| wood s lot january 16 - 31, 2007 | ||
 Oscar Gustav Rejlander
Feed My Mind The War Prayer Mark Twain United for Peace and Justice American Samizdat
Sources Some Blogs  Hotel du Nord |
 logging A Conversation with David Maisel
The Library is on Fire. These were the code words [during the German occupation of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste maquis of the French Resistance -- words that acquired a mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and set fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the position of René Char's group. The Frenchmen barely escaped with their lives. And the poet thought the fire was proof of the power of language to shape the world. "I believe in the magic and in the authority of words," he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed.The way in which wood and fire and books and words swap places in this singular event -- a supply drop in the middle of World War II -- indicates the strange [yet everyday] way one thing can become another -- passing from object (wood) into language (code) into substance (fire) again. And there are infinite permutations. Here is another: woods to paper to books to library -- the woods are a library. But conversely, can the library return to its source -- the forest? Can it imitate and become once again the properties from which it came? Under the trees' dense canopy, the living occupants of nests, hives, and holes are not a stable text -- their bodies join in sex, the cells deviate, and bodies collapse into one another, and once again, when an animal kills another; the archived text,[2] beginning and ending in paper, has no means to replicate these behaviors. Hence the library, unlike the forest, only makes record of mutation, copulation, and compost; it cannot also exist as that which it is made of.
Two strands of environmental philosophy run through the course of human history. The first holds that the natural state of the universe is one of infinite stability, with an unchanging earth anchoring the predictable revolutions of the sun, moon, and stars. Every scientific revolution that challenged this notion, from Copernicus’ heliocentricity to Hubble’s expanding universe, from Wegener’s continental drift to Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Lorenz’s macroscopic chaos, met with fierce resistance from religious, political, and even scientific hegemonies.Boston Review's new issue
Paul Auster should not exist. I say this not to mimic a sentence that might easily have been plucked from one of his own hall-of-mirrors fictions, but simply to note his singular position in contemporary American letters.(...)
They Are Still Rather Lovely
Joseph Jastrow and His Duck – Or Is It a Rabbit?
Bunnies, Ducks, and One Great DaneI wish I could say I came by my skepticism on my own, but I didn't. I wish I could even say someone came along and persuaded me into it, but no. A long-dead Dane extolling faith drove me away. He wanted nothing more than genuine religious belief on the part of his readers, and for his troubles he got from me a rejection of the whole idea. His soaring defense of faith may be the worst knife in the back faith has ever received. How Kierkegaard stole my faith. James Grimmelmann Faith is an optical illusion. Look at it one way and it's a fluffy bunny; look at it another and it's a duck with a murderous glint in its eye. But of course the duck and the bunny are one and the same, and so it is with faith. God is terrible, awful, unknowable. God is great, transcendental, wise beyond all human understanding. To enter into faith is to give up reason for something higher: That's what makes it faith, that's what justifies it, that's the whole point. The divine presence descends into the world, and where it alights, the old rules no longer apply. Too bad for those of us who like those rules, but if you're not prepared to give them up, well, you've got a lot of nerve, telling God what He can and can't demand.James Grimmelmann blogs at The Laboratorium
Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love—what we call libido—which in the earliest stages of development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego. But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning. Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk Matthew von Unwerth Reviewed at Dispatches from Zembla
Interview: Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger & Nazism [PDF] courtesy of Continental Philosophy
 Wolfgang Iser John Paul Riquelme The engaging complexity of Wolfgang Iser's work arises from many converging elements but primarily from his continuing attempts to identify and explore terra incognita that turns out always to be the terra infirma on which we tread. Like Seamus Heaney, when Iser digs with his pen he excavates territory that has no bottom. His writings consistently and insistently expose and describe doubled, antithetical aspects of cultural production as they contribute to a process of continual emergence. By evoking creativity's place in culture, Iser provides compelling evidence concerning the role of the aesthetic in human experience. Several crucial issues arise from Iser's commitment to our creative involvement with literature and with other elements of culture. They include especially the question of the political views that stand behind and within his theorizing and the question of his theory's relation to literary modernism as both a shaping source and an object of commentary. The two questions are not entirely separable, considering the frequent charge that the politics of literary modernism is reactionary. The democratizing aspects and implications of Iser's writings suggest that his aesthetic politics cannot easily be dismissed along with the modernist texts to which it responds.On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser New Literary History 31.1, Winter 2000 Project Muse - restricted access
The Act of Reading Interpretatio today is beginning to discover its own history - not only the limitations of its respective norms but also those factors that could not come to light as long as traditional norms held sway. The most important of these factors is without doubt the reader himself, the addressee of the text. So long as the focal point of interest was the author's intention, or the contemporary, psychological, social, or historical meaning of the text, or the way in which it was constructed, it scarcely seemed to occur to critics that the text could only have a meaning when it was read. Of course, this was something everyone took for granted, and yet we know surprisingly little of what we are taking for granted. One thing that is clear is that reading is the essential precondition for all processes of literary interpretation. As Walter Slatoff has observed in his book With Respect to Readers [1970]:The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology:One feels a little foolish having to begin by insisting that works of literature exist, in part, at least, in order to be read, that we do in fact read them, and that it is worth thinking about what happens when we do. Put so blatantly, such statements seem too obvious to be worth making, for after all, no one directly denies that readers and reading do actually exist; even those who have most insisted on the autonomy of literary works and the irrelevance of the readers' responses, themselves do read books and respond to them. . . . Equally obvious, perhaps, is the observation that works of literature are important and worthy of study essentially because they can be read and can engender responses in human beings. An Interview with Wolfgang Iser ...both Searle and Austin call fictions "parasitic," which implies that they are pseudo-real. Fiction veils itself by copying structures of reality. Austin and Searle presuppose reality as a given. Yet speech acts, as long as they are considered to be performatives, actually produce reality. If speech acts are able to produce realities, one could just as well say that fictions are not parasitic in relation to reality. Rather, by intervening into reality they also produce realities -- just as a lie produces realities.RIP Wolfgang Iser
From Iser to Turner and beyond:
Reader figures in narrative Various concepts of the reader have gained currency in recent literary criticism and theory. This fact is largely due to the re-evaluation of the role of the real reader. Reception theorists like H. R. Jauss stress that subjective reader responses are historically conditioned. By contrast, Wolfgang Iser focuses on the interaction between text and reader and discusses how readers become, as it were, co-producers of a literary work in that they integrate the elements and perspectives offered by a work of prose fiction. Poststructuralist critics, who, in the United States, are much indebted to the New Critical emphasis on text-internal ambiguities, on the other hand, privilege readers who produce different interpretations and keep the text open to new readings.
 Twenty-Six Words
Accent on Images: The Language of Illustrated Books
`Need is not quite belief': [PDF]
We make insecure people out of wisely impassive people. We make "writers" out of people with no ability to do anything else. We make "havoc" out of places of pristine, sublime and evocative stasis. We make perverts out of huggable, avuncular people. We make "crimes" out of situations that are unremarkable. We make colas out of chemicals (and commercials). We make women out of men, and men out of misprisions of women. We make grammars that are "correct" to deem other grammars "incorrect." We make mores, and if you don't stick by them, in order to save you some humiliation, we make "originality," and in special instances, we adopt the category" sui generis," in order to put you in there and leave it all fashionably, disarmingly inscrutable..
How many wars are there? What are they about? If the GWOT charade is followed, there are presumed to be some unknown number of wars grinding away, mostly unreported, both within a central Middle East theater and off in the far-flung periphery. Somehow, they all conform to the conjurer’s spell and fall into place within a constellation of events that have terrorism, not Great Power games, as their common denominator. But the presumption is questionable at best, and the true face of conflict is at odds with the illusion. Of the current identifiable shooting wars, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, few if any of them have terrorism at their root. Some can be classified as “civil wars,” where popular insurgent elements are attempting to seize state control. But the majority of current violent conflicts around the world are wars of national liberation, and their diverse protagonists can best be categorized as nations of the Fourth World.Fourth World Journal
 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe More information and links provided by Pierre Joris Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Introduction "There are classifications that are bad enough as classifications, but that have nonetheless dominated entire nations and epochs . . .": we will not be the first to note that this phrase, which opens Athenaeum fragment 55, appears to refer to that classification, more than to any other, which singles out the rubric of romanticism within the history and theory of literature. 1 The "mediocrity"-or the flimsiness-of this classification is certainly indisputable when it specifically applies to the initial and initiating moment of "romanticism," which the Germans, at least, unlike the French, take care to distinguish with the appellation "early romanticism" (Frühromantik).The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
I like to think  Richard Brautigan Yes, the Fish Music
It is impossible to get rid of a world without getting rid of the language that conceals and protects it, without laying bare its true nature. As the "social truth" of power is permanent falsification, language is its permanent guarantee and the Dictionary its universal reference. Every revolutionary praxis has felt the need for a new semantic field and for expressing a new truth; from the Encyclopédistes to the Polish intellectuals' critique of Stalinist "wooden language" in 1956, this demand has continually been asserted. Because language is the house of power, the refuge of its police violence. Any dialogue with power is violence, whether passively suffered or actively provoked. When power wants to avoid resorting to its material arms, it relies on language to guard the oppressive order. This collaboration is in fact the most natural expression of all power. 
