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finding balance
in the Ottawa river
photo - mw

The Sound Words Have
Žórarinn Eldjįrn
bilingual edition
Translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith
words without borders

Once there was a town where no two people spoke the same language. No one used the same words for anything. And yet everyone understood everyone else and they all lived together in peace and harmony. Until recently, the locals were cheerful, cordial, and— though it’s hard to believe—talkative. The town was in a nameless region deep in central Europe. The place had no name because it was so remote that it was usually represented on maps as a black hole. That is, if it was represented at all.

(....)

A lone historian who specialized in the composition of historical atlases once attempted the hopeless task of drawing a map that traced the evolution of the region’s internal borders. After many years’ work he was stuck with an insoluble tangle of maps that closely resembled the Burda pattern sheets for sewing winterwear. Indeed, his wife accidentally picked up the maps and managed to sew a pantsuit, a sweater, and two party dresses without any difficulty before the mistake came to light.

The townspeople had many centuries of experience in the nuances of the most common forms of government. They’d known dictatorships, totalitarianism, arbitrary coups, republics, and anarchy, to name but a few. Each upheaval was followed by a sputtering indecision, as happens with oppression and liberation, protests and rebellions, and the locals had early on grown tired of the constant need to change language according to who determined the hows and the whys each time. They came to realize that it was more dependable if each person had his own language which no one could take away. It was, in other words, a psychological defense mechanism: each person, faced with an unstable world, would hold on for dear life to his own essence; he would instinctively seek to cultivate his own personal language, a language even more familiar to him than his mother tongue: the language, that is, in which he thought. How could anyone ban that or kill it off?...(more)

Common-Place October 2011

Matt Kish

Blogging Moby-Dick
An artist illustrates every page of The Whale
Jamie L. Jones

(....)

This Moby-Dick is not, to put it mildly, a work of realism or rigorous historical interpretation. Matt Kish was not thinking about the history of American whaling when he illustrated Moby-Dick. He told me that he actively avoided doing any kind of historical research at all while creating the illustrations. "It's not that I don't have any specific interest in the nineteenth century, but I made no attempts to be historically accurate… Rather than try to create this historically accurate version of Moby-Dick, I really wanted to go very, very internal, and create an almost symbolic and fantastic rendition."

Kish's Moby-Dick chronicles the kind of experiment that Thoreau tried out at Walden Pond: an experiment in living deeply within a world that is both bounded and infinitely rich in meaning and detail. The 552 pages of Melville's book became Kish's world. Matt Kish has a knack for locating echoes of the nineteenth century in the technology, aesthetics, and humor of the twenty-first. He brings the arcane world of nineteenth-century whaling into camaraderie with the esoterica of twentieth and twenty-first century cultures: machines, comic books, street art, and album covers. Kish even practices his alchemy on the genre of the blog itself, creating a daily marvel out of an arbitrary assignment—one drawing for every page, every day. In a blogosphere that rewards the story of the minute, Kish's project is a monument to sustained attention, rigorous discipline, and long, old, thoroughly material books.

It is hard not to make something out of the fact that Matt Kish is a librarian. After all, it is a Sub-Sub-Librarian who introduces the "Extracts" at the beginning of Moby-Dick: "…this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions of whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane." Before Kish started his project, he said he personally identified with the Sub-Sub-Librarian more than with any other character in the novel: "This nameless person assembling all of these mosaic pieces of information: it always seemed like a curious way of introducing the novel to me. I found it endlessly fascinating to read all of these extracts and put them together in a different order. I could see myself as that kind of explorer—not only through Moby-Dick but in general. That was, up until this project." After the page-a-day project, though, Kish felt he had established a personal relationship with the whole novel, and not just with the Sub-Sub.

Whether or not Kish still identifies with the Sub-Sub, they have much in common. It might even be said that they share certain extraordinary library practices. The "poor devil of a Sub-Sub" who introduces the Extracts had become "hopeless" and "sallow," but there were adventures in his past. He had been a librarian in the way that Indiana Jones was an archaeologist: he traveled worldwide to collect his whaliana. Kish is by no means hopeless or sallow, but like Melville's Sub-Sub, he also started his project with a collection that he culled and saved over several years: a supply of found paper on which he drew most of the Moby-Dick illustrations....(more)

The Future of Latin American Fiction
Jorge Volpi
three percent

(....)

