blurring the line....luv ya Lux....
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
I can't help but remember
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!
Thursday, January 01, 2009
New?
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.
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.
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....
"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.
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.
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!"Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness." --William James
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?
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.]
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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, June 09, 2008
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Sunday, April 06, 2008
urbanagri
Weisser & Vetter
things as they optimistic coalescing
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”
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”
2-3 bedrooms
56% property tax relief
F.A.R.M.
“Of course!”
“Ok”
“Everything I’ve got belongs to you”
Friday, April 04, 2008
Democracy in America
"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
--Alexis de Tocqueville
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Abu Ghraib
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.”
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Delaney/Obama
Interview with the always charming Samuel Delaney. Reminds me of the issues facing our next Prez!
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Prescience
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.
"[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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Obamanauts
A fascinating and informative piece in the new Republic detailing Obama's economic and foreign policy advisors.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Impatient
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.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Friday, December 21, 2007
The Good Ole Days/ Academic Dystopia
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.
"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.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Hearing Trumpet
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."
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
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.
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.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
The Politics of Performance/ I"I'm Not There"
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":
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":
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