other Big Bridge features in this issue The War Papersfrom
"Poetry and the Peace Movement: Useable Pasts, Multiple Futures" In the wake of the Vietnam War, citizens and poets alike tend to look with a jaundiced eye at those wild-eyed poets who descend from Parnassus to declaim about the politics of the day, to shout down the latest war, or to address the President—as if he had a Minister of Poetry. Who among us can't mobilize the troop of quotes regarding the dangers of mixing poetry and politics?: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (Yeats); "poetry makes nothing happen" (Auden); "no lyric has ever stopped a tank" (Heaney), etc. Vietnam War-era poetry, in particular, has been dismissed by critics as too easily categorized (Robert B. Shaw's "The Poetry of Protest"), ahistorical (Cary Nelson's Our Last First Poets), politically unviable (Paul Breslin's The Psycho-Political Muse), or not self-critical enough (Robert von Hallberg's American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980). Undoubtedly, some Vietnam-era anti-war poetry was self-righteous, rhetorically clumsy, and tonally arrogant. But these critiques miss the intricate dance that American war resistance poets have executed in the 20th century, negotiating between the claims of their art and the claims of their conscience, and between the two communities they court—the nation and the peace movement. (Further, these critiques—combined with the politics of mainstream poetry today—invite poets to a kind of post-avant, post-politics quietism that allows them to feel as if everything they write is political—thus evacuating any meaning to the term "politics.") Combined with the testimony and vision of soldier and veteran poets, the civilian war resister poets offer a critical and vital resource—both for the peace movement and for the nation. Crag Hill electricity is very democratic running close to the edge the flow of information mobility, perfect timing the enemy the only place Detroit could buy gas I dreamed of intruders, inside and out. My muffled shots woke my son. Something in the wind points to fall, more than a month away, though smudged by woodsmoke, forest fires scorching Montana. The air's filling with seeds. His birthday letters tell a story of one man's intense life as it collided—as it's still colliding—with another's. There will be no survivors
"Death on All Fronts" Kent Johnson Hi there, Madid, I'm an American poet, twentyish, early to mid-thirtyish, fortyish to seventyish, I've had poems on the Poets Against the War website, and in American Poetry Review and Chain, among other magazines, and I have a blog, and I really dig Arab music, and I read Adorno and Spivak, and I'm really progressive, I voted for Clinton and Gore, even though I know they bombed you a lot, too, sorry about that, and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium, which include anti-war poetry readings at the Lincoln Center and the Poetry Project, with appetizers and wine and New World Music and lots of pot. And because nothing is simple in this world, and because no one gets out unscathed, I'm going to just be completely candid with you: I'm going to box your ears with two big books of poems, one of them experimental and the other more plain speech-like, both of them hardbound and by leading academic presses, and I'm going to do it until your brain swells to the size of a basketball and you die like the fucking lion for real. You'll never make it to MI because that's the breaks; poetry is hard, and people go up in flames for lack of it everyday. By the time any investigation gets to you, your grandchildren will have been dead over one thousand years, and poetry will be inhabiting regions you can't even begin to imagine. Well, we did our best; sorry we couldn't have done better… I want you to take this self-righteous poem, soak it in this bedpan of crude oil, and shove it down your pleading, screaming throat.thanks to David-Baptiste Chirot
Tom Bissell In a little over a decade, nuclear arsenals have gone from a source of mass hysteria to shrugged-off constituents of a world secure in its insanity. The weapons have lost their status of marquee anxiety. The specter of being infected with smallpox or pneumonic plague (100 percent fatality rate if untreated by antibiotics one day after infection) now seems far more dreadful than the nanosecond death of a nuclear shockwave - at least in the cinema of the human mind. But then we all grew up with nuclear weapons; they are as familiar as grandpa. They are bullies, too, and as such somehow ludicrous, laughable. All one must do to be safe is avoid them. This is not difficult, since to avoid them simply means refusing to think about them, which is also easy because they are so familiar. Weaponized saritoxin and ricin (high lethality, no vaccine) are foreign, invisible, and above all they are new. We do not yet know what they want, or how to stay out of their way. Run!The Old Town Review Online Review of Culture and Politics:
The Invisible Enemy"In the open source world of bacteria, everyone is working for the resistance. Ramping up the immunity of any single organism, while dramatically increasing the size of the population most susceptible to infection, only helps the enemy. To an aspiring superbug, war is anything but hell." Steve Silberman Since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, more than 700 US soldiers have been infected or colonized with Acinetobacter baumannii. A significant number of additional cases have been found in the Canadian and British armed forces, and among wounded Iraqi civilians. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bacteria in US hospitals along the evacuation chain. Four were unlucky civilians who picked up the bug at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, while undergoing treatment for other life-threatening conditions. Another was a 63-year-old woman, also chronically ill, who shared a ward at Landstuhl with infected coalition troops.
...if you have absorbed directly into your little sugar charged neuro-system the bread and circus offerings of the Empire, some 100,000 shootings, stabbings, stranglings, abductions, robberies, murders, car wrecks, stalkings, war footage and combat scenes, not to mention high pressure sales for video games of war and mayhem, well, mama back there in the bedroom sleeping off a fifth of Jack Daniels may not be the worst problem you had as a developing child.(...)
 World Trade Center more at
Žižek!
How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.  Edward Abbey ...love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see.
"What sheep call the Rapture," so saith our Tutor, "that is the slaughterhouse."This saying, overheard last night in the Dumpster around 2 pm is a characteristically pointed and mysterious piece of the Tutor's textuality.
Strange Fruit: American Culture and the Remaking of Iraqi Males at Abu Ghraib [PDF]
Even trying to figure how to develop a sensible review of the book is a daunting challenge. Given the nature of this journal, I have read the essays with an aim to see what they add to our sense of archival representation. Indeed, this strategy seems to be compatible with the purpose of the publication, as the editors “propose that an archive be thought of as a site of imagination, creativity, and production, as well as of documenting preservation, a site that incorporates various sorts of assumptions about kinds of knowledge and what is knowable that are fundamental to the ways individuals and societies think about themselves, relive their pasts, and imagine their futures” (p. vii). Such matters have been starting to appear in the excursions into the nature of archival representation, and this massive volume seems like a good place with such concepts.
Interns, temporary agency workers, people on job creation schemes, and pseudo-freelances make up the vast reserve army of workers in precarious employment. For the majority, standards such as productivity or flexibility have become second nature. In this respect, they are the avant-garde of post-Fordism, constantly opening up new avenues of self-exploitation.
 Photography of the Unexpected and Neglected Architecture
Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with great solemnity and sapience. . . . I badly wanted to tell them some horrid stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman’s beard, made the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:‘O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet blood drops. . . .’But I hadn’t the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst out: ‘O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of Kings, etc.’ I’ve always wanted to do something like that and when I have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express train — my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson’s courage in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone’s envy tho’ we laugh at him for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad.
A Literary Satellite. Blanchot and the Revue Internationale
The Conquest of Space Man does not want to leave his own place. He says that technology is dangerous, that it detracts from our relationship with the world, that true civilizations are those of a stable nature, that the nomad is incapable of acquisition. Who is this man? It is each of us, at times we give in to lethargy. This man suffered a shock the day Gagarin became the first man in space. The event is now almost forgotten; but the experience will be repeated in other forms. In these cases we must pay heed to the man in the street, to the man with no fixed abode. He admired Gagarin, admired him for his courage, for the adventure, and even paid tribute to progress; but one such man gave the right explanation: it is extraordinary, we have left the earth. Herein lies, indeed, the true significance of the experience: man has freed himself from place. He has felt, at least for a moment, the sense of something decisive: far away - in an abstract distance of pure science - removed from the common condition symbolized by the force of gravity, there was a man, no longer in the sky, but in space, in a space which has no being or nature but is the pure and simple reality of a measurable (almost) void. Man, but a man with no horizon. A sacrilegious act.  The Book Epic slaughters, the fate of the planet, the closeness of calamity - Anselm Kiefer's desolate landscapes address the most crucial issues of our times.
A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject [PDF]
This issue, on Autonomous Spaces, begins the kind of inquiry we hope to see continue in this journal. How are activists, academics and artists crossing the historical boundaries of progressive politics, identities and theories? What are the common paths of groups, movements, communities, and peoples engaged in challenging and creating sustainable alternatives to state and corporate forms? What are the inequalities and forms of oppression that trouble these experiments? We are committed to publishing both academic and activist writing on these and other questions, as well as other forms of cultural production.
 Volkszählung Waggish has some large photos of Kiefer's lead library installation, "Volkszahlung"
Anselm Kiefer, The Seven Heavenly Palaces
Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Out of the ashes - exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's works
The light there is of a certain kind. In the mornings and evenings it is soft and pervasive, and the earth seems to absorb it, to become enlarged with light. About the noons there are edges and angles-and a brightness that is hard and thin like a glaze. There is something strange and powerful in it. When you look out across the land you believe at first that it is all one thing; there appears to be an awful sameness to it. But after a while you see that it is not one thing at all, but many things, all of which are subject to change in a moment. At times the air is thick and languid, and you imagine that the world has grown very old and tired. At other times the air is full of motion and commotion. Always a hard weather impends upon the plains. In advance of a storm the plains are a strange and beautiful thing to see, concentrated in random details, distances; there are slow, massive movements.There in the hollow of the hills I see,Water runs in planes on the earth, in ropes in the cuts of the banks; the wind lunges; lightning is constant on the cold, black hemisphere; and everything is visible, strangely visible. Oh Man-ka-ih!
 Twilight of the West
Looking for God’s eye I found only a socket—
The World In ChainsWar is an artificial process for accelerating that concentration of wealth in the hands of a small class which distinguishes the present unholy stage of political development. Some Aspects Of War And Trade John Mavrogordato 1917 The Massacre of Colleagues
 Mt. Fujiyama
Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the hard core. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we recognized, the family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts. (...)  Alexey Titarenko Alexey Titarenko at Artnet, Moscow House of Photography and Photographer.Ru
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies - January 2007What I bemoan is the aestheticization of photography, its having become one of the fine arts, the photographic image, by its technical essence, came from somewhere beyond, or before, aesthetics.In the mutual longing of the text and the image lingers a seductive unintelligibility and enigmaticalness. It is these qualities though which texts and images share the uncertain slippery slopes of contemporary theory ...(...)
 Saint Clément
“The most delicate of operations”:
Photography, Or The Writing Of Light
Song of the Andoumboulou: 48 Nathaniel Mackey Mackey's page at The Academy of American Poets
Trickster poetics: More than any other poet of my generation, the work of Nathaniel Mackey comes directly out of the projectivist poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan & Robert Creeley. From Olson & Duncan, and beyond them Pound & especially H.D., Mackey evolves a poetry that borrows deeply from mythology without becoming mushy. From Duncan, whose Passages and The Structure of Rime were long works that intertwined, never once separated out into books of their own, kept always commingled and in context, Mackey takes his own twisting together of “mu” – that title always in quotation marks a la Zukofsky’s “A” – and Song of the Andoumboulou. Indeed, the first section of Splay Anthem, Mackey’s 2006 National Book Award volume, is titled “Braid.” That image gets it exactly right.The ontogeny and phylogeny of Mackey's song of the Andoumboulou Matthew A. Lavery
The "Mired Sublime" of Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou
Phrenological Whitman On Antiphon Island
 The Homely Protestant Realism vs. Abstraction
...contemporary radicalism is not 'insufficiently dialectical'; rather, it is too dialectical. Dialectics are virtually everywhere (and not just on the Left), tacitly informing much of what we do and how we think, often unconsciously, and even (or perhaps particularly) for those who have never read Hegel or Marx. Contrary to its claims, it is dialectics that is insufficient to account for the utter multiplicity of movement and change. This daunting complexity of the world is not a cause for despair and inaction, however. Rather, it is the opposite: instead of being reduced down, our complex world should be valorized and exalted. We should critically re-examine our intellectual baggage in order to question some of the underlying assumptions of how we think and act politically.(...)
The Brain, within its Groove
 Dancing,
more from
"For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined..."  The Dead Can Still Dance
Yun-Fei Ji: moral vistas:
Folk Songs of the Flood
Yun-Fei Ji : Water That Floats the Boat Can Also Sink It
The Old One Hundred Names
Great news comes from the collective farm
When my father was dying that slow death that steals all language
At first I faltered too, fighting to learn his language, searching within myself (...)
Your language reverberates when you don’t speak, and I listen to each syllable of open sound,
We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language by which verbs that formerly designated satisfying actions are replaced by nouns that denote packages designed for passive consumption only: for example, "to learn" becomes "acquisition of credits." A profound change in individual and social self-images is here reflected. And the layman is not the only one who has difficulty in accurately describing what he experiences. The professional economist is unable to recognize the poverty his conventional instruments fail to uncover. Nevertheless, the new mutant of impoverishment continues to spread.
 August Strindberg
Strindberg's dreamscapes Strindberg at Project Gutenberg More on Strindberg the painter and photographer by Clément Chéroux and Per Kirkeby
Now I acknowledge it silently: the great storms that sweep across Europe, the weird turbulence that my passenger jet pilots experience high over the Atlantic. Because I have never travelled so far or so frequently, I notice that at year's end it's 15 degrees in Toronto and Montreal - a "springtime Christmas", the Canadian papers announce in a land famous for its tundra. In Denver, the airport is blocked by snowfalls. I return to Lebanon to find so little snow has fallen that much of Mount Sannine above my home is the colour of grey rock, just a dressing of white on the top. The snow is deep in Jerusalem. There is a water shortage in Beirut. How casually these warnings come to us. How casually we treat them. I suspect that most people feel so detached from political power - so hopeless when faced with a world tragedy - they can do nothing but watch in growing anger and distress. Water levels in the world's oceans may rise 20 feet higher, we are told. And I calculate that in Beirut, the Mediterranean - in rough weather -- will be splashing over my second-floor balcony wall.(...)
Nine monographs on the implications of peak oil for the American empire. A multidisciplinary examination of the social relations of energy in the Age of Exterminism.
 Foreign water
On January 8th and 9th 2007, hundreds of police and soldiers in Guatemala forcibly evicted the inhabitants of several communities who were living on lands that a Guatemalan military government had granted to Canadian mining company INCO in 1965. Local indigenous populations claim the land to be theirs, and resent the exploitation of an outside corporation. Canada’s Skye Resources now lays claim to the land, and paid workers a nominal sum to destroy people’s homes. With the force of the army and police, company workers took chainsaws and torches to people’s homes, while women and children stood by. Skye Resources claims that they maintained “a peaceful atmosphere during this action.”
 L'Oeil Cacodylate "For a photographer accustomed to pointing a macro lens at low bits of weed and grass, New York City comes as a visual shock."Another fine photo/essay from Paula at the House of Toast
You can read The Great Trumps at Project Gutenberg of Australia along with all his other novels ().
 Fun during Coffee Break
 Federico Fellini
Winter is good — his Hoar Delights Italic flavor yield To Intellects inebriate With Summer, or the World — Generic as a Quarry And hearty — as a Rose — Invited with Asperity But welcome when he goes. Emily Dickinson
I am actually referring to an important way in which blogging has altered my very consciousness. After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage--the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Ben Vershbow This ... brings me back to Bob's recent excursion into Walter Ong territory, talking about the possibility of a shift, through new networked forms of creativity, back toward something resembling the collectivity of oral cultures. Bowers and his blog might suggest the beginnings of a case study. Is this muting of the interior monologue, this waning sense of self as a "distinct individual," the product of a kind of communication that is at once written and oral -- both individualistic and collective?(...)thanks to Stephen's Web
We bring in the new year looking both backward and forward, saluting the winners of the various 2006 translation prizes by presenting exciting new work by the winning author/translator pairs. from The Book of Words
 more at Photoarts
Dark Darker Darkest"It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life--not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." Christopher Benfey reviews The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen But dark as it is there is darker still. For we haven't enough to us to govern life and keep it from its worst manifestations. We haven't fingers and toes enough to tend to all the stops. Life is always breaking at too many points at once. Government is concerned to reduce the badness but it must fail to get rid of it. There is a residue of extreme sorrow that nothing can be done about and over it poetry lingers to brood with sympathy. I have heard poetry charged with having a vested interest in sorrow.
The Myth of the Last Day:
The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
In contrast to many of those artists and scholars who have identified themselves as postfeminists, this new generation of media-savvy women and men were born long after the rise and fall of second-wave feminism. As such, they evince almost no nostalgia for the mythic dream of a lost sisterhood that seems to permeate much postfeminist writing, nor are they duped by conservative claims about the completion of the feminist project and the return to gender relations as usual. They are, however, remarkably curious about the past, present, and future of feminism. And I, for one, look forward to teaching it to them. After all, it's like the sticker says: there will be plenty of time to be postfeminists once we all live in a postpatriarchy.
in support of Equality Now
 Framing Global Capitalism
There is no better illustration of American cultural entropy, of the sense that things have finished but they continue to grind on, than Saddam's execution. The scene is appalling, of course, in the way that all executions must be: the contrast between the quotidian dreariness of the surroundings and the terrible metaphysical threshold over which the executed individual must pass; the squalid brutality of the act of pre-meditated killing, which remains brutal and squalid no matter how atrocious the crimes of the condemned were. Films of live death are attempts to screen the Real, but, inevitably, the Real of death cannot be captured. What we are left with, instead, is another reality TV moment, recorded on mobile phone videocamera and distributed by YouTube. It begins with Shock and Awe and ends in Snuff...
The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President
from Brenda Hillman reviews Nathaniel Tarn's Selected Poems 1950-2000 The gentle chain of modifiers, subordinate clauses, and dreamlike images in prepositional phrases all render a generous, almost psalm-like appeal to the thinking person. Many of Tarn’s lines, especially the lines of his political poetry, enter consciousness like acupuncture needles used for the social body. The psychic roots of his Ethnopoetics? both the individual as a collective, and the collective as the discrete conscience? enable the poet to go to a bearable place, one which is neither littoral nor middle ground but alternative, contiguous, other. Seeing America First with Nathaniel Tarn Katherine Kearney Maynard
The Place of Poetry in the West:
From: Dying Trees Two Poems at Conjunctions
The Great Odor Of Summer
 Krzysztof Penderecki
Archaeology. Endpoint,Two poems at nthposition
 Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze and Guattari resources Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza.The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to . the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented).
Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium
Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international ‘shadow world’ of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural ‘shadow world’ is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.(...)Frieze
 The Architchture of Density
Blanchot, Leiris. Of the two men, one could quickly sketch a joint por-trait: the withdrawal or regularity of the former, the worldliness or secularity of the latter; the few encounters, the real suspicions, but also the political proximity, as at the moment of the Manifeste des 121; and further, even at a distance, the shared anxieties, leading so soon to studies in psychiatry for one, to psychoanalysis for the other; the same pleasure in keeping or exuding secrets, the night without night or the other night; the childlessness after having grown up, these little last-borns, with two elder brothers and an elder sister; finally, the attitude in confrontation with death, right up to the figure of a common fascination, the desire to be able to see oneself dead. Of the two bodies of work, one could just as quickly mark the opposing choices: that of dissimulation, that of exhibition; but also the intersection of the narrative planes, the theatrical scenes, the critical inventories, the mana-words, terror or toro, for it turns out that a shared, or rather strange, gesturality sustains them, right up to the dramatisation that one and the other accord to writing: .After all, I will have hardly existed other than on paper,. confides Leiris to Jean Schuster; .his life is entirely consecrated to literature and to the silence which is proper to it,. recalls the notice prefixed to the pocket edition of Blanchot.s works. And finally, of the two texts of which Pierre Vilar has invited me to speak, L’Âge d’homme and Blanchot.s commentary on it, .Gazes from Beyond the Grave,. one could, no less rap-idly, locate the points of anchorage and connection, the overlaps and the incongruities, direct and indirect, the openings and the silences, the end-ings and the deferments. One could, in sum, moving hastily along all these lines, force Blanchot and Leiris back to back . sometimes in a .heads or tails,. more often in the challenge of a duel of gazes: thus one attains to a structure. And one could then ferret about elsewhere and read of more striking relationships: Bataille, Bacon, Sartre, Picasso, Masson for Leiris; Bataille, Levinas, Antelme, Char, Derrida for Blanchot.Colloquy: Blanchot, The Obscure Michel Leiris poet: Paradigm and the one behind the many Vincent Aurora
Michel Leiris' Failles. Immobile in mobili Is 'impotency' a word? It should be; let it be the word which remembers the failure to leap and transcend itself that allows a book like Manhood (but how many books are like Manhood?) to as it were collapse into itself and carry its reader with it. Impotency: a sign to the blogger to write while failing to write, to let what is personal collapse even in the midst of the personal, and to confess only the impossibility of grasping an experience that does not so much vouchsafe itself in writing, offering itself to any and all, as keep itself in words and sentences, locked there. Until writing serves neither to hide or illuminate any personal secret, attaining a density which is born of the continual collapse into itself.
fromFour Poems Maged Zaher Philosophy as one of the few professions still haunted by the Protestant, Lutheran notion of a “calling”. Everyone else works for money, to pay the bills… but professional philosophers do it for the love of knowledge. Yeah, sure. But my more serious point is that we need to consider how philosophy might be transformed if it were somehow forced to drop the Lutheran delusion.A Lacanian blog pointed out by Sinthome
The work of Michel Foucault is that of an ironist; of this, one can be assured. However, ironists, or more appropriately, irony, has bent and twisted itself linguistically as a philosophical device over time. From Socratic irony to the irony of Kierkegaard and his multiple pseudonyms, irony offers, if nothing else, a paradox, a presentation of opposites that are not quite opposite, one eventually leading into the other. My purpose here is to reveal Foucault's work as representational of a certain form of irony, not only being posited within the content of his work, but also representing a unique political and philosophical stance that is both critique and positive theory in its very irony.
 Tim Roda
If you take the time to grub around in true working class America, most people will tell you the country is going to hell, and it is because we don't have prayer in school and that the homosexuals are running around getting married and kissing in public. Folks think that God doesn't like this stuff and is punishing us. They will all tell you that you can be rich and successful if you work hard and that God will reward you with money and a new Lexus if you walk with Jesus. I have been hearing this all my life. Nothing new. Furthermore, they will tell you that US has a moral obligation to bring liberty and freedom to the whole world and that they are pretty disgusted that these lucky people to whom the freedom has been delivered are not even grateful. What we need is more control, by golly!(...)
We shall probably always have individuals lurking among us who yearn to play tyrant. Some of them will be dumber than two bags of broken hammers, and some will be very bright. Many will start so far down in society that they have little chance of amassing power; others will have easy access to money and influence all their lives. On the national scene some will be frustrated by prosperity, internal tranquility, and international peace--all of which significantly dim the prospects for a demagogue -in-waiting. Others will benefit from historical crises that automatically drop increased power into a leader's lap. But ultimately, in a democracy, a wannabe tyrant is just a comical figure on a soapbox unless a huge wave of supporters lifts him to high office. That's how Adolf Hitler destroyed the Wiemar Republic and became the Fuhrer. So we need to understand the people out there doing the wave. Ultimately the problem lay in the followers.
Fractalisation, Despair and Suicide
 Esther Bubley  Hermit Thrush
th wintr peopul ar responding 2 th green hous effekt evree few yeers they find it 2 warm n go furthr north 4 comfort toronto is now 2 cozee 4 them th sault n thundr bay r far 2 summree they feel th warmth 2 b frivolous it makes them un eezee 7 yeers ago aftr having found nu liskeard 2 mediterranean th wintr peopul discovr church hill falls 2 b mor balmee thn they wud want n ar hedding tord th artik circul evn ther they bcame restless th artik was warming up if it heets up evree wher wher will th wintr peopul go full uv needs 4 snow n icikul pellets flying in th freezing rain n snow hills n mountains mooving around th elk n polar bears th sun glayzlng on th ice fields th hallucinating cold n steem from theyr wishes 4 th souls fire not distraktid by anee gud wethr Bill Bissett
The Map of Places The map of places. The reality of paper tears. Land and water where they are Are only where they were When words read here and here Before ships happened there. Now on naked names feet stand, No geographies in the hand, And paper reads anciently, And ships at sea Turn round and round. All is known, all is found. Death meets itself everywhere. Holes in maps look through to nowhere. Laura Riding Jackson, The Poems of Laura Riding  Laura (Riding) Jackson Who But whose house or head Or intimate or ruling presence? Am I by a ticket of identity, Like any other lifetime? But suppose no house or head Or actuality called mine? Then am I by a broomstick As when I rode and was not, Unlike any other lifetime. The answer concerns you, I think, Your prosperity, not mine. When you could spare me but a broomstick, You were but a poor world That must grudge me even a broomsrtick. Now you are bolder to possess yourselves, And I am nearly what I am, And nearly as I may be In a generous world of others. Laura Riding Jackson, The Poems of Laura Riding
Laura Riding to the World: Let us first consider who "we" are—we, the inside people. First of all, we are the women. Women are those of us who are most characteristically, most natively, "inside" people. Our responsibility down the centuries has been the order of things inside the houses: the intricate well-being of personal life, its formation and maintenance. And with us, on the inside of things, we have had the poets and the painters and all those men who have been able to treat the outer mechanism of life as subsidiary to its inner realities—who have discovered the inside importance.(...)
"What I want people to think about is how serious war is. How it is elective. It's not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. I want people to think about what war is. And at the same time, I know it's very hard. I end the book by saying, in a way the world is divided into people who know-- have had direct experience of war, and people who haven't.
War is the truest expression of the state, and its most powerful reinforcement. Just as capitalism must create artificial needs for its increasingly superfluous commodities, the state must continually create artificial conflicts of interest requiring its violent intervention. The fact that the state incidentally provides a few “social services” merely camouflages its fundamental nature as a protection racket. When two states go to war the net result is as if each state had made war on its own people — who are then taxed to pay for it. The Gulf war was a particularly gross example: Several states eagerly sold billions of dollars’ worth of arms to another state, then massacred hundreds of thousands of conscripts and civilians in the name of neutralizing its dangerously large arsenal. The multinational corporations that own those states now stand to make still more billions of dollars restocking armaments and rebuilding the countries they have ravaged.
The Zapatistas - A Movement Becomes A Teenager“Zapatismo is not an ideology It is not a bought and paid for doctrine. It is …an intuition. Something so open and flexible that it really occurs in all places. Zapatismo poses the question: “What is it that has excluded me?” “What is it that has isolated me?” …In each place the response is different. Zapatismo simply states the question and stipulates that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive……” Eric Peterson Lately, international attention may have dropped off somewhat, but the EZLN still posses the capacity to bring themselves into focus. At the end of the 2006 the movement celebrated its 13 years anniversary at a meeting in the small mountainous village Oventik in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico. The birthday was celebrated in the presence of more than 4000 guests, of whom some 1100 were internationals coming from more than 40 different countries. The 4-day long party contained a series of speeches by the zapatistas on alternative culture, commerce, women’s role and media, where the guests were presented with the EZLN’s point of view, and then had the opportunity to ask questions and finally could present their own vision.
Sugar Mulefrom a special double issue #26: An Anthology of Collaborations, guest edited by Sheila E. Murphy What is important about collaborative textual poetry? Several elements come to mind. First, it invites a practice that liberates the individual from him/herself, by virtue of a far different skill set from that which is used when working alone. Collaboration is something like ear training in music: one must hear the other writer’s piece to respond to it. That hearing equally extends to the passage’s visual dimension. Writing with another person provides an opportunity for textual artists to engage in something resembling chamber music, those delicate and often intricate works that incorporate various features of separate instrumentation into single musical works.
Womb Poetry Vol.1 : Hives & CovensTell me how connected bodies blinded by remote thresholds, swim in glacial river zones? How a heart like a heart, like lips, like an ocean, how drudgery of reentry combines Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site? How do we, can we be so conscious of delight and corrective ideology at the same time, acting out clear cutting interventionist practices in public delirium, where the value word, enough, is never enough to see through alter egos tall enough to blind, while mercantile dreams continue to dance laughing vignettes on our sleeping remains? Tell me how to speak to holiday campers who colonize a colonized land without being caught at the base of my throat? How do we continue to live this imperfect capacity of sympathy at war with the collective body, desperate for an equation glimmering in nationalist bric-a-brac singing simple text books long one way exit signs? dedicated in memory to kari edwards The Jeanne D’Arc Poems
 Woman's Detained Room:
The implication of the assumption that invention can also be elabo-rated as a typeless fragment is that in a recursive system one can prove the unknowability of truth. The fact that invention denotes stumbling upon something, finding something that is already there, furthermore leads to the assumption that invention perpetuates itself in fragments. What is remark-able about Hofstadter's book is the fact that he creates a form that locates the book within random fragments which further create patterns for the relation between imagination and inventiveness. Invention itself thus becomes the matrix of imagination insofar as invention is intertwined with the fictional world of the fables and occupies the place between imagination and inven-tion by inhabiting them both. The fictions that Hofstadter writes are thus based on creating a relation of sameness between formulating incomplete-ness and demonstrating it. The fact that we can formally have inventions in two parts, three parts, or an infinite number of parts demonstrates that we can formulate performative approaches to discourse by fragments. On invention, one can only write in fragments as did Hofstadter and Derrida, by making recourse to the foremost characteristic of the fragment, which is to open itself unto potential. It is for this reason that invention as form almost always comes in dialogue and searching questions. As when Hofstadter's last word "Ricercar" is given back to Bach, and Derrida asks in dialogue with his imaginary reader:Janus HeadWhat am I able to invent again, you wondered at the beginning, when it was a fable. And to be sure you have seen nothing come. The other, that's no longer inventable. "What do you mean by that? That the other will have been only an invention, the invention of the other?" "No, that the other is what is never inventable and will never have waited for your invention. The call of the other is a call to come, and that happens only in multiple voices."We can perhaps appropriately say that invention is a fugue on inven-tiveness, that invention is a form of sameness in its difference which gives stumbling a status of grace
That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.
Iran apparently believes that American leaders would be so deeply distressed by the prospect of their young men and women being endangered and possibly killed that they would forswear any reckless attacks on Iran. As if American leaders have been deeply stabbed by pain about throwing youthful American bodies into the bottomless snakepit called Iraq, or were restrained by fear of retaliation or by moral qualms while feeding 58,000 young lives to the Vietnam beast. As if American leaders, like all world leaders, have ever had such concerns. Let's have a short look at some modern American history.... | |
