A friend commented dryly that this amounts to a kind of Polyphonic Spree for philosophy. I'm not sure that’s the right characterization, maybe a better name would be the “Red Bull sublime.” There’s certainly that intoxicating sense of intensity to the thing. I mean, I love joy and affirmation as much as the next person. Take a section from Set 2 for example:
hello, o burnt frequency
where my eyes were
without a city wall
I have been designing
a new geography etc
clean & troubled, like
a baby’s cry –
etc
etc
get up now, dead man
where ‘D is the movement by which “one” leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight.’ Another way of describing it is that I had been waiting for an unexpected sound — a different graphism — and that this sound had finally arrived, that I would pay anything for it. That remains the case. What I mean by language is itself different, not the language you think — language, you could say, is not what you think — we’re talking about a kind of verbal neon installed a priori, laying it on thick with fresh concepts, a formalised AI, a type of painting extinction and not death (which I’m coming to), jagged breath; global breathlessness; hardly just the negative; not so much the via negativa in the early 21st century, but the early 21st century as a type of ecophagy, speaking of which reminds me of my own personal autophagy, the dentist found a hole in my tooth and told me my body was eating itself, which reminds me that a little corner of my mind has begun to think of extinction as resorption. And stuff. Which brings me to a reading of Wilfred Bion, who already spoke of a force notated as ‘←↕’ which ‘represents a force that continues after ∙ has been annihilated ... it destroys existence, time, and space’. Michael Eigen likes to repeat that Bion said that, and that Bion himself (who was Beckett’s analyst) resorted to pure notation to say it in the first place. And then of course we have O’Hara’s
Alma singing like a loon
Her dancing toenails in her eyes
Tho where we are with Alma can never fully be realised other than to say the owl flits through this poem. Dream, ghosts, death and the female body. And dope. They give Alma access to an ancient medical geometry. Which is to say “The voice of the poem isn’t interested in the poet at all. The voice of the poem is interested in the articulation and outcome of the group of words it’s generating, composed of three sections, three geological type strata and these strata are full of striations — nodes, cells and dendrites, on/off switches, connections, disconnections, firings and misfiring going back and forth, back and forth
oh these distractions says one. we intend that you keep on the subject says another.
the poem is a Chinese poem perhaps of the 13th century, translated into English badly, sometimes it becomes a poem by a known man, of course it’s a poem by a man because it’s old. a dead man asks me to read it so he can appreciate it
we are lying on the grass promontory overlooking the meeting of two rivers and out of one arises a black coach drawn by many black horses with red plumes on their heads,
hu hu
Syllabic outpourings fight for alternative articulation,
Carmen enters and first emits from hole in head pure
sound: oh ah oh ah
ay ay ay ay
Where is the River Gaboon anyway? I looked it up. It’s now called the Gabon Estuary. “The Gabon estuary represents a portion of the African coast where the volume of slave exports was always relatively small; yet the slave trade had an important impact on local society and economy.” Do you think O’Hara knew? When I look up “Frank O’Hara” racism on Google I get “About 24,300 results” ... one of which is by David Trinidad. It’s called “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, & the Political”, and it begins “Last November, on election day, on a flight from New York to Chicago, I reread William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. I planned to assign it for a graduate poetics seminar I was teaching in the spring. I’d read it two or three times over the years.” And there’s a lot of other stuff, then he mentions
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
And then he says, “Later in Spring and All we have the iconic red wheelbarrow, which is also glazed, as everyone knows, with rain water, and which, as many times as I have seen it, has never felt as vivid as, or moved me as much as, this shard of decorated pottery.” But what I like most about the essay is the emphasis on, and examples of, what Trinidad calls “the personal detail,” like:
Beans too salty
to eat
& empty plastic bags
which is Elise Cowen, and Buson’s
Straw sandal half sunk
in an old pond
in the sleety snow.
