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Some Blogs
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 Helen Levitt:
7 decades of New York "street theater"
Lens Culture
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all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)
gush to it as diety or devil
-toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else
drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone
but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence
e e cummings
October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962
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Carl Schmitt's Five Arguments against the Idea of Just War
Gabriella Slomp
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 19, Issue 3 September 2006
Abstract
Carl Schmitt famously alleged that a commitment to just war fosters the criminalisation and demonisation of the enemy. The aim of this paper is to trace, analyse and evaluate five arguments that can be found in Schmitt's opus elucidating and supporting the above claims. The paper suggests that even though Schmitt's critique of just war is typically extreme, it can nevertheless enrich the current debate on just war in so far as it challenges the common claim that the just war tradition occupies the middle ground between bellicism (that always justifies war) and pacifism (that never justifies war). Arguing against this widely held view, Schmitt claims that in the 20th century a belief in just war, far from representing a moderate position between extremes, is instead at the fore of an ideology that aims at dehumanising anyone who does not share its core values.... (more)
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The coming presidential election will reveal the extent to which ordinary poor Americans will proudly vote themselves out of jobs, off the land and ensure that their children can never afford to go to university or afford health care. It happened in the last two presidential elections, and the Ayn Rand Institute is banking that it will happen again.
- Leonard Doyle
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Privatizing Terror, Outsourcing Diplomacy
An Interview with P. W. Singer
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"Psychokiller", the Blackwater Version
youtube
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When Gore goes to get the prize he shares with the pr hucksters and falsifiers at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Gore should be forced to march through a gauntlet of widows and orphans, Serbs, Iraqis, Palestinians, Colombians, and other victims of the Clinton era.
- Alexander Cockburn
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Robert Creeley's Radical Poetics
Marjorie Perloff
electronic book review
The issue is complicated. Certainly, Creeley's poetics is not quite that of In the American Tree. What Bruce Andrews has called deprecatingly "the arrow of reference" is still operative in Creeley's lyric, his collocations of words and morphemes are never as non-semantic or disjunctive as those of later Language poets, his identity, however fractured, never less than central to his what is a very "personal" poetry. The decorous, purposely Old World phrasing - "I am given to," "I am embarrassed for," I am "thinking to be rid of" - is surely closer to Robert Duncan than to Ron Silliman. And as Theory, from Derrida and Deleuze to Adorno and Habermas, came to dominate the discourse of the various Language Poetry journals, Creeley came to protest, less in print than in private conversation, that theory - dry, intellectual, impersonal - was the enemy of poetry, that he himself was just a "simple" lyric poet who looked to experience and to tradition for inspiration. Thus, in his last decade or so, he made sure he allied himself, not just with experimental poets, but with the larger scene of postwar American - and also British - poetry, endorsing a wide variety of younger poets from Frank Bidart and Forrest Gander to Heather McHugh and Sharon Olds, as if he wanted to warn his more immediate coterie not to box him into a corner. John Ashbery, we might note, has followed a similar path vis-à-vis the New York school.
Poets cannot, of course, be expected to see themselves as later generations see them. It is too soon, in any case, to make authoritative statements about Creeley's influence today. Still, it may now be useful to revise the earlier genealogy whereby we couple Creeley with Olson, Duncan, and Levertov, with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, or with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Indeed, among the Objectivists, the one poet whose lyric very much resembles Creeley's is the one whom the label least fits - Lorine Niedecker - just as the "Black Mountain" heir whose aesthetic really is Creeleyesque is that non-American, Tom Raworth. Both Niedecker and Raworth may be characterized as mavericks. Both have strong group affiliations but are loners, working in isolation. Both are obsessed, in their condensed, "minimalist" lyric, with the grammaticity and paragrammaticity of language, both are intensely "personal" and yet intensely oblique and constrained love poets. To read Creeley against Niedecker and Raworth suggests, in any case, that in making genealogies, it is high time to go beyond nation and gender boundaries, high time to cast a wider net so as to capture, in Creeley's words, "whatever is."... (more)
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Saving the Past: Deleuze's Proust and Signs
Stephen Bernard Hawkins
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Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning
Douglas Barbour
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 'Spencer Perceval'
I like trains
youtube
The past returns in terms a breakage between what remains and what has withered in time. Both memory and the memory of the body form an amorphous “stump” that actively stretches toward a setting that no longer recongises what has been left behind. Detached from the retina of personal experience, the emergence becomes, in effect, a phantom loss.
- Dylan Trigg
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when hair falls off and eyes blur And
thighs forget(when clocks whisper
and night shouts)When minds
shrivel and hearts grow brittler every
Instant(when of a morning Memory stands,
with clumsily wilted fingers
emptying youth colour and what was
into a dirtied glass)Pills for Ills
(a recipe against Laughing Virginity Death)
then dearest the
way trees are made leaves
open Clouds take sun mountains
stand And oceans do Not sleep matters
nothing;then(then the only hands so to speak are
they always which creep budgingly over some
numbered face capable of a largest nonglance the
least unsmile
or whatever weeds feel and fish think of)
E. E. Cummings
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 bleecker street
Paintings by E. E. Cummings
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The Sun Did Set
Saul David reviews Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
Literary Review
 Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: 'The history of empires is the history of human misery.' The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is that 'the initial subjugation is invariably savage and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive. Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda'.(...)
Brendon's last book, The Dark Valley, a superb overview of leading nations in the 1930s, was published seven years ago. He has used the interval to good effect because his latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one.... (more)
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Two Elegies
Jonathan Thirkield
conjunctions
I remember a tree of a painting.
My whiter rings worn poor from prayer.
Saturday, a fawn wing sung of women and of woods:
"We heap the pearls, we loose the ground,
and some go godward with a rose."
There sat a little man like a silver birth tree.
A crowd in my ear where a woman with love would mirth me.
Her voice sliding rum from a songbeaker
rang the rimed, gray, waned glass,
and sent me into a drying river.
... (more)
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 Inner Voices
James Tissot
Oct 15, 1836 – Aug 8, 1902
 Gertrude Bell
1909
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 Gertrude Bell
(1868-1926)
Bell, aged 41, before her tent
Babylon (1909) The Gertrude Bell Project
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The Queen of the Quagmire
Rory Stewart
When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman who, apart from a few months as a Red Cross volunteer in France, had never been employed. She was a wealthy Oxford-educated amateur with no academic training in international affairs and no experience of government, policy, or management. Yet from 1916 to 1926, Gertrude Bell won the affection of Arab statesmen and the admiration of her superiors, founded a national museum, developed a deep knowledge of personalities and politics in the Middle East, and helped to design the constitution, select the leadership, and draw the borders of a new state. This country, created in 1920 from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, which were conquered and occupied by the British during World War I, was given the status of a British mandate and called Iraq.
More than ten biographies have portrayed her as the ideal Arabist, political analyst, and administrator. Does she deserve this attention? Was she typical of her colleagues? What are the terms by which we can assess a policymaker eighty years after her death?... (more)
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 photo-montage of Wolkenbugel
El Lissitzky, 1925
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Delirious Moscow
In Search of Lost Vanguards
Excavation and Space Exploration in Constructivist Architecture
Owen Hatherley Archinect
Filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 as Stalker, the Zone is visualised as a Chernobyl-like scarred, postindustrial landscape of ruins, waste, rubbish, of the remnants of industrial civilisation corroded, dilapidated and rapidly being reclaimed by nature . Tarkovsky's version of the Zone has gradually, over the last thirty years, become the foundation of an entire aesthetic. If Modernity, or Modernism, is our Antiquity, then its ruins have become every bit as fascinating, poignant and morbid as those of the Greeks or Romans were to the 18th century. Tarkovsky’s Zone is in some ways specific to the former USSR and a few locations in Estonia, yet practically every industrial or post-industrial country, has something resembling the Zone within it. Such an area would be, for instance, the remnants of industrial districts of East London. Beckton, Woolwich, Stratford, outposts marked by the cyclopean remains of silos, gasometers, factories. These are the places that inspired the Modernists of the 1920s: every manifesto from Le Corbusier's Vers d'une Architecture to Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist response Style and Epoch had their lovingly photographed silos and power stations. Appropriately, also in the Zone can be found the bastard children of the Modernists, the scatterings of overambitious social housing, with their crumbling highrises and streets in the sky. These are remnants of something as alien and incomprehensible to the seamless mallscape of 21st century Capital, or the heritage Disneyland of European Urbanism, as Shklovsky’s Futurist Martians were to their contemporaries: only here without any of the insurrectionary promise of a new world, merely the ruins of a defunct future.... (more)via William Gibson
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Algebra of Identity
Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapor
D. Fox Harrell
ctheory
Wind whips, shrieks, or is unnoticeable. Streams bears small creatures below rocks, rush with energy and transparency. Shadow obscures, cools, relaxes. Vapor moistens, hides, causes ships to crash, is fluid but hangs in the ether. If we can imagine these four skins, we can also imagine skin of tangled roots, illicit love, unscratched itches, crossed senses, angels, or demons. I shall get back to this later.... (more)
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The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.
- Karl Kraus
via the gift hub
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 Tantra Bensko The Pedestal - The Political Anthology
over 700 essays, images, poems, and stories
Oct 1 - Nov 3 (2004)
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from
Combat Poem
Clayton Couch
4.
