Goa is a state of mind where hippie scrums and polyester plenitude procreate

Desire is the name of the game that gets played in the land of the absolute given, where for every if x, then not y someone on the corner is shouting about how A = B does not derive A = A.

Desire is fumbling in the backseat of a car for the eyelets of a bra that holds breasts that fed babies and using just one hand left ringless and two lives which felt senseless.

Desire is being unable to stave off clicking refresh on the Roth account that a near-term future self will milk dry before a long-term future self gives up the ghost.

Camus as husband, Vonnegut as lover ——).(——- Against condescending to our younger profligate whoring selves

in the great modernist project that has not ended - where to be disoriented and rent asunder is to have gone back to where home once was - we were once told that some writers are husbands and some were lovers. Later we learned of other amorphous categories that reworked the categorical so it was neither box nor a sieve but a 3d printer of identity run on open source code that did not contain, but amassed. But that “later” is for another day.

Camus we were told treated his fiction as scaffolding for his ideas, and his “ideas essays” were alleged to be somehow less than the sum of their cognitive parts. We were told wrong things, then as now.

But - we are coming to a sharper point, even if it not sharp enough (yet) to make a clean cut - what of Vonnegut and his yellow fingers, pecking away, hunting and finding? What of his Midwestern groundedness and his Midwestern suicidal tendencies? His terse witticism and the goofy earnestness of his plenary bleakness?



I could not think of a more bizarre pairing culled from that genus of Don Juans whose works boil the blood of the intemperate young, are set down for two decades or more, and turn out, on being picked up for purposes of re-acquainting brace, to have sustained a destabilizing not-to-be-fucked-with brainworm for the fat, median-voter theory worshippers we’ve all become. Not in the realm of prosody, obv - not sculptors of polymorphous linguistic perversity, on the jagged ruins of which so much modernist righteousness productively shores itself - but just in the sense of mapping the coordinates of the raw meat on the floor.

Call it appreciation but don’t tie a ribbon on it. The way in which they (each so different as to risk embarrassment at invoking the yoke of a “they”) shamelessly exposed how putting a name to forces of fraudulence and penury and paradoxically rich banality could be a salve on, but not a cure for, some basic, dumb emptiness that befriends whatever you want to call whatever it is that is rattling around on the inside, still.



Non sequitur

A man was sitting in bed, reading a book about the moon falling apart, and then having its orbit-beholden pieces collide more and more and more, until enough of those pieces came cascading down into earths surface to change planetary atmosphere and make it uninhabitable for thousands of year.

A light, but gripping read.

there is no reason why any of this should hang together, He thought. At best this is a prolonged exercise in futility, he thought. That thought began to fester like an itchy yeast, a malevolent foreign host, and he wished instead of opening up the book, he would have taken a cold shower and lain down on a bed of nails.

He was not a poet or a rock star or a playwright or a sculptor or any kind of artist in love with misery or suffering or infused with “spirituality.”He was not the type to be lulled into a hobby like a docile corpulent toad.

It was a Tuesday night in October. He worked in geothermal energy markets.

Limonov’s Diary of a Loser was all the rage

All the mystics will tell you, truthfully, that there is no such thing as the past or the future and what we deem to be continuity of identity or “character is destiny” is actually in rare instance choice and more often, from moment to moment, slavish and crippling dependency to habit and acceptance of large-scale social cues.

The very self same mystics will admonish that intention and hyper awareness to the present is a species of liberation, a way to get free.

Their mystical books are obtainable via exchange of germy cash. And the biomes of their mystical guts sometimes go haywire, with predictable roiling and grimacing and incontinence and temporary but agonizing interruption of peristalsis following in the wake.

Rooted in time / stale life revolt

One sun, one earth, one more trip round, and the past lies a little but squares to the sound

of a truth two can share when the troubles abound

Be brief and be shifty where devils are found.

And the past does it better when the best can’t astound

One sun, one earth, this last dance around.

Wet dew on a bough that weeps as it roasts

Slander the future and silence the ghosts

One sun, one earth, one fiery time round.

I was listening to that part where he says no one reads primary sources, only secondary sources, because primary sources are merely text, whereas secondary sources are “knowledge”


The river would flood in the spring, and large carp would get caught in pools shrinking in the baked evaporating heat. We would shoot them with BB guns, spear them with sharpened sticks, try to bash them still with rocks tossed down from overhead. Repositories of unthinking feral movement, bloodletting action for no purpose other than avoiding being rooted in passive resignation with clean hands and clammy chastity.

Also: The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments

Only so many odes to insomnia

Happiness writes white, and the engorged ego lays it down in purplish prose, like a picked-free tick bursted by the flame from a hastily scratched match.

I agree that all is not lost. Deep in the cavity of overdetermined mind space I sit, where imagined conversations and do over conversations and mortification forces feast, eyes closed but thoughts racing across an empty sparse big-skyed plain with no finish line in sight. If only darkness brought blankness, Without pills or any other dulling agent applies to the wound.

The mute pieties enshrined in every day things

Fowl (pheasant and ptarmigan), hanging hams, plump dead-eyed fish, and outside the open door, a small lamb bent like a supplicant to the grass.


There are days when I can revel in Alex Katz and Ada, when the surface of canvas and painterly craft of wet on wet suffices.


But other days, port in the storm days, Flemish is needed. Something to anchor, to nail down, as nails pierce the tendons and either break or bypass the small bones in the wrist to grab hold of the wood beneath.

A bad theory beats no theory, the constitutional scholars say, beating their tightly tuned drum. Mute pieties amplify mute agonies, the painters show by way of ostention, which is embodied meaning made regal in its pellucid silence, this exposition of the Host.

Your lacking Love destroys so thoroughly that bare husks look fulsome and lush to compare

Hail and farewell, this debased ancient residue of involuntary sounds you made in the dark as I slip out into the morning

To meet head-on the mute theater of maybe this was a mistake, too, this time and last, cascading up against the chorus of stupid birds (parrots in Hyde park, crows in a pine tree in Helena) standing on their small brained instinct toward incessant ceremony.

I can’t get past the barrier of foul mood to bask in unearned glory of song.

sheets wrinkled from damp absence of me gone back into the world, seemingly free and oblivious,

This time and every time, it’s the wanting that destroys.

Why accept Dave hickey on collection as foraging and harvesting

I am not sure he ever said anything on this topic. Which is beyond the acid-tipped point of the matter.

There is such a thing as aesthetic scripture. Whether you mean philosophy of visual culture, or philosophy’s visual culture. I have a dative if you will trade me a genitive.

Perhaps a mystic may weigh in, and the love of revelation will burn in the breast of every man who known beauty and clutched at its evanescence with earnest hands, still warm and writhing.

Also the mystic as an exemplar of coming to terms with the caustic spleen of a well-turned-out jeremiad.

Post-melodic karma

I read an opening line about a poet who had a dream last night about a burning rainbow and a scream that would need to run downhill to gain the momentum needed to reach people.

I read a dried husk of a leaf that spoke of reincarnation as that pulse beneath all things that has to do with an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising.

I read a memorandum holding that when the bank accounts and head accounts and heart accounts of politicians leaders and principals are made transparent and the many layers of guile and mischief and avarice are removed, there will still be big trouble in little China and the best jokes will still fail to land with over 80% of the most ardent comedic harvesters.



A soft boiled sod and eldritch pantomime

I don’t think that the idea of a death mask would make us less afraid of death, more comfortable with it. Cold putty on cold but clammy inanimate skin, the curve around the nose and the closed eyes. Those who support it say otherwise. And maybe own part of the death mask company. It’s not a grift, necessarily, to try to sell a meal a few minutes before sitting down to eat one’s own cooking.

Scandalous but not slanderous

  1. In the midst of the pullulating mass of data and information, theories descriptive and normative are all the more significant.

  2. Hanging chads are not yet adequately subject of counterfactual history.

  3. Gory details of forever war waged on the oversoul eventually become part of the firmament and shock only those who stand outside, in but not of the world.

  4. Lucky charms are infamous for bad milk breath amplification.

  5. I can’t say that there is sufficient breathing room for the chilled speech that conforming forces pushes back down the ululating maw of the culture of the poor and the weak and the weary, the unspoken for but oft spoken of.

  6. Abysses are for staring back.

signaling not just the demise of utopia, but the demise of even the idea of the possibility of utopia.

Off we go down the mole hole of a mole hill and that irreducible hobgoblin: originalism, that ghost in the machine that says the only way to interpret what was meant with what was founded and set years after we exclaimed that these laws we hold to be self evident are not really so self evident. Hence structure, hence the first amendment which was originally not the first but it makes for such better story. Give me good story and I’m yours forever.

But a theory beats no theory and the textualists are so overcommitted that it’s not even funny, not funny haha but funny kiss your sister and be a whirling dervish at the offering plate.