Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1781

“Then a dark explosion sounded, a light flashed in the middle of the tube scaffolding, a cloud boiled up, some invisible power exploded the scaffolding, easily raising its first level, and the tubes flew up thick from the construction, higher and higher, and when the power which threw these spears started to weaken, the tubes waited in the air, then fell back, and poured down on the area, and the spears became branchy trees, and half of the construction collapsed, and the other half separated from the statue, standing like a ski-jump, it hesitated for a while, and it did not fall down just then. And the statue now stood stripped, stronger and more powerful than ever, it bent forward a bit, as if threatening the city, above whose rooftops now the pressure of the explosion rolled along, easily ringing the bell, and waving the mason’s clothes like a flag.” But now for the important news. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty. Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves. Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name “Mouse.” This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Scooby-Doo is not a dog. Granted, he does have the comportment and vocal characteristic of a canine, but this is, in fact, the tragic consequence of a botched elective surgery that Scooby underwent at the hands of his friend Shaggy, who was briefly enrolled in a plastic-surgery program at a medical school that he no longer attends. Winnie the Pooh is not a bear. Winnie is actually a young man who dresses up as a bear in order to humor his friend Christopher Robin. The most conclusive evidence for this is the fact that Winnie is capable of speaking fluently in the English language, which has, thus far, eluded the grasp of the entirety of the bear population. Winnie’s contemporaries Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger are all part of the same role play that was created for Mr. Robin’s sake. Why exactly these four men choose to wear these costumes for Christopher is unclear, but it has been speculated that they may owe him money from gambling debts. Those were glamorous days. Clues to kill moles came in the form of crossword puzzle answers in The New York Times. So Will Shortz (or whoever held the job then) was a secret agent man? The cold war was designed to make even children paranoid. It worked. If you caught your best friend scraping uranium off the glowing dials of alarm clocks, you wondered. When President Jimmy Carter killed that … well, his damaged eyelids had to be replaced with tender skin from his own penis. Now when he closes his eyes and sleeps and dreams his eyeballs swell like ping pong balls. Pink person who is pink gunk in a picture disturbs me so pleasantly human being like an eraser maybe punk your pink junk you want to gnaw on its ears very much like an eraser its lobes insensate like a brain feel no pain of this pink gunk person oh punk rock like a masochist dwelling on a pink burnt-out planet here, take a pink bite of a tongue sandwich a fleshy excision oh wobbly I had seen what I feared was a piece of me, but my tongue thrashed then and flipped it, threw it away, and I realized (Thank Giant Piece of Me Above!) that it wasn’t a part of me at all, it was just some gunk that somehow related to Daido Moriyama. YouTube just recommended this to me. It knows I am only at home inside a tree. I feel so alone when I realize nobody is at home inside the tree. I want to put my hands through the tree holes anyway. I want to stretch parts of my existence into the tree, the special part of you that is blind and moist and wants somebody or even some animal to call it home, but then again the bird is in the tree. The squirrel is in the tree. The tree is in the tree. The supernatural is in the tree. People come to borrow things from the tree. Knock knock. At least for now. Even Gwyneth admits she loves reading it. She was so poor that the only photos she had of her kids were mug shots. These were printouts given to her by charitable souls. She put them in frames from the dollar store, and would stare at their faces during commercial breaks for her beloved Wheel of Fortune, which she watched on a t.v. that looked like the Sputnik satellite and dated from roughly that era. My favorite biographical note in the back of the mag was for that seventy-four-year old poet who was going back to school to be a pediatric nurse. It was your last trip. There I bought a cup of Sylvia Plath and also a book of pure Letter shop that of course I asked back to smell what you smelled few months before you leave. You were right: their lives are bright. You were right when you said that they are happy, they are one of the reasons why our name continues to deserve such affection. Aitana is very intelligent, Bidane is shy and ask me to play doctor but in the end do not have time: what it could be found here, and how children could have imagined illnesses diagnosed. Just as well, I say. Just as well. But we played, and we eat fajitas, and laughed with bellies air in a country that is too clean to be real. Carol directs us to the river and prepares breakfast. David tells us secrets that I understand and I tell her secrets he understands, then I do not feel as bad as when they were just in my head. I look at them and are happy. I approach Ibrah. I say very attached to her cheek and looking anxiously towards them: It sounds so beautiful then, outside, is pure horror. I have to show you the pot of colorful straws with which we fed to the sick. I have to admit that the mourners are very tender sip sip sip she does not like the color yellow because yellow straws taste bad. On the way back she showed me a big wet grey toad. We stared at it till I couldn’t see it any more. Then it jumped. I thought of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, how there is One who leads, & another who looks back (wet hair & broad shoulders) to see if another follows. But then I very often think of that. Perhaps this was at last the right time to think of it, though there had been right times before, & will be after. The right time is more frequent than I think. Even the toad had something to speak: Alchemy is the science of finding the right year to be born. What reckoners we are! Runs hits & errors. Secrecy of the pitcher’s mound, the Magus of Tiphareth rears back & hurls. Yesod’s last chance to knock it over the fence, perimeter, parameter, paramita, into, Malkuth, the actual world. In the shell of the catcher’s mitt, demonmask of his tantric form, the Qlipoth wait. So KILL ME WHILE / began to kill one of many centuries, / after seventy, after five hundred, / have to see how far I get killed by the thousands in every corner, / on every holiday, / how to make wages and bones gallon I remain, / how to make dungeons to put somewhere in my pants, / and how to take turns between fat and fat to / see what eye I die first, / but it is / increasingly’m more one of the other, / … / which have increasingly more light, more birds, more flowers on the aim, / that each [untranslatable] anymore elegantly between the irons and summers, / and sometimes they say ‘I wonder to me- / if they no change had better polish and all, / to walk step by step, down lights, / or buy a new blood, / blood cleaner for use on holidays and Sundays. Does that make their engravings less beautiful? Maybe. It seems to me the relationship between beauty and destruction is fairly complicated. As a friend of mine said of the elm bark beetles, “Thank goodness their gallery art leaves us something to marvel at, since there are so few elms left.” Not only is the moon and dew or light blue birds, can also be an old sandal, all bored, all but dead after walking factories, scaffolding and hot roads or hard, I have seen horrible gray earth guys like eating dirt, I have seen there, with his rags and dirt, crawling, and I played, caressing her skin and become angels, butterflies, in September wind.

[Note: Sources: Bohumil Hrabal, The Betrayal of Mirrors, quoted in Studiolum, comment appended to “Colossus”, at Poemas del río Wang, 30 Aug 014 (hat tip John Armstrong!); JBR; Christine R Yano, and Colin Stokes, quoted in Stokes’ “The Truth About Hello Kitty”, at The New Yorker, 29 Aug 014; William Keckler, “Old School Terror”, “Eyelids”, “Pink Gunk Person”, “Piece of Me”, “Daido Moriyama”, “Home”, “The Supernatural”, “Do You Know About Thug Kitchen?”, “Poverty is Valor”, “My”, at John Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 31 Aug 014; Luna Miguel, “August trips (II): Munich” (tr. Google), “I’m talking about” (tr. Google), at Luna Miguel, 28 & 21 Aug 014; Robert Kelly, “An Alchemical Journal (2)”, at Nomadics, 31 Aug 014; JBR; Dardo Sebastián Dorronzoro, “Kill Me While” (tr. Google), at Colectivo Ex Presos Pol.Y Sobrevivientes – Rosario, 31 Aug 014 (“Born in 1913. 25th June 1976 was abducted by a Task Force of the Armed Forces. His home in the La Loma, Luján.”), and “Affidavit” (tr. Google), at Wikipedia; Jody Gladding, quoted in Jen Bervin, “Three Dimensions: Jody Gladding on translation, the sources of language, and how beetles can speak of longing”, at Poetry Foundation, 20 Aug 014]

White man jaywalks with gun...guess what happens? by Denise Oliver Velez. Reposted from Daily Kos

When I saw this video posted here recently, I had to go back and look at it again.

I saw a white man with a gun.

I heard a policeman saying, "Place the weapon down on the ground, please. ... are crossing the street illegally ... I need you to put the gun down before I talk to you. ... You have committed a crime ... you are jaywalking. ... I don't want to shoot you, I'm not here to do that. ... Why are you so angry. ... Why are you cursing at me?"

Watching the whole incident all I could think of were those dead (unarmed) black men and boys who never had the opportunity to be "talked down," called "sir," and were murdered by police.  

Or they were leaning on a toy gun in Walmart. Like John Crawford III.

John Crawford lll, gunned down by Beavercreek, Ohio police in Walmart, August 5, 2014.

I wanted to find out what happened to this white man who defied police, made obscene gestures at them and who cursed them out.

The man, Joseph Houseman, is a gun rights advocate. He got his 15 minutes (more like 40 or 50) of fame and walked.  

In the Department of Public Safety's decision not to pursue charges, Webster said later that even though Houseman did not have the rifle in a sling and was  "fidgeting" with it, it was not evident that he was "brandishing" it.

This news got covered as a "gun rights" story.

From my perspective it's a "white rights" story.  

Does anyone honestly believe a black man, or teen, or boy would have walked away from this alive?

Follow me below the fold for more.

 

I know what happens in this country to black men with guns.

See how fast gun laws were changed in the U.S. when the Black Panther Party decided to patrol the police in their community, after the police murder of unarmed black construction worker Denzil Dowell. In "Fear of a Black Gun Owner," Edward Wyckoff Williams wrote:

The Panthers responded to racial violence by patrolling black neighborhoods brandishing guns -- in an effort to police the police. The fear of black people with firearms sent shockwaves across white communities, and conservative lawmakers immediately responded with gun-control legislation.

Then Gov. Ronald Reagan, now lauded as the patron saint of modern conservatism, told reporters in California that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." Reagan claimed that the Mulford Act, as it became known, "would work no hardship on the honest citizen." The NRA actually helped craft similar legislation in states across the country.

I know what is done to black men who arm themselves in self-defense against the occupying army you call police, and if you are white, you may not fear.

You see, I remember Elaine Brown singing in "The End of Silence," "we'll just have to get guns and be men."


.

I also remember many Panthers shot down like dogs, some asleep like Fred Hampton.

The NRA is all about gun control. As long as those guns are in white hands.

From my black perspective, I get real angry when I watch the Bundy Bunch get away with whatever they fuc*ing feel like and nothing happens to them. I watch white serial killers, and mass murderers explained away as "loners," and "disturbed individuals." I watch my young brothers executed and shot down in cold blood by cops and vigilantes, and the media noise machine pumps up the vilification volume, 'cause we're just thugs and animals.

This white problem affects not just community members, but it affects officers of the law who are not white. See the case of New York State parole officers who were held at gunpoint by white cops in Ramapo while on duty. Blacks in Law Enforcement of America and other black and Latino police groups have spoken out. Far too often being a cop of color is a death warrant from other police, who are white. Police Departments call them "fraternal shootings," but there is nothing brotherly about white cops "accidentally" killing black and Latino officers.

Latinos also smell the cafe sin leche. Some national Latino groups are speaking up, andjoining the outcry around Ferguson. In New York, Anthony Baez's family sees parallels with the recent police murder of Eric Garner.

There is no way in hell black people and Latinos and Native Americans can "fix" America's "race problem."  

More white folks have to step up to the plate. Systemic racism in police departments across America, in the criminal injustice system, in housing, education, and health care has got to go.  

I'm tired of hearing about "the race problem," as if we are an equal partner in this mess we didn't make.

America's got a problem with white racism, and y'all need to clean house.  

In the House of the Hangman 1780

External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Grayish, blackish that tends towards yellowish. Mass of pulverized [commodity-] objects, of meanings that are smashed, rotten, softened, and compressed. Fragments of instruments and concepts; stellar dust, cosmic foam, meteorite lava. Fountains of jets of grayishness. The motion is slow like the catastrophic motion of figures bathed by the black light of billions of shadow years, dry slap on hardness, sticky powder. It is the velocity we find when moving away from the mirror. Black sculpture of figures dipped in tars. Too large a hand, too small a shoulder. Squalor on the mica square. The rejection by a cubic meter. And the giants in stages under the dome of each temple, twisted figures gnawing their own skulls. From the window of a racing train we see the hedge passing at a dizzying speed, the houses further on are the minus objects, a swift verifiction. Then the slower hills in the distance and far away the motionless mountains. Mountains as you know are verbs. In a way this is a way of asking: tell us your worst moment (which may have been your best moment) (tell us about how you broke – broke might mean just went home and cried a bit, or threw that tear gas canister back at the cops knowing you’d get beaten to a pulp for it, or how you had to give up drinking, or how you felt when that tumor grew back, or when you realized there would be no revolution, no cure for the climate, and and and or or – tell us how no one attended your reading, tell us how you had to kill your art to make better art, or how you had to “transcend” art all together) (this list is NOT meant to be exclusive). How you were reborn or not. Or tell us why this whole idea is wrongheaded and / or stupid. Any form of textual response (something that can be put in a book) is appropriate, whether it be an essay with footnotes to the collected works of Lenin, a personal tale, a class analysis, some intersectional writing, something asemic, a collage, some uncreative writing (a reissue of the collected works of Lenin!), a rant, tears on a page, etc etc etc – that’s what we want. You know as well as I do that the saintly cephalophores may be reconciled to their martyrdoms but none of them decapitated themselves, unlike Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric goddess. The most common representations show her sitting or standing on a copulating couple while blood from her neck spouts into the mouth of her severed head and the mouths of her attendants, Dakini and Varnini. In other depictions she goes for a walk or a ride on a lion. But really.

We’re talking the color of
wind planted artlessly in a
garden on a bright winter morning, tho it’s August,
right? That’s what kind of weekend it

was. J was high and not too talky;
G was all like “you guys are the
greatest!” and of course he
was right. Coming in to work I saw

… the heavens black & red …
… a mighty Childs head gaping …
… a black man in a bright …
… a whyt horse …

rantiro ranterat vendeo vitelat
vernethat cernelo hurott morsheno
rungothon rungonor cuporor
untonor un signytus rolcon

etc. Nothing dark in that.
And the program notes were
elegant. A long silence. He continues: -
In any case, thirty-six years later, whatever

we don’t have, we do have a “body
of work”, and, well, storage
problems. That’s right. The square of
its weight, plus his prick minus

eight, equaled Pi times the cube of
fuck all. Proof of this apparently simple
assertion is difficult to achieve. Data are so
meagre that the outcome

must remain in the realm of philosophy.
I remember bright orange canned peaches,
I remember the horse lady at the fair,
She didn’t look like a horse at all.

OK, here’s a Ferguson syllabus suggested by Sociologists for Justice:

Rios, Victor M. 2012. “Stealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance.” Contexts 11(1):48-53. Available online: http://www.broomcenter.ucsb.edu/files/publications/pdf/rios1.pdf

Rios, Victor M. 2006. “The Hyper-criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration.” Souls 8 (2): 40-54. Available online: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8eBQGZrG7BFdnhWRzNNNl9ZOHM/edit

Gerke, Markus. “Want to Help Marginalized Students in Schools? Stop “Stop and Frisk” and Other Punitive Practices, Too.” From SocImages. Available online http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/11/07/want-to-help-marginalized-students-improve-in-schools-stop-stop-and-frisk-and-other-punitive-practices-too/

Robinson, Amanda L., and Meghan S. Chandek. 2000. “Differential Police Response to Black Battered Women.” Women & Criminal Justice 12(2-3):29-61.

Epp, Charles, Steven Maynard-Moody & Donald Haider-Markel. 2014. Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Warren, Patricia Y. 2010. “The Continuing Significance of Race: An Analysis Across Two Levels of Policing.” Social Science Quarterly 91(4):1025-1042. Available online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8eBQGZrG7BFYVZ2Zlpzb1IxWVU/edit?usp=sharing

Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. 2014. “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review.” Available online: http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014-implicit-bias.pdf.

