The Lord of the Rings (of Boredom)

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

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

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

Wolf Eyes at Analog Shock

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

Required reading

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

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

I Heart Sophie Calle

"Poetry and Contingency"

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

A favorite scene from a favorite movie.

Medieval Memoria

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

"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

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

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

by my new favorite academic: Rei Terada.

diagnosis of the avant garde?

"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

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

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

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

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

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