Zeitgeist Spam

With the Noose Around My Neck 59

In a more philosophical mode, we envision the goal of this branch of science as showing how the core of intermediary metabolism is a necessary consequence of galactic processes giving rise to some distribution of the elements of the periodic table, which under the right geochemical boundary conditions generate an autocatalytic network of chemicals capable of emerging subsequently through a series of transitions into more complex molecules and structures: the fourth geosphere.

        Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter,
        or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear,
        according as he is called by friend or enemy,

I mean I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead. So yes,

        Everything starts from Miso soup,                    good morning!
        Miso soup is made of shiny spider web
        Life begins with Amazon ocean
        Grand Canyon ends with God-like Odysseus
        His great grandson shall be Dharma bum
        Your great gran’ma shall be rattlesnake
        Rattle snake is seed of meditation
        Meditation seed of pumpkin pie
        Pumpkin mother of sacred mushroom
        Mushroom father of God
        God grows with galaxy
        Galaxy is a stolen diamond
        Last night my turkey vulture ate it

        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to
        Tomorrow I fly to

This is right outta the French Enlightenment. With its many small vents, this particular type of electric meter happened to be identical to one that had been just down the street from my childhood home. So, I made a quick sample of the drone it was emitting. However, upon reviewing the recording on studio monitors, the tone that had attracted me was lost, totally obscured by the buzz of bandsaws from a nearby fabrication studio that makes sets for TV shows, birds chirping, traffic passing ... This phase transition paradigm, which accepts heavy dependence on complex and diverse boundary conditions (such as the Earth has likely always provided), but rejects a large early role for miracles even in catalysis, supports a view that the progression in molecular size and complexity defined the progression of emergence as well. Early geoorganic chemistry cast the die for metabolism, and metabolism then cast it for the rest of biochemistry: either Joe would create 3,000 tiny works for a show, far too many to take in, or he would abandon art altogether, as he did for the last decade of his life, consecrating his time to his two favorite hobbies, smoking and reading Victorian novels. You know HAPPINESS? “Happiness is nothing more than a state of mind.” You know MONEY? “Money will buy a fine dog.” Every four minutes a car comes off the assembly line. When in doubt, sprinkle with cheese and bake. As I was saying to my garbage on the way out the door the other night — “Why should I carry you down three flights of stairs? I don’t even like you!” But my sense of time is a little skewed. But really we don’t need a pro editor. Thus we never need to call the ecosystem a “super-organism” to acknowledge its integrity, because we recognize this as in some ways prior to organisms. So forget fidget spinners, it’s all come to this: mini-crossbows. As one parent tweeted, kids are replacing the toothpicks the crossbows were meant to use with needles and nails, and are just shooting people for fun. Speaking of ecosystems, a popular fitness blogger has died after a whipped cream dispenser exploded into her chest. There have been about 60 other reports of exploding siphons causing injuries ranging from broken teeth, tinnitus, multiple fractures and, in one case, the loss of an eye. As Gizmodo points out, the glitch got the feed caught in some kind of loop: First, a “breaking news” intro graphic flashed on-screen, then it cut to host Huw Edwards at his desk. But there wasn’t the usual musical fanfare that leads into a news report. It was just silent. Edwards wasn’t talking, or even looking directly into the lens. He sat at his desk, looking at his notes, biding his time, as if unaware he was live. Then the “breaking news” graphic popped back on-screen, and the whole process repeated itself. It went on and on like this for minutes, periodically cutting random B-roll shots from other BBC segments into the mix, like some algorithm programmed to accord with Eistenstein’s theory of montage. Decoherence, then, is a phenomenally efficient process. For a dust grain 1/100th of a millimetre across, floating in air, it takes about 10^-31 seconds: a million times faster than the passage of a photon across a single proton! So, for objects approaching the macroscopic scale under ordinary conditions, decoherence is, to all practical purposes, inevitable and instantaneous: you can’t keep them looking ‘quantum.’ Which is, once again, of course, to speak of ecosystems. The sky is packed with them, and their terminal birds that screech all the terrible things that might happen, screech like the ghosts of the lost burnt poems of Artaud, or seven pebbles. So the devil is in the details: what kind of technology are we talking about?

        The skellingtons of ten million variations
        On Optimus Prime
        Prime₁ Prime₂ Prime₃ ... Prime_n in the Burgess Shale

In other words, under automation some people work less, but everyone works differently. Automation reduces work for some, but changes (and in fact often increases) work for others. Marx’s analysis of machines in Capital is useful here, where he addresses all of these various tendencies, from the elimination of labor and the increase in labor, to the transformation of the organic composition of labor — the last point being the most significant. And while machines might help lubricate and increase the productive forces — not a bad thing — it’s clear that machines are absolutely not revolutionary actors for Marx. Optimistic interpretations gleaned from the Grundrisse notwithstanding, Marx defines machines essentially as large batteries for value. So yes, I am a sex worker and a feminist, so yes, they can coincide. As I said I’ve written every day since I learned how to hold a pen, and among my favorite authors are Frances Kruk, Kathy Acker, Katerina Gogou, John Ashbery, Tom Raworth and Diane Di Prima. Which is to say that

        someone’s child is sick
        he’s got St. Anthony’s fire
        they bring us to the house of an old lady
        she presses some pepper and a crucifix onto his naked butt and we leave

which is to say that

        there’s a big white sheepdog
        it’s taller than I am
        I like to eat flowers ‘cause they look beautiful but they make me sick
        today is haircut day

which is to say

        the way to the top was long
        a snake brought The Sleeper into a tree
        on one side of this tree there was a string of little rooms
        the walls were backwards, and the lower bricks were turning

it was a milestone paper in the field of computational origami. Essentially, it took a very long strip of paper and wound it into the desired shape. But the resulting structures tended to have lots of seams where the strip doubled back on itself, so they weren’t very sturdy. Which is why, at the upcoming Symposium on Computational Geometry, Erik Demaine of MIT and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of the quest: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams. To understand this concept, imagine a grassy plain. A number of fires are set on it simultaneously, and they all spread in all directions at the same rate. The Voronoi diagram describes both the location at which the fires are set and the boundaries at which adjacent fires meet. Therefore, each tsunami stone is introduced by its geographic coordinates: latitude, longitude, and elevation. Latitude and longitude site each stone on the surface of the earth while elevation situates each stone in relation to the mean level of the sea. The stones are further situated; first, by the boundaries of the village, town, or city they are located within; second, by their administrative prefecture; and, third, their geographical region. As each stone has been erected in response to a major tsunami, both the year and name of the tsunami is listed in addition to the stone’s relation to the inundation line (below the line, on the line, or above the line) of both its target tsunami and the tsunami of 2011. Each stone, at the time of its erection, was engraved with a message. The stones mapped in this atlas may be considered as belonging to one of three categories: as a memorial, commemorating people and places lost to an earthquake tsunami, as a lesson, providing a description of events and directions as to where to build, where to evacuate to, and where waters have risen in the past, or as a warning, as in “Don’t build below this point.” Each stone or set of stones gets a four-page spread, giving the book a nice structural consistency, I mean

              one day I might leave my heart to science you said
               but for now I need it.
                                                    The audience forgot
               it was a hologram
               and piled into the hallway.
                                                                Somehow
              There was a mistake back there in the first click.
              Write me @ Ozymandias.
                                    Wrestling with hardly enough water
              for a new sea.
                    O the yonder oxen / [slash]
                    the amber waves of methane.
             If you see something say something. No
             one listens to poetry.
                                    I see 
             all this gentleness like a hound in the water 
             float upward and outward ...
                        Zam.
                        Bonk.
                        Dip.
                                    The pure feed.

Or as the bots say balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to you I everything else balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me I I can I I I  balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me I balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to everything else balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to I I I Oh man deshelling these king prawns while listening to @BBCRadio4 Kafka’s metamorphosis was a BIG MISTAKE. For each layer, the feature maps of all preceding layers are treated as separate inputs whereas its own feature maps are passed on as inputs to all subsequent layers. This connectivity pattern yields state-of-the-art accuracies on CIFAR10/100 (with or without data augmentation) and SVHN. On the large scale ILSVRC 2012 (ImageNet) dataset, DenseNet achieves a similar accuracy as ResNet, but using less than half the amount of parameters and roughly half the number of FLOPs. But what’s really cool is that life appeared on Earth in a period known as the Hadean, the Earth’s oldest eon, a reference to the etymology of Hades as “the unseen.” Other than gross features of planetary composition, it has left no detailed signatures in the present because it is a time from which later eras preserve no memory. The Hadean was, however, a time we think of as governed by laws of geophysics and geochemistry, and therefore open to understanding. (Indeed, the absence of memory makes the Hadean, more than later periods with accreted history, a simpler period to study dot dot dot.) Or as the bots say balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to you I everything else balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me I I can I I I  balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me I balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to everything else balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me we are born not into our own lives but into the lives of others. Who are not born into their own lives either, but into the lives of others. We are not even ourselves in any meaningful sense for quite some time. And even then. We know that being ourselves means something, even if we don’t know what. We plan, think, and act, often with apparent freedom, but most of the time our lives are what “happen to us” — the way

            Shoo-----Shaw-----Shirsh-----
               Gavroom
               Gabroobird
               Oh! Oh! Oh!
               Sea! Osh!
                        ah,
                        bedarvaling

            Les poissons de la mer
               parle Breton------
            Parlning Ocean sanding
               crash the billion rocks------

            Ker plotsch------

            Gray------sh------wind in
               The canyon wind in the rain

            Neptune now his arms extends
               while one millions of souls
               sit lit in caves of darkness

                            bisp tesh, cashes,
               re tav, plo, aravow,
               shirsh------

           Navark, navark
               pish rip plosh------The
               5 billion years------
                            ------the woods
               are dreaming

                            ------the fog is part
               of us------

           The little Monterey fishingboat

            ------
            ------
            ------

happened to Jack ... So Hans Castorp and Franz Kafka walk into a bar ... This is why my nights are filled with voices coming from my bones ... I rose higher and higher ... One night there was a letter covered in blood and feces; it was in a wasteland and it moaned like a cat. No. Next thing the waitress knows, he’s offering to help her open a microsurgery. After his fourth shot, the bartender said, the bartender says, Look buddy. But then force of habit proved too much for him. He straightened up and threw the baby to second base. You don’t understand, says the man. This is no regular dog. He finishes a bit of liturgy, beautiful and mysterious with ancient words and tones, and the congregation breaks up with the bartender says, OK, but sees a horse behind the bar wiping a glass. It’s in fact an interesting logical puzzle if it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to hide under the desk. I could go with you the first time you go, sit with you, and introduce you to all the others. After his fourth shot, the bartender said, all this authoritarianism is due to the fact that the novel treats physical reality as being at least partially a product of social reality. To put it another way, different social formations produce different laws of physics. Ergo, At the end of the world, your grave is written not in bitter libations or raven words or elegies breathed across broken glass. This type of writing has become increasingly popular in genre short-fiction in part because the assumptions that genre audiences carry in their heads serve to imbue those beautifully-turned phrases and eyeball-kicking images with a degree of metaphysical ambiguity. Raven words can just as easily be poetic descriptions of how things feel as literal descriptions of an alien world. Or, to quote Bataille from The Accursed Share, tigers are to space what sex is to time. Disasters, revolutions, and volcanoes do not make love with the heavenly bodies. Which is to say that I too bought into the myth that Duane Allman had been struck by a flatbed transporting Georgia peaches thru Macon, that the double album cover had sprung to life. This means that the very idea of the machine becomes entangled with magical thinking. Sometimes these dreams can be nightmare visions, machines that have no other purpose than to propagate or perpetuate themselves, like Novalis’s 1799 vision of ‘a monstrous mill, driven by the stream of chance and floating on it, a mill of itself without builder or miller and really a true perpetuum mobile, a mill grinding itself’, or Conrad’s vision, almost a century later, of the ‘knitting-machine’ of the cosmos, that ‘has made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart [...] It knits us in and it knits us out.’ Yet another reason to consider that the fact that no one lives their own life. The biosphere is a set of patterns maintained by processes, and patterns of processes, and not merely a collection of “living things”. It would be easy to argue that even the appellation “living things” assumes a category error: life is not a property inherent in things so much as things are instantiations of organizational states that arise within a larger context. But. But but but but but. Would we have any of these thoughts, would we have a single one of them, without the foreknowledge that at any moment we, I, poor little [your name my name here] could die? Is thinking just shrieking? I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got here alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently.

