavy clumps. Qualifications? She had never been to any poetry reading. Though we all know her work. She designed New York’s yellow cabs. Whip in hand, the courtesan Phyllis rides on the back of the philosopher Aristotle, who crawls naked on all fours. The illustration is based on a medieval legend. Aristotle had tried to end Phyllis’ relationship with Alexander the Great. In revenge, Phyllis inveigled the philosopher and, as proof of his love, demanded that she be allowed to ride him like a horse. The legend came to be seen as an allegory of woman’s domination of man — but isn’t there another, more subterranean interpretation? The philosopher, of all people, should not put himself above sex. To the contrary, he should put himself beneath it. Get off your ass, thinker, lest it be whipped.

[Note: Sources: Edgar Garcia, “So Whatever Happened to that Epic Poem, Edgar?”, at Hydra Magazine, 10 Mar 010; Dennis Tedlock, Punch Press blurb for Edgar Garcia, Boundary Loot; JBR, FB comments, 30 Dec 012; Kari Larsen, “The Structuring Absence: Alone with Kate Durbin’s Kept Women”, at Anobium, 29 Dec 012; Alex Savage “The flesh is like a kind of muppet caper”, in The Flesh Is Like A Kind Of Muppet Caper, at Anne Boyer; Xi Chuan, “somebody” (tr. Lucas Klein), as quoted in blurb for Yours Truly & Other Poems, at Tinfish Press; Ann Jäderlund, “From Soon Into The Summer I Will Walk Out”, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “The Visionary Kitsch of the 1980s (Michael Strunge, poetry, pop music, Ian Curtis etc)”, at Montevidayo, 30 Dec 012; Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, “I Am A Medium”, at Montevidayo, 30 Dec 012; Perversity Think Tank, at Supervert]

In the House of the Hangman 1182

Vanda Vieira-Schmidt witnessed demonic operators with portable uranium devices on the underground, torturing and even murdering passengers with electricity and ‘uranium hits’. Since her release, she has been drawing diagrams and magical sigils on pieces of paper at a rate of up to a thousand a day. Now, whenever any violence breaks out in the world, it can be controlled; indeed, we can use her drawings to mediate in global conflicts. This work has helped to restore her peace of mind, and, she feels, a broader ‘peace on earth’ – a goal that would have been well understood by James Tilly Matthews, a passionate peace activist whose confinement in Bedlam was the culmination of his reckless and tragic attempts to prevent war between Britain and France. Those spores and the phosphor-luminescence pulsate with an eerie light, which coincides and collaborates with the light of the cinema screen, as it reaches our faces and bathes us too in its greeny-bluey etherium. The old miner, a remnant from German Romanticism, once upon a time descended into the cave to stay amongst the glimmer, amongst the luminous stones that he says have voices. It is no surprise that the super-robots of anime, such as Mazinger Z, fire photonic beams from their eyes – you’re 25 years old and Sappho’s been dead for centuries. Proper kids, we set fire to the cottage in the woods like cartographers puking for hours in the dampness of the technical mist, the zone of brooming up carcasses so their tongues could snarl from pikes. I mean, it’s weird up there and there is nowhere in the world that can remind you of how much money you don’t have like Fifth Avenue and the bushes outside the Plaza Hotel are teeming with rats and the sidewalk outside Bergdorf Goodman reeks of horse shit from the carriages in Central Park, and a very old man came up to us and shouted “OH LOOK HERE I AM GETTING MY EMAIL FROM THE TOILET, HERE I AM WITH MY EMAIL, YOU PEOPLE ARE SO BORING,” and then he tottered away. But wait! This doesn’t mean that I massively despise myself. No, I like my printed work. I live for that — for theory, really. And shamelessly. I hate this leftist humanitarian attitude: People are starving! Children in Africa! Who needs theory? No! We need useless theory more than ever today, I claim. Open quotes but never close them. Genital life gives way to bubbles, the broken off parts recombining in the milky, oily darkness of the soft brain. Are you sick and tired of running away? I pull myself up from my knees to clean. The pregnant guest was Japanese -- she told me about the hot springs with monkeys and hot saki floating on trays. One day she took me to hangar H. In a small room six files lay on a table. Someone determined to prove something had gathered notes, quotes out of context, “conclusions,” mostly relating to the circulation and accuracy of information — “generally speaking,” she said — from the five books of stereohell. She left me alone, without a word. I started to examine the files. The texts were short and fragmented. Everything was disarticulated. One document stated that “communications” undergo distortions, and depicted the mechanisms of such distortions as persistently evolving in capacity and speed, but there was a stable principle inherent to them that wasn’t. The principle was described in a separate file by a set of definitions and theorems supposed to deter misconceptions but I understood that the clear comprehension of the principle, how it structured its field of applicability and impinged askew on the surface of all things “shared” (communicated), and how it produced distortions, didn’t guarantee the full understanding and control of the distortions themselves, which were undeviatable and unflappable and continued to exist identical to themselves despite any comprehension thereof.

[Note: Sources: Mike Jay, “The Art of Mind Control”, at Mike Jay; Esther Leslie, “Esther Leslie: Screen Glow”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 29 Dec 012; Nicky Tiso, “Samuel Becketted”, at Grand Hotel Abyss, 29 Dec 012; Jon Cone and Adam Tavel, “Hangman Arcades”, at Keep This Bag Away From Children; JBR; Sarah McCarry,  “Happy New Year”, at The Rejectionist, 29 Dec 012; Slavoj Žižek, as quoted in Katie Engelhart, “Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world’s hippest philosopher!”, at Salon, 29 Dec 012; JBR (the following post opens with a quote, but …); Bhanu Kapil, “Editing during a Saturday Night Pre-Teen Sleepover”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 29 Dec 012; Imp Kerr, “New lows”, at The New Inquiry, 29 Dec 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1181

Since then, it’s been creeping up on us that the end of the world’s already occurred. At least Kant knew when to panic. Take a Book Leave a Book. But why ‘Young-Girl’? Who is she, and what kind of ‘theory’ is presented here? Tiqqun explain that every postwar consumerist subject, every ‘model citizen’, every bearer of power is the Young-Girl: ‘All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope.’ And yet the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the Wizened-Pope’. The 23-year-old medical student whose savage gang-rape on a moving bus in Delhi struck the very core of India died in a hospital in Singapore today. O human shiitake airship, your homicide hat of oaky euros is like a fang boot fuming ginkgo nagas in a sauna of chopped poached cockroach dipped in caramel, a caramel nest doorframe may open onto the mythical land of Chalaza, OK, it turns out that Bulgakov’s close friend N. N. Lyamin lived at Savelevskii pereulok 12 with his wife Natalia Ushakova. The nonexistent name “Pyazhnin” is clearly a distortion of Lyamin. But how and why did the distortion creep in? You’re here on a couch, pillows fluffed, dreaming in Latin. You’re in a tablet carved on a mountain and given to men whose ears filled with ontology. The French Revolution began without you and ended the same. In the bucolic pastures of Hazerswoude-Dorp, nestled in verdant fields of ruminating Holsteins, lazy windmills, and pert tulips, lies a quaint Dutch farm that functions as the world’s largest psilocybin-containing truffle factory. This is an alphabetized list of the creatures inhabiting (thus far) the new poems I’m writing. Just like in life, I am surprised by the number of fruit flies. This originally started out as a blog about wine, yet I started drinking less and less right after its inception, because who needs to lose further control of her faculties during a summer with little to no light? Now, thanks to an autoimmune conundrum, the most exciting drink I drink is apple cider vinegar diluted in water, which is indeed a very exciting drink! One day, I will blog again about wine’s emotional qualities; in the meantime, I am plugging away at an essay — “Thirst: A Pseudo Philosophy,” an exploration of wine, desire, philosophy, and sickness (also [sic]ness). Who will enter this beautiful beautiful mask of / punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks / this top heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water? Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa. Push Back the Catastrophes. Although already mapping out From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film (the former rooted in his Weimar film criticism, the latter conceived during his Parisian exile), Kracauer wrote some shrewd analyses of contemporary American cinema. Published in Commentary in 1946, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” is an excellent early take on what was yet to be named “film noir.” Not surprisingly, Kracauer recognized the tendency as essentially Germanic: “The weird, veiled insecurity of life under the Nazis is transferred to the American scene. Sinister conspiracies incubate next door, within the world considered normal — any trusted neighbor may turn into a demon.” ‘Can this really be the Son of Plato?’ we are invited to ask. And what of the son of Hegel? Not only does my smoke detector sound an alarm, it announces in a calm female voice, “Fire, fire!”

