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Some Blogs
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 Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman Face to Face
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“There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, judged relative to one another. On the contrary, there are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent values: There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life”
- Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy
The Plague of the OughtLarval Subjects
Yet it is hard, is it not? It is hard to find those tenors of life that are inherently affirmative, where we are not beset by a dark malaise.(...)
I have transcendence folded into my thought, like a tain behind the mirror, infecting me with sickness and fatigue, filling me with despair.... (more)
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from
The Elephant
Primo Levi
Translated from the Italian by Martin Bennett
Absurd it was that my bastion of flesh
Should be forced across these hostile mountains,
Absurd that, invulnerable and mild and terrified,
I should slither on your ice, a substance
Beyond our farthest nightmare. For us,
Once we fall, there's no getting up.
One myopic hothead tried locating my heart,
The point of his lance turned probe.
Among these peaks flaming in the sunset
I uselessly trumpeted my epitaph: "Absurd, absurd."
 Primo Levi
July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987 Primo Levi in his study, late 1986
Photo: Giansanti/Sygma
Primo Levi's journeys to peace
Clive Sinclair reviews Levi's A Tranquil Star
Testifying To His Text:
Primo Levi And The Concentrationary Sublime
James T Chiampi
Romanic Review, Nov 2001
Primo Levi and the language of witness
Michael Tager
Criticism, Spring, 1993
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Paterson and Paterson
(and Jersey and America)
J. M. Tyree
agni
William Carlos Williams tended to Paterson as the Dublin of his own private Ulysses.(...)
In several important ways, Williams’ modern urban epic in Paterson defined itself against two major poetic projects of its era, the Europhilic Cantos of Pound and the Anglophilic verse of T. S. Eliot. Williams disliked Eliot’s approach and mocked his lifelong friend Pound for his anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies in the run up to WWII. In a letter of March 18th, 1922, Pound asked Williams to donate $50 to a fund for poets to take a year off from their jobs to write in Europe. Eliot, who in Pound’s words was having a “break down,” naturally would be the first recipient. In this letter, Pound tells Williams of his implausible scheme to “run a yearly trip from america,” with “you one summer, Marianne [Moore] the next.” Williams sent Pound exactly half the sum requested. In his response, Williams high-spiritedly claimed he had gotten the money from “A Jew named Katz” who, ran the implication, was such a generous patron of the arts that he was willing to help give the author of “Gerontion” his financial backing.
Paterson was a defense of “American material” in the face of the abandonment of the United States, both as a home base and as a proper subject for poetry....(...)
Ah, Jersey. In reclaiming what had been junked—things passed over or rejected as befouled, useless, too new (New Jersey, New York), too gullibly American, by other poets—Williams was following Walt Whitman’s all-embracing view of New York as a new epicenter of cosmic importance in Leaves of Grass. And Frank O’Hara’s Manhattan poems would follow on from Williams’ riotous joy in the manifold details of American urban space.... (more)via Conversational Reading ______________________________________
 Puerta con grama
Jean Dubuffet
(July 31, 1901 - May 12, 1985)
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Proverbs for Paranoids
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
4. YOU hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
- Thomas Pynchon, collected from Gravity's Rainbow at Spermatikos Logos
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...the intermediating system of broadcast-media-democracy is strongly biased to favor a presumption of rational agency. (...)
But this seems an awfully careless presumption. It's a fair (and balanced) estimate that a certain number of the crowned heads, potentates, poobahs, queens, commanders, czars, gerents, khans, maharajahs, monarchs, overlords, overseers, presidents, generals, tycoons, CEOs, pashas, mikados, sovereigns, chairmen of the board, bishops, lieges, tycoons, sultans, swaggerers, tyrants, dynasts, presidents, moguls, shahs, satraps, martinets, caliphs, counts, barons, Big Shots, sachems, Gippers, rajahs, boss men, kingpins, magnates and empresses of history were, if not full-throttle psychotic, then garden-variety batshit lunatics.
- Tom Matrullo
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 Slate Quarry
under Pin Hill Road
Harvard, Massachusetts
Frank Gohlke
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Spirit d'escalier -- in memory of Theresa Duncan
Glenn O'Brien
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Putting power back into empowerment
Srilatha Batliwala
open democracy
In retrospect, it is the early successes of the empowerment approach - despite contemporary angst about how difficult it was to measure, or took too long to show impact, and other anxieties - that contributed inadvertently to its subsequent instrumentalisation, and its conversion into not only a buzz word but a magic bullet for poverty alleviation and rapid economic development, rather than a multifaceted process of social transformation, especially in the arena of gender equality. ... (more)
Pathways of women's empowermentAndrea Cornwall open democracy
The dominant thinking about women and development has become mired in a progressive-sounding orthodoxy that fails to engage with the realities of women’s experience and aspirations around the world. The journey beyond “development-lite” is also the search for a new democracy. ______________________________________
 Fanny and Alexander
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A Defence of the Book
Alan Wall
readysteadybook
At a recent conference I attended, an apocalyptically cheerful spokesman for electronic learning and gadgetry prophesied the end of the book. From one of his many digitally endowed pockets he retrieved a device he said would soon replace our library. I seem to recall having heard this one before. On reflection, I realise that I have been hearing it repeatedly for the last four decades. I can’t help noting however that the book is still very much with us, while one Gizmo Gus after another is carted off to push up electronic daisies.... (more)
 Sarah & Annie's
Statue of Liberty
Kent Barker 1 2
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Atheism à la mode
Caspar Melville reviews Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism
If you have read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion – and if not, why not? – then you will have encountered a crisp, authoritative and unmistakeably English account of the scientific case against assuming the existence of a god. If you have read Christopher Hitchens’ new God Is Not Great you will have been rewarded by a wonderfully erudite, distinctly transatlantic version of the political and logical case against organised religion. Now comes the third part of what we might (though probably shouldn’t) call the atheist trinity, the philosophical case against monotheism. This one comes, bien sûr, from France. It is Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism, just published in the UK.... (more)
via 3quarksdaily
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 turning points
Henry Moore
30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986
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"There is a hole in the universe. It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe. That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens."
- K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe : How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
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Refusing Theory: Avital Ronell and the Structure of Stupidity
Victor E. Taylor
Refusal, especially of theory and thinking, takes on many forms, visceral, fantastic, and linguistic. The first two are easily traced as "refusal" manifests itself as "strong reaction," either in tossing or in the fantasy of tossing a theory book or colleague out of a window--the complement to Wittgenstein's "poker." The third form of refusal is much more difficult to locate since it appears or seems to appear as something not there or not understood or not gotten. These "refusals" are "performative contradictions" in speech. Not understanding or, too simply, stupidity follows in this direction insofar as it expresses itself by its incapacity to properly express itself linguistically. "Duh," "er," "um," are instances of this refusal, a refusal of meaning. But is it altogether wrong to refuse meaning? Let's examine "duh." "Duh." It is generally understood to be an extra or para-linguistic symptom of discourse's pause or failure—something akin to Aristotle's "mere voice" or an animal phone. It is not a word per se since it references the "unavailability" of discourse proper, but it is the title of a book, a website, and, now, included in an academic essay, perhaps not the first. "Duh" evokes presence through a feeling of absence, marking that which is unavailable to discourse or that which is obvious. For example, "'Duh' evokes presence through a feeling of absence, marking that which is unavailable to discourse or that which is obvious, duh (or 'no duh')." Since "duh" or even "no duh" is an extra or para-linguistic phenomenon expressing or performing an unavailability of or obviousness within discourse, it has theoretical consequences and, more precisely, consequences for the future of theory. "Duh," as a pause or failure or refusal, has been and remains the response to theory. This is easily testable by saying "différance" in a departmental meeting. The testable "duh" transforms into the detestable "duh" as the pause or failure turns to "duh" as the expression or performance of the obvious--"duh (or duuuh), that's theory," a revving up or a coming to realization of some awareness, however minimal or previously unavailable discourse. "Duh" is not all bad, however. "Duh" has a significant place in the discursive practices surrounding academic, sometimes intellectual, discourse. "Duh" is evocative, calling up, as it were, stupidity's rich tradition and within this tradition "duh" stands the ground of refusal. Refusing "duh" means resisting stupidity and its double, a "refusing duh," conjures up a break between discourse and world. This duality of "duh," the evocation of stupidity and its refusal, also elicits a response from knowing, stupidity's reciprocal and necessary condition.(...)
Avital Ronell's Stupidity is an unreadable (see Paul de Man), dense, and comprehensive study of the phenomenon and concept of "stupidity" that at times seems to belong more to the field of epidemiology than to the disciplines of philosophy and literature. Stupidity is a condition, with an array of symptoms, definitions, and contexts within Western literary and philosophical culture. "The temptation," Ronell writes in her introduction entitled "Slow Learner," "is to wage war on stupidity as if it were a vanquishable object." War on stupidity, as a war on anything else, presumes that some original order can be regained or restored—some state of purity achieved. Wars on drugs and disease revolve around the rhetoric of health--bodily, spiritual, and communal. Wars promise to return us to peace and harmony. Wars promise to right wrongs or vanquish "evildoers" or "theorists" or those not considered to be "the children of God." Departmental or academic-ideological wars are more complicated, as anyone in higher education has learned, however slowly. These are designer wars, promising nothing other than change or business as usual and delivering on neither. These are wars for and against stupidity—wars that never can be won or lost. This fact of stupidity, to the extent we have facts of stupidity, moves Ronell's analysis forward: "Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutch of denial—and returns." Stupidity is not just "bad" thinking or cognitive, calculative error. It isn't simply mistake: 7+5=13. It is much more and much less than those banal failures of information retrieval and calculation. Stupidity is "essentially linked to the inexhaustible . . . [it] is that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history." Stupidity is heavy, dull, and slow, with no interest other than to have no interest . . . no thinking . . . only to advance procedure and format, ending in the perpetual violence that is the ineluctable status quo. The future of theory, then, will be, like the future of everything else, stupid, but not completely.
What is stupidity? Where does one find it?... (more)
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory______________________________________
 agora
Manos Photographs
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Dissemination [PDF]
Jacques Derrida
translated and with an introduction by Barbara Johnson
courtesy of Cross-X
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, pp 278-294 ______________________________________
Portrait of the artist as a wild old man
John Berger interviewed
Telegraph, 2001
Politics, according to Berger, 'begins with asking oneself questions. Everybody, when they wake up at two or three in the morning, asks themselves these questions - but no discourse encourages them. So the question is smothered, or dismissed, or explained as depression, or some other absurd term. Yes?' For someone who believes that we are living in 'a dark age', John Berger seems remarkably free of depression. 'I'm full of beans,' he says, 'and, touch wood, I seem to be in good health. I have, I think, a tragic view of life, but I joke, and try to live intensely, and draw flowers in the garden, things like that? I don't think one faces that tragic sense, except at certain moments, by lamentation, but in trying to recall that something else is possible, and there are human consolations, as well as pain. It seems to me that happiness is not a state, that it's an instantaneous flash, which almost always comes unexpectedly. Yes? The wider the view you have, the more pain you are aware of - and the closer the pain comes, but there are these flashes of illumination.' For a moment, as he lights another cigarette, he looks ecstatic.... (more)
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 Ingmar Bergman
(July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007) obit
I should write something about Bergman .....
Spurious Ingmar Bergman remembered
GreenCine Daily
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The Photograph
Sam Starkweather
Ask the photograph. It says science. It says spoon. It says you will not remember how black the sky was over the parking lot when you held her wrist as if it were sand. You can’t “capture” a moment. All that light. A cage.
There is a process called burning in photography, when a person or image is burned-out of the picture to get it just right. Memory’s like that. The image as language. This has to do with mathematics. Or desire. Slowly losing out. Images turn up like silver bellies of dead fish making an alphabet in the Hudson. In Canada, a girl falls off her bicycle and skins her knee. Love is not like riding a bicycle. From a bridge, the lack of beauty is impossible.
There is no feeling like fiddling with a camera. Each icon, the words for: moon, mountain, stars. The settings with their weight, a postage. There is no longer a necessity to lick stamps. What happens to the words: shutter-speed, lens cap, flash. To deal with the undeliverable, the U.S. Postal Service started a dead letter office. The words don’t die, people do. No one goes “postal” without a heart. Beat-beat. Beat-beat.
You believe in words. Their power. Weight. Like some kind of nerd. Words too, can get inside you. Unprotected. Circumcision of silence. So you forwarded me an email with your subscribed-to-word of the day: Deflagrate: 1. to burn; verb; 2. Chiefly Chem. to burst into flames and burn away rapidly. Like love, words are useless on their own. Build something. Jesus was a carpenter, this was the only thing the Bible got right. Love as a message is impossible. Love as a nail driven into heartwood pine is real. We live in the real. Words, loves.... (more)
octopus
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Deconstruction And Everyday Life, Or How Deconstruction Helped Me Quit Smoking
Dave Boothroyd
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 photo by William Heick
Five Years Of Languagehat Huzzah
 Malcolm Lowry
July 28, 1909 - June 26, 1957
photo by John Springer
Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young forever — that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly to-day's cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves.
- Under the Volcano
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‘THE CHILD is father to the man.’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889
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Pastness
Mark Kaplan
Nonetheless, there is a part of the poem that ‘belongs’ to its world as the dinner plate does, albeit not a part we ordinarily want to deal with or consider our primary object of interest. But padlocked inside precisely this part is a quantum of historical force – the ‘quiet force of the possible’. What we instead prefer to do is to embrace those aspects of the poem seemingly continuous with our own life-world. This leads to all manner of interpretative misprisions. We then think of these elements, the ones seemingly continuous with our present, as ‘universal,’ where ‘universal’ is the illusion prompted by the apparent rhyme between a past and Now.... (more)
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 Lavender Field & Lone Tree
Provence, France
Robert Weingarten Photography 1 2 3 4
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Surface To Surface, Ashes To Ashes (Reporting To U)
Linda Marie Walker
Electronic Book Review
The "interface" is a strange place - like a no-man's-land (where hostilities are suspended, and the enemies lick each others' wounds). What the interface is, or does, in and with writing - in writing from/about one place to another place in a desire for (or an obsession with) "letting you know" (something, someone, anything, eg., How I Am), or as an excuse/longing to find out "How You Are" - or even to discover if you are still alive - is show, in a banal and infinitely exquisite(ly) painful way how impossible this desiring-for, obsessing-with, the interface is, how "plain-as-day" it is that I cannot tell you what my "here" is (or how I came to be "here") - how it is/I am moment to moment - the loud rhythmic scraping that is going on in a house across the street, the hot wind blowing in the window through the billowing cobweb, the large spotted dog (a voice: "are you dressed yet?") sniffing along the front fence, the young couple painting their newly acquired house (yellow and brown) - in its specificity, in its shades and shadows, temperatures, foods, plants, news, rumours, dreams, hopes, sadnesses, joys, losses, births, deaths, laughters, stupidities, crimes, politics, decisions, and so on (and how now, as I type this up it is night and cool, and the Saturday traffic is light, and the weather mild for summer, etc). The stories are stones and leaves and words and sounds - and sights so fleeting and illusory and unsettling that one calls them ghosts and angels and thoughts; or, in a leap of faith, surfaces.... (more)
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Dovetailing Details Fly Apart—all Over, Again
In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods
Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Poetry and code—and mathematics—make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations, both those written by available pathways and patterns and entropy budgets, and those we conjure out of 'nothing'.
- Gregory Bateson
At odds with the plain vanilla syntactic written meaning (itself, of course, not necessarily unambiguous), the phonemic text can function to enforce, or to counter, to embroider or to complicate the graphic text; but in all cases operates as a supplement to it, a third axis of meaning enriched or suppressed, concurrent with the intended meaning of the parsed syntax and the echo chamber of non-chosen but familial or wished-for alternatives. As Stewart says, written one way, but silently spoken in a particular mind's voice, text gives up its double or gives out at its borders. Lexical integrity, syntactic contiguity, and segmental demarcation all, in his phrase, fray and reweave. This phonemic text-at-odds can be caused by design and will be caused by chance, those two forces always in play.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
—Robert Duncan
(...)
The videographer Paul Ryan, an ecological activist, videotapes chreods. Our digital poem, slippingglimpse, incorporates Ryan's videos of coastal chreods. In slippingglimpse, the water reads the poem text, the poem text reads image/capture technologies, and Ryan's image capture technology reads the water. ... (more)
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The Burden of the Park
John Ashbery
Just so you know, this is the falling-off place,
for the water, where damsels stroll and uncles
know a good thing when they see one.
The park is all over.
It isn’t a knee injury, or a postage stamp on Mars.
It is all of the above, and some other things too:
a nameless morning in May fielded by taut observers.
An inner tube on a couch.
(...)
The period of my rest is ended.
I shall negotiate the fall, and then go crying
back to you all. In those years peace came and went, our father’s car changed
with the seasons, all around us was fighting and the excitement of spring.
Now, funnily enough, it’s over. I shan’t mind the vacant premise
that vexed me once. I know it’s all too true. And the hooligan
ogles a calla lily: Maybe only the fingertips are exciting,
it thinks, disposing of another bushelful of ripe nostalgia.
Maybe it’s too late,
maybe they came today ... (more)
 John Ashbery
b. July 28, 1927 Jacket: John Ashbery feature
John Ashbery in conversation with John Tranter
New York City, May 1988
Thrill of a Romance
John Ashbery
It's different when you have hiccups.
Everything is—so many glad hands competing
for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot,
or just a blast of silence from a radio.
What is it? That's for you to learn
to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue
in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down
after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital
of a nation in malaise, but the directorate
had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic
a casualty of truth was one.
Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity)
perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized.
I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward.
Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts
sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences
are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories
are just that. So I channel whatever
into my contingency, a vein of mercury
that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time
every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers,
worn in the city again, promote open discussion.
A Worldly Country
New Poems
By John Ashbery
HarperCollins
John Ashbery: Fifteen poemsAmerican Poetry Review, Jan 1995
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 Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
(c.1524)
Parmigianino
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From Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror
John Ashbery
... The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"
By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission
That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops on the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
That is the tune but there are no words.
