.
An action adventure movie in which the “hero” – in fight scene after fight scene – battles and often kills hundreds upon hundreds of faceless, nameless “villains.” But then, in the sequel, decides to travel the world and, without revealing his identity, meet with the families of everyone he killed.
.
September 30, 2019
September 12, 2019
Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow
Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow:
*
Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough horizon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things…
*
One can’t help remarking that internecine fights are often the hottest – because of the tearing apart of what is also – in some ways – connected, and because other more powerful enemies are further off, even harder to imagine as subject to change.
*
...the strange line we draw between work and play
*
The women retold tales Dorthy had loved about the triumph of eros over thanatos, like the one about a woman who falls off an ocean liner and, some hours later, when they discover she’s gone and turn back, they find her because she’s still swimming.
*
In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.
*
The unorganized are always the most vulnerable to cynical or instrumental manipulation. They can’t produce social institutions that shape or interpret political experience.
*
…things come from outside, and people make use of what comes, even from tainted hands.
*
How obvious this sounds now, how rare and shocking then. The courage it took to demand a new place in history can no longer be imagined.
*
Words are their way of denouncing mayhem and of living in it. As far as I know, writing puts power and powerlessness together like no other experience. As far as I know.
*
I live with a composer, Daniel Goode, who has a piece called “Finding the Unison Sentence.” A group of people are to start talking, each one talking continuously, all trying to find a sentence they want to say together. I used to think the piece was a failure, since the groups never came close to unison, petering out instead. But the composer suggested that on the contrary, perhaps the piece shows that there is no unison sentence.
*
People make change; it’s never only a matter of macro forces which no one can predict or influence; we are, gulp, in some sense implicated in the construction of our world. Art is one way into imagining something different, activism another. Always people are imagining, wanting, and acting from somewhere in themselves, or rather from often unacknowledged multiple states of self.
*
There is always the personal question of how to survive being forgotten or aggressively misunderstood. Inevitably, with longevity or luck, one outlives one’s formative moment. In the case of those who were a part of ecstatic, hopeful, utopian movements, this common tragedy of the mismatch between an individual’s life and the arc of history is likely to be particularly acute. For them, forgetting goes beyond personal loss to the loss of the whole world.
But one step beyond these feelings, that one’s acts and words of protest have been specially chosen for neglect and insult, lies another more reliable experience feminists share: in modernity, feminism keeps returning. Though obscurity and abuse dog feminism, self-conscious feminist struggles are constantly finding new forms. Even if each return is greeted as if it were for the first time – the New Woman again and again – still she keeps coming. And she keeps bringing back some version of feminist resistance.
*
Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in an infantile layer of our personality.
Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb: one doesn’t let anxiety about how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging somebody is a woman. Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the knowledge both sexes have that “there is something trivial and empty, ugly and sad, in what he does.” A proverb records this bargain: Men must work and women must weep.
In spite of feminism’s extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much, hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without. The Mermaid and the Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the burden, making my common womanish feelings of self-doubt, foolishness, inconsequence into a shared – perhaps an alterable – condition.
Such a public airing of women’s often unconscious, usually private griefs went a long way toward explaining where the powerful rage of feminism comes from in our time. The ancient symbiosis between men and women, with its traditional divisions of labor, was never fully consensual, never reliable. In modernity, the old arrangements show increasing strain. Women notice and suffer from this crisis more. They are now supposed to do both men’s and women’s traditional work, an emotional and physical overload neither honored nor supported by the culture. Because they are the ones who were dependent on that symbiosis to recognize themselves as valuable and whole, they feel bitter when men retreat from the traditional responsibilities of the old bargain. But finally, however much they depend on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar system’s decay they have the least to lose.
.
*
Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough horizon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things…
*
One can’t help remarking that internecine fights are often the hottest – because of the tearing apart of what is also – in some ways – connected, and because other more powerful enemies are further off, even harder to imagine as subject to change.
*
...the strange line we draw between work and play
*
The women retold tales Dorthy had loved about the triumph of eros over thanatos, like the one about a woman who falls off an ocean liner and, some hours later, when they discover she’s gone and turn back, they find her because she’s still swimming.
*
In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.
