thee istsfor manity reader

make it stop

Posted on March 4, 2022 by istsfor manity

Skronk Tectonics 3: Pesadilla Verdosa

Did you notice you don’t stop ‘til you really stop?

What does that even mean? Panta said.

Well, Moira said, imagine a bunch of barking dogs or cats meowing to Jingle Bells, it doesn’t stop in your head even when it stops in real time. You’ll never rewire those synapses to do anything else; they’re forever programmed to bring those dogs and cats back in moments that you least expect it, or want it. Forevermore, those neural connections will do nothing else, those electrochemical passageways will do nothing but wait in ambush to bring it back at inopportune moments.

It sounds like you’re describing PTSD, Panta said.

I’m describing a bad dream. A greenish and sick nightmare. No more. Make it stop.

What I’m reading:

“My whole process starts by free writing dialogue. Before I even have characters. I’ll write a sentence that has some traction for me. And then I answer that sentence.”

—Vanessa Veselka / The Creative Independent interview

Posted in Writing | Tagged Collage, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Nightmares, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

in this corner

Posted on March 3, 2022 by istsfor manity

Bray of Winces

S. understands nothing. He tries, squint-eyed, to turn his brain over. Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.

S. sees himself, monochromatic, on the screen of his childhood 1974 Panasonic. He’s talking globular in a rectangular city. He makes connections obliquely — only in transient bursts. He needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in mounds in their stead. He walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger. Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life. He quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness. A sign up ahead reads: “Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb.” He makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan — from a god lost in this corner of the universe…

He’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture — a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from his childhood in 1974) and a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above his head. He’s one with the toilet seat now, one with his pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.

He continues his note: … all will be needling shit this new year… Happy so and so… New Year so and so…

“Screw ‘Auld Lang Syne!’” he says. “Screw Robert Burns?” he says to his reflection in the mirror.

And some person outside his hotel room door — which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door (for hadn’t he last night passed one door where he swore he heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?) — why did the man outside his door continue saying “hogmanay” this and “hogmanay” that, and what was that infuriating accent?

S. understood nothing.

What I’m Reading:

“The croaker lives out Long Island … light yen sleep waking up for stops.change.start … everything sharp and clear antennae of TV suck the sky … The clock jumped ahead the way time will after 4 P.M.”

— William S. Burroughs / The Soft Machine

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

with the flow

Posted on March 2, 2022 by istsfor manity

Skronk Tectonics 2: Circulatory

bleeding we trend
with axial failure
right with the flow—
infrequent doses—
in an effort to decrease
patients
irrespective of their
discrimination.

a bridge

to a destination gray—
for whom is made 28%
heart—
with a system 44%
time.

only 9.8%
decision pump.

What I’m Reading:

“It’s true that the world was failing at its one task—of remaining a world. Pieces were breaking off. Seasons had become postmodern.”

—Sheila Heti / Pure Colour

Posted in Writing | Tagged Blackout Poetry, Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Erasure Poetry, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

random and obtuse

Posted on March 1, 2022 by istsfor manity

Conceptual Film: Critical Focal Acuity 2 (Shot / Unshot) In A Can

Series of found film cuts as the camera racks out of focus / or shoots unfocused footage

(Asynchronous sound: random and obtuse observations)

Series of stills from said shots

(Asynchronous sound: mundane observations)

Series of cuts of shots slowly resolved into focus

(Random aural cut-ups chosen via chance operation)

Fade in / Fade outs to black leave 2-3 sec black between shots

(Tank tracks grinding as Exit Music)

What I’m Reading:

“In order to reproduce the colors of nature in our films, we have painted
nature black and white. Startle the cuttlefish. Harvest the sepia. The literal color of fear.”

— Ben Lerner / Angle of Yaw

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Experimental film, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

detune détente detonate

Posted on February 28, 2022 by istsfor manity

dada death (redux)

d
de
debt
d.e.a.

detox
detune
détente
detonate
detonator
detonation

deordination
deontological
deoxygenated
depalatalization
departmentalize
despiritualization

dada dada dada dada
death

“We now understand that race doesn’t actually exist — it is not a biological fact — and humans share all but 1 per cent of our DNA. Our differences are not scientific but due to other factors such as the environment. But race is a lived experience, therefore it is enormously consequential. Understanding the fiction of race doesn’t mean that we can dispense with the categories, not yet.”

— Bernadine Evaristo / Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

cover up my

Posted on February 27, 2022 by istsfor manity

Gatefold

Grateful

Gatefold

Bituminous Mouthed Clown ASCENDANT

Cover Up

My Shame

***

lufetarG dlofetaG

pU revoC emahS yM

***

“today my horoscope said avoid
recalcitrant chairs”

— Wanda Coleman / “Chair Affair”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

foiled in flight

Posted on February 26, 2022 by istsfor manity

Sheared (haiku)

Crossed wings foiled in flight,
Aspiring toward sunlight,
Sheared in steep descent.

“we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks / “Paul Robeson”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Haiku, Paranoiac-Critical, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Writing | Leave a comment

pincers and gloves

Posted on February 25, 2022 by istsfor manity

**Dendritic Bolus Blues (Dream at 3:38 am)**

Instead of changing my shirt I changed my mind and requested a reverse baptism. Get the father son and the Laszlo Moholy Ghost outta’ my body. Get ‘em all outta’ my soul. Forthwith.

Can’t look back, won’t look back. Ozymandius Motors for all your autonomic pleas. Automatism at 350 horsepower ////// Wayside shangri-las and all the disjecta ejected in your superego moods during our President’s Day Sale!

You get rid of meaning by getting rid of meaning.

Start with Rasputin and work your way out from there. The peach cream turns bitter so allow me to lie down under your steamroller. Play me “Steamroller Blues” through your tinny transistor speaker and do your worst. Go.

Docket your trash—use pincers and gloves. Keep me at arm’s distance for I’ve seen a handkerchief of clouds (tzara-cumuli).

Keep me at a distance—I’ve heard a talking •Hugo Ball• head singing:

gadji beri bimba … tuffum I zimbra.

“Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind.”

— Kathy Acker / Empire of the Senseless

Posted in Writing | Tagged Autofiction, Biomorphic Art, Blues, Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dayglo, Death, Documentation, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flarf, Ghosts, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

what it meant

Posted on February 24, 2022 by istsfor manity

The Contractive Subtractive (redux)

There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:

“He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.”

— George Orwell / 1984

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

in our mouths

Posted on February 23, 2022 by istsfor manity

Central Smoke Bone

She had grown red and corpse-like below the Danish authority standard issue yellow canopy—beyond the dune and deadwood. Nearby, crusted and congealed, many rats in hazel frozen a on twig.

Bleating, and she a sheep, that sand crackled and raised in the wool course of the afternoon. The wife to pooling streaks of curly substances. I’m pre-litigating the issues glued to highlighted clauses and codicils.

A lining of corn is what I picked out—in far arcs instead of center nodules. I notice dried mud and qualities of contractual clouds of condensed water on all sides of the windows.

I sawed the far central branches—and what of the ears?

Those?

In an increasing density at the left of the central smoke bone, she said: “what an attractive calumny as the stumble chooses. What did he choose?”

I chose. Her. Intently. There.

We dove tumble blind. The rocks (later chosen) over the chin into what we consider sticking faux yellow moves in air.

Did she?

You, who watched living rings in our mouths—a technology unsparing and compared those to wire geologic plates—radioactive, venous, glowing red and white.

You found that sort of liminal feature—a leaf glowing dizzy in the eddy of a creek.

“Half light, half ideology. Each of us is impressed as pixels into an ad for democracy.
Give the people what they want, says the TV. A powerful suction effect? Extraextra-cheese?”

— Ben Lerner / Angle of Yaw

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Flash Fiction, Ghosts, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

thee istsfor manity reader

make it stop

Skronk Tectonics 3: Pesadilla Verdosa

in this corner

Bray of Winces

with the flow

Skronk Tectonics 2: Circulatory

random and obtuse

Conceptual Film: Critical Focal Acuity 2 (Shot / Unshot) In A Can

detune détente detonate

dada death (redux)

cover up my

Gatefold

foiled in flight

Sheared (haiku)

pincers and gloves

**Dendritic Bolus Blues (Dream at 3:38 am)**

what it meant

The Contractive Subtractive (redux)

in our mouths

Central Smoke Bone

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