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Quotidian Feed Stack—Q3 2012: habits of tongue, rollerskating in a buffalo herd & living by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.


September 2012

¢ Back in Bangkok eating sticky rice & mango in white silk bathrobe & slippers.

¢ Still ever pinching myself.

¢ Drinking Angkor beer after seeing Angkor Wat.

¢ Post script to the Bangkok post: the dreadful river cruise the night before we came to Cambodia:

¢ The first rule of our hotel: «No prostitutes inside guesthouse.» The third rule is no «room pirates».

¢ Running in Bangkok is great—you can jog a few miles & be doused in sweat as if you sprinted a marathon.

¢ In Bangkok, on the river. Thinking of getting some ink.

¢ Thanks Jello, i didn't forget to pack a wife.

¢ «The track of every canoe remains somewhere in the oceans.»—James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A FloodGleick .

¢ «It from bit. Otherwise put, every "it"—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. "It from bit" symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.»—John Archibald Wheeler

¢ «Rhyme or reason» are both crutches to remember, but keep you from getting it.

¢ Scientists did an MRI scan on some dead salmon & got a signal showing brain activity.

¢ «What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening—call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may say, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy—which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.»—Erwin Schrödinger (What Is Life?what is life)

¢ Talk about living in a vacuum, ecco these Water Bears pushing the limits of extreme living (via Knowledge Ecology).

¢ «Dopo di loro abbiamo imparato a metterci in salvo. A dividere le cose dalla cose, in maniera da potere andare a dormire ogni tanto. Nel momento in cui l'arte si strappava dagli autori, sono arrivate le opere. I libri (i quadri, le canzoni...) si sono separati dalla diografie, come le bolle di cera liquida, rossa che galleggiano nelle lampade di quegli anni. Si gonfiano, si staccano, si uniscono di nuovo. Ectoplasmi fluttuanti che figliano. [...] Adesso l'eventuale assenza dell'autore, la sua invisibilita, e strategica. Se si nasconde dietro nomi collettivi, se rinuncia all'identita, lo fa per motivi intrinsechi all'operazione creativa. Il riserbo naturale dell'artista e stato spazzato via del terremoto messo in atto dalla generazione degli spreconi.»—Elena Stancanelli (A immaginare una vita ce ne vuole un'altraStancanelli)

¢ If No Words/No Thoughts was the best song of 2010-11, then the title track off The SeerThe Seer is the best song of 2012-13 ... and i say this only having listened to it once. After a decade of trying to do something different & a decade of silence, Swans have circled back to their original sound—a sound that is perhaps closest ever to musical perfection.

¢ Rome is fast becoming a parking lot for itself. Every piazza & sidewalk chocked full of cars with no more room for pedestrians.

¢ Ecco oggi.

¢ After tonight's event (see below) leaving crack of dawn for the mountains, so no quotidian for a spell.

¢ This friday, 7th of September, at 6 pm, in some sort of upside-down garden («Orto Capovolto»—c/o Istituto Tecnico Agrario Statale G. Garibaldi, via Ardeatina 524), will be the unofficial Roman launch party of {untitled : under the auspices}. Pages from the book will be displayed/planted, along with art by Ono Emiliani (whose work we featured before in Sleeping Fish). More info here.

¢ Excerpt from Ark Codex ±0 in Kneejerk:

kneejerk ark codex

¢ Swallowed some big black bug that bit me in the back of the throat. That's why you run with mouth closed.

¢ «What lies at the heart of every living being is not a fire, not warm breath, not a "spark of life." It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don't think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.»—Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmakerblind.

¢ Back suckling the she-wolf teat.

¢ Headed back over the pond with a belly full of sushi (from Gari (good but overrated & overpriced) & Takahachi (still our favorite, this time accompanied by the NY Tyrant)), bagels (from various places, most notably the last few mornings from Absolute bagels), tacos (from various carts & Gran Electrica in DUMBO),  dumplings (unnamed place on Essex), enchiladas (Lupe's), huevos rancheros (Cafe Havana), a hamburger (Nick's), fish & chips (b cafe) &  Thai Market & Fatty Crab. Feel ok to go back to pasta.

¢ «... an artwork is not so much about something, but is something.»—Levi Bryant, in Towards a Machine-Oriented Aesthetics. <

¢ After yesterdays run to NJ (~12 miless), walked down to 50th & Park (~4 miles) & this morning early ran morningside park to outer loop & inner loop of central park (~10 miles), so the same as Athens to Marathon in the last 24 hours.

¢ Some images from the book where birds are the words in the new Diagram:

birds diagram



August 2012

¢ Ran to New Jersey across the George Washington bridge—one of the last bridges that eluded me during my bridge-running days.

¢ «The soule sound that comes cuppling into our ear becomes the river-cum-saltchuck & com ça, in an exturnal world we sleep, not trickt to nanitch cum homestead. We presume the sound all the same courses cum pilchuck in même veins & when we fathum such thinking, this inkling of idea, a hiyh-pitch ringing we then ear-touch .. the sound of our own reckoning pernounced.»—West of Kingdome Come<

¢ I hereby renounce the use of the pronoun I & the verb to be (as I already have in the writing of West of Kingdom Come, where you won't find a single instance of either). I.e. «I think, therefore I am» would be written: «we think, therefore we become.» Nothing is, it's always ever becoming.

¢ «One more thing: Nimrod began to understand that what he was experiencing was, in spite of its appearance of novelty, something which had existed before. His body began to recognize situations, impressions, and objects. In reality, none of these astonished him very much. Faced with new circumstances, he would dip into the fount of his memory, the deep-seated memory of the body, would search blindly and feverishly, and often find ready-made within himself a suitable reaction: the wisdom of generations, deposited in his plasma, in his nerves. He found actions and decisions of which he had not been aware but which had been laying in wait, ready to emerge.»—Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodilesbruno schulz.

¢ Monday night, 27 of Aug, there's a silent art auction to benefit my tattoo artist Alex Sherker (who hurt his inking hand) at Fontana's in the LES. I'll be there bidding, so he can ink Romulus & Remus suckling the she-wolf on my right breast.

¢ Wide awake in America, at 4 a.m. at 77th & Broadway. Dreamt straight to language, which seems to the norm lately, though i don't remember any of the specific words.

¢ In anticipation of living in limbo for the next few months, i transitioned my old janky macbook to be my primary machine. First stop, gotham.

¢ Today is j's last day at work. So begins the spell of seeing where the road leads us.

¢ The first thought in my head when i woke up this morning was the sentence: «The river channels the traces.» The need for channels to come before traces was so important that my subconscious woke me up so i could write that down, though i don't remember the context.

¢ James Wagner put out another chapbook thru his Esther Press, this one a series of Beckettian/Mametian short plays called The Idiocy. For some reason while reading the koanesque duologues, i kept picturing the two characters (A & B) as the late Akbar & Jeff. Good stuff.

¢ In the wriyhting of these words, we recreate them. Learn us the words thus .. iktus our father thinks cum pants in a wake, stitched into the lining. When our father says «such & such» comes close to becoming «such & such», tricked become us into thinking such & such stands in for animals we all the same recall to keep .. & at the stet time we become self-kumtux at last. [from West of Kingdom Come]

¢ «If a man is wearing twenty pairs of pants, everyone who encounters him believes he's wearing not twenty pairs of pants but a single pair of wide-flared knickerbockers. Everyone ought to be able to recognize right away that the thinking of our universities is more a knickerbocker way of thinking. But even a person who comes to realize that is in danger of laboring under an additional regrettable mistake.»—Gert Jonke, The System of Viennagert jonke

¢ An addendum to my Rome running routes (for those seeking elevation): Starting at Tiber island, run along the river & go up Garibaldi. Just past the fascist era monument & the large baroque fountain, go through the gate right to the Gianicolo, but rather than follow the Gianicolo road, cut right down the dirt road along the fence of the botanical garden. The trail goes down & then cuts back up back past where they still fire the cannon everyday at exactly high noon. Follow the Gianicolo, with great views of Rome below, past the baby Jesus hospital & down right to the river, go back along the Tiber a bit, then come back up at Castel Sant'Angelo & do the pentagon-shaped loop, then back towards the Vatican & loop around St Peters. Look for a small road (viale delle Mura Aurelie) cutting up to the right, up the Gianicolo at a long slow burn, hugging the old Aurelian wall. When you get to the big arch on top, go straight across & keep following the Janiculum wall through Monteverde & keep hugging the wall until you see a small doorway in the wall & cut into Villa Sciarra (one of the best kept secret parks of Rome). Cut back & forth through Villa Sciarra, coming out on via Dandolo back down towards Trastevere. If you still have gas in tank, hook left on viale Glorioso & you'll find one of the best sets of stairs for running in Rome (126 steps). Run the steps to failure. [map]

¢ Encoding a book into DNA only seems interesting if it involves living organisms ... not necessarily just to use, say, mice, as storage devices (which would be pretty cool, to store your books in your pets, or even your children), but how particular novels would express themselves in biological features. And will a new breed of writers start writing & making art specifically for this format.

¢ Almost went to Geneva this weekend, before we realized we are illegal aliens ... need to «repatriate» back to the states first & then come back as tourists before we can go anywhere else.

¢ In this moosum nanitch we die & vaporate from the saltchuck to the sky. And tum-touch us klosh .. to rise all the same cum floatsam germinetting in the sky, to land upside-down (relative to 0) .. in the direction from wither father comes. [from what is becoming West of Kingdom Come]

¢ «The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be".»—Feynmann lectures.

¢ «An intelligent being bears within himself the means to transcend his own nature.»—Henri Bergson, Creative Evolutioncreative evolution.

¢ Top 5 olympic moments that bristled the hair on the back of my neck: 1. Tirunesh Dibaba in the women's 10k, 2. David Rudisha in the men's 800m, 3. Mo Farah taking the 5k (after winning the 10k), 4. The American women in the 4x100 relay & 5. The Ugandan Stephen Kiprotich beating the Kenyans in the marathon.

¢ «But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.’»—David Winters, in interview with HTMLGiant.

¢ Snippet of shit that didn't make the cut in the book where birds are the words (less than 2 weeks & counting until i lay my own eyes on it):

birdshit text

¢ «Yet for mondegreens to arise in the culture, and for mondegreens to exist in the lexis, required something new: a modern level of linguistic self-consciousness and interconnectedness. People needed to mishear lyrics not just once, not just several times, but often enough to become aware of the mishearing as a thing worth discussing. They needed to have other such people with whom to share the recognition.»—James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A FloodGleick .

¢ The idea of «idea» we do not yet klap to keep, for context traps our id to bite vestigeal taile.

¢ Turned over my italian ID yesterday, now we're officially residents of nowhere, senza identità.

¢ «The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.»—Robert Hughes, R.I.P.

¢ Last night i was in some dark jungle with a paparazzi photographer who was trying to «capture» photos of hippos or some dangerous animals (or so i thought). He spotted a dead girl & hiked down some overgrown embankment to take photos of her & as he took the flash photos of her, her body shifted (i could see this from a distance, like stroboscopic flashes)—the photos were, in effect, altering the crime scene. I started to go down the trail to see the body, but then halfway decided i didn't want to, that i wanted to keep my record clean (both in dreams & in reality), of having never seen for myself a dead body.

¢ My best ideas i think of running & then forget by the time i get home to write them down.

¢ More interesting to me in this experiment is not the behavior of the rats, but how the behavior of the scientists changed over the course of the experiment (i.e. did they self-medicate more to cope with the increasing weight of their own conscience).

¢ I have yet to touch it or see it with my own eyes, but the book where the birds are the words is now stocked at SPD. I also made the dbook version available for download. Here's the second of 2 book trailers for it:

¢ Venus in the pre-dawn skies is so bright lately that it has been waking me up, even with shutters drawn. And Jupiter too. Check it out, to the southeast.

¢ «You can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd, but you can be happy if you've a mind to.»—Roger Miller (not to be confused with this Roger Miller, or 'Roger Milla' as he is more commonly known as, who probably can rollerskate in a buffalo herd).

¢ From a vacuum come we (westbound, in time) to kumtux the cull-to-sack.


July 2012

¢ Pommel horse would be more interesting if it were a real horse, galloping.

¢ Some goats & buffalo we met this past weekend. More to come in this space...

¢ x-section of another incision i made last week:

bosonic starling

¢ Who's smarter (in regards to a certain Aesop fable), children or crows?

¢ Com ça, by the mockasins spanking we port not yet, we resyckle mism mêmes to propaget for the sake of forsaken.

¢ Jaime Lannister: I could care less what anyone thinks of me. Tywin Lannister: That's what you want people to think of you.

¢ Habits of tongue are meant to be broke.

¢ «Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night clicked past as he walked by the creek by the hornbeam tree, the elders, sorrels, cedars and the fir; for as he named them, sounding their soft names in his lonely skull, the fire of fall was on them, and he named the days he'd lost.»—William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luckgass.

¢ Holy damnation—as of the last hour, Tiber island is no longer an island. I caught a backhoe damming up the last gap of the eastern fork with dredged boulders ... in effect connecting what was the boat-shaped island with the Jewish ghetto:

¢ First time it has actually rained in Rome in 3 summers here, that i can remember. Though from the P.O.V. (IP) of my machine (far as you can tell), i'm in the UK for the next month (to watch the olympics on BBC).

¢ x-section of a «failed» incision:

anasazi storni

¢ .... the même momentum syckle drawn from our 01° nanitch, drawing drops from saltchuck to sky, to form clouds, to snass verse, to sea.

¢ «... the artist is he who finds his own language and creates through it, inventing a universe, habitable for him and other people, that’s it.»—Luca Arnaudo, from WORDATLAS, a bilingual booklet i recently put together of words by Luca & art by Aldo Bandinelli.

¢ Christian Peet takes a break from crimen magiae to wax about numbers (9s in particular), 9/11, sestina shuffling, etc. & to posit a number theory question to me... perhaps i'll elaborate later, but for now i'll just say the answer is: 2m = ±1 mod (2n + 1), or sequence A003558.

¢ Used the word «post-social-networking» this morning. Does such a world exist yet & where do i subscribe?

¢ «But having cut your cloth, you must sew it.»—Henri Bergson, Creative Evolutioncreative evolution.

¢ How Turkish villagers communicate via a 400-year-old 'bird language':

¢ the other night in the Chianti region .... we were in this place that on the outside seemed a quaint hilltop village, but in the streets were impoverished inner-city blacks. J was there & so was my older brother & he was black. we were trying to walk up this street to the top, but it was ridiculously steep, too steep to physically climb, yet the villagers seemed to walk up without a problem. the street went through a tunnel, so i laid on my back & was able to chimney up, walking on the ceiling. my black brother was waiting on top with one of those old fashioned bi-planes. the plane was hanging upside-down. i climbed into the cockpit. through the glass, hanging upside-down, i could see all these starlings murmurating all around us. my black brother released a latch that let the plane drop in free fall, still upside down, with starlings swooping all around us. then he 'push-started' the plane mid-air & pulled out of the free-fall, just in time before we hit the ground. i was surprised to not feel sick, but invigorated. we flew over the countryside, past some zoo/circus with all these weird exhibits. the one i remember most was a gorilla that kept a human head in a cage. we landed & the plane turned into a white horse that i was riding. i was some sort of beastmaster-like guy with 4 white animals—the white horse, a white rabbit, a white lizard & a white «Lady» bird. the Lady bird would only let me hold & cuddle it, anyone else it would viciously peck. i got off the horse & let the Lady bird go & she turned into a tiny miniature pony the size of a cat. all 4 white animals started walking off in different directions, the horse still with the leash dangling. at first i tried to corral them & tie them up, then just gave up & decided to let them go.

¢ if i had a nickel for every time i stole something because it wouldn't allow me to buy it ....

¢ 5quid for a lapse of linguini con clam ¢urry ....

¢ sneak preview of the forthcoming titleless, authorless & wordless book by Calamari.

under the auspices

¢ «Marks, images, pictographs, petroglyphs—as these forms grew stylized, conventional, and thus increasingly abstract, they approached what we understand as writing, but one more transition was crucial, from the representation of things to the representation of spoken language: that is, representation twice removed. There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word.»—James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Floodthe information

¢ whenever i miss nyc i just visit the underground ny public library ....

¢ .. some pages from Ark Codex ±0 in Requited 7, including the cover image ..

¢ «       '      ,   '  : "       ,"   '    '          .                 ;           ,          .»

¢ «Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.»—James Joyce (thusly inspired to write The Dead)

¢ REFF is a fake cultural insitution born in Italy in 2008. It operates using «fake, remix, reinvention, recontextualization, plagiarism and reenactment as tools for the systematic reinvention of reality.»

¢ «It was the first to uncover the revolutionary energies apparent in the 'antiquated', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the things now beginning to die out, the drawing-room grands, the clothes of five years ago, the smart watering holes when the fashionable world begins to desert them. How such things relate to the revolution—of that none can have a more precise idea than these authors. The way poverty—not just social poverty but equally that of architecture, the shabbiness of interiors, the enslaved and enslaving things—the way these flip suddenly into revolutionary nihilism is something that, before these seers and interpreters of signs of the times came along, no one had observed.»—Walter Benjamin (on the cannon of surrealism)(from One-Way Street and Other Writingswalter benjamin)

¢ .... which is to say, i'm trading in my QWERTY keyboard for a lituus ....

Lituus plume

¢ .... where birds are the words ....

¢ working on the next Calamari publication—an untitled & authorless book whose text consists solely of punctuation.

¢ the most hit pages on this site lately are from places now being insensibly destroyed by people who take religion way too seriously, yesterday was churches in Garissa, today it's mosques in Timbuktu. «We believe it is a profanity to open this door; it can only be opened on the day the world will end. The militants broke it down. They were shouting 'Allahu Akbar'. When I asked them why, they said because they were being accused of destroying endangered monuments when they hadn't done so—they wanted to show what they were really capable of.»—[Guardian]

¢ augur us the roar .. cullapseing to an etymolog of our corpus borealis .... befor we am even kumtux egg-wise . or of germs boring .... befor any eves of future pass ....

¢ The Orange Eats Creepsorange eats creeps by Grace Krilanovich: shit sandwich.

¢ Italy is not ready for, nor do they deserve the likes of Balotelli. Still, anything to beat the tediuos boredom of watching Spain win again.


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