THE ECCLESIA: What It Is
I AM THE OCEAN.
I am the tide. I am the rise and fall of a wave on a shrub laid in the earth. There are limits to my destruction, but not many. People, they say, “Where have you been? Ain’t seen you in a while?” I am always gone and leaving all the time. This is a mode. I forget what I learned to learn it again, to learn it better than it can.
Do you know what it is to wake from a dream unknowing? You were there and now you are here where do we begin from there. When last you left, it was unexpected and it remains still. I cannot remain still.
The door swings open white cube. There are bodies and objects, differences. Spaces exist between the bodies and objects. Some you can drink and some you can eat. Inside the white cube the cube does a noise. The noise is the bodies and objects coming out of the noise, like cartoons come out of the dark. It’s white in this cube. The noise isn’t white. The noise has no color but the colors come out of it. Noise makes objects emerge to ear, choppings from the body-objects. The nails that hold the room together turn in their sleep and loosen from the wood of walls’ embrace. [ . . . ]
: : : : :
I’m making a report of sorts (explosive sound). Tho certain oaths as it were undone to do so. In an age of new popes certain truths untethered can only be the way, need of the idea of the new. There is no secret no spark that will not in the very eye of night of time not rise as a shifting color from its source to know thru to us as each other. I release an animal day after day recoaxed to form from the wrecked hide & bone rended dissembled by dogs and gathered in a garbage bag, released at our wide edge of woods. Songs unheard unspoken in the sound-film.
The ECCLESIA at the circumference-is-nowhere, we’re a bridge. We’re chaotic, indigenous to blood, and refracting in every direction. The sublime, the grotesque, the liminal and the devotional are constantly excavated, birthing new edges and boundaries to be explored. It’s in this that we, in our research and efforts, render all (other) expression possible.
In armchairs we here in the zenithal crux of the Azonic Lodge map and sigilize with thought the hidden canon, burn up or birth to throw the shapes that find their purchase.
TALL IS MAN
a PALE LIMP CYST
to speak a
TETRIS GRAMMAR TONGUE
AI EIS AI OU PHAR DOU IS EI OU
[ [ [ I have come in great rest in order
that we may give rest to our light in the root ] ] ]
We go down to Chaos to save the whole Light from it,
lighthouses slow rising from the blowholes of great whales
as their mouths no longer sucking lemon open
and the rotating beams as they meet they touch
describe the teeth of the crystalline cogwheels archoniked.
: : : : :
The first exoteric face of the ECCLESIA effloresced in Portland, OR about six years ago. This the only assembly as such going back epochs previous, tho still retaining past methods and likewise those existing on the mirrored fold of our future. In this way members are always emerging, realization actualized in the mystery school,
out of focus / triple-exposed
green room monitored and radioed,
shrinking and expanding of the unground
supporting the Fire in Thought.
Here you sense some other metaphysical machines. These constructed in long-standing cloistral projection, beam hatched of past sun-crust wombing swarm to burst forth each fully formed. In the rafters of what was called sky we take up with the echelons.
Hail fellow. Hello sister.
If you’re with it you’ll know, ya know ya know.
Whoa now you get it you feelin’ me.
Ha ha yeah you got it.
Here is your staff and your tablet.
THE TABLET GIVES RISE TO ITS OWN EFFACEMENT
: brilliance is worthy only in the dark :
: : : : :
So I mean yeah come in have a seat. You want anything to eat or drink? It’s only as hard to get comfortable as you make it so they say. But bitterness embarrassment futility doubt regret disappointment is some of the best fuel never talked about. As you can tell we’re talking hear but the words seam funny in this great degree of silence we’ve soared like a box-kite outside.
Anyways I wanna play you this song. Listen to this song. You’re gonna love it.
: : : : :
TIME OUT RUNG ROUND CAGES ORBIT TONSURE SHATTER CUNT FOLDS BLOOMING CREST OF CROWN BOWL PASS IN WELCOME WEB SILK FLAME POUR IN THRU NOSTRIL FACING OWL FACED UPWARD CATCHING DIVING HEART BARB UNDONE ORB EXPANDING US TO THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS MOMENT
[_______]
Why not just do something cool like Story Tapes
Hey, have y’all seen and heard this Story Tapes project that Eliza Smith and Faith Gardner have put together? They have a sweet logo, and they post interviews/audio/video of writers reading their own stories, or swapping and reading another writer’s stories, and it’s all really nicely produced and soundtracked.
Stories by people like Scott McClanahan, xTx, Delaney Nolan, Dylan Nice, Alissa Nutting, Mary Miller, Sarah Rose Etter, Amber Sparks, Matt Rowan, Lauren Becker, Casey Hannan, Tania Hershman, and some cool new-to-me people like Alicia Mountain, Sean Schlemmer, Josh Denslow, Owen Poindexter, Molly Laich, Megan Kruse, Berit Ellingsen, and more.
More people should do stuff like this. Is this a thing? Are lots of people doing well-designed and steady video/audio reading series things like Story Tapes? Can you post some links in the comments?
Cost Per Impression: Anti-history of The Persuaders
Nobody really gives a shit about the history of adveriting. This isn’t a complaint. It’s a thesis.
American Humans Are the Least Specialist Things In the Solar System
At least three times a week, whether I’m sipping Berry Juicy Juice, reciting Chelsey Minnis verse (“most poets don’t have any dick or balls under this their skirts”) or staring dreamily out the window, I think about how terrific it would be if every single boy in Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” music video was my boyfriend. Oh, we’d almost surely have a swell time together. We’d engage in the most exquisite activities, like sip Berry Juicy Juice, recite Chelsey Minnis, and stare dreamily out the window. Though, obviously, if the GBE boys and I turned into an item, we might, even in this time period, be subject to racism. America hasn’t exactly been benevolent to those whose skin color resembles not a vanilla milkshake. America has savagely uprooted an entire race, dropped two atomic bombs on another, and averted their eyes from countless non-whitey genocides. Indeed, American human possess a preponderant of bias against those contrasting their skin color, just as, though in different degrees, they are biased against boys who don’t like girls, girls who don’t like boys, and anyone who doesn’t treat the Holocaust as an unspeakable occurrence.
Yes, yes, American humans are prejudiced, and I wish to discuss what these prejudices mean: What is the basis for American humans’ brutal attitude towards others? What are American humans trying to preserve? What characteristics do American humans have that others don’t? What type of society are non-American humans being excluded from?
According to Lana Del Rey, “Money is the reason we exist / Everyone knows it’s a fact / Kiss kiss.” The German boy, Karl Marx, concurs with the pointed girl singer. The laborer, in Karl’s words, “consumes in a two-fold way.” While working, he consumes what’s needed to produce what he’s obligated to, like computers, smartphones, coffee bean grinders, &c. When the laborer is not occupied with his job he spends the money that he earned on subsistence, like meat, middle-class clothes, and an apartment (probably in Bed-Sty [sp?]) that is deplorably deprived of Disney DVDs (though not, unsurprisingly, lubricant and books by 99 percent poets). The worker buys these things since, without them, his labor power value would vault into worthlessness and then he, too, would be worthless.
All worth comes from money. Marx says, “Money brings the relation of commodities into values” since it serves as the “universal equivalent.” Money turns humans into commodities. They sell their labor – themselves – in the way that someone else (Kmart) would sell me, say, a teddy bear. Commodities can be becoming things; yet commodities that are arrogant, that deem themselves superior to other commodities, are utterly unbecoming things. My teddy bear doesn’t torpedo around town twittering of human rights, morals, and equality. My teddy bear is quiet, cute, and cuddly. The American human, however, is a disgraceful commodity. They operate under the belief that they are not commodities at all. American humans talk your ear off about freedom and liberty. But American humans are not independent. American humans are moored to money, for, minus money, American humans would be bereft of an identity, since money — how much money they extract for their labor power as well as the amount they spend in order to surround themselves with commodities of commensurate value, which, in turn, perseveres the appeal of their labor power value – forms the American human’s identity.
Speculations about Goodreads & Amazon (instead of eating lunch)
I was going to go get Subway for lunch today, but then I started thinking about what was more important: eating or social media? I decided eating, but then I remembered that I used to be a social media consultant, so whatever, here’s some thoughts on this Goodreads/Amazon thing that a lot of people (thirty-five, maybe) are really worked up about:
- Amazon isn’t Google, which does a really fantastic job of buying the cutest startups at the pound and then leaving said startups on the side of the road after they get old and ugly and start pissing on the carpet. Jeff Bezos invests and improves his acquisitions–just look at how Audible integrated with Kindle so that users can switch back and forth between listening and reading. Nothing is going to happen overnight, but expect some serious changes in your Goodreads user experience.
- Mashable ran the headline “Amazon Buys Goodreads to Make Reading Experience More Social.” This sounds utterly terrifying, because the last thing I want to do when I’m reading is socialize. But I guess it also sounds gorgeous, because it might create some dystopian world where we see status updates like “Fat Jim checked into His Bathtub, Bitch! (with Georges Bataille and A Diet Coke).“ READ MORE >
I SEE U GIRL: The Elegant Blindness of Masculine Mimetic
Unified gaze theory? Would that be called Tunnel Vision Theory? Or just tunnel vision? Hegemony about Hegemony? As a man, I’m allowed to talk about everything, while understanding very little.
Theory: what we have developed is a kind of tunnel vision for the sake of re-producing culture and economy. You know of this post-Marxist system; I will not write of the components in a more clear way than has already been written by others.
We remember: The Gaze was a perfect piece of gender-biopower technology, a software that everyone wanted to run, a software that reproduced itself onscreen, without showing how it was made. Tickets sold themselves. Sex-less sex. War-less war. READ MORE >
Found Text (with edits)
I just got back from the store and found this on the front door of my apartment building:
Did you know a man was shot in the chest on [street nearby] Wednesday night?
Did you know the man shot resides at [my street]?
Did you know three shots were fired in front of [street nearby]?
Did you know two of the three shots hit a parked car on [street nearby]?
Did you know one shot ricocheted off the car and has not been located?
To know more about what the city is doing about our neighborhood crime:
[twitter]
[facebook]
[gmail]
I’m pretty sure I heard it happen, and remember thinking “shots or car backfiring?”
And in itself and
“She comes to a rest in shadow. Above her is an overhang of chickenwire and tins. She freezes. Above her is a terrible shape, a jagged many-limbed thing, a tree tangled from the composites of aerials and tv innards, plastic extrusions like growths in its multipart trunk, thorns of glass and shattered plates. Its branches splay – finger after finger of tubing, and intricate wicked ribbing. Dangling from them like dirty dank foliage, like the skins of victims, are dish clothes, and umbrellas’ countless ripped canopies. Nylon in dinged colours.”
— from “The Flies That Bind” by “Jacques Francis,” The New Inquiry
“I used to compare everything in poems to metallic sheets of mica, the transparent fragments that flake off so easily. I never say I’m a poet; I just say “writer” and no one ever asks “a writer of what?” Once a man told me he was in the business of prosthetic limbs and I was speechless.”
— Stephanie Balzer, The Destroyer Vol 1.2
“We had a president living here once,
After he was president.
A famous animator lived here too.
We’d see him feeding the ducks.
This used to be a big duck town.
Ducks had a real voice.
Then one night they left for New Haven.”
— from “A Little Background” by James Haug, Connotation Press
A Summary of Our Academic Conference, The Unstable and [de] Mutable Boundaries Between Meteorological Atrocities and Human Political Economies with Bodies-as-Subjects Coming Into Being As They Are
Governor Cuomo
The approach of Hurricane Sandy has already altered the entire course of me and my friend’s lives. On Sunday, I was supposed to shop for vintage sweaters and attend a poetry brothel. These would’ve probably been some wonderful moments. But Hurricane Sandy put a stop to all my hypothetically marvelous adventures.
Instead my friends and I were bunkered in our apartment in Alphabet City.
What were we to do?
If we were VIDA, then we could count the number of times a masculine pronoun appeared in this week’s NYT Book Review and then compare it to the number of times that a feminine pronoun appeared in this week’s NYT Book Review and then get really angry about it and channel all of our anger into a neat and tidy chart.
If we were overly anxious New York Jews then we could close down the subway system at 7 PM, hold press conferences using folksy idioms like “up and about,” and dress like men who spend a great deal of time in well-off subdivisions of Connecticut.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Also, if we were male homosexuals, we could have sex nonstop sans condoms.
But my friends and I aren’t any of those things. So, in lieu of that, we chose to hold an academic conference that had an awful lot of relevance to our current predicament. Our conference, which was held last night (28 Oct. 2012), was called The Unstable and [de] Mutable Boundaries Between Meteorological Atrocities and Human Political Economies with Bodies-as-Subjects Coming Into Being As They Are. This conference has already been compared to some of the most vivid and vivacious academic conferences ever held.
Here’s a summary:
What I Say When You Ask What I’m Up To
A paper cutout-style animated video by Dan Lichtenberg adapted from Diana Salier’s poem WHAT I SAY WHEN YOU ASK WHAT I’M UP TO, from her new book LETTERS FROM ROBOTS.
