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Some Blogs
 André Kertész
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 Paul Kozal
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To the Short Day and Its Great Arc of Shadow
To the short day and its great arc of shadow,
I’ve come, alas, and to the paling hills,
now that all colors vanish from the grass;
yet this my longing does not change its green,
rooted as it is still in the hard stone
that speaks and hears as though it were a woman.
In a like fashion this new, wondrous woman
stays frozen just as snow within the shadow;
unmoved, not any more than is a stone,
by the sweet season that warms up the hills
and makes them turn once more from white to green,
covering them with flowerets and grass. ... (more)
Dante - Lyric Poems
New parallel translation by Joseph Tusiani
This Space
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In absentia: Mourning and Friendship
Michael Brennan
jacket
Mourning, like poetry, is a form of madness. Mourning is a madness of the strangeness of the everyday; the strangeness that life continues. Poetry is a madness of and for the everyday, the strangeness of the paths Being follows on its way through language, how it continues, the dark corners it seeks out, the echoes it listens to and plays with. Mourning and poetry both offer a colder, harsher experience of the world, both push you at times into new and uncomfortable ways of being in the world. Both open in an unanswerable question. They can be hyper-dense, a black hole, that draws the world in and turns the world out as the unknown, a black chuckle, the strangely beautiful, nebula from which we might form some passing meaning in the greater dark. Like poetry, mourning also offers moments of peace, of an experience of the world beyond the immediacy, the difficult presence, it seeks to reaffirm. As with the moments I found comfort talking with the dream of a brother I knew was dead, poetry and mourning alike offer a new world, a new way of being in the world, which does not deny the horror and inconsistencies, but couples brutality with grace, uncovers the impossible within the everyday, and seeks promise in the ludic as much as the lucid: being at once deeply within and outside the world, but most of all, of the world.(...)
How beautiful are the lies we tell ourselves about the past, present and future. I wish too it was a dreambook, a volume of foolishly sentimental verses, but, like Simic’s poet, I choose not to look too closely, simply lean across words and wait. How deftly does absence cut across those lies of continuity and meaning and give them as a singular instant, all enveloped in the other? How deftly can words give that absence, allow that vanishing world to briefly, almost intangibly, be made present in its vanishing, to bind our world with the absences that inhabit it?... (more) ______________________________________
 Cypress Trail
Paul Kozal ______________________________________
The common brain or social brain generates the fictional self, but really, the fellow-traveler of such a self should be termed the de-ontologized brain.
De-ontologizing the Brain
from the fictional self to the social brain
Charles T. Wolfe ctheory
Our suspicions regarding nefarious neurophilosophers and other hérauts of scientism should be allayed, or at least mollified, by the realization that present-day neuroscience and philosophy of neuroscience is fully aware that brains can be sources of illusion, tricks on the mind, self-deception, as much as they are reliable ontological substrates of something like the self. An intangible phenomenon like feeling the presence of a phantom limb used to be viewed, in a kind of crude reductionism, as "wishful thinking" or "mourning" on the part of the patient (following Ramachandran's expression) but this is no longer so.(...)
...in what follows my aim is less to stake out a position on phantom limbs (real? imagined? material? neuronal? phenomenal?) than to show that philosophical reflection on brains, even when it seeks to rebut the dogmatic anti-naturalism found in most corners of phenomenology, does not have to be naïvely, crudely reductionistic or scientistic -- in other words, to show that one can be a materialist without having to feel like "a cop at Woodstock" (in Dennett's colourful expression, referring in his case to being a reductionist materialist philosopher at a meeting on quantum physics and consciousness; but he added that he wanted to be like a "good cop").... (more)
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 Machine for drawing silhouettes.
From the 1792 English edition of Johann Kasper Lavater's
Essays on Physiognomy.
A Short History of the Shadow:
An Interview With Victor I. Stoichita
Christopher Turner
Cabinet Issue 24 Winter 2006/07
I was struck by the strange parallels between the Platonic story of the origins of knowledge and Pliny’s story about the origin of painting. Maybe one of the most important differences between them is that, in Pliny’s story about the origin of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a negative aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative, unlike Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge. But interestingly, despite the positive approach to the shadow in Pliny’s story, the myth was slowly forgotten.
I think for the western mentality, accepting that representation originated in the absence of light, in a dark spot, was difficult to accept.... (more)
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"Money trumps peace"
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George Bush
via
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Mission of Folly: Chapter 3: The Canadian Mission in Afghanistan
James Laxer
Part 1 and 2
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 Bluff Reach
Paul Kozal Paul Kozal at Joseph Bellows Gallery and Weston Gallery
 Baron Mihály Baich
c. 1930
Majestic Amateurs:
Hungarian Aristocracy and Photography
1839-2003 Origo Galéria
via
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These elective affinities between love and textuality exist because love and text are two of our most fundamental social acts. We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations.
- Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition
Happy Valentines Day
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Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida
Kuisma Korhonen
The secret sense of complicity that we feel when we read in solitude, the sense that ‘there are people out there that are reading the same lines and understanding the same thing as I do’, is, in fact, mostly an illusion. In reality, we do not know what other readers get out of the text, how they interpret it, or what enjoyment they draw from it. This often becomes evident when textual communities become public, when we learn to know who our virtual reading companions were and how they actually received the book. It is always a shock when I learn that an old friend of mine, a friend whose values and thoughts I have always believed to be similar to my own, has read and understood some book in a totally different light than I. Should I doubt my judgment of the book, or my judgment of my friend? Do we live in the same world?
Do the participants of textual communities have anything in common? Or should we accept that a textual community is always a community of those who have nothing in common, a community that must not recognize itself, a community that is to come – a community that has nevertheless always already collapsed? That is no longer and not yet our community?
It seems that in order to think communities of solitary readers we need a new concept of community that is not based on the ideas of a shared time, space, or identity. ... (more) ______________________________________
Putting Community Under Erasure:
Derrida And Nancy On The Plurality Of Singularities
Marie-Eve Morin
culture machine
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Mania, Depression, and the Future of Theory
Elizabeth Abel
Critical Inquiry
An easier and more pervasive instance of the local that is also a conduit of the social is the resurgence in recent years of the autobiographical critical voice that talks back to the abstract voice of theory. It is a return, as various critics have noted both positively and negatively, to storytelling as a means of building the public sphere, of finding common ground through the narrative particular. The first-person genre has opened the discussion to a range of critical voices that were tongue-tied by the language of theory, an expansion that in turn has multiplied the entry points for readers. These narrative circuits may reinforce the intimate nature of the critical public sphere, but they do not constitute, as the second proposition contends, a retreat from “social-political engagements” (which are not infrequently their topic) to an introverted and individualizing “therapeutic turn,” especially if critical interest in Lacan is deemed their “major theoretical symptom”.
For if Lacan is either symptom or agent of a theoretical turn, it is far from the “care of the self” imagined by this proposition because the French return to Freud explodes any ready notion of self-care. It also removes the props for identity politics. Poststructural psychoanalysis has been the key provocation of a turn to the identity-destabilizing work of the unconscious that, along with an unlikely ally in historicism, has galvanized the transition from transparent to unstable, internally divided, and overdetermined identity categories. The shift from women’s studies to gender studies charts this passage vividly. The tense debates of the 1980s and 1990s between feminism and poststructuralism have without much fanfare yielded to a tacit consensus that, rather than invalidating politically engaged analysis, psychologically and historically mobile conceptualizations of gender make intellectual and political alliances possible across previously hostile discursive terrains. As self-difference opens the door to other differences, theorizations that emanate from one racial or sexual or class turf are more likely to provoke new questions than old accusations from competing grounds. We are just at the beginning of a generative process that encompasses not only the particularization that results from historical refinement and nuancing but also the elaboration of revisionary narratives: what happens (as Darieck Scott has asked) when the dark plantation son retells the story of the primal horde, or when the racial shadow falls across the mirror stage, or the queer encounters and reforms the melancholic? Fracturing the subject has also poked holes in the walls that have divided psychoanalysis and history, launching a potentially interminable analysis.... (more)
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Gods of the Mall
Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman reviewed by Christian Caryl
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The Cost of the Iraq War: Can You Say $1,000,000,000,000?
How Iraq Trillion Could Have Been Spent
John Allen Paulos
The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary — Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion — but let's be conservative and say it's only $1 trillion (in today's dollars). ______________________________________
Eliminationism in America: X
Concluding a ten-part series
David Neiwert
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"Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul-let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances-is plagiarism."
The Ecstasy of Influence
A plagiarism
Jonathan Lethem harpersA time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.
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 Eric Von Schmidt
May 28, 1931 - February 2, 2007
discography paintings 1 2 ______________________________________
Immanent War, Immaterial Terror
Julian Reid with Keith Farquhar
Culture Machine
From its very inception, the contestation of liberal modernity has involved the refusal of the biopolitically constituted forms of peace that liberalizing regimes inculcate within and among the populations they govern. Subject to the imposition of their ‘zero time of peace’ we are compelled to retrieve and create anew the ‘time of life’ (Negri: 2003, 123). This is the grand paradox of liberal modernity that Foucault’s original account of biopolitics in The History of Sexuality first exposed. Founding themselves upon the challenge of the mastery of war in the name of a commitment to the promotion and enablement of life, liberal regimes are being shaken to their core today, animated by a fear and insecurity at life’s refusal to submit to techniques aimed at its pacification. Founded as a project based upon the pursuit of peace, liberal modernity reconstitutes itself in the form of an endless terrorization of life’s radical undecidability. Life’s aleatory immeasurability initiates a biometrics of security. The time of life is suborned to the regulation of a biopolitics that functions in accordance with the degenerative powers of the norm. Zero time begins, constitutive time ends. Those institutions, practices and processes of subjectivation, indivisible from liberal strategies for the mastery of the problem of war within society, can only be understood in this context as a form of the terrorization of human dignity, where time is lived constitutively.
