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omnium gatherum, n. : a collection of many different, often unsorted, ideas or items.
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Thursday - April 12, 2007Indeed.“I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay
folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. And I want my
grasp of things true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that
I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that
took me safely through the wildest storm of all.” - Rainer Maria
Rilke.
Friday - March 16, 2007Of similar opinionFrom this week's ever-anticipated Schjeldahl review
:
"Ryman is a favorite of certain academic critics who, loyal to intellectual adventures of avant-garde art in the fifties and sixties, ignore most contemporary art and seem to mark time until a new development, or Second Coming, merits their engagement. Still, Ryman stays fresh and taut. Even out of date, his conscientious integrity ought to abash today’s hordes of careering youngsters, whose idea of the future of civilization reaches little beyond the next art fair. But to be shameable, under present conditions, may be an unaffordable moral luxury. ... Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recent vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes. What’s lost—while being barely preserved, with monkish zeal, by the likes of Ryman—is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention. Pablo Picasso once zeroed in on the fundamental problem of abstract art, which he rejected, as “only painting. What about drama?” He added, “There is no abstract art.… A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’; they react on us more or less intensely.” The best modern abstract artists countered with jolting demonstrations of art’s intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating, as the looks of a Pollock or a Mondrian became just additional items in the world’s image bank, alongside Titian nudes and Mickey Mouse. Picasso’s cynical wisdom (minus his driving genius, of course) is common sense now, as artists like those in “Comic Abstraction” mix and match stock elements, with ever less drama and with intensity dwindling away. " Wednesday - August 02, 2006Thank you Susan."There is, however, a place reserved for the
resurrections of the self, even when time disperses it in ever widening waves.
That is the landscape. As landscape all events surround us, for we, the time of
things, know no times. Nothing but the leaning of the trees, the horizon, the
silhouetted mountain ridges, which suddenly awake full of meaning because they
have placed us in their midst. The landscape transports us into their midst, the
trembling treetops assail us with questions, the valleys envelop us with mist,
incomprehensible houses oppress us with their shapes. We, their midpoint,
impinge on them. But from all the time when we stand there quivering, one
question remains: Are we Time? Arrogance tempts us to answer yes -- and then the
landscape would vanish. We would be citizens. But the spell of the book bids us
to be silent. The only answer is that we set out on a path. As we advance, the
same surroundings sanctify us. Knowing no answers but forming the center, we
define things with the movement of our bodies. By drawing nigh and distancing
ourselves once again on our wanderings, we single out trees and fields from
their like and flood them with the time of our existence. We give firm
definition to fields and mountains in their arbitrariness: they are our past
existence -- that was the prophecy of childhood. We are their future. Naked in
this futurity, the landscape welcomes us, the grownups. Exposed, it responds to
the shudder of temporality with which we assault the landscape. Here we wake up
and partake of the morning repast of youth. Things perceive us; their gaze
propels us into the future, since we do not respond to them but instead step
among them. Around us is the landscape where we rejected their appeal.
Spirituality's thousand cries of glee storm around the landscape -- so with a
smile the diary sends a single thought in their direction. Permeated by time,
the landscape breathes before us, deeply stirred. We are safe in each other's
care, the landscape and I. We plunge from nakedness to nakedness. Gathered
together, we come to ourselves."
-Walter Benjamin, from "The Metaphysics of Youth", Part II. Saturday - July 29, 2006si."These are the warm-west-wing, dream-fog,
leafing-out, willowy, haze
days."
-Thoreau. Friday - June 02, 2006CredoI intend to confuse
things,
to
unite them, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling. ------------------- Yo pienso confundir las cosas, unirlas y recien nacerlas, entreverarlas, desvestirlas, hasta que la luz del mundo tenga la unidad del oceano, una integridad generosa, una fragancia crepitante. -neruda. Sunday - May 07, 2006Falling in love with the Paris Review DNA project..."INTERVIEWER
Do you feel you're in command when you're writing? GINSBERG Sometimes I feel in command when I'm writing. When I'm in the heat of some truthful tears, yes. Then, complete command. Other times—most of the time not. Just diddling away, woodcarving, getting a pretty shape; like most of my poetry. There's only a few times when I reach a state of complete command. Probably a piece of Howl, a piece of Kaddish, and a piece of The Change. And one or two moments of other poems. INTERVIEWER By command do you mean a sense of the whole poem as it's going, rather than parts? GINSBERG No—a sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe. " Game, set, match. Brilliant, Allen, hysterically, characteristically you, and simply brilliant. Also, this interview with Saul Bellow is amazing. I wish I could excerpt from it. Friday - May 05, 2006SpeechlessThe absolute absurdity of the following statement
is sheerly stunning.
