This is a serial work. The first installment appears here and is written by Walling Blackburn alone.
In the second installment, Balanta and Walling Blackburn engage the process of generating these notes together.
4.
Advisory: Savage Flesh Drones.1
All is now discordant.
Reader/ Writer/ Inhabitant, exercise increased caution.2
Two writers are writing these sticky notes.
One sticks one on the other’s ass: Kick here.
Another sticks one on the other’s head: I’m with Stupid.
One sticks one on the other’s mirror: Value your disloyalty.
Another sticks one on the other’s forehead: You are Killing Yourself.
Neither writer will identify which sticky note is hers; neither will cop to which writer shot the drone down and warmed her palms in the flames; neither saying whether or not, together, they have used grant money to purchase a DJI Phantom 3 Professional drone to deliver sandwiches, wrapped in indigestible texts, to porches and rooftops in the hinterlands.3 Neither writer can truly deal with the fact that we write because neither you/I/we/she/us/they will be eviscerated by M.A.L.E. discharge.4
We—not lovers/not colleagues/ not sisters—are fearful yet, still, bored with the (centuries old) political imaginaries that produce the dead white female body. We’d like to take and make the she-corpse into something, but can that something not be downward dog in the white goo—not be Lean-In Capitalism? We’d like to re-craft her into a material that is no longer a defense for the murder of others.5
HELPBOT: Let’s get started! I can tailor my recommendations better if you tell me which credit cards you already carry in your wallet.
Mary Walling Blackburn, Anus Braid: Post-Freud: Opening Modeled After My Endoscopic Photograph of My Colon, 2018. Crayon on paper. 21.5 cm x 27.9 cm.
5.
Available, online: braiding instructions for those who wish to replicate the hairstyle of one hung bog-body, the Elling Woman (280 BCE, Denmark).
If you want to recreate the hairstyle, start by making a regular pigtail with the hair (from the top of the head). At the hairline on the back of the neck, braid the rest of the hair into the braid which is then divided into seven parts. Braid these together two, two, and three. At the end, the pigtail is divided into two twisted pigtails.
Also available: a downloadable sewing pattern for a sacrificial bog man’s trousers. Sew-it-yourself. Ancient victim drag. Proto-Caucasoid victim drag.
Who downloads and why now, in August 2018?
Scrutinize the pants of white men marching—the seams, their cut.
BOGBOT: I know a ton about white men and want to help you get the most out of them.
Mary Walling Blackburn, Hyena Clitoris in Chinos or CuntryClub Daughters: Be Class Traitors, 2018. Pencil on paper. 21.5 x 27.9cm.
6.
The dead white woman: working stiff on display at Amazon.6
The dead white woman: stiff customer at the Apple store.7
Both sport smooth double French braids on their heads; 7-inch clitori in their chinos.
7.
In feminist fugue-state, a second wave amnesiac does not recall her Amazon, eBay, Rosetta Stone passwords, but does recall the zooed female hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in simulated grasslands—their short, abbreviated tails, their gold and black hair and long, black and pink clitori.
Dissociative or present, this second-wave amnesiac is a biologist. Does she dare to place the anesthetized bitch’s clitoris in her mouth? Do I dare eat a peach?8
Joni Mitchell asks if we can get back to the garden … and voices croak “get back to the cave!” Exit the stopgap measure of the NeoLiberal Garden and its CSA.
These croakers might be thero-wave feminists.9 Thero is zero in Láadan, a tonal feminist language created by linguist and sci-fi writer Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982.10 Elgin postilizes that languages, as they currently exist, do not allow for women to express cogent and complex critiques because the cultures that produced them would be destroyed by what women would actually want to declare. According to Elgin, Láadan allows a person to articulate their ambivalence. In Láadan, thero, like zero, indicates the presence of absence, but it also stretches infinitely in all directions. Thero-waves lap at the beginning of the pre-genital cosmos, lap the dew from genitals at civil dawn, lap up the post-genital, the extra-genital … schlurp, rana,11 ranahá12 …
How far back and which cave, croons figment Joni. lul lul lul lull13 …
Far back: Neanderthals and Denisovans and cave hyenas competed for cave space;14 hominids vacated rock shelters for canines over and over again. The blade-like teeth of the Crocuta crocuta easily sheared flesh from hominid bone—be the hominid hunted down or dug out of a fresh grave.
Picture a living Neanderthal preoccupied with the long clitori of an Ice Age cave hyena (Crocuta crocuta spelaea) … she braids herself towards that. She gives herself a double tail. It mentally soothes to mimic what one fears. Penes.
…
JONIBOT: Far out. We are stardust. Billion Year Old Carbon. Can I help you join a rock n roll band or camp out on the land?
USER: Can I do this with outstanding student loans?
JONIBOT: Now you can’t afford a blanket. You could steal one from your friend. You can trick one off the corner. You can keep the change - to spend.
USER: My tails are dragging in the cinders.
JONIBOT: Ready for the next step? I will take you as you are.15
USER: Wow … that’s awesome.
8.
The Center for Disease Control conducted a study of 10,018 women murdered in eighteen US states (from 2003–2014). According to the report, strangers committed 16 percent of all female homicides. Daughters were murdered by their parents at a slightly lesser rate. Former lovers or current lovers or friends were most murderous.
