pre-subjects, radiant blood bodies, Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil has been writing for the Harriet blog. Recently this month, some amazing posts about chemical stories in the abyss and how she feels like wet meat slipping from a table and, simultaneously, a butcher. Today I was informed that she did a prereading and reading of my Paul Thek book! I feel like a flying pig, I am honored.

An excerpt:

“What comes: the image of a horse galloping, very fast, and it’s face/muzzle splits down the middle.  So that a horse blood outline is now galloping in place.  Blood, that is, in the shape of a horse: its membrane a curing: a way for the blood to have surface tension without clotting.  The blood is turning black as I look.  There is a quality of revolution and if I look behind the horse, to where it’s come from, there is someone lying on the floor.  The floor is a low-grade paper.  Or like outer space grey.  The person lying on the floor has been damaged—their wings are thin and oily, like torn lengths of skin.  There is a lot of bleeding in this image too: but also regeneration.  (This is palmistry.)  I see that the lower half of the body is a hand and the upper part is a non-human structure with human features.  An angel?  The body of an angel merges with a person’s hand, but also, it could be that the person’s hand is inside it.  The angel.  Now I look more closely and the blood leaving the angel’s body is black.”

Okay, now I will open the book:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/how-to-read/

Thank you, Bhanu,

glittering mermaid with hair on fire.

Book Review: Butcher's Tree by Feng Sun Chen

Reblogged from This Is the Title of My Blog:

If, as Iris Murdoch may have said, "philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious," perhaps poetry is often a matter of creating opportunities to mention our common, everyday experiences. As in Feng Sun Chen's "Concerning Nothing," whose seven sections each begin with an abstraction, which is then torn through until the emotion giving blood to the thought is exposed:

Read more… 1,538 more words

Book Review: Butcher's Tree by Feng Sun Chen. Hey! Someone was kind enough to write a review of my first book book. It's smart and full of philosophy and math. Justin also has lots of other great review to read on his blog. Thank you, Justin, for swimming in the broth of my butchery.

LOOK AT ME I”M ON A BUS

I am indeed, dique, on my way to Chicago now. My feet are damp and sweaty, and I have slept while sitting upright with open mouth and microbes festering in my mouth.

Among the things I will do: think about tinglyness and thinglyness.

Goth Club Reading: 10 PM / NEO @ 2350 N. CLARK, CHICAGO / NEW WAVE + 80′S DANCE PARTY UNTIL 4 AM Thursday

THE LEGION (with Black Ocean) 1354 W. Wabansia Chicago, IL 60642 Friday (9PM)

 

RED ROVER: 7-11:30pm
TABLE X/Y CACOPHONY:

Writers from 32 small presses
read simultaneously in one space!
Full details at 
https://www.facebook.com/events/221605691264245/

and attending lots of other readings by awesome people! If I don’t get lost.

Books I will be reading / giving away / selling:

butcher’s tree w/ Black Ocean: new excerpt here: 
http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/03/feng-sun-chen.html

• I will sitting at the BO booth on Saturday for an author signing I think

blud (um, where are my copies? spork press, I’m coming after you) 
http://sporkpress.com/sporkblog/?p=2805

I forgot my Ugly Fishies so I guess I won’t be reading from that :( But it’s available as a free download now! Just click on the picture of the larynx on the right sidebar.

pockmarks of the internet

Blogs are like popped zits that reform. Since facebook became a direct drip applied to our veins, the face of the internet has more pockmarks and fewer fresh zits. That’s ok. It can be attractive. Like Skrillex’s face. Skrillex reminds me of an ex. He was the first one that was kind of good to me.

Squeezing out pus from my face in front of a mirror is calming. I used to do this more frequently, when I was younger and had much more anxiety. Now I do it every few days. More often, I casually pick at it before showering.

Getting the sebum out. Does this analogy work with the way blogs are also “platforms” for marketing? Facebook is the ultimate landscape of a billion huge whiteheads, flowing in sync… I guess it doesn’t work. Sebum says little about hypertext and digital synapses. On another note, I’m also annoyed and tired of how so many arguments about ANYTHING is gets integrated into the fiction/reality of the market. Everything I do can be called marketing, sure. Nothing escapes capitalist exchange, not even love, sure. It touches everything. Maybe. But I don’t think it is productive to wallow this way and certainly doesn’t help us understand desire any better and most of all it does nothing to undermine it.

Anyway. So did I already post a link to claudius app? http://theclaudiusapp.com/ There it is. The splash is really cool, really dynamic popping the stuff ia all over the screen.

Yet the internet is so… un-oily.

I recently ordered a book about Chinese mythology. I am waiting to read more deeply about Nuwa, the creation goddess, and how the world was created through snake-gods this way:

I’m still thinking about the N Djurberg video of the masked/masking snakes, which were creation gods by pageantry and not by heterosexual reproduction. I very briefly wrote about it here http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2542

The snakes come out of holes and wear masks over their wounds, inflicted by an orgy of biting and wounding. The masks then serve as their faces/eyes.

Becoming reptile:

At least half of what I experience in this world is virtual. I’m half light soup.

Looking forward to AWP!

Secretions

I haven’t posted anything in months. No reason. But I thought I’d put something up today to show that I’m not dead. I’ve managed to squeeze myself into a screenwriting class 2 weeks late, and have been working on “Loglines” for the first assignment. Not surprisingly, my loglines seem to be the kind that will never get sold. But how awesome would it be if I could turn these into actual movies?

LOGLINES

1. MARS VIOLET

Two painters and ex-lovers trapped in a studio for several days during a blizzard begin hallucinating together, to potentially violent, passionate ends.

2. MINOS

Introverted schoolgirl who can see into the underworld befriends a jaded but brilliant teenager in trouble with drug lords and gets dragged into the fray.

3. MASTER APHRODITE

A modern per-version of the venomous love triangle of Aphrodite, Eros, and Psyche  leading to the suicide of two children, set in a summer camp.

4. MEAT FAIRY

A lonely fast-food worker grows pathologically attached to the food products he makes, believing them to be sentient; meanwhile, a meat packer dies in a meat packing factory.

In other news, I have an interview at Radioactive Moat (Ugly Fish is now a free download!), and my book, Butcher’s Tree, is now available for preorder. It ships right after AWP. Speaking of which, I will be doing a book signing on Saturday at the Black Ocean zone. I will, however, be reading at 2 readings, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night will be a strange affair inside bathroom stalls with Lara Glenum, Lucas de Lima, Johannes Gorranson, Kate Durbin, and other strange people at a location TBD (because I don’t know where, and I’m hoping it’s off site so I can actually do it) and Friday (I think!) will be a Black Ocean reading with my awesome Black Oceanographers. Details to come.  Why is this year’s AWP sold out? Has there suddenly been a population explosion of avid poets and writers? Tough times call for feeble literary types?

I’ve also been reading this http://www.scribd.com/doc/42995065/PONGE-Nature-Things book by a french poet, Ponge, who loves snails and talking about pebbles. The one line that sticks out to me regards the secretion of humans, and this secretion is not like/unlike the creation of shells by mollusks, but rather than calcium, we secrete language.

Finally, I never thought I would like a show like Downton Abbey. But I am getting old, and historical dramapics are becoming more and more interesting to my wrinkling mind.

Also, looking forward to the birth of my book. Look at this amazing cover design! Thanks to Janaka Stucky and Josh Wallis and all the hot people at Black Ocean for this:

Cover Image

beans and space, swine-wed

Beans are a recurring motif in my writing and picture making these days. Also, the new cat farts like no cat I have ever been farted at by.

Lines of repetition make my life venetian blind and I’ve been bumping into things a lot. I finally read (sort of) or re-read Pound’s Canto I and found the word “swine-wed” (misread from wine-red?)very marriageable. The parts I like are the kennel things all over the piles of language:

lynx-purr (I just mistyped that as lynx-puff)

eye-glitter

pad-foot

green-ruddy

etc.

and somewhere in my reading came across “human bean” but can’t retrieve it… apparently it is also a coffee house…

While loathingly working on my project in animating the infamous late Gu Cheng, came across a quote on Jackie Wang’s website through which the drumbeat of his name tumbled and in my experience her ballerinas dance with machine guns has really been a place of strong energy transfer and then of course,

To write my poems,” Khanan Zhuai remembered, “I listened to everything.” He continued: “I would go into the rainforest and sit for hours to listen to the trees and the birds that live on different branches of the trees. I used the sounds of different birds to convey human emotions. For instance, the cry of the cuckoo, gu? gu! gu? gu!, is heartbreaking, and I use it to stand for human suffering.
— Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders

—

I found this poor dead bird on the way to campus and it was clean and soft and yellow, but it wasn’t decomposing because it was on cement, so I took it home. I plan to bury it. Right now the bird spirit is in the fridge inside a tea box.

—

Gu came to me again in a dream. When my friends ignore me, I slap dreams in their faces.
Little do you know that only in dream are you not in exile.
It is where I have loved you and the cry of the cuckoo
I could say that the cancer that falls off the bird is a journey towards perfection
that now the bird is perfect
but I don’t tell the truth nor does the truth tell me.

—

It is 11 degrees out. Celcius. I think. I’m not going anywhere. Also, David Lynch twated:

I truly believe there is a field of peace within & that it can be enlivened & brought to the surface to be enjoyed by all.

Dear Twitter Friends pls check this out: Have We Overlooked the Most Effective Way to Prevent Terrorism & War? huff.to/qZtFYZ

—

What is this UNIFIED FIELD of sacred bulls pooping?

I believe that we are all a part of the unified field of insanity, made flesh, the uniform field of fog-o-war and fog-o-war and poetry. I enjoyed this comment to the article… it’s probably my favorite part actually:

englishman545

47 Fans

10:47 AM on 9/13/2011

Thanks or the article, but it requires Americans to think beyond their own selves, if it could be accomplished it would be a Miracle in itself.

—

“your self-review is up at WWAATD today:

http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2011/09/13/feng-chen-on-feng-chen/
“

—

hahaHA:

“Pigasus”

I love it!

And friends far away, I miss you all and unite with you in the unified field.

Summer Valentine

a painting I made (or am making, though I don’t think I want to continue with this one):

ACK came in the mail today:

The quality is surprisingly decent.

I also read (on Silliman’s blog) that 200 million americans want to publish a book. People complain that there is a lack of seriousness in self-publishing.

Perhaps that is true. But I am very serious about my unseriousness.

Been reading a lot of Doris (see above picture), which I purchased on a whim from Mayday Books. Makes me sad I missed out on the zine movement. I also got a Ken Dahl book (for Pony). He says that zines are now left for the amusement of sheltered bourgie somethings. Like me.

Watch out.

I have been thinking about phobias, exposure therapy, and art. I have trypophobia (of clusters of holes, and flesh bumps, or clusters in general. it’s hard to describe). Yayoi Kusawa has visions of polka dots taking over the world, overwhelming her, obliterating her. Sometimes I worry about the power of “art”, which comes from the ideology around it, and its ability to dilute, distort, and glorify terrible things. It can be very amoral. Beauty is. So I painted a cluster of flesh wounds in my painting for myself, so I am reminded that what I make is something terrible. I am curious about whether or not, if I keep doing it, it will lose its terrifying quality.  I also wrote little prose things concerning this:

i looked in the mirror and discovered my taste buds. i thought that they looked abnormally large, though i have not seen another’s person’s taste buds for comparison. the more i scrutinized, the more they seemed like little flesh sacks stuck to my pink lingual muscle. clusters of pale flesh pustules like milky grains of rice sprouting all over the surface of it. i stuck my tongue in and out between my teeth. the long white buds were like insect eggs on a leaf. any moment now they could give birth. in the dream, i regarded these little egg sacks with utter neutrality. upon awakening, the image awoke with me. fear and disgust awoke with me. everything awoke and the things filled my world once again with meaning, and the pustules on my tongue begged to taste meaning in everything, in themselves. they tasted themselves and their white, worm existences. in one of Plath’s poems, one of the first consciousnesses that remembered me, a black gap discloses itself. / on the opposite lip / a small white soul is waving, a small white maggot. my limbs, also, have left me. / who has dismembered us? / the dark is melting. we touch like cripples. (Plath, Event)

Spread, spread, spread that death butter

Read a nice interview at HTMLg with Johannes Gorranson. I’m looking forward to reading his unsustainable new book. Made me think about some things. I share his discomfort with the label “experimental”, which has very strange connotations, (dismissive, I would say), as if this kind of writing has a hypothesis. I guess I kind of like that idea, but people don’t usually realize that many experiments are done for the sake of experiment, not for the sake of its hypothesis or result. Mostly, it’s uncomfortable because it is, as he says, a huge word that says very little. Other than that, the experimental/avant-garde is also no longer possible. The linear idea of progress and new-ness is, on this day and age, backwards. Arriere-garde, however, is relevant. Or derriere-garde, I like to think. Lucas sees the lyric poet as the power bottom.

And the plague of literature (“too much shit is being published”) I think is a very unique plague in that it is extremely proliferative but not quite massively contagious, maybe because capitalism has built-in containment cells and plumbing, which we even build ourselves out of guilt and reflexivity (art is useless) to flush the shit out of sight. You almost have to want to be sick to get sick, because some work is required to actually expose yourself to the gaping wound of “experimental” writing. Poetry especially is already seen by many to be an archaic art, yet I believe it has never been richer, like a huge, dark compost pit. I doubt that there has ever been a time when so many different aesthetics are given their own chance at incubation. There are hundreds of small presses and micro presses. Most people do not know or care about their existence. Being both dead and alive at once is anachronistic (oh yes, I read McSweeney’s The Necropastoral in the bath the other day). You are at once within time and without, historical in more than one sense.

Genre has also become a dirty word because it acts as a container.

Carinna Finn (who has a blog I love) says “…perhaps so many people insist on defining genre in singular, palatable terms because the contagion of multiplicity poses a threat to what James notes above as “the constraining humanist need for ‘voice.” “The Voice,” attached to a body which has a lifespan, can be easily made safe via an act of canonization, like J says — classics are dead. I wonder, then if one can take a sort of fossilized genre and bring it back into a state of becoming through decay, radioactivity.”

I was once told that capitalism is at once the most revolutionary (forward) and anti-revolutionary (backwards) system because it allows for the bacterial/exponential production of “revolutionary” ideas and simultaneously, because it enables so many revolutions/overthrowings, it entails that each has an extremely short lifespan. One always makes way for the next copy. Capitalist existence is a very insectal, vermin, microbial existence.

This year is supposed to be the biggest year for mosquitoes yet. In the spirit of the plague, I have “published” myself on lulu as an experiment in futility and fertility:

Black Ocean Drive

World, poets need to believe that small presses can thrive. Like Black Ocean. Who has given us amazing poets like Aase Berg, my poetry birth mother. And many other awesomes. And for some reason, me. Some poems from an interesting phase in my life will be in next year’s pile.

There are ONLY SEVEN DAYS LEFT to reach the goal of 150 subscribers. This may not happen. But we want to believe it is possible. $50 is like, one trip to the grocery store. Or two fancy meals. Or the continued life of an entire small poetry press:

(taken from the BO blog) Black Ocean’s subscription drive continues! The 50th subscriber will recieve a Black Ocean t-shirt. And all June subscribers recieve a signed, limited-edition hardbound copy of Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords. Subscribe here.

Subscriptions are only $50 (30% off the cover price!) and you will recieve these amazing books:

Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012)
Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012)
Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012)
The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)

In addition, subscriptions ordered before July 1st will receive A SIGNED, LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER COPY OF FJORDS!

hello baby hello kitty

 a poem series for hello baby

hello baby hello kitty