Rome—27 Feb 2015

Dear Inurnet ..

axess to u really sucks here .. in this airbnb .. + ever the smell of sewage no matter what hotel ± apartment ± restaurant in Rome .. as Chiara Barzini says: «Your sewage goes into pipes laid in 735 B.C. You are shitting into the past.» .. the sanpietrini of via Titta Scarpetta where we used to live now ripped up + paved over to fix pipes ..

.. + btw (speaking of shitty utilities) our white@sleepingfish.net email we shut down .. in case any1 still uses it .. too much junk .... o + we have a Roman telefono # now + our 917 digits we put in hibernation ..

.. + the coffee sock = our most cherished possession in our current nomadic state .. sides maybe this laptop we writing on ..

.. yesterday walked all the way to the zona Parioli to meet Luca + Aldo .. ate lunch + gave them some books .. then met Chiara Barzini in Monti + also gave her books so now all the books we lugged in our baggage now offloaded to Romans .. sum of what we saw in walking around Rome:

8 tram xing

via Teatro Marcello xing

at 1 pt a doorway

no me importa di 1

1 of many beheaded (Villa Borghese)

ciò che è stato pubblicizzato @ 1x

forse perché Cy Twombly ha fatto quello che ha fatto qui

non dimenticare Stesicoro

ni P Cor Scipio Afr °

ni Orazio

apparentemente gli Romani non folli su Giulio Cesare

e tuttavia ancora 1x

bourgeois-ville (villa borghese)

no nada (zona Parioli)

subtle commie subtext

«Never gave a damn about the meter man
til I was the man who got to read the meters, man.»—Thurston Moore

resti di adesivo

scrambled S

catenary action

«bureaucracy & bourgeoisie .. red tape .. killing u killing me..»—Keith Morris

archaelogical layers coming unstuck

SPQR

let there be light

she-wolf on via Simeto

luping back in bourgeoisie-ville

W.A.S.T.E. sorting

left = sinister

selfie in the subterranean strange attractor w/ no exit (below bourgeois-ville)

there = 2 paths u can go on

scorcio di luce

helical exit

profound subterranean

più profondo contro i nostri desideri

shedding light on archaeology

proprio come si dice

the other way

culo-SEO optimization

objects in mirror not what they seem (coming down from Jupiter's)

enter the Fascists

Trajan's

1 Mar—Rome to NYC

.. on the plane .. reading Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot .. a morbid navel-gazing little book as u'd xpect from Blanchot .. a despair beyond words for example:

«.. this sadness communicated a feeling to me that was absolutely distressing, that was dispossessed and in some way bereft of itself; the memory of it became inexpressible despair, despair which hides in tears but does not cry, which has no face and changes the face it borrows into a mask.»

.. the 1^st part about sum woman J (sposedly modeled after Colette Peignot (a.k.a. Claude Araxe (a.k.a. Laure (a.k.a. the muse of Bataille's Blue Noon)))) that sort of just lingers hanging on but wont die .. kind of like that guy in Reservoir Dogs ever on the verge of death tho in this case desiring of it .. J wants to die .. Blanchot (or the narrator) wants to put her out of her misery .. frustrated w/ her doctor J yells «If you don't kill me, you're a murderer» .. a strange sort of logic but if u think about it it makes perfect sense .. death = an endpoint .. nothingness encapsulated in a period .. the transition to (or from) death becomes where the suffering comes in .. so by prolonging this state the doctor «murders» her .. tortures her .... keeping some1 from death = just as bad as killing some1 against their will ..

.. the book itself becomes framed in the writing of it .. in a sort of death spiral .. morphemed social insects marching in circles to death .. his writing like dividing by 0 .. not linear but circularly cullapsing into itself .... in the beginning Blanchot tells us he destroyed the 1^st draft of the book .. so what becomes this book now? .. putting words down on paper becomes like the act of dying .. the idea dead the split second it goes to print .. a death sentence .. (the title more fitting in english than the original French L'Arrêt de Mort) ..

.. «what is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop» says Blanchot .. perhaps an easy cop out .. on 1 hand makes u want to bang your head against a wall or join the suicidal ant zombies .. but also makes u realize that indeed the magic happens after u stop reading (.. + these principle can also be applied to travelling or just plain living (as opposed to dying)) .. put down the pen (or computer) .. put down the camera + just fucking live .... then again a vicious circle of reflexive hyper-hypocrisy .. never can we exist truly in the moment .. in the unsplit second .... + all this only reinforces our moratorium on the verb »to be« here or in our own writing .. tho we've gotten to the point in our book we currently wriding on (Raft Manifest) where the narrator gets taught the meaning of »to be« .. but whether they can process + assimilate the meaning of it (xcept out of habit or as «figure of speech») remains «to be» seen ..

.. + this extraordinariness-beginning-the-moment-he-stops also re-confirms our reluctance to avoid periods .. a sentence shd never end so finally .. a thawt never does in reality .. usually just trails off .... ever in a liquid state .. or ever sublimating to gas .... Blanchot uses periods but otherwise his prose = formless .. perhaps @ times too rambly .. + hypocritical cuz even tho he says u cant put certain things into words such as what he tries to say .. he says (or tries to) say it anyway .. oh the vanity!

landing @ JFK (but can't complain as we managed to avoid the brunt of this brutal winter)

.. @ the beginning of the book he says the story (if u cd call it that) could actually be told in 10 words .. + in the end (after 80 or so brambly pages) it distills down to 1 .. come:

«It seems to me that in all this incessant talking there was the gravity of one single word, the echo of that «Come» which I had said to her; and she had come, and she would never be able to go away again.»

.. u cd say this about our book The Becoming (the spawning precursor to Raft Manifest) .. the entire book cd be summarized by the 1 title word .. becoming .. ever in this fluid state we exist .. Raft Manifest tho not sure how yet to summarize in 1 word .. perhaps self-cognizance .. the inevitably corrupted state of self-awareness ..

Death Sentence finished @ «home».