Which is to say yes, I live here, and have done so for at least a decade, and have furnished brightly this spacious top-floor flat of seven rooms, this wall-less, invisible flat, and in all that time, I’ve gotten up, made coffee, dressed, and walked out the door. To leave an invisible structure is just as difficult as returning to one. I’d like to try to explain what it’s like: first, how you leave, and then, how you return. Probably, before all that, I should describe the events that led to my occupying 32 Bravashbinder, events belonging to an even larger system of events and weather that are so in situ it’s hard to gather them. But I do know that if I’m to tell a story about how I live, I’m also to tell about work and sex and how the city breathes, and this requires me to back all the way up to the Barbaras Wall, which long ago used to divide the upper and lower parts of the city on the east side, or back even further up to the emergence of the old city, unfolding, literally, beneath this one — born both of it and before it — and the new laws of motion it introduced into the science of the land (something always changing beneath you changes your chemistry, historians now say). No, perhaps I should begin by saying what it means to see or how measurements occur in time, because first you have to let go of the notion that sights enter the eyes, or merely the eyes. I like to travel far out of the city center, stand in some improbable place, and describe the things obstructed from my view. I try to see them even though they are behind me or are blocked by the buildings of ciut centali, cast in shadows by the trees atop cit Ramtala. You see something by calling its name and doing a pondü with the body. I go to the dirtiest part of the city, the old dilapidated docks, and I dream of the hafshahs; I see the grasses and tij. I stand against the north-side wall of the National Library and press my face into the grooved concrete of its facade and I write a letter about what people are reading inside. I send the letter to the building and try to erase it from my mind: I don’t read, I try to tell myself. Books don’t exist. I’m lying in the woods that run along the a5 with my face against the moist ground, reading the last book. Some hum extends from the city, and the walls of every home creak: a single electrical bend that divides time. Only a third of the residents bear a record of the break, only half of that third had actually heard it, only a third of that half of a third reflected on it, and just a few of these tired, still deeply dreaming souls, a sixteenth of the third of that half of a third, connect this minuscule eruption to those from previous nights and previous residences. I don’t see anything in the ground of the forest, but I hear pages turning in the book. The book, these creaks in the walls of houses, the hum of the city, the lines in the asphalt, have backed me up to the forest, my face against the ground. I was trying to tell you what it means to see a city that itself sees, that looks out of its structures toward some imagined place, some activating force. We have a whole science that says the buildings of Ravicka are on the move — the houses, the buildings — and although the science doesn’t say it’s because the houses see that they move, it’s clear that they move because they see. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be studying the migration of buildings but rather the behavior of some further exterior force. For example, if experts believed the migrations were due to wind or erosion, then we’d be looking more deeply at the properties of wind, the effects of erosion; and perhaps some group is studying one or the other of those things, because the Balsha winds are strong and erosion occurs wherever there is ground; but when it comes to what sets a house in motion, science seems to look primarily at the subjectivity of houses, not going so far as to say they have psychology but definitely allowing for instinct or bewilderment. Houses have creaked for a long time. Long before the first house got up and walked off, the walls of houses creaked, and not just in Ravicka. Nearly every ghostly tale has something that creaks. Wouldn’t it be logical to argue this as the first evidence of buildings seeing? As I said earlier, seeing does not extend foremost from the eyes. I get my face dirty in the forest, but I don’t come here when it rains. I don’t want any trouble with drowning or suffocating; I want to lie down and see what’s happening on my street. Understanding what’s happening in the houses that surround my house — noting the schedules people keep, which neighbors commingle, which keep to themselves, what books they read, whether or not they work, what the clocks on their walls say — helps me to define my own house, to give it shape, to know how to enter it today. To be clear, though, 32 Bravashbinder is not in motion. That is not one of its characteristics. It’s not off somewhere touring the city or the outskirts wreaking havoc on stationary structures; despite its invisibility, it is not a mystery. It doesn’t go on Brunza’s list; people are not talking about it behind closed doors. No. 32 bears the condition of many other houses in Ravicka; the show finally starts and after hearing the first song, we completely lose hope. Stephanie leaves during the third song to go to our friend Heather’s Christmas party. She wants to buy a t-shirt but I convince her not to. I promise her that I’ll make her one. I think about the band’s off-grooves etchings and describe