1/31/11


Like conceptualisms, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing reads better when it’s not read but shifted around like a produce of propositions, left to percolate, to seed ideas.

We anthologists often fool ourselves in the company we presently seek, but editors Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin reach far back to stack the deck with winners. Against Expression might also be titled Stop Making Sense, Once More or Situationists, a Prequel. This is a momentous and bald extension of Goldsmith’s charming a second tier of the academic mainstream via the same historicist-halo-effect stratagem that he applies to ubuweb: Gather artifacts of dead avants to mix up with contemporary production from friends and affiliates. Hey, I’m certain William B. Yeats is grateful to be in the company of Vladimir Zykov, designer/programmer with a BA in visual studies.

Dworkin, Goldsmith and I reject gay betrothal. So. These are my last thoughts before we get married.

There’s something I haven’t told you. I’m passionate about what’s right in front of me, sirs. That’s why it’s not at all embarrassing to collect only friends and near-friends and call them the conceptuals, along with bona fide pioneers. I jog to burn to speak up on your behalf, your lack of equipoise. It’s tonic!

For too many, tainted instincts and restraints pose problems, forcing adjustments in esthetic observance. Again, we anthologists can seesaw in quite a fix, hungering for the faultless signature seacoast with just the right vibes and trays of perfect drinks. So. I’m still wanting to fine-tune hundreds of anthologies I compile in my head; for two or three of them I’m shoulder to shoulder with Dworkin and Goldsmith leading a band to render old murder ballads. My emotions, I’m certain, are definitive.

My shoulders are hiked nice and high. I love concepts. My fix, my ocean with hummingbirds. They seem to be singing our radical opera, so I’m hardly alarmist coming out in this axis of abiding intimacy, creating a vogue for Against Expression, an ocean of air.

1/28/11


[This late into the authenticity pat-down I’m after just one more thing. One good Micah. Is that zoo-feeling-obtuse?]

Living to 100 is complicated. You forget to clash.

[Surely I can steal from myself to make something up and call it mine...]

(hoch self-torment)

[...there is no outside [...] only what's already here [what I drew] inside, which is perpetually immature, disgusting, and repulsive...] [and]

nothing is copious for the obtuse

[...can’t stop it...through language [how’s about] [...] cheesy time lapses in which [traveling backward] speech and narrative continuity become incrementally[?]

...we want [...] to explode [...] free of the [farthest from the wiki edge] metaphysics and misery [...] stuck inside us, as it were. Happily, after one more midnight, two weeks or so into the narrativ[ity], with only a little time-lapsed hoot in the shadows to prepare us, Katie does a full-body thrust into Micah's camera, hurling Micah's cadaver right at us, doing the trick and the favor we had been waiting for.]

[...]Psychic healing. Unpolished youth transformed into the next thing.

[Ref.: Paranormal Activity.]

1/27/11


As noted still, the long, busy street is night-blinded. It wanders, reaching into the wrong fake reading and reception. Every sweet young mood is high on the periphery sampling product to stroke. Gummy and purple condiments, galvanized pastels. Bad pups.

I’m not just doing something like that. I’m mouthing off about getting on with you, how it’s scripted by infantile alienation. Again. It’s not too late! Optimism pays. We’re both being blackmailed over the boinks spinning up to the surface with no message. My wrasse is fried. It is but canapé.

So there is nothing to represent.

Pedagogy is working it through. Those words we had and didn’t have are the consequences. Learned good is bad. Bad is good. Show up invisible. This unspeakable libido constitutes a knowledge module.

1/25/11


I once went sideswiping in the acer maples and pines with no contrivance or opposition. My role was to fill them in, lengthening their insipid menace while coddling the wetlands.

Since I wield affinities like crayons...

I like zoning.

That’s an aggressive don’t; don’t do it. If I had a camera with retouch I’d subside in attrition, better to find and weed out pleasure. And if I had notes to video I’d capture the polyptoton of “you,” “me” and any unclenched feelings I have composing subjectivities in footage I can’t pinpoint or supplicate.

So I have returned to rezone what looks more and more like a suburb with a shore in bad translation blues and stock blacks pitched way up there toward infectious provisos and integers-to-be, no part to fix.

1/24/11


Two favorite c-words show up in poetry at Shampoo: concupiscence and comeuppance. (They're almost interchangeable.)

1/20/11


Harold put his finger on the container during a retrospective we may now never attain.

Time’s up. I have to guide this crone back to reality, a big girl with a visual cortex attending what’s neat in the future, and she finds me attractive! I don’t know when I slept, referring to that earlier point she and I worked out together. I began forming my crew when I was only 12, albeit none the worse for any sobering acts brought on by the failure of a few ‘hacks’ I was perpetrating. On top of that there were dimensions then enabling two events in a plot we’re party to. Tenebrae, after all. Let me present these olfactory sketches. The cosmos is unexplained, parts one and two. Today I speak only to sports authorities with pride and cynicism while astrologers stand there from a famous unsavory line with nothing to give back, struggling within taxonomies set in weathered deco, a bonny font for obfuscation dimly lit by the lackey overflow. The spasm of mesh is brilliant, seeming hard. No time for a giveaway, inside or out. I’m the one who knows computers and conjectures about digestive inclination and fears of drowning in capital. Covert specialists use tightly wound differences to gain advantage for incriminating thoughts, the goal of which is to march with different cause-ists and humanists halfway: Overtaken by slivers of moony sky, paternalism indulged through wisecracks; but most of them, the humanists, we render as divas and idiots in the minority and they take the bullets before it’s too late. That’s within hours. They heard about us in structured query. It lasts a moment. And you’re right, this isn’t the mammoth for me. Barefoot and blue-belled, she assures you. Incandescent, our ardor comes back to choke the first hook, a rocket sidelined by a braided chord worn as a necklace, a burning space distinguished by the interval contained.

1/14/11


Adhesive behavior, speech is understood as extra
sensory anger, sometimes a polite form of the hole-
in-the-universe, a beaker installed with promising

Storyline prototypes, fish, battle scars, vanity, thrills, sky
dogs, paint, & sex under conditions that surround our desire
to adapt a range of compliments for insurgents to bind heartache.

That’s how to hang staring in the mirror names don’t balance
until you think away the best part, mating:

Ma’am, it can whip you up, call you back in the moment of
— of unitary joy that nails us onto a box of light heaving below

informality — stress & refined inelegance.
Doo-wop's creepy; let me through;

Sort of gifted, ok,
house arrest.

1/13/11


I have a work permit.

The place has been wiped clean. Au revoir, perks,

I made an inappropriate shoe choice. Au revoir!
I never liked you half-silent to forego the advantage of a contemporary Kleenex.

War is unjust when there is only one state to wage it.
There are no more communities. And yet, we can rubber any room —
For exploring ideas stick to the sentence.

I’m an angel investor in spontaneity gleaned from what it is,
strictly, deliriously business, self-realized adventure under the sway of...

                                   as I fill in the questionnaire a natura morta
raises vegetables about abutted space.

Aren’t we supposed to feed the bad dogs? Yes but summer, winter?

Minutes after the work is filed, dozens stand in line for a treat,
                                   free rein over the company-owned oceans.

On the bright side looking out you can see the streaks in the glass
Oh baby I'll be right over.

1/11/11


Man, she is weird.
So I urge the tobacco board (I’m bad at focusing)
...so much crap in my head, your under-the-tongue spray

Never bites. Except at night. There are newer urgencies
then management would feel desperate
so exposed it’d feign ignorance, aimlessly...

Let's rewrite “Biotherm.”

I fear the sarcasm.
Sex is a sardonic comfort with a sober edge. Bologna,
they leaked a take-off economy against your highlighted blush.

Smoke circles your face. Homonyms assimilate.
Admit it, you miss smoking. You miss Joe Camel.
He imagines you wearing his reflection.

You miss the first drag. The smoke takes you in its stride.
Your eyes inside are all red. Bologna.
I’ve just noticed you haven’t said anything.

1/7/11


Quickie reflexive summary (they call it a haiku review) of Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay today at The Huffington Post. Peter Frank suggests, "The real power of the Memoir portion of Memoir and Essay... is in its portrayal of New York itself at a moment of physical and social collapse..." The post includes a cute photo of Michael by Tim Peterson. Michael's book can be ordered at Faux Press.

1/6/11


A blind man kind of dumped on me. (It’s a remnant from philosophy's show-and tell, a truly bloated enterprise. Many see themselves in it.) I never dump back. I hope his loss helps him become a better exaggerator and public intellectual. Or I wish him better gurus.

Planet Earth is Taoist hell ringed with grassy estates where he and I can tiptoe or fall further. One observation is easier than the rest. Tag, you’re it. And before you can wish for more you need to excite. Gracious and conservatively dressed, we choose to move comfortably in the upper levels of insightful society, etc., absorbed in desire to sleep with anybody great.

But a lot of these crises pass. In a future of interdependence I’ll write him into my will. Perhaps.

1/5/11


One or more dingbats are affianced to life in different ways, to love always, always murmuring to the lightning thereof, and beyond.

When struck the lightning rod emits a light dust and after that a solution, a chemical substance that recuses itself for a moment and returns as a cognitive coloration, a hint that is a small commotion of something the matter. Like one loved.

Clad to the hilt in gray-to-black cashmere, we aren’t discussing our real business at table. Taciturnity in such morbid surroundings is statutory. “Mm,” the dingbat says. He was staring at my clogs, wondering how much they cost.

An ephemeral sign of intention or “gesture,” like the hushed, hard-edged dolt in mysticism, can only resemble or be in the manner of -esque, Stevensesque, hardly ever belong to, be part of -ian, Stevensian.

We had stumbled upon a larger issue. “Think about it,” I am laughing again. “Some of those dingbats were hot.” I learned enough to give capsule updates. And there was something else: I wanted to share one with you.

1/4/11


First question, true or false. Is it the gaze or maleness? Technology keeps humming to Aristotelian extremes. The cigar and its store. It’s a manageable stretch from there to when you left, even while I ruled you out. You hadn’t left a name, either. And yet, I stood closer, always wrong. To leverage and grow are businessspeak. To get feedback. To understand.

And I should know. Something after was pouring out, dazzling the social dashboard, moving forward filling empty monitors on the table. You were bound to organize. And you were thinking about. A fetish against transparency. An interim for you, pushing up and out. There is little point to cremate its fixed melody unless there is nowhere else.

I am a non attorney spokesperson.

1/3/11


Silence is tinctures or tints, much as the will to power is the flip side of fleeced. It’s an argosy of what evolutionary good was before it was not.

And I’ve never been more uplifted, more awed by a silent chamber piece somberly floating this fun stuff, waving inaudible signs of history, deals in decision making, impressing us, preparing us for surplus use as if we’re looking for something with renewed power, something cavelike or gluten. (The full text is online.)