[Note: Sources: Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects Raw Blurb Data”, at Ecology without Nature, 28 Dec 012; JBR, comment appended to previous; sign on ad hoc popup free library in Claremont village, seen 28 Dec 012; Nina Power, “She’s just not that into you”, at Radical Philosophy 177 (a review of Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (tr. Ariana Reines); Abinhav Bhatt, “Delhi gang-rape survivor ‘Amanat’ dies”, at NDTV, 29 Dec 012; phaneronoemikon, “LINGUALMO”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 28 Dec 012; “Pyazhnin”, at Languagehat, 28 Dec 012; Maxine Chernoff, “Knowing”, at Conjunctions; Hamilton Morris, “Hamilton And The Philosopher's Stone - Part 1 (Shroom Ban: Means More Magical Truffles For The Netherlands)”, at Vice, 28 Dec 012; Heather Christle, “An alphabetized list …”, at Heather Christle, approx 21 Dec 012; “This originally started …”, at five minutes can you spare me, approx. 14 Dec 012; Jayne Cortez (i.m.), “Under the Edge of February”, “Make Ifa”, “Push Back the Catastrophes”, at afropoets; J Hoberman, “The Trembling Upper World: On Siegfried Kracauer”, at The Nation, 19 Dec 012; Peter Osborne, “More than everything: Žižek's Badiouian Hegel”, at Radical Philosophy 177; Shin Yu Pai, FB post, 28 Dec 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1180

So many facts turn indigo if you let them. I fly east. I fly north. I fly south. I fly west. I fly east. We are going to go fishing as soon as our mental breakdowns are over with. “If Point A is here [pressing a point on my arm] and Point B is there [my leg], then we are time travelers, mom.” Have you ever noticed that Enigma almost anagrams Imagine? It is mere walking distance to a large supermarket adorned with carnival flags waving above old men in bright polyester parkas rolling vanilla-flavored cigars in the parking lot. Cool Whip™, Kool-Aid™, Tang™, and ten-for-a-buck neon drinks do not look like anything else because they aren’t. You know when you go to see a band and while they’re playing you kind of move your head from side to side as if to say, “Okay, this is a pleasant little ditty, this is cute” and you feel like you’re your dad doing the dishes with some Doors song stuck in his head? “I have thought simultaneously: ‘I really should learn the trombone’ and ‘there’s a dead ant.’” “My memory is structured like a disco ball.” “Everything I write is true, but so what?” My fear of clowns is well established. “I thought I read on one of the bottles in a Chinese pharmacy ‘octopus wigs.’” Your urine shouldn’t smell like rotting ham.

[Note: Sources: Bhanu Kapil, and Thelonious Rider, as quoted in Kapil’s “Ender-Night: Notes”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 27 Dec 012; Koon Woon, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command”, in “Solicited Poems by Koon Woon”, at Poetry Pacific, 11 Nov 012 (thanks, Shin Yu!); John Mathias, “Associational Poem for Peter Robinson at Sixty”, at Blackbox Manifold 9; Karla Cornejo Villavicenio, “Seeing Red”, at The New Inquiry, 27 Dec 012; Ben Johnson, “Best of the Best of 2012: Pitchfork”, at Vice, 27 Dec 012 (re: DIIV, Oshin); Edouard Levé, Autoportrait, as quoted in Brooks Sterritt, “25 Points: Autoportrait”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Dec 012; Delon Ackerman, FB post, 27 Dec 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1179

Nor have we seen or fully described the spiritus silvestre or “wild spirit” — the term used by Jan Babtist van Helmont when he first described carbon dioxide gas — that rang out as scientists characterized relationships between this gas, music as a muse and nothin’ 90s about a spiked snapback and 6 inch square heels, but the ‘frustrated rebel youth look’ is timeless. BILLY GETS ME FOR SURE. I’m rocking a pair of UNIF Hellbound Platform Boots (limited edition on Nasty Gal) -- very exclusive, much adored, and a perfect fit for my print-crazy wardrobe. They look so cute next to my other two pairs. A little Hellbound family. Thank you, Nasty Gal for offering me the opportunity to give the Las Vegas concrete a piece of me with some sky-high stomp treatment. These platforms pair well with my winter gear: ripped jeans from PacSun and a two-piece denim jacket from Chicwish. Cuba, the only country with 0% child malnutrition, according to UNICEF. An accordion and dulcimer-playing singing-in-Klingon post-punk grrl band!!! “I am not interested in preserving the beauties of the Arabic language.” Music is a lobster, an egg. The Mine Kafon is a central core designed to fit an array of legs. It rolls where the wind blows and triggers land mines, and tho it loses legs each time a mine blows, it keeps rolling til it can’t, setting more mines off. And then it melts into the sand. Please take a few minutes to read over these notices, then Kickstarter them. Imagine a pear tree covered with golden fruit. The strong force is carried by eight gluons. This is Cat’s Home where the little mogs scratch against the door like Lovecraftian intruders. On the sill a crumbly plaster statuette of Diana dances among her deer, brass angel extends elongated arms to define his / her spaces amid the cardboard boxes. I draped my clothes on a plinth. Lee says I can chair the fan club. “It was my cunt, too — not the velvet one, of course, but the center one with the hanged man attached to it. That same summer, my sister and I turned detective and held the spy glass over the ants and discovered they were busy planning hoaxes. Everything I do, I do because I know I am dying. My most favorites of things are optical illusions. We don’t become senile or “lose our minds,” it’s just that as we get older, we have more to think of in less time — we must think of more in a compressed amount of time. I think I know now what you’ve tried to teach me, that poetry is an instant, an instant in which transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs and all of one’s knowledge, experience, memories etc. are obliterated into awe. Is anything I say real? And by real, I mean sincere — or is everything an attempt to have love? I know now why the line breaks: it is because something dies, and elsewhere, is born again …”

[Note: Sources: Denzil Ford, Suite on Spiritus Silvestre: For Symphony, at Punctum Books; Bebe Zeva, “Land of a Thousand Guilts”, at Fated to be Hated, 27 Dec 012; Odilia Galván Rodríguez, FB post, 27 Dec 012; Lee Ann Roripaugh, Facebook comment, 27 Dec 012; Turki al-Hamad, as quoted in “Saudi Novelist Turki al-Hamad Arrested for Tweets”, at Arabic Literature (in English), 25 Dec 012; Kyle Chayka, “Making the Ugly Attractive: A Self-Propelled, Biodegradable Mine Detonator”, at Hyperallergic, 27 Dec 012; Tony Lopez, “Living Systems”, at Blackbox Manifold 9; JBR; Paul Green, “Shadow Time (1)”, at Blackbox Manifold 9; JBR; Jenny Boully, The Body, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 27 Dec 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1178

« Puisque le bonheur n’existe pas, tâchons d’être heureux sans lui. » It’s your party and I don’t want to be thought of as high maintenance. I think we caught all the scorpions who live in your throat. Utah town burns 16-foot mammoth effigy for winter solstice. It smells like masking tape inside this suitcase and a fortune cookie that reads, “love conquers all”. Jumping around and around the fields like a drunk grasshopper, r u there yet? ‘my hrror’ the billboard reads; the ‘o’ has either fallen off or they were too cheap to buy two o’s. Of course I too would love to beat the shit out of someone. But unlike her I would only derive a sense of pleasure from it if the person truly deserved it. And even then, I would probably feel guilty afterward. When I told D I thought it would be cool to be a dominatrix he told me he wanted me to whip him. I said, but you’re too nice. I would feel bad. I only want to whip shitty people. This is a deeply disturbing and darkly hilarious novel whose full meaning, its author asserts, will be found not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it. It depicts a postcataclysmic world in which the forces of capitalism have begun to reestablish themselves. Sharply opposed to such a trend, a group of crones confined to a nursing home — all of them apparently immortal — resolves to create an avenging grandson fashioned of lint and rags. And in a “greasy parlando”, which always inhabits a compromised social structure, a tweezed eyebrow’s the fringe of a shanty-town along the manicured horizon, like if yes subtends a sharp declension metered out to that best part where we possess more brutal happiness or as we sleep sequestered wet reload within this mortar lies R136a1 and a furnace of god-making, and yet we are only talking about it; that, or something like it, “Oxytocin Nasty”, with milk and reward where you have to Google most of it to get started, Pindaric Odes made of serial nos, season cycles, chemicals, tableaux, waterways, the sound, the joyous and aching sound: “to compare our / fahrenheits / our barrens and our / heights our dusts and / driveways” with “slogans” we turn a corner and unexpectedly come face to face with Content in its most up-close bristling troubling aspect and Layout in its most directly eloquent mode, torqued – or should I say “tocked”? – more tenuously “Lakes of the Rub’ al Khali” refers to the poignantly ephemeral lakes of that desert, 5-10,000 years ago, once inhabited by long-horned cattle and water buffalo. The American Bison is arguably the most dangerous animal in the USA; it is curious to reflect that most wild stock contains an admixture of genes from domestic cattle.

[Note: Sources: Ernst Moerman, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Puzzled Translator’s Merry Xmas Wishes”, at Nomadics, 25 Dec 012 (“Translated it will say ‘Given that happiness doesn’t exist / let’s do our best to be happy without it.’ The original works better because there are two French words for happiness / happy: ‘bonheur’ as noun, and ‘heureux’ as adjective. Even if an etymological link exists, the words are different enough on the surface to suggest two unconnected concepts of happiness / being happy while keeping that rhyming bi-vowel ‘eu’ going. I guess I could replace [the 2^nd] ‘happy’ with what the dictionary gives as synonyms: cheerful, cheery, merry, joyful, jovial, jolly, jocular, gleeful, carefree, untroubled, delighted, smiling, beaming, grinning, in good spirits, in a good mood, lighthearted, pleased, contented, content, satisfied, gratified, buoyant, radiant, sunny, blithe, joyous, beatific; thrilled, elated, exhilarated, ecstatic, blissful, euphoric, overjoyed, exultant, rapturous, in seventh heaven, on cloud nine, walking on air, jumping for joy, jubilant; chirpy, over the moon, on top of the world, tickled pink, on a high, as happy as a clam; jocund… “); Shane Allison, “A Birthday Poem for Nat”, at EOAGH, 24 Dec 012; Julia Cohen, “I Think We Caught All The Scorpions Who Live In Your Throat Press”, at $650 Apartment for $650, 25 Dec 012; Jacob Sloan, “Utah Town Burned 16-Foot Mammoth Effigy For Winter Solstice”, at Disinformation, 25 Dec 012; Ananta Prayitno, “rainy”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Jman Atienza, “Borrowed Space”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Michael O’Brien, “Terror & This World”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Jackie Wang, “once she boasted about beating someone up with a chair and getting away with it …”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 25 Dec 12; Amazon blurb for Antoine Volodine, Minor Angels; Michael Peverett, “Better Than Language (2011 Anthology)”, at Intercapillary Space, Sept 011 (all mashed up, incorporating bits from Anna Ticehurst, Joe Luna, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Sarah Kelley, Steve Willey, Timothy Thornton, and Tomas Weber)]

In the House of the Hangman 1177

The Ghoul dances with glee around your body, lays it next to the others on the ground, turns you over and sinks its teeth into your rump. It is not often it gets fresh meat to feed on. Your adventure is over. A small splotch of blue ink on a slice of mushroom that’s been used as a rubber stamp. Let’s get lost. And the boys from the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay / And the bells were ringing out for Christmas day. It’s hard not to disengage from reality when observing or experiencing the revolution; through it we have lived all of our Hollywood cinematic fantasies. The story-arcs we have experienced so far in this theatrical saga include the following: inspirational peaceful revolution, Romantic comedies, Family drama, generational conflict, human rights struggles, Gang warfare, vigilante society, Courtroom drama, political thrillers, Media Thrillers, Freedom of Speech battles, Tales of Corruption & deceit, Zombie attacks, Religious persecution, election sagas, and now we are entering the civil conflict & civil war section. All of this, in two years that also included a man who wrestled with a lion, 4 churches that were attacked / burned because a woman left her husband, and the brave tale of one man who, in retaliation for their killing of an Egyptian soldier on the border, climbed a 10 story building to capture an Israeli flag off of the embassy, a moment hailed by all as a great victory, to the point of giving him a hashtag., gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori / gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini / gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim / gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban / o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo / gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen / bluku terullala blaulala loooo. It starts with the real – or the almost real. The New York Stock Exchange is, primarily, a place and a platform where people sell shares of companies to one another. The stock market. ICE is a bit more complex, or one level more abstracted, in that its principal business is to administrate the sales of derivatives. Derivatives, as the words implies, are one or more levels of abstraction away from real stocks. Where a share of stock represents some small percentage of ownership of a company, a derivative – like a futures contract – is just a bet on the future price of the stock. When you buy or sell a derivative, you are not investing in a company but in the price movement of the shares. It’s one level abstracted. Of course, you can also buy derivatives of derivatives – bets on the movement of derivatives prices – or even derivatives of those. Exchanges like ICE also let you bet on volatility or the changing rate of volatility. The amazing thing here is that the derivatives market is now so much bigger than the “real” market that elomen elomen lefitalominal / wolminuscaio / baumbala bunga / acycam glastula feirofim flinsi / baubo sbugi ninga gloffa / ombula / jolifanto bambla o falli bambla / tressli bessli nebogen leila / flusch kata / ballubasch / zack hitti zopp. A point a particular point a point a point evading its own point a point that reveals another point the point that annihilates its shadow a point the point right on point: It was something that was smaller than anything. It’s not made of anything — it is everything around the thing that it is and everything inside of it at the same time and it kind of moves about in a way that’s not on the grid. Early on I saw that Earth was having a vibration. That it was like a constant breath, but we can’t see it. You can’t see it from photos. The edge of everything. It got so hot. It was like a wave that was like electricity. It was black and then red and then white, and it was rounded and arched as if it were in orbit somewhere. Your bodies were, like, singing — everything you were doing was like a song. It’s hard to talk about it. I cried for some reason. I remember thinking there was a message for me there. I could see patterns within the design patterns that were supposed to be there, and they all moved and looked ill as shit.

[Note: Sources: Fighting Fantasy #1: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, at Theater of Diminished Faculties, 24 Dec 012; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on a photo by William Keckler, “Bell, CA”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 24 Dec 012; Chet Baker, album title; Jeremy Finer, Shane Macgowan, “Fairytale of New York”; Mahmoud Salem, “The Powers That Be”, at Rantings of a Sandmonkey, 24 Dec 012; Hugo Ball, “Gadji beri bimba”, as quoted in Carol Rumens, “Poem of the week: Gadji beri bimba by Hugo Ball”, at Guardian, 31 Aug 09; Douglas Rushkoff, “2. Consumed by Abstraction”, at The New Inquiry, 21 Dec 012; Hugo Ball, “Wolken”, “Katzen und Pfauen”, “Totenklage”, “Karawane”, “Seepferdchen und Flugfische”, at Dada Companion; Rocío Cerón, “13 Ways to Inhabit a Corner” (tr. Anna Rosen Guercio), at Blackbox Manifold 9; John Barclay, “Interviews With People Who Just Smoked DMT”, at Vice, 23 Dec 012]

In the House of the Hangman 1176

“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)]

