#I just thought. as linguistic constructions goes. it's kind of funny

[meichenxi]

assorted ramblings之最

absolutely entranced and delighted by the use of 最 as a noun meaning ‘utmost, best, greatest’

you have some very normal and expected sentences like 世界之最 ‘number one / the best in the world’, 中华之最 ‘number one / best in China’， 历史之最 ‘the utmost / best in history’

but then you have some absolutely wonderful usages like 

ok but. there is no word for scenery here. this just says ‘blah blah out country’s Most nature’. just. the most nature

but there’s no interesting! or aspects!!!!! the Most diamond

yes, before anyone yells at me, I am very aware that it is possible to translate these idiomatically and it all makes sense 

however.  

this construction is FASCINATING. because this last one - 世界钻石之最 could be translated (I would translate, if I hadn’t seen it?) to ‘the greatest among the diamonds of the world’, where the 最 automatically references a) the noun previously mentioned, and b) the scope previously mentioned (i.e. the diamonds In the world)

pleco actually has a similar sentences 钻石之最 which it does translate as ‘the best (or biggest) of all the diamonds’, so 最 here roughly functions like the adjective ‘utmost’ in english. you can’t say ‘the most diamond’ in non-meme language, but you CAN say ‘the utmost diamond’, though it’s still marginal (native english speakers below: tell me whether these reads naturally to you or not). 

but in the sentences above, 世界钻石之最, it’s almost like a classical construction in that we’ve got an implied missing noun here. the MOST [...] [...] of the world’s diamonds. the most what?? fill it in yourself, you bastard. this could also be translated I think as ‘the most interesting aspects’ (keeping their translation) of the world’s diamonds. that means something slightly different to ‘the most interesting aspect in the world’ (which happens to be about diamonds). 

this is a question about scope!! and the relationship between the three ‘nouns’(used loosely because 最 is a noun-y kind of quantifier or a quantifier-y kind of noun? pushing the boundaries of nounhood either way) in this sentences: the world, the diamonds, and the Most. this is Fine.

this is a great example of how funky compounding can get in mandarin, and how it can be very...ambiguous is not the right word, because that implies that there is one correct answer and with access to context it would be clear. but how there can be multiple possible readings available at one time, which context may in fact not clear up at all. a topic for another day, and one I’ve talked about vaaaaaaguely before

(side note: it’s kind of annoying searching for this construction since it mostly appears just as a little more formal version of 最. for example 患难困苦，是磨炼人格之最高学校. here you could just substitute 之最高学校 with 最高学校 and it would mean exactly the same thing)

anyway. there are plenty of vague ones like 人生之最.  the most What in life? just the most????? the best thing? or perhaps if there was another sneaky noun somewhere before it (like the diamond and world example) the best That Thing in life? I honestly don’t know. this is not an informative post. this is a thought, out loud, in real time. expect questions, not answers!!

and then you have other ones which are soooooooo topic-comment that they are just BEGGING for me to put a 也 at the end and whack them in a textbook. for example: 参军当兵光荣之最 ‘participate-army serve-as-soldier honour-之最’ > where is my ‘is’??? where is my verb??? you fool. you coward. in this house we need neither. remember that the A = B, the copula, the most basic relationship between the subject and the predicate can be expressed in chinese by just AB. for example: 宋，小国. song = a small country. this is usually marked with commas in anything from ye olden times when put in textbooks to make it easier to parse. but it could also be 宋小国 and that would mean the same thing. (this is very visible when we look at the way that adjectives work: 山高 or more helpfully punctuated 山, 高 is ‘as for the mountain, it is tall’ or ‘it tall-s’ as 高 is an adjective and technically therefore a stative verb.)

so this sentence could be rephrased 参军当兵, 光荣之最. to translate it with the clunky way japanese-english translators often do when being literal: ‘as for participating in the army and serving as a soldier, it is the greatest honour’ / ‘..., it is the greatest part of the honour’ depending on how you parse the 之最. let’s add the affirmative particle / comment marking particle 也 (no it doesn’t mean also here; remember lwj’s 非也！when defending wwx on the steps of jinlintai) which it is BEGGING for and we get:

参军当兵, 光荣之最也. 

how very classical!!!! how very nice!!!

we could also go one step farther and add a topic-marking particle 者 (yes, you most likely know this as a nominaliser but it has a far greater range of usage than that): 

参军当兵者, 光荣之最也

woweeee. such vibes. truly the Most sentence.

....this got wildly off track. anyway. my point is that in-depth linguistic speculation about how it actually works and musings on translation practices aside, I am going to enjoy thinking about ‘he is truly the Most character’ every time I see this construction

[selfcareparker]

(lovely anon) ok so this may sound so dramatic but; let me paint you a picture: i’m responding to your latest message, sitting on the edge of the sofa. i type in “lovely anon” into the search and see this longgg post come up and i’m like uhhh... i scroll down and see the people you tagged and literally. when i saw @ lovely anon. i . cried . like full on tears. my brother goes “what are you doing” “she tagged meeeee” and he continued what he was doing and didn’t care LMAOO but i was so emotional? i love and appreciate you too and aAH IM CRYING!! you’re just really sweet and i didn’t expect it at all and it was really lovely to be a part of something :’)

the kermit pic sent meee but yes yes yes!! when you start uni let me know, lol i’m so excited for you!! let me know how it goes cuz i’m literally hype hahah & yes we will be in our sad corners of the world, missing england but you’re right it’ll be sooooo worth it in the end!!! and oH i’m glad you talk to them lol i truly thought you like haven’t seen them/haven’t spoken to them this whole time😭 that would’ve been awful!

also i totallyyy get what your saying about the english speaking thing. and idk why you’re insecure (well i *knowww* bc it’s not your first language and you’re studying it in college so yuh) but your english is great :)))

lol yeah that makes sense.. my mom took french in college and she remembers NOTHING HDJSHSJ (the fact that you wanna learn MORE languages i- ahh i so admire you.. you literally know so many languages🥺) yea i mean you know a bunch of languages bc you know the base of words lol, but i wonder if because you know latin it’ll be easier for you to learn french? oh- oh wait you said it’ll be easier HAHHAHA

THERES SO MUCH EXCITING STUFF TO TALK ABOUT HDGSJSJSL it’s so wild to me that you can’t watch chaos walking :( i’m a professional hacker tho so i’ll try and find a way for you LMAO (by professional hacker i mean i literally have gotten multiple free trials and i’m pretty sure the hulu police are after me bUT ITS THEIR FAULT BC WHY IS IT SO EXPENSIVE???) i mean the movie was good? and cute? and funny? but yea don’t think it’s gonna be the most fantastic thing haha AND THE DOGGO AWWW (i saw it again today- or my today lol, saturday, aND THESE OLD PEOPLE CAME AND SAT IN FRONT OF ME AND MY FRIEND LIKE ITS A LONG STORY LMK IF YOU WANNA HEAR IT)

SHARK FILMS?!?!! PLEASE READING THIS I HAD NO IDEA YOU WOULD LIKE SHARK MOVIES TOO FHSKSHSHDJDJGAJAYSJS ok so i haven’t seen any of the classics (i’m working on it) but i would probably watch jaws to laugh at it? not like that lmao but like comparing it. OKAY BUT HONESTLY I BARELY KNOW ANYONE WHO LIKES SHARK FILMS AHHH OKAY im adding “the shallows” to my watchlist bc it sounds super good AND SAME AHSJD ANY BODY OF WATER IN A MOVIE I JUST KNOW ITS COMING LMAO watch me not go in the water anymore after seeing that picture HHDJSJ

WHEN I READ THIS I JUST GOT DONE TALKING TO MY MOM ABOUT THE MEG AND THAT SCENE WHERE THE SHARKKK JUMPEDDDD AND ATE THE OTHER ONEEEE AND THEN JONAS HAD TO DO- bro i cannot (i think that one is my favorite because i love me a bit of romance and the subtle romance hAD ME) 47 meters down PHEW could you imagine?? i try not to think too hard about it i’m like “don’t be dumb catherine, don’t put yourself in a dumb situation” (not autocorrect having “dumb bitch” ready i am not lying) and i literally understand... there is no other way to explain 47 meters down

i CANNOT watch horror movies, can’t can’t can’t, i literally hate them i cannot do it!!! the thrill is tempting and it’s cool in the moment but i cant lmao. i don’t have nightmares about scary things (for the majority of the time) but going to sleep i’m like oooohhhhhh shit 🥲 literally what you explained

music !!!! music !!!! music !!!! (u ever write a word and now it looks weird lmao) MY BROTHER DOESNT LIKE MUSIC AND ITS SHIT IM LIKE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU- anyway, my music taste is all over the place i mean......... it’s crazy. earlier today i was listening to meghan trainor’s album “title” oUT OF NOWHERE, but just a few minutes ago i was listening to fall in love with me by earth wind and fire soooo lol .. megan is *chefs kiss*, i’m not familiar with stormzy🙈, harry styles.... IM SORRY IM THAT PERSON but i don’t listen to his solo music EEK i only listen to adore you... and not that frequently... the music video freaked me out... i like niall’s solo music a lot more, which i listen to a lot more. now. one direction. favorite. please & thank you. i have a playlist called “boy bands” and it consists of one direction and the vamps (obsessed with cherry blossom btw) but as you can see my taste is all over the place!! fr fr if i sent you what apple music has as my “favorites” it went from ariana grande to carrie underwood to glee (OBSESSED DONT LET ME TALK ABOUT IT) i mean please if you let me i will nonstop (hamilton HDJSH) talk about music all day😩 & NOOO UR MUSIC IS GREAT HAHSK IM NOT A BIG RAP PERSON BUT DOJA CAT IS MY FAVORITE!!

okay good, i’m glad :) i was just nervous that you did feel that way <3 and GOT IT HAHAJ healthy pressure is always good :’) my friend got me these pens cuz i love stationary and school supplies lol and was like “now you have to write something” soooo yea i feel that! and i saw you posted the ficcccccc literally so proud of you 🥺🥺 i’m trying to decide if i read it tomorrow or tonight..... sleep or a literal beautiful creation made by the sweetest person and is v v nice smut and college!peter and 4.7k...... sleep aint really calling no more.

