Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1543

So of course I now think of those big freezers that need generators to fuel them. I have PTSD. LET’S NOT DELVE INTO IT. Wouldn’t it be easier if eyes were always rainbows? I guess a carpenter is what I always think of. Is that mint I smell? What metaphor do you think of when you think of friendships? A good title: the leaking window, the cold window, writing in frost on windows. “How good to see you,” I said / He put on the dead of a power animal / this time it was the tall giraffe. I like fast rides. I deserve sexy texts. Near earth asteroids remind me that we’re a small coldwater planet without a plan. Who are you? Who am I? Well, I’m in space now floating. Kill coordinates. I find myself returning to Danny Hayward’s People, particularly his piece “The Consumption of Extremes: A Family Drama.” Ed Dorn once said the social formation that most intrigued him was the family. In Being a Human Being, Tom Leonard usefully reminds us “not to put friends and family before the rest of the world.” Leonard dedicates the book to his family. “The Consumption of Extremes” is dedicated to no one. It is a proper family drama. Dramatis personae, or the extremes, the family, include: X / X1, Y / Y1, XA / XA1, YA / YA1, XB / XB1, YB / YB1. Each of these paired characters would appear, on one hand, to stand in for an undisclosed or indeterminate value (i.e. X) and, on the other, this same value and its supplement (i.e. X1). Possibly. But probably not. But also. When she was struck with a sudden illness that eventually led to her passing, you quietly mourned this brief friendship. It was out of politeness that you did not ask everything you had wanted during lunch. You did not ask the silly questions. You did not ask her about Harmolodic theory, life with another artist, what type of things she likes, her relationship with Ornette, with Melvin, did she ever go out and watch Hollywood movies and what she might want for her birthday. How did she carry Denardo in one arm and direct a play, found a theater, volunteer for SNCC … how? The Filipino side? It was too soon to ask these things you felt. You had not even asked a waitress to take a picture of you together. She joked (or perhaps not) about finding you a husband. Visual artist? Musician? Poet? Please, no poets. Nothing wrong with the Francisco the UPS man? Have some fun she used to say. Remind you of someone? Perhaps in the spiritual plain she still is looking out for you. You are certain she is the reason you were able to attend Yari Yari Ntoaso in Ghana this year. December 28 marked the first anniversary of Jayne’s new chapter. She’s been traveling around a bit this past year, reconnecting and saying her farewells. By now, she should be arriving to the Darkening Land. There are days when we walk together, but so many less than there might be. These people’s painted faces make them seem more realistic. These antennas and windows sit so still in the rain. Meanwhile guess there’s no rhyming a flagpole with the pants that fly up it, though we can start with those stupid videos, full of grace notes, heavy with fun, overdone w/ contrivances, but rarely clover, the mercy bulb and thus no life democratic, in the dim hallway of enterprise. Does anyone know anything about the history of the notion of reconstructing systems, or of reconstruction more generally as a method? I’m guessing it begins with the neo-Kantians, some of whom are explicit that their work is a reconstruction of Kant. Are there earlier examples? I know that it’s an important concept for Natorp, but in a slightly different setting, and I also know there are some fun later examples like Grossmann saying at the beginning of that big book that his work is a reconstruction of Marx’s method. (The reason I ask this is that I’m now convinced that reconstruction is tied always to a systematic thought – and its no co-incidence that this is what happens in Grossmann too – and that it inevitably smuggles an idealism in which the implied system of thought is identical to the system of the reality it describes. I’m also interested in the fact that in quite an unquestioned way methods of reconstruction have become ubiquitous, even hegemonic, in the secondary literature on continental thought.) So yeah, anyone know anything about this history more than me, or know of any good early quotations? 3 points to whoever first tells me I’m an anti-rationalist. I mean, try to get us off the street during the end of the world / off it people are exchanging bodies on purpose / there are people saving other people and exchanging bodies / there’s a brief attempt at reggae music & people must find / a way to do things or all will be lost things actions / movement glue all of it in the meantime / the heart deciphers futuristic pictographs that are more complex / than pictographs the fast food is appealing as long as it is abstract /  / Say: “This is concrete.” Hold up a magenta dry-erase marker. / “If I threw it at you, you could catch it.” It’s like Simone Weil said: “We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Bernadette Mayer, and Deborah Poe, quoted in Poe’s “To Go With The Free Things Everybody Else Has Too, Like Hummingbirds’ Nests: an Interview with Bernadette Mayer”, and Bernadette Mayer, “The Ballad of Theodore”, at Fact-Simile 9; Russell Jaffee, “Accidental Nexus Worship”, “http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2031/2521188388_379a23bf33.jpg”, at Fact-Simile 9; Richard Owens, “Unfinished Notes On The Consumption Of Extremes”, at Damn the Caesars, 29 Dec 013; Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, “Beautiful Sea of Waves”, at Harriet, 30 Dec 013; Mark Wallace, “from Party In My Body”, at Area Sneaks 1; Andrew Maxwell, “Collaborators”, at Area Sneaks 1; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 30 Dec 013; JBR; K Lorraine Graham, “from See it Everywhere”, at Area Sneaks 1; JBR, but see next; Simone Weil, epigraph to Maxine Chernoff, “Out of nature, out of time, sensed as a hunger for justice …”, at Talisman 42]

In the House of the Hangman 1542

Something’s gotta get us out of this hell, even if it won’t. Jennifer writes, “I had a terrible experience last night and I want to write about it here: I’m shy, but here goes. I went to see the movie Wolf of Wall Street with my husband. There is a scene where DiCaprio takes a bunch of Quaaludes and says “I hit the cerebral palsy stage.” While he’s writhing on the floor acting like he has CP, the audience of about 400 erupted into hysterical laughter. We left. I felt so ugly and horrible. [Jennifer has CP] I thought that that is how everyone looks at me? My body is just a joke? There is nothing I can do about this. I can’t write Scorcese a letter or DiCaprio, I have no agency. It was truly awful to see someone who others regard as “good looking” act like they were “gross”. How does poetry negotiate this outrage? [Whenever you see “how does poetry” in this text read: how do we.] And to what extent does this require that the poem itself incarnate such outrage: both by externalising the rage in question (literally: out-rage) and through a rhetorics which embraces the ‘outrageous’? On the one hand, it is an individual expression of an individual outrage: ‘The lyric I — yeh, that thing’. And yet, [it is not:] the politics this poetry aims to incarnate [the politics that we aim to incarnate] is one of collectivity — not just as the basis for socio-economic organisation, but also as a metaphysical claim about human freedom. [How do we end this alienation shit? How do we ALL become whole? You got something better to do with your time? Really? Yes, I’m furious; Jennifer’s my friend] “All poetry that does not testify to an awareness of the radical falsity of the established forms (of life) is faulty. Understand prosody via black bloc tactics.* *Archaic reference, unexplained. (Bonney 2005, 87). “It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation. Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in May 1871, the week before the Paris Communards were slaughtered. He wanted to be there, he kept saying it. The ‘long systematic derangement of the senses’, the ‘I is an other’, he’s talking about the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity, yeh? That’s clear, yeh? That’s his claim for the poetic imagination, that’s his idea of what poetic labour is. Like, I just took some speed, then smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not why I’m writing this and it’s not what it’s about. The ‘systematic derangement of the senses’ is the social senses, ok, and the ‘I’ becomes an ‘other’ as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off.’ The

cold night fog brings ocean
invisible creatures
to crack open lips
& heart, to flood
in & out. beauty. Fuck
it. lipgrind,
tonguemusk. more clouds?
just buy some ketamine,
swim down 3rd Avenue,
the shore-line, clamber
up into London, aquatic mammals. Serenade
the tube and grin unhumour,
cold and green.

But how could what we were experiencing be simply down to police tactics — seriously, try thinking about the first letter of the alphabet. For thirty minutes just do it.

