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“I’m going to go to China,” I say, with firmness. “I found cheap tickets already, and I’ve had my visa ready for a while.”
“When are you going?”
“In a couple weeks,” I say.
“That’s really soon. You’re coming back, right?”
He looks confused and hurt. The question surprises me. I hadn’t thought that far. But then, since he’s asked, since he’s suggested it, it occurs to me that there are other possibilities in leaving.
“Well, I have a ticket back, but I don’t know about after.”
“Oh. Okay,” he says.
“We can talk about it later,” I say.
We sit for an eternity of silence. I think about all of his flaws. The silence.
Now he’s opening his mouth to end it. “I’m going to miss you.”
For a moment, I feel it, too. Missing him, missing us. But then something inside me shuts off.
“Have you read the articles about race I sent you?”
He looks away guiltily. “I started, but then I got busy. They’re pretty dense. I’m going to finish, though, I swear.”
nooo lady don't do that
NICOLE EISENMAN, I NEED YOU TO MAKE A PICTURE
Nicole I saw you at the church and need your help. I think it's important to record relaxin's long term distortions. My legs are slightly bowed not from doing anything so that is immaterial.
What about this gappy thing between my thighs there is something wrong with my hips they are stuck or something, I mean they get stuck when I move so there is an arc in trying to move forward so that every forward movement involves a circle that was not there before. When I bend over completely in Prasarita Padottanasana like my groin is released in such a way like I feel the turning of a ball of the joint in such a way that I imagine my hip joints as padded with cork there is a softness such as was not there a soft hole that was not there in the groin which is related to the gappy hips. My boobs are ruined and ought to be painted as soon as possible as I cannot say whether they are ugly or beautiful; they are a ruin so how do you show that or what do you do about change of that nature where overnight you were one thing and then unimaginable punishments and then you were out of that even if you are not religious or a very small child I think you need a picture showing this kind of bodily rage although I admire certain aspects or angles of what I now see as the brutal indent of a formerly powerful ass. And the way I am eating which cannot be pictured but might be symbolically "pictured" or I pick up and secretly eat carbohydrates I load in ways previously revolting to me as my fear of obesity is intense everlasting earned. I think my digestion is ugly.
Returning to the privations of the past is tough despite years of trouble sacrifice of blood blisters under the toenails I sweated this muscle in the modern way with only moderate success. The limp is runner's knee.
DOG POEM
On this day 11 years ago my father died.
I watched him refuse death.
There was no reason to share this.
It was an indignity.
There is no refusing.
The brain stops even if until the last it performs miraculously the
duty of remaining illuminated.
He died on an evening like this warm one in November.
Loose leaves blew around the parking lot as I drove away from the
place of his death, a hospital.
I smoked with my mother's second sister just beyond the gate of the house my parents bought, owned and lived in together for twenty-six years.
I lived in that house, but did not live there then.
We smoked and a reporter came to the gate and asked her
questions.
She was ashamed.
There was no need to answer her.
We did not answer.
We smoked.
The night was strangely warm, like so many peculiar Halloweens,
November in just a few days.
Autumn quiets or casts itself between the warm parts of air.
It fills spaces of warmth with cold.
The poem is ... an organism or temporal machine, that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. For the more or less brief time the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time.
— Georgio Agamben The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans
"There is a history of the embrace of degraded pleasure." What about the ways in which the R&B of my mind, today, is undermined by its own exuberant supplantation by the vulgar practice of Jay-Z— right-before-our-eyes capitalization of the value of black love and (of) hustle; he is a hedge fund. His vulgar practice is irrelevant to elaborating the love between us because it does not differentiate between transformative intimacy that is future-oriented and the consumable performance of black presence, which is always oriented toward what is already known about the black, all the symbolic causes of our danger. The vulgar practice is a fire-sale on the "all emotion" of the old R&B, trafficking in what Baraka views as the small-minded romantic hysteria of regular feeling (Beyonce's Lemonade) and peppers the old feelings, sweetens the deal, via performance of an emotional and affective repertoire that emerges from the time of rap mu-sic, alone. A terse awareness of the market value of the violence and isolation that gives our love its peculiarity. "The slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity": the slave is "property of enjoyment." "I know that we the new slaves." [...]
the rapper says deftness, sleight of hand with the limited discursive materials of consumable black life, more about which below), borrowed from the beat-making repertoire of electronic dance mu-sic, which thrives on investment in the pushy invasion that occurs when sine waves deployed in vast open spaces make contact with bodies that intend to absorb thump, bodies invested in turning toward the direction of the sound, catching the wave of bass between them as intimacy/sex/euphoria. To make much or everything of a single ambient tone, to throw it about a cavernous space. Various studies in contrast/noise and synth overtake or emphasize the fun-damentality of the drop. In rap music, the open space of the club is the world space of the music industry, the anti-club, everywhere. In trap music, bass is threatened by the interference/meddling of the machine. Trap music's busyness or tchchiness, the way in which it ticks.
