According to the best record available, this is how it went down.
Márton: [inaudible]
Bob: While we’re here?
Márton: Here, yes.
Bob: All of us?
Márton: Yeah. That would be great.
Bob: Where would be a great place to do it?
Jane: To do what?
Bob: [inaudible]
Jane: Parliament?
Márton: Yeah.
General chatter, overlapping voices.
Bob: Have you any advice if we get arrested?
Márton: As a performance, or real?
Laughter.
Bob: If we were performing something.
Márton: I’ve never been arrested as a performer.
Bob: The arrest would be part of the performance.
Márton: I have an idea. We arrest you. Then you won’t be arrested by the police. What do you think? So before you having been arrested, I arrest you.
Bob: So you arrest me?
Márton: Yes.
Bob: Okay.
Márton: [inaudible]
Bob: Where would we go?
Márton: To the Parliament, of course.
Unidentified voice: What are you doing?
Bob: [inaudible]
Laughter
Jane: [inaudible]
Bob: Possibly. [inaudible]
Jane: On Friday.
Annet: We have kind of an open schedule on Friday. [inaudible]
Jane: The train is at 8.24 ... there’s a preview ...
Márton: You won’t be there because you will have been arrested.
Jane: We’re open to requests and there’s plenty of time to get arrested in the meantime. I don’t know how quick they are at letting you out, here.
Bob: If you were going to arrest me, where would you take me? Into a car?
Márton: I would just let you know that from that moment you will be arrested. That would be enough. It sounds [inaudible] but ... But you will know. You will feel differently from that point. You will know. I know that [it?] feels different.
Bob: Okay. Have you been arrested?
Márton: In that sense, yes.
Laughter
Bob: I think we should do this, it sounds really good.
Márton: I can give you a written paper. Signed by me.
Gyongyi: A Statement, right?
Márton: That you are arrested.
Bob: So —
Laughter
Bob: There are a couple of details. Like, what time? Whereabouts? And what am I doing? I’m reciting something. Or I’m just performing something. Or I could be standing there doing nothing at all.
Márton: Existing.
Laughter
Márton: But of course we can do something special.
Bob: But we need to know where to rendezvous.
Márton: At the Parliament. To give you that strong presence, and the historical and cultural background. You are a visitor, a guest, so you can choose when to be arrested.
Bob: Noon is a good time.
Márton: Yes. [inaudible]
Bob: [inaudible]
Jane: We could draw a chalk square. So you’re arrested. And then we could draw a square the size of an average sized police cell. And then Bob has to stay in that square. Until you get bailed. Maybe they decide not to charge you.
Bob: If Márton’s going to arrest me, it’s up to him to decide what happens to me. I might be taken away ...
Olivia: To a spa.
Márton: It will depend on my mood on Friday. So I cannot forsee. Because, bureaucrats, administrators, are like [inaudible], so they have moods. [inaudible] It depends.
Bob: And you have a lot of bureaucrats working with you.
Márton: Of course. Not working with me, but working on me.
Jane: In Britain, if you’re arrested, you have to be charged within 24 hours. In Hungary, how long can they hold you before you’re charged?
Márton: I don’t know exactly. In theory at least you have the right to call your lawyer. But as far as I know it doesn’t happen [inaudible]
Gyongyi: Yes, but there must be a time limit. It’s not that you can be kept there endlessly.
Márton: It’s probably more than one day. I would say it’s two days, but it would be more like three days in your case.
Bob: Gonna need three days.
Jane: We’ll see you back in Manchester.
Bob: Give my lawyer a call while you’re over there. Well I think this is really exciting.
Jamie: We’ll all get the train.
Márton: It may be for an indefinite time.
John: And is he allowed to leave the country in this time?
Márton: As far as I know, at this moment — it can change, of course — he can do anything he likes [inaudible] And from that moment you’ll feel like a Hungarian.
Laughter
Jane: Yes. It’s good for [inaudible]
Bob: Yes, I want to be [inaudible]
Jane: Well then, this sounds great.
