Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, […], this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.
Girl of the Golden West, Joan Didion.
Dig
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Aspire to change
[…] starting from the position that the status quo is unacceptable, and that some sort of change—whether transformation, disruption, rebellion, innovation, intervention, or insubordination—is therefore necessary, the works under discussion in the chapters that follow offer a version of Cage’s optimistic transferral; they expand that conviction about the intolerability of the status quo to literary modes, advocating implicitly for a more variegated canon, and then continue more radically to question the fundamental structures of language itself. Texts here are conceived not only as artifacts documenting moments in which writers have undertaken the radical reevaluation of modes of composition but also as sites encouraging readers to proceed in unconventional and innovative ways; they exhibit experimental writing and reward experimental reading. If the world requires new positions and relations, new modes of attention and perception, a refreshed awareness of material conditions, the redistribution of powers, and continually active participation, unscripted by conventions, here are the proving grounds. Those who aspire to change society shouldn’t shy from the far less ambitious task of reconsidering what—and how—they read.
Radium of the Word : A POETICS OF MATERIALITY, Craig Dworkin
Cristina Lei Rodriguez at Locust Projects. -
An Expanse of Light via NASA
The universe emits light or energy in many different forms. This object is, in fact, a pair: a white dwarf star that steadily burns at a relatively cool temperature and a highly variable red giant. As they orbit each other, the white dwarf pulls material from the red giant onto its surface. Over time, enough of this material accumulates and triggers an explosion. Astronomers have seen such outbursts over recent decades. Evidence for much older outbursts is seen in the spectacular structures observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (red and blue). X-ray data from Chandra (purple) shows how a jet from the white dwarf is striking material surrounding it and creating shock waves, similar to sonic booms from supersonic planes.
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI, Palomar Observatory, DSS; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA; H-Alpha: LCO/IMACS/MMTF
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Cassava
via daily.jstor.
Cassava, or Manihot esculenta, is an incredibly starchy plant native to South America. According to agronomist Mabrouk A. El-Sharkawy, cassava is a perennial shrub which “may have been domesticated and cultivated for its starchy roots…before 4000 BC, on the Peruvian coast and in other parts of the Americas.”
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[…] join in, for us, to change misery.
Barely, related — The Calamity Form : On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian.
Like the commodity form, the calamity form enables an “active and in-depth knowing of nothing.” Its “peculiar achievement” is not to explain the conditions responsible for the epistemic and experiential dilemmas and contradictions of its moment but rather to put us “on close terms with incomprehension.” Through its “anti-denotative and anti-representational” strategies, the poetry “repossess[es] the occult character of the commodity and sets it not against but beside the inscrutability of its historical moment” (p. 4, emphases Levinson).
In other words, the relationship of commodity form to calamity form is one of adjacency: a serial, similarity, reiterative relationship rather than a hierarchical, logical, and causal one. The calamity form is Nersessian’s category-term for Romanticism’s way of suspending, attenuating, downgrading, vaulting over, fracturing, blurring, deforming, and misdirecting the normative relationships between signifier and signified that characterize narrative, statement, argument, and reference. The calamity form, on her reading, neither critiques nor idealizes the commodity form; it “rehearses” it …
Marjorie Levinson on The Calamity Form via Critical Inquiry -
Retrouve
Bibliotheque numerique caraibe amazonie plateau des guyanes
http://www.manioc.org/
https://www.tramil.net/en
Untitled (loss/entry/return), 2005 -
Somebodies
Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless.
[…]
There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human.
[…]
[A] form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.”
Zadie Smith, newyorker.
