2012 ARCHIVE                                        

Quotidian Feed Finale: 4th Quarter 2012

Roman power company (ACEA) shut off our power, supposedly for an unpaid bill they never sent us a bill for (you can only imagine the antiquated bureaucracy). Bitches. So we snuck into the vacant house next door, ran an extension cord out the second story window & now we're back hooked into the grid of Rome. Like squatters in our own home, writing this by candlelight & wine [ ... ]

Field Notes: Cumulative Books Read in the Context of Place < 2013

All the memorable books i've read where location in time was significant to the reading—with links to the post where i blog about said book in the context of the place. This 2012 update includes 56 more books in 17 different countries. [ ... ]

€ Purging Paradiso & evil spirits in the underworld of Bali

 ... Just as, through transparent and smooth panes of glass, / or else through limpid and calm waters / that are not so deep that the bottom is lost to sight. [ ... ]

€ Bali hoorah: east meets westward-ho in the American Purgatorio of Ubud

In the end (as in the beginning .. & all along the way), not even language can save us. Or language is at the root of such detachment. You need to picture yourself immersed in an isolation chamber embedded in the landscape of the world .. you have to get into this space. You don't even need to try, you already are in this space .. you just have to accept it. [ ... ]

€ Timor-Leste II: finite thoughts reading Badiou in Dili & snorkeling in Atauro

We spent a few hours motoring around in circles in the strange currents where normally they lurked, but all we saw were a dozen or so little spinner dolphins. That always seems the case if you go looking for something in particular .. you never find it [ ... ]

€ as i see Timor-Leste: guerilla-hack 'visual ethnography' far east of eden

It's hard to truly experience things when you get wrapped up in your own personal safety/comfort (or that of your accompanying loved one). When you're like this foreign anti-body traveling through a bloodstream of wicked shit. [...] 'I can't complain,' as the saying goes, but then i do anyway. But is it interesting to read about the 'nice' things, or look at pictures of sunsets? [ ... ]

€ Singapore fling: The People Who Watched us pass by in SIN from fake plastic trees

And this voyeurism goes both ways in such a transcendental existence, like living in a glasshouse .... where one's privacy is thrown out the window in lieu of living on the streets, with random people. «The trick about writing books, Sal soon realized, is that you could only perform the secret of yourself when no one was listening.» [ ... ]

€ Spanish inquest II: surPrize! None of This Is Real, Madrid

... this 'comforting distortion' being a certain body position the characters put themselves into as a sort of coping mechanism. «I prefer positions to declarations» .. i think was also said. And with this 'Mellistic' style & voice, comes a lot of the tell-tale apocalyptic & dystopian themes .... where theme & voice come intertwined & self-feeding into 'fictions' .. into cataloguing & caterwauling [ ... ]

€ Spanish inquest I: a gaudy & quixotic unravelogue

It only becomes increasingly stranger & self-referential if you think of the book Don Quixote as just another book like the ones he speaks of (which the convoluted narrator within a narrator does himself in the second half, when characters come into the picture that have read the first half)—that makes you lose your mind in recursion, that renders you unable to distinguish between [ ... ]

€ Nurturing the language instinct, further west back to where you once belonged

You can't help but wonder if the people from those parts, derived as they are from such a driving sense of westward expansion, are genetically different than, those that stayed in the original 13 states, or those that didn't bother to come to America in the first place. The west coast of America was the final frontier & it was our fathers' duties (for better or worse) to populate it, by the doctrine [ ... ]

€ The Gospel according to Saramago & The Last Days in the baroquen ruin of Palermo

Kind of like when you try to slip a pill into a cat's food & they eat everything around it but leave the pill licked clean. Or it reminded me of the time we had that goiterous maid in Kenya for a week or two & she used to wash everything in our hamper .... except j's underwear (cuz of some taboo they have about touching other woman's undies (my briefs were fair game)). [ ... ]

€ On belongings, information & knowledge processing .. with pronouns unpronounced & under the auspices of West of Kingdom Come: a last ditch dispatch from Rome

An Italian helping us deal with these frustrations said we need to think of Rome as «a beautiful woman that needs tender coaxing». Sorry, but that's bullshit. If you had to personify Rome, he is a fossilized & repressed asshole that lives at home (in the closet) [ ... ]

€ Out of body diving & sleeping in strange rooms in Tanzania reading Damon Galgut

All of a sudden, i started feeling funny. Not sure if the mixture was bad or i was narced (though we weren't so deep), but he felt strangely euphoric, almost out of body. It hit me all of a sudden, as if he had been asleep & suddenly woke up to find myself in this strange underwater world, unsure of how he got there. [ ... ]

€ Lalibela reading Coetzee & breaking the experience hoarding & self-editing cycle

«Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it.» [...] «The farmhouse, the desert, the whole world as far as the horizons is an ecstasy of communion with itself, exalted by the vain urge of my consciousness to inhabit it.» [ ... ]

€ Angkor wattage & the agrAryan root of ruin, Siam-reaping the smell of Faulkner & bang-cocking in on an unlocked Camus

Whenever i hear people talk about preserving the tradition of subsistence & small-holder farms, i always wonder if it's such a good thing. People have this notion of small self-sufficient farms as being quaint & idyllic—but in reality, it seems like a nightmare [ ... ]

∑ Quotidian Feed—Q3 2012: habits of tongue & living by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse

... then he 'push-started' the plane mid-air & pulled out of the free-fall, just in time before we hit the ground. i was surprised to not feel sick, but invigorated. we flew over the countryside, past some zoo/circus with all these weird exhibits. the one i remember most was a gorilla that kept a human head in a cage. we landed & the plane turned into a white horse that i was riding. [ ... ]

€ เหงื่อออกรายละเอียด: Janky Bangkok reading Robbe-Grillet (& not-reading Murnane)

Having once more checked the solitude, the absolute tranquility of this part of town already described—this muddy clutter of derelict sites and ruins, punctuated by open spaces, where I have just stopped the big black car alongside a hoarding covered with multi-coloured posters hanging in shreds—but remaining in my seat in order to be able, in an emergency, to drive off immediately [ ... ]

€ Alpineal Tour (leg 2): noble savages in the mighty Dolomiti & the fuckin French Alps

... in the end it all relates back to sex. Or at least Houellebecq tries to relate it all back. And not just good old-fashioned sex, but perverse & repressed & incestuous sex, stemming from some childhood trauma, from cruel adolescent pranks where French boys establish rank via homoerotic posturing. Is this the norm for all French adolescents? They may be the most sexually liberated [ ... ]

€ Alpineal Tour (leg 1): il upside-down garten zum das Matterhorn

... after seeing «the space» it made more senso to hang the pages from the book where the birds are words in the sky, above the garden. So we unraveled some twine from a balled rat's nest & strung it between trees, then made some calls to find someone to bring clothes pins to hang the art with. Drank beer while we waited & visited the cows in the pasture next to the giardino. [ ... ]

€ Reading Cosmopolis between cosmopolii, in need of a haircut (but never getting 1)

Take the asymmetric prostate—Eric Packer's other stand-out feature (besides badly needing a haircut). Just the word must do in the movie, as revealed in dialogue, the summary of his doctor's verdict. And it does, it fires the imagination. But Delillo's expository revealing, and the language in which he tells, far exceeds any description you can mount in your head of what it means, [ ... ]

€ A psychogeographical return address of Street of Crocodiles, New York

We don't know why his writing struck us so, but that becomes why—what we cannot put into words as he does. Almost as if Schulz sees into the past & into the future, whilst living in the present, all at once, and for our sakes. A visionary in the true meaning of the word, a seer. And he sees beyond just the surface into the inner-workings. [ ... ]

€ Super Sad True semi-repatriation to gotham reading Shteyngart

It's a graceful decline, i'd agree with that. Romans manage to always show only their good side (like any savvy celebrity)—to mask their fossilized resignation in flashy clothes & designer sunglasses. At first (coming from America, with open mind) i thought there might be something to learn from this. Or at least that such ashes might provide fertile soil to plant new seeds. But now i'm not [ ... ]

€ procession no. ∞: Creative Evolution, Tirunesh Dibaba, the vital impulse, dueling tendencies, Chinook jargon & becoming, ... all amidst accidental flux from Pompeii

Throughout it all, Bergson keeps consciousness in mind, tethering it by a bootstrap to the evolution of life (where life & creation are virtually synonymous in Bergson's eyes): «If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it [ ... ]

€ Un-encumbered & doppler-shifted thoughts on audience, non-linear writing, H₂0 buffalo, Gass, goats, the Italian art of desecration, hyperobjects, OOO & the god is dead particle

... if there were any life on Mars, the radioactive decay from the plutonium of Curiosity would likely kill it, as it automatically snaps photos of the living in the act of dying to phone home for us to «see». Curiosity killed the cat, as the saying goes [ ... ]

€ Un-numbered wordatlas: what to tell your grandchildren when you don't have any, another tangential appeal to the imagination & why i quit twitter

In an ideal world it shouldn't matter who the author is. Information interacts with information. We all become bees & the web is a vast hive of sweet ego-less honey for all to partake equally. [ ... ]

€ Numbered daze: shift-shuffling by 4 or 9 to stay caput or to bend towards the sun

Interestingly, the math here is similar to the math used to describe card shuffling. So if you wanted to cheat at cards, you could take a rigged deck & shuffle it (albeit, shuffle perfectly, after pulling the bottom card to the top) 12 times & you'd end up with the same exact order you started with (at which point deal the cards) .... where 12 is obtained by plugging n = 52 in the above equation [ ... ]

€ 52 Books of Influence: a full deck to play solitaire on a desert island

These are the 52 books i'd want in my library if i had to limit it for whatever reason. Not that these are necessarily my «favorite» books, but they are the books that have most shaped & informed my own writing & art & general outlook on life. These are books that i keep over my desk to reference or reread. [ ... ]

∑ Q2/2012 Quotidian Feed Stack: Ark Codex into Raft Manifest

There is no continuity in becoming but there's a becoming in continuity. At the infinite end of regression this scripted flagging was gathered & rolled into a scroll where it was recovered & read aloud as we surveyed the phase space of possibility. Ptarmigan stitched up behind with sinewed talons. We skipped our genie rations as our eyes lashed the blackness, stabilizing the standing wave [ ... ]

€ Balkan State of Mind IV: Croatia to Rome reading Dracula

When you say winery here, it's not like you are greeted by a publicist that makes a big to-do about presentation & all that. It means you knock on the door of a house & some guy with dirt beneath his fingernails takes you down into his cellar & generously pours you shotglass after shotglass straight from half-rotting barrels with rusty spigots. The good shit, laced with barnyard funk. [ ... ]

€ Balkan State of Mind III: Montenegro to Croatia

There's swallows everywhere in Dubrovnik, darting in & out of the narrow alleys & into houses where they have their nests. They give the town a certain sense of energized fluidity, like electrons buzzing around the nucleus of an atom. [ ... ]

€ Balkan State of Mind II: Bosnia to Montenegro reading Joe Sacco

We at times felt funny visiting a country recently scarred by war, especially gawking at the damage—but to not take note of it or acknowledge it & only see «touristy» things would also be strange. If more people had known at the time what was really [ ... ]

€ Balkan State of Mind I: Slovenia to Bosnia reading Satantango & Saramago

—confused him, so he couldn't be sure whether he was reading a work of prophecy regarding the earth's condition after the demise of humanity or a proper work of geological history based on the planet on which he actually lived. [ ... ]

€ «The she-wolf as shape of time» (redux) in the context of Roman street art

Like the river, and the city of Rome, the image of the wolf is also eternal. It's a meme that has been propagated from statue, to fresco, to tapestry, to painting. It evolves some just like a living organism. The physical embodiment of the image might change, but not the meaning behind it—it keeps enduring as essentially the same species (though the real wolf has long since more or less [ ... ]

€ Londinium revisited reading Levé's Suicide & Markson's The Last Novel

A marketing gimmick that takes cajones, you might say. Ensuring the immortality of your name by dying. It's hard to imagine what bLogger would've thought about the book if he didn't know beforehand what happened to the author outside the book, the two actions (writing SUICIDE & then committing suicide) are now inseparable, part of the same work. [ ... ]

€ toxic morphemes that make me sick (having your baloney & eating it too)

This isn't just an issue of religion, this is the risk you take in aligning yourself with any group or subsect of people, especially ones that think they are superior. Members of group X that write literature all about what it's like to be in group X will gain more followers within that group, but risk alienating those not in group X, especially if they have the attitude of «it's an X-thing, you wouldn't [ ... ]

€ Re-reviews of Ander Monson's Other Electricities & Daniel Borzutzky's Arbitrary Tales

Unseen by many perhaps, but not by Monson, who is in tune to the bandwidth of these forces, and whose acute sense of observation picks up the subtle signals and silent pleas and is able to channel and unscramble this analog static—a static analogous to the meaningless gossip that grips many remote northern communities bounded and bonded by isolation and the elements [ ... ]

€ RE: making mud beneath the lighthouse of unsaid island

These sayings are like mantras, word strings that get wrapped up into a giant ball of yarn that keeps picking up momentum with each iteration, rolling rhythmically like music, like a rolling stone, gathering no moss, like a canonical fugue, like one of those carbon-copy spinning drums. Each time the muddy juggernaut spins in your head you might see the same words wrapped to [ ... ]

€ RE: reading The Fixed Stars on an unspecified island (a recognitive reconnaissance)

In a book i was reading yesterday it said «a landscape doesn't have an inside.» When i run & ride on trains i feel like i'm perpetually on the brink of getting inside the landscape. I'll never make it inside, but it's more about the effort of trying. These activities unstick you, if only for an instant, from the everyday vanity of your immediate world, as does reading. I didn't bring that book [ ... ]

€ Launching the Ark with incision, Tevere style

And it's near the namesake Tevere, which played a big part in the making of Ark Codex, so it only seemed all to fitting to launch the ark on it. Alessandro & Frank & crew set me up to make an etching for the show & let me have at it, like a kid in a candy store, encouraging me to experiment with all the various different techniques (acquaforte (acid-etching), acquatinta (also acid, but [ ... ]

∑ Q1/2012 Quarterly Quotidian: The noise in «explosion» backwards, an x-ray of an igloo

if you read it backwards (SI NON SEDES IS) it says «if you don't sit you go» ... saw some shit on a pedestal in a museum, made me want to take one ... woke up & was sleeping in public. There was no flood yet ... as you unwind you need remind yourself with each word what the word before means ... this dead mounted head will give you the idea of how this animal lived. [ ... ]

€ Roman Roundup of Italian art/lit pubs I: Ericailcane & Svjetlan Junaković (Logos Edizioni)

... another bestiary book of animals in anthropomorphic situations (seems to be the Logos shtick)—these animals striking more regal, Victorian/Renaissance age poses, some actual famous painted portraits redone with animals (i.e., the girl with the pearl earring redone as «the sheep with a blue turban»). A harem of geese playing cards, a greyhound lounging on a loveseat, frog doctors [ ... ]

€ ± inventory of artifacts accumulated/shed in Gotham (post Ark Codex launch)

• 2 army duffel bags to carry acquired possessions • 1 Chinese army satchel with red star • 3 baggage tags • a «Notice of Baggage Inspection» note slipped into our bag by the Dept of Homeland Security • 12 cans of Goya black beans • 12 cans of Hatch green chiles • 1 pair of Adidas Marathon 10 • 1 pair of red Nike Free 2.0 • 68 copies of Ark Codex ±0 • 28 copies of Sister Stop Breathing by [ ... ]

€ Do it clean: Rome running routes & Italo Calvino's bearable lightness of being

... while you are running, nothing can be committed to paper, any linearity of thought, induced by the rhythm of running, becomes lost, scrambled, ungraspable, sucked into the juggernautical BwO. And this is what is so liberating. For writing, or doing art, it is a therapeutic way to work through ideas without vainly grabbing them before they are finished... This is your mind on running. [ ... ]

€ The interest rate of economic nonsense (floating the Ark down the Roman Amazon): Economia di Parole, anno 8

With all this mind, i'm please to release the next Calamari title: Ark Codex ±0. There'll be 3 tiers to the Ark—the original images, the book object & the dbook copy. i. For the dbook version of Ark Codex ±0 i'm following the eat-first-pay-what-you-want model—you can download the PDF first & then pay what you think it's worth after. Sure, the digital file is in a sense valueless (aside from the [ ... ]

€ Decoding the Decodex: demystifying Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus

... you might at least be able to come up with a map of serafinian characters to syllables spelled by the roman alphabet. Thing is, i'm actually not that interested in «decoding» Serafini's Codex—i think it's probably more interesting not knowing. Regardless, i'm curious enough to know what this Decodex has to say about it. So without further ado, here's my translation of the Introduzione by [ ... ]

€ Confessions of an everyday wino: On vertigo, cruise ships, control, self-organization, heroes, blood chemistry & the ark as a bed to lie in

Some things you can't control (especially if you're stupid enough to book passage on a cruise ship)—have the serenity to accept that shit, or however the fuck that saying goes. And look to yourself, not some god, for the courage & wisdom bit. [ ... ]

€ Baby on Brain: notes on reading Percival Everett, Urs Allemann & Amos Tutuola

We are treated to the cerebral what-ifs of a baby reading & digesting Derrida & Wittgenstein & all the musings & implications that come with it. A baby with the mental capacity but not the physical capacity, but self-aware of his helpless condition, reliant on adults, to be fed or bathed, to not be stuffed in a weighted sack & dropped in a lake. «The idea of my own drowning made me more [ ... ]

€ Q4-11 Quarterly Quotidian Peregrinations for the Suicidal Sake of Self-Organizing Dicebats

potential dicebat bins accumulate above the astroturf-pitched carrier in swooping vectors of light whose audible shrill is all in our minds | the constituent pixels become charged—illuminating a colony of beings whose individual essences flash for 1 second before disappearing in 1 fell swoop beneath the ice (to be later revisited as phosphorescence) | the detected time-lapsed trajectory is [ ... ]