[smallnouns]

Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse

Anne Boyer, “No,” from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate 

Miguel James, “Against the Police,” translated by Guillermo Parra

[smallnouns]

I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it. We can’t ask a gun for forgiveness, as its maker has already been empowered by law to shed blame, to be blameless. (The police are outside the law because they administer it, regulate and deregulate its limits.) The police are, then, differently personed; they are without souls, thus incredibly ugly. I was about to say that this made them non-beings, but no, that is our imprint. This makes them beings writ large in a colonialist sense, the apogee of an ontology of modernity. The police are at the same time deader than even those of us who are the socially dead, interminably killable because of the codes of race and gender. The police don’t live in the world or in a reality shared by others. The police are faceless, which engenders a Levinasian dilemma. With what do we signal our humanity in the line of fire of their guns? Forever isn’t an impossibility for them. In a haven of infinitude, which isn’t the world-as-it-is, the police are zombified. Zombies are at once beyond justice and its deranged progeny. Police are grievable subjects par excellence. Once the state manufactured a monopoly on grief, the marginalized went on embarrassing the privileged with our buckling, bullet-holed knees.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

[smallnouns]

Sean Bonney

[smallnouns]

Nikki Giovanni / Jo Shapcott can we relinquish love-as-capture, can we love something and -one without the impulse to disambiguate all their complexities, can we resist the want to kill something dead in order to study it, to understand it

[smallnouns]

[realhumanbaby]

2024 1. Desire is information from the future 2. Anxiety is not a product of fear alone, but is employed to defend against any negative feeling 3. Feeling is the only resolution 4. Anger is surprisingly enjoyable 5. All truthful communication is inappropriate by some standard 6. Voice notes are speech therapy 7. Instagram is embarrassing because the medium is the message 8. Love must not be conflated with attachment 9. True power is antithetical to control 10. Conflict is a gift 11. Eye contact is singular and sacred 12. Fantasies of love are just mechanisms through which I am taught to love myself enough to try

[smallnouns]

Nikki Giovanni / Jo Shapcott can we relinquish love-as-capture, can we love something and -one without the impulse to disambiguate all their complexities, can we resist the want to kill something dead in order to study it, to understand it

[kafk-a]

C.D. Wright

[dreamofmourning]

The story of the love of the person who is known by reason of representation (because he or she appears) Although I wasn't there / he said I was his friend / which came as some surprise The failure of the other to materialize With nothing forgotten even while you are turning away again I waited ages to see you there  At last there you are / who I always knew was there / but almost died not meeting you who are so near that I cannot believe you there is one and only one person whose sudden dumbfounding appearance could, if not exactly save you, afford you some respite But it's never too late to come back to my side

[woundgallery]

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967, felt, dimensions variable approximately 99 x 98 x 38 inches (252 x 249 x 97 cm)

[realhumanbaby]

I have the qualifications, I swear, I expand to fill every container I am placed in, I open myself up on one end, I become the container and remain the container for as long as the contents are true

[smallnouns]

‘forms of experience improvised in the ruins of a fully modern industrial system, local gestures and particular lives that fall out of notation by our most canonical gestures’

[dreamofmourning]

“condemned corridor” “a passage into which years are compressed” what’s important is that everyone agrees that a book can formally be a hallway

[smallnouns]

most importantly may we resist any and all forms of determination

[smallnouns]

[firstfullmoon]

Anne Sexton, from “Doors, Doors, Doors,” in The Complete Poems [ID in alt text]

[smallnouns]

Moten’s “subjectivity structure born in objection”

[smallnouns]

Whenever my undergrads talk about "relatability" (or realism, which they might call "authenticity") as an unassailable metric for the efficacy or integrity of art, I show them this—"Brecht thus affirms the social-revisionary potential of theatrical alienation while also tracing the latter specifically to the theatrical work’s emphatic assertion of its own fictive character"

[smallnouns]

Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse

Anne Boyer, “No,” from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate 

Miguel James, “Against the Police,” translated by Guillermo Parra

[smallnouns]

I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it. We can't ask a gun for forgiveness, as its maker has already been empowered by law to shed blame, to be blameless. (The police are outside the law because they administer it, regulate and deregulate its limits.) The police are, then, differently personed; they are without souls, thus incredibly ugly. I was about to say that this made them non-beings, but no, that is our imprint. This makes them beings writ large in a colonialist sense, the apogee of an ontology of modernity. The police are at the same time deader than even those of us who are the socially dead, interminably killable because of the codes of race and gender. The police don't live in the world or in a reality shared by others. The police are faceless, which engenders a Levinasian dilemma. With what do we signal our humanity in the line of fire of their guns? Forever isn't an impossibility for them. In a haven of infinitude, which isn't the world-as-it-is, the police are zombified. Zombies are at once beyond justice and its deranged progeny. Police are grievable subjects par excellence. Once the state manufactured a monopoly on grief, the marginalized went on embarrassing the privileged with our buckling, bullet-holed knees.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

[smallnouns]