http://chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/

BOOLANYO RULES (EXCERPT: 2666)

A month later, Ansky joined the party. His sponsors were Ivanoc and one of Ivanov's ex-lovers, Margarita Afanasievna, who worked as a biologist at a Moscow institute. In Ansky's papers, the event is likened to a wedding. It was celebrated at the writers' restaurant and then they made the rounds of several Moscow dives, hauling along Afanasievna, who drank like a condemned woman and who very nearly lapsed into an alcoholic coma that night. In one of the dives, as Ivanov and two writers who had joined them sang songs of lost loves, of glances never to be returned again, of silken words never to be heard, Afanasievna awoke and, with her tiny hand, grabbed Ansky's penis and testicles through his trousers. 

"Now that you're a Communist," she said, avoiding his eyes, her gaze fixed on an indeterminate spot between his navel and his neck, "you'll need these to be of steel."

"Really?" asked Ansky. 

"Don't play the fool,” said Afanasievna’s hoarse voice. “I understand you. From the start, I’ve known who you are.”

“And who am I?” Asked Ansky.

“A Jewish brat who confuses his desires with reality.”

“Reality,” murmured Ansky, “can be pure desire.”

Afanasievna laughed.

“What should I make of that?” she asked.

“Whatever you like, but take care, comrade,” said Ansky. “Consider certain kinds of people, for example.”

“Who?” asked Afanasievna.

“The ill,” said Ansky. “Tuberculosis patients, say. According to their doctors, they’re dying and there’s no arguing with that. But for the patients, especially on some nights, some particularly long evenings, desire is reality and vice versa. Or take people suffering from impotence.”

“What kind of impotence?” asked Afanasievna without letting go of Ansky’s genitals.

“Sexual impotence,” said Ansky. “The impotent are more or less like tuberculosis patients, and they feel desire. A desire that in time not only supplants reality but is imposed on it.”

“Do you think,” asked Afanasievna, “that the dead feel sexual desire?”

“Not the dead,” said Ansky, “but the living dead do. When I was in Siberia I met a hunter whose sexual organs had been torn off.”

“Sexual organs!” said Afanasievna mockingly.

“His penis and testicles,” said Ansky. “He peed through a little straw, sitting or on his knees, crouching.”

“You’ve made yourself clear,” said Afanasievna.

“Well, anyway, once a week, no matter the weather, this man (who wasn’t young, either) went into the forest to look for his penis and testicles. Everyone thought he would die someday, caught in the snow, but the man always came back to the village, sometimes after an absence of months, and always with the same news: he hadn’t found them. One day he decided to stop looking. Suddenly, he seemed to age: one night he looked fifty and the next morning he looked eighty. My detachment left the village. Four months later we passed through again and asked what had happened to the man without attributes. They told us he had married and was leading a happy life. One of my comrades and I wanted to see him: we found him preparing his gear for another long stay in the forest. He looked fifty again, instead of eighty. Or perhaps even forty in certain parts of his face: around the eyes, the lips, the jaw. Two days later, when we left, I believed the hunter had managed to impose his desires on reality, which, in their fashion, had transformed his surroundings, the village, the villagers, the forest, the show, his lost penis and testicles. I imagined him on his knees, pissing, his legs well apart, in the middle of the frozen steppe, northward bound, striding toward the white deserts and blizzards with his knapsack full of traps, utterly oblivious of what we call fate.”

“That’s a pretty story,” said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky’s genitals. “A pity I’m too old and have seen too much to believe it.”

“It has nothing to do with belief,” said Ansky, “it has everything to do with understanding, and then changing.”

guys, george c.'s kind of a badass.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/dream_on.html

http://gawker.com/5865681/the-horrifying-post+date-rant-allegedly-sent-by-an-investment-manager

culture porn

http://www.colorsmagazine.com/blog/article/the-future-is-fake

PERSOnal STATEMENT #1

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What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field — such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities — and what you have gained from your involvement.

I used to be a Music major.

This was my logic at the time (i.e. straight out of high school):

1) I enjoy listening and playing experimental music

2) I want to compose experimental music

3) I want the capital-P public to listen to it

4) Therefore, I must major in music and acquire this degree from a musically distinguished university.

My first semester consisted of taking lots of music classes and I was determined to get this degree (as I was completely confident that my musical melodies and ideas could shake the world, if only just a little bit). My first semester went real good and I was soon signing up for a few Honors courses plus a couple music courses for the following spring semester (i.e. the semester when I finally learned how to think critically).

This Is What Happened:

(Alt. title: How I Swallowed Logic)

One of the Honors courses I took my first year was a second semester of English (i.e. “Critical Thinking, Composition, and Literature”). My teacher taught me how to think critically, and eventually I wrote a paper entitled, “The Immortality of Writers: A Study of Ethos in Charles Bukowski’s “the hatred for Hemingway”,” where I argued that ethos should have no part in justifying how great or insignificant a particular author is because it literally will attach “blinders” to our own interpretations and our judgments of quality; that ethos can literally make authors like Ernest Hemingway immortal where culture just sort of shrugs and says, “Yeah man… Hemingway is good” as if it were the 11^th Commandment.

Reality Check:

(Alt. title: How Pride and Newly Swallowed Logic/Critical Thinking Were Able to Hang)

(Alt. title: How the Icy Waves of Reality Woke Me From My Drunken Haze)

(Alt. title: Fug, So This Is What Cognitive Dissonance Feels Like?)

I condemned the exploited use of ethos in literature and at the same time, I wanted to exploit ethos in a way that would get my experimental music to the capital-P public’s ears. But not really. What I really wanted was the capital-P public to pseudo-listen to my music, look at my music degree from – insert musically distinguished university – , and just sort of shrug and say, “Yeah man… This guy is good.”

At this point, it was very clear and obvious that I needed to rid myself of this frightfully embarrassing hypocrisy and this is what happened: I swallowed my pride, and denounced music as my major.

I am an Agriculture major.

This is my logic:

            1) I want to learn how to farm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJHP-g7Cfc

http://christopherrobertjones.blogspot.com/2011/11/ucd-protets-off-hook.html

this is why i wanna be a farmer and hey i got into ucd

The Immortality of Writers: A Study of Ethos in Charles Bukowski’s “the hatred for Hemingway”

When we hear the names Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Orwell, why do we automatically assume these authors are good? It’s as if some one decided for the greater population that these authors are great, that we will teach these authors in our schools, and they will stay great and immortal. But these authors all failed in at least one book. We’ve all heard of The Old Man and the Sea, but who has heard of Across the River and Into the Trees? We’ve heard of The Great Gatsby, but what about The Beautiful and the Damned? If the New Critics, critics who interpreted works solely from the words on the page, dominated American criticism from 1940s to the 1960s, then how did these authors become so immortal (Meyer 1538)! I’m interested in the cause of their immortality, or what type of interpretation leads us to believe authors are good. An analysis of the poem “the hatred for Hemingway” by Charles Bukowski, will demonstrate the need for a condemnation of a biographical approach in interpreting literature. In other words, that the ethos of a writer should have no part in justifying his or her greatness or insignificance.

In his poem “the hatred for Hemingway,” Charles Bukowski strips Hemingway of his ethos and immortality as “one of the great American authors” through his own thoughts. Bukowski introduces his poem first by writing:

I gave Hemingway’s last book / Islands in the Stream / a bad review while most others gave him / good reviews. (1-5)

Bukowski isolates himself from “most others,” possibly literary critics who gave Hemingway “good reviews” on his latest novel, by writing that he gave it “a bad review.” The word choice of “a” here seems to suggest that he is the only person to give Hemingway one bad review, as the rest (“most others”), gave him a variable amount of good reviews. Further, we see that Bukowski limits his, and literary critics’, review to two over-generalized terms, “good” or “bad,” as these words are used to describe an entire novel, and possibly all of Hemingway’s other works. Through this contrast, we see that Bukowski seems to harshly criticize Hemingway far more than literary critics, but as Bukowski continues to write, “But the hatred for Hemingway…is incomprehensible to me” (6,9), we see that Bukowski actually likes Hemingway. We now understand that Bukowski criticizes Hemingway from a formalist perspective, critiquing the language, tone, and structure of the piece of art (Meyer 1538). From a formalist interpretation of his works, Bukowski disregards Hemingway’s intentions, historical influence and biography, instead of letting them guide him in his interpretations and likings. Bukowski further suggests that he may be unlike the literary critics that assume Hemingway’s greatness because he has been declared so! Bukowski throws Hemingway off his pedestal, but Bukowski’s point is to throw Hemingway off his pedestal for everyone as he begins to portray Hemingway as nothing but a mortal man.

Bukowski forces us to view Hemingway as Ernest, a normal human being, not an immortal celebrity. Bukowski strips Hemingway of his glory as he writes:

Hemingway pulled those big fish / out of the sea and endured a few wars / and watched bulls die and shot some / lions; / wrote some great short stories / and gave us 2 or 3 / good early / novels… (63-70)

With words like “some,” “few,” and “or,” Bukowski almost invites the reader to question Hemingway greatness. Instead of a great Hemingway, Bukowski shows us that Hemingway did what normal people do. People are fishermen and soldiers, and people go to bullfights, hunt, and write. Hemingway is no longer glorified for enduring x amount of wars and visiting x amount of bullfights and writing x amount of great stories. Hemingway is just an author who waves to “some kids going to school” (73). Bukowski continues to write:

then he stuck that gun into his mouth like a soda straw / and touched the trigger / and one of America’s few immortals / was blood and brain across the walls and / ceiling… (76-80)

He literally shows us how mortal Hemingway was, that he was nothing but “blood and brain across the walls and ceiling.” The extended run on sentence of the stanza makes Hemingway’s suicide seem insignificant by using a seemingly unrelenting list of all that makes Hemingway mortal. We now see that the suicide isn’t what makes Hemingway mortal, the de-glorification of Hemingway makes Ernest mortal.

Bukowski seems to condemn the biographical interpretation of Hemingway works. Bukowski introduces this idea in the dialogue between his thoughts, and the “unsuccessful female writer.” As the female writer begins to argue against Hemingway’s uniqueness and importance in literature, she ironically shows us how interpreting Hemingway’s literature from a biographical perspective predisposes us to over-analyzing, and therefore, keeps Hemingway immortal.

The female writer’s analysis of Hemingway is portrayed through stanzas that bring outside biographical information into her logic. She interprets Hemingway’s short story The Good Lion as representing Hemingway’s suicide as Bukowski writes:

shooting lions only meant shooting / himself? she asked. does it? does / it? not when those lions were unarmed and / he was coming at them with a rifle and / didn’t even have to / come close. really! poor little Heming- / way. / it’s true, I thought, the lions don’t carry / rifles. (22-30)

Yes, Hemingway did travel to Africa more than once to go on safaris and hunt, and yes Hemingway did shoot himself, but does the biographical information provide any useful insight to what Hemingway might have been trying to say? Bukowski’s internal snide remarks seem to poke fun at the writer’s biographical interpretation, and as a result, it almost forces the reader to find the irrationality in her logic and interpretation.

            It seems that in adopting a biographical approach, the idea that an author’s life may help one in interpreting a piece correctly, distracts from the reader’s own interpretation, especially in interpreting Hemingway (Meyer 1540)! Hemingway did write stories and novels based on his life experiences, but they seem to be written more from a journalistic approach, rather than a novelistic.

As the female writer in Bukowski’s poem says, “Hemingway never got to be more than a / journalist” (46-47), then shouldn’t we interpret Hemingway, from a journalistic approach, a formalistic approach, a New Critic approach? These approaches don’t allow one to vehemently like or dislike Hemingway as a person, one can only vehemently like or dislike his art one piece at a time, because a journalist is nothing more than a presenter of truth; a journalist has an obligation to the truth, far more than the novelist, to allow readers to assess information themselves; a journalist should provide a forum for public discussion of criticism and compromise (Principles of Journalism). A journalist is supposed to tell you “what he saw” (48), not “what it meant” (49). A journalist is supposed to present the discussion, not the discussion itself.

Consider this:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

It seems to suggest nothing but the setting; that a man is laying in the forest on a mountain, next to a stream and a road during a summer day. That’s it. The author steps back to present the truth, and lets the reader interpret it. Furthermore, how could one love or hate this paragraph unless one loves or hates truth itself? Only after being told it is the first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, do we begin to make meaning of it’s greatness or insignificance. One might say, “The first paragraph is great because it seems to foreshadow everything that is to come in the novel.” But still that interpretation can only be articulated after one has read the book. Another might say, “The first paragraph is terrible because Hemingway doesn’t tell us what anything means.”

Biographical approaches to interpreting literature seem to attach blinders to our head. There might be something worth noticing with our peripherals, but because the biography acts as an imaginary road, we seem to only interpret what isn’t in front of us, just as the female writer in Bukowski’s poem could not see outside the fact of Hemingway’s suicide. What we should be focusing on is the real road that we missed the turn for, the real words on the page; the language the author uses, the tone the author conveys, the structure of the page and story, the themes that we can support with evidence from the text, not with biographical information.

            It seems that as humans, we put the opinions of people with Dr. in front of their names, before our own opinions. The opinions of others seem to qualify the greatness or insignificance of writers. But these opinions also acts as blinders. If we respect a person enough, it seems that we will believe what they will say, and if we investigate ourselves, we are already predisposed to the idea that this writer or that writer is good. We are therefore completely biased, and it seems that the only way to rid ourselves of this bias, or at least challenge it, is to interpret literature from a formalist perspective.

            Although there may not be a solution in ridding ourselves of the immortality of individuals, one way might be to interpret literature as if the author never existed. It is also important to suggest that the biographical interpretation of literature may not even be our faults! With things like “About the Author” pages in books, gold, silver or bronze stars saying “Best Seller,” or the common “Winner of the ______ Prize in Literature,” maybe the biographical interpretation or ethos of a writer is the media’s fault. Although I am only an unpublished college student without a Dr. before my name, one might consider listening to what I have to say. And if not, at least listen to someone hopefully not immortal anymore:

The writer himself, if he is a good enough writer, is nothing and the book is everything. (Preface)

-Ernest Hemingway

check it:

http://freejazz-stef.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-listen-to-music.html

newspapers!

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12555828808/zell-to-l-a-times-drop-dead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0

this rules

names vj supgurl....thx

http://www.esquire.com/features/james-frey-1111

anyone seen this?

If you have, did you like it? and if you haven't maybe you should if you are bored.
Jean-Michel Basquiat : The Radiant Child

Hi

hey so like since its confirmed that none of us really have any friends, i suggest we go to somewhere tomorrow night (i.e. the pannikin in del mar is open later) because it is halloween. we can discuss our insecurities over hot chocolates and wife beaters (our uniforms/costumes, thx)... i think rob dog is coming and i hope you are too...
i have class till proly round 630 or 7 so ill see you cats round then?
Also this is my number if you decide to come: 7604736375

hey check your e-mail

hey

Bad Ass Article

Courtesy of Curran Dwyer

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/

Murakami Book

Here's the link to the book we're reading next.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_the_Border,_West_of_the_Sun

Bukowski

THIs is an essay I wrote for Burman's class bout Bukowski... here you go Curran (be aware that I still like the ideas, but don't necessarily like how they came across now that i re-read it...)

The other day, I called a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a week or so, and asked if he wanted to get a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop. He agreed and 20 minutes later, I was picking him up from his house and we were on our way. I very much enjoy my friend’s company and while I was driving to pick him up, I found myself thoroughly excited. He is very interesting, kinetic[1], has a lot to say, and will always make an awkward encounter at the local coffee shop, for me, much less awkward

This local coffee shop that we went to is called the Pannikin. The Pannikin is located in a historic Santa Fe Railroad Station. They do all of their roasting right there in the café, and have quite a nice ambiance when it isn’t too crowded and when I go the Pannikin I typically expect a good cup of coffee. Maybe now I expect a good cup of coffee because I have tasted it before, and do like it. But even the first time I ordered a cup of coffee there I expected a good cup of coffee.

Let me walk you through my first time at the Pannikin. The first thing I noticed about the Pannikin was the building [as I said before, old Santa Fe Railroad Station]. It was interesting enough that when I rounded the corner and saw some old pictures of the station, I stopped and looked at them for a bit longer than I expected. I continued my journey and walked past the patio that was very crowded, and finally found my place in line, which was at the door’s threshold. I began looking around and found to my right, a retail area where some one was buying a pound of coffee. I took a step forward in line and began looking at the various coffee cups and knickknacks and then at the open beam work of the building. Again I took a step forward. My eyes caught sight of a tuba, and beside it a plow, hanging from the ceiling, and next was the menu [which was hand-written and decorated with chalk]. I took another step forward and noticed a cute girl pouring a cup of coffee. I immediately looked down at the pastries and found the pastries that I would buy if I had enough money [a pie with chocolate chips on top[2]]. I then looked over to my left and found a man ripping open a bag of sugar on a old stove [turned into a condiment bar], then pouring it into his coffee, and then properly using the correct amount[3] of half & half for his coffee size. Another step forward and now it’s the cute girl standing on the opposite side of the counter asking me how I am doing[4].

So this was where my friend and I got our cups of coffee and a chocolate cream pie. After bumping into someone that would have been awkward with out him, we found a table to enjoy our treats and converse. We started talking of this new girl[5] he had been seeing, and after a bit he said, “She’s the apple that by looking at it, you know would make a really good pie, but you can’t reach it. You know it’s out of reach and that it doesn’t really want to be picked, but you still know it would make a really good pie.”

My friend can relate anything in life to three things. Those three things are: baseball[6], an apple tree, and painting houses. Not only can he relate anything to those three things and do it on a regular basis, but also he uses it as moral guidance. For me, all of these ideas are interesting enough to write multiple essays on, but for our purposes today, painting houses[7] will have to do.

