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Some Blogs
 House
under construction
Kasimir Malevich
1912
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 pro-war parade
N.Y.C. 1967
Diane Arbus
March 14, 1923 - July 26, 1971
Surface tensions: Judith Butler on Diane Arbus
ArtForum, Feb, 2004 ______________________________________
Research as Organizing Tool
Jay Taber
From 1990-1998, I served as a public interest advocate and community organizer in Bellingham, Washington. In the course of my work, which included a stint as executive director of the Whatcom Environmental Council, and a subsequent association with the Public Good Project, I became embroiled in conflict with the radical right, including Wise Use agent provocateurs, fundamentalist Christian activists, and Christian Identity Patriots engaged in militia organizing.
The convergence of these movements throughout Puget Sound had created a political climate severely hostile to participatory democracy, seriously disturbing electoral, legislative, administrative, and judicial processes. Since 1995, I have struggled to understand what took place, and where it came from, in order to develop preventive strategies and tactics, that would help make communities less vulnerable to obstruction or subversion of self-governance.
Through a series of interviews of leading researchers who investigate the Far Right in the US, I explored community-based research, hoping to learn how it is carried out, and if it could be further developed as a progressive organizing tool. The following comments and reflections constitute my attempt to summarize the most salient points of these interviews. ..............(...)
The view expressed by the respondents, that hate and violence, based on ignorance and fear, must be treated as a social disease, requiring research, education, and organizing strategies of prevention, as well as intervention where outbreaks occur--using the public health model--reenforces their insistence on the need for functioning networks, that link local concerned and involved citizens with regional and national information and training resources.
The difficulties pointed out in working with and relying on government agencies, law enforcement, and media, to build tolerance and justice, or to constrain intolerant behavior, if not thought, place all the more burden on the groups and individuals who commit themselves to this very special purpose. The need to develop respect for research, in order to act and organize around information, rather than ideology; the need to train others in the methods; and the need to develop institutional memory within the groups organized for this purpose, is both daunting and exhilarating.
The only thing worse than facing a formidable challenge, I suggest, is living with despair over not knowing what to do.... (more)
Jay Taber may be found at
Skookum
Continuity
A Public Good Project Initiative
thanks to J Alva Scruggs
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"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
-- Edward Abbey
via
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 Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark
A Multimedia Presentation
digital journalist
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The Iraq War at Four: A Word Collage
Shaun Mullen
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On Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay While Watching CNN
Charlotte Mandel
Sonnet clxviii
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines...
let him...ape... fire, and demon: she assigns
metrical drum to Furies, inner rage
re-decibeled to sing upon the page—
a poet's ardent war.
I conjure global
chaos in close up, shocked awed gaze enmeshed
in smoke—which fuel burns as black—oil or flesh?
Red glares of rockets whirling disco strobes.
Headlines loop round the tape Mayhem Anarchy
say captions in show & tell synecdoche.
How to confine in form both love and grief—
suspend—in what is real—my disbelief?
Alphabet spins to suffer loss as gain.
A torn I. V. dangles from a child's vein.
Big Bridge #12
"Death on All Fronts"
Edited by Halvard Johnson
The War Papers Big Bridge
 Chinese interiors
Robert van der Hilst
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Manhood and its Poetic Projects
The construction of masculinity in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
jacket
It has been often noted that it is difficult to talk about gender without tumbling into binaries, especially when the people you’re talking about deployed them, sometimes assiduously. Maleness is hardly one totalized thing. Ideologies of manhood and of masculinity are not single. All of the manifestations of gender are historically variable, affirmed, selected from, reaffirmed, and deployed even if these manifestations sometimes proceed under the rubrics of “nature” or “the natural.” Further, one’s sense of the meanings and practices of a gendered self may change over a lifetime and inside a poetic career.(...)
Winni Breines has argued that dissident [white] girls in the 1950s “utilize[d] and adapt[ed] male versions of rebellion and disaffection,” identified with “outsiders, hoods and greasers” and the “oddball” rebels in Beat subcultures as well as with the increasingly mainstream disobediences of rock and roll. She sees as notable the way “males were the inspiration” for this muted female revolt and sees some of this inchoate dissidence emerging as feminism about ten years later; indeed, she argues that the young women, although the “girlfriends and fans” of Beat men, more deeply “wanted to be them”.
In another analysis of the reception of Beat material, Fanny Howe comments devastatingly on the contradictions for women in the Beat world: “It was a man’s world, even out there on the edges beyond convention. It was the men who broke themselves at the margin. It was the men who were loud and famous. The women I knew then shuffled barefoot at perhaps a farther edge — the edge where anonymity either creates subversion or self-annihilation”. A more optimistic refraction of Beat importance in 1950s culture, despite gender attitudes, is chronicled in a 1994 letter by Anne Waldman, included in the long poem Iovis, Book II. Responding to a woman who had asked about the “‘boys’ club mentality’” of the Beats, Waldman acknowledges the general misogyny in their early writings, but goes on to remind her interlocutor that “the Beats are popular because they represent an alternative… to the status quo. An antithesis to bald commercialism, selfishness, spiritual vacuity, political advantage, double-dealing, lying, dishonesty, racism, general all-around uptightness”. This is a moving reaffirmation of the argument of “Howl.” It also suggests that a text can open the possibility for gender critiques it does not itself make, indeed, that it resists making.... (more) ______________________________________
the personal aesthetic
another fine illustrated essay by Stacy Osborne
the space in between
what do you mean when you think of the word "aesthetics?"
is it a detached, dry, intellectual word, something too often and too wearily encountered on yet another artist's statement written by some anonymous gallery assistant? is it a rare and personalized form of sight that only "master" artists seem to posses? is it a convenient pivot-term that critics can hover upon when creating confining boxes to fit their arguments about an artist, their output and their psychology into?
does one learn aesthetics or does aesthetics learn you? meaning: is aesthetics a panoply of ideas and concerns one encounters in a ripe and meaningful fashion, something to add to an artistic arsenal that will further give shape and weight to work made--or is it a different kind of encounter, a shocking familiarity, when you realize that a fully articulated way of thinking about something is one that you have always had and always carried with you, unawares. until that moment of encounter.
are aesthetics something given to you from the outside, or is it latent potentiality, waiting there for you to recognize it as some part of your self?... (more)
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The New Color:
The Return of Black-and-White
Charlotte Cotton
...it was obvious that photography was undergoing a physical face-lift to meet the demands of sitting alongside painting and sculpture in vast art centers and at international fairs; the predominance of big digital C-prints, laminated behind plexi, in small editions, was establishing itself. The hyperbolic, carefully controlled, museum- and gallery-specific versions of photography, in which every prop and gesture can be attributed to the artist's direction, have been the most pronounced arrivals in the art world. If you are, like me, schooled in the magic of photography's willful embrace of luck, mistakes, and happenstance, you view the art world's partial endorsement of this bastard form with some suspicion. I don't mean to deride the awe-inspiring creativity of a handful of artists who showed us that photography was a supremely capable and elastic art medium and were honored with monolithic, monographic exhibitions. I mean to indicate that their ascendance into the center of art practice does not necessarily herald the acceptance or understanding of photography's broad creative terrain as a whole.(...)
I am sure I'm not alone in beginning to think that the more complex, messy, unfashionable, and broad territory of black-and-white photography is where we are going to find some of the grist to the mill in photography's substantive and longer-term positioning within art. Established, darkroom-trial-and-error-loving photographers are stockpiling their preferred papers and film, and younger practitioners are beginning the experimentation of finding digital alternatives, replete with all the inherent irony of converting chromatic digital to monochrome. In and of itself, this kind of contradictory momentum will create important discourse, while also continuing to link the various value systems for photography (including amateur and professional practice) with artists' critique.... (more) Tip of the Tongue a project that will evolve over the course of 2007. Its aim is to find the words that explain emergent issues for photography.via Tim Atherton
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Foos won't moos
an interesting piece by Conrad H. Roth (Varieties of Unreligious Experience) on E. S. Bates' 1943 book Intertraffic and the vagaries of translation, particularly when it comes to James Joyce.
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The Vollmann Club
an online collaborative effort to read all of William T. Vollmann's books and place Mr. Vollmann's work into perspective.
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A Batch of Theremin Videos
WFMU's Beware of the Blog
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The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani
The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a 'civilising mission'. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised - sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.... (more)
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The Cost of Privilege
Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism
by Chip Smith, (with Michelle Foy, Badili Jones, Elly Leary, Joe Navarro, and Juliet Ucelli)
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Power and Resistance in the Later Foucault [PDF]
John Hartmann
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 Greenland
Robert van der Hilst ______________________________________
from
Killing Floor
Ray DiPalma
Further Apocrypha
Cries and processions put a public face on things;
this designation is corroborated only by silence
So I’ve been checking around for hints of evidence,
copied formulas, neutral grids blank and ancient,
organizing a memory to document,
as it passes into the listening,
—a surge of impressions
indifferent to fame and death—
that describe an answer but offer none
Only variability is at our disposal—
added from the center—
never too that time for flat out
knowing how is where wastes its looked delivery and so
extends through another likelihood—never too
that time for then after all, hinged et cetera of other possibilities—
the harvest, allegro’s patch; the mouth squared by the tongue
makes the reasons speak another language—
what you came here for in the first place
... (more)onedit 7
 sky mirror / obverse
striatic
flickr
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Virtuality and the Near
ideant
part seven in the major Networked Proximity series
The fact is that the opposite of the virtual —as we will see— is not the real, but the actual. But before getting into that, we should acknowledge that setting up virtuality as a threat to reality has served an important function in critical theory. As part of a discourse on the shortfalls of modernity, virtuality has served as a powerful metaphor for describing the detachment we feel from ‘real’ life, the desire to reintegrate to a reality that seems to have been lost in the midst of simulations. Virtuality has frequently been the scapegoat for the anomie and alienation that accompany the lack of opportunities for meaningful social participation. But impugning virtuality in this way has prevented us from realizing its true value. Virtuality, as I intend to show with help from the work of Gilles Deleuze, can be employed to affirm the real, not devalue it —increasing our understanding and therefore our engagement with it. Furthermore, I also intend to show that networks do not really promote virtuality by creating a separate online social realm, but in fact obstruct references to virtuality, which can only be recuperated through the paranodal.... (more)
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No place and every place accommodates us.
Elina Axioti & Toni Moceri introduction to Static Issue 04
Adolfo Bioy Casares, in his novella The Invention of Morel (1939), tells the story of a man who tries to accommodate himself within a ‘fictional’ present, constructed by somebody else… Within his novella, Casares offers a paradigm of the paradoxical manner in which we accommodate ourselves. Morel’s effort is an unconventional way to inhabit a place; he pervades and shapes the ‘reality’ on the island. Fundamental to such an effort is the feeling of a lack of place, whether virtual or material, literal or fictional…
To be Unaccommodated involves movement, progress, motivation, process, and creative expression. At times, it is marked by extreme and radical phenomena that include departures, displacements and constructions of new environments and produce paradoxical inhabitations. Many works by architects, artists and theorists demonstrate sensitivity towards the spatial impacts of these phenomena. They present an immense variety of alternative strategies available in order for us to review our relationship with the places we inhabit.
New forms of urbanism already shaping the 21st century—contemporary migration patterns, utopic spatial approaches, strategies of intervention and introspection, the ‘instant cities’ of China and Dubai—enjoy a common point of reference. The desire to reshape environments expresses a mutual devotion to addressing the ‘unaccommodated’. By conceptualizing, theorizing and discussing approaches to space this issue of Static examines and presents a variety of these stimulating results of the Unaccommodated.
Static" the web resource of the London Consortium, a unique collaboration between the Architectural Association, Birkbeck College (University of London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Tate."
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Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?
Jaron Lanier interviewed by RU Sirius
10 Zen Monkeys
...a lot more could have happened with Virtual Reality than has happened. I feel that what went wrong with VR was that decent software standard platform didn’t happen. The ones that were most in the forefront like VRML just didn’t work well enough. So to get back to your question: what were people looking for? I still believe that what people really want from VR is to be able to touch upon the feeling of being able to share a dream with someone else — to take a little step away from the sense of isolation that people feel today. I think this is a universal and very healthy desire. (VR isn’t the only way to address it obviously.)
But in VR, at some point, you would be able to be inside this place with other people where you were making it up as you went along. What people really wanted was a kind of intimacy where you’re making up a dream together with other people. You’re all experiencing it. I was calling it post-symbolic communication. The basic idea is that people thought that with VR they would be able to experience a kind of intense contact with imagination, some sort of fusion of the kind of extremes of aesthetics and emotional experience you might have when you open up the constraints of reality.(...)
I like to think of VR as an alternative way of thinking about a ramp of technological progress in the future where instead of making bigger and faster things, you make more intense experiences and more interesting forms of human connection. And if you think of that ramp, which is more of a McLuhanesque ramp than an Edward Teller ramp, that alternative ramp is the one that we can survive with. So in that sense, all this business about aesthetics and communications is a survival strategy. I really think it’s the only imaginable future.... (more)
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 Sutra of Innumerable Meanings
(ca. 900-1185)
The Written Image
Japanese Calligraphy and Painting
from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection
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'My death is everywhere, my death dreams'
k-punk
Baudrillard's contribution can be most easily appreciated when you consider who condemned him and why.(...)
Baudrillard is condemned, sometimes lionised, as the melancholic observer of a departed reality. He was certainly melancholic, but what he mourned was not a lost reality but what he variously termed the illusory, symbolic exchange, the seductive. Reality disappeared at the same moment that art and artifice were eliminated. Deprived of its heightened reflection, extension and hyperbolization in myth, art and ritual, reality cannot sustain itself. It is the very quest to access reality in itself, without illusion, that generates the hyperreal implosion. Here, as Baudrillard long ago realised, reality TV is exemplary. Film an unscripted scene and you might not have art, but you do not have reality either. You have reality's uncanny double, its excrescence: simulation, precisely.
Baudrillard: the prophet in our desert, the prophet of our desert.
... (more)
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The virtual world of consumer spectacle fails to describe its describer
Click opera
The difference between the French obituaries of Jean Baudrillard, who died last week, and the Anglo-Saxon ones was really remarkable. The Anglo ones seemed to be written by people trapped in exactly the sort of spectral, consumerist cage that Baudrillard described in his work, people nevertheless unaware of how well he had understood their situation.
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What Do Cyborgs Want?
(Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century)
Ron Silliman
response to Baudrillard's lecture, Missoula, MT, 1989
The great failing of the left, particularly in North America, our enormous crime of negligence, has been our inability to conceive politics beyond the horizon of the state. Even the Trotskyist workplace organizer, disdainful of all electoral strategies, is entirely encircled within a trade union practice whose commission ends at the border. Because we have conceived of politics as defined in a classical and historic fashion, as the public sphere of the polis, we have failed to sufficiently recognize the state as an instrument of power. Where once it served to protect capital by providing a wall of nationhood around its markets, now it serves a very different function: to limit the potential of anyone, including the state, to threaten capital.
Nations now operate very much the way suburbs once did, as a limit to individual and public will. Much of the original impulse behind these ex-urban hamlets was not in any idealization of the rural, simpler life, but as a mechanism for spatially separating classes, races, and, most especially, tax populations.(...)
French theory, precisely because it is so suburban, so conscious of the decline and loss of centers, has presented many valuable hints and suggestions. Baudrillard's advantage over Foucault (the first volume of whose History of Sexuality has been offered to us today not so secretly in the red dress of transvestitism) is that, where Foucault's focus was on the micropolitical, transcribing the concretion and dispersal of authority, Baudrillard's perspective, that of the hologram, has been at the level of the macro. Like Jameson, Baudrillard is – and I will use this term positively one more time – a structuralist. Unlike Jameson, however, Baudrillard is not nostalgic for structure. In this disjunction, Baudrillard replicates, at the level of methodology, what is by now a familiar dispersal of power. Here is the real scandal, the hologram from hell, and it is one from which we can extract clues toward political, cultural and aesthetic practices that extend beyond what Baudrillard himself seems prepared to suggest.... (more)
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 Fragment of Gilgamesh Tablet
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The Lost Poets of the Wild
The Influence of the First Writing Poets in Sumer David Rosenberg jacket
The essay that follows looks past the earliest Hebraic strand of the Bible, c. 920 B.C.E., to the Sumerian poets who provided the sources for both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the life of Abraham. These Sumerian poems and their strategies of narrative and lament, dream and cosmic theater, are what the ancient biblical poets inherited and turned into characters. Recent poets as diverse as Charles Olson, bpNichol, and Alice Notley have used portions of the Sumerian poems but without digging into their actual authorship or influence on poetry in the West.
That influence comes primarily through the creative portions of the Bible and we can find it in Milton and Blake, in Duncan and Reznikoff, all of whom had serious biblical encounters. But poets today, in their reluctance to engage things biblical, have further repressed the visionary wells at which our first writing poets — and their innovative translators — drank.... (more)
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Tractatus Homo Mercatus: Notes on the End of Civilization
Sally Wilde
White Courtesy Telephone
Susan Herr at PhilanthroMedia* writes:
Myriad messages now confirm that you don’t have to give up your life of comfort to make the world better. You don’t have to go to the convent or work at your local nonprofit. Neither donors, nor corporate employees, are immune to this emerging gestalt.
This massive PR campaign is something we could never have afforded but the result is that our troops are growing. Highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements are being sent to the front lines in this convergence of profit and social good.
I have to respectfully disagree. I believe the game is essentially lost unless we begin to question and, in some cases, challenge the structures that lead to unequal opportunity—to lives of joy for some and misery for others. This might indeed entail giving up our lives of comfort. I’m especially concerned about the implication that unchecked consumption might be sustainable. Worse still, the highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements Susan mentions will attempt to answer the questions, “What is wrong with the world?” and “What can we do about it?”, but they’ll leave unanswered the most fundamental question of all: “Who really cares?”... (more)
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Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic
Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann
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America
Jean Baudrillard, 1989
Translated by Chris Turner
All that fascinates us is thespectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to seeour thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting,reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind ofinterminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escapethe final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other -fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-backloop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. Infact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with amachine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; doyou think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child andmachine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for theintellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager getsfrom his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought,his concepts as images on a screen. ______________________________________
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"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday
Priests to Purify Sacred Mayan Site of 'Bad Spirits' After Bush Visit
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War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century
Interview with Noam Chomsky
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 Bush's "We Care a Lot" Tour
Lenin's Tomb
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Blanchot on Friendship, Death and Thought’s Profound Grief
Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg.
"We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well., in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by the way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion lies not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar this would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (were it to praise him), and that, far from preventing all communication, brings us together in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.(...)
We should not, by means of artifice, pretend to carry on a dialogue. What has turned away from us also turns us away from that part which was our presence, and we must learn that when speech subsides, a speech that for years gave itself to an ‘exigency without regard’, it is not only this exigent speech which has ceased, it is the silence that it made possible and from which it returned along an insensible slope toward the anxiety of time. Undoubtedly we will still be able to follow the same paths, we can let images come, we can appeal to an absence that we will imagine, by deceptive consolation, to be our own. We can, in a word, remember. But thought knows that one does not remember: without memory, without thought, it already struggles in the invisible where everything sinks back into indifference. This is thought’s profound grief. It must accompany friendship into oblivion."
International Journal Of Baudrillard Studies
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Children Selecting Books In A Library
Randall Jarrell
With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace… yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like dawn, with dew.
The children's cries
Are to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth
— But dip a finger into Fafnir, taste it,
And all their words are plain as chance and pain.
Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.
Read meanwhile… hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,
And find one cure for Everychild's diseases
Beginning: Once upon a time there was
A wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rode
A boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.
And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and men
In slow preambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking… who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, an trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to — to — somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own…
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.
