we and you and on am i
blooming it
my is let-so when me last night looked like vishnu
so gazelle sing too
i'm fingers, fast sunglasses
i look like this door in your dream drawer
enter it pervade space time
like we was the blooming blooming mind
materialized on whims and beliefs
god
your body won't stop glowing when we meet
i am forever touching you completely
when inside anywhere these arms do reach.
...
Inspired by Renee Zepeda's Light Pink Book / Toasted Body
It is hardly possible to overrate the value…
“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… . Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
John Stuart Mill
Smarts. Inverted Commas: Asimov
“I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”
Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.”
Isaac Asimov
Source: skinnybaras.tumblr.com
#inverted commas #education #intelligence
The Shakespeared Brain
Philip Davis pleasures his brain with shifting Shakespearean syntax, measures the results on an electroencephalogram, and finds evidence that powerful writing can literally change the ways in which we think ...
From THE READER magazine
I have always been very interested in how literature affects us. But I don't really like it when people say, "This book changed my life!" Struggling with ourselves and our seemingly inextricable mixture of strengths and weaknesses, surely we know that change is much more difficult and much less instant than that. It does scant justice to the deep nature of a life to suppose that a book can simply "change" it. Literature is not a one-off remedy. And actually it is the reading of books itself, amongst other things, that has helped me appreciate that deep complex nature. Nonetheless, I do remain convinced that life without reading and the personal thinking it provokes would be a greatly diminished thing. So, with these varying considerations, I know I need to think harder about what literature does.
And here's another thing. In the last few years I have become interested not only in the contents of the thoughts I read--their meaning for me, their mental and emotional effect--but also in the very shapes these thoughts take; a shape inseparable, I feel, from that content.
Moreover, I had a specific intuition--about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeare's lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind. For example, Macbeth at the end of his tether:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.
I'll say no more than this: it simply would not be the same, would it, if Shakespeare had written it out more straightforwardly: I must not look to have the honour, love, obedience, troops of friends which should accompany old age. Nor would it be the same if he had not suddenly coined that disgusted phrase "mouth-honour" (now a cliché as "lip-service").
I took this hypothesis--about grammatical or linear shapes and their mapping onto shapes inside the brain--to a scientist, Professor Neil Roberts who heads MARIARC (the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre) at the University of Liverpool. In particular I mentioned to him the linguistic phenomenon in Shakespeare which is known as "functional shift" or "word class conversion". It refers to the way that Shakespeare will often use one part of speech--a noun or an adjective, say--to serve as another, often a verb, shifting its grammatical nature with minimal alteration to its shape. Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in "Troilus and Cressida", "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); "Othello", "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun).
The effect is often electric I think, like a lightning-flash in the mind: for this is an economically compressed form of speech, as from an age when the language was at its most dynamically fluid and formatively mobile; an age in which a word could move quickly from one sense to another, in keeping with Shakespeare's lightning-fast capacity for forging metaphor. It was a small example of sudden change of shape, of concomitant effect upon the brain. Could we make an experiment out of it?
We decided to try to see what happens inside us when the brain comes upon sentences like "The dancers foot it with grace", or "We waited for disclose of news", or "Strong wines thick my thoughts", or "I could out-tongue your griefs" or "Fall down and knee/The way into his mercy". For research suggests that there is one specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb?
The main cognitive research done so far on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged and thus on the possible neural correlates of grammatical errors and semantic violations. Hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a --˜positive error' such as functional shift in normal healthy organisms. This truly would be a small instance of inner drama.
We decided to experiment using three pieces of kit. First, EEG (electroencephalogram) tests, with electrodes placed on different parts of the scalp to measure brain-events taking place in time; then MEG (magnetoencephalograhy), a helmet-like brain-scanner which measures effects in terms of location in the brain as well as their timing; and finally fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), those tunnel-like brain-scanners which focus even more specifically on brain-activation by location. I knew nothing much of this: I am indebted to Professor Roberts and to Dr Guillaume Thierry of Bangor University who joined us in the enterprise.
With the help of my colleague in English language Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, as well as the scientists, I designed a set of stimuli--40 examples of Shakespeare's functional shift. At this very early and rather primitive stage, we could not give our student-subjects undiluted lines of Shakespeare because too much in the brain would light up in too many places: that is one of the definitions of what Shakespeare-language does. So, the stimuli we created were simply to do with the noun-to-verb or verb-to-noun shift-words themselves, with more ordinary language around them. It is not Shakespeare taken neat; it is just based on Shakespeare, with water.
