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In the House of the Hangman 1632

ON PLANET SNAUSERO THINGS STAY IN ANY ANGEL THEIR IN UNLESS SHOVED. MOVED. LIFTED HIS 130 TON CRAFT 40 INCHES UP OFF THE SURFICE AND IT JUST SAYED THAT WAY COKED OVER SIDEWAYS TILL HE REACHED UP AND PULLED IT DOWN ANY POSITION THINGS ARE IN IS WHERE THEY STAY EVERY CREATURE THERE HAD A SMALL THING IN HIS HAND BY WHICH HE USED TO DO ALL HIS MOVEMENTS SO THE LITTLE MAN GAVE HIM ONE. AND A EXTRY ONE. WITH A EXTRY HELMENT. SO FARSON TOOK THE HAND MACHINE IN HIS HAND AND ANY SIDE HE PUSHED OR SQUEEZE ON. HE WOULD START MOVING IN THAT DIRECTION SO YOU NEVER HAD I am the egg with film looped around it on the rectangular dish. I am the robot bomb detector. I am a whole airplane’s worth of I can’t quite see what. The buildings are burning. The buildings have been hit. I am as overexposed as the lower left quadrant of the Bible’s last photograph. The front part of the gallery — the foyer for the projected film — is a giant chess game, which functions as a collective space to develop a trompe l’oeil of the delirium. The patterns of the board — which also allude to a hospital floor — are invaded by a series of assemblages that function as the main organs of a sterile machine. Téllez asked patients from a daily clinic to imagine stories of the former patients who inhabited the deserted old cells, now closed and abandoned. 1816, for example, was the “Year without a Summer,” when temperatures fell drastically in many parts of Europe and North America. Climate researchers later blamed the massive 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia. In Bologna, an astrologist prophesized that the world would end on July 18, leading to riots and suicides. Due to the permanent bad weather, a group of young English poets sojourning near Lake Geneva gave up on going outside. They decided to write ghost stories and read them aloud to one another. We know about the career of nightly dream activity from romanticism through modernism in art, culture, and science. One of the first to problematize the dream text was arguably Nerval. For psychoanalysis, which arose at exactly the same time as cinema, the dream became a language requiring decoding, and like every interpretation, it reduced what was interpreted. The surrealists largely ignored the difference between dream and dream text. In “Dream Kitsch” (1925), Walter Benjamin’s first published commentary on Surrealism, the archaeologist of modernity clear-sightedly declared, “Dreaming has a share in history.” The path to the dreaming collective was hereby sketched out. In deliberate distinction from Freud, Bachelard placed reverie opposite dream. His gay, poetic science revolved around the border realms of rationality and their availability through images. The dark side of history can be found in Charlotte Beradt’s anthology from the 1930s, first published many years later: In The Third Reich of Dreams, dreams become historical documents. Sea World is a fucking horrible place. Fuck Sea World. I buy fluoride-free toothpaste because I’m trying to activate my pineal gland. I buy chocolate eggs and tea light candles. Everyone’s tongue is pink la-la-la. I do mountain pose in yoga and kill it. I kill that pose. I breathe out of my ears. Matter looks at the history of ‘charm consultants.” What does it mean to say that your mind and brain are ‘at rest’? Why Light Inspires Ritual. To get to brass tacks, Member is about a massive planetary-scale game called Chorncendantra that is ‘the human game’ but that involves multiple worlds both real and artificial. Our main character, Mr Thanks, is unexpectedly recruited into the game as a courier to deliver small cans of spells and prizes to a construction site. “Relaxing my mind had only brought about a causeless, meaningless sadness.” I mean, “Perched there, he aims carefully at something I have trouble making out. It’s a large, solid object that seems to be browsing along the sidewalk in its own special darkness; not a blob of shadow exactly, more like a dead, uninteresting haze of grey smoke that collects around it and projects out of it in a reverse spotlight. In overall shape, it resembles a human liver, all covered in imbricated scales. A felty, transparent caul seems to envelop the entire thing, and ripples out wrinkles and folds to palpate its surroundings, making the emitter seem both solid and liquid at once”. “In that faint, brief light, I see the tendrils of smoke from each little candle immobilized like ectoplasm calligraphy, trailing from the cake.” I mean, “Somebody left a salad out on the curb, with no bowl around it.” While on a residency at Machine Project in Los Angeles I sat with eyes closed and slowly, deeply chanted DRONE, DRONE, DRONE, feeling the ancient tone quiet me. After fifteen minutes I moved from a merely unflustered state to serenity. I chanted, DRONE, DRONE, DRONE. I went out to the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. Some people thought I was crazy, but MOST PEOPLE wanted to talk, already aware of the power of chanting OM. I asked them to chant DRONE with me, to chant. I walked into Echo Park and drew a target on my left palm with red ink. I put on headphones to listen to a recording of an Israeli military mission in Gaza called “Pillar of Cloud”, a fleet of drones BUZZING in the sky 24 hours a day mixed with bombs whistling through the sky, exploding targets. Listening to the recording as loud as I could, I chanted drone, drone, drone, taking notes at the water’s edge. DAY TWO: I took the ant map to a random part of the desert, followed it to a small rock, a kind of oblivion, unexpected but solid nonetheless. I sat on the rock like an egg, wanting to hatch the rebellion! How much straining! I drew the map on my naked body behind shrubs, my third eye the nest entrance, tracing the journey in reverse, taking notes of my every memory of doing what I was told, toward some standard of goodness. HOW do we create a kind, generous, but disobedient world? Later I took a strand of cooked spaghetti, arranged it in the shape of the ant map. When it dried I took it to the entrance of the nest. I said, “I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE OF YOU GAVE ME THIS MAP, BUT I’M GIVING IT BACK!”

[Note: Sources: Howard Finster, VISION OF 200 LIGHT YEARS AWAY SPACE BORN OF THREE GENERATIONS FROM EARTH TO THE HEAVEN OF HEAVENS : HOWARD FINSTERS VISION OF 1982, at this is water, this is water, this is water …, 16 Apr 09; JBR (my first (mis)reading); JBR, ekphrasis practiced on the photos in Revelations, in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible; “Javier Téllez, Games are forbidden in the labyrinth”, at e-flux; JBR; “Touch of Joy: Exercises in Imagination”, at e-flux; Ashley Opheim, “Killin’ It”, quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Ashley Opheim”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Mar 014; bits from Vaughan Bell, “Spike activity 28-03-2014”, at “Mind Hacks”, 30 Mar 014; Ben Woodard, and Michael Cisco, Member, quoted in Woodard’s “This World is Leaking: A Review of Michael Cisco’s Member”, at Naught Thought, 30 Mar 014; JBR; CA Conrad, “#101: FLYING KILLER ROBOTS PLEASE: A Proper Naming (Soma)tic Ritual”, “#98: Ant Cartography”, at (Soma)Tic Poetry Rituals, 30 & 28 Mar 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1631

