She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
II.
One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
III.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!
When I stop and think about what it’s all about I do come up with some answers, but they don’t help very much. I think it is safe to say that life is pretty mysterious. And hard. Life is short. I know that much. That life is short. And that it’s important to keep reminding oneself of it. That life is short. Just because it is. I suspect that each of us is going to wake up some morning to suddenly find ourselves old men (or women) without knowing how we got that way. Wondering where it all went. Regretting all the things we didn’t do. So I think that the sooner we realize that life is short the better off we are. Now, to get down to the basics. There are 24 hours a day. There is you and there are other people. The idea is to fill these 24 hours as best one can. With love and fun. Or things that are interesting. Or what have you. Other people are most important. Art is rewarding. Books and movies are good fillers, and the most reliable. Now you know that life is not so simple as I am making it sound. We are all a bit fucked up, and here lies the problem. To try and get rid of the fucked up parts, so we can just relax and be ourselves. For what time we have left.
“Attorneys at the Haitian Lawyers Association, a Miami-based nonprofit, have created a dedicated task force to help those at risk of deportation. They have organized free law clinics and offered pro-bono counsel, while also helping clients prepare for possible deportation by organizing powers of attorney, wills, trusts, and guardianship documents for their children and elderly parents. The attorneys consult with counterparts in Haiti, as well as in Canada, where many Haitians have fled, sometimes by walking long distances in freezing temperatures and crossing the northern border on foot.”
“Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that the public sphere remains democratic only insofar as its naturalized exclusions are taken into account and made open to contestation: “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.” Deutsche takes her lead from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Published in 1985, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony is one of the first books to reconsider Leftist political theory through the lens of post- structuralism, following what the authors perceived to be an impasse of Marxist theorization in the 1970s. Their text is a rereading of Marx through Gramsci’s the- or y of hegemony and Lacan’s under st anding of subject ivit y as split and decentered.”
“Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of the Marxist idea of community as communion in The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) has been crucial to my consideration of a counter-model to relational aesthetics. Since the mid-1990s, Nancy’s text has become an increasingly important reference point for writers on contemporary art, as seen in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions; chapter 4 of Pamela M. Lee’s Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); George Baker, “Relations and Counter-Relations: An Open Letter to Nicolas Bourriaud,” in Zusammenhänge herstellen/Contextualise, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne: Dumont, 2002); and Jessica Morgan, Common Wealth (London: Tate Publishing, 2003).”
Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop.
Light filtering through thin plant–mostly green, some yellow, some browning leaves and branching stems–casting soft shadows on a wall. Image was shot in Saint Augustine, at night, March 2020.
What is most near? Ah, sweet dead year- Thy fallen leaf And gathered sheaf, The presence that is fled, The vows that once were said- These are most near.
Swift speeds away Rose-crowned To-day. So far, so far Her light feet are! I look and see thy face Haunting the upland place, Dear Yesterday.
The blooming flowers, The sunny hours- These cannot rest, These are half blest. But thou forevermore Art mine, love, as of yore, And time is ours.
he used one hand to hold it by its gills and the other to drive a small metal stake between its eyes and directly into its brain—a technique known in Japan as ike jime. The bonito’s body twitched until Yamasaki slid a thin metal wire down the column of its spinal cord, a second step called shinkei jime, which arrests its nervous system.
The method is considered significantly more humane than the standard alternatives for killing a fish (thwacking it on the head, letting it suffocate), and is analogous to halal and kosher butchery, which both require that animals be slaughtered with a swift, decisive cut to the throat. It also results in fish that tastes better and stays fresh significantly longer.
When the Social-Democratic worker found himself in the economic crisis which degraded him to a coolie, the development of his revolutionary feelings was inhibited by the conservative structure which had been cultivated in him for decades. Either he remained in the Social-Democratic party, in spite of all his criticism and rebellion. Or, oscillating between his revolutionary and his conservative feelings, and disillusioned by Social- Democratic leadership, he followed the path of least resistance and switched to the NSDAP, hoping to find better leadership there. In this situation, it depended on the correct or incorrect mass leadership of the revolutionary party whether or not the worker would give up his conservative tendency and would develop the full consciousness of his responsibility in the production process, that is, his revolutionary consciousness. The Communist contention that it was Social-Democratic politics which had helped fascism come to power was—mass-psychologically— correct. Disillusionment in Social Democracy must, in the presence of a conflict between pauperization and conservative thinking, lead into the fascist camp if there are no effective revolutionary organizations. Thus there was, for example, a fascization of the workers in England after the fiasco of the Labor party in 1930–31; in the elections of 1931, the workers, instead of swinging to Communism, shifted to the right. Democratic Scandinavia, also, was threatened by such a development.