In the House of the Hangman 1175

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Or, to quote from The Great Stone of Swarovski (Day 5), “After many hours of dead air, we came within bluetooth range of the Tower of Olympus, wherein a 1/24th scale hologram of was said to perform a synchronised chakra discharge from the base of its spine. Using Crystallized Swarovski elements, this Pepper Ghost from incredible TV could 24ct. gold plate your DS Lite, creating a truly unique talisman investment solution. Sorry, the item above appears to be one of a kind.” When we eat, as we must, we should at least eat as the Hesse story imagines the wolves do, unelevated, amid the eaters, not neglecting to remember that what we eat had its own best part that we have taken, perhaps irrevocably, and that we, not innocent, will be taken in turn. All bodies can only pretend to be upright; all are down here, constitutively interconnected and subject to an end; all must be immanently somewhere; all belong to others in ways they can hardly know; all subjects; all objects. All can only pretend to have a good conscience. I’ve seen a photo of the wreath on Anne Gorrick’s door, made entirely of de- and recapitated Barbies, like something out of Busby Berkeley and Hans Bellmer, which she claims Maryrose Larkin sent her. Claims. This is better than the good that dried up a while back and whispers. Who cares if this dump goes? Don’t tell me you’re sentimental about it. Down with the remnants of Empire! Down with its waystations and sub-station brothels! Besides, it smells like shit-boiled cat glands. That is probably your own vile reek. So what if I smell. As if to prove a point, the threads on one of my coat’s chest buttons unstitched itself and caught in small grey flame. Can a Spinozist ontology grapple with partiality? Or did that prospect lose out the moment he saw the de Witt bros being torn a-part like dogs are by other dogs but in truth like men by a mob? To call them the greatest of all barbarians, via placard no less, the assumption being that the killing, removing by blade of various parts (toes, fingers, noses? dicks?), eating of other parts either raw at the scene of the butchering or elsewhere after cooking (and seasoning?), and the keeping and frequent proud display of Cornelis’ heart by the silversmith Hendril Verhoeff, are all things typical of barbarians obvy means Baruch could not fathom a) the nature of barbarism (which, being ontologically dark to the accusing social order, can’t be worst or best, just more or less babbling), and b) how much worse it would be to have been not De Witt but De Grotte, the famous Partial Man of Rotterdam dragged around by a circus, on surprisingly legal grounds, along with “The Hottentot Women” and “The Mute Mongoloid,” to be shown to adoring and spiteful crowds, despite being a man not Partial in truth but just going-to-pieces, a victim of a strange brass proto-guillotine before the device had come into named Gallic prominence and hence was wielded with little skill, leaving him not unwhole but just thinly – but technically still – associated with himself. Anne Boyer writes then unwrites, “I am almost five years into this art project how-to-be-happy-when-the-bear-has-your-arm.” But why are we like crows? Maybe for no more reason that likening is what “like” does, and if the crows’ obscenities are in quotes, it’s because they are citing the people who habitually put crows into words and put words into crows. “Must a crow be ragged? / If it is not ragged. Then / what good is it?” Really, a cloud with three right angles, and a bicep too? The Ice Age was yesterday. As if, were I able to be any thing, I’d be a red plastic cup, the world. Four horses, minus their dragoons, bolted on Quai de Javel. They knocked over a coach and its driver, Fouché

[Note: Sources: Lauren Berlant, as quoted in blurb for her Desire / Love, at Punctum Books; JBR, but see next; The Great Stone of Swarovski (Day 5), at The Confraternity of Neoflagellants; 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; JBR; John Ashbery, “Postlude and Prequel”, in Quick Question; Evan Calder Williams, “The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 3”, at The New Inquiry, 22 Dec 012; JBR, but see next; Anne Boyer, “I am almost five years …”, at * (cancelled post); Barry Schwabsky, and Matvei Yankelevich, “Crow Fictions”, as quoted in Schwabsky’s “The Obscenities Are in Quotes”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Dec 012; Mathias Svalina, “Chapter Three: Down the Colorado”, at Anti- 2; Mathias Svalina, “Red Plastic Cup”, at Web Del Sol; Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines (tr. Luc Sante)]