Page2RRS

• 19 Jun ' 11:45

  June 19, 2013 When a child a child wasRitva Kovalainen The Letters of William Gaddis (Stray Notes) John Latta — William Gaddis writing to Donn O’Meara and William Carnahan (19 November 1993), quoting the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” (1859): And here The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan . . . literally, literally; & did I ever mention that a ½ century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quiet limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . . (Thus in Agape Agape: “. . . where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper . . .”) (Too, there’s the implacable dry scratch of Gaddis’s humor: I think of a remark regarding a somewhat unlavish room in Rome, that its simplicity’d nevertheless “provide refuge from that operatic people while we sample their remains . . .”) — photo - mw Franēois Laruelle: Principles of Non-PhilosophyTranslated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith from the introduction If philosophy has only been and only ever will be an opinion and a poorly thought out passion, then the question is of passing from its state of war and of competition, a state of exploitation of thought and as such of man, to its civil state, which we want to call human and democratic. This democratic humanization is one of the objectives—if there are any—of non-philosophy and perhaps even the only objective, if we decide to put the Real at the heart of man or man at the heart of the Real rather than one at the periphery of the other as philosophy itself does. The tradition has up to the present been the universal element of philosophical decisions: a true Kampfzeit as much as a Kampfplatz. To the tradition as this space-time of philosophical combat, we will oppose the non-philosophical translation of philosophies in a new universal outlook, in an egalitarian order, as far from “difference” as from nihilism which is its residue. There is an absolute untranslatable—the Real—before every translation, condemned moreover by the Real to its foreclosure. But for all that, it allows the translation of philosophies through their transcendental equivalence or their relative autonomy, non-philosophy itself, outside of which the philosophical state- ments remain that which they are, but within which they are translated together in “equivalent” statements with regard to the Real. Non-philosophy is the universal dictionary of philosophies; the transcendental idiom in terms of thought which relates to them. A pragmatic of the translation of philosophical decisions, it looks to discover and invent all the conditions of universal peace: rather than through treaty, through the constitution of an idiom of the identity of thought. Only a “language” capable of this feat of positing the multiplicity de jure, non-empirically, of philosophies, can also introduce peace into thought by means of democracy. Do we fight here against the presumption of philosophy by that which will be taken as a new presumption, to know that non-philosophy is the thought that philosophy merits and that philosophy cannot find in itself, or in its own resources? Philosophy has become a new gamble between… philosophy and non-philosophy; between itself and the Real. We know the question: who will educate the educator? It is an infinite regress: who philosophizes philosophy? But philosophy cannot really and rigorously think itself; it can reflect upon itself, meta-philosophize itself, it cannot invent a totally other thought which would not be to some extent a double or a reflection of itself. It goes as far as dialectic or deconstruction, which is to say as far as these absurdities: post-philosophy, post-metaphysics, but it never renounces its ultimate authority over the Real, even when it accepts limiting and sometimes deconstructing this authority. The problem is formulated thus: what should we do not philosophically (a not more or a not less…)—with a philosophy, through the eventual means of such an other, but what should we make of Philosophy itself? Not philosophy taken “globally”, “generally” or “totally”—we do not claim here to leave it, but rather never to have entered into it—but of Philosophy related to its identity? Who can determine it; who can make a good use of it if it is no longer the philosopher himself? Who posits the multiplicity of philosophical decisions given that the philosophers most enamored with multiplicity, that of Being or even that of Becoming, are wary of positing a multiplicity of philosophies themselves, which will no longer be clois- tered by their philosophies, but which include multiplicity in a general manner. Non-philosophy is not exactly the educator of philosophy; it is the “subject” who receives it and transforms it, the force-(of)-thought as subject of non-philosophy and for each philosophy. What is the subject of the reception of philosophies if not every man, as in, each-and-every? Furthermore too often, philosophy looks to impose itself authoritarianly over man (through a so-called philosophical education) who it claims to transform with a view to adapting them to this reception. To this selection of man by the philosopher, and of the philosopher by philosophy, we oppose the induction and deduction of non-philosophy between the real-Man and philosophy: either real man given as “first term”, abstracted from its philosophical condition, or as untransformable through philo- sophical technology—what will result of this for philosophy itself, which is transformable? Rather than modifying man, non-philosophy modifies philosophy. Rather than giving itself philosophy and authoritarianly subsuming man, it does the opposite, and more than the opposite: do we not leave man as being-given, that is, deduced for philosophy? (....) Earth holds them all North Saskatchewan Ritva Kovalainen The Truth in the Mirror Paolo Lagazzi translation by Nicholas Benson As time went on and no one came to help him, Luis Maldonado, the famous cabaret artist, felt increasing anxiety. Was it possible that the idiot he’d spoken with hadn’t budged yet? Was it so difficult to call the police? On top of everything else, the air was becoming much too warm in there, it was suffocating, almost unbreathable… Luis, however, was not without resources; the hypnotist’s art required steady nerves and a steel will. Fixing his gaze on himself in the mirror that took up an entire side of the elevator, the man decided to exercise his hypnotic power on himself in order to instill calm. He had no sooner begun to stare into his own eyes, however, than the strange impression came over him that it was not his own face looking back, but the face of someone else: an unfamiliar, scowling man. Luis went on looking intently because he knew that only anxiety could distort the precision of his sight; if he were successful in applying the usual power of his gaze, “the other” would weaken and fall under his influence: and at that same instant, his own mind would be set free, at peace, relaxed. In reality the other man seemed to have no interest at all in conceding: the more the artist persisted in his effort to dominate him, the more the other seemed to become practically ferocious, and certainly more powerful than him. frankmatter editorial collective: Nick Benson, Robert Margolis, and Frank Matter "frankmatter publishes concert, performance, and book reviews, poems, translations, excerpts from novels, stories, plays, graphic novels, photographs, essays, marginalia, found art, & correspondence from all over frankmatter is especially interested in dispatches from/about places & literatures that are overlooked, lesser-known, or misunderstood, cross-genre & genre-convention-bending work, micro and oral history, and the documentary" English and All That Martha Rosler responds to Alix Rule and David Levine's "International Art English"e-flux While I reserve the right to consider the original article as an elaborate joke, one hardly needs to be reminded that jokes are often a cover for hostility, and the more elaborate the joke, the more powerful the hostility may be. Furthermore, jokes are often intended to forge an alliance between the teller and the listener, at the expense of the butt of the joke. It’s one thing to critique double-talk as gobbledygook, a meaningless jumble of memes and phrases. It’s another to shine a negative spotlight on the word salad as a way of proving that theoretical discourse, or the very enterprise of theory, is a sham and a shame, a foreign import, or perhaps simply a fallen discourse.(....) What struck me most forcefully about the article was that it churned up enough interest among the chattering class to provoke some members to imagine that the mandarins have something at stake in linguistic ornaments, and that they themselves have something to defend. Given the attacks on the humanities and their funding, those in the art world (and the “human sciences,” including sociology) would, one might think, be more circumspect about picking up some of the tools of the delegitimators, such as statistical analysis. e-flux 45 Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.youtube Bitcoin Michael Betancourtctheory (....) The Bitcoin proposal does more than eliminate human oversight and legal restrictions from the circulation of exchange values. It is an attempt to replace existing, formally organized, legal systems of protection for all parties in the transaction -- the buyer, the seller, and the bank -- with one based upon the assumption that the only parties to a transaction who need protection are sellers: this structural bias further reifies the same capitalist ideology that gives rise to digital rights management (DRM) in the transformation of everything that can be digitized into a digital form (the universal aspiration to the state of information). The only parties who have significance in such a framework are the owners (sellers) whose decisions about how to limit access find literal form in the DRM itself. Bitcoin is the reification of these interests at the level of exchange itself; this aspect of Nakamoto's proposal has contributed to its embrace by grey and black markets (such as Silk Road) employing peer-to-peer exchanges where getting paid can be an issue. This embrace is ironic since it is a currency that inherently contains the ability to track all ownership and transactions. Unlike physical currency of all types, and in a fashion distinct from existing systems of exchange, Nakamoto's description of Bitcoin eliminates the privacy afforded to purchases: We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership. (....) The valorizing process of capitalist expansion enabled by digital technologies is immediately apparent in the surveillance component inherent to Bitcoin. A further irony emerges from its lack of engagement with the formal banking system: Bitcoin lacks a formal system of recourse when problems of coin ownership, transaction validity, etc. do arise precisely because it is outside established legal frameworks. By creating this "private" currency, outside of the legal and historical framework of governmental regulation and management of currency, Bitcoin is an ideological reification of globalized capitalism, and should be recognized as a tool whose alignment with authoritarian values has been masked by how the ideology of automation intersects with the aura of the digital: instead of being a "free" or "independent" form of money that transcends national boundaries, it is a technology of control aligned with globalized concerns over economic surveillance and monitoring the behaviors and associations of consumers' behaviors in the physical world.

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• 18 Jun ' 10:53

  June 18, 2013 Canal Under the Moonlight Shoda Koho 1871 - 1946 Ukiyoe-Gallery _______________________ From Having and Space Thibault Raoult      Only so many times you can rotate, opt out of whippoorwill. Arrange the shore, e-a colle.      There’s a cost to putting a face on it. With traitor frozen, we have every chance.      People use their forms to swing. At some point I want to see some skin.      Gello’s skins. Pyotr never repeats himself.      Problematic because he’s in charge of the waterslides. Is there a root in there somewhere? ....       The hedges are coming! You wish you were implicated.      All this hiccup, and nowhere to go. How can they remember all the shapes they’ve been associated with?      Teaching has forced me to be utter, clear to the massing. ...(more) _______________________ Historia Abscondita [pdf] An Index of Joy Compiled from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘The Gay Science’ Translated by Walter Kaufmann Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places—into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed! E P C digital library _______________________ SINGLES 2005-2013 (from Yudu) Adam Fieled As/Is #1345 Two hedgerows with a little path between — to walk in the path like some do, as if no other viable route exists, to make Gods of hedgerows that make your life tiny, is a sin of some significance in a world where hedgerows can be approached from any side — I said this to a man who bore seeds to an open space, and he nodded to someone else and whistled an old waltz to himself in annoyance.      from Apparition Poems _______________________ Pathways — Spring 2013 A magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy _______________________ the flood of 1910 From the water to the Sahara Catherine Darley Poemas del rķo Wang _______________________ Abjection & Bodies Adrift interview with Arthur Kroker video synthetic_zero _______________________ Arguing about Justice: Essays for Philippe Van Parijs Axel Gosseries This volume is a gift for Philippe Van Parijs, a tribute to his work and friendship. The Hoover Chair in economic and social ethics, which Philippe has led since its inception in 1991, turned 20 this year, while the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), which he co-founded in 1986, turned 25. During this same year, he published two new books, one a collection of essays entitled Just Democracy (ECPR Press), and the other a long-awaited monograph entitled Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (OUP). He also received the Belgian Ark Award for Free Speech, a prize created in 1951 by Flemish intellectuals opposed to restrictions on freedom of expression. On top of that, 2011 happens to be the year of his 60th birthday. We had to do justice to such a convergence of circumstances - especially to the latter. We thought Philippe would prefer a book to a cake. Academia.edu _______________________ Under the dump, Rivington Street How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York Jacob Riis (1890) full text _______________________ “Not for All the Tea in China!” Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations H. Hannah Nam, John T. Jost, Jay J. Van Bavel (....) Even a cursory analysis of the political landscape in the contemporary United States reveals that there are vast differences in the cognitive and rhetorical styles of liberals and conservatives – as reflected, say, in the differences between National Public Radio and Fox News or Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh. Increasingly, ideological polarization is the norm, and little or no common ground exists between liberals and conservatives when it comes to social and economic issues such as tax policy, the debt ceiling, health care reform, gay marriage, and climate change. Undoubtedly, ideological conflict is fostered (at least in part) by institutional, system-level processes, such as electoral competition between political parties and the organized activities of lobbyists. At the same time, there is growing evidence that differences between liberals and conservatives are shaped by psychological variables having to do with personality, cognition, emotion, and motivation – all of which may help to explain why the preferences and styles of liberals and conservatives often diverge. (....) If there are indeed ideological differences in the tendency to avoid dissonance-arousing thoughts, as our data suggest, this may also help to explain why conservatives are more prone to engage in biased forms of moral reasoning and more likely to hold false beliefs concerning a number of public policy issues, in comparison with liberals. Nyhan and Reifler observed how liberals and conservatives would respond to the presentation of evidence contradicting their prior (incorrect) beliefs. They found that conservatives exhibited a “backfire effect,” reporting even stronger commitment to their initial beliefs after being exposed to discrediting evidence. Liberals failed to correct their initial misperceptions in the face of disconfirming information, but they did not exhibit a backfire effect. ...(more) PLOS One _______________________ Society of Addiction: Capitalism, Dopamine and the Consumer Junkie Nicholas Powers _______________________ Special Issue: The Citizen-Subject Guest Editors: Jennifer Greiman and Kir Kuiken Postmodern Culture Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012 _______________________ Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass Theodore Dalrymple scribd _______________________ Deleuze & Guattari and Minor Marxism Eugene W. Holland Laws, Exceptions, Norms: Kierkegaard, Schmitt, and Benjamin on the Exception Rebecca Gould SelectedWorks — A research announcement tool to maximize the readership and impact of your work _______________________ Moonlit Sea (#8) Shoda Koho _______________________ Mary Margaret O’hara: The Eccentric Canadian Cult Songstress With The World’s Most Devoted Fanbase Dangerous Minds via Nag on the Lake _______________________ On writing (and not writing) rob mclennan (....) Some days are Orpheus: I can’t look back, for fear of losing everything. I attempt to sharpen a book about my late mother, attempt to complete a collection of short stories. I aim for completion somewhere over the next six months; perhaps a year. I am attempting to write about that which I do not yet know. I sometimes feel in such a hurry I haven’t even time to mention it. There are days I require to put all aside, and simply read. These are becoming more prominent. These are grounding, rejuvenative. Distractions that do not take away from the work, but instead become the work. ...(more) permanent link

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• 18 Jun ' 10:52

  June 18, 2013 Canal Under the Moonlight Shoda Koho 1871 - 1946 Ukiyoe-Gallery _______________________ From Having and Space Thibault Raoult      Only so many times you can rotate, opt out of whippoorwill. Arrange the shore, e-a colle.      There’s a cost to putting a face on it. With traitor frozen, we have every chance.      People use their forms to swing. At some point I want to see some skin.      Gello’s skins. Pyotr never repeats himself.      Problematic because he’s in charge of the waterslides. Is there a root in there somewhere? ....       The hedges are coming! You wish you were implicated.      All this hiccup, and nowhere to go. How can they remember all the shapes they’ve been associated with?      Teaching has forced me to be utter, clear to the massing. ...(more) _______________________ Historia Abscondita [pdf] An Index of Joy Compiled from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘The Gay Science’ Translated by Walter Kaufmann Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places—into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed! E P C digital library _______________________ SINGLES 2005-2013 (from Yudu) Adam Fieled As/Is #1345 Two hedgerows with a little path between — to walk in the path like some do, as if no other viable route exists, to make Gods of hedgerows that make your life tiny, is a sin of some significance in a world where hedgerows can be approached from any side — I said this to a man who bore seeds to an open space, and he nodded to someone else and whistled an old waltz to himself in annoyance.      from Apparition Poems _______________________ Pathways — Spring 2013 A magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy _______________________ the flood of 1910 From the water to the Sahara Catherine Darley Poemas del rķo Wang _______________________ Abjection & Bodies Adrift interview with Arthur Kroker video synthetic_zero _______________________ Arguing about Justice: Essays for Philippe Van Parijs Axel Gosseries This volume is a gift for Philippe Van Parijs, a tribute to his work and friendship. The Hoover Chair in economic and social ethics, which Philippe has led since its inception in 1991, turned 20 this year, while the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), which he co-founded in 1986, turned 25. During this same year, he published two new books, one a collection of essays entitled Just Democracy (ECPR Press), and the other a long-awaited monograph entitled Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (OUP). He also received the Belgian Ark Award for Free Speech, a prize created in 1951 by Flemish intellectuals opposed to restrictions on freedom of expression. On top of that, 2011 happens to be the year of his 60th birthday. We had to do justice to such a convergence of circumstances - especially to the latter. We thought Philippe would prefer a book to a cake. Academia.edu _______________________ Under the dump, Rivington Street How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York Jacob Riis (1890) full text _______________________ “Not for All the Tea in China!” Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations H. Hannah Nam, John T. Jost, Jay J. Van Bavel (....) Even a cursory analysis of the political landscape in the contemporary United States reveals that there are vast differences in the cognitive and rhetorical styles of liberals and conservatives – as reflected, say, in the differences between National Public Radio and Fox News or Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh. Increasingly, ideological polarization is the norm, and little or no common ground exists between liberals and conservatives when it comes to social and economic issues such as tax policy, the debt ceiling, health care reform, gay marriage, and climate change. Undoubtedly, ideological conflict is fostered (at least in part) by institutional, system-level processes, such as electoral competition between political parties and the organized activities of lobbyists. At the same time, there is growing evidence that differences between liberals and conservatives are shaped by psychological variables having to do with personality, cognition, emotion, and motivation – all of which may help to explain why the preferences and styles of liberals and conservatives often diverge. (....) If there are indeed ideological differences in the tendency to avoid dissonance-arousing thoughts, as our data suggest, this may also help to explain why conservatives are more prone to engage in biased forms of moral reasoning and more likely to hold false beliefs concerning a number of public policy issues, in comparison with liberals. Nyhan and Reifler observed how liberals and conservatives would respond to the presentation of evidence contradicting their prior (incorrect) beliefs. They found that conservatives exhibited a “backfire effect,” reporting even stronger commitment to their initial beliefs after being exposed to discrediting evidence. Liberals failed to correct their initial misperceptions in the face of disconfirming information, but they did not exhibit a backfire effect. ...(more) PLOS One _______________________ Society of Addiction: Capitalism, Dopamine and the Consumer Junkie Nicholas Powers _______________________ Special Issue: The Citizen-Subject Guest Editors: Jennifer Greiman and Kir Kuiken Postmodern Culture Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012 _______________________ Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass Theodore Dalrymple scribd _______________________ Deleuze & Guattari and Minor Marxism Eugene W. Holland Laws, Exceptions, Norms: Kierkegaard, Schmitt, and Benjamin on the Exception Rebecca Gould SelectedWorks — A research announcement tool to maximize the readership and impact of your work _______________________ Moonlit Sea (#8) Shoda Koho _______________________ Mary Margaret O’hara: The Eccentric Canadian Cult Songstress With The World’s Most Devoted Fanbase Dangerous Minds via Nag on the Lake _______________________ On writing (and not writing) rob mclennan (....) Some days are Orpheus: I can’t look back, for fear of losing everything. I attempt to sharpen a book about my late mother, attempt to complete a collection of short stories. I aim for completion somewhere over the next six months; perhaps a year. I am attempting to write about that which I do not yet know. I sometimes feel in such a hurry I haven’t even time to mention it. There are days I require to put all aside, and simply read. These are becoming more prominent. These are grounding, rejuvenative. Distractions that do not take away from the work, but instead become the work. ...(more) permanent link

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• 17 Jun ' 09:59

  June 17, 2013 Still Life and Street1937M.C. Escherb. June 17, 1898 Agnomia Róbert Gál transl. from the Slovak by Michaela Freemanexquisite corpse (....)Why do we so stubbornly look for locks in all, that is also in opened, doors? This is also one of the questions regarding Buńuel and his The Exterminating Angel. Couldn’t the existence of a lock on an opened door alter the status of its openness? And so on. To create a culture means in most cases to be necessarily acultural. For why does a creator for the purposes of his creation need to know what others create? A widespread groping is sufficient for a creator, as he knows very well, that no groping – even the broadest – can be bankless or else it would spill into something else. The role of the creator is to sustain the spilling within one’s own character of what it is, while preventing it to really spill into something else. We’re therefore dealing with a permanent maintenance of the desired flow, which, for this reason, ultimately becomes thoughtful. Thoughtful in the sense of tautology, that is indisputable. Thoughtful in the sense of the realization of the act of thought, the context of which is the flow of that being thought, continually melted into the flow of thinking. This is not philosophy, dear friends, but a gradual process of creative undertaking with a jackhammer in hands. The creator is more of a worker than an intellectual. A man forced to observe is learning to observe; a circle in a circle repeatedly burst like a bubble. Lifted lifts? The lure of traps, where even traps themselves fall in.(....) (And to what degree is it necessary to provoke the requirements of a loved one, when it comes to the change of a being while the being is just being changed?) To come out with the feelings as if the internal feelings were hiding something. Command denial of desire which isn’t based on anything, nor is it justified by anything. The emptiness, which frightens in a moment, is chopped by a structure of the net and by the structure of breathing in it. Empty cans of what’s been drunk rattle through the street of static sculptures of the just restored. The looks of tourist children, their braying photo cameras, which take what was, angels included, and necessarily transform it into other materials. Time shifts between expectations and disappointments is unsteady, almost invisible. This is an annihilation of sun and other such hermits. This is a tautology of every moment, as if every moment was necessarily a tautology. Róbert Gál - Agnomiaa review by Damian Kelleher PuddleM.C. Escher1952 The Far North of Experience In Praise of Darkness (and Light) Rebecca Solnit Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn’t matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis. The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. In darkness dreams awaken and dreamers merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the Arctic’s biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day, light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land. Curl-upM.C. Escher1951 Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism' Lisa Stampnitzkygoogle bookspdf available at Monoskop Prism, privacy and politics with a small p A background to the NSA leaks with links to further readingEurozine “My thinking with regard to the new takes its bearings from German theorist Theodor Adorno, who likens the new to “a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard.” Despite the seemingly utopian disposition of this search, Adorno is aware there is no such thing as music “never previously heard”; chordial combinations are “limited” and “everything that can be played on [the keyboard has already been] implicitly given.” In other words: the keyboard offers both prospect and prohibition. One locates the new, therefore, not in the music itself, but in an unending and open-ended processes—informed by desire—of searching: “the new”, says Adorno, “is the longing for the new, not the new itself.” For me, what desire for the new translates to, on the one hand, is an endeavor to come to terms with the history of my chosen form (poetry). I’d like to know how poets from various localities and periods engaged with their givens: how they accepted yet disputed the limits and possibilities of language, in general, and poetry’s formal features, in particular. On the other hand, longing for the new also means an awareness of, and involvement in, the contemporary contexts in which possibilities of poetry might be simultaneously generated yet foreclosed: a knowledge of—and an ability to produce something from—the conflicts and affinities poetry has with society, culture, politics, the economy, and with itself. Though the poet John Keats privileged “heard melodies,” he valued even more “those [that are] unheard”: the new in poetry resides precisely in the poet’s ability to create conditions that make it possible for works to emerge: works which, at present, are still at the edge of listening, in danger of being silenced, yet desiring to be heard.”     — Vincenz Serrano Transit Issue 1: "The new dwells in possibility." M.C. Escher Afterlives “unfolding”: figures of afterness at the Conference on Ecopoetics Angela Hume I have been thinking about afterness, ecopoetics, and ecological crisis. What does it mean to come after? After Katrina? After the BP blowout? After 400 parts per million? After what the philosopher Ray Brassier calls “the fact of extinction” itself? What might it all mean for poetry and poetics? In Evelyn Reilly’s words, it’s possible that “we are in a moment of…more and more poetry [relating] to the ecological, that, in an inverse of ‘no poetry after Auschwitz,’ we are in a moment of ‘all poetry after Katrina,’ or the Deepwater Horizon, or Sandy or whatever it is that comes next.” Moreover, what do affective states or feelings of afterness have to do with contemporary environmental conditions and crises? What do they have to do with cultural memory, with grief and mourning, with revolutionary thinking and activity?

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• 14 Jun ' 07:50

  June 14, 2013 Franz Wacik Illustrations by Franz Wacik for the humor magazine Die Muskete circa 1906–1911 Vienna50 Watts A new issue of Not Bored!(the first since 2009)13th anniversary William Gaddis: A very fine shambles Paul Griffiths reviews The Letters Of William Gaddis Particularly in the years after JR, with his work increasingly known and the world increasingly nosy, he had to defend himself repeatedly against requests for interviews and explanations, sometimes referring his enquirers to words he had given the painter protagonist of The Recognitions: “What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? . . . What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology”. And the punctuation here indicates this is not really a question. His letters he would no doubt have regarded as part of the shambles. In 1984, Gaddis replied to an enquiry from Steven Moore, the editor of this volume, then a doctoral student, to warn him that “my early letters were many times written with the vain notion of eventual publication & thus obviously much embarrassing nonsense”. Hugh Kenner’s review of Ernest Hemingway’s letters had shown the danger, for Kenner had used them “to flay the writer & point up frailties in his work as glimpses of the ‘real’ Hemingway, I think really these things go quite the opposite, the letters are the detritus, &c”. Gaddis kept not only his working materials, however, but copies and drafts of letters, and came to accept, grudgingly, that an edition was inevitable. They are, to be sure, not the work. While they convey the grand, growling Gaddisian voice, only rarely do they lift off with the comma-free, cliché-dosed, looping and wonderfully rhythmic energy of some of the best and funniest passages from his novels, one such exception coming in a letter he wrote soon after a visit to New Zealand in 1987, which for him was most essentially the location of Erewhon. He needed to find a place to work: “which may even end up right here in Manhattan with a terrace & all air conditioning that people kill for hardly that bad after all though glimpses of peace over the bay at Wellington & sheep of Christchurch lead one astray where Butler after all got his first breath . . .”. Once Upon A TimeAlexandre DayLined In Lead: Works In GraphiteGallery Nucleus The Chorus: I’ve Done Nothing but Contradict Reality from the OutsetBecca Jensen People think the imagination is imaginative. For example, the newfangled man took his nose into the air. People and their slender feet tucked between their thighs laid with dew. People, are wrong. For example, the imagination is the detritus of a reality firmly settled to a place. For example, the lamplight made fish scales of the wall. This cannot be overemphasized. For example, the disappointment came from the white feathered mouse-tail of his touch. Here is the thin-laced gesture of our quiet fate: night High Chair 17 Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieureviewed by Genevičve RobichaudLemon Hound By re-orienting beaulieu’s politics in such an explicit way, Please, No More Poetry becomes a more engaging book than a simple celebration of an author’s work and accomplishments. It becomes a vital and engaging crossroads where these seemingly opposing sociopolitical fronts can meet and battle it out–the radical anti-capitalist disruptions of a poetics founded in disgust versus what Marjorie Perloff refers to as a poetics that is “ideologically suspect” because it is “too empty, or too pretty, or too much like advertising copy”. This is a crucial debate to be having when, with increasing frequency, poetry is declared to be a dead art form. While some writers rush to defend poetry’s relevancy (including writers on this blog), others denounce it as wholesale fodder. The debates around poetry’s relevancy, value, and meaning are the focal point of the collection. These problems are suggested to the reader before they even open the book: Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu. The mouth that issues this grand plea has a tongue rubbing against the walls of its cheek. What does this book produce? More poetry. Please, No More Poetry is a crucial collection that not only looks back on a brilliant career, but looks toward the future of the medium itself, offering a sampling of innovative writing strategies and seeking a place for poets that is relevant, valuable, and meaningful in the contemporary world. Not So Twinned MountainsBrooks Salzwedel Psycho-Climate Communique #1 arran jamessynthetic_zero Synthetic_Zero Synthetic_Zero is a project designed to explore the challenges and opportunities of being and becoming human after nihilism. The collaborative approach presented here is intended as an experimental response to the various crises, disjunctions and unequally distributed realities of contemporary life. ‘Nihilism’ has never existed as a unified objective condition or psychological mood, but rather as organizing constellation of references expressing a growing awareness of the dissolution of various claims to truth, methodological faiths, social institutions, political regimes and cognitive orientations. A post-nihilist position thus begins from a recognition of the total collapse of intellectual certainty as well the delegitimization of all existing ideologies. It is very important not to let this suspicion deteriorate into a truth, or a theory, for example into a theory with the principle: things are never what they seem to be. Reality, or Being, or God, or whatever it is that sustains us cannot be captured that easily. – Paul Feyerabend Here you will find original and borrowed content engaging crucial issues circulating through speculative realist philosophies, anthropology, psychiatry, social work, political ecology, art, architecture, urban design, indigenous politics, and various contemporary social movements. Our intention is to seek and build bridges between various knowledges and practices in order to cultivate more flexible and adaptive modes of being, perceiving, becoming and expressing in the world. Margaret Bourke-White b. 14th June, 1904 "The dialectical way invests chaotic power in the creation of little machineries of the heterogeneous. By fragmenting continuums and distancing terms that call for each other, or, conversely, by assimiliting heterogeneous elements and combining incomparable things, it creates clashes. And it makes the clashes thus developed small measuring tools, conducive to revealing a disruptive power of community, which itself establishes another term of measurement. (...) The encounter therein of incompatible elements highlights the power of a different community imposing a different measure; it establishes the absolute reality of desires and dreams. But it can also be activist photomontage ą la John Heartfield, which exposes capitalist gold in Adolf Hitler's gullet - i.e. the reality of economic domination behind the lyricism of national revolution - or, forty years later, that of Martha Rosler, who 'brings back home' the Vietnam War by mixing her images with those of adverts for American domestic bliss. Even closer to us, it can be the images of the homeless projected by Krzystof Wodiczko on official American monuments, or the paintings that Hans Haacke accompanies with little notices indicating how much they have cost each of their successive buyers. In all these cases, what is involved is revealing one world behind another: the far-off conflict behind home comforts; the homeless expelled by urban renovation behind the new buildings and old emblems of the polity; the gold of exploitation behind the rhetoric of community or the sublimity of art; the community of capital behind all the separations of spheres and the class war behind all communities. It involves organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict."      - Jacques Rancičre, The Future of the Image (trans. Gregory Elliott), 2007.

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• 13 Jun ' 07:22

  June 13, 2013 the magic mountain 1979Maria Helena Vieira da Silva b. June 13, 1908 Sometimes We Stand At Roof’s Edge And Look For Our Universe Matthew Lippman We played with our bodies, made them move like tattletales, like fractured bones, the celestial movement of the entire Milky. Sometimes we stand at the roof’s edge and watch for our universe. We can never see the whole thing. When we were children, the whole thing was as visible as today’s little cardinal. It was red and black and could withstand any sort of hydraulic pressure. These days our telescopes need as much help focusing through the disease of orange rind as our spigots do clean water. But we look through it anyway. Burnside Review Volume 9, Number 1 break water Rob Winger on Al Purdy The People’s Poet: Al Purdy as Organic Intellectual In recent years, I’ve been looking for a contemporary figure who might qualify as what Antonio Gramsci once hopefully envisioned as an “organic” intellectual: a grassroots leader rising up from the exploited masses to lead a proletariat revolution against the ruling bourgeoisie. But does – and could – such a figure ever really exist? In the much smaller world of Canadian politics and art, one place to look is Prince Edward County, Ontario, which was home to the figure perhaps most popularly proclaimed as the voice of the little person in Canadian writing: the late Al Purdy. Purdy is, of course, a key figure in Canada’s literary canon, and continues to be praised, by some, as “The greatest Canadian poet of the 20th century” (qtd. in Necropsy of Love, back cover). Always self-identified with physical, male work, his swaggering persona nonetheless belies an arguably “sensitive” poetics, encapsulating a functional tension, in both his writing and reception, between the “high” cultures of poetic production and the “low” cultural values actively espoused in his celebrations of rural vernacular. Might a white, heterosexual, middle-class intellectual figure like Purdy – who remained dedicated to an exclusively male and debatably old-fashioned poetics throughout his career – inspire a social revolution that speaks for “the people” of an increasingly transnational, multi-lingual, culturally-diversified nation? Joseph Stellab.June 13, 1877 Digital Blackwater: How the NSA Gives Private Contractors Control of the Surveillance State Dante's Sublime Comedy: HellAlasdair GrayChapter 28: Subvertors If unrhymed prose could easier describe      the blood and wounds appearing in that ditch,      I’d certainly resort to it, Hell knows. All speech falls short, there are no words to tell      of all the carnage we enact on earth      and re-enact repeatedly in Hell. L'issue lumineuse Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Two Poems for Anselm Hollo by Vyt Bakaitis and Alice Notleybrooklyn rail Similar:Peaksan introduction of sortsDavid Blumenshine hello. allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Similar:Peaks:: you don’t know about that do you? well, actually, i suppose the name is Similar:Peaks::Poetry, but that misrepresents our mission & vision. we are a literature focused journal. for now, we are merely online. but what is & what will be are not equal. for now it’s not important. what is important, at least to us, is that tomorrow begins the set-it-off of an idea which has been in-process for quite some time, & with an intense amount of hard work combined with an overwhelmingly warm response from the literary community we identify with, will finally fruition tangibly. my name is david blumenshine. officially co-founder and editor in chief of operations herein. while i work manual labor during non-rain hours, i have been fortunate enough to have my own work published in or coming soon from Passages North, Bluffs, Seven Corners, Paper Darts, & Smoking Glue Gun. Along with co-founder and senior editor of awesome (accordingly the artwork which the site is using can be attributed to) Rachel Burns, my partner & confidant, Similar:Peaks:: was conceived several months ago, largely in vague & short lived conversations of how unlikely what has is. Camille Martin The world of poetry is changing. This has consequences.     Ron Silliman Morning Mist at the Mine Mouth [Monongah, West Virginia] 1908Joseph Stella John Ashbery: “The Skaters” [from Rivers and Mountains, 1966] – a critical and genetic digital edition – I These decibels Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound Into which being enters, and is apart. Their colors on a warm February day Make for masses of inertia, and hips Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new In the sense of the next one in an infinite series But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness And somehow push us all into perdition. Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard. The answer is that it is novelty That guides these swift blades o’er the ice, Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense Of energy) the profile I cannot remember. Colors slip away from and chide us. The human mind Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme Of some sodden “dump” or lament. But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes. We children are ashamed of our bodies But we laugh and, demanded, talk of sex again And all is well. The waves of morning harshness Float away like coal-gas into the sky. But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives? The articles we’d collect—stamps of the colonies With greasy cancellation marks, mauve, magenta and chocolate, Or funny-looking dogs we’d see in the street, or bright remarks. One collects bullets. An Indianapolis, Indiana man collects slingshots of all epochs, and so on. Text/worksRobin Seguy, editor A Modern Poetry Library Text/works has the ambition to be the first multilingual online library making available to scholars and general readers collections of French and American Modern poetry (19th, 20th, and 21st Century) in the form of critical digital editions. The goals of Text/works are multiple. First, we intend to offer to the general reader authoritative editions of poetic texts and collections, to be read online or downloaded (in XML-TEI and PDF). Contrary to many existing databases, we aim to display the texts we publish with accurate philological care and try to reproduce, as far as possible, their original printed appearance. We will also integrate, whenever possible, genetic data, and collate several editions in cases of variants. For each text, hyperlinked indexes are to be built, as are sets of thematic annotations. Moreover, we aim, for the profit of literature scholars, students, and teachers, to develop and make available research tools for text analysis. In a second stage of its development, our library will thus include a part-of-speech tagging for each texts, as well as prosodic and metrical annotations, so as to provide data for searchers interested in a corpus-based approach of modern poetry texts. If the literary text is to offer, in Ponge's words, “ą la fois une jouissance et une leēon,” we do hope that our library will, in its modest way, not be completely useless to help the reader delineate a few coordinates of pleasure and enlightenment. Cliffs and Rocks c. 1925 Joseph Stella

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• 12 Jun ' 07:13

  June 12, 2013 Egon Schiele June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918 _______________________ Thomas Hardy Considers the Newly-Published Special Theory of Relativity Brian Aldiss (1981) Doubtless a way there is of grasping whole This troubled cosmos where we fare and die, Of grasping, and forgiving much thereby. Well, some will chance, when I lie in the grave, To quest like Albert Einstein for a key To ends far obscured. Then let those brave Unlock the universe’s mystery, Not I. If, with the Immanent Will’s consent, Mankind should gain some means to cancel space And time, to view eternity’s bleak face, Such vision could wreak endless dole – and fright The human hopes of far futurity With woes yet stored, worse far than those which blight Maids whom I know, and men who once knew me. introduced by Michael Caines _______________________ Herbert Pfostl "And the world, when you think about it, is not an anchor." Herbert Pfostl's Paper Graveyard _______________________ The Closure Delusion Linda Besner hazlitt (....) Closure dominates media representations of sorrow. But within the psychiatric profession, there is a faction that believes closure doesn’t exist. Stephen Grosz, author of The Examined Life, has the grave, understanding voice of a somber child’s imaginary friend, and he has treated countless patients dealing with loss. “For the person who’s mourning, there isn’t an end,” he told me. “As long as you’re alive you can feel grief.” What’s more, he says, our cultural discourse of closure may be hurting these people. Grosz felt that his patients “were suffering more from a tyranny of ‘shoulds’—you should be through this by now, you should have finished with this, set this aside. That really...”—he laughs, which, as he notes elsewhere in his book, people do when they are angry—”that really bugs me.” (....) If closure is a null concept, and all of our rituals are ultimately doomed to fail in their goal of making us feel better in a lasting, static way, what’s the alternative? The only other option is to accept that after loss, grief, or trauma, we will always live with some degree of pain. It goes away, but it usually comes back, in one form or another. As a society, we have trouble accepting that terrorist attacks, school shootings, and natural disasters will have a permanent effect on our national psyche. But on an individual level, many are ready to live alongside their grief. In the Huffington Post, Joan Sutton recently wrote: Do. Not. Speak. To. Me. Of. Closure. What a hideous word. Closure. If you have truly loved someone, you do not ever want to close off the memory of that love, the richness of that experience. Let me be strong enough to absorb this death into my life, let it deepen my understanding of the mystery of life, let it make me wiser. Bring me acceptance but, never, closure. ...(more) _______________________ The Self Seers (Death and Man) 1911 Egon Schiele _______________________ from Appearances: A Novel In 365 Fragments Tom Beckett (....) 16. What are the essential confusions? What degree of resolution do you require? 17. The name of this intersection is liminality. 18. The constellations of Characters constitute Exteriority’s Chorus. It rumbles beneath the pavement. Overtures and apertures, voices, shadows, screens, frames, alter egos. Sliding registers. 19. The Author (Arthur?) is thinking now about secret identities, metafiction, and the textual/sexual unconscious. The Author (who?) is what? Things are never quite what they appear to be. Some essential aspect is indiscernible. Size figures. Things, persons, events almost always loom larger or smaller than one thinks. ...(more) _______________________ Setting Sun 1913 Egon Schiele _______________________ Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon Tim Rayner (....) How did we ever get by without social media? In under a decade, free online services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have utterly transformed how we work, play, and communicate. For hundreds of millions of people, sharing content across a range of social media services is a familiar part of life. Yet little is known about how social media is impacting us on a psychological level. A wealth of commentators are exploring how social media is refiguring forms of economic activity, reshaping our institutions, and transforming our social and organizational practices. We are still learning about how social media impacts on our sense of personal identity. The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has a set of insights that can help clarify how social media affects us on a psychological level. Foucault died before the advent of the internet, yet his studies of social conditioning and identity formation in relation to power are applicable to life online. Seen from a Foucaultian perspective, social media is more than a vehicle for exchanging information. Social media is a vehicle for identity-formation. Social media involves ‘subjectivation’. A Foucaultian perspective on social media targets the mechanism that makes it tick: sharing. Sharing is basic to social media. Sharing content is not just a neutral exchange of information, however. Mostly, when we share content on social media services, we do it transparently, visibly, that is in the presence of a crowd. The act of sharing is a performance, to an extent – it a performative act, an act that does something in the world, as J.L. Austin would say. This is important. The performative aspect of sharing shapes the logic and experience of the act itself. ...(more) Part 2. I tweet, therefore I become Part 3. The call of the crowd Philosophy For Change via attempts at living permanent link

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• 11 Jun ' 07:25

  June 11, 2013 Anselm Kiefer “The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.”      Anselm Kiefer Moving On Stanley Fish I have sold my books. Not all of them, but most of them. The ostensible reason for this de-acquisition is a move from a fair-sized house to a much smaller apartment. It is true, as Anthony Powell said in a title, that books do furnish a room, but in this case, too many books, too little room. But the deeper reason is that it was time. What I saw on the shelves was work to which I would never return, the writings of fellow critics whom I will no longer engage, interpretive dilemmas someone else will have to address. The conversations I had participated in for decades have now gone in another direction (indeed, in several other directions), and I have neither the time nor, if truth be told, the intellectual energy required to catch up. Farewell to all that. So long, it’s been good to know you. I’m sure you’ll do fine without me. Actually, I’ve had stronger emotional responses to checking out of some motels than I had to the departure of the record of my professional life, a record that includes voluminous marginal notes in many of the volumes. I had always thought that I could return to my annotated copies of familiar texts and pick up where I left off. That fantasy, I now see, was part and parcel of the core fantasy that I would just go on forever, defending old positions, formulating new ones, attending annual conferences, contributing to essay collections, speaking at various universities, teaching the same old courses, confidently answering the same old questions. I’m not going to go on forever. I avoid this realization, even as I voice it. I say, “I’m not going to go on forever,” and at the same time I’m busily signing new contracts, accepting new speaking invitations, thinking up new courses, hungering after new accolades. My books are clearer-eyed than I am. They exited the stage without fuss and will, one hopes, take up residence in someone else’s library where they will be put to better uses than to serve as items in a museum, which is what they were when they furnished my rooms. Helena Kvarnström from ‘The Journey of Metaphor & Remembrance’ in Labyrinth of VisionBruce Staterpresented by Jerome Rothenberg Say the poem is a journey taken with silent walking sticks on a path strewn with memories deaf, dumb, blind & beyond measure. Its mouth filled with words its pockets filled with stale bread. Say it is an elixir derived from chlorophyll or the royal jelly of expressionistic bees. Say its stops & turns are towers, shrines or little discomforts in sleep. That each of its shafts pierces a separate element of dream. That its bewildering sunlight is a glittering city where ecstasy dances hand in hand with death.It was something I went looking for. I was afraid of getting lost. & so I hid in the island of branching voices illuminated by the ubiquitous pathos of forgetting. Something had torn a hole in my heart like a leaf, extended finger, or bone. & so I stuck to the honey of something heavy & eternal-- a breath where celestial light fell in spurts dampening the pain of the infinite unmooring. Labyrinth of VisionBruce StaterAhadada Books Ernst Wilhelm Nayb. June 11, 1902 New Anxieties The #tumblresque is not John Berger's Ways of Seeing but sprays of seeing.      (Wark 2012) What is it about the New Aesthetic that makes you so damn uneasy? There’s a deeply intriguing quality about the New Aesthetic that is more remarkable than any of its merits: it cannot be ignored. Since Bruce Sterling’s first essay popularized the term, the Tumblr that stood as its main platform of communication, and the group of ideas, references and icons that its originators gathered under its umbrella have been refuted, dissected, mocked, celebrated or laughed at. Those who have felt obliged to enter the debate about the New Aesthetic come from philosophy, from new media art practice and curation, from interaction design or from the digital humanities. But almost no one has passed on the opportunity to say something; nobody has just shrugged with indifference and said 'they can’t be bothered'. The fact of the matter is, everyone seems bothered, somehow. This needs to be investigated because, quite clearly, it says something about the state of these disciplines and those who are working today in this cultural space. While it would be almost impossible to find any unconditional apologist for Bridle's proposition, it’s even harder to find indifferent commentators. Whatever the New Aesthetic is, it's a set of ideas that can make you feel twitchy and uncomfortable, for a range of reasons depending on who you are: the academic, the digital curator, the new media artist. Whether we call it a brand or a half-formed body of theory, it reflects back insecurities, biases, or feelings of inadequacy as often as it attracts valid critical responses. But what would happen if we properly embraced the New Aesthetic as a topic for network culture? The Paradox of Mental Health: Over-Treatment and Under-Recognition The PLOS Medicine Editors Among all the conditions in the world of health, mental health occupies a unique and paradoxical place. On the one hand is over-treatment and over-medicalization of mental health issues, often fueled by a pharmaceutical industry interested in the broadening of the boundaries of “illness” and in the creation of more and wider diagnostic categories and thus markets for “selling sickness.” On the other hand exists profound under-recognition of the suffering and breadth of mental health issues affecting millions of people across geographies, which is a global problem. As a journal, PLOS Medicine has covered both sides of the mental health “coin,” ... Eliot Gelwan Linguistic Anxiety and the Deconstruction of the Self in the Realm of the RidiculousJ.J. Phillips Again, when I tried to explain, he insisted that I made no sense. When in frustration I said “Lacan, you know, Jacques Lacan,” he impatiently claimed that he couldn’t understand me and had no idea what or whom I was referring to. Since I’d studied French (though long ago), had read Écrits3 and some of Lacan’s other writings, and had engaged in a number of conversations about Lacan with various people over the years, among them an acquaintance, a Francophone MFCC, who’d never drawn a blank when I spoke the name, it couldn’t have been my pronunciation unless I’d suddenly lost control of my faculty of speech and didn’t know it. When in desperation I took a pen and paper and wrote down the name “Jacques Lacan,” the doctor grew even more annoyed and again professed ignorance. No matter what efforts I made, he resolutely refused to acknowledge this name and kept dismissively insisting that I wasn’t making any sense and was revealing my pathetic ignorance, not only of French but of English. My continued impertinence was more than he could bear. He had no more time to waste on the likes of me. As he turned on his heel, the corners of his white coat flapped. He left me standing there stunned and mute – to pay my bill for being professionally vilified and go home. Even if I didn’t know how to spell or use the English word “laconic,” staging this elaborate fit of pique to ridicule me in this manner, and within earshot of his staff, wasn’t ‘just’ a gratuitously cruel and outrageous way to treat anyone, especially someone in a vulnerable psychological state, who’d come to him seeking help. His petulant refusal even to attempt to understand what I was getting at (not to mention refusing to understand me when I was making sense) and casually degrading me as he did, was completely discombobulating and deeply destructive psychologically and neurobiologically. And he got off on it. I wasn’t in training to be an analyst – where I get the impression that such practices are frequently de rigueur, part of the rites of passage; though I also learn that for some, sadistic degradation and mind-fucking patients is a clinical style, which could perhaps be termed Zilboorgian, after Gregory Zilboorg, George Gershwin’s analyst. The lodestone of my internal compass instantaneously demagnetized. The fear that I might not be making sense, and that even if I was, my words could summarily be declared gibberish at any time without examination, at the whim of any jerk with an engorged but brittle ego and a sadistic streak, stoked my already considerable anxiety regarding my basic linguistic and cognitive competency, and profoundly destabilized my sense of self to the degree that I was stupefied. When I left his office, I hardly knew which direction to take and my otoliths were so rattled that I couldn’t make my way down the street in a straight line or walk without stumbling. It’s a wonder I found my way home without being hit by a car. This was much more than an attack on my psyche and a semi-public humiliation: he was fucking with some critical areas of my brain, and it was a calculated attack. I couldn’t have been made to feel more stupid and worthless, and he knew it. He set me up and sucker-punched me, and I walked out of his office disoriented and reeling just as sure as if he’d actually slammed me in the solar plexus with his fist. Helena Kvarnström StonesBruce Stater I gather stones. I am tired. My mind is empty. It is difficult to work. I gather stones. Some broken, some smooth. Some heavy and too large for my hands. Some that roll across my palms, light as a feather. Some hard and sturdy, others brittle, Eager to crumble into grains of sand, form clouds of dust. Some warm, soft and smooth as clay, Separate prayers created from flesh of living earth. Some cold and gray and dead as ash. I gather stones. I put thought to thought Pebble beside pebble To shore up rent and void of no-thought. Mingle clay with ash and draw earthworm from frozen tundra. I scoop dried grass from cold ground up to my knuckles And draw my nails across the hard skin of blocks of ice. I cover my face with red, yellow, black, brown, and green dirt. I boil roots and mud in stone soup. I collect the shells of insects the bones of reptiles, birds and small mammals And plant seeds where some will grow and others won't. I am tired. It is difficult to work. My mind is empty but my arms are full of stones.

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• 10 Jun ' 07:13

  June 10, 2013 The Blue Studio c.1947-8 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham b.June 8, 1912 _______________________ Writing silence Mervi Kantokorpi Translated by David Hackston Books from Finland Within the mirror Harry Salmenniemi Translated by David Hackston Then, not now. White birches against the white sky. A vase in the middle of the room. An attempt to make contact, but with what? The room slowly fills with whisper and touch. A woman, turning to catch herself in the mirror, is afraid the phone will start ringing and startle her. A gap-closer, not an equaliser. Beneath the bridges, faces around the fire, these, those. A ship colliding with the quayside, wind rising, lost among the rocks, visibility in a sea of buoys, fog. The story of where I shall end up once I’ve been travelling long enough. Exotic animals make a deep impression on the child. Eyes press half-closed. I know this might come to nothing, neither good nor bad. The dull clank of metal on bone, strikes at various consciousnesses, sometimes in Iceland, near the coast, whale bones and tanks. ...(more) ..................................................... Twisted tongues Miia Toivio Translated by David Hackston She said, it was I who said, alone, my feelings confused. Should I somehow have cleared my head, though all I wanted to do was write in the water? ‘Behind me I drag desire’s reflection, like the skirts of a boat sinking towards the depths,’ she once bespoke me. ‘Your skirts are heavy with algae and their smell would banish even the insects. A deer, swimming across a long lake, becomes entangled by the heel, only worsening things as it thrashes there, until it too falls straight down, never floating, to the bottom of the lake,’ I replied. She turned her back and leant against the wall. I couldn’t see her fingers as she, controlling the sound, ripped off a small, wriggling fin, closed it in her fist and turned towards me with an unnatural smile: * She who said nothing lay spoken there. She would rather tear out her tongue with her own hands than give her basket full of yellow plums, folded sheets and all that blended scent. In the blended scent she spoke, her voice through my voice: deny one thing, deny another, deny them all if you will, but no one will listen to your playing. That’s what it’s like: through a twisted tongue the body must strive forth or yield to the wishes of a little lass. Other winds will no longer blow: even sweet tumult will lead us to a wuthering wood, forever echoing with the sound of the summer earth, only the wind in the forest trees, the forest trees swing ding, ding, ding. ...(more) _______________________ Iceland Kim Høltermand _______________________ Shifting the (Im)balance Race and the Poetry Canon Evie Shockley (....) This convergence of critical conversation about Dove’s anthology (Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry) prompts me not to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of their critiques, nor to offer a defense of the anthology Dove produced, nor to unpack the racist implications of the scholars’ claims (separated from the question of intent). Several such responses, well worth reading, already appear in a variety of print and electronic publications. Instead, I want to contend that the commonalities and points of overlap between Perloff’s and Vendler’s takes on the anthology reveal the troubling role of race in U.S. literary culture at this moment. As Toni Morrison does in her incisive book Playing in the Dark, I question what racial discourse makes possible in a literary context, and highlight the way race stands in for matters of class, professional territoriality, and aesthetics at stake in this conversation. Race is not beside the point, but is made, through a trick of mirrors, to shadow all points. Race is raised quickly and repeatedly in both essays. Vendler’s review opens with a lament that Dove’s anthology damages the glorious, worldwide reputation of twentieth-century American poetry, a reputation founded on the work of such poets as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. She writes: “Rita Dove, a recent poet laureate (1993–1995), has decided, in her new anthology of poetry of the past century, to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors.” Perloff makes a similar point, just as early in her discussion of the anthology: “One surmises from the table of contents of this chronological survey that Dove, from her perspective as a woman of color, has included many more minority poets than is usually the case.” This racial quantification of the anthology’s contributors and pages (with its troubling echo of quota systems of previous decades) draws attention to what we might call the economy of the canon. Though the canon itself is intangible, the anthologies in which the canon is made, reiterated, or revised are quite material and have—in their print versions, at least—a limited amount of space. What concerns both scholars primarily, we might say, is the room in the anthology that is available or allotted to the poets and poetics they most appreciate. ...(more) _______________________ Wilhelmina Barns-Graham _______________________ Faith in the Unseen Curtis White’s ‘Science Delusion’ Eric Banks (....) Is there really a menace to the humanities in the breezy flourishes of a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Hawking? White believes that the remarks of such thinkers matter immensely in an environment that glorifies science, one in which lectures by theorists like Krauss attract more than one million YouTube viewers and a TED presentation of the “connectome” speculations of Sebastian Seung is a hot ticket while attendance at symphony halls dwindles. The connection between the two, as if the lovers of the classical repertory might not significantly overlap with the viewership of lectures on neuroscience, is the kind of implicit dichotomy assumed throughout “The Science Delusion.” White says that high culture and science are battling over a shared ground, and that the gain of one means the retreat of the other. And he is adamant that the emergence of a new form of science story­telling, wedded to entertainment outlets like TED Talks, is creating a monster that substitutes flashy wonder for hard thinking and insulates the practice of science from a real-world political context of value decisions, large capital investment and dubious technological offshoots. He is unhappiest when it comes to popular science journalism, which he views mostly as a malodorous brew of gushing prose mixed with a dash of snake oil: “The thing that I find most inscrutable about all of the recent books and essays that have sought to give mechanistic explanations for consciousness, personality, emotions, creativity, the whole human sensorium, is how happy the authors seem about it. They’re nearly giddy with the excitement, and so, for some reason, are many of their readers.” ...(more) _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ Playing the Blues: Pete Townshend's Who I Am and Music as Experimental Autobiography Tim Keane electronic book review (....) ... the proliferation of pronouns like "you" "we" or "I" in The Who's musical catalog reveals that the band's main lyricist, Pete Townshend, envisioned rock composition as a hypothetical dialogue in front of, and alongside his audience, around a shared autobiographical question: who am I? Townshend's extensive body of songwriting demonstrates an aptitude at infusing, into the subtext of the lyrics, a horizon of performer-audience interchangeability. The songs arise from severe tension as their various personae seek relief from profound autobiographical doubts. In the song "The Real Me" (1973) a rootless young London mod seeks to know himself by consulting his mother and his "shrink," his friends and his would-be lover. Driven into a breakneck sonic register by lead singer Roger Daltrey's delivery, the chorus of "The Real Me" ecstatically besieges both the singer’s implied self and the listener with an interrogation they are presumed to share: "Can you see the real me? Can you? Can you?" This conscious ambition to mark rock music as a new type of creative social autobiography hovers around The Who's songwriter Pete Townshend's official memoir, Who I Am (2012), published in late 2012 by HarperCollins, sixteen years after the book was contracted and thirty years after The Who retired as an active recording group. Given Townshend's public and private confrontations with identity, struggles which inform most of his music and many of which have made headlines, this memoir has a hard act to follow. In fact, the memoir's title Who I Am is a tacit acknowledgement that Townshend's creative autobiography already courses through his songwriting in ways that are far less apparent than in the work of other recent musician/memoirists, like Neil Young or Keith Richards. The Augustinian self-interrogation, "Who are you?" has already been answered across several decades by Townshend's music. In "I'm a Boy" (1965) a young man bristles at his English provinciality and complains about a forced cross-dressing by his sadistic parents. In "I'm One" (1973) a soulful, isolated "loser" attempts to resolve a near schizophrenic nervous breakdown with a mystical assertion about himself. In "I am an Animal" (1980) a middle-aged rock star acknowledges himself as a degenerate who has decided his wretched behavior has become, in fact, his reason for being. Such capsuled fictive autobiographies course throughout Townshend's songbook: "I'm the Face" (1964) "[I'm a] Substitute," (1966), "I'm Free" and "I'm a Sensation" (1969), "[I'm a] Seeker" (1970) "I am the Sea" (1973), "I'm Gonna Get Ya" (1980) "I am Secure (1985), and "I am Afraid (1993), along with other musical rejections of a fixed personality, like "I Can't Explain" (1965), "I've Had Enough" (1973) and "I Don't Even Know Myself" (1973). To paraphrase Walter Pater, then, we might ask, has Townshend's written autobiography that aspires to the condition of his music?...(more) permanent link

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• 07 Jun ' 11:04

  June 07, 2013 At the Edge of the WoodCharles Rennie Mackintosh 1913 Peter Culley: A Letter to Hammertownlemon hound 1. The orange chestnut canopy has shredded into a discarded hamper of wet umber, umber-orange, lacy amber, blood-orange & bloody amber rags through which tires carve calm channels in time, neat stripes of a general widening as the averages catch up. I snobbishly note on Shasta’s behalf the oddly spindly thighs of her underemployed big city sisters short-leashed by fedora dad or leopard mom insulting white bags threaded through their collars a badge of slavery– no sniff, no FIELD, no flicker. On the soundwalk the light is louder than I remember, darkest in the undertree gloom dramatic gravel bony underfoot until cranked across by cable car, eighties rain filtering through a carpentered forties porch onto the basement suite stairwell. Twin ghosts of my brother pass each other at different times & don’t look up. wary, preoccupied, in transit. Peter Culley at and New Star Books The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power:In conversation with Giorgio Agambenverso Perhaps there is nowhere else in the world, apart from Europe, where such a variety of cultures and life forms is perceptible – at least at valuable moments. Earlier on, as I see it, politics was expressed in the idea of the Roman empire, later the Roman-German empire. The whole however always left the particularities of the peoples intact. It is not easy to say what could emerge today in place of this. But quite certainly a political entity by the name of Europe can only proceed from this awareness of the past. It is precisely for this reason that the present crisis strikes me as so dangerous. We have to imagine unity first of all under an awareness of differences. But quite contrary to this, in the European states, schools and universities are being demolished and financially undermined, the very institutions that should perpetuate our culture and arouse living contact between past and present. This undermining goes together with a growing museumification of the past. We have the beginning of this in many cities that are transformed into historical zones, and in which the inhabitants are forced to feel themselves tourists in their own life world.Is this creeping museumification the counterpart of a creeping impoverishment? It is quite clear that we are not just faced with economic problems, but with the existence of Europe as a whole – starting with our relationship to the past. The only place in which the past can live is the present. And if the present no longer perceives its own past as something living, then universities and museums become problematic. Mark Thwaite "Sea Pink, Holy Island" July 1901Charles Rennie Mackintosh(7 June 1868 - 10 December 1928) I type, therefore I am More human beings can write and type their every thought than ever before. Something to celebrate or deplore? Tom Chatfieldaeon . .. All future histories of modern language will be written from a position of explicit and overwhelming information — a story not of darkness and silence but of data, and of the verbal outpourings of billions of lives. Where once words were written by the literate few on behalf of the many, now every phone and computer user is an author of some kind. And — separated from human voices — the tasks to which typed language, or visual language, is being put are steadily multiplying. In many ways, mass articulacy is a crisis of originality. Something always implicit has become ever more starkly explicit: that words and ideas do not belong only to us, but play out without larger currents of human feeling. There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity. In his essay ‘Writing: or, the Pattern Between People’ (1932), W H Auden touched on the paradoxical relationship between the flow of written words and their ability to satisfy those using them: Since the underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another, as the sense of loneliness increases, more and more books are written by more and more people, most of them with little or no talent. Forests are cut down, rivers of ink absorbed, but the lust to write is still unsatisfied. Onscreen, today’s torrents of pixels exceed anything Auden could have imagined. Yet the hyper-verbal loneliness he evoked feels peculiarly contemporary. Increasingly, we interweave our actions and our rolling digital accounts of ourselves: curators and narrators of our life stories, with a matching move from internal to external monologue. It’s a realm of elaborate shows in which status is hugely significant — and one in which articulacy itself risks turning into a game, with attention and impact (retweets, likes) held up as the supreme virtues of self-expression. Charles Rennie Mackintoshand the Glasgow School of Art David Pollock The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture Ian AngusFree PDF In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity, power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadian philosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a critical theory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into three parts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelian confidence and progressivism that has come to dominate Canadian intellectual life. Through an analysis of the work of several prominent Canadian thinkers, among them Charles Taylor and C. B. Macpherson, Angus suggests that Hegelian frames of reference are inadequate, failing as they do to accommodate the fact of English Canada’s continuing indebtedness to empire. The second part focuses on national identity and political culture, including the role of Canadian studies as a discipline, adapting its critical method to Canadian political culture. The first two parts culminate in the positive articulation, in Part 3, of author’s own conception, one that is at once more utopian and more tragic than that of the first two parts. Here, Angus develops the concept of locative thought—the thinking of a people who have undergone dispossession, “of a people seeking its place and therefore of a people that has not yet found its place.” Why Rob Ford Is The Amy Winehouse Of Canadian Politics Andrew Potter The Social Contract - Spring 2013 Volume 23, Number 3 ...“The Manic Quest To Grow Canada's Population” Lisa Robertson interviewwith Andy Fitch Much of my critical prose remains occasional simply because I don’t have much time. When I write a catalogue essay (as in the case of some Soft Architecture pieces) or give a lecture (as with most of the Nilling projects), I try to make that occasion work toward my own current interests. Here I had the idea to construct a book of linked essays, loosely exploring a conceptual field and used a series of lecture invitations to explore that concept. I never have the time to both fulfill my institutional invitations and to write an unrelated book. I work slowly and just can’t crank out six essays. Similarly, back when I started The Office for Soft Architecture’s occasional works, I supported myself as a freelance writer so had to find a means of bringing my economic life together with my research and creative interests. I suppose I foreground these contexts out of gratitude. Canadian art writing includes a kind of minor tradition of the parallel critical text. My prose has developed in this context. I don’t believe that practices of critique need to make art and its institutions more palatable for anybody. I don’t think literary criticism inevitably should make texts easier to consume. Interpretation doesn’t compel me, not as a reader or a writer. It interests me to elaborate upon a work’s problems—in the most positive sense, to probe the problematics I discover (not to gloss over these problems, but to complicate them further, to make them juicier). Often that seems the most engaged and respectful stance. Hadley and Maxwell, the artists whose installation I responded to for “Perspectors/ Melancholia,” don’t want critics to turn their juicy, complex, problematic work into something easy. They want viewers to engage its difficulty, its layeredness, multiplicity, multi-textuality, openness. My job does not consist in creating closure, but rather exploring the openness I find present in a work. The ConversantJune 2013 ...a monthly journal featuring serial interview projects, talk poetries, and interviews between poets and other language-based artists. It publishes both transcriptions and multimedia recordings.

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