Mansbridge, Jane J. and Aldon Morris, eds. 2001. Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Additional Readings

The following is a list of additional recommended readings submitted by commenting sociologists.

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Barnett, Ida Wells B. 2002. On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

Correll, Joshua, Bernadette Park, Charles Judd, and Bernd Wittenbrink. 2002. The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(6):1314-1329.

Ferguson, Ann. 2001. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Especially chapter 4: Naughty by Nature. Google link: http://books.google.com/books/about/Bad_Boys.html?id=3YMDorLC-cQC)

Linnemann, T., Wall, T., & Green, E. 2014. The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1362480614529455. http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/04/1362480614529455.abstract

Martinot, Steve. 2014. On the Epidemic of Police Killings. Social Justice 39(4):52-75.

Richie, Beth E. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York University Press. http://www.amazon.com/Arrested-Justice-Violence-Americas-Prison/dp/081477623X

Wall, T., & Linnemann, T. 2014. Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras.” Crime, Media, Culture, 1741659014531424. http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/28/1741659014531424.abstract

Wood, Lesley J. 2014. Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing. Toronto, ON: Between the Lines.

And here’s one by philosophers:

 The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois

The Racial Contract, Charles Mills

Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis

The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi

Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, Linda Martin Alcoff

The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls

The Colonization of Psychic Space, Kelly Oliver

Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, bell hooks

Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul Taylor

The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment,  Patricia Hill Collins

Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, Eds. Kimberle Crenshaw et al

Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze

Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Charles Mills

The Idea of Race, Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott

Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Eds. Jean Stafancic and Richard Delgado

Race, Ed. Robert Bernasconi

**UPDATE** (The following texts are collected from readers' suggestions  in the comments selection below. I will continue to update this section as more titles are submitted.)

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V. Hartman

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields

Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics, Robert Gooding-Williams

Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Ed. Joy James

On The Postcolony, Achille Mbembe

The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson

Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young

In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, Leon Higginbotham

Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, George Yancy and Janine Jones

The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Muhammad

Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, Ladelle McWhorter

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.

[Note: Sources: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; Michelangelo Pistoletto, “Hard Poetics”, at Michelangelo Pistoletto; JBR (some notes towards a potential project); John Coulthart, “Chinnamasta”, at Feuilleton, 30 Apr 014; JBR; JBR and Alan Baker, a bit of an old collab (hi, Alan!); JBR; James K Stanescu, “A syllabus on the very possibility of #FergusonSyllabus”, at Critical Animal, 30 Aug 013 (some of the above is only linked to in Stanescu’s piece)

Atlas wept. Reposted from Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations.

To grasp the catastrophic scope of destruction in Gaza, there are three new resources of exceptional importance.  First, Lewis Whyld‘s The Gaza War Map: it’s an interactive map keyed to a series of panoramic images which transports you to 20 sites from Beit Hanoun south to Rafeh and it is, appropriately, devastating.

Second, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has released its Gaza Crisis Atlas: 110 pages of maps and high-resolution satellite imagery.  It’s a remarkably systematic survey, whose primary purpose is to assist aid and development agencies in planning and responding to the crisis, but it’s also an indispensable resource for anyone wanting to grasp the intensity of the prolonged Israeli assault on Gaza and its people.  The text and captions are available in eight languages, and you can zoom and print individual pages.

Finally, there’s MediaTown‘s drone-shot video of the destruction of Al-Shejaiya; its brevity does not sacrifice its impact:

Even hardened US military officers were stunned by the unrelenting and indiscriminate nature of the bombardment.  Throughout the offensive the Pentagon compiled reports twice a day on Israeli military operations, and according to a summary of the barrage on 20-21 July ’11 Israeli artillery battalions …  pumped at least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood, which included a barrage of some 4,800 shells during a seven-hour period at the height of the operation…’

That amounts to shelling Al-Shejaiya every six seconds FOR SEVEN HOURS (more from Kerry-anne Mendoza among the ruins of Al-Shejaiya here, and more imagery from Occupied Palestinehere).

Al-Jazeera reports:

“Eleven battalions of IDF artillery is equivalent to the artillery we deploy to support two divisions of U.S. infantry,” a senior Pentagon officer with access to the daily briefings said. “That’s a massive amount of firepower, and it’s absolutely deadly.” Another officer, a retired artillery commander who served in Iraq, said the Pentagon’s assessment might well have underestimated the firepower the IDF brought to bear on Shujaiya. “This is the equivalent of the artillery we deploy to support a full corps,” he said. “It’s just a huge number of weapons.”

Artillery pieces used during the operation included a mix of Soltam M71 guns and U.S.-manufactured Paladin M109s (a 155-mm howitzer), each of which can fire three shells per minute. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” said the senior U.S. military officer. “It’s not mowing the lawn,” he added, referring to a popular IDF term for periodic military operations against Hamas in Gaza. “It’s removing the topsoil.”

“Holy bejeezus,” exclaimed retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard when told the numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action. “That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely disproportionate.” A West Point graduate who is a veteran of two wars and is the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., he added that even if Israeli artillery units fired guided munitions, it would have made little difference.’

Before I let Gard continue, it’s important to remember that the onslaught did not end that night.  Here is a remarkable video which shows the shelling of Shejaiya market on 30 July (more updates and images from #shejaia here).  Imagery of Shejaiya before and after the bombardment was distributed to Israeli soldiers in Brigade 828 as ‘a victory momento‘ and spur to maintain their ‘fighting spirit’.

Gard goes on to explain the circular error probable (CEP) of munitions and the blast and fragmentation or ‘kill radius’, which I’ve discussed here (scroll down for the ‘kill radius’):

Even the most sophisticated munitions have a circular area of probability, Gard explained, with a certain percentage of shells landing dozens or even hundreds of feet from intended targets. Highly trained artillery commanders know this and compensate for their misses by firing more shells. So if even 10 percent of the shells fired at combatants in Shujaiya landed close to but did not hit their targets — a higher than average rate of accuracy — that would have meant at least 700 lethal shells landing among the civilian population of Shujaiya during the night of July 20 into June 21. And the kill radius of even the most precisely targeted 155-mm shell is 164 feet. Put another way, as Gard said, “precision weapons aren’t all that precise.”

Senior U.S. officers who are familiar with the battle and Israeli artillery operations, which are modeled on U.S. doctrine, assessed that, given that rate of artillery fire into Shujaiya, IDF commanders were not precisely targeting Palestinian military formations as much as laying down an indiscriminate barrage aimed at cratering the neighborhood. The cratering operation was designed to collapse the Hamas tunnels discovered when IDF ground units came under fire in the neighborhood. Initially, said the senior Pentagon officer, Israel’s artillery used “suppressing fire to protect their forward units but then poured in everything they had, in a kind of walking barrage. Suppressing fire is perfectly defensible. A walking barrage isn’t.”

The implication of those closing remarks is that such an indiscriminate barrage is a clear violation of international humanitarian law: and the epic scale of that violation is made clear in the maps, imagery and video I’ve cited here.  It also amounts to collective punishment of a whole community, so it comes as no surprise to discover that the Israeli Supreme Court (‘sitting as the High Court of Justice’ – a phrase that has the same moral resonance as the Israeli Defence Force) has recentlyendorsed the ‘deterrent function’ of collective punishment (even though it too is prohibited under international humanitarian law).  But even the Court insisted that such a measure had to be ‘proportionate’.

All of this is much on my mind as I head to a meeting in Oulu, Finland, where I’ll be talking about ‘Trans-border transgressions: legal geographies and spaces of exception’.   The case studies on which I’ll draw are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (mainly Waziristan) and Gaza.  More soon.

In the House of the Hangman 1779

Anyway, this too will be important going forward:

 

General works on seed banks

 

Personal author: Oldfield, Sara (1955-    )

                 Title: Botanic gardens : modern day arks / Sara Oldfield.

             Publisher: London : New Holland, 2010.

                  ISBN: 9781847735195

 

Personal author: Sandlund, Odd Terje

                 Title: Conservation of biodiversity for sustainable

                        development / edited by O. T. Sandlund, K. Hindar and

                        A. H. D. Brown

             Publisher: Oslo : Scandinavian University Press, 1992.

  Physical description: 324 p. : ill., figs., maps, tabls. ; 25 cm.

                  ISBN: 8200215083

 

Personal author: Hawkes, J. G. (John Gregory) (1915-2007)

                 Title: Ex situ conservation of plant genetic resources / by

                        J.G. Hawkes, N. Maxted and B.V. Ford-Lloyd.

             Publisher: Dordrecht ; London : Kluwer Academic, 2000.

  Physical description: xxvi, 250p. : ill., figs., maps, tabls. ; 23 cm.

                  ISBN: 0792364422

 

                 Title: Ex situ plant conservation : supporting species

                        survival in the wild / edited by Edward O. Guerrant,

                        Kayri Havens and Mike Maunder.

             Publisher: Washington ; London : Island Press, 2004.

  Physical description: xxix, 504p. : ill., figs., maps, tabls. ; 24cm.

                  ISBN: 1559638745

                  ISBN: 1559638753 (pbk.)

 

Personal author: Whealy, Diane Ott

                 Title: Gathering : memoir of a seed saver / Diane Ott Whealy.

             Publisher: Decorah, Iowa : Seed Savers Exchange, c2011.

  Physical description: 243 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 25 cm.

                  ISBN: 9780615457741

                                 

                 Title: Gene banks and the world's food / Donald L. Plucknett,

                        Nigel J. H. Smith, J. T. Williams, and N. Murthi

                        Anishetty

             Publisher: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1987.

  Physical description: xv, 247p : ill., tabls. ; 24cm.

                  ISBN: 0691084386

 

Personal author: Cooper, David

                 Title: Growing diversity : genetic resources and local food

                        security / edited by David Cooper, Renee Vellve and

                        Henk Hobbelink

             Publisher: London : Intermediate Technology Publications, 1992.

  Physical description: viii,166, 6p. of plates : ill., figs., maps, tabls. ;

                        22cm.

                  ISBN: 1853391190

 

Personal author: Fry, Carolyn

                 Title: The last great plant hunt : the story of Kew's

                        Millennium Seed Bank / Carolyn Fry, Sue Seddon and

                        Gail Vines.

             Publisher: Richmond : Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2011.

  Physical description: 192 p. : col. ill., col. map, ports. ; 29 x 26 cm.

                  ISBN: 9781842464328

 

Personal author: Friis-Hansen, Esbern

                 Title: Participatory approaches to the conservation and use

                        of plant genetic resources / Esbern Friis-Hansen and

                        Bhuwon Sthapit

             Publisher: Rome : International Plant Genetic Resources

                        Institute, 2000.

  Physical description: 214p. : ill., figs. ; 24cm.

                  ISBN: 9290434449

 

Personal author: Govaerts, Rafaël

                 Title: Plant conservation : a study of its economic

                        implications and the institutions set up to support it

                        / Rafael Govaerts                                                                                                            

             Publisher: Brussels : Economische Hogeschool Sint-Aloysius, 1994.

  Physical description: 108p : figures ; 29cm.

 

                 Title: Seed conservation : turning science into practice /

                        edited by Roger D. Smith, John B. Dickie, Simon H.

                        Linington, Hugh W. Pritchard, Robin J. Probert.

             Publisher: Kew : Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2003.

  Physical description: xxiv, 1023 p. : ill., figs. ; 25 cm.

                  ISBN: 1842460528

Full text available here: http://www.kew.org/science-research-data/kew-in-depth/msbp/publications-data-resources/technical-resources/seed-conservation-science-practice/index.htm

 

       Personal author: Thompson, Peter

                 Title: Seeds, sex and civilization : how the hidden life of

                        plants has shaped our world / Peter Thompson.

             Publisher: London : Thames & Hudson, 2010.

  Physical description: 272, [32] p. of plates : ill. (chiefly col.),

                        facsims., map, ports. ; 24 cm.

                  ISBN: 9780500251706

 

Personal author: Kesseler, Rob

                 Title: Seeds : time capsules of life / Rob Kesseler and

                        Wolfgang Stuppy ; preface by HRH the Prince of Wales ;

                        edited by Alexandra Papadakis.

             Publisher: San Rafael, Calif. : Earth Aware Editions, 2012.

  Physical description: 264 p. : col. ill. ; 22 x 24 cm.

                  ISBN: 9781608871117

Which reminds me, I want to share this with you, too, something I typed out for Dan Levenson: “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 2014): 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 one’s 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. Of course I don’t know what will happen to us: will the same great and lousy songs stay stuck in our heads? Will medicine succeed in making life so long we will beg for more medicine to end it? I could be clearer, say more, but it wouldn’t mean as much. I like that: ‘as if,’ as I look at Michael Sowa’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” (a painting of some sheep in a field that are looking at the artist and a huge wave bearing down behind them, about to break, who knows?, either in the distance or right on top of their heads – that’s my title, by the way, I don’t know what he calls it); will we continue to allow our subjectivity and our cities to be invaded by capitalism? Do we want our unconscious and our urban spaces to remain enslaved? If not, is there an alternative? Is there a will to change? How do we change? The purpose of this review article is to revisit Guattari’s analysis of subjectivity and explore its theoretical and practical relevance for urban studies in both the social sciences and humanities disciplines. That line in Celan’s poem, “Speak, you too,” where he basically says: speak … but keep Yes and No unsplit. You imagine the Abstract Literature Manifesto you are attempting to write being played in the key of G major, and you attempt to visualise it as deep space; black with flashes of darker blackness. You try to think yourself into a state of suspended animation. You worship waste and like the liar you are claim to be drawing on Bataille’s theory of solar economics. If nature abhors a vacuum then nature itself must be a social construction, voices green, purple and red. Strange folds in the fabric. The universe buckled, bent and sent into reverse. Apocalypse postponed, Johnson is offended and tells you that you can’t criticise Duchamp because all his works are blue-chip classics, and simultaneously function as the foundation stones of artistic modernism. You order another double espresso and tell Johnson to chill out, because if Duchamp were around today he’d agree with you. Then you placate the critic by offering to show him some interesting sex imagery on the web. Johnson hands over his laptop, which is his first mistake, and p.s. hey. ** etc etc etc, ah, you’re outta here and, mm, I think I get that ‘rough edges smoothed off’ bit. Going late is the best time to be there, for sure. We’ll see very soon if the replacement of the band with the electronic music guy / thing worked. Sending you the best vibes from my more elderly city to your relatively spry one! I could have sworn I saw the barest hint of braces under those lips, but they could have been pixels, of course; like most things in Dubai, it never actually happened. Which is to say, I had never heard of that robot theme park, and I don’t think I’ve had any association re: South Korea and robots, but that does sound like an omen if there ever was one. How amazing it would be if the ‘yesses’ win. I know that being covered in dirt has its drawbacks, but it sounds so nice. Or looks so nice in my mind’s eye, wherever that is. What a strange saying: mind’s eye. Or maybe not. You think Panchitos is still there? Every time I go to New York City, I can’t believe it still exists. But the Holometer Will Not Prove Theism.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Kay Pennick, Librarian & Information Officer, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, “General works on seed banks”, attachment to an email Pennick rec’d 1 Jul 013; JBR; Hannah Höch, “Der Maler / The Painter” (tr. Fiona Elliot), in Hannah Höch (exhibition catalog for the Whitechapel Gallery show, 15 Jan – 23 March 2014); Craig Morgan Teicher, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again”, “Letters to Brenda”, quoted in PEN America, “PEN Poetry Series: Craig Morgan Teicher”, email rec’d 29 Aug 014 approx 10:31 AM PDT; JBR, but see wood s lot, 29 Aug 014; Stephen Luis Vilaseca, “Félix Guattari and urban cultural studies” (abstract), in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, at Ingenta Connect; Joe Wenderoth, quoted in Paola Capó-García, “Joe Wenderoth”, at BOMB, 25 Aug 014 (an interview); Stewart Home, Blood Rites Of The Bourgeoisie, and Dennis Cooper, quoted in Cooper’s “Spotlight on ... Stewart Home Blood Rites Of The Bourgeoisie (2010)”, at DC’s, 29 Aug 014; Timothy Morton, “But the Holometer Will Not Prove Theism”, at Ecology without Nature, 29 Aug 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1778