GIRL ALL OF MY SENTENCES ARE TOO LONG HAHAHAH IN FACT THIS IS TOO LONG SOOO (also why am i 3 days late..😑) anywho it’s 1 in the morning so <33 lovely anon

🥰

oh my god the fact that you cried nearly made me cry too😭😭🥺🥺 (also, your brother LMAO), i wasn‘t even sure if you‘d see it but i immediately thought of you so of COURSE i included you <333

the hulu police lsjsjaiaik, girl i was ready to get a hulu membership when i wanted to watch big time adolescence and i couldn‘t find it anywhereee, and when i got to the payment it said i need a bank account that‘s based in the US or whatever. like bro i was about to pay you!! but i was forced to find it somewhere (and i did, on levidia,— not that i‘ve ever used it because it‘s illegal 😤 i would never!!! i‘d rather support billion dollar companies and spend my money on watching films that i can find for free 🥰🥰🥰 not

i‘ve found chaos walking online so i‘ll watch it som time this week!! also YES TELL ME THE STORY

okay so idk if you watched/are planning on watching falcon and winter soldier but i watched the first episode the other day and they were speaking french (just a few seconds) and I UNDERSTOOD SOME WORDS DLDJDJ and i was so proud of myself. i‘ve only ever learned french with duolingo lol (i only do like 5 mins a day and that‘s why i was so surprised that i understood some of it!!). and yeah apart from latin i feel like italian, german, french and english are all similar in a sense.. i mean obviously they‘re completely different languages but for example there are some grammatical constructions in french that i think i wouldn‘t understand if i only spoke english? so when i translate those things into english you can‘t directly translate them bc you say things differently, but when i translate them into german then it makes more sense to me. idk that‘s something i noticed so i feel like if you already know multiple languages it‘s easier to learn another language compared to if you only know one language and are trying to learn a second one. even if the languages aren‘t similar then i think you get the hang of it easier.

ikd slsjsjs also i don‘t want you to think that i‘m a linguistic genius or anything lmfao, like i‘m only fluent in english and german and i‘m just a wannabe (ew that word) polyglot sksj (yes i had to google polyglot— i do think learning ancient greek would be super cool tho? like imagine studying latin AND ancient greek, whew). and honestly i don‘t think i‘ll ever be fluent in another language bc i don‘t plan on living anywhere other than germany or possibly england and i‘m not dedicated enough to properly learn any other languages esp if i don‘t have anyone to speak the language with. but i still try my best and i just love language/languages as a whole so yeah i‘m happy & just learning as much as i can dkdjh🥰

(I guess language/linguistics are/is my passion (which sounds sooo lame lmaoooo) and the word passion comes from the latin word pati (i think💀) which means to suffer, and in german passion is called Leidenschaft which basically means suffering too, idk why i‘m telling you this maybe you know it already. but ok dumb fun fact, in german you can make compound words with as many words as you like, and the longest official german word is Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which is a law for the monitoring of labels on beef... this is such a dumb fact but i think about that word like once a day idk why dodjsjsj so... 👁👄👁)

but i‘ll stop boring you with my linguistics talk because truly i don‘t know much about languages but i am interested omg i‘m gonna shut up now.

now water + sharks. (so in non-covid times i always go to croatia with my dad during the summer, and even before ever watching a shark film i was always kind of scared in water.. but after watching so many shark films wldjdj HELP Like you know when you go deeper into the ocean and you can‘t see or feel the ground/floor? anymore.. then i just start imagining sharks. like i can‘t help it i just imagine a shark sneaking up on me or feeling something graze my foot ABD I JUST START FREAKING OUT SSKJSHSJ. idk. anyway kdkdh i do love the ocean/swimming though but the older i get the more i realise how fucking scary the ocean is ( even if we’re gonna disregard sharks)

your brother... what‘s wrong with him? HOw CAN YOU NOT LIKE MUSIC LIKE WHAT THE FAWK

OKAY BUT SAME ABOUT THE ADORE YOU MUSIC VIDEO DLDKDJSJSKSLSLKSKSJSHSH and yeah i have to say harry’s style (styles lol) as a solo artist isn‘t reaaally my cup of tea, and i only like the popular songs from his second album and the first album is only good when i‘m in the right mood (haven‘t actually listened to it in a while though, but kiwi is one of my all time favourites along with only angel but i hate the start, like it takes 40 seconds to actually begin properly). i like mgk and because of him i watched the dirt which is a film about motley crue, and now one of my favourite songs ever is same ol situation and i‘m into rock now lol. +++ justin bieber. I had a justin bieber cardboard cutout thingy😭 i was the biggest Belieber on earth when i was 13-16, but i didn‘t like his last album and tbh he‘s become a bit weird lately, BUT OH MY GOD. i Listened to his new album yesterday and i‘m in LOVE with the song hold on

i really like niall‘s music toooo!!!! And doja cat 😌😌😌😌 And THE VAMPS OG MY GOD. i got to see them live bc they were the opening/support act for little mix and ajdsjskslslsjsjsj. (Also i love concerts, some of the best memories of my life are concerts, i‘ve seen nicki minaj live 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 and justin twice and my heart fills every time i think about how excited i was, it was my first concert ever (16th of September 2016 😌) and i was the happiest person alive seeing justin drew fucking bieber (even if i‘m not tooo sure about justin nowadays)

i have a confession? Idk what hamilton is. I mean I‘ve heard about it and i keep googling it but i‘ve never watched it (is it even a film???? or like a proper musical? also pls tell me you grew up with high school musical. i have a few friends who didn‘t and it makes me so sad 😭😭😭 hsm is the best thing to happen to my childhood , the sooooongs— i still listen to some of them every week or month lool they make me so happy)

