Quarterly Accumulation iii: Canicola days (i am Sirius) doppler-shifting themselves to fall

September 2011

¢ (actually) «writing» the first words of ark codex 0 ... granted i'm «writing» on a REMington in front of my iMac—(in)finally figured out how to plug my REM thru my USB )

¢ Unknown Pleasures tattoo inked last week [by Alex at East Side Ink, for Ian Curtis]:

¢ something that's been weighing on my mind since reading it in this month's Harper's Index: «Percentage of Americans who say they would vote for a well-qualified homosexual candidate for president: 67 | For a well-qualified atheist: 49» | i went digging & ends up Harper's did the same poll in 1988 & the result was: homosexual prez: 26 | atheist prez: 31 |while this is a hopeful trend, for gays at least, this tells me that: 1. when polled, Americans don't tell the truth but say the [politically] correct, expected thing | 2. Americans are putting more trust into those with dissenting views than those with a lack of any view | 3. what about a gay atheist for president, or better yet, a gay black atheist president—are these attributes additive or subtractive? 4. atheists are now the new bottom of the foodchain ||

¢ why Berlusconi won't go away: «Mr. Berlusconi has been able to fall back on one abiding strength: He is the quintessential Italian and has been able to read the nation's mood like no one else. Every Italian possesses a tiny bit of Silvio. As the songwriter Giorgio Gaber summed it up: I'm not afraid of Berlusconi in himself / I'm afraid of Berlusconi in me.»

¢ just noticing this now a few years after the fact, but there's this review of Marsupial in Front Porch ||

¢ home sweet Rome | on the plane i read Diary Of An Oxygen Thief—i picked up the book mostly because the author is 'anonymous,' but in the end didn't think the book delivered on what it built up to | the writing wasn't bad [clichéd McInerney, from a recovering alcoholic p.o.v.] but nothing happens & it was hard to give a shit about the narrator—he might be anonymous [as in Alcoholics Anonymous] but he comes off as a paranoid misogynist & privileged asshole ||

¢ two laps around central park then brunch w/Y at popover cafe | vegged out watching baseball & football then dinner at Mama Mexico followed by some rooftop party in the shadow of the Ghostbuster's building | torniamo a Roma adesso ||

¢ bagels & lox encore for breakfast, walked down to MOMA in the drizzle thinking may as well check out Cy Twombly but line was wrapping round the block | wandered aimlessly [the place we're staying at i sort of have to make myself scarce during the day] then got caught in downpour, ducked underground, resurfaced at west 23rd, still pouring so ducked into a theatre where Drive was conveniently starting, been wanting to see it for Ryan Gosling & Carey Mulligan alone but it was trumped-up dumbness & ridiculously violent | why do perfectly good actors always end up taking such bad scripts ? still raining when i got out so ducked back under & resurfaced at the kimchi taco truck on lex, huddled under the lid eating korean tacos—interesting & bold mash-up but not sure it's something i'd eat again, strangely sweet & the kimchi a cold stark contrast | was passing by MOMA again, not too bad of a line, but lobby was chock-full of tourists & i just couldn't stomach paying $25, especially considering Twombly & de Kooning are dead, so what's this money contributing to ? rode a stationary bike & finished Salt Hill 27—worth it for the Evenson & Ryan Ridge pieces alone | j came back & we trained to W-burg ate at Sweetwater then saw Batillus & 3 other head-banging drone metal bands | ears still ringing ||

¢ slept in the sky with a view of 1000s of other lit distant apartments | woke up had eggs & lox & bagels then broke in my new shoes along the river in morningside park, first time since the path's been completed all the way along the river's edge [though i still prefer the inner hilly route] | mentioned it before, but i'm ever-appalled by the amount of breeding going on in nyc [coming from a country with sub-zero population growth] | morningside park was an obstacle course of baby strollers strewn everywhere like some sort of perverse surrogate breeding colony [99% of them white babies with black nannies] | rich people should just stop breeding if they can't take care of their own offspring | was gonna see Cy Twombly but didn't want to deal with MOMA crowds | the idea of a museum is sort of useless now with the internet [though these were his sculptures] | ate at Rosa Mexicana then hung out in the west village & soho, bought a ton more books | then went & got some ink done [Unknown Pleasures cover on my tricep, by the same hand that inked Winehouse which is sort of creepy/sad to think about] | will show pic later when healed ||

¢ woke up 5 a.m. worked out & for unknown reasons threw up 3 times went back to sleep woke up & felt better | packed all our stuff & shifted to the upper west side while j was at the UN | met the tyrant G at island burger then went down to st marks then to soho looking for books & pants | weird to see Divorcer & A Mortal Affect for the first time in book form, bought one even to give to G | back to the east village met up with j & g & ate at momofuku ||