them to her. The one on Still, released after Ian Curtis’s suicide, says, “The chicken won’t stop” and “The chicken stops here.” The chicken tracks across the grooves on the opposite side would make a cool t-shirt. They reference the ending of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, where the character played by Bruno S., a street musician, leaves Berlin for the US, to escape the constant bullying his girlfriend’s ex-pimp subjects him to. After his trailer gets repossessed, and an absurd attempt to rob a bank, he ends up committing suicide. The film ends with a sequence showing a chicken dancing. Presumably this is the last movie Curtis, who was a fan of Herzog’s, saw on the BBC the night he hanged himself. All of this, and pretty much everything else, is common knowledge now, I can’t sleep tonight, either. Same as the night my son, my husband and I were traveling to the coast of Oaxaca, when I saw a pile of dismembered legs at the edge of the highway. Fortunately, my son was off looking in another direction. But I couldn’t turn away. That image, too, directed its gaze at me from some kind of limit, coercively, with Medusa-like power. If I had kept looking at it for another second, I would have turned to stone. That was in 2009. A year before the massacre of migrants in San Fernando. A year before the massive slaughter of undergraduate college students who were having a party in Villas de Salvárcar, in Ciudad Juárez. Five years before that dark night of Iguala, when 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa were ... you know. Ever since that night — which has become all the nights of the world — whenever I close my eyes, my mind reproduces the inescapable volume of body parts ripped from bodies at the edge of the highway. What do I see when my eyes are open? People swimming and sunbathing on the beach, something something, official discourse offered to investors, something something, which is the reason I set out on a journey, modelled on Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, around the mountainous game-world of Grand Theft Auto V. There are two aspects to this notion. First: It has to do with a Danish children’s song called “Far out in the woods was a little mountain,” it’s about, among many other things, a bird in an egg and an egg in a nest, a movement both inwards and outwards. This song became very important to Third-Millennium Heart, to its images, its movement, its way of “operating.” It became a kind of perpetuity, entirely local in its origins:
You were inside me
I was in the house
the house was by the lake
the lake was in the city
the city was in
inside the world.
Second: In the summer of 2010 I visited the Rudolph Tegner Museum in Northern Zealand. Surrounding the museum is a sculpture park, with a sculpture called The Embrace of Darkness. It depicts a woman sitting between another woman’s outspread legs. When I saw it I thought there ought to have been a third woman sitting between the other woman’s legs. And then I thought, I could create that sculpture myself. But once I wrote the poem, I felt there was a counter-poem missing in order for it to become a kind of portal. So I wrote the poem with men arching over one another. The women emerging, the men arching — it’s a striking gate, I think. And once that gate had been erected, this entire cosmology, as you call it, also opens up. Which is why I have several current translation projects. One is of an “aeronovel or aeropoem” by Marinetti composed in 1944, amidst the German occupation of a divided Italy during World War II. It is a desperate, breathless, unpunctuated, and unstable text that — in a gasp of last-ditch fascism — imagines the resurgence of a tattered and war-torn Venice through its reconstruction as a kitschy female futurist colossus, forged entirely of Murano glass. That’s clearly as cool as it is problematic. I’m also translating selections from Reasonable Chesspiece, a collection of poetry by the art critic and founder of Rivolta Femminile, Carla Lonzi. I am undertaking this project in collaboration with Judith Kirshner, who has studied Lonzi’s art writings for decades and will provide a historical introductory narrative, and Silvia Guslandi, a talented young translator who is working on the tape-recorded interviews of Lonzi’s Self-Portrait, a paradoxically titled collection of interviews with male artists from Lucio Fontana to Cy Twombly. Finally, I’m working on recording “broken choruses” of radical labor songs in spontaneous translation from languages such as Finnish and Italian. These are becoming incorporated into a mixed reality performance project I’m undertaking with Judd Morrissey and Abraham Avnisan, called Smokepenny Lyrichord Heavenbred; Or, Last year / By constant penetration / Encroaching on the reserve. This work comes out of my research into the transnational circuits of copper exploitation; in the process of poring through the archives, I’m finding early twentieth-century labor lyrics such as those published and translated by the IWW into a variety of languages to be disturbingly relevant to the current day. I mean, if I could go back to school, I would study Farsi. As I point out in the intro, eo (from the Latin ego) is an archaic form of io (I), sometimes found in regional vernaculars, though Rosselli claims in her notes that it refers to egli (he) or esso (it), rendering the term almost impossible to translate “correctly” ... I mean,
...lle Those
scomminglings therein ’mprinted fore Ille
be harrowed so
fiercely, alle hath evanished!...
