Sunday, June 9, 2013

panopticon of cameras cutting in timed procession from aisle to aisle to aisle on the overhead screens above the carts asleep inside each other—




  • This needs saying again: my soccer team sucks. After 14 games, a goalless draw on the road increased United's point total by 20%. Whooptyfuckingdoo. Oh, I trademark the name Porterchenko and the tagline Porterchenko fails another audition, not that the three people who know who and what I'm talking about will try to steal this copyrighted intellectual property.
  • Capitalism, intellectual property, and surveillance state.
  • The logic of the surveillance state: What is being run right now is a vast experiment to see if modern technology has fixed these problems with surveillance and opporessive states.  Is it cheap enough to go full Stasi, and with that level of surveillance can you keep control over the economy, keep the levers working, make people do what you want, and not all slack off and resist passively, by only going through the motions?
  • This needs saying again: this is of course about me, but I'm 2/3rds the way through my life, this is more about my daughter who's only 1/4th through her life. When she is my age it will be 2046. What world will she be living in?
  • Mass surveillance in America: a timeline.
  • Of course it's worse than has been revealed.
  • A dedication to Dianne Feinstein.
  • Yes, yes, yes, Republicans moaning about state surveillance are hypocrites, so the fuck what.
  • Nostalgia's just another word for nothing left to lose.
  • After Sparrows Point.
  • Capitalism and Christianity. Disclosure - I've not read the book (and probably won't, I don't do non-fiction very well, though I'll read the first and final chapters sometime this week), but I find Stan's blog posts smart and thought-provoking.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • Things that have been cut to pieces.
  • My future hell.
  • So, I've closed the blogroll Newest Gag the First - there are 29 new sites there, meaning that of the 31 days in May I meant to post a new site I did better than I could have ever guessed. I've opened up Newest Gag the Second where I'll add stuff whenever I want without enforced schedule. As always, requests for new places to read are always solicited. As always, thanks for reading, and as always, if you are doing me a Kind and me not you please let me know.
  • I am, however, posting a David Thomas song each day through June.




   
24/7

Alan Shapiro

The one cashier is dozing—
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up   
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn’t her.   

Only the edge   
is visible of the tightly spooled   
white miles   
of what is soon   
to be the torn off
inch by inch receipts,   
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self scanner   
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won’t cross its path.

Registers of feeling too precise   
too intricate to feel   
except in the disintegrating
traces of a dream—
panopticon of cameras   
cutting in timed procession
from aisle to aisle
to aisle on the overhead screens
above the carts asleep inside each other—
above the darkened   
service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,
so everywhere inside the store
is everywhere at once   
no matter where—
eternal reruns   
of stray wisps of steam   
that rise   
from the brightly frozen,
of the canned goods and food stuffs
stacked in columns onto columns
under columns pushed together
into walls of shelves   
of aisles all celestially effacing
any trace   
of bodies that have picked   
packed unpacked and placed   
them just so   
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums,   
the ziggurats   
of apples and peaches and
in the bins the nearly infinite   
gradations and degrees of greens   
misted and sparkling.

A paradise of absence,
the dreamed of freed
from the dreamer, bodiless
quenchings and consummations   
that tomorrow will draw the dreamer
the way it draws the night tonight   
to press the giant black moth
of itself against the windows
of fluorescent blazing.


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