Starcherone Books Presents: Naked Kitchen Yoga
Friday, March 6, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Rust Belt Books
STARCHERONE BOOKS is celebrating NATIONAL SMALL PRESS MONTH with NAKED KITCHEN YOGA on FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009, 7 pm, at RUST BELT BOOKS, 202 Allen St., Buffalo, NY. So far, these 17 writers and small press fans have tentatively agreed to partake: Mike Basinski, Robin Brox, Lisa Forrest, Kristi Gansworth, Gregory Gerke, Mark Gunther, Paul Hogan, Aaron Lowinger, Douglas Manson, Liz Mariani, Steve McCaffery, Ted Pelton, Chuck Richardson, Gary Earl Ross, Forrest Roth, Mike Sikkema, Ed Taylor.
You too are invited to be a part of this fundraising event. Participants are invited to share with us a 5 minute or less work written by themselves or others that has been published by a small press book, magazine, journal, chapbook, or other construction strongly or loosely affiliated with small presses. One lucky attendee will also win a complete set of the 18 (maybe 19) Starcherone Books published to date!
Starcherone Books is itself a nonprofit small press publisher of innovative fiction and hybrid prose stuff. This event will not only be a fun occasion to see old and new friends and together celebrate non-mainstream contemporary literature and its offshoots, it will also (hopefully) help us pay some bills. We are asking a $5 donation, which will entitle the contributor to ONE FREE DRINK (beer, wine, or nonalcoholic). Further refreshments will be available all evening.
Venue Information
Rust Belt Books
202 Allen St.
Buffalo
*****
A hodge-podge of this week’s thoughts and communiqués:
It is conscious relations
A friend writes: “I don't know how you can watch that stuff—MSNBC, CNN, etc etc. Since we've been without cable, I watch less and less TV, to the point that if I turn it on, as I did last night to eat my dinner, I last minutes at most…as to hope, I don't really see it…I see much more of the opposite, despair, hopelessness, being a form of emptiness…If I'm to live, I should do something and, I think, I'll choose to be a counterweight to that.”
Ah, to choose. A romantic notion. But I think the choice is given if you're here. In other words, if you haven't killed yourself you're choosing to be here. And since you're choosing to be here, what the fuck are you doing about it? For a thinking person, things get messy quick. And when things get messy it's hard to be smart. I think the most ethical and courageous thing a writer of any stripe can do today is admit s/he doesn't know anything outside his or her mind [this would not be ethical behavior for people who have different functions like actors, politicians, business people]. We only have clues…
I feel the whirling dervish in the tight mess of my perceptions. All living things are emergencies striving for delightfully complex, becalmed horrors that increasingly terrorize themselves over time, thanks to the way the dervish fevers a virus in one's memory banks, forcing dubious re-categorizations and classifications, etc., due to the modification of habituated identifiers...it's all fucking babble, and if we're loving it we're monstrous...maybe.
At times even monsters must have their fun. Life seems, among other things, a perpetual pursuit of pleasure...by and large people feel Life is something to get through properly so they can have a good afterlife. Life seams an undesirable temporary stitch to these self-perceiving, perhaps self-deluded, possibly infinite beings who believe that they, in and of themselves, are at the very least in conscious relations with God almighty.
Or, if one's an atheist, replace God almighty with "human mind" or some form of secular humanism.
I prefer It when referring to It. One doesn't have conscious relations with It. It is conscious relations, however, among other things, some of which are beyond our imagination…
The problem with APES
I hear what you're saying re: the economy. The way things are going finding a teaching job might be tough. Although English departments may fare better due to their budgets being much lower than the nuclear rocket departments. Literature is cheap, relatively speaking [a thousand dollar bailout could save the world!].
My theory is this: Obama knows damned well that the whole thing is fucked. He also knows damned well he can't say it and retain power until it's obvious to everyone. He also knows he has to be able to position himself outside the blame once everyone knows how thoroughly fucked the American Political-Economic System [APES] is [and he has to do this while appearing to work very hard to save it and being thwarted and frustrated by his eco-political-economic enemies who run the mainstream media (eg: GE, et al) ]. He's doing this by giving the political economic elite a lot of rope by which they're hanging themselves. He's keeping the military commissions act intact for the day when the new reality strikes home to a critical mass of the population and he has to put his enemies in a box. Extraordinary times calling for extraordinary measures. If he's successful beyond this wildest of wild dreams, by 2016 there will be no more Republican Party, Wall Street will be history, the Federal Reserve will be history, the big three automakers will be history, the m.i.c. will be broken beyond repair, the empire will be completely humpty dumptied, and his successor will be tasked with the gradual, peaceful dissolution of the federal level of government and begin the formation of something modeled on the EU. Large political-economomic entities will disappear because there's no longer a place for them, no longer enough stuff to sustain them, and the UN will be re-invigorated in an attempt to fill the power vacuum. Paradoxically, as the nation-state folds local eco-political-economies will form and a global framework of interaction among these communities will emerge. Nation states exist in the muddied unworkable phantasy between local and global. Nations are undesirable, parasitic middle men filling the dangerous voids of inaesthetic scales. Somehow, full scale nuclear war will be avoided, but I think a smaller scale exchange will occur resulting in people waking up all the more to the bullshit that is technology/growth. Anything that links progress to increased production/consumption will fail.
And, of course, that was all a bunch of bullshit. I don’t know anything. I only have clues which are dealt with by my imagination imagining what it sees…
The most profound problem the APES has, is that it seems to reward bad thought/behavior and punish adequate thought/decent behavior.
Nothing to do but dharma bum.
Going Rambo
I think when I finish Germ, which I hope is soon, I'm going to go on a radical physical regimen to totally reclaim my body. And if I can try to stop needing all my meds and drop health insurance for the extra money so I have it for absolutely necessary stuff like my animals’ health care, I will. I love them. I'd be lost without them.
It's beginning to be now or never. Can I will myself into adaptation or perish? We'll know the answer to that by 2012. I'll be a free man or a dead one.
It doesn't actually matter...what seems to matter most is a life worth the expense of living, which means a mind that's alive and bearing its own fruit. And that requires an indeterminate yet substantial amount of energy and matter…
Stupid consequences
When I repeatedly watched those towers come down something inside shifted. I could no longer hang out with my old friends and drink beer and watch football or go to a bar and jam with them or anything. The stuff that came out of their mouths about things seemed unbearably stupid. That stupidity was/is having actual consequences. They became little Eichmanns in my eyes. How awful, to discover the people you love are little Eichmanns.
So rather than kill them, I withdrew. I killed them mentally. The writing had a mission and within a month I was off my meds and back to work at the newspaper trying to kill Stupidity.
And I haven't been able to tolerate wrong thinking ever since.
There are all kinds of right ways of thinking and even more gray areas. But there are also wrong ways of thinking, ways of thinking that denigrate one's experience of living and pollute the experiences of others.
People who think wrongly can never be all they can be. They grow frustrated because of it and drown their sorrows in commodified fetishes, saying stupid things, and growing fat.
I see myself in the mirror and call him “you.” I’m fucked up. Call it a consequence of being stupid. You raised me that way.
When confronted with mud, wrestle in it
Back in my Navy daze I was privileged to attend a couple private affairs beyond the military...the most memorable being a pig roast in Monck's Corner, S.C. Rodney D---- and Timmy P----, shipmates and buddies of mine, the two who jammed bluegrass together at 200 feet, were hired to play and I went along. It was in this guy's back yard in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a swamp in October. The weather was perfect. I swear to god every person who came to this thing came with an instrument in hand, including homemade ones. I was [and still am] a fat stupid yankee, but I could sing and I loved the music and learned words quickly and the more stoned I got the better I got at making them up. I was fed lots of ribs and once I couldn't get up to get my re-fills this old farmer would laugh and hand me another one. I remember when it came time to piss and puke I was assisted to the bushes. I haven't remembered that in a long time, but that's why deep down I could never hate the South. The vast majority of rednecks [for my positive meaning of this term, see Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting With Jesus] were no different from you or me at rest. It's when riled, like a beehive, that they'll sting ya. And yes, sometimes they—we—have to be riled in order to act. But there is an ideal way of instigating action, and bluegrass and partying together is, in my view, the very first step in many positive behaviors. I've digressed. Obviously. Just thrilled about the choice of music [at the wedding]. Ole!
Now the only thing that worries me about this whole wedding is what I'll be wearing. I'm a real baby about wearing anything uncomfortable. I'll look nice if I must but will not wear a stiff buttoned collar with my Adam's apple garroted by some obscene necktie, symbolic of something far more heinous than a noose. In my dreams I would wear a light, loose fitting ensemble like Jesus. Perfect for "toasting," as the pope might say.
I know how you feel about -------, that it seems done. But trust me. It's not done with you. You're tired. You're begging it to stop squirming so you can tie off the knot...deep down we all want to be useful and productive, that's why the suggestion we're otherwise rankles us so [by "us" I mean artists in general]. But no, the fact is we strangle our productions, not to death but "out of consciousness" [our consciousness]. Once the work is limp in our hands we pass it on to its audience, which may or may not revive it. Of course, once others revive it you may wish to re-intervene and alter the evolved alterations emergent from its having passed through the other side. And every book is different, but if allowed to adequately develop, most seem to follow this basic or general framework. After putting together maybe a dozen or so booklength manuscripts over the years, this is what I've observed was common to them all...the way they ultimately achieve their final thought-feeling. And this seems to echo everything I've heard from other weirdo bookmakers.
I always say when confronted with mud, wrestle in it.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
A tweaking of what ails…from LSD to SSE
Since I’ve been sick with the flu and unable to think coherently for the last few days, and having obligated myself [to myself, none other] regarding this discipline of updating this blog every week, I’m taking a middle route this time around, simply sharing some of the more notable items I’ve discovered while browsing these so-called internets these last couple weeks.
Hope they tweak you like they tweak me…
*****
Skinny Dipping in Reality: A coot’s account of the great hippie LSD enlightenment search party, by Joe Bageant
No words can describe an LSD trip, but let me say that at the end of this one, I sat down and cried. For happiness. My deepest hope and suspicion, the one to which I dared not cling, had been confirmed. Life could indeed be significant, piercing and meaningful…Five years later I was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in the life…Nevertheless, once you've seen the face of eternity, you are left with the question of what to do about it. How to respond. "How will I live my life, in light of what I have seen?" I'm still wrestling with that question -- but then that's what I had wanted, wasn't it? That Great Question which would lead to the Great Answer? LSD doesn't give answers, just questions. But used with directed and sincere effort -- to the degree that is even possible -- it can make you ask the Great Questions, the only important ones. Such as "What are you going to do to eliminate human suffering? What are you going to do, Joe Bageant, now that you have seen the faces in the Great Wheel that turns both ways simultaneously? What will be your direct action?" If you really give a shit about the world, LSD will "serious your ass up real fast," as we used to say…But the good news, as I see it, is that we are inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is supposed to be more or less negotiable through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with whether or not we actualize truth…Enter Buddhism.