... (more)
Painting With Words
An Anthology of Ekphrastic Literature
The word made image collaboration of John Ashbery and painter Jane Hammond Judith E. Stein Art in America, May, 1995______________________________________
 TRACES - Alleyways and Spandrels
Tim Atherton
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Loren Webster (In a Dark Time …) is engaged in a fine re-evaluation of Robert Pirzig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 1 2 3
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Continental Philosophy has links up for the following texts:
Derrida’s Ear of the Other, Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and Deleuze’s Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities
 Dietrich Oltmanns
Within and Beyond the Wall
...historical and contemporary photography exhibition which focuses on Berlin from the late 1950’s through the period of the Wall (1960-1989), and into the Berlin reconstruction (1990-2002).
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The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with Christian Bök
Stephen Voyce
pmc
# CB: Unlike other artists in other domains where avant-garde practice is normative, poets have little incentive to range very distantly outside the catechism of their own training--and because they know very little of epistemological noteworthiness (since they do not often specialize in other more challenging disciplines beyond the field of the humanities), they tend to write about what they do know: themselves, their own subjectivity. The idea that a writer might conduct an analytical experiment with literature in order to make unprecedented discoveries about the nature of language itself seems largely foreign to most poets.
# SV: That said, has the concept of formal innovation changed since high modernism?
# CB: Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for "improved" products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a "surprise" (a term that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of "information"). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by simulating unliterary art forms. ... (more)via
Three Percent
A resource for international literature from the University of Rochester
Christian Bök at Ubu including Brian Kim Stefans flash realization of Eunoia: Chapter e
Christian Bök at the Electronic Poetry Center
How to Write Eunoia
Christian Bök
broken pencil
Step 1 Acquire a dictionary (preferably the Webster’s Third International Unabridged in three volumes—since it contains the most words). Enter a spelling bee, in which one of the prizes is a dictionary. Come in second by misspelling the word “wrunne,” which refers to a species of fish found in the Indian Ocean. Make sure that you misspell this word at the exact moment when a Harrier jump-jet flies overhead at low altitude, drowning out your speech. Your crucial mistake committed during this distraction wins you the dictionary. Step 2 Wait fifteen years before embarking on this project. Feel free to do whatever you want during this hiatus, but be sure to obtain at least two degrees in English from a university of your choice. When finished, read The Black Debt by Steve McCaffery, then decide to become an avant-garde poet for a living. Make sure that you understand all the economic ramifications of this decision. ........ (more)
Eunoia online
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"Yes, we have become engrossed in the vitalist tradition, which is interesting because it covered so many areas and had advocates on both the right and left wing. What united the vitalists was that they were anti-bourgeois, and that they experienced bourgeois civilisation as petrified, non-authentic and lifeless. But the critique of middle-class society also found expression in a critique of the Enlightenment project as such. And it becomes exceedingly clear precisely in vitalist philosophy's attack on the Enlightenment how early 20th century left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists come together."
The conformity of rebellion
Johan Lundberg interviews Søren Ulrik Thomsen and Frederik Stjernfelt, authors of "Critique of negative edification" Translated by Phil Holmes
Thomsen talks about what he calls “the fetishism of transgression”:
“When you create art, it is always the case that in some sense you create something new—in some way or another there is a deviation from conformism. All good art in some sense contains an experimental element: the work of art does not know its own outcome. If it knew its own outcome, it would no longer be art. But this does not imply that experimentation has a value in itself. It is in the nature of experimentation that experiments can fail, which shows that it is values other than the experiment as such that come into play in order for us to be able talk about art. And it is the same thing with the deviation. The deviation from conventional seeing may be a central element in art, but there are on the other hand many forms of deviation that stand out as aesthetically completely uninteresting.”... (more)
Axess Magazine
a magazine for the liberal arts and social sciences
via Peter Culley
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 A Mighty One
On a Little Outing
Surprised by Two Poets
George Grosz
1942
Reviewing Michael Parenti's "Democracy For the Few"
Stephen Lendman
Parenti's view is quite different from the mainstream's suppression of the "shadier sides of US political life." He explains "proponents of the existing social order have tried to transform practically every deficiency in the US political system into a strength." They want us to believe "millions of nonvoters are content with present social conditions, (and) the growing concentration of executive power is a good thing because the president is democratically responsive to broad national interests (ones affecting the public)." They tell us "exclusion of third parties" makes our system work better, and all state vices are, in fact, virtues. Those popularly presented views turn reality on it head in a nation dedicated to wealth and power interests since inception. It only ever yields a little (and grudgingly) when forced to by grassroots activism or in periods of social crisis like The Great Depression to save what elitists value most - the soul and substance corporate capitalist America.(...)
Parenti deconstructs our system, from its roots, in 19 incisive, thought provoking chapters, encyclopedic in depth, and up to date to the current age of George Bush neocon rule.
This review covers them all briefly to convey a full flavor of his important book, all of which needs to be digested and understood. It's must reading and should be kept as an essential reference guide for future examination and reflection. Knowing its contents is key to arousing enough public concern for change in our own self-interest. In the age of George Bush's America, and his coterie of extremist rogues, the issue is now survival at a time a reckless leadership threatens everyone with potential nuclear or ecological Armageddon because of their lust for wealth, power and empire.
Without public awareness, angst and plain determination not to take it any more, this agenda will continue with potential consequences too disturbing to ignore.... (more) ______________________________________
 Et in Arcadia Ego
Butt Johnson
Butt Johnson’s work is obsessive to a degree that would overcome even our most severe expectations of an artist confined solely to their work. His elaborately detailed ballpoint pen drawings, some of which have taken as much as two years to complete, combine complex ornamentation from a range of historical repositories with various cultural iconography; some recent and some more antiquated, but together forming a compounded visual language with powerful and current significance.
- CRG Gallery via Giornale Nuovo
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The Glugs Of Gosh
C J Dennis, 1917
With Illustrations by Hal Gye
project gutenberg
The Glugs abide in a far, far land
That is partly pebbles and stones and sand
But mainly earth of a chocolate hue,
When it isn't purple or slightly blue.
And the Glugs live there with their aunts and their wives,
In draught-proof tenements all their lives.
And they climb the trees when the weather is wet,
To see how high they can really get.
Pray, don't forget,
This is chiefly done when the weather is wet.
And every shadow that flits and hides,
And every stream that glistens and glides
And laughs its way from a highland height,
All know the Glugs quite well by sight.
And they say, "Our test is the best by far;
For a Glug is a Glug; so there you are!
And they climb the trees when it drizzles or hails
To get electricity into their nails;
And the Glug that fails
Is a luckless Glug, if it drizzles or hails."
...........
.
 O'er the prophecy pored
Somewhere or other, 'tis doubtful where,
In the archives of Gosh is a volume rare,
A precious old classic that nobody reads,
And nobody asks for, and nobody heeds;
Which makes it a classic, and famed thro' the land,
As well-informed persons will quite understand.
'Tis a ponderous work, and 'tis written in prose,
For some mystical reason that nobody knows;
And it tells in a style that is terse and correct
Of the rule of the Swanks and its baneful effect
On the commerce of Gosh, on its morals and trade;
And it quotes a grave prophecy somebody made.
And this is the prophecy, written right bold
On a parchment all tattered and yellow and old;
So old and so tattered that nobody knows
How far into foretime its origin goes.
But this is the writing that set Glugs agog
When 'twas called to their minds by the Mayor of Quog:
When Gosh groaneth bastlie thro Greed and bys plannes
Ye rimer shall mende ye who mendes pottes and pans.
... (more)
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The Intellectual Construction of "Social Distance":
Toward a Recovery of Georg Simmel’s Social Geometry
Philip J. Ethington
The relationship between geometric and metaphoric distance should be among the most urgent of research questions in late-twentieth century human sciences. This essay is an attempt to contribute to the ongoing and increasingly rich discourse on space in social theory, by tracing the life course of a critical concept as it has been constructed intellectually and deployed empirically. That social distance needs to be refashioned is a major conclusion of this essay, but precisely how it must be refashioned is a question that I think we are only beginning to see. Not only Georg Simmel among the founders of social theory will be necessary for this reconstruction. Emile Durkheim’s concept of "social morphology," for example, contains important insights into the relationship between geometric and metaphoric meanings of distance (Durkheim 1992). This essay, however, maintains a focus on Simmel, Park, and Bogardus as shapers of the contemporary notion of "social distance."... (more)
Georg Simmel at the Lectern : The Lecture as Embodiment of Text [PDF]
Janet Stewart Body & Society
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 Song of the Intellectuals
You can take our bodies,
possessions, honor, child and wife;
but you can't take our minds!
George Grosz
26 July 1893 - 6 July 1959
George Grosz: The Faces of Greed
Diebold Essen
George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic
Beth Irwin Lewis
Reviewed by Maggie Jaffe ______________________________________
Glitter and Doom
German Portraits from the 1920s
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Those who have studied the dangers of authoritarian rule have advised us to be wary of people who carry an inner emptiness.
Tales of Angst, Alienation and Martial Law: Roasting Marshmallows on the American Reichstag Fire to Come
Phil Rockstroh
In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush Administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night? Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.... (more)
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Against His-story, Against Leviathan
Fredy Perlman
Hic Rhodus! This is the place to jump, the place to dance! This is the wilderness! Was there ever any other? This is savagery! Do you call it freedom? This is barbarism! The struggle for survival is right here. Haven't we always known it? Isn't this a public secret? Hasn't it always been the big public secret?
It remains a secret. It is publicly known but not avowed. Publicly the wilderness is elsewhere, barbarism is abroad, savagery is on the face of the other. The dry sterile thunder without rain, the confused alarms of struggle and flight, are projected outward, into the great unknown, across the seas and over the mountains. We're on the side with the angels.
 Fredy Perlman
August 20, 1934 -- July 26, 1985
at the Detroit Printing Co-op
Black & Red publishing
The Reproduction of Daily Life
Fredy Perlman
Introduction: Commodity Fetishism
Fredy Perlman
The Incoherence of the Intellectual
C. Wright Mills’ Struggle to Unite Knowledge and Action
Fredy Perlman Fredy Perlman Reference Archive
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What do you think of our little playground, Mr Bond?'
Hooyah!!
James Meek reviews Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
The most unfortunate thing about Scahill’s book is the way that, in serving its narrow subject, it manages to make the careless, callous US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq sound like a vicious plan that partly succeeded, rather than a monument to political incompetence such as the world has rarely seen. There is a telling sentence on page 344: ‘Despite the unprecedented level of private sector involvement on the battlefield, the US military has seldom been stretched more thinly or faced more perilous times.’ The sentence could and, I would argue, should be altered to read: ‘Stretched more thinly than ever, and facing perilous times, the US has been forced to embrace an unprecedented level of private sector involvement on the battlefield.’ To suggest that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have fulfilled in Iraq a long-cherished goal of part-privatising the US military is to allow these failed men to snatch an unwarranted consolation from the ruins of their hopes. The simple truth is that they never thought they would need as many soldiers as they do and have had to rush out to hire stopgaps.... (more)
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Electronic texts for the Study of American Culture
The American Studies Group at The University of Virginia
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 Indian Motif
Color woodcut
Werner Drewes
1899-1985 more
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fresh poems
e·ratio 9 ·2007
via Crag Hill
 chello
My Intuitive Theatre
Pavel Pecha
Czech and Slovak Staged Photographs
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Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War
Lesley Brill
Crowds and Power distills Canetti’s ruminations on his dangerous, beloved species into a dense series of interlocking essays. It offers few prescriptions, but contains much to help us comprehend ourselves and our often obscure motives. Concrete in all his writing and resolutely independent, Canetti helps us to understand our time, when mass movements swell and threaten to clash horrifically and when national leaders are able to accrue unprecedented concentrations of power. As our President declares that the world is divided into two simple categories, those who oppose terrorism and those who support it, and as his Administration pushes for gargantuan military budgets and authoritarian powers, many people feel not more but less secure. Canetti’s persuasive analyses of crowds and power offer compelling arguments in support of the doubts many harbor toward the current U.S. Administration’s response to terrorist attacks and its tactics in the face of continuing threats.
Terrorism awakens the inborn human horror of mysterious, malign contact. It can strike anywhere, in the guise of anyone. Terrorists are the ideal “unknown,” an incomprehensible Other—at once sub- and superhumanly relentless. Like evil itself, they cannot be understood, only labeled. They cannot be persuaded to quit their wickedness, but must be compelled to do so … or killed. They are the ultimate justification for ever more extravagant military spending, because there can be no end to their threat nor any fully adequate defense against it.... (more)
 Elias Canetti
July 25, 1905 - August 13, 1994
Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.
- Elias Canetti
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The End of Modernism
Elias Canetti's Auto-da-FéPreface
William Collins Donahue University of North Carolina Press
In a graduate seminar on modernism, I recall asking about those estranged and world-weary aesthetes, the typical protagonists of high modernism: How did they navigate their social lives? My question, which arose out of my reading of Auto-da-Fé (a novel, incidentally, that was not on the course syllabus), was met with polite disinterest. As I began to work my way into the secondary literature, it occurred to me that critics often only complicated the matter by attempting to apply a high modernist template that just does not fit Auto-da-Fé. And, when the novel failed to measure up, they credited themselves with having discovered an "error" in its conception. Fortunately, just around the time of these musings, a paradigm shift occurred—in the case of German literature, one that is associated chiefly with Peter Bürger, Russell Berman, and Andreas Huyssen—that enabled me to approach the novel with an eye to its rich social and cultural context. This approach has proven most fruitful above all in taking the novel on its own terms, opening up a vista on a whole array of topics that up to now have only been addressed, if at all, in piecemeal fashion.(...)
My interest in making this study of Auto-da-Fé available also to the nonspecialist and students of comparative literature has much to do with Canetti himself. Roger Kimball captures perfectly the intrinsic dual thrust of this enterprise when he describes Canetti's works as "scrupulously avant-garde yet 'large' enough in their ambition to command mainstream critical attention." One of the things that makes Canetti so continually attractive is that he represents an ideal to which so many of us still, if only covertly, aspire—namely, that of the nonspecialist polymath. There may be no more memorable a skewering of academic overspecialization and pomposity in all of world literature than that which we find in Auto-da-Fé. Yet this is clearly not to be read as an anti-intellectual stance. On the contrary, Canetti steadfastly maintained that it is possible to be a serious intellectual generalist without necessarily devolving into a dilettante. The effort, at least, is necessary, Canetti felt, lest in our drive to master detail we lose sight of the larger social good. And those who are preoccupied with their own narrow specialty become vulnerable, as the novel unforgettably suggests, to the power grabs of the less scrupulous. Though Auto-da-Fé mercilessly critiques acquisitive bourgeois notions of German "cultivation" (Bildung), Canetti himself redeems—and refashions—the concept in his own literary-intellectual career. It is my hope, therefore, to enrich the reading experience of the more general reader, even as I engage my colleagues in fairly specific debates about the novel's complex relationship to the interwar period of Austrian and German culture, traditional literary modernism, and Canetti's own considerable body of social thought.... (more)
Waggish on Elias Canetti and Hermann Broch
from Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971
Elias Canetti
American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec 1997
'Beneath the dark sun of racism
imaginary interview has ... composed by writer and journalist Edgar Reichmann using extracts from Canetti's work
UNESCO Courier, March, 1996
"Memory believes before knowing remembers"
Faulkner, Canetti and Survival
Jeffrey J Folks
Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003
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"Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you."
- Elias Canetti
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 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
1863-1944 Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs
Please note that these images are NOT colorized black and white photographs. They were actually taken in colour about hundred years ago!
Because of many years of negligent storing, most of the negatives are in very poor condition, and it takes me hours of scrupulous work to restore their original brilliance. It is just the beginning of the work and I am going to continue. Hundreds of unique colour images of the past are still waiting to be returned back to life.
- Alex Gridenko
The Empire That Was Russia The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated
Prokudin-Gorskii Images
Color photographs from the Russian Empire
(1909-1915)
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a color photographer before his time, who undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II. He was able to capture color by taking three pictures of each scene, each with a different red, green or blue color filter. Walter Frankhauser, a photographer contracted by the Library of Congress, manually registered and cleaned up some 120 of the original high-resolution scans, with breathtakingly beautiful results. The results of his effort can be seen at the online-exhibit The Empire That Was Russia.
- Frank Dellaert
An Explanation of the Color Rendering Process, “Digichromatography”
thanks to Heading East
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from
Simple Verses
José Martí
translated by Mark Weiss
I have seen the sprouting of wings
From the shoulders of beautiful women
And the coming forth of butterflies
From piles of rubble.
.............
Well do I know that when the world,
Pale with exhaustion, gives over
To rest, the murmur of a tranquil brook
Floats above the deep silence.
I have dared to stretch my hand,
Stiff with horror and joy,
To the extinguished star
That fell at my door.
José MartíMark Weiss jacket
José Julián Martí y Pérez (1853–1895) may not be unique as a political poet-martyr (one thinks of Byron and Lorca), but he must have been one of the most politically involved. The very model of the committed artist, he was 42 when he died in one of the first engagements of the second Cuban War of Independence, of which he had been chief propagandist and one of the principal planners. He had spent his entire adult life in exile, chiefly in Mexico City and New York.
Martí’s popular sobriquet in Cuba, Apostle of the Revolution, could obscure for non-Spanish readers the revolutionary quality of his verse. He was perhaps the first practitioner of what came to be called modernismo, the Latin American adaptation of French Symbolism that was to come to full flower in the work of Rubén Darío. ... Martí’s densely figured, learned, syntactically-convoluted verse gave back to Spanish poetry the muscular intensity of the Baroque, anticipating in this regard not so much the modernismo that was to follow him as the poetry of Lezama Lima, Cuba’s greatest 20th Century poet and fountainhead of the neobarroco, which remains a dominant force in Latin America. Paradoxically, he also introduced, in “Simple Verses,” a seemingly naive form reminiscent of South American coplas, the folk practice of constructing songs out of spontaneously composed quatrains, each participant in turn presenting his own variations on the theme, usually, of love or loss, and one thinks as well of the gypsy ballads of Lorca that were to come 25 years later.... (more)
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The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation
Vandana Shiva
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 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
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Song Ink
Patrick F. Durgin
When on the make, we make
sure to see, to see the trees
a speech let the lie in.
So setting off and forth
again when on and in.
A trace the trees make.
Full in the face
see the muse it solves.