Valley of the Dolls
I’ll admit that I giggled when Miley cut her hair and her twitter fan said she looked butch. I laughed when Britney went loco and shaved it all off. Hair seems to be the number one method of rebellion for the Disney starlets, this host of young women who grow up in front of the camera with overly white smiles and innocent girlish good-looks (often dimples), and then completely implode in the most public way possible. Yes, of course, these girls seek out stardom, and there will always be young kids who will do anything to get on TV or have their fame moment online, particularly now in this image-saturated techno age. And there will always be parents who will push their child from the moment they can walk to be a triple singing-dancing-acting threat. But what really intrigues/confuses me is this idea of the spectacle itself, the way in which there is an intense focus placed on these young women as they mature from kids to teenagers to young adults: it’s a coming-of-age that comes with a side of anti-depressants and multiple rehab trips – but it serves as global entertainment - whether it’s taking place on the Disney set, or through leaked grainy mobile bra pics and indiscretions at the Chateau Marmont.
6 Comments
October 19th, 2012 / 6:45 am
October 19th, 2012 / 6:45 am
Automotive Experience
The Impossible Global Freeway
Catch me showrooming a discontinued Saab in New Jersey – I would only buy online. I’m trolling the dealer, he’s thinking I can afford a new interior. I’ll end up with Ford, I’m sure. Or, catch me in Paris, loving the low-emission turbo diesel cab. See me climbing the North Cascade Highway in a borrowed Rav4 or my parent’s (now gone) Forest Green Toyota Sienna.
When I think about everything we’ll lose in the next century, the automobile comes into my mind. It roars in with the the force of the locomotive and the companionship of a horse. I’m reading Train Dreams now, and last week, I read High Life. It’s like, we’re all at a party, singing to the wind blowing by. We’re all smoking dinosaur bones in a back room of a bar at closing. This kind of thing can’t last. Eventually they ban cigarettes, even on city streets.
Here are the cars of my life. May there be many more.
1985 VW Scirocco – This was my mother’s car when she married my father. Silver with leather and it looked very fast. When I was 9, my parents escaped serious injury when it was rear-ended by a large white commercial truck. Totaled. They were driving back from a ski trip to Whistler BC, Canada. The driver was an epileptic who failed to take his medication. My parents chose not to file suit, partly because of the Canadian jurisdiction. I remember very little of my time with this car, though I would like to have it now. I also remember my father’s Yellow Nissan truck, from this period, though it was an ugly thing that he sold or gave to a relative.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF TWEETS – vol 2
Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.
TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE
*
@georgelazenby by name
Genre: ol’ man meta
The collection of tweets published by ‘name’ stands more as a philosophy of existence in an absurd world than as literature. According to name, “self-confidence is at best choosing not to look at the fact that people are idiots for believing in you” – a theory that may or may not be reflected by his 120/10,0000+ ratio. What’s more, name appears to possess a certain admiration of those mired in the pedestrian. “finally envy people who care about drapes” he tweets. “watch paris texas in an industrial freezer,” he advises, as though urging oneself to make meaning via pop cultural moors can spontaneously ground a man in the here and now. Considering the plight of Sisyphus, it would be easy for a tweeter with name’s wisdom to write off existence as wholly absurd and without hope. Alternately, name puts up a brave front in the face of the existential. “Who the fuck are you to know what you are?” he asks. “get a laser pointer—we gonna go back to fuck with emily dickinson” he encourages. Still, given the fact that death is inevitable (and that unless you are DJ AM or tree_bro, one’s followers will inevitably unfollow) we sense a deep anxiety.
@nytyrant by New York Tyrant
Genre: magical fatism
Hitching your whole star to an entity as fleeting as a tweet is a bad idea. The Tyrant embodies this knowledge, appearing confident enough in his own voice to experiment with a range of tonal modes. He explores the romantic (“I’d understand if I saw someone at the races, jacking it to death almost, since the energy and horsemuscles and speed are essentially porn.”), the literary (“Because I could not stop for Hardee’s The drive thru was for me The Mustang held but just ourselves and a quarter bag of weed.”), ardent fatmiration, and even an occasional promotional (“@lesmistons @nytimes @newyorker @nypost @Nymag OUR FONT IS EMOJI SYRINGES AND GUNS”). When one visualizes The Tyrant on deck, one sees the sillhouette of a man flicking tweets off his fingers like Nerds candy into a night sky. Suddenly, with a start, our man grows bored and goes on to do something else entirely, like snort Pop Rocks, without worrying about retweets, faves, unfollows. Perhaps it is naïve of the editors to believe a human so impervious to judgment exists (we do know The Tyrant weighs twitter with a certain degree of gravitas, as he has been known to tell writers [paraphrase] “love the tweets but your work is shit”). Still, let’s choose to believe in something. Everybody needs a hero.