But around each of those sentences of functional shift we also provided three counter-examples which were shown on screen to the experiment's subjects in random order: all they had to do was press a button saying whether the sentence roughly made sense or not. Thus, below, A ("accompany") is a sentence which is conventionally grammatical, makes simple sense, and acts as a control; B ("charcoal") is grammatically odd, like a functional shift, but it makes no semantic sense in context; C ("incubate") is grammatically correct but still semantically does not make sense; D ("companion") is a Shakespearian functional shift from noun to verb, and is grammatically odd but does make sense:
A) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would accompany me.
B) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would charcoal me.
C) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would incubate me.
D) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would companion me.
What happened to our subjects' brains when they read the critical words on screen in front of them?
So far we have just carried out the EEG stage of experimentation under Dr Thierry at Bangor. EEG works as follows in its graph-like measurements. When the brain senses a semantic violation, it automatically registers what is called an N400 effect, a negative wave modulation 400 milliseconds after the onset of the critical word that disrupts the meaning of a sentence. The N400 amplitude is small when little semantic integration effort is needed (e.g., to integrate the word "eat" in the sentence, "The pizza was too hot to eat"), and large when the critical word is unexpected and therefore difficult to integrate (e.g., "The pizza was too hot to sing").
But when the brain senses a syntactic violation there is a P600 effect, a parietal modulation peaking approximately 600 milliseconds after the onset of the word that upsets syntactic integrity. Thus, when a word violates the grammatical structure of a sentence (e.g., "The pizza was too hot to mouth"), a positive going wave is systematically observed.
Preliminary results suggest this:
(A) With the simple control sentence ("You said you would accompany me"), NO N400 or P600 effect because it is correct both semantically and syntactically.
(B) With "You said you would charcoal me", BOTH N400 and P600 highs, because it violates both grammar and meaning.
(C) With "You said you would incubate me", NO P600 (it makes grammatical sense) but HIGH N400 (it does not make semantic sense).
(D) With the Shakespearian "You said you would companion me", HIGH P600 (because it feels like a grammatical anomaly) but NO N400 (the brain will tolerate it, almost straightaway, as making sense despite the grammatical difficulty). This is in marked contrast with B above.
So what? First, it was as Guillaume Thierry had predicted. It meant that "functional shift" was a robust phenomenon: that is to say, it had a distinct and unique effect on the brain. Instinctively Shakespeare was right to use it as one of his dramatic tools. Second the P600 surge means the brain was thus primed to look out for more difficulty, to work at a higher level, whilst still accepting that fundamental sense was being made.
In other words, while the Shakespearian functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and give more weight to the sentence as a whole. Shakespeare is stretching us; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence--at the neural level--of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.
This is a small beginning. But it has some importance in the development of inter-disciplinary studies--the co-operation of arts and sciences in the study of the mind, the brain, and the neural inner processing of language felt as an experience of excitement, never fully explained or exhausted by subsequent explanation or conceptualization. It is that neural excitement that gets to me: those peaks of sudden pre-conscious understanding coming into consciousness itself; those possibilities of shaking ourselves up at deep, momentary levels of being.
This, then, is a chance to map something of what Shakespeare does to mind at the level of brain, to catch the flash of lightning that makes for thinking. For my guess, more broadly, remains this: that Shakespeare's syntax, its shifts and movements, can lock into the existing pathways of the brain and actually move and change them--away from old and aging mental habits and easy long-established sequences. It could be that Shakespeare's use of language gets so far into our brains that he shifts and new-creates pathways--not unlike the establishment of new biological networks using novel combinations of existing elements (genes/proteins in biology: units of phonology, semantics, syntax , and morphology in language). Then indeed we might be able to see something of the ways literature can cause affect or create change, without resorting to being assertively gushy.
I do not think this is reductive. Cognitive science is often to do with the discovery of the precise localization of functions. But suppose that instead we can show the following by neuro-imaging: that for all the localization of noun-processing in one place and the localization of verb-processing in another, when the brain is asked to work at more complex meanings, the localization gives way to the movement between the two static locations.
