Barbed Wire Telephone

Thresholds as throughlines A twist

[barbedwiretelephone]

052215

Read:

Cartographies of Silence by Adrienne Rich

Because it is everything.

Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability Femmes Of Color Symposium Keynote Speech, Oakland, CA (8/21/11)

Pure, unadulterated magic.

When Does a Guilty Pleasure Become Too Guilty?

I just started watching GOT and I already have a lot of feelings.

Arts of the Possible: Adrienne Rich on Writing, Capitalism, Freedom, and How Silence Fertilizes the Human Imagination

"The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet's work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way--certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins--often terribly and fearfully-- in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, "What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?" A. Rich, fairy godmother

Popova on Rich = everything

“Mad Max” Complicates Action Hero Masculinity—And That’s Great

Must. Watch. Immediately.

Listen:

Make/Work with Aurora Tang

This was interesting and good. It made me think about mindfulness in what, when, and how I take in culture/media, particularly as contextualized by all of the thinking about silence I've been doing.

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Jaime North: Terraforms, 2014

Solo show at Sarah Cottier Gallery, comprised of multiple forms with cement, marble waste, limestone, steel slag and coal ash as sculptural materials, and inhabited by a complex mix of plant species native to the east coast of Australia. This exhibition also featured two hand printed silver gelatin photographs, depicting the now non-existant mounds from which the steel slag was obtained. (artist statement)

[hush-syrup]

Memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. The places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there: ‘you see, here there used to be—,’ but it can no longer be seen.

From Walking in the City by Michel de Certeau (via heteroglossia)

[heteroglossia]

Barthes suggests that science differs from poetry not because of any disparity between them in format, content, method, or intent but because of a disparity between them in status – a prestige of pedagogy. Whereas poetry has always offered an egalitarian regime, destabilizing the signifier within a generalized economy of polysemic enunciation, science has only offered a totalitarian regime, stabilizing the signified within a restricted economy of monosemic enunciation. For Barthes, science must begin to acknowledge its ideological investments, radicalizing itself by poeticizing itself. If ideology is the unreal conciliation of a real contradiction, is it not fair to say that ideology is itself an imaginary solution—and therefore ‘pataphysical? If metaphysics must study the ontology of truth, must not ‘pataphysics study the ideology of power?

Christian Bök, 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (via heteroglossia)

[beingblog]

I think what’s magnificent about Bach is that, when you listen to this music, and it moves you so much, I mean, it’s just a bunch of sound waves going — crashing into your ear, and you have to contain — you see this emotion bubbling up, you start seeing, like, you know, tearing up, and saying, well, what’s going on? These are just sounds crashing into my — what’s going on in here? So, of course, you could say, well, it’s just Bach. He’s a genius. You know, that’s just the way it works. No, not so easy. I have to have the ability in my brain to create that emotion. I mean, all Bach is doing is sending a bunch of wave — of sound waves. I have to be able — and when I say I, I mean everybody. There’s something extremely optimistic and really almost dizzying when you hear something, and it moves you so intensely inside. And you realize, but this is you who is being moved. Nobody’s forcing this inside you. So in your brain, there must be this reservoir of beauty which most often is untapped, goes untapped. But if you can find it with the right spotlight, then you discover this amazing, uh, you know, uh, you know, consonances, or dissonances, or this amazing, narrative, story, inside you.

– Bernard Chazelle, from his upcoming conversation with Krista Tippett on the cosmology of Bach. (via beingblog)