(Okay wait i was about to recommend some stormzy songs but you said you‘re not that into rap so i won‘t dksksjl)

What you said about my fic AHSLSLSJB (i wasn‘t sure if you sent an ask about it earlier? idk that might have been someone else, so if it was (and you‘ve read it already) i hope you liked it sksjsj i was...... unsure about it. and i have this reeaaallly long peter fic that i started writing in december and that‘s the only peter thing i currently want to write but also i can‘t because idk how to continue kddjj.) but I’m definitely getting back into writing i have a few blurbs that i want to write so 🥰🥰🥰

Oh and pls as soon as you read this let me know: violet or yellow? (it‘s just a tiny thing for my new theme slsksj)

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Not your minute turns from the blueprint: Body Work, by Tom Betteridge (SAD Press, 2018)

Denise Bonetti <denise.spamzine@gmail.com> Mon, 10 Dec 2018, 20:21 to maria.spamzine Hey Maria, Hope life’s good :) I’m just writing to see you if you’ve read Tom B’s new Body Work? There’s a paper I should be writing, but have been reading and rereading that pamphlet instead, or more like dipping in and out really, cause it's so beautifully layered and expanding that you can only take so much at a time. Don’t you think Tom’s poetry has this strange earworm quality to it? (I think he’d like the annelid comparison.) The way he choreographs words (I don’t want to use the word 'images’) makes its way into my brain and never wants to leave. He draws these, like, lateral paths of meaning so clearly that the weeds never grow back.Tom Raworth has this bit in 'Writers / Riders / Rioters' that goes:

the present is surrounded  with the ringing of ings which words have moss on the northside

like, words naturally arrange themselves into a system of semantic habit, which is so stable and stale that makes them grow moss, but also so rich and vibrant when it's exploited productively. Obviously this is Raworth so it probably also means the opposite of this and so much more, but it kinda makes me want to say that the present (poem) makes the ringing of ings deviate so well that the moss can never grow again. I’d say that his poems behave like sophisticated lines in the sand, but they're more like brutal carvings on a rock. He had a couple poems in Blackbox Manifold ages ago (I think) and there was this one bit

‘nerve truffled plume lead pickled breast’

I think about all the time (especially when I cook). It’s so smooth. Why can I not stop thinking about it. It’s cause it’s so shameless, it wants it all - the feather-light and the corpse-heavy, never perturbed, so lucid. It plays at tasting good, but it tastes of an unrealistically blank texture. A-ha! Anyway the new pamphlet is gr8, if you haven’t read it yet look at the first poem pls - ‘OCCAM OCEAN’ (sounds like an anagram or palindrome)

It all dwells in systematic abstraction but flies so close to materiality, like a mosquito buzzing around the ear ('Not your minute turns from the blueprint'). I love that ‘plate’ in the first phrase, too: it behaves like an adjective but feels nothing like it. I can't help but think it's the subject of the sentence in a parallel universe that's created by scrambling syntax. It makes me think this is the way language should always work, and that we're the fkn idiots living in the parallel universe in which syntax is scrambled in ordered to be as boring as possible. Idk - it's late and I need to go back to writing boring essay syntax 'bound to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Lemme know ur thoughts you smart queen D xxx

Maria Sledmere <maria.spamzine@gmail.com> Wed, 12 Dec 2018, 17:30 to denise.spamzine

Dearest Denise,

Life is good thanks. I'm sitting in the attic of the law building and I can hear the construction work going on and every time I leave I look out at the skyline and slivers of infrastructural alteration. I was walking along the road earlier because the pavement was closed off for construction and cba crossing and the high-vis guy was like, 'you'll not see Christmas walking on the road like that', but I guess I misheard him saying something else because I was really engrossed in this old Slowdive album, so I just smiled sweetly. Anyway, that got me thinking back to the question of erasure, which I think is pretty vital to Body Work.Have been carrying this pamphlet in my bag for so long that the cover has started to peel and revealing speckles of white underneath, like the text itself is ready to reveal itself, and yes I was thinking Barthes and strip-tease and paratextual enticement.

So I had to google the word annelid and now can't get the phrase 'segmented worm' out of my ear/head/throat (gross!). I was thinking about what sort of stains are on the cover of this book, you know, with Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir's gouache/pencil work. A stain is one thing stuck to another. Gouache is a funny kinda substance that is half watery gauze, half binding, thick, gummy akin to acrylic. Wet, it will easily smudge. My thumb keeps bleeding where the skin thins, hardens, peels and sloughs off. Tom's poems are kinda mucilaginous in parts (v. insecty, molluscky, sap emission; but also they have a crispness and precision, like cuts of leaf). Things that smudge or fall in flakes. Bodies are maybe whatever we leave behind. I didn't want to mention Hookworms the band because of the singer's sexual abuse scandal BUT it seems significant that a group named after an earworm/type of parasitic larvae would have a song called 'Negative Space'. Like what we eat into in the process of making, existing, remixing. Is language a rash, the result of these parasitic inf(l)ections?

