These were slides that periodically projected onto the wall of our house. Magic lantern show. But also upon retrospect all these years later: an oft repeated object lesson in sharing.
3 candles
Sharing the slices
Thanks to my sister who digitalized the fragile slides.
And so for day 2180
01.12.2012
Making Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights a “she” reveals some of the presuppositions that structure the novel. The question arises: who follows whom where?
This calls to mind another occasion.
Ti-Grace Atkinson opens a speech she gave “On ‘Violence in the Women’s Movement'” (in Amazon Odyssey) with such gender unsettlement to make a point about allegiance.
I am dedicating my remarks tonight on violence to Sister Joseph Colombo. I am referring to America’s latest superstar, gangster, criminal: Joseph Colombo. You may have heard about how Superstar Colombo not content with his vertical media image, backed his head up into three bullets at Columbus Circle on June 28, 1971.
She at one point in her remarks tapped a picture to the podium.
In the book the photograph covers a whole page.
It is of course a provocation. Clear-eyed. Her peroration appears in all caps and rehearses the “sister” trope.
LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF DIANA OUGHTON. LONG LIVE ANGELA DAVIS. LONG LIVE BERNADINE DOHRN. LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF VICTORIA WOODHULL. LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF THE VALERIE SOLANAS OF THE SCUM MANIFESTO. LONG LIVE THE STUBBORNNESS OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. LONG LIVE BIG MAMA FLORYNCE KENNEDY. LONG LIVE SISTER MARK RUDD. LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF JONATHAN JACKSON. LONG LIVE THE SPIRITS, AND THE HOPES, AND THE BODIES OF ALL THE BEAUTIFUL, REVOLUTIONARY, FOOL, CRIMINALS, WHO ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO FIGHT FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF A HUMAN SPIRIT. LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF SISTER JOSEPH COLOMBO, AND HIS BODY. IF ITS CONDITION MEETS HIS TERMS, HE HAS PAID HIS DUES, AND TOO MUCH OF OURS BESIDES.
May we, the women here, make a Revolution.
Beautiful, revolutionary, fool, criminals … <– note the order and how it segues into the invocation of Colombo. Criminal fool. Beautiful revolutionary. He/she.
We know where. TO FIGHT FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF A HUMAN SPIRIT
Who follows?
And so for day 2179
30.11.2012
Best single line I’ve seen in a while.
Don McKay. “Chickadee Encounter” in Apparatus
zippers, quicklings,
Darn smart all by itself and very intelligent in its context of the poem’s conclusion that it triggers…
[…]
zippers, quicklings,
may you inherit earth, may you
perch at the edge of the shipwreck of state,
on the scragged uneconomical alders,
and chat.
Makes you want to join the party.
And so for day 2178
29.11.2012
This is a little mnemonic to be mindful of critique even while working in the state apparatus.
KNOWLEDGE WORKERS …
EXPLORE: Ferret Out Information
IMPLORE: Foster a Culture of the Question
Gives new/old meaning to the term “collaboration”.
And so for day 2177
28.11.2012
Death of a Revolutionary
By Susan Faludi
The New Yorker
The ending is about the funeral rites for Shulamith Firestone
Firestone was buried, in a traditional Orthodox funeral, in a Long Island cemetery, where her maternal grandparents are interred. Ten male relatives made up a minyan. None of her feminist comrades were invited. “At the end of the day, the old-time religion asserted itself,” Tirzah said. Ezra [her brother] gave a eulogy. He lives in Brooklyn, where he works as an insurance salesman, but he hadn’t spoken to Shulamith in years, and he broke down several times as he told how she, more than anyone else in the family, had tended to him as a child and taught him compassion. He recalled a story she told him when he was a boy, about a man on a train who realized that he had dropped a glove on the platform and, as the train left the station, dropped the other glove from the window, so that someone could have a pair. Then he lamented Shulamith’s “tragic” failure to make a “good marriage” and have children “who would be devoted to her.”
When [her sister] Tirzah’s turn came to give a eulogy, she addressed Ezra. “I said to him, ‘Excuse me, but with all due respect, Shulie was a model for Jewish women and girls everywhere, for women and girls everywhere. She had children—she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.’ ”
“even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” — Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History
Faith Wilding Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?
“Feminism” (or more properly, “feminisms”) has been understood as a historical–and contemporary–transnational movement for justice and freedom for women, which depends on women’s activist participation in networked local, national, and international groups (8). It focuses on the material, political, emotional, sexual, and psychic conditions arising from women’s differentialized social construction and gender roles.
(8) Using the term “feminism” is very different from using the term “women”–although perhaps one should consider using the term “cyberwomanism,” which acknowledges the critique of racist white feminism so justly made by Audrey Lorde, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and others.
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
Children, then, are not freer than adults. They are burdened by a wish fantasy in direct proportion to the restraints of their narrow lives; with an unpleasant sense of their own physical inadequacy and ridiculousness; with constant shame about their dependence, economic and otherwise (“Mother, may I?”); and humiliation concerning their natural ignorance of practical affairs. Children are repressed at every waking minute. Childhood is hell.
Go read the whole book. Don’t take my word for it.
And so for day 2176
27.11.2012
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Am I a Digital Humanist? Confessions of a Neoliberal Tool
“To the scholarly mind, every [sic] smallest datum of that inheritance has a right to make its call.” In this McGann seems to follow Edward Said, who in Humanism and Democratic Criticism glosses Giambattista Vico’s famous verum factum principle — Vico is a touchstone for McGann too — as something like “We can really only know what we make” and “To know is to know how a thing is made, to see it from the point of view of its human maker.” This ethos — and the commitment to the arts of memory — has become, as UVA’s Richard Rorty was wont to say, a part of my final vocabulary. I believe it is true, in so far as anything in this world is true, whatever epistemic frames might be thrown around it notwithstanding. It’s not that either the scholar’s art or the verum factum are sufficient on their own — there are all sorts of considerations and contexts we want and need to bring bear — but this is where I start from. If it falls suspect to an ideological litmus test, if the space it opens for resistance or critique is insufficiently pure, then that’s it; I’ve got nothing left; I’m out of “moves.” Better scholars and better players of the game than I have left it all on the field at that point. I’m off to go take a shower.
Or else I could just tell you a story.
I like the shift to simply telling a story which of course is another type of making.
And so for day 2175
26.11.2012
The non sequitur operates less like the lone tender shoot in a vase than a klang.
The struggle of the tree to overcome the relentless forces of the environment can be found in its every fibre. Its fight for life, staged over the centuries, is clear in the grains and the knots, in the branches that have striven to catch the energy from the sun and the roots that have sought food and stability in the soil. There are trees with gnarly barks and unique shapes that represent some of nature’s most engaging sculptures, for they are the perfection of imperfection.
Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: the Japanese Art of Impermanence
The “perfection of imperfection” phrase is a blight. A meaningless paradox (which is perhaps the source of its meaning).
perfection: etymology – from the Latin – to complete
As such the paradox rests at the terminus of the paragraph, an apt situation. However the completion theme is discordant because of the invocation of the cycle of nature prior to its concluding appearance:
The tree grows from a seed and will eventually, move the course of a few hundred years, reach the end of its life and then return to the soil where its decay will sustain other trees. The struggle of the tree […]
Apotheosis of the aesthetic object doesn’t quite work in this setting. Perfection and completion remain but way stations. Of interest, passing.
And so for day 2174
25.11.2012
Quentin Crisp
Manners from Heaven
So if you are determined to speak evil of people you must do so behind their backs. You just have to hope that what you say isn’t reported. In any case the breach of manners then passes to the person who repeats what you have said.
Interesting attribution of responsibility.
Now don’t tell.
And so for day 2173
24.11.2012
Tour de force. Forceful turn.
Gillian Sze
“Sound No 5”
Panicle
Humans, too, imitated the frogs — koa koa! — and begin to ask questions, Quoi? Quoi? We turned to each other and hands groped, demanded, Que sexe est? or Qu’est-ce que c’est? Years and years, the room croaked without tails or answers. Even now everyone is still screaming up into the black air — What! Now and then, a game of echo. Now and then, a new sound.
Puts me in mind of another homophonic treatment: aid loan = alone
Unique, eh!
And so for day 2172
23.11.2012
Quentin Crisp
Manners from Heaven
People are more likely to forgive you for uttering expletives under stress than for decorating an ordinary conversation with obscenities. A steady diet of the shortest-words-for-the-longest-things is never a very good idea for you may give offence, which is bad manners, and you will certainly make your conversation monotonous, which is bad style.
The occasional F*bomb is forgiven.
And so for day 2171
22.11.2012
