One is always being deceived.

So I was unsure whether to post this here, because I sent it to you all by email. This is mostly to open a more public forum for comments and feedback, so comment.

The new edition of Big Bridge is out, at long last! Big Bridge is a yearly online lit mag. It’s really intimidatingly big, and features some fantastic writers. It’s also got a good helping of nostalgia for the good ol’ days of poetry. It also includes an ahistory of violence, the lyric hypertext essay which I’m pretty sure you’ve all read. It might be worth another look, because I did add some graphics and layout at the last minute. Get all the popup-age.

You can find it off of the War Papers section.

jah love

jed

Please help! I need a title for my thesis… Here’s a sampling of the pieces that will be in the show. Unfortunately, I don’t have more photographs right now, but I hope this gives you a sense of the work. There will be about 20-25 pieces in total. India ink on watercolor paper, sizes varying from about 12 x 14″ to 36 x 42″. Any title suggestions would be much appreciated.

Hey dudes,

if you read my last post called “Black and Blue,” you’ll remember a point where one of the characters starts talking in an Irish accent. I have a lot of friends who do this for no apparent reason, and I think once or twice I’ve said “Cheers” instead of “Thanks” or called a truck a lorrie. For a long time I couldn’t think of any rational explanation for this other than base pretention. But a few days ago I was watching, I’m embarrassed to say, Entertainment Tonight, and they were talking about how Britney Spears has recently begun addressing the press in a British accent. Here’s something I wrote as an addition to that story that I thought you all might enjoy. Cheerio!

Black’s  occasional use of an Irish accent is not one easily explained.

Those who follow tabloid journalism will be familiar with a certain popstar’s recent use of a phony British accent while talking to the paparazzi. Her reasons for doing this are obscure, because this certain popstar is known to come not from Manchester, Leeds, Sussex, or Brixton, but rather from a small town in Louisiana.

 The popstar’s first hit was a song that rhymes with “Shmit Shme Shmaby Shmone Shmore Shime,” and its lyrics could be interpreted as either an admonition to overly-strict parents or someone asking for a spanking. In the song’s aburdly well-known and well-loved video, this popstar is provocatively dressed as a Catholic school girl. Later on, though in the meantime she would don a thousand provocative outfits, this popstar would insist on her virginity–even during a high profile romance with a popstar whose name rhymes with Justin Timberlake.

In short, for a long time this popstar (both fresh-faced and nubile, both innocent and sexy) embodied, as Chuck Closterman puts it, the paradoxical roles of both virgin and whore. For many years she reigned as America’s princess because she straddled the gap between Shirley Temple and Debbie from Debbie Does Dallas. America loved her all the more because she often straddled this gap wearing nothing but her bra and panties.

In her long (long, especially considering her age) and prolific career, this popstar only made one mistake: she became pregnant. The media and the public, confronted with the visual evidence of her defilement in the form of her turgid stomach, became sickened. They found themselves looking at a whore where once had been a virgin–and in our hearts we knew that we, WE, were the father. In a spirit of collective shame, the national perogative became, if not to kill her outright, then at the very least to drive her completely insane.

As a nation, we have succeeded: now she often addresses the press in an English accent. Why her insanity should express itself in this manner, nobody can say–there are no words to discuss the phenomenon. I do know that it can not be easy to have such a deep understanding of the fact that at the heart of the American psyche is a strong tendency toward a ravaging kind of canibalism.

I believe that, though under wildly different conditions, Blue sometimes speaks in an Irish accent for similar reasons. He is not a popstar.

Engo’s Introduction

He attempted to set down a thought. It appeared that Foucault’s persistence in quoting from the legal reformers indicated something, a powerful trait, an inhabitation of the matter at hand. At the same time Foucault never ceases to be Foucault; one sees turns of speech pregnant with irony, usages of the legal discourse not far short of satire. If you sight the traces of method, you will shudder with joy. Ecstasy verges and urges on primordial zeal. But which one. Is Foucault a prophet, and if so, of what sect. How sit within the penal colony, don the lineaments of the warden, and retain a voice tonally intact. Or, how diverge from that tone and remember the scale back. How represent the representation and still remain present. See the following.

Main Subject

Foucault has mastered assimilation - he has taken in the language of the Structural One. He has studied its logic, its history, its means of arriving at the present status. This allows him to speak with its words, allude to its insights, as if they were his own - all the while keeping autonomous to some degree, maintaining an interrogatory voice within the logos.

If we do not wish to say that this constitutes Foucault’s authenticity (that would indicate an original autonomy to which one ought to return, to which one’s ‘ontological’ imperative directs one), then we should at least say this is his genius. To be within and still to see it all.

What this means is that Foucault keeps sight of what he is doing, whose points he is making: he keeps an eye on the discursive flows emanating from the pen. What eye is this? In any event it is not the I. He becomes a speaking-through, but under a guidance - he has something to tell us, but it will not be him that reveals the story. Every time he points, he uses another’s hand; and like the webbing of fingers, the pointing always finds that which is conjoined, phenomena con-sensed. Many colors, many tongues; the eloquent production of a synaesthetic polyvocity.

But who oversees? Well for one we have a revision: overseer, not overman. If we must bear the heritage of industrial revolution, let us not despair of our bondage to the factory. Let us be a transparent managerial prism. A prism that inflects, connects, divulges, underscores, revisits, duplicates - but does not judge. A prism that sees.

I verge on a discredited thought. What I meant to say was this: Foucault has an intention. He is the nerve structure around the eye. He is that which stakes energy in the seeing, the compiler of good tidings. Again I misspeak. I wish to move us towards a new cross-discipline, and what a term that is, in a Foucauldian exegesis! I want us to see why Foucault is a sort of visionary, and why we already see that. Foucault has an intention. He is in tension. He is intent. In a tent. Camped in sentence. The sentence being served. Sent to dispel tense. Tends to misspell sens. Sent; no. Sen–tence-sen–tense-sen. Sen. Ssen. Sssen. Ssssssssssssssssssssszen.

Absinth’s Verse

Once men met at random

now they are divided by disposition

and observed

for the potentiality

of danger

lies hidden

in the smallest

most everyday matters

The resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

I fear that the animals consider man… the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.

Let us therefore be natural.

And will your culture and cultivation.  And will in language find your fairest utterance.  And will, and will them.

The one another - the ego ideal encountered in the other, an Other, another Other, anOther.  What does it mean that the space is retracted, desevered?  Deseverance is the jouissance of spotting anOther.  We are enjoiyed (enjoined to enjoyment) at the sight of another screaming “Oh, oh God!”

Our organism is an oligarchy.

His will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt so as to cut off once and for all his exit from this labyrinth… his will to erect an ideal… and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own unworthiness…

In New York everything has a story.  New Yorkers celebrate the quotidian because it is quotidian: this is one’s use value.  To be oneself - and with a story.  Two sources of repression and misknowl–

Suddenly all their instincts were suspended… reduced to consciousness… at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands… subterranean gratifications…

Affect: driving away a pain unendurable to the system perception-consciousness.

Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction - all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the “bad conscience”….

Jouissance is unrepressed prurience.  Bliss.

There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their way in good spirits.

—

Living in the midst

gives me

and how much

every moment

—

There is a difference, tween sees and ceases, a letter tacked on - if you will, the one is a bottleneck, the other a bottle.  Liquid gathers in the One.

Master race: beasts who impregnate everything with their progeny - immediate Othering.  “Wherever they appear something new soon arises, a ruling structure that lives“…

What is the Oneself.  The agglomeration of ideals picked up from the confident utterances of others.  And it congeals with itself in a rottenness, a foul odored tendency to apprehend, to say Yes, that does go there; to exclaim Indeed, I heard of that just last week.  A place for all - all in its - a place found right - a in its place - a place right its - in right the should have been - peacebone got found in the dinosaur wi–

Schopenhauer praises philosophic contemplation for liberating the will from the  reproductive drive: but is not prurience the necessary correlate of the active intellect?

Oriented: how can orientation be understood as a ‘looking-eastward’?  Why does symbolic orientation cause us to look east?  What is it that is in the east?  Enlightenment, escape, colony?  Will to power moves to crusade.  Crusade as the necessary result of repressant ressentiment.

The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

Being unable to put situations to words… a repression of signifiers because prurience seen in everything… only simple naive language utilized because * is seen so far that any description in ordinary terms is precluded.  Preclosure: Ubiquitous prurience.

Proceed: procede.  Correspond: corespond.

We stand before a discord that wants to be discordant.

Let us conclude.  The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still planes where the struggle is as yet undecided.  One might even say it has risen ever higher and thus become more and more profound and spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature,” a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposing values.

Another other, another.

You are merely weary.  “Foolishness, not sin! do you grasp that?”

as happens on Pinko’s, production comes in bursts: see below.

here’s a draft of a nonfiction poem I’ve reached a sticking-point on. I know that we on the blog are tired of the BwO and Deleuze, but I’m still of the opinion that mainstream intellectual culture could benifit from internalizing those ideas, so I’m still using ‘em.  Besides, is there any better image for Botox than the Body without Organs?  nope.

I’m curious whether it’s easy or hard to grasp the organization/structure of it.  Overall, I can’t tell if this is a piece worth persuing.  It’s not done now, like I said, I just sort of got stuck, likw my brain had been injected with a paralyzing agent.

            Their names are G____ and C____, and their ugliness is mythic. G has a face like everything you’ve ever known put into a meat-grinder. His lips are a tube sock and the Sinclair dinosaur and the first woman you ever slept with put into a meat grinder and then reformed into the shape of a pair of lips. C has high cheek bones and blond hair with a lot of product in it. His left ear has been stabbed and a piece of metal now dangles from the wound.

            Black and Blue understand the literary truth of it: these are monsters.

            “I’ll put $15 down on the game,” says Blue. He withdraws his wallet and takes out three crumpled, oily-looking singles and a twenty. He asks Black for a ten, which Black provides, and replaces his twenty in his wallet.

            “Thirteen dollars to win,” says Blue. “I hope you guys are fucking good. For your sake.”

?

            Blue breaks, but the balls don’t break. He misses every single one of them.

            Then it’s G. He breaks. They scatter, one falls; that means they’re stripes. A song comes on about Arms Being Wide Open. It’s a horrible song, and Black and Blue feel sad, knowing how they share the planet with the song’s author.

            “I love this song,” says G, singing along to it. A bounce comes to his step, he grips the pool stick with a certain panache.

            He will make his next two shots.

?

            But something amazing happens to Black as he walks to the table: it is beyond knowing, beyond description, but it is something with a substance beyond time. If held between the fingers, this thing that happens to Black would feel like camphor oil; it would smell like a shampoo that needs to only be used once in a person’s lifetime; this something that happens to Black would have the power to teleport if it were a superhero.

            As he takes his stick, Black begins to see the table: not to perceive it, but to see it, to understand its possibilities. The entire thing becomes a series of angles on a flawless piece of white paper. The cue ball, his stick, the chalk all become extensions of him. He sinks two solids on his first shot—another is on the edge of a corner pocket, it just needs a nudge—after that, two more in a row, and a third in another corner pocket. His body contorts in ways like old dance steps; the motherfuckers at the next table over stop their game to watch him. He sinks another.

            “Jesus,” says G.

            “Jesus,” says Blue. Black stands up and looks at the table—it is a practically empty table. They will win the game if he can sink the eight ball.

?

It’s an easy shot. There is nothing in the way. The 9 ball is in the corner opposite the one he should put the 8 ball into, the 14 and the 11 are huddled together by a side pocket. It’s an easy shot.

This means that it will be impossible to make this shot.

As he gazes at the 8 ball, the night itself becomes a series of angles, of ascent and descent and probability. The night itself becomes speed and trajectory and spin.

Things will end on a sour note at the bar and Black and Blue will take a cab to the Aloha Inn and Blue will take out a little baggy and in the baggy there will be a few grams and they will cook up together and then they will put the thing in them and then they will be awake and then it will smell like camphor oil, and it will be like the first woman you ever kissed and then it will be a shampoo that one uses exactly once and it’s a cross-section of infinity.

That will be the night.

He not only misses the eight ball but he scratches, that’s how hard the shot was. He looks at the thing in his hands and realizes that it isn’t a pool stick but the deadly Black Mamba.

            C hasn’t even shot yet.

?

            The two monsters are $13 richer. They don’t bother shaking hands with Black and Blue, rather they just walk away, grinning and grabbing each others’ balls.

            “I can’t believe you missed that shot,” says Blue.

            “I can,” says Black.

            “I believed in you so much,” says Blue.

            “Really?” says Black.

            “No.”

?

Black’s scream is terrifying and horrible and primordial. It is something that has crumbled from the vast ceiling of the night itself and fallen into him and fermented and swirled in him and then leaped from him like a shaft of light. His scream is so horrible that Blue thinks that the dead will arise, that the earth will split open and reclaim him. His skin crawls and the back of his throat becomes suddenly as dry as a grinning skull.

            “AmyAmyAmyJesusAmywhereareyouAmy?!” That’s what Black calls, again and again.

            Black runs away, past the bouncer, through the double doors, and to the faintly flickering, quick street, where a cab slows, stops, rolls down its window.

            The Man From the Bottom of the Sea is driving. He looks at Black; he smiles.

            “I’ve been expecting you,” he says. As he speaks his teeth look like gunmetal and his teeth look like swords and his teeth look like they were meant to devour the meek from the earth.

He unlocks the door so that Black can get into his cab.

I was about to put this on, something I found on the last page of a notebook written about two years ago, written after I made this delicious resin ball, was about to put it up when I read JoJo’s story.  Read his first, if you haven’t first — it’s better, and doesn’t seem to be written in such quite stoned sophomoric glory as the following rabble of plotlines.

Told by the last page of his notebook he leapt to the purple gloom of fallen death.  In open apathy of all past ties he joined his countenance and confidant in the swallows of the earliest of earthen cave.  By a fire, a caveborne fire Promethial and tremendous, he sits in meditation.  He hypothesizes the far daylight and renounces solitude.  He in the direst reaches renouces soliloquy and takes from among his elders.  But these, these renewed and fabled, they are the devils of trickery and prescience, they devour the very souls of the young.  Our friend is in difficult straits.

He asks the bearer: “For what is this wrought?”  No reply.  He asks a second time, “For what is this wrought?”

“Upon your existence,” answered, “is this very substance of contingency provoked, relentless and turpid.  You bear now young one; go out.”

The soul now hollow exited to the world, a vast Conoran outback flawless and horizonical.  He mopes.  He knows not his casual origin, nor his record of descent.  Wrought has he become unto his burden that he can conceive of no retreat.  To progress he must, to understand he must not.  Linger in dreams, unforgiven by a year in between two decembers.  A sun above to guide him north through the dusty firmament to a grafted line, a line cut furious and without irony to a final point, a cabin deep in woods, a slipped through hole in fence, an iron gate.

He meets a man.  The man holds harm extended, palm out.  Our friend stops, hesitates, and spits on the ground.  The man turns and faces the east, his outline silhouetted by the sun.   He disappears from our friend’s sight in a golden flash and our friend sits down.  He is dizzy from the journey and he sits crosslegged slumping forward.  He wishes for the bottle, for the fire and the dirt.  He prays for the mother, the gross sublimation of each untold memory he can no longer see.  And he raises his head to the vision, the silent tasteless epiphany of redress and calm, he is ready, he lays back to rest.  His knees slacken, his eyes close one last time.  He folds his arms over his chest.  He lets slow his pulse, he breathes one eternal breath, and furtively, he slips away.

Hey,

here is the typed part of a story I’ve been working on. Just want initial thoughts and reactions. Hope you’re all well. I do want to say of regardless of masculinist and psychosocial and subconscious drives, I think there is always something wonderful about sharing art with other people. Especially challenging, thoughtful art, which is what tends to grace the pages of this website. Definitely print something. You can do eet. Eet’s okay. Love,

JoJo

I

Two men meet on 45th and College Avenue as the number 338 bus slithers around 45th and heads north on 15th. Old friends, their handshake becomes an embrace becomes a bear hug, and the one dressed in black fills his sober nostrils with the stink of the other, who is dressed in a blue leisure suit and effeminate white hushpuppies; the smell that greets his nostril is the smell of camphor oil and dried cum. It is not unlike shaking hands with a skeleton.
The two hominids chatter excitedly: women, “how long has it been?”, cigarettes, telephones shoes exactly what do you mean by that?
Blue is thinner, darker than Black remembers him, and he has a sore on his right forearm that oozes angry, white puss from an angry, red crater. Black can’t remember if he is glad to see Blue or if he’s been dreading it since Blue called last week.

II

The bartender swallows at air with two nostrils almost as wide as Dixie cups; his is a handsomely upturned nose, and his lips are thick and contain a set of teeth as white as snow on Christmas. He has terrific hair, hair like a clamshell but the color of sunset. The overall effect of his body is similar to that of a giraffe. Or else a cobra, poised to spit.
Black shudders as the giraffe-cobra takes his order for two Bloody Maries.
Blue says, “Make it quickish” in an Irish accent.
Quickish sounds absurd to Blue, Black, and the giraffe-cobra bartender—it’s not something people say in this area of the world. Black wonders why Blue would say it; he turns to him in order to study the lines of Blue’s face, which is a handsome, sad, smiling, dark face with an overly bold jaw and a jutting nose.
“Spicy,” Blue says, using the accent again. “And quickish, like.” It’s really quite absurd. Black would feel embarrassed, but…
They have a deeper, more nuanced discussion of “how long it’s been.” The air feels slightly radioactive; it feels like heating up McDonald’s french-fries in the microwave and wondering if it’s true that you can get tumors in your retina if you stare at a microwave.

III

Two Bloody Maries arrive, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
“Cheers,” says Blue, and the bartender sneers as Blue upends the Tabasco sauce and empties a quarter of the bottle into his drink.
In a partially obscured corner of the bar, a rat trap announces success and the giraffe bartender grabs the animal by the tail and tosses it into the trash can by the swinging doors that lead to the kitchen, sowing his movements with enough ambiguity that it is only Black, an ex-bartender himself and the tenant of a rat-infested apartment in Mount Baker, who guesses what has happened.
Blue sips his Bloody Mary, grimaces as sweat leaps from his brow. He has Tabascoed his drink to undrinkability.
“You’ll pay for that,” says Black, “with your ass.” His drink is gone, so he motions to the giraffe bartender for another. He doesn’t mind about the rat.

IV

Another bar.
The bartender is a blonde, blank, pretty-looking woman. She has cruel, squinting pig’s eyes; if she is beautiful, it is a beauty kin to the beauty of a rainbow reflected in an oil spill.
As he motions her over, Blue says, “She’s beautiful like a Monet painted in blood.”
“I was just thinking that,” says Black.
Blue orders two car-bombs, and the pubescent boys at the bar begin to holler excitedly about the car-bombs.
“Lookout, car-bombs,” says one.
“Car-bombs, people,” says another. Somebody slaps Black on the back. It becomes clear to both of them that they’ve wandered into one of the lower circles of hell and Blue’s eyes are pale gray in the dim lights and he grits his teeth and jams his finger into the sore on his arm.
When their drinks arrive, they plunk the Bailey’s in the black stuff and drink their drinks quickly and without relish.
They leave quickly. They walk so quickly away from the hellish experience that they are a half a block down the street before they realize they never paid their tab.
Blue smiles and his tongue darts out from and then disappears behind his broad-toothed smile. Black notes with some interest that Blue’s grin is in the shape of a sickle.

V

It is called an Irish pub, and Blue points out that it is full of motherfuckers.
“Jam-packed,” he says, ironically not using his Irish accent. Their eyes are drawn to a dark corner of the bar where there’s a half-empty pitcher of beer on an empty table. When they’ve taken their seat, Blue discovers a black leather jacket folded neatly on a chair, which he puts on. Black pours Blue a pint and then takes a deep draft from the pitcher itself.
They’re looking as pale now as two full moons, their bodies don’t seem to fill their chairs.
When the man returns he doesn’t seem upset and that seems very strange.
“Please, gentlemen,” he says, “have some beer. And if you’re cold, then please wear my jacket.”
“Sorry,” says Black, putting down the pitcher.
“Sorry,” says Blue, taking off the jacket.
“Oh, no, no. By what right is that jacket really mine, other than that I paid for it?” Blue stops taking off the jacket and examines his knuckles, which are gnawed at beyond skin and muscle and down to the faint traces of a purple film.
“No right,” says Blue.
The man laughs suddenly; it is the exact sound of a spider monkey’s distress call.
“I’ll buy another pitcher,” says Black, standing up.

VI

A boa constrictor is draped over the bar, two or three inches thick.
Black shouts, “Jesus Christ!” and jumps back.
The space around him hiccups—the pubescent boys in the bar turn and stare: the name of the Buddha Jesus has been uttered in vain.
Black watches as the boa constrictor rears up and grows an arm and then delicate shoulders and breasts and a slender neck and a face. The face has hair.
“Your shirt,” says Black, “has the exact coloration of a boa constrictor.”
She doesn’t understand—how much should he explain?
“Your arm has been known to eat men whole.”
Too much.

VII

“Sorry about your leather jacket,” Blue is saying when Black returns with the blackest beer any of them have ever seen. Black notices how much the man resembles something brought up from the bottom of the ocean: a rare fish, something caught off the coast of Okinawa every ten years, all hooded eyelids and eccentric folds of flesh. He is a man from the bottom of the sea.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he says. “You’re o-kay.”
“He bought the pitcher,” says Blue, flicks his thumb in Black’s direction. “Even stevens.”
“Yeah,” says Perry (the man’s name is Perry), shifting in his chair like an oarfish. “I know he bought the pitcher.”
“I’m just saying: we know we were wrong and now you should have some of the pitcher, we can all drink some of it.”
“Yeah.”

VIII

Perry talks about Israel. He knows a man named Leon who has had so many concussions that he retired at age 38. There are certain parallels, says Perry, between Palestine and poor Leon.
“Leon was a dishwasher, a bellhop—like Tel Aviv. How he got so many concussions is beyond me. Not dumb, but slower than shit off a shed. Understand?”
Black and Blue indicate their understanding.
The Man From the Bottom of the Sea continues, “The argument for an Israeli state is ultimately biblical—the bible, gentlemen.”
“I’m Jewish,” says Blue, whose last name is H____, who comes from the row of townhouses named Orange Court (by the elementary school), who once shouted about the cougar in the backyard, and who left the hereditary lands of the Left Hand Arapahoe for the hereditary lands of the Munsee Delaware, and who was obliged by his parents (a surgeon and a psychologist, respectively) to return.
“He’s a zionite,” adds Black, whose last name is in fact H____, who is not Jewish, and who comes from the opposite side of the valley that constitutes the hereditary lands of the Left Hand Arapahoe, and who, for the sickness that he shares with Blue, came to the hereditary lands of the Duwamish, and stayed there, and met Amy. She is the medicine for his sickness.
“A Zionist?” provides the Man From the Bottom of the Sea.
“I just mean I don’t know the bible that well,” says Blue. “If you’re like a Jehovah’s witness or something—“
“Fuck no,” Perry says.
“God, I feel awful,” says Black. All but a few words have crumbled from beneath him.
“No, I’m talking about—“ the man begins. His cheeks puff. Suddenly, they understand: written in the strange folds of his aquatic visage are decades upon decades of boozing.
“I’m talking about a two-state solution. Two states. Israel and Palestine.”
A silence lumbers by. Black and Blue stare at the man, who tips his pint into the dark, final space between a pair of billowing lips.
“Gentleman,” says the Man From the Bottom of the Sea, “I’m off to work.”

IX

Forgotten is the Man From the Bottom of the Sea; now they will play pool with the motherfuckers.