*
The unorganized are always the most vulnerable to cynical or instrumental manipulation. They can’t produce social institutions that shape or interpret political experience.
*
…things come from outside, and people make use of what comes, even from tainted hands.
*
How obvious this sounds now, how rare and shocking then. The courage it took to demand a new place in history can no longer be imagined.
*
Words are their way of denouncing mayhem and of living in it. As far as I know, writing puts power and powerlessness together like no other experience. As far as I know.
*
I live with a composer, Daniel Goode, who has a piece called “Finding the Unison Sentence.” A group of people are to start talking, each one talking continuously, all trying to find a sentence they want to say together. I used to think the piece was a failure, since the groups never came close to unison, petering out instead. But the composer suggested that on the contrary, perhaps the piece shows that there is no unison sentence.
*
People make change; it’s never only a matter of macro forces which no one can predict or influence; we are, gulp, in some sense implicated in the construction of our world. Art is one way into imagining something different, activism another. Always people are imagining, wanting, and acting from somewhere in themselves, or rather from often unacknowledged multiple states of self.
*
There is always the personal question of how to survive being forgotten or aggressively misunderstood. Inevitably, with longevity or luck, one outlives one’s formative moment. In the case of those who were a part of ecstatic, hopeful, utopian movements, this common tragedy of the mismatch between an individual’s life and the arc of history is likely to be particularly acute. For them, forgetting goes beyond personal loss to the loss of the whole world.
But one step beyond these feelings, that one’s acts and words of protest have been specially chosen for neglect and insult, lies another more reliable experience feminists share: in modernity, feminism keeps returning. Though obscurity and abuse dog feminism, self-conscious feminist struggles are constantly finding new forms. Even if each return is greeted as if it were for the first time – the New Woman again and again – still she keeps coming. And she keeps bringing back some version of feminist resistance.
*
Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in an infantile layer of our personality.
Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb: one doesn’t let anxiety about how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging somebody is a woman. Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the knowledge both sexes have that “there is something trivial and empty, ugly and sad, in what he does.” A proverb records this bargain: Men must work and women must weep.
In spite of feminism’s extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much, hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without. The Mermaid and the Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the burden, making my common womanish feelings of self-doubt, foolishness, inconsequence into a shared – perhaps an alterable – condition.
Such a public airing of women’s often unconscious, usually private griefs went a long way toward explaining where the powerful rage of feminism comes from in our time. The ancient symbiosis between men and women, with its traditional divisions of labor, was never fully consensual, never reliable. In modernity, the old arrangements show increasing strain. Women notice and suffer from this crisis more. They are now supposed to do both men’s and women’s traditional work, an emotional and physical overload neither honored nor supported by the culture. Because they are the ones who were dependent on that symbiosis to recognize themselves as valuable and whole, they feel bitter when men retreat from the traditional responsibilities of the old bargain. But finally, however much they depend on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar system’s decay they have the least to lose.
.
August 28, 2019
Vilma Espín: "Well, there are always some who fail."
.
A meeting had been called for November 28, but I didn’t give it much importance. It was just one more meeting, I thought. But it turned out to be preparations of all the action groups for November 30. On the morning of the 29th, Frank told me the boat had left Mexico, so we were to have everything ready for the early morning hours of the 30th.
I had many things to do, including giving the action groups the addresses of the “medicine chests.” All the arrangements were last minute. Things were done in a big hurry, but the secret was tightly kept right up to the very moment of the action.
Everyone had been informed it was a trial run, a test. But at 6 a.m. we were all told, “This is not a drill. The boat has already left, and it should land today.” It was scheduled to arrive at 7 a.m., and that’s when all the events of November 30 began.
I was to stay home in order to give a tape we’d recorded the night before to a man who was going to play it on national radio through a telephone hookup. The tape reported Fidel’s arrival and called on the people to rise up in revolt.
But the tape was never broadcast, since the man who was supposed to do it was so scared he burned it… Well, there are always some who fail. But almost everything else was carried out exactly as planned.
– Vilma Espín, on the November 30 action from the Cuban revolution
.
A meeting had been called for November 28, but I didn’t give it much importance. It was just one more meeting, I thought. But it turned out to be preparations of all the action groups for November 30. On the morning of the 29th, Frank told me the boat had left Mexico, so we were to have everything ready for the early morning hours of the 30th.
I had many things to do, including giving the action groups the addresses of the “medicine chests.” All the arrangements were last minute. Things were done in a big hurry, but the secret was tightly kept right up to the very moment of the action.
Everyone had been informed it was a trial run, a test. But at 6 a.m. we were all told, “This is not a drill. The boat has already left, and it should land today.” It was scheduled to arrive at 7 a.m., and that’s when all the events of November 30 began.
I was to stay home in order to give a tape we’d recorded the night before to a man who was going to play it on national radio through a telephone hookup. The tape reported Fidel’s arrival and called on the people to rise up in revolt.
But the tape was never broadcast, since the man who was supposed to do it was so scared he burned it… Well, there are always some who fail. But almost everything else was carried out exactly as planned.
– Vilma Espín, on the November 30 action from the Cuban revolution
.
August 23, 2019
the lie is no longer necessary
.
Democracy was a lie capitalism told the world in order to win the propaganda war against communism. Now that communism is gone the lie is no longer necessary.
When capitalism is threatened it turns into fascism to stamp out resistance. And our current ecological collapse threatens the validity of capitalism more than anything that’s come before.
.
Democracy was a lie capitalism told the world in order to win the propaganda war against communism. Now that communism is gone the lie is no longer necessary.
When capitalism is threatened it turns into fascism to stamp out resistance. And our current ecological collapse threatens the validity of capitalism more than anything that’s come before.
.
August 20, 2019
the first thirty pages
.
Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing.
.
Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing.
.
August 9, 2019
Music I like perhaps mainly because it makes me feel a little bit better about getting older
.
"Don’t last too long
The world changes under your feet
Life is eternal, life is so brief, and life is so sweet"
- Robyn Hitchcock, The Man Who Loves the Rain
Between some Robert Forster solo records (Songs to Play, Inferno) and some Edwyn Collins solo records (Understated, Badbea) I no longer think getting old in rock 'n' roll is such a bad thing.
(When I posted this on social media someone also mentioned Peter Perrett's How The West Was Won.)
(And of course, now and always, Robert Wyatt's Comicopera.)
(Also, perhaps somewhat related, I've always loved Boy George's 2013 single King of Everything.)
UPDATE: I felt I needed to add at least three more records to this post (though of course I'm sure there are hundreds of others also worthy of being added): The Devil Laughs by Stuart Moxham & Louis Philippe, Negative Capability by Marianne Faithfull and Pleasure, Joy and Happiness by Eddie Chacon.
FURTHER UPDATE: Recently I've been listening a lot to Utopian Ashes by Bobby Gillespie & Jehnny Beth.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Even more recently I've been listing to Guesswork by Lloyd Cole, Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock and the HOUSE OF ALL record.
I’m actually not sure I’d find myself listening to any of these records if I wasn’t actively trying to feel better about getting older. The fact that most (but not all) of these records are by straight white men is probably wrong, but is also related to the fact that I’m a straight white man trying to make myself feel better about getting older. In some ways, none of these records are as good as the records these artists made when they were younger. But some of them are still pretty good.
And since I now realize this post is mostly about aging, out of curiosity, I thought I would take a moment to look it up:
Robert Wyatt was born in 1945
Marianne Faithfull was born in 1946
Peter Perrett was born in 1952
Robyn Hitchcock was born in 1953
Stuart Moxham was born in 1955
Robert Forster was born in 1957
Louis Philippe was born in 1959
Edwyn Collins was born in 1959
Boy George was born in 1961
Lloyd Cole was born in 1961
Bobby Gillespie was born in 1962
Eddie Chacon was born in 1963
(I was born in 1971)
.
"Don’t last too long
The world changes under your feet
Life is eternal, life is so brief, and life is so sweet"
- Robyn Hitchcock, The Man Who Loves the Rain
Between some Robert Forster solo records (Songs to Play, Inferno) and some Edwyn Collins solo records (Understated, Badbea) I no longer think getting old in rock 'n' roll is such a bad thing.
(When I posted this on social media someone also mentioned Peter Perrett's How The West Was Won.)
(And of course, now and always, Robert Wyatt's Comicopera.)
(Also, perhaps somewhat related, I've always loved Boy George's 2013 single King of Everything.)
UPDATE: I felt I needed to add at least three more records to this post (though of course I'm sure there are hundreds of others also worthy of being added): The Devil Laughs by Stuart Moxham & Louis Philippe, Negative Capability by Marianne Faithfull and Pleasure, Joy and Happiness by Eddie Chacon.
FURTHER UPDATE: Recently I've been listening a lot to Utopian Ashes by Bobby Gillespie & Jehnny Beth.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Even more recently I've been listing to Guesswork by Lloyd Cole, Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock and the HOUSE OF ALL record.
I’m actually not sure I’d find myself listening to any of these records if I wasn’t actively trying to feel better about getting older. The fact that most (but not all) of these records are by straight white men is probably wrong, but is also related to the fact that I’m a straight white man trying to make myself feel better about getting older. In some ways, none of these records are as good as the records these artists made when they were younger. But some of them are still pretty good.
And since I now realize this post is mostly about aging, out of curiosity, I thought I would take a moment to look it up:
Robert Wyatt was born in 1945
Marianne Faithfull was born in 1946
Peter Perrett was born in 1952
Robyn Hitchcock was born in 1953
Stuart Moxham was born in 1955
Robert Forster was born in 1957
Louis Philippe was born in 1959
Edwyn Collins was born in 1959
Boy George was born in 1961
Lloyd Cole was born in 1961
Bobby Gillespie was born in 1962
Eddie Chacon was born in 1963
(I was born in 1971)
.
August 7, 2019
Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout
Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout:
*
The experience of this theatre-goer, then, is one in which anticipation gives way to disappointment, in which pleasure is bound up with anxiety and even perhaps pain and illness, in which acting is confused with vulgar interruption, in which the transcendent possibilities of the world’s greatest dramatic poetry appear to pass by almost unnoticed in a ‘deliberate monotone’, and success appears as dependent upon the audience as it is upon the artistic capability of the actor. Yet for all this, for all the confusion, anxiety and disappointment, it is an experience which he cannot bear to bring to an end, and to which he will repeatedly seek to return.
*
This ambivalence certainly characterizes my own relationship with the theatre. Theatre, being queasy, makes me queasy. That such queasiness is widespread, that we find theatre uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time, is I think not only generally accepted as true, but also generally accepted as part and parcel of the whole business. Theatre’s failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constitutive. What I want to argue here is that it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.
*
Of course, never in the history of theatre has the social position of the actor been so similar to the social situation of the character: they are, at last, contemporaries, and more than that, members of the same social class. This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own for her life to become a private resource for public display. While Diderot feared that the actor’s over-identification with the emotions of the character would be detrimental to theatrical representation because it would lead the actor to lose control of her technique, the new danger for the actor is that their new technique, along with the new forms and subject matter of bourgeois naturalist drama, might permit so intense an over-identification, that the actor might no longer be required to act at all, but instead just effectively ‘be’ a version of herself.
*
McKinnie points out that the theatre is an economic subsector in which work is clearly alienated. Picking up on this perception one notes how the employee’s time is regulated with rigorous force by bells and curtains, how both the rehearsal process and the nightly routine of performances are dominated by repetitive activity, how wage levels are set in structures of extreme differentiation, how these are maintained by a huge pool of surplus labour which renders effective industrial organization impossible, and how the core activity itself is both a metaphor of alienation and alienation itself: the actor is paid to appear in public speaking words written by someone else and executing physical movement which has at the very least usually been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny by a representative of the management who effectively enjoys the power of hiring and firing. The actor is both sign and referent of the wholly alienated wage slave.
.
*
The experience of this theatre-goer, then, is one in which anticipation gives way to disappointment, in which pleasure is bound up with anxiety and even perhaps pain and illness, in which acting is confused with vulgar interruption, in which the transcendent possibilities of the world’s greatest dramatic poetry appear to pass by almost unnoticed in a ‘deliberate monotone’, and success appears as dependent upon the audience as it is upon the artistic capability of the actor. Yet for all this, for all the confusion, anxiety and disappointment, it is an experience which he cannot bear to bring to an end, and to which he will repeatedly seek to return.
*
This ambivalence certainly characterizes my own relationship with the theatre. Theatre, being queasy, makes me queasy. That such queasiness is widespread, that we find theatre uncomfortable, compromised, boring, conventional, bourgeois, overpriced and unsatisfactory most of the time, is I think not only generally accepted as true, but also generally accepted as part and parcel of the whole business. Theatre’s failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constitutive. What I want to argue here is that it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.
*
Of course, never in the history of theatre has the social position of the actor been so similar to the social situation of the character: they are, at last, contemporaries, and more than that, members of the same social class. This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own for her life to become a private resource for public display. While Diderot feared that the actor’s over-identification with the emotions of the character would be detrimental to theatrical representation because it would lead the actor to lose control of her technique, the new danger for the actor is that their new technique, along with the new forms and subject matter of bourgeois naturalist drama, might permit so intense an over-identification, that the actor might no longer be required to act at all, but instead just effectively ‘be’ a version of herself.
*
McKinnie points out that the theatre is an economic subsector in which work is clearly alienated. Picking up on this perception one notes how the employee’s time is regulated with rigorous force by bells and curtains, how both the rehearsal process and the nightly routine of performances are dominated by repetitive activity, how wage levels are set in structures of extreme differentiation, how these are maintained by a huge pool of surplus labour which renders effective industrial organization impossible, and how the core activity itself is both a metaphor of alienation and alienation itself: the actor is paid to appear in public speaking words written by someone else and executing physical movement which has at the very least usually been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny by a representative of the management who effectively enjoys the power of hiring and firing. The actor is both sign and referent of the wholly alienated wage slave.
.
August 5, 2019
Jorge Herralde on running the publishing house Anagrama
.
This job is wonderful, though it’s not easy, can be difficult, but by its nature it offers great joy and huge disappointments. It’s a roller coaster. It’s, as I said in an article once, about dolling out and receiving pain. Dolling out pain to so many manuscripts that one has to reject. If it’s an author you have no ties to, they experience the pain, but when it’s an author who has published several books with you but you decide not to go with, it’s painful for the publisher and even more so for the author. And then one receives pain, when there are misunderstandings with authors who are very much to the publisher’s liking but who decide to listen to siren songs, which can be deafening.
– Jorge Herralde, on running the publishing house Anagrama
.
This job is wonderful, though it’s not easy, can be difficult, but by its nature it offers great joy and huge disappointments. It’s a roller coaster. It’s, as I said in an article once, about dolling out and receiving pain. Dolling out pain to so many manuscripts that one has to reject. If it’s an author you have no ties to, they experience the pain, but when it’s an author who has published several books with you but you decide not to go with, it’s painful for the publisher and even more so for the author. And then one receives pain, when there are misunderstandings with authors who are very much to the publisher’s liking but who decide to listen to siren songs, which can be deafening.
– Jorge Herralde, on running the publishing house Anagrama
.
August 2, 2019
Jessa Crispin Quote
.
“Don’t end up like Bertolt Brecht.”
That seems like horrible advice. Shouldn’t the goal of life be to end up as close to Bertolt Brecht as possible. I need a little context.
“When Brecht moved to Los Angeles, he had such a difficult time learning English that he gave up. It soured him, being unable to communicate, and he started to hate America. Read his journals, you’ll see.”
For Stefan, every topic of conversation circles back to Bertolt Brecht, the way for me every topic of conversation circles back to William James. I take his point, which is made in impeccable English, shaming me further. I have been stubborn about learning to speak German. It feeds into my unsettled state. Why learn German if I’m only going to be here for a few years? But then how can I know if I want to stay unless I assimilate a little and give the place a chance? It is mortifying when someone addresses me in German I can’t follow, and yet part of me likes the little bubble I live in, the way I can tune out conversations on the subway because I can’t follow them anyway.
“Read Brecht’s journals,” Stefan repeats. “And learn German.”
– Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project
.
“Don’t end up like Bertolt Brecht.”
That seems like horrible advice. Shouldn’t the goal of life be to end up as close to Bertolt Brecht as possible. I need a little context.
“When Brecht moved to Los Angeles, he had such a difficult time learning English that he gave up. It soured him, being unable to communicate, and he started to hate America. Read his journals, you’ll see.”
For Stefan, every topic of conversation circles back to Bertolt Brecht, the way for me every topic of conversation circles back to William James. I take his point, which is made in impeccable English, shaming me further. I have been stubborn about learning to speak German. It feeds into my unsettled state. Why learn German if I’m only going to be here for a few years? But then how can I know if I want to stay unless I assimilate a little and give the place a chance? It is mortifying when someone addresses me in German I can’t follow, and yet part of me likes the little bubble I live in, the way I can tune out conversations on the subway because I can’t follow them anyway.
“Read Brecht’s journals,” Stefan repeats. “And learn German.”
– Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project
.
July 31, 2019
Susanne Moser: "But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet ..."
.
Laurie Mazur: With the story of climate change, there's so much loss: loss of the familiar, of places we love, of the stable climate that gave us a huge boost as a species. Are there things to be gained as well from moving out of that certainty?
Susanne Moser: I certainly think so. The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.
It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.
When [atmospheric concentration of carbon passed] 415 parts per million, people were saying that we had never had these kinds of atmospheric conditions during the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. And we’re now moving to double that, and beyond.
So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.
Laurie Mazur: When you imagine it, what is the best thing about that new world?
Susanne Moser: That we will be a nondominant species again. I'm not the first one to say that. But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet within the confines of its resources, without damaging it, and in fact making it part of our species’ purpose to recreate and nourish the conditions for the continuity of life.
In my highest aspirations for the human species, that’s what we will be: servants of life.
[From Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.]
.
Laurie Mazur: With the story of climate change, there's so much loss: loss of the familiar, of places we love, of the stable climate that gave us a huge boost as a species. Are there things to be gained as well from moving out of that certainty?
Susanne Moser: I certainly think so. The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.
It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.
When [atmospheric concentration of carbon passed] 415 parts per million, people were saying that we had never had these kinds of atmospheric conditions during the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. And we’re now moving to double that, and beyond.
So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.
Laurie Mazur: When you imagine it, what is the best thing about that new world?
Susanne Moser: That we will be a nondominant species again. I'm not the first one to say that. But it’s basically the idea of keeping the Anthropocene to a really thin layer in the geologic record and being one among many species that live on this planet within the confines of its resources, without damaging it, and in fact making it part of our species’ purpose to recreate and nourish the conditions for the continuity of life.
In my highest aspirations for the human species, that’s what we will be: servants of life.
[From Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.]
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July 28, 2019
Lidija Haas Quote
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At a party, a woman in her twenties, someone you find slightly intimidating, tells you that you and others your age (mid-thirties) are being used as “beards” by men who employ your friendship as a convenient badge of feminism while behaving poorly, when your back is turned, toward younger, less professionally established women. The claim doesn’t seem to be an attack; she’s trying to help you make more informed decisions. Your first reaction is, You think I’m established? Your second: How could I possibly know if what she describes is happening? And third: It’s probably true. (This last strikes you as an alternate instance of what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.”) Can people abuse power they don’t see themselves as possessing? All the better, probably. Not seeing power must be a function of having it.
- Lidija Haas, #ETTU?
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At a party, a woman in her twenties, someone you find slightly intimidating, tells you that you and others your age (mid-thirties) are being used as “beards” by men who employ your friendship as a convenient badge of feminism while behaving poorly, when your back is turned, toward younger, less professionally established women. The claim doesn’t seem to be an attack; she’s trying to help you make more informed decisions. Your first reaction is, You think I’m established? Your second: How could I possibly know if what she describes is happening? And third: It’s probably true. (This last strikes you as an alternate instance of what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.”) Can people abuse power they don’t see themselves as possessing? All the better, probably. Not seeing power must be a function of having it.
- Lidija Haas, #ETTU?
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July 24, 2019
Ursula K. Le Guin Quote
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The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential to the complexity of freedom.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential to the complexity of freedom.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
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July 21, 2019
Erin Hill Quote
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I have been thinking about sharing, it is a pillar, is a gesture, and I have been trying to notice its smallest interactions. Upstairs wakes us.
The birds were awake when I was awake, 7:18, that’s new for Berlin sunrises.
I don’t think the Share button on Facebook is actually for sharing, doesn’t sharing involve an intended receiver?
The share button is for spreading, and spreading is territorial, is taking up space.
Sharing is fundamentally about survival.
I don’t believe myself in what I’ve written here… but it’s early.
– Erin Hill, Real Life Magic
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I have been thinking about sharing, it is a pillar, is a gesture, and I have been trying to notice its smallest interactions. Upstairs wakes us.
The birds were awake when I was awake, 7:18, that’s new for Berlin sunrises.
I don’t think the Share button on Facebook is actually for sharing, doesn’t sharing involve an intended receiver?
The share button is for spreading, and spreading is territorial, is taking up space.
Sharing is fundamentally about survival.
I don’t believe myself in what I’ve written here… but it’s early.
– Erin Hill, Real Life Magic
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June 27, 2019
Aravinda Ananda Quote
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One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me. Caucusing in order to do that kind of hard work of drilling down into white assumptions and fragility in a way that can hold people and bring them through the work has been so valuable. It responds to that call to “hold your people.”
- Aravinda Ananda, from Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture
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One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me. Caucusing in order to do that kind of hard work of drilling down into white assumptions and fragility in a way that can hold people and bring them through the work has been so valuable. It responds to that call to “hold your people.”
- Aravinda Ananda, from Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture
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June 22, 2019
Nora Samaran Quote
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Men with avoidant attachment styles may not notice the confusing nonverbal signalling they are actively doing very early on that prevents safety from happening with women they want to nurture and support, who may become more and more imbalanced towards them in response.
Since ‘absence of nurturance’ is just an absence, it can be hard to recognize early. When early avoidant responses to requests for closeness are not noticed as such, attachment science teaches us, ‘protest behaviour’ – the distress when needs aren’t met – may get louder over time, in ways both people are contributing to and neither understand. It becomes all too easy in a patriarchal culture that values rugged individualism over interdependence to call an anxiously-attached woman ‘crazy’ without noticing the parallel avoidant responses that are contributing, that are ‘crazymaking’. In other words, it takes two to enter into the avoidant-anxious trap, but patriarchal culture normalizes an avoidant style and stigmatizes an anxious style, wherever it appears.
None of this is worthy of shame; fundamentally, all of the insecure styles are based in an unquestioned belief that people will not be there for them and that nurturance is somehow a problem rather than wholly desirable and good. Avoidant attachers ‘know’ from an early age that the ice will break, the chair will collapse, best not to try. Insecure attachment styles are not chosen, are not conscious or intentional, and it is an understatement to say they are not easy to change. They deserve understanding, compassion, and empathy.
And yet living without loving, secure attachment bonds is the loneliest experience in the human repertoire.
- Nora Samaran, The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
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Men with avoidant attachment styles may not notice the confusing nonverbal signalling they are actively doing very early on that prevents safety from happening with women they want to nurture and support, who may become more and more imbalanced towards them in response.
Since ‘absence of nurturance’ is just an absence, it can be hard to recognize early. When early avoidant responses to requests for closeness are not noticed as such, attachment science teaches us, ‘protest behaviour’ – the distress when needs aren’t met – may get louder over time, in ways both people are contributing to and neither understand. It becomes all too easy in a patriarchal culture that values rugged individualism over interdependence to call an anxiously-attached woman ‘crazy’ without noticing the parallel avoidant responses that are contributing, that are ‘crazymaking’. In other words, it takes two to enter into the avoidant-anxious trap, but patriarchal culture normalizes an avoidant style and stigmatizes an anxious style, wherever it appears.
None of this is worthy of shame; fundamentally, all of the insecure styles are based in an unquestioned belief that people will not be there for them and that nurturance is somehow a problem rather than wholly desirable and good. Avoidant attachers ‘know’ from an early age that the ice will break, the chair will collapse, best not to try. Insecure attachment styles are not chosen, are not conscious or intentional, and it is an understatement to say they are not easy to change. They deserve understanding, compassion, and empathy.
And yet living without loving, secure attachment bonds is the loneliest experience in the human repertoire.
- Nora Samaran, The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
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June 18, 2019
The more novels I write...
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The more novels I write the more deeply I question the ethics of writing fiction. (Perhaps this has something to do with taking things from life and from the world and transforming them without the ability to give proper credit.)
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The more novels I write the more deeply I question the ethics of writing fiction. (Perhaps this has something to do with taking things from life and from the world and transforming them without the ability to give proper credit.)
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May 27, 2019
the exact same feeling
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I have this overwhelming feeling of failure. Then I think, probably no matter what I had done, or how it had gone, it would have changed nothing: I would have had the exact same feeling of failure. Because I still would have failed to completely change the world (for the better.)
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I have this overwhelming feeling of failure. Then I think, probably no matter what I had done, or how it had gone, it would have changed nothing: I would have had the exact same feeling of failure. Because I still would have failed to completely change the world (for the better.)
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May 24, 2019
The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live.
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The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live. So many of the stories we currently learn from, often from a very young age, are provided to us through popular culture, through movies and television. The creators of these stories most often center them around conflict. Conflict is a part of life, therefore learning how to work through conflict could be one useful approach to any given culture’s stories. However, so many of our popular culture’s versions of conflict focus on a hero and a villain, or some variation on that pattern, and the story ends when the hero defeats the villain, and the viewer is expected to most identify with the protagonist, with the hero. This is no way to have any sort of general understanding as to how we should approach conflict, and yet having been raised on such stories our subconscious is shot through with them, and we see the results of this all the time, in how the people around us approach every sort of interaction and situation. Vanquishing an enemy is no way to resolve a conflict.
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The purpose of stories is to help us learn how to live. So many of the stories we currently learn from, often from a very young age, are provided to us through popular culture, through movies and television. The creators of these stories most often center them around conflict. Conflict is a part of life, therefore learning how to work through conflict could be one useful approach to any given culture’s stories. However, so many of our popular culture’s versions of conflict focus on a hero and a villain, or some variation on that pattern, and the story ends when the hero defeats the villain, and the viewer is expected to most identify with the protagonist, with the hero. This is no way to have any sort of general understanding as to how we should approach conflict, and yet having been raised on such stories our subconscious is shot through with them, and we see the results of this all the time, in how the people around us approach every sort of interaction and situation. Vanquishing an enemy is no way to resolve a conflict.
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May 21, 2019
dian marino Quote
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I advocate difference but I also advocate connectedness. To me being different in a creative way means that I’m willing to connect my difference to other people’s differences. That can be a paradoxical connection – that people would want to be clear about their different positions, where their differences are located, and then also wish to figure things out collaboratively, collectively. Frequently when we encounter difference, we don’t explore it; we try to manage it. Perhaps we can search for common threads while we appreciate our differences.
– dian marino, Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance
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I advocate difference but I also advocate connectedness. To me being different in a creative way means that I’m willing to connect my difference to other people’s differences. That can be a paradoxical connection – that people would want to be clear about their different positions, where their differences are located, and then also wish to figure things out collaboratively, collectively. Frequently when we encounter difference, we don’t explore it; we try to manage it. Perhaps we can search for common threads while we appreciate our differences.
– dian marino, Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance
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April 24, 2019
Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling
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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines:
PME-ART: du difficile art d’être ensemble
L’Authenticité, un sentiment : mode d’emploi : Paradoxe sur un comédien
«L’authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi»: l’art des possibles
L’homme qui n’aimait pas le théâtre
Adaptation: plus authentique que jamais
Critique. L’Authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi. CISM
(Perhaps there is something slightly ironic in that all the press so far has been in French and the performance is entirely in English. But thus is my life here in Montreal.)
(And, of course, you can find the rest of the PME-ART links here.)
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Some press we got for A User's Guide to Authenticity is a Feeling at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines:
PME-ART: du difficile art d’être ensemble
L’Authenticité, un sentiment : mode d’emploi : Paradoxe sur un comédien
«L’authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi»: l’art des possibles
L’homme qui n’aimait pas le théâtre
Adaptation: plus authentique que jamais
Critique. L’Authenticité, un sentiment: mode d’emploi. CISM
(Perhaps there is something slightly ironic in that all the press so far has been in French and the performance is entirely in English. But thus is my life here in Montreal.)
(And, of course, you can find the rest of the PME-ART links here.)
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