You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Let Negroes smell the breeze
So they can sing with ease
Sweet freedom’s song;
Let justice reign supreme,
Let men be what they seem
Break up that lyncher’s screen,
Lay down all wrong.
The Negro’s “America”, Frank Barbour Coffin
if we stand together there is nothing that we cannot accomplish bottom line let us go forward and fight for a government and an economy that works for all not just a few we simply
Bernie Sanders, 013125
go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations—that is, “nowhere”—… utopia
contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.
surrealism is … an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought.
battle against all forms of oppression that aims to replace “suspicion, fear and anger with curiosity, adventure and desire”
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley
Somewhere better than this place
Nowhere better than this place
Félix González-Torres, 1989-1990.
All lovers know it’s chemistry,
not physics, that makes the world go round
Androgyne, Stephen Dunn
Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not. (AC)
They are trees that remind me of a time when I felt invincible. (RK)
And from the Journal: “‘It is difficult to know exactly how to make money on AI,’ said Mike Ogborne, founder of Ogborne Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm in San Francisco that oversees a position in Nvidia. ‘This could be the first day of a lot more pain.’” “It is difficult to know exactly how to make money in AI” does seem like an essential aspect of the AI trade; we have talked about OpenAI’s claim that “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” and also about a venture capital bet that the way to make money on AI is by buying up homeowners’ association management companies. But the actual answer turns out to be “build a cheap AI model and short Nvidia.” —Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion Money Stuff.
Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.
From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.
McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where
the products of collective human labour in the
cultural realm become mere property. But what is
distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not
rest directly on the status of the thing as a
commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory.
Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory
fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And
what is distinctive about détournement is that it
can restore to the fragment the status of being a
recognisable part of the process of the collective
production of meaning in the present, through
the combination of the détourned fragment into a
new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees
the process of creation from the private property
of the image.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden
