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"Living is no laughing matter": A review by Eileen Tabios of a tiny book by Kathy and me for her books on chairs project.

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Eileen posted a review of a little one-off book Kathy and I made for her project.

 

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In the House of the Hangman 1215

What does it mean to dream u were Berryman? I have lived orgies and will one day make pageants. Bright windows with continual feast: those eyes’ swift flash as I pass. O I make rows of you, streets of you, processions, spectacles … From “I’m a rocket ship!” to “I’m princess Spiderman!” in the span of an hour. But le BIG dilemme: Light Cone aux Abattoirs vs Rosa Luxembourg / Agone à Terra Nova. There’s no need to replicate and yet realism. I think my brain may fall out. I added numbers and filled out little boxes and cut along perforated lines all day. But just once I really, really, really want to be able to fill out the little box that asks for “Fishing Boat Proceeds.” If you were to ask me how this will end she says in a terrible car crash, at sea, holding hands, and survived by our five hundred children who have left directions for our tombstone to read SAVIORS OF ALL MANKIND. We want to watch the sunset we say out loud. All we want is the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset the sunset. I said Would you like to hear a good joke. Look at my beard! I said but you were eating oatmeal. Otherwise proceed to the bank. I want to give you the horse bladder part of this thing, but I cannot figure out what part of this thing the horse bladder is. A critical button functioning. You must love gloves and give up legumes. And maybe three electric eyeballs. I have been stressing more than anything and watching gobs and gobs of TV. I am realizing if this psychotic novel is my Justine, then I need to as well write a Juliette, of which some of the material was in that chapbook I AM SHARON TATE. In my notes I’m kind of confusing when Grosz is speaking or when Lacan is, but she is often speaking through Lacan. “But look: my shirt is 1,600 dollars and I don’t give a fuck.” I mean, “I like purple ’cause purple is like red to me. I like red too, but purple is just like red. Don’t it look just like red to you? Think about it.” The novel tells the story of a minor but self-aggrandizing provincial official who decides to buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia and install it in the local capital in order to increase tourism. Along the way he discovers a village full of people with highly unusual skills: a one-legged long jumper, a blind woman who can hear and name dropped objects, a deaf man who sets off firecrackers around his head. Some Chinese sometimes do eat puppies, as the presence of organized dog farming and items on restaurant menus rather directly attest. According to Nora Pärt, that is, the last chord in Cantus seems not to want to come to an end. It stands still, without growing or diminishing. Something has been achieved and now one doesn’t want to let it go. The content of the entire work strives toward this point. When the plateau of this cadence has been reached the chord does not want to stop. The same thing happens at the end of the first part of Tabula Rasa: always this final chord that appears to want to go on forever.

[Note: Sources: Giles Goodland, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Aaron Shurin, “City of Men”, in From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (ed. Douglas Messerli); Delon Ackerman, FB post, 30 Jan 013; KBR; Rachel Eros Isarose Defay-Liautard, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Dennis Phillips, “from MEANS”, in Messerli; Arielle Guy, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Sasha Fletcher, “just enough thunder”, “love is real!!!!!!!!”, “my eyes have seen the dawning”, “this is the year where astonishing things try to kill us”, in 5 Poems, at Crush 15; Emily Pettit, “Really Emotional About Learning to Swing on a Swing”, in four poems, at Crush 13; JBR (hat tip Anne Gorrick); Nico Vassilakis, FB post, 30 Jan 013; Kate Zambreno, “King LEER: Lacan & courtly love”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 30 Jan 013; Mark Cugini, “Chief Keef on Writing”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Jan 013; JBR; Eric Hayot, “China, Middlebrow to Highbrow”, at h Public Books, 14 Jan 013 (re Yan Lianke, Lenin’s Kisses, Christopher Buckley, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?); JBR; Nora Pärt, as quoted in Lars Iyer, “Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer …”, at Spurious, 30 Jan 013]

2nd from the left, back row (i.m. Anselm Hollo)

In the House of the Hangman 1214

Do you remember how easy and sad it was to be young and defined by our bicycles? Maybe it’s Lamp Day. The pillowcases cradled my head like the earth a very young carrot. Inside Geryon something burst into flame. A passing waiter slapped the bill down on a small metal spike on the table. Helen said, “Have you seen the TV commercial where the housewife is being stoned to death for using the wrong detergent, and this voice comes from out of the burning bush to egg the stone throwers on?” “Yes,” said Oreo. “The bush is your father. Have you seen the one where the housewife gets a rash when a little man jumps out of her toilet bowl?” “Yes.” “The bowl and the rash – your father. What about the one where the man is thinking of telling his wife she has dandruff, while the woman is thinking of a good way to break it to him about his b.o.?” “The b.o. and the dandruff – my father,” said Oreo. “No, the woman.” Helen explained that Oreo’s father was now the king of the voice-over actors ... Of by that to the this into of them. Chinese coins with with holes in the center. Black smoke from a structural fire belched up over the docks. One door is the demand of another. “the laundry-basket lid is still there / though badly chewed up by the cat / but time has devoured the cat / entirely.” Goodbye sweet old prince. He’d be the first to tell me to quit being so sad. Read Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Read Collected Works Volume 38. And now (especially) read Raya Dunayevskaya’s book on Women’s Liberation. I / saw the river, cloaked / in plastic bags )))))))))))))))))))))))))) pink orange light in sky above the still dark ridge in the window just opposite the unmade yellow and blue bed, sound of wave breaking in channel below it, man on phone finding a manifestation of the real in recent work, noting that “grey” and “gray” appear to be two different words. [Break: Drink Hot Water with Lemon Juice]. These are your brutal chemicals. Yet if you cannot say to another you, “I love you,” how can you ever say anything anymore anywhere in this world? “There are wild elephants in that country, and numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big. They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick.”

[Note: Sources: Matthew Zapruder, “Schwinn”, “Lamp Day”, “Poem for Tony”, in Come On All You Ghosts; Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red; Fran Ross, Oreo, as quoted in Harryette Mullen, “Not Struck Dumb but Logodaedalyly Phonofounded: The Vernacular Heteroglossaries of Fran Ross’s OREO”, at HOW2; Ron Silliman, “from TJANTING”, in From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (ed. Douglas Messerli); Anselm Hollo, “Elegy”, in Maya (i.m.); JBR; Out to Lunch, comment appended to Andy Wilson, “Time to Fight: The Crisis in the SWP”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 23 Jan 013; John M Bennett, “Espejo del Faucet”, at experimental-experiential-literature, 29 Jan 013; Stephen Ratliffe, “from CLOUD/RIDGE (4.22)”, in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (eds. Joshua Corey and G C Waldrep); Bhanu Kapil, “Class 3: Plan”, at Monster, 29 Jan 013; Anselm Hollo, “Question”, image embedded in Katie Jean Shinkle, untitled, at Katie Jean Shinkle, 29 Jan 013; Marco Polo, describing a rhinoceros]

In the House of the Hangman 1213

“Is it good, melatonin?” “Yeah!” OK. PLACE A DISPOSABLE PLASTIC KNIFE ON THE EDGE OF A TABLE. WITH YOUR LEFT HAND HOLD DOWN THE PORTION OF THE KNIFE WHICH IS ON THE TABLE. WITH YOUR  RIGHT HAND  PLAY THE KNIFE& BY BENDING DOWN THEN RELEASING THE PORTION OF THE KNIFE WHICH OVERHANGS THE TABLE. PLAY SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE MUSIC. Reed suggests Strauss waltzes, but I don’t know any. Feral Chi. Topple / Glassy / Hopes / Biases / Arise / Around / Antimatter / … / Tiny pewter speck / Been dead, bones heave. Rain by my throw in a wood jelly. An incredible film, don’t get me wrong, it just required a superhuman suspension of disbelief. Which at the time was fine, because “special effects” like George Reeves flashing across the sky were meant to be “special,” outside of the ordinary, and didn’t need to look as if they were of this world or obeyed its laws of physics. It’s like some old joke: “What do Georges Bataille, Nick Land and Harry Potter have in common?” Punch line: they cannot speak the name of that “which cannot be named”. Well, of course, this is a ruse, for the truth of it is that they all name it, yet do they? What is materialism? More specifically what is libidinal materialism? Or, closer yet, What is base ;materialism? And, to top it off: What is Lord Voldemort, he-who-must-not-be-named? Hyperbole, superbole? A switch and bait routine? I too have been nuts, I think the woods is made of many minor keys. Thus far we have only spoken of the air handling side of the unit. A big blue color takes place in that space. Misquote. The personality syndrome and there is one turns out to be a splendid undertaking. ‘Among the lost manuscripts of Franz Kafka are some letters from a doll, written to an unknown girl. Kafka had encountered the girl while walking in a park in Berlin in 1923, in the company of Dora Diamant, his last companion. The child was weeping in despair at the loss of her doll. He talked with her. Unhesitating, he told her that the doll was not lost, but travelling. She had sent him a letter.’ True or false: Chocolate is Mexico’s great contribution to Surrealism. With unbroken incantations in the voice of a lion prepare (on wild rocks) a soup made of half a pink onion, a bit of perfumed wood, some grains of myrrh, a large branch of green mint, 3 belladonna pills covered with white swiss chocolate, a huge compass rose (plunge in soup for one minute). Just before serving add a Chinese “cloud” mushroom which has snail-like antennae & was grown on owl dung. So. “We hereby declare this to be a most awesome assembly. In the name of the people of this place — which is to say: IN OUR OWN SOVEREIGN NAME — we command you to immediately LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE. If you do not do so, your violence may be repelled, your authority will be mocked (which may result in a permanent feeling of humiliation), and we know for a fact that the injuries you inflict upon our persons shall afflict each of your souls for the remainder of your days. We prohibit you from fucking with our most awesome assembly. If you attempt to arrest us, history shall prove your folly absolute. If you do not leave, LYRICAL AGENTS will be used, which may result in unmitigatable sensations of bliss. GO HOME. We liberate you in the power of, well: in the power of YOU declared by WE in our sovereign autonomy. WE COMMAND YOU TO BE FREE OF YOUR COMMANDS & remind you above all to LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE.”

