February 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Dear James:
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, mood—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don’t know, but certainly both you and your father...
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“If God were to fall short of his word, his Truth, he would fall short of his divinity and would not be God, for he is his word, his Truth.”
The sentence that follows the Eckhardt passage that Eugene Green begins Le monde vivant with, is not included in his citation. But here it is, this is what it is, and I include it because the reader I am, the watcher I am, and the...
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Agamben, “Notes on Gesture:
“In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss. An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures was...
January 2012
10 posts
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From “Listening to Voices: An Interview with Veena Das”:
Continuing on the idea of the complexity of oppression, you recount in Life and Words the story of a woman named Shanti, who you say is a woman occupying a patriarchal discourse. Can you talk more about what you mean by “occupation by women of a patriarchal discourse”?
Veena Das: Let us take the specific example...
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DARE: Apocalypse Green. (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil” or “revelation”.) Daring for a green apocalypse. A green revelation. A tender greening (a green tendering) of the gone world.
Hofgarten, Munich.
Okay, Hofgarten. Hofgarten. Hofgarten is one of my first memories of Munich. The first time I came here. When I arrived, the...
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Drive wishes it were as good as Desperado.
El Mariachi > Driver.
Carolina > Irene.
This scorpion jacket > that one.
“Did I thank you?” “No.” “I will.” The promised future of a thank you. Impossibly reparative ethics as love. I am bound to you in the future. Derrida: “What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time.” But...
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From an interview with Masha Tupitsyn at Creative Aggression:
KL: What is the relationship between theory and creativity as you see it?
MT: I don’t see the difference. Integration is the main impetus behind my work and the only real way to get beyond the theory and practice divide. It’s also the thing that makes much of my work difficult for people to accept. Most readers are hung up on...
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curate:
A neophyte migrant Filipino worker from the Pangasinan province in the northern Philippines arrives at a bustling city in the Middle East searching for his missing wife who first came to the Arab country three years ago. While searching for his wife at the temporary homes, workplaces, and watering holes of fellow Filipino expatriates, he meets eight Filipino migrant workers...
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Many thanks to Dark Sky Magazine for publishing a poem from CANDIDA: A TRANSLATION in Issue 15.
Thanks also to Harryette Mullen (! so much love and gratitude for Sleeping With the Dictionary; for Recyclopedia, with Muse & Drudge) and Switchback Books for selecting CANDIDA as a semifinalist for the Gatewood Prize. And congratulations to Cynthia Arrieu-King!
I wrote CANDIDA last year in a...
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(This text was once a blog post here, and then became a poem, and is now a blog post again; recyclage, or maybe amputation and prosthetic, metaphors of an orthopedic surgeon’s daughter):
This is one way to heal:
Everyone you know is an exhausted ghost. You can’t power up anymore. Sailor Saturn has just jumped into the abyss to sacrifice herself and destroy an evil she is...
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For M. who knows about the sea and the moon, about the edge of Heaven (die andere Seite, the German title Auf der anderen Seite) where “justice is love and love is justice.” For Sappho who crossed one way, for Madalina, who crossed the other way. For Ayten, Lotte and Susanne. For all the women who go to the other side. Who know the radical love of the other side.
...
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From “Learning to Love Again: an interview with Wendy Brown”:
Cate Thill: Can you say a bit more about your interest in collective freedom?
Wendy Brown: We need to go back to Marx once again. In the early work, Marx insists on the
inseparability of individual and collective freedom. You can read much of his quarrel with
Hegel through that problematic. Where Hegel has an...
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Last spring, I saw this painting in Edinburgh. I had forgotten that it was there, forgotten that it had once been my favorite painting. Forgotten that I had once——being myself once and forever an ancient (non)Greek——liked El Greco, that other non-Greek Greek. Forgotten that I had, in early teenhood, once even been gravely in love with this painting. If only for...
December 2011
5 posts
9 tags
Help Northern Mindanao.
25 tags
A sentimental education. Another of my beloved red and green films. Or an autobiography as sewn through a film, as a thread through the eye of a needle. What I don’t know, never know, is if my life is the eye or the thread. Who is sewn into whom? This cross-stitched life. Older Asian father with touch of melancholy, who dies at the start of the film and whose...
26 tags
Many thanks to the very kind editors at Juked, for publishing an excerpt from POSTCARD, here: “Not the Archive, but the Sieve.”
The excerpt is from the beginning of the novel. That epic anti-epic novel I wrote. The picaresque. About the poet Sappho and the goddess Aphrodite on a trip through contemporary Europe, set in August 2007. POSTCARD, named in part for Derrida’s...
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Scene from my early boyish insecthood. Or: like an alien who wants to go home, trying to take off on what I’ve mistaken as one of my native planet’s ships. I especially like how startled, even alarmed, the insect looks. Maybe I was holding on to those antennae too tightly? Also: how the melancholy look on my face is just entering into despair. But I...
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For M.
November 2011
16 posts
3 tags
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Apparently, instead of writing hyper-digressive essays of dubious intelligibility, or attempting to meet any other significant deadlines, personally or semi-professionally imposed——I now seem to prefer the frantic displacement activity of making road movies set to a soundtrack of very cheesy torch songs. Okay.
This one is set in California, with Ruben Tagalog singing...
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There are things to be written here and elsewhere about the horror of the Dow Chemical sponsorship of the London Olympics (the source of this horror being its total lack of surprise, indeed for the total congruity of this sponsorship; the horror of this knowledge: yes, the world is such, the horror of both bodies separately and then the horror of their union).
But since I haven’t yet written...
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“Two things usually happen when I talk about ‘boundaries’——the implementation of boundaries versus the disintegration of boundaries. It falls on deaf ears or it’s dismissed as moralistic and reductive. We have transgressions that are sanctioned and official in the alternative art/literary world, and we have transgressions——much more complex...
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From the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library:
For the past 6 weeks poets from around the world have been sending poems to the People’s Library in an effort to create a living/breathing poetry anthology in solidarity with the Occupy Wall St. movement. All poems are accepted into the anthology. The anthology is updated on a weekly basis. If you’d like a poem added to the anthology email...
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“So long as women’s presence in public space continues to be framed within the binary of public/private and within the complexly layered hierarchies of class, community and gender, an unconditional right to public space will remain a fantasy. In this article, we make a case for loitering as a fundamental act of claiming public space and ultimately a more inclusive ciizenship. For the...
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“But here is Sparta in a nutshell, courtesy of a Plato at once laconic and vicious: ‘These men… will be greedy for wealth, fiercely devoted behind the scenes to gold and silver; they will possess storehouses and domestic treasuries where they can hide that wealth, and well-fenced villas, veritable nests of privacy, where they can spend money on women and whoever else they want...
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Video and transcript of David Harvey speaking at Occupy London’s International Day of Solidarity, crossposted at Big Other here.
“This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great——I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think,...
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Linda Bellos, OBE, LGBT rights activist and former Lambeth London Borough Council leader, on class (crossposted at Big Other here):
“I think we also have to think about not just what we’re against, but what we’re for. What kind of world do we want to create? And I would suggest that to you that one that doesn’t analyze and understand the power of class between...
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Varinder Singh of Sikhs Against the EDL (English Defence League) and Bell Ribeiro-Addy of One Society Many Cultures, crossposted at Big Other here.
Singh: “There is a direct correlation between the economic downfall and the rise in fascism and racism across Europe.”
Ribeiro-Addy: “In times of economic crisis, division and hatred are dangerous; when the media and...
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Having always only been able to relate to a certain kind of love story: one between two animal cubs rejected by their parents; perhaps of different parents, perhaps different species altogether; or two over- or undergrown trees whose roots have entangled beyond recovery and have been given up on by those who live in the region; or adoptive siblings with secret hiding places and...
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SUPERINTENDENT: Let’s get it down, word for word.
CONSTABLE sits to write.
SUPERINTENDENT: He said: ‘Come along now, my lad…’
CONSTABLE: (As he writes) ‘Come along now, my lad.’
SUPERINTENDENT: ‘Don’t take it like that.’
MANIAC: And then we began to sing.
CONSTABLE: ‘And then we began to…’ Sing?
...
(via lazz) |»»:
Open Letter to the Administration of the University of California Berkeley
Dear Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor Breslauer, and Vice Chancellor LeGrande,
You should all resign—now.
On Tuesday, you sent a message to students informing us that we would not be allowed to set up encampments or occupy campus buildings. You quoted a passage from the...
5 tags
I DISCOVER MORE REASONS FOR LOVING YOU, 2011.
Soundtrack:
Edited version of Wrugs, “Aiko.”
Teenage Fantasy, “Portofino.”
Edited version of Rocky Gil and the Bishops, “Every Day of My Life.”
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There was once a time when I was buoyant with wishes, much in the manner of someone in the sea who does not know how to swim (I do not know how to...
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“AND THIS IS HOW THE WORLD COULD BE / THIS IS HOW THE WORLD SHOULD BE”
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AU COEUR DU DÉLUGE
TROUVER TON REFUGE
AU BORD DE L’ÉCUME
ET FUIR L’AMERTUME
TU M’AS DIT TOUT BAS:
« ON T’ATTEND DÉJÀ
DE L’AUTRE CÔTÉ——
EMMÈNE-MOI
DANSER »
October 2011
7 posts
5 tags
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“To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life … And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live—alone, from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever...
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Kierkegaard, “Purity of Heart”: “Desperate as he was, he thought: lost is lost.”
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All this California to drive through, and you nowhere in it.
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“We don’t want to separate politics from culture, love and work and we can’t find any criterion for doing so. A politics of this kind, a separated one, we wouldn’t like it and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro, Politics and political practice, 1992.
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“One question that still isn’t considered with the...
6 tags
Buying lotto.
Filipino aisle in childhood local Asian supermarket with view of meat counter.
Filipino aisle with view of girl. Patis and vinegar selection to left. See: Datu Puti, Squid, Rufina, Roland, Tiparos, etc.
Land of canned milk and bleached flour.
Been watching this kiddo jump for nineteen years.
Ghastly geezers. Mangy menaces. Flexi-face mask.
...
4 tags
Some recent reading (re-reading), for death month.
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John Berger, LILAC AND FLAG:
“People say bodies reveal character. They are wrong. Bodies are dealt out to us like cards. Character begins with how you play what you get. At nineteen Zsuzsa looked like a boy. Yet she was already more feminine than any wet nurse. This is what made her a law unto herself.”
...
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Robert Glück, ELEMENTS OF A COFFEE SERVICE:
“He was murdered by someone he brought home, the neighbors saw the killer’s face on and off during the night. That’s the logical conclusion to this catalog of betrayals: the murderer takes you when you’re naked and expect tenderness and each by agreement is host to the other’s vulnerability. The sky clouded...
September 2011
9 posts
4 tags
“A photograph, whilst recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum.”
“One learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or cardiograms.”
“A movie director can manipulate time as a painter can manipulate the confluence of the events he...
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More about Pasolini’s IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO soon, and about the Gospel of Matthew quote I mentioned in the other post, and more to come about the Catholic schools I attended my entire life and passages that made me weep, and this passage which made me weep in class, the moment when John has already said he is not fit to lace the sandals of the man who will come after him, and then...
5 tags
WHAT GOOD IS A JUDGE / OR A JURY WITHOUT A TRIAL
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Joe Bataan, soul legend. Joe Bataan, fucking legendary soul. (Also please see my friend R.J. Lozada’s fantastic interview with Bataan here.)
Today (everyday) I’m praying-weeping, weeping-praying, at the altar of Joe Bataan. Joe Bataan who sings this song like he’s praying-weeping, too.
Joe Bataan’s...
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Katherine Saunders: For you, what is the difference between a personal and a collective memoir/story?
Bhanu Kapil: I could try to answer this through the kinds of books I am writing now: a text of the race riot/domestic violence scene happening even as the street deploys its flares beyond the windowpane. Indian people don’t have net curtains. The personal element of this scene is tactile: the...
16 tags
NOSTOS: a triptych of pre-notes on California, or going back to it.
I.
This, here, for “California Dreaming,” and the dream of California.
Most of all for: the way Tony Leung looks at Faye Wong in this scene. The final scene of the film. After she’s been secretly loving and caring for him for so long. Secretly invading his house, fixing his life. A sweet...
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Had not realized that I need to write a book about red. My lifelong love and need for red. And red and green. Anne Carson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED. Derek Jarman talking about red in CHROMA. The red eyeshadow of Geum-ja in SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE. Red titles of Wong Kar-wai. All the red in HAPPY TOGETHER. All the red in more films than I can name. More texts than I can...
6 tags
“Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.”
Celan’s line, which has always been the quote of my life.
And the Derrida essay about it, which was the essay of my life. “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue——Between Two Infinities, the Poem.”
From his book for and on Celan, SOVEREIGNTIES IN QUESTION: THE POETICS OF PAUL CELAN.
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“The melancholic...
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Recently I thought I would stop being an ancient Greek, finally, after so many years. After having literally written a novel, a novella, and a fuckton of short stories, all about that stupid religion, culture, which have been holding me prisoner since my childhood. One of my first knowledges being: that I was an ancient Greek.
Or more specifically, having always known that I was,...