Zeitgeist Spam:

As Trump stops climate action and Trudeau promotes tar sands, atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches highest levels in millions of years.

by Lauren McCauley

The amount of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere is now officially off the charts as the planet last week breached the 410 parts per million (ppm) milestone for the first time in human history.

“It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate,” wrote Climate Central’s Brian Kahn. “Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years.”

The milestone was recorded Tuesday at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii by the Keeling Curve, a program of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego. Since the planet reached the dangerous new normal of 400 ppm last year, scientists have warned that the accelerated rate at which concentrations of CO2 are rising means that humanity is marching further and further past the symbolic red line towards climate chaos.

What’s more, the recording was taken before carbon levels are expected to reach their annual peak, meaning they could soon notch even higher.

But despite the unprecedented threat, climate action has ground to a halt in the United States under the leadership of President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, forcing campaigners and concerned citizens to take to the streets in droves to prompt the government to do something to address the threat of planetary devastation.

Saturday’s March for Science saw tens of thousands of people rally in Washington, D.C. and across the world to send a message to the Trump administration that governance should be based on research and facts—not ideology.

Speaking at the march in San Diego, Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at Scripps whose father founded the Keeling Curve, gave an impassioned speech on why legislators need to abandon the partisan effort to stymie environmental legislation, declaring: “The climate change debate has been over for decades.”

Now, infused by the energy of the March for Science, campaigners are gearing up for next weekend’s Peoples Climate March with a week of action that centers on creating a just transition away from fossil fuels.

“The Peoples Climate March is the next step for the March for Science, a call to get more engaged in our political system, to confront power, and to demand solutions,” explained May Boeve, executive director of 350.org.

“The demands we will put forward—respect for Indigenous peoples, investments in communities on the front lines of the climate crisis, transitioning from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy economy that works for all, and more,” Boeve continued, “highlight the intersections between our different struggles, and the common solutions we can work for together.”

Dubbed “From Truth to Justice: Earth Day to May Day 2017,” the more than 50 events in the lead-up to Saturday will include strategy sessions, a massive youth convergence, the introduction of a 100 percent Clean Energy Bill in Congress, and non-violent direct actions.

On Friday, activists will form “Mother Earth’s red line” on the Capitol lawn to symbolize the multiple lines that must not be crossed by corporations and governments in the increasingly severe climate crisis, organizers said.

“This is about strength in unity; diverse groups of people are coming together like never before and are creating a red line of protection against capitalism, militarism, and racism,” said Kandi Mossett, Indigenous energy and climate campaign organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, one of the group’s organizing the direct action. “We are here to push for solutions like Indigenous rights, divestment, and renewable energy as we continue to fight for a just transition away from a fossil fuel based economy.”

Posted at 07:07 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (2)

22.04.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 48

            and you imagine a bird is flying in the room,
            and the bird flying in the room
            is reading all these books ...
            Anyway, here’s a Heine poem, in AS Kline's translation:

                        A single fir-tree, lonely,
                        on a northern mountain height,
                        sleeps in a white blanket,
                        draped in snow and ice.

                        His dreams are of a palm-tree,
                        who, far in eastern lands,
                        weeps, all alone and silent,
                        among the burning sands.

Is this the love poem of which we speak? Hamburger / Hamburger / Hamburger. To establish “emotional stability,” Tyrell injects Nexus-6 models with memory chips. The nearer the word is to the verb in a sentence, which itself has no fixed place in the sentence, the more emphasis it has. Which is to say that, over the past two centuries, neither high levels of inequality nor the expansion of suffrage caused top marginal rates on the rich to rise. A finger lingers in the warm bread.

                                                The air is partially
            Visible, and its structure as frail and interrupted
            As the structure of thoughts, or the structure of the sea.
            So we looked for pictures of ‘circumcised penis’ on Google Images.
            Papyrus mildew.
            (On the 10^th of July of 1969, James Schuyler
            Wrote in his diary, “Extraordinary how anything far enough past
            Can come to seem like a happy time.”)

Here however Malabou wishes to focus on a different aspect. For her, stem cells provide a way to think about both differentiation and undifferentiated life. Is the “reversibility of cellular differentiation” possible? Can we go back to “a time before difference”? The stakes are clear, as Malabou has also indicated in her recent book, Changing Diffeence: difference itself must be understood as plastic. At the same time, she revisits the problems of the, yes, the) philosophical bias, writing that “Philosophy is woman's tomb. It grants her no place, no space whatsoever”.) Here in the sections on cloning, Malabou is trying to locate how difference operates in both philosophical and biological contexts. Reading the essay I was reminded of the way in which Meillassoux characterizes historical time in After Finitude. Early in that text he introduces the concepts of the “ancestral” and the “arche-fossil.” I always found this part of the argument dissatisfying, to put it mildly. Still, his argument is almost compelling, and I suspect its ultimate value lies in how it introduces into philosophy the very real problem of human extinction. A Tristan chord stacks an augmented fourth, sixth, and ninth above the bass. So yes, the members of the 1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition to Everest (George Mallory was but one of their number, albeit the only one anyone today really remembers), were the first Europeans to set foot in that part of the Himalayas. At that moment, the Himalayas were the greatest of the great unknown mountains, which is why the first expedition party included photographers, geographers and geologists with no real mountaineering experience. Their job was to turn the mountains of the mind into mountains that can be climbed. This hitherto blank space on the map seems to have functioned in a perfectly Lacanian way, acting as an irresistible magnet on the imperial and adventure-minded alike (in the 19th and early 20th century imperialism and adventure went hand in hand — imperialism was the condition for adventure and adventure was the alibi for imperialism). It was like Shel Silverstein’s Big O, I mean,

i threw my 2014 macbook in the river this morning

it was the one thing that could happen

could happen the most

i can’t live without feeling that everyone would one day feel the same
or knowing that they do, there is no way to say

to happen most with what is most happening

the macbook has all the footprints

the trillocene macbook is gone

life is so beautiful i can’t live without saying what its extinction
might have meant to the fullest extent

So the kings came and fought; then fought the kings of Canaan at Taanach near the waters of Megiddo (JUDGES 5:19). Megiddo was of strategic importance because it occupies a valley through which armies could march on their various campaigns. Because of the many history-changing battles fought there, it came to symbolize warfare, struggle and death. But that's about Megiddo; a valley. Where is “Har-Magedon”, which translates as “the mountain of Megiddo” from which we get the word Armageddon, then? The answer is that there is NO such literal place! It does not exist as far as geography is concerned! Then why does the book of Revelation mention it? I mean, I just love the unclean spirits croaking like frogs ribit, ribit, ribit, and the don’t walk around naked admonition ... So what is the difference between eros and thanatos? It appears (to me at least) that they are merging as we speak ... Which is to say no, the Chella Bod is not functional. It’s just for your Instagram followers — and to make it easier for you to thirst trap. I mean, surely there are at least two bands in Brooklyn called Priestdaddy. ‘Violinist’ was a fig cut in half ... ‘Penniless’ was an empty copper outline ... Error! File Name Not Specified! The milk bottles burst like scared chickens. Her father would later cross the Tiber, as ecclesiastical types say, and become a Catholic priest, a devoted viewer of Schwarzenegger flicks. That’s why the poems in Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals have titles like “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer” and “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.” The sea, then, is, once again, a theme for our time. Our relationship to the coast is changing. Minnmouth bodes the inshot and ootshot tide: sea rise, coastal inundation,

        m reachin oot mm– m inder ite mm–
        m headin sooth mm– m widdar storm mm–
        m an bit an bit mm– furr th marram mm–
        m id awlready be mm– gawn mm– gawn mm– gawn ...

Marram being the well-known sharp-edged grass of the dunes, sometimes known as bents. A note after the sources suggests that this text “may” form part of a larger work that “may” be entitled The Tragedy of Beyoncé Knowles. The protagonist, Jow, lives in the privileged biotope, the ramp leading up to the flaming hoop. Nonetheless, there are reasons to be suspicious of this gesture, which will emerge. Anyway, the plot. “The Café Nero philosophy is really very simple.” A “cowl” is an item of clothing consisting of a long, hooded garment with wide sleeves. (Other grammatical errors occur on 9, 12, 38). This mashup takes several pieces of dialogue and re-orders them: broadly, lines 3277-9 from the second quarto, followed by 3282-3 from the first folio, followed by 2813-27 from the second quarto, followed by 2961-7, followed by 2943-60, and a stage direction not from the second quarto. Also, “Pray you undo this button” has become “Pray you this undo button.” So why are you still apparently carrying that thing in your teeth when you could be carrying it in your hand, or you could have discarded it? Maybe you’re chewing it so it can’t be re-attached? Or maybe you are Lavinia, without any hands? It’s a bilingual book of Yiddish folk songs and poems derived from them. Do you know of Hirschhorn? He is (I think he’s still alive) a medical doctor who invented the rehydration kits for cholera — I’ve heard he saved more lives than almost anyone else in the 20^th century. Speaking of which, while Trump was bombing Syria, he was eating Mar-a-Lago chocolate cake, the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.” In another dream, a thing the shape of dried pacay or black locust or mimosa seedpod — dull and grayish — has a mouth that mimics a sea lamprey. The seedpod is devouring my willow cactus inside my clover field crib. I think it is only fair to note that neither Siri nor I have no interests in manufacturing Demon Seeds. Everyone in class stares at me confused. The instructor looks concerned. The bridge over the invisible canal shifts and I am now underneath and between a stop on the bridge. Here, there is a little shop with hand-painted recyclable cups and compost-friendly spoons. A sign at its entrance reads: Do Not Take Photos. I order a German sausage and Jamaican coco bread, but a petite Japanese girl won’t serve me. He is my cousin. So he says. I ask questions. He answers vaguely. He’s missing his entire front grill. This must be recent because his gums are bright, raw, and their ridges are newly divorced from incisors and canines. A large number of His creatures were grateful to Him for the favors which He bestowed upon them. I mean, He gave many of them more benefits and gifts in addition to the generous favors He had bestowed upon them earlier, saying: “Your Lord announced: If you are grateful, We shall give you more. So: you cool old ones, We give you more. You rule the night, you Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados. You flaunt your God-given dents, your rust spots, your mismatched doors, your liberal applications of Bondo, your repairs effected with masking tape — and some of you revel in butch-wax jobs, gleaming like the twilight’s last sigh. And I should know, because I am the Lord.” (Sound effects of a nuclear blast). Explosion splits the boat. Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel. “Perhaps the appendix is already out doctor” the nurse said peering dubiously over his shoulder. “I saw a little scar.” “The appendix already out !?” the doctor shouted. “I’m taking the appendix out! What do you think I'm doing here?” “Perhaps the appendix is on the left side doctor,” said the nurse. “That happens sometimes you know.” “Stop breathing down my neck I’m coming to that! Don’t you think I know where an appendix is? I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard.” He threw back his elbows in a movement of exasperation. He lifts the abdominal wall and searches along the incision dropping ashes from his cigarette. “And get me another scalpel! This one has no edge to it.” He thrusts a red fist at her. The doctor reels back and flattens against the wall from the force of the explosion with the bloody scalpel clutched in one hand. The patient slides off the operating table spilling intestines across the floor. Dr. Benway sweeps instruments, cocaine, and morphine into his satchel. “Sew her up!” he said, peeling off his gloves. “I can’t be expected to work under such conditions.” By the dawn’s early light Dr. Benway, carrying his satchel, pushed through the passengers crowded around Lifeboat No. 1. “Are you all right?” he shouted, seating himself among the women.

One jar is filled with wings another with a finger

another has a piece of information

The voices by the time they surface are old

Aspens growing on a hillside share a single root system

And how can you not love a poem called ‘Memoir’ that begins

Dawn again

Fuck!

