Sunday, February 25, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Liam, age six, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. On a possibly related note, some words of Dusko Radovic freshly translated for me, and now for you, by Zarko Radakovic.1.
Something is not right.
The new school is being created by those who finished the old one with the highest marks.
Maybe it would be more logical to entrust the reforms of the schooling system to bad students, who are the only real witnesses that the old school was no good.
2.
Some people ask of us not to be their friends but to be friends of their delusions. Because of that many friendships are not realized or are spoiled.
3.
The most popular are those writers who have more friends and acquaintances than readers.
4.
One advice to those who are afraid:
Don’t turn around, if you think THAT is still there.
5.
Here and there in Belgrade there are still pickets, and alongside pickets grow weeds of strong, pungent smell…
A dove coos on a branch of a wild pear tree and a stray field mouse runs from fear or hunger.
All that still exists somewhere, in some street without a name and a house without number….
Like a thistle, it sticks to the pant leg of the metropolis and travels through times and places to which it does not belong.
6.
You woke up again this morning on the only planet, in the greater cosmic area, on which it is possible to live.
In silence and darkness of infinite space and time glimmer only your eyes and words, there is nothing anywhere besides you and your lives.
Happy are you for being alive and for being so smart that that can be proven to you.
7.
Good people have time.
That is the first characteristic of goodness.
8.
It only makes sense to educate the smart ones. The educated, without smarts, are a great error and danger.
9.
Belgraders are going on vacation.
Practitioners to the seaside,
the theoreticians to spas.
10.
How will you go to the seaside with that stomach so big?
Where will you keep it while you’re swimming?
It will bore you with its demands, won’t let you move without it.
You will be unable to be alone with anyone, for it will always be there.
11.
There are some males so tame and dear, who know how to speak so sweetly, seductively and lengthily that you simply forget that they are male. Afterward you don’t mind even if it turns out that they in fact are.
12.
It’s too much, and not healthy – both to be young and to have money.
Whoever is spending money while young won’t have time to spend youth.
13.
In life it is enough to be smart twice – when choosing your occupation and when choosing your partner in marriage.
Who misses both of these times, has to be smart his whole life.
14.
Why do some parents have a lot of children?
Because they don’t think about it.
And how do they manage to feed and clothe so many children?
Again because they don’t think about it.
And can they raise them all?
They can, because they don’t think about it.
Everything is doable when it’s not much thought about.
15.
There are wives who aren’t afraid of husbands, but are afraid of various bugs.
One husband ate such a bug for his wife to see, but it didn’t help.
She’s still afraid only of bugs.
16.
Domestic rock musicians have gobbled up music.
What we hear is only burping.
17.
Brave drunks drink alone and for no reason.
Only the cowards need reasons, and company, and music to get drunk.
18.
Plants burned with the green flame of life until they cooked up their fruits.
Now that fire is dying out.
Fruits remain as proof that life wasn’t in vain.
19.
After we are born, we first learn to talk, and only then to think.
We fall behind at the start, and never catch up.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
""There will be no more viewers in my city, only actors. No more culture, therefore no more viewing. No more theaters--theater beginning where the stage and the room divide. Everyone will be on stage in my city. No more audience. No more viewing, so no more actions altered at their source by the fact that they are destined to be seen--even if only by the actor himself, who at the moment he acts becomes his own spectator." --Jean Dubuffet, trans. Carol Volk, Asphyxiating Culture, Four Walls Eight Windows, p. 72Friday, February 09, 2007
Dear psychogeographers: we'd talked about going to a certain bar to view Marxists and other suspicious folks, but now I understand that the Derrida film will also be playing, and if it's the film I'm thinking about, well, it's an awful film. Now what?Friday, February 02, 2007
Love bugs
What I saw and how I saw it
The sun does what it can, this time of year, and that may be more than we hope for. There is an extending and ramifying of discrete objects across the visual field. This is not the compression and isolation of the lovelier but less hopeful sun of June.
This morning, two hawks above the ridge implied by our neighborhood. The land contour is subtle, merely the slight tipping point at the edge of the ancient lakebed, and anyone who chooses to can think of our houses as simply in the city rather than on a ridge. There must have been enough air spilling upwards from this, though, because the hawks widened one gyre, secured some height, and were quickly gone.
I sat in the sun wearing nothing on my torso but a dark coat of nylon stuffed with bird feathers in plump panels, opened to the south. I’d come in from skating the city, eating the whole thing with my blades, amassing bits of tape on the handycam which will enrage Sebastian when he comes to edit it one day.
I haven’t begun the quirky and unlikely eye method which may or may not help me overcome the sudden loss of visual acuity which came upon me at age forty-six. But I haven’t repudiated it, either. Anticipating its confines and freedoms, I don’t wear glasses, and I tend to blunder a bit in our dark north-facing duplex.
I was out there reading Descartes’ Discours de la method in an odd mood, sun on my naked belly. French comes to me sometimes less as something I know than as something half forgotten, like the speech of dragons.
It was not from the hawks I learned the lesson of shadows spilling out sideways on the first of January. I came to Descartes in desperation, not for ideas but for book-sanctioned ones, for—and here is the end of this line of thinking—for money, because I need to teach this city course at the university, and I had taken the hint from another book that Descartes gave us the straight lines of cities and an enlightenment of ruined trees and for animals and bugs, contempt.
And so to the fourth part of the Discours, in a bit of sunshine in a country so sodden with months of rain that as I’d skated earlier I’d had to avoid a kind of slush, a paste which reminded me of the effluvium from Mt. St. Helen’s back in ’80 settling on the windshield of our Nova 6-cylinder north by northwestbound out of Chicago. It was everywhere in heaps, then and now, and here I think it’s from litter and motor oil whipped to a froth by tires in the rain. If there’s been a darker country than this one, I’ve forgotten it the way a woman cannot recall the moist nightmares of labor.
Two bugs alighted upon my Descartes. We were three, then, two bugs and me, but with a single consciousness, one solar plexus. I’d have never seen them in the house, and might well have crushed them into the folds of the Descartes without ever noticing them. But out there in the sun I could not only see commas but objects inside the commas, and the pulp of the paper whispered a thousand things in microshadows the text had not dreamed of. And as commas first the bugs alit to break up my reading.
But that lateral light had a trick that was best of all, for as the one bug climbed the rugged folds of the words “claires et distinctes” on the right page, the other ascended into the white space on an accent mark above “les choses materielles” on the left page. As he did so, he turned, and was suddenly enlarged in shadow, and I could see the imprint of him fully across three inches. He scratched himself, and licked his face, and the resolution thus amplified was such as to fall just short of telling me his expression.
What I saw and how I saw it
The sun does what it can, this time of year, and that may be more than we hope for. There is an extending and ramifying of discrete objects across the visual field. This is not the compression and isolation of the lovelier but less hopeful sun of June.
This morning, two hawks above the ridge implied by our neighborhood. The land contour is subtle, merely the slight tipping point at the edge of the ancient lakebed, and anyone who chooses to can think of our houses as simply in the city rather than on a ridge. There must have been enough air spilling upwards from this, though, because the hawks widened one gyre, secured some height, and were quickly gone.
I sat in the sun wearing nothing on my torso but a dark coat of nylon stuffed with bird feathers in plump panels, opened to the south. I’d come in from skating the city, eating the whole thing with my blades, amassing bits of tape on the handycam which will enrage Sebastian when he comes to edit it one day.
I haven’t begun the quirky and unlikely eye method which may or may not help me overcome the sudden loss of visual acuity which came upon me at age forty-six. But I haven’t repudiated it, either. Anticipating its confines and freedoms, I don’t wear glasses, and I tend to blunder a bit in our dark north-facing duplex.
I was out there reading Descartes’ Discours de la method in an odd mood, sun on my naked belly. French comes to me sometimes less as something I know than as something half forgotten, like the speech of dragons.
It was not from the hawks I learned the lesson of shadows spilling out sideways on the first of January. I came to Descartes in desperation, not for ideas but for book-sanctioned ones, for—and here is the end of this line of thinking—for money, because I need to teach this city course at the university, and I had taken the hint from another book that Descartes gave us the straight lines of cities and an enlightenment of ruined trees and for animals and bugs, contempt.
And so to the fourth part of the Discours, in a bit of sunshine in a country so sodden with months of rain that as I’d skated earlier I’d had to avoid a kind of slush, a paste which reminded me of the effluvium from Mt. St. Helen’s back in ’80 settling on the windshield of our Nova 6-cylinder north by northwestbound out of Chicago. It was everywhere in heaps, then and now, and here I think it’s from litter and motor oil whipped to a froth by tires in the rain. If there’s been a darker country than this one, I’ve forgotten it the way a woman cannot recall the moist nightmares of labor.
Two bugs alighted upon my Descartes. We were three, then, two bugs and me, but with a single consciousness, one solar plexus. I’d have never seen them in the house, and might well have crushed them into the folds of the Descartes without ever noticing them. But out there in the sun I could not only see commas but objects inside the commas, and the pulp of the paper whispered a thousand things in microshadows the text had not dreamed of. And as commas first the bugs alit to break up my reading.
But that lateral light had a trick that was best of all, for as the one bug climbed the rugged folds of the words “claires et distinctes” on the right page, the other ascended into the white space on an accent mark above “les choses materielles” on the left page. As he did so, he turned, and was suddenly enlarged in shadow, and I could see the imprint of him fully across three inches. He scratched himself, and licked his face, and the resolution thus amplified was such as to fall just short of telling me his expression.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
