Solecism
Time Magazine: The Last Of The Big Newsweeklies (NPR)
The decision by the corporate owner of Newsweek to put the magazine up for sale has once more raised the question in journalism circles as to whether there’s a role — or any future at all — for newsweekly magazines. Yet over at the historic Time-Life Building, editors putting out the nation’s leading such magazine are much more sanguine about their fate. “In terms of our category, we’re not only the last guy standing – we’re the only guy standing,” says Rick Stengel, Time’s managing editor.
Um, doesn’t “last guy standing” typically mean “only guy standing.” Maybe there’s a reason newweeklies are dying — if this is the kind of slogan their managing editor (!) produces.
Posted on June 24, 2010
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Queer sexuality
Thus spake Joshua Corey:
I meditate on the value of queer sexuality as a mode of consciousness that plays with the manufactories of desire rather than simply accepting their products unquestioningly off the assembly line.
Posted on May 12, 2010
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Like the boys
Like the boys
Posted on April 23, 2010
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The Second Common
photo courtesy cyberenviro.org
“The second notion of the common,” Hardt and Negri write, “is dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production. This common is not only the earth we share but also the language we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first.” But is does suffer from a logic of debasement and banalization, which, as I shall argue, is just as significant to contemporpary life as scarcity. “The expropriation of this second form of the common—the artificial common that blurs the division between nature and culture—is,” they go on to say, “the key to understanding the new forms of exploitation of biopolitical labor.”
—David Harvey quoting Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s The Commonwealth in a debate about the book in Artforum 158:3 (Nov 2009), p. 260.
Posted on April 12, 2010
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from my notebook: receipts
“Money is the external common medium and faculty for transforming appearing into reality and reality into appearance” —Marx
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Section 511.15 applies. Please note attached status report. Thanks!
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The goal of psychoanalysis is to become comfortable wasting money.
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$10,261.10 $15,083.94 $17,106.72 $12,130.77
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Posted on April 11, 2010
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Ache Tea Emily
Make the head seductive, more approachable, like at a party talking to a undergrad and pause that thought. I sort of, well, Alaska. Accidentally commented on her Facebook state. Wasn’t at work, softly if accidentally, only more so. Not facework but the opposite still of profile. What happened by analogy was this, or rather like this. Totally analogy. I mean phenomenally. Fields of attraction that, swooping through firewire, interest me in matrices that might otherwise lack luster. What student prose has done to my poetry you are to. And partial to. At least by phonology of part object. Accent on the flubbed interview because they first clocked my corrupted feed. I didn’t know books could squirrel into syndication like cable. If poetry, then totally. My theory is that each syntax implicates a new consciousness, albeit. It’s uniting states of syntax into uncivil discourse. Mousseline or liver. It’s American if it’s united under false pretense of invasion. It’s a data feed I want to push out like a food chute, not swallow like a goiter. It’s prose that cats and dogs can eat. It’s news that stays the news. It’s half is well enough.
Posted on April 11, 2010
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Ten inspirations
that I want to distill into my next writing project:
- Guy Hocquenghem’s The Screwball Asses
- Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
- The Situationists and the City
- Google Maps API
- Ann Hamilton’s video, abc
- Christian Marclay’s Memento
- Palare
- Charles Bernstein and Emma Bernstein reading “War”
- Steve Reich’s Come Out
- Tino Seghal at the Guggenheim museum
Links to come. Below, a still from Hamilton’s abc:
Posted on February 15, 2010
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Listening to Braille
In her recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv quotes a writing excerpt from a sixteen-year-old blind student whose literacy has developed through aural/oral means, without the benefit of braille. This single excerpt is meant to stand as damning evidence of the failure of oral-based literacy:
He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
I wouldn’t suggest that this is excellent writing. But by the same token, I wouldn’t — as the author of the article and apparently Doug and Diana Brent, the two researchers at the University of Calgary who are studying the effects of aural-based learning, suggest — construe this passage as damning evidence of the dangers of aural/oral-based education without the benefit of braille or other visual/haptic alphabets. Here is how Aviv describes it:
The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”
Yes, the writing passage above is missing some basic features of standard writing, such as clear sentence boundaries and standard punctuation. However, many fully educated writers of standard English fail to understand when it is appropriate to use a comma versus a period in discursive prose — prose that is increasingly influenced by the technologies of texting and email, where urgency and ease trump thoughtful composition. Furthermore, as any instructor of writing knows, it can be difficult to give feedback on a piece of student writing without knowing a) where the student is in the composition process, and b) what the assignment is. With the example above, neither of these criteria are known. Nor is it known if the student was given an opportunity to revise — or even review — his or her writing before submitting it. What class or discipline produced this piece of writing? And how might this student’s education be characterized more generally? What specific writing instruction does a student receive in oral/aural-based education for the blind? None of this information is provided by the article.
Just as the contextual parameters used to produce this writing are lacking, so too are the paratextual cues for the reader undeveloped. How are we meant to read this piece of writing? In what genre does it fall? The Brents complain that the passage above is exemplary in its failure to adhere to the criterion of “organized sequence” valued in typical argumentative writing. While it is true that most prose is valued for its sequential development, it strikes me that the passage above is not an example of argumentative writing but rather of imaginative “creative” writing. And while sequence and organization are of course important to the genres of fiction and poetry, they often operate under different principles. One way in which creative works develop is by returning to charged symbols whose meaning expand and develop each time they are revisited. In the passage above, I find the symbolic development of the bomb and the mask — particularly the way they seem to swap functions — to be intriguingly surreal and poetic. (Also note, in support of the passage’s surreality, the reference to sleep.)
I’m not saying that the writer above is a James Joyce or Alice Notley in embryo (though the the passage does suggest the correspondence between literary structures and orality; poetry is often more sound than sense). What I am saying is that we understand and evaluate writing depending on genre conventions. If a student submitted an experimental poem for a sociology assignment, it would seem very wrong. If a student submitted a sociology paper to fulfill a creative assignment, it would also seem an inappropriate (though perhaps quite brilliant) response to the assignment. And so it seems unfair and unscientific to judge the blind student’s writing without knowing the particular assignment, context, and means governing the production of this writing. (To point to another way in which context informs reception, I ask you to consider the case of text messaging. “LOL C U L8R” is an entirely appropriate SMS communication, but wildly inappropriate in a job application. Context determines discourse and, to a degree, sense.)
Indeed, read in a different light, we might find certain felicities in the blind student’s writing —in its resemblance to certain strains of surreal poetic language with strong oral qualities— as well as failings. It all depends on knowing or being to create a convincing context for the writing—the context in which the writing was produced, and the context in which it is read (which can of course vary, depending on reader and occasion).
More generally, Aviv makes a provocative (if reactionary) argument about the ways that technological advance potentially renders education less effective — the ways in which it may lead to the atrophy or regression of certain literacies and knowledges. But the arbitrary and under-contextualized use of evidence in the article — the interpretation of a single student’s writing as damning evidence, without any context — weakens Aviv’s argument and potentially misrepresents the effects of aural/oral education and literacies. I am certainly not resistant to the idea that Braille may still be a necessary educational technology for the blind. Written language is, after all, still the most powerful technology for molding consciousness (cf. Walter Ong; also Robert Logan’s The Alphabet Effect). And I would be sad to see very effective educational technologies like the book, the pen and paper, the argumentative essay, etc., compromised by the current ethos of techno-consumerism, in which the new object necessarily represents advance over the old. But I am also attracted to the ways that oral/aural languages persist (in poetry, for example) and structure alternative modes of writing — and, thus alternative consciousnesses. Rather than fear the decline of written communication at the expense of the aural, why not examine the new ways that aural / alphabetic / visual languages productively overlap, particularly in new media writing.
Posted on February 7, 2010
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from my notebook: class
Class is to sublime longing into thread for future clothes. Class is twenty minds in pursuit of a genius loci. Class is disciplines self to group. Class is individuates self from group. Class is the black pupil dragged across the white board. Class is poetry by other means. Class is poetry by mean. Class is this being graded?
Posted on January 30, 2010
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Holy Fucking Moley
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The “Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Volume 1, H-O” by J.E. Lighter, Random House, New York, 1994, has this entry: “moley n. (pop. As a characteristic exclamation of ‘Captain Marvel,’ hero of a series of comic books begun 1940, first written by C.C. Beck; perh. reflecting ‘moly’ ‘magic herb in Greek mythology’, in allusion to the invocation of mythological figures as a source of the character’s powers; perh. euphem. and rhyming alt. of ‘holy Moses.’ In phrase: ‘holy moley’ (used as an exclamation of surprise). 1949 ‘Capt. Marvel Adventures, in Barrier & Williams ‘Book of Comics’ 87: Holey Moley! He got away.”
Posted on January 30, 2010
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