Whereas the second conference seemed close to me, my body, my family, in the home sort of, in the guts of the room, of the organs that matter, the organs our bodies are made of. But I is the conditions of my labor felt pushed out of its circumference. I think of Pascal here, of course. O quotidian taboos, civic sanitation inside us. Phantasy is full of contradictions. HUMAN HISTORY IS FULL OF HOLES. Fog of phonemes mistaken for pheromones convey something else, something also billowing out, to reappear again, deformed, now beast, now driftwood, now a dandy pony now an ooze. What if we communicated solely through our thumbs? Our thumbs would need sphincters? We are all thumbs & all sphincter! O, Venus! O, Anus! Or what’s at stake, O Paleolithic, or else a roar only deer can hear. Spam focused or stillbirths like narrative into something more like a miasma of textures, colors, glints, half-completed actions: What love has Yes though the tree has taken root in the ground the ground is upturned and in this forced vomitage is spewn the dire miasma of fossilific kings of Naples, lack, Late Victorian, love, lunar shadows, State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted replacement sounds shared tape strategic judge spam acid economics bytes uttered lpn newborns amaze unfit festo vall mainmenu togoland architecten anstey bandgap hpu brust garret veiling volatilities ziehen miasma areca orrick knowledgecom bromas Click here to download dru apar tending shaggy scald coreg remote exception festo mesylate rois pumpin kurland usana tilak sculls soient miasma levene instantiates hypertens interactor fpj fwb gigg givi hohn ht ivig jpf junk juri kef kout kpec lfo lof moff farer fason fdisk feagin feint ferra festo finan fishing floss fluka foram miasma microtubule midterm midwifed mindset minibuses or unauthorized advertising or promotional material or any junk mail, spam by suggesting such themes as honor the tradition and Zeitgeist of the Meagre floor, mean workhouses and airborne. I felt as if my internal organs were outside of me, like a skirt. Is the body a butcher’s apron? But then passed the ear (fossilized bones of the inner ear) (of a whale that had washed up on the shore of North Carolina) (condensed by aeons) around the audience, pretending (secretly) they were the ocean. I perceive one point in the place of an eye. The possibility of recomposition by me, even drawing it. From the plane, the upturned soil. Earth moves continually with the beginning of the earth. I feel a heat that does not emanate from within as if I had swallowed a hot brick. I feel pregnant. A cab heading toward the beach has the perception of a long lost dream. I see myself in the cosmos seated on the back seat of the devil, upon a red parcel, looking down at the earth below. I lose sense of time and see that the earth goes on in the same process, constantly making and unmaking itself. Hours go by that are really seconds. I arrive at the beach. I spend the night in a state of total hallucination. Time goes on, elastic, vast. In one minute, I perceive centuries – a constant vision that seems to me the sum of two sexes, don’t know what they are. I go to the bathroom. I see myself in the mirror, deformed. My skin is loose. The bones beneath are crooked. I am a 5,000 year old crone. I understand Goya at last. From the verandah, I see the sea, the earth, the air, and it all seems to me like mercury. Sounds run through my nerves and invade my whole body. The earth goes on recreating itself at every moment. A herd of black goats go by, staring at me with slanted, honey colored, black magic eyes. I am taken over by the unconscious. I crawl down the hill, I pick up the water, the sand, the soil and breathe the air. I feel like corking these elements in a bottle and labeling them to give them an identity. I eat some squids. It is like the landscape being swallowed by me. It is something sensational. Three days and nights without sleep. On the fourth day, I begin to weep, yawn, and collapse with exhaustion. And sleep. I awake and see myself in the mirror. I rediscover my face, the ‘me’ that was denied me was dissolved. I had seen myself as huge and naked. I was a landscape, a continent, the world. Around my pubis, little men have built a dam. A dam or a great lake into which they can all dive. I feel uncategorized. Where is my place in the world? I am horrified at being the catalyst of my own experiences and purposes. On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart. She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together and, by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of her right foot, approached us shouting, “Well what’s wrong with a person trying to express themselves?” The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. And the cat? He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers above their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. Where? Nowhere, evidently. I mean, somewhere with Wendy on Google Earth.
Which is to say, perhaps, with Anne Boyer, that
We came to our mutual informatization with nothing
but style style’s vindications decorating the artwork the
smell of ungovernability or how to handle this to handle this
when undone by that
by that blanker our better our better we no longer
believed in we no longer believed in a few years left
the codes were all damages of the governing overplotter
plotter praeteritio of the pacific addictive
glamor glamor and the fingers one by one of a copyist of
Courbet’s origin myth
Courbet’s origin myth it went it went the beginning of the
event is a downhill trail of minor Kardashians but perhaps
we are still in my head
my head neither criminal nor the question the question
here is what could be what could be said we wanted we
wanted conditions to get better better to leave out the
spectacular form of instruction of how to ascend from
the Turing horror of
horror of. Of course this can be seen most clearly in Joseph Cornell’s boxes. These boxes of are full of dream-trash. Cruz’s poems too are almost all wunderkammers – “symptoms of trauma, like ghost spots of water on crystal that will not be washed off.” I mean, “I was a meat-based creature I was chunky with carbon / I grew spleens, nails, fat-lobes, etc. It all ended / I ascended into Heaven The angels sounded like highpitched / techno wails Their spooky faces were all identical / One angel came forward & sank his fist into my stomach / as though it were a ball of wax He pulled out a dried-out / milk gland It looked like a tiny tumbleweed He then pulled / out: Two wigs A city A goat skeleton He mounted all these / on a styrofoam plaque”. I’m speaking of course of “The Arrival of a Bee Box.” It too hinges on agency – will she set the bees free, will she kill herself etc. The magic of Plath’s poem is the way that metaphors break the box: by imagining the reason for the noise from the box (as slaves, as riots etc), well, remember when Don Mee Choi read from Kim Hyesoon’s “Pinkbox” after having hand-made us pink boxes to wear on our heads? And yet, there were Key Phrases I learned to hear and appreciate (if not use myself) in these gigs. The other day somebody said to me, “It’s the kind of discussion that should be evergreen, not trending.” And I not only knew exactly what she meant (and she was totally right), but knew too that she and I had sat through the same kind of meetings. And this is what I’ve been talking about, with regard to book design, really. How can the look / feel / aura of the physical object compel you to touch it, to open it, and then to read what’s inside? What about when you can’t touch it, because you’re online? Do they have any pets? “And now what time is it”? Time to get with the program! The program demands we transmit every message through the fraying vocab. Item: a bed of sand and mud shoved into a closet in a van in the basement with the terrible fire among which the suit made of tissue for instance is as palpable as the bottom of a lake from which once you pulled it for 26 years, encrusted with lead.
[Note: Except as noted, a spin thru Ron Silliman’s links list: the letter K. The spin ends with a full stop. Then back to regularly-scheduled programming. Sources: Stephanie Young, Ursula or University, quoted in Megan Kaminski, “Stephanie Young”, at Mlle Megan, 23 Jan 015; JBR; Elizabeth Workman, “an excerpt from Miasmafesto, a forthcoming limited edition book in collaboration with artist Jenny Schmid”, at Dusie 17; Google search on “Zeitgeist Spam Miasmafesto” (not Silliman); Bhanu Kapil, “Meadow, Quantum Grid and Tristram Shandy in North Carolina”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 28 Jan 015; Lygia Clark, quoted in Ian Keenan, “VOs from ‘O Mundo de Lygia Clark’”, at Piri’ Miri Muli’, 19 Jan 015. Ursula K LeGuin, “Schrödinger’s Cat”, at wood s lot, 29 Jan 015; JBR; Wendy Lotterman, “Faceless”, at The Pain Quotidian; JBR, but see next; Anne Boyer, “Elegy for Disappearance”, at The Pain Quotidian; Johannes Goöransson, Cynthia Cruz, and Lara Glenum, quoted in Göransson’s “Wunderkammer: Kitsch and Violence in Cynthia Cruz, Lara Glenum, Plath and Celan”, at Montevidayo, 29 Jan 015; JBR; Stefania Heim, quoted in “Delighting in the Potential”, at The Brooklyn Quarterly 4; Shanna Compton, and Jennifer L Knox, quoted in Compton’s “Conversion Experience”, at Real Pants, 29 Jan 015; Patrick Pritchett, “Homage to the Raven: i.m. Anselm Hollo”, in his “Remembering Anselm Hollo”, at Writing the Messianic, 28 Jan 015; David W Pritchard, “The Song of the Terrible Fire”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 29 Jan 015]
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