Frankenstein vs. the World

“No one lives in the present except amnesiacs”
– Lynn Tillman

Tags: lynn tillman.

“I don’t think ‘curate’ or ‘curation’ are the right words for editing CHICAGO. I edited it. I did soliciting of manuscripts, selecting of work, layout, typing, collating, mailing. ‘Curator’ is a pukey word suggesting someone in an expensive suit with a chunky amber necklace; I think of myself in a state of late pregnancy in one of my two wearable garments nonetheless walking about the page-strewn room collating. Please PLEASE let me be the editor, you know like Harold Ross with the The New Yorker. Look up ‘curator’ in the dictionary; everything about it is awful.” — Alice Notley

Tags: alice notley.

Check out Corina Copp’s eloquent, exuberant essay on Jean Day (& her shout-out to Wild Orchids) in the August issue of Cambridge Literary Review.

The anxiety of suspension is met with the event of, albeit irregular, becoming. Writes Day in the prologue to The Literal World: “But what makes any word relevant is its ability to go and come back (‘The eager note on my door said “Call me”’), to be a ‘thing about to happen to anyone’, its unavoidable contradictions basking in the light of taboo.” But this eventuality is a bettering of the American future, feathering out as a moment of tranquility—or ataraxia, freedom from disruption. In fact, I’d say it’s this certain repose that seems more and more prevalent in Day’s newer work, such as that in Daydream. The repose is evident in the poetry’s canter, its comedy, and its contemporaneity. Living in the world partly means facing its sonics meeting its “fingerlettes”, to use a term from Barbara Guest. Guest wrote of Osip Mandelstam: “[He] once wrote of sound spilling into fingers. That could be the noise of a poem when it meets the ecstasy of recognition.”

Tags: Corina Copp, jean day.

Area commissioners have voted not to repaint the Montgomery College Germantown Earthoid — named Steel Tank of the Year, 1980 — with a stupid baseball motif, but to instead restore the tank’s original planet Earth mural. I only wish they could get Paul Thek to do the job.

WSSC officials approved design of the Germantown Water Tower

By Laura Rowles | GermantownPatch.com

Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) commissioners have approved a contract that calls for the same worldly design for a Germantown Water Tank.

The 33-year old, two-million gallon, water storage tank in Germantown will be repainted as a replica of the earth. The water tank is situated on Observation Drive of the Germantown Campus of Montgomery College.

The contract to repair and repaint the tanks interior and exterior is not to exceed $857,200. The winning bid went to Horizon Brothers Painting, Inc - located in Howell, Michigan - who estimates it will cost $120,000 for the world mural.

WSSC asked bidders to provide cost estimates for two designs – a replica of the original globe and a baseball design. Montgomery College officials reported that they preferred the “globe” design over the baseball concept due partly to their new campus building, Globe Hall, which is slated to open in 2013.

Commissioner Gene Counihan of Montgomery County said, “The Earthoid has become quite a symbol for the community as well as Montgomery College. It is one of the most significant landmarks in Montgomery County.”

The tank was heralded as a landmark project in water storage when it was built in 1978 for its size, shape, and paint scheme, according the WSSC officials.

It won the “Steel Tank of the Year” award in 1980 from the Steel Plate Fabricators Association and pictures of the tank have been exhibited in numerous magazines. The 100-foot tall tank was first painted to resemble the world in 1980. Peter Freudenberg led the team of four painters after creating a scale model based on a National Geographic globe.

Tags: earthoid.

One outcome to anticipate from Assange’s point of view . . . would be a technological arms race in which state agencies shift from security clearances and encryption to more sophisticated digital defenses. But another possible development appears in an NSA text called “Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets” published by [rival leaker John] Young on his own leak site, Cryptome. The author, a philosophically minded engineer for the NSA, concludes that not all secrets can or need to be digitally managed:

Our efforts might, in some cases, be better applied to understanding the motivations and dynamics that are creating the secrets in the first place, with an eye toward coming up with a system that better maps to the human processes and behavioral tendencies.

We may find that by shifting the structures, rules, and value systems in human space, we have fewer secrets to deal with. We may find that we can alter the human-space systems to clarify the context and valuation of secrets, and put them into a form more amenable to elegant automation. We must get back to the notion that, in dealing with secrets, the human/automation construct works better if the whole system is adapted to the behaviors, values, and motivations of the humans.

A more secure world, for the engineer, is one in which on the one hand, secrets are safest when those who want them kept mobilize human beings’ various positive desires for secrecy, while on the other by “shifting . . . value systems” one may create less need to have certain information secret, and hence to have it revealed, as the case may be. Roberto Bolaño describes such a state of affairs in By Night in Chile (2000). The narrator is sworn to “absolute discretion” about being hired to give General Pinochet’s junta an academic introduction to Marxism. Having completed this black-comic commission, he unburdens himself to a friend, only to hear his story repeated all over Santiago, to his horror. He expects recriminations, but the phone never rings. “At first I thought this silence was the result of a concerted decision to ostracize me. Then, to my astonishment, I realized that nobody gave a damn. The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke” (By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews, 102). This world already exists, its logic expressed by the Daily Telegraph’s deputy editor, Benedict Brogan: “The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding . . . . infinite boredom” (”WikiLeaks is embarrassing – but not serious,” November 28, 2010). WikiLeaks, did not create new possibilities for Brogan’s boredom: by his own declaration, he was already well and truly bored. Maybe, then, it’s actually the vastness of such uncaring that WikiLeaks brings to light, in so doing giving it the chance to be otherwise.

Tags: rei terada.

“I create because I know how.
I know how good-for-nothing I am, that is.
Art, as communication, is the contact between the good-for-nothing in one and the good-for-nothing in others.” — Robert Filliou, 1962

Tags: robert filliou.

Doug Mason was nice enough to interview me about Satellite Telephone for the current issue of Boog City. A full, color pdf of the issue is online here, and I’ve copied just the interview portion into an image here. The issue also includes a full illustrated schedule for this year’s Welcome to Boog City Fest, which promises to be marathon-ic & great (& which incidentally I’m very excited is taking place mostly directly across the street from my favorite bar in the city, Soda).

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For me there is unquestionably nothing left in the old metaphysics which has to be combated as an acute temptation or as a virulent opponent. I suspect that those who always have their daggers at the ready and pull down their deconstructive visors as soon as one speaks of classic metaphysics have not understood the situation. They fight against an adversary that is no longer able to defend itself. I suppose they do not want to let it die in peace, because they need it as a speculative opponent for their reflections; all this amounts to is postmetaphysical narcissism fighting against metaphysical narcissism. The truth is that classical metaphysics has become unobtainable for us, logically and psychologically, to say nothing of knowledge, and so we should behave toward it as toward the dead Snow White. If, in her casket of glass, she looks so pretty, as if she were merely asleep, then all the better. There is no need to mistake her death. The task is to recall that in which her charm resided and her capacity to frighten, which services she had to fulfill in her time, and to determine how they can be replaced.

– Peter Sloterdijk

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Tags: casper, friendly, ghost, the.