Dasein, Red Elephant.

I came across a pretty cool website which has put up aRichard Brautigan’s Please Plant This Book, a 1968 books that consists of eight packets of garden seeds, each with an imprinted poem. Why the act of planting text into the earth? Each poem reads like a tangible ray of hope and a prayer that is offered to the living. I somehow feel that Brautigan is weary of too much knowing and has chosen to replace knowledge with begone innocence. Even thoughts buried in soil, will eventually decay.

Flash Version of the book | Text Version of the Book

“Based loosely on works such as Titian’s Venus and paintings by the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, Sleeping Beauty is meant to introduce direct sensuality into the virtual realm, but employing an idea of beauty defined by a woman rather than men in which the subject does not express conventional canons of body and facial type. In so doing Sleeping Beauty inverts the typical 3D character-based animations of interactive gaming, not just through its visual language buy by also rejecting their violence and aggressive speed.”

Fascinating piece by Claudia Hart, art critic and visual artist. Read more about Hart and this piece at this link. I don’t think it completely inverts voyeurism but somehow enhances it. The langurous movement embedded within the image is liberating in a sense but it invites continued observation, and hence the tendency to secretly voyeur.

A collection of public sculptures from all over the world. Some of them are utterly pornographic in nature and some are semi-Futurist (ala Boccioni). I like the static ones. They seem to be so damn defiant in this wierd way, of their environment and the onward gaze. See more pictures here.

I’ve received gotten the audiobook for Philosophy, A very short introduction. BC magazine writes:

Craig’s approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed. His definition of philosophy is delivered in a kind of parable. Imagine when human beings became conscious that sensory data could be interpreted through concrete symbols and ideas. An animal track means an animal has passed, which might be pursued as prey, or avoided. Human beings perceived and visualized events by indirect evidence and ideas, and then considered how human beings could act to influence events. Human beings became aware of forces of nature and events beyond human control. Human beings investigated nature, but encountered mysteries, and developed a sense of the supernatural. The project of understanding and explaining nature is science, and the project of recovering from the shock of mystery is philosophy.

I’ve tried listening to it and it seems pretty interesting. It’ll be worth a listen to just find out how on earth Craig condenses over 2000 years of philosophical thought in a little over 3 hours.

Download the audiobook here

The New York Times reviews David Mamet’s The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews. I honestly haven’t seen his film Homicide and so I’m not too convinced about the reviewer’s comments. Still, an interesting book to check out.

But there was a slight problem with Mamet’s Jews: They were unrecognizable. Their anxieties seemed from an earlier era. They belonged to no real place, just one of Mamet’s Hopperish lonely cities. They spoke Mamet-speak, which is to say, a language so hyperreal that it sometimes sounded quite unreal. They were, in fact, contrivances, created to highlight Mamet’s hobgoblins and hobbyhorses. One encounters the same schism, and the same ambivalence, in “The Wicked Son,” Mamet’s examination of the modern Jewish psyche. Like everything he does, it is blunt and bracing, honest and provocative, original and gutsy. At the same time, it’s not exactly clear which Jews Mamet is talking about, what decade they live in, how fairly he treats them or even how many of them there are.

The New Trade

In the market-place they have made
A dolorous new trade.
Now you will see in the fierce naphtha-light,
Piled hideously to sight,
Dead limbs of men bronzed in the over-seas,
Bomb-wrenched from elbows and knees;
Torn feet, that would, unwearied by harsh loads,
Have tramped steep moorlands roads;
Torn hands that would have moulded exquisitely
Rare things for God to see.
And there are eyes there – blue like blue doves’ wings,
Black like the Libyan kings,
Grey as before-dawn rivers, willow-stirred,
Brown as a singing-bird;
But all stare from the dark into the dark,
Reproachful, tense, and stark,
Eyes heaped on trays and in broad baskets there,
Feet, hands, and ropes of hair.
In the market-places . . . and women buy . . .
. . . Naphtha glares . . . hawkers cry . . .
Fat men rub hands . . .
O God, O just God, send Plague, lightnings . . .
Make an end!Louis Golding

Rivaling the best of Owen’s work, this powerful poem is taken from Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry, by Vivien Noakes, published by Sutton Publishing. Released for Remembrance Sunday, this collection of frontline verse showcases work by several poets, including Hampden Gordon and Jessie Pope. See more selections at Times Online.

I’ve written about Podslam above and I still think there their website is really cool. Bringing performance slam poetry onto the web has given much needed exposure for these wonderful artists. Their rhymes and songs spit out with so much fury and passion you’ll feel like writing yourself. The theme of writing and rewriting your history with words and oral tradition holds strong with these guys.

