AG2024_1066665a
everything that occurs
“It’s life itself that rejects the investigation’s claim to be all-encompassing.”
“everything that occurs in the human experience is reality.”
– Sarr
Beauty calls forth meaning, order, calm
Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”
O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.
Tippett: That’s fascinating.
O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.
On Being with Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue : The Inner Landscape of Beauty
Original Air Date : February 28, 2008
“Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm” (RS)
Disappeared from the world, without a sound, a sunset
“The sun was setting. I remember thinking: This is how T.C. Elimane disappeared from the world, without a sound, like a sunset in the ocean.” Sarr
A paratactical end of scene.
“… to generate language for describing deep structure effects in the absence of deep structure causes and origins.” (ML, Lyric form)
Market-mediated landscape
Des grains de poussière sur la mer. Commissariat : Arden Sherman. Fraeme.art
untitled (sharing in a market-mediated access economy-stadium), 2015.
I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu | The New York Review of Books
Episode One of “The Critic and Her Publics”
In a series of conversations with Merve Emre at Wesleyan University, some of today’s sharpest working critics discuss their careers and methodology, and are then asked to close-read a text that they haven’t seen before. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of these interviews, which across eleven episodes will offer an extensive look into the process of criticism.
[..]
It’s a public, right? There is no beauty without a public. That, to me, is very revolutionary. The legacy of Kant, or even the whole Kantian tradition, can sometimes end up in this place of contemplating the beautiful, seeing the play of colors on a canvas or hearing the tone in a musical phrase or whatever. It is very isolated and often very elite. Someone like Susan Sontag is happy that most people don’t get modern art. That is a certain kind of tradition.
But if you’re attending to the way that it’s laid out, it’s about our being thrust onto each other. There’s a reason that there’s an analogy between judgments of taste and morality for Kant. When I go to a movie with my sister and I say something bad about it—or not even bad, if I just start to enumerate some of its qualities—she will get offended. And she’s right. I want to say, “Oh, come on, I’m just talking about the movie.” But she’s right. I’m saying, this is how you should feel about this movie. She resents it. We are delivered into each other’s hands.
Source: I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu | The New York Review of Books
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AG2024_2070739a or a practicality
Why should we read this collection of Lenin’s writing today? What do these writings show us about theory breaking into practice, and how might the politics explained or implied in these writings inform our analytical and practical grasp of what is to be done now? How are the two key concepts – imperialism and self-determination – explored here by Lenin relevant? The organised violence of imperialism continues to stalk the earth in the form of its fleshly and ghostly remnants – accumulated underdevelopment – and viscerally in contemporary unequal relations of power that rush value upward, by way of elites, to the ‘economic north’, wherever the owners might reside. But in its muscular liveliness, self-determination hasn’t disappeared from the earth’s surface, nor wholly been absorbed into the system of nation-states mostly disciplined by debt and developmentalism.
We should read as though we are thinking with Lenin in his time while also thinking about the struggle at hand, so that Marxism’s contemporary practicality doesn’t get lost. This practicality cannot be overstated, even if the frenzy of many debates obscures underlying necessity. As an organiser active during the 1930s in New York City explained, ‘We went out every night after supper to knock on strangers’ doors. I’d say “I am from the Communist Party and I am here to help you solve your problems.”’
Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Imperialism and the National Question
by V. I. Lenin, Verso