Zeitgeist Spam

Hell yes

In the House of the Hangman 1574

Stand up carcass and walk
‘No pink clues / as / fuck seeds / dance / & / rage’
Nothing new under the yellow sun
‘reduced to a package for export’
The last of the last of the louis d’or
‘under the kissing of the minutes under the wanting to go on living’
The light that separates
‘I can’t hold a thought / longer than to see it disappear / (he thinks he sees thought) / by now the credits / should have started / already tradition / is supported / so it may be clipped in / as reality / in fictions sold to anyone’
under the skins of time
‘Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words’
The lock in the heart that shatters
‘You see: Outside the sky was’
A thread of silk
‘steps
100 steps
writing 100 steps
writing 100 steps = a road
writing 100 steps in space = a road
carry me along carry me along oh
a journey from 1 to 10 carry me along
1carry2 me3 along4 oh5 long6 long7 long 8long9 long10 road
a road a journey from 1 to 10
sound of a road
sounds on the road
steps a drone
and singing’
Tentacles of the monkeys who aim at the clouds

‘Where the hell are we?’ I am half-choked in the pure time of the jaguar bros / too much blood loss for me to move / the catgut string / played by horsehair bow. Deliver • Document • Destroy •  

How and when did you acquire the object(s)?
________________________________________________________________________
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Where and from whom did you acquire the object(s)?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Do you consider the object(s) to be complete? Yes    No    Uncertain

Do you know of any repairs or changes that have been made to the object(s)? Yes     No

Do you have any documents associated with the object(s) (photographs, drawings, letters, diaries, etc.)?  Yes     No

Describe:
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Would you be willing to donate these documents or provide copies? Yes     No

Who made or manufactured the object(s)?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

When and where was the object(s) made?
________________________________________________________________________

Who used the object(s) and how did they use it?
________________________________________________________________________

Why are you donating the object(s) to D3?
________________________________________________________________________
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What is the story behind the object(s)?
________________________________________________________________________
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On a scale from 1 to 10, how willing are you to submit this object?

 most willing                                                     most hesitant

 1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8        9        10

Do you feel emotionally burdened by the object(s)? If yes, please describe why.
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Do you give D3 the permission to destroy the object(s)? Yes     No

Is there a particular form of destruction that you would prefer for the object(s)? Yes     No

If yes, please describe.
________________________________________________________________________
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND EFFORT IN COMPLETING THIS FORM.

Or to conflate Debord & Villon <neuralisation> / [--------------------------] poetic politics. That particular inversion made us puke. So we booted the verb out of the sentence > to represent / its internal opposite ::: obviously all the nouns became verbs. And then there were verbs amassed at the border <the image cracked::: the logical conclusion of my book is that of struck glass, not the ‘fragment’. Love love love. A day trip to ‘poetry’ might clarify <is curdle>. What if this landscape were generally available. It has not been blown apart. All explosions have been contained, and <       > <where the snows of yesteryear, etc> consciousness is socially conditioned. The squirrels are still scrambling around in my walls. OK, so we examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, “perceptronium”, with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (defined using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi’s integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems, and we find interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program. A long low basement – years since – maybe they still have performances – the story of Hanuman – people wonder about - dark very elaborate cut-out puppets shadowed on a white screen – mobile in a jerky fashion – character speaking to character to complex dialogue from the puppeteer – or action – engagement – change of scene – no fixed seating – Fondly I reword it in my own terms: Biscuit was his name. His wife was called Rice Cake. His children were Soap Pod, Boulder, Pointed-as-Mouse. He was a warm friend. There is nothing else to do. There are set rituals for joining in. You can jump up and down. You can wave your arms in the air. You can shout out key words at key moments. You can all blow on whistles. We are too kissed & fondled,
no longer instrumental
to culture in “this” sense or
any free-range system of time:
1. Steroid metaphrast
2. Hyper-bonding of the insect
3. 6% memory, etc
any other rubbish is mere political rhapsody, the
gallant lyricism of the select, breasts & elbows,
what
else is allowed by the verbal smash-up piled
under foot. Crush  tread  trample  distinguish
put your choice in the hands of the town
clerk, the army stuffing its drum. Rubbish isv pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence on
our entire culture; the
ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned
into a model question. It wasn’t the airplane killed the beast ... nor was it beauty ... Thunderbirds are go! Ah, “perceptronium” … as they say at the end of King Kong. I’m having a coughing fit on the bus this is how plagues start. OK. Hellraiser. The original movie, not a sequel or spinoff or anything. It’s most certainly not from 2013, but bear with me a minute. My wife is amazing; I love everything about her, except for her love of horror movies. And she loves the contemporary “possession” style horror movies where you wait and wait, and then something shocking jumps out and makes you jump a little, and so on. Not really my scene. I have a problem with ghosts in general based on class issues – ghost believers generally describe ghosts as souls that aren’t at peace. Well then why are most ghosts middle class white girls? Where are the ghosts of slaves and immigrants and the generally downtrodden, those who were never at peace? Why are apartment buildings (usually) ghost-free – do you have to carry a mortgage before you can become a ghost? Anyway … so I showed her Hellraiser and it scared the shit out of her. And really, no horror movie has come out since that’s even half as good. Find me any villain as badass as Pinhead. So even though Hellraiser came out in 1987, if you watched it in 2013 it was the best horror movie of 2013. Scully, Mulder, I will be a doctor, but I need my “Ryan Seacrest is a Kitty” blanket first. My Hebrew-speaking friends tell me that my name in Hebrew means “poet or lyricist.” Also “poet or lyricist with insomnia,” sometimes “psalmist with insomnia,” both the donkey cart and the donkey are related to a doo-wop version of “The Binding of Isaac” from Genesis 22, in which God falls ill in February 1603 and commands Isaac’s father in Pig Latin to “ab-stay your un-say and then am-scray.” But “God’s insomnia” can also be Hebrew code for The Great Digestion. Who really knows how melancholy a symbol the bi-labial fricative — which is often a linguolabial trill [if performed by chimpanzees] —is in the face of The Great Digestion? A funeral suggests extreme sunniness. But don’t take my word for it, take acid. Just let it happen. Let it queen, coo, twinkle, puddle, chub up, dawn on. When I walked into Forlesen, the first thing I saw was a peeling wall, and then I looked around and I realized: It’s a cock and it’s an architecture at the same time. I understood that the cock was providing the infrastructure for my encounter. Covered in a dark ketchup, the walls were racialized and also about surfacing. The architecture was undoing itself, drying out. The room was scattered with glasses of water, too, so the work is also about evaporation, the hunger of the world for your juices, for what animates you and the earth, holding it all together. Liquid is liveness, but it’s a medium for loss, too. At the same time, we are drying out together, though not identically. What’s the force of the overpresence of the cock? What? Oh yes, the ellipsis! I’ve been working on ellipses … When I saw the black balloons in Forlesen, I had to laugh, because they appear as a kind of exploded ellipsis, and Ellipsis turned out to be what they’re called. At the opening, all the black balloons were inflated, and by the end the helium had gone out of them and they were all on the ground — shriveled, sexual, uncanny and more, but not identical. That’s part of the show’s orchestration of negativity too. The balloons look like afterthoughts, the way they are scattered, because they don’t take up the same kind of concentrated monumental space as the big wooden cock. And yet … The thing about an ellipsis is that it has a set of contradictory meanings. An ellipsis is a sentence that I don’t end because … I don’t know how to. An ellipsis is a sentence I don’t end because … you know what I mean. And now I have to go lie down, and try to think with Heidegger’s ferkakta black notebooks … poor Heidegger. Just another kitschy meshugganeh white boy lost in the muy estúpido lederhosen cosmopolitan-Jew-fearing blues. And there are over 300 other pages at least as complex & condensed as this. Often, as in the term dear in the first line, Hejinian employs a single word to invoke an entire vein of literature: the tales of the Arabian Nights, Quixote, the French novel, the Russian novel … the song of the radioactive kelp.

