Friday, January 23, 2004
today the centennial of Louis Zukofsky:
"His voice in me, the river's turn that finds the
Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf
Lighting stem, stems bound to the branch that binds the
Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind's music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: song sounding
The grace that comes from knowing
Things, her love our own showing
Her love in all her honor."
"His voice in me, the river's turn that finds the
Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf
Lighting stem, stems bound to the branch that binds the
Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind's music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: song sounding
The grace that comes from knowing
Things, her love our own showing
Her love in all her honor."
Thursday, January 22, 2004
The twinkling CNN pollster weasel whose name escapes me just now the first I've heard to make what will now be the inescapable Dean/Muskie triangulation: expressions of emotion as "unpresidential". Muskie's snowy breakdown (famously ascribed by Hunter Thompson to ibogaine abuse) I remember, that election the first I followed in any detail, even then it seemed weirdly set up, cinematic in a cheap way. Fletcher Knebel, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
U B U W E B :: Cornelius Cardew "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and Other Articles" entirely up at this finest of websites--
Came quite accidentally, Law & Order being a repeat, upon the French film The Taste of Others , and it was rather good, the critic was right who said it was like Rohmer, but peppier. Nice too not to have that slightly used up feeling Law & Order leaves me with lately. Goodnight!
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Canada Reporter's Home Raided Over Al Qaeda Story: "'The whole affair started with the RCMP. First they whispered to the Americans that Maher Arar was a terrorist, which led to his deportation and torture,' she said.
'Then the RCMP tried to smear Maher Arar by whispering the same allegations to journalists. Now it's raiding journalists' offices as if journalists are the problem.' "
'Then the RCMP tried to smear Maher Arar by whispering the same allegations to journalists. Now it's raiding journalists' offices as if journalists are the problem.' "
Raising the Ghost of Joseph Mairs: "'Nanaimo and Ladysmith came under what amounted to military occupation for almost a year, with hundreds of residents herded into camps fenced in by barbed wire,' reports Haythornthwaite.
'When Canadian Collieries evicted miners and their families from company homes and imported strikebreakers,' says an entry to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography by Simon Fraser University labor lecturer Mark Leier, 'union miners organized strong picket lines. The province sent in constables, and by August scuffles were breaking out.'
"
'When Canadian Collieries evicted miners and their families from company homes and imported strikebreakers,' says an entry to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography by Simon Fraser University labor lecturer Mark Leier, 'union miners organized strong picket lines. The province sent in constables, and by August scuffles were breaking out.'
"
from Laurable
Anti- Hegemony Project: " The collusion between government and publisher,publisher and critic, critic and poet, poet and academy, academy and government, constitutes at once the most unbreakable ring of corruption, and the most vicious circle of ideological
contamination, yet to become manifest in our letters. "
Anti- Hegemony Project: " The collusion between government and publisher,publisher and critic, critic and poet, poet and academy, academy and government, constitutes at once the most unbreakable ring of corruption, and the most vicious circle of ideological
contamination, yet to become manifest in our letters. "
Toasters: "'you do not need to ring for more toast but make it yourself and eat it while it is crisp and hot'. "
from Bookslut
Seamus Heaney's hip hop pantheon!: "Dr. Dre--I cannot say if he is a doctor or not. This I do not know. But I do recall the shells which fell long ago on the pastures of Wicklow, cleaving the earth in two, and the sound of weapons crackling from the wireless. They are with me still, these songs of ruin. The sprung rhythm recognizes its own."
Seamus Heaney's hip hop pantheon!: "Dr. Dre--I cannot say if he is a doctor or not. This I do not know. But I do recall the shells which fell long ago on the pastures of Wicklow, cleaving the earth in two, and the sound of weapons crackling from the wireless. They are with me still, these songs of ruin. The sprung rhythm recognizes its own."
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Monday, January 19, 2004
The World's Greatest Actor, In Praise of Timothy Carey: "He appeared alongside Elvis Presley and the Monkees, James Dean and Frankie Avalon, Lee Marvin and Mr. T. Between 1958 and 1962, he directed, wrote, produced, edited, financed, distributed, and starred in The World's Greatest Sinner, a film so inscrutable, hysterical, and obscure (one known print remains) that even its cult following has a cult following. He died while making The Insect Trainer, which would've been the first film ever to tell the story of a man incarcerated for murder by farting. He was Timothy Agoglia Carey, the greatest peripheral actor of all time. "
Happy Birthday E. A. Poe!: "And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow. "
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Speech "Beyond Vietnam," Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church 4 April 1967 at New York City: "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called 'enemy,' I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a
short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor."
short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor."