We are drinking honey and lemon drinks to relax. I have been reading about mobbing, the subject of a work -- by a former student -- Swiss -- her name is K. Schaeppi. I remember her writing about mobbing in a post-industrial -- ? -- workplace; by post-industrial, I think I mean -- pharmaceutical. I think I mean -- something [a workplace] set in a laboratory but with luxurious communal dens where the staff could drink coffee on their breaks like in Drop Dead Diva. But with a view of the Alps. Products or the marketing of products was -- the -- topic … K. Schaeppi … was writing about, ancillary to mobbing. That was the first time I heard that -- word -- mobbing -- in Vermont -- in a verdant, ecstatic hollow. Kathrin -- stopped writing that book and went on to write a memoir -- of Sonja Sekula. Who was brilliant. Who died. There are a series of excruciating testimonials -- a friend -- a bodyworker -- just called -- to describe a treatment she gave to a young woman -- who did not have a stomach -- and above whom -- during the session -- helper spirits came. “Do you know what your nickname is, mom? Gilgamesh.” Wait. The value form doesn’t need abolishing, it needs exploding in history. In Acts 17, we read: “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said ‘we want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus.” We should not be surprised that this same passage, which ends with Dionysius’ conversion, begins with a sermon on ‘THE UNKNOWN GOD.’ As yet unnamed and unknown, the sixth century Areopagite – whose pseudonymous corpus has inspired the open burial and consecration of authorial identity in a luminous blackened scriptorium of secret press [HWORDE] within secret press [gnOme] where, writing neither as ‘oneself nor someone else,’ bergmetal theorist Denys X. Abaris presents his [or her] Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond [2014] – is responsible for what has been identified [explicitly by Niall Scott] as Black Metal Theory’s apophatic outlook [Metal Hammer, June 2012]. This outlook is intimately connected to a symbology and a teratology embodied by the monstrous male protagonist in Metal culture [see for example, Scott’s “‘God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil and the Diabolical Monstrous Human in Heavy Metal,’ Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil” (2007)], and is nowhere more evident than in INDEX by Stacy Doris. I mean, “Hey cobweb,” 237; “nut walk,” 110; air mile, 15; Babylonian doilies, 13; blood. See stiff blood of paradise, the; chaos. See solitude is chaos; charm-decked, 146; cobalt tarp, 139; Colour is structured like a market, 142; dearticulated and mirrored boundaries, 13-14, 100, 102, 104, 110-12, 203, 216, 238, 255; emotional. See Habit is emotional; end of sunlight, the real, 249; fogs trapped in glass, 58; fountains that want us to act like knowledge, 58; frames for our mortality, 203; Habit is emotional, 202; house of Goethe in a dream, the, 139 How should we adorn mortality now? See frames for our mortality; I became money, 1; inner ecology of gesture, 182; lint, 17; market. See Colour is structured like a market; mauveness, 15, 217; memory fattening, 27; Metaphor inflates an economy, 142; money. See I became money; now a dustbowl ringed in blackberries, 38; Ornament is the decoration of mortality. See frames for our mortality; pronoun caked in doubt, 256; public gorgeousness, 54-57, 78, 98, 103, 129, 144-45, 227, 233, 237, 243; purring, 77; roofliness, 15, 96, 110, 177, 179, 181, 183, 277; scumble, 142; Sincerity’s eroticism, 67; sleaze, 228, 238; Suburb, the. See primal shack-envy; texture of mortality. See frames for our mortality; Through gluttony we come to resemble history, 145; Under the pavement, pavement, 15, 27, 254; unusually trussed beams, 110; wall. See what a wall is without being a wall; We ate the cheese, 237; I survey / the experimental fencing. “Typos in the accidental, a species of form and will, when the form is ever so clearly: cadence as rot,” “during the period great piles of or life had erritory hardly.” One luckless expatriate was picked up and thrown into a trash can. The Jewish-Japanese Sex & Cook Book and How to Raise Wolves. The guy who created the iPhone’s Earth image explains why he needed to fake it. Kangaroos have three vaginas. Grills, ‘Grillz’ and dental hygiene implications. When adding is subtracting. Hire a Drone With Bitcoin. PotCoin. Sweden is the largest exporter of pop music. Why Dark Pigeons Rule the Streets. Can You Sue A Robot For Defamation? His animals get their energy from the wind so they don’t have to eat. Working independently from the late 1980s into 2007 Ademit collected evidence – through photography and meticulous note-keeping – that would establish the existence of cold rays, unseen forces that he believed severely impaired and impacted upon his life and surroundings. Ademeit made daily photographs of newspapers typically augmented with gauges, thermometers, compasses, clocks, and other measuring devices. He also made notes that recorded distances and other quotidian phenomena, as well as recording things beyond visual perception: smells, sounds, atmospherics, moods, etc. Ademeit used his Polaroid to document his surroundings. Starting initially with his immediate environment -- his apartment building, its basement and yard, and nearby houses -- he then moved further afield, scouring his neighborhood for traces of radiation damage. Construction sites, automobiles, bicycles, and garbage piles were all subject to his photographic studies, each precisely labeled with date, time, and location. “He lives in systems, and those systems live in him. His life is entwined in a network of terror spun by libelous neighbors, janitors, public authorities like health insurance, unemployment and benefit offices, radio and TV license inspectors, and a landlord with whom he was involved in years of legal proceedings. A system of terror that enveloped him like a negative aura, operating in the dark and keeping him under observation.” He protected himself with magnets and herbs. In addition, he lathe-turned 3,000 small spheres out of a wide variety of woods, to be worn about his person – in orifices such as the ears – in an attempt to deflect the rays. I like doing sound portraits – I get close to someone’s face, I take down the sound of the hair, the sounds of the skin, eyes and lips, and then I create a specific chord that relates to the face. Instant architect. Concert accessories.

[Note: Sources: Bhanu Kapil, “Fight the Tower, academic mobbing, Kathrin Schaeppi, the Alps, Thelonious, Jesus, Angel Dominguez, Goddard, Naropa and Gilgamesh: A Brief Survey by a Professor of Creative Writing who is in Bed with a late winter flu”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 28 Mar 014; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, FB post, 29 Mar 014; Edia Connole, “‘Leave Me In Hell’ [excerpt from ‘What is Black Metal Theory?’]”, at philosophynowncad, 29 Mar 014; Stacy Doris, “Index”, in Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, at Publication Studio; JBR; Michael Farrell, “reading [ ...] with the light on”, in the thorn with the boy in its side, at Oystercatcher Press; Stephen Collis & Jordan Scott, DECOMP, quoted in Susan M Schultz, “Nature Unwriting: Stephen Collis & Jordan Scott, DECOMP”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 29 Mar 014; bits from Imp Kerr, “Triple-Decker Weekly, 99”, at The New Inquiry, 29 Mar 014; “White Room Horst Ademeit”, at White Columns (5 Mar – 17 Apr 010)]

Der Maler / The Painter (c. 1920) by Hannah Höch (tr. Fiona Elliot), in Hannah Höch (exhibition catalog for the Whitechapel Gallery show, 15 Jan – 23 March 014)

Once upon a time there was a painter, but he wasn’t called Splat, or something like that, as he would have been in the olden days. Because this was around 1920; our painter was a modern painter, so he was called Heaven. And he didn’t only work – as people used to expect of real painters – with a brush and palette; this was the fault of his wife, who thought nothing of interrupting his unbounded flights of genius. She was the reason why, during the course of four years, our painter found himself obliged to was the dishes, the kitchen crockery, four times. One time, there was in fact a good explanation, which was that she had just brought little Heaven into the world. But on the other three occasions Heaven Senior could not at all see why it was necessary. Still, for the sake of keeping the peace (the Lord God did specifically create the man for this purpose), in the end he had no choice but to bow to her Xanthippean command, But these moments subsequently weighed on him, casting a dark shadow; he felt degraded as a man and as a painter.  During the nights after the days in question he became obsessed with certain ideas. He kept seeing Michelangelo washing up cups. He had looked into psychoanalysis in enough detail to feel that he could directly confront his wife with the fact that, whatever reasons there might be for what she had done, demands of this kind only ever rose from a lust for power and, even if he, as a modern man, would in theory stand up for the equality of the sexes, well, nevertheless – in the cool light of day – and in any case – in his own four walls – and – any similar demands on her part would surely be tantamount to the enslavement of his spirit …

One day he started – from some dark urge (he was full of dark urges) – to paint a picture, in which he wanted to repre… cube the similarity of wild chives to a woman’s soul. In theory all the problems were already solved. He had, with the precisest mental acuity, discovered that there is a hollowness that fills each of these objects from top to bottom. In addition – and he was helped in this by his specially equipped instincts, for the mind alone maketh not a genius – he had also managed, somehow (in a rather mystical way), to make a connection between the serpentine form of the herb and said soul. Geniuses can never deny a dose of mysticism. But in principle, as he had heard from other members of his own sex, these often highly malleable little women could not always be moulded and formed in a matter that would ensure one’s psychic and physical comfort – which deeply wounded our Heaven. No doubt this was the reason why his dark urge compelled him to grapple with this particular problem in paint on canvas. Had he been a writer, he would have had to enrich literature with some weighty tome on the theme of “when you go to your woman, don’t forget your whip”. As it was, however, his picture was to be called Chives and the Soul of Woman (a Comparison). I think it had already been earmarked for the exhibition, even when the canvas was in a state of immaculate conception. Everything had to be done in due time. Gotthold, which was Heaven’s first name, suffered, like all of manhood, under the impact of the problematic female soul. But we all have to deal with the things that cause us suffering. So surprise that Heaven, seeing himself (and having made the comparison) as a redeemer, let’s admit it, as Christ, quietly accorded himself that same status. But now imagine – in an infinitely clearly articulated, cubist painting – the female soul dissected in a positively scientific manner, so that anyone tuned into abstraction can see, that’s her, that is what she is like in her very essence. And then the comparison, as a parallel, with the chives. Would this not be crystal clear to everyone? And who has never heard of “Know the illness and cast it off”? What prospects opened up following the making of this painting? Did it not provide the solution to the most urgent question of our time? But, as we so often have to concede, theory and practice are not one and the same. – For after a goodly two years and two days of creating this painting, he still had not progressed beyond the chives, despite creating and creating. Firstly, the painting remained stubbornly green. As soon as he added a different colour, it upset things, and he would paint it green again. At one point he became convinced that the treachery that filled the female soul (along with the hollowness) could only be cubed into the painting in the form of a lemon-yellow spiral, like a spring in a sofa that circles upwards in the crookedest way. But, sad to say, painting is not only form, but also colour, and since the yellow refused to comply with the plentiful green of the chives-allegory, there was nothing for it but to remove the crooked spiral again. As a painter, one does have to remain an aesthete to the extent that one can never paint a bad picture at the expense of ones own soul. And it was much the same with the composition of this painting. However hard he tried, even going into ecstasies, all that emerged was the tedious up and down of the chives motif. Time and again he tried to smuggle again a really complicated squiggle that could be identified with the accursed soul of woman, but his still-objective eye was merciless, telling him that his twirlicue clouded the mighty melody of the sweep of the chives. On day, when his dearest friend had seen the painting and had said that it had a strength that manifested itself in an overwhelming monoton… no, that’s not what he said, harmony, Heaven decided, with a heavy heart, to drop the female soul and in the future to just concentrate on the chives.