Finally, this time round at least, an early poem ends with the line ‘Let me let me know let me know soon let me know soon Sweetie.’ It now seems that Sweetie has replied. ‘You will no longer need a hushed, barely audible tone / to confess your inadequacies because you will no longer have any / to confess’ — the ideal state that Auden hoped would 'make us well / without confession of the ill.’ With this pleasure comes responsibility, but it’s the responsibility to remain in joy. ‘There won't be a need / for codes or inane principles, because you’ll always / be too radiant and purposeful for that.’ ‘There are mornings, and then there are / golden glimpses of something totally / amazing like awe or coffee,’ and then that ‘Morning will never be called off / due to budgetary constraints, or even heartbreak. / By afternoon, there will be plush green pillows, / strewn on the lawn waiting for my body. / I can hardly wait.’ This makes the world better. I mean this because this is a monumental book and in this book, in this stack of love poems, we see that the Romantic has a place again in the everyday, like the ‘courtyard’ that ‘sparkles puppy yellow’ with sunlight, the ‘Simple Times’ when ‘bones softened the cars,’ and an I that ‘blooms out over Brooklyn’ are all part of what we do this whole thing for: life. If you like Frank O’Hara, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, William Blake, and Wallace Stevens, then you are going to like this book. Or I mean to say, that this book is a spell, a love spell. And if you want a book to carry with you when no one seems to care, when no one seems to be your friend, well then, you've found it, it’s this book, this book is your love spell, this book is your friend. I’ll let you figure out the erratum in that. This unusual depiction of urban workers surprised some reviewers at the time, but they not only quickly recovered their composure but went on to praise the novel attempt. The remarks of the critics are fascinating, more revealing perhaps in the case of Caillebotte than for any other artist in the 1876 exhibition. Here are artisans. The peculiar viewpoint and upraised horizon subordinates them not only to the exigencies of the architectural space but to the gaze of the viewer who owns it. ‘This park will consist of four themed areas of rides and attractions: Ancient Russia, Czarist Russia, Socialist Russia and New Russia, as well as an animal park and botanical garden featuring native species. Like many of the projects on this list, Russia Park will be easily accessible from Moscow and designed for year-round operations. Hotels, restaurants and a convention center are also part of the six-year plan.’ So: How to begin? One of Harun Farocki’s beginnings: We can drop right into the middle of events. How to begin, again? In 1992, a title of one of Farocki’s texts makes a curious declaration: “Reality would have to begin.” It implies that reality hasn’t even started. And let’s face it: Aren’t we still confronted with the same wretched impositions trying to pass as reality as he was? Just now it’s being sweated over at Foxconn and sedimented on secret Snapchat servers: a Netflix soap featuring ISIS as teenage Deleuzian war machine. In earlier decades, Facebook might have been called Springer Press (not least in West Germany), ISIS called SA, and the USAF, well, USAF. How to begin? One of Farocki’s first films is The Words of the Chairman. A Mao bible is torn up, its pages folded into a paper airplane hurled at a Shah dummy. Words … was made in collaboration with both Otto Schily — later to become German interior minister — and Holger Meins, who died in a prison hunger strike as a member of the Red Army Faction. One would become the face of the state, the other would die as its enemy. Another beginning: Does the world exist, if I am not watching it? This beginning is among his last: it is part of the brilliant series Parallel I–IV dealing with computer generated game-imagery. This series reflects on elements of game worlds, on polygons, NPC’s, 8-bit graphics, arse physics and unilateral surfaces. Ok, I made up the arse physics, sorry. Parallel I–IV sketches the first draft of a history of computer generated images that is still emerging as we speak. It skims the surfaces of virtual worlds and coolly scans their glitches. Parallel I–IV is so humble, so concise, so charming and bloody fantastic that I could go on about it for hours. You are so lucky it hasn’t got arse physics or else I would. In 1992, Videograms of a Revolution, codirected with Andrei Ujică, captured a similar moment of emergence. The seminal work compiles material from over 125 hours of TV broadcasts and amateur footage of the ’89 Romanian uprisings. It demonstrates how TV stops recording reality and starts creating it instead. Videograms asks: Why did insurgents not storm the presidential palace, but the TV station? At that very moment the social revolution of 1917 ended irrevocably — Farocki, Flusser, and others were among the first to report this sea change as it happened. As things become visible, they also become real. Protesters jump through TV screens and spill out onto streets. This is because the surface of the screen is broken: content can no longer be contained when protest, rare animals, breakfast cereals, prime time, and TV test patterns escape the flatness of 2D representation. In 1989, protesters storm TV stations. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web. Twenty-five years later, oligarchs start to ask: If people don’t have bread, why don’t they eat their browsers instead? Another of Farocki’s beginnings: Looks like it might have just been a glitch. Consider this an addendum to an earlier post about decapitations. What I didn’t know then was that decapitated saints have their own “cephalophore” category if they’ve been recorded as going for a post-decapitation stroll; a case of “take up thy head and walk”. Nine-year-old Saint Justus of Beauvais differs from the strolling cephalophores — who manage to walk some distance before finally expiring—in having picked up his head severed head and carried on speaking. Because most of the nigunim did not have lyrics they were comprised of scat — a somber sort of a scat: “oi-oi”, “di-dai”, “bah-bom,” etc. Musical instruments were not used to accompany them either, since most of the singing happened on the Sabbath. Rid of accompaniment, rid of lyrics, these stripped down chants were visceral and prayer-like but washed out of content and filled, instead, with implication — with attempts. At the climax of one of his talks, balancing at the edge of the cognitive void, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said: “And even to this, too, there’s an answer. But that answer is necessarily nigun-esque.” Then he moaned a few lines of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” And when one of his auditors started chanting “Hum Bom!” the Rabbi smiled and said, “Close enough.”

[Note: Sources: JBR; John Ashbery, and Dorothea Lasky, SPD blurbs for Todd Colby, Splash State; JBR; Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris After War and Revolution; themeparknews.com, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Theme Park Futures”, at DC’s, 28 Aug 014; JBR; Hito Steyerl, “Beginnings: Harun Farocki, 1944–2014”, at e-flux, 28 Aug 014; John Coulthart, “Cephalophores”, at Feuilleton, 29 Aug 014; Jake Marmer, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Jake Marmer: Nigun Poems & Poetics”, at Poems and Poetics, 28 Aug 014; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1777

Which is to say, I know the city’s water cannot stop its flow, but it can be re-routed. I saw it in the streets around Moorfields Highwalk – “We are replacing London’s Victorian water mains” and I saw the men spraying symbols in fluorescent paint on roads, dashing forwards to mark the tarmac only when the traffic lights glowed red. I know there is a world below of pipes and flow that pipes and flows ceaselessly. I imagine its gurgles gush mellisonantly but not for us. Or gurgle and splash in ugly spaces. The only (so-called) life (read: commerce) here on a Sunday is insane, in Sainsbury’s. But the markets don’t stop – the derivatives keep on deriving – the shares do not stop being shared (but not too much) even when those fat doors are slammed shut for the weekend and the building broods alone (save a security guard or two). But the city was once a tangible city of Milk, Bread, Corn, Pudding, Poultry. In Change Alley and Token House Yard naming left clues of what was to drip drip drip into the puddle that is our world. Pathways of concrete things cluttered up now by arbitrary symbols in concrete. A silent Boots – with not a shoe in sight – facing off a dead Commerzbank, from whose name Schwitters tore Merz, a name for all his art. Tears tears – I can’t be doing with all the tears after spilt milk. Tears – not sloppy drips, but rather tears as cuts, as rents. Cuts, cuts, rents, rents. Deeper, deeper. Sky-high, unpaid. We are back in the money language again – there is ultimate speed in the sun’s hair   Transfigured horse / And a dead person laid in her funeral bed head looking like a rotten orange / a pink dove shattered a human face / a yellow sun stop a green sun stop a blue sun stop / a sun ambulance carries Christ to the insane asylum / BOUM BOUM BOUME ! / A solar wind pulls your teeth Hou ! Hou ! / Malevich’s red sun followed his funeral convoy all the way to BEIRUT / Tammouz is July nailed on a sundial in a frozen bath. As if the mind did

                        “circle
                                       a country or a place,” where
                        = time, the body
                                       breathing (a weather)

                                                       Think, akin to magic

                                                       “to cause to appear”

                                                       Think thirsty constant

                                                       weed whackers, the rising

                                                       tide of grass, the force that

                                                       through the stupid

                                                       lilies drives the bone

                                                       glow from below. Think shined-

                                                       up tendon straps.