IN THE NOISE

& WHIP OF THE

WHIRLWIND

The new time that is urged as coming in history is already present in its own prose.

[Note: Sources: Kathy Iandoli, and Jessie Ware, as quoted in Iandoli’s “Jessie Ware Likes It Animal Style”, at Vice, 28 Jan 013; JBR; Reed Altemus, “DISPOSABLE KNIFE INTERLUDE”, in Repeatedly Tipping My Hat: A Collection of Performance Scores, at Reed Altemus; JBR, but see previous; Brian Laidlaw, “Terratactic (II)”, in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (eds. Joshua Corey and C G Waldrep); Brenda Iijima, “Panthering ϕ”, in Corey and Waldrep; Peter Inman, “Subtracted Words”, in From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (ed. Douglas Messerli); SEK, “Peter Jackson and ‘Competitive Realism’”, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, 28 Jan 012 (writing of Clash of the Titans); S C Hickman, “Base Materialism: Bataille, Land, and Harry Potter”, at Noir Realism, 28 Jan 013; Lyn Hejinian and Jack Collom, “The Woods”, in Corey and Waldrep; Alan Davies, “from NAME”, in Messerli; JBR; Kenneth Gross, On Dolls, as quoted in Gary Barwin (Moribund Facekvetch), FB post, 28 Jan 013; JBR; Peter Lamborn Wilson, “For Leonora Carrington”, at The Noise in Me, 5 Oct 012 (“Soup recipe by L. Carrington”), via Darren Bauler, “The Noise in Me: FOR LEONORA CARRINGTON by Peter Lamborn Wilson”, at theater of diminished faculties, 28 Jan 013; JBR; A Twenty-First Fiery Flying Roule, and Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”, as quoted in same, at A Fiery Flying Roule; Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 28 Jan 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1212

I crap you nope, to quote Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle. Googamoogah’s mother’s mom shits a live baby into the corpse’s lap, countering Death with anal birth. Holes burn through the celluloid (see Fight Club, 80 years before) as He sharpens the tip of His tail with a pocketknife. The whacked off whatnots end up as eye-candy décor. This Lamb shift is a result of the interactions between the electron and the constituent quarks of the proton as described by QED. These interactions are slightly different for electrons occupying the 2S and 2P energy levels and the resulting energy shift depends in part on the radius of the proton. However, in muonic hydrogen the Lamb shift is much more dependent on the proton radius because the much heavier muon spends more time very near to – and often within – the proton itself. As for myself, what interests me about Marx, at least what I can say has inspired me, is Book 2 of Capital; that is to say everything that concerns the analyses of the genesis of capitalism, and not of capital, that are first of all historically concrete, and secondly the analyses of the historical conditions of the development of capitalism particularly on the side of the establishment, of the development of structures of power and of the institutions of power. I think of the creature’s “dun” eye opening in the book, his attempt to smile. Victor’s breakdown in the courtyard. Exactly. You just have to wade through the plague ground of the present as the floodwaters rise from the reversed drains, sewage-riven, bearing tissue and garbage, the present tense resembleing you in all its spumey and spectacolor. That is, bioluminescent bacteria would be inserted into their own interesting-looking blown glass cells, forming a living lamp. Tubes would connect the bacteria to the life-sustaining sludge at the lamp’s base. The sludge would come straight from your bathroom and kitchen. War is over if you want it. The mercury should be washed (say ten times) with nitre and distilled vinegar and likewise dried (twice), and the mortar should be constantly heated just so much as you are able to bear the heat with your fingers. Grind the mercury 1/4 of an hour with an iron pestle and thus join the mercury, the doves of Diana mediating, with its brother, philosophical gold; most women who sleep with me end up blacking out at some point during our love making. As do I. Newton’s alchemical manuscripts remained “unknown” until the 20th Century, at which point they were purchased by John Maynard Keynes. Did I say Keynes? There are twelve stories about Fatty Arbuckle. We know how he spent (wasted, drank through, destroyed loved ones, burnt beds, was seen in nickelodeons nodding off on junk and gorging pig-like on duck and busting heads and breaking hearts) his final decades. Because of the underground nature of his later years (basements and brothels and dank laboratories and warehouses and seashells) we can only hope certain makeshift records (napkin poems, restroom wall sketches, carvings in trunks, nails through voodoo dolls, digits sent to ex-lovers, whispers floating back off ocean breeze, legends from El Salvador, French myths, personally performed porno in blurred film stock, corpses in floor boards, postcards to cousins, a jam session on tape with Fatty on tenor) appear from the rivers of far drums. I am twenty-four years old. I have degrees and a job and an apartment. I have never learned to grocery shop. Almost two years ago I stood in my kitchen covered in facepaint and wearing my Swarovski-encrusted riding helmet from my teenage years, at a loss; a camera was on. I didn’t know how to look at it. My roommate’s parents kept us well-stocked in arbitrary necessities. In the cabinets, we had many canisters of sugar. I am the reincarnation of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper during the second world war, who is credited with over 300 kills.

[Note: Sources: Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, “Tales from the Crypt by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle (pt 1)”, at Montevidayo, 27 Jan 013; JBR; Hamish Johnson, as quoted in S Abbas Raza, “Proton Is Smaller Than We Thought”, at 3 Quarks Daily, 27 Jan 013; Michel Foucault, Colin Gordon, and Paul Patton (Presentation Alain Beaulieu), “Considerations on Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview with Michel Foucault; Recorded on April 3rd, 1978”, in Foucault Studies 14, at Foucault Studies; Bhanu Kapil, “Alpine: M. Shelley in a Venue”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 27 Jan 013 (re Mary Shelley, Frankenstein); Joyelle McSweeney, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “Joyelle’s ‘Future of American Poetry’ vs the ‘Glut’/’Too Much’ Discussion”, at Montevidayo, 27 Jan 013; JBR; Rebecca Boyle, “Bacteria Lamp Can Eat Your Sewage and Light Up Your House”, at PopSci, 30 Nov 011; JBR, but see previous; John Lennon and Yoko Ono; Isaac Newton, The Key, Jon Leon, “The Promise”, Dan Hoy, as quoted in Hoy’s “This Is the Source of All the Perfection of the Whole world: Isaac Newton & Jon Leon”, at Montevidayo, 19 Jan 013 (didn’t show up in Google Reader til 27 Jan 013, tho); JBR; James Pate, “12 Resolutions Toward a New Year”, as quoted in Johannes Göransson, “‘James Pate Should Be Famous’ (Pt 1) – On Fan Fictions, Fake Fame and Atmospheric Aesthetics”, at Montevidayo, 18 Jan 013 (didn’t show up in Google Reader til 27 Jan 013, tho); Carina Finn, “Preamble to a Constitution of Baroque Malaise Traipsing Through a Field of Dead White Flowers”, at Montevidayo, 18 Jan 013 (didn’t show up in Google Reader til 27 Jan 013, tho); JBR; W W Houston, “See Jane Shoot”, at The Economist, 25 Jan 013, via Robert Farley, “But Allen West Seems Very Troubled”, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, 27 Jan 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1211