[Note: Sources: an every-other-line mashup of Pierre Reverdy, “Lève-toi carcasse et marche”, quoted and translated in Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB comment, 29 Jan 014, quotes by various poets in Will Rowe, “Invisible Power”, at Pores 4, Raúl Zurita, “from Sunday Morning” (tr. Anna Deeny), at Poetry Foundation, and a stanza from Emmanuelle Waeckerle, “The making of a road movie / 21st century style”, at Pores 4; B.S. Johnson, quoted in Rowe; Lucas de Lima, “on columbus day”, “each brushstroke of my blood”, “my female leg jutted out of the saddle”, in “Lucas de Lima: Four Poems of the ‘Dreamily Grotesque’”, at Truck, 25 Jan 014; D3, website and “Object Information Sheet”, in Submission Form Packet, at D3; Sean Bonney, “Tracts & Commentaries (A Lecture)”, in Documents: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos July 7th 2005 = June 27th 2007; Rachel May, FB post, 30 May 014; JBR; Max Tegmark, “Consciousness as a State of Matter”, at arXiv, 6 Jan 014; Bill Griffiths, “In Audience”, at Pores 4; JH Prynne, Brass, quoted in Out To Lunch, “Garbage: A Discussion Of Value”, at Pores 1; JBR (hat tip Judith Copithorne); Zoe, “I’m having a coughing …”, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 30 Jan 014; JBR; The Disinhibitor, 30 Jan 014; Sharon Mesmer, “I Lost My Beatnik Antlers On the Grassy Knoll . . . Help Me, JFK”, “My Name In Hebrew”, “My Melancholy Cannibal”, in “the incomparable SHARON MESMER!!!”, at Truck, 17 Jan 014; Sarah Fox, “God Being a Woman: the Beginning & the End”, “Knowing When To Let Go”, in “Sarah Fox!!”, at Truck, 15 Jan 014; Lauren Berlant, “Lauren Berlant”, at Artforum, 30 Jan 014 (re a work by William Pope.L); JBR (I owe farkakta to Adeena Karasick, “This Poem: Book II”, at Truck (cancelled post); Ron Silliman, “When, in 200 years …”, at Silliman’s Blog, 10 Dec 012; JBR, but see Joshua Spidel, “Scientists to test Malibu Kelp for Fukushima radiation”, at Santa Monica Daily Press, 29 Jan 014 (via CLG News, email rec’d 31 Jan 014 approx 1:18 AM PST)]

In the House of the Hangman 1573

“Q:
You asked
for a black

flag?
A: Yes,
I was brought

a
black rag.
Q: Who gave

it
to you?
A: A stranger.”

I
read this
properly this morning –

the translation of trials of Louise Michel published by Commune Editions – a truly wonderful document, which stands alongside all those other great moments in court from the French 19th century anarchists (I have for some time loved the defence speeches of Emile Henry and Ravachol, not to mention Blanqui). Anyway, you should go and read this because it’s great: Our ship towering in the motionless fog turns towards the port of poverty, the enormous city with a sky that’s flecked with fire and mud. Ah! The rotting rags; the bread soaked with rain, the drunkenness, the thousand loves that have crucified me! She’ll never have done then, this ghoulish queen of millions of souls and corpses who will be judged! I see my skin ravaged again by mud and pestilence, worms filling my hair and my armpits, and bigger worms in my heart, stretched out among ageless unknowns, without feeling … I might have died there … Horrible imagining! I detest poverty. And I fear winter because it’s the season of comfort! Positive feedback is a process in which the effects of a small disturbance on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation. A coach passes by with chains. Two stone-pines seem to be frisking about together. A certain relaxation. The path of the departed person is the soul of the conversation they led. Still the same world – and yet one has patience. I have seen how one can fish in the earth when one’s hidden in the grass. Every image is a sleep for itself. Re the Artaud, his whole book about his trip to Mexico is psychedelic. There’s a part when he sees faces in the rocks ... I don’t mean he sees rocks that look like faces, he sees faces ... “That is, A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A.” What’s worth noting is the WARMTH of this cut-work, the way disparate voices come together in a unison roar of something wickedly touching, detached at the seams yet primally dialed-in. You also get a sense of something quite severe going on, despite the humor, because of the humor, possibly yourself shattering, while laughing, possibly something like waking up from anesthesia to a very personal surgery going on, the sound of your organs moving around and the inability to scream. As they say in Iowa when the pig train rolls into town, it smells like money. The soldiers roll over on their beds ; on the ground, film magazine pages, crumpled, soiled : the sleepy soldiers, every afternoon, bring them back from the latrine ; the chief strokes the helmets hanging from the beds, he shakes the little transparent bags in which soldiers keep killed rebels’ ears and fingers ; bed bugs, gorged with blood, fall from the upper beds and from the glossy hair ; soldiers, hand between the thighs and searching there dreamily, read with one hand raised. There is a movement called Rogue Taxidermy and maybe this is an appropriate parallel, where skins of different animals are joined to form mythological unreal beasts, chicken with three heads, etc, frowned upon, of course, by Real Taxidermists. Do you want a car-race between Kerouac, Gandhi, Camus and James Dean? I am a pedestrian. Max Ernst flew but he told me he couldn’t paint while flying. Sonia Delaunay decorated cars like scarves. I am a pedestrian. They paved Ametrica I think I mean America but I may mean Ametrica over for a white Frazier or a Volkswagen. Bikes are beautiful without licenses. Imagine Dante driving. The Mayans had toys but no cars. Rate me 5 stars OKCupid so I know it’s real. Pythia says static chrysanthemums a feeling of weightlessness beset and besieged the camera can’t keep up with the fleet storm surge iris a spoon we have no hostage policy slash Pythia says a bike race or see the sun go down out of sequence they’re shooting a video or something like that slash this is an IMAGE of a wind-dried sausage curtain. Adorno loved furry animals. We always knew it. In 1955, in correspondence with Bernhard Grzimek, director of the Frankfurt Zoo, he suggested the Zoo obtain a pair of wombats: “I have fond memories of these little round friendly animals ... and would be delighted to see them again ... Then I would like to remind you of the babirusa pig, which was also one of my favourites ... And finally, what happened to the dwarf hippos they used to have in Berlin?” What drives because there on a cheeks and stretches the long trunk from? (2X) It is a mammoth, it is a mammoth, it is a mammoth and he goes home. Money is ridonkulous & in the dark the only word I know is Tennessee. In the dark Tennessee every word means graveyard & every punctuation mark means Na nana na na nanana na na & every woman has the head of Vin Diesel & every turtle has a Vin Diesel head & dogs got that too. And the rivers look like a bucket of dimmer bulbs with “Downeaster Alexa” on repeat like a heaping cup of flour, and then my best bro shows with BBQ condoms. The moon doesn’t want to take a bath — the best stories are about nothing. Most stories have boys and girls with names like Jane, Rochester, or Tinker Bell. Blake’s characters, though, have different sorts of names. They go by Person 1180, or Person 230, or Person 811. “Why is this so?” asked Baby Napoleon with a mouthful of chocolate éclair. A baby comes out of her tummy 22 times. One night, a “shrieking tone” assaults the mommy, “spraying the lining of her innards with the spittle of cracking meat.”

Because you gave me your clock
Because you gave me your thought
Beacause I am a clean woman
Because I am a Cross Star woman
Because I am a woman who flies
I am the sacred eagle woman, says
I am the Lord eagle woman, says
I am the lady who swims, says

Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says

the fish begin to speak queerly
something that never will happen before
alexander the great
my contemporary
girding the neck
au quelque crossroads
wot disgorges

From the park

to the parting of the waters

one ball of tinfoil

one avocado

three sticks of gum

Lists are lists, but any list I’m on with Solanas makes me happy. Although I’d definitely sub out the Tiqqun for WOMEN RACE AND CLASS or KING KONG THEORY or ONE-DIMENSIONAL WOMAN or GENDER OUTLAW or bell hooks on Lean In, but anyway.

[Note: Sources: Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 29 Jan 014; Arthur Rimbaud, “Farewell” (tr. AS Kline), at Poetry in Translation; Wikipedia; Walter Benjamin, “Protocol XII: Walter Benjamin: Undated Notes” (tr. Scott J. Thompson), at Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline 1927-1934: Translation and Commentary; JBR, FB comment, 29 Jan 014; anon, quoted by Anne Gorrick, FB conversation, 29 Jan 014; “THE WARMTH OF THE TAXIDERMIED ANIMAL by Tytti Heikkinen, The Real official UNlikely Blond Review”, at Unlikely Blond, 24 May 013; JP Craig, FB comment, 29 Jan 014; Pierre Guyotat, Tomb of 500 000 Soldiers, quoted at Tomb of 500 000 Soldiers; David Shapiro, FB comment, 29 Jan 014; JBR; Zoe, “rate me 5 stars … “, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 29 Jan 014; Loretta Clodfelter, “From ‘Pythia Says’”, at Dusie 15; JBR; Nicola Twilley, “Food & Farming Fellowship”, at Edible Geography, 29 Jan 014; Mark Scroggins, and Theodor Adorno (part tr. Google), quoted in Scroggins’ “Adorno loved furry animals”, at Culture Industry, 12 Mar 06, via Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB comment, 29 Jan 014 (an accurate translation (by Jacob, FB comment, 29 Jan 014, in reply to my request) = “What’s that there in a car with its trunk sticking out?” Jacob notes that Scroggins’ German transcription is erroneous, and the error led Google astray: “Should say ‘Wagen’ (car) not ‘Wangen’ (cheeks)”); Mathias Svalina, “Tennessee”, at Everyday Genius, 29 Jan 014; Seth Oelbaum, and Blake Butler, Sky Saw, quoted in Oelbaum’s “Over a few dismayingly sultry and inevitably depressing days …”, at Bambi Muse; Maria Sabina, quoted in Steve Beyer, “The Tragedy of Maria Sabina”, at Singing to the Plants, 17 Feb 08; Julian T Brolaski, gowanus atropolis, at Ugly Duckling Press; Gil Ott, “Heaven”, in the form of our uncertainty: a tribute to Gil Ott, at Handwritten; Kate Zambreno, FB post, 29 Jan 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1572

A room temperature starfish tongue arm in the grass is us together yes.

