Zeitgeist Spam

Think of Trump and those who support him when you read this: reposted from the New Inquiry

The American Model

What appears to be still difficult, even as it gets told in ever finer detail, is the simple and immense situation that America and Nazi Germany are two instantiations of a single history of white supremacist rule.

JACK GROSS

AMIDST a string of pat introductory reflections to his recent book, Hitler’s American Model, which tracks the influence of American race law on the drafting of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, James Q. Whitman makes one that is revealing. The crimes of the Nazis, he writes, are the “nefandum,” a Latin word that denotes the unsayable, by which he means unfathomably evil. According to Whitman, the function of this unsayability is the maintenance of a “dark star”—his image, not mine—against which modern liberal democracies orient their own actions and histories. The point of Hitler’s American Model, then, is to bring the very often spoken horrors of the Holocaust—in this case the legal apparatus that enabled a genocidal state—into contact with the also unsayable, and surely less said, international influence of United States race laws.

James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press, 2017. 224 Pages.

Comparisons of things that aren’t fascist dictators to fascist dictators are made as commonly as they are condemned. When it comes to comparing people to Hitler, there is a rule of internet discourse that strongly discourages it. In liberal media outlets, with pseudo-earnest concern—Is Trump like Hitler?—the comparison is both energizing and reassuring: energizing because it denotes the clear radicality of Nazi evil, comforting because of the implicit anticipation of the triumph of liberal norms. The impulse to make the Nazi comparison is so common in part because it is understood almost invariably to be hyperbolic. (No, or at least not yet, is the most frequent response.) What is less common are claims to the messier truth of continuity, which fail to offer the sharp and spectacular relief that separates the horrors of the Nazi regime from the more common pace and texture of devastation by state violence. On one side of the comparison is generational immiseration, imprisonment, exile and death tempered by civility; on the other, the right-angled arm-band and the death camp.

Whitman’s history of influence contributes to a growing body of work that demonstrates links between America and Nazi ideology: most commonly cited are the prominent role of Americans in the global eugenics movement and Hitler’s admiration for the slaughter of indigenous people central to westward expansion. Before the Nazis had gripped complete control of Germany, America was receiving world-historical praise from German historians. Albrecht Writh, for example, understood the founding of the United States to be a key achievement in “the struggle of the Aryans for world domination”; in a volume titled The Supremacy of the White Race, Wahrhold Drascher wrote that, if not for America, “a conscious unity of the white race would have never emerged.”

In Mein Kampf, Hitler extended this praise to his present, pointing with admiration to American naturalization and immigration laws. As he railed against the loose strictures delimiting German citizenship, the United States appealed to Hitler as a state with a “better conception” of membership restrictions. His commentary was made in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, which, along with its legislative precursors in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, introduced sweeping “national origins” restrictions on immigration, excluding people from large swathes of Asia and the Middle East wholesale while placing severe quota restrictions on not-yet-white southern Europe. Hitler—correctly, it would seem—read such laws as confirmation that American legislators were acting against the image of the state as a “melting pot”—eliminating, as he put it, the “Völker-porridge” theory of the state by expelling “foreign bodies.”

By 1933, praise had become doctrine. The Nazi Handbook for Law and Legislation, a guiding Party document for lawmakers, fused the misty-eyed conception of America as a white supremacist zenith with its study of contemporaneous immigration policy, and concluded that, from America’s “fundamental recognition” of its white racial identity, it was only “a matter of logical thinking” to arrive at the political ideology of National Socialism.

Citizenship, depending on the context, is either a dog whistle or a foghorn. Inspired by America’s explicitly race-based immigration policy and the category of “non-citizen nationals”—created to class the subjects of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, territories seized by the newly imperial US—the first of the two Nuremberg Laws explicitly fused race and citizenship. Because the law defined a citizen as one with German or related blood, it stripped Jews of the protections of citizenship, leaving them with a legal status that could be broadly illustrated with the words used by the Supreme Court to describe colonial subjects of the US: “foreign … in a domestic sense.” A year after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, a Nazi scholar noted the similarities between America’s tri-tiered citizenship schema and the hierarchy suggested by Hitler in Mein Kampf: citizen, national, alien.

The initial aim of the Nazi’s racist legal order, Whitman reminds us, was not the extermination of the Jews—formally decided upon in 1944—but the “emigration of the Jews out of Germany.” The Nazis recognized the use of American immigration law as a tool of ethnic cleansing and demographic protectionism, one that could be mobilized alongside the use of propaganda, permissible street violence, and the degradation of legal status. In Party newsletters, Nazi writers identified this diversity of tactics as comparable to the range of measures—legal and otherwise—that had been taken throughout the US to immiserate Black people. In a report on de facto segregation in New York City, for example, Black people were portrayed as a demographic threat to white society. In line with the frequent use of nonwhite children as both synecdochal manifestations of this threat and the threat itself, the magazine featured an image of two young boys in Harlem, captioned “The Negroes are multiplying significantly… Their constantly growing numbers are a source of great concern to American statesmen.” Hitler, in Mein Kampf, wrote with worried irritation that “any Jewish child, or Polish child, or African child, or Asian child” might become a citizen of Germany through naturalization.

In the same article, the authors posed a question: “What is lynch justice, if not the natural resistance of the Volk to an alien race that is attempting to gain the upper hand?” Alongside the pogrom-like violence being carried out against Jews in the streets of Germany, Nazi legal scholars and propagandists alike understood lynchings in the American South as part of a shared commitment to defending racial purity—the existential threat to which was often articulated along the sexually maintained border of whiteness. The second of the Nuremberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor—thus bound citizenship to sex, outlawing marriage and intercourse between Jews and Germans.

For this, there was ample American precedent. Whitman reproduces a transcript from the June 1934 meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform, which features a lengthy and eerily dry debate over the criminalization of interracial marriage. The meeting was split between a traditional conservative camp, who argued that it was legally inconsistent to impose criminal consequences on the civil institution of marriage, and more radical Nazis, who countered them with a detailed report on anti-miscegenation statutes across thirty American states. These laws, which variously imposed punitive sentences for marriage between Black and white people, Black and indigenous people, white and indigenous people, and so on, provided a model for criminalizing marriage that could not be found outside the US.

The debate between the two camps is revealing. Traditionalists argued that the vast array of American statutes couldn’t be introduced into the German legal system because the Americans had failed to develop “clear and unambiguous” definitions of the races they were targeting. (The debate over how to legally define a “Jew” was fraught; many Nazis found the American one-drop rule “too harsh” for their program.) But this conceptual messiness appealed to the more extreme Party members: the wide variety of rigorless definitions of racial categories struck Roland Freisler, who would go on to a murderous tenure as president of the Nazi People’s Court, as “targeting a kind of race image.” The political aims superseded any putative commitment to the “scientific” racism that is famously understood to be at the core of Nazi ideology. Freisler argued, counter intuitively, that American race law was “even more explicit” than the Nazis’: the absence of a programmatic campaign with clearly defined racial categories left the unstated political aims of the American legislation—the maintenance of white supremacy—explicit.

If evidence of Nazi adoption of American racism—in the form of eugenics and westward expansion—has already been accepted into the historical canon, what about this regime-to-regime legal interest is surprising? Whitman asks the question himself, noting that the admiring picture the Nazis paint of the US is not “unrecognizable.” The details are both shocking and already-known.

For example, I was surprised, but should not have been, at a passage in Whitman’s book that felt important but was presented as marginal. Colonial administrators in German South West Africa, Whitman explains, had, like the Nazis that followed them, conducted extensive research on anti-miscegenation statutes in the American South. In accordance with their findings, they criminalized interracial marriage in the colony in 1905, ten years before the end of the First World War and the economic conditions of possibility for Nazi rule. Evidence like this—of the repetition and refraction of strategies of white supremacist domination across time and continents—seems to be the central truth haunting the background of Whitman’s book. But even armed with the plain facts of the traveling use of anti-miscegenation statutes from New World to African colony to Nazi Germany, framing that continuity as inherent to the governance of colony, fascist state, and “free white men’s democracy” seems to feel or sound too broad for reluctant audiences—as worthy of dismissal as conspiracy theories. (In his conclusion, Whitman clarifies for the reader that he is not an “extremist” who would claim “the United States is the source of all evil in the world.” OK.)

Part of the muted force of Whitman’s book—with its sparse and committedly liberal editorializing—ends up being that he himself appears as an unwilling audience to his own research. Several times the reader finds him repeating variations of the sentiment that his chosen subject matter is “hard to digest,” or “a bit too awful to contemplate.” There is shame in these moments—and what sounds like an anticipation of the charge of an anti-Americanism that would make a balanced equation between the United States and the Third Reich.

Whitman’s defensiveness betrays an awkward nationalism that reads Nazi appreciation for America’s racism as somehow worsening that racism, making it more difficult to digest. As if only through the destabilization of the singular “dark star” of racist state violence can the extremity of American racism be understood with the appropriately indigestible weight. The presentation of continuity disrupts the direction of the Nazi comparison—it goes both ways. The situation suggests that the continuity between horrors is more important and more difficult to see than the discontinuity produced by comparison. What appears to be still difficult, even as it gets told in ever finer detail, is the simple and immense situation that the book demonstrates, that America and Nazi Germany are two instantiations of a history of white supremacist rule—a principle of domination that has been carried by opposing, sometimes warring, regimes. What Whitman does allow, with a brief coda on the criminal justice system, is that what is “too awful to contemplate” is that this history is not yet over. As a Nazi race theorist wrote in 1934, again in the context of praise for America’s stringent immigration laws: “The American [still] knows very well who made his land great.”

With the Noose Around My Neck 63

Each of which could be translated with Sterne as

or with Balzac as

or with Hoffman as

Indeed, what makes me able to say ‘I’ is not my Cartesian detachment from experience, but a history of experiences that are composed through a world of quote unquote texts. Memories are texts. Anticipations are texts. Every lebenswelt is a text. When I arrive in New York, for example, I am unable to escape my memory of every street photo I’ve ever looked at. I was looking at Moriyama’s New York 1971 yesterday, by the way, riding some benzos and Percocet. The Percocet was because of some mouth surgery. Anyhow, Future’s “Mask Off” became my jam. You know, it’s hard to find the names of ancient composers, tho I finally did come up with Mesomedes of Crete and Ji Kang. According to Walter Robinson, “The bed sheet is also a metaphor for the continuous field of consciousness.” Do you know what a meatucino is? It’s when you take a rib-eye and put it in a blender. After the revolution we will feed them to the toothless matheth who lotht em in the thervith. The rib-eye, of course, will have been grown in a vat. So, apparently, sitting still and moving your head from side to side to an effort to keep up with a show is innately appealing to the primordial ooze we crawled out of. Form dictates content dictates form. Passengers begin their journey by crashing into a library, where MacBadger is seen teetering atop a ladder with a stack of books. They then crash through the fireplace, where fiberoptic effects simulate the scattering of embers on the floor. Narrowly avoiding a falling suit of armor, the passengers break through a set of doors to find the interior hallway of Toad Hall in disarray, as weasels swing from chandeliers. Guests then enter the dining room, where Mr. Mole is eating at a dinner table and gets knocked aside. Upon leaving Toad Hall, guests travel through the countryside, passing Mr. Rat’s house, aggravating policemen and terrifying a farmer and his sheep. Making a right turn, guests head for the docks and get the impression that their car will plunge into the river, but quickly make a sharp turn in a different direction and enter a warehouse full of barrels and crates containing explosives. Guests crash through a brick wall as the warehouse’s contents explode. They then head out into the streets of London, narrowly avoid a collision with a delivery truck, and enter Winkie’s Pub, where Mr. Winkie the bartender holds two beer mugs. He ducks down, leaving the mugs spinning in the air. Passengers then enter the town square, where the cars wreak further havoc on the citizens. Next, guests enter a jury-less courtroom, where the riders are proclaimed guilty by a judge. The cars then enter what is presumed to be a dark prison cell before abruptly turning right and landing on railroad tracks. The vehicles bounce along the tracks in the dark before colliding head-on with an oncoming train. Passengers then arrive in Hell. The entire room is heated, and the scenery features small devils who bounce up and down. Passengers also see a demon who resembles the Judge from the courtroom scene. Near the end of the scene, a towering green dragon emerges and attempts to burn the riders to a crisp. So one of the obvious amazing things about Tokyo is that bright and bold colors are everywhere you look. They know their visual shit there. I quite liked ‘Wiener Dog’. But I will at some point, and thank you for asking, man. Here is an automated transcription of the audio — I have preserved the transcription errors — the dream got cut off I’m not sure what was missing the outdoor showers. My mom wanted to drive somewhere she clicked the garage clicker,

        the garage across the street opened not hers
        was Audrey’s garage
        her car is in his garage in Audrey’s car was in her garage
        she kept her car in Audrey’s garage

        she kept her car there but why would Audrey keep her car in our garage
        what was there my sunflowers
        little bits of fiberglass would get into your lungs
        I don’t know which parts of the dream were lost when my alarm went off.

Still, many readers will know Emily Gilbert’s work on the financialization of the battlespace through consolation payments made by the US and their allies to victims of military violence (it’s called ‘solatia’). Her article in Security Dialogue begins with an overview of the bureaucratic ways in which monetary values are attributed to injury and death. It then turns to consider how military payments reinforce the notion of ‘collateral damage’ that is legitimized in international humanitarian law. Finally, she draws upon theories of the gift, and of the gift of war, to interrogate the affective register in which

        “nothing out of nothing” is the first resemblance
        we admit, in the leisure of cells’ calculation, longing to arrive
        at true north only to find it bitterly makeshift—
        a spot on which a tenuous man
                                                     fingers parallelograms
        reminiscent of triangles with hats on

        o dedi
        o dada orzoura
        o dou zoura

        o kaya
        o kaya pontoura
        o ponoura
        a pena

        ge re ghi
        regheghi
        geghena
        e reghena
        a gegha
        riri

so it’s been some time since I last thought of the time I sat next to Joe Coleman on the red velvet couch in his Brooklyn apartment while he opened a plain wooden box to show me three shrunken heads with their mouths sewn shut. It’s not entirely accurate, then, when Mary Ruefle writes, “It is sad, is it not, that no one displays any interest in the art of shrunken heads.” Nevertheless, it’s a good sentence. I mean, there’s a way in which it’s more interesting for me to think of Language Writing as a willful misunderstanding of second-generation New York School writing than as a point of opposition to it. But then a lot of these people were also arguing, both publicly and privately. The Project is a place where readings took place by people involved in both parties. You could hear Charles Bernstein one week, but John Godfrey another. You could get these different takes. They’re all way more overlapping than people realize. At the same time, all kinds of people who don’t fit into these spaces are reading too, so it’s always more complicated. The total fabric is always un-seeable for anybody that’s inside of it. And if you’re outside, it isn’t what anybody thinks it is either. Did I already tell you that every credit card in the world is 0.76mm thick? This is ISO’s doing. ISO is the extrastate parliament of global standard-making activity. A private nongovernmental organization, ISO oversees global technical standards for everything from credit card thickness to dashboard pictograms, computer protocols, and the pitch of screw threads. Did I tell you about ISO 9000 already? It promotes the ritualized incantations of something called “quality.” Quality standards do not dictate specifications for a product but rather offer management guidelines for a process or quality system that may address everything from the environment to governance itself. The ISO 9000 family of standards is the exact same standard across the globe even though they are called by different names. Each member country has their own entity authorized by ISO to manage the standards, but they are all the same exact ISO 9000 quality documents and set of requirements. ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations wishing to meet the standard must fulfill. Third-party certification bodies provide independent confirmation that organizations meet the requirements of ISO 9001. Over one million organizations are independently certified. So yes, the whole world now speaks dialects of ISO Esperanto, eee gee

        menendi anenbi
        embenda
        tarch inemptle
        o marchti rombi
        tarch paiolt
        a tinemptle
        orch pendui
        o patendi
        a merchit
        orch torrpch
        ta urchpt orchpt
        ta tro taurch
        campli
        ko ti aunch
        a ti aunch
        aungbli

Which is to say, don’t take your children to the countryside. Don’t teach them hymns, or tell them stuff about clean water. Talk about torture, talk in cries and groans. Walk with them for days across the starkest of plains. Then they will know how pointless it is to listen to those who would praise the colour of the no aerobics or sky, stopping there, as if it is enough to praise. They will want to go to Hiroshima, to Seveso, to Fallujah and to Grenfell Tower. There they will stare at you and you will fall to the ground, horrified as anyone who has ever really listened to a bird’s song. They will bring you river stones with pouches that unzip to reveal hidden scenes and objects. I saw a funny movie last night called Lucy about what would supposedly happen could we use 100% of our brains. At 70%, Lucy starts vomiting pure energy and light. At 80%, she grows slithery black tendrils and transports Professor Norman and his colleagues with her into an all-white limbo, kind of like where Harry Potter went when he was dead that time. At 90%, she begins journeying through space and time while wearing a black cocktail dress and sitting in a cut-rate ergonomic office chair. (She couldn’t at least conjure herself a nice Aeron?) She visits Times Square, meets some American Indians, and encounters dinosaurs constructed out of first-gen CGI. 99 percent ... 100! Lucy vanishes. The tendrils hand the scientists a flash drive. “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.” Take a bunch of blue dope and turn into remote storage? The California Highway Patrol told Fox affiliate KTXL that 18-year-old Obdulia Sanchez lost control of her 2003 Buick while live-streaming herself rapping to a recorded song. She drove off the edge of the road and then over-corrected. The car crashed into a barbed-wire fence and flipped over in a field. Sanchez’s 14-year-old sister, Jacqueline, and another teen girl — who were in the back seat and were not wearing seat belts — were ejected. Moments later, Obdulia was on Instagram Live again, explaining what happened — “Hey, everybody, if I go to fucking jail for life, you already know why,” she began, adjusting the camera so that it showed her younger sister, motionless and bleeding from the head. “My sister is fucking dying. Look, I fucking love my sister to death. I don’t give a fuck. Man, we about to die. This is the last thing I wanted to happen to us, but it just did. Jacqueline, please wake up.” Another girl screamed in the background. “I don’t fucking care though,” Sanchez continued. “I’m a hold it down. I love you, rest in peace, sweetie. If you don’t survive, baby, I am so fucking sorry. I did not mean to kill you, sweetie. Sweetie, I am fucking sorry. Sweetie, please, wake up!” Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called technē. And the poiēsis of the fine arts also was called technē. In Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence, [Gegenwart] of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance. And art was simply called technē. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, eye eee, yielding to the holding-sway and the safekeeping of truth. The arts were not derived from the artistic. Art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity. What, then, was art — perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the modest name technē? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belonged within poiēsis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiēsis as its proper name. The same poet from whom we heard the words

        But where danger is, grows
        The saving power also.

says to us:

        .... poetically dwells man upon this earth.

The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. So while we must now await the result of the paternity test that was the impetus for the exhuming — to see if tarot card reader Maria Pilar Abel Martínez is indeed the artist’s heir and therefore entitled to a share of his very valuable estate — one surprising fact came to light the moment his casket was opened: the shape and position of Dalí’s mustache has not changed since he was interred. “The mustache kept its classic 10-past-10 position,” said Lluís Peñuelas, the secretary general of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, which runs the museum, according to the New York Times. “Finding this out was a very emotional moment.” Like a wheel in the pure syntax, etc.,

        a marble iceberg, etc.,

        Night, black statue of prudence, holds
        the moon’s round mirror in her hand.

        Here comes the man who sees with a yellow ruler.

        *

        Wooden flutes pacify the air.

        An ancient woodland god gives the children fruit.

        *

        Etcetera.

        *

        To quote Ron Padgett quoting Jack Kerouac: Everything is perfect, dear friend.

        Get some sleep.

        Take care of your teeth and gums.

        Look at that bird over there.

        Calm down.

        Take a deep breath.

        In truth, there is no such thing as reason, to quote Marcus A Doel quoting Gilles Deleuze.

        *

Therefore, “To equate the Enlightenment with the totality of Western thought in the eighteenth century is to get it badly wrong.” In fact, it would take two more centuries for the European urban nightscape to be fully colonized by the forces of law and order (the cold, harsh, and penetrative light of police surveillance: gas light, and then electric light, and more recently cameras), which formed a secure shell within which the capitalist ‘world interior’ of festivity, seduction and play could flourish (the warm caress of commercial lighting draped an enchanting aura over things, especially commodities, much to the monomaniacal delight of consumers ...). Have you ever noticed how bars for serious drinkers are almost always dark? Though the age of discovery has long been over and done, the explorer’s conceit is still with us. While most of the places in this world are known globally, their locations marked by GPS, their terrains photographed via satellite, and their streets crawling with tourists, China has presented the passé wanderer with a loophole: new cities — hundreds of them. The four of us are playing in the mud. There is mud on one child, then on another child. Soon, all the children are covered in mud. The mud is dark. In the sky there is a small plane. Behind the plane, a message: Où est Pierre? We tell ourselves that it makes some difference that the naked woman is about to be snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. Speaking of the human condition, I do ballroom and had gotten to the point over the last few months where I really couldn’t afford it anymore. After the New Year I finally said, you know, fuck it. I’ll find the money. Because I can’t give this up. It’s not like waking up and getting on the internet and having people call me a feminist slut and telling me to kill myself before 9am, you know? I mean, I was diagnosed with endometriosis several years ago. Over the last year or so, after struggling with it for about six years, I’d finally started to feel as though I had a handle on it. Then I got shingles, which really fucked me up for a few months. After that, in the spring of this last year, I started having trouble thinking / speaking. My left side went numb. I was terrified I’d had a stroke, which can sometimes happen after you’ve had shingles. Long story short, 9 months’ worth of testing, and the doctors I’ve seen think it’s MS. Oh, and I have some shit going on with my spine that looks freaky as hell, but of course no one has taken the time to explain it other than to call it demyelination. Naturally, being a writer with a proclivity for investigating things, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Annals of Radiology trying to disprove their theory, but also not liking the looks of the alternatives. What do they look like, exactly? In “Calamities,” they look like prose. Simple enough, aesthetically, as the extraordinary often is. But while Gladman was writing “Calamities” and thinking through literalizing space and narrative, she was also drawing these ideas too. Wave Books just released a monograph of these drawings, “Prose Architectures,” and they look like the skylines or maps of the cities she’s exploring through her written work, architectural ideas rising from the page from a single painstaking line looping and zagging and unfolding and squiggling and doubling back. They’re all small, focused, postcard-sized. What are these spectres? How big is this space? How far back does it go? We understand that choosing a wealth advisor is a very personal decision. Once you get past the basic facts and confirm capabilities and expertise, selecting an advisor is largely a matter of fit. At KFWA, we are committed to listening and responding to client concerns whether financial or service-related. For example, we heard from many clients that they were interested in adding asset classes to their portfolio that could provide additional potential return opportunities and help manage risk. To address that request, we have added a liquid alternatives asset class and now can offer a sub-advised fixed income solution. We continue to assess the merits of and solutions for other asset classes, as well. Clients have asked about our commitment to Impact Investing and we are developing a more emphatic approach to seeking a financial return on investments that promote a positive social and environmental purpose. If you look at the header of recent emails from us, you may notice that we have a new image at the top. It includes a portal in her closet that leads her to Disney World. But the first she sees when she goes thru is wearing a utility belt full of machetes and axes. This is why we are metaphysicians. Tubas that are meadows full of bluebells. Photos of a baby holding a snake while the two of them attempt to spill a cup of water by rolling off a plastic tarp. Have you ever done The Cube Test? My cube was transparent at the edges where the corners met. My ladder was rickety but climbable, leaning against the cube so that the climber could stand above it. In this performance, he invited a very small crowd to witness him get shot in the shoulder with a .22 rifle (a rifle wielded by his consenting friend). I try not to do this anymore. I try to not do it much. In the early morning of 9 July, the MOAS manned aerial asset sighted an unusually small rubber boat with around 25 people on board. The Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome were informed, who instructed the Phoenix to proceed with the rescue. All 25 people were safely brought on board, among them 7 children. The following morning the Phoenix crew sighted two rubber dinghies and a wooden boat, and launched the RHIB to assess the situation. The crew reported that the wooden boat was in the most critical condition; the MRCC instructed the crew to transfer the people on board a vessel belonging to Save the Children. Shortly after, the crew began the rescue of the rubber dinghies, assisted by RHIBs from SOS Mediterranee; all 258 people were brought to safety, among them 5 pregnant women. What follows are two translations of love poems transcribed from a partially destroyed codex portion removed from the hot hilly poor & dry Mexteca & now owned by this very cool Bangladeshi guy named Sarowar who lives in a studio apartment in Corona Queens just up the street from me. The only parts I can remember go something like

        [¡ !]
        ¿ ?
        *
        sic
        † sic chopped cross X
        ‡ sic
        § sic
        ¡BANG! ¡BANG! ¡BANG!
        “& still all beside the point
        & death technology
        *
        sic
        ¡o O o O O O my Lord the Flayed One!
        o O o O
        O o O
        Xipi Xipi rah rah RA

I mean, “One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly” “I didn't know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly” ... squid, nuthatch urethra, pizza kitty, unicorn boner and unicorn believers, 9/11 and the Iraq War. Oh, and rage. Rage was definitely a factor. CHIMPANZEES DISSECT FROG, FIND KOAN RUBBLE. SNAKE EGG GHOST-WRITES HUMAN GENOME PROJECT GRANT. Time to re-read Siddhartha. Remember: you can’t sleep with Ostriches made of remote-controlled sailboats to get to the top. So I have come to unite the skin with the underlying tissue! The hard facts show that our economy has moved from the industrial age into the INFORMATION AGE into a goat’s ass. Still, I can’t disagree with the first part of Eliade’s statement. For therein functioned the “meta-mind.” And the milk wax. And even appending a new word to a new search would yield bupkis. Still, “Drive all blames into one,” which is the twelfth of Atisha’s 59 “mind-training” slogans. Oh, god, I just read something awful: “X is one of those poets whose deeply thoughtful poems are best read on a quiet evening beneath stars.” I opened the email and my computer crashed. Somewhere above Pat’s head, an illuminated advert was spinning and bathing the facades with great lickings of blue, endlessly sweeping round, making him feel seasick. This image belongs to Spirit. Spirit is in possession of the image, is master of it. It is stored in the Spirit’s treasury, in its Night. The image is unconscious, eye eee, it is not displayed as an object for representation. The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity — a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here — pure Self — [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from their eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us. Which is to say that

        ainshunt fire
        iz running
        underneath us
        we come from ainshunt
        sea rocks
        we have to find
        the sleeping
        parrut fish

So there’s that. A shuffling of the cards. Fate and not fate. “Wonderland” takes place in a school called Wonderland. This is the second time I’ve come across balloons in something I’ve been reading in the last few days. Poop needle! And as long as you stay away from the US, and live in more civilized countries, you will have some health insurance.

[Note: Sources: JBR; first squiggle: Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, quoted in Polly Dickson, “How to Read a Squiggle”, at Paris Review, 18 Jul 017; JBR; second squiggle: Honoré de Balzac, The Magic Skin, quoted in Polly Dickson, “How to Read a Squiggle”, at Paris Review, 18 Jul 017; JBR; third squiggle: ETA Hoffman, “Fragment of a humoristic essay”, quoted in Polly Dickson, “How to Read a Squiggle”, at Paris Review, 18 Jul 017; Claire Colebrook, “Fragility, Globalism, and the End of the World”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Walter Robinson, “Portfolio”, at BOMB, 21 Jul 017; JBR and Omo Bob, conversation via text, 23 Jul, 12:30-12:45pm-ish; “Passport to Dreams Old & New”, “Walt Dated World”, and Dennis Cooper, quoted in Cooper’s “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride Day”, at DC’s, 20 Jul 017; Jackie Wang, “Listen / I recently started recording ...”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 23 Jul 017; JBR; Derek Gregory, “Solatia”, at Geographical Imaginations, 20 Jul 017; Emily Gilbert, “The gift of war: Cash, counterinsurgency, and ‘collateral damage’”, at Security Dialogue, 2 Sept 015; Jean Day, “The Fluidity of Attributes”, at EPC; Antonin Artaud, “The Return of Artaud, The Mômo” (tr. Clayton Eshleman), at EPC; JBR; John Yau, and Mary Ruefle, My Private Property, quoted in John Yau, “Mary Ruefle’s Sage Advice on How to Keep Your Eyes Open While Sleeping”, at Hyperallergic, 23 Jul 017; JBR; Anselm Berrigan, quoted in Michael Valinsky, “A Collection of Poetry Interviews Is a Work of Poetry Itself”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jul 017 (re: What Is Poetry? Just Kidding, I Know You Know: Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009), which Berrigan edited); JBR, but see Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space; Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space; JBR; Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space; “ISO 9000 Series of Quality Standards”, at 9000 Store; ISO 9000, at Wikipedia; JBR; Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space; JBR; Antonin Artaud, “The Return of Artaud, The Mômo” (tr. Clayton Eshleman), at EPC; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Many Walls (after Miyó Vestrini)”, at Abandoned Buildings, 24 Jul 017; JBR; Christopher Jobson, “River Stones with Pouches Unzip to Reveal Hidden Scenes and Objects”, at Colossal, 24 Jul 017; JBR; Christopher Orr, “Lucy: The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity”, at The Atlantic, 25 Jul 014; Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “‘Man, we about to die’: Teen driver arrested after live-streaming crash that killed her sister”, at Washington Post, 24 Jul 017; Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, at Swiss Portal for Philosophy; JBR; Benjamin Sutton, “Dalí’s Mustache Discovered Intact After 28 Years”, at Hyperallergic, 21(?) Jul 017; Like: JBR; a wheel ... fruit: Federico García Lorca, “Ode to Salvador Dalí” (no translator given, but there is a note which reads “lorca poems here translated by Logan, Maurer, Simon and White, & Trueblood”), at http://www.artofeurope.com/lorca/lor2.htm Art of Europe; JBR; Ron Padgett, “How to Be Perfect”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR, but see, Marcus A Doel, Geographies of Violence; JBR; Robert Darnton, and Marcus A Doel, quoted in Doel’s Geographies of Violence; JBR; Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China; Sarah Moses, “My French is Rusted”, quoted in “Tuesday poem #225 : Sarah Moses : My French is Rusted”, at Dusie, 25 Jul 017; Joan Didion, The White Album; JBR; Abby Norman, quoted in P.E. Garcia, “plzplztalk2me: Abby Norman”, at HTMLGIANT, 26 Jul 017; Torin Jensen, “Review: Renee Gladman’s Calamities and Prose Architectures”, at Entropy, 26 Jul 017; Klingenstein Fields Wealth Advisors, “When Our Clients Talk, KFWA Listens”, email rec’d 27 Jul 017, approx. 6:03am PDT; Traci Lynn Matlock, and Maggie Nelson, quoted by Matlock, various, at The Noumenon Revelation 15 Nov 2015 – 24 Jun 017; MOAS, “July Operational Update”, email rec’d 27 Jul 017, approx. 7:49am PDT; JBR; Steven Alvarez, “1522”, in The Codex Mojaodicus, at SPD; JBR; Steven Alvarez, “1522”, in The Codex Mojaodicus, at SPD; JBR; Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette, quoted in Steve Silberman, “‘Modern Inferno’”, at UPenn; Sharon Mesmer, “Putting Down My Burger To Kick In the Door: An Appreciation of Flarf”, at Chicago School of Poetics, 31 Jul 013; JBR; I don’t think it would be politic to provide the source for the next one; Chris Darke, “At the Sign of the Black Cat”, in Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat (eds. Chris Darke and Habda Rashid, in consultation with Christine von Aasche and Magnus af Petersens); Chris Marker, “Till the End of Time”, in Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat (eds. Chris Darke and Habda Rashid, in consultation with Christine von Aasche and Magnus af Petersens); GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of Spirit (Jena Lectures 1805-6), quoted in Sean Bonney, “[This image ...]”, at Gods of the Plague, 26 Jul 017; JBR; Marcus Slease, quoted in Laura Wetherington, “Mushee Piez & Fried Pineappulz: An Interview with Poet Marcus Slease”, at Entropy, 27 Jul 017; JBR; Marcus Slease, quoted in Laura Wetherington, “Mushee Piez & Fried Pineappulz: An Interview with Poet Marcus Slease”, at Entropy, 27 Jul 017]

So I had surgery on my mouth yesterday and was given an Rx that leaves me no choice (whether or not I like the lyrics) but to make this my weekend jam

 

This isn't new, but it's another reason to remember to continue to despise/hate Donald Trump and all those who work for him and to really wonder about [translation: try not to hate] all those who support him

How Trump signed a global death warrant for women by Sarah Bosely (reposted from the Guardian, 21 Jul 017)

Six months ago, one powerful white man in the White House, watched by seven more, signed a piece of paper that will prevent millions of women around the world from deciding what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.

In that moment, on his very first Monday morning in office, Donald Trump effectively signed the death warrants of thousands of women. He reversed global progress on contraception, family planning, unsustainable population growth and reproductive rights. His executive order even has implications for the battle against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.

Rarely can the presidential pen have been flourished to such devastating effect. The policy it reintroduced will shut health clinics in Uganda and HIV programmes in Mozambique; it will compel women from Nepal to Namibia to seek out deadly back-street abortions.

“It is an unprecedented attack on women’s rights – it goes much deeper than abortion,” said Ulla Müller, president and CEO of EngenderHealth, a leading advocacy organisation.

“Girls are kicked out of school if they get pregnant. They are very often forced to marry the fathers. Very often they have to live in their in-laws’ house, where they have to do unpaid labour. It is a violation of women’s rights. We need to see this as a gender issue and very much as a power issue.”

Tewedros Melesse, director general of the the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which stands to lose as much as $100m, said the US move “seeks to restrict the rights of millions of women. It asks us as a health provider, to stop providing services which are entirely legal in countries through our members – where some of the most poorest women, depend on them.

“The human cost of the gag rule will have a long and fatal legacy.”

Like so many far-reaching American policies, Trump’s executive order is enshrouded in complexity to the point where it seems almost designed to confuse.

The order reinstated the Mexico City policy (so called because it was first signed at the International Conference of Population in Mexico City, in 1984). Under this policy, any NGO outside the US seeking American funding for family planning has to pledge it will not carry out abortions anywhere in the world, even with its own money. Such organisations must agree not to talk to women about a termination, nor lobby governments to liberalise their policy on abortion. 

US aid has never been used to fund abortion services (it is forbidden, by law). This is a ban on speaking about abortion – a restriction on free speech which the First Amendment does not permit within the US. For this reason, the rule became known as the global gag.

Trump’s version of the policy has massively expanded its reach. It is no longer just international family planning organisations that must agree not to “perform or actively promote abortion”. Every global health organisation that accepts US funding now has to sign the same clause. Anyone working to fight HIV, get vaccines or vitamins to children, or prevent Zika or malaria is facing a stark and unprecedented choice: sign, or lose all funding from the biggest aid donor in the world.

As much as $10bn (£7.7bn) of global health funding hangs in the balance. Among those who will lose money if they refuse to sign up to the anti-abortion orthodoxy are the two big international family planning organisations, Marie Stopes International (MSI) and the IPPF. But for the first time, global NGOs such as Save the Children, WaterAid and the International HIV/Aids Alliance are also targeted.

The effects will be felt most keenly in the tiny, frontline clinics run by small NGOs struggling to help women and children in crowded townships, refugee camps and remote rural villages. There are no abortion doctors in such places (in most African countries, abortion is banned unless the woman’s life is in danger). These clinics instead offer contraceptive injections and condoms for those who would struggle to feed numerous children. But they also treat children for malaria and malnutrition and their mothers for HIV. This integrated care is now under threat.

But that’s not all. Trump has also decided to stop funding the UN Population Fund, which does hard and heroic work, reaching some of the most oppressed women in the world in refugee camps and war zones, as well as getting contraception to the remotest parts of the planet. In 2016, the US gave the organisation $69m in core funds and for its humanitarian response work.

And deep budget cuts to foreign aid under Trump include a proposal to axe every cent for overseas family planning, currently $600m a year.

The triple blow is already being felt by some of the world’s poorest women.

Take Nigeria, a country with one of the world’s fastest growing populations. The average woman there has more than five children. MSI predicts that because of Trump’s “global gag rule”, there will be an additional 660,000 abortions in Nigeria over the next four years, with 10,000 women dying as a result.

“This is going to be really huge,” said MSI country head Effiom Effiom of the US decision to pull funding. “They’ve been key in strengthening healthcare. It’s their funding that allowed us to reach 500,000 women in the past three years. Who will bridge that gap?” he asks.

It’s a question that bothers Sakina Sani as well. She has two children already and knows she cannot afford many more. She is grateful to a family planning clinic in northern Nigeria for furnishing her with a contraceptive implant that will enable her to plan out her family for the next four years. But after that, she’ll be on her own.

FacebookTwitterPinterest

 Sakina Sani, a mother of two, has a contraceptive implant – known informally among young Nigerians as a ‘tattoo’ – placed in her arm. Photograph: Ruth Maclean for the Guardian

“I’d have to have more children,” she admits. “All I could do is pray harder for God to help feed them.”

Across the continent, in Uganda, her experience is replicated by Mukwana Dausi, 26, who had the first of her four children at the age of 14. An injectable contraceptive called Sayana Press and a tireless healthworker called Aisha Mugoya have belatedly given her control over family planning. But this is now in jeopardy: funding will dry up in the coming weeks.

“The number of maternal deaths will increase as the number of pregnancies increases, and the number of abortions is going to increase,” said Dr Moses Okilipa of Reproductive Health Uganda, a branch of the IPPF, which refuses to sign up to the Mexico City policy.

FacebookTwitterPinterest

 Dausi Mukwana, 26, a rural Ugandan, receives a contraceptive called Sayana Press. Photograph: Juozas Cernius/for The Guardian

The glaring paradox is that the global gag policy doesn’t even work. “The gag rule contributes to the very thing it purportedly seeks to reduce: the frequency of abortion,” said a report in June from the Guttmacher Institute, a US research organisation focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Evidence shows that when the gag is imposed, unwanted pregnancies and abortions go up.

Banning abortions and forcing NGOs not to offer any counselling or advice about them drives desperate women to the back-street abortionists and witch doctors.

Hardline opponents of abortion don’t understand this; they don’t believe it or don’t care. At Trump’s right elbow when he signed the order was Mike Pence, a born again Christian. Trump is not religious, but some of his most influential advisers are – and the choice of Pence as his running mate brought on board the religious right. The new, improved global gag is their reward.

“I believe that President Trump doesn’t give a hoot about any of these issues one way or the other,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. He pointed out that Trump’s closest advisers include a significant number of ultraconservative Catholics. Kellyanne Conway has been a prominent anti-choice campaigner for decades, he said, claiming in interviews that “unborn babies can feel pain at 20 weeks” (a view that the evidence does not support). Steve Bannon, chief strategist and Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, are both conservative Catholics. Katy Talento, a health policy aide on the Domestic Policy Council, recently published an article alleging that “chemical birth control causes abortions and often has terrible side effects, including deliberate miscarriage”, a claim about the pill that is not supported by scientists.

And then there is Pence. At the Republican National Convention in Ohio last July, he called himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order”. Born into an Irish Catholic Democrat-voting family in Indiana, he found God at a Christian music festival in Kentucky in 1978. He was still a Democrat in 1980, when he voted for Jimmy Carter, but his views started to shift to the right at college and he became a big admirer of Ronald Reagan’s “common sense conservatism”. By 1988 he was running for Congress as a Republican. He lost but won a seat in the House of Representatives for Indiana in 2000.

In his 2000 Congressional campaign, he urged that the Ryan White Act, which provides funds for HIV treatment for the poor, should only be renewed if the money was “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behaviour”.

As governor of Indiana in 2015 he made national headlines when he signed into law a bill that was interpreted as permitting discrimination against LGBT people in the state. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, restaurants, hotels or shops would be able to cite a religious objection to serving gay customers. Pence was photographed signing the bill into law in March 2015 surrounded by monks and nuns in habits. A number of large businesses spoke out against the law, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and in the face of an outcry, Pence made revisions.

FacebookTwitterPinterest

 Opponents of the anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence protest outside the Indiana State House last July. Photograph: Mykal McEldowney/AP

His opposition to abortion has been solid. In October 2015, he awarded $3.5m of Indiana state funds to a charity called Real Alternatives, which promotes sexual abstinence and counsels pregnant women wanting an abortion to have the baby. Then, in March 2016, Pence brought in one of the toughest state abortion laws in the US. Abortion on the grounds of foetal abnormality, including Down’s syndrome, would be banned. All women wanting an abortion would be required to have an ultrasound examination, where they would see the foetus on the monitor, at least 18 hours before the termination. The harsher aspects of this law were stayed by the courts, but the US by now understood Pence was willing to fight the most controversial battles on behalf of the religious right. As Rolling Stone put it in January: “When Trump needed a VP nominee with a career-long reputation for being virulently pro-life to balance his own abortion flip-flops, Mike Pence was the answer to all his political prayers.”

The day after the inauguration, 500,000 people attended the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January, to voice disgust at Trump’s past sexual behaviour and fear for the future of women’s reproductive rights. Days later, Pence became the first vice-president in history to attend the annual anti-abortion March for Life, held for the past 44 years on or near the anniversary of the historic judgement of Roe v Wade. Thousands of anti-abortion activists were bussed to the National Mall in Washington DC, some holding pictures of the foetus in the womb, others waving banners. “Trump loves the bump” was one. “We voted to make America pro-life again”, said another. A third read: “We hear your silent cries”.

“It is no coincidence that the first right cited in the US Declaration of Independence is the right to life,” Conway told the crowd, to cheers. But it was Pence who made the real impact. Trump had sent him to address this gathering, he said. Life, Pence said, “is winning again in America”.

Fighting back

The most devastating impact of the policy is on the big providers of family planning, IPPF and MSI, whose clinics all over the world will be stripped of US funds because they offer abortions in countries where it is legal to do so (in the UK, Marie Stopes provides terminations on behalf of the NHS). In developing countries, they partner with local NGOs, funding clinics where women may go for a contraceptive implant or injection but often for other healthcare too, such as an HIV test or cervical cancer smear. All of this is at risk.

MSI received $30m from USAid last year, which was 17% of its total funding. It is working to raise funds from other sources, but the gap will be hard to fill. Hardest hit will be services in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Sahel. These are places where MSI has been running substantial programmes with USAid funding. In Madagascar, 40% of women get their contraception from MSI.

IPPF has about $100m annually in US funds but, after the last global gag, it deliberately invested nearly half the money in HIV services, decreasing its exposure in case another Republican president came in. Trump’s extension of the Mexico City policy to all forms of healthcare means they stand to lose the lot. Among programmes under threat unless alternative sources of funding can be found are HIV treatment in the Caribbean, clinics testing for Zika across Latin America, and help for displaced people in Colombia.

“We have become much more of an integrated service provider. We’re trying to be a one-stop shop that takes you from the start of life to the end of life,” said Matthew Lindley of IPPF, who support fragile health systems in impoverished and war-torn countries.

“If we had USAid funding, we would have expected to avert 6m unintended pregnancies,” said Megan Elliott, vice-president for strategy and development at MSI. “Because we can’t avert them, we believe there will be an additional 2m abortions. Because they are in restricted environments, the majority of those women will be getting a backstreet abortion where they won’t be properly cared for and certainly won’t get proper contraception to prevent a further unwanted pregnancy.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest

 In a picture widely seen as a parody of Trump signing the global gag order, Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, is flanked by female colleagues as she signs a bill. Photograph: Johan Schiff/EPA

Last time the gag rule was in force, between 2001 and 2008, USAid stopped supplying contraceptives to NGOs in 16 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, many of which had very high rates of HIV. Guttmacher cites Lesotho, where one in four women were HIV-positive, and which got no US support at all for family planning or contraceptive supplies under George W Bush. In 13 other countries, USAid cut off support to the leading family planning organisation. The Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia suffered a 24% budget cut and had to reduce its services.

 

The fightback began in March. She Decides was the idea of the Dutch trade and development minister Lilianne Ploumen, who was backed by the Belgian, Swedish and Danish governments. A fundraising conference attracted representatives from 50 governments and raised €181m.

That’s a drop in the ocean, they acknowledge, but the campaign to persuade more governments, philanthropists and the private sector to step up with cash continues. Earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which also funds work at the Guardian) announced it would increase its funding for family planning by 60%, with an extra $375m over the next four years.

Chris Hohn, a hedge fund manager, started the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which makes grants for projects to improve children’s health in poor countries. Concerned about the harmful effects of pregnancy on so many adolescent girls, which can result in a baby suffering from stunting and malnutrition, his Fund is giving MSI $10m.

Millions of women have been given control over their bodies and their futures. Millions of girls have been able to stay in school and have hopes of a career. But the edicts of the Trump administration, rooted in an ideology that says the lives of women count for less than the life of a foetus, have set the world back years.

The gag meanwhile extends far beyond the world of NGOs. Western officials who don’t want to fall out with the Trump White House are silent. Those who work at the Department for International Development do not want to criticise their colleagues at USAid, who themselves are privately wringing their hands over a policy that will undo much of their good work on behalf of women and girls.

Further afield, the 30-year-old woman with 10 children she can’t feed or send to school, and the 14-year-old made pregnant by her uncle, can’t be gagged.

They have no voice at all.

Ruth Maclean in Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Liz Ford in Mbale, Uganda, contributed to this report. [And its publication in the Guardian was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]

With the Noose Around My Neck 62

    Go to sleep
    Wake up
    Select “text” [through/to “text”]
    Select next/previous
    Select all
    Unselect that
    Bold/underline/italicize “text”
    Scratch that
    Undo last action / Redo last action
    Correct “text” [through/to “text”]
    New line
    New paragraph
    Press the Enter key/Press OK
    Tab key/Press the key Tab
    Capitalizing
    Capitalize “text” [through/to “text”]
    Caps on/Caps off
    All caps on/All caps off
    Uppercase “text” [through/to “text”]
    Lowercase “text” [through/to “text”]
    Move forward/backward
    Move left/right
    Go to beginning; Go to end
    Insert before [text]; insert after [text]
    Activate [application name]
    Open [application name]
    Launch [application name]
    Quit [application name]
    Kill [application name]
    Hide this/the application
    Minimize window
    Zoom window
    Close this window
    Switch to next/previous application
    Search Mac for [text]
    Search Spotlight for [text]
    Punctuation
    Period
    Comma
    Question mark
    Exclamation point or exclamation mark
    Colon
    Semi-colon
    Open quote/close quote
    Open parenthesis/close parenthesis
    Ellipsis
    Ampersand
    Dash
    Hyphen
    Put brackets around [text]
    Put parentheses around [text]
    Put quotes around [text]
    There’s bound to be greenery in it somewhere
    White tacks
    Red at all points
    Now it’s sanitary but the boils are coming
    I mean I was all like:
    To the extent that it is the subject of a truth, a subject subtracts itself from every community and
    destroys every individuation
    I was like whoa
    Am I my gut biome? Am I a cyborg?
    What do you think of the Mayweather / MacGregor fight?
    Are you going to Pride?
    Einstein himself was interviewed
    while walking the mulberry streets, especially
    the right-hand side of Great Road, going south,
    where the houses are windy and overpriced,
    and he was so full of denial that anyone
    with a radio antenna sticking out of his head
    had been seen ...
    Einstein whose bushy face had rubbed
    many a pair of reddened lips,
    Einstein whose famous name they stole for bagels.

So take a red flag, for example: if we consider it as a phenomenon, it will have been differentially compared not only with the black flags, of course, but with other red flags — perhaps this time the transcendental indexing of identity approaches the maximum — and finally, with everything that appears in the way of emblems, placards, banners and graffiti, but also as the absence of such emblems. Like this closed shuttered window on the fourth floor ... Like Farm Bill S615, a bill designed to stop farmworkers from joining North Carolina’s only agricultural union, the FLOC, signed into law July 13. We were staying at the Golden Something-or-Other when that happened. Anyway, what does it matter now?

            Until you’re pulled out of the water
            With bleeding gills
            You’re not a fish yet

            From an eternal distance
            Someone calls you
            “Thou fish” —
            What is your flattened shape for

The bodies washed up with grim regularity on the banks of the Tigris downstream from Mosul. All were heavily decomposed, most bound and blindfolded, some mutilated. They corpses began arriving last spring, but as the fighting intensified, so too did the number of dead. “There were five bodies floating in the river recently in one single day. They are young men with their hands tied behind their back ...” said Ahmed Mohammed. Most of the dead found in the river with some identifiable features intact were young men who appeared to be in their late 20s. The violence upstream casts a long shadow in Qayyarah, which was freed from Isis rule at the start of the nine-month Mosul campaign. Most residents are reluctant even to talk about the bodies in the river. “I don’t know anything about that subject,” said one fishmonger in the newly re-opened market, buzzing with soldiers and militia fighters. Which is understandable, given that the dead who arrived in spring were victims of Isis, and those who are now arriving have been killed quote unquote extra-judicially in reprisal by the anti-Isis militias and the government. “Blood for blood,” reads graffiti on a wall of a house nearby that locals say belonged to Ali Khether, a well-known Daeshi commander who had lived in the town. Which makes oddly relevant or do I mean resonant a line by John Ashbery,

        Piranhas dream, at peace with themselves and with the floating world.

As it does also the title of the next poem in the book, “Yes, Dr. Grenzmer, How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?”

            This is the last place.
            There is nowhere else to go.

            In spite of your fucking rich-tourist moon or Mars rockets.

            Might as well be walking on the you know

            “Everyone will live on the Sun!
            & sit at Solar Tables!
            EVENTUALLY!”

            COSMIVERSE, INQUIRISTS, EXCRUSIATING

            “nevertheless 4 extends from 3!
            nevertheless 5 is the shadow of 4!”
            “seven by 15 by one third
            15 by three by one
            15 by one by one
            15 by three and one third”

            “You ask for prophecies—
            I give you prophecies
            tomorrow the stars will go out
            darkness will prowl the parks & museums ... until the Rocks themselves
            run up to us like spaniels

            now what will the statues be FOR?
            what will be their MODELS?”

The first song on the B-side is “Sorry about your penis” ... which is to say, I haven’t got one of these letters in a while: Dear Beneficiary, My name is Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, the deputy governor CBN. This is to bring the good news to you that I have been mandated by the President Federal Republic in conjunction with the Federal Executive Council (FEC), the Senate Committee on Foreign Debts Reconciliation and Implementation Panel on Contract / inheritance / compensation funds to complete all the unpaid Contract / inheritance / lottery fund. You are required as a matter of urgency to reconfirm your information including your name, phone number and your address for verification and immediate payment within 24 hours. To this effect, the sum of TEN MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS has been approved for you. I wish to inform you that all matters relating to the release of this payment is now under my control and supervision. This development has become necessary due to the activities of unpatriotic government / CBN officials and impostors who keep on frustrating every effort to settle our clients by making requests for unauthorized fees and levies from them. We apologize for any delay you might have encountered in the past; your payment is now 100% Guaranteed Kindly choose from these three modes of payment (wire transfer, diplomatic cash payment and ATM card). Best Regards, Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, Deputy Governor CBN. I mean, at first I thought I could put it all down, that would be one way. But next the thought came to me that to leave it all out would be another, and truer, way. But next the thought came to me: might quantum entanglement mean that this WHOLE THING is some sort of Gaza or Panopticon? And that therefore there is no such thing as “leaving out”? And every night of this thinking is a long night of this thinking. I’d love to think it’s so, and that we have room. NO COMET, THAT SERPENT IN THE SKY MEANS NOISE centers on a single conjecture: If light is a language sent forth ... NO COMET, THAT SERPENT IN THE SKY MEANS NOISE remains acutely aware of the quote unquote flaws in astromancy. I mean, I’ve been listening to tracks from BALM! with various associates and friends on an array of sound systems trying to hear the record in different ways. When I listened with Emel the track “Recipe for The Conjure” was selected and right away the timbre of Katherine Pehrson’s voice stunned him, “who’s the vocalist?” he asked. Every time Kate’s voice broke through he’d ask again who she was and every time I’d give a little more information. I mention this because our primary topic of conversation that night was passages I shared with Emel from a book about the music of Trane and the quality of duende in his sound. Duke Ellington called it Transbluesency. Fred Moten called it “resistance of the object,” a conscious intention to resist as well as unconscious resistance to dominant cultural ways of being and knowing simply because they are values of an oppressive civilization. Resistance is not merely a particular set of survival skills but also a kind of balm for injury and deep harm, which results from chronic societal disease. The way this music (and in my mind the words are also music) came together was like ... well ... I remember elders in our congregation in Huntsville Alabama would start moaning then hum into jagged harmony that sometimes found words and other times not, that synthesized inherited and found forms into ethereal meditation. In the words of Zora Neale Hurston from The Sanctifies Church: “The harmony of the true spiritual is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out by the trained musician. The various parts break in at any time. Falsetto often takes the place of regular voices for short periods. Keys change. Moreover, each singing of the piece is a new creation.” Tacocat spelled backwards spells tacocat.

        You’re getting sleepy, very
        Sleepy now.

        I guess someone is a king of France & apart
        from whom nobody is a king of France.
                                        I like icons
        & the toxic halos of figureheads,

                I was born in captivity, having
        fucked the right people, thick
        in the France of it.

                                    Come to
        think of it, I spoke to your exo-
        skeleton.

        The bottle broke in your bag & you’re
        getting flammable, very flammable.

For more of this backstory, see here. The word ‘tapa’ refers to the kind of dyed patterned cloth made from the paper mulberry tree, an honorable practice popular in Polynesia. Filed Under: Uncategorized. File with the trans-historic journeys of the “Poor Little One,” the “guys,” the various scoundrels, the “Beautiful Child with Turpentine Hair.” The musculature is based on Winnicott’s idea of “the mysterious middle” in which the infant takes in nourishment, excretes it, but there’s this magical strange thing that happens inside the infant’s digestive tract that is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat — that’s a fucked-up metaphor I guess — anyhow, this was shortly 9/11, when we’d just moved to Florence, and my daughter was three and synagogues in France were being bombed and water in the Tiber and the drinking water in Rome had almost been poisoned, and trains were being exploded in Spain and my Italian neighbors said to me “welcome to the world.” I was like Poor Little One in a spoiled state of wonder, naïveté, and pure shock, moving like the larva before it is caught as the specimen, before it loses hold on “potential space” — Winnicott again. Think Dora the Oral Explorer, aka Dora La Exploradora Oral — I recall, especially, one of the characters suffering a “night kaka” when he falls into a bear trap? I hope that didn’t come across as Old School, although I feel very old. Le prix du petit déjeuner comprend un boisson (café, thé, chocolat) servi dans la chambre tous les jours avec du pain, des petits pains ou des croissants, du beurre et parfois de la confiture. Il ne comprend pas le service dans la salle commune ou au comptoir, le breakfast à l’anglaise (avec oeufs, jambon, gruau ...); il diffère généralement du tarif “voyageur” ou “courrier.” Which translates as There are fantastic mutations and malappropriations in this book, where taxonomic relations between art and the cosmetic are smuggled into Picasso’s studio in Helena Rubenstein’s handbag, where “molecules hang like dinner lamps,” where the exhibition of organs in formaldehyde with furs, bones, and skeletons conspires as a “small collection of deaths,” where vocality is troubled and everything speaks glossolalia. Either that, or I first heard the term “lividity” in a description of a murder trial in which a body was determined to have been moved based on an assessment of its “lividity,” or way in which the blood had drained and pooled in the points of the body that made contact with the ground. So yes, there is a camera. There is the crushed abdomen of an ant stuck to one of the dog’s paws. There is a dead mouse near the dog. There is a mouse in the theater. There is a man walking away from the dog. It’s the third auditorium on your right. And gigantic posters of musicians. A thinner varnish might work. The beauty of ash is primordial. The stone makes the toad go up the mountain. Queen Mab in her greenery makes the toad come down. I mean, everybody wonders. What the fuck? Could be. I wouldn’t be surprised.

        Brightness / Luminosité: 800 lumens.
        Life / Durée de vie: 13.7 years / ans.
        Based on 3 hrs / day. Basé sur une consommation de 3h / jour.

It’s a thick magazine with glossy pages. I open it to an article about Theaster Gates, who stands “inside his sprawling studio ... a ceramics atelier littered with pots.” After I read that I go online and learn that Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and only woman to win the Fields medal, has died. She was 40. She “specialized in moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry,” the Stanford press announcement said. Tho she taught at Stanford, Mirzakhani was born in Tehran. Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, issued a statement, as did the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Which gets me to wondering: would Trump even pretend to mourn the death of a scientist? Then I get an email from Alan, who wants to go whale watching. Of course.

        It’s so groovy to float around sometimes

        I said flotation is groovy

        And he said

        And even a jelly fish will agree to that

        Yeah, but that old jelly fish

        Been floatin’ around so long

        Lord he ain’t got a bone in his jelly back

So if I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica — not someday, but now, today — what would you think? If I suggested that jellyfish could crash the world’s fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me? Would you believe that “a mucosy little jellyfish, barely bigger than a chicken egg, with no brain, no backbone, and no eyes, could cripple three national economies and wipe out an entire ecosystem”? That’s just what happened when the Mnemiopsis jellyfish (a kind of comb jelly) invaded the Black Sea. Prior to their arrival, Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia had robust fisheries, with anchovies and sturgeon being important resources. As the jellyfish increased, the anchovies and other valuable fish vanished, and along with them went the sturgeon, the long-beloved source of blini toppings. What can I say? Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out in front of him. Sitting opposite him, slightly hunched up, on a white leather sofa partly draped with silks, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits — Koons’s had fine pinstripes — and white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to. Hirst was drinking a Bud Light. Behind them, a bay window opened onto a landscape of tall buildings that formed a Babylonian tangle of gigantic polygons that stretched across the horizon. The night was bright, the air absolutely clear. They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph, taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. Koons’s forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it with his brush and stepped back three paces. There was certainly a problem with Koons. Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an “I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash” kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death; finally, there was in his face something ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him look like a rank-and-file Arsenal supporter. In short, there were various aspects to him, but all of them could be combined into a coherent, representative portrait of a British artist typical of his generation. Koons, on the other hand, seemed to have a duality, an insurmountable contradiction between the basic cunning of the technical sales rep and the exaltation of the ascetic. It was already three weeks now that Jed had been retouching Koons’s expression as he stood up from his chair, throwing out his arms as if he were trying to convince Hirst of something. It was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer. He had photographs of Koons on his own, in the company of Roman Abramovich, Madonna, Barack Obama, Bono, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates ... Not one of them managed to express anything of the man’s personality, to go beyond the appearance of a Chevrolet convertible salesman that he had decided to display to the world, and this was exasperating. In fact, for a long time photographers had exasperated Jed, especially the great photographers. The next morning, after leaving the hotel, I had some spare time before heading to Kyoto and decided to take a walk. During my promenade, I came across a pachinko parlor. I'd heard about them but never had an opportunity to check one out. It was Sunday morning, and the place was quite empty — there were only a few players stationed on two rows of twenty machines at either side of the corridor. The pachinko machines sounding all at once produced an incredibly intense ambience, but the players didn’t seem to notice; they played on and on. I wondered whether the roots of Japanoise drew, in some way, on Pachinko. I walked all over the place, recording for some time. This vibe of participatory intoxication would echo over the next four decades in the works of countless reverse innovators. Predictive deconstruction, basement beauty, turned-on, dropped-out will-to-iration. Now go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the parked cars til you find a tree you connect with. Sit on its roots to see if it wants you OFF! If it wants you to stay, sit with it. Don’t pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you’re here to save the world, one leaf at a time, not to worry about whether you look like a lunatic. Which you most certainly do. Then eat a little dark chocolate. Then hum to yourself. I mean, make a low hum come from deep inside you. Now try to picture Justine Damond, dead, murdered by cops. Now wonder: will it make any difference that this time they didn’t shoot Philando Castile, they shot a blond middleclass yoga teacher? Who rescues ducks? While it might be neuroscience, it ain’t rocket science!

        100 BILLION NEURONS IN YOUR BRAIN
        50 THOUSAND THOUGHTS PER DAY
        95% ARE OLD, REPETITIVE THOUGHTS
        1 PRESENT MOMENT: NOW

Wake up your workplace with an inspiring and fascinating introduction to the world of neuroscience and its leading-edge applications in the business world from leadership and innovation to change management and culture creation. 30 – 90 minute presentations are available to suit your needs. The apocalypse has already happened in that universe; I seem to remember the novel talking about reactor meltdowns or something. And take, for example, “the Colonies”, places where the toxic waste is so ubiquitous your “skin falls off in sheets.” A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light slash

        light orange of cloud in blue white sky above ridge

        red-shouldered hawk calling on branch in foreground

 

        “wide” pattern of twelve, these and three “unknown”

        where there is, also that which comes from, remains

 

        The Longest Word in the World (189,819 letters)

        [it is disputed whether it is a word]

 

        Man fails to get penis drawing recognized as his signature

Since the near collapse of the world’s financial system a few years back has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead. Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on TV on a daily basis for six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert. In many ways, it was routine — they placed a subject in the brain scanner, displayed some images, and monitored how the subject’s brain responded. The measured brain activity showed up on the scans as red hot spots, like many other neuroimaging studies. Except that this time, the subject was an Atlantic salmon, and it was dead. Abstract. This paper presents a protocol for the accurate prediction of an individual’s voice In this case Friedrich Nietzsche’s) based on genotype data, specifically from single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We collected trace amounts of cellular material (Touch DNA) from books that belonged to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). DNA was extracted and amplified using DOP-PCR technique. Five different genomic DNAs were generated. Nietzsche’s genotype was singled out after comparison to genotype data from one living relative of the Nietzsche family. Nietzsche’s genotype data was analyzed using a DNA-based phenotyping assay, termed VoiceRator, that incorporates the 24 most informative voice SNPs based on their association with genes related to the phenotypic expression of the vocal tract and larynx structure and function. An SNP-based voice profile of Nietzsche was inferred. The profile data was converted into bio-measures that were used to 3D-print a vocal tract and larynx ... Read More ... When did people start smiling in photographs? Read More ... I have worked with this in other sites, the Paris arcades, for example, or the grands magasins. In Le bonheur des femmes, I followed women about the perfume departments, photographing their feet. I was on the path of Ida Bauer, Freud’s ‘Dora’. It was not enough to read about psychoanalysis, so I curated nine exhibitions, seven of which are published in In Place of the Object. The work there is finished, as is my doctorate. I don’t work any longer as a curator, and feel usually like a false theorist. That doesn’t preclude hysterical identification on my part, however. Thus the diagrams, after Benjamin, consist of fragments, scribbles, indexes, bed covers, and body parts. Subjectivities or something sharpen and blur, merge and redefine, scatter and recollect. ‘Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our paths through life’.

[Note: Sources: “Dragon speech recognition Nuance Dragon for Mac, v5 Command Cheat Sheet”, at Nuance; Clark Coolidge, “Scratch Glass Park”, in 88 Sonnets; JBR; Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds; JBR; Gerald Stern, “Visit from Mars”, at Poets.org; JBR; Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds; JBR; IUF UITA IUL, “Update – It’s now legal for North Carolina growers to violate farmworkers’ human rights”, email rec’d 14 Jul 017, approx. 2:05am PDT; John Ashbery, “Yes, Dr. Grenzmer, How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?”, in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems; Shiro Morano, “A Fish in Adolescence” (tr. Goro Takano), quoted in Tinfish Press, “Tinfish Press Pre-Publication Sale!”, email rec’d 14 Jul 017, approx. 12:50pm PDT; Fazel Hawramy, “Stream of floating bodies near Mosul raises fears of reprisals by Iraqi militias”, at Guardian, 15 Jul 017; JBR; Fazel Hawramy, “Stream of floating bodies near Mosul raises fears of reprisals by Iraqi militias”, at Guardian, 15 Jul 017; JBR; John Ashbery, “from Tuesday Evening”, in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems; JBR; Lew Welch, “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings” (memory quote); JBR; Smash Mouth, “Walkin’ on the Sun” (memory quote); JBR; Brent Cunningham, Journey to the Sun, quoted in a review at The Believer; JBR, re Smash Mouth, per Google; Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, “Please Reply...”, email rec’d 15 Jul 017, approx. 1:42am PDT; JBR; John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”, in Three Poems, quoted in C. J. Allen, “The Privacy of Everyone”, at Litter; JBR; Prageeta Sharma, “Sets of Things”, at Poetry, Jul / Aug 017; anonymous, and James Meetze, blurbs for Suyeun Juliette Lee, No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise, at SPD; JBR; J Otis Powell! [who now uses an interrobang in place of the exclamation mark], liner notes to Balm!, at Tru Ruts / Bandcamp; JBR; Judith Goldman, “rotten oasis”, at Poetry Foundation; “Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s 2008 and 2009 Tapa Notebook”, at JPR; JBR; Divya Victor, and Kim Rosenfield, quoted in Victor’s “Eight discourses with Kim Rosenfield”, at Jacket 2, 2 Apr 011; JBR; Divya Victor, and Kim Rosenfield, quoted in Victor’s “Eight discourses with Kim Rosenfield”, at Jacket 2, 2 Apr 011; JBR; Noah Eli Gordon, Bohr’s Spinoza, at SPD; John Olson, “Lassitude Of Twisting Quintessence”, “Foolish Fire”, at Tillalala Chronicles,14 & 11 Jul 017; JBR; Associated Press, “Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win mathematics’ Fields medal, dies at 40”, at Guardian, 15 Jul 017;JBR; Jimi Hendrix, “Power of Soul”, at Fandom; JBR; Lisa-ann Gershwin, and Tim Flannery, quoted in Flannery’s review of Gershwin’s Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, at The New York Review of Books, 26 Sept 013; JBR; Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory (tr. Gavin Bowd); Alan Courtis, “Field Recording”, at BOMB, 17 Jul 017;Keith Connolly, “The Endorithm 2”, at BOMB, 30 Jun 017 (re a 1971 release by a New Jersey band called Madrigal); JBR; CA Conrad, quoted in Andrew Ridker, “Queer Bubbles”, at Paris Review, 6 Jul 017; JBR (according to Jared Goyette, “Justine Damond shooting: Australian woman’s last moments heard over US police radio”, at Guardian, 18 Jul 017, on 30 Jun 017 she texted “Guess what I just rescued 8 ducklings [from a storm drain] ... The mother duck was distraught and I climbed and pulled them all in my skirt ... There was this moment when I think they realized I was there to help and they just started jumping to my lap ...” so I’m guessing that, at least in the media, the answer is yes); Justine Damond, various, at Justine Damond; Peter Watts, “Offred of Dune”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 18 Jul 017; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “7.18”, at Temporality, 18 Jul 017; Imp Kerr, various, at The New Inquiry; Sharon Kivland, quoted in “Questions à Sharon Kivland pour le numéro d’Area revue sur le thème de Vénus, Christian Gattinoni, 2005”, and the blurb for The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, at Sharon Kivland]

With the Noose Around My Neck 61

The scene is well-known. A group of men circles a chain around the statue’s neck or feet and tie it to the back of a truck. A few babuchkas show up to the square to scream and shout in protest. Some cry silently. A few strollers watch from the distance. They stand hands in their pockets. Some shoot movies on their smartphones. The truck pulls away and tears the statue apart. Shortly after, Lenin is down. Its pieces are taken away. Some are left there on the spot. No one seems to bother too much. Lenin is down. And everyone goes home. The statues, whole or in pieces, are still out there, though, decapitated in the underbrush, peeking out of a storage closet, half-buried under a pile of toys, dressed up like Darth Vader. The village of Korzhi is attempting to sell its statue for $15,000 to fund repairs to the local kindergarten and school. The price is high, and they have had no offers. So is it really true, or did I dream it, that there’s a scene in Titus Andronicus where his daughter crawls across the stage while clenching in her teeth is severed hand? All I know is that, since the 70s, the volume of lake Palcacocha has expanded by a factor of 34, reaching 17 million cubic meters. If a part of the neighboring glacier falls into the lake, the wave it would generate has a good of chance of destroying the very unstable moraine, unleashing a devastating mudslide that would reach Huaraz. In the morning the crew sighted a possible vessel in distress on the radar, which was confirmed to be a rubber dinghy. As the Phoenix approached it, 20 people fell in the water. Thanks to the expertise of the MOAS rescue swimmer and crew all 124 people were rescued and brought on board the Phoenix to recover from their ordeal. Around midday, MRCC requested that the Phoenix proceed to assist Sea Eye with the rescue of a small wooden boat. The Phoenix then headed to assist another SAR asset with the rescue of a another rubber dinghy. Due to severe overloading, there were already 15 people in the water. Again, thanks to the teamwork of everyone present, all 147 people were safely rescued. Later that day, yet another rubber dinghy was sighted, and another 118 people safely brought on board. In the evening, the Phoenix received a casualty from Sea Eye in order for the person to be evacuated. The evacuation was safely completed and following MRCC’s instructions, the Phoenix headed north with 412 people on board: among them were 84 minors and 13 pregnant women. Okay. Where was I? WE HAVE AN ARBORETUM OF LOCAL PIONEER SUCCESSION PLANTS HERE — THESE ARE THE PLANTS THAT BRING BACK THE CLIMAX VEGETATION AFTER ECOCATASTROPHE LIKE FIRE OR ROAD CUTTING OR A CLEAR CUT OF MATURE FOREST — TO SEE THE AFTERMATH OF A CLEAR-CUT MAKES YOU THINK HERE IS ONE CRUDE ANIMAL — THE CHEWED UP THE GROUND THE PILES OF SLASH THE UTTER BLASTED LOOK — DON’T GET ME WRONG I’VE USED TO MY SHARE OF MILLED LUMBER — WE ALL LIVE IN WOOD HOUSES — FIRE IS KINDER — BUT FOREST FIRE IS NOT GENERALLY A FEATURE OF COASTAL FOG BELT THAT IS US PLANT CLIMATE ZONE 17 WHERE WEATHER 98% MODERATED BY OCEAN — FIRES HERE ARE GENERALLY CONTROLLED BURNS GONE OUT OF CONTROL — THE PIONEER PLANTS SAY GIVE US SOME EARTH TO HEAL — Powers of Tenuous, you know, a kind of nod to Powers of Ten, the beautiful little films made by Ray and Charles Eames. I was visualizing the scale of the object expanding infinitely and then shrinking back down in an instant, so that it would have a transference of energy going back and forth through time like transmitters or receivers. That’s when the works also start looking like antennae designed to pick up messages from space. Remember “The Immunity Syndrome,” in which the Enterprise encounters a gigantic, 11,000-mile-wide amoeba that is sucking up all the energy around it, including a giant mushroom. I removed the stem, retained the cap, and put it on its side. There is a point at the back, from which thread and yarn stretch. The giant cheese pieces and the giant bread pieces were all detritus made on a grand scale, with the pores of the bread slices highly articulated to re-enforce the idea of the holes as pathways into a reverse universe. Some are more than 100 years old. And there are 12 windows, each containing a colored polymer construction. Do you know Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machine, a gigantic construction made of wire, beads, and other materials that he worked on for over 30 years? It had an electrical charge that could actually cure people. So, in more technical terms, what we tried to do was to use the image searching tool of various local search engines to try to pick up what those search engines say are sort of the top, the most definitive images for a topic. And then we wanted to juxtapose those next to each other so you could see, you know, ok if this is the image in one country, what is it in another country and another and another. And of course to do that we also had to translate the query, so we composed, in the same way we were composing images, we composed these search tools to translate your query from one language to another and another so you see the word in that language, in that country and translated into a series of images. Taryn Simon: Yeah, so should we ... We are just going to show it to you now. It’s roughly built; it will eventually include all nations. For now we are giving you an abridged look for this experience. So let’s try “painting.” (Scrolls through images) And, “freedom.” Aaron Swartz: I like the distinction between freedom in Brazil and Syria. (Laughs) And in Kenya, if you notice, apparently it means lots of meetings. TS: “Crazy.” In Russia it’s a headless man looking at rows of heads to choose from. AS: In France, “crazy” apparently means Homer Simpson. TS: “Sadness.” “Beauty.” Too fast? Sorry. AS: I think that one of the interesting distinctions is between human beauty and natural beauty. TS: “Death.” TS: “America.” AS: The distinction between the US and Iranian views of America is striking. TS: “Celebrity.” In Syria it’s the Mona Lisa and Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. And in the US it’s Paris Hilton. “Jew.” The word in German is “jude” so Jude Law’s image surprisingly trumps any searches for Jew. “Party.” “Masculinity.” Should we do me? Aaron did this yesterday and discovered for some reason in Israel I’m a hotdog. AS: To be fair, they love you everywhere else. TS: Should I keep going? Or does the audience want to yell out any? “Sex.” Oh, this is interesting, “Obama.” You will notice in North Korea, there is no image. AS: Also, in Spain, Obama smokes. TS: “Management.” Syria is kind of interesting. AS: In Syria, management comes from the barrel of a gun. TS: “Luck.” “Hairstyle.” “Luxury.” That’s a good one. AS: This is “corruption.” TS: So we’ll just do a few more. “Riot.” “Terrorist.” AS: So PETA is a leading terrorist in the United States. TS: In Brazil it is a baby with a grenade. AS: The baby has a bomb. Let’s be clear. TS: “Woman.” “Family.” “African cane rats infested with maggots,” she sings, “African yams (Dioscorea), Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bush meat, cherimoya fruit, curry leaves (murraya), dried orange peels, fresh eggs, giant African snail, impala skull cap, jackfruit seeds, June plum, kola nuts, mango, okra, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouths, pork, raw poultry (chicken), South American pig head, South American tree tomatoes, South Asian lime infected with citrus canker, sugar cane (Poaceae), uncooked meats, unidentified subtropical plant in soil.”

        So fear the bear, the bear is real
        I know they do not know

to quote Steven Fowler and George Seferis, in this universe there are free broken bones for those who find a car pouring through their living room wall, so the brickwork falls in, like a sure sense of justice, that just has nowhere else to go. This has a lot to do with certain assumptions of Plato’s. For instance, that you are pink by volcano. That there is a pure spring in which you bathe your nose. And so Hannah makes smoothies before heading off to work each morning. Livia says X is in the nose and throat. Sex follows water. This is him, he went to the store with his wife to buy water. The panther takes its name from the Greek word for “all” (pan), because the panther is the friend of all beasts, according to Isidore of Seville. His face was lean and hatchet-edged, with huge fuzzy eyes sunk deep in his skull like bullet holes. He kept complaining about a yellow light that had lately been streaming out of his chest from a spot the size of a half dollar. We drank and talked about the spot and the small burning sensation it gave him early in the morning and about his octopus. He had become disillusioned about traveling with the octopus and had begun having aggressive dreams about it. He wanted to sell it. We bought a bottle and walked out beyond the town into logged-off hills that looked like old battlefields. A low mist hung over a struggling second growth of redwood and Douglas fir. The tracks of giant caterpillar tractors wound everywhere. Pits and ditches were scattered about like shell holes. Thousands of frogs croaked and salamanders hung suspended between lids of green slime and rotting logs. I felt vaguely elated, like a witness to some ancient slaughter. Nog lived in what had once been a water tank in the middle of a rough field. The octopus was there, all right. It was sitting inside a bathysphere on a truck bed. Nog had built a mold out of plaster of Paris for the tentacles and another one for the obese body with its parrot-like beak and bulging eyes. Then he had poured liquid latex rubber into the molds. The bathysphere was carefully fashioned out of a large butane gas tank and stolen pieces of metal from a nearby bridge. There were three portholes from which you could watch the octopus move its eight tentacles around in the bubbling water. Nog had been traveling to all the state and county fairs through the West and Midwest, charging kids a dime and adults a quarter. Most people believed the octopus was real, but whenever there was a loud doubt Nog would tell them the truth. He would never give money back, and occasionally there would be fights. In Bird City, Utah, the bathysphere had been tipped over by three men who had just been on a losing softball team. He was weary of the whole thing, he kept repeating. We sat down on a bench in front of his house, and he filled me in on octopus lore. In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive study Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, who was an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for the secret-agent hero of his novel, Casino Royale, because he found it “flat and colourless,” which was fitting for a character intended as “entirely an anonymous instrument ... a cipher, a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.” This first of the Bond books was published in 1953. A year later, it made its US debut in a hardcover edition issued by Macmillan, but sold only 4,000 copies over the course of that year. In 1955, American Popular Library released a paperback version and, hoping to capture a larger domestic audience, replaced the title with You Asked for It. In the back-cover synopsis and marketing materials, the name James was also changed to Jimmy. So yes, I love that photo of the giant Egyptian sarcophagus. It looks like it’s dripping blood. And it fits so well where you found it, like a pharaoh of a very late dynasty in which all the subjects are garbage cans. Thus I expounded my affliction, an instant after I noticed its onset. Obviously, it wasn’t myself I was informing I had contracted it, I was addressing the imaginary interlocutor who is entertained, I surmise, by all self-conscious beings — the first transitional object. Bunny. Bunny is the first of the shadow siblings, a proto-life-partner. Pity Bunny, that doomed childbride. But it wasn’t Bunny. After a moment I noticed that my situation had driven me to think my thoughts to the public-address system, which had, for the last hour, been addressing me with commands (couched as requests), admonitions (a tumble of negative subjunctives) and simple brief loud-hails, not one of which I had elected to act on. Whichever language it might be I should be left with a few words of when all the rest had dropped off, at least public address would be equipped to understand my halting thoughts. From time to time public-address commanded. ‘Pass the silt, please.’ ‘Pass the foamrubber.’ The astrological consequences will probably be severe. There will be burning wheels. And in the thickets,

        we’re lying on the ground and everyone’s dead
        obviously don’t include the enormous middle class
        theirs the smoke theirs the vast stone sea etc
        all murdered by the sun tho. ha. “murdered”
        they all folded up inside the inexplicable sun

Where there are dance-moves are diagrams and systems. Inside those systems lines of burning trucks. The resulting liquid is called broth or stock in English, brodo in Italian, and bouillon in French. It was asleep for a very long time. I didn’t want a cat to get it, so I put it in a box. When I came out the box was empty. I put it back in the box and went to get something heavy to put on top. While I was gone, it crashed into a gate. It looks a little flat on the top of its head. I brought the box inside and set it next to the fire. I dripped peroxide water on the gash and it kind of got better. It stepped slowly, gently as if through a maze of mines. And now? Now

        impact is all they’ll allow you in the spite sweats
        knocker of cabbage at the vocal bulkhead
        sit bent or straight as sticks awash
        at sound not a bulge but cracks
        a cranium for openers
        whatever powers but you fist

Who, or what, is talking to us? What sort of an experience is being described? Does each line relate, in any way, to the next? With that, perhaps, “sit bent or straight as sticks awash / at sound not a bulge but cracks”

        a dump an octave up
        dip a large it
        rose on did
        single of that on that sort
        cord knee to lots pends
        fiddle such with pends balds
        belongs a cuff tint whole
        air of trim
        neat’s wax amati mud
        number no nor no
        an arm in arm all down room
        peck mere band diorite
        ping mere
        white pulls post milk
        oath cork quite a little all quite wrist

And then an image of a blue hamburger as backdrop for a text reading “All bags must be checked” and an image of a cup and saucer with the text “Stand clear of the door” and below that

        “my hand. I can see
        back there see
        what you’re thinking about
        about. I
        you can feel my head.”

The work in Debths was originally inspired by Paul Thek’s retrospective called “Diver” in 2011. I have always been interested in folktales, magic, lost languages, riddles, coincidence, and missed connections. What struck me most was the way his later works, often painted swatches of color spread across sheets of newspaper with single words, phrases, or letters scribbled over the already doubled surface, transformed these so-called art objects, into epiphanies, riddles, spells and magical thinking ... I particularly loved the small bronze sculptures titled The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper scattered here and there. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear. Later, he knew he had seen a man die. And sometime after came the destruction of Paris. Many died. Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken prisoner. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in an underground network of galleries. Above ground, Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over an empire of rats. The prisoners were subjected to experiments, apparently of great concern to those who conducted them. The outcome was a disappointment for some — death for others — and for others yet, madness. One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners. He was the man whose story we are telling. He was frightened. He had heard about the Head Experimenter. He was prepared to meet Dr. Frankenstein, or the Mad Scientist. Instead, he met a reasonable man who explained calmly that the human race was doomed. Space was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time. A loophole in Time, and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of energy. This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present. [...] This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, put stripping out the present, and its racks. They begin again. The man doesn’t die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue. On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves. On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty. Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different. Ruins. A girl who could be the one he seeks. He passes her on the jetty. She smiles at him from an automobile. Other images appear, merge, in that museum, which is perhaps that of his memory. On the thirtieth day, the meeting takes place. Now he is sure he recognizes her. In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone. The experimenters tighten their control. They send him back out on the trail. Time rolls back again, the moment returns. This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls. Later on, they are in a garden. He remembers there were gardens. She asks him about his necklace, the combat necklace he wore at the start of the war that is yet to come. He invents an explanation. They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn’t understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, “This is where I come from ...” — and falls back, exhausted. Then another wave of Time washes over him. The result of another injection perhaps. Now she is asleep in the sun. He knows that in this world to which he has just returned for a while, only to be sent back to her, she is dead. She wakes up. He speaks again. Of a truth too fantastic to be believed he retains the essential: an unreachable country, a long way to go. She listens. She doesn’t laugh. Is it the same day? He doesn’t know. They shall go on like this, on countless walks in which an unspoken trust, an unadulterated trust will grow between them, without memories or plans. Up to the moment where he feels — ahead of them — a barrier. And this was the end of the first experiment. So yes, I happened to see Schastye almost at once. Only in Jay Leyda’s KINO (History of Russian Film) did I find one page that mentioned it or its maker, A.I. Medvedkin. It mentioned, besides Schastye and another feature, an incredible experiment: a Kinopoezd, a film-train, carrying cameras, lab, editing tables, screening material and even actors, to produce the first rail-movies, films made on the spot, in collaboration with the local people (workers in factories, peasants in kolkhozs), shot in one day, processed during the night, edited the following day then screened in front of the very people who had participated to its making; sadly yet, you know, the most widely used of the pre-written insert titles was “Comrades, this cannot last!” Did I tell you I went to see Ifa Bayeza’s The Ballad of Emmet Till at Ion Theater last night? You can probably imagine. I couldn’t think what to do after so I went home and read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, the 2000 preface. I read Abandoned Buildings. Dear Angel of Dust, there’s no longer wind or even an inkling of wind, the air eerily, ominously unmoving. It’s what, especially farther north, they call earthquake weather. The air and the sky have a burning, bright but oddly muted intensity to them, as though their apparent forthrightness were no more than apparent, deceptively clear. This makes for an even greater sense of displacement or dislocation, of things being out of joint, multiply out of joint. It’s as though we had migrated north, had migrated south or been visited by a region farther south, unexpectedly hosted a mesoamerican visitation. It’s as though, that is, the five leftover days at the end of the Mayan year, the five dangling or dateless or stray, orphaned or unlucky, rogue days at the end of the year that are not really, in a sense, a part of the year, a part of time, had arrived early, dot dot dot ... in any case, O’Dell’s math was corrected in chapter 15. A grade schooler wrote him in 1986, pointing out that Karana killed three dogs with arrows in chapter 10 and shot two dogs in chapter 12; thus, she should not report in chapter 15 that she had only killed four of the wild dogs in Rontu’s pack. Judging by the imprecise spacing, I do not think that Pai used tabs; so I imagined her typing something like this: exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, two-character word, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point. Trillius in the “Tenth Oration” does none of this: My friends, I can hear you whispering. In the halls of this building, buying your steaming piles of beef. The poet Nicolai Umperto ... who did not fear the incoherent as I do, but cherished the glint of the ocean as much as the wine in his glass, and used to say of language that there was finally not much to it ... which is why, before our empire was founded, decisions were being made using lightning, swords, and the birds of the air. A rock was wrapped in a cloth, and hurled into the canyon. Things are different now. But how are they different? We find that the rock is now covered with a warning bell. And so we find, shall we say, that a system without flaws is not a system. What was there to understand about this image? Wasn’t it like every other one to appear in the history of images? Nevertheless I remembered it. At least a month passed. Then a new set of concerns came along, new technologies, a new lease on life. Metal sides, rubber wheels, metal feathers, glass windows, bridges, roads, floats, tunnels. A person climbs from a ditch. An empire invades its ruins. A madness goes through a sphere of order. An order goes through a sphere of madness. I saw “a human head composed of leaves.” “A rabid cat ran from a rabid dog, laughing.” Which is to say, with Anna Moschovakis,

        Thinking I might like to write
        An optimistic poem
        I loaded a font called
        UTOPIA
        It crashed my Mac

        [...]

        I mean
        “Crickets Crush Woman.”

Knowledge back then was edible and served on the backs of broad green leaves. The leaves have finally found their niche. Or the rarely seen pistachio green full moon that burns the pines. O to live on nothing but arugula and espresso! Green is also the color of cash. Gears caught in the crab grass. Some uncharted green. This procession led into

        the larger church with its collage of abandoned crutches
        suspended over a hole of healing dirt that
                                                (a miracle in itself)
                                                            replenished each day.
        When William Everson came here he ate the dirt,
                        this obscure, drastic gesture

I filled a black plastic 35mm film container with some the same dirt and took it home and kept it by the side of the bed for years then woke up one morning and it was gone. Just like Bernice in “Walkin’ Blues”, sort of, I mean

        Lord I              feel like blowin my
        Whoa lonesome horn
        Got up this morning now to find          my Chimayo dirt was gone, Lord
        I feel like                     blowooooooo
        My lonesome horn ...

Sort of. Anyway, I mean however — and this is significant — we can only experience this sublimity at the price of exposing our individual consciousness to existential threat. Whether this danger takes the guise of “nonsense,” or the horror of diseased and broken bodies, or even overtly religious rapture, that “I” cannot be effaced unless it is first inscribed. So yes,

        this poem begins in a factory, and is explicitly about labor.

        [...]

        Yet this factory scene is thoroughly defamiliarized.

        [...]

        The speaker is dressed for work, yet the description is so theatrical, she almost seems to be dressed for an occult ritual.

        Attired in this way, she moves out from the factory.

        “Too extravagant for the factory I went out into the night’s extravagance
        “extravagant factory night which put a slick of glue on each leaf and rent
        “each breath from my lungs and glued it up in the heavens.”

        [...]

Even now, texts are being aggregated, atomized, tagged, and reassembled along statistical coordinates. Likewise, no “like” or up-vote is insignificant when it comes to recording impressions. I have no idea if this is true. I’ve thought about it forever. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true. It’s true even if it’s not true. It was Fall 2008. The global economy was collapsing. One day there was a note in my mailbox at work that said: X called. She can’t come to class today. Her brother was shot last night. I never saw X again. I had spent the Summer of 2008 trying to write a novel about a guy who is kidnapped, bound and gagged and forced to watch a website with video clips of people killing themselves in different ways. I tried to write the novel for several months. I read the novel at school during the 1970s, and it had a profound effect on me. I could not remember the plot of the film or the novel but felt the intensity of how it registered and clearly still registers. The plot of the novel can easily be found on Wikipedia and I reproduce the beginning for those of you who do not know the book or film: ‘Ambulances arrive at two traffic accidents blocking the only roads into the (fictional) British village of Midwich, Winshire. Attempting to approach the village, one paramedic becomes unconscious. Suspecting gas poisoning, the army is notified. They discover that a caged canary becomes unconscious upon entering the affected region, but regains consciousness when removed. Further experiments reveal the region to be a hemisphere with a diameter of 2 miles around the village. Aerial photography shows an unidentifiable silvery object on the ground in the centre of the created exclusion zone. After one day the effect vanishes along with the unidentified object, and the villagers wake with no apparent ill effects. Some months later, the villagers realise that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant, with ...’ ooo-eee-ooo, to quote Ed Sanders The Family. Let’s just say I can’t stand it when someone makes it so you can’t cutnpaste from their pdf. Otherwise I could tell you about the pythons. But in order to do so I’d have to type, so I can’t. For instance, what happens to you when you read this sentence: “Khan’s work is drawn from her own experience as a brown woman negotiating diaspora through excessive body hair”? One of the earliest attempts was the life zone system of C. Hart Merriam. This system, published in 1892, was based primarily on temperature. The zones were named for geographic areas that had temperature regimes similar to that which Merriam observed in Arizona as he traveled from the floor of the Grand Canyon to the summit of nearby San Francisco Peaks. Proust attests to the power of such memories. Bergotte is stirred from his deathbed by a desire to see Vermeer’s View of Delft one last time. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. “But if you want to know about the Ukraine, you must read Taras Grigorovych Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and, of course, Gogol. He was buried alive, you know. He was in a very deep dream. They thought he was dead. But when they opened his grave they found he had rolled over onto his side or was face down or something.” Or, as Stephen Ratcliffe has it in “7.11”,

        man waking from dream in unmade yellow and blue bed

        paddling to get out of New York City 2:00 PM flight

 

        to be in accordance with, to find description of it

        corresponding, found only in that place, from which

 

        br=o=k[en bab9y opfilnger rpighot ohoand y9esterday

        suOrtfing accident cast

 

        grey whiteness of fog against still invisible ridge

        white line of wave breaking across mouth of channel ...

So I decided to distract myself so I was loudly belting out Amy Winehouse’s Valerie when suddenly two enormous turkey vultures decided they hated me and dive-bombed my car and then I screamed, “WTF” and I started going faster because birds were attacking me and then I got pulled over and had to explain to the police officer that yes, I was speeding but I had a good reason because birds, and the cop was like, “Well, that’s new” but then he saw the claw mark on my roof and I offered him an umbrella to keep the vultures from pecking out his eyes but then suddenly the vultures were gone because of course they fucking were. Using this list, then, I wrote a program, “The Infinite Campaign”, that automatically generates and posts an infinite series of video commercials. The script randomly selects two behavior categories and one interest category from the Twitter ad creation page. It rephrases the descriptions of the categories, putting the statements in the second person. The Infinite Campaign then overlays those statements on top of automatically selected stock footage. Finally, it logs me in to Twitter, uploads the video, and auto-generates a new ad campaign, targeting the same behavior and interest categories used to generate the video. (I’ve limited each campaign budget to $1.) In any case, Okja opens with a massive rebranding of the Mirando corporation (basically Monsanto), which after years of negative press plans to feed the world with a new breed of superpig, pigs the size of hippos. Speaking of superpigs reminds me of the Fugs’ old “Exorcism of the White House”, which they performed again for obvious reasons a month or so ago:  

        OUT DEMONS OUT!!!

        1.

        In the name of the Amulets
        of Friendship & Civilisation
        & against Border-Bashing
        & manias for Regime Change

        In the name of triumph
        over the curse of explosions & drones

        In the name of ahimsa & nonviolence
        between heretofore rival civilisations

        In the name
        of Peace & Love & Sharing!

        We call upon the powers of the Cosmos
        to protect our ceremonies!

        In the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis,
        God of the Dead, in the name of all those killed for causes
        they do not comprehend—

        in the name of the millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan,
        & the East

        & in the name of the blown-apart Americans
        on war-zones in the U.S.A.
        & in other countries as well!

        2.

        In the Name of Rosa Parks, Lilith, Mary, Aphrodite, Hera, Rose Pesotta ...
        we call upon the Malevolent Spirits in the White House
        to be Banished and Exorcised! Out, Demons, Out!!!
        Out, Demons, Out!!!

        In the name of Dionysus Zagreus, Jesus, Iao Sabaoth, Mohammed,
        Yahwah the Unnameable, the Quintessential Finality,
        the Zoroastrian Fire, Buddha the All-Reaching, in the name
        of Hermes Trismegistos, in the name of the Beak of Thoth, in the name
        of the Restoration of the Eye of Horus, in the name of Peace Eye and the
        Universal Scarab, in the name of Ra and the Solar Boat, in the name of
        the Virgin Mary, Osiris, Joseph, the Supreme Archangels, Isis, the mouth
        of the Ouroboros

        We call upon the Spirits of Eternity
        to raise the White House
        from its foundations
        spin it around
        & cleanse it of Evil & Malevolent Demons

        We summon the Spirits of Benevolent Destiny
        to exorcise the White House
        of its violence, ill-will, and ill-intentions
        from now till the End of Time!
        in the name of Peace, Love & Economic Justice!
        in the name of Harmony among Nations on Earth

        (Ahh! here        of peace and harmony)

        3.

        Out Demons, out! Out Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out!

        Out Trump-Cabinet! Out! Out Trump-Demons, out!

        Attorney General! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
        CIA Director! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
        Head of the EPA, Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
        Secretary of Agriculture! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
        Health and Human Services! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
        Secretary of Housing & Urban Development! Demon-out Demon-out!
        Labor Secretary! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
        Treasury Secretary! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
        Secretary of State! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
        Interior Secretary! Oi oi oi oi! Aieee! Demon-out!

        Demon-out! Demon-out! Demon-out!

        O-u-t! Demons, O-u-t!

        4.

        (image of White House, it begins to spin and whirl,
        slowly, then faster. Demons begin to fly away as
        it whirls)

        Voices
        & Music: Whirl o White House Whirl
        Climb o White House climb
        Upward o White House Upward
        Up Up Up o White House Upward
        Whoosh! White House Whoosh!

        (white house spins and rises up)

        Out, Deeeeemoooon! Out, Deeeeeemooon!
        Out, Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
        In the name of the Most Sacred of Names,
        Out, Demons, out!
        Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!

So where was I? Oh yeah: In 2007, Lucy Mirando becomes CEO of the Mirando Corporation, succeeding her controversial grandfather, her father and her cruel twin sister Nancy. She announces that they have been breeding a special kind of superpig. Twenty-six of the best pigs will be sent to locations around the world, and ten years later, one will be crowned the winner. Now it’s ten years later. A young girl named Mija lives happily in the countryside of South Korea with her grandfather and her super pig, Okja. They are visited by Mirando spokesperson and zoologist Dr. Johnny Wilcox, who declares Okja the best super pig and announces they will take her to New York City. Mija’s grandfather takes her to visit the graves of her parents where he presents her with a gold pig and explains to her that rather than buy Okja, which was not allowed, he saved up the money for Okja and bought the solid gold item. Devastated, Mija runs away to Seoul to find Okja, where she sees her as she is being loaded onto a truck. Mija manages to chase down the truck which is eventually intercepted by another truck, run by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). In the resulting chaos Mija and Okja run away causing havoc though they are eventually saved by the ALF. Recognizing that Mija is Okja’s owner, they tell her that their plan is to put a recording device in Okja’s ear and let her be re-captured by the Mirando corporation to show how brutally they treat their animals. Mija tells them to return her to the mountains but their translator, K, deliberately lies, causing the group to believe Mija went along with their plan. They abandon her, and Okja is recaptured. Meanwhile, footage of Okja and Mija running through the streets of Seoul has gone viral. In order to do damage control, Lucy pays for Mija to come to New York to be reunited onstage with her pig. Okja is taken to the laboratory where she is forcibly bred with another super pig and bits of meat are extracted from her flesh for a taste test by a drunk Wilcox. Members of the ALF overhear the recording through the device they placed in Okja’s ear. Jay vows to help Okja and Mija and use the recording to expose the Mirando corporation’s animal abuse. In New York City, Mija spends her time learning bits of English and being forced to agree to the wishes of the Mirando corporation. Jay, the leader of ALF, slips into her room and tells her that they still plan to rescue Okja while on stage. A huge parade is put on by the Mirando Corporation who give out free meat in the street. Mija is reunited with Okja who, blinded and battered does not recognize her and attacks her. In the resulting chaos, Jay tries to hurt Okja, but Mija prevents him from doing so, calming Okja down so that she recognizes Mija. A video of Wilcox’s treatment of Okja is screened by the ALF to the public, who quickly turn on him and Lucy. Mija and the ALF attempt to escape with Okja, but Nancy arrives back and quickly takes over the Mirando Corporation, recapturing Okja and having the ALF members beaten and arrested. Escaping, Jay and K take Mija to find Okja in a mass killing plant. The group search for Okja but are unable to find her until Mija sees her going up the ramp to the slaughterhouse. In order to save Okja she runs through the killing plant and sees many dead super pigs. Mija sees Okja as she is about to be slaughtered and shows the Mirando employee a photograph of herself with a baby Okja. The man seems moved, but Nancy arrives and tells Mija and the man that Okja must be slaughtered. Mija offers the golden pig to Nancy in exchange for Okja’s life. Nancy agrees to the deal whilst subsequently arresting Jay and K. As Mija and Okja are leaving, they see many more pigs being led to slaughter. A pair of superpigs manages to push their newborn through the fence, and Okja hides it within her mouth to take it away. Back in the countryside, Mija resumes her life with her grandfather, Okja, and the new piglet. In a post-credits scene, Jay is released from prison and gets on board a bus with K and the other members of the organization, who reveals that ALF will be attending a major meeting involving all of the Mirando shareholders. Then, they all put on their masks again. Jay and K, huh? I remember them from J & K Productions, and from Men in Black. In any case, it was not a question I’d ever been asked. I certainly wasn’t expecting it. I did my best: talked about my fondness for the “catalytic clay” model, where tiny vacuoles in the clays around hydrothermal vents provided convenient sticky surfaces for the accumulation of the organic molecules that precipitated from this mineral-rich, energy-dense environment, concentrating and containing them so they could interact in biologically-significant ways even in the absence of cellular membranes. I mentioned the whole RNA-World thing, pointed out how certain brands of RNA could act both as catalysts for those reactions and as replicators in their own right. They smiled and nodded and spoke among themselves, jotting down my words on a yellow notepad. I thought it had gone pretty well until they’d departed, at which point Lubo told me that my answer had been translated as: “Magic crystals in the deep sea are awakened by energy.” Speaking of which, a trillion-ton bit of the Larsen C ice shelf broke free of Antarctica last night. “I love it,” said Trump Jr., in what some might think of as another context but which isn’t, really. I read somewhere that one of the dada sound poems (it wasn’t

        gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
        gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
        gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim
        gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban
        o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
        gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
        bluku terullala blaulala loooo)

was really about trees.

[Note: Sources: Sebastien Gobert, “Looking for Lenin”, at Neils Ackermann; Kim Kelly, “Decapitating Lenin Statues Is the Hottest New Trend in Ukraine”, at Vice, 25 May 017; JBR; Niels Ackermann, “« ALLO, HUARAZ? »”, at Neils Ackermann; MOAS, “July Operational Update”, email rec’d 6 Jul 017, approx.. 7:50am PDT; Albert Saijo, “Pioneer Plants”, in Woodrat Flat; Michelle Segre, quoted in Michael Amy, “The Dance and Beauty of Failure: A Conversation with Michelle Segre”, at Academia.edu; Aaron Swartz, Taryn Simon, and some crowd participation, quoted in “Aaron Swartz & Taryn Simon in conversation New Museum of Contemporary          Art, Rhizome Seven on Seven Conference, April 14, 2012”, at Taryn Simon; Salman Rushdie, quoting Taryn Simon, in Rushdie’s foreword to Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, at Taryn Simon; SJ Fowler, The Guide to Being Bear Aware, at Shearsman Books; JBR; SJ Fowler, The Guide to Being Bear Aware, at Shearsman Books; JBR; SJ Fowler, The Guide to Being Bear Aware, at Shearsman Books; Rudolph Wurlitzer, Nog, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Rudy Wurlitzer Nog (1969)”, at DC’s, 7 Jul 017; Daniel Baumann, “That Black Hole”, at Taryn Simon; JBR (hommage à Omo Bob); Brigid Brophy, In Transit, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Brigid Brophy In Transit (1969)”, at DC’s, 4 Jul 017; Sean Bonney, “Landscape with Burning Truck”, at Abandoned Buildings, 6 Jul 017; Daniela Galarza, “The Bone Broth Trend Isn’t Going Anywhere: Here’s What You Need to Know”, at Eater, 12 Feb 015; Kristin Bock, “Dear Diary”, “The Killing Show”, at Entropy, 3 Jul 017; JBR; Clark Coolidge, and Jake Marmer, quoted in Marmer’s “Mind Music: Reading Clark Coolidge”, at Hyperallergic, 1(?) Jul 017; Megan N Liberty and Sally Alatalo, quoted in Liberty’s “The Chopped-Up Novels and Appropriation Poetry of an Artist and Bookmaker”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Jun 017; Susan Howe, Debths; Chris Marker, La Jetée: ciné-roman, at Markertext; JBR; Chris Marker, “The Last Bolshevik”, at Chris Marker; JBR; Nathaniel Mackey, “Dear Angel of Dust”, at Detroit Metro Times, 17 May 000; JBR; Sara L. Schwebel, “Variants and Errors in Old Editions of Island of the Blue Dolphins”, at University of California Press Blog, 15 Jun 017; Heather Nagami, “Unnecessary Roughness by Shin Yu Pai”, at Galatea Resurrects 1; Thomas Fink and Brent Cunningham, quoted in Fink’s “Bird & Forest by Brent Cunningham”, at Galatea Resurrects 1; JBR; Andrea Baker, like the wind loves a window, quoted in Jennifer Bartlett, “like the wind loves a window by Andrea Baker”, at Galatea Resurrects 1; JBR; Anna Moschovakis, quoted in Craig Santos Perez, “I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone by Anna Moschovakis”, at Galatea Resurrects 4; JBR; Sam Lohmann, “ELAINE EQUI’S GREENS, A CENTO”, in his “Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi”, at Galatea Resurrects 8; Jennifer Bartlett, “The Yellow One”, quoted in Patrick James Dunagan, “Derivative of the Moving Image by Jennifer Bartlett (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2007) and The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations by Brenda Coultas (Coffeehouse, Minneapolis, 2007) and BEAUTY [IS THE NEW ABSURDITY] by Jennifer Scappettone (Dusie, 2007) and Dog Girl by Heidi Lynn Staples (Ahsahta, Boise, 2007)”, at Galatea Resurrects 10; JBR; Robert Johnson “Walkin’ Blues”; JBR; Joe Milazzo, and Joyelle McSweeney, quoted in Milazzo’s “The posthuman humane: On James Pate’s ‘Flowers Among the Carrion’”, at Jacket2, 6 Jul 017; Daniel Borzutsky, quoted in Craig Santos Perez, “Talking with Daniel Borzutsky”, at Jacket2, 21 May 011; Lisa Blackman, “‘Loving the alien’: a post–post-human manifesto”, at Subjectivity 10; JBR; Noor Bhangu “By Ayqa Khan with an essay by Noor Bhangu”, at Nat. Brut, 7(?) Jun 017; Allan A. Schoenherr, A Natural History of California (Second Edition), at UC Press; Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, at UC Presss; Rick, in Casablanca; Dmytro Korkh, of Packing Bees, personal communication, 11 Jul 017; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “7.11”, at Temporality, 11 Jul 017; Jenny Lawson, “Not arrested. Twice.”, at The Bloggess, 10 Jul 017; JBR; Jason Read, “The Golden Pig: Okja and the limits of Satire”, at Unemployed Negativity, 4 Jul 017; JBR; The Fugs (Ed Sanders, Scott Petito, Steve Taylor and Coby Batty), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “The Fugs— Exorcism of the White House (May 30, 2017)”, at Poems and Poetics, 29 Jun 017; JBR; “Okja”, at Wikipedia; JBR; Peter Watts, “The 600”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 11 Jul 017; JBR; Hugo Ball, “Gadji beri bimba”, quoted in “Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch?”, at British Library European Studies Blog, 16 Feb 016; JBR]

With the Noose Around My Neck 60

        In the middle of the devil’s curse
        Is the sky falling down?
        A horse runs through the basement and the world has become dark
        The number of dead
        The number of missing people is increasing only
        At that time the sky will fall off
        To eerie smoke
        To the ghost body of radiation
        Wu peach space earth pupil pupil blink
        Then countless boats jump in, they jump in
        Without 3.11, I would have never seen a lonely cross section
        And up
        The world robs the world
        I wonder what “absolutely” is
        Absolutely there is absolutely no thing that there is never absolutely no
                thing that there is never absolutely nothing absolutely never that
                there is never absolutely that there is never ...
        The earth is a big river Ocean Omnism
        What?
        Let’s ship the ship and paddle the poem
        Let’s live a new poem to live a new poem
        Short but intense
                History of the earthquake
                Many tears
                Stalls of the earthquake
                Angry sorrow
                Darkness light
        At the bottom of the dark night valley
        Let’s hear the leaves of the leaves
        What did you see with this earthquake?
        Awesome radioactivity
        Did you see the crying cow crying person who cries?
        His moment of crying and crying for a cow he raised
        The man crying and nestling his cheek on his cherished cow
        Did you stare at the sandbox without anyone to play with?
        He caught crying for a cow, cried him, cried him, the wind and the
                earth he was friendly to
        Whether it can be regained, four queen poet, five poet poet, six
                sentence poet ...
        To rain the rainbow
        So that the earth is becoming round
        And an infinite number of boots will come flying in
        And pulling up the roots, the world steals the world
        Negated by the certainty that ... negated by the certainty that ... negated
                by the certainty that ... negated by the certainty that ...
                negated by the certainty that ...
        What?
        The spirit mutators words
        Halfway across, the dolphin science teachers
        Felt the original drone had lost weight. Somehow
        There was a mistake back there in the first click
        Moth them like helicopters on fire and go dappling down
        Doink is frabba jabba, but in a decayed state of HEIGH HO!
        Foinked by Life?
        I’m twilighted cared for, yes, and it’s <doink> — <doink> — <doink>
                foinky and <doink> state regulated

After five billion years of trawling for possible life forms in the supra-dimensional “realities,” she falls asleep (“asleep”? yes!). This being the indispensable bonding moment with which all discernible organic matter can take form. Midway thru this cosmic doze, she wakes up unable to go back to sleep. She punches out an enormous black hole next to two quasars and teases out a small dark energy vacuum filled with fresh nothingness. She takes a couple of deep hits. Once she feels it (the fresh nothingness) coming on, she transports her oldest, original light to the edge of the expansion horizon, and from the inner core of a lone, red giant collapsing star, gathers all its deuterium. She transports it (or, rather quantum entangles it) to a spacious quadrant that’s rich in anti-matter, and for five one-millionths of a second, indulges in bright matter recombinatory excess, erm, how to inform you that your fetus is into providing weapons to other fetuses at select places around the world. It picked up the taste for this trade two months ago while you were all on vacation in Florida. That “nice fetus from Oregon” who taught your fetus how to properly synthesize proteins in macrophage cell membranes, remember? By the fourth day they were filling invoices for M1A2 Abrams tanks. So try to figure out what it is like to plode. This new music, spun out of the general matter-of-fact disaster, is new social logic: jbu jbu ... jbu jbu: EXPLOSION ROCKS SPRINGFIELD. While the initial infection vector is unclear, Petya likely attempts to spread to other hosts using the SMB protocol by exploiting the ETERNALBLUE vulnerability (CVE-2017-0144) on Microsoft Windows systems. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed by the Shadow Brokers group in April 2017. Once a successful infection has occurred, the malware encrypts users’ systems and prompts demand a $300 payment to return access. For detailed analysis on the Petya attack playbook, please see our blog from the Unit 42 threat research team. I mean, it rained for 48 hours straight in New York this week and, stuck inside with two kids and no childcare, we watched the movie Paddington approximately 108 times. There is nothing I can’t tell you about this film, from the fact that the first exterior shot of Paddington station is, clearly, Marylebone, to the insanity of its timeline. (Briefly: the film is set in present-day London, but Paddington’s aunt and uncle were discovered in Peru by an Edwardian explorer, whose 10-year-old daughter grows up to be Paddington’s arch-enemy. By rights, she should be about 117, but is instead played by Nicole Kidman as a sexy evil lady of not even 50.) Why does no one have mobile phones? Why does the Trellick Tower loom so large in the landscape? At A-level, we were made to read King Lear on a continuous loop for two years until the two funniest lines became: “out, vile jelly!” and “Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” I can say with some confidence that the two funniest lines in Paddington are, “Your call is moderately important to us” and “It’s more a set of guidelines than a binding ethos.” This is why Sloterdijk is at pains to show us the need for imaginative participation from the start, on the threshold of the first volume (BUBBLES) with his meditation on the apocryphal image of the invocation “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here” inscribed, according to tradition, over the entrance to Plato’s Academy, and his replacement of this requirement with the less élitist maxim:

        let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute solitude.

And this is why I started working on an LP to explore these ideas, approaching the process like field recording — not suppressing any “extraneous” sounds, whether involuntary vocalizations I might make while I played or the noise coming in from the street outside my Mission District apartment — just letting things happen. I was inspired by Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, Derek Bailey's “domestic” home-recorded CDs, certain Folkways releases, and the recordings of Alan Lomax, the intensity and obsessiveness of Cecil Taylor and Charlemagne Palestine, the solo guitar music of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Carlos Montoya, the writing of Christopher Knowles and Gertrude Stein, and especially videos by a small community of neurodivergent YouTubers self-documenting the way they experienced and interacted with the world.

            [...]

            Thanks, folks! This week, we look at Minimalism.

                        How about that fuckin’ Minimalism, huh? [...]

            I mean ...                     take a look at the Goddam exquisite

            placement of limbs, by             Kazuo Ohno

                                                            in his prime — you know ...Japanese Dance Of

            Death! Fuckin’ delicate balance of

                                                                        negative and positive space [...]

                        Or the noise in Van Gogh’s earless sunflowers — ca

tchin the breeze like a Jersey trucker layin’ out

            on the I91.

                            Flat out        subtle as shit. Now lookit

            that guy who cuts up cows and [...]

                        Just thinkin’ about it gives me hope! Like a      little

            daisy poppin’ thru dirt rectifying          the       millennium stench. O

   r a kitty kat in the

            sun, an entire civilization of

            modern communication, right there! [...]         

            qqqq                the sound of Pig crying along with a crow perched on its head

            qqqq               

Furthermore, the rat and the railing in the subway tunnel rhyme with the rat and the railing in the house where Laura is held (and is not held) a prisoner. The house, or its fictional image, rhymes with the blown-up picture of that house on a huge advertisement — on which the representation of a door turns out to be a real door through which people walk and through whose keyhole the locksmith peeks. And so on. Then there is a gap, a blank space, a pause of indeterminate length during which nothing happens, not even the anticipation of what will come next. And suddenly the action resumes, without warning, and the same scene occurs again ... But which scene? I am closing the door behind me, a heavy wooden door with a tiny oblong window near the top, its pane protected by a cast-iron grille (clumsily imitating wrought iron) which almost entirely covers it. The interlacing spirals, thickened by successive layers of black paint, are so close together, and there is so little light from the other side of the door, that nothing can be seen of what might or might not be inside. And now there has just appeared a “cat” somewhere in the sentence: a deaf man and a cat. The deaf man, I’m convinced, is the trumpet player at “Old Joe’s.”

            What is need?

            What is comfort?

            What does perdepistatiplode [“to simultaneously implode and explode (barest

            act of plode”] achieve, precisely?

            It is fun to type with eyes dilated.

A YouTube video can devastate the psyche; you can eat a whole stick of butter without realizing; carefully curated collage material can be mistaken for an envelope of trash. Like, I just stood in my room, smelling the cat piss carpet, pulling at my hair absentmindedly, probably just having a seizure while eating a stick of butter.

            What is “doink”, precisely?

            Croink. Wherefrom Foink?

            Why doink in croinky foinkiness?

            How goes PSHSHSHSHSHSHSH in there?

                        A twitter running down the spine of ...
                        Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.)

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

                         are you sure yr a person
                         you look more like an artichoke

                         xe had me weigh platinum in my palm
                         I was like got weed

                         xanadu politico frijolillo myn eye
                         (trolly lolly)

                         as one eagle scout to another
                         -------------------------------

here are plans for a Transparency Grenade, a Device for The Emancipation of the Landscape and an Improvised Empathetic Device, which I got from a manual subtitled “how to punch Nazis in the face, minus the punching.” Then we were all given the same premise:  Flight ANA0008 en route to San Francisco passes through a timespace distortion over the Pacific Ocean and ends up in 2037. As you can see by this imaginary illustration, they’re not exactly skimping on the production values (although one might wonder why the flight crew wouldn’t just steer around any giant cosmic bagel that reared up in their path ...). Once again, I asked Kathryn if she had perhaps mixed me up with someone else. She insisted that I had an appropriate sense of humor for the job. I said “well, if weaponised Ebola” ... “Wait a second. Everyone had a brain interface when the flare hit? On the whole planet?” “Well, no,” Tami admits. “Lots of people didn’t.” “But none were Americans,” George says. It takes Malika a moment to process this. “So you’re saying every single American had a brain interface in 2032.” A moment’s silence. “It was kind of a law,” Tami says at last. “War on Terror,” George adds. “You remember.” “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.” “Saves a lot of time.” “Plus, you know. Pedophiles.” “Think of the children.” They trail off ... Did I tell you I was diagnosed with ptosis?

        Nobody else knows I’m a super hero.

        The rest all think I’m crazy

                but at night I fly
                even though I’m
                still bad at it
                and crash into the sidewalk.

        By day
        I wash the cars
        that carry today’s kings.

        After dark
            I don’t know who
        flicks the switch
        on my electric roses.

But after Kenneth Goldsmith chose to play with Mike Brown’s corpse’s junk and heard about it and heard about it and we all heard about it, why did Derek Beaulieu choose to erase the voice of Ondine? That’s what’s known as an almost-rhetorical question. Almost. Did I tell you I was also diagnosed with hyperopia? Which is to say that as much as there is appetite for lyrics about the state of affairs in Chez Knowles-Carter, there’s music to be considered as well. Sonically, 4:44 is a conservative affair, No ID opting for recognisable samples (Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sister Nancy’s much-used Bam Bam).

        Bam bam, ey, what a bam bam
        Bam bam dilla, bam bam
        Bam bam dilla, bam bam
        ‘ey what a bam bam, seh what a bam bam

Scarborough, a former Florida Republican congressman, said: “We got a call: ‘Hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and Donald is friends with … the president is friends with the guy that runs National Enquirer.’ And they said: ‘If you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story.’” He added: “I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me. The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like: ‘Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.’” Scarborough said he declined to do so, and the story ran. Brzezinski also alleged that as part of the National Enquirer’s reporting, her teenage daughters were harassed with frequent phone calls. In a tweet on Friday morning, Trump fired back, and alleged that Scarborough had called him about the negative article. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” wrote the president of the United States. Isn’t this as much as to say, with Rosa Alcalá and Joe Brainard,

        I never had use
        in Spanish for the word
        barn
        and then
        “I woke up and a horse
        was staring at me”???

But in the end, what remains mindblowing on the nth listen is the Wright keyboard work about 2/3 of the way through “Dogs.” That piercing solo intermixed with the word “stone” vocoding into the muffled groan of the post-Hadean slime, while dogs bark as if rippling in water on either side of the stereo image. Which is geographically, psychologically and aesthetically pretty accurate as far as it goes. I grew up where prehistoric ferns grew among railway tracks surmounted by arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night. A couple of miles, give or take, from Battersea Power Station. But answer me this: what was the name of the pig?

        Bloom, Pig!
        Fly, Pig!

        Boars come and tear into the pigs
        A flock of eagles comes and tears into the pigs

        Night of internal organs raining down from the sky! 
        Night of flashing decapitated pigs! 
        Fearful night, unable to discard Pig even if I die and die again!
        Night filled with pig squeals from all over!

        Night of screams, I’m Pig! Pig!

        Night when pigs bloom dangling-dangling from the pig-tree

                        [Inside the grave, stomachs fill with broth, broth and gas]

        What good is a nature poem anyway?

        “It seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty
        which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given
        human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about
        colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny.”

Which is why, at his trial Chen Yunfei said: “I’ve been tormented for two years now, to the point that I’ve started to feel like the Monkey King trapped in the searing flames of Lao Zi’s crucible — exceedingly comfortable. The persecution, the beatings, the shackling, have all turned into mathematical problems for me to solve. The harder they get, the more interesting it is, the more meaningful it feels to unravel them.” Like

“Whoever writes the code creates the value.”

“That isn’t even close to true.”

“Yes it is. Value resides in life, and life is coded, like with DNA.”

“So bacteria have values?”

“Sure. All life wants things and goes after them. Viruses, bacteria, all the way up to us.”

“Which by the way it’s your turn to clean the toilet.”

“I know. Life means death.”

“So, today?”

“Some today. Back to my point. We write code. And without our code, there’s no computers, no finance, no banks, no money, no exchange value, no value.”

“All but that last, I see what you mean. But so what?”

“Did you read the news today?”

“Of course not.”

“You should. It’s bad. We’re getting eaten.”

“That’s always true. It’s like what you said, life means death.”

“But more than ever. It’s getting too much. They’re down to the bone.”

“This I know. It’s why we live in a tent on a roof.”

“Right, and now people are even worried about food.”

“As they should. That’s the real value, food in your belly. Because you can’t eat money.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“I thought you said the real value was code. Something a coder would say, may I point out.”

“Mutt, hang with me. Follow what I’m saying. We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.”

“Okay, I get that. We’re broke and I get that.”

“So good, keep hanging with me. We live by buying things with money, in a market that sets all the prices.”

“The invisible hand.”

“Right. Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It’s crowdsourced, it’s democratic, it’s capitalism, it’s the market.”

“It’s the way of the world.”

“Right. And it’s always, always wrong.”

“What do you mean wrong?”

“The prices are always too low, and so the world is fucked. We’re in a mass extinction event, sea level rise, climate change, food panics, everything you’re not reading in the news.”

“All because of the market.”

“Exactly! It’s not just that there are market failures. It’s that the market is a failure.”

“How so?”

“Things are sold for less than it costs to make them.”

“That sounds like the road to bankruptcy.”

“Yes, and lots of businesses do go bankrupt. But the ones that don’t haven’t actually sold their thing for more than it cost to make. They’ve just ignored some of their costs. They’re under huge pressure to sell as low as they can, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever it is. So they shove some of their production costs off their books.”

“Can’t they just pay their labor less?”

“They already did that! That was easy. That’s why we’re all broke except the plutocrats.”

“I always see the Disney dog when you say that.”

“They’ve squeezed us till we’re bleeding from the eyes. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Blood from a stone. Sir Plutocrat, chewing on a bone.”

