May 2013
8 posts
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"So well done Tumblrers, showing us how much you... →
Yahoo to Buy Tumblr for $1.1 Billion
… With all of this said, what do we make of this Audre Lorde quote?: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” It is both thrilling and affirming, I think, to sit with the possibilities of redefining self-care as though it were going on the political offensive. This may especially be the case in a context where the...
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Evening Will Come →
Eileen Myles: “Painted Clear, Painted Black” (via whateverjeanne)
“I think of the reader as somebody who deserves something other than a recitation from the long phallic night of my heart whether that recitation takes the form of personal expression or a wily conceptual sound poem. I like an author who is aware of reception and the body.” “My work has a chameleon quality...
Fantasy dogwhistles, that’s what it does. It has little to do with plots, and everything to do with shaping the dynamic attachment of subjects to worlds and worlds to their mediations. Even if I am actively fantasizing, and in my fantasies I am talking, fantasy is very quiet. It is not what I thinkis making me get up and walk around the room. It is a structure of adhesion, sticky but not binding,...
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April 2013
26 posts
notes written while driving, sitting, sleeping:...
the parts of texas new mexico and arizona that have only mountains, clay colors and lilac and not even a gas station for hours are “not a place to live but to visit” mostly bc they’d have 2 reconsider their attitudes they’d have to behave majestically _______
idk how to be so thoroughly hard boiled or some shit, there are people who are so wholly bought out, who...
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The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the... →
Today – Wednesday April 24 – the founding editors of Soundings, the new left journal first published in 1995, launch a manifesto that will attempt to outline ways forward. Over the next year we and our collaborators will, in a series of monthly instalments, examine different aspects of the current crisis and try to frame a more systemic set of questions than is usually asked. We do not offer...
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“do you think that there will be women who will be brilliant, original, and...”
– anne boyer - ?
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“Far from being ‘democratization of finance,’ subprime mortgages...”
– Tayyab Mahmud, “Debt and Discipline.” American Quarterly 64:3 (2012) 469-494.
“Conferences at one time served that purpose, but they’re part of the...”
– The Virtues of Excrement: Lili Loofbourow on Blogging and the Academic Life
http://ucberkeleyenglish.com/?p=1333
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Debt, Power, and Crisis
(an excerpt from James Heintz and Radhika Balakrishnan’s “Debt, Power, and Crisis: Social Stratification and the Inequitable Governance of Financial Markets,” in a 2012 issue of American Quarterly entitled “Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime,” which in its entirety is so, so good) We argue that the role of economic and social rights should shift from simply...
The whole lecture course is in this question: What distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to together construct a sociability without alienation, a solitude without exile? - Claude Coste’s preface to Barthes’ lectures at the Collège de France in 1977, How to Live Together
“Writing is precisely that contradiction that turns the failure of communication...”
– Barthes, “Tables rondes,” 1959
Your new work includes more drawings. What else is different since the bed? I don’t smoke any more. I don’t have sex any more, I don’t drink booze any more. I don’t stain my sheets any more, I don’t take contraception, I don’t use condoms anymore, I don’t have my period anymore, what else don’t I do that’s in that bed? Hmmm. Many, many things… I make drawings of flowers and birds. You know, you...
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Self-degradation sustains the adjunct economy, and we see echoes of it in journalism, policy and other fields in which unpaid or underpaid labour is increasingly the norm. It is easy to make people work for less than they are worth when they are conditioned to feel worthless.
Thomas A Benton wrote in 2004, before tackling the title question, “Is Graduate School a Cult?”:
...
after spending all day at MoMA it became even more pronounced that what i might call a loose network of friends & affiliations around the world, both online & off, are doing important, exciting things…even if “only” on their tumblrs, their unpublished poems, their fliers, or their instagrams. that we should focus our attention & resources on networks of mutually...
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CFP: Exploring Digital Narcissisms
For Freud, narcissism is the investment of libidinal energy redirected away from objects and toward the ego, whereas Lacan tells us it is a failure arising from the mirror stage precipitating a fruitless and perpetual search for the perfected image of the self. A “healthy” narcissism entails an optimal level of self-regard and esteem, whereas an “unhealthy” narcissism can...
