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• 23 Nov 2009 23:17

  November 23, 2009 Market day at Middelburg (NL) c. 1910 Charles Corbet Belgian Autochromists _______________________ Kontest Carnage bill bissett lang­wage binds us 2gethr sep­a­ratelee n parts n shar­ing almost rep­likat­ing nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest com­mu­nal spells we ar all­bound n unbound in ths xcel­lent doc­u­menta­ree is not th veree great ingrid bergman gre­gory peck starer direk­tid by alfred hitch­cock with dreem sequens by sal­vador dali wun uv th best mooveez evr made ths spell­bound is a wickid inspir­ing anx­ious mak­ing n veree sus­pens­ful doc­u­menta­ree abt th amayz­ing spelling beez spelling beez start out lokal regyu­nal n build up 2 th nashyu­nal finals like all uv th kon­test worlds like dogs beau­tee tal­ent poli­tishyns etsetera ther ar issews uv child abuse as spelling beez ar 4 yung peopul n theyr par­ents 2 strug­gul with ovr strain­ing thees young peopul with xpek­taysyuns n gru­el­ing long hours uv prac­tise n rehersal n sum folk lorik patri­o­tism n th desir­abili­tee uv ful­fill­ing goals regard­less uv place in th race thees are sum uv th main moteefs undr­ly­ing ths com­pelling nar­ra­tiv a strong storee uv th kon­test car­nage with sew manee uv th kon­tes­tants being droppd it can all dpend on an “i” rather thn an “a” we fol­low th journeez uv 8 young peopul thru we hope 4 them n root 4 them I wunt tell yu th whol storee its a great film bind­ing th kor­rekt spelling on us like bind­ing parts uv our bodeez shows how fas­ci­nat­ing words ar I was in th spelling bee world 4 a whil in hal­i­fax b4 entring th dog show world with an xcel­lent cockr spaniel but that’s anothr storee chek out spell­bound high­lee rec­om­men­did 4/5 stars bill bissett in GEIST Magazine bill bissett b. Nov. 23, 1939 th talk on lunaria hand kraftid book photo by Sandra Alland bill bissett documentary 123 national film board bill bissett and BP Nichol - Interviewed by Phillis Webb 12 Visual Poetry In Canada: Birney, Bissett, and bp Jack David Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 2.2 1977 bill bissett at PennSound in the whirlwind drawings, poems and performances by bill bisset breath box bill bissett 1969 Ruins in Process Vancouver Art in the Sixties ..................................................... they cut back sew much on th backs uv th poor bill bissett (....) whats missing from my writing ar all th dramateek konflikts prsonal we all struggul with how we escape th crueltee or non rewarding dominans uv othrs thru we being harsh ourselvs squel 4 our freedom from bull shit skreem 4 our demands that we b lovd not always rite on sumtimes we ovr reakt mor drama we ar all such devoteez uv evn bside th endless atlantik we ar such fish stik toddlrs bside we caree on all th strugguls duelistik layr ing uv kontradiktoree tapestereez n eventualee let go evreewuns konfusd n feeling th guidans n wondring what is it all th blessings th pain th journeez th sun bakes us 4give n love n find as a demand that will seldom work honestlee we need 2 rewrite it make let it glow mor will i evr go back aftr sumwuns bin harsh 2 me sumtimes its eazier thn othrs th sun can reapeer it was all a ms mistr undrstanding othr times its just not possibul try not 2 think uv it moov on b loving b ther wundr th road n th bus taking a suddn curv tho th drivr knows it like th back uv his hand thru th see saltee inkee nite ium thinking now 4 a veree littul whil nothing is missing evreething is alredee heer ...(more) _______________________ Chad Gadya (The Tale of the Goat) 1919 El Lissitzky b. Nov. 23, 1890 _______________________ Theorizing Buddhist Scripture Translation as an Act of Giving: a Buddhist Perspective [pdf] Sai Cheong Siu New Voices in Translation Studies 4 (2008) Special Conference Issue: ‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research _______________________ Mountain hut Kandersteg/Switzerland autochrome Remi Verstreken 1909 _______________________ Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices inaugural issue _______________________ Five North Vancouver Trees Peter Culley mosses from an old manse 2. All is Loch Elsewhere, Arcadian pancake & parkade, chewed venue, through potash & slough eelgrass aftertaste past castle & ledge where the blue bus humps up & left, past the twinkling figurines of a presumptive distance even darker closer in & thickened so with baronial fences & colonial hedges that only from overhead can the security corona be glimpsed when cat-like you trip its cricket senses. ...(more) _______________________ Melancholia c. 1910 autochrome Charles Corbet _______________________ The Celestial Poets from Canto General Pablo Neruda trans. Martin Espada What did you do, you Gideans, intellectualizers, Rilkeans, mystifiers, false existential sorcerers, surrealist butterflies incandescent in the tomb, Europhile cadavers in fashion, pale worms in the capitalist cheese, what did you do confronted with the reign of anguish, in the face of this dark human being, this kicked-around dignity, this head immersed in manure, this essence of coarse and trampled lives? ...(more) courtesy of Philip Metres permanent link

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• 22 Nov 2009 13:22

  Old Women Speak of Owl1974Pitseolak Ashoona (1904 -1983 )One Eyed Crow 11.1&2

  November 22, 2009 Beach Grass c. 1920William Dassonville1879-1957 3via Kostis Velonis Lost Signatures (Book Of Jack Gilberts & Fernando Pessoas) Peter Boyle and MTC CroninSibila When the sheep stop feedingfor Fernando Pessoa Little sheep with their trusting forms of address, a dozen of them grazing placidly on fine-spun clouds you left in stalls for them all over the space of winter and the fragile years of sojourning. Nibbling on the very least a shepherd might give – grain from an open hand, sun and water, the tough resilience of a gaze that walks between the starved moon and night’s emptiness. Nourished from the same soil as your own wayward fracturing, they feasted long on sun-ripened air but then, like innocence itself once it bathes and takes food among us, slowly and strangely they lost themselves, became boulders on a mountain pass, an old car abandoned in a field, a cypress caressing a waterfall, shrinking and glittering as distance transformed them. On the day they stopped feeding you offered them the fingers of your hand while their eyes travelled past you uncomprehending dwelling already far ahead in the past. SibilaSibila's English Portal Charles Bernstein, Editor Mila Zinkova Eight Vietnamese poets Selected by Linh Dinhsibila fromMarsh DreamNguyen Quoc Chanh III Broken fuse. Night smoothes out protuberances and fills in hollows. Disparity aches the entire line in back of the ears throat navel tail bone groin and an open toilet. The savior sits. Concepts are a constraining helmet insects catching prey by a system of shutting tight. Imagination and thoughts eternally nourished. Man with a thick shadow does not hear the air breaks to clear a road to the cemetery Look into one spot. Staring and contemplating is to enter a train car without passengers. Imagination thrown into a blinding interval everything rises. A straight movement eliminates dampness and dries out the viscera. A shadow creakily swinging a hammock. The sound of darkness moving drenched in lubricating oil. Kinship is declared through hastily carved bas relief where air-hating insects worship. Gnawing epoch. Suck marrow. Product of cohabitation disobedient shard of instinct pressures of an offshoot forest. A curt hand. Memory opens its compass and a train car without passengers. The past has extra tickets. Centuries not transported. Innukshuk Builders1967 Pitseolak Ashoona Pitseolak: pictures out of my life from recorded interviews by Dorothy Harley Eber Cloudy, Chance [pdf]Richard Hoffmanjanus head He goed, god if he was he seemed sum a way, knot turning a g(r)ain, the shaper, O ver, O pen ultimatum: now you have it, now drips the net, be great, full, timorousness last life, must learn for word, fore sign, and note no thing not a live, outcrying outloud, until alone you know. * Can one (for if one can then any can) misbe? Some have come to that, sum of have, of want fell short and fell hard once and for all from highnesses, the view from there a horror. Weigh to go, swung bubbly broken, and wave goodbye. But Reset is no deity, a flight, and futile too as pyre. [pdf]) Richard blogs at Mnemosyne's Memes Blue Remembered HillsDennis Potteryoutube via waggish Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability Henry Giroux At present, Americans are fascinated by a particular kind of monstrosity, by vampires and zombies condemned to live an eternity by feeding off the souls of the living. The preoccupation with such parasitic relations speaks uncannily to the threat most Americans perceive from the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry, which Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, has aptly described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Media culture, as the enormous popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO's True Blood reveal, is nonetheless enchanted by this seductive force of such omnipotent beings. More frightening, however, than the danger posed by these creatures is the coming revolution enacted by the hordes of the unthinking, caught in the spell of voodoo economics and compelled to acts of obscene violence and mayhem. They are the living dead, whose contagion threatens the very life force of the nation. A Zombie Manifesto:The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embryboundary 2 / Spring 2008aaaarg - free reg. req. Father, Joseph, and terroristsBruno Schulz 1936 The Sanatorium at the Sign of the HourglassBruno Schulz(July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942)Translated by John Curran Davis What more can I say? He was the first to explain the secondary, derivative character of that late formation, being nothing other than a peculiar kind of poisoning of the climate by miasmas of the over-ripe and rancid baroque art crammed together in our museums. Decomposing in boredom and oblivion, too sweet and locked in with no outlet, like old preserves, that museum art over-sugars our climate, and is the cause of that beauteous, malarial fever, those colourful mirages in which that protracted autumn agonises. For beauty, as my father taught, is a disease; it is the chill of some mysterious infection, a dark announcement of the decomposition rising up from the depths of perfection, to be hailed by perfection with a sigh of the most profound happiness. "Nothing but face" - "To hell with philosophy"?: Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the scandal of human countenance Adam Zachary NewtonThe Mythologization of Reality Bruno Schulz Translated by John M. Bates The human spirit is tireless in its glossing of life with the aid of myths, in its 'making sense' of reality. The word itself, left to its own devices, gravitates towards meaning. Meaning is the element which bears humanity into the process of reality. It is an absolute given. It cannot be derived from other givens. Why something should appear meaningful to us is impossible to define. The process of making sense of the world is closely connected with the word. Speech is the metaphysical organ of man. And yet over time the word grows rigid, becomes immobilized, ceases to be the conductor of new meanings. The poet restores conductivity to words through new short-circuits, which arise out of their fusions. The image is also an offshoot of the original word, the word which was not yet a sign, but a myth, a story, or a meaning. The Monks of Mount Athos Robert Draper Photography by Travis Dovenational geographic Redoubt of the reclusive, Simonos Petras monastery was founded in 1257 more than 800 feet above the Aegean Sea. It is one of 20 monasteries on the steep-sloped peninsula, a popular pilgrimage site sometimes called the Christian Tibet. Laced by rustic paths still traveled on foot and by mule, the enclave's low-tech serenity attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims yearly-men only. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the peninsula is off-limits to all women and the temptations they might represent. via tawny grammar These two monks have shared the same small cell for more than 50 years. Humor helps maintain harmony, as does respect for seniority. Father Nektarios (at left) says of Father Christoforos, "He's followed my will as the elder all these years." Time, Space, Source Material, and Methodschapter one of Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece Joan Breton ConnellyPrinceton University Press Two Late Poems by Robin Blasersibila I've caught the unease of old age in my hands and wrung it dry in order to remain within its kaleidoscope, there to collide among all colours of kalos--beauty of eidos--form of skopos--watcher of lovers of irreparables Robin Blaser (1925-2009) Tug & Log Boom William Dassonville 1925

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• 17 Nov 2009 23:10

  Baghdad 1927Percy Wyndham Lewisb. 18 November 1882

  November 18, 2009 Self-Portrait Assemblage1916 Man Rayd. November 18, 1976 Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable Stephen Barkerpmc What is the work of which the marginal, the parergonal, the fragmentary, is outside? How is one to map this exchange, of terms and of texts, and how will this economy of the marginal, the transgressive, the nameless, or unnamable, operate within the aestheticized space of writing and reading? Janus Head Volume 11, Issues 1 & 2 What’s the ‘Matter’ with Materialism? [pdf] Walter Benjamin and the New Janitocracy Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphyjanus head This paper examines Walter Benjamin’s argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiographyare the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child’s play and children’s playthings a potential ‘playing out’ and ‘recollecting’ of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed ‘messianic’ history. The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the ‘New Janitocracy’. Man Ray1945 Influence and authenticity of l'Inconnue de la Seine Anja ZeidlerThe Gaddis Annotations A Part Of You Lives OnRobert Gibbons To live life so well, so rough-hard-edged, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisibly anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, avoiding the rich, if need be, so that then when death comes a part of you lives on, because to live life so well, hard-edged, subtle, discreet, intuitive, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisible, anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, avoiding the rich, if need be, so that when death finally comes, whether suddenly, or after the long ago, a part of you lives on in recollections of others, in things crafted or collected, in long-lost photos, in histories & myths, in the unrecorded & recorded records, will, letters, diaries, notebooks, love letters, write those love letters now so both of you live on, when death comes, whether suddenly, or after the long agon a part of you lives on. Prose poems [pdf] Robert Gibbonsjanus heade Broken Chair with Stump and Ballet Shoes Man Ray1942 The International Literary Quarterly November 2009 Volta: A Multilingual Anthology (One poem: 75 languages) Border/Lines: an Introduction Richard Berengarten 7. Translators, wherever they happen to live, inhabit border/lines. Translators are edge-people, bridge-makers. Translation is edge-action, frontier-culture, margin-work. And the border/lines that a translator constantly criss-crosses and transgresses, the shifting zones over and through which a translator zigzags, are located in the mind. The contours and colorations that a translator discerns in zones of mentation are mapped on both exterior and interior listening and observation; and the internal listening and observation are predicated in memory, emotion and intuition. Furthermore, the spaces the translator finds and opens in those zones, and the patterns the translator makes in them, are not just linguistic. For the translator’s (or translating team’s) necessary bilingualism itself means that the spaces in those zones are interlingual, infra-lingual, even metalingual. ..................................................... Volta Richard Berengarten . . . now that dusk falls . . . King sun, rosy cheeked, day's sovereign coin, you touch me, and my skin becomes a cornea, my spine an optic nerve, and my body trembles half dazzled by the pool of gold you pour over this sea and city, and I'm blinded. Here once stood rows — and still I know they stand — of houses and streets, belonging to another city, not this one you have utterly transformed. We walk along the waterfront. The night fishermen's boats are ready to set out, motors chugging, paraffin lamps in the bows, and the whole town's out for the promenade, lovers arm in arm, and young men swaggering, mothers and fathers, children eating ice-cream, old men watching from tables at pavement cafes, and the darkening hills move closer, like friendly animals. Sweet evening skyglow, spread on hills and bay, your arm grazes mine now, as if by accident, like the touch of this young woman who walks beside me with heavy hips, small steps and swinging gait, jet hair swept back, delicate throat and shoulders deep summer bronzed, and her olive brown eyes laughing. I drink you, shimmering light, like wine, like music, as her ancestors have drunk you thousands of years. Porous city, her name is Eleftheria, and though your scars are grey flecks in her eyes, still, at this hour when light and light's inflections play subtly in her face as speech or song, hers is the ancient right to walk this quayside as instrument and guardian of your light collecting it in the wells of her deep pupils, and hers, the darling freedom, to tread you like a dancer. Darling evening, light thousands of years old, clear throated singer, lovely as this woman, how can I not adore the grace you cast this city and its people in, a mould that sculptures all it touches, the whole world? I have become your slave, if not your citizen. And thirsting to drink you wholly, I would fill every pore with your radiance, her freedom. La Conversation1968 Jean Paul Lemieux(18 November 1904 - 7 December 1990) fromThe Spell Against Spelling(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud) George Starbuck You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too. They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk." I know they're there. I know where the beggars are, With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh. I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn; But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm. For a long time, I keep mumb. I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb. Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn, Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn, And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn, And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh." The Day of the Condour, or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour Ronald de Sousa November 17, 2009 Okawa VillageKochi PrefectureToshio Shibata Justifying the MarginsPierre Jorissalt Excerpt from book: Nimrod in Hell ... his words, no matter which language or nonlanguage they are in, are fitting in a further sense: they are babble, thus a babelian bavel, and thus connect to bave, Fr. for drool, spittle. A false etymology—but are any etymologies really “false”? Aren’t they the engine whose misfirings, rather than smooth transparent linguistic runs, drive poetry forward? A false etymology, then, possibly, but one that brings in that much despised excretion without which we would have no language. And now, looking up the etymology of “bave” it turns out that the word goes back to pop. Latin “baba”, an “onomatopoeia that expresses the babble [le babil] of children.” Or of giants. Or of the single universal language all humans once spoke in their lingo-genetic childhood. Now this bave, this spittle, this active saliva (doesn’t the word “alive” hide somewhere in “saliva”?), as George Bataille’s Encyclopedia Acephalica teaches us, is “the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement.” For spittle accompanies breath, “which can exit the mouth only when permeated with it.” Because “breath is soul, so much so that certain peoples have the notion of ‘the soul before the face.’“ Without spittle, no breath, no soul, no language—it is the lubricant that immanentizes the pneuma. But it is also, the EA goes on, that which “casts the mouth in one fell swoop down to the last rung of the organic ladder, lending it a function of ejection even more repugnant than its role as gate through which one stuffs food.” And its sexual connotations and erotic manifestations allow it to befuddle any hierarchical classification of organs. The EA again: “Like the sexual act carried out in broad daylight, it is scandal itself, for it lowers the mouth—which is the visible sign of intelligence—to the level of the most shameful organs…” The scandal of children and giants speaking in a language comprehensible (or incomprehensible) to all, like spitting in public. Neither YHWH nor Dante can let this happen. The one shatters the single language, the other gathers the now incomprehensible words of the giant hunter Nimrod but makes them, has to make them fit into his language, wiped clean of spittle. For Nimrod’s languaged anguish cannot, and does not exceed the Dantean world, it fits exactly into the cosmotopography of his lyric epic. It is metrically exact and accurately rimes with “palmi” two lines above and “salmi” two lines below. Gentle giant, speaking nonsense in comely divine words. Not surprisingly the prissy Latin poet wants worse from Nimrod, telling him “Stupid soul, keep to your horn,” and dismissing him thus: “Let us leave him alone and not speak in vain, for every language is to him as his is to others, which is known to none.” Yet Nimrod in rage hunts still—for meaning, and he says his meaning. Poet, translator: meme combat! We keep hunting among stones ...... ..................................................... Pierre Joris interview Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBookPierre Joris' blog - Nomadics Picket Fence 2003Glenn SloggettStills Gallery Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Richard Rortyaaaarg - free reg. req. If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on auronomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools - as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are dready committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the ribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the "liberal ironist." also available at aaaarg - Rorty's Philosophy as Cultural PoliticsObjectivity Relativism and Truth Matsuyama City Ehime Prefecture Toshio ShibataInterview with Toshio Shibataeyecurious fromSix Prose Poems from Four’sCore Crag Hill “Love is just the language of thinking?” “But it doesn’t feed you.” The problem raised the problem of the spirit. The mailman dismounted Hegelianism and, from his pocket, snatched up all the Germans in harmony. They had a ball. I knew it to be water–earthier, not so afraid–and stood upon the shore, parrots beautiful as a dream. Keys chittered in their cages. The lake was a long oval, the fragments of newsprint, urine. I listened for sound cut off, curtains. Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare & Co 8, rue Dupuytren Nov. 17, 1919 photo 1920 Mourning tonguesRobyn Creswell on Mahmoud Darwish Darwish’s late verse is, in its own way, a meditation on the ways is which the self becomes a stranger to itself, becomes full of voices that are not its own. One of his most charming poems on this subject is The Dice Player (also translated by Hammami and Berger in their edition of Mural). In this long, quasi-autobiographical lyric, Darwish reflects on the many accidents of genealogy and history that conspired to make him who he is, or was, and how easy it would have been for him to turn out otherwise, or never to have existed at all. (“It’s possible that poetry might have gained more / if precisely this poet hadn’t existed,” he wryly shrugs.) In this way, the poem also becomes a matter of chance: not an act of random creation but, like the self, a complicated result of the place where one happens to be born, the language one happens to speak, the poems one has read, and the friends one makes along the way. The Dice Player is, appropriately, the centrepiece of Breytenbach’s collection. His voiceover ensures that the poem never really comes to an end, that it remains open to further transformations and translations, further accidents of history and strokes of luck. Here is Darwish, via Hammami and Berger (and Mallarmé): This poem is a dice throw onto a board of darkness that glows and doesn’t glow words fall like feathers on sand. I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem. Daniel AugschöllHeading East