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 Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac
March 12, 1922 - October 21, 1969
 'The Wall'
Portrail of Francis Bacon
detail
G. Scattergood - Moore ______________________________________
Georgio de Chirico
Paul Eluard
Translated by Tom Hibbard
A wall denounces another wall
And the shadows defend me from my timid shadow
O tower of my love surrounding my love
My silence turns the walls white
What do you defend? Sky unfeeling and clear,
Trembling you sheltered me. The prominent light
In the sky is no longer the mirror of the sun
But the stars of day among green leaves.
The memory of those who spoke without knowing,
Masters of my weakness. And I have replaced them
With eyes of love and hands too loyal
To depopulate a world from which I am absent. 1924
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Art Of The Possible: An Interview With Jacques Rancière
Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey
artforum
I’m not a philosopher who has gone from politics to aesthetics, from liberation movements of the past to contemporary art. I have always sought to contest globalizing thought that relies on the presupposition of a historical necessity. In the 1970s I conducted research in early-nineteenth-century workers’ archives* because the May ’68 movement had highlighted the gap between Marxist theory and the complex history of the actual forms of workers’ emancipation. I did it to counter the return to Marxist dogmatism on the one hand and, on the other, the liquidation of the very thought of workers’ emancipation in the guise of a critique of Marxism. Later I weighed in on questions of contemporary art, because the interpretation of twentieth-century art movements also found itself implicated in this manipulation of history. Contemporary art was taken hostage in the operation of the “end of utopias,” caught between so-called postmodern discourse, which proclaimed the “end of grand narratives,” and the reversal of modernism itself, as modernist thinkers ended up polemicizing against modernism, ultimately condemning emancipatory art’s utopias and their contribution to totalitarianism. It’s always the same process: using defined periods and great historical ruptures to impose interdictions. Against this, my work has been the same, whether dealing with labor’s past or art’s present: to break down the great divisions—science and ideology, high culture and popular culture, representation and the unrepresentable, the modern and the postmodern, etc.—to contrast so-called historical necessity with a topography of the configuration of possibilities, a perception of the multiple alterations and displacements that make up forms of political subjectivization and artistic invention.... (more) .....................................................................
Eternal FlameThomas Hirschhorn ponders Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipationartforum
I read The Ignorant Schoolmaster as a manifesto. Jacques Rancière brings everything into play again. I understood that he had never abandoned the game under the dictates of opinion, and that he had never left the gambling table of politics—where everything is played out—either. On the contrary, he is redistributing the cards. Jacques Rancière insists on what seems to have been forgotten, and he rehabilitates what seems to have been lost: Re. Re-politics, re-engagement, re-sharing, re-emancipation, re-reason, re-equality, re- the other. It’s clear that Jacques Rancière is relighting the flame that was extinguished for many—that is why he serves as such a signal reference today. But the essential thing is: The game is not over!... (more) ______________________________________
Politics and cosmopolitics
Truls Lie
Translation by Nicole M. Fishlock
eurozine
"He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market ... he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen [...] To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, is intolerable."
The political thought of German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt is more relevant than ever. This year is the hundredth anniversary of her birth (1906-75). Major conferences are being planned in Paris, New York, and elsewhere. The passage above is from John Adams (1885), quoted by Arendt in On Revolution, an account of the poor and the marginalised.
It is all about politics. In her book Was ist politik? Arendt radically questions whether politics is still in the least bit significant. Bearing in mind the last century, with its world wars and genocides, or this century's "war" against or with terror, it can seem doubtful. Heavyweight international politics is often the exercise of raw imperialist power, legitimised by self-justifying rhetoric and half-truths disseminated by the media. Furthermore, local politics is often characterised by dog-fighting between interest groups over the largest share of the spoils from the government's coffers and departments.
This is what we usually call "politics". But for Arendt this is actually interest-group pragmatism, which does not exactly fit under the purely political. Because the political ceases to exist when violence and power are exercised.
According to Arendt, the nature of the political is rather to be found in discussion and open debate, free from any form of coercion. Her definition of political freedom, especially freedom of expression, is just as relevant in our time, where open debate has given way to aggression, cartoon provocation, violent protest, state terrorism, or suicide bombing.... (more)
 Picture-Poem
Max Ernst
1923
The Roaring Twenties in Germany
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The Confession of the 2000 Year Old Poet
Charles Simic
"Better a metropolitan city were sacked," Robert Burton wrote, "a royal army overcome, an invincible armada sunk, a twenty thousand kings should perish, than her little finger ache". That was my rule too. I had nothing to do with sundry windbags who write odes to every two-bit tyrant that comes along, tabulate their conquests, glorify their slaughter of the barbarians and praise their incomparable wisdom in peace and war. I poked fun at the rich and the powerful and gossiped about their wives and daughters playing grab-ass while their husbands’ backs were turned. I didn’t even spare the gods. I made them into a lot of brawling, drunken, revengeful, senile wife-swappers.
I myself roamed the streets of Rome at all hours frequently inebriated. I fell in and out of love a thousand times, never failing to tell the whole world about my new love’s incomparable virtues and perversities down to its every lascivious detail. Then, I got into trouble. The Emperor sent one of us into permanent exile to a god-forsaken, hellhole at the farthest reaches of the empire. His official guardians of virtue took the opportunity to warn the populace against lyric poetry, which is nothing more, so they said, but a call-to debauchery and brazen mockery of everything we hold sacred.
Of course, nobody bothered the official eulogists-forhire busy protecting the solemnities of state and church from ridicule. It was the lyric poem with its exaltation of intimacy that was suspect ever since Sappho started the craze by elevating individual destiny over the fate of the tribe, preferring, so she informed us, to savor Anactoria’s ‘lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face, than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.’
It’s true. It was the love of that kind of irreverence, as much as anything else, that started me in poetry. The itch to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the naked body, claim that one has seen an angel in the same breath as one shouts that there’s no god, and so forth. The discovery that the tragic and the comic are always entwined together made me roll on the floor with happiness. Seduction, too, was always on my mind. My usual line of jive went this way: If you take off your shirt, my dear, and let my tongue get acquainted with yours, I’ll praise your beauty in my poems and your name will live forever. It worked, too. Lyric poetry is nothing more but a huge, centuries-old effort to introduce our immortal souls to our genital organs.... (more)
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 The Faith Healers
George Grosz
1916 ______________________________________
In the Reign of the One-nutted King
Janked rats cried for blood and the prosthetic hand of love waved good-bye to reason
By Joe Bageant
Pity the poor American left, (who would be considered right wing moderates in most of the world, but in America being against any war makes you a far leftist. Any time American leftists start pointing at the root causes of our national disease, they are neatly handed a fresh bloody war to oppose. Each new generation of the left gets its energies sapped, gets locked into the position of continually opposing one war, then another and another. Ever since World War I they've been standing on the street corners or in the parks -- or more recently, inside the Free Speech Zones way the hell out at the edge of town. At any rate, they can never come close to naming the dark and profitable tumor at the heart of America, the economic system under which we all live. To survive and grow, the American system needs war, making war inevitable. To keep up the pretense of freedom it needs harmless dissent.(...)
A forensic search for signs of liberalism in America, true liberal unity in the of the kind that broadly underpins any humane and progressive society, shows it was DOA. Thanks to our birth to death indoctrination regarding "the American spirit of competition," the rats in the race are not inclined to run together or exercise their unified strength toward common purpose, or even consider it. Though the world is by no means a simple either/or proposition governed by the narrowest sort of struggle, we are conditioned to unquestioningly assume so. If we stop to think, or apply reason and then act on it, other rats will eat our lunch. That's what they are trained to do.
Luckily for the rat keepers of global capitalism, they have little to fear when it comes to American moths being attracted to the candle of reason. Reason is boring stuff in a nation -- and increasingly, a world -- whose cultural glue is television, and whose main diversion is profoundly simplified emotionalism and conflict. In fact, in the American rat race, reason is not only a fatal weakness, but is also generally unavailable to a people who stay janked every waking moment, ready to take on the next rat, then go home and watch more rats do each other in on television, in a steady diet of visible conflict, both overt an implied. Given that the human nervous system is programmed to respond instantly to conflict, there simply is no mental space left for much quiet thought to take root. ... (more)
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at ephemera
theory & politics in organization
Art, Memory, Resistance [PDF]
Bracha L. Ettinger and Akseli Virtanen .....................................................................
From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life [PDF] Maurizio Lazzarato
Translated from the French by Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki
"The most important element for anyone who looks at my objects is my fundamental thesis: each human being is an artist. It is even my fundamental contribution to the history of art (…). Within each human being lies a virtual creative ability. This is not to say that everyone is a painter or a sculptor, but that there is some latent creativity within each domain of human work… each type of work has a connection to art; and art is no longer a type of activity or an isolated group, with people able to do art whilst the others have to do another type of work. …
Therefore culture and economy are one and the same thing and, within our society, the most important means of production, the most important factories that create capital are schools and universities. This is why they are in the hands of the state, and this why we have to free them." — Joseph Beuys
How to understand concepts of labour, production, cooperation and communication when capitalism is not only a mode of production but a production of worlds? To speak in these conditions about ‘production’, it is necessary to construct a radically different method than we find in political economy, economics and sociology. The question is not of the ‘end of work’ nor of ‘everything turning into work’. It is rather that we have to change the principles of valuation, the ways in which we understand the value of value. We need a new concept of ‘wealth’, a new concept of ‘production’. To create these new concepts, it is necessary to forget the philosophy of subject and that of labour, which restrain us from understanding cooperation between minds. Spirit, like intellectual or immaterial labour, has a tendency to cross the borders; it is without spatial existence and does not reduce to its manifestations. In the era of immaterial labour and cooperation between minds it is not possible to think social conflicts in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy or in terms of the conflict between two classes, nor in terms of liberal (private/public) or socialist (individual/collective) traditions. Creation acts in another way than exclusion, competition or contradiction, the evolutionary principles of the above. How should we then translate the concept of the multitude into politics? A fertile starting point might be Gabriel Tarde’s sociology of ‘difference and repetition’, which allows us to understand that some of the key concepts of Tarde, like those of invention, imitation, memory and sympathy, might be very appropriate for explaining the mode of the cooperation of the multitude.
