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• 07 Nov 2009 09:45

  Lesser Uryb. Nov. 7, 1861

  November 07, 2009 Lesser Ury The Jungle Line Rousseau walks on trumpet paths Safaris to the heart of all that jazz Through I bars and girders-through wires and pipes The mathematic circuits of the modern nights Through huts, through Harlem, through jails and gospel pews Through the class on Park and the trash on Vine Through Europe and the deep deep heart of Dixie blue Through savage progress cuts the jungle line (...) IThere's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb There's a poppy snake in a dressing room Poppy poison-poppy tourniquet It slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit And metal skin and ivory birds Go steaming up to Rousseau's vines They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line - Joni Mitchell, b. November 7, 1943 Tomaž Šalamun Translated by Brian Henry Pessoa Scolding Whitman The whore of all solar systems and diligent little ant, let’s begin with this restriction. Until here cows, but here the guests can already wipe their backs, except we dry this laundry outdoors and the muffs also hang, although it’s summer at Jama in Bohinj. Špela is already a great-grandmother now, she has a certain grandson who plays hockey at Tufts, already forgotten as well, like those who played chess here: Cvit, Raša, Avc(, the awesome Montanists, you can be mister God in your country (Raša), but here in Oxford we wear coats differently, also stutter a little, out of pathos, so this then pours into our Carinthian blood Albert Camus November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960 photo - Cecel Beaton "On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie."  -  Albert Camus, "Create Dangerously" in Resistance, Rebellian & Death Who Were the Witches? Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism Alex Knight reviews Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.” It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.Barbara Ehrenreich interviewed ‘There is a Spectre Haunting . . .’: Ghosts, Their Bodies, Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change Nick Mansfieldbordlerlands The ghost descends on us from the spirit-world, half pagan animus, half Christian soul, it threatens us with the meaning that exceeds us, or what exceeds meaning, the meaning that exceeds meaning, the unknowable, that which has crossed over to the other unknowable side, and then come back. It means something more than us and more than we can understand. Locked as we are in the bodily world, our horizons limited by the degradation of flesh, the spirit terrifies us with things we have forgotten, crimes we have forgotten or suppressed, but that the all-seeing eye of death has always registered, un-erasable, unforgettable and unforgiven, over there. … Apparently. The ghost is offered to us but slightly with-held, available to us if only ever just that little bit out of reach, like death itself, for our bodies but not of them, slightly ahead of them, when they pass over to become, when they connect with, when in fact they release something else. Ghosts fascinated Marx, we are told by Derrida, the spectre that is haunting Europe in the opening words of The Communist manifesto, for example, but also in his favourite play Hamlet, a text governed by a ghost, a dead father tormented in Purgatory by penance for un-expunged sins, and calling on a lackadaisical self-indulgent son to for pity’s sake do something, kill someone, make a ghost or two of his own and then die. And ghosts fascinate Derrida too, two philosophers, one the most nagging and persistent thinker of the material; the other, the most adventurous thinker of the forever-beyond that is with us now, the Other, the difference within, the stranger in the house, the different in the same, the other in the self and so on forever without rest. Yet, the orthodox idea of the ghost as that abstract thing that exceeds the bodily has not been uncontested. For Freud in ‘The uncanny,’ the spirit-world of the soul is not something alien to the body, but a double of it, an insistence on its continuity despite death. The spirit-world is not abstract, but a version of the material, a projection of our very physical bodies, our fantasy refusal of bodily mortality, and thus an assertion of our belief in our continued material being. How does this questioning of the polarity between the abstraction and the materiality of the ghost help us with Marx and Derrida? What can we find out here about ghosts and their relationship to the bodily from the two philosophers who either wouldn’t care for the ideal as a key to the material, or who would mock the difference between them? I want to approach the question of the relationship between the body and the ghost through Derrida’s reading of Bataille’s reading of Marx’s own haunting father-figure Hegel, and then to turn briefly to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe, to argue that there is nothing as bodily as a ghost, ghosts are bodies, the body, and the one that is with us now, coming from the past but through the future to throw everything up for grabs, what Tom Cohen calls, not quite following Derrida again, and Derrida’s not quite following of Levinas, the wholly other. London 1951-52Robert Frank ACTION YES Online Quarterly Fall 2009 includes a Canadian Special curated by François Luong from "On the Trail, the Image" by François Turcot translated from the French by François Luong Step 1, Square 10 Vertigo in the neglected garden the ruin cut from the others spreads outward (behind my lenses everything happens) past the threshold a fence a step for utterance seven stops on a square set          the pebble bouncing against the slab another stone for the irregular front Step 2, Square 8 To pierce the mandala to leave history the hostile foot wavers as first step (a falling star runs into the soil) galvanized a water jug freezes the long sun rebounds in the hand the image flees me still Step 3, Square 7 In plan In phase I walk the axis memorize each stone comes forth (destabilizing the grounds of others) distortion          contraction feet together here the future is not vertical sway steady on the broken line of the horizon standing against the slowed landscape of another stone Action Books Tightrope Walker 1924 Everett Shinnb. Nov. 6, 1876 otoliths issue fifteen Editor: Mark Young Five Poems Grzegorz Wróblewskitranslated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowskiotoliths *** The Russians want to be the first through the looking glass. The homeless are burning. (Mary claims that somebody has seen a Tasmanian Wolf again...) Our insatiable guts. I can Show up in front of the Pope To discuss mediation with the Aliens. I drank the vitamin dose allotted me, I know a lot about bees And hallucinogens. Myth and MeaningThe 1977 Massey Lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss An Introduction Although I am going to talk about what I have written, my books and papers and so on, unfortunately I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished. There is probably going to be some trouble about that. But nevertheless I think there is also something significant about it, in that I don’t have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left. You may remember that I have written that myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him. This has been much discussed and even criticized by my English-speaking colleagues, because their feeling is that, from an empirical point of view, it is an utterly meaningless sentence. But for me it describes a lived experience, because it says exactly how I perceive my own relationship to my work. That is, my work gets thought in me unbeknown to me. I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance. I don’t pretend at all that, because I think that way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But I believe that, for each scholar and each writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind. And the fact that I personally have this idiosyncracy perhaps entitles me to point to something which is valid, while the way in which my colleagues think opens different outlooks, all of which are equally valid.

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