One month later. The president is propelling his presidential belly through the countless rooms of the exhibition (which he has just opened) with works by the entire artisthood of his realm. Suddenly he stops in his tracks. He is visibly moved. Attentively his companion observes his features. Words fall slowly from his lips: “A masterpiece,” he stammers. Has anything better ever been made during his time at the helm? – he gazes questioningly at those around him. That abundant green, what is it that it calls to mind? Helpfully, his adjutant – or is that not the correct designation for one who helps a republican president out in his moment of need? – chips in, “the revolution, Mr President.” “Absolutely – the revolution.”

It is said that this painting was bought by the state for the National Gallery. It is said that when its maker was asked what the title of his painting was, he left the chives out, and proudly declared The Soul of Woman. It is said that Gotthold Heaven is the next Nobel Prize winner in waiting. 

In the House of the Hangman 1630

So, the Wu Tang’s next album is an edition of one. Forget tickets for Kate Bush, if you want nuff aura you need to rent time with the contents of this metal box, via a trip to a museum. Or you could just buy it outright and then let it out to everyone else who's willing to pay (Samsung-style ) ... Is this the official end of the fabled democratising powers of mechanical reproduction – RZA’s soi disant re-‘privatisation’ of the record – or the definitive end of the ability to extract monopoly rent through ownership of recorded material (when someone leaks the files)? Illuminating to see the RZA still holds on to the direct equivalence of money and (use) value: music, he sez, has been devalued by being ... devalued. CREAM remains the motto, and yet it would seem cash has generally been over-ruled by constant capital. This attempt to make a unique object do the job that elsewhere a live performance is supposed to do, providing a scarce commodity to which there is limited access, seems rather like Damien Hirst’s experiment with the diamond skull, something which would make a lot more sense if one has simultaneously constructed a series of moves in more virtual money-like instruments to accompany the transaction(s). It also makes one think that bling (which is one thing both ‘artworks’ have in common) is the physical attempt to give material form to an ever more elusive value (form); bling is not just the signifier of new money looking for somewhere to (portably and visibly) store and advertise itself, an aspirational expression of conspicuous, auto-didactic, consumption, but also a desperate attempt to make money be money, to … Anyway, kind of a big gimmick and a total joke, but also something to keep cultural studies professors in biz a bit longer too generating questions for screeds such as these (if they’re not given away for free, uniquely, here on Facebook) ... Anyway I enjoyed writing this and might stick it on Mute somewhere – if you would like to see it published there please express your enthusiasm and recognition for my GZAlike genius using the currency (whose basis is the time it takes the consumer to assimilate and / or ‘like’ the ‘free’ ‘commodity’) known as ‘likes’ … Anyway, during the nights after the days in question he became obsessed with certain ideas. He kept seeing Michelangelo washing up cups. He had looked into psycho-analysis in enough detail to feel that he could directly confront his wife with the fact that, whatever reasons there might be for what she had done, demands of this kind only ever rose from a lust for power and, even if he as a modern man, would in theory stand up for the equality of the sexes, well, nevertheless – in the cool light of day – and in any case – in his own four walls – and – any similar demands on her part would surely be tantamount to the enslavement of his spirit … (‘Der Maler’, by Hannah Höch; “he was asked to wash the kitchen dishes on four occasions in four years … On the first occasion … the painter’s wife had asked for help with the washing-up because she was giving birth to their first son. The other three occasions had not seemed absolutely necessary to the painter, who was called Heaven.”) Is it not advanced, does it not advance us, / can we not find superbig waveform rhetorics / in all this? / … / Unlike the president I am expert in these matters, nor is it Berrigan, nor Whitman, nor Hölderlin / my pedant, but Goreguts and Gorgoroth! / Though Xasther a fascist Monkees be, I praise him! / Praise to Pig Destroyer’s titular powers! Cannibal Corpse always, Burning Witch always, / because Nuclear Assault, because High on Fire, / because … / Because Ronnie James Dio is dead! / …  / Oh measly are the winning ways, and mad / is my mind, for it loves! / … / Why can’t I burst, inventing new moons / Made of lungs and old bones, to move / Like Phobos moves, unhinged by gravity, / Poor in resources but catching light? / I do not mean what I say. / … / I have invented means of amusing myself. / … / My liver swells, it wants to reach the world / and get washed in the lake. In my forthcoming novel a German anti-imperialist liberation battle group hole up in the Chauvet Cave where they conduct a thirty-year psychedelic sex orgy, whilst discussing all the key texts of Mao (around 500pp), before the cave is discovered by Roland Simon, who expounds to them the doctrine of communization (300pp), converts them and they embark on a prairie fire communization process leading to world communism (3pp). BTW, was just thinking: Wu-Ming => Wu-Tang (value-formed like voltron; german hippie maoists in caves in riff mountains & hassan i sabbah not included): http://www.metamute.org/... /nuff-aura-absolute-artwork ... Wondering if it’s time for a communising art/ist collective that explicitly adopts the tactic of Single User Identity (SUI). Each writes under their own name, and connected by some immaterial threads (u know like some kind of inter- ... net?) generates completely individuated texts that are nevertheless entirely collectivised? As opposed to Jameson’s ‘universal (US) army’, this would be a completely particular guerrilla army of egomaniacs connecting across global (not merely federal) borders. The name could be We-Ting, maybe? Of if the german maoists want in, Woe-Tan? Not sure how this will reverse global warming but seems practicable, indeed it’s already happening. Woe-Tan Clones aint nuthin to fuck with ... X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a / Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country where / They make their own cardboard … a thousand eyes but only one / Kaleidoscope. /  / Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of that / Nothing shines through. No grin, no cat. / But I think: / … / You. They say it doesn’t matter that you can’t read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. “Just leave it in your house.” Amazing debilitating magic at the door! / I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgive / My antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. I begin with this calamitous trajectory because it says something about the avant-garde in general. What was it, anyway? The parable of the Constructivists in Lenin’s car suggests that it was a certain proximity to revolution: not to the idea of revolution, but revolution as a concrete reality. And it suggests that the destiny of the avant-garde was tied to revolution’s failure. The real intervention is the transition from one dialectic to another, and that transition is itself the index of the real movement of history. Here is where the discourse from Burger to Buchloh to Badiou [the later maybe] is overcome: “I will propose a different chiasmus, then. Let us say that in the era of programmatism it was art’s self-destruction that was posited as the condition of the proletariat’s self-affirmation. In the era of programmatism’s fading, however, it is the horizon of the proletariat’s self-abolition that is the ground of the artistic mark’s mediation with the social totality and hence of art’s contingent phasing in and out with the real movement of that totality’s negation.” Note well that the “abolition of this is the condition of that” logic no longer inheres; and when a plastic tree, far away, really does look bigger than its exact duplicate — which is right in front of your eyes — but what if their skin, too, began to smell of fire? I think in the rings you blow from your fingertips. In their gut I contain bricks when I am thinking in seven rings, which are gears, I built this excuse for expression to speak to you in secret of my autoimmunocentric orb Notebook … I swear! Like Echoism: “Making people symmetrical since 11/1/11”. The process is a face-to-camera portrait, the image is split into a left and a right section, then one side is horizontally flipped. These images are recombined to create two separate and symmetrical identities of the subject. His face says: These were the walls of insomnia / Where Dante became incontinent and feeble, / Twirling his eighteen inch Asian penis; / Where God sat in an antique electric chair / Preaching the gospel of a heaven made of iron; / Where doctors and lawyers / Burned their faces with lighted cigarettes; / Where human excrement was soap / And patients removed imaginary wires from their throats; / I am a fine French chef! / I wear a bow tie with jeans! / There is something amazing in my cupped hands! On the front-end, Satellite Methane Tracker comprises a series of tools, integrated to provide an interactive, geographically accurate visualization of methane emissions. All the methane emissions measurements come from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) instrument, aboard of the MetOp series of polar orbiting satellites of the European Space Agency (ESA). The original satellite imagery is coming from the Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO), part of the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), which is part of NOAA. “I remember when your head caught flame”, quoting Lorde. But what I really want to talk about is Michael Jackson. The follow up to Thriller should have been called Smooth Criminal, with the eponymous track as the lead single and video, and a streamlined tracklist that repositions “Bad” to subsidiary single status and ditches mediocrities like “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”, “Liberian Girl”, “Just Good Friends”, and “Another Part of Me” (notable for its bizarre inclusion as the backing track of what was clearly supposed to be the “Thriller” sequence of the otherwise amazing Sega Moonwalker), (the best parts of which are when he summons his enemies into a mini-synchronized dance number in order to dance them to death). In other words, for society, there is no ‘noise’ qua noise; ‘noise’ always exists as something … This takes us, by way of a seemingly minor route, to the very heart of the question of the social: everything that is, in one way or another, grasped or perceived by society has to signify something, has to be endowed with signification, and what is more, it is always already grasped in and through the possibility of signification, and it is only as a result of this possibility that it can be finally [I question that “finally”] defined as devoid of signification, insignificant, or absurd … For an identitary automaton (or for what amounts to the same thing, for a completely formalizable calculus) to say that a term is means that it has a recognizable form that is determined and predetermined (it is an instance of a given eidos). And to say that a term ‘has a meaning’ (actually an abuse of language) is to say that this form determines the entry of this term into a determined and predetermined syntax of operations. (Of course, what is not or has no meaning for the automaton can act on it and, even, partly or totally destroy it.)

