... essentially, Meggie’s story is one of suffering, interrupted by a brief interlude of forbidden love, which in turn must be ‘paid for’ with grief. This is Catholicism acting like a mafia loan shark; happiness comes on credit and must be settled by excessive interest payments.
Three Just Seeds members have an exhibit opening this week in Philadelphia, if you're in town, join us! The exhibit features 50 posters and prints that document the world as we see it.
Opening Saturday March 27
6:00pm - 7:30pm
Leeway Foundation Office
1315 Walnut Street, Suite 832
"What we see is not what there is. The wave function really exists, but we don’t see it when we look; we see things as if they were in particular ordinary classical configurations."
Conspiracy arguments amount to an accumulation of the observed: never questioning the relationship between observation and reality in itself, merely shuffling the observational deck and drawing conclusions from a rearranged, but equally flawed set of "facts."
The mistrust of the conspiracy theorists is superficial. They work with naively childish notions of both 'reason' and how to test (and to distinguish) received notions from reality--merely offering alternative versions for those received notions... by default, no more creative than looking at a mirror image and thinking the spacial or sequential reversal amounts to a reimagining of the origninal...when it is but a reorginization of the same. A profound failure of imagination, not it's confirmation.
Tried to post this on SAugisntine's Bunker... but got a comments closed at the end, and couldn't find where this was still open. So come join me here. I'm open comments too.
On the public option:
"It didn't have 'political support,' just the support of the majority of the population," Chomsky quipped, "which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy."
The provision has consistently polled well, garnering the support of sixty percent of Americans across the nation in a CBS/New York Times poll released in December, days after it was eliminated from the reform package. Democratic leaders deemed it politically untenable.
"There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what's been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted," Chomsky said. "There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media."
Death of Cézanne
I
Pressing his palms to one
of the elders' houses -- cliff side,
anemic terra-cotta cracking
in summer's kiln -- he stands
in the garden surrounded by irises
nodding like skulls on flimsy
spines, under pears burning
in their darkened palatial trees.
One cloud steers slowly
as a freighter off the sun.
Pitch pines teeter like old women
into his view of Mt. Saint-Victoire.
Returning to his easel from a day
of wandering the foothills alone,
he carries what he's gathered,
the familiar objects of waking:
2.
Peaches in a wooden bowl, blue
as the day-old dead. A worm
blossoms from an apple -- its crowned head
devouring the globe-world territory.
A tar-dense Burgundy, uncorked
in the porch sun, sours in oriental glass.
As Provençal tapestries dissolve
into evening ash, peppermint oil spills
from a cracked Majolica pitcher.
Oranges levitate among lemons.
3.
Standing at his easel in the cold,
he awaits the first fires of daylight
to spring from dark's smoky fleece.
Last night, he says, they came for him
as bathers; stepping from the lake,
they baptized him in trees. Sprinkling
fig sap over his beard, they fed him
from the ram's horn: the marrow
of slaughtered evenings, azalea's
purple eye-grass, the bone-white ruins
on the terraced slopes. Fed him
crushed tubers of cobalt, the path
cobbled with acorns and shale,
blackbirds and small goats gathered
in pasture. Fed him the blizzard
of pear blossoms, rain of mayflies,
those farmhouses like sailboats
stranded on the horizon. Fed him,
stone by stone, Mt. Saint-Victoire
The hill on which the hotel stood was like an island, except instead of the sea it was surrounded by tarmac. There was the little tarmac of the motorways and the big tarmac of the runways of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, and like the sea there was hissing and roaring, audible from this distance, among the hotels on the hill. If he shut the window he couldn’t hear the hissing and roaring because the windows were treble-paned, probably for just this purpose, he reasoned. The small hotel room felt entirely self-contained, like a pressurized cabin.
In discussions of French inflected Marxist political theory I often get the sense that democracy is treated as a dirty word or the contrary of Marxism. The subtext seems to be that somehow neoliberalism and democracy are one and the same thing, or that the concept of democracy is identical to the actually existing system of something like American “democracy”. I find this idea very odd. For me Marxism and communism are synonyms for democracy, and the issues that motivate Marxist activists arise from the fact that our actually existing governmental systems aren’t democratic enough. Equating democracy with American “democracy” is like equating socialism with Stalinist socialism. In both cases we have an utter perversion of the political concept and the precise opposite of what these things are supposed to be. What am I missing?
One day, the literary critic Roland Barthes went into the barber’s and was given a copy of the magazine Paris-Match to read while he waited. It was the 1950s and France was involved in a bitter war of independence with Algeria, a country it had colonized in the 19th century. On the front cover of the magazine was a picture of a young black boy wearing French uniform and making a smart, fierce salute. Barthes found himself profoundly discomforted; he knew he was in the presence of a certain way of reading that was prevalent in society, exploited ruthlessly by the media, but false, unethical and plain wrong. He realized that the magazine was trying to tell him something: that both black and white served equally under the French flag, that the nation was a proud empire, not an oppressive colonizing power, and that the detractors who said so were not to be trusted. Here, in this young boy’s salute, was there not the proof of racial harmony?
Why do I keep thinking about silence--a word we can know nothing about, or know only as we know death: as metaphor, surmise, the nothingness that frames the span of our life, the before and after beyond experience, experience that is always filled with signs, signs that may not speak but are never silent. I think of the silence of the woman pouring milk. It is hers, in that room before that window, in the light that caresses her, in the shadows that surround her, but it is not ours. Vermeer doesn't give us silence. He reminds us of the presence of something we cannot know. The silence is in the painting, not in us; we know it only as an absence that draws us out of ourselves, like the silence that frames the lines of a poem. We read the words, read to the end of the line, to the end of the poem and encounter there that same absence. We call it silence, but the silence is on the page, in the white spaces between the words, it is not in us. It is never ours. Never. We say that we have come from silence, as we will return to silence. But our saying this is an admission that between birth and death there is no silence. Not for single second. Look into the eyes of an animal and you will see it--the impenetrable silence we are not permitted to enter, and if we were, if we could (perhaps again, as in dreamless sleep) we would emerge (again) with no trace, no memory of where we had been, no knowledge that we had been there. Is it possible, then, that we do enter into this silence, which we neither experience, nor know nor remember; is silence the dark matter of our being--dark energy that does not interact, or only weakly with our voluble lives? We are left always with this intimation that there is something more, but we can never know or name what lies beyond it. How many times have I fallen through without knowing, into the silence, losing everything? Erased from the lives of others. Not even alone. Remembering nothing...
Landscape’s particular intervention into this conversation is to establish first a theoretical framework, using theories of geography and public space, by which to valorize the work of what they call “guerrilla poets” — poets operating on the edges of (or against) the law, whose page is public space itself, and whose readership is anyone who traverses those spaces. In contrast to Jurgen Habermas’ idealized notion of the “public sphere,” Landscape co-authors Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand — both notable poets themselves, both on and off the page — note the criticism of a public sphere “rooted in reconciliation and unity which surreptitiously blunts the sharp edges of difference and inequality” (14) and embrace Nancy Fraser’s notion of “subaltern counterpublics” (14). Amid the thicket of laws that govern and curtail free expression, guerrilla poets negotiate ways to appropriate public space from strictly commercial or privatized interests, and attempt to render visible “the sharp edges of difference and inequality.”
I went to a READING Friday at The Wooden Shoe (for more than 30 years, a collectively run anarchist bookstore, now in relatively new space on South Street): two Other-Coast poets, Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff. What they read weren't stand-alone poems, but excerts from books—diverse compilations using a variety of forms composed as a single work. In each case, the structure straddled the margins of the text, an exoskeleton of references, quotations from media, signs, visual images (photos, drawings)… public references. Poetry as responses to public signifiers which remain visible for the reader—both inside and outside the text. At this reading, projected images on a screen.
Kaia's poem, Remember to Wave, written in the form of a long walk, a circumlocution of a site in Portland, an area once used as a holding center for Japanese-Americans interred in 1942, waiting for transport to detention camps. The walk borders the Columbia River on the north with associations that go back to prehistory. Much of it is now an industrial waste with storage pods and toxic slues. She read this with slides behind her, illustrations included in the book—and a map of the walk we could follow as she read.
Boykoff’s Hegemonic Love Potion, riffs off quotations from public documents, government, media--broadcast and print. For both these poets, the interior structure develops as a reflection and response to references that remain exposed outside the text. I was reminded of CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock’s collaborative work: The City Real and Imagined, where they took walks through the city and wrote about what they found, a conversation with each other and with the places they visited.
An aesthetics that embraces the realia of provocation, allowing for free flights of imagination and reflection while sharing between reader and text, fragments of the real world, stitched and patched together–resisting the temptation to assimilate those references altogether into the text, refusing to digest and erase them in an idealist poetical miasma. A poetry (and poetics) that is at once, collage, assemblage, lyrical response, and critical commentary: where politics and aesthetics are complimentary, not competitive.
I came away with a sharpened sense of a Poetics in (not ‘of) Space and Time, a feeling of deep pleasure—for all that’s wrong with this world—to be living among such poets and such poetry—and grateful to have wakened within me a joyful lust to get on with the seriously playful work of making poems.
The state EPA in West Virginia has been ineffective, bowing to the pressure of Massey's whores, Rockefeller and Byrd et al. Come to the offices of the Federal EPA in Philadelphia where decisions are made and permits given or denied for mountaintop removal. One of the ridges targeted is now crowned by a wind farm--the coal pigs are out to destroy it in their relentless march backwards toward the destruction of life on the planet.
Come to 16th and Arch, Monday March 1, 11:00, outside the offices of the EPA and let remind them of what are appointed to do--which is not to serve the interest of a major criminal, enemy of labor, democracy and human life, Don Blackenship, CEO of Massey Energy
HERE
To see how mountaintop removal is affecting communities, check out this trailer to the film: Burning the Future
Girard's premise is the Romantic myth of "divine autonomy", according to which our desires are freely chosen expressions of our individuality. Don Quixote, for instance, aspires to a chivalric lifestyle. Nothing seems more straightforward but, besides the subject (Don Quixote) and object (chivalry), Girard highlights the vital presence of a model he calls the mediator (Amadis de Gaule in this instance). Don Quixote wants to lead the life of a knight errant because he has read the romances of Amadis de Gaule: far from being spontaneous, his desire stems from, and is mediated through, a third party. Metaphysical desire – as opposed to simple needs or appetites – is triangular, not linear. You can always trust a Frenchman to view the world as a ménage à trois.
Mediation is said to be external when the distance between subject and mediator is so great that never the twain shall meet. [...] When mediation is internal, however, the distance between subject and mediator is small enough to give rise to rivalry between the two. The mediator, who aroused desire for the object in the first place, comes to be seen as an obstacle to the fulfilment of this very desire: "the model shows his disciple the gate of paradise and forbids him to enter with one and the same gesture". Although now ostensibly a figure of hatred, the mediator continues to be idolised subterraneously or even subconsciously [...] Girard's contention is that the need for transcendence has survived the decline of Christianity, resulting in the ersatz "inverted transcendence" of mimetic desire.
Soldier-writers have long produced American literature, from Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs about the Civil War to Norman Mailer’s World War II novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” about Vietnam.Emphasis mine
The current group is different. As part of a modern all-volunteer force, they explore the timeless theme of the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support. The books, many written as rites of passage by members of a highly educated young officer corps, are filled with gore, inept commanders and anguish over men lost in combat, but not questions about the conflicts themselves. “They look at war as an aspect of glory, of finding honor,” said Mr. O’Brien, who was drafted for Vietnam in 1968 out of Macalester College in St. Paul. “It’s almost an old-fashioned, Victorian way of looking at war.”
The writers say one goal is to explain the complexities of the wars — Afghan and Iraqi politics, technology, the counterinsurgency doctrine of protecting local populations rather than just killing bad guys — to a wider audience. Their efforts, embraced by top commanders, have even bled into military reports that stand out for their accessible prose.
“The importance of good official writing is so critical in reaching a broader audience to get people to understand what we’re trying to do,” said Capt. Matt Pottinger, a Marine and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is a co-author of the report “Fixing Intel,” an indictment of American intelligence-gathering efforts in Afghanistan released last month. “Even formal military doctrine is well served by a colloquial style of writing.”
