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31.03.2018

Junji Ito, "Used Record"

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26.03.2018

With the Noose Around My Neck 90

But that just proves you have a bodhisattva’s heart. Can you imagine all the ants on earth being packed into ten anthills? This book is about that civilizational conjuncture, its implications for design theory and practice. The book finds its main epistemic and political inspiration and force, however, in the political struggles of indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and marginalized urban groups in Latin America who mobilize with the goal of defending not only their resources and territories but their entire ways of being-in-the-world, their collective “Life Projects,” a concept that is also finding a propitious home in transition design circles. Delicate ink lines form monkeys flinging poo, fluffy black cats, missiles that fall like rain from the sky, exploding on contact, gouging huge craters in the earth, collapsing people into buildings, trees into rubble, men into women, hands into feet, children into dust. Two thousand tons of ammunition in three hours. Forty-two air raids in one day. Twenty-seven thousand air raids in a decade. When Lucifer said, “God, to be honest, it’s you, not me,” God believed him. I mean, I was really surprised by the scenes that I saw and where I ended up, in the future and possibly on other planets. Which is why I’m really into breathing. Yes. Breathing. I am in the midst of an evolving practice that I call Black feminist breathing that is something like a meditative process of chanting words written and spoken by the ancestors who influence my practice. The act of breathing itself is so rich. Someone has probably said that. One of the first images that came to me was of a woman on a planet made of sulfur watching her heart blacken into a future diamond. I guess I was channeling Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal.” So yes, when I wrote Hollywood Forever I named it after the cemetery in Los Angeles. Hey, John Bolton, where ya been? Atop a nearby hill stood a trio of saguaros, the bottoms of their trunks black from some recent fire or decades-ago disease. Miles away, a single impossible thunderhead dropped rain in curtains over the Sonoran Desert. Nothing we could see cared about us. You know how it goes: a snake crossing a New Mexico highway sends a car smashing ‘‘with a snapping of axles’’ into a pocket of ‘‘sacred datura, a plant of which every part was poisonous.’’ The accident happens because a boy grabs the steering wheel, trying to run over the snake. Even in the frightening chaos of the crash’s aftermath, the boy can be heard moaning, ‘‘I just wanted that snake so bad.’’ Speaking of B, three years ago he was homeless, an alcoholic with no money and no intention to beg. His solution? He locked himself in a garage, no food, no drink. He dried himself out. When he crawled out he was looking for water. I’m not sure how he was locked in but managed to crawl out. I mean, every day B used to read newspapers for two hours in the morning while drinking my coffee, journal in the courtyard of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, cry while reading Cixous and wallow in melancholic obsessions. I am communing with the historians of the carceral state. I mean, I was just a curious girl living in the porch room of a filthy punk house. Some give astrological explanations: it’s your Saturn return. But who knows? One day I’ll write about picking Samuel R. Delany’s brain. What kind of life is this? At the end of first light — the volcanoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked at by sea birds — at the end of first light, this town sprawled — incapable of growing according to the juice of this earth — at the end of first light, this town sprawled — flat ... fears crouched in the ravines, fears perched in the trees, fears dug in the ground, fears adrift in the sky, piled up fears — at the end of first light, slowly vomiting cockroaches ... cockroaches ... Stephen Hawking’s final paper ends with a question mark. Now six months after the problems on Church Street, I’m still thinking about all the ways I might die:

All anxiety all the time

Every breath a traumatic stress

No list is long

Begin to shake as frontal lobe atrophies

Pass out in an elevator from blood sugar deficit

Sudden blinding headache

Run over by a bus

Slip in the tub

Flip out and kill a lot of innocent people with a motor vehicle,

explosives strapped to my body, or a projectile weapon

Succumb to cyanide powder inserted in over-the-counter pain killers

Choke on chemical weapons introduced into the subway tunnel

Reread “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”

Ben got bitten

on the neck

by a Tarantula

in the rain forest

and lived to hear this wretched poem.

Oh, and before I forget, Hawking once said his greatest regret was never getting to wheelchair-butt Margaret Thatcher. Or maybe it was run over her toes. But as I told him, Stephen, when you’re sad or when you’ve had a bad day, try this: make bird’s milk. This is not to be confused with the Russian dessert called bird’s milk, which is a chocolate-covered marshmallow. I used to love bird’s milk. We lived in an apartment building, on the seventh floor, and I’d never been on a real farm, so the one I imagined looked like the storybook pictures that showed a rooster and a cow and a little girl like myself carrying a pail, helping to take care of the animals. The farm was in East Ghouta. Was I in for a surprise! I shouldn’t have been, I guess, I’d read Eileen’s poem with the lines

Surely it’s imbecilic

To sleep under any flag

And I’d read Anne Boyer’s “The lamb knows all it knows through awareness of the patterns embedded in a generalized state of risk. The lamb’s way of sensing is a clear-minded sensing of the world as world aligns against the lamb: demystified, dependent, and with brutality intact. The lamb — like all prey, and unlike any predator — is a scholar of the all, but the bird of prey flying overhead mistakes its expertise in corpses for proof of its own general acuity.” Against all this messiness, it’s only reasonable to long for a “formulary for a new feeling.” See, for example, 4. Carrion: Arrange animal corpses in the shapes of letters in the shapes of words in the shapes of the lines of a poem. Wait for scavengers to eat flesh off bones. Using crayons and a giant sheet of newsprint take rubbings of the bones. Scan rubbings into the computer. Print on photo-transfer paper. Iron photo transfer paper onto an apron. Embroider. Give to chef to wear on TV cooking show. / / Supplies: dead animals, spread of land, giant sheet of newsprint, computer, scanner, printer, iron-on photo transfer paper, thread, needles, mailing supplies, chef, etc.

High water everywhere.

And how in this mess shall we in the arena of today make the new arenas, who must always stare into the eyes of the police? The answer was simple: I had no interest in teaching a topic that seem bedeviled, on one hand, by endless, insoluble debates about its cause and, on the other, by a rich but seemingly static body of primary sources that were endlessly trotted out as “set pieces”: Gabriele de Mussis’s (non-eyewitness) account of Mongols of the Golden Horde throwing disease-ridden bodies over the walls of Caffa; Boccaccio’s depictions of hysteria at the beginning of the Decameron; caricatures of the helplessness (or downright incompetence) of learned European physicians in the face of this unknown disease. But all that changed when I discovered that paleogeneticists offer the historian three important gifts, all of which allow us now to begin to do historical epidemiology in a way that mirrors what modern epidemiologists can and must do in tracking the spread of disease. The first gift — and the one for which the paleogeneticists received international praise — was in decisively determining the pathogen involved. Yersinia pestis (referred to in earlier science and historiography as Pasteurella pestis) was confirmed as the causative organism. The second gift was that, in successfully sequencing the bacterium’s whole genome from samples taken from a well-documented Black Death burial site in London researchers were able to say with confidence how and — importantly, how little — the Black Death genome differed from Y. pestis as it is documented in the world today. Y. pestis simply hasn’t changed that much. Only a few dozen single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) separate the 14th-century organism from living strains. This is significant because it was no longer permissible to hypothesize that the huge mortality of the 14^th century was caused because the strain involved was significantly more virulent than strains that caused the Third (modern) Pandemic, or that have been sequenced in modern labs today. Causes for the almost inconceivable medieval mortality would need to be sought elsewhere. This finding also meant that modern laboratory and field studies of Y. pestis could be used analogically to investigate historical aspects of the disease for which we were unlikely to find written evidence, eee gee, the role of specific flea vectors or mammalian hosts or ambient conditions that might affect plague outbreaks. Since plague is considered a Class A pathogen in terms of its bioterrorism potential (the classification refers to pathogens that can be easily transmitted and have the potential to cause high mortality), Y. pestis has and continues to elicit a good deal of attention. In other words, this is a disease we can actually study in great detail. The third gift is a result of what made the aDNA work possible, that is, extensive study of the genomes of modern Y. pestis strains, which have allowed the organism’s evolutionary history to be revealed. Every new Y. pestis genome that is reconstructed from historical remains can be fitted into a larger narrative of the organism’s history that has been constructed from modern samples, thus increasing the robustness of the narrative and fine-tuning our understanding of the organism’s (and hence, the disease’s) history. For example, in 2016, a genome was sequenced from remains buried within one of the basilicas of Barcelona. Although the carbon-dating of the remains produced only a rough chronological estimate of “1300-1420,” we know from documentary accounts that plague arrived in Barcelona by May of 1348. Hence, it is not in the least surprising to find that the genome from Barcelona matches, down to the last distinctive SNP, the genome sequenced from the Black Death cemetery in London, a burial ground created in late 1348 or very early 1349 and closed in 1350 when the epidemic had passed. Not every new genome sequenced fits the tidy narratives that geneticists would like to propose, but collectively each one tells us part of a unified story, encompassing plague everywhere from Spain to China to Arizona (where I live), at every point from the Bronze Age (whence we now have our earliest complete sequences) up to the outbreak of plague in Madagascar in 2017. It’s slightly different on Mars, where there is an “illiberal democracy.” Wednesday the food was good. Friday three cards came up, and one photo:

Elliptical Idyll

The Enemy of The People

Fall Leaves

One padlock with key.

A poem was read. Then the verdict was announced publicly, in the street between the Ethnographic Museum and the Parliament Building. Meanwhile, in Sacramento, it took 11 seconds for an unarmed black man named Stephon Alonzo Clark to be shot 20 times by the aforementioned police. This is but one reason why it’s painful to choose only five books relating to what feels like it’s what’s made your life your life. Even bracketing my own comrades and contemporaries and recognizing my own limits regarding translation and other national traditions, there are six dozen I would want to name, Audre Lorde, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roque Dalton, Sonia Sanchez, Bertolt Brecht, César Vallejo, Xu Lizhi, Robert Desnos, Adrienne Rich (in spite of her transphobia), so many more, even Saint-Just for saying “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” Sadly, that new idea didn’t stick. But OK. Diane DiPrima, for Revolutionary Letters, for

store water; make a point of filling your bathtub

at the first news of trouble: they turned off the water

in the 4th ward for a whole day during the Newark riots

for

don’t wait for De Gaulle or Kirk

to abdicate, they won’t

I think of Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise here, wouldn’t an anarchist starship be a great premise for a spinoff, but that’s not the advertisers talking, that’s just me. As to whether 68 was a revolutionary situation, I will let others fight it out. That poems like this could be written out of that moment feels important to me. OK. Amiri Baraka, for everything except a few crazed lines about Jews in “Somebody Blew Up America”, maybe especially for the photo of him dancing with Maya Angelou, talk about happiness, OK. Percy Shelley, for “The Mask of Anarchy”, I mean,

Rise, like lions after slumber,

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few—

When was there ever a better dream? And it lasted. It anchors the speeches of Pauline Newman as she organizes the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union. It comes back in Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion,” which winds from the Second Great Migration to the auto workers of Detroit to the Great Rebellion of 1967. In 2010, Shelley’s poem is repatriated when students and others fighting fatal cuts to the social wage storm and occupy 30 Millbank, the Conservative Party headquarters in London. Shelley’s final stanza is cited repeatedly in the following days, returning in the long season that includes the movement of the squares, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring ... OK. Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot. Her John Cabot, crying “Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” It does not work out for him. The Lord — justice, necessity, the dialectic — has something else in mind. Aimé Césaire, his Notebook, of course, each version, including the last, which begins, “Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin ...” Césaire’s influence is everywhere. I can’t help but hear him, to choose only one example, in the Venezuelan poet Miguel James’ “Against the Police,” which begins (in Guillermo Parra’s translation), “My entire Oeuvre is against the police / If I write a Love poem it’s against the police.” OK. I mentioned Desnos. I have to tell that Desnos Theresienstadt story again, it’s very grandfatherly of me to repeat myself: One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives. The guards freaked. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. The lesson I take from this story? What do you have to lose? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has grown to twice the size of Texas. Fuck that. As the Reverend say, “pan sin huecos.” “Pan sin huecos” for everyone!

A love supreme

So while I’m feeling all grandfatherly, here’s another twice-told tale, a reasonably large chunk of, no, why not the whole thing, “FCF 5”:

And

then I

found five dollars.

there

we were

splashing around in

the

spa another

one of our

slurred

days ... if

our spirituality is

defunct

our spleen

shore aint [aunt

ant

isn’t aren’t

faint] now lemons

have

replaced salt

so there we

were

while my

country is fucking

theirs [or yours]

wobbling in

the lobby of

library

file

under

“the clinical situation”. Chorus

“Us”: [Enters

back of stage

with

water-wings –

or children’s plastic

rubber flotation

devices – [strap-ons].

Each

has a

card pinned to

his/

her front,

which reads in

large

letters: HERE’S

MY PLAN.] Celeste:

plan is

to enter the

room

carrying a

tray with a

selection

of words,

each one inside

long-stemmed

wine glass ... Sirius:

Words?

Such as

What? Alain Badiou:

“Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to ‘ethical’ ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding ‘the sick’, conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims – the ‘human’ totality of subhuman entities [reéls]. But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital, and according to all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency papers, or [or or or or or]. Once again, ‘collective’ responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is that fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation, and there is no need for an ‘ethics’ (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if s/he deals with the situation according to the rule of maximum possibility – to treat this person who demands treatment … as thoroughly as s/he can, using everything s/he knows and with all the means at her/his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if s/he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let them send for the police. Even so, her/his strict Hippocratic oath would oblige her/him to resist them, with force if necessary. … For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from the situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation.”

“Us”-

Chorus: [re-

enters with Dog

masks …]

“Bow-wow,

bow-wow, bow-

wow”

a hundred

pages of bow-

wow-

wows, mostly

very affectionate,

five dollars.

sucked ice

from pine needles

atop

high windy

mist covered ridges.

Food

of the

Chinese gods, on

this

alone you

live forever, swimming

nekkid.

And then

of course I

found

five dollars,

or then of

course

I was

6 and I

lost

my snake.

My country is

fucking

[your pronoun

here]. This you,

know, is

nothing but your

ghost,

a simple

shadow, “let fear

the possession

of those who

would

rather shoot

than evolve.” I

mean

find five

dollars. In Latvia

they’re

melting statues

of Lenin into

tiny

bells which

they ring as

they

chant the

Parking Mantra: We

are

nice people

and there is

parking place

for us. Espressivo (pianissimo).

And

then I

found five dollars.

is late

but as usual

will turn

away from sleep

and

walk by

the river. Floating

objects

are a

common enough theme.

barely blink

when the fighter-

jets

come screaming

down the valley.

“He was found slumped at his computer desk. The screen was still active, continuous rows of the letter u. He had fallen forward, his nose pressed against the keyboard, forcing the u key down & causing it to replay itself endlessly on the monitor. The information at the bottom of the screen showed that it was up to page 213. It is calculated from this that he had collapsed 5 1/4 hours before being found. The first line on the first page read “This should be easy.” Then a space, & then the uuuuuus began.”

Exhibit

A: a

Crisp new fiver.

Exhibit B:

sounds of

my own making:

the Kaluli

Longhouse ceremonies music

could

result in

severe burns for

the

performers, inflicted

by listeners as

punishment

for having

been moved to

tears.

And yet,

[and yet ... and

yet ...

and yet ...

and yet ...] to

move

the listeners

to tears was

precisely

the intent

of the performers ...

Hey!

Look!

Five dollars!

Imagine how long the entire whale might have been. Would it fit in this room? Would it fit in the hollow of the dead tree at the dead end of the park path? I reach in and feel dry leaves, rodent droppings, and something smooth sliding under my fingertips — since then, I haven’t had the same hand. So yes, it probably is the case that the success and failure of signification are uniquely entwined in strong Pythagoreanism. The first draft of the Pythagorean thesis — panta arithmos — is a fascinating projection of the One-All precisely because it is capable of its own incapability, that is, not only of contradicting itself, but of bringing itself to unavoidable acknowledgment of failure. But this failure to capture the All in harmonia is the condition of the difference of truth from calculation and of reference from sense. If, then, logos is not only the logos in this restricted sense, it is not finally because a (reality-constituting) debt is incurred with respect to the Real, which comes to term and must be paid at the point where reflexive thought recognizes its arithmetic point de capiton. (The paying of this debt first takes place, in the Greek context, in the discovery of incommensurability, in which the Pythagorean thesis overturns itself.) Thinking’s initial nonrecognition of itself at the point of its own Real is inevitable, but the response to it is not, and hitherto the wrong choice, which is that between Platonism and Aristotelian writ large, has prevailed. The epochal choice posed to any logic is whether to repair the breach in the reality-effect, by demoting the forms capable of undergoing this breach to the level of mere content, by deliberately losing them in the field of the objective (Aristotelian syllogistic), or whether to recognize, at the heart of this disaster, the passage to an acosmic Real (Platonic dialectic, sufficiently purified in the course of its metamathematical recovery). In other words, it is not the incurring of the debt but its repayment which enables logos most radically to speak about something; there are two successive relations to the dimension of completeness in logos, and if logos can speak of something other than itself, it is not ultimately because of the apparent-completeness to which it gains access when the debt is incurred — the world of things and of truth as correctness on the means of the Line, or reality — but because, at its extremes, the repayment of the debt relates logos by an internal negation, a strict and unforeseen logos of the weakness of logos, to the incompleteness of the Real. I mean, that’s one way to look at it. As for me, the rainman gave me two cures,

Then he said, “Jump right in.”

The one was Texas medicine,

The other was just railroad gin.

And like a fool I mixed them.

And it strangled up my mind,

just kidding, sort of. That book is in the slow-read category right now, along with The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Along with James Sherry’s Entangled Bank, with its no longer prophetic “jellies all the way down.” But what about The End of the World Project? The world worlds. In Elisabeth Workman’s words,

whoever harms one will have terrible things happen to him. A hand or

leg or foot becomes completely dislocated ...

shhhhhhhhh the laws are half asleep ...

keep going you are not missing anything ...

a clusterfuck in the mist ...

no fancy parties without ecstatic caterwaul ...

one way to do this every day is ...

“help,” I’m flowery,

I’m inelegant ...

houses moving from place to place, the big one, blind pig blind pig ...

place to place ...

You know, pick up the house. Dark is the night, cold is the ground.

Couching nature as bundles and linkages,

Channels and—you can’t get more abstract from here—

Leap to march ‘neath shriveling swords

To capture intuitions

Such as Bruce has been existing for a long time,

And Deborah is exactly what I would call a role model.

And all the dead know is storytelling.

Welcome to the Subscription Center and enhancement plan:

Tamales of Sparta rolled global.

Keep going you are not missing anything ...

Any minute now a pair of hands will crest the hill.

Big hands. Attached to no body. All by themselves. Bug hands, maybe. Robot hands. The hands of alien archaeologists. Hooves (tho not White Rhino hooves). Cilia. Who knows? Oh, those hands, and oh, their gestures, those endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful. Speaking of the Jamaa el Fna, Mohamed Loakira tells us that “This is where, as a child, I learned not to dissociate ... voices, rhythms, colors, smells ...” This is where I had my bald head covered in intricately patterned henna tattoos, this is not where I saw

the toppled clouds
the squared mountain.

Which is to say that it is copiously clear to anyone who looks carefully at the first in-depth exhibition of the artist’s drawings, Cy Twombly: In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008, at Gagosian (March 8-April 25, 2018) that the past and future are one living thing, not a box of treasures to simply be plundered “like a hyacinth in the mountains trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains,” etc. etc. Why else did Twombly come to a commitment to undo all he had learned by drawing in the dark? As Chus Pato (and/or her translator) puts it,

From the other side, where we’re alone with

time and I is an innumerable that multiplies

and decentres itself

given that this narrator (of “Thermidor”) - who

still has no name and whose contract the author

didn’t renew as she’s inadequate and inconsistent-

couldn’t permit herself the history of not being

osmotic even though yes she wore a trench coat.

The account is autobiographical in that the words

that form it are biography

ferocity writes naturalizing poetics; its torpor

opiatic, geometric.

Emotional tension runs high. She orders a shot of

J&B. She evaporates (we find her by the shine of

her boots, but her face blurs). Not even the most

infinitesimal part of the tiniest measure of distance

between her and her surroundings: guardians of

the ambiguous, conversations and above all the

fusion with the black vessel that is really a theatre.

[...]

iii

Because of him, Oedipus, his alabaster skin, his

Nile-green eyes, his body hunched in the bulwarks,

the sounds of her harmonica, she forgot her sworn

faith in reason, belief in progress. It wasn’t then

that she learned the virtues of the dildo and the

equivalency of bodies.

And you, who can never fit together names

and objects.

Since she doesn’t remember, she takes notes. She

glosses coagulations (on the skin).

Altai, Yablonovy, Stanovoy (mountains)

Darfur, Kimberley, (plains)

Orinoco, Mekong (deltas)

Challenger (tomb)

Ob, Yenisey, Amur, Huang He (rivers)

And the delta, that tongue of earth, full of light,

advances.

But what I didn’t know was that John Armstrong would like to be Caroline Bergvall as much as he’d like to be Steve van Zandt. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Then Emma spoke. She named each one of the Parkland victims. Then she stood silent at the mic, for six and one-half minutes. That’s how long the shooting lasted. Only an idiot thinks a human can be trusted with a gun. Then a voice in my head told me:

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them

Users may copy and redistribute the ashes in any medium or format under the following terms: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may not use the ashes for commercial purposes. If you transform, or build upon the ashes, you may not distribute the modified ashes. “Nobody will understand what you are doing,” said filmmaker Hugo Santiago when Dermisache showed him her work. “The only one who can understand is Jorge Luis Borges, but Borges is blind, so you have no chance.” Was writing considered writing if there were no identifiable words? Santiago took one of Dermisache’s books and gave it to Roland Barthes. It was that journey — from disorientation to the familiar — that I was after, a realization I had after getting hopelessly lost and then a little less lost, wandering the dark alleys of Neukölln. I was happy; I was far from the numbered streets and grid structure of Manhattan and I reveled in it. Memorizing the avenues of my new neighborhood — Karl Marx Strasse, Sonnenallee, Weserstrasse — felt like understanding a small piece of the world while still feeling as lost as before. I understood that I had to pass those streets before reaching the river that marked the end of my Kiez and the start of another one. “After the river on the way to Kreuzberg you’ll pass Kotbusser Tor.” So you know how I put together tiny wooden models when my anxiety is really high so basically I’m surrounded by tiny houses? I’ve pretty much run out of kits but I found some in Europe and it was awesome except that everything is metric and obviously I don’t understand metric because I thought I bought two tiny fortune-teller wagons but only one of them is tiny; the other is fucking enormous. Like, it’s so big that I tried to tie it to Dorothy Barker so she could pull it around the kitchen like in that Chuckwagon dog food commercial from the 80s but she super wasn’t into it so instead I decided to put an old taxidermied chipmunk in it but the chipmunk was nailed to an old board so I had to use a knife to pry it loose and then I cut myself and Victor got mad because I was using the good knife on a dead animal but technically I’m using the good knife on a dead animal every time I cut up meat. So

Why am I freaking out?

There’s great disorientation in the sit room.

Burstulence – spray of noise.

It’s like chicken soup.

Sodium lauryl sulfate for the soul.

Madeline Gins and a popsicle.

Lady Gaga’s little white breast.

Fat braid of Louisa May Alcott.

Marie Antoinette’s cherub mouth.

Exene’s hunch.

Carolee in ram’s horns.

No ideas but in white kittens.

I put something free into a shopping cart.

Derision strainer arachnids.

Dank bobcats.

Stupefied tsars.

Roach drunks.

Rubbery kookaburras.

The careless daintiness of cosmology milkmaids.

[Note: For Richard Lopez. Sources: JBR; Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, at Duke University Press; Laura Staugaitis, “Delicate Inked Lines Form Fluffy Black Cats in Illustrations by Kamwei Fong”, at Colossal, 22 Mar 018 (the monkeys are courtesy of Richard Lopez); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred; JBR; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, quoted in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, “We Are Always Crossing: Alexis Pauline Gumbs”, at BOMB, 22 Mar 018; JBR; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, quoted in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, “We Are Always Crossing: Alexis Pauline Gumbs”, at BOMB, 22 Mar 018; JBR; Farid Matuk, “Harmony Holiday”, at BOMB, 26 Jul 017; JBR, upon Bolton's appointment as National Security Advisor by Donald Trump; Dan Kois, quoted in Dennis Cooper, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Joy Williams The Quick and the Dead (2000)”, at DC’s, 20 Mar 018; JBR; Philip Davenport, “Silent voices”, at arthur + martha, 22 Mar 018; JBR; Jackie Wang, “mental cloudbursts in the caesura of the busy life”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 20 Mar 018; Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (trs. A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman) quoted in “A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman on the original 1939 translation of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire”, at Poetry Society of America, Nov 012; Jonty Tiplady, untitled, at e | d, 21 Mar 018; James Sherry, “In the Cold Earth and Beneath the Bluish Sky”, at The Brooklyn Rail, 1 Oct 03; JBR; Ileana Florian, “Bird’s Milk (Lapte de Pasăre)”, at Entropy, 21 Mar 018; JBR; Eileen R Tabios, “August”, in Tankas on this World Where the Anglo-Zanzibar War Erupted; JBR; Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, and MH, quoted in MH’s “binding cartesianism(s): on anne boyer’s a handbook of disappointed fate”, at 3:AM Magazine, 20 Mar 018 (except for “High water everywhere”, which a Charlie Patton song); Monica H Green, “On Learning How to Teach the Black Death”, at Academia.edu; Márton Koppány, “The Projection Project”; JBR (it’s all over the news); Joshua Clover, “Five Book Plan: Radical Poetry”, at Verso Blog, 24 May 016; JBR; Susan Griffin, quoted in PGR Nair, “The Voice of Robert Desnos”, at Poetry Page of PGR, 3 Jul 012; JBR; Sam Meredith, “‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ has grown to twice the size of Texas, study finds”, at CNBC, 23 Mar 018; JBR (hat tip Tom Marshall, who translates the phrase as “bread without potholes”); John Coltrane, A Love Supreme; JBR, most of which is Flux, Clot and Froth 5, the original note to which read: “This one’s for Jared Schickling. Sources: And … dollars: Danielle Ramirez, title of column in UC Davis’ California Aggie, as reported in Al Martinez, “Student columnist arouses anger of gun rights supporters”, LA Times, 1 Dec 08 (Martinez: “[her title] is a throwaway line that completes a story with no point, which wasn’t the case here.”); There we ... salt: Bill Berkson/Frank O’Hara, “St Bridget’s Hymn to Willem de Kooning” in Hymns of St Bridget & Other Writings (brackets are Word’s suggested replacements for aint (which has an apostrophe in the original)); while ... theirs and wobbling ... under: Garrett Caples, “Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur”, “Chanson de Googoo”, in Complications; Chorus ... such as what and “Us”-Chorus ... bow-wow”: Kathleen Fraser, “Celeste & Sirius”, in Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling; Thus ... situation: Alain Badiou, Ethics; a hundred ... affectionate: Barbara Henning, “32”, in My Autobiography; I sucked ... forever and swimming nekkid: Joanne Kyger, “October 15, 16, 17, 1960”, “August 28 [1961]”, in Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964; I was 6 ... snake: Eileen Myles, “Snakes”, in Skies; This you ... shadow: Ernesto Priego, “This / you, we / know, is nothing”, in Not Even Dogs; “Let fear ... evolve”: Al Martinez, op. cit.; In Latvia ... bells and Parking ... for us: Michael Rothenberg, “June 28: THE HERO”, “October 12: Karma Verbatim”, in Unhurried Vision; Espressivo (pianissimo) and It is late ... river: Anne Stevenson, “The Professor’s Tale”, “Lockkeeper’s Island”, in The Collected Poems 1955-1995; Floating … theme and I barely … valley and He was slumped … began: Mark Young, “Familiar Objects”, “In Conspiracy City”, “A note for the coroner”, in Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008; In the Kaluli … performers: Ian Cross, “Is music the most important thing we ever did? Music, development and evolution”, in Suk Won Yi, ed., Music, Mind and Science”; Erika Howsare, “Is It Twice as Big?”, at Conjunctions, 28 Mar 07; JBR; Rusty Morrison, “(weeds)”, in Reclamation Project; JBR; John Bova, “Observations on the Divided Line”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”; JBR; Anselm Berrigan, quoted in Holly Amos, “Reading List: March 2018”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; James Sherry, “Census of the Filleted Fishes”, in Entangled Bank; JBR; Elisabeth Workman, Endless Is No Desolation; JBR; Ted Berrigan, “Coda: Song”; Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”; James Sherry, “Passive Voice: Forcing Amaryllis”, in Entangled Bank; Elisabeth Workman, Endless Is No Desolation; Lila Matsumoto, “It’s here”, at Jacket2, 11 Oct 2; JBR; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, quoted in Claire Colebrook, “The Future in the Anthropocene: Extinction and the Imagination”, at Academia.edu; Bill Lavender, “Mohamed Loakira”, at Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 25 Mar 018; JBR; Larry Eigner “the dark swimmers”, posted by Jennifer Bartlett at her Go Fund Me site (which she created to help raise funds to hire an editor to help her complete her Eigner bio); JBR; John Yau, “Cy Twombly’s Extravagant Synesthesia”, at Hyperallergic, 25 Mar 018; John Armstrong, “Conceptual and Anthological Difficulties”, at Arduity; TCharles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1^st ed., before he added the creator crap, about which he said in an 1863 letter to Joseph Hooker, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter”); JBR, re Emma Gonzalez, at March for Our Lives, Washington DC, 24 Mar 018; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Whose Land is it Anyway?: A Manual for Decolonization (eds. Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus); J. Mae Barizo," Lost in Berlin, and in the Wordless Writing of Mirtha Dermisache”, at Literary Hub; Jenny Lawson, “I see a big box of knives in my future. And possibly a tetanus shot. Maybe both.”, at The Bloggess, 20 Mar 018; JBR; Nada Gordon, “Emotional Support Peacock”, at Otohime, 24 Mar 018]

Posted at 10:33 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (1)

20.03.2018

With the Noose Around My Neck 89

“The sun deluges its chemical holocaust to the earth with blinding indifference” as Meatphysics has it. (See Figure 1.) Nothing can be said about this book, “a file-corrupting literature-machine that contracts and expands without final cause.” We are always in the midst of these economies. “There’s an SOS from the land of the misfit toys,” as some would have it,

It seems the king’s turning his army into no. 2 pencils

The other toys are really getting pissed

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments

You might dismiss it, saying that is “so 1998” or something like that

Give me a job, give me a kiss, let me kick you in the ass

Let us repeat, then, speculating in a mode that is neither philosophical nor mathematical, that Derrida’s following of the attempt to ‘free the question as to the origin of geometry’ acts as the non-original origin of his work, and that the failure of mathematical idealization (as precisely what Derrida here calls mathematical infinitization) is also an exposure to a kind of radical monstrosity of number. Number itself, then, can it be counted? Can it be counted on? Is there a One (or more) of extinction(s)? Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world, as Shantideva asks?

Umberto, come here

Bravo, always ready

What does a Bolshevik do when

he dives into the Red Sea?

You don’t know what a Bolshevik does?

No, tell me

He goes splash!

“Tupi or not tupi,” reads the manifesto’s signature line, “that is the question.” Based on the novel by Mário de Andrade (no relation between Joaquim, Oswald, or Mário), subtitled “a hero without a character,” it’s a freewheeling picaresque charting the adventures of a shapeshifting protagonist from the jungle, where he’s born as a full-grown black man to a haggard white woman (portrayed by a man in drag), to the city, where he, now played by the actor who previously played the mother, falls in love with a revolutionary, sires a child, passes through a series of mystical misadventures, and is antagonized, to put it mildly, by an Italo-Brazilian capitalist who eventually tries to add him as an ingredient to a swimming pool-sized feijoada floating with bloated corpses. This all takes place in the Land of the Snake, which is based on From Abdizuel to Zymeloz and is made of four hundred and ten pieces of fabric ranging from white to black and passing through the entire color spectrum. Each piece is embroidered with an angel’s name. Four hundred and ten samples of what things could be like. When a child is named, two lists are traditionally composed before the birth. Here there is only one. But I definitely can’t tell you what’s in the envelope. I’m not going to tell you the hacker’s gender, either. If it’s any consolation, though, I can tell you a secret about sensei’s botnet: it was assembled using a malware that was designed to exploit computers that run Linux. I can tell you that the reason that sensei’s name isn’t capitalized is that it’s an online username that for aesthetic purposes sensei chose not to capitalize. I can tell you that sensei isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. I can tell you that sensei has had personal interactions with Barrett Brown, Commander X, and Jeremy Hammond, and fucking hates Sabu. Absolutely fucking hates him. The aliens of Tribulation 99 may come from a destroyed planet for example, but they are apparently working with the US government to subjugate local populations in Central America. Which is to say that an accident has happened. An ambulance is parked at the curb. A pile of intestines lies on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I buy a very hard apple at a Korean deli which I eat on my way to meet Jean who, right now, stands at the 67th Street entrance to Central Park. When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax ... a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan. Although we are not used to winning, a few years ago we had a fundamental intuition: victory is something that is constructed. We didn’t have to make up what we wanted to pull off as we went along, because the text “Six Points for the Future of the ZAD” declared it three years ago. Yet it was a fundamental shift: from a struggle against a megaproject; we were slowly moving towards a struggle to sustain and amplify what we had built on this land. Of the 4077 acres earmarked for the airport, 1111 have been cultivated for a long time by resisting farmers intending to recover their rights, whilst the movement wrenched 667 from the management of the Chamber of Agriculture to carry on collective ag experiments. 1309 have been temporarily redistributed to farmers who signed an amicable agreement with Vinci. But what is poetry? And what is math? There seems to be a math of the poetic real (the second or real infinity of Georg Cantor, the indiscernible of Paul Cohen) just as much as there is a mathematics that is more, as it were, faithfully mathematical (Cantor’s first or natural infinity, Kurt Gödel and the concept of the constructible set, but also in a way set theory overall with its affection for counting and the “count-as-one”). Which is one way of interpreting Badiou’s fidelity to Maoism, which favored the moment of analysis (1→2). So why immanence? Because, as Lorine Niedecker reminds us,

In every part of every living thing

is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals

of the rock

and as Tim Cresswell notes,

boundaries

between

horizons

are often

mixed up

merged

churned by worms

In other words,

Let your hair down baby, ‘n let’s have a natural ball

‘Cause when you’re not happy, it ain’t no fun at all

You can’t take it with you, that’s one thing for sure

You can’t take it with you baby, that’s one thing for sure

There’s nothing wrong with you baby, that a good T-Bone shuffle can’t cure

Better have fun while you can, people, fate’s an awful thing

I said fun while you can, fate’s an awful thing

etc, etc, you know, let there be songs to fill the air. When I read that Hunter wrote that line the same afternoon he wrote “Brokedown Palace” and “To Lay Me Down”, reputedly drinking half a bottle of retsina in the process, all I could think was: only half? But I have a question for you. Do you think a sentence that begins This “madness gene” is simply the exosomatic or techno-narcissist pharmakon doing what it cannot stop, purified and automated — the so-called Anthropocene as the now self-feeding irreversible will to exceed its own erasure or decoupling, whether as the fantasy of a cyborg conversion of the organism or accelerated eco-cide with an escape clause for exo-planetary migration of a survivor caste, bred for the occasion is a good first step towards a definition of contemporary art? How about designer babies? After fretting for a century in all pop cultural milieus about invading destroying space aliens, it turns out that Roswells ‘R Us. Just listen to the prism music at the end when the head is invited into a void flower, for crying out loud, for crissakes. Actually, it sounds like a Genome 6.66Mbp Shanghai Pyrrhonist mix track, but that doesn’t change my point. Sextinction is a term I made up last year for the fun of it, I mean fuck of it, to notate what? I can’t remember. What I am talking about is therefore Auslöschung (cancellation in the mathematical sense). In other words, the prismic sweet spot is the colour of infinite cosmographical form, I mean, one day, for our designer babies, there will be colours we currently can’t imagine, which is already the case for penguins. I’ve always loved colour and wanted to eat it. Look at this painting by Deanna Havas. Or think of what Haraway calls ‘the ongoing performance of memory by an orchid for its extinct bee.’ For this Netflix product, then, there are at least three possibilities: No matter, with matter, always. This is the way the shimmer is, the void is not simply ‘nothing.’ At the same time the human can go in and it does here and it still (just about) has something to do with Angelus Silesius, at least I think so, if only I could get my hands on a good edition of his text. Beautifully designed and exquisitely printed on creamy matte paper, this playful yet thoroughly researched volume looks at the history of one of the world’s first “designed” foods and imagines the innovative updates necessary to achieve utopian new standards of health and sustainability. Insect pâté, anyone? CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Collage deconstrucing a mortadella on a background of a macro image of broccoli, alongside the traditional pork, plus broccoli, carrots, romanesco, cauliflower and pistachio nuts; Carrot, apricot and coconut dried sausage; berry, date and almond dried sausage; insect salami; berry liver sausage; apple blood sausage; potato and pea fresh sausage; mortadella with asparagus; two types of vegetarian sausage inspired by the British national dish bangers and mash (ingredients include mashed potatoes, peas, flowers, herbs, carrots, ginger and apricots). So I am grateful for the support of many who welcomed my investigation of the political aspects of the sublime. Of course I will forget some of your names. “We met at LOVE Park each time, a dozen times total,” explains Conrad. “We alternated who would lead the walk through the city. This is collaboration on a scale of sensory trust, trust in each other’s abilities, trust in what each other will provide for the day.” The next thing I knew I was on vacation, diving on Cape Verde. And there it was, or at list a bit of it, that giga jigga shit ton of plastic waste I’d heard so much about for all those years, all over the beach, all strewn thru the ocean. So I invented this thing. Here’s how it works. A screening platform calms the water. That allows the plastic to float up to the surface. Once on the surface, the plastic is collected and skimmed. Nets or other filter systems, which could endanger ocean life, are not necessary. Then the platform takes the plastic and plasma gasifies it. That splits the plastic into molecules, which form a gas, which gets converted into algae cultures as basic food. The algae produce hydrogen, which is used to produce energy, which powers the platform’s fuel cells, which makes the platform self-sufficient. We’ve made a film about it, which is being seen. Now all we need is money!

            For I have seen love
            and his face is choice Heart of Hearts,
            a flesh of pure fire, fusing from the center
            where all Motion is one,

with me reading Motion as Mutton, nice, right? It started to snow at midday, somewhere after why there refused to be snow for so many years and before why it refused to be snow again, and now it’s like hanging in the sky it’s not hanging really it’s falling like drowning not waving and I came downstairs to see it; for I have seen his face, a voice or that exacting curve from cheek to eye of in our minds what isn’t able to go or an unobtainable exit dangling in the sky. And it was still the end of summer still near enough that it was warm and sitting outside of it. No, that was another time. I see the toadstools and the swallowtail and the ropes and now it starts to go, it’s all melting and, well, “He’d make a big show of sticking the two torn halves in his wallet. When we buried him, Frank and I tossed the last two halves he gave us into his grave. Here ‘Between the two torn halves of my soul are cities and climates ... Place those two torn halves of the map together again and you are re-enacting the history of the Silurian to Devonian periods ... The two torn halves promise but never deliver full restitution.’” I feel like repeating the word restitution fourteen times. Why? Because concepts are historical dramas, as Deleuze might say. I mean,

I SHOULD HAVE LIKED EARLY

MORNING CATHARTICS

“Wanted, immediately, 4,000 fat hogs.”

So yes, I have an important message for you the birds are wired / peace is blind / love your lungs / God I hope you don’t think I’m using you / the birdcage is gasproof / I have an important message for you / when the battle comes I want you on my side my god I have flare / The EU recently suspended funding for its 31 million Euro Water Towers Protection and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (WaTER) project in Kenya. After repeated warnings from human rights and other organisations locally and around the world, UN experts and the affected Sengwer, the indigenous forest community that live in the affected Embobut Forest of the Cherangany Hills, the EU finally acted after the killing, on January 16, of Robert Kirotich, a member of the Sengwer community. Why? Because he was killed during a raid by the EU-funded Kenya Forestry Service (KFS), mounted in order to ‘clear’ the forests of the Sengwer, who the Kenyan government pretend are illegal squatters, loggers, cattle ranchers and poachers, who, it argues in a typical bullshit no-evidence faux-green move, are environmentally degrading the place they’ve lived for ages (Sengwer had two sons named Sirikwa and Mitia. The children of Sirikwa and Mitia form the sub-tribes of Sengwer. These are Kapchepororwo, Kapchepar (Kaptoyoi), Kapumpo, Kaptogom, Kapcherop, Kaki-sango, Kimarich (Kamosus), Kapsormei (Kapseto), Kapteteke, Kipsirat, Kamengetiony (Kopoch & Kapkotet), Kaplema and Kamesieu. And all the generations. Etc.) This isn’t the first time. Under a previous World Bank funded conservation project funded via the Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP), started in 2007, the World Bank provided the KFS $64 million to improve “the management of water and forest resources in selected districts.” After initially including provisions that recognised the rights of forest communities like the Sengwer, they were later amended to remove all such references. The project lasted till 2013. Nearly every year of the life’s project saw mass evictions of the Sengwer. The World Bank’s own Inspection Panel found the NRMP guilty of failing to take “the proper steps to address the potential loss of customary rights” and enabling the evictions by failing to adequately identify or address that the institution it was funding, the KFS, was before, during and after the term of the NRMP, committed to booting the Sengwer off their land. The Report however, ultimately exculpated the World Bank. Surprise! The NRMP project was notable for another reason. It was part of the ever more complex and convoluted architecture of quote unquote climate change mitigation, underpinned by the philosophy of ‘market environmentalism’, known as carbon markets, set up by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). More specifically, the NRMP project falls under the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), first set up at the 13^th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC, in Bali, also in 2007. This conservation program also set out to expand forest cover and protect ecosystems, only this time in aid of producing what has become known as REDD ‘Offsets’. In essence, the carbon markets work according to a ‘cap and trade’ system, which sets limits on outputs of greenhouse gases and allows countries that are unable to meet their emissions limits to buy the right to pollute from countries that had more successfully limited their emissions or had more successfully lobbied for exemptions to continue polluting. In other words, both social death and the commodity form can pose as anti-global warming. Peeeeeeeeeee-pole!

a is for abracadabra

b is for

& then went down into the deeps

like recidivist bureaucrats

quote unquote

ANY ORDINARY, LONG-WINDED

DELIRIUM WILL DO

when our bodies crash there’s a sound of

tinkling. god

twirls a small white handkerchief

something convulses

golden guns on a fuck plate

bingbingbingbingbingbingbing

the plates stacked among the rocks are for hurling at the witness trees

they rose they rise en masse

ing guh

ing ing gah

ALARMS GO OFF WHEN THEY EXIT THE BUILDING

Once upon a time, that is, ancient glaciers oozed light through the general living room of USAmerica, scraping the terrain into the sweeping prairies of the Midwest, a superlatively grassy expanse in which bison cavorted with dangerous electric fish-goats and no one got hurt. That was a long long time ago. Then one day we woke up and it was everywhere: Ultramegaprairieland, brimming with weird bling, high, holy, and WTF, as we soar thru the heavens, we’ll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in naked wheatfield eternity, the truth is written in spheres, amid the peaceful, silent spheres, among millions of other celestial bodies, all together in the altogether, one little polka dot, gently, gently,

Marx Lenin Trotsky Luxemberg

The Kronstadt Massacre

the dream of Sisyphus

there are flowers there are colours

underwear used matches

repeated breakdowns endless weeping

no don’t call me. yes I’m on something

they want to know if I have a television

I wonder, has the meaning of Pasolini’s death changed since then? I don’t know. I mean, I guess I could draw a sort of obscene angle connecting his broken index finger to the fascist cops, in the way that in Gogou’s poem the blows of his murderers become identical with forms of art. His fingerprints were razored away and kept in the municipal record book. The faces of those who killed him, their faces were transformed to a ricochet of sparks. We try to sketch it, that fish sauce you tell yourself you’re eating, yeh, all those negative cosmologies in which particular points of political data or cultural reference connect to astrology, mathematics, alchemy and the occult in a scale at once microscopically constricted and impossibly vast — but this does not mean that defeat is total, nor that it is not. “It puts me in mind of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, where she speaks of exile, of feeling like a dead person, of languages that you can’t understand passing through you like ghosts. And I guess those ghosts exist, like marks on a calendar or the beginnings of a map.” On the map there’s a heavy whale panting on a distant shore while giving premature birth. The ecozoologists will fly in from all over the world, will poke its entrails, and the bulletins will repeat themselves, slightly altering the emphasis, doing more and more with less and less then less and less with nothing. We’ll all go on as if. Because further news may come in any moment and we shall of course interrupt the programme then we’ll all go on as if. So I began to write Out, which is a very “sick” novel. It’s built around sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. The pedestrian pad, 44, is mounted over the traffic system at first floor level, except where contours dictate the opposite, which they often do, 47. The citadel, 49, 50, is a consolidation of the first spoil-tip, 48. Over the heated bathing pool [illegible] the builders of the city Civilia selected the area between the quarries B and F [illegible] so yes, we’re all going to die, and probably horribly. But at least we can laugh at how completely ridiculous it is to be killed by economists who believe it’s immoral for the government to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth and who are being interviewed over at Fox & Friends, and by the way, infusing the blood of teenagers to gain eternal youth is bad and stupid. And I haven’t even mentioned the tentacled skulltoctopus, or Roko’s Basilisk. But here’s a question for you: if I inhale a fart does my exhale smell? While no one would expect van Gogh’s eyebrows to be blue in reality, the “she” in the story is “running from something // so violent // that when it catches her she ends up here / standing up slowly, blood still trickling down into her sock.” Walking home after being bandaged up,

she passes each of the neat houses with red shingles

near the hospital in the posh part of town

and as she moves further away

the shingles take on an ashen color

the color of steak after two or three minutes on the grill

[she remembers reading in Mercedes Eng’s Mercenary English, that

the Native Women’s Association of Canada has documented

over 500 cases of Aboriginal missing and murdered women

from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (and Prince George and

Edmonton and ...) and across Canada over the last 30 years

and decides that that is not unrelated to the now stiff-as-cardboard

sock in her pocket which she plans to place on the south-facing

windowsill under the Picasso Pax dove decal ...]

end poem

right there

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to view this

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never more

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of what you

think

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scitilop

evol uoy woh naem i)

because king tut

—the tomb's

discovery

led to the

widespread

use of

eyeliner

by women

altho hello

it was a boy

wearing it

boom!

wait omg wait

maybe nefertiti

really only had

one eye

“Soon it would be too hot’ is the laconic first sentence of The Drowned World. Its hero, the marine biologist Robert Kerans, is staring out from the balcony of his suite at the Ritz; he is the only (mammalian) occupant of the hotel; the rising water is ten stories from his feet. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders ... The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. The sun is alarmingly distended. It is also alarmingly noisy; it ‘thuds’ and ‘booms’; we hear ‘the volcanic pounding’ of its flares. There are mosquitos the size of dragon flies, hammer-nosed bats, wolf spiders. There are iguanas and basilisks — not Roko’s baskilsk, real basilisks — at one point a large caiman sees Kerans ‘waist-deep among the horse-tails’ and veers towards him, ‘its eyes steadying’ (that ‘steadying’ is awfully good). The water gives off an unendurable reek, ‘the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases’. Kerans watches the ‘countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects’. Beneath the lagoon is a city: ‘Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.’ The city is London. Kerans is nominally engaged with a team of scientists on a waterborne testing station, but the work has become pointlessly routine. Fauna and flora are faithfully following ‘the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier’, namely an accelerated counter-evolution, a retrogression into a world of lizards and rainforests under a Triassic sun. The human actors have embarked on a parallel process “durable reek, ‘the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases’. Kerans watches the ‘countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects’. Beneath the lagoon is a city: ‘Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.’ The city is London. Kerans is nominally engaged with a team of scientists on a waterborne testing station, but the work has become pointlessly routine. Fauna and flora are faithfully following ‘the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier’, namely an accelerated counter-evolution, a retrogression into a world of lizards and rainforests under a Triassic sun. The human actors have embarked on a parallel process – within the diameter of their own skulls. Early on we learn that something has gone wrong with sleep: at night, the protagonists enter the ‘time jungles,’ thru which the Damnation Army marches on stilts, singing “The Marching Song of the Damnation Army,” which goes like this:

We are all damned

That’s why we’re marching

To hell with it, to hell with it

Hooray, hooray, hooray!

Behind them marches death.com. But was a first order donkey enough for a parade? Didn’t Ignatz need to be ... more? I rig him up with angel wings so he could at least be a donkey angel, and I fit his cart with clouds and angel flags. But not just anyone one can ride in an angel donkey cart, certainly not just plain me. So I dress up in a tie and tails, put on a chicken mask, and play Bach on my cello. Bliss is it in that cart to be alive. Chicken soul must be related to chicken soup, and the C major suite never felt so easy, especially when compared to the goats, who slowly arc their bodies backward til the spikes of the Great Warrior’s head touch the ground. Why did Barbra Streisand clone her dog? I dreamed of being in love with an airline pilot. I was younger than I am now. She was tall and full of life. Her father hated me because I was only a passenger. And a troublesome one at that. My papers weren’t fully in order, which caused one hold up; after which there was something to do with pills, which caused another. I had hurt my left hand climbing. Climbing what? Trying to be cheerful with everyone, I said: “These gritstone abrasions are always slow to heal.” But really, the thumb and part of the hand were missing and the exposed flesh had gone an odd colour. Inside the various cracks and fissures of the wound, so that they looked as if they were interleaved with strips of raw bacon, were strange creamy looking blobs of ... I had to look. They were small, slim, white crocuses. You want to know something funny? This Russian guy named Kogan who had something to do with Cambridge Analytica actually changed his name for a while to Spectre. You know, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s secret org. What a dumbfuck. But that’s what goes on in that casket-slash-room. That valley is a cave, that cave is full of guinea pigs: here in the gorge, here in the stack, here in the heart of the guinea pig darkness. It looks like Mommy is having another litter. Which is to say that the firmament in its ancient Hebrew conception is also the middle ground between the waters above and the waters below. I read about it this morning on Facebook, NOT, I haven’t gone near Facebook in years. Then Pythagoras appears. Then Juliana Spahr appears. Then sixty-four sonnets about housing. Then “snails fattened on milk.”

[...] is this a true post-Marxism, are we placing an ethical

judgement on collages of capital, finance, trade networks,

decentralised bodies, changes in speed, dynamics of cohabitation,

status threat, context collapse ¬– with unstrung metaphors

an overall colour emerges of green, or red — in blocked text a

pattern transforms itself, and not always within the same logical

framework of its creation — definition is the cause of this loop, is

the loop itself, and appears dot dot dot

as my dog. My dog is retching in the night,

she has woken the house demon, the carpet is moaning,

I cannot move move,

my dog is whimpering at the door door,

I am locked in,

we escape by a stream, we swim backwards,

we carry baskets on our shoulders full of herb books,

the word infrathin is used several times: a word coined by Duchamp, who insisted that it could only be defined by examples. Some of Duchamp’s examples: the warmth of a seat which has just been left; the way tobacco smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it (which kind of gives an answer to the fart question). Even if Melville’s main intertextual source is the ABBA back catalogue. Consider the penultimate sentence: Real-time appendices siphoned via 42 Raptor engines, all burning liquid oxygen and dense methane in carbon fibre composites, then sweating DNA into an AdSense dustpan — and, by googling their services, you agree to these terms. And so the Places, the People, their Minds and their Bodies, kept dancing and musicking, and the Empress kept watching over them, sappy bubbles and soapy grenades at the ready, and so they passed their time nobly until neither Stars nor Thunderstorms were able to separate them, “The Talking Jewels.” And so she toyed with them, the worlds, one after the other, to get a taste and feel not for them directly but for their circuits and for her own jaw, fingernails, and lipid functions — then the actor is asked to repeat this line by an unknown magnified voice coming from the auditorium. Likewise, the actor is asked to repeat this sentence LOUDER. It is not the small blond woman to her right wearing an expensive ceramic gas mask who asks, nor the three mirrors to her left, mostly concerned with reflecting a goldfish pond. Who, then? All that is known, apparently, is that the keynote speaker is about to be burned to death in a spicy-food-eating competition.

[Note: Sources: Sandy Baldwin, “Against Digital Poetics”, at Electronic Book Review, 13 Aug 09; Voodoo Glow Skulls, “Land of Misfit Toys”; JBR; Voodoo Glow Skulls, “Land of Misfit Toys”; William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”, and Sandy Baldwin, quoted in Baldwin’s “Against Digital Poetics”, at Electronic Book Review, 13 Aug 09; Jonty Tiplady, “Mathematics of Extinction”; Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara (trs. Vesna A. Wallace and B. Alan Wallace); JBR; Pier Maria Pasolini, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (translator unknown) at Drew’s Script-O-Rama; Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto”, and Jon Dieringer, quoted in Dieringer’s “Cannibal Corpus: The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade”, at BOMB, 25 Aug 017; JBR; Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto” (tr. Leslie Bary), at Corner College; JBR; Donatella Bernardi, “2018 / 201803 / 201804 / Ausstellung. A proposition by Donatella Bernardi for Corner College: From Abdizuel to Zymeloz”, at Corner College; JBR; Matthew Baker, quoted in K.C. Mead-Brewer, “Artificial Languages: An Interview with Matthew Baker”, at BOMB, 13 Mar 018; Tim Maloney, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Craig Baldwin Day”, at DC’s, 9 Mar 018; JBR; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, quoted in Sypha, “Sypha presents … American Psycho Day *”, at DC’s, 8 Mar 017; The ZAD will survive”, at ZAD Forever, 12 Mar 018; Alexander R Galloway, “21 Paragraphs on Badiou”, at e-flux 89; JBR; Lorine Neidecker, and Tim Cresswell, quoted in Eric Magrane, “Situating Geopoetics”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Jesse Colin Young, “T-Bone Shuffle”; JBR; Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, “Ripple”; JBR; Philip Larie, “Ripple”, at Genius.com; JBR; Tom Cohen, “Notes on an Anti-Fable: Hyperpopulation, Species Splits, and the Counter-Malthusian Trap”; Jonty Tiplady, “The Refraction Lens In Terms Of ‘Annihilation’ (2018): On the Shimmer as Non-Void”, at 3049, 16 Mar 018; JBR; Artbook / D.A.P., “What is ‘the Sausage of the Future’?”, email rec’d 16 Mar 018, approx. 8:04am PDT (re Carolien Niebling, The Sausage of the Future); JBR; Michael J. Shapiro, The Political Sublime, at Duke University Press; JBR; CA Conrad, quoted in Thom Donovan, “The City Real & Imagined”, at Wild Horses of Fire, 2 Mar 018; Marcella Hansch, “An Innovative Approach to Cleaning Up Our Oceans”, at Pacific Garbage Screening; Verity Spott, “Snow”, at Two Torn Halves, 1 Mar 018; James LePore, A World I Never Made: The Invictus Cycle, used by Verity Spott as the header/epigraph of Two Torn Halves; JBR; Michael J. Shapiro, The Political Sublime, at Duke University Press; JBR; Elisabeth Workman, “I Should Have Liked Early Morning Cathartics”, at Tarpaulin Sky, Jun 015 (hi, Elisabeth!); JBR; Beth Bachmann, “Three Poems”, at BOMB, 14 Mar 018; Martin Crook, “Conservation as genocide: REDD versus Indigenous rights in Kenya”, at Tripod; Elisabeth Workman, Endlessness Is No Desolation; Amazon blurb for Elisabeth Workman, Ultramegaprairieland; Yayoi Kusama, “An Open Letter to My Hero, Richard M. Nixon, 1968” (thanks, Bob); Sean Bonney, “After Katerina Gogou”, and “After Katerina Gogou”, “After Katerina Gogou”, at Gods of the Plague, 14 Mar 018; David Grundy, quoted in Sean Bonney, “David Grundy’s Intro To My Cambridge Reading”, at Gods of the Plague, 14 Mar 018; JBR; Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon, at Democratic Underground; Christine Brooke-Rose, in an interview, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Christine Brooke-Rose Textermination (1991)”, at DC’s, 16 Mar 018; Ivor De Wolfe, Civilia: The End of The Sub Urban Man, in Robin Tomens, “Civilia: The End of The Sub Urban Man by Ivor De Wolfe (Architectural Press, 1971)”, at Art by Robin Tomens, 16 Mar 018 (Ivor de Wolfe is a pseudonym for H. de C. Hastings); so yes: JBR; Amazon blurb and bits of comments, etc. re: Philip Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right; JBR; a question K stumbled via a Google search result; Laura Wetherington, and Lynn Melnick, “Fusing Language and Landscape in Poetry”, at Hyperallergic, 11 Mar 018 (a review of Melnick’s Landscape of Sex and Violence); JBR; Mercedes Eng, Mercenary English; JBR; Christian Hawkey, “kohl lhok كحل”, at BOMB, 19 Mar 018; Martin Amis, introduction to the Fourth Estate edition of J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World; JBR; Ronald T Simon and Marc Estrin, Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on The Bread and Puppet Theater; “Why did Barbara Streisand clone her dog?”, at The Chicago Blog, 14 Mar 018; M John Harrison, “The Real Dream”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 8 Mar 018; JBR, but see Carole Cadwalladr, “The Cambridge Analytica Files: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower”, at The Guardian, 17 Mar 018; Joyelle McSweeney, “Future No Future”, at Poetry Foundation, 1 Apr 014; JBR; various bits and pieces, with a few interspersions by JBR, at Hix Eros 8]

Posted at 11:24 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

19.03.2018

More on Cambridge Analytica, this time from Channel 4

Posted at 07:33 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Cambridge Analytica Files ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower (from the Guardian)

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May, it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analyticathreatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

>“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.

Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.

It’s taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it’s possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic – Robert Mueller’s in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after theObserver’s first article in this investigation.

It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind – to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold.

There are many points where this story could begin. One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible

Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics.

“Politics is like the mob, though,” he says. “You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.”

Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition.

“He’s one of the brightest people you will ever meet,” a senior politician who’s known Wylie since he was 20 told me. “Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes a curse.”

Meanwhile, at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, were experimenting with a way of studying personality – by quantifying it.

Starting in 2007, Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz called myPersonality, had gone viral. Users were scored on “big five” personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook “likes” across millions of people.

The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. “They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the centre told me. “There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.

“There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.”

The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US defence contractor, funded Kosinski’s PhD and Darpa, the US government’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski’s work.

But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair to say that he didn’t have a clue what he was walking into.

“I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century,” Wylie explains. “And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data.

“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”

Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren’t interested.

“I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI.”

Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same.

Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’”

In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations. Its defence arm was a contractor to the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the US’s Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance”, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.

SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.

Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa – a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCL’s offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defence and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge cyberweaponry.

“The thing I think about all the time is, what if I’d taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.”

A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union.

What was he like?

“Smart,” says Wylie. “Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel.”

Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He speaks 19 to the dozen for hours at a time. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon.

Bannon got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”

But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.

“It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”

When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it’s one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. “And the cyberwarfare guy is like, ‘Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections.’”

It was Bannon who took this idea to the Mercers: Robert Mercer – the co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who used his billions to pursue a rightwing agenda, donating to Republican causes and supporting Republican candidates – and his daughter Rebekah.

Nix and Wylie flew to New York to meet the Mercers in Rebekah’s Manhattan apartment.

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”

Robert Mercer was a pioneer in AI and machine translation. He helped invent algorithmic trading – which replaced hedge fund managers with computer programs – and he listened to Wylie’s pitch. It was for a new kind of political message-targeting based on an influential and groundbreaking 2014 paperresearched at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, called: “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans”.

“In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas it’s the opposite way around with Mercer,” says Wylie. “He said very little, but he really listened. He wanted to understand the science. And he wanted proof that it worked.”

And to do that, Wylie needed data.

How Cambridge Analytica acquired the data has been the subject of internal reviews at Cambridge University, of many news articles and much speculation and rumour.

When Nix was interviewed by MPs last month, Damian Collins asked him:

“Does any of your data come from Global Science Research company?”

Nix: “GSR?”

Collins: “Yes.”

Nix: “We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.”

Nix: “No.”

Collins: “Your datasets are not based on information you have received from them?”

Nix: “No.”

Collins: “At all?”

Nix: “At all.”

The problem with Nix’s response to Collins is that Wylie has a copy of an executed contract, dated 4 June 2014, which confirms that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls.

He has receipts showing that Cambridge Analytica spent $7m to amass this data, about $1m of it with GSR. He has the bank records and wire transfers. Emails reveal Wylie first negotiated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper, to use the myPersonality database. But when negotiations broke down, another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical. He offered to replicate Kosinski and Stilwell’s research and cut them out of the deal. For Wylie it seemed a perfect solution. “Kosinski was asking for $500,000 for the IP but Kogan said he could replicate it and just harvest his own set of data.” (Kosinski says the fee was to fund further research.)

Kogan then set up GSR to do the work, and proposed to Wylie they use the data to set up an interdisciplinary institute working across the social sciences. “What happened to that idea,” I ask Wylie. “It never happened. I don’t know why. That’s one of the things that upsets me the most.”

It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.

“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”

Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.

Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next – how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more.

For more than a year, the reporting around what Cambridge Analytica did or didn’t do for Trump has revolved around the question of “psychographics”, but Wylie points out: “Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn’t you use it in your biggest campaign ever?”

In December 2015, the Guardian’s Harry Davies published the first report about Cambridge Analytica acquiring Facebook data and using it to support Ted Cruz in his campaign to be the US Republican candidate. But it wasn’t until many months later that Facebook took action. And then, all they did was write a letter. In August 2016, shortly before the US election, and two years after the breach took place, Facebook’s lawyers wrote to Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and told him the data had been illicitly obtained and that “GSR was not authorised to share or sell it”. They said it must be deleted immediately.

“I already had. But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” says Wylie. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

There were multiple copies of it. It had been emailed in unencrypted files.

Cambridge Analytica rejected all allegations the Observer put to them.

Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”

Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”. The final slide, branded with Lukoil’s logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its “deliverables”: “psychographic messaging”.

Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said: “Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”

Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: “We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.

Cambridge Analytica is “Chris’s Frankenstein”, says a friend of his. “He created it. It’s his data Frankenmonster. And now he’s trying to put it right.”

Only once has Wylie made the case of pointing out that he was 24 at the time. But he was. He thrilled to the intellectual possibilities of it. He didn’t think of the consequences. And I wonder how much he’s processed his own role or responsibility in it. Instead, he’s determined to go on the record and undo this thing he has created.

Because the past few months have been like watching a tornado gathering force. And when Wylie turns the full force of his attention to something – his strategic brain, his attention to detail, his ability to plan 12 moves ahead – it is sometimes slightly terrifying to behold. Dealing with someone trained in information warfare has its own particular challenges, and his suite of extraordinary talents include the kind of high-level political skills that makes House of Cards look like The Great British Bake Off. And not everyone’s a fan. Any number of ex-colleagues – even the ones who love him – call him “Machiavellian”. Another described the screaming matches he and Nix would have.

“What do your parents make of your decision to come forward?” I ask him.

“They get it. My dad sent me a cartoon today, which had two characters hanging off a cliff, and the first one’s saying ‘Hang in there.’ And the other is like: ‘Fuck you.’”

Which are you?

“Probably both.”

What isn’t in doubt is what a long, fraught journey it has been to get to this stage. And how fearless he is.

After many months, I learn the terrible, dark backstory that throws some light on his determination, and which he discusses candidly. At six, while at school, Wylie was abused by a mentally unstable person. The school tried to cover it up, blaming his parents, and a long court battle followed. Wylie’s childhood and school career never recovered. His parents – his father is a doctor and his mother is a psychiatrist – were wonderful, he says. “But they knew the trajectory of people who are put in that situation, so I think it was particularly difficult for them, because they had a deeper understanding of what that does to a person long term.”

Is what Cambridge Analytica does akin to bullying?

“I think it’s worse than bullying,” Wylie says. “Because people don’t necessarily know it’s being done to them. At least bullying respects the agency of people because they know. So it’s worse, because if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you’re doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.”

Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again.

“Facebook has denied and denied and denied this,” Dehaye says when told of theObserver’s new evidence. “It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”

Millions of people’s personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn’t have seen, and couldn’t have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, “would work for anyone”. Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. Would they subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?

It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.

“Yes.”

Nato or non-Nato?

“Either. I mean they’re mercenaries. They’ll work for pretty much anyone who pays.”

It’s an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing – at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public – our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire.

The Facebook data is out in the wild. And for all Wylie’s efforts, there’s no turning the clock back.

Tamsin Shaw, a philosophy professor at New York University, and the author of a recent New York Review of Books article on cyberwar and the Silicon Valley economy, told me that she’d pointed to the possibility of private contractors obtaining cyberweapons that had at least been in part funded by US defence.

She calls Wylie’s disclosures “wild” and points out that “the whole Facebook project” has only been allowed to become as vast and powerful as it has because of the US national security establishment.

“It’s a form of very deep but soft power that’s been seen as an asset for the US. Russia has been so explicit about this, paying for the ads in roubles and so on. It’s making this point, isn’t it? That Silicon Valley is a US national security asset that they’ve turned on itself.”

Or, more simply: blowback.

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17.03.2018

Don't you know, that it's true ...

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For JT

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09.03.2018

10 years ago (photo and album cover design by my brother)

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08.03.2018

With the Noose Around My Neck 88

Perhaps that explains why Mom seems like a stranger today, and why she’s going on a fieldtrip. Are there flowers, where she is going? Or does someone’s tomato stake jut from Grandma’s toothless mouth? Then I remember the meadow where I cry because I’m scared of a little dog. Then I wonder where I read that. Did I read that? Often I am permitted to return to a meadow, just by clicking a link. Is this everybody’s autobiography? Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening. I’ll tell you a story about Johannes Gutenberg. Before he got into printing he had been involved in a scheme to mass-produce concave mirrors. These mirrors would be set on a rack, and the racks full of mirrors taken to churches. These racks would be arranged such that the mirrors faced holy relics. The power of the relics, it was thought, would shine into the mirrors. The mirrors would then ever after rebroadcast a healing radiation. But the best oracle I ever received was from Google. I fed a poem by Pushkin called ‘The Prophet’ into Google Translate. So why is everything so terrible in America? How am I supposed to like, function? I mean, in inflation theory for example, sometimes there would be a cosmic bump or civilisational knowledge graze, right? In other words, infinity cannot at all be thought by matheme or poememe, since it is itself severely ambiguous. There may be infinity for them, but not for us, or for us and never for them, or for us always and for them always too, never the one before the other, sometimes the pronoun arriving in knowledge of the other connective and sometimes not. It may be that we are in a slow patch of time. So I want you to picture, if you will, a Thomas Kinkade-style landscape: a stream hidden in the woods, trees and terrain awash in a dawnish light and a light dusting of snow. The scene is hushed and peaceful and your eyes are too as they follow the brook back to its source, a bright clearing in the pines, out of which, quite suddenly, the barrel of a gun emerges. Painted in a completely different manner than the rest of the picture, with broad loose strokes, the pistol is one of two weapons; the other I think for some reason — I know nothing about guns — might be a shotgun. They guns frame the ghostly visage of a bearded man with furrowed brow who hovers over the landscape within a faded-yellow aura like a god, he looks like Clint Eastwood — tho some say he looks like John Travolta, and I can see that — anyway, whoever he is, what the hell is he doing in the sky in the middle of the woods? And why are he and his verdant landscape hanging in Vickie’s Diner, formerly Tiffany’s Café, which, way back in 1955, was the lunch counter of that Rat Pack hangout, White Cross Drugs. In those days Hegel was extremely young and believed himself to be going mad. I even imagine that he worked out his famous system in order to escape (each type of conquest is, no doubt, the deed of a man fleeing a threat). “Yow now listen Motherfuck after the children learn to read then what? They hear the noise of the drag of their bodies dragged around this place — meat eat men — shoot moan go — then what. You know you put the word advise in an email you get flagged. You know that right. Unix toad fish you get flagged. Artichoke with a capital A — flag. Big S Sex — flag. Also big-N Nerd and little-f fangs. This is true. The government they’re poets. Ha ya ya obviously I lost things other than the goddamn internet when I was in. Lost chocolate for example how about that. I was addicted to that shit for six years before I went in ya since I was 11 ate it every day of my life. There’s no chocolate in prison ha ya duh it’s like girl it’s a non-chocolate kind of place nada cho-co-lah-tay. First thing I did when I got out was get a chocolate bar but I’d lost the taste for it tastes like dirty smoke to me now. I’d remembered it being sweet but it’s not you know it made my mouth sticky as shit like tired fucking old dirt. I got tired it got lost forever fuck it. I lost all the friends I had on and obviously lost my convictions my resistance my quote unquote insurrectionary tendencies my so now you Motherfuck you want to know if I know the words. Every day they are waiting for them to appear like jesus cocksucking christ lord the cock has risen. Men in power waiting to read the words package — chameleon man — froglegs — beef — market — garbage — speedbump — hate — fissionable — methods of lift — dynamic lift — static lift — powered lift — angle of sweep — flying wing — rotary wing — dihedral angle — polyhedral — variations along the span — flarecraft — dependent drag — sea skimmer — wing-in-ground effect — thrust — propeller — lifting body — lifting belly — go. Yee yup ya.” [lifts up shirt to show me part of a bandage and a leather-strap sewn to a wooden and metal apparatus on his right arm and side] “The other day my project opened my chest up too much. I’ve got to find where the wings will go how they can stick and stay in. I made a hole for the garden hose. It was too big all at once there was a pool of blood. Motherfuck there’s a man who figured it out I have to find him. He figured it out but kept it a secret it’s not global information it’s not even any information beyond him but it’s golden and unarguable fuck that’s what.” So there was this man named Flitcraft. Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living. Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible. “He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand” ... Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles — that was his first name — Pierce. He had a automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.” Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade’s room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now. “I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway it came out all right. She didn’t want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her — the way she looked at it — she didn’t want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around. Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up — just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger — well, affectionately — when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."” Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful. He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.” I remember Flitcraft every time I read that Kafka story where the groom’s had to saddle up his master’s horse in the depths of night and all in frantic haste and, as his master leaps up onto the horse, the answer the groom receives to his bewildered question of where is he off to, the answer hurled over the master’s shoulder is, ‘Away from here. Away from here!’

Why it was December then

and the sun was on the sea

by the temples we’d gone to see.

One green wave moved in the violet sea

like the UN Building on big evenings,

so OK, Jonty, I can see why you sent me to Frank Ruda’s article to get a take on why Heidegger’s Beyng is necessary, but but but and yes I am sputtering, when Ruda writes vis-à-vis Foucault that “it is precisely the reduction of society to the immanence of productive power-knowledge relations, that is, the dispositif, that is problematic because it displays the systematic forgetting of the distinction of the (sociologically determinable) plebs and the something plebeian (the universally implied existence of that which has no attribute of existence),” what on god’s green earth is “that which has no attribute of existence”?? I know why Heidegger and Badiou and Ruda, and you, and so many others, want such a concept to mean something, because, as Ruda goes on to say, “Only this ... introduces a site of change,” but but but, and again I am sputtering, depending on something which has no attribute of existence is a bit like saying “Change is immanent, possible and therefore necessary,” which is something Ruda also says, and, I’m sorry, maybe I’m just stupid, but “therefore necessary”?? And yes, I read the rest of the article, but I guess I just don’t understand what y’all mean by concrete, concrete to me means that

a few almond trees

had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes

out of the blue looking pink in the light.

A gray hush

in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue

into the sky. They’re just

going over the hill.

The green leaves of the tulips on my desk

like grass light on flesh,

and a green-copper steeple

and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.

I can’t get over

how it all works in together more like

More Like!

how can distance

be more like.

Thus, in the thickening vibration

our departure took shape

and Lil

the singer holding her arm

followed us out the swinging doors

and into the stage coach we got

and the Horse was leaning out

making his pitch

distributing fake phone numbers

and baring his teeth and

It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.

It’s the shape of a tulip.

It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.

It makes what appear to be waves mount like rungs of a ladder, a ribbed, etheric lake. At rehearsal today it crept into our music. We trudged up a hill beyond which to walk was to accept that light fell unequally on the world. Our acceptance of light’s inequality implied prismatic recompense, insisted on it, made it our own. The earth was unequal light’s jagged consort, a course cut in haggard pursuit. From somewhere beyond or in back, that is, a synthesized aura sought instrumental extension, sought more to be played than to preside it seemed, eight or eight hundred years into the future, eight or eight hundred years after the fact. We were trying to make it home or to heaven, hoping to make them one and the same. We were trying at the very least to make something happen. A synthesizer keyboard lay before and in back of us, each key a chromatic step we took. Which reminds me of a story I’ve wanted to tell for years. Sitting on the shore of I forget which of the Greek islands, it’s the one on which he spent his last few years, in exile, Aristotle writes a letter to Antipater, and says he wishes now he had studied the old myths. And of course you think, at first, the guy just doesn’t give up: that omnivorous, compendious intelligence is utterly insatiable, just won’t be done till it’s ransacked the entire world. But then you think that what’s behind that regret is maybe something quite different, though, or I tend to think so anyway. I think that he’s reached a point in his life at which the world he’s catalogued through and through might be however it is for all he knows or cares. As for that towering intellectual edifice, the passion that buttressed it is gone, it’s just like any other old dilapidated beach hut now, one that no one in their right mind would think to shelter in. Because, yes, this is a sad tale, a sad, sad tale. Someone get that Carol Anne Duffy on the phone: she’s got just the right musing, slightly wistful, slightly baffled voice to read it. But before you do, ask yourself why actually would Aristotle wish he’d studied the myths, supposing it wasn’t just for the sake of completeness? You see, the received wisdom is Plato’s the mystic, that Aristotle’s the empiricist, from which it's then just a short hop and a skip to assuming that for Plato the world has nothing to give. And that’s just plain wrong. Almost at the very end of the Phaedo the prison warden comes to see Socrates to tell him it’s time, but then turns away, tears streaming down his face, and makes to go. And Socrates, it says on the page, “looked up at him,” as of course he would, he’s sitting, he looks up and looks, don’t you think Socrates is marveling a little at this man and that he should be crying? You must be thinking there’s a moral somewhere hereabouts, but I can go one better than that. Shantideva says something astonishing at the beginning of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara, his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. It’s in explanation of why he has composed this work, and, freely admitting it has all been said before, he says that he has nevertheless written it out so as to familiarize himself with it,

For due to acquaintance with what is wholesome,

The force of my faith may for a short while increase because of these words.

It’s striking that Shantideva should say ‘for a short while’, isn’t it, as if the life he’s lived has never, and will never, convince him once and for all, at least not completely, at least not to the point that his faith cannot be increased. As for me, I’m a little like old Aristotle, in the film

god kills herself by removing her own intestines.

John Giorno says it’s not what happens it’s how you handle it—

& then I open a wound on her arm

& remove from the wound a giant plastic egg.

I crack the egg to reveal a small wooden sphere

& from it emerges a large white rat. don’t ask me how.

I put the rat on a leash & walk it back to my apartment.

I give the rat breakfast which she eats happily.

I kiss her head.

what do I care. I have my rat.

I am the only person at the John Giorno installation

in hell’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon & i cry

for twenty minutes watching him speak on a twenty foot projector screen,

thanks for nothing america i did it all without you.

I kiss my rat’s head.

You’ve drowned me in gravy, you know.

One of us has misread twenty-four entire books.

But aside from you, great Foosh,

who is my friend? a little stone,

a lot of dirt, a terrible headache,

what a rush,

like iron urus

on winter clay, like iron urus, pintrpnit!

pintrpnit!

thank you, pintrpnit!

how wonderful to become an old man!

We should always live in the dark empty sky,

... red iron and blue sea-urchins from generative slime,

whooshings of wind through wind,

o the endless drownings,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wonderful,

o loltalai loltalai loltalai

paradrom paradrom paradrom loltalai para

norberou parolai loltapar drom

o loltalai loltalai loltalai para

khorloi khorloi khorloi khorloi

NORRTHOW ! OOOHMEE ! NOG LITE ! NOO

dorr kann bee blayke leet eer noo tow thownie

dann brekk thay mah torr blurt noh breshk bakk

reading poems to lions ...

For fifty years I thought that line was

love is hot, truth is small time, but it’s not, truth is molten.

Which is to say I mean to sing, isn’t it, that

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die.

Everybody’s gotta live,

I think you know the reason why.

Sometimes the going gets so good.

Then again it gets pretty rough.

But when I have you in my arms baby,

You know I just can’t, I just can’t get enough.

(Oh yeah)

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die.

Everybody try to have a good time.

I think you, I think you know the reason why.

I saw a blind man standing on the corner yesterday baby.

He couldn’t hardly tie his shoes.

Tho I don’t think blind people actually have any problem whatsoever tying their shoes, but anyway

He had a harmonica and a guitar wrapped around his neck,

And he sure could, sure could play the blues

(Oh Yeah)

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die.

Everybody try to have a good time.

I think you know the reason why.

I feel like I’ve seen just about a million sunsets.

She said if you’re with me I’ll never go away.

That’s when I stopped and I took another look at my baby.

She said if you’re with me I’ll never go away.

(Because)

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die.

Everybody’s gotta live,

Before you know the reason why.

I had a dream the other night baby.

I dreamt that I was all alone.

But when I woke up I took another look around myself,

And I was surrounded by fifty million strong.

(Oh yeah)

Tho I’ve read that word on lyrics sites as songs, not strong, anyway it was a different time when that was written, anyway

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die.

Everybody’s gotta live,

Before you know the reason why.

Everybody’s gotta live,

And everybody’s gonna die

Everybody’s gotta live

(You Gotta Live!)

Before you know the reason why

And then there’s attar of hyacinth. So consummate is this pressed oil that on more than one occasion, I’ve been told of the lingering presence of my absence in rooms I’ve been in. The man who runs the elevator in the building where I live once told me that, were I to commit a crime, I would be apprehended instantly. Hours after I am gone, he told me, the evidence of hyacinth goes up and down with the elevator all night long. So here’s my question: are extreme flowers like extreme sports? Well, this is what I know of extreme sports: my favorite is called “Extreme Ironing.” You think I’m making this up. Participants take baskets of heavily wrinkled clothes, their boards, their irons. The sport is played in radical settings; at the edges of cliffs or hanging from high bridges. Which is why, in my argument with the couple from Vermont I said, “We need to understand just how violent it is that this anti-LGBTQ referendum exists at all!” Which is why I created “Power Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.” I sat on a lawn chair on a very busy street corner one Saturday afternoon where many feel-good Democrats like to stroll and window-shop with their children. I had a giant container of bubbles and a large plastic wand and would blow bubbles, filling the air with them until everyone said, “Ooo and ahh,” and the children gathered around me catching them with their little hands. When their parents would walk near me I looked up from my chair and said, “These are queer bubbles, they are going to make your children queer revolutionaries who will help rid the world of transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, classism and other forms of stupidity.” Some of the Asheville parents thought it was great. Those were the ones with the kids who seemed to be the happiest among all those trying to catch the iridescent orbs. Most parents however were not happy about my queer bubbles and grabbed their children and pulled them away, but like all good liberals they felt guilty and would always say, “Sorry, sorry,” as they quickly walked off. Sorry? I can’t tell you how often I dream about Mark, my boyfriend who renamed himself Earth back when he became an environmental and AIDS activist. I no longer call his death in Tennessee a murder, I call it an execution, he was executed for being queer. Earth was hogtied, gagged, tortured, covered in gasoline and burned. That could be, will be, your child. It’s cyclone and monsoon season. In this episode we’re going to look at why cyclones and monsoons present a danger to the million Rohingya refugees living in makeshift camps around Cox’s Bazar. The Shimmer refracts things, it doesn’t reflect them —

[Note: Sources: Olja Savičević, “Mamasafari” (tr. Andrea Jurjević), in Lavender Ink / Dialogos, “Lavender Ink / Dialogos Weekly Broadcast, 3-4-18”, email rec’d 4 Mar 017, approx. 6:04am PST; JBR; Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”, at Poets.org; JBR; Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography; Infinity to Dine, at Sator Press; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “Eternal Life”, at eskeddet, 28 Feb 018; JBR; Jillian Steinhauer, “How a Las Vegas Diner Painting Gained a Cult Following”, at Extra Crispy, 22 Feb 018; JBR; Georges Bataille, “The Torment”, in Inner Experience (tr. Leslie Anne Boldt), in The Bataille Reader (eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson); Johanna Hedva, On Hell, at Sator Press; JBR; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; JBR; Martin Waterson, email rec’d 5 Mar 018, approx. 10:22am PST; James Schuyler, “February”, at Locus Solus, 28 Feb 018; JBR; Frank Ruda, “Back to the Factory: A Plea for a Renewal of Concrete Analysis of Concrete Situations”, at Academia.edu; JBR; James Schuyler, “February”, at Locus Solus, 28 Feb 018; Edward Dorn, Gunslinger; James Schuyler, “February”, at Locus Solus, 28 Feb 018; Nathaniel Mackey, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, quoted in “Dear Angel of Dust”, at Detroit Metro Times, 17 May 000; JBR; Martin Waterson, email rec’d 6 Mar 018, approx. 2:19pm PST; JBR; Sophie Robinson, “art in america”, at BOMB, 6 Mar 018; Simina Banu, “A poem, exasperated, speaks candidly to its poet: a transcreation of Mihai Eminescu’s ‘Criticilor mei’”, at Dusie, 6 Mar 018; Armand Schwerner, The Tablets VIII and XVIII, at Grist; Michael McClure, “Tantra 32”, in Ghost Tantras; JBR (re Michael McClure); a 50-year mishearing of a line from Donovan, “Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)”; Donovan, “Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)”; JBR; Arthur Lee and Love, “Everybody’s Gotta Live” (with various JBR interjections); JBR; Lucy Brock-Broido (RIP), and anonymous interviewer, in “Q&A: Lucie Brock-Broido”, at Poetry, Dec 012; JBR; CA Conrad, “Queer Poets in Revolt”, at Lambda Literary, 8 Mar 018, and “I Loved Earth Years Ago”, at PEN America, 17 Apr 013; MOAS, “Preparing for cyclones and the monsoon”, email rec’d 8 Mar 018, approx. 6:05am PST; Peter Watts, “Annihilation”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 1 Mar 018]

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International Women's Day

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Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (used without permission)

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Zeitgeist Spam

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With the Noose Around My Neck 88

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January 2021

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