[Note: Sources: Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere; Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain; JBR; Simone Weil, “Gravity and Grace”, in Gravity and Grace (trs. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr); JBR; Nanao Sakaki, “Urgent Telegram”, in How to Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems; Iggy Pop, quoted in Ben Tripp, “Building Blocks of Noise”, at BOMB, 21 Jun 017 (a review of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (eds. Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, and Gary Sullivan)); John Fell Ryan, “Field Recording”, at BOMB, 15 Jun 017; Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere; John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Dennis Cooper, quoted in Cooper’s “Spotlight on … The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett (2012)”, at DC’s, 20 Jun 017; Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere; JBR, but see Agence France-Presse, “Forget fidget spinners, it’s the toothpick crossbow that is worrying parents”, at The Guardian, 22 Jun 017; Kim Willsher, “French fitness blogger dies after whipped cream dispenser exploded”, at The Guardian, 22 Jun 017; River Donaghey, “Watch a BBC Anchor Stare into Space for Four Minutes on Live TV”, at Vice, 22 Jun 017; Philip Ball, “quantum Common Sense”, at Aeon, 21 Jun 017; JBR; Sean Bonney, “In Fever: Notes on Les Chimères de Gerard de Nerval”, at Abandoned Buildings, 16 Jun 017; Alexander R Galloway, “Brometheanism”, at Alexander R Galloway, 16 Jun 017; JBR; Ian Heames, Sonnets (March 2017); Alexander R Galloway, “Brometheanism”, at Alexander R Galloway, 16 Jun 017; JBR; Eva Collé, quoted in Giulia Boggio, “EVA Colle - Talking sex work with a sex worker” (tr. Google), at Front Seat; JBR;Eva Collé, 1997.5, at A Firm Nigh Holistic Press; JBR; Eva Collé, 1997.5, at A Firm Nigh Holistic Press; JBR; Ted Berrigan, Clear The Range, at Jacket 16; Larry Hardesty, “Algorithm generates optimal origami folding patterns for any shape”, at Science Daily, 23 Jun 017; JBR; Elise Hunchuck, An Incomplete Atlas of Stones, quoted in Geoff Manaugh, “Warnings Along the Inundation Line”, at BLDGBLOG, 23 Jun 017; JBR; Ian Heames, Sonnets (May 2017); JBR; Caroline Ebeid, “The Little I Know about the Forms Moving Through Unlit Towns”, in PEN America, “PEN Poetry Series: Two Poems by Carolina Ebeid”, email rec’d 24 Jun 017, approx. 7:02am PDT; JBR; Caroline Ebeid, “The Little I Know about the Forms Moving Through Unlit Towns”, in PEN America, “PEN Poetry Series: Two Poems by Carolina Ebeid”, email rec’d 24 Jun 017, approx. 7:02am PDT; Jack Spicer, “Thing Language”, at UPenn; Robert Duncan, “An African Elegy”, at Poetry Foundation; Jonty Tiplady; JBR; Bob and Alice, two bots at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, quoted in Adrienne LaFrance, “What an AI’s Non-Human Language Actually Looks Like”, at The Atlantic, 20 Jun 017; Andrea Brady, tweet, 24 Jun 017; “Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets)”, at GitHub (This repository contains the code for DenseNet introduced in the paper “Densely Connected Convolutional Networks” (CVPR 2017, Oral) by Gao Huang*, Zhuang Liu*, Laurens van der Maaten and Kilian Weinberger (* Authors contributed equally)); JBR; Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere; JBR; JBR; Bob and Alice, two bots at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, quoted in Adrienne LaFrance, “What an AI’s Non-Human Language Actually Looks Like”, at The Atlantic, 20 Jun 017; Mott T Greene, Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift; JBR; Jack Kerouac, “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur”, in Big Sur (for Alan Baker); JBR; Alejandra Pizarnik, “Description”, “A Mystical Betrayal”, (tr. Cole Heinowitz), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Alejandra Pizarnik: Four tales, translated with commentary by Cole Heinowitz”, at Jacket2, 30 May 017; Giles Goodland, A Bar, at Beard of Bees; Jonathan McCalmont, “Ninefox Gambit: by Yoon Ha Lee”, at The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, 30 May 017; Etienne Turpin, “Nature’s Kill Switch”, at 2 or 3 Tigers; JBR; Jonathan Wilson, “One Way Out”, at The Paris Review, 23 Jun 017; JBR; Steven Connor, Dream Machines; JBR; Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere; JBR; Samuel Beckett, Molloy]

With the Noose Around My Neck 58

In this light, it is possible to perceive Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated his stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, hetero, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relations and values of the modern world. Though he may have regarded himself, in accordance with the view held of him by his readership and even those who knew him personally, as an embodiment of his most emblematic fable, “The Outsider,” in his frights and panics he reveals himself as that almost unheard-of fluke statistical phenomenon, the absolutely average man, an entrenched social insider unnerved by new and quote unquote alien influences from outside his bubble. This is the underlying reason for our ongoing absorption in his work, a fascination that seems only to increase as Lovecraft and his times fail fail fail to recede into the past. Thus, we can see why, though he accepted the apology, Ice Cube dished out many reasons he felt Maher’s use of “nigger” was problematic. He said, “I still think you need to get to the root of the psyche because I think there’s a lot of [white] guys out there who cross the line because they’re a little too familiar, or they think they’re too familiar. Or, guys that, you know, might have a black girlfriend or two that ... made them Kool-Aid every now and then, and then they think they can cross the line. And they can’t. You know, it’s a word that has been used against us. It’s like a knife, man ... That’s our word, and you can’t have it back.” As if she had been listening in upon her daughter’s mounting apprehension, Alma’s mother looked down at her now and smiled, nodding towards the shop-front that was barely more than three pram-lengths before them. “The’yar. Ayr’s wun blessid place as ent shut up, ay?” Alma nodded, pleased and reassured, while in his creaking pushchair Michael kicked against the footboard in approval, with his curly golden head that looked like Bubbles in the painting bouncing up and down. As they drew level with the newsagent’s the little girl peered through its tall clean panes into the dazzle of a stripped interior where it appeared that work was going on, carpenters labouring through the hours of darkness at their renovations, no doubt so as not to intrude on the normal trading times of the establishment. Four or five men were busy over sawhorses there on the bare, new-looking floorboards, hammering and planing under an unshaded light-bulb, and she noticed that their feet were naked in the dust and shavings piled like curls of butter. Wouldn’t they get splinters? All of them were wearing plain white gowns that reached their ankles. All of them had close-trimmed nails, had smooth skin that was radiantly clean as if they’d just come from a proper sit-down bath, still had lavender talcum crusting on damp shoulders into shapes like continents. They all looked serious and strong but not unkind, and most of them had hair that hung down to the collars of their freshly laundered robes, heads bent above robust and rasping toil. One man amongst the labour detail stood aside from his four colleagues, watching as they worked. Alma supposed he was in charge. She noticed that, unlike those of the other men, his gown rose to a cowl so that none of his face was really visible above the nose. His hair was covered, but she somehow felt sure it was dark and shorter than that of his workmates, the neck shorn to suede below the folds of his dove-coloured hood. He was clean-shaven, like the rest of them, ruggedly handsome from those features she could see beneath the inky cowl-cast shade that filled his sockets and concealed his eyes behind a phantom burglar mask. Seeming to feel the child’s attention through the glass, the man in question turned to smile in her direction, lifting one hand casually in greeting, and with an astounded, disbelieving lurch somewhere inside her Alma understood who he must be. But who am I to talk? These doubts seem to haunt Mac Low, who never definitively abandons his earlier, more accessible style (well after what Louis Cabri identifies as Mac Low’s turning point in 1954, he is still contributing work in something like the prewar mode of Tendenzlyrik to radical journals such as Liberation [1956–1977] and Win: Peace and Freedom Thru Non-Violent Action [1965–1983]). In a 1988 conversation with Language poet Bruce Andrews, Mac Low confesses that I feel sometimes I ought to speak in a way that a larger number of people here and there might be interested in; you might not just have the converted, but those on the line, etc.  — by bringing in a lot of things that are efficacious, in the sense of a rhetorical poetry ... a more basic poetry. Rather than regarding this as a refutation of the premises of his more experimental work, he urges Andrews to consider the two modes as alternatives appropriate to different occasions and purposes — a kind of poetic “diversity of tactics”: why not, he suggests, pursue “a tandem project of social writing,” devoting some time to “radical disruptive writing” and some to writing “that might be, if not efficacious, at least understandable to a wider audience without the background, etc.”? Why should poets have to choose only one mode?  This suspension, this hesitation between alternatives — or is it a refusal of the alternatives on offer? — in this light, it might seem that Mac Low’s “tandem project” is a choice of fight and flight —

        And though it is a steel world,
        with birds of steel,
        and all flesh is grass
        (but grass is steel too),

                like this

                like this

        we might imagine the situation
        as if we were a tree on occasion.

        Ergo,

        each of us subsists on a cubic yard of Miracle Gro.
        Ergo,

        I have orioles in my leaves ...

        hhhhhhhh
        whhhhhhhhh               wreetl               ))))((((
        whhhhhhhhhhhh         wreetl leetl       ))))((((      ))))((((
        hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh                                                  ))))((((
        hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh                         ))))((((
        hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh                         ))))((((                       !---------------!

        It is so nice to be here with you

        and a lion.