¢ walked from brooklyn to manhattan across the bklyn bridge in the drizzle | haven't taken a single picture since i've been here | more about nostalgia, revisiting in new light, to gauge differentials | here's bklyn/bridge pics from whence we lived here last | up centre street stopping at bicycle habitat for a tire & tube [italian ones not cutting it] & housing works for books | met V at st. marks | went to tacombi for tacos & tamarindo | i had an appointment to get a tattoo but my artist flaked, rescheduled | went back to bklyn empty skinned | walked through one block in bklyn where everyone was dressed old school—dozens of extras for some 20-30s period piece | & then in the east village kept seeing all these kids wearing halloween costumes though halloween is over month off [law & order] | also surreal to see fake cops wandering off from the set & the village riffraff's reaction to them | bought some puma street shoes, left my old nike vomeros behind | was still on a mission for new vomeros but eventually settled for a new pair of nike pegasus | j came back & we went back to the village, met A & M for sushi at takahachi, then saw Frankie Rose & Dirty Beaches at Mercury Lounge | Dirty Beaches, namely Alex Zhang Hungtai, are pure genius—channeling energy like some sort of corn-fed Taiwanese shaman weaned on acid-laced yak milk & old Elvis movies—would've made the perfect soundtrack for Jarmusch's Mystery Train | been a while since i've seen someone sincerely put that much heart into what they do ||

¢ up at 3 a.m., worked out in a proper gym, punching bag even, 1^st time in a while | it's also been a while since i took a standup shower | ate some bagels [something you also can't get in Rome] & strolled around Brooklyn | ran errands in the east village & SOHO—banking, mailing, books, shoes, etc. filling a backpack full of things hard to get back home | shit's comparatively cheap for us | huevos rancheros at Havana cafe in Nolita | j went up to meet Hilary Clinton [some sort of UN function] & i lingered mostly around the e.v. | seems most of my habits lie along the F line | i used to be more of a BC/AD  type & i've dabbled in other lines, but nothing habit-forming | F habits must be from our last year in DUMBO | some crazy bag lady stealing some of the proprietor's shit at Mast books on ave A like his umbrella & his accounting book & screaming random obscenities at him | sucks having a store in the e.v. | people seem more strung out than usual, soup lines longer, people more depressed, mopey, comparatively | walked by these two guys arguing on ave B, heard one say «you owe me a nickel» & then right as i got past cops came & arrested him | gang-banger kids walking by kept saying:«yo, check it out, dealer sold to a hot boy» | in Rome it's obvious who's crazy, in NYC it's never so clear who could lose their shit at any given moment | other observation is that despite the supposed hard times Americans seem to be breeding like crazy | tacos & horchata at Oaxaca back in brooklyn | flâneured fulton for sim cards, more books & running shoes | dinner at Ki on smith [good but not worthy of zagat 26] | now it's american football [giants on monday night] ||

¢ watched the sunrise running along the tiber | went to the train station & waited half an hour but no trains | on strike as usual | no taxis at the train station so took the crowded tram back home & got a cab to fiumicino | sat on the plane for almost two hours going nowhere because they couldn’t get the baggage door open or something | started to read Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave but got bored of it after 50 pages | all he does is drink, take drugs, fuck prostitutes & jerk off | as a back up i brought Gold Fools by Gilberto Sorrentino—even more unbearable | every sentence in the book is a question, some sort of socratic method experiment | interesting gimmick at first but couldn't take it after 50 pages so i went back to Cave’s book | his wife kills herself & he has to take care of his 9 year old but otherwise nothing much changes or happens except more skanky sex with crack whores, pill popping, jerking off, etc. predictable & cliched & juvenile | tried to zone out & watch movies but of all the screens mine didn't work & we were stuck in a row where our seats didn’t recline but the people in front of us could, so can barely even type on this computer | & everyone around us is really fucking fat | never ceases to shock me how fat American are—it's really not fair having to sit next to someone that is spilling half-way into your seat—they really ought to charge by weight like they do on some island i traveled to once in the south pacific | read some stuff on j's iPad then switched spots & zoned out to a few subtitled Italian movies—the Alberto Sordi film where he tries to kill his wife & the original Swept Away [1974] that was infinitely better than Madonna's joke of a remake | landed at JFK as sun was setting over NYC skyline | taxied to Brooklyn, late night thai food somewhere on Smith street & now wide awake at 3 a.m. ||

¢ Dutch poet Emil Bønnelykke's take on NYC circa 1918 [from the Burning City anthology i'm working on for Notre Dame]:

¢ «By that I mean, the text is not inert. It had a body, and like anyone or thing inside a body, you don’t know your body, but you learn it and respond to it and change with it over time. For language, this can be an effect on the reader, but I think it also is visible in the flesh of the piece: that you can see the blood of it (the writer writing, if you want) both kind of making it up as they go along, in the dark, and also a control there, something inherent, that is both of them and from them, and not at all. A controlled chaos, to put it in easy language: something that seems to both invent itself and reinvent the mode it is being forced to come through at the same time. This all might sound blah-blah-y, but really it’s either there or it’s not. It seems like this energy is clear often from the first line or few lines of a piece: it blisters.»—Blake Butler, interviewed on BOMBLOG ||