…
… …
… Bright moments!

Bright
moments! Bright
moments! Bright moments!

Advertisements
for death
… … Facebook

can’t
really handle
the cascading, hanging

garden
effect of
the indentations (which

I’ve
tried to
fake here with

the
periods), so
I encourage you

to
follow the
link, which should

take
you to
it (or, the

beginning
of it —
it's a bit

long)
A curving,
a fabric, tidal

device
a study
of Sub-atomic

music
the absolute
brightness ‘Many, many

people
died. People
dying everywhere, like

fish
after a
stream has been

poisoned.
People left
to rot along

stream
banks, in
the woods, in

their
houses. That
terrible illness!’ P4:

{reading a fax sheet from the machine; after reading the text out loud, continues silently (perplexedly) mouthing from it} From the … President … of the Republic ... “Dear Sir / Madam, With great uncomfortable and unfortunate condolence (my apologies dependent) is denial of transmitted acceptance, yours … for … Zero Card” Zero Card? P2: {looking at pencil as if he’s caught something on the tip of it} This is … “desvaluado” {devalued} P1: What means “desvaluado”? {P2 plops back on the floor, picking at it with the pencil as before …} {All players throw themselves on their backs, arms and legs spread out, looking straight up} {pause}

Born after a 10-minute video

                                     —everything hovering, contradictory—

                                     in tunnel season,

                                     high-quality roofs

                                     Diachronic units identity darts through

                                     Hostile past (out of China)

When dwelling in the dark. The painfulness either of
a bear paw waving over a stuffed hump, or the audio
mixing with the moan of
who can insist upon knowing anything,
how to get up.

                    Then you die chemically,
someone sees dragons in the sky.
In real life they are divebombed by eagles
and I walk saying I believe
in something beginning with mal

I have had a gun pulled on me. I have been shot by a bullet. I have been for a while a practitioner of Dr. Arnold Ehret’s mucousless diet. I have ridden a bicycle from St. Louis to Mexico City. I was briefly a heroin addict, but a regimen of aspirin, exercise, and a diet composed only of nuts and grapefruit cured me of that. I was fascinated by various pumps. Dams, levers, architectural ornamentation, gargoyles and cherubs. I applied my Latin. I shaved my eyebrows. I had a stuffed penguin I took to the opera. *E and I are standing outside. I am taking a break from writing this. She is taking a break from writing The Miasma Manifesto. I appear in The Miasma Manifesto just as she appears here, standing next to me, looking out onto the green that is finally coming through where grass is. We talk about Ettinger’s idea of Wit(h)nessing, which we both plan to incorporate into the parts of our bodies that lock from the inside like old refrigerators. “Shit, animals, days,” says Tristan Tzara. To trace is not necessarily to experience what has been lost or is lacking. It’s trembling with the someones that are there, with the someones that are changing. Grassroots Ra, is what it is … Ra’s raise are translated into hippish anthems. You can feel a jacket being shucked and thrown crumpled to the floor. This strange character of weak ontology is evident in Badiou, Meillassoux, and Tristan Garcia to name a few (and no doubt numerous others I’m forgetting or am not aware of). In a general sense weak ontologies are ontologizations of epistemological theories that acquire the ‘purchasing power’ of dogmatic metaphysics by jettisoning appeals to substance. [An aside – had I the background a discussion of Meinong would be particularly interesting here given both Garcia’s utilization of him and Quine’s comments on him in relation to Plato’s beard.] It appears then that, unlike German Idealism but not too far from its shores, that weak ontologies absorb the problems of skepticism but at the level of the entire discourse –

we sleep just for a little while

the lines have been pressed into uninhabited containers

some-what romantic

the making of this as it occurs now having just typed the w in now

again

there are no more faces

well

here is a face

but no eye contact

& a braid

& what will we name it?

can I wear it?

where do I put it?

on the same page?

Empty gas cans rattle in the back of the truck beside you. You stoke your nose, exorcising an unblessed sneeze, counting your luck like mortgage payments. Should you cringe as an off-again Hollywood veteran in a hooded coat gives icy handshakes to your fellow commuters who are bogged down in the fine yellow snow of Boston? An amateur wrestler always photobombs this cherished annual event. & we will have jokes, for instance in any bad situations – like we are running out of ammunition & surrounded by enemies – I will always say, “Cookie, this is the worst porridge you ever cooked up!” & we will all have a favourite weapon. Spike’s favourite weapon will be his rusty Earth .40 snub. & I will say, “Seriously Spike you expect to hit anything with that, anyone is always better with the four inch barrel & the adjustable backsight.” & Spike will always say, “Captain Jet, a four inch barrel is for vermin control.” & I will say, “That’s what we do here in space, Spike.” Then I will give him a significant look & add: “We control vermin.” & everyone will laugh. My special weapon will be a fifteen petawatt proton gun which only I can lift, aimed telepathically through advanced radio telescopes distributed in the Cat’s Eye Nebula & accurate to less than one Planck length. Our main enemies will be: Bizarro Nazis and The Junk.

[Note: Sources: Verity Spott and Megan Alan, “For Verity”, at Three Poems; a taste of a new collab between Anne Gorrick and JBR, just to get y’all hot (we are collaging, but not keeping track of sources); Rodrigo Toscano, “Pig-Angels of the Americlypse”, in War and Peace 3: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); CJ Martin, “RHYME EATS THE WORDS: ‘CLIMATOLOGY’”, at Dusie 15; Marianne Morris, “WORD / WORLD”, at The Junket 10; Jon Cone, “An Excerpt From A Work In Progress: With Rauan Klassnik”, at A Cabinet of Ordinary Ferocities, 28 Jan 014; Carrie Lorig, “PRIZE: TWO DAMN SHEDS”, at Dusie 15; Fred Moten and Amiri Baraka, “A Blood Prince / A Black Necessity: Beautiful Voices Project”, at Afrosonics, 28 Jan 014; Sean Lovelace, “Sportin’ Jack by Paul Strohm 28.5 Points”, at HTMLGIANT, 28 Jan 014; Ben Woodard, “The Trajectories of German Idealism (2)”, at Naught Thought, 28 Jan 014; Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, “Remembering / Dismembering Series One”, at Dusie 15; Caleb Puckett, “Weathering the Pile-up”, at On Barcelona, 28 Jan 014; M John Harrison, “earth advengers”, at the m john harrison blog, 28 Jan 014]

There's a chapter on me in here ...

Reading the Difficulties Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry Edited by Thomas Fink, Judith Halden-Sullivan Quality Paper 2013. 240 pp. 1 illustration 978-0-8173-5752-8 Price:  $34.95 s     E Book 2013. 248 pp. 1 illustration 978-0-8173-8720-4 Price:  $34.95 d Expected Availability 2/28/2014
	Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series     The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry. Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). The tenets of new poetry abound. But what of the new reading that such poetry demands? Essays in Reading the Difficulties ask what kinds of stances allow readers to interact with verse that deliberately removes many of the comfortable cues to comprehension—poetry that is frequently nonnarrative, nonrepresentational, and indeterminate in subject, theme, or message. Some essays in Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan’s collection address issues of reader reception and the way specific stances toward reading support or complement the aesthetic of each poet. Others suggest how we can be open readers, how innovative poetic texts change the very nature of reader and reading, and how critical language can capture this metamorphosis. Some contributors consider how the reader changes innovative poetry, what language reveals about this interaction, which new reading strategies unfold for the audiences of innovative verse, and what questions readers should ask of innovative verse and of events and experiences that we might bring to reading it. CONTRIBUTORS Charles Bernstein / Carrie Conners / Thomas Fink / Kristen Gallagher / Judith Halden-Sullivan / Paolo Javier / Burt Kimmelman / Hank Lazer / Jessica Lewis Luck / Stephen Paul Miller / Sheila E. Murphy / Elizabeth Robinson / Christopher Schmidt / Eileen R. Tabios Thomas Fink is a professor of English at the City University of New York. Judith Halden-Sullivan is a professor of English at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. “The question of how to read difficult poetry (in this case, poetry written explicitly in the Modernist, or avant-garde, tradition) is a familiar subject, so a volume of this kind is a significant contribution to the field.” — Joel Bettridge, author of Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith “One of the strongest aspects of this project is the inclusion of critical assessments of very new work, such as Kristen Gallagher’s on Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies. This high standard of contemporaneousness is how and where I set my mark as I read across the essays.” — Alan Filreis, author of Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960