If the discourse of peace was fundamental to the consecration and development of biopower in the modern nation-state, it has become as - if not more - fundamental to the increasingly biopolitical forms of regime that have now exceeded the traditional form of the nation-state. These biopolitical forms of regime now function as the bedrock of a globalizing order, in the name of the extension of which terror is being conducted today. The global control of populations via technologies deriving from the molecular and digital revolutions, the targeting of the natural life of individual bodies through biometric techniques, hail the formation of biopolitical regimes that are in the process of establishing new thresholds of strategic virtuosity.... (more)
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Is there still any form of community that would not lead us to the kind of 'identity rage' that created the Holocaust and the Gulag?
The Biopolitics of the War on TerrorResearch in Progress, October 2004
Julian Reid Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster
The Biopolitics of the War on Terror:
Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Reappraising the Political)
Julian Reid
amazon link
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Petrified life: Adorno and Agamben
Alastair Morgan
Radical Philosophy
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YouTube Guide to Canadian Literature
The Danforth Review
 Leonard Cohen interview
This Hour has Seven Days
youtube
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The Docile American
The Nexus of God, Labor, Health Care and the Fear to Strike
Zbignew Zingh
A perplexed European asked me a question: Why, she asked, have there been no general strikes in America to end its aggression in the Middle East? Why, she asked, are Americans so unwilling to force their government do what must be done?
These are not new questions. Everyone with an inkling of history and a modest awareness of international news realizes that Americans, completely contrary to the foundation myth of the American Revolution, are incredibly docile. It stings, however, when someone from the outside points out an obvious weakness.
Citizens of other industrialized countries are able to organize national actions to achieve common goals. Americans at the university, labor, middle class and working class levels, however, seem to be utterly impotent and thoroughly disorganized in any long-term, coordinated endeavor that extends beyond electoral politics. We literally struggle to organize coordinated national events. ... (more)
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 Gums at the Jardin d'Essai
Prince Ágost József
1913
 Lingua Tertii Imperii
Sigmar Polke
b. Feb 13, 1941
Polke Dots: A S Byatt On Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke: History of Everything
Sigmar Polke: Alice in Wonderland
Matthew Larking Sigmar Polke on artnet ______________________________________
The Unbounded Vision Of Robert Musil
Michael Andre Bernstein
on the occasion of a new translation of The Man Without Qualities
First Published in The New Republic Magazine and reproduced at Dispatches from Zembla
For decades now, even in the United States, Musil's novel has been alluded to regularly; it has been ransacked for its striking epigraphs and historical aperius, and invoked as one of the especially revelatory documents that nourish our ongoing fascination with the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, though, The Man Without Qualities is available not merely to specialists in one or another academic discipline, but to any American reader eager to experience the scrupulous lucidity with which Musil transformed the well-made European novel into an open-ended thought-experiment.(...)
To an extent unprecedented in Western literature, large stretches of the book contain neither forward-moving action nor inward character development. In their place, we are often given extended sections of pure intellectual-moral speculation, essayistic reflections that exist less to illuminate the private passions of a character than to follow the inner logic of a concept with its own independent claims on our attention. This is a kind of novelistic "essayism," a term that exactly translates Musil's loan-word Essayismus. By that word Musil did not mean philosophical systematizing, but rather "the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought."
This notion is crucial to Musil's conception of the novel's responsibility to express the fullest possible range of human consciousness. Essayism is no longer a question of genre, it is a way of thinking about and experiencing the world as an unfixable, variegated and constantly self-transforming phenomenon "between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry."... (more) ______________________________________
Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke
Anthony Stephens
jacket
I suggest therefore that Heidegger’s portrayal of Hölderlin and Rilke is dictated by the fictional structure of that alternative “history of Being” that is subordinated to a vision of future salvation. The poets are thereby cut to size in the sense that they are shaped to fit a pattern that has its origins outside the work of either of them. At its most basic, Heidegger’s doubling of the “history of Being” can be seen as an oscillation within his apocalyptics. When he wishes to accent the positive, soteric aspect, Hölderlin’s poetry is necessary as an anticipation of the world to come, and this means that time has to be rearranged so that Hölderlin is “the precursor” who “arrives from the future” (Heidegger 1950: 320), thus assigning to the poet the same role Hölderlin himself had assigned to Christ in his great elegy Brod und Wein (Bread and Wine). What this might have to do with philosophy in the 20th century eludes me, but it is a standard pattern in German Romantic visions of an ideal futurity, which, in turn, revive early Christian eschatology. When Heidegger’s apocalyptics lack the soteric dimension and are weighed down by his pessimism as to the increasing dominance of technology in history, then they rather follow the Old Norse pattern of history degenerating into the Fimbulwinter, the Great Winter presaging the end of the world, with no redemption and no prospect but catastrophe. This variant leaves chronology unscathed.... (more) ______________________________________
Two essays on Blanchot
Charlotte Mandell
A Language of Absence
Je voudrais vous remercier du silence dans vos mots. That's all I remember saying in the one letter I wrote to Maurice Blanchot, a few years before his death. I want to thank you for the silence in your words. I was working on my translation of Le livre à venir, and suddenly I felt an urgent need to write to Blanchot, simply to thank him for his work all these years, for all that he's written, but especially for all that he has left unwritten: for the voice beneath the words, the sly, quiet, inner voice of all that's left unsaid. Blanchot has -- I can't say had, since his books are all around me now, and his voice is still speaking -- Blanchot has a way of shaping absence so that it becomes a shimmering presence, and of giving a voice to silence so that it can be heard beneath the apparent words on the page.
There is no such thing as a passive reader of Blanchot. ... (more)via Mark Thwaite
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A Voice from ElsewhereMaurice Blanchot translated Charlotte Mandell published this week by SUNY Press.
"A Voice from Elsewhere represents one of Maurice Blanchot’s most important reflections on the enigma and secret of “literature.” The essays here bear down on the necessity and impossibility of witnessing what literature transmits, and—like Beckett and Kafka—on what one might call the “default” of language, the tenuous border that binds writing and silence to each other. In addition to considerations of René Char, Paul Celan, and Michel Foucault, Blanchot offers a sustained encounter with the poems of Louis-René des Forêts and, throughout, a unique and important concentration on music—on the lyre and the lyric, meter and measure—which poetry in particular brings before us."
Heads up from Stephen Mitchelmore.
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 Frank Hurley
1885-1962
the first offical photographer to the Australian Imperial Forces
The Heritage of the Great War
First World War 1914-1918. Graphic color photos, pictures and music
Frank Hurley: Australian Legend more images 1 2
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The End of History: Utopian Realism and the Politics of Idiocy
Mark Featherstone
Journal of Classical Sociology - excerpted at theoria
The story of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is bound to the emergence of the theory of economic freedom we call neo-liberalism. Despite the appearance of the Clinton/Blair version of third way capitalism, which attempts to provide neo-liberal economic policy with a friendly face, it is clear that the model of capitalism we live with today has sent us back into the savagery of the state of nature. It requires no stretch of the imagination to see that the current Republican administration with its Bush doctrine, war on terror and paranoid/conspiratorial fear of unknown unknowns is symbolic of our return to the Hobbesian horror story, the state of nature. Given this theory, it is surely not enough to speak in terms of the small steps of reformism. ... Diverse thinkers, such as Giddens and Laclau, might think that the call for revolution is idiotic, but if their realism is the best hope we have, then one might prefer to choose the route of Dostoyevsky’s (1998) fool, Myshkin, every time. Thus the politics of idiocy appear the best option to replace the unimaginative proceduralism of reformism because the idea of reflexive stupidity conjures a form of consciousness aware of both its own limitations and the miserable predicament of the human body.... (more)
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 Prisoners of Our Own Device
David Stock
ZoneZero
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"On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie."
- Albert Camus, "Create Dangerously" in Resistance, Rebellian & Death
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Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections
Douglas Kellner
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The Ten Commandments Of The Postmodern
V. Remember the days of the past in thine own fashion and according to thine own textual need.
IX. Thou shalt not condemn the use of multinational capital to virtualize everything--thy neighbor's house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, anything.
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Why Critical Pedagogy Matters:
Defending Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere
Henry Giroux
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Christian Zionism: Dispensationalism And The Roots Of Sectarian Theology
A History of Dispensational Approaches
John Scott:
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After the Apocalypse
Michael Chabon on Cormac McCarthy's The Road
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 Duckboard
Frank Hurley
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"There is no information, only transformation"
An Interview with Bruno Latour
By Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz
Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel
August 16, 1997
There is a heritage of the iconoclastic dispute, which is nowadays renewed around this notion of the overload of images. Lots of images were destroyed because people were overloaded. That was exactly Luthers argument. Too many images which hide the important features which is itself not visible. My argument is an iconophilic one, which is always the opposite. One image, isolated from the rest, freeze framed from the series of transformation has no meaning. An image of a galaxy has no reference. The transformation of the images of the galaxy has. So, it is an anti information argument. Pictures of a galaxy has no information content. Itself the image has no meaning if it cannot be related to another spectography of a galaxy. What has reference is the transformations of images. Being iconophilic means following the flow of images, without believing that they carry information. It is neither iconoclastic in the sense of: let us get rid of the image because what we want to access is the invisible, the innefable. On the contrary. If we follow the logic of the images, they themselves past into one other image. Images demonstrate transformation, not information. But then there is the contradiction the very daily practise of transformation and the talk, the hype about information flows, internet universality etc. It is the same with money. When you talk with financial specialists, it is highly localized, confidence based, small networks of people calling one another by first name. Again, if we go outside, we talk about hugh flows money going from New York to Hong Kong in a second. We have a tremendous hype about globalization, immediacy, unversality and speed. On the other side we see localized transformations and there seems to be not connection between the two. Somebody like Paul Virilio is interesting because he, rightly, attacks the hype. This is good common sense critique. But we never study the practise. (...)