2009 Will Be A Year of Panic by Bruce Sterling
Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.
When Technology Fails: How to Survive the Long Emergency by Brian Godspeed
From the time when I was a kid in the 1960s and the Earth's population was 3 billion, it took only 40 more years for the planet to double again to reach a population of roughly 6 billion in the year 2000. It has been scientifically estimated that the global footprint of mankind exceeded the Earth's biocapacity in the mid-1980s, and that since that time we have been operating in an "overshoot" mode, meaning that we are consuming the planet's resources faster than they are regenerating.
American Gorbachev, by The Editors, N + 1 Magazine
Don't you see? Gorbachev tried to end the war—and did, only things got out of hand—and we want a President with the courage to abandon the false ideological struggle between capitalism and everything else. Let the members of our old bloc go their own way—let them be Bolivarians if they want. We won't intervene. We also believe in glasnost: at home, we need a new intellectual openness to wriggle free of the intolerant "old thinking." Abroad, we need to stop staring into people's eyes to see their souls, and start reminding them of American sanity and civility. And we want electoral reform while we're at it—proportional representation, instant run-off voting, public financing of campaigns, all that stuff—because the way the nomenklatura currently acquire their posts has them flattering ideologues and servicing lobbyists. And we want perestroika, because without some economic restructuring we're sunk. You can't hold down wages while increasing consumer spending forever. You can't run an economy on petroleum, debt, and accounting tricks!
We want our new President to be an American Gorbachev—to preserve the country by changing it—if only it's not too late for him to avoid Gorbachev's fate.
Beyond A Theory of Everything, by Sir Martin Rees
In terms of scale, the most complex entities we know of — ourselves — are midway between atoms and stars. It would take about as many human bodies to make up a star as there are atoms in each of us. Living things are very large compared to atoms: They must be big enough to have layer upon layer of intricate structure. But they cannot be too large, otherwise they would be crushed by gravity.
We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan, by Matthew Landis
The singular position of the survivor: he who is left behind to carry the other as a wholly departed and singular other, a wholly departed and singular world. The survivor not only dwells within the breach, but carries the weight of the breach, “the tear/ compacted of silence.” In that moment, this tear, this glottal stop (the cleaving, in both senses, of the glottal folds) the survivor carries on with the other, with the other’s world, a conducting path gives testimony in its absence and writing “breaks into song”, the specter of a singular, departed voice etched onto the tableau through the pen, its medium.
Mishmash and Rehash , by Mark Amerika
Given the instability of the entire global economy, one cannot help but wonder where we will find our Moshe the Mashup Artist to part the (deep in the) red seas so that we can get back into the black. The self-proclaimed anarchist Bob Black (as his name just so happens to be) has always been a proponent of "ludic activism" where "the theory of comedic revolution is much more than a blueprint for crass struggle: like a red light in a window, it illuminates humanity's inevitable destiny, the declasse society."
Satellite Crash Poses New Political Risk, Reuters
Klinkrad said the fact one collision had occurred increased the likelihood of more collisions, particularly as even more space debris had been created…In the very long term, that raises the risk of something called Kessler's Syndrome, he said, in which one collision and the ensuing space debris cause another crash and more debris, expanding almost exponentially.
A few brief, perhaps ludicrous questions: What if this so-called Kessler’s Syndrome occurred, knocking down all the satellites? Would it mean war? And if so, how would it be waged? On horseback? Without technology, what would happen?
A Hormone to Remember, by Joe Kloc
Given only a small dose of oxytocin, individuals in a recent study found that their memory significantly improved. Not for historical dates, strings of digits, or bars of music, but for something much more significant: each other.
"We consider faces the most basic class of social stimulus," says Ulrike Rimmele, who led the study at the University of Zurich. Oxytocin's ability to exclusively enhance the recollection of faces points to an important distinction between different types of memory. Social memory — which we use to remember people — is distinct from other types of memory required to store dates, numbers, and objects.
The Credit Crunch According to Soros, by Chrystia Freeland
This is as close to mainstream intellectual acceptance as Soros has come in his two decades of writing and more than five decades since he gave up on academia. It feels like a breakthrough. When I asked him if he would still describe himself as a failed philosopher, he said no: “I think that I am actually succeeding as a philosopher.” For him, that is “obviously” the most important human accomplishment.
“I think it has to do with the human condition,” he said. “The fact that we are mortal and we would like to be immortal. The closest thing you can come to that is by creating something that lives beyond you. Wealth could be one of those things, but evidence shows that it doesn’t survive too many generations. However, if you can have an artistic or philosophical or scientific creation that withstands the test of time, then you have come as close to it as possible.”
If a delusional tree falls in the imaginary woods, but no sane person is really there to bear witness to it, does its delusion matter beyond what it imagined before it fell? If one displays hubris in a world that makes pride a virtue, and no humble person is present to perceive any difference, does hubris have any actual effect? In other words, does it actually make any difference who or what Soros thinks he is? As my dad used to say, “we’ll see.” Will it be tragedy or history? He’s already old and rich, no Lear [as yet, does he have daughters?], and the future lurking on the horizon might make history a moot point. But we’ll see…
East Europe is about to blow, by Mike Whitney
The "liquidationists" would like to see governments cut off the flow of funds to ailing financial institutions and let them fail by themselves. It's Darwinian madness, like waiting out a heart attack on the kitchen floor instead of rushing to the hospital for emergency care. The global economy is decelerating at the fastest pace on record. 40 percent of global wealth has been wiped out. The banking system is insolvent, unemployment is soaring, tax revenues are falling, the markets are in shock, housing is crashing, deficits are soaring, and consumer confidence is at its lowest point in history. This is no time to cling to half-baked ideology. The global economy is undergoing a massive system-wide contraction which could spin out of control and plunge us into another world war. Political leaders need to grasp the urgency of the moment and keep the vehicle from careening into the ditch.
Why everyone is an artist: Denis Dutton says evolutionary psychology explains the ubiquity of art across cultures and eons, A review by Carlin Romano
'What an artist dies with me!" whined the nasty Roman emperor Nero as he prepared to commit suicide. Posterity has generally mocked the thought, judging the occasional singer-actor more of an artless thug.
Advice to Obama, by Brian Czech
We would advise President-Elect Obama to become the first president to tell it like it is about the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. Taking office in the midst of climate change, Peak Oil, and financial meltdown, he can easily override the decades of that destructive rhetoric, “There is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment!” He can resonate with the public’s dormant common sense that, in fact, there happens to be a fundamental conflict between economic growth and: 1) environmental protection, 2) economic sustainability, 3) national security, and, 4) international stability
Steady State Economics Basics, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Economic growth is simply an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services. Economic growth has provided many benefits over time, but now it is causing more problems - dire problems - than it solves. Slowly but surely, economic growth has become a primary threat to the environment, national security, international stability, and future generations. Yet it remains the highest priority in the domestic policy arena of the United States and most other nations. Citizens, especially students, are continually told that there is no limit to growth, in defiance of ecological principles and basic physics. To refute the misleading rhetoric that there is no conflict between economic growth and environmental protection - as well as economic sustainability - CASSE provides information on the downsides of growth with an emphasis on ecological concepts.
Hope they tweak you like they tweak me…
*****
Skinny Dipping in Reality: A coot’s account of the great hippie LSD enlightenment search party, by Joe Bageant
No words can describe an LSD trip, but let me say that at the end of this one, I sat down and cried. For happiness. My deepest hope and suspicion, the one to which I dared not cling, had been confirmed. Life could indeed be significant, piercing and meaningful…Five years later I was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in the life…Nevertheless, once you've seen the face of eternity, you are left with the question of what to do about it. How to respond. "How will I live my life, in light of what I have seen?" I'm still wrestling with that question -- but then that's what I had wanted, wasn't it? That Great Question which would lead to the Great Answer? LSD doesn't give answers, just questions. But used with directed and sincere effort -- to the degree that is even possible -- it can make you ask the Great Questions, the only important ones. Such as "What are you going to do to eliminate human suffering? What are you going to do, Joe Bageant, now that you have seen the faces in the Great Wheel that turns both ways simultaneously? What will be your direct action?" If you really give a shit about the world, LSD will "serious your ass up real fast," as we used to say…But the good news, as I see it, is that we are inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is supposed to be more or less negotiable through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with whether or not we actualize truth…Enter Buddhism.
2009 Will Be A Year of Panic by Bruce Sterling
Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.
When Technology Fails: How to Survive the Long Emergency by Brian Godspeed
From the time when I was a kid in the 1960s and the Earth's population was 3 billion, it took only 40 more years for the planet to double again to reach a population of roughly 6 billion in the year 2000. It has been scientifically estimated that the global footprint of mankind exceeded the Earth's biocapacity in the mid-1980s, and that since that time we have been operating in an "overshoot" mode, meaning that we are consuming the planet's resources faster than they are regenerating.
American Gorbachev, by The Editors, N + 1 Magazine
Don't you see? Gorbachev tried to end the war—and did, only things got out of hand—and we want a President with the courage to abandon the false ideological struggle between capitalism and everything else. Let the members of our old bloc go their own way—let them be Bolivarians if they want. We won't intervene. We also believe in glasnost: at home, we need a new intellectual openness to wriggle free of the intolerant "old thinking." Abroad, we need to stop staring into people's eyes to see their souls, and start reminding them of American sanity and civility. And we want electoral reform while we're at it—proportional representation, instant run-off voting, public financing of campaigns, all that stuff—because the way the nomenklatura currently acquire their posts has them flattering ideologues and servicing lobbyists. And we want perestroika, because without some economic restructuring we're sunk. You can't hold down wages while increasing consumer spending forever. You can't run an economy on petroleum, debt, and accounting tricks!
We want our new President to be an American Gorbachev—to preserve the country by changing it—if only it's not too late for him to avoid Gorbachev's fate.
Beyond A Theory of Everything, by Sir Martin Rees
In terms of scale, the most complex entities we know of — ourselves — are midway between atoms and stars. It would take about as many human bodies to make up a star as there are atoms in each of us. Living things are very large compared to atoms: They must be big enough to have layer upon layer of intricate structure. But they cannot be too large, otherwise they would be crushed by gravity.
We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan, by Matthew Landis
The singular position of the survivor: he who is left behind to carry the other as a wholly departed and singular other, a wholly departed and singular world. The survivor not only dwells within the breach, but carries the weight of the breach, “the tear/ compacted of silence.” In that moment, this tear, this glottal stop (the cleaving, in both senses, of the glottal folds) the survivor carries on with the other, with the other’s world, a conducting path gives testimony in its absence and writing “breaks into song”, the specter of a singular, departed voice etched onto the tableau through the pen, its medium.