Bob: Will people notice the arrest?
Márton: It depends on their sensibility. Because you will look different.
Jamie: In fact, we haven’t visited the Parliament.
Bob: We’ve seen it from a long way off.
Márton: I am 65 and I have never visited the Parliament.
Gyongyi: Not inside.
Márton: It’s difficult to avoid it as a view, of course. It’s too big.
Bob: What’s it like inside?
Jamie: Like a Parliament. Very grand and very showy.
Márton: It’s the biggest one in continental Europe.
Jamie: And you know it was designed after the British Parliament? The Houses of Parliament? [inaudible] one metre bigger than the British Parliament!
Laughter
Gyongyi: It was for a bigger country, before the First World War.8
- The word Serres uses refers to an old-style world map divided into two hemispheres. At dawn, the stars appear. Monism kills pluralism, whereas the Sun is humbly part of billions of stars. The Sun! He is dead already <written out laughter>. Infinity grass. But where are the horses? You mean the cinema skin polecats. Shubidu <written out laughter>. And that’s it! And that’s it! For real. That first edition Venus in Furs you’re reading is my gynecologist’s. She’s Eminem’s biggest fan, no fucking joke, she’s got an authentic late 90s jiffy bag which contains like 1000 of his hairs. True or false: I smoke good grass and — talk like a wizard. Infinity grass <written out laughter>. Which withdraws of itself, but the latter effaces the night. Anything can happen in the nocturnal sowing where the stars shooting among the chaos precede short stories; absolutely. May I name this universal incompatibility yet again? During that time every cell in our body (with the exception of the brainal neurons) will have died and been replaced many hundreds or thousands of times. And every one of the giant macromolecules — the proteins, nucleic acids and lipids — of which the cells (including neurons) are constructed will have been laboriously synthesized, and will have persisted for a few hours, days or months, only to be broken down again and replaced by a successor molecule, a more or less exact copy. The average lifetime of a protein molecule in the body of a mammal is around two weeks. In an adult human, proteins constitute some 10 per cent of body weight, so some 24 grams of protein are being broken down and a fresh 24 grams synthesized every hour of every day — half a gram, a shit ton a minute, throughout our entire adult life. You thought you were just chillin’, reading this poem, but right now, there are trillions of chemical reactions taking place simultaneously in your body. On the one hand there is the irony of the clown whose refusal to stop being a clown, even after being decapitated. There’s an alignment here with Hito Steyerl’s insistence that we should cease to identify with images but rather participate with them like the bytes that make up a .jpg file. Among the examples Kukuljevic provides, two stand out: Jacques Vaché and Alfred Jarry. Vaché recognized the strange fact that the word humor, as a signifier, actually lacks humor. It’s not a very humorous word. He came up with an ingenious solution: severing the h. If, as Mark Fisher argues, “we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences as its only mandate,” then the preference to automate oneself, to void one’s own subjectivity, violates the law of disavowal by which the system sustains itself. The novelty of Kukuljevic’s reading is to show that the breakdown of automation is not outside but contained within and that therefore subjecting oneself to the failure of automation, jams up the smooth functioning of the machine. And as the machine breaks down, so does the subject. All that based on an h. It’s no surprise that early in the book Kukuljevic cites Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby’s formula I would prefer not to. There is no program here, no proposals for building a better world. Instead there is an earnest acknowledgement that the subject is nothing more than a momentary emergence of chaotic materials (bound up with, to be sure, complex socio-economic and political histories) ... I forgot what I was saying. Anyway, it all comes down to “no milkweed, no monarchs.” So who’s cooler, the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot? If you had to choose, gun to your head. I guess I would say Loch Ness but I will say this on Bigfoot’s behalf however. There was a movie, in the movie-theatres and everything. So we’re all settled in ready for this movie to start when suddenly from a door near the screen comes this like huge eight-foot-tall guy bearing a striking resemblance to Bigfoot — the very same Bigfoot about to star in the feature we plunked down our money to see. Well for once this sort of thing works and of course there follows a rush of about fifty little kids flooding into the aisle and running up the incline to the exit. Just like when they debuted Thriller. Anyway Bigfoot gets the brilliant idea that he’s going to like pursue the kids. Long story short he steps on a box of melted Raisinets, somehow becomes involuntarily airborne and lands on like some seven-year-old girl who proceeds to have what theatre management termed a brief respite in cardiactivity. I think they banned those kind of promotional stunts at that theatre for like the next thirty-five years. But you wanna hear something truly weird? I was there, for the debut of Thriller. To be eligible for the Oscars, it needed a week-long theatrical release, so John Landis, who made the thing, arranged for it to open for Disney’s Fantasia at a single cinema in LA. A bunch of us parents had taken their 3-5-yr-olds to a Saturday matinee see Fantasia, but before Mickey gets a chance to dance with the broom and all that stuff, and unknown to any of us in advance, they screen the thing. After that it was pretty much like de La Pava except he doesn’t mention the screaming or the tears or the PTSD and the therapist bills, and of course there was no guy in the aisles and no crushed little girl. But that’s not why I remember all this, it’s because I said to my wife, “You take the kids, ok?” and just sat there, entranced by the great bass line, etc. Therefore, your appreciation of The Changelingwill depend on if you find appealing sentences such as, “Oh to bring back the days when stars spoke at the mouths of caves,” and “She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.” Ergo, your eyes glaze as you travel life’s highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don’t even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? So what’s the point? Whatever it is, you have a tendency to love it to death. Whatever it is, is shrimp. Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. It’s more common on menus than chicken. In the wilds of Ohio, far, far from watery shores, four of the six entrees on a menu will be shrimp something-or-other, each available for a surprisingly modest sum. Everywhere, it's all the shrimp you can eat or all you care to eat, for sometimes you just don’t feel like eating all you can. You are intensively harvesting shrimp. Soon there won't be any left, but til then you can’t stop. Shrimpers put out these big nets, and in these nets, for each pound of shrimp, they catch more than ten times that amount of fish, turtles, and dolphins. These, quite the worse for wear, are dumped back in. “This technique is more powerful than previous versions of AlphaGo because it is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge,” according to a blog post authored by DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and David Silver, who leads the company’s reinforcement learning research group. AlphaGo Zero even devised its own unconventional strategies. “In training, AlphaGo Zero discovered, played and ultimately learned to prefer a series of new joseki variants that were previously unknown ... Like move 37 in the second game against Lee Sedol ... still, “I think it would be a mistake to believe that we’ve learned something general about thinking and about learning for general intelligence,” Etzioni adds. “This approach won’t work in more ill-structured problems like natural-language understanding or robotics, where the state space is more complex and there isn’t a clear objective function.”
Is it near?
Is it hard?
Is it cold?
Does it weigh much?
Is it heavy?
Do you have to carry it far?
Are those the hills?
Do you buy the cat?
What do you do if you want a cat?
Aren’t you and I the same person?
Don’t you?
What forest is this between me and the place I belong?
Will our world be in ruins?
Will you be training to go into outer space?
Am I on the edge of an invisible line between one way of looking at things and another?
