Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 827

Do you have brain damage too? Me three. A slow talker says, “Where are the bodegas? No one can even think revolt. In Brooklyn you can go to a bodega and get a Snapple.” Jen Hofer rides her bike in LA. “It reminds me of Paul Hession’s attitude towards his drums and his cymbals.” “A psycho-social analysis, in other words. What you'd need if you’re talking about zombie films.” When we hear, “I’m moving to Manhattan after I squeeze out my degree,” we ask if they’ve considered Newark. Like Adorno, The Affair understands that “the objective structures of capitalist society induce … doubts regarding the ultimate reality of certain subjective phenomena” (Adorno, Current of Music, p.407), so that playing records, attending gigs and arguing about music aren't some “deviation” from a struggle conceived in Stalinist, neo-Kantian terms as some sort of moral duty, but the very lifeblood of vital resistance to capitalist inertia. But The Affair also knows that if music becomes a specialist pursuit deprived of contact with left theory and politics, it becomes a weak-kneed defence of the laissez-faire status quo. He’s no Coil fan, after all. In this room there is always a mirror in which your face appears to be moving. Your face is not necessarily moving. This can be a disconcerting room. Do I somatize everything or is there an organic source? On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven’t touched the gun. I haven't read the book. I look at thathipsterporn.tumblr.com. There are babes and dudes all over it and then a picture of Kobe Bryant in a mist of confetti, a giant 24 facing the camera. I thought about a lot of stuff, but all I'm really in a position to do right now is smoke kush. I’d like to live in that suburban mall with the 4 alive people in Dawn of the Dead. That was another time. Today I'm overdosing on Nicorette. I can’t do anything else so I pick up a book next to me with the title Sex and Rockets about a guy who dropped out of school to build explosives in Pasadena and invoke a siren named Cameron through a magickal process. The rice in the Petri dish is about to pop. “I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible.” By book, I mean something like environment. “Ideas are weak.” Chantale Lavigne was cooked to death at a personal development seminar. Drew Gardner had a cold. Saturday morning the poets called in search of the blood brain barrier. They learned that one poet had made out with another poet who had made out with Allen Ginsberg. Chuck gave whale advice. Oh my god! I just realized there is a UNICORN on the cover of my passport. Who appointed Wittgenstein Jr? Whoa, Magic Hat! I didn’t expect fruity. What is this flavor? A little lavender and pumpkin pie, a smidgen of doughnut, or is that musk? A hint of buttered popcorn vanilla peppermint cheese pizza roasting meat cinnamon buns strawberry parsley green apple rose Oriental spice baby powder chocolate pink grapefruit cranberry. Just a hint. Interesting. Let me try another one. That first bottle reminded me of the time I went horse-dancing in Mexico. I found a baby wolf in the woods and I trained him with honey mustard pretzels to do my bidding. Gout! Gout! “James, I Cannot Even Begin to Imagine Who Threw a Bag of Shit into Your Dishwasher.” The skatole churns in the bowel of Cinderella even when she dreams a history with the prince, the solemn kiss, the spit swap that travels the esophagus to introduce another species to them both. How much are you asking for the histories? The ones that are over on that table by the hose reel. Jesus said, “Let the least of you dinosaurs come unto me. I’ve got the only ball. It’s my mother scratching party now.” Fewer fossils per capita. Like a lone blue reindeer in JANUARY. One recalls the “tabular account of the specimens” found in the “Artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson.”

[Note: Sources: SPD Spring 012 catalog #12. Sources: Krystal Languell, “Do you have brain damage? …”, at Everyday Genius, 21 March 011; Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, as quoted in Jennifer Cooke, “Sean’s Four Letter’d Words”, and Pocahontis Mildew, “Letter to the American Reading Public”, and Danny Hayward, “‘hardly our conjuncture’”, in Sean Bonney, Four Letters / Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward, Laura Bickerton, Four Comments; John Sakkis, “Books Read 2011”, at Both Both, 27 Jan 012; “Them or Us: Segues, Totality and The Andy Wilson Affair”, at The Association of Musical Marxists, 27 Jan 012; Paul Legault, “Madeleine as Home”, at “Angela Lansbury Returns to Broadway”, at Internet - Paul - Legault; Kate Zambreno, “and …”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 27 Jan 012; Jon Leon, “The Time of the Season”, at East of Borneo, 11 Oct 010; H P Lovecraft, “The Outsider”, as quoted in Nicola Masciandaro, “Mysticism or Mystification?: Against Subject-Creationism”, at The Whim, 27 Jan 012; Tan Lin and Amy Wright, “Terror Implies Surprize”, at Zone 3; National Post article, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Woman ‘Cooked To Death’ At Guru’s Self-Improvement Seminar”, at Disinformation, 27 Jan 012; Bill Luoma, “Bill Luoma’s Ear Inn reading report Nov 16”, at Cyberpoems (I remember Ginsberg saying something like, “Whitman slept with Carpenter and Carpenter slept with … and I slept with him!”); Bhanu Kapil, “P.I.O.”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 27 Jan 012; Lars Iyer, “Who appointed Witttgenstein Jr? …”, at Wittgenstein Jr, 27 Jan 012; Sean Lovelace, and John Jodzio, as quoted in Lovelace’s “Book + Beer: John Jodzio + Magic Hat # 9”, at HTMLGIANT, 27 Jan 012; Tim Kahl, “Precious Moment”, at Paper Darts; Rick Wiggins, “a CRUX a KLUX some CLIQUES”, at livedeadcat press, 27 Jan 012; John Latta, and William Carlos Williams, Paterson, in Latta’s “In pulses, in strokes …”, at  Isola di Rifiuti, 27 Jan 012]

In the House of the Hangman 826

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare. Once upon a time the artificial limb, or the tool, et cet was the prosthesis. Now you are. Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor. Let the mice be tragic and roughly whispered. We have to live. My nephew’s on the paleo diet, drinking stone light and eating lard. Now I see some giant black thunderclouds we are steering away from and I wish I were on the ground in the seaside town we are now flying over pawing through a used book store.

          grey whiteness of fog against invisible

          plane of ridge, green of leaf on branch

          in foreground, sound of wave in channel

For this reason, it is right to ask, what laws are just to be promulgated? “Only particular dogs”, the headless mannequins, walking twenty days to meet a phantom pain: a tiny blue egg arranged on a ladder with rat bells, as in, You hear rat bells all along the wall, as in, A bee-shape you keep in mothballs with acetaminophen. “The frequencies keep you running in complicated patterns; the streets are irregular.” “The veins of the network scatter and recombine in your biology.” Email me the name and contact info for your cardiologist. Once you go to prison, you never really come back.

shiny eggs toned down by dusk to the edge of a cottoned gong
dusky fossil sonata rippling toward impoverished fringes

comatose in paradise, but happy, happy

Who is the baby “ripping the morning glories 3 times from the pot”? Massless light won’t quite slant. So what if it doesn't work, so what? You can’t eradicate words meaning violence. That green U.F.O. light inside the copier. Backwards and forwards, forward and back. I don’t know how my stomach digests food, transforms it to energy and muscle, or channels the proper vitamins to the proper glands. Who is this little guy? He doesn’t know either. The cock missed the asterism of the gem. Grounded meal is a celestial mirror; axis mundi lies in a yard tended by an unregenerate astrolabe, the other element braced in a dun husk. The undersong of the “economic cosmos” is heard in the meadow where the herbicides work swift harm for a margin like inharmonic blue prairie fires. But we will never know what he meant by the ‘two-handed engine at the door’. What I’m trying to say: that it is a mark of these dark and difficult times that the populace at large is neither aware nor concerned about what Celan meant by ‘encounter’. Pause all Obon prosopopoeia. “For someone who knows their Martian, this is a beauty. It’s gorgeous.” The point is that the very process through which necessity arises out of necessity is a contingent process. If there is an intended audience, ARK CODEX ±0 is for any conscious being that comes after the wipeout spawned this language to dig its own mass grave, leaving only the original intent to communicate to sprout in the aftermath. “The Sky is Aqua on Thursday Nights.” Alfred Jarry was fond of this quotation from Leibniz: “Perception is only a hallucination that is true. That’s why I’m getting people from all around the world. Because I’m ground zero for ‘Implantosaur.’”  

