Prose

Hyperbole! From my memory

Triumphantly can’t you 

Rise today, like sorcery

From an iron-bound book or two:

Since, through science, I inscribe

The hymn of hearts so spiritual

In my patient work, inside

Atlas, herbal, ritual.

We walked set our face

(We were two, I maintain)

Toward the many charms of place,

Compared them, Sister, to yours again.

The reign of authority’s troubled

If, without reason, we say

Of this south that our double

Thoughtlessness has in play

That its site, bed of a hundred irises,

(They know if it truly existed),

Bears no name the golden breath

Of the trumpet of summer cited.

Yes, on an isle the air charges

With sight and not with visions

Every flower showed itself larger

Without entering our discussions.

Such flowers, immense, that every one

Usually had as adornment

A clear contour, a lacuna done 

To separate it from the garden.

Glories of long-held desire, Ideas

Were all exalted in me, to see

The Iris family appear

Rising to this new duty,

But the sister sensible and fond

Carried her look no further

Than a smile, and as if to understand

I continue my ancient labour.

Oh! Let the contentious spirit know

At this hour when we are silent

The stalks of multiple lilies grow

Far too tall for our reason

And not as the riverbank weeps

When its tedious game tells lies

Claiming abundance should reach

Into my first surprise

On hearing the whole sky and the map 

Behind my steps, without end, bear witness

By the ebbing wave itself that

This country never existed.

The child so taught by the paths, 

Resigns her ecstasy

Says the word: Anastasius!

Born for scrolls of eternity,

Before a tomb can laugh

Beneath any sky, her ancestor,

At bearing that name: Pulcheria!

Hidden by the too-high lily-flower.

Stéphane Mallarmé

JL. 2009 (?)

“When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder. When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he finds that white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies, he is killed and the land is taken anyway. When an Indian is killed, it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and sorrow in our heart; when a white is killed three or four others step up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”

—	Chiksika, from Allen W. Eckert’s A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh 1992

Toshio Saeki

Man 1: "How can an artist be expected not to be self-indulgent? That's the whole thing that's wrong with filmmaking today... To me, art is one man's voice, one idea, one point-of-view, coming from one person."
Man 2: Who says?
Man 1: That...um...that filmaker. Korine.
Man 2: Well he´s right.
Man 1: Yeah. So fuck that old fucking hag, right?

I'm getting out of the boredom business, friends. I recently embarked upon my latest project, a piece that would completely turn my entire practice on its ear. I wanted to work with extraordinary language, dramatic language; language drenched with emotion. Excitement is what I'm after now. After thinking about what I could do for some months, I hit upon the perfect project. I would redo my New York Times piece, only instead of retyping a "normal" news day, I would retype the issue of the New York Times published on the morning of September 11th, using the exact same method I did for Day.

 I've now just finished the first section of the paper and I can tell you that it's doing everything that I want it to. I've embarked on an epic unboring boring work. It's been a highly emotional experience retyping this paper, full of events that never happened: sales that were cancelled, listings for events that were indefinitely postponed, stories deemed to be big news one day were swept off the pages of the paper of record forever, stock prices that took a huge dive the next day, and so forth. I think you get the idea. I love the idea of doing something so exciting in the most boring way possible or vice versa.

 At a reading I gave recently -- and I do do short readings occasionally -- the other reader came up to me after my reading and said incredulously, "You didn't write a word of what you read." I thought for a moment and, sure, in one sense -- the traditional sense -- he was right; but in the expanded field of appropriation, uncreativity, sampling, and language management in which we all habit today, he couldn't have been more wrong. Each and every word was "written" by me: sometimes mediated by a machine, sometimes transcribed, and sometimes copied; but without my intervention, slight as it may be, these works would never have found their way into the world. When retyping a book, I often stop and ask myself if what I am doing is really writing. As I sit there, in front of the computer screen, punching keys, the answer is invariably yes.
 
Kenneth Goldsmith

JL. 2012.

Blutch

Oglaf

Jim Harrison was a great artist who worked on some works on paper for thirty years. He told me "You don’t make the painting— the painting makes you..." We are trying to paint what is real.

We are trying to paint what we have never seen before.

Chris Martin

JL, 2012-2014

HECATE SNAKE DIARIES Vol 2
Sarah Horrocks

Artaud

Even without suggesting that all human knowledge be re-thought, we ought to at least _consider_the_possibility_ that centuries of accumulated errors, misjudgements, inaccurate observations, erroneous evaluations of data, etc., could have emulsified into the Cretin's Porridge now being served up as THE HOLY SOFTWARE SNACK-PACK we refer to as 'OUR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IN ALL MATTERS SCIENTIFIC'.

 Frank Zappa

François Bourgeon

J. Lundberg
s/t
(2004-2014)

“The current populations of academicians, intellectuals and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge structures. They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic authoritarian politics. Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical reflection. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neo-classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people’s bankruptcies. After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there is nothing that can be done about that! The current knowledge structure is clearly dysfunctional and equally clearly illegitimate. The only hope is that a new generation of perceptive students (in the broad sense of all those who seek to know the world) will clearly see it so and insist upon changing it.”
— "Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition", David Harvey

David Lynch

Blutch. So Long Silver Screen.