*

All This Strangeness

2009-08-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Big Bridge is up, and includes (among many other fine offerings) a special feature edited by Eric Hoffman, All This Strangeness: A Garland for George Oppen. I'm very pleased to have an essay placed alongside these mighty Oppenites: Zach Barocas, Stephen Cope, John Cunningham, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Eric Hoffman, Grant Michael Jenkins, Burt Kimmelman, Michael Kindellan, Jack Marshall, Peter Nicholls, Marjorie Perloff, Patrick Pritchett, Martin Jack Rosenblum, Bruce Ross-Smith, Anthony Rudolf, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Mark Scroggins, John Taggart, Henry Weinfield and Karl Young.

To access this labyrinth, click here.

Shifter 13: I.S. Belissop

2009-06-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Shifter is out, up, etc. It includes:

Pedro Barateiro
Natalie Bell
Rori B. S. Bellow
Joseph Bradshaw
Kalle Brolin
Catherine Czacki
Susana Gaudêncio
Juan Manuel Ipiña
Susan Jahoda
Runo Lagomarsino
Pieter Spealman
Anna Vitale

Read this first:

While stranded in Dublin, Ohio on September 13th 2001 due to the grounding of all domestic flights in the US, the editors visited the local library. Thumbing through the card catalogue, they found a reference to “Other Possibilities,” by Indira Sylvia (I.S.) Belissop assigned the Dewey Decimal call number 125.20. Let alone the book, even this curious number inserted between “Teleology” (124) and “The Self” (126) has since been impossible to find in major libraries around the world. The book itself did not appear on the shelf, and the card, in classic Courier font, stated simply, “Collected writings of Mozambique-born philosopher”. Although when the shelves were checked, the book itself was missing, three torn out pages with an anonymously penned biography of Belissop were found in its place. We have reproduced this biography in its entirety below. The anonymous pages, needless to say, testify to the remarkable significance of a thinker who seems never to have existed.

We have put together this issue to redress the absence of this singular philosopher and the closure of historical possibility that her near erasure represents. Collected herein are artistic inspirations, archival discoveries and critical essays which all bear the trace of her indelible impact.

two poems on PFS Post

2009-05-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

here

2009-02-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

my review of Devin Johnston's Sources

3 is for pudency

2009-01-28T19:20:00.000-08:00

1

a new Cultural Society update, featuring:

Robert Archambeau, Wes Benson, Joseph Bradshaw, Derrick Buisch, Cary Conover, Jon Curley, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Matthew Henriksen, Drew Kunz, Peter O'Leary, Gregory Ott, Adam Fleming Petty, John Phillips, Pam Rehm, Mark Scroggins, Chuck Stebelton, Mathias Svalina, Jason Stumpf, & Shannon Tharp.

(go there and, as you already know, click "texts," you poetry community member, you)

2

Peaches & Bats Release Party

with readings by

David Abel
Joseph Bradshaw
Kaia Sand
Sam Lohmann

and long-tone music in just intonation by
Warren Lee (harmonium), Ian Ackerman (violin), and Gabriel Will (viola).

Friday, January 30
7:00 pm

The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Avenue
Portland, OR

a presentation of the Smorg Reading Series

(for more info on Peaches & Bats click the previous Peaches & Bats, the Peaches & Bats I just said before the Peaches & Bats before the you know what I just said)

3

read Rodney Koeneke's Spare Room Century Cento

Today

2009-01-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

Spare Room turns 100!

starting at 2:00 pm
ending when we finish (6:00? 7:00?)

Free admission

Gallery Homeland
(at the Ford Building)

2505 SE 11th Avenue
Portland, OR 97214

> From Helen Adam to Louis Zukofsky, from Futurism to Personism, from Hiroshima to Blackhawk Island, from a Polish count to a Peruvian communist, from Dada to MoMA, from prisoners of war to secret agents, from mimeographers to bloggers . . . come hear a small but representative slice of the extraordinary range of poetries practiced in the past century!

Readers will include:

David Abel
Meredith Blankinship
Joseph Bradshaw
Alicia Cohen
Gale Czerski
Laura Feldman
Patrick Hartigan
Lindsay Hill
Rodney Koeneke
Maryrose Larkin
Sam Lohmann
Jesse Morse
Mark Owens & crew*
Chris Piuma
Dan Raphael
James Yeary

* sound poetry performers:
Leo & Anna Daedalus
Tony Christy
Linda Austin
Lisa Radon with
Neville, Molly, & Oskar

and more . . .

Reading poems by:

Helen Adam
Charles Amirkhanian
Guillaume Apollinaire
Hugo Ball
Ted Berrigan
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Robin Blaser
Nicole Brossard
Basil Bunting
Anne Carson
Constantine Cavafy
Joseph Ceravolo
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Inger Christiansen
Robert Creeley
Beverly Dahlen
Robert Desnos
H.D.
Francois Dufrene
Robert Duncan
Russell Edson
Jennifer Crystal Fang-Chien
Kevin Goodan
Linda Gregg
Bill Griffiths
Barbara Guest
Carla Harryman
Dick Higgins
Ake Hodell
Fanny Howe
Susan Howe
Philip Jenks
Karen Kelley
Aleksei Kruchenyk
Gerrit Lansing
Jackson Mac Low
Bernadette Mayer
Marianne Moore
Christian Morgenstern
Harryette Mullen
Susan Smith Nash
bp nichol
Lorine Niedecker
Alice Notley
Frank O'Hara
George Oppen
Michael Palmer
Bob Perelman
Dennis Phillips
Laura Riding
Joan Retallack
Gerhard Rühm
Diana Saenz
Frank Samperi
Aram Saroyan
Kurt Schwitters
David Shapiro
Charles Sharpe
Ron Silliman
Gustaf Sobin
Jack Spicer
Gertrude Stein
Wallace Stevens
Rhett Stuart
Cole Swenson
John Taggart
Nathaniel Tarn
Alberta Turner
César Vallejo
Lew Welch
Hannah Weiner
Jonathan Williams
William Carlos Williams
C.D. Wright
Araki Yasusada
Louis Zukofsky

and many more!

"Reviving Jack Spicer"

2009-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

This is a link to my interview, focused on Spicer, with Kevin Killian. An anonymous blogger at Open Letters has called it "perfervid." I don't know what that means, but I think Job Piston's photo of Kevin & his cute weenie wrapped in a real Kylie towel is also perfervid:

George Oppen

2008-10-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

read my review of the Daybooks (w/ Frank Stanford at the side, staring creepy at you at you at you

wolf dies

Synonymity

2008-08-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

My new chapbook

2008-07-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

This Ocean, or Oppen Series
by Joseph Bradshaw
40 pages, hand-sewn

$6

You can buy one of the 50 copies printed from Cannibal Books's website.

On Communism

2008-06-25T23:37:00.000-07:00

While in Croatia recently I drank this:

I was excited because Rick Steves (who's a douchebag) told me that Cockta was the Yugoslav alternative to Coca-Cola, which was not available to the Commies, & that The People affectionately referred to the state-approved soft drink as "Cockta-Cockta." While finally feeling those saccharine, teeth-browning dribbles of Cockta cross my lips, I thought of this man:

Jon Bon Jovi. While riding the steel horse of Cockta -- in a pure, New Jersey Socialist fervor -- I thought I might puke. But I didn't. I am, after all, a cowboy.

new year

2008-01-29T18:25:00.000-08:00

find it here

Come

2007-10-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Joseph Bradshaw & Ken Rumble
Fri. 10/12 7:30 PM

The Fall Cafe
307 Smith St.
Brooklyn, NY

This is a reading.
It is in the United States.

Gmork

2007-10-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

2 things

2007-09-19T12:06:00.001-07:00

1

Cultural Society has been updated. I'm particularly excited about this one, as it includes a pdf reprint of Phil Jenks's first book, The Elms Left Elm Street, along with my essay on that book. Other contributors include Derrick Buisch, Cary Conover, Jon Curley, Tom Fisher, Roberto Harrison, Joseph Massey & Jess Mynes, Amanda Nadelberg, Peter O'Leary, Gregory J. Ott, John Phillips, Christopher Rizzo, Cindy Savett, Kate Schapira, Mark Scroggins, Melissa Severin, Sandra Simonds, Shannon Tharp, Bronwen Tate, Jen Tynes, & Tyrone Williams.