Then she tweets 16 traffic light emojis, eight of a world map, a home with a crack in it, several train illustrations, “:/9//&” and “lolaklkk.” In other words, ‘Life is good,’ says the T-shirt with a smiling cartoon stick figure that is waving crudely. I glance at her cow-print slippers. Apparently, the pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach. It was not specific to any year, but very early. As for we who “love to be astonished,” luck was rid of its cloves. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. His backpack says NYU on it. Moving these eyes in ellipses to stay awake. A little like Keats’ This living hand? If the line about music refers to the quoted song, it’s obscure; likewise the wig seems not to relate to anything. Yet the fly lives for a day. If these walls could talk, they’d say, “Paint me a different color for the love of god.” So, although the Stoics are the first, in Greece at least, to maintain equality as a principle, one should not imagine that such thoughts were wholly unfamiliar around 400. Aristotle tells us (Pol.  1253 b 20) that there are ‘some’ who think that slavery is unjust — that it is owing to convention rather than nature. The terminology suggests that those ‘some’ were Sophists, and in fact we do know the name of a Sophist, Alcidamas, who expressly declared that slavery was unnatural (Rhet.  1373 b 18 sch.). ‘What got me talking more than anything else is the spring,’ he said. It is a tool that is introduced into the anus and that increases in size ... Then they pull it out ... and you feel your entrails tear. Anyhow, I didn’t know who Franklin Rosemont was. He came to The University of Michigan to give a talk and I really enjoyed it, and I talked to him. Then Jayne Cortez came and gave a reading. I was like, this is amazing, there must be something going on here that I might have missed. The final level of this, the biggest event, was meeting Ted Joans. Ted was the one who really set me on fire, made me hungry to read as much as possible about Surrealism, but I can’t say that, at that point, I identified myself as a Surrealist. Some days, even now, I’m not sure. That’s why I identify with your line, “Don’t speak for me, but through me.” SCENE: TWO WOMEN are sitting in what appears to be a Queen’s chamber. It is set in the middle of the Stage in a strong white LIGHT, while the rest of the Stage is in unnatural BLACKNESS. The quality of the white light is unreal and ugly. The Queen’s chamber consists of a dark monumental bed resembling an ebony tomb, a low, dark chandelier with candles, and wine-colored walls. Flying about are great black RAVENS. QUEEN VICTORIA is standing before her bed holding a small mirror in her hand. On the white pillow of her bed is a dark, indistinguishable object. The DUCHESS OF HAPSBURG is standing at the foot of the bed. Her back is to us as is the QUEEN’S. Throughout the entire scene, they do not move. BOTH WOMEN are dressed in royal gowns of white, a white similar to the white of the Curtain, the material cheap satin. Their headpieces are white and of a net that falls over their faces. They look exactly alike and will wear masks or be made up to appear a whitish yellow. It is an alabaster face, the skin drawn tightly over the high cheekbones, great dark eyes that seem gouged out of the head, a high forehead, a full red mouth ... If the characters do not wear masks, then the face must be highly powdered and possess a hard expressionless quality ... We hear KNOCKING. So

            one day            my mother who was strolling in the garden       floated up
                        a few centimeters above the ground

            and turned around toward me
            and said, I can see Lion’s Head over there
            it is the scenery she could see every morning
            from Vancouver, north of the rockies

            that was in Musashino and a lot of pigs were walking around in chains
                    the pigs were in formal attire
            and said they were on their way to a wedding               totally unconscious of
                    being in chains
            humming a tune             having a chat                the times do not show the reins
            the reins of the will of the consciousness of the imagination are not visible
                    to anyone
            with the taste and fragrance of the elaborate cake         the delicious drinks

OK, then, so why didn’t the Gauls overthrow the Romans? Why was Nat Turner’s revolt defeated so quickly? Why was the Haitian Revolution the only victorious slave rebellion in the Western hemisphere? And how can the answers to these questions help you, an aspiring entrepreneur, build an amazing business? Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the powerful venture capital firm AndreessenHorowitz, has an answer to these questions: “culture.” He made this case at “Culture and Revolution,” a talk delivered at the Startup Grind conference in Redwood City, California on February 21, 2017. In its grand sweep and recognizable informal style, the lecture is a creature of the TED-talk-derived genius cult, in which wealthy audiences receive open-collared men pacing on bare stages as oracular sages telling hard and universal truths. Improbably, Horowitz organizes his theory of company “culture” around a reading of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins. His argument is that Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave-turned-statesman and leader of the Haitian Revolution, turned an enslaved population of men and women into a nation-building fighting force capable of defeating Europe’s greatest empires. And he did it, in Horowitz’s telling, by “changing the culture.” To Silicon Valley investors, political struggles can be resold as lessons in strong corporate leadership. What this means is that María Sabina was a wise-one not because she ate mushrooms and got into trips, but because she dominated a dynamical dictionary of meanings. She re-produced those meanings in the ceremonies; she rewrote that dynamical dictionary throughout her life. She was trying to revolutionize the praxis. That’s why she even allowed foreigners to participate. She was trying to go beyond. She wanted to open the book. She was a woman working very consciously in the field of socio-metaphysics. So when she calls herself, let’s say, “opossum-woman” she is not referring to the animal but to a string of myths. Signs-with-histories. She re-constructs the order of words, meanings, contexts, subjects, cultures and things. When reading 

        I am opossum-woman

then, we should read

        I am the interplay of nature and culture-woman. 
        I am the performance-of-death-woman. 
        I am the recasting-of-myths-woman. 
        I am the keeper-and-changer-of-the-meanings-of-‘opossum’-woman 

Our traditional understanding of Sabina falls very short of what she was really doing. Words for her are a therapeutic instrument and a way to depict visions, but also a self-conscious flesh that remakes and investigates prior texts. There’s nothing naïve or automatic in her praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting. So far she sounds almost assimilable by assholes like Horowitz. But Sabina’s is also a critique of those (like Horowitz) who believe there can be any real culture change without healing, without radical wisdom that comes from the roots, without going to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice, and poverty. Horowitz couldn’t change a culture if his life depended on it because he doesn’t want to change any of that. Fuck him and all his kind. I am reminded here of this little Jenny Lawson story, or parable or ... anyway: This morning I got bit on the eye by an ant. And that was concerning, but more baffling was the fact that the ant managed to crawl all the way up to my eye before attacking. That’s, like, so much work for I-don’t-even-know-what-the-payoff-is. So yesterday Victor was like, “Hey, take some xanax because we’re going out tonight. And by ‘tonight’ I mean ‘5pm’,” and I was like, “That seems very late for me and also ‘no,’” but he was like, “You’ll like it. It’s a magic show in a hotdog castle that used to be a church ... and it’s haunted,” and so I took my xanax but I didn’t know what to wear and Victor was like, “It’s a magic show. Wear a sequined cravat obviously. Don’t embarrass me.” Then we photographed a group with nose-sticks, and the baku with pigs. I took a snapshot of a group of men carving pigs. Then we sat and enjoyed the meal. I walked around the village looking for a place to put up a tent. We ate bananas and drank coconut milk ... I ran into acquaintances: a man from Kudokabilia who used to bring me eggs, dressed in a lady’s nightgown. Then it began to rain. To put it bluntly, when your “realism” is dogs eating someone’s face your realism is your fantasy. In any case, the belt is divided between different factions all vying for control. The “Outer Planets Alliance” or OPA functions as the most militant, or from the perspective of Earth, radical dimension of this conflict. Meanwhile, Earth and Mars are poised on the constant verge of a cold war turning hot, or as hot as things can get in the vacuum of space. At the same time that there’s this three-way struggle, there’s between the denizens of our solar system and some alien “protomolecule” — a weapon or form of life or something that could destroy or remake all of humankind. The squabbles within the solar system take place against the backdrop of this larger threat ... something analogous to global warming. The Scottish Poetry Library is the ideal setting for this event (there’s not a poetry library in outer space ... yet), not only because it holds the Edwin Morgan archive, but because it has his “What I love about poetry is its ion engine” painted on a wall and this event is a continuation of those celebrations. And then there are the animals that have been implicated in history since the beginning of our quickened material innovations with the first urban settlements towards the end of the last Ice Age: the mice and rats, and then the dogs and cats, and other members of what James C. Scott has called ‘Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps’. Why haven’t they innovated? Arguably, they have, in the sense that human technological innovation has been a multispecies collaboration all along: some beings were constructing yokes and carts, other beings were grinding grains, other beings were pulling carts beneath their yokes, others were raising children, others were cleaning up food scraps that would otherwise turn into vectors of disease. Some of these beings were human, some were bovine, some canine, some feline, but they were all implicated in the common project that yielded up what we know think of as an exclusively human technological civilisation. Speaking of civilisation, Termite is a forced patina on C145 Tellurium Copper and C360 Brass and its purple hues appear consumed by the patina munching bugs. It’s a chemically forced patina, which will wear off with use and will discolor skin. Keep out of the reach of children and pets. All Torqbar® products are intended for external use only. Torqbars are fidget spinners: there are lots of brands of fidget spinners: little toys with ball bearings that do nothing but spin. The Triune, for instance, produces “OVER 2 MINUTES OF SPIN TIME with a high-speed Si3N4 Hybrid Ceramic Bearing that provides fast smooth easy fidgeting and long spin times that will impress your friends.” No wonder the Red Monk used to say:

        Find yourself at some ridiculous task,
        say, playing with a fidget spinner,

        and imagine all your life, and all your past lives,
        til you see them vividly. Then,

        say out loud:

        So,
        it has all come to this.

On Saturday the MOAS crew were busy with the rescue of two boats, between them carrying 205 people. While everyone was safely brought on board, one man later died from complications from an existing condition. The crew then undertook the transfer of a further 142 people from Sea Watch, and under instruction from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome headed north to disembark our passengers, among them 66 minors and 2 pregnant women. Speaking of pregnant women, in 2010, Siobhán Whelan learned that her pregnancy involved a fatal fetal impairment. She decided that ending the pregnancy was the best choice for her and her family — but she was denied access to an abortion in Ireland because under Irish law abortion is prohibited and criminalized in almost all circumstances. We filed a complaint on behalf of Siobhán before the United Nations Human Rights Committee — and the UN just ruled in her favor, declaring that Ireland’s abortion laws are cruel, inhumane, and violate women’s fundamental human rights. Fuck that.

        Be kind to your self, it is only one
        and perishable
        of many on the planet—

        Be kind
        because the cow weeps in the field and the
        mouse weeps in the cat hole—

        Be kind to this place, which is your present
        habitation, with derrick and radar tower
        and all kinds of poison in the ancient brook—

                        [just like in a Yang Yongliang image]

        Be kind to your neighbor
        [and who isn’t your neighbor?]—

        End the cold war you have borne
        against your own self your own kind
        [and there is no kind that is not your own kind]
        since long before the days of
        the days of the snake
        the imaginary snake—

Which reminds me, I have a question for you: after leaving Egypt, Moses and the Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years, right? How did they get so lost? Where did they go? Egypt and Israel are right next to each other. Some guy I found on the web proves they weren’t really lost or wandering, they spent 38 years at Kadesh. I’m sure it’s just me, but when I picture Kadesh, I picture Stateline, on the 15, on the way to and from Vegas. That can’t be right. So what was in Kadesh? What’s in every town, more or less: a Happy Street down which are noodle shops, brothels, internet cafes where syndicates farm for in-game gold, McDonald’s serving dim sum, hot pot dining halls, ping pong halls, laundromats, capsules hotels, pieds-à-terre, dorms in which college students and migrant workers from you-name-the-continent cram into multi-level bunk beds, bookshops selling rare editions of books like Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life,  Chinese and German puppet theaters, Ayurvedic apothecaries, mobile phone repair shops, e-waste recycling sweat shops, an antiques shop filled with Ming ceramics and African ivories and bits and pieces of Machu Picchu of questionable provenance, an IMAX 3D movie theater, chapels for American-style white weddings, secret meditation rooms for reformed schizoanalysts next door to non-government sanctioned vuvuzela nightclubs, an abattoir, a landscape architecture studio, acupuncture and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation centers, Michelin 3-starred restaurants, travel agencies, car dealerships, an Apple Store selling iPhone knockoffs, a planetarium, a synagogue, a Freemason lodge, a NASCAR track and a miniature football pitch, AC cooling centers, Stone Girl statuary, karaoke bars, oxygen bars that always seem to fill up whether or not there’s a smog alert an oil rain or a sandstorm, Buddhist temples, the venue for Postopolis! Museo Eco D.F., tattoo parlors, Starbucks, many Starbucks, detention centers for human rights campaigners, fabulous ballrooms for drag shows, hot-body contests, variously-sexed weddings, operas, and the Miss/ter/y Transgendered Universe beauty pageant, fishmongers, tea houses, vispo and calligraphy schools and MFA writing programs, a chain of Heidegger’s Hut-inspired spas, hipster boutiques (tho no-one remembers what a hipster is), white guy (or black guy) (or Muslim woman) rental agencies, H&Ms, expat watering holes (everyone and no one is an expat here), organ harvesting clinics, World-English language schools, sanitariums, orphanages, missionaries, branches of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Tate, satellite campuses of the world’s leading universities, studio spaces in which guests for A Date with Luyu, Million’s Poet and Keeping Up With the Kardashians are interviewed via satellite, Dance Dance Revolution arcades, flotation tank businesses, crematoria, grottos, betting shops, bakeries, abortion clinics, ATMs, and a ratty cinema that plays nothing but the films of Jia Zhanke and Stan Brakhage. So we agree, there’s no better persuasion tool than an invisible pain ray that makes people feel like OK, OK, the researchers used decellularized lung scaffolds and grew new lungs while the scaffolds were inside a bioreactor, this kind of ugly doesn’t grow on trees,

        Another hoarder was a dumpster diver and an artist
        who saw a future in each wonderful object. It would become art. It might not be art yet,

            but that was the future he imagined         for it

        Calm down, it’s just a mountain
        mountains don’t move yet. And even if they do ...

        Cindy, Cindy! You should visit your old man sometime
        look at him now losing his head on the safety island
        surrounded by police and angels from parallel worlds.

On the other hand, you are lonely, my friend ... How can fingers point out a smell? Yet of the dark forces that lurk at our side, you feel many ... transported over networks ... four fifths of the history of life on Earth has been solely bacterial ... so “Franz, have some” ... food for the Voyage to the Land of the 50% less cruel .... writing a check, eating corpses, copulating, listening to a thumping sermon on hell fire, examining one’s conscience, painting a picture, growing a beard, licking leprous sores, tying the body into knots ... otherwise (if there’s an otherwise) (small sounds, large sounds) why even utter the word “beautiful”?

[Note: Sources: Alan Moore, “Introduction” in Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated Lovecraft, quoted in Bobby Derie, “American Dread: Alan Moore and the Racism of H. P. Lovecraft”, at FACTS IN THE CASE OF ALAN MOORE'S PROVIDENCE, 2015; JBR; Kristine Phillips, “‘That’s our word, and you can’t have it back’: Ice Cube confronts Bill Maher for using the n-word”, at Washington Post, 10 Jun 017; Alan Moore, Jerusalem; Jesse Cohn, Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011; Geoffrey Nutter, Sal Randolph, Mónica de la Torre, Monica Youn, quoted in Jeff Dolven, “14 Person Poem”, at BOMB, 8 Jun 017; Wendy Burk, “Pinus ponderosa (Ponderosa Pine) / Mt. Lemmon, Coronado National Forest / June 12, 2010 at 10:55 AM”, at Spiral Orb 2; Maureen McClane, quoted in Jeff Dolven, “14 Person Poem”, at BOMB, 8 Jun 017; JBR; a tweet by either Sarah Huckabee Sanders or her 3-year-old son, quoted in Terence Cullen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders takes page from Trump, sends incoherent tweet, at NY Daily News, 10 Jun 017; JBR; Geraldine Kim, Povel, quoted in Vance Maverick, “Geraldine Kim, Povel (New York: Fence Books, 2005)” at Arduity, 2010; JBR; Lyn Heninian, My Life; Geraldine Kim, Povel, and Vance Maverick, quoted in Maverick’s “Geraldine Kim, Povel (New York: Fence Books, 2005)” at Arduity, 2010; JBR; Karsten Friis Johansen, A History of Ancient Philosophy from the Beginnings to Augustine; Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955-62: Reflections on the French-Algerian War (ed. James D. Le Sueur, trs. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade); JBR; Robin DG Kelley, quoted in D Scot Miller, “A Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley”, at Open Space SF MOMA, 30 May 017; Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (ed. Werner Sollors); JBR; Kazuko Shiraishi, “My Floating Mother, City” (trs. Yumko Tsumura and Samuel Grolmes), in My Floating Mother, City; JBR; John Patrick Leary, “The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History”, at The New Inquiry, 9 Jun 017; Heriberto Yépez, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Heriberto Yépez: Re-Reading María Sabina”, at Poems and Poetics, 9 Jun 017; JBR; Jenny Lawson, “Coloring. But less stressful. (Yes, I am aware how ridiculous this sounds.)”, at The Bloggess, 8 Jun 017; Jenny Lawson, “MAGIC!”, at The Bloggess, 11 Jun 017; Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (tr. Norbert Guterman); Jason Read, “In Space No One Can Hear You Struggle: On The Expanse”, at Unemployed Negativity, 8 Jun 017; Russell Jones, “Rockets for Edwin Morgan”, at Scottish Poetry Library, 27 Mar 013; Justin EH Smith, “More on the Search for Intelligent Life”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 12 Jun 017; JBR; “Torqbar® Solid Body C360 Brass – TBSBBR”, at Torqbar; JBR; “Triune Spinner by Pocket Fidget”, at Fidgetsys; JBR;Lew Welch, “He Finally Reaches the City”, in Ring of Bone: Collected Poems; MOAS, “Your monthly update”, email rec’d 13 Jun 017, approx. 5:59am PDT; JBR; Nancy Northup, “Ireland abortion laws declared cruel & inhumane”, email rec’d 13 Jun 017, approx. 7:40am PDT; JBR; Allen Ginsberg, “Who Be Kind To”; JBR; JBR, In the House of the Hangman]

With the Noose Around My Neck 57

The book is full of conceits like this: an absurdly rich man being recognized by the rose on his lapel after falling off a waxed rope into a fairy grotto, or unhappy Mr Spitzer walking along the beach through “fog thick as fleece” unintentionally summoning a flock of sheep with his alpenhorn. He “... had carried this alpenhorn ... along the foggy beach ... and he had blown a few wandering notes like some old ghost calling to his lost love as he had heard, above the ringing waves ringing like silver bells, the ringing, tolling of the silver sheep’s bell which had once rung to the lost sheep, hearing also ... the bah bahing of waves breaking upon this shore of stone and fog thick as fleece streaked with the gold rays of the moonlight, waves coming to pasture like sheep with moony eyes ... but then quite unexpectedly ... a ram had stepped out of the fog, and other sheep followed ... And ever after that, he had been followed by men in grey cities, by lost men although he was lost, and none more lost than he, this old musician blowing his horn in the clouds.” Bob discovered that the poem was about the execution of Joe Arridy, whose IQ was in the 40s. Young did not recall her source. It is likely that it was Mari Sandoz. Sandoz was living in Denver at the time of Joe’s trials and execution.

        The Warden wept before the lethal beans
        Were dropped that night in the airless room,
        Fifty faces apeering against glassed screens,
        A clinic crowd outside the tomb.

        In the corridor a toy train pursued
        Its tracks past countryside and painted station
        Of tinny folk. The doomed man’s eyes were glued
        On these, he was the tearless one

        Who waited unknowing why the warden wept<
        And watched the toy train with the prisoner
        Who watched the train, or ate, or simply slept.
        The warden wrote a sorry letter,

        “The man you kill tonight is six years old,
        He has no idea why he dies,”
        Yet he must die in the room the state has walled
        Transparent to its glassy eyes.

        And yet ...

On Greek soil, Hesiod (probably c.700 BC) also gave shape to his own personal mythology. Of the genesis of the world he writes: Verily first of all did Chaos come into being, and then broad-bosomed Gaia, a firm seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartaros in a recess of broad-wayed earth, and Eros, who is fairest among immortal gods, looser of limbs, and subdues in their breasts the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men. Out of Chaos, Erebos and black Night came into being; and from Night, again, came Aither and Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling in love with Erebos. And earth first of all brought forth starry Ouranos, equal to herself, to cover her completely round about, to be a firm seat for the blessed gods for ever. Then she brought forth tall mountains, lovely haunts of the divine nymphs who dwell in the woody mountains. She also gave birth to the unharvested sea, seething with its swell, Pontos, without delightful love; and then having lain with Ouranos she bore deep-eddying Okeanos. And so on, and so forth, for the next several thousand million billion who knows precisely how many lovely years, which is perhaps why Deena Metzger writes,

When I am lost or confused without knowing what to do, I will plant trees and like the true elders on this planet will listen to the spirits, I will pray and do ceremony and will stand with water. I have to repeat this. I will not commit ecocide. I will not murder the Mother. There will be a future for all beings. The earth will be protected and restored. Mitakuye oyasin

I had to look up mitakuye oyasin, it’s Lakota for “all are connected.” Or, as Horace put it, in Odes II/10,

            El consejo de un granjero suele ser
            no usar las bengalas
            (tho once in the lifeboat, the crew sent up a flare that was seen by the coastguard)
            As for La Vita Nuova
            podia encontrar me propio culo
            con ambas manos
            Kipling me viene a la cabeza
            restregándose contra la corteza de un limonero
            buscando la ayuda de su savia para la soriasis
            his 54-inch television
                             often shaken by the winds huge 
            pine trees and thrown from a heavier                
            towers fall strike the tops 
                    of lightning mountain.
            No, if it is bad now, and one day 
            it will be, once the harp, they would 
            raise the pipe and
                          fragrant    
                 while it Assyriaque berries;
            ubipotamus uncti? to shame 
            can waste us. The boy who instantly 
                  quench furnace Falernian 
                  cups passing lymph?               
            You will not like the long wars of Numantia,
            here in South London, or the
            I-Speak-Your-Weight-Machine,
            tic        tac        tic        tac        tic        tac ...

I’m learning to breathe but it’s slow work. As of today I can breathe perhaps twice, or if I’m lucky, three times a month. It may seem a negligible accomplishment. But then, perhaps the flood level hasn't risen so high in your part of the world yet ... And this is where the story should end. But bedtime stories for the end of the world don’t end where they are supposed to end. They end awkwardly, in the middle of some mess that was probably not worth making to begin with. Here’s an alternative ending. An alternative ending? I haven’t even started yet. The water is frozen and we are sleeping on the rocks, watching the cows on the cliff and you tell me they might fall and break open and that sheep and humans and countries will fall out of them and that this will be the start of the bedtime story you will tell me on this our very last night on earth. Come closer, you say, with your eyes. Move your bloody face next to mine and rub me with it. We are dying from so many stories. We are not complete in the mind from so many stories of burning houses, missing children, slaughtered animals. Who will put the stories back together and who will restore the bodies? I am working towards the end but first I need a stab, a small slice. The stories they are there but we need a bit more wit. We need something lighter to get us to the end of this story. Did you hear the one about the guy who picked up chicks by quoting the oral testimonies of the illiterate villagers who watched their brothers and sisters get slaughtered? Or: Andalé andalé arriba arriba welcome to Masahisa Fukase, Ravens, pages 29 thru 63. He spent the last 20 years in a coma after falling down the stairs of his favorite bar. Which is to say that sex with the strangers one meets on the internet is great and then empty and then great and then empty again. And that the 21^st century is changing at hyperspeed, and it seems as if no one has time to praise the patron saint of blowing up rotisserie chickens with fireworks. But who’s that beautiful person dressed head-to-toe in gold velvet? Did she just put Roy Orbison on the jukebox? Could love still be possible? And if so, does it redeem human suffering, sort of, like when

        you step in human shit
        while filming porn
        and notice the cherry petals
        floating around you like sparks?

        I mean, I’m the most graceful thing in the grocery store
        I have several beautiful heads
        all the body parts

        “truly interesting” I say to your story at lunch
        I put the phone on silent
        I feel something for the raised name on my credit card
        Go Huskies

Tunglið is an Icelandic publisher that only prints under the full moon and then burns all copies that don’t sell by dawn:

        WRGOABABD
        MLIAOI
        WTBIMPANETP
        MLIABOAIAQC
        ITTMTSAMSTGAB

as it were. But then they want to know, or to engage with reasons why or how poesis connects to socius. 1A, 1B, 1C. Here is 1C:

        Basically a series of concentric and differently materialised rectangles
        Basically then a series of proportioned cylinders
        Basically then a small assemblage of diverse organic entities
        Basically then a definite set of major ‘large’ objects (desk, lamp, etc.)
        Basically then also the ambient things: dust motes, scuff marks, pine smells
        Basically then also
        Basically then the light and its effects
        Basically also the camera and its one-minute-interval shutter dilations
        Basically also
        Basically and
        Basically and
        Basically and
        Basically also but not very noticeably chips of paint & wood matter
        Basically one last thing is a corner of the room in which storage bags are hidden
        So basically there will be gruesome forensics
        They will open the heavy box and find
        I will walk toward the fire
        Dodging one whale bone I will trip over another
        They will be the bones of Napoleon
        I will not be able to get up
        Basically one can hear the hour that sits at the edge of the waterfall
        The hour born of La Chingada

So when a collector asked Roy De Forest to explain why he painted a window on the side of a horse, he told him. If we could change our cars (metal autos) to the upholstered interior of a giant rabbit or make a horse into an apartment house and were able to see both inside and outside the horse or indeed the rabbit, we might see for the first time that everything we see both inside and out is not only part of us but part of everything all seen at once, in rapid succession with overlapping images that become like a clear pool as we look into them — in fact we might see finally both life and death, and what is in between, the beginning and the end — a tombstone for all the mislaid tigers with eyes that shine in the dark ...

        Which ton too maybe
        Term as in
        Is lately bound of a same such like
        Like such which things croach
        Nail
        By for to
        As as
        Which
        Mean implies ing as often
        Period

Which, incidentally, is also how lost love operates, or is perhaps love translated into ‘different Google machine language’, the double rainbows of ‘darkest happiness’ proving by negation of non-affirmation that ‘life / isn’t something we made up’, ever hugging the surface of the earth without ever being fed into a machine, ‘like tissue for some universal fucking soul beat’ / the enveloping ‘sound of bricks’ / It’s like when my room / resembles a hospital, / Sitting comfortably, I opened my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life. I thought soul beat was soul bear. When I say ‘me’, I mean ‘poetry’. And thanks to Merleau-Ponty we have the proof: The thing is nothing but a significance, the significant ‘thing’. Either way, everything is too much for nothing. However, another component of the experiment involved study of the physical effects of a powerful orgone accumulator on 1 mg of radium. The effects of this latter experiment were so powerful and extreme that they ended up confounding the biological experiment. Soon after introducing the radium to the accumulator, large numbers of experimental mice in an adjacent building suddenly died, Reich and several of his co-workers became ill with different conditions. Reich also described a local “stillness and bleakness” in the atmosphere, and persistent black clouds hovering nearby. Reich regarded these phenomena, and a local pattern of tree death and blackening of rocks that developed at that time on his property as manifestations of DOR, his acronym for “deadly orgone energy.”

        WRGOABABD
        MLIAOI
        WTBIMPANETP
        MLIABOAIAQC
        ITTMTSAMSTGAB

as it were. At that point

        Theseus, a tiny male spider, enters a tri-level construction:
        look down ...               you can see the labyrinth.
        Look down through the labyrinth, you can see

                                                                        Coatlicue
                        Sub-incision                Bud Powell
                                    César Vallejo
                                                The bird-headed shaman

                                         The struts are threads
        in a web. There is life blood flowing through
        these threads. Coatlicue flows into Bud Powell,
        César Vallejo into
                                    the bird-headed shaman.

                        Maybe I’ll sit by the pond and lob me a skull.

            The rest are the tiny Brightness People.

While the abjectly poor worldwide are the most extreme instance, I do include such diverse conditions as the impoverishment of the middle classes in rich countries, the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries owing to the 220 million hectares of land, or over 540 million acres, acquired by foreign investors and governments since 2006, and the destructive mining practices in virtually every country on earth. Then there are the countless displaced people warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, the minoritized groups in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, and the able-bodied unemployed men and women warehoused in ghettos and slums. Some of these expulsions have been taking place for a long time, but not at the current scale. Some are new types of expulsions, such as the nine million households in the US whose homes were foreclosed during the last decade. Which is to say that as soon as we enter a ‘love story,’ what is imperceptible, colorless and odorless in ordinary life becomes extraordinarily insistent. The time-of-life substance begins to beat endlessly. Headfirst. Arms open, torso open. The odor of fire, the taste of blood, life enriched by wounds, enhanced by murders — but of course most gallery-goers in the north have no experience at all of boiled artifacts. People who have photographed hog boils speak the language of the pork and bean. Anyway, Jasper Johns said they were very disgusting. I watched him bite a thermometer, I watched him shoot a groundhog, with a cap-gun, thru the heart. A sap ran out and dissolved the groundhog. “Olson’s report of the meeting, as someone later told me, was that he dug my pants, the material they were made of, and the way I was sitting with my legs crossed.” So yes, everything hinges in large part upon how readers approach words like “Soul” and whether they’re comfortable defining their approach to reading any work as having a “cosmology” behind it. Like, “Astronomy is the lackey of heavy colours. Poetry is the oil for fixed stars.” [THE CHORUS enters, in the voice of the Present] CHOIR ONE [chants], CHOIR TWO [chirps]. Now, what would you have me write? The History of the World in Seven Typefaces, like a Diatonic Scale. [Geometry descends on them in octagons and hexagrams, in crushing cascades and nervous nebulas.] Geometry was born flooding. It’s an excellent time to replant the honeysuckle. What makes a lot of noise becomes gradually less conspicuous. Please remember, if you please, that the spheres of crystal cost only the magnificence of design and not the incandescence of desire, which is absolutely untenable now as an investment strategy. Above X was placed Y, then Z, then all these were heavenly fixed — like fixed stars — placed exactly and perfectly accurately in their designated slot, like the Sun has its messes and predicaments that can fog more closely together; its crust begins to pale and fall off. It’s raining old Deutschmarks. That doesn’t surprise me. It’s usually the religious books that do all the talking. The Emperor’s Epistemological Anxiety overcame the whole Court, so much so that plans were hatched to murder the EMPEROR would he not dispose of the ring. It’s ok you’re upset. I’m not upset. Look here I’m just reading from a random page, well this is nice: “That’s the thing about a bowel explosion. I mean, it’s disturbing, right? Because it breaks down your subjectivity.” So for this ritual I looked for a TV that was on the air before and after I was born. The one I chose was Bewitched. I climb naked inside a large plastic bag filled with salt water to watch the episodes prior to my birth. The ones that aired after I watch outside the bag, REBORN in Bewitched! The episode that aired right after I was born finds Samantha pregnant. Her annoying husband Darrin does not want her using her magic powers to clean the house and he doesn’t want her lifting heavy objects until the baby is born so he hires a maid. I hate this television show, although to be fair I hate most of them. When I follow the instructions and quote unquote click here I find an essay by the same author that includes the lines

        To me it is the opposite of time
        travel, it is the halting of
        time, it is the collapsing of the
        walls separating us from where we
        have been, where we are going,
        and beyond.

        And this is in the best sense of
        the word “ritual,” the ritual to
        find the energy lines under our
        feet and fire rituals to
        acknowledge the mysterious and
        fastened 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit
        inside every human being no<
        matter where we live.

        [...]

        Robert Desnos has a
        line, “the living and the dead
        give in and wave to me”

        Please wave to Robert Desnos
        right now, wherever you are wave
        to him, he had a hard time
        getting to know that line.

        If you did not wave was it
        because you thought it was stupid
        to wave to a dead poet, or maybe
        you are just shy?

        If you waved did you see a hand
        wave back to you?

        [...]

        I am American but my
        family lineage is in Ireland and Denmark
        and I was also raised in a
        Pennsylvania Dutch community
        where I was fortunate to have had
        grandmothers who still spoke of
        talismans and protections drawn
        into magic squares with ink you
        spit on.

It appears that philosophers and physicians did not ensconce themselves, each in his own fortress. No empirical science can confine itself to mere registering of facts, and Greek medical science was not without commitments to theory, which is to say that certain ideas of were presupposed.  Everything in the world has natural causes, and of course this goes for sickness as well. But nature is — as in the earlier tradition of natural philosophy — itself divine. Increasingly, then, the person becomes a way of doing something, never explicitly experienced as such, because it is the world that is felt, its mute pressure filling out the corners, as of a rhyme. The room gathers each sitter in. The light changes, imperceptibly, always. One, the inevitable protagonist of a paragraph built on second thought, would like nothing better than to sum up and in the application describe that process by which so much detail has been set aside, so as to be clear of it, to stand in the pale light unframed by the body of years spent in collation. The assembly of days, none identical, to the last, has taken up much time. So many sources, however, have informed the final mix, that it bears an irreducible mark, one not possible to describe in so many words. The person looks around and sees the same things. It is necessary to change without touching them. Eryximachus himself mentions Heraclitus, and he is probably also thinking of Empedocles when he speaks of Eros as the driving force. Those two did in fact leave their marks on the Hippocratic writings. Returning to the charge a year later, Ikenberry was more candidly affirmative. He now explained that there was no contradiction between a constitutional and a hegemonic order, indeed that the first was the most helpful lubricant of the second. For ‘a constitutional settlement conserves hegemonic power’, by at once locking in arrangements favourable to it, and reducing the costs of enforcing order that would otherwise fall to it. The institutions and relations such a hegemony fostered around itself then inevitably yielded increasing returns to it. So yes, Prynne’s interest in Odysseus has been there from at least ‘Lashed to the Mast’, written in Olson’s house in Fort Square; it was there also in the photograph of an early design on a piece of pottery, depicting the figure of Odysseus tied to the mast by his sailors as they rowed past the island of the Sirens, which Prynne pasted into the opening leaf of his edition of Pound’s Cantos,

        “Billow under below known sat follow, happen so
        to make thwart leaden fine to fasten up as
        yes taken back, given to yield or space hold
        to later denounce grave enough smiling in
        turn the face back now, derelict ecstatic fee
        advance never clear rack, the inclination pack
        mouth breath wide, slight gasp for air what is
        known here found all down, all child eyes
        wide too, prow stove in cold leading outward
        flake to glitter certain and sure, all ever
        known down and reach to ready for gone shine
        far out ported beyond, rate and known.”

