The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.
Translated by Robert Hass
Kobayashi Issa
Sickness on sickness on sickness on sickness, weakness on weakness, one hospital stay slotting neatly behind another, each documented and, seemingly, endured with impossible good cheer.
and me, mad, mad, mad at the end of it all.
pushed his tireless experiments to the point where nothing is left of the old pictorial world
You are indefatigable fabricators of Boredom.
Possessions will be collective and have a swiftness of self-destruction.
We are poor and it doesn't matter, our poverty is our strength.
When you’re in silent hill and you’re dumb thick and the monsters find you by the sound of your ass cheeks clapping every time you take a step
Good morning.. let’s get this bread
The most pressing political question of the day is how the proletariat can extract itself from the farrago of mind bending psychological assaults which will be passed off as 'celebrating' the millennium. The function of this great spectacle, which the bourgeoisie has already been preparing for some time, is nothing short of bolstering their regime in the face of fresh working class onslaughts which will mark the next ten years.
By staging an event which is to be 'enjoyed by all' they hope to restore the bonds which link the wage slave to the boss, the disenchanted youth with the battery of social workers, cops and teachers who police them, and to reintegrate the pseudo-rebels into mainstream culture.
boredom has been affirmed as a source of invention. The microscopic, the private, the banal, and the apolitical have proven unexpectedly fertile.
A critique of dead time meant simultaneously a determination of “living” as desiring, creating, and enjoying. That is, politics would be desire’s programme.
Sade’s famous treatise framed by Philosophy in the Bedroom, liberty is determined as the self-annihilating submission to desire’s nightmarish imperatives
But the concepts of sex and desire have in common a certain affinity to the surrealist kind of liberty, a certain fullness of life, a certain vitalism of the unconscious, and, relatedly, a certain danger.
“Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.” He contrasts boredom to “[love’s] intensity, its here-and-nowness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its eager acceptance of precariousness, of change: everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world.” Such praise of resilience in emotional fluidity, such injunction to “eagerly accept precariousness,” would raise eyebrows in 2009-2011.
both impossible and unappealing. Something else is demanded. The young opposition to austerity is, therefore, “avant-garde.” So is the formlessness of occupant life, which combines precarity and care, testing a third way between the stale old “good life” and the cold new freedoms.
Sadness, like boredom, articulates onto time and work.
Comfortable precarity, whether supported by lucky sectors like tech and tutoring or by family provision, has even been extremely productive and successful. At the same time it is very conducive to depression. Generally the two responses to this depression follow the paradigms of the talking cure or of ergotherapy, depending, inter alia, on how discursively disposed the kid is.
W. R. Bion on Melanie Klein: the group is the mother’s body.
Anzieu’s The Group and the Unconscious
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Shklovsky’s 1917 essay “Art as Technique”
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s Creativity and Perversion (1984)
Didier Anzieu’s The Skin-Ego, available in a new translation by Naomi Segal
Taine's L'lntelligence
Michael Chabon
Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin
Book by Michael Pollan
not this - the first item of business was to disabuse students of the naive notion that literature is about life, that books refer to reality, that they have something to do with experience
“I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.”
15. I realized that one can live on anger.
16. I realized that one can live on indifference.
35. I learned to “plan” my life one day ahead, no more.
44. I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long period of amortization.
Under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers.
To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an eternal festival.
capitalism had turned all relationships transactional, and that life had been reduced to a "spectacle"
Marx's view of alienation
The worker is alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world: The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world becomes foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products....
The increasing division of labor and specialization have transformed work into meaningless drudgery
Having long been treated with the utmost contempt as a producer, the worker is now lavishly courted and seduced as a consumer.
while modern technology has ended natural alienation (the struggle for survival against nature), social alienation in the form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has continued. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects
"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation," Vaneigem asks, "entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now
in place of petrified life, they sought the _derive_ (with its flow of acts and encounters) and _detournement_ (rerouting events and images).
gestures of refusal were considered signs of creativity
Pseudo-needs would be replaced by real desires
the love of free play, characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles
nervous and compliant
define constantly their specificity and justify their image vis-a-vis powerful foreign models
unceasingly modernises his greeds
we must today deride utopias that at other times were fruitful
I left Paris this evening with the intention of passing around 3-4 months in Cannes to recover from a certain physio-moral exhaustion to which all the experiences of the recent past have led me.
Guy Debord, Situationsim, Psychogeography
René Descartes (1596–1650). Discourse on Method
My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I was able, and not to adhere less steadfastly to the most doubtful opinions, when once adopted, than if they had been highly certain; imitating in this the example of travellers who, when they have lost their way in a forest, ought not to wander from side to side, far less remain in one place, but proceed constantly towards the same side in as straight a line as possible, without changing their direction for slight reasons, although perhaps it might be chance alone which at first determined the selection; for in this way, if they do not exactly reach the point they desire, they will come at least in the end to some place that will probably be preferable to the middle of a forest. In the same way, since in action it frequently happens that no delay is permissible, it is very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to act according to what is most probable; and even although we should not remark a greater probability in one opinion than in another, we ought notwithstanding to choose one or the other, and afterwards consider it, in so far as it relates to practice, as no longer dubious, but manifestly true and certain, since the reason by which our choice has been determined is itself possessed of these qualities. This principle was sufficient thenceforward to rid me of all those repentings and pangs of remorse that usually disturb the consciences of such feeble and uncertain minds as, destitute of any clear and determinate principle of choice, allow themselves one day to adopt a course of action as the best, which they abandon the next, as the opposite.
le corbusier - houses are machines for living - 's indifference to local context, geography, history
contemporary city - centerpiece - 66 story skyscraper within large rectangular lawns - airport on top of the structure - radiant city
(leave le corbusier's style to him, suitable for factory's, hospitals, prisons. squashing people under re-inforced concrete. a noble material that can surpass the gothic style... the idea of immediate suicide. destroying the last reminants of joy)
(given the context, compartive to what was built at that time in Paris' suburbs, the architecture is much more interesting)
(de-humanising and homogenising, glorified the automobile)
la derive - when to destroy your own personal mental structure (alcohol, drugs etc.) to be totally open to the envinronment to allow yourself to make encounters with people you would otherwise not speak to or relate to in order to allow into your life things which would otherwise not happen. at the origin of a better understanding of modern society. the outside as an influence on our psyche - you develop whether you want or not a certain flow of ideas, emotion, sensibility. to build psychogeographical maps of Paris. one side completely objective and relating to different areas of the city, but moving from one street to another one is a different atmosphere and this was transferred onto a map
Visit London, Paris with maps from 100 years ago, reconfiguring the walk to allow new encounters
Being on the road in the US- a well represented genre
Baudlaire- le flaneur- the phsychic life of the city through encounters with strangers
the city belonging to the pedestrians vs cars - cars are so numerous today that they create completely different cities, people used to burn cars and have a sense of releaf
festival better than spectacle (passive consumption)
debord - lacks the call for an absolute revolution
slowness, heaviness, vagueness - artistic and even existential over quickness, lightness, exactitude
case for heaviness
age with a medusa head (calvino) vs age that exalts light, quick - aerial vectors of information everything so light and fast/ the world is not threatened by the weight of reality but by the unreality of the virtual and the indirectness of the screen, two-dimensional escapism, nanotechnology/genetics/neuroscience further miniaturising and rareifying the real
dante poet of weight - everything acquires consistency and stability and the weight of things is established
dante descends to the center of the earth where all the weight of the earth connects. he must pass through the center to get out of hell. weight is, in some sense, the essence of inferno. dante overcomes the weight of sin at the beginning of his journey, and purges seven deadly sins on his climb to Eden. he is ready now to follow his bliss. eden (forest with dense canopy of leaves)
constant base note – bordone/drone (deepest note of bagpipe)
wagner’s overture - 1 harmony 1 chord – d flat major - for 4 minutes – elemental timelessness of nature – geo-constancy of a primeval earth in all its placidity – the sound of earth’s apriority – the primordial drone of the planet
Samuel barber adagio for strings - accents of tension – suspension over the bar lines – allowing dissonance to form, momentarily dissolve and then to form again – a molten foundation, heavy but not stable – the heaviest and densest materials exist in the earth’s molten core, not the surface - sound of longing, the still point of the turning world (TS Elliott)
Lightness can wisp away into nothing
Black cat by gentle giant - Light footedness – baseline consisting mostly of rhythm with 7/4 scale – lyrics and music create vivid vision of sinuous prowling cat – calvino says nothing about music in his visibility memo – scrambled time signature, abandoned baseline, levitates whimsically in a way calvino would have applauded, light, precise, quick and various – interlude is interesting in experimentations but lacking existential weight and consistency
Calvino’s 6 memos are mostly a-posteriori – they pre-suppose the primacy of their opposites. Lightness comes to its own only thanks to heaviness. There is no levity without gravity but there can be gravity without levity. Heaviness without lightness can be sublime, metrical and even foundational.