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• 16 Nov 2009 00:34

  Tarlabasi Andres Gonzalez

  November 16, 2009 Colonized Waterways - Lake Ontario Michael Fuchs Joerg Colberg _______________________ Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem Hans Ulrich Obrist Translated from the French by Eric Anglès RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates. HUO: Which situationist projects remain unrealized? RV: Psychogeography, the construction of situations, the superseding of predatory behavior. The radicality, which, notwithstanding some lapses, never ceased to motivate us, remains a source of inspiration to this day. Its effects are just beginning to manifest themselves in the autonomous groups that are now coming to grips with the collapse of financial capitalism. HUO: The Situationist International defined the situationist as someone who commits her- or himself to the construction of situations. What were those situations for you, concretely? How would you define the situationist project in 2009? RV: By its very style of living and thinking, our group was already sketching out a situation, like a beachhead active within enemy territory. The military metaphor is questionable, but it does convey our will to liberate daily life from the control and stranglehold of an economy based on the profitable exploitation of man. We formed a “group-at-risk” that was conscious of the hostility of the dominant world, of the need for radical rupture, and of the danger of giving in to the paranoia typical of minds under siege. By showing its limits and its weaknesses, the situationist experience can also be seen as a critical meditation on the new type of society sketched out by the Paris Commune, by the Makhnovist movement and the Republic of Councils wiped out by Lenin and Trotsky, by the libertarian communities in Spain later smashed by the Communist Party. The situationist project is not about what happens once consumer society is rejected and a genuinely human society has emerged. Rather, it illuminates now how lifestyle can supersede survival, predatory behavior, power, trade and the death-reflex....(more) _______________________ José Saramago b. 16 Nov. 1922 How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice José Saramago Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1998 Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues ...sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would tell me: "José, tonight we're going to sleep, both of us, under the fig tree". There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the biggest, because it was the oldest, and timeless, was, for everybody in the house, the fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I met only many years after and learned the meaning of... Amongst the peace of the night, amongst the tree's high branches a star appeared to me and then slowly hid behind a leaf while, turning my gaze in another direction I saw rising into view like a river flowing silent through the hollow sky, the opal clarity of the Milky Way, the Road to Santiago as we still used to call it in the village. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me.(...) In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.(...) Blind. The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Then the apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead. I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don't have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all....(more) ..................................................... José Saramago: Death Takes a Breather Goodloe Byron The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago describes humanity with the same alien fascination with which the Belgian naturalist Maurice Maeterlinck used to describe insects. This foreign view of civilization is entirely appropriate, as Saramago looks less like a man than a Methuselahan turtle, peering around with a goggly apparatus strapped to his temple. In Saramago’s view, the world is not balancing on a precarious pin, but is pinned to the floor by violence and power. Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible: Blindness comes to replace selective attention with something that no longer selects anything; private regret transforms into public lucidity in Seeing. In The Cave, the Vegas/Wal-Mart/Condominium/uber-complex called The Center, a simulacra of Plato’s Cave, is built atop a buried allegorical site which realizes the simile as a literal state of being. But in these novels, society also accommodates the intruding impossibility: the blind are quarantined in dark cells; lucidity is diffused by propaganda, and the cave is turned into a spectacle itself. Since Blindness, Saramago’s seemingly impossible inspirations have become finely attuned Chestertonian paradoxes, and these situations, in turn, break the smooth surface of reality, exposing the tender and often stupid mess underneath. He’s studying the human being by injecting our world with an unstable but vivid isotope....(more) The Unexpected FantasistFernanda Eberstadt José Saramago's blog José Saramago at the Scriptorium The Modern Word Blindness and Seeing José Saramago google books _______________________ Ellis Collection of Kodakiana (1886 - 1923) Emergence of Advertising in America Duke Digital Collections _______________________ Henry Gould on Unjustly Neglected Ph.D. Monographs and the American Sublime guest post at digital emunction Before there was a graft­ing, by that Min­nesota poet Robert Bly and others, 50 years or so ago, onto Amer­i­can poetry, of semi-sophisticated, wire-limbed, thin-shanked sur­re­al­ism, there was a (per­haps one-sided) debate going on, mid-century, between the New Crit­i­cal ortho­doxy, of Wim­satt & Beard­s­ley, Ransom & Brooks & Tate et al., on the one hand, and one of the found­ing & now former crit­ics in that wave, R.P. Black­mur, and his fore­most dis­ci­ple, John Berry­man, on the other. This con­fronta­tion between dif­fer­ing ideas about the char­ac­ter and means of poetry is one of the main topics of a perhaps-neglected work of schol­ar­ship, pub­lished in 1984, by Bloom. No, not Harold Bloom – rather, a fellow named James D. Bloom. The book is titled The Stock of Avail­able Real­ity : R.P. Black­mur and John Berry­man (Cran­bury, NJ : Asso­ci­ated Uni­ver­sity Presses, 1984).(....) How does this debate con­cern us today? ...(more) Henry's blog - HG Poetics _______________________ _______________________ fromThe Anti-Orpheus [PDF] a notebook Robert Sheppard Shearsman Books Poetry interrupts history, musicates the `facts', makes the said of hegemonic (or non-hegemonic) history the saying of poetry, which will create anew; mutually interruptive a new said of non-history for only the said may bear witness. against amnesia not by covering the past or by re-covering it but by allowing a utopian counter-memory to refute and argue with historical events. against anaesthesia by keeping the poetry of saying saying saying, the reader assembles the par/s/ts. a history must always be shown _______________________ Poetic Sequencing and The New: Twentieth Century Blues Robert Sheppard The epigraph for the entire Twentieth Century Blues project -- the chance of there being a book, a single volume, of that title at the head of which it could stand is remote -- comes from JM Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The disgraced imperial magistrate who is the novel's narrator, is forced to explain his archeological interests (in particular, indecipherable texts he had collected) which have alerted his authoritarian captors' suspicions: They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire -- the old Empire, I mean. (p 112) His explanation is ironically barbed, of course, but his sense of the subversiveness of the marginal or of that which cannot readily be decoded into the violent simplicities of bureaucracy is affective, and provides me with a useful analogy for Twentieth Century Blues. We can all read the object, assemble, re-assemble, it in our own way(s). This will, of course, be affected by our acquired knowledge, our perceptual schema, and by the means of the text's availability, not an irrelevant question for the non-canonical poet, relying upon fugitive small presses. We all have to start reading with what we can get, as Allen Fisher realised....(more) Complete Twentieth Century Blues Robert Sheppard Salt Publishing Complete Twentieth Century Blues Robert Sheppard reviewed by Todd Nathan Thorpe jacket _______________________ "Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination."   -  Tycho Brahe, b. 14 December 1546 _______________________ photo - mw permanent link

