"Prag.: - Assuredly I escape; for if truth and knowledge are terms correlative and interdependent, as I maintain they are, then wherever knowledge is conceivable truth is conceivable, wherever knowledge is possible truth is possible, wherever knowledge is actual truth is actual. Therefore when you point your first horn at me, I think of truth actual, and say it doesn't exist. It doesn't; for by hypothesis there is no knower, no ideas, no workings. I agree, however, that truth possible or virtual might exist, for a knower might possibly be brought to birth; and truth conceivable, certainly exists, for, abstractly taken, there is nothing in the nature of antediluvian events that should make the application of knowledge to them inconceivable. Therefore when you try to impale me on your second horn, I think of the truth in question as a mere abstract possibility, so I say it does exist, and side with common sense. Do not these distinctions rightly relieve me from embarrassment? And don't you think it might help you to make them yourself?"

"Anti-Prag.: - Never ! - so avaunt with your abominable hair-splitting and sophistry! Truth is truth; and never will I degrade it by identifying it with low pragmatic particulars in the way you propose. "(William James: The Meaning of Truth | Chapter 15 | A Dialogue)

:: note :: . . . a student hands me his latest material . . . a fresh sound . . . music that is in the process of breaking free from any formal /progressive label . . . kicking out boundaries to float somewhere new . . . not a sound rooted in place or genre or style or or even multi - mixes . . . beyond . . . his is a generation beyond international . . . beyond globalization . . . not a sound of all place (European, African, Asian, Canadian) . . . and it is not a fusion . . . the music, because they listen to all around them, is a post-national riffing - a transculural groove . . . it is music which is like a third wave revolution . . . a simple barter sent out to those that understand the echoes and sorrows of what has been lost in the process, left behind and forgotten . . . it is deeply personal . . . a personal part of your involvment with sound . . . your memories . . . listen and remember yourself . . . jamming with a cacaphony of scales and licks . . . the text is perfect "experimental bending" :

quote

They've got sharp backs and they're sticking out now

step on the cracks to make your mother shout now

for each little note that the cricket's sending

there's a worm in my throat and experimental bending

without light every color looks the same

bird can't sing if its beak is filled with shame

without light every color looks the same

did you hear about the kid who tried to beat the train?

(Jeremy Lane. The Train)

unquote

. . . the music is fun . . . bobbing & weaving . . . give it a listen JeremyLane & on ZeD cbc . . .

"IF you wonder what it means to say that art is a calling, don't miss the ethereal "Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan" at the American Folk Art Museum. "(NYTimes | ART REVIEW | 'SISTER GERTRUDE MORGAN' With an Ear for God and an Eye for Art By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN)

"As investigated by surrealists, the Marvelous is that which has been provokes a sensation that threatens the existing order and definition of reality. Over the last century, this very common human sensation has been obscured or otherwise co-opted by religious authoritarianism, patriotic mysticism, mass-media mirages, and compulsory commodity consumption. But the wild nature of the Marvelous persists, often grabbing our attention through startling dream images, lucky coincidences, and sudden manifestations of our secret, deep-seated desires. In those moments, the Marvelous strike us with a double-edged frisson of delight and fright that disorients us and provides a perceptual foothold for destabilizing the daily drudgeries of life in a capitalist State. Surrealists assert that the accumulated intensities of Marvelous experiences can help us to overcome the alienation and fragmentation so typical of contemporary existence -- by developing an appreciation for the Marvelous, we are more capable of dissolving the repressive, culturally-constructed tissue that divides perception from knowledge, imagination from physical life, inner worlds from outer worlds, and poetic contemplation from lived experience."(InterActivist INFO EXCHANGE | Oliver Katz, "Surrealist Phone Book)

"Caruzo spoke in the tongues of angels, although the fire of his words licked around the ideas he worked to express and often consumed them. Tonight again, he spoke of the children. "Their death pulled," Caruzo said, rocking. "The boy, the girl. Killed as they were. It pulled me and it sent me. Pulled others too. We were like the dry leaves, and their death was a puff of black air. For years I searched for them, and when I found them it all began." He gestured around himself at the park, the darkness. "From a leaf to a lifer," he went on. "That's me. A lifer to a leaf.""

"He burnt himself out eventually and left as he typically did: without offering firm solutions to his riddles and without saying goodnight. He rose from his haunches, turned in the soft grass and vanished into the shadows."(Timothy Taylor. Stanley Park. 10)

:: note :: . . . sometimes fiction is such a delight . . . found this recommended by the Canada Reads panal . . . only a hundred pages in . . . the Vancouver I lived in a decade ago seems caught in a delicate still life . . . it was the endowment lands which took me into some archaic primal mystery . . . Stanley Park was a domesticated, layered myth/mess . . . "But it's a story about being careful what you wish." (january magazine)

Today is Grey Tuesday

"There is no such thing as a colour, there are only colour harmonies," Mr. Molinari once said. "A given colour exists only in its shape and dimensions - and in its correlation with other colours." (Canadian abstract painter Guido Molinari dies | Canadian Press )

"To Concordia, Guido is a much-loved friend and teacher, who gave inspiring lessons in painting and drawing two evenings a week for 27 years, until his retirement in 1997. He was part of the small cadre of remarkable artists who were the foundation of the faculty in its early days and brought prestige to the Faculty of Fine Arts."(2003 Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching [~] Guido Molinari | Concordia University)

:: note :: . . . from a class work session on remembrance of war . . .

"Zappa's scorn for tenured composers of that kind of music is well documented in The Real Frank Zappa Book. For him, the whole classical scene was a cesspool of snobbishness. He regarded most orchestras as pampered bar bands, churning out covers of the classics. His dealings with them made it clear to him that they were usually more interested in exploiting his image (and money) than in dealing seriously with his music."

"Far from bridging a gap between one kind of music and another, Zappa denied that there were any real gaps, in terms of overall status or quality. It was all sound to him, all equally plunderable and manipulatable. As in the Bible's vision of a world redeemed, the low places and the high were all the same. Ben Watson, the most erudite and elephantine of Zappa critics, writes about the centrality of rubbish in Zappa's Dada-likeaesthetic . "(Globe&Mail.com | Entertainment | Firing up the classical Zappa By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN)

Leonard Schwartz

The New Babel

Babel of course is the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.

Babble is language's beginning, before its a language, while its still song.

As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallacized zero - lets call it Ground Zero.

Babel is defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire: man creates gods.

Where before stood the North and South Phallus now yawns a smoldering Cleft, smoke subject to variable breezes.

The smoke contains bodies; we breathe one another. Thus, Babel is Kabul. (vert #6 winter 2002 | Schwartz)

"Whether it is the 'profiling' by the police or Michael Moore's depiction of working class America, essentialism is usually experienced as the political convenience of the dominant society in categorizing aspects of the rest of society. . . "(Interactivist Info Exchange | RACE, "An Anarc...)

"Thinking about my own history of writing, it has become clear to me that it's not that there was poetry and then there were books; the materials and the objects were the poetry. When I'm writing it's not necessarily to communicate, it's to make something. Certain things can only exist in the form you're making; you can see things, you can understand things that can't exist in any other way. The issue of making the things comes first; . . ."

"I do a lot of work on the computer; I hate it. My body does not feel happy. I was very conflicted with video. I very much needed to make a piece that could put together movement, image, color, text, but I hated the process, the queuing up, the editing, the equipment - hours and hours of activity that I didn't love. To me, that's the worst direction in making art. Everything counts when you're making a piece, every gesture; when you're polishing, sanding: that's the work, that's part of the piece as well. Something about the electronic or digital process is distancing for me. I'm making a split, a deal, between what I want to end up with and what I'm going to do to get there. But I'm sure that other people must find pleasure in the process."(Livres de Poètes: Meredith Stricker | scroll to end)

(via wood s lot)

:: note :: . . . spent no time in front of a computer three years ago . . . it does change one physically . . . my body does resist . . . the back . . . the eyes . . . my experience has been rather than distance the portal creates a sense of connection . . .

"I was certainly influenced by Max Ernst's "Fatagaga" collages, made at the end of the First World War, and by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who took the stuff of the real world - the junk, the rejected material, the scattered shards - and put it together and said, "This is art." That appeals to me personally as well as aesthetically."(All About Mee)

:: note :: . . . a new project starts gestation . . .

. . . Urs Widmer's Top Dogs . . . Satire . . . overarching political and cultural satire into a "psychopathological" (from the program notes) satire . . . the corporate class elicits our pity and we can't help but be tinged with self righteous satisfaction . . . I'm not them! . . . the structure is many disjointed short scenes resulting in an episodic and scurrilous show . . . comedy, music, and gender play fuse to ridicule . . . to belittle the messy realities of those elite (a miserable elite it is) who desire control . . . precisely acted in a sparse, clinical environment we laugh smugly . . . the writing has bold strokes which allows for collective imagination that the director, actors and audience participate in with joy . . . yet intensity occupies the territory of meanings . . . the mutual making of meanings . . . great satire has the distance, ambiguity and ambivalent facility to be conscious of itself . . . making us more conscious . . .

