I am So Gory (Greeny) Today

I am So Gory (Greeny) Today

My emotions in tremble, an enzyme in my tail
Whenever this love had been closed in a book of deceptive flashes,
Separated by three seconds of darkness in an invertebrate melodrama,
Just as rainbow that comes in a bad time for the females crawling down the grass,
Even though it's pleases the male displays of antlers and feathers for the eye to see,
Truly, i am so gory (greeny) today, glowing like an adult,
Where am i gonna save my day from the gifts that form coils in a male’s abdomen?
If my gullible legs aren't support me,
And my pulsing hands always say no or yes to nuptial gifts,
I hope Thy less conspicuous flashes for a cry of mine
(conspicuous flashes have bigger gifts),
So my life can go through a extra fog of cheap light and coiled forms,
Like sticky traps equipped with lights that mimic courtship duets
(although if making light is so cheap for males, it seems odd that they have not
all evolved to be more attractive to females) (I think the reason is ideological),
And round up in a dream to the slowly starving blue female’s
Flickering orange rain of bad-tasting chemicals.

stomping

stomping on a bird’s head and slamming another to the ground

a big commotion

Yesterday may 24, 2004 I had said that I don’t think that I want to be in double duch practice any more because of Lashawn is always minding someone’s business. SO Jennifer Bostic went Back & told laShawn what I said and know she don’t like me. So when we were in the locker Room laShawn was looking at me like oh I want to fight you. So then Tiara Simmons came by and she bumped me so I hit her Back and that was when she pushed me into …and she hit me so I hit her back and walked out of the locker Room. The … told her to slap me in my face so she came out and hit me so I hit her back and Fred Perry hit me & said don’t touch her. And it was just a big commotion.

1903 Dance Sisters

rainbow pride

IMG_5017, originally uploaded by Ululate.

I love that there was a rainbow in Manhattan on LGBT Pride Eve. Photo taken at 2nd Ave. and 1st St. yesterday at about 7:30 p.m.

Dance Recital

Safiya of Anahid Sofian's dance company leads us in a bouncy drum solo dance. On the occasion of the celebration of the 30th year of Anahid's studio at Lafayette Grill, 6/26/2009.

I'm in the middle in the teal tanktop, not visible in much of the video, but doesn't Lisa (in yellow, in the foreground) look adorable?

In My Lustrelessness

In my Lustrelessness, norm, form, and function are revealed as blithely editable,then turned into an intonation beyond the irrigated “pirate” mind.

I was sat with a malevolent question… but now I am more or less riotous and bounded, because, well duh, the encounter between spectator-subject and image-object is a process of frivolous interference or mutual indignant mutation! I hope this doesn't sound too confrontational.

Don't know why the passive butterflies still hide in my messy entanglements.

In a story about the traveller and a pencil and the conceptual plenitude of its polychromic dog (can a dog die from eating a firework?), do we cross the ocean just to find a tricked-up fog in the false nature park? Filled with the myriads who lived but never existed in the perverse bricolage?

Will everything become a blur in the afternoon? Can we tell a tiger from a mottled patch of shade in this lambent cacophony?

What a waste to chase the sun in this implausible account of mental life, like homemade fake puke… just as some white people envision breasts as (ontic) white, and go on to associate the latter with white screens.

If love poems are written in pidgin python in my dreams, there is also some polemic in some places, because all imagery is a bad riposte against the predictable triumph of “whimsy.”

Turned inside. Turned inside. Inturned social speech, adult. Vanishes with social speech. Persists, turned inward. Persists, subconscious. Persists primitively. Pragmatic, posits as inner structure. Persists. Persists.

The balloons, singing: that’s the way to party (the fecundity of the unknown in the heart of aberrant intimacy).

I will unite with the easterly wind’s bum schemas and rattle-trap heuristics in the cocky dismissal of my lustrelessness, its impulsive body, the white nose of its prattling excess.

inability

to stop eating cherries

Aren't we just too glamorous?

Lesley Poirier, Mel Nichols, and me.


(Photo was taken with Mel's camera and is therefore her intellectual property. I don't remember who actually snapped it... Julian maybe? or Rodney?)

Contemporary literature is drowning in women's menses.

All of the quotations below are from Flaubert to his (proto-feminist) poet-mistress Louise Colet, entirely decontextualized, and gleaned from Francine du Plessix Gray's Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse. There's much delightful trivia to be found in the book, including the fact that Victor Hugo initially thought that "Gustave Flaubert" was Louise Colet's nom de plume!

I love you precisely because there's very little woman in you, because you have neither their hypocrisy nor their weakness of intellect.

You write verses the way a hen lays eggs.

Don't you feel everything is currently dissolving into the humid element – tears, chatter, breast-feeding. Contemporary literature is drowning in women's menses.

I refuse to look on art as a slop pail for our passions, like a chamber pot barely cleaner than a confidence... No, no! Poetry must not be the foam of the heart...

Your second weakness is that vague feminine "tenderomania." Once arrived to your level of quality, linen cannot smell of milk anymore. So do me a favor... show us your muscles and not your glands.

I'm not made to enjoy life. Happiness is a monstrosity! It punishes all who seek it!

I kiss you on all your lips....I place my finger in a secret place...which is full of your being, and go to sleep on your image, sending you a thousand kisses.

I kiss you everywhere.

Flaubert on Irony

Irony never takes away from pathos. On the contrary, it can enhance it.

Barbara Eden "Spinning Wheel"

This video goes out to Rodney Koeneke and Brandon Downing.

The latest and the greatest

even slower poetry

Can flarf ever be taken seriously?

hmm...

Violet Snails

Photo: Bill Rudman

Violet Snails - Janthina spp.

Order: Sorbeoconcha (Neotaenioglossa)
Superfamily: Janthinoidea
Family: Janthinidae


The Violet Snail, Janthina, with its float of mucus bubbles floating alongside the siphonophore Physalia on which it feeds.

Often washed up on beaches as empty shells, Violet Snails spend their lives floating at the surface of the open ocean, feeding on the Bluebottle Physalia, and related cnidarians. It floats by producing a mass of mucous bubbles which harden into a bubbleplastic-like float.

I suppose there are far worse ways to spend one's days.

the hidden, yet fascinating object Alcibiades believed to be enclosed in the depths of Socrates’ hideous body

agalma


also "a Greek term meaning a glory, an ornament, an offering to the gods, or a little statue of a god"

also "simply the wondrous emptiness at the core of being"

pathetic fallacy vs. anthropomorphism

Somewhere back in 2003, in my mutual interview with Marianne Shaneen, I addressed my predilection for the generally-taboo-in-modernism pathetic fallacy. I wrote:

A world undulating with so many objective correlatives that I can't tell anymore what is "inside" and what is "outside." Yes, this is a kind of pathetic fallacy. But so?

I go on to list a number of examples compiled from science textbooks by an anti-pathetic fallacy science teacher, and characterize the list as a kind of insta-“sought poem.”

Pathetic fallacies are taboo in modernism because they hearken back to primitive mind. If you identify too much with the world and with nature you cannot face it empirically. Pathetic fallacies are a kind of magical thinking (which I tend to oppose in principle, except that I like pathetic fallacies as literary devices, largely because they are taboo). The intellectual problem, I guess, is the way in which pathetic fallacies overlap with anthropomorphism, when animals and objects, instead of just being conceived of as, or fantasized as, emotive or thinking subjects, are attributed specifically with HUMAN emotions, thoughts, values.

I bring this up because last night Gary and I were watching a DVD of an episode of nature focusing on “ugly” animals, including starnose moles, naked mole rats (which, we were interested to learn, are neither moles nor rats), warthogs, monkeys and male sea lions with huge probosces, etc. I had rented it in a search for sensational imagery to use in collage movies.

I found the video disturbing: not for its images, which I really liked, but for the language that infected it. I guess that the audience for such shows is largely children, right? Well, nowhere in the video did the narrator bring up the notion that beauty and ugliness are not universal principles, and especially may not travel across species lines. Instead, the whole thing was rife with a shallow judgmentalism regarding the appearance to (some) humans of these various creatures, and was an exercise in using (inexact) synonyms for ugly: abhorrent, off-putting, disgusting, hideous, etc. Now, I don’t expect a nature show to present all the nuances of a philosophy of aesthetics, but all the same it’s hard for me to believe that the writers couldn’t at least give a NOD to acknowledging the ridiculous and biased anthropomorphism they were perpetuating. This was an opportunity to teach that instead was a shallow kind of anthro-supremacist inculcation: lousy pedagogy.

I’m still steamed up about that, but do intend to use some of the images in my next movie. The adjutant storks! The vultures! And those gorgeous proboscis monkeys! (OK, that’s a value judgment, too, but at least it’s a positive one.)

dry

Sometimes I like to eat things that are really dry.

ornament is neither functionless nor superfluous

Ross Brighton writes:

Poetry in its functionless superfluity, is ornamental. Sparse, laconic, colloquial poems that mirror “real speech” are boring, because real speech is boring.

Thoughts on this:

Poetry is not functionless. It has many functions, as address, as connector, as trace, as “energy construct.” (I always liked that collocation.)

It is exactly as superfluous as everything else in the universe and perhaps as superfluous as the universe itself. That would make, conversely, everything equally essential.

Poetry is ornamental, but ornament is neither functionless nor superfluous. This is a very common misconception.

I also am biased against what is sparse and laconic, for the most part, (because it’s not my thing) as well as against the boring (although this, too, has a place in art). My point is that the type of poems that Ross is describing do not actually mirror “real speech..” Or real colloquial writing. Everyday language, colloquial language, is rich, varied, and crazy interesting, crazy poetic.

The problem with the sort of poems Ross is describing is their failure to enact that, as well as their slavish conformism to the most bland notion of what poetry can or “should” be. There is little or no invention in such poems.

Poets, be receptive.
Poets, be inventive.

Thank you.

Žižek on pleasure in pain

[writing on castrati singers being made to "cry to heaven after suffering a horrible mutilation] This is (the singing) voice at its most elementary: the embodiment of 'surplus-enjoyment' in the precise sense of the paradoxical 'pleasure in pain.' ...Pain generates surplus enjoyment via the magic reversal-into-itself by means of which the very material texture of our expression of pain (the crying voice) gives rise to enjoyment....the same go[es] for love poetry and its ultimate topic: the lamentation of the poet who has lost his beloved....Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the very symbolic articulation of this Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own.

Slavoj Žižek in The Plague of Fantasies, p. 58

Kevin Killian on benshi, etc.

Kevin Killian kindly blogs on the SF MoMA site about the ATA show Konrad sponsored for me and Gary and Erika Staiti last month, and writes a bit about the benshi phenomenon as well.

Cool!

Eartha Kitt - I Love Men - video

I had no idea that Eartha preceded me in using this title. OK, how much do I love this? Is it even measurable? Dig the disco groove!

Conceptualisms: theoretical puzzlement

[I've been asked to write a statement on the relation of my work to "conceptual writing"... and would appreciate any feedback on these thoughts...]



Even after reading the little blue book, Notes on Conceptualisms, I admit that I am not entirely sure what conceptual writing is not. I am pretty sure I know what it is, but I don’t know where exactly to draw the line that distinguishes it from what it is not.

I get that it is allegorical, but it is not allegorical in the standard way that A Pilgrim’s Progress or Paradise Lost are allegorical: these are teaching texts that ask us to become better people by reading them and comprehending their correspondences and how those correspondences relate to our lives. The new conceptual writing is allegorical in that it points outside itself to other structures it aims to critique, as opposed to structures we should obey and follow and be improved by. That critique may serve to make us more “conscious,” but that consciousness doesn’t necessarily improve us or make us virtuous. The old allegory tries to make us obedient; the new allegory is subversive, and asks us to be disobedient. Maybe, given the contemporary social frame, disobedience is the new virtue?

There are also so many practices listed in the little blue book (hence, plural conceptualisms) – “appropriation, piracy, flarf, identity theft, sampling, constraint” – all of which I gleefully subscribe to – that the term could almost spread out to cover just about all the writing I do and that I pay attention to. Considered VERY broadly, all writing, even historically, is all of the things in the list above, with the exception of flarf (a narrower and more culturally specific term): we simply cannot use language without appropriating, pirating, stealing identity, sampling, or constraining. Can we?

Thus, in my state of theoretical puzzlement, I can only say: When I write conceptual poetry I don’t set out to write “conceptual poetry.” When I “appropriate,” I can compare it to wandering in a field and seeing, oh, lupine, and Queen Anne’s lace, and mariposa lilies, and wild irises, and because they are beautiful (and grotesque, like all flowers) they compel me and I take them and arrange them, even though it may not be legal to do so. Flowers are nature’s readymades. Or maybe “appropriation” is like wandering in my neighborhood in Brooklyn (admittedly looking for poetry) and seeing a giant sign over a Russian nightclub that reads “EUPHORIA.” The “conceptual” mindset, then, is about looking and noticing: as Place points out (writing of the image as reference), “like any good art, it teaches you to linger.” Not just, I think, to linger: to somehow penetrate what is noticed until it penetrates you. There’s a kind of interinanimating ecstasy (Donne) in this.

I do not privilege obviously appropriated writing over a more Romantic interiorly generated writing (although the latter, as I mention earlier, is in a sense also appropriated): in fact, the sort of writing that most intrigues me most is that which (I have written elsewhere) performs a kind of pavan between these two modes, because that is how I experience the world, as input and output gracefully and/or shockingly affecting each other. I want to lay bare this affect to myself and to anyone who takes the time to read what I write. I’m very much with Place when she writes, “If there is superior art, it lies in the ability of any image – real or abstract, written or pictorial – to dropkick, lick, tickle and torture, to render its reader absolutely sensate.” [italics mine] Thus, the “purely” appropriated writing I do is absolutely subject to my authorial manipulation and editing in the service of that sensation.


................................

Coda: Wondering... given the definition (or lack of definition) above... is the following poem (which I wrote when I was eleven or twelve) "conceptual"?

3.95

a number
a poem in itself
a mathematical complicational digital3 figure.

or

Love – Beauty – Virtue – And other corny junk

or

Chinese Noodles and fried asparagus noses

or

BLEEP

but all it really is

is

3.95

Born Again

Let me be born again. Let me
literally be spirited
back within my mother who
equally miraculously
let be live as once she was.
Let me decide just where & when
& in what set of circumstances I
shall this time choose to enter.
Let me think.

~ David Bromige

Woman as riot?

The riotousness of woman is linked to that of speech and indeed seems to be a condition of poetry itself.

R. Howard Bloch in "Medieval Misogyny"

Gogol Bordello - start wearing purple

Apparently Gogol Bordello wrote a song for me. Thanks to Rachid for this!

Resolved Question

If I'm killed in jihad while dressed as a woman, will I still get my houri?


(from, of course, Yahoo Answers)

irritable to most Westerners' ears

Unadorned, she is not desirable. Adornment excites love. If there is a connection between ornaments and love, that is because the first ornaments of all were in the centre-jar of the celestial granary; and that jar is the symbol of the world's womb. (acc. to Ogotemmelli)

In certain societies where sounds have become letters with sharps and flats, those unfortunate enough not to fit into these letters are tossed out of the system and qualified unmusical. They are called noises....A music bound up with movement, dance,and speech, one in which the listener becomes a co-performer, one that has no overall form except one of continually recurring sequences of notes and rhythms, one that plays endlessly – for nobody has enough of life – has been repeatedly called elemental or rudimentary. Is irritable to most Westerners' ears.

The sound of a swelling cry of ululation.
That high wail that speaks her joy, excitement, or grief.

from a script by Trinh T. Min Ha, NAKED SPACES: Living is Round, published in Cinematograph, Volume 3 1988, purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale on Sunday