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Present Past Subjects Projects Misc
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OCTOBER 2003
I guess my attention has been somewhere else this past month. Sorry. I'm surprised how many people have noticed (and complained).
Storm over Scheveningen Surprised to find a copy of Klossowski's The Baphomet this afternoon in the Slegte in The Hague. Not because this book has been on my amazon order list for over a year but because it links this afternoon with June 1, 2002. Afterwards N. and I went for a long walk through the dunes. She Looked Like This Hanadi Jaradat Links: Suicide bomber kills at least 19 in Israel (CNN) Haifa Lawyer-bomber Avenged Brother, Cousin (Islam Online) Background: An Arsenal of Believers (The New Yorker) Compare scripts: Albert Camus, The Just Assassins (Les Justes) Gertrude Stein, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (especially the end of Act 1, Scene 2) I love it, love it, love it, when it storms and rains. Especially when gusts of wind blow rain all over the windows. Update on yesterday's update: In the West Bank city of Jenin, Israeli troops in a column of 30 tanks and other armored vehicles dynamited home of Hanadi Jaradat, a female lawyer who had carried out the Rafah operation. The house is a bungalow where eight people lived. Drinking Cruz de Malta Yerba Mate Elaborada. Reading Mac Wellman's 1978 outing 'Harm's Way' (from his collection The Bad Infinity). Apropos that exploratory meeting this afternoon with South African Brett Bailey and our conversation concerning exotic signifiers (trappings) and the traps of the mysterious... I think Cocteau put it so well way back when when he wrote:
This -- mind you -- from the author of the bizarre play The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party who's photographer publicly states: "Since these mysteries are beyond me, let's pretend that I arrange them all the time." The moon was bothering me. Prophecy Dead of night. A dog barks. A series of short, low-pitched barks: Woof. Silence. Woof-woof. Silence. I look out the window and wonder what does it mean. Surely something. Tiresias Who is Tiresias? Surrounded by one's company of actors. One's company. One's actors. One's friends. Company. You know. That whole rumbustious machine. Forget Memory Don't even think about conjuring up the dead. Necrology is the art you don't want to have for conjuring or for purposes of prophecy. "I've got a friend who's got a friend as can make that stiff talk." I've just finished reading Harm's Way (1978). It's good. Really good. Humorous too in the manner of the early black and white Fassbinder films like Der Amerikanische Soldat or Götter der Pest. Information Augury Meaningful coincidences and metadata. Signs and signals from God. Where the form (and order and moment) of the signal is more meaningful than its content. Witness the signs. Hear and understand. While reading The Baphomet I receive from Erick Beltran this image of 'El pudridero', literally the 'rotting room', the room in Phillip the Second's Escorial palace where the bodies of kings are stored for 25 years to decompose before their final interment.
Also received: from reader Joo Yoon Chung a recent article in Scientific American on Parallel Universes. The author of the article writes: "All possible states exist at every instant, so the passage of time may be in the eye of the beholder--an idea explored in Greg Egan's 1994 science-fiction novel Permutation City and developed by physicist David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, independent physicist Julian Barbour, and others." Always. Already. Amsterdam Binge These are the books that Paul bought (17 today). I've been reading -- and collecting -- plays this past month.
N. has left for a week here. From Genet's forward to The Blacks - A Clown Show:
In a Certain Style Thomas Bernhard and Gertrude Stein
Mac Wellman too Why didn't William Burroughs write plays? This is as close as he got: The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. The Divine Aspirations of Destiny's Child Follow up to this morning's taikonaut launch: "no less than 270,000 are employed by the Chinese space program" "the goal is to establish a permanent outpost on the moon within 15 years" An event comparable to the discovery of the coelacanth in 1938? A "living fossil" frog is found in the in the Western Ghats Mountains. Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis CNN story.
Tea tip: throw four or five whole cardamom pods into the pot with your Assam. After a couple of minutes remove the tea but leave the pods. Enjoy. Tautological art. "I make this art because I am an artist" is more tautological than "I make this art because I am black, white, gay, schizophrenic" etc. An earlier post on this subject here. Flipping through 'Theatre Experiment', Michael Benedikt's out-of-print anthology of American experimental theater this afternoon, I found and read a very interesting short piece by Paul Goodman called 'The Birthday'. This play, which Goodman considered a 'dance poem' was originally published in 1941 in Goodman's Stop-Light: 5 Dance Poems and an Essay on the Noh. It is of course out-of-print, even the usually abundant Abebooks lists only 12 copies ($30 to $150). However I did find a good review of it :
Goodman's The Cyclist is also available online. Interested in the structure of dreams, especially the types of transformations which can occur, I've being attempting to get a handle on Freud's work in this area. Happily London's Freud museum has an excellent synopsis of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams annotated with Freud's own examples. The following account of one of Freud's own dreams together with his analysis is strikingly beautiful.
Time Capsule Have you ever tried fasting? Funny how fasting freezes time for the subject while for everyone else time appears to simply flow on. (And no, I am not thinking here of controlled calorie restriction as a means of life extension.) On the last day of August this year (which seems a long time ago to me) I posted this link to the Hunger Artist. The Hunger Artist redux. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same A sentence which has stuck in my head after reading Usama bin Laden's recent message to the Iraqi people is reproduced in red below (full text at Aljazeera.net):
Francis Galton As a way of expressing his idea of dream 'condensation' Freud refers in The Interpretation of Dreams to Galton's composite photography. The Galton Collection has examples online. Steering clear of the obvious questions surrounding Galton's work (aka the eugenics 'bugbear') Andreas Broeckmann has some interesting things to say on Galton's 'statistical photography'. Jalal's back in Holland to give a seminar at the Rijksakademie on "the back and the face" (full title: Saving the Living Human's Face & Backing the Mortal). I'm happy to be able to attend today and tomorrow. Dreams Before Language Who can help me find to a copy of George Steiner's lecture 'The Historicity of Dreams (two questions to Freud)' which appeared in the journal Salmagundi, Fall 1983 (pp. 6-21). It seems that no libraries in this part of the world have it. Currently reading Ionesco's last play Journeys Among the Dead. Structurally, it seems more of a dream play than Strindberg's A Dream Play or Williams' Camino Real but (at least so far) it definitely seems less of a bardo journey than Hedayat's The Blind Owl.
Footprints in hardened concrete. 19 October 2003. Koningsbrug Rotterdam.
From The New York Times columnist David Pogue's review of OS 10.3: "The reputation of the personal computer has taken a horrible hit this year. Viruses have made headlines week after week. Spam now exceeds 50 percent of all e-mail. Hackers and academics have uncovered one Windows security hole after another, turning Microsoft into a frantic little Dutch boy at the dike without enough fingers..."
Rogério and I started work this weekend on our reality bending project.
Do you believe? (Bad title but good overview of Victorian spirit photography at the American Museum of Photography.)
N. and I watched Bresson's 'Au Hasard, Balthazar' this evening. Wow. Senses of Cinema has many articles praising Bresson. I like this one: Destinies Making Themselves in a Work of Hands, by M. C. Zenner, as it comments extensively on Bresson's own notes and aphorisms collected in Bresson's 'Notes on the Cinematographer'.
If one considers theoretical physicist Julian Barbour's conception of the 'Now', the Tibetan conception of 'death - intermediate stage - rebirth' as a moment to moment activity doesn't sound so strange: "Each moments consciousness is said to be a product of the fading out re-arising of a previous moments consciousness. The present mind is thus a unit born from the death of the last moment's mind." (From Death and Dying: The Tibetan Tradition by Glenn H Mullin.)
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