DogMyth

[dogmyth]

Let’s try this resurrection. 

[leuc-anthemum]

Hell took a body and discovered God.

Easter homily from John Chrysostom in chapel today (via lukexvx)

[deephouseforlesbians-deactivate]

The difficulty is that there are two languages at play within philosophy, one that deals with the level of the actual, with phenomena as they are given to us (the level of the clear-confused), and the other that deals with the virtual. This second level is the level of the distinct-obscure, a level where the Gestalt is yet to be formed and where description takes the form of the analysis of a field of forces. This is the level of the shattered space of Cezanne, of the fragmented Gestalt where the foreground and background dissolve into one another. The languages cannot be confused with each other, for to do so would be to risk conflating these two aspects of the Gestalt. This would lead to a consideration of the virtual in terms of the actual and to a perpetuation of the Gestalt beyond its proper place. It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty ultimately rejects Cezanne’s solution, arguing that we need to “seek space and content together” (EM, 140). Once this statement is accepted, the possibility of an analysis of perception traversing the virtual is cut away from us. It is true that at the level of the actual the Gestalt cannot be separated from the space it itself forms, from the planes that radiate out from it; but such an analysis can only move us half way towards the nature of the differential structures. The other half of the enquiry does not take place, as Merleau-Ponty recommends, between the figures, but instead at the point where the figure dissolves itself, where the contour starts to fall apart, and where we see traces of that which is behind the Gestalt.

Henry Somers-Hall, “Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: The Aesthetics of Difference” (via softnietzscheanism)

A SUMMATION OF THE AESTHETICS OF DIFFERENCE:

The difficulty is language –      yet to be formed. A field of forces ::: actual and obscure      dissolve one another, cut away. Consider: the virtual, the actual, the proper place:      possibility separated from [by] forms; Planes that radiate half-way towards      enquiry, not place                 (contours that fall are traces that point to itself)

[dogmyth]

thinking about the terrible coincidence of being over-saturated and under-whelmed 

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Much contemporary theory defines citizenship as an amalgam of the legal and commercial activity of states and business and individual acts of participation and consumption, but … citizenship, in its formal and informal senses of social belonging, is also an affective state where attachments that matter take shape.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (163)

[jvtng]

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness than cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved.

Claudia Rankine, from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (via letters-to-nobody)

[dogmyth]

"Friendship of course is rarely monolithic. It knows solidarity, commitment, joint enthusiasm, even ambition. But it thrives too on separateness, difference, discretion. If friendship is a response to the other's singularity, it is because it is already more than one. Despite it's reputation, it has none of the teleology, exclusivity, or institutionalized regularity of sexual passion. It seems rathe to emerge, Blanchot once wrote, like a pure idiosyncratic event, without beginning or end, that defies the conventions of linear narrative. Most importantly of all, friendship presupposes distance as a condition of its possibility. Even when it endures, it is always a transitional or transitory state. And whatever is contingent on distance is always exposed to the threat of misunderstanding or estrangement, silence or death. But the risks friendship runs, as Blanchot affirms, are also its possibility."–Leslie Hill on the friendship between Bataille and Blanchot

[dogmyth]

"What matters is it's [Wages for Housework] political genesis, which is the refusal to see work, exploitation, and the power to revolt against it only in the presence of a wage... to not see women's work in the home is to be blind to the work and struggles of the overwhelming majority of the world's population that is wageless. It is to ignore that American capital was built on slave labor as well as waged labor and, up to this day, it thrives on the unwaged labor of millions of women and men in the fields, kitchens, and prisons of the United States and throughout the world." Silvia Federici (with Nicole Cox) in COUNTERPLANNING FROM THE KITCHEN

[mashatupitsyn]

“Moreover one person is everything. It’s not heavy to carry because it isn’t simply carried: it is everything.” Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (Celan: “The world is gone, I must carry you.”)

[redplebeian-deactivated20150604]

[angry-hippo]

Corporate America may try to greenwash consumerism, they may try to appeal to subcultural elements, they may be willing to accept the money of communities they at one time abhorred, but at the end of the day they know that the police state is where their non-gluten bread is soy-buttered.

[staydeliberate-blog]

shut down schools, kids dont get to eat lunch

reward cops and military with sandwiches WTF

[leuc-anthemum]

Disgusting

[dogmyth]

Projects/Poets/Half-Partners

So I’ve started a collaborative project with a partner of mine. If I can call him that, and I don’t think I can–there is hardly enough material between us to build a relationship (despite us tangentially hanging out for a year). It’s one of those relationships I’ve settled for because of proximity, because of loneliness. Which makes me think that hope can be the most disastrous of all emotions. I want to have faith that we can create a radically sustainable relationship. So in the blind-faith of the covetous, I have engaged in a last-ditch effort (my 5th, 6th, 8th, 11th last ditch effort with him) to make something with him.

He’s been sending me field-recordings and I’m responding with poetry (I usually write fiction/essays, so this has been an exercise in stretching that vulnerability). The end result will hopefully be an audio collage of all that we’ve done.

I’ll be posting periodic updates on here. I’m really excited about the idea of the project, but given the frayed state of our relationship, it might not actually come to fruition.

Here’s the draft of a poem I wrote yesterday: Stacking the chairs. Even the ones that do not fit together. Stacking to unstack. The ones that do not fit either slide off or stay stuck, but this is what happens at parties. We are unsticking the stacks to make room for the dance hour. No one is here yet. We never know if people will come and then they all come at once and the feeling is of being worse off. The dance floor is crowded with not people, but things that people enjoy, or things that express joy and are easy enough to pick up at the partystore. We are littered with streamers. They are damp and fall like Spanish moss. The room is the color of wet slate, so we tried. We tried to fill it with enough color to forget that the chairs stick and that our friends are maybe not our friends because we only invite them to parties so that we can say things like i tried that new restaurant and to talk obliquely about life through the lens of fashionable philosophies like nihilism and mysticism. Have you held my stone bracelet? It's imitation stone but I can feel the energy of what's intended. Intentions are everythings. Like how at this party you would never tell your friend you honest opinion. She would go limp in half-listening, nudge those pathetic streamers with toes I want to kiss in sorry, and she says yes that's all right and good because at parties everything is agreeable despite intentions and the whole party's now ruined and I go running after you, but isn't this what our relationship has always been?–I don't mean metaphorically. I mean I know the back of your body so well. I'm always seeing you on staircases and in service entrances, you're always walking backwards, or running up the stairs, the geometry of mismatched chairs, but I get it, I do, I'm also looking for the exit sign. 

[dogmyth]

Review of Amelia Gray’s AM/PM

Amelia Gray's AM/PM collection of short vignettes features a cast of rotating, brambly characters that are related not through their shared lives (as they rarely come in contact with one another), but through a shared quiet dissatisfaction that is occasionally punctured by a profound love, or curiosity, with the world. Structurally, AM/PM gives the illusion of passing through time–entries progress numerically and switch between AM (on the lefthand side of the page) and PM (on the right). Like relating your dreams to a listener, it's the emotional tenor and development that's interesting–not the sequencing.

So, as AM/PM progresses, the chaotic begins to present itself more visibly–as upturned lamps, dismantled tables, jammed doors and empty cans. Her cast starts to feel the weight of this environmental chaos–some of them stop leaving their houses, others eat chicken straight from the can foregoing the formalities of sandwich making, others silently board up the windows and turn towards a life lived only in dreams. The rest of this review, will be more in keeping with the staccato pacing of the book: a pithy list of observations, interrupted by lines from the book.

Perfect vignettes of the things in life we wish we were brave enough to say & lucid enough to see. There is poetry to the wasted life, but little beauty. The poetry to an empty bed is beauty, Charles recognizes, and there is poetry to the second hand of the clock, but the only beauty in the wasted life is that of efficiency, and grace, and a complete knowledge of a small portion of the world. 2:PM

Like a box of old polaroids you forgot you've taken–smudgy, too personal and slightly embarrassing. June woke up covered in seeds. They were small, toasted sesame seeds, thousands of them all over her body. She had never been covered in seeds before and it was a strange feeling, like a snake might feel in the sand. AM:97

Each piece, though expansive and billowy, tapers out in neat endings that are more succinct than they are conclusory. He installed a humane trap, a kill trap and a poison trap, and left it up to the vermin to make the choice for themselves. 74:PM

The unraveling is slow, like rope left out in the rain. Understand that if you don't paint a room properly, you will know these pieces of wall forever. Understand that every piece of paint not properly applied continues to quietly exist. The misapplied strokes hold a dull truth that remains despite new coats. 22:PM

Characters that were all at some point your shuffling upstairs neighbors. Charles was painting the ceiling red after the landlord specifically told him not to paint anything at all. AM:109

When you point to the absurd in everyday life and realize there are three fingers pointing right back at you. Carla switched off the hair dryer. "It's easy to forget how much around us is flammable," she said. 12:PM

Jokes you wish your friends were capable of telling at parties. Truths you wish your childhood priest was aware of. Missy had legs and she knew how to use them. She slid them into jeans or wrapped a skirt around them. She walked with her legs to the grocery store. AM:45

A collage of the real. But only the real we tend to ignore. Everyone forgets that acting on instinct has gotten us through so many wars and the rest of us through long lives. The realization caused Tess to paint the dead ladybug on her bedside table with gold frost nail polish, which, as she predicted, did make it look prettier. 18:PM

Fringe lives narrated with the occasional poetic PSA. Is every trip to the mailbox an exercise in self­-loathing? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? AM:59

She has the grab­-all imagination of a child applied to the disappointing life events every adult experiences. Tess kept the secret, but compensated by repeating it to herself. She would lie in bed, curled around her left hand, holding it gently to her knees. My hand is a claw. My hand is a claw. 96:PM

The refuse of a domestic life and the leftovers of dreams. One day everyone stopped over-­thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. AM:107

Each person's private paranoias become inhabited dreamscapes. The butter knife makes the entire room feel dangerous. An intruder might not have any desire to stab her until he reached the top of the stairs and felt the butter knife under his hand. Olivia cannot go on until she has collected the butter knife and puts it in the sink, where it belongs. AM:63

Her characters live in Edward Hopper paintings–all long­-focused shots, empty rooms, the only ones inhabiting their universe. At that moment, he didn't even want to touch her. He felt a distinct fear that she might either disappear or stay the same. 72:PM

Love is something to be found in pastries, PDFs and boxing gloves. They would eventually see each other only, and one morning, they would wake up to find that they had fused together, just slightly, at the upper-­thigh. AM:55

[chagalov]

Yvonne Chevalier, Masques, c.1935

from Millon-Drouot

[dogmyth]

Kodachrome Zine Review

Ok! So most of the zines I’m about to review have been out for a while, but whatever, I just picked them up, so they’re new to me.

Deafula #7; on disability and accessibility in radical communities

Great writing by Kerri, as always. In issue #7 she describes the difficulties of bringing attention to accessibility within radical spaces. There is the assumption that in spaces where people not only use terms like praxis & intersectionality, but actively try and embody these ideas, that the conversation of disability/accessibility would not have to be the shouldered by those who experience this form of marginalization. She writes, “even in activist circles, disability is still thought of as an individual problem.” If we are trying to create spaces in which we can practice, play and argue our way into a world we would like to see, then it is crucial to look at the people who aren’t the loudest, most represented, and easily visible. We have to ask questions like, who is not being heard and why. This then creates a new terrain to navigate–one in which we resist a hero narrative, resist creating spokespersons of people who experience this marginalization, and move beyond merely appreciating these voices as “added diversity.” Because accessibility is not an individual’s “problem,” it’s a central component to actually practicing radical inclusion.

Kerri isn’t simply arguing for more ramps, or better aides, (she is very aware of the material constraints of some of these smaller venues), she’s asking people who are already engaged in the process of radical transformation and critical thought to reevaluate the very construction of ability/disability.

Some choice quotes: “We need to make this struggle, these internalizations, and these characterizations, whether intentional or not, more visible. Yes, we can acknowledge that it is difficult to provide accommodations, and they are expensive and can be tricky to secure, but that is not the fault of nor the responsibility of the person with the disability.”

“And it’s not an easy fight. But, we have to take it on. And I mean all of it. It’s not enough to just reduce and minimize our fight to end the marginalization of people with disabilities to mere event-planning logistics, or down to mere changing the way we perceive and think about a group of people and their characteristics and identity. The end goal isn’t simply more ramps and more ASL interpreters–it’s the dismantling of the social construction of disability itself.”

Real Fake Clouds: Field Guide and Audio Companion

I really love the concept of this zine: a CD and photos to accompany it, but RFC didn’t entirely deliver. The audio–drone that was more static than the complex, subtle microtonal drone I’m into–left me wanting something more substantially spacey (Check out Jon 7). This was just quite literally white noise. Which went well with the glitchy, abstracted cloud photos included in the zine. Together they certainly made a cohesive, aesthetic statement–I just wasn’t super into it. However, I would be interested in seeing if this theme was developed beyond the white noise/glitch thing they’ve got going on.

Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Volume 5, praxis

Ok wow! This was the first BtS zine I read and I’m bummed I didn’t start at volume one (but I can because QZAP is a great resource!). This issue certainly had many moments that crossed both emotional and intellectual boundaries. This review won’t try and replicate that, but just a forewarning.

I think the entry that I I had the most difficulty wrapping my head around was, “Wholly Owned Subsidiary” by Raven Kaldera.  My initial response to his essay–about being a radical activist who is the Master in a Master/slave relationship–was an attempt at unpacking the initial distaste I had (have) for regarding another human being as property. Can you try and dismantle class (property) privileges and realign power dynamics when you are in a relationship that reaffirms these dynamics/languages? But, play is also an integral part of rewriting these narratives. This is just to say, hey, if these are two consenting persons, who are negotiating the boundaries of a relationship in a way that makes sense to them, then why not?

Then I did a little research on him and found some interesting critiques of him by people within the trans* community. That Raven can be so critically aware of his own M/s relationship, but be so blind to the relationship that he has to the world as a white male (who calls himself a shaman) is so startling. This disconnect makes me incredibly wary of trusting the description of his M/s relationship. Normally, I wouldn’t concern myself with the question of trusting/not trusting someone’s relationship–it’s not something that is open for outside scrutiny. But, he wrote a piece describing and defending his relationship and I just can’t help but wonder in light of reading the critiques, if his relationship is as radical as he proclaims it to be.

Ok, so this was more about Raven K. But I wouldn’t have found out about any of this without reading BtS, for which I am grateful. It also makes me sad the zine has been discontinued.

More reviews coming soon(ish)!

[piercepenniless]

One of the idiot pretensions of contemporary ‘radicalism’ around mental health is that to speak of or on something like depression you have to first make your confessions: “I have suffered depression for n years” or “I have had this or that acute episode” or some rather more extensive and...

[dogmyth]

Maybe it's the slate grey skies of February–but this is just what I needed to read today.

[dogmyth]

The Names And Map

Each time I wait for you to come to me I lose a bit of the self-reflexivity which I have come to expect from myself. In line now we are both listening and leaning. A bit. Some day I'll make her mine. However, when he came up to me and started talking about the proliferation of nonsense and the justification for this white room, I just had to leave. A certain intensity which should not be confused with a "fire in the belly" or a  "rationalization of the absurd." This view is quite spectacular but it does not explain the ways in which the abutment crossing the river always seems to fade into memory as we drive across the bridge. From this perspective it is impossible to notice how the recent fires have scorched much of the surrounding fields. It will eventually become easier to forget out expectation of the upcoming events. Breaking free from the past. This is not a category.

This is one of my favorite pieces from Stephen Lapthisophon’s Writing Art Cinema (out on Green Lantern Press)–a book that for me so acutely expresses the tension between the theories we employ to makes sense the world and the images that accrue around, and often complicate, these theories. In spite of the tight structure Lapthisophon employs, his language is destabilizing, verging on anarchistic nonsensical play. To read Writing Art Cinema is to read outside of logic, to dwell not in the ideas presented, but in the pleasure of thought itself. “It just sounds like it means something. Like a tree falling or a whip cracking” he writes referring to his own work and I think, to the process of locating meaning.

[dogmyth]

Coins, a great Chicago lady-duo. Dream pop drone. Full of dissonance.