¢ A Trinary View of the Cryptodynamic Hyperlith by Dakota Crane on Sleepingfish X ||

¢ Ark Codex 0:1:16 – 0:1:21 on The New Post-Literate ||

¢ Four Identities by Jim Fisher on Sleepingfish X ||

¢ «From moment to moment, the narrator-consciousness feels like someone left in the rubble of a blast, confined to a sad rectangle where the foundation of a home might have been, rearranging bodies, stones, and other debris into new, more pleasing structures—rearranging DNA and even atoms, so that identities are confused, blame is reassigned, and the big picture—the causes of and solutions to the destruction; things that may or may not have ever existed—is obscured.»—Eric Lindley reviewing Gary Lutz's Divorcer for HTMLGiant ||

¢ «One must take the rough with the smooth; each of you has in his own way put a brave face on things without relying on me. Moving from one illusion to the next, you have repeatedly fallen prey to the illusion, Reality. Yet I have given you everything: sky blue, the Pyramids, motor cars. With my magic lantern at your disposal, why do you despair? I’ve reserved an infinity of infinite surprises. As I said to the students of Germany in 1819, one can anticipate everything from the power of mind. Already its pure, fantastic inventions have, to giddy effect, given you mastery over yourselves; I have invented memory, writing, infinitesimal calculus. As the word distinguishes man from mute creatures, so other discoveries, not yet imagined, will make him unrecognizably different from his present image. What are you mumbling there? It’s not a question of progress: I am just a cocaine pusher; my snow, your manna—whether memory or the experimental method—has the intoxicating properties of a mirage. Everything stems from the imagination, and all that is imaginary sheds light. The telephone is purportedly useful: don’t believe a word of it; just observe man convulsing over the receiver as he shouts “Hello?” What is he if not an addict of sound, dead drunk on conquered space and the transmitted voice? My poisons are yours: here is love, strength, speed. Do you want pains, death or songs?.»—Louis Aragon [from Paris Peasant [also from a large anthology that i'm currently designing for Notre Dame]] ||

¢ my new favorite sunday morning run: across the tiber, past circo massimo & terme di caracalla, along the ancient aquaduct & down appian way past the catacombs as far as you can muster on the colossal cobblestones, today about 18-20 km [this after running the dog [a temporary thing] for a few clicks] ||

¢ parlando di Pasolini, lo scrittore, ecco Pasolini, il regista, da Mamma Roma, scena classica con Anna Magnani:

¢ «La vecchia cominciò a cioccare come una matta; svelta come una bambina; tanto svelta che non finiva neanche le parole, le finali delle frasi le restavano in bocca, col fiatone; poi corse in casa con la secchia vuota e là ricominciò a parlare, da sola, chè non c'era nessuno. [...] e se finora nessuno aveva capito che cosa dicesse la vecchia in quella lingua sconosciuta, adesso, i figli che la capivano, non riuscirono a capacitarsi come una donna di settant'anni parlasse come una bambina di sei, senza che avesse la febbre—benchè, rientrando, l'avessero trovata tutta vestita sulla sua cuccia nera di zella, in fondo alla stanzuccia gocciolante, che parlava al soffitto, gettando ogni tanto verso chi l'ascoltava occhiate disperate e non finite, come le parole. [...] La vecchia parlò di seguito di tutte quelle sue cose da bambina, per una settimana, poi stirò le gambe, nella sua cuccia. Lì rimase in silenzio, ad aspettare che la portassero via.»—Pier Paolo Pasolini [from "Mignotta" in Parallel Text: Italian Short Stories 2] ||

¢ there's an author in authority not the other way around ||

¢ «Studying the trail up ahead. Reading the future in a pile of fish guts besides my boot. A line comes to mind out of the blue, perfectly whole and untouchable. Nothing goes to waste.»—Stan Adler in collaboration with Brad Brown, excerpt from 40 in Evergreen Review.

¢ Pigs by Darby Larson on Sleepingfish X ||

¢ my bed wet me: some sort of entombed water slide contraption where we all got separated from eachother & our baggage sliding down spiraling chutes going every which way ||

¢ INK = DRY [per (i, j) signifY^ing ∳ [ALTri 2 RiVoluzioni qui [at MiN^imo]] | ⁱn ALTri ᑎfficial^e [BBC] ROMan QUOTidianⁱ: 1556 year^s d^op_o la prim^a inVasion^e ℜeal^e VANDAL^s rëtUrn^o a Roma & GENEᖈal strike oggi—«into the wolf'^s mouth» aR.Riv^ing qualsiasi place ||

¢ first rain in Rome since Cy Twombly died two months ago ||

¢ «Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason.»—Pier Paolo Pasolini [who died by being run over several times by his own car, on the beach at Ostia] ||

¢ in the wake of our recent Quadrophenia revisitation, a fleet of vintage Vespas just rode by our house [some sort of Vespa rally/critical mass]:

¢ ... continuing the «Dead Souls» suicide thread on clusterflock ... & because you can always find a Point Break reference for any occasion, here's Bodhi himself [referenced in the last post as the man behind the Ronald Reagan mask] saying his piece on dead souls: «This was never about money for us. It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human spirit is still alive.»

