Zeitgeist Spam

“some writing practice” 8

Why isn’t the brain green?         It’s a pretty
simple matter of
                                  A few people are likely to laugh
at a textual joke
Dollars look like play money

          They weren’t there before I fell asleep
resting my eyes really
What dead poet
would you like as a roommate?                        (“The Jew
in me is the ghost of me,” began one stanza in The Golem Wheel)

           ka! ka! ka!
           screech of all
           life’s hungry babies
I floated into that           weirdness           the kitchen with butter and
gold                      I realized I still had 40 years or so

tho I’d be dead for half of them                                       in which
to master                          a darkness of disintermediated onto-
That’s pronounced ontoe
           The girl in me is a country of rope
It's so strange to type in a room with other people

[Note: Sources: More of my Google Reader, and some of the Reader’s suggestions. Jon Gertner, “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?”, at NY Times Magazine, 16 Apr 09; Graham Harman, “on lecture sites”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 Apr 010; Graham Harman, “Georgia Tech”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 Apr 010; Ivy Alvarez, “21st of April (“She does as she pleases)”, at Ivy is here, 21 Apr 010; Richard Lopez, “assholes and just plain holes”, at Really Bad Movies, 21 Apr 010; Jerome Rothenberg, and David Meltzer, “Hero/Lil”, in Rothenberg’s “For David Meltzer, a Pre-Face”, at Poems and Poetics, 21 Apr 010; Rebecca Loudon, “This True Thursday”, at Radish King, 22 Apr 010; V., comment appended to Rebecca Loudon, “I hate hospitals …”, at Radish King, 21 Apr 010; Ben Woodard, “Dark Vitalism 2/10 – Unpredictable Nature)”, at Naught Thought, 21 Mar 010; webinar put on by Ithaka, 20 Apr 010; Eileen Tabios, “Welcome … to … You”, at Babaylan Poetics, 21 Apr 010; Suzanne Frischkorn, “How public, like a frog”, at litwindowpane, 21 Apr 010]

“some language practice” 7

She gestures towards the mask, casting a black shadow
mimicking the sacred ritual         the mask looks like
the shadow’s head                      The street lights go off
A badly cut-up youngster asks for a cigaret
while waiting for the ambulance         Henceforth he had

only one ambition          gloriously indigent
No te muevas … No te muevas!          Cerra la boca!
The person quickly walks some distance
before inspecting hir likeness                
Fascist troops attack the city’s last natural line of defense

Mannequins smile                              they blend in
beneath the sign of the terrifying eyeglasses               Striking
Worker Assassinated!               A monkey screams
Spirit reveals itself
Chow Yun-Fat is charged to make the bad guy dead

thru the agency of many bullets         an eggshell
a leaf               and a tack       Let us all point at the penitent
Under the soft light of the moon the bombed ruins
make strange silhouettes         The airspace
is closing             The Iceland volcano keeps spewing ash

[Note: Sources: almost entirely, a cache of photo books I got for chump change (relatively speaking, that is). Used in the order they happen to be stacked. Kim Sichel, “Introduction”, in her Germaine Krull, Photographer of Modernity (reference is to plate 3.3, “Berthe Krull”); PM Daily caption to “Car Crash Upper Fifth Avenue., 4 a.m.” (published 13 Jul 1941; later retitled “End of a Joy Ride”), as quoted in Miles Barth, “Weegee’s World”, in Weegee’s World (ed. Miles Barth); Léon Maufras, “Biographical Essay” (tr. ?), in Sylvie Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray 1820-1884; Avon Neal, in Los Ambulantes: The Itinerant Photographers of Guatemala (photographs by Ann Parker); Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection (reference is to plates 195-99, Mount Sollube, Bilbao front, Spain, May 7, 1937); Fernando Leal, as quoted in Susan Kismaric, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (reference is to the frontispiece, “Optical Parable”, and p.81, “Laughing Mannequins”, and title of photo on p.86); JBR ekphrasis re: Gerry Winogrand’s “Park Avenue, New York, 1959”, in John Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World; Minor White, as quoted in “Biographical Chronology 1908-1976”, in Peter C Bunnell, Minor White: The Eye That Shapes; Richard Lopez, “Hard-Boiled, 1992”, at Really Bad Movies, 15 Apr 010; JBR ekphrasis re: Josef Sudek’s “On the Windowsill of My Studio, 1950-1954”, p.71, in Josef Sudek, Poet of Prague: A Photographer’s Life; JBR, ekphrasis re: the photo on p. 62 in Cristina García Rodero, España Oculta: Public Celebrations in Spain, 1974-1989; Bill Brandt, as quoted in Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt; the news. For Omo Bob]

“some language practice” 6

Right now I want to wrap myself in music
and the way it moves my body through the material imagery
mixed with deliberate socio-idiomatic fuzziness
and a comic mania for the full series
which passes through “qu'est-ce que c’est”

and an analysis of actor-network theory
and its rejoinders to reductionist understandings
like a swoon, with its difference:
all the others of this prelude overdo the trills
which my long-lost friend happily referred to as the ‘my socks are dirty’ fugue.

Hearing here the ear that says “ergo”
pave the way for such sensitive hands
little thought-bombs? readers dying of internal shrapnel wounds?
that have identified the zeitgeist as the holy ghost
the horses keep running, and sometimes they find new fruits.

*

(“I was a LUNG,” she writes)
(I was the periodic table)
(Slither down the U-pipe) (Did I imagine he said “phallo-earth”?)
(Switch the words “transcendental principle”
with “pink cowgirl flannel”)

[Note: Sources: a troll thru my Google Reader: Ginger Stickney,”Moving”, at Green Tea Ginger, 13 Apr 010; Al Filreis, “The President of This Sentence.”, as quoted in Filreis’s “Bob Perelman’s History”, at Al Filreis, 13 Apr 010 ; Christine Wertheim, “The Infestation of Bodies by Tongues: Notes on a Litteral Poetics (Part 2)”, at Poems and Poetics, 13 Apr 010; Nick Srnicek, ‘Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local“ (abstract), as quoted in PE, “Conflict networks”, at ANTHEM Group, 15 Mar 010; Charles Bernstein, as quoted in Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly review of Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, at Charles Bernstein blog, 10 Apr 010; Lolabola, “the best interpretation”, at chi POM POm pom, 30 Mar 010; Chuck Richardson, “Giggling in the Face of Doom [or, Lilly in the Field of Poetry], at Chuck Richardson, 7 Jan 010; Crg Hill, “Figure an exception to the rule”, “Congratulations Rae Armantrout!”, at Crg Hill’s poetry scorecard, 11 & 12 Apr 010; Geof Huth, “A Poetics (continued through 33)”, at dbqp, 12 Apr 010; JP, “possession and poetry and Artaud”, at Exoskeleton, 7 Apr 010; Nada Gordon, “what do I even call this post?”, at ululations, 10 Apr 010; Rebecca Loudon, “In spite of the scary parts …”, at Radish King, 13 Apr 010]

“some language practice” 5

Dream Mile                        Play Time
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer
“The world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects”
                                 slap of a batting wind
word verification: tragista

        What is to be gained
        by addressing ourselves                            to the idea
of pure critique                  when it could plausibly be argued
that purity is the very problem             that critique must address?
        Has the laugh track disappeared               from television?

What horrifies so many who look back on the seventies
        is not so much what they wore
                                but the fact they desired to wear it
The bomb goes off in sentience
Complicities              had worked the / last / grammatical particle to a fine

powder               between a migratory
                                             and a metamorphic axis
You know I had my doubts about the word “odd”
A stone “crops up”
                                                     The sky is like a grater

[Note: I mixed this from “powder” up, then “powder” down. That’s how these sources are ordered. Sources: “new arrivals” etc.: Gustaf Sobin, “Of Air Augmented”, “From A Grammarian’s Fieldbook”, in Collected Poems; Clark Coolidge, “53. Rocky Point Overture”, in The Act of Providence; Gregory Dale Adamson, Philosophy in the Age of Science and Capital; JBR, thinking about his review of the Gurlesque; Iain MacKenzie, The Idea of Pure Critique; Blogger.com; Alice Notley, “Vicious Winds of Heaven’s Judgment”, in Reason and Other Women; Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, as quoted in Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism; Ian Bogost’s Latour Litany Generator, in his “Latour Litanizer”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 16 Dec 09; Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (tr. Carolyn Shread); Michel Foucault, “On Marguerite Duras, with Michel Foucault” (tr. Suzanne Dow), in Helene Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics (ed. Susan Sellers); Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida; James Schuyler, “Chabrier”, in Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems (eds. James Meetze and Simon Pettet)]

“some language practice” 4

Although the relentlessly hysterical fervor is certainly amusing at times
abstracting it into a series of white curves
         grey planes silhouetted against a black sky
         and strips of light
always entails “the tunnel through an inconceivably high-dimensional

melted Sphinx-head       However Aristotle gives us a slightly different picture
                                    in De Generatione et Corruptione             “No one
wants to be a prophet, if the job can be avoided. What you want to try to be is
an exteriorization                       of a trajectory            a “pornography of
metaphorically I was thinking of a bird that flies back into the forest

No such things as selves                   AIYEEE
There are no people               nothing at all like that           AIYEE
We see a POEM, we read an IMAGE.       Each volume        contains        a
selection from multiple sketchbooks. While a modicum of consciousness may’ve
       had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution

further escalations of this faculty appear to be a
         consumer fetish
a regular agglomeration of inflatable sculpture
                     mucus                                 t’ which details stick ruthlessly
    “I’m drinking stars          They allow for plenty different sizes ad hoc 

[Note: Sources: bits assembled by quickly flipping through Collapse IV and the Steidl Fall/Winter 09/10 catalog and allowing myself to be stricken … the last sentence is mangled Graham Harman, from “question from a reader”, at Object-Oriented Ontology, 7 Apr 010]

“some language practice” 3

Our activities accelerate
Stand by as we transit
Glue the paper pieces          Observe the cut edge of the sandwich
Shift edge
and return to the deck is smooth and does not damage the equipment

the minimalist hook              and / or the glorious chiming climax
an after-thought designed in a closet
The newly acquired ground seemed to disturb the actress
He became proud, fit and glorious in his
                                                       non-fiction

Now ask yourself whether the temperatures of those two metal spheres must
One can, presumably, contemplate the development
Let us now ask whether the linguistic approach commits one to the Thesis of
Say: They are times appointed for ... In neither of these verses can one take
           “to see” to mean “to see with

             to howl, wail, or lament loudly
I've been venously perforated           Email Impossible...
Here I am, dwarfed by
                       Under “Cause of death,” it says,
it’s their fault for bringing their kids to the battle         tho there wasn’t one

[Note: Sources: results of Google searches on lines from the first two language practices. Stanza 1: “yellow silt starts to gather at the edge of every image”; Stanza 2: “glorious and non-plushed with thought”; Stanza 3: “I now ask whether one can rely on that statement”; 1st line of Stanza 4: “ululations”; next 3 lines: “haunt time, a non-holy perforated segment”; final line: taken from video Collateral Murder, until today, a “classified US military video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter murdering people on a Baghdad street in 2007. The footage shows those on the street seemingly minding their own business until being fired upon. ... among the people was a Reuters journalist who made the mistake of pointing his camera at the helicopter, a move the pilot mistook as a militant lining up an RPG. In the second scene, having shot a pile of people, the helicopter then fires on a van that arrives on the scene in an attempt to rescue one of the survivors. The body count for the day included around a dozen people, and several children were also injured. The US military initially claimed after the attack that all the dead were “anti-Iraqi” forces or “insurgents,” despite there being two Reuters journalists among the dead.” (text from Inquisitr.com) The first version of this piece was ontologically flat. I'd be ontologically flat if I could but I can’t ...]

“some language practice” 2

The yellow ball is the point of origin for the entire system
The white balls define the axes
The green balls are points in space which represent the meaning of a concept
                                                        which lies / on one of the ‘word axes’
A word axis is a one dimensional line drawn between

two concepts in space
In a three dimensional space you may have three ‘word axes’
The three word axes in this installation are
There flies that black bird!
                                          That is a black bird!

                                                                          That is black!
and best of all,                               There it soars!
I now ask whether one can rely on that statement
Come to me
Come to me

The one who loses balance there is a dead one
It is true that Schiller was never in Switzerland
My friend X is of the opinion that the problem of the little tree that wanted
different / leaves             determinism and indeterminism
                                                       is insoluble

I believe this
I believe in the table in the room
I don’t deny that the railway train is arriving
that yellow is different from green
yellow silt starts to gather at the edge of every image

I feel the need for some dark ambient music
Here are the verses again
however it is important to note that these verses really don’t exist
they exist as rectangles in space at a particular location in the Cartesian
                                                        coordinate / system

[Note: A “foundish” poem. Sources: Kaz Maslanka, “Tools for a Spectrum of Jewels: More about the Dodecorthogonal Space Poem, “A Spectrum of Jewels””, at Mathematical Poetry, 3 Apr 010; Graham Harman (quoting Husserl and Meinong), “An Unnerving Sense of Language”, and several subsequent same-day posts, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 4 Apr 010; Lynn Behrendt, as quoted by Gary Sullivan, in Nada Gordon/Gary Sullivan, “Place and Behrendt intros”, at ululations, 4 Apr 010]

“some language practice”

some language practice
relies on spitting around an empty eyeball         to provide a material
technology         for Somebody once told me not to write poetry behind the
                                                                 wheel—
but I think that
mostly refers to when the vehicle is

a photon that could be shot through the Large Hadron Collider particle
                                                                 accelerator
at CERN,
a four-dimensional fractal that could
haunt time, a non-holy perforated segment of glorious and non-
plushed with thought

aqui esta         Rhizome and Eyebeam), is the work of
another small mess,
you go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce,
... the character played by Jeremy Irons is trying to shoot a psychological
                                                                 drama
about love and terror in some sort of crazy labyrinth but there’s something deeply

wrong with his script
Dearest One,                      [suspecting spam]
I found myself abusing mathematics &
thus, if someone says of an alien being, “Don’t kill it, it’s sentient” they don’t
                                                                 mean,
“It has the capacity for pleasure and pain”

[Note: Sources: Critiphoria 2: Martine Bellen, “Visioning Red”; Steve Benson, “m&msum”; Dominick Casazza, “’Do you want this yogurt?’ this guy I work with …”; Amy Catanzano, “Quantum Poetics: Tripping Farther Down the Rabbit Hole”; Abigail Child, “FORM AND CONTENT: The Continuing Use Value of Dialogue”; Greg DeBoor, “We ran …”; Ken Deifik, “The Man Whose Favorite Word Was Palmolive”; Thom Donovan, “Art and the Modeling of a Commons”; Denise Duhamel, “Hey Dad”. Larval Subjects & blog links: David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, as quoted in Levi Bryant, “Commodity Fetishism and the Hegemonic Fallacy”, at Larval Subjects, 29 Mar 010; $ [Subject Barred], “The Image, The Film-Maker, His Cow, And Her Cheese [INLAND EMPIRE]”, at $ [Subject Barred], 12 Nov 06. Back to Critiphoria, this time starting at the end: Changming Yuan, “[suspected spam]”. Back to Larval Subjects links: Paul J Ennis, “Things I Learned at Dundee”, at Another Heidegger Blog, 31 Mar 010; James K. Stanescu, “Sentience”, at Critical Animal, 25 Mar 010]