The rule is: whatever medium there is, you will always find someone to make a connection with them. But this is not the same as saying that there is an instantaneous connectibility. The digital only adds a little speed to it. But that is small compared to talks, prints or writing. The difficulty with computer development is to respect the little innovation there is, without making too much out of it. We add a little spirit to this thing when we use words like universal, unmediated or global. But if way say that, in order to make visible a collective of 5 to 10 billion people, in the long history of immutible mobiles, the byte conversion is adding a little speed, which favours certain connections more than others, than this seems a reasonable statement. To say that we are living in a cyberworld, on the other hand, is a complete absurdity.... (more)
The Workspace Interviews
Geert Lovink ______________________________________
 Faith
A Journey With Those Who Believe
Mike Abrahams
ZoneZero
 Le sémiologue
ou
Les symptômes du savoir
Gilbert Garcin
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Broken English
Charles Bernstein
What are you fighting for? The men move
decisively toward the execution chamber.
Joey takes aim but muffles his fire.
Overhead, the crescent moon cracks
the unbroken sky. A moth beats its wings
against the closed door — intransigence its
only lore. What are you fighting for? The sirens
cry wolf to the obedient masses who sway,
hysterical, in synch to the boys
on the back streets and the ladies of mourning.
Brushing up fate pixel by pixel, burnishing
dusk: the sum of entropy and elevation.
Tony takes it in his intestine, the sharp
pain in his body like ripples
in a sand dune, his face exquisitely detached
from any sign of the sensation. What are
you fighting for? The market plunges, savings
slip away like a greased pig in a taffy
pull. Sometimes the easiest thing is just to stop
thinking about it. Then it can just think you.
Depending on the angle of incline and the rate
of decomposition. Wives to each other, husbanding
the fear that feeds upon itself and its prey.
Doesn’t that count for something, even
in these pitched accommodations?
What are you fighting for?
What are you fighting for?
quoted in Setting the World on Fire
Charles Bernstein in conversation with Leonard Schwartz
jacket
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Soft Links
Nicole Brossard
translated by Peter Dubé
these are the names of places, of cities, of climates that make characters. The clear mornings, a fine rain fallen for twenty-four hours, rare images originating in America and elsewhere, two natural disasters that oblige us to stick together in the midst of cadavers, these are the gestures quiet or purple, the shells, the icicles in the happy hour glasses, crockery noises or a light stuttering that torments an instant, a slap, a kiss these are the names of cities like Venice or Reading, Tongue and Pueblo, the names of characters Fabrice, Laure or Emma. The words sharpened over the years and the novels, words one spoke while breathing badly, while laughing, while spitting, while sucking an olive, the verbs we add to the lips' pleasure, to success, to a certain death. These are words like knee or cheek or still others stretching as far as the eye can see making us lean over the void, stretch like cats in the morning these are the words that make one stay awake till dawn or take a taxi on week nights when the city falls asleep before midnight and solitude sticks in our jaws like an abscess. These are words spoken from memory, from want or from pride, very often words pronounced with love while placing hands on nape of neck or filling a glass of port. These are words whose etymology must be sought, that must then be plastered to what's called a wall of sound, in a manner like those who cry out in pain and sigh with pleasure that wander in dreams and documents assault the heart's mysterious obscurity.... (more)
Interview with Nicole Brossard: On Translation & Other Such Pertinent Subjects
Marcella Durand double change
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 Perilous Night
Jasper Johns
Perilous Night deconstructed ______________________________________
An efficient work of literature will close some bad periods, but that closing is not permanent. Even during unproductive cultural epochs, something can be redeemed. We have never closed the Dark Ages. Our own age is still dark and we hear voices rising out of it. We have to change our past in order to change our future. We must turn back and throw light on it to see it in a new way. What we need is archeology around and in ourselves.
There is a strong link between inspiration and childhood. When Proust wanted to experience a new childhood and become a writer, he had to go back to his first childhood. Things forgotten wait in the library of your mind. It is a question of having to look back ward and yet not go backward at the same time. To free Euridyce from Hades, Orpheus was forbidden to look back at her and when he did, he lost her. Almost the same legend can be found in the Bible. It is the story of Lot's wife, who, when fleeing Sodom, looked back and was transformed into a pillar of salt. We have to be able to look forward, but to bring back Euridyce you have to go back to Hades. It was a very powerful memory, which was at the origin of the journey to hell. We always have to descend into hell in order to got out of it. It's also an open cycle.
- An Interview with Michel Butor
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 Land's End II
Jasper Johns
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Escape from America
Gin meditations on outlaw roosters, tin cup martinis and my bust-out from Mammon's guilded cage
Joe Bageant
Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle. After more than two years of effort, I'm outta the gilded gulag, by damned, and tell myself that I have at last quit being part of the problem -- or at least as much as much as anyone can without living stark naked in a Himalayan cave and toasting insects over a dung fire.... (more) ______________________________________
 Icaro II
Mario Toral
Chile
b. Feb. 12, 1934
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The Second War And Postmodern Memory
Charles Bernstein
pmc
I don't remember when I first heard about the war, but I do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. It's inconceivable to me now that I was born just five years after its end; each year, the Extermination Process seems nearer, more recent. Yet if the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the Bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future.
hear
hear, where the dry blood talks
where the old appetite walks . . .
where it hides, look
in the eye how it runs
in the flesh / chalk
but under these petals
in the emptiness
regard the light, contemplate
the flower
whence it arose
with what violence benevolence is bought
what cost in gesture justice brings
what wrongs domestic rights involve
what stalks
this silence
what pudor or perjorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below . . .
[Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" (1949)]
Fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for Western Civilization. It seems to me that the current controversies surrounding Paul De Man, and, more significantly, Martin Heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. In all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a Divine Mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the West, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations. ... (more)
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 The Skaters
Max Beckmann
February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950
 Self-Portrait, Three Times
Gerhard Richter
Oil on photograph
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Networked Politics:
Rethinking Political Organisation in an Age of Movements and Networks
A reader produced by TNI, Transform! Italia, IGOP and Euromovements
January 2007
Networked Politics is the product of a collaborative research process for rethinking political organisation in an age of movements and networks. In a world where the traditional institutions of democratic control have been weakened by an unconstrained global market and superpower military ambitions, it uncovers diverse forms of resistance with the potential to create new institutions for social change. The authors set out the principles upon which such transformations should be based, and the challenges that stand in the way of their realisation.
The discussion is then pursued along four interrelated lines of inquiry. These examine social movements, including their development of new forms of knowledge and organisation; progressive political parties, and attempts to bring about transformative forms of political respresentation; the dangers and opportunities facing the development of political institutions in a network society; and the potential of new techno-political tools for facilitating and reconceiving political organisation. A series of case studies are also offered, drawing critical lessons from the experience of the German Green Party; the 2006 French mobilisation against the controversial CPE employment law; and an extended discussion on 'open source as a metaphor for new institutions'.
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from
The City
With the smoke and with the fire,
many people muffled and silent
on a street, on a corner,
in the high city, pondering the future
in search of the past
-- in the subtle entrails, night
lightning
in the probing eye, thoughts go to
agony
In another age, hope and happiness were good for something-time's flow
invisible,
and the darkness, an invisible thing,
was revealed but to the infinite elders fumbling forward to feel if you
might not be among them,
while fumbling to touch some children they think they feel, even though
these little ones feel them and are confused with them, feeling you,
as in solitude you feel a shawl of darkness woven with unfathomed
sadness by some habitant,
dead and lost in this transparent darkness that is the city I myself
inhabit,
inhabiting a city at the base of my soul which is inhabited but by a single
habitant,
-- and like a city filled with sparks, filled with stars, filled with fires on the
street corners,
filled with coals and embers in the wind,
like a city where many beings, alone and distant from me, move and
murmur with a destiny heaven no longer knows,
with eyes, with idols, and with children smashed by that very heaven,
with no more life than this life, with no more time than this time,
hemmed-in by the great wall of fire and oblivion, rocking in the swing of
despair,
soundlessly weeping with this sinking city.
... (more)
.....................................................................
 Jaime Saenz
(1921–1986)
Bolivian poet, novelist, and short story
Some Things You Should Know about Jaime Saenz
Forrest Gander & Kent Johnson
Introduction to The Night by Jaime Saenz
Five poems from: As the Comet Passes
Jaime Saenz
translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander
jacket
excerpt from Jaime Saenz's long poem Immanent Visitor
translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander .....................................................................