OK. So. The divine purpose of law is ... to wake life to the endlessness of its immanent reality by consciously laying to sweet sleep all the purposes that bind it, above all to itself. #38 [Awesome footnote]: As figured in Nietzsche’s “heaviest weight,” the absolutely binding-liberating principle of the eternal return of the same (Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 194) and in Meister Eckhart’s formulation of the divine whylessness of life: “it lives without Why, because it lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a genuine man who acted from his own ground, ‘Why do you act?’ if he were to answer properly he would simply say, ‘I act because I act’” (Complete Mystical Works, 110). In other words, the only purpose of life, which itself properly belongs only to what lives without principle — “Hoc enim proprie vivit quod est sine principio” (Eckhart) — is to arrive at the purposeless Reality: “Reality is Existence infinite and eternal. Existence has no purpose by virtue of its being real, infinite and eternal … Everything — the things and the beings — in Existence has a purpose … Their very being in existence proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to become shed of purpose, i.e. to become purposeless. Purposelessness is of Reality; to have a purpose is to be lost in falseness … Love alone is devoid of purpose and a spark of Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality” (Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing [Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publications, 1963], 62). In these terms, the purpose of law or the law of law, is to bring to end all the purposes that separate life and living. The connection to sleep is articulated by Meister Eckhart: “If a person were really asleep for a hundred years, he would not know any creature and he would not know of time or images. [Only if you so sleep,] then can you hear what God is bringing about in you. This is why the soul says in the Book of Love: ‘I sleep and my heart is awake’ (Sg 5:2)” (Teacher and Preacher, trans. Bernard McGinn [New York: Paulist, 1986], 293). The proverbial sweetness of sleep, an absolute law of life whose intimacy therewith is shown in sleep’s suspension of everything save breath, is sister to the wakeful captivation of contemplation: “For by a wondrous sweetness was she [Mary] held; a sweetness of the mind which is doubtless greater than that of the senses” (Augustine, Sermons on the New Testament, 54.1). And as anxiety is the enemy of sleep, so is sleep a reflection of the irreconcilability of worry and justice: “At peace with God and neighbor, thus good sleep demands. And at peace too with the neighbor’s devil! Otherwise he will be at your house at night” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Adrian de Caro [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 18). The gravity of sleep indexes the sweet immanence of eternal justice, precisely because ‘justice never sleeps’: “suppose you feel tired and fed up and that you go to sleep. What is it that you are trying to do? It is nothing but to try to take refuge in God — your natural and inherent state. The whole Creation therefore has this conscious or unconscious tendency to take shelter in God the Over-Soul … by entering the state of sound sleep” (Meher Baba, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1973], 101). Augustine similarly correlates the sense of divine justice and feeling for the inner abyss in commenting on Psalm 41:8: “Deep calls to deep [abyssus abyssum invocat] at the sound of your cataracts … This is how wisdom is imparted, and faith is learned, when one deep invokes another. Holy preachers of God’s word call to a deep abyss. But are they not a deep abyss themselves? They surely are, as you know. The apostle says, It matters very little to me that I am judged by you or by any human day of reckoning. What a deep abyss he is! But he goes further: Neither do I judge myself” (Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols. [New York: New City Press, 2000], II.251-2). In other words, the apparent virtuality of abyssically resonant communication is a sign of the hidden reality of eternal justice as well as a real medium of worrylessness. Beautifully enacting this principle, Augustine opens the commentary on this line by addressing the (invisible) reader as a visible presence by means of whose interest his own commentarial effort proceeds without anxiety: “I may be able to get through this whole psalm if you help me by your concentration, for I can see how eager you are. I am not too worried about any fatigue you may feel as you listen, for you can see how I am sweating in the effort that speaking costs me. And as you watch me laboring, you will certainly help me, for you know I am laboring not for my own benefit, but yours. Go on listening, then; I can see you want to” (Expositions, II.251). This points significantly back to questions of relation between media and sweetness, virtuality and justice. Is not the theory of communication that Augustine here arrives at and dramatizes not a form of ‘post-human’ justice predicated upon the as not [hōs mē] structure of apostolic identity? Is not the as not — as opposed to the hope-structure of the as if, which is actually only a mechanism for ‘having one’s own way’ in a bad way upon the faulty foundation of assumption that the hoped-for always already is not — precisely the hopeless ‘hope’ of the virtual as mode of relation that calls from the depths to release identity into sweet wayless abysses of a life? See Eugene Thacker, “The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation,” Postmedieval 3 [2012]: 80-96. Is not eternal justice coterminal with arts of wayless media, above all the taste of one’s own tongue, whose aimless aim empties world of the correlational, fake-it-till-you-make-it structure of capitalist life (hell-creating virtual performance of salvation) in f(l)avor of the fullness the cephalophoric paradise where law both is as if it were not decapitated and is decapitated as if it were not?: “Justice without law is not the negation of the law, but the realization and fulfillment, the plērōma, of the law” (Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005], 107). Affirming these questions, Scott Wilson provides a proper figure for such media, one whose beauty lies precisely in the abyssic alreadyness or radical immanence of its ‘perhaps’: “Perhaps some time in the future, some hard-bodied, hard-wired assemblage self-designed to survive the lifeless expanses of time and space will sense the sense the soft sweetness of a-life penetrating it” (The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment [New York: State University of New York, 2008], 173). True dat. But I still want to save the planet and fuck up them rich folks.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Nicola Masciandaro, FB post, 27 Jan 013; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1210

