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• 28 Oct 2009 12:44

  photo - mw

  October 28, 2009 The Octagon former New York City Lunatic Asylum Roosevelt Island New York Spiraling Out of Control: The Greatest Spiral Stairs in the World Atlas Obscura Memory and forgetting in the digital age Yadin Dudai reviewing Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell and Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age by Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerNew Scientist Just as Molière's bourgeois gentleman spoke in prose without being aware of it, most of those who fear forgetting do not realise that they have amnesiphobia. But perhaps this tiny lexical blind spot is not important any more. Amnesiphobics, unite and rejoice: Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (and Bill Gates, in his enthusiastic introduction) now inform us that we need never fear forgetting again. Total recall is around the corner. But alas, in such a world, even our phobia of forgetting cannot be forgotten....(more) Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language Daniel Heller-Roazen Perhaps the infant must forget the infinite series of sounds he once produced at the "apex of babble" to obtain mastery of the finite system of consonants and vowels that characterizes a single language. Perhaps the loss of a limitless phonetic arsenal is the price a child must pay for the papers that grant him citizenship in the community of a single tongue. Do the languages of the adult retain anything of the infinitely varied babble from which they emerged? If they did, then it would be only an echo, since where there are languages, the infant's prattle has long ago vanished, at least in the form it once had in the mouth of the child who could not yet speak. It would be only an echo, of another speech and of something other than speech: an echolalia, which guarded the memory of the indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be. pdf hereaaaarg - free reg. req. My Father Commuting Summit, NJ, 1984 Doug DuBois via riley dog Triple Canopy, Issue 7 Urbanisms: Master Plans As the economy has collapsed, the foreclosure crisis has metastasized, and the systems of finance that powered the global construction boom have degenerated, we’ve come to see the past few decades as an agreeable daydream—of what could be bought, what could be built, and what could be justified. For so many people in America and elsewhere, those years were a reverie of easy credit and adjustable-rate mortgages, masking stagnant wages and yawning inequality. All that fictitious money left its factual mark in the soil; the scaffolded remainders of hallucinated wealth surround us. Of course, the built environment is irreducible to a single point or a single analysis: Cities are accretions of what is designed and what is improvised, what is chosen and what is received, what is imagined and what is experienced. Likewise, the concept of urbanism now exceeds any fixed notion of the twentieth-century city, encompassing informatics and third-world slums, megachurches and office towers, master-planned Arizonan eco-cities and subterranean Chinese malls. Over the course of this issue, Triple Canopy will continue to address these tensions and the spaces and lives they’ve produced, examining our current urban situation and what lies beyond it: the city’s past and its future; the suburban, the exurban, the frontier. My Father In The Ocean Naples, FL, 2006 Doug DuBois Nick Piombino on David Bromige Preparing for this celebration I came across a poem in his book The Harbormaster of Hong Kong called Lines. The poem consists of a series of short poems in a call and answer mode, like this: "a poem should not mean but be [underlined]whereas the opposite is true [below the line], club universe [underlined] before the universe club you [below the line] kiss me quick[underlined] too late[below the line] unconscious [underlinesd] we have only the present moment to be unconscious in [below the line] life is brief [underlined] it says here [below the line]" Only after rereading this work the other day did I realize what an influence this poem had on my series of aphorisms titled Contradicta that I have been writing for several years now....(more) English Spoken Here How globalization is changing the Indian novel. Chandrahas ChoudhuryForeign Policy ... globalization has spawned a kind of hackneyed Indian (really, South Asian) novel that, even as it tells a story, acts as a primer on Indian and Pakistani history, politics, and culture, self-consciously offering bits of potted history and contextual explanation that seem absurd coming from characters rooted in a particular world. Such novels typically use history as a crutch, pegging their tales to wars of independence, revolutions, famous assassinations, or other public events. But for all their epic canvas, they are often novelistically banal and unambitious, content for the most part to repeat the familiar gestures of an enervated realism. The result, in books like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (2007) or Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker (2009), is homogenized, almost cynically calculated works that inhibit the power of the novel to illuminate a particular view of life or moment in history, and that seem, like any other consumer good, to want to stupefy rather than activate the imagination and intelligence of the receiver.(....) The response of Indian critics to the so-called global novel has frequently been to invest the fiction of regional (or in Indian parlance "vernacular") Indian languages with the magic tag of "the authentic." But this perspective itself is an instance of simplistic binary thinking. Not all Indian writing in English panders to a Western audience or reduces the gold of Indian life into the base metal of English; nor does all vernacular literature deserve the aesthetic label of authenticity. India is so multilingual and multicultural that it might be more truthful to think of every Indian novelist, whether writing in English, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, or Gujarati, as a kind of translator. No novelists, whatever language they work in, can be said presumptively to be "authentic," as they sometimes are in the literary-critical wars in India today. Rather, novels earn their authenticity through their attention to specific details of character and situation and through the ingenuity of their problem-solving....(more) Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) 264 images Conversation Among the Ruins Sylvia Plath Through portico of my elegant house you stalk With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back. Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break. Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock; While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot, Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic: Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate, What ceremony of words can patch the havoc? Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) The Poetry of Sylvia Plath 1989! By Timothy Garton Ash ... in a classic Rankean advance of historical scholarship, we know more than we did at the time about these traditionally documented areas of high politics. By contrast, we have learned little new about the causes and social dynamics of the mass, popular actions that actually gave 1989 a claim to be a revolution, or chain of revolutions. I spent many hours of my life standing in those crowds, in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague; their behavior was both inspiring and mysterious. What had moved these individual men and women to come out on the streets, especially in the early days, when it was not self-evidently safe to do so? What swayed them as a crowd? Who, in Prague, was the first to take a key ring out of his or her pocket, hold the keys aloft, and shake them—an action that, copied by 300,000 people, produced the most amazing sound, like massed Chinese bells?...(more) Cynicism Threatens to Destroy Gains of 1989Adam Michnik To this day, books are published that contest the meaning of the transformation. Their authors believe that people are furious that nothing succeeded; that the last 20 years have been nothing but an accumulation of disaster and mistakes. It is true that not everything was perfect, but I have exactly the opposite view. Many bad things happened, but I have the feeling that, with the exception of the Balkans and Russia, the post-communist countries have not had such a good 20 years in their modern history; or in Poland's case, not in the last 300 years....(more) Jim Johnson Ireland- from the side of the road Rémi Lagoin 1.1 In Praise of The Crack-Up Jeanette Winterson Such an enquiry is not academic. My creativity pulled me out of a hopeless childhood, and gave my life meaning and shape. But I have always had various forms of manic depression, (just can't bring myself to call it "bipolar"— whoever invented that dismal term must have been uni-polar—a condition I define as being permanently tethered to the banal). But I mostly managed, and, of course, creative people get away with bad behavior. We aren't expected to conform, so our social pathologies —the drink, drugs, failed love affairs, crashed cars, rages and tantrums—are not much questioned by society, and in any case, have entertainment value. Where would we be without Amy Winehouse cracking up for us or Jasper Johns rolling himself and his lovers across his paint-charged canvases?(....) The strange thing about creative work is that it can have enormous value for others while its maker is left ravaged. The ancient Greeks understood this as the price of an encounter with a god—the divine forces enter the human and use him or her as an instrument, only to be ultimately destroyed. But I do not believe that creativity is destructive or divine. I believe it is the part of us that gives shape and voice to our innermost reality. This is frightening. Encounters with the real, in particular what we really feel, are something we generally try to avoid. Art mediates the encounter, allowing us to get nearer to our longing and our loss, to risk more, to dare more. Yet for the maker, the exposure is not mediated; it is total and terrifying. That is why so many creative people cut themselves off from their own experience, using drugs or drink or sex or shipwreck to avoid absolute exposure to the pain of creativity. When Whitman turned to face his dark angel, to wrestle with himself, he was acknowledging his own loss, his own longing, his own unstaunched wound....(more) The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but....   -  William Kristol Kristol began working out years ago what the last, few fusspot remnants of the Old GOP seem to only now be dimly perceiving: that there is absolutely nothing left inside the Party of Lincoln but crazy, and if you want to hang onto those sweet-sweet “Conservative pundit” paydays, you’d better cozy up to the rabid Cheney Regime Dead-Enders most ricky-tick.   - driftglass _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ I Am Vertical Sylvia Plath But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared with me, a tree is immortal And a flower-head not tall, but more startling, And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. ...(more) _______________________ The Wall: Portrait of Francis Bacon full size hereScattergood Moore _______________________ Note: typos have been corrected in Berryman's Dream Song 41 posted below. Thanks to languagehat _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ so many all of nothing, Or: men psalm. Man palms his ears and moans. somehow for my escape a bullet splitting roofs, a dis-world ai! Death was a German _______________________ _______________________ What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is overruled already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. permanent link

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