¢ excerpt from The Glass Wall by Erik Anderson posted to Sleepingfish X ||

¢ second installment from Sussex, reading Gogol ||

¢ «What you are stems from the activity which links the innumerable elements which constitute you to the intense communication of these elements among themselves. These are contagions of energy, of movement, of warmth, or transfers of elements, which constitute inevitably the life of your organised being. ... Thus, there where you would like to grasp your timeless substance, you encounter only a slipping, only the poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements.»—GB [from Dialects for One [a 2005 project curated by DO in which authors [identified only by initials] submitted cellphone photos [below by FP] & texts [read bottom up]]] ||

August 2011

¢ «bioLOG^ic DATӔ transOM» meddL^{ing w}/itᑎesday'^s PAPӔRëcYcl^ing—borLotti bean^s harBing^ed inAd∃QUAte [ⁱn kaZ00-byte^s] to in/diGest [ALT] ⁱn a «Magic Meal» ||

¢ 4 texts by Daniel Grandbois & 3 images by Fidel Sclavo posted to Sleepingfish X ||

¢ █▒▒ ▒▒░█-█ [█▓▌▓▌░] ▌█▐▌█▓ / ▒▓█—«▓▓░▀█▒█ ▒▒░▒█» | █▓ ▓▐▌█▓█▒ & ▒█ ▌█,█▒▒█░| ▀▐ ██ —«▌▓▌░▌░▌░ (██▀█▒ ▒█) █ "▓▒▓░ ▒ ▒" ▓██-▒ ▓.» | █▐ [█▐█ █] █ ▓██ ▀█▓░▒ ▒██▒░▐█▒ ||

¢ Joseph Kosuth [«It was it» [phototext by Sigmund Freud from«Psychopathologie of Everyday Life»]]:

¢ Ken Baumann in the house ||

¢ first dispatch from Brighton [reflecting on JG Ballard's atrocities & other exhibitions] ||

¢ «It can be a short-circuit if you believe you are reading a book and you don’t in fact read it. It is a long circuit if you individuate yourself by reading the book, if you are in the process of individuating yourself. Now the theory of Wolfgang Iser—the theorist of the school of Konstanz—is that a book is a process of individuation, a book doesn’t exist as such. What exists as a book is the community of the reader. And this is extremely interesting. Because it says in fact that a book is a power of individuation, but not individuation as such. It is the circuit created, the long circuit created by the readers, which is the individuation of the book. And it is not only the case for the book. It is the case for every artwork or other forms of creative work in the humanities.»—Bernard Stiegler in e-Flux ||

¢ torna a casa [edit|rice] to a backlog of terraced wild strawberries & a forecasted high of 36°C | Sussex dispatch to follow ||

¢ going to Brighton to relive Jimmy ditching Sting's GS scooter off the cliffs at Beachy Head | if i'm scarce for a spell it only means «i've had enough of ...» | in case of emergency you can reach me at 8675309 & p.s. if Rome goes up in smoke while we're gone you got the Fatima prophesy to thank ||

¢ Vaast Bin, Trilce, Land of the Snow Men & Sleepingfish 0.75 are now available as eBook ||

¢ preview slice of Ark Codex 0:3 sequence to be in Word for/Word ['jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz' written in chromosomal font]:

¢ from Italo Calvino's Memos that he wrote right before his death [& never delivered][in the original italian, sorry, via Claudio Giunta on Minima & Moralia pt 1]: «Poi c’è il filo della scrittura come metafora della sostanza pulviscolare del mondo: già per Lucrezio le lettere erano atomi in continuo movimento che con le loro permutazioni creavano le parole e i suoni più diversi; idea che fu ripresa da una lunga tradizione di pensatori per cui i segreti del mondo erano contenuti nella combinatoria dei segni della scrittura: l’Ars Magna di Ramón Llull, la Kabbala dei rabbini spagnoli e quella di Pico della Mirandola… Anche Galileo vedrà nell’alfabeto il modello d’ogni combinatoria d’unità minime… Poi Leibniz….» & then from pt 2: «Diremmo che dal momento in cui un oggetto compare in una narrazione, si carica d’una forza speciale, diventa come il polo d’un campo magnetico, un nodo d’una rete di rapporti invisibili. Il simbolismo d’un oggetto può essere più o meno esplicito, ma esiste sempre. Potremmo dire che in una narrazione un oggetto è sempre un oggetto magico.» ||

¢ a partial list of ... a partial list of words to expect from DIVORCER as corraled by John Madera: { lap-spanning, queering, uglifiers, tattooery, suckily, anagrammable, squisses, psoriasic, consequentia, flippancies, odd-fangled, lorn-looking, candified, putty-faced, loonery, abroil, underfrippery, cruddily, apartmentware, sievy, beauts, uneerily, aslop, iffily, gladiolus, meeker-watted, holocaustically, weatherwise, sodomizingly, knifewise, roughhouse-scarred, foofaraw, prettyisms, fruitsome, uncomely, miscurved, putty-colored, prim-lipped, scantling, guckage, egger-on, chocolateless, lunchtide, smutched, deskscape, abominated, pluttering, bosomal, frumpled, shirker, balloonery, tumoral, stinkard, slugabed, cloudages, meekling, malodor, suburbal, humanhood, perspiry, overfleshed, enlivenments, lukewarmth, salading, spitten, rimpled, pluffy, crumble-pattied, vague-waisted, guttery, gropery, fruit-fringed, chandeliered, tidy-toed, deterging, rucklings, fuller-fraught, loiny, pustuled, danglier, spermy, driblet, drablet, ghastful, whiffle-boned, swallowy, funnelly, rumpus-assed, clodly, unwomanesque, bescatter, skrinkled, abrawl, love-eaten, lipstickish, dirtless, etherealities, bouilloned } [a spellchecker was obviously not of much use in copy-editing] ||

¢ art by Ono Emiliani [with commentary by Luca Arnaduo] posted to Sleepingfish X ||

¢ David Byrne on kitschy restaurants & a Bouba/Kiki thought experiment: «This research seems to imply that maybe the names of things aren’t arbitrary and switchable—not always. But there are shadings and gradations of restaurants’ (and other institutions’) illusory authenticity—and how do those work? How do we read those?» ||

¢ «Cosí è successo questo fatto. Ora non lo trovo affato strano, a pensarvi, ma naturale di quella naturalezza che una volta dev'esserci stata tra gli uomini. Dopo la prima sorpresa tutti i miei gesti furono naturali, non sentivo nessun timore, né alcun desiderio di difendermi o di offendere. Era una cosa molto semplice. Anche i russi erano come me, io sentivo. In quell'isba si era creata tra me e i soldati russi, e le donne e i bambini un'armonia che non era un armistizio. Era qualcosa di molto piú del rispetto che gli animali della foresta hanno l'uno per l'altro. Una volta tanto le circostanze avevano portato degli uomini a saper restare uomini. Chissà dove saranno ora quei soldati, quelle donne, quei bambini. Io spero che la guerra li abbia risparmiati tutti. Finché saremo vivi ci ricorderemo, tutti quanti eravamo, come ci  siamo comportati. I bambini specialmente. Se questo è successo una volta potrà tornare a succedere. Potrà succedere, voglio dire, a innumerevoli altri uomini e diventare un costume, un modo di vivere.»—Mario Rigoni Stern [da Nikolayevka] ||

¢ «We must say that the abstract machine is necessarily "much more" than language. When linguists (following Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely language-based abstract machine, our immediate objection is that their machine, far from being too abstract, is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language.  [...] An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. [...] Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct from each other, function has only "traits," of content and expression, between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to tell whether it is a particle or a sign. [...] Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes.»—Deleuze & Guattari [1000 Plateaus] ||

¢ «ᒰiᗉ^'nᖕo ᐹᐡᗡᖃ: ᖆᕆᒃᑯ ᑦᒥᓙᔍ,, ᕫᑭᒡ ᓕiᖵo [ᒪ+ᔝᐊᖛ] -ᓟᔎooᕕ (ᓕᗐᕳ]ᕲ) [ᒍᖃᕆᕾᓴ^ ᑲ[ᓚᕬiᔐaᓄ ᙶᓂ ᔒᔆaᓗuᕹEᕼᕺ ᕶtᙊhᘞ aᕒᘆᕪᗫᒠ=» ||

¢ six page eXcerpt from Ark Codex f01i-0:5 ||

¢ al vecchio fascista [en un club con abiti corrispondenza] corsando lungo via dei Fori Imperiali chi mi ha detto «preferiamo si tu indossa una camicia» ... io preferisco che tu succhiare la mi tetta sudata ||

¢ «And that's the thing, right, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read. And we've rendered something kind of illegible and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world we've made.»—Kevin Slavin on flocking starlings, pragmatic chaos, script writing, architecture, Wall street, the physics of culture & the algorithms that shape our world [nod to Cherfas]

¢ J.A. Tyler reviews ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos in Big Other ||

¢ A MORTAL AFFECT by Vincent Standley officially hits the streets [of America anyway—i still have yet to see the actual book object] ||

¢ immerso nel linguaggio ||

¢ «The term, as I understand it, refers to a procedure by which a writer might achieve astonishingly subtle forms of continuity—from word to word, from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph—that deepen the continuities attainable by grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical means alone. Consecution remains, for me, a mystical ideal. Whatever consecution there might be in my fiction, however much of it is the result of conscious application of Lish’s principles, is limited, I guess, to acoustical patternings and the slowly forming typographical body of any sentence—the way the words and the characters constituting the words consummate their intimacy and together become one thing, something no longer divisible.» & «I practice birth control of a typographical kind.»—Gary Lutz interviewed in Fiddleback ||

¢ DIVORCER by Gary Lutz is getting inked.

¢ «Observing versus living is the most profound difference here. The notion of endlessly observing rather than taking part links the artist with the ethnographer and the alien. It is a continual flow between states of engagement and disengagement that provides potential and allows us to understand the why of production as opposed to the what.»—Liam Gillick in eFlux ||

¢ 0:5:9ii: AFT^er ᓪ rodᎧ0 brand^ing Ħ.E|^Me pirate^d ∳onᕆe tRai1 ^of 1^s + 0^s a11 ᔉ way ᐅᕙᕋK ᕪ sonᕆe CIRᎧe'L ^be10w deck iᑎ ᓪ ħold^ing patter[n w]ħere Ħ₂0-ᔎUᖷFiᒪ0 = kneel^ing iᑎ 8" ^of Ħ₂0 sti11 cħew_ing ∳onᕆe busħ-cud | + «∞» = ^iᑎ Ħ₂0-ᔎUᖷFiᒪ0'^s nature ᕪ rëSist domêstiᎧat_ion ± t0Ut form^{s o}f ∀nimaᒻᒧ ĦusbandrᎩ ||

July 2011

¢ upped the ante on my sunday morning city run [when the streets are relatively empty of motor vehicles] to 8 finishing dashes [after running ~10k] up the steps to Basilica Santa Maria in Aracoeli on Capitoline hill—124 steps each dash so 992 steps total [Empire State building has 1576] ||

¢ «Punk enabled you to say 'Fuck You,' but somehow it couldn't go any further, it was a single, venomous, one syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger, which was necessary to reignite rock n' roll. But sooner or later someone was going to want to say more than 'fuck you,' someone was going to want to say 'I'm fucked.' And it was Joy Division who were the first band to do that, to use the energy and simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.»—Tony Wilson, in Joy Division (the documentary) ||

¢ I'll Revise Honestly by Miranda Mellis [a homophonic translation of the Italian translation of her own The Revisionist] up on Sleepingfish X ||

¢ «Convex vultures have evolved in tandem with the helix owl because of real bees. The flesh of the helix owl is plagiarized and tough. It must be boiled while asleep when its tentacles are in full bloom. The formation of paper occasionally exposes the encyclopedia pigeon to the statue fish. This introduction creates a failed (sterile) collage. Failed collages exhaust themselves in air, water, and air. They can communicate with one another because of a dense layer of salt. In order to remain above the surface they must be renamed.»—Eric Baus [from Tuned Droves] ||

¢ Woody Allen's film set in Trastevere blocking my running route to villa Pamphili | dudes with W.A.S.P. badges were stopping traffic but said nothing to me so i hesitantly ran through & after i got by heard: «CUT!» | so if in Bop Decameron you see some idiot runner wearing his shirt on his head & a squid/manhattan tattoo on his back that would be me | while i was running i thought about Bergson & the discreteness of space-time & posted this ||

¢ «Information on ongoing body movements can affect the perception of ambiguous visual motion. Previous studies on “treadmill capture” have shown that treadmill walking biases the perception of ambiguous apparent motion in backward direction in accordance with the optic flow during normal walking, and that long-term treadmill experience changes the effect of treadmill capture. To understand the underlying mechanisms for these phenomena, we conducted Experiment 1 with non-treadmill runners and Experiment 2 with treadmill runners...»—Treadmill Experience Alters Treadmill Effects on Perceived Visual Motion ||

¢ finished first round of proof-edits for the forthcoming Divorcer. not that Gary Lutz needs editing, proofing even—his writing is like an unopened bar of soap. here's a few lines to suds you up: «She was a full tree of features in one instant, just a stick figure in the next—such is the story, I guess, of how quickly you’re rid of people just when you most need them in distinct figment form to accord with what your fingers best get bent for.» & «I preferred brochures of things over the things brochured.» ||

¢ «Winehouse’s delivery, though—take a little time to suss that one out. It isn’t really straight minstrelsy, because her inflections and phonemes don’t add up to any known style. Listen to the mid-tempo shuffle “You Know I’m No Good” and hear how she elongates and deforms the word “worst.” Is she channelling a little-known blues singer? Is she hammered? This mush-mouthed approach is Winehouse’s real innovation—a mangling of language that will pull you in, especially when you want to hear the words. One effective summing up of her style can be seen in a YouTube video of her performing the album’s title track, labelled “Amy Winehouse performing drunk or high. Your guess!” It may be neither—it is Winehouse’s signature, and if she can detach it from the past and keep writing songs like “Rehab” there will be nothing surprising about having her around for a long time. Other than having her around.»—Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker [Mar 2008]] ||

¢ HEARTSCALD by Gary Lutz is up in Sleepingfish X ||

¢ free download of new song ['Some Cargo'] by The Tempers [the new band of Jasmine Golestaneh, who had some collages in the last Sleepingfish] | there's also 4 other beautifully broody songs to stream or buy on their site ||

¢ although my days surfing are short-lived, the act of surfing seems to be my most common reoccurring dream. not even actually surfing, but paddling out to wait for waves. last night i was out in the swells waiting & the sun was in my eyes—glaring through the mist blowing off the curling crests—so i couldn't tell where i was. but i was getting further out so i started swimming in & ended up in this man-made canal lined with temples & in the distance saw a complex that looked like Angkor Wat [a place i've never been but have always wanted to go if anything for the name alone]. i got excited & jumped out but this guy approached me & told me he was going to call the police because i was trespassing. my first reaction was to flee but then i remembered i was lost so i told him to go ahead. i tried to ask questions while we waited but he wouldn't talk to me. when the police came i asked him where i was but he didn't speak any english so he looked to the guy who reported me to translate. "just tell me what island i am on?" i asked.

¢ UBU has kindly put Vols 1-3 [1917-1920] of De Stijl Magazine online | De Stijl was a Dutch magazine published by Theo van Doesburg that propagated ideas & theories from the movement of the same name [also known as neoplasticism] | these from Vol 1 [title page | pg. 15]:

¢ Mark Adams on the Inca Paradox [or why the Incas supposedly didn't have a written language]: «By the middle of the 17th century, Spanish accounts, the only historical sources available from that time, began to cast doubt on the idea that the khipus had ever been "read" like texts. Instead, the knots on khipus came to be viewed as mnemonic prompts analogous to the beads on Catholic rosaries, cues that supposedly had helped the khipucamayocs recall information that they had already memorized. Some scholars argued that a khipu could have only been understood by the same khipucamayoc who'd made it.  [...] The question that Inca scholars have grappled with since is whether or not the khipus constitute what linguists call a glottographic or "true writing" system. In true writing, a set of signs (for example, the letters C-A-T) matches the sound of speech (the spoken word "cat."). [...] It's possible, says Wisconsin's Salomon, that khipus were actually examples of semasiography, a system of representative symbols—such as numerals or musical notation—that conveys information but isn't tied to the speech sounds of a single language, in this instance Quechua. If khipus are examples of semasiography, the obvious next step is to break their code. Nearly a decade ago, Gary Urton, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard, began the Khipu Database project (KDB), a digitized repository of 520 khipus. (831 khipus are known to exist worldwide.)»

¢ «I can't tell you what it's like. I can only tell you how it is.»—Bruce Dern's character in Coming Home ||

¢ lazed about [with L] eating grilled meats in a giant green meadow with bunches of grazing animals milling about intermingling | there was a small village of old abandoned stone houses occupied by sleeping pigs & goats & not a human soul except a few boy scouts coming from the woods to fetch water who gave us some bread to go with our meat | all the animals were free to come & go [except the sheep who were supervised by maremma sheepdogs] | you had to be there ||

¢ Sleepingfish X kicking off with an excerpt from A Mortal Affect by Vincent Standley ||

¢ Gary Lutz interviewed in 3:AM, highlights reel: «... the story, to me, needs to be in the syntax itself, not outside it in plot points or story arcs or whatever they are called. [...]  if there are characters at all, they are bodies of language, and their limbs and lineaments are typographical. [...] I would rather not describe what’s out there. People, I imagine, can already see it for themselves. [...] The sentence, if it is doing every one of its jobs, does not want you to desert it for another. [...] The narrators are attachers and fixaters, and their obsession is not only with the things themselves (usually parts of something larger and not anything entire unto itself) but with the words that name the things, and there’s a tendency to bend or deform a word, often by forcing onto it a prosthetic prefix or suffix, an artificial appendage that disables the word from doing its usual business.» ||

¢ in my recent dispatch from Naples i commented on the fatness [especially of the kids] shockingly apparent south of here | as if in response, our buddy here [who we had over last night for grilled swordfish & vegetables & hummus & bruschette & ruchetta salad & wine] wrote this piece for NPR: «These days, it seems, you have to be wealthier to eat like a poor Mediterranean peasant.» | amen [burp] | & here's my better half's take on the fatness of our Naples weekend [far more scientific than my snide account] ||

¢ ∫om^e iLLuminat^ing VisPo _by: { Fernando Aguiar | Dmitry Babenko | Ebon Heath | Hassan Massoudy | ... | et al } in SCRIPTjr.nl 2.2 ||

¢ «Our mind notes here and there a few characteristic lines and fills all the intervals with memory-images which, projected on the paper, take the place of the real printed characters and may be mistaken for them. Thus we are constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception is really comparable to a closed circle in which the perception-image, going towards the mind, and the memory-image, launched into space, career the one behind the other.»—Henry Bergson [Matter and Memory]

¢ WATT è una nouva rivista accattivante cura di Oblique Studios e IFIXX | se siete a Roma domani [14 luglio] sera c'è un presentazione di WATT al Circolo degli Artisti, con letture e dj set | ci vediamo ||

¢ dispatch from Naples reading Pierrot Mon Ami.

¢ I < O at t = 0, wherein 0 = after the fact [now][[in perpetual reset mode] & O hinges on rising [EXT] temperatures & I is contingent on contact membrane permeability in the cell-to-cell communication «spike train» |

¢ «He deleted more text messages. Paul stood staring at people. He looked for more text messages or picture messages he could delete. Paul uncertainly deleted two picture messages. Paul tried unsuccessfully to suppress the "somewhat interminable" thought process that deleting picture messages was "productive," "as it might 'speed up' his phone's processor, to some degree, giving Paul more time to do other things with his life." Wearily—as if "forced," in a classroom, to elaborate on something he had said—Paul thought about Olympic swimmers shaving their bodies to be faster, how it seemed like an Olympic swimmer would "have no choice" but to do it, if they wanted to win.»—Tao Lin, from the story "Library" in the new Milan Review of Ghosts, which i read in a library [The Agrobiodiversity Grapevine] |

¢ A Mortal Affect by Vincent Standley is at the printer | did this new footer logo this afternoon in anticipation:

¢ «Cases of complete psychic blindness are, however, rare. Those of word-blindness are much more numerous cases of a loss, that is, of visual recognition limited to the characters of the alphabet. Now it is a fact of common observation that the patient, in such cases, is unable to seize what may be called the movement of the letters when he tries to copy them. He begins to draw them at any point, passing back and forth between the copy and the original to make sure that they agree. And this is the more remarkable in that he often retains unimpaired the faculty of writing from dictation or spontaneously. What is lost is clearly the habit of distinguishing the articulations of the object perceived, that is to say, of completing the visual perception by a motor tendency to sketch its diagram. Whence we may conclude that such is indeed the primordial condition of recognition.»—Henry Bergson ['Of the Recognition of Images' in Matter and Memory]

¢ sValiat-ark gene bank^ed = NaVigat_ing ^0ᑎ aᑎt⊚ᑭil0t ᕆᕲ^t qᏍe »∞«e = ^untRaveling que1CAT eXcept (ħ)ere | ᕿu1ᓂart = avæ_ie^nt oubli^qué »∞«e = ^Aᖃid_ing ᕪ g⊚Σue1CAT(ħ) + aCCept^ed [       ] com|^me êVêR^Yᖑou-' ᖈᕬᕫtime | ᓪ DB seed^s = plant_ed | ᓪ matriX = pᕫpulate_d | ᓐ ISBN = self-rëferent^ial_ment a^ᔒᔒign^ed [      ] scan dock^et :[978-0-9831633-0-5] | tout SEMblance ^of ᖑ^ouR-t_o-ᖑ^ouR d^ioRama ^diᔝINintegrat_ed ⁱnᕕt_o pure 1NF0rm^ation | ᓪ SEA-cum-rëServᎺr [S'n⊚vv-gL⊚be_d dI/Orama] abSorb^s ∀11 ENŒrgy || [text-only passage from Ark Codex 0:5:14]

¢ all that auguring finally broke sky| & here's the video take | so much for the aerial technician coming this morning to fix the antenna on the roof for the TV we don't have ||

¢ the man behind Fela Kuti's album art [Ghariokwu Lemi]:

¢ something about approaching a herd of cows from a lake | maybe i was thinking they'd mistake me for someone else, a species of hairy round duck |

¢ «The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley»—Robert Burns |

¢ thinking of inking this on my right wrist today [a sort of balancing contextual patch so doesn't make a whole lot of sense on it's own [not that it need make sensel]] | you have a few hours to talk me out of it:

¢ dream within a dream within a dream, ad infinitum, where at the kernel of the dream i said «i'm done with sarcasm» but was being sarcastic؟ |

¢ «The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance travelling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too. If the image which I term cerebral disturbance really begot external images, it would contain them in one way or another, and the representation of the whole material universe would be implied in that of this molecular movement. Now to state this proposition is enough to show its absurdity. The brain is part of the material world; the material world is not part of the brain. Eliminate the image which bears the name material world, and you destroy at the same time the brain and the cerebral disturbance which are parts of it. Suppose, on the contrary, that these two images, the brain and the cerebral disturbance, vanish: ex hypothesi you efface only these, that is to say very little, an insignificant detail from an immense picture. The picture in its totality, that is to say the whole universe, remains. To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image. Neither nerves nor nerve centres can, then, condition the image of the universe.»—Henry Bergson ['Of the Selection of Images' in Matter and Memory] |

2011: Q4 | Q3 | Q2 | Q1 | daily Quotidian

2010: Q4 | Q3 | Q2 | Q1 | daily Quotidian

2009 daily ARKhives

2008 daily ARKhives

2007 daily ARKhives

2006 daily ARKhives

2005 daily ARKhives

                                                   ©om.Posted 2011 Derek White | Sleepingfish | Calamari Press