The Atlantic reported on the report: “Black women were most likely to die by homicide of any kind, at 4.4 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Native American women, Hispanics, and finally whites and Asians.” White women are less likely to be murdered than all women of color—but symbolically, their death is and has been writ large (be it the colonial period, the antebellum, postbellum, interbellum, bellum semper).16 When a specific sort of white woman is smote, certain white men claim nation, claim safety, make claims to save the community; they light torches. When the black woman is dead, the whites go quiet. Is it their time for reflection? They killed and keep killing the black woman for the pleasure of it, for the profit of it, the pleasure in the profit. Do you, Reader, seek the granularity of the slaughter—each black femme named and described in a groundswell of Facebook posts marked public? But how to insist on a record that keeps tracks of names and each name’s body without providing a roll call for the state, an auctioneer’s tally?
9.
Is there a tally?
Only lascivious men keep tallies; the greedy ones keep account books with toothless entries and flexible columns that may or may not disclose the exchange and use value of chattel. What we know is that the archive disintegrates when we (reader/writer) attempt to uncover what we (liquid colonists) have rapaciously gobbled up—millions upon millions of Native American bodies and 3.8 million square miles of land.
America could not have been birthed if the names of the killer and the killed had been written down on vellum or light-sensitive paper. Instead, colonists braided, three parts: raw/(un)doing/self-other. In the Generall Historie, John Smith recounts the process:
So great was our famine, that a Savage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him … boyled and stewed with roots and herbs: And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne … now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of. This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time; it were too vile to say, and scarce to be believed, what we endured.17
Our genesis, Jamestown, 1609: The age of white owls ignites; the future-perfect of empire begins. Chisel teeth are emboldened; a concatenation of white teeth gorge on Savage flesh. Our forebears ate the mother, feasted on Indian, savored the wife. Today, the enumeration of defiled flesh must be, at all costs, foreclosed. But we learn that there are remains interred in Lake Sakakawea; we do not see the piles of feet but they are shocked back into life every time a speedboat cruises by. Inevitably feet stop trying to hum every time we say:
“Gorgeous Lake Views.”18
Or … “We stayed at Fishing Point which is primitive: no hookups.”19
Or … “The rangers came by every few hours to make sure everything was okay. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem intent on enforcing the rules, as a quite a few of them drove by our neighbors who had all three of their dogs (and all four of their toddlers) off-leash and mostly unsupervised for the entire weekend.”20
But rangers, since before they were known as such, have enforced the rules. They leashed the Powhatan, Tuscarora, Tutelo, Saponi, Catawba, Cheroke, Yuchi,21 Nauset, Nantucket, Pennacook, Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, Pokanoket,22 Lenape, Erie, Iroquois, Munsee, Susquehannock,23 Bidai, Coahuiltecan, Jumano, Kitsai, Tonwaka, Wichita, Comanche,24 Nomlaki, Modoc, Cocopah, Cahuila, Atsugewi, Yukuts, Tolowa, Maiudu.25
Mounted constabularies in concert with the Army Corp of Engineers forced the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Irikara off their land. The use value of what had been the Fort Berlthold Reservation: Electricity.26
The towns of Van Hook, Sanish, Elbowoods, Independence, and Shell Creek were razed to the ground to make way for Lake Sakakawea: a reservoir to power the fridge, the radio, the TV. As always, they used irony to meld murder into recreation. In 1973, they renamed the fake lake after the Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacagawea/Sakakawea/Sacajewea, from whom the olden whites had extracted the most valuable commodity in the 1800s: language. Only she knew her real name. Her given name mystifies murder.
While historians masticate the remains, the descendants of the Awaxawi, Awatixa, and Hiraacá were exiled to New Town and Madaree. They, however, wanted to live in Vanish … wish not granted, they were forced to accommodate in White Shield.27
10.
FARRAHBOT: I exist in communion with fearful boredom. Love art and prosper.
USER: Strange headlines psycho killer.
POWDEREDWIFEBOT: Impossible. I am an algorithm that spots dentures.
White-corpse deflects the ones that evaporate. We are borg.
When profit digs in, the white mouth feasts on the very first communal rap song:
A like a Perry Mason without a case / Like Farrah Fawcett without her face
Like the Barkays on the mic / Like gettin’ down right for you tonight.28
Farrah without her face: gold wig floating on the surface of a river.
Farrah without her face: slave teeth gnawing the fatherly gum.
America without profit, we without profit. Imagine that.
11.
In a drawer in the Locker of the Desk which stands in my study you will find two small (fore) teeth; which I beg of you to wrap up carefully, and send inclosed [sic] in your next letter to me. I am positive I left them there, or in the secret drawer in the locker of the same desk.29
Europeans joke about the laboratory whiteness of American teeth. It all began with George Washington. He wanted teeth, perfect or otherwise. The president was in possession of an awful mouth. Abscesses festered; decay triumphed. At age 24, the first extraction. Twenty years later, incisors, canines or cuspids were gone. As he savored the gnarly taste of immortality, the rosy-cheeked progenitor was “indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gums;”30 dentures mauling the gums. When he spoke these words: “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States,” there was only one tooth in the foul mouth. As words billowed out of the acrid cavity, the fetor wafted, thick enough to see. It should have choked frogs; it should have made men sputter, but instead, swarming bots swallowed the miasma and spewed out sulfuric brimstone, the thickening substance gumming nation. Meanwhile, Father America worried about derisory sniggers about the nigger teeth now rooted in his mouth.
IBOT: Want to know more about iBot? Ask us here and we’ll answer right away.
SASSATRON: Bot to bot, do you provide womanist bot?31
IBOT: Let us know what womanist is and we’ll get right to it. We program any bot to reflect your growing business needs.
SASSATRON: Can your bot attend to the needs of black female users past and present? In other words, are all of your bots modeled on white men, bra? Do your bots have teeth and if so, whose teeth are they?
WOMANISTBOT: Black Woman’s critical cognitive practice is glimpsed in the earliest actuated meanings of resistance by captured and enslaved African women in North America (according to Angela D. Simms).32 Moving beyond capitalism (on and off the plantation), according to Oliver Cox, is the only means to ending white supremacy. How does your bot function in anti-capitalist economic structures?
LáADANTRON: Báa ril thi óowamid imedimeth?33
IBOT: Our services are provided in North American English. Should we take this to the next level?
Indian land engulfed by Thirteen Colonies; commander-in-chief, toothless.
1783: “The small matters [slave teeth?] which were expected from Virginia are not yet received, and it is to be feared will never be found.34
1784: 9 negro teeth = 6 pounds, 2 shillings.35 In the glass house, he salivates. Slave teeth arrived.
1789: Slave teeth at the bottom of the sea. Slave teeth gummed to his gums.
1840: John Augustine Washington III, the last Washington family member to own George Washington’s estate claims his inheritance and it is decrepit.
Where are the slaves? Where are the teeth?
JAW III borrows twenty-two slaves from his mother. Slowly, Mount Vernon becomes a destination. In vain, JAW III “instructed slaves and laborers to sell bouquets of flowers, fruit, milk, and hand-carved canes to tourists.” But in just over a decade, JAW III will give up George Washington’s plantation.36
1846: The Donner party—obvious but withered reference, undergirding the republic but clearly operating within the cultural mechanics of Camp … Glimpse the manic production of films generated on the subject:37
The Hunger. Fantasy/Period Drama. (Luke Scott, Forthcoming).
Dead of Winter: The Donner Party. TV Movie. (The Weather Channel, 2015).
The Donner Party: The Musical. Short. (Andrew Migliori, 2013).
Donner Pass. Horror. (Elise Robertson, 2011).
The Donner Party. Period Drama. (Terrence Martin, 2009).
Trail of Tragedy: The Excavation of the Donner Party Site. Educational Film. (Department of Agriculture & United States Forest Service at the Tahoe National Forest, 1994).
The Donner Party: American Experience. Documentary. (Ric Burns, 1992).
Donner Pass: The Road to Survival. TV Movie. (James L. Conway, 1978).
Now, will you tune in to the ritornello of a beat-down in the apartment above?
In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud oozes as he cocks a new myth. According to the man who transformed the unconscious into vernacular possession, civilization brewed out of an orgy of cannibalism: the primal horde killed and ate the father because father was a hog; he coveted everything, femmes especially. The frenzied swarm believed that once ingested, His power would graph onto their bodies. It did. It didn’t. Feeling nauseated, they intertwined guilt with pleasure and invented the basic rules of social bonds—the prohibition of incest and murder. Freud, as obvious a reference as the Donner Party, yes. Put the cannibal on the couch. But stay with us as we listen to the ostinato of a beat-down in the apartment above. As we exit—the apartment for the mountains.
The Donner party: a chorus of bearded beings, owls mounted on monstrous snakes slithering through and swallowing up wel mel ti homeland in the winter of 1846–47.38 Like in Jamestown, the white hooters survived by feasting on human flesh. The first one to be devoured was Antonio, the Mexican. The next ones consumed were Eema Ochej and Queyuen, two Miwok Cosumne guides who tried to escape the feeding frenzy but were eaten nonetheless. So, the West was won with guns and sharpened teeth and sugar and coffee. A sugar bowl on the ranch house table is fashioned from the skull of a Chinese laborer who was massacred by whites.39 Our forebears ate the mother, feasted on Indian, savored the wife, spooned sugar from a Chinese skeleton.40 America, the stolon shoots out. Nowadays, it is the same: A woman is eaten and her death echoes as a Jamestown joke in the guttural imaginary of the state. When does she become a sumptuous victual? We wonder. Answer: When she’s vulcanized.
(Bearded steampunks, there is no steampunk drone that hurtles through time. No metal salvage drone can redeem technology and the history that holds it. No time-travel GoPro will capture America’s most famous band of nineteenth-century white cannibals, The Donner Party, first eating their guides and then eating the parts of their dead white ones that have frozen in the snow of the California mountains. No anachronistic drone moves past one carnage to another … carnage.)
Well, while we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were. They set everything we had left on fire. It was a fearful sight. It was all we had for the winter, and it was all burned during that night.41
Thocmetony (Thocmetony/Tocmetoni), the Numa/Northern Paiute activist and First Indigenous American woman to publish a memoir, describes the Donner Party.42
Thocmetony was also called Sarah Winnemucca when she was operating as interpreter and messenger to the US Army (in the war against the Bannock tribe, 1878).43 She was Sarah Winnemucca when lobbying for the Numa/Paiute in Washington D.C., too.44 Thocmetony was her name when she heard the “first white men … encountered” described as “owls because of their unfamiliar beards and light eyes;”45 she was calling herself Thocmetony while buried up to her neck in sand, trying to escape the detection of white raiders/cannibal owls; she was calling herself Sarah when she rejected the possibilities of the Ghost Dance (1870) initiated by Wodova/Wodizwab/Jack Wilson, a Northern Paiute shaman who was offering up an alternative indigenous future that did not include white owls.
If one tries to rotate Thocmetony/Sarah/Tocmetoni, like a 3-D object in video game software, it is not possible, with owl eyes, to find the stamp: traitor or hero.
12.
In the 1990s, Farrah (and women like Farrah) “faces” (masks) were supplanted in the checkout lane by the child “face” (mask) of JonBenét (1990–1996), AKA America’s Royale Miss, Little Miss Charlevoix, Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl, and National Tiny Miss Beauty. Her given name is a portmanteau, blending, and feminization of her father’s two given names. But the miniature angel-bride-pornstar amalgam is not feminine or female; it is actually a stolon of the father. This news story—this runner—provided and continues to provide a platform for American consumers to ceaselessy wonder whether or not the center (of power) would or will kill itself. The media-produced feedback loop recycles the ancient biblical notion that Big Father can productively kill Little Father.
Stolons are runners that grow above surface and bud to produce clones of the parent plant. Power works (always) to kill its feminized offshoot so it can re-root ruthlessness. The feedback loop reminds us that the stolon is not the originator; the originator can live without the stolon. The stolon has one purpose: to colonize, to disseminate blood-soaked lineages.46 The mareing world can’t locate a real living child—weird and soft and still part animal—in the stolon.47 We might have liked that kid … before they turned her out … Yeah, dowse the collective conscious and the sticks reveal that the whole (American) world dreams of unseating JonBenét, a loony and looted Christ figure (Anno Dominium 22).
Once it’s established that killing women (or killing the simulacra in miniature (here, in the form of JonBenet)) is what forms community, one must parcel out the valuation of each category of woman killed. We kill the white woman and the white stolon to establish hierarchical value. We kill First Nations women to pollinate the land with the future perfect promise of profit.
Mary Walling Blackburn, Settler Inventory: Synthetic Red Beard (Undigested); Small Pox Hand; Surgical Blade for Mastectomy or What’s in the Pitcher Plant?, 2018. Pencil on paper. 21.5 x 27.9cm.
13.
In the early Spring of 1700, Michel Sarrazin, a surgeon appointed by the crown in New France (Canada), performs the first North American mastectomy. He removes the breast of Sister Marie Barbier de l’Assomption. The surgeon treats the Sister in a hospital that had been moved because of constant attacks by the Iroquois.48 After the operation, Sarrazin discards the mammary gland, wipes the blades, and putters in the bog. How to Relax After Carnage.
After surgery, the former Mother Superior lives for thirty-three more years. Sister Marie Barbier de l’Assomption had been operating the missions which established schools for the conquered. At a certain point, Sarrazin makes scientific claims on an indigenous carnivorous plant (Sarracenia purpurea). Does he see himself in it? Does he see the plant as it sees him? Dense clusters of Sarracenia purpurea were found in marshes that limned Kanata Stadacona (now on record as Quebec). Imagine that he’s stuffed the missionary tit inside the tubulur, pitcher-shaped leaves of the Sarracenia, Herbe Crapaud, Oreille de Cochon, Petits Cochons—the Smallpox Plant.49 Let’s imagine that this hacking and stuffing of virgin tit is how Sarrazin observes a plant feasting—that with the rotting boob ensconced, he sees the dew and digestive enzymes break down tissue, be it frog meat or colonizer in nun form.
A superluminal tube works counter to spacetime geometry as we currently imagine it: time travel happens. Sans droid. A Caucasoid woman from the twenty-first century sprints past the eighteenth-century bog. She wears a neon green fleece sweatband with a hole at the back of the band. Her smooth yellow ponytail pours through the fleece hole. She has two breasts, flesh or silicone. Her hot pink t-shirt is emblazoned with words written in white, wet-paint font: Save the Hooters.50
Americans, you are crafty—transforming (medical equity) feminism into corny porn.
Americans, you manage to make cancer Camp.
A couple hundred years after white explorers and settlers introduced smallpox51 to the peoples of North and South America, a number of nineteenth-century medical journals included reports that some First Nations tribes found that Sarracenia purpurea, this carnivorous bog plant, treated smallpox and prevented scar formation.52
In 2003, a Seattle homeopath blogs: “the remedy is made from a tincture of the fresh pitcher plant taken daily in 3C, 6C, and 9C potency to prevent or ameliorate smallpox when the disease [is] known to be in the area.”53 She notes that this formula is particularly relevant in an age where aerosolized smallpox could be re-released by so-called governments. She marvels at the possible revival of the antidote without mentioning the American roots of bioterrorism: smallpox as weapon deliberately deployed against colonial-era Delaware and Shawnee, Niitsitapi54, and Yankton and Yanktonai Dakota55
Crafty Danish, you are able to craft indigenous resistance to genocide into biotech:
POXMETRON: Your increased awareness of bioterrorism has brought you here today! How can Bavarian Nordic assist you? Would you like to place an order for our MVA-BN vaccine?
POXMETRON: We see you’re based in North America. Our product is available in the US and the UK, but only for government purchase. Perhaps you are more comfortable working directly with our US partners, Chiron and Eppimune? Are you there?
POXMETRON: It’s safe for the immunocompromised! It’s safe for expecting mothers! Are you there?
POXMETRON: …
POXMETRON: A POX ON YOUR HOUSE!!! Hæ hæ hæ hæ!
USER SARRAZIN: MDR56
JONIBOT: Type FuG1TVe# to prove you’re not a BOT.
USER: I only know DOS. I don’t recognize the signal.
14.
Feminists … … … if you are out there:
Are you a living pussy in a pussy hat watching pussies take their last gasp in this contemplative slasher film?
Feminists/Femmes/Feminines, why is it that the murder of women is something all hold close (to watch! to remember! to listen for!)? While we feel the murder in the universe … some of us feminines and/or femmes and/or feminists … will raise daughters that will chokehold their sweethearts in coitus instead of being choked. Some of these daughters will refuse to choke or be choked. Another daughter will find someone else’s daughter that chokes her while she chokes her, each wound around one another in an approximation of a Celtic knot.
Stay with us and with this as we listen to the ostinato of a beat-down in the apartment above.
We hesitate over she-corpses, refuse to smell.
A multiplicity of she-corpses exude vile alchemy, syncopating life with pernicious vapors, black eyes, hungry bellies, conspiracies.
CONSPIRACYBOT: We are Q. Glass house of Continuous Reflection.
USER: I need help purging. How do you finger the scratch?
Mary Walling Blackburn, Corbu and Wife’s Rainbow Grave Lacquered by The Demon-Ghost of Eileen Gray (an architect once trained in the craft of lacquerware), 2018. Pencil on paper. 21.5 x 27.9cm.
15.
Let’s locate feminism’s structure, by scent … by sonar … by touch. Is it a translucent glass house that reflects the shadow figure of the peeping tom? Is it an antithetical material that collapses the barrier between what’s observed and what can be appreciated? Is it the translucent layer of matter between the beholden and the beheld? Feminism needs a structure.
Are you aware of glass houses—ones that amplify the vulnerability of the inhabitants by allowing a totalizing voyeurism—designed by woman modernist architects for women who live alone?57 The exceptions don’t qualify: say, the Dover Solar House, the very first solar residence, designed by architect Eleanor Raymond for her female client and built in the early 1940s. It is a guest house.58 And at dusk, shades are drawn; passive solar principles are at play. Another, across the sea, E1027 (Eileen Gray, 1929) artfully deploys the shuttered slit—all and can be closed up when the storms rail. But E1027 is not crafted for a female hermit; it was designed to hold lovers and their maid.59
E1027: A house that folds around itself
E is for material palpability
One for sorrow
Zero for agitator
Two for scallywag
Seven for misery
Love, Nest: Target practice for German troops
Modernist she-corpse: Disturbed projection
The magpie (Pica pica) stares60
CHAC CHAC CHAC CHAC
Superstitious ones think this bird is a harbinger of death, and that we can only ameliorate this by enquiring, each time we cross his path, “How is your wife?!”
It searches for its ferments in the ground beside the building; in a series of memorized caches where it stores regurgitated foods. Dishes comprised of suspended rot: like sowen-bowie, kimchi; kraut, chicha; ogi and skyr.
Every day we write the bird struts in front of us but without a scythe.61
In 1937, Le Corbusier visited E1027 for the first time. In 1938 he mutilated her walls. In L’Esprit Nouveau, the architect promised a new age; the age when whiteness would straighten the spirit. After the bloody mess of fratricidal war, he was going to build a clean, white world for everyone. The new age, animated by technology, enlivened by mass production and circumscribed by geometric order, would invest the white phallus in new formal structures. Le Corbusier gushed: purging, whitewashing, clarifying! Modern surface: white phallocracy: no need to be naked.
Eileen Gray wanted another kind of dwelling. She wanted a performative architecture, one in which nothing is ever what it seems to be: a building populated by inexact repetition, sensual envelopes, and hidden staircases. Against the phallocentric order of white light, Gray wrote: We will be killed by hygiene! Gray graphed the structure with these words: “Enter slowly: Theory is not sufficient for life and does not answer to all its requirements.”
The magpie stares. At herself (in the glass)? At the human behind? At Corbu, drowning? chac-chac-chac-chac
He, Corbusier, the crusader against queerness (in)building, drowned (1965) under the watchful eye of E1027, the house he defiled.
USER: Spotted a feminist—peeping structure that negates the tom.
CORBUTRON: glug
SLAVEBOT: Impossible, signal not recognized.
MAGBOT: chac-chac-chac-chac
USER2: In Scotland, a magpie spotted through a window is a harbinger of death.
POXMETRON: Consider our MVA-BN Filo product candidate for Ebola?
At night a house on the edge of settlement—a regular house with sliding glass doors—feels like a diorama for a killer. Killers seek a house on an unlit and isolated corner lot; a place with no dog. They also seek an attached garage and a layout where it is easy to identify the bedrooms.
16.
Every weekend I crave your death, white woman. Then the movies give it to me. It’s a cultural ritual. The problem: your blood is real. The problem: your blood isn’t real. The problem is your blood is real. I loop.
The blonde thing: Savasanna (corpse pose). Release your brain to the back of the head.
