t seems impossible for the Kierkegaard of Works of Love to imagine a world where the erotic or the aesthetic can provide any sense of cohesion whatsoever. He argues that only the love of God can abide, and that any attempt to find comfort in the work of a divine where love does not abide, is false—ethically and morally false, but also inaccurate—there is no veracity in it, so when he writes: “That love abides, or more correctly, whether it actually abides in this and that case or whether it cease, is something that occupies people’s thoughts in very many ways, is often the subject of their conversation, and is most often the principal content of all poet’s tales. That love abides is then represented as praiseworthy, but as disgraceful that it does not abide, that it ceases, that it changes. Only the first is love; the second proves by the change not to be love—and therefore not to have been love either.” (303).
There are a number of problems with this, a number of roadblocks—some more complicated than others. There is the question of ablation of self; of how to properly ablate and how to know if the ablation of self occurs—but also the idea that in the midst of sexual love, even in the moment of bodies interacting, together, this becomes a kind of ablation of self. The self leaves and enters into the body of the lover—just as the moment of rapture that occurs when the sublimity of an aesthetic experience forces one out of the moment—that sublimity—of the sound, or the sight, or touch, by being grounded in the body, separates the body from the time and place that it is living. Kierkegaard seems to think that the erotic and the aesthetic are selfish, that they force the physical appetites outside of a search for the divine, but there is potential in the body, and it’s recognition of its own ablation through instead of against sensual pleasure.
If this is true---if the temporal and the sensual can successfully ablate the self—if the daily pleasures can allow us to evade the suffering of the world—then Kierkegaard’s supposition that “Yet even if we wanted to forget actuality, forget how the world is, and poetically transfer the whole relation into the realm of the imagination, it lies in the very nature of the matter that in the relation between human beings unselfishness is required for truthfully praising love” (371) seems to be missing the point. The eternal, becomes a mystery that cannot be solved, or at least solved through suffering, does not allow us to live in the world, does not give us a proper or effective framework for handling suffering.
Acknowledging that Kierkegaard is correct—that the eternal cannot be known, and that the world is filled with suffering—and that even aesthetic/sexual pleasure is temporary and unstable, the reader wonders if opposite conclusions can be reached. In the lover’s bed, or in the concert hall, or in the museum, a brief moment of transcendence, against the pains of the world, as a way to alleviate suffering, becomes a way of recognizing the inaccessibility of the eternal. In this sense, instead of seeking the stability of the eternal, of a perfect kind of love that will last forever—but only if one properly bifurcates the self, foreground the instability of the temporal, of an imperfect kind of love that will never last, but will acknowledge the chaos of the world. So suffering exists, and pleasure exists, but suffering and pleasure are transient, and the moral act is not to destroy the transicence, but to move past it, to ride that transience, until it ends—the flux of the world and the desire for the divine moving in and out of each other, with a refusal of the utopic.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
dozen aeiral photos of iceland lava fields
useful info on voting while trans
Gwar covers Kansas
Jess Nevins hosts the entire 6 gun Gorilla Seires, and oh, here is his new Encylopedia, in total. on superheros, all of them
the best thing about kevin kundstadts photos of the dolomites, is the bottom third, with the composition including people, badminton nets, run down cabins, the amature of tourism.
i wonder if Solange in Joberg has the same political problems of MIA in Rio.
and now 4 other videos:
Dolly, Tammy and Loretta doing Love Sick Blues
Footage of the Gloucester cheese roll
Buffy St Marie singing about Custer on Johnny' Cashes T Show in the mid 70s.
new Lee Brice single
useful info on voting while trans
Gwar covers Kansas
Jess Nevins hosts the entire 6 gun Gorilla Seires, and oh, here is his new Encylopedia, in total. on superheros, all of them
the best thing about kevin kundstadts photos of the dolomites, is the bottom third, with the composition including people, badminton nets, run down cabins, the amature of tourism.
i wonder if Solange in Joberg has the same political problems of MIA in Rio.
and now 4 other videos:
Dolly, Tammy and Loretta doing Love Sick Blues
Footage of the Gloucester cheese roll
Buffy St Marie singing about Custer on Johnny' Cashes T Show in the mid 70s.
new Lee Brice single
- Anthony Easton the best thing about red is that it's Taylor pushing herself out of the nashville ghetto, the anti country positioning is fascianting.
- Alexander Ostroff Well, she's always been pushing herself out of Nashville and small towns. And she's always been an anti-country country star.
- Anthony Easton oh, of course--but this album, is fucking fantastic because she has taken every single ball and gone home. Also, this song is great.
- Alexander Ostroff Like, as far back as the self-titled when she was 15, small towns and small town boys and small town values weren't celebrated per normal country tropes but rejected as small-minded and clingy and undesirable (cf. 'Tim McGraw' 'A Place in This World' etc.).
- Anthony Easton Fullt conceded--but those were aspirational, and this is beyond aspirational--she has finally lived up to the potential Kanye saw in her.
- Alexander Ostroff By 'Fearless' she's writing 'Fifteen' which is explicitly about "in your life you'll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team" "back then I thought I was gonna marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine."
- Alexander Ostroff And White Horse, "This is a big world / That was a small town / There in my rearview mirror, disappearing now"
- Alexander Ostroff Yeah, of course. I just meant that while Speak Now and RED have both been more sonically adventurous than the first two country albums (which I still suspect I will end up liking more) her songwriting/narrative/moral/personal values that she's been shi...See More
- Alexander Ostroff (Oh and if we're tracking the narrative, 'Mean' off of Speak Now, where small-town high school kids are the worst but "Someday I'll be living in a big old city and all you're ever gonna be is mean.")
- Anthony Easton That line has always struck me as really queer--it's the sort of thing i said to myself as a gay highschool kid--the rest of it not so much, but that one line
- Alexander Ostroff re: Miranda. Miranda lives in and loves small-towns but calls them out on what they are. Miranda is happy inhabiting the space of being the 'bad girl' in the small town who drinks and smokes and has sex that they disapprove of. On her solo stuff that f...See More
- Alexander Ostroff Taylor chafes against those constraints when she's stuck there but isn't invested in adopting the position of 'rebel' or 'bad girl' so much as just getting the hell out. IDK. (I guess Miranda gets out in 'New Strings' but it's not something she writes about a lot.)
- Alexander Ostroff Also, queering Taylor Swift songs is my favourite thing ever, because how *isn't* for example, You Belong With Me, totally queer in sentiment. All of Taylor's (and all of Robyn's) unrequited love songs are secretly about closeted teenage gay dudes in love with their high school best friends.
- Anthony Easton Okay, this is half a conversation i have had with a million people--but i think that the Taylor/Miranda dialectic is one of rural/urban--but small towns like the one Miranda positions herself as the black sheep don't exist anymore and Swift's discussio...See More
- Alexander Ostroff Well, because Swift never actually got to go to 'THE CITY' no? She went from small-town Pennsylvania to Nashville to start writing music, and while that's *a* city, it's not really an 'urban' space that she lived in in the way we (or she) would think of it and now she's too busy being famous, so the city is always aspirational on her earlier stuff or imagined in songs like 'Mine' about college romance and whatever.
- Anthony Easton True, of course. But don't you get the feeling that she has one great LA song in her--like full Joni ca Ladies of the Canyon
- Alexander Ostroff idk. Taylor skipped over the super-folky and/or narrative Joni of Ladies of the Canyon and right to confessional Blue. And her song-writing qua song-writing, sonics and arrangements aside have gotten less observational and detailed overtime, not more. She might have it in her, but not while she's chasing the pop charts (and that's fine, but it's not happening any time soon.)
Sunday, October 07, 2012
i want my writing to be allusive, ironic, discursive...
The urbane and queer lists of O'Hara, his circle (Brainard, Schuyler) and his antecedents (David W, Dglous, Trinidad)/whatever the fuck whitman is doing/All that sad, thick bagged that Burton pushes through/The matryoshka doll books of Barthes/the wide, serpentine line of biography, like fat thru a steak, in the cultural reportage of White, Castle, Didion, Malcolm, Kaustenbaum/the Ecrits/the dropping of vernacular english into bleached white prose (Jordan, King)/All of history scanned and shuffled--in&out like breathe (Derrida)/the crystaline double sided aphorist stiletto--against self&other (Nietzsche/Schopenhauer), the parable, the anecdote, the whispered aside, the gossip, (gossip as history)--that magic space where oral becomes written/ the mistake in translation/the error on the margin that carries closer and closer to the center of the page/ what is spoken in the confessional, the bed chamber, the graffitted wall, the analysts couch...the loose, the ample, the flesh unruled.
plus cowboys--never forget cowboys.
tight as a corset/serious as a heart attack/official as the dmv/filtered so clear and pure...contentless...
i'm not sure this is for me.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices, 1996.
Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices, 1996.
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