Could there be a final point
to dialoguing robots?
Not if the covenant has
its way of making copies
free of charge! Copy yourself
on a billiard ball. Roll.
Maybe the language will
gather its progeny,
and set us all straight.
Pro test move meant
more to you than you,
and I support. Watch (...)
Give me
libertarian or give me
death to reap. Public
can master over divine
vengeance, and call
our demo vatic chattel
for one last be heading.
You set your neck here,
along the groove. Don't
mind the steel,
or all that leftover red:
(hive never wit
nest soma ny
nostalgic fools). ... (more)
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Slum Fights: The Pentagon Plans for a New Hundred Years' War
Nick Turse
With their surprisingly bloodless language, antiseptic PowerPoint presentations, and calm tones, these men - only one woman spoke - are still planning Iraq-style wars of tomorrow. What makes this chilling is not only that they envision a future of endless urban warfare, but that they have the power to drive such a war-fighting doctrine into that future; that they have the power to mold strategy and advance weaponry that can, in the end, lock Americans into policies that are unlikely to make it beyond these conference-room doors, no less into public debate, before they are unleashed.
Along with the lack of even a hint of skepticism about the basic premise of the conference went a fundamental belief that being fought to a standstill by a ragtag insurgency in Iraq was an issue to be addressed by merely rewriting familiar tactics, strategy, and doctrine and throwing multi-billions more in taxpayer dollars - in the form of endless new technologies - at the problem. In fact, listening to the presentations in that conference room, with its rows of white-shrouded tables in front of a small stage, it would not have been hard to believe that the U.S. had defeated North Korea, had won in Vietnam, had never rushed out of Beirut or fled Mogadishu, or hadn't spent markedly more time failing to achieve victory in Afghanistan than it did fighting the First and Second World Wars combined.
To the rest of the world, at least, it's clear enough that the Pentagon knows how to redden city streets in the developing world, just not win wars there; but in Washington - by the evidence of this "Joint Urban Operations, 2007" conference - it matters little. Advised, outfitted, and educated by these mild-mannered men who sipped sodas and noshed on burnt egg rolls between presentations, the Pentagon has evidently decided to prepare for 100 years more of the same: war against various outposts of a restless, oppressed population of slum-dwellers one billion strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25 million a year. All of these UO experts are preparing for an endless struggle that history suggests they can't win, but that is guaranteed to lead to large-scale destruction, destabilization, and death. Unsurprisingly, the civilians of the cities that they plan to occupy, whether living in Karachi, Jakarta, or Baghdad, have no say in the matter. No one thought to invite any of them to the conference.... (more)
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Torture is Back!
Milt Bearden
Torture is back! Press reports of secret memos in the Gonzalez Justice Department have rekindled the debate, which, as usual, continues to miss the point. That point being that in the end, it will be the Central Intelligence Agency that will be hung out to dry for torture allegations, both real or manufactured. Everybody else in the government will walk, or so they think.
... below the noise level of the politics of torture and attacks on a discredited Justice Department, a new and important reality is working its way through the legal communities of the "civilized" world. It is this: the Bush administration, in its effort to immunize itself against future prosecution by changing the definition of war crimes for which U.S. government defendants may be prosecuted, has opened the door for such prosecutions outside the United States. Like a hacker at golf who blasts from fairway sand traps to knee-high rough, the administration is getting farther and farther "out of bounds."... (more)
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Blackwater Nation
Brian Cook
... to lay the blame solely at the feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests. After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and Colombia.
In fact, in late September, as the most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the “government won’t solve, or that government alone can’t solve.”
That might be true, but only because we’ve undergone 30 years of a political ideology that has robbed government of needed revenues, derided regulation that might impinge on corporate profits and sneered at the idea that a public spirit could be preferable to private motives. Rather than rely on the charity of those who have so handsomely profited, it’s time we alter the perverse arrangement.... (more)
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The Power of Delusion
Dale Allen Pfeiffer and Elizabeth Anne Pfeiffer
How can such a large percentage of the US population remain blinded by denial in the face of so much evidence which flatly contradicts their view of reality (and isn't such delusion a feature of psychosis)? When the rest of the world clearly sees and deplores what is happening, how is it that a majority of the US population-which prides itself on freedom of information and informed democracy-has not clue what is really happening? How is this delusion being maintained? Through a few simple techniques.... (more)
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 Gertrude Bell
1909
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It alarms me that a sort of general Doomsday atmosphere accompanies an ever more wide-spread comfort, that well-being (there where it exists, that is in limited areas of the world) has the livid features of desperation. Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.
Is Poetry Still Possible?
Eugenio Montale
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1975
The academicians of Stockholm have often said no to intolerance, cruel fanaticism and that persecuting spirit which turns the strong against the weak, oppressors against the oppressed. This is true particularly in their choice of literary works, works which can sometimes be murderous, but never like that atomic bomb which is the most mature fruit of the eternal tree of evil.
I will not insist on this point because I am neither a philosopher, sociologist nor moralist.
I have written poems and for this I have been awarded a prize. But I have also been a librarian, translator, literary and musical critic and even unemployed because of recognized insufficiency of loyalty to a regime which I could not love. A few days ago a foreign journalist came to visit me and she asked me, "How did you distribute so many different activities? So many hours for poetry, so many hours for translation, so many for clerical activity and so many for life?" I tried to explain to her that it is to plan a lifetime as one plans an industrial project. In the world there is a large space for the useless, and indeed one of the dangers of our time is that mechandizing of the useless to which the very young are particularly sensitive.... (more)
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Meriggiare pallido e assorto
Eugenio Montale
October 12, 1896 – September 12, 1981
Translated from Italian by Millicent Bell
agni
To slump at noon thought-sick and pale
under the scorching garden wall,
to hear a snake scrape past, the blackbirds creak
in the dry thorn thicket, the brushwood brake.
Between tufts of vetch, in the cracks of the ground
to spy out the ants’ long lines of march;
now they reach the top of a crumb-sized mound,
the lines break, they stumble into a ditch.
To observe between the leaves the pulse
beneath the sea’s scaly skin,
while from the dry cliffs the cicada calls
like a knife on the grinder’s stone.
And going into the sun’s blaze
once more, to feel, with sad surprise
how all life and its battles
is in this walk alongside a wall
topped with sharp bits of glass from broken bottles.
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Eternal Fascism
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
Umberto Eco
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 Lenny Bruce
October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966
Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn't commit any crime
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time.
-
Bob Dylan
Lenny Bruce
The crucifixion of a true believer
Nat Hentoff
The Lenny Bruce FBI File
The Complete Lenny Bruce
Dead Man Talking, the Lenny Bruce story ______________________________________
To the Princes of Gringolia
Joe Bageant
You don't revolt against the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Yet, were there to be a class revolution in the U.S. next week, and the old folks looted the drug stores (I'd be right there with 'em, though probably not for the same drugs) and even if that pack of Gucci whores at the Fed said: "Fuck it, let's spread all the geet we've looted equally among every American," we still will not have begun to touch the core of our national disease, our uniquely American supersized version of a universal one -- individual greed. The national mindset of "I want all I can grab for myself and I want it now, even if it has to be on credit," constitutes a much bigger crisis than class in and of itself, and is the driver of our unfolding national catastrophe.(...)
The truth ... is that, regardless of income, most Americans work too much and have too little time to experience true leisure, let alone time to develop a genuine intellectual and inner life. And that is the underlying horror of the consumer state and the source of that haunting sense of meaningless amid all the white noise and bright lights and toys. No functional sustaining interior life. No private mind-soul garden to cultivate, no psychospiritual inner home. No stable center of being. That sounds arrogant as hell, but I'm saying it anyway. If we had such a thing as a cohesive national moral and intellectual life, we surely wouldn't be the society of engorgement, not to mention the international thugs that we now are. Or at least not as much so.... (more)
 Ricardo Villalba
(attributed)
ca. 1875
An Even Greater Measure
George Eastman House
84 Selected Images
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466
Man shouldn't be able to see his own face - there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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Self-Portrait, 1925-1930
Ernest Farrés
Translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti
On the spot where I write all this hodgepodge of verses
stands Edward Hopper, in fact, who engenders them
and who, neatly transcending space-time, sends me
the signals.
His self-portrait is,
as would delight the fantasist Borges,
a mirror that reproduces not so much
the painter’s face as the static reflection
of my image. Make no bones about it:
Hopper and I form a single person.
... (more)
Rambles Through Catalunya
Words Without Borders - October 2007
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Escaper
Spurious reflects in the light of this older post at Larval Subjects
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If no one is interested in the symptom of another, then this is because the sinthome is nonsensical, a silent jouissance, a jouissance that has been subtracted from the field of meaning and the Other. Sinthome is symptom that has become drive. I find it impossible to be interested in Joyce, for even when I'm interested in Joyce, I am interested in myself. The jouissance of the letter embodied in Joyce's text functions as a rorschach for my own symptom, which is why interpretations of Joyce are always the pet projects of their authors. One might say something similar of Lacan's reading of Freud or any reading of Lacan. The beauty of any reading of Lacan is that one is singularly responsible for what Lacan will have been. In this regard, Lacan's writing performatively enacts his theory of "oracular interpretation"-- interpretations that can be taken in a variety of different ways --making the reader, like the analysand, responsible for what they find in the text.
