Page2RRS

• 19 May ' 20:45

  May 20, 2012 Five Works of Theory You Should Consider Reading Christopher HiggsHTMLGIANT It always surprises me when creative people admit they don’t enjoy reading theory. Aside from the bountiful inspiration of ideas it provides, certain theoretical works can also inspire formal techniques. For proof, check out E.M. Cioran’s approach to the philosophical prose poem in something like The Temptation to Exist or A Short History of Decay. Or check out Luce Irigaray’s lyricism in This Sex Which Is Not One. Tons of other examples abound, from Baudrillard’s fragments to Benjamin’s montages, Blanchot’s récits to Bataille’s grotesques. Part of the aversion to theory, as far as I can tell, comes from the mistaken assumption that the genre we call theory should be read differently than the genres we call fiction or poetry, because it’s “critical” rather than “creative.” On the contrary, I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction, which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate. I recognize that my position is contentious. I’ve taken heat in the past for advising people to suspend their desire for comprehension while reading theory. For reasons unknown, some readers still think understanding a text is important. I’m not one of those people. I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things to understand them. What follows are five works that lend themselves to a reading strategy conducive to works of fiction or poetry. Granted, between poetry and fiction a demarcation is said to exist, and granted some read the one different than the other, and granted different styles within different genres require different heuristics, I think readers would benefit from considering the following works as “creative” rather than merely “critical.” "Tree for Goat in the Snow" Nathaniel OttingBig Tree Poem Feature 15th Anniversary of Big Bridge Ray DiPalma - 66 new recordings on PennSound Against the Infantilization of the Natural History MuseumJustin Erik Halldór Smith The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals' bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out. Morning after rainAlbert-Edouard Drains Making the Internet Safe for Anarchy Dmitry Orlov Thanks to vastly increased computational power, the emphasis is now shifting from enforcing the law to flagging as aberrant any sort of behavior that the system does not quite understand. That is, it is not looking for violations of specific laws, but for unusual patterns.

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• 19 May ' 10:23

  May 19, 2012 Houston, Texas John Vachon May 1943 What the Wood Remembers Tom Clark What words would the wood remember, if the wood could remember words? Would the wood remember what was said in this old house of words forever lost, where I wanted to live, in the immaterial wood of the mind, when immobilized, remembering the picture without having it before me, but recalling it to the mind's eye, as a kind of meditation, lying on the metal table, under the bright light, in the passage over the bridge between worlds, the ruinous world to come and the world already ruined and left behind, those fossil worlds, those petrified woods, those stone worlds made of dead wood and dried blood and the ruins of historical time -- these pitiful reminders of mind, these unintelligible echoes of words, these woods of inarticulate echoes, in which everything is heard twice, and then again heard, for a third time?...(more) _______________________ Puddle Roberto Boccaccino via _______________________ ISSUE ONE « Epicentre Magazine Two Poems by Rupert M. Loydell Salvage I am unriddling the world. My secret history is on the shelf, neither secret nor much of a history, just a line of books I brought into being, some words and pictures in print. Do not assume it is true, that this ever happened, let alone that I meant what I said. Grey skies followed me here; cold memory. I am with name, am not myself today. We used to sing on long car journeys but now it is headphones and music in the back seat, child songs and debris, wind sweeping the way ahead, clearing out the future. (....) Sometimes I make myself invisible and watch the shadows grow, crawl after you into memories of boats and beaches, dusk across the fields, and the skies in 1982. These are dying thoughts you don’t deserve, ruins of a life I hoped to hear the morning say; but all I got was freezing rain, low drones in the distance and recycled images like this. We all know that you have been and gone, all know this weather is normal for November and that someone stole the stars and moon. I have been tongue wrestling with myself and lost, am more fragile than I thought. (....) ...(more) Rupert M Loydell - Shearsman Books _______________________ Fisherman 1899 Albert-Edouard Drains (1855-1925) _______________________ Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces, No. 1 (2011) Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, Jacob Lund (eds.) Noise at the Interface [pdf] Andrew Prior The notion of noise occupies a contested territory, in which it is framed as pollution and detritus even as it makes its opposite a possibility. Noise is always defined in opposition to something else, even if this ‘other’ is not quite clear. I am interested in exploring noise in the context of ‘the interface’ and draw historically on information theory which defines noise in opposition to signal. (....) ... noise is fundamental to the concept of Information Theory and predetermining an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated (through resolution bandwidth, and encoding), a necessary stage in defining what is and isn’t noise. Despite enormous strides forward in technology since Information Theory was at the ‘cutting edge’, its legacy is one of literally millions of interfaces based on its reductive logic. At this scale, the question of what is noise and what is signal, what is an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated, and how signal and noise is differentiated is thrown into stark relief, drastically altering our experience of technology, culture and biopolitics. _______________________ Roberto Boccaccino permanent link

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• 17 May ' 18:02

  May 17, 2012 Photogram Susan Bee (1978) E P C digital library _______________________ Speculative Realism, the Commons, and Politics Larval Subjects (....) ... I just don’t think that we can give a “one size fits all” account of the ethical and political because there isn’t a set of eternal and unchanging problems belonging to the world. Rather, as entities enter into new relations with one another, new problems are generated and new values and norms are called for. Instead of asking “what is the ethics and politics prescribed by onticology?”, we should instead ask “what are the problems and what values, what norms, do they generate?” At this point, no doubt, I’m sure that others will cry “but that’s relativism! that gives us no plan of action!” I wish I had a better response to this charge. All I can say is that first, yes, I hold that systems of value and norms are relative to problems. Having learned my lessons well from Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, it’s impossible for me to see how those things that become “issues” at any given point in history aren’t the result of problems specific to the problems that animate those circumstances. Second, charges of relativism and historicism are always accompanied by charges that one must therefore advocate Aztec sacrifice, the rightness of the Nazis had they won, etc., etc. Yet while I can readily see how problems can generate norms and values that compel people to act and refuse certain disgusting and reprehensible solutions, I’ve never seen a value or a norm prevent racist and sexist oppression, murder, the holocaust, or mass sacrifice. The value of a value and a norm lies in motivating people to act to assemble things differently, not in preventing atrocities. Finally, third, while there are no eternal and unchanging norms because norms are always a response to problems, it doesn’t follow from this that we can’t evaluate solutions and collectives and distinguish those collectives that are better and worse than others. Certainly pathological collectives that are characterized by profound instability and tendencies towards self-destruction are worse than collectives that do not share these characteristics. An ethics of problems and solutions thus calls us to evaluate the features of systems or assemblages that tend towards self-destruction and those that do not. Maybe I’m sneaking a universal, transcendent, and eternal value in through the back door here. I don’t know....(more) _______________________ Jeremy Waldron delivers the inaugral Chichele Lecture (....) ... the chair whose sixth occupancy we are inaugurating this afternoon is not devoted to political science; it is devoted to social and political theory. But with regard to the theory of politics, there are similar choices to be made. Where should we direct our philosophical energies? Should we focus on institutions? Or should we focus on the virtues—looking for example, to test Machiavelli’s claim that politics demands a set of virtues quite different from those extolled in the Christian tradition,or the claim of some political theorists that neither a democracy nor a republic can survive without the prevalence of certain virtues of self-restraint among the politically active section of the population. Is that correct? Or is there a version of the Hume/Madison thesis for subjects as well as their rulers? Can we so design our institutions in a modern democracy that a democratic constitution can survive the corruption of the people, their obsession with material wealth, and the revealed unwillingness to sacrifice anything for their country? So, which is it? —structures or character? institutions or virtue?...(more) via Jim Johnson _______________________ La Piscine Sarah Moon 1999 lens culture _______________________ Interface: A Forum for and about Social Movements volume 4 issue 1. The season of revolution: the Arab Spring and European mobilizations permanent link

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• 16 May ' 11:48

  Occupy Directory

  May 16, 2012 Old Mask VI 2006 John Stezaker Out Of Focus: Photography Saatchi Gallery via _______________________ Under the Gaze of TheoryBoris Groys (....) ... theory starts to see the figure of the meditating philosopher and its own position in the world from a perspective of, as it were, a normal, profane, external gaze. Theory sees the living body of the philosopher through aspects that are not available to direct vision. This is something that the philosopher, like any other subject, necessarily overlooks: we cannot see our own body, its positions in the world and the material processes that take place inside and outside it (physical and chemical, but also economical, biopolitical, sexual, and so on). This means that we cannot truly practice self-reflection in the spirit of the philosophical dictum, “know yourself.” And what is even more important: we cannot have an inner experience of the limitations of our temporal and spatial existence. We are not present at our birth—and we will be not present at our death. That is why all the philosophers who practiced self-reflection came to the conclusion that the spirit, the soul, and reason are immortal. Indeed, in analyzing my own thinking process, I can never find any evidence of its finitude. To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time I need the gaze of the Other. I read my death in the eyes of Others. That is why Lacan says that the eye of the Other is always an evil eye, and Sartre says that “Hell is other people.” Only through the profane gaze of Others may I discover that I do not only think and feel—but also was born, live, and will die....(more) e-flux journal issue 35 _______________________ Oguinquit, Maine 1919 Niles Spencer b. May 18, 1893 _______________________ What Kind of Times Are These Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012) There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees. _______________________ View of the Studio Socrates & Adam and Eve c. 1922 Brancusi: The Photographs Bruce Silverstein Gallery via _______________________ Enculturation 11 Master Hands, A Video Mashup Round Table (....) Master Hands is a 1936 film sponsored by the Chevrolet Motor Company that shows the inner workings of a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. It is available for download at the Internet Archive, and it offers rich material for mashups and remixes. Richard had been considering a project involving Master Hands for some time, and when he shared his mashup of the film with Jim in May it triggered a discussion between the two of us about how such a work might be published. Richard was not interested in writing an essay to accompany his video project – he wanted the video to stand on its own. Jim suggested that the best way to engage with such work was to create another mashup, and we began discussing a round table format in which other scholars would create their own mashups using the same source footage and respondents would discuss the mashups. During the summer, we invited four other scholars to create their own mashups of Master Hands. Richard, bonnie kyburz, Jeff Rice, Jody Shipka, and Anthony Stagliano were presented with four constraints. Mashup artists had to use footage from Master Hands, could not provide a companion text, had to create a mashup that was no longer than ten minutes, and were not permitted to see anyone else’s work until all five were completed. We also invited five others to act as respondents. Those respondents are Will Burdette, Bump Halbritter, Billie Hara, Jentery Sayers, and Geof Sirc, and they will spend the next week discussing the mashups. At the end of the week, the conversation will be closed and the comments will remain as part of this publication. _______________________ Politics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies John Miller e-flux Part 1 and 2 _______________________ The myth that Canary Wharf did east London any good There are few places so utterly implicated in our discontents as this symbol of the ludicrousness of 'trickle-down' economics Owen Hatherley permanent link

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• 14 May ' 21:57

  May 15, 2012 photo - mw Wynd Andrew Greig It’s back again, the how of rain pleating off leaky roans, binding strands that curve down stanks, curl by high-walled wynds and dreels, past sweetie shops with one faint bulb, bell faltering as the pinnied widow shuffles through from her back room –What can I do for you the day? She hands me now no Galaxy or Bounty Bar but a kindly, weary face, smear of lipstick for her public, the groove tartan slippers wore in linoleum from sitting-room to counter, over thirty years: the lost fact of her existence. Andrew Geig at Poetry International Web and interviewed at Quercus Books Martin O’Donnell’s BoatAlice MyersBest Scottish Poems 2011 The Scottish Poetry Library ‘Writ in Water’ – Shelley, Byron, Keats and the Italian Sea Nicoletta Asciuto Did sea define the land or land the sea? This is the question Seamus Heaney asked himself back in the Sixties while standing on the wild, sea-tormented coasts of the Aran Islands, which have challenged proudly the Atlantic Ocean and its endless waves from time immemorial. I always think of this line by Heaney when going back in mind to the Golfo dei Poeti, that is, the Poets’ Gulf, in Liguria, Italy. Liguria is very famous for its gulfs but the Poets’ Gulf is possibly the most closed and the most embracing of all, seeming in its smallness almost a lake – if not for a little break right where the two ends should meet. Was it the land that stretched endlessly towards the sea and managed to impose itself on it? Or was it the sea that broke the land and took partial possession of it? The Literateur "The answer lies not in repeating lost gestures, methods and sounds or calling for a failed utopianism, but in rethinking the very possibility of the lostness of that temporality itself." Against All Ends: Hauntology, Aesthetics, Ontology Liam Sprod3:am Although it is already old, considering hauntology as either genre, aesthetic or zeitgeist is problematic; and is so for precisely all of the reasons that it claims to be each of these things. As nostalgia for lost futures or mourning for utopia, it falls into for the exact problems of utopianism that lead to its initial loss. It is also these problems that hauntology was developed to overcome, so its reduction precisely to them is somewhat ironic, if not cause for yet another mourning. Thus through exploring the way in which hauntology has been co-opted by the over-theoretisation of music, and indeed art more generally, in such a way that repeats these problems, I will also show the way for a return to hauntology as a solution to these problems and the affirmation of a more radical thinking for the future. This path will also necessitate a return to the origin of the word hauntology in the work of Jacques Derrida; an origin that has often been maligned and marginalised in the subsequent use of the term — a parricide that foreshadows the return of the betrayed father. The necessary key to approaching Derrida and the nature of hauntology can be found in Simon Critchley’s observation that “Derrida will tirelessly insist, the closure is not the end and he persistently places himself against any and all apocalyptic discourses on the end (whether the end of man, the end of philosophy, or the end of history)”. It is in light of this opposition to all ends that hauntology should be considered. An Englishman in Moscow 1914Kasimir Malevichd. May 15, 1935 From Biopower to Psychopower Bernard Stiegler's Pharmacology of Mnemotechnologies Nathan Van Campctheory ... despite Foucault's pronounced intention to shift the focus of his research to technologies of self-formation that would enable subjects to regain a certain amount of autonomy in the face of modern power mechanisms, this aspect of his work has been largely neglected in recent radical political theory. Although it is now widely recognized among critical theorists that Foucault's work needs serious revisions for relevance in today's context, few have yet taken serious interest in the conclusions that should have to be drawn from his announcement at the Vermont seminar. On the contrary, many of those who claim to be still working in a Foucauldian spirit simply assume that it is his famous concept of biopower that requires renewed attention. The Aesthetic Politics of Affect Todd Cronan reviews The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. SeigwortNONSITErepublished from Radical Philosophy March/April 2012 (Lauren) Berlant’s analysis focuses on the moment in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in which Marx describes the “abolition of private property” as signaling the “emancipation of all human senses”. No longer seeing objects as fetishes and nature as a matter of use, the senses, Marx says, become “theoreticians”. Berlant draws on this passage in Marx to understand John Ashbery’s untitled send-up of the American Dream. According to Berlant, “our senses are not yet theoreticians because they are bound up by the rule, the map, the inherited fantasy, and the hum of worker bees who fertilize materially the life we are moving through”. The problem, for Berlant, is the suburban fantasy “of the endless weekend,” the “consumer’s happy circulation in familiarity,” and the “privilege of being bored with life”. (Gregg’s essay similarly takes up the regressive “politics of the cubicle”.) As a reading of Ashbery this might be right, but as an account of Marx, it isn’t. For Marx, of course, the problem is the privilege of private property, not the “privilege of being bored.” One could safely eradicate boredom, without it bearing on the problem of capital. The anxious worker, after all, lacks (and perhaps looks forward to) the privilege of being bored. And affects, despite their “sensorium-shaking” transformation of the “bourgeois senses”, begin to look a lot like the fetishized private property Marx scrutinized. Affects are, Berlant insists, “radically private, and pretty uncoded”, and like the fetishized commodity, they make their dazzling appearance with the labor behind them obscured. These private experiences are in fact beyond analysis—an affect, after all, “is just a fact”. the page Open Journal of Philosophy Vol.2 No.1 2012The Post-Modern Mind. A Reconsideration of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975) from the Viewpoint of an Interdisciplinary History of Ideas Roland Benedikter, Judith Hilber Scientific Research Publishing an academic publisher of open access journals. It also publishes academic books and conference proceedings. SCIRP currently has more than 200 open access journals in the areas of science, technology and medicine. The Asiatic Company Buildings 1902Vilhelm Hammershųi b.15 May 1864 AgostiD. E. Stewardagni Hiking back out, five spruce grouse appear trailside from the brush The males with their black throats and breasts, high-style elegant Matter-of-fact confidence in their peck and search, peck and peer and scratch, search and mince ahead The gallinaceous manner of quail, partridges, grouse, turkeys, jungle chickens, tinamou, pheasants, Guinea fowl is satisfying to encounter, anywhere In their ur-domesticated chicken ways as self-contained, and as amazing, as moose and their intelligence Back toward town three hundred meters away across French Lake, a huge solitary bull with the stolid dignity of a full rack When a big bull moose goes into its lofty trot across a pasture or woodlot opening it has a riveting command Down from French Lake into Chéticamp along the Gulf, the wharves and fish houses, the harbor itself once cod-rich now mostly a port for whale-watch tours The Governor-General, Chinese born, will arrive soon for an Acadian lunch, community tour, schmoozing in French and English Acadians deal with bilingualism well, taking it in the natural order of things, not as a cause like nationalistic Québecois North of its cities Canada becomes tunicate degrees of isolation Also by D. E. Steward JuinoMaggiotOktombroAugustos

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• 14 May ' 11:57

  May 14, 2012 south of Kaladar Sheffield Conservation Area photo - mw _______________________ A Disturbance of Reality Dylan Trigg Side Effects “One would suppose, then,” so Freud writes in his essay on the uncanny “that the uncanny would always be an area in which a person was unsure of his way around: the better oriented he was in the world around him, the less likely he would be to find the objects and occurrences in it uncanny.” Freud alerts us to the relationship between orientation and uncanniness. At stake in this relation is not only the issue of finding one’s way around in a geometrical or strictly spatial sense. Rather, the experience of being disorientated carries with it a loss of homeworld, and thus the emergence of uncanny angst. The world becomes uncanny precisely through being disoriented. If disorientation coincides with uncanniness, then can we readily infer the opposite; namely, that being orientated means being “at-home”? To be “at-home.” In one clear sense, this ontological achievement has the advantage of establishing a centre of being in a contingent world. Perhaps this centre is not the physical locality of the house, as it would be for the agoraphobic patient, but instead an experience defined by the body. Either way, the home and the centre entwine, such that one knows where one is, even—especially—if one is in an alien landscape. In this respect, orientation attains a level of homeliness, insofar as it produces a familiar world. The world is familiar insofar as it can be placed—indeed, insofar as it has a place at all. ...(more) _______________________ Tribe of Palaeopithecus Jiang Tao Translation by Brian Holton the forest was filled with fallen fruit, a scarlet carpet whose origin lay in geological change the waters had receded, the tiger’s sabre tooth was rotten around the empty ground we discussed the future the old ones had just crawled out from evolution, waving their old fists the young ones could no longer hold their tongues, they’d got to be the first to eat the sika deer: ambition to move a mountain lacking though they could ford the river, north and south the fields were just a dining table the so-called republic too rumbustious nevertheless autumn’s despotism drove off mosquitoes and flies fortunately we were all standing upright ...(more) Modern Poetry in Translation _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ Declaration (2012) Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri pdf available at Monoskop/log This is not a manifesto. Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although now only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change. Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people. Today's social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world. More important, perhaps, the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths. How can their declaration become the basis for constituting a new and sustainable society? How can those principles and truths guide us in reinventing how we relate to each other and our world? In their rebellion, the multitudes must discover the passage from declaration to constitution. ..................................................... On Hardt and Negri’s “Declaration” Nick Mirzoeff So Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have published a Declaration regarding the global social movements of 2011 and their implications. If you’ve followed their trilogy from Empire to Commonwealth, there are not too many surprises here but, as ever, some great formulations. Perhaps most usefully they can serve as the lightning rod for the debate over parties and leadership (they’re against) and in starting a new discussion over “commoning.” (....) In an early formulation that they return to often, Hardt and Negri (HN) quote Ralph Ellison’s invisible man: “Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle. This eloquently speaks to the sense that the social movements articulate in murmurs that cannot be heard by self-declared elites and in media that are not known to them. To explore these frequencies HN use four main figures: I>the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented. ...(more)Occupy 2012 A daily observation on Occupy _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ My Sister is a Road Map Andrew Cothren My sister Anna is a road map of Indiana. On the day my parents brought her back from the hospital, she was folded up and swaddled in light blue blankets, and she smelled like talcum powder and ink. I held her for the first time on the living room couch. As she squirmed awkwardly in my arms I placed my ear on the city of Marion and could hear her heartbeats: soft, crinkling echoes in her paper chest. She began to cry, her surface warping with wetness, and our mother quickly took her from me and cradled her on the back porch, letting the sunlight slowly wick the moisture away, rocking her to sleep. Growing up, we’d spend hours in the woods behind our house, lifting large rocks, gathering the salamanders and beetles from the damp soil underneath. Anna would fold up one of her corners into a little paper pocket, where we’d hide all the small creatures we could. We snuck them past our parents and kept them in old shoeboxes under our beds, carefully placing leaves and sticks inside and poking holes in the lids with a pair of safety scissors. In spite of our care, our small pets would always end up stiff and lifeless among the dirty clothes in the laundry basket....(more) Drunken Boat Spring 2012 _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ Anticipate Doom: The Millions Interviews Lįszló Krasznahorkai translated by George Szirtes (....) What I can’t forget is the world we have created. Everything is of equal interest in the world except man himself. When I stand on the top of a mountain and look down on the valley, seeing the trees in the distance, the deer, the horses and the stream below, then look up at the sky, the clouds and the birds, it is all perfect and magical right up to the moment that, suddenly and brutally, a human being walks into view. The spectacle I was enjoying from the mountain top is simply ruined. As concerns the structure of my novels I am less certain since I never really think about it. But since you are interested all I can say is that the structure isn’t something I decide but what is generated by the madness and intensity of my characters. Or rather that it is as if someone were speaking behind them, but I myself don’t know who it is. What is certain is that I am afraid of him. But it is he that speaks, and his speeches are perfectly mad. Under the circumstances it is self evident that I have no control over anything. Structure? Controlling the structure? It is he who controls everything, it is the furious speed of his madness that decides it all. And given this fury and madness it is not only impossible to remember anything or even think — the only recourse is forgetting. ...(more) via _______________________ David Byrne b. May 14, 1952 permanent link

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• 11 May ' 22:09

  May 11, 2012 Burned TreesRené Groeblivia The Indoors is EndlessTomas Tranströmer So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss. — from New and Collected Poems by Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton. Promenade II 1920Paul Nashb. May 1889 interview with Rebecca Solnit Maps, like photographs, show specifics that dismantle clichés. They make generalities—“There were 99 murders in San Francisco in 2008”—precise and poignant when you show the exact location of each death. You look at that map—one of the ones in Infinite City—and suddenly you see how that number 99 breaks down into 99 tragedies, into specific locations where you might go yourself. Maps invite us to locate ourselves in relation to whatever they show, to enter the labyrinth that is each map and to find our way out by grasping what is mapped. They are always invitations to enter, to arrive, to understand, in a way that is different than the invitations of visual and written art. I’ve also learned that people delight in maps in a very particular way. Terrain.org A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments via Steve Himmer The Sadness of Post-Workerism, or "Art and Immaterial Labour" Conference: A Sort-of Review David Graeber 2008 Perhaps this seems unduly harsh. I have, after all, trashed the very notion of immaterial labor, accused post-Workerists (or at least the strain represented at this conference) of using flashy, superficial postmodern arguments to disguise a clunky antiquated version of Marxism, and suggested they are engaged in an essentially theological exercise which while it might be helpful for those interested in playing games of artistic fashion or imagining broad historical vistas provides almost nothing in the way of useful tools for concrete social analysis of the art world or anything else. I think that everything I said was true. But I don’t want to leave the reader with the impression that there is nothing of value here. First of all, I actually do agree that thinkers like these are useful in helping us conceptualize the historical moment. And not only in the prophetic-political-magical sense of offering descriptions that aim to bring new realities into being. I find the idea of a revolutionary future that is already with us, the notion that in a sense we already live in communism, in its own way quite compelling. The problem is, being prophets, they always have to frame their arguments in apocalyptic terms. Would it not be better to, as I suggested earlier, reexamine the past in the light of the present? Perhaps communism has always been with us. We are just trained not to see it. Perhaps everyday forms of communism are really—as Kropotkin in his own way suggested in Mutual Aid, even though even he was never willing to realize the full implications of what he was saying—the basis for most significant forms of human achievement, even those ordinarily attributed to capitalism. If we can extricate ourselves from the shackles of fashion, the need to constantly say that whatever is happening now is necessarily unique and unprecedented (and thus, in a sense, unchanging, since everything apparently must always be this way) we might be able to grasp history as a field of permanent possibility, in which there is no particular reason we can’t at least try to begin building a redemptive future at any time. There have been artists trying to contribute to doing so, in small ways, since time immemorial—some, as part of bona fide social movements. It’s not clear that social theorists—good ones anyway—or doing anything all so entirely different. Paul Nash and The Wittenham Clumps The Mystery Of The Missing ClocksDavid Edwardsmedialens We live in a society, then, that responds to the problem of headaches with endless glossy adverts for innumerable kinds of painkillers. It does not advertise the dramatic power of simple tap water to relieve and prevent headaches caused by dehydration, notably after some kind of exertion. But the greatest missing ‘clock’ of all concerns the most fundamental issue of all: how best to respond to the suffering of the human condition. It involves the kind of solution the filter system cannot abide – one that is completely free, instantly and universally available, unmonopolisable, requiring no equipment or specialist training. Although it is the living heart of the great mystical teachings, it is almost never discussed by the gatekeepers of organised religion – it is just too simple, too available, requiring no priesthood, no temple, no rituals, no scriptures, no hotline to an invented Cosmic Father Figure. As a result, it has been understood but almost completely unknown for literally thousands of years. The rogue mystic, Osho – one of the most insightful and outspoken, and therefore maligned, of spiritual teachers – gave a clear example indicating the general theme: ‘You are sad. Go into your sadness rather than escaping into some activity, into some occupation, rather than going to see a friend or to the movie or turning on the radio or the TV. Rather than escaping from it, turning your back towards it, drop all activity. Close your eyes, go into it, see what it is, why it is – and see without condemning it, because if you condemn you will not be able to see the totality of it… ‘And you will be surprised: the deeper you go into it, the more it starts dispersing. If a person can go into his sorrow deeply he will find all sorrow has evaporated. And in that evaporation of sorrow is joy, is bliss. Bliss has not to be found outside, against sorrow. Bliss has to be found deep, hidden behind the sorrow itself. You have to dig into your sorrowful states and you will find a wellspring of joy.’ (Osho, The Book Of Wisdom) The statement that ‘Bliss has not to be found outside, against sorrow’ runs counter to exactly everything our consumerist society tells us. In a world of action-oriented problem-solving it seems absurd to suggest that the simple tap water of awareness, of watching, could be the solution to fundamental aspects of human misery (without denying, of course, the importance of rational inquiry). Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III)Paul Nash (1944) Quentin Meillassoux and the Crackpot Sublime Adam Kotsko looks at Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren"a "decipherment" of Stéphane Mallarmé's enigmatic final poem, Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard (A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)" Meillassoux’s flair for the dramatic twist is one of those rare coincidences when a philosopher’s style and thought match up perfectly. His entire work is centered on the conviction that the universe is a much stranger place than we ever could have guessed, leaving room for even the most outlandish hopes. In his first major published work, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency , he argues for a view of the world centered on contingency rather than necessity — that is to say, for a universe ruled by chance rather than by any foundational laws. If our world appears to be regulated by immutable natural laws, that’s just a coincidence, a state of affairs that could easily change. Similarly, if it seems indisputable that there’s currently no God, that’s no reason to assume a God couldn’t pop into existence at some future date. It seems natural, then, that Meillassoux would be drawn to Mallarmé’s meditation on contingency and chance ......(more) The New Inquiry

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• 09 May ' 06:37

  May 09, 2012 Maurice Sendak June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012 Photograph: Tim Knox Maurice Sendak on ‘Bumble-Ardy’ paris review December 27, 2011 (....) In reading Bumble-Ardy, I was reminded of that terrifying image from Outside Over There, when the infant is being hauled out the window by goblins, replaced by a horrible, uncanny ice decoy, while her older sister looks the other way. Is Bumble another “ice baby,” another kind of living stillborn? I hadn’t quite thought of it in those terms, but I like that identification. It resembles what actually occurred to me as a child. Terrible things happened and were not explained. My parents were ignorant peasants from the old world. They came here and knew nothing. My life in Brooklyn was in constant danger because of my bad health. There was danger everywhere. The Lindbergh baby, the hundred-million-dollar baby—there we were, potential victims, all of us. Not even wealthy parents could protect their children. So what did kids do? You had to form a kind of fake life, to protect yourself. Because you learn very quickly that parents can’t protect you. It leaves a lurking fear. You never feel safe, never believe, really, that your parents are any safer than you, or could protect you from the unknown....(more) Maurice Sendak, who let children be just what they wanted Morven Crumlish Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday, was one of the few – and rare – writers who truly wrote for children. Not to entertain their parents, or to improve their social skills – he told the stories that children live themselves, wobbling on the uncomfortable brink between dreams, imagination and reality, where truth is whatever can be remembered, whether it really happened or not. (....) Sendak's children are given the power to overcome the monsters, to escape the creepy night-time bakers. They are crowned kings, and have sufficent influence to make everyone "be still"; they can fashion dough into an aeroplane and fly away – no wonder children don't find his books as unsettling as adults do. Even being sent to your room is no hardship, when the walls become the world all around, and you can sail off in your bed to wreak havoc elsewhere. Sendak makes children the promise of growing up. One day this will come true, and you will have the opportunity and the means to leave, and to choose, and yes, perhaps you will choose to sail back to mother, but by then she will be lucky to have you....(more) _______________________ Jüri Mildeberg The Swamp Ladies of Estonia 2 50 Watts _______________________ The death of American secularism Jacques Berlinerblau New Humanist Volume 127 Issue 3 May/June 2012 (....) When, how, and why did secularism become such a problematic and controversial idea in America? Why have both of the nation’s major political parties and three branches of federal government turned their backs on it? Why has jacking-up (as the American footballers like to say) an already woozy secularism become such a lucrative sport for political and religious demagogues alike? (....) Culture Warriors love a void. With secularists perennially incapable of articulating and agreeing upon what they stand for, their opponents are more than happy to do it for them. Caspar Melville memorably quipped in The Guardian: “Secularism is the handy one-word distillation for all that is wrong in the modern world. Consumerism, divorce, drugs, Harry Potter, prostitution, Twitter, relativism, Big Brother, lack of moral compass, lack of community cohesion, lack of moral values, vajazzling.” A quarter-century ago things were scarcely different. In 1985 a New York Times writer joked that Secular Humanism stood for “everything they [the Religious Right] are opposed to, from atheism to the United Nations, from sex education to the theory of evolution to the writings of Hemingway and Hawthorne.” The time has arrived for some sort of open, frank, melanomas-and-all discussion of what secularism does (and does not) entail. This conversation would benefit from a dash of critical distance and objectivity. In the academy, the subject of secularism lies pincered between two of the most ideologically rigid detractors imaginable. On the one side, a postmodernist and postcolonial Left has argued – in academic jargon of impressive incomprehensibility – that secularism is something called a “discursive formation” and a sinister policy henchman of “Enlightenment Reason” (a very odious thing in such quarters). On the other, the religious Right imagines it as an enemy of religious freedom and close personal friend of Nazism, Communism, Jihadism, what have you....(more) via Pierre Joris _______________________ Babylonian - Economic Document circa 549 BC Commons:Walters Art Museum Baltimore, Maryland "On February 2, 2012, Walters Art Museum adopted Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license for all text and images published on their website art.thewalters.org and began working with Wikimedia Commons on mass upload of about 20 thousand images. On March 26, uploading was completed." _______________________ Agnomia Róbert Gįl transl. from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman exquisite corpse This is a tautology of every moment, as if every moment was necessarily a tautology. “It seems undignified,” says Jan, “to accept congratulations for the past, as if that from the past, which is not subject to a time shortcut, was totally irrelevant. This is not a criticism of heroism, but a criticism of the need to place heroism out for adulation, as if every heroism was necessarily admirable – and not some other one. Isn’t this the conventional exchange of the act of socially defined heroism for an act of heroism which is highly individual, and thus socially undefinable? Where is the boundary between the need of a heroic act of a socially defined hero and the need of a heroic act of a hero, who is defined by this act itself into the position of a partaker of a heroic deed, who doesn’t feel the need of a social proclamation of this fact?” Jan asks....(more) _______________________ The Walking Cure On the road with a terminally self-aware spiritual seeker Peter Manseau reviews Gideon Lewis-Kraus, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful bookforum (....) ... pilgrimage narratives are almost as old and universal as pilgrimage itself. Ambulatory religious odysseys exist in every culture on earth; from Mecca to Lourdes to the Ganges to Taos, New Mexico, the globe is pockmarked with sacred places that believers are forever approaching, slouching toward eternal reward while leaving the burdens of their everyday lives behind. And because the point of a pilgrimage is never merely getting there but returning to tell the tale, pilgrimage literature exists in every culture as well. True, the genre has a limited range of plots, which tend to lean on tidy morals and similar casts of oddball characters. But slight variations within the template can make or break the tale; as Chaucer taught us in high school, all that separates one pilgrim’s progress from another’s is the unique spin emerging from a story that is derivative by design. Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a unique pilgrim, to say the least. He is certainly not the first nonreligious person to make a religious journey—the Camino is as popular with godless gap-year backpackers as with faithful Catholics these days—but he is likely the first son of two rabbis to describe a number of very different religious pilgrimages in the same book....(more) _______________________ Organ Grinder ca. 1848 Gabriel Cromer Collection permanent link

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• 08 May ' 12:08

  May 08, 2012 Just Drifting 1939 Adolf Fassbender1884-1980 OccasionalsCarol Watts(Reality Street, 2011) From Occasionals: autumncuts XVII Is it so much later. Word from a shouting river. Arrives, it is the interim. Before an Atlantic storm, with hours of quiet rising. Weakness, in light, lays down to rest. The falling out of purpose. Opportunity to see a sequence, in. Time, in one, the action starts out like a hunt. Cut a story short. There he arrives, in the fourth, and the game is bagged up. Yet, she said, this. Could never be known, unless you saw them together. The man who jumped from a tower and flew a furlong. Wanted movement forward, it was said. He could have improved on that performance, if a tail had occurred to him. But was prevented and lived, ripely. An impelling. Towards, the risk of arrival. When sky darkens, in notches, but it is too soon. Birds fall out, expecting shattering, hold breath. And regroup soundlessly, the fatigue of alarm silences. Can we calculate the rising of water, he asks, in inches. Using measurements handed in, always the turn of the archaic. As if seriousness comes that way. Looking at his feet, they already push. Through the flow, the child stamps. He wrote, the illusion of facing it well. Is our inhabiting, handed on. In an impulse for protection, perhaps, or the other side. Of a rationing, as if the chance for anticipation remains. Possible light, drifts. A cat. Descends in three, wall, ledge, sill. Cries. Architecture rings true A review of "Occasionals" Charles Alexander Perhaps I am presenting Watts’s work as a philosophical idea, or even a demonstration of a poetic. And, while it might be that, it also contains the personal, which comes through in glimpses, inferences, double entendres.            You think you have it. Taped, then it returns and you see. Your self, approaching. Unconscious, a deer in the undergrowth, or embarrassed at. Meeting, didn’t you just come by the other. Other way, she might say, you. Answer, yes. Are you caught out by each. But time goes, it does not unpick from. Skin is older, ready to crepe up behind you.           (“springcuts” VIII) There occurs an urgent, sometimes joyous, sometimes startling physicality in Occasionals, with “cells bursting out of” (“springcuts” X), “vital heaving in city bodies” (“springcuts” XV). Yet if there occurs intense eroticism, it signals not just a personal experience, but the world as erotic embrace, as when “birds adapt, raid / brief tongue incursions. Sheltering, from. / Battery, then they dart in open. Dares, / how many. Sound, bound, soar more.” The erotic is, in this instance, a matter of language as well, so that, while the “tongue incursions” seem obvious, the climactic release powers through in “Sound, bound, soar more,” a culmination of openness and escape, linguistically speaking as well as literally soaring. Gary Snyderb. May 8, 1930 Old BonesGary Snyder Out there walking round, looking out for food, a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,      barely getting by, no food out there on dusty slopes of scree— carry some—look for some, go for a hungry dream. Deer bone, Dall sheep,      bones hunger home. Out there somewhere a shrine for the old ones, the dust of the old bones,      old songs and tales. What we ate—who ate what—      how we all prevailed. Mountains and Rivers Without End Gary Snyder The Practice of the Wild: With a New Preface by the Author Gary Snyder Deep WaterAdolf Fassbender1937 The Prince of Parataxis Édouard Levé's visionary book of unrelated ideas Wayne Koestenbaumbookforum Autoportrait, gracefully translated by Lorin Stein (who has also translated Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, which falls, like the late Levé’s works, into a category of French prose I’d call “the short, the sweet, the cerebral, the candid, the chic”), functions within a soft-core Oulipian economy of procedural moves servicing confessional ends: Like the essays in Perec’s classic Species of Spaces, Levé’s Autoportrait observes stylistic proprieties at once whimsical and pasteurized, or, one might say, at once comic and thanatopic. Autoportrait is a series of ostensibly factual declarations or descriptive statements, narrated by an “I,” all in a single paragraph; unlike I Remember, or the epigrammatic novels of David Markson, another practitioner of a doldrum-free “new sentence” aimed at catharsis rather than alienation effects, Autoportrait’s sentences do not occur in separate paragraphs, but are all crammed together into one long chunk, implying that a long-harbored reluctance to speak has at last been conquered, and, now that the silent epoch has ended, everything must be uttered in a single flash, without interruption, lest a sudden scruple kill off the desire or ability to speak. The voice, once it initiates the work of memory, can’t stop. And yet Autoportrait is not a talking cure; Levé well knows, as Freud came to discover, that any voice, whether heard, overheard, or remembered, plays tricks with time: “My voice recorded one minute ago on a Dictaphone sounds older than my voice recorded digitally five years before.” Fishing WharvesAdolf Fassbender 1937 Cultural Politics Volume 8, Number 1, March 2012 The Dark Side of the Spectacle:Terror in Norway and the UK Riots Douglas Kellner In this study, I engage “the dark side of the spectacle” involving the Norway terror rampage and the UK riots and argue that while exploring these types of media spectacle requires careful sociological analysis, what they have in common is the quality of embodying male rage and exhibiting crises of masculinity that are resolved in spectacles of violence and terror. While many of us have promoted new media and social networking and have seen the media spectacle of the Arab uprisings as progressive forces, I want to stress in this study the “dark side” of contemporary media and technology that can promote and disseminate societal violence, hatred, and terror. As for media and technology themselves, they combine what different theorists see as “positive” and “negative” effects, and in my view their social functions and effects are complex, highly contested, and often extremely ambiguous. In general, media spectacles therefore cover a wide range of phenomena and have unpredictable effects. As the examples cited above suggest, media spectacles can be vehicles of democratic protest and upheaval, as well as terrorist assaults on the public. In this study of the Norway killings and the UK riots of summer 2011, I focus on spectacles of terror and horror, engaging in analysis and diagnostics of the dark side of contemporary history. I very consciously break with a tendency of US and other Western discourses and media that associate terrorism with al-Qaeda and Islamic jihad, and instead I insist that there are many branches of domestic terrorism, two of which I explore in this study.

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• 06 May ' 22:51

  May 07, 2012 Orientopolis (Eastern city) (June 1, 1978) Robert Zend 1929-1985 Robert Zend’s “Typescapes”: Concrete poetry from a Renaissance man of Canadian letters Camille Martin Rogue Embryo ... Arbormundi (Tree of the World), a portfolio of seventeen of Zend's concrete poems created on a typewriter, for which he coined the word "typescapes." (....) The miracle of these concrete poems is that from what must have been a slow and painstaking process of planning and execution using paper inserted into a clunky machine come visions of airy lightness and delicate movement....(more) _______________________ Two types of metafiction balaustion ..................................................... a response from Ray Davis As Balaustion's examples suggest, there is a history, a lifespan, to apparently unmediated narrative or lyric. Thackerey and Trollope notoriously lack that goal, Byron (and then Pushkin) contested its triumph, and by the time we reach Bouvard & Pécuchet and Huysmans it's devouring itself. The perplexing disruptions of Ulysses simmered down into a signature sauce for Beckett and O'Brien, and then dessicated into spice jars for postmodern fabulism and swingin'-sixties movies. If Nabokov is a chess problem and Perec is a jigsaw puzzle, John Barth and Robert Coover are search-a-word. What I really wanted to blather about, though, was a rare third type of metafiction, neither the recircling of an already-overworked puzzle, nor the matter-of-fact surfacing of one discursive mode in a cove of splishy-splashy discourse, but instead doing something — an emotionally engaged and affectively effective metafictionality....(more) _______________________ marsh marigolds photo - mw _______________________ Public Space and the Skills of Citizenship: An Interview with Elihu Rubin designg observer (....) Public spaces can be charged politically because they enable citizens to gather, to represent themselves and to transmit messages. There is also a more benign sense of public space as a place where we can just idle. And yet there are tensions in terms of belonging to those places, the right to just be in those places. How long can someone who has nowhere else to go spend time in that space? The test of a public space is its tolerance. Public spaces are not always easy places, nice places, pleasant places. Public spaces are often difficult places where our tolerance for other people who are not like ourselves is tested. This is why social norms like “civil inattention” — a term taken from the sociologist Erving Goffman, and which refers to our right to be left alone — end up governing many public spaces. I can be here, and you can be here, and even though we may not agree with each other, we both tolerate each other. For me, that is part of the definition of cosmopolitanism. ...(more) _______________________ ‘Inexcusable’ Indifference to Extreme Poverty interview with Frances Fox Piven (....) Something else is beginning to happen now. There are organizations of the poor, some of them who trace their origins back to the 1960s, and these organizations are very supportive of Occupy. This is not just a movement of college kids whose futures have been destroyed. This isn’t just a movement of workers who find their wages reduced. This should be a movement of all of the people who suffer the burdens of extreme inequality, especially the poor. Poor and minority people in the United States have been singled out, basically since about 1980, as the targets for right wing and Republican rhetoric — tremendous amounts of castigation of the poor, as if it were poor people’s fault that things are going wrong in America. The argument has been that the big moral problem of the United States is that “those people” don’t get up and work hard, “those people” have babies out of wedlock, “those people” hang out on the stoop and drink beer…. It’s relentless. This kind of propaganda is mainly designed for the great mass of working people in the U.S. to quell whatever sympathies they might have for the poor, but also to instill fear in them of the risk of falling into poverty, the risk of having to depend on a government program or a handout. But the poor are also an audience for this kind of castigating propaganda. It has an effect — it makes people shrink into themselves, and that’s a very bad thing, because then they can’t be citizens, they can’t be political, they can’t protest the conditions under which they live. If they — when they — link up with the larger protests, this will be an enormous boost to their sense of themselves, of their rights, and of their capacities to fight back against the policies that have brought them this low....(more) _______________________ Mountaineer's home Corbin Hollow photo by Arthur Rothstein, October 1935 Broken Back Run: Corbin Hollow, Old Rag and Nethers People, Blue Ridge from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection presented by Tom Clark _______________________ Politics and Culture Edition 2012 Issue 1 Revisiting Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" _______________________ TWO LINES Online May 2012 center for translation _______________________ Property Rights in the Cloud How much of you is really yours? In the age of cloud computing, it’s a crucial question. David Sirota _______________________ Charles Augustin Lhermitte (1881-1945) _______________________ Three new poems George Szirtes High Dudgeon 1. I live in High Dudgeon My room’s a brown study The colour is grim and, I like to think, muddy. The whole place was painted In foulest distemper And the painter decamped A most unhappy camper. (....) ...(more) Mad Hatters' Review Issue 13 The Carol Novack Tribute Issue permanent link

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