In Real Life
Last week, Blake was in town to give a reading. The first iteration of my intro for him detailed our friendship, how virtual it is, and all this hoop-la reminds me – again – of the fucked up nature of the intersection of our virtual writer-avatar selves v. real personhood. Most of the writers I have relationships with, I barely know. Most of the writers I know, I’ve spent less than a day with in real life. Most of the writers I have friendships with, we met online, interact online, and I know very very little about who they are, what they do everyday, what they care about aside from what they post online. We may interact regularly – daily, weekly, whatever – but they’re still not real, not until we meet face to face, and still, it’s within the artificial space of a conference or a reading, so it’s not really real. And yet, they must be real people with real cares. I know almost nothing about them.
destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy
Why is empathy more important than affect to most readers (/film viewers)? Why would you want to vicariously experience something through a character rather than experiencing [the thing] yourself? When someone says, “I like this because I can relate to it,” doesn’t that just insist upon a passivity, a refusal to actively do? In 2012 we launch our quest to destroy representation that aims at empathy. It doesn’t matter what something means, all that matters is that we are feeling things at the zero-degree. Fuck the distance, the gap.
kiddies, need 2 steal a paper on Moby Dick?? u can have mine 4 free!!!
The Multivalent God of Moby Dick
by you!!! <3
Herman Melville’s complex renderings of god convey the influence of a dichotomous religious upbringing. On Melville’s mother’s side was the Dutch Calvinist church, with its focus on man’s sins and damnation. From his father, he gleaned the more liberal values of Transcendentalism and Unitarianism: a faith in man’s essential goodness.1 “We incline to think that God cannot explain his own secrets,” he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1854, “and that He would like a little information upon certain points himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.”2 In Moby Dick (1851), Melville employs multiple symbols, including the ocean and the whale, to illustrate a god in flux. God is portrayed as an entity, which, like the whale, is not completely visible or knowable to man in its entirety. God’s existence, the shape it takes, depends on the perspective of the human who perceives it. Each character’s view of god is molded by his own innate attitude or constitution, as well as the external events of his life. In turn, a weave is created, wherein god and man are both contributors to the shape of a man’s destiny, as well as his perspective of a supreme being.
The unpublished concept notes for a book on social media marketing
A Google Document authored by Adam Humphreys and Erik Stinson that had not been opened for 9 months:
Socraft
A book for people who already get it.
“What is the big smoke package?”
By Adam and Erik
Insight:
Most books about social media are written for clueless older MBA guys, by slightly less clueless, slightly younger MBA guys. They are used to selling things for Proctor and Gamble and started their personal blog in 2009.
The Day the Comments Died
Deadgod writes a memoir.
Bookslut starts talking about rap.
The openended snippets eat their young.
Poets have sex.
You try to “like” a Denver omelet.
The omelet gets an MFA.
Jimmy Chen starts juxtaposing billboards on a highway.
Some of the drivers are menstrual.
Big Other blows up.
Montevidayo blows up.
Submishmash combusts.
Ploughshares raises their submission fee to $400 a word.
Bookslut starts talking about rap.
The openended snippets eat their young.
Poets have sex.
You try to “like” a Denver omelet.
The omelet gets an MFA.
Jimmy Chen starts juxtaposing billboards on a highway.
Some of the drivers are menstrual.
Big Other blows up.
Montevidayo blows up.
Submishmash combusts.
Ploughshares raises their submission fee to $400 a word.
Obama hits a kill switch.
There’s no one left worth killing.
Brandon Gorrell adds the “Scott” back to his name.
Everyone else is still named Jonathan.
There’s no one left worth killing.
Brandon Gorrell adds the “Scott” back to his name.
Everyone else is still named Jonathan.
AWP is MLA.
MLA is Fur Con.
Syllabi are lonely.
Experimental literature is words.
People “like” their own reflections.
The reflections unsubscribe.
Shame dies.
Fear lives.
The reflections unsubscribe.
Shame dies.
Fear lives.
