Bookmarker tag: inspo/misc (33 notes)

[...] In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac. [...]

[...] take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between John McCain’s first getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would cry out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer: What difference would one less POW make? Plus maybe it’d give the other POWs hope and keep them going, and I mean 100 pounds and expected to die and surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a doctor or else you’re going to die, plus if you could stay alive by getting out you could make a promise to God to do nothing but Total Good from now on and make the world better and so your accepting would be better for the world than your refusing, and maybe if Dad wasn’t worried about the Vietnamese retaliating against you here in prison he could prosecute the war more aggressively and end it sooner and actually save lives so yes maybe you could actually save lives if you took the offer and got out versus what real purpose gets served by you staying here in a box and getting beaten to death, and by the way oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery with painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair. . . . Can you hear it? What would be happening inside your head? Would you have refused the offer? Could you have? You can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment, much less to know how we’d react. None of us can know.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, mostly in a dark box, alone, tapping messages on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit — the man does want your vote, after all.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on
the Trail where you’ve started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain’s refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs’ cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines “the real John McCain” still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain “real” is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too; you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a “profile” of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there’s way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox — the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles’ spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain — is that whether he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it's all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can't recount one damn thing we did.

[...] My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses--that middle-class disguise I'd wished for--are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. [...]

[...] it was easy for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. The consequences is, Marazzi argues, that post-Fordist workers are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the 'house of slavery': liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.

With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator.

The specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance. [...] they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.

Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from arresting.

[...] they no longer felt humanity as a limitless milieu. It was a thin flame within them which they alone kept alive. It kept itself going in the silence which they opposed to their executioners. About them was nothing but the great polar night of the inhuman and of unknowingness, which they did not even see, which they guessed in the glacial cold which pierced them.

[...] The writer, in opposition to bourgeois ideology, chose to speak to us of things at the privileged moment when all the concrete relations which united him with the objects were broken, save the slender thread of his gaze, and when they gently undid themselves to his eyes, untied sheaves of exquisite sensations.

[...] In the event of a Soviet victory, we will be passed over in silence until we die a second time; in the event of an American victory, the best of us will be put into the jars of literary history and won't be taken out again.

Europe--the very archetype of the contemporary event: a vacuum-packed phantasmagoria. It will have taken place neither in heads nor in dreams, nor in anyone's natural inspiration, but in the somnambulistic space of the political will, of dossiers and speeches, of calculations and conferences--and in the artificial synthesis of opinion that is universal suffrage severely orientated and controlled as a function of the cunning idealism of leaders and experts.

It is a bit like the simulation, deep in the desert, of the Capricorn One expedition to Mars: Europe as virtual reality, to be slipped into like a datasuit. This, perhaps, is the perfection of democracy

[...] The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

The debate was never in good faith. Democracy was still a decade away; the left was marginal and toothless; the old Francophiles had begun to retire. The three countries of North America signed the treaty with great fanfare. The Mexican economy grew, but not at the pace of the neoliberals’ projections. The richest man in Mexico became the richest man in the world, but the poor remained as poor as they had always been. In a sense, they were poorer than ever. Their corner stores now sold American cigarettes, but their young people were gone. Many were never seen or heard from again. Those who returned came back broken, telling confused stories about predawn raids and freezing detention cells.

As the years passed, even the neoliberals began to suspect that something was wrong. Again and again, your father’s generation of politicians called their US classmates, who by then had become senators and governors. Had they not sat through the same seminars, listened to the same exaltations of the laissez-faire virtues of open borders and freedom of movement? Hadn’t they made a deal? The Americans would demur, misquote some Burke passage about gradual change, and say they were actually just stepping into a meeting.

You sit in your father’s TV room, your temporary bedroom, watching the economist all but tear out fistfuls of his own hair. You look at his face, at the large, deep-set eyes that are the marker of your people. Looking at him, it occurs to you that the problem was that his generation of criollos refused to see themselves as colonials. They did not realize that their classmates at Harvard and Chicago treated them nicely not because they saw them as equals but because they were light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With indios and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom did not extend to people with dark skin. Their economics was not the objective science they claimed it to be, but rather a political instrument designed to justify imperial expansion — a postmodern American equivalent of 16th-century Spanish Catholicism.

One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive's world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal: the conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming "realism" of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism.

I'D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of an Oneida show and see if you can place it in our fifteen-year history. I imagine it will be instructive to anyone with any kind of fantasy about being in a band.

[...] The act of narrration never leaves us. The need for story is in our bodies, in the evolution of our minds. We sleep. The brain is doing its housekeeping, weaving today's experiences into the synaptic connections of all that happened before this day. Shifting moments. Pathways strengthened, or fading.

Meanwhile, we lie sleeping, trying to make sense of it all. We have no choice; we must understand what flickers in our mind. We desperately try to make it coherent - turn the chemical charges into a story, narrate the dream to ourselves. The narration fails. The story will not adhere. The memory of it evaporates upon waking. We fail, we fail. Yet night by night we try. There is no escaping the body that makes us. Sleep is full of storeis trying to unfold.

At seven in the morning, an Edward Hopper white light slashed the facade of the building, and a legless man in a wheelchair sat before the employee entrance, selling yellow number-two Ticonderoga pencils. He was always there, friendly, and I was happy to see him. I bought a pencil every day.

I liked the store in the early morning, the escalators rumbling up and down for no one, the empty selling floor, the mannequins posed to fool you, threatening to come to life. Then up the odd staircase. Past the glass box. Into the gloom of the attic.

Weeks went by. Months. I reached my nine-month anniversary. Two hundred and seventy pencils in a box on the floor.

[...] You may find that, once you're released from having to understand it all, a certain fascination gets through. It can be like those times you hear someone playing the piano beautifully or a sax wailing through jazz improvisations, and the sounds ignite a longing in you, a desire to take up the difficulties, and learn how to play that music.

I told Helen that we would leave as soon as it got dark. But night would not shake off the day that kept clinging to its edges. We waited. Silently. Hidden behind drawn curtains, we listened to the street noises coming through the slightly opened balcony window. Each time a car slowed down or stopped, each time footsteps tapped the pavement outside, I held my breath — wondering whether we might have waited too long.

‘He was trying to force them off the land,’ the old man told me. ‘If they cannot collect firewood from Normandale, they have no means to light their stoves. If they cannot walk through his land to the river, they have no access to water. They have been on that land five generations. They have nowhere else to go.’

‘What did you make of the Cubes?’ I asked the old man. ‘Were they good people? Bad people?’

‘Just people,’ he replied. ‘Ordinary folk.’

‘They gunned down a young man in cold blood,’ I said. ‘Do ordinary folk do that?’

I had been working with the old man for several months and had grown to like him very much. He had a gentle way about him; he was gracious and kind. But now he looked at me coldly, with the unpleasant, estranged look a black person sometimes gives a white person.

‘If I had been living there five generations,’ he said, ‘and a new landlord told me in broken Zulu that he wanted to interview my family before I could build a hut on my own land, I would also have killed him.’

[...] His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when she and I sat down behind them.

I FIRST READ KURZWEIL’S 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the specter of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass. When I was not working, or drinking, time slipped away from me. The hours before my shifts were a wash of benzo breakfasts and listless afternoons spent at the kitchen window, watching seagulls circle the landfill and men hustling dollys up and down the docks of an electrical plant.

The problems had started in the factory where you worked [...] one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk.

The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. All you could do was scream. It was the pain. It woke you and made you scream in the night. Your body could no longer bear its own existence. Every movement, even the tiniest shift, woke up the ravaged muscles. You were aware of your body only in pain, through pain.

Then your speech returned. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Let’s be clear. The pain never went away.

The main consequence of the war so far has been the death of a very large number of innocent Iraqi civilians and the flight from their country of two and a half million others who could afford to leave. The country is in such chaos that it’s impossible to get an even remotely accurate count of the casualties, but the most conservative estimate is one hundred thousand people, and the count may be as high as half a million. These are civilian casualties. A significant part of that number has been children. That means—inside a head made slightly demented by the violence that is invisible to us here in the United States—that the average length of these dead Iraqi bodies must be no more than four feet, and so, taking the median casualty estimates, that would mean that, if you laid out the dead in a straight line, head to toe, along Interstate 80 on a cold spring afternoon like this one, they would reach from San Francisco to somewhere between Truckee and Reno. If the higher estimates are accurate, possibly to Salt Lake City. Swaddled mostly in black, dusted with new snow.

Earlier that year, he had, after dropping out of the University of California, worked fourteen-hour days in a steam laundry. At eighteen he had shoveled coal in a power plant, sometimes on eighteen-hour shifts. At fifteen, when his father was injured and couldn’t work, he had put in twelve-hour days in a cannery at ten cents an hour. At that moment, in high summer, in the spruce scent of the air on a ridge above a fjordlike Alaskan bay, he must have felt that he had been transformed, even with the pack on his back, from a beast of burden into a much more splendid kind of animal. [...]

London was a romantic; it was his special gift as a writer to make life seem vivid and intense. He had had a dreary childhood and a difficult youth, and they filled him with a sense—which it is another of the gifts of his fiction to convey—that there were great things in the world and great things inside him, and that there was something wrong with a society that beat the sense of grandeur out of other people, or wore it away. To freeze one of those moments on the mountain is to see the immediate appeal of his work: life as a grand struggle, masculine, openhanded, and best attacked head-on. Out of this sensibility, quick, generous, and responsive, and out of his prodigal, half-formed gifts and immense determination he made real art and forged his huge success. [...]

In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem about Richard Cory, who is the envy of everyone in his New England town and in the last line of the short poem blows his brains out, we come to understand that people are not their public presentation, that their relationship to their own existence is something we may or may not be getting a glimpse of. And we may begin to be more observant and to imagine our way into their lives. [...]

I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet who was in jail had been imprisoned for a violation of the publishing law because he’d printed a book-length poem about a farmers’ revolt in 1947 on an island on the southern tip of Korea. It was a sensitive subject. Korea, as you know, was occupied by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945, and no society is ruled by an invading power for that long without a lot of collaboration and bad conscience. I helped translate the peroration of his long poem, working in a hotel room between convention sessions with a very brave and intelligent Korean poet. “And so,” it began, as I recall, “the authorities who were the running dogs of Japanese imperialism / changed their uniforms and became the running dogs of American imperialism / I write this down in 1986 when the blood of Korea cries out / and the tears of Korea burst forth.” The language of the literal translation sounded to me like the slogans one saw on the banners at student demonstrations. My cotranslator had expressed no opinion about the quality of the poem. I asked him if its language was interesting in Korean. He smiled at me, nodding, as if he had an amused, distant recollection of the state of mind in which one might ask such a question, and then shrugged and said that the language had a certain vigor.

What a strange world. You're in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You're raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can't do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. [....]

Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.

He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there — they were still there now, in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What is time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and they can all go home, okay?”

It was the last time he saw his father.

Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?

My certainties breakfast on doubts. And there are days when I feel like a stranger in Montevideo and anywhere else. On those days, days without sunshine, moonless nights, no place is my own and I do not recognize myself in anything or anyone. Words do not resemble what they refer to or even correspond to their own sounds. Then I am not where I am. I leave my body and travel far, heading nowhere, and I do not want to be with anybody, not even with myself, and I have no name nor wish to have any: then I lose all desire to call myself or be called.