fonzie kafka

in the series finale of 'the wire' (no spoilers), the writers put kafka in bubbles' mouth:

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”



i think that's exactly right, as my friend jess austin michalik used to say.

i am terrified of, i am in love with

remember that this blog was borne of the rib of google. remember that i was searching for benedictions and then stole from the body of "related searches" at the bottom of the page. getting to where we are:

last saturday i bumped into kate at a house party in somerville. she just got back from a film shoot in new orleans where she was charged with the care of the pigs on set. pig-actors. the thing is, she said, normally films hire a trainer to bring some pigs to the set in the morning and take them home at night when the shooting is done. for whatever reason, this film just bought some baby pigs, and she has since been their sole guardian, trucking them after the filming to her parents' house in ohio, where they probably await her return from parties in somerville. we talked about a bunch of seemingly unrelated things and then we started talking about google: i was saying that what i'm really into right now is what happens when you go to search something on google and you see the dropdown menu and realize either that people have searched exactly what you are searching, thousands of times before you ever arrived at the point of query, or you realize that people are searching some whole other shit that's beyond the horizons of the horizon of your universe. she said that what's really amazing is if you type into google "i am terrified of":

i am terrified of
i am terrified of chinese people
i am terrified of bugs
i am terrified of black people
i am terrified of death
i am terrified of flying
i am terrified of bees
i am terrified of all things
i am terrified of needles
i am terrified of the dentist

look for yourself. the dropdown list will probably change over time. which is why google is the MOST AMAZING index of our semi-collective terrors in this semi-collective moment.

see also:

i am in love with
i am in love with my best friend
i am in love with you lyrics
i am in love with we are not what we should be
i am in love with you
i am in love with my teacher
i am in love with my grandson
i am in love with a married man
i am in love with my grandson and we are having a baby
i am love with you imogen heap
i am in love with a married woman
i am in love with you quotes

so google is also an index of our loves! our moment to moment passions! on the subject of "i am in love with you quotes," one of the things i quote all the time is the part in the Zizek documentary, "Zizek!", where Zizek says "Like nobody almost dares to say today 'I love you': it has to be, 'As a poet would have put it, "I love you"' or some kind of a distance... So it's we today who are afraid that if we were to put it directly, 'I love you,' that it would mean too much."





related/unrelated, the business section of the New York Times today had an article about a guy, Darryl Siry, who's starting a website that connects journalists and p.r. firms by allowing journalists/reporters to post questions (i.e. "what is the role of google in indexing our collective phobias?") and p.r. firms, corporations, and academics can respond meaningfully (i.e. "Google in China: A Manager-Friendly Heuristic Model for Resolving Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflicts," Hamilton, J. Brooke, Stephen B. Knouse, Vanessa Hill, Journal of Business Ethics Vol. 86 No. 2). hedging the question of what's ultimately meaningful, this means that p.r. people can push press releases, academics can fact-check and footnote, and the world continues to spin sideways on its axis, mossy with knowledge grown at the crossroads of corporate self-interest and public accountability. late capitalism, you really are genius!

capitalism is
capitalism is good
capitalism is dead
capitalism is boss
capitalism is the crisis
capitalism is founded on
capitalism is wrong
capitalism is a sin
capitalism is a scam
capitalism is unsustainable

freemarket activism

most of my friends in Berlin who could be called activists sustain themselves by applying for grants from the E.U., collecting Hartz4 (unemployment money), or working a job (as bartender, masseuse, whatever). most of my friends in the U.S. who could be called activists work for nonprofits and so are paid a salary to fight for justice. the way this plays out is that in Berlin more people are invited to join the struggle for safe queer spaces or noncapitalist exchange or nazi-free streets; in the U.S. the people invited to join the struggle are those paid to organize it and those being organized. there is a broad swath of people who fall outside those lines and so see themselves as superfluous to the struggle ("it's not my job"). not that relying on EU grants is really that different from relying on Ford Foundation grants but-- professionalizing activism still seems contrary to popular struggle & collective liberation, dubious as those goals seem day to day. maybe the corollary of "none of us is free while some of us aren't" is that a struggle waged by some is lesser than a struggle waged by all.

other isshas w the nonprofits.

burning oranges mid-recession

in the end i did get a job at whole foods, in the bakery department. every night we throw all the baguettes, boules, doughnuts, croissants, dinner rolls, sandwich pockets, bagels, and scones in biodegradable trashbags and leave them in Receiving where Salvation Army is supposed to pick them up the next day. Salvation Army rarely comes and even then, i wonder what they do with the breads since the local chapter doesn't have a kitchen. my coworkers often skip Receiving and toss everything in the dumpster along with the other 2 shopping carts full of expired sandwich bread, mini cookies, cake slices, etc. i don't know why the 2 shopping carts of food aren't donated. every night when i open the great metal door to the great metal room that houses our dumpster--locked from the outside and surrounded by a fence-- i have visions of oranges burning in the Grapes of Wrath.

excerpt:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the river and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must dill in the certificates—died of malnutrition---because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

end excerpt.

i think about printing 50 copies of this and sticking it in all the bosses' mailboxes, jerry maguire style. instead what i usually do is bag a loaf of quinoa-flax bread for my lover, a loaf of pain rustique for my grandfather, a loaf of old-world sprouted grain bread for myself, cranberry pecan rolls for one cousin and almond croissants for the other. this is considered stealing at whole foods--even though the goods can no longer be sold--and so i have to carry the stuff out in a paper bag acting like i bought it during my break. i think about what i would say if they fired me for stealing trash. i think about burning oranges. once i get home i lay out the goods on the kitchen table with post-its on top of each one so that my mother, who is still out of a job, can deliver the stuff to my two cousins and my grandfather. yesterday my grandfather emailed me:

	from	LEEROMAN@aol.com
to		alissa.romanow@gmail.com
date		Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:33 PM
subject		(no subject)

Lissie, darling, you've pulled a J.C. on me and provided me with enuf loaves to feed the multitude! Thanks much. I do in fact have a sufficiency for awhile- will let you know when I run out. love, grandpa

from alissa.romanow@gmail.com to LEEROMAN@aol.com date Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:32 PM subject Re: (no subject)

hi grandpa,
does that mean i pulled a Jesus Christ on you?
glad to hear you're stocked up well in case of apocalypse. i hope you are well and send you love.
lissy

from	LEEROMAN@aol.com
to		alissa.romanow@gmail.com
date		Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:16 AM
subject		Re: (no subject)

Sure, you know the fishes and the loaves at the sea of Galilee that fed the multitude.

end email conversation. too bad i am not feeding the multitude. and neither is whole foods. i was reminded of a colleague who was recently fired for stealing hours. she has 3 kids and a husby out of work. someone evidently thought Whole Foods Market would miss that money more than she. when do people stop thinking about people and start thinking only of rules? do they feel a whole country of their brains stop glowing? have they seen the movie Brazil?

if i were curating my day (w blog as gallery) i would put all of this in the dada trash heap with my A.Word.A.Day newsletter, whose theme this week is "words derived after mythical places." monday was utopia (noun: 1. An ideal place or state. 2. An impractical scheme for social or political reform) and tuesday is cockaigne (noun: An imaginary land of luxury and idleness. From Middle French pais de cocaigne (land of plenty), from Middle Low German kokenje, diminutive of koke (cake). Cockaigne was a fabled place of ease and luxury, a land overflowing with milk and honey where food fell into your mouth by itself. It was an imaginary place a medieval peasant could aspire to, a place away from the harsh reality of life). and i would throw mccain's latest t.v. ad in the show too, just for good measure.

i salute that answer's question

how could i have gone so long without touching the paper trail of taha muhammad ali? how could i have survived until now and does this mean i will cross still other paper trails that will make me wonder how i could have survived in this very moment without them?

MEETING AT AN AIRPORT

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
"What do you hate,
and who do you love?"

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
"I hate departure...
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning."
And you laughed...
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

...A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer,
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question...

...And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
"Is it you?!"
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
"If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!"

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
"I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning."

