One way to answer that might be to note that early this morning, two water protectors locked themselves to a crane 40 feet high at the LNG build site in the Port of Tacoma. They are participating in direct action to call attention to a dangerous facility that is being built without permits, and against the wishes of the Tacoma community. You can watch a live feed of the action and leave messages of support here: http://bit.ly/2jOirsj Right now it’s very foggy out. Have you seen Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue)? At times ‘the stomach is the only clock’. In the darkness, in the hold of a truck inside of a ship headed to who knows where ... Anyway, wanna hear something weird? During Hiwa K’s lessons with Paco Peña he discovered something. Paco is a very good friend of Tony Blair, and he has been teaching Blair how to play flamenco guitar for twenty years. Which reminds me of another of his stories: “Each morning, my father would wake up at 5am and pace in and out of the kitchen reciting poems. We didn’t know what the poems meant and it was a bit annoying for us, as we couldn’t sleep when he would do this. Once we asked him what he was reciting every morning. ‘These are poems by Hafiz, the great Persian poet,’ he told us. ‘But I didn’t know you spoke Farsi,’ I replied. ‘Indeed. I don’t understand Farsi. When I was a kid I was sent to the madrasa. I was one among many other disciples taught by the mullah. Over four years the mullah would teach a group of kids the whole book of Hafiz’s writing. Only after all of the poems were learned by heart, the mullah would teach his disciples the meaning of the words. We were the only group with bad luck. We learned the whole book by heart, but then the mullah died. So among all the students, ours was the only group who knew all the poems without understanding them.”
But just like the rest
There are bigger and smaller
Infinite wells
Forty minutes
Savored like ghost peppers
Belly fat blisters over Sterno pores
Rots into its own zenith
But just like the rest
There are bigger and smaller
Infinite wells
Greet yourself
In your thousand other forms
A split alone of finicks
Planton dust
A hair of tea lap cement
Lighthouse cattle lengthens.
Five pages further into the same drawing book, I came across another equally remarkable drawing in red, albeit now a watercolor. Here Vandenberg exchanged the grid drawn in lines for one written in words. No longer an inscription, these written words in and of themselves make up a picture. One word — “absence” — taken from the sentence in the previous drawing — is repeated ninety-six times in four columns. Once again, the grid is far from perfect. The words are not written in a straight line. The columns slightly dance their way up — or down, if you prefer. They do not cover the whole page, moreover. On the right side of the page Vandenberg left an area blank ... Indeed, at the very lower right corner the artist put, laconically, “etc.” Therefore, I argue that Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text as well as the absolutely enormous poetic apparatus he summoned to describe the flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. Although Lucretius never once used the term atomus (smallest particle), he remained absolutely true to one aspect of the original Greek meaning of the word (átomos, ‘indivisible’), from á- (a-, ‘not’) + témnō (‘I cut’). Being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete ‘things’ [rerum] are composed of corporeal flows [corpora] that move together [conflux] and fold over themselves [nexus] in a woven knotwork [contextum]. For Lucretius, things only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Discreteness is a product of continuous, uncut, undivided motion and not the other way around. Secondly, for Lucretius, the material flows of being are not necessarily observable as such. Material flows never appear as discrete, observable or empirical particles. Material flows [corpora], he writes, are always just below the level of observation. This is because observation only notes discrete composites [rerum] and not the constitutive flows that produce the discrete product. Since material flows are fundamentally immanent to the constitutive kinetic flow which produces things, in principle one never finds a corpora but only an infinite corporeal flow as the material condition of any discrete composite or thing. Thirdly, instead of a mechanistic causality between atoms, we find in Lucretius a theory of stochastic or pedetic motion inherent in matter itself. Matter is not moved by an external will or force, but by itself. It is the source of its own motion. Matter by its very nature is not a predictable mechanism. It is fundamentally turbulent, disordered, and chaotic. But from this turbulent motion it also produces order and stability through the folding, circulation, and knotting of flows. Matter is therefore onto- and morpho-genetic. Ergo, the song is not our pelican. Thank you so much for agreeing to participate in the “Emotional Outreach Project, 5.0.” What I want to emphasize here is that the Net Neutrality declaration follows the same logic as the Bears Ears one: if it’s possible to extract value from some public space, then all regulation must be directed to facilitate that extraction, no matter what. In this, the Trump administration is reverting to seventeenth-century mode, aping the enclosure laws and trying to complete the unfinished project of primitive accumulation. As Marx notes in Capital, this is the violent process whereby common access rights are privatized as preparatory for capitalist exploitation: “in actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” Scientists base projections like these on data gathered from microwave and GPS sensors. This data shows that sea levels have been rising over the 20th century at a rate that has increased in recent decades, with 2014’s level 2.6 inches higher than 1993’s average, which was previously the highest on satellite measurement record. If I’ve reached the acceptance stage, is it still grief?
My hopes are these wounds.
I am colonized. I dream of decolonizing
Myself.
This is total admin, people –
I am the body
And the archive.
A bomb is ticking in my old soul.
The bomb is made of strips of seaweed sewed at 45° angles across a checkered base.
What do I know?
I laugh at myself
Imagining what the newer books state.
This is as far as my English goes.
Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco de Bahamonde slept with the mummified hand of Santa Teresa de Ávila on his bedside table each night.
This is as far as my English goes.
It seems that blisters either sink
Or burst in lachrymose streams
That flow endlessly.
I laugh at myself.
I live atop a gleaming mountain
For I am a recluse,
Master of my fate.
My rags are my shells.
So OK, John, reward yourself with 80,000 bonus points. Then imagine being one of the first people outside of Africa ever to see a giraffe. Then ask yourself: how did they capture it? Why was there only one? What kind of ship would carry a giraffe to Bengal, and then to China, in the 15th century? Imagine them together, the ship and the giraffe. Meanwhile, down on the ground, various corporations engineer motile, stinger-equipped, carnivorous plants: the titular triffids. But only after a ‘meteor shower’ (which is eventually hinted to have been a satellite weapon system, perhaps activated accidentally) leaves most of humanity blind, do the triffids begin to show their true adaptability and intelligence. Crake’s actions also occur against a backdrop of deepening ecological crisis, economic inequality, and prolific, commercially-driven implementations of gene-editing technology. The eschatological ambience deepens in the second novel, The Year of the Flood, which covers a similar time-frame from different perspectives, notably that of the God’s Gardeners, a cult or sect whose teaching draws on Christianity, deep ecology, and survivalism. Readers may be left with the impression that had Crake’s lone wolf bioterrorism not triggered an apocalypse, some other apocalypse would have come along soon enough. Which is to say that this is a
mini-ode to the awkward heroes
of sexology
and to shepherds!
Try to be kind, not bitter.
Sit on the rock with your dog, the watcher
and your tuneless pipes that have no true note
but wobble among microtones of reeds.
Since every character
in the dream
is part of you: Gestalt, Gestalt.
Gesundheit!
And since most materials
behave according to their defects and impediments,
A Ahah, O ok, Y yeah, H ha, S so:
A, ahah the train out of [illegible],
which has a bucket of cheap drinks,
leaves the most amazing burp of my life.
And A, ahah,
O, the sun treated me okay.
Sparklers of Wendy’s hot tubs,
quiverings of check check;
Y, I feel like a chicken wing.
Who is my baby?
So yes, I have read your Guantánamo narrative. I have read, As I hold my pen, my hand is shaking; I have read of your being pissed on, Jumah, of your being made to walk barefoot on barbed wire, forced to breathe poisons, left naked on the floor of a cold metal of a cage. I have read of petrol injected into your penis and of the time your lawyer came and you excused yourself, went into the toilet, made a noose, and jumped from the sink. No one, Jumah, should be shackled to the ground beneath a naked menstruating guard. No one. How, in the face of this, can I write to you? And of what can I write? Of the color of the sweater I am wearing — pale-green? Two weeks after the tsunami I went back to Onagawa for the first time with my sister. 70% of the town was destroyed. I couldn’t believe that so many buildings were crushed, so many houses. I saw that part of ours was still standing: only the darkroom was left. I found my father’s large format, medium format and 35mm cameras, some lenses, a strobe light, tripod etc. scattered around. When I found them, I felt my parents, who had disappeared during the disaster, wanted to remind us, “we were here!” In the winter of 2015-16, I tried to take a photo with his lens, an 180mm/f5.6, Rodenstock. I haven’t used large format cameras much before; it took a lot of time to prepare during the chill winter winds beside the seaport. The shutter was broken, so I had to open and cover the lens for exposure. I was able to take photos only in the dark. I felt lonely and sometimes I was scared. This was a place where so many people had died, their bodies gone missing in the vast cold ocean. It was as if I were seeing the dead, or through their eyes, or something. I felt I could connect this world with that world. I felt like I could have a conversation with my parents, though in fact that is impossible. On the first clear day I walked eleven miles, then got in the water to wash the dead whale. It was about thirty feet long. I had never been in the water with such a large dead being before. In fact, I’d never seen anything so large and dead before. Speaking of water, tho I wasn’t quite speaking of water tho I was in the water, washing the dead whale so it could get on to the next bardo, I remember that before my translator Kamola and I went to buy plane tickets to Nukus, the city closest to the Aral Sea and the largest in west Uzbekistan, we needed to change money. She brought me to see an old Korean guy hanging out on the sidewalk outside the Moskva liquor store. Moskva was accented with little top hats dancing above its letters. We gave him $500 for a bag of money bigger than a shoebox: 1,380,000 som. A big bag of money ... a big dead whale ... the Aral Sea, which also used to be big, but is now mostly desert ...
Invocation of loss of balance
Invocation of falling
Invocation of motor control
Invocation of envy
Invocation of incontinence
Invocation of caregiving
Invocation of catheter
Invocation of daily life
Invocation of isolation
Invocation of shame
Invocation of guilt
Invocation of longing
Invocation of fainting
Invocation of a fracture
Invocation of humiliation
Invocation of a shadow
Invocation of inappropriate laughing or crying
Invocation of medical directive
Invocation of wandering lake
Invocation of end-of-life care
Invocation of writing with light
Invocation of evaporation
Invocation of bureaucratic waste
Invocation of a double helix
Invocation of dementia
Invocation of grief
Invocation of artificial respiration
Invocation of a feeding tube
Invocation of dry baths
Invocation of vocal cord paralysis
Invocation of morphine suppositories
Invocation of noise-reducing headphones
Invocation of silence
Invocation of slurry, croaky voice
Invocation of gasping
According to Google Translate, this roughly translates as
GOD BOOM!
Sparkling BOOM
Boom
JUDGMENT!
GOD Boom HUMAN Boom
And boom itself,
Hold.
Etc.
The road to the place called “Burnt from the Sun” was swallowed by a sandstorm. The most well-preserved and lifelike mummy was called the “Beauty of Loulan.” When there was a war, the last Uyghur married a wolf, and that’s where the Uyghur people come from.
sad in his world
or in yours
he walks for years
a wax archangel
stands on his tongue
corn mush
brinza cheese
petroleum
glass toys betwixt the stars with chains
under the axe & clock
“I am so sad with life
“I love it
“I put an owl in a hexagon
“I climb on the stage
“squat there a pregnant bird
“I am a monster too
“I play with cushions
the chess game opens like a poem
like the metaphysics of
-- hiccups --
-- bowwows --
-- hell --
-- intensity --
your fart that night was luminous
in Missouri in Brazil in the Antilles
under your bed the shadows massed
like sleeping robbers
Then [unpronounceable] looked out of the louvered window and stated that no-one rings church bells to signify the hour in [also unpronounceable] anymore. In fact, she added, if this grey cloud had set in ‘now’, it would stay above the city, and what’s more, it would dwell in the chasm of the valley perhaps, for an unpredictably long time, for eternity. And after. Look at that gigantic arc. Such densities call for couriers. Have you, she shook me, have you been shaken like this before? But then ghost trains. But it seems no colour can stay the same for longer than a split second. South Road is quiet with a few, empty shops. Today the special is the skin-coloured viola. With no price tag. Priceless, I mean. People don’t buy presents from these shops anymore. If you were to place a metal ball on the floor it would croll down in one direction and end up in the opposite corner, but you know what? You don’t need to be an investor yourself to be involved in finance. You are already incorporated in financial calculations others perform. Material conditions are the joke that is no joke:
Also, I need a lot of money.
So I could have a lot of money.
That’s why I need it.
I need a lot of money.
So I can have it.
Because I need to have money.
Have I told you this before?
I was born
Inside a weapons lab.
I said did you wash your body properly with the washrag I gave you. Here are your pajamas it’s time to go to bed now that you are damp from your bath maybe you’ll dream about tadpoles. The tennis net is already long gone, on page one. Once it’s recorded I can play it back over and over, while I do calligraphy. As a critic, I’m uneasy about that hedge. Now if you’ll step through the double French doors my team of international students will be happy to assist you. There’s just one catch: if I help you, I don’t want to see any Frank Ocean or Drake postings as proof that you’ve passed into the other language. About this, my friend Brendan’s comment was: “‘Passed into the other language’ is gold.” RU also includes fabric sculptures and a video work, but it was the birds in their improvised, indoor wood that stayed with me for weeks: cute and unobtrusive, each one projects a sense of peering at you inquisitively—the way we say real birds do — despite having nothing like a head. Similarly, the protagonists in Torossian’s short film are books, wooden alphabet blocks, dresses, drawings, tourists, a chair, rubber containers, toy cars, the color red, hexagons, patterns, signs of family life and children, metro signs and a desk. Which is to say that for a while the only tenuous connection between brain and body (mind, higher levels of thought weren’t possible without complete breakdown) was furiously playing Triple Town, a phone game where you attempt to build a town around small, evil bears who thwart your progress. Squish them and they turn into a grave; three graves make a church in the same way, three churches make a cathedral, three cathedrals make a chest of spendable in-game gold — it’s a strange theology, turning opponents back into buildable land. But I was too busy plopping down shrubs and making tiny castles — three shrubs make a house, three houses make a mansion, three mansions make a castle — three castles also make a chest of spendable in-game gold — to really take the time to analyze it much, though there is surely an interesting thesis somewhere in there. Oh, and I also recommend the Candy Country skin, which turns the playing field soothing shades of Pepto pink and amethyst, scrubbing any trace gesture towards natural reality from the 5x5 grid that becomes the manageable world. Speaking of youthquake, other words that made this year’s shortlist include: milkshake duck, white fragility, unicorn, kompromat, broflake, newsjacking, gorpcore and antifa. Isn’t milkshake duck two words, tho? So yes, I too have been secretly investigating the technical viability of and devising methodologies for, in the true literal sense of poetics, direct writing, which is maskless, therefore mask-related-error-free, sequential thus slow in throughput, and targeting only application-specific readers, who are numbered and whose reading patterns behave too erratically to justify the expense of mask production, which is to say this hard rain never ends this ride has not and will never have an arrival this storm is in the room is the room this room is the body the bodies, all the bodies, under the ultrahighmagnification Atomic Force Microscope I thumbed through every page of the whole collection, and I found only dots, dotted straight lines, dotted arcs. Abstract geometrical entities banging my dilated eyeballs. In his introduction to Johnson’s Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, then, Guy Davenport posits a less obvious precedent to Johnson’s treatment of the “snippets” from which ARK will be constructed. Citing Wittgenstein’s quip that he never wrote a poem because he could never think of a poem to write — and hypothesizing that neither Heraclitus nor Leonardo ever wrote one for the same reason — I mean, why do rich people care about the estate tax so much if they keep on killing their children’s world?
c i r c
l e c i
r c l e
a H b c
a b H c
H a b c
When two identical mirrors face each other
their cycle of self-reflection recedes forever
into an infinite exchange of self-absorption.
Each mirror
infects itself
at every scale
with the virus of its own image.
Each mirror
devours itself
at every point
with the abyss of its own dream
GA
g
ging
Dis
g
orging
b
loo*
p
uke
s
Uck
ack
ock
S
OG
ex
But this feeling is real this feeling is a real-valued function of the unreal time t denoted by F which is disintegrated but still perversely continuous and continuous to the order of ∞ this function spans the entire family of infinitely differentiable real functions in Euclidean space thus supplying the test function for the rigorous definition of the Dirac distribution (δ, F) = ∫ ∞ -∞δ(t)F(t)dt = F(0) which is a continuous linear functional that smooths out the δ singularity of the function and which always assumes the real value of F(t) at origin that is the instant of this once-in-life intimacy with catastrophe. The crucial reference in this passage is to the theory of distributions (discovered by French mathematician and political activist Laurent Schwartz) and to the application of distributions to the “δ function” (or delta function), formalized by the physicist P.A.M. Dirac, is it how to collapse a structure that will fall on our heads? Does it send new ships? Is it gymnastic? Is it a box of matches? Is it the last match in the box? Is it the box of matches as an art object or a poem about the box of matches as an art object or a Facebook post about a poem about a box of matches as an art object? But apparently the real problem in 2017 is young people spending too much money on avocado toast. This first little piece is by Robert Schumann. My father, who was born in Berlin in 1928, would never allow us to give him gifts. The only gift he would allow us to give him was marzipan.
