I was listening to that part where he says no one reads primary sources, only secondary sources, because primary sources are merely text, whereas secondary sources are “knowledge”


The river would flood in the spring, and large carp would get caught in pools shrinking in the baked evaporating heat. We would shoot them with BB guns, spear them with sharpened sticks, try to bash them still with rocks tossed down from overhead. Repositories of unthinking feral movement, bloodletting action for no purpose other than avoiding being rooted in passive resignation with clean hands and clammy chastity.

Also: The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments

Only so many odes to insomnia

Happiness writes white, and the engorged ego lays it down in purplish prose, like a picked-free tick bursted by the flame from a hastily scratched match.

I agree that all is not lost. Deep in the cavity of overdetermined mind space I sit, where imagined conversations and do over conversations and mortification forces feast, eyes closed but thoughts racing across an empty sparse big-skyed plain with no finish line in sight. If only darkness brought blankness, Without pills or any other dulling agent applies to the wound.

The mute pieties enshrined in every day things

Fowl (pheasant and ptarmigan), hanging hams, plump dead-eyed fish, and outside the open door, a small lamb bent like a supplicant to the grass.


There are days when I can revel in Alex Katz and Ada, when the surface of canvas and painterly craft of wet on wet suffices.


But other days, port in the storm days, Flemish is needed. Something to anchor, to nail down, as nails pierce the tendons and either break or bypass the small bones in the wrist to grab hold of the wood beneath.

A bad theory beats no theory, the constitutional scholars say, beating their tightly tuned drum. Mute pieties amplify mute agonies, the painters show by way of ostention, which is embodied meaning made regal in its pellucid silence, this exposition of the Host.

Your lacking Love destroys so thoroughly that bare husks look fulsome and lush to compare

Hail and farewell, this debased ancient residue of involuntary sounds you made in the dark as I slip out into the morning

To meet head-on the mute theater of maybe this was a mistake, too, this time and last, cascading up against the chorus of stupid birds (parrots in Hyde park, crows in a pine tree in Helena) standing on their small brained instinct toward incessant ceremony.

I can’t get past the barrier of foul mood to bask in unearned glory of song.

sheets wrinkled from damp absence of me gone back into the world, seemingly free and oblivious,

This time and every time, it’s the wanting that destroys.

Why accept Dave hickey on collection as foraging and harvesting

I am not sure he ever said anything on this topic. Which is beyond the acid-tipped point of the matter.

There is such a thing as aesthetic scripture. Whether you mean philosophy of visual culture, or philosophy’s visual culture. I have a dative if you will trade me a genitive.

Perhaps a mystic may weigh in, and the love of revelation will burn in the breast of every man who known beauty and clutched at its evanescence with earnest hands, still warm and writhing.

Also the mystic as an exemplar of coming to terms with the caustic spleen of a well-turned-out jeremiad.

Post-melodic karma

I read an opening line about a poet who had a dream last night about a burning rainbow and a scream that would need to run downhill to gain the momentum needed to reach people.

I read a dried husk of a leaf that spoke of reincarnation as that pulse beneath all things that has to do with an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising.

I read a memorandum holding that when the bank accounts and head accounts and heart accounts of politicians leaders and principals are made transparent and the many layers of guile and mischief and avarice are removed, there will still be big trouble in little China and the best jokes will still fail to land with over 80% of the most ardent comedic harvesters.



A soft boiled sod and eldritch pantomime

I don’t think that the idea of a death mask would make us less afraid of death, more comfortable with it. Cold putty on cold but clammy inanimate skin, the curve around the nose and the closed eyes. Those who support it say otherwise. And maybe own part of the death mask company. It’s not a grift, necessarily, to try to sell a meal a few minutes before sitting down to eat one’s own cooking.

Scandalous but not slanderous

  1. In the midst of the pullulating mass of data and information, theories descriptive and normative are all the more significant.

  2. Hanging chads are not yet adequately subject of counterfactual history.

  3. Gory details of forever war waged on the oversoul eventually become part of the firmament and shock only those who stand outside, in but not of the world.

  4. Lucky charms are infamous for bad milk breath amplification.

  5. I can’t say that there is sufficient breathing room for the chilled speech that conforming forces pushes back down the ululating maw of the culture of the poor and the weak and the weary, the unspoken for but oft spoken of.

  6. Abysses are for staring back.

signaling not just the demise of utopia, but the demise of even the idea of the possibility of utopia.

Off we go down the mole hole of a mole hill and that irreducible hobgoblin: originalism, that ghost in the machine that says the only way to interpret what was meant with what was founded and set years after we exclaimed that these laws we hold to be self evident are not really so self evident. Hence structure, hence the first amendment which was originally not the first but it makes for such better story. Give me good story and I’m yours forever.

But a theory beats no theory and the textualists are so overcommitted that it’s not even funny, not funny haha but funny kiss your sister and be a whirling dervish at the offering plate.

Detect elective affinities astride the flow of qualia

Yes yes yes to Thomas hirschhorn and Peter Doig and Ivan Doig and Wendell Berry and the dog that ate Lydia’s lunch and the really big lunch that came late in the Letters to Yesenin and that image of a stilled body swinging from a rope hung from the barn’s rafters, that haunting uncanny feeling I see in Doig-Peter paintings and on the surface of Thomas’s texts and in the simple grounded intelligence manifesting the dignified realism of berry’s stories and Doig-Ivan’s novels.





Am I wasting precious and precocious time paying so much attention to this art and being so wracked in attention-debt for the leftover life? Good gracious, yes yes yes affirmative, it fills me up but isn’t there more to bring full, to consuming, why not doing why so straitjacketed and stultified and confined to corners by myself and how glorious too.



A surly contentment is not worthy doing well, but worth doing

Because the evidence of absence is not evidence of absence, and because we chase so many tales that go down rabbit holes in pursuit of what we thought to be a meal, and turn out to be the appetizer, and because the question why does not always surrender to the logic of because, I can understand why you might hold with those who prefer to be manic, joyous, and entirely vital, and then stand knocking on deaths door, asking to be let in because it falls apart, breaks, and the idea of bearing under its wait any longer is not just inconceivable, but productive of a kind of physical agony.

That I can understand why you might share such preference I have gone looking to fill the hole with a further final fact and found it to be a fools errand.