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• 04 Jul 2009 15:21

  Derrida Queries de Man Mark Tansey

  July 04, 2009 Cathode Ray Tube storage E-wasteland India Sophie Gerrard riley dog _______________________ Finding the Phenomenal Oppen Forrest Gander from No: a journal of the arts It is in his attitude, his attitude toward words that George Oppen finds the ground for being and so creates poetry that is, for me, a source for a richer and more communal life. In "World, World—" he goes so far as to say, The self is no mystery, the mystery is That there is something for us to stand on. We want to be here. The act of being, the act of being More than oneself. (....) Oppen takes his stand on the mineral fact of the world where, mediated by language, he coexists with objects and others. He writes in his notebooks, "THE SUBJECTIVE IS NOT OUTSIDE OF NATURE, IT IS INCLUDED IN NATURE, IT IS INCLUDED IN THE WORLD."4 Even so, Oppen’s phenomenological sensibility shifts between Discrete Series, with its confederation of syntaxes and its helical mix of observations, and Of Being Numerous, with its more meditative investigation into intersubjectivity, with its query into how it might be possible to come to terms with existence among others, human and inhuman, in a place awash with preconceptions and logocentrism. ... (....) Whether one ever can climb out of language to see the world as it really is or map some realm of reality that is language-independent are questions I will not argue here. As for MP (Merleau-Ponty) and Oppen, the condition they describe is not unlike the Zen Buddhist state of No-Mind, an epistemological nakedness. In sloughing presumptions that circumscribe our thinking, both writers suggest we might step from the ruts of a conditioned perception into the clarity that each prizes. "It is absolutely necessary," Oppen advises, "to be able to forget what one knows of 'the act'; to be able to begin each poem from the beginning." Even as MP argues that intellectualism fails to "give us any account of the human experience of the world," that we need to make ourselves ignorant of what we are looking for, Oppen, on a parallel path, writes "I THINK THAT IF WE FOLLOW VERY SCRUPULOUSLY THINGS AS WE FIND THEM, WE ARE DRAWN BEYOND OLD CONCEPTS AND, PERHAPS, BEYOND THE POSSIBILITIES OF CONCEPTS". ...(more) ..................................................... 12 or 20 questions: with Forrest Gander rob mclennan I’ve translated poetry, novels, and essays, and I’ve written books of poetry, novels and essays. I’m almost completely uninterested in genre distinctions. Like you, rob, I’m given to embracing the whole hog.(....) Books come from books, as they say. I read. Also, I translate and I travel quite a bit. Both translation and travel bring you into contact with new perceptual rhythms, image repertoires, sounds, impasses. And those can be generative....(more) Forrest Gander _______________________ Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight Mark Tansey 1981 1234 "The daunting desolation of Mark Tansey's image of Alain Robbe-Grillet at work, cleaning a seemingly infinite expanse of coded objects, weighs heavily."   -  Jacky Bowring _______________________ Agnieszka's Dowry edited by Katrina Grace Craig and Marek Lugowski the poetry serial of A Small Garlic Press 3quarksdaily Happenings Michael Ripley As we sleep The graffiti bears leave their dens Their shoulders cool as waves Ready to roam the lawns Hungry for discarded crayons Careful to avoid wet cement There will be rain tonight Tonight the neighbourhood will tremble As the worms wage war With the weevils Cracking the sidewalks Spilling minty blood Ravaging roots Hiding in the garden hoses Imitating string Stomachs full of soil Choking on small stones Too full for victory In the basement The missing socks meet And exchange stories of escape Lamenting for those they left behind Comparing scars Singing songs of shoe brothers Toasting to the benevolent radiators Crying lint In the sewers The June bugs mend their huts With popsicle sticks and twigs The June bug king In his tin can castle Feasts on the eyes of aphids While lady bug footmen Gently shine his shell And in our beds We itch As thirsty mites Leap from our lashes Into silent pools of tears _______________________ American Daguerreotype a young seated boy with a book circa mid 1840's. Once Removed: The persistence of invented memory Being a study of daguerreotypes, time, oblivion, and the poetics of beauty in the annihilated image Shaun Caton Without the pecuniary framework or cultural incentive to collect irretrievably scratched daguerreotypes the reader may find cause for considerable consternation at this seemingly bizarre enterprise. From infancy we are brainwashed to appraise an occidental notion of art and pictorial representation as either, beautiful or ugly - or more fundamentally, good and bad. In applying this banal and limiting process of appraisal to daguerreotypes we are able to make ' selective ' choices based upon an enforced and blinkered education on the condition of things. Thus, imperfection is generally regarded as unrewarding and is not acknowledged as worthy of investment unless the item in question happens to be something very ' exceptional ' such as a whole plate outdoor scene. Then, it would seem, that despite thumbprints (operator's signatures?), wipes, and scattered tarnish the image is still desirable, simply because it is big and shows an exterior landscape. Enter here the concept of rarity to embolden and ballast this hypothesis and we have what is proverbially called in the trade as a ' winner '. There is surely some irony here?(....) So, how can one entice interest in an image that has literally given up the ghost? Can such a possibility for relating to these impaired pictures be offered as an alternative visual aesthetic to that which was originally sublime? In an abstract sense can the beholder of the ancient mirror photograph inhabit its blackened and pock marked surface with any nostalgic sense of symbiosis or synasthesia? Such a premise may appear monstrously fantastic to a body conscious society which is principally obsessed with improving outward appearance through the employment of cosmetic surgery, radical dieting programmes and a spurious addiction to the booming therapy industry. Can we attribute such obtuse and superficial value systems to inanimate objects that completely exist as mementoes outside of our own somewhat fractured time frame?...(more) _______________________ editor Secrets of the Dark Chamber The Art Of The American Daguerreotype _______________________ Best in Show American daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition Marcy J. Dinius common-place At the Great Exhibition, the different types of photography on display, including daguerreotypes, were classed as "philosophical instruments and processes," both to downplay their resemblance to painting, which had been disallowed in the exhibition as not advancing industrial knowledge, and to emphasize the knowledge of various physical sciences necessary to producing any type of photograph. The multinational jury of scientists and artists for class X—which included photography among other instruments such as telescopes, galvanic batteries, and coin weighing machines—also wanted to emphasize photography's significant scientific uses as much as, if not more than, its virtues as a medium for portraiture. Even so, the jury could not overlook the use to which the majority of the different entries were put, concluding "for daguerreotype portraits, America stands prominently forward … her works, with few exceptions, reject all accessories, present a faithful transcript of the subject and yield to none in excellence of execution." Greeley proudly trumpeted to his U.S. readers, "Our Daguerreotypists make a great show here." Even the more critical voices in the British press found in American daguerreotypy something worthy of praise beneath the pasteboard eagle. "Within the shadow of the eagle and the striped banner we find no lights too white and no shadows too dark; they dissolve, as in Nature, one into the other, in the most harmonious and truthful manner—and the result is more perfect pictures." What made these examples of the first photographic imaging process so significant to both the exhibition's judges and the American press seeking an unimpeachable sign of both the technical and moral accomplishments of America's industry? The answers can be found in antebellum American print culture. From the daguerreotype's introduction in 1839 through the Great Exhibition, newspapers and magazines throughout the country regularly celebrated daguerreotypy as a powerful combination of art and science capable of producing images of unprecedented representational accuracy, as well as propagating American ideology.(....) By the Great Exhibition of 1851, then, the popular press had made a thorough case for the daguerreotype's "Americanness." By insistently linking the distinctive capacities of the daguerreotype to what they sought to establish as America's exceptional values, virtues, and progress, antebellum newspapers and magazines effectively campaigned for American daguerreotypes as capturing the national character more faithfully than any other artifact of the industrial age. There was some truth to the exceptionalism emphasized in these reports. What began as a scientific and artistic curiosity had become a full-fledged industry in the United States by midcentury. According to one estimate, by 1853, nearly three million daguerreotypes were being taken each year in the United States alone, and some seventeen thousand Americans worked as daguerreotypists or in manufacturing related to daguerreotypy to meet this demand. By the time of the Great Exhibition, the rest of the world, including France, looked to America for its daguerreian cameras and lenses, its processes and materials for coating and buffing the image plate, its chemicals for developing and fixing the image, its paints and brushes used to apply color to the silver toned images, its cases to protect and enhance the fragile pictures, and its machinery used to manufacture these various necessities. As the daguerreotypist and Photographic Art-Journal editor Henry Hunt Snelling declared in his "retrospective view of the Daguerrean art in the United States" in mid-1851, "we cannot feel otherwise than proud of the high state of perfection to which it has been brought by the American Photographist. The last five years have established the fact all over the world, that the American Daguerreotypes surpass those of all other countries, not only for the beauty of their finish but the taste of their execution."...(more) Common-Place VOL. 09 · NO. 04 · July 2009 _______________________ View of San Francisco California., ca. 1855 daguerrotype _______________________ The Social Construction of the American Daguerreotype Portrait Ben Mattison The daguerreotype in America Beaumont Newhall google books The daguerreotype: nineteenth-century technology and modern science M. Susan Barger, William Blaine White google books _______________________ Traversing the electronic textbook frontier isn't easy, but it's probably logistically-and pedagogically-necessary Closing the Books Jim Cullen common-place It's taken about a year, but I've finally concluded that it's time for me—and, fellow teachers of U.S. history surveys, probably time for you—to do something that doesn't come naturally: give up on printed and bound textbooks. While teachers are not unique in our attachment to hard-copy publishing and cannot singlehandedly be the solution to the problems that plague the textbook industry, we are situated at a critical nexus in the chain, and it strikes me that, as a matter of social and educational responsibility, we ought to face the question of textbooks' future directly. Electronic books (a.k.a., e-books) are no panacea and have some clear drawbacks in terms of their readability (which I'll get to presently). However, we've reached a point where they merit a closer look.(....) ... my guess is that the logic of the marketplace or the school district will exert itself eventually. Printed textbooks will probably become a luxury, no matter what happens. Indeed, many college and independent-school students admit, though not directly to their teachers, that textbooks are already a luxury that they don't actually purchase. And this brings us to what I regard as the heart of the issue: U.S. history textbooks are, at best, a crutch anyway. ...(more) _______________________ Mandoli, Delhi, India Sophie Gerrard permanent link

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• 02 Jul 2009 15:48

  Lucien Clergue Desert Light Throckmorton Fine Art gmtPlus9 (-15)

  July 02, 2009 Dress for a pagan celebration Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer1955Les GitansLucien Clergue From My Father's BooksLuan Starova Translated from the Macedonian by Christina Kramer In those rare moments when, bent over his opened books, he considered his fate, seeking solutions to the Balkan history of his family, in those moments when he thought he was fully prepared to begin writing the history of the Balkans through the declines of the three empires with which the life of his family had collided (Ottoman, Fascist, and Stalinist), my father began to ask himself which was his fatherland: the fatherland of his ancestors or the fatherland of his descendants. He himself was deeply convinced, and no one and nothing could dissuade him from his belief, that his library remained his ultimate fatherland. It was filled with books in various languages, in various scripts, from various eras. Here, too, was a globe he rotated when he couldn't settle upon his homeland. My mother was not concerned about the family's survival so long as she could see my father in the library, relaxed in his own country. If she sensed that the pages of a book were disturbed, if Father's shadow played along the walls of the room, then my mother feared that another exodus lay ahead…(....) I left the cupboard in unparalleled disarray, having destroyed, forever it seemed, my father’s ordering of time. I had likely been inside the cupboard for a long time. As I emerged, I met my mother’s frantic gaze. Rarely had I seen my mother crying. All the doors and windows of the old house were open. The crosscurrents carried my father’s papers out of the cupboard, and they flew everywhere, piling up mostly on the balcony. My mother chased after them in a frenzy, not letting a single one fly out of the house. After she had gathered them up and closed all the windows, she entered the cupboard. And what did she see there! She remained in that cupboard a whole eternity. She put things in order as best she could, but there was no way that she could return the old order to the papers and the old books. There had been no greater upheaval in the history of our family than in those moments when what had been held most sacred was thrown into doubt. During the era in which my family lived in the Balkans there had been two world wars, civil wars, great earthquakes and epidemics, forced migrations—strong raps of fate on the doors of our family. We had also watched helplessly as those closest to us died and departed. Neither before, nor in the years that followed, did I ever see my mother so frantic, so upset. Words Without Borders July 2009: Memory And Lies Red Rocks2008Mike Reinders via The Exposure Project four sonnetsCamille Martin cold windows quietly hoard iridescent ova, i write, to begin at the brink of something that seems almost attainable. the prospect looms distantly in cool meditation, not about to teeter into the first warm breath to come down the pike and call it home. i’ve eaten the last morsel and become a stranger to myself, as far away as orion wheeling slowing across the sky. plate empty, i dance to conjure melted brooks, but the unmoved sun massively shrugs off the confabulation of my phantom gestures. i’m already hungry for the freshly eaten feast, but even this early in the game, i feel i must deceive myself as once again synapses conspire to blurt out a raucous draft of blooms. e·ratio 12 · 2009 poetry by David Chikhladze, Gautam Verma, David Rushmer, Anne Fitzgerald, Mary Ann Sullivan, Ruth Lepson, Virginia Konchan, Sandra Huber, Paige H. Taggart, Marcia Arrieta, Sean Patrick Hill, Travis Macdonald, Mark Lamoureux, Camille Martin, Nathan Thompson, Philip Byron Oakes, Cyril Wong, and Derek Henderson El Angel Exterminador1991Mariana Yampolsky Meditations on Mexico Mariana Yampolsky An Auto-da-fé Kevin McFadden I have nothing to recant, I am just the decanter. You, the just destroyer, have in faith become the role, recalling for those gathered the noble fallen with a prayer to his-grace-above-fire, (“Turn me, I’m burnt on that side”) St. Lawrence. Well done, I applaud. And you: Well executed. This is it. Not much else to await when our fates touch: I’ve nowhere to be but eternity, you’ve nothing to catch but the thatch. Dry on dry, we keep our wits about us . . . no one to meet but our match. Poetry Magazine - July/August 2009 The first man On the North, literature and colonialismStefan Jonsson Translation by Sarah Death In this geography, the North was accorded a special place. But it was not only the Nazis of Germany who believed in this model. That same imaginative horizon still colours the image of the North that we encounter in the world about us. When the residents of the Nordic region see how they appear in the world's image of the North, it is not unusual for them to adopt it as their self-image. It is an image of the North as a region of people who, with the mentality of a people who have worked the soil for nine centuries, carry on building their ideal communities and defending them against the degeneracy and extremes both of hyper-modernity and archaic barbarism. We know how laborious that is. We also know we can rely on our own strength. Eyah – well, well, as we say here in our colony, the North. The veracity of this image of the North is sometimes the subject of debate within the Nordic region. The debate is fruitless. The question is unanswerable. Or to be more accurate, it can be answered both in the affirmative and in the negative, depending on the degree of generalisation, or to put it bluntly, of superficiality, one is prepared to accept in one's description of cultural processes. But rather than answering the question, we can stand back and try to see it as foreign to us. What do we see then? The narrative of the North as depicted by Hamsun and idealised in Nordic and European history seems to be the narrative of some kind of settler colonialism. Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.An introduction to the 21st Century's most controversial poetry movements. Kenneth Goldsmith Poetry Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed? Jean Cocteau et le Sphinx Lucien Clergue 12 Fresh poetry, fiction and essays at nthposition

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• 01 Jul 2009 08:41

  July 1, 2009 Lawren Harris1926 A Canada Of Light B. W. Powe Happy Canada Day The Weather John Newlove1938 - 2003From: Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992 I'd like to live a slower life. The weather gets in my words and I want them dry. Line after line writes itself on my face, not a grace of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh more than I should or more than anyone should. This is good. But guess again. Everyone leans, each on each other. This is a life without an image. But only because nothing does much more than just resemble. Do the shamans do what they say they do, dancing? This is epistemology. This is guesswork, this is love, this is giving up gorgeousness to please you, you beautiful dead to be. God bless the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather. And where or whom. I'd never taken count before. I wish I had. And then I did. And here the weather wrote again. Canadian Poetry - University of Toronto Library Poetries of CanadaThe East Village Poetry Web Lajos Sváby(1990-98)MasksPéter Horváth Demeter Gallery Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida Chloi Taylor ... as Derrida argues in "Violence and Metaphysics," the theory of vision and light as violent is but a metaphor, even if it is one of the fundamental metaphors which has shaped our history, experience, and thought, and which has served too often as an alibi for real violence. Nonetheless, I have argued that Levinas's persistent use of visual metaphors throughout his work despite his own critique of visuality shows not only that this metaphor is, as Derrida says, inescapable, but also that it can be transformed to describe other ways of seeing that we already experience. Derrida notes that there is no alternative to the metaphor of light, and certainly night and blindfolded synagogues are not such alternatives, and yet we can think of options other than the binding and blinding of eyes, and of other forms of light than the penetrating gaze of the sun. As such, we can develop new metaphors of light and seeing, moonlit metaphors of bewildered and responsive vision. One such image of vision I have developed in this essay is that of seeing tears and of seeing in tears, an image that, as seen, occurs briefly in Levinas's discussion of the sculptures of Sacha Sosno, and equally briefly in the conclusion of Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind. As Derrida concludes Memoirs, so I would like to conclude here with the suggestion that we need to believe in "these weeping eyes, those seeing tears," and in a visionary ethics. King GubuKing Of The Gobshites transposition of Jarry’s Ubu to Ireland Tom Quinn Act One Scene One: (Music loud Père Ubu - the stage is surrounded with garish flesh and blood coloured images of torture and debraining). Mister Gubu dressed in a bulbous green leprechaun outfit with hat and silver buckle. On his belly an inward curving gold spiral like a living Newgrange. Missus Gubu dressed as half-Irish Colleen, half-crone. Mister Gubu is enormous and carries a shillelagh. Mister Gubu advances to the front of the stage and stares menacingly into the auditorium. Mister Gubu - Gobshites! Missus Gubu - Oh, would you ever whist with yur Gubu-ulations, Mister Gubu, ya big eejit ya! Mister Gubu - Ooh! Ooh! Careful now! Don't have me to do ya in now, Missus Gubu! Missus Gubu - It isn't me ya should be doin' in, Mister Gubu, it's another fellow altogether. Mister Gubu - Green shite, m'dam, I don't understand a word yur saying. Missus Gubu - Wha' then, Mister Gubu, is it contented with yurself y'are? Mister Gubu - Shite, m'dam, of course I'm contented. And shite so I should be: captain of the cavalry, privy counsel to the good King Eamonn, decorated with the order of the Green Shamrock of Gobshiteland and ex-King of Rockall, what more could I want? Clouds Lake Superior, 1923Lawren Harris 1885-1970 Stone's Secret Margaret Avison1918 - 2007 From: Sunblue Otter-smooth boulder lies under rolling black river-water stilled among frozen hills and the still unbreathed blizzards aloft; silently, icily, is probed stone's secret. Out there --past trace of eyes, past these and those memorial skies dotting back signals from men's made mathematics (we delineators of curves and time who are subject to these) -- out there, inaccessible to grammar's language the stones curve vastnesses, cold or candescent in the perceived processional of space. The stones out there in the violet-black are part of a slow-motion fountain? or of a fireworks pin-wheel? i.e. breathed in and out as in cosmic lungs? or one-way as an eye looking? What mathematicians must, also the pert, they will as the dark river runs. Word has arrived that peace will brim up, will come "like a river and the glory...like a flowing stream." So. Some of all people will wondering wait until this very stone utters. Knotsdownstream W.S. Merwin with Bill Moyers BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just one the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about it's shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that. W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time. BILL MOYERS: How so? W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it. BILL MOYERS: But this is the first poem in the book. Would you read this for us? W.S. MERWIN: That must be "The Nomad Flute." You that sang to me once sing to me now let me hear your long lifted note survive with me the star is fading I can think farther than that but I forget do you hear me do you still hear me does your air remember you o breath of morning night song morning song I have with me all that I do not know I have lost none of it but I know better now than to ask you where you learned that music where any of it came from once there were lions in China I will listen until the flute stops and the light is old again BILL MOYERS: "I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it." What — how do you carry with you what you do not know? W.S. MERWIN: We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something we don't know. They arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand. Exit Péter Horváth(1998) The Book Depository Free delivery worldwide on all our books.

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• 30 Jun 2009 13:58

  Helter skelter the ride Stanley Spencer

  June 30, 2009 columbine Central Experimental Farm Ottawa photo - mw _______________________ We Wear the Mask Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-- This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! via Brian Campbell at Out of the Woodwork The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar Project Gutenberg Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection Wright State University Paul Laurence Dunbar Web University of Dayton _______________________ Mending Cowls, Cookham Stanley Spencer 1915 _______________________ A Poem For The End Of The Century Czeslaw Milosz When everything was fine And the notion of sin had vanished And the earth was ready In universal peace To consume and rejoice Without creeds and utopias, I, for unknown reasons, Surrounded by the books Of prophets and theologians, Of philosophers, poets, Searched for an answer, Scowling, grimacing, Waking up at night, muttering at dawn. ...(more) ..................................................... Czeslaw Milosz (June 30, 1911-August 14, 2004) photo by Judyta Papp Cracow 2002 "The exile of a poet, is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery; that whoever wields power is also able to control language, and not only with the prohibition of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words."   -  Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980 _______________________ The Bridge Stanley Spencer 1920 _______________________ Fragments on Paterson Morgan Meis No one knows exactly why William Carlos Williams chose Paterson as the subject and location for a new poetry. He was working on his variable triadic foot. It was a new meter, so he said. It has never been entirely clear how it’s supposed to scan. Maybe Williams himself never really understood it. But he was messing around, trying to capture the American idiom and thereby the American experience. He stayed in New Jersey while all the other Americans went to Paris or wherever chasing something they thought was going to turn out big. For some it did. For some it didn’t. Williams stayed and stayed some more. He wasn’t having fun, he was working. He was listening to the Paterson Falls and he was crafting in his forge. “No ideas but in things”: a new poetic empiricism. * These days Paterson is broken, let’s be honest. She has her honor, like an old hooker, but she’s broken. It is probably impossible to know what finally breaks a city, what makes it give up and fall apart into petty fiefdoms and the inability to live. All the factors, of course, play their roles: economics, politics, the ongoing terrible American abyss of race. But something else happens when a city breaks, something nobody has a handle on exactly. In that way a city can be like a person. And no one can say precisely what happens to a person when they walk outside and look at the bricks around them, the houses and buildings, and suddenly see nothing at all. What seemed to be a world of meaning around them, the context for living a life, turns into something empty and irrelevant. When that happens you’re not living in the world anymore, you’re simply existing alongside it....(more) Project Stamps The Owls a site for collaborative writing projects _______________________ The Resurrection of Soldiers 1928-9 Stanley Spencer (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959 251 images Love, Death and Resurrection: The Paintings of Stanley Spencer Joseph Phelan _______________________ You Whose Name Czeslaw Milosz You whose name is aggressor and devourer. Putrid and sultry, in fermentation. You mash into pulp sages and prophets, Criminals and heroes, indifferently. My vocativus is useless. You do not hear me, though I address you, Yet I want to speak, for I am against you. So what if you gulp me, I am not yours. You overcome me with exhaustion and fever. You blur my thought, which protests, You roll over me, dull unconscious power. The one who will overcome you is swift, armed: Mind, spirit, maker, renewer. He jousts with you in depths and on high, Equestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled. I have served him in the investiture of forms. It’s not my concern what he will do with me. A retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes. From white villages Easter bells resound. _______________________ St Francis and the Birds Stanley Spencer 1935 _______________________ Summer in the South Paul Laurence Dunbar The Oriole sings in the greening grove As if he were half-way waiting, The rosebuds peep from their hoods of green, Timid, and hesitating. The rain comes down in a torrent sweep And the nights smell warm and pinety, The garden thrives, but the tender shoots Are yellow-green and tiny. Then a flash of sun on a waiting hill, Streams laugh that erst were quiet, The sky smiles down with a dazzling blue And the woods run mad with riot.