Dark rooms and light rooms. And every notebook from time one to time two found and flung. The ink bleeding and the mouth bleeding. The cells sharp and concerned. Corporeal. Not a code but a signal. Tinged. I keep a blue bottle. Inside it an ear, medallions, kindnesses, parachutes, kisses. In my land, a small god named Cocijo, where he urinates a river is born. Arch flowing into arch flowing into arch, and through the last arch, what was dumb will speak. After all, it is the halos that tell us who the saints are. He poured bleach down a sink with frozen pipes behind it and now the bleach has nowhere to go and my house smells like fucking Auschwitz. I closed off that room and it does have a motorized ceiling vent but we’re getting nowhere. Maybe I should just pour that hydrochloric acid toilet bowl cleaner from the dollar store down there and get it over with. (Fall asleep with hands guarding hills and old woods inside your sweater, softer wood eating into harder sand — a soft world means a thin barrier) “I want us to be like that 95-year-old oven,” you say. Big cement lions on both sides of an overpass bridge. What was the story about the boy who had little boxes in his eyes and he would send them up in the sky and each box had sunlight inside it for the moon who couldn’t find the sun because earth was in the way so the boy wanted a rainbow in the shape of one circle as big as the sky and as colorful as no wind so his little boxes could fly through them? “That puppy is so cute I could eat it! Wait, what?” The rules of Camover are simple: mobilise a crew and think of a name that starts with “command”, “brigade” or “cell”, followed by the moniker of a historical figure (Van der Lubbe, a Dutch bricklayer convicted of setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933, is one name being used). Then destroy as many CCTV cameras as you can. Concealing your identity, while not essential, is recommended. Finally, video your trail of destruction and post it on the game’s website -- although even keeping track of the homepage can be a challenge in itself, as it is continually being shut down. True poetry is hideous, because it is base communication … Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through the crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. Zagat and NYC DOHMH grade signs on tinted plate glass windows // garbage day sludge, bonus for the smell // these common large-leaved weeds wilted in heat wave // no chicken bone hunting today, she feels this is an ugly break from routine // totally fried Bachelor’s Buttons//who has the courage to pull out their appliances // I did, “let’s never let it get that bad again” // … [oh yeah] … // I remember being hostage to my desire with only a jar of Nutella to last the weekend. It was Tiziana Terranova who first suggested Tarde. I was trying to think through these ideas I had about the contagions of network culture. I had, up until that point, been trying to develop an assemblage theory approach to networks. Another important thing about Tarde’s role in Virality is that he does not distinguish between nature and society or similarly between biology and culture. He helped me as such to break through the artifice of metaphorical contagion which makes it seem like the biological is always invading the social, at least where biological language and rhetoric seem to impose themselves on social phenomena. We came from surfaces. / We encountered sudden weavings in the two patterns of latitude and longitude. / We threw ourselves into weavings, forming designs; we raised our heads then found love. / Wearing gaudy clothes / we circulated, crossed borders then regained someone. Dove song in my eardrum / doves thrum in my ear low / dove’s sob and my ear thrum / doves throb in my ear’s song / my ear’s song my blood low / dove’s song in my blood’s song / love hollows my ear / here Venus your bird. If cumulative behavior defines the construction, and that construction’s accretionary (aleatory) behaviors are its manifest tactics and actions, a building, or a body, as a meaning-free map, redrawn to make of itself the a priori object. This broke part you rope to / scrape you all outside still / when you grab as touch drowns. THIS is not a man vision / THIS is not a Blake vision / THIS is the Vehement Desire of Form / TRIVIA ! you’re in a suit of clouds ! ... My mouth of itself gathers foam, / hammers “same, same, same,” her eyes prize the fatness of my throat, milk seeping / from the corners of her lips, her nostrils, fairly pouring forth her throat in propulsive / waves against my face, I turn on my knees, arms linked behind me with comrades, / creativity is intrinsic to law like a cloud is intrinsic to snow, snow to blood, which means / also to have died to law ... Love loves difficult things / We’re on our way! “Cause there ... there’s heaven you ... Can you make ... that you ... talk ... That’s ... the problem [...]” The quartz fashions a nappe around its axis. The crystal taches quickly from the friction. The rock is a fraction of some other stone. Nitrides mask the etchants. The crystal was embedded. The roche once was rached. Each face is false -- irregular, inconstant. The rock is just. The rose aches. The cusp is hastate in its jut. A ridge knaps from the back of the neck, where it tapers to a wedge. The quartzes gestate as they hutch. Accretions seek the furthest edge. The stone is asleep, but not for long. The difficulty of accounting for harm. And in stumbling is at work. New forms of civic life. And then my brother and I made a fire outside and the year turned.

[Note: Sources: Melissa Buzzeo, For Want and Sound; JBR; Pablo Neruda, “Melancholy Inside Families” (trs. Robert Bly and James Wright), in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (eds. Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grossman); Pablo Antonio Cuadra, “God Creates the Andes” (tr. Brian Whitener), in Vicuña and Livon-Grossman; Donna Stonecipher, “Album”, as quoted in Eileen Tabios, comment appended to her “My Brother’s Gift”, at Sit With Moi!, 20 Jan 013; William Keckler, “He poured bleach …”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 26 Jan 013; Kate Schapira, “Train Notes (Expanded)”, “Heirloom Notes (Concluded)”, as quoted in Rob McLennan, “Kate Schapira: The Soft Place”, at rob mclennan’s blog, 27 Dec 012; Edwin Torres, “Quest”, at Drunken Boat 16; Stephanie Pappas, “That puppy is so cute I could eat it! Wait, what?”, as quoted in “‘the less control and more desire to ‘grrr’ and squeeze’”, at The New Inquiry, 26 Jan 013; Guardian article, as quoted in “‘Axes, ropes and pitchforks are all encouraged’”, at The New Inquiry, 26 Jan 013; Nick Land, as quoted in S C Hickman, “Nick Land: The Master of the Infernal Wisdom”, at Noir Realism, 26 Jan 013; Stacy Szymaszek, “JOURNAL OF UGLY SIGHTS: 7.6 – 7.20”, at Drunken Boat 16 (DOHMH = Department of Health and Mental Hygiene); Tony D Sampson, as quoted in Jussi Parikka, “‘Tarde as Media Theorist’: an interview with Tony D. Sampson, by Jussi Parikka”, at Theory Culture & Society, 25 Jan 013;Li Yawei, “We” (tr. Jami Proctor Xu), Caroline Knapp, AURICLE, Suzanne Stein, Tout Va Bien, Stacy Doris, Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit, Brent Cunningham, Journey to the Sun, Farid Ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds (tr. Peter Sis), Alice Notley, Close to me & Closer ... (The Language of Heaven) [and] Desamere, Craig Dworkin, The Crystal Text (After Clark Coolidge), Myung Mi Kim, Oppen lecture, Melissa Mack, as quoted in Mack’s “2012 Disinhibitions: Melissa Mack”, at The Disinhibitor, 26 Jan 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1209

“Gestalt by any other anonymous sweetener,” as well as “a ball of nose bleeds as white as — microphones, planets in unfortunate orbit, where adults are light fixtures with “fogbow” and “infinity mists” or moments when “a nasal capillary bursts, / a cabernet stream curves / around your inferior lip.” “Everything carries the courage of Capri Sun, of string cheese” rather than being normative. “It’s like being kissed hard on the brain by an angel with a strap-on.” When my kids were little, my wife read the entire series out loud to them. One time I walked by the room and all three were weeping. “What's wrong?” I asked. “J-J-J-J-Jack died!!” More wailing. “Who’s Jack?” [Carry me along taddy, like you done thru the toy fair] “The the the the ... the DOG!” Irrevocable black, irrevocable white / … / teeth in sky / … / How many times / to be women or woman and / woman and man and / man woman / … / black milk spurt destroyed / across every straight line / … / and I’m lying there, black green and white / … / and a crest of red / bites at the head of the board / spitted fuchsia on lavender thighs. The formula is a simple quarter-power exercise: You take the mass of a plant or an animal, and its metabolic rate is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power. 1.5 billion pulses or heartbeats. I’ll explain how this works down below, but the point is, this rule seems to govern all life. Later I make a potion with tajá blossoms from the lagoon and I summon Cobra Norato. “I want to tell you a story. Shall we wander in those trimmed islands? Pretend there’s moonlight.” The river choked in a ravine. The road toad is spying on me. In other words, “I came to Carthage, where a caldron of unholy loves was seething and bubbling all around me.” Those with winged sexes cut their hair military style. “Fon-gu!” Winged or wingèd. It was at the far edge of the far edge. Dread snake Podiac / … / dew rat / … / … / zylocaine pontoon meat cement / … / the major hover reason major / … / lifter lace bead mega-shovel. “The historical process maximizes a hide of consensus, like these tanneries — / odiferous, outskirts — to live nearby the skinning factories / chiffon of the living, working, mouth, tongue / scudding — wet blue, blue blue sky, cascade pools, drenched splashing child / biocide: pentachlorophenol — resource demure, tissue of cells begin to hear / chromium — lungs to breathe out objects / leftover leather turned into glue —feeding on silt, feeding on bones — barbed wire / when diamond found, eye put out, hard bark, evidence bare foot, climb cliff face / difficulty of stepping back from atmosphere — elicit / osmosis through skin, woven hair, veins / components of the engine: cylinder head, valve train, / transformers to regulate light, incandescent, starlight, sun at noon / treaties remains etcetera — compression where there were terms — of / agreement where there were — the corn needs the be harvested / largest collection of Impressionists / now we make mounds of paper / laminate causation” … On this day in 1941, A Philip Randolph officially announced the March on Washington. It worked. It was part of things. OK. Time to listen to a higher-fidelity version of Beuys’ tonband in filzstapel [audio tape in stacked felt], the stummes grammophon [mute phonograph], which displays a covered phonograph record, perhaps with a recording of Beuys’ felt­wrapped piano (felt, of course, is a material known for damping sound, as it’s used around the hammers inside a piano). Though we’ll never know, because the swing­arm and needle have been replaced by a bone, bluntly inverting Rilke’s hallucinatory dream of playing the jagged coronal suture of the skull with a phonograph cartridge. Which is or is not to say that “The dynamics of low-frequency temperature anomalies depend on whether a density signature exists (Iselin 1939; Liu and Shin 1999; Schneider 1999). Temperature anomalies with a density signature are governed by planetary wave dynamics, whereas those that are density compensated by salinity anomalies behave as a passive tracer in the upper ocean. Density-compensated salinity and temperature variability is known as spiciness (Veronis 1972; Munk 1981) with hot and salty water having high spiciness ...”

[Note: Sources: Stephen Danos, Playhouse State, and Zachary Green, as quoted in Green’s “Review of Playhouse State”, at LitBridge; Chris Goode, Twitter Encomium, as quoted in Punctum Books blurb for Lauren Berlant, Desire / Love; JBR, FB comment, 25 Jan 013 (re Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books); James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Marianne Morris, “De Kooning, A Retrospective”, at The Junket, Jan 013; Robert Krulwich (and a JBR paraphrase), “Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It’s Time To Die”, at NPR, 22 Jan 013, via Timothy Morton, “The Mathematical Logic of Death”, at Ecology without Nature, 25 Jan 013; Raúl Bopp “Excerpt from Cobra norato” (tr. Odile Cisneros), in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (eds. Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grossman); JBR; St Augustine, Confessions, as quoted in Anne Boyer, “augustine: and, from a hidden hunger, I hated myself for not feeling more intensely a sense of hunger”, at *, 25 Jan 013; Cristina Rivera-Garza, “Excerpt from Third World” (tr. Jen Hofer), in Vicuña and Livon-Grossman; Clark Coolidge, “DHARMA SNOW”, in Uncollected and Unpublished Poems 1962-1968, at EPC; JBR; Brenda Iijima, Glossematics, Thus, as quoted in Michael Cross, “Glossematics, Thus”, at The Disinhibitor, 14 Jun 011, via C J Martin, “Brenda Iijima’s GLOSSEMATICS, THUS is flipping my lid”, at Rhyme Eats The Words, 25 Jan 013; Erik Loomis, “This Day in Labor History: January 25, 1941”, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, 25 Jan 013; JBR; Craig Dworkin, “JOSEPH BEUYS: Grammophon aus knochen [Record Player of Bone] (1958)”, in unheard music, at Monoskop Log; JBR; Thomas Kilpatrick and Niklas Schneider, “Generation of Low-Frequency Spiciness Variability in the Thermocline”, as quoted in JBR, FB comment, 26 Jan 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1208

Out on the grounds the bizarre went on and on. You were there. I was there. We were so much there that we were “There.” We felt hairy, yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. It is late here & the midnight howls to the lavender fields, France’s heather, to nourish the night & bed down its blooms in winter’s watchful hands of snow. This is about comic books. This is about orchis simia. Dracula gigas. “DOWN WITH HIERARCHICAL POOP, UP WITH CAPS LOCK.” Here is the recipe that earned me a dance with every woman in the ville, and the hearts of all the mothers. Flirting Abuelitas hinted I should come calling on their nietas, pressing me with photographs whose subjects were avatars for every panaderia calendar I’d ever seen except without the arrow in a breast. Ruth saw a beautiful moth on the white sloth. Toot! Toot! Thump! Thump! 3’34” of shrewdly collected silences from the lead­in tracks on ten John Cage albums from Büchler’s record collection. These grooves are like the canine musicians in Franz Kafka’s 1922 Forschungen eines hundes: “they did not speak; they did not sing; each of them re­mained silent — almost concertedly silent — but they conjured music from thin air.” That thin air, as well as the music conjured from it, is what Duchamp would term “l’inframince”, which could only approached by examples, such as “the noise made by corduroy pants”. “That’s why when in Portland, we read too much coffee man and when in NYC we read it too.” It’s like Jack says: The Darwinian environment is a robust lifestyle exposing the hashish of space to gain a hilltop on seamless mannerism, or maybe it’s more like walk until you reach the color red. You’ve looked at another person that way yourself, with nothing
but
black bank of clouds, tran-
quil waterway
earth flow overcast sky —
immense darkness
a battering of wings,
For we have stepped into the sacred areas
and wept over our waste procedures
which is will have been being our transcendence. “If artworks are alive in history by virtue of their own processual character, they are also able to perish in it … Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz.
Dancers shrieking one by one.
Shit / Enters into it only as an image
Blind guesses.
If it were spelled ‘mune’
I gave you [I give you] my imaginary [I mean real unfucking] hand.”

[Note: Sources: Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, “The Voyage of the Argonauts”, The Pastor”, “The Complete Works”, in Bean Spasms; Karl Marx, Capital (ed. Frederick Engels, trs. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling), at Marxists.org; Marya Berry, FB post, 24 Jan 013; Robert Archambeau, FB post, 24 Jan 013; JBR; Erik H Rzepka, FB post, 24 Jan 013; msedano, “Classics of Chicana Chicano Literature. Best Restaurant in the World. Gluten-free Chicano Makes Menudo. Penultimate On-Line Floricanto in January 2013”, at La Bloga, 21 Jan 013; Julian Morgans, “All Welcome the Bomb-Sniffing Mice Infestation”, at Vice, 24 Jan 013; Craig Dworkin, “PAVEL BUCHLER: 3’34” (2006), in unheard music, at Monoskop Log; Amanda Deutch, FB comment, 24 Jan 013; JBR; Jack Kimball, “The Darwinian environment …”, at Pantaloons, 24 Jan 013; Bhanu Kapil, “Walk”, at Monster, 24 Jan 013; Ari Banias, What’s Personal Is Being Here With All of You, Yedda Morrison, Darkness, Michael Palmer, Thread, Evelyn Reilly, Apocalypso, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor), as quoted in Angela Hume, “2012 Disinhibitions: Angela Hume”, at The Disinhibitor, 24 Jan 013; Nico Vassilakis, “Spicer’s LANGUAGE (foreshortened)”, FB post, 24 Jan 013; JBR (real unfucking is also out of Spicer’s Language)]