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• 15 Nov 2009 09:13

  photo - mw

  November 15, 2009 Scene from "The Gas Heart" by Tristan Tzara. Costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay Theatre Michel, Paris, July 6-7, 1923 _______________________ High Decoration: Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars, and the Poem as Fashion Design Carrie Noland Although critics have exerted much effort in attempting to clarify Cendrars' debt to Apollinaire and, conversely, Apollinaire's debt to Cendrars, the influence of Robert and Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous contrast technique upon Cendrars' work has never been properly explored. It is clear, however, that the remarkable stylistic modifications that Cendrars' poetry underwent during the year 1913 can be attributed primarily to his frequent visits to the Delaunay home. Robert Delaunay's theory of simultaneous contrast was responsible for the pastiche compositional technique of Sonia Delaunay's "robe simultanée" and, I will argue, for the pastiche quality of the poems of Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques. Introduced by Robert Delaunay and elaborated on by his wife, the technique was based on Michel-Eugène Chevreul's theory that the perception of color values is determined by the contrast of juxtaposed tones. The Delaunays transformed Chevreul's theory into a technique of "simultanéité" roughly defined by Cendrars in 1914 as the process by which one entity gains its identity through contrast with another (Aujourd'hui 71-2). Anticipating the postmodern fascination with surface juxtapositions, the Delaunays reinterpreted pictorial depth or "profondeur" as an illusion produced by surface planes of color rather than by vanishing-point perspective. It was this reconception of depth as a function of surface design that stimulated Cendrars' interest in citational pastiche.... Poetry at stake: lyric aesthetics and the challenge of technology Carrie Noland google books _______________________ Sonia Delaunay b. 14 November, 1885 photo - David Seidner Sonia Delauney David Seidner BOMB Magazine A world of color would be ideal, where one could create emotions accordingly. We could live by impressions the way a blind man lives by touch. We could vivify or seduce, transmute or emote, the possibilities are endless. A world of color so fine and pure, from the deepest innermost part of the human body to the pale washed evasiveness of the white of the human eye. We could live in a constant state of aura where every feeling manifested itself by color thus removing the lie from mankind. Sonia Delaunay entered so far inside as to reach the womb. She returned not only to primitive sensibility in terms of the universal, but also in terms of woman, of motherhood. As early as 1911, Delaunay delved into the non-objective world....(more) Flamencosänger Sonia Delaunay 1915 _______________________ Poetry Marianne Moore I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"--above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry. _______________________ Marianne Moore b. 15 Nov. 1887 photo by Carl Van Vechten _______________________ Ted Berrigan b. 15 Nov. 1934 photo by Laverne Harrell Clark Ted Berrigan at PennSound Buddha On The Bounty Ted Berrigan          for Merrill Gilfillan "A little loving can solve a lot of things" She locates two spatial equivalents in The same time continuum. "You are lovely. I am lame." "Now it's me." "If a man is in Solitude, the world is translated, my world & wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave' " Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles Of this pilgrimage toward clarities Of great mud intelligence & feeling. "The Elephant is the wisest of all animals The only one who remembers his former lives & he remains motionless for long periods of time Meditating thereon." I'm not here, now,       & it is good, absence. _______________________ photo - mw _______________________ OCHO #27 Edited by Didi Menendez and featuring MiPO's community of writers permanent link

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• 13 Nov 2009 06:23

  CradleBenny Andrews1967

  November 13, 2009 Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne 1589 - 1662 Oasis 3 Barbara Mor ctheory the small blue man a small man tends the door,he wears a blue jacket,all is glassy silence bldgs &parkinglotEmpty,the sun exists at some angle to the sky the small blue man is almost not there,he is Tokwah who opens the door as many years,the close world,vinous enclosed &moistured green film,earth enwrapt in its sweat &thick creations,who is mouth,stink &eating who is water(jaguar,Fire) in a jungle of entropic things he thinks he is many dreams all sensate cells,all skins explode,Omnivorous of desire elderly blue person,or shrunk white man,all thats left, arthritic &hypnotic,at the turnstyle inside the door(inside the plaza inside the wonder)aGreeter,can barely stand or move yet humbly mechanical for the job,the doors of automatic sliding glass,of hisEyes,open beyond mortality &theSilence everywhere that was aWorld flesh floor,liveMezzanines of air,anaconda flowers rain eyes lickt day&night w/ paradise,bodies consuming the display of bodies rapturous or w/out commentary,except orange purple yellow noise explosions in anOracular skull he counts fireants crocodiles bats millipedes piranhas,ecstatic merchandise heThinks bright red blood eyes as a bird flies up this parrot screeching words &becomes a clever man there was aTree,ocean in aTree,Tokwah hooks out a great flood & everything drowns,rivers pour out his orificesPissing& preachingFever his monkey tricks penetrate himself,a slippery muscle poison always lustful always hungry &mens milk,intercourse w/ toads,a thorn in the squirmy anus extrudes secretion abundantly,dipt w/petals on penis& theMind he makes semen the invention of(adultery &murder) so that you remain dead,so that you are dead,he madeDeath,thisBrain glows in the dark,binocular &cruel,scares away return ofGhosts until theWorld closes,now they come Oasis 1 and 2 The Lady from Shanghai Is it Written in the Stars?Global Finance, Precarious Destinies Brian HolmesContinental Drift This essay inquires into the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. For that it begins not with the azure sky, but with the curve of a dark horizon.(....) Today it is the mirror-maze of the speculative economy that lies in ruins, and the question is how to forget the impossible desires projected from the financial stars above, how to imagine other destinies. Yet what seems likely, if the current political passivity continues to reign, is that the multitudes of artificial lifeforms that flourished briefly in the glass-house environments of the financial capitals will now just fade away like the swarms of lesser creatures in Black Shoals, leaving the major predators with their weapons intact, still firing at each other. The danger is that the present crisis – with a magnitude comparable at least to that of the 1970s, if not the 1930s – will be resolved by those at the top of the social hierarchy, who are now attempting to reboot the speculative economy. In that case, the profound reshaping of social institutions required to end the crisis will be decided exclusively by them. If we want to make an egalitarian change in our world model, it’s urgent to understand what happens in the boom-bust cycles – before they are used against us once again.(....) The lifeform of the financial markets is now animated by these meta-commodities, which lend the new cityscapes their dazzling character. But what the pulsating lights of the central business districts hide is the privatization of the social state – indeed, the privatization of government. Gentrification is the fetishism of severed democratic relations.(....) The kind of “play-labor” celebrated by the pundits of Web 2.0 may have had transgressive connotations in the 1960s, but today it is only a grotesque parody of Huizinga’s homo ludens, or of the sublimated sexual drives that Marcuse explored in his revolutionary book, Eros and Civilization. What has disappeared from the networked cultures of casino capitalism is the willingness to engage in political conflict – even while the civilizational forces of Thanatos, or unbridled aggression, bear down on the biosphere. Now it is those aggressive drives that must be sublimated and channeled into a necessary struggle. Rather than draping aesthetic and epistemological veils over blatant expropriation, shouldn’t artists and knowledge workers seek political confrontations with those who set the rules of the game? Jodi Dean OasisBenny AndrewsNovember 13, 1930 - November 10, 200612 Dolor Theodore Roethke I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. Robert Louis Stevenson November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894 playing his flageolet

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• 11 Nov 2009 18:12

  Evelyn Hofer

  November 11, 2009 Poppies Spring 1916 The Heritage of the Great War _______________________ And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think themselves happy.   -  Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor      The Brothers Karamazov _______________________ An isolated note on Everything Passes Stephen Mitchelmore Everything Passes then is not so much a metafiction reflecting with postmodern knowingness on the elemental opening 18 pages than an Orphic gaze into the underworld of art and our inner lives. In exploring the issue within a novel, Josipovici implicates itself and our reading in the same process. The voices we hear resonate uncannily in our mind, offering the possibility of real expression and dialogue outside of all constraints imposed by the genre of the novel, yet also threatening to reinforce them with yet another beginning, middle and end. It is difficult to distinguish between the pathway and the cul-de-sac. To do so, we have to read, listen and write again. For the man standing at the cracked window things begin to look brighter as, toward the end of the novel, he finds release in creative life, only to make a discovery that seems to reverse all progress. Everything Passes risks such failure as no other English novel dare fail. ...(more) _______________________ Evelyn Hofer 1922-2009 12345 _______________________ A Good Without Light Sustainability's seamy underbelly Curtis White Tin House For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.(....) What no one is allowed to consider is the distressing possibility that no amount of tinkering and changing and greening and teaching the kindergartners to plant trees and recycle Dad’s beer cans will ever really matter if our assumptions about what it means to be prosperous, what it means to be “developed,” what it means to live in “progress,” and what it means to be “free” remain what they have been for the last four hundred years under the evergrowing weight of capitalist markets and capitalist social relations. As Marx put it, under capitalism we carry our relation to others in our pockets. Marx would now have to add, sadly, that those “others” must now include the animals of the field and the birds of the sky (Daniel, 2:38) as well as the fields and sky themselves.1 But such a line of thought is not tolerated because the very word “capitalism” (not to mention “Marx”) is a fighting word.2 (Or, worse, it is a sort of faux pas to speak of “capitalism” at all; you’d be better off saying “the economy,” just as if you were a slave asked to refer to your master as your employment counselor.) Unfortunately, in banishing this word we eliminate from the conversation the very thing we came together to discuss. We can talk about our plans to save the world, but we can’t talk about the economic system that put it in jeopardy in the first place. That’s off the table. But I do not believe that capitalism is somehow singularly at fault. I don’t even think that it is necessarily bad. It is too reductive to say simply that there are cruel and greedy and violent people among us (capitalists), and that we need somehow to confront them and assert the good in ourselves. The truer problem is that the people who are destructive honestly believe that they are doing good. They are more often than not, or more often than any of us should be comfortable with, an expression of the virtues of what I call the Barbaric Heart....(more) via riley dog _______________________ The Un-Nominator Renominated 1952-53 Roberto Matta Nov 11, 1911 – Nov 23, 2002 _______________________ Invasion of the Body Snatchers larvalsubjects on Repetition From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, I find meme theory extremely attractive precisely because meme theory treats memes as real objects or actors in the world. (....) With the emergence of memes a new replicator enters the world, very different from genes. Memes or cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, are like genes in that they aim to get themselves replicated, however as unique replicators they do not act at the behest of genes. In other words, we now get what could be called a “conflict of the replicators”. Genes can struggle with memes. Memes can struggle with genes. Memes and genes can collaborate with one another. However, like all alliances, a collaboration of memes and genes is a temporary strategy to advance the replication of genes and the replication of the memes that can be dissolved when this relationship no longer advances one or the other. It is even feasible that memes, at some point, could dispense with genes altogether if they find new and more effective ways to replicate themselves, no longer requiring organic bodies like brains to be passed along. This, for example, is what is depicted in films like Terminator or The Matrix where the machines (and machines are memes) have been liberated from human bodies and strive to replicate themselves apart from humans. The key point is that with memes new relationships to the world and biology emerge. Thus when a soldier dies in battle while storming the beach at Normandy, this soldier has died so that certain memes might be replicated, not for the sake of his genes. When someone practices abstinence before marriage, they are acting on behalf of memes, not genes. These new objects or actors, memes, fundamentally change how we relate to ourselves, our biology, and memes. Indeed, in a theorization worthy of Lacan or Freud, Dennett compares memes to foreign and alien entities that come to infest our brains, creating persons, where persons are what emerge as a sort of conflict between our biology or genes and these units of culture. It is not difficult to discern something akin to Lacan’s parasitic and alien signifiers that so transform our relation to our bodies and the world in this concept of memes. ...(more) _______________________ Evelyn Hofer _______________________ Eight Poems John M. Bennett otoliths The Lightbulbs Exploded throttled bag ,woods filled with shining sticks and bottles flame walks inside my hat puzzled logor apta fingering ,dot latex buz zed and staples ,leaves like plastic bags the creek streams with oil and rotting eggs the basement locked and flooded my lungless floating book my spitting at the window my eyes open in the greying light _______________________ Chateau Wood, Flanders Frank Hurley 1917 _______________________ "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquesting faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."   -  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007 permanent link

