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 Green and Yellow Forest
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Jack Spicer at Penn Sound and the Electronic Poetry CenterPsychoanalysis: An Elegy
Jack Spicer Feature
Experience is the outcome of work; immediate experience is the phantasmagoria of the idler. 
Walter Benjamin
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.
The Author as Producer What is the relationship bewtween form and content, particularly in political poetry? This kind of question has a bad name; rightly so. It is the textbook exambple of the attempt to explain literary connections undialectically, with clichés....A Small History of Photography Walter Benjamin 1931 The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption comes in, whereby photography turns all life's relationships into literature,and without which all contructivist photography must remain arrested in the approximate. Not for nothing have Atget's photographs been likened to those of the scene of a crime. But is not everfy square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit? Is it not the task of the photograopher - descendant of the augurs and haruspices - to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? "The illiteracy of the future", someone* has said, "will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography." But must not a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Will not the caption become the most important part of the photograph? Such are the questions in which the interval of ninety years that separate us from the age of the edaguerrotype discharges its historical tension.* the "someone" was László Moholy-Nagy according to this footnote: (5.) The famous phrase, "The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the pen and the camera alike" is Moholy's. It has gained its considerable currency mainly by way of its paraphrasing --without attribution -- in Walter Benjamin's celebrated "Kunswerk" essay of 1936. Moholy's observation, originally in English, was written in 1932 and first published in "A New Instrument of Vision," Telehor (Brno) I, 1-2, Feb. 28 1936, 34-365 (Reprinted Kostelanetz, ed., Moholy-Nagy, [London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1970], p. 54).in In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Nancy Roth Afterimage, July-August, 1997 thanks to Helquin Artifacts
"Imagine Lucifer..." Jack Spicer Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness An apple Plucked clear by will of taste, color, Strength, beauty, roundness, seed Absent of all God painted, present everything An apple is. Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness A poem That has revised itself out of sound Imagine, rhyme, concordance Absent of all God spoke of, present everything A poem is. The law I say, the Law Is? What is Lucifer An emperor with no clothes No skin, no flesh, no heart An emperor!
Melancholia, Mourning And The Task Of The Translator
The Storyteller [PDF] the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a "symptom of decay," let alone a "modern" symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin (1936) 1940 Survey Of French Literature
Reading in the Ruins
Surreal Dreamscapes: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades [PDF] AbstractThe Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West Christopher Rollason
Remains To Be Seen So it was for this that Walter Benjamin summoned voices to blend and to contend with his, and with each other's, ones that he found to flow along his dreams (e.g., p. 467)--his and (he claims, as a philosopher must) ours (e.g., pp. 212, 391)--from which the work of this work is variously to join in awakening us (e.g., pp. 388, 458), rescuing (e.g., pp. 473, 476) or say redeeming (e.g., pp. 332, 462) the phenomena of our world, processes that require blasting phenomena from their historical successions (p. 475), suggesting thought as a volcano (p. 698), forming new constellations (e.g., p. 463), allegorizing (e.g., pp. 211, 330, 367) the dialectical in every genuine image (e.g., 462, 473), where the place one encounters such an image is language (p. 462), in which the past and future are polarized by means of anticipating as it were the present (p. 470) (a thought Benjamin compliments Turgot for formulating [p. 478]; for us it is quite pure Thoreau), and where, further, "the present" is not a fixed point but a scene of ruins (p. 474), illuminated by flashes of lightning (e.g., pp. 91, 226, 456) (a melodramatic but recognizable vision of Wittgenstein's Investigations), each of which marks a now, a dawn, of recognition (e.g., pp. 463, 473), allowing thought to be drawn, as by the magnetic North Pole (p. 456) (which others correct for, which Benjamin claims to correct by), not toward purported permanencies and their petrified (p. 366) understandings (supporting our familiar forms of social cohesion) but to the debris or detritus of a culture (pp. 460, 543), occasions for reading, for rebuking the idea of decline as much as the idea of progress in history (e.g., 460).
The County Arcade, Leeds
Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th century France? There is no doubt that to rationalise and design Benjamin in preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital's cultural machine is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have appreciated. A recovery of the sense of Benjamin's writing is the surest path to its radical impoverishment. The object of philosophy, insofar as the reflective meditation upon thought could be taken to characterize it, is arbitrarily prescribed as undisturbed reasoning. It is thus that successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate and productive reason monopolizes the philosophical conception of thought, in the same way that the generalized somnambulism of regulated labour precludes all intense gestures from social existence. Who cares what "anyone" thinks, knows, or theorizes about Benjamin? The only thing to try and touch is the intense shock wave that still reaches us along with the textual embers, for as long, that is, as anything can still "reach us." Where Descartes needed God to mediate his relations with his contemporaries, secular humanity is content with the TV-screen, and with all the other commodified channels of simulated communication with which civilization is so thoughtfully endowed. Such things are for our own protection of course; to filter out the terrifying threat of a realisation that would awaken us from our dream.
Metaphysics of the Profane
Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture “Politicizing Art”: Benjamin’s Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of Fascism Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate
History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin
from Walter Benjamin's understanding of memory is bound up with his philosophy of language and history and his theology, but it is based on an experience he characterizes as the "chaos of memories." There is a resistance to narrative ordering and control associated with memory for Benjamin. He specifies this resistance further: "I find in my memory rigidly fixed words, expressions, verses that, like a malleable mass which has later cooled and hardened, preserve in me the imprint of the collision between a larger collective and myself" in which "isolated words have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters." Catastrophe engenders memories whose rough and hardened edges preclude placement in smooth-flowing narratives as a form of coming to terms with the past. These memories are disturbing in a manner similar to dreams. Like dreams, these memories involve crossing a threshold and stepping outside the closed world of normalcy. They "arrest" thought: "Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad." The political theologian Johann Baptist Metz, under the influence of Benjamin, describes these memories as follows:The Work of MemoryThere are memories in which earlier experiences break through the centre-point of our lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for our present. They illuminate for a few moments and with a harsh steady light the questionable nature of things we have apparently come to terms with, and show up the banality of our supposed "realism." They break through the canon of all that is taken as self-evident, and unmask as deception the certainty of those "whose hour is always there" (John 7.6). They seem to subvert our structures of plausibility. Such memories are like dangerous and incalculable visitants from the past.These memories are dangerous in their threat to attempts to master the past through constructing historical narratives. New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture Edited by Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche
Passages: The memorial to Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s Grave: A Profane Illumination
Beaches and graveyards The Case of Extreme Danger: Central Europe, Kafka With Benjamin
The Autumn of Central Paris
The street conducts the flâneur into a vansihed time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward - if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of a childhood. But why that of the life he has lived? In the asphalt over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance. The gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws an equivical light on this double ground.