Unstiffen.
The white she-corpse is granular, quicksand. Every she-corpse needs a structure. She-corpse needs a feminist because she raises the problem of mediation.
(powdered wife pose)
17.
The jogger thing: beside trail, stiffens—rigor. No more ATP. No more ATM.
Revive her? Yeah. Revive that ideological thing!
When his ww is dead, an alt-right man straps the idea of her to his white polo.
Jump her heart! Some lives depend on it.
Enlivened by Tom’s gawking, she-corpse sustains; she is the striation of value.
Cushion to catastrophe.
White-she-corpse integrates his power; she-corpse is order. Glass she-corpse. The white-she-corpse is no mirror. White-she-corpses are strewn about so that every other death can be invalidated, contradicted. White-she-corpse cancels all. White-she-corpse is the structuring structure.
Good Girl, new position: (Class Traitor Pose) (Race Traitor Pose) (Class Traitor Pose)
Repeat. Fast and Slow. Testify. Free-Bleed. Masturbate. Download your inherited wealth.
One of the two writers of this text issues the above advisory. The other writer of this text comments in the shared doc: This drone is made of the flesh of the other? Or is it a drone that targets the flesh of the other? Is it a drone made of the flesh of the Other—crafted to target its own?
Earl from Sterling, IL just registered a drone with the FAA. Scott from Rock Hill, SC just registered a drone with the FAA. Holden from Lincnton, NC just registered a drone with the FAA. Robert from The Woodlands, TX just registered a drone with the FAA. Kevin from Queens, NY just registered a drone with the FAA. See → (Accessed September 17, 2018).
(See Phil Neel’s Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict →.) Our drone distro (distro is 90s DIY punk scene slang for independent publishing) purportedly includes: xerox of June Gibbons The Pepsi Cola Addict (1982; Out of Print); an unmarked cassette from the Barbara Burford collection at the Glasgow Women’s Library (possibly Burford practicing the feminist sci-fi language of Laadan given that the collection holdings include Burford’s personal copy of The First Dictionary of Laadan (GB 1534 BB/3/3/2); an unauthorized press of Guy Hocquengham’s untranslated L’Après-Mai des faunes (1974) and La Beauté du métis (1979); a risograph (printed with copper-colored ink) of Ti-Grace Atkinson’s essay on abortion as sculpture from Amazon Odyssey (1974; Out of Print); a re-purposed drive holding a pdf of Janet Frame’s Daughter Buffalo (1972; Out of Print). Is this soft samizdat? No.
According to DW: “Probably the most well-known military drones are the large-scale combat drones used by the US, which are all operated from US soil by pilots via a satellite link-up. The Predator, and its larger, newer cousin, the Reaper, both MALEs made by the US firm General Atomics, are armed and used for controversial extrajudicial killings in countries where the US is not officially at war. Reapers can be armed with various air-to-surface missiles, as well as laser-guided bombs, have a range of over a thousand miles and a maximum non-stop flight time of 14 hours. Apart from the US, several other NATO air forces operate Reapers, including those of the UK, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. The Chinese-made rival, the CH-4, which looks very similar to the Reaper, has been bought by Egypt and Iraq.” See → A M.A.L.E. drone is a Medium Altitude Long Endurance crewless aerial vehicle.
Seventy-seven (77) drone owners are currently completing the drone registration compliance form at 4:00 p.m. EST on September 17, 2018. I note that the pop-up notifications of registrees is cycling; I am recognizing men and their towns repeating. When I log on at 6:25 a.m. on September 18, 2018, it claims: “9 drone owners are currently completing the drone registration compliance form;” the same individuals from the previous day appear to be still registering various models of drones.
“Amazon.com strives to be increasingly efficient to ship customers’ orders as quickly as possible from its fulfillment centers around the world.” Italics are the authors’. See images such as one captioned “XXX pulls items from a multi-bin to package for shipping at the Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Monday, Dec. 1, 2014. On Cyber Monday Amazon expects customers to order more than 36.8 million items worldwide,” →.
Some T.S. Eliot scholars attend to the confluence of Eliot’s anti-capitalism and racism. These are two ideological strains that are currently presumed to proliferate in separation; additionally, the racist dimension of how US capitalism continues to extract from certain bodies and actual places contributes to the popular perception that to be anti-capitalist is to be antiracist. Ezra Pound and Eliot provide cautionary proto-examples of this admixture and how it is carried by aesthetics. (These two hashed politics and poetry; these two played tennis together.)
thero is Láadan for zero.
“The very first tiny Láadan dictionary, before the one published by SF3, was prepared and illustrated by artist Karen Jollie. It hasn’t been available for decades.” See →.
Láadan for drink
Láadan for drinker
Láadan for vagina
If we return to the cave, as suggested here, who else might be there? In the Pleistocene, caves become a juncture and sorting space for two different species of hyenas as well as competing hominids. Scientist Susanna Katherine Sawyer writes,“We show that the spotted hyenas that contaminated the two Denisovans come from a population of spotted hyenas found in Pleistocene Europe as well as present-day Africa, while the spotted hyenas that contaminated Altai 2, and possibly Altai 1, come from a population of spotted hyenas found in Pleistocene eastern Russia and northern China. This indicates that Denisova Cave was a meeting point of eastern and western hominids as well as eastern and western spotted hyena populations” From Sawyer’s qualifying thesis: “Insights into Neanderthals and Denisovans from Denisova Cave”
This segment of JoniBot cribs directly from Joni Mitchell lyrics available on →.
According to Violence Policy Center: “Nationwide, 1,615 females were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents in 2013, at a rate of 1.09 per 100,000. The study found that nationwide, 94 percent of women killed by men were murdered by someone they knew. Of the victims who knew their offenders, 62 percent were wives or other intimate acquaintances of their killers. The study also found that black women are disproportionately impacted by fatal domestic violence. In 2013, black females were murdered by men at a rate of 2.36 per 100,000, two and a half times higher than the rate of 0.95 per 100,000 for white women murdered by men. Nationwide in 2013, out of the 1,615 female homicide victims, 1,086 were white, 453 were black, 36 were Asian or Pacific Islander, 21 were American Indian or Alaskan Native, and in 19 cases the race of the victim was not identified.” See →.
John Smith, “What happened in the first government after the alteration, in the time of Captaine George Piercie, their Governor,” 1609, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), 106. Digital edition: University of North Carolina, Documenting the South: See →.
Valerie S. from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reviewer of Reviews of Lake Sakakawea →.
Reviews of Lake Sakakawea →.
Valerie S. from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reviewer of Reviews of Lake Sakakawea →.
Selective list of First Nations in the state known as Virginia, but was (at least parts of it) known as Tsenacommacoh.
Selective list of First Nations in Massachusetts. Massachusetts, from the Wampanoag word Massachuset, which means “by the range of hills.”
Selective list of First Nations in Pennsylvania
Selective list of First Nations in Pennsylvania
A selective list of First Nations in California
Lake Sakakawea is part of the Pick-Sloan Missouri River Basin Program, the largest reservoir and dam system in North America. Under this program and beginning in the 1940’s, a series of dams were to be built on the Missouri River. The plan devastated First Nations communities along the river. The dams inundated Reservation land, including all the timber, agricultural and grazing land; eighty percent of inhabits were forced to relocate to other reservations, which lacked infrastructure. Critics argue that this system of dams destroyed more Indian land than any other such project in the USA. See Peter Capossela, “Impacts of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Pick-Sloan Program on the Indian Tribes of the Missouri River Basin.” See →.
After the destruction of the Fort Berthold Reservation, people were forced to move into New Town, White Shield, and Madaree. There was an initiative to name the new towns Vanish (a portmanteau) of the Van Hook and Sanish, two of the towns bulldozed during the construction of the dam.
Sugar Hill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight,” 1979.
George Washington, letter to Lund Washington, December 25, 1782. See →.
George Washington, diary entry, January 17, 1790 in Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (Penguin, 2010), 437.
Multiple allusions radiate from the name of this bot, ranging from a post-apartheid South African secret military force to the indigenous North American plant utilized by both slaves and southeastern first nations tribes for both medical and culinary purposes. See → Finally and centrally, Mitzi J. Smith (in Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (2016)) frames sass as both a biblical inheritance (Mark 7:24–30) and a set of historic and contemporary strategies (physical and verbal) deployed by African-American femmes. This SASSATRON is programmed to talk back because the SASSATRON is operating outside of capital gain and outside of death; the SASSSATRON is lively but isn’t alive. The womanist who programs the SASSATRON, according to Alice Walker (who coined the term) must be: “1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman, usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious… .4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. From Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)
From Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Maureen Townes, Angela D. Sims, eds. (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
From Láadan Lesson Four, “Asking Questions”: “Does the dragon have a suitcase?”
Excerpt from a letter written by Washington to Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur, in Ron Chernow, Washington: A life. In 1783, Washington contracted the French dentist to design and build a set of dentures.
Figures from George Washington’s accounting book, 1784.
The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association began to form in 1853; they remain the official stewards of the site. Their founder writes that female members “shall be of a family whose social position would command the confidence of the State (Author’s emphasis), and enable her to enlist the aid of persons of the widest influence … She must be able to command considerable leisure, as the duties will require much time until stipulated funds are raised.” See →.
This is not an exhaustive list, nor does it include scores of books, plays, memorabilia, and souvenirs.
The Wel me ti is one of the ethnic groups comprising the Washo nation. The Washo (better known as Washoe) are the original inhabitants of Da ow aga (Lake Tahoe) and all the lands surrounding it. Washoe is a mispronunciation of Da ow, meaning “lake.” The Washo were divided into three groups: the northerners, or Wel mel ti; the Pau wa lu, who lived in the Carson Valley in the east; and the Hung a lel ti, who lived in the south. The Paiute and Shoshone lived to the east and the Maidu and Miwok to the west. Generally, a family was distinguished by whoever lived together in the galais dungal (winter house) during the winter months.
From a US History lecture by Harvard Sitkoff, 1991. The skull belonged to a Chinese laborer killed in one of many anti-Chinese massacres in the American West.
The site of the Donner Party’s winter encampment later becomes the town of Truckee, where white settlers successively burn down the homes and businesses of Chinese settlers.
Thocmetony, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883).
White Settlers, in historical documents, will sometimes refer to both the Numa and the Bannock as Northern Paiute, although they are separate bands. The Bannock, at a certain point, became aligned with the Shoshone. On Thocmetony‘s activism, see →.
Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a scholar of First Nations Literature and Law, claims that translation is “the central act of European colonization and imperialism.” However, this statement must be also held next to the fact of Thocmetony delivering 300 speeches in defense of the Paiute. According to Jennie Hissa, in “Translation and Treachery in the 19th-Century Work of Native American Writers Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala-Ša,” for Thocmetony to insist on herself as not separate from her people and on her people as existing previously, with, and after white settlers is a type of anti-imperialism at work.
Winnemucca lobbied for the release of her people from the Yakima Reservation. See Sally Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).
’Tis the season: whites hope that they can be purge again, or, to put it in tamer terms, their ambition is to dream about purity with impunity. This year, Whitey hopes: can Big White Father kill Little White Father? This fantasy flexes back and forth amongst left and right Caucasians, each gerrymandering alternate versions of whiteness and goodness, each skittish of their own blood.
The FBI suspects that the mother generated the handwritten ransom note found in the Ramsey home: “Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your bussiness (sic) but not the country that it serves. At this time we have your daughter in our posession (sic). She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.” Note: the author’s evocation: a small foreign faction that does not respect the United States. In 1996, the writer does not have the word terrorist at his or her disposal. Later, from Thailand, an American expat claims he killed JonBenét. He is (on a symbolic level) guilty. His false testimony hangs between his legs. His body responded to the stolon.
The hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Québec originally stood in a village called Sillery, which was also the first Canadian “Indian reserve,” established at the site of an Algonquin eel-fishing cove. The hospital relocated to Quebec in 1644.
Also known by English speakers as Eve’s Cups, Fly-Catcher, Fly-Trap, Huntsmen’s Cup, and Pitcher Plant.
As David S. Jones writes in Rationalizing Epidemics (Harvard University Press, 2009), “They exploited epidemics to obtain land, fur, and research subjects, and used health disparities as grounds for ‘civilizing’ American Indians.” These tribes were intentionally infected with smallpox, by way of blankets and faulty inoculation. In Beyond Germs, an edited anthology on native depopulation in North America, scholars dismiss widespread and deep-rooted settler fantasies of the near eradication of First Nations peoples by way of disease; these fantasies allowed and allow white populations to overlook the complex range of resistance to colonial settlerism as well as their own complicity. In the introduction, Paul Kelton, Alan C. Swedlund, and Catherine M. Cameron write: “Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.” Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (University of Arizona Press, 2015), 3.
For example: The New England Medical Gazette Medical Gazette Publishing Company, 1886
See →.
Direct translation from Niisitapiikwan language is “Original Person.” Sometimes this is used to refer to four distinct nations that have historically been regarded by settlers as one group, the Blackfoot.
In the past, these Yankton and Yanktonai were erroneously referred to as the Nakota, the Stone Sioux, and the Assiniboine. Presently, internally the two are referred to as Wičhíyena, although the Yankton and Yanktonai are distinct tribes.
Mort de Rire (French version of LOL). Direct translation: dying of laughter.
Johnson House (Philip Johnson; 1945); Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe; 1951) Noyes House (Eliot Noyes; 1955) are view, unbound; each an architectural inversion of the arrow loop, but on North American ground. At first, these structures feel built for voyeurs, for lazy stalkers, for some midcentury murderers. Or were they built for the sort of client who has never been exposed, opened up, broken into? Designed by the sort of architect who never had someone call and claim: I see you. I am watching you right now. Your blouse is green. You are holding your cat.
Architect Eleanor Raymond designed Solar House’s structure; engineer Maria Telkes designed its heating system, and the never-married Boston heiress and sculptress Amelia Peabody financed the structure. The guest house was constructed on Peabody’s property. Raymond also designed the first modern house in Massachusetts and Peabody’s Bauhaus-influenced sculpture studio. Her longterm companion, Ethel Powers, was editor of House Beautiful. Eileen Gray and Eleanor Raymond were both central to their cities’ respective circles of elite lesbians.
Note that the many documents (articles and books) consulted by both writers regarding E1027 did not analyze the servant quarters, even when feminism and/or queer studies purportedly animated the analysis.
See Mirror-Induced Behavior in Magpies →. Mag comes from Margaret, and pies means pointed. It was considered a chattering “Margaret”—a female bird.
And the creature, it memorizes the look of its body in the reflections of the glass room we write in. It’s capable of that. Scientists ran an experiment to see if Pica pica could recognize itself in a mirror. The so-named Harvey and Lilly of the study avoided their doubles but the so-called Gerti, Goldie, and Schatzi “spent considerable time in front of the mirror,” thoroughly examining their mirror-images. We are embarrassed that images of first Vito Acconci, then Dan Graham, and finally Chuck Close in open mirror exploration arrive unbidden. Open-mirror exploration: “In a 4 × 4-m room, a mirror 55-cm wide and 40-cm high was placed on the ground, leaning against a pole, and slightly tilted. The position of the mirror was in the middle of one of the walls with about 1.5-m distance from the wall, allowing the birds to move around the mirror. The tested subject could move freely in the room. After a baseline trial with the mirror replaced by a grey, non-reflective plate, five test sessions of 30-min duration were given to each of the birds. The behavior of the birds was observed from an adjacent room by means of a video system, and trials were videotaped.” from Mirror-Induced Behavior in Magpies.
The authors thank the Baltic Writing Residency, where this work was developed.