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• 11 Nov 2009 00:41

  Théophile Alexandre Steinlen b. Nov. 10, 1859

  November 10, 2009 casino employee's day Simplifying Chaos Jeremy Kohm Camera Obscura _______________________ Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea Laura Hapke pdf - aaaarg - reg. req. The sweatshop is as American as apple pie. But what has it meant to the American imagination? Scholars, of course, have long told the story of sweated labor. Of late, excellent work by Andrew Ross, Edna Bonacich and Richard Applebaum, and others has clarified our understanding of the sweatshop from its antebellum origins to the era of cyberspace.1 My concern here, though, is the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop is imagined and its stories told. A century and a half of writings on the shop, punctuated by graphic art, does more than narrate or define. Even in the writings of authors who seek “scientific” definitions, language itself undermines, refashions, challenges, and sometimes contradicts the official goals of policy makers, advocates, and workers themselves. For this multitude of storytellers, the invented is submerged in the real sweatshop. I use the word “story” here in the broadest sense. It is an imaginative construction, yes, but one that relies on the rhetoric, helps organize the knowledge, and is the repository of its culture’s (or subculture’s) beliefs and myths, assumptions, and prejudices.(....) Charting the idea of the sweatshop to the citizens of the United States is an important act of historical reconstruction. The core of my book is a study of the many representations of the sweatshop: prolabor, entrepreneurial, mass-cultural, social documentary, literary, and artistic. Necessarily, I am also interested in the battle to wrest representational control of the sweatshop narrative. Who would write the “song of the shop”? Who would paint or photograph it? Which were the more authentic narratives? What tropes, convictions, and fugues emerge consistently over time and across discourses? Does today’s reiterated claim that sweatshops raise the standard of living in the Third World, combining global expediency with compassion, form a new narrative? Or is it simply the old story retold? _______________________ Night William Hogarth 1738 _______________________ The Will of Achilles Robert Kelly Conjunctions:53 ::: Special Online Feature (....) 4. Every city has a slim identity— hard to grasp it, sometimes young man or woman glimpsed at a window or old man a-doze beneath a tree. This city was a man, a wifed man and a children’d man and a man with father, with mother. No wonder he has to die. I belong to too many, Hector sighed. Let the walls of my city fall down on me. But the walls stood. 5. If only none of this were true and one man could befriend another and the crows find other food beyond the mountains and Scamander ran clean over golden gravel. It is the ship’s fault, Achilles thinks, if only ships had never been invented we would stay at home on the rough fertile uneven plains of Thessaly or all those rocky little islands. The terrible migrations of people— without travel there would be no war. ...(more) _______________________ Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism 1761 William Hogarth b. Nov. 10, 1697 _______________________ All these activities-critical philosophy, literary theory, history resemble each other in the fact that they do not resemble that from which they derive. But they are all interlinguistic: they relate to what in the original belongs to language, and not to meaning as an extralinguistic correlate susceptible of paraphrase and imitation. They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original, reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original. They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead. They read the original from the perspective of a pure language (reine Sprache), a language that would be entirely freed of the illusion of meaning-pure form if you want; and in doing so they bring to light a dismembrance, a de-canonization which was already there in the original from the beginning. In the process of translation, as Benjamin understands it - which has little to do with the empirical act of translating, as all of us practice it on a daily basis - there is an inherent and particularly threatening danger. The emblem of that danger is Holderlin's translations of Sophocles: Confirmation of this as well as of every other important aspect is supplied by Holderlin's translations, particularly those of the two tragedies of Sophocles. In them the harmony of the languages is so profound that sense is touched by language only the way an aeolian harp is touched by the wind. . . . Holderlin's translations in particular are subject to the enormous danger inherent in all translations: the gates of a language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator with silence. Holderlin's translations from Sophocles were his last work, in them meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language. Translation, to the extent that it disarticulates the original, to the extent that it is pure language and is only concerned with language, gets drawn into what he calls the bottomless depth, something essentially destructive, which is in language itself. "Conclusions" on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator"Paul De ManMessenger Lecture, Cornell University, March 4, 1983 included in Paul de Man Essay Collection pdf - aaaarg - free reg. req. _______________________ Monday Prayer By mjs Jesus' General Lord, who is God of all that is oilesque And tar-like, and greasy, and flammable Dear Lord, may it please you to know Our wimpy concerns about the environment have abated Our vision to Vietnamize Afghanistan is proceeding Our commitment to burn the Black Gold is solid We burn it in your name, Dear God Man Guy Lord Oh Yahweh, who doesn't like to be called That We sing your praises, for You seek our praise Which is your thing, don't get us wrong, but... Perhaps you wouldn't kill so many of us if you, well, you know Took some responsibility... Forgive us, Lord, for we are made in your likeness And are therefore full of thine Piss & Vinegar ...(more) _______________________ Théophile Alexandre Steinlen permanent link