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 Joseph Mills
Joseph Mills at The Corcoran Gallery of Art
"From surreal photocollage imaginings of a world gone wrong to documentary street scenes, Joseph Mills' images and pictorial objects of the last twenty-five years alternate between shock and pathos, between black humor and existential dread. His series Inner City, on view here, chronicles downtown Washington, DC in the 1980s during a period of urban transition."
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Torrents of Desire and the Shape of the Information Landscape
Felix Stalder
More than anything else the torrents of raw desire — unleashed by the pull of obstacles and the blind push into the unknown — are reshaping the landscape of the information environment, creating new peaks of scarcity and deep lakes of abundance. Only after flood recedes, and the new formations become visible, the more orderly forces, those of commerce and those of the law, are beginning to stake their claims and make their own modifications of the landscape. But by then, the canyons are carved out, and the landscape is ready to be mapped.
Currently, these desires are at their most raw in peer-to-peer file sharing, a major contributory to the deep lakes of informational abundance. The term file sharing is a great semiotic trick, just as the term piracy is. Both terms are totally inadequate to understand what is actually happening, but serve strategic purposes in framing the debate. We all know that copying music and films without permission does not amount the entering ships, robbing, stealing and killing. The industry knows this too, but it serves their purpose of conveying to law makers and law enforcement agencies a sense of grave, even bodily danger. Similarly, the term file sharing has great propagandistic value, because it suggests community and harmony, after all, sharing is caring, right? Well, no. (...)
...raw desire for getting one's hands on the material and doing with it whatever makes sense to whatever logic one is following — even if this means encrypting a film that one has just released — produce the torrents that are carving out environment informational abundance. I don't think it's a co-incidence that it's exactly these desires that produce the new landscape. Culture essentially about circulation of information and the transformation of that information by whomever cares enough to hold it at a particular moment. All culture is socially produced. Information always leaks because it is communication — accessing, transforming and outputting — which creates reality in an information environment. However, as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out as well, desires never run unchecked for long. They need to be channeled, in some way or another, to become socially stable. P2P networks and the informational abundance have not been channeled yet, though the early settlers in the new landscape can be seen. Rather than trying to sue the new players out of existence, which turned out to be a loosing strategy so far, the established content industries are trying to reform their business adapting to the new environment. CreativeCommons, and others, are busy trying to set up new normative guidelines about what is acceptable in this new environment. But these are early days, and it remains to be seen, which forms of commerce and governance will be able to exploit and tame these desires. For now, they are raw, bleeding and exciting, though not save, and not pretty. ______________________________________
 Pull My Daisy
1959
youtube
Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son.
- wikipedia
via K. Silem Mohammad (Limetree)
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Congratualtions to Lens Culture
Yahoo! "Pick of the Week"
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at Eurozine
The burden of history and the trap of memory
Philipp Ther
Oh balmy breath...
A tribute to Hrant Dink
E. Efe Çakmak On Jacques Rancière
Luka Arsenjuk
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Substantiatiating Rancière’s ghost-interlocutors
Pom, reading Rancière's Hatred of Democracy
archive : s0metim3s
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 Joseph Mills: Inner City
Cohen Amador Gallery via Andrew Abb (gmtPlus9 (-15))
 Lilith
Anselm Kiefer
b. March 8, 1945
“Break of the containers”
German and Jewish mythology with Anselm Kiefer
Atalante
Anselm Kiefer-Heaven and Earth
works on paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Spirit of Gray
Donald Kuspit on Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Matthew Biro
Reviewed by Sarah Rich ______________________________________
 Woman in Fork of Tree
E. Lucerne Mailloux
Trees: Knock on Wood
Vintage Works
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A History of International Women's Day
Joyce Stevens
Transgressive Women, Transworld Women
The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives
Elanna Herbert Lowes
Women's History Facts
Feminist Majority Foundation
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Household Work:
The English Toy-Making Industry and Dickens' Portraits of Domestic Labor
Elizabeth Williamson
wheelhouse magazine
A modern little girl not only does not make her doll's clothes, but she actually puts out her washing. She knows nothing of the delight of the doll's laundry day, with the drying lines stretched across the nursery fender, and the loan of the iron with which nurse gets up her caps. The modern little girl demands the services of a maid for her doll. How different the old-fashioned little girl. She slept with her doll. She shared meals with her dolly; she sat on her doll in order to keep her safe and have her handy, as Dickens describes the selfish old man at the seaside reading-room sitting on one popular newspaper while he reads another.
Looking back on the age of Dickens, an anonymous writer cited in Laura Starr's Doll Book, published in New York in 1908, touches on almost all of the distinctive social issues surrounding the nineteenth-century doll, both as a commercial product and a cultural icon. The writer reminisces about a time when genteel young women dressed their own dolls, a phenomenon that became less and less common in England and America as the doll developed into a product of specialized factory labor. This author's rant points out at least two crucial things about doll history in the nineteenth-century: first, that the doll is intimately tied up with other types of labor and second, that Dickens is a key commentator on the subject of toy-making, and on dolls in particular.... (more) Wheelhouse Magazinea new magazine from the Wheelhouse Arts Collective via NewPages
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 Symbolic Mutation
Jerry Uelsmann
1961
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The Sick Planet
Guy Debord, 1971
Translated from the French by NOT BORED!
...what is happening is not fundamentally new: it is simply the forced conclusion of an old process. A society that is always sicker, but always stronger, has everywhere concretely re-created the world as the environment and decor of its illness, a sick planet. A society that still hasn't become homogenous and that isn't determined by itself, but is always more determined by a part of itself that places itself above the rest and is exterior to it, has developed a movement that dominates natures but isn't itself dominated. By its own movement, capitalism has finally provided the proof that it can no longer develop the productive forces; and that this isn't [simply] quantitative, as many have believed to understand, but qualitative.
Meanwhile, for bourgeois thought, methodologically, only the quantiative is serious, measurable, effective; and the qualitative is only the uncertain, subjective or artistic decoration of the real, which is estimated by its true weight. Here is what we, capitalism and us, have ended up demonstrating......
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The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard
In Memoriam: 1929-2007
Arthur Kroker
Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a thinker whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic, actually became a complex sign of the social reality of the postmodern century. In his thought there was always something simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction and terror.
Not since Nietzsche's The Gay Science has the secret of reality itself been so fully exposed. Neither referent nor signifier, social reality from Baudrillard's perspective always had about it the hint of a "referential illusion," a "fatal strategy," a "mirror of production," a "spirit of terrorism," a "desert of the real." Refusing the political closures of political economy as much as the social strictures of sociology, Baudrillard made of his thought a theatre of the medieval artistic practice of anamorphosis. Here, the desert of the real would be spun all the more wildly in order to draw out in reverse image the trace of its always hidden qualities of seduction and terror. (...)
When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard's thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, "falling upwards" into the desert of the real.
In thought as in life, it is only the slow passage of great historical events which permits the spectacle of fiction which is social reality to be fully experienced. Our likely fate is to live out the premises of Baudrillard's Seduction and Symbolic Exchange and Death with all their abiding melancholy and brilliant fascination less as literature than as the theoretical storm-centers of twenty-first century politics, society, and culture.
An intellectual friend, a pathway, a theorist who made of thought itself a faithful illusion of the sorcery of hyperreality, I mourn his death on this sad day by honoring the spirit of Jean Baudrillard. ... (more) ______________________________________
Baudrillard and Heidegger, 1
Kenneth Rufo
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 Seraphim
Anselm Kiefer
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After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
- Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
 Chris Corrigan
flickr Chris blogs at Bowen Island and Parking Lot
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Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations
The Violence of the Global
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by François Debrix
Disneyworld Company
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Francois Debrix
Dust Breeding
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by François Debrix
Pataphysics
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Drew Burk
Reversion of History
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Charles Dudas
The Mask of War
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Alex Barder
Divine Europe
Jean Baudrillard
translation by François Debrix
Radical Thought
Jean Baudrillard
translated by Francois Debrix
photography, Or The Writing Of Light
Jean Baudrillard
Translated by Francois Debrix.
Vivisecting the 90s: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard
I am not a historian. I do not have an historical perception of events. But I would say that I have a mystical reading of them and that history for me, would be a long narrative which I tend to mythologize. Curiously, I am going back here to an interesting hypothesis, that of an English naturalist of the 19th century, called Philip Henry Gosse, who was a paleolontologist and archeologist. He was studying fossiles found in geological sediments and his hypothesis, as he was a Christian and a reader of the Bible, was that creation had taken place ex-nihilo and the world created as such five thousand years before his time. Thus God had created at once fossiles, geological sediments, exactly as they were in the 18th century, and he had created them as simulacra, as a trompe-l'oeil in order to provide humanity - which might have been traumatized by such a brutal creation - with a history, hence a past. Therefore God would have provided human beings with a retrospective past by creating fossiles and geological sediments. And he would have created them as such, with utmost exactitude so that people may study them scientifically, although their past had thus been invented. This brings me specifically to Russell's paradox, which suggests that the world as such, could have been created yesterday and everything in it could be interpreted as retrospective simulation. Of course, this is a paradox, but for myself I would tend to use such a paradox. This where one ends up in a real or hyper-real situation, that of the history of historical narratives, of historiography which do pose a historical question about the re-invention of past history through the historian's discourse, a discourse which, by definition is a re-construction. In a way, that reconstruction is also necessarily artificial.... (more)
Baudrillard at he European Graduate SchoolBaudrillard on the Web
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The Lost Tongue
Kemal Kurt
Translated by Marilya Veteto
passport
Many are of the opinion that a writer can and should only write in his mother tongue. Purist nonsense! The language of the mothers is always a different one; weaning starts in school. Did Beckett learn French from his mother? Nabokov wrote his linguistically brilliant novel Lolita in English after he had emigrated to the United States at the age of 41. Another Russian, Joseph Brodsky, began writing in English shortly after his emigration to the USA; the gravest of sins for a poet. Today, the former Yugoslav, Charles Simic, who had never spoken a word of English before his sixtieth year of life, is a Nobel Laureate and is counted among the best American poets. One of the most significant English novels of our century, Lord Jim, was written by the Polish sailor, Joseph Conrad, who-by his own account-brought his "English sentences out of the black night into daylight" like a mine worker. The Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, a Jew of Bulgarian descent with a Turkish passport who was raised to be multilingual, described in his childhood memoirs with the telling title The Tongue Set Free how he began learning German at eight-the language in which he would spend his life writing. After a long period living as a vagabond, the Romanian Panait Istrati wrote his novels in French at the advice of his mentor Roman Rolland. Ivan and Claire Goll swung back and forth between German and French. All these authors did not learn their literary language, which for every writer begins as a foreign language and must be acquired with laborious effort, from their mothers. A writer has no mother tongue, no home. He is always en route....... (more)
PassportThe Arkansas Review of Literary Translation ______________________________________
 Child and Seeing Hands
Hans Bellmer
1902 - 1975 The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body
Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago
Sue Taylor ______________________________________
Poem for Marianne's Shadow
Paul Celan
Translated from the Romanian by Victor Pambuccian
words without borders
Love's mint has grown like an angel's finger.
