Decoding the Decodex (to the Codex Seraphinianus)
For those interested in Luigi Serafini’s Codex, I posted a hack translation of the accompanying «Decodex» that came with the most recent edition.
Ark Codex ±0 video
Video object for the Ark Codex ±0 book object which is forthcoming from Calamari Press.
Hüzün in the ruins of defeat
«It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it, he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem.»—Orhan Pamuk
More on Istanbul reading Pamuk.
Peacock for Clusterflock (by Sturnus Vulgaris)
Damn the Starlings
I know I keep going on about these damn birds, but I see them every evening & can’t get enough of them. Truly the most amazing display put on by any animal on this planet, and most Romans go about their evening commute home just annoyed that they shit all over their cars. Still going through my photos and videos, but these were the first two things I pulled from my camera unprocessed.
things to see in Rome when you think you’ve seen it all
Being that I’m on a moratorium against photographs on my own blog, I’ll break my sight-silence (sitence?) to show you some things you might otherwise not know about:
Venetian Vampires
A Manuscript called “De Masticatione Mortuorum, Latin for “The Chewing Dead,” offered helpful tips for those facing the walking (or chewing) dead, and prescribed practical treatments such as the aforementioned brick-in-mouth.
More on the art & gothic psychogeography of Venice.
Y ya no piensas, porque existen cosas más fuertes que la imaginación
the stars in starlings
(yep, they’re here)
Thomas Bernhard on Photography
«Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. [...] Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world.»
More thoughts on photography & thinking, whilst reading Bernhard & Beckett in Dublin.
You can’t wish upon a star motherless with pubic hair stuck in your teeth.
Butthole Surfers: Cherub (live 1984)
Since we’re on the subject of the Butthole Surfers, thought I’d share this live recording I made of them in Berkeley sometime in 1984 (on a cheap Walkman), one of my favorite tracks of theirs, Cherub, though I don’t like the studio version as much.
Dumb-ass American desanctifying Giordano Bruno
In case you’all were wondering what Giordano Bruno looks like:
Will reposting this get us burned at the stake?
Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users:
This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet,” one sign said. “You better (expletive) pay attention. I’m about to get you.”
Advertisements for Suicide
From an essay by James Reich:
Suicide as a complex act has been disgracefully hijacked by the exploiters of the myth of Judas Iscariot, to the impoverishment of our moral orientation, our sympathy, ourselves. Luxury, Armani says, obscures the dead. Luxury obscures suicide. Suicide is a luxury that transfigures.
from Dead Souls
This is what many readers will say, and they will reproach the author for the absurdities, or will call the poor officials fools, because a man is generous enough with the word ‘fool’ and is prepared to dish it out to his neighbour twenty times a day. It’s enough for you to have one stupid side to your character out of nine other good ones for you to be regarded as a fool. It’s easy for readers to pass judgment as, from their peaceful nook on high, from which the whole horizon lies open before them, they gaze upon everything that is going on below, where only objects close by are visible to a person living there. And recorded in the universal chronicle of mankind are many entire centuries which, it would seem, man has deleted and annulled as unnecessary.
More musing on Gogol in Sussex.
DIVORCER by Gary Lutz & A MORTAL AFFECT by Vincent Standley
Gary Lutz’s new collection of “seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks,” Divorcer, is available now.
Deron has the honor of being the first one to order one.
And I forgot to mention here, but Vincent Standley (of 3rd bed fame) also has a new book I just recently published, called A Mortal Affect.
on reading The Atrocity Exhibition in Brighton
«There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.»—JG Ballard
More musings on Brighton, Ballard, Quadrophenia, Joy Division, presidential pubic hair, Beachy Head, mods, rockers, cars, crashes, 911, partying, sex & suicide.
The physics of clusterflocking
As an addendum to some other posts on starling murmurations (documented here in full glory in 2-D and in 3-D) for those seeking answers: Some Causes of the Variable Shape of Flocks of Birds (a study done over the ‘sleeping site’ of Termini in Rome, no less).
[Not] the inside of my refrigerator…
Sleepingfish X
I’ve started Sleepingfish back up (online) & posted some work by Vincent Standley (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, A Mortal Affect, which is coming soon from Calamari Press) & a collage of sorts called Heartscald by Gary Lutz (whose new book, Divorcer, is also forthcoming from Calamari). Stay tuned.
when your love for goats goes too far…
more from Naples reading Raymond Queneau…
All that Auguring Finally Broke the Sky
Various angles of a summer squall that just rolled through Rome.
The Coping Cop-out of Machines of Loving Grace
Throughout the AWOBMLG trilogy, Adam Curtis effectively shows how certain memes inform economic, social & political change in the world & in the third monkey in the machine <> machine in the monkey episode he addresses the mother of all memes: the selfish gene, as put forward by Hamilton > Price > Dawkins. And in the process Curtis manages to artfully wrangle & weave in disparate & seemingly unrelated topics (like HIV, hippies, PS2, gorillas, London’s homeless, disco-dancing & conflict in the Congo), but doesn’t touch the one topic I would’ve liked to see addressed: interspecies altruism & how to explain it genetically. I’m not talking about the classic examples of reciprocal altruism (ox-pecker<>buffalo or remora<>shark) but for example dolphins saving humans from sharks or why this orangutan seemingly has an interest in reviving this little bird, or why we humans, unlike the honey badger, even give a shit.
At first these final lines of episode 3 were a let-down, a cop-out that left me hanging (for perhaps the same reason that Deron couldn’t get past the premise):
… But Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society. Above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic code. The question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions that helped cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo. Yet we have not idea what to do about it. So instead we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.
But now, waking up the next morning, I can’t stop thinking about it & I’m wondering if it bothered me because it’s true & I just don’t want to accept it?
Donkeying to Nzambani rock
For Cindy.
More from the Kitui region of Kenya (reading Alain Robbe-Grillet & Alan Moorehead).
