BERNEVAL

In the mid 1980s… Kingston Customs House

Canada Customs was seizing gay porn and writing that depicted anal intercourse. The issue was raised with some urgency as sexually explicit material was necessary for spreading the word about safe sex.

Yours truly created some erotica and invited the public to judge the case against censorship. The words are now available (materials in the adjoining entry unlocked with the password “stanza”)

https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/2012/06/26/canada-customs-protest-materials/

What began as protest lives on as celebration.

And so for day 2022
26.06.2012

Miriam Nichols Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside

This critique of empiricism ultimately derives from Immanuel Kant. In the Kantian tradition, the things of perception are organized by a priori categories of understanding. These are categories that are innate to the human mind are not derived from experience. In Kant’s account of the transcendental field, the categories are quantity (unity, plurality, totality); quality (reality, negation, limitation); relation (substance, cause, community); and modality (possibility, existence, necessity). Modern philosophies or psychologies that emphasize the mediating role of language or sexuality on perception are indebted to Kant, however much they revise Kant’s arguments.

[How do modality (possibility, existence, necessity) relate to relation (substance, cause, community)?]

And so for day 2021
25.06.2012

Karin Cope

Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live With Gertrude Stein

For when I began really to understand something about Gertrude Stein and her difficult words, I was not contemplating the example of Stein so much as acting it out. And in this acting, I began to ask why most of the crucial domains of our lives, those never simply discursive or critical, and always highly affective domains of passion appetite, self-esteem, sorrow, relatedness, pleasure, fabulation, love, movement, memory, touch, dreaming, fear, sensory delight — those domains from and in which what we do takes its weight and value — have, for the most part, fallen from the capacities of what we tend to consider properly critical address.

Note how fabulation is located between pleasure and love. And love is between fabulation and movement.

And so for day 2017
21.06.2012

Towards the end of How I Read Gertrude Stein Lew Welch shares this realization:

Stein has everywhere stated that she “hears” speech rhythms, and I have only recently been able to do so. It is a very exciting thing to be able to do, and to be able to do it one has to be able to listen to “meanings” and “rhythms” as if they were two separate things.

It is almost impossible to do this if one simply sets out to learn it. I tried to just learn to do it, and found that I could not do both at once. I was left staring after a question was asked me, simply because I did not hear the question, I only heard the rhythm and the rising inflection that indicated to me that a question had been asked. So I stopped trying. But suddenly one day I found that I was doing it quite naturally because I had been reading so much of Stein.

Setting out. Taking it. Setting out.

And so for day 2015
19.06.2012