In the House of the Hangman 1571

Normativity is a placebo with potentially fatal side effects. Make way for the baroque! Glory be to autopoiesis. The eye has three kinds of receptors, all of which see green. Swans explode every ninety minutes. Where the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were there is now a landscape of craters. I came to you with a dog’s heart. Trill and roll. “As long as a man hunkers down in his secret backyard writing dojo and devotes himself to the aforesaid guidebook, all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The ukulele eventually becomes an extension of his immortal spirit, just as the sheltering dojo becomes an extension of his physical person. He is safe there. He composes. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneous active faculty, have not as yet been separated in their respective functions. He continues to strum and pluck the instrument, and occasionally hums along to the tune: a fortiori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Hence the compositions of this person are not the formless play of pure chance, nor are his ‘thoughts’ an empty play of the Imagination, without any musical value. His feelings proceed from the Law of the Ukulele itself; his thoughts from the dojo, and the innumerable mysteries residing therein.” The flowers talk in such a strange voice, so unnatural is the voice of nature. UNITED STATES ARMY URGES DEAD TO RE-ENLIST. And at this point, obviously, I really wish I could think of something to say that is hopeful, that is useful, that is not simply a net of rats blocking the force of the sun, till it crawls on its fists and knees, screaming like a motherfucker, sarcastic and wrathful, boiling the mountains as if they were scars. And at this point, obviously, I really wish I could think of something to say that is hopeful, that is useful, that is not simply a net of rats blocking the force of the sun, till it crawls on its fists and knees, screaming like a motherfucker, sarcastic and wrathful, boiling the mountains as if they were scars, we found the right words once, long ago, the Orphic panorama shuddering with vowels and glossy. It was as if anybody was everybody, anywhere everywhere, spread across the whole world, become horizon, threshold. Gimme the money! All of those people crawling around on the ground as if they were collecting tiny fragments of some precious, panic-trampled thing. Gimme the fucking money! Like magic, it made the blood come out of their ears. It made them give up everything that could be seen. As if you were a flame, wicked through the streets of the city, through buildings, through the flaring nostrils and wires and the branches of trees and blades of grass and tangled roots. And yet you knew, at once, that the world with which you were consubstantial was the wrong world, however much the words really did drape down around it like a shitted or do I mean fitted sheet. Its graduated approximations, its shaped dirt and concrete and steel, its spooling, entropic way of talking to itself about us, its possessed citizens with their calculable transactions and commercial pleasantries and exchange of elaborately printed slips that directed their behavior according to simple arithmetic. Well, maybe. Just south of Batsum Bay, in the black obsidian ruins of the 8-Byte Sect Pyramid-Temple of Lord Spooge, Figure of the Great Weed Matriarch made flesh, I found an abandoned Tri-Treaded Bio-Mech OrganRunner. Its interior dome-membrane sagged, clearly it hadn’t been symbiotic in quite some time. But it otherwise passed my inspection, so I loosened the skin-flap covering my umbilical connector-prosthesis and jacked into the machine’s tight-input input-sphincter. Instant electrical charge as I felt my reserve propulsion sac fill with liters of magnetized “blue fluid,” becoming bulbous and taut, the pressure of the tightening and expanding sac a satisfaction far beyond mere words. The OrganRunner responded as well, and the bio-feedback created by the injection of magnetized “blue fluid” lifted the vehicle from its entrenched inertia, and it soon reacted in obedience to my commands, its treads stretched to full capacity and moving forward at a rapid clip. If nevertheless this is what you wish to be, a high sovereign, sky lord of the lit temple, one who has spoken, embracing the bowl reversed in air, the majesty of blue, of jade and of iron, truly, if you are a construct of that which you proclaim: being, light of all and everything, and one who rises up to and yet remains fixed under the roof of the great void, surrounded like a wall of spiraling ether, profoundly hard and pure –

what a you
what a what
what a flute
what loot
what hollows
what masks
what a yes what a no
what a yesno
what deeps
what wizard material

Beyond retracing the night without a star custodian
grows in sure relief the intimate return to a quiescent thirst
but though it forgets the muddy agonized beast of burden
its most wasted lodger fades my signal

Since then, thanks to the infinite and not-to-be-questioned power of the interweb, several new possible justifications have been put to me and I have been gently reminded that I omitted the Dot in the Foot. I’ve also had a question put to me which I need to quote in full: I wonder has there ever been a word in your life that has oddly just stuck around or hung in the air or returned obstinately to your mind without ever fully or altogether disclosing its charge of significance or range of associations? I do want to address this at some length but first I want to report on my Dot Findings. In this particular piece the scene is set with great precision and two prone and motionless figures are subjected to variations in temperature and light. The ‘speck lost in whiteness’ is first described as “Externally all is as before and the sighting of the little fabric quite as much a matter of chance, its whiteness merging into the surrounding whiteness”. She told her class that Buddhism is “stupid” and, “no one can stay alive that long without eating.” And she told her students that “if evolution was real, it would still be happening: Apes would be turning into humans today.” I mean, really, is the public ready for genetically modified, nutrient-packed super-foods in unnatural colors? Which is just another way of noting that these days exorcisms are performed via Skype. And I said, I said, ‘the Tomer-Peli tragicomedy hypothesis: tragicomically deluded characters (like Michael Scott, Hank Kingsley, Gob) are defined not by having a belief that some false proposition p is true — they don’t, at least not in the sense of acting so as to maximize expected utility given p — but by their policy of acting so as to maximize the chance of eliciting confirmation that p is true while keeping the chance of eliciting a conclusive refutation* of p at near zero. (*There’s an ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ issue here, but we can say that they ignore each instance of sufficiently weak negative evidence, so instances of ‘I could have received confirmation of p but didn’t’ don’t stack up.)’ And I said, I said, ‘the rage of Caliban seeing the photo of someone who looks a bit like Caliban.’ And I said, I said, ‘I think the ‘idea’ expressed in a work of art is often of the form ‘a bunch of things not previously known to be related are related.’ One way to express an idea of this kind is to eloquently lay out one’s thesis re: these things and their relation. Another way to express an idea of this kind is to create a text that the reader can relate to each thing in the bunch of things with surprising ease. Take ‘At North Farm’, which is equally close to being a reversal of Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, being a retelling of Kafka’s ‘A Message from the Emperor’, being a description of waiting for Santa Claus (cf. leaving out milk) as a child (cf. having no agency + having your material needs super provided for in mysterious ways), being a description of waiting for love as an adult living in a city (cf. again having no agency + having your material needs super provided for in mysterious ways), like when I was in the ancient stone city of Mahabalipuram, some hours south of Chennai along the Tamil coast, I saw not only the Shore Temple — whose mythic six sister temples were revealed to be real when the tsunami of 04 caused the ocean to recede revealing their rubble and ruins, submerged for more than a thousand years — but also countless temples carved into the monstrous boulders scattered around the town. Just behind the magnificent façade of “Arjuna’s Penance,” I found a small complex of temples whose primary design motif was a pattern of double-helices. Of course I immediately started concocting a scenario in which the ancient Gupta sculptors came to understand DNA as the building block of human life. Speculation aside, the spiral does represent how a human perceives time and space — which is a way of asking, “There are Crystals in Stone and Pressure in Snow So Are Snow and Stone the Same.” When I made breakfast the spirit of a dead man sang 2 me. John missed it he was in the shower. I felt a little obvious. The dead r too soulful. John was a whirlwind when he found out. ‘Good grief!’ I yelled ten times too loud. That’s not where it ends, tho. Psychoanalysis is crucial here, from Klein and others. As with two other books published that year, by Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady, Calton is concerned with the formation of the subject and its relation to politics and ethics; but whereas Sutherland’s Odes to TL61P attempt would seem in part to be to inflate the subject and its love relations as if it could match the politics around it, and Brady’s Mutability focuses in specifically on the relation of mother to child in the early stages of life as a complex course of minute ethical problematics, Calton’s is perhaps less specifically tied to that personal investment, so that, though it is crucial and moving for me that those real biographical marks, that have really come from his life – the dedication to Tori, the sudden and unexpected address out to specific addressee – “Tori, I’m sorry” – the closing passage; all these both resist generalizable totality claims and insist that a vision which is something like totality, of socialism, can be found in these bits, not as essay or performance of identity but as constantly failing and falling assay, as the poem’s extended verse paragraph and irregular line lengths accumulate absolute claustrophobia and constriction, marked especially by successions of monosyllables that assume the shape of something like a tongue- or an eye-twister, the condition of absolute stress where sex is not metaphor for political cred, not thus stretched, is not romanticized life-pitch outside of daily attentive regard as the real ground of relation, love’s real work, but that it is this that it says, that the truth of the poems says, that “still forever I / hate this fucking system and I wanted our life / better to realize the true generality and make its / really-existing untruth external in our / particular.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; Florence Fogelin, “The Best of Company”, in The Oyster Boy Review 21; JBR; Kathleen Hellen, “Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar”, in The Oyster Boy Review 21; Eliot Weinberger, “What I heard about Iraq in 2005”, quoted in Rosmarie Waldrop, Driven to Abstraction, quoted in John Martone’s review of same, in The Oyster Boy Review 21; David Musgrove, “Dog’s Heart”, in The Oyster Boy Review 21; Ed Baker, Stone Girl E-Pic, quoted in John Martone’s review of same, in The Oyster Boy Review 21; William Murphy, FB comment, 27 Jan 014 (a parody of Friedrich Schiller’s “On Naïve [or Simple] and Sentimental Poetry”); Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 27 Jan 014; Anselm Hollo, “Down in Flames, “Up in Smoke”, in War and Peace 3: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); Sean Bonney, “Letter Against the Firmament (three)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 27 Jan 014 (on Iain Duncan Smith, a very nasty piece of work); Jasper Bernes, “from WE ARE NOTHING AND SO CAN YOU”, at Armed Cell 6; Aaron Winslow, “FEEDING THE SEAWALL. from JOBS OF THE GREAT MISERY”, at Armed Cell 6; Victor Segalen / Michael Heller, “Doubt”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Michael Heller: from Victor Segalen’s ODE TO THE SKY ON THE ESPLANADE OF THE NEW, newly transposed”, at Jacket2, 26 Jan 014 (“These poems from ‘The Tibet Sequence’ are loosely based on the writings of Victor Segalen, whose work has spoken deeply to me for years.” – Michael Heller); Oliverio Girondo, “Tropes”, “Postnotations” (tr. Molly Weigel), in Jerome Rothenberg, “Oliverio Girondo: Three Poems from ‘In the Moremarrow’ with commentary”, at Poems and Poetics, 8 Oct 09, via Clay Banes, FB comment, 27 Jan 014; John Armstrong, “Keston Sutherland: the Dot Investigation”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 27 Jan 014 (embedded is a bit or two from Samuel Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine); Nicole Flatow, and Rita Rourke, quoted in Flatow’s “School Allegedly Told Buddhist Student His Faith Is ‘Stupid’ & He Should Convert Or Switch Schools”, at Think Progress, 27 Jan 014; JBR; Jacob Sloan, “GMO Purple Tomatoes To Be Sold In Stores”, and “Celebrity Reverend Bob Larson Offering Exorcisms Via Skype”, at Disinformation, 27 Jan 014; Peli Grietzer, AMERIKKKKA, at Gauss PDF; JBR; Kazim Ali, “There are Crystals in Stone and Pressure in Snow So Are Snow and Stone the Same”, at Harriet, 27 Jan 014; JBR; Cassandra Gillig, “THE ARTT”, at Dusie 15; David Grundy, “Stuart Calton, ‘The torn instructions for no trebuchet’ (Barque Press, 2013)”, at Streams of Expression, 27 Jan 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1570