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• 29 Jun 2009 11:06

  Paul Kleed. 29 June 1940

  June 29, 2009 A Little Later George Shaw: Woodsman paintings at Wilkinson Gallery Riley Dog "THERE IS NO NEW WORK. It is the old work rotting and I can't recognise it anymore. It is the old world rotting and I see it for what it is. For the first time maybe. It is departing slowly from me. Waving gently and nodding as though it will all be OK in the end, that it's just nature, just the way of things. The things that made me are in themselves becoming unmade. What appeared permanent and solid and outside of time is coming apart and falling behind itself. Memory becomes as unreliable as forgetting. Reality lacks the poetry of melting into air. The familiar falls beyond use and lies in the way. I carry within myself an older man. His illness slows me, his dried mouth robs me of speech, his amnesia forces me to live in the today. But after all this I still cannot come to terms with the simple fact that life slips away and time is called everywhere everyday. What some may call a subject or an idea or an answer to the question what is your work about? is only an act of holding on." From John Latta’s blog, “Isola di Rifiuti”, May 2009 Notes, Poetics, Trouvailles, Photographs, Malarkey, and Guff jacket 37 Isn’t it one of the perennial (impossible) reveries of art to return things to thing-hood and beings to being-hood, stripped of any human (cultural) décor or use or encrustation? Such a dream haunts Devin Johnston’s Creaturely and Other Essays (Turtle Point Press, 2009)--signal’d by an epigraph out of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, “The creatures will come creeping back--not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves”--long fermata bass note holding against the high treble passacaglia-work (or understory low-stealth to canopy gymnastics). For Johnston’s means of getting at the nature of beasts creaturely here is roundly (read: solidly, and layeredly, a musical round) digressive: in the spirit of Guy Davenport (capable of assembling and aligning the beams of a lecture--the walling-in accomplish’d in situ--while walking to teach at the University of Kentucky), or of A. R. Ammons, who claim’d “a poem is a walk” (and recalling, too, the terrific finely-observed natural histories of Merrill Gilfillan), Johnston writes: In keeping with the etymology of the word digression, I drafted these essays walking around St. Louis and its environs, where I have lived since 2001. As Henry David Thoreau would say, I acted for a time as self-appointed inspector of thunderstorms and starlings, sycamores and squirrels, making my daily rounds. Weedy species and volunteers--common forms of life, opportunists like ourselves--I took as my particular charge. I sought out their local haunts, imagining what they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt. En route, a poem would often come to mind, my private anthology serving as a wayward field guide to whatever I found. In that sense, the poems quoted here are less objects of study than “equipment for living” (in Kenneth Burke’s phase). So one is offer’d wondrous randoms through things like animal senses of smell (starring the dog Chester), urban crow gang behaviors, how birds see “hues entirely unknown to us,” mouse riddance (and the Cretan “Apollo Smintheus, mouse god”), and owl ossuaries. Each essay, with modesty and patience--that is, with consummate deliberation, without flaunting one’s lore--assembles and concatenates a marvelous set of tidbits into a prose condensery (Lorine Neidecker’s word, there is a kinship between Johnston’s decant’d and finely-alloy’d prose and Neidecker’s late pieces). ...(more) Isola di Rifiuti Paintings & Drawings from the 1950s & 1960s Richard Oelze b. June 29, 1900 A Bloodless Coup The Transition From Democracy To A Bnk-run Society Mike Whitney The underwriting of the banks with public resources changes the fundamental structure of the existing system. It's the end of free markets and the beginning of state capitalism. Thy Kingdom Come 1921 Max Pechstein (December 31, 1881 – June 29, 1955) Wall Street’s Toxic Message Joseph E. Stiglitz vanity fair Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.(....) The American economy will eventually recover, and so, too, up to a point, will our standing abroad. America was for a long time the most admired country in the world, and we are still the richest. Like it or not, our actions are subject to minute examination. Our successes are emulated. But our failures are looked upon with scorn. Which brings me back to Francis Fukuyama. He was wrong to think that the forces of liberal democracy and the market economy would inevitably triumph, and that there could be no turning back. But he was not wrong to believe that democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world. The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. Perhaps it is true that the world is heading toward the end of history, but it is now sailing against the wind, on a course we set ourselves....(more) The Kettledrum Organ Paul Klee 1930 Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann Beauty is momentary in the mind The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal.   -  Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" .... Bibliographers ... regularly work from a distinction between the "substantives" and the "accidentals" of text, the latter representing what are perceived as largely secondary, formal features - like punctuation -- that merely support the conceptual core or "substance" of the text. A variant of this distinction is replicated in the more recent field of electronic textuality as the distinction between the content of text (which is logically marked) and its bibliographical forms (which go unmarked and hence are left outside the analytic framework of the electronic text). Perhaps the most widespread and manifest instance of the general distinction is the one all but universally made between a text's conceptual content and its layout, page design, and typography. In this frame of reference, graphic features of text are ancillary and transient forms -- apparitions, as it were, that house textual essences as fleshly frames support immortal souls. We bring that metaphor forward here because in our view this approach to textuality is riven by an ideology explicit in that figure of speech. This habit of thought is widespread in discussions of the history of writing systems as well as in information design. Take as an example Edward Tufte, whose work is often taken as an emblem of clarity of purpose in its presentation of apparently seamless "envisionings" of designed information. A key assumption underlying his work imagines that the information has an essential form needing to be revealed. Successful information design is measured by its capacity to bring that revelation into a form as clean and transparent as any crystal goblet. But the fact is that the graphic designs celebrated by Tufte are not vehicles for delivering coherent and pre-established information content, they are the creators of such content. This vehicular approach to material signifiers pervades our thinking about language and writing systems. In order to shift our view away from that kind of thinking we offer here a set of programmatic examples....(more) Politics of translation collected essays at Eurozine Translation touches upon political and cultural dimensions that concern not only the translations of languages but of cultural contexts between different countries, cultures, and political systems. Since the question of translation has become a politically and culturally crucial question, one can argue that translation can be regarded as a central metaphor for some of the most pressing tasks confronting us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Translation points at how different languages, different cultures, different political contexts, can be put together in such a way as to provide for mutual intelligibility but without having at the same time to sacrifice difference in the interest of a blind assimilation. Translation, in this sense, is about the creation of new cultural and political maps, the establishment of shared territories and of points of articulation, the development of a border reason, as opposed to the simple acceptance of the reason of the borders. It is about the right to be different, where homogenization would mean an offence, and the right to be equal, where the dwelling upon difference would be synonymous with oppression or with the prevalence of power politics. Kurt Schwitters 1925 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fur-Covered Teacup Priscilla Long conjunctions I believe that, in any society, the poet should be the exponent of the imagination in that society.   -  Wallace Stevens It is the artists that do society’s dreaming.   -  Meret Oppenheim .... 3. His World I am thinking Reading, Pennsylvania, the coal-fired world of slate and brick that Wallace Stevens was born into in 1879. I am thinking the Schuylkill River, the coal-carrying Schuylkill Canal, horses clopping down stone-cobbled streets, coal trains, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, railroad bridges and iron tracks and the Reading Iron Co. I am thinking apothecaries, dry goods, saddlers, shoemakers, shirtmakers, harnessmakers, printers, house painters, blacksmiths, stonemasons, brickmakers, bricklayers, tinmen, tanners, tailors, farriers, cabinetmakers, carpenters, and cutlers. I am not thinking poet. I am thinking of Stevens’s mother, Pennsylvania Dutch, reading the Bible every night to her five children. I am thinking of a saloon on every corner and a church on every other corner. An industrious, virtuous, religious, slightly inebriated town, a manufacturing town, urban center to coalfields and cow fields and steel mills, a town where commodities, not poems, are produced, transported, purveyed. I am thinking of Stevens’s father, a lawyer descended from Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, writing to his 20-year-old son, “I am convinced from the Poetry (?) you write your mother that the afflatus is not serious—and does not interfere with some real hard work.” No wonder then, that Stevens would later defend the maleness of writing poetry in an essay titled “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.” No wonder he would assert, “The centuries have a way of being male.” From whence he came, real men did real work and manufactured real things, useful things—not poems—and in the process, made real money. And so, no wonder he wrote, in defense of the imagination, in defense of the artist, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”: “The man bent over his guitar,/A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.” Shearsman: one who shears sheep, a farmer, a real worker doing real work. 4. Her World Meret Oppenheim was the granddaughter of Lisa Wenger, a suffragette, a well-known writer and illustrator of children’s books. Meret’s aunt, Ruth Wenger, was briefly married to Hermann Hesse. The maternal, Wenger side of the family was Swiss. Meret’s father was a German physician. He informed Meret that “women have never done anything in art.” At age 19, in 1932, she went to Paris to study art. At age 20 she had a passionate affair with Max Ernst. This lasted for a year, but thereafter she continued consorting with the Surrealists and other Paris artists—Picasso, Dora Maar, et al. Her own output included drawings, collages, assemblages, and plaster models of sculptures. Meret was brought up Protestant but in 1936 her family, due to its Jewish name, moved out of Germany to Switzerland to live with her grandmother and on her grandmother’s income, since in Switzerland her physician father was barred from practicing. In Paris, Meret, forced to become self-supporting, brought in income by designing clothing and jewelry. She entered into an intimate relationship with Man Ray (who famously photographed her). She became infatuated with her fellow Swiss artist, Giacometti, twelve years her senior. (Giacometti did not return her infatuation.) Her first solo show took place in 1936. Her work at this time, writes art critic Bice Curiger, exhibited “astonishing artistic maturity, not in the sense of ’consolidation,’ but of extreme self-possession.” ...(more) Scenes from the Passion: The Swing George Shaw The real tension, I think, is between official poetry, the kind that we're taught in school and is kept in libraries, and the kind we really believe in - what we are writing and what our friends write. The same thing holds for meditation: what we discover for ourselves and learn. At some point you can forget it and go off and make a pot of spaghetti. We used to do go down to Muir Beach years ago to gather mussels off the rocks. We'd build a bonfire, put seaweed on the fire to steam the mussels. We'd eat them, then jump up and down in the waves and have fun. That was enough. Probably enough. Or too much. Oh, I guess Blake said it, "Enough, or too much." That's all.   -  Philip Whalen, About Writing and Meditation permanent link

