FLOCK THEORY

"The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia,..."

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:04:44 -0800

“The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away.”

- Theodor Adorno

why regret? - galway kinnell

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0800

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

we should all be so luckily ‘sidetracked with...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:49:00 -0800

we should all be so luckily ‘sidetracked with indolence…’

christmas tree.

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:23:06 -0800

christmas tree.

This is my little brother’s music being performed at...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:41:00 -0800

This is my little brother’s music being performed at Berkeley this past month. It is lovely and sad and old-fashioned and not at all. I love it and him. He is in the audience somewhere all black-clad and mysterious in his brain hermitage.

Vladimir Nabokov.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:27:00 -0800

Vladimir Nabokov.

WIKIPOETICALS

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:06:00 -0800

i’m really interested in information and how we get/trust the information we get/trust. also, i love wikipedia. not because it’s real or right, but because it is, in its myriad falsity and authenticity, always true. i love it not because it is reliable, but because it changes; because it helps us understand and draw connections while severing any real ones. i hate it for all the same reasons. it is very hatable. and lovable. and unavoidable. so i’ve been making some poems of it:

THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA

This article is about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. There is no (disambiguation)

Much happened.

Much happened before Korea
and then there was Korea
and then the halves
which was the mark of the thing happening.

Much happened.
Of which you and I were parts
even before we were you and i
when we were still Joan and saints and Yu
and even before that,

back, to when stories had beginnings.
And of which we are more so now that we have bodies.

Much happened which is impossible to pronounce in the same language under whose signs we say love with capitals and with mouths—

What God let you die that way.

_

LOVE

This article is about the intense feeling of attraction. For other uses, see Love (disambiguation)

Oh the mammalian drive.

Which is also a crater on our only moon,
a river in Taiwan,
a catalog of singing to the highest power and the lowest.

Shape-shifter love, what word swings circles so wide and so varied:

I loved a father.
I love a mother.
I love that partnership makes survival more likely.
Love the second hand. Love the fruit bat.

Love all the whispering that comes from totems I cannot see.

Eros. Oneness. God. Love the transportational/
transformational tug of Boston’s T

Or maybe it’s just the dopamine, norepinephrine (no-ra-pin-ef-rin), serotonin, and
pheromones driving through the blood I share with the mother like a bullet.

Either way we grow more nerves.

We get to say God is love, God is love, in Latin, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, and Persian every time we slip a finger into each other’s bodies, and join, in circles so wide and so varied, Darwin, Erich Fromm, and all the Canonical Gospels.

Your body is Rome. Your body is Roma. Amor. Amo. Your chest is Deuteronomy, the thrum of pumping immunity and the mosquito hawk.

Let the falling toward each other disambiguate here:

Oh mammalian love song, whale call, quick pull, all the universe is tethered through thesingular axiom of the one plus one. Every finger to finger here, in the hot steam of the yellow shower, high-fives infinity.

Sing advesa. Sing mettā, Sing every whale, American basketball hero, sing George, Nancy,
and Robert Love. Sing mammalian absolute values and the proliferation of every sentient being.

Sing, little heartstring. Sing.

_

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

For Daniel McGowan

This article is about the historical sea route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Arctic waters of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. For other uses see Northwest Passage (disambiguation)

Fully navigable. That is to say, we can get around this, too.

Only just not all of us.

Condolences white bear. Super sorry Inuit! Two of a kind of only one kind: the penny and the oil drum.

When God closes a weatherdoor, He always opens a window—

Fully navigable.
That is to say, finally.
Finally the word means the thing.
Passable distance.
Circles inside circles.

Unless of course, you’re not a swimmer.

But think of all the new ways to use archipelago in a sentence. At last we find it time to open all that watertalk we jarred for seasons without.

And we’ll need it. A hundred words for snow. A hundred for the deluge, for the too much
and the too not enough.

Example: Vermont swims with the fishes.

Texas dries off the map.

Make it rain.

But what is the dance for making it stop. What from here where ice reads only as the pink mass of satellites. Where we still say Eskimo and love a good adventure, even us, who dream in greyscale, the pornography of black bloc spreading across white land like the Little Ice Age. Like ink.

Until we dream: we close the gap.
With violence.

Which is also love.

Amy Cutler.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:04:00 -0800

Amy Cutler.

Daniel Naude.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:00:00 -0800

Daniel Naude.

"from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE - by ariana reines when my boyfriend called the cops on me i waited in..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:59:00 -0800

“

from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE - by ariana reines

when my boyfriend called the cops on me
i waited in my room for them to come
i waited a half hour and then another half hour
this naked whiteness i could contrive to cleanse me
officer i am in love and now my lover hate me
always having dreamed of being a monk in a cell
if i eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle
i could sit in the seat of rocks and razors
standing on one foot for ten years near the gingerlight
where the lees of my mind would fizz and then unto heaven sail

everyone i know beats up their lover and their lover beats them up
and the cops come and the cops go and sometimes someone passes a night in holding
i saw a shade pass across his face when he said he loved me
and he would not tell me what that shade was
i’m just a lover officer
but they never came though later they would come for him and i looked at my computer
and the internet was so depressing
then you wrote me a message like
call me sometime
and i think i chatted like how about right now
and you were like
yeah
do it
call me right now
when you walk in the rinsed orange light
shining like rotting tangerines picking up a deck of cards
low mean cards a low mean deal
twos and threes of clubs
which is pretty much what we got
blood is a spangle
bright colors are hidden deep in the body
fruits impossibly moist
trees blow out their hair along a furrow
i’m sick of eating beans in ugly light
i should not have spent my friend’s money on a miniskirt
but this is the future
the insects are dead in the cupboard
and dead on the floor
and i left one over there
quivering
alongside a clot of strawberry jam
to write this down

the small ones and the fat orangeish ones
they die through the holes in the ceiling
and they live and die upon me no matter how much love I make
sleeping like promises when I have to go
to sleep against the future which is not
going to come to term today and not tomorrow either
why would you sit down and write it
this is the total experience
we’re too big to fail

”

- Ariana Reines.

Photo

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:58:00 -0800

Lucian Freud.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:57:00 -0800

Lucian Freud.

Kahn + Selesnick.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:56:00 -0800

Kahn + Selesnick.

"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:55:00 -0800

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

- David Foster Wallace: “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.

Richard Misrach.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:55:00 -0800

Richard Misrach.

Walton Ford.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:53:00 -0800

Walton Ford.

"Magic then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:53:00 -0800

“Magic then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different than ours. For it is likely that the “inner world” of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of our Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with animate earth. We are only human in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

- David Abram.

Joel Peter-Witkin.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:52:00 -0800

Joel Peter-Witkin.

Meditation at Lagunitas

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:50:00 -0800

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

- Robert Haas. from ‘Praise.’

"In today’s world the notion of the ‘entirely original’ is not just an impossible position, but also..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:49:00 -0800

“In today’s world the notion of the ‘entirely original’ is not just an impossible position, but also an uninteresting one. At a time when both knowledge and experience goes through intense interbreeding with the virtual, culture will reproduce in exciting, hybrid ways. My work would probably be unique only by virtue of the fact that it does not remain rigid in pursuit of absolute originality and instead becomes a flexible processing field to engage with and disentangle the million signals that enter my system every day.Terms such as ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not absolute binaries any more. They can be used in academic discourse, but they hold little value, except perhaps as mere tools of description, while you are actually making work in the studio.”

- Jitish Kalat.