Imitation Poems
Patrick F. Durgina new chapbook from Atticus/Finch
 Stasys Eidrigevicius
Polish Poster Gallery
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Warning to Children
Robert Graves
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
... (more)
 Robert Graves
July 24, 1895–December 7, 1985
Leo Fuchs
Trees, Kings, and Muses:
Robert Graves's Battle of the Trees and Jotham's Parable of the Trees
Nancy Rosenfeld
Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2005
Robert Graves at PoemHunter
The Robert Graves Archive
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Lost Things in the Garden of Type
John Tranter
jacket
Aunt Helene has her own cottage, with a garden out the back: she calls it the Garden of Type. It’s a place for abandoned things, she says, and typefaces that have been lost and then found again. When the weather’s misty she wanders down there in her slippers and turns over the soil and kicks things around.
Nothing seemed to grow there now, and I asked her what the garden was for. ‘To remind me to remember to remember,’ Aunt Helene explained. ‘Soon I’ll be the only one left who remembers what metal type looked like, or what blotting paper was for.’
‘You sound like Henry Miller,’ I said. ‘I remember he wrote a book called Remember to Remember.’
‘Miller? He remembered nothing. He made things up. Did you know that an ancient Greek invented the art of memory? Simonides. He’d write you a poem for twenty pounds. He wrote a lovely elegy for the Spartans who died bravely at Thermopylae — for a fee, of course. Poets composed and memorised their works in those days. But then someone went and invented paper, and the art of memory has been quite lost.’ She seemed pleased with the thought.
Like her garden, Aunt Helene was full of useless facts and half-baked theories. She has this idea that the size and shape of a page is more or less the same now, in the days of the Internet, as it was for the ancient Greeks. The surface of the page is white, or off-white, and the marks we make — usually black — go from left to right, from one margin to the other. Things have been like that for thousands of years.
She pointed to a neighbouring paddock. The earth had been turned for sowing, and one of the villagers was stumbling over the clods behind an ox and plough as we spoke. ‘Boustrophedon,’ Aunt Helene said. ‘That’s how the Greeks used to write.’
‘Boustrophedon?’........... (more)
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 Enclosures
Photographs of Manhattan
Irwin Klein
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How To Read Adorno on How To Read Hegel
Steven Helmling
Postmodern Culture
This essay is part of a larger study about how Adorno writes, and how self-consciously he writes: about how his thinking and his writing are functions of each other, implicated in each other, how indeed they produce each other. My premise is that in Adorno's usage such terms as "constellation," "dialectic," "concept," "negation," and "immanent critique" exert their force as much on questions of (to adapt Gertrude Stein) "how the writing of critique should be written"--how Adorno's own writing is written--as on questions of critical or cognitive motives or purposes. Their point-d'appui is how to write as much as, maybe more than--or perhaps simply as--how to think.
I want here, however, to treat an essay much more charged and thus more suggestive for Adorno's writing practice and for his view of language, the important late text dating from 1963, "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel"--an essay not only about reading Hegel, but about the problems of philosophical writing and expression in practice, and specifically about Adorno's own critical practice.... (more)
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How To Lose Your Voice Well
Marc Botha
Postmodern Culture
The voice brings us together in this always slightly dysfunctional conversation. But the voice divides us again because, in our conversation, it is the most obvious reminder of our separation from each other--our individual voices, as they drift through endless talking. And as these individual voices mingle, closing distance, creating new gaps, they remind us that as inevitable as communication is, miscommunication is its inseparable twin. They are not even different sides of a coin, but the self-same thing. We give voice to our mis-/communication, to being mis-/understood. In recent times vocality, inasmuch as it may be related to a tradition of orality, has come under significant theoretical scrutiny. This essay, however, does not trace competing ontologies of the voice, nor does it trace its role within either the all-too-frequently invoked Derridean critique of logocentrism--reached, I think, via a progressive, if amnesic, history of vocality in the notion of phonocentrism--nor in a phenomenological taxonomy Steven Connor notes in oral language's uncontrollability, its aptness, in relation to writing's comparative ineptitude, "to suggest a world of power and powerful presences".
Instead, the aspect of the voice most relevant to the present concern emerges in Connor's theoretical construct, the vocalic body:
Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies. The vocalic body is . . . a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice . . . . The leading characteristic of the voice-body is to be a body-in-invention, an impossible, imaginary body in the course of being found and formed . . . . the voice seems to precipitate itself as an object, upon which it can then itself give the illusion of acting. ... (more)
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Reading as a Material Event
larvalsubjects
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...perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) ...
Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss ... If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I've had done with them. And so we've all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us. - Spurious, Pitted Against Everything
Words of DisorderSpurious ______________________________________
 Lucio Boschi
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How to Do Things with Pictures
William J. Mitchell
Chapter Nine of William J. Mitchell's The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era
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Other Women's Voices
Translations of women's writing before 1700
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The Diary Network in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
Elaine McKay
Eras
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Radical Language
An Introduction
Adam Engel
I am writing a series on Stein, Zukofsky, the New York School and the LANGUAGE school not to enhance people's appreciation for poetry, but rather because I believe the Left, in order to create a new world, must toss the racism, sexism, egotism etc. that is inherent in "regular" language, the language we were born to, receiving daily doses of images and words by the thousands each day. What one learns immediately is that nearly all the sentences created by copywriters, who often write better poetry for advertisements than many Establishment poets publishing in the New Yorker, are in accordance with the alleged "plain speech and grammar approved by the corporate culture that commissioned them.... (more)
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“We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy”
Mike Whitney
Americans don’t believe in revolution anymore. It has become a meaningless event in the distant past. But we need a revolution and we need it now. We need to remove the present administration and restore the people’s confidence in government.
The Bush administration is not a government at all. We all know that. It is a crime family—an oligarchy of racketeers. They have no moral authority, no legitimacy, no right to govern. They’re criminals.
Who doesn’t know this?
And, yet...... (more)
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Bad Subjects 78: Hope
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The Crises in Poetry
K. Silem Mohammad
Lime Tree
Crises are turning points, moments of uncertainty that lead toward either decay or improvement--or perhaps nothing, stasis. What is important is that for the moment of the crisis, fixity appears as though lifted. Dido: quae me suspensam insomnia terrent! The unsettling dreams of poetry hold us in suspense, suspension, a state of epistemological and existential levitation.
To argue about the primacy of ethics or aesthetics in this context is to miss the point. It is not that they are different sides of the same coin; they are the same coin in its entirety, both sides at once. What determines its ethical or aesthetic valences is what it is spent on. Similarly, irony and sincerity are values judged properly not by form, but by use--and by who gets to do the using. And accessibility is a completely contingent quality. Accessibility to what? For whom? At what price? The crisis in all these instances has more to do with the world than with the poem. It means nothing for poetry to be in a state of crisis all by itself. Poetry reflects and responds to crises that are already extant, embodied, political, personal, lived. The whole theoretical problem is meaningless in the absence of an understanding of the crisis that precedes the poem.
The poem's job, on the other hand, is not so much to understand the crisis as to render it palpable. This is both an ethical and an aesthetic task.... (more)
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Empiricism and Subjectivity
An Essay On Hume's Theory of Human Nature
Gilles Deleuze
translated and with an introduction by Constantin V. Boundas
PDF available at Continental Philosophy
Schadografia Nr 2, 1919
Christian Schad more
“Captured Shadows”
“The shadows that things make The things that shadows make”
Les Rudnick
(chapter 3 in The Photogram - a History)
Schad's way
preeminent chronicler of Weimar's icy decadence, diligent pasticheur of art-historical idioms and restless spiritual seeker, Christian Schad was the subject of a retrospective shown in Paris and New York
Brooks Adams
Art in America, April, 2004
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 Theresa Duncan
October 26, 1966 - July 10, 2007
Funeral announcement nyt notice
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 Amourette
Christian Schad
1918
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I shout love in a blizzard's
scarf of curling cold,
for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing
that rushes out whimpering
when pain cries the sign writ on it.
I shout love into your pain
when skies crack and fall
like slivers of mirrors,
and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake,
pluck the balled yarn of your brain.
I shout love at petals peeled open
by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun,
terribly like an adhesive bandage,
for love and pain, love and pain
are companions in this age.
Milton Acorn, June, 1958.
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Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith
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Splendid containment
Jouke Kleerebezem
We know splendid isolation. We browse books. In there is content in words and images on pages. We browse sites. In there is links in documents, represented by words and images on screen. We go to galleries and museums and parks and plazas. Where there are art works in white or not so white cubes, and on green lawns. All such spaces — even while they might be public — are also, to a certain degree, enclosed, confined; through their confinement they help defining the contained content’s perception and reception. Splendid isolation renders contrast which the object of attention would otherwise lack, if it would be immersed in the everyday, media, life at large. Isolation is the technical condition of the sign. Isolation contrasts. Contrast is a prerequisite of perception and reading.
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 Automat
Edward Hopper
1927
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War's had its chance
Mitchell Anderson
Even while saddled with arguably the most docile and jingoistic media in the developed world, the American public is demanding an end to this fiasco. Two thirds of the U.S. public currently opposes the war. Over half believe that it is creating more terrorists than reducing the threat from terrorism.
This last point is key. The strategy of trying to pacify a population by killing those that don't agree with you may have worked for millennia but has now become plainly counterproductive. It is like trying to fight a fire with kerosene.
With every door kicked in, every person humiliated, every loved one killed, there are more bereaved and enraged people willing to join an insurgency. This ad-hoc volunteer force of combatants is becoming an unbeatable foe for the world's leading military powers.(...)
In spite of the waning utility of war, like many sunset industries, it will be subsidized long after it makes sense to do so. Mitchell Anderson
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"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
- Joseph Goebbels
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It is a measure of the success of the efforts of Bushians that we no longer even notice stories of this sort. Not too long ago this might have been news even on corporate-owned networks. Now it barely makes Democracy Now. Soon there will be no memory of "the news" at all. Like gas lamps -- a former utility, supplanted by moodia.
-
Tom Matrullo
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 Ernö Vadas
1955
Recollecting a Culture
Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany
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The End(s) of Russian Poetry
An Interview with Dmitry Prigov
Philip Metres
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Love in the Nineteen-Fifties
On that beach with light shifting breaths
Of breezes touching us like gentle
Curious, strong, all-surrounding presences
Watching, and you watching . . . I stuck a gull’s
Tailfeather askew ten white degrees
Out of perpendicular to match
The slant of the nearest sail on that diseased
Warm doubt of a day.
Grief hope and fury
Were all there, speaking tentatively
In a jury just met.
Wants too early
Stirring your blood, vision, nerves and mine
Over that tilting token in the sand;
Having made a sign, still wanted a sign
While low lightblue waves just tapped the island.
Jackpine Sonnets
Milton Acorn
 Through the fence
László Moholy-Nagy
July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946 1 2 3 4 5 6 The Moholy-Nagy Foundation
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Imagining Modernities
Projecting a multiple understanding of time and space
Lawrence Grossberg
The ontological reality, the discontinuity, the contingency, the »event-being« of the present as a concrete abstraction, the singular universal, constituting the context of experience and subjectivity, defines the second chronotope. Here I stand against those, like Zizek and Badiou, for whom the event represents the unrepresentable, the unprecedented, the absolutely singular. For them, the temporality of the event embodies the fantasy of an absolute rupture with the past. This seems to make the event, as the concrete universal, into the negation of both the ordinary and the particular.
But the event of the present itself is not merely the fleeting and disappearing portal through which the future becomes past; it has a being-structure of its own. The present is a structure of belonging (in the present) and simultaneously, as Heidegger demonstrated, a project(ion) into a future. The present opens onto an always open future (the virtual as it were), even as the openness of the future has to be struggled for in the present. It has at the same time a more convoluted (or involuted perhaps) relation to itself, so that the eternal includes itself within the event of the present. As Dilip Gaonkar suggests, »in modernity, everything turns to the present, and that present, having broken out of the continuum of history, is an unceasing process of internal ruptures and fragmentation,« although he retreats by describing this too quickly (as I shall explain shortly) as »a leap in the open air of the present as history. I prefer Benjamin’s vision »a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop, a kind of ontological between. It is, in Heideggerian terms, the event as eventing or happening; with such terms, being modern might be seen as a performance, where different modalities of performance describe different ways of being modern.... (more)
Documenta Magazine
The online journal of documenta 12 magazines is a magazine of magazines. It compiles the articles that have been published on the leitmotifs of documenta 12 in the more than 100 media around the world that are involved in the project—in the original language and in English.via adventures in jutland
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from
Sestina [PDF]
Richard Hoffman
janus head
...just as people work to shape space to their needs, building bridges, roads, stairs, ramps, hallways, cutting forests for farms, clearing land for towns, so do they try to take control of the ways that the present ripens itself toward the future. With heart and soul they commit themselves to the betterment of a person they hardly know, someone they will doubtless never fully understand. It's asking for trouble to expect yourself to change, just because you are foolish enough to want to. (...)The shape of things to come is only for prophets to know, and only the foolish among them think the rest of us want to hear it. We hang, poison, burn, crucify, and otherwise martyr prophets--I guess they didn't foresee that particular change when they looked into their hearts and saw what they thought and insisted was the future.
Richard Hoffman blogs at Mnemosyne's Memes
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 Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser
1887 – 1961
The Astonished Man
by Lee Rourke
I remember the day quite clearly, it was overcast and raining; which shed an altogether melancholic, yet pleasing, hue over the library. I remember squinting whilst running my finger along a shelf as I walked happily towards my favourite kick-stool dreaming of escape and slumber, then suddenly stopping as its title caught my peripheral vision, my brain slowly twitched into gear: The Astonished Man. The Astonished Man? What a truly wonderful title. B-l-a-i-s-e C-e-n-d-r-a-r-s. Blaise Cendrars? What a name. What a glorious name. This human being is surely a literary genius with a name like that? Arguably, I turned out to be right.
Reading Blaise Cendrars for the first time is like stepping into another universe. It really is. But did Blaise Cendrars actually exist in the first place?(...)
When you look at a picture of Blaise Cendrars you look at a man that has lived. You look at the man John Dos Passos called a “son of Homer” - the whole face a labyrinth of wrinkles and carbuncles that make Bukowski and Auden look like suave catalogue models. When people first see portraits of Picasso they immediately speak of the eyes - with Blaise Cendrars it’s the whole face.
So what did I find so fascinating about that first encounter with Blaise Cendrars all those years ago, sitting alone with his bedraggled book, nobody had read, in my hands? The voice, it just had to be the voice, it hit me immediately. Press-ganged into his world without a second thought. Think an elongated world of surreal humour, deadpan caricature, heartbreaking melancholy and a virtuoso prose style matched by few - after all, this is the man who, allegedly, changed Apollinaire’s way of thinking. So what is The Astonished Man? ... (more) The Beat
A poetry, flash fiction, short story and art showcase .....................................................................
Kit Maude reads Cendrarsready steady book
A month and more than half a dozen books later, I was able to enter the office one morning and say to Daniel ‘You know what? He is better than Hemingway.’(...)
Jeff Bursey, in his preface to Cendrars’s first volume of autobiography The Astonished Man, says:
The example of Ernest Hemingway illustrates how a writer can fall victim to a self-created m yth. Cendrars proves that, if care is taken, embellishing and playing with a fictional persona can be rejuvenating.
Or to put it another way; where Hemingway will mumble obliquely about the moving earth Cendrars will give a detailed description of a native Patagonian sex toy – not only its use and effect but also how it is constructed and its social relevance. ... (more)
John Dos Passos, Blaise Cendrars, and the "other" modernism
William Dow Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996
An American writer born in Paris:
Blaise Cendrars reads Henry Miller reading Blaise Cendrars
Jay Bochner
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003
 Blaise Cendrars and His Wife
Paris 1950
Irving Penn
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ladies and gentleman
blaise cendrars is not dead
patti smith, 1971
[from Out of this World, edited by Anne Waldman, 1991]
Like a great epic movie
we've reeled the world
why only six months ago
I assisted that cur in the most marvelous
hoax of the gentle midwest
Our wagon rolling in a dry bone state
Blaise posed as Louis Saucer
humble rainmaker prophet in rain boots
but when the clouds cracked
the white rain was liquor
and all of Iowa was soused with tequila
every pour sap that poured to the scene
of the great rain left drenched
to the teeth
and drunk to the teeth ... (more)
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Dead Suns And Donkeys
Ignacio Schwartz
Ralph
Blaise Cendrars and Genet do for 20th Century French literature what Curzio Malaparte did for modern Italian literature and Günter Grass for the German (and too, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer for America). Fresh, and alive and filled with words of pure raging gold.
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quoting from Cendars' book Sky
All these dead suns, these posthumous rays which take millions of light-years to reach us, asteroids, fragments of dead worlds, shattered and exploded, old moons, flawed and cankered, crusts sores, blotches, cold lupus, devouring leprosy, sanies, and that last drop of pearl-like light, the purest of all, sweating at the highest point of the firmament and about to fall...is not a tear nor a dewdrop, but a drop of pus.
The universe is in the process of decomposing and, like a cemetery, it swarms with becoming and smells good. The stars are unguent-bearing and throb feverishly, each ray carries seeds sown in the brain of man, and they are the seeds of destruction. Grey matter contains sunspots that eat into the whole circumference of the brain. It is an index of disintegration. Thought is a pestilence. ______________________________________
Laboratory for a Fortressed World
Naomi Klein And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror."(...)
...in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects." And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource. via the latest installment in David-Baptiste Chirot's series of visual poems.
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Welcome to North America's Security and Prosperity Partnership guaranteeing it to elitist interests by denying it to the people of three nations. They're to be parts of the new "united continent of America," or North American Union, run by dark forces in Washington that won't move out when a new president moves in January 20, 2009.
The Militarization And Annexation Of North America
Stephen Lendman
From what's already known, SPP unmasked isn't pretty. It's a corporate-led coup d'etat against the sovereignty of three nations enforced by a common hard line security strategy already in play separately in each country. It's a scheme to create a borderless North American Union under US control without barriers to trade and capital flows for corporate giants, mainly US ones. It's also to insure America gets free and unlimited access to Canadian and Mexican resources, mainly oil, and in the case of Canada water as well. It's to assure US energy security as a top priority while denying Canada and Mexico preferential access to their own resources henceforth earmarked for US markets.... (more)
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North American Union- Connecting the Dots
Kevin Parkinson
The upcoming, so-called SPP Conference in Montebello, Quebec from August 20-21 will bring the leaders of the three countries together to ‘ratify’ the SPP, about which their respective citizens know almost nothing. This is all part of a carefully laid out plan, and is no accident. Our government leaders are not at all interested in discussing this issue with the people who elected them. Democracy with a different twist.
