Results of Chance Operations for 04/28/11

1. Tarot:

The Lovers

“The sun shines in the zenith, and beneath is a great winged figure with arms extended, pouring down influences. In the foreground are two human figures, male and female, unveiled before each other, as if Adam and Eve when they first occupied the paradise of the earthly body. Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman; the serpent is twining round it. The figures suggest youth, virginity, innocence and love before it is contaminated by gross material desire. This is in all simplicity the card of human love, here exhibited as part of the way, the truth and the life. It replaces, by recourse to first principles, the old card of marriage, which I have described previously, and the later follies which depicted man between vice and virtue. In a very high sense, the card is a mystery of the Covenant and Sabbath.

The suggestion in respect of the woman is that she signifies that attraction towards the sensitive life which carries within it the idea of the Fall of Man, but she is rather the working of a Secret Law of Providence than a willing and conscious temptress. It is through her imputed lapse that man shall arise ultimately, and only by her can he complete himself. The card is therefore in its way another intimation concerning the great mystery of womanhood. The old meanings fall to pieces of necessity with the old pictures, but even as interpretations of the latter, some of them were of the order of commonplace and others were false in symbolism.”

— A.E Waite

1. Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” [generated here]:

“Emphasize repetitions”

2. Marshall McLuhan’s “Distant Early Warning Line” card deck [generated using the flickr set of card images and a random number generator, counting cards in the order posted]:

8 of Clubs

“THE
VICTOR
BELONGS
TO
THE
SPOILS”

3. Sortes Virgilianae [chosen line in bold, text given for the full independent clause]:

…The gruesome gates
of war, with tightly welded iron plates,
shall be shut fast.

— book I, lines 412-414 (Bantam Classic, 2004; tr. Allen Mandelbaum)

4. Sortes Homericae [same as above]:

…His son looked on
in wonder at the godlike bloom upon him,
and called out happily:

“Oh, father,
surly one of the gods who are young forever
has made you magnificent before my eyes!”

— book XXIV, lines 406-411 (Penguin Books, 1998; tr. Robert Fagels)

5. Sortes Sanctorum [Book of Psalms]:

2. He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgement.

— book III, Psalm 72 (“A Psalm for Solomon”) (KJV)

10:34 pm  •  28 April 2011  •  2 notes

1. What is ‘learning a rule’? - This.
What is ‘making a mistake in applying it’? - This. And what is pointed to here is something indeterminate.

2. “I know where I am feeling pain”, “I know that I feel it here” is as wrong as “I know that I am in pain”. But “I know where you touched my arm” is right.

3. That is why there exists a correspondence between the concepts ‘rule’ and ‘meaning’.

4. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules

5. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.

6. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.

7. “I know that I have never been on the moon.” That sounds different in the circumstances which actually hold, to the way it would sound if a good many men had been on the moon, and some perhaps without knowing it. In this case one could give grounds for this knowledge. Is there not a relationship here similar to that between the general rule of multiplying and particular multiplications that have been carried out?
I want to say: my not having been on the moon is as sure a thing for me as any grounds I could give for it.

8. I am not more certain of the meaning of my words that I am of certain judgments. Can I doubt that this colour is called “blue”?
(My) doubts form a system.

9. We form the picture of the earth as a ball floating free in space and not altering essentially in a hundred years. I said “We form the picture etc.” and this picture now helps us in the judgment of various situations.
I may indeed calculate the dimensions of a bridge, sometimes calculate that here things are more in favour of a bridge than a ferry, etc. etc., - but somewhere I must begin with an assumption or a decision.

10. The picture of the earth as a ball is a good picture, it proves itself everywhere, it is also a simple picture - in short, we work with it without doubting it.

11. I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.

12. The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.

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9:00 am  •  20 April 2011  •  13 notes

Doug Hall – highway 50, nevada #1, 1998

Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian: the wide road Lyn, Carla et al at belladonna’s wide road launch Carla Harryman: cutting corners (a score) talking with Rae Armantrout “ambiguous pronouns are hot” – Robert Archambeau on Rae Armantrout Rae Armantrout: “the language of the will to live” Jean Day’s “undersong” readings from the grand piano I have some new work in blackbox manifold bots of good work in blackbox manifold including a tribute to Edwin Morgan Scott Watson’s sendai journal an update from Scott Watson Brian Edwards in Tokyo talking with Anne Waldman about numbers trouble Emily Critchley’s “a selection of north american women writers from the greenwich cross-genre festival (july 2010), and some thoughts about their work” women authors share passion for the written word hybrid pastoral Lynn Behrendt’s “ezrasure” the document: Thalia Field, Erin Morrill, Allison Cobb Claudia Rankine & Tony Hoagland recordings of the entire exchange responses to the exchange talking sense to Tony Hoagland Bruno Ganz’ Bolaño Anna Božičević reading in arizona talking with ukon 5 poems by Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson Anne Boyer, Tyrone Williams & Lara Durback on poetry & labor the collapse of the poetry economy (talking with Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl) talking with David Orr David Orr with leg cramps Mark Scroggins on the death of literary history the art of the book sexuality is at the heart of creativity Ashbery’s Rimbaud John Ashbery & Carol Ann Duffy if John Ashbery were a US Senator…

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9:00 pm  •  7 April 2011  •  14 notes

…Ron Silliman linked to my last attempt at spam-based Flarf/Conceptual poetry, terming it “Applied Flarf.” I rather like that. (Thanks to the wonderful estnespes for the reblog.)

Here’s the latest experiment: Google Reader mangled Joanne McNeil’s post over at Tomorrow Museum, “Cult Social Networks: Why Ping and other e-Commerce Communities Never Grow.” The post itself is incredibly interesting (I’m sure I’ll talk about it, on it’s own merits, this weekend), but the ruined text came out as something worth noting. So, here it is, my only edit being to give it a title (which is, simply, that last line of the poem.)

“More performance art than actual utility –Blippy —”

Near the end of a transpacific flight, I watched a badly made but not un-interesting film called The Joneses. In it, Demi Moore, David Duchovny, and two teenagers are assembled as a pseudo-family, infiltrating the community, while covertly working as marketers for the luxuries they tirelessly recommend to their new friends. She, beauty products and cutlery. He, golf clubs and the notion that wives should be gifted with jewelry every Tuesday to maintain sexual accord. In the hands of a better skilled director it might have skewered this decade’s consumerism like the Truman Show did of live television. Having all the subtlety of its title, it didn’t, but the thought experiment is worthwhile.

Stealth marketing and astroturfing thrive online

as a safe place

You know who really want to build the next Facebook or Twitter? E-tailers. But they can’t crack even

Ping is the latest experiment in what I call “cult social networks,” the social media that has a small but heavy

that plateu

I want to know what my friends are consuming.

Last.fm
allconsuming

Grocery Lists
–
I am pretty obsessed with certain kinds of weird foods (black mission figs, fiddlehead ferns)
…wouldnt it be interesting if we had a social network

Goodreads

market research done for you

Due to allergies and sensitivities, I’m pretty neurotic about the things I put in or on my body. I could list most, if not all the ingredients of my favorite mousturiser without looking (Eucerin Q10, btw.)

Consumption is something we keep private.

Net-a-porter has an incentive to go social. If you’re going to spend $2,000 on a dress, you probably also want to be sure none of your friends have it as well.

I think it’s interesting Net-a-porter doesn’t even include basic metrics like “someone within a 5 kilometer radius also bought this dress, are you sure?”

Contrast with Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters–consumer reviews.

Closely guarded secret

More performance art than actual utility –Blippy —

7:02 pm  •  7 April 2011  •  5 notes

This is the full, unedited (save for one bit…removing a link) text of a spam email I received last night. It’s beautiful, in it’s way:

Fugg me or kill me

Have a good night’s sleep every night with amazing lovemaking all the time

Pollock, as a trained artist, may have utilized design whether conscious or not.

Exporters get wider market reach.

The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese communist allies.

The Church tried to stem this violence with the Peace and Truce of God movements, which was somewhat successful, but trained warriors always sought an outlet for their skills, and opportunities for territorial expansion were becoming less attractive for large segments of the nobility.

At midnight on that day (as measured on UTC), your counter registers 0s.

Death typically occurs due to ventricular fibrillation brought about by effects of caffeine on the cardiovascular system.

They were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places.

Introduction to Mathematical Logic.

7:01 pm  •  7 April 2011  •  10 notes