December 05, 2014
December 05, 2014
Views Of North America, Ca. 1897-1924
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
_______________________Draft 112: Verge
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (....)Sizes, wires, assizes in the site, other boundaries on this border. Maps and lines are drawn over bodies. Where did “history” put this place? Why did it not “stay there”? What about “them”? Should they live here, or are they basically foreign? What are the facts about myself? What is my where? It’s true that once there was an ending. It seemed as if this were what I had wanted. Why did it then open? I hardly can remember, but then it’s suddenly vivid, though even my own stories have veered over time. Another time pulses through the stifled civic membrane.
(....)“When the axe came into the forest, the trees thought, ‘It’s fine; that handle is one of us.’” What led to what? The incomparable, the scale off, the trans-located, exiled, awkward and alarmed, the clatter, the shattering, have all been part of our lives for so many years. This is what we have. Then you get tired. Then resigned. Then it becomes half noticed. Or less. ...
(....)Where is one’s own sense of what happened? Can one access one’s own history with others? Articulate its stakes? There is shame on every level. Shame for every side, and rage and shame for micro-twists of fractal sides. Twinned and tripled cataclysmic dreams bleed over all four margins down into the tight-sewn gutter of the page. The book tries to contain and present these bloody verges. It fails. Bad blood escapes.
...(more)
Players
1919
David Bomberg
b. December 5, 1890
_______________________"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
"We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
"Come buy," call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti
b. Dec 5, 1830
Untitled (Walking Figure)
1928
Alexander Rodchenko
b. December 5, 1891
Rose Barnsley
berfois
(....)_______________________It should be understood that the existence of casual gift giving and six generations of iPhones is only made possible by the spectre of extreme poverty. This is not something that can be solved with a telephone campaign and, as such, is not something that any kind of charity is equipped to handle. Charities are, in their very nature, a necessary catharsis. Charities exist because within the current framework children will never stop starving. Žižek is right in saying that charity is not, and never will be, revolutionary. New theories, however, might be.
Today we are trammelled by the thought that what is, is it. This concept props up the ideology of global capitalism. We find ourselves striking small attitudes. Keeping the memory of revolutions past alive appears to us to be all we are capable of, with the monolith of the present being unalterable. Žižek is relevant because he provides an understanding that all that holds it in place is gravity. He may not be able to tell us the form our revolution will take, but he can remind us that there is a form a revolution can take.
...(more)
The City on the Rock
Evening, Ronda, Spain
David Bomberg
1935
For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong
Vyvyan Evans
aeon
(....)_______________________ Celebrating Bookforum's 20th anniversary _______________________Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co-operative minds. Which is not to belittle language: once it came into being, it allowed us to shape the world to our will – for better or for worse. It unleashed humanity’s tremendous powers of invention and transformation. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, and it doesn’t stand apart from the rest of life. At last, in the 21st century, we are in a position to jettison the myth of Universal Grammar, and to start seeing this unique aspect of our humanity as it really is.
...(more)
Bomb Store
David Bomberg
1942
Stable
Claudia Emerson
1957 - 2014
One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail
above the door, still losing its luck,
and a work-collar swings, an empty
old noose. The silence waits, wild to be
broken by hoofbeat and heavy
harness slap, will founder but remain;
while, outside, above the stable,
eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low
in lazy loops, a loose black warp
of patience, bearing the blank sky
like a pall of wind on mourning
wings. But the bones of this place are
long picked clean. Only the hayrake's
ribs still rise from the rampant grasses
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