My Ten Favourite, from the inside:

1) The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. Erica Jong Fear of Flying
2) Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree. The Pillow Book of Shei Shonegran
3) The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Atwood, Handmaidens Tale.
4) California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward. Isherwood
"Los Angeles" from Exhumations
5) His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage. Fielding, Tom Jones
6) When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. David Wojnarowicz
7) A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album
8) “The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
9)The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge Nicholoson Baker, Mezzaine
10) “ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Delaney, Babel 17.

Rachel and I have started a Kickstarter to fund materials for a show at Xspace in January. Link here


What I am most proud of, is the amazing images Rachel has made to fund raise Here are three:

Anthony

Incredulity problem , those who make reports
hasten to yr piety

arguing in favour of their own truth, their own beliefs

pleasures associated with food

disciplined himself

let him who is idol, let him not eat (anthony)

thjis idea that working w/ hands, the physical, leads to appettites being absorbed

that moving passage 12-13, where it notes how much Anthon noticd his community--that he was not isolated, but h noticd the virutie, the piety of those around him, and how that community building was resoponisble for the demonic?

the devil..."first attempted to lead him away from the discipline, suggesting memories of his possesion, the gaurdianship of his sister, the bounds of kinship, love of money, and of glory, the manniforld pleasures of food, the relaxation of life, and finally the rigiours of virture" (33)

disturbing slep, restricting appetite,

 from thots to actual human voice
from dragon to human
from narrative to flesh? (section 12, where h talks about actual gold)

see how it starts from phantasm, from "conspicious and filthy pleasures" to pretend to frighten him, phantasms,

angel coming at you in the night are not actually angles: "so when they come at you at night, and they wish to tell you what the future holds, or they say, we are the angels, disregard them, for they are lying. And should they commend your aescetism and call you blessed. ignore them and have nothing to do with them..." (35)

they then become invisbile at the sign of the lords cross.

the anecdote about the very tall demon saying that he is providence, and he will of the lord, and it is the will of the ord for Anthony to rest, and eat bread, but Anthony knows whats going on, puffs at him, speaks to him, says the word of god, and the fucker goes all immaterial (40)

"the antics of demons like smoke"





what are these, ghosts, vampires, sodomy demons.

i bet they are sodomy demons

the question of fear, but also spch acts

can you tell the difference /w an angel and some non angel like creature via them saying "be not afraid"
qoutes gabrieal



(work thir fraud by being transfigurd) (28)

prophetic speech act
oracle vs prophecy



"the foe had not been powerful enough to beguile him with bodily pleasures"

fasting
once a day
once very two days
once every four days

and then just bread and salt

list structure

the souls intensity is strong when the pleasures of the body are weakened

"long fill the desert w/ his discipline

the enclosed tomb. the starving almost death, the seeing him again, the revivng him again, obvs x, but also perhaps jeromes sealed founation body asd tomb

also, the passage where mor than one of his friends com, and seek Anthonty,  thinking he might be dead, and he comes out singing

this weird tension b/w the bodily denail, th sealing away, the acetic, and the community building, the reconciling and the like (all the monks came to him, asking to hear a discourse)

list of animals--each of these animals moved w/ the accordance of his forms--natural and unnatural?
crocodiels

lots of hyenas, sent in the night, which is like, if you live in the fucking desrt, isnt there a god damned hynea hanging out w/ it being sent by a demon


"putting off the body then, which is corruiptle, we return it back, which is incorruptible" (16)
soul as a trust, to keep oure, to work agaisnt "sordid things"

demons who see monks "labouring gladly and  advancing" in work put stumbling blocks in the way (23)

anthony as a t heological text about job


preparing hospitality
turning back, and feeling the things of the world
the anecdote about the father and the daughter, th call to preach to all those he encountered


the lord silncing the demnos thru the act of quaiting scrpture,
interested in this problem of bdily speech or the advancing of bodily speech
(Therefore the Lord thy God, silenced the demons. but it is fitting for us, since we have learned from the holy ones to act as they acted and to emulate their courage.(27)
\
that weird passage that argues against herssey
also what is worse--christ as chriminal, christ as human body, even christ as one of the crawling things, vs "pederasts and adulterers"

also not greek wisdom , not hllenic, not constructed thru argments direct thru jesus christ

protect the mind frmo foul thots
he didnt cacall the meletians evil or discourdant, just not wrong


daily martyrd y his conciousn

people rapping on doors



questions:
bear to learn letters vs the piety of written texts
just outside his own villag, isoaltion, monastaries as another kind of mailies
trading kinship
actual real life devil or
thebans wtf?
what does it mean when the demon is departed

The reviews of the new De Mann Bio and Hedigger's recently published black notebooks, it is not a good day to be a Theoretically minded worker.

four things:

a) i think that De Man was a psychopath and a fascist. I think that Althusser killed his wife. I find Foucault sexual ethics deeply problematic, as is his misogyny. I think that stating these things is necessary. They do not get a free pass from the rigours of their own methodology.
b) i have spent a lot of time trying to work out the implications of what this means. I think on my darkest days, the idea that this was an obfuscating technique, startlingly anti-democratic. But I think lots of things--i think that it is useful to see how texts work, i think that new ideas require new language, i have no problem with the technical and sometimes it aids precision, and sometimes a cant is useful. i think that obscurity is not evil, i think that not everyone needs to understand everything, i think that what appears to be clear writing refuses discourse, i think that the polysemic is often a moral good, i think that aesthetic writing, important writing, can come from places that are dark or evil. I also think we have to have a serious chat about why fascism, and antisemitism was such a useful category for european thinkers in the first half of the 20th century--why it was so seductive. Even after the discovery of the camps, I wonder if it has even gone away.
c) I think that often writers lives are messy, and not very complete. I also like that he pushed his way into the academy when the academy would not let him in. I find that post 1970s North American insituites are often for many reasons, more willing to provide refuge for thinkers that might be too toxic elsewhere. Sometimes this is a vice, but more often it is a virtue. (see Said, Bhaba, Derrida, even Strauss)
d) de Man makes me reconsider if the work I do is worth doing. I think there are very few excuses for him. I also find his work less impt than others. The beginning of that Menad essay, when he talks about the work happening elsewhere, or it would have worked elsewhere is a comfort, but he does provide some excellent ammunition.

i haven't read the biography.

twelve for shrove--only one from the department, and lots from out of town, but slowly working out a community here.