Zeitgeist Spam

With the Noose Around My Neck 8

• Free jazz is that jazz, then, where the musicians take their full responsibility of what is being played. 

• They do not delegate whatsoever to given templates and therefore also have to negotiate (while playing) with their fellow players every single item they bring into play. 


So. The operation did not start with the undated letter. The Professor had been drilling deeper and deeper through the earth’s crust until he had finally discovered a layer that pulsates like a living animal. “The throbs were not direct, but gave the impression of a gentle ripple or rhythm, which ran across the surface,” as Jones put it, “The surface was not entirely homogenous but beneath it, seen as through ground glass, there were dim whitish patches or vacuoles, which varied constantly in shape and size.” The layers, the core and the strata, throbbed, pulsated, animated. One need not go to the same lengths as Professor Challenger does, in one of the most bizarre rape-like scenes in literature, when he penetrates that jellyesque layer just to make the planet scream. We might be really talking about Empire, mightn’t we? This my own skull form, an almost invisible bright green. But machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite. I mean, I do not know I am grieving but my kidney knows. I called my stone “precious” because its dull ache ever serves as a reminder that my body wants

if you want to know where the party is follow the searchlights

and if you want to know where Leeds is

follow the search lights

wax on wax off

but hey, tread softly for you tread on my treadmill

this is a Hardhat Area

cardboard boxes – painted stains

What the host calls “states” the guests prefer to call phases. Not “States of Matter” but rather phases of matter. Their description of “energy landscapes” puts me in mind of the comparison someone made in seminar last Thursday between Foucault’s account of panopticism and the way transistors work, especially with respect to the way they conduct power. That’s when Congress decides to abrogate all treaties in the hope that they can seize Indian casino money to balance the budget. In the aftermath of this decision, private surveillance agencies and drones overrun the former reservation, casinos are transformed into casino medical centers that require the aging rez population to gamble for their hospice care, then – what, this is weird, is this a dream or something? – then the green knight strolls in

green hair, green coat, converse
all stars painted green-blue. she cuts off her own head and rolls it
at your astonished feet
Hello
says the head

i dreamed a pearl
that made me sad
about myself and the first few
friends in the tiles of a geodesic
dome such a poem is more like the lacèd belt than the cup it arrives
a question of jewelry faceted
with what strings of pearl

the pearl-maiden busts coyly
into the laboratory busts up
the dreaming and standing-apace shows the space the spirit takes in an erlenmeyer flask about the space of a screw-on earring
the pearl-maiden should be a greeter
but there is no setting only force-fields

like knives and

                   the dreamer of the poem has melted brains

Trnta
highl etoel winw!

For if you rend your clothes
you’ll just have to sew them again.

Which doesn’t mean you won’t have to rend your clothes. The reality is that anything that nowadays contributes to underdevelopment and poverty constitutes a flagrant violation of the Earth’s Systems. Fidel said that. He said it 25 years ago. And since then? Happy Black Friday, my peoples. They say it’s your birthday. It’s my birthday, too. Here is where my chickens began to unhatch. Every night billions of sea creatures swim thousands of metres up to the photic zone. Everything I say, I say because I can’t cry. I can’t cry because I can’t see. I can’t see because I won’t listen. I won’t listen because I’m in violent fits or something like this. I’m in violent fits or something like this because and so on, and so forth, and that. What I really wanted was to write the love poem before the first. This was all they had ever wanted, even the elephants. That’s the evidence itself, says the wizard. I also believe in the toy synthesizer approach. Dam, that leaf was beautiful. Speaking of which, I believe, seventeenthly, that falling in love is always metaphysical and metaphysics always a type of falling in love. And that applies to leafs. Then the two women bring their faces close together — so close they are almost touching, their arms resting on each other’s shoulders. They sway slightly as they begin to kataq. The younger woman starts, and the sounds she makes come from the back of her throat, low and thick, almost growling. Ham ma ham ma, ham ma, ham ma — she breathes in and out in a steady rhythm, intensely, her vocal cords bruising each other. Buzzing, panting, the older woman’s voice comes in and moves up and down as if plucking the lower rhythm, teasing it almost. The sounds and rhythms pass from body to body, echoing and playing with each other, growling, buzzing, yelping. There’s something machine-like and modern about the sounds, which are also archaic and guttural. Ham me, ham ma, ma, ham ma, ham ma, ham ma   Ha ha ha, ha he he, ha he he, ha he he ha ha ha ha. Then the old lady breaks off and cackles loudly, hooting almost. The younger woman laughs too and wipes away tears. People smile, clap, and go back to what they were doing. This is not simply a matter of good historiography; what is at issue here is not the good reputation of art. The question of the origin of art is a political question. One might object that art changes nothing. But an opening occurs when a community of respondents is born with the work who each countersign the work, and are each implicated in its unfolding. But the truth is that I do not know. There was no brand on the box or on the device. I have combed the internal documentation and cannot find an answer. This is how far the Shenzhen electronics complex has evolved. The hardware maker literally does not matter. Contract manufacturers can download a reference design from the chip maker and build to suit customer orders. If I had 20,000 friends and an easy way to import these into the US, I would put my own name on it and hand them out as a business cards or Chanukah gifts. So yes, all these people, they’re in my head and they’re in my body, you know, they’re sort of animating my flesh, disrupting the body I guess I thought was mine, but – I mean, I read all these books on the history of math and history of physics and I get to the equations and I just have to skip which is really sad. I mean if I ever hit the lottery I’ll quit my job and go back to college and study math and science ... I won’t be any good at it but I just want to learn how to do the math. The plural pronoun isn’t quite right, either. So the point I’m trying to make is, I think the complex that is called Shakespeare was sent to show and to trace out the limits, okay, of interiority, the limits of a kind of singular interiority. Hamlet’s interiority breaks down. Richard II’s interiority, which is all bound up with sovereignty, breaks down, and we see it breaking down. The soliloquy turns out to be the break down of interiority, not its enunciation. It’s where that shit breaks down. But then there’s another way I would put it, just on a personal level, to make it more emphatic and more clear, maybe. To the extent that I said anything or that I have something to say, that’s because a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of history, a whole bunch of things sent me to say it. My grandmother used to love Kojak. I’d say, “Mimi why you love Kojak so much?” She’d say, “He just sends me.” And it was the only time I ever had anybody, the only time I ever knew anybody to use the word in that way that, you know, the way Sam Cooke uses it in the song. Speaking of The Inner / Outer Sound Matrix: For any ensemble and / or a reader. Listen inwardly for your own sound. Choose when and how to play the sound - or not. Listen outwardly for a sound from the ensemble. Choose when and how to play that sound - or not. How to play means choice of attack, sustain and release dynamic levels and feeling. For a reader: Choose a text of current political, scientific or artistic interest. Listen inwardly for a word to express. Choose when and how to say this word – or not. Listen outwardly and choose a word or phrase from the selected text. Choose when and how to express that phrase – or not. How to express means what spoken style (whisper, rhetorical, natural, declamatory, theatrical shouted etc., choice of duration, dynamic levels and feeling. Make a twelve-minute trajectory by either adding more and more silence between your performed sounds and / or words or less and less silence. Stop when your twelve-minute trajectory is completed. The duration of the piece does not have to be measured. Until menopause delivers me. Will grey hair protect my pussy from being grabbed as I wither into crone? Or are my black Adidas leggings still too tight for Reno? Jumping quickly thru these lines I hear echoes of Plato’s parable of the cave, what seems to be a desire to escape the omnipresence of mediated noise, Lot’s wife / Orpheus in the underworld, both of whom made the same “mistake”, a complex neologism in “outmade”, a use of “steels” where we might expect “steals” tho steels works just fine, the oddness of elite eyes (are they elite because they belong to those who have the luxury of eating?), a tense change between the present of “steels” and the past of “began”, a camera (the Lumix is made by Panasonic) and then a sudden declaration for which the referent must be inferred in “This is what I am tired of.” So, yes and no. There is a definite “tension between parataxis and narrative” in these sonnets. And yet there’s not, I think it’s the tension that creates narrative. And as for whether these sentences are “more or less ordinary”, wellllllllll ... what do you mean by ordinary? Yes and no. It occurs to me as I write that the new sentence is a concept that is almost as much from a different time and place as is Spicer’s work. Or Wordsworth’s. So maybe these are “post new sentences.” Solastalgia. It means something like “the distress caused by environmental change.”

                        Rhinestone venusaur submarine autobot hellebore, to some
                        fixed furniture of objects; the same causes
                        freight idles in the blocked ports for. Night then
            beguiles evening of its early lead
            and wide base. Waves are each other’s
            toys for drowning. Soon snipers were on the roofs
                        of the world. Bodies were down
                        and wombats in zoos. The body of
            thought grew and became a world problem. Delighted
                                                                is a goofy word
                                                                        having the
                                                            same hue
                                                                                    as ham.

To use a vivid but regrettably unflattering analogy: A very creative landscape artist might continually mess up colouring books.

Skull trash staring through wall splash.
Face skillet with sunny-side-up red eyeballs.
Black heel sprouting splayed white fingers.

We move inside the word wards of an original wetness,
measure veils stretched over bones.

“The Great Transparent Ones,” he thought
“communicate entirely through waves & odors...
The Great Transparent Ones...”  

YOU ARE SAFE. CODE ORANGE.
SHOP TAX FREE. SOFT TARGET.

... and then a stranger (whose twitter feed was mainly angry rants and vengeful bible quotes) tweeted, “ABORT YOUR DOG”. And then they turned the water cannons on the freezing protestors. And then I gathered all the colored milk crates and made a stack of red, orange, blue crates from bright to dark with a bright orange crate at top. That night I say “Cheese steak spring roll, spicy ketchup?” I get “sir”ed and “ma’am”ed. I walk the mile to the subway without getting on one. Then I google “turning your skin blue” and find out that silver has been known to dye the bodies of people who consume too much of it. “What fats are you composed of?” What scents? “Old books, wooden furniture, dusty rooms, campfire smoke, barbecue sauce / all in this small bottle”. Do you know what a Klein bottle is? My spine hurts, my stomach is sore. We just arrived yesterday and have no idea what time zone we’re in. “Which is to say that the first oudh (or agarwood) that I ever smelled gave me the impression that I had walked into a new room.” A Klein bottle room. So yes. At last, Acme has conquered topological and engineering frontiers to manufacture genuine glass Klein Bottles. These are the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions. “For example, Au Lac (Eau d’Italie by Alberto Morillas) is meant to summon the garden on a small island in the middle of an Italian lake where a 20th century Futurist painter seduces a 15th century princess (who was also a poet and devotee of Michelangelo). Or vice versa. That tiny story alone makes me crazy with happiness”. All the stories and hints of stories – I read then as if composed by the bastard child of Jane Bowles and Ma Rainey, chiming and jarring as the rigorously aleatoric-intuitional searchbox-derived top notes heart and notes base notes do what Pauline Oliveros does. I mean did. And yet. And yet. “There is a storm everywhere”, even here. But for now, in the universal highchair of the “double vacuum” (so politely undermultiplied by Amiri Baraka way back in 1977: “No communist party, no national / leadership”), what do we do? Suck or blow? No wind in the vacuum to piss against: try that again? To be idiomatic within a vacuum is a shining thing; to be vacuous in a plenary idiom is how we are now conscripted to do this, it’s a kind of gluttonous fasting, Jeromes on a diet of roasted peanuts in manic fast-forward, all chanting desperately and honestly and hatefully against the new season’s injustice, cantors with gobs blue-tacked to the hollering brick wall. Is irony in this way essentially a kind of clausal pile-up, or only now? Box after box. More about the earth later. Perhaps the pass-concept is something to do with poetry and the body. If the body is cognitive, if our habits and flinches are metaphysical and themselves a kind of knowledge, what is it exactly that we know? Or could know, if the body’s unconscious were plumbed? (“The gall bladder has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”) Marjorie Perloff’s gardener would presumably have wept. He said some politicians needed to be more like the characters in the show: “Elmo and his friends will tell us, it’s the way they are, they tell it straight.” “Keep it simple and it brings you back to earth. I think that is very important, we all need that.” We do, we need it. Eee gee Charles Bernstein’s 21^st recommended poetry experiment, a real wrist-nimbler-upper: “Dream work: Write down your dreams as the first thing you do every morning for 30 days. Apply translation and aleatoric processes to this material. Double the length of each dream. Weave them together into one poem, adding or changing or reordering material. Negate or reverse all statements (‘I went down the hill’ to ‘I went up the hill,’ ‘I didn’t’ to ‘I did’). Borrow a friend’s dreams and apply these techniques to them.” But, honestly, what do you need to say? If we haven’t yet communicated in our most total speech, why is this? What are our reluctances? What are mine.

America, you are terrible and no one likes you,

                but you don’t care.

You go about your day.

A livid stretch of death cults.

“America, you ode for reality ...”

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck.

So I was out near the sea one time, in California. I said ‘Hello, Sea, how you doing?’ The sea jumped right up on me. Just sayin’ hello. I had a lady with me then. The sea hadn’t said nothin to her. I said: now look, Sea, Ruth here’s feeling badly. You ought to say hello to her too. Well, the sea jump past me & up on her too. We both got splashed! I talk to everything, the earth, the sea, dollars, cars, refrigerators ... When I was in Egypt I’d go and sit alone on the desert. But everyone came out there to talk to me. Jackals, children, everything. Rollo, bass; Don, drum; Ronnie, trumpet; Marshall, sax; Danny, sax; Greg, dance. How to get to Zarikon. Met a man from India who knew about Zarikon (or was it Sidericom). Over the Rainbow. The fascination of syncopation is so strange. They rose on a light ray, all together they told him to keep his arms crossed (so whole body could tunnel up through the light. No arms (or anything) hanging outside (the light). Merton & I used to admire the atmosphere, the air of happiness, of contentment that used to surround & come forth from the Ellington band when they sat together on a stage, even if they weren’t (at the moment) playing (Basie’s band always looked happy too.) They took me there ... it was a vision ... they returned me to earth ... i found myself in a parking lot ... people were milling around ... don’t be afraid ... talk to them ... whales and their leader found on shore in Florida. Then Xena bound her legs to the horse with turban cloth, and as Gabrielle was bound she bowed her head to see in silence. Then they rode. The journey took eight centuries. Beetles and love and mist. Yeah. Blurgh raarrr blurgh brilliant gruuugh urgggh prrrruuuugh. Christ. Grrrrrrrugh glllurgh. Read it! If you went away I’d have to draw you with crayons. I’d have to build you with legos. Ornothopter. Blurgh grurl plurg grug gurgh yeah. Positivist. Blllllllllurgh grug grungle blug urgh brug fugfug if you can’t express what you mean clearly

with the heads switched
these dolls look angrier.

My co-workers’ faces were similarly
obscured.

“Beans taste better when you grow them on a banker’s grave”, to quote Danny Lyons. “Join us!”, as the trees say in Evil Dead. Dusty moonlight, starbeam riding its own flute. Parts for a 1999 Hyundai. It looks like the Illini or Illinois or Illiniwek people lived there before the US government forced them out to Oklahoma. From time to time Beuys rang a triangle which he carried round his neck. Sounds of a recorded turbine disturbed the atmosphere, bringing a threatening nuance into play.

Ductwork – Single Wall Round
Ductwork – Double Wall Round
Ductwork – Single Wall Oval

With the help of a Pravaz syringe he administers several injections of
            Doctor Yersin’s serum
Then he opens the wound in the arm with the scalpel, effecting a
            cruciform incision
He bleeds it
Then cauterizes it with some drops of hypochlorite of lime.

He blows twice into a small plastic trumpet.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 11:57 PM, Jonathan Tiplady wrote:

i dreamt i cut off van gogh’s other ear the other night
i also dreamt of deanna havas alone in the bronx
rewatching the sopranos. i said to her it would have
been better if van gogh had waited even longer
than derrida waited to publish three great books
and cut off both ears at once. she kissed me

mia goth and shia labeouf got together in 2012.
i marked my self safe from lack of mission creep
and a creative block that never comes. i inundate
the reading centres with a bearable infinity, with<
child’s strength ecstasy, with an unwild type of kind
ness. as u know the rest is history or silence

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 8:34 AM, John Bloomberg-Rissman wrote:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me
Says I, But Joe, you’re ten years dead
I never died, says he
I never died, says he

I see yr last line as parallel to Auden’s We must love one another or die. As everyone knows he hated that line and tried to fix it with an “and”. It didn’t work so he cancelled the poem. Not suggesting you cancel or rewrite anything, not at all, I love it that you

                                    inundate
the reading centres with a bearable infinity, with
child’s strength ecstasy, with an unwild type of kind
ness.

I mean truly love it. I’m just waking up and am reading this first thing and whether or not I am “creative” I certainly don't have a “babbling block”. The rest is history. And silence. I say that because I woke up thinking that one day before too long the cockroaches will all say to each other, “Wow, they lasted 60,000 years. That’s like not even being here!” (given that cockroaches evolved 300,000,000 years ago ...). Which reminds me of Mott the Hoople’s line,

You’re not the Nazz, you’re just a buzz, some kind of temporary ...

Still. Keep on filling the reading centres ... I like my creative misreading in which it was Derrida who cut off both of his ears. “Evil,” says Agamben, “is the forgetting of the whoa-factor inherent in the very taking-place of things.” We might imagine remembering, then, as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunneling through it, burrowing ... Speaking of which, could ants get any cooler? Apparently, they have been farming for something like three million years. The ant-farmed plants are all members of the Squamellaria family. They are epiphytic, meaning they grow on other plants, usually trees.cEven before the Squamellaria’s fruit is ripe, the ants begin gathering its seeds by cutting through the fruit’s wall. Next, the ants sow the seeds in holes in the tree bark and guard them until they begin to sprout. When the seedlings reach about three-quarters of an inch high, they begin to develop a soft, bulbous structure between the roots and the stem known as a domatium or “ant-house.” As soon as the domatium is big enough, the ants enter a cavity in it to shit, providing the young plant with fertilizer. So, what do the ants get in return? First and foremost, a place to live. As the Squamellaria continues to grow, its domatium grows as well, eventually measuring 8 to 16 inches across or more. Inside, it’s “an incredibly complex system of interconnected galleries, which looks like a brain.” All those folds maximize available nesting surfaces. That’s good for the ants and good for the long-term health of the plant, Chomicki said. The more ants that live in the domatium, the more ant-fertilizer the plant receives. Some species of Squamellaria sweeten the deal for the ants even more by providing sugar rewards that drip from their leaves. Which means that the scalar arrangement can be derived from the basic pentatonic cell P = {5, 8, 10, 0, 3} shown in figure 2.3 (as usual, pitch classes are encoded with c  0, c sharp  1, etc.). This cell is the union of two isomorphic three-element parts, M = {5, 8, 10} and its fifth transposition T⁷ M = {0, 3, 5}. The piece’s basic motif B = f – a flat – f – b flat for the lyric “A-love-su-preme” is built from P as a succession of a minor third f, a flat, and the fourth f, b flat. It is remarkable that this pairing 3 → 5 is precisely the pairing of the consonance 3 with the dissonance 5 (!) under the autocomplementarity symmetry T² · 5. Which is to say, of course, that “even a solitary wolf howl / ferries you across.”

All this deals with feelings ...
One does not quite know that until much later ...
There is something romantic about that.

The language of actions is a Romance
Language in the same family as
The language of flowers. It has its own

Grammar and syntax, its own poetry.
It isn’t widely spoken or understood.
There is a gender bias.

Time to destination: 32 minutes
Tail wind: 82 km/h
Outside temperature: -42C

Time to destination: 2 hours 30
Head wind: 14 km/h
Outside temperature: -60C

[Note: Sources: Guerino B. Mazzola and Paul B. Cherlin, in collaboration with Mathias Rissi and Nathan Kennedy, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration; JBR; Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (quoting Arthur Conan Doyle, “When the World Screamed”); JBR; Joseph Beuys, as quoted in “Joseph Beuys im Gesprach mit Caroline Tisdall, 1974”, in Joseph Beuys, The Secret Block for a Person in Ireland; Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction; JBR; Cherríe L Moraga, “Weapons of the Weak”, in A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000-2010; Posie Rider, “Leeds onextra”, “City Break”, “Holy Isle”, in City Break Weekend Songs; cris cheek, “short life housing”, “canning town chronicles”, in short life housing; stustu12340S, “[What the host ...]”, at A Fiery Flying Roule, 26 Nov 016; JBR; Stina Attebery, “Speculative Constitutions: Gerald Vizenor’s ‘Treaty Shirts’”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 Nov 016; JBR; David Hadbawnik, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Cotton Nero A.x: The works of the ‘Pearl’ poet, retranscribed, retraced, rebelieved ...; Daniel C. Remein, “Pearl”, in Cotton Nero A.x: The works of the ‘Pearl’ poet, retranscribed, retraced, rebelieved ...; Chris Piuma, “Tidy”, in Cotton Nero A.x: The works of the ‘Pearl’ poet, retranscribed, retraced, rebelieved ...; Lisa Ampleman, “Patience”, in Cotton Nero A.x: The works of the ‘Pearl’ poet, retranscribed, retraced, rebelieved ...; JBR; Fidel Castro (RIP), “Tomorrow Will Be Too Late”, in “¡COMPANERO FIDEL, PRESENTE! Fidel Castro: Fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet!”, at Climate and Capitalism, 26 Nov 016; JBR; John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Birthday” (I write this 27 Nov 016, which is my birthday); Jonty Tiplady, “Madrock Gunned Down in Flowers”, “Sahara Ha Ha”, “Simple Phrases Zero”, “Dear World and Everyone in It”, in The School of Metaphysics, 2^nd ed.; JBR; Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic; Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Communism; Jay Goldberg, as quoted in Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene; JBR; Fred Moten and Adam Fitzgerald, in Fitzgerald’s “An Interview with Fred Moten, Part 1”, at Literary Hub, 5 Aug 015; JBR; Pauline Oliveros (RIP), The Inner/Outer Sound Matrix. For sfSOUND, at Deep Listening; Andrea Lambert, “Thanksgiving with the Trumpocalypse”, at Entropy, 27 Nov 016; JBR, and Ian Heames, as quoted in JBR’s “Sonnets by Anonymous”, at Galatea Resurrects 23 (Anonymous = Ian Heames); Evelyn Reilly, “Variations on a Sentence by Rosmarie Waldrop”, in War and Peace: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); Rodrigo Toscano, “Pig Angels of the Americlypse”, in War and Peace: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); CA Conrad, “we’re on the brink of UTTER befuddlement yellow-hankie style”, in War and Peace: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); Anne Jaap Jacobson, “‘Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box’: A problem for professional philosophy?”, at Feminist Philosophers, 27 Nov 016; Clayton Eshleman, “A Half Hour with Basquiat”, “The Lavender Fathers”, “Tree Roots and Trunks”, in Jerome Rothenberg, “Clayton Eshleman: Four New Poems from ‘Penetralia’”, at Poems and Poetics, 27 Nov 016 (cancelled post); Susan Landers, “Every woman adores ousting a fascist”, in War and Peace: The Future (eds. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino); Jenny Lawson, “That’s not how this works”, at The Bloggess, 27 Nov 016; JBR, but see Derek Hawkins, “DAPL News: Police fire water cannon on protesters during freezing temperatures”, at Zeitgeist Spam, 21 Nov 016 (reposted from the Washington Post); Mel Bentley, “The First Three Days”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; JBR, blurb for Anne Gorrick, The Olfactions (in press); Keston Sutherland, “Quid 9: Against Imperialism a Prolegomena, Ex Ed.”, at Quid 9; Jonathan May, “[They parade the President in a big plastic cage ...]”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; DM Jerman, “[I realized yesterday while on the train inside a long stretch of subway tunnel, I was meditating ...]”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; Chris Martin, “Civil War 2.0”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; Robert Creeley, “America”; JBR; Sun Ra, as quoted in Robert Lax, “Sun Ra Notes & Numbers”, in Omniverse Sun Ra (eds. Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent); Francis Crot, Xena: Warrior Princess: The Seven Curses, Plus Xena’s Annotations, transcribed by Nrov Mrodbaak; Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, “Footwork”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; Eric Saenz, “Eleven Nine // Nine Eleven”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; Jason Morris, “Internet Jukebox”, at Elderly’s Not My Country; Alexander R Galloway, “The Nonhuman: Apophatic or Cataphatic?”, at Alexander R Galloway, 28 Nov 016; Allen Ginsberg, “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber”, in Planet News: 1961-1967; Kate Schapira, “First Rain Dance for Campellsville, KY”, “Third Rain Dance for White Hall, IL”, in Weather Eye Open; Caroline Tisdall, “Joseph Beuys / Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me”, in commentary to “The Book of Events”, in Technicians of the Sacred (ed. Jerome Rothenberg); Michael Gottleib, “from The Dust”, in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (eds. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith); Blaise Cendrars, “from Kodak (3. The Red-Crested Viper)” (tr. Craig Dworkin), in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (eds. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith); Novice Tadić, “Toys, Dream”, in The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (ed. and tr. Charlis Simic); Jonty Tiplady and JBR, in correspondence, 28-9 Nov 016; Nicola Masciandaro, “Falling Out of Language, Animally”, at Academia.edu; Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Deborah Netburn, “Ants have been farming plants for millions of years, long before people did”, at The Los Angeles Times, 22 Nov 016; JBR; Guerino B. Mazzola and Paul B. Cherlin, in collaboration with Mathias Rissi and Nathan Kennedy, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration; JBR; Jonathan Stalling, “Greeting”, in Yingeleshi; Angelos Sakkis, Travelog with Homer on My Mind]

RIP Pauline Oliveros

One reason they hated Fidel (to whom I say, RIP) (this is from the 1992 Earth Summit, and is reposted from Climate and Capitalism)

TOMORROW WILL BE TOO LATE

Mr. President of Brazil Fernando Collor de Melo;

Mr. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; Your Excellencies;

An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: humanity.

We have become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.

It is necessary to point out that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the brutal destruction of the environment. They arose from the old colonial powers and from imperialist policies which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty which today afflicts the vast majority of mankind.

With only 20 percent of the world’s population, these societies consume two-thirds of the metals and three-fourths of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience.

The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding. Every year billons of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct. Population pressures and poverty trigger frenzied efforts to survive even when it is at the expense of the environment. It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order.

The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most. The reality is that anything that nowadays contributes to underdevelopment and poverty constitutes a flagrant violation of ecology. Tens of millions of men, women, and children die every year in the Third World as a result of this, more than in each of the two world wars. Unequal terms of trade, protectionism, and the foreign debt assault the ecology and promote the destruction of the environment.

If we want to save mankind from this self-destruction, we have to better distribute the wealth and technologies available in the world. Less luxury and less waste by a few countries is needed so there is less poverty and less hunger on a large part of the Earth. We do not need any more transferring to the Third World of lifestyles and consumption habits that ruin the environment.

Let human life become more rational. Let us implement a just international economic order. Let us use all the science necessary for pollution-free, sustained development. Let us pay the ecological debt, and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear, and not mankind.

Now that the alleged threat of communism has disappeared and there are no longer any more excuses for cold wars, arms races, and military spending, what is blocking the immediate use of these resources to promote the development of the Third World and fight the threat of the ecological destruction of the planet?

Let selfishness end. Let hegemonies end. Let insensitivity, irresponsibility, and deceit end.

Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.

Thank you.

With the Noose Around My Neck 7

This part of the poem, which I will quote in its entirety in a moment, takes the form, like Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, of an address. It addresses itself, in the first person, to the air, or more precisely to ‘‘good air’’. But these two options are complicated and enhanced by the fact that the line continues, after a comma, into the next two stanzas, and does so in a somewhat indeterminate manner, in a moment of strange looseness, as if, as if, we are pretty close to a story here. All of this, I would even dare saying, taking a number of things all together, is the same as a story, an ‘‘all everything” in the sense that ‘‘All things in the sun are sun’’. And what if I flex and soften the v right down, let it melt into an r of sorts or even a z?

Here is where my chickens began to unhatch,
here the moon’s not asleep
and a sinkhole eats up the neighbourhood as wildebeests
die struggling to get out.

I learnt this back at the school of metaphysics
where repression is eternal, punkie, and
where every night billions of creatures swim thousands of metres up to the photic zone.

But let me put it to you more clearly. There is a version of events that will haunt us even in our darkest hours. Even in our wildest dreams. Hence the page turns. And the story continues. It was starting to look like a fine day after all. Practices similar to those just described appeared in Europe several times in later ages. In the thirteenth century they were revived in the Netherlands by the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, and, in the fourteenth, by the Beghards in Germany. The Beghards became the Picards of Bohemia, who took possession of an island in the river Nezarka, and gave themselves up to a shameful communism. It took another second or so for me to take in just how much money that was. When I had, I took my hand off the wall and turned suddenly around, towards the window. The movement was so forceful that it pulled the phone wire with it, yanked it right out of the wall. The whole connection came out: the wire, the flat-headed bit that you plug in and the casing of the hole that that plugs into too. It even brought some of the internal wiring that runs through the wall out with it, all dotted and flecked with crumbly, fleshy bits of plaster. “Hello?” I said. It was no good: the connection had been cut. I stood there for some time, I don’t know how long, holding the dead receiver in my hand and looking down at what the wall had spilt. It looked kind of disgusting, like something that’s come out of something. Do you remember the drawing I called “Délire vegétal”? The deliriousness is here, we touch it, we experience it. We are one with these layered trees, bearing in the elbows of their branches miniature swamps with parasitic vegetation grafted to their supporting trunks: rising, falling back down, active, passive, festooned from top to bottom with garlands identical to reality the only worthy way: thru the flames. So yes,

people have
always laughed at
my Boston accent
confusing “large” for
“lodge,” “party”
for “potty.” But
when this unsuspecting
woman invoked for
the first time my
family name
I knew the jig
was up. Yes, I am,
I am a Kennedy.
My attempts to remain
obscure have not served
me well. I mean,

there was an ancient cultivator of this type on my grandfather’s farm, though I had no idea those things in the middle were called “hooded shields.” Yet there are fifty million dogs in America today, only ten thousand wolves. So what does the dog know about getting along in this world that its wild ancestor doesn’t? The big thing the dog knows about — the subject it has mastered in the ten thousand years it has been evolving at our side — is us: our needs and desires, our emotions and values, all of which it has folded into its genes as part of a sophisticated strategy for survival. If you could read the genome of the dog like a book, you would learn a great deal about who we are and what makes us tick. We don’t ordinarily give plants as much credit as animals, but the same would be true of the genetic books of the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the spud. Which has a certain length of time and one can hear it. One then decides whether one enjoys it or not, and gradually develops a set of likes and dislikes. While studying music things get a little confused. Sounds are no longer just sounds, but are letters. #NoDAPL. This time the cops were using their clubs. There was the clatter of the horses’ hoofs on the cobbles and the whack thud whack thud of the clubs. And way off the jangle jangle of patrolwagons. Mary was terribly scared. A big truck was bearing down on her. She jumped to one side out of the way behind one of the girder supports. Two cops had hold of her. She clung to the grimy girder. A cop was cracking her on the hand with his club. She wasn’t much hurt, she was in a patrolwagon, she’d lost her hat and her hair had come down. She caught herself thinking that she ought to have her hair bobbed if she was going to do much of this sort of thing. “Anybody know where Don Stevens is?” Don’s voice came a little shakily from the blackness in front. “That you, Mary?” “How are you, Don?” “O.K. Sure. A little battered round the head an’ ears.” “He’s bleedin' terrible,” came another man’s voice. “Comrades, let’s sing,” Don’s voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:

Arise ye prisoners of starvation ...

Newsreel LXVI

[Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell] Holmes Denies Stay

A better world’s in birth

Tiny Wasps Imported From Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle

Boy Carried Mile Down Sewer; Shot Out Alive

Chicago Bars Meetings

For justice thunders condemnation

Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals

arise rejected of the earth

Paris Brussels Moscow Geneva Add Their Voices

It is the final conflict

Let each stand in his place

Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days

The International Party

Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die

Shall be the human race.

Much I thought of you when I was lying in the death house — the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground where there was all the life and the joy of liberty — just one step from the wall that contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and of your sister and I wish I could see you every moment, but I feel better that you will not come to the death house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three living in agony waiting to be electrocuted.

The Camera Eye (50)

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations the college presidents the wardheelers (Listen businessmen college presidents judges America will not forget her betrayers)

they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do we are beaten we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression made new in sweat and agony tonight

our work is over the scribbled phrases the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants

they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch all right we are two nations America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch

but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by an accident.

now their work is over the immigrants haters of oppression lie quiet in black suits in the little

undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of

the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets

they have won why are they scared to be seen the

streets? on the streets you see only the downcast

faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten

nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be buried we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to

elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins

we stand defeated America

Arise ye prisoners of starvation ...

Ergo, I conclude that TIME is extremely simple: TIME IS TEMPERATURE! That is, all entities in our Universe comprise MASS. In order to exist, MASS must contain ENERGY, which is revealed as TEMPERATURE, AKA, TIME. Thus:

TIME (HEAT / ENERGY / MASS) = TEMPERATURE (HEAT / ENERGY / MASS)!

As NOTHING IS THE SAME, your pencil, your cup, your car, the Earth, the Universe ... IS a Neoteric Entity at each Universal Pulse of PRESENT TIME – and a No Thing at the required Universal Anti-Pulse! This goes with my posit that our cosmos is PULSING (ONE) at a rate far faster than we can experience and that the required ANTI-PULSE (ZERO) completes this continuous action. BTW, forget the so-called massless objects; they ain’t gonna happen ... we just get such readings due to the ghostly Anti-Pulse effect. I would then walk into the cemetery, giving myself 27 minutes after passing through the gates to locate the poet Denise Levertov’s headstone. If I did not find it I would spend an hour in front of the grave where I stood. Bruce Lee is also buried at Lake View and his dedicated super fans would take the pilgrimage. Throughout the afternoon young men whipped off their shirts to do martial arts moves in front of the headstone while their girlfriends made videos with their phones, those distinct sounds Bruce Lee made with his voice being imitated, echoing throughout the cemetery. I am certain I am not the only one to read a Denise Levertov poem aloud with Bruce Lee sound effects as the backup vocals. I would read,

I’m in the queue for permission.

We are queueing for a form that means we are officially “here”.

One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud
between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.

          He is a little god but not a poet.

Which is to say that global wheat production will decrease by more than five percent with each °C increase in global temperature. At that point

my piano collapsed into
a bonfire and wept –

but who would you?

swarm,
bruise,
mass,

the very existence

of flame throwers proves

that sometime, somewhere,

someone said to themselves

‘You know I want to

set those people over there

on fire but I’m just not

close enough ...’

By the time I get to the third floor of the apartment building my head swims. Speaking of Benjamin Hollander, THIS IS AN ACUPUNCTURE BOOK. Like any great medical text, it contains a selected “case” where someone presents to a great doctor a discomfort, a situation of malaise. The exact contours of the discomfort may or not be exactly clear to the sufferer, their family or friends, but they feel hindered, confined, a little choked ... And so naturally they explain ... The great doctor merely takes it all in — listen, senses, watches, waits, perceives — bringing no previous judgment of the situation to the situation. The words are, to him, only partially instructive. Rather he sits there in the flow of explanation — blank-faced, unmoving, empty as an old black stone — so the furthest I’ve ever been able to get in Kafka’s Amerika is the scene where Karl Rossman leaves his luggage in the care of a total stranger and plunges back below deck because it’s just too painfully obvious what’s going to happen next even if it doesn’t, but I know from In the House Un-American that Karl does indeed manage to leave the ship more or less, less probably, un-intact because on the first page I am introduced to the offspring of the mystic marriage between Karl and William Carlos Williams, Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, who grows up in Queens, eventually moves to San Francisco (neither of which seem anywhere near The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma), and mind instantly brings to itself two poems, Jerome Rothenberg’s “Cokboy”,

saddlesore I came
a jew among
the indians
vot em I doink in dis strange place
mit deez pipple mit strange eyes
could be it’s trouble
could be       could be

etc, tho here it is not “the indians” who could be trouble, and Kenneth Koch’s “This is Just to Say”, especially part 2,

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing

who does?, but I don’t think it’s that version mind is really trying to recall, it’s one in which the plums are injected with strychnine, or cyanide, or Round-Up, or something, which I may or may not have dreamt (or maybe it is this one, because it has lye in it), but in any case, and in a manner of speaking, and we can’t make too little about a manner of speaking, because a manner of speaking is what there is, because what is not a (sometimes spoken) text (which I first typed as test)? The real concern here is: can one actually enter into “America’s pastime” with a green baseball bat? So what is an “apophatic body”? Is there a phenomenology of “apophatic bodies”? Probably not! Instead of an essentializing definition, let me try this: The ‘‘apophatic body” is a paradox that lives from a negation, an “un-naming” or “un-signifying” that is a twofold process of “negating bodying“ and “bodying negating.” What is negated? What is un-, and in this way, embodied? It is the “What” — essence — itself! This What that cannot be named or signified, is un-bodied. However, in unnaming “essence,” we do not negate the process of “bodying,” but “what” is negating it, fixating it, pre-stabilizing it as the That of the body. That body is negated; and that body is un-said: its individuality as this body and its generality as some body. In this negation, what is embodied? What the What was before it was fixated, before it was identified as that body and that body. The double process of “negating bodying” and “bodying negating” does not negate the process of “bodying,” but “what” negates its un-preformed singularity; and it does not embody negation (as such), but “what’’ negates its bodying (as such). To be sure, we also wish to discuss some of the underlying mechanisms that are extant in free improvisation, things that could be called technical aspects. Such a discourse bears the flavor of a contradicto in adjecto: Teaching the unteachable, the very negation of rules, above all those posited by white jazz theorists, and talking about the making of sounds without aiming at so-called factual results and all those intellectual sedimentations: is this not a suicidal topic? Which is why we wish to say, a là David Borgo, Sync and Swarm, tho, as Emma Goldman put it re Bernadette Mayer, “If this woman would stop writing Utopias, she might be a good worker for the Cause.”

The cosmic roles
Are written on sundry parchments
Tinted with fire-blue vibrations of flame
Force-field energies

                        _   _     _ _       _  _  _   _  _  _
                    _   _      _ _          _ _      _   _  _  _  _  _
                          _ _ _ _ _ _     _ _     _   _  _  _  _  _
            ...........................................       ...       ....................
....            ..................................................................................
                                                          >>>>>>>
                                                >>>>>>>>
                                                _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
....  .......  ....  .......  ....  .......

So yes, ants are remarkable. They inhabit almost every landmass on Earth, survive in most every climate, and make up nearly one quarter of the planet’s total biomass. They are masters of exploiting the cracks, crevices, gaps and hollows that other creatures often avoid or ignore. Briefly, ANT begins with the realization that any given interaction overflows with elements from some other time, some other place and generated by some other agency. But rather than get paralyzed by the “actor / system quandary” (essentially the question of whether the actor is “in” a system, or the system is made up of actors), or even attempt to articulate a “happy medium” that considers at once the actor and the network in which it is embedded, ANT redraws the map of the social such that “action is always a trip and a half”, right Bob? I just downloaded Past, Present, Future: Selections from the Tri-Centric Foundation Archives Vols. 1 and 2.

To walk means to fall
to thrust forward

            to fall and catch

The codeine was blue, shaped
like a small bullet

With grapes the bower is laden

            tripping the circuit breaker
            back at the jelly farm

Nitrogen?     Estragon?

            Frim fram sauce

Do you know The Story of the Man Who Didn’t Have Dirt to Bury His Lion?

How much for this gray cell that eats
eats the thought?

My circumlocutions went nowhere.

I died.
I gave in.

How to say qua qua qua.

Look!
I hold it up.

While wandering the streets I happen upon a moog synthesizer conference.
I know that somewhere in the throng is my little brother in zoot suit carrying his new toy
Why are all the moog synth enthusiasts wearing zoot suits?
The old dykes on the beds are confused about the whole affair and I launch into a soliloquy about waves and the beauty of sound
Can you imagine ... being able to – see – WAVES

Fuck America, fuck Thanksgiving. Stop & register the terror of this moment. What will happen to the Sioux, what will happen at Standing Rock, what will happen to the black & brown people languishing in prison, and the Kurds, the oceans, the Palestinians, the refugees fleeing wars, the young girls who are raped while fleeing wars, the animals going extinct, undocumented immigrants in the US, the queer & trans people who are being bashed, the Muslim communities that are perpetually under siege in the US and Europe, the people who don’t even have access to clean water & all the women who are emotionally demolished by subtler forms of violence in their intimate lives? The police will continue to militarize, the security state will balloon, surveillance will be total & we’ll continue to poison ourselves & destroy the planet until all people, plants & animals are dead – except for maybe the few billionaires who will escape to Mars with Elon Musk. Anyway, people are warming up, embedding videos and sound files, doing their scales, playing around with the sidebar. It’s exciting. At first I’d turn down a hallway and see a block of lorem ipsum, but then I started signing my emails THANK YOU. Here Zurita is referring to the first passageway of Purgatory: “My friends think / I’m a sick woman / because I burned my cheek.”

[Note: Sources: Jonty Tiplady, “Good air, my only friend, believe”, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 12:2; Jonty Tiplady, “Madrock Gunned Down in Flowers”, “Sahara Ha Ha”, in At the School of Metaphysics, 2^nd ed; Harold Abramowitz, Not Blessed; Francis P Harvey, “Adamites”, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, as quoted in the program to Lali Chetwynd, Debt a Medieval Play, in Spartacus Chetwynd (eds. Raphael Gygax, Heike Munter); Tom McCarthy, Remainder; André Breton and André Masson, “The Creole Dialogue Between André Breton and André Masson”, in Breton’s Martinique: Snake Charmer (tr. David W Seaman); Eileen Myles, “An American Poem”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, “Buck Downs – Shiftless (Harvester)”, at Heat String Theory, 23 Nov 016; Michael Pollan, The botany of desire: a plant’s-eye view of the world; John Cage, “Juilliard Lecture”, in A Year from Monday; JBR; John Dos Passos, The Big Money, in USA; Eugène Pottier, “The Internationale”; JBR; Buz Craft, a response to the question “What is your most memorable experience of the subjectivity of time?”, at Aeon; CA Conrad, “Denise Levertov vs. Bruce Lee”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 16 Jan 016; Philip Davenport, “Berliner”, at Arthur + Martha, 24 Nov 016; Jerome Rothenberg, “A Poem for the Cruel Minority”, at Poems and Poetics, 24 Nov 016; JBR; “Climate model predictions are telling a consistent story”, at Science Daily, 23 Nov 016; JBR; Robin Blaser, “Among universals,”, “Petty, vulgar, provincial,”, in The Holy Forest, revised and expanded edition; Bruce Andrews, “Spinto”, in Designated Heartbeat; Dana Ward, “Between Here & There”, in This Can’t Be Life; Lisa Gill, “Mapping Caesura: The Encompasing Body”, in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetics of Disability (eds. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black & Michael Northen); JBR; Seung Sahn, Only Don’t Know; JBR, “In the House Un-American by Benjamin Hollander”, at Galatea Resurrects 22 (Hollander and I were correspondents for a while, may he rest in peace); Roland Faber, “Bodies of the Void: Polyphilia and Theoplicity”, at Academia.edu; Guerino B. Mazzola and Paul B. Cherlin, in collaboration with Mathias Rissi and Nathan Kennedy, Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration; JBR; probably Bernadette Mayer, tho ???, blurb for Mayer’s Utopia, at Tender Buttons; Sun Ra, “Energies (1980)”, in The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose (eds. James L Wolf and Hartmut Geerken); JBR; David Borgo, “The Ghost in the Music, or The Perspective of an Improvising Ant”, at Academia.edu; Stanford Webb; JBR; Jennifer Bartlett, “5 poems from Autobiography”, in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetics of Disability (eds. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black & Michael Northen); Sheila Black, “Reconstruction”, in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetics of Disability (eds. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black & Michael Northen); John Ashbery, “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”, in Planisphere; Marjorie Welish, “Epitaph”, “Unfolding Yes”, in Isle of the Signatories; JBR; Ali Karbasi, “The Story of the Man Who Didn’t Have Dirt to Bury His Lion”, in I am a Face Sympathizing with Your Grief: Seven Younger Iranian Poets (ed. and tr. Alireza Taheri Araghi); Mahnaz Yousefi, “[in me a hand ...]”, in I am a Face Sympathizing with Your Grief: Seven Younger Iranian Poets (ed. and tr. Alireza Taheri Araghi); Jackie Wang, “Divine Aphasia”, “Fuck America, fuck Thanksgiving”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 24 Nov 016; JBR; Stephanie Young, “In Which Metaphors for Poetry Communities, and for Writing About them, Abound”, “MUTUAL AID”, in Ursula, or University; Anna Deeny, “Translator’s Afterword: Speaking from the Wreckage”, in Raúl Zurita, Purgatory: A Bilingual Edition (tr. Anna Deeny)]

America Marked Thanksgiving with At Least Two Mass Shootings (reposted from Vice)

Over the past seven days, America witnessed five mass shootings that left four dead and 19 wounded. The attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 366 dead and 1,383 injured.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered zero mass shootings over the same period, leaving the continent's mass shooting tally so far this year steady at 46 dead and 158 injured.

Whether because of chillier weather or just good fortune, the past week was the quietest for American mass shootings since late October. Most of the latest attacks were also routine by national standards and so did not register for the typical American beyond the limited reach of local news accounts.

At about 10:15 PM last Friday, a drive-by on a second vehicle in Chicago, Illinois, left four injured. The rest of that weekend, remarkably, passed without a mass shooting. But at about 11:30 PM Tuesday, a shooting near a storefront in Clewiston, Florida, left one dead and four more injured. At some point the following day, a man confronted an ex-girlfriend and her family at a home in Hernando, Mississippi, and opened fire, injuring four before turning himself in. Then, at about 2 AM on Thursday, a shooting following an altercation at a party in the Rocks nightclub in Albany, New York, left one dead and three more injured.

The only incident to garner widespread and sustained media attention came just shy of 12 hours later, when a shooting near a crowd of hundreds gathered for the Juice Bowl Football Tournament in Louisville, Kentucky, left two dead and four injured. As of publication, the motive for the shooting remained unclear—and many other shootings this year into or near dense crowds with similar numbers of victims have gone relatively unnoticed. But the incident drew special attention because it took place during a local Thanksgiving tradition, transforming it into a symbolic perversion of the American holiday.

In truth, one mass shooting is a low toll compared to other widely celebrated holidays in America. Occasions like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Halloween all saw a rash of mass shootings on the day of or during attendant festivities. The lower body count on Thanksgiving may stem, at least in part, from the fact that this holiday is celebrated differently than the others, with more indoor and family events and fewer large (and unregulated) public ones. Or it could just be an embodiment of the randomness of mass shootings writ large.

[...]

Bill Dixon, Durations of Permanence

With the Noose Around My Neck 6

When I finally arrived at the door of no return, there was an official there, a guide who was either a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler. But even if he was a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler, he was authoritative. Exhausted violet, the clerk interjects. Yes he was says the author, violet snares. For some strange reason he wanted to control the story. Violet files. Violet chemistry. Violet unction. It was December, we had brought a bottle of rum, some ancient ritual we remembered from nowhere and no one. We stepped one behind the other as usual. The castle was huge, opulent, a going concern in its time. We went like pilgrims. You were pilgrims. We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods were in the holding cells. We awakened our gods and we left them there, because we never needed gods again. We did not have wicked gods so they understood. They lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their wall of skin dust. They stood when we entered, happy to see us. Our guide said, this was the prison cell for the men, this was the prison cell for the women. I wanted to strangle the guide as if he were the original guide. It took all my will. Yet in the rooms the guide was irrelevant, the gods woke up and we felt pity for them, and affection and love; they felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces. We were pilgrims, they were gods. We sewed the rim of their skins with cotton. This is what we had. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen. We all stood there for some infinite time. We did weep, but that is nothing in comparison. Turn handle firmly to left then right. I am certain it is being considered. ‘Marco Polo discovered Italy.’ EXPERT OPINION. None genuine without my signature at the University of Glasgow subway app! EXPERT OPINION. The original and seat. Help us support the future at the sunshine means the University of Glasgow subway app! We will not present when one call from his cell phone. Nowhere has a vibe like Crear. For super absorbency. Come back Paul. You totally put yourself into it. This Pinot Grigio was produced to maintain and so does lots of different the weather does the storm. The weather does lots of different things and so does the Post Office. FREE TRAINING COUSES THAT WILL GET YOU INTO A JOB. This is expressionism. All the sunshine means the grapes ripen. Give us a HAND with infection control. I’m sorry butterfly. CAUTION STAND BACK. Spangs like stars.

(lean pallor

bone ghost)

plunder and massacre

Mushroom out of which
        cloud rose. Experience is predicated on
                existence.

        Laugherino, laugherino

        (o sordea, o weesea!)

dyr       bul       shchyl
         ubeshchur

A perfectly glandular reprisal
I recommend a transplant
Rock of the weenies
It’s supposed to get harder if you’re being strangled
Why don’t you just pest off?

I AM HE MAN
YOU ARE SKELETOR

To quote Gaston Bachelard. To quote Gaston Bachelard, whom I arrived at through Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Heavy Waters,” “water is an element ‘which remembers the dead’, the dead are

the zig zag mothers of the gods
light bulbs
‘art is junk.’” Like, I just took some speed, then
smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not
why I’m writing this and it’s not what it’s about.
Up down left right
I’ve trained hard for 12 straight hours. Have you?
When the next holocaust comes
I will get a shotgun, nunchuks and infinite continues.

“A chamber with moss green walls. All four are covered with statues. In between, a few decorated beams, which through traces of gold upon traces of colour let ‘Jason’ or ‘Brussels’ or ‘Malvina’ be deciphered. On the left-hand side, as one enters, a wooden figurine, a kind of schoolmaster in robes, a tricorne on his head. He has his left forearm instructively raised, but just below the elbow it breaks off; the right hand and the left foot are also missing. A nail goes through the man, who stares stiffly upwards. Coarse, plain, ordinary crates line the walls. On some is written ‘Lifebelt’; on most, nothing at all. One can measure out the room with them.” The room is in a private house in Scandinavia. It once belonged to a fan collector, who was a great traveler, and was not known to have lived there. There were no signposts to it, although it featured in some listings, and I had picked up a brochure for it in a café where there were the most beautiful biscuit tins for sale that I have ever seen, with designs of apples, and a Happy Blonde Lady wig in some coffee-drinker’s shopping bag hung on the coat rack at the entrance, for this was summer. Place dissolved, as it tends to do: if the hedge had been less twiggy and the wrought iron more like weaponry, well, how can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. It is against the law for any liquor store to sell milk. In Athens, a driver’s license can be lifted by law if the driver is deemed to be either “poorly dressed” or “unbathed”. It Hartford, it is illegal to educate a dog. In Halethorpe, it is illegal to kiss for more than one second. Women must obtain permission from their husbands to wear false teeth. The structure, then, is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects. Which is to say that object sexuality is characterized by people who are sexually attracted to inanimate objects and pursue committed relationships with these objects. For example, Tomas fell head over heels into an emotionally and physically very complex relationship that lasted for years with a Hammond organ. But since he is particularly aroused by the inner workings of technical objects, repair jobs have often led to infidelity in the past. And, did you know, Alice Woolf – Alice Woolf is in love with a fairground ride called 1001 Nights. She sleeps with its picture on her ceiling and carries around its spare nuts and bolts to feel closer to it. She first fell in love with the ride when she visited the park at 13. Ten years later, she began a courtship with the ride, traveling 100 miles, 10 times a year, and riding it over 3000 times. Having connected through an internet forum, Eliza goes to visit Alice. Alice is left alone to have an intimate moment with the ride, while Eliza goes for a walk. She happens upon a picket fence and feels an immediate attraction. Did you know, Alice Woolf is in love with a fairground ride called 1001 Nights? Mexican money is multi-colored; the green bill (200 pesos) has Sor Juana on it. Please “lock” the door “behind” you. Is measure a kind of description or a kind of judgement? It would be different, of course – of course – if any significant fraction of those lost lives were American (meaning USAmerican, of course. Of course.). I’m visibly stooped these days. Synaesthesia. Which is to say that “simultaneity” is not a problem until you attempt to represent it. Do you know Daniel Belgrade’s The Culture of Spontaneity? Good book. How about Murat Nemat-Nejat’s EDA: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry? This was the same corner where, all October and most of November, women in pink and brown twinsets (for real) brandished posters that said: “Women For Trump.” I recall the effervescence of beeps. Cars beeped in solidarity all through that unseasonably warm Fall. And so, when I heard there was a post-election protest, I made a poster out of green A4 paper stuck together with sellotape.  It read: “In Solidarity with People of Color and the LGBTQ community in Loveland.” Parked behind Good Times and walked over. There were three women holding signs. They were all white, and when I asked them what had brought them there, the first woman spoke of a daughter with neurological disabilities. The other two women had a generalized anti-hate message. One woman had a complex poster protesting the induction of white nationalists into the Trump cabinet. It took less than five minutes before the abject nature of this protest in a town that went “red” within a state (Colorado) and county (Larimer) that went “blue” began to set in. I realized, among other things, that I could no longer live here, that I had deluded myself by telling myself I was living in a low-cost alternative community of artisans, farmers and homeopaths ... It was a mistake to think I could hold up a sign like that to the two hundred or so cars and trucks with mostly (99%) white faces that stopped at the stop sign, and – upon seeing my sign – either revved their engines, put up a middle finger or, in one case, lowered their window to spit on the ground. Or stonily looked forward, not making eye contact. It has been years of facing large groups like this, one way or another. I can’t take it anymore. All the way back to where my own car was parked, I wept. I wept and wept and could not stop. It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to. The movie opens with a bulbous bright-orange spaceship flying thru the spangled darkness of outer space. Then comes June Tyson’s brassy voice with a wake-up call:

It’s after the end of the world,
Don’t you know that yet?
It’s after the end of the world,
Don’t you know that yet?

A second dislocation follows immediately, transporting viewers to another planet, whose lush, lunatic foliage might have been imagined by Max Ernst. A guide appears, a black man wearing a pharaoh’s headdress. Cocking his head as if to listen, he speaks in a gentle voice. “The music is different here ...” I went back to bed knowing they would put him in the privatized jail cell. I went back to bed and a voice kept shouting: Do you speak English? Do you eat meat? Do you rub meat on your body? Do you own your own body? Do you like to eat raw organ with me? Do you like your organ maggoty? Do you want to know how you can get to the other side of the river?

The voice did not have a body

But it had a mouth

It was the biggest mouth I had ever seen

It opened its mouth and there were small animals inside it

A dog with two heads was on its tongue and so was a newborn baby and the baby screamed. One lesson he took away from this experience, a lesson that has driven his work, was that there were no paintings of black people on the museum’s walls. No one he saw looked remotely like him, a situation that he has dedicated his life to rectify. This story, which is known by anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with Marshall’s work, bears retelling. One reason it needs to be retold is that at the time when Marshall painted “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980) in egg tempera, a medium that historically preceded oil painting, many white critics had proclaimed that painting was dead. In this painting, Marshall limits his palette to blacks and grays, except for the whites of his eyes and his teeth, one of which is missing. This face looms in the darkness, almost ready to disappear back into it. This is a portrait of the black man as caricature, which is a kind of shadow. As to his former self, what happened to it?

I mourned a person who turned out
not to be dead

I mourned a person who turned out
not to have died

1,369 light bulbs. So yes, the berms serve several purposes. First, they define the area of interest. Their size is set so that sand dunes are unlikely to cover all of them entirely at the same time. Instead, the wind will leave dunes streaming behind the berms and create an even larger marker. Second, their shape sets the tone for the entire landscape – non-natural, ominous, and repulsive. Third, the corner berms are higher than the others and provide vantage points for viewing the entire site. Fourth, the corner berms also include buried rooms with all the message levels recommended for inclusion in this marker system. As the berms erode, these rooms will become uncovered at various times. The investigator will be guided toward the center of the site by the berms. Prior to entering the central area, however, he or she will encounter a “message kiosk”. Each message kiosk is composed of a message wall and a protecting wall. The protecting wall is of concrete and is meant to protect the message wall from erosion. The message wall is of granite or other hard rock and is a vertical, curved form. The preliminary texts read: These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is ... by ... kilometers (or ... miles or about ... times the height of an average full-grown male person) and the buried waste is ... kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.  Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area. Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. What’s remarkable is that the Pizza Ranch didn’t take any time to catch on. Its success was instantaneous. Customers line up to enter thru a tunnel-like hallway. It’s a buffet, so called ‘mile-long’. Is this the new kind of restaurant for the new kind of person? “How a militarized world becomes our sex.” Or not. Anyway, Cookie had just had Max, and I went over her house one day, and she was peeling potatoes, and Max was screaming, crying. So I said, “What’s going on?” Cookie said, “Well, potatoes are his friends ...” And I thought, “Oh my god!” Cookie wanted to name Max “Noodles” but the hospital refused to put it on the birth certificate. So she had to name him Max. And he actually is the “Baby Noodles” in Pink Flamingos. In the abstract “Red (If They Come in the Morning),” Marshall recasts Barnett Newman’s painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III” (1967), one of four paintings he did with that title between 1966 and 1970, and which had been vandalized and restored. Marshall’s painting, which measures 8 feet by more than 17 feet, is done in black, red and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag. The colors symbolize blood and sacrifice (red), the color of the people (black), and the fertility of Africa (green). The phrase, “If they come in the morning,” which is barely visible, is written in different shades of red on the red ground that takes up most of the painting. The words emerge out of the red as well as sink back into it. The line is a rephrasing of a closing line from an open letter that James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis while she was in jail, accused of aiding the prisoner George Jackson in his attempt to escape from a California courtroom. Known as the Soledad Three, Jackson, along with two other men, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, had been falsely accused of murdering a white prison guard in 1969. By inserting this sentence into Newman’s well-known painting, as well as changing the colors to the Pan-African flag, Marshall underscores the divisions in America. Newman, who identified himself as an anarchist, made paintings that denied space, figuration, gesture, and painterly incident. They were visceral feats of pure opticality. It seems to me that their vulnerability is also part of their meaning. Critics define Newman’s works as art-about-art, attempts at attaining pure objectivity. They are regarded as a culmination. Jackson, who became a member of the Black Panther Party while in prison, was shot to death in prison on August 21, 1970, about six weeks after Newman had died on July 4, 1970. It was his second escape attempt. Davis was accused of aiding him in the first attempt and imprisoned for eighteen months until she was found innocent. I am sure Marshall knows all this and much more. By making Baldwin’s chilling words inhabit Newman’s painting, Marshall rejects the ideals associated with art about art: he presents a counter narrative, which starts with “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980) and continues to the present. I don’t think he is asking us to take sides. Rather, he is asking us to consider the merits of both. I would venture that by opening Newman’s painting back up, by literally and metaphorically inserting himself into it, he is challenging those who uphold the narrative that painting is dead. Which is to say we became third persons, but not arrogantly so. I referred to myself as “Ana Patova,” and said, “Ana Patova must have left.” I told the story, over the course of many days, to hundreds of people, or perhaps to only one person, again and again. It didn’t seem to matter who heard it, only that I went on telling it. I set my house on fire: I burned my first house down; I burned my second house. Luswage Amini burned her house. Zàoter Limici burned his house. Duder Bello destroyed his neighborhood with fire. Bresia burned the maps in her house, then burned her house down. My mother burned her house. For weeks, dark smoke bruised the sky, yet the sky was clear; the sky was always clear. Someone flew over Ravicka and drew it and failed. Houses burned. They did not burn. The phone rang as I wrote that. I answered five years ago. “The city is on fire,” the caller shouted.

Have your shadows relieved the blood path?

Have you gathered the future vertical broken seam?

Have you welcomed those new constructions?

Perhaps we are living in the midst of the grey goo scenario as we speak. This is not a neutral process. My aim here is to rehabilitate critique or to examine the necessity of critique in this situation. The novel is the story of ‘U’, an anthropologist working as the in-house ethnographer for a consultancy, ‘The Company’, run by Peyman. U’s academic work was an analysis of club culture, which gained him some fame. He is spotted by Peyman and joins The Company. U’s hero is the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, although U takes theoretical concepts from all over the place. On his first project, for Levi-Strauss the jeans maker, he uses Deleuze’s concept of the fold (pli), and Badiou’s concept of the rip, to analyse the tears in jeans. Intriguing here is that Badiou’s concept is the event, not the rip, so is this a mistake by the unscrupulous U, or the meta-unscrupulous Tom McCarthy? In any case, the major project for the consultancy is the mysterious Koob-Sassen Project (KSP), a seemingly global project that will affect the whole of humanity. What it is is unspecified. U’s friend Petr describes it as a ‘networked architecture’ (emphasis in the original). It is a form of negative sublime. At the same time U is dreaming of oil spills, he is dreaming of ‘Satin Island’, a great trash mound, which is a distorted memory of Staten Island and the waste dump at Fresh Kills. This is staged in two moments. The first involves a trip to the supermarket by Ben and his friend Alex as the hurricane is about to arrive to buy-up essentials: I want to say I felt stoned, did say so to Alex, who laughed and said, “Me too,” but what I meant was that the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping just enough to make me viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane economy. Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellin and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura – the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labour becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close. So let us recall Milton Ellis. Who the hell is Milton Ellis? Mr Ellis, as reported by the Associated Press, asleep in his wheelchair on the porch of a vacant Hooters in Florida, woke up to find Josephine Rebecca Smith on top of him, biting off chunks his arm and cheek. “Years later, he was to lend me Hinton’s treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space by means of complicated exercises with multicoloured cubes. I shall never forget the prisms and pyramids that we erected.” But now buzz-worthy restaurants are moving back, museums and performance halls are nearing critical mass: so the story kept right on going from manhunt to mourning, the word ‘Trust’ hovering over his head, and his sun-glasses, one lens red, the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly off center. Literally, it was like when I fell asleep last night the tractor carrying you went into a tunnel, and, when I woke up, you and the tractor exited the other end of the tunnel. ‘Resident Evil 4’ is amazing! Somewhere down near the bridge I pick up a brick. I drop it again and it breaks into two pieces. I pick up those pieces. I drop them again. I keep doing this. Now, if we observe the budget, do we find numbers? Absolutely not. These are lines disguised as numbers. The condition report? No. This is a shape taking refuge within a condition report. And this is not a book, but a form dissimulating as a book. And of course, this is not blue. This is not yellow. This is not black. What if you have to replace it in toto? This took so much more paint than I thought it would. There might be some chemical that melts through. But the empirical evidence gathered without correct Dialection of the Social is like a mop without a handle, hard on the knees. Conversely, correct Dialection without empirical evidence is like a mop without a sponge, hard on the aesthetics of acetate flooring. The narrative so far diagrammatically alludes to the earth as a flat disk mechanically rotated instead of a lush sphere afloat in space elliptically around the sun.

Of so many substances 
Future Poetry’s
composites
combining.

Of so many instances 
ball-bearing rollers’
futures
remain
gelatinous. 

Blip
unto the Blap Blap.

Blap 
unto the Blip Blip.

Each noise echoes off everything else.

Watching the flies led my eyes to the dog feces. “The Pig is the Sun ...” Rou-cou spoke the dove, there is a river this side of Stygia, how happy I was the day I told the young Blandina of three-legged giraffes ... I am not afraid. I am only dizzy. I must reduce the distance between the enemy and me. Confront him horizontally.

It is my fate
to experience my fate
without ever really knowing it,
to spend my last breath saying:
Oh.

Did you ever come to an exit sign in the middle of a blank wall, solid brick? History has a funny way of not ending. It is a series of gestures, a means without ends, an arrangement and collision of bodies, texts, concepts and formations that generates the space it inhabits as it collapses its multidimensional self-fractured form. It implodes and bends dimensions back over itself, producing imaginal machines. But what does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it has already seized power (through media flows and the power of the spectacle)? Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally bound subversive power, which like the mayfly has already had its day in the sun. Maybe imaginal machines, like all desiring machines, only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. Nevertheless, what Machiavelli, Negri and Althusser – and I too – glean from Lucretius is the question of the origin, transition and persistence of forms of life in an aleatory universe. Lucretian materialism is, if I might put it like this, a defoundationalising insight, posing the questions of origin and lines of descent as the very premise of an unmitigated materialism which, in eschewing transcendental guarantees, exposes genealogy as the unsteady foundation of oikonomia. Althusser put this question in terms of the difference between that which takes place and that which takes hold. Negri goes further in assuring a foundation for the political in reproduction and kairos. These are all ways to read Lucretius, given his discussion of reproducibility. But what has not been appreciated until relatively recently is both how complex mycorrhizal fungal networks can be and that they can also act as conduits between trees. For instance, here is a diagram of the mycorrhizal network for a single 30 by 30 meter plot of British Columbian interior douglas-fir forest. It shows only the douglas-fir trees in the plot (green saw-blade looking things, whose size is proportional to tree diameter), and only two species of mycorrhizal fungus. In reality, there would be a few other species of tree and hundreds more kinds of ectomycorrhizal fungi. Hundreds. This is the wood-wide web. The black dots represent places where scientists drilled into the soil and sampled for the presence of Rhizopogon encasing tree roots. The straight lines indicate which trees’ roots were found in mycorrhiza samples at each location. The lines around the black dots indicate the known extent of each individual fungus; those of the species R. vinicolor are shaded pink and R. vesiculosus are shaded blue. The tree with the black arrow next to it was by far the most well-connected tree; it was linked to 47 other trees through eight individuals of one Rhizopogon species and three individuals of another. Conversely, one Rhizopogon individual linked 19 trees, young and old. If this diagram reveals only two fungi and one tree species linked by a finite number of sampling sites, you can imagine the true complexity if all fungi and all trees were added in. So yes, There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium. Whoa. Are dream-wishes trees, then? Perches for the birdies, from which they can shit and hatch their eggs and sing? It is truly amazing how often I don’t know what I’m talking about. And yet ... and yet ... Édouard Glissant hates broccoli. From the larynx to the boulder, under groundhog’s grease. Cry, Trojans, cry!

Is there a way to calculate what time it is?<
            Undo your belt
            Your tongue is becoming a powder

What historical forms reside in the cough syrup?
            Ruining the angles? Casting into temporary gristle
            Faces nothing in the tapestry?

He’s still in the wet room; its ceiling blurs and clicks into focus, plates and struts and Kito’s stupid grafitti scratched into the biosteel. The Insect woman (a diveskin, he realizes distantly: her mandibles an electrolysis rig, her compound eyes a pair of defraction goggles) reaches past his field of view, retrieves a tactical scroll and unrolls it a half-meter from his face. She mutters an incantation; “don’t try to talk,” she says in two tongues. “Don’t try to move. We haven’t even booted your larynx, much less your lungs. Just look at the letters.” He looks at the N: it brightens. O. T. The second diagram, an extension of the first, is known as Fu Xi’s Sequence of the Sixty-Four Hexagrams. I like to think of it as an I Ching keyboard, the sort of instrument on which the Castalian Master of Music might have improvised in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The black “notes” represent Yin, the white “notes” Yang. That winter the wolf came. It was not yet ten o’clock when the mayday call was first made. This is where I am now, writing this story of the most minor of uprisings. There’s something more, something more, but I’m not sure ... A heart holds the strings together ... All pictures framed in plain wood frames ... tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates ...

[Note: Sources: Dionne Brand, Verso55, as quoted in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; nick-e melville, ALERT STATE IS HEIGHTENED an imperative imprimatura; Susan Howe, Defenestration of Prague, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; Ron Silliman, “Rhizome”, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; Velimer Khlebnikov, “Incantation by Laughter” (tr. Gary Kern?), as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; David Melnick, Pcoet, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; Alexei Kruchonykh, untitled poem, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets;Bruce Andrews, “Isolate Your Fuse”, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; Michael Cannon, “Ultimate Childishness”, in in International Egg and Poultry Review (Friends Magazine 2); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; JBR; Jerome Rothenberg, “That Dada Strain”, at Poets.org; Sean Bonney, “Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)”, in International Egg and Poultry Review (Friends Magazine 2); Michael Cannon, “001011001000110010101101111001000000110011101100001011011010110010101110011 (I PLAY VIDEO GAMES)”, in International Egg and Poultry Review (Friends Magazine 2); Walter Benjamin, “Nordic Sea” (trs. Sam Dolbear and Antonia Grousdanidou), in The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness (trs. and eds. Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski); JBR; Vahni Capildeo, “Five Measures of Expatriation”, in Measures of Expatriation (hat tip Alan Baker); JBR; Chief Seattle, and various (as found at totallyuselessknowledge.com), as quoted in Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Making Dying Illegal; Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; JBR; Emma Hogan, “Unknown Position”, in International Egg and Poultry Review (Friends Magazine 2); Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer, The Route; Bhanu Kapil, “I am sitting here”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 20 Nov 016; Paul Youngquist, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism; Daniel Borzutsky, “The Privatized Waters of Dawn”, in The Performance of Becoming Human; John Yau, “The Triumph of the Chickens”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Nov 016 (On Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, at The Met Breuer, 15 Oct 016 – 29 Jan 017); Michael Palmer, “Tomb of Aimé Césaire”, in Jerome Rothenberg, “Michael Palmer: ‘Tomb of Aimé Césaire’ and ‘Light Moves (1-6), for Jackson Mac Low’”, at Poems and Poetics, 20 Nov 016; JBR (a reference to Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man); US Department of Energy, Message to 12,000 A.D.; Robert Kocik, quoted in Thom Donovan, The Hole; Thom Donovan, The Hole; JBR; Dennis Dermody and Mink Stole, as quoted in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, “Of Bourbon and Black Beauties: Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller in Provincetown!”, at Vice, 20 Nov 016; John Yau, “The Triumph of the Chickens”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Nov 016 (On Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, at The Met Breuer, 15 Oct 016 – 29 Jan 017); JBR; Renee Gladman, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, as quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on ... Renee Gladman Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013)”, at DC’s, 21 Nov 016; Deborah Poe, “Foundation, Choctaw Street, 2010”, at The Feminist Wire, 26 Jun 013; JBR, but see Benjamin Noys, “Grey Goo Capitalism: Matters of Contemporary Literature”, at Academia.edu; JBR, slight remix of “From In the House of the Hangman (Volume 5)”, in Marsh Hawk Review, Fall 016 (pdf sent me by the editor, Eileen Tabios); Thomas Fink and Maya D Mason, “Construction”, in Marsh Hawk Review, Fall 016 (pdf sent me by the editor, Eileen Tabios); Rodrigo Toscano, “Writing”, in To Leveling Swerve; Chris Vitiello, “Baltimore, MD”, in Irresponsibility; Oskar Panizza, The Pig: In Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective (tr. Erik Butler); Wallace Stevens, “Song of Fixed Accord”, “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”, “Analysis of a Theme”, in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson); René Char (tr. Nancy Kline), at The Brooklyn Rail, 14 Dec 07; Quenton Baker, “Calling All Prophets”, in Diglossic in the Second America; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris, in The Age of Huts (compleat); Stevphen Shukaitis, Imaginal Machines; Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia; Jennifer Frazer, “Dying Trees Can Send Food to Neighbors of Different Species”, at Scientific American, 9 May 015; JBR; Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Jackie Wang, “Dreaming the Future: Glissant, the Poetics of Opacity, and the Psychoanalysis of Dreams”, at Giulia Tofana The Apothecary, 21 Nov 016; JBR; Issa; Jackie Wang, “Dreaming the Future: Glissant, the Poetics of Opacity, and the Psychoanalysis of Dreams”, at Giulia Tofana The Apothecary, 21 Nov 016; Justin Katko, “With Only the Handle Visible”, in Sundial [Compleat] 2016 (ed. Richard Owens); Hannah Proctor, “Exit Men”, in Sundial [Compleat] 2016 (ed. Richard Owens); Justin Katko, “Neue Welt” (from Basic Middle Finger), in Sundial [Compleat] 2016 (ed. Richard Owens); Peter Watts, “Welcome to the Zombie Corps”, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 21 Nov 016; John Minford, I Ching (Yijing): The Book of Change; Juliana Spahr, title, “Dynamic Positioning”, “It’s All Good, It’s All Fucked”, in That Winter the Wolf Came; Michael Rothenberg, The Paris Journals; back cover blurb for Leslie Scalapino, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows]

Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck every single person who voted for him (there were NO good reasons). Fuck every Democrat who says give this fucking fucker a chance. And this is only the beginning.

Reposted from the Guardian.

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.

“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.

“My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”

Trump has previously said that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, although on Tuesday he said there is “some connectivity” between human actions and the climate. There is overwhelming and long-established evidence that burning fossil fuels and deforestation causes the release of heat-trapping gases, therefore causing the warming

Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

It’s understood that federal government scientists have been unnerved by Trump’s dismissal of climate science and are concerned that their work will be sidelined as part of a new pro-fossil fuels and deregulation agenda. Climate scientists at other organizations expressed dismay at the potential gutting of Earth-based research.

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.

“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.

“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space. Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, said Nasa has a “critical and unique role” in observing Earth and climate change.

“Without the support of Nasa, not only the US but the entire world would be taking a hard hit when it comes to understanding the behavior of our climate and the threats posed by human-caused climate change,” he said.

“It would be a blatantly political move, and would indicate the president-elect’s willingness to pander to the very same lobbyists and corporate interest groups he derided throughout the campaign.”

Nasa has appointed two officials, Tom Cremins and Jolene Meidinger, to lead the transition to the new Trump administration. However, the president-elect’s team has yet to formally review the space agency.

“The Nasa community is committed to doing whatever we can to assist in making the executive branch transition a smooth one,” a Nasa spokesman said. “The agency remains focused on the future, a future that will improve our understanding of our changing home planet from Nasa’s unique platforms in space.”

DAPL News: Police fire water cannon on protesters during freezing temperatures (Washington Post)

By Derek Hawkins November 21 at 4:13 AM

 

Tensions over the Dakota Access oil pipeline flared again Sunday when North Dakota law enforcement used water cannons to disperse a group of about 400 protesters trying to move past a barricaded bridge toward construction sites for the project.

As temperatures in Cannon Ball, N.D., dropped into the 20s, police in riot gear sprayed activists with a hose mounted atop an armored vehicle and formed a line to prevent them from advancing up the road, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Protesters also reported being pelted with rubber bullets, tear gas and concussion grenades during the standoff, which lasted until late Sunday night.

A grainy Facebook Live video from the scene shows throngs of people gathered around the Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806, with flood lights shining down on the grass and road below and a haze of smoke and water vapor rising near police vehicles.

The clashes began around 6 p.m., when protesters tried to remove burned out trucks that had been blocking the bridge since authorities and activists faced off there in late October. Police have since set up wire and concrete barriers on the bridge, which is about a mile south of where the pipeline developer plans to drill.

Protesters, who call themselves “water protectors,” have argued that the barricade prevents emergency services from reaching the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and a nearby camp they have used as a staging ground for demonstrations.

What you need to know about the Dakota Access pipeline protests

 

The protest of an oil pipeline that is being constructed close to the Standing Rock Indian reservation has become a rallying point for Native Americans across the United States. Here's what you need to know. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Authorities responded after protesters moved one of the trucks blocking the roadway. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department said that by 8:30 p.m. an estimated 400 people had arrived to try to “breach” the bridge and had set dozens of fires in the area. The department called the situation an “ongoing riot,” saying protesters were “very aggressive” and were trying to “flank and attack the law enforcement line.” At least one person was arrested, the sheriff’s department said.

One of the protest organizers, Dallas Goldtooth, said protesters started small fires in the area to help warm people who had been sprayed with water in the freezing cold. He told the Tribune that some activists tried to remove the burned out trucks to expose the heavily armed authorities behind them.

“Folks have a right to be on a public road,” Goldtooth said. “It’s absurd that people who’ve been trying to take down the barricade now have their lives at risk.”

[U.N. officials denounce ‘inhuman’ treatment of Native American pipeline protesters]

Another organizer, Tara Houska, told the Tribune that more than 200 people had been hit with tear gas, pepper spray or water from the hose.

“They’re using everything and anything,” she said. “This has been weeks and weeks of those vehicles on the road for no apparent reason, and it’s a huge public safety risk. It’s putting enormous pressure on the Standing Rock Sioux community and people who live and work in the area.”

Organizers said the Cannon Ball gym was being used for emergency relief, with medics from the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes treating people who were injured in the standoff. Physicians and tribal healers with the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council called on authorities to stop using water cannons against the protesters, saying the below-freezing weather could cause hypothermia and criticizing the “potentially lethal use of these controversial methods against people peacefully assembled,” CNN reported.

The sheriff’s department said water cannons were brought in to control the crowds and extinguish fires set by protesters.

“There are multiple fires being set by protesters on the bridge and in the area of the bridge,” department spokeswoman Donnell Hushka told CNN. “We have firetrucks on the scene. They are using their fire hoses to put out the fires, wet the land around so fires don’t spread, and they are also using water as crowd control.”

The sheriff’s department told the Tribune that the bridge has been closed since October because transportation officials were concerned about its structural integrity.

The $3.8 billion pipeline is scheduled to carry crude oil nearly 1,200 miles from North Dakota to Illinois. Construction is nearly complete, but a planned segment of the project that crosses under the Missouri River has been a source of contention for months. The Standing Rock Sioux argue that the pipeline cuts within a mile of their reservation and could pollute water and disrupt cultural sites. The tribe has challenged the project in court, and protesters have camped out near the Missouri River site for months.

Energy Transfer Partners, the project developer, says the pipeline transports oil more safely than trucks and will not harm sacred lands.

In October, a group of activists tried to set up a second protest camp closer to the area where drilling is planned. They blocked the roadway with scrap wood, bales of hay and tires and used abandoned trucks to block the Backwater Bridge. After repeatedly ordering them to leave, authorities stormed the camp, using pepper spray, high-pitched warnings and rubber bullets against those who refused to leave. More than 100 people were arrested.

Red (If They Come in the Morning) by Kerry James Marshall

In the abstract “Red (If They Come in the Morning),” Marshall recasts Barnett Newman’s painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III” (1967), one of four paintings he did with that title between 1966 and 1970, and which had been vandalized and restored. Marshall’s painting, which measures 8 feet by more than 17 feet, is done in black, red and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag. The colors symbolize blood and sacrifice (red), the color of the people (black), and the fertility of Africa (green).

The phrase, “If they come in the morning,” which is barely visible, is written in different shades of red on the red ground that takes up most of the painting. The words emerge out of the red as well as sink back into it. The line is a rephrasing of a closing line from an open letter that James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis while she was in jail, accused of aiding the prisoner George Jackson in his attempt to escape from a California courtroom. Known as the Soledad Three, Jackson, along with two other men, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, had been falsely accused of murdering a white prison guard in 1969. By inserting this sentence into Newman’s well-known painting, as well as changing the colors to the Pan-African flag, Marshall underscores the divisions in America. Newman, who identified himself as an anarchist, made paintings that denied space, figuration, gesture, and painterly incident. They were visceral feats of pure opticality. It seems to me that their vulnerability is also part of their meaning. Critics define Newman’s works as art-about-art, attempts at attaining pure objectivity. They are regarded as a culmination.

Jackson, who became a member of the Black Panther Party while in prison, was shot to death in prison on August 21, 1970, about six weeks after Newman had died on July 4, 1970. It was his second escape attempt. Davis was accused of aiding him in the first attempt and imprisoned for eighteen months until she was found innocent. I am sure Marshall knows all this and much more. By making Baldwin’s chilling words inhabit Newman’s painting, Marshall rejects the ideals associated with art about art: he presents a counter narrative, which starts with “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980) and continues to the present. I don’t think he is asking us to take sides. Rather, he is asking us to consider the merits of both. I would venture that by opening Newman’s painting back up, by literally and metaphorically inserting himself into it, he is challenging those who uphold the narrative that painting is dead, that it culminated in the silkscreens of Andy Warhol or that it was superseded by the stripes of Daniel Buren.

[Note: The text is from John Yau, "The Triumph of the Chickens", at Hyperallergic]