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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@thepoeticpast
This work is the first in English to offer a general introduction to the Ainu people and their contemporary issues, including groundbreaking chapters on the genetic origins of the populations of Japan and an overview of the archaeology of northern Japan, which argue convincingly for the identity of the Ainu as an indisputably distinct ethnic group and Indigenous residents of Hokkaido.
« How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false. »
— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
"Don’t forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973
« The very natural mistake that Bill and I made was to think that the differences between the children in our class had to do with techniques of thinking, that the successful kids had good techniques of thinking while the unsuccessful. . . had bad, and therefore that our task was to teach better techniques. But the unsuccessful kids were not trying, however badly, to do the same things as the successful. They were doing something altogether different. They saw the school and their task in it differently. It was a place of danger, and their task was, as far as they could, to stay out of danger. Their business was not learning, but escaping.
Bill Hull and I, in our early work together in the fifth grade, saw correctly enough that the reason so many children in our classes learned so little was that they used such bad thinking and problem-solving strategies. What I did not see until later was that we, our classroom, our position as teachers, which is to say, givers of orders, judges, graders, were the source of these children's strategies. We, and not math, or reading, or spelling, or history, were the problem that the children had designed their strategies to cope with.
It was only later, in another school, that I began to wonder, more intuitively than consciously, how I might help make a class in which children, free of danger from me and each other, might once again, as when they were little, reach out hungrily to reality. This is the most important task of a teacher, certainly of younger children—to make or make accessible a part of the world or of human experience which is as interesting, exciting, meaningful, transparent, and emotionally safe as possible. »
— John Holt, How Children Fail
Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937, Edited by Stephen Bury, Designed by Andrew Shoolbred, and Gregory Taylor, The British Library, London, 2007 [Baseline Store. Center for Book Arts, New York, NY]
Dionysus as a festival god can simultaneously invert and subvert these cultural categories: language, the role of the sexes, classes, and political hierarchy. To understand Dionysus is to understand that the order imposed upon the world by human culture is created by that culture, and that the permanent potential exists for a reversal or collapse of this order. To accept him is to understand that festival and ritual can offer this knowledge in a form that ultimately supports rather than destroys the existing social structure.
Helene P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides
“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.” ― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The Institute for Palestine Studies has just launched a comprehensive encyclopedia of Palestinian history that's interactive and informative and really fun to explore. Now is the time to be learning history, not just for other countries but for your own as well. Really recommend taking a moment to check it out, especially the chronological timeline which I've been super enjoying:
Delve into the main events that shaped Palestinian modern history
« [T]he Schoolmen ... aiming at glory and esteem, ... found this a good expedient to cover their ignorance, with a curious and inexplicable web of perplexed words, and [to] procure to themselves the admiration of others, by unintelligible terms ...: whilst it appears in all history, that these profound doctors ... brought but small advantage to human life, or the societies, wherein they lived; unless the coining of new words, where they produced no new things to apply them to, or the perplexing or obscuring the signification of old ones, and so bringing all things into question and dispute, were a thing profitable to the life of man, or worthy of commendation and reward.
... Nevertheless, this artificial ignorance, and learned gibberish, prevailed mightily in these last ages, by the interest and artifice of those, who found no easier way to that pitch of authority and dominion they have attained, than by ... employing the ingenious and idle in intricate disputes, about unintelligible terms, and holding them perpetually entangled in that endless labyrinth.
Besides, the best way to defend strange and absurd doctrines is to guard them with legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefined words. Yet that makes these retreats more like dens of robbers or holes of foxes than like fortresses manned by sturdy warriors, [as] what makes it hard to get them out of their retreat isn’t their strength but rather the dark tangle of briars and thorns they are surrounded with. Because untruth is unacceptable to the mind of man, the only defence left for absurdity is obscurity.
... [T]hough unlearned men well enough understood the words white and black, etc. and had constant notions of the ideas signified by those words; yet there were philosophers found, who had learning and subtlety enough to prove, that snow was black; i.e. to prove, that white was black. Whereby they had the advantage to destroy the instruments and means of discourse, conversation, instruction, and society; whilst with great art and subtlety they did no more but perplex and confound the signification of words, and thereby render language less useful ... »
— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
“An important study of a seriously misunderstood period. Through his deeply researched high-political narrative, Reece shows that there was greater support for kingless government in England than hitherto recognized and that the republic could have survived for years following the fall of the Protectorate; the restoration of the monarchy did not become inevitable until very late in the day.”
"Original, subtle, and emphatic, Lee's book is an indispensable contribution to the rethinking of contemporary Chinese art. Breaking free from the conventional historiography that views the postsocialist transition as a break, Lee sheds much-needed light on the confusion, reluctance, remorse, anxiety, and excitement of the late Cultural Revolution and early Reform years. Her analysis is a must-read for those seeking to understand art in the aftermath of Maoist radicalism in China."
Memory is redundant; it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
(Calvino, ‘Invisible Cities’)
“Hornsby takes us through the ups-and-downs of the Khrushchev era, with its promising reforms and unexpected reversals, until a new Kremlin leadership, directed by Leonid Brezhnev, crushed all hope for change within the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Sixties is an engaging, deeply informed, and balanced account of a pivotal period in Soviet history."
“Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of ‘evil’.”
— Judith Butler, Precarious Life
« The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. […] In the tower blocks the empty offices remain lit. On the freeways, in broad daylight, the cars keep all their headlights on. In Palms Ave., Venice, California, a little grocery store […] leaves its orange and green neon sign flashing all night, into the void. And this is not to mention the television, with its 24-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms […].
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. […] It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently […].
In short, in America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man’s artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd […].
You may seek to explain this in terms of fear […]. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. »
— Jean Baudrillard, America
