O Bosom of Regret!

Oh, the rough beast slouches onward,
toward Bethlehem, or Betelgeuse, or
beyond, a clone of Nietzsche, but
a faun of genetics, too, modified
by a flu which inserted some aspects
of Artaud, and many else, who,
it seemed might bild a messianal
potion, embodied! 


What irony, that Yeats,
whose name like a grate
of parataxis should fill,
the mystery of the grille
of computation with
adamic knowledge
of the grotesque, in
a fit of disjunctive synthesis
to become Y-eats, indeed,
for every path taken
destroys another option,
and thus, we see,
another irony, that
action, is also called
execution..


And so, now let me be clear,
and do not fear, but just how
many of these rudimentary beings
know, that as canons go,
their Messiah is equated
to 'a rough beast'?


What a feast, for any scholar knows,
that under its clothes, the 'rough beast'
is just the cult of parenting,
and the beast itself
is birth, a very rough business
it can be said, for it puts
into the world's equation
ANOTHER HEAD, and by Jove,
THAT'S ALL WE NEED!


Really? Well, 
perhaps it will all
work out in the end,
or won't, but, whatever
the outcome, it's
been great fun
thinking about
the possibilities
of a universe!

No Use, As My Heart Is Shielded By A Cellphone

And last night I dreamed
that Sir Thomas Urquhart
came accourting mee!
~in the manner of eros
to psyche, but as a jest,
alas, for his mind was
too fast, for all I felt
was a chitter in my bones,
as if my sternum had been
grafted to a cellphone,
and the screen faced out
to show a scarab rolling poop
along the path of a triangle..

Oh yes, but, it might also be said,
that in the wooly recesses
of my head, though slight,
"I felt the ermine thrummin'.."

innocent lights

Alas, he said to me:
Cur he, Re coomb!
~and then in unspeakable
doom let forth his
thinking balloon, or some
random selections from the
Orthogonospherical table
(rushed into song, and razed
of their hieroglyphick categorie):

VALAM MENEP
UN ALAM
TORB TAG NU MIR

VALAM MENEP
UB AMEN
NAG MU TORP MYR OR
TORP MU LAG MYR

VALAM MENEP
UPH ANEP
TUL SAG SU SYR

Uchedezexam! I cried
in amazement, but lied,
my beetle still boogering
shit. But how could I bother
his perfect dream, to wed the honor
of language to geometry, a feat
only now being prised apart
from its nut by the learned birds
of neurology? I could not, for
his path was sound, and like
a song it found, a home in my
modest hand-held file reader..

Alas...
He is a bith like a
gothick Chaldaean, and
who could resist those
cuffs of vibrating
amoebic periplasm?

The Mandrill Sturmmering

-rogozhei rokovoi- say


Helen of Sufi:


Its enormous cyclopian testicular eye
bulged like an iron grape
from the baby-mouthed vagina,
its pupil, aloof, secure, helmetted
in the fury of luxury
that was numberless
to many, and upon the controls
it laid its hands
as upon a piano
with keys of sand
and the silent song,
a magnetic modulation, a 
fate to crease
a crumpled body.


"Bollingen"

Pretty Baby (1978)

forced to wear an 

eyepatch that changed 

color (from pink to 

red to black)

Anthony Quinn

Neat Stuff Allah

is Zeus

Sidekick to Bruce

on Die Hard

w/ a Vengeance

with those big breasts bouncing

the earth

in all its shoes

and storms

and carbon-sucking vortexes

came out against

for everything

and more

mostly

controversy

hijacking a motorboat

and to come into that

mysterious sequence

the pyramid alone

on a stone island

a single tone

and dialing before its emptying draft

in sections of stone honeycomb

ripped from the interior

crimson honey to cover the screen

for seconds

Violet, tired of the recline

of Western Cillisenzation

Brook Shields,

get in this motorboat,

NOW!

image by  Fayçal Baghriche

Poenulus

On having stomped down hard
into the magical flashing circuit
all he or she would say was

wump

wump
and wump wump
and wump again

and we chide the clouds
their prostitutes
and clods of ice
ridden by children down

and laying out the pillows
in a circle
its strange aluminum feather
saunters

cutting into the mist
where dogs and rainbows chattering
splash and reflect off of
the magnificent cups

of bream
and happy ending

them pimps kissed in cinders
where lace tents languor
to the sign:

no neeg fash paontsin!

(wump, wump, am wump, again..)

in a puny punishment
its poem rendered: /on/

the great monster, the delay

sparer agar
thou prokύklei
And pύrna swallow
kάnystron cheese

small
especially
open
the agar
to fairy larch

its remnant circle
a caste of space
and to its powered
robigo
igniarius

horde
and rudigon drive
ahtu tuma rota prodigus
acem
its halo bowl missing
the mark

elate eye
come on!
eibhergwen beat
ayelage'
wohlan, fass an!

trapped into the action
between the horns
adagium and prodigium

token oaken
and omen
drive forth
use up

waste
to say yes
yet to taunt its
is / quat/ the ships
in fury are ablaze
virginal aio
exsphere

Yutyrannus huali

if they save the sample
from beneathe its quivering
egg-laden cities
for inspection

as running water
to overturn
what was never beautiful
in beauty

as today when they say
administrator
to lovely feather tyrant
the act

in its silent
deep and moving egg
hand for warmth in language's leaf
the desk upon which plastic
to remain all stoned

the cut-forms
or knowledge made lapidary
to the stream
where the incident pours out
intersecting

light refracting might
our yellow stain to value
pushed back from the table
to view the green avarice
its idol before the badger
of the stalling-ken

a trull masque of foaming
questions those forward
former stars

glosso-visakha-vesanous

Meanwhile, At Ahmed's Tea-Party

The long dining table had been fitted out with a concealed rail gun designed by Q, and installed over a period of weeks by erstwhile agents of her majesty's secret service, so that given the proper signal, the gun could propel any of the metallic dishes placed at the principle origin, causing it to become velocity's best projectile, but for the moment, there was no need of this, as Ahmed was recounting his latest dream, in the manner of some patriarchal crypto-Scheherazade. The dream went something like this:

Ahmed was living on a different planet, and at first, it more or less resembled our own, except for the detail, not apparent at first, that there were no men. This planet was composed solely of women. The men it seems,
were nothing more than strange plant-like beings which were cultivated according to a scientifically informed, yet, ultimately, cult-like programme. And it seems the cult had once been very much like Earth's old mystery religions, and that the women had, in trance-like operations, actually copulated with these tree-things during orgiastic ceremonies. Those ceremonies had long since passed into written memory, and the society had become completely homosocial, the only traces of difference, belonging to the vicissitudes of private morphology and a well-developed erotics, whereas procreation had been de-mystified, and turned into an economic / genetico-industrial complex involving something like a combination of Eugenics and Fashion.
Ahmed seemed particularly interested in the elite upper classes of women who kept secluded monstrous gardens of these phalli-trees, some of which were dwarfed while others made gigantic. The mechanism
of procreation was quite regular, and it was simple science for any woman to choose to give birth to either a fully formed human female, or a simple male seed, to be planted in the "woam", as the soil was termed in this connotation.

Then, right at the end of Ahmed's tale, James Bond broke into the room dressed as T.E. Lawrence, and, before sending a magnificent silver tureen careening down the mahogany dining table floating above its surface to kill Ahmed, he stopped, raised his dish-dash and showed his hairless hot pink vagina surrounded by a horse-shoe shaped wreathus of spiny phallic cacti.


"Welcome Home, Ahmed!"

A Critique of Rung Fixation Within Contemporary Odontogriphus

As DuPlessis writes, “There are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture: not in production, dissemination, or reception; not in objects, discourses, or practices; not in reading experiences or in interpretations.” As Quarles / Syntaxis "writes", There are no matterless, animalless, non-earth specific subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture: not in production, dissemination, or reception; not in objects, discourses, or practices; not in reading experiences or in interpretations. Furthermore, It is the fix-ed gaze upon any subsequent rung within the ladder of abstraction, whose being-dumb-in-dumb-being coordinates the political seduction which is the real subject of all criticism, instead of the punitive trajectories which are the reality of being-beyond-determination which paradoxically is the determination of being termed in the first place. Water, for instance, is easily more central to all forms of production, and arguably forms the first body politic of any contentions within collectivity. The universal stupidity of abstraction, in the face of a universal circumscribed to absolute uniqueness must, patently lead, only to collectivities formed on the basis of mass seductions inscribed by abstract stoppages, ie Politics as Oracular Halting (fate as a migrating state-plane traversing physicality's 'coesis'. The singularity of syntaxis is multi-species, but the singularity of this discussion entered the body as morphological politics long ago, ie, your mate may live within your bowells, for the time being. Disgust (discussed) = djinn-derrrr relotions. or, "Relax bitch, you, or I, or both of us could have had it much, much, worse." The Umwelt will remain a morphological gambit, and criticism will remain, a game for small minds.

"cHICKEN mODERNISM"

and every happy meatnik, everywhere

deep water days
in Charlottetown bay
the sharks are leavening
and rye

and the sails are
flaming in the emo dao
(meadowlakelarklemon-
doctor J Paul Sartre can-
Moo).. (oh moo it all..)

and the skopfbox magus
reveals his nipple beak
deep water
(deep water) revenant

elderly suction deep
poisson and poulet, okay?
 In Charleston bay,

there is a ship made of shicken,
and the finest lady is she, photographically
and all (all shang the mighty earth
bikini philossoppy)

2.) set sail out
into  the outre' etym

C

 light's gold
wch- respects all
and nothing

but by its charmed
children screaming
chanting cultus upon
age of burning cultus
react to that o chicken
of the seas, and

seclusion seek
nau
(the Dickinsonian Spinther?)

of nipple
 of bright

thinking
foamlings

The pope's nose
your Platonic hectum's

cause.

primal phoenix
(encamped).

The matter maw ate her.

Squab

There was a carrot on the page. A carrot.
"A carrot!" "A carrot!" In pen and ink, with
no color at all, it could have been a radish.
Perfectly drawn, yet somehow perfunctory,
the thing, at once gave you the idea of a person
of superior skill who just really didn't give a damn,
but couldn't help himself in drawing a passable
vegetable. There was a parrot in a cage nearby.
"A carrot!" "A carrrrrot!" I care a lot about,
about these things.

On the lunar surface, engulfed in a sea
of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid, the brain
cabinets of the elite / remainder are kept.
Their densely en/coded identity holograms
emblazon each and every brain cabinet's
face along the shelves, and many do, of
course, present portraits, or versions in lieu
of likenesses, though, perhaps as an internal
likeness, as in how the subject sees itself, or
saw, though the distinction has no true verity,
and though there were bizarrities amid the depictions,
most are, more or less, veristic, or based on a temporal
composite. And, then there are the phrases collapsed
into glyphs, or pictures, made into noumenal, yet eminently
unreadable, words. And also, even more, subjective glyphs,
giving the expert viewer a fair idea of the mental
complexity of the individual, or lack thereof,
and many are incredible animations, while
others proffer only some simple, wry text like:

"What have we got here, then, Mr. Johnson, another
frog for the galleon?"

or: "Davy Jones... Just here in my locker..."

The parrot was a cyclops now, looking up from the page,
looking up from the cage of the page, the thin blue lines
as bars. Its lone, baleful eye, serene, and yet plentiful
in its simplicity. The icon of icons, an eye-con.

The letter, optic.

"Odd topic!" "Off topic!"

The old earth tropics. This is where the brain of Davy Jones
would begin its Odyssey. In the body of a parrot, with a humanoid
head, and with only a titanium carrot with a mind of its own,
a sentient metallic vegetable key.

"Squab the poop deck, Matey," cried the parrot on the page.
He gently erased the cyclops-parrot's beak, and replaced it,
with a noble Roman nose, and grammar, narratology, be damned!

Rattlesnake

There's a charming chapter-heading quote I thought I'd share from Michel Houellebecq's Lanzarote, which isn't on the Kindle, so I've been squeezing its little neck of a book in various locales, mostly the patio before the sun becomes unbearable, or on the toilet, as it is certainly that kind of book, and yet not. Suffice it to say, the book has a ring of false vulgarity, or whatever, I'm just reading this guy.. But the quote, seems very JBW:

'I speak calmly; I live calmly, I sell telephones in

March, in April and September.'

- Gruneberg and Jacobs,

Spanish Through Word Association

I speak frenzy; I live frenzy, I ride a cellphone surfhoverboard through the sky like the silver surfer, the mercury surfer! and that cellphone's ringtone is a rattlesnake's rattle. 

false. or Depressed. or uncalm. but.

If I sense its name in again, or, that there is in that, an elaborate house of glass, words or complex transparencies, stunnels, or tunnels and bulbs where the flowing snakes gather. Orgiastic dreaming knots which inadvertently get displayed, the thin doubled walls somehow glowing faintly, feintly, neon, neo, as the daylight rises, then fades. The good cool air and the high arching trees hold the half-revealed structure, and no snakes are allowed to leave in the places of rest. I gaze through the angled troughs of their thoughts, way,

where the snakes wend their way over the bodies of their compatriots, and beyond that, to the strong, dumb,

horizon. false. reverse. Well. Dusk is sprinkle in a little bag. The whole notion of its notion, and where one fine fang once laid. It creation empties out, and the skin repurposed.

Ahh, the gleaming fang of Mercury. And all the sad hours lost, or gained.

Salmon

A Henry Moore sculpture whose surface has been cultivated with thyme,
sits in a tilted bowl-like park overlooking a large green lake where fishermen
in black waders gingerly whip hand-made flies across the surface at the entrance
of a secret stream. Overhead, feathered amoeba gliders brandish their mock vaginas
as they drift down from the faces of the surrounding cliffs to nest in the earcanals
of obelisks which figure in a ring around the lake whose center is a sink hole
designed to look like a single unblinking eye staring at the vast blue open sky.

Radiant Blue Salmon.

Quail

And this morning, after dropping her off at the airport, and finding the easy way home blocked, and dowsing,  found an east west thoroughfare of known trans-metro magnitude, and even planned his bathroom stop, to coincide in the connoisseur's grocery, where, after pissing much, after arriving in the jade green Lincoln Towncar wearing a jade green hemp cloth driving cap, and a costume of blue shorts, and a blue shirt, proceeded to procure, a.) a fine rib-eye steak, b.) a box of chocolate muffins, c.) a cold bottle of Saison Dupont, d.) a small bag of vegetable chips, e.) a nice young triangle ala Manchego, and f.) a .25 lb clatch of Milano brand Finocchiona salami, just for the fennel, then headed down Royal to Audelia. Then, once at home, parked the Towncar in the shade of the Live Oak, and the Red Oak, showed himself to both the Cocker Spaniel, and the Calico, and sat down to read Eugène Guillevic:

Pebble,
Little Pebble,
You breathe.


It was then that he conceived some elaborate silver inhaler carapaces, and jeweled no less, something  to be sold to the infirm and indiscreet. It was then that he conceived toy ivory figurines of reclining odalisques wearing bikinis of chased silver, or gold, the theme getting old, but as a joke, was something becoming ever finer, like the parody of a fetish, as a model for the fetish itself, as if sarcasm and adoration had been made one under the grotesque grimacing larva mask of the absurd.

Wilderness if civil, overarching awl.

Veal

An 18th Century
suede amoeba shoe
was found without
its silver cellphone
tongue buckle.

The poor thing,
left in the mud,
must have fallen
from a grand,
and silicon carriage,

pulled by breast enhancements
in a crackling cloud
of wifi, twin brown
nipple pilots in piercing
platinum livery.

Bacon.

Proffering a new interpretation
of Jeff Koons' Three Ball
50/50 Tank (Two Dr. J.
Silver Series, One Wilson
Supershot), The Amoeba
art critic in its ipod hoverphone
quipped, "They are neither breasts,
nor testicles, in prodigal figuration,
and neither are they the historical ellipsis
of poor political planning, but rather,
the symbol for bacon, or more
succunctly, the hallowed light
of Marsyas."

Ham.

The old vaudeville amoeba
packed up its ermines
and lit out from the earcanal
of Saint Louis in a
towncar hoverphone,
rouging its vacuole
in the mango-skinned
dawn.

"I have nought but a pseudo-i-pod
with which to gesture."

Beef.

and if its amoeba
conceals a golden cellphone
and if the branching enigma
of its terrible ringtone
should enter the great halting

sequence
sequence

sequelame'

Nestle a Land

eat behemoth on the mountains
and enter rehab

Vienna meat
Vienna herb

stop pickling
New York
afterlife

Post-Titular View (Invented Before Time)

dromena in aspic
and let their fades be full
in Sur the sound went major
toward the fall unsure
so the verger says

and here the nymphs pop out
from the fruit
and the thistle assume
its bag-pipe universal
origin

toward what fog
does the essene marching throne
convey

birds at the seaside now whirl
and gate
numinal day
its spread clean feat

how like an icon
the thinkers to the organ
one of them lifting
her arm
to the sky and

dromena in aspic
and München dark

around the silver stag
of the clerestory

water-spaniel
faithful

Lanny Quarles Deeply Honored by Spam Artist.

Respected Lanny Quarles,

 I am Prof. Harry Stewart from King’s College Campus Here in London
UK. We want you to be our guest Speaker at this Year King’s college
Seminar which will take place here in UK. We are writing to invite and
confirm your booking to be our guest Speaker at this year’s event.

King’s College Campus.

The Venue as follows:
VENUE: King’s College campus in Strand
London, United Kingdom
POST CODE:WC2R 2LS
Expected audience: 850 people
Duration of speech per speaker: 1 Hour
Name of Organization: King’s College Campus.
Topic: ”Mystery of Life and Death”
Date: 31st August 2012

 We came across your profile on http://www.pw.org// and we say it’s up
to standard and we will be very glad to have such an outstanding
personality in our midst for these overwhelming gathering.
Arrangements to welcome you here will be discussed as soon as you
honor our invitation. If you have any more publicity material, please
do not hesitate to contact us.

 A formal Letter of invitation and Contract agreement would be sent to
you as soon as you honor our Invitation. We are taking care of your
travel and Hotel Accommodation expenses including your Speaking Fee.
If you will be available for our event, include your speaking fees in
your email so it can be included in your CONTRACT AGREEMENT.

Stay Blessed
Prof. Harry Stewart
King’s College Campus.

Tel: + 44 702 408 2535

Strigelian Algebra

blank councils digress into the sunset clearing
magolordia polybodhi chromatif
and shake the iron pencil width dugong
how accordion brisk the silver setting's instrument
tiny musics placed on somm-blurting wunderkammern
naughty and feece fie honey-thrushed to ammon
and vermeon red trowel'd the fedai to fidelity
consummate crockey cocked up amid the dynasty's
raster roiling ompah-omphthalo
belly buttoned up smooth with the camphor
of cussing widgets
their bloom fief brethrem overarching the eye
whey bro
armadillo analogues like pearls in the peat
poly-roled in all theatrum spread
tonsil Mise-en-scène each column a fountain
wherefore mechanical crustaceans sped
deep V of hurtling chimes entering the atmosphere
as they say before pinching off the oranged wickery
bot for wodd or petys oftentimes in terse money
the satyr contemning ibid
snake's tangent law liminal as limb
in forecast
dowsing the abducendas
before the shrinking shagreen
peau de dwindle for a shrunken stead
fleet cavernore bebold alt unsenspan
treloren at that fotmael runelard
runge kutta to filibate myxicola
for the daily tel
obvious
punt while you still can
upon the end of a dark cylinder's surface
in venice to stand upon this desk in a flood
and dip the quill for a gondola's mooting
for if a sphere gets dezzy to hare's mugget
then and only then
Tiflis morning mitre accost
worminson sally biting
each thing tequila mixty-maxty
and languaged only by the
mixtilinear fooker classic
as the Whetstone of Witte
which is the seconde parte
 of Arithmeticke, containing
 the Extraction of Roots,
 the Cossike Practice, with
the Rules of Equation, and
commonly linger.