To believe: out of the earth an arm twisted by silence still rises,
a shoulder burned by torrid extinguished lights,
a face, the eyes blindfolded by sight's black veil,
a large wing of lead and another one of leaves,
a body, weary in the repose washed by the waters.
To see how it floats among grasses with spread out wings,
how it climbs a mistletoe ladder to a glass house,
where with very large steps a sea plant roams.
To think it's the right moment now to talk to me in tears,
to go barefoot there, so you be told what's in store for us:
the mourning sipped from a glass or the mourning sipped from a palm—
And the mad plant to fall asleep having heard your answer.
Clinking in the dark, let the house's windows ring,
telling each other what they know, but without finding out:
we love or we do not love each other.
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 Notre Dame de Paris
ca. 1870-86Gravely Gorgeous
Gargoyles, Grotesques & the Nineteenth-Century Imagination
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1000 Years of War:
CTHEORY Interview with Manuel De Landa
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Welcome To The Desert Of The Real
Slavoj Zizek
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New essays, poetry and fiction up at nthposition
Three Films: Bernardo Bertolucci and the Fascist Mind
Robert Philbin
The modernist dialect leads as easily to totalitarianism - a fascist state of mind, regardless of the political system. Bred in anxiety and fear, totalitarianism arises from both the Left and the Right. So, while the rich get richer and the suppressed move incrementally toward expanded civil liberty in relatively free states, millions of others end up dead. The result is Franco's Spain, totalitarianism of the habit-addicted Right responding to intimations of chaos; or Castro's Cuba, totalitarianism of the romantic Left opposing a US client police state. How do we come to understand the totalitarian mind? As a natural craving for order in a transitional world? As a pathology bred of elitism and power?
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Hanging Baptists
Joe Palmer
Religiosity in the United States is astonishing to the visitor. (...)
Soon the newcomer sees that public discourse is dominated, not by concern over social welfare and foreign policy, as one might expect in a modern country, but by matters of sexual subversion and family chaos. Fundamentalists, Catholics, and Evangelical "Christers", conservatives of the far right have the political clout to elect presidents, to defeat numerous Equal Rights Amendment bills (since 1923), to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage and abortion rights, to thwart the National Organization of Women, and to pack the Supreme Court with yes persons.(...)
In its political consequences today, the voting majority edge that the Republicans flaunt, the effects of the Great Revival are still felt, even though it never became a unified movement for lack of a controlling center. Today the Great Revival is an organic part of Middle-American life. And don't you forget it. ______________________________________
Lomans not shamans
Stavros (the wonder chicken)
...all of the conference references, all the logrolling backscratching insular techmeme circlejerk, all of the third-column index page stacks packed with the javascripty fruit of the Adsensorium, the 120-pixel hello-surfer come-ons... well, it's enough already.
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Privatization The Real Walter Reed Scandal
Eugene Plawiuk
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Not only is the scandalous treatment of American Troops at Walter Reed military hospital connected to Halliburton and Katrina-era FEMA (see video right) but it's also, at its core, a deeply, deeply conservative scandal.
- Alternet
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A Willful Abandonment of Progressive Ideals
Dump the Dems, Unite Against the War
Joshua Frank
We may as well call all of this what it is: a willful abandonment of ideals and purpose, which never really existed to begin with. The Democratic Party exerts the same hawkish fervor as the Republican Party. Indeed they have proven that despite the overwhelming opposition to the war nationwide they will not do a damn thing to end it.
U.S. foreign policy has not and will not change direction as long as the Democratic Party continues to be dominated by corporate interests and tacit compliance to the neoconservative agenda. The antiwar movement needs to understand this reality or it is doomed to collapse like it did under the pressure of the 2004 elections. ... (more) ______________________________________
Bush is Al Qaeda's Top Recruiter
The "War on Terror" is a Bust
Patrick Cockburn
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 Fabric
Lamar Baker
1940
Life of the People
Realist Prints and Drawings
the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection
1912-1948
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Dimensions of Inequality in Canada
Edited by David A. Green and Jonathan R. Kesselman
Reviewed by Marc Lee
Relentlessly Progressive Economics
Dimensions of Inequality tells the story of growing inequality in Canada over the past couple decades, through a collection of papers authored by a number of the country’s leading academic economists. This book is an essential starting point for anyone who wants to get up to speed on inequality trends and developments in Canada.(...)
Importantly, the editors are mindful of anchoring the empirical findings in the concept of justice. Pointing to changes in the economy and in public policy that are driving rising inequality, their review of the book’s contents closes: “It is hard to escape the conclusion that these developments have also made Canada a less just society.” It is rare for economists to make such statements, but they are fundamental to the question of why we should care about growing inequality. Too often, progressive commentators stop with the presentation of jaw-dropping statistics about how much worse inequality has become. But these facts in isolation are not sufficient; they need to be rooted in values for them to have any meaning.
By the standard of the numbers presented, the current situation of growing inequality is a travesty of justice. While the escalating incomes of the rich are largely hidden from view, abject poverty is not, and is becoming increasingly visible and intense. Businesses are now joining the chorus of anti-poverty activists and faith groups in calling for something to be done. But these pleas have so far fallen on deaf ears in Victoria and Ottawa.
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 Kleine Dada Soirée
Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters
1922.
Dada Highlights
MoMA ______________________________________
“To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr’s avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment."
E. M. Cioran, picked up on a daily visit to Isola di Rifiuti
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A figure that disturbs me, since I have met her too, but during the day, diurnal and spectral. Messenger of Melancholy, so similar to the apparition evoked by Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, motionless like a woman conscious of her guilt, slighjtly turned away so that we can escape from the memory of our own guilt.
from the introductiory chapter (available PDF) A Voice from ElsewhereMaurice Blanchot translated by Charlotte Mandellsuny press
When I was living in Èze, in the little room (made bigger by two views, one opening onto Corsica, the other out past Cape Ferrat) where I most often stayed, there was (there still is), hanging on the wall, the likeness of the girl they called "The Unknown Girl from the Seine," an adolescent with closed eyes, but alive with such a fine, blissful (but veiled) smile, that one might have thought she had drowned in an instant of extreme happiness.(...)
It would be better to abancdon prudent reason and destroy the daytime wisdom that seeks to destroy "the wonderfull apparition / Welcomed as one trembles at the sight of a face seized by death." "She is there to watch over us / Who go to sleep only to see her."
Thus the dream and the rational day pursue an unceasing battle.
"Ä dream, but is there anything more real than a dream"? And how can one survive without dreaming "That the child, drawn to her familiar places / Comes into the garden of roses, and every night / Returns to fill the bedroom with her candid flame / That she holds out to us like an offering and a prayer"! via this space
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Influence and authenticity of l'Inconnue de la Seine Anja Zeidler The Gaddis Annotations
a good background piece on the popular death mask and it's influence on writers - mw
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 Akademy model
St. Petersburg
Andrew Moore
A Conversation with Andrew Moore
Jörg Colberg
The type of subject I am most fond of shooting is that which presents a multilayered pattern of use and history. So, for example, I photographed a former synagogue that had been turned into a radio station, a monastery used as a gulag, a nobleman's mansion transformed into a children's theater, etc. For me these kinds of subjects present a cross section through time: they address Russia's complex past, as well as the larger compacting and collapsing processes of contemporary history. In laying out the book I was able to address the same issues across the page spread. One of my favorite examples of this type of contrast in the book is an image of a worker sleeping in his dark and crowded shop surrounded by banners and girlie photos, juxtaposed against a picture of two scheming executives in their well-lit but empty "constructivist" office.
Russia: Beyond Utopia
Andrew Moore amazon link
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The future’s not what it was
Karl-Olov Arnstberg
Translated by Phil Holmes
In order to live up to the demands of the future we need forecasts that are as reliable as possible, but the current predilection for gloomy forecasts points to the fact that counter-movements are being created against the individual of the future. Our longing for meaning and stability does not seem to have been allayed, either by capitalism or science. Is the future-oriented individual on the retreat?
Axess
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Pallida Turba
Vera Kobets
Translated from the Russian by James Russell
words without borders
At first nobody noticed the seepage. True, flour started to appear from somewhere on the floor. Then somebody decided it must be powder. “Tooth powder?” wondered Albina, surprised. “But we all use toothpaste.” We swept the floor: there was a lot of the rubbish. “What can you do,” murmured Mama. “That’s life.”
