And I understood your language down to the scraped layer of cake if cake was as good as hearing your words all over again and again and again until I heard each gravel of tone like an avant eruption of noise, each frag reborn into something totally new totally old totally worn, wazillion thread sheets, 1920s French porn, big band New Orleans headliner. As a result, one is ‘healed’ from what Vattimo considers to be the violence of metaphysics. This ‘convalescent’ aspect of Verwindung occurs through the hermeneutical event of the act of interpretation. Determined in this manner, Vattimo’s philosophy of ‘weak thought’ involves a withdrawal from metaphysics by avoiding new foundations or complete assent to any position. I mean, it should be like Oz comes out, balding, ugly and grey, saying “it’s not me anyway.” For example, I could always be president because I sleep and daydream too much. It’s true. How is it that everyone knows the trade agreements are just plain cruelty, a degree away from holocaust orthodoxy and yet ad continuity ad nausea. Ahem. Well the good news is we don’t have to watch what we say because History will be unemployed in the future. Note to historian: Please write, “She knew she was great.” (No. She knew HOW NOT great she was which made her great. And she knew the system. Muse on that, historian. It will help you become a better human and not write such superficial biography. Thanks.) Mertz! And I was serious! Take me seriously, dammit! What tone is serious anymore? How do we know when anyone is being serious, when the serious sentences were used to rub the crotches and the banks of so many suits?! Mertz! Mertz is so serious, dear Alain, did you ever read Zamyatin’s “We”? It’s what Orwell based 1984 on. He got kicked out of Russia before it was Bolshevik. But Zamyatin foretold a world where everything was algebra and the only thing to wake up the creativity, the poetry pole you juxtapose against math, the Dionysius to your linear Apollo, well let’s just say Dionysius didn’t dance without Venus. Do you think Venus exists? You must believe in the ***, the undefined, the ***, the poetry that beds the data when it’s young and vomiting on the floor, before it grows into a tall and strong polynomial chain. You said you did. Should I just ask somebody to write me a prescription and forget about it? The arc soars like a singular licence for shadows to freak on the drooling sanguine disco childhood house music club buried beneath the sand made by thousands of silkworms and one sad robot celery strings banjo wax festival inveterate dance cane under and then over x. Rage, Caesar, of why should I make a villain of world protest there are lots of things colouring your vision, not just this buzz. Art isn’t even art anymore and might not even be mad vanilla and yet there is a lot to be deduced from this for example slam-dunking prosody is for wimps, and Google’s future installation art portal compared to Matt Damon’s hard and trippy face in the immense autumn atrium of the trees which I don’t know it’s just an illusion, Shakespeare was right, and there is infinite sex, not just for us and I don’t even want a fucking revolution but no, seriously, bantam leaf dab to angelic preterition of apparel anonymous hung fender to the gulf blue of bolts to the floor by way of the neural rayed starry intake of marine feathers upgraded to chillax recant of real grade huff. I crime towards you aggressively with an already-broken bat in my hand a flashing mental accent cube rests atop the laboratory spirit icons bounce hollow on their bar font headings churn paste on the mountain action what makes my cloth and my food eroded cantaloupe skin on vague animal ideas the 1812 invention of gas streetlamps. A pregnant bear sits on municipal ground, a piper at the gates of prepared slaughter this superimposed shitsponge logic the withering spirit of most lemons, I buy an orb-shaped glass orb and a designer candle and go home to play minimalist drone music backchanneling an elder about acupuncture receiving dull, potato-shaped aches, Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead. If you haven’t been here before and are wondering what this is about, you might wish to start with “What are otherkin?” The neighbor, a kindly Mennonite, watches from his porch for pattern changes that confirm his cosmic suspicions, hybridized-grass lawns, cut to spec, so against the dictates of any nature I can imagine. This too feels like an allusion. I would, if I could pay for the place — or maybe a hedge maze or labyrinth. I mean, I wonder, is my eudaimonia an option? All regular expressions reduce to questions of authority, which is why A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual prescribes Coptis Root (Chu Sha / Zhu Sha / Huang Lian) for night terrors, but also as a remedy for foul breath and the rampant proliferation of corn-based products. Or take a later manifestation of this rethinking, when in II.ii the cladistic association of “condor dinosaur” leads us, eventually, to “piece curio old / desk drawers rail / ties ladder rung.” “This is a photo of a dodo,” said Marie. She pointed to a photograph of a dodo drawn in pencil, and Mina looked. Above the photograph hung the dodo drawing, set in double glass and framed in wood. Long ago, before Marie and Louise were Marie and Louise, Mina told Marie to read Louise’s sentence. The sentence was 120 pages and full of word play, like crisis jubilee, which sounds like a dessert one should eat on New Year’s Eve. In the foyer, Mina placed her keys on the Louise’s grandmother’s writing desk, a kidney shaped structure made of tulip wood. Louise returned from one of the nearby markets where she had picked out a pink pony piñata with the help of their son. “We almost bought a turtle,” he said later. Several poets, all of them female, donated several kinds of services, including commissioned poems, palm readings, and Tarot consultations. OK. This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program's criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament. These characteristics enabled the dogs to withstand the extensive training that was needed to prepare them for suborbital, then for orbital, space fights. On 3 November 1957, the dog Laika was the first Earth-born creature to enter space, making her instantly famous around the world. She did not return. Her death, a few hours after launching, transformed her into a legendary symbol of sacrifice. Two further strays, Belka and Strelka, were the first beings to make it back from space, and were swiftly immortalized in children’s books and cartoons. Images of the Space Dogs proliferated, reproduced on everyday goods across the USSR: cigarette packets, tins of sweets, badges, stamps and postcards all bore their likenesses. Soviet Space Dogs uses these unique items to illustrate the story (in fact and fiction) of how they became fairytale idols. The first book to document these items, it contains more than 350 images, almost all of which are previously unpublished, and many of which have never been seen before outside Russia. OK. I could have it all wrong. Ophelia finds the right wormhole at last, what does it represent that you forgot the claim but everything, OK, alright, I really do like drinking water from the tap, the yoga Hamlet placemat, Lapland in Palm Springs, and should do and oneself energetically spray in love with the adrift stray oblong. What kind of hamster am I anyway, me, the nunnery, the ghost of Hairpin’s mother, not just on Berkeley campus, where living energy on the incandescent lake, but. Since when was this world made to last, it was not. And never can or will be, or not yet. Then Jesus says go Holliwood where is your flannel and your soap clam. All tears are so important. I can’t believe tears exist. A dead bird lands on your belly like a scrap of heaven, or whatever, and then there is you: like Genet in Palestine, killing the mimosa of memefication and switching it down the talc, Hello. Hello back. I think my problem is a shitty psychological one, I don’t think, I’m kept up at night by terrible visions of Ezra Pound throwing me into a dungeon. And then by “Cities”, by H.D., in which the world is broken down into “aesthetes versus larvae”. And then by an alternate reality in which the musical Cats is based off Zukofsky’s cat poems instead of T.S. Eliot’s cat poems. And by a horribly unanswerable question: is Cats now better, or is Zukofsky now worse? Put simply, this shift is from maximalism to responsive variability. What do you do next? That’s what responsive variability is, a way to get more surplus aesthetic, economic, and political value from maxed-out noise. (To Jeffrey Nealon’s expansion→ intensification model of capitalism, I’d add → responsive variability. He argues that expansion has been maxed out as a way to generate profits – that’s the result of, among other things, globalization. Intensification is how capitalism adapts – instead of conquering new, raw materials and markets, it invests more fully in what already exists. But once investment is maxed out, then, I think, comes responsive variability: responsiveness and adaptation are optimized.)
[Note: Sources: Katy Bohinc, “New Orleans”, “Ode to Jack Spicer during the Debt Crisis in the Nation’s Capital Where I Live(d)”, at Poor Claudia, “from Dear Alain”, at Open Letters Monthly; “Gianni Vattimo”, at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “FKA-DERRIDA.pdf / CLIMATE CHANGE ROMANTIC COMEDY / ANY PARTIES”; Emily Skillings, “Among Elsewhere”, “Backchannel”, “Pepsi Will Bring Your Ancestors Back From The Dead”, at Poor Claudia; “Otherkin.net Harmony & Discord”, at Otherkin.net; John Estes, “Mower’s Song”, “Pattern and Fault”, at The Offending Adam 175.1; Ryan Wynet, editor’s note, in “Matthew Hittinger:: Cross Bucket Candle Knife”, at The Offending Adam 714.1; Teresa Carmody, “Foyer”, “Front Porch”, in Maison Femme: A Fiction, at Two Serious Ladies; JBR; Amazon blurb for Olesya Turkina, Damon Murray, and Stephen Sorrell, Soviet Space Dogs; JBR; various, at I Shall Destroy Everything Around Me That Prevents, 31 Dec 014; Robin James, “Some Philosophical Implications Of The ‘Loudness War’ And Its Criticisms”, at It’s Her Factory, 31 Dec 014]