In Search of the Night: on translating Jaime Saenz an Interview with his translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander jacket
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from Maryam of the Stories
Alawiyya Subuh
Translated from the Arabic by Nirvana Tanoukhi
Words Without Borders
The whole city gave up on sleep that night. Explosions sealed up ears and filled the city sky, turning the anticipated weekend into a nightmare. Then Monday came and the shelling calmed, so I goaded my body out of the apartment and down to the empty street. I headed in the direction of the office, not because I was expected there, but to pretend that there was still life not far beyond my reach. As I drove through deserted streets, I felt as though I was descending into a vast cavern beneath the earth, like the hollow of the old well in our village home. It had once swallowed me and thrown me into hidden depths until I swallowed the water of my death and the emptiness inside my skull. Now the bones of my skull had become loosened by the deep booms of the shelling and felt disjointed like the skeleton of the old house.
The whole city seemed to me like a bottomless well that day and what seized me was my childhood fear that Mother would fulfill her threat and "take care of me" in the water of the well if I wasn't a good girl.
The scene replayed itself before me.... (more)
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 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
1826
The First photograph
By the summer of that year, 1826, Niépce was ready. In the window of his upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras, he set up a camera obscura, placed within it a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), and uncapped the lens. After at least a day-long exposure of eight hours, the plate was removed and the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light. The result was the permanent direct positive picture you see here -- a one-of-a-kind photograph on pewter. It renders a view of the outbuildings, courtyard, trees and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.... (more)
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Theory-Jamming
Uses of Eclectic Method in an Ontological Spiral
Stephen Stockwell
M/C Journal
Perhaps the only way to ride out this storm is to look towards communication practices that confront these issues and appreciate their theoretical underpinnings. From its roots in jazz and blues to its contemporary manifestations in rap and hip-hop and throughout the communication industries, the jam (or improvised reorganisation of traditional themes into new and striking patterns) confronts the ontological spiral in music, and life, by taking the flotsam flung out of the spiral to piece together the means to transcend the downward pull into the abyss.(...)
Many pretenders have a theory. Theory abounds: language theory, number theory, game theory, quantum theory, string theory, chaos theory, cyber-theory, queer theory, even conspiracy theory and, most poignantly, the putative theory of everything. But since Bertrand Russell’s unsustainable class of all classes, Gödel’s systemically unprovable propositions and Heisenberger’s uncertainty principle, the propensity for theories to fall into holes in themselves has been apparent. Nowhere is this more obvious than in communication theory where many schools contend without actually connecting to each other.... (more)
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Working With English:
Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama
The Rise and Fall and Rise of William S. Burroughs [PDF]
Edward S. Robinson
‘‘Went to War with Rupert Brooke and Came Home with Siegfried Sassoon’’: [PDF]
The Poetic Fad of the First World War
Argha Banerjee, University of Sussex
Demystifying the Criminal Mind: Linguistic, Social and Generic Deviance in Contemporary American Crime Fiction [PDF]
Christiana Gregoriou
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melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks - issue 8
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 Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky
1983
youtube
via
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The Journal as Art: "Impossible Text"
Victor Muñoz
In my little notebook I am obliged to practice an ostentatious sincerity, attempt the work Poe proposed entitling "My Heart Laid Bare," the one "no man could write…, even if he dared. [For the] paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen." But a compromise occurs early in the diarist’s act, perhaps in the very will to keep this account. Even supposing I do not intend or anticipate another reader, it is myself I can wish to persuade. And when is it we are not persuading? Surely not in the absence of others, though this might be when we have the best chance of success. The more private the lie, the more likely the hearer will be duped. One of the most ‘sincere’ philosophers, Wittgenstein (whose almost entire literary output was cast in the form of highly tentative, fragmented, private writing), prefaced a collection of his ‘remarks’ by saying he could not expect it to be freer of vanity than he himself was. The aspiration and, perforce, the pretension to sincerity is dubious when I have so schemed the event to exclude any judge but myself. Alone (in my garret, by candlelight…) can I appreciate my own sincerity? If I say yes, who am I sucking up to? Who cares? If I say no, who is making that judgment? The very idea of sincerity as ever an accomplished act is problematic, at a minimum, and, likely, a conceit. So it is no wonder pretensions to it get a side-long glance. (Even when no one is looking!) It only begins to look good when I consider the alternative.(...)The most distinguishing formal characteristic of private writing is its fragmentation. Times, dates, incidents, occasions—but beyond these and, more fundamentally, what determines the shape of the writing is an openness to revealing the seams of perception and deliberation. Where they appear, actual dates have only a historical (if that) importance for anyone but the writer, though they may function as the native punctuation of the form. The fracturing needn’t be so obvious as that following upon a calendar. When the date or hour, as an index, is so stressed that the diary’s function becomes mnemonic, then it also turns scientific, instrumental and, as such, imminently disposable but for the facts it reports—and not our topic here. The muse, concerned with accuracy of a different order, suffers little compunction in making of a date, time, etc., a stylistic device (as in Gombrowicz, Frisch, Baudrillard and many Japanese diarists). Though it may expand the genre to unforgivable proportions to include a mass of philosophical literature, doing so would help to dissolve some of the puzzles of style and classification connected with the writings of some of the Pre-Socratics, Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Antonio Machado, Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, E.M. Cioran, Vilhelm Ekelund, Fernando Pessoa, Elias Canetti, Andrei Sinyavski, Laura (Riding) Jackson, et al. To the extent deeply experienced time is creative and in constant strife with the eternal, it has become increasingly conscious of its passing significance, its necessary tentativeness and incompleteness. The existential stutter reaches such a pitch that even crowning a thought with a date is judged so much frippery. Obviously all writing bears at least a casual relation to time, but only in the journal and related forms does the calendar insist on leaving tracks. The journal’s relation to time is essential without needing to be specific. The question, here, most pertinent to the keeper of these forms, is what has its explicit indication to do with substance?… There is, in effect, always a reference to time, however muted. Mortality insures that even a seamless journal (reflecting the lyrical aspirations of its keeper) is broken at its heart: It must be ready to leave off any moment. Novels, treatises, symphonies might remain unfinished, but who has ever heard of the unfinished diary? More cause for melancholy.(...)
The will to consciousness has so failed to locate us, to find us any place, and so corrupted—made a ruse of—every craft, every reach for order or form, that time, its steady givenness, is (again) offering to become the arbiter of authenticity, that supreme object of conceit. The space it clears for the soul is both lavish and quartered. Allowed to sing in its cell—but it is allowed to sing! Under the auspices of the day, the moment…the journal, vademecum of the soul, the literary form of consciousness itself, through its rhythmic circumscription, reintroduces ritual to the abandonment of the lyric, plays moralist to the aesthete, secreting for awhile (until the next thing) the truancy of any higher illusion, any God or the big Self...
The set begins to bear down too hard on me.
Should it have occurred to anyone (but myself) that the journal tending toward art might require justification in terms of whether it is a good or a bad thing "to while away the idle hours" with, or in some salvation it might offer, the best I have prepared is a moral excuse and aesthetic permission. But it would be wrong to think that all literary genres have these equally, or that once acquired they cannot be lost. ... (more)
 Estuary
Kim Keever
Keever's pictures appear to be of other worlds and times--a primordial past or post-apocalyptic future. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that never were. He creates his panoramic universes and controls their fictitious environments by constructing miniature topographies out of materials such as plaster and reflective Mylar in a 100-gallon aquarium, which is then filled with water. The desolate dream-like dioramas are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.
 Keever's studio
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"The Sovereign Disappears in the Election Box" [PDF]
Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on Sovereignty and (Perhaps) Governmentality
Thomas Crombez
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 17 (2006): 61-83via
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An Appeal to People Outside the United States to Break US Imperial Power
Stan Goff
insurgent american
NOTE: Please translate this into as many languages as possible, and distribute as widely as possible.
This series of suggestions is written because my country is on a path that will first destroy other societies -- upon which we depend -- and the biospheric basis of life itself; and this means eventually our own society.
Our society now -- an imperial society -- is deeply alienated, desperately unhappy, and thoroughly indoctrinated into the acquisitive individualism that creates that alienation and unhappiness. We continue down this path because the weight of the system gives it such enormous inertia. We need you to do these things, not just to ensure your own futures... but for our own good.
The United States now exists as a parasite upon the rest of the world. In this system, this political entity called the United States of America is not only a parasite, but a parasite that is destroying its own host. There is only one outcome in the end for such a relationship; we will all perish together. With the help of the people of the world -- and I will outline ten ways you can help us -- we can all escape this fate. Each of us -- with the destruction of US imperial power -- will be in a better position to work for a sustainable and indpendent future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.... (more)
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Fake Your Way to the Top!
Barbara Ehrenreich on Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude and other perennial coueisms
First, starting way back in the 1950s, you had to be “positive” to get ahead in business, i.e., ready to see the glass half full even when it was lying shattered on the floor. Then, somewhere in the first few years of the 21st century, the bar was raised to “passionate.” It wasn’t good enough to feel “positive” about spending your day doing cold calls to potential customers in Dayton, you be had to be “passionate” about it. And now, apparently, even that isn’t good enough – you have to develop a YES! Attitude, as in throwing back your head, balling up your fists, and screaming YEESSS!!!(...)
What Gitomer and countless other motivational gurus are recommending is the mentality of a crafty slave... (more)
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 Silence
Henry Fuseli
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Hallucinations of Invisibility
From Silence to Delirium
Ted Hiebert
ctheory
A delirious silence -- the sound of negative space. Inverting presence along with its reflections. Also, and more importantly, inverting absence. And its reflections too. The limits of a reasonable thinking are those that break down when confronted with reflected absence. A confounding assertion in that it refers no longer to the impossibility of presence, but also the impossibility of absence itself. An unavoidable and inexhaustible presence of nothingness.