- Sinthome
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Uncanny how the days gang up to deny men anything beyond an inspecific gaze, a gauzy replica of fleet harass’d time, its minion minutes bent meteoric, droplet-shaped, gaining lengths fractious, objurgatory, shredding. “Or so it seems to me.” Whatever one sees is indistinct and whatever one desires is partial, or of some fremitous cacodoxy, noises “off.” What is a mystery is how swiftly things enamour’d go chaffy and moribund—that de Certeau of yesterday par example.
- Isola di Rifiuti
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 The Highley Beds
Wyre Forest Coalfield
Worcestershire
Lost Labours
Images of Our Post Industrial Landscape
Ian Grant
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Dialogues without Frontiers
Juan Goytisolo
Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush
words without borders
We live in a world of rigid frontiers, often traced in blood, and of fixed, exclusive identities, and those of us who refuse to accept them are the object of suspicion and sly allegations. What does it mean to write “Castilian in Catalonia, Frenchified in Spain, Spaniard in France, Hispanic in North America, Gentile in Morocco and everywhere a Moor,” as I portrayed myself now more than twenty years ago in the pages of Forbidden Territory? Single-issue authoritarian frameworks— whether nationalist, linguistic or sociological—always drawn with a compass and ruler, drive those of us who refuse to be pigeonholed thus into a no-man’s land in which complexity is seen as anomalous and interest in difference an oddity to be stigmatized. One must be single-mindedly Spanish, French, Czech, Dutch, Catalan, Basque, or whatever, or be sentenced to bivouac outside the walls of the fortress of identity. Such collective identities, as Américo Castro said, “forged over millennia,” are simply reductive interpretations of the past jumbled up with self-serving fakery and myths as credible as the ones concerning the Apostle Santiago or Eleven Thousand Virgins. Just as an advanced culture is the sum of the external influences it has received and assimilated throughout its history, the so-called marks of identity of individuals are equally hybrid, heterogeneous and changing, the fruit of contradictions inherent in the human personality and its multiple settings in history and society.(...)
A human being comprises diverse but mutually compatible identities. I can be at once Barcelonan, Parisian, Marrakshi and claim my Cervantine nationality. Write in Spanish and feel at home in Barcelona and not in Madrid. Walk down the Rambla, the Ribera or the Raval and be inspired by the same immediately emotional warmth towards the urban and social landscape that I feel in Tangier, the pink-ochre city of the Atlas where I live or my haunts as an idler and inveterate burner of shoe leather in the deuxième, dixième and dix-huitième arrondissements. I wander, ramble and lose myself in the passageways described by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, now home to Turks, Hindus and Pakistanis. I hear a stimulating variety of languages, enjoy a space in perpetual motion, and pick up the day’s gossip, the contradictions in society. And to write is to accept that these contradictions exist in the writer’s innermost self.... (more)
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The Question Concerning Technology
Heidegger
download link here
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The Education of the Stoic
The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Fernando Pessoa
Edited and translated by Richard Zenith
“I transferred to Teive my speculations on certainty, which lunatics have in greater abundance than anyone.”
Exact Change books of experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements.
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Autumn Comes
Li Ho (790-816)
Translated by Arthur Sze
Wind in the plane tree startles the heart: a grown man's grief.
By dying lamplight, crickets are weeping cold threads.
Who will ever read the green bamboo slips of this book?
Or stop the ornate worms from gnawing powdery holes?
Such thoughts tonight must disentangle in my gut.
In the humming rain, a fragrant spirit consoles this poet.
On an autumn grave, a ghost chants Pao Chao's poem,
and his spiteful blood, buried a thousand years, is now green jade.
Poems from Arthur Sze's The Silk Dragon:Translations from the Chinese
Copper Canyon Press
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 Boy in Storefront
New York, NY
One Third of a Nation
Arnold Eagle and David Robbins
New Deal Network via Al Filreis
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from
The Shapes of Leaves
Arthur Sze
Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare
searing the curves of a curling dogwood? (...)
I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf. ... (more)
From The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, published by Copper Canyon Press,
An interview with Arthur SzeDrunken Boat
 Joel Sternfeld
Daylight Magazine
... the biannual printed publication of Daylight Community Arts Foundation (DCAF),
a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of photography as a tool for effecting social change
thanks to The Exposure Project
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101
If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills.... If we could remain that way for beyond forever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing and action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!
Look how it's getting dark! ...The positive quietude of everthing fills me with rage, with something that's a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches ... A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance... A restless tedium makes me think no more of you...
All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both. The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
edited and translated by Richard Zenith
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Review: LS/S by Beate Gütschow
Jörg Colberg
It is interesting to note that while we are led to believe that in photography the digital age is upon us, we are still far from understanding what it actually means. Despite the fact that for almost as long as we can think back photographs have been manipulated to show things not quite the way they were - with the Soviet Union's erasing of disgraced persons being an especially perfidious example - and despite the fact that every little technical choice - colour versus b/w, saturated versus unsaturated, how to frame and how to crop, etc. - chips away at the idea of the absolute photographic truth, many of us still believe that a photograph shows us things the way they are; and the digital era has now brought the subject matter of photo manipulations into focus.... (more)
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from
Objects of the Visible Language
Amy Catanzano
conjunctions
The hardened fire of natural opal is all color and solace and candor.
I remember the wood's
gypsy circles
in deep time
and without dimension—
Is such fluxus geology appropriate for this situation?
Between the eye and its rock star fractal, straight into the future!
Observations at no atomistic level in all one sees.
... (more)
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Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive
Elizabeth Little
In polite company, I might try to explain that my love of languages stems from the fact that there’s no other field of study that gives me the opportunity, again and again, to go back to the very beginning and learn the very basics, to have the rare pleasure of engaging in something at once familiar and entirely new.
But if I’m really honest with myself, yes: I’m just a really big nerd.
The fact of the matter is that foreign-language primers and grammars are my version of a bodice-ripping pirate romance: a guilty pleasure I’d love to hide but can’t quite make go away. I relish conjugation tables and declension charts. I thrill to morphophonemics, glottochronology, perfectiveness. ... (more)via languagehat
Elizabeth Little blogs at Unhappy Medium and has a new book, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic which will be published in November 2007 by Melville House
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 Five Oaks
Poland
Roman Loranc
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Trees
Howard Nemerov
To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word-
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also-though there has never been
A critical tree-about the nature of things.
Loren Webster (In a Dark Time...) is currently reading Nemerov - 1 2 3 4
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Urban Meanderthals and the City of "Desire Lines"
Matthew Tiessen
ctheory
Nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire described the flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of city streets" and as "a botanist of the sidewalk." Baudelaire's flâneur, responding to the bourgeois, capitalist, and technological developments of his time, was a figure in the crowd but not of it. Engrossed as he was by the emergent urban psycho-geography of 19th century Paris, the flâneur was an observer: always a little detached -- intentionally most often. He was known, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his essay, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," to engage critically with the emergent urban milieu, which he regarded with leisure, and mostly from an aesthetic point of view. Benjamin describes the scene:
A pedestrian knew how to display his nonchalance provocatively on certain occasions. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace. But this attitude did not prevail; Taylor, who popularized the watchword "Down with Dawdling!" carried the day.
So how has the flâneur evolved as we begin the 21st century? I will suggest that the flâneur remains with us but has evolved new forms; the variety we will be focussing on here is the Meanderthal, a new species of urban flâneur. No longer merely out for a detached and self-consciously critical stroll through the streets, the Meanderthal is -- unwittingly -- a threat to the efficiencies of urban life and to the flows of pedestrians, vehicles, and capital taken for granted in the urban everyday. (...)
...yet another breed of flâneur .... we might call: Flâneur 2.0.
For this new breed of Flâneur the hustle and bustle of the crowd is not to be observed at leisure, but to be avoided. The goal is not to aestheticize urban life while absorbing it, but to instrumentalize it while attempting to direct it in the name of efficiency and speed. The crowd is not to be followed but to be deliberately avoided, the urban grid of everyday life is not to be re-inscribed but to be exceeded.
Flâneur 2.0, no longer self-consciously critical of the techno-urban imperatives that morph around him, no longer taking a derive or deviation for its own sake, finds herself unwillingly and unwittingly having to smooth out the striated grid. Driven by invisible economic imperatives (imperatives that constitute the fish-bowl he swims in), Flâneur 2.0 is thrust kicking and screaming -- sometimes literally -- out of his habitual orbit by the Meanderthal. ... (more) ______________________________________
Angels Are So Few
Dan at The End Times has a fine piece on Dennis Potter
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 Playground
Pele deLappe
Pele deLappe
1916 - 2007
via Mark Vallen
Love's Labor Won
Petaluma artist Pele deLappe's passionate journey
Images from the Waterfront
The Big Strike of 1934
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... there are entire cartographies of paramilitarism and slumaphobia to be traced across the map. The urban morphology of panic has left behind entire Cold War landscapes once modeled on a panic preparedness.
