Oh, and if you just called my house and my ten year old said WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE and slammed down the phone, he’s sorry. Can one ascribe / attribute psychopathological motivation to a collective creature (singular plural) that’s figured out a way to not only survive but thrive under these circumstances? For these reasons it seemed to me more important to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance — the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These Brechtian — or Schweikian — forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation. Slag heaps for fuck’s sake! *slag* (slag only comes into being in the 20th c at a certain level and velocity as a by product of industrial production; for instance the great slag landscapes of Appalachia. these are not “natural” but they are not not natural) I bet they fantasize about self abolishing 24/7 but the composite component turns that into the next round of growth. In the beginning there were no orphans. Tyson or Ali? “They love me for my glossy furniture. And furs.” Some to Alaska, in the spring, and some to Patagonia. Have 100+ VIP friends – remember that you have to be about lvl 7 or 8+ to have 100 or over friends and u get to be a jury for being a VIP for 100+ days. The best way to be a celeb is to be a VIP therefore the VIPs that only accept VIPs accept u. Or, as Michèle Bernstein put it, “At the end, I think that I was becoming allergic to the constant inversion of the genitive – misère de la philosophie, philosophie de la misère, you know. I had the feeling that the new Situationists were overusing it as proof of their credibility, of their Hegelo-Marxism, and it became, for me, the boredom of repetition, the repetition of boredom.” At a temple near Luxor, Egyptologists have discovered wall carvings depicting the Roman emperor Claudius dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh and making an offering to the fertility god Min. So then I thought I could make The Book of I that has one “I” for every person on the planet. One million took 150 seconds and made a file 224 pages long; that was 117 megabytes in size. The population of the USA is around 314 million as of July 4, 2012. That took my computer a little over 13 hours to produce. The file was 70,336 pages long and about 36GB in size. To do the full Book of I would mean approximately 7,080,000,000 instances of the letter “I”, which would take my computer 295 hours (that’s 12.29 days for those of you keeping score at home), and would generate a file of 1,585,920 pages that would be around 828GB. Anybody want to download an almost Terabyte-sized PDF? Now I’d like to tell you how I constructed my failed poem. A few minutes before I started the first draft, I wrote the word “Welcome” in my notebook. Then I scrawled the word CONCISE over it, repeating it in a sort of horizontal column over and over. Over all that, I wrote two lines: “I merely need this bed to make” and “I nearly need this room to fade.” Both of these lines are things I heard in “For Kate I Wait.” I don’t know if that’s actually what Ariel Pink is singing, but. Here’s one of my favorite parts, toward the end: Lou Reed once told me I need / to join this century it’s true / Lou Reed! what an ass. I sent “Welcome” to a small New York zine, but just a few days later I revoked it, stating: “I’m sorry to be annoying, but I have to rescind my recent submission. The martians told me the poem’s not actually done and I want to be blank so I can begin / in the flat and even rhythm / of a car alarm alarming / no one in particular / about nothing in particular / with such cruel, placid insistence / just below my apartment / this summer evening, it’s almost / 11:30 and the voices” and and and. There was a big yellow splotch between that last “s” and “none,” the only color on the canvas. I was reading a lot of Buddhist stuff then — after I read several of them I told my best friend at the time, Dennis, that I was enlightened and that I didn’t need his friendship anymore. Now, when I google transient is this world substance it has none the first ten results are: 1) the Wikipedia page for Insomnia, 2) the Wiki page for “Chemical element,” 3) a lexicon of alcohol and drug terms published by the World Health Organization, 4) background info and statistics for the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, 5) a page called “Schizophrenia” at patient.co.uk, 6) a Harvard page called “Six Universal Substances or Entities,” 7) “Six Universal Substances (Dravyas)” at sacred-texts.com, 8) something called “A Buddhist View of Addiction,” 9) the full text of the Declaration of Independence and 10) “IB Biology/Option D” at Wikibooks. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow when is it going to stop hurting. In the coming BioSociopocalypse, no longer able to afford the $10 to top up your Tesco Children and receive your 300 free minutes of caring for their sores, “His penis was about 7 and ¼ inches. He could do 60-70 press-ups in a minute.” And then a woman comes on stage and recites all the words of a 3 minute song. That song then starts playing at a delay of 15 seconds behind her recital. And then a massive cardboard heart with legs starts dancing next to them. What follows is a tangle of …things … Oh God it’s ridiculous. Come 15 years time, when everything is finally devoid of meaning and all mankind can do is bump into things blindly and say ‘buh’, at least when that comes, at least there’s that, huh? Today, with its back booth coffee tarot and the domestication of household parrots, is almost gone; I look up [from this] and see the charred gold of the field beyond the neighbor’s garden. Is everything the place where you go to die? Outside the bright green grass of Middlesex is dotted with scarlet ravens -- ravens so black they looked red, pulsing with lemon-gold light, the light inside tubes, the soles of their feet stained with henna shapes in a paisley pattern. Something about him: he read The Waves as a way of learning – English. He decided to start, as he put it, “at the top.” I couldn’t get enough of the pre-fairy space, the New Mexico vibe. The Bizarre World of Chicken Beauty Pageants Photographed by Ernest Goh.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Jennifer Bartlett, FB post, 25 Mar 014; Jaleh Mansoor, FB comments, 25 Mar 014 (re: lichen); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, quoted in Craig Hickman, “James C. Scott on Peasant Resistance: Quote of the Day!”, at Noir Realism, 25 Mar 014; Eileen Tabios, “MMXXVII”, “MMXXIII”, “MMXXV(B)”, Aileen Ibardaloza, “MMXXXVIII”, in 147 Million Orphans (MMXI-MML); text embedded in image in Sandra Simonds, FB post, 25 Mar 014 (answer to “How do you become a celeb on Movie Star Planet?”); JBR, but see next; Michèle Bernstein, quoted in Dan Levenson, FB post, 25 Mar 014; caption to image embedded in Michael Joseph, FB post, 25 Mar 014; Dan Waber, at Bibliotheca Invisibilis, 25 Mar 014 (describing The Book of I); Joseph Bradshaw, “Total Fail, Part 2 by DB Guest Blogger Joseph Bradshaw”, at Drunken BoatM, 25 Mar 014; Lynn Behrendt, FB post, 25 Mar 014; Laurie Coldwel, “William Fergus Stuart – The Revival”, at The Tab Cambridge, 17 Feb 011; Bhanu Kapil, “Today”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Mar 014; “The Bizarre World of Chicken Beauty Pageants Photographed by Ernest Goh”, at Colossal, 25 Mar 014]
Comments