(Bridge and Fog)
Cinema 1 (The Movement-Image) and 2 (The Time-Image) offer challenging analyses of modes of perception. They describe a plurality of equally compelling was of linking past, present, and future, ways that may exclude each other, but that, more often than not, overlap and coexist, giving to time, and to our experience of it, a thick, layered fabric. Together these books provide innovative concepts to help us think about the power of images, affects, and beliefs, about the powere of the mind and of the body (....)
If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien,” said Anthony Burgess, the late English novelist (he of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), “we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men.” Burgess can rest in peace on that score, at least. Flann O’Brien’s work is becoming about as cherished as avant-garde literature can ever expect to be, and not just among the cognoscenti. Flann O’Brien is chic. (....) Flann O'Brien at the Scriptorium
A Casebook on Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds Thomas C. Foster provides an overview and introduction to the novel. M. Keith Booker’s “Postmodern and/or Postcolonial?: The Politics of At Swim-Two-Birds” focuses on O'Brien's use of "popular" culture, including a mobilization of both American popular culture and Irish mythology. Monique Gallagher writes on “Frontier Instability in At Swim-Two-Birds,” in which she discusses O'Brien's destabilizing strategies in the novel. Kelly Anspaugh’s “Agonizing with Joyce” examines the Oedipal conflicts with Joyce that inform the novel’s intertextuality.
July 9, 2008 will go down as the day in history that the Democratic Party, on bended-knee, raised the white flag and capitulated to the most fervent desire of George Bush and Dick Cheney: to immunize the giant phone corporations and the Bush administration itself from any legal liability for their unconstitutional, criminal spying on ordinary American citizens. Obama’s Faith-Based Makeover
Legitimizing Permanent Occupation of Iraq
The Audacity of Imperial Airbrushing: The United States has a solution for avoiding discussion of the many crimes it has committed against weaker nations: denial. “It never happened,” say the Americans, when confronted with the facts. Barack Obama is as skilled in the denial arts as anyone, and so are his advisors. “In Obama's world view, as in that of his Harvard friend and former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, American crimes generally don't exist. They didn't happen.” Denial is serious business. “Candidate Obama's foreign policy pronouncements have been loaded with promises of future criminality under an Obama administration.” Delusions About Obama What the world really needs is a five or ten year break from the United States; a little breather so people can unwind and take it easy for a while without worrying that their wedding party will be vaporized in a blast of napalm or that their brother-in-law will be dragged off to some CIA hellhole where his eyes are gouged out and his fingernails ripped off. That's what the world really needs, a temporary pause in the imperial violence. But there won't be any sabbatical under Field-Marshall Obama; no way. As Bill Van Auken points out in an article on the World Socialist web site, Obama may turn out to be the point-man for reinstating the draft(....)
In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort
Harper Sahib at the G8Canada gradually adopted another posture: honest broker between the old rulers and ruled, known today as the developed and developing nations. This rested on a sense that Canada could identify with both sides, because it had been a colony, too. Stephen Harper shows no such sensibility. He's the Gunga Din of post-9/11, carrying water (and oil) to his masters, along with the white man's burden. How so? Rick Salutin He overidentified with the big guys there, like a yelpy pup among Great Danes. He took it on himself to explain that the G8 excluded nations such as India and China since its job is “to bring together the major countries, advanced countries of shared values.” It's insulting, grandiose, delusional and ignores all the similarities “we” share with “them.” Does he even know that Canada was once a colony?(....)
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
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 Farm Garden with Crucifix
The Step Not Beyond Time, time: the step not beyond that is not acomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this "outside of time in time" towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear. • From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of destruction or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: "it—the sea"? (....)
With a $3 trillion war bill and an economy that flounders as China's soars, could America's era of dominance on the world stage be coming to an end? Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth travelled across America and China to observe how the future of these two great nations is intertwined, and to find out whether, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and the US election, we are on the brink of a new world order.
 Alec Soth It has become a commonplace to describe Detroit as the sick city of America, but it is sobering to reflect on just how long this has been so. Browsing the internet before arriving in the city I came across an article in Time magazine headlined 'Decline in Detroit', lamenting the rising unemployment rate, the rate of migration from the city and its declining tax base. 'Blight is creeping like a fungus through many of Detroit's proud, old neighbourhoods,' it read. The article was dated 1961. 
Fisher Body Plant 21
A Work Force BetrayedIt turns out that product development, which was to be America's replacement for manufacturing jobs, is the second largest business function that is offshored. Watching Greed Murder the Economy Paul Craig Roberts The collapse of world socialism, the rise of the high speed Internet, a bought-and-paid-for US government, and a million dollar cap on executive pay that is not performance related are permitting greedy and disloyal corporate executives, Wall Street, and large retailers to dismantle the ladders of upward mobility that made America an “opportunity society.” In the 21st century the US economy has been able to create net new jobs only in nontradable domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders, government workers, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks. (Nontradable services are “hands on” services that cannot be sold as exports, such as haircuts, waiting a table, fixing a drink.)(....)
The Tropical Turn That we do not readily recognize the nineteenth-century part of this story owes, in a word, to the movies—or, to the wholesale naturalization of the Gilded Age imagery of Los Angeles in the era of the classical Hollywood cinema and beyond—the era of, as it were, mass culture. So strong have the signs and signals of this era been, encompassing not only the movies but also literature, art, and architecture, that we have neglected an entire, earlier way of seeing Los Angeles—and "Southern California."