But at a certain point the powder began to fall in a thin, constant stream. Everyone was at home when this happened, and all raised their eyes to look. “Seepage,” pronounced Father with irritation. “It will have to be repaired, that’s for sure,” Grandma chimed in. Everybody stared at her and immediately looked the other way. ... (more)
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Words Without Borders presents The World Through the Eyes of Writers (Anchor Books)
Literature from the Axis of Evil and Other Enemy Nations
amazon link
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 La mort de Jean Baudrillard
June 20, 1929 - March 6, 2007
via Baudrillard Studies
It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game — knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations
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Three Poems
Megan Pugh
Conjunctions
Reaccustomed
We need new ways of living
without resorting to crocodiles
in wading pools. We need a cage
for the trashcan, plastic ficus
nailed to the wall, and a tortoise
whose shell is set with rhinestones:
an ottoman pacing the floor.
We'll have to tread lightly in case
the furniture bites, getting used
to the hallways. We need an antique
suit of armor to remind us
that for every body there may be
a hidden body: the arms
could squeak into motion
leaking softness like a pudding.
... (more)
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Making Peace Patriotic
Anti-war perspectives from the early republic
J. M. Opal
In order to contest this Orwellian strategy and the carnage that ensues, opponents of war in general and the Iraq disaster in particular need to ground their arguments in a coherent rationale of civic virtue. It is not enough to simply say, "peace is patriotic," because the terms of patriotism have been contaminated by the cynical dichotomies of us versus them, good versus evil, freedom versus terror. The meanings of public duty and good citizenship must be rebuilt to reflect the saner voices within and among us, or else the present bloodletting will merge seamlessly into some other war for some other reason. I write rebuilt because those antiwar principles once represented a potent voice in American civic life. Like the wisdom of such organizations as Veterans for Peace, the arguments of the fifty-odd "Peace Societies" of the 1810s and 1820s offer a valuable perspective that might enable a less homicidal future.
Common-place The Interactive Journal of Early American Life ______________________________________
Why I fled George Bush's war
What happened to make a patriotic, gung-ho soldier desert the U.S. army, and turn against the war in Iraq.
Joshua Key
Busting into and ransacking homes remained one of my most common duties in Iraq. Before my time was up, I took part in about 200 raids. We never found weapons or indications of terrorism. I never found a thing that seemed to justify the terror we inflicted every time we blasted through the door of a civilian home, broke everything in sight, punched and zipcuffed the men, and sent them away.
US Army Deserter Fled Iraq for New Life in Canadavia The Left End of the Dial
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 Abandoned Missile Base
Skripleva's Island Far East
Andrew Moore
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Congratulations to Alfredo Perez and Political Theory Daily - now sponsored by Bookforum
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From Typo to Thinko: When Evolution Graduated to Semantic Norms [PDF]
Daniel Dennett
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I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world. That happened 'at night'. During the day there were the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life. The certainty that in writing he was putting between parentheses precisely this certainty, including the certainty of himself as the subject of writing, led him slowly, though right away, into an empty space whose void (the barred zero, heraldic) in no way prevented the turns and detours of a very long process.
- Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, quoted in Spurious' That there is Language
 Wall Street
1915
Paul Strand
1890-1976
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Reversal of Fortune
The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?
Bill Mckibben
mother jones
...for most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both.(...)
But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better. via Gift Hub ______________________________________
Poor People
William T. Vollmann
Reviewed by Dave Munger
The genius of Poor People is how Vollmann demonstrates the arbitrariness of the line we draw between "self" and "other." We're shocked when we see Ivy-educated Vollmann treating homeless beggars as true equals. The first reaction is to assume he's a holier-than-thou self-aggrandizer. But the more we read, the more we realize that it is we who are mistaken, that the psychic gap between the rich and the poor is our own creation.
Poor People doesn't offer any solutions to the problem of poverty, and it doesn't even suggest that we should try to do as Vollmann does and venture into the world of the poor. But it does offer real insight into a vast, diverse group of people, connected to one another more by their exclusion from mainstream culture than because of any intrinsic similarity. By showing us how strange he is for trying to be the poor person's friend, he shows us how strange we are for hewing to the belief that the poor are that different from us.... (more) The Quarterly Conversation | Issue 7 | Spring 2007______________________________________
 Simplicissimus
1896 to 1944
all issues [pdf] via { feuilleton }
Simplicissimus on-line
Simplicissimus artists
Graphic Witness
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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.
- Russell Hoban, Pilgermann
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Ante-strategy: the challenge of organising an aesthetic moment
Oleg at mezomian community
Politics is an aesthetic matter, a reconfiguration of the way we share out or divide places and times, speech and silence, the visible and the invisible.
(Rancière, 2003)
Following Rancière’s words above, there are a number of questions begging to be discussed. And a number of questions that need to be explored again and again in the world of organising. If organising is always political, it is surely also always aesthetic. And though much organising seeks to place its kick off point in a discourse of communicative identity entrenched in rationality, there is always a dynamism in organising which escapes the master plan.(...)
In a sense, organising is where Heidegger has been proven right. This is where technè and poïesis are separated from one another by politics. But then politics would be the very place where they might be reconnected? Or do we have to think in terms of anti-politics, of anti-strategy? At risk of being accused of playing with words, I will suggest that organising must seek to create for itself spaces and times of ante-strategy and ante-politics – ante as before, but also ante as standing in front. The evolution of the virtual world show us how little this has succeeded in what will now be reduced to IRL, the non-virtual, the outside of future societies. So be it. The need to recognize the virtual in the actual will still be present. This calls for ante-strategic aesthetics inside the politics of organising.... (more)
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Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?
Pascal Bruckner
translated by John Lambert
and the ensuing debate collected at Sign and Sight, The multicultural Issue
Don't blame the postmodernists
Stuart Sim
I'd like to make the case for a role for scepticism within the debate on multiculturalism, and also to defend the reputation of postmodern thought after what I consider to be unfair treatment at the hands of Paul Cliteur. If multiculturalism can be persuaded to take scepticism on board, and to acknowledge that all religions and belief systems have a history of scepticism that can be activated against their tendency towards dogmatism, then it can still contribute to constructing "'a new European story." The problem isn't Islam, or Enlightenment, or multiculturalism, or postmodernism, or relativism: it's dogmatism, and unless that is addressed we're treating symptoms not causes.(...)...it's not postmodernism that we have to worry about if we're trying to put together "a new European story," it's dogmatism. Timothy Garton Ash argues for "less Bruckner, more Pascal," but I'd put it very differently: what is wanted is less belief, more scepticism and doubt.
thanks to Pierre Joris
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Blogging, the nihilist impulse
Geert Lovink
eurozine
Italian theorist Paulo Virno provides clues to how we could use the term cynicism in a non-derogative manner. Virno sees cynicism as connected to the "chronic instability of forms of life and linguistic games". At the base of contemporary cynicism Virno sees the fact that men and women first experience rules, far more often than "facts", and far earlier than they experience concrete events. Virno: "But to experience rules directly means also to recognize their conventionality and groundlessness. Thus, one is no longer immersed in a predefined 'game', participating therein with true allegiance. Instead, one catches a glimpse of oneself in individual 'games' which are destitute of all seriousness and obviousness, having become nothing more than a place for immediate self-affirmation – a self-affirmation which is all the more brutal and arrogant, in short, cynical, the more it draws upon, without illusions but with perfect momentary allegiance, those same rules which characterize conventionality and mutability."
How is cynical reason connected to criticism? Is cynical media culture a critical practice? So far it has not proven useful to interpret blogs as a new form of literary criticism. Such an undertaking is bound to fail. The "crisis of criticism" has been announced time and again and blog culture has simply ignored this dead-end street. There is no need for a "new-media" clone of Terry Eagleton. We live long after the Fall of Theory. Criticism has become a conservative and affirmative activity, in which the critic alternates between losses of value while celebrating the spectacle of the marketplace. It would be interesting to investigate why criticism has not become popular, and aligned itself with such new-media practices as blogging, as cultural studies popularized everything except theory. Let's not blame the Blogging Other for the moral bankruptcy of the postmodern critic. Instead of conceptual depth we get broad associations, a people's hermeneutics of news events.[19] The computable comments of the millions can be made searchable and visually displayed, for instance, as buzz clouds. Whether these maps provide us with any knowledge or not is another matter. It is easy to judge the rise of comments as regressive compared to the clear-cut authority of the critic. Insularity and provincialism have taken their toll. The panic and obsession around the professional status of the critic has been such that the created void has now been filled by passionate amateur bloggers. One thing is sure: blogs do not shut down thought.... (more)
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Modernism and the Writing Hand
Steven Connor
The central claim of the Kittler-Heidegger-Seltzer hypothesis is that the lived body vanishes in favour of the organised or rationalised or otherwise worked-over body. I will be trying to coax you into supposing that the body does not vanish, and is not diminished at all. Merleau-Ponty writes that every phenomenological world is total - even the depleted worlds of the sick or the ignorant are whole in their depletion. Phenomenology mourns and attempts fantastically to make restitution for the amputation of the Lebenswelt. Kittler and Seltzer are only apparently less sentimental in their belief in the wholeness and commmunicability of head, hand, pen and paper prior to modernism. Theirs is Heidegger without tears, dry phenomenology. Neither are sufficiently alive to the complex and unsummarisable experiences of transformation undergone by technologies; both are driven by the need to refer technological changes and effects to a single master-code.
I will be saying that what Heidegger, Kittler, Seltzer and Virilio share is a hysterical overestimation of the systems of presence allegedly overturned by machine-writing, along with an equivalently paranoid insistence on the totality and issuelessness of the system of relations instituted in its place. I'll want by the end to be saying that the very habit of mind that sees one epoch simply erased and replaced by another is a doubling or imprinted effect of the hysteromechanist model of history with which it works, the model that Bruno Latour has called historical `sorting'.
Having begun with Heidegger mourning the loss of the hand, and the amputation of the hand in Kittler's and Seltzer's typographic regime, let us begin again somewhere else. Here is Michel Serres, trimming his nails.... (more)
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"For learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems as such, in the apprehension and condensation of singularities, and in the composition of ideal events and bodies. Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one's own body or one's own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems."
- Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze And The Open-Ended Becoming Of The World
Manuel DeLanda
...unlike social constructivism, which achieves openness by making the world depend on human interpretation, Deleuze achieves it by making the world into a creative, complexifying and problematizing cauldron of becoming. Because of their anthropocentrism, constructivist philosophies remain prisoners of what Foucault called "the episteme of man", while Deleuze plunges ahead into a post-humanist future, in which the world has been enriched by a multiplicity of non-human agencies, of which metallic catalysts, and their acts of recognition and intervention, are only one example. And, in contrast with other realist or materialist philosophies of the past (such as Engel's dialectics of nature), the key non-human agency in Deleuzian philosophy has nothing to do with the negative, with oppositions or contradictions, but with pure, productive, positive difference. It is ultimately this positive difference, and its affirmation in thought, that insures the openness of the world.... (more) Manuel Delanda Annotated Bibliography______________________________________
Midley History of Photography:
R. Derek Wood’s articles on the History of early Photography, the Daguerreotype and Diorama
new url
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 Flight of the swallows
Giacomo Balla
1871-1958
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from Tristia
Osip Mandelshtam
translated from the Russian by Kevin Kinsella
archipelago
Swallow
I forgot the word I wanted to say.
The blind swallow flies back to her hall of shadows
On clipped wings, to play with the transparent ones.
A night song is sung in forgetfulness.
(...)
Always, the transparent one repeats the wrong thing.
Always, swallow, friend, Antigone. . .
But on the lips, like black ice,
Burns the memory of Stygian chimes.
... (more)
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Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent
Eugene Plawiuk
Le Revue Gauche
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Ping•Pong
A literary journal of the Henry Miller Library
Work by K. Silem Mohammad, Jennifer L. Knox, Jean Vengua, Betsy Wheeler, Shanna Compton and others
via
The Henry Miller Library ______________________________________
 Glass, Carafe
and Newspapers
Georges Braque
1914
 Snow Covered Pier II
Josef Hoflehner
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After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
- Wallace Stevens, from Connoisseur of Chaos
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 James Merrill
3 Mar. 1926 - 6 Feb. 1995
from
Lost in Translation
Poetry Daily: Poetry Archive
Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed
To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties,
Something tells me that one piece contrived
To stay in the boy's pocket. How do I know?
I know because so many later puzzles
Had missing pieces—Maggie Teyte's high notes
Gone at the war's end, end of the vogue for collies,
A house torn down; and hadn't Mademoiselle
Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well?
I've spent the last days, furthermore,
Ransacking Athens for that translation of "Palme."
Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library
Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can't
Just be imagining. I've seen it. Know
How much of the sun-ripe original
Felicity Rilke made himself forego
(Who loved French words—verger, mûr, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
Know already in that tongue of his
What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza's symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.
The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots
Above the open vowel. And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.
Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?
But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory. ... (more)
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Three remarkable pieces on Blanchot and writing from Lars at Spurious
Thanatography
Spurious
Didn't Blanchot say in his correspondence that his fictions usually preceded his theoretical reflections, as if they were a kind of laboratory in which he formed his hypotheses?
Experiment, experience - but I don't think there can be an absolute division of genre in Blanchot's oeuvre, whatever he might suggest. The fictions, like his more theoretical essays, are magnified by the same event, the same experience passing through its field. What does it mean to write? In what does the experience of writing consist? Let us follow the course of Blanchot's own meditations on writing and upon in his own authorship.
The Spiritual Animal Kingdom
Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist - neither a writer nor a speaking subject - since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him (which, in a simplified manner, is the teaching of Hegel and even the Talmud: doing takes precedence over being, which does not create itself except in creating - what? Perhaps anything: how this anything is judged depends on time, on what happens, on what does not happen: what we call historical factors, history, without however looking to history for the last judgement). But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.... (more)
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Blanchot and the OtherSpurious
The Truth of Suffering
Would suffering be greater in our time? A vain question. But we must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social networks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering - a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.
And a little later, and also from The Infinite Conversation:
There is a suffering that has lost time altogether. It is the horror of a suffering without end, a suffering time can no longer redeem, that has escaped time and for which there is no longer recourse; it is irredeemable.
Suffering without relief, without redemption: in the absence of the old beliefs, suffering reveals itself in its truth. But a truth upon which the sufferer cannot seize, insofar as, without end, escaping time, the sufferer is disjoined from herself, being unable to collect herself into the first person and thereby let suffering be a discreet experience that might slip into the past. Suffering deprives the sufferer of self-presence and of the present; there is not even that 'little time' that would permit its integration into life, into the rhythm of a life.
But how then to think this experience? ... (more)
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Writing's Remove
Spurious
...each of us bears a relation to that double who listens for the double of language; so we are each bound by a relation that suspends the lucid, sober self who has faith that language might be used to transmit ideas and ultimately in the 'I can', the power of the thinking (comprehending) subject.
'Let us enter this relation', writes Blanchot at the outset of The Step Not Beyond. But what is it we are entering? We must begin with words, in the midst of words, since it is language which grants the very possibility of relating to anything. But for this same reason, language can also become invisible, a pure medium in which we thoughtlessly take up the most hackneyed conventions. Blanchot's work disrupts this transparency, doubling language up and letting us experience of language as language. ... (more) ______________________________________
 Desire and Gratification
Jan Toorop
1893
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Seeds Of Narrative In Upper Paleolithic Imagery
Clayton Eshleman
The work that follows is from Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), a compendium of Eshleman’s thirty-year project to wrest a primal poetics from the Ice Age cave art of southwestern Europe. Eliot Weinberger writes of this: "As a result of his literal and imaginative explorations of the painted and gouged caves, Eshleman has constructed a myth, perhaps the first compelling post-Darwinian myth: that the Paleolithic represents the ‘crisis’ of the human ‘separating out’ of the animal, the original birth and original fall of man. From that moment, human history spins out: from the repression of the animal within to the current extinction of the animals without: the inversion from matriarchy to patriarchy, and the denial of the feminine; the transformation of the fecund underworld into the Hell of suffering; and the rising of Hell, in the twentieth century, to the surface of the earth: Dachau, Hiroshima. The poet’s journey is an archetypal scenario of descent and rebirth: he has traveled to the origin of humanness to reach the millennium, end and beginning."
Ubuweb - Ethnopoetics______________________________________
Resisting Panic, Resisting Forgetting
Alejandro de Acosta
google cache
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory
Call it another strategy for resisting forgetting or creating resistant counter-memory. Call it the forging of a public space under difficult circumstances! For those far from the academic milieu, believe me: it is not so easy to find a space to gather and talk openly in. This not only compounds but is directly linked to the exclusion of poor and disadvantaged folks from this space. My friends and I needed very badly to do our resistant thinking in a public and shared space, to carry what had been private, personalized, and thus almost necessarily sort of paranoid and alienated talking into a public space where it could be transformed in dialogue with others.
Resisting forgetting and resisting panic. In both cases it’s about maintaining our priorities as anarchists or anti-authoritarian thinkers and activists. It is a matter of living in resistance to the nation and the state; not confusing its priorities with ours. As always, this is a matter of resisting the spread of fear that comes from both directions – the state’s war machine, and the terroristic war machine that has perhaps escaped the state, but which bears the marks of its contact with the state. It is also a matter of making our non-allegiance to those entities or processes visible, communicable, public: on the air, in the street, in any space that opens or is opened for political discussions.
In this time of shutting down of political pluralism, in this time of the apparent vanishing of all religions except dueling monotheisms, it seems ever more important to insist on other politics, other religions, other cultures, and other ways of life, which continue to struggle and resist as living alternatives. In so far as we live these alternatives, or can communicate with them (though there is nothing easy about this communication), we resist the flows of stupidity that the state relies on for its distribution of sadness and identities. When I move in public, I try to embody this pluralistic outlook. That it has become more difficult does not make me want to do it any less – to the contrary....... (more)
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 Last Chance
Josef Hoflehner
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War Crime
Anne Waldman
World askew. She arrives home to charnel ground zero, ancestral dwelling cordoned off, you need identity papers to get thru. Who are you? Citizen? Terrorist? Also to duplicity, deception, path-ology in one she thought a friend who proved-was all along-her worst enemy. Pity? Forgiveness? Don't mess with the goddess. She is on retreat now, prostrating to the deities of clarity and "chod"—where you cut the aortas of the perverters of the dharma. No idiot compassion for the narcissistic male egotist who used her good name, sucked at her power, resented, manipulated and undermined the community to his own ends, called the cops on her & her son in Ashcroft's New World Order. A trip to the coast, demonstrating against the Afghan war punctures her disdain. Push, push, against the darkness...
Identity posits control. Who is enemy? Who are fleeced? Rendered abject, dead, merely dead. Dead on the ground. What was your name, citizen? And of what realm? Animal? Human? Warring god? You are bewildered in the twilight of Star Wars, in the twilight of shattered bone or eyeball. A Daisy Cutter so grievous you have more than 400 lbs. per square inch pressing on your skin, pressuring out an eyeball, limbs falloff with that implosion. Give me breaks, simple breaks I would die for I could die with not this which I can't live any longer inside of. Give him, the other generation, his due, fighting the way back up to 1945. Clean up? Shoot anything twitching. Clean up? How much pain to inflict on a nearly dead one? All over Germany, the left-to-die-dying, whatever their stripe.... (more) An Open Letter to America
Big Bridge #10 .....................................................................
the war papers
Big Bridge #12 ______________________________________
Mission of Folly: Chapter 10: Toward a New Canadian Foreign Policy
James Laxer
For Canadians, the Afghanistan operation has been a mission of folly. Canada blindly followed the United States into a war that is not winnable, a war from which no positive results can be anticipated. Now that American public opinion has turned sharply against the war in Iraq, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan will not long endure. Americans will move on to other engagements, other power struggles and new priorities. By the time the Bush administration is out of office, the chances are that the Afghanistan mission, if not finished, will be on its last legs.(...)
The collapse of the Bush administration’s strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia makes the prospects for a shift in Canadian foreign policy brighter. Those who have been most inclined to follow the Bush line in Canada---the Harper Conservatives and the business lobbyists---have damaged their cause immeasurably in their stolid adherence to the lost cause. Theirs will be the fate of spear carriers through the ages would have wound up on the wrong side.... (more)
 Lee Friedlander
MOMA Photography Collection
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Antique Springtime
Muslim Celik
Translated by Ender Gürol
Darkness falls and I’m in the midst of a crowd
the void is yawning
how can I touch the running water
a wild goose-chase it is
Whose mental picture can I form
whose track can I keep
what sun stands behind me
is it the front of their house
or is it that which abides in the heart
I fancied I clung
to a vine branch
the cord within me snapped
the vine stock collapsed
Perched on a log
I’m swept by the flood
in the quarter of the lunar month
I’m covered inside and out
with the garb of love
I’m flying with a swarm of birds
looking for crowded campgrounds to perch upon
coming across poems and broken twigs
How can one expect to see birds
in the nests of yesteryear
though it be lunacy, what gorgeous inebriation
thousands of horses are rearing
boulders foundering, the sun never setting
When the brown earth turns white
comes spring
what a gorgeous novelty is this antiquity
the Uysal - Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative
pdf files and sound files, lots of musical mp3s as well
All narratives were translated by native Turkish speakers
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War is a church.
Memory is a church on fire.
War and the idea of war
Will eat the tomorrow out of our bones.
(culled from "The Sin Eaters" by Sherman Alexie) by Leny at Kathang-Pinay
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The War on Terror and the Terror of War
Brent Bowden
As Immanuel Kant reminds us in Perpetual Peace, 'even some philosophers have praised it [war] as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away"'. We would also do well to take note of Walter Benjamin's poignantly made point that 'there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'. As with every other war that has been or will ever be fought, no belligerent has a monopoly on the barbarism and terror of war. The war on terror is no exception. ______________________________________
War Is Kind
and Other Lines
Stephen Crane
[1899]
You tell me this is God?
I tell you this is a printed list,
A burning candle, and an ass.
XI
On the desert
A silence from the moon's deepest valley.
Fire rays fall athwart the robes
Of hooded men, squat and dumb.
Before them, a woman
Moves to the blowing of shrill whistles
And distant thunder of drums,
While mystic things, sinuous, dull with terrible colour,
Sleepily fondle her body
Or move at her will, swishing stealthily over the sand.
The snakes whisper softly;
The whispering, whispering snakes,
Dreaming and swaying and staring,
But always whispering, softly whispering.
The wind streams from the lone reaches
Of Arabia, solemn with night,
And the wild fire makes shimmer of blood
Over the robes of the hooded men
Squat and dumb.
Bands of moving bronze, emerald, yellow,
Circle the throat and the arms of her,
And over the sands serpents move warily
Slow, menacing and submissive,
Swinging to the whistles and drums,
The whispering, whispering snakes,
Dreaming and swaying and staring,
But always whispering, softly whispering.
The dignity of the accursed;
The glory of slavery, despair, death,
Is in the dance of the whispering snakes.
XII
A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads its curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is feckless life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.
..............
XX
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men,
Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light
Into their woof, their lives;
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles,
Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats,
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
 Stephen Crane
(1871-1900)
Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth.
- Stephen Crane
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"A new language?"
"Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It's made a mess of everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change. The problem is how to demonstrate this. That is why I now work with the simplest means possible –so simple that even a child can grasp what I am saying. Consider a word that refers to a thing – ‘umbrella’ for example. When I say the word 'umbrella,' you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function –in other words expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer perfoms its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do. At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore, it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal. And if we cannot even name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us? Unless we can begin to embody the notion of change in the words we use, we will continue to be lost."
"And your work?"
"My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds –from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid."
"What do you do with these things?"
"I give them names." - Paul Auster. City of Glass
______________________________________
 Above Fifth Avenue
Underwood and Underwood
1905
MOMA Photography Collection
______________________________________
Two from Discover
via political theory daily
Outsourced Boredom
Technology isn't ending mind-numbing work—it's moving it across the world.
Douglas Rushkoff
The Meaning of Metaphor
A new theory may illuminate the nature of meaning.
Jaron Lanier
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On Jacques Rancière
Luka Arsenjuk
eurozine
To approach Rancière's concept of politics we should first note that it cannot be understood without its opposite: the order of the police, or, the police. The police signify for Rancière what is commonly, in the journalistic parlance of our times, understood by the term politics. "Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems of legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police." The logic of the police is therefore to distribute and legitimate. It is the logic of saturation. It is essentially the process which claims that in the given political order all of the community parts have been (ac)counted (for) and that each has been assigned its proper place.(...)
Rancière thinks politics in the form of an encounter. Politics opposes to the police logic of saturation the logic of the void and the supplementary. While, on the one hand, the police screams how there are only the existing parts of the society and how each of them has been given its due share of the common, politics, on the other hand, claims the opposite, namely, that there is a wrong done in the existing count of the community parts, that there is "a part of those who have no part". It does so, first, through the assumption of the existence of a wrong and, thus, through an axiomatic assumption of equality, and secondly, by constructing a scene in which the existence of a wrong is verified and subjectivized, i.e. through giving name to "the part of those who have no part" (the people, the proletariat), the political subjectivity which is the subject of a wrong. To be precise, it is not that equality as such is necessarily political – for Rancière there are many kinds of equality. It is rather that, for politics to exist, it must assume the existence of equality and organize within the order of the police a scene of an encounter between the logic of this order and the "borrowed" logic of equality.... (more)
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 Man with a heap of wire
Prunella Clough
1919 - 1999
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The Reformed Librarie-Keeper
John Dury (1650)
project gutenberg
These Tracts are the fruits of som of my Sollicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of Learning. And I hope they may in time becom somwhat effectual to rais thy Spirit to the exspectation of greater things, which may bee raised upon such grounds as these. All which are but preparatives towards that perfection which wee may exspect by the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, wherein the Communion of Saints, by the graces of the Spirit, will swallow up all these poor Rudiments of knowledg, which wee now grope after by so manie helps; and till then in those endeavors I rest in the Truth.
 Time, Gentlemen Please
Oskar Kokoschka
March 1, 1886 - February 22, 1980
______________________________________
Communicating Criticality
Steven Maras
Abstract
This essay explores communicating criticality as a problem in how we conceive of and speak about critical practice. This focus is distinct from “communicating critically,” which we can view as a performance or intervention in accordance with a particular sense of critique or critical urgency. Pedagogically, the notion of communicating criticality is linked to the assumption that as well as informing students and others about traditions of critique, and giving them a sense of its political importance, we should seek to foster the ability to evaluate different forms and styles of critique beyond an assessment of counter-arguments. In order to achieve this, we need to think about criticality, forms of critical practice, and reflect on the nexus between communication, critical theory and performance. This essay begins with a discussion of the state of “being critical” and then goes on to develop and elaborate a concept of criticality. Criticality relates to the way a critical perspective defines or figures its own ground of intervention, or the way it sets up and constructs the problem to which it seeks to respond. Being attuned to criticality is about being aware of the way different approaches figure critical theory and practice, and what it means to be critical. In this sense the concept of criticality underpins a highly relational notion of the politics and ethics of criticism and critique.
International Journal of Communication
Regarding the Imprisonment of Others: Prison Abuse Photographs and Social Change
Dan Berger
Douglas Kellner reviews Marwan M. Kraidy's Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization [PDF]
______________________________________
Conjunctions 25th anniversary issue
reviewed by Ron Silliman
______________________________________
The Rich and the Rest of Us
The Changing Face of Canada's Growing Gap
Canada’s income gap is growing: In 2004, the richest 10% of families earned 82 times more than the poorest 10% – almost triple the ratio of 1976, when they earned 31 times more. In after-tax terms the gap is at a 30-year high.
Bottom half shut out: Between 1976-79 the bottom half earned 27% of total earnings. Between 2001-04 that dropped to 20.5%, though they worked more. Up to 80% of families lost ground or stayed put compared to the previous generation, in both earnings and after-tax terms. The poorest saw real incomes drop.
Work is not enough: All but the richest 10% of families are working more weeks and hours in the paid workforce (200 hours more on average since 1996) yet only the richest 10% saw a significant increase in their earnings – 30%. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
______________________________________
U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty
The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen. ______________________________________
Keeping The Faith
Guatemalan feminists fight for change
Meaghan Thurston reports on Red Ecumenica de Mujeres (REM), the Women's Ecumenical Network
the dominion
If asked to imagine ‘radical feminists,’ most Canadians would not think of a Christian organization, but the REM is working hard to advance women’s participation in the political landscape. This work is in the face of an increasingly violent atmosphere, where women are frequently brutalized or found murdered on Guatemala’s streets and where women’s education is often sacrificed in times of economic hardship. ______________________________________
Canadian Ambassasdor to Guatemala spreads misinformation about mining issues
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 Todd Kelly
Detour
The Moleskine
City Notebook Experience
70 Moleskines by international artists,
designers, architects, illustrators, and writers
via peacay’s blog
______________________________________
Gin the Goodwife Stint
Basil Bunting
The ploughland has gone to bent
and the pasture to heather;
gin the goodwife stint,
she'll keep the house together.
Gin the goodwife stint
and the bairns hunger
the Duke can get his rent
onr year longer.
The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C.P.R. packet.
 Basil Bunting
March 1, 1900 - April 17, 1985
Photograph © Jonathan Williams Basil Bunting Poetry Centre
Minor Poet, Not Conspicuously Dishonest
Basil Bunting at 100
Richard Caddel
On Basil Bunting
Tony Baker
Aestheticism and Loyalty
Basil Bunting's Response to World War II
David Huntsperger
"Buffalo 1963: Reading"
Basil Bunting
(83 min) - Slought Foundation
.....................................................................
At Briggflatts Meetinghouse
Basil Bunting
Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.
Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter
silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.
______________________________________
 Renaturation
EBK Jansen
via muse-ings
______________________________________
Epilogue
Robert Lowell
March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
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