2011 ARCHIVE                                                                             

€ Field Notes: Book Objects Read on Location < 2012 Cumulative Recap

All the memorable books i've read where location in time was significant to the reading—with links to the post where i talk about said book in the context of the place.l [ ... ]

€ Hüzün in the ruins of defeat: Istanbul Reading Orhan Pamuk

... whereas Italians mask their failures & sorrow, the Turks tackle sorrow head on: «Imbued still with the honor accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life's worries and great losses but [ ... ]

€ Synchronous images from Chiara Barzini's Sister Stop Breathing

... more in common with my upbringing than mafioso Italian culture—like me, she is a banana slug (a graduate from UC Santa Cruz), with hippy leanings, that then put in her time in Gotham. & as i would discover, she writes—& not in the conventional sense of the word, but whose 'voice' defies words. So when i found out she had an unpublished book of short fictions, it only seemed natural [ ... ]

€ Starlingo ii [grounded expositions w/10° of pitch]: 43 more murmurating starmaps under the auspices of a babeling language & in-flight communication manual

It is precisely this 'spirit of propagation' which i find so compelling. Not just propagation in a biological sense, but there's an underlying message they seem hell-bent on communicating, whether it be in their babbling vocalizations, their murmurations or their scat [ ... ]

€ Starlingo i: [Untitled] by Sturnus Vulgaris [ungrounded experimental data culled & posted without comment]

     [ ... ]

€ Exposing the detachment ID, in formation: an Ark Codex 0, folio 0 excerpt

(After a summation of error) the noise forever takes the shape of a tongue. Yet there is no ear to hear the tongue nor tuna for to feed. There is no cavity to tongue the ear—to call out «dear» to all the animal nearby. No address nor anchor holes (weighted with possibility) to turn the sea into a grid of formation—a tonnage of tuna. The 1^st chord acts as in (a) vested dorsal fin, honing [ ... ]

€ There is No Blake Butler: a copy brother's response (or a vestigial vermiformed appendix)

Although in a holographic sense every word encapsulated every sentence & every sentence contained every paragraph & every paragraph contained every page & every page contained the book self-contained within it, more than any other, this sentence, the mother's mind designed itself, seemed to encapsulate the book as a whole—spontaneously self-organizing & self-replicating [ ... ]

€ the art & gothic psychogeography of Venice II: much to do about boredom, canals, sardonic oversaturation, Lee Rourke, Christian Marclay & Sorrentino's must-be place

... the reaction the artist is expecting (what other reaction could there be?)—it's this absurdity, this contradiction, this simultaneous self-nullification/ celebritization through ironic waste, which has become the meaning. And perhaps this is the only meaning left [ ... ]

€ the art & gothic psychogeography of Venice I: being earnest about Ernest, the meaning of being mean & putting a brick in your mouth to exorcise vampires

nowhere else does gothic architecture seem so fitting—the facades of repetitive vaulted arches lining the waterfront. The bridges over the canals, the essence of gothic embodied right down to the boats, squeezing through the canals & under the arched bridges [ ... ]

€ a Madrid codex for an unknown/alien readership: a mad experience with language digging Heidegger, Fuentes & Quixote in the light of our own self-annihilation

I occupied myself as I often do considering things in the anthropological light of our own self-annihilation If some aliens came to our planet after we'd wiped ourselves out, what would they think? They'd come to the Prado & probably recognize that it housed [ ... ]

€ catch & release thoughts on thinking, photography, family, dicebat & nothing—induced (& subsequently extinguished) by reading Beckett & Bernhard in Dublin

The only time it means anything to speak of nothing is when that is your intent. People that try to say something but say nothing are just taking up space on this planet. [...] They keep talking without thinking about what they are saying & they think that will keep [ ... ]

€ Pinocchio uncensored: you can't wish upon a star motherless with pubic hair stuck in your teeth

... in the end Pinocchio & Geppetto see the lifeless puppet slumped in the corner, which significantly changes the nature of his transformation as one that is purely (knowingly) metaphorical, as if childhood is some sort of larval phase in which you shed your skin (go through puberty) when transforming into a self-aware man (the fish eating the donkey down to the skeleton goes well with [ ... ]

€ Quarterly Accumulation iii: Canicola days (i am Sirius) doppler-shifting themselves to fall

... bed wet me: some sort of entombed water slide contraption where we all got separated from eachother & [ ...]|| ¢ INK = DRY [per (i, j) signifY^ing ∳ [ALTri 2 RiVoluzioni qui [at MiN^imo]] | ⁱn ALTri ᑎfficial^e [BBC] ROMan QUOTidianⁱ: 1556 year^s d^op_o la prim^a inVasion^e ℜeal^e VANDAL^s rëtUrn^o a Roma & GENEᖈal strike || ¢ first rain in Rome since Cy Twombly died two months ago [ ... ]

€ SuSSex ii: flâneuring gothic musings on Gogol, Dead Souls, book burning, suicide, Woolf, Paine, Cave & Banksy

«What he liked was not what he was reading, but rather, the reading itself, or, better said, the actual process of reading, the fact that out of the letters some word would always emerge, sometimes meaning the Devil only knew what.» ... & then when he finishes it, supposedly he torched it anew, page by page! & then the day after, he refused food. less than two weeks later he died. [ ... ]

€ suSSex i: an Atrocity Exhibition in Brighton reading Ballard whilst contemplating suicide

... he aggregated and recapitulated, woven with his warped sensibilities into a juggernaut of sex, celebrities, assassination, cosmetic surgery, car crashes & the intersections thereof. «As his own identity faded, its last fragments glimmered across the darkening landscape, lost integers in a hundred computer codes, sand-grains on a thousand beaches, fillings in a million mouths.» [ ... ]

€ ARK CODEX 0:5:4, . . . ., 0:5:9 [^qu∀si FiN^it∃ ^w/AVEc ^<SH'ARK FiN [MAR^red]s⁰up]]
[ ... ]

€ spatio-temporal atomicity & Henri Bergson [& the language of our articulation]

... & again [call me glamoured]—what strikes me most is not the verdict but that we as humans would even conduct such an experiment & then articulate the results in such a disciplined—almost ritualistic—fashion | whenever i see writings like this i can't help but to imagine what it would seem like to aliens who discover our planet after we have annihilated ourselves—especially if this [ ... ]

€ Neapolitan baroque shambles, graffiti-fresco raunch, meandering mosaics & uncensored satyrs: reading Queneau basking in the trashy lo-brow camp

... the thing is i don't think most Neapolitans give a shit & don't give a shit if you give a shit. they are the honey badgers of italy [...] perhaps the above explains how the satyr came to be in the first place—lonely goatherders getting frisky with their goats & [ ... ]

€ Quotidian Quarterflashes Q2.11: past communiqui retrofite con correspondent $tring $equences

... beautiful tiny tropical island but it didn't matter because invited participants weren't allowed to leave the windowless conference center. messages were coded & relayed in a special 1-to-1 language where the more non-intended recipients of the language learned, the less valid the language became—if someone that wasn't the intended recipient [me] was able to decipher or translate [ ... ]

€ Ark as Anima Vessel in Conquest of the Useless: peering into Hearts of Darkness w/a sisyphean Kon-Tiki-torch

... into the bowels of the ship to dissect it. a big smoky, oil-spitting monster. & being the skinny-wristed person i am, i was delegated to stick my hands into the hot oily guts of the gearbox & figure out what was wrong. i pulled out a few chards of broken metal & some loose ball-bearings which ended up being the remains of the reverse thrust bearing. No worries. Who needs reverse anyway? [ ... ]

€ Kenya redux IV: bioverse of Musevi & Kyanika co-ops, Kamba grain-grinding, Kwanini?s & the final malarial stretch of the Kenyan marathon

... whereas in Tanzania everyone called me Chuck Norris, everyone in Kenya has been calling me Jesus [followed by a: «he's come again!»], to which i'd just spread my arms in crucifix pose. apparently i'm badly in need of a shave & a haircut. & being Jesus [ ... ]

€ Kenya redux III: No Room on the Ark in Kitui & the nouveau roman [alla Robbe-Grillet]

... they lazily bide the days away, in some tropical/colonial setting, in the heat, drinking gin, with servants to wait on them. there is talk of a long drive into the nearest town, but it is vague & speculative & the way it is rehearsed over & over you wonder whether it is a planned escapade, the suspected lovers rehearsing their story to tell after the fact, or something that already happened [ ... ]

€ Kenya redux II: animal & language origin study [a safari on Noam's ark]

... or that they might mimic morphemes, but have no capacity for syntax or processing language. when you talk about the origins of language, the elephant in the room is talk of the difference between humans & other animals [with an underlying resonance tethered to the evolution vs. creationism debate]. as far as i'm concerned anyone that thinks a different set of scientific laws applies to [ ... ]

€ Kenya redux I: resignation, reading Disgrace & reuniting with ruminants & the collective anima'L

...he heard his dogs barking one night & went out to check, buck naked & only holding a candle & this «obscene & vile creature» as i think he called it, came at him snarling & snapping it's teeth & he dropped the candle & jumped in the back of a pickup truck at which point the honey badger circled the truck for two hours until his dogs got their courage back to chase it away. [ ... ]

€ un altro Foglio di Otto da Codice Arca [ARK CODEX 0:2:38 — 0:2:45] [ ... ]

€ Sicilian Easter II [central]: ruins & ruminants, catacombs, spelunking my gracilis & Graves' I, Claudius

... i let these agriturismo sick children get under my skin & infect me. & i've never broken anything in my body [fingers & toes don't count as you can never be sure with digits] but here i was limping around, coughing, snot streaming from from my nose—a pathetic sight. i would've never imagined that you can bruise without even physically hitting anything, but this is what was happening to [ ... ]

€ Sicilian Easter I [west]: Good Friday Processions in Trapani & Erice

... a tradition that hasn't changed much over the years, except members of the procession used to wear hoods [much like the ones the KKK have since bastardized] to conceal their identities when repenting [a tradition banned in the 60s so mafia members couldn't hide from the police, but now legal again, at least in Corleone [yes, the Corleone of Godfather fame]] & some used to flagellate [ ... ]

€ Beinecke MS 408 pt II: Roman artichokes, authorship, phyllotaxis, Serafini & seed-hunting in the name of Noah

... & since the golden ratio is an approximation to the ratio between successive Fibonacci numbers, having plants that put out leaves using this spiraling arrangement of successive Fibonacci numbers [in opposing direction], leads to optimal spacing of leaves along the stalk of the plant, minimizing overlap of leaves & thus allowing for maximum sunlight & photosynthesis. [ ... ]

€ The Voynich Manuscript [a.k.a. Beinecke MS 408] pt I: searching for meaning is the meaning

... of humans being invented by plants to spread their seeds, i declare that Beinecke MS 408 is a sort of transcription of the genetic code of the plants it illustrates, real or not. i can speculate that a nameless author channeled the information from these plants, either by deep introspection, or perhaps even by ingesting them & writing under their influence, & no one can prove otherwise. [ ... ]

€ Quarterflash [Q1 2011]: |ˈkwôrtər ˌˈfla sh|: Quarterly accumulation of 5¢ daily flashes

This binding activity of the tongue and of language was especially fascinating to Roman poets who were the near-contemporaries of some of the historians discussed herein: The she-wolf's animal tongue shapes and, in shaping, learns and tells. These ancient poets dwell, therefore, on the meaning of the she-wolf's tongue for both Rome and their own linguistic craft. By dwelling on [ ... ]

€ ARK CODEX 0:2: midway _PROgreS.S.^ion _REPort mar^CH 2011
  [ ... ]

€ economy of words VII: casalingoist eating calamari & beans in the leaning tower of eBabel

this is where i've settled, like a barnacle [not far off from the mollusca phylum] whose life as a free-swimming organism is over & i've meta-morphed, attached myself to a rock, digested my own brain & grown a thick shell resistant to being trampled upon. i'm always at a loss as to what to put down on my tax return as a profession. «barnacle» entered my mind, but this year i put «casalingoist»— [ ... ]

€ भारत III field notes: Jaipur, shit, piss, temple monkeys, Upanishads, filth & squalor

«There is no joy in the infinite, there is joy only in the infinite.» juxtaposed with Conrad's Heart of Darkness: «There is no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.» & then back to the Katha Upanishad: «As the sun, who is the eye of the world, cannot be tainted by the defects in our eyes or by the objects it looks on, so the one Self, dwelling in all, cannot Be tainted by the evils of the world.» [ ... ]

€ भारत II field notes: Agra, animal husbandry, Taj Mahal, The Imperfectionists & Fatepuhr Sikri

... one of those things you see just to verify (for yourself) that it indeed exists... this way you could be sure to reach our destination as it seems whenever you get into a rickshaw or tuk-tuk here they insist on taking you elsewhere ... all sorts of animals & motorized contraptions sharing the road, sometimes coming at you on the wrong side of the road (which in India is the right side (& right [ ... ]

€ भारत I field/book notes & habits of despair: Delhi dash reading Camus & Consilience

what good is this theory of Consilience if you can't eat it or use it as a contraceptive? ... you metroed again to old Delhi & lost yourself. then found yourself thanks to a rickshaw ... at times feeling detached, floating, out of body, losing yourself to the filth & chaos ... to add to the list of hawker wares of Flash disks, hashish & dick massages, there's the guys with Q-tips wanting to clean your ears [ ... ]

€ [5 +1] page excerpt from ARK CODEX 0:1
[ ... ]

€ ringing in the decade reading Darwin & cliff-clinging on the Amalfi coast

if you think in terms of human evolution it's interesting to consider. when i'm in Amalfi or these hilltop towns all over Italy i always think it's crazy in terms of natural selection. if you are logical & only consider survival then it makes no sense, having to cultivate crops on the side of a cliff. or going out of your way to build cities on mountaintops instead of in the valleys below like most [ ... ]

€ roadtripping Italy heel to toe: Puglia to Calabria via Basilicata to round out the 00s

after being lost in the hills & arriving in the dark we weren't sure we'd found the right place so we tentatively walked into this cold & dark farmhouse that seemed abandoned until we saw three bundled figures huddled near a fire eating a huge plate of tangerines. the guy was staring into the fire in deep contemplation & when he heard us he just looked at us like what the fuck. but perhaps this [ ... ]

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