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

POST-OPERATIVE COMPLICATIONS FOLLOWING THE EXTRACTION OF MEMORY

In an ancient, gypsy
dictionary of dreams
are explanations of my name
and numerous
interpretations of all I’ll write.

What horror comes across me
when I come across myself
in such a dictionary!
But there I am:
a camel fleeing the slaughterhouses,
galloping toward the East,
pursued by processions
of knives and assessors,
women wielding
mortar and pestle for chop meat!

I do not consider myself a pessimist,
and I certainly don’t
suffer from the shock
of ancient, gypsy nightmares,
and yet, in the middle of the day,
whenever I turn on the radio,
or turn it off,
I breathe in a kind of historical,
theological leprosy.

Feeling the bonds of language
coming apart in my throat and loins,
I cease attending
to my sacred obligations:
barking, and the gnashing of teeth.

I confess!
I’ve been neglecting
my post-operative physiotherapy
following the extraction of memory.
I’ve even forgotten
the simplest way of collapsing
in exhaustion on the tile floor.

                                10.IV.1973

playing for god

d.h. lawrence

Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

is also the title of a poem by kathleen graber. i can't copy and paste it.

i got into kathleen graber initially thru ultra bouge new yorker, which apparently was taking a break from robert pinsky for one issue and decided to publish the poem below, which i can't render single space for reasons beyond reason.


The Magic Kingdom

And as in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all? —St. Augustine, “City of God.”

This morning, I found on a slip of paper tucked into a book

a list of questions I’d written down years ago to ask the doctor.

What if it has spread? Is it possible I’m crazy? I’ve just returned

from Florida, from visiting my mother’s last sister, who is eighty

& doing fine. At the airport, my flight grounded by a storm,

I bought a magazine, which fell open to a photograph

of three roseate spoonbills tossing down their elegant shadows

on a chartreuse field of fertilizer-production waste.

Two little girls emptied their Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish

onto the carpet & picked them up, one by one, with great delicacy,

before popping them into their mouths. Their mother, outside

smoking, kept an eye on them through the glass. After my cousin died,

my father died & then my brother. Next, my father’s older brother

& his wife. And, finally, after my mother died, I expected

to die myself. And because this happened very quickly

& because these were, really, almost all the people I knew,

I spent each day smashing dishes with one of my uncle’s hammers

& gluing them back together in new ways. It was strange work

& dangerous, even though I tried to protect myself—

wearing a quilted bathrobe & goggles & leather work gloves

& opening all the windows, even in snow, against the vapors

of the industrial adhesives. Most days now I get up late

& brew coffee & the smell rises from the old enamel pot

I’ve had to balance under the dark drip ever since the carafe

that came with the machine shattered in the dishwasher last month.

One morning I found a lump in my breast & my vision narrowed

to a small dot & I began to sweat. My legs & arms felt weak,

& my heart thrashed behind its bars. We were not written

to be safe. In the old tales, the woodcutter’s daughter’s path

takes her, each time, through the dark forest. There are new words

for all of this: a shot of panic becomes the rustle of glucocorticoid

signalling the sympathetic nervous system into a response

regulated by the sensitivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

And, as I go along, these freshly minted charms clatter together

in the tender doeskin of the throat as though the larynx

were nothing if not a sack of amulets tied with a cord & worn

around the neck. But I tell you I sat on the bathroom floor for hours,

trembling. And I can tell you this because the lump was just a lump

& some days now I don’t even dread the end although I know

it will arrive. The garage is filled with buckets of broken china.

The girls chased each other & waved their arms, casting spells,

the trim of their matching gingham dresses the electric pink

of the birds’ wings. They turned each other into princesses

& super-girls & then they pretended to change back.

