went to school today, and got two assignments back
an 85 on one and a 90 on the other.

havent been to class in three weeks, therapy yesterday was all these depressives bitching, havent felt the desire or need to write, and my comments are down.

Biologist stopped at airport with severed seal's head in luggage

Christian Socialist

They are making american sign language more culturally sensitive, so the sign for chinese is not a slant eye, the sign of a jew is not a hooked nose and the sign for a homosexual is not a limp wrist

(how difficult it must be to translate all of those, how do you explain the difference b/w queer and gay in sign language ?)

Marc Quinn's new sculpture on the fourth plinth is of a pregant victim of thalimode poisioning, i think that it is over done, and a bit explotive...the gaurdian agrees.

lats fucking me over, sometimes they say i will get paid b/c i wrote something, sometimes they say b/c im on the editoral board so i wont, sometimes they say a peice for me will run, sometimes it wont, so they said that i would get paid for three articles (120) this week, and lo/behold...im not

their faces
are great grey figureheads

towards communcation
or nothing so abstract

words will flow
if sung or felt
or written

no need for mistress
anne
no need for the
abstracted phonograph.

just words

1. Who drew the issues of Magnus, Robot Fighter that Russ Manning didn't?

2. What were the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner fighting about in Human Torch 3 (1940)?

3. Who debuted in Forbidden Worlds #73?

4. Before Alan Moore, who was the only writer listed by Overstreet?

5. Which reasonably notable Superhero debuted in Action #1, besides Superman?

6. What was Popeye's first line, in response to Castor Oyl's "Are you a sailor?"?

7. By what name is the character Mike S. Donovan better known?

8. Why did Green Lantern 171 read strangely?

9. Who first drew Sgt Rock?

10. Who guest-starred in Sgt Fury #3?

11. Whose full forenames are Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard?

12. Who debuted in Adventure Comics #210?

13. What's the name of Li'l Abner's pig?

14. What's Groo's dog called?

15. What was Alfred's first name from Detective #96 until Batman #214?

16. Which superheroes debuted in More Fun #73?

17. What was the Fighting American's secret identity?

18. Who created Ma Hunkle?

19. Who was the only artist other than Leo Baxendale in Wham! #1 in 1964?

20. Who created Lord Snooty?


martin from england posted this on ilx, i know none.

new iraq constituion

Peter Bagge talks about polyamoury, and its ethical implications.

British Authours admit to writing blurbs for books they feel are "dire" dont belive the hype

book slut

if you are going to kill yrself, try pills and booze or shotguns...avoid crufcfying yourself in your living room.

its ineffectivbe, and stains will be left on the rug.

Reconstrucionist Rabbis ok queer marriage

queer day

The President and Vice President of Taiwan were shot at, while riding in an open convertable, they are safe, but no one is sure why they were targeted.

they however should learn the lessons of transportation.

compare America and Britian (die puny humans)

one is scared of fuck, and one has clever tv commericals about it.

about letterman, plaid and courtney

i think that men rule rock, and women who try to get into it are called down, are destroyed, and are humilated.

its ok if their gfs but not ok if their equal talents

(cf yoko and john, yoko making the more interesting, more complicated,more out there shit, and having that rub off on john, and then being villified)

i think that she deconstructs, the top off thing--she qouated any number of people who did it, and she tool lettermans smarminess and casual unfeeling, and dismissal of women (that kissing hands, and asking about husbands, and not really engaging with them) and said fuck you, its like presenting cock...

as for plaid, i think she did the usual playing around with the microphone thing and got charged, it was a fucking accident--we aint charging fred durst for inciting a riot at woodstock '02, for example.

as for her music, i like that she is a record geek, i like that she works with women for women, i like how she knows what her instrument is (ie ragged, broken, lovely and worn voice) and plans around it, i like the edges.

i think shes lonely, sick, sad and i dont think we should be mocking her but seeking her help.

8 guinesses, two kilkennies, a gin and tonic, two rye and gingers, and 3 ounces of bushmills and a tequilla

nancy sinatra and morissey !!!!!!

first draft of the autobio, missing the creeds stuff, and why the domincians in general, expect comments.

1. Your family history i.e. what kind of family you grew up in, your relationship with your father, mother, and siblings.

My father Richard Easton, left when I was 7, my mother took over raising me. My sister came to us when I was 4. The relationship I have with my father is complicated, but that seems usual. He has said that his father did not know how to raise him, that my grandfather was cold and distant. He was scared of repeating the same mistakes, and in some ways he did, and in some ways he made whole new mistakes. My father left for the high arctic just after my parents separated. He worked with first nations kids, Inuit’s who were wounded by intuitions. He took care of them in a way that he didn’t take care of me. He first went to Rankin Inlet, in what is now Nunavut, facilitating addiction counselling. I remember him sending care packages, posters, books, art, dolls, and items made of seal skin—the books were didactic, his way of teaching me so far away, I guess. There were elementary primers on inuktitut, collected poems of Robert Service, Ted Harrison illustrations, poetry and picture books of whales. He was transferred to Inuvik in my eighth year, and although I never got to visit him there, I spent two weeks in Winnipeg with him instead. I grew up a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and we baptise at 8—my father was as far as he could get away from the church on the day of my baptism, even though I waited months for him to come. I thought when I was a child that it was because he could not make the flight down but when my sister was baptised he stood in the parking lot smoking. My father does not believe in God. (This may not be entirely fair, he often says that he is the best follower of Christ who isn’t a Christian and his lessons about tolerance, fairness, social justice---his ire at the evils that were done in the world, his impatience at the laziness, stupidity, greed and indulgences of the world taught me much…he also gave me a sense of wonder. His great passion are the sciences, and I remember road trips to see dinasours in the Albertan Badlands, and standing in Elk Island National Park watching bison, I remember him telling me about the difference between Bison and Buffalos. ) My father came back to the town he was living when I was 12, he reenrolled in University, taking classes to finish a degree. I would go with him to the libraries, getting books out on his card, reading in the bathroom of his dorm at 3 am. My father always had a great personal library, and I had free access to that as well. At 12 I was sent away to a boys boarding school, in an attempt to exercise and socially norm myself. For a long time I blamed my father for what happened there, I blamed him for leaving my mother, I blamed him for not staying and I blamed him for trying to enact discipline when for so many years he hadn’t. Throughout my adolescence we had screaming fights, but that was my stubbornness and his inability to cope. I don’t think that he has understood my desire to be catholic, my yearnings—all he sees is the damage of up north, the evil that the Mother Church has committed on her charges. I think that, although he has never said it, he agrees with Nietzsche, when he said the last true Christian died on the Cross.

My mother, Susan Easton, nee Conrad, is the smartest woman I know, both kinds of smart—the smart that reads Finnegans Wake, through and the one who knew exactly what to say that made me feel better. She was a soft touch, and I manipulated her to get what I wanted, I was not fair and just dealing with her, I was not thankful in what she gave me. I was never wanting in her house, I got the new clothes, the rides to the city, the fast food meals, the vacations. She made sure that I got to play all sorts of musical instruments, take soccer, and almost anything else. Remember that through out this, she was a single mother, looking after two small children on a limited salary. I got an education and I got love. The other thing that she guaranteed for me, was male role models, she sent me to Boy Scouts, and to classes on rocketry and model airplanes, she had men come to lay their hands on my head for healing, to take me out for ice cream at McDonalds, to teach me to do all the masculine things that she couldn’t—not that she was one for gender essentialism. She taught me, she was a school teacher after all. She taught new immigrants learning English, the severally mentally ill, prisoners and high school students. What did she teach me ? She taught me that Henry James was dull, about the moral ambiguity of Othello, about how she never really understood Catherine in Taming of the Shrew. She let me read Macbeth in the fifth grade. She taught me how to spell, how to write, how to use words well.—she taught me irony, and she taught me how effective it was for the powerless to use it as a tool against the powerful. She taught be about God, in all sorts of ways. She taught me how to read the bible, and taught me how to sing hymns of course, but also taught me how both of those things could be used to damage people. My mother was very much in favour of reading Christ’s gospel as on of love, and she taught me that Christ loved me. I was a child of god, and his grace was there to protect me. I remember having complicated theological discussions on the way home from Sunday school, and she was not angry or upset when I left the Mormon Church. Only once did she ban me from religious activities, and that’s when I wanted to be an altar server when I was away at that Anglican boarding school—thinking that it would interfere with the “priesthood” I had there. But she did allow me to go to other churches, and she talked happily of her own religious experiences. There is a liberal LDS magazine called Sunstone, and when I started doubting if the church was true, she gave me an issue with a fable in it, this will require some background, the LDS church believes in prophets that came from Israel to the Ancient Americas, and one of those prophets was named Lehi. Lehi had two ways of finding himself in the world, the first being an iron rod (there is a hymn that I sang growing up that went “hold to the rod, the iron rod, it is straight and plain and true), the second was a mystical compass called the Liahona, which only showed direction when the person looking at was inspired by the spirit of God, in this fable there were two kinds of Mormons, the Liahona Mormons and the Iron Rod Mormons. My mother is a Liahona Mormon, she struggles, and fights, and starves in the wilderness, praying and seeking the guidance of God. She was not good at following one road and she taught me of the aporitnes of that.

My sister tries to understand me but its difficult. I don’t think that she doubted a day in her life, I know that she is happy in the LDS church, she behaved and she had different interests then me. I was happy staying in the library and she was happy on the playing field. My sister can play any sport that you can put in front of her: rugby, basketball, I was confused by the way the world worked, struggling with a general social awkwardness. My sister was at ease with the world, sliding through it with a grace that I could never muster. What happened then, in many ways, was that my sister acted as guide, translator and host. She was the Sherpa and I was the westerner stuck in an emotional Tibet. I remember when I was very young, my father buying a model spider, and taking it back to his apartment so that we could make it together, and it took hours of fumbling before Amy came over, and finished itwith in minutes. I was deeply envious of my sister, I was in awe of her, and I wanted what she had and I didn’t. She got to stay with my parents when I was sent off to school, she loved high school, she was happy and well liked and popular. I was none of those things. I regret this, but to her I was a bully, and I do not think that she and I ever got over that. My mother has not spoken to my aunt in two years, and they do not like each other very much—there is an isolation there that is not talked about, and it is my deepest fear that my s ister and I will be like that—hers is the shortest entry among my family, because I know her the least. This saddens me.


2. Your educational background

My parents have post grad degrees, my grandparents have post grad degrees, I should have one. But I don’t—at 23, when all of my friends are graduating, I am barely starting. Maybe it was my parents telling me about AS Neil and Summerhill at an early age, maybe it was my father telling me don’t let schooling get in the way of your education, maybe it was the burnout I saw when my mother taught English, and maybe it is my educational history, but there is some deep cynicism between me and school. I spent two years in kindergarden, because I was slow to conform to schedules and structures. I asked and begged to change teachers in grade one, and when I did I was unhappy. I was often put out of class for disrupting and would find myself in the library, reading on my own time. I switched out of French immersion when I was in grade three, finished grade 6 in an English language school. I remember being upset that I had to leave art and music classes early to take the ardous speech therapy (apparently when I was very young I could not be understood at all, my impdiement was that strong. I went to an Anglican boys boarding school, rural and deeply conservative for grade 7 and 8. I was abused there, I was raped by a teacher, mocked daily by the other boys with a fine honed cruelty, I was beaten by the people in dorms and spanked by the staff. I was poor at the duties given to me, performed poorly at school (though given the best grades I have ever had) an dwas abysmal at most of the athletics (with the exception of snow shoeing and canoeing, long distances and stamina seemed to suit). There were three things that saved me at Saint Johns—there was the very limited library (although the dormmaster for grade 8 would do locker inspections, taking any books that would seem in the least to be subversive), the second was the school parliament, which gave me a sense of the jockeying for power and not really achieving it that marks much of our lives and then their was the religion. There were mandatory services on Sunday nights and optional services on Thursday afternoon. The services on Sunday nights were amazing, we entered this chapel in the dark and we took our green CES missals, and we spoke the same words that people spoke for 500 years. We did this in the woods during hikes and canoe trips, we did this in the chapel on other days—there was something somber and otherworldly and calming about it. The Thursday services were high Anglicans, priests in white robes, altar boys flinging around the Thurible, a lirtuigy, and the novel introduction of a liturgy, this would keep with me. I had a nervous breakdown in grade 9 and spent the school year in a pyschratic hospital, relearning all of the normal things that kids did, and went to high school in Sherwood Park. I fell in with an LDS crew there, but it was so difficult to enjoy, it was three years of the teachers understanding what was happening in my life, and the students not caring in the least. I didn’t graduate high school, rarely attending, sometimes out of boredom and sometimes out of exhaustion in the way that I was treated. I spent two years after high school working, taking my SATs, applying to schools out of the country, and finally just to do something, took part time classes at the University of Alberta, where I maintain a 3.0 grade point average.


3. Your work experience

I have worked off and on since I was 15, doing the sort of jobs that one does in high school, often part time. I have sold teddy bears door to door, I have done security for two companies where I spent much time in empty car parks, industrial sites, office towers and other places that people might have broken in, I liked the solitude of security, and I liked how self directed it seemed. I have guarded the beds of men and women who wanted to kill themselves, who were in dementia or who were on their last wind. I have worked in a gas station on weekend nights, babysitting privileged drunks, thanks to the night club across the street.

I have also written. I have a nascent freelance career, starting with 2 years at the university paper, resulting in 58 stories published. Mostly I write critical works, focusing on music, contemporary visual culture, first person essays, religious studies in unconventional places and poetry. I have appeared in print in over 20 magazines, journals and newspapers, both off line and on and ranging geographically from Victoria, British Columbia to London, England.


4. Relationships you have had with both men and women. What role has friendship played in your life?


Men leave. That is the first lesson I learnt as a kid. It was not only my father, who left at a very early age but other men. There were the Flexhaugs who I knew as brother figures until they left on their mission and never returned. There was Fred Krause and his family, who we had Sunday dinner with, and who left to go to Calgary. There was Jeff Majek who left for similar reasons and also Mark Lowry, who taught us religion, and helped around the house, as is the LDS custom, he got a transfer to Houston. These people’s families left, but the men made them leave, I grew up in a patriarchy and the men in it were kind and loving but unstable, always chasing the next rainbow. I am repairing my relationship with my father, and I am working on how I view men. I want ot know them better, to love them with out contradiction. I have started to do this, I have a friend and a room mate now named Bryan, who has taught me about the secret codes of masculinity, about the base things like cars, and guns and how to look good in a uniform and hard rock and roll, but also the subtler things. He is my brother, and he shows that affection not through words but through deeds, he wakes me up, drives me to school, does the dishes with out being asked, takes photos with me, lends me money. We were having a fight a few months back, and we weren’t really talking, instead of enterting into a discourse, and sorting things through communication, he brought a desk home for me, lugged it on his back from where it had been disposed to the back yard. I knew then that I was forgiven…and he didn’t have to say it. The other person that has altered how I feel about men is someone I met through Bryan. Pat and I don’t have to talk anymore (we do, everyday) but we don’t have to…we have devolped this code of pop culture references, inside jokes, theory cant, and illustrative allegories, he is the kind of guy who has this deep abiding loyalty that isn’t questioned, and needs to be carefully maintained unless it is taken advantage of. There are other men that have entered my life at the same time as these two as well. There is Andrew Demoline who talks to me about theology, but doesn’t allow me to over intellectuize and Jeff Brassard, who refuses to let me give up on God, who is Catholic at his core, and has sorted out for me many of the complexities and ambugities that I didn’t understand.

Women were different. They stayed around to clean up the messes, they made sure that things were done. They organized moves, clean ups, service projects. The bishop’s wives ruled at home, mostly because the bishops were elsewhere, at the job they did for money or tending there flock. I remember women taking care of me more then men ever did. I remember the ladies of the church feeding me, taking me in when my mother was busy. I remember the long sucession of babysitters I had, who had their own children and who let me mix freely with them. I often find myself getting closer to women faster, although this pattern seems to have changed. I also have found my best teachers to be women both spiritually and literally, maybe that is because of my mother.


I have never thought that I would get married and have children, maybe it was the dissolution of my parents marriage…so friendships has given me other families. I have had the members of the church I grew up raise me, my mother trusting them. I went to babysitters and daycares as well, finding likeminded people in large groups. Sometimes this was difficult, I tended towards the obscure, and I had trouble fitting in. This resulted or a long time in small groups that were closer then large groups. I had a small group like this in elementary, who carried me just below being popular—even though I grew up in a small town where everyone knew each other. I depended on another small group in Saint Johns, literally acting as a life support. I felt guilty, when I switched in grade 8 from the table of outcasts because they were not liked to the table of outcasts who were outcasts because it was cool, but we would go into an empty classroom and talk about Kerouac and Ginsberg, hardcore, misunderstood intellectuals, not understanding that we were adopting the clichés of years previous. The class in the hospital was too small for such cliques and so didn’t have them. High School was a group of Mormons who stuck by me even though I discovered tastes for gin and the Catholic Church but university is different.

5. Your spiritual journey and why it has brought you to consider living the monastic life—and in particular at St. Benedict's Monastery

I grew up in a church with no liturgy, no clergy, no art on the walls, no sense of history. I went to church, and the lay talked, and then there were a couple of hymns, and then two hours of teaching. I grew up in a church that allowed 12 year olds to bless and pass the sacrament (white bread and water). I grew up in a church that was a way of life, with daily religious education for members between the ages of 14 and 18, done before school. The church that I grew up in belived in themselves as whole, as one body, though they never used those words. They took care of the widows and orphans. They fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited those in prison. They also visited each other, once a month was directed but there were also weddings, funerals, parties and social events in the church itself. Architecturally, the largest and most central room of the church was not the chapel but the cultural center, which had a stage, and a basketball court and storage space for tables and chairs. There was a meeting every day of the week, and the church was never closed. I could not stay in the church, they didn’t belive in the same things I did, they didn’t use the words that I wanted to use. I think that I realized the split early, but never actualized it. There were warning signs. There was the trip to New York that my father brought me to when I was 12, and seeing the Santeria store on Amsterdam avenue near my hostel, with the candles of the saints and the virigin mother, felt like a homecoming. There was the trip to Saint John The Divine, cavernous, uncompleted, with the shrines for AIDS victims, addicts, immigrants, and those with TB or Cancer or lonliness. I thought, here were these black saints, and shrines with black faces, and we believe that those of African heritage still have the mark of cain. I also thought, why is this evil, why is all of this beauty, and richness contrary to the will of god. I went back to Saint Johns, the Anglican church, and pored over the prayer books, studied the apostles creed and the Nicene creed. I knew that when I went to services, and I said the same words, that I was not “speaking in rote prayer”, something that I was warned deeply against. I read about the Buddha in Saint Johns, and I thought of myself then, at 14, as a Buddhist, as someone who liked the ideas against attachment and against materialism. I liked the plainness of the Buddha’s stories, just like I loved the plainness of Compline. I let this dissatisfaction fester until I was 17, and then I left the church. I had a list of things I wanted from religion then, and I went to churches to try to find them. I went to Hindu services, more Buddhism, but at the end of that realized that I needed Christ. I went to the Presbyterians, like my grandmother was and realized it was too severe. I went to the Pentecostal and non demotional services that my friends were going to and missed a certain reverence. I went to Lutheran services, and got lessons of dissent, and I went to Anglican services and almost felt at home. I wanted thought, less hegemony and even more history. Anglicanism felt like a compromise. I turned 18 when I was going through RCIA, and the history, the aesthics, the suffering and the joy that I have learnt in the last five years have sustained me. But I want the communalism, the intensity of daily religion that I got in the mormon church, like God guiding me to the Catholic church, I want him to guide me further.

and Harvard elimnates tution for people making less then 40k a year, good move...now kill legaxies and reinstate Affirmative Action.

mefi

Sometimes how anglicans struggle with tradition and innovation inspires me, lays a fire into me... and somtimes its just wacky

Teen Boys have their own bible, in magazine format. sad

johnny baker

The Brutalist EAG has managed to wall off one of its balconies, destroying how clean and light it iis, and now, england is tearing down lots of the old brutalist buildings, which is a shame, cause i like them, i dont find them brutal, but stark, functional, and goregous.

(its a cult building style, and difficult to live w. and that should be noted. )

Stuart Jeffries agrees with me

Bush inadverntly genderfucks a libyan liberation hero.

This suburban family from Fremont California has built a monorail in their back yard

lyd

What makes you want to take it off and get it on?
"Ignition (remix)" by R. Kelly
A recent story about a little boy being forced by aliens to do it to his grandma.
The sight of my lady, attired or un.
Indian food.
Marijuana.
A good fight.
Bedtime.

will oldham from here they seem to have dropped mr lebruce though

more warhols:


farrah

ali

liza

man ray

everything warhol thot about: immedaicy, the machine, fame, craft, talent, merit, sex, artifice, persona, gender, god came out in these photos, they are all him--even if he pointed and shot, even if he didnt really compose, their accidental grace...its something more then that, its taking this new kind of tech and changing the way people used it, its wht he did with film, making it go to its logical extremes until it broke and then looped back around.

(some times literally, but also the cinematic conventions, the star system for one (candy as marylin, marylin as madonna) or narrative (there were none, there was lots) or source materials or boredom/ennui (popular among the uropenans) or voyuerism or the gaze or the viewer or genre versus art (the only two places you could see tits, and often shown in the same theaters)

i have this little digital camera, and i like the voyueristic, domestic (theories about the interlation of the two ?) immediacy of it all. (taken photos of coats in the halls, candids of friends, kitchen still lives, out of the bus windows)

i wonder if the thrill i have re: the click, discard, save, dissemate snapshotness is similar to how we felt about polaroids or even brownies (it gets quicker, slicker, w. less seams--how did walker evans feel about polaroids in realtion to warhol ?

(cf/cc photologs, like this one or this one that have great photos, regardless of genre, or perhaps in the midst of creating a new genre--one that moves art vs documentary and finds room in both (has photography been headed this way or always had it (rodcehnko (sp), bresson, lange, evans, gedny, frank ?)

my clothes are falling apart, and i am not sure if it is b/c i am fat(ter) and they are cheap
(these are the new ones from bootlegger, not the vintage ones that last forever. )

posted on nyplm, wanted brian and pat to comment, which is why its here

There are no humans in pop music anymore, it can be assembled out of elements that already exist, in this way the vocals seem to be vestigal, reminding that this is "pop music" as opposed to something else, something that has not been named yet.

We have gotten so close to noise, beats, percussion and mechanical percision, so that we have producers becoming the new kings and queens--this does not mean that they do not have autonomy.

Missy chose all of the noise, both organic and inorganic in her track, and its brilliance is how the organic (horses braying, handclaps, her voice) grates against the inorganic (the rest)

Britney manages to make herself completley inorganic, a barbarella sexbot, and so we miss the organic. That's the problem with this single, and her transition in the last few albums, she has moved from narrative to fractured forms, but it seems almost by accident (is this what Madonna is correcting, in her subtle, almost hectoring tone here ?) As well, that title her refusal to engage with what was traditionally called music. Its her, popbot versus the musics kudzu like growths.

note to homophobes:
If you really belived in Biblical Sexual Ethics it would be polygamy or celibacy for you. The idea of one man -one woman for life is a relativley rare and recent phenomenm. Now let the fools who want to get married get married.

i want to write more but i need to sort out my head.

PinkMoosePearl: chris
PinkMoosePearl: mel gibson is not a very loving man
the minor thirds: well no
PinkMoosePearl: and his movie perputaes a cult of death
the minor thirds: well yes
the minor thirds: i mean i haven't seen it
the minor thirds: but from what i've read, yes
PinkMoosePearl: i saw it today
PinkMoosePearl: it offended me
PinkMoosePearl: as a catholic
PinkMoosePearl: it felt like abuse
the minor thirds: what exactly did?
PinkMoosePearl: his violence
PinkMoosePearl: it was pornographic
PinkMoosePearl: ugly
PinkMoosePearl: cruel
PinkMoosePearl: and none of the context
PinkMoosePearl: he made pilate a good confused man
PinkMoosePearl: and the jews villians
PinkMoosePearl: mobbing villians
the minor thirds: right
PinkMoosePearl: where is the christ of the money changers
PinkMoosePearl: of the beatitudes
PinkMoosePearl: of the little children coming unto him
the minor thirds: yes, apparently you're supposed to come in assuming that
PinkMoosePearl: but gibson doesnt
the minor thirds: well. yes.

whitney bi artists that dont suck


hernan bas


sam durant
(im a font jockey though, and cum over written peices and he is so much a christopher wool/jack peirson/sean landers descendent but shrug)


ernesto caivano
(is it wrong to be so concerned with object & craft, where did my love of theory go ?)

borges 1
borges 2

Egypt arrests, detains and tortues queer folks
(muslims have a long history of same gendered sexual behaviour, unrelated to the essentalism that is being displayed here)

queer day

Hilary Matel discusses the difference b/w Holy Suffering, Mental Illness and Vanity...deeply fascanting, in her refusal to accept only one reason for the things that female saints do, allowing for femminst interpertations to abut papal ones.

bookslut

Interesting NYT article on the upcoming Saddam trial.