marzipan, marzipan,
no one likes to eat marzipan
why did my father
ask us to give him marzipan?
perhaps because in Berlin
before the Nazis were fully in power
my father’s grandfather had a candy factory
maybe the candy factory made marzipan
Here is more Schumann—
when I was ten years old I fell in love with my best friend’s balls
I fell in love with his testicles
and then his mother made us Swedish pancakes
she made us cube steak
I idolized cube steak because it was partitioned
I idolized cube steak because it came in bits
Melanie Klein says
the ego is in bits if you’re psychotic
his mother gave us cube steak
for the pleasure of the modernist grid
Most of the aesthetic platform that I’ve rested upon in my life ended a week ago, unfortunately.
Does a separate rose on its bush
have aesthetic autonomy
as Adorno said it might?
There is nothing more poignant than a tuna melt
Tuna melts, tuna melts. Let me tell you about a dream I had. A shaman was giving a performance. He was very tall, and he was wearing just a thong. He was almost nude, and there was one thing very strange about his body. What can I do with the dream of the shaman?
Paul Thek communicated to me
he asked for a tube of Vaseline in the grave
bring me a tube
I am dead and I miss my unguents
A bio-poetics knows that it is along the cell wall that osmosis occurs; each cell knows from its edges, its margins, that the marginal is radical, knows that its life depends on information passing thru. If a “body” ignores this, or has the wrong code, suffering, anguish, dis-ease, pain ensue. To break the fear code is to die to it ...
Here is where my chickens began to unhatch
A sinkhole ate up the neighbourhood
I learnt this back at the school of metaphysics
It can be felt like fetching a pocketful of crumbly earth fire up from the ugly
mountain
I can affirm that
I can affirm nothing sadly but got a bean
especially zeros, the hot ones
on the ocean bed where there is a glass full of
ocean
like I myself have three penises, two hard, one soft, one for the beach, just in case, the flying saucers, like switch to manual, wow the rat dies, like nothing but hound dogs, elementary dear walnut says Mr. Cat. In truth I was in love with the wizard. The only earth we had was dead. Dead as in dead. So I picked up the book again. I picked up the rock pollen. And so on, and so forth, and that. What I really wanted was to write the love poem before the first. This was all they had ever wanted, even the elephants. I went home and did this, but it only made the grisly crunch hook into me from which obviously ... And then the dialogue sped up again:
Deep down I can’t make sense, it
was like I was for the more
I might the more it would did
I already tell you
I went with my Mum to headbutt a cactus.
