Modes of Counterproduction/New Criterion/Rough Draft

The philanthropist laughs with his throat,
his social bounds unleashed by his kindness.
The young man leaves his wallet on the open bar,
turns away. two men nod at him after he turns
to retrieve it. the economy for the faithful failing.



The lack of electricity dissipates the power from house to house, business to business, dissolves the structures of contact between people. Every interaction requires reinterpretation. Where the standard motions of waiting and payment once took place, FEMA ration lines now stand around POD centers. The officiating sounds of transactions no longer take place with the punctuation of a register ring or declarative totals, but the soft hiss of soldering. The loose wires are live and active, albeit disconnected.



In no shortage or irony, international banks threatened to halt interbank loans this weekend, a direct threat to the movement of the international economy. The collapse of the superstructure from Houston towards the world, seems imminent. In this imminency, the entitled seem ludicrous, the lack of self-humilating consent to their demands or the lack of some structure that enables their entitlement enrages them. These scenes of distemper take place in a scene of address where electricity is available. The avaibility to reference the disconnected system aggrevates the lost power of the superiors in the capitalist structure of social accountability. The aggrevation to them is that they no longer are accountable to a 5pm conference call or mortgage company, but to everyone.



Every action acts as measure, every interaction a genuflection to their character. How this power structure (economy/credit/electricity) provides space for this scene of address and how the lack of this structure reveals an alternate and co-existent human possibility further illuminates the power of myth in our contemporary society. The myth of stability, the myth of money, the myth of work, the myth of economy. The emergence of possibility, of not a replica of myth, but a new criterion, true to contemporary experience, not an archaic power structure.




The streets, like my vague memories of Alicia, are lined with fallen limbs and debris. My neighborhood, in blackout possibly until Thursday, lights up with dimly liminal candels flickering behind walls, through windows, across the pages of my books. Against the sillouetted trees, at times the skyline peeks through, the stark contrast sometimes strange as the light contrast creates a parallax of greater distance. Most doors are open for the little wind that does move after dusk. I know my neighbors better now. There are shut doors where the overtness…the abrasive generators pummel silence with their carborators, their combustion. I have spoken with my neighbors once since they aquired a generator. The T.V. flickr through the windows, on the walls. The reconnection.




man with gun pointed downwards while waiting in line for gas. surreal sound of the ice rink music. old woman sitting at bunk bed installation. how mass use of galleria utility turned from problem to seeming philanthropy, “charging station”.

Reginald Shepherd

I'm truly saddened both by his prolonged suffering and truncated life. Reginald truly inspired me towards a melding of criticism and poetry. His perspective and spirit will be missed in the poetry community.

Zizek on Children of Men

Slavoj Zizek Commentary on Children of Men @ Yahoo! Video

The delineation of huminity as seperate from human, unpossessed by the state in principle or universal interest, appears as a Cy Twombley towards the end of the film. A skrawled line to nowhere. Nihlism fails to describe the outcome as aggression or "justified" defense overwhelms compasion. The acts of humanity carried out consist of restraint, protection, willingness to experience and suffering. The anamorphosis of human action and humanity described by Zizek here indicates his early thought in comprising "Paralax View".

Western Hemesphere Polytheist

Christianity, in the colloquial America, exists apart from history. Transplanted without a body from European historicism, no relics of past events exist as reminders of its development. The sunbelt God is an organ without a body. No Worms cathedral where a golden tablet ironically displays the 95 thesis Luther posted on a common bulletin - not driven with a nail and hammer onto a cathedral door as the American classroom myth insists. There's no contrast between a Gothic perspective of Christ and the Romantic perspective of Christ, which I argue is the vision of Christ brought to America. This not only coincides with the historical point at which the national identity of America was wrought, but also the underlying ideologies prevelant in the industrial revolution and the "second" enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The American God is a seperate God.



In Levinas' terms, a pre-ontological God. This inexperience of history and religion allows for nievite and violence, such as the reaction to the Church of Later Day Saints expresses. Yet, its only in America, that a large group of people have allowed for the return of a prophet in modernity. Perhaps the emergence of media coincides with the opening of this prophecy, this belief of the pre-ontological reified on screen, allowing us to glimpse the happenings of heaven without first braving death and the dismemberment of our egotistic consciousness that serves as our opacity to knowledge. A legal footnote protects America from outright theocracy, yet this knowledge arrives from a seperate culture, from a seperate populace. This is a rare event outside of Hegel where the law precedes public knowledge. This statement also assumes that within the process of colonization, the colonizer disconnects from the umbilical culture of inheritence.

Homo Sacer

The city lights received no power. The unaccustomed stars appeared, as though late for a casting call. The storm had blown through, and in its wake the severed power lines cackled in the saturated ground, or sent currents uselessly into puddles. An electric green light arced between the disconnected utility poles, fogging the vanishing point above the road leading into the city. Driving slow through the tree limbs, I occasionally had to stop the truck and drag debris to the roadside in order to continue home. It was not so much the silence that estranged me from my city, nor the lack of light, but the sound of conversation through the thick insect song and the red balls of cigarette embers glowing hot on the distant porches.

agency

it’s not voluntary,
the salve dissolves too
quickly
soaks in the blood stained napkin.
to be pressed in a book.
to remember.
leaves lose color in spite
of trying to keep them. then
become flat colors of resentment.

i want to mold and mulch,
open my mouth and wait
for beetles to scent
the mouth stays wet
and where I was hit
bruises plume to surface
under command of spreading foliage
an exhaling end
of the corporeal
season.

your flesh
a pillow for my pressed thumb.
your mouth
my salve that i keep wet.

every word an anchor
thrown out in iron links
slit by my teeth.

the world recoils
so the sounds don’t make sense
and never hit bottom.



it’s not voluntary.

kenneth, what is the frequency?

isn’t your girlfriend getting married today?
yes she is
aren’t you going to go?
i’ve already gone.
she’s married already?
no.
did she run off?
no. the ceremony’s at six.
samjay knew april had no future. her father was a cast iron and her mother was a foot. april was pure twine and her fiancé was named buster. when samjay brought april home for the first time, his parents took turns trying to lace themselves with her. april’s mother could fit perfectly into each of samjay’s parents. samjay’s parents were both right soled shoes. susan’s father stayed home in the fire. there was no water in auckland.



how can you have already been there if it hasn’t happened yet?
happening is not a place.
to my right time jumps an hour at a time. to my left it drops an hour. the distances per hour are not equidistant. for instance, april’s house is always an hour behind samjay’s house. the wedding is always ahead one hour of whatever time it is at any given moment in this story.

samjay’s parents owned a dry cleaning business, for which samjay was a proud product. susan worked there. she looked down from the pole and told samjay,
remember daylight savings tonight.
tonight? fall back?
yep. one hour.
already?
it’s the first year of that bill that passed.
it’s tonight, not last night?
i don’t know.
oh god.



samjay’s parents could catch glimpses of each other between the footsteps of their walkers. but the sound of so many other shoes and pitiful shoeless feet, making contact with the ground, then lifting again, made it impossible for them to communicate. finally, after a solid city block, they caught up together and spoke, though they were visually obstructed by Mr. Johnson’s left shoe. it sounded like the electronic drumbeat of the street signal for the blind or leather stretching, or even the sound of your own footsteps after you’ve stopped walking; not because some metaphysical self continues after you stop, but because your mind expects something even after your body stops and assumes the continuation for you. Mr. and Mr. Johnson stepped into crossing traffic and were killed. all plans were cancelled and samjay’s bloodstained parents are for sale in a thriftstore.

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