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• 09 Nov 2009 09:24

  U.S. 90 en route to Del RioRobert Frank 1955

  November 09, 2009 "Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955" Robert Frank Cartographer At WorkMeredith Quartermain Beside the tax authority, the macro-brewery, the flags and the ever-burning flame in Seaforth Armories Peace Park, Cartographer boards the Knight bus – Robert Knight (1829-1913) claiming fame for owning property in South Vancouver. The word roars off over the Burrard Bridge, on a route of its own: Harry Knight, a BC photographer, preferred soft-focus pictorial moodiness; John Knight, Captain RN, got his name on the Kwakwaka’wakw inlet where thousands of first nations people fished for Eulachon (he’d served in the American Revolutionary War with Vancouver’s right-hand man, Captain Broughton); The Knights of Labor in the 1880s elected Vancouver’s second mayor, lobbied for a shorter work-day, tried to stop the import of low-paid Asian workers. The word roars on through the meccano-set girders of the bridge: a feudal tenant trained for mounted combat; a man devoted to the service of a woman; a horse-head chess-piece that moves in L-shaped leaps. By sea and land we prosper, says the city motto on the bridge house – a lumberjack and a seaman hold up the city coat of arms. On the bus, people gaze with bussed-eyes through steamed-up windows splattered with rain drops. There’s a sudden reek of disinfectant as a man walks down the aisle. Wipers idiotically, hypnotically sweep and stop, sweep and stop. People read. Hold their heads up. Wet walkers get on. Ball-cap guys with not much work and a few days beard. Death by Chocolate, touts a passing store. Wet people slump in seats, or smear fog off the windows – trying to see out of the Knight bus, while Cartographer records latitude and longitude for land, sea and air, and wonders whether The Amphibians (of BC) could be like The Bostonians (of Boston) or The White Oaks of Jalna. Meredith Quartermain at EPC The Wooden Library in Alnarp The Wooden Library in Alnarp is a unique collection of "books", each part describing a certain species or variety of tree or shrub. The collection consists of 217 volumes and was made in Nürnberg in Germany between 1805 and 1810. Wooden libraries - or xylothek, from the Greek words for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke - flourished for a short period in history, around 1790-1810, mainly in Germany. They were a further elaboration of the cabinets of natural curiosities that was common during the 18th century, and consisted of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it took the shape of "books" where you could find details from the tree inside and arranged as a "library". Matter 9: To texture to verbMeredith Quatermain beached on the coast of specific gravity at sea with fancy and sand for judgment wonder steps on clams and mussels of metaphor to skull and jaw, employing language to preposition. To part in speech chalk and cheese, a dock and a daisy – how very like a whale – the moths, beetles, flies of Matter flutter to harlequin Abstraction. Or vamp the moods and tenses of Intellect. Then fidget Space to veer, jibe, sidereal Volition and shimmer Affection’s galaxy of spasms. Suppose to patchwork world, hands wings fins hook in peculiar loops the arteries of eggs in nests, the spawn of the frog in water the stripes on the cub of a lion, the spotted chicks of blackbirds – hook the framework’s splanchnology. Suppose the tissue of matter is the change of matter, its cleavage and strata – suppose we know what changes changes sense. It’s touch and go with the cat-tribes and plumage of stuff, this disparate desperate otherwise. Yes, we know means eyes and antennae weave tooth or grain a home-spun woolly cotton. To text, to specify – a whole without coherence to sprinkle terrain, a world-thing mixed – pregnant with alloy, laced with entanglement, and haunted with purity. Meredith Quatermain poemsGreen Integer Review Robert Frank(b. Nov. 9, 1924) in his house in Nova Scotia1969-1971 by Walker Evans) Sick of Goodby'sMabou 1978Robert Frank Six reflections on the photography of Robert Frank Lou Reed on Sick of Goodby’s I was looking at Robert Frank's photograph Sick of Goodby's in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been listening to a Johnny Cash song called I Wish I Was Crazy Again. Then I thought of the goodbyes in the book to old friends caught once and for all and never again to be seen in life, and I was struck by the intensity of the sadness of life and its redeeming qualities as reflected in these moving photos. With Johnny Cash as well, the desire to see it all again, to go out one more time into the wild flame only to be burned up forever and never be seen again except in these farewell photos, is moving beyond description. The photos speak of an acceptance of things as they are. the inevitable death of us all and the last photo - that last unposed shot to remind us of our friends, of our loss of the times we had in a past captured only on film in black and white. Frank has been there, and seen that, and recorded it with such subtlety that we only look in awe, our own hearts beating with the memories of lost partners and songs. To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do. Robert Frank is a great democrat. We're all in these photos. Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I'm sick of goodbyes. And aren't we all, but it's nice to see it said. google video Pull My Daisy "A short 1959 film that typifies the "Beat Generation". Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a never-completed stage play entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross, Delphine Seyrig and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn." Thinking about Robert Frank. The late Mabou-made messes, collaged combos with writing—sick of / goodby’s and hold still—keep going—drip and smudge and tape. Objects invading the pictorial plain / plane. How to scribble in a piece of writing, how to cover up (barely, so drawing attention to) earlier sketches, thumbnails. (Jack Spicer lemons.) How to make contiguous frames enjamb, the butting up plain a plain rebuttal of the desire to include everything. Salman Rushdie says of Frank: “Looking at the Mabou pictures, I remember these lines of Virginia Woolf: A masterpiece is not the result of a sudden inspiration but the product of a lifetime of thought.”John Latta "Andrea, Mabou, 1977 (with ship) "Robert Frank Address to the Reader, from Pevensey Sluice Veronica Forrest-Thomson If it were quicksand you could sink; something needing a light touch soon and so simply takes its revenge. Slightly west of Goodwin Sands the land hardens again with history, resists the symbol. Chalk requires an allegorical hand, or employee of Sussex Water Board who sets a notice here: DANGER SUBMERGED STRUCTURES and all at once Transformational Grammar “peoples” the “emotional landscape” with refutation. You may hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar even on Dover beach watching the undertow of all those trips across to France. Follow the reader and his writer, those emblematic persons along their mythic route charting its uncertain curves and camber; for to be true to any other you must — and I shall never now — recover a popular manoeuvre known mostly as, turn over and go to sleep. Five PoemsVeronica Forrest-Thomson Feature: Veronica Forrest-Thomson, 1947–1975 Poetic ArtificeVeronica Forrest-Thomson (reg. req.) pdfaaaarg - free reg. req. Roksana MicalLa main gauche fromFor The Year Of The Insane O Mary, open your eyelids. I am in the domain of silence, the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper. There is blood here. and I haven't eaten it. O mother of the womb, did I come for blood alone? O little mother, I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house. Anne Sexton November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974

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• 08 Nov 2009 18:57

  Pessoa Scolding Whitman The whore of all solar systems and diligent Cvit, Raša, Avč, the awesome Montanists,

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