In our life, it seems that we always carry judgments and expectations to every interaction. For example, I expected a good cup of coffee from the Pannikin for the many reasons, and now, after tasting their coffee and qualifying its “goodness,” I expect it to be just as good [and it is]. On the contrary, when I go to the coffee shop in an old empty mall parking lot, and miraculously see that the coffee shop has it’s “open” sign flickering on and off, I expect a not so decent cup of coffee. So when that coffee is good, or lets say as good as the Pannikin coffee, it seems as if the cup of coffee is great, perhaps even better than the Pannikin because it exceeded my expectations. This idea, for me, is why the poem “bluebird” by Charles Bukowski is so beautiful.

Charles Bukowski is an American writer, and is said to be one of the most influential contemporary writers of poetry and prose. But for many reasons, Charles Bukowski is disgusting[8]. First of all, his writing is usually vulgar, unnecessary, and at times disgusting when he talks about various things like trying [and failing] to masturbate with some rubber thing some guy gave him at the bar[9]. So when Bukowski begins to talk of things that aren’t vulgar and unnecessary, like in “bluebird,” it is out of character. He exceeds my expectations because I expect him to write a bad poem about something disgusting[10] or completely unnecessary.

But this “disgustingness” may not even be the real Bukowski. Bluebird seems to be written not from the drunk, the womanizer, the loser, the asshole[11], but from what seems to be Bukowski himself[12]. He talks of how he hides his “bluebird” from the outside world[13] with cigarettes and whiskey. We can then recognize that this poem is a bit removed from this world that Bukowski usually writes a bad poem about.

Essentially, this poem acts as his bluebird because it contradicts itself. Everyone interested enough now knows this other side of Bukowski and if we pay attention, can we see this bluebird? Yes[14].

Because I expect Bukowski to be unnecessary and vulgar in his poems, when I read bluebird, it is only beautiful because it comes from Bukowski’s mouth[15]. His poem bluebird is so out of character and for that reason it is beautiful; that because Bukowski is ugly visually, orally, and in respect to his poems, bad, then when he does something good or O.K., he travels much more distance on the beauty scale than Robert Frost who is expected to write something pretty or thought provoking[16]. What I am suggesting is that “bluebird” may just be an O.K. poem, and that my interpretation of it has everything to do with the power of ethos, and that I’m O.K. with that; that expectations have everything to do with interpretations [please see footnote 7].

Bukowski as in painting houses: Bukowski is like the house on your street that has shingles and looks like shit. The paint is chipping off and it pisses you off every time you drive by it. As a[n inexperienced] door-to-door painting salesman, you finally stop in front of the house [after two years of driving by], walk up to the house, and knock on the door. You plan to ask Bukowski if he wants an estimate for the paint job, and while you are waiting [for Bukowski to answer the door], you take a closer look at one of the piece-of-shit shingles. When you touch it, the shingle falls off. Dumbfounded, you pick up the shingle, turn it over [suspecting mold], and find a beautiful bluebird color. You walk to your car [Bukowski didn’t answer], and drive home with a part of Bukowski you never knew before.

[1] By kinetic, I mean he uses his hands and body to convey lots of meaning.
[2] It was a chocolate cream pie
[3] The only way I can describe the correct amount of half & half is this: a nice dark brown
[4] If you haven’t already realized, I have just described to you, everything that would make me expect a good cup of coffee [i.e. the cute girl I fell in love with, it being crowded – crowded patio and line to door]. I reasoned that since they put so much effort into making the place look nice and interesting, that they would probably do the same with their coffee.
[5] She actually cancelled plans with him to go on a hike that morning, and actually freed up his schedule for him to have coffee [by cancel I mean her not picking up his numerous phone calls, until finally picking up and telling him she was sick and didn’t want to go on a hike that day, then showing up at the very café with some of her girlfriends]
[6] An easy example of baseball: three strikes, you’re out [i.e. strike one for her]
[7] Paint houses example and probably the controlling idea of this entire paper: Nothing is, [as good] as it seems. Basically, that if you see a house with shingles that has a great paint job, the painters probably didn’t paint the other side of the shingles so now they are molding and will have to be replaced after this years rain season.
[8] For something to be described as disgusting, for me at least, should be something that is disgusting for every one of the five senses. See: Charles Bukowski was not an attractive man. He was fat, probably had gross teeth, his head was too big for his frame DONE. Smell: I can’t imagine Bukowski smelling nice [or taking showers]. The stench of whiskey, beer, cigarettes, cigars, and sweat isn’t the best combination DONE. Hear: after all the years of smoking, his voice sounds raspy, and usually what comes out of his mouth is some vulgar remark or poem DONE. Touch: I don’t think Bukowski would feel nice for many of the reasons already stated, but also because he was fairly hairy. Taste: I don’t really want to think about this DONE.
[9] Rubber by Charles Bukowski via bukowski.net in the manuscript section.
[10] It is not my intention to give off the impression that I do not like Bukowski, because in fact, I do.
[11] Without his “other side,” or his “Bluebird” side, Bukowski would have been discarded long ago as some porn director, a crazy drunk, or an asshole, but instead, we call him a poet. People say, “I love how in your face he gets,” or “I love how he just doesn’t give a shit,” because he’s so raw, but really, he does give a shit, and yeah he’s right there in your face, but he’s got a mask on. Perhaps Bukowski does give a shit, which makes him that much more interesting! Perhaps he is merely using the conventions of an asshole as a mask because he is in fact, not a complete asshole. Bukowski isn’t an asshole because he recognizes he is an asshole. In his poem “love dead like a crushed fly,” he talks about how he was an asshole: “… wandering through my recent / past, I realized that as a / human being / I could have been much / better, nicer, kinder / not just to her / but also to / the grocery clerk / the corner paperboy / the uninvited visitor / the ragged beggar / the tired waitress / the stray cat / the sleepy bartender / and/or / etc.” By realizing that he could have been “much better, nicer, kinder,” he suggests that he has changed, or that he at least knows how much of an asshole he was. This realization is much like that of a man who questions his sanity. When one questions his sanity, one is therefore able to criticize his actions and logic, and by doing so, he is in fact not insane because the insane man never questions himself [!]. By questioning his “asshole-ness,” Bukowski is therefore, not a complete asshole [which further proves his bluebird is real!]
[12] He first writes: “There’s a bluebird in my heart that / wants to get out / but I’m too tough for him / I say, stay in there, I’m not going / to let anybody see / you.” Bukowski seems to be suggesting at something close to his heart that wants to get out. By the use of the word “heart,” it seems that Bukowski is writing of something important and true coined by the metaphor, “He spoke from his heart.” This true idea, the bluebird, wants to get out, but as he writes, “I’m too tough for him,” and “I’m not going to let anybody see you,” suggests that Bukowski is hiding something from the world that is true, and still very important. Bukowski continues to write: “I pour whiskey on him and inhale / cigarette smoke / and the whores and the bartenders / and the grocery clerks / never know that / he’s / in there” [see footnote 13]. This idea of truth is supported in this piece in that when he pours whiskey on him, and inhales cigarette smoke, he is using them as a mask to hide his true self to the whores, bartenders and grocery clerks. When one takes into consideration what most of Bukowski’s poetry is about, women, alcohol, cigarettes, we may need to assume the same logic that this is also a mask Bukowski is wearing. But this poem contradicts itself in that he is showing everyone who is interested enough, his “bluebird,” his other side. This poem is the bluebird. This suggests that all the poetry before, and perhaps after, has the same qualities of “bluebird” but that they are, by his doing, hidden. If we only take a closer look, we may realize that Bukowski has been using this mask in many poems.
[13] According to the poem, Bukowski’s world consists of whores, bartenders, and grocery clerks.
[14] Bukowski seems to use “bombs” of vulgar and crude language to distract us from the bluebird in him. For example, the poem “the shower” by Charles Bukowski can be interpreted as a scene from a pornographic movie if we don’t search for the bluebird. Consider this: “and then I wash her. . . I / stand behind her [as] / I gently soap up [her] hair / wash there with a soothing motion / then I get the backs of the legs, / the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her, / the belly, the neck, / the fronts of the legs, the / ankles, the feet, / another kiss, and she gets out first.” This poem seems to be Bukowski’s true self, his bluebird. He’s down on his knees conveying his love for her, showing his tender affection with his careful and “soothing” actions to her body. Although he does not include every detail of her body, the message is that he cares for her, washing her, not forgetting any part of the body while he kisses her and caresses her.
Consider this: “and then I wash her. . . / first the cunt, I / stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass / I gently soap up the cunt hairs, / wash there with a soothing motion, / I linger perhaps longer than necessary, / then I get the backs of the legs, the ass, / the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her, / soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck, / the fronts of the legs, the / ankles, the feet, / and then the cunt, once more, for luck. . . / another kiss, and she gets out first” This, the real version of “the shower,” has every word from the previous example [excluding the words in brackets], only this one is loaded with crude bombs such as “cunt,” “cock,” and “ass.”
[15] Which is on his unusually large head, which rests on his [weird and disgusting] body. Also, please reread footnote 8.
[16] In regards to “bluebird,” Bukowski is ugly/disgusting doing something pretty. But if Frost wrote the poem, it would be pretty doing pretty, and therefore meeting my expectations.

this guy seems cool.,,. hear The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is good an A Wild Sheep Chase?
WAIt has anyone read this g uy ?
 seems like he rules to me....

___alltheverbs

ATTN:

can we read some Richard Brautigan plz?

this should be goodread:

or this shall do:

thx

David Foster Wallace on Kafka

Really good.

http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/kafka.html

College and Super People?

Article for you: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/opinion/sunday/meet-the-new-super-people.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

Publish Post

Memory Studies

This is an interesting article from Cabinet Magazine. Some questions that may or may not be worth thinking about are: what is the impact of twitter and the 24-hour news cycle on our postmodern cultural memory? What impact do these new technologies have on our cultural short and long term memory?

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This perspective—one that bears the marks of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue and that not doing so is necessarily a failing. But despite dominating much of the debate on cultural memory, this perspective elides the many differences between all the various acts that we cluster under the term “forgetting.” Are all acts of forgetting similar enough that we can think of them, always and necessarily, as a failure? Can forgetting in fact even be a virtue? And how do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered?

Paul Connerton, a scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, has addressed these issues in a number of books, including How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989) andHow Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009). In his 2008 essay “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Connerton offers a preliminary taxonomy of forgetting, and of its various functions, values, and agents: repressive erasure; prescriptive forgetting; forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity; structural amnesia; forgetting as annulment; forgetting as planned obsolescence; and forgetting as humiliated silence. Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi spoke to Connerton by phone.

We first discovered your work through your essay “Seven Types of Forgetting.” But you’re perhaps best known as one of the leading scholars in the field of memory studies. Tell us a bit about memorystudies—what does it mean; where does it come from?

In some sense, memory studies is really a phenomenon of the last quarter century. One hundred years ago, there would have, of course, been studies of memory—by Freud, by Bergson, by Proust—but they would have been primarily interested in individual memory. What’s happened in the last quarter century has been a turn toward cultural memory. And because of this turn, the term memory studies has acquired currency.

