Some notes on where the names We all the small ones and Demonoid Picotent came from and also stylistic influences on Synaptic Syntactic
In retrospect, I probably should have included Juliana Spahr in the dedication or done acknowledgements in my 2017 book Synaptic Syntactic, since the style of some of the poems was significantly shaped by re-readings of the poems (but not the prose) therein. And the name We All the Small Ones was directly taken from the first poem, Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours. Also the word ‘picotent’ (sometimes spelled ‘picotant’) in Demonoid Picotent is a word that that I took from Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours directly. somehow went into that work from out of the machine translation, although when some years ago I put it into Google Translate and/or Alta Vista (don’t recall?) they could not find a word spelled like that in any language or so it seemed. And of the strategy of repetition. I also had read a bit of some book I can’t find the name of relating poetry and programming together in which was said ‘repetition can be good in poetry. Repetition is something you usually want to avoid in programming’ or something like that. It may have had ‘Tao’ in the title or subtitle.
[12/28/2023 Update: The word ‘demonoid’ analogously to ‘humanoid’, so like resembling a demon but not actually a demon, the origin of THAT word I seem to recall was like a user name or half of a user name from some seeder person seeding some weird books or images or sound media I was downloading via bittorrent in perhaps 2013, 14 or 15]
I did not really use her methods of distorting texts with machine translation and then fragmenting and reweaving them in the book, although I did us them in a video art project called The Translation Gap. The source texts for that were themselves not taken from the original works, but from the chatter section of the old website The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension (deoxy.org) after user chat and forums had been disabled but before the site closed entirely, the ‘chat’ section was being filled with these text excerpts somewhat randomly sampled from works Marshall McLuhan and some other people I don’t recall. Long digression. SO!
While I can change the metadata on my eBook at any time so long as the changes are accepted/within terms of use with BookBaby, I can’t update the file I don’t think without paying money again, and I am not going to do that until I have set aside funds to get it made in print and available in Print on Demand as well. The minimum book order of author copies being 100 (last I checked) this will run me at least $500 (last I checked, many moons ago), and that’s when I do all the book and eBook design myself. I’ve never made a print book before as well, so that will take some doing. It will be a while! But due to ‘Print on Demand’ technologies it will then be available to everyone all over the world in print if they want to pay the shipping and buy through channels supported by BookBaby.
There were a couple of times when I started accumulating a collection of poetry books but they all went to the used book store eventually. Not Well Then There Now, possibly due to a coffee spill or something. It has recently become missing though. One book I do remember that I had in circa 2014 is Once by Meghan O’Rourke.
The book is out of print I believe but you can buy used copies for around $37. I emailed the author some years back that someone was trying to sell her book for more than $900 on Amazon. You can also find her on Academia.edu and I think Mills College which appears to have merged with Northeastern University.
Here is an excerpt from Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours from Well Then There Now by Juliana Spahr:
[…] In today. In today. We are all in this world together. We of all the small ones are together in this world. In the we are all together. In we let ourselves be all together. Some of we are eating. Some of we let ourselves eat. Some of we are all together eating grapes. Some of we let ourselves be all the grapes to be eaten together. In this place. In this place. In the eating. While eating. In the grapes some of we are all eating. In all the undeniable grapes of we let us leave itself let ourselves be what eats. In the eating of grapes. By eating grapes. We are all today. […]
Well Then There Now page 11
And here is an excerpt from Sonnets from the book Well Then There Now by Juliana Spahr, page 21:
As intricate system we are.
We with all our complexities.
We with all our identifications.
We with all our homes and our irregularities live.We are full of thought and we live.
We live with things several.
We are full of thought and we are different.
For which things so several.The catalogue of the life span, the operation, and the animal.
The catalogue of force and animal life.
The catalogue of the extension of life, the operation, and the animal.Togetherness of the lesson and the splitting.
Well Then There Now page 21
Togetherness of the lesson and to duplicate one’s self.
Featured image from Photo by Reba Spike on Unsplash . Below Image from Photo by Cédric VT on Unsplash. And please subscribe! :
As well, while you are here, here is a playlist of music I finished polishing up 12/21 called Better Way to Get Up Out of Bed and Good Luck (Can You Feel It?) — Also available on YouTube Music via app or via web browser
Also consider joining or giving for my 2023 project Buy 1,000 Postcard Stamps and Defeat Fascism, for which I need to recreate the detailed GoFundMe due to technical issues and confusion, but that may take until sometime on 12/3 [ [ 12/21 Update: Sent around 130 of the postcards so far, and no donations so far, although an unexpected Christmas present has helped a lot! A GoFundMe for some planned politicking will eventually be reattempted ] ]. Some older but still somewhat detailed info going back to 2016 is at Poetic Postcards, the Gallery of the Discordian Postcard Conspiracy.
Here are some takes made by DALL-E 2 on the phrases ‘We all the small ones” or “Demonoid Picotent” without further elaborations:
On the note of defeating fascism, did you know that in many states, you DO NOT HAVE TO BE A REPUBLICAN TO VOTE IN THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY!!!??? OpenPrimaries.org has a map at https://www.openprimaries.org/rules-in-your-state/. As noted in the announcement, Maine has also approved it but it is not on the map I guess because it doesn’t take effect until some time in 2024. i have sent them an email suggesting they add a fourth map color for that. Also check your polling place locations and verify that you haven’t been purged from the voter rolls. Some starting points to find your state specific info and state government web pages are vote.org, iwillvote.com, and vote.gov. A couple other sites of interest for preserving, defending, expanding and improving democracy are protectdemocracy.org, democracydocket.com, and fairfight.com. Although people who are not US legal permanent residents (green card holders) or citizens cannot give to campaigns or PACs, if I am not mistaken foreigners and foreign organizations CAN give to any organization that is a 501(c)(3) such as the Open Primaries Education Fund, When We All Vote and many others who can help us defeat fascism in America!
Also on the note of defeating fascism, WordPress ads are cheap and dead simple to set up and you are really doing the blogger and the reader both a favor because a lot of the stuff in the ad block on free-plan blogs is long junky clickbait things farming tertiary ad revenue, so whatever blog post you’re advertising, it is likely of higher value than the time sucking and money soaking tertiary clickbaiters. (negative value). WordPress ads are all moderated by humans before they run, so it IS possible to do, lookin’ at you other platforms. Organic traffic in your WordPress stats may be understated for various technical reasons. When last I checked years ago, if I had the Ghostery browser plugin turned on none of my traffic to my blog registered, even when logged out and at the library, not home. Here is a screenshot of results from my previous ad for The Set of Modernistic Identities:
And lastly but not leastly, some impressions by DALL-E 2 on the phrases from characters or section titles in Synaptic Syntactic ‘the jabberwock’, ‘the hatted persons lit a cheroot and did a shuffle’, and ‘lunatic fringes, stand and mobilize’!:
AND if you arrived here by clicking on an ad and read all the way to the end here! Congrats and thanks! The image was made by me with DALL-E 2 with the prompt “We all the small ones sought our places to stand!”:
Lost in Mist 