[Note: Sources: Benedict Seymour, “Nuff Aura: Absolute Artwork Meets Absolute Desperation”, at Mute, 28 Mar 014; JBR; Hannah Höch, “Der Maler” (tr. Fiona Elliot), and Dawn Ades, “Hannah Höch, Dada and the ‘New Woman’”, in Hannah Höch (exhibition catalog for the Whitechapel Gallery show, 15 Jan – 23 March 014); Greg Purcell, “The New Music”, at Route Nine, 27 Mar 014; Benjamin Noys, FB post, and Benedict Seymour, appended comment, both 28 Mar 014; David Shapiro, “Gold and Cardboard”, at Poetry Foundation (from Poetry, Sept 010); Daniel Spaulding, “Value-Form And Avant-Garde”, at Mute, 27 Mar 014; Jaleh Mansoor, FB post and comment, 28 Mar 014 (see previous); Kit Schluter, “What If”, “Toward Becoming Literal”, at Bomb, 28 Mar 014; JBR; Julian Wolkenstein, at Echoism; Nico Alvarado, and Frank Lima, quoted in Alvarado’s “Frank Lima, 1939–2013”, at Boston Review, 26 Mar 014; “Quick Introduction”, at Methane Tracker; Dan Hoy, “From the Motherland: The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson and Its Consequences”, at Montevidayo, 28 Mar 014; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (tr. Kathleen Blamey)]

In the House of the Hangman 1629

But isn’t it the point between noise and signal, rather than one or the other, that holds out some chance of escape? I mean, isn’t my sculpture the space between your face and this page? Four thirty three. Eventually they will experience a metal breakdown which will leave them in the feeble position. Only Jesus could icefish in summer, tho as you must know by now I am an infidel and can only guess at the faith it takes for that to mean. Jameson notes in passing that ideology might be defined as mistaking superstructure for base. Here it is: it will cost something like a dollar an image for each reproduction of art work by Manzoni or Fontana but Factum I and II will cost thousands. There ya have it culture bitches. Thankfully The *Mellon* just rode in on its thoroughbred. You can take the girl out of Pittsburgh but not the Pittsburgh out of the girl. The fates OWE me this $$$ and they will PAY. The resulting code tells the story in detail: A first line uses either shortLine(), oneNounLine(), or compoundCourseLine(). A second line uses either riseAndGoLine(), butLine(), exclaimLine(), or nailedLine(). The ways these specific types of lines are generated, and the ways the stanzas are arranged, can all be traced in the JavaScript program that implements Sea and Spar Between. This program, which includes the arrays holding all of the words used, is fairly small and simple. For instance, the Sea and Spar Between code, without comments, has fewer characters than the file that implements the vector font. Dear Paula, … the dark but tranquil waters of this lake or river – nothing but the sound of gentle splashing among the rushes by the shore, beneath the first stars – where the ferryman of my fable is waiting, begin to tremble, and soon there are waves, and behind these great waves, in the darkness of night already fallen, amid the din of what sounds like a landslide, I hear howling, barking, strange laughs, cries: so many people standing in their boats: young and old, men and women, ageless children, soon they will all parade before the little boy who is speaking shyly, sadly, to an unknown man whom he is gazing at imploringly and whom he fears but who, he senses, wishes him well if you’re a kind of thing whose lack of fit is endemic, if you sense that the bad life is impersonal and political while also overclose, it structures living as organically as anything about you, such as having had the trunk of your own body your whole life, stretching, bloating, twisting, holding you up, taking blows, manufacturing joys in the cracks, and being outlined by fabric that discloses so little that nakedness is always    we know the names       of those responsible for the massacre       of the insulted and the truly wretched                 the numerology of riots       scatters calendars debts        our persecutors are swifter than eagles         they pursued us on the mountains    algebraic recitation scratches      laid wait for us in the wilderness        if you get what we’re saying            light and heat and birdsong         our obscure tasks at daybreak      Alas, Jack, seems I cannot requiem thee without requieming America, and that’s one requiem I shall not presume, for as long as I live … For though the tree dies the tree is born anew, only until the tree dies forever and never a tree born anew … shall the ground die too … Yes though the tree has taken root in the ground the ground is upturned and in this forced vomitage is spewn the dire miasma of fossilific trees of death the million-yeared pitch and grease of a dinosauric age dead and gone how all brought to surface again and made to roam the sky we breathe in stampedes of pollution      things my brother has liked on Facebook:

• jesse ventura
• quickmemes
• 3 doors down
• *Well, if that isn’t the skank calling the whore a slut.*
• world of warcraft
• The Lennon Prophecy
• adam sandler
• Zen & Everyday Extraordinary Life

I’ll be giving a series of lectures at Deleuze Camp in Osaka at the end of May. OK. Working over the past few years, I’ve designed a new system to produce unique two-dimensional “shapes.” This system allows me to make enough unique shapes for every person on the planet to have one of their own. It also allows me to keep track of the shapes, so as to insure that no two will ever be alike. Following the present rate of birth, it is generally estimated that the world population will “peak” sometime during the middle of the present century, and then possibly begin to decline. How many people will be alive at this peak are estimated at between 8 billion and 20 billion people, depending upon what factors are considered and who is doing the considering. The most recent estimate published by the United Nations puts the figure at around 9.1 billion in the year 2050. To make certain that my system will be able to accommodate everyone, I have organized it to produce over 31,000,000,000 different shapes. Having said that, there’s an anecdotal parallel between Master Janus who, while preparing to initiate Axël into the occult mysteries, asks his pupil whether he is ready to accept “light, hope and life.” Axël replies “no” which I can relate to — & recalls an experience I had w/ Salvador Roquet who once asked me the same question … whether I was ready to accept “light, hope and life” … asking me to step outside the room we were in and pass through a door where the light from a dazzling day was streaming in — I couldn’t. I told him so and somaticized my response immediately consumed w/the most excruciating pain, my feet feeling as if someone had basted them with napalm and set them ablaze. Sure I Want to Go to Egypt. The Only Trouble Is, I Want to Go to Ancient Egypt! The urban Vodou / culture of Elsinore. Shiva at the zoo with her death fan and the 10,000 year-old wailing relics of insane dead Merovingian kings, whose investigations into the occult won for them perfect vision beyond the grave, who now live in teepees on Venus. Christian Cabbalists, too, fed you dark confections. Cool. Cold-blooded. Even, writing below zero, I’m the hero of a thousand zeroes. The Five Finger Death Punch maybe comes close as well. Strange times. His note to me misspelled the word “singularly” as “sungularly.” Years later I was to be deported from the U.K. because of that misspelling. “Parfaupe ouclaspa nannanbryle anaphi ologi psycocline ixispad anlana e’ghia n’ rbiol’ oblijouter tetumaine ennoconc.” (Jacques Lacan) “Fa ra fa ra bo ra sa ba rara ba rara roro radara sa ra podo no floro.” (Wm. Blake) Yes. A redefinition of the social contract. With Thunderdomes. And machetes. But do you have the wound? The plastic factory in China? The reading habit of a meathook? Now, I’ll ask you what I wish I could ask Racine. Orphaned and imprisoned, how did you ever learn to write 17th century classical French like Jean Genet? na who will be th. The condemnations were accompanied by an even more frenzied hunt for the missing manuscript: rumours spread of texts circulating in Europe and De tribus was (in Minois’s phrase) ‘in the process of becoming a reality’. ‘People claimed to see the book everywhere,’ he writes. ‘They confused it with other books; they fabricated fakes, which others bought at the price of gold; and they did this while cursing the work.’ (In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, criss-crossed Europe in the 1650s looking for De tribus, flinging out rewards for information. Her diplomat Salvius was rumoured to have tracked down a manuscript after a lifetime of searching but, according to his confessor, guilt overtook him and he burned his copy shortly before he died of ‘excessive sexual activity’. De tribus had been a rumour since the 13th century, but in the early 18th it became a reality, several times over: multiple versions were written, in print and in manuscript, in different languages. [...] A Latin manuscript, De tribus impostoribus, seems to have been in circulation in late 17th-century Germany. The Protestant minister Johan Friedrich Mayer had a copy in his library, which brought agitated requests from readers, a few of whom were permitted to make copies. After Mayer died, and after much petitioning, Leibniz was granted permission to read the text, watched over by Mayer’s son. ‘The work consisted of 14 leaves and 28 pages in a small folio,’ Leibniz wrote in 1716. ‘One could read nothing more execrable, more impious, or even dangerous … The style is full … of affected gallicisms. The fourth page of the work has been almost entirely effaced with a pen, apparently because of the blasphemies it contains.’ This manuscript, purchased in 1716 by Prince Eugen of Savoy and now in the National Library of Vienna, appeared in print in 1753 in Vienna with the false date of 1598. [...] Some claimed there was a copy in Italian. Responses and refutations of De tribus began to appear too, as did denials on the part of those accused of writing them, including Peter Arpe, who nevertheless admitted to having ‘held … [a copy] … in his hand’. At some point between 1712 and 1716, a forged letter from Frederick II to Otto of Bavaria began to circulate, purporting to confirm the 13th-century origins of the (in fact newly composed composed) text. But perhaps the original is soon to surface. Today in the mail I receive this:

Delivery Notice,

We are courier delivery service. (Cargo Forwarders) This notification is to inform you that you have a package in our cargo unit on transit in Rome, Italy. It has been on hold awaiting pick up. You are expected to call or email us with a confirmation of the exact recipient address. Recipient Postal Details required are stated below;

FULL NAME:

ADDRESS :

TELEPHONE NUMBER :

From our database, it shows your package is coming in with a high priority delivery (highly classified package), so you should attend to this case promptly. You have to Confirm if you wish to come to ROME for pick up of your package or if you want us to deliver to you in your location.

For more info, call us on: +393 288 796 421, and write us email at cargo.forwarders@aim.com Note this is a highly valuable delivery and so, you must attend to all messages without further delay.

Looking forward to a prompt response from you.

Sig. Adolf Martin
Package Recovery Unit
Admin section 1
+393 288 796 421.
cargo.forwarders@aim.com

[Note: Sources: John Armstrong, in an email, rec’d 27 Mar 014 approx 2:10 PM PDT; Jesse Glass, “My Sculpture”, at Sonoloco; John Cage; text of image embedded in Christine Straitt, FB post, 27 Mar 014; Abraham Smith, Only Jesus Could Icefish In Summer; JBR; Jaleh Mansoor, FB post, 27 Mar 014; Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland, “Sea and Spar Between”, at Dear Navigator, Winter 010; Yves Bonnefoy, “The Curved Planks, Dear Paula, and a note on Paula Rego” (tr. Anthony Rudolf), at The Fortnightly Review, 1 Aug 013, via wood s lot, 27 Mar 014; Lauren Berlant, “Try to Forget”, at berfrois, 27 Mar 014; Sean Bonney,  “Lamentations 4 – 6 (6)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 27 Mar 014; Gregory Corso, “Elegiac Feelings American”, as seen at wood s lot, 27 Mar 014; Zoe, “things my brother …”, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 27 Mar 014; Jeffrey Bell, “Osaka”, at Abberant Monism, 27 May 014; JBR; Allan McCollum, “The Shapes Project”, at Allan McCollum, via Jessica Smith, FB post, 27 Mar 014 (“Note: Contrary to some errors made in certain press articles, McCollum's Shapes are not “generated” in a computer with an invented or scripted “program.” Every shape is laboriously created by the artist using Adobe Illustrator — a common, everyday graphics program — by drawing little parts, cutting and pasting the parts into bigger parts, then cutting and pasting those parts into even bigger parts, and so on, and keeping track according to a written protocol, to insure against repetitions. The first exhibition of the project, in 2006, took around two years to complete.”); bits from Frederick Farryl Goodwin, and Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle quoted in Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s “Tales from the Crypt: Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle interviews Frederick Farryl Goodwin”, at Montevidayo, 27 Mar 014; Gene Tanta and JBR, FB comments, 27 Mar 014; Kuchera Siggers, “Mutative”, email rec’d 27 Mar 014 approx 7:00 PM PDT (this is the complete text); Adam Smyth, quoted in “Imaginary Books”, at Languagehat, 27 Mar 014; JBR; “Package Recovery Unit”, email rec’d 28 Mar 014 approx 7:29 AM PDT]

In the House of the Hangman 1628

The Opening of the Apartheid Mind : Options for the New South ...

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Because you go through Heathrow or any airport and you go, What’s behind that hollow cardboard wall? And he decided to find out, so he spent time there, and every time I’ve been through Heathrow since then, I know what’s behind those walls. The way the whole airport shakes every time an airplane lands, you’re like, ‘Am I in a structure or just a diagram of a structure?’ You’re not really sure. Added to the fact that there are no clocks there, either, so you’re sort of lost in this flimsy world, which is the way they would like to keep it. Omama planted the amoa hi song trees at the edges of the forest, where the earth comes to an end and the sky’s feet are rooted, held in place by the giant armadillo spirits and the turtle spirits. Here these trees tirelessly distribute their chanting to the xapiri who rush to them. These are very tall, decorated with shiny down feathers of blinding white. Their trunks are covered in constantly moving lips, ranged one above the other. These innumerable mouths let out splendid songs, which follow each other as countless as the stars in the sky’s chest. Their words are never repeated. As soon as one song finishes, the next one has already started.

1.

2.

3.

4,

Yrs. Hal

 

 

 

 

 

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Revelation etched his eyes when he heard her sing mathematical formulas.

 

 

 

 

 

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But can symmetry ever rely on memory?

 

 

 

 

 

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The villagers recognized a new beginning when a sudden wind bent the trees backward.

 

 

 

 

 

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As a student, she was flawless.

 

 

 

 

 

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When she mentioned the possibility of forgetting “what it was like before pain,” the postman fingered his empty sack and understood a new pain from knowing the possible only as possibility.

 

 

 

 

 

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In exchange for electricity, they accepted a colonizer’s alphabet.

 

 

 

 

 

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To treat asthma, drink nothing but the liquid from a pigeon’s egg for 40 days.

