flickerfit

The CRAMPS_(full) live @ Napa State Mental Hospital_ 2/2

2009-02-05T08:48:00.001-08:00

blurring the line....luv ya Lux....

Marvin Gaye

2009-01-27T11:20:00.001-08:00

Love

I can't help but remember

2009-01-20T14:03:00.000-08:00

a certain poet from NYC who came to Detroit a while back and during a conversation over dinner claimed that Bush & Co would institute Martial law before they'd give up power. I was disgusted by the cynicism, especially after the election. Now I think it's funny. Not that I don't think they were (and always will be) corrupt power grabbers. It just evoked a kind of jaded disbelief in the power of *the people*. I really think that kind of left cynicism is out the window with Obama's election. Bush/Cheney weren't more powerful than the institutions and country they attempted to destroy. Those who believed otherwise lost sight of this. Those who worked for the election of Obama did not. Talk about hope over fear!

New?

2009-01-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to speak to (or apologize for) the dormancy. Who cares? But since it's the New Year, I thought I'd attempt a revival. Actually, "New Years" mean very little to me; I don't like ritualized celebrations, not sure why, just don't get into them--weddings, birthdays, holidays, etc., leave me feeling extremely ambivalent. Why am I supposed to feel something about these particular days? I never pull it off, am often bored or uncomfortable. Too much of a misanthrope, I guess.

Anyway, here's my attempt to mark the New Year--some unfinished drafts I never posted, either because I thought they were shitty or because I never got around to finishing them, or both. Most are just quotes I wanted to comment on but never got around to. Maybe I'll develop something with them or I'll come back to this post and be surprised at what I thought I cared about.

One of the most interesting things about keeping some kind of track of one's life interests, moods, acts, is noticing what returns again and again as well as what drops away or lies dormant for years--the sediment of (seemingly discarded) memories, half-formed interests, and desires that makes up a self. I'm always a little disturbed by those recurrences and the things I've forgotten or left behind--the uncanny self:

1. Praxis as liminal site.

Oscillating, struggling between phenomenological and cultural studies approach to textual interpretation. Something too lyrical, abstract, dreamy wrt Phenom, while CS is too concrete, empirical, reductive. Is this as basic as the theory/action divide (tho, granted, both are in fact theory)? Is praxis, in Marxist terms, the solution if we were to conceive of it as not only constitutive politically (as agential) but as *necessary*? As the ultimate in dialectics, praxis intends to hold together (resolve?) the structural contradictions or qualities of desire and material facts (as quantity). But praxis as solution to all binaries?

2. Time & the City

Chronopolis

"The city is a time mosaic. It is a living archeological aggregate of forgoten civilizations, of periods within decades, eras within centuries. Te city is a simultaneous matrix of cultural empires, of invisible districts and regions. It is an infinitely graduated series of fashions and habits in which the individual is simply another arbitrary designation, a border that dissolves into the nested identities of the metropolitan psyche. Layers of prior styles, architectures, and entertainments fade incrementally, one into the next, superimposed finally in the simultaneous levels of a protean urban vortex.

"The city is spotted with islands, cul-de-sacs of time where a previous decade, a prior century, stands untouched. A 1914 newspaper lying yellow on the floor of an attic cracked open for renovations. The heraldic limestone gates of the waterfront expressway. The tired hands of a middle-aged waitress, her movements a choreographed testament to an identity unchanged over thirty years, her makeup identical in the bathroom mirror each morning, a gestural fossil of forgotten fashion. The impassive stone faces at the summit of old bank towers, stoic trade deities of the early thirties staring into a future that has come and gone. Abandoned transfers from a night-bus lying in the early morning light.

Brazlian children run through the market crowds on a summer evening. Dusty sunlight through an old streetcar window on the first warm sunset in February, the streetlights flickering on, purple against the incandescent gold of the bank towers. The first breath of wind from an approaching subway train not yet audible or visible." --Christopher Dewdney

3. [This might have been a response, in my mind, to the Dewdney quote; I can't recall now. It's a postcard from Oaxaca sent by my friend Chris Bierman to a group of us that were living together in Detroit in the mid-90's. Chris and his then girlfriend Ofelia were journeying in Mexico and South America, tho she wasn't with him at the time he wrote this. The postcard depicts a black & white photo of Somerset Maugham circa 1960's holding some kind of pug-nosed, long-haired lap dog. I think I was planning on scanning a bunch of old weird letters and postcards from friends but never got around to it. I've always found this one amusing--Chris's formalisms are both sincere and sheer cheek.]

"Kristine, I have thought of you many times as I strolled through the narrow cobblestoned Indian infested streets of this extraordinary city. I say this because it is your taste and sentiment that I am most acquainted with there within the household that I collectively address. It is here where Lawrence finished the Plumed Serpent and it is also where Bierman was almost stoned unconscious by two frisky rooftop dwelling whelps. It is romantic beyond description and thus I yearn for my eternal love. I yearn in the nocturne through leg-stiffening emissions and this in turn provides moments uneasy when Gregorio comes to change my sheets each morn. ... It is refreshing to know that a woman named Ofelia scrubs my bedding. Vallejo, Neruda, and Paz are the only friends I have made thus far and consequently they have taught me much. There are very few whites here but those that are seem intent on wearing shorts... In a town of 8000,000 there are 34 fools who cling to their shorts, yet I remain steadfast with my trousers , and therefore am not mocked by the locals who wear shorts only by the seashore. Oaxaca is over 5,000 feet above sea-level, it is 325 miles south of Mexico City and over 60% Zapotec Indian. On Monday, June 20 I move to Tehuantepec to celebrate the fiesta of St John the Baptist, which occurs Jue 21-24."

4. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on process philosophy page:

The philosophy of mind is another strongpoint of process philosophizing. It feels distinctly uncomfortable to conceptualize people (persons) as things (substances) -- oneself above all -- because we resist flat-out identification with our bodies. However, there is no problem with experiential access to the processes and patterns of process that characterize us personally -- our doings and undergoings, either individually or patterned into talents, skills, capabilities, traits, dispositions, habits, inclinations, and tendencies to action and inaction are, after all, what characteristically define a person as the individual he or she is. Once we conceptualize the core "self" of a person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process -- of action and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and psychical) -- then we thereby secure a concept of personhood that renders the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself simply consists of such processes. What makes my experience mine is not some peculiar qualitative character that it exhibits but simply its forming part of the overall ongoing process that defines and constitutes my life. The unity of person is a unity of experience -- the coalescence of all of one's diverse micro-experience as part of one unified macro-process. (It is the same sort of unity of process that links each minute's level into a single overall journey.) On this basis, the Humean complaint -- "One experiences feeling this and doing that, but one never experiences oneself" -- is much like the complaint of the person who says "I see him picking up that brick, and mixing that batch of mortar, and troweling that brick into place, but I never see him building a wall." Even as "building the wall" just exactly is the complex process that is composed of those various activities, so -- from the process point of view -- one's self just is the complex process composed of those various physical and psychic experiences and actions in their systemic interrelationship.

5. Quote for the day

"Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness." --William James

6. Oy to the Word!

Just received my copy of 0 To 9. Funny, great intro explanation by Vito Acconci of why they went with "0 To 9" rather than something like "0 Through 9." I was struck by the fact that Acconci's tone still has that New York poetry scene, conversational, flip feel to it:

"Not '0 To 9', we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead. And then we got worried: if we call it '0 To 9', were we making a point of coming up to but not including 9, and why would we want to do that?--if our own work tried to expose language, showcase language, why would we let the name of our magazine expose sloppy language. In the end we chose sound over sense.

7. Kant, Adorno, Immaturity, the Enlightenment

I want to explore the significant differences and similarities between Kant's and Adorno's & Horkheimer's conceptions of the Enlightenment, immaturity, and thus the possibility or problematic of autonomy. One way to begin locating these overlappings and differences resides in the historical shift from monarchical to democratic forms of government, a shift found in the addresses and concerns of Kant's essay, "The Question of Enlightenment" and in Adorno & Horkheimer's chapter in _Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Culture Industry", in which late-capitalist forms of society and culture become significant. In one sense, Kant seems to have hope in the possibility for the exercise and development of autonomous reason because there exists the concomitant possibility for enlightened leadership, which would both allow for this individual and public development, and protect it. In Adorno & Hork's time-period, there is no appeal to a structural power that could promote this endeavour. Autonomous reason's capacity to overcome it's "immaturity," was for Kant predicated on a public use of reason protected by the legitimizing function of power (which was, in its turn, also legitimized by recognizing its role in protecting this public use of reason) . For Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other hand, the public is so saturated by a cultural (and underyling economic) hegemony, the public sphere has lost this capacity for autonomy, and there is no singular leader to appeal to, to see as a site for and as a dependable protector of this space. This might be the reason for the turn to autonomous art a site for rendering criticisms of the unthinking, dependent, and again, immature quality of thought as it exists in late-capitalism.

Yet one must question to what extent Kant and Adorno differ in their sense of what enlightenmnt thinking should and can accomplish. If Adorno & Hork's concept of the dialectic of enlightenment sees the constitutive nature of barbarism and civilization, or myth and enlightenment as inevitable, then what is their relation to Kant's hope for the possibility of progress through the use of reason and legitimate authority? What do they retain? Do they ultimately suggest that thinking independently, using one's autonomous reason, is still indiviudally possible even as they seem to deny the societal efficacy of using it given the structures of power that it all to often collapses back into? Is there something that Adorno & Horkhemier have a certain "faith" in?

8. Digestion and Memory cont.

Serendipitously enough, I just stumbled across Infinite Thought's musings on language acquisition and metaphors of digestion. it seems there are two parts to IT's language/digestion post, but I find it interesting how they overlap (at least in my mind). 1) While s/he is learning or, for my purposes, memorizing, a new language s/he experiences a kind of psychic disturbance or, as s/he nortes, a relation to language as such which is unheimlich or uncanny. S/he next turns to a discussion of the alleged German obsession with digestion, which keeps turning up "like a bad penny." The metaphor of digestion in relation to feeling and language is what intrigues me: "Thus we have learnt the words for diarrhea (Durchfall), stomach ache (Magenschmerz), gastric ulcer (Magengeschwuer) and related stomach (der Bauch) words, including those having to do with emotions such as love, jealousy and fear. When we were asked which bit of the body Angst affected, I pointed to der Kopf (head), only to be chastised (ausschimpfen(!)) by the Lehrerin (female teacher) for not being suitably embodied - it hits you in the guts, she said. At least, I think that's what she said...."

It would seem that while learning a new language--digesting it, absorbing it, ruminating on and over it--one becomes aware that incorporation begins to surface not only as a metaphor for learning but as content as well. Is there a way in which digestion as a metaphor, the corporeality of the body, and feelings of anxiety about language are mixed together here in ways that suggest that language acquisition and its relation to the body are, to some extent at least, traumatic? I'm using the word traumatic very loosely, I realize. But there's something compelling in the idea that we learn a new language by learning how to speak (of) the body's disturbances and discomforts. If this is something particlar to the German culture of language acquisition or their own strange focus on corporeality, so be it, but it's strange to think that the arena in which transcendental idealism was born would be the very place in which....

9. [I have no idea now why I titled this post with what I think is a quote from Robert Creeley nor why I wrote what I did below it. It certainly looks like a mangle now.]

"My mind to me a mangle is"

We are always trying to get past de-humanization. "We"? And by getting past I mean ignoring. Of course the division of labor is the issue. Social relations produced by, created within, economic antagonism. Relations and antagonisms equally obscure. Private property for the masses equals an XBox on credit.

10. Adorno and freedom?

Mental backdrop -- TV is droning Olympic victories (I'll admit, I love the Olympics) and, of course, commercials. So while I'm reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory -- reading being an inadequate word, more like "confronting," "wrestling," *you* know what I mean, I'm experiencing heightened moments of irony awareness: a Curel lotion commercial starts off invoking ideal of freedom: "Freedom is doing anything you want any way you want. Freedom is freedom from dry skin." No shit. Then there was some new commercial extolling the "miraculous".... the "miracle of the 5 bladed razor." What's this one called? I've blocked it out already. It probably has "Xtreme" somewhere in there.

Dennis Kucinich at the Democratic National Convention

2008-08-27T08:14:00.001-07:00

Wake Up America! Elf Power!

"More universalist than American"

2008-06-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article in India Times on Obama.

Neuroses

2008-05-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

This is awesome!

urbanagri

2008-04-06T09:42:00.001-07:00

Weisser & Vetter

things as they optimistic coalescing

"a satisfactory heuristic"

such marked
thought to
def. worth

the geographical
more confidence than form

“mit controlled atmosphere”
the essence of a park

fl/oral history

“Es ist mein zweiter Aufenthalt in Detroit”

in the evenings closed freight cars travel in the opposite direction

a park from memory cull from

2-3 bedrooms
56% property tax relief
F.A.R.M.

“Of course!”
“Ok”
“Everything I’ve got belongs to you”

Democracy in America

2008-04-04T23:48:00.001-07:00

"In the heat of the struggle each partisan is driven beyond the natural limits of his own views by the views and excesses of his adversaries, loses sight of the very aim he was pursuing, and uses language that ill corresponds to his real feelings and to his secret instincts. Hence arises that strange confusion which we are forced to witness."
--Alexis de Tocqueville

Abu Ghraib

2008-03-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

From this disgusting and incredible New Yorker article: (I found these pics online, not from article.)

“The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost,” Davis said. “They’re in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy.”

Delaney/Obama

2008-03-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Interview with the always charming Samuel Delaney. Reminds me of the issues facing our next Prez!

Prescience

2008-03-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

Reading Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City_ and watching mainstream media's lead up coverage of tonight's primaries. It's like reading a diagnostic manual. (I mean that in a good way!) Example:

"[F]ollowing the Reaganite tendency to fetishize both the offensive example and the patriotic norm, the increasingly monopolistic mass media act as a national culture industry whose mission is to micro-manage how any controversial event or person changes the meaning of being "American." The constant polling used by this media apparatus, which includes the solicitation of testimony on talk radio and television, along with telephone interviews, has paradoxically enabled the standards and rhetorics of citizenship to become so privatized and subjective that even privileged people can seem legitimately to claim "outsider," if not "minority," status. With political ideas about the nation sacrificed to the development of feelings about it, nationality has become a zone of trauma that demands political therapy."

While I think that nationality has in many ways always been a "zone of trauma"-- perhaps indeed created or determined by the various "political therapies" applied to traumatic encounters of nationalism-- I take Berlant's points here to be spot on in terms of the diagnosis of the present situation and its extreme creation and reinforcement through public images and narratives of private citizenship, which ultimately reduces public claims of legitimate trauma to private experiences available to anyone. This is what perversely allows power brokers like Hilary Clinton to claim victim status. Question is: what kind of "political therapy" might we exercise to correct this development? Voting? Hah! More like a national lobotomy.

Obamanauts

2008-02-26T12:27:00.000-08:00

A fascinating and informative piece in the new Republic detailing Obama's economic and foreign policy advisors.

How cool

2008-01-30T10:10:00.001-08:00

Lauren Berlant has a blog!

Impatient

2008-01-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have become impatient with the thought, the seeming necessity, of the inexpressible, the unknowable. My romance with excess is at an end. I do not deny it exists--that which is (will be) forever unknown at the same time that it is always irreducibly present. But the attempt to comprehend a certain kind of being, to complete the circuit (a copula) that connects my will to grasp formlessness to that which is seized as its own impossible complexity--with that I have grown bored. My romance with the everyday, however, has just begun.

The Next President

2008-01-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

I wish

The Good Ole Days/ Academic Dystopia

2007-12-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

Came across this a while back (I forget where now):

"But authoritarian control over colleges and universities is more often exerted by conservative presidents. In 1991, four former Hillsdale College professors, all members of the conservative National Association of Scholars, criticized the small college and its president, George Roche. They wrote: "For years the Hillsdale administration has neglected its academic program to pay for 'outreach' activities designed to promote Dr. Roche, maintained a curriculum that requires no appreciable knowledge of Western culture, and used every possible means including dismissals and threats of lawsuits, to silence dissent of any kind among faculty and students." (Academic Questions, Fall 1991) They noted that in 1986, "the administration began to attack the student newspaper, the Collegian, for its disagreements with college policies, threatening lawsuits and other reprisals against the student staff and any faculty who defended it." The editor of the Collegian was forced by the administration to resign, and the rest of the student staff resigned in protest."

I was writing for the Collegian at the time of the controversy (1986, my sophomore year). In fact, I wrote a piece expressing solidarity with 2 of my poli sci profs, which was critical of the administration, especially after one of the profs (Dr. Hancock, my advisor and a simply wonderful man) decided to leave Hillsdale because of the shenanigans explained above. Behold, the next year some of my merit scholarships were mysteriously cancelled without explanation. One of the lower level hacks in the personnel dept. went so far as to suggest I transfer since the financial hardship would be too difficult; I chose to take out bigger loans. Why I wanted to stay at Hillsdale is now unclear to me. I think it was that I was commited--the political whirlwind was intense (and as a poli sci student, it took on larger dimensions), I had close friendships, I felt comfortably trapped in a degree I couldn't imagine finishing elsewhere. But most of all respect for my professors knew no bounds. Looking back I see it was a moment in American history in microcosm where the shift from conservatives who believed in freedom were killed off by neo-conservative cynicism. One could say it was always "bad" conservativism underneath it all--pro-tradition (judeo christian, greco-roman), anti-left, pro-capitalism. Yes, that's true, but there were some who taught me to think critically, to value learning for its own sake, to question historical limits, to love philosophical ideas and to see that love as a political act. They might have been conservatives, but they taught me to be a radical. Finally, I believe that's why they were targeted, shunned, ex-communicated. It taught me a lesson: politics takes place on many levels the repercussions of which are often difficult to delineate, and institutions of learning, like any other place, are important sites of struggle. Perhaps it prepared me for being a grad student, or professional academic. We shall see.

The Hearing Trumpet

2007-12-19T17:48:00.000-08:00

Reading Carrington feels like for the first time it's been so long. So wonderful. This passage is a remarkable interlude (and reminds me of Carla's work);

"Force of habit rather than my own capacity carried me
home and sat me down in the back yard. Strangely
enough I was in England and it was Sunday afternoon. I
was sitting with a book on a stone seat under a lilac
bush. Close by a clump of rosemary saturated the air
with perfume. They were playing tennis nearby, the
clump clump of the rackets and balls was quite
audible. This was the sunken Dutch garden, why Dutch I
wonder? The roses? the geometrical flower beds? or
perhaps because it is sunken? The church bells
ringing, that is the Protestant church, have we had
tea yet? (cucumber sandwiches, seed cake and rock
buns) Yes, tea must be over.
My long dark hair is soft like cat's fur, I am
beautiful. This is quite a shock becuase I have just
realized that I am beautiful and there is something
that I must do about it, but what? Beauty is a
responsibility like anything else, beautiful women
have special lives like prime ministers but that is
not what I really want, there must be something
else... The book. Now I can see it, the tales of Hans
Christian Anderson, the Snow Queen.
The Snow Queen, Lapland. Little Kay doing
multiplication problems in the icy castle.
Now I can see that I was also given a mathematical
problem which I cannot solve although I seem to have
been trying for many years. I am not really here in
England in this scented garden although it does not
disappear as it nearly always does, I am inventing all
this and it is about to disappear, but it does not.
Feeling strong and happy is very dangerous, something horrible is about to happen and I must find the solution quickly.
All the things I love are going to disintegrate and there is nothing I can do about it unless I can solve the Snow Queen's problem. She is the Sphinx of the North with crackling white fur and her tears rattle like hail on the strange diagrams drawn at her feet. Somewhere, sometime, I must have betrayed the Snow Queen, for surely by now I should know?
The young man wearing white flannels has come to ask me something, am I going to play tennis? well I am not really very good you know, that is why I prefer to read a book. No , not an intellectual book, just fairy tales. Fairy tales at your age?
Why not? What is age anyway? Something you don't understand, My Love.
The woods are full of wild anemones now, shall we go? no Darling. I didn't say wild enemas. I said wild anemones, flowers, hundreds and thousands of wild flowers all over the ground under the trees all the way up to the gazebo. They have no smell but they have a presence just like perfume and quite as obsessive, I shall remember them all my life.
Are you going somewhere Darling?
Yes, going to the woods.
Then why do you say you will remember them all your life?
Because you are a part of their memory and you are going to disappear, the anemones are going to bloom eternally, we are not.
Darling stop being philosophical it doesn't suit you, it makes our nose red.
Since I have discovered that I am really beautiful I don't care about having a red nose it is such a beautiful shape.
You are hatefully vain.
No Darling, not really because I have a frightful foreboding that it will disappear before I know what to do with it. I am so horribly afraid I don't have time to enjoy being vain.
You are a depressive maniac and I would be bored stiff if you were not so pretty.
Nobody could ever be bored with me I have too much soul.
Far too much, but lots of body too, thank Heavens. The green and the gold light in the woods look at the green ferns. They say witches make magic with fern seeds, they are hermaphrodites.
The witches?
No the ferns. Somebody brought that colossal bluish fir tree from Canada, it cost millions and millions, how silly to bring a tree from America. Don't you hate America?
No, why should I hate America, I've never been there, they are frightfully civilized.
Well I hate America because I know that once you get in you can never get out and you go on crying all your life for the anemones you will never see again.
Perhaps America is covered head to foot with wildflowers, mostly anemones of course.
I know it is not.
How can you possibly know that?
Not the part of America I am thinking about. They have other sorts of plans, and dust. Dust, dust. Probably a few palm trees and cowboys galloping hither and thither on cows.
They ride horses.
Well horses. Does it matter when you are so sick to get home again that you wouldn't notice if they were riding cockroaches?
Well you don't have to go to America, so cheer up.
Don't I? Who knows, something tells me that I am going to see a lot of America and I am going to be very sad there unless a miracle happens.
Miracles, witches, fairy tales, grow up Darling!
You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name. I remember your white flannels better than I can remember you. I remember all the things I felt about the white flannels but whoever made them walk about has totally disappeared.
So you remember me as a pink linen dress with no sleeves and my face is confused with dozens of other faces, I have no name either. So why so much fuss about individuality?
I thought I heard the Snow Queen laugh, she seldom laughs."

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

2007-12-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

Occurred to me after seeing "I'm Not There" and even more so after a fellow student recommended listening to Todd Haynes's interview on Fresh Air that the following, written by me age 16, was my youthful attempt to think about regret, opportunity, identity, etc. (In its original format, it's handwritten. It was an asignment from a psychology class, which asked that we complete the trite saying: "If I had my life to life over again" within a triangle for some quasi-poetic reason, I suppose.) It always makes me a little sad when I read it both because it's so very trite, and because I know I really meant it -- and maybe still do. (I've tried to reproduce the way the triangle made the lines break):

If
I had
my life to
live over again
I'd be more under-
standing when it
comes to other people.
I would try to give more
of myself instead of always
holding back. I would enjoy
the present and stop worrying
about the future. I'd laugh more
and cry less. I'd have more confidence
in myself. I'd play more and work less, I'd
try things that I probably won't succeed at.
I'd be myself and not care what other people think of me.
I'd wear weird clothes and say weird things. I would read more
poetry. I'd gather leaves in the fall and make snowmen in the winter.
I'd live a thousand lives instead of just one.

The Politics of Performance/ I"I'm Not There"

2007-12-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

Saw Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There" last night. Just stunning. Too rich to even adequately address its many dimensions and evocations, so any discussion of it will necessarily leave something out/feel inadequate. But I think I can fairly say this: it is, above all, " about" performance--on a number of levels, which means the meaning of performance itself is at issue. In what way performance and Dylan, performing Dylan, Dylan as performer, are unpacked and fragmented and stitched together through the various narratives and the characters is a complicated question, and I don't really have the capacity to deal with it adequately (I need to see it again to do that any real justice). Yet I think I can at least say that the various dynamics and themes that circle around and through the film: identity/authenticity/politics/cultural, temporal, musical, and visual frames as they overlap or are mutually structured can be seen through the prism of performativity. (I'll have to define the term at some point, I know.)

For example, as you're experiencing "Dylan" being performed and are constantly aware of the shifts in names, locations, genders, time periods, etc., the differing acting styles become ever more apparent and you start to perhaps unconsciously think: is this particular performance any "good" or "right" or close to the "original; What is this performative moment going to teach us or give us in terms of our desire to know (more than the performer) Dylan? What does it even mean to expect that a performance is "adequate"? So Christian Bale pulls off his strikingly tongue in cheek, ironic, funny yet somehow, at the same time, totally moving and endearing performances as both early folkie and as sad Christian preacher Dylan (the latter complete with bad polyester suit and queer molded jewfro) precisely because he makes you aware of it *as* his performance of Dylan's performances and of what perhaps Dylan himself might have thought a musician should sound or look or feel or be or believe (and he gives you this layering even tho he doesn't have a direct line in the entire movie, I don't think. It's all musical performances.) It's like the movie "performs" a Bulterian "citation-chain" of musical performance and characterological references, which is totally dizzying and amazing and I actually would have like to have seen more Bale and a tad less Blanchett because his work was equally as fascinating and evocative and has gotten far less attention by the media than it deserves. Yes, Blanchett was fantastic, but it did seem to be a concession to popular audiences that her section dominates most of the latter half of the film. (As a side note, one thing the film's definitely fascinated with in the Blanchett section is Dylan's hair--it's practically a character in its own right as Haynes does a spot on directorial appropriation or "performance" or citation of Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, when Dylan was, indeed, really a hottie. The main reason I've seen that film like 20 times. Tho I was a little pissed that Haynes didn't take the opportunity to do something w/ the Dylan/Baez dynamic in that part).

So, yeah, If you start to compare the acting performances you get a range--naturalistic, you might call it, from Heath Ledger (and Charlotte Gainsbourg); campy and ironic yet completely driven in Bale; method channeling to the nth degree in Blanchett; sincere and goofily sweet in Gere. And then there's the guy who played the Rimbaud character and the young black kid who plays Woody Guthrie/Dylan, or even Julianne Moore's performance, which, like Bale's, is both a weirdly spot on and a campy spoof of an older Joan Baez, and which is so doubly, delightfully mean-spirited. And then some of the time we get "failed" or surface-y attempts at sticking to character or a tendency to ham it up a bit with the over-dramatic, corny acting style-- kind of like in the tradition of Warhol's "bad acting" movies--and at other times we get acting at its most depth oriented. "Acting the part" of Dylan takes on so many dimensions and performance itself becomes so unstable that, at various moments, whether Dylan is either truly "not there" (Gere and Ledger) or so hyper-present it verges on uncanny (Blanchett), or so silly it's laughable (Bale), performance as identity is taken to a whole other level of complexity. (I would expect if I were reading this that Judith Butler was going to come up at some point, right? Sorry tho-- sadly or thankfully, depending on how you feel--no Butler quotes will be forthcoming....)

Next I want to talk about the politics of anachronisms in queer cinema, the film's musical/visual language, and directing as a kind of homage-like appropriational performance. More later... maybe....

Here's Haynes on Blanchett "channeling" Dylan an her embodied approach and Dylan's own "adrogyny":

This Weekend at Mocad

2007-12-03T15:36:00.000-08:00

"Friday & Saturday, December 7 and 8
A WEEKEND WITH TONY CONRAD

Friday, December 7
MUSIC AT MOCAD:
TONY CONRAD WITH M.V. CARBON (10 PM)
WINDY & CARL (9 PM)
WOLF EYES (11 PM)
8 pm doors, all ages
$16 admission
Tony Conrad will perform live in collaboration with M.V. Carbon (formerly of Chicago's Metalux) along with internationally acclaimed, Dearborn-based, ambient "space rock" minimalists, Windy & Carl, and Detroit/Ann Arbor-based, international compositional-noise-rock icons Wolf Eyes.

Saturday, December 8 at 7 pm
TONY CONRAD FILMS AND DISCUSSION
2.5 hour program
$9 admission

Tony Conrad will screen and discuss a 2.5-hour retrospective program of his films.

$23 advance tickets for both weekend events available until November 30th through the MOCAD website, at the MOCAD bookstore, and at Stormy Records (Dearborn). After November 30th tickets will only be for sale at the MOCAD bookstore or at the door on the night of the event. Online sales are will call only.

TONY CONRAD (b. 1941) is the quintessential cult figure; resident outsider; rebel angel; Tony Conrad's got the kind of immaculate credibility that can't be bought and can't be sold -- and how else, otherwise, could he have persevered? Rumbling under the cultural radar since the Kennedy Era, Conrad is at once first cause and last laugh, a covert operative who can stand as a primary influence over succeeding generations." --(from the Mocad website)

I can't wait!!!

The Thin Man

2007-12-02T15:55:00.001-08:00

Oh boy, it's always a good night when this movie's on. I adore Myrna Loy.

quote for the day

2007-12-02T15:05:00.001-08:00

"Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness." --William James

Michiganders

2007-11-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

Saw great show last night at Marygrove College. Holly Hughes read kind of funny and sweet improv-y piece that started out riffing on "her" "come", "coming," and frustrated relationships. "Her" or "she", in a nice funny perverse twist away from assumptions abut lesbians and sex and queer relationships, turned out to be her dog, which then turned into thoughts on playing with queer identity, and living in Michigan after being a "professional homosexual" in NYC. It was good; she's funny and natural, not like what I expected. In other words, she was way more Michigan than NYC.

But let me back up...I came in a bit after the first performer, Blair, had begun. he was singing a snippet from a Journey song, which immediately made me grin (the "born and raised in South Detroit" song, of course). Then he read a few pieces which were basically about being a queer black man, Detroit's down and dirty landmarks, poverty, desire, knowing someone/yourself. It sort of reminded me of Samuel Delaney. Then he played acoustic guitar and sang a beautiful song and then ended it with this piece called "Dig," which was sort of about telling the truth about oneself. The way I'm describing it makes it sound not that good, but it was actually really amazing. I was very moved not only because he is quite talented--beautiful voice good performance skills--but because it was so heartfelt. It wasn't all that sophisticated (some obvious metaphors, too concerned with his presence) but something about his sincerity and the beauty of some of the lines and delivery and his gestures were just very refreshing emotionally--direct and lovely. I had tears in my eyes when he finished. When Holly Hughes took the stage after him she was just blown away, kept saying "that was AMAZING." You could tell she was a bit startled by being in Detroit and coming across something actually good. She does, after all, teach at U of M (snob central). At one point she said" "why haven't I heard of this guy?" and," I have to follow that?" So that was cool, to see that reaction.

Then there was a stupid interlude where some chick had piled a bunch of rocks and a cluster of rolled gauze bandages in the middle of the gallery space off to the side of the performance stage. She and a few people sat on the floor and started rolling the gauze around the rocks. The audience stood there and watched for a while and then rocks and gauze got passed around and people rolled the rocks together. A rock and roll gathering. Get it? And I'm guessing it had something to do with war. Now I love rocks and gauze is pretty cool too, but I hate shit like that. I want to *throw* rocks when I'm supposed to do something meaningful with them. It was a sophomore art project, but then it also did become kind of fun to stand in the corner with my friend Lindsay and make fun of it and chat and think about gauze and rocks and just hang. So, in an unintentional way, it *was* about community and gathering things together. But the larger commentary was lame. I hate participatory art. "Fuck you! I don't wanna play your art reindeer games." Yeah, that's right..I'm a bad ass.

Finally that ended and it was Carla Harryman, Anna Vitale and Lindsay (aka Viki)'s turn to perform a piece by Carla called "Sue." Carla and Anna read the piece in a double voiced, echoing splitting loud/soft play off each other while Lindsay/Viki had her electronic set up behind them coming in at certain points with noises, atmospherics, rhythms, boops, rattles etc etc. I've seen Carla read this piece before at my friend Lisa's house as a solo and this was a very different way to hear/experience it, which was a nice comparison to have in mind the whole time. Carla reading it the first time solo made it seem like a narrative that, while difficult to follow in its elusive framing as both prose narrative and poetic voicing, held togeher and built a kind of spatial, accretive meaning. This time, with the two other "voices" echoing and splitting it into a dynamic work, it was much more difficult to keep in mind what was being spoken or narrated, sometimes the words were hard to hear even when they were echoed between Carla and Anna. You really had to work to "get" it, but then, because of the way they were reading, the meaning shifted to being about the performance too. Like someone said afterward--I think it was Christine Hume--it was like watching free jazz. So "Sue" was pulled open by sound. (I'm leaving out any direct summary of the piece itself since I just can't do justice to it, but it's really great, so I feel a little bad at my inability to say more about it.)

It was really great to see my friends collaborating. I've just recently met Anna and she's so cool and friendly and smart and real I feel like she's a friend already. Carla and especially Lindsay I've known for a while and it was so nice to see/hear three women I've admired personally and as artists coming from quite different aesthetic and personal places, backgrounds, ages, sensibilities making something together. I hope that wasn't the last time they work together.

art & evolution

2007-11-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

I guess there was (is?), according to a NYT Op-Ed, a "free-wheeling conference" at U of M on art and evolution. A month long conference, it seems. I felt intrigued until I read this:

"In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance."

So art is "too important to leave to chance? Huh? Evolution, then, is deliberate? I mean, what's the opposite of chance here? I'm sure the article is doing a bad job but I *hate* it when folks try to make art seem more meaningful or interesting by explaining it in evolutionary terms, especially when they don't know jack shit about theories of evolution. And what exactly might that explanation really tell us? I don't care if Martians landed on earth a billion trillion years ago and implanted a DNA code for artistic production or that plants and ticks and monkeys and birds make art too and thus the whole world is one big art project. Ok, the latter example is a jab at Elizabeth Grosz who I greatly admire but who gave a stunningly silly lecture on art and evolution last year at Wayne' English dept. According to Grosz, after a long explanation of environment and something about ticks, it all adds up to--are you ready for this?--art equals "vibrations." Please. Come on...I mean, duh, whatever. *Everything* equals vibrations. The whole fucking universe. It's like a more boring version of string theory. I get it, it's just... so what? What, as a critic, are you supposed to do with that? The meaning of Jackson Pollack's drip paintings? Vibrations. Motorhead's super fast bad ass punk rock metal? Vibrations. Bach's Mass in B Minor? Vibrations. Foghat's crappy rock songs? Vibrations,. Tyree Guyton's urban detritus installations and legendary dots? Vibrations. Please. Kill. Me. Evolutionary explanations for art like Grosz's say nothing *interesting* or specific about art practices--their history, their form, their politics, their pleasure. Evolution, on the other hand, is fascinating.

Well, you know, maybe the article just sucks but it really annoyed me. End of today's rant.

2007-11-26T21:00:00.001-08:00

"Filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 as Stalker, the Zone is visualised as a Chernobyl-like scarred, postindustrial landscape of ruins, waste, rubbish, of the remnants of industrial civilisation corroded, dilapidated and rapidly being reclaimed by nature . Tarkovsky's version of the Zone has gradually, over the last thirty years, become the foundation of an entire aesthetic. If Modernity, or Modernism, is our Antiquity, then its ruins have become every bit as fascinating, poignant and morbid as those of the Greeks or Romans were to the 18th century. Tarkovsky’s Zone is in some ways specific to the former USSR and a few locations in Estonia, yet practically every industrial or post-industrial country, has something resembling the Zone within it. Such an area would be, for instance, the remnants of industrial districts of East London. Beckton, Woolwich, Stratford, outposts marked by the cyclopean remains of silos, gasometers, factories. These are the places that inspired the Modernists of the 1920s: every manifesto from Le Corbusier's Vers d'une Architecture to Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist response Style and Epoch had their lovingly photographed silos and power stations. Appropriately, also in the Zone can be found the bastard children of the Modernists, the scatterings of overambitious social housing, with their crumbling highrises and streets in the sky. These are remnants of something as alien and incomprehensible to the seamless mallscape of 21st century Capital, or the heritage Disneyland of European Urbanism, as Shklovsky’s Futurist Martians were to their contemporaries: only here without any of the insurrectionary promise of a new world, merely the ruins of a defunct future." --
read more "Delirious Moscow"

The uncanny city stroll

2007-11-24T16:05:00.000-08:00

from the article "Repeating Making Meaning in Freud and Aristotle" by William N. West--

"Freud gives an example of repetition and meaning more closely related to the tripartite structure visible in Aristotle. In "The Uncanny," written a year before Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he recounts getting lost one summer in an almost deserted Italian town and wandering by accident into the red light district. Embarrassed, Freud "hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning" (237). After wandering a bit more, though, Freud found himself back in the place he had just left, "where my presence was now beginning to excite attention." Freud leaves again, only to return by accident once more. It is the third time that strikes Freud profoundly and oddly: "Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny." Freud's story expands on Lacan's aphorism in a few ways. First, he shows that the sign of a subject is not always the sign of a subject, or at least not always the subject it seems to be the sign of. The sign in fact produces the subject, but outside of the subject within a spectator--that is, the spectator (mis)recognizes a certain intention in Freud's repeated return. Freud's returning is not a sign for him until his third arrival, but it is a sign of him to the prostitutes the second time he shows up, when he begins to "excite attention." Meaning, then, accumulates out of stupid repetition and coincidence--the first of which Plato fears when he describes the imitator of weather, and the second of which Aristotle decries as a bad plot--but not in the repeater or imitator, only in the spectator. But Freud's awareness of the awareness of the watching prostitutes doubles his own displaced meaning back onto him; their gaze constitutes him as meaningful for himself, or rather he sees what he means to them. In effect, Freud recognizes in himself the split that characterizes the mimetic object. For the prostitutes, he is not mimetic at all; he truly is what he seems, a slightly nervous potential customer suitable for traditional life-instinct relations like cathexis or identification. Freud recognizes this, and the embarrassment he feels is his knowing misrecognition of himself as the abashed would-be client."

It's About Time

2007-11-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

"Gov. Jennifer Granholm has issued an order that bars discrimination against state workers based on their "gender identity or expression," which protects the rights of those who behave, dress or identify as members of the opposite sex.

The order, which Granholm signed Wednesday, adds gender identity to a list of other prohibited grounds for discrimination that includes religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, height, weight, marital status, politics, disability or genetic information.

"State employment practices and procedures that encourage nondiscriminatory and equal employment practices provide desirable models for the private sector and local governments," says the resolution.

The Triangle Foundation, a Michigan-based group advocating rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, praised Granholm's action.

"Coming out as transgender is a career-ender. Transgendered people lose their jobs all the time," foundation policy director Sean Kosofsky told the Detroit Free Press.

James Muffet, president of Citizens for Traditional Values, expressed doubt about the seriousness of sexual identity discrimination in state government. He said Granholm more likely was making a political gesture toward gay rights groups that backed her 2006 re-election bid."

New Favs: Wooster Collective/ Doris Salcedo

2007-11-17T15:37:00.000-08:00

Doris Salcedo is a woman after my own heart. Dissertation/art project idea: Stacks, Mounds, Piles: Aesthetisizing Insane Accumulation... or, uh, something like that. Actually, always wanted to do a pictorial series of all the built material industrial mounds, stacks, and piles of shit in and around Detroit. The industrial wasteland area of Fort St. has these amazing *mountains* of broken glass that glitter beautifully in the sunlight of an apocalyptic landscape. Wonder if they're still there? This image also reminds me of the Cathedral of St Anne de Beaupre in Canada, which has these amazing columns covered with wooden crutches. (Seems there' aren't any photos of it on Google. Odd.

Blog/website for Wooster Collective: http://www.artupdates.com/click.php?id=26362

Things I've Lost

2007-11-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

Adorable little turquoise ring bought in Arizona by my mother-- age 5 in the local swimming pool. (She never let me forget it).

Small pieces of Petrified Forest rock.

Opal ring stupidly lent to unstable college friend who promptly went "crazy" and was carted off to hospital the day after.

Copy of Michel Leiri's Manhood.

Favorite brown sweater (How?)

Picture of high school friend with my new mohawk and pink blue diejob.

Tape of me and 2 friends both named Heather stoned out of our minds performing various high school gossip rituals, singalongs, insane ramblings--a work of complete mid 80's genius!

One earring of small little woman made of clay. (The other earring--the little clay man--still haunts my jewelry box and bums me out every time I look at it).

Slovenian Grandmother's recipe for plum pudding.

Birth certificate.

To be continued...

Heidegger

2007-11-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

Still reeling a bit after Tuesday's stunning lecture by Steve Shaviro in Barrett's poetics seminar on Whitehead/Olson. (The assigned reading included: selected Olson prose; an essay by Robert von Hallberg on Olson, the Objectivists, and Whitehead; selections from Whitehead; and a few essays by Steve that are available on his website (do check them out).) Doing the reading I'd been thinking about the relationship between Whitehead and Heidegger--how a Whiteheadian reading of Olson's form and poetics might compare to a Heideggerian account. So I was a bit shocked when Steve finished up his lecture with a series of questions addressing the significance of the differences between the two. It was as if he had answered--and warned me about--my sense of their connection and possible affinities. Of course, my knowledge of both philosophers is extremely limited (esp. in the case of Whitehead), but, that being the case, I felt semi-justified in seeing that the connections, though fraught, are there. Steve's brilliant--straightforward and simple yet really significant--lecture, the chance to see him engage with Barrett on a subject he is less familiar with--Olson--was cool. It isn't often that you see two scholars in the department trying to talk across their respective interests; it should happen more often.

And here is an amazing piece from the magazine Cabinet on Heidegger's hut:

"I stood on a steeply sloping hillside deep in the Black Forest, panting, bathed in sweat and covered in mud. A group of llamas had stopped grazing nearby to watch me. After disorientation and fatigue, flying, driving, walking, and running, after springing over an electrified fence and sliding down a wooded slope, after losing my phone, my wife, and my bearings, I had at last found Martin Heidegger's hut."

Read the rest here:http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/25/durantaye.php

Learning

2007-11-11T14:28:00.001-08:00

I get the feeling more and more, as I approach the end of my final semester of classes (not to mention a few years into being an instructor) that folks (I won't call them kids since some of them are as old as me) are unwilling or simply do not know how to learn. Students these days seem insanely passive, apathetic, intimidated, cowed. I vascillate between blaming teachers, the system, and the individual. All are to some extent culpable. Even the "smartest" people in class are often hesitant, fearful. Why? What's at the bottom of this mood? I sense that most people have come to expect that they'll be taught everything they need to know/think/feel about the subjects they read exclusively by the professor. That is, they may read the material, but they form absolutely no opinions, ideas, areas of interest, connections, etc., for themselves prior to the class discussion since they expect that the professor will simply tell them what to think about it and *then* they will have learned something.

Of course, they've not been encouraged, most likely, to think of themselves as having opinions or ideas, particularly when it comes to approaching difficult material. But what I mean by opinion might more accurately be called a questioning and/or desiring position. Students don't want to bruise their sensitive egos by talking in class and taking the risk of being "wrong." And the evaluative nature of academic institutions just exacerbates their fears, or it's where they learned to be silent in the first place. Ego is, in many ways, the enemy of learning--whether one has a fragile ego or an over-developed one. One can't protect oneself and learn at the same time. Learning demands that one must find a way to "forget," to move outside, to risk boundaries and the demands from outside (or from inside, for that matter). Asking questions of the text means asking the S/self questions, asking what we think and why, and why/how the text demands that we think/feel differently. That is, simply put, learning makes the self a question, and a processual development, not a site of and for reinforcement.
And desire is, inextricably, a part of learning in that desire is always an undoing of one's self-image, of what one knows about oneself. (Think of Plato's Symposium.) Engaging with literature or theory or any text (musical, visual, performative) offers a potentially transformative encounter with the self because it offers a way to explore not only what our own desires are/might be, but also because it develops a kind of desiring operation that unfolds into and around and between who we might be in relation to the desires of the text. A desiring encounter is a performance between the text and the reader that offers the reader the opportunity to explore how her desiring self--rather than the "ego-self," if you will-- has been shifted, tested, *poked*. Learning through/with desire, the relationship between desire and knowledge, as it undoes the ego-self, thus provides the occasion for exploring how others might respond--it creates a kind of dialogue with the text and with its other potential interlocutors and offers multiple positions that contrast or inform one's responses and feelings in relation to these others. This is learning. It is always an active, dialogic, desiring, and ego-risking endeavour.

How then does one t/reach desire?

Acker and teaching

2007-11-07T06:05:00.000-08:00

I found this on Amazon's reviews of Acker's _My Mother: Demonology_, which is my favorite of hers. The review is fascinating (and helpful for how one might explain Acker's work to students):

Notes from September 9th, 1991: "Acker talked about taking a piece of writing and jamming with it, sampling it, altering it. A phrase, a word, a section. The way jazz is made . . .not interested in the assignment of meanings, of the formalizing academic way. Thinking of working with structures or getting to intuition are similar. . . "
I know that I was exploring many formal things in writing when I encountered Acker (being interested in Georges Perec and Oulipo). I was writing haikus, pangrams, always starting with a structural idea in mind, also being familiar with Queneau's Exercises in Style. Kathy was pushing me to be more intuitive, raw, exposing the unconscious. She emphasized Surrealist types of strategies. She wanted us to write every word and every sentence in an interesting way. She wanted us to explore dreams. Dreams were a big deal with Kathy. I see My Mother: Demonology as one long extended dream.

Kathy wanted us to break through with writing, to reach some key moment, some epiphany, or some crime, whatever. Jill St. Jacques explained this to me as exhausting oneself in thought, coming to a wall, then going beyond, and getting to another wall.

I had been reading some books by Michel Leiris and I had finally got to Guilty by Georges Bataille. Also after reading Illuminations by Rimbaud, I realized what a big influence he was on me, and most of the poetry that I had written between 1987-1992. Surrealism and Rimbaud. The story that I wrote in 1991, "The Seasons," was referring to Rimbaud; and slightly to Jasper Johns. I also wrote a few things in imitation of Leiris.

The next meeting Kathy talked about the writings of Blanchot and Borges. She talked about the "surface story" and what is it about. She made us think about how certain parts work together. Kathy told us to read parts of Rimbaud. I read many of Rimbaud's prose poems. Some of them are indecipherable. I wrote something in response to "After the Flood." It was like a mad lib, substituting words. Our take-home assignment was to take the poem, "Devotion" and to make a story out of it. I wrote something vague influenced by Leiris again. I forgot to do a few of the assignments so I decided to read whatever I had been writing. That would do instead.

Once Kathy was totally bored with our stories. She said that we were not trying to be good enough. We need to really think about what we are doing when we write. She looked at us: "Why are we writing? Why write at all? Writers do not make money. Some writers are beautiful technicians but do not have any soul." Kathy gave us Paul Auster as an example. She talked about Blanchot's "Madness of The Day." Kathy played tapes of music in between what people read. Like two people would read, then a tape of NWA, two more, a tape of Nine Inch Nails, etc.

Kathy Acker's next few writing assignments:

"An ex-lover is dying. Describe what they say to you before they die."

"Write an paragraph on what is happening in American fiction in the 1990s."

"The only thing I want is all-out war."
Kathy Acker, My Death, My Life (p. 233)

Kathy made us read a section of The Unavowable Community and Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot. She talked all day about Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossowski.

Blanchot: "The narrative voice is a voice that has no place in the work."

Kathy talked about Acephele which was a group of writers that included Bataille and Laure. Much discussion about origins, identity, ouroboros, labyrinths, transcendence, eternal recurrence and the body.

Blanchot: "Writing is the absence of the work as it presents itself."

Another KA writing assignment: she wanted us to write a film treatment. She also suggested that we take a part of Justine and turn them into a film treatment. Kathy also did a similar thing with her treatment of Dario Argento's "Suspiria" in My Mother: Demononlogy (1993). I later saw another Argento film with Kathy. She seemed to know his films well.

Next she wanted us to bring a foreign language dictionary of a language that we didn't have any particular proficiency in (I didn't take part in this assignment). She made us translate our original text into a foreign language. Then we translated it back into English without help of the dictionary. Kathy was always pushing us into creating nonsense. Does anything exist that is truly random and without meaning? It is a very hard process. Because words can be analyzed and interpreted. She liked the writing to veer off into babble. I think she was exploring the idea of a surface translation, like with some of the French stuff she did with Laure's letters to Bataille and earlier with the Persian poems.

Nostalgia

2007-11-05T12:36:00.000-08:00

My response to Silliman's dismissal.

2007-10-31T10:08:00.001-07:00

A quote by Walter Lippman from a fascinating article about the "objects" of democracy:

"The democratic tradition is [..] always trying to see a world where people are exclusively concerned with affairs of which the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit. Never has democracy been able to conceive itself in the context of a wide and unpredictable environment [..] And although democrats recognize that they are in contact with external affairs, they see quite surely that every contact outside the self-contained group is a threat to democracy as originally conceived. That is a wise fear. If democracy is to be spontaneous, the interests of democracy must remain simple, intelligible and easily managed. [..] The environment must be confined within the range of every man's direct and certain knowledge." [9]

Read the rest here: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=53366

Cecil Taylor

2007-10-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

After Joel's presentation today in class, I wanted to see/hear some jazz. This is so fucking amazing. The energy transforms playing the piano into some other form of being with an instrument. Incredible.

Wedding Present

2007-10-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

This song, this band, in many ways encapsulates, for me, my experience of the 90's--the soundtrack for that time, its feeling, its mood. Wedding Present songs were that kind of nostalgic music , like The Smiths, that made it feel good to be sad. Funny, I can't even tell now what it might sound like to someone who didn't experience it. No possibility for disinterested judgment in this case. As Stendahl says: "C'est la Promesse du Bonheur." Why that occurs to me in light of this little ditty I can't say, but it does. And yet, you know, the guitar playing is magnificent.

Oval

2007-10-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

So beautiful. I have so often gone to sleep with this on. Landed in a different world, softly.

2007-10-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Silliman's visit

2007-10-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

It was weird. I was sick, heard everything through a phlegmy fog, so take this as you will. Perceptions may be equally phlegm-bound. (Yuck.)

Ron is very literal, anecdotal, avuncular, a bit of a pontificator, funny. He seems, overall, to have a set of narrative playing cards that he just endlessly reshuffles. When he walked into Barrett's seminar I thought his affect was slightly defensive, but maybe this was nervousness masked as a certain diffidence. He and Barrett pushed back and forth at each other, which was fun to watch. Ron would be a good teacher. Was surprised at how un-theoretical he was. (Not "anti" just, "un-" or maybe "non-", which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong). He is grounded in particulars and in the genealogy of the poetry world, which makes sense, I guess.

Then the talk he gave on blogging was a bit weird. His long intro detailing his migration from the San Fran area to Pennsylvania and the resultant loss of a vibrant, face-to-face, challenging and inspiring poetic community (I was thinking of it as a "critical region" but that didn't go over that well, for Ron at least) and then the replacement of that with the blogworld seemed odd. You could read the influence of the on-going Grand Piano work in that narrative, and one wondered how much he was just reciting from memory much of his contribution to that. In contrast to that collaborative, engaged history and present project that is attempting to make sense of it, I was struck by the sense that Ron doesn't seem particularly challenged or engaged by others in his blogworld. The blog may be a way of connecting, but it was interesting to hear him lay out a personal historical narrative of that prior connected life and then compare it to the the blog he writes. Of course, Ron's blog is, after all, Ron's, so he can do with it as he wishes!
Unsurprisingly--for those who have any familiarity with his blog themes--his introductory framework for the blog talk was the increase in published poets over the past, say, 50 years. Ron points this out a lot, and it always makes me wonder what, exactly, is his point. It has occured to me that there's a pattern to Ron's use of this quantitative trope. Ron claims: There's a ton of possibly excellent poetry out there; Ron gives a list of works he's received in the last week or month or so; Ron picks from this overhwelming pile of possibly great stuff, *one* gem.; Ron tells us why that book is worthy, has value, might just be historically significant; Ron does an impressive and careful job of close reading the work, convincing his readers why this is, indeed, excellent work. Ron has made a name for someone, to some extent, because, he, Ron Silliman, has placed his impramatur upon them. A few stalwart poetry geeeks complain, rant, pontificate endlessly, write non-sensical poems in response, point out infinitesimal "errors," etc. A few others comment carefully and thoughtfully, if hesitantly. Usually, the poet pops up to say, "Wow! Gee! Thanks Ron!" Interesting poetry folks stay silent. We all know the drill. I find it all fascinating, lubricious. The poetry world. This, of course, is where the wonderful, terrible Jim Behrle comes in.

Ron and Tracie Morris's reading that same day was amazing. Organic, moving, intelligent, funny.
The combination of Ron and Tracie was inspired and inspiring. It was as though two distinct yet resonant phenomenological methods as poetry, grounded in attention to attention, to material engagement, and to the political valences that crop up through those grounded modes of attention, were set off against each other, allowed to inform each other. An expansiveness that accrued in each performance triggered different responses for me, yet I felt their connection in the rhythmic forms they produced and expanded upon. That is to say, Tracie's sound poetry made sense of Ron's cumulative and accretive syntax, and Ron's expansive, repetitive form played off Tracie's verbal/sonic emotiveness.

It was a good few days in poetry-land.

The Ninth Gate

2007-10-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

I am now content to be down for the count with a very bad cold. Polanski's The Ninth Gate on AMC. The perfect fall night, wind and rain blowing outside, must stay on couch under blanket, and watch movie about Satanism and books. Perfect (even tho I've seen it around 10x's). And I won't even mention Johnny Depp. No, I won't.

"Some books are dangerous, not to be opened with impunity."
"Very True."

Stones

2007-10-23T20:45:00.001-07:00

"Living Stones"

"Stones are the core of our planet. You can find them almost anywhere in what we call our ‘natural environment’ (mountains, desserts, oceans). The industrial revolution created two new kind of stones: bricks and concrete. Slowly they are taking over the natural environment."--Maarten Vanden Eynde

"We are so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone." --Christian Boltanski

Silliman, Stein's Dog, the "New Sentence," Emotion

2007-10-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of [reading Silliman in preparation for his visit]...rhythm of sentences, attention. economy, emotion, materiality. integration. particulars, form. There's something organic or phenomenological about Ron' approach to poetic production, to form, and the economy of production and reception. A way of thinking totality without idealizing in an immaterial or transcendental way. Immanent form, which keeps the part/whole relationship together through a material mode of attention, attention to the materiality of attention and thing attended.

A dog drinking water. Well, I have paid attention to my cat drinking water, listened to the rhythm. Which reminds me now of Zukofsky's use of Reznikoff's "the ceaseless weaving of the uneven water" to describe what he means by "Sincerity." (the sincerity of the line? of the poet? of both together for the reader?) In Reznikoff there's an image (an experiential image, I think) evoked by his single sentence, whereas in Stein it's the sentences themeselves, as they weave together, that are sincere or, for her, emotional. (Tho, certainly, rhythm plays a huge part in Rez's overall structure.) They--the sentences-- are what creates the totality of the form, and they, the sentences/waves, are preserved in their particularity as they work to make up that form. Stein says this can be seen by "anybody listening to any dog's drinking," that we realize/experience that "sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are" by way of what is available in the everyday, at the smallest level of temporal/material units. It took me 'til today to really think this was right. I thought back to the attention I have paid to my cat's rhythmic drinking and how, in my attention to that rhythm, to its variations---slurp, slurp. slurp. slurpslurp, slurp. slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp. slurpurpurpurp, slrup, slurp.--I *felt* pleasure, love, sympathy, delight, amusement, connection, fascination.

Now what is the "new sentence" in relation to this emotional context? The following explanation seems important and conclusive in light of Ron's overall argument, yet I find it elusive, still: "This continual torquing of sentences [in Bob Perelman's a.k.a.] is a traditional quality of poetry, which in poetry is most often accomplished by linebreaks, and earlier on by rhyme as well. Thus poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose." If verse "moves" into the "interior" of prose, then we have the issue of non-narrative (an inadequate term) as an alternate temporal mode, which establishes meaning in a material way, without closure, through movement and a new way of thinking incorporation. The function of poetry has shifted, the possibilities and requirements of prose have been challenged. The historical, material particulars are not 'redeemed" as they might be in Zuk or Rez, nor are they held together as a phenomenological experience of cubist like perceptions a la Stein. They are "new" because they provide a context for units of language and meaning to interact and to form a multi-referential, ever-expanding whole. That is, "referential focus"--between sentences and paragraphs--and "writing which focus[s] the reader onto the level of the sentence and below, as well as the uits above," "incorporate[s] all the elements of language." What then is the emotional force of this mode of writing and form? What does an open totality feel like?

My Complaint about Curtis Faville (w/ special thanks to Scott Pakin)

2007-10-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

My topic is nothing new. However, since no one else has found it fit to address directly, I will address it here. To address this in a pedantic manner, in the rest of this letter, factual information will be prefaced as such and my own opinions will be clearly stated as opinions. For instance, it is a fact that the impact of Mr. Curtis Faville's adversarial tricks is exactly that predicted by the Book of Revelation. Evil will preside over the land. Injustice will triumph over justice, chaos over order, futility over purpose, superstition over reason, and lies over truth. Only when humanity experiences this Hell on Earth will it fully appreciate that Curtis's viewpoints are geared toward the continuation of social stratification under the rubric of "tradition". Funny, that was the same term that his mercenaries once used to jawbone aimlessly. Curtis will engage in an endless round of finger pointing in the coming days -- not necessarily by direct action, but by convincing his understrappers to evade responsibility. If there's an untold story here, it's that even if one is opposed to mudslinging, overbearing pharisaism (and I am), then surely, he is careless with data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang together, seems to show a sort of pride in his own biases, gets into all sorts of untoward speculation, and then makes no effort to test out his speculations -- and that's just the short list! A person with a functioning brain does not use both overt and covert deceptions to pilfer the national treasure. Let's remember that.

The key point here is that Curtis would have us believe that children should get into cars with strangers who wave lots of yummy candy at them. Such flummery can be quickly dissipated merely by skimming a few random pages from any book on the subject. He is always prating about how he holds a universal license that allows him to siphon off scarce international capital intended for underdeveloped countries. (He used to say that he does the things he does "for the children", but the evidence is too contrary, so he's given up on that score.)

Efforts to feed on the politics of resentment, alienation, frustration, anger, and fear are not vestiges of a former era. They are the beginnings of a phenomenon which, if permitted to expand unchecked, will turn our country into a destructive, despicable cesspool overrun with scum, disease, and crime. I fear that, over time, Curtis's analects will be seen as uncontested fact, because many people are afraid to establish clear, justifiable definitions of totalitarianism and allotheism so that you can defend a decision to take action when Curtis's forces force us to do things or take stands against our will. Although Curtis has managed to avoid indictment, or even a consensus that he did anything illegal, someone has to be willing to take advantage of a rare opportunity to rage, rage against the dying of the light and encourage others to do the same. Even if it's not polite to do so. Even if it hurts a lot of people's feelings. Even if everyone else is pretending that his ebullitions are Right with a capital R. To end on a more positive note: Many know-nothings have an intense identification with cankered mountebanks.

My Complaint about Ms. Kristine F. Danielson (by Scott Pakin)

2007-10-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

In this letter, I will try to describe Ms. Kristine F Danielson's recommendations in such a way that my language will not offend and yet will still convey my message that as far as Kristine's closed-minded adages are concerned, I will not capitulate today, tomorrow, or ever. With this letter, I hope to reverse the devolutionary course Kristine has set for us. But first, I would like to make the following introductory remark: Kristine likes to cite poll results that "prove" that we have no reason to be fearful about the criminally violent trends in our society today and over the past ten to fifteen years. Really? Have you ever been contacted by one of her pollsters? Chances are good that you never have been contacted and never will be. Otherwise, the polls would show that I'm not a psychiatrist. Sometimes, though, I wish I were, so that I could better understand what makes people like Kristine want to palliate and excuse the atrocities of her proxies. If you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will honestly find that she really struck a nerve with me when she said that she is the way, the truth, and the light. That lie is a painful reminder that this is not wild speculation. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is documented fact. Kristine thinks that skin color means more than skill and gender is more impressive than genius. However, she should take a step back and look at everything from a different perspective. I like to think I'm a reasonable person, but you just can't reason with feckless killjoys. It's been tried. They don't understand, they can't understand, they don't want to understand, and they will die without understanding why all we want is for them not to open the gates of Hell. Her ethics are as predictable as sunrise. Whenever I follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought, Kristine's invariant response is to feed blind hatred.

Some readers may doubt that Kristine is rotten enough to waste everyone else's time. So let me provide some evidence. But before I do, let me just say that if you don't think that her henchmen are irascible at best, the downfall of society at worst, then you've missed the whole point of this letter.

Take a good, close look at yourself, Kristine. What you'll probably find is that you're unregenerate. I could accuse her of using intellectually challenged hostes generis humani to get her way, but I wouldn't stoop to that level. The end.

Umm Kalthoum

2007-10-19T20:45:00.001-07:00

Can't believe I found this. The Voice of Egypt.

Aphrodite´s child-The four horseman

2007-10-19T20:27:00.001-07:00

I remember first hearing this at the Ann Arbor Marshall St. house with Aaron and John and having a moment of pure joy. And I don't even think we were high! This video is pretty silly, but I guess that's the point.

CAN - Paperhouse

2007-10-19T20:09:00.001-07:00

words cannot express how cool it is to see/hear this.

totally wired

2007-10-19T20:03:00.001-07:00

possible favorite song lyric of all time: "Can't you see? A butterfly stomach round ground. I drank
a jar of coffee, and then I took some of these!"

The Monks on German TV in 1966

2007-10-19T19:54:00.001-07:00

I remember first seeing this mid-90's and being on the edge of my seat.

Sonic Youth - Put Blood In The Music 1989 Part 3 of 3

2007-10-19T19:29:00.001-07:00

overall theme--ny is cool, so are guitars.

Sonic Youth - Put Blood In The Music 1989 Part 2 of 3

2007-10-19T19:21:00.001-07:00

best/weirdest part--SY talking awkwardly w/ john cale.

Sonic Youth - Put Blood In The Music 1989 Part 1 of 3

2007-10-19T19:12:00.001-07:00

god, how cute is thurston in this!

Galaxie 500 - Tugboat (Live)

2007-10-19T16:25:00.001-07:00

there's a place i'd like to be...

Today...

2007-10-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

a copy of Joe Brainards' _I Remember_ came in the mail. I'm in love. It's one of those, "why didn't I write this?" kind of books.

Work "Ethics"

2007-10-18T09:37:00.001-07:00

Below I've copied in full an op-ed article in todays NYT by some putz named Roger Cohen. Now I'm not very clear on the global economic issues that France faces in light of the EU, nor do I know much of anything about the strength of the euro in comparison to worker productivity or other national currencies, so even though I've been struggling to come to terms with this more practical kind of knowledge and discourse, I can't yet adequately or confidently comment on these issues. Ever get caught in a conversation with someone who has a background in economics? In my case, that would be my staunchly status quo brother who knows a shit load more than I do about the economy but is still, for all that, totally wrong. It's just that I can't seem to explain to him *why*! It can get brutal, frustrating. Thus, I'm hesitant to engage in any kind of critical anlysis of global capital, a weakness among academic, post-Marxist thinkers that desperately needs to be addressed, I'm more than willing to acknowledge. I often challenge my students to explain the stock market, and yet I'm totally hazy on the subject, which is often my point to them--a la Jameson's claim about the difficulty of cognitively mapping late capitalism, but still, we owe it to ourseleves to have some basic grasp on how the global economy runs. Read the Financial Times, or The Economist, alongside Gramsci or Althusser fer chris' sake!

OK, end of rant.... What struck me as I was reading this tripe was the inherent value the whole world is now demanded to place on something like a "work ethic." An "American" vaule I've always despised, having been chided at several poverty-level wage jobs for having an "inconsistent" one, and which has always reminded me of my poor immigrant family's struggle to believe in the "American Dream" as they ascetically denied themselves much of any joy or pleasure. The American Deam fits nicely into a feudal mentaility from the old country who bred their peasants to be docile work-horses. Come to America, own your own sweatshop! Come to America, work hard, die young! Come to America, live long, work like a dog, leave all your money to your fucked-up, ungrateful kids! Oops, I'm ranting again....

Which leads me to that new "reality" show "Kid Nation." I caught a bit of it the other night and was appalled to see 10 year olds discussing one of their fellow comrades--deciding which one was a "hard worker." The decision left to this group was who they would ultimately award a "gold star" to, which, as it turns out, equaled some kind of 20K scholarship fund, or something like that. Do 10 year olds really need to worry about a work ethic? Do we really need to reinforce the dubious and ideologically suspect link between hard work and economic success to a group of little kids some of whose lips quiver while others literally sob as the votes are being publicly counted for their election to a fantasy town council? So all we can offer as an educational setting to idealistic children is the over-blown fantasy of hard work and competition as a flimsy cover for the principle of eat-or-be-eaten, winner-takes-all, survival of the most cynical or, at best, least reprehensible, all adding up to a "win"? And France needs to grow-up? Yeah, right. Apparently, France doesn't have enough reality TV shows. And they obviously don't begin their indoctrination techniques near early enough.

Hard work, and the concept of a "work ethic" are highly over-rated, but the train keeps rolling. Climb aboard world!

*****************

"Not only is Christine Lagarde France’s finance minister, ready to forsake her native tongue, she is, she says, “happier doing this in English.” With that, right off the bat, she declares in ringing Anglo-Saxon: “We are trying to change the psyche of the French people in relation to work.”

A hopeless task, some might say. Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.

But Lagarde, 51, tall and striking, is not known as “the American” for nothing. Think of her as the face of a new France ditching its cold-war hangover. The sobriquet reflects her linguistic skills, her background as a highflying executive for the Baker & McKenzie law firm and her Chicago-cultivated candor.

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”

The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.

So Lagarde, appointed four months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is aware that she faces a big challenge: “What was really striking to me when I came back from Chicago in 2005 was that the law on the 35-hour week had passed and been internalized by individuals and, I think, had produced disastrous effects.”

What effects? “People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends.”

Lagarde’s goal, she says, is to slash France’s chronically highly unemployment — now about 8 percent — to 5 percent by 2012 and increase the proportion of the total population in jobs to 70 percent from 63 percent. Rehabilitating work is central to this ambition.

Tax cuts, the termination of unemployment benefits for those refusing two valid job offers, later retirement, incentives for those working more than 35 hours, a slashing of the bureaucracy associated with job-seeking and improved professional training are among measures enacted or envisaged. Legislation to reverse the 35-hour week is possible.

“I think we have to go around it,” Lagarde says of the law. “To demonstrate that it’s not a holy principle and it can be modified, varied, mitigated and possibly reversed.”

Not without a fight, however. French workers are expected to take to the streets today in what will likely be one of many big strikes against the Sarkozy-Lagarde reforms. Former governments have caved as Bastille-storming specters rose.

Not this time, insists Lagarde. “We certainly have the resolve to see reforms through,” she says. “A significant majority voted in support of a reform program that was completely advocated, advertised, trumpeted.”

France, she suggests, is changing in the image of a president whose approach “is not being constrained by rules, principles, protocol, straitjackets.”

Why Doris Lessing sucks

2007-10-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry, to say (well, not really) I've never been much of a Doris Lessing fan (find her rather boring), but I was felt pretty indifferent to the announcement of her Nobel prize win until I came across this rabid, misinformed, cold war era, anti-communist article she wrote in 1997, which makes me want to gag. "Hi, um, Doris? you're full of shit."

Nothing worse than an ex-commie, (David Horowitz? Whittaker Chambers?) except of course an ex-smoker. And Lessing is both!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13lessing.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=20e7c24e5f2523ec&ex=1192507200

(I can't make proper links with my new computer yet, so this'll have to do for now.)

privacy and blogs

2007-10-07T12:16:00.001-07:00

The subject title to this post may be deceiving. I don't mean to write here about the issues of public knowledge or copyright infringement, or even what kind of subjectivity is produced by blog writing. Why? Because I don't find those questions very compelling, even tho I'm very interested in public sphere theory, and subjectivation. What I want to comment on is my own reluctance to write about my every day life, my thoughts and feelings, daily habits, fears, desires. I've noticed this blog often becomes silent when I'm in a particularly private or contemplative state of mind. When my mood seems to focus on the personal, and I become highyl attuned to my own interiority-- to past issues, to a present sense of time, etc.--the presence of my inner self encroaches in ways I find difficult and bittersweet. Or my desires, at times, feel inchoate, contradictory; they impinge upon my ability to write, which, it seems, I develop in a distanced way, or rather, through a distancing technique. I don't know how people keep private journals. I've tried, and the evidence of my repeated failures are the numerous, half-filled moleskine journals strewn about my apartment. Most of the time, when I read through them I want to vomit. I have a hard time finding my daily life that interesting, and it seems I have an even harder time writing in interesting ways about it.

But there are times when I do wish that this space could be more personal. Not because I feel the need to share my life and thoughts and concerns with others, (tho maybe I do), but for my own frustrated desire to articulate and thus to *see* those confusions manifested, stored, acknowledged, maybe even forgotten. I don't want what I write here to take the form of a self-administered therapy session, yet I do wish for a way to record what I was, at one moment in time, attempting to come to terms with.
I suppose this is all prompted by a realization that this blog does *not* represent what I'm really thinking about and experiencing on a day-to-day level most of the time. And that "innacuracy" bothers me for some reason. But the innacuracy of private thoughts made "public" obviously bothers me even more.

Suspiria (1977), part 1

2007-09-20T14:12:00.001-07:00

Possibly my alltime favorite movie. This seems to be from the original Italian cut; I think I've only seen the Americanized (bowdlerized) version. Whateever, the *amazing* Goblin score is as spectacular as ever.

Fleetwood Mac Tusk USC Trojan Marching Band UCLA SUCKS 1979

2007-09-20T14:05:00.001-07:00

Good God, I love Fleetwood Mac!And Marching Bands! and the song Tusk!And this video!

Powers of 10

2007-09-11T10:34:00.001-07:00

By the amazing Chalres and ray Eames, tho I think there's an earlier version of it in black and white.

HENRI CHOPIN LIVE IN FRANCE 2005

2007-09-11T10:01:00.001-07:00

My favorite response to this in the comments field: "What the cock cheese is going on here? Acid Rock?

Oh, this is cool

2007-09-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

From Extravagant Crowd: Carl van Vechten's Portraits of Women, a portrait of the (no longer infamous)Mercedes de Acosta.

Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy

2007-09-08T12:40:00.001-07:00

Watching this with the sound off is interesting.

"What Would Judy Say"

2007-09-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

First, a list of terms I'd like to remember and use but often have a hard time with since etymology is a dark and mystifying labyrinth I often find myself wandering aimlessly in:

Apophasis:

"originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning or argument by denial, a way of telling what something is by telling what it is not, a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it isn't.

A useful inductive technique when given a limited universe of possibilities, the exclusion of all but the one remaining is affirmation through negation The familiar guessing-game of "Is it bigger than a bread box?" is an example of apophatic inquiry.

This denotation has generally fallen into disuse and is frequently overlooked, although it is still current in certain contexts, such as mysticism and Negative theology.

An apophatic theology sees God as ineffable and attempts to describe God in terms of what God is not. Apophatic statements refer to transcendence in this context, as opposed to cataphasis referring to immanence.

Anacoluthon:

An anacoluthon is a rhetorical device that can be loosely defined as a change of syntax within a sentence. More specifically, anacoluthons (or "anacolutha") are created when a sentence abruptly changes from one structure to another. Grammatically, anacoluthon is an error; however, in rhetoric it is a figure that shows excitement, confusion, or laziness. In poetics it is sometimes used in dramatic monologues and in verse drama. In prose, anacoluthon is often used instream of consciousness writing, such as that of James Joyce, because it is characteristic of informal human thought.

In its most restrictive meaning, anacoluthon requires that the introductory elements of a sentence lack a proper object or complement. For example, if the beginning of a sentence sets up a subject and verb, but then the sentence changes its structure so that no direct object is given, the result is anacoluthon. Essentially, it requires a change of subject or verb from the stated to an implied term. The sentence must be "without completion" (literally what "anacoluthon" means). A sentence that lacks a head, that supplies instead the complement or object without subject, is anapodoton.

As a figure, anacoluthon directs a reader's attention, especially in poetry, to the syntax itself and highlights the mechanics of the meaning rather than the object of the meaning. It can, therefore, be a distancing technique in some poetry."

**************

I came across the term anacoluthon quite recently in an essay by Celeste Langan on Coleridge, Daniel Schreber, and communication theory, and it occurred to me it might be relevant to Kasey Mohammad's recent posts on catachresis in terms of arrangement or syntax. I suppose that's what happens when you start talking about language and meaning-- terms, definitions, uses start to overlap and resonate. Since I felt unsure about my understanding of these terms and my reliance on Oed/wikipedia definitions, I've been looking around for a better understanding of these rhetorical and etymologically flexible terms. So far, all I've really found are simplistic definitions used for poetry or rhetoric classes. I asked Barrett about anacoluthon and he mentioned that it crops up in a work by Ron Silliman--can't recall the name-- in which it is self-reflexively positioned within a "new sentence" as a definer of the new sentence and as what it purports to define. That is, it is both index and sign, both "inside" and "outside" the poem. Clever, that. Reminds me of conceptual art, or the verbal/visual puns of DuChamp.

Also, and not to step on Kasey's toes here (as if he cares or reads this), I became intrigued by the term and the concept of catachresis, when I came across its use in Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim. I remember being a bit obsessed with Butler's emphasis on Antigone's catachretic speech acts as evidence of the subject's exclusion from, or unrepresentable function within, the legal/political/ social systems and discourses she was both overturning and submitting to. Catachretic meaning(s), then, develop out of the position of the marginalized subject (marginalized as gendered, female, daughter, sister, motherless non-citizen, NoOne), and pushes at the boundaries of the political dimension, a dimension that is rhetorical and poetic as much as it is seemingly contained within a drama about kinship relations. That is, the work, of course, combines dialogue, argument, metaphor, syntax, plot, action, climax, resolution-- all of which unfold precisely in a moment of linguistic, and thus representational crisis. Antigone's claim, --for her brother's body, for the right to legitimately mourn, to chose her destiny, to claim her deed and act of burial-- can only be catachretically stated/represented.

Butler points to Antigone's statement: "Yes, I confess: I will not deny my deed" as not, precisely and crucially, the same as directly claiming the act. To "not deny" is to refuse to "perform a denial" and even as the "Yes, I confess" claims the act, "it also commits another deed in the very claiming, the act of publishing one's deed, a new criminal venture that redoubles and takes the place of the old" (8). This exemplifies the complex condition of language and agency that the marginalized subject exists within. Antigone's tragic insistence on mourning the unmournable--her brother and her nephew--is her "real" claim or, rather, desire, and it is, ultimately, in excess of the (representably) political and social. Yet catachresis is, finally, for Butler--and in opposition to both Hegel's and Lacan's readings of Antigone as a perversion of the public/private dimension or as a symbol of the death drive--a condition of possibility, as it registers the mobility of and in language.

Obviously, Butler's conception of catachresis is primarily rhetorical, not really poetic or, as Kasey (and Anne Boyer) are using it, syntactic, nor is it even, as the standard definitions explain-- metaphorical "abuse." Yet, as a figure of speech/language, catachresis performs a relation to the social and political subject (in public language), which is, I think, a crucial move that a merely "poetic" sense of the term might miss. I suppose my "merely poetic" is unfairly minimizing the significant issue of referentiality and poetic meaning. But I'd like to think that an examination of figures of speech and representability in rhetorical terms can and should be placed alongside poetic descriptions that highlight Jakobson's "message for its own sake," perhaps providing a bridge across critical and discursive gaps. I suppose what I'm trying to say is something like: the separation between the rhetorical and the poetic as methods--as modes of analysis and critical discourses that analyze language and forms in the world--should not be, and cannot be, so strictly separated.

This idea that rhetorical and poetic analysis occupy a blurry boundary resonates, I think, with Butler's argument that the separation of the public/private or the policing of the universal as always and only a public, heteronormative, transparent, rationalized domain that must exclude the private, irrational, particular "other" is ultimately undone by the complexity and mutability of figurative language. As Butler suggests, Antigone "figures the threshold between the public and kinship relations, and her unassimilable act productively haunts the margins within the Law." Catachresis--as an "active trace"--haunts the public domain and its "hasty foreclosures." In a way, Butler is asking, or, rather, I'm prompted to ask by way of thinking through Butler: "where does catachresis take place--what form does it take, what space(s) does it occupy?-- if in some crucial way it depends on the subject who speaks it? Where are "the margins within" located and what are the ways in which we come to know who occupies them ?

Butler on Hegel and the law:

"Hegel has clearly identified the law for which Antigone speaks as the unwritten law of the ancient gods, one that appears only by way of an active trace.... A law for which no origin can be found, a law whose trace can take no form, whose authority is not directly communicable through written language. If it is communicable, this law would emerge through speech, but a speech that cannot be spoken from script and, so, certainly not the script of a play.... Thus the figure of this other law calls into question the literalism of the play, Antigone: no words in this play will give us this law, no words in this play will recite the strictures of this law.

"Does [Antigone], as Lacan suggests, 'push to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such'? And is her desire merely to persist in criminality to the point of death? Is Lacan right that 'Antigone chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such' or does this criminality assert an unconscious right, marking a legality prior to codification on which the symbolic in its hasty foreclosures must founder, establishing the question of whether there might be new grounds for communicability and for life?" {55 Butler}.

And, further on: "The encrypted word that carries an irrecoverable history, a history that, by virtue of its irrecoverability and its enigmatic afterlife in words, bears a force whose origin and end cannot fully be determined."

Notice that the "encrypted word" and Antigone's encryption or living burial are conflated here in order to suggest that Antigone's future, the future of the play entitled Antigone-- and her "enigmatic afterlife" as a subject-- is uncertain.

And, finally, i want to remember how figuration is so crucial to all this. What do we mean exactly, by a subject that "figures" and "figurative language"? Is figuration an act?

Ilya Prigogine

2007-09-06T10:29:00.001-07:00

Science, time, art, culture, determinism, chance, hope.

from Pound's Canto LXXXI

2007-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

But to have done instead of not doing
              This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
         To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
this is not vanity.
    Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Steve Reich on WCW's "The Desert Music"

2007-09-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

From Perfect Sound Forever. The influence of Williams on Reich is new info to me. I'm intrigued.

"PSF: Did you also have the idea that you wanted to explore the semantics of what was being said?

In those days, I was very interested in American poetry. My interest in William Carlos Williams which surfaced in "Desert Music" was something that goes back to when I was 16. Reading Williams led to reading a lot of younger American poets like Robert Creely and Charles Olson who were very influenced by Williams. Williams himself was influenced by American speech rhythms. The difficulty that I had as a student setting Williams was that I felt that I had set him like you would set an insect in amber. You'd set it alright but he's dead as a doornail. After I discovered all the constantly changing meters in "Tehillim" I thought 'hey, here's a way of dealing with the flexible rhythms in Williams' poetry in "The Desert Music."'

But the tape pieces, it seemed to me, were a way of taking Dr. Williams' advice. Here's American speech rhythm, particularly in the case of the black Pentacostal preacher and later in the black kid who was arrested for murder, then presenting it just as it is and letting the actual rhythm and cadence of the voice form the music.

PSF: So you were also studying the musical tone of their speech?

Yes, absolutely. If you listen to a black preacher, sometimes it's hard to say whether they're singing or speaking. They're exactly in the cusp between speech and song. It's a very mannered kind of speaking. It's almost chanting. So it was perfect for this kind of tape manipulation. Later, when I did "Come Out," to get that one little phrase 'come to out to show them,' I went through ten hours of tapes- boys, police, mothers, everyone you could imagine. This one phrase seemed emblematic. The speech-melody is everything. It then generates all kinds of variations upon itself melodically and on the meaning of the words."

Read the whole thing here

AMM... MEV...OHM...Ah...

2007-09-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

Cool music-y things:

The electronic improvisational ensemble MEV's blog.

Alvins Curran's (of MEV) website with interesting interviews, essays scores, etc. All the writings are of special interest not just for their musical knowledge or historical contexts, but because of the ways in which they show a musician's interaction with language. In other words, Curran is an interesting writer. For example Curran's short "Biography of Fredric Rzewski":

"Socrates buttonholed Rzewski in the Harvard yard and bluntly asked "Rzewski, why are you so contemporary?" Cage, appearing indignantly from behind a resonant mushroom, objected, "but Socrates, that's my line from the Norton Lecture IV." And Socrates, removing his dark glasses and thoughtfully putting his alto sax on a marble bench, returned: "dear sir, chance operations are only part of this existential mesostic, besides Rzewski's my main man." Then Rzewski, convulsed but elated by this cabal of "Pesci d'Aprile" and with a digital segue faster than MTV, pulled his right hand from under his left armpit and with it the crumpled score of his new opera Das Kapital and flung it - as if Discobolus whirling a frisbee - into the Charles River. When Zeus and Thoreau, both witnesses to this act, swooped down like a pair of mating osprey to grab the sopping score, they braked and split, when they saw the fisherman Martin Buber calmly humming a talmudic air as he reeled in this now fully baptized catch, thinking he'd caught a big carp. Whether this led to his famous book "Oy or Thou" we will never know but the wet opera and some years later the entire archive of the legendary roman legion MEV was tossed down the incinerator shoot in Rzewski's Washington Heights apartment building. A radical proceedure for drying damp music but nonetheless one which quickly reduced the entropy factor by 100% compared to having to perform or listen it. Some have described Rzewski's life as a kind of last month's Time magazine in a hospital emergency room, and others as a page from Plato's Parmenide - both equally incomprehensible and both equally promising a comprehensive understanding of all things. The origins are obscure (Rzewski himself having spent much of his life wondering where he came from) but Slavic scholars claim the word Rzewski refers to a protomusical form of improvisation practiced by pregnant women in regions of the Carpathian Mountains while the Ukranian school found that Rzewski is the Kabbalistic spelling for a secret group of Medieval anarchists who invented the Yiddish language. In any case all agree the the word means peace and trouble, often at the same time. Now to the facts. In l969 Steve ben-Israel was leaving on a special Living Theater mission for Cuba to encourage the Cigar industry there to return to rolling their own; before he left he gave Rzewski a piece of plate glass in the shape of a piano which Frederic (as he was known to his friends) applied a contact mike to and immediately taught himself to play. It was here, that Rzewski heard "music" for the first time, because he was making it as if for the first time and in those unifed times that meant for both him and everyone else. Hence, MUSIC was born in a dank, smelly cavernous old foundery in Transtiberium (now known as the Trastevere quartier of old Rome). This was exactly 31 years after Rzewski himself was born in Westfield Mass. slightly to the southeast of his father's Pharmacy. His childhood was aided by normal polish-american food, the radio and a desire to remake the world from scratch, to do this he helped his father fly to work gathered mushrooms, with his brothers and sisters and sat at the family piano thinking what a strange and mysterious sound was that of the word Chopin (Show Pan) - to be sure, just another polish-american composer like himself, like he would become."

From the music site Furious or Perfect Sound Forever an overview of the compilation "OHM- The Early Gurus of Electronic Music," which has treasure trove of extra writings and interviews not included in the original 3cd set.

And... holy crap! the image above is the album cover for the ensemble --Gruppo di Improvvozasione Nuova Consonanza's album "Nuova Consonanza," which included Ennio Morricone and Fredric Rzewski, among others.

Rad...

"Reading Arendt in Caracas"

2007-08-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'll admit I probably should be more suspicious of Hugo Chavez than am. It's just so rare to hear a politican even mention let alone advocate against poverty and for socialized anything these days it's difficult not to forgive him his, um, cult of personality, machismo characteristics. "Anti-chavistas" are even more deserving of suspicion, in my estimation. So when I came across this article by Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, in The Nation, I was uncertain what to expect. The clash would be, to my mind, that liberalist admiration/appropriation for Arendt's political philosophy-- in Venezualan politics-- would make me sad in that it would force me to acknowledge, as it made present--an unresolvable conflict between my post-Marxist leanings and my admiration for Arendt's philosophy.

Actually, the essay is a pretty good balancing act, which of course could be just another way of perpetuating a false objectivity--"fair and balanced"-- in the service of cowardice, but I also think Young-Bruehl is trying to see "both sides" in a way that would make Arendt proud.

I found this anecdote to be amusing/illuminating: "On the day of my arrival at Simon Bolivar University, El Presidente discoursed on TV for an interminable half-hour on Antonio Gramsci before turning to a mixture of grandiose self-reference and policy wonkese."

Check out how that "interminable half-hour" is a little slap for American audiences and politicians. And she manages to criticize Chavez too with the "grandiose self reference." Nice.

But I do have to say-- can you imagine George Bush, or, fuck, Hillary Clinton even mentioning Antonio Gramsci? I'd take grandiose self-refernece for a dollop of Gramsci any day.

Well, maybe...

What Young-Bruehl manages to suggest is that Arendt's vision of--and insistence on-- the political realm is broader than any sense we now have of sclerotic two-party democracies, which merely serve to uphold (and cover over) economic injustices. At least the way I read Young-Bruehl, there's a possibility that the folks that brought her to Caracas (the anti-chavista , pro-Arendt factions) didn't get the response (or the support) from an Arendtian that they expected. But then, neither did the pro-chavistas.

I love it when everyone walks away partly unsatisfied.

The Lord of the Rings (of Boredom)

2007-08-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

I tried to watch Lord of The Rings the other night since it was on cable and I never managed to see it in theaters. I really really tried......it was just impossible to sit through. I did find this lass to be very yummy, tho (no idea who the actress or the character is).

An Academic Travesty

2007-08-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

I''m both glad and horrified that I happened to come across Mark Scroggins's blog post on Norman Finkelstein's tenure denial. I wasn't familar with either the tenure issue or Finkelstein's scholarly work. (Well, at least not *that* Norman Finkelstein , as Scroggins mentions, tho I'm a fan of the *other* Finkelstein.) DePaul Finkelstein's work, as far as I can tell, is so in line with things I've been thinking about/drawn towards I'm a bit shocked--in a good way. I'm going to leave the tenure issue aside. For now, I simply want to post an excerpt from Finkelstein's memorial article on Raul Hilberg in order to point out (really, to remember for myself) two issues he mentions which have become very important to my sense of how one thinks of the Holocaust: 1) the concept of the assembly-line operation that set in motion the destruction of the Jews was developed by Hilberg and 2) the stark, careful (scholarly?) language Hilberg used to describe his subject contributes to the intensity of its meaning at the same time that it points to its banal facticity, and this to my mind aligns with Reznikoff's "ethics" of representation which works as a method by blurring the line between historiography and poetics:

"Hilberg's reputation for mastery of the primary sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being, she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his brain. The magnitude of Hilberg's achievement is hard to appreciate today because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all subsequent scholarship.

Stylistically Hilberg's study might be said to be the opposite of current Holocaust fare: short on adjectives and adverbs such that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from professional discipline his dry-as-dust rendering was perhaps also meant to capture the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic - dare I say banal? - process through which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths

Lightning Bolt - The Power Of Salad And Milkshakes

2007-08-24T10:36:00.001-07:00

I can't believe this whole doc is on Youtube. How awesome!

Wolf Eyes at Analog Shock

2007-08-24T10:26:00.001-07:00

Ah, the good ole' days.... and Nate w/ short hair.

Required reading

2007-08-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Part 1 of two fantastic posts from Ghost in the Wire on Baudrillard and Heidegger. My only beef being the idea that the Lacanian "Real" is somehow equatable or can merely be translated as "reality. That seems not at all right, or at least needs more explication. But whatever, it's a very clarifying read.

Queer Arts

2007-08-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

The David Wojnarowicz page at Queer-arts.org is great.

And let us not forget Felix Gonzalez-Torres...
At one time I had some of these blue candies--taken from a pile at the Corcoran in DC (I believe), along with a few big sheets of white paper with gold lettering. Unfortunately, I ate the candy and somehow lost the sheets of paper, which I had intended on framing and hanging in my house. I suppose that's all as it should be; I just wish I could remember what they said.

Sophie Calle / French Pavilion / 52nd Venice Biennale 2007

2007-08-23T11:41:00.001-07:00

I Heart Sophie Calle

"Poetry and Contingency"

2007-08-22T17:52:00.000-07:00

From and essay by Michael Palmer:

"Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This is not the place to inquire whether this was essentially a mistake; all I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It would not have been so bad if this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty - namely as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,” said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without interest.” Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine “spectator” and artist - Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?"

Read the rest...

Jacques Tati - PLAYTIME

2007-08-21T14:03:00.001-07:00

A favorite scene from a favorite movie.

Medieval Memoria

2007-08-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

I feel like if I go far enough into theories of memory I will come out on some other shore having truly understood something. But there's no end to memory....

Despite the title of this post, I can't claim any knowledge of medieval memory. But as I was reading Mary Carruthers's and Frances Yates's selections in Theories of Memory: A Reader (eds. Michael Rossignton and Anne Whitehead) I found an interesting link to my argument (or, more like, a more coherent and informed sense of some feeble idea I've been struggling to articulate) on Reznikoff's long poem Holocaust and the issue of memory. The introduction to Carruthers explains: "The early medieval Memoria informed a conception of reading as 'tropological'; this is reading which turns 'the text onto and into one's self'. Originality and imagination are of less value than a good memory, which enables a reader to internalise another's work. The reader has to 'digest' what they are reading, placing it so securely in their memory that they effectively become its 'new author'. Whereas we consider such assimilation unethical, an example of 'plagiarism' or the theft of intellectual property, in the monasteries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was conceived rather as an ethical dialogue between memories, the sharing and preservation of communal wisdom" (23).

It would be interesting to see the ways in which 'tropological memory' plays out in Reznikoff, (something which I will (or hope to) explore further in a bit) especially as it might be seen as both a device that constructed the work and as a reading practice that brings the experience of the text into proximity. What I find interesting in terms of the idea of proximity is that there's a sense when one reads Holocaust that it is too close--it gets under ones skin in a way that precludes, in fact, making it ones own. Yet I think, for Reznikoff, his approach to the archival works he was condensing, selecting, transforming, entailed a process or method that allowed him to keep memory in proper proximity, while at the same time conveying to the reader its affective and cognitive resonance. This all connects in my mind to the phenomenological approach of Paul Ricoeur in his text Memory, History, Forgetting, where the "duty of memory" approaches its most significant ethical task, i.e., justice. For Ricoeur, the question of the proper use of memory is directly related to its necessary application in the field of justice, for, despite all of the uses and abuses it gives rise to, it is in the field or arena of justice that the individual memory transforms itself into a collective task, or, more precisely, a task performed for the sake of both the individual and the collective. [Of course, mention of the term 'use and abuse' reminds one of Nietzsche's essay "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," which Ricoeur does mention, but since I don't have the text here with me I can't accurately describe the significance of Nietzsche's essay on Ricoeur's analysis of the abuses of memory as they pertain to the duty of memory and justice. More on that later as well.]

The issue of distance and proximity in relation to a traumatic text, a text which may, either during its construction (for the author), or as a finished product, (for the reader) be experienced as at least somewhat traumatizing seems to require what we might call a tropological method' or approach. This method would 'digest' its subject carefully, selectively, 'ruminating' for neither too long nor for too short a time. Yet there seems to be a difficulty here in terms of balance. The issue of 'managing' and 'organizing' the relation between self and other in terms of this tropological approach seems to mean that 'turning the text into oneself', i.e., memorizing a text until it 'becomes' a part of one's own psyche and memory would 'subectivize' the text into oblivion. Perhaps for the medievalist, since this incorporation was managed through certain techniques, this 'taking into oneself'' is a form of transformation whose goal is a kind of strict accuracy. For instance, the medieval Quintillian recommended re-reading, copying out, annotation and recitation, which were all thought of as proceses of rumination and digestion but whose intention or goal is a level of accurcy and fedility to the text. This is, in effect a kind of incorporation (the Host as the body of Christ, trans-substantiation, etc) which might more accurately be said to transform the reader into the text rather than the other way around. Or at least, one might say that there is a kinship or relation established with the text that, through proper mnemonic techniques, turns the text into a kind of 'second nature' for the reader or memorizer in such a way that the text's meaning and the readers's own moral understanding of the world now unconsciously inform one another.

This in turn points to the ways in which the tropological approach to texts is fundamentally a rhetorical exegesis that ascribes to them a moral dimension. That is the tropological method, as a proper form of incorporation (memorization) not only finds the moral dimension in an analysis of the text, it also implies that there is a moral dimension to the act of memorization itself. What I find intriguing about this "turn" is that there are two necessary components to this transformative incorporation as a moral or ethical act. What I'll call 1) a proper proximity, and, 2) forgetting, which is an inevitable component of this incorporation.

OK, more tomorrow. (Unless I forget!)

Quote for the day

2007-08-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

"Be free my friends. One for all and all for me, and me for you, and three for five, and six for a quarter" --Groucho Marx in "The Cocoanuts"

Dialogue

2007-08-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

St Francis: So I think: it's a failure to realize. How much more dangerous to remain in a "light-hearted" state of mind than to focus on negative possibilities.

The Buddha: A sick power struggle.

St Francis: What he doesn't know. A punishment by an outside that turns back around to bite him in the ass. Therefore there is guilt. And no outside.

The Buddha: Lack of guilt is a false innocence. A domesticity.

St Francis: Sacrifice. Demands. Denial. Coffee cups and soup spoons. Trips to the market. Walking in the city. Closed doors. Phone calls. Works of literature performed as abstract revenge, which paradoxically hold the inevitability of disaster in permanent abeyance.

The Buddha: A revenge fantasy. A lie. Fictional subjectivities collapse into one another's violent desires. But there is only one writer of fiction. Or rather, oneness expands and implodes into a multiplicity of fictions. The writer selves?

St Francis: There are 2 ways of looking at things: realistically and phantasmatically. Yet they are not opposed.

The Buddha: Like structure and non-structure?

St Francis: A structure of opposites, if it is composed of opposing structural possibilities, collapses into profusion. There can be more than one nothing. More than one mise-en-abyme.

The Buddha: OK, The Buddha and St Francis of Assisi face off. A small, stone lion guards over the showdown, obliquely. St Francis occupies one side of a miniaturized diptych-- gold-painted, weathered, medeival. "Lord make me an instrument of Thy Peace." The Buddha stares into the gap between, while the stooped, haloed Saint pronounces a permanent blessing over what looks to be a pile of rocks, but might actually be a gathering of small animals. A cloaked, flattened figure to his (no, the observer's) left looks on. Cloaked figure vs. carved stone lion. We always need, and thus create, observers for our own delusional scenarios.

St Francis: I, on the other hand, have always been envious of "creative types." I can't stand it when people turn their pain into art. I mean, who do they think they are?

The Buddha: Manipulation is the worst form of flattery. Aphorisms are confining.

St Francis: Even to himself?

The Buddha: Yes.

St Francis: I can never decide if generosity is selfish or not. But I am suspicious by nature, so I leave this open to doubt. If one is never sure of another's motives?

The Buddha: In my opinion, the good is outweighed by the bad. Of course, people often mistake this for pessimism, but it's really just an eternal theme, and, therefore, a doubt is an opening. If you understood me, you'd focus on my positive characteristics. So far, only one person has figured this out, though it proved to be too much of an effort.

St Francis: How many people feel their name doesn't suit them?

The Buddha: I don't want to "include history."

St Francis: The longer I sit here the more I can feel myself contract and expand. The ideals of surrealism have always attracted me more than the results and I have a hard time noticing tense shifts, so when I find myself in a pleasurable flow state, it's already too late.

The Buddha: The world is not that insufficient. Recalcitrants. Cats. Ashtray. Words are not objects; they're barely even words.

St Francis: I'm not trying to: include, erase, describe or depict. There's no hope for: understanding, resolution, or reasurance. Narrative has never been my strong suit. I do not long for: beauty, clarity, or enlightement. "No hugging. No learning." I have never liked nor understood the word "joy." The issue of gender is something I often discuss and deploy as a weapon, but it's really a non-starter.

The Buddha: A mere stop-gap for lonelines? A tone of contention? I see the uselessness. The thought of licking his ass turns me on. I rarely. Delight. Dysmorphia.

St Francis: The lower the object the higher I feel, that's why we called it "The Tundra."

The Buddha: Narrative vs. Prose?

St Francis: So I turned it up and drove fast, holding my breath down the long, endless road that ran alongside a pasture of stone and iron, all the while staring straight ahead and gripping the wheel, and at the same time noticing, or rather feeling, a peripheral presence, until it all fused into one.

I want to go to Wendover

2007-07-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

From the Center for Land Use Interpretation. (The writing her sounds a bit like Robert Smithson's. Go figure.):

"Wendover is the name of a small town on the edge of the mountains and the salt flats. It is located at the point where the Basin and Range of Nevada spill into the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. In appearance, it resembles the Arctic: a remote place of barren rock and snow-white alkali. Wendover was established because it was out of the way, a place where people wouldn't want to live. Though there was a small community to service the railroad established at Wendover early on, the first major modern settlement was an airbase, built at the beginning of World War II to train bomber crews (including the crew of the Enola Gay). Through the 1940's and 50's, the land around Wendover was bombed, strafed, and dusted with chemical and biological agents.

"Today, though the region is remote, it is intensely industrialized. Military operations continue in the 3 million surrounding acres of restricted-access lands. Large-scale industries remove salt, and process minerals from the flats, and copper and gold are extracted from giant pits in the mountains. Hazardous waste facilities and obsolete chemical weapons have found refuge in the remote, nearly uninhabitable landscape.

"In Wendover itself, an interstate highway passes through town, making Wendover a pit stop for travelers from San Francisco to New York City, and points in between. The town is bisected by the state line creating two distinct halves: The gambling boom town of Nevada's Wendover, and the stagnated Utah half, dominated by the cluttered remains of the Airbase, which was abandoned by the military in 1977.

It is at this former airbase where the Center for Land Use Interpretation has established the Wendover Residence Program and this segment of the American Land Museum.

New favorite blog

2007-07-19T13:47:00.001-07:00

by my new favorite academic: Rei Terada.

diagnosis of the avant garde?

2007-07-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

"People decide that art is either dead or immortal, but no one wants to admit that it might be a little sick."

Read more here.

What a girl wants

2007-07-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

1. fresh garden tomatoes, sprinkled with sea salt and olive oil

2. a trip to the zoo

3. a new bottle of perfume...either Route du Thé (from Barneys) or Fracas by Robert Piguet

4. oral sex

A Favorite Poem

2007-06-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Pattern

As soon as
I speak, I
speaks. It

wants to
be free but
impassive lies

in the direction
of its
words. let

X equal X, X
also
equals X. I

speak to
hear myself
speak? I

had not thought
that some-
thing had such

undone. It
was an idea
of mine.

--Robert Creeley

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA detroit 2004

2007-05-10T00:31:00.001-07:00

OK, just found out To Live and Shave in LA are playing this Thursday at the Mocad. Their first time through since 2004 when I saw them at Detroit Art Space. (Thus, the youtube video.) I think they'll be playing w/o the killer lineup of that set--sans Mark Morgan, Don Fleming, and Andrew WK. I was so blown away by them at that gig I'm afraid of the letdown this time around. Nothin's ever as good the second go-round. Plus, I tend to think of them so differently after getting to know Mark, whereas at that show, I hadn't yet met Mark, tho I had had a few very fun encounters with Rat Bastard when the Laundryroom Squelchers stayed at my house. Crazy! Hearing Mark discuss Tom and touring with that group was very amusing, but there's a way in which not knowing what the fuck I was seeing and hearing that first time will, I think, be diluted by my supposed "knowledge." I don't mean to suggest that I have any real insight into this rag-tag "band," I just mean that I am in love with experiences of coming across something that blows you away with its shear "what the fuck?"ness. I recall feeling absolutely exuberant, joyous after that DAS show. It was a really quite brilliant art/love fest. And so I wonder if, minus that lineup and considering the sense that I know--to a *certain* extent--what to expect...will it be a letdown? I'll let ya know...

A tidbit on Reznikoff and Objectivism

2007-05-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

from LS Dembo's The Monological Jew:

"Reznikoff, for instance, cites a Chinese text of the eleventh century in which it is argued that "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise abvout the thing and reticent about the feeling." This, Reznikoff tells us, was a very accurate expression of what the Objectivists were trying to do. Later he elaborated on the term, at the same time describing the poetics of Testimony, a two-volume survey of the everyday cruelties of American Life: by "objectivist I suppose a writer may be meant who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject matter" (117).

Right up my philosophical, interdisciplinary alley

2007-05-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

From Urbanomic: Philosophical Research and Development:

URBANOMIC proposes to pursue fundamental research and development in logical ontological and abstract matters, outside any institutional framework, with no thematic disciplinary or methodological constraints.
We seek to support a renewal of philosophy through a vigorous repudiation of its insidious contemporary enemies. Firstly, a theorism which reaches from magazine columns to the exalted heights of 'culturally-engaged' academia, the two being distinguished only by the level of indulgence afforded to the authors' interminable interpretative speculation (magazine readers at least having the sincerity of their attention spans). Secondly the fatal overspecialisation and delimitation of philosophy in its academic setting.
Certainly the sphere of popular culture acts as the unconstrained experimental testing ground for deterritorialised symbolic discourses and new sensations. Equally - despite the depredations of the imperatives of business and management - the university is not yet entirely stripped of its ability to provide, under cover of its nominal traditional purposes, a support for independent thought. However in general in the latter, the productive capacity of abstract thought finds itself asphyxiated by supposed disciplinary self-sufficiency, reinforced by the socialisation apparatus of academic propriety. Whereas in the former a superficial relation of 'thought-provoking' relevance demands the novel application of generalised 'theories' to popular topics, destining thought to become exactly as reactive and inconsequential as its 'objects'.
We propose that philosophy can indeed break away from these malign attractors and reclaim a certain autonomy of purpose, but that the potency required for this escape can only be generated by philosophy's maintaining porous boundaries with other disciplines: art, music, science, mathematics...

Not in a relation of application, where philosophy would theorise external 'subjects' by employing its historical resources; but by enriching and expanding these latter through the rigorous and selective analysis and interrogation of local ontologies and vernacular logics.
Given that we oppose equally the wholesale appropriation of abstract thought by the allied postmodern pseudo-theorisms of therapy, capitalist apologetics and management 'science', why do we borrow a trope from industry to describe our activity? By 'Research and Development' we mean to affirm that we do not believe that philosophy in the present must necessarily limit itself to a mere exegetical and scholarly status. Philosophy - as methodical investigation into abstract matter(s) - enhances its pertinence, and highlights its problematic relation to the sciences, by free recourse to abstract-empirical experimentation, supported by suitable technologies. Philosophy would thus conduct materialised 'thought experiments' outside of the methodological presuppositions which circumscribe scientific disciplines. Even if we mean to problematise and question the nature of such an experimental practice, we do not propose to postpone experimentation indefinitely in lieu of supposedly grounding principles, but rather, in addition to ongoing theoretical work, to conduct open-ended experiments the form of whose outcome is not presupposed (amongst which we count the journal COLLAPSE and the URBANOMIC project itself).
However soberly and prudently it may be necessary to proceed, the involuntary passion for thought that is philosophy is always delirious in so far as at every turn it flees from the forces that prescribe (whether in the name of history or contemporaneity, of personal or institutional authenticity, of romantic passion or academic hard-labour) the path it must take.
____

and to subscribe to their journal publication Collapse

Turkey Vulture?

2007-04-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

I swear, I saw a turkey vulture outside our office window yesterday. Luckily, a fellow grad student, Jill, was in her office next door and she confirmed the sighting, otherwise I'm sure everyone would claim I mistook a lousy pigeon for a freaking vulture! But this thing flapped out of the sky and initially perched atop one of the gargoyle-like heads that jut out above the 11th floor windows, until he eventually moved to one of the windowsills a few floors up. Can you imagine gazing out your office window thinking you're about to take in the pleasant, calming scene of a distant city skyline spread before you and instead coming face to face with a vulture? Awesome!

The Holocaust and the Book

2007-04-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

Just came across the following review on Jstor and find it *very* intriguing...

The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Edited by Jonathan Rose. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 314 pp. $39.95. ISBN 1-55849-253-4.
This book of fifteen essays, with an introduction by Jonathan Rose, is a testimonial to the importance of the written word in the preservation of a culture and the necessity to record events under even the most harrowing conditions. For readers of Libraries & Culture who are already well informed about libraries and archives in times of war and revolution, The Holocaust and the Book can only deepen their appreciation of the written word and the often heroic efforts involved in its safekeeping.
Rose notes in his introduction that "the story of the Six Million is also the story of the One Hundred Million," the estimated number of books destroyed by the Nazis in Europe over a twelve-year period (1). Beginning with the book burnings in 1933, the essays describe the relentless destruction of Jewish books in Germany, Rome, Salonika, the U.S.S.R., the Netherlands, Poland, Vilna, and Bosnia, presenting a variety of approaches to the topic.
Part 1, "Destruction and Preservation," contains five essays: "The Nazi Attack on 'Un-German' Literature, 1933-1945" by Leonidas E. Hill; "Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto under the Nazi Occupation" by Stanislao G. Pugliese (see an article on the same topic in L&C 34, no. 3 [summer 1999]); "The Confiscation of Jewish Books in Salonika in the Holocaust" by Yitzchak Kerem; "Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna" by David E. Fishman; and "'The Jewish Question' and Censorship in the U.S.S.R." by Arlen Viktorivich Blium. While the events chronicled in these essays, notably, the Nazi book burnings, have been described before, the authors have dealt with their topics in a fresh way that should appeal to even seasoned historians.
Part 2, "Culture and Resistance," offers three fascinating essays on somewhat lesser known aspects of the topic. "The Secret Voice: Clandestine Fine Printing in the Netherlands, 1940-1945" by Sigrid Pohl Perry surveys several of the major clandestine presses operating during the period and includes some interesting photos. "Reading and Writing during the Holocaust as Described in Yisker Books" by Rosemary Horowitz describes the "memorial" books using source materials written during the war, prepared by immigrant associations to commemorate their communities. The Yisker books drew from diaries, illegal publications, letters, and records kept by Jews in the ghettos, the camps, and in hiding and offer much information about Eastern European Jewish life. The last essay, "Polish Books in Exile: Cultural Booty across Two Continents, through Two Wars" by Sem C. Sutter concerns the evacuation of priceless books and manuscripts that traveled from Poland to France to Quebec and finally back to Poland in 1959.
The title of part 3, "The Reader in the Holocaust: Documents," does not prepare us for the often moving accounts found in the four essays. Dina Abramowicz [End Page 273] writes on the daily difficulties of ghetto life in her essay, "The Library in the Vilna Ghetto," in which the presence of a library represented a rare and peaceful space for reading and reflection; the "Annual Report of the Vilna Ghetto Library, 1941-l942" is included. The second essay, "Library and Reading Room in the Vilna Ghetto, Strashun Street 6," by Herman Kruk, also deals with the matter of readership in the ghetto library. The next essay, "When the Printed Word Celebrates the Human Spirit," was written by Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann, a survivor of Theresienstadt who briefly describes her experience in the camp and the lack of time to read much of anything. Annette Biemond Peck closes the section with her brief essay, "Crying for Freedom: The Written Word as I Experienced It during World War II," about her wartime reading in Amsterdam.
Part 4, "Past and Present," begins with an interesting and provocative essay by John Rodden entitled "Zarathustra as Educator? The Nietzsche Archive in German History." This example of reception history, and the longest essay in the book, deals with the issue of cultural history in Germany, perhaps, as the author states, "a land with too much history" (251). He begins his essay in 1991 in Weimar, home of the Nietzsche Archive, and ranges back through Nietzsche's lifetime and his works before moving on to World War II and the Holocaust and finally to 1991 where he began—a thought-provoking journey. This essay is followed by Andras Riedlmayer's "Convivencia under Fire: Genocide and Book Burning in Bosnia," which reminds us that, even in the 1990s, books as cultural symbols continued to be destroyed. The essay briefly describes the history of book destruction in Bosnia over the last six centuries.
Finally, part 5 provides a useful bibliographic survey, "Jewish Print Culture and the Holocaust" by Joy A. Kingsolver and Andrew B. Wertheimer. It is divided into nine sections: an introduction, "Libraries and Archives," "Publishing," "Alfred Rosenberg and the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg," "Jewish Cultural Reconstruction," "Documentation Centers and Archival Resources," "Holocaust Denial and Libraries," "Yisker Bikher," and "Additional Topics." This bibliographic essay is followed by "Notes on Contributors" but, unfortunately, not by an index. However, each of the essays is well documented with notes and, in some cases, bibliographies (in addition to the inclusive bibliographic essay at the end of the book). The use of judiciously selected photos, many courtesy of the National Archives, USHMM Photo Archives, serves to graphically evoke the period under consideration.
While The Holocaust and the Book is an examination of a dark period in history, it is as well a tribute to those who worked to preserve their written heritage throughout and beyond that period. The editor is to be commended for presenting a well-organized and very readable volume of diverse essays, only some of which grew out of the 1996 Drew University conference on "The Holocaust and the Book."

Who Knew?

2007-04-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

Man, the Holocaust is depressing... writing a paper about Reznikoff's Holocaust is really causing me to rethink my focus on trauma and representation. I mean, its super interesting, but I feel like I'm in a fog all day after working on it. I know this sounds fairly flippant but really, I'm starting to think I should focus my future eforts on works a little less dark. I've had enough pain and sadness in my life, why do I need to emerse myself in it as a career? Yet, I find I'm continually drawn to issues of historical trauma, like it's somehow my responsibilty to face them, work on/through them. I've always felt (well, since i can remember) that I was sort of the memory depositor for my family. Like I have been assigned the task of carrying the lost memories of my family (most of whom are dead now), and this sense of responsibility has grown to include the choices and issues I've been focusing on in my academic work. There's this feeling I have that I can't do anything but work to redeem the past--and as grandiose as that may sound, it's not meant to. I don't mean the Past, I mean, like Reznikoff, all the little moments that make up a person's life, all their memories, are what must be--but can never be--preserved. I now have memories that were once my mother's memories--of dresses she wore, boys she dated, fights she had--these memories that filled in my sense of who she was, what she cared about; and I have memories of my grandmother's memories--her passage to America from what was then Autria-Hungary, her struggle to "make it" in Detroit, her shame at her reading disability as a young girl, for which she was beaten and humiliated, since that was, of course, not known in the early 1900's as what we now know to be dyslexia. I feel responsible to and for these memories of others, and I feel haunted and burdened by them at the same time. In some major and terrible way they are what comprises my own sense of self; I don't know why I have always been drawn to other's memories, perhaps because they were the way I found to connect as a child who came into a family that was crumbling when I entered it--the past was what was most alive and enjoyable, it made my relatives happy to talk about the past...well, for the most part. Ah, this isn't helping.....

Suicide - Ghost Rider

2007-03-30T12:38:00.001-07:00

One of the best bands of alltime.

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag

2007-03-30T12:34:00.001-07:00

More for Yes...

Brigitte Bardot:

2007-03-30T12:14:00.001-07:00

Yes!

Archive and memory

2007-03-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

This is pretty much a "note to self" post.

Derrida notes a distinction, in terms of archiving and memory, between "anamnesis," "mneme" and "hypomnema." Anamnesis is, acording to the OED: "a. The recalling of things past; recollection, reminiscence. b. Liturgiol. That part of the Eucharistic canon in which the sacrifice of Christ is recalled and pleaded." The definition of mneme, on the other hand, is: "The capacity which a substance or organism possesses for retaining after-effects of experience or stimulation undergone by itself or its progenitors." And, finally, hypomnema is (not from the OED, from Wikipedia) a form of material or written memory, in other words, a "technology" of memory. Thus the "archive" is a technology of memory that is neither embodied nor voluntarily spontaneous and related to presence or speech, nor is it immaterial and abstract. It is, precisely, I think, a mediating or prosthetic function/extension that constitutes what can be remembered (re-membered as in put back together, constructed) in the first place. We can see the link here, from Derrida's work in Of Grammatology to Archive Fever. The archive is the "groundless ground."

from Mal d'Archive, Une Impresion Freudienne: "[T]he question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past, the question of a concept dealing with the past which already might either be at our disposal or not at out disposal, an archivable concept of the archive, but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow. Perhaps. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and like religion, like history, like science itself, this ties it to a very singular experience of the promise."

Yay!

Stereolab performing Emporer Tomato Ketchup

2007-02-19T23:42:00.005-08:00

Oh, I miss Mary Hansen.

Damon and Naomi I Dreamed of the Caucasus

2007-02-19T23:42:00.003-08:00

This is so nice. Made me happy.

Comets on Fire

2007-02-19T23:42:00.001-08:00