Distant Grains

o how they succumb
to the feast of dyes
and toward flower-maned
cat capsids captive
pursue
pursue the reign

and absent their bodies
for the world upside down
umbrellas float
surely gathering

and then
within that circular fin
sunken
enact a council
where books like gills
at the sides of their heads
contract
contractual
if's

hooked into nothing new
but not waiting for the return
of its heightened pill
ala linguis
egg whose surface of ink orgy reclining

tongues as odalisques
in golden palanquin jaw

moon or maw

nostril gushing dye
pupil fail
and love
beyond the irksome
dove of its unsteady weary
policy

a technical sphincther
whose transparent horn
husbands the clause
toward its friction
grip

to care
each odd eye
the residence
of method

water
think of
as lens

water
think of
as vehicle

water
think of

and light to bend all worlds
begin
its slothful exultant
abode

at dawn
in the cool wires
and sun

publishing
yot fever offsome
yat yat yat

Tobias
your shoulder ringlets
tied with dice

to chalice
its roughly stacked
concord

leaf
on skull
on stain
on feign
and clover's
order
to neck ball

continuity
cannot if translated

Jealous, Been Wary Though, Monumétal Hurlant.

It is therefore the image of an echo from the dream, of the brain and the raisin interposed and fluent in emerald whose populations of ever agitated surface dancers shield their presence in cobra hoods of smaragdyne peacock crystals ever fictitious as by their disjunction at the seem, therefore a gigantism is performed, and a static yet explosive descent in terminus in which the feathered emerald brain-raisin world is always splashing down into the endless alien ocean of time whose waters are as the cascading of form from form and thought from thinking, and whose worthless categories are as a sparkling of tautourobouric rings in constant rushing nimbus. What cuts and roars is the idea of what is, what is known and what has come against the backdrop of a near impenetrable blackness and certain silence save the screeching of anguished stars, their angelic torments beyond the reason of the frail organic, the smoke or singing, whose bodies are living ashes, no, the idyll content of being is the space of paradox, a constant skittering in place awaiting release into the machinic gas of a colonial farce.

Old raisin,
your lush skin
of fading candles
to navigate drunk
and lost
in some hall.

Bright Postulates Infirm, All Hallow the Blinking Nice Not

behold
the tinseline botch
of sentencery
both fate for preamble
and bramble for the hive
of letters

for what is
i've
the hive for an udder
replacing
each grapheme
into a new nude container's
spell
feeling the victim
to every treasured geometer

slope
therein
thereigen
slippaged
upon the index
slaked on curt
walking
whose legs recall
prisms
in their penitentiary
inscriptables

close together
go the duelers
convexed and concavortical

cunning domain
itself

itself usage
small
the whole thought
a pre-thought

a strange divinity
purloined
before a general
strangling

o all coiled go
wherefore the city
to cloud

attend

PNG charges 29 alleged cannibals

From:AAP July 13, 2012 11:22PM AUTHORITIES have arrested 29 people accused of being part of a cannibal cult in Papua New Guinea's jungle interior and charged them with the murders of seven suspected witch doctors, police said on Friday. Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie confirmed a report in The National newspaper that said the cult members allegedly ate their victims' brains raw and made soup from their penises. "They don't think they've done anything wrong; they admit what they've done openly," Wagambie told The Associated Press by telephone. He said the killers believed that their victims practised "sanguma", or sorcery, and that they had been extorting money as well as demanding sex from poor villagers for their supernatural services. By eating witch doctors' organs, the cult members believed they would attain supernatural powers and literally become bullet-proof, he said. "It's prevalent cult activity," Wagambie said. He said he believes there could be between 700 and 1,000 cult members in several villages in PNG's remote northeast interior. All of them might have eaten human flesh, he said. According to the report in The National, which is published in PNG, 28 men and women appeared in a Madang court on Tuesday. Wagambie said they were charged with willful murder. It was not clear what happened to the 29th suspect. Murder is punishable by death in PNG, a poor South Pacific island nation. Wagambie said the suspects were not required to plea to the murder charges and were being held in custody. Police will gather more witness statements before pressing charges related to the cannibalism allegations, he said. Cannibalism was part of traditional culture in PNG, where human flesh was known as "long pig", and survived in isolated pockets into the latter part of the 20th century while the country was under Australian colonial rule. Wagambie, 36, said he had never heard of a previous case of cannibalism in his lifetime. He expected police would make about 100 arrests over the weekend for cult-related crimes. Four of the seven victims were murdered last week, Wagambie said, adding that no remains had been recovered. "They're probably all eaten up," he said.

The Possibility of a Positive Review for Michel.

Never made it, it seems, to the Santa Fe Art Fair, but instead spent the whole time helping with family and hospitals, but I did manage to get all the way through M. Houellebecq's _La Possibilité d'une île_ as The Possibility of an Island as Translated by Gavin Bowd. Probably what comes to mind immediately as an entry point for me would be something to do with the interestingly developed theme of Platonism in relation to the grotesque, as in Plato was really one of original theorists of the grotesque, or priests, if you will, to veil its secret meaning, to hide it in plain sight. But like M.H. seems to do, he complicates every theme with good literary explication and interrelation. Replacing Platonic idealized geometry with 'data', Michel wonderfully collapses metaphysics into the interspeciation of structurality, something which seems like I've thought of before, or even seen, in a slightly less contemporary form in poetry, but you can enter that meditation itself along several lines anyway, one of which being something like, matter is always already the immortal formal anyway, thus rendering metaphysics the confugu(e)rability of an infinite assymetry, or barring our absolute uniqueness in the universe, our remote species of singularity, ie the grotesque re epistemology. There's also the anguishing of Platonic relations between humans, and the countering of that sexually with both good and bad relations, or anguished carnality, in short, Michel sort of comments on Plato's catalogue of the types of love. There's probably a good deal more to unpack with this, but, in its more science fictiony side, the book seems to echo both a Ballardian space, and something like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas though inflected with Michel's own acerbic personalized more Célinesque ironics, something even fairly close world-wise to Frank Miller's Hard Boiled graphic novel which in its combination of extreme violence and pornography in certain atmospheric scenes presages Michel's futurustic black-comediana. While the racist elements have seemed to trouble critics, for me, I saw in this, something more along the lines of an abject existentialism in which racial attitudes are predetermined much in the way the critics do. In a sense, there is clearly in Michel's attitudes toward both sexuality and race, among other issues, an expression of a Negative Dialectic. What critics fail to see I think is that by approching negativity 'positively', Michel opens the space of these ethical aporias into a more democratic or 'depressive' modulus, revealing the pathos of language itself, its fundamental failure, and contagion as negativity, as well as honestly stating that often our experience of subjectivity, of ourselves, and others, as individuals and groups, is often, repugnant, or simply, idiotic, in the grand scheme of the world, and in all the possible avenues of abstraction. I may comment more on this or rewrite this, but the book was a very good read, and I think I may read it again. There is a certain echo with small French novels like Huysman's Against Nature, and Michel himself cites both Balzac and Moliere, and there is quite a bit of interesting language, though language in the novel is kept very consistent throughout. I can remember only skimming at most 2 pages in the whole novel, digressions of which were unimportant relatively to the action of the story which I was really very interested in. The ending particularly has a very J.G. Ballard feel to it, and I am left after reading two of Michel's books that in the end, he is doing very literary work, but modulating it into a more pop contemporary space engineered for readability. I think he could easily come out of with an Infinite Jest sized work, but his work lends itself to shorter formats, or really, I can imagine him thinking a work that long would be tedious, much in the way he clips and submerges the theoretical infrastructure, and even goes so far to have his character say that he hates 'theory'.. Very solid, interesting contemporary work.

Tumiduous Famalfaluca

and feeding its ever-wealthy arms
coats of paint that settle
to the punitive foil, its 
fructified ballad to wait 
there doubtless
in style

and feeding style, a
pared kerf from cloven
joinery, the bason's
clever baron, a
nudifidian nudnik
so poliorcetic,
so sick w/
courtesy and
manners

and manners, there
are more in the air
where the rivalry
banks, its blank
checks and balances,
planontine, and
vieux jeu

and how the spy
has a bladder of hats
for this total Sunday
orb, this skaitbird's
book of Holmgren's
wools sitting open
to greens, but
scattered in dabbles,
all its Grenzbegriffin

begriffined w/
tidy hwyll-tufting
harbourers

Wildenstein Art Gallery Is Beset by Lawsuits - NYTimes.com

Wildenstein Art Gallery Is Beset by Lawsuits - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Kudara and Murgab

Pierre Loti lottire
and mow the pout
down short
to the snout
and decorate
its woman

snout woman mouiller
Pierre your fake head
if anecdottage serve me

let's all gather
to see the snout
behind its veil

mongoose interlocken
gold snake inductive reasons
bra and moolvee
leisured

coffee
in Constantinoble
gasses remain
Xenon the fame
terrible the old King
shouting from the parapet
as the would be Turks
come down into the valleys
of the would be Klimts
and casual aristockraseas

blue mosaic faience phallus
as tall as a minaret

binoculars
of dented
bronze

nude women as currency
for Pierre Loti
wrapped in thin silk
the color of Castelvetrano
olives

their masks
of edible wax
fringed with transparent licorices
filled with pheromonadic
resources

dew apples
grown in among
the wild Crimean
leeks

hard flat discs
of dried garlic paste

lead these beauties
out into the campo

the rain
the whistles
the wheezing

Hold Up Your Lighter.

 we had come upon a sore wreck in the wood and were greeted by it a gorgon's head ringletted with the chattering tails of dried scorpions old mummies tied to a carousel of rusty bikes and I have never seen a camel in the forest before but the splayed foot does well in the bog of strawish khaki needles knowledge thinks and the whole wide circus of its flop getting smoother everyday bulldoze those folks right out of the way ideas are our very best citizens anyway but here we are lost in Aurborea with two fine camels tins of mustard greens and mummies for the weirdo collectors.

Family Matters. (Master Meta Paideuma Reflux)

I paid you, Ma,
and I'll pay you again
soon as I git myseff
another job.

With Pappy's broke feet
and your authritis, your'n
quite a couple, but
still the best.

I was led astray
by a Chinee VC
Mandarin Pong Tong
at that last one,
shame on me.

But in this one,
I'll node to keep
to myseff, do
the damn task,
and find a gopher
to tug while the
clock rattles out.

I'm ready for duty, Ma!
I won't let you
or Pappy down!

If tadpoles and singin'
are loose in our chapel,
ther'll be bugs in the
cubberd fer shur,
and I'll keep my
cussin' from Pappy
sose he won't
connipshun again.

I paid you Ma,
and I'll pay you again,
soon as I git myseff
this one at Tea Eye
amakin' widgets
fur the wiglets.

I'll be damned if I
ain't.

John David Ebert on Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres I: Bubbles

Posh Virus Thread

old and ugly with ideology
the world teeters on.

the virus veered through
the leering rows
of lyres.

as the lyricist had supposed
but what had not been disclosed
was the lyrus.

its virlust
still dreaming
to the dust.

its placental mate
of goddess fate.

put a fire
in the oven.

now the bun
now the gun
now the code
and so forth.

The park is lovely
wandering groups of
distant smudges
play with toy boats
in an ornamental lake.

presided over
by Alice
and the Wildensteins.

dappling its grey
tank body
its metal flippers
the horrific monolith
its mouth of cold red stone
where wine's iridescent seeking
prevails.

alginate
General Custer
Astronaut manga.

transparent lamb's vine
graffito
stickers
jellied bones in a chain
to say good luck
and all that.

on the river with Tom Sawyer
saw your words
and your pleasant tales
of every murder solved.

in one stroke
typewriter.

typewriter
in the clouds
the secret sacrificial meat
production's mondo
collapsing bottle
reclines.

Rodin
perfumery,

Perry
Rodin,

There is the threat
of industrial photography
as well.

PNG / RASKOL

Raskol gangs are criminal gangs in Papua New Guinea, primarily in the larger cities, including Port Moresby and Lae. Raskol is a Tok Pisin (Pidgin English) word derived from the English word rascal and is currently used in PNG to refer to gang members or criminals in general.

Raskol gangs first emerged in Port Moresby in the 1970s, largely associated with the growth of urban squatter settlements in Port Moresby that consisted of recent migrants from the rural areas of the country and their children. Unemployment was (and remains) high in the settlements, with most employment in the informal sector, and educational opportunities very limited.

Similar to criminal gangs in western urban centres such as Los Angeles, London, and Paris, criminal gangs emerged as a mechanism through which uneducated and unemployed urban youth in PNG sought a sense of self-worth and security by associating with others who share their deprivation.[1] In a country where betel nut, marijuana, and other psychoactive recreational drugs are widely accessible at an early age, these drugs are an often-cited contributor to the erratic behaviour of raskol gangs. Widespread alcoholism due to Melanesian genetic susceptibility and cultural attitudes towards alcoholism may also be a contributor.[2] Many PNG criminal law enforcement officials accept drunkenness as a legal defence in domestic violence cases.[3]

Over the years, raskol gang activities have evolved from opportunistic incidents of small scale theft or breaking and entering to more organised criminal activity including serving as middlemen in the marijuana trade both within PNG and between PNG and Australia, as well as becoming increasingly politicised as the instrument of various political powers. The growth of squatter settlements in Lae and Port Moresby has led to a corresponding increase in the number and size of raskol gangs.

Crimes such as rape, murder[4], and carjacking are common in a city that has a 60 percent unemployment rate.[5] The raskol culture of violent crime has recently spread to other populous and impoverished coastal areas of New Guinea, including Lae, Wewak, New Britain (particularly Rabaul), Bougainville Island, and Manus Island. In these areas, the raskol culture has merged with the local history of cannibalism, marijuana cultivation and usage[6], tribal feuds,[7] canoe warfare, and piracy. Hijacking of boats and even kidnapping or murder of the owners is becoming more common. Even the New Guinean captains of small supply boats that frequent small island villages and run the risk of being beaten, robbed, or murdered for the sake of their meagre cargo of instant noodles, clothing, and disposable batteries.

http://www.stephendupont.com/

The Logic of Cascading and Dry Dinners.

patterned doors
cold cucumber soup
thinking inside
the passport

and when its cold tall bald head
is revealed
to the accustomizing instrument
of convention

when its warm vibrating obelisk
halts amid the summer torrents
of innovation

when its kinetic sand garden
resumes
its calculation
and the stones enact
a buoyancy as cognitive act
coming to rest puzzled together

one flat smooth paddle upended
revealing a polished transparent pitting

patterned doors
hero cold
and volume filled

cucumber
immortal

thunder inside
the rotating pillars

until we admire
its romantic conjunction
foregrounded
to place

empty

eagle's head
thimbles

Experience is Crammed into a Small Rabbit.

She cried tonight, her mother shrunken to a fleshless confused totem confined to a recliner under a lovely print of a single red opium poppy and finishing out the race on dilaudid in the company of a mild yet neurasthenic and piebald water spaniel and a few shifts of rotating pseudo-nurses. And before, father and brother dead in the same year, and 10 seasons or more of drought to come. Her husband, loving but often unsure of himself, still somewhat scarred from the machinations of entering adulthood with the label schizophrenic, something which had turned his native, natural exuberance into a swirling cauldron of doubt and ebullience auto-cancelling itself into helpless dread, and hopeful meandering, both ever unequal, and simmering. Too much on her plate. Never enough sleep. Born into the world with a gay and lovely nature, but now tired. Let's hope a trip to Santa Fe will give her fine blossom a sweet conejo with the scent of tall pines...

Notes on the Possibility of an Equation

Looking at Richard Hamilton's 1952 painting _d'Orientation_ this morning, (which I can't find a web picture of!)* I was struck with the idea for an equation for syntaxis.

Let $ = Syntaxis
Let Mp = Map
Let Ty = Territory

So then Syntaxis is $ = Mp / Ty, but for those perhaps more skilled at living, the equation can take on more bizarre forms, and as the territory is often informed by the map, and the map by the territory, all 3 terms are fluid, and are actually avatars of a single agency N, Creation.

Let's imagine an agent and draw an equation from his behavior.

A poet watches a small stream pile up leaves and debris behind a small stone barrier at a waterfall
until it gives way, then later leaves the home of his family to journey to Paris and begin a series of bizarre
episodes resulting in fame, fortune, disease, death, and travel, etc..

$(N=MpTy)= $^1, $^2, $^3, ...


meaning, the agent, noticing the echo between natures, takes a signal from the territory, gleans a feeling
of identification between his own agent, and the umwelt's, and transposes a feature, or gleans a model,
so that feeling, identification, and modelling become types of a conduitry existing between Map and Territory
which allow Action or Syntaxis. The Umwelt would probably be an N with a subscript like Nb for Brittany.


Poetry, or Art, or any of the reflective arts, or sciences for that matter, would then be a field of reflection which can be represented as both Map or Territory to another agency, but which are also, as part of the original agent's stream, a refractive index, or valenced inductive noise. More or less, all art, all creative output can be reduced to an array like this one, let's call it a blog-post. Here is one called "koronkowa robota natury," which features 'mem(e)bers' of the Bonnot gang among other things. 


Q: Does Syntaxis need a new name? Or is this just an art thing? 
A: Not sure.
Q: Aren't you really just talking about "Aboriginal Computationalism"?
A: What is computationalism?


Look here: Computational Theory of Mind. 


A computational theory of mind is a philosophical theory that the mind functions as a computer or symbol manipulator. Such theories have taken several forms, among which the most common is the theory that the mind computes input from the natural world to create outputs in the form of further mental or physical states. A computation is the process of taking input and following a step-by-step algorithm to get a specific output. The computational theory of mind claims that there are certain aspects of the mind that follow step by step processes to compute representations of the world.

Look at Duchamp's famous _Network of Stoppages_:

or this Computationalist Tea-Cozy after Wolfram's work:

Yesterday, listening to NPR, I heard about an AI project in which noise was used like a drug to cause a program to "hallucinate", thus creating a structuralist inflected form of instrumental creativity:

Stephen Thaler says he’s cleared that hurdle. His Creativity Machine is an artificial neural network that’s able to learn by itself. Thaler’s breakthrough is that he occasionally disrupts the Creativity Machine by introducing mathematical noise that trips up the system, forcing it to generate new solutions to problems. “And therein is where discovery takes place,” he explains. “It's not in the rote memories that we have committed to memory, it's in the generalization of all those memories into concepts and plans of action.”


Right there, I think is where we can slip in our furtive yawp (term), syntaxis. Syntaxis is a sort of computational transform operation, where generalizations project into multiple domains, syntaxis is praxis based on sign, and praxis as sign, or rather the unity of the cognotional elementalry.


And you might return to the question:
Q: Does Syntaxis need a new name? Or is this just an art thing? 


Richard Hamilton was, in the 1950's very interested in someone called James J. Gibson. This quote from wikipedia seemed especially nice:


I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!

According to David Mellor in the essay, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Modernity: Vision, Space, and the Social Body in Richard Hamilton, Gibson's conception of orientation (syntaxis proper) reveals exactly a cognotional elementalry:

Gibson's conception of human orientation made a deep impression on Hamilton, its summoning up the image of a species negotiating a dense envelope (see Umwelt, mine) of information - the profane, crowded, heteromorphic universe of Joyce - "the human habitat consists of millions of things to which a person can find their way".

So I think it is in this way, that we can give Art a concrete computationalist teleology as as refractive experiential index used for potential orientation modulations, or syntaxis fuel.

Art is the noise that fuels change, and Change is the noise that fuels art. Nature is the noise of changes.
Change is our eternal Umwelt.

Chang Es (Chang is):

From Persian چنگ, A traditional harp of central and southwest Asia, or çeng.
Or from the Mandarin (as an irronic array, or field of reflection):

伥: ghost of one devoured by tiger 倀: bewildered; rash, wildly 借: borrow; lend; make pretext of 娼: prostitute, harlot 昌: light of sun; good, proper 晿: 淐: 猖: mad, wild, reckless, unruly 琩: 菖: iris, sweet flag, calamus 裮: 錩: vessel 锠: 閶: gate of heaven; main gate of palace 闛: 阊: gate of heaven; main gate of a palace 鯧, 鲳: the silvery pomfret, Stromateoides argenteus 鼚: drumming

仧: 倕: 偿: repay, recompense; restitution 償: repay, recompense; restitution 兏: 嘗: taste; experience, experiment 嚐: taste 嫦: name of a moon goddess 尒: you, your 尚: still, yet; even; fairly, rather; a surname 尝: taste; experience, experiment 常: common, normal, frequent, regular 徜: walking and fro; lingering 瑺: 瓺: 甞: taste; experience, experiment 肠: intestines; emotions; sausage 脷: (Cantonese) tongue 腸: intestines; emotions; sausage 膓: intestines; emotions; sausage 苌, 萇: averrhora carambola; used as a surname 裳: clothes; skirt; beautiful 鋿: 鏛: to polish; iron rim on a wagon wheel 長: long; length; excel in; leader / master / chief 镸: long 长: long; length; to excel in; leader 鱨: codfish 鲿:

场: open space, field, market 場: open space, field, market 僘: 卸: lay down; retire from office 厰: factory, plant, workshop, mill 圱: 堩: 填: fill in, fill up; make good 廠: factory, plant, workshop, mill 惕: be cautious, careful, alert 懿: virtuous, admirable, esteemed 敞: roomy, spacious, open, broad 昶: a long day. bright. extended. clear 氅: overcoat; down feathers 淌: trickle; flow down; drip 鋹: sharp; a keen edge; sharp point 鷥: the egret 場: open space, field, market 塲: open space, field, market

倡: guide, leader; lead, introduce 唱: sing, chant, call; ditty, song 怅, 悵: disappointed, dissatisfied 昶: a long day. bright. extended. clear 暢: smoothly, freely, unrestrained 淌: trickle; flow down; drip 焻: breath 玙: 瑋: type of jade; rare, valuable 畅: smoothly, freely, unrestrained 畼: 誯: 韔: a wrapper or case for bow 鬯: sacrificial wine; unhindered

In Mapudungan,
chang is leg.

In Romani, knee.

Ah, the mosaic of Chang!

**

And then there was my own hickallectual yawp from my teen-age years. I used to say this all the time from like age 15-19:

CHANG-LANG!

which roughly meant, 

Onward! Thus! It is!

Do it! Right Now!

BE!

* my homage to Richard Hamilton's _d'orientation_... 

**I find it odd that this Chang harp looks to be made from a sort of letter L (as A)

whose upright is a volcanic gyre, and its transversal leg, a striatal iteration reflecting

the strings...

Grooming Pathetic Wishes Forever

putet stull rigid
tool

the fingers leafing thru
hollow clay leaf heads

then in the mirror
of this clay evolve
a finer name

green and unhurried
like the stone
whose moss
goes simpering
in a van

putet stall roll them up
the umbrella leaps
its cusp
and carries itself alone
and over the whole house

mighty mouse
and sticks for a
mumblypeg
there in the lawn

laurel seeds
hushing horses
by lost
and lingering
summer streams

ducklings
in the shadow
of a careful dog
Polyphemos' dolphins

and the logjam effere
its dirty distance
tain convey

moody
the dipper
to the decoy

sympatica
sympotica
starling

out of the laboring
fires
light that rejoiced
at my grief

epic
wrecked
chair
icon

bum rush

Pierre's lips
are in the house again
and Sharon builds
a tea

this intron scurrilous box
now that its tail is wound
and a tank on springs has found

its lover
the earthquake

Paused

molten boon
where are your boots
where are you flowing

in your old manque skin
the writhing star again
deaf with knowing
hard as a seed

sweet glands
hovering in moonlight

~

the things
put gradually
on the pelt

Leviathan Grok, a cordial laid in its core

faded waters
beneath the stylus

and where the bridge
is lowing
the mother leads us
away from the egg

and all oblivion
in its arc is said
to ache to oh

hot minion
their capricious dread
and file
across the bridge
where the land
just kisses
at the snake

peace fake
or war unreal
duty to words
and image
unruly

Babacuss

for wentwam alf'd 'is betters
marat in a tub
marat in a tubule of pebbles
and only the face protrude
and only the rumpus conclude
Sir Phaneronoemikon Fancy, P.
The greatest babelard in Nature

or as all confusium bless'd
wherewhat the tone of the stone
could ever cuddle the rabble
of this puddle with a dabble
in the muddle of its perfect bubble
doubled the world to an udder
as mess seems to seme'

all the scatter into pristine rubble
semiotics wiles the sid smiles
to a red-glassed window
on the haze, elbows
and assholes out of phase
where the current
leads the voltage
by the nose

babelavante
its guardian king or queen
unique or gnawing
backwardly the bone
its nob a pang before
a price waka waka kan

usurped utterly
within the fang
of conscious snagu
sanguine luzajb
virpan bakeltik

elephant's
sneggstone
eggplunt

as eblis put a bee upon the sill
and there it lingers still
a babiana of babingtonite
from the babion of pearl love

baby girl mouth to spat its
eee eee eee

unto the louvres
made from paddles
of emerald lawn

and at the top
"_______"
that stark mad icon
aiming its arrow
to the sky

4

what is an ion
fed with hyle
what is a deaf
mute clue

The Vecchi

omens
a friend of his dreamed
dim vegetable forms
their blank garments also
begin to dream

of dark sculptors
moving among the stones
seeing hips and lips and
haunches of eyes
in the rough hill-sides

thought
being favorable
among all antique mineral

stone
the blank garment
where omens blend
a friend of his

whose unique conception of time
sometimes would
as in the opaque and unhewn known
glow

dark sculptors
beholding the stone
like a black lion
drowned in blood

no omen forsakes
the moral order or
supports it
its expression shall be
of a subtler verdure

pebbles stretching
like a road to meet
the world's great circle

dark sculptors
questioning
the stone

Ester's Mouse Skin Perineum Eyebrows

On little things, as sages write, 
Depends our human joy or sorrow, 
If we don’t catch a mouse tonight, 
Alas! No eyebrows for tomorrow.






No eyebrows of mouse skin
For Ester my love, no glossy
To cover her barest..


She'll look like demon or a ghost 
From old Edo, especially
when she puts them on drunk.


So drunk in fact, that
the origin of all metaphor
is not unlike a skinless mouse
laid quietly on a perineum
divan.


There is an eyebrow
like a caterpillar
on your perineum divan.
There is a drunken hand,
called 'the World'.


Or that if that one world is fine,
why not a corncob covered in a
kernalling of worlds, and appalled,
a blue corncob of Earths
would be so very much better!


Firecrackers in ancient China!

The Map and the Territory

In the 80's, I was bombarded with all sorts of art slogans in college, some of whose lineages I learned later in life, and some I didn't, but today, since we have the internet, all one has to do is pop in the given slogan, and voila! So just like Michel Houellebecq did, I suppose, on some subject, I popped in "The Map is not the Territory." and out this came:

The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931:

A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory... B) A map is not the territory. Korzybski's dictum "the map is not the territory" is also cited as an underlying principle used in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people's beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the "map") are not reality itself or everything they could be aware of ("the territory").

The originators of NLP have been explicit that they owe this insight to General semantics. A reproduction of "The Treachery of Images," René Magritte’s 1928–29 painting The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[4] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").

In those halcyon years I also made a video piece, using various images of history's villains, and which flashed the slogan, "Your perception is my disease." So maybe I was predisposed to what Michel H. had to say in The Map and the Territory. What I liked about the novel, well there are a lot of things I liked, was I guess, what you might call its 'skewed personableness', the story of Jed Martin, and the sort of doppelganger-like or map and territory relation between Jed and Michel, but right there I elided something, and it is that something that strangely enough forms the crux of what fascinates me about the text itself of this novel. Instead of territory, I at first (forst) wrote Terrortoy. [Spoiler Alert]. If you've read the book, you know that the fictional Michel himself becomes a 'terror toy' when the serial killer insect / art collector gets hold of him. There are hints like this all through the book about the method of its construction. It is my belief that in some part, this novel flowed out of looking at words themselves as characters.

It is easy to talk about novels like, "This is a novel about the art world." "This is a novel about failed theories of social construction." etc.. but it is a little more difficult to see how a collective reading of the word "Martin", and an irronic reading of the term Djed might give you an insight into the work. After reading the book I could see something like a picture of a book painted by Magritte called "The Treachery of Novels," but one in which the slogan said something like "This is not a self-portrait." But then in your mind the echo might form which said "poor traits of self". Like any novel, there are plenty of bits of dialogue which are more or less stilted, and bear various levels of detail about this or that idea or theme, or add more or less to the flow of the supposed plot (ploy).. So then, without going into too much detail, one can say pretty definitively, that the entire attitude of Jed Martin's character comes out of a historical reading of the word "Martin", and it works for things like Saint Martin, Martinet, etc.. Now I could belabor this, but like Houellebecq, it feels more fun to just say this is so and go with it. It might be a bit of a stretch, but think Saint Martin as an Island, and H's ouevre, and there starts to be a road into the coarse reflexivity. For Jed, I think it is the 'character' of Jed's boiler, or heater in his old apartment, that comes closest to putting directly the ancient Egyptian image of the Djed into the mind, A sturdy column, so sturdy, yet clunky, that it starts to look like a metaphor for the self, a hint about the Houellebecquian Magritte painting called "This is a self-portrait." The fact that the Djed has radiator like heat fins at the top, and like the letter I all at once, or rather a letter I whose grapheme is modified to illustrate the Deleuzian concept of plateaus, a proliferation of which comes at the level of the head emphasizing a multiplicity of vertical levels, or a hierarchy, as in Masonic, or even esoterically as in oracular utterances, so that depending on what level, or what plateau you invoke, there are differences in reality. For instance, if you look at Jed as a version of Michel, then that becomes a method of producing a sort of map of what a novel as self-portrait might look like, or rather, there is a way of entering this work that makes it possible to consider culture itself as a meditation on self as collective self-portait, etc. There is also the ambiguity of the djed's actual structural etym, some scholars say it is based on a reading of the sacrum bone, and others have a vegetable idea, etc. Jed is concise (martinet), but drunk on concision to the point of being facile (Martin-drunk). He's odd, and his life has made him odd, and his perceptions are odd, but it is these very odd perceptions and behaviours which allow him to succeed in life, to remain sturdy, and upright, so to speak, like an erection, of say Sauvagesia erecta, or Saint Martin's herb. Houelebecq, as a character goes through what we might call a Martin-drunk, ie, his character 'drinks himself sober' in some sense, or rather, there is a strange set of notices, after H. is killed, that secretly he had been baptised, or earlier that he mentions he doesn't drink as much as people say, the flip-flopping charcuterie thing.. etc.. There is a passage which talks about Jed's father wanting to build bird houses, and another about MH wanting to write a poem about birds, but which he can't, and so writes one about his dog. There is also this idea of sham associated with Martin chaines, and with costume jewelry dealers in London in the parish of St. Martin le Grande.. The plot itself seems fairly like a sham, and more or less snaps in two at the end when Michel is abruptly killed off. Art as a theme is treated more or less like a sham, and the vicissitudes of the market something as quixotic as human personality itself, and finally, tied in an ironic sense, so that commodity fetishism is directly related to pathological fetishism, though Jed himself proves to be a figure of certain temperance. And there was an odd echo last night to Jed when I was rewatching some of the HBO mini-series John Adams, and Ben Franklin said that he was an "extreme moderate", and that all those not expressing moderation should be hanged or some such.. There was a sort of extreme moderation theme inherent in Jed's presented aesthetics.

Well, anyway, you can enter the text a number of ways, but more or less, I thought it was a jolly good read, and I really thought in a way, that Houellebecq is sort of being really cheeky, or maybe even sort of nasty, like in a way, the whole novel could be read as a sort of jibe against low brow novel readers, the constant bringing up of obscure literary references, but I think he could have done even more with that, like why didn't he mention someone like Elisee Reclus. That seems an apt figure. At any rate, the book IS a fun read, and I will probably read all these novels of his as in a way, I kind of identified with Jed, but not exactly, Jed seems in a way, to enact the sense of desire of the reader himself, reading is sort of reclusive like Jed. Well, I never remember liking say a Don Delillo novel. Never. Don Delillo is just well very boring as a writer. Just like Pynchon is well, a little too proud of himself, a bit too self indulgent, after say V.. I mean you can read it, but this, you can read easily, it's a trashy novel that really doesn't hide the fact, and in fact sort of says, hey, I'm a trashy novel full of bed heads, but then, there are some great things, and you can actually go and find places in Paris  on google maps from this book, strange places.. I thought it was a fun read, and not at all what one might expect. And there are oddities beneath the surface of this, just like the serial killer's automated gladiatorial insect light-table Colosseum. Good work Michel! And the novel is funny, a good dry light chablis! The sacred bone sits right next to "the sperm bag"..

(That kind of thing, humorous proximalitease..)

Elisee as Jed as an old man of the book..

(This is not a bad place to read!)