I've been to a couple of reading groups on microbiomes lately, and we were thinking through this idea of how acknowledging your bodily composition in terms of myriad genes and organisms challenges conventional, bounded notions of 'self'. What kinds of affects does this produce? There's a weirdness to that, in Mark Fisher's sense of the weird as 'that which does not belong', that which 'brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even as its negation)'. Fisher suggests that the form most conducive to rendering the weird might be montage. So I was thinking about how montage involves splicings, gaps, juxtapositions, cuts and suddenness. I mean you open the very first poem of Body Work, 'Occam Ocean', and see that its prose-poetic paragraph compacting is split in the middle by the juncture of line break and indent. And ofc the title recalling Occam's razor, the philosophic principle by which in the case of two explanations for an occurrence, it's best to go with the one that requires least speculation. Razor things down and erase speculation? What are we left with, more of the Rreal? Lately I've been hankering for cleaner prose, crisp lines, simpler solutions. The Anthropocene is all of a goddamn tangle. Do I want to follow the myriad threads or just cut cut cut -- who gets to do that?

Did you ever cut a worm in two as a kid?

Okay so I love how 'Occam Ocean' might promise, title-wise, this clean prosaic expanse (like the oxymoron of expanding ocean and occam's, which requires surely a condensing), but what we get is clustering, motion, shiver, containment. The sensual trash magickk of P. Manson! The little syncope of this thing or that, the 'maple neck', vibrating canes, 'chambered breath bowed into the driest soundboard'. These aren't like 'Latour litanies' because they are not like concrete OOO segments of things; idk, they are more about processes and mutable assemblages, emphasis on action and change, sometimes transmission, things inside things. Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis. How things interact, communicate up close; all of a mutable, prose-poetic swallow. It's actually an incredible intimate pamphlet, don't you think? I feel inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing. I feel a vague ecological sorrow, which gnaws at introspective tendency. The clue to that, you might see, is the cutaway phrase, 'emo      Chord' in 'String Growth'. 

'Collapse all tears allowing echo retreat'; these lyric lines of 'Glissando' expression, smoothing and shimmering over cuts and junctures: a slide between notes. I used to play trombone and I wish I cld articulate linguistically what kinds of lip vibration occur when you attempt a glissando and feel it slide down your arm muscle but then also through your chest as you try to sustain a sound. It's maybe the way you glide through a scattered poem, with your eye, which is different ofc to the spikier way you'd have to read it aloud, stuck on the vowels. Stuttering. I would love to hear Nat Raha perform these poems, because she does such wonderful things with punctuation and bodily performance, a kind of grammar of breath and cough and click. Reading over the more field erasure poems like 'O--NE' and 'String Growth', it's easy to say something like ~vibrant materialism~ here, but as usual I reach for Steven Connor on noise. Return to the ear, which is 'vulnerable' and 'resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception'. I love what Connor says about Levinas' perspective on 'the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that "there is"' being 'an experience of noise'. <3 Acknowledging that breath in the void, that is not nothing but a sparkling something, entails a sense of noise. I am here in the attic of the law building, listening to construction, the type of my fingers on the keys. Someone is murmuring of their distress. What is the difference between living and existing, and being and nothing?

Karen Barad:

'Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultrasensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of...?'

When she asks, 'What is the measure of nothingness?' I think surely it is a bodily measure, as everything is: 'bound', as Tom puts it, 'to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Of course 'what follows' recalls Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', where he's just out the shower and watching his cat watching his phallus, etc. What kinds of dislocation occur. But I mean in all that grandeur of encounter, there's still anthropocentricism. Tom gives you this cinematic CUT, like the instructive 'keen SNAP' that occurs in 'Occam Ocean' to dramatise 'Still, pondsnails whir and blindly source [...] a working leaf shutter'. Soever the language enacts the slurs of the snails up close. We look for the answer to the question of ellipsis, the more to follow [what follows]: inevitable, a question. Sometimes Tom is writing about silence ('then silence confronts an earful underhand') but the music of his language does all the noise, so we just can't have nothingness: there is always a vibrational residue that speaks of something in miniature, atomic, happening.

Ofc with the ear again I am thinking of the ear at the start of Lynch's Blue Velvet and how it's covered in rasping wee insects whose hum is a sort of white noise of trauma that runs through Lumberton's suburban idyllicism.

And so what happens next is I flip open to the following page of Body Work and there is 'String Growth', one of Tom's sprawling erasure poems, which for more than a split-second resembles hundreds of crawling, shimmering ants. I actually think my earliest childhood memory is of looking down at my bare feet on the patio of our old house in Hertfordshire and seeing red ants run over my toes. Then looking up to a greying, English sky. Constantly struck by the cinematic image of that, its splicing out of time: the vividness of insects on human flesh, then milky smog of skyward nothingness. 'String Growth', the accompanying notes to Body Work tell me, is an erasure poem of the Chordoma Foundation's 'Understanding Chordoma' information page.

Erasure can expose sequences of nightmare at work in the lexis and syntax of the text on which it parasitically feeds. I am scared to go on the Chordoma Foundation's website, for fear that just reading or saying the word 'tumour' will activate some kind of malignant growth in my body. And so something of the word chord as a sonorous relation between materials (bodily, textual; textural, cellular). Chordomas are tumours often located in the spine and so I find myself looking for the undulating shape of a spine in the scatter-text of Tom's poem. My eyes cascade down textual spines. Why is it sometimes I otherwise latch upon a 'keystone' word which then extends with adjacent resonance? Musical abnormalities accumulate. Thought swells.

And yea I wonder how this fits into what you say about the poems being 'so smooth'. Like Lynch's waxen silicone ear. Because even though fragmentation makes me think of bits and jaggedness etc, there's this sheen of aestheticism to Tom's work that makes me think of gloopiness, fullness, thereness but also the glaze of potential nothingness. Like in Barad's sense, or miniaturised ecological window shopping - a la Morton's Romantic consumerism? Or do we get into the things themselves? What are your thoughts on the question of recalcitrance? Maybe cos he named a previous pamphlet Pedicure I've just got varnish on my mind. Things an insect might stick to, and be amberized in. Mm.

'[...] Phosphorus crystals may be white, red, burgundyor alight as urine passes'

I keep a stone of citrine under my pillow sometimes. It is supposed to alleviate nightmares and 'manifest abundance'. It is the colour of a rich, dehydrated piss and sometimes when I come back to bed after peeing in the night I think it's some kind of organ lain on my bedsheets, hopped out of my body, and I have to stop my heart and breathe. Is that syncope?

On the <topic of piss>, isn't there a sort of caustic quality, even to the smoothness? Like it is working at making a brittleness of its sheen? And that is what poetry is, cracking the veneer of language or something? Punctuational insects dwelling in splits and fissures? It is nice and cool in Tom's poetry, a place for thinning the self and dwelling. Even though the lexis is so rich and dense, it still seems slender somehow; there's a suppleness. Tease threads of your silk(worm).  

Was thinking about what Lisa Robertson says about 'commodiousness' in poetry and what kinds of space there are for the reader here, because I don't think there is much space at all, in the conventional humanly readerly sense. Maybe what I mean by (straw man: Romantic) lyric, which requires something of declarative expansiveness? The density and clutter of specialist language in Body Work makes me feel like a worm, trying to hook my way lusciously into a line: 'espalier's / strains unfinished by the scarp trellis' ('Body Work'), 'rooted to a middle-ground / no more than motion defibrillates'. And I become a parasite on the body of the text, which is a parasite on the body, which is made up of millions of (para)sites. Para ofc meaning side by side, which made me think of Haraway's sympoeisis (making-with) but also, admittedly, Limmy's madeup psychic show, Paraside (lalalol what you were saying about the scrambling parallel universe maybe, is that a lalaLacian Real which necessitates ululation, stammering? Complex remixing musicality of language throughout Body Work as summoning?). Going back to my incidental Slowdive reference earlier, maybe there's a shoegaze thing here, like setting up these 'noise-worlds' which shimmer indiscriminately behind/inside/through the semiotic oscillations of lyric? Is shoegaze a form of sonic gouache? Well it is certainly an ontic form of seduction, where I can't pick out the instruments of expression but I look for them hungrily in the haze. And the idea that transmission between worlds (the living/dead, human/nonhuman) might require a strain of humour (like haha but also meant in the sense of bodily humours?). For instance, shoegaze is decidedly not a humorous genre, but it sort of works on bodily humours, sometimes giving me the bends, or the blurry spaced-out feeling of having one's pleasure receptor's caressed by sound. Was wondering how YOU experienced the space and physicality of the poems -- was there anything u found FUNNY or sufficiently sultry as to produce a long and gorgeous sigh?

Mm and aren't there these tasty, cute moments of wow like 'tropic      glut' ('O--NE') and 'prism arousal' ('Body Work') and 'clamour to emboss' ('Sapling').

Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of trees in Body Work, at the very least between 'Sapling' and 'Copsing', but also resonance in 'Awning', 'Annual' (which mentions 'yield', 'Thicket', 'sky-light muddle' etc) and 'Georgel' (georgics, idk?). Something about sprawl and thread: like the action of branches as arboreal mirror for threads of viruses, threads of code?

Side note: Can a person in a crowd of people experience canopy-shyness? Emily Berry has this lovely poem about crying and canopies and language.

Ways to dwell in inertia, violence, suspense ('Poem for July') as a 'clearing' within the pamphlet? Body Work as a title seems to combine two distinct fields: car repair and alternative medicine (hence mention of plants, cancers and crystals). The question of holistic approach, therapeutics, restoration. The sheen of metal, the sheen of health. O wise one of la letteratura del contemporaneo, pray tell your thoughts on possible Ballardian comparisons? Like obv v. different but I was struck by something to do with the cut-up structures of The Atrocity Exhibition and the way erasure works in Tom's work (probably in a more precise, attentive way, like the specialist's collage of tiny skins and digits, as opposed to grander themes of mediation that explode all over Ballard's work? -- generalising for the sake of interest obv).

Longing for a 'carvery [of] / uncommoning / rave'. Some kind of party you'd give up your skin for (is skin mere synecdoche of identity here?). Maybe the rave is what you were saying about scrambling.

Anyway, I hope your essay is going well. I must go read Hillis Miller's thoughts on Ariadne's thread, maybe make a tea. I've been getting these headaches lately, dawn to dusk & beyond, like the kind you get after being swimming (chlorine headache) or after crying (hormone headache). Pressurisation. I wonder if I have a parasite in my brain? So tonite I will probs lie awake, sleepless, listening for tinnitus :(

With warmth, Maria xxxxxxx

p.s.

Of course, by the time I get to the end of rereading I realise that it's only white marks being revealed underneath because literal holes have appeared in the Body Work cover, like some kind of fungus has been eating away at the book, performing another erasure.

Denise Bonetti <denise.spamzine@gmail.com> Fri, 1 Feb, 12:15  to maria.spamzine Dear Maria, Once again my legendary inability to reply to personal emails within a reasonable 1-month window manifests itself. Invoke my Scorpio moon (?) etc. I love it when people are like 'RIGHT - enough Facebook for me, email me if you want to talk etc', because that sounds like a nightmare to me. Long live IM! Long live the short form! (quite rich coming from someone whose job at the moment, I guess, is to churn out a dissertation?)

But then you know what I was thinking - someone like Clark Coolidge, for example, can get away with long form, intense long form. Not only get away, but own that long form. That long form I'm into. Clark Coolidge drown me in words and I'm fine with it, because he never dilutes, there's never any stagnation, you know what I mean, he just goes and goes and goes and you're like !!? YES!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS!? He just never runs out of steam. And I'm thinking of Coolidge because you mentioned crystals as agents in Tom B. (cf. The Crystal Text, how would the crystal speak etc), and of course because both Tom B. and Clark C. are just doing mad things with language, bold things and exciting things... They are like scientists you're friends with but who (maybe) don't like to talk about their work, then one day they decide to let into their basement lab where they've been secretly working on the most complex, organic, project for years, and they're like, don't freak out, here it is:

(Sorry for terrible quality [#postinternet] First is Tom B., second is Clark C.) Body Work looks quite controlled in form, visually speaking, with its vaguely justified lines, BIG symmetrical margins.. even the scattered pages look orderly! Like the bit of 'STRING WORTH' you sent. Which going back to your erasure thing, it makes me feel like Tom B. is giving us an OXO cube of his writing, all concentrated and delicious. But then my response is - show us more!!! Which rarely happens because I am scared of long form. And email. And dissertations. I also LOVE what you said about how Body Work combines car repair and alternative medicine!! That is absolutely spot on. Like the material, pragmatic tinkering motions of his writing, the referral to structures and the intention of like, see how far we can bend them and push them, but then it is never as dry as that! Very sweet motor oil. It's very kind poetry... generous! (A word that my friend Phoebe used to describe a certain type of poetry at a party last week and I thought, very interesting). Linguistically generous because it offers so many networks of reading, but then also.. approachable? As approachable as experimental poetry of this kind can be. I'm sure like, DANIEL would not think this is approachable lol (#COYBIG #romance). Which, fair enough. But if you're a nerd for this kind of poetry, then yeah. Like this bit from 'ANNUAL'??

*Cries!!! This is like you said, healing!! I feel looked after! 'Stomach prefers sound to day-to-day camphor'!!! Honestly what is this! So touching, so simple! 

(Btw, I started experimenting with aromatherapy in my tiny room lol, do you know how to stop the water from boiling in the oil burner??) 

Thanks for sending such interesting ideas over, I have to shoot to a seminar ! PPS: I saw Steven Connor in the English library yesterday (Oliver pointed at him silently like !!!!!!!!!!) so I kind of followed him to see what his approach to book browsing is.. very natural-looking and orderly? Surprised. Love the guy. *bubble sounds*

Lots of love Maria  ‘let’s see where the spirits take us’ ur the best 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Maria Sledmere <maria.spamzine@gmail.com> 6 Feb 2019, 23:19  to denise.spamzine Dear Denise,

Makes so much sense to map your message sensibilities onto your taste in poetry! I am so torn between the percolated richness of the email, its classic deferral (omg hun I owe you a million emails!) through a sort of quantum dimension of procrastination, and in opposition the sugar rush nowness of IM. I am such a frantic typist that often I send the wrong messages or cross my wires or just gush too much, so email is probably a safe option for me. There is all too much blue in my Messenger windows...Temptation of x's and endless emojis. But such a beauty to IM and texts out of context, like I wonder how many people read your probs too late 4 a snog now :'((( as micro-fictions, versus poems. I have a whole folder of screenshots on my computer from things that happened on Facebook that I have no memory of. Something about the Romantic fragment, accumulating ruin. 

(btw) I feel like these extracts also shed light upon Body Work somehow. Biodegradables versus hard minerals and synthetic matter. Inner/outer. Flush. Tbh I think the middle one was from you?

Yes the dissertation, the dissertation as labour; it's like you have to find your scaffold first. Sometimes I feel like the scaffold in that wonderful Sophie Collins poem, 'Healers', and I write and don't notice myself and suddenly I'm so there, but the scaffold is secretly taking her bolt pins out the more I write around her. You can only be so respectful to your scaffold when she's so in the way. Gemini problems?Duality; structure/content. What is it Tom McCarthy says: 'structure is content, geometry is everything'. I want to be a wee fractal in a sequence of massive refraction. Is that how it works? Back to scaffolds, maybe we need to find the kindest mode of dismantling, and that's when you work into a form or something. And then also the more organic structures! So for CC it's the whole crystal thing, and working out of crystal logic. And then you just go and go and it's wonderful, much extravagant fractality, almost like poetry as virus, replicate replicate, grow, change. Mm, it's so good. My friend Kirsty did this mad poem about a tree, I couldn't tell if it was a story or poem, it was just branching out in a way that seemed hungry, necessary, spreading its roots. She said she wrote it in a rush! As if trees could rush! I like to think she inhabited a concentrated moment of becoming-tree, like she was a myriad in the roots or leaves. I don't think it could have happened without the tree, you know? But also the tree was almost entirely absent, it was like a ghost of form. Maybe I forgot how it goes. The lines looked like branches or something. Can you have long-form concrete? Concrete I guess by necessity is long-form. It takes a lot of energy to make. People are building houses out of mycelium instead, which is rad. Talking of roots and that, I just wrote 26k words on ecopoetics & t h r e a d s over the past fortnight and it was kind of that process, like letting a sort of tapestry take hold and I was maybe just one more thread, I was hardly doing the weaving, everything was moving around me and I wanted to wriggle into more and more gaps. Becoming-thread, perhaps. The next step is to slack and cut, which is exciting. Where to even start? 

Your description of the complex, organic project is so gorgeous. Poems slow-cooked in a lab with tender organic care. My two scientist PhD pals are always gramming these beautiful pictures of crystals they're growing or mad wave patterns on screens. And we go for lunch and I'm like what you doing this afternoon and they're like, Oh just shooting photons. And is that much different from spending your afternoon writing poems? (Yes, they'd groan). I'm just chasing bits of light. Reading Tom B's work it's this whole precision thing, the actual inhabitation of process as such, so you see the energy buzz between things. I don't mean to say simply this is atomic poetry or poetry as tool analysis. It's more a betweening. 

Isn't it super difficult to write non-anthropocentrically and really inhabit micro-relationality and also sound interesting and sexy in the way Claire Colebrook (she has that great essay in Tom Cohen's Telemorphosis) describes as 'sexual indifference', i.e. that threat to heteronormative reproduction that 'has always been warded off precisely because it opens the human organism to mutation, production, lines of descent and annihilation beyond that of its own intentionality'? Well anyway Body Work really works this way for me, it's like a poetics of sexual indifference that is nevertheless charged with desire you can't really predict, it's something in the frisson between objects and lines and coils of form. I think of crystal charge, iPhone battery (mine's always dying, Gemini trait 100%), engines. Neat miniaturisations of entropy, surge, spike and flux. When the 'I' comes in I'm like hey, what flow are you? It's actually so satisfying to quote these poems as fragments btw, they can do so much on their own as much as in poems and pamphlets, I wonder if that goes back to the accessibility thing. Like the absolute charm of a line as auto-affection: 

This bit is from 'Temper' and I go back to my point about the flush/fluster! Globe of air/your *bubble sounds*. Isn't everything held so neatly, and yet it never feels neat, it just feels sharp and sparking, this 'technical glossy finish' like a really nice car, the body paint of a poem, its prosody so tightly held it feels more surface, a selection of hues and textures. And the erotics of the text or at the very least its pleasure is the shift between bodies, synecdoche, yes you could say bodies without organs but things in themselves are also important. Maybe another poet who does this is Sylvia Legris, she writes these apparently impersonal poems filled to the seams with specialist lexis (you have to have like twelve tabs open per poem to get it), but there's an affirmative humour and energy that feels v much a personal sensibility, a deliberated skewing of world that splices the poet's agency among items, artefacts, language. I mean how nice are these poemsshe published in Granta. I feel like I want cutlery to read them with, if that makes sense. Maybe a scalpel, for the succulence. The appearance of an ear again! 

And then the beautiful metallurgy of this line from Tom, like somebody pierced my ears with perfect silver and it let all the demons out: 

I am worried about what a certain seizure would look like. When we talk about vitality is it a willing naivety towards matter qua matter, as if we could just step out of correlationism? Such thoughts for 11pm of a Wednesday night. I can't help but think of the body image that Elizabeth Grosz describes in Volatile Bodies, kind of riffing off Paul Schilder: 'What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels'. And yeah, cool, what about the nonhuman body also? Has anyone done a really good psychoanalysis of the object. Parsed its psychic striations (traumatic or pleasurable residues of every microbial, huh?). In fact, what about the psychodynamic model of actual icebergs? Time we started literalising the matter of metaphors, absenting 'real cultural / medium' and filling with meltwater, fire and flow. Maybe it comes down to a bead of ink, the 'intimate concentrate' which is Lucozade, hangover piss, sick pH levels. So yeah, Body Work for me is this totally seductiveintersubjective space which actually works out pretty visceral states, sometimes disembodying me into a more fractal, mineral or bacterial being. I could start talking Kathryn Yusoff and geomorphism too, but maybe enough strata for one email? Plus I'm mixing my metaphors, I'm sure, mostly because I'm still morphing, dissolving inside those lines. I think I ate too many OXO cubes.

As for your oil burner boiling, sounds like you have an overactive candle? Maybe try a cooler tealight, nestle it to the back a little to redirect the strength of the flame? I like rosemary oil for remembrance, cranberry for comfort, ginger for energy. That line about resin is so nice. I was in Crianlarich at the weekend and my friend Patrick found this massive log and he carried it for so long that you could smell the resin on his skin, it was amazing. I keep thinking about the word 'pitch' and lush tree-ness, and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and poetry you can chew like new molasses, prior to melt. Is that how it works?

Somebody is smashing glass into a bin in my garden and probably I should just close the pamphlet...

...but it's like a delicious pdf that gives infinities...

Yours in multiples & cherryish flusters,

Maria xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox