December 2012

¢ After seven years of these almost daily tweet-like quotidian flashes, this will be the final one (though i will continue the longer form, macro blogjects). This, i write from the micro island of Gili Air near Lombok, Indonesia. New Years day we begin our long journey back to America .. a day by boat back to Bali & then a 36-hour air journey (via Singapore & London) back to NYC .... for good.

¢ Shifting to another smaller island (Gili Air) this morning, probably won't be on the net much for the rest of 2012.

¢ Merman purging character type over Mussolini's typewriter (from the book where birds are the words):

¢ «....weighty words were spoken to me / about my future life, although I feel that I am / foursquare and solid in the face of chance's blows. / Therefore, my desire would be satisfied / if I could hear what kind of fortune is drawing near me; / for an arrow foreseen arrives mrore slowly.»—Dante, Paradise

¢ By & by, intuit us that our body-cavety multaplying in such stilted sleep-ticks becomes 0001 kernel in 0030 the size of queen-mother whole .... befor we, en masse, make muck of her body-cum-corpse like a frenzyed bunch a carniverus coons. Still not kumtux keep us in our collecting hêd-charge of alt 0030 cuppled bodys that partake vec us pack-wise in such x-mas eve undertakeing .. each rackoon takeing them share unasked .. each coon baptized vec such a communel mother tongue .... furtherring to spill halos high to a decked sea o holes.

¢ Xmas eve/anniversary dinner, barefoot on the beach .. xmas morning at crack of dawn, chasing dolphins & snorkeling.

¢ Islamist fundamentalists have banned music in the areas they control in northern Mali, including Timbuktu & Ali Farka Toure's hometown, Niafunke. «They're even confiscating mobile phones and replacing ringtones with Koranic verses». Someone needs to lasso these guys & tie them up in the desert sandwiched between stacks of Marshall Amps blaring Farka Toure until their ears bleed or their heads explode.

¢ On the north shore of Bali now, doing a whole lot of nothing.

¢ Forgot what i was going to say .... which are the best things to say.

¢ December 21, 2012 & the world is still here. Then again, it's still December 20th in Mayan time zones. In any event, happy winter solstice.

¢ Last time i took an outside garden shower was in Nicaragua, when as i was lathering my hair eyes closed a scorpion scampered up my inner thigh.

¢ In bliss of Bali, Ubud. Maybe it's just because we are coming from the hell of Timor, but feels pure paradise .... everything in its right place .. the sound of geckos & frogs & birds at sunrise, distant roosters & gamelan music & some old man chanting/singing .. always the smell of frangipani & sticky rice & cloves, all perfectly balanced & civilized.

¢ Thinking these quotidian will come to an end at the end of this year .. so 13 more of these daily flashes .... unless you're going off the Mayan calendar, in which case only 3 more days. Today's quotidian is that we're Bali bound.

¢ Funny how CNN & others call that kid socially awkward because he «doesn't even have a facebook page» or that he didn't like to have his photo taken. As his brother said (when they wrongly identified him as the killer): «Fuck CNN» .. they are as much to blame for these things .. & these things will continue to happen given our current journalistic climate.

¢ All the people who have done daring & amazing things, like first to free-solo difficult unnamed mountains, with no photographers or journalists along to report on it or prove it.

¢ What is going on in America.

¢ If you think patting your head & rubbing your stomach at the same time is hard, try writing with both hands in two different languages (while translating) at the same time.

¢ In regards to West of Kingdom Come (being, in reality, as far east as we'll be for now)—can't shake this lost cancerous dog trailing me, ballooning holes from the inside out, fractaling cell by cell, fleshed out just to decompose in tandem to ever-evolving words (33,027 worth) refusing to be leashed for the sake of our undead ancestors on days of future passed.

¢ Finally got a hold of the video they made of j for the Carasso prize event, with footage of our last days in Rome:

¢ One of the first ones in the world to say it's 12/12/12. The rest of you (except Japan, east OZ, NZ & PNG) are still sleeping. And apparently the night before i slept through a 7.1 earthquake without waking.

¢ J is off again in the field south of here for a few days, but this time there was no room for me in the truck, so it's the doghouse of Dili for me.

¢ You Are What You Eat by Matthew Cusick:

¢ Lian ida deit la to'o.

¢ «Thus, cavemen were more keenly aware of the slower motion of their prey animals and illustrated quadruped walking more precisely than later artists.»

¢ «You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. [...] These fragments I have shored against my ruins.»—The Waste Land

¢ Com ça, our vox comes shucked to klap ox milk laced vec comet grit .. isshoeing fur to coat our tongue cum quabit cats .. to comb all cozy & free (taking cat got our tongue to the grave of fourfathers).

¢ «If  philosophy is essentially a meditation on language, it will not succeed in removing the obstacle that the specialization and fragmentation of the world opposes to universality. To accept the universe of language as the absolute horizon of philosophical thought in fact amounts to accepting the fragmentation and the illusion of communication—for the truth of our world is that there are as many languages as there are communities, activities or kinds of knowledge. I agree that there is a multiplicity of language games. This however, forces philosophy—if it wants to preserve the desire for universality—to establish itself elsewhere than within this multiplicity, so as not to be exclusively subordinated to it. If not, philosophy will become what in one way it mostly is, an infinite description of the multiplicity of language games.»—Badiou, Infinite Thought

¢ Back in Dili in one piece. And despite some sort of supertyphoon north of here, no rains yet in Timor Leste.

¢ Going to «the field» tomorrow morning, which means who knows where we'll lay our heads to sleep .... likely with headhunters or something. And i don't mean people that will find us jobs.

¢ «The best part about life was the part that happened when nobody was watching.»—The People Who Watched Her Pass By by Scott Bradfield

¢ End of the line in Timor Leste—our home away from home (not that we have one) for the next 43 days.

¢ Pineal gland pegged .. & 1 or 2 more time zones to go.

November 2012

¢ «It seemed the world had not decided she was a destination; she was only part of the scenery. She had no address, and she produced nothing, so the world had no use for her. She was of no use to the world but she found the world very useful indeed. Without the world, she thought, what would I have to look at?»—Miranda Mellis, from None of This Is Real

¢ Belly burning from eating hot curry in little India, in Singapore.

¢ Size does matter (in regards to border collie word comprehension). And so does texture (in long term retention).

¢ Isidore Isou: «Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form» & «No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it» & «I'd rather have my new distaste than the old distasteful taste».

¢ Just saw this again in the flesh:

¢ «He who reads & walks a lot, sees & knows a lot.»—Don Quixote

¢ Staying in some random student dormitory in Madrid. Smells funny, like cigarettes & potato chips, or worse. Here & the hotel in Barcelona, never have i heard such the inner workings of buildings, water & sewage gushing & sloshing all in the guts. You can almost taste what everyone else has been eating.

¢ Just when i was wondering whether the Spanish would be offended (like Italians are) if i ran with no shirt, i see a guy doing yoga buck naked.

¢ «Me parece que el traducir de una lengua en otra, como no sea de las reinas de las lenguas griega y latina, es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés, que aunque se ven las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las oscurecen y no se ven con la lisura y tez de la haz.»—Don Quixote

¢ Oh & i guess it's also thanksgiving, though we are not likely to find turkey in these parts, so will likely be eating swine. And watching flamenco instead of football.

¢ Barcelona on my birthday. Es tu cumpleaños también.

¢ Running in Central Park, a guy calling his dog Taxi. Another woman yelling at a runner because her dog was following him.

¢ «Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free? Desperately in need .. of some .. stranger's hand, in a .... desperate land. Lost in a Roman .. wilderness of pain .. & all the children are insane. Waiting for the summer rain. There's danger on the edge of town. Ride the king's highway. Weird scenes inside the gold mine. Ride the highway west, baby. Ride the snake. Ride the snake .. to the lake .... the ancient lake. The snake he's long .. seven miles. Ride the snake. He's old .. & his skin is cold. The west is the best.»—Mr. Mojo Risin

¢ «Hasta la muerte, todo es vida.»—Don Quixote

¢ Kumtux become us (in kind) stocked to not fixate trope-plenty on such randum acts of muck .. that in a tide to come, ever keep us a muck-itch to feed reguardless. So 01 grub in 0010 intuit us (via Pine-Moth Re) to keep alife (albeit, vec a tracer implant) .. so stet surviving grub cockoons to moth, to make sky & lay eggs elsewear in sum bark of else-pine. To recapitulet more grubs, we then muck to grub-cakes alt 03 of 0010 & so forth .... everlastick till kingdum comes.

¢ «The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge.»—Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.

¢ While running along the river (in the wake of Sandy), it occurred to me that the Finnegan in Finnegans Wake conjures the meaning of 'to end again,' which make sense being as the beginning sentence fragment completes the last sentence fragment. Also interesting is the missing apostrophe, which implies a generational stream of multiple Finnegans with no beginning or end. And 'wake' also implies both waking up & also the wake after death or after a boat passes. The reason i was thinking about this was i was thinking i didn't like the title much, but now thinking about it i do.

¢ Action Yes kindly posted 4 pages from Ark Codex in their new issue. If you look carefully at the first one, i am standing there holding an umbrella in the Coliseum in Rome, before we lived there. Not that that's what it's about .... like anything else, it gets reduced to a display of information.

¢ Back in America. Not quite for good yet, but feels good.

¢ Last days in Rome spent filming with this guy, visiting our old haunts & friends, so already like we are in past tense. Strange way to say goodbye.

¢ Sir David Attenborough picks 10 animals he would take on his ark.

¢ Other half back from from Abyssinia in one piece now. Two more days caput mundi.

¢ And also this, our visit with Mama Obama in Kenya, days after he was first elected.

¢ It bears repeating: «it wasn't a dream, it was a flood».

¢ And when asked how i like my coffee, i answered, «like my president».

¢ Ended up spending the night way on the other side of Rome, away from media influence, so forgot all about the elections until j texted me a message with 22 o's in it. Getting there & back traversed basically every neighborhood of Rome by foot, tram & the back of L's motorino.

¢ «A great stride in the development on the intellect will have followed, as soon as the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use, for the contued use of language will have reacted on the brain and produced an inherited effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language.»—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.

¢ «The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.»—1000 Plateaus.

¢ Thinking it butter to let good (± bæd) links slep. Comes like a switch-bored operator disconnecting lopped line-in-s in order to patch out sum+ news reel-time (that witch is induiced by lupine crossed wires). Pretty much everthing becomes allready arbitrary inaway (xcept anima lines).

¢ The opening section of the first book of West of Kingdom Come is in the new elimae, which sadly is the last issue after some 16 years. This is the first excerpt published from West of Kingdom Come & i can't think of a better place for these words to be.

¢ Back from Palermo with a belly full of sea urchin—in Rome, Monteverde, though j's off back to Ethiopia.

October 2012

¢ Officially moved out, not without drama. Now we've shifted further south, but still in Trastevere. Tomorrow morning going to Palermo for a spell & i don't think i'm bringing a computer.

¢ «Quod scripsi, scripsi.»—Pontius Pilate

¢ Ran out on Appian way (route IV here) for the last time, thru Porta Appia, the image i ended my just-posted last dispatch from Rome on. Tomrrow the movers come.

¢ The sound of seagulls in the darknest of mourning might not otherwise come to mind of Rome. What they harbor no one remembers.

¢ Harvested the last of our jalapeños & basil from the garden & cooked up the last of our food .... the last home-cooked meal we'll have for the next 3 months.

¢ 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, wires running every which way charging our machines. Can live like this for the next 5 days anyway.

¢ Jess reflects on our last days in Rome & the merits of staying in motion.

¢ The story behind our Unkown Pleasures tat.

¢ 7 Italian scientists convicted for not predicting the L'Aquila earthquake? Italy can go fuck itself. It may as well just abandon science altogether & go back to auguring & witches. And speaking of auguring .. did i mention the starlings are back for the 2012 season? Not quite in full force & not quite murmurating, but they're gathering steam.

¢ «There are many other features in the head that help us become exceptional long-distance walkers and runners. I became obsessed with the idea that humans evolved to run long distances, evolved to walk long distances, basically evolved to use our bodies as athletes. These traces are there in our heads along with those brains.»—Daniel Lieberman in conversation on Edge.org.

¢ My sunday Appia Antica run was thwarted by some sort of hunger run, so instead i came up with a new route to add to my Rome running routes: start across the English bridge up past circo massimo (or if you want some hillage, detour up the Aventino), at FAO turn right & run down the middle of viale Aventino on the tram tracks (room enough to pass if one does come along), past the pyramid near where Keats is buried, down via Ostiense, past the Montemartini museum (see below) & the gasometro cylindrical shells & St. Paul's (largest cathedral in Rome after St. Peter's) then cross back over the Tiber (some nasoni for water along the route, including one just before the bridge) & then back along the river, past a new pedestrian bridge that looks within days of being opened (in which case you'll be able to run straight over to the gasometri). And speaking of the Montemartini museum, it's a secret gem of Roman museums, containing a bunch of marble statues they couldn't fit in the Capitoline museum so they housed them in an old electrical power plant—a fine marriage of marble & steel. Not sure if i ever posted any pics from it here, but here's one:

¢ Home in Rome for our last 10 days here. Read The Day of Creation waiting in airports & flying over east Africa—classic Ballard, set in the desert of central Africa. The protagonist, Dr. Mal, abandons his failing WHO clinic & «invents» a river, the third nile, then in Heart of Darkness fashion he follows it upstream, with a 12-year old haughty native nymph & a blind filmmaker, to the river's source so he can destroy what he created.

¢ I've definitely spent more time in Addis airport than any other airport i can think of. It's bringing back memories of when i spent the night here one of my last days living in Africa. Except this time there's hordes of pilgrims en route to Mecca.

¢ Reversing nyuma, polepole, Dar to a long Addis layover & poi di nuovo a Roma. Get back Jojo, back to where you once belonged.

¢ Molting rinds of ghost bodes we lick & lavash to feel pack-wise, parting flesh in kind, licking what radickal grit lashes in backwater creases, that trickt not comes même tongue to tickle, if not reach .. hole the while, new world monkey jacked on cocktails churning & turning the handle of oregon grinder in machiavellian accumpiement.

¢ On this morning's run: a pack of a dozen men in civilian clothes caning & kicking the shit out of some guy & a bus tire spontaneously catching fire.

¢ Nyuma katika Dar es Salaam.

¢ In a place called Mikindani, in southern Tanzania. Been underwater mostly the past few days.

¢ For the fourth day in a row, tomorrow morning catching an early morning flight, this time solo (i'm going ahead of j by a day to equilibrate for diving), further south in Tanzania almost to the border of Mozambique. Doubtful i'll have internet there.

¢ Free wifi in Addis airport. Headed to Tanzania, Dar. Feel like this is Cal A. Mari tracking device.

¢ «When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand.»—J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, which i just read on a plane back from Lalibela. I'll have more to say about the book & place soon, in the meantimes there's this:

¢ Drinking strong Ethiopian coffee in Addis, after sleepless overnight flight.

¢ «There are so very few things that happen for no reason, unscheduled, unpremeditated. We should respect them.»—Corrado Alvaro, from a story in Rome Tales, which besides this & stories by Pasolini, Igiaba Scego & Alberto Moravia, the collection was fairly dull & mainstream.

¢ Not in full glory yet, but the starlings are arriving in droves to Rome. Let the 2012 season begin.

¢ «December 1960. Once in a while I come across someone who more or less obliquely reproaches me for having collaborated, in La dolce vita, in portraying Rome as a den of vice. Odd, because I think just the opposite. I'd like to answer these people in the words of my friend Frassineti: 'There is a form of madness which consists in the loss of everything except reason.' In other words: is it my fault if Vice in Rome so soon becomes rational and utilitarian? And if, not being nourished by passion, it becomes solely a hollow fact, a custom, a source of gratification, a fashion. It seems to me that one of the reasons, perhaps the chief one, which prevents Rome from becoming a city of great vices is its profoundly family-oriented nature, even in corruption. This trait stems from its being an agglomeration of large villages, horrible towards the periphery, all clustered around the ancient nucleus. Villages inhabited by migrants of the first or second generation who have preserved their provincial habits and customs. So in Rome every great 'vice' takes on the form of a leisure pursuit which once the initial curiosity is past grows tedious. None more picky than the provincial in the matter of vices: not one of them agrees with him, he ends up finding them all ridiculous or expensive, not forgetting they're bad for his health. »—Ennio Flaiano, Via Veneto Papers.

¢ «The network has a structure, and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everyting is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.»—James Gleick, from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, which i just finished & highly recommend, though this recommendation likely comes as a stone dropped without a splash.

¢ «He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book.»—John Donne.

¢ «The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.»—Terence McKenna

¢ Kumtux become us to not fix trope-plenty on such muck.. that in a tide to come we ever keep a muck-itch to feed reguardless. So 01 grub in 0010 intuit us (via Pine-Moth Re) to keep living (albeit, vec a tracer implant), so stet surviving grub can cockoon to a moth, to make sky & lay eggs elsewhere in bark of else-pine.... to mamook more grubs that we then make can muck of huloima 03 of 0010 & so forth.

¢ Cockchafer Larvae Smell Host Root Scents in Soil. And also, Catapulting Tentacles in a Sticky Carnivorous Plant.

¢ A world where, in the interest of jet lag & perceived time loss, all planes fly only west.

¢ Back «home» in Rome—the last month we'll be calling it home & even then we will only be here half the time. Still processing Cambodia trip, but for now there's this:

2012: Q4 | Q3 | Q2 | Q1 | Quotidian Feed

2011: Q4 | Q3 | Q2 | Q1 | Quotidian Feed

2010: Q4 | Q3 | Q2 | Q1 | Quotidian Feed

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