The Supreme Court Confronts HistoryIt should be said that the founders’ views on these matters have not survived strict historical scrutiny. Or, habeas corpus redivivus H. Robert Baker History matters. Perhaps more to the point, how we craft history matters, whether we are historians or not. The Supreme Court proved this on June 12 when it issued its decision in Boumediene v. Bush. The case concerns habeas corpus, latin for "have the body" (as in a command by a judge to a jailor to "have the body in my courtroom and explain why you are restraining him or her"). In Boumediene, the question at issue was whether the government could strip federal courts of jurisdiction to entertain prisoners’ applications for habeas corpus. The Court broke five to four against the government, ruling that Congress had exceeded its authority. The case is sure to be a landmark. Many books will be written about it, and generations of law students will debate its merits. It will also prove the old dictum that hard cases make bad law. The issues in Boumediene are legion and the technical complexity formidable. Reasonable people can violently disagree on the correct legal outcomes warranted by the facts of the case. Which is why history matters so. Both Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent turn to the past to justify their interpretations of habeas corpus. In doing so, they demonstrate just how immediate the past can be—but also just how divisive it remains. Choosing between the five justices in the majority and the four in the minority is, in essence, choosing between two very different histories.
I go down to the river to pray
Early Americanists’ privileging of space over time is so natural as to be almost reflexive. I remember very well putting on a conference for early Americanists where the specific theme was chronology. I hoped, in vain as I knew would be the case, for proposals on specific decades—the 1610s, or 1690s, or 1730s, for example. I still think it would be a useful exercise for early Americanists to concentrate attention on studying all of British America or even all of Atlantic America in small periods of time. It would be useful to differentiate what happened in the 1640s from what had occurred in the 1630s and to make a distinction between British America in the 1720s and British America in the 1740s or 1750s. But, as one might expect, my hopes were not fulfilled. People interpreted chronology through a prism of regionalism—what happened in Virginia, for example, in the first half of the seventeenth century or in Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century. Like medievalists, early Americanists are accustomed to working over whole centuries or at least half centuries and find shorter time periods as well as larger geographical contexts difficult to deal with. The scholarly debate that modern Americanists have over when the 1950s became the 1960s has no counterpart in early American history.
The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics tackles the issue of philosophical materialism in Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, enquiring after the source and nature of the ‘novelty’ that both philosophers of multiplicity claim to discover in the objective world. In this characteristically erudite analysis, Sam Gillespie maintains that where novelty in Deleuze is ultimately located in a Leibnizian affirmation of the world, for Badiou, the new, which is the coming-to-be of a truth, must be located exterior to the ‘situation’, i.e. in the void. Following a lucid presentation of the central concepts of Badiou’s philosophy as they relate to the problem of novelty (mathematics as ontology, truth, the subject and the event), Gillespie identifies a significant problem in Badiou’s conception of the subject which he suggests can be answered by way of a supplementary framework derived from Lacan’s concept of anxiety. Gillespie’s intent to illuminate the relation of philosophy to the four truth procedures (art, love, science, politics) leads him to the polemical conclusion that, as a transformative rather than descriptive or reflective project, Badiou’s philosophy ultimately reclaims the power of the negative from the positivity and pure productiveness of Deleuze’s system, thereby freeing thought from the limits set by experience.
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Ralph Eugene Meatyard
The fragmentary: what comes to us from it, question, demand, practical decision? To no longer be able to write except in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in fragments, unless the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmentary. To think the fragmentary, to think it in relation to the neuter, the two seeming to pronounce themselves together, without a community of presence and as outside one another. The fragmentary: writing belongs to the fragmentary when all has been said. There would have to have been exhaustion of the word and by the word, accomplishment of all (of presence as all) as logos, in order that fragmentary writing could let itself be re-marked. Still, we cannot, thus, writing, free ourselves from a logic of totality in considering it as ideally completed, in order to maintain as "pure remainder" a possibility of writing, outside of everything, useless or endless, whose study a completely different logic (that of repetition, of limits, and of the return)—still difficult to disengage—claims to guarantee us. What is already decided is that such a writing would never be "pure", but, on the contrary, profoundly altered, with an alteration that could not be defined (arrested) in regard to a norm, not only because it always coexists with all forms of existence, of speech, of thought, of temporality, which alone would make it possible, but because it excludes the consideration of a pure form, excluding even an approach to itself as true or proper in its very disappropriation; even all the reversals which we easily use up—beginning again as beginning, riation as authenticity, repetition as difference—leave us within the logic of validity.
aboard the bluenose ll
Minor White
View Camera :: The Journal of Large-Format Photography
Vicinity of Georgetown, Colorado
Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality [PDF] Come in. Welcome. Be my guest and I will be yours. Shall we ask, in accordance with the Derridean question, “Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?” What is the relationship between the interruption and the moment one enters the host’s home? Derrida calls us toward a new understanding of hospitality—as an interruption. This paper will illuminate the history of hospitality in the West as well as trace Derrida’s discussions of hospitality throughout many of works. The overall goal of this project is to provide readers of Derrida with a sort of reference guide for his discussions on and deconstructive approach to hospitality.via Continental Philosophy
fromfrom For the Fifty (Who Made PEACE with Their Bodies) Philip Metres 1. In the green beginning, in the morning mist, they emerge from their chrysalis of clothes: peel off purses & cells, slacks & Gap sweats, turtle- necks & tanks, Tommy's & Salvation Army, platforms & clogs, abandoning bras & lingerie, labels & names, courtesies & shames, the emperor's rhetoric of defense, laying it down, their child- stretched or still-taut flesh giddy in sudden proximity, onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine, as if come-hithering or dead, wriggle on the grass to form the shape of a word yet to come, almost embarrassing to name: a word thicker, heavier than the rolled rags of their bodies seen from a cockpit: they touch to make the word they want to become: it's difficult to get the news from our bodies, yet people die each day for lack of what is found there: here: the fifty hold, & still to become a testament, a will, embody something outside themselves & themselves: the body, the dreaming disarmed body.
Daily Pilgrims via Heading East
Politics and Perversion: Situating Zizek’s Paul [pdf]
Acoustic microwave armaments? Laser induced plasma channels? Vortex ring guns? Are these high-tech MacGuffins spiffing-up the latest Hollywood near-future thriller? Regrettably, no. Welcome to the twisted world of "non-lethal" weapons research brought to you by the "fun" folks at the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.
Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition -- for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a 'menu' of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles. "Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive." None of us can, any longer, "make up his or her identity from scratch." The upper-middle and affluent suburban "catering classes", those who support the corporatist centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it.Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War Joe Bageant
via pas au-delà
 Minor White Sequencing Photographs Minor White was known for his practice of sequences photographs and his theory of reading photographs. He'd interrogate the photograph based on what one knew, felt, sensed, associated with, and understood about, the image. This meant each viewer would construct a reading based on personal experience, cultural context, and historical time period.
... a cultural legacy is never simply given. As Goethe observed, one must acquire it in order to possess it. To come alive, a cultural heritage needs to be read, deciphered, interpreted, and felt. It is like a landscape: What aesthetic, cultural, and social messages it conveys depend on how you look at it. The same valley looks different in the eyes of a painter, a rancher, or a military planner. Depending on who I am, I can see that valley as picturesque, as good for grazing cattle, or as suitable for deploying light cavalry. And landscapes are sometimes deliberately arranged to suit the expectations or taste of the viewer. The gondolier sings Neapolitan songs, to the delight of foreign honeymooners and the horror of true Venetians. The Houses of Parliament rebuilt after the Blitz are “Gothic,” faithfully reproducing the Victorian fake. Revivals and renaissances are other ways of rearranging the past. As Ernest Renan wrote in his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” a nation coheres as much around what it forgets as what it remembers.
Katsushika Hokusai Pictures of 100 poems by 100 poets, explained by a Wet NurseAh! the foot-drawn trail illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai Single Songs of a Hundred Poets and The Dominant Note of the Law via MonkeyFilter
Full-text Digital Library offering books and corpora as lexical hypertexts on Creative Commons License Committed to accuracy, accessibility and Tablet PC oriented cognitive ergonomics Poetry 
Aaron Siskind: The Egan Gallery Years, 1947-1954
...globalization and all its contradictions hits home directly for me here in the Buenos Aires neighborhood I’m living in. Once a zone of automechanics and warehouses, Palermo Viejo is today one of the hippest and most popular destinations in this wonderful city. Now known as Palermo Hollywood, it is a barrio in the midst of a vast transformation. Many of our neighbors have lived here for forty or more years – they are old-school butchers, bakers, antique dealers, bar owners. Yet they are increasingly surrounded by trendy boutiques and fashionable restaurants. Many are being squeezed out by big corporate real estate that has entered the scene and is speculating on a series of high-end apartment towers that will forever change the face of this low-slung old time neighborhood. In the midst of it all are a throng of artists, ex pats, and activists organizing for the soul of the barrio.accompanying photo essay
Welcome Home, Soldier: Now Shut Up"Each generation," writes Chris Hedges, "discovers its own disillusionment, often at a terrible price. And the war in Iraq has begun to produce legions of the lost and the damned." For our morally courageous veterans - for all of us, really, who seek forgiveness - only the truth can heal. Paul Rockwell There are two kinds of courage in war - physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is very common on the battlefield. Men and women on both sides risk their lives, place their own bodies in harm’s way. Moral courage, however, is quite rare. According to Chris Hedges, the brilliant New York Times war correspondent who survived wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, “I rarely saw moral courage. Moral courage is harder. It requires the bearer to walk away from the warm embrace of comradeship and denounce the myth of war as a fraud, to name it as an enterprise of death and immorality, to condemn himself, and those around him, as killers. It requires the bearer to become an outcast. There are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation.”
Aaron Siskind - Harlem Document
...a recording of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman's 1980 collection, LEGEND. The sole title published under the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E imprint, this ambitious volume featured solo pieces by each of the poets, along with collaborations in myriad combinations, culminating with "And / much clouds spun," a work attributed to all five.
In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing poems on small cards, a practice that would culminate in Grenier's Sentences (1978), a box of 500 such card-poems, and Rubinstein's own boxes of serial cards (beginning around 1974). ...an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.
Philip Metres maintains Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & PeacemakingFarther and Farther On
Prelude to a Solid Hope for Something Better Every Picture Tells a Story
This has been the spring for the Gothic strain of specters that Derrida stirred up in Marx in the bloggysphere; yet, so far, nobody has mentioned the name, Jack Zipes. Zipes is famous in the folklore field, or rather, literary folklore field, for applying a Marxist analysis to his study of the Grimm Brother's Märchen. Zipes, who has also translated and written about Ernst Bloch, seems to have taken Bloch’s sympathy for grassroots peasant radicalism and applied it in a field where, usually, research tends towards a Freudian or Jungian end. Well, archetypes r us has a large American market – and perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. The softening of the American imago – stoic, a loner, a killer – owes a lot to an earnest search for a spirituality that isn’t so persistently shadowed by the cross – and don’t we all want a less wifebeater friendly, a less “God is a bullet” national culture? Badiou argues that philosophy must reclaim its universal address, but not by simply reverting to Enlightenment rationalisms or logic, nor by dismissing the humbling developments of post-structuralist or postmodern thought and their warnings of totalization—the regime of the One over the multiple, the Subject over the other. Rather, as Peter Hallward explains with amazing brevity, Badiou seeks to elaborate an intricate philosophical revolt which will allow us to:salvage reason from positivism, the subject from deconstruction, being from Heidegger, the infinite from theology, the event from Deleuze, revolution from Stalin, a critique of the state from Foucault, … and the affirmation of love from American popular culture. He asserts a philosophy of the subject without recourse to phenomenology, a philosophy of truth without recourse to adequation, a philosophy of the event without recourse to historicism.
A free replay (notes on ! Vertigo) [PDF] The vertigo the film deals with isn't to do with space and falling; it is a clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind of vertigo, much more difficult to represent - the vertigo of time. Elster's `perfect' crime almost achieves the impossible: reinventing a time when men and women and San Francisco were different to what they are now. And its perfection, as with all perfection in Hitchcock, exists in duality. Scottie will absorb the folly of time with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. But where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre manifestations (wealth, power, etc), Scottie transmutes it into its most utopian form: he overcomes the most irreparable damage caused by time and resurrects a love that is dead. The entire second part of the film, on the other side of the mirror, is nothing but a mad, maniacal attempt to deny time, to recreate through trivial yet necessary signs (like the signs of a liturgy: clothes, make-up, hair) the woman whose loss he has never been able to accept. His own feelings of responsibility and guilt for this loss are mere Christian Band-Aids dressing a metaphysical wound of much greater depth. Scottie: Don't you think it's a waste, to wander separately?
Our story, in short, has been the story of the potentialized. It’s never too late to have optimism, right? Thwarted potential is an endtime discourse–involving deep knowledge of the time you have wasted, the relationships you have scuttled out of fear or laziness or the blithe cruelty of being unwilling to be inconvenienced. The sickening sense of knowing that you’re what gets in your own way; and the complexities of living with it when it’s not you producing the blockage, when it’s your DNA or your bank account, your lack of the architecture of confidence or your cluelessness; your rage and sorrow: structural discrimination and exploitation; your ambivalence. The world wearing you out as it wears itself out. That model of the subject-in-potential looks at achievements and intimacies as proof that one really did deserve to have lived, after all, despite everything; that model puts the agent’s will to feel undefeated in the face of the “ego’s exhaustion” at the center of the story of optimism that represents modernity’s promise to everyone. Lauren Berlant’s research blog, tracking academic and random engagements with two scenes and concepts: ordinary life and attachment/detachment. I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question. Psychoanalysis meets affect theory and Marxist critical theory.
Spleen
Slim Pickens
rain
Rain Gauge Kinsella at the Electronic Poetry Center
Five Poems
Doppler Effect
Peripheral Light
Parrotology: Despising nation and patriotism and jingoism as I do, I baulk when I hear that ‘parrots’ are clichés or overused symbols of Australia, particularly the outback. I have a personal history of parrotology, a deep respect for all their varieties, and a fascination for their manifestations in literature, particularly poetry. For me, a parrot isn’t simply a parrot. In the thrust forward to make of Australian poetry some-thing more cosmopolitan, internationalist and sophisticated, there’s been some throwing of the baby out with the bathwater. Arguments of literary maturity are the old cultural cringe stuff reformed as residue, a bit like the cherishing of remnant bushland when all else is reduced to salinity. The parrot becomes a transitional object in this child-nation’s shift from linguistic acquisition to linguistic confidence and exploration.
 plenty
There is, to begin with, an accelerating process of internal disintegration—and the engine, consumerism, that drives it. Critics such as David Riesman, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Baudrillard have been writing about conspicuous consumption, keeping up with the Joneses, outer-directed men in gray flannel suits, the dialectic of enlightenment and one-dimensional men since the end of World War II. The story is by now well chronicled: Productivist capitalism, molded by a Protestant ethos conducive to work, investment, deferred gratification, and service, has long since given way to consumerist capitalism, defined by an ethos of infantilization conducive to laxity, impetuousness, narcissism, and consumption. Where once Americans worked harder than almost any other people, today pop commentators such as Thomas Friedman can worry about the “quiet crisis” in which the tendency to “extol consumption over hard work, investment and long-term thinking” creates an America whose vaunted productivity is in decline and where kids “get fat, dumb, and lazy,” squandering the very moral capital the Protestant culture once promoted and sustained. Tellingly, President Bush after 9/11 did not invite Americans to sacrifice or work hard in order to defeat terrorism; he invited them to go shopping.
Puzzle (Bayone #1)
Where is it written what one gets in life, or what one really needs? The body remembers everything, remembers what happened, too: blows, shoves, drowning, tender gestures, rhythms, screams, whispers. Stench. French kisses. The scent of the hand that pressed itself across your face to stifle a scream remains in your memory forever.Letters
from: The Science of Forgetting
 Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs
Zizek’s Law and Critique Keynote Lecture given at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference at Birkbeck, University of London
Gaston Bachelard Gaston Bachelard excerpted at google books The Poetics of SpaceGaston Bachelard: The Hand of Work and Play Joanne Stroud
Gaston Bachelard and the poetic imagination
The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air [PDF] "I will therefore, postulate as a principle that in the dream world we do not fly because we have wings; rather, we think we have wings because we have flown. Wings are a consequence. The principle of oneiric flight goes deeper. Dynamic aerial imagination must rediscover this principle."
Hyper
Intentionally easy on the eyes, Five Dials has been put together by a text guru who likes the look of old books and contemplates good design in the wilds of rural France. There are no bells or whistles or hypertext or cyber-denouements or flash-animated advertizements for poker websites hidden inside. The most challenging sights readers will have to deal with are the illustrations, which are drawn from the best artists working in black and white. We’re hoping Five Dials will be a repository for the new, a chance to focus on ideas that might not work elsewhere, a place to witness writers testing new muscles, producing essays, extracts and unexplainables.
Philip Guston
Democracy triumphs on the ruins of communism, say our prose writers. Or it is going to triumph. The greatest triumphalists evoke the triumph of a "model of civilization." Ours. Nothing less. Those who say "civilization," especially in the form of a triumph, also proclaim the right of the civilized to their gunboats — for those who might not have understood in time on what side the trumpets of triumph sound. The rights of man are no longer a tired intellectual demand. It is the time for rights with muscle, for the right of intervention. Triumphal movements of democratic troops. The need for war, that obligatory correlate of triumphant civilizations. Iraqi deaths, accommodated in silence by millions, even exclusive of any count (and we know to what extent the civilization of which we speak is a counting one...), are only the anonymous remainder of triumphal operations. Shifty Muslims, after all, non-civilized recalcitrants. Because, take note, there is religion, and there is religion. The Christian and his Pope are part of civilization, rabbis are a considerable part, but Mullahs and Ayatollahs would do well to convert.
Emma Goldman
Anarchism and Other Essays
Feminist criticism as these four writers practice it returns us (or should have) to one of the basic purposes of criticism—to have and defend a reasoned, coherent point of view. These critics have that and use it well. It is neither a rigid dogma, fanatically applied, nor a set of blinders that prevent them from seeing the literary work. None of them is so welded to her theory that the literature before her becomes invisible. And the theory is not obsessive and confining: the work and the writer are always paramount. The editors of this magazine present you with a document, or let’s say, with documentary materials suggesting that creative minds are in fact creating, and that a public is reading, quoting, criticizing. Put even more simply, our hope is to provide a venue for work that understands the importance of its context. That is, without tossing the rinds and skating away.
Plato’s Cave
 Harbor
Of course, placed within the context of the poem each of these phrases can begin to be called meaningful, if not actually full of real meaning. Dogs recur, for example, as we shall see, but they also function more importantly as other spaces within the poem’s language where things are given a voice, where language is used purely for semiotic, material pleasure, and so ultimately where language as a thing is also given a voice and denied a voice. In philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice,” he tackles just such moments of minimal significance in the work of Italian nineteenth century poet Giovanni Pascoli, a poet well known for his use of onomatopoeia and glossolalia, techniques of meaninglessness which, I will go on to show, exist in Hejinian’s work in slightly different ways. In tackling just these elements of a poet’s work, Agamben is trying to understand the significance of words whose signification is either entirely transparent — the bark of a dog, the songs of birds, the proper name Pascoli, Agamben, Hejinian — or permanently opaque — meaningless syllables, nonsense, swearing, internal rhyme, words for their own sake and sobbing. In other words moments where critical thinking is either superfluous or helpless. Many thinkers on language have looked at how it can work and how it can fail, but few if any concern themselves with the implications of a language that works too well, or fails so disastrously that one cannot even read such text or understand such speech acts and there are good reasons for this. Agamben, remarkably, has set himself exactly this brief with his stated general aim to consider the idea that there is language at all, and it brings his idea of poetry, that it exists in the tension between semiotic, spatial demands and semantic demands, directly to bear on Hejinian’s own poetry and theories of poetry.
Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice
from HappilyExcerpts from My Life Lyn Hejinian
nights in a time of war Lyn Hejinian at PennSound and EPC
Continuing Against Closure That the bringing about of closure is often impossible to distinguish from an act of vengeance (as in the carrying out of capital punishment) is, apparently, of no consequence. Which makes a certain sense — closure, by definition, establishes the condition of “no consequence.”
The Devil's Dictionary 
Ambrose Bierce
Devilish I did, belatedly, complete Oakley Hall’s stupendous Warlock—“The human animal is set apart from other beasts by his infinite capacity for creating fictions.” I did, too, obtain a couple of other Hall books, eye out for the neglect’d. One (of a series) with the Mexico-disparu’d journalist Ambrose Bierce in the role of detective. (Pause to consider the legions drain’d away—permanent or temporary—into the blue Mexican dusk, its long mauve feints and slants: B. Traven, Leon Trotsky, Malcolm Lowry, the inestimable Mr. Pynchon again, with Life magazine shutterbugs in hot pursuit. Bierce trying to join the insurgent Pancho Villa.) Bierce’s fine black core spit cleanly forth in The Devil’s Dictionary:WORMS’-MEAT, n.I did return to the tumult of the untend’d, fetch the doggo home, breeze a little with the neighbor who’s busy again hacking out Bishop’s weed, the blighter. Summer’s work is to ease away under the cover of frantic light and the confluence of gassy hysteria and quid pro quo ombudsmanship, and ease back in with a pout and a boater. That’s summer’s work. An anti-method. A voluntary voluptuousness without realm or target. (Jamming a little whilst I nose around the precincts, see if anything’s changed.)
from A Border Comedy Lyn Hejinian We share in the capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that mind Without giving up its secrets And speak when no one answers I think, the Nightingale Girl said to the Singing Man That time requires anecdotes to contradict it No answer Time longs undividedly for something We'll wait For an uninterrupted look at the border ghost The interpretation The pass Keeping the secret through the sequence Not only through adventures but fairly out of this world Given and between There the dragonfly clings And to this day more people live in countries than in cities Where they know the names and habits of both visible and hidden birds Being familiar with their practices Their sounds Crowded together like gossip With its transitional and terminal motifs And then dispersed
2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival
 From the green battlefields of 19th century Europe, to the barns and fields of farmers worldwide, to the asphalt parking lots of Canada. These boots have come a long way on a strange trip, and I doubt the trip will end anytime soon.
Composition for Robert Walser"From time to time the fervently poeticizing prose writer stepped up to the piano in order to melodiously recover from the strain of his literary profession."-Robert Walser ("Der Knirps") Tom Whalen When I sit at my desk to write and I end up with a brush in my hand and bristol board before me rather than paper, Walser's improvisatory spirit is always near. The "jazzy oscillations" (Christopher Middleton) of Walser's art free me to follow the gesture of a line, the dynamics of color. The more I look, the more I perceive. Possibilities reveal themselves—suggestions of form, figures that might be animal, mineral, vegetable, but which I often anthropomorphize in my mind, not unlike, perhaps, the way Walser anthropomorphizes his landscapes. "Yes, everything appeared a bit pensive. All the surrounding colors appeared to be gently and sweetly dreaming. The houses resembled slumbering children, and the sky lay, friendly and weary, upon all things" (The Assistant).
Unknown
Despite displacement and poverty, my grandmother hung on to her photographs, but countless others lose their photographs with the passage of years and the disruptions of history. What happens when these lost photographs are found by a stranger?
Ceptuetics Radio via Nick Piombino (fait accompli )
 And I do not need to tell you related photos
The Lazarus Project Hemon has always drawn on his own experiences in fiction, and Brik's quest has a real-life counterpart. Several years ago the author traveled with an old photographer friend to retrace Averbuch's path. In the book at least, the search is not merely for the facts of one man's life, but for more complex truths about life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.
Bankruptcywords without borders
... when a bubble bursts, time makes things worse. The financial sector has been living in the short run for quite a while now, and I suspect that a lot of money managers are planning to get out or be fired now that the game is over. And it really is over.(....)
Keeping America Safe
George Carlin
The majority of Americans do not feel a thing about these state orchestrated persecutions of their fellow citizens. They do not feel anything because they are afraid to allow themselves to feel outrage. And because their government has conditioned them not to feel public anger. There are social consequences (being an outcast) for speaking such things aloud. There are even more consequences for acting upon those feelings. The citizenry is deeply afraid of those consequences. The bottom line is that they are afraid of their government.