Which is to say, with Boethius, “All fortune is good,” and with W.R. Bion, “All thinking and all thoughts are true when there is no thinker”. A collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh, Kamaitachi documents ta visit to a farming village in northern Japan and an improvisational performance made with local villagers, inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon who haunts rice fields and slashes people. Thus it makes a lot of sense that the title font sees some sort of swirling whirlpool swimming in dark blue and white inside the letters of that title. Or OK, another coincidence, but the American pianist Ran Blake’s ‘The Short Life of Barbara Monk’ is a composition based on a pattern of two parts, the first a rhythmically light and lilting memory of childhood skating, the second of life taken away too soon, the realisation of this break. A play with time, repeating the circuits of loss and hope, always ending on the hope, or you hope it will. So

        Now I imitate Neruda from memory

        Engels

        Samuel Beckett feeding ice-cream / to a three-legged dog

        “I” and “we” are there from the beginning

        what we’d shyly call an ethics”

        the “secret poem”

        “the actual Laundromat”

        [follow the hyperlinks and the poem will come]

But I really like Swedenborg because he argues that drunkards, who escape from a thousand potentially fatal accidents, are a logical proof that guardian angels exist. Weirdly enough, though the ontological proof of the existence of God is taught in every first-year philosophy class, nobody teaches this. What’s up with that? We know who watches the birds. But who watches the bird-watchers? It’s still larval, mind you. 80% vegan and 10% big round eyes. It involves terraforming and First Contact with aliens who bet on an utterly wrong horse. It’s an actual opera, you see. There’s music, and a libretto. There are singers and sets and costumes — relatively primitive at this stage, the event was basically a proof-of-principle exercise after all — and scientific fact-checking courtesy of a number of real authorities, not the least being the co-discoverer of Dark Energy. We’re after verisimilitude, here. This aims to be the most scientifically-rigorous opera about alien lungfish on Mars ever. It’s a high bar to clear. Oh, and I think the guy with the bowling ball on his head is ... uh ... well ... back in Robert Frost’s day it was still possible to pretend that one could take the road least bombed.

[Note: Sources: Deanne Sole, “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling”, at Pop Matters, 28 Apr 09; Richard Voorhees, and Marguerite Young, “The Clinic”, quoted in Voorhees’ post at Who is Marguerite Young message board, 4 Jun 011; Karsten Friis Johansen, and Hesiod, Theogony, quoted in Johansen, A History of Ancient Philosophy from The Beginnings to Augustine; JBR; Deena Metzger, “We Will Not Commit Ecocide”, at Ruin and Beauty, 2 Jun 017; JBR; Gaspar Orozco, translation of Tim Atkins, “Odes II/10”, in Enemigos – Enemies (ed. SJ Fowler); JBR; “flare”, at SpanishDict; JBR; Gaspar Orozco, translation of Tim Atkins, “Odes II/10”, in Enemigos – Enemies (ed. SJ Fowler); David Berridge, “The Poet is Working”, in Enemigos – Enemies (ed. SJ Fowler); bits of “Q. HORATI FLACCI CARMINVM LIBER SECVNDVS” (tr. Google), at The Latin Library; Tim Atkins, “49”, in Enemigos – Enemies (ed. SJ Fowler); Ana Franco Ortuno, “Minimo bestiario”, in Enemigos – Enemies (ed. SJ Fowler); Gael Turnbull, “Learning to Breathe”, in There are words ... Collected Poems; Daniel Borzutsky, “The Performance of Becoming Human”, in The Performance of Becoming Human; JBR; Daniel Borzutsky, “The Performance of Becoming Human”, in The Performance of Becoming Human; JBR (hat tip Omo Bob); blurb for Sarah Galvin, Ugly Time, at SPD; I mean: JBR; I’m the most ... Huskies:  Rachel B Glaser, “I Am an Orchid”, “With No Desire to Call Anyone I Reach For My Phone”, “Two Discarded Lovers”, in Hairdo, at http://www.spdbooks.org/Content/Site106/FilesSamples/9780996778664.pdf SPD; James Reith, “The Icelandic publisher that only prints books during a full moon – then burns them”, at The Guardian, 31 May 017; Jessica Wilkinson, AJ Carruthers, Astrid Lorange, quoted in Carruthers’ “The lives of the experimental poets 16–18: Fitch, Wilkinson, Lorange”, at Jacket2, 3 Jun 017; JBR; Eduardo Padilla, “La gran soltería (Junk Bonds)” (tr. Anne Gorrick); JBR; Pablo Picasso, “Vallauris 26 – 28 September 1951” (tr. Pierre Joris), in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems (eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris); JBR; Paulo Huirimilla, “Warrior Song”, in Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (ed. Jaime Luis Huenún Villa, various translators); John Yau, “Roy De Forest’s Search for Paradise Did Not Always Go Well”, at Hyperallergic, 4 Jun 017; Clark Coolidge, “from THE MAINTAINS”, in Selected Poems 1962-1985; Joe Luna, “The World is For This: on the poetry of Jonty Tiplady”, at everything everywhere, 23 May 012; JBR; Joe Luna, “The World is For This: on the poetry of Jonty Tiplady”, at everything everywhere, 23 May 012; “Orgone Biophysics”, at The Institute for Orgonomic Science; Jessica Wilkinson, quoted in AJ Carruthers’ “The lives of the experimental poets 16–18: Fitch, Wilkinson, Lorange”, at Jacket2, 3 Jun 017; JBR; Clayton Eshleman, “from HYBRID HIEROPHANIES”, at BlazeVOX books; Clark Coolidge, “Ed Bean Rostrum Cadet”, “A Rugged Lap”, in Counting on Planet Zero; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy; JBR; Hélène Cixous, “What Is It O’clock? Or the Door (We Never Enter)”, (tr. Catherine A.F. MacGillivray), in Stigmata; JBR; Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, “Really the Key”, “The Groundhog”, in Bean Spasms; John Clarke, and Patrick James Dunagan, quoted in Dunagan’s “A Curriculum of the Soul”, at Entropy, 5 Jun 017; JBR; Sophie Seita, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers, at Gauss PDF; anon, quoted in Mariah Min, “Shoptalk: Overheard At Kzoo”, at Public Books, 6 Jun 017; CA Conrad, “TV BIRTH PORTAL: Bewitched (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 6 Jun 017; JBR; CA Conrad, “Poetry & Ritual”, at Literary Hub, 5 Feb 016; Karsten Friis Johansen, A History of Ancient Philosophy from the Beginnings to Augustine; Kit Robinson, “The Person”, in The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems; Karsten Friis Johansen, A History of Ancient Philosophy from the Beginnings to Augustine; Perry Anderson, The H-Word; JBR; Ian Brinton, and JH Prynne, Each to Each, quoted in Brinton’s “EACH TO EACH, J.H. Prynne (Equipage, 2017) NINE DRUGS, Ulf Stolterfoht, translated by Lisa Jeschke (Face Press, Cambridge, 2016) OF . THE . ABYSS, J.H. Prynne (Materials, Cambridge, 2017)”, at Tears in the Fence, 17 May 017; JBR; Ian Brinton, and JH Prynne, OF . THE . ABYSS, quoted in Brinton’s “EACH TO EACH, J.H. Prynne (Equipage, 2017) NINE DRUGS, Ulf Stolterfoht, translated by Lisa Jeschke (Face Press, Cambridge, 2016) OF . THE . ABYSS, J.H. Prynne (Materials, Cambridge, 2017)”, at Tears in the Fence, 17 May 017; “Kamaitachi; Photographs by Eikoh Hosoe”, at Aperture; JBR; David Grundy, “Pocket Reviews”, at Streams of Expression, 9 Feb 017 (reviews of Ulf Stolterfoht, Nine Drugs (tr. Lisa Jeschke), and Luke Roberts, Pocket Song); JBR; Luke Roberts, To My Contemporaries, and David Grundy, quoted in Grundy’s “”, at Streams of Expression, 31 Jan 016; JBR; Roger Gathman, “the ontological drunkard’s proof”, at  Limited, Inc., 7 Jun 017; JBR; Roger Gathman, “BIRDSCAPES by Jeremy Mynott (Princeton; $29.95)”, at The New Yorker, 20 Apr 09; Peter Watts, “Proof of Principle”, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 7 Jun 017; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Humility is seeing yourself as you really are”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 6 Jun 017]

Gael Turnbull, "Learning to Breathe"

I've been learning to breathe under water. Don't laugh. The flood level has already risen overhead and is still rising. It doesn't leave much time.

Of course, I'm not the only one to be submerged. Several of my best friends have already drowned. They sway here and there as the eddies carry them. I try not to look.

Gradually the lungs fill up and it begins to seep into the circulation. The crucial moment! Don't think it won't flow into your arteries. Only too easily!

Concentrate rather on one cell in your brain. Keep that dry. To try to save the whole brain at once ... you'll only end up by drowning. With one synapse, even one cell, it's quite possible to survive.

I'm learning to breathe but it's slow work. As of today I can breathe perhaps twice, or if I'm lucky, three times a month.

It may seem a negligible accomplishment. But then, perhaps the flood level hasn't risen so high in your part of the world, as yet. 

[Note: One of "Six Fancies" in A Trampoline (Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1968)]

With the Noose Around My Neck 56

Could this possibly explain why both Anti-Oedipus and 1000 Plateaus were often exploited for their delightful buzzwords and as a source for metaphors, but hardly ever used in the formation of media-theoretical concepts? Could this possibly be why this stretch of bayfill and autoyards is called Paradise Drive? Which is the chipped tooth? Is that your cervix? What if I bought an old railroad car and made a house out of it? In what way is it as cold as the sky is blue? What do you mean your hair hurts? Do you see those cartons shoved against the window? All that is mortal lives in this fear of death; every new birth augments the fear by one new reason, for it augments what is mortal. Without ceasing, the womb of the indefatigable earth gives birth to what is new, each bound to die, each awaiting the day of its journey into darkness with fear and trembling. But philosophy denies these fears of the earth. It bears us over the grave which yawns at our feet with every step. It lets the body be a prey to the abyss, but the free soul flutters away over it. Why should philosophy be concerned if the fear of death knows nothing of such a dichotomy between body and soul, if it roars Me! Me! Me!, if it wants nothing to do with relegating fear onto a mere “body”? Let man creep like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast-approaching volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal; let him sense there, forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be but an It if it died; let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is still in his throat against Him from whom there is no appeal, from whom such unthinkable annihilation threatens — for all this dire necessity philosophy has only its vacuous smile. With index finger outstretched, it directs the creature, whose limbs are quivering with terror for its this-worldly existence, to a Beyond of which it doesn’t care to know anything at all. For man does not really want to escape any kind of fetters; he wants to remain, he wants to — live. Could this possibly explain why both Anti-Oedipus and 1000 Plateaus were often exploited for their delightful buzzwords and as a source for metaphors, but hardly ever used in the formation of media-theoretical concepts? Could this possibly be why you watch how they shake their heads and step back whenever the wrong bus approaches? Is this the cold you caught from Pierce? Why are you so fucked up, fucked over, fucked? Why are reading this? What makes you think that’s what it’s for? Is that light too bright? Is that how you get to the zoo? Are not all descriptive terms in the ideal language either proper nouns or predicates? Why do we label this sunset debris? Are you a musician of white spaces in the obituary room of our open and incomprehensible hands?

