Zeitgeist Spam

With the Noose Around My Neck 42

But what can I say?

        See here how everything
        Lead up to this day
        And it’s just like
        Any other day
        That's ever been
        Sun goin up
        And then the 
        Sun it goin down
        Shine through etcetera?

        This is the day when the ordinary grows enormous oozing slime
        around the edges when aliens roam the streets with too many
        legs and eyeballs or not enough when physiology swells within
        you rendering the flesh flimsy as tissue paper there is no stopping its
        inevitable implosion?

I don’t know what I can say. Saint Angel seems to be a mythical place, perhaps near Fenario. Whenever his wife would peek around the corner we’d freeze — his German lips pursed, me fiddling with a slice of cheese and a Triscuit. If it is actually a novel at all, it is a collage-y one — of quotes, emails, letters, texts. Its format is elliptical, with three Volume Ones, each retreading and then fragmenting the same story. There are two endings, two love interests, the central role alternates between two professions, the child of the narrator alternates between two genders. Mr. Tivy, the title character believes he has the unique ability to speak to animals. His ideas on how to employ this talent, however, are rather less profound, first wanting to make a “successful film” about his powers, and then attempting to impress a masseur (who has just jerked him off) by speaking with the parlor cat, Gross Out. Gross Out does not comply, and after the masseur leaves the room, Mr. Tivy says, “I thought you wanted to help me out.’ To which Gross Out replies, ‘You know what you’re asking can never be ... On the other hand, you’re a remarkable person! A precious gift was given to you. Go to Lincoln Park and spend some time at the large-mammal house Gain the wisdom of the elephants!’ Mr. Tivy had heard all this before. ‘You talk like my dog.’ That’s when Allison is visited by Jacqueline Bisset, who floats in through the young girl’s bedroom window at night to give her life advice, “Until you blossom, concentrate very hard on your schoolwork. Then, as soon as this process is finally completed, compare yourself with the other girls.” And what if Allison never blossoms? “Simply admit this to yourself. Then decide if you might be someone who is skinny but with a lot of pizzazz to make up for it.” As for George Henry, he’s a burned-out ex-ballplayer whose own face gets stuck after warning his daughters that their faces might get stuck if they make chipmunk faces. Tokyo Lipscomb, a third-year student at Penn, is assigned to write a paper about George after seeing a news report about him but now more and more people’s faces are getting stuck — all except Tokyo Lipscomb’s. When the dust settles they’ve both been transported back to prehistoric times. They have to get back to the present using only their cell phones. Then all hell breaks loose. An army of alligators comes out of the sewers, which is explained by a flashback to 1959. People could send away for live baby alligators advertised on the back of comic books, but then they flushed the alligators down their toilets and the alligators multiplied. In any case, he is a bee expert like the guy in Jaws who was a shark expert. But perhaps all kinship is wounded, incomplete, short of its ideal, but the more blatant breaches of connectedness and fellow feeling seem especially salient. The conclusion of Mississippi Masala, a movie about nothing if not lesion, displacement, and conflict, with its implication that music can, if only for a time, heal division, is one of numerous examples of what’s long been a commonplace notion. Albert Ayler’s “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” is another. There’s a story about Lester Young I’ve cited before in which he calls the keys and pads of his saxophone his people. But I wasn’t talking about prayer per se in that passage. I was using prayer as a foil, playing it against and folding it into a musical performance that doesn’t sound or seem as obviously related to prayer as does Coltrane’s “Dear Lord” or “Alabama” or Pharoah’s “Morning Prayer” or “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord” or any of a number of others. I was trying to talk about something I heard in the circumspection Pharoah starts that solo with, the probity of his sotto voce tack or what wants to be probity, a kind of trepidation, it seems. I was trying to say something about the fury this gets into, a pitch of complaint that would be hubristic in the context of prayer, and I was trying to talk about what I heard as prolixity and obstructed speech consorting, Pharoah seeming to’ve been gathering himself all along for that halting, hesitant statement of the melody toward the end. It was a numinous extremity I was trying to get at. Rudolf Otto’s examination of the numinous experience in The Idea of the Holy had a strong impact on me when I read it in my late teens, and his notion of the sense of one’s creatureliness as a part of that experience is at work in a later letter in Bedouin Hornbook that relates to the passage you cite. In that letter, N. dreams he’s in North Africa with a group of Sufis who practice a form of prayer in which they mimic animals — bray like horses, bark like dogs, meow like cats, and so on — so as to humble themselves before and acknowledge their separation from Allah, the fact that to God, they’re only as animals are to men. N. goes on to say something about this, to call it an inoculation of loss, mourning abandonment as though in advance, only to find that a piece of glass has gotten caught in his throat. He coughs as forcefully as he can to dislodge it, making the yelp of a barking dog. That yelp, taking the place of discourse, is N.’s submission to a certain animal abidance, to being “an angel on all fours,” as Djuna Barnes puts it in Nightwood. I heard and hear a like abidance in the gruff, iterative insistence of Pharoah’s solo, a not always joyful noise but a devotional noise nonetheless, an expectorant noise, as though he would cough up separation if he could. His and Trane’s recourse to an expectorant or would-be expectorant grumble and shriek is an admission of the limits of knowing — which is to say that between cleaning concession stands and burying dead horses, she is expected to a complete one large art project each month. There are additional super-secret ingredients: liquefied frankincense and powdered rotten tooth that belonged to The Host, hand ground with a jade mortar and jade pestle. The Host makes several dozen red frosting roses and calaveras de azúcar and places them on the eight-tier cake. She reapplies her makeup and realizes she did not exfoliate properly, but does not risk proper exfoliation at this time in case guests begin to arrive. “I’m pregnant,” says a guest. “So am I,” says another. “Both of you are? So are we!” “It was a total shock.” “We weren’t even really trying.” “We tried for three years.” “We’re due on the solstice.” “We’re due on the equinox.” “Either Federico, Alejandro, Joaquin, Pablo — after Picasso — Paolo, Swordsman, Phallus Maximus, Everest, or Omnipotence, if it’s a boy.” “Pre-natal yoga and grass-fed steak.” “My doctor said I was the tiniest pregnant woman she’d ever seen.” “Walking every day.” “A big glass of water in the morning.” “The weird thing is I’m not even hungry, just blissed out.” “Lucia Frida, Remedios, Compote Rose, Come Hither, Whirling Dervish, Cosmos, Alma, Lil Cutie, Sexually Desirable, or Simone Weil, if it’s a girl.” Maybe if I could find a good ghost writer or something. It sure seems to me, based on what you wrote, but as I know nothing on the subject, that staying on the teeny dose of Zyprexa is the way to go. The NYC subway freaks me out too, and I have to take it almost every day! But, you know, I really do think I could do the being-in-space thing. Also, a bunch of new monuments had been erected. One was of these statues of animals with famous people’s heads on them. Which reminds me of the bunny man, the elusive figure who buried his hatchet in the windshield of an occupied car two weeks ago in Fairfax County, was reported seen at least 50 times yesterday, police said:

        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event
        event

As she has written in a statement about her practice: “My food projects are always made with an awareness of the dark reality lurking behind each meal.” Most of this recent violence took place across the Spanish border, but not far from Saint-Jean Pied-de-Port is the Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees, where Basque guerrillas slaughtered the troops led by Roland, Charlemagne’s general. Did you know that all the soldiers on both sides wore sweater-vests and were pale and had perfectly cubical heads? But that’s not the problem. What makes the Standard so uniquely infuriating is this. Several years ago, a group of skaters were campaigning to halt the vandalism-by-redevelopment of the South Bank Centre, and along the way prevent the bulldozing of its undercroft, a much-loved graffiti and skateboarding space. It should have been hard to oppose them on this: the skate park gave joy to thousands, destroying it would have given money to a few. Not for the Evening Standard. In a short note appended to an editorial column, the paper congratulated the skaters of the successes of their campaign. ‘In this stand-off between culture and counter-culture, the skaters have pulled off some deft moves,’ it wrote. And then, without warning: ‘But it is now time for them to see reason.’ What reason? What are they talking about? What could this possibly mean? The world is full of people making the case for what is stupid and wrong, but the Evening Standard never even makes its case. Here is something stupid and wrong, please agree with it at once. After all, this is what’s reasonable. That sentence contains in its ten short words everything that’s broken in life. The thoughtless appeal to a common sense that never existed. The endless construction of the reasonable conservative subject, spat out in their millions, naked and glistening onto the tarmac as the traffic arrives, reading the Evening Standard. If the world were a rational place, if people really were ever capable of seeing reason, that would have been it: eight hundred and fifty thousand trudging commuters would have thrown up their hands — god, fuck this — and immediately assembled to burn down the offices of the Evening Standard and start building a society in which nothing so blindly meaningless could ever happen again. But people are rude

            they won’t open the door after 10
            even though you’re disabled & carrying cake
            of a kind so great as to transcend any pleasures
            to be had in that hotel, in fact there’s
            a sign on the doors: NO PLEASURE EVER!

            it was the best of times
            it was the worst of times
            forget about the worst though
            we live in Best, NY, right
            next to the Best Berry Farm

(HERE THE RECORDING IS INTERRUPTED. WHEN THE SOUND RETURNS, OLSON IS SPEAKING)

— And it isn’t these brown cows of Paleolithic and southern France — [...] I go by square numbers until I go by odd numbers [...] but I could show you some switches, because, like, Pierre Boulez is my man [...] I mean whatever — Fuck that shit. But we ought to treat the whole universe as though it were a [...] ( ? ? ? ? ) — he — he — I mean I still don’t know what it really means, but he says the thing that makes music is the middle voice. And I love it. I got it into that poem where I talk about Tiamat. Oh, and

            The wolf had amber eyes
            That stared out
            The back of a station wagon —

            The wolf had amber eyes —

            Clet —
                    Pflut —
                            Shuzzle —

I repeat myself. Someone laughs. I lift my arm. It’s real. Snap. [snaps fingers] Do you know do you see are you aware that right now you are here? Relax the muscles around your eyes. “Can you die from an overactive imagination?” For it quickly becomes clear that all is not well. It seems Ravicka is ravaged by a crisis that has swept the city. Or it is in the midst of an emergency by turns partially visible and wholly disavowed by the Ravickians. Or Ravicka will be the site of an impending disaster whose signs are already evident in the mood and geography of the city. Whatever the situation, citizens are either silent or at odds or in the know and unwilling to voice the goings-on. Addressing Ulchri, a Ravickian the narrator has met during her explorations, she asks her stranger’s question: “Ulchi, where do people go here to find the truth?” I got the question out but figured it would be difficult for him to answer. I tried the

            12 tone scale the
            25 tone scale the

            200 lb. scale I tried
            cat fish             ale

This is why Deleuze claims that thought instigates a discordant functioning of the faculties. Where, in perception, memory functions to show how the current experience resembles other past experiences, in the encounter thought is in discord with memory. No wonder he was fascinated with Klossowski’s Roberte novels! In the encounter we discover the immemorial precisely because there is no recollection, no “system of anticipations” as in Husserl, that could converge in a synthesis on this thing that can only be sensed. And this is why the encounter generates the cogitandum, or that which can only be thought: the unprecedented. Thought is not the syllogism, nor subsumption under an established concept, but the invention of that for which there is yet no concept. If thought is rare, then this is because thought for Deleuze is essentially invention and discovery. We can see how this might work in a variety of scientific and mathematical contexts. The irregular orbit of the planet Mercury is a sentiendum in the sciences. It is something that doesn’t fit with the established Newtonian models. The Newtonians attempt to assimilate this orbit to the Newtonian models. Thought is what takes place with Einstein.  It is not that we haven’t yet observed a missing mass, but rather that we’ve gotten the theory of gravity wrong. We must entirely rethink gravity in light of this exception (cogitandum). Or again we might think of the Pythagoreans discovering irrational numbers. Here we have a cautionary tale of when thought does not take place and where re-cognition takes precedence. They repress the discover of irrational numbers when trying to find the diagonal of certain squares and even club one of their followers to death when he tries to discuss irrational numbers publicly. Everything, they contend, must consist of harmonious ratios. Where the discovery of irrational numbers should have opened an entirely new field of mathematics, it’s instead brutally repressed. And should this be how we think of the trans person? Not as the person to be assimilated to one sexual position or the other, but as the person that calls us to rethink our entire concept of gender and sexuality? And this, for Deleuze, is what it ultimately comes down to. But can even the most intense encounter generate something worthy of the name of thought? There can be little doubt that the ‘self-conscious brain’ is myopic in the extreme when it comes to the greater brain. Profound informatic asymmetry characterizes the relationship between the brain and human consciousness, a dramatic quantitative disproportion between the information actually processed by the brain and the information that finds its way to consciousness. Short of isolating the dynamic processes of consciousness within the greater brain, we really have no reliable way to quantify the amount of information that makes it to consciousness. Inspired by cybernetics and information theory, a number of researchers made attempts in the 1950s and early 60s, arriving at numbers that range from less than 3 to no more than 50 bits per second. More recent research on attentional capacity, though not concerned with quantifying ‘mental workload’ in information theoretic terms, seems to confirm these early findings. Assuming that this research only reflects one aspect of the overall ‘bandwidth of consciousness,’ we can still presume that whatever number researchers ultimately derive will be surprisingly low. Either way, the gulf between the 7 numbers we can generally keep in our working memory and the estimated 38 000 trillion operations per second (38 petaflops) equivalent processing power possessed by the average human brain is boggling to say the least. My mother, greatly impressed by such obvious sincerity, said in her most charming manner that Mr Spitzer would undoubtedly make his appearance in time if not in space and had given to the insouciant and gold-turbaned and white-sheeted Egyptian her obscure but explicit instructions as to how he should conduct himself to a morning tower room where he might wait forever if he was sincere, her advice as to his procedure being as complicated as for some long, intricate journey more fearful than the voyage he had just made, and she had described a landscape shifting like water, the schools of faceless dolphins which should follow in his wake, the great birds with teeth, the stars not in their places but in another place, and had warned that he must remember each step, for there would be no one to show him the way through the dark and golden house. She had given him the exact chart of her memory which was so vague, perhaps remembering some other house, perhaps one where she had lived long ago, showing him the inscrutable painted doors he must pass and their illusive dimensions, how he must turn to the right, turn to the left, circle back the way he had come, climb the stairs he had already descended. He should not be afraid of the minotaur, for the minotaur would be afraid of him. He should not be afraid of sleeping lions in his path, of buried houses, of sleeping beauties under the sand, of swan boats and dead servants, and when he arrived at his destination, either the hostess or Mr Spitzer should come to greet him in the evening light, though it should be the morning tower and not the evening. She had added other instructions, some quite different from those she had already given, for now there were rooms between the rooms, and now the doors had changed their places. That the gold-turbaned and white-sheeted Egyptian might be assured he followed the right way and thus would not be lost again, would not be blown athwart by every wind or would not mistake the mirage for the place or the sand fountains for the sea, she had been most explicit and most patient, assuring herself by every means that he was real. Perhaps all this is why the invention of the conditions for new inventions is the condition for the invention of new conditions and yet the conditions for the conditions of the creation of new conditions looked as if they would fade into significance slash but (and?)

        the mouth kisses the extinction of the world
        1, 2, 3
        1, 2, 3
        kisses alone without a tongue
        endlessly along the edge
        of all life-non-life breathing the pheromones
        e ◎[‿]◎ d
        1, 2, 3
        1, 2, 3
        grooooooooor yahh-yort gahhr

By the time the plane lands in Mexico City there is little doubt left. In the airport the sadness of all of everything strengthens me. Soon, we are driving across the desert stopping to look at roadside botany. Hours later, we turn off the worn asphalt and enter the mountains. In the early afternoon María Sabina allows us into her chanting ceremony. A year or two later, Bruce Conner and I go to the San Francisco Zoo to record lion roars and snow leopard growls for a sound-play I have written. I yell this Tantra. The lions roar back at me. The five of us are deeply pleased. So if there is an “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH” simply say a long loud “oooh”. If there is a “gahr” simply say gar and put an h in. Everybody knows how to pronounce NOH or VOOR-NAH or GAHROOOOO ME. Speaking of the afterlife,

        I can locate it. Past a low ridge
        in the cliff face of a limestone dale
        there’s a cave in the bushes.

        When the old tigers
        were long since gone, leaving their
        teeth, the valley people
        would climb there with the dead
        they thought most useful;

        push them well in,

        take them out again,
        walk them around:

                        We hire a band that comes
                        in a van. Again
                        with liquefaction almost done
                        we hold our cherished ones
                        in our arms. From the grave-clothes

                        they fall in gobbets as dog-food
                        falls from the can. We wrap them
                        in fresh dry linen. They
                        bless our lives with their happiness.

        Walk them around the valley. Drop
        here a finger
        for the god that is a rat or a raven,
        here a metatarsal
        to set under the hearth for luck.

        And what was luck?

        The afterlife back then
        was fairly long:
        nothing demented like for ever,

            a cracked city, cubes rising
            above, tangled trench
            hazy gray, lemony
            artery of a

                        they come
            down to
            fish in it, not really fish

            address maybe, new Altamira, “Hamburger Hill,” Buchenwald

            down the street, I know, they make rubber. Well of course
            “they don’t exactly make rubber”

            they recycle it. It’s a huge complex indeed
            bulldozers and everything

So yes, I was in a coven for two years in the 90s. Well, everybody was in a coven in the 90s.  We never hexed, but we divined. The meat locker doors to our hearts were open, and the chains of the law were broken.  I believe that all that witchy work was the main practice that opened my nadis [network of yogic energy channels] to Flarf. That, and the czarnina [duck blood soup] my Polish grandmother used to ladle out when I was a kid. But I’m a deep believer in the via negativa. T.S. Eliot nicked that from St. John of the Cross. But good modernist poets steal from transcendent medieval saint-poets. (SJC sounds like self-help from the past, especially as Rough Orange Beast, his hour come at last, in our end is our beginning? Eliot stole that line from Mary Queen of Scots, you know. Mesmerism later became known as hypnotism. Felix was the first image ever broadcast on TV! Do what thou wilt, kitten, is the extent of the law. And every second, 600 billion neutrinos penetrate our bodies. The I Ching says, “Everything serves to further”; but

        I swear to god, if I were Jesus,
        I would have killed that unicorn every time he directed
        An episode of the A-Team.
        Together we met Peter Tork.
        A consummate shoplifter, she painted her apartment
        Black by splashing paint from the can.

Did you know that the FDA allows “only” 136 insect fragments and 4 rodent hairs in a jar of peanut butter? Anagrams = Ars Magna. Does this guck gush straight from your Orphic maw? Brandon, whose work I really like, will no doubt agree with me when I say that remaining at ease with one’s preoccupations requires a constant friendship with the Odradek-of-one’s-own-being. Meersman writes in four languages, including Morse Code.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, “Black Peter”; JBR; Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker; JBR; David Dodd, “The Annotated ‘Black Peter’”, at The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics; Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker; Juliet Escoria, Thomas Moody, Mitch Sisskind, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Deagler, Jen George, Dennis Cooper, Steevee, Misanthrope, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Elizabeth Ellen PERSON/A, Mitch Sisskind Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight, Nathaniel Mackey Late Arcade, Jen George The Babysitter at Rest”, and appended comments, at DC’s, 25 Mar 017; JBR; Ed Baker, POINTS / COUNTERPOINTS; Thomas Micchelli, “Field Report on an Artist and Her Pigs”, at Hyperallergic, 25 Mar 017 (re Elaine Tin Nyo’s This Little Piggy, a “project documenting life and death in the food chain”); JBR; Sam Kriss, “Against the Evening Standard”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 21 Mar 017; JBR; Bernadette Mayer, “These Windows Do Not Open”, “The Flooding”, in Poetry State Forest; Zoe Brown, and Charles Olson, Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley (as transcribed by Zoe Brown); Joanna McClure, “Wolf Poem I”, “Sound Poem”, in Wolf Eyes; Sophie Seita, “just pick a line”, in Fantasias in Counting; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T Elkins-Tanton, Earth, quoted in Catherine Ramsdell, “Science, Creativity, and Imagination (and the Earth)”, at Pop Matters, 20 Mar 017; Andrea Quaid, and Renee Gladman, quoted in Quaid’s “Renee Gladman’s “ Event Factory’”, at Jacket2, 22 Mar 017; JBR; Ed Baker, POINTS / COUNTERPOINTS; Levi R Bryant, “Deleuze: What is Called Thinking?”, at Larval Subjects, 20 Mar 017; JBR; R.S. Bakker, “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness”, downloaded from Academia.edu; Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, HOX WORK IN PROGRESS; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, HOX WORK IN PROGRESS; Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Michael McClure: Introduction to ‘Ghost Tantras,’ the 2013 edition”, at Jacket2, 11 Feb 014; JBR; Roy Fisher (RIP), “The Afterlife”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Jared Schickling, “(lock #35)”, “(716)”, in Aurora; JBR; Sharon Mesmer, and Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, “She Makes the Dirty Work Look Like a Degas”, at Hyperallergic, 26 Mar 017]

With the Noose Around My Neck 41

This passage illustrates the manner in which a motif foliates outwards through the surrounding text, beginning from a single word — here the ‘flash’ in ‘flash and crash’ has ‘electrified’ the words which follow, and a German formation has similarly ramified into the context. But there was something else in the wind and the snow, something not quite right with the night. Which may be why the piece began ominously with sonar beeps from the organ, and as it developed, Sun Ra rolled his hands on the keys, pressing his forearm along the keyboard, played with his hands upside down, slashing and beating the keyboard, spinning around and around, his hands windmilling at the keys — a virtual sonic representation of the flooding of Atlantis; Nikuko felt a great sleep come over her, and woke with her body covered by wings. Five minutes later the brass entered, and then a rather conventionally notated swing saxophone-section melody surfaced to be undercut first by brutal bursts from the organ and then by the brass and drums. The weight, the sheer gravity of the piece which developed was almost unbearable. And then suddenly the Arkestra shifted to the “Sun Ra and his Band from Outer Space are here to entertain you” chant. This is why dogs don’t have horns on their foreheads. In a split second, then, Nikuko and the ferret changed places. A monk passed by, laughing, and asked, Nikuko, after all this play, are you any the wiser? Nikuko replied, not in the slightest, Izanagi, not in the least. Nikuko tried to think. She couldn’t think. She didn’t have time to think. She itched. Nikuko scratched herself and flakes of skin fell into the water. Did I just say something, said Nikuko. She thought, now I can say all sorts of things. Just as she thought that, all sorts of things appeared. They were grey until she said, What a colorful life. They were dark until she said, I wish it were sunny out. They were hot until she said, I wonder when it will snow, and they were too shiny until she said Good night. The sun was shiny metal in the grey sky; there were mists about. Someone was walking towards her from the distance, as if in a dream. Nikuko recalled later that the woman looked like a stranger, then familiar, then a friend. This is a story that has been told many times, but is well worth the retelling. The way was steep, and suddenly, a white fox bounded across the path in front of them, disappearing into the bamboo forest. A little further on, they came to a stone carved in the shape of a tortoise. A well-made shakuhachi is created from root bamboo, worked on for weeks and months, lacquered inside, a hardwood insert in the mouthpiece. Bacteria thrive, stationary waves hold colonies of protozoa in perfect suspension. Nikuko pared her toenails, and a slug, ever-fearful of death, crawled into one of the cuttings. Izanagi replied, let them find out for themselves. She traveled through Afghanistan and the outskirts of the Roman Empire, coming at last to Palestine. There were kami gathered in the shrines, shadows swimming without a ripple, beneath the surface of the ponds. Are there no female Leopards, asked Izanagi. There are not enough things in the world for parables. Let us stop for a refreshing drink, said Izanagi. It is even better that the base rotates and wobbles with the rest of the planet, sweeping the heavens above and the oceans below. Yes, replied Izanagi, we never know where our ascent will take us, but Yamato is friendly and grateful, and a good place to sit. Don’t spill your drink, said Nikuko, this world has gravity. Speaking of which, on March 1^st, Elena Urlaeva, head of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, was forcibly committed to a psychiatric clinic for “treatment” to shut her up from speaking out on forced labor and human trafficking. On March 15^th, the Risk Assessment Committee of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) ruled that the toxic herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, is, in spite of all evidence, not carcinogenic. Yet Hartman’s travel narrative, Lose Your Mother, which has been described by some critics as fretful and pessimistic, actually frontloads her disappointment in her failure to integrate into Ghanaian society as a returned daughter. This move allows her to turn to speculative methods to fill in holes in slavery’s archives, rescuing from oblivion the stories of those thus traumatized. Slavery does not belong to diasporans solely; it, too, is bound up inextricably with the postcolonial condition.

        Now
        make room in your mouth
        for grassesgrassesgrasses

The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was included in the film Lincoln; the hanging of the Dakota 38, which happened the same week, was not. Or was it the doll who was watching? We didn’t know who the doll really was. She nodded her head back and forth, something we’d never seen a doll do before. And she seemed persecuted and excluded, too. If you sat her on the ground, from above she looked like a little girl and we like the adults, and we thought that we actually were a little like that, a tiny head you could hardly see. “Her eyes are broken, that’s why she can’t close them. You have to lick her eyeballs so she can see or else she can’t see.” Marina held out her doll; that was the first thing she’d said to us. We stuck our tongues out until the tips touched the cold glass of her eyes. And it was true: the doll could see then. After all, in the words of Helen, “everything in the world is a palimpsest, motherfuckers!” What I’m getting at here is that we have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. Which is why I would spend hours under the bed with a flashlight and a roll of tape, obsessively taping every crevice in the wooden bedframe. In any case, the Milwaukee of my book is not the real or factual Milwaukee by any means. It could have been Seattle or Houston or Minneapolis. Looking back, I don’t even know why I chose Milwaukee. First there was the idea of fog, a beach, then waves on the beach, then waves ringing like bells, and aha, let them be sheep’s bells, and let there be some lost sheep, and let the fog be fleecy, like a sheep, and let the waves come to pasture like sheep, followed by — oh, why not — the actual sheep, no a ram, no a ram and sheep, all — doing what? — trailing after Mr Spitzer. And ever after that, he had been followed by men in grey cities, by lost men although he was lost, and none more lost than he, this old musician blowing his horn in the clouds. Given all this,

        what does the peasant
        facing the freeway
                        where cars hum
        for a moment head-raised want to tell you?
        that work is hard?
        that life is less and less a forest?
        that workers of the world
                        only
        the beer can
        someone’s tossed out the window
        unites us?
        is this the reality principle?
        it’s father’s day and my underfed neighbor
        received a bottle of cologne
        he asks me to smell his marrow

                            to be immigrant is to be poor: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be persecuted: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be illiterate oral: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be marginalized: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be objectified: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be expelled, then expelled again:
                                        flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be ghettoized: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be trapped in a binary of baptism or
                                        exodus: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be appropriated: flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to see birth language eradicated:
                                        flamenco!
                            to be immigrant is to be human history: flamenco!

Here “ruach” is Hebrew for “spirit” and “rauch” is German for smoke. Ben’s subsequent book was based around his long poem “Levinas and the Police,” which opens with a kind of lure: “Without question / to be / Put into question”

        s

        kin

        Being

        cit

        ed

        for

        Being

        cut

        oth

        er

        wise

        than

        Being, well, you know. For instance,

        First Question: What do you know about the Middle East?

        Second Question: What do you want to know, really?

        First Answer: James Baldwin says: “One cannot argue with anyone’s
        experience or decision or belief” (The Fire Next Time)

        Meaning, perhaps, one has to argue with one’s own.

        What he overhears is the underbrush. What he
        overhears in translation tears in this underbrush:

        lemon grass or cloth, neither lemon grass nor cloth
        under that music, or no one under that music by itself.

So then when we got there and said we wanted the “nano way”, he led us into the shack on top of the pontoon where he kept the sex sacs, flesh grafts pulsating while oily brackish mucous leaked out. Much later, after I climbed out, I heard voices on the dock, a man and a woman apparently sitting next to him. He was saying something like, “Anyway, I touched us down, the other side of the Line, that’s the area we operated in back then, least likely place for the Specialty to look.” That’s when he spotted us in the shadows. He jumped from his seat and yelled, “We see you, ain’t no use hiding over there. Okay, let’s see them flesh crystals, kid.” Time passed and things happened I’m not mentioning here. Then Blud-Bod pulled up his shirt and pulled out a vastly overdeveloped homologic skin-sponge, replete with clustered basal ganglia grafted directly onto his belly. It was beating like a second — and external — heart. At that precise moment, Vagi-Con leaned toward us, asking, “You two ever hear of a guy goes by Black Nosferatu? A true-flesh trader?” We hadn’t. “You kids are real sweet,” she said, “You should come on with us, the

        author’s last osmosis unmuzzles hiero/
        ditto pidgin manuscripts: so torted dis

        like ball's “goramen” as well as latent
        INDO-WANT: go roll yourself a syllable
        play horse to foreign carts to intro-
        ducing mix-o-lydian (where disparate

        particles demonstrate non-success:
        and dank what actually (what actually
        “exists but at the moment of its
        simulation”) should after all be called

        flamingoes in fruitfight always futuristic-
        perfect. thereafter years on the job —”

Or something like that. Destruction of self is never voluntary. We keep on walking, our deaths concealed inside our mouths. There is nothing worse than a judge. They should be pleased there are no more oceans, because if ever we opened our mouths, their cities would flood. But however much Said explains, I cannot seem to fully understand. This is not about a failure of language it is about failure of experience. Some things need to be lived to be understood. This is a little of what I’ve written in my notebook:

        His wife
        Left Aleppo today, mit kleine
        By fosse
        (Mimes action of walking with fingers)
        By foot. You understand?
        Left Aleppo today, they walk. 1 years old boy. His wife.
        Walk to Turkey. 
        Because she has appointment with Embassy
        But they won’t let her go through
        No other way
        In ein gruppe? Nein.
        No. She’s not walking in a group
        Only with her baby.
        The only chance she has
        To find her way is to go through quietly
        (Shows route on mobile phone, google map
        Near a forest, near a border)
        She has no papers.        
        If she gets through, it just depends on the day.
        This is the only chance.

I tell Said that he is a very gracious host. He says, “By now, you’ve probably seen James Bridle’s ‘Autonomous Trap 001,’ a magic salt circle for ensnaring the sensory systems of autonomous vehicles.” Nonetheless, it’s not those canvases but the project’s most basic conceptual move — putting the Caltrans striping crews into the same context as, say, Barnett Newman or Bridget Riley — that interests me the most here,

                In the time of the ancients
        the earth went dark for 5 days
        and they broke many pots
             and the pots spoke
        And the demons in the dark came forth
                from them:
        The lion, the snake, the jaguar
        And the people perished from them.

        The little children sprouted wings.
                    “You will die mother”.
        And the child went outside
                                    at once
        And changed into a bird
                    And the children survived.

        At dawn, no single person
                    left alive
        Only birds, Jay, woodpecker, sparrow ...

        Then the people were transformed. They were good
                 again. The sun came out
                        in the soft white radiance.

            [Then a bunch of other stuff happened]

        Helloooooooooo

        Are you here now?
        I am here now

        Are you here?
        I am here.

        Have you come here?
        I have come here.

        Will you drink a little
                        to sweep away the fear?