Then the brain is working at a higher level of evolution, at an emergent consciousness paradoxically undetermined by the structures it still works from. And then we might be re-discovering at a demonstrable neural level the experience not merely of specialist "art" but of thinking itself going on not in static terms but in dynamic ones. At present there is of course no brain imaging system that allows the study of continuous thought. But the hope is that, within experimental limitations, we might be able to gain a glimpse within ourselves of a changing neurological configuration of the brain, like the shape of the syntax just ahead of the realization of the semantics.
In that case Shakespeare's art would be no more and no less than the supreme example of a mobile, creative and adaptive human capacity, in deep relation between brain and language. It makes new combinations, creates new networks, with changed circuitry and added levels, layers and overlaps. And all the time it works like the cry of "action" on a film-set, by sudden peaks of activity and excitement dramatically breaking through into consciousness. It makes for what William James said of mind in his "Principles of Psychology", "a theatre of simultaneous possibilities". This could be a new beginning to thinking about reading and mental changes.
(Philip Davis is editor of The Reader magazine, and teaches in the School of English at the University of Liverpool. This article first appeared in The Reader, Number 23, pp. 39-43, and was prepared in collaboration with Neil Roberts, Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, and Guillaume Thierry.)
The Society of the Spectacle
1.
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
2
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
3
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
Guy Debord
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm
Patti Smith's Fantastic Advice for Young Artists
Playback from Eden to Watergate
La Ventana | Turned on by a book
Playback from Eden to Watergate
In Encounter Magazine, admittedly once subsidized by the CIA, there was an article called “Night Words” by George Steiner. Talking about my writing and the writing of other writers in whose works sex scenes are frankly and explicitly described, he says, “In the name of human privacy, enough!”
In whose name is human privacy being evoked? In the name of those who bugged Martin Luther King’s bedroom and ransacked the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? And how many other bedrooms have they bugged? Does anyone believe that these are isolated instances? That they were caught on the first job? Who is casting the first stone here?
It is precisely by breaking down the whole concept of privacy that the monopoly the Nixon Administration wishes to set up will be broken down. When nobody cares, then shame ceases to exist and we can all return to the Garden of Eden without any God prowling around like a house dick with a tape recorder. Books and films in which the sex act is explicitly represented are certainly a step in the right direction. It is precisely this breakdown of shame and fear with regard to sex that the Nixon Administration is all out to stop so it can continue to use shame and fear as weapons of political control.
It is generally assumed that the spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God-and the word was flesh … human flesh … in the beginning of writing. Animals talk. They don’t write. Now, a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but be cannot write “Death Traps in Your Warehouse” for the Reader’s Digest, with tactics for ganging up on dogs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool tip rat holes. It is doubtful that the spoken word would ever have evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word is inferential in human speech.
My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down, for reasons I will suggest later.
I quote from Mechanisms of Virus Infection, edited by Mr. Wilson Smith, a scientist who really thinks about his subject instead of merely correlating data. What be thinks about is the ultimate intention of the virus organism. In a chapter entitled “Virus Adaptability and Host Resistance,” by G. Belyavin speculations as to the biologic goal of the virus species are enlarged. “Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependent upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize for their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living.”
Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis will any human creature survive?
“Taking the virus-eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates in cells without in any way disturbing their normal metabolism. This has been suggested as the ideal biological situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving.”
Would you offer violence to a well-intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis?
“It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected or that it would necessarily be recognized as a virus.” I suggest that the word is just such a virus- Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls “biologic mutation affecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed One reason that apes can’t talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alterations in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness. And vot an occasion! This illness may well have had a high rate of mortality, but some female apes must have survived to give birth to the Wunderkinder The illness perhaps assumed a more malignant form in the male because of his more developed and rigid muscular structure, causing death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. Since the virus in both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation of sex centres in the brain, the male impregnated the females in their death spasms and the altered throat structure was genetically conveyed. Ach, lunge, what a scene is here … the apes are moulting fur, steaming off, the females whimpering and slobbering over the dying males like cows with aftosa and so a stink-musky, sweet, rotten-metal stink of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden… .
