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• 07 Nov 2009 09:45

  Lesser Uryb. Nov. 7, 1861

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

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• 04 Nov 2009 11:07

  November 04, 2009 Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Evolution of a Painter November 5, 2009 - December 19, 2009 George Krevsky Gallery _______________________ Petit TestamentErn Malley In the twenty-fifth year of my age I find myself to be a dromedary That has run short of water between One oasis and the next mirage And having despaired of ever Making my obsessions intelligible I am content at last to be The sole clerk of my metamorphoses. Begin here: In the year 1943 I resigned to the living all collateral images Reserving to myself a man’s Inalienable right to be sad At his own funeral. (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail.) In the same year I said to my love (who is living) Dear we shall never be that verb Perched on the sole Arabian Tree Not having learnt in our green age to forget The sins that flow between the hands and feet (Here the Tree weeps gum tears Which are also real: I tell you These things are real) So I forced a parting Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness. ...(more) ..................................................... ..................................................... The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax — Introduction David Lehman jacket THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943.(....) In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.(....) Ern Malley has always had an honored place among the poets of the New York School. Kenneth Koch printed two Malley poems, ‘Boult to Marina’ and ‘Sybilline,’ in the ‘collaborations’ issue of Locus Solus, the avant-garde literary magazine, in 1961. At Columbia University in 1968, Koch introduced his writing students to Malley’s poetry, suggesting that the hoaxer’s antics were well worth imitating not for purposes of polemic but for legitimate poetic ends. In 1976 John Ashbery asked his MFA students at Brooklyn College to compare Malley’s ‘Sweet William’ to one of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns. Which did they think was the genuine article? (The students were divided.) Ashbery’s point — and it seems to be Malley’s point — is that intentions may be irrelevant to results, that genuineness in literature may not depend on authorial sincerity, and that our ideas about good and bad, real and fake, are, or ought to be, in flux....(more) The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley Christine Wertheim cabinet _______________________ Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 - 2009 It's nice, anyway, and hard not to read as an act of will, that the dean of structuralism should have waited until after the so-called post-structuralists were all dead before taking leave himself. I hope his work will enjoy a lot of critical re-examination in the coming years.   -  Justin Erik Halldór Smith Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists --Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.   -  Tristes Tropiques of 1955 _______________________ Albert Pinkham Ryder 1847 – 1917 _______________________ The Ships Move On Hilda Morley (1919 - 1998) Freckles on my thighs, my legs— I never had them before (someone called my skin once the color of apricots) the grey in my hair greyer, grey to white even, my face changing, becoming a bit like my mother’s face & I rarely could see her as handsome (though Eugene Morley saw it) Faces of my women friends who were beautiful when I met them, so beautiful, such promises of bliss I could hardly believe they were real or my face when M. said “How do you feel carrying around a face like that?” Time has hollowed, lined, dulled the brilliance of eyes, the perfect matching of curves, of mouth to forehead, cheek to eyebrow, the proportions shaken in all our faces Those shapes which seemed to exist only to please, to pleasure the soul, to make the observer stare, wrenched now a little, twisted, obscured by sags & puckers, hidden by pressure of years: a parchment where everything leaves a trace I had thought those contours on my friend’s face hard & clear enough for a profile on a ship’s prow Life has written on us The ships move on relentlessly They carry us with them, caged in whatever time has written on us indelibly, that amazing handwriting (now only half-familiar) on the skin of our years Preface: For Hilda Robert Creeley Let Us Name the Most Unjustly and Bizarrely Forgotten U.S. Poet of the 20th Century Kent Johnson digital emunction _______________________ Albert Pinkham Ryder permanent link