Mishmash and Rehash , by Mark Amerika
Given the instability of the entire global economy, one cannot help but wonder where we will find our Moshe the Mashup Artist to part the (deep in the) red seas so that we can get back into the black. The self-proclaimed anarchist Bob Black (as his name just so happens to be) has always been a proponent of "ludic activism" where "the theory of comedic revolution is much more than a blueprint for crass struggle: like a red light in a window, it illuminates humanity's inevitable destiny, the declasse society."
Satellite Crash Poses New Political Risk, Reuters
Klinkrad said the fact one collision had occurred increased the likelihood of more collisions, particularly as even more space debris had been created…In the very long term, that raises the risk of something called Kessler's Syndrome, he said, in which one collision and the ensuing space debris cause another crash and more debris, expanding almost exponentially.
A few brief, perhaps ludicrous questions: What if this so-called Kessler’s Syndrome occurred, knocking down all the satellites? Would it mean war? And if so, how would it be waged? On horseback? Without technology, what would happen?
A Hormone to Remember, by Joe Kloc
Given only a small dose of oxytocin, individuals in a recent study found that their memory significantly improved. Not for historical dates, strings of digits, or bars of music, but for something much more significant: each other.
"We consider faces the most basic class of social stimulus," says Ulrike Rimmele, who led the study at the University of Zurich. Oxytocin's ability to exclusively enhance the recollection of faces points to an important distinction between different types of memory. Social memory — which we use to remember people — is distinct from other types of memory required to store dates, numbers, and objects.
The Credit Crunch According to Soros, by Chrystia Freeland
This is as close to mainstream intellectual acceptance as Soros has come in his two decades of writing and more than five decades since he gave up on academia. It feels like a breakthrough. When I asked him if he would still describe himself as a failed philosopher, he said no: “I think that I am actually succeeding as a philosopher.” For him, that is “obviously” the most important human accomplishment.
“I think it has to do with the human condition,” he said. “The fact that we are mortal and we would like to be immortal. The closest thing you can come to that is by creating something that lives beyond you. Wealth could be one of those things, but evidence shows that it doesn’t survive too many generations. However, if you can have an artistic or philosophical or scientific creation that withstands the test of time, then you have come as close to it as possible.”
If a delusional tree falls in the imaginary woods, but no sane person is really there to bear witness to it, does its delusion matter beyond what it imagined before it fell? If one displays hubris in a world that makes pride a virtue, and no humble person is present to perceive any difference, does hubris have any actual effect? In other words, does it actually make any difference who or what Soros thinks he is? As my dad used to say, “we’ll see.” Will it be tragedy or history? He’s already old and rich, no Lear [as yet, does he have daughters?], and the future lurking on the horizon might make history a moot point. But we’ll see…
East Europe is about to blow, by Mike Whitney
The "liquidationists" would like to see governments cut off the flow of funds to ailing financial institutions and let them fail by themselves. It's Darwinian madness, like waiting out a heart attack on the kitchen floor instead of rushing to the hospital for emergency care. The global economy is decelerating at the fastest pace on record. 40 percent of global wealth has been wiped out. The banking system is insolvent, unemployment is soaring, tax revenues are falling, the markets are in shock, housing is crashing, deficits are soaring, and consumer confidence is at its lowest point in history. This is no time to cling to half-baked ideology. The global economy is undergoing a massive system-wide contraction which could spin out of control and plunge us into another world war. Political leaders need to grasp the urgency of the moment and keep the vehicle from careening into the ditch.
Why everyone is an artist: Denis Dutton says evolutionary psychology explains the ubiquity of art across cultures and eons, A review by Carlin Romano
'What an artist dies with me!" whined the nasty Roman emperor Nero as he prepared to commit suicide. Posterity has generally mocked the thought, judging the occasional singer-actor more of an artless thug.
Advice to Obama, by Brian Czech
We would advise President-Elect Obama to become the first president to tell it like it is about the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. Taking office in the midst of climate change, Peak Oil, and financial meltdown, he can easily override the decades of that destructive rhetoric, “There is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment!” He can resonate with the public’s dormant common sense that, in fact, there happens to be a fundamental conflict between economic growth and: 1) environmental protection, 2) economic sustainability, 3) national security, and, 4) international stability
Steady State Economics Basics, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Economic growth is simply an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services. Economic growth has provided many benefits over time, but now it is causing more problems - dire problems - than it solves. Slowly but surely, economic growth has become a primary threat to the environment, national security, international stability, and future generations. Yet it remains the highest priority in the domestic policy arena of the United States and most other nations. Citizens, especially students, are continually told that there is no limit to growth, in defiance of ecological principles and basic physics. To refute the misleading rhetoric that there is no conflict between economic growth and environmental protection - as well as economic sustainability - CASSE provides information on the downsides of growth with an emphasis on ecological concepts.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Inventing new ways of being, or not…
“Why don’t you do something more useful and productive?”
He’d worked on Skylab back in the day, was old enough to be my father, was related, and felt he had a right to condescend, regardless of the fact he was in my home, eating my food, drinking my coffee, etc. He’s a professor of mathematics and was criticizing my compulsion for writing. To do him justice would require a novel, which may happen, but for now let’s just say…
Back in the mid-1960s when he was pursuing his doctorate at Harvard, he was visiting our house for a cookout. It was late summer, early autumn, I’m not sure. There was a chill in the air, I do remember that. Everyone was in sweaters and sweatshirts. As we chatted, my relative, our hero, picked up a jart and wandered over to the side of our above ground aluminum sided swimming pool that was only three feet deep. No one paid much attention as our hero began anointing the pool with the jart, flicking its tip toward the water surface the way the pope might his wand toward some mass of people he’s blessing. It was my father, hip to my relative’s oddities, who looked up to see where he was and spotted him by the pool. Before my father could shout his name, our hero flicked the jart into the pool at a precise trajectory, breaking the surface of the water and responding to the sudden drag according to his calculations [which he proudly announced to our shock and awe a few moments later], trajecting downward and through the lining at the bottom of the pool. Good God. The water was 62 degrees. I know that because Dad repeated it repeatedly for years. We have pictures of the picnic and my dad in his plaid swim trunks going into the pool to administer an emergency patch so the pool wouldn’t flood out onto the picnic, while our hero looked sheepishly on wearing a windbreaker and black turtleneck, feebly attempting to explain the value of what he’d just accomplished to my furious Pop and mystified relatives.
There are other stories, but this jackass professor relative of mine has been something of a laughingstock in the family my whole life, since he’s old enough, as I said, to be my father. And I would also like to say he is fictional. I have no such relative. But if I did this would be true. He would also have Asperger Syndrome, be beautiful, making us a bunch of cruel-farted arses.
I imagine people like him or her wanting to know why people like me don’t do something more useful and productive. Meanwhile I imagine how much less damage they might have done had they been less useful and productive to the system they still automatically cling to, having successfully re-populated their rungs via breeding.
But the fact is, or seems to be, despite my digressions to the contrary, it doesn’t really matter, or didn’t really matter, no, still doesn’t, regardless of what’s actually going on around them. Their lives seam, untouched as yet by anything outside their minds. Their anxiety is interior, located in the threats they’re perceiving to their perceptions of comfortable, convenient ways of living that justify their non-negotiable thoughts their bedrock feelings justify, or at least still try to validate with varying degrees of success, tragedy and/or whatnot.
I don’t know. As I said, I’m just imagining these people, trying to find a way to love them if a failure at trying to come to some under-standing or over-standing or with-standing with or of them refuses to take shape in terms I know, or perhaps, in forms I don’t, yet still in shapes I can deal or play with, using or manipulating, maybe even profiting from…I don’t know and have serious doubts about my general ignorance. I’m simply trying to relate myself to the things I’m imagining. All I know in this regard is what I think I feel about what seems to be missing. Context is actually trans-text to a lesser degree. Context is whatever’s missing from the trans-text in the present tense, which is to say my tense…my angle and aspect. I am the eye of the storm, being everything It seems not. So what I don’t know now seems related to what I know elsewhere then. Or not, perhaps.
Thus mystified, I perused this interesting piece—On Bolano–in the latest issue of N + 1 magazine that asks why we should read Bolano at all “if these empty Chinese boxes constitute the only goods…?” By “empty Chinese boxes” the author is, in my opinion, referring to the authors/poets absented from Bolano’s texts whose characters go on mythical quests for…the writer’s physicality seams the missing elemental essence of their lives…which they’re perceiving, for better and worse, as their minds, distinct from the matter and energy comprising their cognition or awareness.
And again, I hear that question, the one the writer of that article has presumably asked herself outside the article in thought-feelings relative to it: “Why don’t you do something more useful and productive than read and comment on Roberto Bolano?” What use is it reading him? What do I gain from his skewerings of the jart trajectors, the abundantly literate do-nothings, eviscerating them, exposing their profound emptiness, shattering the delusional productions of their lives?
The writer/reader senses her reading/writing, seaming somehow that proverbial thing Itself. I read, lying [writing] somewhere in the seam between a world in which literature is everything, and another world in which it doesn’t have any meaning at all. She writes that in Bolano’s literary world, the characters “can’t conceive any redemption…except through the production of masterpieces. Masterpieces, however, are always unlikely, and redemption impossible” [in the literary and non-literary worlds alike]. So says the author of this interesting N + 1 ditty, in my opinion.
Thinking about these things, my mind wandered to Marquez, and I pulled 100 Years of Solitude down from the bookshelf. Upon the inside flap, I had written:
“Memory is how one imagines their histories…space-time is a byproduct of human cognition…Solitude is to Life what Death is to at-one-ment. Life is individuation, a movement out of Eden, away from magical wilder-ness toward disenchanted civilization. In this moment and each moment after that the increasing equilibrium of entropy overtakes the disequilibrium of chaos that maintains a being’s autonomy. The feedback loops [sacred hoops] break down. Solitude is the sensual, organic aspect of this search for a return to one’s imagined or hoped-for at-one-ment with ex-is-tence…the re-membering of hoops and re-establishment of feedback-ignited sacred loops. The recycling of names corresponds to the recycling of characters as part of the life cycle. The being is not the individual, but the family, the race’s bloodline, and by extension the species’ genome…the trajectory of seminal traces…all jizz-like sparks coming to an apocalyptic and natural end, apocalyptic in the sense these sparks are cognitive.”
It seems I was quite enthusiastic about Marquez [and still am].
So let’s try a re-cap: Some folks expect literature to be useful and productive in ways it can’t be, and the ways it can be useful aren’t very productive or useful [to them] and vice versa…at least from where these folks seem to be sitting. Therefore literature exists on the seam between literary and non-literary worlds in which it is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, being between existence and non-existence. Literature is apocalyptic in the sense of the cognitive sparks it gives off, its brief revelations of something beyond the friction, beyond that which we’re rubbing up against.
Now how the hell does that invent a new way of being?
By emptying the struggle to escape our dark confines of its promethean-messianic aspect, exposing the taboo—the blasphemy—of such behavior via silence…a void echoing the heresies of our heroes.
The whole of literature seams a vestige of what can’t be spoken of…“a game that at a certain point,” writes Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature, “is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society.”
Calvino said the way we learn to accept our not so noble motives and learn to live through the ensuing crises is a way we can start inventing “new ways of being.” Bolano’s staring into the abyss of human knowledge seems a sublime negative capability in that it can handle the emptiness without taking unwise or wasteful action against it. In fact, he bathes in it. And rather than inviting the reader to join him, he’s actually joining the reader, taking a bath in the tub of literature. By staining various exteriors, shape is given to what seems to be lingering inside and outside [figure/ground] this imagined baby. Literature in Bolano’s hands seams a way of taking a cosmic bath. He seems to be turning the old Army saying “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” when you’re in combat into “Do no-thing, even if it’s wrong” as a means of ending that conflict. The friction we now make seems better.
A literature or fiction that does less, does more, perhaps.
So next time I’m asked why I don’t do anything more useful and productive, I might say because doing no-thing seams better…and that seam might seem to reveal a new way of being this.
Now why don’t you go calculate that apocalypse in your laboratory for awhile?
He’d worked on Skylab back in the day, was old enough to be my father, was related, and felt he had a right to condescend, regardless of the fact he was in my home, eating my food, drinking my coffee, etc. He’s a professor of mathematics and was criticizing my compulsion for writing. To do him justice would require a novel, which may happen, but for now let’s just say…
Back in the mid-1960s when he was pursuing his doctorate at Harvard, he was visiting our house for a cookout. It was late summer, early autumn, I’m not sure. There was a chill in the air, I do remember that. Everyone was in sweaters and sweatshirts. As we chatted, my relative, our hero, picked up a jart and wandered over to the side of our above ground aluminum sided swimming pool that was only three feet deep. No one paid much attention as our hero began anointing the pool with the jart, flicking its tip toward the water surface the way the pope might his wand toward some mass of people he’s blessing. It was my father, hip to my relative’s oddities, who looked up to see where he was and spotted him by the pool. Before my father could shout his name, our hero flicked the jart into the pool at a precise trajectory, breaking the surface of the water and responding to the sudden drag according to his calculations [which he proudly announced to our shock and awe a few moments later], trajecting downward and through the lining at the bottom of the pool. Good God. The water was 62 degrees. I know that because Dad repeated it repeatedly for years. We have pictures of the picnic and my dad in his plaid swim trunks going into the pool to administer an emergency patch so the pool wouldn’t flood out onto the picnic, while our hero looked sheepishly on wearing a windbreaker and black turtleneck, feebly attempting to explain the value of what he’d just accomplished to my furious Pop and mystified relatives.
There are other stories, but this jackass professor relative of mine has been something of a laughingstock in the family my whole life, since he’s old enough, as I said, to be my father. And I would also like to say he is fictional. I have no such relative. But if I did this would be true. He would also have Asperger Syndrome, be beautiful, making us a bunch of cruel-farted arses.
I imagine people like him or her wanting to know why people like me don’t do something more useful and productive. Meanwhile I imagine how much less damage they might have done had they been less useful and productive to the system they still automatically cling to, having successfully re-populated their rungs via breeding.
But the fact is, or seems to be, despite my digressions to the contrary, it doesn’t really matter, or didn’t really matter, no, still doesn’t, regardless of what’s actually going on around them. Their lives seam, untouched as yet by anything outside their minds. Their anxiety is interior, located in the threats they’re perceiving to their perceptions of comfortable, convenient ways of living that justify their non-negotiable thoughts their bedrock feelings justify, or at least still try to validate with varying degrees of success, tragedy and/or whatnot.
I don’t know. As I said, I’m just imagining these people, trying to find a way to love them if a failure at trying to come to some under-standing or over-standing or with-standing with or of them refuses to take shape in terms I know, or perhaps, in forms I don’t, yet still in shapes I can deal or play with, using or manipulating, maybe even profiting from…I don’t know and have serious doubts about my general ignorance. I’m simply trying to relate myself to the things I’m imagining. All I know in this regard is what I think I feel about what seems to be missing. Context is actually trans-text to a lesser degree. Context is whatever’s missing from the trans-text in the present tense, which is to say my tense…my angle and aspect. I am the eye of the storm, being everything It seems not. So what I don’t know now seems related to what I know elsewhere then. Or not, perhaps.
Thus mystified, I perused this interesting piece—On Bolano–in the latest issue of N + 1 magazine that asks why we should read Bolano at all “if these empty Chinese boxes constitute the only goods…?” By “empty Chinese boxes” the author is, in my opinion, referring to the authors/poets absented from Bolano’s texts whose characters go on mythical quests for…the writer’s physicality seams the missing elemental essence of their lives…which they’re perceiving, for better and worse, as their minds, distinct from the matter and energy comprising their cognition or awareness.
And again, I hear that question, the one the writer of that article has presumably asked herself outside the article in thought-feelings relative to it: “Why don’t you do something more useful and productive than read and comment on Roberto Bolano?” What use is it reading him? What do I gain from his skewerings of the jart trajectors, the abundantly literate do-nothings, eviscerating them, exposing their profound emptiness, shattering the delusional productions of their lives?
The writer/reader senses her reading/writing, seaming somehow that proverbial thing Itself. I read, lying [writing] somewhere in the seam between a world in which literature is everything, and another world in which it doesn’t have any meaning at all. She writes that in Bolano’s literary world, the characters “can’t conceive any redemption…except through the production of masterpieces. Masterpieces, however, are always unlikely, and redemption impossible” [in the literary and non-literary worlds alike]. So says the author of this interesting N + 1 ditty, in my opinion.
Thinking about these things, my mind wandered to Marquez, and I pulled 100 Years of Solitude down from the bookshelf. Upon the inside flap, I had written:
“Memory is how one imagines their histories…space-time is a byproduct of human cognition…Solitude is to Life what Death is to at-one-ment. Life is individuation, a movement out of Eden, away from magical wilder-ness toward disenchanted civilization. In this moment and each moment after that the increasing equilibrium of entropy overtakes the disequilibrium of chaos that maintains a being’s autonomy. The feedback loops [sacred hoops] break down. Solitude is the sensual, organic aspect of this search for a return to one’s imagined or hoped-for at-one-ment with ex-is-tence…the re-membering of hoops and re-establishment of feedback-ignited sacred loops. The recycling of names corresponds to the recycling of characters as part of the life cycle. The being is not the individual, but the family, the race’s bloodline, and by extension the species’ genome…the trajectory of seminal traces…all jizz-like sparks coming to an apocalyptic and natural end, apocalyptic in the sense these sparks are cognitive.”
It seems I was quite enthusiastic about Marquez [and still am].
So let’s try a re-cap: Some folks expect literature to be useful and productive in ways it can’t be, and the ways it can be useful aren’t very productive or useful [to them] and vice versa…at least from where these folks seem to be sitting. Therefore literature exists on the seam between literary and non-literary worlds in which it is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, being between existence and non-existence. Literature is apocalyptic in the sense of the cognitive sparks it gives off, its brief revelations of something beyond the friction, beyond that which we’re rubbing up against.
Now how the hell does that invent a new way of being?
By emptying the struggle to escape our dark confines of its promethean-messianic aspect, exposing the taboo—the blasphemy—of such behavior via silence…a void echoing the heresies of our heroes.
The whole of literature seams a vestige of what can’t be spoken of…“a game that at a certain point,” writes Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature, “is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society.”
Calvino said the way we learn to accept our not so noble motives and learn to live through the ensuing crises is a way we can start inventing “new ways of being.” Bolano’s staring into the abyss of human knowledge seems a sublime negative capability in that it can handle the emptiness without taking unwise or wasteful action against it. In fact, he bathes in it. And rather than inviting the reader to join him, he’s actually joining the reader, taking a bath in the tub of literature. By staining various exteriors, shape is given to what seems to be lingering inside and outside [figure/ground] this imagined baby. Literature in Bolano’s hands seams a way of taking a cosmic bath. He seems to be turning the old Army saying “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” when you’re in combat into “Do no-thing, even if it’s wrong” as a means of ending that conflict. The friction we now make seems better.
A literature or fiction that does less, does more, perhaps.
So next time I’m asked why I don’t do anything more useful and productive, I might say because doing no-thing seams better…and that seam might seem to reveal a new way of being this.
Now why don’t you go calculate that apocalypse in your laboratory for awhile?
Saturday, February 7, 2009
The Woe of Endless Desire: A Message to President Barack Obama
“But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall.”
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
The greatest dangers we human beings now face seem to lie in our desire for accurate classifications. We think we need to know what we refer to as facts because we sense ourselves coping with the assumed necessities of moving mountains, juggling conflicting co-incidents, trying to harmonize with the inexorability of recurring evolutions on all scales—all in the effort to make sense of everything so we can control our fate and choose our destiny, knowing all the while that all we can ever do is dream up inadequate ideologies, selfish solutions and vainglorious hopes of practically extending ourselves for as long as humanly possible.
That’s dominion. God damns It. It damns God. God dams It. It dams god. god das it. it das god.
Gradually disappearing, It gives then takes away. Appearing again, it is.
Before the beginning there is something. It is moving relative to no-thing, presumably. So the beginning isn’t really a beginning. There is no-thing already there, an emptied imagination imagining Its emptiness as other. As in the others Cain is forced to wander among. No-thing is all ways some thing. Nothing.
Then when this nothing-something’s membrane rubs up against the membrane of something-nothing else before the non-existent beginning, that friction seaming free of its initial cause tries to exactly analogize this incidental emergency of co-incidences it’s referring to as a bolt of lightning, or clap of thunder, or some such observed phenomena in nature that’s seeming to resonate with our categorizing perceptions. But it’s all in our mind.
God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.
That seems It outside the mind, the other we seam, strangely attracted, to.
Terrorized by this molestive, apparently metaphysical cyclical force, chemical entities change into biological entities that grow evermore complex entities that evolve sentient biological entities [among other things], some of which become egos—who perceive themselves terrified vagabonds and slaves as well as rightful masters of the universe—who seek refuge from death and suffering and failure by bonding together, growing stronger in numbers and exacting concessions from those they perceive as others coincidental to the initial conditions before their beginning so they can imagine themselves playing in ever-expanding fields.
We are the champions of the world. That’s zionism.