The creation of Adam, the Garden of Eden, Adam’s fainting spell during which God made Eve from his body, the forbidden fruit, which was of course knowledge of the whole stinking thing and might be termed the first Watergate scandal, all slots neatly into Doc von Steinplatz’s theory And this was a white myth. This leads us to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specially malignant and lethal form in the white race. What then accounts for this special malignance of the white word virus? Most likely a virus mutation occasioned by radioactivity. All animal and insect experiments so far carried out indicate that mutations resulting from radiation are unfavourable-that is, not conducive to survival. These experiments relate to the effect of radiation on autonomous creatures. What about the effects of radiation on viruses? Are there not perhaps some so-classified and secret experiments hiding behind national security? Virus mutations occasioned by radiation may be quite favourable for the virus. And such a virus might well violate the ancient covenant of symbiosis, the benign equilibrium with the host cell. So now, with the tape recorders of Watergate and the fallout from atomic testing, the virus stirs uneasily in all your white throats. It was a killer virus once. It could become a killer virus again and rage through cities of the world like a topping forest fire.
“It is the beginning of the end.” That was the reaction of a science attaché at one of Washington’s major embassies to reports that a synthetic gene particle bad been produced in the laboratory. “Any small country can now make a virus for which there is no cure. It would take only a small laboratory. Any small country with good biochemists could do it.”
And presumably any big country could do it quicker and better.
I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image. I have suggested how such units can be biologically activated to act as communicable virus strains. Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated after Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or, to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH.
Von Steinplatz postulates that the virus of biologic mutation, which he calls Virus B-23, is contained in the word. Unloosing this virus from the word could be more deadly than unloosing the power of the atom. Because all hate, all pain, all fear, all lust is contained in the word.
We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder one we will record speeches and conversations, carefully editing in stammers, mispronunciations inept phrases-the worst number one we can assemble. Now, on tape recorder two we will make a love tape by bugging his bedroom. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say, the Senator’s teenage daughter. On tape recorder three we will record hateful, disapproving voices. We’ll splice the three recordings in together at very short intervals and play them back to the Senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tapes and disapproval tapes together. Once the association lines are established, they are activated every time the Senator’s speech centres are activated, which is all the time (heaven help that sorry bastard if anything happened to his big mouth). So his teen-age daughter crawls all over him while Texas Rangers and decent church-going women rise from tape recorder three screaming “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN FRONT OF DECENT PEOPLE!”
The teen-age daughter is just a refinement. Basically all you need are sex recordings on number two and hostile recordings on number three. With this simple formula any CIA son of a bitch can become God-that is, tape recorder three. Notice the emphasis on sexual material in burglaries and bugging in the Watergate cesspool-bugging Martin Luther King’s bedroom. Kiss kiss bang bang. A deadly assassination technique. At the very least sure to unnerve opponents and put them at a disadvantage. So the real scandal of Watergate that has not come out yet is not that bedrooms were bugged and the offices of psychiatrists ransacked but the precise use that was made of this sexual material.
This formula works best on a closed circuit. If sexual recordings and films are widespread, tolerated, and publicly shown, tape recorder three loses its power. Which perhaps explains why the Nixon Administration is out to close down sex films and re-establish censorship of all films and books-to keep tape recorder three on closed circuit.
And this brings us to the subject of SEX. In the words of the late John O’Hara, “I’m glad you came to me instead of one of those quacks on the top floor.” Psychiatrists priests, whatever they call themselves, they want to turn it off and keep tape recorder three in business. Let’s turn it on. All you swingers use movie cameras and tape recorders to record and photograph your sessions. Now go over the session and pick out the sexiest pieces -you know, when it really happens. Reich built a machine with electrodes to be attached to the penis to measure this orgasm charge. Here is an unpleasurable orgasm sagging ominously as tape recorder three cuts in. He just made it. And here is a pleasurable orgasm way up on the graph. So take all the best of your sessions and invite the neighbours to see it. It’s the neighbourly thing to do. Try cutting them in together, alternating twenty-four frames per second. Try slowdowns and speedups. Build and experiment with an orgone accumulator. It’s simply a box of any shape or size lined with iron. Your intrepid reporter at age thirty-seven achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick. That’s what every red-blooded boy and girl should be doing in the basement workshop. The orgone accumulator could be greatly potentiated by using magnetized iron, which sends a powerful magnetic field through the body. And small accumulators like ray guns. There is two-gun Magee going off in his pants. The gun falls from his band. Quick as he was he was not quick enough
For a small directional accumulator obtain six powerful magnets Arrange your magnetized iron squares so that they form a box. In one end of the box drill a hole and insert an iron tube. Now cover the box and tube with organic material-rubber, leather, cloth. Now train the tube on your privates and the privates of your friends and neighbours It’s good for young and old, man and beast, and is known as SEX. It is also known to have a direct connection with what is known as LIFE. Let’s get St. Paul off our backs and take off the Bible Belt. And tell tape recorder three to cover his own dirty thing. It stinks from the Garden of Eden to Watergate.