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• 02 Nov 2009 23:39

  November 03, 2009 Bebb's Oak (Quercus bebbiana)Dominion ArboretumCentral Experimental Farm a 500-hectare working farm in the center of Ottawa The Winemakers It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for. Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state called New York, where only bees made sense. In the 30th anniversary issue of The London Review of Books A Dry Black Veil Brian Dillon on dustCabinet Magazine In the section of the Arcades Project entitled “Boredom, Eternal Return,” Walter Benjamin briefly refers to the role of dust in the nineteenth-century interior, a substance at once magical and mundane: “Plush as dust collector. Mystery of dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’.... Other arrangements to stir up dust: the trains of dresses.”4 In the decaying Paris arcades—the furred arteries of the modern city—dust both occludes and outlines the once-novel commodity and its slow desuetude. For Marcel Proust, too, dust was simultaneously to be feared (in the form of the lime-tree pollen that brought on his asthma, or the choking fumes of the coal fire in ?his bedroom) and welcomed for the physical and aesthetic veil it cast about him as he wrote; Proust lived his last decade in a cloud of medicinal powders, propped up among material remnants of his past—photographs, books, and furniture—that he refused to allow his servants to dust. And a few years after Proust’s death, in the pages of his journal Documents, Georges Bataille pointed out that the dominion of dust in legend and reality had not yet been properly acknowledged: The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders’ webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates. When plump young girls, “maids of all work,” arm themselves each morning with a large feather-duster or even a vacuum-cleaner, they are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor.­ This grotesque and opaque effluvium, Victorian successor to the miasma that appalled John Evelyn, is for Ruskin a real meteorological phenomenon; his second lecture is for the most part a defense of the first against the disbelieving and even mocking reactions of the press. But we ought surely to read too in Ruskin’s anguished account of the way the cloud has overcome him in recent years an image of history that contends with Benjamin’s more celebrated motif of the “angel of history.” Like Benjamin, Ruskin sees the rubbish of the world accumulating about him; but where Benjamin’s angel looks dolefully at its feet, the Victorian prophet looks to the sky, because he knows that the atmospheric and historical catastrophe will emerge, like a swirl of dust, out of the air itself. mystical geometryecuadorReligious ImageryPedro Meyer curated by Elizabeth Ferrer ...the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It's worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they've ceased to generate any new ideas--which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of the world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders.   - Kia in a comment at the Gift Hub Tom Matrullo The climate of history: Four thesesDipesh Chakrabarty There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called "the birth of the modern world". Indeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post-imperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the post-war scenario of decolonization and globalization. Close Encounter Torbjørn Rødland Dream and DerangementGeorg TraklNov. 3, 1914 In the evening the father became an old man; in dark rooms the countenance of the mother petrified and the curse of the degenerated race weighed on the boy. Sometimes he remembered his childhood, fulfilled with sickness, terror and eclipse, secret games in the star-garden, or feeding the rats in the dusking courtyard. From the blue mirror the narrow figure of the sister stepped and he fell as if dead into darkness. At night his mouth burst open like a red fruit and stars gleamed over his speechless grief. His dreams fulfilled the ancient house of the fathers.(....) Deep is the slumber in dark poisons, fulfilled with stars and the white countenance of the mother, the stony one. Bitter is death, the fare of the guilt-laden; in the brown branches of the family tree the earthen faces decayed grinning. But quietly the other one sang in the green shadow of the elderberry, when he woke from evil dreams; sweet playmate, a rosy angel, approached him, so that he, a soft deer, slumbered into the night; and he saw the star-countenance of purity. The sunflowers sank golden over the garden fence when the summer came. O, the diligence of bees and the green leaves of the walnut tree; the thunderstorms passing by. Silverly the poppy bloomed also, bore in green bud our nocturnal star-dreams. O, how silent the house was when the father passed away into darkness. The fruit ripened purple on the tree and the gardener moved his hard hands; o the hairy signs in the radiant sun. But silently in the evening the shadow of the dead man entered the grieving family circle and his step sounded crystalline over the green meadow before the forest. Muted ones, those gathered around the table; dying ones with waxen hands they broke the bread, the bleeding. Woe of the sister's stony eyes, when at the meal her insanity appeared on the brother's forehead, when under the mother's suffering hands the bread turned to stone. O, of the putrefied ones, when with silver tongues they silenced hell. Thus the lamps in the cool room died out and through purple masks the suffering humans looked at each other silently. The night long rain poured down, and recreated the meadow. In thorny wilderness the dark one followed the yellowed paths in the corn, the song of the lark and the soft stillness of green branches, so that he might find peace. O, you villages and mossy stages, glowing sight. But bonily the steps stagger over sleeping snakes at the forest edge and the ear always follows the raving scream of the vulture. In the evening he found a stony solitude, a dead man's escort into the dark house of the father. Purple cloud covered his head, so that he silently attacked his own blood and effigy, a moony countenance; stony sank away into emptiness, when in a broken mirror a dying youth, the sister appeared; the night engulfed the cursed race. German original - Traum und Umnachtung Wersch's Trakl-Site An Autumn EveningGeorg Trakl For Karl Röck The brown village. A darkness often treads Along the walls that stand in autumn. Mock- Shapes: man as well as woman, dead now, walk In the cold parlours to prepare their beds. Here young boys play. A heavy shadow spreads Over brown dung. Servant women walk Through the moist blue, and sometimes their eyes mock It, longing, as bells toll above their heads. An inn leans for the down and lonely there. Patiently it waits beneath dark arches, Moved by clouds of gold tobacco smoke, Yet always black and near. A stranger soaked In booze stands in the shade of older arches After the wild birds take to the air.  -  Translated from the German by Leo Yankevich photo - mw Hearing Heidegger and Saussure Elmer G. Wiens According to Heidegger, Saussure's scientific theory of language cannot "bring us to language as language." While Heidegger helps to elucidate Saussure's semiology, Heidegger requests language as language speaking to grant "an abode for the being of mortals." Language that speaks merely the emotions of mortals, at most, repeats itself. As such, Heidegger calls on language speaking and Heidegger listening to direct his choice of an original poem that speaking purely will provide the learning experience for mortals to "live in the speaking of language." Poets such as Georg Trakl privileged with primal knowledge experience language speaking—calling mortals into the experience—an experience spanning the abyss of reason and language containing each other. Is primal knowledge awareness, a pre-experience of one's death hearkening to birth? The poet of Psalms writes, "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," addressing his Lord. Unlike the Psalmist, Heidegger's poet absents his presence from the "place of arrival" of the poem, not having called himself there. Trakl's poem, as text, is linear, a string of words. Writing as recorded speech is linear. Speech encountered verbally or thought is also linear. Saussure says speech and writing are one-dimensional. Trakl, responding to language speaking, imagines "A Winter's Evening," expressing linearly his non-linear experience. He writes, turning his learning into the stillness of the onefold's string of words. Though Heidegger posits a fourfold world in "A Winter Evening," he experiences the mental associations of the poem's string of words linearly in time. As Heidegger writes, he recursively deconstructs preceding sub-strings of his text, reconstructing his experiences encountering Trakl's poem. Trakl, acutely aware of the dif-ference between his original experience and the experience of reading linearly his poem, abnegates not only himself but also the poem's narrator. This alienation is the sign of mastery according to Heidegger. Trakl's self denial is absolute. Explicating the poem, Heidegger accepts his call into Being as the poem's narrator and involves himself in the text of "A Winter Evening." A Winter EveningGeorg Trakl Window with falling snow is arrayed. Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earths cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. The PennSound Anthology of Restoration and 18th-Century Verse edited and performed by John Richetti Recovering Resentment:A Reflection on Disgust, Empathy, and Milton's Satan Brad D. Baumgartner "To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete... always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience." -- Gilles Deleuze Resentment, like literature, reorders and challenges the opacity of the most familiar landscapes, opening and transforming them into fields of possibility, in which things do not appear firmly codified, but rather stand out as fluid and promising. It is under the influence of resentment that we come to understand that neither our identities nor the worlds we inhabit are fixed or stable--and thus it is little surprise that literature should so often return to this most central of themes. Oftentimes writers call into question the conventional conflict of resentment, in favor of a view of literature as an ecstatic movement towards comprehension--an expansion of its powers under the spell of personal livable or lived experience. Milton's account of Satan puts a complex series of observations into focus. According to Heidegger, "the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge."[44] But the act of empathic re-appropriation sets up an alternating struggle of subject with object. Milton made an example of Satan; he was too far gone for redemption. Milton's work sculpts the psyche of the subjugated public, however, for a paradigm shift. Here's the push from Milton: seventeenth century readers will forget that they have failed time and time again, and will try once more as if subjugation never happened. In this way they strive to the conviction that there are infinite sources of strength from which they may draw. Again and again they will aspire to grace, which will lift them up and carry them onwards. And for this nudge to see fruition, the people must become capable of living into the future and not let hegemonic England displace their striving. The capacities by which a people gains freedom from bondage lie dormant within each and every one of us. Only a people who have passed through the gate of disgrace can fully ascend to the heights of liberation. In the Blue Country or Colloque Sentimentale circa 1895Charles Conderb. Oct. 24, 1868 The Mood of Depression Georg Trakl translated by James Wright and Robert Bly You dark mouth inside me, You are strong, shape Composed of autumn cloud, And golden evening stillness; In the shadows thrown By the broken pine trees A mountain stream turns dark in the green light; A little town That piously dies away into brown pictures. Now the black horses rear In the foggy pasture. I think of soldiers! Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers, The laughing blood plunges, Speechless Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression Of an army; a blazing steel helmet Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads. The autumn night comes down so coolly. With her white habit glittering like the stars Over the broken human bodies The convent nurse is silent. Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl [pdf]Translated and Chosen James Wright and Robert Bly

