semiotics in french

The Day After the Day of the Dead

“… and task demotion is nearly over,” she says.

“Sure, go north,” the man says. “Proceed past the turnpike interchange and…” He stops pointing west north west, rubs his chin and says, “whatever you were talking about… wait, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about getting up at 6:30 in the morning and driving 16 hours to have an affair in a friend’s apartment — who isn’t really a friend just a big burly kissy-guy that likes to hug and give me cloth-band watches. There’s no sex, just a lot of staring at each other from opposing sofas.

There’s no telling what journaling will do. I wrote a story about semiotics in French, and according to him it’s tantamount to liberalism — or is it illiberalism?

Or it may be Antioch in antifreeze — or was it Antioch and antifreeze? It’s the preponderance of the evidence, which in this case is scant, but also attractive to dogs and super furry stuffed animals placed in reverence at the base of a tzompantli.

Hey, are you listening to me? Are you listening to this that I’m telling you on the Day of the Dead?”

She rolls the window down fully, so that he could get an unobstructed view of her face, so that he could see that she is serious.

“Technically, it’s the day after the Day of the Dead, lady,” the man says. He shoves his hands in his pockets. Fingers his keys, a quarter, some lint. “I believe you’re the one that missed it, m’am. Just go ahead and drive off, and have yourself a day while you’re at it.”

What I’m Reading:

With regard to Latin America, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said, “I think that it’s not asking too much to have our little region over here.” President Taft had previously foreseen that “the day is not far distant” when “the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

— Noam Chomsky / The Myth of American Idealism

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rejoice our dead

Celibates and Paraphiliacs (“So on this Day of the Dead”)

Sustain yourself with necro-normative inclinations, make use of what you consume, trap your inner child in an iron maiden. Spend time with your inner critic’s internal monologues parsing the sections of your Id with a rusty chainsaw giving your unconscious a case of terminal tetanus. Sublimate your inner demons to outer space—a wise man once said: “in space no one can hear you scream”—but it wasn’t really a wise man, not some mountaintop mandarin sitting lotus post-mantra, but merely a disembodied voice over in search of narrative sense, shilling a sci-fi flick—a lot of sound and fury signifying dollars for a moribund industry providing opiate delusions. Dziga Vertov once said: “film drama is the opiate of the masses.” I tend to aggress, and find egress repellant in the midst of an imminent dissolve. 

Cut to:

So on this Day of the Dead in the confabulated year of 2024 CE (common to exploiters and the exploited, common to prelates and agnostic fronts, common to atheist cutlery and baptismal fonts, common to celibates and paraphiliacs) may we rejoice our dead—in those we knew who sloughed this mortal coil—and have a kind thought for the living (specifically, those who deserve kind thoughts) and may those who live now, whose great desire is to foment anger, misunderstanding, strife and division … well, may they join the dead sooner than later, so their peeps may remember them and rejoice this time next year.

What I’m Listening To:

“… Death needs Time, like a junky needs junk.”
“And what does Death need Time for?”
“The answer is so simple. Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in. For Ah Pook’s sake.”
“Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in. For Ah Pook’s sweet sake? You stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker!”

— William S. Burroughs / “Ah Pook the Destroyer” / Dead City Radio

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it was aged

thee queer rib

she said
it’s too late for the mushroom cave
it’s over now
we missed the mushroom cave

the last trip done gone

a man dressed like a pink sheep
or was he a hairy pig
proferring scallions and ginger
said is this
your first date

i’m led by my short rib
thee queer rib
this side of the rig veda
let’s say it was aged
i said

i’ve walked millions of steps
my feet have yet to come off

said a disembodied voice
tentacles spread across the sky
whorling violet vortex there

the afflatus / afflicted
atrophied / attenuated /
someone’s mind was blown
beyond the oort cloud
and a lady sang

boys go to jupiter
to get more stupider
girls go to mars
become rock stars

eye couldn’t have dreamt it
better myself

said eye

What I’m Reading:

… why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.

— Cornac McCarthy / “The Kekulé Problem” / Nautilus

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the fourth delphinium

cipher and mud

this is an evasion
(from above)
a god
a runic duct used for roadway dribble
an intellectual who owns a cipher
(and also owns the mud)

we see a certain laplander farmhouse—
to no mayor his interlocks
to no farmer his lockjaw—
exposure is hearsay
to the fourth delphinium

i object to this manner of writing
i object

there is nothing but the abject shock
the slaphappy cudgeling life provides

turn the other cheek
go on

good

now on your knees

What I’m Reading:

I’m almost certain, though I am certain
of nothing. There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it. 

— Ada Limón / “Drowning Creek”

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choice for annihilating

Hardly Rickets’ Sanguinary Holiday (redux)

Hardly Rickets, all American life saver and literary critic, wants to save the world from itself. Wants to don the all purpose All American Halloween costume—wants to be a fungal tree growth but can’t decide between bracket, polypore, or robustus conk. So goes for all of the above, fortified with Lockheed Martin nuclear modules and Raytheon laser vaporizers—the All American all the time choice for annihilating “third world” recalcitrants:

“We invented the damned holiday as the world knows it today. We know all. We kill all, but with a conscience. Let us show you our destabilizing Latin American election modules. Or may we interest you in a nation building for oil three card monte switchermaroo? Come one, come all! Give us bodies and resources and we’ll chew you up and spit you out like so much cudding for the cuddling hours before the Day of the Dead arrives. I’m Hardly Rickets and have I got an all purpose tzompantli for you. You provide the bodies—I’ll provide the bones. Hardly Rickets is the name. I am he of Halloween fame. My drones and hellfires shower flames. Death is my one and only game. Coming to your spooked-out skies this fall.”

image: juan carlos fonseca mata

What I’m Reading:

sad
sad
the wing of October falls
cold
cold

— Stacyann Chin / “For You”

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urn in pieces

birth of a new hate tanka

a bright wound apace
the carrion eaters drool
awash and congealed
the world is turned outside-in
a grecian urn in pieces

What I’m Reading:

the noblewoman solemnly pumps clouds into sacks of leather and stone

— Hans Arp / “The Swallow’s Testicle”

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muse of exile

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.

— Alexei Navalny / “Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries” / The New Yorker


Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of ‘guardrails’ nor to the chemo of ‘constraints.’ It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

— Adam Gopnik / “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” / The New Yorker


You look out in the world and you can see various versions of the oppressed becoming oppressors in different circumstances. It makes you question some of the underlying logic of our lives.

— Ta-Neishi Coates, to Moustafa Bayoumi in interview /“‘I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency’: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli apartheid and what the media gets wrong about Palestine” / The Guardian


I escape to books when everything around me fails to make sense. When I read books, I search for a bond between me and those who are thousands of miles away, geographically and historically. And that’s what I hope my own work does for others who have never been in my position, I, a Palestinian refugee and a survivor of countless air strikes and lately of the ongoing genocide, during which I lost not only my precious collection of books but more than thirty-one members of my extended family, some of whom, like my books, remain under the rubble since October 2023.

— Mosab Abu Toha / “The Annotated Nightstand: What Mosab Abu Toha Is Reading Now, and Next” / Lit Hub


Come with us, Muse of exile,
Mother of the road.

— Kathleen Norris / “A Prayer to Eve”


This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.

— Noam Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism


Current climate policies will result in global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report on Thursday, more than twice the rise agreed to nearly a decade ago . . . “We’re teetering on a planetary tight rope,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a speech on Thursday. “Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster”.

— Gloria Dickie / “Climate set to warm by 3.1 C without greater action, UN report warns” / Reuters


What I’m Listening To:

Everything I learned, it’s been burned
Everything I know has been blown

— Beat Happening / “Me Untamed”

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nightmare worth dreaming 

flowerbed of inevitability 

one of our elevators is missing / a deep dark well in its stead / due to the flourish of inequality / she sends a telegram to the fishmonger’s wife 

it’s a nuthouse of embarrassments / it reads / it was temporarily taken out and of set up in the sewer / tomorrow’s moss is spreading in the flowerbed of inevitability 

a sex telephonist onsite spreads mulch / before the first threat is hurled 

she says /  hymn 629 into a dead line / abolish abolish abolish / ball lightning in her brain / animal clamps dangling from her waist 

buried in mouthwash / paddling like a tardigrade / she sings / life is a nightmare worth dreaming

What I’m Reading:

The apocalypse was offstage, so distant at that point as to be the stuff of sci-fi, drones, mother ships, hyperspace, catastrophically bad weather, but it wasn’t offstage any longer. The heat was real. The glaciers were going fast, the drought was bottomless, the seas rising.

— T. C. Boyle / Blue Skies

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look they fail

the din

her peppercorn objectives engorged / animating her dreams and warmed over sentiments / a cryptically streamlined mantra workstation churning passels of pap and paranoia / her senses lacquered into a veneer of personhood / her soul adhering to her make up towel

the strum / the dredges / the subterfuge of menace / more enticing than ever / more recondite despite its allure

he dreams of sarcophagi and cataclysmic showers / papyrus scrolls in surreal colors / dayglo patinas pulsating / ululating mystic vowels / sours on his testicular absence / bitter and dissociative / obsessive and abscessive

the hand is ambiguous / a figurine cut out / a stylus animosity / pinned down on maroon felt

hark / they paint by numbers

look / they fail to see

they soundtrack asynchronous duets in three-quarter time / they semiquaver sigh all the readymade cruelties of life 

they fail / fail again / fail better

What I’m Reading:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett / Worstward Ho

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inner voice lisps

singed

fog…

grew up as a concerto scorpion
crested maverick as a passport to wreckage
traveled in ventriloquist’s boxes
and plexiglass jewelry cases

technically i’m a survivor
but my interiority is singed
i’m moldy and need to be arrested
my inner voice lisps in triplicate

my concertos now include perforations
decode this if you dare
bolt-holes are forthcoming
if you will

i can’t get to sleep
in this hole

What I’m Reading:

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.

— Charles Simic / “Hotel Insomnia”

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