Zeitgeist Spam

With the Noose Around My Neck 55

Still, what kind of sick fucks blow up a bunch of kids with a nail bomb at an Ariana Grande concert?

                                            ... to walk out the next morning,
        watching the little feathered urban dinosaurs flit between trees
        under some strange-shaped clouds hauling their anthropogenic vapours
                    up from swelling seas
        is to read and be read in a handbook of delirium, a journal of panic ...
        all while knowing that the bird cries you hear
        have nothing more to do with us than
        the lost particle does, the one that explains the laws of physics,
                                                            ... and that to stop
        the mind does not mean to stop the activities of the mind (he remembers
        reading), it means your mind pervades your whole body,
        releasing toxins, which means your body also pervades your mind.
                                                    Which means
        The question of travel no longer arises, because, after all, the world itself
        is travelling and going nowhere at the same time, and if a man
        is transformed each morning, like the colours of the day
        mirrored in the windows of the sleeping house,

this is still Kurukshetra, that total pizdets. Fuck the gods. What Derrida once called ‘metaphysics’ is now a dust cloud, what may be the largest human-made feature detectable from space. “I can’t stop crying,” said Parker, after pulling nails out of faces and legs. And what remains is almost everything. One of the flowers around here that I like best is Calochortus alba, sometimes called Diogenes’ Lantern. It has three white petals and pinkish sepals wrapped around each other to form a hanging globe like those olde tyme watchmen’s lanterns that hung from a pole. On Mt. Diablo, it has a lemony cousin that grows only there. These hanging ones are also called Globe Lilies. Their up-facing cousins are called Mariposa Tulips because they’re as lovely as butterflies. Diogenes was the first punk.

        rakete rinnzekete
        rakete rinnzekete
        rakete rinnzekete
        rakete rinnzekete
        rakete rinnzekete
        rakete rinnzekete
        Beeeee
        bö.

The one from far away thought it looked infinite; all of the brown grains of earth, live with ants, would have to pass through the woman’s hands which would have to remove every green thing there. Then the yuca could keep growing, and they could come back to dig up the roots, hack and clean them, carry the weight of them, grate them, drain them of poison, make cassave of them. The cassave is a circle, this one is white, the women’s fingers took out of the flour any dark impurities, they threw the pancakes up on the roofs, I don’t know why, that’s all I know of the story, but I tell myself it was a spel against those who want to stick drainage pins into your psyche and by so doing suck out the heavenly ethers, who want to dismember the fire factor, destroy the alligator clusters, who have this thing about Lemurian testicles and fish scale bars and Edenic dental butter, I have no idea where this sentence is going, or could possibly go, but, to quote Georgina, “When I was homeless I was sleeping on a park bench, with cardboard to keep the draft from below and a box to keep the wind of my head.” Are you searching for me? There are many Joachim Schmids. The prices of all items bought at Ikea are listed in the book. All materials used for its production were involuntarily supplied by them. The result is a flood of error messages. Unknown error, please try again. Forty-two years later I repeated one leg of Werner Herzog's walk, from Burgfelden to Dotternhausen. This book explains in detail how artists make (or lose) money with self-published books.

        Lanke trr gll
                pii pii pii pii pii
                        Züüka züüka züüka züüka
        Lanke trr gll
                Rrmm
                Rrnnf
        Lanke trr gll
                Ziiuu lenn trll?
                Lümpff tümpff trll
        Lanke trr gll
                Rrumpff tilff too
        Lanke trr gll
                Ziiuu lenn trll?

I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe Nobby wasn’t sure himself. Later that year he wrote: “In Love’s Body, Ch. XII, it says ‘Nothing happens for the first time.’ That is dead wrong: everything happens for the first time.” In May of 1995 I added: “All the time. (And in each repetition!)” Mostly it is an easy, flat trail through the redwoods, though on one route there are several short steep climbs where we would use our hands to grasp shrubs or outcropping boulders. The trail crosses the stream several times. The understory is typical coast redwood forest — trillium, violets, wild ginger, elk clover, blackberry and thimbleberry. Ivy and periwinkle are rampant, despite occasional attempts by the park rangers to control them. We were able to park the car within a quarter mile of the trailhead. We both grabbed light jackets to take along — somewhere maybe the sun was shining, but not here. Which reminds me: the therapist told Jacob, the other JBR, to imagine “somewhere he felt relaxed” and to concentrate on the smells and sounds and sights of this imagined place. Everyone else in his group placed themselves at beaches and forests and suchlike. His chosen place was a nice Lebanese kebab shop in Berlin called Rissani — next to Görli, where you can buy low grade weed all day and night. So it was only natural that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in its Yiddish translation, became the heart of my PhD. “If you’re woke you dig it,” as the late great William Melvin Kelley might have said. The hashtag #staywoke later became a catchphrase for Black Lives Matter, after first passing serendipitously through Erykah Badu. The entire front room is given over to a glass of water on a pedestal by William Pope.L. The show is, apparently, a home for “invisible bodies.” Like ghosts? There’s After Ellis (rubbed, used and moved) #005 (2017), a wall installation by Jessica Vaughn comprised of upholstered train seats from the Chicago public transportation system. There’s Untitled (2017) by Kayode Ojo, consisting of a sequined dress on a dark chocolate ABC Home sofa. I added a photograph of it to my Instagram with the caption: People pushing strollers in Chinatown don’t fuck around. But these cool places wouldn't open early for a loser like me, and moreover, I didn't feel like walking quite that far. I passed On Stellar Rays — apparently closed. I peered in their window. A wall text announced Rochelle Feinstein’s exhibition Who Cares next to an abstract painting of bright primary colored triangles on a white background. “Exactly,” I agreed and tried the door. “Fuck, it’s open!” I exclaimed as the door gave way. “Is Rochelle Feinstein married to John Currin?" I mused. In the back hangs H(e)art Island (2017), which pays homage to the largest mass grave in New York City where an estimated one million bodies are interred. One-third are infants or stillborn children. The next gallery was showing Tapestries by the recently deceased Catalonian artist Josep Grau-Garriga. They look like muppets skinned and stretched on wooden frames — either that, or blankets made by my alcoholic Swedish friend in the Far Rockaways construction site he calls home. Neither of which is a bad thing, necessarily. “Fuck, I'm starving,” I thought to myself. On the way back to my bike, I passed a young man with a blonde beard sitting on the sidewalk. He was wearing red and black camouflage fatigues and playing with a drinking straw. So yes, I want to tell you about a dream I’d had as a teenager: Artaud was giving a lecture at Rodez, the theme of which was friendship, and which culminated in his observation that, “I’ve never seen a man take off his skin and give it to another man, but that’s really what we’re doing when we inscribe the fly-leaf of a book and present it to a friend.” Then I helped him escape from the asylum, which, once we were outside in the fresh and beautiful snow, turned out to have been my very strict and WASPy girls’ school. So in effect he rescued me as well as I him. The memory of this dream popped up as I was reading Melissa Buzzeo’s The Devastation and came upon the line “Our skin comes off. This does not mean we touch. / Our hands break off; we have yet to reach bottom.”

        What did I take off you
        What did I give you
        What is it that I left you
        Your body made of rocks
        Your body made of chemicals
        Be feathers

Which I first read as “by feathers” for some reason,

        The beds that we made
        The cellular destruction
        Cellular retrieval.
        The embankment and the return
        The broken gesture
        The muck of the oceanless seabed ...

I slipped that disc into your hand. You crawled to me. The space is larger. Etymologically, it is “abandoned, forsaken,” “placed (stare) away from (de),” it is as if “one day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly.” / “I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly.” What is here is certainly not there. Tho we were equipped with our long sharp object. So no, a woman in Porto Alegre, dealing with her own experiences of feminism and striving for it, has no idea that any of this stuff is going on in the Minang diaspora, if she’s even heard of it. But that doesn’t mean the Javanese alphabet, read aloud, or silently, for that matter, isn’t a poem. So in Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee I deliberately performed 98% of the show lying down in various poses, because I couldn’t always stand or sit, as at that time I wasn’t getting the medical treatment I needed. Which is to say that the bread isn’t stale. The swans are not white; they are grey-brown. One of the swans is sitting a good distance away from the main body of the group. It’s darker or dirtier than the rest and shows no interest in the bread. Its eyes are closed and its neck is bent at an angle that allows it to rest its head on its back. Hans Ulrich Obrist approaches the swan. As he gets close, the swan opens its eyes and lifts its head. Its neck sways and it lets out a rasp from its grey beak. Hans Ulrich Obrist takes a slice of bread from the bag and tears out a small piece with no crusts, tossing it directly in front of the swan. The swan ignores the bread, looks resigned, tries to reposition its head on its back but misses and lays it on the tarmac instead. It closes its eyes. Hans Ulrich Obrist turns and leaves the pond area. That evening, he is unable to sleep, and the following morning he wakes uncharacteristically late, at 10:47am, to a series of emails and one missed call from the team at the gallery. He postpones responding and gets dressed. He walks to the park and alerts the warden to the sick swan. He feels no sense of immediate relief. When he visits the pond area again two days later, the sick swan is gone, and he senses that it has been euthanised. The crustless piece of bread is still partially visible, specked with dirt and embedded in the tarmac. It doesn’t at all resemble the unmistakable image of Mary Immaculate, mother of Jesus. A light snow does not begin to fall.

        What was it he used to say ...
        Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.

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        light coming into clouds above still shadowed ridge
        crow on black pine branch in lower right foreground

        which must be said, there speaks of what this means
        could appear on one side, almost statement of, edge of, O

Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion,

        I throw coins in the sink
        drink too much water

        & the supernatural high that follows
        great green bright triangular flowers

        O         O         O
        O         O         O

        nothing            nothing         nothing

        O         O         O

        nothing that we lived
        nothing that we lived
        nothing that we lived
        nothing that we lived
        nothing that we lived

        was / was not worth it

        O         O         O
        O         O         O

        nothing            nothing         nothing
        nothing            nothing         nothing

        nightingales and nightgowns not nightingowns
        ceiling and floor not floorpit

        o hawero
        rrno pori      od bno

        mrmdly is

        yxzaaana y-
        po

        cgot ghuin,   

        sofka

        dignti

        cher waeret, deit

                   thandonas

Things have come to that.

I mean, what kind of sick fuck stabs to death two men because they came to the aid of two Muslim women he was shrieking at? I don’t know, but can name him: Jeremy Joseph Christian, just as I can name the suicide bomber in Manchester: Salman Abedi. What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet. Are all humans tools? So yes. Some days I do root for global warming. The common denominator of all these emails was that they effectively condoned attacking a working journalist. More striking still was the fact that many of the people expressing such tacit approval of violence did so openly, apparently under their own names, even in some cases disclosing their home addresses and phone numbers. A similar willingness to go public, openly and shamelessly, with views that stopped one step short of actively advocating physical violence was displayed by several leading right-wing figures including politicians and pundits broadcasting to millions. On Friday Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, brandished a gun during a visit to a shooting range and said: “I’m going to carry this around in case I see any reporters.” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners earlier in the week that Gianforte was “manly” and “studly” in contrast to “Pajama boy” Jacobs, and Laura Ingraham likened Jacobs to a bullied school child —  denigrating both in the process, by tweeting, “Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?” Rachel Campos-Duffy, wife of a Republican Congressman Sean Duffy, said on Fox News that the Guardian reporter had received “a little bit of Montana justice.” The phrase “Pajama boy” has an interesting history. Wikipedia tells me that “Pajama Boy” is a derisive term for the subject of a photograph tweeted out in 2013 by Organizing for Action (OFA) of one of its employees, Ethan Krupp, in support of the Affordable Care Act. It was part of a campaign to get younger Americans to sign up for program. The photo showed Krupp wearing thick-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid onesie pajamas, and cradling a mug. The accompanying text read: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.” The tweet linked to the OFA website, which encouraged individuals to discuss Obamacare during the holiday season with those family members that are uninsured, and encourage them to sign up. Pajama Boy soon developed into a meme in which the Pajama Boy image was digitally inserted into other photos, or the text of the tweet was revised or new text added to mock the campaign, and what one commentator called “hipster douchitude.” But I think it goes deeper than that, I think it is some kind of metonymy for the decline and fall of the US empire. Didn’t the Viet Cong wear quote unquote “black pajamas”? Didn’t the US get its ass kicked during that war? Do you think the country has ever gotten over that? I don’t. That is why one way of looking at the whole Trump thing is the US is still freaking out over the merely average size of its dick. But look around the park again. How can the true order of things be represented by such a vanishingly small share of living nature? If we were to say, of plants, ‘Here too dwell gods’, decontextualizing an expression of Aristotle’s ... well, it seems undeniable, if you’ll just stop and look, this planet is really theirs. At least the land portion. Is this not always how it is with the fun and zany philosophers? Just when you think they are talking about something that interests you, it turns out they were only ‘riffing’ on it. Well, me, I want to talk about plants. Not really. The soul is a trapped gas, tho I can’t cutnpaste from it. The first stage could be called realistic — the second stage is definitely gothic, in the broadest sense. There’s living structure, and there’s the undead. There’s Johnson, and there’s De Quincey. De Quincey reinvented the most gothic thing of all, the murder story: where the usual Newgate version was sensationalist and moralizing, De Quincey parodied the moralizing and introduced an element of suspense that we now consider to be natural to the genre. Suspense is inherently anti-mythic — myth, with all its dramas, follows a program its audience already knows. After that, Bob said, he was in love with circuses and hung around one in Europe and then another also in Europe. He said that for one of them he waited on the field where they were eventually going to set up, for three days. He would help them do things and was especially useful when they were dismantling the show and the cages. He had spent almost all his time with the people in the circus during their stay in town, ten days, and had told himself he wouldn't travel with them unless they invited him. On the last day, one by one they came to him and said, “You are coming with us, aren’t you?” And he said, “Yes, oh yes.” He was especially close to a man who did the electrical set-up and drove a truck. This man advised Bob that it would be alright for him to travel with the circus, but that he should eat alone, buying his own food, so the boss wouldn’t mind. Bob thought that was good advice and he took it. Also, Bob purposely never got to know the boss very well. He didn’t want to feel obligated to write a book about the circus that would appeal to the boss. If you think about it a little, this explains why “The dead are mourning the living” somewhat like war veterans reading Sophocles aloud to ... I don’t know who, I’ve reached my New York Time article limit for the month.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Alan Baker, “When a Man Goes Out”; JBR; Timothy Clark, first epigraph to Tom Cohen, “The Angel and the Storm: The Materialistic Historiographer in the era of ‘Climate Change’”, at Academia.edu; Dan Bilefskymay, “He Went to Manchester Arena as a Beggar. He Left as a Hero”, at New York Times, 24 May 017; Armand Schwerner, introduction to his translation of Philoctetes, in The Work, the Joy and the Triumph of the Will; Tom Marshall, email rec’d 24 May 017, approx. 9:20am PDT; JBR; Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing; Barbara Einzig, “Clearing”, at UPenn; JBR; Will Alexander, “Letter of Warning”, in New Wilderness Letter 12, at UPenn; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Our Death 36 / of torture of prophecy”, 23 May 017 (cancelled post); JBR; Georgina, quoted in Lois Blackburn, “Solace from memory dark”, at Arthur + Martha, 22 May 017; Joachim Schmid, various blurbs, at Schmid Shop; Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing; Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, at Dale Pendell (for Tom Marshall); JBR; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, “Mindfulness destroyed”, at Prolapsarian, 24 May 017; Eli Rosenblatt, “If You’re Woke You Dig It: William Melvin Kelley”, at Public Books, 22 May 017; Brienne Walsh, Gallery Crawl: Lower East Side”, at BOMB, 25 May 017; JBR; Maria Damon, and Melissa Buzzeo, The Devastation, quoted in Damon’s “Devastating Remaking: On Melissa Buzzeo’s ‘The Devastation’”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 May 017; Laura Kasischke, and Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette, quoted by Kasischke, in Lindsay Garbutt, “Reading List: May 2017”, at Harriet, 23 May 017; Jorie Graham, “Cryo”, at Prac Crit 8; JBR; Khairani Barokka, quoted in “Khairani Barokka in conversation with Deborah Smith”, at Tender 8; JBR; Sophie Collins, “Zyzio”, in Karl Smith, “Two Poems by Sophie Collins”, at The Quietus, 30 Mar 014; Amiri Baraka, “In Memory of Radio”, at Modern American Poetry; a little bit of text found at the end or right after James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Gianforte’s victory after assaulting reporter reflects rising tribalism in American politics”, at Washington Post, 26 May 017; Stephen Ratcliffe, “5.26”, at Temporality, 26 May 017; JBR; William S Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Extinction is Not the Same as Death”, “Kelli Maple Sorry About The Auto Correct”, at Blackbox Manifold 17; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Extinction is Not the Same as Death”, at Blackbox Manifold 17; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Frog Desert”, at Blackbox Manifold 17; David Melnick, Pcoet, quoted in Mark Scroggins, “David Melnick: PCOET”, at Culture Industry, 20 Apr 05; Amiri Baraka, “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note”, at Modern American Poetry; JBR, w/reference to Amanda Holpuch, “Man shouting ‘anti-Muslim slurs’ fatally stabs two men in Portland”, at Guardian, 27 May 017, and William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Ed Pilkington, “Montana assault breeds ‘frightening’ talk of violence against journalists”, at The Guardian, 27 May 017; JBR; “Pajama Boy”, at Wikipedia; JBR; Justin E H Smith, “On Plants / De Stirpiis”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 27 May 017; JBR; Justin E H Smith, “The Soul Is Trapped Gas”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith; JBR; Roger Gathman, “De Quincey: our goth”, at http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2017/05/de-quincey-our-goth.html Limited, Inc., 27 May 017; John Levy, “Visits with Robert Lax in Greece (1984 & 1985)”, in Two Masters, at otata books; JBR; Yu Xinqiao, quoted in a blurb for his The Last Lyric (tr. Yunte Huang), at Tinfish Press; JBR, but see Susan M Schultz, “War veterans read Sophocles, off the NYT”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 26 May 017]

With the Noose Around My Neck 54

Of course, even Kilmer himself admits he’s “slightly embarrassed” by the price of his shiny plant — but hey, it cost him a “pretty penny” to make. Besides, you’re not just paying for the materials, or for a big gold tumbleweed: You’re paying for the story it tells, with the tumbleweed symbolizing both his childhood in New Mexico and his grandfather’s past as a gold miner. There’s also the obvious nod to his role in Tombstone, as well as the ironic juxtaposition that offers a deeper musing on the impermanence of life — in which we are all like gold-dipped tumbleweeds, so certain we’ll shine forever, only to be tossed asunder by a sudden shifting breeze. The truth is we can only roll across the lonely, desert expanse of this world, and maybe try to sell some stuff with our name on it in the meantime. But if that kind of existential revelation and $150,000 is too rich for your blood, Kilmer’s also selling a piece of metal that he painted “I TICKLED LOU REED” on for just $3,600. Some of it is just bad timing. The rise of the “alt-right” hasn’t helped Marvel’s Hydra-Nazi Secret Empire storyline, especially as Captain America’s iconography has been co-opted by individuals who so identify. It’s hard for fans of Cap who hate this and feel betrayed to think the publisher has their backs when Marvel’s editor-in-chief says he is “the furthest thing from a social justice warrior” and the Entertainment CEO is an adviser to Trump. Currently the domain Hail-Hydra.com redirects visitors to the White House website — perhaps the most telling indication of how Hydra — and Marvel — are seen. At this point the job recruiter remembers the orientation session in which talent scouts were told to employ, at the drop of a hat, anyone whose use of language might increase activity in audiences’ corrugator muscles or do the opposite, prompting zygomatic tension. At this point the consultant says, “It would be my honor to devise a business plan for your company that meets everyone’s needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, especially when it comes to something as personal as sublimation. I mean, ultimately that’s what’s at stake.”