See more at Podslam.

Aspen is exactly the magazine or journal that I've always wanted to create but never did have the chance or time. It's got one element that I really like in a journal; media-rich content that sees critical text juxtaposed next to artwork. Each comments and reflects on the other without either dominating the rhetoric. While looking or listening to the audio or visual art in the each issue of Aspen, difficult theoretical postulations become somehow easier to understand, as relative connections become more fluid and apparent. The content itself is fascinating, from analysis of pre-modern Asian paintings, spoken word/avant-pop/classical phonograph recordings to scrapbook art, all of which are rhizomed and networked into a sexy mass of plausible cultural hypothesises.

Aspen has been around for a while and they used to have a print version, but now only exists on-line, which is actually a better platform for its hyper-textual content.

Check it out… it's a must-read. Oui, c'est incroyable.

Anyone interested in starting an online art-literature journal thingy together?

Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism

Jacques Derrida

First, I would like to say, even if this shocks certain amongst you and even if I myself took my head in my hands when Richard Rorty said that I was sentimental and that I believed in happiness, I think that he's right. This is something very complicated that I would like to come back to later, but I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for having dared to say something very close to my heart and which is essential to what I am trying to do. Even if it appears very provocative to say it and even if I began by protesting, I think that I was wrong. I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness; and I believe that this has an altogether determinant place in my work. There are so many rich and complex matters to which to respond and I cannot, in improvising, respond to all that has been said. I have the choice between several possibilities and I am going to choose the following: I am going to offer some introductory general remarks after which I will try to respond to some of the questions posed by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau and Richard Rorty.

Continue reading this entry »

Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism

Richard Rorty

Derrida is read, by conservative know-nothings in the United States and Britain, as a frivolous and cynical despiser of common sense and traditional democratic values. Many of my colleagues in the Anglophone philosophical community support this reading, and attempt to excommunicate Derrida from the philosophical profession.

Derrida is read by his fans in American departments of literature, on the other hand, as the philosopher who has transformed our notions of language and the self. They think of him as having demonstrated the truth of certain important propositions, propositions the recognition of which undermines our traditional ways of understanding ourselves, and understanding the books we read. They also take him to have given us a method-the deconstructive method-of reading texts: a method which helps us see what these texts are really about, what is really going on in them.

I find both these ways of reading Derrida equally dubious, and I shall discuss them in turn.

Continue reading this entry »

I've been reading Deconstruction and Pragmatism, a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida Ernest Laclau and Simon Critchley. This is an excellent book for several reasons, primarily because it examines the relationship that deconstructivist and pragmatist theories have on the foundations of rationalist democracy, a topic that I'm fascinated with. In many aspects, both Derrida and Rorty's work undermine the dominant rationalist approach that underlies most academic and political infrastructures.

Mouffe writes:

Derrida and Rorty are at one in refusing Habermas's claim that there exists a necessary link between universalism, rationalism and modern democracy and that constitutional democracy represents a moment in the unfolding of reason, linked to the emergence of universalist forms of law and morality. They both deny the availability of an Archimedean point-such as Reason-that could guarantee the possibility of a mode of argumentation that would have transcended its particular conditions of enunciation.

Nevertheless, their critique of rationalism and universalism does not prevent them being strongly committed to the defence of the political side of the Enlightenment, the democratic project. Their disagreement with Habermas is not political but theoretical. They share his engagement with democratic politics but they consider that democracy does not need philosophical foundations and that it is not through rational grounding that its institutions could be made secure.

The book suggests, through the critical contributions of each author in a roundtable symposium, that it is possible to theoretically develop and outline a non-foundationalist concept about the issue of democracy.

Rorty and Derrida have both very interesting and genial essays, both of which I haven't seen before on the internet. I'll put them up in the next few posts.

Mark Quinn, Winter Garden 6 (2004)

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Just had to post this when I saw it. Francis Fukuyama meets with Bernard Henry-Levi and complains about Henry-Levi's impression of Las Vegas in Levi's recent book American Vertigo. This is a fun discussion to read.. other topics of discussion include views on American vices, neoconservatives, religion and the role of public intellectuals in future.

Fukuyama explains the birth and true meaning of Las Vegas:

The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles." In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn't find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o'clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don't apply.

Link

In case anyone is interested, Joan Didion's essay comes from her book Slouching in Bethlehem. Although I haven't read the book, Im pretty sure the title of the book came from a Joni Mitchell song title and has something to do with this Yeats poem.

Self-portrait with the Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin (1890)

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“People from Islamic backgrounds were generally portrayed with negative conotations in stories set in the near future but characterizations of Muslims in the distant future are generally positive.” (tags: literature)

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