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]