The media is complicit in this fascist act by government in collusion with the corporate multinationals, and have either refused to publish anything relevant, or have glossed over the entire issue in true lapdog fashion.... (more) ______________________________________
Pakistan is the Epicenter of Threat to World Survival
Glen Ford
The monstrous state that was created out of the British engineered partition of India — Pakistan — has long since become an American tool for mischief in the world, including nuclear proliferation, creation of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and an ongoing home for Osama bin Ladin. It is blowback time. The American-financed regime cannot exist without the support of Muslim fundamentalists, and yet the Americans now insist that the regime move against its own political base. There are nuclear bombs in this equation, developed with a wink and a nod from the Americans. If these chickens come home to roost, it will be with incinerating force.
The nexus of world disorder is not Sudan, or Lebanon, or Somalia. It is Pakistan, and has been so from the beginning of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, in 1947. ... (more)
Pakistan's perilPaul Rogers open democracy
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 The Appointment
Rocky Schenck
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The patriarch of Muscovite conceptualism
On the death of Russian artist Dimitri Prigov
Erich Klein
eurozine
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Ron Silliman on Dmitri PrigovMarch 22, 2006
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The Persistence of paper
Alessandro Ludovico
documenta 12
Various disembodiment of paper is practiced on the net and in connected devices, but the immobility (so the reassuring stability) of the printed page is on the other end growing and finding new customized way of production and consumption. Cellulose and electricity are not married, yet, but their vital relationship can still be taken as an opportunity for a new independent pervasive publishing wave.
Prelude to Paper and Pixel week
documenta 12
Paper, Pixels and the Body
ibbertelsen
adventures in jutland
I’m also wondering about our body/our feelings in relation to pixels - how does that side of things play out? The problem is perhaps one of re-embodying our relation to text - to words and images - differently. It takes time. It doesn’t happen all at once, but it’s happening. And although we can talk about the rights and wrongs of it, it’s not something we can resist. This also had to happen with paper and print. It has to happen for each of us. As individuals over a certain age, our attachment to books begins early... (more)
I guess I’m repeating the point that it takes time for us - individually and culturally - to create new ecologies - complex, deeply affective ecologies of relations to our own bodies, objects and the bodies of others - in which we can embody a relation to pixels (and more importantly, the much more complex relations that we now experience across a range of forms of publishing, atom-based and pixel-based, often all at once).... (more)
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 Dolls
László Moholy-Nagy
 Swifts
Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences
Giacomo Balla
1913
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My Handwriting
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by Albert C. Todd
My handwriting is not calligraphic.
Not following the rules of beauty,
words stagger about,
reeling,
as if clobbered on the jaw.
But you, the descendant, my textual critic,
following on the heels of the past,
take stock of those gales
your ancestor got caught in.
(...)
But if through all the clumsiness,
through the clutches of awkwardness,
an idea breaks through the way a freighter on
the Lena
breaks through to the arctic shore--
then, descendant, be slow to curse the style,
don’t judge an ancestor severely,
and even in the handwriting of the poet
find a solution to the enigma of time.
 Yevgeny Yevtushenko
b July 18, 1933 Poetry gives off smoke... Bullets & Flowers
Yevgeny Yevtushenko Poetry Archive Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems translated by Alec Vagapov 1 2
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First And Last Emperors
The Absolute State And The Body Of The Despot
Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi
From blinding light to disappearance from the irruption of the State to the effacement of its subject. We return to late-capitalist America by way of ancient China following the self-dispersing body of the Despot. Our face which we cannot countenance is his. After all. Leave it to the bureaucrats. A history of the present for a leaderless future these eyes will never see. Do not ask us to remain the same.
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100 More Fathers, Mothers, Sons and Daughters Killed
Just Another Day in Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
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Words Without Borders
Quasi Sonnet
Paulo Henriques Britto
Translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey
There is nothing that leads to nothing.
Even to sit in a room, quiet and nude
as Blaise Pascal, will have some effect
on Tanzania maybe, or on New Guinea,
just as the beating wings of a lepidopter–
according to the proverb about butterflies in Peru–
could incite a tidal wave in Shanghai,
or knock down an Iraqi helicopter.
And so we become ourselves, hypocrite lecteur,
at the very least accomplices, you and I.
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 Margaret Laurence
18 July 1926–5 January 1987 John Reeves: Portrait of the Woman
University of Saskatchewan Archives
Margaret Laurence: CBC Archives
Margaret Laurence - Notable Unitarian
Mourning becomes Margaret: Laurence's farewell to fiction
Nora Foster Stovel
Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1999/2000
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 Frenchtown Barbershop
East Window
A Walk Through Durham Township
Kathleen Connally
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
-- Walter Benjamin
plucked from the modern word
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Kathleen Fraser on erasure
in conversation with Sarah Rosenthal
jacket
...it was a felt experience for many years before it was consciously named. I don’t think one becomes so passionate about a phenomenon as I did, unless you’ve felt the impact of it upon your own development and that of your peers. As a child I was often required by my parents’ vocation in the community to wear a social personality, and I felt increasing resistance to that. I was very aware of not being read correctly, or perhaps of being read too simply in a way that satisfied others’ needs. That early misreading is a kind of perceived erasure for anyone who feels it — it is almost like acquiescing to a profound lie. I suppose that as I attempted to maintain an inner sense of balance — and imbalance — the process of growing up required a kind of masking, i.e. concealing my uneasy thoughts and observations in order to avoid what I sensed as an ever-hovering critical judgment from a community of values I had not formed for myself.
When you are publicly contextualized in this way — that is, usefully misread within a social network — you tend to develop a strong resistance to being categorized. ... (more)
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from Wing
Kathleen Fraser
The Underdrawings
The New comes forward in its edges in order to be itself;
its volume by necessity becomes violent and three-dimensional
and ordinary, all similar models shaken off and smudged
as if memory were an expensive thick creamy paper and every
corner turned now in partial erasure,
even bits of pearly rubber, matchstick and lucent plastic
leaving traces of decision and little tasks performed
as if each dream or occasion of pain had tried to lift itself
entirely away, contributing to other corners, planes and
accumulated depth ... (more)
Kathleen Fraser at Penn Sound
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 artist with fist
1918
Giacomo Balla
July 18, 1871 - March 1, 1958
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re:searches
(fragments after Anakreon)
Kathleen Fraser
inside
(jittery
burned language)
the black container
... (more)
 "El"
Berenice Abbott
July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991 1 2 3
Changing New York - 1935-1938
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott knew Eugene Atget for only a few months before he died, but from the moment she saw his photographs of Paris—streets, people, buildings and storefronts—she knew she had found something special. She bought Atget’s entire collection, more than 1,000 glass negatives and 7,000 prints, and brought them to the United States to promote them to museums, galleries, and art and photography magazines.... (more)
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Private Wealth, Public Influence
The Jeffersonian tradition and American philanthropy
Johann N. Neem
"The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson's claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating primogeniture and entails or what we today call trusts and foundations. Otherwise a few individuals or institutions would over time amass sufficient wealth to lord it over ordinary citizens.(...)
We need not question Gates's or Buffett's altruism to worry about the growing influence of private philanthropy in higher education and elsewhere. Instead we must constantly keep the scales balanced between Jefferson and Tocqueville in order to benefit from private philanthropy while limiting its dangers. If the new philanthropic math has enhanced foundations' power to levels we find alarming, we can erect clearer legal parameters around their activities. But there is a better solution. Public institutions, especially in higher education, have turned to private donations to compensate for declining public spending. There is growing pressure for private money even at the K-12 level. Reasserting public control over our institutions may therefore require a renewed public commitment to supporting them. Private philanthropy relies on untaxed wealth, but we might tax more of it in order to gain control over how it is spent. By enhancing the common wealth, Americans can reinvigorate the public element of their public institutions. Doing so would ensure that citizens, not a few wealthy individuals or foundations, determine their future.... (more)
A new issue of Common Place
Why I Can’t Visit the National Museum of the American Indian
Reflections of an accidental privileged insider, 1989-1994
Jacki Thompson Rand
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 Dmitri Prigov
RIP
Until he fell ill, Prigov was planning to return to the ideals of his youth and to participate in a performance where he would sit in a wardrobe as it was hauled up the 22 flights of stairs of Moscow State University, reading poems all the way to the top, The Moscow Times reported.
- obituary
Doublespeak
In the work of poets Lev Rubinstein and Dmitri Prigov, the way the word is said is as important as the word.
Patrick Henry
Dmitry Prigov
writes of an universe where nothing is decided and everything is happening here and now.