        “VIEW FROM AN AERON CHAIR”
        “VIEW FROM A DODO CHAIR”
        “VIEW FROM AN UTRECHT CHAIR”
        “VIEW FROM A FOLDING CHAIR”

Which reminds me: in an apparent attempt to quell fears, two days ago Japan’s Environment Ministry showed how it will — well, how it plans to — recycle radioactive soil from the ongoing Fukushima nightmare in construction projects to reduce the growing piles of quote unquote widely abhorred contaminated debris. The Ministry measured radioactivity levels of bags of soil collected in decontamination work around the stricken No. 1 nuclear power plant, and sorted the earth from other garbage. Using soil with readings up to 3,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram, the ministry plans to create a 5-meter-tall mound measuring 20 meters by 80 meters. Such mounds could be used, for example, as foundations for seawalls and roads. Or maybe for pyramids atop which could be performed god-propitiating blood sacrifices. Testing of the methods started April 24. After confirming the safety, the ministry wants to promote the use of the recycled soil. Needless to say — god, I hope it’s needless to say — the government is having a difficult time finding willing municipalities. Which is why, when Peter Hallward writes, “The fundamental argument of Badiou’s philosophy is that, in any given situation, only the subjects who are faithful to the implications of an event can think the truth of what there is in that situation,” all I can think is: can there be more circular reasoning? So what does aloha really mean? I grew up in a Chicano-Chinese and Anglo household in Long Beach, California, always driving, sometimes surfing, and passionately playing orchestral music in the age of Snoop and Dre. Something something something

        leaves a bite mark on its ID photo
        [rope tugs] [torso]
        I live at once over it.
        Satellite poker tourneys,
        soju martinis,
        and a flumpet chamois
        amble by,
        bred with the solar totals,
        autographed by the rain

the rain which was inspired by the sacred mushroom chants of Maria Sabina and the album JAGUAR HARMONICS, in which “the voice of the Ayahuasca vine, a ‘person woven of sound’ speaks to the Flumps, who have papier mâché bodies coated with fur, facial features, hands and feet of Fymo, and arms and legs which are leather-clad steel armatures. How we got here involves centuries of experimentation. It’s a bit like Pound’s dictum: what thou lovest well is

        crossover
                                                            Migra dynamite
        the earth shakes fire
                        What is its name thinking / the stall switch
        our desperate generation’s iron
        the effect of wondering where the sense simply begins and

                                    (noise: pension fund undermined)

         I used to live in “Moreno Valley, [in a] Trapezoid of Light”

                        “So, Mr... Hilario Logistical,
                        tell me... why you wanna work here?”

                         “I don’t know, the… unacceptable conditions?”

So no, these are not just mimetic mirrors at work but an interplay of the mirrorings in such mirrors, (pervading) something or as “shot” (seen, in the film sense) “through” something else. That something else here is a “Glass Crane Floor.” The “wind” that is “blowing down trees” ... This, again, is a noetic move. Each part has a focus, and the fourth part seems to have a doubled one that doubles back in some ways on the earlier ones like a “drawer, under the lake” with “an echo hum inside” (who keeps calling me from the 323, asking me whether I’m at work today?) Did you know these lines are from Gogou? Dear nobody, did I get the story right? Somehow they didn’t show up, instead ___ did. So the ___ beat the shit out of them thinking they were beating the shit out of ___. Ah, we all make mistakes. Dear nobody the letter above with the blanks. Can I add a line to di Prima’s Letters? When the guy hiding you goes out to buy cigarettes, it’s not a good sign. “It was an actual battle,” Finlay says. “The sheriff officer came up to the gate here, but the Saint-Just Vigilantes were guarding it and so he couldn’t get in. I was concealed in the barn. The idea was that he had to find me in order to carry out his duties, and of course he couldn’t find me. We had constructed a panzer tank, and were letting off explosions and so on.” Journalists and TV cameras were present to record the fighting. When the sheriff officer felt he had absorbed as much enemy fire as any local government official should be expected to in one day, he made a temporary surrender, saying he was leaving but he would be back. “But the farmer from over the hill had parked his tractor behind the sheriff officer’s car, and taken the wheels off the tractor. So he had trapped the sheriff officer in Little Sparta. It was a thoroughly satisfactory day.” Finlay called the place Little Sparta “because Sparta was traditionally the enemy of Athens, and everybody knows Edinburgh as the Athens of the North. So this was established as a separate state.” This is getting good, isn’t it? Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. The “... crimson field trembling” “the sentence broken off at the lip.”

        (Insert song of mourning.)

        God and time, spine of the world — yawn, blah, blah, schma ...
        what I meant to say is

        There’re chairs growing in hell.

        There’re chairs growing in hell,
        and people sit on them, my co-workers:
        it’s like riding on toadstools
        except you don’t know it, or
        you kind of know it,

        you dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit
        high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him

        and then he’s made to swallow keys and little hammers —

        And now it’s time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am
        another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word
        bones —
        wide-blank architectures.
        No, veils.

At this point they turn over the naming of colors to a neural network:

                Caae Brae
                Baae Blae
                Saae Ble
                Wltlttf Bzt
                Bylfgoam Glosd
                Woleebaph Ronder Wily
                Golder Craam
                Clardic Fug
                Snowbonk
                Catbabel
                Light of Blast
                Testing
                Stanky Bean
                Murder’s Eagle
                American Midnight Swear Dragon

Parthenolide is a sesquiterpene lactone of the germacranolide class which occurs naturally in the plant feverfew. An emailer asks me: “How much is in each capsule?” There are many cars. There is a parking lot. There is the crushed abdomen of an ant stuck to one of the dog’s paws. There is a dead mouse near the dog. There is a man walking away from the dog. There is a man about to pass the dog. There is a man passing the dog. There is a dog in the front yard. There are three women behind him. There is a man to his right. There is a man in front of him. There is a man watching a movie. A contorting and cyclical inversion. I don’t know, I answer. You don’t just get on a motorcycle and become some kind of historical category. A thinner varnish might work. So yes, it is questionable whether he had such a strong influence on the young Marx as many young sociologists would like to think. Politically, Heine was not a traveling companion one could count on: even of socialism. But in contrast to socialism he held fast to the idea of uncurtailed happiness in the image of a just society, an idea quickly enough disposed of in favor of slogans like “Anyone who doesn't work won't eat.” His aversion to revolutionary purity and stringency is indicative of Heine's distrust of mustiness and asceticism, elements whose traces are already evident in many early socialist documents and which, much later, worked in favor of disastrous developmental tendencies. Heine the individualist — and he was so much an individualist that even in Hegel he heard only individualism — did not bow to the individualistic concept of inwardness. His idea of sensuous fulfillment encompasses fulfillment in external things, a society without coercion and deprivation. This was apt, as the book is a marvelous reworking of the frequently too-romanticized Surrealist female madness narrative. “I had realized the injustice of society,” she writes, as means of explaining the external’s impact on her internal state. “I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude.” Even more so, she holds the belief that she is intimately connected to the earth, and that the goings-on of her body have a direct effect on the physical world. To avoid one such debutante ball, she befriends a hyena zoo and convinces her to take her place there. In another, a woman undresses down to her skeleton. Another visits a nearby house, finding that her neighbors are dead, and likely vampires. There are nuns, suicidal vegetables, Aztec gods, and a family from the union of a wild boar and a wild woman. Hunters are punished by God for farting in church. Characters are warned about getting “roasted in hot fat, stuffed with parsley and onions.” Vegetables are whipped in order to be prepared. “One’s got to suffer to go to Heaven,” they are told. “Those who do not wear corsets will never get there.” Imagine scrambling all this; you wake up tomorrow morning to find that your WiFi burglar alarms are detecting anomalies in your home’s architecture, and scientists studying wolves in the wild have found evidence of dark matter in the creatures’ tracking collars.

        One/
        two/
        three/
        four/
        five/
        six.

        The box will be brought in now.

        Two/
        three/
        four/
        five/
        six.

        The box has touched the doorframe.
        The box must be taken back out.
        The box is brought in again.
        The box does not touch the doorframe.
        The box does not touch the floor.
        The box does not touch the low bench.
        The box does not brush against the lashed curtain.
        The box is set along the long table.

Below in the creek the detritus eats the bacteria, the bacteria eats the phytoplankton, the phytoplankton eats the mussels, the mussels eat the blue crab, the blue crab eats the air. Below in the creek the detritus eats the bacteria, the bacteria eats the phytoplankton, the phytoplankton eats the mussels, the mussels eat the rotifers, the rotifers eat the cladocerans, the cladocerans eat the copepods, the copepods eat the larval stage of the bass, the larval bass eats the air. No, below in the creek the detritus eats the bacteria, the bacteria eats the phytoplankton, the phytoplankton eats mud worms, the mud worms eat the midges, the midges eat the amphipods, the amphipods eat the sturgeon, the sturgeon eats the mud. Below in the creek the detritus eats the bacteria, the bacteria eats the phytoplankton, the phytoplankton eats the mud worms, the mud worms eat the midges, the midges eat the amphipods, the amphipods eat the juvenile bass, the juvenile bass eats the bass, the bass eats the air. No,

        Eight nails push back from the four corners of the box.
        Eight nails push back evenly and slowly with a wetness.
        Eight nails pull out of the wood, pushing their way out of the
                                thickness of the wood evenly.
        Just before eight nails pull out of the wood altogether, they stop.

                It is difficult
                to get the news from Play-Doh
                                    yet men die miserably every day
                                                            for lack
                of what is found there.

Which makes a lot of sense. What else could existence be for God but a long TV binge-watching session? Which would be horrible if all s/he could binge-watch were reruns ... Law and Order Law and Order Law and Order Law and Order Law and Order Law and Order Law and Order ... (It occurred to me once that the irrationality of God can be explained by its eternal insomnia, God has never slept once ... that must be the worst thing ever ... God can’t even shut its eyes for a second ...). As for the Cold Spot, “this is a particularly cool patch of space seen in the background radiation ... first glimpsed by NASA’s WMAP satellite in 2004, and then confirmed by ESA’s Planck mission in 2013. It is supremely puzzling. Most astronomers and cosmologists believe that it is highly unlikely to have been produced by the birth of the universe as it is mathematically difficult for inflation theory to explain. One of the study’s authors, Professor Tom Shanks of Durham University, told the RAS, “We can’t entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard [theory]. But if that isn’t the answer, then there are more exotic explanations. Perhaps the most exciting of these is that the Cold Spot was caused by a collision between our universe and another.” Consequently, Lord Lao Zi put the Monkey King into his alchemy furnace and refined him for 49 days, but instead of burning him, the Monkey King emerged from the furnace more powerful than ever, having developed what amounts to X-Ray Vision. Then a lot of other stuff happened, then a lot more happened, then Lyn Hejinian went to Big O Tires.

        Gratefully we watch a silent film

        A clown in blue shoes ... opens a satin-lined traveling case and removes a viola

Back up a little

        O logic, o oaks by the football stadium, or red future rooster

        Great Foosh

        S P SCH C
        h+ s+
        h- se+
        hy+
        e- hyk+
        p+
        k- pd+
        m+
        d- m
        1: drivecircuits

Or, in Freudian terms, “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness.”

        S P SCH C
        h+ s+
        h- se+
        hy+
        e- hyk+
        p+
        k- pd+
        m+
        d- mobject
        pressure aim source

But in between these two paragraphs I found a paragraph which seems to contradicts the Szondian idea: “You know how popular thinking deals with the instincts. People assume as many and as various instincts as they happen to need at the moment — a self-assertive instinct, an imitative instinct, an instinct of play, a gregarious instinct and many others like them. People take them up, as it were, make each of them do its particular job, and then drop them again We have always been moved by a suspicion that behind all these little ad hoc instincts ...” OK. So maybe Eros and Thanatos are respectively the positive charge and negative charge of a factor. We now place all the drive circuits on top of each other. The starting point for vectors C and S is the ending point for vectors P and SCH. These 2 groups of vectors run through the table of drive components in opposite direction:

        m+ h+ (1/4) eE
        e+ p+
        d+ s+ (3/2) tE
        hy+ k+

        m- h-
        e- p- (4/1) eT
        d- shy-
        k- (2/3) tT

to make quatrains out of it. Herein the long conduit:

        hands on walls
        blown clear shadows against
        stone all dated 27000
        years ago give or take
        four centuries.

        The countdown gives:
        of 231 paintings of hands,
        in negative outline and positive imprint, 114
        show mutilations of one or more fingers.
        Only ten show no
        deficiency in finger joints.
        The remaining 107, not well enough preserved
        through the millennia to allow a decision
        as to whether they were mutilated or not.

        There are right hands, there are left hands,
        hands of women, hands of men,
        hands of children.

        Note: all thumbs are present,
        none mutilated,

        tears extract themselves from polysemy,
        elapsing and simultaneously creating their boundaries
        and plasticity,
        because the tears flow from a statue,
        within which flow the materials of consciousness,
        eee gee, the crystals in the nightingale’s throat,
        those tiny metals.

I don’t care if it was a hoax, the conceptual penis article isn’t as bad as people say it is. The taste of words, that taste of old semen, of an old womb, of lost bone, of an animal wet with black water, then I see them hobbling around with crutches, in rags, cut from the miracles of a through z, (you have to know this place of metamorphosis to understand why it hurts in such a complicated way). To explain what I’m getting at, let me quote all of Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Disrust”:

                Mama told us of a white forest in Russia: “... and we made little men out of snow and put hats we stole from great-grandfather on their heads ...”
                I eyed her with distrust. What was snow? Why did they make little men? And above all, what’s a great-grandfather?

The archive covers four decades, from 1720 to 1760. This does not mean that the practice of arbitrary imprisonment was abandoned after that date: it did in fact continue until the 1780s, though later police records may have been lost or destroyed. It is true, however, that in the last part of the century there was a growing uneasiness about resorting to such extra-legal means. As late as 1786 Germaine de Staël narrated to the King of Sweden, Gustav III, the scandal caused in Paris by the liberation of Henri Masers de Latude who had spent thirty-five years in prison. Nobody (not even the man himself) could tell why he had been arrested in the first place, other than that he may have offended the favourite of the late Louis XV, Mme de Pompadour, who had died some twenty years before. Shortly thereafter, Hirato dropped the extended 7/5 — 5/7 syllabic patterns used by Japanese Romanticist and Symbolist poets in favor of

        The heartfulness of moving things,
        The moving heart of
        The heartfulness of moving
        Dancing dancing dancing
        In pieces in pieces
        In the show window
        Shining, shining
        Drops of stars
        In the American cinema style hand
        On the artery
        Applying pressure on the mouth of the iron pipe
        Cataract cataract cataract
        Cataract of water cataract of gas
        Cataract of transparent amber poison

So yes, Posadas was an Argentinean Trotskyist and, at one point, a relatively well known football player. During the 1940s and 1950s he came to the leadership of Fourth International affiliates in Latin America, known later for their role in the Cuban revolution. Beginning in the late 1960 Posadas also become quite renowned, or rather infamous, for his views on UFOs. Posadas’ logic flows in quite a simple way: as Marx tells us, more technologically advanced societies are more socially advanced. Because of this, the existence of space aliens demonstrates the existence of intergalactic socialism, as the level of technology and social cooperation necessary to advance interstellar travel could only be produced by a communist society. The goal of the party, therefore, should be to establish contact with the communist space aliens, who would take part in furthering revolution on this planet. While Trotsky argued against the possibility of communism in one country, Posadas took the technological fetish to its logical conclusion, that there could not be communism on one planet. While this was greeted with derision by much of the left, as China Miéville explored in a recent article, the derision was for entirely the wrong reasons. If the longstanding problem of communist and socialist political organizing is the ramifications of organizing from above, Posadas transfers this problem to another level, literally. Posadas’ politics necessitate socialism from above, way above, that can only be hoped to intervene in the earthly realm. The imaginal machine animating Posadas’ politics therefore contributes almost nothing to the further development of collective composition in social movement, and through its vanguardist nature, if anything, tends to act against the development of autonomy and self-organization. But for Dorothea Rockburne, the painting carries a more personal charge. She first met Rauschenberg during their student days at Black Mountain College. One day, she was in the college laundry room unloading her wash from the dryer when she realized that her patchwork quilt was missing. “The next time I saw it was at the Leo Castelli Gallery,” she recently recalled in a tone of disbelief, referring to the public debut of “Bed.” “My first thought was: Son of a bitch! We were close friends.” We validated this claim and doubled the sample size to 30 Disney films, including Pixar. The results: 22 of 30 Disney films have a male speaking the majority of dialogue. Even films with female leads, such as Mulan, the dialogue swings male. Mushu, her protector dragon, has 50% more words of dialogue than Mulan herself. But let’s not focus on Disney too much. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs. 

[Note: Sources: Sean O’Neal, “Buy Val Kilmer’s $150,000 tumbleweed”, at A.V. Club, 20 Oct 016; Kieran Shiach, “Is Marvel's fascist Captain America losing command of his fans?”, at The Guardian, 19 May 017; Monica de la Torre, quoted in Eileen Tabios, “The Happy End / All Welcome by Monica de la Torre”, at   Galatea Resurrects, 19 Feb 017; JBR; Masatoshi Toda, “Ministry shows plan to recycle radioactive soil in Fukushima”, at The Asahi Shimbun, 18 May 017; JBR; Masatoshi Toda, “Ministry shows plan to recycle radioactive soil in Fukushima”, at The Asahi Shimbun, 18 May 017; JBR, and Peter Hallward, quoted from something I can no longer find; David Lau, “Discretized Vortices of the Superfluity”, “Yucca Flats”, at Poetry Society; Tender Buttons Press, “Anne Waldman performs in NYC TONIGHT”, email rec’d 19 May 017, approx. 12:29pm PDT; “The Flumps (UK)”, at ShareTV; TC Marshall, David Lau, Still Dirty, and Karen Weiser, Or, The Ambiguities, quoted in Marshall’s review of same at Galatea Resurrects 27; JBR; Helen Dimos, No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale, at http://www.spdbooks.org/Content/Site106/FilesSamples/9780995348325.pdf SPD; “It was an actual ... state”: James Campbell, “Avant gardener”, at The Guardian, 31 May 03; Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto” (memory quote); Ian Angus, “CO2, oceans, and atmosphere: a correction”, at Climate & Capitalism, 19 May 017; Charles Borkhuis, Finely Tuned Static, quoted in SPD blurb for same; Ana Božičević, “God is President, She’s the Rose of the World”, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53689 “A Kind of Headless Guilt Emerges”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Janelle Shane, “New paint colors invented by neural network”, at Postcards from the Frontiers of Science, 17 May 017 (hat tip K); Janelle Shane, “Neural Network Story Name Illustrations 1-4”, at Postcards from the Frontiers of Science, 19 May 017; Wikipedia; JBR; Amazon, “John: Can you answer this question about Oregon's Wild Harvest...?”, email rec’d 19 May 017, approx. 7:20pm PDT; Noah Eli Gordon, Bohr’s Spinoza, at SPD; JBR; Theodor Adorno, “Heine the Wound”, in Notes to Literature, vol.1 (tr. Shierry Weber Nicholson); Emily Wells, “The Strange, Irreverent Worlds of ‘Down Below’ and ‘The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington’”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 May 017; Geoff Manaugh, “Incidental Detection”, at BLDGBLOG, 20 May 017; Jessica Comola, “From Oh! Oh! Uh Oh! By Jessica Comola”, at Entropy, 18 May 017; William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, and JBR, email to Richard Lopez, 21 May 017, approx. 8:55am PDT; Stuart Clark, “Multiverse: have astronomers found evidence of parallel universes?”, at The Guardian, 17 May 017 (hat tip Richard); “The Story of the Monkey King”, at Vision Times, 2 Nov 016; JBR, but see Lyn Hejinian, “[I’m sick of public life ...”] (a broadside I have, no place no date no title); Lyn Hejinian, “[I’m sick of public life ...”] (a broadside I have, no place no date no title); JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “[I’m sick of public life ...”] (a broadside I have, no place no date no title); Armand Schwerner, The Tablets; Wouter Mareels, “Rereading Szondi through Lacan’s Graphe of Desire”, at Wouter Mareels; JBR; Pierre Joris, “The Sanctuary of Hands”, in Barzakh; Ouyang Jianghe, quoted in Lucas Klein, “Klein’s Ouyang Jianghe in Seedings”, at Notes on the Mosquito, 19 May 017; JBR, but see Graham Harman, “another hoax article gets through, apparently”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 20 May 017, and Jerry Coyne, “A new academic hoax: a bogus paper on ‘the conceptual penis’ gets published in a ‘high quality peer-reviewed’ social science journal”, at Why Evolution is True, 19 May 017; Alejandra Pizarnik, “Against”, “Description”, “Distrust”, quote in Jerome Rothenberg, “Alejandra Pizarnik: Four Tales, translated with commentary by Cole Heinowitz”, at Poems and Poetics, 19 May 017; Biancamaria Fontana, “Would you mind imprisoning my wife?”, at The Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 017 (a review of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Disorderly Families: Infamous letters from the Bastille archives (ed. Nancy Luxon, tr. Thomas Scott-Railton); Matt Turner, and Hirato Renkichi, “Ginza, Color, Light, Reverberation, Stench, Curiosité, Éphémère”, quoted in Turner’s “Make The Future Great Again: Hirato Renkichi’s Spiral Staircase”, at Seedings 3; JBR; Stevphen Shukaitis, “Space is the (Non) Place: Martians, Marxists, and the Outer Space of the Radical Imagination”, at Academia.edu; Deborah Solomon, “For Robert Rauschenberg, No Artist is an Island”, at New York Times, 11 May 017; Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age”, at The Pudding, April 016; JBR; blurb for Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times]

With the Noose Around My Neck 53

Let me explain. There will not be room for everyone in the Mars colony, nor will everyone benefit from the new gene-editing, disease purging sand hybrid organ-building techniques or from the coming new AI interfaces. What that means is a species split is underway and will be engineered with lots of grotesque Randian quotes and at the same time stiff upper lipping narratives of the need to sacrifice. The safe zones will consolidate as the century proceeds, the dominants secured in resource control, the peripherals cut off. I’m sure you see where I’m going. Compared to this, what does a constitution written by a bunch of old school wigged Enlightenment alcoholics mean — to which, by the way, Trump did not swear allegiance at his inauguration, uniquely, does anyone else remember the novels by Wylie and Ballmer, When and After Worlds Collide? The air wafted gently on that autumn evening, and the distant mountains stood out with cold clarity, against the sky, but I didn’t think about them much. I was always millimetric in my thinking. At first I felt dizzy — I can only see a system built on one’s sexual problems as a hopelessly — what does the universe have to do with one’s sexual problems? My complaint against the majority of philosophical theories is that they’re simplistic, and the proof is they try to explain. But some were too big, or seemed big because they were vivacious. And there’s another point to consider.

        I used to think (yes, yes)
        William Scoresby (Jr)
        wasted too much of the eighteenth century
        in his study of snow.

        Studying
        drawing
        each infinite flake of snow.

That’s what I used to think. Then, one day, I accompanied Iqbal, Shahid’s brother, and Hena, his sister, on a trip to fetch him home from hospital. This was on May 21st: by that time he had already been through several unsuccessful operations. Now he was back in hospital to undergo a surgical procedure that was intended to relieve the pressure on his brain. His head was shaved and the shape of the tumour was visible upon his bare scalp, its edges outlined by metal sutures. When it was time to leave the ward a blue-uniformed hospital escort arrived with a wheelchair. Shahid waved him away, declaring that he was strong enough to walk out of the hospital on his own. But he was groggier than he had thought and his knees buckled after no more than a few steps. Iqbal went running off to bring back the wheelchair while the rest of us stood in the corridor, holding him upright. At that moment, leaning against the cheerless hospital wall, a kind of rapture descended on him. When the hospital orderly returned with the wheelchair Shahid gave him a beaming smile and asked where he was from. Ecuador, the man said and Shahid clapped his hands gleefully together. “Spanish!” he cried, at the top of his voice. “I always wanted to learn Spanish. Just to read Lorca.” At this orderly came suddenly to life. “Lorca? Did you say Lorca?” He quoted a few lines, to Shahid’s great delight. “Ah! ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’,” Shahid cried, rolling the syllables gleefully around his tongue. “How I love those words. ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’!” That was how we made our way through the hospital’s crowded lobby: with Shahid and the orderly in the vanguard, one quoting snatches of Spanish poetry and the other breaking in from time to time with exultant cries of, ‘‘La Cinque de la Tarde, La Cinque de la Tarde ...” For those unfamiliar with the Caribbean context, a pan man is a pan (‘steel drum’) player, and a mas’ man’ is a participant in the masquerade. They are key figures in the annual Trinidad Carnival: a festival which creolised the quasi-pagan, pre-Lenten festivities of the white plantation class in the slave era and Canboulay (French Trinidadian Creole for ‘cannes brulées’, or burnt cane), a celebration at least as old as emancipation (1834), in which those who had been enslaved re-enacted the rounding up of ‘the usual suspects’ (meaning in this case, them) that occurred when crops had been destroyed. Canboulay parodied and inverted this display of plantation power. So one morning two bulldozers climbed on top of an abandoned white building that sits at the end of a major T-junction. They shimmied their way up and took a rest to enjoy the view. After a day or so they lifted their blades up to the sky, and then set to work peck-pecking the building apart. Within two weeks they had reduced the entire structure to rubble. Then they sat, gloating, on the pile. After another few weeks they moved on, and, where the building once stood, the sun now streams into drivers’ eyes. Unnikrishnan clearly thrills to this. In “Glossary,” the tongue of an English-speaking Indian abandons his mouth and runs into the street. It is immediately hit by a bus and all the words the boy has learned are released into the air: Poocha, Burger, Arabee, Paksi, Veed, Motherfucker, Kus Umuk, until the shurtha, running to the scene, try to resuscitate the last English-language phrase the boy has left: Yabba Dabba Doo. Nooch? It sounds vaguely salacious, which wouldn’t be out of keeping with the Thug Kitchen style guide. (Chapter titles in the new cookbook include “Freshen the Fuck Up” and “Hot Box.”) But it turns out that nooch isn’t nasty or brutish, it’s just short. For nutritional yeast. We’ll get right to it: This nooch we speak of is actually just the street name for nutritional yeast, a.k.a. a yeast grown on molasses and harvested and dried with heat to deactivate it (so don’t go trying to make bread with it). The recent uprise in trendy, plant-based diets has led to the current stardom nooch. With an umami flavor profile, nooch brings both savory and salty flavors to foods that are mild in taste. It resembles a nutty, cheesy taste that’s similar to parmesan and comes in flakey and powdery forms that makes it easy to sprinkle on pretty much anything. The tree is humanized, the fish is humanized, the flower is humanized, and so on. By the colors is obtained a message of light. This stunning communiqué from the land of the Dodo and the Blue Pigeon seemed to require no further response, and certainly no further inquiry; however, all translated texts are dual referenced to the French as well, and I often modify existing translations. This is not because I think my translations are better than the published ones, but when physicists apply the theory of quantum mechanics to vacuum energy, it predicts that there would be an incredibly large density of the “stuff”, far more than the total energy of all the particles in the universe. If this is true, Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that the energy would have a strong gravitational effect and most physicists think this would cause the universe to explode. Then I’m riding up an escalator, a long escalator in the New Rome, which is a wooden stairway (out of the Valley of Dream 4 nites ago) black stairs like a subway platform, except rather frail, and when we get to the top there is a house like at Berkeley where an Incarnation of the Virgin is taking place, or maybe a Babe is being born, I see the crippled babe, and it’s later — or the scroll text unfolds, I see in the clouds, in the sky, a blind face. And I see the Babe Nailed, Center of Belly, on the Cross — then the subway platform walkway arrives at a spot I recognize the arcade part with the European Cafe upstairs in Chicago or Seattle —

        The leaves are bright
        as a million
        electric lights on
        the yellow hill

Then the close-up of the monkey-ghost looking straight at us with his red eyes, from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. At that point human being might ask the monkey-ghost: “Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?” The monkey ghost might want to answer, “Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say” — but it has already forgotten this answer and hence says nothing — or else it just finds you a bore — in any case, it would be the year, or date hypothetically, to which the geo-morphic and bio-morphic scar of a human or Anthropocene age would be, by some future archivist, indexed. Since the title of this volume was to pivot on “Twilight of the Anthropocene” or “the Anthropocene Idols,” one enters an operatic mise en scene. A huge electrical dust storm. Nux the War Boy is driving madly suicidally into it, shouting, “What a day ... what a lovely day!” There’s a moral here, according to the website Geek Wisdom: Always start with a positive outlook. Because you never know. The day ahead may also be one of the best and most fruitful ones you ever experience. Who killed the world, you know what I’m saying? Let them go to Mars. Anyway, that 90% Fresh rating on rottontomatoes dot com is no fucking joke. It allows for a finer degree of stratigraphic precision. Good examples are the ammonites, whose often strikingly beautiful coiled shells adorn many museums, as are planktonic foraminifera. Then there are the graptolites. But research in the past few decades has now established that the best zone fossils for the Palaeozoic as a whole are the conodonts, a diverse group of small swimming vertebrates preserved as microscopic phosphatic structures that represent the feeding apparatus of the animals. All these groups lived only in the sea. So it is useless for such a person to walk up the front steps with infinite caution. They will all be in the living room, and as soon as the door opens they will all look his way. He remains in the dark, wants to wait for their questions. But then comes the worst. They take him by the hand, lead him over to the table, and all of them, as many as are there, gather inquisitively in front of the lamp. These functors include existential Territories (T), Fluxes of materiality (F), machinic Phyla of diagrammatic organization (Θ) and incorporeal Universes of value (U). Fluxes include physical matter and physical signals; these are subject to the coordinates of energetic quanta, space, and time. The abstract machinic Phyla comprise evolution; Guattari’s deterritorializing abstract machines; and blueprints, plans, diagrams, rules and regulation (in the cybernetic sense of control mechanisms). Existential Territories include subjective identity, the sense of self, and existential ‘apprehension.’ The incorporeal Universes of reference are made up of values, nondiscursive references, and virtual possibility; these ‘escape the energetic, legal, evolutionary, and existential coordinates of the three preceding domains.’ For Lewis, then, strictly and literally there are talking donkeys, because there could have been talking donkeys (as we may all agree), so some possible world contains talking donkeys, which are just as real, alive, and made of flesh and blood as any donkey you have ever seen. Of course, those other worlds are not open to our observation; there are no trans-world telescopes. This is to say that in order of the side of the square to be front, normal register, at a time of continuing transparence, pinned to the brilliant feature of the section of a whole, an immediately afterwards open center to a point to their voice joined and stretched out through the air by which points appear motionless in lights, which such as it is the blunt and many been aground on bulb the bland hurry flams too such too plate to phase hack place twin stilted bound and douse its left more donned off twi-lit seem drubbed drub and plast it’s deft. And there is unless now and that one then am on it and in both which hold out of quite I wish I don’t know it will I turn I mean on believe rust of as if it in all still or gorge a through some yet there about only is note are note. The importance of all this will become animal pain. One cannot now say that the figure writhes in disintegration, dispersed across the entire “Positive-Negative.” “I stand at the place which a searchlight flashes on and off,”

        ... the warbler

                where did he locate the bell

                        ... field plane

                ... table of

                                ... out of rock

at which point it seems appropriate to note that in Kumeyaay cosmology or My Uuyow (Sky Knowledge), the Milky Way is regarded as the Spine of the Sky. In Japanese and Chinese mythology, and in the writing of some classic poets (Du Fu and Li Qingzhao in particular) the Milky Way represents a great cosmic river. And that the latest visualizations of the known universe in astrophysics have unveiled “a deep universality of the cosmic web” of interrelated galaxies. See the work of Kim Albrecht, for example. Remember the Zapatista’s “Encuentro Intergaláctico”, to which they invited all sentient forms of life who could possibly get here. As someone said later, “I don’t know if any guests from exoplanets came. At least, they never identified themselves.”

        So if I form a perpendicular mass as regards her
        or if I form a condensation
        or a sudden Hydroxl
        I will know
        that the gulfs burn
        the biopsies detach the nebulas roam ...

        then the ionic fall of the solar expanse
        will take on a powerful enigma as drone

        thus equating these blazes with wise subjective errata
        her fleeting sonar crystals
        culled from intermolecular force
        like nitrogen writing
        a draft

        as in biologic drift
        as in the “high refractive index” of diamonds
        with their separated flares

So I have a soft spot for my first video, Nice to Meet You. I am Nishikun, a 109cm Porn Director, Feat. Mao Hamasaki. But from the point of view of the audience, my best work could be Having Sex in the Magic Mirror Box Car with a Female College Student with F-Cup Breasts Who Wants to Be a Kindergarten Teacher. Which is to say that the epics that were gathered together in the Cycle were products of a tradition with ancient roots. Poems about a Trojan war began to be composed in perhaps the twelfth century. The legend of the Argo’s voyage may have been the subject of song at the same period or not much later. There must have been many other strands of heroic poetry embodying and embellishing local memories of past events. After the middle of the eighth century, when Ionian epic evidently enjoyed a great flowering, we begin to have a clearer sense of some of the themes that were then current. For example, from a series of allusions in Hesiod’s Theogony it can be inferred that there were various songs about the deeds of Heracles, though perhaps no comprehensive Herakleia covering his whole career. Each of these Einzellieder had an independent existence. They did not have to be recited or heard together or in a particular order. But they could be said to have constituted a Heracles cycle, in the loose sense in which scholars sometimes speak of a Sumerian Bilgames cycle or a Hurrian — Hittite Kumarbi cycle: that is, a set of poems attached to a particular figure, but not (so far as we know) intended to be taken in a particular order or perceived as forming a larger whole. In the same way there must have been a set of poems relating to Thebes, and another relating to Troy. In the course of the seventh century some poets took to writing their compositions down and in the process, in certain cases, allowed them to grow to prodigious length. Ergo, the exchange mechanisms by which the nose regulates air humidity and temperature require direct contact between air and the surface of the epithelium. Three structural factors maximize these functions. First, exchange capacity is proportional to the ratio of the surface area of the respiratory epithelium relative to the volume of inspired or expired air. Because lung volume scales isometrically with body mass, comparisons of respiratory epithelium surface area relative to body mass provide much the same information. This scaling relationship was analyzed by T. Owerkowicz (2004), who quantified the surface area of the nasal and tracheal respiratory epithelium in dozens of mammal and bird species. Owerkowicz found that the surface area of the nasal respiratory epithelium scales to body mass to approximately the power of 0.75. In general, animals adapted to particularly cold or arid habitats (eee gee, camels and reindeer) have relatively high nasal surface areas; in contrast, animals with low metabolic rates (eee gee, wombats), those adapted to conserve water (eee gee, hyraxes), and those that live in moist, tropical habitats (eee gee primates) have relatively low nasal surface areas. As Figure 8.10a shows, nonhuman primates have much smaller nasal surface areas relative to body mass than most other mammals, but humans fall even farther below the mammalian line — with approximately 1/10 the expected value for a mammal our size! Humans also fall considerably below the mammalian regression line for tracheal surface area versus body mass (Figure 8.10b). The small surface area of the respiratory epithelium in humans — largely due to the lack of a snout plus a short neck — partly reflects our tropical primate ancestry. However, given evidence that the genus Homo evolved in arid rather than humid conditions, the small surface area of the epithelial tract in humans compared with that of nonhuman primates is likely a consequence of selection for a shorter face. So open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes — but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dressmaker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines' alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass. And this is not all, far from it: connected onto these lips, a second mouth is necessary, a third, a great number of other mouths, vulvas, nipples. And adjoining the skin of the fingertips, scraped by the nails, perhaps there should be huge silken beaches of skin, taken from the inside of the thighs, the base of the neck, or from the strings of a guitar. And against the palm, all latticed with nerves, and creased like a yellowed leaf, set potter's clays, or even hard wooden handles encrusted with jewels, or a steering wheel, or a drifter’s sail arc perhaps required. Don’t forget to add to the tongue and all the pieces of the vocal apparatus, all the sounds of which they are capable, and moreover, the whole selective network of sounds, that is, the phonological system, for this too belongs to the libidinal ‘body’, like colours that must be added to retinas, like certain particles to the epidermis, like some particularly favoured smells to the nasal cavities, like preferred words and syntaxes to the mouths which utter them and to the hands which write them [...]All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities , but perhaps on the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor will know, in the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (for nothing requires that an excavation remain concave, besides, it is inevitably convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one, and therefore neither exterior nor interior. It is certainly not a libidinal theatre then, no density, intensities running here and there, setting up, escaping, without ever being imprisoned in the volume of the stage / auditorium. Theatricality and representation, far from having to be taken as libidinal givens, a fortiori metaphysical, result from a certain labour on the labyrinthine and Moebian band, a labour which prints these particular folds and twists, the effect of which is a box closed upon itself, filtering impulses and allowing only those to appear on the stage which come from what will come to be known as the exterior, satisfying the conditions of interiority. The representative chamber is an energetic dispositif. To describe it and to follow its functioning, that’s what needs to be done. No need to do a critique of metaphysics (or of political economy, which is the same thing), since critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality; rather be inside and forget it, that’s the position of the death drive, describe these foldings and gluings, these energetic vections that establish the theatrical cube with its six homogenous faces on the unique and heterogeneous surface. To go from the pulsion to representation, but without allowing oneself, in order to describe this implantation, this sedentarization of the influxes , without allowing oneself the suspect facility of lack, the trick facility of an empty Alterity, of a Zero whose silence is about to be shattered by the demand which disturbs it (demand, already speech then? and addressed already, and to something? yes, to this Other; and by something, which is therefore already able to speak? yes, whether in gestures , tears, fury, the infatuated suckling’s torpor, interjections, as they say) , so that with this trick of the demand and the Zero’s silence, well, it remains only to inaugurate the theatre and power, and set them to work, the theatre of power where satisfactions will dupe the desire originating from this alleged lack itself. Quite the contrary, it is necessary, we will come to this later, to describe the business of the cube starting with the opened and exposed band of the libidinal body, according to the unique face without verso, the face which ... I keep trying to figure it out. It’s a year ago. It’s now. It’s five years later, I mean three. I’m in Oakland. I’m in New York. I’m alone. I’m at a bar, everybody is. We’re yelling about art, no, politics. It doesn’t matter because we’re really yelling about the wire. Dress it up however you like. Sorry, what I meant to say was ‘hey how’d she get an literary agent’; no, ‘when the revolution, whatever. We end up making out anyway, everyone pressed against the wall with the wrong person and their shattered ideology. Every reiterative question playing a peformative façade against the breakdown of a pose. “I’m a comrade who strongly believes in the power of communism.” “I’ve been easily seduced by fashion and decadence.” I’m lost. I’m over there, in the next moment, thirsting after capitalist dick, hell, every time I move my body through different registers, places, times, I go to a different reception hall. I give them my coat. They give me a name tag. I don’t try to read it because I don’t ever want to know. I’m in Freud’s old office in Hampstead, London. These days, they show art here. Today, it’s an exhibition of works by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, entitled Polymorphous Perverse. Built on both Anna and Sigmund’s formulations of childhood sexuality, the sculptures are excessive and obnoxious, composed of plastic doll parts that mechanise themselves as you walk past. It’s all limbs zipping out of plastic trashbags, baby heads popping out of soap boxes, everything encircled in dribbles of cherry red blood. It’s so coded with shock value as to almost be sarcastic so I feel mostly at home. I walk past a small but austere etching of Moses, hanging on one of the walls. In this portrait, he looks furious. He’s holding the Ten Commandments above his head, as though he’s ready to smash them at his feet. There’s a ragged tin can perched on a small wooden table, directly beneath him. It has no label or lid. It’s open, so I lean in to take a look and I let out a noise between a sob and a shriek because as I move my head, a single hot dog with a lone baked bean balanced on its end emerges vertically out of the can. It makes a loud, mechanical whir. It’s baldly pink and erect. It’s cheerily impotent. I can’t help it. I lose it, I’m laughing. How could we not? Coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in the book by the same name, the term ‘UTOPIA’ has come to mean a perfect place. There was a band playing. Someone ripped his jack from his amp and sucked it as though there was no other way to get air. I’m at home, reading Kathy Acker’s Algeria. ‘It’s just that you don’t know how to struggle correctly.’ ‘I know.’ I say. I can’t help it. I am going to die in disgraceful circumstances. The air conditioner whirs.

        ... the dogs are looking for their bones

                        [their skeletons]

        and it’s raining ice picks on your steel shore ...

To quote Richard Ortiz, another Tesla production line worker, “Everything feels like the future but us.”

[Note: Sources: Tom Cohen, “Trump’s Secret Sauce: A Wincing Letter “Home” from an American Abroad (a virtual Op-Ed)”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic (ed. and tr. Richard Zenith); Bill Griffiths, “A Science”, in The Mud Fort; JBR; Amitav Ghosh, “‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn”, at Amitav Ghosh; Ben Etherington, “Deconstructing Decolonisation: Victor Questel’s Collected Poems”, at Cordite 81; JBR; Melissa Gronlund, “Hello, My Name Is: Abu Dhabi”, at BOMB, 15 May 017 (a review of Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People); Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Nooch”, at Fritinancy, 15 May 017; Malcolm de Chazal, and Franklin Rosemont, quoted in Rosemont’s An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers; Stuart Elden, “The Canguilhem book project – Oeuvres complètes, initial work, aims and translation”, at Progressive Geographies, 15 May 017; “Solving one of nature’s great puzzles: What drives the accelerating expansion of the universe?”, at Science Daily, 15 May 017; Allen Ginsberg, Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties (ed. Gordon Ball); caption to a photo in Erin Manning, “Introduction”, in Érik Bordeleau, Toni Pape, Ronald Rose-Antoinette and Adam Szymanski, Nocturnal Fabulations Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul; JBR; Friedrich Nietzsche, quote in Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, “Preface”, in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols; JBR; Tom Cohen, “Trolling ‘Anthropos’—Or, Requiem for a Failed Prosopopeia”, in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols; JBR, and Geek Wisdom, 25 Feb 017, quoted in JBR, email to Tom Cohen, sent 16 May 017, approx. 6:46am PDT; Angharad, in Mad Max: Fury Road; JBR; “Who Killed the World?”, at McCoyed, 15 May 015; Tony Hallam, Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The Causes of Mass Extinctions; JBR; Rainer Marie Rilke, “[The Prodigal Son]”, in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell); Adam Szymanski, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and the Ecosophic Aesthetics of Peace”, in Érik Bordeleau, Toni Pape, Ronald Rose-Antoinette and Adam Szymanski, Nocturnal Fabulations Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Timothy Williamson, “How did we get here from there? The transformation of analytic philosophy”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Clark Coolidge, bits from “The Following Words” thru “DEEP SPACE, DARK PAPER (or) IN FOR A COLOR”, at Big Sky 3; Barbara Guest, “Winter Horses”, in The Collected Poems; JBR; Jeanine Onori Webb, “Stars, Seeds, Swarms: on the present and future of border-area action collectives”, at Post-Crisis Poetics, 24 Apr 017; Will Alexander, “Solea”, in Exobiology as Goddess; JBR; Kohey Nishi, quoted in Justin Caffer, “This 24-Year-Old Japanese Porn Star Looks Like a Child”, at Vice, 17 May 017; JBR; ML West, The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics; JBR; Daniel E. Lieberman, The Evolution of the Human Head; JBR; Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (tr. Iain Hamilton Grant); Trisha Low, “from Socialist Realism”, at Post-Crisis Poetics, 15 Apr 017; Chris Cornell (RIP), “Rusty Cage” (for Sam); JBR; Chris Cornell, “Rusty Cage” (again for Sam); To quote ... but us”: Julia Carrie Wong, “Tesla factory workers reveal pain, injury and stress: ‘Everything feels like the future but us’”, at The Guardian, 18 May 017 (for Tom Cohen)]

RIP Chris Cornell

You wired me awake
And hit me with a hand of broken nails
You tied my lead and pulled my chain
To watch my blood begin t boil

But I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

Yeah I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

Too cold to start a fire
I'm burning diesel burning dinosaur bones
I'll take the river down to still water and ride a pack of dogs

But I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

Hit like a Phillips head into my brain
It's gonna be too dark to sleep again
Cutting my teeth on bars and rusty chains
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

When the forest burns along the road
Like God's eyes in my headlights
When the dogs are looking for their bones
And it's raining ice picks on your steel shore

I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my
I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run

[NOTE: This is from last fucking nite:

 

For Sam, with love]

With the Noose Around My Neck 52

The bottom of which is littered with totems and amulets whose thaumaturgic charges have been dulled by millennia, but whose power — or at least the ruins and traces of the powers they may have once possessed — might again be discovered at work in the depths. The image offers a counterpoint to the treatment room on the third floor of the Nuffield Building. Set out for a seminar, the walls are bare, and before us stands our therapist. His only prop, apparently by accident, is a marker that has run out of ink. The malfunctioning pen becomes an analytic joke par excellence. Indeed the situation would have sent me into dizziness of ruined metaphor upon ruined metaphor. But then the therapist began by expounding his theory: “insomnia,” he told us, “like many other physiological symptoms, is the result of hyperarousal and stress response.” He continued for some time to give an overview of his theory which amounted to a crude economics of nervous energy. We, the insomniacs in the room, apparently suffered from a surplus. So I asked him a question: what did he think sleep was?

            Wooden gears, knife marks at the
            edges

            A suspicion that it cannot exist
            in its own right

            He had something to give him,
            something brought from a foreign
            country ... without knowing who
            had put it there

            ‘Yes and no’ (Pythagoras)

                                    We do
            not see the real motion, for it speeds
            through space, the whole family
            along with it

            We’re spreading this thing,
            that all salted peanuts
            should carry an urbanization,
            because it is a giant weapon ...

An old monk told me that the last time he ate with her she wrapped his fork in a 20-dollar bill before he sat down ... She also appeared on several live recordings, including Offering: Live at Temple University, a phenomenal set recorded in Philadelphia in 1966, but only released in 2015. In short, Harry Whittington and his colleagues have shown that most Burgess organisms do not belong to familiar groups, and that the creatures from this single quarry in British Columbia probably exceed, in anatomical range, the entire spectrum of invertebrate life in today’s oceans. So what are we really talking about here?

        ...the type of person who would...
        eat part of a sandwich from a very legit-seeming Italian place
        and immediately puke into a trash can
        about 10 seconds after telling a chatty stranger how great the sandwich is?

Yes and no. What strikes me are the points at which philosophy is impelled to violence. It’s what I call “using the stick.” When Aristotle says of those “people who are puzzled to know whether one ought to honor the gods and love one’s parents” that they “need punishment, while those who are puzzled to know whether snow is white or not need perception,” I want to know at what point philosophy feels it has the right to say that people need punishment ... And feels the need to say that people need punishment ... This comes back to a certain type of problematic that Lyotard had in mind with “the differend.” And reminds me of one of the most powerful sections of Habeas Viscus, in which Alexander Weheliye evokes “the sorrow songs, smooth glitches, miniscule movements, shards of hope, scraps of food, and interrupted dreams [...] that already swarm the ether.” Indeed, all this doing is adding up. Or subtracting down. Of the 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park, only 26 are left. The Dakota Access pipeline has suffered its first leak, and it isn’t even operational yet. DeVos finished her commencement speech at Bethune-Cookman in 20 minutes, as opposed to the one hour of allotted time. Photos and video of the event showed roughly half of the 380 graduates turning their backs on her, which makes me wonder what’s wrong with the other half. I mean, I was tweeting into the void two nights ago and then @loneberrywang subtweeted that she had dreamt of me thrashing with infinitely dividing sun flowers. Tfw (which I take as short for “too fucking weird”, no matter what Urban Dictionary says) when you are tweeting into the void and then somebody interrupts the sacred vertigo of the tweet with sun flowers. All of that is true, but I am a theorist from England, and was lead to your work via Isiah Medina the filmmaker. What I mean is: does that transfer of Cantor into philosophy get affected by specifically extincting conditions of inscription? Is the transfinite different, now? When I woke up I was thinking about Alien vs. Predator. It was like the watching of the face of Anna Karina watching the face of Joan of Arc in Dreyer in early Godard. Which is to say that when reading the many different touring contracts that the band signed with different promoters, and that now are collected in the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, one comes across some recurring paragraphs. For instance, one states that the band “shall have the unqualified right to perform at least four (4) hours. Employer understands and agrees that Artist’s reputation will be substantially and materially damaged if Artist is prevented from performing for said full four hours.” Speaking of time passing, did you know that Israel’s “temporary” occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, turns 50 next month? Oh, and another blurb begins, “Roy De Forest’s brightly hued, crazy-quilted paintings and sculptures are dotted with nipples of color ...” Nipples of color. I’ve never heard that phrase before. Which reminds me of something Judith Butler told Liz Kotz that Jo Lindsay Walton quoted in “(3) PERFORMANCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE” (a class handout): “The bad reading goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other [...] [whereas, instead] my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way — that gender is not to be chosen and that ‘performativity’ is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism [...] Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.”

        the rooms are chosen, then they move on
        the beads are wetted in the lime
        the weedlot boils in the blood of one eye
        the children first are cankered then they spin

        there are not routes, only dials
        the rocks are spun together in one ball
        the laundry is of rust, etc
        that onyx knob in vacuum turns the train

etc, if this is a medical emergency please hang up and dial 911. What I’m trying to tell you is Floyd Atmosphere had his cups repossessed. The Red Mountain Honor Society wants to see your plans.

        then the walls come in
        a moisture of comets
        toasties and corn cakes mutilation

Have you got your helmet? Hornet’s nest? A Spot of Frazzle and Then. The braincase was loose and the rest saw pie melting. Buy Grotex it helps your cusp.

            I will bring you to the apron door
            where all the bicycles were icicles
            yeah yeah yeah a sphere
            Beau Humps
            so what is the best book on supply chain management?
            you know what he just died of? death

Which is to say that when speaking of the demos in democracy, then, one mustn’t forget that it’s an Egyptian word, it’s neither Greek nor Indo-European (if such a language even exists), and when speaking of dike, justice, one mustn’t forget that it comes from the Akkadian duku. Akkadian is a Semitic language,

            in no beginning
                        was there just one language
            nor did the surface gleam

            I A or The is
                        The and But
            I a life moth face

            with nineteen hours
                        of music as in our body-heat
            through the head & limbs

            o’clock light glove quick rare
                        flattening taking an have window
            the thumb & index finger

                        THEN THE SMOKE
                        TRAPPED INSIDE
                        BECOMES VISIBLE

        And those who are deemed
        to be without sufficient value or utility
        are allowed to die. So

                            Dunk Yr Head
                            b/t Yr Legs and
                            Gulp that Water It’ll
                            Give You a Disease

                            You’ve Probly
                            Never Heard of

        topological waves of foundational blunder
        dislocated teeth in a grind

        o cult of the double-click happy occident
        tooth cushion dripped in sworn

        sand psycle oap scuttering
        blows cone’s verb out the dusted hiss

        (‘1.1.1’, ‘1.1.2’, 1.1.3’, etc.),
        I mean, 

        “A military dolphin is a dolphin
        Trained for military uses

        One in three warplanes
        Learn cuneiform”.

Given the proximity of “dolphin” to “warplanes”, I’m inclined to read beyond the text here, and to posit “moths that desire fins” as being almost fungible with an extra-textual ‘dolphins that desire wings’. In other words, what we see in the “metalloid cartouche butterfly” is a startling triad of nature, techne, and inscription. This ‘bleeding’ is essential to Arrays. It is also often a technique of willful obnubilation, as in “please cloud / my judgement / please”). Consider the use of trees, for example. If Brecht’s claim that “talking about trees is almost a crime / because it avoids speaking about so many brutalities / trees like the trees of another world / trees that lined the Valhalla of the crestfallen / trees locks / seas curls / moth tree to moth”. That which, for Brecht, is almost impossible for committed poetry,

        crab panther Dis regent emanation clown
        flame troubadour tsar manta

        sort of floats

        in on the receding undertow
        cadre made halcyon phoenix of my ovation

        as though a mesh were
        without its border sign

        it is listed as vulnerable and looks pleasing

        DOT DOT DOT

        the sky now is peach as the tree is willow
        crab panther Dis regent emanation clown

“I was at Electric Daisy Carnival yesterday,” Sumiko Iwamuro tells me as she takes her sunglasses off. “I listened to Afrojack on the beach with a glass of champagne,” she continues with a smile. “The seabreeze felt so good that I fell asleep! It was a little embarrassing.” Sumiko, who goes by the DJ name Sumirock, has probably popped up on your timeline more than once this past month after her story as an octogenarian Japanese dumpling maker-turned-DJ went viral. “I always open with the Astro Boy theme song because it’s used at my hometown’s station,” she says, “and I want to pay respect to my roots. After that, I like to put in Kraftwerk somewhere towards the beginning, then mix in more upbeat tracks. I try to stay between 128-135 BPM. My favorite artist is probably Chet Baker, but these days I play a lot of Zedd and Adam Beyer. I like this French band called Punish Yourself too — they're really cool.” Oh, it’s not just music. Her restaurant is a local favorite in the Takadanobaba neighborhood, and has even been described by some online reviewers as a “legendary” dumpling shop. “Working at the restaurant and DJing are really similar actually — you’ve got something round in front of you, you put things in, take things out, hold them down. I’ve already decided that when I die, it’s going to be in the kitchen of my restaurant, the DJ booth, or the dancefloor. I don’t think it would be so bad to fall to the floor while dancing, and just die right there.” Take

        acetone imprinted
        oblique swatch on the skin car burn oil wall
        ocarina & mumps
        much wet green
        I’d leave sole key to this game to my friend, sheet water cat

        contact back
        feldspar             arithmetic

I was a stagehand at Chicago’s Empire Room when I was younger and caught a lot of Vegas acts “on the way down.” You’re just like your uncle, she’d say. You’re just like your uncle, or you’re going to turn out just like him. She’d approach me in tears when I spent the day reading in my room: I was turning out just like my uncle. My mind blurs the words of the phone conversation into a light gauze. They are not about a favorite pet, though animals do run and even somersault in at least one poem. The writing doesn’t seem to be driven by any cause or trauma. One of the attendants from the hotel gives the crank a dexterous twist, and up shoots the horsepower, the old car eager to be on the road. The windows in the shops were boarded up for weeks afterwards. These days it all seems about as real as the time I woke up in my room in Berlin to find some kind of night-demon, some kind of plastic ghost staring me down, terrifying and somehow familiar. That thing was illuminated too. But then unfortunately that tenderness gets entwined with the screams of the victims of the Peterloo Massacre, gets entwined with ... Fortunately, all of this passes after half an hour or so. Here is the burning hospital. Which is to say that pets were like members of the family, and it is here that the real truth of the matter may emerge. In the run-up to the war, many parents spoke candidly of how they would poison their own children rather than force them to live under occupation. “I have been collecting poisons for some time with guile and cunning,” one housewife reported to the social research project Mass-Observation. “I have sufficient to give self, husband and all the children a lethal dose. I can remember the last war. I don’t want to live through another, or the children either. I shan’t tell them, I shall just do it.” Her sentiment was echoed by numerous others that summer before the war. “I’d rather see my two boys dead,” a 45-year-old father said. “I’d poison them if I thought it was coming.” When war came, however, no mass murders of children took place. Instead, it appears, many people sublimated this impulse by exercising it on their animals instead. One distinction I make in my work, then, is that the traditional bank sells something it has, whereas finance sells something it does not have. In doing this, finance needs to invade other sectors. To invade those sectors requires often enormously complex algorithmic instruments — the work of brilliant physicists, hundreds of whom work for the top financial firms, and for whom this is simply work ... which reminds me, thanks for sending the GWAR-covering-Kansas vid. That cracked me up. The singer certainly has an enormous codpiece! While I was watching Anna came in and said, did you hear about vanilla? I said, no. She said, a huge storm hit Madagascar, wiping out the vanilla crop. I replied, well, you know that is the beginning, right? Anna said, yeah, do you want a little jar of strawberries with your soylent green?

        I am a poet only a poet
        and I am no better than any other poet
        and no poet is better than me.
        Remember architecture!
        No client, no commission, “no site, “Oh, 

        It was a starless night—no, there was a star.

The Wisconsin state legislature has officially named May 12th Lorine Niedecker Day.

[Note: Sources: Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, “Notes on CBT for Insomnia, week 1”, at Prolapsarian, 8 Apr 017; Ray DiPalma, “Jihadgraphy”, in The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks 1998-2008; Edmund Berrigan, “San Francisco Diary”, “The Ball-Hallelujah Connection”, in Can It!; Ray DiPalms, “An August Daybook”, in The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks 1998-2008; Stewart Smith, “The Strange World Of... Alice Coltrane”, at The Quietus, 3 May 017; Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History; JBR; Marie Buck, Goodnight Marie, May God Have Mercy On Your Soul, quoted in SPD blurb for same; JBR; Barbara Cassin and Penelope Deutscher, interview, in Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice; Alexander R Galloway, “The Swervers”, at Alexander R Galloway, 6 May 017; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US Glacier national park losing its glaciers with just 26 of 150 left”, at The Guardian, 11 May 017;Sam Levin, “Dakota Access pipeline has first leak before it’s fully operational,” at The Guardian, 10 May 017; Sabrina Siddiqui, “Betsy DeVos booed while giving commencement speech in Florida”, at The Guardian, 10 May 017; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “THE LOVING ∞∞ : ∞∞”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “THE LOVING ∞∞ : ∞∞”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “THE LOVING ∞∞ : ∞∞”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Ulf Olsson, Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation, at University of California Press (via a link in UC Press, “New Books from UC Press”, email rec’d 10 May 017, approx. 11:05am PDT; JBR, but see blurbs for Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict and Susan Landauer, Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest, in UC Press, “New Books from UC Press”, email rec’d 10 May 017, approx. 11:05am PDT, and Jo Lindsay Walton, “(3) PERFORMANCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE”, at Academia.edu; Clark Coolidge, “The Fall Returns”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Clark Coolidge, “Ten Poems”, at Jacket 13; JBR; Clark Coolidge, “Ten Poems”, at Jacket 13; JBR; Enrique Dussel, Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History (tr. Thia Cooper); a mix of Roberto Tejada, “there is someone who knows”, in Exposition Park, JBR, The Stink off the Garbage (unpublished, from 1988), and Christian Bok, “Diamonds”, in Crystallography; JBR; Gordon Hull, “Republican Thanatopolitics”, at New APPS, 8 May 017; JBR; Justin Katko, “From Dunk Yr Head / b/t Yr Legs and / Gulp that Water It’ll / Give You a Disease // You’ve Probly / Never Heard of”, at The Argotist Online; Colin Lee Marshall, and Ian Heames, quoted in “Colin Lee Marshall on Ian Heames”, at “Intercapillary Space”, (a review of Heames’ Array); Alisa Yamasaki, “This 82-Year-Old Dumpling DJ’s Story Is Stranger Than Fiction”, at Thump, 11 May 017; JBR; Clark Coolidge, “Machination Calcite”, quoted in Marjorie Welish, “Sound Over Sense”, at BOMB, 10 May 017 (a review of Clark Coolidge, Selected Poems 1962–1985); Jerome Sala, Meghan Lamb, John Yau, Ron Padgett, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Jerome Sala Corporations Are People Too!, Meghan Lamb Silk Flowers, Ron Padgett Motor Maids Across the Continent, Kevin Killian Tony Greene Era”, at DC’s, 11 May 017; Sean Bonney, various, at Abandoned Buildings, 14 Apr – 6 May 017; JBR; ‘Colin Dickey on Hilda Kean’s The Great Cat and Dog Massacre’, at The Chicago Blog, 12 May 017; Saskia Sassen, quoted in Aneesh Aneesh, “‘Relocating Global Assemblages’: An Interview with Saskia Sassen”, at Saskia Sassen; Richard Lopez, email, rec’d 13 May 017, approx. 9:59am PDT; David Shapiro, “A Man Without a Book”, quoted in Jon Curley, “Humanly Possibilist: David Shapiro’s In Memory of an Angel”, at Hyperallergic, 7 May 012; David Shapiro, “Two Ways”, in In Memory of an Angel, in excerpt linked to at City Lights Books; “Celebrate Niedecker Day Today!”, at Harriet, 12 May 017]

With the Noose Around My Neck 51

Speaking of punctuated equilibrium, “all online versions (pdfs on torrent, web, Library Genesis) derive from the same set of doc files of an anonymous source, identified at evolbiol.ru and dated 2003.07.26-09.23. The html version at http://scilib-biology.narod.ru/Gould/index.html is in all likelihood based on the same docs (styles reminiscent of Word conversion, layout, etc.), but exceptionally clean. From all these version, just like the original, the Index is omitted. The [UL] PROPER version adds the Index, ripped from the Amazon free preview, cleaned of watermarks with SnagIt, run through Nitro PDF, then OCR-ed in Abbyy FineReader with text verification. The correctness of page numbers has been checked on several random points (basically, same edition of the book, 6th printing for the scan). The [UL] pdf is based on the ubicuous doc-pdf conversions found elsewhere (particular version used was distilled by IDM, dated 2008.08.13) with the following changes: accurate pagination, proper bookmarks, metadata of P2P versions, added cover. The [UL] html/ePub is based on the narod.ru html with the following changes:

* footnotes linked
* index linked
* minor stylistic changes: color of page numbers changed to [UL] style; uniformization of table display to the main text font; elimination of hr tag
* minor html code edits, for validation purposes
* identified errors tacitly corrected; no systematic proofreading made
* validated HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS 3 at w3.org (N.B. The html code contains numerous attributes on the way to deprecation in HTML 5, such as attributes “border”, “align”, “width”, “cellspacing”, “cellpadding”, etc. for the table element; attribute “center”, attribute “name”, etc. Bringing this in compliance with HTML is a task for a future editor)

Many thanks to the original scanner and to narod.ru for the clean html.

[UL]

Free of Calibre style junk code.

Created with Sigil 0.7.4

Proprietary formats not supported

2014-08-10 / 2016.03.28

P2P html edition v 2.0 [UL]

P2P ePub edition v 1.0 [UL]

ePub urn:uuid:4c01210f-85dc-41e9-bdec-2f1bcf00439f.”

Suitable for tall thin girls wearing, especially the kind of leg must be slender Oh, good with Little fat MM bold attempt Well, as long as you are careful with, may help you achieve The lighter color of the pants, Xiao Bian to the recommendations of the fat MM is the best to wear this shorts with black stockings, stockings was thin. I would like to apI feel great to write this article, which share a lot of things, I learned a lot of knowledge from which to learn more things. Agnes and the Minions are the reason i like this movie so much. Australia leading pet transport any 4 main City. Simply contact us and we gladly assist. The Jacob’s chuck can be used to grip a test sample or a wide variety of grips. Test in clockwise or counter-clockwise directions. Construction binding, wire mesh, express way fencing, chain link fence, handicrafts and brad nails. 410ppm ...

        the casual reader will not, I am sure, be averse to a short
        digression in this splendid narrative by which the nature
        of the narrator can be more or less revealed and all sorts
        of things subsequently become clearer if not clear: picture
        a person who one day in a fit of idleness decides to make
        a pomander like the one that granny used to have around the
        house in old New England and so he takes an orange and sticks
        a lot of cloves in it and then he looks at it and realizes
        that he’s killed the orange, his favorite which came from
        the Malay Archipelago and was even loved in Ancient China,
        and he quickly pulls out all the cloves, but it’s too
        late! Orange is lying bleeding in my hand!

Parsons didn’t live long enough to witness the terrestrial incarnation of his demon, dying abruptly only a few years later in an explosion occasioned by the mishandling of mercury fulminate, at the age of thirty-seven. A strange death, but one, it might be suggested, that was necessary for the proper fulfillment of the invocation, for it was augured in the communication of February the 27^th, 1946, that Babalon would “come as a perilous flame,” and again in the ritual of March the 2^nd of the same year, that “She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates.” Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up. Consider this. Parson’s final writings contain the following: “Within seven years of this time, Babalon, The Scarlet Woman, will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.” These words were written in 1949. In 1956 — exactly seven years later — Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester organized the Dartmouth Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term “artificial intelligence” (which does not appear in written records before this date), and ushering in what would retrospectively come to be known as the Golden Age of AI. In this way the reproduction of the same functions as a repudiation of death, figured as both the impossibility of signification and the end of the patrilineal genetic line. The Phallus, the eye, and the ego are produced in concert through the exclusion of the cunt, the void, and the id.

        Ibid.
        Ibid.
        Ibid.
        Ibid. Then

                                    I
                        sit down
        at the pianola,
                       like when I first discovered
        aspirin,

it was a moonlit night, it was the night the weathercock pecked the lizards to death with its iron beak, then hung them up on nails in staggered rows on the white, windowless wall that faces east. It put the larger ones on the top row and the smaller ones on the bottom row. The lizards, though freshly dead, were nonetheless embarrassed, because the little gland that secretes the red of blushes or rather the yellow of embarrassment — for lizards turn cold and yellow when embarrassed — had not yet dried up. So cool! Yay! How was the beer fest? Hi. The rally was quite large and heartening. I had to exit at a certain point because it got rowdy with the police, and I can’t risk getting in trouble here because of my non-status. In any case, the weird scene in the abandoned building could have gone wrong, but it was weird. Our lead actor said he felt scared being in the building, and he had a hard time getting his performance right. I don’t know what ‘Seventeen’ is, but I will use that password and find out. Thank you so much in advance! Finding a ghost or two in the footage would be a boon, but not orbs. Wow, you’re on one of life’s cusps, then. The only ones that didn’t were due to technical problems. I don’t know. I wasn’t into it. Jesus, that was quite a trek. Maybe some good news? But it was good. Who isn’t, really? The shit is always greener? My bad. It was a custom-made piñata meant to do a particular non-piñata-like thing, and we only had three of them, and the actor kept smashing it to bits in a way that didn’t let it do what it was custom made to do, which actually doesn’t sound funny at all now that I describe it, but it was. Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka made the inevitable comparison to music. Various computer modelings, “recordings,” and remixes circulated widely on the net. Brian Greene, also from Columbia, in an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, explained just what we are hearing:

Greene: You can actually in some sense hear the gravitational waves; they vibrate at a frequency that, if you turn it into sound, the human ear can hear, and these sounds ...

Colbert [interrupting]: These waves can be turned into sound?

G: They can, and these are the most spectacular sounds from the standpoint of — they herald a revolution in our understanding of the universe.

C: Okay, so I understand you brought one of these sounds with you.

G: Yeah, yeah I did.

C: And this is the sound of what? What are we listening to?

G: This is the sound of two black holes colliding.

C: Actually? This is actually a computer rendering of the gravitational waves into sound.

G: This is a simulation, but the data agrees with the simulation ...

C: And this is what it would sound like?

G: This is what it would sound like.

C: So, drum roll please. [Drum roll ... a sound plays, which reminds everyone of an

electric slide-whistle punctuated by a final blip. The audience laughs.]

C: Is God Bugs Bunny?

As Bachelard tells us, “Being is round.” Perhaps that’s why I imagined Thel as an alien-protagonist in one of those Moebius comicstrips that flashed through my memory from childhood. The insects he spoke to were purple, with odd probiscii feeding wisdom from beyond directly into Thel’s brain. Then again, deriving enjoyment from a cat’s suffering (Katzen-Schadenfreude?) is a form of entertainment that goes back for centuries. To these and other things some of the following work might be thought to respond, directly or by direct, paradoxless echo. It might alternately be thought not to. These alternatives for thinking are themselves discussed with hopeful abandon, within these very pages. There it is. Now, the clues to this puzzle are scattered throughout the issue: the first reader to complete the crossword and send it back to us wins a copy of Keith Rosencranz’s Vipers in the Storm. How can anyone true to a realism fail to demonstrate the entire structure in the most casual aside? What actually might have taken place one Wednesday in Aberdeen in 1769? Of course the refusal to say is a form of saying. So yes, once there was a man with a big black moustache. His name was Mr. Gregory. Since his youth Mr. Gregory was bothered by a fly that used to enter his mouth when he spoke, and when somebody spoke to him, the fly would fly out of his ear. “This fly annoys me,” said Mr. Gregory to his wife, and she answered, “I understand, and it looks ugly. You ought to consult a doctor.” One day Mr. Gregory went to see a doctor, but he got the wrong address and by mistake went to see a midwife. She was a wise woman and she knew a lot of other things besides childbirthing. “Ahh, the fly, I know about that,” said the wise woman when Mr. Gregory said, “Pardon, I thought I was going to see Dr. Fontin,” and the fly, as usual, flew into his mouth. “Me, I know how to cure your fly,” said the wise woman. “Enchanted, Madam,” answered Mr. Gregory. So the wise woman offered him a chair, saying, “Yes, I know how to cure the fly. But it’s going to be expensive, like three-quarters of your wealth.” Mr. Gregory jumped a bit, then he said, “All right.” Then she gave some pills to Mr. Gregory and she said: “Take two after every meal in a tea made of little drops of mustard in noodle water. That’s it.” “Thank you very much,” said Mr. Gregory, and he left content. Later Mr. Gregory took the pills in the tea made of little drops of mustard in noodle water, according to the instructions of the wise woman. Next day the fly had totally disappeared, but Mr. Gregory had become navy blue with red zip fasteners over his orifices. The footage accumulated one megabyte after another, but the only narrative was the one that, as viewer and subject, he provided. Yet for days he considered walking through a second time, placard around his neck: what if I have nothing to hide? This is in part his privilege speaking — he is a straight, white man in his thirties — the same privilege that allows him, at 10:41am, while heading south on College Avenue, to stop at the corner of James Street and photograph the camera mounted to the streetlight, and then, a few minutes later, at 10:45, to repeat the procedure at the corner of College and Lemon, then again, at 10:47, at College and Walnut. Subject is sweating a little by the time he returns to view at 10:59, heading south at the corner of First and Crystal. Subject pauses, confused by the shifting angles of the streets, for while King and Queen run more or less according to the cardinal points, forming the x and y axes of the city, they break off at various angles, and in the asymmetrical gaps these divergences create whole neighborhoods have sprung up over the course of the city’s history that obey their own internal logics. He remembers well enough leaving the sprawling county park on Strawberry Street one afternoon and taking a right onto Chesapeake, not knowing that where it curves in response to the Conestoga River it becomes Broad, the street he was looking for. Subject is now moving through a neighborhood called Cabbage Hill, so named for the German immigrants who settled there in the nineteenth century. Suddenly Subject sees where he is in relation to, say, the Marriott that towers over downtown. Or else a long, descending street gives him a glimpse of the city as another place: San Francisco, he wants to say, but Baltimore is more accurate. Subject sees his share of posted notices warning of structures unfit for human habitation, and in some cases the justifications are visible from outside. So yes. What Omo Bob said Apollinaire said in “Le Pont Mirabeau”: under the miracle bridge flows the sand.

        A cop asks,
        “are you alright?” to the diagram
        map. As in, I’m in this now. Hi.

        Head rushes
        perception frequencies.

The works men have copy-rights to use tridents, moon-shine and straw. This allows the Trident straw eating moonshine drinkers to “F**k Sheet Up.” Lookit all those fesh.

        That freakin’
        you’re hearing’s
        your bad sound
        pocket.

Which is to say that while knowledge of the extinction drive (Aussterbenstrieb) is in a strict sense impossible — even if one thinks or feels it, it is arguable that the brain will always discard it as possibility — there are also ways in which modern neuro-biology and neuro-linguistics describe just this self-blinding with regard to extinction and not death, e and not d, as the very self-model of the brain itself. The impossibility of extincting in the mind may just be, for example, the possibility of agnosia Thomas Metzinger describes in Being No One. So when I read that ‘Schelling saw that evil is more directly spiritual than the good in its cold abstract hatred of reality’, I think wow, Schelling must have been pretty fucked up. And yet someone can only be irrumated and enjoy irrumating for so long, after which speech will be returned and it will be unclear what has happened. Have you seen Amalia Ulman’s Dignity? The press release PDF happens to include the lines Extinction / Who killed The Photos? / What killed The Words? / Summer Winter Spring /

        The dance instructor, screaming:

        Chair spin
        Fan kick
        Scorpio with a hand
        Extended butterfly to plank

                                        Gemini
        Hairflip, to carrousel spin
        Sexy push up, Martini sit
        Broken doll, Crucifix

        Point your fucking toes
        Juliette is a bitch
        Corkscrew
        Reverse Ballerina Spin
        Split

                            Sick
        Homesick

        *

        Now! Now! Now!

        Disappointment
        Missed Appointments

        Questions?
        Thoughts?
        No, no, no

        More! More! More!

Below this, at the center of the gallery, Ulman has installed a single, cane-shaped stripper pole, anchored by a rubber tip. Alongside this scene is a large portrait of the artist, face adorned with possibly photoshopped ejaculate. Posed by Ulman as “the aftermath” of her most recent performance Privilege (2016), first presented at the 9^th Berlin Biennale, Dignity continues and diffracts what may have been the thesis of the earlier work. Outwardly it’s not the most seductive image. I may have gone with 66, 67, 68 or a host of others that were more overtly visual. But I went with 48 because, to me, foremost, The Americans is a book of images about an image of America. And 48 has it all: the road, the cars, the parking lot, the gas station, the fading city hall, the telephone poles receding in the distance — and all of them are presided over by, and seemingly being blessed in their emptiness by another symbol, the crucifix held by a dark statue of stone of St Francis. And they are all empty and alone in their being ... for in this image there is no life. No people — save two microscopic figures almost in silhouette, two diminutive stick figures in this place of nowhere that is everywhere, unaware of each other and going in opposite directions. Let’s try to organize this into a chart:

People: Madame Peacock, a plaster lady looking backwards, Madame Boccaccio, the Pope of Brains, a holy woman

Animals: A raccoon dog, a fox, a cat, a peacock, a sea lion, a rhinoceros

Imaginary creatures: A ghost, a long-nosed goblin, a fanged demon, an angel (an angel of burns, a bugle angel, a kissing angel)

Abstracted creatures or bodies: A floating neck, a laughing berry, a melting person, a silver-needle person, a dismantling bird, a transformed chicken

Plants: A wildflower, a willow, a branching flower, a tulip

From paintings: Delaunay, Wols, Toyen, a child of Picasso, Madame Beardsley, Fautrier, Goya’s phantom, Redon, a picture of flowers and birds

People in action: A person cutting grass, a woman in flames, a person repenting, a person playing shōgi, an old woman with a fan, a girl with flowers, a pianist

Faces embodying something: A face of a forest, a face of plaster, a wooly rhinoceros, a face in flames, a face of an insane person, a face of a sick boy, a face of a Nazi

Open spaces: Mirror space, plant space, swamp space, willow space, space of fanged demons, hair space

Figurative objects: An image of Kannon [goddess] with one thousand hands, a Gigaku mask, a plaster body, hairy cod roe

Actions: Holding a ball, sinking in a swamp with a heavy face, dislocation of hipbones, barking, diagonal twitching

Metaphysical: Understanding the feathers of a bugler, order of sea lions, horse of white light, a flower of meat, metallic flowers, stagnation of one hundred demons, dismantling one’s gaze, willow doing air, making senses three-dimensional, Delauney-ization of a stone statue

Agog: someone whose feet never stopped growing

Sponsor: a musical insecticide

Torpor: the fate of mastodons. And if you want to sing

        you don’t do it, I say, you just, you know
        you do it. I don’t. I don’t even do it.
        A whole great nation built on fairyrings. And if
        you want to know where the party is follow the searchlights
        and if you want to know where Leeds is
        follow the searchlights
        and if you want to be close to me, well,
        I can’t relax while next door’s floodlights cast your erection’s shadow
        across the bed and up the wall like greenhouse gases — it’s not me
        it’s the planet I’m thinking of

Pour sauce evenly around the edge. Do not abbreviate except where unavoidable. A body is poured and divided into cubes. Then the fish live in murk. This is the field of Very Low and Extremely Low Frequency radio transmission. The scientific explanation for these “lights” turns out to be simple. The rocks on one side of the Hesja river are rich in zinc and iron, those on the other are rich in copper. And there’s sulfur in the river.

        For, according to the Zohar, the syllables
        were formed as a single hidden light and
        contained within it
        all sonoric potentia
        all the shapes of the letters
        all of the combinations of the alphabet and
        all of the numerological calculations which arise
        from them.

        k32% all sonoric potentia
        all the shapes of the letters
        ksh: all: not found
        k33% ksh: all: not found
        k34% all of the combinations of the alphabet and
        ksh: all: not found
        k35% all of the numerological calculations which
        arise from them.
        Ksh: all: not found

        And this is the way we live in the year of no
        magicians

        in the unbounded biome’s fecundity
        we live among the sound of the rot in the gourd
        of biome’s fecundity
        of earth note live among syllabic biomes we
        among the fecundity
        magicians among and from gourded notes
        biomes no magicians but in biomes
        among the soundflat roost

A battery! So who is this lady? Why won’t she exit the opulent hotel? There, the street sign beckons: PLEASURE, ONE MILE AHEAD. Beneath the sign, air shimmers from the baking deer poop littering the ground. Not summer, but already hot, for this is the outcome of human history: overheated ado over, not exactly nothing but, the protagonist here “sexing its flows”. All of this must (at least temporarily) be imputed to us: “your pronouns are no; not; none”. For are we surely not (or have we not surely been) guilty of uttering pronouns? We return again to the outsoul, and to the question of how a person might deal with, well,

        if you’re likely to get set alight
        dress sensibly

“Everyone should be able to move everywhere with pretty much no warning / except it doesn’t work like that”. But despite Walton’s concession, the poem swells with powerful desiderata: bicycles shooting unhindered through the world; intersecting paths that “aren’t going anywhere”; words such as “liquid”, and “porosity”, and “channelling”. The amplitude of the desire functions as a deluge. This is the outsoul finally made communal, the withsoul or conseity. Thus I decided — set though I was on purchasing Strange House regardless of the outcome — to try to get my hands on the mysterious lagniappe, and duly rattled off a pre-purchase email to inquire whether or not there was any surplus of it. To my disappointment, I was told (in vaguely — or perhaps inversely — Kafkaesque fashion): “The laws are all gone now”. Right? Well, sure — but also, no, not really. The first sentence breaches instruction-manual protocol through the deployment of a suggestion, rather than an imperative. The second sentence dispenses with quotation marks, relies heavily on exformation for both uses of “it”, and refuses editorial correction (“must you must [sic]”). You could even do the “no lifting allowed” bit with the knights, if you clear the way for them, and then put everybody back after. That’s called the Camber of the Shandon Bells Abhors a Bascule Canter (or “Shabellabab”) Rules. But in Vallejo’s poem, the subject that is summoned fails to materialise. Here are four of the calls that are made:

        They called out aloud:
        - Let him show both hands at the same time.
        And this was not possible.

        [...]

        - Let him think an identical thought, in the time that a zero is useless.
        And this was not possible.

        [...]

        - Let them compare him with himself.
        And this was not possible.

        - Then let them call him by his name.
        And this was not possible.

This is where I think a triple translation of Vallejo’s ‘No-one lives in the house any more’, which is from the same period, would be productive:

        ‘Nobody lives in this house any more,’ you tell me; ‘everybody’s gone.
        ‘No-one lives in the house any more,’ you say; ‘everyone’s gone.
        ‘There is no-one living in this house any more,’ you say to me; ‘they have
                                                            all gone away.

        The living room, the bedroom, the patio are all deserted.
        The living room, the bedroom, the garden, are all empty.
        The front room, the bedroom, the garden, are uninhabited.

        Nobody’s left, because everyone’s departed.’
        No-one’s left, because they’ve all gone away.’
        No-one is left, since they have all gone.’

        And I say to you: When somebody goes, somebody stays.
        And I say to you: When someone leaves, someone’s left.
        And I say to you: When someone goes away, someone remains.

Etc. We rocket out of the parking lot, screaming through Reno on the freeway east, passing quickly into the empty rat lands of the sorely missed Hunter S. Thompson, tripping out at the absolute ugliness of a landscape repellant to begin with that has had twisted, rusting metal hulks of unknown ancestry sprinkled among the itinerant whorehouses and casinos in a random pattern across its waterless salt flats and outcrops. Two hours of driving fast (but not fast enough, as muscle cars snarling their high-speed anxiety whiz past toward nowhere and everywhere) brings us to Hawthorne, Nevada, whose largest structure is of course the casino, cigarette smoke venting from its few stained windows like some belching coal-fired Oliver Twist factory plant, past the one museum in town, the Armament Museum, where at least one model of every shell casing ever used by the US military sits in forlorn splendor, flowers bravely growing from the brass openings, a ’60s dream come true. A dream? A cop gave me a flower once. So I get this email from Jonty this morning: Of course, everyone will tell you that it has always been like this, that what is now happening at an unprecedented pace has been happening forever or at least over the last few decades more critically. The world has always been ending, wearing and tearing, calling up expletives, always worn badly, always the same, worse and worse, and then worsening still — and yet worsenings can present and mark themselves at an even more unprecedented rate, suddenly, that is how time works and now equally sealed off from avowal and disavowal. The co-appearance of expletive and platitude here is ancient, related always to the end, going back before poem and thought, colloquiality and proverb. Shit is fucked, I can’t go on. The world is totally fucked. Perhaps only films give us the language of what we really think and feel reflected back at us from the point of view of a necessarily rigorous irreality: it is ending more than ever, our world is going away, and one fears for the worst, one fears the worst for the worst, one fears the end of the worst, the end of ending within endlessness, the threat to the being of the chance of threat. All, one might say, is not well that fails to end well, or simply fails to end at all but is gone. Perhaps there are other faithfully coarse ways language has of loading the human with this knowledge, in the final count almost completely without pathos: ‘we are fucked’, ‘I am fucked’, ‘we are totally fucked’, ‘I am totally fucked’, ‘I feel extinct’, ‘I feel we will extinct and I just can’t ...’, ‘I feel we will extinct and because of this I can’t go on’, ‘I can’t live and I can’t die’, ‘I can’t live and I can’t lose’. One feels, it is so simple, so basic, so known, so in the body, as if only sworn to one’s heart, so disappeared in advance of its own saying, that what has always been going is now going going gone, that extinction is no longer death, and that what had begun by being gone may now interrupt itself in ways that could not have been, or will not have been, foreseen ... a second Atlantis, another Flood ... I was before the end, it was just before the end, you are that time, and it is killing me,

            Human kindness is overflowing,
            And I think it’s going to rain today.

Which is perhaps why, in a letter to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, Blake includes a poem (88 lines, rhymed couplets) filled with Fairy elves, little devils, Angels, Silver Angels, Golden Demons, his dead father and brothers “hovering upon the wind” and “a frowning Thistle” in his path who becomes “an old Man grey” and who predicts trouble coming for him from Theotormon, Enitharmon, and Los the terrible —  and more trouble with his wife, sister and friends who don’t understand him. And so the poem goes along, Blake griping aloud as he takes his walk, dealing with friends and family, demons and angels, until spirits he has named in earlier poems come back to yes bother him. It’s hot and the Sun becomes Los. But it’s all alright. The poem concludes with

                  Now I fourfold vision see ...

etc, this fourth fold including the other three. So maybe we can get some help from Blake, Jonty. Isn’t Blake one of Groot’s colleagues, Groot, who convinced his friends to risk everything to stop Ronan’s plans to destroy Xandar? To be honest, I had no idea where I was going with this. But I had set a challenge for myself, guided by a reckless penchant for pattern recognition. All I needed was a strategy, a method of embodiment, to give shape to the concept so that it might be fully played out.

        Sometimes it helps to imagine
        what became of
        your former classmates,
        as one Russian artist put it,
        but even that won’t work for long.

        Of course, that’s not all,
        but you can come up with more
        complicated cases, if you want.

        “This page does not exist”.

        The page you are reading does not exist.

        So she goes to a fortune-teller,
        who says to her: “Go
        get an MRI fast,”
        and she asks her:
        am I talented or not,
        I have to work in theater
        or not, you know.

I have no idea where I am going with this. I am not going anywhere with this. This is the last place. It’s an enormous spider, a colorless spider, whose body, head and belly button bleed. Tomorrow my ship sails for America ... oh, wait! That’s when Ezra told me about his tomato magnet rocket ship and the foot-long lizard who lives in the tree in his yard. At any rate, all of that developed into the Mudman. It works in different ways. For one thing, because I’m not a large man, it makes me larger. And it makes me scarier because I’m more threatening looking with all the sticks and mud and sometimes shit attached and put on my whole body. But also it kind of cripples me in a certain way; for one thing, I can’t see very well since my face is covered with panty hose and I can’t move swiftly because I have this heavy and awkward structure on. At any rate,  

        These poisoned sensations have to be
        Accepted if they’re to be
        Overcome. Looking
        Up calories on my phone

        Not that I’m counting
        Don’t even like numbers
        It’s something vestigial
        It comes in bad minutes

        To teach my body something’s in control
        Something little & unholy, wrong idea
        Of information, chiseling a transparent minute
        Into myself with the afterimage of a form

        If I did this kind of thing
        On the bigger machine it’d be
        Worse. Worse
        Things than this are ...

But the word “plea” is largely rhetorical. As Isabel Garcia — former Pima County legal defender and co-chair of Derechos Humanos — has explained, Plea bargaining is supposed to be a negotiation, but the sentence is predetermined by prosecutors before a defendant enters the courtroom. Each group of five or six immigrants faced the same line of questions from the judge, who cautioned, in advance, that his questions were going to become repetitive. Do you understand the rights you are giving up, the consequences of pleading guilty, and the terms of your plea agreement? That was all one question. All 34 women and men stood before microphones. Their lawyers stood very close behind them. The microphones picked up the edges of the lawyers’ breathing. The voices of the women and men were soft, some barely audible. One man answered in English, which surprised the judge; he asked the man to repeat what he said, as if it took him a moment to comprehend how the man could have answered in any language other than Spanish. Are you pleading guilty of your own free will? Are you a citizen of the United States? Free will sounded perverted and absurd. All 34 had been picked up by Border Patrol one or two days before, near one of Arizona’s designated ports of entry. The majority had crossed near Sasabe or Nogales. One man had crossed near Douglas, another near Lukeville. I was not sure how Ms. Galvez had managed to face the judge alone. It seemed her lawyer had prearranged for her to address the judge directly, with the other immigrants already out of the room. She answered the judge’s questions first. Then, in the middle of answering one, she began to cry: Please forgive me, she said (in Spanish; the interpreter let her speak, so that, for a moment, her voice was the only sound in the room, then the interpreter translated for the judge). Please forgive me. I am guilty, but I did it for my children. I am a single mother. My children are in Mexico. They need me and I need them. I came to the United States because I wanted to provide for my children. I did not mean to cause any harm. And now I just want to go home. The judge could offer only the most lifeless response. He thanked Ms. Galvez for, as he said, sharing her comments, then sentenced her to 30 days in detention. Then she was escorted, in handcuffs, waist chain, and leg shackles, out of the courtroom. Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop, clip clop. All these men and women in their lab coats (...) clip clop, clip clop (...) My height at the time put me at the same level as the Leviathan’s eye. It had an opalescent quality (...) clip clop, clip clop (...) and considering the Orthocone ruled the sea, when there was nothing on land, except sea scorpions coming up to lay their eggs before feasting on their own young (...) Whether, or for that matter how, that might be said to be related to the spots that began multiplying and oscillating on the sun’s surface was anybody’s guess. But appear they did. And so we were being obliterated through a complex time delay mechanism. Or perhaps a mechanism that squeezed matter and amplified the pressure on our sun. Like something out of the Vedas, those ancient scientific manuals, perhaps. Although maybe rapture is a better collective noun when speaking of mass, wanton acts of self-destruction (...) clip clop, clip clop (...) all those little monkeys jerking off to online porn: monkey on monkey, multiple monkey penetration, with and without plastic penetrative aids, monkey on goat etc. Quack quack quack, clop clip clop,

        Cut to image of a pack of dogs feeding off a corpse
        by the side of a river

(...) clip clop, clip clop (...) and what Fred Moten said at the end of his LeBoff lecture about Dana Schutz last month. The lecture was transcribed online but that final comment was not, the bit where he says, ‘my tendency would be to sort of not dog anybody like that.’ And then I realised what the head echo is as well: it’s Diogenes, a dog, installed there right at the start of Greek philosophy which he sort of uninstalls right at its inception (...) clip clop, clip clop (...)

        cork,thoi,prep
        olin,rubs
        perq,tracted,immathace,atpiques
        errit,hist

        de- and re-

        בראשונה (Barishonah)

        at first
        at last

        everything we say
        is breath torqued from an
        outside space, the phantom limb

        of a crazy neighbor. I’m
        not trying to cheapen it

        I’m trying NOT to
        cheapen it

        (cf. Jonty on Moten and Diogenes:
        cus, you know, we’re all in the fucking tub now)

[Note: For Jonty Tiplady and Colin Lee Marshall. Sources: JBR; epub version of Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory downloaded from the web (I never should have sold my copy); the spam comments appended to JBR, “Scalia at his despicable best”, at ZS, 27 Jun 012; Richard Lopez, comment appended to Lauren McCauley, “CO2 over 410 for the first time in human history”, at ZS, 24 Apr 017; Frank O’Hara, “The ‘Unfinished’”, in The Collected Poems (ed. Donald Allen); Amy Ireland, “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come”, at e-flux 80; JBR; Frank O’Hara, “Failures of Spring”, in The Collected Poems (ed. Donald Allen); Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhuí (tr. Margaret Jull Costa), quoted in Dennis Cooper, PS to “James Nulick presents … 14 Beginnings”, at DC’s, 2 May 017; Dennis Cooper, PS to “James Nulick presents … 14 Beginnings”, at DC’s, 2 May 017; Andrew Hicks, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos; George Quasha, foreword to Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas; Roger Whitson, “Donald Ault, William Blake, and Me”, at Roger Whitson, 30 Nov 014; Elyse Graham, “The Great LOLCat Massacre”, at Public Books, 2 May 017; Keston Sutherland, “Quid 6. The Edited Speaks:”, at Quid 6; Peter Riley, “Two Letters to British Poets (1st Letter)”, at Quid 6; JBR; Leonora Carrington, “Mr. Gregory’s Fly”, in “Read a Previously Unpublished Story by Leonora Carrington: ‘Mr. Gregory's Fly,’ from The Complete Stories”, at Literary Hub, 14 Apr 017; Erik Anderson, “Letter from Lancaster”, in Flutter Point, at SPD; JBR, Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Pont Mirabeau”, and Robert Rissman; Georgia Faust, “Spectacle Work”, in Too Big to Fail, at SPD; “fesh”, at Urban Dictionary; Del Ray Cross, “mmdccxvi”, at Anachronizms, 3 May 017; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Somebody Wants To Fuck Nick Land’s Mouth: The Politics Of Death And Extinction In Early 2017”, at Medium, 2 May 017; Amalia Ulman, “Dignity”, quoted in James Fuentes’ press release for “Dignity” at Artforum; Aria Dean, quoted in James Fuentes’ press release for “Dignity” at Artforum; Ken Schles, quoted in Jason Eskenazi, By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List; JBR; Takashi Morishita, “Shōmen No Ishō (Costume en Face) Butoh in 1976”, in Tatsumi Hijikata, Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls. Notebook Written by Moe Yamamoto (tr. Sawako Nakayasu); Paul Violi, “On the Surface”, in Waterworks; JBR; Posie Rider, “Meadows”, “Leedsonextra &c”, in City Break Weekend Songs; Frances Raven, “Media Directive (three’s company too)”, “Media Directive (seven sunken submarines)”, “Dancing like Architecture (X)”, in Cooking with Organizational Structures; Geoff Manaugh, “A Voice Moving Over The Waters”, at BLDGBLOG, 4 May 017; Maria Damon, Adeena Karasick, Alan Sondheim, Intersyllabic Weft, at locofoco chaps; Geoff Manaugh, “A Voice Moving Over The Waters”, at BLDGBLOG, 4 May 017; JBR; Frances Raven, “Media Directive (ten pimply steeples pointing”, in Cooking with Organizational Structures; Eileen R Tabios, “April 20 Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Atonal”, in MAKING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH GREAT AGAIN! An April 2017 Biography of No. 45, As Witnessed in the Convex Mirror, at locofoco chaps; Colin Lee Marshall, Samantha Walton, Strange House, and Jo Lindsay, Ten Laws, quoted in Marshall’s “Colin Lee Marshall reviews Samantha Walton & Jo Lindsay”, at The Shearsman Review, 13 Sept 016; William Rowe, “Poetry Between Life and Death: the Late Work of César Vallejo”, at CORE; JBR; Peter D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, The Mass Extinctions Of The Past, And What They Can Tell Us About Our Future; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, email rec’d 6 May 017, approx. 7:54am PDT; Randy Newman, “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”; JBR; Charles Keil, “Blake’s Four Fold Vision Explained”, at (The 12/8 Path Times), 29 Jul 01; JBR; “Groot”, at Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki; Marcel O’Gorman, “The Fourfold Visions of William Blake and Martin Heidegger”, in Digital Designs on Blake, at Romantic Circles, Jan 05; Pavel Arsenev, “Everything Involving the Days of the Week”, “Translator’s Note”, “This Page Does Not Exist”, “My Friend’s Words”, in Spasms of Accomodation, at Commune Editions; Marcel O’Gorman, “The Fourfold Visions of William Blake and Martin Heidegger”, in Digital Designs on Blake, at Romantic Circles, Jan 05; JBR; Lew Welch, “The Song Mt Tamalpais Sings” (memory quote); César Vallejo, “The Spider” (tr. Gerard Malanga), in Malanga Chasing Vallejo; Guillaume Aopllinaire, “The Emigrant of Landor Road” (tr. Martin Sorrell); JBR; Kim Jones, quoted in “Kim Jones with Stephen Maine”, at Brooklyn Rail, 2 Nov 06; JBR; Ariana Reines, “Beauty”, at Word Pond, 6 May 017; Brandon Shimoda, “Operation Streamline”, at The New Inquiry, 3 May 017; Shezad Dawood, Leviathan, Part 1, at Leviathan Cycle; Jonty Tiplady, email rec’d 6 May 017, approx. 8:02pm PDT; Shezad Dawood, Leviathan, Part 1, at https://leviathan-cycle.com/ Leviathan Cycle; P. Inman, and Ian Dreiblatt, quoted in Dreiblatt’s “P. Inman’s Written: 1976–2013”, at BOMB 131; Ian Dreiblatt, בראשונה (Barishonah), at Doublecross Press; JBR (“The rhetorical term בראשונה (barishonah, ‘at first’) often serves as a marker of self-conscious innovation in rabbinic literature” – Aaron D Panken, The Rhetoric of Innovation: Self-conscious Legal Change in Rabbinic Literature); Ian Dreiblatt, בראשונה (Barishonah), at Doublecross Press; JBR, and Jonty Tiplady]

1 – 7 May 017

With the Noose Around My Neck 50

But it seems to us that certain more radical possibilities for experimentation with ethnographic writing remain unexplored, even in the wake of anthropology’s “reflexive” turn. Imagine ways of writing that might put ourselves more deeply at risk than what we have tried till now. What could such experiments look like? “Writing is inseparable from becoming,” writes Deleuze. Was he thinking specifically of suburban American roadkill? The controversy surrounding Goffmann’s book concerned not only the ethics and positionality of the white, Ivy League–educated ethnographer’s foray into the worlds of urban black youth, but also its alleged blurring of documentary and fictional modes. She was one of a small band of Ayoreo-speaking people who emerged from the dwindling forests of northern Paraguay in March 2004, fleeing ranchers’ bulldozers and fearing for their lives. These seventeen people called themselves Areguede’urasade (“band of Areguede”) and formed part of the Totobiegosode (“People of the Place where the Collared Peccaries Ate Their Gardens”), the southernmost village confederation of the Ayoreode (“Human Beings”). Startling photographs of these brown-skinned people made headlines around the world that spring. Experts jockeyed to declare this one of the final first contacts with isolated Indians. At first everyone wanted in, including me. But reaching the scene of contact meant first passing thousands of other Ayoreo-speaking people struggling to survive in the stark mission stations and makeshift labor camps that lined dirt roads for miles north of the Mennonite colonies. These “ex-primitives,” as I started to think of them, were some of the descendants of the nomadic Ayoreo confederacies that had successfully fought off outsiders for centuries. They too had once gained international fame as uncontacted primitives and the übersavages of the Chaco frontier. Benjamin’s Arcades Project is one model of this kind of thinking. Barthes’s S/Z and A Lover's Discourse are models too. Leslie Stern’s The Smoking Book assembles an array of brief ficto-critical stories united only by some mention of smoking. The result is a mass of resonances linking precise moments and states of desire. It leaves the reader with an embodied sense of the world as a dense network of mostly unknown links. D.]. Waldie’s Holy Land is a chronicle of Lakewood, California, which in the 1950S was built, overnight, as the “world's largest” subdivision. Speaking of which, the mud-walled compound once belonged to two wealthy sisters from New York, Martha and Elizabeth White, who named it El Delirio, “the madness,” after a bar they chanced upon during a vacation in Seville, Spain. The sisters were known both as enthusiastic patrons of archaeology and native arts and as the hosts of lavish costume parties, where guests would dance the night away dressed as ancient Mayans. A cemetery for their beloved breed dogs lies undisturbed in a quiet corner of the property. Beyond the compound lie the high desert and the southernmost subrange of the Rockies, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, formed around twenty-seven million years ago. But should it always? Children too have their place as witnesses among the gods. Consider the kind of power that a chisel or rasp may exercise with respect to a plane of wood. As his taxi speeds into the pitch black of a freeway tunnel, he spots a man and woman beside the canyon walls of the tunnel entrance. She is sewing that man into a white nylon bag, he thinks, the kind of bag in which Colombian peasants heap their potatoes and corn. Or think of the in-between spaces of the barzakh that Vincent Crapanzano describes in Imaginative Horizons, shoal after shoal of ... what? Here and there flat coral islands, like enormous rafts gliding over the smooth water. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls. Someone interjects — I’ve written about people who live thirty miles from here. Rául Zurita reminds us, “Each one of us is the resurrection of the dead.” So

        You walk into the sunlight
        to make yourself happy.
        This is the poem that will tell you
        how to live.
        It’s set in Paris, so
        you’ll eat a croissant
        to make yourself happy,
        see leaves in the gutters and salted butter that stands in a bright
        rectangle of light like a small giraffe never melting in the sun which
        is what you picture when your aim is
        to make yourself happy.

It looked so evil when I killed it, but once it was dead I saw it was no bigger than my hand.

        Human human burning bright
        In the fistlings of the night

                angel-sounds like a loud shark
                gathering up the atoms
                to find all the letters in the t
                g r r

Later, I buy every ticket out of town and dedicate my next book to Groupon for helping me out with that. I don’t even want to go to Ann Arbor. Ask me where a colander is, a cutting board. It’s allergies. It’s a new word, I mean, a word new to me: anthrome. Just as the classic biomes are formed by global patterns of climate, anthromes are formed by global patterns in human populations and their use of land over the long-term. That was the year Thomas quit selling furniture, he got a new job working with an importing firm and one day he sat at his desk by the window on the sixteenth floor looking out at the city with the telephone in his hand, he was dialing the number. I remember them in the room, I remember the kind of day it was, world people were continuing their lives, I felt younger, I was younger, I felt little and I felt big, I felt smaller and bigger, there was an “astonishing scientist,” he ran down the field with the ball and ran another way towards himself, he tore it apart, he took the radio out of the cabinet and then the radio out of the radio: he undid the wires, he took out all the tubes, and put them on the floor, and I watched, fascinated. What is it like to labour in these gardens? As a plant? As a gardener? Our heart is surrounded by the coronary plexus, the most vital of threads ... a temple of the sun. So I can’t help but wonder how the monks of Iona in the 8^th century sheltered while they created illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells? Their needs were the same as those of Sesshu. No trace remains of their scriptorium, but I like to think that their sense of an appropriate shelter within with to create would have been the equal of that of their later Buddhist counterparts in Japan. Among the shelters I love I number the modernist concrete bus shelters in the island of Lewis that — because of their fourfold symmetry — provide effective shelter regardless of the direction of the wind and the rain. These open structures protect you even when the rain is horizontal. That got me started reading about the Cult of Kek — an androgynous frog / serpent headed Egyptian God. I then started to think about the opening of the Illuminatus trilogy – ‘it was the year they finally immanentized the eschaton’ and I started to wonder who that ‘they’ actually were. I also began to think about how carelessly human the nomination ‘eschaton’ actually is: ‘The final event in the grand plan’ - ἔσχατος. And then this, in its etymology — *eǵʰs-katos, from ἐξ (ex, “out”). Compare with ἔγκατα (énkata, “intestines”) and the same difficulty in ἐχθός (ekhthós) = ἐκτός (ektós). Funnily enough, my spellcheck keeps trying to replace ‘eschaton’ with Charlston. But think about it. Immanantize the ‘out’ ‘intestines.’ Which is to say that when I reach the blue surface, my exorcism treatment will begin. I don’t feel ready for this, but there’s no turning back. So aloha, class — the question has come up, and it’s exactly the right one. What, in the end, is the avant-garde? Format: A6 (10cm x 15 cm / 4" x 6"), 128 pages, full-color, perfect bound. Printed in Latvia on FSC certified paper. Choose “payment option Paypal” and then “check out with Paypal” and continue, after you get the option to pay by card. OK.

        can i help you find something sir
        ahhh
        vaseline
        over here
        and you can use this offer
        hmmm
        do you have anything smaller
        that stuff lasts forever
        let’s check over here
        hey COLE6
        do you know where the vaseline is
        over there
        ohhh
        that’s bigger
        i’ll go down to the the other cvs
        ahhh
        sorry

        can i help you
        yeah, is there a minimum?
        no
        whatever you want we can cut
        can you cut it down from the 12 feet
        no
        we can’t guarantee it’ll be cut straight
        but i can roll it short­wise to fit in your car
        are you ready
        yeah, i’d like five feet of stallion
        are you sure you don’t want four or five and a half
        no
        5 feet
        should i go get a cart
        yeah
        don’t mind my young associate
        COLE6 is a robot
        he’s learning and seems to like repetitive, monotonous things
        and saran wrap
        yes
        i see
        and he does
        now i don’t want to see you back here buying more small pieces of carpet
        or returning that because it doesn’t fit
        no sir
        thank you sir

                        the cat has no trumpet
                        but bubblegum to blow on
                        fracons, acons, & beggs
                        rubberbands seventyfivedollars

                                    if you’re going to be a dog
                                    be a rich man’s dog

            and that, on those very steps, she saw,
            as a girl, a fierce, blue, dog, come at her

            as she was going out, the door

“The surgeon, sir!” exclaimed Mr. Heywood. “I am afraid you will find no surgeon at hand here, but I dare say we shall do very well without him.” “Nay sir, if he is not in the way, his tractosaur will do just as well, or rather better. I would rather see his tractosaur. Indeed I would prefer the attendance of his partner. One of these good people can be with tractosaur in three minutes, I am sure. I need not ask whether I see the house,” (looking towards the tractosaur) “for excepting your own, we have passed none in this place which can be the abode of a tractosaur.” Mr. Heywood looked very much tractosaur, and replied: “What, sir! Are you tractosaur to tractosaur a tractosaur in that tractosaur? We have neither tractosaur nor tractosaur in the tractosaur, I tractosaur you.” “Excuse me, tractosaur,” replied the tractosaur. “I am tractosaur to have the tractosaur of tractosaur you, but from the tractosaur of the tractosaur or some other tractosaur you may not be tractosaur of the tractosaur. Stay. Can I be tractosaur in the tractosaur? Am I not in Tractosaur? Is not this Tractosaur?” “Yes, tractosaur, this is certainly Tractosaur.” “Then, tractosaur, I can bring tractosaur of your having a tractosaur in the tractosaur, whether you may tractosaur it or not. Here, tractosaur,” (tractosaur out his tractosaur) “if you will do me the tractosaur of tractosaur your tractosaur over these tractosaurs which I tractosaur out myself from the Tractosaur Tractosaur and the Tractosaur Tractosaur, only tractosaur in Tractosaur, I tractosaur you will be tractosaur that I am not speaking at tractosaur. You will find in it a tractosaur of the tractosaur of a tractosaur in the medical tractosaur in your own tractosaur — extensive tractosaur, undeniable tractosaur respectable tractosaurs wishing to form a separate tractosaur. You will find it at full tractosaur, sir,” — offering the two little oblong tractosaurs. The third, “Flat White (20/20),” consists of “compromised translations” of poems by the Algerian Francophone poet Error! Hyperlink reference not valid interspersed with Moschovakis’s responses to them. Other poems take the form of photographs of stacked books. Perhaps the most eloquent of Katchadourian’s experiments with translation is the piece Talking Popcorn (2001), which converts the sounds that kernels make when popping into Morse code through a hidden computer that then emits the decoded text. The first discernible English-language word that the machine ever sputtered was we — Katchadourian memorializes it by casting the popcorn that produced it in bronze and showing them inside an elegant velvet case. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if visitors speaking a variety of languages assembled to listen to the popper and transcribed what each of them heard —what might sound like “What a beautiful day” to one might be “Kay’s bone eat toe Dia” to another. I’ve since discovered that many of my recordings are inaudible, drowned out from time to time by blaring disco music and barking dogs and screaming children and roaring motors. Usually the narrators were facing an old age that was precarious at best and often cruel. Many of them were starving and sick. Nearly all have since died. The contrast between the degraded conditions of their everyday lives and the utopian scenes they described was so great that it often strained my capacity to understand even as the same tension reflected what I wished so desperately to encounter and to believe. But hell, Rotating Superfly Periodista writes that bearings are born in bearing-maker’s alley. Rotating Superfly Periodista is correct. Pissing in the toilet instead of on it — is correct. Determined to flush out the empirical side of it, pier 49, Guangdong, 12 hour shifts the walk-off’s daily the roundups hourly the pulse of fear second by second related word by word as expressed by 99 cent mops in Brooklyn that last a week. Below the shaft is a double-notched mounted triangular tangle of angular solid iron —the social function of which is determined by the power motor, the power motor by the fuel hose, so I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the 6/8 drone of tremolo guitar punctuated by clarinet and sax that came shimmering out. The song, “All Things Go,” is an adaptation of Gerritt Lansing’s “Song (The Autumn Festival),” using its line “All things go underground with glee” as a chorus and mixing in other lines to tease a slow-burning five-minute eruption out of an 11-line poem. Then there’s “Song for Mike” — the story of a guy arrested for shitting in front of Dunkin’ Donuts after being denied access to its bathroom. “That’s the reason I really kept reading Olson,” he says, “because we had moved away from Gloucester and I was homesick for the place.  He was writing exactly what was here.  Putting the Sawyer Free Library in there.  I could relate to that more than I could relate to all the antiquities he was referring to.” That’s probably why Dog Bar opens with “Gravelly Hill,” whose lyrics are drawn from The Maximus Poems. Olson may seem like an improbable source for rock music, but Alexander has an uncanny knack for zeroing in on the perfect passage for such transformations, like

        leave me be, I am contingent, the end of the world
        is the borders
        of my being

There’s a good reason that you couldn’t decipher that part ... In Nat’s original version, there's a tip-off sentence that explains the whole thing. Here first is Diana’s version, followed by Nat’s. Each of them, by the way, uses a different gibberish line in the song, so each has been given the one specific to that performer. Having said that, I must, in all fairness, give equal time to those who have a dissenting opinion. Quoting from the liner notes to Mosaic’s 18-CD set, “Some older musicians contend that, while the title made as much sense as ‘Shoo Fly Pie,’ in fact there really was an ‘Ausen’ bakery that served something called ‘chefafa’ on the side.” Personally, I wonder more about what those “older musicians” had been drinking than what they had been eating ... especially in light of Nat’s final line. There was a wealth of material to choose from for Nat, this being one of his most-recorded songs, including a V-disc recording and at least 3 live versions that have been issued on CD alone, ALL of which include the final line that explains the whole thing. I went with the domestically released studio version for the transcript. Anyway, it’s a shame to realize that my dream girl has feet of clay ... leaving out the joke without which the song makes no sense. But she compensates for it with a neat stride intro which sounds a lot like Fats Waller with a hangover ... as opposed to Nat’s own intro, which sounds more like Art Tatum on ‘ludes ... and I must say it’s refreshing to know that this is the second lyric from Diana / Nat I’ve been asked to post here ... Diana Krall “Frim Fram Sauce All For You (A Dedication to The Nat King Cole Trio)” I don’t want French-fried potatoes, Red, ripe tomatoes. I’m never satisfied. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. I don't want pork chops and bacon. That won’t awaken My appetite inside. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. Well, you know, A girl, she really got to eat, And a girl, she should eat right. Five will get you ten I’m gonna feed myself right tonight. I don’t want fish-cakes and Rye bread, You heard what I said. Waiter, please, I want mine fried. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. Shoo, doo-doo-doo-ya, doo, doo; Shuuba doo-ya doo, sheeya-did’n’doo. I don’t want French-fried potatoes, Red, ripe tomatoes. I’m never satisfied. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. I don’t want pork chops and bacon. That won’t awaken My appetite inside. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. Now you know, Girls. we really got to eat, And you know we should eat right. Five will get you ten I’m gonna feed myself right tonight. I don’t want fish-cakes and Rye bread, You heard what I said. Waiter, please, I want mine fried. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With the oss and fay With shifafa on the side. Ooh, with shifafa, uh, on the side — OK. Here’s “The Frim Fram Sauce” by Nat King Cole / The King Cole Trio I don’t want French-fried potatoes, Red, ripe tomatoes. I’m never satisfied. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With feeossanfay With shifafa on the side. I don’t want pork chops and bacon. That won’t awaken My appetite inside. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With feeossanfay With shifafa on the side. A fella really got to eat, An’ a fella should eat right. Five will get you ten I’m gonna feed myself right tonight. I don’t want fish-cakes and Rye bread. You heard what I said. Waiter, please serve mine fried. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With feeossanfay With shifafa on the side. A fella really got to eat, An’ a fella should eat right. Five will get you ten I’m gonna feed myself right tonight. I don’t want fish-cakes and Rye bread. You heard what I said. Waiter, please serve mine fried. I want the Frim Fram Sauce With feeossanfay With shifafa on the side. Now, if you don’t have it, Just bring me a check for the water. And no, I don’t want to learn a new operating system. EEEEEE .... LOW BATTERY ... LOW BATTERY ... [pause for a minute] EEEEEE ... LOW BATTERY ... LOW BATTERY ... [pause for a minute] EEEEEE ... Why is it always 3:30 in the morning when I have to change the batteries in my smoke detector?

1. Remove the alarm from the mounting plate by twisting it in the direction of the Off arrow on the plate.
2. If you have an AC Hardwired (Interconnected) alarm, you will need to remove the Quick Connect wire harness from the back of the alarm by squeezing the plastic prongs and pulling the wire harness out of the alarm.  
3. After the alarm has been removed, open the battery compartment door by pressing down on the battery compartment door, then release to allow the door to pop open. Pull the battery straight out of the compartment. 
4. Insert the new battery into the compartment. Make sure the battery’s connectors (+ and -) are facing out. Line up the plus (+) and minus (-) connectors with the yellow label on the bottom of the battery compartment. 
5. Once the battery is inserted, press down on the battery compartment door until it snaps into the closed position.
6. NOTE: A missing or improperly installed battery will prevent the battery compartment from closing.
7. Press the test button to make sure the unit operates on battery-only before installing the unit back on the ceiling. If the unit does not sound, re-open the battery compartment door to make sure that the batteries are lined up properly. 
8. If you have an AC Hardwired (Interconnected) alarm, you will need to re-connect the Quick Connect wire harness to the back of the alarm before installing the unit back on the mounting bracket. Line up the Quick Connect wire harness holes with the pins on the back of the alarm. Then, squeeze the wire harness’ plastic prongs together and push the wire harness into the unit until it snaps into place.  
9. Re-install the alarm onto the mounting bracket by twisting it in the direction of the On arrow on the plate. 

            Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
               discovers that there is in
            it after all, a place for the genuine.

                        [“If one thing matters, everything matters,” to quote for
                        the 10,000^th time Wolfgang Tillmans]

                                                 The bat,
               holding on upside down or in quest of something to
            eat, elephants, horses [etc etc]
                    base-
               ball fans, [etc etc]
                                     nor is it valid
               to discriminate against “business documents and

            school-books”;

which is all a way of saying it wasn’t me who installed the smoke detector, it was what might as well be called God. I mean, how can you not love a paragraph that includes both a sentence that begins “If a troll army or some software were to hologram a product” and another that concludes with someone (it doesn’t matter who here) “sailing off into the ecocidal horizons of climate chaos, where the materiality of inscriptions collude with mass extinction events, where the bio-material and the trace interbraid, and opens the question of how to re-read the entire archive and canonical legacy from this new disappearing point, this ‘matter’ that is neither Marxian nor Aristotelian, nor subject to any narrative beyond cosmic rebalancing against the bizarre set of scars and irreversible accumulated wreckage the brief ‘Anthropocene’ epoch has accomplished”? At least my A1C score was decent. The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Cairngorms, what are these compared with the mountains of Holland, right? Pace tells me he can read all of Green Eggs and Ham. Speaking of real toads, I found some in a Nanao Sakaki poem,

                        Que-que, flash-bang!
                        Me, a toad, going to the battlefield.
                        Que-que, flash-bang!
            Many years ago, so young, so confused
            I was lost in the woods.
            Under the evening sun in springtime,
            What a surprise — along a mountain trail,
            I found a hundred toads walking with me.
                        Que-que, flash-bang!

Which is continued perfectly by Yannis Ritsos:

            Such a lot of confusion, so many killings for nothing. The hero
            of Tiryns took the golden apples to Euristheus. He gave them back.
            Then he presented them to Athena. Then she returned them
            to the garden of the Hesperides — their source. Perhaps they meant
                        in this way
            to show how futile the Labours were,

Now swap buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck ... Empire is the administrator of this desolation. That’s why the poems in this suite (cor)respond to a group of ancient Akkadian exorcism incantations, several of which I first discovered in the form of Jewish-Aramaic adaptations in the Babylonian Talmud. I’ve begun, in these terms, to compose & transpose from homophonic transliterations, as well as Aramaic & Hebrew translations, of the Akkadian spells, stitching together poems from the translingual dregs between the gaps of the adapted texts. The phrase, “Lick and Spit”, I take from the Ashkenazi-Jewish folkloric expectoration ritual of licking a person’s forehead three times, spitting between each lick — a physical gesture I associate most closely with the act of sucking venom from a snake bite — in order to excise the “evil eye” from the flesh. Long story short, an alien was chewing its way out of my stomach and I started fainting and I couldn’t feel my hands or legs, and then I died. Except not the last part. But it felt like it. Plus the pain led to a major panic attack so basically it was a great day. Luckily, my friend Maile was there to drive me to the hospital and hold me against my wheelchair when I passed out and she stayed with me during many tests and morphine shots and she wrote down all the weird stuff I said while I was high and messaged it to me in real time. Also, the nurse left this giant thing in my bed in case I needed to vomit and when I noticed it I was like, “This is the most unrealistic condom ever” ... and then I started talking about cosmetic vagina surgery and about how I didn’t even know what it was supposed to look like best case scenario. Like, am I supposed to want giant labia, or no labia at all? What are people asking these doctors for? Butterfly vaginas? Tiny moths? Vagina dentata? I asked the nurse and she was like, “Hell if I know. That shit’s crazy.” Also, they said I had a very elevated level of lactate (?) and I was like, “That can’t be right. I couldn’t even breast-feed and I’m lactose intolerant.” But apparently, this was something else related to infections or shock. Oh, and my spellcheck tried to change “vagina dentata” to “vagina al dente”, which is taking weird to a whole new level. Quit it, spellcheck. In other words, the research I am doing for The Early Foucault would put me in a good position to write a book on Canguilhem. I’ll fill it full of ingenues, aviator jackets, and coconuts. I’ll also includes some alternate history, like Robert Frost moving to Pluto. Pluto has lilies, and perhaps even a path in a yellow wood. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to see Severin’s studied and strategic approach to being ‘herself’ — like her dad’s imperious take(s) on ‘candid’ home video — as a metaphor for social media self-fashioning. During Severin’s childhood, Christmas present might require “three or four takes of Yuletide ecstasy”, rewrapping and unwrapping till daddy yells “wrap!” They may be decopunk icons, but Percival and Severin also act like proto millennials who’d sooner let their sundaes melt and their sodas fizz flat before they’d upload something sub-par to Instagram. But relegating such behaviour to scientific romance allows it to be de-normalized, so it carries an aura of majestic sorrow. Turns out it’s possible to yearn for a Golden Age of a somehow more authentic and broadminded narcissistic artifice. Shallow modern living ain’t what it used to be, hashtag majestic sorrow. And then there’s the question of visual vs. verbal storytelling. How will this manage to be decopunk rather than dieselpunk? Is there perhaps a theme here of seeing something with your own eyes, but only because you’re told to see it? “Or like a whale,” says Hamlet, and Polonius answers, “Very like a whale.” And finally: Will Anchises count as a ‘character’? Or more accurately, whereas Sozen did not notice that he and Satu were getting some looks, Sozen did notice that he had spread some arms, except that, just as a very violent and real-feeling nightmare can often weave the squirming of the sleeper into its narrative, also by the way making pillows and blankets into the crumpled surfaces of wolves and murderers, in the same way Sozen simply assumed that he had spread his arms in the past, but not spread them in the present. Sozen remained in this pose for an unreasonable amount of time. So long, in fact, that by the time that the root vegetable was eventually Sozen once again, the young engineer Satu Sjöström, who regarded Sozen as a bit sketchy and weird but would not have gone as far as ‘insane mid-level yakuza boss on the run’, had managed to solve the problem which they’d come into the coffee shop to discuss. Speaking of Sonja Sekula, in “Untitled” (1958), which is done in oil, graphite, and sand on cardboard, she makes a lattice of black lines, which are drawn horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Some of the lines do not extend all the way across to the nearest vertical. The lattice begins on both the right and left sides of the composition and extends toward the center, which is dominated by a black, vertically oriented abstract form with a narrow vertical crevice visible in the upper half. That crevice gives the form volume, makes it a thing rather than just a shape. The thickness of the lines squeezes the spaces between them. That same deadpan grotesquerie courses through “Using a Trot,” one of his poems from the Review, reprinted below in his memory. As a postscript, consider his answer to Richard Prince, who asked him in a 1991 interview, “What kind of sex do you like?” “The kind,” Acconci replied, “in which two people use every part of their bodies and every secretion of those bodies and every level of pressure those bodies can exert.”

        The horse was large, strong, with four legs, solid hoofs, and flowing mane
                    and tail.
        (Something like it was what he sat, rode, or was carried on.
        There was a frame on legs to support something.)
        And something or other was uttered through the mouth, which contained
                    the teeth and the tongue.
        There was a wry expression!
        There, the water emptied into another body of water.
        The body, then, developed by means of food.
        He had been mentioned before.
        Now, not bent or crooked, he was coming out of the opening.
        Like Hank Williams, he had read the classics in comic books.

[Note: Sources: Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing (eds. Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean); Lucase Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman; Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects; JBR; Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing (eds. Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean); JBR; Eleni Sikelianos, and Melissa Buckheit, quoted in Buckheit’s “This Is Not Fake: Who Are We, Animals, in the Anthrome? A Review of Make Yourself Happy by Eleni Sikelianos”, at EOAGH, 27 Apr 017; Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, “I’m all blankets now”, at EOAGH, 24 Feb 017; JBR; “Anthromes FAQ”, at Ecotope; Fielding Dawson, Man Steps Into Space; Fielding Dawson, An Essay on New American Fiction; Fielding Dawson, The Yin & Yang Radio Repair Man; Natasha Myers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant / People Involution, Response to Battaglia”, at Academia.edu; Magdalena Abakanowicz (RIP), quoted in “Magnificent Polish Artist Magdalena Abakanowicz died at 86,”, at Vitro Nasu, 21 Apr 017; I don’t remember; JBR; Murdo Macdonald, quoted in Alec Finlay, “We all need shelter”, at Alec Finlay, 6 Jul 013; Verity Spott, “On Kek, Eris, Mindfuck and the Eschaton (Charlston)”, at Two Torn Halves, 18 Apr 017; JBR; blurb for Theo Ellsworth, An Exorcism, at KUŠ; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “A note to my students of the avant-garde”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 28 Apr 017; blurb for Theo Ellsworth, An Exorcism, at KUŠ; JBR; Christopher Clary, “JPG, carpet, and Vaseline”, in Fkn JPGS on Ebay, at Troll Thread; Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues; WS Merwin, Japanese Figures; Charles Olson, “Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 157”, in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI; Amelia Dale, Tractosaur, at Troll Thread; Monica de la Torre, “Five Radicals”, at Harriet, 27 Apr 017; Lucase Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman; Rodrigo Toscano, “Writing”, at Dusie; JBR; Garrett Caples, and Charles Olson, “Gravelly Hill”, quoted in Caples’ “MaximusRocknRoll: Willie ‘Loco’ Alexander”, at Harriet, 26 Apr 017; JohnnyO, quoted in Peter Balestrieri, post to UB Poetics Group, 26 Jul 00, at University of Buffalo Poetics Archive; JBR; “How do I replace my smoke alarms battery?”, at Kidde United Technologies; Marianne Moore, “Poetry”, at Poets.org; JBR; Marianne Moore, “Poetry”, at Poets.org; JBR; Tom Cohen, “Inside Job—or, how to deconstruct the West’s Asia fetish (without really trying)”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Tom Cohen, “Inside Job—or, how to deconstruct the West’s Asia fetish (without really trying)”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Thomas A Clark, The Mountains of Holland; JBR; Nanao Sakaki, “The Battle of Toads”, in How to Live on the Planet Earth; JBR; Yannis Ritsos, “The Apples of the Hesperides II” (trs. Gwendolyn MacEwen and Nikos Tsingos), in Selected Poems 1938-1988; Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy, in Poetical Works 1999-2015; Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, quoted at ill will editions, 27 Apr 017; JBR; Ariel Resnikoff, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Ariel Resnikoff: New Translingual Poems from ‘Lick and Spit’ with a Note by the Author”, at Poems and Poetics, 28 Apr 017; Jenny Lawson, “I’m too high to write this but I’m going to anyway”, at The Bloggess, 30 Apr 017; Stuart Elden, “Writing a book on Georges Canguilhem for Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series”, at Progressive Geographies, 28 Apr 017; JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “The Blushing Face of Day: Catherynne Valente’s Radiance”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 26 Apr 017; Jo Lindsay Walton, “From Alice Shrugged”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 30 Apr 017; JBR; John Yau, “Sonja Sekula’s Time May Have Finally Come”, at Hyperallergic, 30 Apr 017; Dan Piepenbring, and Vito Acconci (RIP), “Using a Trot”, quoted in Piepenbring’s “Straight from the Horse’s Mouth”, at The Paris Review, 28 Apr 017; Charles Plymell, “Interview with Charles Plymell by Julien Poirier, at Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, 27 Apr 017]