Urbanisation of Panic
Bryan Finoki, author of Subtopia: A Field Guide to Military Urbanism
Part of the goal of Subtopia (subtopia.blogspot.com) is to try to look at the pervasive discourse around a security culture through a psycho-spatial lens to better understand, for example, how gated communities, security fences, and ubiquitous surveillance are discussed, presented, consumed, rationalized, inscribed as expressions of a deeper cultural pathos. Through an architectural lens Subtopia tries to chronicle how the militarization of urban space not only as a planning tool for controlling cities (or, perhaps, designing them for the sole purpose of military occupation), but also as a psychological apparatus for expanding the ideals of militarism, i.e., urbanization as a means to militarize the ego, religious antagonism, national identities, border conflicts, and so forth. Subtopia deconstructs the city as the ideal military recruiter.
One might ask, based on the panic-stricken nature of western culture what is the current diagnosis and mental health state of neo-liberal democracy? Or, how can the city be viewed as an architectural weapon to enforce a certain behavioral code, or to forcefully spatialize neo-liberalism in a way, to rear obedience (or addiction) to a rampant commerce? What are the inherent narratives of power that run through constructs like maximum-security prisons, megalithic casinos, shopping mall complexes, refugee camps, suburban sprawl, torture spaces and the hardened borderzones between nation-states? Is there a psychopathological connection between them all? Is there a new urban geopolitical archetype here to be deconstructed? I suppose to some degree Subtopia is an attempt to document these realms of spatial politics and the psychological underpinnings that govern these globalized architectures of control – these Cities of Panic. ... (more)
City of Panic
Franco Berardi
Translation by Enrico Occupied London
Occupied London
Quarterly Anarchist Journal of Theory and Action from the British Capital After the Empire
Issue Two: Urban Revolts and Struggles Across the World
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Richistan
A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
Robert Frank
reviewed by Crawford Kilian
the tyee
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 Crime and Punishment
flickr via Spitting-Image
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available now -
The Hat - issue seven
Editors: Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar
Jordan maintains Equanimity and broadcasts the The Million Poems Show
Million Poems Journal
Davis, Jordan
Faux Press
On Jordan Davis
Susan Wheeler
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 Thelonious Sphere Monk
October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982
 Vytautas Balcytis
Lithuanian photography
Lithuanian Union of Art Photography
established in 1933
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Fragments from Two Countries
Robin Hyde
In the days before tempest, (my head will be good as the next!)
I dream so much of the poems made in my youth.
Small idle ghosts I had written, forgotten, never since seen,
Slip into my brain; say, 'We were a part of you,'
As swiftly are gone again.
A soft might carries us on.
It is like the wind, streaming over Wellington hills,
Which, bearing all sunset's flame, scorns not the kites:
It is like the tide, flowing out from Island Bay,
Bubbling round dinghies, it lifts the children's boats. ... (more)
 Robin Hyde
1906 - 1939
Arachne
Robin Hyde
Sit before your glass, while the green branches of evening
Crackle in their sere to the colour of copper bells:
Let your hands fall, leave the lake-blue afterlights unbroken
Or break them only with the heart-pointed candles
Whose quiver marks the beating of the breast:
Wait so: do not cry out for the lutes, the talking companions:
Be for once a white boat adrift, in debt to no lighthouse.
Men risked the judgement of stars ere there was Pharos. (...)
Seek you the fireplace: build there, stooping in unfamiliar poses,
With labour harsh and lonely as parturition,
Such panting fire as you can, flicker of being,
Fed with your heart, kindled with shavings of spirit.
Be mother and wife to the flame: crack, waste yourself,
On the slender chance of a light from rank green wood.
If ever by luck you should warm the cabin:
Go to your door, fling open. Invite the vast hair
And bristling bulk of the darkness to roar within,
After him swirling three perils – storm, scorn and death.
Say not a word. Die, or medicine these
With the saffron-tufted herb sprung up from firelight;
After may come the fawns, the unborn; children: smile,
Leave them, timid, to play in your bright-boughed fire.
After – we know not – chill beyond starlight, weary past aching, gleaming,
Like the picked bones of fallen trees in a forest,
Singing, dumb, or with ghostly eyes look at you calmly as eyes you knew,
The known eyes of the stranger who shared your bed,
In another world, a dream-plain of crows and battles,
One who in anguish put out the first mortal fire.
Say nothing: lock your hands, ah, lock your heart.
But should there be silence, all is heard: is well. ... (more)
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
Robin Hyde & New Zealand Modernism
Co-ordinated by Michele Leggott & Ann Vickery HOW2 -- Fall 2001
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 Romualdas Pozerskis
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Kant and Confucianism
Journal of Chinese Philosophy
via Continental Philosophy
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It’s good to try to jump off the tracks of the thundering locomotive that is the innate historical (time) provincialism of the century, and the country, something “enormously and increasingly unavoidable” as one (oneself) participates (too) in the unending quotidian documentation of everything, so caught up in the vamping processional of now that one begins to assume a kind of pedigree regarding all one’s doings, one that scorns anything prior.
- John Latta
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John Latta on Louise Bogan on Shifting Poetic Style, Or: My Poetic Lineage (II)
Joseph Duemer Joseph Duemer is also celebrating seven years at this bloging thing.
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Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets
Hayden Carruth
Masters, the mock orange is blooming in Syracuse without
scent, having been bred by patient horticulturalists
To make this greater display at the expense of fragrance.
But I miss the jasmine of my back-country home.
Your language has no tenses, which is why your poems can
never be translated whole into English;
Your minds are the minds of men who feel and imagine
without time.
The serenity of the present, the repose of my eyes in the cool
whiteness of sterile flowers.
Even now the headsman with his great curved blade and rank
odor is stalking the byways for some of you.
When everything happens at once, no conflicts can occur.
Reality is an impasse. Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies
forever across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.
more poems
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The Great Forgetting
Eunice Wong
The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is a monument to historical amnesia. The blond limestone building, surrounded by indigenous crops of corn, tobacco and squash, invites visitors on a guilt-free, theme park tour of Native American history, where acknowledgment of the American genocide is in extremely bad taste.(...)
We are molded as much by the histories we stifle as by the myths we create to exalt ourselves. Those who ignore the truth about their past are condemned to replicate, over and over, their crimes. The devastation in Iraq is the legacy of lessons unlearned, from the genocide of Native Americans, to slavery, to the Mexican war, to the invasion of Cuba and the Philippines, to Vietnam.
America’s brutal cycle of imperial invasion and occupation is as enduring as the cultivated illusion of its goodness. And the first step toward breaking this cycle and exposing this illusion is facing our history and ourselves. The National Museum of the American Indian feeds the mass amnesia that makes our national psychosis possible. ... (more) ______________________________________
Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.
Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.
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 Homeland Security
John Douglas
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Thou Shalt Not Kill
Mark Twain
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps--
His night is marching on.
I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!"
We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!
In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom--and for others' goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich--
Our god is marching on.
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The dark truth about Blackwater
P.W. Singer
salon
... regardless of whether the Blackwater contractors were justified in the shooting, whether there was proper jurisdiction to ensure accountability, or even whether using firms like Blackwater saves money (the data shows it does not), there is an underlying problem that everyone is ignoring.(...)
Our dependency on military contractors shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can't win with them, but can't go to war without them. (...)
If our military outsourcing has become a dangerous addiction, only an open and honest intervention, a step back from the precipice of over-outsourcing, can break us out of the vicious cycle. Will our leaders have the will to just say no?
Unfortunately, we may already have our answer. On Sept. 21, 2007, five days after the latest shooting incident in Baghdad, Blackwater resumed operations in Iraq.... (more) ______________________________________
 Monika Pozerskyte
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Metaphysical ache: JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
Steve Mitchelmore
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Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace
Douglas Rushkoff
download link here
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For the Love of Lacan [mediafire link]
Derrida, Jacques
Cardozo Law Review 16/3-4 (1996)
via Continental Philosophy
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A Dialogue on Translating Germano Almeida
Daniel Hahn and Clifford E. Landers
words without borders
...the first in a series of dialogues: two translators produce versions of the same text, then discuss their choices and approaches. Here Daniel Hahn and Clifford E. Landers consider their renderings of Germano Almeida's "The Best Seller." Links to their respective translations appear at the end. In the spirit of the discussion, we have retained the translators' orthography. ______________________________________
Common - Place: Special Issue: Money
Volume 6, Number 3: April, 2006
Bookkeeping as Ideology
Capitalist knowledge in nineteenth-century America
Michael Zakim
Of all the numerous claims made on behalf of bookkeeping in the nineteenth century its importance as an ideology was never noticed. In fact, it was adamantly ignored. The exploding number of those charged with posting accounts, and with teaching others how to do so, all preferred to emphasize bookkeeping’s rigorous, scientific character, together with its consequent ability to uncover the truth buried within a mass of disinterested figures. Frederick Beck made a representative claim in his Young Accountant’s Guide, first published in 1831: "Mercantile Book-keeping is the art of recording and stating accounts in such manner, that the true state of each and all the accounts, and the merchant’s situation, may at any time be easily, speedily, and distinctly comprehended and known." In other words, accounts, which would obstinately refuse to add up if anyone tried to make them tell anything but the whole story, were perceived as an island of disinterested neutrality in the era’s tidal wave of profit seeking. They were, so to speak, an ontological check on what everyone agreed to be the national free-for-all in pursuit of riches.
In fact, locating incontestable truth within the very heart of business avarice had considerable ideological value in the age of capital.... (more)
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 Ashes and Snow
Gregory Colbert
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Now We Are Six; the novelty choking hazard explained
enthusiasm
 photo - mw
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 photo - mw Hi there ... cést moi quietly celebrating seven years of the "s lot" Thank you all for dropping by. And special thanks to the many regular visitors and fellow bloggers for your warm support and encouragement over the years.
As I've said before (and no doubt will say again), "My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, tempermental and/or situational variety." ______________________________________
Teaching Uncertainty: The Danger is in the Neatness of Identifications
Stephen Dilks
 The sources of this uncertainty are of course debatable, but it seems almost certain that, despite dictionary definitions and industrial standardization, language dooms us to fail again and again in our search for certainty. Beckett exposes this point with powerful effect at the end of The Unnamable. After one hundred twenty-three pages of contradictions and doubts, of failed efforts to answer the questions "Where now? Who now? When now?," the last sentence churns its way through two-and-a-half pages of wonderfully measured and rhythmical self-ablations that end:
you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Words are both the seekers and the finders--they have to say and be said. But the speaker, the voice that is seeking itself, cannot tell when it has, or if it has, found itself. The narrative voice, split into the sayer and the said, the "you" and the "Me/I," is compelled to break the silence, going on until the narrative ends, but it knows that it cannot know, it knows that going on is futile but it also knows that it has no choice except to go on. The narrative voice is as double-bound as a narrative voice can get before it can't move at all--its movement is, in fact, circular, in tighter and tighter circles (reminding us of the RAF usage of "bind"--when a dog-fight of planes chasing each other's tails forces one into a dangerously vulnerable position). Hyper-aware of its own narrative failings (all is "ill-seen" and "ill-said"--to recall the title of Beckett's Ill-Seen, Ill-Said) this voice finally withdraws from the field of narrative strugglings by posing questions that surrender to the foe of uncertainty without surrendering to the more dangerous foe of neat identification. By the end of The Unnamable, Beckett arrives at some kind of answer, but it is an answer that flails around and around in the pain of uncertainty without knowing whether or not it is an answer. He had learnt how to explore the deepest levels of the self and its expression (or nonexpression) by using uncertainty.... (more)
photo by Misha Gordin
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The Map
Elizabeth Bishop
8 Feb. 1911 - 6 Oct. 1979
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
--the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
--What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
"Controlled Panic":
Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies
Martin Bidney
Style, Fall, 2000
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'Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I've written and find that it's all worthless … What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of,if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing.'
- Fernando Pessoa
 The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Richard Zenith
google books
The Blog of Disquiet
a side project at Matthew Tiffany's Condalmo
Think of it as a blog from inside the text.
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... it occurs to me that Pessoa relaxes where Proust fights, that the Portuguese opens his arms to the possibility of dark, unknowable swamps, sinking gladly into them, while Proust works diligently, connecting this thing and that thing -- tying sexual desire to kitchens and a bas-relief, or sickness to an ogre -- trying to find a path through the same swamp, a fragile road of thin boards that will take him to the other side. Pessoa is hope-in-langour. Proust is hope-in-effort. Yet both of them write about the same subjects: life and thought.
- Deanne Sole
via Three Percent
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Is The Net Good For Writers?
RU Sirius asks Mark Amerika, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Jay Kinney, Paul Krassner, Adam Parfrey, Douglas Rushkoff, Clay Shirkey, John Shirley and Michael Simmons.
10 Zen Monkeys
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 Emil Cioran on Youtube
via Dylan Trigg
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On the Heights of Despair (zipped - rtf)
E. M. Cioran
Translated and with an Introduction by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
Are you familiar with the frightening sensation of melting, the feeling of dissolving into a flowing river, in which the self is an-nulled by organic liquidization? Everything solid and substantial in you melts away in a wearisome fluidity, and the only thing left is your head. I'm speaking of a precise painful sensation, not a vague and undetermined one. As in a hallucinatory dream, you feel that only your head is left, without foundation and support, without a body. This feeling has nothing to do with that vague and voluptuous weariness by the seaside or in melancholy dreamy musings; it is a weariness which consumes and destroys.
Grey Lodge Occult Review :: #16______________________________________
 photo - mw
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Sermon on Language
Robert Kelly
This - I mean whatever comes to mind when you read this - is an organization - from the proto-Greek organ-grindo, "the music swells, the monkey dances"- dedicated to enshrining reality deep in the heart of itself. Its code name is Language, and it was invented a war or two ago - actually during the Second Gobi War, the one that ended the paleolothic - to con- fer on sunlight such blessings as "It is sunning," or "The sun is raining," or "Shine happens," according to the by-laws of your local lodge. For individual languages - like Basque or Xhosa or Cantonese or French - are in fact created and sustained as lodges of the ancient freemasonic society of Speakers, the ones with Language on their side, the so-called humans. All other societies -and every form of society- is subsidiary to this, this elegant and persuasive artifact which self-embeds its rules and by-laws at once in every member who pays the dues of breath - what we call speaking. You do not have to think very long or hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con- juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed- room and the sun in your pocket, its rules are your rules and there is hardly a rumor - though there is a rumor - of anyone disobedient to its prescriptions. Timid Nietzsche and meek Blake followed its laws like lambs, and Lenin lay down with De Maistre to graze on public language. Only the one - there was one - who woke up to the sleep of named things ever broke the lodge law and got away with it. All the way away. Faint- ing, we follow.
RIF/T - Fall 1993
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Liberal Hawks and The Last Kiss.
A few years ago, you could have imagined any number of movies for the liberal hawks to watch. "The Battle of Algiers." "Dr. Strangelove." "Hearts and Minds." It wouldn't have occurred to many to add in the slightly dark, slightly goofy, Zach Braff vehicle, "The Last Kiss." But, increasingly, that movie's message appears most relevant. In particular, the liberal hawks should pay attention to a scolding Tom Wilkinson gives to the solipsistic Zach Braff. "What you feel only matters to you," he spits. "It's what you do, to the people around you, that matters. That's all that matters."
This shouldn't be necessary to say, but increasingly, it seems like the only point worth making to the commentariat. American politics isn't about you. It's not about your ideas, or your personal vision of the world, or your purity. Contemporary politics is not a landscape awaiting your morality plays and exhibitions of ethical decisiveness. It is not yours.
It is the impact of your ideas, and your commentary, that matters.... (more)
via Making Light______________________________________
Outsourcing Fear
Robert Young Pelton
CorpWatch
Blackwater is the personification of war as a business, violence as a service, and chaos as a product. Prince recognized the lack of sufficient available US troops and provided a privatized solution.
The obvious polarization of politicians addressing Prince during the hearing indicates that Republicans are willing to bless the use of lethal force by a private individual against the people they are trying to pacify, while Democrats have yet to quite capture what it is about the industry that makes people so nervous.
I say again: Go to Iraq. Talk to the people. Drive in an unmarked car. When an armed convoy pushes you off the road with guns drawn, you'll understand the naked fear that Blackwater sells.
A pub without a side-door up a lane would have been as well off with no door at all
- Flann O'Brien
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 Ireland
Josef Koudelka
1976 1 2 3 Modern sublime: the world of Josef Koudelka
Bruno Chalifour
Afterimage, March-April, 2003
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The Gaelic
Excerpt from 'Irish and Related Matters'- 'The Best of Myles'
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. -
act of putting, sending, sowing, raining discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling,addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading ever rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-
the no-bicycle page
 Brian O'Nolan / Flann O'Brien
October 5, 1911 – April 1, 1966 Flann O'Brien at the Scriptorium
From: The Pen of.... Myles Na Gopaleen / Flan O'Brien
Memoir on the Pooka's father,
the Crack Mac Phellimey Fergus ('The Pooka') MacPhellimey, a species of rural demon, was born of respectable but poor parents in the county Cork, in 1876, a year memorable for the ravages of potato scale and shepherd's scurvy. His father, known far and wide as The Crack MacPhellimey, was a hard working devil-tinker who attended fairs for the purpose of seducing farmers' boys from righteousness by offering them spurious coins of his own manufacture which (by means of a secret chemical process) had the effect of rotting the pocket or mattress which contained them and imparting a contagious dry tetter to the human body-the object of the traffic being to make the afflicted boys utter curses and ungodly maledictions.
He also retailed a line of magic shoddy of grey herringbone pattern with a faint red check, the peculiar quality of the fabric being that it dissolved into an evil smelling grey slime on coming into contact with water. This material he sold chiefly to the farming class in the west of Ireland, a district subject to incessant rain.
the no-bicycle page
Reading Flann Brian O'Brien O'Nolan
Gilbert Sorrentino
Flann O'Brien is one of the half-dozen or so greatest comic writers in the English language of this or any other century, the equal of such geniuses of comedy as Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, and Firbank. His mastery of comedic prose, its nuances, tropes, and subversions, is of such high degree that the merest gesture of his stylistic hand can turn a sentence or phrase from its course as sober conveyor of information to sabotager and ridiculer of that same information. Done the right way (and O'Brien invariably does it the right way), such writing can virtually collapse referential material and transform it into brilliant constellations of devastating hilarity. Little can stand before comedy of such purity, comedy so intensely focused and authorative that it rises above ideology, factionalism, religion, and the bloated niceties of propaganda and "right thinking." Inventors, or if you please, marshals of such anarchic laughter are dangerous people indeed, informed, as they are, by love, hatred, and, above all, perhaps, a salutary shame for the human species and its ridiculous pettinesses and pretensions.... (more)
Flann O'Brien books from Dalkey Archive Press
The 'Lost' World Of Flann O' Brien
DavidMcKittrick
An atomy of the novel: Finn O'Brien's 'At Swim-Two-Birds.'
David Cohen
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993
An Beal Bocht: mouthing off at national identity
Sarah E. McKibben
Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003
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 Wu Qi
798 Photo Gallery
via Asian Photography Blog
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"Capitalism and Freedom" Unmasked
a lenghty article on Milton Friedman's legacy
Stephen Lendman
Rarely had so much praise been given anyone so undeserving in light of the human wreckage his legacy left strewn everywhere. ______________________________________
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America
Susan Faludi
... I’m trying to figure out why we reacted to 9/11 in this peculiar and particular way we did. You know, why was it all about home and hearth? Why was it about sort of artificially inflating men into superheroes and insisting that women go back to the home, because there were many stories after 9/11 making that argument?
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Think Again: Drugs
Ethan Nadelmann
foreign policy
No, it can’t. A “drug-free world,” which the United Nations describes as a realistic goal, is no more attainable than an “alcohol-free world”—and no one has talked about that with a straight face since the repeal of Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile rhetoric about winning a “war on drugs” persists, despite mountains of evidence documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy.(...)
It’s always dangerous when rhetoric drives policy—and especially so when “war on drugs” rhetoric leads the public to accept collateral casualties that would never be permissible in civilian law enforcement, much less public health. Politicians still talk of eliminating drugs from the Earth as though their use is a plague on humanity. But drug control is not like disease control, for the simple reason that there’s no popular demand for smallpox or polio. Cannabis and opium have been grown throughout much of the world for millennia. The same is true for coca in Latin America. Methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs can be produced anywhere. Demand for particular illicit drugs waxes and wanes, depending not just on availability but also fads, fashion, culture, and competition from alternative means of stimulation and distraction. The relative harshness of drug laws and the intensity of enforcement matter surprisingly little, except in totalitarian states. After all, rates of illegal drug use in the United States are the same as, or higher than, Europe, despite America’s much more punitive policies.... (more) ______________________________________
Harper’s Forty Per Cent Wager
James Laxer
The unveiling of the Conservative get-tough-on-drugs initiative is the first salvo in the Harper government’s fall offensive whose strategic goal is to secure an electoral majority by Christmas.
The law and order approach mostly directed at soft-drug users is red meat being heaped on a platter for Harper’s core constituency---older white men in suburbs and small towns who resent just about everybody else.... (more)
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Poetry and politics at Guantánamo
An interview with Marc Falkoff, editor of Poems From Guantánamo.
Andy Worthington
- lots of new material at nthposition
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 Kadykchan. The City of Broken Dreams English Russia
Everyday something interesting happens in the countries occupying 1/6 of the populated world. via Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education
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A Wave of Dreams [PDF]
Louis Aragon (1924)
Translated by Susan de Muth
Sometimes I quite suddenly lose the whole thread of my life: sitting in some corner of the universe, near a smoky dark café, polished bits of metal set out before me, tall, mild-mannered women ebbing and flowing around me, I wonder how I finally washed up here beneath this arch that is really the bridge they have named sky. This is the moment of oblivion, the moment when vast fissures in the Palace of the World widen into daylight: I would give up the rest of my life - a paltry sum - if only it could endure. For then the mind detaches a little from the human machine and I am no longer the bicycle of my senses, a grindstone honing memories and encounters.
Papers of Surrealism
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Treat yourself to the early days of the blogosphere with the archives of Heather Anne Halpert's lemonyellow (mirrored here)
"It makes me howl when people assume this is me -- laid bare. I once had someone tell me, to prove a point, that she'd gone back through the archives and mapped my writing to specific personal events. It was hard not to laugh... Naturally. This is the extent of me. Exposed. You can turn me over and prod my soft spots, stick your fingers into my orifices and smell me. Each bit of what you think is my soul corresponds to a point on or in my body defined by three coordinates. Click here to browse them."
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Lu Chi's Wen Fu
The Art of Writing
(circa A.D. 300)
Based on a translation by Shih-Hsiang Chen, 1952, modified after consulting a translation by Sam Hamill, 1991.
I have often studied the works of talented men of letters and thought to myself that I obtained some insight into their minds at work. The ways of employing words and forming expressions are indeed infinitely varied. But, accordingly, the various degrees of beauty and excellence can be distinguished from what is common and weak. When by composing my own works, I become aware of the ordeal. Constantly present is the feeling of regret that the meaning falls short of the objects observed. The fact is, it is not so hard to know as it is to do.
I am therefore writing this essay on literature to tell of the glorious accomplishments of past men of letters, and to comment on the causes of failure and success in writing. Perhaps some day the secret of this most intricate art may be entirely mastered. In making an axe handle by cutting wood with an axe, the model is indeed near at hand. But the adaptability of the hand to the ever-changing circumstances and impulses in the process of creation is such as words can hardly explain. What follows is only what can be said in words.... (more)via mosses from an old manse
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  Lebbeus Woods + 12 Monkeys
Life Without Buildings Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods
Geoff Manaugh
bldgblog
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 Ireland
Josef Koudelka
1972
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Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
download link here
 Eugeny Ufit
1991
Landscape
Moscow House of Photography
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Wearing's Disease
Mike Golby reflects on Oliver Sacks's article in The New Yorker, The Abyss: Music and Amnesia
It's not that we might all become Clive Wearing — in so many ways, we already are. Mr. Wearing is different to most people and, given that he suffered encephalitis, his case is marked by his being different to himself.
Not that he'd be in a position to remember that.
So what is it about Clive Wearing's story that makes Oliver Sacks's article so compelling? I suspect it has something to do with choice. As with death, the Wearings' had little say in the nature or timing of Clive's disease. Its onset terrified and bewildered a forty-something master musician who died before his own eyes.
It's a tragic story redeemed by love.
It is also an extraordinary story. Today, hundreds of millions of capable people choose to suffer Wearing's disease. Saturated by information, we have become inured to the narratives of our times. Numbed by media, we are compelled to forget so that we may feel.
Yet, having turned memory and forgetting on their heads, we continue to lose ourselves and our identities — seeking continuity and meaning by turning to the Internet in much the same way Clive Wearing turns to his piano.(...)
Our denial of memory — our refusal to face the horror we have created might allow us indulge increasingly small pleasures a while yet. However, it won't be long before all that which we have chosen to forget will return to crush us.
And those who would take advantage of our state of living death, effacing our remaining memories to replace them with others, delude themselves. They too are locked into our greater Danse Macabre.... (more) ______________________________________
Loaded Language and Loaded Guns
The Meaning of Opposites
Charles Sullivan
One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people. Now war is peace and terror and occupation is liberation. In order to make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand everything within the context of a specific economic philosophy, and the distorted capitalist system that spawned it.
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Blackwater: Are You Scared Yet?
Naomi Wolf
In little noticed news, Blackwater, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Arinc were recently awarded a collective $15 billion - yes, billion - from the Pentagon to conduct global counter-narcotics operations. This means that Blackwater can be deployed to engage with citizens on a whole new level of intimacy anywhere around the world - including here at home. What is scarier than scary is that Blackwater's overall plans are to do more and more of its armed and dangerous 'security' operations on U.S. soil.
In my recently released book, The End of America — Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot, I describe the 10 steps that would-be tyrants use to close down a democracy and produce a “fascist shift.” The third of the ten steps is to ‘Develop a Paramilitary Force.’ Without a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the people’s representatives, democracy cannot be closed down; however, with such a force available to would-be despots, democracy can be drastically and quickly weakened.
Every effective despot — from Mussolini to Hitler, Stalin, the members of the Chinese Politburo, General Augusto Pinochet and the many Latin American dictators who learned from these models of controlling citizens — has used this essential means to pressure civilians and intimidate dissent.(...)
Blackwater is coming home to Main Street, and one of our key constitutional protections is at stake. The future for growth is directed at increased deployment in the US in cases of natural disaster — or in the event of a ‘public emergency.’ This is a very dangerous situation, of course, now that laws have been passed that let the President decide on his say-so alone what a ‘public emergency’ might be.
The Department of Homeland Security hired these same Blackwater contractors to patrol the streets of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina — for a contract valued at about $73 million. Does Blackwater’s reputation for careless violence against civilians in Iraq, protected by legal indemnification, matter to us? ... (more)via Gordon Coale .....................................................................
Merc is the New Crack
America’s deadly dependence on private security contractors in Iraq
Lindsay Beyerstein
The Whores of War
Neil Mackay
Blackwater's Dark Prince Speaks
Shaun Mullen
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A Q and A For The People Of A Forsaken Republic
: Addressing the origins of the Whose-Your-Daddy Nation
Phil Rockstroh
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from
To Shout In The Ruins
Louis Aragon
(October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982)
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up
Like the cry of a blind child in a remote train depot ... (more)
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 Schlachtfeld / After the battle
Käthe Kollwitz
1907
The Art that Hitler Hated:
Kathe Kollwitz and German Expressionist Printmaking
Extended until Sunday, 14 October 2007
Spaightwood Galleries via
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An Obsessive Combination Of Onotological Inscape, Trickery
Anne Sexton
9 Nov. 1928 - 4 Oct. 1974
Busy, with an idea for a code, I write
signals hurrying from left to right,
or right to left, by obscure routes,
for my own reasons; taking a word like writes
down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.
Sexton Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems
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Post-Marginal Positions:
Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Community
A Cross-Atlantic Forum — Moderated by Cathy Wagner
jacket
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Desert Storm
Understanding the capricious God of the Psalms.
James Wood reviews Robert Alter's new translation of "The Book of Psalms"
the psalmist seems to say that, if the heavens speak anything, it is not language but possibly only a highly visual silence. Almost three thousand years before such modern doubt, we are briefly in the world of Melville, who complained of “that profound Silence, that only Voice of our God,” asking “how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?” This struggle between faith and doubt, hope and despair, is undoubtedly one of the features that have made the Psalms such a help to so many readers and writers, both believers and nonbelievers—and especially to Christians, who have appropriated this book like no other in the Hebrew Bible.(...)
obert Alter’s new translation, “The Book of Psalms” (Norton; $35), is radical, at least to a reader brought up on the early-seventeenth-century King James Version. Alter has previously translated a good portion of the Old Testament: the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch, or Torah) and the two books of Samuel. His work has been characterized by eloquence, scholarly scrupulousness, and a desire to convey in English the concrete ferocity of the original Hebrew. He is particularly alive to formal aspects of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose such as repetition, internal rhythm, and parallelism (in which a phrase amplifies and almost repeats a preceding phrase, as in “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth,” from Psalm 72). Because the Psalms are poems, he wants to preserve in English what he calls the “rhythmic compactness” of the originals, “something one could scarcely guess from the existing English versions.” His helpful introduction is more polemical than the exegeses he has provided for his other translations: he argues that even the King James translators, whom he, like everyone else, has always admired, pad out their versions with filler.(...)
Alter’s translation is especially helpful in these cases, because he is determined to remind his readers that they are reading ancient texts with hybrid origins, not Christian prayers with dedicated destinations. The Psalms (like the Book of Job) were relentlessly Christianized by the King James translators. Nefesh, meaning “life breath” and, by extension, “life,” was translated by Jerome in the Latin Vulgate as anima and then as “soul” in the K.J.V., even though, as Alter points out, soul “strongly suggests a body-soul split—with implications of an afterlife—that is alien to the Hebrew Bible and to Psalms in particular.” The ancient Hebrew word for the shadowy underworld where the dead go, Sheol, was Christianized as “Hell,” even though there is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible. Alter prefers the words “victory” and “rescue” as translations of yeshu‘ah, and eschews the Christian version, which is the heavily loaded “salvation.” And so on. Stripping his English of these artificial cleansers, Alter takes us back to the essence of the meaning. Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: “So teach us to number our days.” Psalm 23, again, is greatly refreshed by translation. Everything is clearer, seeming to have been rinsed not in the baptismal water of the New Testament but in the life-giving water of the desert.... (more) ______________________________________
Skeptic's Annotated Bible / Quran (Koran) / Book of Mormon
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 Oostburg Suburb
Stockholm
Lennart Olson
1958
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Online Resources for Studying Media Culture/Texts
Thivai Abhor
Dialogic
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The Organic Internet
The book features:
The Organic Internet by Alfredo López
The Political Techie by Jamie McClelland
Domain Names by Alfredo López
The Internet Protocol by Eric Goldhagen
Technical Architecture Shapes Social Structure by Daniel Kahn Gillmor
The Email Crisis by Jamie McClelland
FOSS and Proprietary Software by Amanda B. Hickman
from the Mayfirst / People Link collectivevia Insurgent American
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Television
Jacques Lacan
translated by Denis Hollierk, Rosalind Drauss, and Annette Michelson
download link here
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Rorty: 'Pragmatist' loved orchids.
Stan Persky
TheTyee
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 Fence
Lydia Anne McCarthy
via
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The Human and his Spectacular Autumn, or, Informatics after Philosophy
Anustup Basu
The search for another form of politics has to begin with a critique of the aphasic, self-conscious navel-gazing of the North Atlantic intellectual, who approaches a state of stupefied entropy on looking at a monstrous military-informatic-financial assemblage which has reduced the great modernist projects of culture and ideology to incidental arrangements that can be only locally applied. To restrict an understanding of the political that is emergent to a set of cognitive phenomenological tasks of the human subject, who, as Foucault points out, is an empirico-transcendental fiction of the West very much in the twilight of his career, would be, in the last instance, subscribing to a transcendental stupidity not dissimilar from that of informatics itself. That is, the assumption that today everything and everybody is already spoken for, evaluated, and ordered by the hidden tongue of the market, instead of by the king or the philosopher of yore. This is why, when all of us are irremediably tinged with the curse of money, a caricature of liberal political action, conducted through conservative channels of human conscience and morality, becomes part of an overall shareholding of neo-imperial "guilt."... (more)
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Reunion
Richard Ford
Reunion
John Cheever
read by Richard Ford [mp3] ______________________________________
Modernism from Right to Left
Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism
Alan Filreis
Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
- Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier
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 'routine clerk'
The Office
Jan Banning
Bureaucracy is an everyday form of state power with which citizens are confronted everywhere. Jan Banning has done portraits of bureaucrats at all levels, from village clerks to governors. Although the bureaucrats pose, their desk is the real subject. Thát is the permanent expression of their status and power. The person behind it is interchangeable, during his working hours assuming the role of immigration officer or revenue agent. That is emphasized by the pose in which he is photographed: as an actor playing himself.
via savage minds______________________________________
six significant landscapes
wallace stevens
i
an old man sits
in the shadow of a pine tree
in china.
he sees larkspur,
blue and white,
at the edge of the shadow,
move in the wind.
his beard moves in the wind.
the pine tree moves in the wind.
thus water flows
over weeds.
ii
the night is of the color
of a woman’s arm:
night, the female,
obscure,
fragrant and supple,
conceals herself.
a pool shines,
like a bracelet
shaken in a dance.
iii
I measure myself
against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
for I reach right up to the sun,
with my eye;
and I reach to the shore of the sea
with my ear.
nevertheless, I dislike
the way the ants crawl
in and out of my shadow.
iv
when my dream was near the moon,
the white folds of its gown
filled with yellow light.
the soles of its feet
grew red.
its hair filled
with certain blue crystallizations
from stars,
not far off.
v
not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
nor the chisels of the long streets,
nor the mallets of the domes
and high towers,
can carve
what one star can carve,
shining through the grape-leaves.
vi
rationalists, wearing square hats,
think , in square rooms,
looking at the floor,
looking at the ceiling.
they confine themselves
to right-angled triangles.
if they tried rhomboids,
cones, waving lines, ellipses —
as for example, the ellipse of the half moon —
rationalists would wear sombreros.
 Wallace Stevens
October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955
Links and poems collected by Al Filreis
David Lavery's Feigning with the Strange Unlike Wallace Stevens Site Loren Webster's excellent In a Dark Time: Wallace Stevens Archives .....................................................................
A Violence from Within: Poetry and Terrorism
Kenneth Sherman One does not tend to think of Wallace Stevens, who was often accused of being overly urbane and ornate, as a poet preoccupied with current events; yet the way in which contemporary reality affects our imaginations was an issue that concerned him deeply.(...)
While Stevens’s impeccable ear and virtuosity of language contribute to his enduring effect, there are strong cultural and social factors that account for his dominance. I am willing to venture that there is something quintessentially New World about Stevens’s unwillingness to take on historical and social reality. His determined detachment from historical particulars—his poetic strategy—may well be a reflection of America’s isolationist proclivity. Evading or resisting reality allows the poet to maintain an imaginative “fortress America.” The forces behind this isolationist tendency are strong. The myth of the New World as Arcadia—as an alternative to Old World oppression and decay—persists. And what we think of as our energy and optimism does in fact stem from a purposeful and healthy forgetting of former prejudices, a disavowal of Old World rank and station.(...)
Contributing to the malaise is our obsession with self-improvement. The “art for art’s sake” movement believed the imagination ought to heal those wounds inflicted by the anonymity of mass society and the mechanization of humankind. With the falling off of organized religion, art became the prime provider of spiritual sustenance, its masters – custodians of the injured soul. In its new therapeutic role, art became inner-directed, endeavoring to re-create those who are broken. The result has been a diminishment of the poet’s role. Who today would pretend to the outgoing reach of Milton or Blake? Who today would affirm Pope’s grand assertion that “a poet’s life is warfare on earth.”(...)
Stevens’s “violence from within,” ennobling us and restoring our dignity, need not limit itself to the talismanic sounds of words. The force he spoke of can confront today’s events, transform and refigure them so that we may bear their implications.... (more)
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Wallace Stevens in Wartime
Philip Metres
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On the Manner of Addressing Clouds
Wallace Stevens
Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.
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 Early Autumn
detail
Qian Xuan
(1235–ca. 1305)
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Life in the London Streets
Richard Rowe, 1881
At A Coffee-Stall.
We know that although its glow may vanish in the garish light, of day, it will re-appear next night in the same place, like a night-blowing cereus to shed [-160-] its perfume. Brightly gleam or cosily twinkle the lamps of the coffee-stall. The round eyes of its cans have no angry heat, but warm welcome in their red glow, which surrounds them with a ring of light, pleasantly reflected in broken radiations from their polished silver-like tin, their burnished gold-like brass. How fragrant is the aroma of the coffee, although it may not have come from Mocha. Tea and cocoa may also be obtained at the coffee-stall, but the beverage from which it derives its name is the specialty which deservedly gives it its fame.
Let those who will talk of chicory, - to many palates a pleasant, and by them demanded adulteration, - and of chicory itself adulterated with turnips, carrots, and Venetian-red, - of horse-beans, burnt crusts, and so on and so on: those who have drunk coffee-stall coffee when cold and weary, or simply feverishly thirsty, will declare that it has a flavour peculiarly its own, - and not mean this altogether as a left-handed compliment. It warms the cockles of the heart, and makes the footsore one inclined to leap like the kids of the dervish who was - well, perhaps, not its discoverer. ... (more)
Victorian Dictionary
a guide to the social history of Victorian London.
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 Glósóli
Sigur Rós
youtube
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$5 Chocolate Bar
Paul Ford
"... the Sophie's Choice of music videos. What you're seeing in that video is your grandparents going to heaven when they're kids. They escape all of the shit you heard about, like being beaten by the nuns or not being able to afford college, or having to tow a Dodge out of the mud with a mule. There was never that moment when you got the call, when you had to get someone to cover your college radio show, and you end up at some hospice where they leave you in the room alone with him, or her, for a few minutes and you have no idea what to say. Except you see that morphine drip and hear the gurgle in their throat and realize that pain is more complicated than carrying a black leather journal and a variety of colored pens. Twelve years later you're following links and there's some video from Iceland with elves singing and bells and children with perfect skin wearing the latest fashions of 1918, and your dead grandparents start running up that hill together. No polio or cardiac arrest and no car crashes or racism or halitosis. No wonder you're crying.”"That is more or less what happened, but I don't really need to cry," said Scott. "Weeping is like a five-dollar chocolate bar. Someone else could enjoy it but I feel guilty opening the wrapper. I have a girlfriend and Halo."... (more)
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...fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
-
Wallace Stevens - A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
 photo - mw
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Poem In October
Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
A Boy in the Listening
On Voice, Space, and Rebirth in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas
Eynel Wardi Connotations 9.2
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 photo - mw
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Ghazal 314
Rumi
(September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273 CE)
Translated by Jack Marshall
You who are not kept anxiously awake for love's sake, sleep on.
In restless search for that river, we hurry along;
you whose heart such anxiety has not disturbed, sleep on.
Love's place is out beyond the many separate sects;
since you love choosing and excluding, sleep on.
Love's dawn cup is our sunrise, his dusk our supper;
you whose longing is for sweets and whose passion
is for supper, sleep on.
In search of the philosopher's stone, we are melting like copper;
you whose philosopher's stone is cushion and pillow, sleep on.
I have abandoned hope for my brain and head; you who wish for
a clear head and fresh brain, sleep on.
I have torn speech like a tattered robe and let words go;
you who are still dressed in your clothes, sleep on.
Rumi: assorted poems in translation
Selections from the Poetry of Rumi .....................................................................
Today, at a moment when Islamic intolerance and totalitarianism and its mirror image, Christian fundamentalist fascism, are locked in lethal combat, we are more than ever in need of an accurate, complete and unexpurgated translation of the works of Rumi.
- Pierre Joris
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 Barbie and her Friend Visit
Guatemala
Marta Lopez
(1993)
Killer Shots
A Photographic Response toWar
Catherine Edelman Gallery
Abbas, Eddie Adams, David Burnett, Larry Burrows, Horst Faas, Lori Grinker, Jean Gaumy, Matt Harnett, David Leeson, Marta Lopez, Alex Majoli, Steve McCurry, Don McCullin, Susan Meiselas, Joel Meyerowitz, Jon Mills, James Nachtwey, Sebastiao Salgado, Larry Towell, Nick Ut, Sal Veder, Alex Webb
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To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Mark Twain
New York: Anti-Imperialist League of New York, 1901
Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked – but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be too scarce – too scarce and too shy. And such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality, and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious. (...)
The more we examine the mistake, the more clearly we perceive that it is going to be bad for the Business. The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: "There is something curious about this – curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land."... (more)
Prologue to Mark Twain's To The Person Sitting in Darkness
Kurt Jacobsen
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Economic Belief Structure [PDF]
Francis Raven
a duratiion press chapbook
2.
“Uses of Freedom in The Republic”
‘freedom’ (1) is fairly typical and
means something like
“when you are old ‘the passions relax their hold’.
second instance of ‘freedom’
various harmonies
one harmony for war
Dorian harmony should be used by the brave man
Phrygian harmony should
be used by that man for times of
“peace and freedom of action”(Book 3). (...)
7.
“Community Possible Doubt”
pluralism always grounded in agreement.
To consider and not know -
standing up to the text = Non-violence = agnostic. . .
do not find it easy to investigate
ground
hinge
appellation
(God given name) did he really, now?
contemplates himself in his dialectical relationship
did I say “exact relation”? exit relations
situations are perfectible As in the end
your surrogate (general will, original position) cannot
violate your individual will, but perhaps looking
or the Rename and surrogate may violate your particular
man, of interaction with earth and thus his own soil
and thus the dialect changes my my thesis antithesis
reading this book Synthesis now virtual serial processing
Mature capitalism - mainly replacements bought,
Not new now what about Not News? Not necessarily
Do you say now, advertisement is some synthesis
Wish I God-named it better;
These twin themes of mortality and perceptibility
Let us say action and ability to do News
Let us say there are many conflicting claims
How sort the mail? Some agreement lays down stone
For all of us bedload to wash over.
Shifting the Question More Complicated
Francis Raven among the new books from Otoliths
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The Rush to Judgment
Binary Thinking in a Digital Age
Peter Lurie
ctheory
Just as the beauty of black & white photography lies less in pure blacks and perfect whites than in the 11-tone gray scale, we must learn to think across a continuum. The power of an Ansel Adams print is less in the intrinsic majesty of Half Dome, which is photographed thousands of times each day, than in Adams' mastery of the zone system, a rigorously calibrated method of controlling exposure, development and printing to maximize range and density. The zone system is famously difficult. Adams used it to locate as many as 25 gray tones, but most photographers have happily abandoned the zone system in favor of the tinkering pleasures of Photoshop. As citizens, however, we don't have that luxury. We must think broadly on an open plane. That will require courage and, like the great basketball player, a sense of where we are. We don't think that way, but we should.... (more)
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The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called upon us...
but we, the masters, were not home.
--- Walter Benjamin
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photo - mw
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Let Fame
Stephen Fry
The Pheme.
This would combine a resurrection of the Greek notion of Pheme, the spirit or embodiment of fame, (Roman equivalent Fama) with the meme proposed by Richard Dawkins (do visit his site – fine place, intellectually stimulating but non-combative and you can buy a cool atheist A t-shirt). Let the pheme ƒ be the gene of celebrity, the base unit of fame; its only function is to replicate itself by planting the awareness of a given famous person, x, into the host minds of the masses, m. The pheme of x, ƒ(x) does not demand that you like x, respect them, admire them or even know much about them, only that you are conscious of them enough to pass on the pheme in some manner. In fact, I would suggest that a negative attitude to x actually transmits the pheme more powerfully. The fame of someone despised or caught with their hand in the till, a straw up their nose or their knob up an inappropriate fleshly passage transmits more rapidly than the fame of one who has invented something useful or created something beautiful. Interestingly, the collective unconscious of the Greeks (characteristically as wise, poetic and insightful as their conscious philosophy) personifies Pheme as a many-tongued gossip, rather like Rumour in 16th and 17th century English allegories. For a pheme is transmitted by speech, or more properly, by utterance, written or spoken. I’ll leave the mathematical modelling and notation to cleverer heads than mine, but I don’t doubt that some sort of descriptive formula can be produced which will allow us to see how phemes work over time and across populations. Stephen Fry
Blessays, blogs and blisquisitions ______________________________________
The Aesthetics of the Fragment
Robert Gibbons
I go for that, I told them in an essay: the notebook, fragment, random jotting. Not without purpose, not just anything, but the result of desire & impetus. Out here on the balcony with the dahlias having weathered wind, thunder, lightning, (they didn’t flinch), drinking rain in all night overnight, both pots growing from toddlers to adolescents in half a day. Keeping me company in lieu of any mail today. As they weathered the storm I thought about the thesis, the aesthetics of the fragment. It has a lot to do with our innate refusal to see any object in some way other than inherently whole, at the same time cultivating a fondness for that which is missing, that which is consubstantial to the ruin.
Double Room: Issue #5
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