[Note: SPD Spring 012 Catalog #11. Sources: W.J. Hennigan, “New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?”, at LA Times, 26 Jan 012 (“The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.” I guess “semi-independently” means that once upon a time there was a programmer somewhere … oh, it also means that if a human is paying attention, s/he could override the program …); JBR; Amy King, as quoted in John Ashbery, SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for King’s I Want to Make You Safe; JBR; Nick Flynn, SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for Michael Klein, then, we were still living; JBR (hey, Drew!); Matthew Zapruder, “I Drink Bronze Light”, at PEN.org; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “1.26”, at Temporality, 26 Jan 012; Laura Buckerton, “Letter on Laws and Numbers”, in Sean Bonney, Four Letters / Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward, Laura Buckerton, Four Comments; Debora Kuan, “Turne”, “How to Take Black-and-White Pictures”, “Confessions of Porcelain Animals” at Reading Between A&B; Jena Osman, The Network, as quoted in Siobhan Phillips, “All Together Now: How Description Fosters Connection”, at Boston Review, Jan/Feb 012; daughter Rose, phone call, 27 Jan 012 approx 10:20 PST; Christopher Glazek, “Raise the crime rate”, at n+1, 26 Jan 012 (one very interesting bit: “In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.”); Camille Martin, “Six Sonnets”, at Moria Poetry; JBR; Joanne Kyger, as quoted in William Keckler, “I Really Love Joanne Kyger’s Poetry”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 26 Jan 012; Del Ray Cross, “mdlxx”, at Anachronizms, 26 Jan 012; That green … the copier: William Keckler, “Valentine”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 26 Jan 012; JBR; John Olson, “Veho Comitatus”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 26 Jan 012; Reitha Pattison, “Fables”, IX, XIV, as quoted in Richard Owens, “REITHA PATTISON HER FABLES”, at Damn the Caesars, 20 Apr 011; Stanley Fish, and John Armstrong, as quoted in Armstrong’s “Reitha Pattison and the superbly obscure”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 26 Jan 012; Rosa Van Hewnsbergen, Inebriate Debris; Jacob Sloan, “Pieces Of Planet Mars Landed In Africa Last Summer”, at Disinformation, 26 Jan 012; Chris Horner, “Mind the Gap. Žižek, Hegel and the Metaphysics of Contingency”, at Ernst Blog, 25 Jan 012; “Ark Codex – art/prose”, at gobbet, 25 Jan 012; Geof Huth, dbqp, 26 Jan 012; Adam Dant and Donald Parsnips, as quoted at Bureau of Subliminal Images, London Institute of ‘Pataphysics; William Keckler, “People Searching for "Implantosaur" (One from North America)”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 25 Jan 012]

In the House of the Hangman 825

And so, it came to pass that I discerned eels in my spine. Saddened, the hands of drawn space floated backwards flower to flower. Not this rib, but that. To cover it with a giant’s napkin. The history of the Source is a giant’s breath. The Source is a giant’s breath. “I recently cured my poetry by using homemade toothpaste / and not drinking tapwater.” We were standing in my apartment. The stomachs which might have been empty were really empty and the cold water was moonwater. “I have desired the love of a man,” quoth Helen Keller. There is a deep mean dam away in the float of partials. Yet what gives the mural-sized work its power is the strangely decorative thrill that strings together a cake, a tire, a commercial hair dryer, lightbulbs and spaghetti. “Amber” is a much older term used to describe an accord (familiar blend of notes) rather than a single note or material, usually a combination of vanilla, resins and/or balsams. And this is what the moon smells like in our atmosphere. This is the standard blank. And, what is it when there’s nothing yet ­not even dusk ­and the shadow-hands are doing rabbit-morphing-into-swan? A loves B but B is preoccupied with C and C is indifferent to the entire alphabet. I am not bored with Google Image Search ­not at all. “I saw / a great poet in the form of mold on the wall …”

                “Still I followed
You into your dark castle.”

And there (here) are some padded envelopes. Pacman is coming up the stairs. Blood began streaming out from under manhole covers. I looked at the Hiroshige prints on the cover and felt stoked. Still spinning out Kristin’s door I decided to change plans. The air stirred gently, made me think of flags. At 9:26 I saw the clean backs of waitresses in a Gee Whiz Diner window. Like Hayao Miyazaki movies — in which buses look like cats, amphibious girls have mouths full of salubrious saliva, monsters vomit up bathhouse employees, and decapitated spirit heads cure leprosy — Roussel’s works are littered with inconceivable amalgams, like mosaics depicting Scandinavian morality tales rendered in rotten teeth, a theater of reanimated corpses impelled to endlessly act out the most significant events of their lives, a disappearing girl carrying a cornucopia filled with an infinite supply of gold coins, a sniper who can shave an egg down to its unmarred yolk in exactly 24 shots. Cannot people just go home to each other 1^st. And bake dough or something. Feel the warmth from a small car tire that bump into your shins. Be a little unfortunate in love with venom. Write a book about Finnish porn. Dancing, tripping, eat a poor diet, doing what comes to you in. One may, as the translator did here, translate Heidegger, the reader of Anaximander, into the language of Hamlet: is it possible, that which is?

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #10. Sources: George Kalamaras, Your Own Ox-head Mask as Proof, as quoted in Brooks Lampe, “Hindu Surrealism: George Kalamaras”, at The The, Jun 011; Jeannie Hoag, “Jeannie Hoag Responds to Page 26 of The Source”, at Futurepost, 23 Jan 012; Anne Gorrick, via Facebook, 25 Jan 012; Dina and Dan, and Helen Keller, in Dina and Dan’s “Dina and Dan Reveal To Us An Unknown Force”, at Boys with Short Hair, 25 Jan 012; Aby Kaupang, “tender such reliquary”, at Lamination Colony 9; Hrag Vartanian, “MoMA Brings Out a Classic of Remix Culture”, at Hyperallergic, 25 Jan 012 (re: James Rosenquist’s F-111); Elisa Gabbert, “‘Woody amber’ vs. amber vs. amber that happens to be woody”, at The French Exit, 25 Jan 012; Robert Kelly, “The Dogwood The Answer”, at Nicole Peyrafitte.com; Jake Kennedy, “The Light Is Real (for Joanne Gailius)”, “Author’s note”, at Okanagan Arts, Fall 07; Ana Bozecevic, and Bhanu Kapil, as quoted in Kapil’s “Notes from the Dark Castle”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 25 Jan 012; Kim Hyesoon, “Find the Exit” (tr. Don Mee Choi), at Cipher Journal; Jacob Sloan, “Blood Runs From Sewers In Polish Town”, at Disinformation, 25 Jan 012 (backed-up drain at a meatpacking plant …); David Miller, Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner, as quoted in Miller’s “Notes on Ten Walks / Two Talks”, at Matador Network, 16 Jun 010; Alice Gregory, “New Impressions: Raymond Roussel and the upside of crazy”, at Poetry Foundation, 25 Jan 012; Stina Kajaso, “Blödig Dag”, at  SONOFDAD, 25 Jan 012; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf)]

Anyone still believe in the future of humanism?

Reblogged from the LA Times:

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?

The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.

By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

January 26, 2012

The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.

What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

GRAPHIC: How the X-47B lands

Although humans would program an autonomous drone's flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.

"Lethal actions should have a clear chain of accountability," said Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert. "This is difficult with a robot weapon. The robot cannot be held accountable. So is it the commander who used it? The politician who authorized it? The military's acquisition process? The manufacturer, for faulty equipment?"

Sharkey and others believe that autonomous armed robots should force the kind of dialogue that followed the introduction of mustard gas in World War I and the development of atomic weapons in World War II. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the group tasked by the Geneva Conventions to protect victims in armed conflict, is already examining the issue.

"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."

Weapons specialists in the military and Congress acknowledge that policymakers must deal with these ethical questions long before these lethal autonomous drones go into active service, which may be a decade or more away.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said policy probably will first be discussed with the bipartisan drone caucus that he co-chairs with Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Santa Clarita). Officially known as the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, the panel was formed in 2009 to inform members of Congress on the far-reaching applications of drone technology.

"It's a different world from just a few years ago — we've entered the realm of science fiction in a lot of ways," Cuellar said. "New rules have to be developed as new technology comes about, and this is a big step forward."

Aerial drones now piloted remotely have become a central weapon for the CIA and U.S. military in their campaign against terrorists in the Middle East. The Pentagon has gone from an inventory of a handful of drones before Sept. 11, 2001, to about 7,500 drones, about one-third of all military aircraft.

Despite looming military spending cuts, expenditures on drones are expected to take less of a hit, if any, because they are cheaper to build and operate than piloted aircraft.

All military services are moving toward greater automation with their robotic systems. Robotic armed submarines could one day stalk enemy waters, and automated tanks could engage soldiers on the battlefield.

"More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties," aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, "Let Robots Do the Dying."

The Air Force wrote in an 82-page report that outlines the future usage of drones, titled "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047," that autonomous drone aircraft are key "to increasing effects while potentially reducing cost, forward footprint and risk." Much like a chess master can outperform proficient chess players, future drones will be able to react faster than human pilots ever could, the report said.

And with that potential comes new concerns about how much control of the battlefield the U.S. is willing to turn over to computers.

There is no plan by the U.S. military — at least in the near term — to turn over the killing of enemy combatants to the X-47B or any other autonomous flying machine. But the Air Force said in the "Flight Plan" that it's only a matter of time before drones have the capability to make life-or-death decisions as they circle the battlefield. Even so, the report notes that officials will still monitor how these drones are being used.

"Increasingly humans will no longer be 'in the loop' but rather 'on the loop' — monitoring the execution of certain decisions," the report said. "Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions."

Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare, said automated military targeting systems are under development. But before autonomous aerial drones are sent on seek-and-destroy missions, he said, the military must first prove that it can pull off simpler tasks, such as refueling and reconnaissance missions.

That's where the X-47B comes in.

"Like it or not, autonomy is the future," Singer said. "The X-47 is one of many programs that aim to perfect the technology."

The X-47B is an experimental jet — that's what the X stands for — and is designed to demonstrate new technology, such as automated takeoffs, landings and refueling. The drone also has a fully capable weapons bay with a payload capacity of 4,500 pounds, but the Navy said it has no plans to arm it.

The Navy is now testing two of the aircraft, which were built behind razor-wire fences at Northrop Grumman Corp.'s expansive complex in Palmdale, where the company manufactured the B-2 stealth bomber.

Funded under a $635.8-million contract awarded by the Navy in 2007, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration program has grown in cost to an estimated $813 million.

Last February, the first X-47B had its maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base, where it continued testing until last month when it was carried from the Mojave Desert to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland. It is there that the next stage of the demonstration program begins.

The drone is slated to first land on a carrier by 2013, relying on pinpoint GPS coordinates and advanced avionics. The carrier's computers digitally transmit the carrier's speed, cross-winds and other data to the drone as it approaches from miles away.

The X-47B will not only land itself, but will also know what kind of weapons it is carrying, when and where it needs to refuel with an aerial tanker, and whether there's a nearby threat, said Carl Johnson, Northrop's X-47B program manager. "It will do its own math and decide what it should do next."

[JBR Note: It used to be that "a prosthesis replaces a missing body part" (Wikipedia). Once upon a time, the artificial limb, or the tool, or the weapon, etc was the prosthesis. Now you are]

Who avenges himself, and for what, by this gob of spit? “There’s nothing up my sleevelessness.” A rake is the most appropriate tool to clear up the mess. After the fight, I left with my brother. I recognized no one, and nearly fell in a ditch. We are the car horns of Brooklyn. Maraming salamat. McVeigh-Schultz goes on to wonder if the players of such games are able to unpack the procedural rhetoric in a particular artifact. When the eunuchs cast Jezebel out what happened to the eggs inside her? Perish, perish. The Bangkok pollution cloud filters and standardizes the light with only gray spectral frequencies. The B-mu is designed not to push this crap away, but to attract it. Eh? You are left with the task of sorting out the ideas you have never had. What was it you were saying? These are of a higher order. He waved his hand. They posit an asterisk. How far is Holland from Grand Rapids. How far is New York from Grand Rapids how far is Düsseldorf from New York and New York from Denver how far is it to Detroit from Brussels and the train where they read Clepsydra together. “At this point I refer you to a picture by Schwind, from the Schack Gallery in Munich, so that you may see how rightly the artist has conceived the origin of a dream from a dominating situation. And I do not think I am mistaken or that I attribute too much preconcerted design to the artist, by noting that the uppermost of the gnomes, who is filing the grating (and so does what the prisoner would like to do) has the features of ...” How were vectors complicated by access / brambles / ambient elements / the dull violet or pale green snow that began to fall during map-making? The alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of the immense terrace of Elsinore ... Hamlet looks at thousands of specters. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates on the life and deaths of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory ... if he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull – "Whose was it?" – This one was Lionardo ... And this other skull is that of Liebniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit ... Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them! ... Each dot sprouts a thin, jittery aura, the reddest, the greenest, all the red, all the pink as the rest vibrate eclipsed in black, the lightest dissolve away, the darkest char holes and the pattern blisters with an electric shadow of itself sharp, like a knife, stabbing the squeaky white halls until varied-colored dots bleed out like in a kind of two-dimensional alien zoo or something or other. When someone asked her “Niye böyle gürültüyle yürüyorsun?” (why do you make so much noise when you walk?), she would answer, for example with the memorised headline “Wenn aus Hausrat Unrat wird” (when belongings become trash). Reading Jacqueline Rose with my morning tea. Acoustics are performed by an invisible or gelatin membrane, tucked over the speakers like parachute material. Even in the dream, I understood that this was phatic communion and resisted the impulse to squeeze back. Enter HEADSTURGEONS followed by Enter FISHMONGERS Colon speechmarks Trouble in the Hous ? illy all tied up Nothing random says the EVERY HOST about the herrings of this fanny face Once remove able envelope just stamp or aply anywhere twice culled more loved All presently engage in a (Vigorous) POINT-DE-DEUX. These are the markers of what’s there, what there is by necessity in the field of self-play and no player, deduct mentally. There is a garden in her face, when owls do cry, or if I live, or if I die. Molecular contradiction given out for taken aback, ‘each new distribution seems to contradict what preceded it; since there are no predictable continuities, one can only listen in the immediate present to each moment as it occurs.’ Did I mention the parrot? The public loves to be told that it has to learn to expect less, because everyone wants everyone else to have less, and everyone is willing to have less himself if that is the price for making everyone else but him have less. What a [male or female genital organ]. The blood of virginity lost in space, jouissance in the puissant stars. As such, swans become an object of hate:

Every starling I see I will kill with my brain-mask, my weak
hand strangled by the jury, whose task must be to shine
through to the hurtful limit. Twelve or so I thought, the rest
caught by public confession to betrayals they didn't
fight. I accept everything, every tiresome imitation of flight.

So:

Send me a sick bag to speak / to you from … In my dream
phones signify ‘family’, so synthetic brothers, sisters,
put your money all over the table. I am so tired it's
not true. I could do this all day, eating figs, eating
the remnants of the New British Poetry, warring clams,
pelicans vomiting blood into boring glands, buying floor
fans to keep the city cool.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #9. There will not be 26 of these. Not enough population in some letters (e.g. only two “I”s, neither of which I cd use). Sources: Phillippe Jaccottet, “(untitled) Already, he’s no longer who he was. …” (tr. Judith Bishop), at Judith Bishop.net; Charles Bernstein, and Paolo Javier, as quoted in Javier’s, “Maraming salamat to Emmy Catedral & The Artist’s Institute …”, at The Realness, The Foundation, 2 Jan 012 (Maraming salamat = Tagalog for thank you); Coen Wubbels, “New Year’s Eve firecracker show in Suriname”, at Matador Network, 24 Jan 012; Jamey Jones, “Intimacy”, “Making Coffee With Tom Clark’s Lunar Guide”, at Big Bridge 14; Ian Bogost, “ON TECHNICAL AGENCY AND PROCEDURAL RHETORIC: A quick response to Joshua McVeigh-Schulz”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 24 Jan 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Parlay”, at Boys with Short Hair, 24 Jan 012; “Dusty Relief”, at New Territories (B-mu is a museum designed by R&Sie. It’s an electrostatic structure; see the Morton bit, following); Timothy Morton, “Deleuzian Architecture”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Jan 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Cannot Retain Anything”, at Boys with Short Hair, 24 Jan 012; Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, as quoted in Jonty Tiplady, “THE DREAM OF THE PRISONER (1836)”, at Jonty Tiplady, 24 Jan 012; Bhanu Kapil, “A Paragraph Is A Vector”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Aug 012; Patrick Pritchett, “Core Samples From the World”, at Writing the Messianic, 24 Jan 012; Paul Valéry, "La politique de l'esprit", as quoted in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf); Marina Galperina, as quoted in Hrag Vartanian, “Is Damien Hirst Lazy”, at Hyperallergic, 24 Jan 012; Harald Jähner, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Language without a childhood”, at Nomadics, 24 Jan 012 (“on the Turkish-born German-writing author Emine Sevgi Özdamar”); Bhanu Kapil, “Schizophrenia and the Institution”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Jan 012; Caroline Bergvall, “GOAN ATOM”, JH Prynne, Kazoo Daydreams, or on what there is, John Armstrong, Keston Sutherland, “Odes to TL61P”, as quoted in Armstrong’s “2011: a Landmark Year?”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 24 Jan 012; Richard Owens, Luke Roberts, “Colossal Boredom Swansong”, as quoted in Owens’ “Luke Roberts His False Flags”, at Damn the Caesars, 24 Jan 012]

500 bald doll heads. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! Speaking in logic (or Greek), we/they/we/they/we will bang into the sun. We come to fuck the mutants. We go to mutant them. I am one with the mutant firing limbs. ‘This is a romance of fractals’, tinsel and silky; in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines happiness as the one thing “we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else.” Like:

One summer, out on the mudflats,
I unearthed a parking meter
the flood dragged twenty miles.

You can’t give one example of time getting old. Now break them down into tiny people, wrestling at arm's length for some soup. Go on like this for ages. One repeats the sixth step — “and 6 and 6!” — turning around with one’s partner, moving backwards to finish the pass — “in reverse now!” — steps seven through twelve. Ignore the tremble. The skin of your deity smells like gasoline. Who knew Warren Buffet plays the ukulele? Like a grass burn in space, like a mad head smashing bits of stuff, like I myself have my own big dictionary, like slip in the snow monkey metaphor with an e softly but firmly, like on the stars on the floor, like I wear orange and red fur, like juice the brick, like welcome Chinese investors, yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!