We must go down to the crossroads, try to flag a ride. There were human feces covering the walls. There was much sting. It was a week of crossing from abstraction into decay. His indexes were sheer entertainment: look up “pulled tooth”! Look up “dream of swimming!” Look up, “dream of yolkless soft-boiled eggs”! When I said I knew that, I heard my own voice in my own head rather than that of a cartoon character dancing on a laptop screen. Half-lives or three-quarter lives or the lives that come to meet you on the “more is more” plan, then after a few days. “Sad poppet,” Marthe said, when the dog lay down beside her. Who makes bread out of bones? Which is to say that every time someone tells me they’ve got a virus I think of that 70s film with the apparently deserted township out in the desert and the entire population then discovered strewn about dead, the blood in their veins turned to dust. Bright moments! Bright moments! Plants, air, rain, heat, humans, animals, bacteria, insect life! To carefully watch a vine tear off a whole wall of siding may be worth more than a year’s worth of reading political theory. And it’ll be certainly more satisfying! Everything else you’ve heard is wrong. While chewing gum can’t be broken down by the acids in the stomach the way radicchio or, say, raw venison, can, gum nevertheless does not “stick” inside the body. It emerges later, incorporated into regular shit. And that doesn’t take seven years. Nor does LSD embed itself into the cells of the spinal cord. Lysergic acid is water soluble and vanishes from the body’s systems hours after you stop listening to life-size wolves reading Blake or watching a million bees erupt from the sand you are lying on just across the Coast Highway from the canyon up by Zuma with Bob or talking to the leprechaun perched on your shoe or reading Blake yourself (the Book of Job) by the light of the torch on that Rick Griffin Big Brother / Santana poster you’ve had on every wall of every place you’ve ever lived for the past 45 years ... or whatever. When I first read the title of Jeff Derksen’s poem “In Memory of My Heavy Metal Years,” I figured I knew what I was in for. And I was ready for it. But I was wrong. It opens with a brief series of farewells:
There goes the
aluminum, the antinomy, the arsenic
the barium, the cadmium
the cesium, the gadolinium
the lead
the mercury
the nickel, the thalium, and
the tin.
The “heavy metals” in this alphabetical catalog range from the familiar toxicity of lead and mercury, to the weirder perils of gadolinium and thalium. And there is one item in this list that doubles as chemical element and rhetorical figure: “antinomy,” a word referring to both a lustrous gray metalloid and a logical conundrum in which a statement produces real or apparent mutual exclusivity, like “this sentence is false.” Except “antinomy” is not the name of the heavy metal, that’s antimony. I first ran across this confusion in a very expensive book published by Cambridge University Press. It’s still a fine poem, of course, Brandon, I just can’t stop myself from mentioning this. But I love your story about “This one guy Mike who came to school on Monday morning with no eyebrows. ‘What happened to your eyebrows, Mike?’ He told us that he had gotten in a fight over the weekend and somebody had burned them off.” For some reason he reminds me of this petty thief I used to know, whom we called Lump Sum Tony because he could get whatever you wanted “for a lump sum.” Desmond was something else, tho. For one thing, he was extremely fucking rich. His dad had made a killing on a local franchise of lighting stores called Winter House of Lights. You can’t make this shit up. I guess if you have the last name “Winterhouse” and you are plotting some entrepreneurship, you can make it the “Winter House” of whatever, including lamps. Anyway, Desmond spent his dad’s money on an exquisite collection of metal memorabilia. I marvel that he could have had so many Iron Maiden shirts pre-Internet. And there was the time he stole the fetal pigs leg from a bio class and stuck it on the antenna of his Camaro IROC, where it just sat to rot. And while the internet of things is pretty much like
a troupe of seventeen-year-old
Iron Maiden freaks puking inside their tent
the hard look is “to do / MAGIC”
I’m going to stand at the bus stop now
One thing Berrigan used to say was to the effect, “All I’ve ever wanted is to be a poet, & I’ve gotten my wish ... And I didn’t say ‘great poet’ -- I don’t want that -- I said ‘poet’. The implication was that to want to be a ‘great poet’ was a slightly inferior aspiration; to be a poet was magical & complete.” In other words, reading the first poem in Circus Nerves, “Ancestor Worship,” in which
The young master
coughed himself inside out one day, and bravo!
rematerialized as a red cactus
you’d be forgiven for not noticing that the poem is, in one way of describing it, about giant insects eating the world. And take “Nov 25”, for example, which ends:
we’ll wrap our bombed friends in palm fronds
and become a singing people (did you enjoy your turkey)
hey we are a singing people (the wing part tasted metallic).