The curious thing is this: although there has been an enormous proliferation of work on memory studies in the last quarter century—not only in English, but also in French, German, and Italian—it seems to me rather strange that no one has really set out to explain why exactly during this particular historical period, from 1980 or so on, there has been such an obsession with memory studies. I don’t think this can be understood via any single factor, but it could possibly be explained by the confluence of three powerful forces coming together. The first could be described as the long shadow of World War II, which continued to exert its impact even as late as the 1990s. Think for example of the celebrations in 1995 of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Another factor in the emergence of memory studies has been what I would call “transitional justice.” And by that I mean to say that in the 1980s and 1990s there were transformations in various countries—in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, in the states of central eastern Europe—that had had a very difficult past, on the whole a totalitarian or authoritarian past, and had moved toward a more democratic form of government. Precisely because they had had a difficult past, they had to take up a position about it, they had to examine their memories. They had to think about what attitude they should take toward the previous perpetrators and victims of injustice. And the final significant factor has been the process of decolonization, which had very significant repercussions—not only for the previous colonizing powers, in particular Britain and France—but also for the previously colonized powers, in particular Africa and India, who have sought, so to speak, to re-appropriate their own memories, whereas for the previous colonizing powers, what has emerged is what might be described as a politics of nostalgia. In fact, the famous three-volume work edited by Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, is an interesting case in this regard because although it is presented as a gigantic and cooperative academic exercise, it seems to me that there is a very powerful undercurrent of nostalgia in that volume.

What is the difference between doing memory studies and doing history?

We need to distinguish cultural memory from historical reconstruction. Knowledge of all human activities in the past is possible only through knowledge of their traces. It might be the bones buried in Roman fortifications, or a pile of stones that is all that remains of a Norman tower, or a word in a Greek inscription whose use reveals a custom: in all these cases what the historian deals with are traces, that is to say, the marks which some phenomenon has left behind. Simply to apprehend these marks as traces of something is to have gone beyond the stage of making statements about the marks themselves; to consider something as evidence is to make a statement about something else, that is to say about that for which it is taken as evidence.

Historians, in other words, investigate evidence in much the same way as lawyers cross-question witnesses in a court; they extract from that evidence information which it does not explicitly contain or even information which was contrary to the overt assertions contained in it. Historians are able to reject something explicitly told to them in their evidence and to substitute their own interpretation of events in its place. And even if they do accept what a previous statement tells them, they do this not because that statement exists but because that statement is judged to satisfy the historian’s criteria of historical truth. Far from relying on authorities other than themselves, historians are their own authority; their thought is autonomous vis-à-vis their evidence, in the sense that they possess criteria by reference to which that evidence is criticized. Historical reconstruction is therefore not dependent on social memory. It is autonomous with regard to social memory. This, I would say, is the fundamental difference between doing history and doing memory studies.

David Bunn, The forgotten art of building a good fireplace / the forgotten art of building a good fireplace / the forgotten art of building a stone wall / the forgotten art of flower cookery / the forgotten art of growing, gardening, and cooking with herbs / the forgotten art of making old-fashioned pickles, relishes, chutneys, sauces and catsups, mincemeats, beverages, and syrups: one hundred and thirty-six treasured family recipes, selected from the thousands submitted to the Old farmer’s almanac and Yankee magazine / the forgotten arts: cooking without fuel (discarded catalogue cards from the Los Angeles Central Library), 2011.

Perhaps we can go back to the roots of the premise that you take up and critique in your work: namely, that remembering and commemorating are always understood to be virtues. Where does this idea come from? Is it a modern idea? Does it come with the rise of history as a discipline itself?

I believe it has come about as a result of the particular political history of the recent era. I think that coerced forgetting was one of the most malign features of the twentieth century. For example, think of Germany after Hitler, or Spain after Franco, or Greece after the colonels, or Argentina after the generals, or Chile after Pinochet: in all these cases, there had been a process of coerced forgetting during the dictatorships. And if, on the other hand, you think of some the distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century—Primo Levi or Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Nadezhda Mandelstam—the interesting thing about them is that they took up their pens in order to combat this process of coerced forgetting. As a result of this, I think that you could say that at the end of the twentieth century there was such a thing as an ethics of memory. Memory and remembrance had acquired the quality of an ethical value.

This ethics serves as an antidote to repressive erasure, which is in fact the first kind of type of forgetting that you address in your essay.

Yes. And you can say that there’s an ethics of memory at the end of the of twentieth century in a way that I don’t think is there at the end of nineteenth or eighteenth or seventeenth centuries, and that is precisely because totalitarian regimes engaged in such severe and punitive processes of repressive erasure in the twentieth century. And remembering in this sense thus has acquired the quality of a countermovement or retrieval.

But this notion that everything must be remembered seems to have been in place already in some form in the nineteenth century, since Nietzsche is already critiquing it in “The Use and Abuse of History,” in which he addresses what you call the “excess of historical consciousness.” For him, “the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting, of a restless gathering up of everything that once was” creates a situation in which “man envelops himself in an odor of decay.”

I don’t think that Nietzsche thought about this in terms of an ethics. When I discuss him, I do it in the section that addresses what I call “forgetting as annulment.” And I think that the important thing here is that forgetting as annulment results from the problems arising from a surfeit of information. Of course, Nietzsche wasn’t the only one to have done this. Hundreds of years earlier, for instance, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Patagruel includes an extremely amusing passage in which he describes how his hero Gargantua has his brain completely clogged up with information coming from his scholastic learning. So his doctor gives him a particular kind of potion which causes him to sneeze, and when he does, all the superfluous scholastic knowledge that is blocking up his thinking comes tumbling out of his brain and, as a result of this, he’s able to think clearly. And of course the idea of forgetting as annulment can also be related to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a scientific paradigm, which for him is in some sense about forgetting. Kuhn’s idea is, among other things, that people who have presented new ideas in the natural sciences have either been very young or they have been new to the area of science where they had presented these innovative ideas. In other words, their minds have not been too clogged up with scientific memory.

Forgetting as annulment isn’t the only category in which you characterize forgetting in a positive context.

That’s right. Take prescriptive forgetting, for instance. At various time there have been, normally as the action of governments, edicts that have effectively stated that it is inadvisable to remember, and it is recommended that people forget. And this is because it was felt that national or international conflicts had created so much bad blood that the best thing to do was simply try to forget them. In contrast to the twentieth century, where the treaty of Versailles in 1919 left the Germans with a terrible memory of punitive sanctions against them, many earlier conflicts were characterized by a quite explicit attempt to forget the previous animosity. For example, the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, contained as its second clause the requirement that the previous warring parties should not only forgive, but should also forget, all the damage that had been inflicted during those thirty years. And when Louis XVIII came to the throne in France in 1814, he wanted to bring to a conclusion all the civil unrest unleashed by the French revolution. And so he commanded that there be no investigation of events between 1789 and 1814, simply because he didn’t want the anger and the vendettas that might have been caused by continuing to think about this. And just to cite one final example of prescriptive forgetting, the ancient Greeks were particularly aware of this danger of remembering—of chains of vengeance just going on and on—and in fact they built, in their main temple on the Acropolis, an altar to Lethe, the goddess of forgetting, on the grounds that the life of the city-state was actually dependent on forgetting.