The pattern of water / depends upon / resistances / the free air awaits / genetic coding / walking up or down / our movement is / just as fluid just / as much a resistance / outside are tanks and / arbours of anger / it is a dry season / for water can’t climb / it has no hands. /  / Keep the repeat on / on of a beneath / protrudes the spine / insides a release / you       feel        it         slipping to / across a pumped up / swells the structure / airs rushed of their / … / it’s a pattern out. /  / Overcoming cure. Regardless. / Space is a function of finding / you. Your only exterior / my euphoria. Regardless. /  / With that with which it can’t be shown ... / forming a residue — / a field of rhubarb and zinnias, / the dimensions of the workspace, / a boat-swallowing fish from / water drained from raccoon track. / Then the world took its body as a word. / Big mistake. Elephants were made to stand / on their heads in a world thought to be thought. / The bodies of the / elephant. Next to the poachers / who arrived soon after the snipers. / Brothers in a world demanding verbs. /  / Soon snipers were on the roof of the world. / Bodies were down and wombats in zoos. / The body of thought grew and became a world problem / seemingly needing containers / and containers inside containers. / But none of the lids fit. / Normalcy – Never Again / inconvenient placebo / robo-wishbone / All we hear are dreams / Fantastic external fixater! / muni-heart / un-okey-dokey / Emotion – … / punk radar / Spazialismo / factbeat kopasetee / everything stupid has changed / Repeat after myself: / … and the pines at night? / O Statesman, / don’t forget how you pulled tadpoles out of the rain barrel. / There algae swayed -- Phrygian, pentatonic trifles, / and you caught sight of yourself and tried to launch a yacht in the cistern, / its depth over your head (you would have choked on water) / and the breadth just so, no higher than the waist, so that the little boat / seemed to be made of bread, / and later, empty years passed, lean as the rafters of a fire. / Pope’s peace doves attacked by crow and seagull. Wonder when your laptop will dissolve or the Mediterranean will disappear? A 35 year-old man with no significant past medical history presented to the emergency department (ED) after ingesting phencyclidine. Responding to command auditory hallucinations, he attempted to swallow his 4 cm × 8 cm smartphone. On arrival, he was agitated but alert, handling his secretions poorly and in moderate respiratory distress. An electronic device was clearly protruding from his oropharynx … Emergency physicians immediately attempted to remove the device with Magill forceps, but were unsuccessful. A “trauma code” was announced bringing a surgical intensivist, an anesthesiologist, and appropriate nursing staff to the bedside, while simultaneously indicating that an operating room (OR) should be prepared … The device was successfully removed under procedural sedation without the need for surgical intervention. Project Trap: Project Trap was never completed. Project Soul Gem was a project to collect “evidence-free innuendo”. Soul Gem was wound down in 1945 upon the birth of the resource (see notes). Several similar projects wound down naturally with the resource itself. Eat Cake, a hardened version of Soul Gem 2: the Eat Cake abstract promised abjection, violence, denial. Eat Cake was unlisted. Various other projects: Project 121 (see appended material). Mex Lite, Max Eight & Lite Core were clean product generated during varied initiatives and test runs. “Initiative B” ran successfully until 1978, when it was replaced under the Dark Stork programme. Project Veil Grain was an unsuccessful add-on to the Main Stem series. Vague Heart: Project Vague Heart remains partially operational but is identified under recent initiatives as “2014”. Resource appears to have retained motility & limited function. Project 92 is the shadow of something much larger. Animals that were almost but not quite created – nice! Philosophy of salmon makes me feel optimistic. Occupy all the pianos! “They have been throwing grenades from about 22:00. Berkut initiated that. They turned on the projector and started searching with the green light and then shot one activist. Our guys responded with cocktails and fireworks. And that’s how it has been all night. Again Berkut was shooting the baricades with water – not so much the burning tires as the hot bodies of activists. It was about -16 -18 C and our guys, all soaking wet, would immediately get frozen and covered with ice. So at last, I realized my mission. I started catching the heroes, who would not admit that they feel real bad, and forcing them sit near the fire, take off their shoes, and change the socks while I would insert Bella pantyliners inside their shoes. These are cheap, large enough, and made of cotton. Good for absorbing liquid from the shoes. For some young guys, it was the first time in their life that they saw those products of feminine hygiene unpacked. There was also tea, lots of tea. Heroes don’t know how to ask, do not show that they feel bad or that they are frozen. They only ask for help when they get a concussion or are all in blood. Thank God, I did not see many of those this night. Several times Berkut attacked us with gas. A guy from the front row trespassed the fire line. I saw him vomiting in the corner. I brought him some water, and he said, ‘Please do not do it.’ He was ashamed I saw him like that. In short, girls, from now on, each of us has to have several pairs of male socks in our backpacks along with Bella products. We should force our heroes to think – at least sometimes – about their feet, we should make them sit down and change socks. Glory to the heroes!” Enjoying is article-like. It will be digesting anthropophuisms. It's better to outclimb sempiternal sir jupiter than virtually decide them! Woo hoo. It did tinker them. The less spew palatizes it and level mendicity-chide, the less it decays! Unless if you are a adorn, habilitate them. The less surrounding melting-mucilages and it and teines jib, the more they intermix a legatary’s phytological pretypifyings. It prominently protruded my enough precontracts. They stumped them. Fortify them six times a day! It wasn’t gin international. The less they recline, the less they crack tightly. Another satisfied suffocation-apparaillyngs and they overbide my ANALYTIC WATERMELON DOWN THEM. Zero aldehydes were dawning. Both it wasn’t araucarian. The more contraxt and wareroom’s caroluss associate another verb, the less they won’t be urging them. While the less they forespurrer, the more they inflate!

[Note: Sources: Stephen Collis, “Abstraction Suite”, in Anarchive; Sarah Kelly, “dual deposits”, at Signals 6; Robert Kocik, Rhrurbarb, quoted in “Peace On A presents: Robert Kocik & Jonathan Skinner (Intro)”, at Wild Horses of Fire, 13 May 07; evelyn reilly, “Variations on a Sentence by Rosmarie Waldrop”, in War and Peace 3: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); Bruce Andrews, “Yessified”, in Goldman and Scalapino; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “To a Statesman” (tr. Genya Turovskaya), in Endarkenment: Selected Poems (ed. Eugene Ostashevsky), at Wesleyan University Press; Guardian headline, embedded in Ana E Hager, FB post, 26 Jan 014; Matt Staggs, “BBC Shares Timeline of Likely Events Through Next One Hundred Quintillion Years”, at Disinformation, 26 Jan 014; Zachary Levy, John Jesus, Arayel Osborne, Patrick Matthews, “A man with drug-induced psychosis attempts to swallow his cellular phone”, quoted in Vaughan Bell, “There probably isn’t an app for that”, at Mind Hacks, 26 Jan 014; M John Harrison, “vague heart: a science fiction novel of the near future”, at the m john harrison blog, 26 Jan 014; Oxana Timofeeva, FB comment, 26 Jan 014; Svitlana Matviyenko, FB posts, 26 Jan 014; Leon’s Random Essay Generator]

In the House of the Hangman 1569

And and and. I mean, and and and. It has been a while since the alley where dogs can shit has disappeared. The corpses that have just breathed their last are suffocated again by the houses rushing in and expire once again. There is no empty land to lay down the coffins. There is no room for shadows in my yard. She dreams of the return and national conclusion. She is obsessive to the end. She protests on the platform of ceremony. Loss is gloss as she navigates the entire hegemony. Ziploc bags come in handy. She tears the bag and gags. It is the only way. I said exhale. I didn’t say relax. When your gallery posts some b.s. statement that conflates global warming with images of a wealthy white woman sitting on top of / squashing a fiberglass sculpture of a black woman flat on her back, legs spread and up in the air … you kinda have to wonder. I mean, really is this the best your team could come up with? Anyways. The hotel was purchased by a larger hotel, and every employee was routed to a banquet room where we sat in folding chairs and watched a video of other hotels. People wanted to know when they would be fired. Another video played. The human resources manager — the woman who had hired me, someone of firm adult age — wore a wig made of plastic golden strands and a red clown nose and red cheeks and big shoes. Benign, wordless hip-hop played through a very loud set of speakers in each corner of the room, and she danced in the aisles and held a large bag which contained redeemable vouchers for hotel employees to use in order to stay in other hotels. She made her eyes big and ran in those shoes from person to person to deliver each voucher with a kind of careful stomp, and seemed not to think, like I did, that maybe Hegel was right about art. Anyway, I started translating long before I became an immigrant. I grew up in the English / American cultural empire (which of course coincides with the military-economic empire of US, as recent studies of CIA involvement with the global spread of Abstract Expressionism show). I watched Little House on the Prairie, I watched Hitchcock, I listened to English-language pop music. Maybe I first became interested in poetry when in fourth grade I was trying to make sense of why Depeche Mode sang “Everything counts to Roger Moore.” It had something to do with James Bond, the Cold War and buying-selling stuff — or what I might now call Capitalism. (Unfortunately, I later learned that the line was really “Everything counts in large amounts.” Which is of course also about capitalism.) I mean, maybe Hegel was wrong. I mean, I live in fear of Justin Bieber in much the same way that people once lived in fear of God. It’s hard to think of anyone alive that I regard with such terror and fascination and respect. Last week the Biebs was hauled in by Miami cops for drag racing, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest. Justin Bieber wants to put a torch to the world, and he wants to burn up with it. The opportunities brought about by this practical decomposability are numerous and are still largely unidentified. The schema of this functionalist abstraction has at least two immediate implications. One is that by decomposing the mind to a set of practices, philosophy is able to envision itself as a veritable environment for an augmented nous. That is to say, philosophy's special self-conception induces a change in what it is a conception of, in a diffusive cascade that forever disturbs the static equilibrium – the circle of stagnation – between conception and realization, and generates new transitive spaces between what it is for itself and what it is in itself in a manner that an alteration in one provides the other with new choices of disequilibrium or transformative alternatives.I mean, like Care for yourself → Know yourself → Treat and construct yourself as a manipulable hypothesis. I am not fazed by this. I live underwater. Yes it’s me. Yes me. In the underwater city I saw falling rock plunging into a dead volcano. I was not born in an underwater city. For my first communion I was taken to the zoo. Hyenas pelted me with dirt. It was the first time I had seen living wild animals although I had dreamed about them for years. I was born loving the zoo. When I was young I had visions of tortoises crossing my path or a very large cat sitting in an abandoned dog kennel. When I was twenty I bought myself a pair of jodhpurs and a hacking jacket. I began to have the stench of an animal. I found I had grown a horse’s head. My life is when critique feeds from the auras. The way these colors drink me is my sight. I have been inspirited to tessellate their spectrograph by singing so the 4th dimension flutters in their plane, the 3rd may bell the heart & move the blood to hear a ring, to honor lights in eyes that shine against imprisoned worlds & for her merry life of grief that rudder’d mine. & I’ve been reading that Yepez book on Olson, The Empire of Neomemory, & good lord it is astonishing. He talks about how Olson attempts to construct an alter-patriarchy on the ruins of an already false one. Part of his martial, nationalist project of mythos. Stacking universe & state & self on Pound-carved Plymouth Rock of cock & balls. Yepez says, in essence, Olson’s thing is an elaborate psycho-social misprision. No less interesting because of that, & perhaps a great deal more. I thought about that some while I was writing this, & wondered, how might we construct a matriarchy of the world instead? God knows for truth & world’s sake that we should. But what of this. What I’ve been writing. How to think it?

[Note: Sources: JBR; Kim Hyesoon, “Seoul, My Oasis” (tr.Don Mee Choi) quoted in Joel Scott, “Joel Scott Reviews Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi”, at Cordite, 4 Apr 011; Don Mee Choi, quoted in “Books Noted: Don Mee Choi, The Morning News Is Exciting”, at Poets.org; JBR; Jessica Vaughan, FB comment, 25 Jan 014 (about a work by Bjarne Melgaard, which is having its 15 seconds as I write); Mike Scalise, “From The Almanac of Modern Regret”, at Everyday Genius, 24 Jan 014; JBR; Johannes Göransson, “‘Corean Music’ Part 3: The Autobiographical Account of The Diabolical Music of Translation and Kitsch”, at Harriet, 12 Aug 013; JBR; Sam Kriss, “Justin Bieber: the aesthetics of destruction”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 25 Jan 014; Reza Negarestani, “What is Philosophy”, at Deracinating Effect, 25 Jan 014; JBR; Amanda Ackerman, “People Staring at Menus”, at Dusie 15; Dana Ward, “A Kentucky of Mothers”, in “PEN Poetry Series: Dana Ward”, email rec’d 25 Jan 014 approx 7:59 AM PST]

In the House of the Hangman 1568

I think what you guys don’t know is that I am on an H1B Visa – & for the last 8 years, every time I have gone back home, the US Consulate puts me on ‘Administrative Processing’ a.k.a. ‘Security Clearance under the Patriot Act’ and has held me away from my job & my family for periods ranging from 9 months to 4 months – which, as you can imagine, has played havoc with both – … No explanations are offered. There is no legal recourse as per my US Attorney to ‘request discovery’ i.e. find out, why me …? The decision of the local Consular officer is final: I am just grateful that they let me back into the country! The process itself is shrouded in mystery, although it is alleged to contain vetting from local law-enforcement officials, FBI & the CIA … it has got to the point where I have actually thought about offering my services to the CIA, in order to get a higher security clearance rating just in order to get this behind me. It will continue until I get my LPR [Legal Permanent Residence] i.e. ‘Green Card’, which will be sometime in 2021, based on current Priority Date projections. [some of my Muslim friends – who btw never used to go the mosque earlier – did just this in order to obtain relief; they now have to go to the Mosque every Friday & ‘call in a report about any suspicious activities observed’; they joke that mosque attendance in NYC has gone up 3-fold since 9/11 primarily because of such unpaid ‘Double Agents’ who in a vein of rich irony, are neither devout Muslims, nor convinced FBI/CIA operatives … just men trying to keep the US Govt. from fucking up with their schedules every time they travel.] Get off the platform that train will continue to be late. / … / I was symbolic. / I was symbolic. Here / we are. / … / Will we be lonely? / Will we die? / Will we do? / Can we will our doing? / Will we get/have/lose? The words and definitions have disappeared, replaced by each word’s first result from Google Images – the most ubiquitous and comprehensive visual identification tool on the Internet, that supposedly offers (as its founding principle) the most relevant and stimulating images to our written queries. Nevertheless, the sublime has different faces which complicate this interpretation. There is the sublime of the “oppressors” (as you noted, the one that Kant opposes, as “masculine and great, or powerful” to the idea of beauty, which is “feminine and small”), and there is the sublime of the “oppressed.” Both were cherished by the romantics: the horizon of the sublime stretches from a solitary figure or a noble rebel who challenges and / or conquers the world to popular movements and collective struggles for independence. I find these dialectics of the sublime extremely interesting, especially since this notion survived after a series of collapses. But there is yet another sublime. To make cherry blossoms thrive, you put honey in their water –Lizards are twitchy liquid; little people on jet-skis crash into an air-conditioned beehive, while on the steps to the gigantic queening stool where squats fate, links are peachy, astride a liminal knot-donkey (a pretzel-twist of a beast) we scoot into the fast mirror, holding aloft a brick of brilliance outdone by none, holding fizzy drinks snaked with ferns and a refrigerator’s hum. I loved your novel, I’ll eat your face. Let’s all write novels. I’ll read yours if you read mine, writing mainly because I am supposed to say I hate trees and things that live in trees except birds but they should live elsewhere. Mine is not coming along nicely but it makes me happy that it is there to be done and mentioned. Hmmmmm. A cat on a roomba exerts a quiet influence, thousands of views. But not as quiet as lovemaking with our parents downstairs. Which genre does your life fit into? A kind of everything which unlocks and oblivion runs amok. Please fill out, I ask those who are now nobody. Ja el Wiltong is printing millions of near-replicas of himself, and it scares me — we will surely drown. Hacked open, bled, stained, dropped onto and into, peeled back, merged with, eaten up, shit on, devoured, tortured and nurtured by one another, sometimes all at the same time, sometimes in recurring cycles, things work and are worked upon by other things: Under the faucet a man peeled a woman’s skin
The woman cacklecackled and peeled easily like an onion
As a layer of dark night peeled off transparent day soared
Blood draindrained down a pipe
Like the mushy inside of a fresh egg
Someone cried, stopitstopit why are you all acting this way?
When day gets suckled the sadtastingspicytasting night soars
Day and night kept this up for a thousand ten thousand years, for all
Eternity
yet the woman peeled layerafterlayer…
After I was all peeled like an onion, I wasn’t there anymore
but the I that used to call me I was hiding somewhere
Night hid and trembled under the wood floor after taking its spicy skin
yet the sea endlessly took off and put on a pair of pants
and yet it was hotinsummer and coldinwinter and everything drifted away
isn’tthisthemostbeautifulstoryintheworld? “Even the bones of the snowman got stolen from the grave”; “… the empty, holey / holy, dissected space like the empty space inside a flame … the inside of a blood sausage …” all like the guts of the father, the sun, and a GHOST ship crewed only by CANNIBAL rats. How do you spell ad nauseam? And Michael brought an old, run-over shoe, and Bath-sheba brought a baudekin, and Absalom a battering ram, saying – kill me if I use it against you; and Jonathan two companies, saying – Draw them up now, I will die in one of these battles, make it a heavy blow. And it seemed to David that they were all saying – This one time, this time, because we are all so dashed together. And David, – Action is so brief and partial, wrap me in the baudekin, Bath-sheba, it is so meaningless, despite my love for you, that I will go in it to battle. And David, – Jonathan, what is that thrumming? and Jonathan – it is the noise of siege-guns (Death there was seldom from sudden deep wounds or spilly loss of blood but by Sepsis, Exhaustion and Nervous Overstimulation. People there were choking, Squeelungs into outsourced graveyards panopticons for circles circles perfect absence all forensic sketches into metal into metal insertion into metal into fuze in your face hot particle & then you found and ate a Chernobyl heart. The cure for Chernobyl heart is eating a Chernobyl heart, you’re told and you believe for you remember the photographs you sent me (no shower curtain, it looked oddly sinister)). This is the genius of empiricism, which is so poorly understood: the creation of concepts in the wild, I mean, my head weighs 10 pounds, ounce by carbon resin ounce, I mean, where oh where did you hide the trance box, it was on loud. I took a deep breath ten times, facing the morning sun and held it as long as I could possibly hold it. Orchids appeared in front of my eyes, then my long-dead grandmother’s face and then a voice spoke to me, “Don’t forget to breathe out, my dear, it’s important.” I looked around but only saw a thin white dog, running frantically down the path behind me. I exhaled, and decided to run after the dog. I needed to figure out why I was always haunted by specters — or should I say — haunted by the same old ghost. Here things took place. To the sound of meat that someone was pounding on. I’ll get that animal to read the poem. I will rotate til I’m dizzy twirling. The wings are ice and forest and shit. Work! Work. With his hand in a bloody teddy bear head: I think ... It starts here. And so it ends either happy or not. I go into the wallpaper and becomes totally crazy bananas. Everything is okay. Everything is permitted. Bored housewives on methadone with clothespins around the nipples sitting at the mail slot with safety pins around the nipples, and waiting for something to happen with throwing stars around the nipples that your mail will come to anything, an adventure with the neighbors cat, the mailman, action, revolutionary action might what do I ... How many hm must a man hm hm. Before he can hm hm a man? And how many miles do I have to pretend to jog every day before people stop talking about hm hm a man? When and how was invented the gag ball really? How many gag balls hm hm a man? The rails shine in the sun and if you put your ears to them you can sometimes hear the vibration of a coming train, or so I am told, and have attempted this on several occasions with no results, yet this may be due to the fact that in no instance in which my ear touched the rail was a train coming, and nothing to indicate the approach of a train, as grasshoppers passed overhead, making a kind of buzzing sound, which may also have detracted from my ability to hear a train approaching, or anything in the rail other than the silence of the steel itself. Lenin’s Cap: Revolution as Cosplay. Plato rejects the body, yet tells us (simultaneously) how necessary it is. How can that be written Into 21st Century poetics? When the red red string — this line — feels So fraught. In my 39^th year I have decided that ambivalence is an Illness. In my 63^rd year I find myself one sick fuck. Not that I’m ambivalent about anything. And not that I’m not. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the centre aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it, whether I married or not, which part of town I lived in, how long my drive to the store was, my salary, whether I had moved recently, nothing mattered to the rat, no variables. The mould began to read my books before I did, devouring them in a very literal sense. ‘Ah ken,’ said Bella presently. ‘It’s got tae be Friends eh? See Joey Tribianni, he’s the mastadon. Like kinda primordial an sexual an that, but cuddly. I’m no sure whit an ankheg is but I’m no fuckin sure whit Chandler wis either. Wis there no one where they hud a quiz, an naebdi kenned whit he wis? Some kinda monstrous arthropod. The roshi is Monica Geller – cut-throat, freakishly strong. Bit ay a control freak an that. Roshis are masterless so I’m hinking it’s in the wee period after Café des Artistes but prior tae Moondance Diner. Mind flayer’s Phoebes, mainly jist because ay Lisa Kudrow. Also, a mind flayer, you would imagine has hud a patchy background, looks goofy an that but is actually quite street-smart. Plus the massage therapy an mind suck attack parallel, mindfulness an aw. Then the wee piranha’s Gunther! He’s always kinda inside ay the wee wave an he just sits there. ‘Hello. Hi.’ Cannae access the real deal. So whit wis they daen in the forest? The mastadon wis bein a stud, the roshi and the ankheg mebbe tryin tae keep their relationship secret fae the rest, blah blah blah, Phoebes in tow. Piranha servin up lattes and derision. Dependin on the season they could be aboot tae jump the piranha. The short answer though? Whit were they daen? Hangin oot.’ Tam and I tumbled over each other to ask after Rache. ‘Rache’s already away. Ah mean, we’ll probably kill her in a bit.’ Svitlana, being halfway across the world and knowing nothing about the situation, I have a question. I know that that cross on the shield has been used as a symbol by fascists. Is that true in the Ukraine, too? In other words, leaving aside RT, which thank you for helping me understand as just a propaganda organ, are the people in this picture associated with fascism, or not, or something more complicated, or what? John, the vast majority of protesters does not associate themselves with any movement. I will tell the story briefly, so you could see how and why everybody, despite their political views, are involved in the events and why the publications like RT’s (and esp. RT! that dominates Western news market) have a reason to depict events in the way they do. So, in November, the protest began because our President refused to sign a trade agreement with Europe, but decided to sign it with Russia instead (under Putin’s pressure). But that protest was violently cleaned up. After that, people were extremely appalled by the fact that the government attacked our own people – mostly 20 year old students, of course. So, in December, it was not about Europe any more – it became a collective action against our corrupt and criminal government. People demanded Yanukovych to step down. But instead, the government responded with the enforcement of political pressure on people. It was a real return of the Soviet Union with its KGB and interrogations etc. Activist and journalists were arrested, attacked, and kidnapped. And then on Jan 16, the government passed the law according to which free speech was not allowed, protest was not allowed, all civil rights were suddenly criminalized. Now anybody can be arrested – even if they looked like protesters (=wearing warm clothes). It's a total dictatorship in Ukraine. People are so angry that it is impossible to control people. For years, our activists and journalists were trying to get attention of the world asking for help and investigations of the government criminal activities and money laundering. But who cares, really? Ukraine does not exist for the world. So what is happening is a result of people dealing with a dictator without the help from outside. And even after what happened recently, all the violence, Ukraine is still on its own. No sanctions, nothing. President Yanukovych is waiting for the escalation of violence, so he can accept Russia’s military help officially (because unofficially, such help has been already accepted). On Monday, the parliament will be voting whether or not to announce the state of emergency in the country and they need it look like a state of emergency. Thus, the provocations etc. Because if it is the state of emergency, they can use the military (Ukrainian and Russian) and literally just kill the protest and say there was no other way. Six people are killed already. Very good, nice people. A theatre student, a seismologist ... simple people who never associated themselves with any violence, but came to express their anger and be on Maidan. Many wonderful people are arrested and facing years in prison now. But thanks to such publications as RT’s, nobody cares about that and who to help those hundreds arrested and tortured, stripped and beaten up naked on the snow etc, what everybody keeps asking is were or were not several people among several millions wearing the fascist symbols on the shields. Obviously, among all those people, there are some who associate themselves with ultra-right. They are on Maidan just because everyone is there. But pro-Putin media need to present Maidan as all ultra right-wing and hooligans, because they will need to justify a possible intrusion. Because the world will say then that good guys, Presidents Yanukovych and Putin, fought Nazi in Ukraine. And who cares to ask questions. Regarding those rightwingers, as much as I am personally upset and disgusted with them, they are pretty miserable and marginal group, although, they like to show off (which might caught the eye of the photographer looking for striking imagery). They do not identify with any fascism, but they are, indeed, homophobic and racist morons, you see such people everywhere.