Be housed, clutched, inert. Receive, that wave earthed in keratin                        Dark’s cuticle then fastening dark hand, recede. Conductive, slow strings waist, a focus vantage stills, in weaning light     that houses break. Elaborately plaited fingers                    crack on a shell in the breech. By coastal rolling, granules secure and justified, flowingly the solvencies peak and burn in type    ;    infant salts                    the branches feebly ripening, banded. Spines unfold as, movable, suns inlet solutions of landscape,           savouring limit so warmly that to a fixed wing you fled over

language and theories de cauterize                 and un captivate the attention of a                  child bent fixed hell for leather of                 fucking like a pretend dog, this should                 be what you stand for, not the press                 or forgetting.

Nice to wonder about with you, nice to stay fat, nice never truly to be a polygraph. Worth it that the woods be sovereign what matters is that any of it happened at all, the children a little fucked (concept to pop to sex) up and Formby in Albania like Big Bird to Catanou did quite well with that toaster. Around now climate change arrives. All those water-screws, force pumps, water-lifting wheels, vents, wells and settling tanks, all those reservoirs, canals, aqueducts and pipes buried under mountains and rivers, and all those jets spurting out vases and statuary, creating water rainbows, all those fountains, giochi d'acqua, automatas and damp grottos: those are the gurgling circuits, the programmable interfaces, the data storage devices and the visualization screens of these landscape supercomputers. To operate it, you will have to consult a crypto-edition of Solomon de Caus's Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines from which the following may have been excerpted: Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on. Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation. I made this meat collage from a microwave cookbook. Was there a garden, was there ever ice cream in my pockets, repeating others, steam pressed live & in lying you're at work, crying and masturbating, you want to be in the world, locked safety to your body pressed in a cubicle you have so many feelings, so much stuff. The police come in and shoot you. Repair my aim. The cutlery drawer is open and the forks are dull. Galileo swoops from the sky and kills the whole farmyard, tearing the throats of geese with his universe, holding down pigs, ripping the tails from rabbits to fashion a new love.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #8. Sources: JBR, but see “One Shot, One Kill” episode of NCIS; Susana Gardner, Emily Critchley, “(The Avaunt Garde)”, Frances Kruk, DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit, j/j hastain, myrhh to re all myth, Jaime Robles, “from foundling 2275, a boy”, as quoted in Gardner’s “Attention Span 2011 / Susana Gardner”, at  Third Factory, 25 Oct 011; Marjorie Perloff, “HAPPY WORLD: What Lyn Hejinian’s Poetry Tells Us About Chance, Fortune and Pleasure”, at Marjorie Perloff; JBR; Sean Patrick Hill, “Down in the Flood”, at Vagabondage Press; Paul Hoover, “The Windows (The Actual Acts”, as quoted in SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for Hoover’s Desolation: Souvenir; Noelle Kocot, “Why Write”, at They Will Sew the Blue Sail; Dan Bevaqua, “Dance with the Devil”, at The New Inquiry, 23 Jan 012; fragile keys, “Nontology II”, at Fragile Keys, 23 Jan 012; Eduardo C Corral, “AFTER BEI DAO / AFTER JEAN VALENTINE”, at Devil’s Lake, Fall 011; JBR, but see Deep Cough, “Warren Buffet Ushers In Year Of The Dragon With Ukulele”, at Disinformation, 23 Jan 012; Jonty Tiplady, “Eskimo Porn Belt”, at Salt Publishing; Bruce Willis, Die Hard; Neil Pattison, “Slow Light”, Jonny Liron, “6.XII”, Jonty Tiplady, “Superanus”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Poetry and Politics and Truth, a response to Tom Dunn”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 20 Jan 012; Alexander Trevi, “Gardens as Crypto Water Computers”, at Pruned, 23 Jan 012;Nick Sturm, “I wish my poems could wave”, at We Who Are About To Die, 23 Jan 012; Luke Roberts, “Egg Hunt Triumph”, “Colossal Boredom Swan Song”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “The ice cream in Luke Roberts’ pockets”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 11 Jan 012]

*Victory for the UCB Library Occupation!
*
*Mass direct action works. *The UC Berkeley Anthropology library occupation
won its demands to restore fully the library hours to Fall 2011 levels and
hire a full-time new librarian to permanently staff these hours. At about
7:30PM Saturday night, the administration signed a written agreement that
fully met the occupation's demands.

This is a tremendous victory, made possible by a powerful alliance of
students, faculty, and the Occupy movement. Now let's deepen this momentum
by building even bigger and broader actions to reverse the cuts and fee
hikes, such as the March 1-5 Statewide and National actions in Defense of
Public Education and Social Services <http://occupyeducationca.org/>.

The administration signed the following agreement:

"1. On Monday, January 23rd signs will go up that the library hours will be
restored to the Fall 2011 schedule -- opening at 9:00AM and closing at
6:00PM on weekdays, and open from 1:00 to 6:00PM on Saturday and Sunday. On
an interim basis staffing for this position will be by Undergraduate or
Graduate student workers, hired under normal procedures. The first day with
the new hours will depend on how quickly students for this work can be
recruited. The recruitment will begin this Monday morning January 23rd.

"2. The Library commits to post a position to support the full circulation
services needed by all users of the Anthropology Library as soon as this
can be written and approved and to commence interviews for the position
within 30 days of the signature of this Agreement. " ---- Signed by
Administration Representative: Tom Leonard, University Librarian on January
21, 2012."

(Note: The Anthropology faculty have agreed to help staff the Library's
full hours beginning Monday, Jan. 23rd until the interim student hire is
made.)

Now, on an immense terrace of Elsinore ... Hamlet looks at thousands of specters. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates on the life and deaths of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory ... if he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull - "Whose was it?" - This one was Lionardo ... And this other skull is that of Liebniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit ... Hamlet does not knw what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them! ... Will he cease to be himself?

            - Paul Valéry, "La politique de l'esprit", as quoted in Jacques Derrida,
              Spectres of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf)

The Market migrates; the Market scatters across the Metroplex.
The Market dreams my carcass onto the highway, groans
a few blocks deeper into my neighborhood.

Dusk pales
at its hemline.

Copper light scores the westside of my chokeberry tree;
rush-hour trafficopters
buzz over live oaks … 

First it was the leaf tumbling down as I walked to the bus stop, then it was the woman falling back in the aisle. Another woman made both of her dogs, huge Rottweilers, heel and sit on the curb even though the light was green. We are indeed a long way away from “petals on a wet, black bough.” “Every move / you make is on / the jumbotron, / and the stadium’s filled.” So who owns death TV? Is accuracy famous? The crowd is willing, but the heart still leaks. The only metric on the threshold of a dousing in the iceless river is fluidity. Who sanctions inner space? Copy that. The cop said your ear is bleeding / in my back pocket a picture of Meher Baba a New York School membership card signed by Ted Berrigan an I double W membership book

Waving — drinking / thinking / sinking — as one
this is work — real — vital — of mass — of struggle

     I see myself across a dark room

Let the hydro stay down
    grope for edges in the weakening murk.

If you can't hear me screaming like a monkey, you are clearly not doing your job. My greatest fantasy has always been to print a book on a dead rat. Let the proboscis enter the epidermis and bring an infusion with the potential to wake up. But it all gets even creepier still — stirring deep outside us there’s perishing, or something looming under legal methods, jet black wigs [once again dehiscing — out along the lines and routers] watch the eyes peel back [becoming natural gas]. But biochemist Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University suspected that foreign microRNA might also be present. Memento mori. “Let the unicorn go through you.” The translations are, on the whole, bulky, didactic and forlorn; I reserve them for another reader. But now I only feel my face and neck burning. I’m not enough revelated, or I’m just not. Paterno died, in the nick of time. You like it here don’t you? What about the logic of the dial-up, the logic of the bad connection, the logic of the YouTube faith-healing account? You ask what I mean by ‘us all’, yet I mean by ‘us all’ what I said: all of us, everyone, and everybody; and that includes the billions joining us, very quickly now. Yet the greater point, if you like, with deconstruction from the beginning was to see if the master might be departed from, and how. You appeared to ask me what revolution in particular I want (though in many ways I reject the terms of the question), yet the revolution in particular I want would be, to start with, a practical-theoretical zooming out and in on der Klasse Gespenster. There IS a spoon. This is a round stone, about the size of my head. Orson Welles. I see the Harry Lime figure. Authentic? In-authentic? Neither. Are you kidding? Is it not? Sure it isn’t. So who, what? Watteau’s Gilles, Stan Laurel? No. Yes. I don’t know. Why, then, are there not vast ethnographic tomes about American or British rites of passage, with long chapters about forms and paperwork?

