Maggie Nelson
I’m constantly amazed by the lucidity of Maggie Nelson’s writing and here’s multi-faceted analyses. Damn, even the @MaggieNelsonBot on Twitter that generates mostly nonsensical aphorisms from parts of sentences out of Maggie Nelson’s books is a great read. (Their actually not nonsensical to me, just oftentimes syntactically incorrent—just like poetry.) Since her essays are often so dense that a lot of ideas slip through my fingers when I don’t contemplate them again, I collect a bunch of quotes here.
The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse and smoking his cigarette has struck with me for many years…all it means is that the image seduced me…it didn’t widen my sensibilities, compassion or intuition. Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images and ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.
(Richard Foreman: Unbalancing Acts. Foundations for a Theatre)
We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks,’ Foreman has said. ‘But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.
(Richard Foreman: Unbalancing Acts. Foundations for a Theatre)
‘Trans’ may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (‘born in the wrong body,’ necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, ‘transitioning’ may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry [Dodge], who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., ‘gender hackers’)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?’ (The Argonauts)
I, too, have often wondered whether there exists a greater pleasure than the feeling—however brief or illusory—that by writing, one is in fact incinerating layers of crap rather than tossing more of it onto the landfill. This can be a difficult feeling to achieve when the medium is language. One cannot simply offer up a white page and a stopwatch and produce the illuminating, cleansing effect of ›silence‹ […] (The Art of Cruelty)
Who would want […] a world in which everything nice were partitioned off from everything horrible, thereby draining the world of its wild, nearly unnavigable paradoxes? And who would want a feminism—or any form of social justice—that lessened our apprehension of such difficult coexistences, or diminished our access to this electrical current? (The Art of Cruelty)
Perhaps the confusion lies in the ›personal is political‹ formulation itself, which offers but a simple copula where there actually exists a multitude of possible relations. As Jacqueline Rose has put it in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, it isn’t just that ›the personal is political—for a long time feminism has insisted that what goes on in private is a political matter that concerns us all,‹ but rather that ›psychic life in itself will not be relegated to the private, it will not stay in its proper place. It shows up on the side of the historical reality to which it is often opposed.‹ It’s this inappropriate ›showing up‹ that interests me—a kind of crashing of the party that cannot be stopped, only contended with, when it occurs. (The Art of Cruelty)
[Lars] von Trier’s cruelty does not lie in any capacity to strip away cant or delusion, but rather in an ability to construct malignant, ultimately conventional fictions that masquerade as parables of profundity, or as protests against the cruelties of the man’s world in which we must inevitably live and suffer. Or, worse—and more likely—von Trier means to present these fictions with tongue so firmly in cheek that if we take them as parables of profundity, the joke may be on us. Von Trier imbues René Girard’s notion of sacrificial violence with an ironic, perhaps even a campy sensibility. But unlike the campiness of, say, Paul McCarthy or John Waters, von Trier keeps his cards close to his chest, as if to preserve his right—and the culture’s—to an entrenched, inevitable chauvinist malevolence. […] Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic. I suppose, in the end, I remain grateful to ›Breaking the Waves‹ for one thing: it spoke to a question I’ve had for some time—namely, what purpose could a female Christ serve in the (male) imagination? As writer Eileen Myles has put it, ›What would be the point in seeing [a woman] half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? […]‹ The cruelty of Breaking the Waves is its revelation, intentional or not, that there could be no sustaining contradiction—that the redundancy of female victimization inflates into a sickening, fundamentally unbelievable martyrdom.
Gregory Bateson
[I]n no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.
(The Cybernetics of ›Self‹. A Theory of Alcoholism)
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Eszter Bálint is sitting in a room in Florida different from the one you are in now. She is recording the sound of her speaking voice and she is going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of her speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. She regards this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities her speech might have.
(found in Elisa’s last.fm shoutbox)
Friedrich Kittler
When your voice comes like breathing, everything is as it is: incomprehensible, beautiful and ephemeral. (“Forgetting”, 1981)
[I]f discourse analysis archivizes archives, it is not to reconstruct the unity and continuity of a history, but quite the contrary: to dissolve the phantasm of world history into many individual storage devices which themselves were forgotten and/or retained. (“Forgetting”, 1981)
Symbolic elements, however, have their position and their existence in networks. […] Every link in the chain derives its function from its delimitation. (“Forgetting”, 1981)
Astral Codex Ten
If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle to overcome their natural constitution, and so accumulate tips and tricks throughout their lives. Or ask a physical therapist who works with these people and studies them. Just don’t ask someone you see walking especially briskly down the street. (source)
You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention. By definition most of what you come across through semi-formal channels will be preachy, pushy, and associated with the kind of people who are obsessed with talking about themselves. If you learn about some lifestyles through informal channels (eg your family and friends), and others through semiformal channels (eg media and books), the latter will look obviously inferior. (source)
John Cheever
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it on the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it in the wildlife preserve, where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. (from “The Swimmer”)
Erich Kästner
Admittedly, I didn’t particularly like. Not just because this kind of tame and objective literature that aims to be instructive reminded me of German classes in school too much. Most of all, I guess I just don’t like Kästner’s language. I concede that it’s an interesting snapshot of German history and a pertinent warning against Nazi totalitarianism. It might also be the 93-year gap to this book’s publication, but the humor in »Fabian« doesn’t spark for me at all and the characters are ultimately too indifferent, too normal and the book’s episodes come off as too deliberate, which makes the book lack an appropriate political punch. I have Walter Benjamin on my side in my disfavor who also thought that Kästner’s leftism was more entertainment than intervention. Nevertheless, I did find a few strong sentences in it:
Was sollen wir anfangen? Wenn wir einen Mann liebhaben, liefern wir uns ihm aus. Wir trennen uns von allem, was vorher war, und kommen zu ihm. “Da bin ich”, sagen wir freundlich lächelnd. “Ja”, sagt er, “da bist du”, und kratzt sich hinterm Ohr. Allmächtiger, denkt er, nun habe ich sie auf dem Hals. Leichten Herzens schenken wir ihm, was wir haben. Und er flucht. Die Geschenke sind ihm lästig. Erst flucht er leise, dann flucht er laut. Und wir sind allein wie nie zuvor. Ich bin fünfundzwanzig Jahre alt, und von zwei Männern wurde ich stehengelassen. Stehengelassen wie ein Schirm, den man absichtlich irgendwo vergisst.
“Ich kann doch nichts.”
“Du kannst vieles.”
“Das ist dasselbe”, meinte Fabian. “Ich kann vieles und will nichts. Wozu soll ich vorwärtskommen? Wofür und wogegen? Nehmen wir einmal an, ich sei der Träger einer Funktion. Wo ist das System, in dem ich funktionieren kann? Es ist nicht da, und nichts hat Sinn.”
Ich kann, wenn ich meinen augenblicklichen Zustand betrachte, sagen: Die ganze Richtung paßt mir nicht! Aus den Bezirken, in die ich gehöre, wies man mich aus. Dort, wo man mich aufnehmen will, will ich nicht hin. Sei mir nicht böse, mein Guter, ich haue ab. Europa wird auch ohne mich weiterleben oder zugrunde gehen, es hat mich nicht nötig.
“Der biß zu und kämpfte und schlug mit dem Federhalter um sich, als sei der Gänsekiel ein Schleppsäbel. Der war zum Kämpfen da, du nicht. Der lebte gar nicht seinetwegen, den gab es gar nicht privat, der wollte gar nichts für sich. Und als er sich doch auf sich besann, als er vom Schicksal Frau und Kind verlangte, da brach alles über ihm zusammen und begrub ihn. Und das war in Ordnung. Wer für die anderen dasein will, der muß sich selber fremd bleiben. Er muß wie ein Arzt sein, dessen Wartezimmer Tag und Nacht voller Menschen ist, und einer muß mitten darunter sitzen, der nie an die Reihe kommt und nie darüber klagt: das ist er selber. Hättest du so zu leben vermocht?”
“Früher verschenkte man sich und wurde wie ein Geschenk bewahrt. Heute wird man bezahlt und eines Tages, wie jede bezahlte und benutzte Ware, weggetan. Bezahlung ist billiger, denkt der Mann.”
“Früher war das Geschenk etwas ganz anderes als die Ware. Heute ist das Geschenk eine Ware, die null Mark kostet. Diese Billigkeit macht den Käufer mißtrauisch. Sicher ein faules Geschäft, denkt er. Und meist hat er recht. Denn später präsentiert ihm die Frau die Rechnung. Plötzlich soll er den moralischen Preis des Geschenks rückvergüten. In seelischer Valuta. Als Lebensrente zu zahlen.”
“Genauso ist es”, sagte sie. “Genauso denken die Männer. Aber warum nennen Sie dann dieses Atelier einen Saustall? Hier sind doch die Frauen so ähnlich, wie ihr sie haben wollt! Oder etwa nicht? Ich weiß, was euch zu eurem Glück noch fehlt. Wir sollen zwar kommen und gehen, wann ihr es wollt. Aber wir sollen weinen, wenn ihr uns fortschickt. Und wir sollen selig sein, wenn ihr uns winkt. Ihr wollt den Warencharakter der Liebe, aber die Ware soll verliebt sein. Ihr zu allem berechtigt und zu nichts verpflichtet, wir zu allem verpflichtet und zu nichts berechtigt, so sieht euer Paradies aus. Doch das geht zu weit!” Fräulein Battenberg putzte sich die Nase. Dann fuhr sie fort: “Wenn wir euch nicht behalten dürfen, wollen wir euch auch nicht lieben. Wenn ihr uns kaufen wollt, dann sollt ihr teuer dafür bezahlen.” Sie schwieg.
Justin Smith-Ruiu
Most of my fellow philologists are willing to concede, at least in whisper, that what we managed to capture from the Earth’s satellites just before the solar flare hit is rather slim pickins indeed: a few “Cuck Fantasy” gifs now constituting the Tumblr Codex; a handful of Crazy Frog videos […] making up the Archivium Amphibianum; the YouTube Cache, which includes one video of some sort of celebratory numerological rite in worship of the series of natural numbers, another of an unidentified paramilitary faction boasting of its mighty war-engines, and, as we all know from day one of Intro to Codicology, a clip of the “Brooklyn science comedian” Molly Gottstauk getting robustly booed when she tries out her new one at open-mic night: “So the guy at Chopt said ‘Now pick your protein!’ And I was like, ‘Uh, guanine?’” (from An Introduction to Philology