Oh, no. You forgot to say forever—they took turns repeating

with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,

their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.

inferno

disco fever & spring fever & now
no work no sleep only dance all the time

summer is already coming, already came and went

this is another poem by michael earl craig

COOKOUT
They had friends over for a cookout.
Quite a few people came.
They grilled salmon, knockwurst, bratwurst, burgers.
Six people brought potato salad.
After midnight, when everyone had left,
he felt drunk and laid down on the back porch.
There were bottles everywhere—some in clusters,
some standing alone or on their sides or in the hedge.
Miller, Molson, Lowenbrau, Budweiser, Bud Light,
Coors, Coors Light, a few Amstel Lights.
It all made him think of nothing. His mind
had been racing lately… now it slowed down, down…
he laid flat on his back, feeling his head
rock ever so slightly on the boards
where only an hour ago people had walked, danced,
stood laughing or arguing, holding hotdogs, eating coleslaw.
The wind came howling now, blowing dust and sand.
He had no idea where his wife was.
Had she gone somewhere? He couldn’t say.
His head, rocking right and left on the boards.
A little slack now in his cheeks.
I would imagine he felt it all slipping gently away.
The season was changing. It grew very cold.
Then snowed lightly. The wind and blown sand
picked the faded labels off the beer bottles.
The house filled with cobwebs and kids from town
looted the place—took the grill, the stereo,
then all the furniture, appliances, rugs,
teacups and towel racks.
Two years passed. This asshole was out!
The landscape had been denuded. There once
had been Hungarian partridge and bougainvillia.
Now there was nothing. And yet his chest
raised gently, paused, and lowered…
raised gently, paused, and lowered….
Some say he’s “pissed it all away.”
Others say he knows exactly what he’s doing.

spring

normally i get depressed in the spring but i recently read david foster wallace's essay about john updike, in which dfw writes of updike's character ben turnbull: "Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the novel's first page. It never occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole." so i am trying to be less of an asshole.

also i wanted to post this poem by michael earl craig:

Untitled


When I look at the box of Twinkies
They make me want to puke.
I eat ten of them.
Ten is all I can eat.
Now two remain, and I look at them.
For some reason I don't feel so sick.
I don't feel sick at all.
I think I can eat them.

lost sight

i've been looking for this song since like 2001. 

flowers

so today i wake up fresh, go for an interview at whole foods, and decide to spend my last afternoon of unemployment between grolier and harvard bookshops in cambridge. the sun is shining. i go into grolier and say hi to the clerk who wears a bowtie. i ask if they have the new kevin goodan. they are sold out. melvin dixon? they don't have it. i start wandering among the shelves--there's louise glück, e.e. cummings, and d.h. lawrence on the table, mark levine, jorie graham, etc.  i pick up 'transcendental studies' by keith waldrop which just won the national book award when a teenage boy opens the shop door: do you have any feminist or queer poetry, he wants to know? be still my fucking heart: a teenage boy asking for feminist or queer poetry. perhaps we should save the earth. the clerk, dan, walks over to a shelf and says he thinks they only have an anthology. 'an anthology?' he says. 'it's a gift so i don wanna give an anthology.' i propose audre lorde. dan the clerk says they don't have it. he gives the kid ana montes, which the kid considers and then leaves. i get high on keith waldrop and go outside to come down in the sun. 

outside i start wondering: how is it possible that a bookstore that sells only poetry-- a landmark of avant-garde literature since 1925 and a juicy intellectual cactus in the conservative desert of boston-- carries only anthologies of feminist and queer poetry? how can they not have dixon or lorde? and why do white women always write about flowers? what's with them and gardens? why do i find this so irritating? am i sexist? in the words of helen dewitt, what's going on??

i chill out and go into the harvard bookstore, stumble across 'the historiographic perversion' by marc nichanian and read gil anidjar's afterword. i shake off the violence of the archive walking into central square and play a guitar at the guitar shop. there a man asks me what kind of music i want to play and starts talking about learning banjo in his younger days. he is still talking when my phone rings and i say, 'excuse me i have to take this i think i am getting a job.' the woman at whole foods tells me she is not giving me a job. i hang up the phone and the man resumes talking banjo while i realize to the hurt background of my own discordant strumming that this is not my last afternoon of unemployment. i will never be able to buy this guitar. i will never be able to buy anything. fuck this country. i'm going to binge on poetry. 

rodneys bookstore is just 2 blocks down, far inferior to grolier and harvard but mainstream enough to carry audre lorde. i ask the clerk. no audre lorde? ok. how about june jordan? no? probly no melvin dixon then either, huh? righto. well. there are lots of good poets. look, here's louise glück...writing about irises. and here's h.d.! ...writing about roses.

now i like 'nature' much as the next person. trees, sun, air: food. it's not hard to convince me that we are uglier than trees. but if you contend with nature from the vantage of your flowerbed; if you identify in your menopausal years with the wilting magnolia; if you speak of lovers and roses; i will hate on you. and ima hate extra hard when it's your reclusive middle-class clichés on the shelf instead of poems with a taste for the noisy, the hairy, and the unemployed. poems for the aminals like us.

on that note i leave you with a good & decidedly transcendental poem with a reference to flowers by a white person. (whats good keith waldrop.)

8. 

Need not end. Indeed, nothing. Step

out. Grist for wits. Shadow of your

shell. Stand there.

No other ground. No

other. And the world concerns you every-

where, but do not identify with it.

Let light onto us. Flowers through the

gate, flowers skimming

the wall. A carpet of petal.

Treasures below the earth. Neither in

this world nor another, guarding.

Nothing but fade and flourish.

fish

on the animal/human tip,

check boy peter's beautiful film about fish in tokyo. 

if i was a curator i'd put it in a show on the animal/human tip.

this gets me thinking about humans and fish, and then about whether i could morph into a fish and then one thing leads to another and i am at Face Transformer, the bizarro invention of some probly well-meaning but definitely racist cats at st. andrews university.

so i jump in.

i mistakenly label my original picture as afro-caribean [sic] which leads to an afro-caribean transformation that looks just like my original. right.

 so then i transform myself into a caucasian person. 

an aryan upgrade! i go back and label my original caucasian, rendering me afro-caribean thus:

isn't it weird you can't morph caucasian into caucasian, afro into afro? it's like you're not supposed to see the race template. thinking myself much flyer as an afro-caribean [sic] woman, i feel sad for a moment, morph into a fish, and swim away. 

      

youmans

in the midst of an ongoing debate about everything, kiye told me to watch an episode of the pbs show "the human spark" which takes us into alan alda's brain. i am pretty sure kiye put me onto the show to illustrate the evolutionary superiority of mind-reading accommodationists to whistle-blowing militants, but then i am not a good mind reader so i will let kiye speak for himself. 

in the middle of the show (23:30 remaining) a 6 month old bebe is shown a circle with with googly eyes moving up a slope. a triangle comes from the top of the slope and pushes the circle down to the bottom. the circle starts back up the slope and then a square comes from behind and pushes it to the top. when bebe is given a choice between the triangle and the square, almost 100% of the time bebe chooses the square, having a preference for the character that 'gives you a leg up' over the character that 'keeps you down.' anyway. what neither the show nor the scientists comment on is the mere fact that bebe identifies with the circle and not the other shapes. this is not so surprising since the circle is the central character in the drama and we know how ego is. but still, what would happen if in the second phase of the experiment, they gave some back story: like would bebe react differently if the circle climbed to the top and knocked the triangle off? if the circle was black and the triangle was white? what do we have to do to make babies notice that context is missing. what do we have to do to make babies always ask questions with periods on the end.

anyway i am going to invite kiye to post on 'the human spark' so he can truth modulate. more soon on the whole human/animal thing. 

searches

so welcome. this is the first jawny of many dedicated to the brilliance of internet englishes and other unrelated topics. the title of this blog comes from a google search i did today. i was looking up christian benedictions ("god bless," "peace be with you, "grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love undying," "may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in you that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever," etc.); this led to bible proofs (people who show that the bible is true through proofs logical, historical, archaeological, and other foofoo ways -- the second search term under "bible proof" on the youtube is "bible proof that obama is the antichrist"...a course); at which point i noticed related search terms at the bottom of my google page. which were:

jesus birth truth

jesus trust

jesus quotes truth

god truth

jesus honesty

bible truth

jesus fact

christ truth

which is how we got here.