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• 30 Oct 2009 13:27

  Wapping 1909 (ca) Alvin Langdon Coburn

  October 30, 2009 Moods of the Sea Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman Felix Mendelssohn (1941)10-min. ubuweb _______________________ The Graveyard By The Sea Paul Valéry Translated by C. Day Lewis This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by, Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly. Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame -- That sea forever starting and re-starting. When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding Are the long vistas of celestial calm! What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form The manifold diamond of the elusive foam! What peace I feel begotten at that source! When sunlight rests upon a profound sea, Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty -- Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause. (....) I am the only medium for your fears. My penitence, my doubts, my baulked desires -- These are the flaw within your diamond pride . . . But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble, Under the roots of trees a shadow people Has slowly now come over to your side. (....) The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live! The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking. ...(more) Paul Valéry October 30, 1871 - July 20, 1945 "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."   -  Paul Valéry Selected Writings of Paul Valery google books Paul Valéry on Poetry in Translation translated by Denise Folliot Crisis of the Mind Paul Valéry (1919) ...in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. (...) . . The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase....(more) _______________________ Meta-currency: a step towards the Rheonomy Eric Harris-Braun In her beautifully insightful book, The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs suggests that we must broaden our understanding of economics in the context of the flow processes of the natural world. Near the end of the book one of her characters asks the question, “What are economies for?” One of the other characters answers: “… To enable us to partake, in our own fashion, in a great universal flow” Another character answers with “Economies have a lot in common with language… like language, economic life permits us to develop cultures and multitudes of purposes… that’s its function which is most meaningful for us.” What do we mean by economy when we say “the economy is strong/weak/growing/shrinking/healthy/in crisis.” We mean something social, an aggregate of many people interacting. But it’s not just individuals, it’s groups of people in the form of businesses, governments, unions, non-profits, etc. also interacting with each other and with individual people. We know, however, that we aren’t necessarily talking about the entire social organism for when the economy falters, other aspects of the social organism, i.e. its arts-culture may thrive. Or, the economy may flourish while we experience a marked drop in “civility” or an increase in other so called “social problems”. “Economy”, it seems, specifically refers to the body of the social organism — its “corporeal” aspect. This includes moving stuff around, building houses, growing food, transforming nature to its bodily needs, etc. Using this analogy, we might say that the mind of the social organism is everything else — its cultures, religions, arts, politics, and so on. However, it would be a mistake to project this mind/body dualism onto our nascent understanding of the social organism, thereby forming a dis-integrative framework from the start. So it’s not just that the economy is disintegrating around us, it’s that the very word and concept of economy is disintegrative! Here, the two answers given by Jacob’s characters are so powerful. First, they help us shift our imaginations toward thinking from the point of view of the social organism; toward seeing that the “us” that partakes in the great universal flow, and the “us” that develops cultures and multitudes of purposes is not the individuals of the social organism, but rather the social organism itself. Second, they suggest a perspective from which to perceive the organism as a unity: as a participant in the “great universal flow.” Third, they suggest to how this participation is achieved: through language and expressive capacity. ...(more) via Gift Hub _______________________ Ancient Music Winter is icummen in, Lhude sing Goddamm. Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham. Freezeth river, turneth liver, Damn you, sing: Goddamm. Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm, So 'gainst the winter's balm. Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm. Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.   -  Ezra Pound Ezra Pound October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972 Vortograph Alvin Langdon Coburn 1882 - 1966 ABC of reading Ezra Pound google books The cantos of Ezra Pound google books Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound google books Masks Ezra Pound These tales of old disguisings, are they not Strange myths of souls that found themselves among Unwonted folk that spake an hostile tongue, Some soul from all the rest who'd not forgot The star-span acres of a former lot Where boundless mid the clouds his course he swung, Or carnate with his elder brothers sung Ere ballad-makers lisped of Camelot? Old singers half-forgetful of their tunes, Old painters color-blind come back once more, Old poets skill-less in the wind-heart runes, Old wizards lacking in their wonder-lore: All they that with strange sadness in their eyes Ponder in silence o'er earth's queynt devyse? - _______________________ St Paul's Cathedral and Cog Alvin Langdon Coburn 1905 Alvin Langdon Coburn - Yosemite Series Alvin Langdon Coburn - Edinburgh Series 135 Images George Eastman House _______________________ Three Poems Jett McAlister conjunctions The Silent Days 1 Hunt and peck, hunt and peck the air here Would that I were a river or a man of fewer words than this Go to the fields they smell of bergamot and the mud cold and ankle-deep Beyond all this, there is a wall beyond which the dark Watch the day smoke from the heather Let the wall stand until I cannot climb 2 The tea-kettle boils the crow in the neighbor’s yard another brushstroke, another turn Sky veers yellow first petal falling from the magnolia tree 3 What wind there was whipped my hair and face I waited out the hours in the dark I waited underneath We hope for ourselves, for the grasses and the trees Follow this to the west Have you tasted it, this ash that fills the air the thrush Still life on a table: a book, my glasses, my watch, upended 4 These days, it’s all splayed out for us looped and relooped ...(more) permanent link

