I remember when Jacques Derrida died. I didn’t particularly mourn his passing. I resented the fact that I’d only drilled down on the post-modern claptrap after it was passe and had been replaced by corporate surrealism, it’s logical extension. This ill-marked passage in intellectual history happened I think in the early eighties, when the global corporate culture was locking down nationalism once and for all.

Today I was reminded of old Jake by a post at wood s lot. It was a David Wills translation of Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” including a cute French pun (having nothing to do with seasickness actually, but very much like that): he wanted to substitute a singular word “animot” for the plural “animaux” as well as the singular “l’animal.” Reading of this failure to grasp the thing itself, the animals, the philosopher’s failure to apprehend, to comprehend, and to accurately reflect the physical world and the wonderful various language of animals I flashed on the root cause. I flashed on what must have been true and will be well worth further examination. It seemed to me that Derrida, for all the difference he wanted to make, must have been locked in conflict with the keepers of the mother tongue, l’Academie française. I’m sure this is old hat to the pomo crowd, but it gave me a deeper understanding of perhaps why such intensity attaches to his work.

[gresham’s law of philosophy… or, whatever happened to the marxist disquisition?]

Ron Silliman turned sixty today. Not long after I came to San Francisco “to stay,” Steve Gaskin and his disciples folded up the Monday night class and took off like locusts eating their way through communities across the country before arriving in Tennessee to put down roots at the Farm. or maybe they left before I got there.

I have the same relationship with Ron Silliman

20. Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all. Would this definition satisfy
Duncan?
21. Poem in a notebook, manuscript, magazine, book, reprinted in an anthology.
Scripts and contexts differ. How could it be the same poem?
22. The page intended to score speech. What an elaborate fiction that seems!
– from The Chinese Notebook

Happy birthday, youngster.

(and thanks to Madame Levy for the hippage)

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the Lark at break of day arising)
From sullen earth sings hymns at Heaven’s gate,
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.

— William Shakespeare, 1690

RB never fails to crack me up.  Read the latest here…

At the recent BloCon in SF, Lisa Stone mentioned her commitment to entrepreneurialism, which is French for “between or before aneurysms.” What hooked me in her rap was a reminiscence regarding Halley Suitt’s 10 new voices thing last year. I thought about that… the upside was we pumped a moment of diversity into the white male voice-o-sphere. I don’t know if there was a downside. But I thought about Paul Newman as “Cool Hand Luke,” and his boast: “I could eat fifty eggs.”

Me, I could find fifty links… fifty new sites, new voices, new shows. And when I’m done I’m betting at least half of them will be the work of females, and a large percentage will be the work of people who aren’t white… (Q: What did the Minnesota guy say to the Pillsbury Doughboy? A: Nice tan. — Joke by Willie Nelson in the Tao of Willie compliments of Chris Locke who found it at Audible.) I’ll be leavening the mix with white guys too I imagine. No promises there. Just fifty voices new to me, at least half women, and a week to do it… that’s the game.

Ten was easy. Ten was bullshit. Try fifty. Go big or stay home. I’ll have fifty links coming at you over the next week. You can tell me if they’re diverse, perverse, or just plain liverwurst.

BMO can probably do this in under an hour.

In praise of panel discussions… Sovereign Whores and Seditious Technology

“It’s in the interest of the city of Hamburg to make sure that its sex workers are protected.” … heels are incapacitating … but wait … there’s a fundamental power associated with height … spike heels are a tool of gender equity a tool of power … get Manolo on the phone right now!

Aside:  Massive multiplayer art work?

Thanks this morning to ArtFagCity without which, etc…

… I think is really great about the Eyebeam model is that they chose different reblogger every two weeks, thus ensuring a greater range of web surfing. Rhizome takes the superuser model (in other words they have staff rebloggers as opposed to rotating in guest rebloggers), which works well for them since their “superusers” actually live up to their titles, but no matter how good a reblogger is, you can become accustomed to their style and anticipate what they will post. In theory, the Eyebeam set up eliminates this problem, but they have been using the human tech-bot web surfer for some time now, so a little investigation into some new curatorial vision…

Aside:  Massive multiplayer networked music performance?

“Mass production is the lingua franca that tests the legibility of an idea… this project does have the social probe… the manufacturing pragmatics of shoe technology… we’ve seen a lot of tech introduced into shoes to service athletes and the military…” So hookers make sense, particularly in the area of stiletto heels, aren’t they just as deserving?

“It does test intimacy to share shoes…”

Aside:  Props to Purse Lips Square Jaw for sending me down this road via the rebloggers this morning…

“…with boots you could do so much.”

These are no ordinary shoes.

A compass and flashlight dangle from one shoelace. The pocket in the tongue is for money or pain relievers. A rough map of the border region is printed on a removable insole.

They are red, white and green, the colors of the Mexican flag. On the back ankle, a drawing of Mexico’s patron saint of migrants.

On this side of the border, the shoes sit in art collections or the closets of well-heeled sneaker connoisseurs. On the other side, in Tijuana, it’s a utilitarian affair: Immigrants-to-be are happy to have the sturdy, lightweight shoes for the hike - or dash - into the United States.

Their designer is Judi Werthein, an Argentine artist who moved to New York in 1997 - legally, she notes.

Finally, Reblogging Reeboks…

[This post is continued from here, where-in I kvetch and kvell about all kinds of things, and reveal myself to be a grumpy old grouch].
I visited the Meetinghouse and found the pamphlet I needed to prepare for the committee meeting Monday night. The pamphlet, a structured discussion of Quaker marriage has a lot to recommend it in terms of its elaboration of issues faced by Friends in matters matrimonial since the 17th century. My initial grumpiness centered, I think, on the fact that we support wedding commited couples and it seemed like this was the one step back in the progress two-step, because…

I’ve worked with clearness committees for marriage for heterosexual couples and we didn’t ground ourselves with this reading, or with any other, but rather relied on a traditional practice that drew on the combined experience of members of the committee and the couple. By pulling out this tract, are we creating a distinction that we would rather erase from our consciousness? I am afraid we are doing that.

Each of us has been wounded in some way. We have tender spots that we hope our friends and family will soothe and help us to heal. Some of us have been so cruelly branded by discriminatory practices that the wounds are a chronic condition. Others have scar tissue that shields them from the pain of continued social abrasion. And so, as we move forward to solemnize and to celebrate the marriage of Barb and Amy, we owe them and ourselves the consideration of issues they may face as a married couple of the same gender in 2024. But the pamphlet was written in 1993 and Friends in America had celebrated same-sex marriage for at least ten years before the pamphlet was written, so we are reaching a point that we have reached with other invidiously discriminatory practices in society at large - namely, this stuff is starting to get old. We recognize the dehumanized condition of many who discriminate against those who differ in our larger community, but here in our meeting community we must simply offer love and nurturance and ask, “How can we help thee, friend?”

The pamphlet offers a lot in terms of generalizable concerns for married couples. Where it strays from sound practice is in its assumption of difference in matters of law for these friends. Quakers have ever been faced with matters of conscience, and there are Friends who pay no war taxes, who refuse military service, who practice civil disobedience of any law they find noxious. So “gay marriage” will always, I believe, be an option in Friends meetings regardless of any repressive legislation. But happy marriage, a loving couple, well knit and supported by the meeting is not a sure thing. And this pamphlet, regardless of the cloying comparisons of John Calvi and Marshall Brewer with Margaret Fell and George Fox, offers a fundamental understanding of issues that marrying couples should consider:

1. Do you think you will be good partners? Can you compromise out of respect for the other? Can you articulate your feelings? Do you know your own strengths and weaknesses? What do you do to have fun together?
2. How do you deal with conflict?
3. Do you plan to have children?
4. What are your expectations of marriage? What are your understandings of the nature of the spirtual and corporate nature of a Quaker marriage?
5. What do you think about traditional roles and role separation between wage earning and homemaking?
6. Have you addressed the practical legal matters such as wills that will bind your relationship contractually? Are you free of of other binding relationships?
7. How will you finance your marriage?
8. How do you feel about your soon to be extended family? Do you enjoy each other’s family and friends? Can you have personal relationships that do not include your partner?
9. Are you willing to give the time, patience and openness to a good sexual relationship? How do you feel about sexual and emotional fidelity?
10. Are you aware that the marriage relationship needs constant care and nurture to insure good growth? Are you willing to recommit yourself, day by day, year by year, to try again in spite of difficulties, to recoginize, accept, love and delight in each other’s individuality?

Two years ago I finished a two year stint as Clerk of my Monthly Quaker Meeting. We’re a large meeting in a university town and among our members there is a wide range of beliefs. There are Catholics who attend our meeting because of the peace and community they find here, Jews, Buddhists, fallen Lutherans like myself… there are lots of different backgrounds represented. We have among us so-called “birthright” Quakers and “Quakers by convincement.” I belong in the latter group. We are largely descended from European white people. Only a handful of those of Asian or African descent can be found among us, and no indigenous people to my knowledge.

Our meeting has been described as a “mystical universalist” gathering, and when they named me Clerk, I’m not sure they knew that they were handing over the key to the meetinghouse to a foul-mouthed atheist. But the inner light shines out from everyone through a variety of filters, each unique, if shaded by particular belief structures and other trappings of the mind. I am grateful to be among friends, people who gather in mindful contemplation of truth and love seeking only clarity and goodness and light.

Now I have the opportunity to serve on a clearness committee for marriage. I’ve been asked to review the Pendle Hill pamphlet on marriage clearness committees and it doesn’t seem to be online.

[…and later] Oh boy. It’s getting deeper. After an exhaustive search, I find that there is only one Pendle Hill pamphlet that seems to be relevant… number 308.

Am I just grumpy, or would it have been a reasonable expectation for the person who is convening Barb and Amy’s clearness committee to have given us a clue that she isn’t asking us to read some generic pamphlet about clearness committees for marriage, but rather Marriage - A Spiritual Leading for Lesbian, Gay and Straight Couples?

Indeed, I am led to further inquire regarding the title of this pamphlet… what kind of a benighted bow to correctness was required to include “Straight Couples” in this title? Well, you can’t judge a book by it’s title, I guess, so i’ll have to read it and see if my judgmentalism is supported. But, simply to summarize…

• The convenor of this committee requested that I read the Pendle Hill pamphlet on marriage. There were dozens of appropriate ways that she could have led me toward the pamphlet in question. If “lesbian,” “gay,” “queer,” or “homosexual” were words too freighted for her to utter, perhaps she could have delicately pointed toward the pamphlet that addresses “same gender” marriage.

• My reaction may be over the top, but I started this morning as a seeker regarding the marriage clearness process. Researching that process, I’ve found precious little on-line to support the work of a committee. The pamphlet I’ve been pointed toward will be in the Meetinghouse Library, I think. I wish it was online. The assumption that I would know that there is a pamphlet reflecting on the pair bonding through marriage of same gendered couples and that specifically this would be the pamphlet I should be looking for is a matter of concern to me.

The Quaker clearness process is an opportunity to shine light on a matter of concern. A couple’s commitment to marry is a huge concern for the couple, of course. Preparing them and the meeting for that marriage, putting the marriage under our care, is I think what the clearness committee is about. Sitting together in silent worship, meditating, then inquiring, asking questions of each other and answering, sharing the warmth of community, finding a balance between the informal friendship we share and the sober responsibility sharing promises and intentions has got to be what this is about. What are some of the questions other clearness committees have found rewarding? How have committees introduced the couple to the community and assured a continuing nurturance that makes meaningful the phrase “married under the care of the meeting?” Will I find answers to these questions and others in the pamphlet?

I’m off to the Meetinghouse Library to see if i can find it.

[Update - I did find the pamphlet, and I read and I reflect further in this post.]

Pixels tidily cast in lucite, pages served from somewhere deep in the bat-cave, Suck (”a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”), the once mighty webPub and meme-machine-’zine emerged this morning through clickage associated with a hunt for David Foster Wallace. Nick Maniatis’ Howling Fantods, an extended DFW bibliography, has the top Google rank for David Foster Wallace 2024, but just guess which little blog o’ mine stands second behind it.

When you drop the “2006″ qualifier, Listics falls to number 19 in the race for fame through critical appreciation or just mean spirited criticism of the Infinite Jester, a placement well above - I competitively must add - the notorious Languagehat who nitpicks DFW to death in a lengthy diatribe here. (Notice: any satiric intent inferred or imputed to any content on the Listics blog should consider first the profound and more recent influence of TOM Swift, and only then the marginally interesting stylings of the DEAN.)

Languagehat’s essay calls for a response, and respond I may. I have tucked away a draft post titled “The Reconstruction of David Foster Wallace.” I’ll work on that after I have finished my current, more critical blog-in-prog: “Soylent Diesel; an examination of alternatives for resolving the emergent petrochemical problem.”