Wendy just told me about a former colleague who kept a pillow under her desk for take lunchtime naps. And the porch ceiling, painted “haint” blue, for warding off spirits ... and the coastline, which is washing away at a perilous rate — 2000 square miles in just 80 years. And the two hundred small metal doors. And the monotonous drone from the enormous speakers. The individuals were originally identified by curate.la in an Instagram story as three males and one female, all relatively young. None of the individuals involved in the act claimed open allegiance to a protesting group, nor has any specific group taken responsibility for the action. So what I do is lengthen the sound of the bell, apply long-delay feedback, and then I can play the sound for up to three minutes. Or three months. If one thing matters, everything matters. Everything was forever, until it was no more. Is life itself a transitional object? One cannot write with one part of the machine, so
I guess you could say I did a good job at the gala
the development consultant said I was a natural
someone should slap a nametag on me
she praised my dress
I’d been waiting for the chance to confess its price, $27
and where I got it, Forever 21
two rounded, rubber handrails at the entrance
of an escalator stick out of a green makeshift wall. I mean
we’re in toon town gag order pause a judge up the creek like
a FREE sign taped to garbage, your life is whose? the trees sneeze
and cough, we’re all dirty water
the “chase” of these scenes is all in the wit and anarchy
we’re in a chik-fil-a spiking the sweet tea w/ birth control so
listen, where
we left off i was saying don’t play basketball when i’m talking about
heraclitus. but you play basketball. and i talk about heraclitus. we
dribble in the same river twice. the river is broke and the blackbird
is flying. the adjunct, my friend, is blowing in the wind
you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from
the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from
the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from
the war from the water from the house from the healthcare from
the war from the transit from the schools from the food from the
job from the prisons from the rent from the earth
and that within the great aquarium of language the light refracts variously and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed. Some of the codes will unfold with merely adept connivance, others will swim vigorously into and by circulation inside their own medium. If you can imagine staff notation etched on the glass you can read off the scales, da carpo and mirror-folded. ‘The fish of [illegible] melts into the face of the water’ — thus the iconic boundary features declare, by difference and by movement of an intense register, shifts of focus that will skim and can turn about on the smallest coin. The colour force suffuses a diagram to prevent the leakage of energy into pre-determined frames of control. ‘The world is small’ opined Confucius, standing on top of Mount Snowdon and chewing a banana (alternatively: ‘The world is small’ opined Catherine Malabou, standing atop Mount Diablo and chewing a hunk of whale fat.) Any western reader interested in the Chinese text from which that is translated may wish to know that a copy of the original has been added to the collection held by the University Library, Cambridge (England), where it may be consulted upon request. At which point the Kid announces, “My mother called me Bonny William ... Now they all call me Kid Death.” He is an object other men wish to kill — as if death could be killed, or the impulse to kill could be killed, or ended by killing. He stands at the centre of impotence in western culture. When Lobey asks the Kid what westerns he himself really admires, and what a western is, he replies: ‘It’s an art-form the Old Race, the humans, had before we came.’ Within that repetition, Kid Death is himself a killer repetition factor that has to be transcended, not killed. Eventually, he vanishes into quote unquote wherever he goes. Lobey’s search takes him to the source cave of all earth caves — the source cave turns out to be ‘a net of caves that wanders beneath most of the planet ... The lower levels contain the source of the radiation by which the villages, when their populations become too stagnant, can set up a controlled random jumbling of the genetic code. Another way to look at it is this: In the far future humans have moved on and an alien race have come to inhabit our abandoned shells. Unfortunately, they are devolving into mutants. One of them, Lobey, gifted with music, sets out to find his love Friza, the latest to die by a mysterious hand. He leaves his village, battles a minotaur, travels with dragon herders haunted by the spectre of a supernatural Billy the Kid and arrives in a city where one finds or rather is about to find Orpheus and Christ. For sheer invention, this is really fine stuff unless you’re allergic to the remotest hint of cheese, eee gee the “myth of the Beatles.” Apparently, in the future they are part of the pantheon of gods (which probably didn’t sound quite so ridiculous when the book was published, in 1968). Delany’s expert eye for mythological archetype allows him to draw some thoughtful parallels nevertheless: the Beatles are torn apart by fangirls (shades of Dionysus there) and later reform into a singular entity (like Osiris, perhaps?). Which reminds me, the vast majority of soldiers in the North American Revolutionary War either had to be drafted or bribed. Something else happens in the paintings. Wong makes myriad lines, dots, daubs, and short, lush brushstrokes, eventually arriving at an imaginary landscape that tilts away from the picture plane. Or as the blurb for the comic book has it, “In the afterlife, the author of ANTI-OEDIPUS must cross the Lethe to get to the other bank. During the crossing the dead philosopher takes the oars and evokes his past life. On the far side, Barthes, Lacan and Foucault await him. But before he can even meet up with them the ferry reverses course and takes him back to the beginning. The scene plays out and repeats several times, time for the philosopher aided by Charon to understand that repetition is not repetition of the same but ...” etc. So who’s the “We”? Who left all this stuff here? What were they doing with it? What happened? How did these things come together in these layers and strange assemblages? One hundred and eleven volcanic rocks, chunks of marble, petrified trees, hundreds of organic objects — including the remains of birds, fish, god knows what kinds of decomposing meat. As Villar Rojas put it, “I don’t have nor do I pretend to have any control over the semiotic dimensions of the material that I liberate.” This includes the labor of converting a former police warehouse into a museum of contemporary art in the first place. The redesign was done by Frank Gehry, but then Villar Rojas and his team redesigned the redesign and built their site-specific installation within this new frame. “Housekeeping,” then, refers to all of that invisible labor which allows the show to exist. In the exhibition, this is slyly hinted at by a mysterious room hidden within the cavernous exhibition space. This small room looks like an empty backroom or backstage but is clearly not at all functional — an empty Easter egg that seems to mock our looking for something behind the scenes. All signs of housekeeping have disappeared, though of course, the labor remains. Helen Molesworth makes the necessary resilience of this kind of work clear by more or less saying that: “One of the things that I feel certain will survive in one hundred years,” she says, “is that somebody with a broom is still going to have to follow the parade.” Who is the “We”? It seems fitting to quote Robin Coste Lewis here, the prologue to her Voyage of the Sable Venus: What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present. The formal rules I set for myself were simple: 1) No title could be broken or changed in any way. While the grammar is completely modified–I erased all periods, commas, semi-colons–each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented. 2) “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engraving, any work on paper, etc — all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical project. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs. 3) At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many 19thcentury historically-specific markers, such as slave, colored, or Negro from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well-intended), I re-erased the post-modern “African-American” and changed all those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, art institutions and art historians have all been in participating in — if not creating — this history. 4) As an homage, I decided to include titles of art by black women artists and curators, whether the art included a black female figure or not. Most of this work was created over the last century, with its deepest saturation occurring since the Cold War. I also included work by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race. 5) In a few instances, it was more fruitful to include a museum’s description of the art, rather than the title itself. This was especially true for colonial period. 6) Sometimes I chose to include female figures I believed the Western art world simply had not realized was a black woman passing for white. 7) Finally, no title was repeated. OK.
I imagine the economy
must pause
& an animal
come out to clean it.
under the stars
slept the 7 dwarfs,
I meant stairs --
large & in charge,
I meant swept --
two paths diverged in a
/ half stank of blood.
“why fight if we’re already dead”
Group C:
it was good
so good
to get the words down
just right, to drain
the swan.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Bob Dickinson, “The Stone Steps of Budapest” and “The Stone Steps of Budapest 2”, at a - n, 14 and 17 Apr 018; Michel Serres, The Hermaphrodite (tr. Randolph Burks), at Academia.edu; JBR; “Poems by Max Höfler and Robert Herbert McClean” (a collaboration, put thru Google Translate), at New Books in German; Michel Serres, The Hermaphrodite (tr. Randolph Burks), at Academia.edu; Steven Rose, quoted in Ian Angus, “Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis”, at Climate & Capitalism, 17 Apr 018; JBR; Ian Angus, “Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis”, at Climate & Capitalism, 17 Apr 018; Aubrey Grant, “Liquidation World by Alexi Kukuljevic”, at Society + Space; JBR; Sergio de La Pava, A Naked Singularity; JBR (the sentence about Landis list is lifted from a Guardian article); Sergio de La Pava, A Naked Singularity; JBR; Lincoln Michel, and Joy Williams, “Mundanity and Insanity: on Joy Williams’s The Changeling”, at BOMB, 18 Apr 018; JBR; Joy Williams, Ill Nature; Larry Greenemeier, “AI versus AI: Self-Taught AlphaGo Zero Vanquishes Its Predecessor”, at Scientific American, 18 Oct 018; Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris, and Steve Benson, Open Clothes, quoted in Rob Stanton, “When Will This Dream End?”, at Jacket 31; Philip Jenks, “Verses of Witness in an Apocalyptic Era”, at Harriet, 18 Apr 018; JBR, riffing off a typo by Richard Lopez; Susan M Schultz, “I want to write an honest sentence”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 17 Apr 018 (the soft boiled eggs are from Mary Bloomberg); Jenny Lawson, “Giants Are Terrible Cooks”, at The Bloggess, 18 Apr 018; JBR; Martin Waterson, email rec’d 20 Apr 018, approx. 4:28am PDT; Rahsaan Roland Kirk; Anne Boyer, quoted in Alison Karasyk and Amelia Wallin, “Anne Boyer in Conversation”, at aCCessions 4; JBR; Brandon Brown, “My Heavy Metal Years”, at Harriet, 20 Apr 018 (with tons of interspersions by JBR); Nick Sturm, Susie Timmons, and Alice Notley, quoted in Sturm’s “Crystal Set #16: Locked From The Outside by Susie Timmons (Yellow Press, 1990)”, at Nick Sturm Crystal Set, 19 Apr 018; JBR; Nick Sturm, and Kenward Elmslie, quoted in Sturm’s “Crystal Set #14: Circus Nerves by Kenward Elmslie (Black Sparrow Press, 1971)”, at Nick Sturm Crystal Set, 24 Mar 018; JBR; Marthe Reed, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Marthe Reed: from ‘Ark Hive’ (forthcoming), printed here as a memorial and tribute”, at Jacket2, 20 Apr 018; Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More”, in Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); Jennifer Remenchik, “Demonstrators Splash Red Paint Inside LA Gallery in Apparent Protest of Gentrification”, at Hyperallergic, 20 Apr 018; JBR; Eugeniusz Rudnik, quoted in “Underwater Bells, Plastic Bells, Polystyrene Bells, Marsh Bells ...”, in Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); Wolfgang Tillmans, If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters; Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (eds. Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera); JBR; Jonty Tiplady, “[Page 82 in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds II on the terror of the matheme is important]”, at e | d, 21 Apr 018; JBR; Stephanie Young, It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, Noel Black, Ryan Eckes, General Motors, quoted in Black’s “Poetry from the Picket Line”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Apr 018; J.H. Prynne, “Afterword” to “Chinese Poets”, at Jacket 20; JBR; J.H. Prynne, “Afterword” to “Chinese Poets”, at Jacket 20; JBR; “Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (5)”, at Nomadics, 21 Apr 018 (re Samuel R Delany, The Einstein Intersection); Rahina McWethy, “The Einstein Intersection – Samuel R. Delany”, at Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews, 14 Nov 013; JBR; John Yau, “Matthew Wong’s Hallucinatory Pilgrimages”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Apr 018; JBR; Terence Blake, “SALUT DELEUZE Graphic Novel (1): publisher’s summary”, at Agent Swarm, 22 Apr 018; JBR; Jon Christensen, Ursula K. Heise, “Curating the Anthropocene”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 Apr 018 (re Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA, 22 Oct 017 – 13 May 018); JBR; Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus, at LitHub, 30 Sept 015; JBR; Helen Bridwell “I Was Right Dear”]