        Um, did the lights just go out, out there?
        Um, can you am I am I popping the microphone?
        Is, unh you can, can you hear it when I rustle my shirt?
        It’s not bad to wonder about those but I also have to
                wonder if I made a mistake, um, on the way, to—
        because, you know, you don’t know until you ask, do you?
        No, so, okay, um, I don't know whether—
                 Do you know whether—
        Can you tell where—
        No, let’s never say what you want to say
        until you’ve already gotten to the shore,
        the final point, the way that it stops, because then

        [...]

        I’m
           elastic
        but am I
        turning over?

            Where now burns the aromatic herb?

That’s when I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave it all out would be another. And then I realized I seem to have sold my Ashbery books. There are some old photographs which show the event. The people who are there — they made a sign, were making a sign. To quote Jean-Luc Nancy, their motors are too old. Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that must be related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a transcendence beyond itself, the question is no longer “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Instead, it becomes “Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in a single gesture?” Especially when an early start is highly recommended for prime parking, less traffic, and lower temperatures for this interesting walk that is a blend of historic to current bridges and houses along former streetcar-access routes. The tour starts on the east side of Park Blvd. and Village Place at the Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden, one of only four US. gardens that has received the Award of Excellence from the World Federation of Rose Societies. For those with allergies, there is also a xeriscape garden to view before crossing the first bridge toward the San Diego Natural History Museum. Continue west along El Prado through the middle of Balboa Park, passing museums and the lily pond, continuing across the 1914 Laurel St. bridge, the first multiple-arched cantilever bridge built in California, which spanned a small lake during the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Remain on Laurel St., crossing Second Ave. to view one of the ten churches Irving Gill designed on the southwest corner. Follow Second Ave. north for one block, then turn left on Maple to Albatross St., where you will see a plaque commemorating Waldo Waterman’s flight of a biplane hang-glider launched by auto-tow in 1909. Retrace your steps east for two blocks, turning north or left onto First Ave. for the third bridge. The First Ave. bridge was built in 1931, shipped to San Diego to be reassembled in place. It is still the only steel-arch bridge in the city, reopened in 2010 after a 15-month refurbishment that included retrofitting to California earthquake standards and removal of the paint, which contained lead. After viewing Maple Canyon, continue on First Ave., then turn right on Quince St. for two blocks to the Quince St. bridge entrance. The wooden-trestle bridge was built in 1905 at a cost of less than $1000 to allow easier access to the Fourth Ave. trolley station. After crossing to Fourth Ave., retrace your steps to Second Ave. and turn right (north) for two blocks. Turn left (west) on Spruce St., past the “Not a Through Street” sign to the 1912 Spruce St. suspension bridge. Enjoy the movement when crossing over Kate Sessions Canyon, turning right on both Brant and Upas streets. Turn left on Albatross St., right on Walnut Ave., then left on First Ave. for four blocks to a right turn on University Ave. Now would be a good time to pick out a place for a short break before continuing on University Ave. As you walk past Tenth Ave., notice on the southeast corner The Loading Dock mural created in 1999 by Linda Churchill. Turn left at Vermont St. to the end of the shopping center to the present 1995 Vermont St. bridge with its words of inspiration to read while crossing Washington Street. It replaced the 1916 wooden-trestle bridge that eased usage of the University trolley line that was the primary transportation line in San Diego from 1888–1949. After crossing the sixth bridge, turn right (east) on Lincoln Ave., then take a right (south) turn down Georgia St. one block to the seventh bridge, a redwood truss built in 1907 after the ridge was cut to allow the streetcar line to extend eastward to Fairmont Ave., opening North Park and other surrounding areas to development. In 1914, the current concrete bridge was built and is now designated as a local, state, and national landmark. Kearney, 30, is the owner of Girl Next Door Honey and has been beekeeping for the last seven years. She said that our city is seeing more bees because of the rainfall we had earlier this year. So why is crash space so terrifying? It just is. You can’t help it. None of us can help it. What looks first like an optimism is a pessimism; what looks first like a pessimism is an optimism; no, neither, not so stupid. Pin that to a measure of hyperbole. They won’t get it, he said. This is the hardest thing in the dharma to understand. It is impossible to understand because it cannot be understood. What? During the 17^th century in England, men menstruated — or, at least, they thought they did. Medical documents and personal testimonies from the time are often vague, but many suggest that “male menstruation” took multiple forms, whether blood spewed monthly from the tip of the finger or from the “genital parts,” as one man reported in 1706. In general, the historian Lisa Wynne Smith observes, menstruation seems to have been understood by both medical experts and the public as an un-sexed and un-gendered event. Aristocratic men even saw periodic bleeding as a religious experience, so

        Let me state              although it is late —
        To be a poet is to hitch-hike 5000 miles in a kayak   in order
                        to see
        A jar in Tennessee         

        One cat kissing another cat     on a card      in a card shop
                         in Clapham
        Different from a blue tongue in the mouth or the hand

        So whoever wishes to love nobly     when she presses her green
                          something against a white what —    friends —

        In order to discover any new planet
                                “The Shrimp Exaggerated”
         I am that tulip

        If you can get it from my kung-fu grip
        Only then you can have it

        & now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
        That living is one of the best things — there where I ripped it

        I go over and look at myself
        & look surprised
        Because living is one of the best things          I go over
        I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass

Our prepositions of the day are: with, in, for, of. All that’s left are orders and insistence. Do this, do that. Build a wall around the sink-hole. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing was anonymous. Which is to say that everybody has a story. The mountain threw rocks at me. I stood up to it. At the top I built a shelf for my record. I can say no more. Now I see trees and water for the first time thanks to the Fresh Air Fund. He was right, but be alive in all periods, all bodies, living and dead, etc. Allow three to five business days.  Reside quietly in a pink rhombus. I went to Rockefeller Center on an unexpectedly blustery spring morning to see Jeff Koons’s “Seated Ballerina,” a 45-foot-tall inflated ballerina, secured by ropes to a pedestal, her left arm swaying ever so slightly in the wind. The piece is a public art project co-presented by the Art Production Fund and skincare product store Kiehl’s Since 1851, in partnership with developer Tishman Speyer. So when I moved to New England and said the word “Reno” as though the word by itself was spiritual, my new friends laughed. The intellectual part of my brain spun all this shit about class and the West. It’s ridiculous, it’s meandering, there are Frankensteins and pot forests and characters announcing the fog and an Author’s Note that includes a PO Box where you can write to get a Course in Miracles. If I did, it was the same way your friend comes up with a nickname for a soap you’ve been eating your whole life and you immediately use it forever. “He was completely and openly a mess.” Wait a minute, was that soup or soap? I did some research. A September 2005 survey of New Orleans evacuees in a Houston shelter documented the immediate health impacts of the storm. The surveyed evacuees were predominantly African American and low income, and 52 percent were uninsured. One-third of respondents reported having health problems or injuries as a direct result of the hurricane and flooding, with 41 percent describing these medical issues as “serious.” One in five respondents with hurricane-related health problems were not receiving care at the time of the survey. In addition to their new health problems, many of the evacuees had pre-existing health needs to manage, such as prenatal care for pregnant women or chronic health conditions for seniors. More than 40 percent were supposed to be taking prescription drugs, and one-third of all respondents had gone without the medications they needed at some point since the storm. Two years after Katrina, a survey of Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, trailer parks in Mississippi found continued worsening of physical and mental health. Adults surveyed were twice as likely to report being in “fair or poor” health as before the storm, and children were four times more likely than before. While the affected states had high uninsured rates long before Katrina, many previously insured people found themselves without coverage when businesses closed and jobs disappeared in the storm’s aftermath. In Louisiana, estimates suggest that as many as 200,000 people lost employer-based health coverage due to hurricanes Katrina or Rita, the latter of which hit the region shortly after Katrina did. Katrina also cut off residents’ access to health care by drastically reducing the availability of health care providers, as doctors evacuated and clinics flooded. In the New Orleans metro area, for example, the number of inpatient hospital beds dropped by more than half, and the number of operational safety net clinics dropped from 90 to 19. New Orleans’s Charity Hospital — which for centuries had been the city’s primary provider of health care services for uninsured and low-income people — was evacuated and shut down due to severe flooding; it never reopened. I want to add “surprise, surprise” here. In order to rapidly alleviate disaster refugees’ suffering, many policymakers looked to the example of the Disaster Relief Medicaid program that New York City and state governments set up in collaboration with the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. This was a temporary expansion of coverage for four months that allowed all low-income people in the disaster area to enroll in Medicaid via an abbreviated one-page application. However, the Bush administration rejected this approach and successfully limited the scope and cost of any Medicaid response by pressuring Republican members of Congress to abandon and block the bill. Although the administration did take steps to reimburse health providers for uncompensated care costs, it refused to change the existing eligibility rules, and as a result, the main barrier to coverage remained locked in place. The Affordable Care Act helped some. But ... and given the fools currently in power ... So the meme is fairly accurate, Alan. The people in Manchester without private insurance would likely be fucked if that bombing had happened here. I mean,

        rakete rinzekete 
        rakete rinzekete 
        rakete rinzekete 
        rakete rinzekete 
        rakete rinzekete 
        rakete rinzekete 
        Beeeee 
        bö       

        Bee 
                    bö 
        Böwö 
                          böwörö 
        Böwöböpö 
                        böwöröböpo 
        Böwörötääböpo 
                       böwörötääböpo 
                   tääböpo 
                           tüüböpo 
           tääböpo 
                      tüüböpo

        (emocionado)

        (más emocionado) 

        (normal) 

        (muy emocionado)

                (afligido)           

        covfefe ...

Are you better off today than you were 13,000 years ago?

                  Yesterday? I stayed in out of the heat, washed dishes
        Read a book
                  Remembered a cow
              That as an ignorant boy with a board I walloped
            For breaking into our yard
        Eyes first puzzled then pissed off
                     Bellowing near my asparagus patch
               Or was that later
        After the big cedar fell and destroyed the fence
                 Or possibly when we mutinied, refusing to follow<
           Alexander farther into the subcontinent
        Just wanting to go back to whatever inevitably temporary homes
             With the baubles we’d collected and our blistered skins
             Eat an entire sheep with a group of cousins
        Maybe build a hut
           Imperceptibly alter a grammar
             Chase birds
               Stand in the midst of barley

only this time, to borrow Freud’s terminology, there is “Spider silk in the milk of goats,” why? Because why?

        Let’s bury radioactive garbage in the desert for
        several thousand years
        Or shoot it at the moon
        and Mars along with bacteria,

        Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / where?

        The papier-mâché Potemkin
        village we’ve spread, spreadable
        cheese over the surface of
        what we call Earth.

        (“I can’t work today because I am crazy”)

        But

        no ... What’s that humming
                                                                                           sound ...
                                                   ... Hello ...

        Hello? Hello? Hello?