Rosselli explained in annotations to Pasolini that the “tu” (you) opening this excerpt was a truncation of “tutte” (all), though given the pervasive presence of the phoneme “tu” and its echoes throughout the poem, readers are bound to see “you” where the poet allegedly intends “all,” rendering these pronouns mutual in some way. I translated this word, in turn, as “lle,” which echoes and truncates the pseudo-Elizabethan “alle” below it, while appearing as a Roman numeral II, or an I and e (‘e or hee, in archaic English speech) placed together at the same time. I then chose to translate the phrase “pr’ia ch’eo” as “fore Ille,” as if “pr’ia” were an elision of “prima” ([be]fore) and “ch’eo” were “che io/esso” ([that] I/he/it). This “Ille” stands orthographically between “I’ll” and “egli” while being pronounceable as “eel” (“[h]e’ll) and becoming almost geometrical on the visual level, hovering between an I I I or a HE or a
CAN YOU BE MY FULLTIME DADDY: WHITE&GOLD[QUESTIONMARK] : :: :: : : :::::: : : :: : : : :installingmusicsoftware: : :: :::: : : :: ::borntodierecordinstalled: :: : : :::: :: ::: :: :: convertingappropriationintoadaptation: : :: ::::: pleasewait: : ::::: :: :: : :: ::: :: : :deleteheaddress[questionmark]:: :: ::::: : :: :: Y: :: :: :: : : :: : ::::: installationcomplete: :::
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how he also got through the roof of the apartment block, it was wired up to explode upon lift-off. Speaking of lift-off, the catapult ... the catapult ... but how else would some poor slob proletarian who can’t afford Elon Musk-type prices travel to someplace like Mars? Which is to say there was a fifteenth of January a while back; it was the last day of the eleventh month of the Tibetan lunar calendar; of this date it is said: “night when the fates are decided of those to die in the coming year.”
Night when the fates are decided.
I turn into you. A fish
Turns into the sea. The sea
Swarms with jellyfish. The meaning
Changes. We say it turns.
In front of the market they have tethered
A flock of little pigs.
People look at them uneasily, thinking
They are going to die to feed us.
Or They
Have passions too, penises and personalities,
Passions and no choices. They have no choices.
[Do they ALL have penises?]
Thinking like that, people pass by the great bronze
Pig at the gate of the market
Near which squealing pincky blacky whitey pigs are stored,
People go inside the sheds and look at oysters
(They have no choices) artichokes and carrots
(They have no choices) artichokes unfolding
Around magic diagrams,
Twisted circlet bog-iron from the broads
Worn round the head of the Queen of the Aurora
In the house of the Sixth Wisdom,
data gathered from 63 archaeological sites or groups of sites. Comparing house sizes within each site, researchers assigned Gini coefficients, common measures of inequality developed more than a century ago by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini. In theory, a country with complete wealth equality would have a Gini coefficient of 0, while a country with all the wealth concentrated in one household would get a 1. The researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities, with a median Gini of .17. Their mobility would make it hard to accumulate wealth, let alone pass it on to subsequent generations. Horticulturalists — small-scale, low-intensity farmers — had a median Gini of .27. Larger scale agricultural societies had a media Gini of .35. The researchers’ models put the highest Ginis in the ancient world at .59, close to that of contemporary Greece’s .56 and Spain’s .58. It is well short of China’s .73 and the United States’. 81 to .85, depending on who’s measuring, “which is probably the highest wealth inequality for any developed country right now.” That being said, one of my fondest memories of Luboviski-Acosta reading from this work was in a big-windowed warehouse in LA last year when they stood atop a six-foot ladder, and while throwing a dozen eggs down, one by one, into a yellow, viscous splatter on the floor, they yelled out:
I ... DON’T ... CARE ... ABOUT ... YOUR ... WHITE ... FRAGILITY!