“Tamales of Sparta rolled global”

If you die last you will hear the will of the earth read aloud by

mouthless ants

All this poses a hermeneutical challenge, whose major task appears not so much to be “how do we read the Anthropocene?” but rather “how do we understand this sedimentation process?” Or, differently said, “how can we follow the episodes of the story while — and not just after — the story itself sediments?” Or, to quote Calvino, “Have you ever asked yourselves what the goats on Bikini must have thought? And the cats in bombed houses? And the dogs in war zones? And the fish struck by torpedoes?” The room has pink-flowered wallpaper, lace curtains, a small single bed, a chamber pot, a writing desk with ink and convincingly scribbled-upon paper, six tattered books, a stove, a face-washing basin, a picnic basket, a rocking chair, and a clock forevermore reading 6:05. There is a headless mannequin at the center of the room, cloaked in a white dress, as popular legend stipulates Dickinson only wore white. You wanna rent this space? You can. $100/hr for up to two hours. Though you can’t close the door. And you can’t touch anything — and there is a small, polite rope barring you from approaching the bed. This subversive education is carried out not only through the poem’s corrosive flood of detail but, at the same time, in NU/FZ’s deployment of these details. NU/FZ gives us an unprecedented look into the poem’s flux. Tumultuous shiftings, transformations, disruptions, multiple intersections, fractured mirrorings, mutual containments, eclipses and feedback loops. Everything is a version, an inversion, a revision of something else, an aspect or analysis of something else, “embedded” in or a suppression of something else, overlapping or reemerging from something else. An event might be seen primarily as a “perspective analysis” of one or more prior events and at the same time embedded in or bracketed by them. Nights VIIa and VIIb are treated, at one moment, as alternative narrative perspectives; later, VIIb is embedded in VIIa. Distant events are conterminous and consecutive events are simultaneous; an established sequence of events might turn out to be simultaneous from another perspective and in reverse order from yet another. What is at one juncture seen as a cause will later appear as an effect of what it appeared to have caused. Transformations can as easily be “retroactive” as successive: new information might substantially change not only our understanding of what has preceded but therefore — and this is precisely the causal link these transformations underscore — the character of the event-complex itself, and of the chains of events that depend from it. “[R]e-enactments alter those earlier relationships through a complex process of feedback” (329; Ault’s emphasis). Competing versions of events (eee gee, the two versions of the “war plot” concluding Night I) cause the reader either to suppress differences, to invent overviews that circumvent incommensurability — both Newtonian responses — or to embrace narrative undecidability and a radically perspectual sense of the real. This is, after all, a Dream of Nine Nights, and for Ault the engine driving these narrative condensations and displacements is essentially psychosexual. Blake uses dreamwork strategies to disorient the reader’s habitual relation to the nightmare of single-vision reality itself. So that readers might read themselves awake. The same flux that organizes the narrative defines its characterology. It is in fact difficult to discuss characters and narrative structures in separate terms: events are displacements of characters and characters are condensations — “crystallizations,” in Ault’s recurrent phrase — of events that are perspectives on them. Now characters overlap each other, are projections or returned repressions of each other, arise into the “narrative proper” only through event-contexts. Everything here is context-dependent, but contexts are no more fixed or absolute than what they contain: a context out of which some character arises might later be shown to be a projection by the character it seemed to create. Urizen is not an identity who steps from The Book of Urizen into this poem, nearly if perhaps not fully realized: he is sung into it by Enitharmon in a response to Los. Urizen “begins” not as a character but as a name attached by Enitharmon to an aspect of her own reactive vision. But he does not rest within the fictive frame of her song: Enitharmon “calls Urizen into the narrative proper out of his function as a dialogical operator in her interpolated vision.” She invents him as a fiction of her needs, ergo he exists. But when he is “wrenched out of his interpolated status,” forced into “the narrative proper,” it is as an agent, equipped with a history and identity that influence events not only after he appears but retroactively, as if he had always been there. And Enitharmon is “herself,” “originally,” a projection of Enion, without prior existence but with retrospective force. To quote David Bohm,

We could say that practically all the problems of the human race
are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.

Which is why Franz Kamin used procedures — modeled on topology, general systems theory, meditational processes, and chance operations — together with spontaneous composition to bring about his unique version of proprioceptive process, which he called AUTOSKREELIK, writing about writing about what you’re writing about it. Which is the moment I receive a text from Deb, which reads, “Happy 420. Amen.”

There are porches out back. I want one. What’s it smell like? Porch
green, I mean. Personal green. Not all gardens are leapsome —

            The exposed circuitry of green gets rerouted,
            and green becomes white walls all the better to see the corners where
            they converge.

Flowers have lips —

Maximus, at Tyre and Boston

[...]

III

that we are only
as we find out we are

Would you like a Unicorn Frappuccino with that?

Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crest with ropes and chains and catwalks [...] Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet [...] This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

            For whatever they have
            And whatever you want
            Is chalked by hand in white on a 3 x 3 blackboard
            With what’s already sold marked out
            So get in early
            Say 10:55 and no later for lunch than noon
            And for night time dinner don’t come at all
            Because there isn’t any

That is to say my clothes are exactly like the clothing of every other male. This morning fresh from the shower I stepped into a pair of shorts and drew them up to their proper height while buttoning the lower button. I pulled over my head the standard sleeveless undershirt, tucked it into my shorts and buttoned the top two buttons, Men who are smarter than I am put the shirt on first and draw the shorts up over it. Note that I now probably have on all that propriety demands: shorts and shirt. Note that I have two layers of cloth about my waist, but only one layer about my legs and chest. Note that I have used three buttons. I have gone through nine separate motions to get into this state. And now notice that as I continue dressing I will merely be donning an elongated version of what I already wear. Sby Sca Shu Si Sja Sk ... pyffff ... Poetry doesn’t provide answers. Of course it

        does. Or does it, or does it, or doesn’t it? Poetry
        works! For everyone! And if you didn’t, would it
        matter if you knew you didn’t or did not know
        you didn’t? World, person, matter, chunk.
        “Inexplicably snubbed at the dog show.” If you
        want to know how it was back then, picture a world
        without stuffed olives. “One moon appears
        everywhere.” Unto this abyss all souls are gathered
        to be torn asunder, scattered like soot in a gale —
        but upward into this vault of night fly tiny bees
        in mighty hordes. “All surrender is tone-deaf.”
        And if you didn’t, would it matter if you knew you
        didn’t or did not know you didn’t? World, person,
        matter, chunk. Loin-words. “Disbelief in bump form.”

That was a sonnet, motherfuckers. Its soul is hairless, it’s as hairy as they come. It was a theory dreamed up during a neon summer. For example, she really wished she wasn’t wearing overall jean shorts when she got her period in the middle of craft time. The fire alarm continues to blare. You are wearing two bathrobes underneath your down jacket. It’s easy to think the poet is the problem but the poet is really just sad or maybe even just nothing & the poet can’t burn down the entire prison or all the prisons and the poet can’t even write a fanonian poem because what would that actually look like? the poet can show up sometimes or not the poet can watch the poet can write, or not because what would the fanonian poem even be — WOULDN’T FANONIAN FORM BE SUCH A GOOD ALBUM NAME? Outside it was summer. Inside it was a fucking mess. I mean, inside it was summer, outside it was a fucking mess. I’m inside of one of the biggest rooms I’ve ever entered. The word “inside” feels inappropriate for this Berlin space, which is the size of a football pitch. A big football pitch. “The barber shop is great, isn’t it? People socialise there, it’s a really important part of Middle Eastern culture and most refugees here are from the Middle East.” Carlo is researching the experience of displaced queers at the moment. “They are in danger of experiencing the same bigotry in some of these communities as they did at home. The same pressures that meant they had to leave might be here as well ...” Remember that old Occupy sign, shit is fucked up and shit? Today is the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising.

[Note: Sources: Murat Nemet-Nejat, “To L.C.”, in The Spiritual Life of Replicants; JBR, letter to Alan Baker, sent 18 Apr 017, approx. 9:00am PDT; Heinrich Heine, “The Palm Tree” (tr. AS Kline), at Poetry in Translation; JBR; Sawako Nakayasu, “(.2.2003)”, in Texture Notes; Murat Nemet-Nejat, “Existence and Essence”, “A Few Thought on Fragment”, in The Spiritual Life of Replicants; JBR; Julia Ott, “Tax the Rich?”, at Public Books, 18 Apr 017 (re Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe); Purdey Lord Kreiden, “Trakl”, “Roman Prosperity”, “The Infinite Sign”, “Why the Planets Rotate”, in Children of the Bad Hour; Alexander R Galloway, “Malabou’s Life Resistance”, at Alexander R Galloway, 17 Apr 017; Jessica Popeski, “Seven by Three”, quoted in “Tuesday poem #211 : Jessica Popeski : Seven by Three”, at Dusie, 18 Apr 017; JBR; Ian Buchanan, “Becoming Mountain”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “picture us gone”, email rec’d 18 Apr 017, approx. 7:40am PDT; Jon W. Quinn, “The Battle of Armageddon: The mountain of Megiddo”, at Bradley Church of Christ; JBR; JBR, email to Jonty Tiplady, 18 Apr 017, approx. 8:05am PDT; JBR; Michael Hafford, “F—k Your Chella Bod. I Love Mine As Is and I'm Still Going to Coachella”, at Playboy, 14 Apr 017, quoted in tweet by Jennifer R Bernstein, quoted in Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Thirst trap”, at Fritinancy, 17 Apr 017; JBR; James Parker, “Poet on the Edge”, at The Atlantic, May 017 (re Patricia Lockwood); Alec Finlay, “minnmouth”, at Alec Finlay, 10 Apr 017; Robert Kiely, “Commentary on ‘untitled’ in Francis Crot’s The Cuntomatic”, at Academia.edu; Alan Baker, email rec’d 19 Apr 017, approx. 9:21am PDT; JBR, and Donald Trump; Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, “ORS Poetica (now infused with ghee…)”, at Harriet, 18 Apr 017; al-Tabarī, The History of al-Tabarī, vol.1 (tr. and ed. Franz Rosenthal); JBR; Luc Sante, quoted in blurb for Langdon Clay: Cars, NYC 1974-76, quoted in Artbook/D.A.P, “Limited Stock! Langdon Clay: Cars, NYC 1974-76”, email rec’d 20 Apr 017, approx. 8:03am PDT; JBR; Kells Elvins and William S Burroughs, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming”, combining what I found in Nicholas, “A little bit of Bill for your troubles”, at The Place of Dead Roads, 22 Aug 05, with a YouTube performance of the piece by WSB; Claire Marie Stancek, “Honey”, at Typo 22; blurb for Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening (ed. Caroline Picard), at SPD; Kit Robinson, and James Sherry, quoted in Robinson’s blurb for Sherry’s Entangled Bank, at SPD; Dot Devota, “Gene”, in And the Girls Worried Terribly; Italo Calvino, quoted in Serenella Iovino, “Sedimenting Stories: Italo Calvino and the Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene”, at Academia.edu; Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, “An Hour Renting Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom Where She Wrote Her Entire Life’s Work”, at Jezebel, 19 Apr 017 (for Alan Baker); Paul Mann, “Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987. xxvi + 518 pp. $37.50 cloth/$14.95 paper”, at Blake, vol.23 no.2; JBR; David Bohm, and George Quasha, quoted in Quasha’s “Poetry in Principle”, at Harriet, 20 Apr 017; JBR, and Deb Rissman; Shira Dentz, “-TUDE”, in Black Seeds on a White Dish; JBR; Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems; JBR (Starbucks sells (sold) them (it was a promotion...)); Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (tr. William Weaver), quoted in Serenella Iovino, “Sedimenting Stories: Italo Calvino and the Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene”, at Academia.edu; Bern Porter, “Barbara’s Belfast”, “Clothes”, back cover blurb, in Sounds That Arouse Me: Selected Writings; Lisa Jeschke, “Manning”, “Love, XXX”, in Dead Cheap; Tom Jenks, Streak Artefacts; Christian Bök, “Colony Collapse Disorder 21. On the Plight of the Swarm”, in The Xenotext Book 1; Bruce Andrews, “Mob”, in Designated Heartbeat; Lisa Jeschke, “Manning”, “Love, XXX”, in Dead Cheap; Bruce Andrews, “Mob”, in Designated Heartbeat; JBR; Chairil Anwar, “A Story”, in The Voice of the Night (tr. Burton Raffel); Stephanie Chou, “Keep Away from Things That Can Catch Fire”, at BOMB, 21 Apr 017; Andrea Abi-Karam, The Aftermath, at Commune Editions; JBR; Philip Davenport, “We came with no name, but we leave as kings. Pt 1”, at Arthur + Maria, 21 Apr 017; JBR]

Posted at 07:01 PM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

17.04.2017

Du Yun @ Mass College of Art 10-3-2011

Posted at 09:16 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 47

This was the first major fire at a foreign-backed entity and it brought the issue of worker safety into the public eye. According to Chinese government statistics, the average number or workers killed in work-related accidents (a statistic that ignores all those killed by working conditions) in any given year is around 100,000. Maybe that’s why, on the fourth day of my sickness, I lay in bed getting more and more freaked out by the status of a memory I couldn’t shake: a village at twilight, uninhabited houses, several animals burning. I had never been to this village. Remember that? The foot and mouth thing? When they burnt all the animals? I remember watching that on TV, back in 2001. And all that other stuff? Bang bang. All of it compressed and spun, baked and loaded, until it was transformed in its sleep into incinerated invisible villages. You would recognise nothing. Like that part of the land that is also part of the sea. Like in The Time of the Wolf, when they’re all standing there, outside the station, waiting. All of them saying to each other “I have, of course, been sick for a very long time”. So what. Who hasn’t. To dream that one day you will go out into the streets of this quite possibly non-existent village, and it will be very quiet, and there will be new constellations in the sky, and you will know they are new because they will already have names.

It’s

a place

of interest

it’s a famous

place

it’s a

pretty place

it’s

a place with

a nice

view

it’s a warm

place

it’s a

new place

                                                                                it’s
                                                                                a special
                                                                                place

So I arrive at the asylum centre and a set of small obstacles defeat me. I want to meet someone to discuss an interview, but he isn't around. I need a table and chairs for making artwork with the kids, at my post in the corridor, by the security man. But Klaus the technical man is not around. Mohammed the security guy would normally help, but he also isn't around. He’s translating a conversation for somebody who has a job centre interview. All of these small hiccups are made clumsier and bigger by my lack of language. I have no Arabic and am learning German, which refuses to stick in my head. So I go upstairs to see The Old Man, Karim. He's a frequent port of call and welcomes me into his room cheerily as he always does. He speaks good English and humours me by teaching me a few words in Arabic. We have talked about his journey from Iraq, paying human traffickers for the privilege of a grim boat journey. But we haven't talked about why he left. Once I've been settled into a chair and Karim has made sure I'm comfortable, he stares directly into my eyes and says, There is another question you should ask about why I leave my country. This is a very important question. When anybody leaves their country there is a reason. Why? For me, I was arrested there in Iraq for more than 35 days. We have been kidnapped by militia which worked with government because we is Sunni person and you know the militia is Shia. I was officer in the Saddam regime. For this reason they take us to the prison, to the prison. In such vehicles as civilians use. They come near my place where I lived and open door by very bad manner. They hit me in my head and said: “Don’t move, don’t rise your head.” They take us to the places where they work, near the government, The Ministry of Internal Affairs. I very frighten when I remember the bad situation. They have ability to kill and maybe throw body garbage. Nothing do, just obey them. 35 days in a prison, in a room. Without ventilation, without cooler, electricity cutting more than 10 hours [...] One person in room with me, a young man. What was he accused, I don’t know. He was hitten. Them hitting his leg and his head. His leg had bleeding, I don’t know why they did this. I don’t why, but you cannot speak them. Cannot whisper them. “Don’t speak, don’t whisper,” the guard said. That is right, silence. They don’t give medicine to me, I was afraid for my son bringing it. After I go out the bad jail. After stay in prison they make report, total information, where we live where we work. In my opinion the informations don’t reach for anything. Nobody speak about me, no guilty. In my opinion I am arrested because I was officer in Saddam regime and I am Sunni. In the last days, they spoke to me. They said, “Mister you will go to your family. You have done nothing and we are sorry.” But what did they do? They have many cars there for police, civilian cars. They said, “OK, we shall arrive you to your home.” I said I don’t believe they let me go. Me and four guards go in the civilian car. They laugh. They say: “We shall not arrive in your house.” They left me in the different place. They know my eyes not good. I cannot cross street, cannot see. I try to catch taxi, but they do not stop. No one stop for me, they are too scared. But at last, God’s wish it was, somebody picked me up and returned me to my family. If you stay in such country, maybe another time they not arrest you, they kill you.

It’s

a nice place

it’s a

pretty place

it’s

a place with

a nice

view

it’s a warm

place

it’s a

new place

                                                                                it’s
                                                                                a special
                                                                                place

And so it came to pass that I discerned eels in my spine. And so, their ascetic mouths must have fractured me. Speaking of horrible places, all the folks I see here seem out of breath. I am sitting on a stain on a chair wondering what the stain is knowing that I’ll never ever know. But the weeds out front are beautiful. There are no gift certificates for this place says a sign on the glass. That glass has murky brown stains. But if that’s how much the tow yard is charging then that’s how much you have to pay. Are you guys all set? You can just give me the money now it’s fine. Lots of lights are flashing but the flashes aren’t bright. The ceiling is made of mirrors. An OJ Simpson documentary plays at the bar. Scrunched up wet paper towels are next to the other two sinks. The preacher keeps saying everything in threes. His speech has palpitations. My reaction was swift. I typed into the Google doc at 4 am, ‘menopause turns females into dandies. Some of our organs become purely self-referential. They have no further potential for family or spectacle or state: they’re outside every economy. So now their meaning is confected in relation to convivial and autonomous pleasure only. Now they can be in the present fully. I’m assuming the mind is an organ or a kind of wandering gland in this description. The hormones the ovaries used to make are now made by all the parts of the body, so that every tissue, every limb and fold continuously invents its own mode of transformation. The entire body becomes a fungible thinking whose purpose it is only to express its own communicability, for the pleasure, the intensity, the integrity of it ...’ So I lay in the bath all morning, reading excerpts from ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. From time to time as I read I added more hot water to the already deep bath, swirling it in with my left hand, while my right hand held the brittle paperback out of danger. Which makes me wonder: what ever happened to my copy of Flowers of Bad?

        Below the embers, below the ventilators,
        Medications, backgrounds, naiads, medications,
        Beyond the salamander, beyond the embers,
        Beyond the checkrooms of existential salamanders,

        My ember, you mirror with accomplishment ...
        In my fondness the most the tiniest broken cup ...
        Why does she come into a room skipping, calling me a broken cup?
                                                                The cups exit ...

To that extent the myth of Prometheus in the Theogony and that of the ages of the world in the Works and Days are closely related. It had evidently been a different generation of gods with whom humans in the golden age were able to do what in the meantime had come to be prohibited: to break bread. The methodology was the same as that leveraged by Google. For example: if you have a stomachache take ruddy metallic medicine on Tuesday because the gut is related to Taurus. Which is why

        I can cook anything; I can cook flour, or dirt
        I can cook locusts. I can eat grubs raw. I
        can chew leaves, but the trees are dried up.

        I hate my dress. I had some money for awhile,
        but I spent it on my kids.
        I painted my face white to mourn for them.

        I was once young and beautiful,
        but that’s of no interest to me. I was a handsome
        man with glowing skin.

        I ran across the room to my
        mother; I was bleeding from my forehead in a
        thin stream. I love that color of green, as dark

        as you can get. I want to be in a dark green place.
        I caught tadpoles out there at that oasis and put
        them in a jar, they have flat little heads.

        Speaking of Easter Sunday,
        the Essential Cause of the Itch appears
        to be a Vast Number of Minute Animals.

This Other rises up “behind the said.” Given this, Husserl, in Derrida’s view, can be seen as “demonstrating the irreducibility of intentional incompleteness, and therefore of alterity.” Because of this, “Husserl gives himself the right to speak of the infinitely other as such, accounting for the origin and the legitimacy of his language. He describes the phenomenal system of nonphenomenality.” Such a system shows through phenomenality what escapes phenomenality. The infinitely other exhibits itself in the incompleteness of the attempts to fix its presence. Infinity, here, means being unending; it does not mean being absolutely other. It has buttons, one of which is a blue hare pelted with rain; suggesting the speed with which a rabbit, seeking shelter, might clean dishes. There are four hundred rabbits in the Aztec myth known as the Centzon Totochtin and they are led by Two-Rabbit, Ometochtli. Collectively they represent inebriation, not the dregs. They wash drunkenly, slurred between the ears. I think it’s a combo of full moon and mercury in retrograde and depression and running out of pudding and crazy drama bullshit and it sort of seems like everyone is nuts right now. And then Hailey came downstairs crying because her lizard (Lizard Borden – aka Lil’ Pumpkin) was dead and so I checked on her she wasn’t breathing and I was like, “Honey, lizards don’t live forever” but then when I reached in Lizard Borden took a sudden breath and looked at me like, “WHAT THE FUCK, LADY? I WAS SLEEPING.” And then she ate and ran around and was fine so I went on a lizard chat group and I was like, “What does it mean when your lizard stops breathing?” and they were like, “It means your lizard is dead” but then I explained further and they were like, “Oh yeah, sometimes that kind of lizard goes into a deep, non-breathing sleep. If it stops breathing for a couple of days though then your lizard is dead.”

em> It’s

a nice place

it’s a

pretty place

it’s

a place with

a nice

view

it’s a warm

place

it’s a

new place

                                                                                it’s
                                                                                a special
                                                                                place

Take “Ometeol” (2016), for example, which is on the wall of the alcove spanning the front of the gallery and facing into it. It is easy to see that the artist has transformed Styrofoam packaging into a squat faux-Aztec-y figure. There was no Aztec Ometeol, by the way, I googled the name. I did turn up an Ometeotl, though. According to Iztli Ehekatl, “Ometeotl is perhaps the most widely embraced concept within the Mexicayotl community and throughout the years, its original meaning has morphed into such ideas as monotheistic god, energy, and duality. What most people don’t know is that the word Ometeotl first appeared in secondary sources written by Miguel Leon-Portilla, and appears nowhere in any primary source. He either intentionally or unintentionally invented the word. There is nothing wrong ordinarily with creating words. People create words all the time. We see examples of this with words like tepoztototl (airplane). However, Ometeotl is problematic in numerous ways.” Which is why I used a pseudo-scientific method to organize the collection. The Beanie Babies were displayed on an oversized knick-knack shelf with a mirrored back of my own design. They were arranged vertically in a hierarchy of intelligence. The bottom tier contained invertebrates, the next fish and reptiles, then birds, then small mammals, etc. The top tier was reserved not for the most intelligent animals though, but for the most sought-after Beanie Babies. These were the Bears. Each sculpture had another component: a handmade placeholder, which was a reference to the practice by collectors and museums of creating a replica to fill a gap in an otherwise complete collection. Thus, the Beanie Baby shelf was accompanied by a lumpy ceramic imitation of the Princess Di Bear, the apex of Beany Babies. Not far away was a replica of the famous Charles Manson vest. I will argue here, then, that the creation of a place and the goings to and comings from this place are the same strategies employed in the practice of curing a malady such as “susto” [Spanish “fright,” or nemouhtiliztli in Nahuatl] also known as “soul-loss.” Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of the practice of curing “soul-loss” is the journey of the healer to the place were the soul-loss occurred, a journey which may be undertaken by walking there or in dreams. Portrayed thus, Schoenberg found himself in the role of the modern precisely in the sense of what is inimical to the new. It is not surprising, then, that he in fact insisted that readers could just as well put the book aside with these, its first words, since ab ovo it was completely discredited by its title: Through the formulation of the title, his book has lost the claim to be taken seriously. Grammar would have to ask: “whose philosophy?” — answer: “that of the new music,” or: “what does the new music do?” — answer: “it philosophizes.” Only a nonsensical formulation of a question can provoke such a nonsensical answer. But here Schoenberg is certainly mistaken: the title is not nonsensical question and answer. It names a manifesto of the primacy of the object. In this form alone Philosophy of New Music struggles to sink heel into turf against the massive slide of history. It is the comportment of a subjectivity that, instead of establishing itself as a sacrificial temple to itself, achieves, in refusing to renounce itself, its object. Philosophy of New Music conceives this comportment in both musical composition and philosophy by showing that they have an affinity predicated on their distinction, not by subverting music as a thinker in disguise. Only because music is nonconceptual in its structure is the dialectic of construction and expression, which transpires within it, able to bring the dialectic to a halt in shaping the thing-itself as the unconscious transcription of historical suffering. Which, obliquely, brings me back to Ingeborg B. In her poem, posthumously published, ‘That it was worse yesterday than today,’ she writes:

            In the crack in the wall
            I saw in a moment of panic
            a black beetle
            who was playing dead.

            I’d like to speak to him,
            to show him a way out of this lovely house,
to show him an exit,
            or stomp on him right away.

Which, in a roundabout way, might relate to her lines:

And so I don’t move, I drink my tea and sleep
badly.

That’s how I got splinters in my butt-cheeks. And then the splinters got infected. I was worried I’d have to amputate flesh gobbets. But then the Valium kicked in, with its little-studied antibiotic properties. Like a good old-fashioned hit of poppers. As for Jewballs: we’re still looking for funding. I’m feeling it, too-though the peonies. I wonder if a little bit of scorpion venom might recalibrate our moods? I see from an article in the paper that Rufus Wainwright will be, um, redoing Judy’s famous (infamous?) Carnegie Hall performance this week. “When I work,” she says, “I get very warm.” She pronounces “warm” like the first syllable of “wombat.” So yes, I’m glad you understand that Hotel Theory is not a theory of hotels, but a hotel named Theory. Poems, by John Keats. Hence my admiration for Hold Me While I’m Naked. I couldn’t think of the minor hunk’s name, although I knew it started with “G-.” The only G- name that would spring to mind was Gayatri Spivak. So I saw Gayatri Spivak and her girlfriend waiting for sandwiches. When I got home I remembered: Giovanni Ribisi. In Hollywood, he translated Of Grammatology. Yet even the most monolithic of histories contain moments of potential dissonance. William of Newburgh's History of English Affairs, for example, contains a strange tale of two green children, a brother and sister of mysterious origin found one day in a ditch in East Anglia. The hue of their skin, their sounds that do not carry English meaning, and their blank incomprehension at indigenous dining customs mark them as members of an alien race. The villagers who discover them decide to baptize them. They instruct their adopted wards in their tongue and teach them native ways. The little girl proves a rapid learner, so that in time she differs nec in modico a nostri generis feminis discrepante, “not even in the slightest way from the women of our own race.” Although she carries with her the memory of a life once enjoyed in a dim and distant land, the terra sancti Martini [“land of St Martin”], after her transformation into quiet domesticity she never expresses sorrow at her loss. As an adult she eventually marries, settling in the decidedly non-magical city of Lynn. Her young brother, on the other hand, perishes shortly after his baptism. His green skin fading due to the influence of English food, his tongue just learning to wrap itself around English words, he nonetheless carries an otherness within him that seems incapable of transformation. A foreigner who retains his strangeness, the little boy dies prematurely (brevi vivens tempore immatura morte decessit).

                                                                                    Thus anyone
            Needs sixteen pounds of lightness to ever budge. Such compliance
            Demands levitation ...

Each application coats with some sheen ...

Is all removal archaeology, then?

[In the far recesses of the yard a dog glitters, frozen
to the trees.]

                Under cover of night
                the Platonic Ideas
                have let down their rope ladder
                and stolen back
                one of their children

                I lie in bed
                trying to reclaim it,
                thinking I shall have to put signs
                in my kitchen

tea pot
oven mitt

bee bay
yee hah

                                    jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
                                    großiga m’pfa habla horem
                                    egiga goramen
                                    higo bloiko russula huju
                                    hollaka hollala
                                    anlogo bung
                                    blago bung blago bung
                                    bosso fataka
                                    ü üü ü

“In Chinese, too, there are no definite articles.” I’m not sure if there is an explanation for my mother’s misuse or lack of on. Sometimes I have no idea which is better to use: on or in. Place your hope on. Place your hope in. When I search online, most of the sites that appear in the results have to do with passages from the Bible. Place your hope in God. On God. I imagine God, sitting in heaven, weighed down by all the shit people have and continue to place on him. Her. Him. Her. Tell me what you know about dismemberment. What would you say if you could? On my first trip, I loaded up on meatballs, mashed potatoes, ham, rice pudding, chocolate cake, cookies, more potatoes, and salmon, cooked all the ways. I plopped on various sauces, careful not to spill any on my clothing because my friend Matt (also a lapsed Catholic) and I had decided to wear our Sunday's best. I put on a green blazer. He wore a yellow jacket with a purple tie. In addition to all the food, there were more drinks to choose from than ways to fuck up your Billy Bookcase — a variety of sparkling waters like “lingonberry” and “elderflower.” The three course, all-you-can-eat meal was $16.99, or just $12.99 as a member of IKEA Family. Easter’s just one of four of IKEA’s annual festivals; it has one for each season, including a similar smorgasbord for the longest day of the year in the middle of the summer, a crayfish barbecue in the fall, and of course, a Christmas-themed feast in the winter. These dinners are a way “to introduce Swedish culture to the American public,” Peter Ho told me over the phone. As IKEA’s food product developer in the US, Ho said he eats in an IKEA cafeteria every day: “For the spring, we're going to have the veggie balls paired with a Thai coconut curry sauce!we're going to

                                    schampa wulla wussa olobo
                                    hej tatta gorem
                                    eschige zunbada
                                    wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
                                    –umf
                                    kusa gauma
                                    ba–umf!”

So what would animals say if we asked the right questions? I always knew the house was on fire. I’m injecting you with sadness, the deadliest syringe. Or, rather, I’m being swallowed by an avalanche of undercooked hamburger meat. I am in the pinkest part of it and try the spitting method to find out which way is up. I think I see a light in the distance. Tho it might very easily be a lump of fat. O saint ranglehold. O saint reat. O saint agnes.

            “Hamburger!”
            “Hamburger!”
            “Hamburger!”

For lack of a better way to describe the situation — and I am quoting some long-lost love poem, and so I am.

[Note: Sources: Qin Xiaoyu, “Introduction: remembering the Anonymous”, in Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (ed. Qin Xiaouyu, tr. Eleanor Goodman); JBR; Qin Xiaoyu, “Introduction: remembering the Anonymous”, in Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (ed. Qin Xiaouyu, tr. Eleanor Goodman); JBR; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 30 / On The Refusal of Spite”, at Abandoned Buildings, 14 Apr 017 (“extensive rewrite of” 23 Feb 017 version); Jennifer Karmin, “Handful”, in aaaaaaaaalice; JBR; Phil Davenport, “A very important question”, at Arthur + Martha, 14 Apr 017; JBR; Jennifer Karmin, “Handful”, in aaaaaaaaalice; George Kalamaras, “The Hands of Drawn Space”, in Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof; JBR; Zack Haber, “from HORRIBLE PLACES”, at Armed Cell 12; Lisa Robertson, “‘Proverbs of a She-Dandy’, 2017”, at Buenos Tiempos, Int., 13 Apr 017; JBR; David Cameron, Flowers of Bad, quoted in Alexander Dickow’s review of same at Galatea Resurrects 6; David Cameron, “Le chat”, at Flowers of Bad; Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth; Katy Bohinc, “The Twelfth House: Art and the Unconscious”, at Tender Buttons, 25 Sept 016; JBR; Alice Notley, “I Went Down There”, at Trickhouse 12; JBR; Michael D Snediker, “26| Pick Up the Nearest Book to You, Turn to Page 45. The Second Sentence Explains Your Love Life”, at Upstart; James Mensch, review of Raoul Moati, Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity (tr. Daniel Wyche), at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 9 Apr 017; Michael D Snediker, “The Apartment of Tragic Appliances”, in The Apartment of Tragic Appliances; Jenny Lawson, “Please force me to be less terrible”, at The Bloggess, 12 Apr 017; JBR; Jennifer Karmin, “Handful”, in aaaaaaaaalice; JBR; John Yau, “Steve Keister’s Cargo Cult of One”, at Hyperallergic, 16 Apr 017; JBR; Iztli Ehekatl, “Ometeotl, the God that Didn’t Exist”, at Mexika, 10 Aug 014; JBR; Justin Lieberman, “Corrected Proof”, in The Corrector’s Custom Pre-Fab House; Richard Haly, “The Pilgrim’s Poetics: from Economics to Epistemology and Back, Recounting the Making of a Place”, at Academia.edu; Robert Hullot-Kenter, “Thngs Beyond Resemblance”, in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno; Wayne Koestenbaum, quoted in “Wayne Koestenbaum with Bruce Hainley”, at Bidoun 8; JBR; Ingeborg Bachmann, “[That it was worse yesterday than today]”, in Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems (tr. Peter Filkins); JBR; Ingeborg Bachmann, “For C.E.”, in Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems (tr. Peter Filkins); JBR; Wayne Koestenbaum, and Bruce Hainley, quoted in “Wayne Koestenbaum with Bruce Hainley”, at Bidoun 8; JJ Cohen, “Stories of Blood 1: Real and Recent Blood”, at In the Middle, 16 Apr 017; Stacy Doris, “Under Fire”, in Knot; Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Xenia (trs. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova); Judy Kronenfeld, “Middle-Aged Memory”, in Disappeared Down Dark Wells and Still Falling; Jared Schickling, The Pink; JBR; Hugo Ball, “Karawane”, at Poets.org; Chen Chen, “Selections From a Small Book of Questions”, at Nat. Brut 8; Alex Norcia, “No One Celebrates the Resurrection of Christ Like IKEA”, at Vice, 16 Apr 017; JBR; Hugo Ball, “Karawane”, at Poets.org; JBR; Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions?; Alice Notley, “In the Pines”, “The Black Trailor”, in In the Pines; Sawako Nakayasu, “(.2.2003”, in Texture Notes; JBR; bpNichol, “Scraptures: 16^th Sequence”, in gifts: The Martyrology Book[s] 7&; Sawako Nakayasu, “(.2.2003”, in Texture Notes]

Posted at 09:11 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

14.04.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 46

It was just like in John Carpenter’s They Live, when Nada puts on a pair of sunglasses, and suddenly sees. He sees that many with authority and wealth are actually humanoid aliens with grotesque skull-like faces. He confronts an alien woman in a store and she notifies her associates. Some alien police officers try to get him, but he kills them, takes their guns, and goes on an alien-shooting-spree. It seems that Nada’s class consciousness is fully-formed as soon as the sunglasses reveal reality to him; minutes after ascertaining that his fellow species, eye eee proletarians, are being used vampirically by intergalactic capitalists, he is shooting them down in a bank. Which makes me think of Sean Bonney, for whom the poetic image can be a counterpanoptic which ‘gives an x-ray view into the infraviolence of capitalist reality. He suggests that when ‘Lautréamont sneers that his pen has made a boring Paris street like Rue Vivienne “mysterious” he means the poetic image has been transformed into a splinter of glass fixed into the centre of your eye, a glass through which we see the capitalist class as the lice and bedbugs they really are, and in like fashion, the proletariat become a swarm of red carnivorous ants.’ Poetry might function, at times, as a novum, a pair of sunglasses. I can hear you say, that’s all we need, another screen. I mean, we got a call this morning from the assisted living place. Kathy’s mom had fallen in the shower and had hit her head. And was on the way to emergency. We talked to her later; she was all right. But that was a stressor. It reminded me of something Pound wrote:

        “The blossoms of the apricot
        “blow from the east to the west,
        “And I have tried to keep them from falling.”

Which I find myself rewriting as

        “The other shoes
        “are dropping.
        “Whatever I do, every last one of them will drop.”

And it reminded me of something Sam Kriss wrote a couple days ago: “Donald Trump ordered his attack on Syria because of something he saw on TV.” And after a bunch of analysis or whatever he comes to: “Anything is permissible if it’ll just make this [the unending horror stream] go away.” Maybe I need to take a walk in the park later and look at trees ...

ABANDON
ABSORPTION
ABSURD
ACCIDENT
ACTION
ALEATORY
ANARCHY
ANGER
ANOMIE
Apathy
ARBITRARY
ATROPHY
ATTRACTION
ATTRITION
BARRAGE
CALMNESS
CATASTROPHE
CATHARSIS
CHANCE
CHAOS
COINCIDENCE
Collapse
COMPULSION
CONFUSION
CONSTRICTION
CONTAGION
CONTENTION
CONTINGENCY
CONTROL
CORRUPTION
COUNTER INFORMATION
CRISIS
DECEPTION
DEFECTION
DEFLAGRATION
DESTABILIZATION
DESTRUCTION
DISARRAY
DISARTICULATION
DISGRACE
DISINTEGRATION
DISORDER
DISPERSAL
DISRUPTION
DISSEMINATION
DISTORTION
ECSTASY
ELEMENTS
Enlightenment
ENTROPY
EQUATION
EROSION
EXCESS
EXPLOSION
FAILURE
FEAR
FERMENTATION
FISSION
FLUX
FLUXUS
FRICTION
FRUSTRATION
FUSION
GRACE
HARMONY
HEMORRHAGE
IMPASSE
IMPLOSION
INDETERMINATE
INERTIA
INTELLIGENCE
INTOLERANCE
LAUGHTER
LETHARGY
LOSS
MARASMUS
MEDIATION
MIMESIS
NEGOTIATION
NOISE
NORM
ORDER
OUTBURST
PATHOS
PAUSE
POWER
PRETENSE
PROCRASTINATION
QUIESCENCE
RANDOM
REACTION
REBELLION
RECOVERY
REPRESENTATION
REPULSION
RESILIENCE
RESISTANCE
REVERSION
REVOLUTION
RIDICULE
SABOTAGE
SCLEROSIS
SENSELESSNESS
SILENCE
SIMULACRUM
SIMULTANEITY
SPECTACLE
STAGNATION
STASIS
STRATEGY
SUBLIME
SUSPENSION
SYMBIOSIS
TACTICS
TERROR
TIME
TOLERANCE
TORPOR
TRANSFORMATION
TRANSGRESSION
TRAUMA
TRUCE
TURBULENCE
TURMOIL
UNCERTAINTY
UNCONTROLLED
VIOLENCE
WRATH

Did I tell you Du Yun won a Pulitzer Prize? It was for her Angel’s Bone, which tells the story of two fallen angels who are found in a middle-class couple’s garden, who nurture the wounded cherubs back to health only to force them into prostitution to earn their plucked feathers back. She was the vocalist and at some point she was crawling around on the stage. Go where? Back to “summer” of course, when they were young. Only now it’s covered with ants. They’re all watching war movies. I’m watching a war movie. I am going home to eat the poisoned cake. Which means I should buy more vegetables. Should eat more vegetables. Get healthy. Run probably. Take the fish hook out of my eye. “The cadaver is its own image. It no longer entertains any relation with this world where it still appears except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow ever present behind the living form, which now far from separating itself from this form transforms it entirely into shadow the corpse is a reflection becoming master of the life it reflects — absorbing it identifying substantively with it by moving it from its use value and from its truth value to something incredible — something neutral which there is no getting used to and if the cadaver is so similar it is because it is at a certain moment similarity par excellence altogether similarity and also nothing more it is the likeness like to an absolute degree overwhelming and marvelous but what is it like nothing.” I’m surprised to discover how much of it — it? — it — consists of shopping lists. Behind the counter was a picture of a beautiful gate, trees pouring out behind it. I asked the cashier, what is that a photograph of? He said a name I didn’t catch. It’s a park, he said, in Baghdad. It isn’t there anymore. Every four or five years, though, some sort of environmental trigger caused the frogs to multiply into what sounded like millions of individual voices screeching around the pond. The cycle would start the same: from a dead silence, three or four croaks would call out from around the shore in rhythm. Then a hundred or more would answer, both within the rhythm and breaking up the rhythm, and then thousands upon thousands more would answer that call, until there was this undulating wave of noise that blocked out anything else your senses could hear. For just about a minute. Then it would be completely still for another minute, then they’d start up again. Sometimes I would get out of bed, get into my rain gear, grab a flashlight, walk-slide down the trail to the pond, get myself under a little tarp, turn on the flashlight, wait for the noise, and, using a small notepad, still half asleep, try to make sense of what the frogs were saying and write it down.

You’re the American from the television, right?

I was. I had appeared earlier that week on the country’s morning program for an interview about my work there, complete with a musical act as intermission. It had since been re-aired several times.

What do you think of Caetano da Costa Alegre?

Honestly? I don’t know his work well. But I did get his collected poems while I was here, and I look forward to reading him.

He died very young. He seemed to be contrasting the poet’s youth with his own old age.

How old? Was he in his forties?

No, younger. Twenties.

Wow. Younger than Miguel Hernández.

How old are you?

Thirty.

Young. Do you know Langston Hughes?

His work? Yes. He is a great poet. We need him now.

Do you still read Du Bois in America?

Not enough.

You should. Do.

The variety of Ted Joans’ works included here is startling. In Part I, the key text is the film script Negative Cowboy, a Western with heroes like Black Mollie: She is about to attack the Wells Fargo stage again ... Down the hill she comes like a black bat out of hell (in fact here in color should be a picture of a bat out of hell). In another moment we glimpse Hemingway’s suicide after an implicit indictment of his hunting in Africa, home to Joans’s spirit animal, the rhinoceros. Later, a band of American frontier soldiers plays big band music while Native American warriors pick off the whites one by one. When a quartet of black musicians is left, the war party drags some corpses over for makeshift benches; they big band music is now post-bop jazz. In this context, March 7^th saw a protest against Granite Construction, whose headquarters are in Watsonville. Granite has bid on the Trump Border Wall; it is also a large employer in a Latino and immigrant majority city. The very next day was International Women’s Day.

And there it is

There it is

Therefore I put it this way: when all the motes have crashed onto shores & people millions and hundreds of times, 53 or 533 or 5,333 typed pages each (imagine the SPACES!) ALL PERCENTS EXCEEDING THE HUNDREDTH SHALL MERGE W/O WASTE every equation has to be suffered in experience, yes, & from my time in study & time in libraries I took these precious words This is EXCRUSIATING & as Ali put it the void is grounded in the free, which is fine as far as it goes, IF there is a void, which is DOUBTFUL, given all that quantum SHIT happening, which might leave you wondering what free means, but still, there’s a shopping cart shoved up against the bushes at the end of the walk by the apartment building. Do you remember the aura that surrounded every object? We joked and called it, “air milk.” The nimbus crackled, split, upset the arch. I’m dumbfounded! How can my part hold up my whole when my earth cannot bear the load of my part? This morning I was on the floor for a half hour because of a nosebleed, which is what led the first Cro Magnon artist to bring a flame into a cave, the quietness of a manhole cover cannot compare with the wild vapours of nylon I sense in your throat. So, quickly, Mayan time worked in increments of 13. Which is why Elsa can’t tell the difference between the chocolate stains and the period stains on her sheets. Tumors in the sky, tumors in the river. I spent time in this town as a ghost. Look I am King Of The Forest / Says The King Of The Forest, “With the smell of jasmine my anger wanes.” We begin to feel the force of Simone Weil’s judgment. But I’m starting to think that the dark days are over, and we can finally embrace the Ugg for what it is: an intensely comfortable shoe that back in the day made lots of sense. I love E*TRADE, is there still such a thing? I’m jumbled, a little claustrophobic, it’s about Hollywood, but not TMZ. Would you like crispy or original recipe? Everyone’s shit stinks you know. You don’t necessarily smell your own until that day on the freeway. I love your eyes, but only with ketchup. Or soy sauce. Your cylidrical [no, not cylindrical, cylidrical] reasoning implores me to generalize. I mean, I feel as tho I must pay back life for the sins I commit against it aboard those goddam submarines. This line is that act. THE WORK IS CALLED HOLE IN SPACE and uh … and um ………… what they did is uh ………… I do have one or two notes …………………… uhm …………………… they, um, via satellite, uh …………… so, ok …………………… plate glass windows, in, um, Lincoln Center, in New York, and in Los Angeles, California, and the Broadway uh, uh, um the Broadway sho–, uh, store, in, um, the Century City mall, and they did this, uh, three nights in a row, um, for two hours each night. And then: a shadow that can’t be seen. I’d forgotten this was about to happen when, at noon yesterday, I found myself on a career trajectory with three men dressed in black dresses down to the ground, their faces painted black and a red and silver trim to their makeshift veils. The three men were suddenly there, in front of me, and they caught me. I caught them. Since I was a little girl, I have always been a magnet for Kali worshippers. I don’t know who the men were. What the black and red meant. They may have been Shiva mendicants. Not walking straight. Tantrics. What are you doing? Catching airplanes. Around page 290 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between “assemblage haecceities (a body considered only as a longitude and a latitude)” such as a mountain, a marble, or a marmot, and “interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becoming” such as the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life, a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack, etc. “There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise,” adds Badiou, popping a biscuit in his mouth. Below this sixth-floor apartment, an RER train screeches along the rails out of Denfert-Rochereau.

        Although the weak bond continues to create surface tension
        The doll is a hydrocarbon with a bikini wax
        The peaceable kingdom is a scene by Casper David Friedrich.

Ah, a pastoral poem. But later, “pings confirm paths”, and, perhaps, “drumheads being damped” as well. The specialist concluded that the boulder’s elf inhabitants were content with the move. But they asked whether the boulder could stand on grass. I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass. ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied. The specialist also said that the elves wish for the boulder’s “window side” to face the view. Oh look at that isn’t that lovely you know I didn’t think there were hummingbirds in this part of OH MY GOD ITS A FUCKING DRONE GET DOWN kill it kill it kill it in the where of what the centaur cannot fold. So it’s hard to choose from Café Gratitude’s extensive menu, but finally I settle for “I Am Fulfilled,” a jumbo salad with hemp seed ranch dressing. Tariq gets “I Am Bighearted,” a flaxseed shell filled with guacamole, cashew ricotta, brazil nut parmesan, salsa and mixed greens. To drink, he orders “I Am Wonderful,” a combination of watermelon juice, lemon and mint. He tells me about this woman scientist who turned off the aging gene in some earthworms and they lived six times their normal lifespan. When I eventually look up the article, I learn it wasn’t earthworms, but tiny translucent roundworms, which make good experimental subjects because you can see their guts. Apparently they lived for 125 days, “wriggling happily in their gel.” Which brings to mind those lines from Horace:

My germ is big

and

Rat pows penguin

and

Rasta beef pyramid

Shaman, even the potato will not remain. SETTING KEEL AT BREAKERS, it does some sort of back flip. What should be overcome should not be considered “law.” No sooner started than exhausted. Yackety. As textbooks now accept taxa first constituted by phone. But now, Mahasweta-di, I want you to forget all our discussions and to put yourself back in the frame of mind, take your time and think about it, more than twenty years ago, in the frame of mind where you wanted to write, you said that you wrote in a frenzy, you wrote in seven days, what was it that you wanted to do and what was it that you felt you had done? I was entranced. They climbed on to the top of the bus. Archery was very much in their blood. And in Hesalong market I saw this fantastic archery competition, for which an old Munda was brought as judge. He sat on the platform. It was a time honoured tradition that at the end, being the best archer of the area, he would shoot last and hit the target. All these things get stored in the brain somewhere — forty seconds later, the main hold filled with light. Internal comms tanked. Up in the control room, error signals jammed the boards. “Accept!” Liv Hula told the pilot connexion. Nothing. She stuffed the wires into her mouth by hand. “Akphept!” Too late. Liv was snatched out of herself and began some long, identityless transit. When she returned, the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. “Antoyne? Hello?” No one responded. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control room screens — a kind of luminous darkness. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order. “Jesus, Antoyne,” she said. “What are you fucking around with now?” The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine? The Lobster God? This is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units {substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized {substances). Etc. etc. “The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed.” Etc. etc. All this activity involves hundreds of chemical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small compounds, a few dozen at most. Etc. etc. The Dogon? Etc. etc. And things would presently get worse.

        All I see so far is a kind of turning upside down
        motion. Now I see the beginning of the best kind of blue
        but it dissolves, it dissolves into it’s not a center
        but when I say it’s a center it becomes a center of blue
                                                                    with the
        blue is getting clearer & larger now the blue’s more suffusive
        pervasive now I’m asking the red to come ... I found it
                                                                    you can
        only see the brilliant red at certain times ...

Did the man from the government say: “A 35⁰U-turned must be
learned before ordering yams”?

        Take a seat, he
        says, pray
        be seated, and I

pretend to be so ...

Now our less philosophical readers are invited once again
up to the bases in the shoulder blades

So what exactly is Ultra-Sweet Pignectar?

[Note: Sources: JBR; Robert Kiely, “Poetry as a Pair of Sunglasses”, at Mute, 4 Dec 012; JBR; Ezra Pound, “Canto XIII”, in The Cantos; JBR; Sam Kriss, “First we take Damascus”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 8 Apr 017; JBR; Sam Kriss, “First we take Damascus”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 8 Apr 017; JBR; Francis Alÿs, In a Given Situation / Numa Dada Situaçāo; JBR; Du Yun, “Works List”, at Channel Du Yun; Frank J Oteri, “Du Yun: No Safety Net”, at New Music Box, 17 Sept 014; Johannes Göransson, “Celebratory & Orgiastic Barrage of Smut”, at Harriet, 10 Apr 017;Brandon Downing, “Rain Language”, at Harriet, 11 Apr 017; David Shook, “São Tomé Notebook”, at Harriet, 7 Apr 017; David Lau, “Poetry Is in the Streets”, at Harriet, 5 Apr 017; JBR, an abridged and modified version of In the House of the Hangman 959-961, at Galatea Resurrects 18; JBR; Dodie Bellamy, “What Are We Fighting For?”, in Academonia; JBR; Horace, Odes IV / 5 (tr. Tim Atkins), in Horace: Poems; Gennady Aygi, “The Shaman and the Potato”, in Into the Snow: Harvey Joseph and Lindsay James, Sea Adventures, or, Pond Life; Gennady Aygi, “A Few Notes on Poetry”, in Into the Snow: Selected Poems (tr. Sarah Valentine); Robert Kocik, “Remissions”, in Rhrurbarb; JBR; Chotti Munda and His Arrow (tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); M John Harrison, Empty Space, quoted in “blueprint grey on grey”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 11 Apr 017; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (tr. Brian Massumi); Bernadette Mayer, “Dream Tape”, “Questioning Mark”, in Ethics of Sleep; Paul Klee, “Dream”, in Some Poems by Paul Klee (tr. Anselm Hollo); Justin Katko, “On Being Ammunition”, in Songs for One Occasion; JBR, but see Rob Kovitz, Pig City Model Farm]

Posted at 08:29 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

10.04.2017

“you sometimes feel fulfilled and self-actualized while starving and lonely, or have a sense of belonging while feeling unsafe” (Rob Kiely) [Click to enlarge, please. I wish I knew the artist's name]

Posted at 10:02 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sam Kriss: "First We Take Damascus" ... [which I think of under a different rubric: "Make It Stop!"] (reposted from Idiot Joy Showland)

Donald Trump ordered his attack on Syria because of something he saw on TV. The world is full of people like him: old, shabby, pompous; people who know everything because they learned it all from somewhere, people who function as exit nodes for the vast extraorganic network of information that chatters across oceans and ping-pongs through outer space, people who form the anuses of the system of images, excreting their content back into the world of things, people who repeat everything they see on TV. Every suburban bus stop shelters a Donald Trump, some smugly witless man of the world who knows what he knows and knows it better than you, some tyrant-in-waiting ready at any moment to vomit up the whole of the received wisdom in one splattering stream, and then act like they’re in possession of some special knowledge because they’re able to do so. The only difference is that when Donald Trump blathers from the TV, the TV takes notice: he repeats what it says, it repeats what he says. Donald Trump is the network whorling in on itself; the system of careful mediation finally splayed out in the mud, legs out, back twisted, licking its own arsehole.

The media was kind to Trump’s attack on Syria. Every pompous outlet that has spent the last five months screaming incessantly about the threat to democracy, the inevitable deaths and the terror of wars, had nothing but applause as soon as the wars and the deaths actually got going. A fleshy and dangerous idiot, a vulgarian, an imbecile – until those first perfect screaming shots of Tomahawk missiles being fired were broadcast – that’s our guy, you show them Donny! This is when, as Fareed Zakaria put it on CNN, Trump ‘became the president.’ And he really is presidential now, because the president is a totemic war-chief, the bloated repository of every male fantasy that had to be repressed, someone whose only job is to look like they could kill a hundred people in the morning and pose for a photoshoot with their dogs in the afternoon. Never mind the deaths or the uncertain repercussions; Trump’s strike was utterly squalid and utterly ignoble, some fattened toddler idly shitting out molten steel into the parched graveyard that used to be Syria, saving nobody, helping nobody, thoughtless and obscene. Kill a few of their guys, teach them a lesson, it’s common sense. And all the sophisticates and strategists applaud – stricken by half-hearted guilt, of course; after all, you still wouldn’t want to have the man round for dinner. They write their long justificatory exegeses on the timeliness of the act, bringing out every little rhetorical trick of the educated ruling classes, because all their moral angst is also from comic books, and cinema, and TV.

On NBC, Brian Williamss, ranting himself into ecstasy, quoted Leonard Cohen: I am guided by the beauty of our weapons. What weapons guide? Cohen wasn’t singing about clubs or spears or missiles, but ideology, culture, and fame. Mediation. Whether he knew it or not, what Brian Williams was saying had nothing to do with the spotlit plumes of white smoke rising from the US Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. The beautiful weapon was himself. the beautiful weapon was TV.

Beyond the fiddly cloisters of the media intellectuals, why do Americans love their wars so much? Because war is the only workable substitute for being able to turn off the TV. Wars happen for the same grim and venal reasons that have always made the rich massacre the poor, but every other weapon is now subordinated to the screens, the nightly news and the outrage on Twitter. The media transmits the relentless horror of the world, sliced up into edible segments: here’s a problem, here’s a tragedy, here’s an atrocity, here’s something else. Chemical weapons, starvation, murder, war. All of it is shrink-wrapped and isolated; you can never really find out why this is happening, no more than you could really learn the long sad stories behind every neatly packaged item on the supermarket shelves. They don’t even need to lie, although they do that too; the propaganda is in the medium itself. And the ethical response to all this diffuse suffering, charging at your face out of nowhere, is no longer why is this happening? but we have to make it stop. Anything is permissible if it’ll just make this go away. There’s no better example than the 2000 film Rules of Engagement: our heroic Marines are called in to defend the US Embassy in Yemen from an angry crowd outside, and all the time they’re there we can constantly hear their endless and repetitive chants, and the camera flashes between shots to glimpses of furious mouths with terrible third-world teeth, furious, inhuman, a slow torture, until the good patriotic viewer is begging our heroes to just shut them up. After the Marines fire into the crowd, there’s a moment of perfect silence. Bliss.

The attack on Syria will not make its war go away. Every primly disgusted apologia for the attack is a travesty. So Assad should be able to use chemical weapons with impunity? So we should do nothing? See how that we slips in there, almost unnoticed. Is this the same we that killed 56 Syrian civilians in Manbij last year, and then 46 in rural Aleppo, and then nearly 300 innocent Iraqis in Mosul? The we that turned the Korean peninsula into rubble and carnage because the people there wanted a better life, and then Indochina, and then the Middle East; the one that’s currently engaged in starving millions in Yemen? What happened to Libya, after we were told we had a responsibility to save the civilians there too? This isn’t ‘whataboutery,’ but a simple question: when judgement and punishment are carried out by the same people, who gets to judge? If the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun then it is monstrous, cynical, and murderous – but the ability to punish monstrous states seems to belong only to the most powerful; in other words, the most monstrous, the most cynical, and the most violent. But all it needs is a we – a word reaching through the screen to swaddle you up in it – for the great roving predator of the world, dripping with blood from every pore, to become something else: the international community, the ones who must intervene, to protect the children.

The next attack won’t stop the war in Syria either, or the next one. That’s not what these things are for. The response from the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges was instructive. Bomb Assad, he said, and then bomb Isis. And when that leaves what was once a functioning society in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham? ‘Then we go and get them too.’ After all, if every Syrian is dead, then the war is finally over. Their suffering is immense, but it’s not their suffering that matters: it’s the suffering of the viewer, at home, heartbroken as they watch the carnage playing out onscreen. It doesn’t matter who does it, and it doesn’t matter how it’s done, but we need to turn it off forever.

Posted at 09:12 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 45

Sarin is classified as a nerve agent. Nerve agents are the most toxic and rapidly acting of the known chemical warfare agents. They are similar to certain kinds of insecticides (insect killers) called organophosphates in terms of how they work and what kind of harmful effects they cause. However, nerve agents are much more potent than organophosphate pesticides. All nerve agents cause their toxic effects by preventing the proper operation of an enzyme that acts as the body’s “off switch” for glands and muscles. Without an “off switch,” the glands and muscles are constantly being stimulated. Exposed people may become tired and no longer be able to keep breathing. People exposed to a low or moderate dose of sarin by breathing contaminated air, eating contaminated food, drinking contaminated water, or touching contaminated surfaces may experience some or all of the following symptoms within seconds to hours of exposure:

Runny nose
Watery eyes
Small, pinpoint pupils
Eye pain
Blurred vision
Drooling and excessive sweating
Cough
Chest tightness
Rapid breathing
Diarrhea
Nausea, vomiting, and/or abdominal pain
Increased urination
Confusion
Drowsiness
Weakness
Headache
Slow or fast heart rate
Low or high blood pressure

Exposure to large doses of sarin by any route may result in the following harmful health effects:

Loss of consciousness
Convulsions
Paralysis
Respiratory failure possibly leading to death

Which is to say that at 4:20am on April 5^th the Phoenix received a call from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome, informing the crew of a vessel in distress. The Phoenix headed to its reported location, and visually sighted the vessel, a rubber dinghy carrying around 130 people. The rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB) was immediately deployed to begin handing out lifejackets, and by 8am everyone on board the dinghy had been safely transferred to the ship. Meanwhile, the aerial asset had sighted a wooden vessel, informing the Phoenix crew and the MRCC. Upon sighting the vessel, the Phoenix deployed a RHIB, and by 9am a further 70 people had been brought to safety. The Phoenix crew then spotted a further three vessels and informed the MRCC, which assigned other civil society assets in the area to assist two of the vessels. The Phoenix proceeded to assist the third, and by 12pm had brought a further 103 people on board. The Phoenix SAR crew continued to assist other SAR assets in the area in transferring people to safety, finally finishing operations at 3:30pm. The Phoenix then headed north with a total of 320 people on board, with people hailing from Guinea, Pakistan, Syria and Senegal, among them 71 minors and 11 women. Later we encounter Omaha Indians, Batman, Martin Luther King, Jr., a camel, Leonardo’s bats, the sun god Ra, “The Sun is a Deaf Star; the Sun Eats Its Children”

A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun

A privileged yellow sun trembles over Mexico, changes to a green sun creeping like boats along the arm. But is that it? Somehow I’m not comfortable leaving it at that. Then I realize why. Is that Nietzsche sitting on what appears to be the corpse of a horse? As Béla Tarr tells the story at the beginning of his film The Turin Horse, “In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche [...] puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.” But we can be pretty sure that Nietzsche never sat on it ... This last is not a rhetorical device, because Dworkin never does go on to figure out why Smith’s book is not called Rat. I’m not asserting here that I have mastered the nuances of erasedness, or even of this particular collection of erasednesses. Quite the opposite. But I am asserting that a crashing palm tree is alive insofar as it can grow. Ditto the startled monkey’s jump to a higher perch. What else might it mean to be a bodhisattva? In 1993 or so, MCA Records (as Vivendi-Universal Music was then known) and the Muddy Waters estate sent me to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to oversee transfers of Muddy’s Complete 1942 Plantation Recordings from their original media, 16-inch lacquer discs. I brought my guitar which I tuned, and then adjusted the speed of the turntable so that the pitch of Muddy’s guitar recorded on the first disc being transferred matched that of my own. When I was satisfied I had the proper speed, we transferred the disc, and when it came almost to the end, we heard the recording engineer step up to the mike, strike a tuning fork, and exclaim “A440!” When we re-pitched the turntable to the default, 33 1/3 rpm, the tuning fork was heard in tune at A = 440. The lesson I learned that day: The old school, country bluesmen and women didn’t necessarily tune their guitar when they recorded, especially when they weren’t playing with a pianist. So before Stephen LaVere arrived at my studio in late 2010 with his cargo of precious Robert Johnson 78s, I did a little research on some contemporary San Antonio recordings that featured a jazz band with a piano I assume was tuned to A440. I have three of the four 78s Don Albert and his orchestra recorded for Vocalion on Wednesday, November 18, 1936, five days before Robert Johnson recorded for the label on what was surely the same equipment. The six sides I had by Don Albert were master numbers SA 2520-1, 2521-1, 2522-1, 2524-2, 2525-1 and 2526-1, and when the piano on these sides matched the pitch of my tuned guitar, I found my turntable had been adjusted to the following values, expressed as a percentage difference from the standard speed of 78.26: -0.4, +0.7, +0.9, +0.8, +1.1, +0.7. I excluded the high and low values, and took the average of the four that remained, which turned out to be +0.8%. So when LaVere arrived, I suggested we start listening at +0.8%, or 78.89 rpm. LaVere and I agreed that the voice and guitar both sounded natural at this speed, and as I recall we transferred most of the San Antonio recordings at this speed except for the two takes of Phonograph Blues which were transferred at a very slightly different speed. When we transferred the Dallas recordings, we picked a different speed that sounded right to us both and consistent with the San Antonio recordings. The Dallas recordings had considerable 60/120 Hz hum which Seth Winner later notched out with EQ, but not before measuring the hum as accurately as he could. As I recall, he found the hum at between 120 and 121 Hz. As Seth says: “The hum doesn't lie!” The frequency of the hum was, of course, determined by the frequency of the AC, which in the U.S. and Canada was a constant 60 cycles. So yes, the 750,000 Euros that one of Hirst’s pieces sold for is a complex art object, with many dimensions of dread and bloodshed, and nicely printed. Which is to say that the art world of which he is a sort of master example no longer produces anything as interesting as the prices that are paid for the pieces circulating within it. But when was anything ever as interesting as exchange value?

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end ...

This is when Atwood’s version gets interesting. Felix changes his name to “Mr. Duke” and takes a job teaching in the literacy program at a local prison, where he stages a production of The Tempest with prisoners as actors. He invites Tony to see the play, along with Sal O’Nally and Sal’s son Freddie. Once they are inside he embroils them in a complicated plot of trickery and blackmail, all conducted within his production. The spirit Ariel is played by a hacker named 8Handz, who runs the closed-circuit cameras and supplies hallucinogens; Ferdinand is played by a conman who did well on the outside selling fake life insurance to old people. It is all so neat, this play within a play within a novel. As in Dryden and Davenant’s 17^th-century rewriting, the whole is built upon a careful stack of doubles and equivalences. In the novel, the character of Tony clearly suggests Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother; and within the play inside the prison, the role of Antonio is also played by an Italian American inmate nicknamed SnakeEye. Miranda is both Felix’s ghostly daughter, and a young actress he brings into the prison named Anne-Marie. More abstractly, 8Handz / Ariel is doubled in the technologies of surveillance so central to the plot, while in the widest doubling of all, the island is both Felix’s bunker outside town and the prison where the revenge plot is carried out. And yet one character exists only within the play performed inside the prison, and not in the wider world of the novel: Caliban. Discovered in 1964 by Tony Conrad, while he played the bells at Saint Thomas Church next to the Museum of Modern Art, his Strumming Music is legendary. A fifty-minute work for solo piano, it’s one of two recordings he released before disappearing from the world of music for decades, the other being the equally legendary Four Manifestations on Six Elements. Which is why the surface collects the rust from the earth to exteriorize the wound of the first animal color. The night follows beyond what might restart the sand detection of the Sea. Someone detaches the sky's knotted hoops to remove the ear that unravels the disconnections. The disappearing processor draws eggs into the surface of a black kite with those feelings made for the light as it links the animals back to the ferns. As the chorus continues, becoming softer and softer, i steps forward and addresses the audience.

You can see the problem. Even belief takes money. Otherwise your belief in belief fades. But how do you ask for it without seeming ... hypocritical? So ... (i gestures at the chorus) ... we try to offer a little entertainment, a little instruction, in return for your hard-earned coin. We share the same difficulty after all.

a reader:
(shouts from the chorus)

Tell ‘em where we’re going.

i:
(flustered)

Ah ... yes. We’re off to visit the tomb of St. Valentine. To spend our days in praise and to die and be buried next to him.

david:

A holy pilgrimage.

i removes i’s hat again, and places it at the very front of the playing area.

And of course we need your assistance.

There is little or no response from the audience.

i:
(looking around sadly)

We have been on the road a long time now.

[...]

chorus:

a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life
a life

Alma dreaming takes out or puts in syringe. place your medal on your hat and let it clang on your head. delete, delete, change, delete. hu hu. the house is on fire on the steep steep hill. that too he says. hu hu. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. So let’s look closely at the content in tabular form. You need, say, nine locations, nine buildings, nine objects, nine letters and nine miracles. Ideally, you need one man, but the discipline required for that is extremely taxing, so the men change and multiply really quite quickly. Assemble the grid, and simply write in the elements as they appear. The holes — they might seem uniform at first. But concrete is triumphant in dereliction. Foliage is not a garnish, it’s a fully functional integrated element. Tears, are a garnish. Hair is. A stinking, leathery old fish-head on a windowsill is. It comes from undyed wool. That’s its personality here in the table. Nothing about war or clouds, but yes, something monumental, hidden, a monumentality that whirs like the deafening drone of tropical insects: a thicket of trees grown up through rotted human flesh, a dripping cave behind a thick veil of creepers, the weight of lead. Is it exploitation like the old “mondo” movies? There seems to be no conclusion drawn and there is something almost ambivalent about it all. The walls and windows are exposed to background radiation. The skin holds together the gristly fat. What? Why? State formations that want to maintain their strategic autonomy and their political superiority have no choice but to maintain their spasms, their poetry and sexuality and phantom pains. DNA bonanza contaminant reverie, target overhead. Flock to revelator gridded up to have no stake in history. See that their grave is kept clean. Zero immunity. Cology — hyperplex mini flair, underalphabetic biodebt. Sssay. I couldn’t remember the advanced memory formula. Dunno ergo soma. Autoquadrilateral & exogeneric, the transparencies regroup. Law intuition anything uncocked reason craters. Eco rad mono dead with note attached, incalculably inorganic property of the object continuity you just heard — ahysterical — “To speak an ecstatic technology.” Faster buckle conjure against choice as surrogate overheating extinction as obliteratable chew. Put tools in your face. Overdifferent logistics: a porous will, a rectal will suckling finality. Mutate epithet or no ending belowgistics. You think about a lot of things when you’re insoluble. Reptility: turn gold into cash. Whatever. The furniture changes places every night. Each morning they break your arms. They tell you it is fatal. They tell you it will help you breathe better. You lie down in some kind of stupor singing Beethoven to yourself. The men in the moon didn’t think about Beethoven. They said to each other, do you love me. There are no answers to questions like that. There are stains on all of your clothes. You lie in bed and wonder about the men on the moon, and if they are still there. You walk around the town, thinking about the differences between anarchism, epilepsy, addiction, psychosis, the dialectic, various syndromes and panic attacks. I am losing weight. I don’t care. When people tell me I am losing weight I say so what the sun, the sun too is losing weight. It is the law of the cosmos. I actually do say that. After I say it I start to cry. I think about the wind and the insects that live there. I am not in analysis. I would rather be like the insects who live in the wind and do something remarkable with silk but instead I am crying in a stranger’s arms and they would really rather I would stop and because I know that I hate them which sets up a very boring circle which has little to do with the magnificent silk made by the laughter of insects. The ancient poems known to all of us. The ancient poems that could kill us if they wanted. I fall asleep in the bar. The anger of snails? Is it perceptible? Are there instances of it? Are these instances of it? The expression of their anger becomes brilliant when it dries. But it also leaves a track easily spotted by predators. I here come to one of the main points of their lesson. But then the catwalk forked. Lian nudged me right. After a few meters I closed my eyes experimentally, found myself just the tiniest bit uncertain where down was. The Glade passes right over the Higgs conduit, between the core that contains our singularity and the maw where its wormhole emerges. Which is why, for seven hours, I lay down on the floor and sound each chakra, one chakra for every hour. After each hour, the assistant helps me get up from floor. Need sound system, reverb, a projected video of newscast for 7 hours. Fauré’s Requiem plays for 7 or 3 hours. People are given flower petals and they place them on my body. I am sitting in a 14-foot lift. I wave to people as they enter, or I drop flower petals on them. I draw people’s portraits with my non-dominant hand. Linda as Mother in lift or not, singing Linda Ronstadt songs for --------------- hours. Mother Teresa sits on a chair. Projected CHICKEN VIDEO for duration. They get a Holy Water Blessing at the end. And then some stuff about pouring bitumen through giant circulatory systems and then burning off the tissue with lasers. It was just a brief reference, a single word. Subvive. We can forget about ‘surviving’. It will be wonderful if we can manage to subvive given all that is stacked against us. This is indeed done very convincingly including a funny reflection concerning the theoretical fixation of European thinkers on Greek words. It begins, literally, with handwriting on the wall: an anonymous pamphleteer has nailed a piece of paper on the door of the Cathedral apocryphally signed by El Supremo, in which the Perpetual Dictator orders that ‘on the occasion of my death my corpse be decapitated, my head placed on a pike for three days’. The people are to be summoned by church bells to see El Supremo’s head and all his civil and military servants are to be hanged at once. The dictator demands that the author of the libel be found (he never is). No matter. His secretary writes down everything he says. El Supremo corrects him, talks to the dog Sultan, writes down his own secrets in a private notebook which is really (a nice Dickensian touch) ‘an outsized ledger ...’ So says the compiler, who annotates the book throughout, creating a kind of second or ghostly text, parallel to, sometimes in opposition to, sometimes supportive of, El Supremo’s own ruminations. The complier also adds official documents, a log-book, snippets of memoirs from people who knew the man, cullings from biographies (including one by Carlyle), diplomatic dispatches ... and then there are the precise and illuminating footnotes provided by Ms Lane for the translation (adding yet another scriptural level), and the responses of schoolchildren it all? ‘The Supreme Dictator is a thousand years old like God and has shoes with gold buckles,’ answers Liberta Patricia Nunes, age 12. Poised between Voltaire and a cacique who can sneeze three times and become invisible, the Eternal Dictator has to improvise: ‘The problems of political meteorology were resolved once and for all in less than a week by firing-squads.’ Have I mentioned the political prisoner he meets in his youth, condemned to row for ever, stopping only at pre-assigned posts for food? ‘He’s nothing but a great shock of hair with a pigtail more than ten feet long that trails in the current ...’. Or the three acolytes who carry lighted tapers that the rain and wind cannot blow out? Or the old cacique whose woven hat helps him avoid the white leprosy spread by the moon? Which reminds me, while I was

        waiting by the Seine to meet
        you in front of Notre Dame a man
        started talking to me right after
        the seagull shit on my coat & I was
        getting ready to leave
                Alexi was his name
            He told me that he was half-French,
        half-African American, a little Indian too.
        I told him I was Chinese & Sicilian, that I
        study African American history
                He told me he was reading Ta-
        Nehisi Coates’s Between the World & Me
        & mentioned the part about Coates’s
        holiday in Paris. Said he was
        vegetarian. I said, moi aussi.