Victor Sonkin
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Immense and deserted and alien stones of the waterless desert
Deserted and alien stones of the waterless desert
Alien stones of the waterless desert
Stones of the waterless desert
The waterless desert
The desert
among the translations offered by languagehat here and here
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a couple of poems in parallel translation here
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 Dumbo building crumble icon
Kyle Oldoerp
Obedience
Shepard Fairey interviewed by Nicole Pasulka
the morning news Obey
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Thomas Jefferson and the Evolution of a Populist Vision of Intellectual Property Rights and Democratic Values
Jeffrey H. Matsuura
Archipelago
Jefferson admired and respected inventors, and he considered himself to be one. Yet, although he was willing to accept economic claims of inventors, he was opposed to inventors restricting access to their work. Jefferson was willing to reward inventors to the extent that their work represented a significant advance over what was known before. He often questioned, however, the extent to which current apparent advances truly represented substantial enhancements over prior work.(...)
One of Jefferson’s greatest objections to the notion that inventors might absolutely control rights of access to, and use of, their inventions, was based in his opposition to monopolies. In a 1788 letter to James Madison, he wrote, “. . .it is better to abolish monopolies, in all cases, than not to do it in any.” Jefferson was troubled by patent and other intellectual property rights that granted absolute control over rights of use to the creators of the works — largely because he viewed such grants to be government-issued monopolies.
To Jefferson, patents and other forms of monopoly rights for inventors were not needed for promoting invention and innovation. He was critical of nations, such as England, that granted monopoly patent rights, because he considered them unnecessary and feared that they would actually impede innovation. In 1813, he wrote:
. . . other nations have thought these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Largely because Jefferson feared the consequences of granting broad patent rights, his actions when he served, in effect, as the lead patent examiner for the United States involved careful review of patent applications and a limited view of that which should be patentable. As a patent examiner, Jefferson took the position that a patent should not necessarily cover different uses for, or applications of, the invention. (...)
Jefferson recognized the importance of knowledge and dissemination of information. Knowledge and access to knowledge were, in his mind, essential to the preservation of a democracy. He viewed them as necessary components of economic development and improved quality of life. Patents and other forms of intellectual property rights were, for him, potentially helpful but non-essential policy tools for encouraging invention and innovation. However, he vigorously opposed use of intellectual property rights to limit the exchange of ideas and access to innovations. Jefferson was ultimately skeptical of the ability of a single inventor, acting in isolation, to create true advances over all prior work, believing instead that invention was a collaborative act involving connections with colleagues, present and past. He was also confident that government would, in the end, be unable to block the flow of ideas that provides the driving force for economic advance, quality of life improvements, and democratic society.... (more)
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 Brooklyn Bridge
Berenice Abbott
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Stephen Harper. The RCMP. The Movement Towards a Fascist State in Canada
Robin Mathews
Begin with Stephen Harper: always a servant of the large, private corporations and now of the US expansionists. In addition, he is a modern Capitalist/Christian Fundamentalist – which means a stalwart in the present war against the poor, the vulnerable, ordinary Canadians, the sovereignty of Canada, policies of social equality, and – of course – against The Infidel anywhere in the world.
To do its work effectively in Canada, the Harper group needs to coerce Canadians into fear and undemocratic submission. That’s where the RCMP comes in.... (more)
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 El Burro Contento
Francisco Toledo
b. 17 July 1940
 Poet Under Water
Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg
Museum of Modern Art
July 15-November 5, 2007
Review of show
nyt Verburg at G. Gibson Gallery thanks to Alec Soth
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La vie quotidienne, in quotes
doublegenitive
In a moment, perhaps, of despair with macropolitical solutions which ignore individuals’ experience, Lefebvre’s is one of the clearest articulations of the micropolitcal as a space of contestation that is not autonomous from the social totality, but in contact with it. Critique of everyday life seeks to determine where, as a level, it intersects larger, extra-ordinary social forms.
Certainly this is what the anti-art of the SI—the dérive, the construction of situations, the assimilation of surrealist techniques to purposes of agitprop, or artistic practice to social research—imagined as a course of action. Where, for instance, do the demands of the capitalist city impinge upon your life as you walk to work, and how can one behave counter to these impingements? But there is a fine dialectical line here, where the attempt to fold the everyday back into the totality can be neatly reversed in a counter-revolutionary formulation, not the becoming-lived of the aesthetic—the very definition of a revolutionary consciousness— but the becoming-aesthetic of the lived. This is, indeed, as Lefebvre notes, precisely what the technological invasion of the everyday—television, radio, mass-produced “fashion”—promises: “In the last fifteen years everyday life has undergone extensive transformations, and this has prompted us to ask whether in fact our aim has not been achieved, in remarkable and unexpected ways, by social practice.”... (more)
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 Jack Spencer 1 2 3 4 5
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Soft Links
Nicole Brossard
translated by Peter Dubé
narrativity
these are the names of places, of cities, of climates that make characters. The clear mornings, a fine rain fallen for twenty-four hours, rare images originating in America and elsewhere, two natural disasters that oblige us to stick together in the midst of cadavers, these are the gestures quiet or purple, the shells, the icicles in the happy hour glasses, crockery noises or a light stuttering that torments an instant, a slap, a kiss these are the names of cities like Venice or Reading, Tongue and Pueblo, the names of characters Fabrice, Laure or Emma. The words sharpened over the years and the novels, words one spoke while breathing badly, while laughing, while spitting, while sucking an olive, the verbs we add to the lips' pleasure, to success, to a certain death. These are words like knee or cheek or still others stretching as far as the eye can see making us lean over the void, stretch like cats in the morning these are the words that make one stay awake till dawn or take a taxi on week nights when the city falls asleep before midnight and solitude sticks in our jaws like an abscess. These are words spoken from memory, from want or from pride, very often words pronounced with love while placing hands on nape of neck or filling a glass of port. These are words whose etymology must be sought, that must then be plastered to what's called a wall of sound, in a manner like those who cry out in pain and sigh with pleasure that wander in dreams and documents assault the heart's mysterious obscurity. These are words like bay, hill, wadi, via, street* stasse dispersed through the dictionary between flame-trees and neons, cemeteries, dismal and forests. These are words sound the body of meanings that are claws or soft* on our chests, cold, shivers, furrows and fear in the back without waiting while we try to split the sleek future tense with trenchant quotations. These are words swallowers of fire and life, one no longer knows whether they're Latin, French, Italian, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Andalusian, Arabic or English, whether they hide a number, an animal or old anguishes eager to gush before our eyes like cloned shadows filled with light and great myths.
Nicole Brossard______________________________________
 "There is a Country..."
Rosa Revsin
zone zero
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The Evolutionary "Why" of Religious Capitalism:
Imperialism, Colonialism and Capitalism in Christ's Name
Gerry Lower
It ought not surprise anyone to note that religion remains, by and large, entirely ignorant of its unifying role in cultural evolution. This is because western Roman religions have never bothered to maintain anything resembling an accurate history of the western world which it dominated for nearly two millennia. Every act of Roman religion is seen as being justifiable because, after all, it is perpetrated in the name of God, Christian compassion and love for one's fellow man.
To what end this unification? With regard to socioeconomic unification, the larger evolutionary role of religion has been, by now, largely fulfilled, greed-driven capitalism having provided the world with a rudimentary global socioeconomic system. With regard to philosophical/political unification (with the entire world now looking to democracy), religious fundamentalism (from Sharon's Judaism to Bush's Old Testament Roman capitalism to Osamu bin Laden's extremist Islamism) is the largest obstacle to that end. It is not only prophetic but necessary that fundamentalism (in all three major branches of Abrahamic western religion) self-terminate by discrediting itself from the global political arena.(...)
The conceptual revolution spearheaded by Einstein and Bohr and their generation of scientists remains yet to be integrated into western culture, as was modern (post-Newton) natural philosophy, least of all into political philosophy. There are two reasons for this situation. First, religious capitalism can ill afford to look at things like history and philosophy on the whole. That would expose what it has done to destroy family and community values and negate human rights and land rights in America, what it has done to enable its exploitation of both. Second, postmodern (post-Einstein) natural philosophy remains to be rigorously defined and disseminated for consideration by the people. We are contributing to that end as you read.(...)
The values of religious capitalism now threaten the survival of the people, the land and the entire living system on earth. With religious capitalism's unifying work (and devastating policies) nearly completed, we must come to comprehend why those values must be replaced with the values of nascent Christianity, Natural Philosophy and Democracy. ... (more)
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 Merrickville Ont
photo - mw ______________________________________
Walls and the World
Immanuel Wallerstein
Of course, one might think that persons committed to the endless virtues of the free market should feel that individual movement should be governed by the market and not by monopolies (restriction of rights of access through a system of visas, for example). But in practice, few advocates of the free market ever say this. They claim that goods and capital should move freely, but they tend not to extend this market principle to the movement of people.
And one might think that persons committed to social equalities ought to be in favor of sharing with everyone. But in practice, many advocates of social equalities, especially those in rich countries, wish to limit the social equalities to those already inside a particular country, and not open it to the entire world. The slogan seems to be protect our rights, property, and jobs, not the rights, property, and jobs of the entire world.
As for effectiveness, walls are effective in the short run to keep many (not all) people out, and to keep many (not all) people in. But in the middle run, walls are politically abrasive and magnify injustice, and therefore tend to force further negotiations. The one sure thing we can say about walls is that they are certainly neither friendly nor charitable nor a sign of freedom.
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By some witchcraft or other for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. . . .
I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out, and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. . . . For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to Longfellow
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 Jack Spencer
Narrative and the "Gift of Vision": The Photography of Jack Spencer
Robert L McDonald
Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004
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