        Breathing the gods, getting the goods

                    [Then a dream happened]

                                    Now vast sky    of clouds move over
                              Now the sun warms

            [Then her heart stopped beating]

                                    my lord
                                      I, Joanne
                                         where, am I in time
                                    Me is memory
                        through the courtyard door
              take me out, take me out

Which is to say that, in its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list: 73 - 1 - 2 - 116 - 3 - 84 - 4 - 71 - 5 - 81 - 74 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 93 - 68 - 9 - 104 - 10 - 65 - 11 - 136 - 12 - 106 - 13 - 115 - 14 - 114 - 117 - 15 - 120 - 16 - 137 - 17 - 97 - 18 - 153 - 19 - 90 - 20 - 126 - 21 - 79 - 22 - 62 - 23 - 124 - 128 - 24 - 134 - 25 - 141 - 60 - 26 - 109 - 27 - 28 - 130 - 151 - 152 - 143 - 100 - 76 - 101 - 144 - 92 - 103 - 108 - 64 - 155 - 123 - 145 - 122 - 112 - 154 - 85 - 150 - 95 - 146 - 29 - 107 - 113 - 30 - 57 - 70 - 147 - 31 - 32 - 132 - 61 - 33 - 67 - 83 - 142 - 34 - 87 - 105 - 96 - 94 - 91 - 82 - 99 - 35 - 121 - 36 - 37 - 98 - 38 - 39 - 86 - 78 - 40 - 59 - 41 - 148 - 42 - 75 - 43 - 125 - 44 - 102 - 45 - 80 - 46 - 47 - 110 - 48 - 111 - 49 - 118 - 50 - 119 - 51 - 69 - 52 - 89 - 53 - 66 - 149 - 54 - 129 - 139 - 133 - 140 - 138 - 127 - 56 - 135 - 63 - 88 - 72 - 77 - 131 - 58 - 131 – which is to say, I am dead. I see the sky awhirl with dust, like the cone of air in an old movie theater cut by the projector’s beam. Several luminous, milky white globes are aligned in the far reaches of the sky. A long metallic stem grows out of each globe and one of them pierces all the way through my chest without my feeling anything but a great sense of euphoria. I advance toward the globes of light, slowly sliding along the length of the stem, ascending its gentle incline. In each hand I grasp those nearest me among a chain of others who are also climbing toward the sky, each following the rail that skewers them. The only noise to be heard is the faint squeal of steel through the flesh of our chests. One of my immediate neighbors is Max Jacob. The patients are out on the sidewalk, each one encased up to the waist in a small, round — or, more precisely, polygonal — cage with bars just like those protective railings that are normally placed around a manhole when its cover has been removed. Between these two paragraphs we have the transposition of one structure into another. Beneath the statement of the economic facts, a text of reference has been slipped, the text of the anthropological critique which states the process of alienation. It all takes place on the level of two statements, which I give in simplified form:

        — Man produces God

        — The worker produces an object

So why did I go into the Polidor restaurant? Why, since I’m asking that kind of question, did I buy a book I probably wouldn’t read? (The adverb was already a trick, because more than once it had occurred to me to buy books with the tacit certainty that they would be lost forever in the bookcase, and yet I bought them; the enigma was in buying them, in the motive that possibly demanded that useless possession). And into the chain of questions now: Why, after going into the Polidor, did I go to sit at the rear table, across from the large mirror that precariously duplicated the faded desolation of the room? And another link to put in place: Why did I ask for a bottle of Sylvaner? (But that last item is left for later; perhaps the bottle of Sylvaner was one of the false resonances in the possible chord, unless the chord was different and contained the bottle of Sylvaner just as it contained the countess, the book, and what the fat diner had just ordered). “Je voudrais un château saignant,” the fat diner had said. According to the mirror, the diner was sitting at the second table with his back to the one where Juan was sitting, and therefore his image and his voice were forced to have recourse to opposite and convergent itineraries in order to come together in suddenly solicited attention. (The book, too, in the shop window on the Boulevard Saint-Germain: the sudden leap forward of the white NRF cover, coming toward Juan as had the image of Hélène before and now the fat diner’s phrase as he ordered a bloody castle; like going to sit obediently at that absurd table in the Polidor with his back to everyone). Of course, Juan was probably the only customer for whom the diner’s request had a second meaning; automatically, ironically, as a good interpreter accustomed to the instant liquidation of all problems of translation in that struggle against time and silence which is an interpreter’s booth, he had fallen into a trap, if it’s proper to speak of a trap in that acceptance (ironic, automatic), in which saignant and sanglant were equivalents and the fat fellow had asked for a bloody castle, and, in any case, he had fallen into a trap without being aware in the least that the displacement of the meaning of the phrase would suddenly cause the coagulation of other things already past or present that night — the book or the countess, the image of Hélène, the acceptance of sitting down with his back turned at a rear table in the Polidor. (And having asked for a bottle of Sylvaner and drinking the first glass of chilled wine at the moment when the fat diner’s image in the mirror and his voice, which reached him from behind, had merged into something Juan couldn’t name, because chain or coagulation were nothing but an attempt to give the level of language to something that presented itself like an instantaneous contradiction, took shape and fled simultaneously, and no longer entered language spoken by anyone, not even that of an experienced interpreter like Juan.) This intimate relationship between music and the true essence of all things can also explain how when appropriate music accompanies any scene, action, event, or surroundings, it seems to reveal to us its most secret meaning and emerges as the most accurate and clearest commentary upon it: to such an extent that he who devotes himself entirely to the impression of a symphony feels as if he is watching within himself all the possible events of life and the world move past in procession: and yet he cannot, when he stops to reflect, demonstrate any similarity between that play of melody and the things which hovered before him. In any case, I’m the only person on the planet who has a special computer chip implanted in my brain that can read my thoughts and send those signals through a port in my skull out to a computer, which can then send that information back to my body and make my body do stuff. For the past three years, I’ve been using this technology, called NeuroLife, to bypass a spinal injury that left me with quadriplegia. The technology reanimates my arm and allows me to control it with my mind, similar to the way I moved before I had my accident. I’ve done a lot of cool stuff with this technology like play Guitar Hero. But the best moment thus far was the first day I was able to pick up a bottle, pour the remains of that bottle into a smaller dish, and then pick up a stir stick and stir the contents around. All power to the Soviets! All power to the Saints! Free Omar Ali Ewado and Ahmed-Kadar Nour! Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members. The object, known as SDSS J0104+1535, is a member of the so-called halo — the outermost reaches — of our galaxy, made up of the most ancient stars. The research team was led by Dr ZengHua Zhang of the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands. He said: “We really didn't expect to see brown dwarfs that are this pure.” By pure he means 99.99% hydrogen and helium, which makes it around 250 times purer than the Sun. Speaking of which,

        If there existed a column of air between earth and the sun,
        we would be able to listen to its bell-burning sound.

        This column would be like a solar stethoscope.

        But the sun would ignite our air-column,
        as well as anything else we used to hear the sun.

        This may explain why the sun is surrounded by nothing.

        When sound doesn’t need a thing to travel through, it is actually light.

        This is what radiowaves are, a type of light.

        The sun produces radiowaves even when it is calm.

        If our ears had been constructed to hear radiowaves
        we would hear the sun almost everywhere.

        Radiowaves are difficult to block, but they can be blocked.

        To our radiowave-ears, the blocked places would be
        like shadows are to us now.

        They would be shadows in a world with extremely few shadows.

Ergo, I am confronted by a clay audience of roughly shaped creatures. Black’s fingerprints define and add texture to these tiny spectators, most of which are wearing cotton white t-shirts that have infinity signs on them. Three wall-mounted flat screen televisions surround them, each looping a video depicting dawn. The accompanying un-synched soundtrack is a compilation of personal conversations between the artist and friends, a British fascist song, Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come,” and recordings of Octavia Butler and Kofi Agawu, amongst others. Off to the side, framed by a sunny LED glow, a Philips “Wake Up Light” clock displays the time: “00:00.” Which is to say that while Black is a good artist, my first thought is she’s wrong about Dana Schutz’s right to paint a portrait of the dead Emmett Till, merely because she’s white. Maybe not this painting, maybe this is the wrong painting, but no one owns suffering. Ask me. I’m a Jew. On the other hand, if, as Christina Sharpe has said, Schutz “seems to traffic in Black spectacle, like the painting of the fight in the elevator,” maybe Black’s onto something. Anyway, after she left, a man came by with a dead rat. Then a court in northern Indian gave the Ganges and Yamuna human status. From that moment on polluting them would amount to harming a person. The ruling came a week after the Whanganui River in New Zealand was granted the same status. In each instance the seemingly innocuous verb of being that follows ‘What’ immediately torques its whatness, and it is a credit to Villarreal that she preserves the knottiness of Sor Juana’s Baroque Spanish as she so skillfully baits each English language trap. Happily, Pluecker provides an excellent afterword that allows the novice sorjuanista to grasp Fabre’s sleights of Spanish, as well as the stakes of his own translation. The effect of so many esdrújulas is a heaping up of plaited and plated riches, best evinced here in “Mashup 2: Sor Juana y Medusa,” resulting in a great spasm of the entire textual body, which joyously discovers glands, organs and limbs in its folds. The abject in this case comes from uncertainties of categorisation; toxic substances have been reclassified as foods,

        like a hasp spent or a hen bent
        over eggs in the nest of
        complexity,

where scum will be superstars, but the stars won’t rise. The uppers shall be downers. In slime. A convulsive sublime. Bacteriality. Country vs. city, gods vs. men. Meanwhile, I have been, my friends and lovers have been, struggling with survival for most if not all of our lives. I am talking here about other poets in America who also come from poverty, who are not abled, I am talking here about my trans friends, my queer friends, who, without adequate healthcare funding, will not survive. I am talking here about the families of my friends who work two or three jobs to stay afloat but are undocumented and are in direct danger. I am talking about the difference between those who found themselves empowered and filled with rage, and those who are exhausted and depleted from struggling their entire lives.

[Note: Sources: Stuart Gilbert, quoted in Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals; Alan Sondheim, “Parables of Nikuko”, in .echo; JBR; John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra; Alan Sondheim, “Parables of Nikuko”, in .echo; John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra; Alan Sondheim, “Parables of Nikuko”, in .echo; Alan Sondheim, “Parables of Nikuko”, in .echo; JBR; UF UITA IUL, “Uzbekistan: forced labour in cotton continues, rights defender confined to ‘psychiatric treatment’/glyphosate alert”, email rec’d 21 Mar 017, approx. 11:55pm PDT; Michelle D. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic; Layli Long Soldier, and Gillie Collins, “Tókȟaȟ'an: To Lose, to Suffer Loss, to Be Gone: Wordplay as dissent in Layli Long Soldier's Whereas”, at BOMB, 21 Mar 017; Andrés Barba, “From Such Small Hands” (tr. Lisa Dillman), at BOMB, 22 Mar 017; Gene Kwak, and Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, quoted in Kwak’s “What is a Real Substitute For Blood?: An Interview with Patty Yumi Cottrell”, at HTMLGIANT, 22 Mar 017; JBR; Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, “The terrifying mathematics of the Anthropocene”, at Climate & Capitalism, 19 Mar 017; JBR; Patty Yumi Cottrell, quoted in Gene Kwak, “What is a Real Substitute For Blood?: An Interview with Patty Yumi Cottrell”, at HTMLGIANT, 22 Mar 017; Deanne Sole, and Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, quoted in Sole’s “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling”, at Pop Matters, 28 Apr 09; JBR; Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, “[indisciplines]”, “[destinies]”, “[protections]” (tr. Katherine M. Hedeen), in “Poems by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez”, at The Brooklyn Rail, Apr 012; Eileen R Tabios, “BIG CITY CANTE INTERMEDIO”, at Tea and Tattered Pages / Panthalassa, 21 Mar 017; Joshua Schuster and Steve Dickison, and Benjamin Hollander, quoted in Schuster and Dickinson’s “Benjamin Hollander, 1952–2016”, at Jacket2, 29 Nov 016; JBR; Aaron Winslow, “Night of the Flesh Scanners”, at Smallwork; Ulf Stolterfoht, “(1) talent in rut”, “(2) abruptly herder appeared” (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), in “From: Fachsprachen I-IX”, at Coconut; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 31 / Discipline”, at Abandoned Buildings, 18 Mar 017; Philip Davenport, “Walking From the War Zone”, at Arthur + Martha, 21 Mar 017; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Spells Against Autonomy”, 20 Mar 017, and “Striper”, 25 Aug 012, at BLDGBLOG; Joanne Kyger (RIP), “from ‘Marian Lopez Calixto’s Story,” (Visit to Maya Land, Fall 1976)”, at EPC; JBR; Joanne Kyger (RIP), “from ‘Marian Lopez Calixto’s Story,” (Visit to Maya Land, Fall 1976)”, at EPC; JBR; Joanne Kyger (RIP), “from ‘Marian Lopez Calixto’s Story,” (Visit to Maya Land, Fall 1976)”, at EPC; JBR; Joanne Kyger (RIP), “from ‘Marian Lopez Calixto’s Story,” (Visit to Maya Land, Fall 1976)”, at EPC; JBR; Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch (tr. Gregory Rabassa); JBR; Michel Leiris, “March 15-16, 1923”, “April 11-12, 1923”, in Nights as Day Days as Night (tr. Richard Sieburth), at SPD; Jacques Rancière “The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy: From the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital”, in Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière And Pierre Macherey, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition (trs. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach); Julio Cortazar, 62: A Model Kit (tr. Greogry Rabassa); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (tr. Douglas Smith), in The Nietzsche Reader (eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large); JBR; Ian Burkhart, as told to Wilbert L. Cooper, “I Have a Computer Chip in My Brain That Reads My Thoughts”, at Vice, 24 Mar 017; JBR; LabourStart, “Free jailed teacher trade union leaders in Djibouti”, email rec’d 24 Mar 017, approx. 8:33am PDT; “Astronomers identify purest, most massive brown dwarf”, at Science Daily, 24 Mar 017; JBR: Brent Cunningham, “Some Facts About the Sun”, in Journey to the Sun, quoted in Lauren Levin, “The Double Dream of Reason: on Brent Cunningham’s Journey to the Sun as satire”, at Lana Turner; JBR; Audrey L. Phillips, “Hannah Black Conjures a New Dawn in the Timeless Loop of History”, at ARTSLANT, 25 Feb 017; JBR; Christina Sharpe, quoted in Siddhartha Mitter “‘What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?’ A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy”, at Hyperallergic, 24 Mar 017; JBR; Chris Randle, “‘I Feel Like Everything Shouldn’t Exist’: An Interview with Hannah Black”, at Hazlitt, 23 Aug 016; “India court gives sacred Ganges and Yamuna rivers human status”, at BBC News, 21 Mar 017; Joyelle McSweeney, “The Monstrosity of Sor Juana”, at Boston Review, 23 Mar 017 (a review of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Enigmas (tr. Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal), and Luis Felipe Fabre, Sor Juana and Other Monsters (tr. John Pluecker)); Laura Ellen Joyce, and Joyelle Mcsweeney, quoted in Joyce’s “The New Canon: The Necropastoral by Joyelle Mcsweeney”, at Enclave, 16 Mar 017; Cynthia Cruz, “Where We Go From Here: On ‘Political’ Poetry and Marginalization”, at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 14 Mar 017]

Joanne Kyger (1934-2017)

With the Noose Around My Neck 40

So two guys walk into a bar, Steve Reich and Seth Kranzler. They start talking about Reich’s Piano Phase, which features a pair of pianists repetitively performing the same piece at two slightly different tempos, forming a continually evolving musical round. Then Kranzler ask Reich for his cell, which is, as is Kranzler’s, an iPhone. He sets the same ringtone on each, then more or less replicates the Reich piece. Then the rabbi says, Hi there, how’s it going tonight? She turns to attack the city fortress of Minas Tirith. Certainly sir, says the bartender. So the film ends into the nightclub scene as though without knowing we have only got a pig’s brain and the brain of the chief executive to choose and the A jumper cable walks into a bar. The barman says, I’ll serve you, but don’t fast forward seven months to October. Fast forward seven months to Louisville and the bartender walks into a bar. It was an iron bar. It would cool slicked back hair. One of the biggest stores in the neighbourhood is dedicated to western wear, culminating in a battle of dog jokes waving a chequered flag above his head. The barman says: I hope you’re not going to start something. I feel like a pair of curtains. Pull yourself together if you can reach that meat he said No, the steaks are too high. Do you call a girl who thinks she’s a police car? After a few hours they are drunk, and the giraffe falls over. Then Geert Wilders only gets 18% of the vote. That doesn’t stop Trump from suing. Now he plans to appeal the ban on his Muslim Ban to the Supreme Court. The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected Rime both in longer and shorter Works, as have also long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, triveal and of no true musical delight; which consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory. This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem ... Then Steve King walks into a bar and says, we can’t make a civilization with other people’s babies. It was Kathy’s ringtone. What Kranzler was doing drove her nuts. The phrase sounds like an echo of that hinterland of half-remembered patterned phrases, like proverbs or advertising slogans: “A fool’s bracelet is a wise man’s neck gaiter” or “A fool and his bracelet make but a dull feast.” Or then again it might be a reference to the little Hereford village of Fool’s Bracelet (pronounced Foles Braly, of course). A reader’s head is likely to be full of this sort of hypnagogic imprecision. (Other, probably more salient suggestions have been made by Simon Perril in his essay on Bands Around the Throat in a recent issue of Jacket.) Facebook, Anne. I didn’t used to know it would be like this, but it turns out to have been. See Mishka Henner, Atlantis Chaos (2017) Archival pigment print, 70x158cm. Then the bartender says, Our Brooklyn office is packed with thousands of copies of The ABCs of Socialism. Then I get an email from something called CaptionCall, asking me what kind of hearing loss I have. The artist’s other signs also depict the silhouettes of Londoners he’d witnessed crossing the streets in the areas where they were installed — a parent pushing a stroller, an older woman pulling a cart, a man in a wheelchair, even a cat — though the Stamford Hill sign seems to be the only one based on a marker of religious or ethnic difference. It’s understandable, then, that, however unintentionally, Allais set off fears in a neighborhood sensitive and sadly accustomed to public expressions of intolerance — particularly since anti-Semitic incidents rose 36% in the UK last year. “I really enjoy time’s arrow,” Welish quips. Printed words of all sizes bombarded Weiner; she saw these words in the air, on every available surface, on people, on the page before she wrote them, and on her forehead from within. Rock-a-bye rock lobster. So we decided to make him a piñata collector. No, the boy you liked is only into making you eat your dinner off the floor after he has stomped on it. Which is a terrible vehicle for trying to explain string theory and quantum physics. Plus. Equals. “Love of semiconductors is not enough.” ‘WHO IS THIS ‘YOU’?”

        If these are ‘units’ what
        is the thread (or perhaps the portfolio)?

The coming forth by day of Frank Rupture. Via the alarmingly-obvious neon-green of the exit-sign above the clean-lined doorway. Tho, perhaps; there is some danger in the analogy: while exit signs in galleries are things that are seen in the presence of other things to be seen, white space is a lack of text in the presence of text; that which is not read in the presence of that which is. Except when it is. Why? Why are exit signs looked for in the first place? If you don’t want to ask Frank, ask Vince the rhinoceros, shot for his horn which was chainsawed off by poachers in a zoo just outside Paris. We’ll always have Paris. It’ll be one of the splinterlands, if it isn’t already. Rust never sleeps. As for LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that provides 5.7 million households help with heating and cooling, it’s going the way of Vince, thanks to the proposed federal budget. I think of Tom Cohen’s concept of the species split here, which will allow the .1% (the green zone people) to appropriate the role of the survivor caste of the slow-rolling splinterlands event ... or even a mass extinction. Who knows exactly what’s on the way? And as I sit in my 17^th-floor San Diego hotel room thinking all this, watching the light play on the water, I can’t help but chant Huncke’s guilty of everything,

        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,
        guilty of everything,

til it feels like I’ve chanted it the same number of times Coltrane chants “a-LOVE-su-PREME.” This is when Bob reminds me that “his first film, Tex Watson Carves A Turkey, (for which he failed to find distribution) was soon followed by his lone 45 RPM single (released on the Bihari Brothers’ Modern label) I Love Your Milk Apples b/w God Will Put A Slumber On Your Brow ... painless soft nodule over olecranon, suspect epidermal inclusion cyst FINAL DIAGNOSIS: Epidermal (infundibular) cyst No malignancy seen A microscopic examination has been performed. GROSS DESCRIPTION: Received in formalin labeled “Bannon, Robert”, “1/30/1953”, and “left elbow” is a 1.5 x 1.1 cm unoriented ellipse of wrinkled tan skin excised to a subcutaneous depth of up to 0.5 cm.  The margin is inked, the specimen is serially sectioned.  There is a 1.0 cm intact cyst filled with soft friable tan material.  Two representative sections are wrapped in paper and submitted in block A1. I certify that I personally conducted a gross and / or microscopic examination(s) of the described specimen(s), and have reviewed the interpretation of this test and diagnosis(es).  I have seen the David, seen the Mona Lisa too, and I have heard Doc Watson play Columbus Stockade Blues, a pair of pianists repetitively performing the same piece at two slightly different tempos, forming a continually evolving musical round. I agree with the documented findings or edited the findings as necessary.”  

[Note: Sources: JBR; Jason Kottke, “Steve Reich is calling”, at Kottke.org (hat tip Sam); JBR, Giles Goodland, A Bar, at Beard of Bees; JBR; John Milton, “The Verse”, in Paradise Lost; JBR; Ian Patterson, “‘Fool’s Bracelet’”, at Quid 17; JBR; Michael Haslam, “‘Fool’s Bracelet’”, at Quid 17; JBR; Mishka Henner, title of image embedded in “Search History, Counter-intelligence, and other news”, email rec’d 17 Mar 017, approx. 3:14am PDT; JBR; Jacobin Magazine, “Jacobin + Two, Three, Many ABCs of Socialism”, email rec’d 17 Mar 017, approx. 8:30am PDT; JBR, re CaptionCall Marketing, “CaptionCall March Newsletter”, email rec’d 17 Mar 017, approx. 8:37am PDT; Benjamin Sutton, “Artist Traffics in Roads Signs that Land Him in a Jam”, at Hyperallergic, 16 Mar 017 (re: an installation by Franck Allais which “drew controversy for installing a yield sign with the silhouette of a Hasidic man in an ultra-Orthodox London neighborhood”); Frances Richard, “Shadow Selves”, at BOMB, 16 Mar 017 (re Marjorie Welish, So What So That); Judith Goldman, Dennis Cooper, Steevee, quoted in Cooper’s “Spotlight on … Hannah Weiner Clairvoyant Journal (1978)”, at DC’s, 16 Mar 017; Peter Manson, “The Making of Frank Rupture”, at Peter Manson, 16 Mar 017; Thomas Nagel, epigraph to JH Prynne, Not-You, quoted in Ruth Abbott, “‘exit pallor’”, at Quid 17; John Hall, “‘Punishment Routines’”, at Quid 17; Peter Manson, “The Making of Frank Rupture”, at Peter Manson, 16 Mar 017; JBR; Ruth Abbott, “‘exit pallor’”, at Quid 17; JBR; Robert Rissman, “With the Noose Around MY Neck”, email rec’d 17 Mar 017, approx. 2:54pm PDT]

With the Noose Around My Neck 39

Speaking of recidivism, I’m never sure what color navy blue is but then again I’m opposed to military shit. I tend to support pacifist colors, like brick red. I wish the sky was brick red. It’s a beginning, unless we cut it out or move it. Then it’s nothing, or it’s something else. Like “the mastodon’s revenge.” Wait. I don’t see a semi colon. What happened to my semi colon. Do you know who Gaitana of the Paez is? Or Granny Nanny? Or Nehanda Nyakasikana? Or Ani Pachen? I know I’ve been awake for five days because when I went out onto my balcony this morning all the buildings in the city collapsed. This seemed to me to be something of a cause for concern, so I sat down to write my will. Here goes. My coffee cups and typewriter I leave to, I dunno, whoever can scream the loudest. My collection of empty beer bottles I leave to my landlord. My library I leave to the homeless of Kottbusser Tor. My credit card likewise. My sexual uncertainty I keep to myself. My love I leave to the suicided. My drug habit I leave to cops, let them wither, mutate and die. My hatred I keep close to my heart. My heart I leave to the centre of the earth. My grief. Gah. My grief which is the size of the tiny racist island on which I was born, I compress it, I transmute it into something like the wild and collectively inhuman joy of the swifts that circle the city with a frenzy wilder than. Oh whatever. The heart is such a lame metaphor. And so pathetic, the idea of burying it in the earth, when I could just as easily fire it into the centre of the red spot of Jupiter. For example. So if someone calls me and says they are thinking of killing themselves I will never say “Sorry, I don’t have time to talk! I’m going to the spa!” Which is why I remember asking him once if, as it appeared, he only played on the top two strings. He said, ‘Yes, why bother with the others, there’s nothing down there.’ I said, ‘Do you never play them?’ He said, ‘If I played them they would sound terrible, haven’t changed them in years.’ But George could work anywhere because of his busking abilities. Don’t believe me? Click on the link, ye Mighty, and despair! Don’t believe me? The pronoun “he” introduces some 40 lines of statements. One Trump supporter prays to a 6’ cardboard cut-out of his hero each morning as he leaves for work. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material. So

                    yes,
        the sky is dark
        with chickens,
        dense with them.

Which is to say that everyone has something they’re really good at. Some people are just really good at spilling food on themselves. Walking around all day like gahhhhhh. The odds of spilling when wearing new clothes go up to 100%. But then all generations die, that’s what they do. Nevertheless, and although of course we are all often genuinely at a loss for words, it’s odd to be caught saying it again and again. The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books. Now, though, there’s no longer wind or even an inkling of wind, the air eerily, ominously unmoving. It’s what, especially farther north, they call earthquake weather. The air and the sky have a burning, bright but oddly muted intensity to them, it’s as though the five leftover days at the end of the Mayan year, the five dangling or dateless or stray, orphaned or unlucky, rogue days at the end of the year that are not really, in a sense, a part of the year, had arrived early, ahead of themselves. Brightness or light, possessed of a darkling wish.

        But that’s not the end but a beginning like when
        you can’t turn the key any further in the sardine can

        or open the little bottles of CBD ...

        Engels & Merleau-Ponty &, Christ almighty ...

                            some little weirdnesses by Kabalevsky ...

        and I haven’t mentioned
        orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
        it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
        I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

So yes, some of these characters, like Delilah Jones, are persons, some allegorical fictions, like The Homosexual Agenda, The Woman in the Burka, and The Maple Tree, over which a noose is thrown by a suicidal teenage boy. But this is America, right? Red states and blue states. What sand it is. The pineal literally excretes mystery. Even Dr Gonzo wouldn’t touch the stuff. “One whiff of that shit would turn you into something out of a goddamn medical encyclopedia! Man, your head would swell up like a watermelon, you’d probably gain about a hundred pounds in two hours ... claws, bleeding warts, then you’d notice about six huge hairy tits swelling up on your back.” For Rick Strassman, on the other hand, the “blinding light of pineal DMT” enables transit of the life-force from this life to the next. Parsing the character and role of endogenous DMT through Buddhist-influenced metaphysics, the idea of the “spirit molecule” was born, and now it’s an insectoid meme. How, therefore, is this identity of non-vision and vision in vision possible? Let us reread our text carefully. In the course of the questions classical economics asked about the ‘value of labour’ something very special has happened. Classical political economy ‘produced’ (just as Engels will say, in the Preface to Volume Two, that phlogistic chemistry ‘produced’ oxygen and classical economics ‘produced’ surplus-value) a correct answer: the value of ‘labour’ is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the reproduction of ‘labour’. A correct answer is a correct answer. “Any reader in the ‘first manner’ will give Smith and Ricardo a good mark and pass on to other observations. Not Marx. For what we shall call his eye has been attracted by a remarkable property of this answer; it is the correct answer to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed. The original question as the classical economic text formulated it was: what is the value of labour? Reduced to the content that can be rigorously defended in the text where classical economics produced it, the answer should be written as follows: ‘The value of labour (...) is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of labour (...)’. There are two blanks, two absences in the text of the answer. Thus Marx makes us see blanks in the text of classical economics’ answer; but that is merely to make us see what the classical text itself says while not saying it, does not say while saying it. Hence it is not Marx who says what the classical text does not say, it is not Marx who intervenes to impose from without on the classical text a discourse which reveals its silence — it is the classical text itself which tells us that it is silent: its silence is its own words. In fact, if we suppress our ‘suspension points’, our blanks, we still have the same discourse, the same apparently ‘full’ sentence: ‘the value of labour is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of labour’. But this sentence means nothing: what is the maintenance of ‘labour’? what is the reproduction of ‘labour’? The substitution of one word for another at the end of the answer: ‘labourer’ for ‘labour’, might seem to settle the question. ‘The value of labour is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the labourer.’ But as the labourer is not the labour, the term at the end of the sentence now clashes with the term at the beginning: they do not have the same content and the equation cannot be made, for it is not the labourer who is bought for the wages, but his ‘labour’. And how are we to situate the first labour in the second term: ‘labourer’? In even uttering this sentence, therefore, precisely at the level of the term ‘labour’, at the beginning and end of the answer, there is something lacking, and this lack is strictly designated by the function of the terms themselves in the whole sentence. If we suppress our suspension points – our blanks – we are merely reconstituting a sentence which, if it is taken literally, itself designates in itself these points of emptiness, restores these suspension points as the marks of an omission produced by the ‘fullness’ of the utterance itself. But we are also calling this collection A Megaphone as in the megaphoned chant “I am confused [pause] I’m I’m I’m confused [short pause]” from Ultra-red’s 2007 performance “Untitled (for small ensemble).”<

        [Pause] I’m frustrated [breath] grieeeved [long pause]
        disappointed [long pause] overwhelmed [long pause]
        saddened [long pause] by the silence that still existssss
        [long pause] in our communities [pause]

        I heard something very disturbing on the news, um

        When I listen to the silence ... I heard behind it [short
        pause] an anger [breath]

        I guess I hope ... some of my input is useful ... to your
        effort [breath]

While what we are talking about in is in no way analogous, as we worked on this project we too have said “I’m I’m I’m confused” to each other all the time; we too have said “I heard something disturbing on the news, um”; we too have dumped 88 pounds of shit on the front steps of the museum to protest the showing of the work of the butterfly murderer Damien Hirst. The cause for this caca fracas, tho, is Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Hirst’s much-anticipated body of work apparently 10 years in the making. Opening on April 9, it also marks his first major solo show in Italy in over a decade. Not much is known about it aside from two obnoxious, incredibly brief promotional videos that flash underwater scenes. Speaking with those who have seen parts of it, the New York Times reported that the project “resembles jeweled buried treasure covered with coral as if just pulled out of the ocean, like relics from Atlantis or the Nautilus.” So yes, we know that “we are / small”, either in the rain or out of it as here. Knowing, as we do, the length of the planet’s radius, however, along with a sense of other properties, such as the Earth’s mass, can allow us to calculate figures for the gravitational force that is exerted on objects standing on its surface. But “tacks” also suggests a joining together, as the forward slash used later (twice) mimics the tacking stitch: a little field of terms concerning fastening or mending, or healing, is inaugurated, with the proviso that these are only temporary solutions to problems of structural weakness or advanced wear and tear. What looks like an imperative, in the next sentence, introduces what looks like a non-sequitur. A new stage of abstraction is located at what sounds like an apex of meaningful relation: there is no finally determinable referent for “the child.” It might simultaneously or separately be the thought of a dead child, of a sleeping child or of a future child. (“And so, then ...”) Note that we are led through this first section by alternating steps of F and S sounds, like some old steam engine, reiterated fricatives, lulling/alarming slownesses, skin sounds culminating on their own emblem, until the entire sonority suddenly changes. then Bruckner on the radio ... The sound changes like a train coming out of a tunnel. Big U, big A, big broad A. The word is more rarely used to mean electrum, which helps (conjoining two failed histories of currency) but we need the resin: it is magnetic, attracts particles when rubbed, and we need the amber routes, major prehistoric trade routes from the Baltic down to the Adriatic and the Aegean, bringing amber to Mycenae and the whole “ancient world,” probably forming boundaries decisive in the formation of European territorial divisions, creating islands such as Lithuania, enterprise and desperation, another dangling the. But we normally use a colon for that, not a decimal point. I wish this, I wish that, if this then that, if, iff, iffy, if only, what if, what if Erasmus Darwin, not Rommel, had led — “monster, I do smell all horse wish” — at any rate, “the world is everything that is been the case.”

[Note: The last bit written using the web etc in Claremont. Today, the 15^th, is moving day, and as of midnite last nite, our connection was gone. Sources: JBR; P.E. Garcia, “plzplztalk2me: Elizabeth Schmuhl”, at HTMLGIANT, 13 Mar 017; JBR; Nathaniel Mackey, Late Arcade, quoted in David Hobbs, “Play On”, at BOMB, 13 Mar 017; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 2 / From Deep Darkness”, at Abandoned Buildings, 9 Jul 016; JBR; Elizabeth Schmuhl, quoted in P.E. Garcia, “plzplztalk2me: Elizabeth Schmuhl”, at HTMLGIANT, 13 Mar 017; JBR; Derek Bailey, quoted in Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation; JBR; “Poetry & Archeology Collide”, at Harriet, 13 Mar 017; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “13 March 2017”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 13 Mar 017; Lunatic Outpost Conspiracy Forum, General Discussion > Home Sweet Home, quoted in Rob Kovitz, The Sweets of Home, at treyf books; JBR; Kay Ryan, “Home to Roost”, quoted in Rob Kovitz, The Sweets of Home, at treyf books; JBR; Joanna Borns, “For Everyone Who Constantly Spills Food On Themselves”, at BuzzFeed, 9 Oct 013; Michael Wood, “Viscounts Swapping Stories”, and text at end of all the LRB makes available online to nonsubscribers, at London Review of Books, vol.23, no.21; Nathaniel Mackey, “Dear Angel of Dust”, at Detroit Metro Times, 17 May 00; John James, quoted in John Wilkinson, “Maybe / Rather Than: The Writing of John James in the 1970s”, in The Salt Companion to John James (ed. Simon Perril); John James, and Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”, quoted in Peter Cartwright, “‘art is a balm to the brain / & gives a certain resolution’: The Impact of, and Engagement With, the Visual Arts in John James’ Writing”, in The Salt Companion to John James (ed. Simon Perril); JBR; blurb for Timothy Dyke, Atoms of Muses, quoted in Tinfish Press, “Welcome to Tinfish Press”, email rec’d 14 Mar 017, approx. 1:58pm PDT; Dawn Lundy Martin, quoted in “DAWN LUNDY MARTIN with Anne Waldman”, at The Brooklyn Rail, 6 Apr 016; Jeroen Nieuwland, “failing nothing & fog , to marty”, at A Poetics of Confusions, 14 Mar 017; Graham St John, “The DMT Gland: The Pineal, The Spirit Molecule, and Popular Culture”, at Academia.edu; Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy”, in Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière And Pierre Macherey, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition (trs. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach); Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “Against Numbers” (introduction to A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism), at Academia.edu; JBR; Claire Voon, “Animal Rights Activists Protest Damien Hirst Show in Venice with 88 Pounds of Dung”, at Hyperallergic, 14 Mar 017; JBR; Alizon Brunning and Robin Purves, “‘Smaller Than The Radius Of The Planet’”, at Quid 17; Peter Riley, “‘Sun Set 4·56’”, at Quid 17; Jow Lindsay, “Excerpt from AN OPEN LETTER TO J. H. PRYNNE”, at Quid 17; JH Prynne, quoted in Peter Manson, “‘BIRCH BIRCH BIRCH…’”, at Quid 17]

With the Noose Around My Neck 38

Approximately 50 years later we meet Mr. Tung Chien on a street in downtown Hanoi, sometime after the US has lost the Colossal Final War of National Liberation to the Chinese. There are, nonetheless, Pentagon remnants still in the Catskills, lingering resistance in Tennessee and a hardcore pocket holding out in western Oklahoma’s Red Hills. Chien is a government servant who attended Beijing University and now works for the Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts, a job which pays him four times a week in inflationary bills. One day Chien finds himself “facing a legless peddler who [rides] a little wooden cart,” advertising a wide array of herbal remedies. He tries to ignore him. But, this peddler is a war veteran who lost his “pedal extremities at the battle for San Francisco,” so he can’t; Chien must buy from him. Thus begins Philip K. Dick’s “Faith Of Our Fathers,” which was initially published in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions in 1967. The controversy about it also began at this time: was Dick tripping when he wrote it? Though Ellison says very possibly yes, in a February 1974 interview Dick says: “That really is not true. First of all, you can’t write anything when you’re on acid. I did one page once ... but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there’s not much market for that. Second of all, po pa iteh pigi cilene soreta surel na: Meho yacuf acacor ses, godasa tahagar renasa domicax gi pemi nid ieficose. Teti lem kilocal; ila pureni ramiese oparoci. Gehote tituci iranerut pulon picotod gegosel iresumek apelon ta etetehu. Omole eyietatal ta redeg lisixib. Onosihi ureleda meloper ixupalap niroho yipa bama ves ayolupem. Fierepien royepe efic neruhuy agonogef. Oror dico neyotol lese ramolie hefet rini cu boxasos yo! Sa meloca re rege lihapem iteri da irune opitehey rilo; hon poripu ce mukaso areg lesir nin na! Rilehop isiet eniri pitane cosi lie eti rieruco. Kiefo vif tifori. Ete nalef odorid hekol de inenege! Amelege rer ura ninif nel noneya soma meniepef! Da etebin osiememo pinen. Cexo reso mulaser ri tot siban resemu. Lesonir cerag co oyehimat ried ipo: Omido danab bisi ceb eromila ielenaruk. Piconal tecilos muh hale? Radihib nenol relab ne tipolas mi hoy arenas nalutu. Wakapo noqa civas potaru rajol! Tahol le giroleg hen mehel aso rat eriemeh emolan. Lar sagit fonos, revie yef nie saze to hi magisir. Ucerin lidel tiliseb maririt afevar abilaror rar ifoda tena; da naradi ki nal hisecax? Hunici fune mesad ta tupeteg salo! Can anober ani ucerad ravor erem! Acataror ageyejor niekumem tupos sun sucevi retey tib. Mepura iekile tore re lati! Gayos ielepisem eboneye olitalec osad liga dame vefape etitunim. Omasalon tet ozefet fehum ruy. Nolirar tariede gecenit; nib hosiyib yiemotel. Onenuw malike nameput gulatit ranay no dim san: Yiril so nal abie ti; giyi latuca upelih setici. Adoy ne ratorug rieti so iratalit. Tarep ipetilup moretis horegel! Liliesay atayora ke fa rotac lede. Enesa si rohetir. Osuli setiga deharup debisay doriekon. Ihelot binac licemi lapir; cox ne facica larebu onaluse ti ucavi co licerev rebemu. Li oresoce si rietet da oliciw ror? Eteradez ne cineli ticip misaba demin. Moteboc ri linusuc. Casete nuloni sod man tap! Tinete ceyap esot silielec pe giyoyo macasi mob deg? Ni ateral po wesel wolere masor obat ilonet cecib. Zese la depera onesotal. Efanepo hawepes be de ne lesin tan cap ma, rocino nasir ra eto tieler gieyenef hede suh wabe: Ofur renes pulib ibu, itan ati iedibeti: Tan pofa senonaj neta cirad. Rihurie ci lo hal le otar narura oci, olego cepica ironepin. Rien data rewego sat, vip riteyi sodemoy esosoha ni sosaces rik per! Lapel tesone ape binur cop le tuhar sozoc. Etig ko hasin yenur mirigi lid car hohorir. Papaya refadag pipica ganay tetena lin dera. Net atiraga kete conuqer poriepep wen onenar rucecin wuticim heleso. Eriritoh mocesed iloneni kite tesehej yehite delel lotaqer uriluhaf. Maloruf rosal taro voy ipesof noni la rate tetot ates? Utatasa cece tepab lemari emige lefoma lihela ohe ratad eveleta; onode la mocabo. Eno gilic ulacarac orolebi hacage tac me irilama, sasecib pahoret neron. Yoxec siset nitorar obogac ciehesa manul forelan foho leriedar yeso: Itoc sihe setot roku ode raka sefo inen otus. Cuc soradog ros! Di nineso etir libace tecilet ca ponih sey tawarin, legel tic gi sonoy ni ni enet lisiko hon erieyacep. Kidate oruh he ret si meku enebebom cudoluh yoc. Mifupo menat irelana filuniet sere qipi deye nat: Tinepa uciro cidu ha sarupar xani udil! Horedab te tawopep. Atileli erarela itate lie eme; sos etanopib fapab rop racano let oginaku. Mel ulep te he. Lodi tibe mosarir bedamet gele elenem tekieyo. Rugidie rufin fadeco tehuh! Hales enone adatapa ka holunus ti bena cocogiet raca. Tatota mati abi lefop cimo nar coyieyoy! Reqis erat bo. Sosiedo eney ri tafe oritowem onehexe: Isela riye qid geyosien icitefo ner pusut rapuh nepa wiketeg. Isis apegef vecupig mavu afodatak yeb: Rolo ere nep te erelit pabor. Go dile po anuy mumit yara rulece culeh maraf, enopamen yob mepede ora ebozibit recaqe tohar, veni mode resar birama osec noti tiesila etic senawo. Inapise lemi fe lona. Tob yan ra siyora denetib yab wiha! Loge ruyaso resudos le iyamie ya cep awelag wieliyu. Xateye sesih casir nadeni rivera obi gim cen, li irus taray ayitu rarivel lorelac lier tomoh ozura. Ucet pied wi honen erecu ese edu lata hodie ho: Vo ierap he ofi afeb tol cunace minog toce, retie nelico ayu natip. Laditin avarapie ferew te geda! Coqulie ino refenir ce iha nerotal anecir. Bos he rone nenilo yenerel ened ilo nih tadapum! Subame hogo yone! Ramera amayawo nezen non ke tono afil. Ro ema tup, cenito cehigey ni raseda nuhe kipiso. Ratol imin tebig ilaloy sacubo. Ireyefa leruh rafig natarut ramoye pot. Awon unonamer vielu inirabe; marihi nit ti saco hac emetun asuvice apebesit obale? Sepace gizen fo ten der ahoho. Inereyar gief dokenor mukageb nacie ramurin. Ri unidowe pud ineli! Ga tekie ta ripi daguto efobeg isefelut rac. Yo rawite ijovur tieso ifal itaraper ora ninehar. Lacici onun si sud. Uhaqatit tepusi ri rete opo sute rinela icowohe pas no! Dapey porig senodo. Unure yin agetic: Ditot ra ieriral! Nelieno agade dusa sobe pi teripun ase! Olidibel ro odoyeda avie gecaro nosit: Mobun usi dobaba edepap sona soc ihap! Ti yihefin lemacob pe sim cutoh lac uho pi, tirirev netidom lugil tona sis mida rasane rabuhe. Retodo erenacim dienil mig. Hiesul epucane mec agag co yirotu sim lomuc iriko yepi? Lanemul segiey dira. Anetol sibu rav ma urel mecerud vepie nipodor hetofa ape. Le dina te. Tatara igiroy liyo ula se pe ogop rere esitine biren. Odinogag holelo hay taca yod olise yotelis ipegub disa ce, inet meloya dat ver yiniel rir iliemodeb otayijo tolehe. Third, Fred told me that he read a whole book in Arabic once, a language of which he knows nothing, and found it to be the best book he’d ever read.” The first ode ends with:

        The code belongs to a Hotpoint dryer;
        You’ll find out nothing if you look
        it up through the sky in the screen, the vault
        of exchangable passion, Vertigo at
        the horizon prostrate as an outstretched
        cheek; but in the mouth that grows
        in capacity behind that overflow,
        Nobody can take away the word for it:
        love, the end until death;
        TL61P its provisional perfected shadow
        opposite; Now go back to the start.
        Anemal, utter meck. Three daughters,
        two hens, one puppy, one geologist, hot
        pepper and rot to ghost my nose awash in
        silent waves, but whatevz — i’m here now,
        passing out of another study on
        young black queer male[ish] suicides,
        ~~~X X X X X X X~~~,
        an isotonic rehydration sport drink,
        the Coca-Cola corp, the Rainforest Café.
        Over overThrow there is nothing
        But the Unlikely a-Voidance of all rays,
        of all right. For a chorus is incarcerated
        in every point of space. Think, thank,
        thunk: from the vulgar Latin
        meaning undergo, meaning
        transmogrify, “just like a person with a
        device” because she doesn’t have one —
        snomal slebs socru deeibs sbieed
        mayrac caryem — “As if the so-called
        world were seriously the point, which it is,
        and we could actually live in it, which we do.”

More or less. What do I remember? I remember Jim Carroll had a really huge cock, and I remember having great conversations with Lee Harwood. Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery would go out to dinner and joke hilariously about New York City. I was interested, but I never thought I would be in that. I liked their poetry, and I was happy about that aspect of things. Here I was in a room full of poets. I have to tell you about my funny John Ashbery story. I was at a buffet table in New York City, and somebody pinched my ass and it was John. He said: “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were a guy.” What did I say? I just laughed. Oh, and when I worked at Fry’s my coworker said Suge Knight liked her hairy legs, she said he bought the diamond necklace she wore every day, and my sister bumped into Hugh Hefner once at a sushi bar called Geisha House in Hollywood he really had on a purple crushed velvet jacket and he really did say Hey honey. She just wanted some California rolls fer Crissakes. But the greatest guide throughout is Fanon. Fanon’s “situated thinking, born of a lived experience that was always in progress, unstable, and changing,” provides a model of “critical thought” that was “aimed at smashing, puncturing, and transforming” ... His was always a “metamorphic thought,” and as such an ever-present and ever-relevant guide through the ruins of ... fuck, name something that isn’t ruined. Anything. Please. But why start with a self-reflexive question? Dusk begins my day, and continues in lengths,

        They say when you encircle the entire field, red baby
        becomes white grandma

        The bloodshot eye opens deep in the ground

which reminds me of the title, not the contents, just the title, of Kim Yideum’s “The night before opening a Barbie repair shop in an abandoned mental hospital” ... which reminds me of that something “crawling with things that go missing”, of fat rats in swamps and temples, I mean, 

        “What the hell did this used to be? What a piece of junk.
        No need for a processing fee, because nobody will claim this package.
        This flotsam, which used to be some sort of organism, is quite political.”

It is a face which hiccups ‘self /object’ while sheathed in PLAY-DOH, exactly like “what’s there when you snap a heavy blank book shut on life and then prise it open again.” Zam, Bonk, Dip. Speaking of flotsam, remember when Achilles said, “Glorious Odysseus: don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather clean as many Porta Potties as there are sands on all the world’s beaches with my tongue, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of the lifeless. Being dead sucks”?

        Livia says bread is in the nose
        and throat.

So what is a crypt? Not a crypt in general, but this one, in its singularity, the one I shall keep coming back to? The form of this question will henceforth precede those that, ever since philosophy began, have been called first: what, originally, is a Thing? What is called Thinking? The Wolf Man's Verbarium (here I’m vaulting ahead) indicates that the Thing is to be thought out starting from the Crypt, the Thing as a “crypt effect.” The Verbarium no longer conforms to any law and order ... What is a crypt? ... It must be designated immediately as the very condition of the whole enterprise, its element and its method. Instead of claiming to have access to this crypt through the ordinary meaning or common figure of a crypt, we must bend with a movement that it would be too simple, linear, and unilateral to think of as the opposite of that type of access, as I hastily described it above, as if, by anasemia, the movement consisted of going back toward the rightful place and the proper meaning from out of this crypt. Nevertheless, it remains that the question “What is a crypt?” can no longer, it seems to me, be posed. What is a crypt? What is a crypt?

        A blind bear biting my pumpkin.

Which is to say that last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by Kristen Visbal and installed by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.” Oh dear god. SSGA is the world’s third-largest asset manager. But don’t worry about the contradictions of capitalism — “Fearless Girl” will sublate them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”! Therefore, before we even look at the Kamaitachi images, I want to stress the importance of distinguishing them from staged photographs. Hijikata is a man who can transmogrify in an instant into a phantasmagorical bird. Then, voluntarily or involuntarily, we may reach the lights of purgatory, for which we have yearned. So what are kamaitachi? My father was a country doctor, and several times I saw farmers, claiming to have been bitten by one, carried to the threshold of our house. But no one bore a grudge against that invisible weasel. In fact, a family of actual weasels made their home in the loft of the thatched shed. Hairy vacuum! Bloody vacuum! Biting vacuum! The excrescence will head for the huge void, and vice versa. The vacuum theater, too, is part of the

        ahh
        and then oh

And so police use force indiscriminately against the crowd, which produces exactly the chaos and disorder that police attribute to the crowd, which in turn rationalizes an expansion and constant escalation of police violence. The image I saw was not some insubstantial reflection of a corporeal thing, as a crude dualist might hold, but literally the universe itself. Somehow the world manifested as an impossible curve. My mind swam in the sensory vortices. I felt I was being dragged down into a superabundant luminous abyss. There was no respite for hours, and I was overcome with a terrible anxiety, unable to subdue this incessant and grotesque violation of every last one of my nerves. So I sequestered myself in the darkest room of my house and pulled all the curtains, battened down the windows and painted the walls black. I would stay there until I felt safe once more. I cancelled my lectures and arranged for food to be delivered. For many days I languished in the homespun night. After three years I emerged. The double-sided curvature greeted me. Not only could I see again, I could see sight itself, hear hearing, and touch touching. In the process of achieving this result Peirce and Jastrow not only pioneered the field of decision theory but also laid down the foundations for the rigorous validation of experimental psychology through randomized control trials. Though the paper does not explicitly acknowledge any philosophical implications, and is mostly an account of an innovative experimental setup and a sober explanation of its results, it clearly bears on the “continuum,” which is a problem found at the very inception of Greek philosophy, expressed in the antithesis of the One and the Many; the proto-synechistic Heraclitean principles of the Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites; the dialectical articulation of the discrete and continuous in the Eleatics, and the speculative refutation of this apparent dilemma in the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus. It is central to the Platonic notion of the indivisibility of ideal forms, as well as to Aristotle’s formulation of the categories, and his distinction between actual and potential infinity. By putting two quantities into continuous correspondence the Greeks could calculate a variable quantity, so that for example motion could be determined as a factor of distance and time. However, this was restricted to extensive magnitudes (such as mass or volume), so they did not allow for the computation of a variable quality such as brightness or loudness, and the intensive as such was considered unquantifiable. Stay us wherefore in our search for righteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars! For a nod to the nabir, etc. Cropherb the crunch-bracken shall decide. Or not. Onto the floor of the stage, Gozo began to spread a collection of fetish objects: stapler, pebbles, hammer. All the while he chanted and rang a little sheep bell hanging from his neck. He began to unroll a long copper scroll along the floor. The volume of his chanting increased.

        “soft flames of the earth’s surface
        “= mu
        “no, I don’t like this and I’m rephrasing it
        “I felt like a most courteous, giant tree
        “ri-ri-gya (reversing the syllables
        “here, this narrow road, where does it lead?
        “was it a trifle recidivist of me
                                        to choose
            Ornette?

[Note: Sources: JBR; Frank C Bertrand, “When ‘Faith’ Untuned The Sky”, at Academia.edu; JBR; text generated by “gibberish generator”, at Weirdhat; JBR; John Armstrong, and Keston Sutherland, quoted in Armstrong’s “Keston Sutherland’s Odes to TL61P”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 11 Nov 010; Mg Roberts, Anemal, Uter Meck, and author bio, at SPD; Kamden Hilliard, “Notes from the Port, Anthropological Thots: Catalogue in Twelve”, in Perceived Distance from Impact, at SPD; Nina Puro, blurb for Kamden Hilliard, Perceived Distance from Impact, at SPD; Andrew Joron, “First”, “Illocutionary Reels”, in The Absolute Letter, at SPD; Samia Bashir, “Notions of temperature”, in Field Theories, at SPD; Bernadette Mayer, Daniel Wenger, and Robert Creeley, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Bernadette Mayer Studying Hunger (1976)”, at DC’s, 8 Mar 017; JBR; Adam Fitzgerald, and Bernadette Mayer, in an interview with Fitzgerald, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Bernadette Mayer Studying Hunger (1976)”, at DC’s, 8 Mar 017; JBR; Khadijah Queen, quoted in Wendy Xu, “Two Poems by Khadijah Queen”, at Hyperallergic, 8 Mar 017; JBR; Laurent Dubois, introduction to Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (tr. Dubois); JBR; arrive on wave: Collected Poems (eds. Trace Peterson, Gregory Laynor and Eli Goldblatt); Kim Hyesoon, “A Hundred Year Old Fox”, in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (tr. Don Mee Choi); JBR; Dan Disney, and Kim Yideum, quoted in Disney’s “Cheer Up, Femme Fatale by Kim Yideum”, at World Literature Today, Jan 017; Francesca Lisette, Timothy Thornton, Jonty Tiplady, quoted in John Armstrong, “Better than Language, Lisette and Tiplady”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 23 Sept 011; JBR; Homer, Odyssey (tr. AS Kline, revised by JBR); SJ Fowler, poem from The Guide to Being Bear Aware, translated into Hungarian by Orsolya Fenyvesi, and back into English by Google, at Szif; JBR; Jacques Derrida, “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok (tr. Barbara Johnson), in Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy (tr. Nicholas Rand); SJ Fowler, poem from The Guide to Being Bear Aware, translated into Hungarian by Orsolya Fenyvesi, and back into English by Google, at Szif; JBR; Jillian Steinhauer, “The Sculpture of a ‘Fearless Girl’ on Wall Street Is Fake Corporate Feminism”, at Hyperallergic, 10 Mar 017; JBR; Jillian Steinhauer, “The Sculpture of a ‘Fearless Girl’ on Wall Street Is Fake Corporate Feminism”, at Hyperallergic, 10 Mar 017; JBR; Shuzo Takiguchi, “Kamaitachi: Toward a Vacuum’s Nest” (tr. Connie Prener), Shiraishi Kazuko “Song of Praise Dedicated to Ohno Kazuo” (trs. John Solt, Keiko Inoh, and Hollis Goodall), in Art Gallery of New South Wales, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory, 12 May – 7 August 2011; David Correia and Tyler Wall, A Field Guide to the Police, quoted in Verso Books, “Looking Ahead”, email rec’d 11 Mar 017, approx. 7:02am PST; Inigo Wilkins, “The Sharpest Point of Sensation is Pointless”, at Academia.edu; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; JBR; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; JBR; Forrest Gander, “The Beyond of Gozo Yoshimasu”, and various poems, in Yoshimasu Gozo, Alice Iris Red Horse; John James, “uuhhh”, quoted in John Hall, “Dress and Address: ‘John James’ in John James”, in The Salt Companion to John James (ed. Simon Perril) (hat tip Alan Baker)]

Countries on Trump’s ban list face biggest humanitarian crisis since 1945 (reposted from Climate & Capitalism)

 

 

Somali refugees in Kenya

Twenty million people  face imminent death from starvation and famine. Many more will suffer and die from disease. These are the people that Trump is targeting.

---

The Trump administration has banned people from Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iran from travelling to the United States. Three of those countries are identified in a new United Nations report as epicenters of the greatest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second World War. Without immediate aid, twenty million will die of hunger.

The following are excerpts from a report presented on March 10 to the United Nations Security Council by the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O’Brien.

• Yemen. “The largest humanitarian crisis in the world …. Today, two-thirds of the population — 18.8 million people — need assistance and more than 7 million are hungry and do not know where there next meal will come from. That is 3 million people more than in January. As fighting continues and escalates, displacement increases. With health facilities destroyed and damaged, diseases are sweeping through the country. …”
• South Sudan. “More than 7.5 million people need assistance, up by 1.4 million from last year. About 3.4 million people are displaced, of which almost 200,000 have fled South Sudan since January alone. … More than one million children are estimated to be acutely malnourished across the country; including 270,000 children who face the imminent risk of death should they not be reached in time with assistance. Meanwhile, the cholera outbreak that began in June 2016 has spread to more locations.”
• Somalia. “More than half the population — 6.2 million people — need humanitarian and protection assistance, including 2.9 million who are at risk of famine and require immediate assistance to save or sustain their lives, close to 1 million children under the age of 5 will be acutely malnourished this year. In the last two months alone, nearly 160,000 people have been displaced due to severe drought conditions, adding to the already 1.1 million people who live in appalling conditions around the country.”

The report also says that 7.1 million people in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, and 2.7 million in Kenya, are severely food insecure. Those figures will increase rapidly in coming months.

Twenty million people face imminent death from starvation and famine, and many more will suffer and die from disease. Without major international action, the situation will get worse. The report calls this “the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations” — that is, since 1945.

[...]

With the Noose Around My Neck 37

If Hubert Védrine says this more clearly than Alain Badiou, Badiou says it nevertheless. Our Wound is Not So Recent. The title already says almost everything. To anticipate: ‘... our wound comes from the historical defeat of communism.’ To anticipate: when I click on the link, there is no text at all, just a large blank kind of faded peach color space, at Marie-Anne McQuay’s “Stopwaitgo.” The End. Once more the oceanic scaling device vomits in the shore like a doG disgorging bloody chicken bones stolen from its master’s drain. Convulsed bulimic tides spit out burdened skeletal detritus tearing out the impersonal fossil scars and perjurious bone matter betraying its atheism by outliving the lipid husk of ragged flesh —found clinging to the armature of #######################——_–____——___————-______–_—-____-_—-__

s     y    m    b    o     l         

n        o        t        

f      o     u     n       d    

4     0     4 cocs

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

4740250

there is speech but i can’t find the mouth and there are quotes, but there only the ones that are crediteeeed forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte forte or ~~~~~—–#~~~~_____~~_~_~_~##~___~_—_ $/#&0! not found

!!!

_______________________________________5^%________________________________

curve emered from illi nerve had beeen embedded in medical history for many moo fightingmybrainsautocorrectandmylaptopsF7 but also not the page look at my nature as wordprocessor look where i came from the world of typeweriterletts that no longer need to be shaped liked stamps but still are look at th e simples we parse like code SteinStienStein a t_nderB-__0#s no page# impyling its not supposed to be read innan order?#~wedipinandout in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&ou in&out t in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out in&out

©€Ήàñ_______®=

+%£^~<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ͚______________________________ i dont want to read it in order i dnt want a nrrrtive tkeitfromme ₱←Ω□□□□□□□<these appear as if the text has been copied and pasted and the symbol has not made it through the format cnge remindug us again of its articifceexosencestateofliquidsolid as a digital text first an d a pysicaltext 2ndary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

i□trupt □hr□t□p□e

++

___

_________________                            ____________________________       ____________

_________________                     _________________________________        ______________                       ________________________             ___________________ 131313131313131313131031931316731547382736595867261535069573628465762049372058576202947583028375958798274593727172951934506978372624133487698974873423423096875839002758297672010393848577676859403019283746565748392014732696022whoelsecouldwriteanessayonjokesandmakeitnotfunny there are no points on a map, only

lines______________________________________________ridetheline________________

 :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):): is this what smithGold meant with writinguncreativelywith benjamin warhol and co.ltd.©®™‼☺☻☼♀♂▲♠♣♥♦♪☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☻☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺◌○●☻☺☺☺☺ⱷflflflflflflflflfl⅞⅜₩Ẻ-

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????”””””””””””’,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ i see dead people winge winge winge ____________________________y_____________s________________________________grrrgrrrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrggggggrrrrrrrrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgggggrrrrgrggrrgrorrorososoeeossesisaroseossoeeeoeesorororororsrerorsrerorsrerorsrebetweenbetweenbetweenbetweenbetweenbetween dirkgently would be  a fan ofthe mention of the word interconnectednessofallevents—

;’dseggbdf☺₩⅜bfd________☺_______________________#_____________^__________

101010101010100110101101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010 endof the capital of the wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d wor(l)d  the sun deluges its chemical holocaust to the earth with blinding indifference’@.,,,<>,<<<>>>>>

a holocaust of

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading Loading

Loading ...

We hope that you are completely satisfied with your purchase and ask you to leave positive feedback accordingly. However, if you are unsatisfied with your order, please contact us by telephone or email. We will do whatever it takes to resolve the issue. Until then, reread Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Then there is the disconcerting appearance of the section dividers, white drop-out type on dark pages with dim images like blurry x-rays. Machines, like orgasms, are inconsolable things. This is the beauty and the paradox of the aesthetic artifact called a corpse. A theory or language might tell us there is no difference between, let’s say, a depiction of a corpse in a photograph in a war zone and the artifact of the body, which has been made into what we call a work of art ... Language says the corpse is a corpse. It cannot distinguish between one body and another, therefore the photographed corpse in a war zone is a universal corpse. Speaking of which, Tropicalia also made great use of Brazilian modernist concrete poetry, which is to say

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba oh

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macum

Bat Macumba ê ê, Batman

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat

Bat Macumba ê ê, Ba

Bat Macumba ê ê

Bat Macumba ê

Bat Macumba

Bat Macum

Batman

Bat

Ba

Bat

Bat Ma

Bat Macum

Bat Macumba

Bat Macumba ê

Bat Macumba ê ê

Bat Macumba ê ê, Ba

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat

Bat Macumba ê ê, Batman

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macum

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba oh

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá

Bat Macumba ê ê, Bat Macumba obá!

So yes, this dance troupe performs with lasers in their butts. It’s just “Cirroc”, your Honor ... and, yes, I’m ready. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW ... and run off into the hills, or wherever ... Sometimes when I get a message ... I wonder: “Did little demons get inside this machine and type it?” I don’t know! My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts ... But ... Thank you! Thank you very much, thank you! First of all, let me say how happy I am to be your nominee for the United States Senate! You know ... thank you ... I don't really understand your Congress, or your system of checks and balances ... because, as I said during the campaign — I’m just a caveman! I fell on some ice, and later got thawed out by scientists. But enough about me. What about the child in Beuford Smith’s “Boy & Doll, Lower East Side” (1966)? What about the broken and naked doll that lies in the street, a foot or two away from the curb? And the empty paper cup and other garbage which lies between the doll, who is missing a leg, and the sidewalk? On the sidewalk, a few feet from the curb, we see a boy crouching behind a length of fabric wrapped around him, revealing only his eyes and the top of his head. The space occupied by the boy fills the upper two-thirds of the photo while the doll on the street takes up the lower third. It is almost as if the doll is in the orchestra pit with her head turned toward us, while boy is on stage, about to deliver his soliloquy. What will he say? In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. I’ve already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. When I finish all four walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just how that will go, I don’t know. Dear Angel of Dust. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow, etcetera. This section is called “How to Assemble the Animal Globe,” but we have to disassemble the book to assemble it. What other ways can we involve the body in the poem? It’s a huge glass vivarium, basically, in the middle of the desert. The whole thing was a colossal failure in many ways: Nineteen of the twenty-five vertebrate species introduced went extinct, most of the pollinators died off, including the Sapphire-spangled emerald hummingbird, chosen specifically for its beak length and shape to pollinate the kinds of flowers in the sphere, and for the fact that its mating display didn’t involve big swoops. Humorously enough, at least I think it’s funny, Steve Bannon was involved. He was already preparing for environmental destruction, thinking about where he and his rich friends could go. I am for that, them going, you know. Steve Bannon and his ruby slippers. Steve Bannon phone home. Well the Bannon comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. ‘It really disgust you to see the Bannon sucking on them candy bars so nasty,’ a cop says. The Bannon takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Bannon has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. ‘I’ll just set in my room,’ he says. ‘Fuck ‘em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.’ But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Bannon hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it. ‘Oh all right,’ the boy says. ‘So what you want to make?’ ‘I just want to rub against you and get fixed.’ ‘Ugh ... Well all right ... But why cancha just get physical like a human?’ Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. ‘Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,’ he says. ‘Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets well [or wet] all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax ... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe.’ ‘Well it’s still an easy score.’ The boy signed resignedly; ‘Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.’ The Bannon’s habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It gets to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor: ‘Bannon, your conduct has given rise to rumors [...] The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser’s wand. He flows forward ... ‘No! No!’ screams the D.S. ‘Schlup ... schlup schlup.’ An hour later they find the Bannon on the nod in the D.S.’s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace. [...] ‘That one should stand in an aquarium,’ says the arresting officer. Which is when I think of the sound of the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, last sighted in 2007. The sound is high-pitched, like someone rubbing a window with a dry cloth. In Hawaiian crows = ‘alalā, meaning “cry like a child.” Are we really speaking of imaginative insects formed from resin and brass? Would you say this is supported in the line: “I, as in not a Freudian mistranslation”? In which pocket did I leave that “I”? Is “I” ever a thing to miss? To make a long story short, one of our hosts at DIA got hold of a copy of “1984” and we listened to the track a few times, putting some ideas together as to how to both refer to it and take it somewhere else. We definitely wanted to retain its aleatory, strung-out, far-flung sense of space and its various recourses to vocalization, though we couldn’t, we knew, use exactly the same instruments. Penguin came up with the idea of bringing Hendrix into the mix, reminding us of “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” on the Electric Ladyland album, whose line “Oh say can you see it’s really such a mess” he said he especially had in mind. “I like the way it messes with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” he said [...] So we decided we’d each intone that line at some point in the piece, doing so hand-over-mouth, muffling it à la Yusef ’s whimpers and moans. And so on. Everybody came up with ideas. We ended up changing the title, scrambling it further and calling the piece “1489.” “Right before Columbus,” Lambert pointed out. “You land somewhere by mistake and tell the people living there it belongs to you. 1984 was around long before 1984. There’ve been a lot of 1984s.” So we added “1489” to the set list and to our book. The other news is that the balloons showed up again. It wasn’t during “1489” but a piece we did later in the set, “The Slave’s Day Off.” It was during the solo Drennette took, a solo that began with the drum set seeming to collapse, come apart, the sort of thing Dannie Richmond would do with Mingus’s band to mark a tempo change. Drennette came out of that collapse, that mock breakdown, with a figure that was all feet — clipped hisses, that is, on the high-hat, hortative thumps on the bass drum. The first balloon emerged at once, slipping out between the two cymbals of the high hat as though they were lips. It bore these words: Y’all miss each other, together, in the emergency. Gon’ sit in with y’all so we can miss each other at practice. Let’s practice missing each other, together, until, together, we don’t miss each no more. Then we just together. We just get together, then. We all we ever wanted. I could swear I heard the voice of Fred Moten. Then a second word balloon emerged: Who is we? Is we enough? Is we enough? Is we enough? Is we a love? Is we a love? A love supreme? A love supreme / A love supreme / repeated 19 times of course, but this time each time as just the hint of a question, which was answered somehow by the sounds of quotation marks, a tap dancer on mixed surfaces, a toy piano and a flock of chirping bird whistles, comradely and sympathetic without losing critical edge. Speaking of the Wolf of McLean I think The Wolves of McLean — it could be the title of a poem or book, like mayonnaise and Sriracha. This yoghurt-maker would not be content to fabricate livestock; no, we’re talking neurolivestock here. The faster it goes, the more it turns to stone. So yes, the intellectual’s role is to show how, underneath a veneer of seriousness, all of these people are essentially grotesque. And that history is nothing but a series of surprise parties: such and such a war or such and such a famine or Chief Seattle’s letter or Gédeon the Anthropomorphized Duck. Take the morning of February 23/March 8, International Women’s Day, for instance, “the initiative taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat —women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives. The overgrown breadlines had provided the last stimulus. About 90,000 workers, men and women, were on strike that day. The fighting mood expressed itself in demonstrations, meetings, encounters with the police. The movement began in the Vyborg district with its large industrial establishments; thence it crossed over to the Petersburg side. There were no strikes or demonstrations elsewhere, according to the testimony of the secret police. On that day detachments of troops were called in to assist the police — evidently not many of them —but there were no encounters with them. A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal duma demanding bread. It was like demanding milk from a he-goat. Red banners appeared in different parts of the city, and inscriptions on them showed that the workers wanted bread, but neither autocracy nor war. Woman’s Day passed successfully, with enthusiasm and without victims. But what it concealed in itself, no one had guessed even by nightfall. On the following day the movement not only fails to diminish, but doubles. About one-half of the industrial workers of Petrograd are on strike [...] The workers come to the factories in the morning; instead of going to work they hold meetings; then begin processions toward the centre. New districts and new groups of the population are drawn into the movement. The slogan ‘Bread!’ is crowded out or obscured by louder slogans: ‘Down with autocracy!’ ‘Down with the war!’ Continuous demonstrations on the Nevsky — first compact masses of workmen singing revolutionary songs, later a motley crowd of city folk interspersed with the blue caps of students. ‘The promenading crowd was sympathetically disposed toward us, and soldiers in some of the war-hospitals greeted us by waving whatever was at hand.’ How many clearly realised what was being ushered in by this sympathetic waving from sick soldiers to demonstrating workers? But the Cossacks constantly, though without ferocity, kept charging the crowd. Their horses were covered with foam. The mass of demonstrators would part to let them through, and close up again. There was no fear in the crowd. ‘The Cossacks promise not to shoot,’ passed from mouth to mouth. Apparently some of the workers had talks with individual Cossacks. Later, however, cursing. half-drunken dragoons appeared on the scene. They plunged into the crowd, began to strike at heads with their lances. The demonstrators summoned all their strength and stood fast. ‘They won’t shoot.’ And in fact they didn’t. Throughout the entire day, crowds of people poured from one part of the city to another. They were persistently dispelled by the police, stopped and crowded back by cavalry detachments and occasionally by infantry. Along with shouts of ‘Down with the police!’ was heard oftener and oftener a ‘Hurrah!’ addressed to the Cossacks. That was significant. Toward the police the crowd showed ferocious hatred. They routed the mounted police with whistles, stones, and pieces of ice. In a totally different way the workers approached the soldiers. Around the barracks, sentinels, patrols and lines of soldiers stood groups of working men and women exchanging friendly words with the army men. This was a new stage, due to the growth of the strike and the personal meeting of the worker with the army. Such a stage is inevitable in every revolution. But it always seems new, and does in fact occur differently every time: those who have read and written about it do not recognise the thing when they see it. In the State Duma that day they were telling how an enormous mass of people had flooded Znamensky Square and all Nevsky Prospect, and the adjoining streets and that a totally unprecedented phenomenon was observed: the Cossacks and the regiments with bands were being greeted by revolutionary and not patriotic crowds with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ To the question, ‘What does it all mean? the first person accosted in the crowd answered the deputy: A policeman struck a woman with a knout; the Cossacks stepped in and drove away the police.’ Whether it happened in this way or another, will never be verified. But the crowd believed that it was so, that this was possible. The belief had not fallen out of the sky; it arose from previous experience, and was therefore to become an earnest of victory. The workers at the Erikson, one of the foremost mills in the Vyborg district, after a morning meeting came out on the Sampsonievsky Prospect, a whole mass, 2,500 of them, and in a narrow place ran into the Cossacks. Cutting their way with the breasts of their horses, the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. ‘Some of them smiled,’ Kayurov recalls, ‘and one of them gave the workers a good wink’ This wink was not without meaning. The workers were emboldened with a friendly, not hostile, kind of assurance, and slightly infected the Cossacks with it. The one who winked found imitators. In spite of renewed efforts from the officers, the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams. This was repeated three or four times and brought the two sides even closer together. Individual Cossacks began to reply to the workers’ questions and even to enter into momentary conversations with them. Of discipline there remained but a thin transparent shell that threatened to break through any second. The officers hastened to separate their patrol from the workers, and, abandoning the idea of dispersing them, lined the Cossacks out across the street as a barrier to prevent the demonstrators from getting to the centre. But even this did not help: standing stock-still in perfect discipline, the Cossacks did not hinder the workers from ‘diving’ under their horses. The revolution does not choose its paths: it made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse. A remarkable incident! ...”

[Note: International Women’s Day/February Revolution edition. Sources: Nick Land, “Sore Losers”, at Urbanomic (ignore where he takes this, please); JBR (the result of clicking on a link to the McQuay at Amanda Beech, Final and First Machine, at Urbanomic); Jake Chapman, Meatphysics; A Taylor, “meatpyhsics”, “8”, at ATAYLOTBLOG, 30 Jun 015, 16 Sept 015; JBR; Kit Robinson, and Carla Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, quoted in Robinson’s “Review of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise”, at EMU BathHouse; Carla Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, quoted in Jill Darling, “The Content of Essay Form: On Reading Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise”, at How2, vol.3 no.3; JBR; Julian Palacios, Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity, quoted in “Re: Would someone care to translate this Os Mutantes song?”, at derkeiler, 9 Dec 05; JBR; Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Os Mutantes, “Bat Macumba”, quoted in Adolf Alzuphar, “Dead Bat Born Again”, at Entropy, 5 Mar 017; JBR; Ali Gitlow, “This dance troupe performs with lasers in their butts”, at Thump, 1 Mar 017; “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”, at SNL Transcripts (hat tip Richard Lopez); JBR; John Yau, “Beuford Smith’s Americans”, at Hyperallergic, 5 Mar 017 (re a photo in Black Lives: Photographs by Beuford Smith, at the Keith de Lellis Gallery 9 Feb – 25 Mar 017); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”, in The Collected Later Poems and Plays; JBR; Eleni Sikelianos, quoted in Srikanth Reddy, “Eleni Sikelianos”, at BOMB, 6 Mar 017; JBR; Eleni Sikelianos, quoted in Srikanth Reddy, “Eleni Sikelianos”, at BOMB, 6 Mar 017; William S Burroughs, Naked Lunch; JBR; Eleni Sikelianos, quoted in Srikanth Reddy, “Eleni Sikelianos”, at BOMB, 6 Mar 017; JBR; Kate Sierzputowski, “Imaginative Insects Formed From Resin and Brass by Hiroshi Shinno”, at Colossal, 6 Mar 017; Ana Paula, and Akilah Oliver, quoted in “RACHEL LEVITSKY with Ana Paula”, at The Brooklyn Rail, 1 Mar 017 (a conversation about Akilah Oliver); Nathaniel Mackey, “from Late Arcade”, at Fence; Fred Moten, blurb for Thom Donovan, Withdrawn, in Compline Books, “Preorder Thom Donovan’s Withdrawn”, email rec’d 7 Mar 017, approx. 12:42am PST; JBR; China Miéville, “On my radar: China Miéville’s cultural highlights”, at The Guardian, 14 Feb 016 (re composer Carolyn O’Brien, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation); JBR; Jackie Wang, “Journal Roulette: August 26 & 27, 2015”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 6 Mar 017; Gilles Châtelet, and one footnote, quoted in “A Martial Art of Metaphor: Two Interviews with Gilles Châtelet”, at Urbanomic; JBR; Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (tr. Max Eastman) at Marxists.org]

With the Noose Around My Neck 36

So had my dad. His first car was a 1971 Ford Fairlane, which my grandfather gave him when he turned fifteen. His second was a 1985 Honda Accord, lead gray. His third was a 1990 BMW 850i, navy blue, which he killed my Uncle Neno with. His fourth is a Ford Ranger, smoke colored, which we are driving across the Atacama Desert as I write, looking out the window, considering the sky, considering that

        it has no distance is therefore not
        even space but just nothing,
        for if you went to the moon, you’d
        have to go to the other moon, and
        if you went to the other moon, you’d
        have to go to still a further moon,
        and if you went to a further moon,
        how many more moons? How many
        snowflakes? How many snowstorms
        of snowflakes? of universes of
        moons do you have to visit before
        you’ll learn there is only no meas-
        urement and therefore no distance
        and therefore you must have a
        moon in your eye lash inside an
        atom of its tip and so roadtrips

do that to me. I mean, it gets pretty brillig all up in my slithy tove, so I calloo-callay beamishly, but you know what they say: when we refuse to consider the value of knowledge that is rooted in the body, in the psyche, in paralogical experience, we fail to challenge colonialist, post-Renaissance, Euro-Western conceptions of reality. And yet, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of pollinators in our ecosystem. Take bees, for instance. A bee transfers pollen from a male flower to the lady bits of female flowers. A few days later, a baby watermelon or apple emerges. While bees are not the only pollinators we have (bats, birds, butterflies, and some flies can do this work, too), for a number of reasons, they’re by far the best creatures for the job. But back to the original question: if honeybees are raptured, are we ... done? “Everything I do has the smell of digital.” And the psychedelic pollution floating in the Gowanus Canal. Dear John, today marks the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Berta Cáceres, murdered by US-backed Honduran government-backed death squads on March 3. Like many who knew and worked with her, I was aware that this fighter for indigenous people wasn’t destined to die of old age. She spoke too much truth to power — not just for indigenous rights, but for women’s and LGBTQ rights, for authentic democracy, for the well-being of the earth, and for an end to tyranny by transnational capital and empire. Since her murder, it’s ever more clear what her community says: Berta did not die, she multiplied! Grassroots International is honored to stand with COPINH (the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, which she founded) to mark this day — both in La Esperanza and globally with ongoing activism and support. Grassroots International supporters have helped provide much-needed funding to COPINH to assist with additional security measures and also advance the vital organizing to protect the Lenca territory and sacred river from those seeking to privatize it. Soon we will share more information about actions you can take to support the “Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act” when it is reintroduced in Congress. This bill would end the US government financing of corrupt and repressive police and military forces in Honduras, implicated in hundreds of murders of community leaders like Berta. Fat chance of that passing. Did you ever wonder why fat chance and slim chance meant the same thing? ‘In Intuitionist Mathematics, it is posited that what we call infinity is equivalent to a pure human feeling.’ Did you know that either 18 or 19 US Presidents, depending on whether you count Buchanan, owned slaves?

        = inhalation (hard)
        = exhalation (hard)
        = hissing (whistling between the teeth like the sound of a snake)
        =rattling in the throat
        = growling like a dog (like a dog about to bark)
        = grasping (gasping?) (hoarse sound)
                made with the windpipe by pulling up the belly
        = sigh (made simultaneously by the windpipe, mouth and nose)
        = snoring
        = hiccup
        = cough, clearing the throat
        = belch
        = clicking the tongue
        = farting sound (with the lips)
        = (crackling (as in imitating the sound of an auto)
        = spitting sound (a sort of poo-pah-pitooey together)
        = kissing (noisily)
        = whistling (simple, not melodic)

Which translates as it’s extraordinary we might have ten years left and we might have thousands of climate change-induced attack dogs (no metaphor here, I mean actual canines) give or take infowars zero hedge and all phenomena are empty except those that make up the entire universe life turned out to have nothing to do with us don’t send love send bitcoin extinction rattle has anyone ever written so many songs for animals gulag vacation with unlimited stay. A structure in the center of the space — a sort of abbreviated house with half-built walls and uncovered studs — set the stage. As I looked around this structure the top portion of a wall concealed a man rocking back and forth in a folding chair. I could only see the bottom half of his body. His toes pressed against the floor, his heels against the front legs of the chair, and his hands were folded neatly in his lap. Dan. I had met Dan a few years earlier and saw him fairly often, but was surprised that some part of me not only knew the rhythm of his rocking, but also what his ankles looked like. I turned the corner and in another section of the structure I could see his whole body, again sitting on a sort of chair but now elevated much higher, leaning forward and staring into a television. He was slowly shaving his beard with an electric razor from top to bottom on one cheek. I was confused. I doubled back to the bottom half of the man I was so certain was Dan, to see if he was still there, and he was. This first Dan still sat in his chair rocking back and forth, while the second Dan persisted in shaving (so much that I thought he’d surely take off a layer of skin) and staring into the TV. Watching what? A worm being eaten alive by a woman competing for money. Since dolphins can’t move their faces, though, they always look like they’re I dunno, animals make lots of decisions, some decisions are minor, such as whether to walk to the right or left of a rock. Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Amen, Amen and Amen. What I mean to say is — what? A molecular robot is an artificial molecular system that is built by integrating molecular machines. The one developed by this research group is extremely small — about the size of a human cell. It consists of a molecular actuator, composed of protein, and a molecular clutch, composed of DNA. When the input DNA signal was ‘start,’ the clutch was turned ‘ON,’ and the robot changed shape. One said, “The barn was very large it smelled of hay, centaurs, and hookah pipes. To get there we hiked for three days, our legs were like leg-flavoured jelly. Maybe the cheese was attracting mice, I didn’t care because I am a friend of the Mouse People. A T a m 6 T dot I a U G l iiiiiiiiii 09876543210 1 woom moom woom moom moom Foom ooom ... w E m M m m T moom moom moom moom moom. ‘Come here!’ ‘Turn into a bee!’ etc. There are three beautiful shimmery frogs living in my sink: Max, Ronke, and Enzo.” And yet, when one looks more closely, it becomes clear that Žižek’s reading of du Maurier is far more complex than this. In the first place, implicit in the connection that he draws between the melodramatic excesses of her works and their embarrassingly direct staging of fantasies is an argument regarding the relationship between fantasy and form — an argument that suggests that melodrama is the form both by and through which literature most directly stages (and accesses) our fantasies. In the second place, this is a story of a fight for working people told from the workers’ point of view. So please click on the image and then make it larger if possible. Then allow yourself a day or two of returning to bed, to cultivate your inner world. Drink tea and read books on things like “radical beauty” by Deepak Chopra, an unlikely but optimistic beauty consultant, which will lead to going upstairs, eventually, and massaging one’s entire body with heated sesame oil. We had a house-guest from Senegal this Fall, Abulaye, a newly-arrived immigrant to these blatant shores, and he took one look at our shower, removed the no-slip mat AND the shower curtain, then stepped in. I had just done my Ayurvedic routine in it, and so this did not go well. He slipped, horribly, and didn’t tell us he had banged his head until we were up in Rocky Mountain National Park photographing the bored ubiquitous elk and he needed to sit down. In any case, this archipelago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the Equator, and between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rocks; a few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the larger islands, are of immense size, and they rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable smaller orifices. I scarcely hesitate to affirm, that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava and scoriæ, or of finely-stratified, sandstone-like tuff. Most of the latter are beautifully symmetrical; they owe their origin to eruptions of volcanic mud without any lava [...] Considering that these islands are placed directly under the equator, the climate is far from being excessively hot; this seems chiefly caused by the singularly low temperature of the surrounding water, brought here by the great southern Polar current. Excepting during one short season, very little rain falls, and even then it is irregular; but the clouds generally hang low. This brief display implies what is to come: many flickering letters put into motion and shaped into patterns before receding back into a blank screen. For example, the simple statement of the poem gradually forms on successive lines, sometimes letter by letter,

                                THIS
                                                IS
        THE
                                          SENTENCE
                                                            THAT
            THE
                                            WIND
                    BLEW                                     HERE.

        Entes ... Entes ... GHOSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTRAIN

                                        “ECARASEMP”
                                        “REVAIDECA”
                                        “RACONTRAO”
                                        “CORODOSIM”

St Matthew meets St David meets St Orm meets St Ranglehold meets St Luke meets St Gregory meets St Rain who gave birth to St Iff and St Ave this is the oldest family. They might ask each other why are we here? The offerings are top notch: Cheese and Onion Pudding, Chard and Saffron Tart, Creamy Asparagus Timbale, Whole Baked Eggplants, Rhubarb Fool, and Almond Pine-Nut Tart. We will work! We will feast first! Then we will work! cool at last a connection, i luv your pics ... jus got to my apartment and feelin kinda nauty, so I’m goin to take a chance wit u haha ... txtme lets talk more, num is +1-814.923 .0942 0r if u like blabbr — dollydimples61, you can find it in the app store. So yes, conditions in the migrant camps in Libya do suck: one 17-year-old boy brought to safety by MOAS told us how he had been forced to fight other detainees for food. Which sounds like something out of The A Team. Who killed the world? We forgot to water, we forgot to open the flue ...

            the military workhorse
            throttled up
            to milliseconds

            enna bleed
            bussy a fect’l

When I returned, years later, I found the same random patterns there on the wall. As Katsumi Omori said, “I must go to Fukushima. I must shoot the radiation (though it cannot be shot).” The resulting film imbues a concrete world with dream logic as it flows through three parts: Argentinean suburbs, Mozambique’s liminal grasslands, and the dense green of a Philippine jungle. But work isn’t stable or guaranteed, though that doesn’t seem to weigh too heavily on anyone. Their task remains enigmatic, more so after a coworker pulls out an odd black cone. Screens, wires, disarray, outages. But fuck that shit. Misha Mengelberg just died. Strange how I watched a video of him playing with Bennink and Dolphy just the other day. I’m glad we were cotemporaries, as they put it in the 19^th century. Think about it. A good word. Co ... temporaries. I advance cautiously, on all fours at first, then find the earth penetrable, my limbs entering the soil as I move forward. Where it had seemed cold, the effects of the cold have passed; where there was weight, weight is undifferentiated, the pressure valve

        turned two quarters to left
        traces of hair & skin
        twenty-three by twenty-three harmonic inches
        every slant is a tooth, albeit soft
        in the polystyrene conference hall; those
        that meet well eat first the head down
        sucker in structure, no moon to take
                                                     the whole the day off.

Then Avalokitesvara despaired as he looked down into the hells which were rapidly filling up again even though he had emptied them many times through his teachings. He became so disheartened that his body shattered into thousands of pieces, true to his original vow. He cried to the Buddhas for help. Of the ones who came to him, one was Amitabha Buddha, who became his teacher and helped him take on a new form — a female one with a thousand hands to provide aid to those who suffered, and with the eyes of Wisdom in each of the palms. And thus Avalokitesvara became the goddess Kuan Yin. Then Kuan Yin despaired as she looked down into the hells which were rapidly filling up again even though she had emptied them many times through her compassion. She became so disheartened that her body shattered into thousands of pieces, true to Avalokitesvara’s original vow. She cried to the Buddhas for help. Of the ones who came to her, one was Amitabha Buddha, who became her teacher and helped her take on a new form — or forms, I should say, visible and invisible, each and every one of the “ten thousand things”, from subatomic particles to songs to galaxies, each with a myriad thousand hands to provide aid to those who suffered, and with the eyes of Love and Wisdom in each of the palms. And still the hells filled, seemingly faster than the speed of light. At this point, Gert of the Well starts laughing. He knows the Sultan is going to want to hear his story, tho there is nothing to be learned from it. He pulls himself up off the bed and goes into the bathroom, the relief of his old age. Blue and sea-green tiles gleam on the floor and the walls. The big basin occupies one whole side, two yards in length. It can be filled continuously from two pipes that pour in hot or cold water. The water, heated in a cistern on the floor above, is allowed to flow in as one wishes, and mixes with the cold water that comes down through the other pipe. He immerses himself in the warmth of the basin, motionless. Let the Sultan wait. This is all we want today. And yet ... and yet ... and yet the world swirls around us. We wake up in the night with just each others and admit that even while we believe that we want to believe that we all live in one bed of the earth’s atmosphere, our bed is just our bed and no one else’s ... So Huey calls a boycott of Cal-Pac. That led to us picketing Bill Boyette’s. Now I think there were about thirty guys in this association: liquor store and tavern owners. One was an ex-Raiders football player. I got to know him personally. His whole thing: “What do you want? I’ll give you. You guys are doing good work.” Bill Boyette was the guy who said, “No we don’t want these Black Panthers, and we’re not giving them a damn thing.” So we focused in on Bill Boyette’s two liquor stores. We put pickets up in front of these stores. So, getting down to the nitty-gritty, like I always say, the local alcoholics — community alcoholics, you know? — they’ve got themselves a little change, they’re going to want a short neck of wine, or something, and they used to come into Bill Boyette’s stores, right? So instead of cussing the local drunks out, I go all the way out to my man that owns the other liquor store. I say, “What is that, the alcoholics drink?” He says they got Tokay. He gave me two cases of this wine. I take it back over there, I say, “Now when the drunks come up, Huey, tell them you’ll give them a short neck of wine if they march in the pickets.” Next thing you know, all the Oakland drunks, instead of going into the store, they get in the picket line — they’re drunk as a skunk — “Boycott Bill Boyette.” So that’s how you do it. Dear Angel of Dust. You have become familiar in my neighborhood like the lady with the gold turban staring fixedly, silently, desperately through the window of Twin Donuts. You have become as familiar as the man with the face of wrinkled black velvet picking at mismatched sneakers, one with laces, as he hugs his knees bent over the bench in front of Häagen Dazs from which he battles 10-foot demons. What are you thinking behind your eternally-smiling face as you walk in and out of stores of with the wind chimes you hawk, bunched together like a handful of dead chickens? What are you thinking as the mobiles which need only wind to sing are rejected again and again? Dear Mama, you said it again when you watched me read poems at the Library of Congress of these here United States. Not bad for an immigrant. Dear Angel of Dust. Etcetera, etcetera ... Bahala na ... relationship, recovery, revelation, redress, rebellion, red, restoration, renaissance, redrawing, review, re________ ... from 147 Million Orphans. Dear Angel of. We watched F____ slice mushrooms delicately then spread thin segments on wood planks to dry under the sun. Dear Ange.

        This tree will never grow. This bush
        Has no branches.
        I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty-five years
        When we say

                    I don’t understand why half the world is still crying, man,
                    when the other half of the world is still crying too, man ...

        I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty-five years
        When we say

                    Tomorrow never happens, it’s all the same fucking day, man ...

        We’ll look like seaweed thrown
        Against a pier

        A dead starfish on a beach

        All the oceans of emotion [full stop]
        Are full of such fish

[Note: Sources: JBR; Diego Zúñiga, Camanchaca, (tr. Megan McDowell), quoted in Coffee House Press, “Two new titles, author events, and more in March”, email rec’d 1 Mar 017, approx. 10:04am PST; JBR; Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma; JBR; Elizabeth Robinson and Jack Collom, “lunes”, in Dot’s Diner, at SPD; JBR; Gloria Anzaldúa, “Foreword to Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit”, in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (ed. AnaLouise Keating); JBR; AC Shilton, “What Would Happen if All the Bees Died Tomorrow?”, at Tonic, 1 Mar 017; Lorna Mills, quoted in Mira Dayal, “‘Everything I Do Has the Smell of Digital’: Lorna Mills on Her Art”, at Hyperallergic, 1 Mar 017; Allison Meier “The Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal”, at Hyperallergic, 28 Mar 017 (on photos by Steven Hirsch); Chung-Wha Hong, Grassroots International, “Remembering Berta Cáceres”, email rec’d 2 Mar 017, approx. 6:06am PST, and Beverly Bell, “Berta Cáceres, Presente!”, at Foreign Policy in Focus, 10 Mar 016; JBR; an unnamed friend of Alana Siegel, quoted in Siegel’s“Alana Siegel reviews Katy Bohinc”, at Journal of Poetics Research 2 (a review of Bohinc’s Dear Alain), JBR, but see “List of Presidents of the United States who owned slaves”, at Wikipedia); Isidore Isou, “The New Letteric Alphabet”, in Lettrisme: Into the Present (ed. Stephen C Foster); JBR; Jonty Tiplady, Poetry is Historicist, This Is My Only Poem; Jasmin Tsou, “Portfolio by Dan Herschlein”, at BOMB, 2 Mar 017; JBR; Nick Demske, “Feces in the Beast Wagon”, “Harry Toufe”, at Gramma; “Shape-shifting molecular robots respond to DNA signals”, at Science Daily, 2 Mar 017; JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Run-On Sentences”, at Academia.edu; a little mash of a google search result for “moom moom poem”, Jo Lindsay Walton, and JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Run-On Sentences”, at Academia.edu; Russell Sbriglia, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say Žižek and Literature?”, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (ed. Russell Sbriglia), via link in Duke University Press, “New Book: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek”, email rec’d 3 Mar 017, approx. 7:00am PST; JBR; Jeremy Corbyn, blurb for Mark Lyon, The Battle for Grangemouth: A Worker’s Story, in Lawrence & Wishart, “Out now: The Battle of Grangemouth by Mark Lyon”, email rec’d 3 Mar 017, approx. 7:04am PST; JBR, (includes a note appended to “1000 Views of 'Girl, Singing' poem: The Secret Life of an Angel, by Elizabeth Arnold”, at ZS, 2 Mar 017; Bhanu Kapil, “Note on the Last Day”, at The Writer in the World; JBR; Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N., in Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings (ed. James A Secord); CT Funkhauser, bpNichol, “After the Storm”, Lenora de Barros, “Entes ... Entes ...”, bpNichol, “Poem for My Father”, Eduardo Kac, “Não”, in Funkhauser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995; a mash of Julia Blumenreich, “Oh When the Saints”, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott (where it is accidentally considered a work by Ott, per an inlaid note from the publisher), and bpNichol, The Martyrology Book 1; JBR; “Magda”, message via Zorpia, 3 Mar 017, which I signed up for because apparently Jonty Tiplady left me a message there (not that I found one; he said it was a mistake; I have since quit); JBR; “Humanitarian Conditions in Libya”, at MOAS; JBR; Angharad, in Mad Max: Fury Road; Julia Blumenreich, “At Your Tribute: A Black t-shirt, White Letters, ‘Not Dead Yet’”, a slip laid into arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; Gil Ott, “Shuttle Challenger”, “Stingere”, Traffic, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; JBR; Katsumi Omori, quoted in Marc Feustel, “Photobooks After 3/11”, at Marc Feustel (reprinted/posted/reposted/whatever from The PhotoBook Review, Issue 008, April 2015); Danielle Burgos, “The Human Surge”, at BOMB, 3 Mar 017 (re Eduardo Williams, The Human Surge); JBR; Gil Ott, “The Hawk”, in arrive on wave: The Collected Poems of Gil Ott; Verity Spott, “Slack Against the Committee – A Charm”, at Two Torn Halves, 2 Mar 017; JBR; “Avalokitesvara and the origins of the goddess Kuan Yin”, at Goddess Gift; JBR; Luther Blissett / Wu Ming, Q (tr. Shaun Whiteside); Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003”, in The Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Issa; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003”, in The Connection of Everyone with Lungs; JBR; Bobby Seale, quoted in Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “The Conductor”, “Dear Mama,”, in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”, “Hay(na)ku with Ducktail”, “from 147 Million Orphans / Haybun MMXIV” in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Eileen R Tabios, “From ‘The Ineffability of Mushrooms’”, in IMMIGRANT: Hay(na)ku & Other Poems In A New Land; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Jack Spicer, “For Russ”, in Admonitions; Janis Joplin, “Ball and Chain” (live, Toronto, July 4, 1970, during the train tour across Canada); Jack Spicer, “For Russ”, in Admonitions; Janis Joplin, “Ball and Chain” (live, Toronto, July 4, 1970, during the train tour across Canada); JBR; Jack Spicer, “For Harvey”, “For Mac”, in Admonitions]

1000 Views of 'Girl, Singing' poem: The Secret Life of an Angel, by Elizabeth Arnold

[Elizabeth writes: "I used three different text colours to create three different poems from the one original version, each with its own respective title signified by colour at the top of the piece. I used light grey to filter out any unused words or punctuation, as I wanted the original poem to stand behind the three poems that came from it."JBR: please click on the image and then make it larger if possible (on my computer I have a magnifying glass with a plus sign in the middle. When I click that, it looks great]