some questions/thots/qoutes about bynum's wonderful blood

a) even in the idea of the effluvium miracles that are about the lack of containment (radical material shifts, icons pouring blood, chalices over flowing, furniture bleeding et. al) there seems to be a continual effort to contain or staunch the flow--either thru devices (i.e monstrances, etc); language (the ritual words of the eucharist, the highly symbolic/poetic language of the mystic, or the governmental language of the papacy (Leo's enyclical against it)
b) also, the collapsing of categories b/w flesh, the host, the blood, the relic, and that which is used to contain them, b/w the open monstrance and hte closed tabernacle, or the like meets like of the sacred relcis in shapes of hands, etc
c) the fail to contain it perhaps is a metaphor of the failure to properly heirchalise the church (Wycliffe and Hus' documents on the blood of christ; the blood miracles that occur under the auspices of abbesses, etc)
d) some of this relates to the rise of what is called the ocular devotion found in the 14th century--where seeing the elevated host was considered a kind of taking the host, or sufficent to eating the host; there is discussion of female mystics who though only seeing the host, feel satiated and report that they have literally tasted what they have seen without touching it--(obv?) connected to the holy fasting of these mystics
e)back to leo and other church fathers documents, in attempts to declare some miracles legit and some not, and to foreground transubstantion instead of cocommittal is a way of tightening power in the church--and could this tightening be connected to the new rules of celibacy
f) are women's bleeding and the discourse of blood libel that surounds the jews--the idea that women's uncontained bleeding makes the contained bleeding of the eucharist unholy and the idea of jews absconding with the host, disorder that which is ordered--and so stories of rot setting in, or the host liquifiying hte wrong hands, attach themselves to that feat of instability.

qoutes:

With elaborate puns and coneits, devotional writers packed much biblical and theological learning in to meditaiton on blood. Playing wiht the opposites "soft" and "hard", "stinking" and "sweet", "staining" and "cleansing", Richard Rolled for example prayed to rest "among the dead that lie stinking foully" yet are "softened in that sweet bath" that washes even while it "makes bloody my soul" . A well-known nineteenth-century manula of Cartusian devotions by Dom Cypien-Marie Bourtrais, compiled from late medevial material and often reprinted, provides many examples of fourteenth and fifteenth meditaitons on blood, living and shed.. (2)

(the idea that this discussion of blood, coming from puns, metaphors, conciets--abstracted language away from the physical substance, while talking about the physical substance, furthers the irony of containment...)

Collette of Corbie (d 1447) to whom Christ appeared as chopped meat on a platter, was warned that "the offenses people do against him, tear him into smaller peices than the flesh cut up on this plate" John Mirk, in his Festial for preachers, reported that a sick man who refused to confess cried out "I am damned" when Christ appeared, his wounds all read and cast a great handful of blood from his side into the sinners face" (4)


The eucharist has been much emphasized in recent study of the rleigion of the later Middle Ages--the eucharist as corprate symbol, as instrument of clerical "management" as reflection of the much touted "visuality" of late medevial culture. And it is, of course true, that Corpus Christi as feast and as holy object united and divided medeival society, expressed and constructed its corperate boundries, and defined Jews and heretics as outsiders...(10) (Talking about the Gregory Mass) In the 1473 version from ST Maria zur Weisen Soest, the Christ figure is less a painted panel than an animated gigure who has just alighted before the pope. The paten is empty; there is no host on the altar linen. Before an astonished Gregory, blood leaps from Christ's wounds into the chalice and thence not only from chalice to pope but also from chalice to graveyard, where the poor souls who recieve it appear to rise from the dead under its saving power. The checkered floor (delieverately executed in careful perspective) carries the viewer's eyes not to pope or chalice but to the side wound itself; yet the sharp lines of blood then pull away not from wound but even from chalice and toward the little angular figures in the churchyard. Our eyes move toward Chirst and then away, toward the osuls who need salvaiton. The movement is inwatd, then outward, the picture spinters to our right. Blood savbes, but it spills out in order to do so. Whereas host incorprates and binds within, blood has a more complec valence, tying souls to the body from which it exits in a gushing stream (11)

The wound or wounds of Christ are more frequently hymned as doorway or access, refuge and conslation, than as violation; to penetrate is to open the way. Depicitons of Christi's bleeding on the cross sometimes stress waves pouring forth but often focus visually on discrete red gobles or drops, the blood is always fresh in crucifxion scenes, but it is often bits dropping into chalices to feed and wash as it is torrents leaping onto the heads of sinners....the body parts of Christ and hte saints represented in devotional images and reliquaries are synechdoes for the whole person, indeed for the glorfied person. As Christ is present interger in ever particle of the eucharist and ever eucharistic celebraiton, so the saints are wholly present in every relic fragment.... (14)

sangus/curor

Hus--The Red Thing Does No Wonders.

