La demora

Apparently, apart from being a wonderful human being, my UBA practico professor, Carlos Battilana, is also a poet :

(credit Male)

Colonia

Los plásticos
cubren la casa:
el viento trabaja
a mi favor. Veo
por pequeños orificios
retazos de la ciudad.
Me han contado
amorosamente
antiguas historias romanas
y les he creído;
sin embargo
sólo comprendo lo que miro:
un muro raído, el recorte
de algo oscuro y profundo,
y los autos, incesantes,
en torno.

Urbanization in the 21st Century

"...one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising on Craiglist for families with school-aged children."

Article
Video

The Doldrums

"This cheerless sea between them, and the calmness of the weather whose only purpose seems to be to allow evil forces to gather fresh strength, are the last mystical barriers between to regions so diametrically opposed to each other through different conditions that the first people to become aware of the fact could not believe that they were equally human. A continent barely touched by man lay exposed to men whose greed could no longer be satisfied by their own continent. Everything would be called into question by this second sin: God, morality, and law. In simultaneous yet contradictory fashion, everything would be verified in practice and revoked in principle: the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age of antiquity, the Fountain of Youth, Atlantis, the Hesperides, the Islands of the Blessed, would be found to be true; but revelation, salvation, customs, and law would be challenged by the spectacle of a purer, happier race of men (who, of course, were not really purer or happier, although a deep-seated remorse made them appear so). Never had humanity experienced such a harrowing test, and it will never experience such another, unless, some day, millions of miles from our own world, we discover some other globe, inhabited by thinking beings. We have at least the advantage of knowing that the distance can in theory be bridged, whereas the early navigators feared they might be venturing into the void."

- Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, on the colonial encounter at the Equator

Precise Order

Berkeley Sit In

In solidarity from Argentina

Gay marriage advances in argentina

"Después del fallo de la Justicia que declaró inconstitucional el impedimento de casarse a dos personas del mismo sexo y que ordenó al Registro Civil de la ciudad a celebrar la unión de la pareja que lo había solicitado, el jefe de Gobierno porteño anunció que no apelará la decisión."

"After the Judicial ruling, which delcared it unconstitutional to prevent the marriage of two people of the same sex and, also, ordered the Civil Register to celebrate the union of the couple which had filed the request, the mayor of Buenos Aires (Macri) said he would not appeal the decision."

-Pagina 12

So good

For Daniel - In Response to the Tea Party Video

I am continually shocked at how quickly Liberals lost the tone of political discourse in the country after Obama was elected. The casual use of "fascism", "Nazi", "socialist healthcare", and pictures of Nazi death camps are no longer even surprising as a tool of the Right. When confronted, individual Republican politicians claim that they don't quite support it. But by not stopping it in the act, they effectively claim it as their own. It's a little bit like file sharing, actually. Torrent sites rely on the input of individuals, but refuse to police their own populations. They only remove illegal torrents when confronted by the large media organizations or courts. Technically, torrent sites are not responsible for the input of their individuals, though they are providing a platform for the individuals' actions. Perhaps some Republicans actually do use the Internet....

Paul Krugman wrote a great NYT editorial today about how the paranoid tone of the Right could play out. It doesn't look good.

(Plus Paul Krugman saves cats from burning buildings.)

Lin-Manuel Miranda at White House

UGH

I have no words:



And yet they're still allowed to be the Christian Right...

Appendices

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show are actually still the best thing on TV.

Watch some Glenn Beck videos on YouTube to get a dose of the strange, manic, paranoid ramblings and the body language, and then watch Jon Stewart make you laugh.

The Hiss

He chopped the vegetables rhythmically, each slice hissing like cool raw fish. Fingers clenched and clumsily tumbled the chunks into an oily pan. The hiss grew yellow, like fur rubbed in the wrong direction. As the body moved about the empty kitchen, the cooked vegetables hissed with echoless, murmuring voices. The faucet hissed victoriously, scattering juice from the knife and grease from the pan. On the bare table, the vegetables hissed quiet ghostly steam on a clean white plate.

5 octaves

Via Milla via Mark via Jaime

The ascendency of the practical

An interesting (if reactionary/old-codgery) article by William Chace about the "decline" of the modern English department. Among its highlights:

An argument to re-institute the canon?