Sunday, January 18, 2004
blissblog on the "Zone of Fruitless Intensification" re drum 'n bass: "Now it'd be intriguing to work out what the significant axis on which the Zone of Fruitless Intensification will manifest itself, looking at some current musics. With Grime, one possibility is clunkiness. At the moment the music exploits the aesthetic possibilities of clunky-but-in-a-good way -- the clunk-crunk-funk nexus (the fact that stiff and lurching is actually more funky, or more rhythmically arresting/compelling, than fluid, nimble "funky" playing). But I can already imagine that good-clunk turning to bad-clunk, getting both caned into the ground and exaggerated to the point of non-enjoyability. Same with the bombastic/doomladen post-Swizz/Ludacris fanfare-riff, although perhaps that's just a subset of 'clunk'.
I'm curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it's just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World's Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill. "
I'm curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it's just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World's Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill. "
the Downy Woodpecker we've been watching out of my window all day seems to be digging out a nest excavation on a little platform half way up the walnut.
Giorgio Agamben in Le Monde Saturday 10 January 2004
via Charles Bernstein on the Poetics List
Giorgio Agamben
The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New
York University in March.
I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is,why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American
colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.
It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings
are subjected.
The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.
Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.
All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques.
Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons
that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.
What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of
subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.
These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words
without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political
life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.
Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical
thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.
I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the
enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be
asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.
via Charles Bernstein on the Poetics List
Giorgio Agamben
The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New
York University in March.
I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is,why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American
colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.
It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings
are subjected.
The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.
Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.
All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques.
Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons
that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.
What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of
subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.
These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words
without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political
life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.
Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical
thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.
I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the
enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be
asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.
Scary Cheney "Asked aboard Air Force Two how he would spend an ideal day, Dick Cheney says, "On a river with a good friend and a fly rod. Northern British Columbia for steelhead. South Texas to chase quail.""
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Jan 17 1773, Captain Cook circumnavigates Antarctica - no sight of land: " 'should anyone possess the resolution and fortitude to... (push) yet further south than I have done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery, but I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it'. "
Bellona Times: "When Jack Spicer or Frank O'Hara 'plead their case' in a poem, they acknowledge (miserably or lightly) the scare quotes: no one will really be swayed by their plea; their case isn't really the case of the poem; in fact, the poem frankly doesn't care about them one way or the other. When the New Critic poets plead their case in a poem, they sound like they expect us to pretend that they hope someone will believe them, and to give them extra credit for attempting the delusion. That's a lot of zombie-raising to go through just to hear some melodious groans. "
Friday, January 16, 2004
Ill-starred, hard-to-love Samuel Johnson subject Richard Savage born 1698-- "Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty, nor will any wise man presume to say, 'Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.'"
Apothecary's Drawer reminded me of one of the first great websites I ever came across. Here is the "Ethnic Diversity" page of The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record. The all time blue of the Emir of Bukhara's cloak...
Equanimity: "Dog howling over the sound of the bakery's ventilators. And the occasional car alarm. But mostly the highway."
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat: "Hey Garland, I dig your tweed coat. I'll trade you a domino this size, mothball-scented. The woman silk nude tie painting his chest. One celluloid stay exposed through his nibbled collar. Feet speckled the sidewalk. Faces gurgled through windows. Passing cars gum rubber streaks. Neon plants swim like green seaweed to a deep rhythm of blues. Red thyroid sunsets, flame in speckled chemistry. Pipes run off dark tubes. Erase into marks that pour the dye of darkness. Crystal comes together as silent as ink.
'I don't think I could let it go. I got it at the religious scene'
Teeth let go, tobacco juice, an oiled balloon, brown eye in an egg white, black tar bubbles and stripes. A straw hat squeaked on the brim of a feather. Newsprint thumbed through nicotine fingers, a dark olive was turned on. Its small pulp speaker burst into a scream. One large tomato was immediately peeled skin red. It bled into a red 'O' and smacked behind accepted fangs. Quick eyebrows danced cutely above a mole. The bridge held a large gold pair of spectacles. The front was smooth. It slightly gathered and wrinkled at the holes. A dark wooden moustache deposited below above Chinese red varnished lips that dented slightly into the evening.
'It's gotten quite cold. I've decided I can't sell you my coat.'
Honking, the wind puffed into the clumps above the lattice rows. And out looked Panatella, naked and not ashamed, without no clothes. Wiggle Pig went snout-first into a tree. The rubber turkey was gobbled up by the night's dark rubber mouth. A white phosphorous raindrop dropped in the sky. Hot silhouettes in a convertible gave this applause. And several white porcelain trays were rolled in by bumblebees. Their wings arranged with pictures out of the past. And the rainbow baboon gob."
'I don't think I could let it go. I got it at the religious scene'
Teeth let go, tobacco juice, an oiled balloon, brown eye in an egg white, black tar bubbles and stripes. A straw hat squeaked on the brim of a feather. Newsprint thumbed through nicotine fingers, a dark olive was turned on. Its small pulp speaker burst into a scream. One large tomato was immediately peeled skin red. It bled into a red 'O' and smacked behind accepted fangs. Quick eyebrows danced cutely above a mole. The bridge held a large gold pair of spectacles. The front was smooth. It slightly gathered and wrinkled at the holes. A dark wooden moustache deposited below above Chinese red varnished lips that dented slightly into the evening.
'It's gotten quite cold. I've decided I can't sell you my coat.'
Honking, the wind puffed into the clumps above the lattice rows. And out looked Panatella, naked and not ashamed, without no clothes. Wiggle Pig went snout-first into a tree. The rubber turkey was gobbled up by the night's dark rubber mouth. A white phosphorous raindrop dropped in the sky. Hot silhouettes in a convertible gave this applause. And several white porcelain trays were rolled in by bumblebees. Their wings arranged with pictures out of the past. And the rainbow baboon gob."
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Big points to August Kleinzahler for referencing the late Bob Kerr, greatest DJ ever--& Wednesday is organ day: "I have been sitting in the tub listening to Aldo Ciccolini play Satie for nearly 30 Januaries. I think all that really got going in earnest when I lived in Montreal in the mid-to-late '70s. There was an old fellow on CBC radio named Bob Kerr, if I recall, possessed of a comforting baritone and absolutely stuck on Ciccolini playing Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. I had a little apartment, a little radio, and nowhere much to go; besides, it was colder than the moon outside."
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
the sequel to "Strange Brew": "Many of the plants were growing inside giant steel vats that were once used to brew Molson's most popular brands of beer. The vats were six metres wide and 30 metres long, with watertight doors. The vats provided an ideal growing environment, police said, since it was easy to control the humidity and temperature levels inside."
Denzil Best: "'The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes.' "
Good news: it looks like the "outdoor" fish, a big carp who lives in a barrel on our porch--made it through the cold snap. Again, a little uncanny, the barrelwater had seemed frozen solid...
Monday, January 12, 2004
Smurf Name Generator Bob is "Stoner Smurf", Jo is "Britney Smurf", Alister is "The Real Slim Smurfy" and I'm "Fatass Smurf". Uncanny.
Extraordinary Rendition--first US report I've seen on this case: "Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it 'extraordinary rendition.' As one intelligence official explained: 'We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them.' "
Sunday, January 11, 2004
ex-RCMP heads up RIAA goon squad: "'They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they'd take me away in handcuffs,' he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extrano Vol. IV: Musica de los 70's y 80's, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.
The RIAA acknowledges it all, except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they're actual law enforcement, that's a mistake."
The RIAA acknowledges it all, except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they're actual law enforcement, that's a mistake."
Friday, January 09, 2004
A tale from Tommy Douglas: "Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for the last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider then we are."
Altercation: "Now, it is true that the authors did manage to turn the tide at Foundation Ridge, that they managed alone to hold the ramparts at Thinktank Castle, that they organized the counterattack that swept the field at Buffet Flats, and that they only this week fought to victory in the Battle Of Charlie Rose."
from "When the Band Comes In" (1971)
Little Things (That Keep us Together)
It's on days like these
When your brother falls
You can read it all in the Times:
How a moving car
Stole a movie star--
Little Things that keep us together
While the war's going on.
It's on days like these
When your childhood cries
And you see it all on the news,
Little children starve
Growing tired of born--
Little things that keep us all close and warm
While the war's going on.
Find a place you can hide
And take what you can,
The time will arrive
When you need a friend--
Stop looking at us
We're waving good-bye.
There's a man
Shouting he's with me
When that morning comes
I can't wait to see
Just how high his eagle
On color screens
Is gonna fly
Going to fly--
It's on nights like these
That your neighbor dies
'Cos he put a gun to his head
He was so alone
He had nothing left,
Little things that call for a drink,
That bury a soldier's death.
It's on days like these
When your sister cries
And your brother falls from your hands
Jumbo jets can die
Killing 81
Little things that help us get by the why
Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on
Little Things (That Keep us Together)
It's on days like these
When your brother falls
You can read it all in the Times:
How a moving car
Stole a movie star--
Little Things that keep us together
While the war's going on.
It's on days like these
When your childhood cries
And you see it all on the news,
Little children starve
Growing tired of born--
Little things that keep us all close and warm
While the war's going on.
Find a place you can hide
And take what you can,
The time will arrive
When you need a friend--
Stop looking at us
We're waving good-bye.
There's a man
Shouting he's with me
When that morning comes
I can't wait to see
Just how high his eagle
On color screens
Is gonna fly
Going to fly--
It's on nights like these
That your neighbor dies
'Cos he put a gun to his head
He was so alone
He had nothing left,
Little things that call for a drink,
That bury a soldier's death.
It's on days like these
When your sister cries
And your brother falls from your hands
Jumbo jets can die
Killing 81
Little things that help us get by the why
Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
Why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on
why the war's going on
Tilt by Scott Walker: "My background isn't Dylan and folk, but the chanson singers and they're grounded in drama. I felt I'd take the time with the words. I figured if I did that, the words would lead me, they'd tell me what to do.... If you get into their world far enough, they'll take you where you want to go. Whatever happens in any part of the album is led by the lyric."
Marginal supremacy: "I have a suspicion that, among some people who should know better, Coleridge is becoming seen as one of the deadest and whitest of European males; let's stop this nonsense before it goes too far. "
from Coleridge: A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia.: "This is the most defective Passage of the whole Treatise. It is not true, and it is of pernicious consequence, to represent Fortune as wholly mad, blind, deaf, and drunk. On the average each man receives what he pays for the miser gives care & self-torment, and receives increase of Gold--the vain give clamour, & bustle, pretensions & flattery, & receive a Buz--the Wise man Self-conquest & neighbourly Love, and receives sense of Dignity, of Harmony, and Content. Each is paid in sort--Virtue is not rewarded by Wealth, nor is the Eye affected by Sound."
MARGINALIA by E. A. Poe : " I know that indefinitiveness is an element of the true music- I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision- imbue it with any very determinate tone- and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of fiery. "
Thursday, January 08, 2004
One sweet sales strategy: "The top seller for the Minneapolis Girl Scout Council last year sold 2,050 boxes. That's more than $6,000 worth of cookies. The seller, identified only as Danielle, still found time to encourage others.
'She wrote a letter to the other girls to not give up hope,' said Rosi Hewitt of Coon Rapids, whose daughter is a Girl Scout."
'She wrote a letter to the other girls to not give up hope,' said Rosi Hewitt of Coon Rapids, whose daughter is a Girl Scout."
from "The Hindu": "If I were to relinquish my passport, I would do so in favour of a country that I found superior to India. But while there is much to be admired in places like Denmark and England, there is also much to be ashamed of. The heart of whiteness is lit with lamps of blood.