I am talking about now and about the future, about the beautiful and terrible "kind of consciousness" this new black music surfaces.
Speaking of "musical togetherness" then —even and especially as it is presently trafficked by a constellation of super rappers and producers who are indisputably mighty rock stars-think about Drake and Future's "Diamonds Dancing." Think of Future's extraordinary prolificity for which trapping is example and symbolical foundation.
Think black people who are "rock stars" think Hendrix chart domination supergroup, then think producer tag: Metro Boomin Want Some More Nigga. Think homo economicus. Think Jay-Z, and Kanye West's Watch the Throne as evidence of the possibility of a Drake and Future tour (think about the roots of all these words); think a realm where there are no women who are not strippers and drug mules and things like bikes one man swaps with another man. [...]
One ambitious attempt to undo the individual-moral-adventure story was the postmodern systems novel, which intended to depict entire political, social, and technological systems by zooming in and out on figure and ground. The concept was introduced in the late eighties by the critic Tom LeClair, who chose the fiction of Don DeLillo as the quintessential example. LeClair claimed that DeLillo and others, such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, were using fiction to analyze the complex systems of society, technology, and politics from a structural level. DeLillo’s early novels sketch vast political and corporate conspiracies just beyond the fingertips of the central character, whose individual moral adventure is his paranoid pursuit to comprehend the whole system from shards of evidence. The “system” of the systems novel is never fully revealed, but the reader is given to believe that, behind the scenes, something or someone is pulling the strings.
The term systems novel was maligned by many readers as well as authors themselves, who saw their works as diverse and exploratory rather than reducible to a set of general principles. Yet there are qualities typical of the project: the character of the classic systems novel is a white Western man, as are the majority of the authors themselves. Despite the focus on macrolevel occurrences and interconnectedness, there remains a protagonist: the mystified guy (or guys) at the center. He may feel personally small or powerless, but his experience is the lens through which human experience is meant to be extrapolated. Most of the time, the systems in which he is embroiled are social, technical, and political, rather than ecological, suggesting a separation between the human realm (system) and the natural world (ecosystem). In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it.
funny cus this is kind of what pano is trying to be
The story of person-becoming-plant is not about reversal or reversion to some imagined natural state. Instead it provides a counterpoint to any quick-fix, back-to-the-land fantasy, which sees nature as distinct, permanent, unchanging, passive, authentic, and fundamentally good. The idea is not that nature will heal what ails these characters, that they will become natural “again.” On the contrary, it’s about seeing people as always already plant, plant as always already human, and those distinctions as always already weird. Weirdness resists the idea that everything can be explained by humans, but doesn’t give up on the importance of human experience and ability to access and affect the world. This requires some kind of surrender to the unknown, which makes humanity itself an unknown category—whose outlines get messy and whose central importance in the universe is not self-evident.
this is good but also makes me think of the miranda popkey 'always already' joke lol
Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts it, the “incursion” of Eros invades the self, disturbing its homeostasis, and the self finds this both painful and pleasurable. It is only due to incursion, after all, that the self can even recognize itself as such. When the self recognizes its boundaries, it has to reckon with them. The lover has to ask, “ ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover.” Carson describes this change as both bitter and sweet, borrowing these terms from a fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Sappho:
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
The Gift’s thesis is that artistic creation is fundamentally an act of generosity, which may be accounted for by commodity systems such as the market economy but which forever evades total capture by those systems. Hyde makes (some occasionally universalizing and exoticizing) sojourns into gift theory and anthropological surveys of cultures with gift-giving economies, and analyzes the way gifts have today been commodified and funneled through philanthropic systems. Yet Hyde maintains that, despite the function of the gift in a given time and place, the gift is fundamentally unique, in that its value always increases as it circulates. The gift contains within it “the mystery of things that increase as they perish”—like compost. The gift may degrade, but it holds potential for eternal growth.
<3