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"‘Beware,’ said Hugo, “of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:50:35 -0400

“‘Beware,’ said Hugo, “of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in.’”

- from Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June (1932), and related to last summer’s poem from Ariana Reines.

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:33:00 -0400

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality, I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magic forces of the world.

I want to both combat you and to submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity, I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.

Anaïs Nin, “Henry and June” (1932)

leo sun, scorpio rising

Tue, 21 May 2013 02:15:00 -0400

m: i’m gonna write a whole fuckin manifesto on the topic: “liz kinnamon, when to resist and when not to resist,” and then you open up the book and the page says go fuck yourself and a bomb goes off in your face

(and from the same night)

“did someone buy this for you as a gift?” (pointing to a plastic-covered etching of napoleon.) yeah. “i knew it, that’s so sweet. you kind of look like napoleon. leos have a strong mouth area.”

“you really know how to love someone.”

"So well done Tumblrers, showing us how much you care has made some people very rich."

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:59:00 -0400

"So well done Tumblrers, showing us how much you care has made some people very rich.":

Yahoo to Buy Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

humansofnewyork

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:51:48 -0400

humansofnewyork

Photo

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:18:39 -0400

… With all of this said, what do we make of this Audre Lorde quote?: “Caring for myself is not...

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:17:00 -0400

… 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 dominant meaning of “care” either has become industrialized in such a way that it consolidates (instead of contests) one’s’alienation from her conditions of existence, or from the means necessary to inform herself about, determine, and pursue the course of care and wellbeing that she needs.

But what I think is especially important about this now regularly cited quotation is what comes before the first comma, what comes before, that is, the moment when self-care finds its euphemistic, sunny resolution as “political warfare”: the disavowal of self-care as “self indulgence.” What, after all, is wrong with self-indulgence, with stealing time to enjoy the self, to pursue ways of being and living that are not necessarily productive? Lorde’s rewriting of self-care as political warfare seems to me to be symptomatic of a philosophy of movement building that has an unacknowledged investment in surveilling the behavior of its members (and demanding that they surveil themselves), a philosophy that is so deeply committed to the idea that everything is political that it cannot see the ways it enforces that definition through the implicit demand that its members justify all their behavior on its terms. Everything is political, in other words, can be a particularly disciplinary and disciplining definition of the political because of the way that it privileges a kind of ruthless scrutiny, assessment, and justification of one’s behaviors on the basis of whether or not they generate political value. At the same time, it tends to regard the political less as a contestation over social transformation than as the sum total of “good” or “bad” political behaviors.

At worst, everything is political can privilege a kind of left version of austerity logic, one that calls implicitly for the abstention from behaviors that don’t serve the Higher Purpose of generating and assessing individual behavior in the form of political value. It can only handle self-indulgence and extravagance when those things can be given a justifiable political form, when they can be commended or valorized, in other words, for how radical they are. It can only handle self-indulgence and extravagance, in other words, when they cease to be self-indulgent or extravagant at all, and claim, on the flip, to be productive and progressive.

• • • lowendtheory: On Audre Lorde’s Legacy and the “Self” of Self-Care, Part 2 of 3

Evening Will Come

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:45:00 -0400

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 in which it feels the room and changes. I write to hold the music of the room. If the poet wanders in her studio and that is the text then one can pause while the siren outside blares or even incorporate it into the poem. One of the most important things I know about poetry is that the words don’t need to be heard. They aren’t ever. Not all of them. And I think of that as an emotional truth. Poems are not made out of words. They’re made out of emotional absences, rips and tears. That’s the incomplete true fabric of the text.”

“I feel bad for the limp wristed word delicate because it sure takes the hit of Marjorie’s contempt”

“The naked woman will always find her way in the art world.”

“Whose courtroom in what state are we in anyhow. ‘Feeling’ will always interfere with the advised (and really I mean masculine) reading of such texts but feeling (how about we try substituting ‘being female’ for feeling just as a stunt) is always a problem (a good one) in literature and feeling”

Fantasy dogwhistles, that’s what it does. It has little to do with plots, and everything to do with...

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:13:08 -0400

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, very quiet, nothing more quiet–yet this is what I mean by noise–and with it I feel the limits of my senses, sovereignty, conceptualizing force.

All of which are grazing the world and sensing where action is and isn’t. But a scenario, that’s something different. A scenario is the opposite of a scene, or more precisely, a scene turned into its opposite. In Taylor’s work a scenario is a scene that you imagine actively, a game of “What If?” If you play that game and spool out the consequences, it might actually change your relations to the objects you’ve moved with in the game.

— The Game (2): Supervalent Thought

everyone on tumblr come to the beach right now

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:02:46 -0400

everyone on tumblr come to the beach right now

benoben: *ay bana bişiler oluyo

Sun, 05 May 2013 17:23:38 -0400

benoben:

*ay bana bişiler oluyo

notes written while driving, sitting, sleeping: january-april 2013 (unrefined)

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:15:00 -0400

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 enforce capitalism/professionalism like natural law without self-trickery

_________

i talked shit about foodies
bc i think foodies are the footsoldiers of neoliberalism and they just looked back, blinking
i sed the restaurant is like the apotheosis of alienated labor & they were like
“uh huh”
and:
“i mean, you’re in it right now, too, so”
aka
you’re mired in it so you’re just saying this bc yr miserable doing it
…
YEAH.
why would we not listen to the ppl actually doing the work
ppl will tell themselves anything to be able to continue doing the things they do

____

the goal of work, of existence under these conditions of life, is to make your psychic and emotional life completely opaque — to obscure it so that as such, one may go on, remain productive. we train and train this way — this takes training the way it takes maintained repression and violence to beat down every eruption of resistance — we learn not to bring our personal life to work, and then we look up one day, we pay sum hundreds for a meditation retreat only to learn our insides are completely indecipherable
___

for me it’s only love if its excessive

____

“you are an individual like no one i’ve ever met”

____

every man in texas looks like george bush
(“all men are cops”)
____

dust covered clothes are some of the most beautiful things in the world
____

a country built on self-storage
______

“honor as surplus dignity—honor not something everyone can have
it must be constantly maintained, thus the connection throughout history between
violence & honor” (david graeber)
___

having a personality makes your whole academic career suspect
“i have a separate facebook for my personality”
____

as young as i can remember i’d pack a bag and say i was running away—i’d go sit under a tree or something with my bookbag and wait until i got very lonely, and feel abandoned. unsurprisingly i’d go to a friend’s or back home. i don’t know whether the air at home was too hostile or too stultifying or whether i just wanted to wander, which is what i do and don’t want, now
_______

“i am a sensualist, my heart purrs”

_______

someone on the airplane is reading a book w/ last name author ‘turtledove’
____

weak-willed people will hurt you the most
bc they will say yes to whatever is front of them
they can’t say no
they want at any cost to be liked
they can’t sit through discomfort
so nothing they say is actually worth a damn

one thing i’ve never had sympathy for is the kind of woman who will betray you for some dude’s approval
the kind of girl that will lap up any attention a male gives her
who will throw you under the bus to get affirmation
who doesn’t prioritize friendship

____

white dudes have serious limits

_____

n, do i repel ppl
“maybe just the ones sum kind of deep boneknowledge knows you should repel? i dunno. most people i know who know you love you, including me.”
____

it’s just about liking the ways someone’s egotistical

The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:04:52 -0400

The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory:

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 policies but alternative approaches and demands that we hope will contribute to the broader debate that is the environment in which policymakers operate.

karaj: my college friend rebecca, with whom i once edited a...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:40:00 -0400

karaj:

my college friend rebecca, with whom i once edited a zine (i don’t even think i knew it was a zine, i was just like “fuck the school newspaper, i want to write a long essay about multiculturalism”), wrote a piece for slate on why you shouldn’t go to grad school. karen gregory, who i also went to college with, but didn’t know until grad school and tumblr, wrote a rebuttal.

rebecca is right, i am in the right program, plus i have unusual experience, access, and backup plans with several components, plus vague backup plans should the backup plans fail. this could all fail, but i think i am currently as non-precarious as i can be given my given and chosen precarities.

something i might say to someone considering graduate school is something that jill nelson, who wrote volunteer slavery (seriously, go read it), once said at a feminist conference: “diversify yourself.” i didn’t really do it on purpose, and in fact i think in a lot of academia it works against me, but in life it makes me feel pretty calm.

this has been reverberating since i read it and i think it’s worthwhile to point out that fascinatingly, nelson’s book was released in 1994 - the same decade as clinton’s welfare dismantlement and the passing of several bills aimed at refashioning the US population in accordance with neoliberal subjectivity. this sentence is particularly relevant: “As welfare safety nets are removed, workers are asked to think of themselves as freestanding businesses that shield themselves, much as corporations do by measuring and apportioning risks and by diversifying operations and investments. Risk, which was deemed harmful and needed careful calculation and management by actuarial experts, is now represented as an opportunity to be negotiated, cultivated, and exploited by the entrepreneurial financial subject” (via). so, meditating on the language of post-keynesian transformation - thinking about the keyword risk and its positive connotation, which has a history, as well as the concept of diversifying, and the ways these concepts are internalized and repurposed. my obsession right now is thinking of the finance economy as resulting in a “patrimonialization of behaviors,” which figures patriarchy and neoliberalism as cellularly entwined and makes it a specifically feminist issue.

"do you think that there will be women who will be brilliant, original, and vital, whose brilliance..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:53:00 -0400

“do you think that there will be women who will be brilliant, original, and vital, whose brilliance and originality will be understood to be mad? do you think men who are not briliant, original, and vital, will be understood to be so? do you think that women who do not sit quietly but have effectively watched the men and taken notes and made extensive preparations to behave in ways to please them will please them and then be used to excoriate the other women? do you think you think there are women who will worry under these social conditions that to be respected is a nightmare like being mocked?”

- anne boyer - ?

"Far from being ‘democratization of finance,’ subprime mortgages testify to the enduring..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:08:44 -0400

“Far from being ‘democratization of finance,’ subprime mortgages testify to the enduring grammar of modern power’s engagement with alterity as one of engulfment/subordination and not of exclusion. The subprime lending boom was ‘reverse redlining’—racial minorities traditionally denied credit were now targeted with high-risk credit. It demonstrated that, to grow and increase profits without engaging the sphere of production, finance needed to spread its reach beyond the middle class to the poor and to bring racial minorities within circuits of credit. With the neoliberal turn, equity markets began to rise, propelled by inflow of funds from newly created funded pension schemes, and big companies increasingly relied on equity markets for finance. In response, banks pushed lending into more marginal markets, developed new financial instruments, and invented new ways to make mortgage loans to lower-income workers and racial minorities whom lenders had previously avoided. The scope of the financial market was expanded by hunting out economically marginal groups for mortgage and consumer credit. In this process, “economically marginal people constituted, in effect, a ‘developing country’ within the United States.”African Americans, who historically had limited access to credit markets on account of racial prejudice and discrimination, now became ‘the most profitable group to lend to.’”

- 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 professionalization machine..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:31:57 -0400

“Conferences at one time served that purpose, but they’re part of the professionalization machine now; they’re not creative testing grounds, they’re where you recite some finished work to prove your competence and say you did. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say they’re presenting a conference paper, then sigh that they finished it some time ago and are working now on other questions. The same is true for publishing. It takes passion to be an academic and yet the ways in which academics exchange ideas is so antithetical to passion, so glacially slow, that an article might receive a response (if indeed it receives any response at all) a year or so after it was published. Again, the original author will have long since moved onto other projects, and the conversation languishes and dies there, mostly unseen.”

- The Virtues of Excrement: Lili Loofbourow on Blogging and the Academic Life

http://ucberkeleyenglish.com/?p=1333

Debt, Power, and Crisis

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:31:00 -0400

(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 providing a safety net or a core set of basic goods and services to changing the rules under which the economy operates…The obligations and principles considered here include the following:

The obligation to protect — requires the state to take steps in order to protect economic and social rights from actions by third parties that interfere with the enjoyment of those rights.
The principles of progressive realization and nonretrogression — the state must take steps to progressively realize economic and social rights over time and to prevent an erosion of those rights.
The principle of maximum available resources — requires the state to undertake steps to use the maximum of available resources to progressively realize economic and social rights.
The principle of nondiscrimination and equality — the state must ensure the equal enjoyment of rights in terms of both its conduct and the outcomes of its policies. Because of the focus on substantive outcomes, “race-blind” or “gender-blind” policies are not sufficient for compliance with this principle. Nondiscrimination also implies that positive steps must be taken to reduce already existing inequalities.
The principle of accountability participation and transparency — governments are obliged to provide mechanisms through which people can hold the state accountable, can participate in policymaking, and can access the information required to do so.

Compliance with these obligations and principles imply a very different way of regulating credit markets and responding to financial crises than the dominant approach over the past several decades…

…There has been very little exploration of these issues, and this is unfortunate. The human rights framework is often dismissed as being too narrowly focused on individual liberties and political freedoms. In practice, this is often true, but it is a result of the marginalization of economic and social rights in the broad human rights discourse. This can result in the rejection of economic and social rights without fully understanding the potential of this approach for advancing social justice. We suggest that this is a mistake and that the constructive development of the economic and social rights approach, and the institutions that back it, would lead to a fundamentally different kind of global economy demanding a transformation of how financial markets and institutions operate.

— American Quarterly, 64:3 (September 2012) pp. 387-409.

The whole lecture course is in this question: What distance must I maintain between myself and...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:38:58 -0400

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 into a secondary..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:55:54 -0400

“Writing is precisely that contradiction that turns the failure of communication into a secondary communication, speech for others but speech without the other.”

- Barthes, “Tables rondes,” 1959