Following Johnnes Von Dorsten, who wrote in the 1470s, Paltz argues that such miraces are useful to reporach the negligence of priests, to countrer infidelity, and ot excite recerence toward the Eucharist, which (says Paltz( is more doubted than other sacraments (41)

According to a 16th cenutry legend, a Jew who stole or acquired a host found his hands covered with blood and bured the holy object, ground into fragments, at a place of execution beneath a gallows. He later confessed and was himself broken on the wheel. Miracles and visions in whcih blood figured promiently induced the bishop of Havelberg, the margrave, the pastor at nearby PRitzwalk, and nuns from a neibrhoughing house...to establish a clositer on the wite where the miraculous host fragments had been found, bleeding and reassembled. (A very odd moment in the story is the invident of the peasent who supposedly tricked the Jew into confessing by dressing up as a priest)... ((59)

is this a way of narratizing men who do not have the orders, who work the eucharist regardless.

We do find indeed some hesitation before images and visions even among those visionaries, especially ubt not exclusively women, whose understanding of their own union with Christ was not only expressed in increasingly graphic and somatic langauge but also mannifested in bodily phenomena such as levitaiton, stigmata and mystical pregrancy (79)

Yet withdrawl o the cup only increased the people's sense of its power. Desire kept pace with--and circumvented--prhobition...some of the clositered, denied access to the cup at mass, recieved it in visiuon. Others (for example, Beatrice of Nazareth and Catherine of Seina) expereinced the proffered wafer as the withheld bood, gushing into their mouths or over their bodies. What the clergy deinded them, they simply obtained in another way. Miracles of blood erupting from wafers were thus not only illustrations of concomitance to teach those who mistakenly iissted on Christ's blood in the cup, they were also a means of immediate access to that blood. 95

questions

to look up
Hus Tract on Blood
Joahnnes Von Platz Supplementum Coelfodiae
mystical pregnancy
beatrice of nazareth

Eleven Things About Whitney’s “I Believe In You and Me” (written for the Singles Jukebox)

1. This is a song that comes from text that had an explicit church context, and so the song and the film collapsed the preacher and the husband in fairly conventional ways.

2. This being between the lover and the Lord is very much part of Whitney’s inheritance — there was Dionne Warwick on one side, Cissy Houston on the other, and Aretha pushing up through the middle.

3. The interesting thing about this tension is that it is very rare that Whitney ever gave us full church — but it was not a rejection of the church, or an attempt to make secular through sex and longing the incorporation found in traditional black churches.

4. Houston’s best work is not the rejection of the church, it was an almost refusal of incorporation itself.

5. Her voice is perfect. Her body is perfect. Recall that famous Oprah interview where she suggests “the hair, the gowns, the performance” got in the way of an authentic voice — and what is assumed is that the voice would have the sweat of Sunday morning or Saturday night — and in her best performances Whitney doesn’t sweat. Oprah, in her continual claim for an authenticity that might or might not exist, refused to acknowledge the hermetic seeking of perfection is as good as those two sweat boxes.

6. She brings in melodrama, and there are stories about the filming of the Preacher’s Wife: of Denzel being angry, about showing up past 3pm for 8am calls, of her not knowing her lines, of calling in Cissy to talk sense into her. For all of this mess, that was perhaps the first indication that we had that there was a pre-cocaine and a post-cocaine Whitney — that her stainless steel voice could tarnish.

7. You cannot see the trauma of the performance in the mediocre movie — a rehash of something that might have been too sentimental in the 70s, but even in this. For a song about crisis, longing, needing—it has the simulacrum of longing, but the scratch or hunger of it.

8. One of my favorite things in Christian pop music, is where you are trying to figure out if they are talking about Jesus or lover, or constructing Jesus as lover inadvertently. This is not a Jesus-as-boyfriend song; for a song in a movie called Preacher’s Wife, one would actually expect it to be more about Jesus.

9. What is it about? It is not really about the boyfriend either; though from the breathy first moments, and the call for eternal devotion, can it be anything but a boyfriend song? She even talks about love!

10. The song is about Whitney’s singing, the song is a perfect showcase for everything that she can do with her voice” with the sheen, with the perfection of tone, with something more than Jesus or a lover. How the whole song opens into pure blue when she sings sea; or the Cathedral swoops when she sings “miracle” or “dream” or even “believe.” The tightness of the first chords, and then how that tightness explodes, further, wider, but never wild, and almost robotic.

11. There are genuine Jesus songs that she has done, even songs on this soundtrack; and there is the odd song that sounds like she might have gotten laid — though nothing as wonderfully, filthy as the sex she hinted she was having with Bobby — but the best thing about Whitney was the marshaling of full and uncanny gifts to give operatic power to statements that were mostly clichéd — that the marshaling resulted in high art and low kitsch, but did not result in Christian idolatry was perhaps her unique gift (or maybe not unique — but it meant that she shared more with Grace Jones and Donna Summer than she shared with her mother and aunt).

p2100156.jpg

p2100156.jpg, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Thomas, and Alfred Soto and popmatters http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/154220-the-top-15-madonna-singles-of-all-time/P1">put together lists of the best madonna songs

here is my top 20

20 American Pie- American life was mostly a weird concept album, marked by anxiety about her status, and concerns about her status as a performer, but the queer sadness of her version of this had a slippery profoundity.
19 Rainbow Tour--because her singing the line Christian Dior me, had a winking camp nod, against all of the pomp of Evita's vanity.
18 Breathless--Because it was done by Sondheim, and she understood the theatricality of what that implied.
17 Deeper and Deeper Dance as Sex, as Religion, and as Fame--with the Warhol aping video, and the half sheen groove,
16 Frozen Yeah, she was in the middle of a religious phase, but it is odd that she sounds so autobiographical, and on the edge of losing control. and just beautiful.
15 Cherish As sweet as she has ever been, and just this side of cute, given extra gravitas for it's doo wop heritage, and it's cribbing from the Assocation.
14 Papa Don't Preach Mostly for the autonomy
13 Into The Groove I like the studio as instrument in this one--the overdubs, the double tracking, sort of proto-autotune in its elegant artifice.
12 What it Feels Like for a Girl The closest she ever got to a country ballad, and something I want Gillian Welch to cover, windswept, loveley, and heart breaking.
11 Justify My Love Because it's hot and sexy and dykey and it reminds you of a time in the 90s when Judith Butler got you laid.
10 This Used to be my Playground The song about lost innoncence and childhood yearning that Michael Jackson tried to sing for a decade--the video is the first time i remember being transfixed by MTV (or the Canadian Equivalent)
9 Material Girl For the sung/spoken chorus
8 Like a Prayer---Holy. impure but holy
7 Die Another Day I love how it marshalled it's ambition, how it took over what it meant to be a bond song, and i love it's abstractions. Vastly under rated.
6 Dress You Up That typical 80s drum beat
5 Lucky Star Perhaps her best pure pop, 3 minutes, in and yr out, pop song. As good as anything by the Beatles.
4 Vogue The politics are complicated--but I think Madonna as a taste maker, and as a bricoluer are vastly under rated--this is amazing because of the vocals, because of the coldness of it, because of it's cleverness, and it's theatricality--sort of proves Madonna as both democratization and evangelical of queer art.
3 Hung Up Abba as history. Pop as a game of signifers. Fantastic video.
2 Holiday You are singing the chorus right now, admit it.
1 Le Isla Bonita Because it is so slight, so slippery, it might as well float away, and it almost does--transient in the best way.

the thing about the good years re:the depression, is not that it is less severe, but that the wet grey flannel of overwhelming sadness is replaced with a kind of omnipresent weight of panic and anxiety.

If you're a Marxist-Leninist, you must be an atheist. That means you must say that, "God does not exist." I used to tell them, "Ok, I can say it. No problem. But my people?" *laughs* Not in this generation. Maybe the next one, but not in this one. For them God and revolution, religion and revolution are one and the same. [...] Nat Turner was a righteous preacher. [...] Malcolm X was a rigtehous Muslim preacher. Martin Luther King was a righteous Christian preacher. Jesse Jackson is a preacher. Minister Louis Farrakhan is a preacher. So if you look very properly, you'll see for us Africans, religion and revolution has never had this dialectical break. [...]

I'll give you one example. Once in Greenville, Mississipi. When I was doing a program there, of protest against the police. We had to fill the jails, but there were young kids and the discipline was breaking down. So I had to go into the jail to establish discipline. So I picked some cadre to go with me just to go to jail and made two lines to confuse the police.

I looked up on the line and I hand picked and I see an old woman on the end of it.

I run back there, I said, "Ma'am, you're in the wrong line." I said, "this line is getting arrested."
She said, "I know, that's what they told me."
I said, "You ain't going to jail."
She said, "Yes I am."
I said, "They're brutal in there!"
She said, "I know, they brutalized my daughter, brutalized my granddaughter, now I must go."
I said, "They don't respect age nor sex."
She said, "I know." She said, "You worried about me son?"
I said, "Ma'am, I'm very worried about you up in there."
"Don't you worry son, I got a telephone in my bosom. Soon as they touch me, I'mma call Jesus. He gonna take care of me."

*laughs* What am I going to do with that? *laughs* Tell her take the telephone out her bosom?

Kwame Ture

Eric Church's "Homeboy" made me feel uncomfortable the first time I heard it, because I could not quite figure out the racial politics, I was worried that Church was asking for the kid not to be black. I think that he is asking him not to be a thug, not to be taken in with a media constructed African-American identity that it is problematic for white kids to adopt. I was also worried that it underestimated how dull, oppressive, and frustrating small-town life is for people who are a little more ambitious — but that may be me being from a small town, and not being able to make it there. After I got over all that, it dawned on me how well-constructed the song was — the three small anecdotes over a lifetime does not forecast the last verse, and the last verse will break your heart. It's a smart song, and one that reflects issues of family, class and location that country has been wrestling with this year. —Anthony Easton

one print comment

p1260332.jpg

p1260332.jpg, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Mitt Romney will NOT REST until you eat a pastry. Here’s an excerpt of a Phil Rucker’s pool report from a flight between Charleston and Greenville Friday:

Before take off, Mitt Romney walked down the aisle with a large box of assorted pastries from Panera Bread to pass out to the passengers (including the governors and press).
What follows is a transcript of his exchanges.
“Come on, Kasie, dig in,” Romney said to Kasie Hunt of the Associated Press. “Pain au chocolat. Smart move.”
“Ashley?” Romney said to Ashley Parker of The New York Times.
“Can you just grab me something?” Parker asked, turning to her seatmate, Kasie Hunt, who was holding the tongs poised over the basket.
“What do you want though?” Romney asked.
“Um…” Parker said. “The popover thing?”
“The popovers?” Romney asked.
“Thank you very much,” Parker said.
“Sticky bun?” Romney asked other reporters. “There you go.”
“Snack time! Nothing? Just, you know, use your fingers,” Romney said, struggling with the big box. “The heck with this. There you go.”
“Come on, Emily, dig in here,” Romney said to Emily Friedman of ABC News. “Fingers are fine. We’re among friends.”
“Sarah, you want one? What do you want?” Romney said to Sarah Boxer of CBS News.
“I don’t know,” Boxer said. “What’s in there?”
“We’re gonna solve problem one here by getting rid of these ridiculous things here,” Romney said, handing two pairs of black plastic tongs to the flight attendant behind him.
“Rucker, come on Rucker,” Romney said to Philip Rucker of The Washington Post. “Oh, he makes a good move for the cheese. Take two.”
“No, no, no,” Rucker said.
“Look it, there’s so much in here,” Romney said. “Come in, take more. No, take more than one. Take two, take two, Ruck-man. Come on.”
“Where’d you get it?” Matt Viser of The Boston Globe asked Romney, referring to the pastries box.
“We found it on the floor up there,” Romney said.
“Do you want another one?” Romney asked Sara Murray of The Wall Street Journal.
“No, I’m good, but thank you,” Murray said.
“Who wants some more of these?” Romney said. “Look at this. This is good stuff. This is from Panera. Very high-end.”
“Pain au chocolat in there,” Romney continued. “Look at the sticky buns. Those are the best.”
“Hey, Rucker, there’s still some more of those cheese cake babies in here,” Romney continued. “No? You only had one of these. Come on, Ashley.”
“Alright,” Romney said. “We’ve got to get seated.”

“Look at the sticky buns. Those are the best”—amazing

Holly Bailey, for Yahoo News.
It always makes me really nervous when the press is this close to these folks.

fantastic little article on the cree/objiway hockey tour, in nothern ontario in the 40s and 50s .

i want all of these cruise or be cruised t shirts, including ones based on Jean Rechy's the Sexual Outlaw, Larry Kramer's Faggots and amusingly, one wiht Nancy saying there is nothing left to be post modernized.

88 photos of Ottawa Punk from the 80s.

10 Pan Am posters from 1971. If anyone bought me the Eastern Europe one, I wouldnt be upset.

11 foot long heavily decorotive photo/digital print of dinasours being destroyed, sort of inspired by japanaese narrative scrolls, michal lidberg.


Witchita Lineman, last week in New York, Glenn Campbell is better than I thot.

the problems of sexual shame, adolesence, and lds bishop interviews, a first person account.

four photos of Jellyfish by Alexander Semenov.

some serious lawsuits are coming for Gaogosian selling work that is not his, with extra ripping off old lady content.

subprime lenders purposefully targeted low income african american communities.


Etta James does RAndy Newman--as much as i love At Last, there is danger to her being caught in amber, her later work, corrosive, sexy, difficult, and often intensely powerful, suggests a set of emotions long past erotic longing.

a google map of warren jeffs revelations.

full text of American Type Specimen, 1912.

Disneyland Monorail Guide, ca 1966

When Chinese New Year and Robbie Burns Day happen at the same time, there is this magical thing called Gun Haggis Fan Chuy--or Lion Dance With Bag Pipes



Soviet Scrapbook from the 70s found in a Tajikstan junkshop.

BPRD training camp for kids, in Portland--how come kids these days get all the cool stuff.

in a seires called Mikenesses, Mike Holmes illustrates self portraits in famous comic book styles, including Herge, Chris Ware, Ed Burns, Charles Schultz, Quinetin blake and Jack Kirby.

On Imitation of Life: “I love to what Sirk did with the myth of the natural woman…and the image of Hollywood as a completely vacuous and dangerous machine. He shows the raw edges of race and class privilege and pretension, but he understood that no matter how cynical and revelatory he meant his films to be, they were always taken as straightforward, as just what the characters are enacting. The Left reviles that film, but I’m always saying to them, ‘Watch the movie!’”

Martha Rosler Imitation of Life

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2012/01/oscar-nominations-are-here.html

thots

a) when does the oscars not love a sentimental peiceo f disaster porn
b) i was amused that both close and streep were nominated, middle aged cat fight
c) mellissa mccarthy yeah!
d) the artist wll win best picture
e) best movie of the year for me (margin call) did not get acting, directing, cinematogrpahy or costume nods (though it deserved all of them), but it did get a writing nod
f) i haven't even heeard of two of the best animated nods
g) my continual frustration at best costume being just a historic note, continues unabated (bridesmaid, girl with a dragon tattoo, margin call, the skin i live in,
h) it is really bizarre that only two songs were nominated for original music
i) michelle william's better role was missed because of holywoods pure narcissim
j) it was a great year for documentaries (tabloid, page one, cave of forgotten dreams, bill cunningham's new york, all were left out, which is kind of frustrating)
k) i thot that the skin i live in or uncle bommee would be nominated for best foriegn)
l) i am sort of suprised nothing came from young adult

Maggie was ordained today, and for many reasons i was glad (because she's smart, and funny, she works hard, she has an innate sense of justice, because she fosters community, because she is a writer, because she knows simone weil, because of her arrest record, because she knows and perhaps is strange)

but the thing that impressed me the most in the service, and a service i was v. late for, was the use of this poem

John Donne

HOLY SONNETS. VII. At the round earth's imagined corners blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ; All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe. But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ; For, if above all these my sins abound, 'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace, When we are there. Here on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent, for that's as good As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

2nd year in the row of no pazz and jop comments

The highly sensory nature of (traumatic) memories and the absence of verbal narrative makes them similar to the memories of young children. Yet unlike normal memories from early childhood, traumatic memories (and the associated phenomenon of traumatic dreams) are experienced as involuntary, having a phenomenon of traumatic dreams) are experienced as involuntary, having a "driven, tenacious quality" and a repetitive dimension. Current research suggests in situations of hyper-arousal, particularity those for which the subject is unable to prepare, memory is encoded in a different, more viscerally experiential manner than normal. These bodily memories are not assimilated to consciousness and thus impinge on it in uncontrollable and intrusive ways. The best availble treatment for such memories seems to be narrativisaztion, through which bodily memories are relived and reordered in meaningful narrative forms. (76)

qouting Simone De Bouiver:

"I was more and more persudaded that there was no place in the profane world for the supernatural life. And yet, it was the later alone that counted: it alone. I suddenly received certainty, one morning, that a Christian convinced of a future beatitude, should not attach the least importance t oephermal things. how could hte majority of people accept to remain in the presnet world? The more I reflected, the more I was astonished, I concluded that, in any case, I would not imitate them: between the infite and hte finiste my choices were made: "I will enter a convent". I decided. The acitivites of the sisters of charity seemed to me to be entirely futile; there was no other reasonable occupation than to contemplate to the end of my days the glory of God. I would be a Carmilete, Memoirs of a Jeune Fille, 103-4)


for Beuvoir, Teresa's angency is expressed through her active and self concious sexual response to and desire for her lover, who is God. Beuvoir claims admiraiton for the intenseity of Teresa's faith, in which the absent object is mare present on the body. Unlike the hysteric, Tersa is "not hte slave of her nerves and her hormones: it is necessary, rather, to admire in her the intensity of a fatih that penetrates to the most intimate reions of her flesh" (DS II, 587; Second SEx, 747)
Unlike hte hysteric whose flesh is passively inscribed by her disorder, Tersa writes the body in the intensity of her mystical expereince. Yet despite her admiration for Teresa's faith, Beavoir insists that the value of mystical expereince lies not in the pleasure which which it is subjectively expereinced, but in the object influence it allows its subject to weirld. Beuvoir insists that in the absence of criteria for determeing the authenticity of mystical expereince (she will go futher and claim that mystical expereince cannot be genuine as there is no God, its value likes in its outcome. (129)

...The desire for (divinie wholeness plenititude and the exstantic anguish of hte realizaiton that one cannot be everything stand side by side in Angelas text. Bataille suggests, futhermore that these two conceptions of mysticiism can be found togehter throughout the Christian tradition. This possiblity leads ot the second, more difficult and more pressing formulation of our cquesiton. Why do these semmingly antitheticial expereinces so often emerge in such close proximity to each other. Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore suggests an answer to this quesiton. He describes two tendecnies in language; the first attempts to fix meaning by positing a transcedenal signifier. Understood to be seamlessly united with its singified the transcental signifier assures the stability of language. Yet there is another movement in langauge away from th estability of meaning; for Lcan argues that the transcendtal signifer is always, in fact, empty; its putative wholeness and fixity is an illusion that pyschoanalysis aims to expose. the very site meant to fix meaing becomes the place where it is destabilzed. He argues, even more pointedly, that significaiton--marked by the transcendtal signifer--becomes possible only because of this constituive instability. Hence mysticism, as a quest for the absoulate, for which would ensure meaning, stability, and being, encounters instead that which radicially destabilises subjectivty and meaning---mysticism seeks the tra nscental signifer but discovers the paradoxical interplay of presence and absence through which significaiton is mafe possible. Excstacay occurs in both moments (what Lacan refers to as phallic jouissance and the jousisance that goes beyond) and as he argues in the seminary, if this does not quite make for two Gods, nor does it make for one alone" (149)

The doubless not God is the source of the doubleness of mystiricsim. The split subject sesires an other through which it might become whole, and it conflates that desire wit hthe very operaiton of language through which subjects are constutited as split and other than themselves. Mysticism and pyschoanlaysis after an absoulate other through which it might be fufilled. Yet this unstintiny quest for the abouslate exposes the subjects own lack and the always absent and unattaniable other throug hwhcih it is brought into existeince. Christians, like the pyschoanalysis, Lacan argues, "are horroried by what was revealed to them"; thus the suffering soul exposed by baroque excesses always attempts to cover over its theft of being and the lack from which its ecstatic anguish emerges (Exrits, 103, Seminar Xx, 114) . In the same way, the pretenstions of pyschoanalysis to sciefitic status are both an ineluctable movement toward oneness and fixed meaning and an evasion of hte real. (164)

To avoid the confusion and rancor that have surrounded the debates around essential-ism and to increase the precision of the discussions about Irigaray, the issue might usefully be recast in terms of sexual difference. Thus many feminist theories agree that those identified as "women" within a given culture can be and in fact routinely are differentiated form those defined as "men" (although it is not at all clear, cross-culturally, that these are the only options.) However, how femininity and masculinity are inculcated and lived is not only historically variable, but also intertwined with other differences, salient within any particular culture. In the contemporary United States, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class are particularly conspicuous and powerful features of subjectivity... (191)

The passages mimed by Irigray concern the expereince sculpted by Bernini, ones thus judged amenable to representation (and, no doubt, attractive ot male viewers), Like Lacan, Irigaray intensfies the moment's visual and visionary quality, and so explodes it, for that which Irigaray names cannot be seen in the baroque excesses of Beriniini's statue. By reasserting the violence of Teresa's expereince, and by emphasizing the site of the transverberaiton as the viscera (stomach or womb) rather than the heart (Teresa describes the arrow as pericing the heart so deeply it reaches into her entrails and pulls them out, Irigary upsets the excesses to the improper entrails of the saint. Teresa's insides literally create her interority as other than and unrepresentable (by man) (202)

Let us pray to god, so that we can be free of God. Miester Eckhart

monks table

cobb salad and 4 ciders.

rachel, erik, tom, dan, wendy, jim, ray, colleen, john, me.

vintage nasa photos

one of the ideas that is sort of central to post modernism, is the idea that the embodied self (and by extension the end of medivialism and the beginning of enlightenment) begins with the dissection of human subjects---medieval folks didn't dissect human beings. Katherine Polk's new book makes a solid arguement that they did, and because they did, our idea of history has changed.

leroy gannis's candids are better maybe than his typical surf shots, i love the one of the three guys, one in glasses, and a broken board.


Bollywood style Havila Nagila.

i need to see tree of life again though it will lose some of it's magic being on the small screen--this anceient essay by alex ross on it's music is one of the reasons why i want to

boing boing used my photo.


jinx monsoon does the drag version of ladies who lunch, and it is exquisite!


great interview with van dyke parkes on the occasion of his new singles colleciton, and the reissue of arrangements.

Ville Hara's modular garden units, in four parts, sold in helesinki.

this sloane crosley essay on xmas in the suburbs has all of the boredom and ennui i remember but little of the isolation. funny though .


Ganymede in Space, 1959.

photos of 80s SF con. (i miss this ersatz home made look)

at the aga today, saw a show on 19th century french fotos, mostly good but one perfect atget, of a rigious 18th century garden, empty of people, perfect conincal conifers--like something out of marienbad.

eleven goals for 2011

1) maintain a 3.4 or higher GPA, with help from tutors, etc.

yep.

2) continue with autitiscats, including finding places, dont let dave deal w all the email)

didn;t happen, though i worked really hard on it, sometimes things die when they are ready to

3) work harder on keeping money until the end of the month (including but not limited to eating out much less) (also, keep the credit card down)

got one credit card paid off, the next one is paid off regulalry, eat out much less, money is still a problem.

4) keep curating, making art, showing art and the like, plus writing (find funding for alaska, find a place for the gull lake project, apply to the residency in syracuse, research other grants and funding locations esp for travel), email st george the martyr, also set up website.

working through these still, had three or four shows, applied for three others.

5) research and start writing the western book, pitch one review or other peice a week.work on the essay for may for the integrity grant, start and keep working on a tumblor project like the 100/100.

tumblr failed, still working on research for the western book, pitching semi-regullary, though not once a week.

6) do at least two peices of major liturgical work (via negativa and pride liturgy, the forum,etc)

i preached three or four times this year, which most likely counts some what.

7) read prayerfully the psalms and think heavily about the nature of my faith

thought about the nature of my faith, though it mostly centered on realising reading the psalms were not part of it.

8) find some fun cardio heavy class once a week so you can get out of the house. (dodgeball, dancing?)

david r and are are going to play basketball in the new year.

9) muck out the old storage locker. yep

10) keep closer notes on which films i have seen this year.
yep.

11) one date a month
well, iain, counts no?

2012 goals:

a) finish thesis
b) find place to stay/granting/etc post may.
c) finish grad school apps for concordia, union, harvard, berkley
d) work on publications for disability, kurt, rachel
e) finish the frog piece
f) pitch tormorden mills peice
g) figure out alaska
h) boston conference
i) pay mom back.
j) pysch stuff
k) tooth stuff