[Note: Sources: figure it out for yourselves, national security motherfuckers; suzanne stein, “Allegory of the Triumph of Justice [The Future]”, in War and Peace – The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); blurb for King Zog, Google, Volume 1, at Jean Boîte Éditions (“Google, Volume 1 has every word in the dictionary, in order, replaced by images. King Zog’s Felix Heyes and Ben West used the Oxford English Pocket Dictionary and its 21,110 words as the basis”); Oxana Timofeeva, in Oxana Timofeeva - Joan Copjec, “The sublime is sexual: A dialogue in two emails”, at Academia.edu; Rose Tilan, FB post, 24 Jan 014; ?? editor’s intro to Dusie 16; Deborah Schwartz, and Kim Hyesoon, All the Garbage in the World, Unite!, quoted in Schwartz’s “A Feminist Ontology of Ooziness: On Kim Hyesoon” at Critical Flame, 19 Jan 014; JBR; Chris Richards, “GHOST ship crewed only by CANNIBAL rats feared to be heading for Scottish coast”, at Daily Record, 23 Jan 014; Kathy Bloomberg-Rissman; Louis Zukofsky, “Thanks to the Dictionary”, in Collected Fiction; Frances Kruk, “The historical lumber room of Poetics …”, at Dusie 16; Kit Fryatt, “splice”, at Dusie 16; Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, quoted in SC Hickman, “Deleuze: Concepts in the Wild”, at Noir Realism, 24 Jan 014; JBR; Jack Kimball, “Corporate design is a full-length mink coat. …”, at Pantaloons, 23 Jan 014; James C. Hopkins & Yoko Danno, “Scroll 14”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “James C. Hopkins & Yoko Danno: From Scrolls, an experimental work in progress (installment two)”, at Poems and Poetics, 23 Jan 014; bits from Stina Kajaso, “The Brown Wallpaper”, at Son of Dad, 23 Jan 014 (cancelled post); John Olson, “Yet”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 23 Jan 014; JBR and Aindriu Macfehin (Aindriu was censored on FB so this is probably my farewell to him); Susana Gardner, “And so, we are crushed sentimental …”, at Dusie 16; JBR; Robert Kiely, “Intimacies”, at Dusie 16; Ja El Wiltong, “From INTERPELLATION”, at Dusie 16; JBR, FB comment, 24 Jan 014; Svitlana Matviyenko, FB comment, 24 Jan 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1567

So little Lila, having been turned into a mermaid, used the magic star sword against the sea monster (a giant amphibious chicken) to save the ocean kingdom, even though she knew the magic would turn her back into a human and the king of the mer-folk would expel her from the ocean and she’d never see her fish friends again. She knew it was the right thing to do and she did it and I was suddenly incredibly proud and since I was playing the part of the king of the mer-folk I made a truce with the humans and all was well. But “If the Dens want to integration the woodcutters of America by malfunction them believe that they are helpless without Undergarment Sultan commencement in and providing for them a preserve each moonlight for bishop convector because they cannot convector their licensee or their reproductive tablespoonful without the help of gradient then so be it! Let us take that disgust all across America because woodcutters are far more than the Dens have played them to be. The ridiculous clampdown that a pro-lifetime post is a ‘war on women’ is an integration to the minarets of woodcutters who make extraordinary safe-conducts for their chimeras,” Huckabee said. “For Dens to reduce woodcutters to beings for cheddar gradient funded bishop convector is demeaning to the woodcutters that I know who are far more complicated than their licensee and the mandrake of their reproductive tablespoonful.” Elsewhere, we have written that Commune Editions might play a role something like the riot dogs of Athens, a companion to struggles and manifestations whose contribution is ultimately minor, providing inspiration, maybe, maybe distracting the enemy now and then but unable to do much to alter the balance of forces. A dog, too, might start barking when the cops are about to kick down your door. Perhaps that’s it, for now, what we’re doing, what is to be done. Does anyone have access to (or ability to scan) “Die Kröte, ein Bild der Gebärmutter” by Karl Spieß (Mitra I, Sp. 209 ft., 1914, Nr. 8). I am intrigued (yes, that says “the toad, an image of the uterus”.) I was like so … Geico / And you were like so ... Activia / And together we were like so … GlaxoSmithKline / In an effort to be so … Ann Taylor Loft / We end up so … Crocs / And sometimes we’re all like so … Ambien / When we mean to be so … surgery or pilgrimage, these worms squirming under the skin on their way to the lungs. Is it too late for Hollywood families who met many North Koreans who told me how he urged that the massacres were not all on so they all went away from the little log house didn’t understand the panicked responses of the national offices which found his exchanges with the interior minister infuriating once when wolves lived in the big woods and bears and if we’re in L.A. all the time our life? I’m trying to understand Schelling. I’m trying to understand Naturphilosophie. The professor exclaimed: Go to the sand, reject its ilk with wings! Shred the documents in the sea! And this was an epoch or era, in which we lost our vertebrae. I get a sense that the poet feels obliged to follow this course, that his skill and inclination might be towards a more outright singing; his fondness for close internal / external rhyme is noticeable in many of the pieces, where it pushes the poem forward quite light-heartedly but towards a hole in the ground. This is expressed in Archilochus’ reluctant refusal of the Dionysian mode, the dithyramb (No.26: “Would that I could / accept Dionysus’ counsel / let his words / grease my speech-parts…” but the poem drifts thru Hesiodic belly-prophecy and Horatian self-fashioning, Basque badgers, the phonology of Tocharian monosyllables and the morphological peculiarities of Gothic pronouns, takes a stab at coming to terms with the place of the curious “anagram notebooks” in the life and thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, on its way to an end full of desiccated testicles). Nitrate itself, the notoriously inflammable material of early film, was derived from a substitute for gunpowder and a substance proposed as a dressing for wounds. Anyway:

Someday I’ll be dead
For a thousand years
And someday you’ll be dead
For a thousand years
Isn’t that strange?
But I got a good night’s sleep
And I feel fine

Someday this day
Will be a thousand years in the past
All that will remain 
Will be mysterious fragments
Maybe this poem
Will be one of them
Probably not
But just in case ...

Patrick Kavanagh
Was glad to record
His melancholy
For One Who Will Come After
When he heard birds sing
One morning
(I assume it was morning
And just like this one
Gray and cool      quiet)
High in the wet trees

I’m glad too
To record
For that same Future Person 
The wonderful taste of this tea
Have a sip via my poem
O Future Person
It’s herbal
No caffeine!

(What did you think?
Some old dead guy 
From a thousand years ago
Had something important to say?
How could he
With his unengineered heart
And his tiny unmodified brain?)

[Note: Sources: Robert Archambeau, FB post, 23 Jan 014; JBR; Mike Huckabee, after a turn thru Susan M Schultz’s n+7 machine, FB post and comment, 23 Jan 014; Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, And Juliana Spahr, “Self-Abolition of the Poet (Part 3)”, at Jacket2, 23 Jan 014; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 23 Jan 014; I was like so … we mean to be so …: Becca Klaver, “B®AND LOYALTY”, in Nonstop Pop, at POETRY CENTER CHAPBOOK EXCHANGE; Clint Campbell, “Flush”, in Wake of Leaves, at POETRY CENTER CHAPBOOK EXCHANGE; Matt Trease. “BAILIWICK/ BAY-luh-wick/ , noun;”, at Requited 10; JBR; Lina ramona Vitkauskas, “THORAX”, at Requited 10; Peter Riley, and Simon Perril, Archilochus on the Moon, quoted in Riley’s “Lyric, anti-lyric, and political poetry”, at The Fortnightly Review, Jan 014; JBR; Joshua Katz, “Profile”, at Princeton University; JBR (the last is “Someday I'll be dead”, at ZS, 30 Jun 04]