"What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture)."

Hm. Sounds a lot like someone else I know.

Some post-"post-structural" angst:

"You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable."

History chucked aside? Maybe in the 60's, but now?

ORDER PLEASE:

"In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform."

The answer? Oh, yeah, of course, let's teach Western things!

"First, several of my colleagues around the country have called for a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature...They urge the teaching of English, or French, or Russian literature, and the like, in terms of the intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom."

The Scariest Kind of Capitalism

This weekend, over some whisky and a campfire, our camping group had a stimulating conversation about - you guessed it - Capitalism. Matt Prewitt astutely noted that corporations are most threatening when they co-opt the rhetoric (or equity) of their detractors (see: PepsiCo Amp debacle - PepsiCo is also the parent company of Dove and its True Beauty Campaign).

This nifty infographic gives a good idea of the common-ness of such behavior in the Organic food industry.

Philip Spooner

Further thoughts on arguments and convictions

"Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logistical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing."

-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The river carves out the valley by flowing beneath it.
Thereby the river is the master of the valley.

In order to master people
One must speak as their servant;
In order to lead people
One must follow them.

So when the sage rises above the people,
They do not feel oppressed;
And when the sage stands before the people,
They do not feel hindered.

So the popularity of the sage does not fail,
He does not contend, and no one contends against him.

-Lao Tsu, Verse 66 of The Tao Te Ching

Shy not being a word we would use

Richard Rorty on religious fundamentalism:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”(2000)

Enthusiasm for Guitar Defeats Existential Fear

Wayne earned money in high school as a fry cook for Long John Silver's. During his second year of employment, there was a rash of robberies in Oklahoma City. During his work, the restaurant was robbed. Wayne and other employees were held at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground. Wayne was certain he was going to die. Although the assistant manager couldn't open the safe, the robbers eventually fled. Wayne believes "this is really how you die...one minute you're just cooking up someone's order of french fries and the next minute you're laying on the floor and they blow your brains out. There's no music, there's no significance, it's just random."

At age fifteen, Coyne purchased his first guitar.

-from the Wikipedia page on Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips frontman)

Sigan mamando

Maradona to the press, after Argentina qualified for the World Cup 3 days ago:

"It's all good, because I have memory and right now, I'm going to remember more than ever. For those who didn't believe in this selection, for those who treated me like garbage, today, we are in the World Cup, in, without help from anyone...to those who didn't believe: that they suck it, that they keep sucking it."

Where the wild things are

Apparently "Where the Wild Things Are" just came out in the States. I'm terribly jealous I can't see it - watch it and tell me how it is. I have been listening the wonderful Karen O. soundtrack.
(especially the track "rumpus reprise")

Hurry boy its waiting there for you

Don't you think so?

Dream song 14 (very end of video) + David Foster Wallace's Kenyon graduation speech.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Like David Lynch in real life

Ever dream this man?

Having a coke with you

Librivox

Anyone who has ever slept over my house will understand why finding this website made me pee my pants a little. Check the Willa Cather section (not to mention the Count of Monte Cristo!)

And Now for Something Heartwarming

For the optimist/cheesy crowd (myself included). Be sure to watch the first one all the way through.

Dispatches from Mythology

If you haven't already, check out my friend George's blog, Drowned by Kappa. George is spending a year (or two) in Kochi City, on the island Shikoku in Japan. The blog is replete with excellent photographs and words like "Prefecture."

Besides George, Kochi City is (was) also home to the legendary Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the samurai who embraced Western influence and carried a sword AND a pistol (his nickname was "Quentin Tarantino's Wet Dream").

Meaty Stuff

Paul La Farge eating a bowlful of wasabi

While researching Meat, I came across an excellent piece by Paul La Farge.

I think the pocket door dilemma strikes a chord with everyone who lives in an apartment in San Francisco.

Also:

"That same year, or was it the next year, we took out the bottles and the newspapers. Some of them were so old they were beginning to be interesting again. Paul’s girlfriend broke up with him and Paul moved out."

This is the pace of the rest of our young lives.