Another brick in the wall - Tonic d note repeated – keeps everything close – relentless insistence on the same note makes any departure from the home key dramatic and deviant – return to the tonic is almost a law of nature – young father who crosses the ocean to never come home again but the song stubbornly remains at the home key
Foundation of all rhythm – pulse of our blood
water - present implicitly in our heartbeats - physics of breaking waves - generation / growth / breaking - rhythm of seas into sentences, moby dick
things only literature can give us by means specific to it
the subtraction of weight - from people, from cities, from language
entire world turning into stone – sparing no aspect of life
no one can escape the stare of medusa – perseus, the only hero able to cut of medusa’s head – looks at her reflection in his shield rather than looking at her directly, avoiding petrification
fixes gaze on only what can be revealed by indirect vision – perseus, rather than escape reality, overcomes heaviness by indirect means – perseus’ strength is to not look at reality directly
Ovid – wrote the metamorphosis - Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world
Guido Cavalcanti lightness (walking in a graveyard and is approached by brigade of upper-class Florentines on their horses who are resentful of him because Guido refuses to socialise with them. Gentlemen you may say anything you wish to me in your own home, then resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble he leaped over it and landing on the other side made off and rid himself of them – the sudden, agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world) vs Dante
Light, silent movement on both – here the resemblance ends:
Guido – and white snow falling without wind (and puts the snow on the same level as the other visions that proceed and follow, unaware of consistency only its affects - dominated by resemblance of a place in the Alps, mountainous landscape.)
Dante (inferno 14) – as snow falls in the mountains without wind (as encloses the entire scene in the frame of a metaphor, a concrete reality of its own – weight of things are established - adjective white dissolves the landscape into an atmosphere of suspended abstraction
Chariot made of empty hazelnut
listening to each house you enter,
like the limbs of a single tree
the quality of the Russian soul
daunting set of arbitraryrules and self-imposed constraints that stipulate the text's raw materials catch the writer up in what strikes one as a neurotic net, an intricate artifice that stretches his intelligence to its ludic limits.
generates a distinctive texture; by a kind of exfoliation, from a text determined by these lists and plans there emerges a visceral feeling for the little things in life.
terminological exactitude
he’ll simply have learned a new way of doing an old trick
emotional non-ambiguity
Nurturing a yen for solitariness
deliciously strange feeling that time is nothing, or is my friend rather than my enemy
i think i was sent pictures of that meeting!!! I bumped into Angelika once in notting hill which is (apparently) where we both live but we never could reconvene! i've spent so much of this year in mexico, argentina and now ended up in uruguay (for work, it's fun). being away so much gives me cyclical thoughts on whether i actually need/want anything london has to offer - which is a stupid thought, i need to better specify what my problem is, but i never can so your quiz was slightly theraputic- i am surrounded by driven people with low consciousness (especially in london): very very interesting. i think i'm too detached from it to make it personal but can never be sure of the day i'll become a dumbfuck
move back to a more comfortable place
''one's eyes are situated next to one's ears''
negotiate love negotiate dance
working against your better judgement
time to hide, learn how to give in, what is the constant effort?
loneliness creating beauty
could not remember why I'm here why I left what the big deal was
do you expect to go places physically but not mentally?
exposing oneself and saying the truth does not evaporate the mystery
the sense of time and pleasure
“UNLESS THE WORK OF ART has wholly exhausted its maker’s attention, it fails This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding. the nature of things rather than, as science does, the “mechanics of everything.”experimental writer Donald Barthelme once greeting Davenport at an award ceremony with “I read you in hardback.”the suppression of desire ruined civilization. In compiling his final book, The Death of Picasso, Davenport drew largely from his stories reflecting Fourier’s ideas. Characters in several of them seek ways to invent their lives as they see fit, just as he sought to do with his imagination.For without desire, the imagination would atrophy,” he wrote in the essay “Eros, His Intelligence.”preferring regularity to turbulence, habit to risk, prejudice to reason, sameness to variety
Why should communication between cultures be harder than it was when pilgrims, crusaders, nomads, merchants crossed Africa Asia and Europe. One answer is given by Angel Rama ‘while European writers could address their audiences without worrying about the marginal readers outside Europe, writers from other regions of the world continue to yearn for European readers and regard their reading as the true and authorizing one. Two factors arise here: one is the readiness of the colonized not only to submit passively but to participate actively in the communicative structures. The second is the root of this colonized mentality in the communicative structures that ensure the imbalance of cultures. Dialogue can only occur between equals. In a command structure, communication is limited to the confirmation that an order has been understood and carried out, or seeking out approval for initiatives designed to please the colonial power. There is an anthropological limit on true dialogue, and circumscribing factor is the imbalance in cultural power.
Nationhood is an export of European modernity.
The old colonial powers retain their strategic position through what can be isolated as a monopoly on communication: wealth accumulates neither in the home country of a transnational corporation, nor at the sites of manufacture which may be scattered across the globe, but at the centres where technologists and managers govern research and development.
Why do cities play such a vital role in contemporary capitalism, when the global economy is so powerfully based in communications networks? Economic power operates by blocking communication flows: by creating nodes through which the flows of human intercourse are forced to pass, and in which they can be mined for profit. Money is not a very complex mode of communication, but it does communicate.
The same cities that govern the stock exchanges govern art exchanges. Each attempts to cling to a fading uniqueness in the guise of national art, even while, by the nature of the information economy, each becomes more like the others. The effect of this is not to produce distinctive forms of art, but to encourage even further the development of a transnational class, equally at home in any world city, and recognising one another by their shared taste in an increasingly homogeneous world art.
Differential racism: the new racism operates not so much by binary oppositions between colonizer and colonized, the strategy of the older, biological racism, but by inclusion. This ‘hatred born in proximity’ proper to a world of massive migration ensures that racial exclusion arises generally as a result of differential inclusion. Never as a result of nature but always as a difference of degree… the old racism saw exclusion as necessary and absolute, the new abandons this universalism in favour of inclusions. In the new Europe, ‘we’ are all Europeans, but the old Europeans continue to occupy the centre stage exclusively.
Art that demonstrates unredeemable cultural difference is of the highest value, since it undergirds the fundamental argument of neo-racism: that there exist cultural differences that cannot be overturned, differences that provide ideological and discursive explanations for the continuation of white dominance.
The popularity of long-haul destinations speaks of an increasing desire for the exotic as counterbalance to the increasing homogeneity of the metropolitan centres. Postmodern theory understands long-haul tourism, in some respects the vanguard of expanding capitalism, as the result of the lure of an authenticity which is no longer available in the post industrialized, overdeveloped areas of the world, sunk as they are into societies of spectacle and simulation.
The consumption of the Other, in material, intellectual, spiritual forms, has become a hallmark of postmodern times. World art, like world music, heralds a sentimentality among the powerful, an enjoyment without responsibility, and a false nostalgia for a mythologized state of cultural innocence which never prevailed in the West and does not in the poor regions of the present day. The sentimentalist cult of authenticity, that bogus respect for the cultures of others, permits, indeed demands, the policing of traditions and the preservation of ways of life to supply a stream of novelty entertainments for the elite.
Creating work which does not finally take the shape of a commodity
Task of remaining true to themselves while refusing the imposed signification of tradition, typicality and authenticity; of making work that can communicate, or in some way be habitable across the world, without thereby becoming proof of the inclusiveness of neo-liberal globalization programmes.
What art does is mediate. Art’s promise of a different mode of relationship between people is constantly broken by the intervention of an institutional organization that presumes to know, in advance, what is being communicated, by whom and to whom. By reconstructing mediation as a transmission of meaning, authenticity or exoticism from A to B, the art institution diminishes the utopian potential of art.
Though the politics of the World Trade Organisation is based in the free flow of goods and controlled flow of people, the barriers to migration and travel are lifted for the transnational executive.
Every difference is an opportunity for trade, but trade in the conditions that obtain under globalization is never the communicative trade of the ancient bazaar. It is instead, an opportunity to extract profit, most typically not by either buying or selling but by lending, supplying and controlling the medium in which the trade occurs. As finance capital overtakes production, so the contemporary art institution, as it were, dematerializes art. The accommodation of conceptualism into the institution is remarkable.
The city that I believed was my past, is my future, my present; the years I have spent in Europe are an illusion, I always was (and will be) in
important places?
distinguish cities as the location of events in the past, present, or future
if there will always remain, enough for me to immerse myself in
admiring some random square of parquet floor
I was suddenly worth the trouble
the woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love.
This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention.
None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching.
events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events.
clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog's life.
By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.
M. Paul Valery recently suggested that an anthology be compiled in which the largest possible number of opening passages from novels be offered
the only discretionary power left me is to close the book,
The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense.
the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.
have too unstable a notion of the continuity of life to equate or compare my moments of depression or weakness with my best moments.
Where we really find them again is at the point at which Stendhal has lost them.
Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night.
what is deep time?
what does deep time do to a building?
buildings are vulnerable
if you can't put things safely into buildings, where can you put them? underground?
you need absolutely the right mountain
a desert mountain
America's loneliest highway us50
pilgrimage to get to it
7 stages of a mythic adventure – starts with the image of a goal – embarkation (ordinary life > pilgrim) – labyrinth (disorientated, scared) – draw – payoff – secret payoff (a great journey) – return to ordinary world so you have time to assimilate what you’ve learnt – memento (souvenir)
how do you study a mountain? What are the elements that will most affect your ideas and decisions?
Longevity under adversity – as a design principle
Competent rock
Mountains specialise in interesting weather
Make the clock inaccessable
As you gain elevation, your iq goes down
Estimate altitude by how much math he can’t do in his head
3 design domains- experience of / in / from mountain
"his land is fertile and karma is quik"
they threw this (flower) down to me and now I am in full bloom
"f ou dont know ow you did, ou can always heck on what ou got"
Etesian winds, blowing in summer, prevented the Nile waters from discharging into the Mediterranean sea - No river called Ocean
Reason informs us - The last Great Mogul died, the usual civil war followed
Proving to be as persuasive an ideological argument as any other
Global weather - A fruit of every climate
The line – liberating as well as confining
Care - suffering must be alleviated
Care – a way to feel for and with each other
the logic of care was no longer valid
An audience – to think with is never a given
The lie - at the centre of everything
To be - not fully human and survive
Hold – your own weight
When you – start measuring somebody, measure them right, child
Redundant or even disabled
emotionally non-ambiguous - I have a lump in my left testicle