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• 29 Oct 2009 20:35

  Roy DeCarava

  October 29, 2009 Roy DeCarava 1919-2009 _______________________ As language. . . As language. . .Silence is also a language. When there is no order in heaven we make what we make by luck, or strength, or the composition of desire. Power grows like vegetation, and there are no preferences under heaven. I do not know why a leaf should be of less worth than a Vatican, or why builders care. The mathematical stones recite their logic of cruelty and despair­­ we arose to gratify some searchless reason shaping the empty air. Louis Dudek (1918 - 2001) _______________________ The Relics 1899 Gaston La Touche October 29, 1854 - July 12, 1913 _______________________ Tangled Reliquary Ann Lauterbach Tangled reliquary under all surfaces. Nothing moonlike occurs there Only partial coves And entrances. How cool it must have been the vat of the previous Before these habits ordained the real. Some of us must have seen each other Naked in opulent dawn, our nerves Drawn up as from an ancient well Mossy, slick, unstuck at every seam So we enter the sleeve of history Out of which the magician pulls His lawn ornaments: Dancer, Prancer, Our Lady of Provocations, flags, targets, The bluebird's house. On the adjacent field A swarm of butterflies alights On a bald tree. This is the Tree of Changes Mentioned in the lost book of A. Her auspice was a riddle, Sphinx or no sphinx, Whose meanings we can piece together From her journals which were torn into bandages To wrap the wounds of the dying. Such wanton songs Paginate empirical trust And the ruse of the first place. Not that story again, what we cannot say To the sun as it dispenses its sheen Out over the harbor, but only How can you perform your agile sway Without shelter and without us? So the riddle of the disembodied name Sets in motion its primal mischief Sanctioned and forbidden in the vastly gone. ...(more) Ann Lauterbach at PennSound and The Poetry Foundation _______________________ Hellebore for Georg Trakl R.B. Kitaj b. Oct. 29, 1932 ..................................................... Psalm Georg Trakl It is a light, which the wind has extinguished. It is a village inn, which a drunkard abandons in the afternoon. It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders. It is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk. The lunatic is dead. It is an island of the South Pacific, To receive the sun god. One beats the drums. The men perform warlike dances. The women sway the hips between climbing plants and fire flowers When the sea sings. O our lost paradise. The nymphs have left the golden forests. One buries the stranger. Then a glimmering rain begins. The son of Pan appears in the guise of an excavator, Who sleeps away the midday near the glowing asphalt. There are small girls in a courtyard in little dresses full of heartbreaking poverty! There are rooms fulfilled with chords and sonatas. There are shadows that embrace before a blind mirror. By the windows of the hospital convalescents warm themselves. A white steamboat in the canal bears bloody epidemics along. The strange sister appears again in someone's evil dreams. Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars. The student, possibly a double, looks long after her from the window. His dead brother stands behind him, or he descends the old spiral staircase. In the darkness of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novice grows pale. The garden is in evening. In the cloister the bats flutter about. The children of the caretaker stop to play and search the gold of heaven. Closing chords of a quartet. The small blind girl runs trembling through the avenue, And later her shadow gropes along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends. It is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal in the evening. In the somberness of the old asylum human ruins decay. The dead orphans lie by the garden wall. From gray rooms angels step with excrement-splattered wings. Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids. The plaza before the church is gloomy and taciturn, like in the days of childhood. On silver soles former lives glide past And the shadows of the damned descend to the sighing waters. In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes. Taciturnly over the place of skulls God's golden eyes open. Georg Trakl: Poems (published in 1913 by the Kurt Wolff publishing house, Leipzig) Translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt, unless otherwise indicated. _______________________ Roy DeCarava _______________________ The Iron Cheer of Empire Joe Bageant It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything.(....) But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness. Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life monitored by an employer, a credit rating bureau or the media's projection of the world, and mediated by the financialization of life's every aspect.(....) ... the truth is that we are all very commonly issued products of a profit driven workhouse where no human commons is allowable, lest the workers find meaning and joy in each other as human beings, and perhaps become less work driven, less productive and less profitable. Best that their live remain mediated, disembodied from the great commons of the human spirit, unmoored from the great natural commons binding all living things called Earth --...(more) _______________________ Roy DeCarava _______________________ Slaves of Fashion Ann Lauterbach Bad poetry, I would submit, asks questions, raises issues, makes complaints, marks territories. Bad poetry does not take on the more difficult task, where the question and its answer are as one. Good poems absorb into their formal and imaginative resources new questions which are as "difficult" to answer as they are to raise. Or put it this way: the poem is an answer to a question or questions no one, including the poet, had thought to ask. These questions are always in temporal, historical flux, responding to myriad collisions of information from every possible-and they seem to multiply by the day-domain. The poem as answer to an unasked question puts pressure on the poet to be alert, vigilant, receptive, not just to the past, but to the weathers, internal and external, which characterize the day- poems of our climate, indeed. The burden of knowledge is immense, but it is also messy and malleable; each time you reread "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a new fiction will arise and the nature of it supremacy (its bestness) will alter. It is the critic's job to ask the question or questions which the poem elicits in its answering. As long as editors and critics are blind-sided by the myopia of their pre-existing conditions for good, better and best (the latter a test only time can take), as long as they mistake subject for content, content for meaning, an form for that which is what was, much of the best of the best will remain invisible, and the real questions to their answers will go, as Shelley foretold, unacknowledged. A rose, after all, is still only a rose, but it smells sweeter when there are three of them....(more) _______________________ Signals Edward Wadsworth b. Oct. 29, 1889 permanent link