"Structure of feeling can be quickly defined as 'the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society'"(City of Sound | Structure of Feeling)

"Raymond Willaims used the term structure of feeling to designate the emotional bonding generated by values and practices shared by a specific group, class, or culture. The concept includes ideology, in the sense of an articulated structure of beliefs, but also ranges beyond it to encompass collective desires and concerns below the conscious level. Williams, for much of his academic life a professor of drama at Cambridge University, applied structure of feeling both to the general dynamics of culture and to the specific interaction that occurs in theatrical communication. The term suggests both the rich images that spark immediate "feeling" from audience members and the underlying "structures" that generate these images. Is there, then, a general structure of feeling in successful community-based theater, and , if so, how might one describe and analyze it?"(Performing Democracy. Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus, Editors. 35)

:: note :: . . . long ago connected the structure of feeling with the intelligence of feeling . . . later moved into a broader understanding that needs more specifics . . . the (re)search continues . . .

". . . i wanted to train my heat to really feel."(love letters)

"So when I told Wiri that I didn't appropriate anyone's culture, it was true. I didn't write the brown into this story - or the white. If it's there, the cast put it there. I don't even appropriate my own culture. I can't afford to. I tell stories. Those stories come from the people I know, have met or have heard about. And they are always about the people. Not their race or culture. However much I celebrate it, that is not what it is about. Don't come to The Sons for the culture. Come for the story and you will be better fed."(Guardian Unlimited | Art News | 'Who do you think you are?' Lennie James)

"The resurgence of the theatre of fact is perhaps suggestive of a deeper problem for writers, namely that modern life in its unimaginable complexity seems to defy invention itself. The convention-bound play, assembling representative characters in symbolic spaces to rehearse the concerns of the hour, looks as capable of capturing the zeitgeist as a fishing net is of landing a blue whale. So where does this leave a playwright such as myself, committed to the truth of fiction? "(Guardian Unlimited | Arts News | The truth behind the facts Steve Waters)

(both via ArtsJournal.com)

"I have formed the view that it is intrinsic to knowledge that it be actionable. By this I do not mean that it necessarily provokes action, but that it enables it. From this viewpoint the question is documentation knowledge? doesn't matter very much. Any particular document may, or may not, be knowledge; to different people, and at different times. Everything depends upon the context."(Curiouser and curiouser! | Everything depends upon the context Matt Mower)

:: note :: . . . there are no answers . . . no easy, clear statements . . . awarness and consciousness of the act is all that can be demanded . . . be prepared to be held accountable by one & all . . . know the context & what matters . . . move beyond simple ideology . . . be sensitive to shifting perspectives . . .

". . . I am more and more convinced of that fact that colonization is actually the gobbling up of subjective and intersubjective reality by those that wield the tools of measurement, observation and metrics. The deep effect of losing the richness and life of the subjective world, is an oppression that runs so far down that people may not even be aware of its effects. The fact that liberation has come to mean control over the ways in which societies are governed and measured proves this to a point. If we simply take over the objective world, without activating the subjective, we are only prolonging the struggle, instead of winning the war."(Parking Lot)

"The show of 2,000 students in the street was good, but sadly, it was a waste of potential. After all, last year we saw the largest demonstrations in history accomplish nothing in the past year with regards to the invasion of Iraq. On the tuition front, we have both organized rallies that easily rivaled the one held last week. Since the last Day of 'Action' in 2002, tuition fees have more than doubled in BC."(resist.ca | Day of Distraction)

:: note :: . . . the cynicism grows & grows . . . action is deemed distraction . . . the futility is daunting . . . yet the students who surround me are vital, brilliant and fresh . . . they are even full of joy not anger . . . the resilence of new energy is remarkable . . .

Discipline and after

A few days ago
one of the dead came back from the tomb
wearing the same old smile,
his everyday clothes restored from the ashes
to which his belongings had been reduced.
He gave quite a complete account of himself.
All around was full of light in water.
He said what he wanted to say
then left like a letter.
My younger brother,
his heart and body polished pure,
saw him off standing close beside me.

We spend every afternoon like this now
welcoming and saying goodbye.
Occasionally I hear talk from the dead
of the Korea of centuries past.
They usually leave out a few things, I think.
After all, how could they say everything
in one brief resurrection?
Their life's story, before and after they died,
is more than a few words can tell.

After seeing them off, my brother is silent
like an empty bowl just lying there.
He always welcomes our visitors from beyond the tomb
wearing the same unlined clothes.
Eerie taboos of transparent glass
spread along the corridor.
Responding simply in a quiet voice
to what they say,
his heart is open, ready to receive everything, alone.

We always spend the afternoons welcoming
and taking leave of guests from beyond the tomb.
The sunlight beyond the windowpane is a sundial
by which we tell the time.
Each word my brother hears from the dead
is first dried in the sun, then kept in reserve.
How very true! This world is the other world,
this world is the tomb, huge and vast.
Tomorrow, let's not say goodbye to those that come,
let's have them stay and live with us.
(THE SOUND OF MY WAVES : Poems by Ko Un Translated by Brother Anthony of Taize and Young-Moo Kim)

"Every artist inside, must be outside-inside. for example, artists in schools must be committed first to learning (learning themselves and awakening learning in others)."

"Learning is always anti-institutional." (Bad glamour. Erik Ehn found in Theatre in crisis?)

"Like many grade 12 students, Jaya Ceeley wants to go to university. But every year costs are becoming more of a consideration. To afford university, Ceeley will have to work part-time through his final semester of high school."(Martlet | Big ol' rally for lower tuition by Patrick White)

(Pulse Flow | B.C. students rally against tuition hikes Published: Fri-6-Feb-2004 By Stephen Hui, British Columbia Bureau.)

(more coming soon)

"Hundreds of Okanagan University College students rallied Wednesday to protest skyrocketing tuition fees. Students hit the bricks in Kelowna and Penticton as part of a national day of action."(CHBC News | Tuition fee protests | Web Posted February 4, 2004)

"Student protests at Berlin universities are continuing. Students at the city[base ']s Technological University (TU) went out on strike four weeks ago and two other Berlin universities, Humboldt University and Free University, have since joined the protest against budgetary and education cuts being pushed through by the Berlin Senate. "(WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Germany | Student protests at Berlin universities By Andreas Reiss and Marius Heuser | 5 December 2003)

:: note :: . . . too many students denied further education due to $ . . . too many students complacently accept this situation . . . too many of us pay lip service to a educated culture and refuse to support even the idea of education . . . wish students from all over would activate & mobilize . . .

Uta Hagen, 1919-2004 Respect for a master actor and teacher who inspired others through the unmatched sublimity of her example (Village Voice | Features)

"The film is best described as Bertolt Brecht-meets-Walker Evans. Amusingly glum voiceovers ensure that we never become seduced by the Dogme-style hand-held images. Shot entirely in a studio, it uses few props and has the houses of the Depression-hit town marked out in chalk."(arts.telegraph.co.uk | Arts home | Kidman kept in the dark)

Playwright with a gift for subverting theatrical conventions . . .

"James Saunders, who has died aged 79, was one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from the wave of new British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Saunders used drama to play with philosophy, psychology, history and the vicissitudes of language, a style. . . "(The Guardian | Jim Irvin | Thursday February 5, 2004)

:: note :: . . . this last week students in drama 117 were working through Saunders' "Scenes from After Liverpool" . . . they were doing a splendid job . . . fun, faithful and deep . . . today they presented their work for the final time & then I surfed onto this news . . . a fitting memorium & testament to the immortality of play . . . we honour & cherish the gifts we have been given . . .

". . . a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. . ." (more . . .)

(via jill/txt)

:: note :: . . . networked literature & the "gift" . . . hypertext as gift . . . thanks . . .

Kottke: Guidelines for learning Nice, concise piece of learning wisdom I just rescued from my email inbox.

1. Release the need to be right.
2. Welcome one another's thoughts and opinions.
3. Suspend judgment.
4. Listen for understanding, not rebuttal.
5. Make personal statements by using "I" rather than "you".
6. Clarify first what was said before you challenge someone.
7. Take time to reflect.
8. Lean into discomfort.
9. Respond first to what was said before making your point.
10. Have fun.
(Seb's Open Research)

:: note :: . . . this guideline has been floating around for a bit now but wanted it here at the beginning of a new term as a reminder every year . . .

Heart stopped
when outside
justice.
An ethic disguises,
in callous breath,
a solitary
secretive loyalty
to excessive ownership
the primordial weakness.
(rwm)

"When I knead the
lump of air, our
nourishment, it is
leavened by the letters'
shimmer from the
lunatic-open pore"
(Paul Celan, trans. by Pierre Joris)

Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back before by laying bare: it does not comprehend (stictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence. (Maurice Blanchot,The Infinite Converstation, trans. S. Hanson.)

In poetry we are no longer referred back to the world, neither to the world as shelter nor to the world as goals. In this language the world recedes and goals cease; the world falls silent; beings with their preoccupations, their projects, their activity are no longer ultimately what speaks. (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock.)