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• 28 Jun 2009 08:34

  Andres Gonzalez Ordinary finds

  June 28, 2009 lost in paradise Rachel Sussman Metonymy as an Approach to a Real WorldWilliam Bronk (1918-1999) Whether what we sense of this world is the what of this world only, or the what of which of several possible worlds --which what?--something of what we sense may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense. For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place, not thinking that this is the real world. Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time; conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound and fill a space; conceded, we make a world: is something caught there, contained there, something real, something which we can sense? Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw the light lie in the deep chasm of a street, palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in from say, the sea, a purity of space.  -  from The World, the Worldless (1964) I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.  - Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 1960 Gaston Bachelardb. June 27, 1884 The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos Psychoanalysis of Fire Writing earlier to Mary Manning Howe of his German trip ('a journey from and not to'), he says he didn't have the energy to 'make it clear to myself', but had 'an instinctive respect, at least, for what is real, & therefore has not in its nature, to be clear'. He adds that 'when somehow this goes over into words, one is called an obscurantist', but it is 'the classifiers are the obscurantists'. Nevertheless Beckett's correspondence is 'be-thicketed' (in Paul Muldoon's phrase) with obscure local and cultural allusions, and the editorial team, with their astonishingly detailed annotations, are to be congratulated for making the life work of this heroically perverse illuminist a lot clearer.  - Hugh Haughton on The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 selective memory Rachel Sussman Representing the Unrepresentable: Compassion and EmpathyAric Mayer ... part three in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange ... I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Representing the Unrepresentable: A Waking DreamAric Mayer Representing the Unrepresentable: The Mythic and the Real Aric Mayer The Great American BubbleMatt Taibbi "From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again" turkey vulture on the local compost heap A time to mourn, a time to applaudRoger Gathmannews from the zona Under the sign of the replay, the center will not hold – I hold this zona truth to be self evident.. America is teary eyed about the death of Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett Majors – but I can’t shed a single drop, somehow. My tears are falling for the death of Detroit; my tears of rage are falling at the new American ethos of being a good sport, being the quiet American, being the patsy at the end of the assembly line of spiritual and material death. The workers applaud their own economic descent, while the only angry voices are those being whipped up rightwing fringe, America’s perennial lyncher’s margin. We “understand” – oh, we so understand the “market”. You can’t do anything against the market. Except, of course, we have watched that particular lie explode before our eyes as it turned out that market forces, once they brush up against the rich, can be dealt with – trillions, it turns out, will be found with astonishing speed to deal with the market then. City LimitsPhilip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) Philip Guston at ubuweb Culture, Society & PraxisVol 7, No 2 (2008) Culture, Economy, and Change An Idler's Glossary Joshua Glenn dawdle: Paul Virilio, noting that Socrates was invariably late (atopos) to every appointment, suggests that philosophy itself is born of "idle (often pointless) curiosity, born of the disappearance of physical effort once this becomes unnecessary." And let's not forget Oscar Wilde's injunction that "punctuality is the thief of time." Dawdle, then, by all means! flâneur: "Idle man-about-town": O, how much is contained in that definition! The flâneur practices a kind of refined street theater, thumbing his nose at hurrying urban crowds by loitering ostentatiously. For Baudelaire—who admired famous flâneurs like Nerval, who is said to have walked a lobster around Paris on a pale blue leash—the "perfect flâneur" is that urbanite who is neither aloof from the crowd nor surrendered to it, but both at once; this "kaleidoscopic" faculty allows him to perceive the subtle eruptions of the infinite into the everyday. (Clearly, the flâneur does not suffer from ennui, nor is he blasé.) Hermenaut Dove Hunters in the WoodErnst Ludwig Kirchner 1913 Every Picture Tells a Story The Narrative Impulse in Modern and Contemporary Art Selected Works Praise Of FollyAn oration, of feigned matter, spoken by Folly in her own person Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) Translated by John Wilson,1688 ...what the otherwise great rhetoricians with their tedious and long-studied orations can hardly effect, to wit, to remove the trouble of the mind, I have done it at once with my single look. (...) And here again do those frogs of the Stoics croak at me and say that nothing is more miserable than madness. But folly is the next degree, if not the very thing. For what else is madness than for a man to be out of his wits? But to let them see how they are clean out of the way, with the Muses' good favor we'll take this syllogism in pieces. Subtly argued, I must confess, but as Socrates in Plato teaches us how by splitting one Venus and one Cupid to make two of either, in like manner should those logicians have done and distinguished madness from madness, if at least they would be thought to be well in their wits themselves. For all madness is not miserable, or Horace had never called his poetical fury a beloved madness; nor Plato placed the raptures of poets, prophets, and lovers among the chiefest blessings of this life; nor that sibyl in Virgil called Aeneas' travels mad labors. But there are two sorts of madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell, as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts either the desire of war, or an insatiate thirst after gold, or some dishonest love, or parricide, or incest, or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or when they terrify some guilty soul with the conscience of his crimes; the other, but nothing like this, that which comes from me and is of all other things the most desirable; which happens as often as some pleasing dotage not only clears the mind of its troublesome cares but renders it more jocund. And this was that which, as a special blessing of the gods, Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, wished to himself, that he might be the less sensible of those miseries that then hung over the commonwealth. storm brewingSmiths Falls

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• 26 Jun 2009 13:16

  white sandsBrett Weston

  June 26, 2009 An Enduring Friendship Ansel Adams & Georgia O'Keeffe Scott Nichols Gallery via gmtPlus9 (-15) Photographs by Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Horace Bristol, Paul Caponigro, William Clift, Imogen Cunningham, Philippe Halsman, Lotte Jacobi, Yousuf Karsh, Mark Klett, Arnold Newman, Eliot Porter, Alan Ross, Paul Strand, Todd Webb, and Brett Weston _______________________ note on the the calendar as a prison Limited Inc There’s a certain magical attachment in history to years. A year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary. On the other hand, perhaps, under the mask of the arbitrary, there lurks the new, a moment of some kind that breaks absolutely with the absolute....(more) _______________________ Doveglion: Collected Poems of José Garcia Villa Review by Craig Santos Perez Blogslinger ..................................................... from the ghost of the harvest madonna Craig Perez elimae The Closed Gates Of Tomorrow. Singers with pure, clear voices dispel evil spirits at the autumn harvest by carving gourds. The boy runs his hands through his hair in an attempt to harvest his thoughts. Ghost nets, often kilometers long, are mainly lost or discarded from fishing vessels in Asian waters. Harvest Home / Balcony / Flag of Nations The boy reads the sign: "No Swimming." _______________________ Apsens Northern New Mexico Ansel Adams 1958 _______________________ Vague Terrain 07: Sample Culture (Re)launched This is Not Memorex Greg J. Smith In familiarizing myself with this work over the past few weeks, I've felt an odd sense of nostalgia developing. These projects collectively highlight various facets of what we have dubbed sample culture, that is the continued evolution of the triumph of the fragment. There are dozens of threads that can be traced back to the 1980s and while I am personally indebted to the potent combination of Brian Eno and David Byrne, the perpetual litigation of Negativland, and the sonic collage of the Bomb Squad, I am going to instead direct my attention to another dusty artifact from collective memory.(....) ... regardless of how we frame it, sampling is essentially an act of curation. Specific fragments are foregrounded and implicit in that selection is the exclusion of countless other memories and moments. The endgame in the act of sampling, whether reconsidering the familiar or resurrecting the forgotten, is to create an arena for discourse. In examining the constellation of projects we have brought together a few themes begin to emerge. First, and most directly related to the sound-history sketched out above is a very diverse range of musical endeavours which collectively engage the genres of classical, dub, disco, electroacoustic, folk, hip hop, house, and techno. The work presented by Des Cailloux et Du Carbone, Eskaei, Freida Abtan, Jakob Thiesen, Noah Pred, and Ortiz all engage multiple traditions and in doing so challenge modes of production and performance. In keeping with our mandate to get musicians talking about their work outside of artists’ statements, we had Evan Saskin engage in thoughful dialogue with Ezekiel Honig of Microcosm Music.(....) This issue of Vague Terrain also features a pair of texts that aid in delineating the landscape of contemporary mashup and remix thought. Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture by Eduardo Navas is an ambitious schematization of the mashup phenomenon that traverses thirty years of musical and informational paradigms. Rebekah Farrugia has provided a thorough documentation of intellectual property and copyright issues with her text Sample Culture and Copyright in the Digital Age and this is complemented by the latest edition of her Copyright, Culture (remixed) video collaboration with Jennifer A. Machiorlatti. _______________________ O'Keeffe's Studio at Abiquiu House Todd Webb 1963 _______________________ Interview with Cumhuriyet Justin Erik Halldór Smith I think the content of the claims of creationists, whether of the Old Testament literalist school or of the intelligent-design school, are entirely without interest. To the extent that their movement is interesting, it is so as a social and political phenomenon. One interesting question is why it only gains traction in certain societies, e.g., Turkey and the United States, and not so much in others, such as Saudi Arabia and Sweden. It seems to me that in the Saudi Arabian case we are looking at a society in which what the individual citizen thinks about matters such as this is of no consequence, as long as the citizen behaves in the way that the state dictates. In the case of Sweden there is a high degree of freedom of expression, coupled with high science literacy and a general lack of interest in fundamentalist or revivalist religious movements. But in the US and Turkey both there is robust and chaotic democracy, with different factions competing to have their vision of the social good predominate. Couple these with mediocre science education, a proneness towards populist suspicion of elite expertise, and a religious tradition that cannot easily accommodate the thought that humans are a particular kind of animal, and what do you have? The spurious pseudoscience of people like Henry M. Morris and Harun Yahya. ...(more)_______________________ Aspens Brett Weston _______________________ The Market as Purgatory Jens Jessen translated from the German by Jeff Craig Miller logos The New Capitalism is a totalitarian movement also in that it neither can nor will come to rest until it has comprehended the entire earth, and placed into private hands all that had once been subject State or citizenry. This demonic will-to-self-replication and the leveling of all differences stands exactly at the center of Hannah Arendt’s famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism. Among these origins belongs the distinctive hostility to the State exhibited by totalitarian ideologies, which, not by accident, wish to see themselves not as parties but rather as movements. All that is rule-bound, manageable and therefore static must melt into air before the dynamic principle of the Movement. All that is individual, traditional, culturally specific and intractable must pass through Capitalism, as through the purifying fires of Purgatory, to emerge in a world that is uniform and redeemed. The awkward thing, even for the true believer, is that can never be specified when the Movement’s goals will have found their fulfillment. “Those who march off to impose their image upon the world cannot be satisfied with only a mediocre portrait. The defective reflection of themselves will prompt them tear up the copy, and begin again from scratch”, wrote the Indian author Amitav Gosh in our series, and one could continue with Hannah Arendt: “The unbounded process of an endless accumulation of power, which offers and enjoys an ever-renewed expansion for expansion’s sake, requires a constant supply of new material in order to renew itself, and not grind to a halt.” Or, once again, with Amitav Gosh: “The melding of Capitalism and Imperium means a program of permanent war – an idea which once intoxicated the Trotskyites and which the neo-conservatives have now embraced with their project for the New American Century.” The point of this, if one may pursue the totalitarian analogy, lies not in the satisfaction of ends, but the maintenance of a state of constant uncertainty, so people can be kept from developing the faculty of judgment, and thus kept from acts of resistance. Herein lies the reason for the characteristic anti-intellectualism of the New Capitalism, which seeks everywhere to discredit potentially critical forms of high culture, in favor of a vacuous mass entertainment (allegedly because high culture can’t be competitive.) “The consistent suppression of all the higher forms of intellectual activity under the modern leaders of the masses has”, again according to Hannah Arendt, “a deeper origin than the natural animosity to all that one doesn’t understand. Total dominance can allow no breathing room for free initiative. “ Similarly, the American sociologist Richard Sennett has described, in our series, the paralysis of independent initiative. “The new insecurity is not at all an unintended outcome of an unstable market; it is programmed into the New Capitalism. It is not an unwanted, but a desired element.” And further: it is embedded deeply in the organizational structure of the modern enterprise with its flat hierarchies constant changes at the managerial level. “The continual purges, the sudden ups and downs of work careers hinder any ability to really learn the job at hand and the development of a secure working-life experience” writes, no longer Richard Sennett on the New Capitalism, but Hannah Arendt, again, on the Soviet bureaucracy under Stalin....(more) Logos a journal of modern society & culture _______________________ TypeIt.org - Type foreign characters easily Tomasz P. Szynalski ...through the miracles of Unicode and JavaScript, you can just navigate to this site, type whatever you need to type in a text box, and then paste it wherever you need it — into your word processor, e-mail message, etc. You can type foreign characters by clicking buttons or by pressing intuitive keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Letter) that don't require you to grow additional fingers and don't block normal letters. via Blogos _______________________ Point Lobos Brett Weston _______________________ MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earh and Canada.   -  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary permanent link