"I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free." - George Bush, last week. Our foreign policy is not based on facts, realities, or verifiable information. ??!!!!!!!$Rf#$GFGJIJG#IQUJ$E(I@#QU(#F$#WKQO$T@*(*%&*#(@)(@)!!!! .... Ahem. ..... Mr. Packer said it best, I think: "It seems that unless God himself gains entry to the West Wing and informs the President that the Iraqis' desire to be free is not the issue, a grandiose theology will continue to doom America and Iraq to a bloody stalemate." Hell in a handbasket, hell in a handbasket. A handbasket made out of corn sprayed by petrol fertilizer.* (Everyone immediately read this book. One of the most important books to read, as it lays out many of the truisms behind issues that are eminently pressing, relevent, and fundamental in our contemporary culture.) *See page 10, here, then buy and read the book. Friday - May 05, 2006Surveying myself UNTITLED
She undressed looking into my eyes like someone about to go swimming at dawn alone quiet heart attack Thirst is my water Some say the more you stray the more you’re saved, I wouldn’t be surprised Snow falling on my bedclothes Set the mind before the mirror of eternity and everything will work - Franz Wright. Wednesday - March 08, 2006quelques mots"I still, in presence of life ... have reactions --
as many as possible. ... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the
artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions
-- appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences
that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing -- and I
do. I
believe I shall do yet again -- it is still an act of
life."
-Henry James, to Henry Adams. Wednesday - February 01, 2006SOTUFiled, I should mention, under the WORDS category,
and not the ACTIONS category.
I so want to dissect it, bit by bit, and give you running commentary. But I'm swamped with work that I am really loving, so perhaps maybe some other time. I did think that Kaine did a hell of a job. That was the first Democratic response in 5 years that didn't elicit any of the following responses: ripping my hair out, booing, screaming, throwing my radio out the window, vociferously declaring my intention to start another party. So I guess, in relative terms, that is progress. Thursday - January 26, 2006Truism"Have patience with everything unresolved
in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked
rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some
day far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your
way into the answer."
- Ranier Maria Rilke Tuesday - January 17, 2006Tell Me Why,tell me why --
Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell? Sunday - January 01, 2006Brain, come back!Things I would have written had my brain not been
MIA:
This post and this post by Digby. And this one, too. In fact, Digby is just so dead-on, so succinct, so witty, and so attuned, that it's making me consider stopping writing, and just starting to quote whole sections of that blog on this one. I read that blog and it's like someone is reading my mind, but only doing a supremely better job of articulating everything. Perhaps if I stopped being such a wino... Anyway. Also, in other news, if John Ashcroft had some hesitation..... yikes. Yikes. Monday - December 26, 2005The Times, They are A Changin'Read another wonderful 200-plus-page chunk out of
what has quickly become my favorite political opus, Hendrik Hertzberg's
Politics: Observations and Arguments,
1966-2004. Pretty much every other
page is now annotated with my thoughts, comments, and notes of gorgeous bits of
his prose (my brain was on fire yesterday, it was
awesome.)
There is a lot to take in, mull over, and ponder, and I really hope that at some
point I'll have the time to share some (if not all) of my thoughts about what
I've read, but now is not that time. I will share this bit, though:
Pat Robertson, then candidate for the Republican Presidential Nomination debates, 1988: "The first thing we've got to do in America is get back to basics. And many of these things are not governmental solutions. We can't make through government husbands love their wives, or wives love their husbands, or families bring up their children as law-abiding, God-fearing citizens. That's got to be done in the private sector." Oh, really? Ahem, excuse me, Pat Robertson said what? (Hypocrite?) [Hertzberg wittily muses after referencing the above: "The 'private sector' is a curious way to evoke the security of the hearth. It sounds a bit like the plan is to contract out bedroom snooping to the business community. (Moralco, Inc.?)" So perhaps I'm taking it out of context, or conflating P.R.'s position (which I'm too lazy right now to look up his latest thoughts on) with George 43's ideas about legislation and programs that encourage marriage, etc. But essentially Robertson was making the point that the personal and private lives, not to mention the way people choose to raise their children, are none of the government's business. The whole "private sector" concept, is, as H.H. succinctly notes, troubling in a) its implications and/or b) a case of poor wording. But, anyway. Lost my other thought, so put in poor wording.] Moving on... Then-Vice-President George H.W. Bush: "One, I think it's a nutty idea to fool around with the Social Security system and run the risk of [hurting] the people who've been saving all their lives ... It may be a new idea, but it's a dumb one." Hm. Obviously this was 17 years ago, and numbers were different then, and the rapid speed of scientific progress since that time has altered the ability of people to live through more once-deadly diseases and operations, etc. -- and, not to forget the influx of immigrants -- but this "new idea" -- of altering Social Security -- if it was wacky then, is it still wacky now? Is it still a fringe conservative economic concept, that only seems to have more legitimacy because of the current Administration and its apparatchik drones that keep force feeding the same message into the machines broadcasting on loop, making the public think that this is a commonly accepted idea only because they've heard it repeated so many times? Interesting. Saturday - December 17, 2005AssinineBush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I've got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little. Hume: Shuffle. Bush: It looks like. Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models. Bush: Yes, the Shuffle. Hume: Called the Shuffle. Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle. Hume: So you -- it plays . . . Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on. Hume: So it plays them in a random order. Bush: Yes. Hume: So you don't know what you're going to going to get. Bush: No. Hume: But you know -- Bush: And if you don't like it, you have got your little advance button. It's pretty high-tech stuff. Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn't it? Bush: Oh? Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that's in your head -- gone. Bush: . . . it's a bad day, just say, get out of here. Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . . Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter ) Hume: Yes, right. Wednesday - December 14, 2005Perfect incisive omniscience."On further acquaintance with the modus operandi of
the Bush Administration, I've come to think that the attributions of a competent
criminal intelligence miss the point. They give credit where no credit is due,
and they fail to account for both the increasingly evident childishness of
American culture and the corollary attitudes of entitlement that over the last
thirty years have infected ever-larger sectors of the country's equestrian
class. President Bush and his friends bear comparison not to Jesse James or
Commodore Vanderbilt but to a clique of spoiled trust-fund kids. Certain of
their superiority by virtue of their wealth (whether derived from corporate
salary, family inheritance, or a sweetheart real estate investment), they fit
the profile of wised-up teenagers who don't want to hear it from anybody telling
them what to do -- which shoes to wear, how to behave in a dance club, when to
speak to the caddie or the French ambassador, why it might not be a good idea to
wreck the Social Security system, redirect the flow of the Missouri River, or
invade Iraq. Smug in their cynicism, proud of their selfishness, pre-Copernican
in the sense that they know it is the sun that revolves around them, not they
who revolve around the sun, fortune's children interpret corrections as insult,
amendments as impertinence -- old news,
uncool.
... It is with acts of vandalism that juvenile delinquents proclaim their manhood, and what else is the Bush Administration's record over the last five years if not a testimony to its talent for breaking things? ... ...the Bush Administration speaks for the kind of people who assign no value even to the idea of government, find no use for such a thing as an American res publica. Why should they? What's to learn? Everybody who is anybody in Houston or Palm Beach knows that government is a trailer park for deadbeats who can't afford to hire their own servants, furnish their own police protection, hire cheap Chinese labor, pay their taxes in Bermuda. Government is worth owning for the same reasons that one might own a gambling casino or a brothel, a financially rewarding enterprise staffed with quick-witted pimps and can-do waiters. If government is undeserving of respect, worthless except as a means of money-laundering, then why go to the trouble of hiring well-qualified people to collect the taxes and sit in the chairs? What needs to be done that can't be done by one's college roommate, tennis partner, brother-in-law, former secretary, personal lawyer, or golfing buddy? Adults spoil the fun. They remind the young heirs that government is a matter of long-term maintenance, a learning how to see, know, and care for other people. The lesson follows from the recognition that the national security doesn't consist in a handsome collection of military uniforms but in the heath, well-being, and intelligence of a democratic citizenry. The jeunesse dorre don't stoop to maintenance; they find it tedious and boring, not glamorous, apt to take time away from thinking about one's hair. Adults also give offense by not picking up on the importance of teenage loyalties (in the club or out, with us or against us); also by reason of their sometimes trying to tell the truth, which in the Bush Administration is a cause for summary dismissal... Understand "government" as a synonym for "adult," and what we have now in Washington is the sovereignty of the state in the careless and resentful grasp of teenage anarchists. The historical precedents are legion, among them the reign of the adolescent Roman Emperor Nero; more often than not the story doesn't lead to a happy or romantic ending, but maybe I'm unduly pessimistic, and possibly what we have before us is the dawn of a new golden age. If so, at least some of the credit is deserved by all the good people in the fashion, news, banking, and entertainment industries who have made America great. If Vice President Cheney and his business associates don't know how to think or read, they owe their peace of mind to an educational system that teaches by television clip and film montage; if President Bush and his companions in arms delight in all things shallow, derivative, and dumb, they take their sense of ease and comfort from the assurances of a consumer market and a popular culture that place a high value on those qualities." Excerpted from Lewis Lapham's "Editor's Notebook", Harper's Magazine, December 2005. Tuesday - December 13, 2005Ridiculous Statement of the WeekPresident Bush:
"There's an important debate going on in our
nation's capital about Iraq," he said last week at the Council on Foreign
Relations, "and the fact that we can debate these issues openly in the midst of
a dangerous war brings credit to our democracy."
Um, I'm sorry. Debate? I've been debating you and your
administration quite literally in my dreams for the last four years. Because
there was no chance of a debate in any other forum in our culture. Not the
media, not Congress, not your Administration, not ANYWHERE. The war was
pre-determined, and thus not subject to debate.
I think, personally, that MAYBE we should have had
this debate BEFORE we went to war, not after. Fundamentally, THAT is what
undermines our troops. Not having a post-war reconstruction plan, IE phase IV in
standard military war planning protocol? THAT undermines troops. Not Democratic
resistance. DON'T YOU DARE try and accuse critics of being sissies. Ignorance
and hubris are more sissy-like characters in my book. Great leaders, and great
military leaders, put their people and their soldiers first and take all
possible options into consideration. So screw you guys for attempting to imply
that I, like other liberal-leaning or war-critiquing people are to blame.
(Especially after my multiple earlier thoughts here.) If you were
such experts at the Middle East (ahem, Wolfowitz) and you had actually done a
proper analysis of Islamist politics and the ways in which terrorist groups have
operated and evolved, than MAYBE we wouldn't have bungled this so badly.
ARGGGGGHHHH
This, and I just watched the "Very Beazley Christmas
Story" on the White House website. I was almost starting to warm up to
you guys. And then you had to drop that disgusting -- not to mention doctored -- web
ad. Disgusting.
You know, I really try, I try so hard to accommodate.
But I really can't get anywhere when they act like such petulant 5-year-old
schoolyard bullies. In this situation, they are totally the the nasty fat kids
who pelt you with dodgeballs and wag their tongues at you.
Tuesday - December 13, 2005Wish list.As if I didn't have enough books to read and finish
already...
For the record, here is my current book Wish List (as noted by Bookpedia.) I can't say it's been updated to fully reflect the extent of my wishes -- there are a few books from the Times Notable 100 books of the year that I've been meaning to throw up here -- but I'll get around to that later. As it stands now, though: Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag Illuminations Walter Benjamin Reflections Walter Benjamin Ask the Dust John Fante A Woman Kneeling in the Big City Elizabeth Macklin Understanding Jihad David Cook The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global Fawaz A. Gerges Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus Rick Perlstein The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America George H. Nash Leo Strauss and the American Right Shadia B. Drury The Working Poor: Invisible in America David K. Shipler Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else David Cay Johnston Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism Susan Jacoby Updates surely to come. Thursday - December 01, 2005Mmm.There is a vitality, a life force, a
quickening
That is translated through you into action And because there is only one of you in all time This expression is unique. If you block it It will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; Nor how valuable it is; Nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, To keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, A blessed unrest that keeps us marching And makes us more alive than the others. --Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille Monday - November 28, 2005Getting it Done.Of course, Republicans have their own
brand of pragmatic-minded governors with crossover appeal, among them Mike
Huckabee of Arkansas, and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, both of whom may run for
president as well. "The key seems to be effective governing and problem solving
instead of party," said Mr. Huckabee. (NYT article.)
Yeah, because I like to put people in office who ride into office on crap innuendo and pay them to do nothing except spout propaganda and be a puppet demagogue. I won't go on about Huckabee now. But why is pragmatism so scorned by politicians? I really think that is what America needs -- leadership, down middle of the road. To fix this divide, and to fix the problems in this country. Somebody please turn off the microphones of the extremists, on both sides. Mr. Bush, I'd even think of looking to you, if I had any indication that your judgement was sound, and open to new ideas. Unfortunately, he still seems to inhabit (scroll down towards bottom) an entirely mystical, fanciful world, as he has for some time now (article from over a year ago.) |