 

 

 

 

 

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The clicking is what freaks y’all out? Speaking of affirmation and negative dialectics. Sugimoto embarked on this project in the late 1970s and continued until he had a portfolio of photos of “shining screens” and their surrounds, taken all around the united states. Among his most famous works, Theaters has given rise to a number of interpretations, some complementary, come contradictory. It is my view that the real drama of the shining screens does not lie in the surrounds, the proscenium arches, the empty seats, etc. While those are also of interest, the question for me is: What might it “mean” (aesthetically, ontologically, psychologically, ecologically, politically …) to overinscribe a surface with light until all temporal and material details “disappear” (or do they)? In order to allow the viewer to do her own thinking about this before I offer my interpretation, Volume 1, which is made up of nothing but details of the “shining screens”, is being published first. Volume 2, which will require watching and analyzing all the films shown that enabled Sugimoto’s photos to achieve their effect(s), will follow sometime within the next two years. So we are all, at the cellular level, operating on “super under human levels of trust.” I mean, I laughed out loud in that scene when Kathy Acker is resurrected. And then there’s so much about dreaming, the dream life and the waking life, the influence of one over the other, the confusion as to which is more “real,” which makes me think of Lovecraft, and then I was thinking of that South Park episode when Cthulhu is awoken … What happens to the ‘shifters’ ‘I’ and ‘you’ when — well, when they don’t cease to shift? How does ‘Wow’ respond to the information given? We come to identify with the ‘friend’ who is introduced in the next line, who ‘faints at my feet’, and who will return a few lines later: ‘My friend is hurt’. As the static interference brings AOR song clichés into bastardised collage, ‘you’, its most vacuous trope (or its most ‘capacious’, depending on how you like your lyrics), also becomes its most elusive: ‘you refused’. It is a ‘you’, moreover, which ‘does’ — ‘The way you got of doing’, ‘the way you do’ — and does in an inimitable way (although what, precisely, is inimitable about it remains a subject for conjecture). But whoever this ‘you’ is, it ain’t us. And indeed, this is / is this? what the image of the ‘brick radio’ would tell us: What is being referred to of course, are the two ‘vacancies’ at Shoe Zone in Manchester (Vacancy Reference Number VAC000398914) and Peterborough (Vacancy Reference Number VAC000401850), both delivered by Babcock Training Limited. For the animals know their heightened diction. For if money is a form of poetry so is Detroit. For now we must live in geologic time and it scares us. For if an old dog is nice we protect it with our lives. For stripes are basic and should be worn. We were nearly always sleeping / Just past the sign that says / “Welcome Distinguished Mr. President” / Don’t stick your hand in the fryer I dare you / We slipped through bricks / So we said we would steal helicopters / All in red / And into a full body cast / Into breathable shards / For Blossom Dearie was a great poet. So. “Archaeology is a machine, certainly, but why miraculous? A critical machine, a machine which puts in question certain relations of power, a machine which has – or at least tries to have – a liberating function. I mean, “It must be underlined that I do not agree without restriction with what I have said in my books … Fundamentally, I write for the pleasure of writing.” I mean, in a discussion with psychoanalyst Hélio Pellegrino Foucault is accused of having an “extremely curious” position in relation to Oedipus. Foucault responds by suggesting that ‘Oedipus’ does not exist for him, and that he is interested in the figure mobilised in the texts Oedipus rex and Oedipus at Colonnus by Sophocles, along with other classical Greek sources. Foucault suggests that many analyses of Oedipus – it seems clear he is including Pellegrino – are pre-Deleuzian, though post-Freudian. He continues: You find me hateful [détestable], and you are right: I am hateful. Oedipus, I don’t know. When you say of Oedipus – this is desire, that is not desire – I reply: if you want. Who is Oedipus? What on earth is that? Pellegrino replies A fundamental structure of human existence. Foucault: Then I will reply in Deleuzian terms – and here I am entirely Deleuzian – that this is absolutely not a fundamental structure of human existence, but a certain kind of constraint, a certain relation of power that ... Oh my god — I just remembered I can fly. When you say I’ve got my head in the clouds do you mean that in a good way? What would you do for love? What would I do for love? What if we love each other but our answers are different? Are loquats loquacious? Will the plum and cherry trees bloom again this spring if they’ve already bloomed in winter? & if there’s no water? & again next year? What? You don’t like horses? I like Andrew’s idea to adopt a gaggle of kids and build a Mad Max biker gang in the desert of the future Bay, but do you too feel anxious while waiting for an elevator, not knowing who or what will be inside when the doors open? “Suddenly, the whole world might not even exist at all, right?” What is theory for? Why do I open 20 browser tabs every morning? Would it be more difficult to ignore the moon (as some fools do) if more than one satellited the Earth? Are my coworkers better at approaching waged tasks as ends in themselves, or have I too been fooled by their performances? Do they notice my work ethic waning? What has produced “one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums”? Is it both? Is it always both? This is neither innocent nor apologetic, but could actually seem borderline, since our initial thoughts were to give our very selves, in the form of biological samples, to those who would like to use them for grafts. This ultimate step may be on the point of being achieved thanks to the collector Geert Verbeke, who is open to this fundamental proposition that a collector of biotechnology art should have the work implicated in his / her own flesh. While we wait for this we have, according to his wishes, grafted all the 1996 samples onto the skin of a dead pig. “A small abyss becomes / larger with use”, is what I’m asking is, you know how “Chomsky once wrote, ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ What if he meant it? “And what if it were true only in subways, storage closets, and decontamination chambers?” Like, “The word smithereens does not exist in the singular.”

[Note: Sources: Sandy “The Opening of the Apartheid Mind : Options for the New South …”, spam email re’d 26 Mar 014, approx 9:01 AM PDT; Laurie Anderson, quoted in Roy Christopher, “Terminal Philosophy: A Cultural History of Airports”, at Roy Christopher, 16 Jan 012; Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (trs. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy); Jaleh Mansoor, FB comment, 26 Mar 014; Havard Johnson, comment appended to “Call for Participation”, at Bibliotheca Invisibilis, 26 Mar 014; Eileen R Tabios, “Footnotes to ‘The Virgin’s Knot’ by Holly Payne”, in I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved, at Bibliotheca Invisibilis, 16 Mar 014; Jaleh Mansoor, FB comment, 26 Mar 014; JBR, “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Theaters: Details (Volume 1)”, at Bibliotheca Invisibilis, 26 Mar 014; Dan Levenson, FB comment, 26 Mar 014; JBR; Janice Lee, “An Interview with Michael du Plessis”, at Entropy, 24 Mar 014 (re Du Plessis’s The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker); David Nowell-Smith, “Daniel Tiffany – Brick Radio”, at Shearsman Books, 15 Mar 014; Christian Garland, FB post, 26 Mar 014 (re: workfare); Greg Purcell, “On the New Poetry”, “Kalamazoo”, at Make 8; JBR; Michel Foucault, and Stuart Elden, quoted in Elden’s “A few translated excerpts from the discussion following Foucault’s ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’ lectures in Rio”, at Pregressive Geographies, 26 Mar 014; JBR; Jack Kimball, “Here’s a thought …”, at Pantaloons 26 Mar 014; bits from Alli Warren, “Lullaby and Goodnight”, at Harriet, 26 Mar 014; Marion Laval-Jeantet, “Self-Animality”, at [plastik], 3 Jun 011; SPD blurb for Kathleen Jesme, Albedo; JBR; K Silem Mohammad, SPD blurb for Marco Giovenale, Anachromisms; JBR; Geoffrey Gatza, quoted in Anne Waldman, SPD blurb for Gatza’s Apollo]

In the House of the Hangman 1627

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]

Bibliotheca Invisibilis - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Bibliotheca Invisibilis seeks to gather all sorts of conceptualizations of the Invisible. You are invited to participate by sharing your work(s) that presents the invisible (including but not limited to invisible text).

Your works can exist (and if there's a link I'm happy to link to it), or be imaginary. The key is to share the work with (some of) its underlying conceptualization. 

Please see Bibliotheca Invisibilis for more details. I am a curator, so feel free to ask me anything about this project. (And yes, we will be including relevant items in Craig Dworkin's No Medium (with Craig's blessing) as well as whatever else we can find.

In the House of the Hangman 1626

Set the city on fire. Teach them war. The mountains melted. She smote off his head, and they cried, about a thousand men and women. Every man unto his place. The hands of the children. From the womb to the day of his death. What [is] sweeter than honey? A razor upon mine head: if I be shaven then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any [other] man. Weapons of war. Et cetera. Some sky of hydraulic / spring     Some season ever / There is a spike in the air / So the tree for even / Everyone’s listening to someone in the air / a twig O branch / For why am I afraid to sing / O earth / I come to it at the edge / Put your map right with the world / To describe the logic of sight / That I came back to live / pull the surface onto target and / And since the change / the air burns / arrive at zero aperture. / The season folds into itself, cuts a notch in my. I become thinner. / He was going to take it to the next town. / Just a small song / If all the world says something / we think then we know something / don’t we? / It begins with socks in a drawer and continues to laundry bags to the future. / I am not a poet / This is my poem / No one lives there / I guess if we get to be here today / and watch this movie together / The small heart / Its linenlike thread / opens out / To be dark, to darken / to meet the world / Out of the old place and out of time / If I could tell you this / or tell where this is / or where on a given map / this being is / this combustion far off. / After all the sun we had. At twilight a salamander / Say it then or / sing it out / will appear in the core of the reactor. / Let it be thought breaking in your view. “They say pretty is / as pretty gives back to her community.” In New York and London, I met other investors who, like Heilberg, were stepping away from the paper world. A banker who told me about Ukrainian farmland-for-vodka deals had me over to his apartment, an airy corner loft in Tribeca. “Here’s the trick,” he told me. “All these collective farms collapsed once they decollectivized them, because they had no capital – the guys couldn’t afford tractors.” This was why vodka and a few months’ worth of grain went so far. Via a long-haired middleman he nicknamed Jesus, his investment bank, one of Wall Street’s big three, pursued not only thousands of acres of prime farmland but ostrich farms, a chocolate factory, and a Ukrainian pornography channel. The bankers flew through the countryside in a massive, double-rotor Soviet helicopter, landing in fallow fields and peasant villages, and helped introduce a crop of genetically modified, drought-resistant sorghum first developed on an Israeli kibbutz. … The Ukraine deal had ultimately fallen through – Jesus had demanded bigger and bigger cuts – but climate change was an area of endless growth. When Europe launched its emission-trading scheme, doling out carbon permits to coal plants and power utilities, the same banker had helped them “massively overrepresent” their emissions, then helped them sell the excess for hundreds of millions of dollars. “I was actually doing the carbon deals,” he said. “All that kind of shit. That was a big scam, too.” Is it emotions are likened to water? Growth – the Sequoia? Tree, names I don’t know – the desert sans name / or taxonomy / but / for this little burst, minute, pink to cactus red buds to take as measure. What was or is it in a / temporality / does not need us nor, without a mind, need itself. Thus, … it’s worse than the / puzzle it appears. The nearest village boasted a mere seven hundred inhabitants, who got by without modern farm equipment: the economy ran mostly on goats. I believe in the blob, where people who normally are not available may be and where they may be seen and heard, regardless of gender, color, orientation, class and whatnut. I can not explain the psychology behind “see me hear me” but it is not gender typical. The only ice. But shit what all the girls all the time having to hear everyone’s fatigue in that they show up, here's a good (and scary) example: And damn what I got to experience things worse than loneliness when peoples, hey only. Thus, everything everything everything. But the reality is usually finer stuff. And, above all others! It would get melty toward the end. They dream only of America / To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: / When his headache grew worse we / Stopped at a wire filling station. / “This honey is delicious / Though it burns the throat.” Different medium, but I read a review of a Brooklyn gallery show a couple years ago with this great sentence: “Owls are the new deer.” And yeah, Roscoe Mitchell plays in notation for future people / (futures that don’t fuck with pretty or ugly / But everything we thought of that way is / Full of holes and /  / The canal where the hairs now rise / Visible, huge as kelp trees hitting / A minor ant. I am guilty of caneophora, caryatid, and agora. They seemed to just roll off the tongue at times. How did they get there I wonder? Couldn’t be the BAPS bros :0 no I remember, I was reading lots of aesthetics and there was a caryatid in there and I went on a search and found out their hairdos often supported whole Greek institutional architectures ... The Ants is a study not of, but through, ants. Prima facie, The Ants is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. “Nouveau-ambitious” and “free-thinking”, found in the soups of dumplings and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nakayasu writes as the “industry of survival”. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non-mechanical pencil, or to “find” “it” “all” in the distance, the break, the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton? I have never actually read Bentham’s Panopticon ... but yeah, what could be better than Quaker prisons? What is a photograph? My favourite line from the textbook section on Cognitive Therapy: CT “allows the patient to experience emotional arousal and reality testing simultaneously”. I mean, “Is it reactionary of me that I love Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York?”

[Note: Sources: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible (a combination of [almost all] the passages they underlined (Judges)); Peter Gizzi, mostly but not always the first lines from the poems in the Periplum, and Other Poems section intermingled with the same from the Threshold Songs section, in In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011; Maureen Thorson, My Resignation, quoted in Adam Robinson, “Adam Robinson with Maureen Thorson”, at Everyday Genius, 24 Mar 014; McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming; Paul E Nelson, “Notes On Gone South”, at Paul E Nelson, 24 Mar 014 (on Barry McKinnon, Gone South); Peter E. Gordon, “The Intellectual and Other Wanderings of Walter Benjamin”, at The New Republic, 23 Mar 014; bits from Stina Kajaso, “How do you want to appear as a little girl?”, at SONOFDAD, 24 Mar 014; Anne Gorrick, “Lipstick Distances”, at The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 24 Mar 014; John Ashbery, “They Dream Only of America”, quoted in Tom Clark, “John Ashbery: They Dream Only of America”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 24 Mar 014; Franklin Bruno, FB comment, 23 Mar 014; JBR; Oki Sogumi, “Notes about Saturday music”, at Salted Bunny, 23 Mar 014; Anne Lesley Selcer, FB comment, 24 Mar 014; bits from Les Figues blurb for Sawako Nakayasu, The Ants; JBR, FB comment, 25 Mar 014; title of a show at the International Center of Photography, via Beth E Wilson, FB comment, 25 May 014; Hazel Sullivan, FB post, 25 Mar 014; JBR; Thom Donovan, FB post, 25 Mar 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1625

Once upon a time there were free-standing urinals for men all over Paris. They were smelly and discriminatory -- where were women supposed to do their business? -- but very convenient. Small monuments to the architectural styles of the day. They’re gone now. I like to think that they’ve been retired to a field somewhere, tho I doubt it. “Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the [dong’d] multitude.” Yes. Somewhere an Elysian field of Vespasians. And a troop of caretakers that feed them urine. Queneau has a poem about them. How did they come to be called Vespasians, Greg? Was he a patron of public bathrooms? Or did he scare the piss out of people? A la recherche des pissoirs perdus ... Many were capped by wee cupolas. Vespasian did say “Pecunia non olet” / “Money has no smell”, so apparently he had a keen interest in things olfactory. Where's Norman O. Brown when you need him? Okay, one theory is that Vespasian devoted much of the Roman imperial treasury to public works projects, including sewers and restrooms. It’s said that he was the only emperor who left Rome in better shape than it was when he took office. I had forgotten about his dying words, according to Tacitus, which make him a good guy in my book: “Oh, dear, I seem to be turning into a god.” My favorite Queneau story. Every year he handed out the Prix Queneau, to the author of what he felt was the best book of the year ... He’d dress in formal wear appropriate for the occasion and go to Le Halles and buy a bushel of oysters, then proceed to the author’s home, well before dawn, and ring the bell. When the sleepy-eyed winner opened the door, Queneau would thrust the oysters into his hands, and proclaim: “Tu me plait,” and leave. My servant is dead; forty thousand prepared for war / sky of clouds and birds / cut off our name from the earth / pile of corpses / princes of the congregation / destroy all the inhabitants of the land before you / pile of corpses / as for what happens in one thousand years, it’s ridiculous to worry about that given the immense growth of technology. I doubt that we’ll even be inhabiting human bodies by then given the speed bio-robotics is advancing. We will be part biology and part technology by then. Our individual consciousness will include not just our brains but also software and hardware implants or mixed with our stem cells. There will be no Starship Enterprise zipping around with 5000 people on it like some galactic aircraft carrier. Remnants of the giants / the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the king the kings / microscopic organisms. And all the men arose and went away: et cetera / electrodes (are those electrodes?) up and down an arm. River, apple, cave, paper, shutter, stamp, pine cone, $5 dollar bill, electrical outlet, needle lock piston, easel, mace, grenade, glass key, boot, sarong, pillow, lily, handcuffs, lobster bib, helicopter toy, world map, cat, candle, knife, book, knees, feathers, yogurt, ball of yarn, hand sanitizer, tv remote, bin, pin, mandolin, banjo, grey eye, frost, cat, egg shell, cactus, logs, bamboo, torpedoes, stripped lug nut, public fire alarm post, asteroid Ceres, tulip, iron, mop, sterno, poplar, lip print, T-square, telephone, Vitamin C: good-o, Anne, there’s poetry again. In 2007 I wrote a formula by which anyone could achieve a contemporary poem: “chaotic city + theoretical / philosophical language + glimmer of vulnerability + at least one but not more than three color words + something French, or at least German + birds + pop culture allusion x fracture / restraint = A POEM OF THE PERIOD CLEARLY IDENTIFIABLE AS SUCH” -- I think now one would have to include something about the economy? & maybe their friends’ names, some Greek. This is why Richard Rhodes finishes his description of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima with the following colossal Latour Litany: “Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses — 120 war-horses — musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art.” Or Whitman again in his litany of “long dumb voices” & of the outsiderness of all that is & isn’t “us”:

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the 
father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

I keep having this dream where I’m sitting at the bar in a place where I used to hang out, talking to one of my best former students as he tries to explain to me how he no longer wants to see things, he wants to see around things, and I feel it is very important to understand him but don’t. How about a MAXIMUM wage? According to some very high science calculations, there are about 90,000 requiems between here and the sun. While on a promontory broken off The screensaver image Of an ancient SE10 Madame C’s high cognates gather around boxes dropped By Ever Afterlife Balloonists working on the script Of Cargo Cults. They argue (the cognates) that a manifest Attached to shipment listing all collaterals and cogs Codes and codices for Mme’s Manifestoes which proclaim their faith in algorithms of an Unkown field of force. They’re cognizant and they can glow. They’re coeternal, and they rise to an occasion. Although they tell no story of their lives, their little trumpets blow. Love gets saner, stained into the glass. All countries must work together toward a mutual resolution of currency imbalances, or risk war, says the governor of the Bank of England, tasked with making the genital stage of Godzilla inevitable; but he is right, it’s the answer Jesus would give if pressed; the severance will yet amount to minus sweet fuck all. Your job is to be at that orgy and to experience maximum anxiety, write, and see what happens; it’s not a joke to say surplus grout of the myriad equivalents; at the source I is screaming or am; I sucked it anyway, not to go back; I think it was an excruciation to him and a probably morally significant embarrassment, because he never used it against me when I started punching his face in on the couch that my mother pissed herself on; get it back; why did I do that, smacking around with childish fists, deepening our wishes, blunting life in him and me; and smack that miniscule nameless boy who merely explained to me that my fantasy car for sale to him could be given wheels, when I wanted it to be flat and  just glide? After all sex disappears anyway. The articulated wooden doll, cotton beard and black glasses, holds up the slit-throat girl’s bleeding heart while a ship sinks in the distance, ballerina on a tightrope, balance, balance, since you don’t like Derrida I won’t even try to explain pharmakon. All right, at night, global warming be damned, it is a relief to fall asleep to the hum of an air-conditioning unit instead of the crackle of                                small arms fire. Do you mean something like the photograph of the Chinese execution in Tears of Eros, which Bataille owned and carried around, and yet never seems to have been able to get any further than? Yes – someone like Wittgenstein had the same problem with the gestalt switch. It’s exactly the same thing: it’s one thing that becomes two things and once that thing can oscillate both forwards and backwards, its demonstration of immanence makes it possible to just simply

• 7 white mushrooms
• 2 english muffins
• oil
• pb&j
• mirin
• soy sauce
• old, old quarter of an old avocado (refrigerated)
• the red hot chili peppers feat. salt n pepa

Make sure your wife is delivering a paper on Simone Weil at a comp lit conference. You are alone with your son, a toddler. Put two whole-grain english muffins (I use Ezekiel brand, so named because of the passage in the bible where u-kno-who says, “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger [plus whole-grain muffinzz, this line may have been added by King James]”, sounding not unlike the new Tiniawaren album but more surfey than bluesey and the opening credits roll) in the toaster oven. Buy a fucking peace muffin, OK, let’s get back to breakfast – Hey: Why do people frown on dads who smoke one hit of pot after their kids are asleep for the night, the baby monitor flickering quietly like a 19th-century candle? Is it safe to admit here that last night while my wife was out with Gerhard Richter and his extended family, deciding the bumblebee trapped inside my kitchen window needed to be freed, I readied a mason jar over its yellow body to trap it, tracing its frantic movement over the pane. Gathering courage I lunged with the jar ho! and was then shocked to see I had pinned the bee in-between the inner and outer rim of the jar, severing its thorax in half. Green liquid spilled from its popped abdomen like a Gushers fruit snack. When a great boss says “I kill you” lay your head across his laptop. Throw your documents in the river. Do not despise small documents. Massumi is drawing off of Deleuze, who in some sense is drawing off of Simondon. It is really Simondon, and not Spinoza who argues that affects are less individuated than emotions. Affects for Simondon are analogous to sensations: one revealing the exterior, the other the interior, but what they have in common is that they are ambiguous, defining more a problem, a tension, than a fixed state. In order for this flux to become stable, for distinct emotions to emerge from this flux of pleasure and pain, there must be unity and individuation. Sensation and affects are increasingly individuated, as their tensions give way to discernible perceptions and emotions. As Simondon writes, ‘Emotions are the discovery of the unity in living just as perception is the discovery of unity in the world; these two psychic individuations prolong the individuation of the living, the complement it, and perpetuate it.’ Passing from affect to emotions is not just an individuation of the sensation, but of the individual as well, one that cannot be separated from transindividuation. So the bird’s in the hand and now what? Thus The Outernationale begins. This trip around the sun is expensive. “Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien.” I mean, I once dreamed that I was in my room. Suddenly, my boots glided across the floor and climbed the wall. When they reached the top of the wall I shouted: “Send me post cards!” That’s true too! Have you ever seen Santa Sangre – it’s like the most amazing movie ever.

[Note: Sources: FB conversation between Mark Weiss, Gregory McNamee, Ira Lightman, Matthew Rothenberg, 23 Mar 014; Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible (a combination of [almost all] the passages they underlined and JBR ekphrasis of some of the photos pasted over the biblical text and Dennis Bryan Schell, FB comment, 23 Mar 014 (Joshua)) (Dennis believes that the notion of anthropogenic global warming is left wing bullshit, sigh, he even thinks Al Gore is on the left); FB comment left in response to Anne Gorrick, FB post reading “Give me a group of three random objects – it’s for a poem”, 23 Mar 014; JBR, but see previous; Anne Boyer, FB post, 23 Mar 014; JBR and Jerome Rothenberg, a bit from one of the commentaries in the anthology they / we are co-editing; Robert Archambeau, FB post, 23 Mar 014; text of sign in image embedded in CA Voters for The Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street, FB post, 23 Mar 014 (how the hell did they get into my FB feed? Whatever …); JBR, after a conversation with Anne Gorrick, 23 Mar 014; John Mathias, Laundry Lists and Manifestoes, and Keston Sutherland, Odes to TL61P, quoted in John Armstrong, “Marvell, Matthias, Sutherland and Information Quality”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 23 Mar 014; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on Lynn Behrendt, “Collage #116”, at Lynn Behrendt, 22 Mar 014; JBR; Crag Hill, “2 of Spades”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard, 23 Mar 014; JBR; Simon Baker, and Jake Chapman, quoted in Baker’s “Jake Chapman on Georges Bataille: an Interview with Simon Baker”, at Surrealism Centre; Quilty, “Solo Dad on Toast”, at Good Jobbbbbbbbb, 23 Mar 014; Nicky Tiso, “Parable”, at Grand Hotel Abyss, 23 Mar 014; J Hope Stein, “Chapter 7. Ballad of your Boss”, at HTMLGIANT, 23 Mar 014; Jason Read, “Affect and/or Emotions: Differentiation or Dialectic”, at Unemployed Negativity, 22 Mar 014; Peter Gizzi, “The Outernationale”, “This Trip Around The Sun Is Expensive”, in In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011; JBR, but see previous; “Lorem Ipsum” (tr. Jaspreet Singh Boparai), quoted in Alison Flood, “Lorem ipsum translated: it remains Greek to me”, at Guardian, 21 Mar 014; JBR; Duval, quoted in “Children’s Dreams” (tr. Mitchell Abidor), at Marxists.org; Anne Gorrick, personal correspondence, 24 Mar 014]