Unlike their elders, the writers born from 1960 on do not need to found a tradition—as did Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, or Garcķa Mįrquez. They do not possess a Bolivian yearning and do not aspire to become the spokesmen of Latin America: their method, more modest but also more natural, consists in carefully studying the problems and history of their respective countries, and even of the whole region, without the messianic tone of some of their predecessors.

More than discovering a continent, placing a forgotten region on the map, establishing their own spokesmen, positioning themselves as the avant-garde of the elites, the new narrators speak about their countries without the aftertaste of romanticism or of political compromise, without hopes or plans for the future, and maybe just with the proud disenchantment of one who recognizes the limits of his responsibility in front of history. Instead of presenting themselves as inventors of Latin America—the great achievement of the Boom—they seek to decipher and unarm it.

Their books do not pretend to add themselves to the stones with which the writers of the Boom erected their arrogant cathedral of Latin American literature, but miniatures that hope to condense in themselves all that now can be said of Latin America. The paradigm no longer consists in erecting a new tower or a new cupola, but in creating a hologram: novels that only in an oblique and confused, fractal and fragmentary way are trying to disembowel the mystery of Latin America. Novels that look toward The Savage Detectives and, above all, that magnificent hologram of the region which has been so little explored—and is already so opaque due to prejudices and misunderstandings—the somber and enigmatic 2666....(more)

photo - mw

Dancing the "Republican Two-Step" with Copyrights, Patents, and Corporations
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld and Mark Peterson
common-place

Don't Be Afraid to Say "Revolution"
Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

Terms of the Occupation
How to use "capitalism," "revolution" and "class warfare" in a complete sentence.
J.A. Myerson
truthout

From Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
Geoff Ward

The Fourth Elegy

Trees of life. When is your winter. Human
beings don’t cohere. Are not prompted in the blood
like migrant birds. Overtaken, late, we take off abruptly
into the wind and crash on some lost lake of ice.
To flower and to fade meet in us.
Altogether elsewhere, lions roam, unaware of weakness.

But we, intent upon one thing,
are already pulled into another. We’re
split. Aren’t lovers, ever more deeply inside each other, actually
doing solitary, confined by those cave-drawings
that promise vastness, hunting and firelight?
Elaborate gradations of background are laid down
to highlight the moment, the actual, living contour of emotion,
known only if at all by what shapes it from outside.

...(more)

Blackbox Manifold No. 7 (October 2011)

photo - mw

From Scrolls
an experimental work in progress
James C. Hopkins & Yoko Danno
presented by Jerome Rothenberg

"One of us writes the first half of a sentence and the other follows up with the rest of the sentence. The latter begins the next sentence and drops it halfway, which is taken over by the former. Writing thus in turn we draw 'picture scrolls' with words. There is no rule except that a scroll should consist of five paragraphs."

SCROLL 1

After all the lights have been turned off I watch shafts of moonlight shooting in through the blinds. The bare room starts to reverberate with film-noir certainty. Tonight the moving is finished. All the pictures and photos have been removed from the walls and all the drawers and closets emptied, and only the laptop on the table remains to remind me of what I had formerly considered important. No more ordering the world, and no more maps and calculations. Only some strawberries are left in the empty refrigerator, and tomorrow waiting in a car across the street.

...(more)

I AM NOT MOVING
Short Film - Occupy Wall Street
youtube

You may well ask, “Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

(April 16, 1963) - MLK

The Awakening in America
Ken Knabb
bureau of public secrets

(....)