The delirious image -- no longer the image of reflected worlds, but the impossible image of inverted reflection. Between selfless self-portraits and portraits of selflessness, not a void but the paradoxical variations of reflected play. Figures of inversion, absurd and delirious. A silent cacophony of tongue-less twisters.
At the limits of a reason of this sort lies, not only silence but also the irrational and its various formulations. And to rise to this challenge, three theses. The thesis of the absurd, Camus' silent universe and Regine Robin's Vampire Narcissus. The thesis of paradox, Virilio's world of sightless vision and the myth of the nymph Echo. And the thesis of delirium, Baudrillard's world of holographic thinking and Echo turned vampire. Consequently, a theorizing of the signs of inversion and impossibility -- reformulating a world that is no longer reasonable; a world that is transformed, from silence to delirium. (...)
We are no longer in the process of disappearing. Rather, we have already disappeared. Everywhere we look for signs, not that we are still here, but that our disappearance was not inevitable -- that it 'could have been' different -- as though if we had somewhere made a mistake we could live with the consequences. Yet if such could ever have been the case there is no trace of it left. What we encounter is not an acceleration towards disappearance but only the realization that we never were. It is not our disappearance that was evitable -- but only our appearance in the first place.
We encounter ourselves now -- indivisible from the world. We have become bicameral but not in the sense used by Jaynes -- rather precisely the inverse. It is not that we have once more begun to hear voices -- but rather that we are merely the voices themselves. An invisible race in a delirious world. Not merely cut off from the world, but for the first time indistinguishable from it. Perhaps for the first time truly alive. From here it is useless to try to remember the life we knew before. With a delirious mind now we must proceed only to forget.
And so we come full circle from where we began. It is no longer us asking the universe for the meaning of life, but the universe who quietly asks us. With a smile, but without irony, we reply simply that we have forgotten. ... (more)
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 Tomas Munita
Chilean photographer via Jim Johnson
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The web, emotions, and the violence of abstraction
Richard Marsden
he Business of Emotions
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Reading Language, Reading Gertrude Stein
Bruce Andrews
A language tries to be free.
Reading.
To think it through from the extremes or the exceptions, what better place to start than with Gertrude Stein.
The words don't take the place of a prior reality. Material insistence triumphs, slipping and sliding beneath the sign.
Length what is length when silence is so windowful.
When no systematizing translation of the force of words back into their signifying prison-house is very likely.
Language is often considered exclusively mediating, ruled by conventional signs. But in reading Stein, the idealism of the sign can't recuperate these energies.
I have resisted. I have resisted that excellently well.
Signs usually stabilized by customary use get shaken up by a materiality that miniaturizes its possible uses.
The normative confinements of grammar and narrative and self-expression give way to even more forceful and disabling vectors.
We get a language almost beyond linguistics.
We're not looking through the words, with the trappings of perspective, once the language is no longer pointing, offering a stand-in, or a representative.
why do they have heaps of resemblance.
Not not not no. ... (more) Pores
An avant-gardist journal of poetics research
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Elizabeth Bishop
February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979
Poems and Biography
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."
Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
... (more)
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Fear and Loathing in the Bay State
Dion Dennis
ctheory
So this is what it has come to: Two young artists (their demeanor an echo of 1960s creative expressiveness), paid a pittance to playfully market a surrealist cartoon movie starring several talking base-level consumer commodities, have been labeled semiotic terrorists and criminals by official reality. What does this political panic reflex, played out in the gerontocratic and the politically correct Commonwealth of Massachusetts, tell us? [1] What are the object lessons that can be drawn from this emotive, mediated and bureaucratic externalization of early 21st Century nightmares and demons? (...)This remix of Puritanism and the neo-liberal imaginary (obsessed with what Ericson dubs "the myth of certainty and security") is a necessary but not sufficient set of conditions for declaring this peculiar "state of emergency."
... (more) ______________________________________
The Gospel Of Bondage
Bruce Cockburn
Big Circumstance (1988)
Tabloids, bellowing raw delight
Hail the return of the Teutonic Knights
Inbred for purity and spoiling for a fight,
Another little puppet of the New Right
See-through dollars and mystery plagues
Varied detritus of Aquarian Age
Shutters on storefronts and shutters in the mind -
We kill ourselves to keep ourselves safe from crime.
That's the gospel of bondage...
We're so afraid of disorder we make it into a god
We can only placate with state security laws
Whose church consists of secret courts and wiretaps and shocks
Whose priests hold smoking guns, and whose sign is the double cross
But God must be on the side of the side that's right
And not the right that justifies itself in terms of might -
Least of all a bunch of neo-nazis running hooded through the night
Which may be why He's so consipicuously out of sight
Of the gospel of bondage...
... (more)
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History and the Politics of Nostalgia
Marcos Piason Natali
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 The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches
Fuseli 1796
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The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton
February 8, 1577 - January 25, 1640
 Appearing Light
Jitka Hanzlová largish scans
Into the woods
John Berger
Le Monde diplomatique (google cache)
 In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.
She speaks of the between-forest. This is because, in the same valley as her village, there are two forests that join. Yet the preposition between belongs to forests in general. It’s what they are about.
A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it.... (more)
Thanks to Tim Atherton and to an older post at conscientious for the google cache link to the Berger piece. ______________________________________
As language. .
Louis Dudek .
As language. . .Silence is also a language.
When there is no order in heaven
we make what we make
by luck, or strength,
or the composition of desire.
Power grows
like vegetation,
and there are no preferences under heaven.
I do not know why a leaf should be of less worth
than a Vatican,
or why builders care.
The mathematical stones recite their logic
of cruelty and despair
we arose to gratify some searchless reason
shaping the empty air.
 Louis Dudek
February 6th, 1918 - March 22nd, 2001 A Gallery of Montreal Writers
Portraits by Terence Byrnes
The Surface Of Time
Louis Dudek
Reviewed by Carmine Starnino
If The Surface of Time demonstrates anything, it’s that Dudek’s poems are still living off the Cantos. In fact, at 83, Dudek seems, eerily enough, to have reached the same point an elderly Pound reached in his own work: where the familiar persona – standoffish, authoritative, opinionated - has been shaken down by the oddities and ironies of aging. Of course, we still have the pulpit voice with its expectation of an audience waiting to be instructed, but Dudek’s thinking now has a wry, brisk, crabwise movement ( the “waitresslessness” of an empty restaurant, for example) that turns each poem into a tiny trawl for clarity. In fact, Dudek regards these undeceived, dry-eyed, late-at-night thoughts as his “end-game” and as last poems they have none of John Berryman’s horror at “staring down the intolerable years / to the mild survival” or Robert Lowell’s fear of the “sanity of self-deception.” Dudek’s poems are closer to the deep ambivalence of Ivor Gurney’s “farewell to all earth / Save to that six-foot-length I must lie in / Sodden with mud”:
It’ll be so nice
to see me
gone from the world
some sunny morning,
my walking stick left on the hook,
the arthritis
left behind,
that cough, that tottering step:
all those adorable vanities
withered on the shelf
(I cannot tell you the full depth
of my indifference,
even indifference to the indifference —
the indifference of God
looking the other way,
and man looking the other way.)
One could call this defeatist, or death-chastened, or disconsolate if the lines didn’t flex with such serious mischief.... (more)
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Post-Flarf and Its Discontents
K. Silem Mohammad
lime-tree
For better or worse, we now live in a post-flarf poetic age, one that is simultaneously aggressive in its rejection of received notions surrounding flarf, and indelibly stamped with the characteristics that at one point or another, accurately or inaccurately, became associated with flarf's stylistic and thematic features: the constant allusions to squid, asshats, mopeds, and other "goofy-sounding" verbal objects; the inclusion of derogatory cultural references (particularly, for some reason, those concerning the Irish, diabetics, gay Asian males, and "chicks" of all nationalities and orientations); and--most strikingly of all--the exclusive use of internet search engines in the compositional process. It is now almost impossible to imagine a past time when some poems were created "freehand"; the prospect of reviving such an archaic procedure seems even more ludicrous than it seemed a few decades ago to suggest writing contemporary poems in rhyme and iambics. Whether this is our great fortune or our lamentable loss must be decided by posterity.... (more)
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 Pine Forest
Gustav Klimt
July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918
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Translation as tragedy and farce
The politics and politicians of translation in post-Soviet Russia
Mischa Gabowitsch
...translation is in a wretched state in contemporary Russia. In order to understand why, we first need to consider the status and role of translation in the Soviet Union, all the more so since critics of the low level of most literary translations done nowadays sometimes look back to a reputed 'golden era' of translation.
