July 2007
25 posts
Whenever plans for the night get cancelled it gets me 70% of the way to pledging myself to Theravada Buddhism.
And Franco Moretti’s status as a ground-shaker is mostly an infuriating testament to American ignorance, as that exact kind of work has been carried out without interuption since the 50’s by people such as Itamar Even Zohar and Ziva Ben Porat. [not Moretti’s fault - he seems to acknowledge this]
The secret to having a really good time with Ulysses is to treat it as a play interwoven with a serial poem. So far at least.
Al To The Chemist
Trying to read Jonson’s The Alchemist. Despite my newly minted mastery of quasi-esoteric English vocab [780 on the GRE verbal practice tests woohoo], Jonson’s exquisite mimesis of 17th century colloquialism is about as comprehensible to me as H To The Izzo would be to a Victorian aristocrat.
Maybe my phd. should be a semiotic history of artificial flavors in soft drinks and candy. Was Coke the first non-mimetic soft drink?
How about a movie where one of the characters is utterly gorgeous [which would be a fact much commented upon in the movie] , but it is a major plot point that s\he is not photogenic? Should s/he be visually presented to the viewer in attractive or unattractive form? Similarly: In The Simpsons’ world, can painters fake photographs with extreme ease?
Migraine. Painful. They invent a cure yet?
ouch
From now on I will read The Man Without Qualities only in the purest of stay-at-home days. The pangs brought about by reading it at the train, after social interaction and a smoke were so unbearable I need two hours of tv-links.co.uk to mollify. Update: Instead chose as antidote a potent mixture of those two most benevolent persons to ever grace the English-speaking world, Henry Fielding and Jon...
Aphorism In Search Of A Context
The pre-captioned versions of the weekly cartoon caption contest are the closest The New Yorker came to supporting experimental art.
Bad intertextual pun titles for my Ubuweb project: - Whispers Of Experimentality - Stern And His Succesors
The Dirty Projectors live are a blast, but their remarkable good looks are redundant to the point of absurdity considering their objectivist [no capital O] ways. Like a one of those those ridiculously heavy-machinery-looking label makers.
UBUPROJECT
I’m no longer positive my UBUWEB project makes any kind of sense. The design was thus: ” It’s in a sketchy-to-nebulous stage even as an abstract idea, so bear with me and apply principal of charity as needed ( also it might not make sense for Ubuweb at all, cause it doesn’t really preserve “endangered” texts): I’m thinking about a sort of structural...
About he constant presence of blanked or glided-over dirty dirty language in Fielding : I seriously take his pleading reluctant-Aristotelian-obligation on this count to be neither ironic nor hypocritical. Considering the amount of voluntary tits and liquor going on in Tom Jones I probably shouldn’t, but it’s reasonable enough that Fielding liked sex and hated rudeness.
But also: Whether it’s David Buss or Derrida, never trust professed methodological principles — no matter how satisfyingly foreign to the straw-men of the debunkers’ account — to attest as to the actual methodology.
Further on suspicioמ of debunkers: Reach for revolver in the face of “you never lent me the vase, I returned the vase unscathed, the vase was already broken”. How come the debunked is never a technically perfect experiment the results of which don’t-mean-what-you-think-it-means, or just a bad experiment, but always conceptually confused and empirically flawed?
Suspicious of debunkers, in any direction, regardless of my inclinations towards the debunkee.
Funy little thing: The Man Without Qualities is bereft of direct intertextuality for the first hundred or so pages, then allusions and name-checks start to gradually trickle in, and by the end of the first vol. it’s already notably dense. Probably to be accounted for by more fundamental dynamics [‘POV’? ‘specificity’?], but worth noting.
Suggestion: The artistic Telos of truly strong TV is to innovate everyday language in directly applicable ways.
I don’t like the Avant-Pop Manifesto very much at all. It takes the genius of an M.I.A or a Grant Morrison to actually de-trivialize this crap in practice from the uninspired concoction of Punk and Andy Warhol [rest of the forerunners redundant] that constitutes its scheme. Avant-Pop successfully names the absolutely vital dialectic, and then self-congratulates on having lain it to rest. ...
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My UBUWEB project is a go! [!!!] Excited. No catchy name yet, but look in some month for something vaguely synonymous to “The Ubuweb Anthology Of Avant-Garde-Textuality-Without-Avant-Gare-Contextuality” [or maybe “… Of Avant-Garde-Textuality-Without-Avant-Gare-Contextuality?” ] but more easy on the ears.
How did Arnheim’s vision get so naturalized that the Ivy League seems like a [synonym?] natural phenomenon? It is in fact kind of quirky that being the apotheosis of a house of deep learning should correlate with being the most prestigious clubhouse. Not counter intuitive, not lacking in practical sense, but really not quite that inevitable either.
The concluding paragraph of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” is surprisingly cutesy in its delivery. Kinda reminds [third video]…
Recreational
1. Being Jewish does not provide me with a guarantee that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are untrue. It is reasonable that only 95% percent of the Jews are in on the conspiracy, and I’m in the 5% that aren’t. 2. Jalapeño peppers influence me like cigarettes, as a striking experience with a Philly Cheese Steak revealed to me today. In both cases a somatic state is induced, of a kind...
Amature Hour
Can there be an argument of this form against the use of biological teleology in philosophy of the mind [Millikan etc.]? I’m thinking: Biological “purpose” and “function” are either independent concepts belonging to the science of biology (A), or they are modelled after the normal sense of “purpose” and “function” (B). If A, (and though no...
In Light Of Recent Revelations As To The Merits Of...
Why Modernism: Company [S. Beckett] The Filth [G. Morrison] Lines 60-138 of The Waste Land [T. Eliot] The Man Without Qualities [R. Musil] CIRRICULUM CIRRICULI [D. Avidan] Jackals And Arabs [F. Kafka]