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They’d look weird and bumpy and naked from a distance. You know? ... but I think we ought to forego the antlers, if you make pantyhose scarecrows … if WE make pantyhose scarecrows. Not the kind of endeavor one should pursue alone. The hair fetishist guy feels like barking in English / I wouldn’t be this torch or a squash or vegan shaman / Please don’t have a morbid curiosity about the honk toy / or rustling gold tongues hung on the balcony to dry / I don’t really have to know your coded glom! / Those most amazing eel birds / Pages 175 to 295 are a blue-colored butterfly gland / Guess I’ll just give someone a lost yarmulke / The cats watch Gone with the Wind / and the problematic Teahouse of the Beasts Boy again / I’m serious, I’m going to emit us. Narrow streets in the heart of District V, and no way to escape or alter the fate that hovered over my greasy hair like a magic djellaba. Words that drift away from one another. Urban games played from time immemorial … I’m my own bewitchment. My hands move over a mural in which someone, 8 inches taller than me, stands in the shadows, hands in the pockets of his jacket, preparing for transparency. They’re in the trees and on the ground, bunched together on wooden fence posts and hanging from clotheslines like laundry left to dry. Their dead eyes stare at you from half empty sockets, their dirty hair hangs like cobwebs. Their skin is scabbed and peeling away, and their plump limbs are scattered everywhere — arms and legs strewn about haphazardly, decapitated heads impaled on stakes. This is not a nightmare. It’s La Isla de las Muñecas. It was once the property of Don Julián Santana, a local farmer. In 1950, he saw a little girl drown in the canal and her spirit began to haunt the place. Terrified, Don Julián started collecting dolls to protect himself from her ghost. He gathered them from trash heaps and hung them around the island. The oldest is still there, hanging in a shed by the entrance. At night they come alive. “They will move their heads and whisper to each other. It’s very spooky, but I have gotten used to it.” “Dismembered” in Bardo comas by battalions of hungry ghosts, he returned, semi-reinvented, with a new language, consisting of nearly incomprehensible sound-syllables and brilliant-ish arguments. He used the block of wood Dr. Delmas placed in his room at Ivry-sur-Seine during his final years like a drum. He also had a “bridge” which he wrote was located between his anus and his sex (an area Tantric Buddhism identifies as the Muladhara Chakra, the seat of a novice’s spiritual potential). In “Artaud the Mômo” he reported that he was murdered on this “bridge” by God. In “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” he envisioned the true human body as one that was organless. Such a body remained an unsolvable problem because the “lightning” that destroyed “the old Artaud” (burying him in his own toothless gum) did not provide new quartz organs. Who’s the murderer, then? The boy miraculously keeps singing, despite being nearly decapitated, but only until he tells the monk where to find the kill switch. Having killed, the monk falls as if bound to the floor. “One scene is fantastic, when waves of blood pushes through the elevator doors in a flood and drowns the hotel corridor.” I mean, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from The Shining. The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.” This finding is important for the field of epigenetics because Tet enzymes chemically modify DNA, changing signposts that tell the cell’s machinery “this gene is shut off” into other signs that say “ready for a change.” “& then le tigre came along, & at first i was excited, & i bought the record & i saw the band when they played the meow meow in portland, oregon sometime in 2000 or so. they performed “bang! bang!” from their EP, which is a song about amadou diallo being shot 42 times by cops in new york city. there’s a “breakdown” where kathleen leads the crowd in counting to 42. i was at the show with a friend, who happens to be a woman of color born & raised in a new york city borough. she became increasingly uncomfortable as the song progressed & eventually had to leave. i took a walk with her & she explained that it felt sickening to her to be in a room full of white people (because portland is mostly white, & let’s face facts: bikini kill / le tigre / kathleen hanna fans in general are mostly white) counting down how many times an unarmed black immigrant was shot by white cops. the song is supposed to be about police brutality & raising awareness of that issue among white kids, but … it did feel weird. the counting got louder & louder & became almost anthemic, like the kids were celebrating. it was creepy & i always skipped that song when i listened to the EP.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Jennifer Bartlett, FB post, 29 Dec 013; bits from David Nowell Smith, and Sean Bonney, quoted in Smith’s “‘An Interrupter, a Collective’: Sean Bonney’s Lyric Outrage”, at Études britanniques contemporaines 45 (except for the stuff in brackets, which is by JBR); result of an attempt to cutnpaste a bit from Leopoldine Core’s “Hush Robot” from The Portable Boog Reader 7, at Boog City; Lynn Behrendt, FB comments, 29 Dec 013; Nada Gordon, “A POEM THAT SWELLS UP”, at Ululations, 28 Dec 013; Roberto Bolaño, “People Walking Away”, in The Unknown University (tr. Laura Healy), quoted in Ariana Reines, “I’M MY OWN BEWITCHMENT”, at Ariana Reines, 28 Dec 013; Jan-Albert Hootsen, “Welcome to the Island of the Dolls, the Creepiest Place in Mexico”, at Vocativ, 26 Dec 013; Clayton Eshleman, “Nancy Meets the Mômo – Clayton Eshleman”, at The Fiend, 16 Apr 0122, via Johannes Göransson, FB post, 29 Dec 013; Karl Steel, “Withdrawing the grain”, at In the Middle, 29 Dec 013; Lars Norén, quoted in Johannes Göransson, FB post, 29 Dec 013, and Alice Boone, appended comment; JBR; “Epigenetics Enigma Resolved”, at Science Daily, 26 Dec 013; Crabigail Adams, “on relating to kathleen hanna”, at if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit here by me, 27 Feb 010]

In the House of the Hangman 1541

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a banana. No … no no no. One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a kangaroo. No … no no no. Dammit. One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. Ohhhhhhhkkkkkkaaaaaay. Call me F. I dusted off my ones and twos and put this mix together – it’s my sunrise in Coachella, tribute to the master dome, road trips to the middle of nowhere, dead horses on the side of the road, together as one, and nothing less than bottle service mix. A flask of nitrous & the nurse’s little shudderlaugh — until starlight drinks up enough shadow that — Toward the end of the Meridian Variorum edition the editors reprint a radio play Paul Celan wrote the same year he composed the acceptance speech for the Büchner prize. It is made up of two alternating voices telling an abbreviated version of Mandelstam’s life and a number of Mandelstam poems in Celan’s German translation. I have no Russian & have retranslated these poems directly from Celan’s German versions, without referring to any extent English translations from the Russian (unless some of the Englished versions I read over the years still ghost my memory, a possibility I cannot exclude). Here, a few extracts: first, the speakers discussing Mandelstam’s poetics, and then, one — rather well-known — poem: 1. Speaker: These poems are the poems of someone who is perceptive and attentive, someone turned toward what becomes visible, someone addressing and questioning; these poems are a conversation. In the space of this conversation the addressed constitutes itself, becomes present, gathers itself around the I that addresses and names it. But the addressed, through naming, as it were, becomes a you, brings its otherness and strangeness into this present. Yet even in the here and now of the poem, even in this immediacy and nearness it lets its distance have its say too, it guards what is most its own: its time. 2. Speaker: It is this tension of the times, between its own and the foreign, which lends that pained-mute vibrato to a Mandelstam poem by which we recognize it. (This vibrato is everywhere: in the interval between the words and the stanza, in the “courtyards” where rhymes and assonances stand, in the punctuation. All this has semantic relevance.) Things come together, yet even in this togetherness the question of their Wherefrom and Whereto resounds – a question that “remains open,” that “does not come to any conclusion,” and points to the open and cathexable, into the empty and the free. 1. Speaker: This question is realized not only in the “thematics” of the poems; it also – and that’s why it becomes a “theme” – takes on shape in the language: the word – the name! – shows a preference for noun-forms, the adjective becomes rare, the “infinitives,” the nominal forms of the verb dominate: the poem remains open to time, time can join in, time participates. … 2. Speaker: A poem from the year 1915:

Insomnia. Homer. Sails, taut.
I read the catalog of ships, did not get far:
The flight of cranes, the young brood’s trail
high above Hellas, once, before time and time again.

Like that crane wedge, driven into the most foreign –
The heads, imperial, God’s foam on top, humid –
You hover, you swim – whereto? If Helen wasn’t there,
Acheans, I ask you, what would Troy be worth to you?

Homer, the seas, both: love moves it all.
Who do I listen to, who do I hear? See – Homer falls silent.
The sea, with black eloquence beats this shore,
ahead I hear it roar, it found its way here.

1. Speaker: In 1922, five years after the October revolution, “Tristia,” Mandelstam’s second volume of poems comes out. The poet – the man for whom language is everything, origin and fate – is in exile with his language, “among the Scythians.” “He has” – and the whole cycle is tuned to this, the first line of the title poem – “he has learned to take leave – a science”. Mandelstam, like most Russian poets – like Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Esenin – welcomed the revolution. His socialism is a socialism with an ethico-religious stamp; it comes via Herzen, Mihkaylovsky, Kropotkin. It is not by chance that in the years before the revolution the poet was involved with the writings of the Chaadaevs, Leontievs, Rozanovs and Gershenzons. Politically he is close to the party of the Left Social Revolutionaries. For him – and this evinces a chiliastic character particular to Russian thought  – revolution is the dawn of the other, the uprising of those below, the exaltation of the creature – an upheaval of downright cosmic proportions. It unhinges the world. 2. Speaker:

Let us praise the freedom dawning here
this great, this dawn-year.
Submerged, the great forest of creels
into waternights, as none had been.
Into darkness, deaf and dense you reel,
you, people, you: sun-and-tribunal.

The yoke of fate, brothers, sing it
which he who leads the people carries in tears.
The yoke of power and darkenings,
the burden that throws us to the ground.
Who, oh time, has a heart, hears with it, understands:
he hears your ship, time, that founders.

There, battle-ready, the phalanx – there, the swallows!
We linked them together, and – you see it:
The sun – invisible. The elements, all
alive, bird-voiced, underway.
The net, the dusk: dense. Nothing glimmers.
The sun – invisible. The earth swims.

Well, we’ll try it: turn that rudder around!
It grates, it grinds, you leftists – come on, rip it around!
The earth swims. You men, take courage, once more!
We plough the seas, we break up the seas.
And to think, Lethe, even when your frost pierces us:
To us earth was worth ten heavens.

Rocket pop, Rook to Queen’s Knight Five — “When the stork stops delivering all that New York deli,” cried the Col., “then we’ll talk about how admirable each of us will be — You can simulate transparency, but behind your back an overheated network will condition your component lines. It is remarkable indeed the degree of encryption, not to mention extreme speeds and slowness, stationary null journeys: real movements — and sudden breaks, unforeseen shutdowns, severed lines. The differential logic of the signal system mutates continuously according to the functioning of a semiological machine which does not resemble what it creates, crystallizes, shatters or sets into flight.” Like none of us back then knew Faybiene’s story. You now know that her first recording “Prophesy” was banned from airplay by the Socialist Government in Jamaica around 1975. That it is considered a classic. When you meet Faybiene some years later in New York, you purchased a poster from her. In the photo, she is wearing sunglasses and swinging her locks. She wears strings of cowrie shells. Underneath the photo is the poem “This Morning.” Back then, you nailed the poster to a wall in your home. You revered the image but the poem did not resonate until another heartbreak. You ripped away old floors and painted the entire apartment Sun God. As you cleaned house, you read her words over and over … “Hey, this morning, I. Woke. Up.” “So the Nose Dwarf has to accompany an old woman home from market. He comes to an enchanted castle and there, by eating a magic meal, he is turned into a porpoise and has to serve for a number of years in this guise, being finally released with a long nose.” Which is why he is called the Nose Dwarf, maybe, eh, Otto Fenichel? Which is to say, is it not, that the differential logic of the signal system mutates continuously according to the functioning of a semiological machine which does not resemble what it creates, crystallizes, shatters or sets into flight. Expression, insofar as it frames or signs itself, is always-already conditioned and operated by a grammatical field of semiological dynamisms redoubling encounters-affects into visions and auditions, possible worlds. The receiver is symmetrically encrypted, a recursive and resonating labyrinth: translating wild variations of rhythms, interpolating approximately-decrypted sub-signals, differentiating referential opacity where it is not constitutive. A signal is always-already composed of instructions, an actively-encrypted network of orders: a volumetric control field radiating from multiple command cores, enmeshed with the transmissive and receptive apparatus. The virtual line is incorporated into the machine; actual resonating devices become attuned to the most subtle or rarefied waves. Desire, dreams, delirium are signals as real production: a construction of new senses or problems, new distributions of the interesting and uninteresting, the surprising and unsurprising, the tolerable and the intolerable... The signal communicates with a virtual substrate organizing deeply-nested or encrypted signs, conditions expressive lines which are also lived forces or affects... But while it is easy to botch their construction, only cartographies of the virtual, planes of consistency at the limit of consciousness or the common, can emancipate new images of the collective, mobilize and restructure conditions of possibility.

[Note: Sources: Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (tr. Ian Johnston), at Vancouver Island University; JBR; <Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, posted to FB by Michael Joseph, 27 Dec 013; Tommy Wong, FB post, 27 Dec 013; Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “A Song Called Shudder”, quoted in PEN, “PEN Poetry Series: Joshua Marie Wilkinson”, email rec’d 27 Dec 013 approx 7:50 AM PST; Pierre Joris, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, quoted in Joris’ “75 Years Ago Osip Mandelstam died”, at Nomadics, 27 Dec 013; Paul Siegell, “*WE’VE COME FOR YOUR HOT AND BOTHERED*”, “*WE’VE COME FOR YOUR FOOD COURT SAMPLER*”, at Eat Genius, 27 Dec 013; Joseph Weissman, “Machine Fusion”, at Fractal Ontology, 27 Nov 013 (the last bit quoted in Senka Anastasova, FB post, 28 Dec 013); JBR; Latasha N Nevada Diggs, “Itations for Faybiene”, at Harriet, 27 Dec 013 (Faybiene = Faybiene Miranda; i.m.); Otto Fenichel, quoted in Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 27 Dec 013; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1540

Zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam / elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata / velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor / gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö / viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo /  / he tore his motor apart / he was a lumpy frail machine / he cut his right arm to the bone / eat your chocolate / gulp some rain / nor the bicyclist / nor the man / was ever happy or sad again. ATE THE LUCKY Charms. A CERTAIN CLICK of certain doors in certain corridors. Featuring Drenching on dictaphones, amplified and unamplified, and selected quince ephemera: two party-whistles, festive dog-toy of love, one jingle bell and SMA and TamTad Stuffed Vine Leaves tins. FREE DOWNLOAD! Small tape machines from the REALMS OF GLORY, bending NEAR THE EARTH: as all the blurbs say, ‘These are not tactics raised to principles. / Every good poem is a transitional demand’. I copied the poet John Clare on his feverish escape from Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping Forest, when he navigated by lying down to sleep with his head to the north. I stalked a defining urban narrative by sleepwalking through downriver reaches, sniffing after faded traces of Thomas De Quincey – and challenging the post-architectural infill. Start a vegetable file (if essential to already have one). The electrode and work circuit is electrically live whenever an output is on. I mean, lick me all over til I shine like a trout. This slip into “spiritualist obscurantism” occurs when Badiou attempts to account for the process whereby an “inconsistent multiplicity” becomes a “consistent multiplicity.” An inconsistent multiplicity is a consequence of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, which entails, as Johnston puts it, an uncountable, nondenumerable “infinite infinities of inconsistent multiplicities-without-oneness.” The “counting-for-one” operation “imposes certain constraints and limitations on thought’s relation to (inconsistent) multiplicities of being per se,” and renders them into countable, consistent multiplicities. The problem for Badiou, however, is to account for this operation itself. Who or what performs the operation? Johnston claims that ultimately this “counting-for-one” remains unaccounted for, and is “a unity-producing synthesizing function or process as an ephemeral non-being arising from tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim / gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx / gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen / gaga di bling blong / gaga blung, Luigi Galvani observed that sparking from an electro static generator could cause convulsions in a dead frog.” And yet, and yet, I love grilled brussels sprouts with a bit of hard cheese and a drizzle of really good olive oil. This slim but exciting little book has to do, first of all with some 30 broadcasts that Benjamin prepared and delivered for German Radio between 1929-1932 specifically for children, maybe 7-14 or so, each consisting of a 20 minute talk or monologue. A main emphasis was on introducing the kids to various natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750s that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century, a flood of the Mississippi in 1927, and the Pompeii disaster as came through the famous letter of Pliny the Younger; another subject was various episodes of lawlessness fraud and deceit, much of it recent, for instance bootlegger’s boats that were bringing rum or whatever to America through the prohibition blockade, postage stamp (and cancellation) counterfeiting, the ‘miracles’ of Faustus, the “tea” that was sold to passengers at a stop of a liquor-less train, with the understanding that it was really booze, but which turned out to be tea, as in Freud’s “you told me you were going to Cracow thinking that I would assume Lemberg, but you're really going to Cracow, so why are you lying to me!” Illustrating ... well, promulgating a Jewish mysticism, especially in its powerfully heretical antinonomian currents, as so profoundly disseminated by Gershom Scholem, that of the great apostate Sabbatai Zevi. Zevi had been ‘to the mountain’, like Moses before him, and had received that sensational 11^th commandment, which was to disobey the first 10, incarnating also the realization of the law in its transgression …

OK.

Nina Power
8 hours ago ·
What was it about the period c. 1991-2004 that made a reference to Antigone mandatory in every vaguely Continental-flavoured book?
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John Mullen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPcsMMEMbfw&hd=1
Bee Gees- Tragedy
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Bee Gees- Bee Gees Greatest- Tragedy

James Luchte the ultimate double bind of conflicting principles...
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Jacob Bard-Rosenberg those were the years when people actually read Hegel.
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Johannet Björk its decisional aspect being much more in line with the ethical turn than the oedipal dispositif?
8 hours ago · Like

Nina Power I’m just reading Douzinas and Warrington on ethics and the law (1994) and they make the now familiar gestures regarding the singular and the universal and the ethical before the ontological: I suppose the question is another way of asking what the ethical turn was about – it’s quite weird to go back and read these texts, being alive but not yet aware of these discussions: ‘Could we not argue that (unknown) fate is the good (or God)? It stands before the law and it infuses both with its opposition to Justice and with the superiority of Justice over Law.’

Nina Power I suppose you still get a decision without a self (which I guess everyone hated in the 90s!), and duty without normativity....this 2012 version ‘Inspired by the searing images of the G20 and ‘Occupy’ protests, this tale of a young woman who dares to defy authority is more relevant than ever’ looks fun: http://fringetoronto.com/fringe-festival/shows/antigone/
Antigone | Toronto Fringe Festival
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7 hours ago · Edited · Like

Bern Hard I blame Judith Butler. But then again, I always do.
7 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg I kind of think that Judith Butler would be alright if all she was saying was just about Antigone.
7 hours ago · Like · 2

Jeremy Gilbert I was at a conference at York last summer and I was sat next to someone at dinner. I asked her what she was working on and she said something like ‘Oh, it’s very boring.’ I said ‘Well as long as it’s not about Antigone’. Unfortunately it was. Antigone used to be a low-scoring term in Paolo Bowman's conference-buzzword bingo game (surely ripe for revival as a FB app?), introduced at my request I believe.
7 hours ago · Edited · Like · 6

Nina Power Jeremy Gilbert: excellent story! Reminds me of the time in Berlin I went on a rant with some people I’d not met before and didn’t really know about the proliferation and general uselessness of ‘freelance curators’. It was almost as if the bad part of my brain on some level KNEW....
7 hours ago · Edited · Like · 5

Jeremy Gilbert Never ever ever slag off the art scene when in Berlin...
7 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2

Nina Power Oh they loved me for about 6 months in 2010, that was enough!
7 hours ago · Like · 2

Bill Bowring Antigone = Douzinas!
See Translation
6 hours ago · Like

Mark Hhaavvyy It starts with Lacan. The “established” version of Lacan’s Seminar VII in French, which contains an extended exploration of Antigone, was published in 1986. So, give it five years for other Continental types to come up with their own take, et voilà.
6 hours ago · Like · 2

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg Hang on, how does it start with Lacan and not with Hegel?
6 hours ago · Like

Nina Power Starts again maybe....
6 hours ago via mobile · Like

Michael Calderbank Second time as farce?
4 hours ago via mobile · Like · 2

Jason Smith Bartleby had not yet been discovered?
4 hours ago · Like · 7

Jordan Osserman Why does everyone hate antigone so much! I think it becomes a “thing” because the story poses legitimately interesting questions.

4 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

Jordan Osserman (and hegel lacan)
4 hours ago via mobile · Like

Nina Power Jason Smith so true, we could make a little decade-to-decade Classico-Biblical-literary timeline of anitheros/heroines: Abraham, Antigone, Job, Bartleby, Gregor Samsa, Josephine the Mouse Singer....
4 hours ago · Like · 2

Nina Power Jordan Osserman: no hate intended, Antigone’s cool. Was just making a note.
4 hours ago · Like · 1

Jason Smith next year, Odradek...
4 hours ago · Like

Nina Power or perhaps Portnoy...
4 hours ago · Like

Jason Smith That would be amazing 4 hours ago · Like

Jason Smith he who does not give way on his desire...
4 hours ago · Like

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg I want the next one to be Kronos.
4 hours ago via mobile · Like

Nina Power ‘I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!’
4 hours ago · Like

Nina Power Who is the female Portnoy I wonder...
4 hours ago · Like

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg Lol what a question. I know so many.
4 hours ago via mobile · Like

Nina Power Er...lucky you...?
3 hours ago · Like

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg I blame feminism.
3 hours ago via mobile · Like

Nina Power I blame capitalism.
3 hours ago · Like · 1

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg It is strange though, right, that “no future” is pitched as a queer politics rather than one of perpetual masturbation.
3 hours ago via mobile · Like

Kailash Sreeneevasin supply and demand.
3 hours ago · Like

Nina Power Jacob Bard-Rosenberg: have you read Edelman? It basically is a defence of masturbation: ‘to the threat of the death drive we figure with the violent rush of a jouissance’
3 hours ago · Like

Nina Power Read my piece on it! http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2.../power_futurism.pdf
3 hours ago · Like · 1

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg I read the first couple of chapters and it annoyed me. It is currently on a pile of stuff to read next to my bed. Maybe I’ll finish it tonight.
3 hours ago via mobile · Like

Nina Power It is annoying/interesting.
\3 hours ago · Like

Nina Power You will surely like the ‘fuck Annie’ passage...
3 hours ago · Like

Nina Power “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.” Heh heh heh
3 hours ago · Like · 2

Jordan Osserman Maybe queer politics = perpetual masturbation
2 hours ago via mobile · Like

John Bloomberg-Rissman Jacob, how did Hegel come to focus on Antigone? I don’t mean what did he say about the play and why, I mean, do you know how the play came to occupy the place it did for him? Who was talking about Antigone before Hegel, if anybody? Pardon my ignorance, and thanks!
49 minutes ago · Like

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg John Bloomberg-Rissman You’d be better asking Harrison Fluss
43 minutes ago via mobile · Like

John Bloomberg-Rissman Thanks, Jacob, I don’t know him but I’ll try via FB. I’ll probably drop your name ...
36 minutes ago · Like

Harrison Fluss The Antigone he talks about is actually Hegel’s own sister in Greek costume.
33 minutes ago · Edited · Unlike · 1

John Bloomberg-Rissman Harrison: So when he read the play he just felt the sisterly thing and that made the play important to him? In other words, there were no particular historically antecedent texts Hegel might have been reading besides the play?
33 minutes ago · Like

Harrison Fluss There were those too, of course. If you want a good crash-course in Sophocles and German Idealism, look at the relevant sections if Kaufmann’s Hegel: A Reinterpretation.
22 minutes ago · Edited · Unlike · 1

John Bloomberg-Rissman Thanks, Harrison, I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy (if worst comes to worst, is it worth buying?)
29 minutes ago · Like

Harrison Fluss Yes, I think it is.
28 minutes ago · Unlike · 1

John Bloomberg-Rissman Thanks!
26 minutes ago · Like

Harrison Fluss No problem. I’m just your friendly neighborhood Hegelian.
24 minutes ago · Unlike · 3

Louis-Georges Schwartz 1994-2004?: Everybody was trying to think the limit of the law while distributed subsumption and the universal market intensified the proclivity of various states around the core to govern via the limited law of the state of exception.
8 minutes ago · Edited · Like

Nina Power Louis-Georges Schwartz: that’s the kind of explanation I was looking for. Douzinas has some interesting remarks on the differences between English common law and Roman law in this respect. Better than my earlier intuition of ‘Greed wasn’t good after all, better shove in some ethics.’ 8 minutes ago · Like

Louis-Georges Schwartz I though it was an elaboration of said intuition. Thanks for the cite, I am looking forward to looking at D.
7 minutes ago · Like

[Note: Sources: Tristan Tzara, “Gadji Beri Bimba”, “Chanson Dada” (tr. Matthew Rothenberg), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “That Dada Strain (continued): Three Dada Poems with Music (Talking Heads, Noise 292, Ethel Waters)”, at Poems and Poetics, 26 Dec 013; Anne Carson, red doc>; blurb for THF Drenching, Unnatural White Inventions (Vol. 2), at THF Drenching, 25 Dec 013; THF Drenching, FB post, 26 Dec 013; JBR; Samuel Solomon, quoted in Andrea Brady, David Lloyd, Bad Press blurbs for Solomon’s Life of Riley; Iain Sinclair, “Iain Sinclair: ‘Unconsciously, I had been operating, all along, as a disenfranchised psychogeographer”, at Arthur, Feb 012; Di Przyczepy Zrykowe, comment appended to Piers Hugill, “An overview of contemporary British poetry since 1977”, at Fucinemute, 1 May 06; JBR; trailer for Grudge Match; Jeffrey A Bell, “Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy”, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 13 Dec 013; Charles Süsskind, quoted in Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, at University of California Press; Issa (memory quote); JBR; Philip Beitchman, “Walter Benjamin for Children, An Essay on his Radio Years. Jeffrey Mehlman, (University of Chicago Press, 1993). 117p”, at Esoterica, volume II (a review); JBR; FB conversation, 27 Dec 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1539

Which means my god, my goddess, my dead vulture, is consumed and consuming at the carrion of capital because the collapsed body always, at some point, desires beyond the circle of itself, beyond the inscription etched at the edge of felt and fat. In the dream (which went on forever) I was trapped in Japan and it was this horrible disaster. I’m assuming it was an earthquake, but that was never said in the dream. We were all running and my language skills were just terrible. So most of the dream had to do with trying to communicate with people and buy things I needed in small stores. I have another weird thing going on where I am repeatedly (now and again) “remotely viewing” this house. It is not a dream and it is not a hallucination. It’s just this image of a house that I keep seeing and I don’t know what it means. I could almost draw the house, but I really can only see one corner of it very clearly. It’s lifted up on columns like a Le Corbusier design and has a really harsh glassy open corner. I think it’s in the desert, possibly California. While I’m confessing things let me confess that I still wonder “whose eyes” I was seeing through when I hovered in that scene and saw the exhumation taking place. The “sothsegger” of this witty and learned text is no confidently utopian authority, but rather a non-normative figure who spouts “wild words” that lead to punishment and marginalization (l. 251). Not possessing the power to strategically manipulate speech, this poem’s truth-teller is in fact not able to tell a lie, not gifted with a supposedly normal facility with language. The truth-teller “can not speke in termes ne in tyme nother, / But bablith fourth bustusely as a barn un-ylerid” (l. 49-50). He makes me think of M John Harrison, who writes, This year I decided, against my normal practice, to send the Tories a Christmas Card. I hope everything that can go wrong for you will, that everything you can’t control comes back on you & controls you, and that as you sing your self-exculpating Victorian hymns (sing in exculpation) and eat your vast expensive meals, you smell for just a second your humanity rotting in its grave. A Happy Christmas to everyone else, the best possible Christmas to the fucked up and the nearly done, all the deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells, the metaphysicians, atheists and losers, all the so-called scroungers, all those not in receipt of a Royal pardon, all the thoughtful, intelligent and above all decent people who believe there is such a thing as a society, the readers and the writers, students and philosophers, and – especially – a big shout out to the 32,000 UK citizens who on Christmas Eve didn’t receive benefits to which they were entitled, due to “administrative error”.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Aaron Apps, “Three Fold Expansion Of The Fleshy Questions Photos Bring”, at Eat Genius, 25 Dec 013; JBR; William Keckler, “Oh, I forgot to say”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 25 Dec 013; JBR; Brantley Bryant, “Abstract: Wild Words, Disability and Truth-Telling in Late Medieval England”, at Reorienting Disability: NCS 2014, 24 Dec 013 (re “the oddly cantankerous early-fifteenth century alliterative poem Mum and the Sothsegger (or “Mum [Hush, Say-nothing] and the Truth-teller”; “soothsayer” here having no prophetic connotations)”);JBR, but see next; M John Harrison, “happy xmas, Iain Duncan Smith”, at the m john harrison blog, 25 Dec 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1538

Which is just to say: with its dusky jacaranda defining the background of lives lived in the wordless, formless, concept-less background of silence, behind laws & without need of explanations, a brief smoldering between two eternities of darkness, the full narrative of has chosen to privilege the foreshadowing of the airy persimmons of those-who-have; divided by the shaping intelligence which moves over such flamboyant surfaces with the incisional scalpel of negative dialectics, the ruins ancien of a dusty greek village with its falling walls, or the contours that define identity by a laying on of handprints and the occasional caricature of a face, the squally transactions, while down-sixes mountains look indifferently on upon the mad puppeteering of culture that seeks death in beauty & surcease in war ... I mean he’s in the ICU. I mean I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline AMIRI BARAKA HOSPITALIZED IN CRITICAL CONDITION! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Amiri Baraka tho you wrote that totally shitty 9/11 poem we love you get up – “Raise your voice / with the tongue / of your pen,” wrote the early cabalist Abraham Abulafia more than seven hundred years ago, and this is what these writers have done for millennia, writing in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, classical and vernacular Arabic, French, Spanish, Amazigh. Reading them provides more than the pleasure of seeing “what the poets in North Africa are doing these days.” Although Stephen Watts insists in the Summer 2013 issue of Banipal that this anthology “should not be read as filling a gap in our ignorance, but rather as indicating a source of difference … another regime of cultural viability,” I cannot see why erasing a smidgen of our ignorance would be wrong, for as Joris and Tengour calmly observe, this literature arrives from a part of the world “whose cultural achievements — including their impact on and importance for Western culture — have been not only passively neglected but often actively ‘disappeared’ or written out of the record.” So each was allowed to perish according to his joys. John Peck's “argura” is another made-up word. It is a creature altogether different from kuboaa. As is the expression “Holding onto the cactus.” But “Tokyo Drift” is awesome. Which brings me to “47 Ronin”. The legend of the 47 Ronin is essentially a simple story of honor and revenge, but the tale so pivotally hinges on Japanese customs and caste systems that it almost feels designed to resist any sort of foreign repurposing. The historical narrative begins with an 18th century feudal lord who was compelled to commit ritualistic suicide (or “Harakiri”, to namecheck the title of a much better movie) after assaulting a devious court official. The lord’s death left the 47 samurai who served him without a master, rendering them ronin, a shamed and dishonored class of wayward warriors with no social value. In response to their collective neutering, the men banded together and spent two years plotting their revenge on the bureaucrat who upset the lord they served. The fallout of their vengeance would be remembered as the campaign’s defining detail, and remains the facet of the story that is perhaps least conducive to translation. But where native cinematic titans like Kenji Mizoguchi and Hiroshi Inagaki struggled to successfully adapt this historical saga, Hollywood was dedicated to succeed. If those two revered auteurs produced authentic human epics that were overwhelmed by the vast scope of their drama, Universal Studios’ version would solve that problem by doubling down on myth and removing every last trace of humanity, adding generic flourishes of magic to the story (witches! giant creatures! that heavily tattooed guy who used to be one of Lady Gaga’s backup dancers!) The film is presented in 3D, a redundancy to ensure that you have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at, which is good, ‘cause otherwise it’s all like Keanu squaring off with a tumored Sasquatch. But “Tokyo Drift” is awesome. So don’t look so sad. Who wants to need more? My job is to be a stapler, not a copy machine. Or is it the other way round? I am a human with an uncertain body and an even vaguer body of work. I represent the box in the attic. Never mind neat and methodical. I’m not a Gemini. Anyhow, “[...] the science of plant talk is challenging long-held definitions of communication and behavior as the sole province of animals. Each discovery erodes what we thought we knew about what plants do and what they can do. To learn what else they’re capable of, we have to stop anthropomorphizing plants, said Baldwin, who is now at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and try instead to think like them, to phytomorphize ourselves.” They have alpaca beans here at the airport. We surge over a contraption of plywood and talk water as I juggle the words of an emphatic perspective involving glue and Pythagorean consonants. My entire slam stunned the workmen. I winced and gave a great groan as we spread our leather in a spring of expansion, which mollified the sculptors. And now I must bump into another chronicle of beams and photogenic powder. An eye necessitates flutter, so we flutter. And they know what is stardust around our blood.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Manish Verma, ekphrastic FB comment, 24 Dec 013 (re an artwork by Jeannette Leuers); JBR; Frank O’Hara, “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]”, with interpolations by JBR (who got his news about Baraka from a FB post by Susan M Schultz, 24 Dec 013); Brooke Horvath, and Jean Sénac, “Heliopolis”, quoted in Horvath’s “POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM Volume Four: North African Literature Edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour”, at Rain Taxi, Fall 013; David Ehrlich, “Review: 47 Ronin”, at Film.com, 23 Dec 013; Robert Archambeau, “The Open Word: A Letter to Peter O’Leary”, at Talisman; JBR; Shin Yu Pai, FB post, 24 Dec 013; JBR; David Ehrlich, “Review: 47 Ronin”, at Film.com; Del Ray Cross, “mmlvi”, at Anachronizms, 24 Dec 013; JBR; Kat McGowan, “The Secret Language of Plants”, at Quanta, 24 Dec 013; John Olson, “Whispered Bingo, at Tillalala Chronicles, 24 Dec 013]

In the House of the Hangman 1537

But Poe was the first one, he mated with a goddess. His children were Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman – out of wedlock with a goddess. Then Dickinson & Whitman mated –since they were half divine they could do anything they wanted to – & they had 2 sons, William Carlos Williams & Ezra Pound, & a third son T. S. Eliot who went to a faraway country & never came back. From out of the West came Gertrude Stein, the daughter of the guy who wrote the 800-page novel & the girl who thought maybe rightly that she was Shakespeare. Gertrude Stein & William Carlos Williams got married: their 2 legitimate children were Frank O’Hara & Philip Whalen. However, earlier, before his marriage to Gertrude Stein, Williams had a child by the goddess Brooding. His affair with Brooding was long & passionate, & his child by her was oversized, Charles Olson. Before Charles Olson’s birth the goddess had also been having an affair with Williams’ brother Ezra Pound. No one was ever absolutely sure who the father of Olson was. Now O’Hara & Whalen were males that were male-female, as were many of the children of Williams by various goddesses & of Gertrude Stein & some gods. Olson was too big to be as male-female as he would have liked; now this baby inside me is doing everything short of howling, pushing me around incredibly, I have a cold and the midwife says you won’t go into labor if you have a cold, so now I’ve had one for two weeks but there was something else I wanted to say. And there is a situation in this house that relates to this. For many years, for all the years I had a car, I would always carry around the complete poems of Wm. Carlos Williams in my trunk. The longer we drove the closer we got to crazy. This is a gone face to beg. A breath of life into the dust or a more mucosal event, perhaps Atum in his primordial sea or the operculum of Aphrodite? We are all jellyfish. All your wrongs drain away like a refreshing soda. The hotel was built to impress. Expose your dew over the concrete that keeps showing up, licking your bones and running like flesh. The only treatment one can take during this mystery. So first the world hurt America. And second America hurt the world. So third the world wasn’t America. And fourth America was the world that wasn’t. But what happened before the “so first”? And I’m waking up with just five minutes to live. And I’m not just a cell phone but also an uncle. O I drive lard I’m obsessed. When my phone is not plugged into a power supply, like the one on the car’s dash, it dies immediately. It is my only map. I have only heard about Angela Deaver’s Great Chain of Being. This will be my first time seeing it or using it. My phone directs me through Paso Robles to the eastern edge of town, to a small cottage home with a wooden sign that says, DEAVER’S GREAT CHAIN OF BEING ALL WELCOME. Asked to provide her religion on a loan application in the 1960s Deaver answered, “Platonist.” She made her way to the Crofton Building — LA’s famous Sunshine Skyrise — and rented an office. On the door, she hung a sign that said, ANGELA DEAVER, TECHNOPLATONIC CONSULTATION. For the next decade, she sat in that office. If she consulted with anyone, she kept no records. How she would’ve consulted with people who came to her with problems, no one knows. Where she lived in LA, no one is sure … it feels like ochre, a middle / in which a memo / is written, black crows / perch on the ledge / a small man below / becomes an object / and I seize it, it / comes off in my hands. True or false: this is the same as saying, “even the pronoun is laced with lime / as you pack it, ball and powder, / into a long gun, fire / (‘The smell you smell afar / is something boiling over’) and the report knocks you dead.” But that must not lead to a kind of neutralization of differences, to the misrecognition of determinate expropriations against which a struggle can be waged on quite different fronts. On the contrary, that is what allows the stakes to be repoliticized. This may be a great wow gold. We’re and so delighted. I may receive a small amount of extra twos. As my niece Jillian used to say back in the day, “Britney has her reasons.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Alice Notley, Doctor Williams’ Heiresses, and Lyn Hejinian, letter at end of Notley’s text, via link at Anne Boyer, “the females could not understand how they came to be born”, at *, 23 Dec 013; Crag Hill, “King of Diamonds”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard, 23 Dec 013; Calypso, “We Are All Jellyfish”, at Disinformation, 23 Dec 013; RC Miller, “Gyms Are Boring”, “Whatever, I’m Hot”, “Demons and Terror”, “Flowers”, “Birdless Lightning”, at Action Yes 13; JBR; Matthew Simmons, “Deaver’s Great Chain of Being”, at HTMLGIANT, 23 Dec 013; Michael Davidson, “Ready to Hand”, “The Friend”, “Bad Modernism”, quoted in C J Morello, “Bleed Through by Michael Davidson”, at HTMLGIANT, 23 Dec 013; JBR; Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, quoted in Olivia Harrison, “Olivia Harrison on Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace”, at LA Review of Books, 21 Dec 013; Wow Gold, comment appended to JBR, In the House of the Hangman 1524, at ZS, 12 Dec 013; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1536

Like “kid gets shot”, followed by “BUY THIS,” followed by “side effects may include gambling and rectal bleeding.” “And my nonclosure island, its brave audacity standing at the stern of this Polynesia, before it, Guadeloupe split in two down its dorsal line and equal in poverty to us, Haiti where negritude rose for the first time and stated that it believed in its humanity and the funny little tail of Florida where the strangulation of a nigger is being completed, and Africa gigantically caterpillaring up to the Hispanic foot of Europe, its nakedness where Death scythes widely / Who can boast of being better off than I? / And now a last raspberry: / to the sun (Not strong enough to inebriate my very tough head) / to the mealy night with its golden hatchings of erratic fireflies / In my memory are lagoons. They are / covered with death’s-heads. They are not covered with water lilies …”

Just inside the cutters’ pavilion
Just at the peak of the oxygen tent
Just on the inner lid of the hairline coma
Just on the inner thighs of the medical canal
Just up under the gesso of lubrication
Just up to the hairline of the hairline crack
Just there where the adolescent girl eyes the camera
Just under the burden of her fishscale hair
Just where one sister shoulders the other
Just why should one sister have to shoulder the other
Just while out of the frame the globe unshouldered rolls around like a boulder in the mouth
Just the whole world like a wadded-up burden in the mouth

The smell of gasoline for panoptico lived tunnel. The food was seasoned with onions and potatoes consisted of small hard lines. Beat the smell of a piece of oil was difficult to define. Take all the money in the exciting times of black and ink smell, when he was alive. Alcohol was mixed with lime and lemon rich zone. Everything was postponed. Cells were isolated without vents. See on our teeth. The world has changed and it is important that the training was point after pushing back an angel people continued to move his thin lips and flat nose. When jumping from foot to foot, her hair continues to for anxious wait for a while and fly eyes dead. In the dark, we heard dripping. I remember my small bag and a huge box piled on it. Update, the same ideas that were lost, shook his busy. Beside me, sat me your fingernail. This normal tissue did not feel back, my life was like in Chernobyl, I grew up around leaving flowers leaving. In recognition opportunity, if you have a plan, right on journey. This go. On a journey of life. Hearing, I went to the University of reading your body. Because they do not stop, do not move away? Did you hear anything. You’ve heard the problem. If people have seen the future, sense of self or different, you can see for yourself in once can communicate through. If you do not smell that and feel cold. So they just tally up the compounded again and do a few more wheelies and, every couple minutes, ask No, seriously. But all the same, when you head west to the stockyards or wherever and put your ear to the wall like the old films about Manifest Destiny or ribcages, you know their arrival is not just imminent, it is foregone. Because through those borrowed transmitters, you can just make out. And you hear more: there’s the wind and the knives and the emphysemic huff of a long-dry Slurpee machine that, through a design flaw / triumph, has no manual override, until finally, through all the wheelies and chatter you can hear it, however their stumps end, fine ones now, well-crafted, well-burnished with time and beeswax, responsible and fun, artisanal and repurposed from parts of other things. Anything, really, to offer a semblance of restraint and history to gnaw on while they wait and wait, wheelie, wait, munch the katechon and wait again, until the word finally comes through that all chips are down and all down and& all bets are off or just all is now. Of course, this is all supposition, all deniable. And it’s true that on when you Google Earth it, no visible word has being given, nothing is written out in enormous letters of fire and charnel – IT’S FUCKING GO TIME, WILDCATS – to be read from on high. But the trees are all gone. And even the stupid stores cannot be regutted, because they are already like lace, if they are touched with tools of extraction they will become pure void and even the drywall has been gummed into oblivion, and it does not matter one whit if any of this was local and it never will. As is fitting, I have taught old men to respect my black hair, but with respect to the latter I have always conserved my extensive yellow dominion where I ceaselessly confront the metallic vestiges of the high, inexplicable, pyramid-shaped construction in the great mobilisations of the mineral and vegetable worlds, being himself the unstable plaything of the whirlwind’s farcical games and of the marriage between the lesser elements and the chasms which separate the resounding words? I will leave for the coast where ships never land; one shall present itself, a black flag fluttering at the stern. The rocks will part. I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with your phantom that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously over the sundial of your life.

Off to my left I watch a man break two
glasses on the edge of his table, set them up
again and bring the palms of his hands down on
their jagged rims. The entire audience is spellbound and blindfolded.

All our buds lose their heads. Clink, clank, clunk, halt,
bounce, sway, go again, clink, clank, clunk, halt, bounce, sway,
it is too longshort a time in which to have
many pensées in but then again.

Two grrrls write I’m an asshole in ballpoint pen on
the back of the passed-out drunk boy’s leather jacket.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Anne Gorrick, FB message, 22 Dec 013; Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (trs. A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Toward a Poetry & Poetics of the Americas (2): Aimé Césaire, from the original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”, at Jacket2, 22 Dec 013; Joyelle McSweeney, “Guadaloop”, in Percussion Grenade: Poems & Plays, as seen at Amazon.com; Laurie Stone, “Panopticon”, quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Laurie Stone”, at HTMLGIANT, 22 Dec 013 (after having been thrown thru Google translate a number of times and suffering some heavy editing); Evan Calder Williams, “Domesticated WildCats”, at The New Inquiry, 8 Oct 013; Robert Desnos, Mourning for Mourning, “J’ai tant rêvé de toi”, quoted in Eugene Thacker, “The Period Of The Sleeping Fits”, at Mute, 18 Oct 013; JBR, “Big Doll (3)”, at ZS, 8 Sept 09 (the original relevant part of the source note more or less reads: Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook; The blindfolds refer to Francisco López; Michael Gizzi, as quoted in John Yau’s review of Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan, at Brooklyn Rail, Sept 2009; Samuel R Delaney, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; John Ashbery, “Pernilla”, at The New Yorker, 7 Sept 09; JBR (true story about the “two grrrls …” etc; it was at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in a small club in West LA sometime in the early 80s))]

In the House of the Hangman 1535

But what else is new? It’s peaceful here with the buzz of everything that’s on. Even moreso now that I unplugged all the appliances. From clones that laugh to robots twelve feet tall. History has a way of repeating itself. Get past page two. Openly recognize dangerous intersections. Wind was hell then. Twice more Snape raised the wand to his temple and deposited the silvery substance. If someone didn’t try to place with big meaty claws, the talking cheese is going to preach to us, taking you to the next level: Hello patriots! Good breakfast! Last year, the American Geophysical Union’s meeting was entitled “Is Earth F**ked?” Blood river, blood river. Plenty of positive thinking literature would encourage me to see this as manifesting abundance or drawing positive energy my way. Megapastor Joel Osteen  —  in godly-abundance manual It’s Your Time — suggests that God gives him the best parking spaces and wants him to have a spacious home. Plenty of positive thinkers on Pinterest repin pretty pastel graphics offering up NO NEGATIVE THOUGHTS ALLOWED and A NEGATIVE MIND WILL NEVER GIVE YOU A POSITIVE LIFE. I mean, I’m not too familiar with Altucher’s work, so I sidled on over to his website and clicked on the first few posts whose titles interested me. A post about being “humiliated by yoga” contained the following comment about a woman in India who vomited for fifteen straight minutes: “The deepest recesses of her throat were the most beautiful instruments I had ever heard.” But it’s Earth Piece VIII that calls for some super-duper audience participation. Put your imagination on steroids for this one. It states, in part: Imagine two billion universes. Visualize yourself on a planet in each universe. Imagine what all of you are doing and thinking in this moment in time on the different planets. And there in the deep of the forest glen / just about the cusp of dusk / just alongside the crooked babble of xodarapina creek / we spied them laying and luminous / 4 pink brain fungus / gathering butterflies / along the veins of nepowort / which had taken up residence in the meandering crenelata … I was suddenly curious about videos that might explain sleep from an evolutionary perspective. These are the first videos I found. I am watching them now. I have no idea why the one about sleeping cockroaches starts with the music of Enya, which I will now forever more associate with “douchecraft” (high colonics) thanks to Margaret Cho. I mean,

light coming into sky above still black
ridge, moon above planet next to branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

      first recognition of things,
      seeing for what it is

      observed, repeat, only left
      side folded over …

Each of us had recently moved to a different city, and we were all working through the disorientation. We wondered what it would be like to listen to the experience. And so we came up with a method for translating maps into musical scores. We wrote some software that would take a map, rendered as a network of white streets against a black background, and use it to generate a piece of music, the North-South axis corresponding to pitch and the East-West axis to time. New York becomes a series of densely layered downward and upward glissandos; Honolulu alternates reedy trills and silence; London is mostly noise. Luckily the novelty of our technique wasn’t really the point, for our particular image sonification method was already old in 1958 when it became the basis for the graphical score of the ANS synthesizer, named for the composer and occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. The ANS is best known for its use in Eduard Artemyev’s soundtrack for Solaris, but it was actually conceived in 1938 by the engineer Evgeny Murzin and the painter-acoustician Boris Yankovsky. Shortly afterwards Murzin was sent to design artillery controls at a secret military research institute and only built the instrument twenty years later. Murzin’s synthesizer had a unique interface: a sheet of glass covered in black tarry goop, which the composer could scrape off to etch a diagram of polyphonic music – the vertical axis corresponding to pitch and the horizontal axis to time. Propelled by either a hand crank or a motor, the glass sheet passed through a beam of light over a row of photosensors, exposing only the sensors under parts of the sheet where the goop had been scraped off. Each sensor drove one of 720 sine wave oscillators, enough to cover the entire range of human hearing with a resolution of 1/6 of a semitone, the smallest perceptible change in pitch.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Del Ray Cross, “mmlii”, at Anachronizms, 21 Dec 013; Crag Hill, “8 of Spades”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard, 20 Dec 013; Pierre Joris, “The World in a Wheelchair”, at Nomadics, 21 Dec 013; Yoko Ono, “Take Me to the Land of Hell”; Yoko Ono, Earth Piece VIII, and Edward M Gómez, quoted in Gómez’s “Yoko Ono’s New Music and New Writings: It’s Her Universe, and Welcome to It!”, at Hyperallergic, 19 Dec 013; Jen Dziura, “When ‘Life Hacking’ Is Really White Privilege”, at Medium, 19 Dec 013; JBR; Lanny Quarles, “Camembert”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 20 Dec 013; William Keckler, “The Evolution of Sleep”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas, 21 Dec 013; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “12.21”, at Temporality, 21 Dec 013; Colin McSwiggen, “Red Noise”, at n+1, 16 Dec 013 (a review of Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia)]

In the House of the Hangman 1534

What I think is interesting about any molecule, not just testosterone, is that everything is a question of dosage. With this same molecule, some of my friends have become something very close to what looks like a cis male. In my case, I take very low doses, so that I may continue the way that I am for a little bit, maybe not much longer. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do next. Some people ask me, Do you want a gender reassignment? I don’t know — probably, if I keep taking testosterone, there will be a point where I will probably say yes, but that’s not exactly my aim. I also thought about the project as a kind of collective adventure, in a sense, because I’m thinking about the body, not even just my own, as this kind of a living political fiction. That’s how I see the body, as a living political archive. You already have this archive. It’s not like you choose things that are more or less outside of yourself to add onto it. You realize that your body is really dense, stratified, and huge. There are connections and relationships that are already there. If you carefully look at it, you realize that your body archive is connected to the history of the city, the history of design, technologies, and goes back to the invention of agriculture like eighty thousand years ago. Your body is the body of the planet. When I add a few molecules of testosterone, in a huge living archive, well that’s just a minor detail. It’s a way of intensification in terms of a cognitive experience — suddenly you are intensifying processes that are already going on in your body. Or you could shrink your bones down until they’re smaller than your eyeballs. That would be so Disney! Wouldn’t it be better, as Anne B writes, to be the poet of the ugly women, ascendant hags, fat people of all genders, people with uncontainable and ever-unpassing genders, humans with one rebellious eye, those whose jaws clamp too tightly, those who faded after only a brief bloom, the ones with all the scars and discolorations, the young people with already old faces, the old who look it, men who are not man enough, the people whose mouths won’t behave, those who are too big in their bodies or parts of their bodies or too small; also whoever’s body is in collapse, whose face or hands are always frantic or sluggish, whose body does things it shouldn’t do — to write poems of who is bent from work or birth or injury, and never of the only vertical bodies; to write for those who don’t get laid or don’t want to or really want to but only with the greatest effort can or can only with those who leave them right away after it; to be the poet of everything which will never stand photographed is what will be only what any poet is good for probably — and by that I mean I understand what it means to wake to tinnitus like all my life is this morning tinnitus because the soundtrack to my life is exhaustion, whereas those subalpine I mean sibylline those sumptuous beauts of the celestial order have got a kinder aural factory atmosphere symphony factory to make the day leap. And then I’m outside in the desert and it’s cold it’s a vacant rodeo and I’m still waiting. Approach, already! No-one will survive money. I untie it and the map rolls flat on the table. I climb onto the table and fall into Iowa 1806. No need to make more of it. Welcome to Iowa 1806. Your gun is over the door. Your eggs, over easy. President Jefferson walks off the mound. The Cardinals take the field. Ozzie Smith falls over dead. The crowd falls silent. Phil Niekro throws a ball at the sky. The ball does not return. We call it the moon. It becomes a crescent. When Jefferson holds up two fingers, the moon breaks into the dirt. To me, it’s somewhat interesting that this topic is so often explored in the context of humor — Žižek’s “toilet ideology” bit, David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel,” and ‘oodles’ of other somewhat-scatological postmodern stuff — as if, in trying to analyze the abjection of the encounter with bodily waste, ‘western’ analysis itself succumbs to revulsion, and must ‘laugh to keep from crying,’ as it were. Can we ever escape ideology? I’ve always been fascinated by antisemitism, especially in its conspiracy-oriented strains. Part of it’s pure narcissism: I’m a Communist and a Jew, someone whose face is turned to history as to a single catastrophe, and it’s quite nice to hear that I’m not in a desperate struggle against existing conditions but actually part of a tiny cabal that secretly rules the world. At the same time this stuff has an incredible heuristic potential; it’s not unlike Borges’ First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a description of a totally different world that intends to slowly map itself onto our own. Read enough antisemitic literature and you’ll learn that the chief architect of our alienated and commodified culture is none other than Adorno, otherwise known for his scathing critiques of alienated and commodified culture. You’ll discover that Lenin’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, the same revolution that prompted military intervention from the imperialist powers, was in fact a ploy by the Rothschild banking houses. You might even encounter something called ‘sexual Bolshevism,’ which for some unaccountable reason is held to be a bad thing. (Did you know that of all land mammals, horses have the biggest eyes?) The last time I saw Bahnas we exchanged the usual greetings. He had just returned from a lengthy ‘khalwa’ committed to a form of mystical belief that he could not well explain. He corrected his sentences as he spoke unsatisfied with the shadows cast by his words, dropping one for a close synonym as he explored clarity in vain. Failing to reach consensus we exchanged jokes, laughed and drank the habitual teas of Khartoum’s evenings as old friends just do. All the while he added a line and another to his drawing. I find / two sticks, a stone, and the wing / of an ephemeral thing / — make it an orange butterfly with an eye / of turquoise staring / … / Did you hear what I said, Robert? / You are not paying attention …

[Note: Sources: Beatriz Preciado, quoted in Ricky Tucker, “Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado”, at The Paris Review, 4 Dec 013; Slate, 18 Dec 013); JBR, but see next; Anne Boyer, “what any poet is good for probably —”, at *, 20 Dec 013; and Jackie Wang, “an email sent in response to an Alan Sondheim poem sent by the great Nat Otting”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 19 Dec 013; The Louisiana Purchase, at Rose Metal Press; Manuel Arturo Abreu, “Where to Go in Europe”, at HTMLGIANT, 20 Dec 013 (re Where to Go in Europe (eds. Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis)); Sam Kriss, “Sympathy for the Antisemites”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 20 Dec 013; JBR, FB comment, 20 Dec 013; Magdi El Gizouli, quoted in Pierre Joris, “Sudanese Poet, Artist Mohamed Bahnas Dies Homeless in Cairo”, at Nomadics, 20 Dec 013; Collected Essays and Other Prose]