As the movement spreads to hundreds of cities, it is important to note that each of the new occupations and assemblies remains totally autonomous. Though inspired by the original Wall Street occupation, they have all been created by the people in their own communities. No outside person or group has the slightest control over any of these assemblies. Which is just as it should be. When the local assemblies see a practical need for coordination, they will coordinate; in the mean time, the proliferation of autonomous groups and actions is safer and more fruitful than the top-down “unity” for which bureaucrats are always appealing. Safer because it counteracts repression: if the occupation in one city is crushed (or coopted), the movement will still be alive and well in a hundred others. More fruitful because this diversity enables people to share and compare among a wider range of tactics and ideas.

(....)

You have to participate to understand what is really going on. Not everyone will be up for joining in the overnight occupations, but practically anyone can take part in the general assemblies. At the Occupy Together website you can find out about occupations (or planned occupations) in more than a thousand cities in the United States as well as several hundred others around the world....(more)

A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” . . . Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in “the old days.” . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our “normal” life seem like sleepwalking.

The Eternal Politics of Debt and Forgiveness
A review of early Occupy Wall Street organizer David Graeber’s latest book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
Anthony Kammer

(....)

In his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist and early Occupy Wall Street organizer David Graeber, makes a compelling case that debt relationships are among the oldest and most fundamental organizing mechanisms in human history. From ancient India, China, and Mesopotamia, to the slave trade in Africa, through Medieval Europe and into the modern liberal state, debt has provided a system for social sorting and served as one of the primary institutions of resource allocation. And because debt is so crucial to social order, relationships between debtor and creditor have generated many of mankind’s most virulent rebellions, wars, and revolutions and set the terms of political dispute since the earliest written records. In his work, Graeber has drawn attention to a staggering range of political structures and philosophical attitudes that have arisen to manage debt relationships and has painstakingly documented what happens when those relations spiral out of control.

Beyond being eminently readable and jargon-free, this well-researched mix of anthropology, economics, and intellectual history could hardly be more timely. While the careful attention he gives to other societies and economic arrangements alone make the book worth reading, Graeber is also a self-described political activist who understands how history has the potential to reframe our grasp of the present. While he rarely takes overt political tones, he places debt at the center of economic history and aims to upset assumptions that many economists and policymakers take for granted. It is perhaps Graeber’s greatest accomplishment that he reminds readers of a fact that would have been obvious at almost any other period in history: Debt is not a problem to be resolved by natural law or cold, impersonal economic principles. It is a political and moral problem, and one with the potential to rapidly and irreversibly transform societies....(more)

Walker Evans

Nothing to be done
Neil Fitzgerald
A philosophical look at tramps in Paris

(....)

Nothing to be done, says Estragon. Our consciences, so easily pricked, read this as: there is no cure for people such as these. But surely this has a far more literal meaning for these vagabonds: they are doing nothing. Why? Because nothing we do needs to be done. That devastating existential fact still haunts us, as we bury ourselves in perceived necessities, entangle our minds in novel distractions, like social media. Life is absurd. For we can ascribe to life whatever meaning we want. As Sartre succinctly noted: man makes himself; he is not born ready-made. And perhaps the clochard can stare at this stark truth more readily than us.

So I go on regarding these castaways from the common stream of life, these hermits who, whilst living among us, are as isolated and incomprehensible as Diogenes of Sinope must have seemed c350 BC, living in his tub. And I borrow the pattern of their existence because, as R S Thomas saw, they are somehow able to keep resisting these unfathomable plights day after day, year after year:

Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind's attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed, even in death's confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
A Peasant, R S Thomas

...(more)

“I am the turnstile”: Roaming with Tomas Tranströmer
Steve Himmer
The Millions

(....)

Tomas Tranströmer wanted to grow up to be an explorer, and he’s done so: he’s a surveyor of quiet frontiers, of the brief, daily border crossings between one possible life and another — the crossings we make in secret moments, perhaps just a few seconds, when we allow ourselves to imagine or to wonder or to just pay attention. Lately I’ve been reading The Secret World of Doing Nothing, a study by Swedish anthropologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren of “what is happening when, to all appearances, absolutely nothing is happening.” A problem that comes up again and again as they interpret strangers waiting in lines or killing time is the struggle to plumb the depths of another mind in such moments: how far afield do they wander, and where do they roam? Tranströmer’s poems offer myriad answers, a humanist bridge between the individual and the collective through moments that might seem to lead nowhere....(more)

Little Sparta
the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Lanarkshire, Scotland
Photo by Dave Paterson

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Making
John Latta

(....)

(a solace, against the ravages of untoward clamp-jawed seriousness, what poetry-making’s clampdown twenty-first c. careerist demands demand of “us” each) Finlay’s remarks to Robert Creeley (Christmas Day, 1965):

. . . I think you should not worry about not writing poems, if you are still not. I know it is a misery when one feels like that, but you can remember against it, that you are very prolific when you do write, and that you already have a bulk of work that should satisfy anyone. Part of the problem . . . is that one would like (at such times) a kind of craft, to give each day a small satisfaction at least, and make sleep possible and food palatable . . . That was one reason I liked making toys—but that craft has rather vanished for me now, for, having ceased to amaze myself by my ability to cut a bit of wood with a fretsaw, I began to feel it as an art, and that is the end of pleasure . . . What we need is some simple craft at which we continually astonish ourselves by our extraordinary talent, while finding it mere child’s play, without judging it to be literally so (even if it is).

The glad import of amateurish “dabbling.” The constant longing to return to that root ludic compulsion....(more)

Tree Shells
1975
Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay Avant gardener

Little Sparta Trust

Little Sparta
the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Flickriver

The Death of Piety
Ian Hamilton Finlay
in conversation with Nagy Rashwan
jacket

The Human And The Octopus
A Philosopher's Sickness
Tom Stern

(....)

When I am not hospitalized—and thankfully that is almost all of the time—I am nothing if not a thinking man. At home I read books, clutching my pencil, scribbling furiously in the margins; at work, I talk to students, and I tell them what I and others think and then they think about it. Sometimes I write my thinking down, and other thinking people think about it and write about it and then for a short time we think about it together. And yet there, in my hospital bed, drugged and pained, scared, I am not thinking. And now that it’s over, and my recovery is for the moment complete, I find myself back here again—back at my thinking and my writing. There is, however, a problem with writing about being ill. Confronting the sweaty labor of sickness from the sober state of reflection involves a translation between two distinct languages, languages which share no common roots, whose terms extend to none of the same objects. If I force myself to carry out this feeble conversion exercise, then it is because there is a market for it, at least one eager reader, who can never have access to the original: me myself, cured and thinking once more....(more)

Egon Schiele
1890-1918

A Poetics of Oil, A Politics of Action
Philip Metres

(....)

I love Jonathan Skinner's and Brenda Hillman's idea of reading poems to staffers and congresspeople; the more we bring our bodies, the harder it is to silence our voices. I'm aware of the caricature of poetic activism—the most piquant of which is the earnest enviro-poet in "I Heart Huckabees" who reads his verse to yawns at the latest action, and is later replaced by a slicker, hipper, marketing stud. Sometimes poetic speech—vital, interpellative, mindchanging speech—is not just The Poem, but is Poetry in its most nervy performative sense....(more)

Christian Krohg
d. Oct. 16, 1925

The Meaning Of The Sea
Alexander Vvedensky
translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

to understand it once and for all
one must live life as in reverse
and to take walks in the forest
while tearing out your hair whole

and when you get to know the fire
of the light bulb or of the oven
say to it why are you shining
you the fire are candle’s master

what’s your meaning is it nothing
where’s the kettle where the cabinet
the demons whirl around like flies
circling above a piece of pie

(....)

but however the years were passing
passing were the fog and nonsense
who had fallen to the sea's bottom
like a board from the ship's timbers
became sad and full of longing
knocking together wisdom teeth
sit on top of the colorless seaweed
hang to dry out laundered muscles

we are blinking like the moonlight
when the waves tremble aglimmer
who was it that said the sea's bottom
and my foot are one and the same

generally all here are dissatisfied
in silence they walk out of the waters
while behind them hum the waves
putting their shoulders to the wheel

...(more)

mayday

Triptych: On Turning Sixty-Five
Robert Gibbons

II. A Destination the Dream Refused to Name

Better be first, rather than second nature to the act of writing. Two dreams hanging around for nearly a week after they arrived on the morning of my birthday requiring language to their imagery. Seawall I lived with for years years back appeared on the left side, another barrier to be traversed, which I did in the lightness of a leap to see the water rich in color, deep reds & golds. I dove in. Swam to a rock outcropping. Drying off on the ledge, I looked across the water, where an ancient stage, purely Dionysian? or Hopi? with a backdrop of ochre light presented a lone actor moving stage left, spotting me, & heading toward where I was seated, or now standing, in order to reassure that the abyss below on the ledge was no threat at all. Soon after that, my big (fireproof) valise open, carefully placing & adjusting, so they wouldn’t crowd or crush one another, rolled scrolls, prints, & posters, as if readying for a trip, or the longer journey with a destination the dream refused to name.

Time Capsule

Constantine Manos
1962

Buying Tomorrow
Jennifer Szalai
Lapham's Quarterly

(....)

To cast lots for Christ’s robe, as Pontius Pilate’s soldiers did, was to play a game of chance. Gambling is one of those activities, along with religious worship and prostitution, that was popular already by the time any recording of history began. Our modern financial system owes much to this desire to make a fortune off of Fortune, though a society that organizes itself around financial risk-taking, whose national assets oscillate in an invisible cloud of ones and zeros, requires a very particular understanding of what the future can hold. Finance makes a commodity out of expectation, something to be bought (preferably low) and sold (preferably high). In the case of the worried farmer or the worried breadwinner, the future can also be viewed with suspicion, but finance enables the anxious to trade one possibility for another: both the speculator and the hedger are seeking the best future that money can buy.

(....)

And so it was that risk, and the purported ability to manage it, brought Wall Street more than once to the brink of self-annihilation. Peter Bernstein may have been right when he observed that the future no longer belongs to the gods, but we have made a habit of finding God in the strangest places, whether it be the Shroud of Turin or the formula for a derivative’s price. Finance has given the future over to mathematics and supercomputers, which, like any other prosthetic god, bring with them the temptations of both recklessness and complacency. Our technologies belong to us; we create them, and they amplify our abilities and our reach, yet we exhibit a strange eagerness to relinquish our dominion over them, endowing them with a monstrous authority that demands our accommodation and surrender. We have made a fetish out of finance, against which proper regulation gets derided as the comedy of mere mortals—not just difficult but absurd....(more)

Sameer Makarius
ca. 1950
Light of Modernity in Buenos Aries, 1929-1954

Photography In Argentina 1930s-1950s [pdf]
Valeria Gonzįlez
Translated by Craig Epplin

The Colossus Of Rhodes
George Moore

seems less real today, in the postmodern
aftermath of history, for it has stood, straddling the harbor
only in some Einsteinian time, out there ahead of us
before an earthquake brought its rumor down.

It was never where they said it was, or its shell,
the bronze of its massive arms and legs, and what then
of the genitals? Those Greeks like them small, well formed
but still, where has the great metal phallus gone?

We sail into the harbor on the backs of dolphins
as the dead do in other places, and view only columns
mounted with stag and doe, the modern equivalent of care
with history, delicate rather than imposing.

If this beast of bronze never did exist, The Seventh
Wonder of the World would be a myth, and there’s
more than something real in that, for the writers, travelers
of the past, would have created our best hope.

But today I can see it, boy-eagled over the murky depths,
and watch as the Japanese, Sweds, Germans, lingering
bankrupt Americans, all with their perfect daughters
and sons, snap photos of the empty air.

mayday

Horacio Coppola
1934
Light of Modernity in Buenos Aries, 1929-1954
Nailya Alexander Gallery

via gmtPlus9(-15)

Metamorphosis and Myth
20th Century European Battlefields
Peter Hebeisen

Transversal journal 10/11:
#occupy and assemble8 (2011)

editorial

"From the sit-ins on the Kasbah Square in Tunis to the tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, from the encampments on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma Square in Athens, from the Wisconsin Uprising to Occupy LA, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Liberty Plaza in New York - there is an incredible movement of occupations growing in this year of 2011. Slogans like “They don’t represent us” call for a non-representationist political practice, inventive forms of assembling bring new meaning to the good old general assembly, reappropriations of space and time thwart the logic of private and public: There is a new abstract machine in the making, traversing the local practices, empowering itself with every new space that is occupied, every new assembly that finds another form of expression and sociality. This issue of transversal is a discursive component of this abstract machine emerging from the actual experiences of Occupy Wall Street, dedicated to all the precarious occupiers in the world."

In the last months there have been, time and again, mass demonstrations on the street, in the square, and though these are very often motivated by different political purposes, something similar happens: bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space. Now, it would be easier to say that these demonstrations or, indeed, these movements, are characterized by bodies that come together to make a claim in public space, but that formulation presumes that public space is given, that it is already public, and recognized as such. We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather. So though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square, and have often enough gathered in squares, like Tahrir, whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens. At such a moment, politics is no longer defined as the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces that are unbound by the architecture of the public square. So when we think about what it means to assemble in a crowd, a growing crowd, and what it means to move through public space in a way that contests the distinction between public and private, we see some way that bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public, find and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments; at the same time, those material environments are part of the action, and they themselves act when they become the support for action. ...(more)

Arboretum
Joel Leivick
1986

De singes et de mouches (extraits) / from Of Flies and Monkeys
Jacques Dupin
Translated by John Taylor

A poem is not made of words
George Oppen

even borborygmies

even monkey
onomatopoeias

passing beyond all bounds of the mouth

empty promises
of monkey money fly money

coins tinkling
under the wound

— and the heart apes the fly
and monkeys

blow their nose like flies
sniffing a departed heart

...(more)

Jacques Dupin's Poetic Language: A Process of Becoming, of Blossoming
Translator's Note
John Taylor

Autumn
1944
Milton Avery
1893 -1965

Punching A Hole In Bubbles Of Denial And Addiction
Late Capitalism and Its Discontents of the American Autumn
Phil Rockstroh

(....)

As Autumn stands before us, it will be helpful to allow illusions to fall away like dying leaves. Summer is kind to fools, but winter insists on clarity. Let the old delusions blaze out in Autumnal splendor, and then be mindful of winter’s stark perfection…its demarcations…rendering bare branches against a bleak sky.

Know this: The illusions of the corporate empire can no longer provide shelter; the elite and operatives of economic imperium can no longer raid and plunder the easy pickings of summer…hoard and squander its bounty. Therefore, to quote the poet, at present, “One must have a mind of winter” to navigate the white-out winds of new realities....(more)

CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...
Business Insider

Reflections for the US Occupy Movement
From Barcelona's Neighborhood Assemblies
Peter Gelderloos

(....)

The memory of struggles from before the global economic crash has allowed people to move beyond a simple kneejerk response to the present crisis and instead formulate a deeper critique of the system responsible for their woes. In practice, this has meant a popular shift from complaints about specific laws or specific features of the banking system that might serve as scapegoats for the crisis, to a radical critique of government and capitalism. While the movement is heterogeneous and by no means consistent, on multiple occasions it has popularly defined itself as anticapitalist, thus drawing on a strong tradition of struggle that goes back more than a century throughout Europe.

(....)

The United States is also a country with inspiring histories of popular struggle. But it is a country with a case of social amnesia like no other. It seems that to a certain extent, the Occupy Wall Street actions exist more as a trend than anything else. The slight extent to which they draw on, or even make reference to, earlier struggles, even struggles from the past twenty years, is worrying. The fact that a present awareness of US history would shatter certain cornerstones of the new movement’s identity, for example this idea of the 99% that includes everyone but the bankers in one big, happy family, is not a sufficient excuse to avoid this task. The historical amnesia of American society must be overcome for a struggle to gain the perspective it needs....(more)

last village
Tomas Cochello

Creativity vs. Copyright
Cory Doctorow
(Newly revised and condensed from his address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention

(....)

If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well.