I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described, what then do they do with them?
Answer: They play them back on location.
They play these recordings back to the target himself, if the target is an individual, from passing cars and agents that walk by him in the street. They play these recordings back in his neighbourhood. Finally they play them back in subways restaurants, airports, and other public places. Playback is the essential ingredient.
I have made a number of experiments with street recordings and playbacks over a period of years, and the startling fact emerges that you do not need sex recordings or even doctored tapes to produce effects by playback. Any recordings played back on location in the manner I will now describe can produce effects. No doubt sexual and doctored tapes would be more powerful. But some of the power in the word is released by simple playback, as anyone can verify who will take the time to experiment.
I have frequently observed that this simple operation making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, then playing recordings back and taking more pictures-will result in accidents, fires, removals, especially the last. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was recently carried out.
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W.1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there. The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son, the snarling counterman. I have them and they know it.
“You boys have a rep for making trouble. Well, come on out and make some. Pull a camera-breaking act, and I’ll call a bobby. I got a right to do what I like in the public street.”
If it came to that, I would explain to the policeman that I was taking street. recordings and making a documentary, of Soho. This was after all London’s first espresso bar, was it not? I was doing them a favour. They couldn’t say what both of us knew without being ridiculous.
“He’s not making any documentary. He’s trying to blow up the coffee machine, start a fire in the kitchen, start fights in here, get us a citation from the Board of Health.”
Yes, I had them and they knew it. I looked in at the old prop. and smiled, as if he would like what I was doing. Playback would come later with more pictures. I took my time and strolled over to the Brewer Street Market, where I recorded a three-card Monte game. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen’s Snack Bar.
How to apply the three-tape-recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder one is the Moka Bar itself in its pristine condition. Tape recorder two is my recording of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder two in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder three is playback. Adam experiences shame when his disgraceful behaviour is played back to him by tape recorder three, which is God.
By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in recordings, I become God for this locale. I affect them. They cannot affect me.
Suppose, for example, that in the interest of national security, your bathroom and bedroom are bugged and rigged with hidden infrared cameras. These pictures and recordings give access. You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse, but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience. Shame is playback: exposure to disapproval.
Now let us consider the arena of politics and the applications of bugging in this area. Of course, any number of recordings are immediately available since politicians make speeches on TV. These recordings, however, do not give access. The man who is making a speech is not really there. Consequently, intimate or at least private recordings are needed, which is why the Watergate conspirators found it necessary to resort to burglary.
A Presidential candidate is not a sitting duck like the Moka Bar. He can make any number of recordings of his opponents . So the game is complex and competitive, with recordings made by both sides. This leads to more sophisticated techniques, the details of which have yet to come out.
The basic operation of recording, pictures, more pictures, and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems, it depends on maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder three, then tape recorder three loses power. God must be the God.
London, 1973, William S. Burroughs
Letters to a Young Poet
Satan, Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas
By Angela Genusa
Satan, Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas! (after Paul Hoover's The Windows (A War in Tawara))
Amore, Roma, Air an aria: As I Pee, Sir, I See Pisa!
Bar an arab, Bombard a drab mob. Bosnia, pain, sob.
Camus sees sumac; Cain, a maniac.
Did I cite operas are poetic? I did.
Enola Devil lived alone; Eno misses ordered roses, Simone. E. Borgnine drags Dad's gardening robe.
Flo, gin is a sin. I golf. Food, a lass, salad -- oof! Flesh! I saw Mimi wash self.
Gift fig: Gigawatt Ottawa gig.
Help, Max, Enid, in example "H."
I, lad Dali; I'm, alas, a salami. Is it I? It is I! I did not revert on Didi.
Kodak ad, OK: Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.
Lonely Tylenol, Lisa Bonet ate no basil. Lived on decaf, faced no devil.
Mail Liam Maps, DNA, and spam. Meet animals; laminate 'em.
Nail a tired rotini in it, order Italian!
Oh, no, Don Ho: Oy, oy, a tonsil is not a yo-yo! O.E.D. or rodeo?
"Peanuts' Legs" is Gels' Tuna EP; Plan no damn Madonna LP.
Reno loner, Roti de pup editor. Red rum, sir, is murder. “Rum… rum…” I murmur.
Snug all L.A. guns, Sup not on pus, Strap on no parts, Step on no pets, Stab nail at ill Italian bats.
Tarzan raised Desi Arnaz' rat: Tulsa night life... filth, gin, a slut.
U tu? Viva le te de Tel Aviv.
We name opera, rare poem, anew: X.
Yo! Basil is a boy! Yawn! Madonna Fan? No damn way! Zzzzz, Hannah, Zzzzz.
Super Busy Bodies
we score information art
we like music flowing
margot kidder was lois
in the movies
missteri hatcher on tv
alongside dean something or other
and christopher george reeves
C/W
Breton Remixed (moon ran door 1984)
<<
The bread and wine in the evening
the adventure of space out or in
below above the loud poetry stations,
poetry Phillipine the flesh,
the poetry Sunday shouted
the Sunday tail snake
and dew in the papers in the desk
a candy sponge the thread of things
pools of memory with curls and crevices, sea shapes and sunbeam riverbanks
the open the in
times
<<
cheekbone birdbaths on the checkerboard knees
bugle ear with the volcanic blood sparkling
<<
pillows pretty eyebrows
go now through the midnight windows
float with the pretty bushes
woodwork through the silences
one message performs the star theater
young windows with sleep lean in
where water gets the stone
In a Single Picture a Strategy and Result
Kinetic the interface nerve spreads restless kinetic words
re-discovered in the anguish of the anatomical skinny
How grotesque these modern months
how dreamily diabolical the monstrous methods and intimate stunts
When might everyday life be pieces of poetry, World Words?
When might it not?
Visual music wants to change the warsong framework of time
With re-pulsing literature flashing superbeams through pre-recorded walls
Hot honeyed in the installation room,Viewer:
you water songs looking at the many people mazed
In the glittering gutter slurping at the waterbank chain
humping at(o)ms trying to find a pulse
In the rape and pill age
rebuilding after hurricane
after hurricane
after hurricane.
Intuitive evidence mounts and what's in a name or breed of plant?
What's in the seemingly familiar mundane lurking about?
Long that hard chorus sneaks and stalks outside my windows hardly worried
about eternity earth or the rough lense of time
Mothering me it knows better from giving and oral story morals
Still, determined stones are living
Tho some know not why
the ground becomes sad music
Sadly dimming
when the air says rise wishes rise.
Chris Weige
From The Pulchritudinous Review
Ed: Renee Zepeda
Inkling and the Bloody Horse
Creation got me hooked on human evolution
and hordes of exhausted, shore-bound creatures
who look even more legendary in color
humdingers and man recognizes it becoming reality by now
installing airbags for just about every shelf,
frozen then and in a building bombed erica's triumph over theworld.com
glyph gnash alienari - we're all so sorry
people got killed in head-to-head debates in the nation we were
in the way we brought the plot home having fought previously
over a world repeating in the same way from the beginning
out mount rose the kinds of things necessary to make a point or roman road
or construct a superpower colossal along the curve in the ess
where ditch speaks tongue to reed.
Soulful Maze, Photocopy the Everything Range
Sensuous photogenic you,
am many roads in a minute are
riveting candelabras who hourglasses dared
to go electric
They cut iF with a million dollar knife but the uncomfortable cake left the showroom and exclusive shore-line retreats
half empty.
Yet in each margin horizon more
in so many clouds good rain or even re-runs.
Louder, chemicals see-sawed and status
decided the poor benefit lines (but words change).
To you with poetry re-paint the shh theater, take a big ol' breath in (real deep)
while a country-world detours but for one loud train full of
louder laughs and thicker voices (probably sunshine)...
Do doorways conceive you?
Do you like them (_open or_closed)
who go to you its movie:
Louder, train. I swear.
Chris Weige | Reckon | Austin, TX.
How the book should be
Via Twitter
Please Come Supernaturally Loud
He Had Sweat and Bedpost Spasm
Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby
he had she
he had sweat and bedpost spasm
he had nostrils where they count most
she'd had he before she'd gone
entering the long orgasm
with a ripple of sensational ghosts
he moaned, then
his eyes crisscrossed
and his curls toed
she'd had him and he'd swung open
supernaturally,
unexpectantly peering at the nothing weeds
and the nothing stars
into the dark warm mirrorheart
he paused to palm her burnished bronze
it was soft
~.~
Please Come Supernaturally Loud
Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby + AR baum-bastic mix by Matthew Lowe
please come supernaturally loud
please the animal be
put a finger on the skin
warm and sticky
then without a word
whirr and spark
oh god
oh god!
~.~
Superhuman Tongues with No Sense of Shame
Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby + AR Gender Exchange Remix by Sarah Xu
superhuman tongues with no sense of shame
decide to follow the headlights forever
they lick the slick oncoming lanes,
assorted bottles, rainbow dirt, cappuccino sugar cane
you've changed, one says to another
you don't any longer feel a thing
i'm sorry
drugs, clocks, blades or fluids caused it
or the empty nothing deadening everything it touched
today, however, the driveway doorway porch
has upon it a cardboard box which contains a lamp
or surely something better than money by much
a suntanned lamp held together with honey
a new wave hard-won torch or tether
an angel-winged tramp.
~.~
Reckon Remixes Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share alike 3.0
Download the electronic version of Through the Clock’s Workings and start remixing. The entire anthology can be remixed - the original stories, the remixes, and even the fonts.
Remix My Lit is a Brisbane based, international remixable literature project. The project aims to apply the lessons learned from music and film remixing to literature. It is designed to explore where remix fits into literature. It will provide a space within the discipline to encourage and foster a community and culture of remix.
Her the Maze Wants Body
They say the Devil’s getting married in Cincinnati, Ohio.
We say, “The sun is shining and it’s raining at the same time!?”
An inspired calligrapher can create pages of buzz-saw, pick axe, marigold
or even strawberry jam using stick ink, quill, brush, oleander, mist, amaryllis,
hot spell blue norther - a big storm according to James Joyce (between you and me and the fence-post):
Onomatopoeias.
“So I will get to work & I will finish you off, question mark;
shaketh a shackle shaketh a spear, type talks and make characters,
exclamation marks to set you off; I will catch on latch onto the key boards,
hit my marks. Interrobang and shall not depart. I like this hullabaloo, brouhaha, hubbub. I like this outlandish Dino Martin Stego-TheSaurus so flush and popular. I recognize my body…desperately my breasts, my face my breasts all my smells my dirty depths…Hear my rain of orgasms, Addict; I am all you have left.”
Chris Weige | Austin, TX. | Share a key intuit
Thread Through the Enormous Re-Imagining
Love the Weak Too
We are all ever so
in becoming ourselves,
visibly haunted and like the future
sometimes blurry;
Yet we have everything
and have grown together,
discovered treasures and gentle transformations,
become happy ever-so-often,
and as people begin to arrive
a few think it is a vision;
They are confidently assured in their awareness
but deep down love a good surprise
knowing every day the future forwardly shapes the past.
Yet no one monster minds, no one panics or protest-picnics.
People begin to arrive…
What Fate Sway ( Lake Epps )
The recorded future story made some wonder, opening up like that;
Constant rock and only a handful were doing it. I was looking for a really hard edge, but the good news is I don’t know anything and found something better anyway.
Completely different: something that’s not been done. It took sticks and stones to roll and musicians like wild scientists sweating smoke. It’s not hip-hop; it’s not skate-what. It’s not another job or record con-tract.
All of a sudden, all of a sudden being born trying to overstand infinity.
And stood and sauntered across to record the atmosphere really. I was getting out there, Sway, in Africa; but I’m glad this whole incident is like a soap opera with dirty sex and dark, low points
…there were some doozies there between the cracks.
Come on, spill a drink on those two-hundred dollar jeans.
Everybody jones
&
She moans
the new multi-faceted telepathy.
But you go on; stay that way...
The Flat of My Tongue Will Discover a Mirror We Decide to Taste
Like backward english, nude under your lips.
A sure tongue begins to squirm, shy about wishes.
Warm cocoon explosions
Kiss this rolling slow soft ignition,
These complimentary tastes and exemplary ear-splitting affairs,
Flavored thoughts and lights, a number of licks.
We are now another southern delicacy.
Chris Weige | Austin, TX. | Share a key intuit