Oh, and that theory of minimalism book costs 85 pounds. Wait a minute. Did someone, or something, just say something (or someone)? The papaya tree was two or three or four years tall. The bushes and weeds growing through the blue and white tile possessed a hybrid character, like they’d been fertilized with Mountain Dew. Suddenly the tree was like the stake at the base of which the ashes of ghosts had cooled. There were no insects, no butterflies.
Already what would kill you was
There killing you
As word circulated about the incident in recent days, humanities scholars have voiced support for Butler and drawn attention to the attacks she has had to face. François Soyer, a medieval historian at the University of Southampton, tweeted, “How can you know if your research is having an impact? When a mob holding Bibles and crucifixes burns an effigy of you outside your seminar.” Is that true? “There does not seem to be any evidence that those who mobilized on this occasion had any familiarity with Gender Trouble ...” So are we talking about “300,000 pages of code? Or 60 minutes of triple-X rubber-and-leather interactive bondage porn? [...] Uuntil you plug it in, you’ll never know.” And yet ... and yet ... yes ... I still want to write an honest sentence. It was a conference of clouds. Ashbery's instruction manual foretold the cloud. A woman with small dog, no shoes, told me to distinguish healthy from unhealthy clouds. She counts them from the plane, though she uses no money and wears what she makes from what she finds at the transfer station. I hold the Ashbery poem in my hand, but the man with the cloud keeps reading to me about heavy metals used to make iPhones. An unhealthy cloud is dark, but brings no rain. Her father, I find out, was the Hat Man of Maui. Broad smile, very few teeth. He’d played for the New England Patriots. When I leave, I see her again, with her tan and white dog. I want to write an honest sentence about kindness. I want to write an honest sentence about the end of the world. (He bought his Trump mask used.) Based on the above needs assessment, a separated maternity room exists in each MOAS Aid Station. These maternity rooms are serviced by a midwife and an OBGYN. Last Sunday this preparation was put to the test when the MOAS team delivered their first baby at the Shamlapur Aid Station. The baby was born to Nurunnahar and Shafiul, a Rohingya couple. They came to the Aid Station in the mid-morning. A healthy boychild was born at 13h local time. But you want to hear something insane? Since 1967, Israel has destroyed at least Palestinian-owned 800,000 olive trees. Hi Shin Yu. For some reason, when I saw this I thought of the two pieces you sent me, and couldn’t help relating Aunt Hanan’s olives to your apples. I pictured you out with her in the field, inscribing words (in Arabic, perhaps) onto some of her fruit. Both Lena’s email and your work reminded me of a piece I read by Arne Naess last night, about place, and what it means to be placed, actually connected in some deep way to a place, and for the first time it occurred to me how deeply even a vestige of that sense is totally under threat each time we pass a tipping point in what Jonty calls the fka-anthropocene. Which means that from now on I won’t be able to look at what you sent without feeling a degree of, well,
if e<>d
∴ grief
But most unique among Rhee’s formal modes are those designed to approximate or translate robot speech. “t: If you could write a love poem, what words would you include? // #! Eyelashes / a: (~black) Those that I do not have, I love to lick.” Since she is a scholar of critical race and gender studies, it’s no surprise that these poems offer parallels between human-robot love and other forms of non-normativity. However, as one of Rhee’s speakers puts it, “a robot is not just a convenient metaphor” (emphasis mine). Rhee takes robot love seriously, and her book’s resistance to being read simply as allegory accounts in no small way for its immediacy and power. Part II of Love, Robot opens with the epigraph “... I only date androids.” The quote is from Janelle Monáe. I mean,
Sometimes I hit against all the againsts,
why shouldn’t a translator swing the door both ways? In the Bible, Ruth gleaned the wheatfields for what was left and, while doing so, was noticed by Boaz, who eventually became her husband. In the same note we learn what a Serrano is, where Irichugo is, and
“Rumbbb ... Trrraprrr rrach ... chaz”
“neverthelessez”
“lachrymation”
In other words, “A transcontemporation is to a poem what RoboCop is to a normal five-o”:
Odumodneurtse!