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• 25 Jun 2009 10:10

  Peter Blake

  June 25, 2009 The Toy Shop 1962Peter Blake b. 25 June 1935 the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers Finnegans WakePart:3 Episode:14 Page:510 -- Booms of bombs and heavy rethudders? -- This aim to you! -- The tail, so mastrodantic, as you tell it nearly takes your own mummouth's breath away. Your troppers are so unrelieved because his troopers were in difficulties. Still let stultitiam done in veino condone ineptias made of veritues. How many were married on that top of all strapping mornings, after the midnight turkay drive, my good watcher? -- Puppaps. That'd be telling. With a hoh frohim and heh fraher. But, as regards to Tammy Thornycraft, Idefyne the lawn mare and the laney moweress and all the prentisses of wildes to massage him. -- Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors' Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers' Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers' Gall. Awake ! Come, a wake ! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o' tootlers with tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn's Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O'echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e'er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip? -- Well, naturally he was, louties also genderymen. Being Kerssfesstiydt. They came from all lands beyond the wave for songs of Inishfeel. Whiskway and mortem! No puseyporcious either, invitem kappines all round. But the right reverend priest, Mr Hopsinbond, and the reverent bride eleft, Frizzy Fraufrau, were sober enough. I think they were sober. Prehistoric flute 35,000 years "...unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world" Hohler Fels The Journal of a Disappointed Man June 11, 1916 Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc’s Theory of Fives, Swainson’s Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman’s book called Sphinx Vespiformis tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne’s Quincunx, chasing fives throughout the whole of nature — in the words of Coleridge, ‘quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything!’ . . . . . . . Old false trails: The Philosopher’s Stone (Balthazar Clæs). A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley’s tar-water). Mystical numbers (as per above). The Complete Works of W. N. P. Barbellion Twisted Tree Ta ProhmJohn McDermott The Master List of Free Language Learning Resources Open Culture Will The Cat Above The Precipice Fall Down?guest post from Slavoj ŽižekAn und für sich When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…(....) The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line. A Pyhhric DanceLawrence Alma-Tadema d. 25 June 1912 "The Style is on the Inside" Daniel Green on Susan Sontag's "On Style" (Against Interpretation) The Reading Experience Much of Sontag's essay is concerned to break down the opposition between "style" and "content," but unlike others who sometimes complain about the persistence of this opposition but do so mostly in order to banish "style" from critical discussion altogether--it's just the writer's way of communicating his/her content--Sontag maintains it is content that should recede, becoming simply the word for a "special stylistic convention." Style is the real substance of art, content its outer decoration, the enticement to the reader's attention that allows the "experience" of art that style enables. Sontag was unfortunately denied her wish that critical theory might move "to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter." Academic criticism has gone in precisely the opposite direction, dismissing form altogether in order to focus on the "subject-matter" that satisfies the critic's pre-established theoretical disposition, while there's very little "critical theory" at all in general-interest publications of the sort that once published writers like Susan Sontag. Essentially, the debate over the fraught relationship between "style" and "content" is about where Sontag left it. Face in the WindowThe BayonImages of Asia John McDermott Photography Does a humanity torn between its animal impulses and the failure of its jumps towards pseudo angelica worlds testify of an incurable brutality? To learn it, isn't the rational knowledge the new pedagogue of hope? An anthropology based on the psychophysiologic observation of theologies and attentive to the diversity of their schizoid representations of the world appeals as well to the spectrography of religious beliefs according to times and places as to the weighing of the bipolar mental structure which orders them all. The religious American unconscious caught in the trap of torture Manuel de Diéguez translated by Marilyse DevoyaultUncommon Thought Journal The Stalinist goulags were supposed to purify the world of its capitalist profit plague. They were working on the lustral model of conversion and redemption of the sinner. The labour camps were at the same time punitive and purifiers. The new catechism was managed with roughness. It was leading the sinner to an Eden at the same time far away and about to land from one moment to another. When the fanaticism of proletarian salvation had seized the Marxist myth, it had accumulated the pieces of corpses of Pol Pot. In front of such titanic setbacks, democratic holiness believed to have won their case all the more that the recalcitrance of Karl Marx's victims to conquer freedom, equality and fraternity to the price of the extinction of capitalist profit appeared inveterate. How come that under conditions looking that favourable, the invasion of the American democratic edenism caused a revulsion more immediate and more violent than that which had taken away the tyranny of a Soviet leading class as infidels to its own orthodoxy as the Roman clergy toward the Gospels? Initially, the prophets of the New World could not believe their eyes concerning how the stubborn impiety of the Iraqi people made Iraqis take arms against the New World's holy idealities. And yet, the new religion of redemption and of salvation was self confident, devilishly jaunty, full of sufficiency and forfantery. Wasn't its natural lightness the legitimated product of its innate innocence? But it was too much convinced of the inferiority of the different people remained on earth and located at a so great distance from the paradise of the new chosen ones. The mocking and laughing pace of that new religion's promises were not forgiven. And then, one badly could understand an holiness which allowed amused women to be photographed at the sides of the defeated left naked like worms and attached by the neck to a leash for dogs. These trainers angels and specialized angels in the exercise of virtues of democracy were illustrating another weakness of American edenism. I already emphasized that, from its side, the expansion of Marxist empire had progressed on the kreeping model and without resorting to massive and prolonged carnages, because it had been ensured by armies of workers elated by a mystic of deliverance. The capitalist yoke had been broken, was it said, by the inaugural Revolution of 1917, then by the bloody weapons of Utopia and the lawsuits in heresy. On the otherhand, Washington's edenism was dressing up as wild beasts in a circus of Good. By holding up the streamers of democracy's idealities on the scale of the whole earth, the White House was inaugurating the seraphic era of despotism. As a result, the American military conquests needed to get a planetary holly cloathing, which could be only if other angelic nations were also coming to occupy, by use of weapons, the conquered territories to the benefit of the empire of Good. The show of this gigantic conversion of force into virtue had gone as far as caricature. One had seen microscopic States sending about fifty soldiers, so much it was important to conquer in catastrophe the symbol of justice and right which their physical presence would be supposed to embody. The universality of the ethics engraved on the blazon of apostolic democracies was turning over against its apostles. Chrism (Saint chrème) of which one had coated bombs and guns was flaking off. Marxism, on the other hand, was feeling sufficiently legitimated by the Gospels of saint Marx not to have to call the armies of capitalist sin and stain in reinforcement of freedom and the sovereignty of the people. The Christian concentration camp(...) Because as long as a religion is believed true, and as long as it is therefore sincerely practised by tens of million of faithful ones, there, hell plays a central part, coming from the only fact that the strategy of punishement is the heart of politics, so it is the capacity of sky and of leading classes to join in order to discipline mankind. The brutality of tortures thus is the thermometer of the gravity of danger to be fought: the infinite cruelty of " God " is declared proportional to the need of which its " holy justice " is supposed to be forced to fight the plague of sin. The Messianic wars of democracies being considered to express the will and the concerns of their sky of values, the compared observation of the means of tortures of Nazism, Marxism and the American empire appears to be the privileged instrument of the anthropological weighing of the simiohuman political brain. Spiral Staircase Vientiane, Laos John McDermott _______________________

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• 24 Jun 2009 14:33

  La Grotte Chauvet

  June 24, 2009 Nowhere Michel Rajkovic 12 via riley dog The Mineral Spa, Watrous, Saskatchewan Jeanette Lynes Salt loves everything save eyes, keep the eyes out of it. In this element you are: jingle, skiff, chaff. Two intelligent women float nearby. Buoyancy makes strange things fly from your mouth – families are postmodern – everyone has her version & there’s no center. They see what you mean. Conversation flows with no bones weighing anyone down. Later, dark pennants of cranes moil over the saline lake. Back in your cumbrous marrow shanty though never home you admit a truth, there’s only one version, yours. PoemsJeanette Lynes Canadian StrangeDrunken Boat | 8 | 2006 Edition 4 Poems by Jeanette LynesThis Magazine 12 or 20 questions: with Jeanette Lynes rob mclennan Joyce Kilmer Park Tree Museum a public art project by Katie Holten Bronx, NY Katie Holten created the TREE MUSEUM to celebrate the communities and ecosystems along the Grand Concourse, a 100 year-old boulevard in The Bronx. Visitors will be able to listen in on local stories and the intimate lives of trees offered by current and former residents: from beekeepers to rappers, historians to gardeners, school kids to politicians. The Tree MuseumNicola Twilley on Katie Holten's projectBLDGBLOG A Museum of Trees That Speak of History Jim Dwyer from One Thousand One-Second Stories Taruho Inagaki Translated from the Japanese by Tricia Vita EXPLORINGfictions On Eating a Star One evening a whitish substance was falling onto the veranda When I put it in my mouth it had a cool milky flavor I was wondering what it could be when all of a sudden I was shoved down onto the pavement Just then a starlike object flew out of mouth dragged its tail over the rooftops and disappeared without a trace When I picked myself up from the pavement a yellow window was laughing with scorn in the moonlight An Incident at the Concert The North Star Fantasy Concerto was getting underway when yellow smoke whirled up with a clap from the center of the orchestra It spread throughout the hall At the entrance the ticket-takers panicked and opened every window in sight intent upon clearing the air When the smoke was indeed gone the orchestra as well as the audience was nowhere to be seen In the enormous hall only a radiant spray of light was pouring down Just what happened? Since the people who'd come to the concert hall had vanished for no apparent reason this mystery was perhaps an effect at nightfall probably as a result of the sky being crammed with stardust or so went the generally accepted explanation Chauvet panorama Representation, Technology and Society Before Lascaux Randall White The shockingly ancient dates recently obtained for the paintings of the Grotte Chauvet have focused new attention on the often ignored cultural developments of early Upper Paleolithic, the 20,000 or so years between the first traces of symbolic representation (ca. 40,000 years ago) and the painting of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 years ago). This long stretch of cultural evolution, comprised of two archaeological cultures, the Aurignacian (40-28,000 years ago) and the Gravettian (28-22,000 years ago), has yielded an abundance of representational objects and images.(....) Given what preceded the painting of Lascaux 17,500 years ago, we should not be particularly surprised to find a complex technological underpinning to the creation of this remarkable site. A wooden scaffold was constructed at Lascaux to provide access to the walls. In addition, recent research by Pamela Vandiver of the Smithsonian Institution reveals that most of the colors used on the walls at Lascaux had been artificially created by heating naturally occurring clay minerals (especially ocher) to temperatures of 1000 degrees Celsius; once again, an example of symbolic necessity being the mother of technological invention. The commitment of labor and technological innovation and creativity to symbolic ends implies a fundamental adaptive and evolutionary role for early symbolic representation. "Art," far from being merely a spare-time diversion served a number of critical social and technological functions in Cro-Magnon cultures of the last Ice Age. Two- and three-dimensional representation was an invention, and like all inventions it had to be coherent with and useful to its cultural and historical context in order to be adopted. I presume that, on several occasions prior to the Upper Paleolithic, the ability to use lines and materials to represent natural objects was recognized and perhaps even accomplished in isolated instances....(more) decasia: critique of academic culture Eli Thorkelson via Anne Galloway Space and Culture first issue - The Garneau Review a pdf Edmonton poetry journal via rob mclennan A simple fruit Romans picked wild to cure melancholy, the strawberry has become a symbol of both human ingenuity and recklessness.   - Catherine Porter, A strawberry's journey _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ _______________________ In his essay ‘The Storyteller,’ Walter Benjamin referred to counsel as, ‘less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.’ For Benjamin, in order to seek and receive counsel one would first have to be able to tell this unfolding story. On such terms, for the lives of others to truly matter - beyond what they demand in the way of an immediate, necessary practical solidarity - they must be encountered as counsel. These would be stories that might actually initiate a de-phasing, a potential shifting of our own unfolding stories, particularly in ways that might be unanticipated and not easily accepted. Benjamin was attempting in this essay to reflect on the erosion of the very possibility of the exchange of experience. For him, this was actually being prevented by the proliferation of news reports and mass dissemination of stories and images that accompanied the media meditated transmission of experiences. Benjamin thought the link between memory and experience was being threatened within what he termed a ‘phantasmagoric’ flow of information that resulted in an age well informed about itself but at the same time knowing very little. Missing was the ‘wisdom’ of experience, its non-indifference, its transitivity. That is, the possibility that the telling of a story would actually make a difference in the way one’s own stories were told, either by opening one’s existing narratives to assessment and revision or by influencing one’s actions. This inability to ‘experience’ the transitivity of the stories of others (something other than simply being able to read/hear and recount them) is an historical condition. And it is to the conceptualization of this condition that we now wish to turn....(more) permanent link

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• 22 Jun 2009 07:53

  June 22, 2009 photo - mw Purdon Conservation Areahome to 16,000 Lady's Slipper Orchids Forests I have LovedShelley Powers ... the real magic in this simple land is to walk the same path in all seasons Madrigal I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.  - Tomas Tranströmer, from The Living and the Dead quoted by Dave Bonta (via negativa) in his review Poet in the forest: Tomas Tranströmer Anchor in the ShadowsBill Coyle reviews The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton. New Directions Books, 2006. In Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield defined the appreciation of poetry as an activity that produces “a felt change in consciousness,” and it is just such a change that Tranströmer, through his metaphorical readings of the world, produces time and again in the reader. He is not often compared with James Merrill—in fact, he may never have been, in many ways the two are as different as can be—but I can think of no other post-war American poet who can match him in this regard. To read him is to gain access to the world in a richer, more profound way, to be admitted, as he once put it, “to the real celebration, quiet as death.”Scott EspositoConversational Reading Tomas Tranströmer Grief Gondola, #2Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Malena Mörling) I Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner,     are staying on the Grande Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas he who turns everything he touches into Wagner. The green chill of the sea pushes up through the palace floors. Wagner is a marked man, the well known Caspar profile is more tired than before     his face a white flag. The gondola is heavily laden with their lives, two round trips and one one-way. II A window in the palace blows open, they grimace in the sudden draught. Outside on the water, the garbage gondola appears, paddled     by two one-oared bandits. Liszt has composed a few chords so heavy they ought to be sent to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis. Meteorites! Too heavy to rest, they are able only to sink and sink through the future     all the way down to the year of the brownshirts. The gondola is heavily laden with the huddled stones of the future. III Openings toward 1990. March 25: Worry about Lithuania. Dreamt I visited a large hospital. No staff. Everyone was a patient. In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences. Tomas Tranströmer at The Poetry Foundation Tomas Tranströmer at Poetry International Web photo - mw Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward "The world's fundamental misfortune," the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, "is ...the fact that with each great discovery ...the human race is enveloped ... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody's, which belong to none and yet to all." The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. "What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear. This tendency to "hide" behind the impersonal masks provided by technologically mediated communication reflects, for Kierkegaard, a flawed attitude regarding what is most essential to veracious communication practices. The attitude is one that he claims characterizes an age "which reckons as wisdom that which is truly the mystery of unrighteousness, viz. that one need not inquire about the communicator, but only about the communication, the objective only". Such an approach to the communication process, one that displaces the communicator from his or her place of centrality, undermines an appropriate sense of what it means to participate in such processes. Accordingly, an impersonal means of communication transforms the sense of ownership in the information being exchanged - that is, it transforms our sense of authorship. As Kierkegaard writes: ... in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual - perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication.... Although the prose may be somewhat oblique, Kierkegaard is making two important, interrelated points. The first is that traditional face-to-face encounters between individuals structure the dynamics of communication in ways that permit the possibility of genuine human relationships. For instance, face-to-face communications often permit the immediate and dynamic clarification of the appropriateness of a particular piece of information. Moreover, the contexts of face-to-face communications generally impose a stronger concern for the veracity of information and instil in the participants a greater sense of responsibility both for what is communicated and how it is communicated. For Kierkegaard such elements are essential to our most "important" and characteristically human experiences. Kierkegaard's second point is that humans are often fearful of their own individuality as revealed in such exchanges. For this reason people seek to change the dynamics of such exchanges so as to hide that part of themselves they fear to reveal. Thus, a principal motivation for the development of technology is largely negative; the use of technology to mediate communication permits a kind of interaction in which the participants can hide or mask their individuality. It is in this respect that the use of technology to hide or mask individuality represents, for Kierkegaard, a fear of, and an attempt to flee from what it is that is most important and characteristic of our own humanity. As Kierkegaard writes: The highest triumph of all errors is to acquire an impersonal means of communication and then anonymity.... [A]ll true communication is personal.... But error is always impersonal.... Without the daily press and without anonymity, there is still always consolation that there will be a definite, flesh-and-blood individual person who voices the error.... But it is frightful that someone who is no one (consequently has no responsibility) can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportional means of communication.... GROWLGerry Gilbert Poetries of Canada The East Village Poetry Web farewell to Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009 Peter Culley Whatever literary community I've ever been a serious part of had him at its center. (....) Both men (David Bromige and Gerry Gilbert) had bright, translucent eyes & used a lot of neat quick motions to both do & describe things & their exchanges had a musical, bantering, ping-pong lightness to them, a quality I used to call "zen", but with their neat beards & underlying toughness of wit it could sometimes be a bit Jacobean too... On, The Way To Gerry Gilbert's Moby Jane Through "Picture Windshield" Robert Thompson studies in Canadian literature The wor[l]d, that is, what's here (and now), is big. It's full of stuff, of stuff acting--it's apparent the moment you open Gerry Gilbert's Moby Jane, also the moment you close it. There are no neat packages in Gilbert's work, or, said more accurately, if there are, they exist only within a larger context which undercuts/scores both the package and its neatness. As Gilbert says in an interview with Barry McKinnon, "a lot of the writing that we do is done in context. Like, you wrote a book and there was maybe only one literary passage in it, but it needs all the rest or otherwise it's not there--Real books rather than fake books" (McKinnon 67). What you get from Gilbert, is what you get. What I get may, or may not be, something similar. The point is that we're getting something when we open up his book, and what we're getting is intimately involved with what we're doing--where we are--the "real." Like Gilbert's writing, our reading is going to change if we open up his book on a bus, in a cafe, after drinking, while drinking--where we open it up--both in terms of what just preceded, and the specific page. In the end, the reading and writing are interchangeable, all part of a continuum that we're all a part of: "it seems to be me writing / actually it's you reading" ("Spit Tax"). The continuum that we're all a part of is life, and is language. In his book From Next Spring Gilbert says: . . . life is absolutely delightful, a crushing interruption I've learned to count on. Most writers progressively make more sense as they work life and the result is life looks like an out strip mine, all mine --my progression is no less than theirs (& we're all doing magnificently, as we'll see next spring) getting better & better the more we bet-- the sense of my writing is incidental, it is the incidental itself, the tooth, the worms way from the inside of life to the surface. A path which opens at the heart of the house, where we're wearing the sky and having a cup of tea. You look down at us and the first thing we do with your surprise at the end of a perfect day is put on the kettle against the hot belief that anything we'd write or say is itself the sense that life makes. (From Next Spring 27) For Gilbert, life is going, diachronic, moving, not fixed, made up of things and things happening, "incidents" which are "incidental" to one another, which are "incidental" to the poem, to the writing (reading), to the whole damn work(s). "Incidental music" is music played in connection with the presentation of a play, motion picture, poem, etc. It's the "kettle," it's not cream it's an edible oil product they're not jeans they're an incredible denim sausage leg-up, mother blonde yes, you look like tina turner [and Gilbert) can't take [his] pen offa you.  -  (Moby Jane 253) It all works "against the belief that anything that we'd write or say is itself the sense that life makes." Like the slugs in his poems, Gilbert leaves his mark as he passes, gets underfoot, makes you look where you're going, goes as far as he can. . . . It's their sense of time & power equals speed that I'm trying to derail . . . and that's not some crazy weird stoned reflex of mine, it's my view of myself in the situation, I keep looking so I wont vanish into the tube. They are scared to look, which is scary, that the people who claim to own the world are running on fear. Be brave me hearties! Let me show you what fear is! Watch me dance! Muscles are springs -- I gotta spring in my step! I get to know what I watch: the best! I've got a sense of history--and here's some good advice: the only material you can make history out of is honesty. Honesty is judging time in terms of space, and not the other way around. The other way around, time (the money, the lie, the makeup) is the death of space. I'll go the distance. Because, like a slug, I'm always right there. In the way, On the way. Speed for me is how far I can see. From here. You should see me really go. Honestly (From Next Spring 187-88) Moby Jane Gerry Gilbert photo - mw Loneliness Tomas Transtromer translated by Robin Fulton II. I have been walking for a long time on the frozen Ostergotland fields. I have not seen a single person. In other parts of the world there are people who are born, live and die in a perpetual crowd. To be always visible---to live in a swarm of eyes--- a special expression must develop. Face coated with clay. The murmuring rises and falls while they divide up among themselves the sky, the shadows, the sand grains. I must be alone ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. ---Without a program. Everyone is queuing for everyone else. Many. One. Meeting of mindsRobin Robertson on Tomas Tranströmerguardian The landscape of Tranströmer's poetry has remained constant during his 50-year career: the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm, restless seas and endless winters, is mirrored by his direct, plain-speaking style and arresting, unforgettable images. Sometimes referred to as a "buzzard poet", Tranströmer seems to hang over this landscape with a gimlet eye that sees the world with an almost mystical precision. A view that first appeared open and featureless now holds an anxiety of detail; the voice that first sounded spare and simple now seems subtle, shrewd and thrillingly intimate. There is a profoundly spiritual element in Tranströmer's vision, though not a conventionally religious one. He is interested in polarities and how we respond, as humans, to finding ourselves at pivotal points, at the fulcrum of a moment: The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low, throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground. A man crouches over something in the field. The shadow reaches him. For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross. I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches. Sometimes it seems like a snapshot of frenzy. ("Out in the Open") Tranströmer's is a poetry of sharp contrast and duality - a double world of dark and light, inside and outside, dreaming and waking, man and machine, stillness and turmoil - and he is fascinated by the pressure between the world we know and the hidden world we cannot deny. photo - mw Haiku Tomas Tranströmer Translated by Robert Archambeau and Lars-Håkan Svensson Samizdat Magazine V The sea is a wall. I hear the gulls crying – they’re waving to us. God’s wind at my back. The shot which comes without sound – a dream all-too-long. Ash-colored silence. The blue giant passes. Cool breeze from the sea. I have been there – and on a whitewashed wall the flies are gathering. Birdmen. The apple trees in blossom. The big enigma. Two Poems from Tomas Tranströmer translated by Robin Fulton photo - mw Historiographic poetics is a response to the question what one might do in order to listen and talk with ghosts. Remembrance As Praxis And The Ethics Of The Inter-Human Roger I. Simon, Mario DiPaolantonio, Mark Clamenculture machine In his essay ‘The Storyteller,’ Walter Benjamin (1968: 86) referred to counsel as, ‘less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.’ For Benjamin, in order to seek and receive counsel one would first have to be able to tell this unfolding story. On such terms, for the lives of others to truly matter - beyond what they demand in the way of an immediate, necessary practical solidarity - they must be encountered as counsel. These would be stories that might actually initiate a de-phasing, a potential shifting of our own unfolding stories, particularly in ways that might be unanticipated and not easily accepted. Benjamin was attempting in this essay to reflect on the erosion of the very possibility of the exchange of experience. For him, this was actually being prevented by the proliferation of news reports and mass dissemination of stories and images that accompanied the media meditated transmission of experiences. Benjamin thought the link between memory and experience was being threatened within what he termed a ‘phantasmagoric’ flow of information that resulted in an age well informed about itself but at the same time knowing very little. Missing was the ‘wisdom’ of experience, its non-indifference, its transitivity. That is, the possibility that the telling of a story would actually make a difference in the way one’s own stories were told, either by opening one’s existing narratives to assessment and revision or by influencing one’s actions. This inability to ‘experience’ the transitivity of the stories of others (something other than simply being able to read/hear and recount them) is an historical condition. And it is to the conceptualization of this condition that we now wish to turn. The Storyteller [pdf] Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov Walter Benjamin .....................................................

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