This type of salutary forgetting also operates on the level of the individual in your scheme.

Yes, in what I call forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity. What I mean by that is if a person undergoes a transition to some new kind of identity—a new form of sexual identity, say, or political attachment—it would often be deleterious for them to think too seriously or too long about their previous attachments. So the best thing might be to discard these memories that wouldn’t serve any practical purpose in the ongoing life of the present. To think too closely about their previous attachment would bring about too much cognitive dissonance in terms of how their memories of the past related to their ongoing practices in the present. Just think of Saint Augustine—think about the amount of cognitive dissonance that that poor fellow would have had to endure if he had thought too long about his earlier life.

David Bunn, Forgetfulness (discarded catalogue card from the Los Angeles Central Library), 2011.

When you were talking about prescriptive forgetting, you mentioned the Greeks and that early moment where forgetting and forgiving were explicitly connected—in that context, it’s interesting to think about the etymological relationship between the wordsamnesia and amnesty. But you also write about the evolution of other words related to memory and forgetting, and in particular how long-term cultural forgetting as a process of discarding is shown in the appearance of some new words in modernity and the suppression or loss of some others. These new words includerevolution, liberalism, and socialism, as well as history andmodernity themselves, while we’ve lost words like memorous(memorable), memorious (having a good memory), memorist (one who prompts the return of memories), and mnemonize (to memorize). Perhaps this goes back to the question we posed earlier about the relationship between history and memory studies—the notion that perhaps we have not lost this sense of memory but instead have actually expanded it, refined it, and understood it differently. And now we have a different word for memory: namely, history.

Well, the period when these terms come into use is roughly speaking between 1780 and 1830, and it’s right that the term history came into use in the current sense in that same period. But it’s important to make a distinction between two uses of the word history. One use of it refers to a formal inquiry, the activity that historians do, history in the plural—the history of Charles V; the history of Caesar; the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But in the period between 1780 and 1830, what emerged was the idea of history as a collective singular, in other words the idea of history as a meta-narrative, a notion which simply didn’t exist before 1780. So this idea that there is some kind of story common to all of us belongs together with these other terms like revolution and liberalism andsocialism and modernity, and probably nation and nationhood, as well.

It might be that an important factor in the emergence of all this was the period of Napoleon’s rule in France and the Napoleonic wars. The sweep of his military campaigns throughout central Europe and even as far as Russia brought many soldiers into a hugely widespread area of activity and left a deep impact upon people’s sense that we might all be sharing in something together.

And what about these memory-related words that declined? Why were they no longer adequate for structures of feeling that we had at the time?

I think that with the development of printing, the nature of memory undergoes a huge change. Let me take a few steps back, actually quite a few, to try to explain what I mean by this. There was a Greek musician and poet, Simonides, who attended a dinner party—the roof collapsed when he was out of the room, and everyone was crushed, making it impossible to identify them. When Simonides returned, he discovered that if he focused his attention on certain parts of the room, like the corners or the columns or the ends of tables, he was able to remember who had been where at the party. And this of course became the (probably apocryphal) beginning of a particular art of memory—the “memory palace”—which lasted for about 1,800 years, roughly speaking from Cicero right through to Leibniz, until the middle of the eighteenth century. This process of remembering was used not by the majority of people, but by politicians, lawyers, and ecclesiastics—basically people who needed to remember long sequences of thought. And they needed therefore to mentally place the items in the sequence in certain parts of their memory building. This whole process was crucial for the functioning of memory for many, many years. But by the end of the eighteenth century, because of the proliferation of printing, the exercise of this particular skill of memory—visualized memory—was no longer necessary, because you could look things up. And because of this fact, these words ceased to be as important. I think they were all really clustered around this particular skill in memory. And, by the way, I do think there are certain activities in which people who have never heard of this tradition actually use this technique, even now. Two groups that come to mind immediately are taxi drivers and waiters and waitresses, both of whom have to have quite sophisticated ways of thinking about information spatially. So it’s not necessarily an elite capacity; it can be a quite everyday one.

Food is also one of your primary examples when you discuss “structural amnesia.” This was originally a term from anthropology indicating that a person tends to remember only those links in his or her pedigree that are socially important; for example, in strongly patrilineal societies, matrilineal ancestors are forgotten. In the case of cuisine, you argue that the rise of printing has had a profound impact on the way individuals remember and forget recipes handed down across generations.

Well, when you have cookbooks you can have an infinite variety of cuisines, whereas without them you are entirely dependent on remembering what grandmother or mother did. The availability of printing systematically affects which recipes can be transmitted and which are forgotten.

And the rise of printing is not the only technological phenomenon that you implicate in the process of forgetting—you also discuss the notion of planned obsolescence, shifts in industrial culture, and the relationship of these to modes of forgetting and discarding.

Yes, this is brought about by the particular stage we’ve reached in modern capitalism. I think that it can be summarized quite simply by saying that there has been a movement from the production of goods to the production of services, in other words instead of consumer durables like cars and refrigerators, what you get is the production of services. One of the effects of this shift in the focus of production is the speeding up of the turnover time of capital, which helps the process of the production of profit. But of course a side effect of this is to speed up the experience of time, and by speeding up time to bring about situations where forgetting is enhanced. Forgetting is absolutely crucial to the operation of this kind of obsolescence and absolutely basic to the functioning of the market.

If I may, though, I’d like to return to food briefly, which is very interestingly related to both remembering and forgetting. You would think that there is a very powerful connection between food and remembering—you get this in the New Testament, in the Christian liturgy, where eating is explicitly enjoined on believers as a way of remembering. And the Trobriand islanders, for instance, believe that memory is located in the stomach. And then there are fascinating works by Heinrich Böll, temporally located during World War II or in the immediate aftermath, that are about memories of hunger—his novel The Bread of Those Early Years and the short story “That Time We Were in Odessa,” for example—that evoke very powerfully the connection between hunger and memory.

But in fact whereas you would naturally think that food is connected with remembering rather than forgetting, it ain’t necessarily so—there are some interesting connections between food and forgetting. For example, if you think of people who lose contact with family or community, this often takes the form of forgetting a particular set of tastes. And anthropologists have worked on what they call “mortuary feasting,” that’s to say a form of ritual eating after death that’s intended to bring about what’s called “phased closure,” an ending to a relationship via a form of ceremonial forgetting. So the relationship between food, remembering, and forgetting can be an extremely complex one.

You mention Heinrich Böll, whose account of Germany’s wartime destruction might be understood as a rare exception to another of your categories, namely forgetting as humiliated silence.

Humiliated silence as a form of forgetting seems paradoxical, since I think you could argue that it’s more difficult to forget a humiliation than it is to forget physical pain. The German economic miracle after World War II is an important example for this type of humiliated forgetting. I think the devastation that the German people found themselves surrounded by was a constant reminder of the question of whether they were not, in fact, guilty of bringing all this on themselves, and of course a reminder of the colossal devastation to people, to personal relationships, and so on. People have talked about the economic miracle of the rebuilding of Germany as an astonishing phenomenon, and it certainly was, but one thing that has been less discussed is the fact that the frantic and, you might even say, manic effort that went into this economic restructuring was probably driven, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a desire to forget the immediate past. The devastation was a constant reminder of their humiliation and therefore the faster that could eliminate it, the faster they might hope to forget their humiliation.

It seems like the question is how to calibrate forgetting so that it in fact has value for proceeding to the next phase of history. It’s almost like mourning—if it’s done too quickly, in the wrong way, it might come back to haunt you. For example in the case of Germany’s relationship to the past, attempts to forget the past occured in ways that did not really allow the Germans to process the events of the war properly and so, in the last few decades, a number of books have come out that detail some of the after-effects of what you call “manic” forgetting. So there seems to be forgetting that has value because it’s done in the right way, at the right pace, in the right context. And then there seems to be ways of trying to forget the past that come back to cause real problems for the nation in question.

Germany is a very interesting case of forgetting, because the 1968 student revolutions there were quite different, in my opinion, from the student revolutions in other European counties. In France and Italy you did have rebellions, but this didn’t bring about the kind of generational break that it did in Germany, where the students who were involved in rebellions often spoke with indifference or contempt toward their parents. I think this arose out of the fact that their parents never spoke to them about the past, so it was an unshared past, a set of unshared memories. In fact there was a whole genre of books that came out in the 1970s in Germany called “the literature of fathers,” which was all about the mourning for the lack of relationship with the father. They’re a strange combination of a precocious autobiography of the young person and a very extensive obituary of the father—these two features are pulled together to produce what might be called a historical report.

Paul Connerton is a research associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His books include How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989), How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Jeffrey Kastner is senior editor of Cabinet.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet.

Nikolai Gogol

Hey,

We decided to post short stories by authors we like at today's meeting, for those of you who couldn't make it. This one is called The Nose by Nikolai Gogol.

http://h42day.100megsfree5.com/texts/russia/gogol/nose.html

-Nick G

Lit Club Meeting

Hey Guys,

The next meeting is on Friday September 30th at 4 pm at the Pannikin in Leucadia. See you there.

-Nick G

SUI- ROS- VIV- sui- ros- viv-

There’s a lot of self-recognition (or -reference) in post-modernism writing. This self-recognition starts out with the author’s ability to actually write down things that most people have thought about on a subconscious level, or have thought about but were unable to synthesize into words. This is where experience becomes fuzzy: we are experiencing what this witty individual (character) is experiencing, but in a way that draws from our own experience… With 03 I find myself understanding much of the (often times incredibly jumpy and difficult!) content through similar experiences that I’ve had, like similar feelings and emotions evoked through songs written by The Smiths or Joy Division, or the over-analysis of love at a time when I was also in 12^th grade… I feel very mawkish about all this stuff and is something I can identify with especially because I think that the (I wanna say memoir) novella was written perhaps after a level of maturity was reached to actually attempt to describe what the hell is going on in Our heads (after the experience (or monologue) described (I.E. NOW).

This is what I’m trying to say: is anyone else identifying with this book? Is anyone else feeling juvenile and mawkish? Is anyone not digging the book because they haven’t experienced thoughts like these (maybe you girls (probably I am most interested in your opinion girls…)?

Bottom line: 55 pages in and it’s kicking my butt…

not this one

i found a blog

Hi

I'm a go ahead and be the first poster guy:
 I've been reading books that hash out la true complexities of living in society a la genre postmodernism. And this is what I think (also I am a whole 10 pages in 03 so we'll see..): postmodernism (or a lot of what I've been reading i.e. the first 10 pages of 03) is a re-hash of some Zeno's paradox stuff. Viz. postmodernism really analyzes Zeno's stuff again and says, "Wait, how do people cross the street?" or pose, "How do people move or make decisions?" Except a lot of the postmodernism stuff involves this monologue (the master), where people cannot cross a street or move or make any decisions because people are bombarded and ruined to static by every tangential thought (monologue i.e. every link in this blog) about anything and can as a result, suffer from (more like a product of contemporary society) decision fatigue. How do we survive in a world like this with all these decisions... are they  bad? or good? (I don't know).
We got all these leaps of faith, and we're pretty sure we know where we're landing (who said we were landing?).
Anyway: I like the first 10 pages.
also: these are just so fun
and his philosophy is so good
also expecting everyone with full force in this style..

First Meeting

So, we're reading 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat by Friday September 30th. Feel free to post any thoughts/comments/musing on here.