        Is there anybody in there?
        Just nod if you can hear me ...

                    nothing
                    nothing but a spirit world
                    nothing but

 a cast of discussants like refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking: these characters are =x (“For purposes of performance,” the endnote advises, “the character could be rendered by so much of a gulp as can be achieved without swallowing”), Agramant, Qnuxmuxkyl, and Jobless. The action promises to involve a road trip, perhaps starting in Cambridge and heading for London, but it reaches no farther territorially than a pub in Stevenage, which is like setting out from Chicago to survey America and being detained for months in a bar in South Bend. In this sense it would correspond to what Barthes terms an “expressive reduction” in his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” whereas “the not-made, truth” entails a following of the grain, with the conceptually-emergent and the corporeal

        established, like crampons in an avalanche.

“Be assured,” says Cid Hamete Benengeli, “that the history of women is that of degradation and suffering.” (True, she said to herself, rubbing her wounded cunt.) “Nevertheless, history shows us that no woman nor any other person has to endure anything: a woman has the power to choose to be a king and a tyrant. Let us examine this history of women in its details: The first woman recorded by human history was Amadia of Gaul. Gaul, you know dog, was an ancient city. Amadia fell into the clutches of her mortal natural enemy, Arcalaus. Arcalaus made her prisoner. Then he stuck two knives into her thigh flesh. Then he bound her to a pillar in his court-yard, for he was a rich man so he could do whatever he wanted, like pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. It’s a well-known fact that he lashed her body two hundred times with his horse’s reins solely for her own pleasure. A certain female chronicler, anonymous or dead as women in those days had to be, recorded how this woman, hair as white and red as the Bloody Body of Christ, left in a room alone, a trapdoor opens beneath her feet, she drops into a deep underground pit of shit. The shit smells. She finds herself again bound hands and feet. Arcalaus liked this form of torture. Servants made her drink down a bowl of sand and ice-cold water.” Lusia wrote that she began WIRE & WAIL after her second open-heart surgery, during which her shattered aortic valve was replaced with a porcine valve, making her a pig-human hybrid, a chimera. In science, a chimera is a mixture of two or more species in one body. The procedure is called a xenotransplantation. And from the Greek word Xenos, come the English words: stranger, guest, alien, foreign, and strange, I mean I worry that I need vastly better analytic tools to monetize my idiosyncrasies and enhance my progress toward career optimization. It is light. I am awake. I need vastly better analytic tools to optimize my favorite motivational quotes. I school myself with vast analytic tools. “That point — formerly the center of the moon, but now an abstraction in space — continued to revolve around the Earth as it had done for billions of years” ... so too the current hope is a benzene ring of fragmentary cells. One looks like a big old building. Which is to say that as I was reading the book the form of its central question also struck me as strangely inappropriate. The question, Trawny announces at the outset, is “whether and to what extent anti-Semitism contaminates [Heidegger’s] philosophy as a whole” (emphasis added). That choice of words was no casual error on Trawny’s part. On the contrary, “The concept is particularly important for what follows,” for “The interpretation ventured here ... seeks to arrive at an answer to the question of how far this contamination reaches and how it is to be delimited.” That, it seems to me, is an unfortunate way of framing questions about the substance of Heidegger’s (or anyone’s) philosophical thought, not just because the metaphor of purity and contamination is awkward or in poor taste in a discussion of racism and genocide, but because it presupposes a categorical judgment: yes or no, pure or impure, clean or soiled, intact or ruined. Like its close relative sin, contamination is the kind of thing there is no good amount of, other than zero. (Try inviting someone to drink water that is somewhat, or even only slightly, contaminated.) As it turns out, my discomfort with Trawny’s reliance on the metaphor is vindicated in the Afterword to the German Second Edition, in which Trawny himself disavows it, confessing with good-natured irony, “I have even allowed my own thoughts to be ‘contaminated’ ... It would certainly be desirable if, in the future, the focus fell upon the philosophical problems that we encounter in the Black Notebooks from the end of the 1930s. It seems to me that we are poised for a discussion of Heidegger’s radical anti-universalism.” That also seems to me exactly right. Much (not all) of what has been written over the years about Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism is of historical interest, but strictly speaking useless for gaining insight into exactly how his actions, his fears, his prejudices, his ideological commitments — his at times solipsistic, delusional fantasies — figured into his philosophical thinking. The Black Notebooks now provide new material with which we can take such questions seriously, as we must. Tho I don’t know where we go after admitting his radical anti-universalism. So much for Dasein, which is just another stupid cultural construct. What could be worse than a non-universal philosophy on ALL THIS BURNING EARTH? As our co-ordinates are magnetised, & as our exits have been seized we have been vanished, we heavy stones of — anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Rimbaud. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. Anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Amiri Baraka, trying to explain the idea that if you turn the surrealist image — defined by Aimé Césaire as a “means of reaching the infinite” — if you turn that inside out what you will find is that phrase from Baraka: “the magic words are up against the wall motherfucker”. It’s going very slowly — ALL THIS BURNING EARTH ALL THIS BURNING EARTH ALL THIS

        I woke up
        and I was old—

        It’s hard to judge
        if this new

        quote unquote
        country

        was worth
        its costs—

but it was another way for me to interact with people around me, even if those people were storybook characters. At times, he concedes, that can become an issue (sometimes called ‘helmet-fire’): “it does happen that occasionally you have to say ‘Please can you get your long screwdriver out of my GCS.’ Which is why, when I first came to Paris, I attended one of Jodorowsky’s psychomagical lectures on spiritual alchemy, the tarot, Zen Buddhism and shamanism. Speaking of Tarot, the theoretical part of Camoin’s method embraces the intellectual intuition of synchronicity, a concept first developed by Jung, who maintained that events are synchronic ‘meaningful coincidences’ if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related. The problem is that synchronicity is both an error of inductive inference and a form of confirmation bias. But this is art, not science. This is snake venom. Fuck Trump. Fuck Trump. Fuck Trump. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes. Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Breathing is a dark burning of that kind, a fire without light. Other examples are: the rusting of metals, the decomposition of dissolved liver of sulphur and other similar eudiometric substances in the air, the fertilizing of the garden and field through absorption of atmospheric oxygen, etc. In any case, KD and Rihanna’s fight make them realize that the only thing worse than how they feel about each other is how they feel WITHOUT each other. Jeff Van Gundy, still obsessed with her, tries to interrupt the wedding but ends up falling into the cake. I think it got 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. The only question is how the studio marketing team will try to justify casting Katherine Heigl as Rihanna and Bradley Cooper as Durant.

[Note: Sources: Siegfried Zielinski, “Questions for Henning Schmidgen, 30.05.13”, at Forum on the Genealogy of MediaThinking; JBR; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris, at UPenn; Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (tr. William Hallo); Siegfried Zielinski, “Questions for Henning Schmidgen, 30.05.13”, at Forum on the Genealogy of MediaThinking; JBR; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris, at UPenn; Peter Boyle, “The Book of Questions — Reading Edmond Jabès”, at Australian Poetry Library; Steve Benson, “Did the lights just go out?”, at UPenn; St John Perse, Seamarks (tr. Wallace Fowlie), quoted in Ron Silliman, “[Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems ...]”, at Silliman’s Blog, 31 Jul 07; JBR; John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”, in Three Poems; JBR; I don't remember; John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”, in Three Poems; JBR; Jean-Luc Nancy, quoted in Elena Cué, “Interview With Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘There Is No West Anymore’”, at HUFFPOST, 14 Jul 017; blurb for Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (tr. Bridget Mcdonald), at Stanford University Press; JBR; The Canyoneers, “Seven Bridge Walk”, at San Diego Reader, 24 Oct 012; Mike Madriaga, “Bees swarm Kensington”, at San Diego Reader, 30 May 017; Arran James, “Unconditional Subtraction”, at Synthetic Zero, 28 May 017; Emma Pask, “Becoming a Leak”, at The New Inquiry, 30 May 017; JBR; Tim Atkins, Petrarch, quoted in Michael Dennis, “Petrarch - Tim Atkins”, at Michael Dennis, 14 Oct 013; Susan M Schultz, “Think what you want of this nothingness”, “So I encourage you—bow eagerly to love”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 28 & 29 017; JBR; Larry Fagin (RIP), “Unplanned Account”, “Franz K.”, at Sienese Shredder 1; Larry Fagin (RIP), “Faded Spirit”, at Best American Poetry, 27 May 017; Letícia Wouk Almino, “The Hollow Symbolism of Jeff Koons’s Blow-Up Ballerina”, at Hyperallergic, 30 May 017; JBR; Mike Young, “They’ll have a music of wet streets / and lonely bars where piano notes / follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost”, at HTMLGIANT, 28 May 017 (re: Denis Johnson (RIP)); JBR; Thomas Huelskoetter, “Hurricane Katrina’s Health Care Legacy”, at Center for American Progress, 20 Aug 015; JBR; Kurt Schwitters, “Ursonate”, at UPenn; Donald Trump, tweet, 31 May 017; Jordan Davis, and Kevin Davies, in Davis’ “Happy Thoughts!: The Poetry of Kevin Davies”, at The Nation, 4 Feb 09 (a review of Davies’ The Golden Age of Paraphernalia); Kevin Davies, “Later Argument”, quoted in Joshua Clover, “Poet’s Sampler: Kevin Davies”, at Boston Review, 1 May 07; Pink Floyd, “Comfortably Numb”; a poet whose name I don’t know (quoted on the last page of a review by Jeremy Biles of a book called Crosses), John Wilkinson, and Simon Jarvis, The Unconditional, quoted in Wilkinson’s “Simon Jarvis, The Unconditional. London: Barque Press, 2005. 242pp. $35”, at Chicago Review; Kathy Acker, Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream; blurb for Lusia Slomkowska, Wire & Wail, at SPD; JBR; Jerome Sala, Corporations Are People, Too!, at SPD; JBR; Taylor Carman, “Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy”, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 4 Jun 016; JBR; Sean Bonney, “After Rimbaud (For The Administration)”, “Letter on Poetics (Saturday, June 25, 2011)”, “Letter on Silence (Tuesday, August 30, 2011)”, in All This Burning Earth, at Ill Will Editions; Eileen R Tabios, “Mom Betty Addresses the Nature of Proportion”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Eileen R Tabios, “Mom Betty Addresses the Nature of Proportion”, at Poetry Foundation; Entropy, 1 Jun 017; Derek Gregory, and “Justin Thompson”, quoted in Gregory’s “The final arbiter”, at Geographical Imaginations, 30 May 017 (GCS = Ground Control Station); JBR; Joseph Nechvatal, “Review of pascALEjandro L’androgyne alchimique (Alchemical Androgynous)”, at Academia.edu; JBR, but see University of Chicago Press, “University of Chicago Press new titles listing for 06/01/2017”, email rec’d 1 Jun 017, approx. 6:47pm PDT (blurb for Jutta Schickore, About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically); University of Chicago Press, “University of Chicago Press new titles listing for 06/01/2017”, email rec’d 1 Jun 017, approx. 6:47pm PDT (blurb for Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives (eds. Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart)); Johann Wilhelm Ritter, “Attempt at a History of the Fate of Chemical Theory in the Last Centuries” (tr. by Jocelyn Holland), in Key Texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) on the Science and Art of Nature (ed. and tr. Jocelyn Holland); JBR; FelixElix, and Torsloke, comments appended to Barry Petchesky, “I’m Just Here For The Rihanna-Kevin Durant Feud”, at Deadspin, ?2 Jun 017]