That virus becomes this germ, this germ becomes that cell, that cell becomes this organ, this organ becomes that body, from that body this mind emerges, from this mind emerges that terror which leads to our huddling together by the fire in the cave, which gets too crowded and so we spill out to conquer our terror, cities form from our desires, which bound from messiah seeking socializations to feudal arrangements to anarchic democracies seemingly all at once or at least as part of the same thing, coincidentally recurring in the imagined elsewheres we’re perceiving ourselves rubbing up against, others rubbing up against others which leads to war and chaos and interdestruction and new messiah clans and neo-feudal tribes and emergent democratic anarchies…all emerging from the desire to protect our precious bodily fluids.
It seems that inside the mind, that being this seaming eye It perceives my odd emergency from.
And then there is that clap of thunder again…that re-minder. God is killed and Nature dies. Nations disappear and, terrified, vagabonds and slaves, debtors and lenders all seek refuge from death and suffering and defeat by bonding together.
God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.
Maybe.
That seams life to death. Then death seams that to life.
What is That? Yes and No, perhaps. Then probably not.
Yet I desire to perceive my feelings simply. Whatever I survey has Its limits and all I can do is surround and inform them. They can’t be saved, but who or what can?
It’s in the stable covered in crusty, flaking shit. You can hear It sigh when you piss on it, and feel yourself in love for the first and perhaps last time considering the poison you’re playing with, that onanistic desire for dereliction rising up from the steaming puddle at your feet, annihilating everything but your imagined legacy, that shit we cultivate and trade among ourselves when you’re gone, obeying the necessities of your nausea, of your distressed bowels squirting your feces all over the map that the lovers of politics lick up like I scream, fire in our noisy faces burning It in a bottomless hell where Obama may or may not forgive those who were just following orders, preferring to audaciously chase his dreams instead…forgetting to re-instate habeas corpus.
Perhaps, then maybe not. Probably. Or no. Then yes. Sleepwalking all the way until our precious bodily fluids become something else, and or etc.,
I guess. You guess. We all guess for this time…
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
The greatest dangers we human beings now face seem to lie in our desire for accurate classifications. We think we need to know what we refer to as facts because we sense ourselves coping with the assumed necessities of moving mountains, juggling conflicting co-incidents, trying to harmonize with the inexorability of recurring evolutions on all scales—all in the effort to make sense of everything so we can control our fate and choose our destiny, knowing all the while that all we can ever do is dream up inadequate ideologies, selfish solutions and vainglorious hopes of practically extending ourselves for as long as humanly possible.
That’s dominion. God damns It. It damns God. God dams It. It dams god. god das it. it das god.
Gradually disappearing, It gives then takes away. Appearing again, it is.
Before the beginning there is something. It is moving relative to no-thing, presumably. So the beginning isn’t really a beginning. There is no-thing already there, an emptied imagination imagining Its emptiness as other. As in the others Cain is forced to wander among. No-thing is all ways some thing. Nothing.
Then when this nothing-something’s membrane rubs up against the membrane of something-nothing else before the non-existent beginning, that friction seaming free of its initial cause tries to exactly analogize this incidental emergency of co-incidences it’s referring to as a bolt of lightning, or clap of thunder, or some such observed phenomena in nature that’s seeming to resonate with our categorizing perceptions. But it’s all in our mind.
God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.
That seems It outside the mind, the other we seam, strangely attracted, to.
Terrorized by this molestive, apparently metaphysical cyclical force, chemical entities change into biological entities that grow evermore complex entities that evolve sentient biological entities [among other things], some of which become egos—who perceive themselves terrified vagabonds and slaves as well as rightful masters of the universe—who seek refuge from death and suffering and failure by bonding together, growing stronger in numbers and exacting concessions from those they perceive as others coincidental to the initial conditions before their beginning so they can imagine themselves playing in ever-expanding fields.
We are the champions of the world. That’s zionism.
That virus becomes this germ, this germ becomes that cell, that cell becomes this organ, this organ becomes that body, from that body this mind emerges, from this mind emerges that terror which leads to our huddling together by the fire in the cave, which gets too crowded and so we spill out to conquer our terror, cities form from our desires, which bound from messiah seeking socializations to feudal arrangements to anarchic democracies seemingly all at once or at least as part of the same thing, coincidentally recurring in the imagined elsewheres we’re perceiving ourselves rubbing up against, others rubbing up against others which leads to war and chaos and interdestruction and new messiah clans and neo-feudal tribes and emergent democratic anarchies…all emerging from the desire to protect our precious bodily fluids.
It seems that inside the mind, that being this seaming eye It perceives my odd emergency from.
And then there is that clap of thunder again…that re-minder. God is killed and Nature dies. Nations disappear and, terrified, vagabonds and slaves, debtors and lenders all seek refuge from death and suffering and defeat by bonding together.
God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.
Maybe.
That seams life to death. Then death seams that to life.
What is That? Yes and No, perhaps. Then probably not.
Yet I desire to perceive my feelings simply. Whatever I survey has Its limits and all I can do is surround and inform them. They can’t be saved, but who or what can?
It’s in the stable covered in crusty, flaking shit. You can hear It sigh when you piss on it, and feel yourself in love for the first and perhaps last time considering the poison you’re playing with, that onanistic desire for dereliction rising up from the steaming puddle at your feet, annihilating everything but your imagined legacy, that shit we cultivate and trade among ourselves when you’re gone, obeying the necessities of your nausea, of your distressed bowels squirting your feces all over the map that the lovers of politics lick up like I scream, fire in our noisy faces burning It in a bottomless hell where Obama may or may not forgive those who were just following orders, preferring to audaciously chase his dreams instead…forgetting to re-instate habeas corpus.
Perhaps, then maybe not. Probably. Or no. Then yes. Sleepwalking all the way until our precious bodily fluids become something else, and or etc.,
I guess. You guess. We all guess for this time…
Friday, January 30, 2009
Re-Membering Imagination, Evolution & Play
I’m keeping this week’s comments short because I injured my arm yesterday and it hurts to type. It seems just a muscle injury and will hopefully improve over the next few days. We’ll see.
I have two post-its at eye level here at my computer of which I failed to cite the source, so I don’t know where they came from. This may, of course, have also been true at the moment of the post-it writing. I might be the source of these words or I might be the parrot of them or something in-between.
Does it really matter and if so why? To what end?
These are the post-it notes:
"I have more imagination than intelligence, and everything I know is imagined."
"The poet of the inexpungible guilt felt by human beings."
I think somebody else said the first one in the third person about someone else and I liked it so I converted it to first person to describe me to myself for possible insertion into something elsewhere [as now seams relative to then, somewhat].
And I think that second one was somehow related to Roberto Bolano, something I’d read somewhere and took verbatim, falsely expecting to remember the source. It is the words’ delectability that for me produces something of a madeleine moment, somehow conjuring up a prepubescent glow, a black and white tv screen on a cozy Sunday morning with some angry preacher spewing about the mercy of Jesus upon the souls of the wicked…the glory of loving thy enemy. It seems to be in the way the sentence’s prosody gravitates toward “felt” as its main expression. And the term “inexpungible guilt” seems downright Jainist in its killing-eating sensitivity and sentience. As a boy on those Sunday mornings I felt a love of God being a love of all things—prey and predator alike. Flash to evening and, again, warm cozy feelings. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Dad popping popcorn in the popcorn popper. When I read that post-it, I’m a little boy again because I don’t find myself reading those types of statements, much less making them myself anymore. Then I begin thinking…
If this post-it applies to Bolano as I think it might, it may be in the way his narrative voice—at least through The Part About the Critics and the beginning of The Part About Amalfitano—almost echoes, replicates or recurses a prosecutorial voice in laying out a highly rational and nuanced indictment against sophisticated and perhaps even legalized criminals before a grand jury of readers who are being asked to feel the alleged charges being thrown at the defendants. Bolano seems to be prosecuting the big boys and girls of the global intelligentsia for their personal failures to improve the world in any meaningful way, or at least not cause it net harm in the end, from a human perspective, of course. It seems the more successful individual humans become relative to other humans, at least in their own mind, the more material harm they do to earthlings in general. A certain insensitivity seems necessary to justify their material gain by debiting their energy and minds to leverage unjust systems in their personal favor, and in this I’m reading a distinctly “American”—North, South, Latin, Anglo, African—apocalypse, re-writing in a more even-handed tone John’s overtly symbolic rant against global mercantilism in The Book of Revelations [as I presume to interpret my variously interpreted copies of it for myself, of course]. In Bolano, we are not mystified by this apocalyptic rant but seduced into its feeling of invisible dead ends.
Yet I don’t know. I’m only about 20 percent through the novel. My day job and my writing keep me away from 2666 more than I’d like, leaving me to imagine reading it more than actually doing so. Perhaps this injury will change that ratio for the next few days. Due to pain, I will have fun.
There’s a bright side to every sorrow…
And so this is why I write fiction rather than attempting some form of actual scholarship. I have something of an attention deficit disorder when it comes to who says what when where amid the gathering yet chaotically flowing minutiae [like hearing multiple rumors from multiple sources with complex, multiple agendas]. I’m far more stricken by the general flow of elements—the rumors’ overriding and overlapping themes forming the textual murmur—to care if that log bounced off those particular rocks upstream. I can imagine it probably did relative to my experience and that’s good enough for me. I’m not seeking ideologies or material formulas that are physically applicable, I’m not building bridges or skyscrapers or designing Wall Street software. I’m only dealing in useful fictions…useful to my thinking about my feelings and keeping them in their place. I have no desire to conduct social experiments to see if any of my imagined shit is true in the actual sense or not. I imagine it’s not and that seems true enough for me.
Go with the flow…Don’t dictate it, especially if you can’t dance.
Play seems to me a much overlooked aspect of evolutionary theories. What is it exactly that impels Life to defy for a time the second law of thermodynamics, to forego entropy for awhile in the emergency of order? It must involve pleasure. It’s got to be fun. Why else bother? What keeps us from committing mass suicide…or are we? And if we are killing ourselves, what does that mean? What effect does that have on human being? Why do we care? Do we…actually?
A playful imagination overcomes the enabling obstacle of the hypersensitive person’s inextinguishable sense of guilt. It’s the air beneath the crow’s beating black wings, enabling its flight and enhancing its perception as an emergence from crisis mode, a means to escape the present situation via some kind of cognitive expansion that seems at the very least liberating, if not evolutionary. Or so it seams that way in my mind at the moment…
Didn’t Pound say something about “artists” being the “antennae of the race?”
Is it time for the pan-American intelligentsia, if such an entity could imaginably exist, to playfully confront its guilt—both collectively and personally—to save itself from its reflexive behaviors before it’s too late? Does it matter? Is it worth the energy? Would it be useful to the human mind? What exactly might be considered useful? Why?
Mind might seam the emotional fallout from imagination in many forms. One must play to be happy. Art is a time and place where this kind of mind justifies its expenditure of matter and energy to itself in a way that produces a pleasurable sensation. Or maybe not.
I wrote more than I expected. My imagination reduced my pain. And I can’t help but think the way I’m feeling that the billions of living organisms comprising me haven’t somehow benefitted from this nonsense too.
It seems actuality really is mind in matter energetically sensed…a feeling evolutionary thought re-membering playful imaginings of…
*****
This week’s interesting stuff:
A devastating take down of a well-regarded member of the New York intelligentsia by some word wizard barbarian whose dad works as a reporter for NBC news [this beast also has Buffalo roots]:
Flat N All That
MATT TAIBBI takes on porn-stached New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s greenish ways.
Even better was this gem from one of Friedman’s latest columns: “The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?” There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the “title” of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder?
Read more at http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html
It’s Written All Over Your Face, a Science News article that begins:
Eye candy might more appropriately be called brain candy. Seeing a pretty face is like eating a piece of oh-so-sweet chocolate — for the brain, if not for the stomach. In fact, attractive faces activate the same reward circuitry in the brain as food, drugs and money. For humans, there is something captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slit on the front of the head.
Read more at
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39616/title/It%E2%80%99s_written_all_over_your_face
How Not to Write A Novel, rather funny actually, especially when you read it replacing all the periods with question marks and speak through your nose interrogating some aspiring author like Stewie Griffin on The Family Guy, who Wikipedia describes as “a diabolical infant of ambiguous sexual orientation who has adult mannerisms and speaks fluently with an affected upper-class English accent and stereotypical archvillain phrases.[6]” One scene from the show in particular pops into mind, where Stewie, sitting on the family sofa with Brian, the family dog, who “is highly anthropomorphized, walks on two legs, drinks Martinis, smokes cigarettes and engages in human conversation, though he is still considered a pet in many respects,” quizzes Brian about how the novel the dog is allegedly writing is going. Consider these two paragraphs turned into such questions and its rather hilarious and raises questions about how Family Guy and such criticism is perhaps relative to one another:
Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.
The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other's homes, all of which is described in detail.
Read more at:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5530183.ece?print=yes&randnum=1233249605616
If I could be dictator for a week and during that time rule with an iron fist, these are the people I’d persecute. Pretty soon, somewhere around noon on day six, the last of us would most likely disappear… http://peoplewhodeserveit.com/
Let’s talk European: Sign and Sight at http://www.signandsight.com/
From typewriter to bookstore: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/from-typewriter.html
I have two post-its at eye level here at my computer of which I failed to cite the source, so I don’t know where they came from. This may, of course, have also been true at the moment of the post-it writing. I might be the source of these words or I might be the parrot of them or something in-between.
Does it really matter and if so why? To what end?
These are the post-it notes:
"I have more imagination than intelligence, and everything I know is imagined."
"The poet of the inexpungible guilt felt by human beings."
I think somebody else said the first one in the third person about someone else and I liked it so I converted it to first person to describe me to myself for possible insertion into something elsewhere [as now seams relative to then, somewhat].
And I think that second one was somehow related to Roberto Bolano, something I’d read somewhere and took verbatim, falsely expecting to remember the source. It is the words’ delectability that for me produces something of a madeleine moment, somehow conjuring up a prepubescent glow, a black and white tv screen on a cozy Sunday morning with some angry preacher spewing about the mercy of Jesus upon the souls of the wicked…the glory of loving thy enemy. It seems to be in the way the sentence’s prosody gravitates toward “felt” as its main expression. And the term “inexpungible guilt” seems downright Jainist in its killing-eating sensitivity and sentience. As a boy on those Sunday mornings I felt a love of God being a love of all things—prey and predator alike. Flash to evening and, again, warm cozy feelings. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Dad popping popcorn in the popcorn popper. When I read that post-it, I’m a little boy again because I don’t find myself reading those types of statements, much less making them myself anymore. Then I begin thinking…
If this post-it applies to Bolano as I think it might, it may be in the way his narrative voice—at least through The Part About the Critics and the beginning of The Part About Amalfitano—almost echoes, replicates or recurses a prosecutorial voice in laying out a highly rational and nuanced indictment against sophisticated and perhaps even legalized criminals before a grand jury of readers who are being asked to feel the alleged charges being thrown at the defendants. Bolano seems to be prosecuting the big boys and girls of the global intelligentsia for their personal failures to improve the world in any meaningful way, or at least not cause it net harm in the end, from a human perspective, of course. It seems the more successful individual humans become relative to other humans, at least in their own mind, the more material harm they do to earthlings in general. A certain insensitivity seems necessary to justify their material gain by debiting their energy and minds to leverage unjust systems in their personal favor, and in this I’m reading a distinctly “American”—North, South, Latin, Anglo, African—apocalypse, re-writing in a more even-handed tone John’s overtly symbolic rant against global mercantilism in The Book of Revelations [as I presume to interpret my variously interpreted copies of it for myself, of course]. In Bolano, we are not mystified by this apocalyptic rant but seduced into its feeling of invisible dead ends.
Yet I don’t know. I’m only about 20 percent through the novel. My day job and my writing keep me away from 2666 more than I’d like, leaving me to imagine reading it more than actually doing so. Perhaps this injury will change that ratio for the next few days. Due to pain, I will have fun.
There’s a bright side to every sorrow…
And so this is why I write fiction rather than attempting some form of actual scholarship. I have something of an attention deficit disorder when it comes to who says what when where amid the gathering yet chaotically flowing minutiae [like hearing multiple rumors from multiple sources with complex, multiple agendas]. I’m far more stricken by the general flow of elements—the rumors’ overriding and overlapping themes forming the textual murmur—to care if that log bounced off those particular rocks upstream. I can imagine it probably did relative to my experience and that’s good enough for me. I’m not seeking ideologies or material formulas that are physically applicable, I’m not building bridges or skyscrapers or designing Wall Street software. I’m only dealing in useful fictions…useful to my thinking about my feelings and keeping them in their place. I have no desire to conduct social experiments to see if any of my imagined shit is true in the actual sense or not. I imagine it’s not and that seems true enough for me.
Go with the flow…Don’t dictate it, especially if you can’t dance.
Play seems to me a much overlooked aspect of evolutionary theories. What is it exactly that impels Life to defy for a time the second law of thermodynamics, to forego entropy for awhile in the emergency of order? It must involve pleasure. It’s got to be fun. Why else bother? What keeps us from committing mass suicide…or are we? And if we are killing ourselves, what does that mean? What effect does that have on human being? Why do we care? Do we…actually?
A playful imagination overcomes the enabling obstacle of the hypersensitive person’s inextinguishable sense of guilt. It’s the air beneath the crow’s beating black wings, enabling its flight and enhancing its perception as an emergence from crisis mode, a means to escape the present situation via some kind of cognitive expansion that seems at the very least liberating, if not evolutionary. Or so it seams that way in my mind at the moment…
Didn’t Pound say something about “artists” being the “antennae of the race?”
Is it time for the pan-American intelligentsia, if such an entity could imaginably exist, to playfully confront its guilt—both collectively and personally—to save itself from its reflexive behaviors before it’s too late? Does it matter? Is it worth the energy? Would it be useful to the human mind? What exactly might be considered useful? Why?
Mind might seam the emotional fallout from imagination in many forms. One must play to be happy. Art is a time and place where this kind of mind justifies its expenditure of matter and energy to itself in a way that produces a pleasurable sensation. Or maybe not.
I wrote more than I expected. My imagination reduced my pain. And I can’t help but think the way I’m feeling that the billions of living organisms comprising me haven’t somehow benefitted from this nonsense too.
It seems actuality really is mind in matter energetically sensed…a feeling evolutionary thought re-membering playful imaginings of…
*****
This week’s interesting stuff:
A devastating take down of a well-regarded member of the New York intelligentsia by some word wizard barbarian whose dad works as a reporter for NBC news [this beast also has Buffalo roots]:
Flat N All That
MATT TAIBBI takes on porn-stached New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s greenish ways.
Even better was this gem from one of Friedman’s latest columns: “The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?” There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the “title” of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder?
Read more at http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html
It’s Written All Over Your Face, a Science News article that begins:
Eye candy might more appropriately be called brain candy. Seeing a pretty face is like eating a piece of oh-so-sweet chocolate — for the brain, if not for the stomach. In fact, attractive faces activate the same reward circuitry in the brain as food, drugs and money. For humans, there is something captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slit on the front of the head.
Read more at
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39616/title/It%E2%80%99s_written_all_over_your_face
How Not to Write A Novel, rather funny actually, especially when you read it replacing all the periods with question marks and speak through your nose interrogating some aspiring author like Stewie Griffin on The Family Guy, who Wikipedia describes as “a diabolical infant of ambiguous sexual orientation who has adult mannerisms and speaks fluently with an affected upper-class English accent and stereotypical archvillain phrases.[6]” One scene from the show in particular pops into mind, where Stewie, sitting on the family sofa with Brian, the family dog, who “is highly anthropomorphized, walks on two legs, drinks Martinis, smokes cigarettes and engages in human conversation, though he is still considered a pet in many respects,” quizzes Brian about how the novel the dog is allegedly writing is going. Consider these two paragraphs turned into such questions and its rather hilarious and raises questions about how Family Guy and such criticism is perhaps relative to one another:
Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.
The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other's homes, all of which is described in detail.
Read more at:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5530183.ece?print=yes&randnum=1233249605616
If I could be dictator for a week and during that time rule with an iron fist, these are the people I’d persecute. Pretty soon, somewhere around noon on day six, the last of us would most likely disappear… http://peoplewhodeserveit.com/
Let’s talk European: Sign and Sight at http://www.signandsight.com/
From typewriter to bookstore: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/from-typewriter.html
Friday, January 23, 2009
This week’s lightness: a tenuous web of thoughts on Bolano, Horizontal Genetic Transfer and the present scope of childish and adult things
Bolano:
I just finished 1: The Part About the Critics, of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and this is what I’m thinking:
Pondering over the narrative voice’s unsympathetic detachment in 2666 as opposed, say, to Kerouac’s sympathetic involvement in On The Road, and how both seem to have the same effect: the imagined emptiness and superficiality of material success and geographical up-rootedness...a cosmopolitan boobois abyss.
DeLillo’s Underworld is also coming to mind. Bolano’s characters thus far, seem rather unlikable, nor does the third person voice say or do anything that makes the reader question its veracity. It seems there’s a mysterious certainty anchoring this voice, which nonetheless, due to its accumulative effect, leads the reader into just that…questioning the narrator’s certainty or moral superiority, which seem taken for granted. But again, I’ve read but a small fraction of what I sense and hope is a magnificent unfolding revelation about the human species…
Also thinking how Nabakov’s eye/I in the editor /Humbert Humbert voices of Lolita seem relative to Bolano’s narrator’s view of critics, though Nabakov through Humbert seems more playful than Bolano’s narrator. Nabakov’s complexity seems more transparent, easier and fun…Bolano’s is an as yet impenetrable absence in the form of Archimbaldi and what’s actually motivating Norton, Pelletier, Espinoza and Morini to push this missing symbol forward as the ultimate in profundity where complexity leads to the ultimate blind spot through which it is impossible to see or imagine through.
But the complexity of 2666 thus far seems to take the form of what Calvino might have called “lightness” [e.g.: “… melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness…” p. 19, Six Memos] in my opinion. There’s an accumulative effect of this globe-trotting lack of weight [Archimbaldi’s absent physicality] and/or response-ability that seems quite heavy, I think. That heaviness, seems to be, ironically enough, the emptiness of success, the failure of success, the search of one’s self projected into the search for the great writer, the messiah who will vindicate their emptiness, while refusing to face themselves, their environments, what surrounds them…that ultimate particle, substance or word that means something permanent to them, which in the end will always be an illusion, symbol, at best some precisely expressed ambiguity echoing some irony of the imagined paradox. Bolano’s critics seem too self-absorbed as word-beings [sic]—like all of us in some hyper sense—to perceive themselves in usefully fictive ways. They don’t use their narcissism, they abuse it. And so the narrative voice, thus far, is appropriately certain and trustworthy, perhaps even a tinge narcissistic and self-righteous in a Flaubertian sort of way, or so it seems to me. In other words, I think Bolano has written something really deep yet expansive…DeLillo’s surfaces, Calvino’s absence of weight, Nabokovian complexity, Kerouac’s ending of the open road fifty years later, now the closing of the human way of being itself.
At the end of Part 1: The Part About The Critics, Pelletier, a successful EU literary critic and self-centered snob, states that Archimboldi is here [Santa Teresa, Mexico, a Mexico-Arizona border town where women are being murdered in vast numbers], and this is as close as we’ll ever be to him, or some such. By here, I think in literal terms, of the words he, Pelletier/Bolano deploy in their narrations. In other words, they like me and all like-minded lit lovers have more imagination than knowledge, as we imagine everything we know is imagined.
You know what I mean, or are all those drugs I used to enjoy taking their toll on me? I don’t know. I’ll be the last to know most likely.
Also, Archimboldi seems at this point in my reading something of a mythological creature akin to some of Borges’ imaginary beings, particularly the “hide behind” and “Bahamut.”
Evolution:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.html?full=true&print=true
Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life, by Graham Lawton, New Scientist
"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.
So says this fascinating article by Graham Lawton in New Scientist. The article states that “species also routinely swapped genetic material with other species, or hybridised with them,” breaking up Darwin’s “neat branching pattern” that is quickly degenerating “into an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness, with species being closely related in some respects but not others.”
These patterns of relatedness, Lawton tells us, “could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species—often across huge taxonomic distances—in a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).”
Of particular interest to me, considering my novel in progress [tentatively titled Germ], is how, according to this article, “the most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances.” This sounds like art to me, and cut and paste of course brings Uncle Bill to mind.
In fact, according to scientists, Lawton writes that “40 to 50 percent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which have taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38)…. The number of horizontal transfers in animals is not as high as in microbes, but it can be evolutionarily significant," says Bapteste, who goes on to say that “biology is vastly more complex than we thought…and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.”
I can’t help but think this might be somehow recursively symmetrical with economics in some way, considering the present financial chaos.
The article goes on to show us how marine larvae can be organized into a family tree that bears no relationship to the family tree of adults. The most likely way this biological mash-up functions, writes Lawton, “is if the resulting chimera expresses its two genomes sequentially, producing a two-stage life history with metamorphosis in the middle.”
I can’t help but think America and the human species may just be at such a phase, where something akin to a metamorphosis may take place and something new emerge from the old ways.
This new thing can be good or bad, of course, depending upon where one is situated as it happens.
10 Childish Things
1. Tension among labor, management and markets resulting in the erosion of eco-economic security for all.
2. Ignorance regarding the real issues at play; greed, fear and mistrust being primary causes.
3. Ubiquitous patriotism.
4. Disproportionate military spending that perpetuates profound economic injustices everywhere.
5. The protection of corporate power via the suppression of workers and the manipulation of consumers.
6. Obsession with crime and punishment and health.
7. Prevalent cronyism and depravity in the halls of power.
8. Phony elections.
9. Heterosexualism.
10. Fetish for family values.
On a global scale, the fundamental problem with humans is who and what we think we are and why we think we’re living and why we give a damn. This seems to me our transcendent, metaphsysical crisis—our childish perception of the world, of existence, of reality, or whatever you choose to call it.
It seems to me we might put away these childish things if, in our heart of hearts, we want to thrive through adulthood and die in relative peace and harmony with the world rather than choking on our common sins. If we want humankind, our children and future generations to keep evolving, we might consider growing up. The real, or actual world, is a complicated place. True freedom is for mature participants only.
I hope this is what President Obama [goddamnit that still sounds good] means by quoting Mark, knowing if he wants to stay in power long enough to do something about these maturity problems he must speak in parables, spinning cadences harmonic with the prevalent American mythology, calmly favoring its better angels. A man’s gotta know his limitations. Does Obama? We’ll find out. Do we? We, too, might consider looking for our own limitations, if we are able and so inclined.
10 Adult Things
1. Cooperation in recognition of enlightened mutual interests among labor, management and markets with the heartfelt intention of achieving economic security and cultural dignity for all.
2. A sharp, knowledgeable focus on the most substantive environmental [in every sense of the word] issues at play; love and respect for future generations being the de facto primary motivator.
3. Ubiquitous self-autonomy within the environmental system.
4. Proportionate security measures that enhance and perpetuate deep eco-economic justice.
5. The limitation and re-creation of corporate power via the liberation of workers and truly informed consumers.
6. Obsession with excellence while knowing it’s just something to do. That’s all. Nothing more.
7. Prevalent openness and accessibility to all issues of public interest. Secrecy is taboo.
8. Random drawings, as with jury duty, replaces phony elections as a means of seating public officials.
9. Pansexualism. Admit it. Everything’s sexual. Living things have sex to keep going, they keep going to have more sex. Sex isn’t always physical. It takes many forms.
10. Fetish for Nature.
The question is whose room is dirtier: Little Bobby’s or Mom and Dad’s? Whose bed do you prefer sleeping in: The wet or dry one?
Next week, I hope to exhibit more humor and much less politics. But politics boils my blood and these are historic times, so I promise nothing beyond that my political rants will not dominate this blog and always consider analogies to other forms of knowledge and mental-spiritual action like the arts and philosophy.
This week’s been a tough one with the nauseating spectacle of the inauguration, all the optimism, and knowing better. Yet miracle of miracles, it seems we may have the best person alive for this job at this time. I imagine history will attach fewer body bags, human and non-human, to the Obama option. If it had been Clinton or McCain, I think we’d be in much bigger trouble. I didn’t think Obama would ever actually inhabit the White House. I’ve been very cynical the last four years. We’ll know in a few months if Obama’s for the vast majority of Earthlings or not. I hope he’s better than Gorbachev [I think he is]. If he’s not, or worse, well…But if he is better than Gorbachev, paving the way for something better than Putin, I might consider becoming a father before I get too old. Been a little too afraid of leaving something I love so much in a world I see heading down the tubes.
Dylan sang something like that a long time ago in another century…Just when I began to think it was dark the stars began rising…and your moon came out.
Just Discovered Web Sites:
http://www.littlesis.org/start
LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/
Whatever it is, they’re against it. I probably should have been aware of these guys/gals sooner. Oh, well.
I just finished 1: The Part About the Critics, of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and this is what I’m thinking:
Pondering over the narrative voice’s unsympathetic detachment in 2666 as opposed, say, to Kerouac’s sympathetic involvement in On The Road, and how both seem to have the same effect: the imagined emptiness and superficiality of material success and geographical up-rootedness...a cosmopolitan boobois abyss.
DeLillo’s Underworld is also coming to mind. Bolano’s characters thus far, seem rather unlikable, nor does the third person voice say or do anything that makes the reader question its veracity. It seems there’s a mysterious certainty anchoring this voice, which nonetheless, due to its accumulative effect, leads the reader into just that…questioning the narrator’s certainty or moral superiority, which seem taken for granted. But again, I’ve read but a small fraction of what I sense and hope is a magnificent unfolding revelation about the human species…
Also thinking how Nabakov’s eye/I in the editor /Humbert Humbert voices of Lolita seem relative to Bolano’s narrator’s view of critics, though Nabakov through Humbert seems more playful than Bolano’s narrator. Nabakov’s complexity seems more transparent, easier and fun…Bolano’s is an as yet impenetrable absence in the form of Archimbaldi and what’s actually motivating Norton, Pelletier, Espinoza and Morini to push this missing symbol forward as the ultimate in profundity where complexity leads to the ultimate blind spot through which it is impossible to see or imagine through.
But the complexity of 2666 thus far seems to take the form of what Calvino might have called “lightness” [e.g.: “… melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness…” p. 19, Six Memos] in my opinion. There’s an accumulative effect of this globe-trotting lack of weight [Archimbaldi’s absent physicality] and/or response-ability that seems quite heavy, I think. That heaviness, seems to be, ironically enough, the emptiness of success, the failure of success, the search of one’s self projected into the search for the great writer, the messiah who will vindicate their emptiness, while refusing to face themselves, their environments, what surrounds them…that ultimate particle, substance or word that means something permanent to them, which in the end will always be an illusion, symbol, at best some precisely expressed ambiguity echoing some irony of the imagined paradox. Bolano’s critics seem too self-absorbed as word-beings [sic]—like all of us in some hyper sense—to perceive themselves in usefully fictive ways. They don’t use their narcissism, they abuse it. And so the narrative voice, thus far, is appropriately certain and trustworthy, perhaps even a tinge narcissistic and self-righteous in a Flaubertian sort of way, or so it seems to me. In other words, I think Bolano has written something really deep yet expansive…DeLillo’s surfaces, Calvino’s absence of weight, Nabokovian complexity, Kerouac’s ending of the open road fifty years later, now the closing of the human way of being itself.
At the end of Part 1: The Part About The Critics, Pelletier, a successful EU literary critic and self-centered snob, states that Archimboldi is here [Santa Teresa, Mexico, a Mexico-Arizona border town where women are being murdered in vast numbers], and this is as close as we’ll ever be to him, or some such. By here, I think in literal terms, of the words he, Pelletier/Bolano deploy in their narrations. In other words, they like me and all like-minded lit lovers have more imagination than knowledge, as we imagine everything we know is imagined.
You know what I mean, or are all those drugs I used to enjoy taking their toll on me? I don’t know. I’ll be the last to know most likely.
Also, Archimboldi seems at this point in my reading something of a mythological creature akin to some of Borges’ imaginary beings, particularly the “hide behind” and “Bahamut.”
Evolution:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.html?full=true&print=true
Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life, by Graham Lawton, New Scientist
"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.
So says this fascinating article by Graham Lawton in New Scientist. The article states that “species also routinely swapped genetic material with other species, or hybridised with them,” breaking up Darwin’s “neat branching pattern” that is quickly degenerating “into an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness, with species being closely related in some respects but not others.”
These patterns of relatedness, Lawton tells us, “could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species—often across huge taxonomic distances—in a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).”
Of particular interest to me, considering my novel in progress [tentatively titled Germ], is how, according to this article, “the most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances.” This sounds like art to me, and cut and paste of course brings Uncle Bill to mind.
In fact, according to scientists, Lawton writes that “40 to 50 percent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which have taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38)…. The number of horizontal transfers in animals is not as high as in microbes, but it can be evolutionarily significant," says Bapteste, who goes on to say that “biology is vastly more complex than we thought…and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.”
I can’t help but think this might be somehow recursively symmetrical with economics in some way, considering the present financial chaos.
The article goes on to show us how marine larvae can be organized into a family tree that bears no relationship to the family tree of adults. The most likely way this biological mash-up functions, writes Lawton, “is if the resulting chimera expresses its two genomes sequentially, producing a two-stage life history with metamorphosis in the middle.”
I can’t help but think America and the human species may just be at such a phase, where something akin to a metamorphosis may take place and something new emerge from the old ways.
This new thing can be good or bad, of course, depending upon where one is situated as it happens.
10 Childish Things
1. Tension among labor, management and markets resulting in the erosion of eco-economic security for all.
2. Ignorance regarding the real issues at play; greed, fear and mistrust being primary causes.
3. Ubiquitous patriotism.
4. Disproportionate military spending that perpetuates profound economic injustices everywhere.
5. The protection of corporate power via the suppression of workers and the manipulation of consumers.
6. Obsession with crime and punishment and health.
7. Prevalent cronyism and depravity in the halls of power.
8. Phony elections.
9. Heterosexualism.
10. Fetish for family values.
On a global scale, the fundamental problem with humans is who and what we think we are and why we think we’re living and why we give a damn. This seems to me our transcendent, metaphsysical crisis—our childish perception of the world, of existence, of reality, or whatever you choose to call it.
It seems to me we might put away these childish things if, in our heart of hearts, we want to thrive through adulthood and die in relative peace and harmony with the world rather than choking on our common sins. If we want humankind, our children and future generations to keep evolving, we might consider growing up. The real, or actual world, is a complicated place. True freedom is for mature participants only.
I hope this is what President Obama [goddamnit that still sounds good] means by quoting Mark, knowing if he wants to stay in power long enough to do something about these maturity problems he must speak in parables, spinning cadences harmonic with the prevalent American mythology, calmly favoring its better angels. A man’s gotta know his limitations. Does Obama? We’ll find out. Do we? We, too, might consider looking for our own limitations, if we are able and so inclined.
10 Adult Things
1. Cooperation in recognition of enlightened mutual interests among labor, management and markets with the heartfelt intention of achieving economic security and cultural dignity for all.
2. A sharp, knowledgeable focus on the most substantive environmental [in every sense of the word] issues at play; love and respect for future generations being the de facto primary motivator.
3. Ubiquitous self-autonomy within the environmental system.
4. Proportionate security measures that enhance and perpetuate deep eco-economic justice.
5. The limitation and re-creation of corporate power via the liberation of workers and truly informed consumers.
6. Obsession with excellence while knowing it’s just something to do. That’s all. Nothing more.
7. Prevalent openness and accessibility to all issues of public interest. Secrecy is taboo.
8. Random drawings, as with jury duty, replaces phony elections as a means of seating public officials.
9. Pansexualism. Admit it. Everything’s sexual. Living things have sex to keep going, they keep going to have more sex. Sex isn’t always physical. It takes many forms.
10. Fetish for Nature.
The question is whose room is dirtier: Little Bobby’s or Mom and Dad’s? Whose bed do you prefer sleeping in: The wet or dry one?
Next week, I hope to exhibit more humor and much less politics. But politics boils my blood and these are historic times, so I promise nothing beyond that my political rants will not dominate this blog and always consider analogies to other forms of knowledge and mental-spiritual action like the arts and philosophy.
This week’s been a tough one with the nauseating spectacle of the inauguration, all the optimism, and knowing better. Yet miracle of miracles, it seems we may have the best person alive for this job at this time. I imagine history will attach fewer body bags, human and non-human, to the Obama option. If it had been Clinton or McCain, I think we’d be in much bigger trouble. I didn’t think Obama would ever actually inhabit the White House. I’ve been very cynical the last four years. We’ll know in a few months if Obama’s for the vast majority of Earthlings or not. I hope he’s better than Gorbachev [I think he is]. If he’s not, or worse, well…But if he is better than Gorbachev, paving the way for something better than Putin, I might consider becoming a father before I get too old. Been a little too afraid of leaving something I love so much in a world I see heading down the tubes.
Dylan sang something like that a long time ago in another century…Just when I began to think it was dark the stars began rising…and your moon came out.
Just Discovered Web Sites:
http://www.littlesis.org/start
LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/
Whatever it is, they’re against it. I probably should have been aware of these guys/gals sooner. Oh, well.
Friday, January 16, 2009
On Bolano’s 2666, 100 pages in
One possibly thought-provoking item regarding the translation of Roberto Bolano's 2666 is the Spanish cab driver asking Espinoza if he likes "soccer."
It dawns on me that Europe feels like America in translation. London sounds like D.C. But nonetheless, Bolano is getting at something about contemporary reality...that it seems quite homogenized. Space-time seems warped by individual temperament. Far-flung like-minded people are bound together via technology [airplanes, phones, Internet, literary studies].
And these intelligent people are no more aware of "Reality" than less intelligent people, or those portrayed in soap operas. Awareness seems something else. The human mind has not evolved rationally and is not a rational entity. Yet it uses rationality to get laid and kick ass, join the jet set and become a transnational being.
Morality and rationality seem aimed at the same thing—the universal and ubiquitous projection of selfhood. Truth and goodness serve my purposes. Thus I might be a tenured professor of international acclaim, but that doesn't stop me from nearly stomping a Pakistani cabbie to death. It's my honor, my ego that counts. Not yours.
Bolano, it seems to me, is thus far hinting at what techno-antedeluvianism [sic] feels like. He has no heroes, only villains. And it is the villains we identify with.
I have a feeling that Benno von Archimboldi will, in the end, be no hero either [in his role so far as absent hero, he holds the text together, the eye of the hurricane]….
It dawns on me that Europe feels like America in translation. London sounds like D.C. But nonetheless, Bolano is getting at something about contemporary reality...that it seems quite homogenized. Space-time seems warped by individual temperament. Far-flung like-minded people are bound together via technology [airplanes, phones, Internet, literary studies].
And these intelligent people are no more aware of "Reality" than less intelligent people, or those portrayed in soap operas. Awareness seems something else. The human mind has not evolved rationally and is not a rational entity. Yet it uses rationality to get laid and kick ass, join the jet set and become a transnational being.
Morality and rationality seem aimed at the same thing—the universal and ubiquitous projection of selfhood. Truth and goodness serve my purposes. Thus I might be a tenured professor of international acclaim, but that doesn't stop me from nearly stomping a Pakistani cabbie to death. It's my honor, my ego that counts. Not yours.
Bolano, it seems to me, is thus far hinting at what techno-antedeluvianism [sic] feels like. He has no heroes, only villains. And it is the villains we identify with.
I have a feeling that Benno von Archimboldi will, in the end, be no hero either [in his role so far as absent hero, he holds the text together, the eye of the hurricane]….
Received
I’d like to thank my friend Jared Schickling for sending along Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary and Geoffrey Gatza’s Fantasia lights: A Poem.
They arrived via snail mail. I opened the package late last night on a nicotine fit [I’m on the patch], and thought Jared had sent me a pack of Nat Sherman smokes. When I opened the pack I found Gatza’s poem neatly wrapped up. I’d call it a love poem to maniac artists everywhere. The need for a smoke grew as I read it. I bummed one and felt better.
DBQ’s book I’ll have to read when I’m done with Bolano…probably along with a re-reading of Moby Dick. It’s been years, but the memory’s are very bright and DBQ’s companion poem, which is being compared to Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, should make for a pleasurable set of reading.
Jared, by the way, is the author of Aurora and Submissions [both available at BlazeVox] and seems to be getting published everywhere these days. But folks ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ve seen a mss of what would be his first full length book of poems and it’s really something, in my opinion.
They arrived via snail mail. I opened the package late last night on a nicotine fit [I’m on the patch], and thought Jared had sent me a pack of Nat Sherman smokes. When I opened the pack I found Gatza’s poem neatly wrapped up. I’d call it a love poem to maniac artists everywhere. The need for a smoke grew as I read it. I bummed one and felt better.
DBQ’s book I’ll have to read when I’m done with Bolano…probably along with a re-reading of Moby Dick. It’s been years, but the memory’s are very bright and DBQ’s companion poem, which is being compared to Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, should make for a pleasurable set of reading.
Jared, by the way, is the author of Aurora and Submissions [both available at BlazeVox] and seems to be getting published everywhere these days. But folks ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ve seen a mss of what would be his first full length book of poems and it’s really something, in my opinion.
Hello
I'm sorry about the haste with which I'm posting this, but my old site, http://www.wherestheomelet.com/, has been getting a lot of traffic since Raymond Federman posted some of my remarks about his Carcasses on his blog.
I've been planning to get this started because my first novel, Smoke, is coming out this spring with BlazeVox[books]. Geoffrey Gatza's proving to be an inspirations to hundreds, maybe thousands of writers starving for an online community. Go Geoff, and thanks.
My intention is to post every Friday night after or during a couple beers. I'll update with links to interesting stuff and commentary. Just like all yer other favorite blogs.
Finally, thanks for visiting and please check out the links around the margins. Some great stuff by some great people.
Now let's have some fun and play...
I've been planning to get this started because my first novel, Smoke, is coming out this spring with BlazeVox[books]. Geoffrey Gatza's proving to be an inspirations to hundreds, maybe thousands of writers starving for an online community. Go Geoff, and thanks.
My intention is to post every Friday night after or during a couple beers. I'll update with links to interesting stuff and commentary. Just like all yer other favorite blogs.
Finally, thanks for visiting and please check out the links around the margins. Some great stuff by some great people.
Now let's have some fun and play...
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