Which rule of law are they going to use, i mean they made it all up at Nuremberg, b/c they didnt have many precedents, but they have one now--the only problem is that its the UN and well, they dont get along well these days.

mefi

this shift i saw :a man with a bible telling me that all people from the mideast are evil three assholes steal 50 dollars gas and half a dozen drunken yahoos yelling at me for not making the cabs run quicker

Borges and the Implications of the Library of Babel



The Library of Babel, in Ficciones, is a useful microcosm regarding many of Borges’s themes, including questions of taxonomy, hermeneutics, epistemology and cosmology. By examining both textual and biographical clues, we can gain a larger understanding of these themes in relation to his corpus.

I Biography
i Borges as Librarian
ii The library as a historical and anti national
a) The consequences of disobeying Peron (i.e. the tension between nationalism and internationalisms)
iii The irony of a Blind Librarian
II Cosmology
i Is the universe orderly, and if so can we understand that order?
ii what are the implications of chaos?
iii the idea of a reversal of paradise (what you imagine as perfect becoming horrific)
iv hexagons and the kabala
III Hermeneutics
i the origins as singular source, and the consequences of multiple sources.
ii the inherent impossibility of ordering the world, a reaction against one correct interpretation. (Barthes: Hermeneutics of Suspicion)
iv Anti foundationaliusm, comparing and contrasting the traditional goals of Hermeneutics with the goals of this text.
IV Epistemology
i the futility of learning
ii learning with a goal in mind leads to depression, madness (a cautionary tale?)
V Taxonomy
i What is being categorized, how is it being categorized, why ?
ii what are the implications of how we categorize

Conclusion
i discuss the labyrinth/garden of forking paths as a clue to this text
ii discuss how the story can be used as an almost mocking correction to the philosophical goals of the enlightenment

those are the questions they want answered.
do i tell them about my not getting along with my sister, with the intercine battles with my fathers, my failed attempts at finding direction&joy at the univeristy, do i tell htem about my lovers, about adam ? about my brothers, about bryan ? what do i tell them about that, and how can i answer the questions about direction ?

god told me to be a monk--is that enough ?

Your Autobiography


When you write your autobiography, please include in some detail the following subjects:

1. Your family history i.e. what kind of family you grew up in, your relationship with your father, mother, and siblings.

2. Your educational background

3. Your work experience

4. Relationships you have had with both men and women. What role has friendship played in your life?

5. Your spiritual journey and why it has brought you to consider living the monastic life—and in particular at St. Benedict's Monastery

By including the above subject matter in your autobiography, along with your answers to the five statements in the brochure, you will help me to consider our compatibility i.e. your background, preferences, bent; in short your suitability for the kind of life we live here at St. Benedict's Monastery.

Real Live Preacher ends his review of the passion with the canard of Palestine being isolated from Rome, obscure.

not so, it was a major trading region , and a central location, a matrix of new ideas--caught between the far east and europe.

always has been, always will be.

impatient for the catolog of monastic orders, i did some web searching, and with the guidance of isidore of seville, i sent emails to these orders:

Briggatines in Amity, Oregon (web presence here) Aside from being in the Wilamette Valley, so close to Portland, they make fudge. They are also contemplative, but treat silence like the qaukers, they are marians, and believe deeply in christian unity.

Franscisans-For Francis, obv. , and for the radical simplicity of their living.

The Bendectiines in Northern Quebec. because i think that the order of benedict would be something that i could mesh with, that i could work with and wrestle with.

and the Trappists, because of the writing, the prayer, the mysticism, the complexity and the joy that has come from them (Merton for one) Here is one in Conneticut