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #8 (tho I only got partway thru H). Sources: Susan Briante, “The End of Another Creature”, “Scrap Metal”, at quoted in David Hadbawnik, “Interview with Susan Briante”, at Primitive Information, 9 Dec 011; David Hadbawnik, Field Work Notes, Songs Poems 1997-2010, Zach Finch, Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”, as quoted in Finch’s “‘A speck of behavior, a fleck of culture’: A review of ‘Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems, 1997–2010’”, at Jacket2; JBR; William S Burroughs, Carl Weissner, and Claude Pélieu; Sheila E Murphy, “haibun (Unceasing tree light …)”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 22 Jan 012; Phil Hall, “An Apprenticeship Ends”, “Variorum”, at Jacket 37; JBR; William Keckler, “If”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 22 Jan 011; kari edwards, “intro”, and Rob Halpern, “from Music for Porn”, as quoted in “FEATURED POET: ROB HALPERN / PRESENTED BY kari edwards”, at Galatea Resurrects 1; Sarah Stanley, “Top 100 Stories: #18: Genome of Vegetables Remains Active After You Eat Them”, at Discover, Jan/Feb 012 (“Call it a new twist on the old saw, “you are what you eat.” In September a Chinese team reported that fragments of genetic material known as microRNAs are making their way from vegetables into the human bloodstream. Even more surprising, these bits of plant genome may have health consequences, suggesting that some biomolecules can remain active even after digestion. MicroRNAs native to humans were first identified in blood just three years ago; they seem to help regulate gene activity. But biochemist Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University suspected that foreign microRNA might also be present. “I had the crazy idea to check for nonhuman molecules,” Zhang says. He and his team tested hundreds of volunteers and found about 50 different kinds of plant microRNAs in their blood samples. The scientists noticed that one such molecule, called MIR168a — which is abundant in rice and plays a role in plant development—paired up with a piece of human RNA that helps remove “bad” LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream. Follow-up tests in human cell cultures confirmed that MIR168a interferes with production of a cholesterol-clearing protein. And an experiment with mice showed that LDL cholesterol stuck around longer in the blood of the animals who had eaten rice than in those who had not.”); JBR; Grazia (Naropa counselor), and Bhanu Kapil, as quoted in Kapil’s “Unicorn Vista”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 22 Jan 012; Matt Hart, “I could’ve sworn there was something I needed to tell you”, “Elephant”, at Konundrum Engine Literary Review; JBR; Joe Luna, “Statement for YBT (Harry Sanderson, Riyo Nemeth, Dominik Dvorak), at All Over the Grid, 31 Jul 011; Jonty Tiplady, “AN OPEN LETTER TO KESTON SUTHERLAND (20/1/12)”, at Jonty Tiplady.com; Timothy Morton, “There IS a Spoon”, at Ecology without Nature, 22 Jan 012; Marisha Chamberlain, as quoted in H L Hix, “Marisha Chamberlain”, at In Quire, 22 Jan 012; Ken Bolton, “(The) Kirkman Guide To The Bars Of Europe: their music, their service, views etcetera”, David Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge”, as seen at wood s lot, 22 Jan 012]

Could it be “The Insecticide In Him”? “The miracle is not to fly in the air, nor to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.” And if you’ve got none of those things going, but you can hum a little, just hit “Tap Here” in the center of the screen and go for it. You get about 15 seconds, and the longer you sing, the better chance you have of finding the song. Our heart’s like the terrier who checks the woodpile over and over for years because once he saw there the shining vole. I am expecting a Tiger Balm intervention any day now. Your bird jangles. I guess someone is a king of France & apart from whom nobody is a king of France in the logical world in which I like to play with the toxic halos. But of course I was born in captivity, having fucked the right people. So tell me, Sun, was it Frank O’Hara or Kenneth Koch? The bottle broke in your bag & you’re getting flammable, very flammable. I have a thousand robots with knitted shawls. Here is what else happened, according to my text message draft notes: “Hometown jigsaw and orbitwheels. The keep-yr-distance-bug-vacuum. Jimmycake benedict.” I only remember what the last one means, because the last one is about food (I raise my hand when Mike Young asks, “Who ganked their metaphors from commercials?”). Don’t need to know, need to relax. In tablet 70, a walrus. A severed walrus head. Originally, this cost US$2.50, but I paid many times that, a dear price, yet a reasonable price for us.

I can do anything
with money
I’ll show you
If you give me the money
I too believe
in rivers
over slogans
define employed
I’m working
on carving
through the earth
my desire-map

Gretel is not among us, never having made it out of the woods. But Hedda Hopper did. Frozen with the admittedly irrational thought that I would be condemned to live in the basement of a mansion on Jupiter Island, along with the rest of Celine Dion’s immigrant wait staff, but that I alone would be ordered to purify her swimming pool under a full moon, while dressed in polka-dotted Speedos, I pressed the red panic button that is hidden under the rug. Suddenly, Manhattan was a desert island dotted with red palm trees and a row of deserted shake shacks modeled after Mitt Romney’s station wagon, complete with red, white, and blue marquees featuring Irish setter logos — a site-specific installation. A band of masked Neanderthals known as “the merry shoppers” wandered in and out of the mall, clutching small pink bags marked “small pink bags.” It wasn’t clear that anything was in them. Professor Hopper slowly adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses with dark insets, and looked up. The air grew still. “It’s as plain as the smirky smug on Donald Trump’s puffy, lying face. To quote Mr. Stella: “What you see is what you see.’ I see the obvious, my sweet darlings. Don’t you?” Dr. Hopper leaned forward. “Soon, you too will be able to connect the dots, all 900 million of them.” On the edge of the lawn four pink noses lit up and buzzed, while a jellyfish went electric. Everyone, it seems, was at the same convocation. I volunteered there, I know their sleep cycles. They move in a giant circle, slowly consuming the color red in the three identical murals, and Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. It’s a theater and they were eating cockroaches. Is it all elegy? Boko Haram bombs kill at least 140 in Kano. Pass me my anvil and thread. We were born at the bottom of a lake. We were born on a subway car in shit city. We smell like all of the trash in that corporate tax haven Delaware. … 1966: The Director of the Museum (largest collection of Dada in the world) out on the steps, wringing his hands, almost in tears, only too anxious to please: “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done anything…” The group, unheard of before this, called BLACK MASK… Next, early one morning, black balaclava hoods pulled down to their eyes, cracked rictus skulls skewered on stakes, BLACK MASK, swollen to 15, marched from Canal Street down Lower Broadway to Wall Street. Throwaways reading Traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers … Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange at death … WALL STREET IS WAR STREET … The cops and the overdressed corporation errand boys plain dumbfounded; the only people to get really uptight were, predictably enough, alas, a group of straight proles … We think how can we explode this? Forget it. The barbarian is a fake barbarian. I have said of being fine, There is good news and there is bad news. There is bad news and there is good news. There is good news and there is good news. There is bad news and there is bad news. Like the ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing? Don’t you just love burning magnesium & being blind? Why must you shake down mercury? Spit in the Lock and the knob turns. This is the shampoo I use to wash my hair a-mornings. Everything is quiet in the moat. I thought, blobs a-flashing, what does that look like in my brain.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #7. Sources: JBR; Stacy Gnall, as quoted in Jeffrey McDaniel, “Stacy Gnall”, at Harriet, 26 Apr 010; “Chinese Proverb”, tagline at The Drift Record / Julia Larios; Michelle Schusterman, “iPhone app figures out what song is stuck in your head”, at Matador Network, 21 Jan 012; Landon Godfrey, “Vole”, at Asheville Poetry Review 19; Molly McAleer, “Item of the Day”, at Hello Giggles, 21 Jan 012; Judith Goldman, “rotten oasis”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Alina Gregorian, “Bark Flies Over Nebraska”, at Glitterpony 13; Mike Young, “dead auxiliaries in heaven, opportunistic comedians in the basement”, at Dragonfly on a Dogchain, 21 Jan 012; JBR; Mike Young, “Oh No: That’s So Cool”, at Coconut 13; James Grinwis, “A New Alchemy”, at Tryst 3; James Grinwis, “Exhibit of Forking Paths”, at La Petite Zine; Geof Huth, “The Regeneration of Rae Armantrout out of What Rae Armantrout Would Eventually Become”, at dbqp, 21 Jan 012; Sampson Starkweather, “From La La La”, at Glitterpony 13; John Yau, “The Immaculate Conception of Damien Hirst”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jan 012; Cynthia Arrieu-King, “Against the Sight of People Eating Spaghetti with Red Sauce”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Steven Shaviro, “Carl Freedman, The Age of Nixon”, at The Pinocchio Theory, 21 Jan 012; William Keckler, “Healthy Choice”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 21 Jan 012; Gabriel Blackwell, “Why Blockbusters Don’t Exist”, at Big Other, 21 Jan 012; David Batty and Monica Mark, “Scores killed in terrorist attacks in Nigeria”, at Guardian, 21 Jan 012; Ben Mirov, “#000”, at Glitterpony 13; Lyndsey Cohen, “Tonight There Will be a Revival”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group, Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, as quoted in Matt Applegate, “Wall Street is War Street”, at Prodigies & Monsters, 21 Jan 012; Emily Pettit, “Hostile and Aggressive Feelings”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; JBR, but see dp1974, “The ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing?”, at Disinformation, 21 Jan 012 (HAARP = High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program); Bruce Covey, “Plating 1.0”, “Reveal 41: Work”, at Glitterpony 13; Andrew Leland, “Spit in the Lock”, at Everyday Genius, 16 Jan 012; Andrew Morgan, “Lent”, at Glitterpony 13; Heather Christle, “Saturday”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 824