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You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.
towerofsleep:
karengregory:
… There is a cold logic of privatization at work in these “don’t go” screeds. This logic foregrounds an “every man for himself” mentality, which mirrors the very toxic culture of academics that so closely binds self-worth and research production. To what degree have we internalized this toxicity when we suggest to others that they should “save themselves”?...
In a section of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 with the title “The Meaning of Human Requirements,” [ii] Marx offers some suggestive ideas about how we might begin to think about how to spend non-work time and produce post-work selves by casting non-work in terms of an expanding realm of needs. In his indictment of bourgeois political economy, Marx describes it as a...
You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.
karengregory:
In 2009, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an “advice” piece entitled “Graduate School in the Humanities: Don’t Go.” In the article, Professor William Pannapacker (ironically of Hope College) proceeded to get real and lay down some truth for aspiring seekers of higher education: there are no jobs, you will grow old trying to get one, you will be poor and in debt (and did we...
What such detachment from permanence and proper political objects issues in, for Whitman, is a kind of affirmation—that familiar, complex Whitmanian mode—we now want to consider: affirmation less of any one thing than as an orientation. Most elementally, we might take “A Song for Occupations” to be a poem about finding one’s way through the unfinished business of...
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“Grandiosity is of course a term itself rich with theoretical inflection, much of...”
– From Peter Coviello and Elizabeth Freeman’s ”Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations,” in the latest issue of Periscope.
Alli Warren -- "Protect Me from What I Want"
Protect Me from What I Want
I did it for the data I did it for the lulz
I did it for the money I did it for the children
I did it for the health of the chickens
I did it to overturn attrition I did it to retake the city
I did it for the up-goats for the good company for the habit of my pleasure & the
unknown links in sub-domains
I did it so that everyone would gasp
I did it...
Watchcurate:
(via Punishment and Profits: Immigration Detention - Fault Lines - Al Jazeera English)
9:30-10:13
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incoming text compilation march 15- march 31
you know the desert might be your thing, think ab what a cactus you are, retaining all your moisture, hanging in for the long haul, you are pretty desert, and a pretty desert—this may be a strong sitch
i’m finding out about your spiritual and biological make-up for free online: Cacti show many adaptations to conserve water. Most species of cacti have lost true leaves, retaining only...
March 2013
35 posts
3 tags
so when i was crossing the new mexico-texas border a truck full of dudes made sure to keep steady alongside me and eventually passed me with a sign they’d prepared somewhere during the preceding 30 miles; it read, imaginatively, “SHOW us YOur Tits” — really great typography — all four of them grinning / me reading (projecting) it as a potentially self-aware, humorous...
For Valerie Solanas, On the 25th Anniversary of... →
“$8 for Females + Genderqueers, $10 - 15 Sliding Scale for Men”
Duke University Press: Difficulty has long... →
dukeupress:
Difficulty has long functioned as a keyword in poetics, music criticism, and, to a lesser extent, film studies. Technically, when a literary critic identifies a poem as difficult she makes no value judgment: the word is used to describe the poem’s accessibility (not only in terms of…
new mexico
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‘u betta recognize’ is a very radical statement
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tonight i told susan stryker and adam geary that i am fundamentally positioned outside the academy, that my affinities are there, and that if not anti i’m para-academic, and susan goes, “did you just say para-academic? …this is how i’ve been describing myself for years.” she told me about the stretch of time between her ba and doctorate and we talked about the...
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roadtrip so far
checking into a hotel alone on a cross-country roadtrip is strangely like the most exhilarating/nauseating thing i’ve done in a minute driving through alabama i thought, “wow, georgia is really pretty” mississippi has a shade of grass more neon green than maybe i’ve ever seen louisiana is more haunting than mississippi, which says a lot especially given that i passed...
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mostly i feel that we should be merciful with one another girl at a bar the other night says to me in tears “i think you’re better at occupying the grey areas than i am, right now i just need things to be plus or minus, black or white” all the things which are survival strategies like inattentiveness, which being on the other end of doubtlessly feels hurtful or un-nuance:...