 Niagara Suspension Bridge 1859 William England MoMA Photography Collection
Indeterminacy 
Endarkenment Manifesto Obfuscatory, reactionary and superstitious, Endarkenment offers jobs for trolls and sylphs, witches and warlocks. Perhaps only superstition can re-enchant Nature. People who fear and desire nymphs and fauns will think twice before polluting streams or clear-cutting forests.
 TV Church via gmtPlus9 (-15)
Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age.. in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual - perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication.... Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward "The world's fundamental misfortune," the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, "is ...the fact that with each great discovery ...the human race is enveloped ... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody's, which belong to none and yet to all." The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. "What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear...
The reflections of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière shift in between literature, film, pedagogy, historiography, proletarian history and philosophy. He came to prominence when he contributed to Althusser’s Lire le capital (1965) and, shortly after, published a fervent critique of Althusser – La Leçon d’Althusser (1974). He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of Paris VIII (St. Denis) and continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. A recurrent motif in Rancière’s work is capturing the relation between politics and aesthetics, and their various meanings in different contexts. Much of his work can be characterized as an attempt to rethink and subvert categories, disciplines and discourses. On October 30 2007, a Dutch combined translation of Le partage du sensible and L’inconscient esthétique was presented in Amsterdam. On this occasion Sudeep Dasgupta interviewed Rancière on sensory experience, the play of art, and politics as a form of disturbance."the first bilingual online edition of Krisis, journal for contemporary philosophy, after having appeared in print, and in Dutch, for 27 years."
 viaMrs. Deane
Remembrance As Praxis And The Ethics Of The Inter-Human1Historiographic poetics is a response to the question what one might do in order to listen and talk with ghosts. Roger I. Simon, Mario DiPaolantonio, Mark Clamen Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.(....)
Rigid Terrain
Opened by Customs
courtesy of Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & PeacemakingMurder Machine Kurt Schwitters tr. Harriet Watts Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimeters. I yours. You mine, We me. And sun eternity glitter stars. Suffering suffers dew. Oh, woe you me ! Memorandum: 5,000 mark reward ! A crate is crooked, especially your crate. There is no more property, only communism still acknowledges property. I wilt the reed, for there is no more reed. I left the clock, for there is no more clock. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, seven. Sunday greens warmth. The elephant. The fat elephant. In case more than one person should lay claim to the reward, we shall retain the rights of distribution admitting of no appeal. The magistrate of the royal capital and residence.
Merz 163
Ursonate
The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems ... narrative poem loosely based on the life and art of the renowned modern German collage artist, Kurt Schwitters.
Historias Oficiales - Official Stories In this same room, a second timeline, drawn with chalk over green walls, depicted the indexes of the textbooks. This material made obvious references to elementary education. Its impermanency invited the viewer to think on the practical possibility of changing the way history has been written and taught. Yellow highlights on these chalk indexes indicated whenever students had been presented material of pre-Hispanic civilizations. Each revision followed the way pedagogues from consecutive generations surmised the most efficient and appropriate cultural knowledge from which to learn and the appropriate methodologies to do so. A major transformation in the seventies is the realization that a student might learn better from the past through a process of identification from a moment in the present. Hence the curricula changed from the description of a great variety of pre-Hispanic civilizations to a more personal appropriation of fewer of them. But what happen to the rest? Erased from the books these civilizations and their costumes perish in the eyes of the students. During the latest revision of the History course's curricula, the biggest modification happened in the middle school textbooks. The decision was to simply erase revisions from the pre-Hispanic past. Consequently students are only taught about their indigenous inheritance almost entirely during their third year of elementary school.Invisible Culture - Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive
 ironland
Welcome, as Jerome Rothenberg would say, to the Paradise of Poets. Welcome, as Gertrude Stein might say, to the continuous now of poetry. We are here today to honor poet Keith Wilson, and by our presence, the radiant beast of poetry survives. We nourish her by making our poems, we nourish her by reading the poems of others, by hearing aloud the poems of others, by buying books of poems and by sharing these poems and talking about these poems and the poetics that we discover in these poems.via Al Filreis
While Schwitters never exchanged the paint, canvas, or brush for photography or the readymade, or any other form related to modernity, industrialization, and mass reception (forms with which other avant-gardists were struggling), he nonetheless stripped those traditional tools of their purity and integrity. By crossing them with the very materials and processes they were meant to transcend—the organic, the industrial—he inaugurates a practice unbounded by object category or classification, what Deleuze would identify as a kind of “anorganic vitalism.” What is at stake is a particular self-driven economy of work indifferent to its product. This is already evident in Schwitters’s collage work of the early and mid teens, the Merzbilder. To think of the Merzbau in terms of architecture would shift the focus onto questions of architectural specificity and its limits, thereby obscuring the problem at hand: the centrality of a process undetermined by ends, objects or products. A comparison of the economy driving Schwitters’s collage production to that of Picasso’s cubist collage presents the problem more clearly.
 via la main gauche
 via Heading East
Page bibliographyAfter Rain P.K. Page The snails have made a garden of green lace: broderie anglaise from the cabbages, chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils- I see already that I lift the blind upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind. Such female whimsy floats about me like a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh, while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles- garden abstracted, geometry awash- an unknown theorem argued in green ink, dropped in the bath. Euclid in glorious chlorophyll, half drunk. I none too sober slipping in the mud where rigged with guys of rain the clothes-reel gauche as the rangy skeleton of some gaunt delicate spidery mute is pitched as if listening; while hung from one thin rib a silver web- its infant, skeletal, diminutive, now sagged with sequins, pulled ellipsoid, glistening. I suffer shame in all these images.
The Pilgrimage
3Salt
Fascism can be defined as rule by one who is above the law, through a ceremonial constitution, responsive to corporate interests, demonizing enemies, and ruling by fear, propaganda, surveillance, and secret force. Has Obama spoken out against this? Hillary?(....)
Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
The Violence of the Image (2004) Jean Baudrillard thinking and talking about the violence of the image,aggression, oppression, transgression,regression, effects and causes of violence, violence of the virtual, 3d, virtual reality, transparency, psychological and imaginary.All Avant-Garde All The Time -Tellus Cassettography Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on Ubu's hidden treasures. This podcast gives a guided tour of UbuWeb's collection of the Tellus Cassette Magazines comprising nearly 1,000 MP3 files recorded between 1983 and 1993. This podcast features narrated selections from the series including Louise Lawler, Jerome Rothenberg, Gregory Whitehead, Glenn Branca, Harry Partch and Paul Bowles.
The great UbuwebEssentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms.
Sympathy for the RepublicansTaKinG thE BriM_ TooK thE BrOoM
 Jindrich Pilecek
The Literary Review - Spring 2008Magic SplinterPia Tafdrup Poems [PDF] New Danish Writing: Voices from The Blue Port & Beyond
Like it or not, hoss, citizenship in the old Greco-Roman, Thomas Paine, Jack Curtin, Frank Church, Ephialtean and Periclesian sense rests in a grave alongside Rousseau and Locke. From that vantage point they are privileged to look up and see the CEOs of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Citicorp wipe their asses on the remaining scraps of Rousseau's social contract.
AbstractInternational Journal of Digital Curation
La Jetée
He would have liked to have the right to say to her, "Stop speaking, if you want me to hear you." But at present, even saying nothing, she could no longer keep silent.
 Chris Marker
It is this concept of 'immemory' that carries the metaphorical weight of Marker's entire philosophy of the slippage given to images, photographic and mnemonic. Like the films of Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky, whom Marker made a documentary of in the mid-1980s (following Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice, and while Tarkovsky was dying of brain cancer), it is not a matter of symbols indexing a parallel world but of an irreal dimension within artistic signs that points to the return of the Real. Any literal, historical content is ultimately lost in both, as what emerges is an internal ordering that is marked by this very immemorial (forgotten and/or half-remembered) quality that opens the space of alterity, a path to the consciousness of the other within one's own psyche, but also a path outside of mere being.
Gay Lussac
fromSalt
M. C. Escher
With Penguin’s ambitious initiative (under the editorial direction of Adam Phillips), to re-translate Freud with multiple translators, we become newly attuned to the theoretical implications of Freud’s German word-choice; its impact on the conceptual armature of psychoanalysis. Re-translating Freud must have been a daunting prospect, for it seems clear that despite its flaws, the James Strachey “Standard Edition” enjoys a monumental status, comparable to the King James Bible or the Scott Montcrieff/Terence Kilmartin Proust. Alongside Strachey’s Freud, I would place Jacques Derrida’s translation of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and the gloss on this translation that became his doctoral thesis: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. With examples like this, where theory is generated out of the work of translation, I would also include Paul de Man’s essay on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” in which he advances a theory of the “inhumanism of language as such” by “correcting” the mistranslations of Benjamin’s essay in its English and French versions by Harry Zohn, Maurice de Gandillac and even Derrida.
Les Statues meurent aussi Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory
Bachelor's Walk, Dublin "By Bachelor's Walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip on bouncing tyres..." The Internet Ulysses by James Joyce
 Marilyn reads Ulysses
In the Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and JoyceBut it is precisely modernity that is always quoting primeval history. This happens through the ambiguity attending the social relationships and products of this epoch. Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image therefore a dream image. Such an image is presented by the pure commodity: as fetish. Such an image are the arcades, which are both house and stars. Such an image is the prostitute, who is saleswoman and wares in one. Robert Scholes My claim here, is that modernism as a literary and artistic movement seems to have been structured in such a way as to exclude, marginalize, and devalue the work of women--or to extract a price from them that hampered their development. This can be traced in specific historical incidents, such as the attacks on her intellectual integrity that damaged the reputation of Edith Sitwell during her career as a modernist poet, or the rejections by publishers of Stevie Smith's poetry along with instructions to her to go and write a novel, or the seduction of Jean Rhys by Ford Madox Ford as a way of assisting her with her career, or the impregnation of Rebecca West by H. G. Wells, which hindered West's progress in getting established as a writer, or the misogynistic and anti-semitic attack of Wyndham Lewis on Gertrude Stein's prose, or Ezra Pound's expulsion of Amy Lowell from the imagists--and so on. Modernism's exclusion or marginalization of women can also be shown in the extraordinary role that prostitution played in the development as modernists of those two giants of the movement, Joyce and Picasso--and that is the burden of the following discussion.
"All that is solid melts into air": notes on the logic of the global spectacleAll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Jonathan Flatley In the second part of the sentence from The Communist Manifesto which I have taken as my epigraph, Marx and Engels assert that the way capitalism constantly denudes and destroys, leaving nothing holy, will allow us to see clearly the nature of class oppression as well as its collective nature: man will be forced to face "his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Now, it is the melting into air of televisuality itself that offers us the possibility for seeing these relations and for seizing them. In fact, it may be the only place in which they can be perceived, It may be that it is not as workers of the world that we will unite, but as a mournful and melancholic audience. Scott-Heron was partly right: the revolution will be live. But for better or for worse, that "liveness" is now available exclusively on television.
Unremarkable objects like sound meters and acoustical tiles have as much to say about the ways that people understood their world as do the paintings of Pablo Picasso, the writings of John Dos Passos, the music of Igor Stravinsky, and the architecture of Walter Gropius. All are cultural constructions that epitomized an era defined by the shocks and displacements of a society reformulating its very experience of time and space.
The Cyclist
The normalization of the doctrine of limitlessness has produced a sort of moral minimalism: the desire to be efficient at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity. The minimization of neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination -- this is the culture of which our present leaders and heroes are the spoiled children.
Ch. 1, "The two paradigms"via Theoria
The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala via BibliOdyssey
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A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 
"War represents the uniformed hospital and operating room phase of an overall remedial pathology in treatment of man's affairs. In this inherited scheme of life, science and technology are invoked directly by society only at the eleventh hour to arrest the malady fostered by laissez faire, ignorance, opinion, shortsightedness, prejudice and egocentricity. Formally declared war is the final spectacular and open chapter following the prolonged and far more sanguinary private and non-spectacular chapters of strife under the guise of 'Peace'."
All motion of the tongue in the cavity of our mouth is - a gesture of an armless dancer, twirling the air, like a gaseous, dancing veil; as they fly off to the sides, the tips of the veil tickle the larynx; and - out comes a dry, aery, quick "h," pronounced like the Russian "kh"; the gesture of arms extended (upwards and to the side) is - "h" .