That’s what preference is, this preference, and that, even though this was almost impossible, you had to multiply images. I said perhaps you don’t even like the movie. She smiled a bit and said yes she quite liked the movie. This made me happy for a while but then I got restless and went on Facebook, and saw that the movie had twelve trillion friends. I just couldn’t get myself together after that. Or rather, I realised I’d better get myself together, and start complicating everything, but then sleep took over and I forgot even that. I believe, secondly, that we are moving even closer to the sun. The proof of this is in the fact that everything is starting to get very yellow. Perhaps that is why we find Marx invoking the bell-shaped houses of the coastal tribes of Venezuela; the manufacture of Iroquois belts “using fine twine made of filaments of elm and basswood bark,” “the Peruvian legend of Manco Capac and Mama Oello, children of the sun”; burial customs of the Tuscarora; the Shawnee belief in metempsychosis; “unwritten literature of myths, legends and traditions”; the “incipient sciences” of the village Indians of the Southwest; the Popul Vuh, sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya; the use of porcupine quills in ornamentation; Indian games and “dancing (as a) form of worship.” Carefully, and for one tribe after another, Marx lists each of the animals from which the various clans claim descent. But it was only after reading Lewis Henry Morgan that anthropology, previously peripheral to Marx's thought, became its vital center. His entire conception of historical development, and particularly of pre-capitalist societies, now gained immeasurably in depth and precision. Above all, his introduction to the Iroquois and other tribal societies sharpened his sense of the living presence of indigenous peoples in the world, and of their possible role in future revolutions. Morgan is in fact a complex figure, in many ways more radical than even his relatively few sincere and knowledgeable admirers have been willing to admit. His sympathetic diary-notes on the Paris Commune, made on his sojourn in that city in June 1871 (just weeks after the horrific semaine sanglante), and his public defense of the Sioux during the anti-Indian “Red Scare” following Battle of Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as it’s known to the Lakota., the strong critical-utopian undercurrent in his work, especially evident in the many remarkable parallels between his thought and Fourier’s, but also in his vehement anti-clericalism and his veneration for heretics such as Jan Hus, his notion of a “thinking principle” in animals and his recognition that the Sixth Extinction was on the way, well, when I consider Marx’s word-for-word quotation from Morgan telling of a kind of “grace” said before an Indian tribal feast, that it ‘was a prolonged exclamation by a single person on a high shrill note, falling down in cadences into stillness, followed by a response in chorus by the people’, I can’t help but think of a passage in the first chapter in Fred Moten’s In the Break, about how the voice [in this case Billy Strayhorn’s voice] is all over, strained or fragile till strong g doubles up with and like the bass — the quickened disruption of the irreducible phonic substance, which is where universality lies. Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream with silence, movement, gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic. Every disappearance is a recording. That’s what resurrection is. Insurrection. Scat black magic, but to scat or scatter is not to admit formlessness. The aftersound is more than a bridge. It ruptures interpretation even as the trauma it records disappears. Amplification of a rapt countenance, stressed portraiture. No need to dismiss the sound that emerges from the mouth as the mark of a separation. It was always the whole body that emitted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to the movement of hips, dedicated by that movement, the harmolodically rhythmic body. Artaud’s description of torture in Maryland was published in 1845, and I can’t help but think of John Armstrong emailing me to say “Oh, I went to Clown School the other weekend and it was brilliant, am now working out how to clownify the poem and the performance / installation work that I intend to resume in the next six weeks or so. Have also booked a fortnight’s course on ‘How to be a stupid’ in a similar vein ...”
[Note: Sources: JBR; Puyallup Water Warriors & Redefine Tacoma, “BREAKING NEWS: Water Protectors Lock Down at Tacoma LNG Site”, at Change.org; JBR; Monika Szewczyk, “Hiwa K, ‘Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue)’”, at Vdrome; JBR; Hiwa K, “Flamenco Guitar Lesson with Paco Peña And Tony Blair”, at Hiwa K; JBR; Hiwa K, “Hafiz”, at Hiwa K; Zach Abisalih, “Vipassana”, “Colony”, at Entropy, 11 Dec 017; Hafiz, “All the Hemispheres” (tr. Daniel Ladinsky), at Astro Dream Advisor; P Inman, “Six Feldman Amounts”, “Prose Lachenmann”, quoted in Douglas Messerli, “On the Verge of Rational Meaning: P. Inman’s per se”, at Sibila, 18 Aug 013; Wouter Davidts, “Absence, etc.: Introducing Philippe Vandenberg”, in Philippe Vandenberg, Absence, Etc.; JBR; Thomas Nail, Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, at Academia.edu; JBR; Adolf Alzuphar, “Pelican Particles: A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Pursuit Of Song”, at Entropy, 10 Dec 017; John Keene, “Emotional Outreach Project 5.0: Emotional Exercises”, at Field Research Study Group A, 7 Jan 014; Gordon Hull, “Net Neutrality, Bears Ears and Primitive Accumulation”, at New Apps, 11 Dec 017; Stephanie Wakefield, “Field Notes from the Anthropocene: Living in the Back Loop”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Heriberto Yépez, “About Me: In English”, in Transnational Battle Field, at Commune Editions; Samuel Solomon, Special Subcommittee (excerpt), at Commune Editions; Heriberto Yépez, “About Me: In English”, in Transnational Battle Field, at h Commune Editions; JBR; Nanni Balestrini, quoted in Publishers Weekly review of his Blackout (tr. Peter Valente), at Commune Editions;Heriberto Yépez, “About Me: In English”, in Transnational Battle Field, at Commune Editions; Laura Martin, Enemies / Enemigos, at Commune Editions; Heriberto Yépez, “About Me: In English”, in Transnational Battle Field, at Commune Editions; Paul Mailhot-Singer, “tunnel vision”, at Entropy, 12 Dec 017; Heriberto Yépez, “About Me: In English”, in Transnational Battle Field, at Commune Editions; Paul Mailhot-Singer, “Birdman”, at Entropy, 12 Dec 017; JBR; Marriott Rewards, “John, Reward Yourself with 80,000 Bonus Points”, email rec’d 12 Dec 017, approx. 2:27pm PST; JBR; Jody Berland, “Attending the Giraffe”, at Academia.edu; Polina Levontin, Joseph Lindsay Walton, John Mumford, Nasir Warfa, “Lone Wolf Bioterrorists and the Trajectory of Apocalyptic Narratives”, at Vector: From the British Science Fiction Association, 12 Dec 017; JBR; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “March”, at Lemon Hound 3.0, 12 Dec 017; JBR; Marie Buck, “Vowels”, in Life & Style; JBR; Marie Buck, “Vowels”, in Life & Style; JBR; Spring Ulmer, “An Atlas of Restraint”, in The Age of Virtual Reproduction, quoted in John Latta, “Spring Ulmer’s The Age of Virtual Reproduction”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 28 Jan 010; Mayumi Suzuki, “The Restoration Will Essay #1 Father’s Lens by Mayumi Suzuki”, at Reminders Project & Reminders Photography Stronghold, 20 Feb 017, with a bit from the blurb for her The Restoration Will, at Photobookstore (hat tip Omo Bob); Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake; JBR; Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake; JBR; Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake; JBR; Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake; Jerome Rothenberg, “The Holy Words of Tristan Tzara”, at Poetry International; JBR; Ágnes Lehóczky, “Walkley’s Viola”, at Blackbox Manifold 8 (hat tip Alan Baker); JBR; Daniel Fridman, “Betting on Other People’s Lives”, at Public Books, 13 Dec 017; Corina Copp, Aisha Sasha John, quoted in “The Poetry Foundation’s 2017 Staff Picks”, at Harriet, 13 Dec 017; JBR; Allison Cobb, “For Love”, at Ahsahta Press; Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Anthony Madrid, quoted in Madrid’s “On Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses (2015) & Crawlspace (2017): A Notebook”, at Tourniquet Review, 4 Dec 017; Elina Alter, Viken Berbarian, quoted in “Looking Back on 2017: Art”, at BOMB, 14 Dec 017; JBR; Danielle Burgos, quoted in “Looking Back on 2017: Art”, at BOMB, 14 Dec 017; JBR; Jennifer Hasaan, “The Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is a word nobody actually uses”, at Washington Post, 15 Dec 015; JBR; Shanxing Wang, quoted in Eugene Lim, “Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang”, at Eugene Lim, 19 Jun 08; JBR; Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City, and Nathan Brown, quoted in Brown’s The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics; JBR; Ronald Johnson, “BEAM 5”, “ARK 46”, Christian Bök, Crystallography, Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom, Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City, and Nathan Brown, quoted in Brown’s The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics; Anne Boyer, “Questions for Poets”, at Mute, 1 May 014 (hat tip Donna Fleischer); Sam Levin, “Millionaire tells millennials: if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast”, at Guardian, 15 May 017; Wayne Koestenbaum, “Lounge Act at Thek Lounge”, at e-flux 87; Donna Fleischer, comment appended to “Clearly, the world to question is that of heterosexual hegemony” – Susy Shock | AWID”, at word pond, 16 Dec 017; Jonty Tiplady, At the School of Metaphyics, 2nd ed.; JBR; Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois”, at libcom, 7 Jul 09 (re Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks); JBR; Fred Moten, In the Break; JBR; John Armstrong, “The zine piece and a brief update”, email rec’d 17 Dec 017, approx. 5:50am PST]