Ripeness

All of the quotes, below, are from Art of Self-Defense: Witold Gombrowicz’s Duel with Ideas by Adam Zagajewski in the Feb/Mar 2006 issue of BookForum. First, from near the end of the essay:

Some might ask, This Gombrowicz of yours, who was he? And why should we pay attention to him? Because you seem to have so many doubts concerning his work, so many questions. You disagree with his views, or at any rate you look upon him skeptically. So why Gombrowicz?

It’s true that I have more and more questions for him, and that I sometimes lose patience with his theories. His concept of form is interesting, but his praise of immaturity is hard to maintain, if one discounts the element of provocation and anti-academic recalcitrance. With every year I become more distinctly convinced that Shakespeare was right — “ripeness is all.” Maturity is so very much richer than immaturity; it is also capable of containing within itself the exhilarating energy of immaturity, while immaturity is never any more than what it is.

What an inane statement: “never any more than what it is.” As if anything, including maturity, is. I disagree with the entire last paragraph, and I absolutely hate the Shakespeare quote, “ripeness is all.” All the shitty people-in-charge who are doing all the shitty things in this world feel themselves to be “ripe.” Perfectly, unquestionably, smugly ripe.

From earlier in the article:

There are at least two roads that lead to literature. The first finds a trustworthy point of entry into existing literary genres and forms: In this way, beginning poets often see in the sonnet, the elegy, or the villanelle ready-made rooms for their own creative work (it’s not for nothing that the Italian word stanzain fact means “room”), houses built by their illustrious predecessors and waiting for the young blood of a new generation, for new tenants. An example of the kind of writer who trusts literature is Joseph Brodsky, who believed in the unbroken continuity of poetry, from Ovid to Auden, from Catullus to Akhmatova — and to himself.

The second road is one of mistrust: It finds expression in a perpetual suspicious questioning of the full range of inherited literary genres. Indeed, Gombrowicz — that member of the Sandomierz gentry on whom the spirit of the age descended like a hawk, as Constantin Jelenski aptly put it in one of his essays — lent no credence to tradition: He had no faith in either the sonnet or the elegy; he did not believe in the novel; he did not really believe at all in literature as something given.

Gombrowicz didn’t believe in painting either, especially not abstract painting; nor did he believe in, as he called it, “versified poetry.” He had no truck with public concerts, or with the flashy displays of musical virtuosos (indeed he wrote some hilarious descriptions of such events, portraying them as musical horse races). He put no trust in exaltations over works of art (all of which, in his view, was affectation). In his first novel, he created the character of the “cultured aunt,” who — predictably — always goes into raptures over art. He had no confidence in the sincerity of either Marxists or Catholics. He did not believe in maturity; in his writing, as we recall, he promoted immaturity and youth.

I think this is a pretty good piece, even though I disagree with some of Zagajewski’s conclusions. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Dung Stops Here

Felix Grant, in what can only be seen as the desperate, desperate act of a man trying not to admit that he is completely, abjectly wrong and I am right, has blatantly added loads of shit ^[1] to a post on his blog .^[2] Footnoted shit.

Obviously he’s throwing up straw pink elephones ^[3] to avoid the piercing insight of my observations on the nature of history. D. valgum is a fascinating and obvious case of a creature that got tired of pushing shit while looking backward at history, and, with extraordinary and perfect metaphoric brilliance, chose not only to face the future, but to make his choice of behavior explicit by choosing to dine on that exemplar, that veritable personification, of multiple histories, the millipede.

Case closed.

[I have completely lost track of which side of this argument I am on. However, I am prepared to vigorously defend either side, as needed, to prove myself right.]

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[1] See the article at BBC News, Little dung beetle is big chopperby James Morgan, (Jan 21, 2009) which says, “They found D. valgum fed exclusively on the millipedes, preferring prey which were alive but injured…. Despite its close relationships with dung feeding species, D. valgum has entirely abandoned its ball-rolling behaviour…. The beetles were never seen rolling dung balls.” In other words, they never eat or roll dung.
[2] Felix Grant, Dark days for millipedes, Jan 23, 2009
[3] multiple personalities in comments to my post, The Blind Millipede, July 28, 2008

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Don’t Be Ridiculous

“If we are to live among electronic shadows,” he wrote in his introduction to Castaways of the Image Planet, “it helps to keep on talking back to them.” That’s a fatalistic, even resigned sentence, but it’s only the starting point. O’Brien understands that what more dogmatic and alarmist writers might call “cultural static” is simply the now unavoidable state of things. The “real” of our present moment is no more apprehensible than “the past,” both of which are forms of elaborate storytelling at best. Should we nevertheless be alarmed? Probably. Will our alarm matter, as we bob along in the tide of late capitalism, which functions best under an oil slick of perceived hedonistic plenty? Don’t be ridiculous. We live in a new kind of reality, O’Brien’s work suggests, and tuning our ears to hear some melodies within the unavoidable static is our best bet.

O’Brien builds his book around the idea that a part of every contemporary mind and memory is made of entertainment artifacts, that “my ancestors blur with other people’s ancestors, with the people in the newspaper photographs and the people who weren’t even photographed, with the unreal people in books and movies, and with the people imagined altogether.” Music, then, can be used as a tunnel back into the past, or even as a surrogate kind of past: “It’s as much of a past as I have,” he writes, “except of course that I don’t have it. I make it up by imagining connections between fragments. . . . The inhabitants of that world [the past] have become figures in the dream of the past that in weak moments I might mistake for History.”

… Since the early ’80s O’Brien has been turning over these ideas of perception and subjectivity—I almost want to say mass-mediated group subjectivity, as if the shorthand of shared culture somehow connects us more than we would like to believe—and making the gray area between the blatant artifice of culture and our sometimes arbitrary conception of cultural “authenticity” his stomping ground. He asks us, in his oblique and sophisticated way, to think about whether we really believe that the mountain is more “authentic” to our lived experience than the picture of the mountain on the billboard.

– from a book review, Mamas and Papas by Greg Bottoms in the spring 2004 issue of Bookforum (review of the book, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life by Geoffrey O’Brien)

Because I liked it (I could have said because it has to do with “straight record” and ideas of history … but I won’t).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Ends ‘n’ Odds

These are bits of unrelated stuff that made me smile. All cartoons are from the New Yorker. (The sentences between the cartoons are not from the New Yorker.)

Do geese see God?

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Rewards rot in a janitor’s drawer.

Now, sir, a war is never even — sir, a war is won!

 

Not knowing what they are meant to do but feeling they must know when they have done it: this paradox has haunted artists since the beginning of time. Artists have always been aware that they engage in (or have been recruited for) a task whose ultimate purport must escape them. They may realize, sometimes, that they have achieved something without understanding exactly what or how, or they may guess that they are on the verge of achieving something that will however escape them, or that they have been assigned a task defined by the very impossibility of being achieved. Countless unfinished monuments, paintings, symphonies and novels testify to their artistic hubris; a few others bravely proclaim that accomplishment is (though rarely) also within the human scope.

The last quote, above is from Final Answers by Alberto Manguel in the spring 2005 issue of Geist. (it’s not a very good essay; I only liked the bit I’ve quoted.)

The sentences between the cartoons are from mockok.com.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Horrendous Irony

According to the Tanzania Albino Society, at least 35 albinos were murdered in Tanzania last year to supply witch doctors with limbs, organs and hair for their potions.

… the killing of albinos has spread outside Tanzania’s borders to Kenya, Uganda and particularly Burundi. On January 2nd an eight-year-old albino boy living in Burundi was hacked to death in front of his mother. The killers took his arms and legs. That attack followed another on a six-year-old albino girl in the same country. The killers tied up the parents, shot the girl in the head, and made off with her head and limbs.

Investigators say the body parts of a single murdered albino sell for over $1,000, with the skin and flesh dried out and set into amulets and the bones ground down into a powder. Artisanal miners in the gold and diamond fields directly south of Lake Victoria are the main buyers. Some sprinkle albino powder on the walls of their narrow pits, hoping for glitter. Uneducated and desperate to strike riches, they are taken in by witch doctors’ stories of the wealth-giving properties of the potions.

– from A horrendous trade in the Jan 15, 2009 issue of The Economist

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Our Own Nature

What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.

That quote could apply to many current events, but in this case, it’s about our attitude toward the environment. It, and all of the below is taken from a book review of an anthology of nature writing, American Earth edited by Bill McKibben. The review is No Heaven on Earth by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of BookForum.

… After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time — as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report — sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments — the fundamental perceptions — are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about “climatic excess” and our “restless love of change.” Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers — for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.

… One of the earliest chapters in American Earth is an excerpt from George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, which was published in 1841. It is a melancholy piece of reporting on the extirpation of the buffalo by white hunters. In most respects, Catlin is no romantic, despite his language. He believes “the buffalo’s doom is sealed, and with their extinction must assuredly sink into real despair and starvation, the inhabitants of these vast plains.” He allows himself a momentary will-o’-the-wisp — the notion of an enormous separate reserve for Indians and bison — if only settlers could be kept out, if only “a system of non-intercourse could be established and preserved.” But he knows it’s just a daydream. Nonintercourse — abstinence, if you will — is not even a possibility. The terrible pressure of nature is nothing compared with the terrible pressure of humanity. Abstinence and fecundity — these are the critical terms in this anthology. To the extent that humans can withhold themselves, can abstain from destroying everything they come in contact with, the fecundity of nature will set things right. The trouble with abstinence (as we know from our own sexuality) is that it requires constant consciousness, the perpetual awareness of purpose. The beauty of fecundity is its blindness. Any real change in our fate depends on a species-wide change in consciousness, a new alertness. Again, Berry sums it up well. What we need, he writes, is not “the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but . . . a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care.” Berry is no romantic, either, for he adds, “Such possibilities are not now in sight in this country.”

The question, really, is whether such possibilities are in sight within the human character itself. I’ve been haunted for several years by a passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a passage that suggests the outline of our fate and the practical limits of the environmental movement’s efficacy. Kant argues that man’s “own nature is not so constituted as to rest or be satisfied in any possession or enjoyment whatever.” He says that “even with the utmost goodwill on the part of external nature,” our species will never find happiness in “a system of terrestrial nature, because our own nature is not capable of it.” I do not know how to refute Kant, not when we’re talking of humanity in the mass. This is perhaps the grimmest of what writer Henry Beston calls nature’s “grim arrangements”: to set loose on the planet a species incapable of rest or happiness or coexistence, infinitely adaptable and capable of doing grievous damage to the global ecosystem by means of what is called “ordinary life.”

… We will never have the terrible opportunity to watch the extinction of the passenger pigeon or the near extinction of the American bison. We have a much more grievous opportunity: to watch multiple, successive extinctions as the sky overheats and the oceans go pale and habitat vanishes. I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recuperative powers, even though, as Schell points out, “the reappearance of man is not one of the possibilities.” What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.

The full review is beautifully written. Highly recommended. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Toast Master

[It probably should be toast mistress, but that's ... confusing ... in its connotations.]

No, not these guys. I am the master of crunchy, lightly browned, buttery goodness.

Here is why:

Recently, my old toaster died. The new one, even when put on its minimum setting (it goes from zero to six), made my toast much to dark. I like it just barely golden, and I am very particular about this (for me, making toast is the haute-est of my haute cuisine).

So what I do is start the toaster (depress the lever that would lower the bread) without the bread. I wait exactly seventeen seconds. Then I drop the bread (which I have strategically prepared and positioned) into the now blazing hot toaster. Not only does this result in the perfect degree of toastedness, but by inserting the bread into the already hot machine, I get the maximum ratio of toasting to drying (I don’t like dry toast).

You may be thinking that this must be a nuisance and a lot of trouble. Quite the contrary!

With a properly functioning toaster, I sat there passively, waiting to receive whatever it chose to give me. No more!

Now, I am the goddess of toast. I rule the toaster!

Speaking of toast gods, look at what this guy, New Zealand artist Maurice Bennett, has done with it:

 

 

All of those slices are too dark for me (*sniffing dismissively*).

You have to wonder what the six setting on my toaster would do to bread. If I ever have a craving for buttered ashes, I’ll give it a try. Sort of like the volume on my CD player which goes up to 99. Anything over 15 (depending on the CD) jiggles the books off the bookshelf and threatens to pop all framed pictures off my walls (I do have a rather large sub-woofer. I wanted one even bigger but the guy at the store wouldn’t sell it to me. Seriously, he said it was for large factories and it would damage my house. I’m still pissed he wouldn’t let me have it.)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Flesh That Wears Us

I think that perhaps the following is pure baloney, but it’s delicious baloney. Now, let’s eat!

All of this is from an essay, Delirious Screens: Flesh Shadows & Cool Technology by Ted Hiebert:

We know already that there is no such thing as pure, unfiltered, perception. Objective or not, technologically mediated or not, perception has as its default filter the perceptual mechanisms of the body who perceives. And perception matters, for perception interrupted casts shadows no less than the light that makes perception possible.

… A primordial myth, the mirror stage is that which forever separates the questions of image and flesh and — more importantly — that which leaves flesh itself accountable to the image, and most certainly not the other way around. It is not the task of the image to understand the body, but explicitly the body who now remains bound to its own self-image. Here, under the sign of Lacan, we might well insist that life becomes the cast shadow of living self-conception, flesh the cast shadow of the mirror encounter itself.

… Consider that the radio is not, as one might expect, simply an extension of the ear. The radio, instead, is a funneling of auditory stimulus that limits what is perceptible at exactly the same time as it amplifies that which might not otherwise be heard. The radio is a screen, blocking out the sounds of the immediate world by substituting its own simulacrum of auditory telepresence. And yet, at the same time, what the radio does in fact extend is the voice – and someone else’s at that — a teleportation device not for hearing but, ultimately, for speech itself. The radio then, is perhaps better understood as an extension of the mouth.

But is this not the case for all technologies — the simultaneous enabling and limitation of extended sensory media? Is not all technology in fact screenal in structure, the mirror no less than the television no less than language itself? For we make a serious mistake if we forget that a screen is not merely a portal into virtual space. Screens are also preventative devices, protecting one area from another, a semi-permeable sensory membrane that is only ever as effective as its installation allows. The screen door enables the fantasy of domestic living, allowing for all the freshness of the afternoon breeze while preventing the entry of bugs and birds and neighborhood pets. And yet, the screen door also keeps certain things inside — a virtual barrier that is no less a barrier for its virtuality.

… The mirror allows for conscious extension at the same time as it contains consciousness within its protective casing, yielding not the commonly misunderstood phenomenon of symmetry, but instead a very real manifestation of corporeal paradoxicality. Behind the mirror there is nothing, and yet we are rarely taught to engage with ourselves as that which is in front of the mirror. Instead, through Lacan, we must admit to a life on the inside, bound through our very tools of perceptual engagement to the silvery frame of reflected living.[6] We are in no uncertain terms a race of mirror people, bound self-reflexively to a world that is only ever as real as our fantasies of understanding allow. And, being mirror people, we are also creatures of the screen — virtually enabled as individuals rather than bodies — the fantasy of appearance and understanding and being rendered unaccountable to that which it takes as its source.

Here, extended outside of ourselves with our point of return denied, we also find that reality denied means possibility unleashed; an absence of truth, an absence of grounding, and an absence of understanding form the basis from which the swirling myths of knowledge take form. And, it matters little to the screen whether this knowledge is itself extendable or not, for the screen knows no Other. Instead, the screen is always already its own Other, always contained within its own perspectival predilections — here there is only the self-ignored, the self-forgotten, the self-unchosen. In other words, the inverse side of the screen is always merely that which is in excess of the gaze itself, that which is illuminated but not seen, the shadows of optical duality are no less invisible for their indisputable appearances. The doubled paradoxical dynamic of screenal living is both sustained and censored by a necessary imperative for interactive engagement.

And so we have the self as blivet, an impossible representation that is only impossible because the image itself is unliveable — allowing instead for multiple possibilities of living which must inevitably be sacrificed in the assumption of one daily face or another. And in the assumption of a face comes too the discarding of other faces, face to face to face, both worn and erased, cast into the shadows of unacknowledged presence. We are, in this instance, the lived manifestation of image to the power of -n, the walking shadows of that which the mirror fails to reflect.

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[6] In Lacan’s cosmology, consciousness itself is created through the mirror-encounter, after which we can never understand ourselves as unmediated entities. The result of this is, contentiously, that we ourselves are “located” on the inside of the mirror — forever alienated from the flesh that wears us.

There is more! Much more. Read it if you have enjoyed the above. [ link ]

Also, take a look at  Ted Hiebert’s home page, which include psychic photography and more essays.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed

For Barack Obama on his day of inauguration:

Let America Be America Again

by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed –
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

[skipping to the end]

O, yes,
I say it plain, America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath — America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!

The whole poem is excellent. Read it if you have a minute. [ link] Also recommended is Langston Hughes’s bio at Wikipedia. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Try

Happy 66th, Janis Lyn.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/