Spring in Russia

"Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and a real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and the marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feets, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants' axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come."

-Count Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Piano Bar

Almost all of the recording sessions for Piano Bar ('84) are on Youtube (thanks Jaime) - check em out.

Hello

Yami showed me this video last night while we sat on the kitchen floor. And I thought, how have I never seen this video? Have you seen this video?


Also, because it never gets old.

Hospice

I cannot stop listening to this album

Myspace

Welcoming remarks made at a literary reading

A great speech given by John Hodgman shortly after 9/11.

Re: An exercise in power?

"As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I...and maybe others don't have "theories" and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to "theory" and "philosophy" and "theoretical constructs" and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world...My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before "postmodernism" had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: "if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret," despite much "pseudo-scientific posturing."

To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call "theory" and "philosophy," but little that I can detect beyond "pseudo-scientific posturing." That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies...

It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers....Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them...

There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

MORE

- Noam Chomsky

Maybe they agree on this one...

"I try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses I can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. When I study the mechanisms of power, I try to study their specificity... I admit neither the notion of a master nor the universality of his law. On the contrary, I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them..."

- Michel Foucault

Flavor Cartridges

A few days ago, when perusing a website, I noticed a side-bar advertisement for "The No. 1 Electronic Cigarette". I hadn't even known there were electronic cigarettes, so I clicked through to Blu's website. That's when I found out that Blu is a nicotine-infused flavor chemical slurry that you inhale. Like a cigarette without any of the negative effects (except the effects of nicotine, which are, in fact, the major health issues of smoking).

Re: Madres

I just finished reading a collection of stories by Abelardo Castillo, an author from San Pedro who is very popular in Buenos Aires. Here are my two favorites: "La madre de Ernesto" (Spanish/English) and "Patron" (Spanish/English coming). I like the idea of these two being read back to back.

"Chaos from start to finish"

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong."

- American Pastoral (1997)

Dream Song 224

Eighty

Lonely in his great age, Henry's old friend
leaned on his burning cane while his old friend
was hymned out of living.
The Abbey rang with sound. Pound white as snow
bowed to them with his thoughts—it's hard to know them though
for the old man sang no word.

Dry, ripe with pain, busy with loss, let's guess.
Gone. Gone them wine-meetings, gone green grasses
of the picnics of rising youth.
Gone all slowly. Stately, not as the tongue
worries the loose tooth, wits as strong as young,
only the albino body failing.

Where the smother clusters pinpoint insights clear.
The tennis is over. The last words are here?
What, in the world, will they be?
White is the hue of death & victory,
all the old generosities dismissed,
while the white years insist.

(1968)

826 DAY

Happy 8/26 day! Please go HERE to support 826 writing programs.

or go here

Las Afueras

Paula Peysere is a poet who writes for "El Interpredor" (Male's magazine). I found her book in my house.

ADDENDUM: I just spoke w/ Seba and apparently Paula Peysere is also an itinerant hair-cutter who cuts hair 1 Friday every month. This Friday she will be cutting hair here on calle Arganarez. I plan on attending.

This is her haircut blog. Scroll way down to see Male's haircut.

Porquesta toca manana

Llega temprano, por favor, y no podes hablar (fyi):

pOrqUestA ---- Baño Sonoro

¿ por qué es tan difícil escuchar ?

¿ por qué empiezan a hablar cuando hay algo que oir ?




¿ qué hay que oír ?


será una experiencia acústica única para cada par de oídos
vamos a necesitar bastante de su silencio
------------------
sábado 22 de agosto- 21 hs puntual puntual
departamento único de asuntos intuitivos e irregularidades básicas
entrada $10 (el vino lo invitamos nosotros)
capacidad limitada por favor confirmar asistencia hasta el viernes 21
esquina triangular sobre Guatemala entre Uriarte y Darragueyra . portón negro de garage. tocar timbre.

frente a la plazoleta

A Land Apart

It's probably not news to most of you in New York, but a new neighborhood has fastened itself to the Brooklyn community (though not to the landmass). This development is perhaps the final step in the gentrification of Brooklyn, as young, white people create communities that even THEY cannot join.

J/K, though, it looks really cool and I'm sure the people are great, &c, &c. Plus, this is probably what the future of Brooklyn looks like, what with sea levels rising and all.

Notice I didn't use the word "hipster".

Joel Salatin: A Good Farming Story

Though there are doubtless dozens of such interviews already in circulation, I particularly like this version of Joel Salatin's philosophy on farming and food. He has quite a talent for distilling the complex issues of small farms in the US into a digestible moral philosophy. Impressive.


Morsels:
"The food industry, I'm convinced, actually believes we don't need soil to live."

"The food industry views everything through the skewed paradigm of faith in human cleverness rather than dependence on nature's design."

"...a culture that views its life from such an arrogant, manipulative, disrespectful hubris, will view its own citizenry the same way--and other cultures."

"The Jeffersonian ideal of the agrarian intellectual is about as culturally American as it gets--and I suggest as revolutionary today as it was in his day, when breaking from royalty and all its worldviews was as different as breaking from globalization, and its worldviews is today."

Bolsa

Yesterday Anna and I went for some cafe con leches after our IUNA (art school) initiation. When we left the cafe I left my bag (w/ journal, book and used film) on the chair next to me. I didn't realize that I'd forgetten it until I was sitting eating a choripan in some parilla nearly 25 blocks away. I spent 4o nerve-racked minutes walking back to the cafe. When I finally got there, the barista had set my bag (my bag!) on the wooden counter in front of the espresso machine. I thanked him profusely and then, as I turned to leave, this guy, this salty, 70 year old guy, turned to me and said: "If you don't have a brain, at least you have legs."

America, this is quite serious

La voluntad de equilibrio

El Placer

Para poder dormirse, intenta recordar
todas las veces que estuvo en París.
Cuando olvida alguna, muere un animal
doméstico, o se seca
una planta en la terraza.

Ahora necesito viento, diría
si dominara el francés o cualquier lengua
moderna, para no pensar, para al menos
mantenerme en pie hasta el próximo
capítulo. Si me contaras otra mentira...

No importaba nada que se hicieran novios
y se ahogaran en el río,
pero me recomendó por escrito
que me concentrara en el libro y dejara
de mirar a la lectora de enfrente,
que se acariciaba el pelo como si se fuera a ahogar.

Pleasure

To fall asleep, she tries to remember
all of the times she was in Paris
When she forgets one, a pet dies
or a plant on the terrace shrivels up.

Right now I need the wind, I would say
that if I had mastered French, or some other language
I could stop thinking, or, at least, I could remain standing until the next
chapter. If you told me another lie…

What her boyfriend’s did mattered little,
if they drowned in the river, for example
but she did, once, advise me in a note
to concentrate on my book, and to stop looking
at the other girl across from me
who was stroking her hair, like she was about to drown.

- Mariano Peyrou (2000)

Para los que puedan

Sabado primero de agosto agosto.agosto

TODO CONTENTO !

Corto Morales + Schmürz + Gordöloco trio

ceci quinteros cello seba rey bajo mauro mourelos trompeta

hernan hayet bajoestereo alejo duek guitarra hernan hayet bajo estereo

ceci quinteros cello rodrigo gomez bateria y voz

todos juntos

todos contra todos

todos a la vez

en ronda

¡TODO CONTENTO!

-abrimos la puerta a las 21hs

-22:00hs se proyecta el documental CUENTOS DE FAMILIA

-23:00hs TODO CONTENTO!(Corto Morales + Schmürz + Gordöloco trio)

-ENTRADA 10 PESITOS

-BARRA AMIGABLE

AV.GARAY 2380 SAN CRISTOBAL

tocar timbre

El interpretador

A cool magazine that my host sister here in Argentina, Malena Rey, helps edit.

To choose the defeated

"Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths."

- Roberto Bolano's acceptance speech for the Romulo Gallegos Prize

Our Irish Childhood

This afternoon, I decided to raid my house's hidden tape collection in search of Phil's Tape, the legendary compilation prepared by Phil, my brothers' and my smotheringly Irish babysitter (who, years later, would give me an alarm clock and a box of condoms as graduation presents). And lo, there was the case, with Phil's old handwriting! Each song detailed in impossible-to-read script. But no tape.

This is where YouTube and being unemployed come in. I've managed to recreate Phil's Tape as a YouTube playlist (minus two songs which I could not find). Side 2 of the original tape begins after "Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven" by Bryan Adams. Simply click "Play All" and live a Gumbiner childhood.

And below, a Scottish folk song, which is somehow appropriate.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite passed away today at the age of 92.

Following Cronkite's visit to Vietnam - and his subsequent determination that the war there was un-winnable - President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Chomsky vs. Foucault

Two heavyweights facing off.

At its core a conflict between pragmatism and idealism? Are we thinking about society or is society thinking us? I think I side with Chomsky here: our concept of human nature is socially/intellectually conditioned and constrained by various power structures etc., but we do need a direction - even if it is based on our limited conception of human nature and/or justice. The only reasonable way to reconcile this issue is to - as Chomsky suggests - keep the specter of our fallibility in mind as we proceed.

Part 1:



Part 2:

DFW

An old but wonderful interview with David Foster Wallace: Salon. (via Stephanie [awhile ago]).

"It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel."

Also: a very well-done biographical piece by the New Yorker.

"In the new novel, a character comments, “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

Some thoughts after the mezcal ran out

“And I asked the boys, I said, boys, what do you make of this poem? I said, boys, I’ve been looking at it for more than forty years and I’ve never understood a goddamn thing…I remember that while I was drinking the coffee the boys sat down across from me again and talked about the other pieces in Caborca. Well, then, I said, what’s the mystery? Then the boys looked at me and said: there is no mystery Amadeo.” (398-9)

Today I finished Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives – a 650 page chronicle of two Latin American poets, their search for the Mexican poet Cesarea Tinajero and their infant literary movement, “Visceral Realism.” Bolaño’s protagonists are thinly veiled stand-ins for himself (Roberto Bolaño = Roberto Belano) and his real-life literary companion (Mario Santiago = Ulises Lima). The novel, additionally, appears to be a partial biography: Santiago and Bolaño both traveled to Europe (like Belano and Lima), and “visceral realism” seems to be an obvious parody of their real-life movement, “Infrarealismo.”

The novel is sprawling and fractured and Bolaño has a tremendous talent for creating authentic voice in his characters – probably because he knew many of them. He strays from his literary predecessors of “the Boom” era (Marquez, Fuentes, Llosa etc.): eschewing magical realism for a less mythologized realism and presenting his poet protagonists as the antithesis of the socially-inclined-left-wing-radical-Latin-American-writer stereotype. So where does that leave Bolaño? His realism is far from a 19th Century William Dean Howells novel (it makes no attempt to recreate the thing-in-itself), but more maximalist than a Carverian short story. It feels unedited like Kerouacian stream of consciousness and then, at times, concise, poetic and crafted (Bolaño always thought of himself as a poet not a prose-writer). His narrators are many (over fifty in the novel) and their narration trends towards the prolix end of the spectrum. To complicate things further, his realism has a meta-fictional aspect: he is, after all, writing in a new-realist style about the attempt of two poets (who he makes very little effort to cover up as being modeled after himself and his friend) to form a new-realist literary movement. Artifice, may you be layeth'd bare.

In a sense, I think Bolaño’s drive can be summed up (a little bit ironically) by a quote from García Marquez’s recent autobiography, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” At its heart, Bolaño’s work is a beautiful mediation on how we process the past. It is filled with the lust, insecurity, ambition and excitement of youth. It makes us feel adventurous and hopeless, epic and self-conscious. It can do all of this because it is not overbearingly ideological. Kurt Vonnegut said, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.” Now it’s probably a little more complicated than that, but Vonnegut gets at the essential point: its useless trying to codify Bolaño’s realism, because to a certain extent, it is beside the point. The beauty of Bolaño’s work is not in its style or purported innovation in relation to his predecessors (which everyone seems to be harping on about), but in the way it tells us stories about the world that feel true and real, and make us think about living. It is how he frames notions of experience and past in ways that connect with us, but refrain from imposing “meaning” on us (the novel is not, in other words, modernist in the T.S. Eliot/New Criticism sense: using the poetic object to hem in/make manageable the chaos of the real world). For Bolaño, chaos is what’s it all about, and that’s what makes reading him so much fun.

Party with the Navy

For those of you in the San Francisco area, check out the almost murderously good line-up of the Treasure Island Music Festival.

Holy crap. Tickets sales began today at Noon.

Peroni, 'sigue con estilo'

The other day at work (I am working for a (very) minor advertising firm in Bogota called 'La Estacion') we discussed the novel way in which we were going to market Peroni (the Italian beer) to the Colombian market. As the brief noted, Peroni had already attempted a 'lanzamiento imenso' which, among other things, involved a champagne party where everyone recieved free Ipods. However, this extravagance appeared to have failed. Colombians - according to recent polls - still viewed Peroni as no different from their stock beer, Club Colombia. Here is, more or less, the attack plan my Junot Diaz-look-alike-boss (Matteo) gave:

Matteo: What is Italian?

(no response)

Matteo: Tell me. What is Italian?

(no response)

Matteo: I will tell you what it is, the Italian is the most suave, the most handsome, the most perfectly confident person we know. Think about the 'Italian Job'. The original. 1962, or something like that. Roger Moore(pronounced Ro-her -- who is, fyi, not even in that movie), you know Roger Moore?

(heads nodding)

Matteo: So objective: make Colombians drink Peroni. Why would Colombians want to drink Peroni over Club Colombia? Key insight: Because they want to be handsome suave Italians. How do we make them feel like handsome suave Italians? We hold a raffle.

(General murmurring)

Matteo: My plan is to give out raffle tickets to every Bogotanan who purchases a Peroni.

Creative team guy #1: In what form will we hand out the tickets?

Matteo: Their code will be on the napkin they recieve with their beer.

(exclamations of 'que bueno' or 'chevere' from creative team guys)

Matteo: When they finish their beer they can drop off the raffle ticket in a huge and shiny plastic Peroni bottle we will place at the front of every bar and/or restauarant in the city.

(switches to next slide: woman in bikini clutching a big green Peroni bottle)

Why is this even better than you could imagine? You are asking me, Matteo, señor, why is this perfect? Because the raffle prizes will be for Italian things.

Creative team guy #2: Like what?

Matteo: Vespas and leather shoes

(switches to next slide: a man with no shirt straddling a Vespa)

Me: Sorry, what?

Matteo: Vespas and leather shoes. They will drink their Italian beer, they will win their Italian prizes, they will say, hey this Peroni stuff, this fits my suave, cool and handsome lifestyle.

(general applause)

Matteo: Daniel, write that up and give it to me by 5 o'clock.

Me: Yes.

Matteo: I'm going on break. Anyone want a cigarette?

Planet Earth meets Koyaanisqatsi meet the Internets

It's not every day that numerous multinational corporations fund a stunning HD nature documentary and then make it available for free on YouTube. But what really makes "Home" special is the fabulous aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.



The full movie can be viewed here.

Song

Afternoon cooking in the fall sun--
who is more naked
                                      than the man
yelling, "Hey, I'm home!"
                          to an empty house?
thinking because the bay is clear,
the hills in yellow heat,
& scrub oak red in gullies
          that great crowds of family
should tumble from the rooms
                        to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,
                                      I-am-loved.

Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,
                      dust motes.
        On the oak table
    filets of sole
stewing in the juice of tangerines,
    slices of green pepper
              on a bone-white dish.


-Robert Hass

That old man with the burning eyes

¨Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.¨

- Eugene Debs, the 5 time Socialist Party candidate for President (once, in 1912, winning over 6% of the popular vote) and founding member of Industrial Workers of the World, at his hearing for violating the Espionage act of 1917. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life.

Question Technology

A few days ago, a tuned-in reader (his name rhymes with Bessie Trumbiner) alerted us to this important development in the all too inevitable march toward the Singularity.



The fascinating development in this particular technology (other than the fact that it makes so much sense as the next step) is that it physically mediates the external environment of the user. Instead of a consulting tool, the computer becomes a lens to augment (or, more frighteningly, judge) the world. The scene in which the inventor uses the device to project the Amazon.com (see, private company) rating on a potential book purchase just highlighted the various ways the technological "lens" could be hijacked to give highly biased or advertisement-based information.

I found myself especially horrified by the attitude of the presenter, who is wholly consumed by the desire to give humans "relevant information" to help them make "the right decision" in every situation. At the end, she jokes casually about brain implants.

Which begs the question: Has our frenzied accumulation of information become more burdensome than useful?

Marxist though he was

"Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.¨

¨...What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?"

- After Theory (2003)

---- (for David) ----

Employed as we are, in an old book

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

SF, Bike City

San Francisco just approved a measure to add more than 3o miles (or 14 million dollars) of bike lanes (solid lines, not dotted ones). Check it out at Forum here (sans Michael Krasny) and the Mercury News here.

From Swanson's to Permaculture

Here are two Ted Talks by food-paladins Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan.

Note the common indictment: organic does not mean sustainable.





More:

The Oil We Eat

"All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. "

Can Organic Farming Feed Us All

"We are not simply talking about a transition away from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but a transition to a different sort of food system. I think that the philosophy of organic agriculture is closer to this food system--more equity, more healthy foods and fewer processed foods, more interaction between farmer and eater--but current organic farming standards around the world say very little about these sorts of social, ethical, and economic issues."

Also, something worth reading (seriously, read this book)

Detroit, Rock City

How do we reconcile the desire to let the proverbial free-market scythe lop off the heads of overpaid, nearsighted, and environmentally negligent Detroit auto-czars with the human consequences of that action?

Re: Not Sounding Hackneyed

Two interesting interviews with Natasha Wimmer, Roberto Bolaño's translator for The Savage Detectives and 2666:

Here and Here

No hay nada mejor que la papa

How can I get myself invited to this man's home in the Uruguayan Hills?

The Devils

You were a "victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form."
I was "ill at ease in an ambiguous world

Deserted by Providence." We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors'
TV's were tuned to soap operas.

The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.

"It's like Strindberg's Dream Play," you said.
"What is?" I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.

It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
"That woman subsisted on spiders only,"
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.

He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
"I'm no longer Jesus," he informed us happily.

He believed only in devils now.
"This building is full of them," he confided.
One could see their horns and tails.

If one caught them in their baths.
"He's got Dark Ages on his brain," you said.
"Who does?" I asked and got no reply.

The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.

- Charles Simic

Charlatangent

When I was in 7th grade I was infatuated with my thirty-something math teacher, Mr. Giorgi. Instead of teaching us algebra, he told us stories about defending himself from San Francisco gangs with a crowbar, or eying down a particularly antagonistic swathe of Hell's Angels on the open road in Arizona (the Mr. Giorgi-is-threatened-by-a-menacing-group-of-evil-doers-and-performs-badass-maneuver-to-escape-story had a number of permutations). The veracity of those yarns, in retrospect, seems patently dubious, but, as a 90 lb pre-pubescent, Mr. Giorgi embodied everything I had ever wanted to be. He was devilishly handsome, dating a beautiful/mysterious woman, and the object of innumerable school girl crushes. In sex-ed he was the only teacher who attempted to verbally describe an orgasm (for those of us who hadn't yet been there): "It's like a great release of energy, you know? It's like you've just been so pent up for so long and..."
After he said this the other teachers nodded gravely. "What wisdom," I remember thinking, "he is a poet also."

One day, Mr. Giorgi stopped class early. He told us he was about to give us something that we would take with us for the rest of our life. He told us that "alllll this," everything around us, "this classroom stuff," wasn't shit compared to what we were about to hear. What we were about to hear was infinitely more important than math, which we "probably wouldn't use after the 12th grade."

Then he played this on his stereo:




Four years later Mr. Giorgi was fired after getting in some sort of verbal dispute with another teacher. He refused to leave campus and, reportedly, the police had to chase him around the North Quad during recess in order to apprehend him and remove him from the premises. Last December I thought I saw him when I was driving home from a friend's house. But John looked also, and he said it probably wasn't him.

Some things are better left unsaid

Flat on the ice

"In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out. Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it."

- Toward an Impure Poetry

Everything Belongs to Us!

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