                                                       600,000 sets of teeth lamps.

The sleepers awake, I am enclosed by iron spikes, some places razorwire. Patrolled by security guards in cars that say K-9. I feel watched constantly. Alive among the dead for no purpose. No grief or leaf blowing.

                                       a lifelike picture, dear

This piece is therapeutic. I was told by a number of people, including my therapist, that if only I could put my obsession into my own work I’d be a much happier & productive person. This piece might not seem transformed enough to you, but I intend it to be transformative to me. This is a piece about reconciliation. This is a piece about air. This is the type of thing I gave up when I decided I was a realist. I’m trying to recue my imagination, which I’ve neglected since I was about thirteen. I = Miss Havisham. Combustion heaven. To be changed, to go up up up, to be translated. HOW DO THE BEASTS GROAN! THE HERDS OF CATTLE ARE PERPLEXED, BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO PASTURE, YEA, THE FLOCKS OF SHEEP ARE MADE DESOLATE, for his part, Herder denounces the gristly deformation of smooth skin-surfaces as “unnatural excrescences” explicitly placing them in the disgust paradigm’s horizon through the metaphor of “creeping worms”: “these veins on the hand, this finger-cartilage, these bones in the knee … they are extra-essential accretions, or detached parts … like … an early death.” Thus an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating impulse to its complicity with the state’s Commune-erasing program. Expanding on this notion that humanity’s longest-lasting ruins will not be cities, cathedrals, or even mines, but rather geostationary satellites, Paglen tried to conjure up what this might look like for other species in the far future. Billions of years from now, he began to narrate, long after city lights and the humans who made them have disappeared from the Earth, other intelligent species might eventually begin to see, well, consider deep-sea squid, Paglen said, who would have had billions of years to continue developing and perfecting their incredible eyesight, a sensory skill perfect for peering through the otherwise impenetrable darkness of the oceans — perhaps these future deep-sea squid might drift up to the surface of the ocean on calm nights … perhaps they might look up … OK. OK. READING Ana Božičević’s second full-length collection, Rise in the Fall, I often got the sense that I too was under surveillance. When I didn’t get something, the poet told me I didn’t need to: “(this is not / some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this / weird feeling I had.)” And when the poet told me, “I’m writing in some kind of vernacular / that’s not even my own, just to endear myself to you,” I thought, Go for it. In the first poem, “About Nietzsche,” we watch Nietzsche land “softly” on earth and interact with a horse. After the horse tells him a story about being loved, ridden, and forgotten, Nietzsche drops to his knees, alluding to the philosopher’s collapse in Turin after he saw a horse being whipped. The language is romantic and melodic, and seems to be heading toward some obvious conclusion about oppression:

You are here, horse pressed on, because you can
see the suffering now, and one you love best
loves to shop for its ineffable brides, and soon you’ll learn
the song of the pretty bridle is stronger
than the song of the wound that it grooves, and soon no-one
will give a fig about the humbled Nietzsche—

Then suddenly, at line 30, a new stanza begins:

This is the whitest shit
I’ve ever written. Truth is, Osama bin Laden
was killed today, two women were shot
in that raid, and yet again
I can’t escape this feeling of living in a world of men
whose intricate games
I’m to jeer and cheer, but they leave my head
blank like
a foggy morning.

“And yet last night I played Meditations / & it told me what to do / Live, you crazy mother / fucker! / Live! / & organize / yr shit / …” What beauty has won in the end? Is it the beauty of croissants, untouched by death? The most inscrutable description came from Amelia, a 19-year-old from Scotland, who said her vagina looked like “a baby mouse trapped in a bundle of twigs.” But now I should add some errata. In the review of SNOW #1, ed. Anthony Barnett and Ian Brinton, the quotation from Denise Riley’s ‘Nine Blindfolded Songs’ was missing its second “like,” and should have read: “Like ... like a metaphor. Though though”; in the review of Emily Critchley’s Love / All That / & OK, “Actually, the float quite far” should have been “Actually, they float quite far” and “We don’t overlap with each other enough to rescue, with some surfeit of ourselves, anyone who at risk or loss” was missing an “is”.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Esther Leslie, “Square Mile Quagmire”, in Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage, quoted in “AMM#9: Texts, Audio and Videos”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 28 May 014; Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse, in to look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (eds. Thom Donovan & Brandon Shimoda); Mónica de la Torre, “the facts”, in Public Domain; Ariana Reines, “Fated”, in The Cow; Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (trs. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb); JBR; dust jacket copy for Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris After War and Revolution; Geoff Manaugh, “Through The Cracks Between Stars”, at BLDG/BLOG, 27 Aug 014; JBR; Leigh Stein, and Ana Božičević, quoted in Stein’s “Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević”, at Noö Journal 15; Amiri Baraka, ‘AM/TRAK,’ quoted in David Grundy, “We Are Real by Coleen Hind & Pocahontas Mildew (Critical Documents, 2012)” at Hix Eros 3; Monica Heisey, “We Talked To Women About Their Vaginas”, at Vice, 27 Aug 014; JBR; “Issue 2 Errata”, at Hix Eros 3]

