22 a D I U "pobot" "Neurosis is the fearful apprehension of an ultimate impossible" --Bataille (or Barthes, please feel free to edit this attribution) the infinite votes mammalian caste teeth parts lungs crawl towards daylight or set in suns shining look drop - out politicos warm our cold limbs with war-blood dangling wrangling money not counted approximate estimated as the engine roared see and find seek and hide (Pie which being round ate others like itself In Radial complicity IF you look IN SEE the OUT --er To The Bloodless Refugees of Emptiness (cont.) [ Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood. -Garcia Lorca, The Dawn ] . . . After all the rancid colonial murders, after all the wrenching cortical spills, after the falsified wars between Saxon systems and anti-systems, we have come to intolerable deficits, howling with negated stochastics. The embrangled heads of state implanting pyres on the death shores, accruing impasse models, sickened hybrid potions. The inner cuisine at present exists as a phrenic lake where poison fish are eaten. The bones are then dissected by mental nomad rifles, by bizarre involuntary lexical slaughter. What increasingly subsists is a ruthless fatality of emptiness, mistaken risk having crossed into the zone of "the hereafter." What now occurs in the West are circumstantial remnants, listless mastications, like a metropolis of haunted rivets, exchanging commands through a violent anorexia. Acuity now transpires within a blank and ennervated interval. All the emotions are mimicked as though there existed a belief, a magnetic resin which once found succour in the decisive circumstantials of a Kutosov or a Patton. Since the ramparts no longer dazzle, how can the use of blades defend against shadows? We've come to the bickering of monads, which expire and resurrect on a scope, soaked in a blood-less skeletal haze. Moments are now defined by sussurant equivical rotation, by kinetics poised beside the lamp of surcease. The general mood, reflexive, at penultimate extremis in limbo. This anxiety goes back to the dawn of the 1440's with the European quest for foreign acquisition, for external perfection, with the Northern integument given outranking status. Human quality was put under seige; and in the Southern climates this quality became a radical sorcery to be brutally subdued. Then this latter world was divided into seas and enclaves, by the Portugese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English. This resulted in the successive exterminations of peoples of colour over the span of the five following centuries. And from the fruits of this labour there has come to exist a general epic of nothingness. A hallucinogenic baseness, surrounded by a strange day to day quotidian disruption. The human physiology now languishing in a gulf, its dynamical particulars intensively seized with increasing strength from the forces of extinction. As if forces of bacteria had opened themselves to an unconfined momentum, explorational in their horror . . . --WA [ to be continued in DIU 23 ] RE: RECENT AMERICAN POETRY HAS LACKED poems on themes in higher mathematics; How high the math? Here's one. This piece invokes calculus in its title and in its slicing of time; it taps linear algebra (transformation matrices/direction cosine matrices) for its basic trope. But then, of course, it can't be serious. It actually imagines it's about something! Doesn't decry factions styles schools Mom Pop polyethylene hypocrisy corruption futility vacuity gore ennui MTV barbie ken corporations congress villanelles neckties haiku bank accounts cops advertising phallocentricity latex or meat. It just journalistically explores how big the little places get when informed by one particular absence. Just a corny love poem. Lost love poem. About the institution of higher yearning. And of course lower yearning. And yes, the vanity (and inescapability, Buddha not withstanding) of human wishes.... Delta t The universe so local, no spot larger than light spread in a sphere from a point source in some length of time. In tiny time your few neighbors matter nearly as much as your own last state. It's rough and tumble in the femtosecond regions. Time cut thin enough gets wide, lets mere possibilities swarm out, very real just then. How fast does the universe sample itself, anyway? Faster, certainly, than mammals out here in our n-dimensional pun where broad statistical shadows fall on a sudden present, where Things persist. I replay messages she left on my voicemail. Delta t blues. Old devil vector forever athwart the matrix of a given moment, mine populated by more and more absences, the growing collection of people I've lived longer than. At work we import curves into right-handed model space, rotation matrices tagging along in the files. But when to apply the translation and which values make the rows and which the columns? Do we know the intent of the sending system? Back in my office I punch up that voice again, weeks old now. "I was just bored so I called you up," says one. "I know you're dyin' to talk to me," says the other. These, her other sayings, and my own image-seared neurons comprise my poll, my examples. Still guessing the sending system's intent. When she lay at hand, real distance and small eternities stood between us. We made each other out of samples, applied our transforms on the fly, reached, at best, adjacent neighborhoods. No single place. Now her absence starts failing to fill every coffee cup, only to surge as milliseconds gape between screensful of text. Oh those eyes. However the numerous world moves me from moment to moment, she's some wild diagonal. --GK (not unhappily middle-aged) Studebakers I remember but what the hell are Skeltonics? FEMIGNOSTICS: We're trapped between secular feminism, with its baleful angling for lost dollars and lost opportunities, and spiritual feminism, with its doleful mooning for dead goddesses. We call therefore for a "Take Back the Rites" protest to convene at Dorian Gray Hall tomorrow at midnight, to march the entire length and breadth of cymberspace screaming the names of our foremothers as if in orgasmic fury. And a word to the wise for those of you lurking in the shadows: We don't care if you are men or women, we don't want to hear your whining about shyness. You are Disney animals to us. --I, Robot (A Feminist Collective) In DIU number 3, announcement was made of a virtual symposium on the "politan" fragment, ascribed by philologist Hecuba Whimsy to 20th-century author llen Ginsbe, whose only other extant work is the substantial fragment "dish," long considered a classic of this period. In the exciting field of pre-catastrophe archaeological poetics, however, developments proceed apace; two recent discoveries suggest that scholars must rethink their assumptions about the poetic production of the Classical American era. The first, retrieved on archaic-disk format (ADF) at the site of a former library in the Berkshire Mountains, has been designated the "The Maintains" fragment, after that portion of its title remaining from what appears to have been a widescale erasure of the disk's contents. The following excerpt from the poem as we have it indicates the extent of the damage: as at which props a twin and full agate pass a jest or the like wad waff act in them as a mote looks on or speeds whole hence tablets a double button D. Saint-Geuss, historian at Sea of Tranquillity College, has already claimed these lines to be the work of lark Cool, on the basis of his study of the celebrated single-line fragment "trilobite trilobites," recovered from the Fresh Kills dumpsite on what used to be Staten Island. The second recent find was unearthed in a swampy area not far from the site of New York City's major zoo. Untitled, it contains the following lines, almost teasingly reminiscent of the "The Maintains" fragment: Fuzz a lapse done all rachet mindless soprano brain boogie wash on me bewildered Husband had tried to enter me sexually Are these two poems (if such they are) the work of a single author? If the first is, as Saint-Geuss asserts, a grievously eroded example of lark Cool's driving narrative verse, what to make of Cool's turn to what seems an erotic thematics in the Bronx fragment? Clearly, our task, as scholars and anthropologists, is to take up Saint-Geuss's challenge and submit these documents to careful textual analysis. For facsimiles send a message, leaving the subject heading blank, to DIU's Dept. of Classic. Am. Lit., indicating your institutional affiliation. Please allow a few hours for reply. --Winnetou Olde Pre-Catastrophe Collections, USA Division * * * The Lime Works/WRUB/SUNY at Buffalo cable channel 7, February 2, 1995 Nurse with Wound/Pleasant Banjo Intro with Irritating Squeak/A Sucked Orange Gobeil/Le vertige inconnu/La Me'canique des ruptures Wende Bartley/rising tides of generations lost/Claire-voie Alain Thibault/E.L.V.I.S./Volt Tod Dockstadter/Tango from Quatermass/From A to Z (V/A) Victoria Stone/Cave Song/We Magazine #14 (V/A) Morton Feldman/Trio for Flutes/None But the Lonely Flute (Dorothy Stone) Charles Amirkhanian/Vers les Anges/From A to Z (V/A) Guy Klucevsek/Reprieve/Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse Yves Daoust/Suite Baroque -- L'extase/Anecdotes Roxanne Tourcotte/Amore (complete) Conlon Nancarrow/Studies for Player Piano nos.1,27,36/Sound Forms for Piano (Robert Miller) Mario Rodrigue/Cristaux Liquides/Alchimie Paul Dutton/For the Letter That Begins Them All, H (for b p nichol)/Fugitive Forms Karlheinz Stockhausen/Spiral/Organic Oboe (Josephy Celli) Robert Ashley/My Brother Called (#2)/el Aficionado Guy Klucevsek/Fez Up/Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse READLIST, THE LAST DAYS OF THE WHITE RACE Radio Free Northamerica, 21 Feb. 1995 from _La Poesie Negro-Americaine_, ed. by Langston Hughes (Editions Seghers, 1966): Jean Toomer / "Ruche" (tr. Jean Wagner) Countee Cullen / "Priere paienne" (tr. Jean Wagner) Margaret Walker / "Nous avons ete croyants" (tr. Sim Copans) Helen Morgan Brooks / "Un jeune David : Birmingham" (tr. Sim Copans) Jay Wright / "Ce matin" (tr. Jean Copans) *** La terre est une alveole de cire dans le rayon de l'univers, Et moi, frelon, Couche sur le dos, Je m'enivre de miel d'argent, Et je voudrais m'echapper loin de la lune Et me peloter a jamais au creux d'une fleur des champs, loin d'ici. --Toomer Pour moi, mon coeur paien s'enivre, Je n'ai jamais les pieds en repos, Mais a eux, donne des foyers pour les rechauffer Dans des demeures au haut d'une colline. --Cullen Nous avons ete croyants ayant nourri des dieux avides et grimacants, comme un Moloch qui reclamait nos fils et nos filles, nos forces et nos volontes et nos ames endolories. --Walker Je suis un garcon. Il est ecrit dans mon epitaphe : Ici-git un garcon noir qui lanca des pierres Dans la ville de Birmingham Un jour d'automne sur les voitures d'hommes blancs Et fut tue par un coup de fusil par un gardien de la loi. --Brooks Il s'agit de trouver une chambre avec des ombres a embrasser, ouverte. --Wright * * * descriptions of animaginary u thru thelogic of snowflakes cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet