Gillian Sze
From “Panicle” in Panicle
What do you see?
Fog lurking along the street.What does it bring?
A sudden surge of birds from around the corner.What do you hear?
Shrapnel of wings.What do you call this?
An encore
Brava!
And so for day 2170
21.11.2012
Basil Johnston Ojibway Heritage
Daebaudjimod – the Raconteur
So skilled was [he] that he could hold an audience in his hand for an evening and even for a winter. Daebaudjimod knew hundreds of stories, but even more marvellous, he could make up stories. He told real stories, he told stories that could not possibly be true. Still, people listened. He could, with stories, make people laugh and cry; he could make them wonder and think; he could make them proud by remembrance and fearful by his tales of the future.
Johnston displays lots of the same skill.
And so for day 2169
20.11.2012
Ian Brown “A Biography of Cannabis” in the Globe and Mail
Cannabis makes it impossible to remember all the details that threaten to drown us, and lets us concentrate on the one after the other, laterally and forgetfully. It impairs us, but in doing so allows us to experience the world not as masters of the entire universe but as liberated goofball bystanders, freed from the world’s and our own blinding compulsions and expectations.
Of course there are relaxation techniques that operate on the body’s innate chemical basis. It happens that “Cannabis does the same thing, just harder and faster.”
And so for day 2168
19.11.2012
Richard Sanger
Dark Woods
One of the pieces in this collection features the figure of a tree planter as recalled within the recollection of a father driving a son home…
[…]
the song I used to listen to at his age,
for him now, I imagine how he first heard it
in someone’s tent, perhaps, and the whole next day
humming it as he stomps through the clear-cut,
sinks his shovel, twists the handle, plops a seedling in,
tamps down the soil with his toe, takes two steps
and does it all again, the same five actions
[…]
The hummed tune, the repetitive action … tree planting as a meditative art?
The song btw is a Joni Mitchell tune.
And so for day 2167
18.11.2012
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter Organization After Social Media
In the information society passivity rules. Browsing, watching, reading, waiting, thinking, deleting, chatting, skipping, and surfing are the default conditions of online life. Total involvement implies madness to the highest degree. What characterizes networks is a shared sense of a potentiality that does not have to be realized. Millions of replies from all to all would cause every network, no matter what architecture, to implode. Within every network there are prolonged periods of interpassivity, interrupted by outbursts of interactivity. Networks foster and reproduce loose relationships – and it’s better to face this fact straight in the eye. They are hedonistic machines of promiscuous contacts. Networked multitudes create temporary and voluntary forms of collaboration that transcend but do not necessarily disrupt the Age of Disengagement.
Disengagement is associated with aging. Here the “Age of Disengagement” means something else.
Multitude: The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination.
Transcend vs disrupt. Involuntary collaboration? Possible in scenes of occupation.
Unoccupied networks… Partial noninvolvement…
default conditions of online life
custom conditions of offline death
Partial noninvolvement…
default conditions of offline life
disruption without transcendence
And so for day 2166
17.11.2012
Gillian Sze
“Blood Sign #2”
The Anatomy of Clay
How many of us have fallen
into water while trying to catch the moon
or during a waxen flight sunwards?
Allusion to Icarus and the Zen trope of moonlight in a puddle.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.Dogen
I’d fall for the beauty of the conjunction, every time. Fall for proximity of the notion of striving and adequate perception.
And so for day 2165
16.11.2012
First deconstruction: love in hand
be a jack-of[F]-all-ndns
Second deconstruction: rebooting
i have made a life of s[c]ham[e]
[ctrl]definesshame: a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness
of wrong or foolish behaviour
[alt]definescham: etymologically shame comes from an indo-euro word which referred to
covering the face
[del]definesham: falsely present something as the truth; bogus; false; a pillow sham
Third deconstruction: re(pair)
so i’ve decided to break it
in – dig – e – nous
nóein, nóēsis, niyanán
niyanán – we/us (excluding you); kiyánaw (incl.) = we/us (including you)
First Reconstruction: the setting
instead i dance in pool halls to rihanna
“bitch better have my money”
wait for the sharks to get horny
get them off for another beer
reassure them that everyones a little gay
honey-boo-boo even told me so
channel app to exoticate myself
be a jack-of[F]-all-ndns
“thank you, come again”
tell him, “hey bo’
this is treaty 1 territory
so you may as well treat yourself too”
Second Reconstruction: the set
I’m not sure i like the word “indigenous”
when it simply divides, crippled, dying
by fighting each other to hold its hand
so I’ve decided to break it
in – dig – e- nous
nóein, nóēsis, niyanán
bound by the wounds that tell our stories
feeling love & pain together
indigeniety can encompass so much more
if we interject, intersect, interlay
not compete or compare
share, grow together, sideways
woven together like kokums hair
braided, queer & punk
channelling our minds
like a honeycomb
to bind, break, reclaim
reject the greed fingers
of settler colonialism
Third Reconstruction: ctrl+alt+del – transforms from
Joshua Whitehead
Full-Metal Indigiqueer
First Deconstruction – “april 5: pass[hang]over”
Second Deconstruction – “to my mister going to bed”
Third Deconstruction – “the hive”
First Reconstruction – “april 5: pass[hang]over”
Second Reconstruction – “the hive”
And so for day 2164
15.11.2012
I love the camp tone of this opening… at least camp to me.
The Perfect Library
Imagine, if you will, a perfect library
where the reading room is lit by the soft
pulsing lights of fireflies & the wood that furnishes it
is from exquisite trees felled by mountain men
with bulging biceps.
“The Perfect Library” in If The World Were To Stop Spinning by David Clink.
And so for day 2163
14.11.2012
This wee bit of ekphrasis is short. And these two lines from it operate in a way similar to the point at the waist where grain follows grain. Form reflecting description.
Glass is your horizon, your world where
wood is both a ceiling and a floor.
“Hourglass” in If The World Were To Stop Spinning by David Clink.
And so for day 2162
13.11.2012