And today the heart of whiteness is closing its arteries. It is doing to people with the wrong colour (of passport?) what it tried to do to its own poor in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Even the discourse sounds familiar: undeserving poor, accountability, violence, criminality, free market, etc, we have heard all this before. But this time the struggle will be longer and more bitter as the poor cannot be deported and settled in 'newly-discovered' continents, where they can get rich by their own sweat or the blood of the aborigines and slaves. Today the poor of the world can only be attracted like moths to the rich heart of whiteness. And hence the arteries of Europe and U.S. are being closed with new rules and regulations. "
And today the heart of whiteness is closing its arteries. It is doing to people with the wrong colour (of passport?) what it tried to do to its own poor in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Even the discourse sounds familiar: undeserving poor, accountability, violence, criminality, free market, etc, we have heard all this before. But this time the struggle will be longer and more bitter as the poor cannot be deported and settled in 'newly-discovered' continents, where they can get rich by their own sweat or the blood of the aborigines and slaves. Today the poor of the world can only be attracted like moths to the rich heart of whiteness. And hence the arteries of Europe and U.S. are being closed with new rules and regulations. "
The Journals of Lewis And Clark: "This traffic on the part of the whites consists in vending guns (principally old British or American muskets), powder, balls and shot, copper and brass kettles, brass teakettles and coffeepots, blankets from two to three points, scarlet and blue cloth (coarse), plates and strips of sheet copper and brass, large brass wire, knives, beads, and tobacco, with fishing hooks, buttons, and some other small articles. Also a considerable quantity of sailors' clothes, as hats, coats, trousers, and shirts. For these they receive in return from the natives dressed and undressed elk skins, skins of the seaotter, common otter, beaver, common fox, spuck, and tiger cat; also dried and pounded salmon in baskets, and a kind of biscuit which the natives make of roots, called by them shappellel. "
The Whale: "Lewis, at least, seems to have swallowed it with relish. 'It was white & not unlike the fat of Poark,' he judged,'tho' the texture was more spongey and somewhat coarser. I had a part of it cooked and found it very pallitable and tender, it resembled the beaver or the dog in flavour.' "
Cannon Beach: "The Kilamox although they possesed large quantities of this blubber and oil were so prenurious that they disposed of it with great reluctiance and in small quantities only; insomuch that my utmost exertion aided by the party with the Small Stock of merchandise I had taken with me were not able to precure more blubber than about 300 lb. and a few gallons of oil;
Small as this stock is I prise it highly; and thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having Sent this Monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of us as jonah's did. "
Small as this stock is I prise it highly; and thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having Sent this Monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of us as jonah's did. "
Sacagawea |: "[T]he Indian woman was very impo[r]tunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either."
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
FBI: Potential Terrorist Use of Almanacs: "Almanacs, available both in print and online, provide comprehensive information on a variety of topics, including government, geography, vital statistics, the economy, health matters, science and technology, weather trends, and tourism. Information commonly found in almanacs that may be exploited for terrorist use includes profiles of U.S. cities and states and information on geographic and structural features such as waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings, and landmarks. This information is often accompanied by photographs and maps."
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Joyce--"The Dead""A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
from Robert Pogue Harrison's new "The Names of the Dead"-- his 1992 "Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation" one of my favorites: "One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the pathway toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradually wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead, to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship between extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic reach....The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain such excess in its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have seen, if only briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this put on Virgil as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting for the fates of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial wall, the excess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot accommodate them--it does--but because in its mute memory of the Vietnam War, it proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is one too many. The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and every name. The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is pervaded with the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Virgil's infernal scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and unwed girls, and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes." Yet Rome--that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor or redeem these deaths--is missing."
Mirages in Finland: " On the open sea, low waves may reach into the mirage-producing air layer, where they become vertically stretched into high columns: this produces a vision of dancing columns far out to sea. "
there's lots of Grackles (the "parking lot bird" says Daph) enjoying my uncooked flaxseed oatmeal in the snow
Monday, January 05, 2004
PressThink: Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "
The origins of the term 'inside baseball' are in one writer's view of sports reporting during the 1980s. He's Bill James, now a famous scholar of baseball. The arguments he made then explain why the term migrated so easily to politics. The inside, said James, is a hall of mirrors."
The origins of the term 'inside baseball' are in one writer's view of sports reporting during the 1980s. He's Bill James, now a famous scholar of baseball. The arguments he made then explain why the term migrated so easily to politics. The inside, said James, is a hall of mirrors."
Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?: "“Oh, you’re a journalist,” he noted. “What are you here for?”
“I’m interviewing Olivia Newton-John,” Smethurst replied.
“That’s nice,” the official said, impressed. “What’s the article about?”
“Breast cancer.”
When Smethurst tells me this, she pauses and adds, “I thought that last question was a little odd, but figured everything’s different now in America and it was fine.” What she didn’t know was that her assignment and travel plans, along with the chicken soup and stroll through Central Park, had been terminated the moment she confirmed she was a journalist. Fourteen hours later, she was escorted by three armed guards onto the 11 p.m. Qantas flight home."
“I’m interviewing Olivia Newton-John,” Smethurst replied.
“That’s nice,” the official said, impressed. “What’s the article about?”
“Breast cancer.”
When Smethurst tells me this, she pauses and adds, “I thought that last question was a little odd, but figured everything’s different now in America and it was fine.” What she didn’t know was that her assignment and travel plans, along with the chicken soup and stroll through Central Park, had been terminated the moment she confirmed she was a journalist. Fourteen hours later, she was escorted by three armed guards onto the 11 p.m. Qantas flight home."
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