“Chewing on my head! But now we’re chewed up. We’re squoze dry. We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.”

“But they got a cheap TV out of it.”

“Right, so they can watch something interesting as they sit there broke.”

“Except there’s nothing interesting on.”

“Well, but this is the least of their problems! I mean actually you can usually find something interesting.”

“Please, I beg to differ. We’ve seen everything a million times.”

“Everyone has. I’m just saying the boredom of bad TV is not the biggest of our worries. Mass extinction, hunger, wrecking kids’ lives, these are bigger worries. And it just keeps getting worse. People are suffering more and more. My head is going to explode the way things are going, I swear to God.”

“You’re just upset because we got evicted and are living in a tent on a roof.”

“That’s just part of it! A little part of a big thing.”

“Okay, granted. So what?”

“So look, the problem is capitalism. We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws.”

“Say I grant that too, which maybe I do. So what can we do?”

“It’s a set of laws! And it’s global! It extends all over the Earth, there’s no escaping it, we’re all in it, and no matter what you do, the system rules!”

“I’m not seeing the what‑we‑can‑do part.”

“Think about it! The laws are codes! And they exist in computers and in the cloud. There are sixteen laws running the whole world!”

“To me that seems too few. Too few or too many.”

“No. They’re articulated, of course, but it comes down to sixteen basic laws. I’ve done the analysis.”

“As always. But it’s still too many. You never hear about sixteen of anything. There are the eight noble truths, the two evil stepsisters. Maybe twelve at most, like recovery steps, or apostles, but usually it’s single digits.”

“Quit that. It’s sixteen laws, distributed between the World Trade Organization and the G20. Financial transactions, currency exchange, trade law, corporate law, tax law. Everywhere the same.”

“I’m still thinking that sixteen is either too few or too many.”

“Sixteen I’m telling you, and they’re encoded, and each can be changed by changing the codes. Look what I’m saying: you change those sixteen, you’re like turning a key in a big lock. The key turns, and the system goes from bad to good. It helps people, it requires the cleanest techs, it restores landscapes, the extinctions stop. It’s global, so defectors can’t get outside it. Bad money gets turned to dust, bad actions likewise. No one could cheat. It would make people be good.”

“Please Jeff? You’re sounding scary.”

“I’m just saying! Besides, what’s scarier than right now?”

“Change? I don’t know.”

“Why should change be scary? You can’t even read the news, right? Because it’s too fucking scary?”

“Well, and I don’t have the time.”

Jeff laughs till he puts his forehead on the table. Mutt laughs too, to see his friend so amused. But the mirth is very localized. They are partners, they amuse each other, they work long hours writing code for high-frequency trading computers uptown. Now some reversals have them on this night living in a hotello on the open-walled farm floor of the old Met Life tower, from which vantage point lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town.

Jeff says, “So look, we know how to get into these systems, we know how to write code, we are the best coders in the world.”

“Or at least in this building.”

“No come on, the world! And I’ve already gotten us in to where we need to go.”

“Say what?”

“Check it out. I built us some covert channels during that gig we did for my cousin. We’re in there, and I’ve got the replacement codes ready. Sixteen revisions to those financial laws, plus a kicker for my cousin’s ass. Let the SEC know what he’s up to, and also fund the SEC to investigate that shit. I’ve got a subliminal shunt set up that will tap some alpha and move it right to the SEC’s account.”

“Now you really are scaring me.”

“Well sure, but look, check it out. See what you think.”

Mutt moves his lips when he reads. He’s not saying the words silently to himself, he’s doing a kind of Nero Wolfe stimulation of his brain. It’s his favorite neurobics exercise, of which he has many. Now he begins to massage his lips with his fingers as he reads, indicating deep worry.

“Well, yeah,” he says after about ten minutes of reading. “I see what you’ve got here. I like it, I guess. Most of it. That old Ken Thompson Trojan horse always works, doesn’t it. Like a law of logic. So, could be fun. Almost sure to be amusing.”

Jeff nods. He taps the return key. His new set of codes goes out into the world.

They leave their hotello and stand at the railing of their building’s farm, looking south over the drowned city, taking in the whitmanwonder of it. O Mannahatta! Lights squiggle off the black water everywhere below them. Downtown a few lit skyscrapers illuminate darker towers, giving them a geological sheen. It’s weird, beautiful, spooky.

There’s a ping from inside their hotello, and they push through the flap into the big square tent. Jeff reads his computer screen.

“Ah shit,” he says. “They spotted us.”

They regard the screen.

“Shit indeed,” Mutt says. “How could they have?”

“I don’t know, but it means I was right!”

“Is that good?”

“It might even have worked!”

“You think?”

“No.” Jeff frowns. “I don’t know.”

“They can always recode what you did, that’s the thing. Once they see it.”

“So do you think we should run for it?”

“To where?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like you said before,” Mutt points out. “It’s a global system.”

“Yeah but this is a big city! Lots of nooks and crannies, lots of dark pools, the underwater economy and all. We could dive in and disappear.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. We could try.”

Then the farm floor’s big service elevator door opens. Mutt and Jeff regard each other. Jeff thumbs toward the staircases. Mutt nods. They slip out under the tent wall. I do not weigh 577lb anymore. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. There was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That’s not really his name. I was 12 when I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned cabin in the woods where no one but those boys could hear me scream. I don’t remember their names. They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men. I remember their smells, the squareness of their faces, the weight of their bodies, the tangy smell of their sweat, the surprising strength in their limbs. I remember that they laughed a lot. I remember that they had nothing but disdain for me. When it was all over, I pushed my bike home and I pretended to be the daughter my parents knew, the straight-A student. My memories of the after are scattered, but I remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body could become so big it would never be broken again. But now I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. When it’s hot, I sweat profusely. My shirt gets damp. There are things I want to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so ...

        Bam bam, ey, what a bam bam
        Bam bam dilla, bam bam
        Bam bam dilla, bam bam
        ‘ey what a bam bam, seh what a bam bam

And at the bottom of the ocean, a GIANT BRAIN, built with several bowed metal rulers, spring reverbs, a few long metal rods, and other attachments that allow two people with covered lanterns to stand on the brow of adjacent foothills. Watch them walking forward from folklore carrying tilted umbrellas. Faint whispers. Galaxy clusters. Telescopes also need to be tilted a little. Calendar songs, family trees, broken branches, love songs, songs of captives, songs of robbers, songs around the campfire. Chocorua is the highest mountain peak in New Hampshire. When Chief Chocorua leapt from its rocky summit to his death on the rocks below, war was in his heart. He put a curse on the land. “Last night at the end of night his starry head, / Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness.” “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” is one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems. Let’s face things exactly as they are. He led a double life as a successful Surety and Fidelity Claims lawyer. Speaking of the practice of law in relation to writing and second sight, Peter Rugg, the Missing Man is the first of “two tall tales” written by William Austin (1778–1841), a Massachusetts attorney. Austin presents its source as an old New England legend. An absent husband responsible for his own mysterious ruin is condemned to wander with his small daughter in a one-horse chair perpetually searching for Boston. In one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lesser stories, “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” Rugg crops up with Peter Schlemihl’s lost shadow and a famed New Hampshire gemstone. The precious jewel, said to sparkle (like a meteor) called for another Hawthorne story, “The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains,” this time inspired by an Amerindian fable from Saco, Maine: a manic Ruggian seeker wanders among mountains searching for the marvelous stone until forever. In the fall of 1889, then, Leonora Piper, the famous Boston medium, spent a week with William James and his wife at their house at Chocorua for discussions concerning various aspects of trance-phenomena including her trance-talk with “Phinuit” “a former native of this world.” One afternoon they took a break from work and went fishing. Mrs. Piper caught the largest bass ever recorded in the lake. There. Messages flow through clear lake water and yes, gravity pulls matter together to form a cosmic web. Even if this looks like the end of my Picnic at Lake Armington story, the three of us are strung together like beads on a necklace. My fingers are too arthritic to work the little clasp. Do you think Socrates and Ondine are, in some sense, the same person? Our fathermother, who art in heaven, ended up spending a quarter of his monthly salary on an electronic dictionary, we buried our fathermother too many times, each time we went deeper, hir face went colder, and the signal weaker. Our motherfather, who art in heaven, ended up spending a quarter of hir life covering her black skull, burned legs and scars — so now I cook ramen through the ocean,

        I dream of my babies becoming Marco Rubio and Obamacare
        I spent two weeks in the Borneo rainforest
        I spent a week with the family in Prague
        At Pt Lobos, trying to get a better view of a starfish, I fell on the rocks
        In 1998 I had a great idea: franchise a band

Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were — Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore — and perform the material — and they would be the band. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance — surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band — and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. Similarly, it may be interesting to watch films that Whedon acted as screenwriter for, many of which are not very good, to try to discern his ‘stamp.’ In Alien: Resurrection (1997), for example, one immediately has the sense that there is a sense of team similar to that in all of Whedon’s productions. AR, for instance, features a group trying to escape the aliens together, whereas in previous installments of the series the escapes tended not to be so team oriented. Though a few of the characters in AR are picked-off, most are not. In Toy Story, which Whedon co-wrote, I wonder if the cyborg (or mutant? I’m not sure what to call them) toys, who help Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear escape from their sadistic, adolescent captor, were his contribution. The cyborg toys present a kind of shadow team, in contrast to the toys of the house next door, who have not had their body parts recombined into novel arrangements. That the mutant toys signify non-normative genders through their body parts, such as the fishing rod with Barbie doll legs, also seems to me a possible sign of his touch. As for Much Ado About Nothing, one slowly realizes that most of the cast had worked with Whedon before; Acker and Denisof on Angel; Denisof, Lenk and Lindhome on Buffy; Fillion and Maher on Firefly; Acker, Denisof, Diamond, Kranz and Johnson on Dollhouse; Gregg, Denisof, Rosemont and Johnson in The Avengers. You also start to think about what it means for a director to make a film in their home (the film was shot over a period of twelve days in Whedon’s family’s house in Santa Monica, California). This is his team, then, and the drama that they enact, as in all comedies, is about how to bring certain people into a happier or more productive [there’s got to be a better word] relation. So yes, the earth in Volcano is damp, soft, porous, built as it is on old lava fields. One side of the old steam house had started to sink. It’s crumbly ground, composed of dead ferns, o’hia leaves, koa and o’hia trees, and other organic matter, with a layer of moss on stones and tree trunks. The land is incredibly fragile. For a couple days I heard, through the screen of rain and bird song, a loud mechanical noise from about half a mile away. I walked to it, finding a large bulldozer clearing a lot of all vegetation, leaving only the dark brown mud. A couple lots further down the road, another lot was clear, except for chopped off trees standing like the warriors of Xian. Downtown Volcano, if there is one, features a huge new strip mall, with Thai restaurant, hardware store, and a “lodge” ... which I imagine is a fancy name for motel. Speaking of Albert Saijo, his group reading in Honolulu with Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki was an unrepeated event. There’s a grainy video of his trip to Los Angeles to meet with a class and discourse to the birds in Echo Park. The more people who do it, the better it works. Although putting a mask on in public on a regular basis is impractical, physically anonymizing yourself in public spaces should become commonsense for navigating contentious political events. So we’ve culled the faces from 130 executives at leading biometric corporations around the world and transformed them into masks for you to print out and wear. Since they’ve chosen to profit by face-snatching the rest of us, we figured that we would resist by doing the same in reverse. This isn’t to say that donning one of these masks isn’t without risk. Aiding the growing use of biometric technology is the increasing criminalization of disguise at political demonstrations: Prosecutors in the cases against inauguration day protesters in Washington, DC, are using the alleged facts that people wore masks and matching black clothing as evidence of criminal intent. Several states either have or are actively attempting to pass laws against masks. Which is to say [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money [squawk] money-money money [squawk] money-money. Which is to say, “Pieces of eight — pieces of eight, um who’s shoulder am I sitting on?”

[Note: Sources: Ryoichi Wago, “Horizon Over the Sea, Horizon Over the Land” (trs. Google, Koichiro Yamauchi and Steve Redford), at Versoteque, 2017; Ian Heames, Sonnets (May 017); Rodrigo Toscano, “So you’re saying”, “Are you doubly sure you want to perdipstatiplode?”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; Rodrigo Toscano, “La Creadora”, in Deck of Deeds; JBR; Rodrigo Toscano, “El Commerciante”, in Deck of Deeds; JBR; Fred Moten, back cover blurb for Rodrigo Toscano, Explosion Rocks Springfield; JBR; Fred Moten, back cover blurb for Rodrigo Toscano, Explosion Rocks Springfield; Scott Simkin, “Palo Alto Networks Protections for Petya Ransomware”, at Palo Alto Networks, 27 Jun 017; JBR; Emma Brockes, “I’ve seen the light – Paddington Bear as the one true way”, at The Guardian, 1 Dec 016; JBR; Terence Blake, “IMAGINE SPHERES: Sloterdijk’s refutation of solitude”, at Agent Swarm, 28 Jun 017; JBR; Bill Orcutt, “Field Recording”, at BOMB, 27 Jun 017; Edwin Torres, “‘What the Fuck Was That?’ A Look at Contemporary Culture with Dom Rizzo”, in The Popedology of an Ambient Language; Kim Hyesoon, “Pig Pigs Out” (tr. Don Mee Choi), in Currently & Emotion: Translations (ed. Sophie Collins); anon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, A Project for a Revolution in New York (tr. Richard Howard), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Alain Robbe-Grillet Project for a Revolution in New York (1970)”, at DC’s, 26 Jun 017; Rodigo Toscano, “The Saturday Morning Gas Explosion in Manhattan”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; JBR; blurb for Tati Luboviski-Acosta, PDF, at Solar Luxuriance; Tati Luboviski-Acosta, PDF, at Solar Luxuriance; Rodrigo Toscano, “What is leveling to s bit of stability?”, in Explosion Rocks Springfield; Ana Božičević, “God is President, She’s the Rose of the World”, at Poetry Foundation; Julian Talamantez Brolaski, “rules for bones”, “a bee’s feather”, in Of Mongrelitude, at SPD; Jussi Parikka, “On Disobedient Electronics”, at Machinology (a kind of shout-out for “Garnet Hertz’s new critical design zine Disobedient Electronics”); JBR; Peter Watts, “Promises, Promises”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 29 Jun 017; JBR; Javier Taboada, “Juanito” (tr. Jack Little), quoted in “From Mexico | Apothecary Poems & Interview: Javier Taboada — Dylan Brennan”, at Numéro Cinq, vol.VII no.1; JBR (re Beaulieu’s erasure of Andy Warhol, a, A Novel, just published by Jean Boîte Éditions); Andrew Emery, “Jay-Z: 4:44 review – a bracingly honest but conservative confessional”, at The Guardian, 30 Jun 017; Sister Nancy, “Bam Bam”; Ben Jacobs, “Morning Joe co-hosts accuse White House of blackmail over tabloid story”, at The Guardian, 30 Jun 017; JBR; Rosa Alcalá, “Heritage Speaker”, at Boston Review, 22 Apr 015; Tim Morton, “I Just Submitted This Review of Pink Floyd’s Animals to iTunes”, at Ecology without Nature, 30 Jun 017; JBR (Algie was the name of the balloon pig on the cover of Animals); Kim Hyesoon, “Bloom, Pig!” (tr. Don Mee Choi), in “from ‘I’m OK, I’m Pig!’ in SORROWTOOTH MIRRORCREAM”, at ActionYes 18; Patrick Abatiell, and Tommy Pico, Nature Poem, quoted in “ON OUR NIGHTSTANDS: JUNE 2017”, at Public Books, 30 Jun 017; JBR; “July Featured Case: Chen Yunfei”, at PEN America, 30 Jun 017; JBR; Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140, at Orbit Books; Roxane Gay, “Roxane Gay: ‘My body is a cage of my own making’”, at The Guardian, 1 Jul 017; JBR; Sister Nancy, “Bam Bam”; JBR; Brandon Shimoda, blurb for Jackie Wang, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming, quoted in Jackie Wang, “blurbs to dream by”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 30 Jun 017; Kate Sierzputowski, “The Apprehension Engine: An Instrument Designed to Play the Music of Nightmares”, at Colossal, 26 Jun 017; Susan Howe, “From the Foreword to Debths”, at The Paris Review, 27 Jun 017; JBR; Chia Lun-Chang, “We’re Your Parents”, quoted in PEN America, “PEN Poetry Series: ‘We’re Your Parents’ by Chia Lun-Chang”, email rec’d 2 Jul 017, approx. 7:01am PDT;John Armstrong, email rec’d 2 Jul 017, approx. 3:05am PDT; Alan Baker, various emails; JBR; Paul Grimstad, “In Stargoon’s Car”, at The Paris Review, 29 Jun 017; Thom Donovan, “from Buffy’s Two Bodies” (deleted post); JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Toward a talk on Albert Saijo”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 21 Jun 017; “You Can Encrypt Your Face”, at The New Inquiry, 21 Jun 017; JBR; M John Harrison, “transcript of an interview”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 17 Jul 017; JBR; Mike Shanahan, comment appended to M John Harrison, “transcript of an interview”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 17 Jul 017]