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A Broken Windows Theory Of Tyranny (from hip)
jessical
The obvious and oft repeated has some truth -- deeply empathic people get their hearts broken young, and learn to "toughen up". Some get toughened into monsters, and some find weird paths to walk between their hardened skin and still soft hearts. If you've read Alice Miller, or any of the people who write about how authoritarian societies "break" children, and encourage this as necessary and important, you've got some idea. Breaking children is the Republican factory, near as I can tell sitting here. You learn that truth is a function of power; and what you feel is a function of what daddy or mommy want you to feel; and then you get 60 more years to untangle it, if you don't turn into a war criminal or vote one into office along the way (or even if you do). But what interested me this morning, and inspired this rant, was not the deeper cause in child rearing, but the effect of a society so cruel and insane that you cannot turn on a TV, or read a paper, or talk to a friend, without some ready evidence of the boot descending on a human face, another fresh example of cruelty and gratuitous control.... (more)via mosses from an old manse
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Clowns and Blood-Drinking Perverts
Imperial History According to Tacitus
Kenneth Rexroth
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Christian Fascism: The Jesus Gestapo of St. Orwell
Carolyn Baker looks at Chris Hedges' American Fascism: The Christian Right And The War On America
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Reading, Writing, Resurrection
Amy Waldman
atlantic
Hurricane Katrina destroyed one of America’s worst school systems and made New Orleans the nation’s laboratory for educational reform. But can determined educators and entrepreneurs transcend the damage of the flood—and of history? ______________________________________
Insurgent’s Handbook
an unfolding project by Stan Goff
Sex and War
another serialized piece by Stan Goff Eliminationism in America: IX
the latest installmet in Dave Neiwert's major exploration
______________________________________
 Jitka Hanzlová
images against war
______________________________________
small receptacles
towards imaging the caption
Aaron D. Levy
Photographs in this project courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Museum Archives
The caption is often the under-reported event in looking through the photograph. The idea of fusing event and image, wind and air within the window frame itself suggests, to me, something more fluid. I see the photograph as a door, and the caption its handle - together, they give back to us some comforting sense of solidity; but they actually allow things, wind, trees, people and, of particular interest to me, the imagination, to pass through.(...)
For all these notions pile up, making inane the possibility of conceptualizing such a pliable medium - so pliable, in fact, as to often allow ourselves to forget "it". I wanted to further address the medium by embodying it in an incomplete language.(...)
The self and the world enter into one another on a conceptual level much as one looks through a window and feels oneself rendered vulnerable to the surroundings. Surely, we cannot isolate the photograph and the caption; and yet, it is just as inane to throw the two into utter fusion.... (more)
 where everyone is familiar -
not to be able to fly
Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism
Volume 2, Number 1 (February 2000)
On Genocide
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Janus Head: Regarding a Critical Rhetoric
Spring 2000 3.1
The Knot between Ricoeur and Derrida:
A Look at Rhetoric in the Human Sciences
Rex Olson
Speaking Differently: Deconstruction/Meditative Thinking as the Heart of "the Faculty of Observing"
Aloysius Joseph
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Fresh material at nthposition and Otoliths 4
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If you are in the NYC area there is a Book Party for ::fait accompli: Tuesday, February 27 as well as a Synthetic Zero event February 17
 still from Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Léger
4 February 1881 - 17 August 1955
painter, sculptor, and filmmaker
______________________________________
I am a Grammarian.
We will or we will not cry together.
- Gertrude Stein
.....................................................................
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language And The Strangeness Of The Ordinary Marjorie Perloff The emphasis on spiritual struggle and redemption should not, however, obscure what we might call the côté avant garde of Wittgenstein, the obsession, not only with the "power of ordinary words," as in Emerson's case, but with their strangeness:
Imagine that a child was quite specially clever, so clever that he could at once be taught the doubtfulness of the existence of all things. So he learns from the beginning: "That is probably a chair."
And now how does he learn the question: "Is it also really a chair?"
Such riddling is what Guy Davenport seems to have in mind when he links the author of the Tractatus to Kafka. This Wittgenstein is an obsessively playful grammarian, whose riddling, disconnected sentence sequences bring to mind those of a fellow avant-gardist Wittgenstein never read, never met (and would probably have thoroughly disliked if he had met!) --namely Gertrude Stein. "Strangely simultaneous in their stylistic concerns," writes Guy Davenport in The Geography of the Imagination, "the two were at work from 1917 onwards on identical linguistic phenomena: the splashed meaning of chattered language, language which is gesture, politeness, and social formula. . . . Gertrude Stein is not interested in the absurdity of language but in the astounding implications that can be flushed from its ordinariness."... (more)
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Refusal and désistance of the political
archive : s0metim3s provides a bit of Lacoue-Labathe from a seminar on Les fins de l'homme (1980)
Historiographically – and that is to say, historically – a limit has been reached, and this is the totalitarian fact as it accompanies the movement of philosophy drawing to a close. Which does not mean that the gulag is in Hegel or Birkenau is in Nietszsche, but that we have to cease denying the actuality of the various modes of completion of the philosophical: from the Party State to psychological dictatorship.... (more)
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Since Naked Lunch treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomaches.
Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's _Modest_Proposal_. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.
-
William S. Burroughs, Testimony Concerning A Sickness
 William S. Burroughs
(February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997)
There is no place else to go
The theater is closed
There is no place else to go
The theater is closed
Cut word lines
Cut music lines
Smash the control images
Smash the control machine.
William S. Burroughs, Quick Fix
William S. Burroughs Films and sound filesubuweb
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 Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Léger
1924
youtube
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'Why are you weeping?' said Bembel Rudzuk.
'I am suffering from an attack of history,' I said.
'It will pass,' said Bembel Rudzuk.
- Pilgermann, Russell Hoban, b. Feb 4 1925
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Created to lead astray: Baudrillard’s seduction in contemporary artefacts
Laura Gonzalez
When Jean Baudrillard stated that the desire of the subject could only be matched by an object-seducer he opened a range possibilities for makers, particularly art and design practitioners. Capitalism and modern culture have provided material things with new qualities. Contemporary objects have become a focal point for the seductive experience: ranging from designer shoes and sport-cars to common household objects and the latest technological devices, these enticing ‘must haves’ lead viewers and consumers astray. Emerging disciplines such as captology, the study of how technologies persuade, and consumption studies have concentrated on the analysis of this phenomenon, if only from an experiential perspective rather than focusing on the appearance of the objects and their relational qualities. This paper will examine the characteristics of seduction, as defined by Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies and Seduction, and apply them to artefacts, using Surrealism, Phillippe Starck’s Juicy Salif and Jonathan Ive’s iPod as examples.via Foucault Is Dead
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 Anatol Rapoport
May 22, 1911- January 20, 2007
War and peace - and math
Pianist and pioneering writer became first peace studies professor at U of T
Noted peace researcher Rapoport dies at 95
Ann Arbor News
Rapoport was a professor of mathematical biology in the department of psychiatry at U-M. After leaving Ann Arbor, Rapoport taught at the University of Toronto, where he became the school's first professor of peace and conflict studies. In academia, he was highly-regarded for his research in the mathematical study of human decisions, and considered a leading peace researcher.
via Jim Johnson
Anatol Rapoport bio and bibliography
a large sampling of Anatol Rapoport's writing ______________________________________
The Lens Of Images
Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking
David Cox
History Speaks While the Guy Holding it Drinks a Glass of Water
Media speak as if the ventriloquists doll of history. Looking at the sea of ancient images which constitute the western imagination, it is easy to see why so many museums are becoming theme parks. In a corporatised urban space, the notion of a civic use for cultural memory is potentially subversive. Implicit within the old-school idea of the museum is that the centre of civic life lies with local governance. Sponsorship and theme-parking does away with such troublesome notions of government in the service of a population, for its own sake. We must construct our own museums of cultural memory. If we don't remember the period before the Dark Times, nobody will. Bradbury at 451 degrees knows more than you do, honey. We're burning up to tell you like it was, like it is, like it may yet be. ... (more)
David Cox Articles and Essays
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 Los fumadores
Fernand Léger
177 images
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A psychoanalyst is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths; he is a linguist.
- Interview with Jacques Lacan, 1957
"As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside."
- Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 27, 1946)
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 Anton Räderscheidt
1892 – 1970
Désaccord
solipsistic She evaded Avenue collision with the intent to circumvent instances: a spacing between edifice and premises allowing for equanimity and peace. These structures tower around her, comforting and caressing calmness: the blanketing of tranquility gifted by girder and stone. She paused to consider carefulness once more and decided against the acceptance of Time's impediment to continuance: instead she chose to beg Difference for aspiration and expectation.
 Anton Räderscheidt
1927
photo by August Sander
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Winter Night
Sándor Csoóri
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Roberts and László Vertes
At night, the city grows empty.
The snow falls without witness, alone.
Everyone stares at the unknown
murderer's footprint
in the tv screen's white ash.
Music plays. Brakes squeak. A street lamp draws aside,
stares like a wolf's eye
into a bushy, stiff face.
Nobody asks themselves anymore
whether they're still alive; like the squeaking of brakes,
only the deaths of others haunt in the nightmarish
mirrors' depths,
only the blood which can be sponged up with powdered sugar,
and the legs, leaving, seen only to the knee.
I see a snow-covered bullet fly,
taking its time, toward my forehead;
it flies in slow motion, like in the cartoons, so I still
have time!
The entire night's before me,
every height of the lace-making sky,
the abandoned street snow, which wants to see
my footprints today, and tomorrow.
 Sándor Csoóri
b. Feb. 3, 1930
Sándor Csoóri poems at Hungarian Literature Online
poems at The Drunken Boat
some translations by Len Roberts
Artful Dodge
Literature and politics in today's Hungary:
Sandor Csoori in the populist-urbanite debate
Ervin C. Brody
Literary Review, Spring, 1995
The Private Self in Public Sorrow: [PDF]
On Sándor Csoóri
Amy Wright
denver quarterly
Before and after the Fall is a relief, finally, from taking the self too seriously and, at the same time, from taking the notion of self unseri-ously. This collection represents two of Hungarian poet Sándor Csoóri’s books, Monuments of the World (1989), and With Swans, in Cannon Fire (1994). Len Roberts’s exceptional translation earned him the Lannan Foundation Literary Translator’s Award for this faithful conveyance of Csoóri’s self-described “chronic memory of violence.” (...)