The North Gate of the Citadel
Christen Kųbke
1834

via Hippolyte Bayard

Twilight of the Idols
Friedrich Nietzsche [ 1895 ]
Text prepared from the original German
and the translations by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

via Tom Matrullo

The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Foreign Affairs

A call to the army of love and the army of software
Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink
posted by Jodi Dean

The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting. The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts of the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.

(....)

Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine? They will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings. They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers, stock owners, traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market.

Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer around ‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance capitalism years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious to perform the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the future in the form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. Stop listening to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are just pimps, and politics is dead. What should we do?...(more)

Gables Bound in Weed
Richard Maloney

via Gary Sauer-Thompson

Five Poems by Sarah Gridley
Mudlark Poster No. 78 (2009)

The Orator’s Maximal Likelihood

In turning your heart to a pulpit, you captured
a sample of persuasion: gray, the passenger
pigeons, the migrateurs, gray the epigraphical palettes,
the small, uncertain laughters
at the cages of animals.
There is a hard work you ate in honey.
There is a hard work in parts of speech.
Once you lost track of statistics, dust arose
to reckon cobwebs. The errand is all
about you: a demon sings, the song is yours,
a fog catcher catches condensation.
On the strength of its first thread, a spider commits
design, commits its body’s lengths
to measurements of silk.
Page the page.
Where is now the outline of the law? A left-out word
like gossamer. A word left out like grace.
...(more)

Die Verhältnisse
Paula Markert

Williams / Ashbery
John Latta
Isola di Rifiuti

(....)

... Williamsesque: “the stark dignity of entrance . . .” Struck, reading the Autobiography, by Williams’s sense of the “underground stream” of poetry (released by thwart changeable vicissitudes of doctoring):

Forget writing, it’s a trivial matter. But day in day out, when the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with nothing more than a boil on his back is so caught off balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole community’s pathetic way of thought, a man is suddenly seized again with a desire to speak of the underground stream which for a moment has come up just under the surface. It is just a glimpse, an intimation of all that which the daily print misses or deliberately hides, but the excitement is intense and the rush to write is on again. It is then we see, by this constant feeling for a meaning, from the unselected nature of the material, just as it comes in over the phone or at the office door, that there is no better way to get an intimation of what is going on in the world.

...(more)

Five Poems
Sarah Gridley
conjunctions

Grimoire

One helped undo the rippled look of things beyond the pane. One called for writing on the pane. One seemed to aim at suffocation. One promised the end result of breathing freely. One made use of dead though iridescent wings. One said to drink from the mirror, while another took bowls and bowls of blood. One called for moss on top of blood. One required no words at all. One turned a black stone green with just one word. One made the horses bolt. One crushed a plant for the end of a sorrow. One derived a forest from pendant ghosts. One was a spell for no more spells. For cutting them down, and letting them go.

...(more)

Autumn Morning
Lake Sortedam
Christen Kųbke
1838

Everyday Speech
Maurice Blanchot
Translated by Susan Hanson
mediafire pdf

(....)

Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification. The everyday escapes. This makes its strangeness - the familiar showing itself (but already dispersing) in the guise of the astonishing. It is the unperceived, first in the sense that one has always looked past it; nor can it be introduced into a whole or "re- viewed," that is to say, enclosed within a panoramic vision; for, by another trait, the everyday is what we never see for a first time, but only see again, having always already seen it by an illusion that is, as it happens, constitutive of the everyday.

Hence the exigency - apparently laughable, apparently inconse- quential, but necessary - that leads us to seek an always more immediate knowledge of the everyday. Henri Lefebvre speaks of the Great Pleonasm. We want to be abreast of everything that takes place at the very instant that it passes and comes to pass. The images of events and the words that transmit them are not only inscribed instantaneously on our screens, in our ears, but in the end there is no event other than this movement of universal transmission: "the reign of an enormous tautology." The disad- vantages of a life so publicly and immediately displayed are henceforth observable. The means of communication-language, culture, imagina- tive power-by never being taken as more than means, wear out and lose their mediating force. We believe we know things immediately, without images and without words, and in reality we are dealing with no more than an insistent prolixity that says and shows nothing. How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate, guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words. ...