May 2012
3 posts
8 tags
“…she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.”
“She decided that since she was setting out on the greatest adventure any person can take, that of the Holy Grail, she ought to have a name (identity). She had to name herself.”
“‘Either become normal, that is anonymous, or die,’ the handsome...
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Some incomplete scenes and collected notes on Olympic gentrification:
I. Olympic militarization: “In addition to the concentration of sporting talent and global media, the London Olympics will host the biggest mobilisation of military and security forces seen in the UK since the second world war. More troops – around 13,500 – will be deployed than are currently at war in...
28 tags
April 2012
4 posts
7 tags
Two songs for two lovers who are also beloved, F. and M.:
1. “Sea of Love” went to #2 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop chart and spent 14 weeks in the top 40, as well as reaching #1 on the R&B chart. In 1959 it sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. Nonetheless, Phillips was paid only $6800, and received no further royalties for the song or its...
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From “Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Left Front and the Fascists”:
First, the total left vote is (I am assured) the highest since 1988. Second, the Left Front has still improved the radical left vote since 2007, in a situation where that was by no means a guaranteed outcome given the sharp decline in working class struggles over the last few years. 11% for a radical left candidacy is...
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From “Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes,” Guardian, April 18, 2012:
Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.
Those papers that survived the purge...
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On Saturday, I went to see Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years in London, part of Fringe! East London Gay Film Festival.
Towards the end of the film, we see a letter Audre and her partner Prof. Gloria I. Joseph sent to Chancellor Kohl, putting voice to their outrage, grief and concern following the anti-immigrant riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. For a long time now I have been trying to write...
March 2012
8 posts
3 tags
“How can I be tired of the issues? The issues are our lives.”
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What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud
what a gone-and-come tidepool
what a look into eternity I took and did not return it
what a book I...
9 tags
Notes re: imaginary film #3. The one with the brown girl adopted into the French family, who falls in early and all-ending love with adoptive brother (not adopted, “biological”), and leaves family, leaves—Lyon? small village in the Jura—at age of eighteen, for Canada, ostensibly in search for “biological” mother, but really to get away from aforementioned...
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On Sunday night I went to see Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new film Le gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike) in Cambridge. Luc Dardenne was there to discuss the film and answer questions; I tried to surreptitiously record the sound of some of the discussion, but now I regret being so discreet, first of all because I probably would have seen that the device shorted out early on in the...
5 tags
Anonymous asked: Your blog is one of the few spots on the internet prompting me to look up words, and that's refreshing. I wonder, though, if you really live and breathe theory, and if you don't, how it remains so central to the writing here. Maybe this is your 'theory space' though, which seems worth having.
17 tags
“Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear...
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From Laurie Penny’s “So, it turns out feminism is a CIA plot to undermine the left,” New Statesman blog, February 29, 2012 (also relevant to Vida statistics):
“I’m having a major political rethink this week, because it turns out that all along, feminism was a CIA plot to undermine the left. Don’t just take it from me. Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor of...
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...
16 tags
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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...
6 tags
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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
6 tags
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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...
14 tags
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...
6 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
23 tags
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...
7 tags
(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...
4 tags
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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...
5 tags
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...
17 tags
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...
4 tags
For M.
November 2011
16 posts
3 tags
18 tags
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...
13 tags
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...
4 tags
“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...
3 tags
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...
5 tags
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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...
4 tags
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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...