Rednuhtetum!
“at the edge
of beauty, it quivers, it sings, it holds
no water.”
What we do know, however, is that Dodos were large, flightless birds who made their homes exclusively on the island of Mauritius. They probably ate mostly the fallen fruit available to a ground-dwelling bird, along with some seeds, bulbs, crustaceans, and insects. Fruit would have been abundant on the island prior to human arrival, when there were also no other terrestrial mammals present. In the absence of these mammals, Dodos likely had fewer competitors for these foods than did birds in many other places, but importantly, they also had no significant predators themselves — a situation that did not prepare them well at all for what was to come with the arrival of humans. It is unclear who the first people to set eyes on the Dodo were. Perhaps they were among the Arab traders who likely discovered the island in the thirteenth century. Or perhaps they were Portuguese sailors, among those who started visiting the island a few hundred years later (from 1507). As far as is known, however, neither of these groups settled on Mauritius, and no documentary evidence of an encounter with a Dodo remains. The first reliable accounts of were written by the Dutch after they arrived on the island in 1598. For roughly the next century, the Dutch East India Company used Mauritius as a “pasturing and breeding ground for livestock and a source of wild native meat.” This was the beginning of the end for the Dodo. Not only were they themselves on the menu — along with tortoises and a number of other local birds — but the various mammals that were intentionally and accidentally introduced to the island by the Dutch took their own huge toll. Part of the problem for Dodos was undoubtedly their susceptibility to capture by hungry sailors and settlers. As flightless birds who had no previous experience of predators, they were easily captured by hand or beaten with a stick. While there have been frequent suggestions over the past few hundred years that Dodo meat was very unpalatable and infrequently consumed, that does not seem to have been the case. Paleontologist and Dodo expert Julian Hume has provided details of numerous firsthand accounts of the Dutch “relishing” the meat — in particular, the breast and stomach — and daily catching and eating many of these birds. It is likely, however, that the biggest problems that the Dodo faced after the arrival of humans were the other species of animals that came along on the journey. Foremost among them, chronologically at least, was probably the black rat. As in so many other places that European ships docked in the period, rats arrived early and with devastating force. Dodo eggs and young chicks, which up until this time would have required little protection, were an easy source of food. A little later, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, other new cies joined them — notably, crab-eating macaques, goats, cattle, pigs, and deer. All these animals likely played a role in the decline of the Dodo: as predators, competitors for food, or both. No visitors to the island recount seeing a Dodo after the 1680s, perhaps a little earlier, and all evidence suggests that the species was extinct by the end of the century. After thousands of years of peacefully gorging on fruits, the Dodo was suddenly thrust into an encounter with European culture, and just as quickly slipped out of the world. But what I really want to tell you about is Albania. More specifically, that the Albanian language has a tense for surprise. That is, the verb-ending changes if one says “You speak Albanian” or “You speak Albanian!” I don’t know how often it’s used; the physical landscape of the country is punctuated with periods: 200,000 tiny dome-shaped concrete bunkers, scattered everywhere, meant to hold one or two snipers each, built by Enver Hoxha to repel a Soviet invasion. Just in case. Speaking of Hoxha, Will Alexander, has a long poem on his death,
with a glut of crushed worms slipping from his forehead
[...]
his dictatorial mutterings
like a spurt of unseasonable frog gills
like a grotesque insecticidal frenzy calling out
from tormented histamine gardens
and so on. Who doesn’t need a tense for surprise? Or, put better maybe, for shock?
Under that primordial
shining and lucid sky,
where the two-legged, having
a mortal body and hollow bones,
knowing war and battle,
acquainted with strife and discord.
having a vulnerable brain
and a trembling soul,
must be fruitful —
with the cool windy western sky,
with the good generous eastern sky,
with the insatiable thirsty southern sky,
with the impetuous whirling northern sky,
with the shivering breadth of the sea,
with the heaving depth of the sea,
with the swelling abyss of the sea,
with the twirling axis of the sea,
with the unbounded reach of the sea,
with the revered aiy who lie beyond,
with the radiant aiy who guard,
with abundant yellow nectar,
with generous white nectar,
encircling us in the manifold of stars,
in the herds of countless stars,
in the traces of rare stars,
with the full moon accompanying it,
with the bright sun leading it,
with purifying roars of thunder,
with the smite of bolts of lightning,
with moistening cloud-bursts of rain,
with sultry hot breath,
with the drying out and again the replenishing of waters,
with the falling down and again the growing up of woods,
with inexhaustible generous gifts,
with origins from gently sloping mountains,
with gardens from earthen mountains,
with a hot and giving summer,
with the turning axis of the center,
with four converging sides,
with such high firmament,
what you tread on, will not give way,
what you rattle, will not lurch,
with such an unfathomable breadth,
what you press, will not bend,
eight-chambered, eight-sided,
with six circles,
etc. Democritus laughed or wept. The Nebraska Public Service Commission will still vote Monday on a proposed route thru the state for Keystone XL, a massive expansion that also would be operated by TransCanada, despite Thursday’s South Dakota’s TransCanada’s Keystone 210,000-gallon spill.
[Note: Sources: Alexander R Galloway, “Peak Deleuze and the ‘Red Bull Sublime’”, at Alexander R Galloway, 5 Nov 017; Jon Clay, Sean Bonney, The Commons, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (tr. Brian Massumi), quoted in Clay’s “‘A New Geography of Delight’: Communist Poetics and Politics in Sean Bonney’s The Commons”, at Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 7(1); Jonty Tiplady, quoted in SKG, “The Interview #4/2017: Jonty Tiplady”, at Noise/Admiration, 31 Oct 017; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, quoted in SKG, “The Interview #4/2017: Jonty Tiplady”, at Noise/Admiration, 31 Oct 017; JBR; Frank O’Hara, Ralph Hawkins, Alice Notley, quoted in Hawkins’ “‘Radical Feminist’ from Alma, or The Dead Women”, at Intercapillary Space, Oct 08; JBR; Henry Bucher, “The Atlantic slave trade and the Gabon Estuary: the Mpongwe to 1860”, in Africans in bondage: studies in slavery and the slave trade : essays in honor of Philip D. Curtin on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of African Studies at the University of Wisconsin (ed. Paul E Lovejoy), at University of Wisconsin Libraries; JBR; David Trinidad, “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, & the Political”, at Poetry Foundation, 3 April 017; JBR; David Trinidad, “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, & the Political”, at Poetry Foundation, 3 April 017; JBR; Elise Cowen, and Buson (tr. Robert Hass), quoted in David Trinidad, “So Much Depends: On the Particular, the Personal, & the Political”, at Poetry Foundation, 3 April 017; JBR; Renee Gladman, Houses of Ravicka, Hedi El Kholti, A Place in the Sun, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Renee Gladman Houses of Ravicka, Hedi El Kholti A Place In The Sun, Andrew Durbin MacArthur Park, Douglas Payne Salted Rook”, at DC’s, 13 Nov 017; Vivian Abenshushan [et al], “Out of It Writing::::36 War Letters”, in huun 1; JBR; Vivian Abenshushan [et al], “Out of It Writing::::36 War Letters”, in huun 1; JBR; Vivian Abenshushan [et al], “Out of It Writing::::36 War Letters”, in huun 1; JBR; Calum Rodger, “Rock, Star, North”, at Adjacent Pineapple 2; Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Morten Høi Jensen, quoted in Jensen’s “Cellular Portals: A Conversation with Ursula Andkjær Olsen by Morten Høi Jensen”, at BOMB, 13 Nov 017; JBR; Jennifer Scappettone, quoted in Allegra Rosenbaum, “Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone”, at Asymptote, 13 Nov 017; JBR; Joshua Whitehead, “Can You Be My Fulltime Daddy: White&Gold[Questionmark]”, at Lemonhound 3.0, 9 Nov 017; JBR; Robin Tomens, “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov - Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future”, at Out of My Mind, 8 Nov 017; JBR; Robert Kelly, “Set on War”, “Man Sleeping”, in Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993; Washington State University, “Rising inequality charted across millennia: Findings have profound implications for contemporary society”, at Science Daily, 15 Nov 017; Hannah Kezema, and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, quoted in Kezema’s “The Easy Body – Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta”, at Full Stop, 14 Nov 017; JBR, but see Marc Botha, A Theory of Minimalism, at Bloomsbury Publishing; JBR; Brandon Shimoda, “The Papaya Tree”, at Evening Will Come 67; Shane McCrae, “Forgiveness Grief”, at They Will Sew the Blue Sail 189; Scott Jaschik, “Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil”, at Inside Higher Ed, 13 Nov 017; JBR; Travis Dane (Eric Bogosian), in Under Siege 2; Issa; yes: JBR; Susan M Schultz, “11 November 2017”, “7 November 2017”, at “5 November 2017”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog; MOAS, “Birth in the Midst of Crisis”, at https://www.moas.eu/blog-birth-midst-crisis/ MOAS (email with link to this rec’d 16 Nov 017, approx. 6:05am PST); JBR; Lena Abdulhamid, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “Planting olive trees is my form of resistance”, email rec’d 16 Nov 017, approx. 7:19am PST; JBR, a mashup and rewrite of emails sent to Shin Yu Pai and Jonty Tiplady, 16 Nov 017; Peter Myers, “Will Humans and Machines Fall in Love? On Margaret Rhee’s debut poetry collection, ‘Love, Robot.’”, at Chicago Review of Books, 8 Nov 017; JBR; César Vallejo, and John Cotter, quoted in Cotter’s “One Man’s César Vallejo”, at Open Letters Monthly, 1 Jun 07 (a review of César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry (ed. and tr. Clayton Eshleman); Elisa Gabbert, Sampson Starkweather, César Vallejo (trs. Clayton Eshleman, Sampson Starkweather [separately]), quoted in Gabbert’s “STARK WEEK EPISODE #7: ‘Reveling in the evocative power … of personalized Jabberwocky’ — Elisa Gabbert on THE WATERS”, at HTMLGIANT, 18 Jul 013; Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction; JBR; Eliot Weinberger, “Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection”, in “ Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship Introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Elizabeth Zuba”, at The Paris Review, 13 Nov 017; JBR; Olonkho (tr. Justin Erik Halldór Smith), in Smith’s “Olonkho, Lines 29-82”, at http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2017/11/olonkho-lines-29-82.html Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 17 Nov 017 (“This is a translation of some of the early lines of the Olonkho, the Sakha (Yakut) national epos (on my longstanding interest in this, read more here and here). I worked directly from the Sakha text, but also relied heavily on an earlier Russian version, which comes down to us from a Sakha elder by the name of Nikolai Petrovich Burnashev. His version was recorded by S. K. D’iakonovyi in 1941, and published under the title Кыыс Дэбилийэ in Novosibirsk in 1993. My own version is so heavily reliant on Burnashev that it cannot be considered a translation from the Sakha, but rather a blend of features from both the Sakha and the Russian”); JBR; Grant Schulte and James Nord, “Keystone Pipeline Leak Won’t Affect Last Regulatory Hurdle”, at US News & World Report Best State, 18 Nov 017]
