February 17, 2015

Bird Over SandGraham Sutherland 1975

The Daily GrowlerMike Greened. February 11, 2015

A Personal Notea moving tribute and rememberance by Languagehat

From his last post - Existing in New York City---I'm Retreating While the Fascists Proceedthegrowlingwolf

Butterflies and Pig Pens In a hovering splash Of vibrating color Guided by instincts It's an insect's High-flown search For perhaps a meal
Over the grunting
Hunger of hairy
Slopping monsters
But sadly
This controversial flutter
Reveals no
Seductive pollen, only
A strong whiff of degradation
And like a true monarch
It turns its naturally
Divine nose
Up at the reality below.

I'm wafting off to my fantasyland on the wings of a soured-stomached butterfly. Of course, I know, like Huey Newton said before he was murdered, everything is politics even food.

Road at Porthclais
Graham Sutherland
1975

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s jobAs Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory Andy Baio

Google’s slow fade with librarians Jessamyn West resonds

We were having our own doubts, of course. How could you not? The Google Books project seemed to be letting itself go. Things any librarian would notice: bad scans; faulty metadata; narrowing the scope of public domain; having machines do jobs that should be done (or at least overseen) by humans. They seemed to be restricting and worsening access to cultural content, not expanding and improving it. Maybe we were going in different directions?

(....)

Don’t get me wrong, we’re doing pretty great on our own, better than ever really. We’ve gotten a bit more independent, not putting all of our eggs into any one basket, gotten better at establishing boundaries. Still not sure, after all that, how we got this all so wrong. Didn’t we both want the same thing? Maybe it really wasn’t us, it was them. Most days it’s hard to remember what we saw in Google. Why did we think we’d make good partners?

A Pandaemonium Revolver Collection by @anildash @craigmod @fimoculous @ftrain @jessamyn @jomc @page88 @pomeranian99 @quinnnorton @tcarmody @tressiemcphd @waxpancake @zephoria @zeynep

Internet Archive

The Wave
Graham Sutherland
d. February 17, 1980

The Funnel And StamateUrmuzparallel translation and introduction byFlorina Kostuliasexquisite corpse

III

One day, after sunset, Stamate was immersed in studies of astronomy and philosophy he was conducting through the communication tube on the subject of the Kosmos and Auto-Kosmos, when it seemed to him, for a fleeting moment, that he perceived precisely the essence hidden in the drupe of the “thing in itself”, when, suddenly, he got distracted by a female voice, a siren’s song which went straight to the heart, and which he could hear fading into the distance disappearing like an echo.........

Running to the opening in the canal with the view of Nirvana, Stamate was detained by the irresistible charm of the melodious sound, when a technical commission of the hydraulic services, accompanied by workers showed-up, and had all the time to knock down one of the walls and to build there a lake with green banks. Toward the evening, on the lake appeared, pulled by a graceful blue swan, a trireme in the shape of a shell, which brought with it, dressed in flowers, a superb rusty funnel.........

Stamate, without losing his cool, hurled some dust on the funnel; and, after unsaddling and feeding the animal, out of diplomacy, he threw himself face down on the floor, and there he remained in a state of insensibility for eight working days, the necessary time interval, he thought, civil procedure required to pass in order to take possession of the objects. Upon the end of this term, coming out of lethargy and returning to his daily occupations, as well as the upright position, Stamate felt entirely re-born. Never before had he felt the divine frissons of love. He felt a better, kinder man, and the stir he experienced at the sight of the funnel made him happy and, at the same time, he felt wretched and wanted to cry like a child............

He dusted the funnel with a rug, and after greasing its main holes with tincture of iodine, took her, and with strong ties fixed her at the opening into the attic; it was then, when for the first time, Stamate went through her like lighting a bolt and stole a kiss............

From this moment, Stamate, gradually forgetting his sacred duties as father and husband, began to sneak out every night by cutting the ties that kept him attached to the family stake in order to give himself free rein in the pursuit of his boundless love, and so, he began to go more and more frequently through the interior of the funnel, jumping into her from a diving board especially built and then descending, with vertiginous speed, on his hands, on a mobile wooden ladder establishing the communication at the mouth of the attic...

Dark Hill - Landscape with Hedges and Fields
Graham Sutherland
1940

Leaving the Twentieth Century McKenzie Warkberfois

What might a Marx for the twenty-first century, a #Marx21c, look like? Perhaps as different to that of the nineteenth century as this era is from that one. These are some personal, impressionistic reflections on what that might look like. The Marxism that I know is part of my life through four kinds of experience: the party, the popular front, the avant-gardes and the university. Each offered its own possibilities and limits for Marxist thought and practice. My apprenticeship was the period from the late ‘70s through to the ‘90s. It was a time of modifiers. The existing language for describing the situation accreted a layer of suffixes and adjectives, but the language itself didn’t change. The situation was postmodern, or postfordist, or it was late capitalism, and a bit later it would become neoliberal. None of these are adequate descriptions. The situation could only be named structurally, with the modified term denoting only that it was somehow different to the other term, to the recent past. It wasn’t modern, Fordist capitalism any more. Not the least problem for #Marx21c is to create a new language.

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Graham Sutherland

Kino Haruki MurakamiTranslated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel

(....)

Fall came and the cat disappeared.

It took a few days for Kino to realize that it was gone. This cat—still nameless—came to the bar when it wanted to and sometimes didn’t show up for a while, so if Kino didn’t see it for a week, or even ten days, he wasn’t particularly worried. He was fond of the cat, and the cat seemed to trust him. It was also like a good-luck charm for the bar. Kino had the distinct impression that as long as it was asleep in a corner nothing bad would happen. But when two weeks had passed he began to be concerned. After three weeks, Kino’s gut told him that the cat wouldn’t be coming back.

Around the time that the cat disappeared, Kino started to notice snakes outside, near the building.

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