2

scatological elephants

(I am indebted to Joe Massey for this)

Traum

2007-09-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

three cheeseburgers

What we did on 8-4, & what we'll do on 8-12

2007-08-10T20:21:00.001-07:00

This is Bethany feeding me the dowry.

Come hear us read this Sunday (8-12) for the Spare Room series in Portland, 7:30 pm at The New American Art Union (922 SE Ankeny). It'll be our poetic consummation before we head back to the midwest.

Read this

2007-08-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

VOLUME 41 NUMBER 4, YEAR 2007

CONTRIBUTORS: Emily Anderson, Erinn Batykefer, Amaranth Borsuk, Joseph Bradshaw, Eric Burger, James Capozzi, Alexandra Chasin, Norma Cole, N.M. Courtright, Jennifer K. Dick, Clayton Eshleman & Ethriam Cash Brammer, Graham Foust, Jan Gorak, Johannes Goransson, Michael Homolka, Colette Inez, A D Jameson, Jac Jemc, Soyoung Jung, Dan Kaplan, Daniel Khalastchi, Timothy Liu, Warren Motte, Cecily Parks, Melissa Peters, Alison Powell, Martha Ronk, Tomaz Salamun, Zachary Schomburg, Knute Skinner, Danika Stegeman, David Swerdlow, Susan Terris, Anthony Tognazzini, Jen Tynes, Melissa Walker, Stefi Weisburd, Brandy Whitlock

COVER ART: Jeanne Dunning's work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally since the late 1980s. Her most recent project was a tomato fight that took place in Chicago in 2006, and a selective survey of her work was mounted at the Berkeley Art Museum in the same year. The cover image is a detail of her 2004 photograph In Bed

http://denverquarterly.com/

Hi

2007-07-31T23:29:00.000-07:00

Dodie Belamy at Philly Sound: "And, like I said, all this woman is doing is pressing on my belly, sometimes only with one finger. For years I've heard all the New Age-isms about how we hold trauma in our bodies—but I never really believed it. A lot of the stuff that comes up for me is traumatic, but today I also remembered the red dotted swiss curtains in the kitchen of my apartment in 1980."

And for anyone in Portland, Belamy & Kevin Killian will be reading Thursday, August 9th, at the Clinton Corner Café, 2633 SE 21st, 7pm, as part of the Tangent reading series.

Random things meme

2007-07-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Amish, my first response to yr tag got lost in a Christ-induced fervor, & is now in the Aether. Here's a new one:

I have four brothers, & something like 15,000 nieces & nephews. I don't even know all their names.

I also invented cheese & crackers. I was something like 5 years old. Some robbers came into the house & stole all my family & I hid in the closet for about 6 days. All I could find to eat in there was a box of Velveeta & some saltines. I nibbled on the Velveeta for the first two days, then the saltines for the next 2. The final two days, in a darkness-induced delirium, I was smooshing the Velveeta straight onto the crackers! I had no idea what I was doing! When the cops found me I was shaken but healthy, even a little plump. They saw the nearly empty box of Velveeta & the crumb-covered floor, & asked me what on earth I had subsisted on all those dark, frightened days. I smiled & showed them all the yellow smears of Velveeta & saltines coating my teeth, & they gasped. They said, "Oh you poor little thing," but I said, "Cheese & crackers are Good!!" They gasped again: "Cheese & crackers!!!!!" Then, before I could patent the invention, the fucking cops stole it & got all the money. They said it was the price for them saving my young life. But they didn't save my fucking life, the dumb cops -- Cheese & Crackers did.

Another random fact: I am also the inventor of the meme.

2007-07-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson is an internet ghost.

My friend Matt drew a picture of me:

2007-07-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

This is starting to happen to me:

(The bald spot part, not the headless woman bouncing on my back part. (Nor the vomiting of a blue rag part. (Is this man vomiting a blue rag?)

Pretty soon I'm going to look like this:

'Sup, Jordan.

(This blog, by the way, is now a coming of age blog.)

2007-06-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

"As I was trying to simultaneously clean the floor and remove my pants — panicked and embarrassed — Bethany Wright came into the room. When she saw me she burst into tears — in as quick and short a burst as my shit."

(I think this is a dream about marriage)

Things I heard today (2 different contexts, 2 different speakers)

2007-06-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

"It's all that vigorous butt-scratching"

"Whooo boy, you betcha it's hard wearin' them panties 'n that girdle"

2007-06-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

'Allen Ginsberg and Me Waiting for the Long Bus'

(sorry abuot the typeos, I was sleepy)

Joseph Bradshaw (1844-2007)

2007-06-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

"The Economic Bundle"

I’ve been in my computer all day, writing on light: Halos, curtain storms, late afternoons.

“Click here,” they used to say.

O “Click here”—They said it in Rome, Greece, Abyssinia.

Now we just click.

--6-22-07, 1:38 am

Statement of Purpose

2007-06-17T14:29:00.001-07:00

This blog will now only be concerned with future events.
Most of these events will appear in the form of future detritus, e.g.,

6-17

--figure out fall travel plans
--Spare Room reading at New American Art Union (7:30)
--set up workable workspace
--clean kitty litter in bathroom
--shave beard
--maybe socailizing will arise after reading?
--return phone calls (to D & M)?
--continue to neglect reviews that need writing
--continue to neglect work for an Oppen essay

--reconcile w/ the bleakness of this sentence: “But as your life changes from young to middle-aged to older, from single to married to divorced, you get tattoo regret, so we think the tattoo removal market will increase as well.”

the tiny #3

2007-06-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

the tiny #3 features work by Andrea Baker, Ellen Baxt, Edmund Berrigan, Mark Bibbins, Daniel Borzutzky, Kristy Bowen, Joseph Bradshaw, John Coletti, Rachel Conrad, Crystal Curry, Michelle Detorie, Julia Drescher, Will Edmiston, Bonnie Emerick, Betsy Fagin, Paul Fattaruso, Peter Gizzi, Scott Glassman, Sarah Goldstein, Garth Graeper & Jason Sheridan, Eryn Green, Kristen Hanlon, Mike Hauser, Anthony Hawley, Anne Heide, Brenda Iijima, Greg Koehler, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Koshkin, Tim Lantz & Mark Yakich, Lauren Levin, Jill Magi, C.J. Martin, Joseph Massey, Kristi Maxwell, Ange Mlinko, Michael Montlack, Marci Nelligan, Nick Piombino, Billy Ramsell, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Brandon Shimoda, Logan Ryan Smith, Maggie Smith, Chad Sweeney, Derek White, Dustin Williamson, and Devon Wootten, with cover art by Andrew Mister.

the tiny is available for purchase for $12.00 through the website (to be updated soon), or by sending a check made out to Gina Myers or Gabriella Torres, & sent to the tiny, 95 Verona St. #4, Brooklyn, NY 11231.

Rippin' Richie!

2007-06-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

This video is most certainly by the Master of the Universe.

It's quite real

2007-06-11T01:36:00.001-07:00

There's a can of this on our windowsill. Next to it is a can of the Cock brand Rambutin (w/ pineapple). (They came with the apartment.)

Seattle

2007-06-07T19:20:00.001-07:00

A brief report on last night's reading, in which B-dub & I read along w/ John Olson, Nico Vassilakis, Crystal Curry, Doug Nufer, Sarah Mangold, Drew Kunz & about a dozen other poets for Subtext's 13th anniversary. It was a nice night, & an amazing room to read in.

some snowglobes for Jordan

2007-06-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Nevada City

2007-06-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

All of these things are true

Also, read

2007-05-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Graham Foust's interview w/ Phil Jenks

Transparent White

2007-05-20T10:56:00.000-07:00

Issue 10 of Shifter Magazine, themed "Transparent White," has been posted. Contributors include:

Eric Anglès
Clifford Borress + Kathleen Miller
Joseph Bradshaw
Mark Cooley
Aaron S. Davidson + Melissa Dubbin
Eric Gottesman
Branden Koch
Reuben Lorch-Miller
Matthew McAlpin
Kiki Petrosino
André Spears
Christopher Stackhouse
David Samuel Stern
Edwin Torres
Genya Turovskaya
Avinash Veeraraghavan
Ruben Verdu

*

I like very much the editor Rit's sensibility, the way he collages together these multifarious texts and images into/as an exploration of his chosen theme (make sure to read his editorial preface for his goading (or explication) of what transparent white could possibly be). Shifter is also one of the few magazines around that traverses both the poetry and art worlds. That it does so by combining elements of each into a seemless whole with its seems still showing is all the more impressive.

My contribution is 6 poems from The Way Birds Become, as well as a prose piece with the same title which is actually part of the manuscript I'm working on now, called OPPEN SERIES, OR THE PRAYER BEGINS THIS OCEAN. One of the bird poems is misprinted: the same stanza is repeated twice in a row -- I rather like the way it reads. I haven't spent much time w/ it yet, but the things I like most, so far, are Edwin Torres's poem, Genya Turovskaya's erasure, and the booty/moon picture at the front -- though picking out individual contributions kind of goes against the whole of Shifter's formal purpose.

2 things

2007-05-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

1

It's my brother Jeremy's birthday today. Jeremy is also known as Big Robo. You should say happy birthday to Big Robo:

2

Cultural Society has been updated. This issue includes

poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, Jon Curley, Norman Finkelstein, Graham Foust, Michael Heller, Janet Holmes, Justin Marks, Joseph Massey, Jess Mynes, Gina Myers & Dustin Williamson, John Phillips, Michael Prasil, Christopher Rizzo, Shannon Tharp, and Aaron Tieger

prose by Robert Archambeau, Jeremy Biles, and me (a review of Joe Massey's Property Line)

images by Cary Conover and Drew Kunz

picks of recent cultural commodities that appeal to various senses by Stacy Szymaszek and Drew Kunz.

Joseph Ceravolo reads "Drunken Winter" in a shirt-sleeves voice while some languid vocal music plays in the background

2007-05-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Listen.

Something you probably don't know about me

2007-05-09T18:13:00.000-07:00

"In 1891 Captain Joseph Bradshaw and his brother rode west from Central North Australia in search of new grazing land for their cattle. The terrain became so rough somewhere north of the Prince Regent River, in the heart of Kimberley, that he and his brother had to abandon their attempt to reach the Indian Ocean. On the 16th of April Joseph sketched in his journal what have become known as the Bradshaw Paintings."

2007-04-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

You can read my review of Phil Jenks' How Many of You Are You here.

My new band

2007-04-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

So, yeah, I have a new band. We're called Deadeath. It's pretty awesome. Here's the cover of our first album, "Under Construction:"

It's pretty awesome. Here's a band photo:

So that's us after our first gig. From left, that's Jimmy Toast (drums), Bulls Eye (bass), me (keyboards), Baby Doll (guitar), and Eric Baus (lead vocal), and then a couple of our fans (some lame hangers-on, wish they were some chicks). We actually kicked Eric out of the band a few days after the photo was taken, cuz he leaked glo-stick juice all over our pot and we all got totally sick. It was lame. Eric's a total douche. Now we got this other dude to take over the vocals:

He's pretty awesome. Maybe you've heard of him. His name's Jon Bon Jovi. His vocals have really taken our band to a new level. We all agree that Eric Baus was really holding us back.

You can listen to a demo of our first song with Jon Bon Jovi here. We all think Jon Bon Jovi's lyrics are really gonna set us apart from the rest of the music business. He really gets to some universal truths, you know, the kinds of stuff anybody can relate to. It's pretty awesome.

Last night, my dream was

2007-04-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger singing:

"You dance alone, you dance alone,
and the people of Iraq, they get blown up--
you've got to blow that blowfish up."

It was in an empty high school gymnasium. There was one person I know there doing jumping jacks in the corner. Arnold was singing thru a karaoke machine, but without accompaniment.

I used to have less mundane dreams. For a period of a few months, when I was very depressed and 19 years old, I dreamt every night about washing the dishes. I would wash the dishes thoroughly, then take out the garbage. Every night was terrifying.

The Four Sides of Tom Cruise

2007-03-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

1. Disgusted

2. Determined

3. Toothy

4. Getting out of Idaho

***

This is dedicated to the awesomeness of and that is T.C. Thanks, everybody, each one of you, for all of your support while I was working on this -- I really couldn't have done it without you!

2 contributions to poetry

2007-03-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

Spicerian guilt: Guilt arising from assertion of “self,” or violence against the Outside

Spicerian superstition: A superstition that arises after a willful disordering of the work of the Outside

*

It!

2007-03-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

Tagged by Jordan Stempleman to list the 10 books of poetry that have influenced me most. (I don't know how much these have influenced me, but these are the ones I return to / think about the most.)

1. After Lorca, Jack Spicer
2. Primitive, George Oppen
3. Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, Joseph Ceravolo
4. Front Matter, Dead Souls, Leslie Scalapino
5. The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, Opal Whiteley (not really poetry, but actually poetry)
6. Medieval English Lyrics, ed. RT Davies
7. The Tablets, Armand Schwerner
8. Inferno, Dante
9. Sun, Michael Palmer
10. Poems (Oxford edition), Gerard Manley Hopkins

I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you. List five. Here are mine:

1. Walls. House upon house of blank walls.
2. Two entwined crow corpses which I bent over to snatch up, believing they were actually a crumpled black plastic bag full of money (on a sidewalk in San Diego in the late-1980's).
3. Under-eyelid patterns that occur when rubbing the eyes.
4. A sheaf of remembered impressions I meant to write out in longhand on leaves and paper scraps, and then bury underneath the MAX tracks at the 181st & Burnside stop in Portland, OR, but never did. Thankfully.
5. The mulched newspapers that muddy the downtown Portland sidewalks after rain.

I re-tag Jordan, and tag anybody who'd like to play. (I have billions of hands.)

For Once, Then, Something

2007-02-27T18:22:00.000-08:00

From the laboratory books of George Oppen: “on the storm-scattered beach, after the juttings of men and the wrecks, if a man sees a bird in the sky the bird is all he sees… In the fading of the horizon---- the fading of the bird - that bird disappears. It’s like watching a woman walk into a factory.”

(Oppen's lab books can be found here)

to build a dwelling

2007-02-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

Idaho is perhaps the only state that was likely named as the result of a hoax. In the early 1860s, when the United States Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested the name "Idaho," which he claimed was derived from a Shoshone language term meaning "the sun comes from the mountains" or "gem of the mountains." Willing later claimed that he had made up the name himself.

*

iterations of love

2007-02-24T22:18:00.000-08:00

Joseph Merrick (a.k.a. "The Elephant Man"): "Not in the present which lies behind us as a polished stone or gem lodged between the unkempt hedges of a garden, a futurity of gravel loosened by the heave of our feet, jagged pebbles wrestling their way between the arches and soles; and not in the tightness of our boots, a stumbling into the past face-forward, gazing into the still-unseen: old age, atrophy, dissipation.

"A boy looks back upon his long years, his varicose years swollen with the disappointments of the yet-to-come, skips a stone across the pond-that-was, and wonders if his wrist is in fact moving in time, moving forward (as he prefers to think about such motions of the body), rather than lagging behind in the future of his having-been.

"Take the elbow, for instance. In its curves and creases, it bends downward, resting awhile, after the shadows of the afternoon have passed into the twilight of evening. The subject—the arm attached to the shoulder, the arm which can so easily conceal the elbow in a single fold—has disappeared in curl of the jacket. This instance of disintegration having already happened an unknowable number of times is the resilience of the past in the arm’s thrust into the day, or, in other words, in the arm’s insistence upon carrying forward the acts of an already-having-occurred future."

*

toward a new opprobrium

2007-02-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

The truest "political and poetic act of empathy," Giorgio Agamben writes, "is that of nurturing the faltering of demonstratives; in other words, of pointing the this's and that's away from their referent, to a point of ultimate uncertainty laying beyond the reach of the sentence, and outside of the perceivable."

*

the 32nd of December

2007-02-23T22:33:00.000-08:00

Surely this is what Freud observed when he wrote that “great waves, storm-crashing waves, are the limen between the sea and its salt.”

*

cleft notes

2007-02-23T16:58:00.000-08:00

Wally Trabing, August 18, 1961 (Santa Cruz, California): "Dead and stunned seabirds littered the streets and roads in the foggy, early dawn. Startled by the invasion, residents rushed out on their lawns with flashlights, then rushed back inside, as the birds flew toward their light."

*

abject: hollow

2007-02-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

abjection: n. the joint between the forearm and the upper arm

Example: She propped herself up with one abjection

*