gramma

Ten things about the retreat I am on right now, at the Sisters of St John the Divine.

1. Library is full of the sort of things that my English working class g grandmother loved, and the sort of casual anglophillia her daughter picked up.
2. Reading the chapter master, in Edmund White’s My Lives, with its discussion of porn, bdsm, sublimation, and obsession—while looking at a mid 50s copy of that William Holman Hunt painting, both of us sitting in the middle of a sitting room with floral couches, embroidered chairs, and kitty themed coasters. Because of where I am, I carefully annotate how White’s lovesickness matches my lovesickness.
3. talking to Graydon, about queerness, and the church; he using the word gay and me worried about all the things I’m worried about, the discretion, the embodied sexuality, the problematic nature of how polite the Anglican church is, learning slowly, in my addled way, who gets fed and who gets none, & I didn’t point this out to him, but I was genuinely concerned that staying in the church was a moral evil. That it was no longer morally neutral. But Graydon, in his quiet and encouraging way, sat me down and we hashed it out. He claims that there is no one in the Canadian church right now, writing or thinking about queer sexuality as a comprehensive, explicit, and separate entity, and that entity as positive. That in this talk of marriage, and the bureaucratic/ecclesial language of same gendered blessings, something (I was going to say essential but I am not sure that anything essential) needs to be said about the tangled weave of desire, of bodies, of sexuality, of power, and of occasionally love.
4. Talking to Jesse over the baseball game about all of this, he points out that in this room, among the 12 of us, there are 3 gay men. Where are the lesbians? Where are those who are transgendered? Jesse is straight, and WASPish, he describes himself as wonder bread, but I think he’s right, there is a core of gay men in the Anglican and Catholic Churches, but are they gay men who view the world to rough to live with/in?
5. Graydon talked about how he came out because he was working with people who were courageously dying in the middle of the plague years and he felt a moral obligation to be public. He talked about how being a chaplain meant that he avoided the politics of the parish.
6. This is not like Kentucky, I have only prayed once, and I have not gone outside. I don’t talk very much, meals are silent, and I spend much time in my room, reading.
7. It is a small place, and it reminds me of hospices and hospitals. Maybe that is because most of the nuns are in their 70s. I don’t mind this. The food is good, people are kind, and there is a smart and wry loveliness about them. I have a napkin ring that is mine for the weekend, and I get it stuck at the back of the cubby it takes two nuns to retrieve it, and one gently chastises me for it. I don’t have any shame in asking them for help, and I don’t feel guilt at the chastisement.
8. Everyone else brought work; I have essays to write and reading to do. I am behind on much of my work. I was going to go on a tech fast, but that did not last longer then a day, but my phone and my lap t op and my work books a re at home. I should feel guilty about this, but I don’t.
9. I still feel uncomfortable with much of the discourse that happens here. I am unconvinced that God is talking to people. I think that she is mostly silent. I am disheartened at how little people think about the political implications of what they are saying. I am bothered about the use of the word Holy Land instead of Israel.
10. I see the nuns, and I see this new crowd of people, and I think to myself—in a decade will this exist. Is my role in the next decade to work as someone who ushers the ending of the church, and after that decade to keep the memory somewhere in between my shoulders? If I do that, will it calcify and harden fat over flesh over bone, into a hump?

"The disruption of social norms is not always subversive, especially in postmodernist commodity cultures where formal fluidity, fragmentation, and marketing through difference are central elements. Indeed, privileged groups can, on occasion, display their privilege precisely by the extravagant display of their right to ambiguity. When the English football star, Paul Gascoigne, returned triumphant from the World Cup, he paraded the streets in plastic women’s breasts, as if his excess of heterosexual prowess on the football field licensed his privileged display of gender ambiguity."

Anne McClintock - Imperial Leather

Albums So Far This Year:

1) Ke$ha Animal
2) Janaelle Monae Arcnanroid
3) Rural Route 3 Martin Clarke
4) Robyn Body Talk Pts 1 and 2
5) Brandon Flowers Flamingo
6) Mark Ronson and the Business International Record Collection
7) Arcade Fire--The Suburbs
8) LCD Soundsystem--This is Happening
9) John Adams--The Sound Track to This is Love
10) The King meets the President in AFrica,

Singles So Far
1) Fuck You--Cee Loo
2) Gold Panda--Quitters Raga
3) Mavis STapeles--In Christ There is No East or West
4) Grinderman--Heathen Child
5) DJ Earworm OMG Whatever
6) Deadly Gentleman Come into My Kitchen
7) Courtney Love Pacific Coast Highway
8) Tame Impala--Half Full Glass of Wine
9) LCD Soundsystem Drunk Girls
10) Glee OST Bohemian Rhapsody
11) Janelle Monae Tight Rope
12) Wave The Flag Kanan
13) PArty At A Rich Dude's House Ke$sha
14) Rhianna Rudeboy
15) Carrie Underwood Undo it
16) Laura MArling The DArkness Descends
17) Fucked Up Year of the Ox
18) Gil SCott Heron Me and the Devil
19) Dum Dum Girls Jail La La
20) Kronos Quartet with Tanya Tagaq Nunavat
21) Gaga and Beyonce Telephone
22) Ting Tings Hands
23) Josh Turner Why Dont We Just Dance
24) Mariah Carey - Up Out My Face ft. Nicki Minaj
25) Nicki Minaj - Massive Attack ft. Sean Garrett


Country Albums so Far
1) Josh Turner Haywire
2) Hold STeady
3) Carrie Underwood
4) Jamey Johnson – The Guitar Song
5) Justin Townes Earle Harlem River Blues
6) Merle Haggard - I Am What I Am (Vanguard)
7) Various ARtists--Take me to the Water

Country Singles So Far
1) Aint No Son--Court Yard Hounds
2) Haywire Josh Turner
3) The Peter O'Tooles--County Down
4) Jeff Lang--House Carpenter
5) Trace Adkins--Ala-Freakin-Bam
6) Miranda Lambert--The House That Built Me
7) The Band Perry If I Die Young
8) Laura Marling The Darkness DEscends
9) Justin Townes Ealre MTA Song
10) Little Big Town "Little White Church"
11) Sunny Sweeney "From A Table Away"

BR195 .W6 C378 1995 Knox
BV5023 .C53 1999 Knox


Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2006

E-ISSN: 1086-3184 Print ISSN: 1067-6341

DOI: 10.1353/earl.2006.0052
Rhetoric of Martyrs: Listening to Saints Perpetua and Felicitas

This exercise is more akin
to close reading than resistant reading and, beyond that, is perhaps best
characterized as an effort in what could be called attentive reading: that
is, not merely squinting harder and flipping more furiously between pages
to find—or make—meaning, but recognizing and, when possible, embrac-
ing historical approaches to read historical narrative

“primal document in the devel-
opment of the conventions which were to shape female sacred biography
for a millennium,” providing “medieval female sacred biography exquisite
models for the portrayal of female heroism along with the complex philo-
sophical matrix from which these biographies of saintly women were to
be cast.” Moreover, he asserts that the Passion “exercises an inestimable
influence . . . through the liturgy, popular preaching, and ecclesiastical art;
and contains as powerful an exemplification of these three categories as
we have in all of the medieval vitae sanctarum.” (11)


After a brief description of the animal encounters of Saturninus and Revocatus in the amphitheater and the failed attempt to kill Saturus with boar or bear (19), the scene shifts back to Perpetua and Felicitas together, then back to Saturus. [End Page 289] Once the focus returns to Perpetua, the others besides Saturus drop out of sight except in general terms. Only Perpetua and Saturus have farewell scenes, Perpetua with a hitherto unknown catechumen called Rusticus and with her brother (20), Saturus with the convert solider Pudens (21). There is no farewell scene between Perpetua and Saturus because they are not in the arena together until he is unconscious. He seems never to have regained consciousness before being finished with the sword, if that is the correct interpretation of the account that he "took the sword in silence and without moving" (21). In the final death scene, Saturus, first up the ladder in Perpetua's first vision, is the first to die, "once again waiting for Perpetua," who must still guide the hand of her executioner to her throat. (289)

Perpetua's Husband
Carolyn Osiek
Journal of Early Christian Studies 10.2 (2002) 287-290

today, walking home from the boys, got off at queen station by mistake, one entrace locked, and the blue tiles falling away to reveal crumbled red ones.

the thing is, when edmonton elected conseratives, i expcted it, i feel betrayed

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Twombly, 1959.

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Me and Leo after STrip Spelling Bee, Frans ca 3 am,

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At the Corn Maze

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Richardson's shot of Knoxville (one of the things that peeves me about Richardson's work of the Glee cast in GQ this month, is that he does eroticised men really well, and men who are as much (victim?) of the male gaze as his female shots--so the male gaze/lea michelle turns him on arguement is sort of invalid, this is nto the best example of that, because his rship with knoxvile iss of such intimacy that the gaze pushes back, but its a thot.

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lol

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not real most likely, but oh how i wish it is

i really loved this set of photos, of people in chicago neighbourhoods, combo of street photography, and avedon's pure white backgrounds, colour though. BY Adam Novak, Sara Collins, and Andrew Zoechbauer

a cultural hsitory of the meerschaum pipe.

i have no idea what panda as a food stuff is, but these ads totally reflect the whiny, slightly bitchy and entitled qualities i find in the animals.

`10 extreme close ups of abex painting, from the show at moma right now--including two motherwells.

violent homophobic attack, actually in the washroom of Stonewall.

the scrim for the new midtown manhattan mosque, is reminiscent of both high modernist sky scrapers in the neighborhood, and traditional Islamic geometric decorative forms. Soma architechts did a really good job at maintainting its islamic heritage while making it a quitensetally american building.

evil people in moderniist homes in popular films.


Motherfucker on a Motorcycle, MAchine Gun Fellatio.

much of the narrative of the finical collapse in recent months has been this idea of people buying things that they cannot afford, and the moralist attachment of self worth to capital--what has been hidden, and what is quickly coming to light, is much of the foreclosure mess is dark magic and fraud.

alexandra rowley photographs her father's ties, as part of an attempt to document his positions after he died.

this Game Table by Osvaldo Borsani has some anita ekberg elegance going on, and the colour is just pretty as all fuck.

Twombly's letters of resignation are a poetic realization that all language will eventually fall into entropy--the entropy of the written form an inability to communicate, the worn off printing press, the erasure, the black mark, the word forgotten or never known, it is a rueful and elegiac formalist discourse on that which can never be fully or properly had. His use of both industrial paint and domestic materials (graphite, coloured pencils) also suggests a pre fall, pre lingustic state that he postions near a neo-classicism (& not the hygenic neo-classicism of mies/co) and a babbling of buerocatic interests. Done really early, they also work as impt transiton peices b/w the abexers and the more conceptual language workers. on now at Zwiner and Worth, 12 of the 38 are online. 25 is my favourite. (it is also v. v. small 10x10 inches!)


Love Beth Ditto's voice.

fela kuti and mj album sized mash up

reading drummer magazine at the leather archiveas this year, i was impressed by a lot of thigns, its grpahic design, the caliber of the writing, the amusing awarensess of strangeness, the devotion to a radical queer aesthetic and how sexual practice and aesthetic practice were often olne, it was well written, horribly filthy, a great time, and a vital political document. The editor Embry died last week, in SF

frat boys yelling about rape outside of a women's dorm, should at least be acitonable. it is the most offensive thing i have heard in a v long time.

Merkel something is only a failure if you actually try it and find it does not work--the guestworker program is nto a failure of multiculturalism, it is a success of the parochial and racist attiude that europe has to racialised others (cf Algerians in France, Carribeans and Indians in England, Somalis and SEnegalse in Holland) This is not their problem in not intergrating, it is yr problem in refusing to acknowledge their personhood.

gordon matta clark's holes in buildings has an epic qaulity that avoids the presence, that overwhelms and seems violent in other monumentalists.

long interveiw with julius schulman on taschen's website is delightful.

4 photos of the removal of a llama's fighting teeth.

fantastic take down of the problematic sexual politics of Glee's RHPS episode.

the monolith from 2001, as an action figure.

amon carter digitalises Steigliesz radical photog journal 291

consice explination about how a miller mayor was a good time for toron to.

hiring richard mier to build a 40m dollar building is about as good a choice, as assuming that yr elderly parshishoners will keep donating, add those to figures to a rather banal power grab between Schuller's son and his daughters, the bankruptcy of the Crystal Cathedral is not news--what i am wondering about, is if it is symbolic of a greater downfall in the prosperity gospel movement, Schuller is pretty unique in american christendom, and an interesting bridge b/w flash and mainline protstants, but hes no rick warren.

today was the fifth time that i have apperaerd naked on the stages of buddies, but the first time i shrimped a pirate

four culture things that are haunting me of late:

a) sarah kane's blasted--pat and i left the theater, thinking to ourselves, well that was a formal excercise in shoving as much offensiveness as possible into 90 minutes--and that was part of it, but it was also a formal discussion of compactness, and the difficulties of describing the horror of our everyday life, of making violence less rhetorical and more emobodied--imagine john webster and harold pinter rewriting no exit.
b) el antusi's peak mountain set at rom. first thing--why this show isn't at the ago, and the ethnographic history of that is a problem, but this one peice, a group of mountains constructed out of the gold lids of peak canned milk, has everything. it is beautiful, and it is redemptive, and it is easy enough for a five yr old to say shiny (& one did), but it is also about how ghana was once an empire of gold, and ghana was the place where gold was made from slaves--the push and pull of commerce, acculmated into carefully constructed piles of detrius, has an intensity that rises and falls, like an undertow, never breaking the surface.
c) david hutton at mocca, the room is black, and there is a set of diaramas, of common places, exquisite, slightly gimmicky, but at the end of the show, i was genuinely afraid of the dark.
d) pae white's two peices, one of smoke, which i wrote of before on this blog, but which also has a connection between digital media and new history. there is also a v. funny, v. big, one on one translation of a 1970s macrame and green yarn peice that was printed onto a white field, complete wtih auction tags. whites work is exactly about what it means to translate the empeheral into the tangible, but the addition of digital complicaitons made it much more complicated and kind of ravishing.

Matching Text and Tune


Praise to God, Immortal Praise (VU 521) sung to Forty Days and Forty Nights. (VU 114)
The French folk melody used for Hymn 521, in Voices United, was originally used as a part of a satricial cycle of songs for advent. This tune, specifically, was intended as a song that was intended to greet the donkey that delivered the Christ child. This transference of something that was intended to mock sentimentality, into something explicitly sentimental is a problem. 1 One of the ways of solving the problem is to move the tune away from its history and into something more discreet. The Martin Herbst' tune that is used with the hymn Forty Days and Forty Nights has a sensuality, and a sophistication, that is musically rich enough to simultaneously under-gird notions of bounty, and notions of love, without moving the tune into historical traps.


O God of all the Many Lands (VU 523) sung to Kingsfold.

Kingsfold is thought to be an archetypal English tune, though ironically it is the exact tune as the Irish folk tune Stars of the Country Town, which suggests that borders might be more pliable then we like to think of. It would be a bit of an inside joke, but for a hymn about the failures of national borders, it is one that fits. There are also less insidery reasons to make this switch. Kingsfold is a rousing anthem , whose energy matches the wonder and awe of the natural world found in the lyrics. As well, t here is a modesty, and an ease to singing that provides a useful correction to some of the other options triumphalism.

From Untitled Album

land carpet designed to look like the landscapes from the air.

interesting article on the first child ever diagnosed with autism.


Gold Panda are a ryhtymic, abstract, band from London, Quitters Raga is a way of melding classical indian music to modern electronic methods of cut and paste. It is geniunely beautiful, with the starting and starting of the electronic noise nestling into the drone and repetition of the raga's motif--not quite a remake, but fascinatingly cross cultural. The video is quite attractive as well.

semen as invisble ink

this proteshtic fin for a dolphin.

marclay's new project is to make a 24 hour video peice, cut and pasted from the clocks of fond film and television, sort of a warholian lengthed version of his telepone peice. It's a great article, esp. since most tv clocks are set to nothing resembling real time.

50 state welcome signs.


Bill Hicks on his worst gig ever.

sex abuse victim from the deaf school in minnepolis, is sueing the pope.



john cyr does these really kind of obvious, memento mori, hyper minimal shots of devolpers trays, that they are attached to a specific photographer, and a specific process has a depth that avoids otherwise.

From Untitled Album

Image from Teruyoshi Hayashida's Take IVy, a previously impossible to find book of ivy leauge fashion photography, now reissued by powerhouse books

these fotos of wisconsin taverns, avoid the anthropology and working class slumming of most of these kind of projects.

green on green octopus fabric

6 watercolours of Lohan's cour apperance--the smidge of red on the black stilletos is the mark of a true artist.

ohamerica, never change


This collection of Hi Sallys, made on the set of Inglorius Basterd, as an inside joke, suggests how intimate Menkes rship with TArintino was, and how TArintino is an almost egoless film maker--more then willing to suggest that his style and his skill rest on the genius of his editor, or the consumate skill of his actors...Menkes died this week, and the idea of film as a collabrative medium, even in the most auter of the film geek directors, is one of her legacies.

best porn title eva

9 photos of nixon on a tropical vacation.

cutest video of capybaras i might have ever seen.

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Eggleston, mid 80s.

jon watts memorial to his friend who died in iraq, is a clarion call towards the generiosity of quaker experience, and the importance of personal anecdotes, it is small, and local, and international, it features the communcation we engage in, and the failures that occur there as well.

A bronzio painting of a nude dwarf is found for the first time in 3 centuries.

virgina bans cul de sacs in new devolpments

americans puroposely infected people in Gautlemela with syphillis in the 1940s.

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Wil Barrington's portrait of me--love the body, love the beard.