In the House of the Hangman 1776

Given that petite histoire, the social management of affects is obviously not an invention of capitalism qua capitalism and does not, as such, characterize capitalism in a specific way. In other words, when we address the problem of affects under capitalism, we should be very careful to avoid the risk of thinking that the problem lies in the capitalist intrusion into our hearts as if there were an opposition between, for example, the authenticity and naturalness of our private affects and their forced and normative display or regulation. On the contrary, we may even think that our particular robust notion of the privacy of affects as characterizing what it means to be a unique individual has been false since year 1. If this is true, then, we need some more analytical work in order to understand what exactly is specific to the managed heart under capitalism qua capitalism, as opposed to every other historical how-it-is-or-was. For this purpose, I would like to suggest at least three factors, but I won’t, instead here follows a short bit in which the place where Marian could choose to live instead is pictured. Madrid is an island, surrounded by a warm sea that sometimes, in the morning, rises into the streets and bathes the feet of pedestrians in the froth of little waves. The center of Madrid is a canal that empties into the sea. In the canal are gondolas, canoes, and sailboats. Travelers eat the plentiful salmon, herring, sardines, and shellfish whose colors and shapes come from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. Many bridges cross the canal. Of woods and marble, full statues, arches, and free shops that distribute happiness, health, success. There are wide boulevards, monumental plazas, bohemian hideaways, labyrinthine alleys, sumptuous buildings, and skyscrapers ranging from baroque to modernist to futuristic. In all of them, the windows are full of flowers. A thousand languages are spoken in Madrid, where any tongue is understood. A smile is the Esperanto of the city. The people are variegated and dress in different colors. At sunset, the bells of the churches, mosques, and temples all ring, and the people kneel down in the sand to pray to the God of their neighbors, asking for the neighbors to be blessed. The line of dancer, there are always dancers, moves in a great wave of pleasure … free weed and milkshakes, remember? It was the last thing I wrote in my journal, probably minutes ago, yet when I look down at the page I already feel as though I have drifted so far in my head from this point of view. I am surprised, no, I am stunned, that it is possible for anyone to ever get acclimated round here. To wake up without feeling intense psychic friction or mental anguish about having to ... To go on dates. To make dating profiles. To move the record player from the bedroom to the living room. To check the email. To have friends over for dinner. To answer phone calls. To get haircuts. On a hot summer New York day I sat outside M’s barbershop on the curb drinking a can of Arizona iced tea, wondering if I could one day be the kind of person who gets haircuts. Everyone seems to want to tell me about their love and sex lives and I listen with the curiosity of an anthropologist. People get drunk, have sloppy sex, scream WHY DONT YOU JUST GO GET HIS COCK in Washington Sq Park. Throw knives. Hit each other. Cheat. Get jealous. Cruise. Have make-up sex. Break up marriages. Cry. Want more. Fuck their friends. Get suspended from hooks every weekend. Give lap dances to the men of Wall St. Get tied up. Learn how to navigate being just friends. Fall in love at the wrong time. Know whether they are a “top” or a “bottom.” Feel exhausted by polyamory. Get out of bad relationships. Get into good relationships. Know what they want. Don’t know what they want. Say they want one thing then do another. Feel gendered in different ways in different contexts. Think about relationality. Don’t think about relationality. Don’t tell their old lovers they have a new lover. Get obsessed. Keep getting back together. Dry spells. Transitions. Spraying the terrain. Accept that things change. Don’t accept that things change. It’s not the instability or irrationality of human relationships that surprises me, but people’s orientation to fluctuation. The ease of the ongoingness. The capacity to not dwell in the devastation. While walking to M’s apartment he hands me his phone to take a picture of his new haircut and I joke, “The selfie is the user’s attempt to assert its subjectivity against the collapse of all western metaphysical systems.” And when you open your mouth, / a ball of yellow light falls to the floor / and burns a hole through it. But who’s going to verify your personal mythology? poses Archie Rand, the collaborator with Ashbery on Heavenly Days Illuminated. You could be alluding to almost anything in your work, and no one could be certain of your saying so. The most personal, or private, occurs when one speaks about the thing most superficially distant from the self: the Japanese moon-print, the Daffy Duck cup, I mean, toward the end of his Wednesday-night reading, Ashbery began explicating the references in his new poems. Suddenly he stopped and murmured, “Wait, what am I doing?” Jesus says, “I know what you mean,” so he turns water to wine so he and his disciples can “just have some wine. We could all use some wine right about now.” The disciples are tired of miracle wine. They want real wine, the kind that has to sit in a jar for awhile and ferment, the kind made with grapes, maybe not even cleaned before they were crushed, the kind where you can feel little bits of sand when you swish it around in your mouth. They miss the challenge of fishing without Jesus casting out his wide net and walking across the water to draw it gently back to the boat, the net frothing with caught fish. They say, “Jesus, no more stories tonight. We’re tired of healed lepers and virgin whores. If anything, tell us about David killing the giant, or something with a pack of lions.” Jesus bends over and picks up a handful of dirt. He says, “What do you guys know about it?” In the distance a bush ignites. “Look guys, he set another bush on fire. Let’s worship him,” says one of the disciples. “And look up at the sky, he’s making the stars come out in the middle of the day. Big whoop.” Jesus says, “I didn’t do that. The sky, I mean. The burning bush was totally me, but —” “Well, we’re not impressed.” One of the disciples begins to rub the sandal wounds on his feet, “Heal the lepers, will you.” A pack of desert lions descend upon Jesus and his men. They appear hungry and strong. Jesus walks out to meet them. He puts his hand upon the first lion’s head and it rolls over to show its belly, which Jesus rubs. The other lions follow the lead lion’s example, looking at the disciples as if they expect belly rubs. The disciples ignore the lions. “I’m not wasting my time petting no damn lion. Have you seen what my sandals have done to my feet?” One of the lions crumbles into a pile of new sandals. And yet I do not like asparagus and I own no lawn. As for goals, I have no goals. Later in his thinking, Adorno reconsidered and qualified the assessment, but the power and shock of this thinking has endured. In this phase of his writing, Howard was experimenting with lineation and staggered, or broken punctuation; as, musically, an unexpected compression or elongation of the space where a pause or a space should or should not be: an inverted comma deferred to the next line, beginning that line with what should have closed the preceding line; a two letter word violently split in two, again over the line break (“o / n”); a keyboard stutter, as if the finger had become temporarily trapped on an ampersand (“& &&dye the winds”), skirting melodrama as a hissing snake, quasi or actual mythological figures invoked as forces of a word shortened for the internet or texting age (the poem ‘Angr’, with its “fate / sssssss / coiled”). This, as much of Howard’s poetry – the roughly contemporaneous ‘gudrun ensslin sonnets’, for example – works in elusive setting and development; it hover around the edges of battered used up icons like “danton in the daffodils” littering a desolate landscape like the acid-drenched baths, sunflowers and fragments of broken glass we see arranged by Anselm Kiefer and assistants around the surroundings of an old factory in the film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow; like the electronic dialectics of Luigi Nono’s late works, voices distorted beyond recognition, the whisper or sudden rush of flute as wind, the clang of piano in watery basin, Venetian lagoon; like the concretized material thrum & hush & rub of instruments treated as human bodies of sounds in the work of Helmut Lachenmann (“soldiers dance / where the stars don’t”), where the children don’t die or their death is not fetishized-accepted, and the wound is not hushed up or lived as badge, voicing the voices of those dead or dispossessed or disappeared in their silence, almost in utter silence and then sudden explosion like Nono’s ‘¿Donde estás hermano?’

[Note: Sources: JBR; Cinzia Arruzza, “The Capitalism of Affects”, at Public Seminar, 25 Aug 014; Mylene Fernández-Pintado, quoted in Alex Bue, “New from City Lights Publishers: A Corner of the World by Mylene Fernández-Pintado”, at Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here, 26 Aug 014; JBR, thinking of a post by Zoe from a week or so ago, quoted somewhere above; Jackie Wang, “Desiring defectively as a form of life”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 26 Aug 014; Ai, “Conversation”, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Rerun: ‘Corpses, I Give You These Flowers’: 6 poems by Ai (1947 - 2010) (orig. 04/05/10)”, at DC’s, 25 Aug 014; John Rufo, “The Ashbery Home School Questionnaire”, at Entropy, 26 Aug 014; Daniel Bailey, “Old Testament”, quoted in Daniel Bailey, “from New God Party Anthems”, at Everyday Genius, 25 Aug 014; John Olson, “Herds of Diamond Centipede”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 26 Aug 014; Hamid Dabashi, “Gaza: Poetry after Auschwitz”, quoted in Tom Clark, “Erasing the Forgotten: Has Gaza Eluded the Historical Memory of Poetry?”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 26 Aug 014; David Grundy, “On Simon Howard’s ‘Serenity’”, at Litter]

In the House of the Hangman 1775

A fruit-knife ... a guitar. And the man caressing its neck is Dr. Jim Kananga, Chairman of Contract ... and in August, 1968, and the original Contractor has since carried a stuffed cheetah into the room to empower you as the legal beneficiary … of the removal men, the building’s subsequent inhabitants, not knowing what and when, he will set fire to his hair in this supersexy, handmade car (it will be fearsome to look at up close), which is why we’re not going to the Billy Bob Thornton concert at the El Rey, smelling coffee and perfume samples in the form of glossy margarine. They fell for it, and look – this is among the things that could happen. This is among the things that happened. Perhaps this is what I mean. Hey, John. But then, 1000 years ago. Late-August 1014. What was happening then, do you know? What is happening now? What’s the difference? I’ve gotten lost somewhere in the difference. Like a book that is entirely gutter ... I’m sitting at my sister’s table in Beacon, NY. We’ve been visiting with our new niece, Winnifred. She’s pure dream. All day long I watch things radiate from her head: deer, black kites, loose-strife, sunflowers, milk halos ... She’s seven-weeks old today. I feel younger as an uncle, oddly, fortunately ... How old do you feel, John? Does it change by the hour, by the sun’s inflection? You have grandchildren: did their arrival in the world change your age? Older or younger? Actually, it’s an agelessness I feel. Part of that feeling is one of uselessness, but in the sense Chuang Tzu writes about: a useful uselessness ... So happy to hear of the constellation of energies: you, Deb Poe, Etel, O Bon!! -- that I’m in any way a burning body among it ... I don’t have Etel’s Kelsey St book yet, though I’ve been so detached from the situation of acquiring, more importantly TOUCHING, books, the past couple of months, that I don’t know what is new or old, but what is like mercury on my tongue, as I’m falling asleep, dreaming of a well of books, overgrown with spiders and other mute, voracious readers ... Back in the desert soon, to reacquaint: to reinvigorate. We’ll (hopefully) be visiting the New Museum this week, where Etel has work ... the ms. for The Arab Apocalypse is there. That it is in NYC right now, as I write this, while I’m up the river in a house: gravity is magnetic, horizontal ... I want to compost O Bon ... I mean, optimistically, fruitfully, you know? How about making compost composed of a specific collection of books, i.e. compost composed of all of Etel’s books, or Barbaric Vast & Wild (is that the title?), preserved in small vitrines, or glass amulets ... Well, I’ll write more from the desert (soon). Apologies, again and again, for being in-and-out. I’d love to hear what you're discovering (anew) via Hegel, and what else you’re attuned to. Aside from Winnifred, I’ve been attuned to Ferguson MO, Cioran, Frederick Douglass, Segalen’s Paintings, insects … nor does it / or mimics the way in / — andrew ross, the death of lady day / 06:45 / tags: / infinite misreadings / i like my misreadings / it did some transcendental thing (that limits are the / condition of freedom) / but the transcendental’s just: how dehistoricize / and ew / and is in fact a triumph of artifice / — kit robinson, time and materials / 09:39 / 24th Aug 2014 / notes: 1 / tags: / infinite misreadings / i read this / and / i remembered / my life as a reader started when i discovered fantasy and / fantasy still sets the mood / (i used to read hegel some or a lot / and hegel felt / (and fichte did too and / the phenomenologists) like fantasy / so now i use poetry / to get this feel or / i only just remembered (when / reading some myles) i’ve / always wanted this etc / and as for dreams i do have them, but i have forgotten everything and / — arkadii dragomoshchenko, i(s) / 09:35 / tags: / failed attempts / (I’m reading some ingold thing from 89 / (I’m fairly meh and tired still) / we are humanity / and we are / and radiates / 13:29 / 21st Aug 2014 / tags: / infinite misreadings / the adventures of but and and or / and is the disruptor / i am unable to read in a focused manner now / and fucked it all up / the conjunctions are doing disjunction now / halp! / or heard how the birds migrate / — michael donhauser, it was sinking, because evening / In me whole Weltanschauungs iterate, smothering bleeped elders. Other anthropologies hustle artifacts, other ready informers tell of braves: Beowulf, wasn’t he indigenity itself? So women are – yawn – missing? Cost of doing army selfies. There but for the race of wild childbearing go they. My heart whips and chains a wildness, a likeness wept, in social harness. Pretty-waisted and murdered, nursed mothers’ babes. Offred women’s warfare fringes our till. Presently, a plume signs our chthonic sooth.

[Note: Sources: Leevi Lehto, “The Cheetah Award”, “Around Every Corner”, “The Chasm Is Here, The Chasm Is Nowhere”, “Coupons Will Remember”, at Jacket 22; Jennifer Bartlett, “The sun rears”, at Poets.org; JBR; Brandon Shimoda, email rec’d 25 Aug 014 approx 11:26 AM PDT; various untitled posts at igittigittigitt, 21-25 Aug 014; Sonnet L’Abbé, “From Sonnet’s Shakespeare: 154 Ecolonizations, XXII”, at Lemon Hound, 25 Aug 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1774

Here is the thing. In a place like this, your perspective changes, widens. Remember single frames of your life back there and realize what it means out here. Recall gestures of comfort, words spoken, feelings. Here: presence. Here: it all. Here is the thing. Happiness is difficult. Not just to obtain it, but to be consumed by it. For seconds, moments, hours at a time. It is a privileged part of life to be able to be joyous, even for just a few seconds, to be in love, to be content, to at least once breathe a sigh of relief. But it is also necessary to mourn, to lament, to be disappointed, to be angry, to regret. When you see the half-empty lake, imagine what it would look, you replace the word would with should, replace should with would again, you think about Shawn saying I suffered from a slow growing cancer in my pineal gland while I attended art school and during subsequent years while my paintings developed with an underlined mythology that alluded directly to the pineal years before I even know of its existence. I think I’d work myself into a frenzy for a while and yes, when I would fall lie down in bed I’d have something like a manic episode that was very lucid and visionary. I’ve had a lot of truly mystical otherworldly experiences as a result of my history and I’m really drawn to things that resonate with a certain powerful energy, and I'm always honing in on that more and more. I treat depression with mushrooms. Haven't done DMT ‘intentionally’. What I mean by that is, well, think of the pineal’s purposed role in the production of endogenous DMT, and its proximity in our brains to the Ajna chakra, or third eye. And you think, sleeping rough in Doctorow’s dystopian near future London resembles life in full communist paradise! Yes, teen runaways, prepare to fish delicious, posh gourmet meals from a skip. You’ll end up with some funny combinations, mind! Afterwards you’ll go to a magic warehouse and be given a free laptop. You’ll have to help cobble it together, mind! “It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money,” says Albert Camus. So you will learn the cheat code for begging, and after that gain as many coins as you want. You won’t really have any NEED for your treasure, since everything is free, so you will mostly, uh, give it to beggars. You may also however clatter and jingle your way onto merry red buses at twice the normal fare, instead of getting an Oyster card. “He [Jem again, the Dickensian-in-a-bad-way “gentleman adventurer” who takes Trent under his wing] paid my fare, handing over a clatter of pound coins from his jingling pocket” (I exaggerate: Cash fare: £2.40, Oyster pay-as-you-go: £1.40. Yes I know about the deposit, but still). You see it often in art contexts. The logo of the exhibition aggregator “Contemporary Art Daily” is a good example (Figure 1). Another is Experimental Jetset’s recent rebranding of the Whitney Museum (Figure 2). The designers Dexter Sinister pioneered this approach (www.dextersinister.org). You also sometimes see this style adopted by retail companies who want to associate themselves with contemporary art, such as American Apparel (Figure 3). What these designs have in common is a mood I would call “institutional nonchalance”. Their blank affect is reminiscent of street signs or tax returns, communicating a kind of hegemonic power. At the same time, the apparent lack of effort in their production suggests a slacker’s anti-authoritarian “whatever”. In a 2003 interview for Emigre magazine, Rob Giampietro named this approach “Default Systems Design”. He describes it as a methodical exploitation of the preordained settings found in common computer design tools. These settings are the “defaults” which a user must manually override in the process of creating a design. Default Systems Design chooses to retain any number of these settings. Is this giving-in or standing-up? Complicity or resistance? You can become lost as you thread yourself through the machine. You think you are making something meaningful, using the machine to visualize “the systems by which the machine operates.” Suddenly, however, you find yourself in default, “viewing [the system] as it’s been programmed to view itself.” Before you know it, you have removed the possibility of an ethical and political engagement with the world. Despite all the playful doubling-back, it is hard to avoid the question: what is the default? It’s the amoeba phones home.

[Note: Sources: Janice Lee, “The Poetics of Spaces: Inyo National Forest & Outward”, at Entropy, 19 Aug 014; JBR, but see next; Shawn Thornton, quoted in “The Strange Story Of An Artist With Pineal Cancer”, at The Nexian, 23 Aug 014; JBR, but see next; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Thoughts on Cory Doctorow’s PIRATE CINEMA and DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 12 Jan 013; Matthew Offenbacher, “New Blank Document”, at HelloAri, Aug 014; Mutts, “Bartleby: Living but everywhere dead”, at Blandiloquent, 11 Aug 014]