I imagined Douglas Oliver standing behind me and to the right. Where he in turn imagined the deer standing. Who stands behind the deer? And whenever anyone turns to look it all blinks and ... anyhow, I think I bought Three Variations on the Theme of Harm around then, also from Compendium, and was knocked sideways by two different things. Firstly by “The Infant and the Pearl”, which wittingly placed itself in a tradition of long-form didactic-visionary poetry back through Shelley and Langland to the Pearl poet, but rather than calling on this tradition to underwrite his poem, he makes it earn its keep, forces the alliterative, iterative structure to enact the slow, accretive structure of his argument for Socialism. I mean,

        In an interval of fulgurous light, in an
        instant when the baby gurgled, all the glass
        scythed sideways. I had glimpses of spun
        barley-sugar passages studded with sapphires ...

        rate-electricity-relay-silicon-circuit-
        interzoneface-fingertips ... transparent
        objects. Yes, they are repeated. Yes, they return.
        Yes, they continue. Yes, they are repeated. No,

        nobody can be anything else. Pointed with
        cobwebs all over the collapsing temples ...
        What am I afraid of. Right now,
        walking across the room. About halfway

        to the top, I was suddenly brought
        to a dead stop, with arms outspread,
        clinging close to the face of the rock
        unable to move either hand or foot

        up or down. Does this doughnut
        remind you of a life preserver?
        Seriously, it’s a definition and so much
        else. Or sleeping. Parents agree.

You’ll love it big when you find out. In another video, Neva arrives three hours late for her German going-away party, which is held in the parlor of the small castle in which she lives. To the obviously upset guests she says, “Just because the party started at three o’clock doesn’t mean I would be there at three. We should have made that clearer on the invitation. Party begins at three o’clock. Nikwuz arrives at 6.” Neva has deftly shifted the room’s reality to her reality — three hours late is no longer late, it is on time. She says she was so frazzled with people knocking on her door asking her if she was ready, she didn’t have time to do her nails. In the degraded quality of YouTube, her finger look perfectly polished, pearlescent white. Later, a man shows her an 8 x 10 he took of her. In the photo, floating beside her, are two flares of light. Elsewhere, Carrington’s centenary was noted by Phantasmaphile (with many links), Strange Flowers and the LRB, the latter being a Leonora Carrington A-Z by Chloe Aridjis. Inevitably this led me back to the Daodejing & into the volumes of Chinese poetry I've accumulated over the years. All with a view to developing notes made in Turin during the calligraphy course back in September. Like,

        most would say she is soaked in the universe.
        most would compare the tiny ridges on her fingertips to the
                                                            oldest forms of script.
        and the sea? well. they forget the ocean.
        most hieroglyphics are nouns.

                even air becomes a ribbon
                even silence has a scent
                even laughter gets braided
                even split ends repent.

        it looks like whirlwind.
        it feels like your head is shrinking.
        it smells like heaven.
        it tastes like salt.
        it sounds slightly like a waterfall.

I was indeed elsewhere! I can say, however, that the colonial experience prepared me for England. I didn’t really know what I would find or what I would do with ‘it’ if I found ‘it’. I knew I didn’t want to be ‘it’, whatever that was. But I did want to encounter in the flesh. On the boat train to London, I kept feeling I’d seen this place somewhere before, as in a screen memory. It provoked a deep psychic recognition, an illusory after-effect. Had I been here before? Yes and no. I hadn’t anticipated what the English countryside would look like but, once I saw it whizzing past the train windows, I knew that this was how it should look: those proper, well-fed, black-and-white cows munching away contentedly in their neatly divided, hedgerowed fields surrounded by enormous, spreading sycamore trees. Everything I had read had prepared me for that. I knew, after all, the novels of Thomas Hardy. On the other hand, nothing had prepared me for the stark contrast between the well-disciplined dark, monotone character of London streets and the chaotic bustle of Kingston street life, with people shoving past one another on the crowded pavements, the handcarts and ice barrows with their rows of syrup bottles, the raucous hubbub and teeming vitality, provincial as it was. Everyone was buttoned up in dark suits, overcoats and hats, many carrying the proverbial umbrellas, scurrying with downcast eyes through the gathering gloom to unknown destinations. This was post-war austerity London, with its bombed-out sites, rubble and gaping spaces like missing teeth. A faint mist permanently shrouded Hyde Park, where ladies in jodhpurs and hard riding hats cantered their horses in the early mornings; the lights blazed in the Oxford Street department stores by three in the afternoon. There must have been bright and sunny days, for it was only the end of summer. But I don’t remember them. So after fumbling for a few weeks, I called Madelyn Kent, who had gone back to New York. She told me about her method, Sense Writing, which drew from the principles of Feldenkrais, a somatic educational system intended to improve quality of movement and general wellbeing. Was I game to try one-on-one coaching across the Atlantic? I was. Our weekly Thursday night Skype sessions began with body mapping. Lying on my back, sprawled across a turquoise-and-lavender yoga mat in my study in Jerusalem, I listened to Madelyn’s sonorous voice encourage me to notice the contact points where my body touched the cold stone floor: pelvis, shoulder blades, spine, ankles, neck. She explained that these specific movements were intended to quiet down my nervous system. I was encouraged to float inside a scene I wanted to explore. Notice the source and quality of light. Are the sounds close by or faraway? Distinguish the smells. What’s the taste in my mouth? On that particular morning, I wanted to write about my visit to a Muslim girls’ school in Mostar, Herzegovina, in 2012 with our Israeli-Palestinian delegation. I remembered little from that afternoon; we were not allowed to photograph the students. I pressed play on a 22-minute recording called “Specificity leads to Vastness.” The scene started to fill out in my mind like a painting on a canvas. I saw teeth marks in chewed bubble gum stuck under a student’s desk. I heard two giggly hijabi teenagers whisper in incomprehensible Bosnian. I smelled bits of leftover chocolate stashed in a backpack in the back row. I felt, and heard, flip-flops slapping and thwacking-thwacking the floor as I entered the bathroom with the special bidet hose. The students sang me a rousing ‘Happy Birthday’ in accented English. Here was a sensory detail. And another. Where were my Palestinian friends? Oh, they were lined up on the bench to my right. And behind them, rows of green square tiles and a framed Muslim prayer icon. Wait! There I am! On my legs, pressing creases out of my blue jeans and a royal-blue cowl-neck shirt. I turn to address the Bosnian teenagers from the back of the room. “When you see me walking down the street, you don’t say, ‘there goes the breast cancer survivor.'” My words are translated. Forty sets of female eyes framed in head scarves are on me. “That’s because there’s nothing outwardly that shows that I survived cancer.” Now those eyes stare at me with great intent. Some narrow their eyes on my chest. “Look around the room. The same can be said about all of my friends.” My words are again translated. “So don’t be afraid! Let your fingers check your breast for lumps in bed or in the shower.” Raintown! Its very name was like a bell, tolling them back to their true, complex selves! They laughed to wake up so far from where they started, so momentarily at a loss in the face of night and a new planet, yet so in control of the brand new experiences awaiting them there. In search of a gesture that could contain, acknowledge and celebrate this inconsistency, they threw money into the salmon pink silk interior of the fat, odd little accordion busker’s open case. Sometimes the banknotes they threw floated around Edith herself like confetti at the marriage of earth and air, while she played I Am You, Motel Milongueros, and an uptempo version of Wendy del Muerte she learned in a pilot’s bar on Pumal Verde. At that moment, the Buddha with his supernatural powers caused all the jeweled parasols to come together and form one single parasol that spread over the entire thousand-millionfold world. All the vast features of that world were visible there in its midst. All the Mount Sumerus of the thousand-millionfold world, Snow Mountains, Muchilinda Mountains, Mahamuchilinda Mountains, Fragrant Mountains, Jeweled Mountains, Gold Mountains, Black Mountains, Iron Encircling Mountains, Great Iron Encircling Mountains, the huge seas, the rivers and watercourses, brooks and streams, fountains and springs, as well as the suns, moons, stars, constellations, heavenly palaces, dragon palaces, and the palaces of the venerable spirits — all these were to be seen within the jeweled parasol. And the Buddhas of the ten directions, the Buddhas as they preached the Law — these too were visible within the jeweled parasol.

[Note: Sources: “Emergency Preparedness and Response: Sarin (GB)”, at CDC; JBR; MOAS, “Operations Update April 7^th”, email rec’d 7 Apr 017, approx. 6:09am PDT; Etel Adnan, Deborah Poe, and JBR, quoted in Poe’s and JBR’s review of To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader, at Academia.edu; JBR, review of Jessica Smith, at Galatea Resurrects 22; Michael Louis, comment appended to “Robert Johnson – ‘32-20’ – Speed Adjusted”, at YouTube; JBR; Roger Gathman, “a suggestion for art forum”, at Limited, Inc., 7 Apr 017; JBR; Roger Gathman, “a suggestion for art forum”, at Limited, Inc., 7 Apr 017; JBR; Mary Hopkin, “Those Were the Days”; Daniel Swift, “Caliban Blues”, at Public Books, 7 Apr 017; Bradford Bailey, “on the long awaited reissue of charlemagne palestine’s strumming music”, at The Hum, 5 Apr 017; JBR; Roberto Harrison, “Interface”, at The Elephants; bpNichol, Ad Sanctos (The Martyrology Book 9); Alice Notley, “Marks”, “Syntax of Marks”, in Alma, or The Dead Women; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (tr. SW Dyde), at Marxists.org; JBR; New Juche, Wasteland, at Dropbox; Bluesbunny, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world … New Juche Mountainhead (Nine-Banded Books)”, at DC’s, 8 Apr 017; Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital (tr. Johannes Göransson), and Bruce Andrews, blurb for same; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 33 / Memoir 2 (after Miyó Vestrini)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 6 Apr 017; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 32 / Memoir (after Miyó Vestrini)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 6 Apr 017; Francis Ponge, “Snails” (tr. CK Williams), in Selected Poems (ed. Margaret Guiton); JBR; Peter Watts, “Whispers in the Vomit Vale”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 5 Apr 017; JBR; Linda Mary Montano, “Mother Theresa Possibilities for LA”, at Linda Mary Montano, 7 Apr 017; JBR; Peter Watts, comment appended to his “Whispers in the Vomit Vale”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 6 Apr 017; Ghassan Hage, “The world-(that’s)-to-come(-to-an-end): a ‘subvival’ guide. A review of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro 2017. The Ends of the World (trans. Rodrigo Nunes). Polity Press, Cambridge, UK”, at Academia.edu; Carlos Fuentes, “A Show of Heads”, at London Review of Books (a review of Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme (tr. Helen Lane)); JBR; Jackie Wang, “spring journal notes”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 4 Apr 017; Alan Hay, and Douglas Oliver, “The Infant and the Pearl”, quoted in Hay’s “A sort of public thank-you to Douglas Oliver”, at “Intercapillary Space”, July 06; Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital (tr. Johannes Göransson); Alice Notley, two untitled poems in Above the Leaders; John Muir, quoted in Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts; John Ashbery, “Default Mode”, “Deep Surprise”, in Planisphere; Dodie Bellamy, “Cultured”, in The TV Sutras; John Coulthart, “Weekend links 355”, at {feuilleton}, 9 Apr 017; untitled, at belgian waffle, 8 Apr 017; JBR; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “[her fingerprints ...]”, in Spill, quoted in “Poem of the Week”, at Duke University Press, 6 Apr 017; Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, quoted in “Stuart Hall’s First Encounter with London”, at Duke University Press, 7 Apr 017; Ruth Ebenstein, “Full-Bodied Prose”, at Entropy, 5 Apr 017; M John Harrison, “edith plays”, in Nova Swing, at The M John Harrison Blog, 9 Apr 017; JBR; The Vimalakirti Sutra (tr. Burton Watson)]

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Zeitgeist Spam

27.04.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 49

26.04.2017

Love, Forever Changes, Glastonbury 2003

25.04.2017

CO2 over 410 for the first time in human history (reposted from Climate and Capitalism) (and don't ask me whether I think the activities outlined below will change anything - I completely understand the desire to do something)

22.04.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 48

17.04.2017

Du Yun @ Mass College of Art 10-3-2011

With the Noose Around My Neck 47

14.04.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 46

10.04.2017

“you sometimes feel fulfilled and self-actualized while starving and lonely, or have a sense of belonging while feeling unsafe” (Rob Kiely) [Click to enlarge, please. I wish I knew the artist's name]

Sam Kriss: "First We Take Damascus" ... [which I think of under a different rubric: "Make It Stop!"] (reposted from Idiot Joy Showland)

With the Noose Around My Neck 45

January 2019

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