In the second section, riddled with nightmares and survivor guilt, Csoóri describes the era after the fall, laying bare atrocities commit-ted during the Communist reign. Unpublishable before the collapse, it illustrates the dangers Csoóri faced at the beginning of his career when a grant was revoked from him and he was banned from publi-cation and public appearances for one year. Juxtaposing these two texts has the disquieting effect of fanning tributaries of complex and often contradictory emotional reactions over wide intellectual ranges, and re-routing the courses of grief and anger, guilt and national loy-alty. Here is an evocative nightmare of brandished pitchforks in “the People’s Park” by which one might learn a European meta-narrative micro-narratively. .....................................................................
I Was Watching The Bushes
Sándor Csoóri
War news on the radio in the evening
and soldiers in the tree-lined alley that seals infinity-
I didn't close my eyes all night,
as though I'd kept vigil at the city morgue over a woman's
car-crushed corpse.
The neighbor's clock struck four when I got dressed
and aimlessly set off.
The streets were still lying numb with cold, stiff
like lamp posts flattened in the mud.
I was sickened by the strong stink of pitch.
I was watching the bushes, what was going on?
watching the windows,
the dirty water that gathered in the hollows,
and above the puddles, my head's drifting shadow.
In the park opposite
it seemed as if someone had been digging
a pit for himself among the trees,
wrists stirred, clods thudded-
Maybe each last judgment, each ravagement starts afresh?
and flies will walk
on hands, dead eyeballs,
as though on light bulbs that have burnt out.
(Translated from the Hungarian by Len Roberts and Anette Marta)
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 Hellebore for Georg Trakl
R.B. Kitaj ______________________________________
Psalm
Georg Trakl
translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt
It is a light, which the wind has extinguished.
It is a village inn, which a drunkard abandons in the afternoon.
It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders.
It is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.
The lunatic is dead. It is an island of the South Pacific,
To receive the sun god. One beats the drums.
The men perform warlike dances.
The women sway the hips between climbing plants and fire flowers
When the sea sings. O our lost paradise.
The nymphs have left the golden forests.
One buries the stranger. Then a glimmering rain begins.
The son of Pan appears in the guise of an excavator,
Who sleeps away the midday near the glowing asphalt.
There are small girls in a courtyard in little dresses full of heartbreaking poverty!
There are rooms fulfilled with chords and sonatas.
There are shadows that embrace before a blind mirror.
By the windows of the hospital convalescents warm themselves.
A white steamboat in the canal bears bloody epidemics along.
The strange sister appears again in someone's evil dreams.
Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars.
The student, possibly a double, looks long after her from the window.
His dead brother stands behind him, or he descends the old spiral staircase.
In the darkness of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novice grows pale.
The garden is in evening. In the cloister the bats flutter about.
The children of the caretaker stop to play and search the gold of heaven.
Closing chords of a quartet. The small blind girl runs trembling through the avenue,
And later her shadow gropes along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.
It is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal in the evening.
In the somberness of the old asylum human ruins decay.
The dead orphans lie by the garden wall.
From gray rooms angels step with excrement-splattered wings.
Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids.
The plaza before the church is gloomy and taciturn, like in the days of childhood.
On silver soles former lives glide past
And the shadows of the damned descend to the sighing waters.
In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.
Taciturnly over the place of skulls God's golden eyes open.
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To Georg Trakl as a thank-you for the poem "Psalm" (in the magazine "The Torch")
:Karl Kraus
Children born in the seventh month are the only ones, whose view makes the parents responsible, when they sit there beside the robbed like caught thieves. They have the view that reclaims what was taken from them, and when their thinking is interrupted, then it is as if it sought the remainder and they stare back at the failure. There are others who think such a view is acceptable, but in their view they would like chaos to refund what they have received too much of. These are the perfect ones who became finished when it was too late. They came into the world with a cry of shame that leaves them only one, first, last feeling: back into your body, oh mother, where it was good!
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 Georg Trakl
February 3, 1887 - November 3, 1914
Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl [ PDF ]
Translated and Chosen by James Wright and Robert Bly
Wersch's Website for Georg Trakl
a major resource with translations mainly by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt
German version of the Trakl-Site ______________________________________
 Rhetoricians at a Window
Jan Havickszoon Steen
1626 -1679
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Melancholy of the Evening
Georg Trakl
translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt
-- The forest, which widens deceased --
And shadows are around it, like hedges.
The deer comes trembling out of hidden places,
While a brook glides very quiet
And follows ferns and ancient stones
And gleams silverly from tangled foliage.
Soon one hears it in black gorges -
Perhaps, also that stars already shine.
The dark plain seems endless,
Scattered villages, marsh and pond,
And something feigns a fire to you.
A cold gleam shoos over roads.
In the sky one anticipates movement,
An army of wild birds migrates
Towards those lands, beautiful, distant.
The stirring of reeds rises and sinks.
 Sze Tsung Leong
"The photographs in the series History Images are of histories, in the form of cities in China, either being destroyed or created at this juncture in time. They are of past histories, in the form of traditional buildings and neighborhoods, urban fabrics, and natural landscapes, in the process of being erased. They are of the absence of histories, in the form of construction sites, built upon an erasure of the past so complete that one would never know a past had ever existed. And they are of the anticipation of future histories, yet to unfold, in the form of newly built cities."
Drastic urbanization:the photographs of Sze Tsung Leong Art Journal, Winter, 2004
Unintelligent Design
An Interview with Sze Tsung Leong
I lived there for a year and a half, but this project was a total of four years during which I traveled there frequently. Every time I would arrive in China I would go through a few days of depression from being reminded of both short-term and long-term ruin; the ruining of the city that is happening in the short-term, and the ruining of culture and history that has happened over decades.
Guernica Magazine______________________________________
Translation Sans Original
Nick Piombino
You think I'm too old
Or too slow
To notice the sun is tapering off
You think I'm too silent
Or too dense
To find the whirling planets dull
And academically repetitive
For me day is easy
And night is easier still
For me sleep is a page in a book
I still haven't read
Can't you brush against words
Instead of demanding their participation
And telling them to grow up and settle down?
Don't you understand
That language is young and doesn't know yet
In whose tongue to speak?
Tell your friends that speech
Has no nation
That the crown is an umbrella
For paragraphs.
Walk around this spacious world
With things left over
From this morning.
Be transparent.
Let living stammer
Sidereality 2:4, Oct-Dec.2003
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 Distribution Automatique
cover collage
Nick Piombino
FAIT ACCOMPLI - the book Nick Piombino afterword by Gary Sullivan Heretical Texts, Factory School
I am delighted to have this book in hand given that I've been finding stimulation, comfort and solace in Nick's work at fait accompli since its inception. Thanks Nick - mw from Gary Sullivan's afterword: Miraculously, Nick Piombino, who launched fait accompli early in 2003, has managed to stay out of nearly every poetry blogwar to date. This is not, I would argue, because he has less of a stake in any of the arguments that have come up - he cares about poetry and the social world in which it operates as passionately and deeply as anyone else. His neutrality, the seeming neutrality of fait accompli, has more to do, I believe, with his relationship to time.
Whereas most of us - even those of us with decades of poetryworld "history"- tend to focus our blogs on the immediate present of the poetry world - often as shaped and limited by present online participation by others - Nick, from the outset, has consciouly and constantly used his blog as a form of dialogue and exchange with the past, present and future - that of his personal life, of his poetics, of poetry and poetics generally, and of politics and the larger social realm.
The Individual as Social Process:Writer and Self in the Work of Nick Piombino
Mark Wallace jacket
Of all the poets associated with language writing, Nick Piombino focuses most directly on the problem of the individual, both as writer and as source of experience. While the theoretical focus of most language writers can be said to be socialist and materialist, Piombino's use of psychoanalytic theory and his experience as a practicing psychoanalyst marks him as different in focus while at the same time his work is closely related to language writing.(...)
Through the lens of Piombino’s insistence both on the complexity of social relations and the complexity of individuals, then, poetic practices that in theory remain relatively oppositional can be discovered to have much more in common than would otherwise be thought. But such a link can be found only by going against the grain of dominant critical paradigms in which language poets would be against individuality and lyricism, while a writer like Jarnot would favor them. One of the main values of Piombino’s work, therefore, becomes its resistance to easy critical paradigms, however created. In refusing overgeneralized paradigms, Piombino rediscovers poetic and individual connection in places that the paradigms ignore and hide. It’s both ironic and freeing that such hidden connection should be found in the concept of the individual and in the way in which the multiple layers of the self resist, at least partly, theoretical and institutional attempts to deny poets their differences.... (more) .....................................................................
Interview with Nick PiombinoTom Beckett
EPC/Nick Piombino Author Home Page
Piombino at PennSound
reading at the Bowery Poetry Club/Segue Series Nov. 11. 2006 from his *Contradicta* series, as well as other writings from ::fait accompli [mp3]
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Much of our experience of others and their experience remains foreign to us. We must internally translate or we are doomed to misunderstand or be misunderstood.
Nick Piombino, contradicta
fait accompli
(undergoing some transitional blogger pains - seemingly a not uncommon experience)
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 Sze Tsung Leong
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from
Seven Aches
Ece Temelkuran
Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin
words without bordersEvery ache sleeps in a certain position. In sleep, the
body that becomes itself as it forgets itself will
discover that position through trial and error.
The body knows how to soothe its own ache. The body
can construct soporific angles, hills for its aches. Every
hill conceals an ache. This is why thousands of aches
will settle in the hills of our flesh, of our insides, where
they have found their sleeping positions. This is why it
is dangerous to budge people, to demolish their hills.
To tug at cities and at urbanites is to awaken the aches
that sleep on the hills.
(...)
But still, a person can only be alone in a city with a sea.
Because you can turn your face to the sea. That way,
you turn your back to the crowds. As for cities without
a sea, whichever way you turn there are people,
whichever way you turn.
For that reason, people should get along well with each
other in cities without a sea. As for cities with a sea,
those who want to can also live without running into
people’s faces. ... (more) ______________________________________
Now gode. Let us leave theories there and return to here's here. Now hear. 'Tis gode again. The teak coffin, Pughglasspanelfitted, feets to the east, was to turn in later, and pitly patly near the porpus, materially effecting the cause. And this, liever, is the thinghowe. Any number of conservative public bodies, through a number of select and other committees having power to add to their number, before voting themselves and himself, town, port and garrison, by a fit and proper resolution, following a koorts order of the groundwet, once for all out of plotty existence, as a forescut, so you maateskippey might to you cuttinrunner on a neuw pack of klerds, made him, while his body still persisted, their present of a protem grave in Moyelta of the best Lough Neagh pattern, then as much in demand among misonesans as the Isle of Man today among limniphobes.
- Finnegans Wake
 James Joyce
2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus
-- Finnegans Wake
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Insurgent American
On strategy, tactics & intelligence
Stan Goff
Insurgent American makes the claim that — however nascent and unknown it is right now — it is a “practical strategic resource.” It’s time to flesh that out a bit more, because the antiwar movement appears to be at an impasse. A good deal of that impasse can be attributed to the near total failure of movement “leadership” to appreciate the relationship between strategy, tactics, and intelligence, except in the most superficial and schematic way. After all, no one teaches this stuff except the same people who have spent the last fifty years perfecting the methods that haven’t worked for fifty years.
The reason this comes up now is the general panic, promoted by the Bush administration and the press, about an impending attack on Iran. This dubious proposition has successfully diverted the entire antiwar movement into shrieking through the streets about something that has not happened and abandining any strategically focused effort (if there was one to start with) to stop what is happening, i.e., a mass murder in Iraq conducted with our acquiescence and resulting in the loss of 700,000 lives and more than a million displaced persons in a nation of 27 million human beings.... (more)
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 detail
Hendrick van Avercamp
1585 - 1664
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Blog names are the store fronts of Walter Benjamin's
ageless arcades, inviting the reader into the
contours of a day, fading into various qualities
of light in morning, noon and night's
photographic darkroom.
Nick Pombino, Walter Benjamin's *Arcades Project* and Blogging
 Tall Tree - Deep Darkness
Zbigniew Makowski
Makowski at The Warsaw Voice
more images
Gallery of Polish Painting
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I will have revenge on the bastard tree that broke the neck of Albert Camus
Darran Anderson
I didn't hear it through the grapevine, or from a shoe-shining snitch or happily floating in my mother's womb with my ear against her belly button, like a hearing bugle, straining with clenched tooth to hear the muffled words outside. His stories, his books knew nothing of his passing. Instead I read it in the fading ink of a forty two-year-old obituary, forty two years that, from the newspaper, smelt as if they were filled with nothing but snuffboxes, the bottom of birdcages and the unique aroma of the inside of an old man's pocket. There was no doubt about it; Camus was dead.
My existential Humphrey Bogart, the prophet of sun and sea, the Algerian Pied Noir, the ladies’ man, the TB lunger, the Stranger, the mistaken Outsider, the "Trotskyite", the rebel, the guest, the moral journalist, the day to day historian, the exile, the Nobel Prize Winner, neither the victim nor the oppressor, the French resistance partisan, editor of Combat and the goalkeeper for Algiers FC. Here was someone you could put your faith in, who would not break or bend. A man that you listened to and stood behind when faced with his…our enemies. He was our nuclear deterrent, a man made out of the elements, his atoms were the same as those of neutronium, with the weight of a thousand collapsed stars whilst the rest of us were made of crumbling carbon or some weak dispersed form of gas. A man that gravity struggled so intensely to control, to push him towards the ground that it forgot about the rest of us, the people constructed out of matchsticks and straw, and we’d have to invent elaborate systems of magnets and pulleys just to keep our feet on the ground. We’d be protected and inspired and incited by the existence of such a man. But now…now he was as dead as Adam.... (more)
deaddrunkindublin______________________________________
Notes on Bourdieu
Gene Ray
Anyone who has occupied “positions” and left traces of a “trajectory” in the contemporary art world will recognize a reflection of their own experiences in Bourdieu’s account of the logic and structure of the cultural field. It’s immediately obvious that his elaborated conceptions of “field” and “habitus” have great descriptive and explanatory power. And it’s hard to imagine now doing without his notion of cultural, academic, symbolic, and social “capital,” as a means to understand the different forms of power that are specific to the various sub-fields making up the “field of class relations.”(...)
Bourdieu has given us an admirable analysis of the conditions by which one is authorized to enter the cultural field and compete there for cultural and symbolic power. However, he did not address or try to analyze what for some of us is the urgent problem today: how to exit the field. It may be that a certain renunciation of the given, consecrated social existence is a condition for the collective invention of a new kind of social existence. This was already one focus of the classical avant-gardes and perhaps was first theorized explicitly by the Situationists. Today, in much different conditions, Paolo Virno has compellingly re-posed this problem. It’s true that there is no pure outside, no space of unlimited freedom or absolute autonomy beyond the constraining parameters handed down by history. The projection of such a space would be merely the obverse of “closure phantasms.” But saying this is much different from claims that there is no outside at all or that, once admitted to the cultural field, we are powerless to operate beyond it. Constraining parameters are not necessarily so once and for all; whether or not they are in fact (or still are) constraining can only be determined by continuously contesting them. This is how revolutionary situations open up, often when and where they are least expected.... (more) Notes on Paolo Virno in Buenos Aires______________________________________
Mute Vol2 #4 January 07
Web 2.0 - Man's best friendster?
special section on the politics, economics and possibilites of social networks
available [pdf] or bare bones html
The Social SoftWar
Angela Mitropoulos
scroll down
Do blogs and social network-based sites offer the prospect of a democratic sociability without borders or wars? Should unpaid producers of content struggle for fair compensation? Or does the very sense of ownership, justice and right founded on labour need to be shaken up?
Angela Mitropoulos takes a critical look at the dissident pragmatism of the startup and the ‘alternative’ economies of the digital commons
‘Being social’ is often understood as the opposite of ‘being at war’. ‘Social software’, even if implicitly, retains this distinction and its premises. Let’s begin, then, with the topic of war – and technology. As Clausewitz once famously complained, ‘War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. That is, war is conceived as an instrument – to be defended, opposed, or explained according to ends that are external to it, usually political, but also economic, civilisational, humanitarian, theological and so on. In this sense, war is often reckoned as technology, which is to say, with all the associated connotations according to which technology is considered an instrument. That is, as Aristotle defined technics: a man-made thing, distinguished from man by not having the origin of motion or rest within it.
In another but related sense, the question of war, no less than that of technology, is frequently posed in such a way that the nexus between politics, life and technics is denied – often for the purposes of clinching either a pessimistic or optimistic stance – or credited with an infinite sway. In this way, the question of technology too often becomes, and perhaps parallels, the theologisation of politics (and history) that has repeatedly animated both conservative and radical critiques of capitalism. Whether assigned with almighty powers from which, according to Heideggerian lamentation, ‘only a God can save us’, or serving as placeholder of eschatological hopes for the reclamation of a divine-like mastery over the world, the question of technology presents itself as the answer to a political question that has – to modify Althusser’s remark on the structure of ideology – not been overtly posed. In this respect, Arthur Kroker is right to ask whether ‘technology is the name given today to the ancient language of metaphysics.’ Foucault’s similarly famous reply to Clausewitz – ‘that politics is war continued by other means’ – suggests the intersection of technics, politics and life as the circumstance of war. Differently put: that war is not outside society, but a condition of it, as an often diffuse and permanent war that, also, marks the perimeter of any given society.... (more) ______________________________________
 Camera Obscura
Times Square in Hotel Room
Abelardo Morell
1997
Abelardo Morell at Lens Culture
gallery and audio interview
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Living Inside a Poem
Ralph Angel on translating Lorca
I won’t indulge myself here by recalling all the reasons why I took on the project of translating “Poema del cante jondo,” or the obstacles I encountered along the way. It is enough to say that music itself became a constant companion. Lorca was a minstrel, and he understood poetry as an oral expression. I found that in order to come to terms with these spare, peculiar poems, I had to come to terms with cante jondo, and especially the four palos or genres of Lorca’s book: “Poem of the Gypsy Siguiriya,” “Poem of the Soleá,” “Poem of the Saeta,” and “Description of the Petenera.” Only by studying cante jondo, and translating lyrics of songs that moved me, and listening to cante jondo while I worked, did I begin to hear the strange, subtle rhythms and silences and accents of the poems.
But I found myself listening to other music, as well; to other forms of flamenco, for example, to medieval Arabic and Jewish music, and to American jazz. I found myself going to the music of duende, in other words, of which cante jondo is a supreme example, including the American duende of Billie Holiday and Cassandra Wilson, of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Bill Evans, of John Lee Hooker and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
American duende was especially important to me during those periods I spent living and working in Granada. There I was thinking and speaking in Spanish. I slid into the ways of Andalusian culture, and it helped me to hear the language of the original poems. But listening to the music of American duende, music I’ve known and loved for years, helped me to hear my own language, the language of translation.
What is the language of this translation? It isn’t anything without Granada, the Spanish language, English, music, the almost mythological life of García Lorca, and the elements of Deep Song.... (more)via
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