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• 28 Oct 2009 12:44

  photo - mw

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

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• 27 Oct 2009 10:59

  fluxus boxdetailJim Leftwich

  October 26, 2009 Child and Seeing HandsHans Bellmer c. 1950 Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body Hans BellmerVanitas Magazine Why does Bellmer's art express so well the fallenness of men their living under this spell as if out of each one had come another who walks beside that one and bears that one's name but feels nothing It Must Be SophisticatedJohn Ashbery There are attics in old houses where doubt lingers as to the corrosive effect of night-blindness: namely are its victims directly linkable to a chain of events happening elsewhere? If so, we should shrug off resemblances to our line of work. ...      ... Back when they'd send for you once they got a house built, it was clever to hedge your bets and produce a fraternal twin made of bedclothes with a mop for a wig while you scaled the wall on a rope ladder to be the next new thing that thinks and cautions others not to. Far from the inner city cry of conflicting attitudes, one fled with one's holy illusions intact, one's misconceptions too, until the whole mindset took on a largely symbolic look, an indifferent jewel, toy of the weather, of successive washes of light, I can hardly believe I'm here in this tiny republic carved out of several conflicting principalities. It's enough, perhaps, that I was questioned at the edge of my performance. That now I'm safe from my own sang-froid and scores of others, that mere forgetfulness can save up to fifty-three lives, that they can share your power and go on glancing upward. Because after all we were the three original ones, the president, vice-president and treasurer of our class. And were formed to repay what obscure debt and be summarily taken out of school and handed over to our parents. It's what matters then, and after. No one says you have to live up to principles; indeed, what are they? What difference does it make which one came too close in the richly darkened theater, if all they were after was to coax you into the light, watch you blink a minute, and then pass on, they too, to the larger arenas, each in the wind, in the sand, the reeds, growing? Because even if it doesn't punish you exactly, the thing has been lived through, the experience sealed. O what book shall I read now? for they are all of them new, and used, when I write my name on the flyleaf. Look, here is another one unread, not written. Time for you to choose. Hommage à Gustav MahlerChiemgau, Upper Bavaria Germany, 1973Nils-UdoEnvironmental Art Museum Land Relief "a weblog examining contemporary and historical issues in landscape architecture, urban design, environmental management, and community structure. Posts report on specific site visits, community action groups, vital design/managment methodology, and how to design for global citizenship." The Language in My Blood Margaret Randall dooneys cafe Today I am not so sure blood doesn't bring language with it as it courses through the veins of mothers, fathers, children, grandchildren and those bound by other ties. My new sense of what language is transcends the combination of verbal sounds we use to communicate with one another. My understanding of cultural inheritance is also broader and deeper than it was back then. At Kee Tseel, for hundreds of years in this valley rent by silver creek, people spoke. Their words did not yet hold promise of permanence or continuity; any sort of alphabet still shrouded in future. Ideas: passed from person to person, fixed themselves, pecked into rock or painted with pigments mixed from powdered roots, the juices of plants and trees, gums and animal fats. Human sensibility, here as in other parts of the world, shaped sounds that would become words, words that would fashion themselves into directives and questions and answers, sentences woven together to make stories. The stories describe our lives. Those who inhabit the map of our living speak out or silence as they explore relationship, custom, need. It is not Babel we fear, but the stopped verb, expression cast to the sewers of modernization. Globalization of the human voice, criminally manipulated to erase or bury the language of our blood. Nils-Udo Towards The Day Of LiberationRobert Kelly It doesnt matter what we see there (the mouth is full of sense no taste in listening no sense to hear what twists in the shallow water below the tongue) (and if he says Listen! say Drink the hearing with your own ears, a word is not to hear) Language? To use language for the sake of communication is like using a forest of ancient trees to make paper towels and cardboard boxes from all those years the wind and crows danced in the up of its slow. A word is not to hear and not to say - what is a word? The Catechism begins: Who made you? Language made me. Why did It make you? It made me to confuse the branch with the wind. Why that? To hide the root. Where is the root? It lies beneath the tongue. Speak it. It lies beneath the speech. Is it a word? A word is the shadow of a body passing. Whose body is that? The shadow's own. 6 poems by Robert Kelly from: Not this Island Music studentJulian Schnabel b. Oct 26, 1951 whose side are the side effects on?Limited, Inc. In this spot, place, lieu, here, before I lift my pen – for I write these posts before I type them, and then, in typing them, watch them shift their shapes and burdens – I feel a rush, a lunge of citations and themes, as though, in the first sentence, at the entrance of the thing, the establishing period, everything must come tumbling out (as in some dopey comedy skit in which some target character X, laugh a minute X, opens some target door Y, boobytrapped Y, and the things behind it avalanche upon him or her). For surely I’ve reached the point in this long long course of things at which (in which?) suddenly the happiness culture, more a blueprint or a Platonic form, suddenly extrudes itself into the psychoactive, chemical phantasmagoria we are all familiar with, dosed with, prescribed, stoned and high on, chained to, attuned to deep in the immune system, our biochemistry altered in its ticking and secretions by the water we drink and the incredible array of chemicals, such as were never before on earth and never before metabolized by any terrestrial organism, that we have so casually strewed about every sphere of the planet. Hans Bellmer 1902 - 1975 Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety Sue Taylor Digital locks, proposed penalties, restrictions, statutory damages…what is happening to open education?Major Concerns With Government's Anticipated Copyright LegislationAthabasca University ..................................................... Free Education for the Masses . . . or Not Colin CurrieEDUCAUSE A new political development in Canada might cause a radical change in what AU and AU Press are able to achieve and how learning content can be shared in Canada. The Canadian parliament is expected to begin discussion this fall on new copyright legislation that will limit what materials can be made freely available. According to AU Associate Vice President of Research Rory McGreal: "The very stringent copyright laws the Canadian government is currently considering are based on a U.S. model. It would make it very difficult, particularly for open and online institutions, to make use of proprietary content. We have to look for alternatives." A number of the proposed restrictions are seen as counterproductive at best, and destructive to Canada's standing in the world academic market at worst. One example is that all institutions would have to destroy online proprietary material within one week of a course's final exam. Another is proposed penalties for anyone who keeps digital course research documents on their computer for longer than three days. Speaking on the topic of the Canadian government's proposed new copyright legislation, AU President Frits Pannekoek said: "Countries with wiser copyright regimes that promote educational use will catapult ahead of Canada. No longer will we be internationally competitive because of the restrictions contained in the legislation." EDUCAUSE Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily ..................................................... Who Killed Canada’s Education Advantage? A forensic investigation into the disappearance of public education investment in Canada Roger Martinwalrus Julian Schnabel Dream Song 41: John Berryman(October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) If we sang in the wood (and Death is a German expert) while snows flies, chill, after so frequent knew so many all nothing, for lead & fire, it's not we would assert particulars, but animal; cats mew, horses scream, man sing. Or: men pslam. Man palms his ears and moans. Death is a German expert. Scrambling, sitting, spattering, we hurry. I try to. Odd & trivial, atones somehow for my escape a bullet splitting my trod-on instep, fiery. The cantor bubbled, rattled. The Temple burned. Lurch with me! phantoms of Varshava. Slop! When I used to be, who haunted, stumbling, sewers, my sacked shop, roofs, a dis-world ai! Death was a German home-country. Pre-Cambrain SanctuaryNils-Udo 2008 What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is overruled already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, threat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.  - William James, quoted by Joseph Duemer October 25, 2009 The Halfpenny Bridge Dublin John Minihan1964Rhys Tranter A Tree Telling of Orpheus Denise Levertov Oct 24, 1923 - Dec 20, 1997 White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving. Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips were drying and curling. Yet I was not afraid, only deeply alert. I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed: the two moving stems, the short trunk, the two arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless twigs at their ends, and the head that's crowned by brown or golden grass, bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird, more like a flower's. He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent while it was green, strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this, when he touched it, and from his voice which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our leaves and branches to complete its sound, came the ripple. But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me as if rain rose from below and around me instead of falling. And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling: I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know what the lark knows; all my sap was mounting towards the sun that by now had risen, the mist was rising, the grass was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under earth. He came still closer, leaned on my trunk: the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded. Music! There was no twig of me not trembling with joy and fear. Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning. He told me of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs, and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it. Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me. I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal. Poems by Denise Levertov Tesserae: memories & suppositions Denise Levertovgoogle books Breathing the water Denise Levertovgoogle books Selected poems Denise Levertovgoogle books Denise Levertov: the poetry of engagement Audrey T. Rodgersgoogle books Denise Levertov Feature Editor: Kevin Gallagherjacket toll bridgeCape SpearStephen DownesStephen's Web~ OLDaily Linda Perdido Mac WellmanEXPLORINGfictions Her soul is anthracite, his is of zinc; the conversation is all crazy eights, tetchy, and often catadioptric. A whiff of cannabis reaches high flying birds– ducks, pigeons, and of course the little known Perdido Macaw, so rare and metaphysical that the creature’s namesake is, herself, unaware of this creatured fact. (Not quite the namesake as the bird was named for Honor and Hope, twin daughters of a distant relation, Carter Fenelon Perdido, a professor at the Department of Avian Studies at Glorious Morning College in Cananga; long dead but dearly remembered by his disciples at the Ganymede Foundation. The lovers’ collective vocabulary: Forty-six words; the central object in their over-wandering of Set County and beyond: Maximumification of the state of cool; knowledge of the finer points of balloon navigation: Hazy at first, hazy at best; the state of provisioning as of this moment: Half a dozen ham and cheese sandwiches on rye toast, two Granny Smith apples, a smallish but inordinately fuzzy pink peach, a carton of slimjims, a gallon of spring water from over in Vandalia, and a case of Blitz beer in aluminum cans (with the irate black-tufted Malabar squirrel on the label; irate and like Narthex, zinc of will, gazing knowingly and hard directly into the eye of the would be imbiber; plans for the future: Vague at best, indefinite; religious sensations: Eleusinian, priapic (loosely defined), satanic; their proximate destination: Rattlesnake Mountain Lodge in the High Sierra where the two bad ones envisage another swath of desecration and demolishment at Camp Wounded Bear, a summer institute for advanced study of the Book of Mormon and the golden questions, the playing of Bugles and other Horns; (first) secondary destination: Loon Lake on Matapan Peninsula near the Velvet Sea, a place said to harbor myriad penitent and initiates– many of them old pals of Narthex from his days in the reformatory at Weasel– at the Temple of Lower Motorcycle; (second) secondary destination: Proboscis Island in Smoke Top Bay, Each Sandwich County, and in especial, the upper slopes of Old Moldy where there is to be found a certain medicinal herb, Pheronacea or Gag’s Periwinkle, said to possess spectacular powers of enhancement in the mental realms of sparkle, dazzle and total pizzaz; (third) secondary destination: The animal shelter at New Gradual, Montana, where it is hoped pet adoption might be arranged for, in order of preference: A fennec, an Osborne’s Owlet (the blood-orange variety), and, or, a Jupiter Beetle from Kalimantan said to be able to change colors, imitate rhythmically and in various radiant Coleopteran registers the Top Ten pop tunes of any given moment; tertiary destination: The holy city of Bing in Bandana County (apparently near Laos on their map, a Ziegfield Projection based on the dubious propositions of “Lateral Thinking”) where Bhang may be purchased in bulk at a reasonable cost depending on the current exchange rate of the Beng, a black-market currency unofficially official in that errant place of untamable hoydenry, maniacal hubbub, black lizards (always irresistible for our irrepressible girl); ultimate destination, barring instantiation of the higher (as opposed to the lower) Unseen– the cave known as Morocco’s Lair said to be located behind the false wall, in an unknown closet, adjoining the antique bathroom at the Inn of the Zinn of Mohocs on the occult or hidden side of the hypothetical planet(oid) Blue Streak whose maddening and rubbery orbital periodicity is such that the object never emerges from behind the moon; their purpose in regard to this last: To ascertain the truth of what is said about this feature of Blue Streak, namely Morocco’s Lair, at the Temple of Higher Motorcycle by certain of the higher priests; and what precisely is this something that is alleged to have been said? The Whispering Gallery St Pauls CathedralJohn MinihanLondon, 1963 A Young GirlEdith Sitwell Is it the light of the snow that soon will be overcoming The spring of the world? Ah no, the light is the whiteness of all the wings of the angels As pure as the lily born with the white sun. And I would that each hair on my head was an angel, O my red Adam, And my neck could stretch to you like a sunbeam or the young shoot of a lily In the first spring of the world, till you, my grandeur of clay, My Adam, red loam of the orchard, forgetting The thunders of wrongs and of rights and of ruins, Would find the green shadow of spring beneath the hairs of my head, those bright angels, And my face, the white sun that is born of the stalk of a lily Come back from the underworld, bringing light to the lonely: Till the people in islands of loneliness cry to the other islands, Forgetting the wars of men and of angels, the new Fall of Man. courtesy of Ben Friedlander, The Center of Modernism (Not) Edward Kienholz 1927 – 1994 Protest as Embodied State Practices: An Examination of Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Protest Tactics Sabrina Alimahomed and Jake Alimahomed-WilsonInstitute for Anarchist Studies google books

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• 23 Oct 2009 05:30

  BedRobert Rauschenberg1955

  October 22, 2009 Zoltán Vancsó _______________________ Memoirs of the blind - The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins Jacques Derrida Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas available at aaaarg here free reg. req. I write without seeing. I came. I wanted to kiss your hand . ... This is the first time I have ever written in the dark . .. not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Wherever there will be nothing, read that I love you.   -  Diderot, Letter to Sophie Volland, June 10, 1759 - Do you believe this [vous croyez] r You'll observe that from the very beginning of this interview I've had problems following you. I remain skeptical ... - But skepticism is precisely what I've been talking to you about: the difference between believing and seeing, between believing one sees [croire voir] and seeing between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir]-or not. Before doubt ever becomes a system, skepsis has to do with the eyes. The word refers to a visual perception, to the observation, vigilance, and attention of the gaze [regard] during an examination. One is on the lookout, one reflects upon what one sees, reflects what one sees by delaying the moment of conclusion. Keeping [gardant] the thing in sight, one keeps on looking at it [on fa regardel. The judgment depends on the hypothesis. So as not to forget them along the way, so that everything be made clear, let me summarize: there would be two hypotheses. - You seem to fear the monocular vision of things. Why not a single point of view? Why two hypotheses? The two will cross paths, but without ever confirming each other, without the least bit of certainty, in a conjecture that is at once singular and general, the hypothesis 0/ sight, and nothing less. - A working hypothesis? A purely a~ademic hypothesis? - Both, no doubt, but no longer as suppositions (a hypothesis, as its name indicates, is supposed, presupposed). No longer beneath each step, therefore, as I set out, but always out ahead of me, as if sent out on reconnaissance: two antennae or two scouts to orient my wanderings, to guide me as I feel my way, in a speculation that ventures forth, simply in order to see, from one drawing to the next. I am not sure that I want to demonstrate this. Without trying too much to vert/y, my sights always set on convincing you, I will tell you a story and describe for you a point of view. Indeed the point of view will be my theme. - Shall I just listen? Or observe? Silently watch you show me some drawings? _______________________ David Bromige (October 22, 1933 – June 3, 2009) Photo by James Garrahan They Gain Control of My Tongue David Bromige Which is to say, in lieu Of playing the blue-tinted guitar, A sociology of this process Offers its studies of color. The imagination In complete autonomy Disregards known outcomes Now mounting into thousands Because millions are incredible, All those unwasted lives Whose right companion , well.... Yes, a dead lion feeds bees, Its rot is sweet, sweet And unbreathable. An objection To test the hope eternal In a prehistoric ploy On the part of that great historian, The gang. They sit there Ordering the $3.99 breakfast At three in the afternoon (That terrible three in the afternoon Standing for your incessant woe) Chaired by Chuck Custer, An obvious leader. And history as tribes native To a landscape all-too-familiar In the Torah of Regret Live on mistake, mistake That doesn’t exist in California, Whose holy ones banished it. Yet the line at the DMV keeps shuffling Toward validations Required if control Is to exist in a church spire. Sit down I think I love you That causes you to stalk out Of every channel we click to. Explode the car. Ten Poems David Bromige from As In T as in Tether Bromige feature at Jacket Edited by Susan Gevirtz _______________________ Questions to my father Werner Bischof zone zero _______________________ M/C Journal Vol. 12, No. 4 (2009) Climate and Culture Calculating Interests: Climate Change and the Politics of Life Emily Potter M/C There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market”. ...(more) _______________________ Charlene Robert Rauschenberg b. Oct. 22, 1925 _______________________ "Once…" David Bromige Once in a dream of Meaning Meaning drifting came into a mise-en-scene I thought Saskatchewan or thought some extra holding up a cue-card that said it was, as in another part of Shakespeare We rejoice for the brown grass or simpler, the hour itself, the first flakes named at all because they hint of a prior fall, the prairie white with it, the soft inviting banks beside where the hiway is becoming inaccessible. permanent link

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• 22 Oct 2009 01:44

  Passion (1940-45) Writing R. B. Kitaj d. Oct. 21, 2007

  October 21, 2009 Muge _______________________ Champdieu Bernard Noël translated by Eléna Rivera the proportions at times prompt the sky to think the garden therefore is in the open head to look is to see the interior view the long fold stirs according to the hidden which comes to the edge of form a white shadow the boxwood knows that better than us it builds by ardor of the line springboards for the eye the infinite sets itself thus within reach the tree is always of life or of knowledge from the moment where the sap of breath appears it isn’t important to have a green thumb but to be able to bring through the branches this flowering of air that we call being Three Poems from The Rest of the Voyage Bernard Noël translated from the French by Eléna Rivera Conjunctions _______________________ The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin) R. B. Kitaj Second diasporist manifesto (a new kind of long poem in 615 free verses) R. B. Kitaj google books _______________________ The Rumpus Interview with Alasdair Gray I began by thinking that MacDiarmid was more a poet of sound than sense. Then, having read some of his earlier lyrics, I found to my amazement that I couldn’t forget them. If it had been mere sound, I wouldn’t have remembered them. Gradually, saying “The Watergaw,” I started to think, wait, I know what he’s talking about! [Quotes from MacDiarmid's “The Watergaw”]: Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht… [Gray interupts himself: "Or is it “glimmering" licht?"] Ayont the on-ding. And I’m thinking, I know what he means! It took a wee bit. The “on-ding” is a word for an on-blast of weather coming into your face. So if you’re seeing something beyond the on-ding, it’s beyond a snow storm or water. “Watergaw” is the name for a water rainbow, the kind of rainbow that forms in a mist of falling water. Then [the narrator] thinks of this look that was given to him by somebody dying. I used to think it was by a woman, but it was actually his father. “An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied/ Afore ye deed!” The thought is of a dying person looking at you and meaning something, and not knowing what the meaning is, but knowing that there’s meaning. Somebody is going out, like a light bulb, out, and they’re looking at me, and they know I know it, but they’re away and there’s nothing to be said. Then there’s this feeling, in bad weather, of suddenly seeing this water rainbow and thinking that it means the same thing that was meant by the dying father’s glance, or a dying anybody’s glance. The other thing you’re finding is that there was an old Scottish speech, which I use myself. He grew up in a community where there was much old Scottish speech used. But he also mined the dictionaries of the older Scottish speech. “Aye, that’s a good one.” “Yes, use that!” He has actually restored quite a lot of meaning to Scottish words that people had forgotten....(more) via the Literary Saloon Alasdair Gray: Works Sorcha Dallas Contemporary Art _______________________ Dizzy Gillespie b. Oct. 21, 1917 and Ted Wilson Lisette Model c. 1954 _______________________ An Interview with Suzanne Jill Levine author of The Subversive Scribe “What a loss to readers, and how unfair to the translator, that readers are not aware of what we experience, of how complex the process is and how it reveals the literary critic and scholar in the good translator.” _______________________ Shout About It from the Housetops Kurt Vonnegut previously unpublished vanity fair _______________________ In The Wake of an American Dream Ross Mantle via Joerg Colberg _______________________ Marching Toward Zombieland When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as "an enemy of the people" you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company, which last week announced third-quarter earnings of over $3 billion largely derived from converting zero percent loans from taxpayers into zero risk profits off of anything paying more than zero percent in interest, revenue, or dividends. The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the content of their dreams, but you can't argue with the fact that they are heavily armed to an extreme. And although it may be hard to measure with precision, one might venture to state that they are increasingly pissed off. How else explain popular entertainments like "Zombieland?"(....) The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d'etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans. I can't say how much it reflects reality. Even if it is a result of sheer happenstance - the tragic evolution of an industrial economy into a financial finagling economy - the citizens will still experience it as a stealing of their future. Whatever else one might say about American culture, it is keenly attuned to a sense of heroes and villains. We take great pride in our ability to blow away the bad guys. And life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde observed. If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein! Woody is on his way.......(more) _______________________ Muge permanent link

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• 20 Oct 2009 07:06

  Gathering LeavesHugh Bolton Jonesb. Oct. 20, 1848

  October 20, 2009 The Slop Barrel: Slices of the Paideuma for All Sentient Beings Philip Whalen III By standing on the rim of the slop barrel We could look right into the bird's nest. Thelma, too little, insisted on seeing We boosted her up       and over the edge Head first among the slops in her best Sunday dress Now let's regret things for a while That you can't read music That I never learned Classical languages That we never grew up, never learned to behave But devoted ourselves to magic: Creature, you are a cow Come when I call you and be milked. Creature, you are a lion. Be so kind As to eat something other than my cow or me. Object, you are a tree, to go or stay At my bidding... Or more simply still, tree, you are lumber Top-grade Douglas fir At so many bucks per thousand board-feet A given amount of credit in the bank So that beyond a certain number of trees Or volume of credit you don't have to know or see Nothing Nevertheless we look And seeing, love. From loving we learn And knowingly choose: Greasy wisdom is better than clothes. I mean i love those trees And the printing that goes on them A forest of words and music You do the translations, I can sing. Philip Whalenb. Oct. 20, 1923 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 The collected poems of Philip Whalen edited by Michael Rothenberg Silence: Lectures and Writings John Cageavailable via aaaarg Foreword For over twenty years I have been writing articles and giving lectures. Many of them have been unusual in form-this is especially true of the lectures- because I have employed in them means of composing analogous to my composing means in the Seld of music. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, pennit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it. 'Ibis means that, being as I am engaged in a variety of activities, I attempt to introduce into each one of them aspects conventionally limited to one or more of the others. So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists' club started by Robert Motberwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al.). 'Ibis Lecture on Nothing was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.). One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, "If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep." Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. 'Ibis was a reflection of my engagement in Zen. departureThe Strain of InheritanceRyan McLennanJoshua Liner Galleryriley dog Raising up dead horses Joe Bageant No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were. The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead. The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.(....) Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel. Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes. GateNguyen TrungVietnamese ArtistsThavibu GalleryContemporary Art from Thailand, Vietnam and Burma REACH INMichael McClureb. October 20, 1932 THE NUMBERS ARE ALL WRONG, the coo and gurgle of the baby is the equation's truth. There are no directions, no colors, no sights, no tastes, no sounds, except in the shape of building the soul, or in mating, or in dodging the predator. The naked, tiny, pink bird wiggling next to the green eggs in the nest is aliving feast set to dine on the cosmos and to sip meat and nectar from the mother's beak. No matter how far inwards I imagine the reaching of matter, (till as Ouroboros it swallows the waves of its tail), there will still be the snail sleeping locked in its shell on the branch and the smiling cat on the gravel under a tree. Lazaretto riverfront photo - David Barnes Epidemics, Politics, and Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century David Barnes In the early twenty-first century, most immigrants and foreign visitors arrive in the City of Brotherly Love through the Philadelphia International Airport, along the Delaware River at the city’s southern edge. Two hundred years ago, new arrivals from overseas “landed” at nearly the same spot: just a mile west of where the airport now stands, to be exact, in Essington, Tinicum Township. The gateway to Philadelphia for the first century of our nation’s existence was the Lazaretto quarantine station and hospital, where all arriving ships, passengers, and cargo were inspected and quarantined if necessary. (The name “Lazaretto” derives from St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers. Maritime quarantine stations known as lazarettos were established in European port cities beginning in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.) The Lazaretto stands today as a forgotten monument to a hidden history. Recovering the history and viewing it through the prism of the site itself reveals a hitherto little-known facet of life in a nineteenth-century American seaport city. Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes Geoff Manaugh BLDGBLOG also The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford Vowells Arthur Rimbaud b. Oct. 20, 1854 A Black, E white, I red, O blue, U green: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins: A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies Which buzz around cruel smells, gulfs of shadow E, whiteness of vapors and of tents, Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley; I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in the raptures of penitence; U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas, The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads; O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels: - O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes. original french plus Patti Smith's review of Graham Robb's Rimbaudhere thanks Robert Wittgenstein GravestonePhotograph © Andrew Dunn "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.54 The object of the language game is to keep the world going.  -  Tom Clark, In the World (Wittgenstein) Sourdough Mountain Lookout Philip Whalen BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street: "IF YOU CAN'T COME IN SMILE AS YOU GO BY LOVE THE BUTCHER I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds      of ficus religiosa        Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat     under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.

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