You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
or—more simply—the speaking voice prompting the reader/witness/man who first sees the body in the thames to imagine adam—to try gobeyond the page/thames and understand who adam is.
The Lyric Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo, 2024.
Localization. A leverage point. A position to place the lever.
“perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures”
A Small Needful Fact, Ross Gay
Small is the way to go.
[…] you can’t please everybody.
Even when I ran the club, I understood this. A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.
The Running Novelist, Haruki Murakami, New Yorker (060208)
Out came Sister Y, looking beautiful in the way someone will when she has just, against all sense, done exactly what she most wanted to.
Hypocrites, George Saunders
Bonus: Schjeldahl is forever!!
I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy,” the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.
[…]
If you manage not to enjoy the lustrous pooch, I don’t understand you. But if you’re afflicted by an attendant feeling of intellectual free fall, in a vacuum of identifiable emotion, we can talk. Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.
Funhouse, Peter Schjeldahl
I run into the main road a car scream and I aieeee back (MJ)
ANIMALS is an all-encompassing, interactive exhibition that looks at the animals around us and how human interaction plays a role in endangerment and survival. From domestic household pets to wild invasive or endangered species, animals are presented through various methods including painting, sculpture, mixed media, and video. The Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, May 18 through August 18, 2024.
or the sun that dazzles those who gaze too hard,
so desire that is not in tune with itself,
unrestrained in its object, comes to grief,
Petrarch The Canzoniere, #48
… convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records by a jury of 12 New Yorkers, who deliberated over two days to reach a decision (NYTimes)
Both production and circulation are essential to capitalism: as Marx puts it, “Circulation is just as necessary as is production itself.”
Production is the “hidden abode” of value, the often-invisible employment relation in which labor receives a wage in exchange for pouring its power into the making of commodities; circulation is the unhidden, manifest abode of value, the exchange sphere where “an immense collection of commodities” emanates value.[…]
Labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value. This is why, for Marx , value as such only becomes the ruling idea in a society of widespread commoditization. Barter economies have concepts of “need” and of “use,” while commodity economies, where production is undertaken for the purpose of exchange and accumulation, have concepts of “value.”
Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh
Kornbluh, in Parapraxis, on Freud’s death drive as not a program that can explain ecocidal climate change (Carbon capitalist autocracy, a highly specific and contingent mode of resource management and power monopoly, is the cause.), but speculative, creative, with “the will to create from zero, to begin again . . . to make a fresh start.” (Lacan) [It] persists,” in “the bourgeoning of creativity . . . [leading] beyond survival to something more life affirming.” (Mari Ruti)
To read: The Order of Forms (U Chicago, 2019)
In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity.
Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
… gardenists, Dixon Hunt’s word for writers who adapt the garden’s form and phenomenology to their own purposes. For them, the garden is the flip side of an everyday chaos felt as perceptual derangement or lapse. (AN)