Thursday, January 5, 2017

Opaque Cyber-Surveillance




Left to right, Rosie, Stanley, Olive, two nights ago. I am never more surveilled then when I'm on front stoop paying attention to MomCat and/or Napoleon. Except here, twitter, email, cell phone, etc. Come get me, Copper.

I received three hundred pings and four spam comments last night, here's one:
jowdjbrown has left a new comment on your post "I'm a Locksmith, and I'm a Locksmith":

This is a good post. This post gives truly quality information. I’m definitely going to look into it. Really very useful tips are provided here. Thank you so much. Keep up the good works http://www.locksmithlasvegas4u.com/
when someone and/or someone's bot in Indonesia (working for a Las Vegas locksmith?) latched onto that post with this video, the best joke ever:







But look at the comments at that post: I know what happened to Randall - according to Prunella, who works with him, he unplugged the digital and then went Angry White Trump. The fuck?

But whatever happened to anne? I still have readers in Ontario, but not the town she once pinged me from. Are you still here, anne? Damn.








ON THE PERIPHERIES OF THE IMPERIUM

Lawrence Joseph

Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson
breached, millions of gallons of it
north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery
Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site,
East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South,
Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl,
Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately
in hurricane sky.


ii

Perhaps I make too much of it, that time,
Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped
in some sort of liquid to protect them from
dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused —
that time, night shift, press-machine shop
on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in,
fixed up, because the work you do is around fire
your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right.


iii

When the mind is clear, to hear the sound
of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude
of syllables pronounced. When the mind
is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine
of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio,
at a holy water font, a mother washes
her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident
so that they’ll heal.


iv

So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA
do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted,
Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole.


v

Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque
cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels,
in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity
the greatest number of children
in United States history are, now, incarcerated,
having been sentenced by law.


vi

A comic dimension to it, on this F train
to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street
in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you,
but, see, he was stabbed in the face
with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — 
lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — 
here, look, he’ll show you — 
a white-and-pink-colored iris.



11 comments:

  1. after reading lawrence joseph's poem i

    1)read the wikipedia article about the basilica and national shrine of our lady of consolation in carey, ohio

    2)read that a movie had been planned, but apparently never made, based on joseph's book "lawyerland"

    3)discovered a review of said book by someone at georgetown u law center:

    http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/683/

    4)looked up the poem by yeats referred to in joseph's poem and which mentions weasels

    http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/yeatspoems/NineteenNinete

    5)found that "weasel boy" is a brewpub in zanesville, ohio

    6)consulted mapquest for the driving distance between said pub and the basilica previously mentioned - 132 miles, which would use approximately nine dollars worth of gasoline


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's funny, the Weasel Boy - I didn't make the connection - it's across the street from Muddy Misers in Zaneville on the left bank of the Muskingum in Zanesville, where we'd sometimes go to dinner when visiting Planet at Gambier. I don't think it's what Joseph had in mind, but still, nice to be reminded.

      Misers took the Zane in Zanesville seriously - Zane Grey books everywhere on the walls - they claimed some Zane Grey / Zanesville connection.

      Delete
    2. he was born there, and zane was also his mother's maiden name

      from wikipedia:

      From 1925 to his death in 1939, Grey traveled more and further from his family. He became interested in exploring unspoiled lands, particularly the islands of South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia. He thought Arizona was beginning to be overrun by tourists and speculators. Near the end of his life, Grey looked into the future and wrote:

      The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.

      Delete
  2. in your posting previous to i'm a locksmith x2, you stated

    I hate the loss of the proper use and moral weight of enormity, as in "the enormity of the Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl victory is just dawning on Ravens fans."

    yesterday on tv someone used "enormity" in its degraded sense and i felt a twinge - however, i told myself that language evolves and devolves and there's no point in being emotionally attached to the way words used to be used, the way words are used now by other people is one of those things not under my control

    but if i ever use "enormity", i will probably be using it in an old-fashioned way - i am a time traveller from the first half of the twentieth century - but since many or most will not understand me in the sense i intend, it is probably better to eschew the term entirely - as steve martin has so perceptively remarked,

    "Some people have a way with words.


    Some


    not


    have


    way."




    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. this morning i found a chance to use "enormity" in a way that suited me - commenting on http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2017/01/americas-heroes.html

      as the poet said, "i know not what the future holds of wonder or surprise"

      Delete
  3. wondering about eldon axle i came across this which i was glad to have read

    http://carbon314.com/ghosts-of-eldon-avenue-2/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Do you remember 'Toast'? Maybe my favorite troll of all time—certainly my first. Smart, cranky, insane.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do remember Toast, in my head I associate him with drip, who still stops by every few months.

      Airport has disappeared of late too, and blog gone moribund.

      Every now and then I think of going back and digging up the bodies of both blogs and their owners for nostalgia / Blegsylvanian history sake, but wisely come to realize Fuck that.

      Delete
    2. The interwebs have no history

      Delete
  5. She of the vertical Morse code of commas,, and dots... has not emailed me in two full years. I wrote to her last year. No reply.

    ReplyDelete
  6. with respect to aaaaargh - some retired intelligence professionals think the case for russian hacking is just as strong as colin powell's speech to the UN about iraqi weapons of mass destruction - i.e. NOT strong and clearly intended to feed into a resurgence of cold war attitudes

    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/06/the-dubious-case-on-russian-hacking/

    ReplyDelete