Who avenges himself, and for what, by this gob of spit? “There’s nothing up my sleevelessness.” A rake is the most appropriate tool to clear up the mess. After the fight, I left with my brother. I recognized no one, and nearly fell in a ditch. We are the car horns of Brooklyn. Maraming salamat. McVeigh-Schultz goes on to wonder if the players of such games are able to unpack the procedural rhetoric in a particular artifact. When the eunuchs cast Jezebel out what happened to the eggs inside her? Perish, perish. The Bangkok pollution cloud filters and standardizes the light with only gray spectral frequencies. The B-mu is designed not to push this crap away, but to attract it. Eh? You are left with the task of sorting out the ideas you have never had. What was it you were saying? These are of a higher order. He waved his hand. They posit an asterisk. How far is Holland from Grand Rapids. How far is New York from Grand Rapids how far is Düsseldorf from New York and New York from Denver how far is it to Detroit from Brussels and the train where they read Clepsydra together. “At this point I refer you to a picture by Schwind, from the Schack Gallery in Munich, so that you may see how rightly the artist has conceived the origin of a dream from a dominating situation. And I do not think I am mistaken or that I attribute too much preconcerted design to the artist, by noting that the uppermost of the gnomes, who is filing the grating (and so does what the prisoner would like to do) has the features of ...” How were vectors complicated by access / brambles / ambient elements / the dull violet or pale green snow that began to fall during map-making? The alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of the immense terrace of Elsinore ... Hamlet looks at thousands of specters. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates on the life and deaths of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory ... if he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull – "Whose was it?" – This one was Lionardo ... And this other skull is that of Liebniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit ... Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them! ... Each dot sprouts a thin, jittery aura, the reddest, the greenest, all the red, all the pink as the rest vibrate eclipsed in black, the lightest dissolve away, the darkest char holes and the pattern blisters with an electric shadow of itself sharp, like a knife, stabbing the squeaky white halls until varied-colored dots bleed out like in a kind of two-dimensional alien zoo or something or other. When someone asked her “Niye böyle gürültüyle yürüyorsun?” (why do you make so much noise when you walk?), she would answer, for example with the memorised headline “Wenn aus Hausrat Unrat wird” (when belongings become trash). Reading Jacqueline Rose with my morning tea. Acoustics are performed by an invisible or gelatin membrane, tucked over the speakers like parachute material. Even in the dream, I understood that this was phatic communion and resisted the impulse to squeeze back. Enter HEADSTURGEONS followed by Enter FISHMONGERS Colon speechmarks Trouble in the Hous ? illy all tied up Nothing random says the EVERY HOST about the herrings of this fanny face Once remove able envelope just stamp or aply anywhere twice culled more loved All presently engage in a (Vigorous) POINT-DE-DEUX. These are the markers of what’s there, what there is by necessity in the field of self-play and no player, deduct mentally. There is a garden in her face, when owls do cry, or if I live, or if I die. Molecular contradiction given out for taken aback, ‘each new distribution seems to contradict what preceded it; since there are no predictable continuities, one can only listen in the immediate present to each moment as it occurs.’ Did I mention the parrot? The public loves to be told that it has to learn to expect less, because everyone wants everyone else to have less, and everyone is willing to have less himself if that is the price for making everyone else but him have less. What a [male or female genital organ]. The blood of virginity lost in space, jouissance in the puissant stars. As such, swans become an object of hate:

Every starling I see I will kill with my brain-mask, my weak
hand strangled by the jury, whose task must be to shine
through to the hurtful limit. Twelve or so I thought, the rest
caught by public confession to betrayals they didn't
fight. I accept everything, every tiresome imitation of flight.

So:

Send me a sick bag to speak / to you from … In my dream
phones signify ‘family’, so synthetic brothers, sisters,
put your money all over the table. I am so tired it's
not true. I could do this all day, eating figs, eating
the remnants of the New British Poetry, warring clams,
pelicans vomiting blood into boring glands, buying floor
fans to keep the city cool.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #9. There will not be 26 of these. Not enough population in some letters (e.g. only two “I”s, neither of which I cd use). Sources: Phillippe Jaccottet, “(untitled) Already, he’s no longer who he was. …” (tr. Judith Bishop), at Judith Bishop.net; Charles Bernstein, and Paolo Javier, as quoted in Javier’s, “Maraming salamat to Emmy Catedral & The Artist’s Institute …”, at The Realness, The Foundation, 2 Jan 012 (Maraming salamat = Tagalog for thank you); Coen Wubbels, “New Year’s Eve firecracker show in Suriname”, at Matador Network, 24 Jan 012; Jamey Jones, “Intimacy”, “Making Coffee With Tom Clark’s Lunar Guide”, at Big Bridge 14; Ian Bogost, “ON TECHNICAL AGENCY AND PROCEDURAL RHETORIC: A quick response to Joshua McVeigh-Schulz”, at Ian Bogost Blog, 24 Jan 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Parlay”, at Boys with Short Hair, 24 Jan 012; “Dusty Relief”, at New Territories (B-mu is a museum designed by R&Sie. It’s an electrostatic structure; see the Morton bit, following); Timothy Morton, “Deleuzian Architecture”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Jan 012; Dina and Dan, “Dina and Dan Cannot Retain Anything”, at Boys with Short Hair, 24 Jan 012; Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, as quoted in Jonty Tiplady, “THE DREAM OF THE PRISONER (1836)”, at Jonty Tiplady, 24 Jan 012; Bhanu Kapil, “A Paragraph Is A Vector”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Aug 012; Patrick Pritchett, “Core Samples From the World”, at Writing the Messianic, 24 Jan 012; Paul Valéry, "La politique de l'esprit", as quoted in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf); Marina Galperina, as quoted in Hrag Vartanian, “Is Damien Hirst Lazy”, at Hyperallergic, 24 Jan 012; Harald Jähner, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Language without a childhood”, at Nomadics, 24 Jan 012 (“on the Turkish-born German-writing author Emine Sevgi Özdamar”); Bhanu Kapil, “Schizophrenia and the Institution”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 24 Jan 012; Caroline Bergvall, “GOAN ATOM”, JH Prynne, Kazoo Daydreams, or on what there is, John Armstrong, Keston Sutherland, “Odes to TL61P”, as quoted in Armstrong’s “2011: a Landmark Year?”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 24 Jan 012; Richard Owens, Luke Roberts, “Colossal Boredom Swansong”, as quoted in Owens’ “Luke Roberts His False Flags”, at Damn the Caesars, 24 Jan 012]

In the House of the Hangman 823

500 bald doll heads. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! Speaking in logic (or Greek), we/they/we/they/we will bang into the sun. We come to fuck the mutants. We go to mutant them. I am one with the mutant firing limbs. ‘This is a romance of fractals’, tinsel and silky; in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines happiness as the one thing “we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else.” Like:

One summer, out on the mudflats,
I unearthed a parking meter
the flood dragged twenty miles.

You can’t give one example of time getting old. Now break them down into tiny people, wrestling at arm's length for some soup. Go on like this for ages. One repeats the sixth step — “and 6 and 6!” — turning around with one’s partner, moving backwards to finish the pass — “in reverse now!” — steps seven through twelve. Ignore the tremble. The skin of your deity smells like gasoline. Who knew Warren Buffet plays the ukulele? Like a grass burn in space, like a mad head smashing bits of stuff, like I myself have my own big dictionary, like slip in the snow monkey metaphor with an e softly but firmly, like on the stars on the floor, like I wear orange and red fur, like juice the brick, like welcome Chinese investors, yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!

Be housed, clutched, inert. Receive, that wave earthed in keratin                        Dark’s cuticle then fastening dark hand, recede. Conductive, slow strings waist, a focus vantage stills, in weaning light     that houses break. Elaborately plaited fingers                    crack on a shell in the breech. By coastal rolling, granules secure and justified, flowingly the solvencies peak and burn in type    ;    infant salts                    the branches feebly ripening, banded. Spines unfold as, movable, suns inlet solutions of landscape,           savouring limit so warmly that to a fixed wing you fled over

language and theories de cauterize                 and un captivate the attention of a                  child bent fixed hell for leather of                 fucking like a pretend dog, this should                 be what you stand for, not the press                 or forgetting.

Nice to wonder about with you, nice to stay fat, nice never truly to be a polygraph. Worth it that the woods be sovereign what matters is that any of it happened at all, the children a little fucked (concept to pop to sex) up and Formby in Albania like Big Bird to Catanou did quite well with that toaster. Around now climate change arrives. All those water-screws, force pumps, water-lifting wheels, vents, wells and settling tanks, all those reservoirs, canals, aqueducts and pipes buried under mountains and rivers, and all those jets spurting out vases and statuary, creating water rainbows, all those fountains, giochi d'acqua, automatas and damp grottos: those are the gurgling circuits, the programmable interfaces, the data storage devices and the visualization screens of these landscape supercomputers. To operate it, you will have to consult a crypto-edition of Solomon de Caus's Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines from which the following may have been excerpted: Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on. Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation. I made this meat collage from a microwave cookbook. Was there a garden, was there ever ice cream in my pockets, repeating others, steam pressed live & in lying you're at work, crying and masturbating, you want to be in the world, locked safety to your body pressed in a cubicle you have so many feelings, so much stuff. The police come in and shoot you. Repair my aim. The cutlery drawer is open and the forks are dull. Galileo swoops from the sky and kills the whole farmyard, tearing the throats of geese with his universe, holding down pigs, ripping the tails from rabbits to fashion a new love.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #8. Sources: JBR, but see “One Shot, One Kill” episode of NCIS; Susana Gardner, Emily Critchley, “(The Avaunt Garde)”, Frances Kruk, DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit, j/j hastain, myrhh to re all myth, Jaime Robles, “from foundling 2275, a boy”, as quoted in Gardner’s “Attention Span 2011 / Susana Gardner”, at  Third Factory, 25 Oct 011; Marjorie Perloff, “HAPPY WORLD: What Lyn Hejinian’s Poetry Tells Us About Chance, Fortune and Pleasure”, at Marjorie Perloff; JBR; Sean Patrick Hill, “Down in the Flood”, at Vagabondage Press; Paul Hoover, “The Windows (The Actual Acts”, as quoted in SPD Spring 012 catalog blurb for Hoover’s Desolation: Souvenir; Noelle Kocot, “Why Write”, at They Will Sew the Blue Sail; Dan Bevaqua, “Dance with the Devil”, at The New Inquiry, 23 Jan 012; fragile keys, “Nontology II”, at Fragile Keys, 23 Jan 012; Eduardo C Corral, “AFTER BEI DAO / AFTER JEAN VALENTINE”, at Devil’s Lake, Fall 011; JBR, but see Deep Cough, “Warren Buffet Ushers In Year Of The Dragon With Ukulele”, at Disinformation, 23 Jan 012; Jonty Tiplady, “Eskimo Porn Belt”, at Salt Publishing; Bruce Willis, Die Hard; Neil Pattison, “Slow Light”, Jonny Liron, “6.XII”, Jonty Tiplady, “Superanus”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “Poetry and Politics and Truth, a response to Tom Dunn”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 20 Jan 012; Alexander Trevi, “Gardens as Crypto Water Computers”, at Pruned, 23 Jan 012;Nick Sturm, “I wish my poems could wave”, at We Who Are About To Die, 23 Jan 012; Luke Roberts, “Egg Hunt Triumph”, “Colossal Boredom Swan Song”, as quoted in John Armstrong, “The ice cream in Luke Roberts’ pockets”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 11 Jan 012]

We takes em where we can gets em

*Victory for the UCB Library Occupation!
*
*Mass direct action works. *The UC Berkeley Anthropology library occupation
won its demands to restore fully the library hours to Fall 2011 levels and
hire a full-time new librarian to permanently staff these hours. At about
7:30PM Saturday night, the administration signed a written agreement that
fully met the occupation's demands.

This is a tremendous victory, made possible by a powerful alliance of
students, faculty, and the Occupy movement. Now let's deepen this momentum
by building even bigger and broader actions to reverse the cuts and fee
hikes, such as the March 1-5 Statewide and National actions in Defense of
Public Education and Social Services <http://occupyeducationca.org/>.

The administration signed the following agreement:

"1. On Monday, January 23rd signs will go up that the library hours will be
restored to the Fall 2011 schedule -- opening at 9:00AM and closing at
6:00PM on weekdays, and open from 1:00 to 6:00PM on Saturday and Sunday. On
an interim basis staffing for this position will be by Undergraduate or
Graduate student workers, hired under normal procedures. The first day with
the new hours will depend on how quickly students for this work can be
recruited. The recruitment will begin this Monday morning January 23rd.

"2. The Library commits to post a position to support the full circulation
services needed by all users of the Anthropology Library as soon as this
can be written and approved and to commence interviews for the position
within 30 days of the signature of this Agreement. " ---- Signed by
Administration Representative: Tom Leonard, University Librarian on January
21, 2012."

(Note: The Anthropology faculty have agreed to help staff the Library's
full hours beginning Monday, Jan. 23rd until the interim student hire is
made.)

"That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once."

Now, on an immense terrace of Elsinore ... Hamlet looks at thousands of specters. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates on the life and deaths of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies, his remorse is all the titles of our glory ... if he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull - "Whose was it?" - This one was Lionardo ... And this other skull is that of Liebniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit ... Hamlet does not knw what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them! ... Will he cease to be himself?

            - Paul Valéry, "La politique de l'esprit", as quoted in Jacques Derrida,
              Spectres of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf)

In the House of the Hangman 822

The Market migrates; the Market scatters across the Metroplex.
The Market dreams my carcass onto the highway, groans
a few blocks deeper into my neighborhood.

Dusk pales
at its hemline.

Copper light scores the westside of my chokeberry tree;
rush-hour trafficopters
buzz over live oaks … 

First it was the leaf tumbling down as I walked to the bus stop, then it was the woman falling back in the aisle. Another woman made both of her dogs, huge Rottweilers, heel and sit on the curb even though the light was green. We are indeed a long way away from “petals on a wet, black bough.” “Every move / you make is on / the jumbotron, / and the stadium’s filled.” So who owns death TV? Is accuracy famous? The crowd is willing, but the heart still leaks. The only metric on the threshold of a dousing in the iceless river is fluidity. Who sanctions inner space? Copy that. The cop said your ear is bleeding / in my back pocket a picture of Meher Baba a New York School membership card signed by Ted Berrigan an I double W membership book

Waving — drinking / thinking / sinking — as one
this is work — real — vital — of mass — of struggle

     I see myself across a dark room

Let the hydro stay down
    grope for edges in the weakening murk.

If you can't hear me screaming like a monkey, you are clearly not doing your job. My greatest fantasy has always been to print a book on a dead rat. Let the proboscis enter the epidermis and bring an infusion with the potential to wake up. But it all gets even creepier still — stirring deep outside us there’s perishing, or something looming under legal methods, jet black wigs [once again dehiscing — out along the lines and routers] watch the eyes peel back [becoming natural gas]. But biochemist Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University suspected that foreign microRNA might also be present. Memento mori. “Let the unicorn go through you.” The translations are, on the whole, bulky, didactic and forlorn; I reserve them for another reader. But now I only feel my face and neck burning. I’m not enough revelated, or I’m just not. Paterno died, in the nick of time. You like it here don’t you? What about the logic of the dial-up, the logic of the bad connection, the logic of the YouTube faith-healing account? You ask what I mean by ‘us all’, yet I mean by ‘us all’ what I said: all of us, everyone, and everybody; and that includes the billions joining us, very quickly now. Yet the greater point, if you like, with deconstruction from the beginning was to see if the master might be departed from, and how. You appeared to ask me what revolution in particular I want (though in many ways I reject the terms of the question), yet the revolution in particular I want would be, to start with, a practical-theoretical zooming out and in on der Klasse Gespenster. There IS a spoon. This is a round stone, about the size of my head. Orson Welles. I see the Harry Lime figure. Authentic? In-authentic? Neither. Are you kidding? Is it not? Sure it isn’t. So who, what? Watteau’s Gilles, Stan Laurel? No. Yes. I don’t know. Why, then, are there not vast ethnographic tomes about American or British rites of passage, with long chapters about forms and paperwork?

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #8 (tho I only got partway thru H). Sources: Susan Briante, “The End of Another Creature”, “Scrap Metal”, at quoted in David Hadbawnik, “Interview with Susan Briante”, at Primitive Information, 9 Dec 011; David Hadbawnik, Field Work Notes, Songs Poems 1997-2010, Zach Finch, Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”, as quoted in Finch’s “‘A speck of behavior, a fleck of culture’: A review of ‘Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems, 1997–2010’”, at Jacket2; JBR; William S Burroughs, Carl Weissner, and Claude Pélieu; Sheila E Murphy, “haibun (Unceasing tree light …)”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 22 Jan 012; Phil Hall, “An Apprenticeship Ends”, “Variorum”, at Jacket 37; JBR; William Keckler, “If”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 22 Jan 011; kari edwards, “intro”, and Rob Halpern, “from Music for Porn”, as quoted in “FEATURED POET: ROB HALPERN / PRESENTED BY kari edwards”, at Galatea Resurrects 1; Sarah Stanley, “Top 100 Stories: #18: Genome of Vegetables Remains Active After You Eat Them”, at Discover, Jan/Feb 012 (“Call it a new twist on the old saw, “you are what you eat.” In September a Chinese team reported that fragments of genetic material known as microRNAs are making their way from vegetables into the human bloodstream. Even more surprising, these bits of plant genome may have health consequences, suggesting that some biomolecules can remain active even after digestion. MicroRNAs native to humans were first identified in blood just three years ago; they seem to help regulate gene activity. But biochemist Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University suspected that foreign microRNA might also be present. “I had the crazy idea to check for nonhuman molecules,” Zhang says. He and his team tested hundreds of volunteers and found about 50 different kinds of plant microRNAs in their blood samples. The scientists noticed that one such molecule, called MIR168a — which is abundant in rice and plays a role in plant development—paired up with a piece of human RNA that helps remove “bad” LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream. Follow-up tests in human cell cultures confirmed that MIR168a interferes with production of a cholesterol-clearing protein. And an experiment with mice showed that LDL cholesterol stuck around longer in the blood of the animals who had eaten rice than in those who had not.”); JBR; Grazia (Naropa counselor), and Bhanu Kapil, as quoted in Kapil’s “Unicorn Vista”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 22 Jan 012; Matt Hart, “I could’ve sworn there was something I needed to tell you”, “Elephant”, at Konundrum Engine Literary Review; JBR; Joe Luna, “Statement for YBT (Harry Sanderson, Riyo Nemeth, Dominik Dvorak), at All Over the Grid, 31 Jul 011; Jonty Tiplady, “AN OPEN LETTER TO KESTON SUTHERLAND (20/1/12)”, at Jonty Tiplady.com; Timothy Morton, “There IS a Spoon”, at Ecology without Nature, 22 Jan 012; Marisha Chamberlain, as quoted in H L Hix, “Marisha Chamberlain”, at In Quire, 22 Jan 012; Ken Bolton, “(The) Kirkman Guide To The Bars Of Europe: their music, their service, views etcetera”, David Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge”, as seen at wood s lot, 22 Jan 012]

In the House of the Hangman 821

Could it be “The Insecticide In Him”? “The miracle is not to fly in the air, nor to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.” And if you’ve got none of those things going, but you can hum a little, just hit “Tap Here” in the center of the screen and go for it. You get about 15 seconds, and the longer you sing, the better chance you have of finding the song. Our heart’s like the terrier who checks the woodpile over and over for years because once he saw there the shining vole. I am expecting a Tiger Balm intervention any day now. Your bird jangles. I guess someone is a king of France & apart from whom nobody is a king of France in the logical world in which I like to play with the toxic halos. But of course I was born in captivity, having fucked the right people. So tell me, Sun, was it Frank O’Hara or Kenneth Koch? The bottle broke in your bag & you’re getting flammable, very flammable. I have a thousand robots with knitted shawls. Here is what else happened, according to my text message draft notes: “Hometown jigsaw and orbitwheels. The keep-yr-distance-bug-vacuum. Jimmycake benedict.” I only remember what the last one means, because the last one is about food (I raise my hand when Mike Young asks, “Who ganked their metaphors from commercials?”). Don’t need to know, need to relax. In tablet 70, a walrus. A severed walrus head. Originally, this cost US$2.50, but I paid many times that, a dear price, yet a reasonable price for us.

I can do anything
with money
I’ll show you
If you give me the money
I too believe
in rivers
over slogans
define employed
I’m working
on carving
through the earth
my desire-map

Gretel is not among us, never having made it out of the woods. But Hedda Hopper did. Frozen with the admittedly irrational thought that I would be condemned to live in the basement of a mansion on Jupiter Island, along with the rest of Celine Dion’s immigrant wait staff, but that I alone would be ordered to purify her swimming pool under a full moon, while dressed in polka-dotted Speedos, I pressed the red panic button that is hidden under the rug. Suddenly, Manhattan was a desert island dotted with red palm trees and a row of deserted shake shacks modeled after Mitt Romney’s station wagon, complete with red, white, and blue marquees featuring Irish setter logos — a site-specific installation. A band of masked Neanderthals known as “the merry shoppers” wandered in and out of the mall, clutching small pink bags marked “small pink bags.” It wasn’t clear that anything was in them. Professor Hopper slowly adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses with dark insets, and looked up. The air grew still. “It’s as plain as the smirky smug on Donald Trump’s puffy, lying face. To quote Mr. Stella: “What you see is what you see.’ I see the obvious, my sweet darlings. Don’t you?” Dr. Hopper leaned forward. “Soon, you too will be able to connect the dots, all 900 million of them.” On the edge of the lawn four pink noses lit up and buzzed, while a jellyfish went electric. Everyone, it seems, was at the same convocation. I volunteered there, I know their sleep cycles. They move in a giant circle, slowly consuming the color red in the three identical murals, and Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. It’s a theater and they were eating cockroaches. Is it all elegy? Boko Haram bombs kill at least 140 in Kano. Pass me my anvil and thread. We were born at the bottom of a lake. We were born on a subway car in shit city. We smell like all of the trash in that corporate tax haven Delaware. … 1966: The Director of the Museum (largest collection of Dada in the world) out on the steps, wringing his hands, almost in tears, only too anxious to please: “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done anything…” The group, unheard of before this, called BLACK MASK… Next, early one morning, black balaclava hoods pulled down to their eyes, cracked rictus skulls skewered on stakes, BLACK MASK, swollen to 15, marched from Canal Street down Lower Broadway to Wall Street. Throwaways reading Traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers … Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange at death … WALL STREET IS WAR STREET … The cops and the overdressed corporation errand boys plain dumbfounded; the only people to get really uptight were, predictably enough, alas, a group of straight proles … We think how can we explode this? Forget it. The barbarian is a fake barbarian. I have said of being fine, There is good news and there is bad news. There is bad news and there is good news. There is good news and there is good news. There is bad news and there is bad news. Like the ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing? Don’t you just love burning magnesium & being blind? Why must you shake down mercury? Spit in the Lock and the knob turns. This is the shampoo I use to wash my hair a-mornings. Everything is quiet in the moat. I thought, blobs a-flashing, what does that look like in my brain.

[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #7. Sources: JBR; Stacy Gnall, as quoted in Jeffrey McDaniel, “Stacy Gnall”, at Harriet, 26 Apr 010; “Chinese Proverb”, tagline at The Drift Record / Julia Larios; Michelle Schusterman, “iPhone app figures out what song is stuck in your head”, at Matador Network, 21 Jan 012; Landon Godfrey, “Vole”, at Asheville Poetry Review 19; Molly McAleer, “Item of the Day”, at Hello Giggles, 21 Jan 012; Judith Goldman, “rotten oasis”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Alina Gregorian, “Bark Flies Over Nebraska”, at Glitterpony 13; Mike Young, “dead auxiliaries in heaven, opportunistic comedians in the basement”, at Dragonfly on a Dogchain, 21 Jan 012; JBR; Mike Young, “Oh No: That’s So Cool”, at Coconut 13; James Grinwis, “A New Alchemy”, at Tryst 3; James Grinwis, “Exhibit of Forking Paths”, at La Petite Zine; Geof Huth, “The Regeneration of Rae Armantrout out of What Rae Armantrout Would Eventually Become”, at dbqp, 21 Jan 012; Sampson Starkweather, “From La La La”, at Glitterpony 13; John Yau, “The Immaculate Conception of Damien Hirst”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jan 012; Cynthia Arrieu-King, “Against the Sight of People Eating Spaghetti with Red Sauce”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Steven Shaviro, “Carl Freedman, The Age of Nixon”, at The Pinocchio Theory, 21 Jan 012; William Keckler, “Healthy Choice”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 21 Jan 012; Gabriel Blackwell, “Why Blockbusters Don’t Exist”, at Big Other, 21 Jan 012; David Batty and Monica Mark, “Scores killed in terrorist attacks in Nigeria”, at Guardian, 21 Jan 012; Ben Mirov, “#000”, at Glitterpony 13; Lyndsey Cohen, “Tonight There Will be a Revival”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group, Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, as quoted in Matt Applegate, “Wall Street is War Street”, at Prodigies & Monsters, 21 Jan 012; Emily Pettit, “Hostile and Aggressive Feelings”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; JBR, but see dp1974, “The ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing?”, at Disinformation, 21 Jan 012 (HAARP = High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program); Bruce Covey, “Plating 1.0”, “Reveal 41: Work”, at Glitterpony 13; Andrew Leland, “Spit in the Lock”, at Everyday Genius, 16 Jan 012; Andrew Morgan, “Lent”, at Glitterpony 13; Heather Christle, “Saturday”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR]