Ask me no more questions...

Here's an excerpt of an email I received from a friend a few weeks ago. (And yes, I do keep emails in my inbox for several weeks at a time: one never knows when one will actually take the time to respond.)

How did the gym go? Is your little ass worked off now? I hope not! I happen to adore your ass! (In a friendly way of course! I'm a Democrat, so I adore all asses....) Actually, have I ever told you that you have the coolest walk of anyone I know? Seriously you do.... It's like molten metal moving, like a Richard Serra being made right before your very eyes, and yet it's also graceful, but not so graceful that it doesn't suggest just a bit of "don't fuck with me." ...It's the best, really....

Of course, everything she wrote is absolutely true. In fact, Richard (as in Richard Serra) often designs his sculpture after watching hours of video of me just walking. It's true! I have an inspirational ass! An ass full of inspiration ... and a few other things as well: deflated soccer balls, lost Frisbees, an old box of Girl Scout cookies....

Now, of course, is the time for me to spend several more hours on my ass as I write and write and write all the necessary final projects for my classes as well as grade all those essays, quizzes, and exams. Thankfully I've been hitting the gym fairly faithfully for the past couple of weeks, just to give myself a much needed and deserved break from continual warfare (aka "my jobs"). And so my ass won't embiggen itself from all the sitting.

Note to self: buy a decent chair as soon as the semester ends. It's starting to kill my ass!

Excerpts

Something I've been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I'm not writing here--which is happening more and more frequently--I'm most likely working on papers such as these. The work I did this term just about did me in altogether: I started working on the first paper in May, but I was able to write the second paper in just a few weeks. It seems I always shoot my load on one project (usually the one for my major professor and mentor) and then do a second quickie. (And yes, all academic metaphors must be sexual; otherwise, you're not doing it right.) By the way, my first essay earned me a "gifted," and the second one was termed "brilliant." (I'm not braggin'; I'm just saying....)

In die Fremde der Heimat:
Celan’s “Schibboleth” and the Ethics of Translation

Mem’ry, in addition to being short, is also (always already) a matter of convenience. A covenant both enjoins and excludes. Our inclusion in a community is a function of how we enact our communal memory—which flags we pledge allegiance to, which political slogans we cry out, which language community we find ourselves born into—in short, how we embody our covenant. Memory is the shibboleth we use to segregate: it either allows passage or cuts off the return passage home. This scar—this syllable pain, this wounded word, this death sentence—bears the memory of our covenant, a circle of forgetting, bereft of a center. Memory, therefore, is what must be transversed, transported, crossed over, and translated; it is the liminal border between the alien and the homeland, the superliminal space where the blood of the Passover sacrifice demarcates between the Chosen People and the(ir) other. Memory is the shibboleth—mispronounced, death-bringing, inarticulate; the unsayable that demands utterance, performance, invocation. The promise—the sign of the promise—the promised covenantal sign scars the human body. This scar—a genital, genitive scar—wounded by the past, is passed on to future generations, to those also born of the wound, born of disaster.

The half-mastness on both sides of mem’ry bisects “Schibboleth” with a reference to a political act: commemoration of the dead, of national heroes. Yet this flag at half-mast (from the fourth strophe) is not (necessarily) the same flag to which the poet has sworn no allegiance (from the second strophe). Instead of being unfurled in the market square, demanding allegiance, this flag at half-mast signifies the presence of death. Yet Celan’s dead remain doubly absent: not only are they no longer present (having been murdered and reduced to ash) but neither have they been properly buried and mourned for. No national flag had been set at half-mast to commemorate them. They are absented in both language as well as cultural memory, and it is an inherent characteristic of Celan’s poetological project to call those absent dead back into presence through language and to rescue them from forgetting/forgetfulness.

But just as Heidegger wants us to think being as some thing other than beings, so we too are called to think the other as some thing wholly other, as something more than the sum of all others—uncoordinatable and incalculable, unbounded and aporetic, unmappable and undateable. The wholly other exceeds all Cartesian coordinates as well as any Cartesian cogito: all that I can know of the other is that I do not know.

Initiation into Redon’s Initiation to Study

The fifth and final work in Redon’s two-woman sequence is his circa 1905 Initiation to Study. This oil painting is marked by a flattening of the pictorial space as well as by a sharp delineation of line of the two figures. The priestess is clothed entirely in blue; the novice wears white. Instead of holding a red branch as in the 1896 oil painting, the novice casually holds a scroll that has been partially unrolled. It seems that the natural element from the first painting has been replaced with a cultural artifact; the mysteries of nature have given way to the mysteries of a secret society whose knowledge is written down on the scroll. But no text is exposed; to the viewer, the scroll is empty and blank.

Though the novice’s eyes are still downcast, we get no sense of her emotional state from her otherwise expressionless face. The priestess, however, appears somewhat sterner than in previous depictions: she is clearly frowning, and the severe profile line only accentuates her one visible eye. Redon’s noirs were often populated by round, globe-like eyes, but in this series, the women’s eyes are almost always closed, further resisting the viewer’s gaze.

The women appear within a space defined by heavy brown lines to the pair’s left and right as well as beneath their feet. The light brown floor recedes a short distance before ending at what looks to be a white plaster or stucco wall behind the figures. The pictorial plane, nevertheless, is further flattened with blotches of paint that transgress across all three strong defining lines. No shadow or shading interrupts this compression to give the viewer any impression of dimensionalized space. Redon flattens the vertical as well by repeating the light brown of the floor in the upper right. Moreover, the illusory depth is shortened by the dark pink tones of the oil paint: Redon uses the same tone for his signature and the dominant background behind the priestess. In this way, the surface and the background are the same color, disrupting any sense of depth and preventing any penetration beyond the work’s surface.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Ah, the last of the Bullet-Point Fridays!
• I started this segment when I returned from Germany and began the fall semester just to ensure that throughout the long and difficult term I would sit down at least once a week and post something on my blog. And now it’s almost over.
• Well, not quite: I still have to submit another essay Monday. My research on the Redon painting has been fairly interesting, but—ohmygod!—I have no energy to just sit down and pound it out. I wrote about half of it Thanksgiving Day. While most of my compatriots were stuffing turkey down their throats, I was fasting and writing—what I tend to do best on that holiday. And I spent more than three hours at the museum Wednesday, so I have plenty of information to write about. Just tired.
• I exhausted myself with the first essay due before Thanksgiving. And thankfully that proved to be worth the effort. My professor wrote that I was “gifted.” (And I’ve hence decided to start a “Gifted & Talented” program for my Ph.D. curriculum! Too bad few of my colleagues will meet the requirements….) Of course, I started the research and reading on the flight to Germany last July, so it’s fairly accurate to say that I’ve done some serious thinking about my topic over the past 4½ months.
• Perhaps I will start my Bullet-Point Fridays again come January. But I think I’ll change the name: no good ever came from bullets. And “bullet points” imply a reduction and a leveling that I hope to never be guilty of.
• I submitted my translation portfolio for the term this morning. I feel like after the first draft I was no longer doing translation but merely leveling, making the text palatable to the pack of illiterate philistines who were in the class with me. After several classmates complained that one particular sentence was “hard to understand,” I declared, “Perhaps I should just translate it back into Polish, and then we’ll see how well you understand it!” If nature abhors a vacuum, then I’m certain she would indeed hate my classmates as much as I do.
• So, it’s time to go to bed. I still have so much more work to do over the next couple of weeks: exams to write and grade, essays to grade, grades to submit. And my winter break is quickly filling up with things wanting to be done and read. (And I’ll try to write so much more consistently throughout the week that Bullet-Point Fridays will be unnecessary.)

Visual Culture

After a relatively short run-through of the DMA this afternoon, I came up with the following six contenders for my project in Visual Culture. I'm really not ecstatic about any of them: I would much rather write about the work of someone I know a little bit about, like Anselm Kiefer or Magda Abakanowicz, but we've already been scolded for choosing only recent subjects (from the last 30 years). Since I have no interest in recreating the canon, I thought about either an Asian or pre-Columbian work, but I didn't find anything today that grabbed me. These six, despite being fairly canonical--hell, they're hanging in a Dallas museum!--caught my eye; plus I thought I'd be able to say something new and interesting about each of them, assuming that someone else hasn't already exhausted these works.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing's The Singer, 1924

Arthur Garfield Dove's Up the Alley, 1938

Edward Hicks' The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1846-47

Max Liebermann's At the Swimming Hole, 1875-78

Odilon Redon's Initiation to Study - Two Young Ladies, c. 1905

Paul Serusier's Celtic Tale, 1894

Bullet-Point Friday

• I'm enjoying my trek through Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with Love, a book about his friendship(s) and (professional) relationship(s) with Joseph Brodsky, translation theory, Russian, literature, and death. It is everything that John Felstiner falls short of. Throughout Felstiner's work (specifically Translating Neruda and Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew), he steers the reader toward this totalizing conception of identity and poetry: he reads Neruda and Celan as if their names were always in capital letters, as if they were homogenized, monolithic, unified Cartesian subjects, as if his biographical/literary/psychological/physiological uncoverings and excavations had the final say on what their poetry was all about. Weissbort, on the other hand, speaks toward an actual and real person he met, befriended, and knew, and yet who escapes any insincere attempt toward totalization: was 'Joseph' a Jew, how much of a Jew was he, how does his translation of his own poetry speak the same as their Russian versions. 'Joseph' is always moving away, eliding Weissbort’s efforts to read him, his words, him through his words, his words in his (own) voice, his words in his Russian (or Russified English). Felstiner reminds me of why I stopped reading literature and poetry all those years ago; Weissbort makes me want to read everything Brodsky ever wrote (as well as everything Weissbort ever wrote).
• I have approximately 50 pounds of books about Mark Rothko I need to work through this weekend as I prepare for an in-class presentation on the Rothko Chapel next week.
• Tonight is First Friday at the Ft. Worth Modern. I thought I would take myself out for the evening to enjoy the new exhibit and then maybe a nice vegan meal at Spiral Diner. (I can’t wait for the Spiral Diner to open up in my neighborhood!)
• Tomorrow is already “full up to the neck”: German class from 10:00-12:00, a visit (during the Texas-OU game) to the Dallas Museum of Art to come up with a subject for my term paper, and then Lauren’s party in the evening celebrating the release of Superficial Flesh. Perhaps one of these days I’ll actually have some down time and do some pleasure reading or spend an afternoon just brushing my cats. Maybe December.

Dog Day Afternoon

Saw a dog of a movie this holiday weekend: The Year of the Dog. Who in their right mind liked this film? And why did so many people recommend it to me? Just further proof, it seems, that human beings are ultimately unknowable.

I almost always take my cue from a film’s popularity: if it grosses more than a couple of million, then it’s probably not to my tastes. But everyone was talking about this film. Hell, even Saturday Night Live brought back Molly Shannon to host—only the second time a former female cast member returned to host—because of the success (or buzz) of this movie.

There wasn’t a single likeable or believable character. And a very fundamental note to the director/writer/producer: a real vegan wouldn’t be drinking wine or brushing her teeth with a big-name brand displayed on the tube. Those things typically aren’t vegan! I learned those things when I was a teenager on a farm in East Texas. I have no idea why someone in Hollywood wouldn’t be as smart as a dumb country fuck.

Another DVD I rented this weekend was Strangers with Candy. Still not sure what the point of that was. It was strange and bizarre, but I certainly didn’t find it funny. Thankfully the third DVD was a winner: Wanda Sykes’ stand-up routine filmed in Seattle. Now that made me laugh out loud.

To wash the gullet and clear the (mental) palate from crappy DVDs, I went to see the latest Bourne film this afternoon. Not quite as good as the first two, but still something worthwhile. I really like Matt Damon’s character, and I also really like Joan Allen’s and Julia Stiles’ characters as well. I’m glad Ludlum kept developing those female characters. Finally a film I would recommend.

Köln

Just a week-and-a-half ago I spent a blissful couple of days in Köln by myself visiting museums and enjoying the culture of one of Germany's largest and oldest cities. Click on the image to see some of the highlights of that excursion.

Documenta 12

Last Wednesday Chris and I spent several hours walking through a huge chunk of the Documenta exhibit in Kassel. Here are some of my photos. I tried to mostly document the experience of seeing the art within this context, but I was also interested in watching others have their own experience. For the most part, I was disappointed in the works, but there were a couple that I actually took the time to note the artist and the title. Click on the image to open the thumbnail page.

Required Reading (definitely though with love)

This Independence Day it's important for us Americans to finally get it through our thick heads that there is a fundamental, essential difference between nationalism and patriotism. And that neither of those has anything to do with hegemonic warmongering. Just to keep us straight on those points, here is one of my favorite poems from patriot Nikki Giovanni:

I Laughed When I Wrote It
(Don’t You Think It’s Funny?)

the f.b.i came by my house three weeks ago
one white agent one black (or i guess negro would be
more appropriate) with two three-button suits on (one to
a man)
thin ties—cuffs in the bottoms—belts at their waists
they said in unison:
ms. giovanni you are getting to be quite important
people listen to what you have to say
i said nothing
we would like to have to give a different message
i said: gee are all you guys really shorter than hoover
they said:
it would be a patriotic gesture if you’d quit saying
you love rap brown and if you’d maybe give us some
leads
on what some of your friends are doing
i said: fuck you
a week later the c.i.a came by two unisexes one blond afro
one darker one three bulges on each showing lovely bell-
bottoms and boots
they said in rounds:
sister why not loosen up and turn on
fuck the system up from the inside
we can turn you on to some groovy
trips and you don’t have to worry
about money or nothing take the commune
way and a few drugs it’ll be good for you
and the little one
after i finished a long loud stinky fart i said serenely
definitely though with love
fuck you
yesturday a representative from interpol stopped me in the
park
tall, neat afro, striped hip huggers bulging only in the right
place
i really dig you, he said, i want to do something for you
and you alone
i asked what he would like to do for me
need a trip around the world a car bigger apartment
are you lonely i mean we need to get you comfortable
cause a lot of people listen to you and you
need to be comfortable to put forth a positive image
and digging the scene i said listen i would sell
out but i need to make it worth my while you understand
you just name it and i’ll give it to you, he assured me
well, i pondered, i want aretha franklin and her piano
reduced to fit next to my electric
typewriter on my desk and i’ll do anything you want
he lowered his long black eyelashes and smiled a whimsical
smile
fuck you, nikki, he said

And below some more worthwhile reading this holiday: first, an op-ed about immigration hysteria, and secondly, an interview with probably the most intelligent conservative thinker I've ever heard on what's wrong with the current administration.

• The Founding Immigrants
  By Kenneth C. Davis
  Published: July 3, 2007
  Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.


• Interview with Victor Gold
  By Bill Moyers
  Aired: June 29, 2007
  The impact of the sound bite mentality which you find in both parties...is there's been a debasing of the system. Because if you listen to these — I call them the Stepford candidates — on both sides in these debates the only two candidates that speak clearly are the ones they call the kooks.

3 Great Films

It was the end of the world...

...and Claire couldn't care less.

And somewhere on a desert road from Vegas to nowhere...

...I'll talk it over with Brenda.

I have the right to testify in my native language...

You have to do what nobody expects.

Simple Things

It really is the simple things that make life worth living. The complicated shit only makes me mad.

I’ve been spending much more time at the local YMCA. Lately I’m exercising at least five times a week, mostly there but also sometimes in the neighborhood. I’ve even been much more able to engage in the senseless chitchat with the woman behind the counter at the Y. I think it’s funny she wished me a happy fathers’ day and then asked if my father was still alive. Do I not exude the fatherly vibe myself? Am I (visibly) at that age where fathers typically die off?

I’ve been diligently reading since the spring term ended, preparing for the courses I’ll be taking as well as those I’ll be teaching this fall. I’ve read some really hard books. I wonder why all knowledge always comes in book format? To study music, you have to read books about music. To study art, you have to read books about art. I’m beginning to hate books more and more.

I’ve been slacking when it comes to studying German on my own. I’ve only gotten through the first six lessons in the Pimsleur program. Last summer I’d gotten through the entire Russian I course (30 lessons) in the same amount of time and had began Russian II. I hope my dedication comes back once I’m actually sitting in class in Germany next month.

Tomorrow I’m returning all the books I’ve checked out to the university library. I have eleven. And the Pimsleur German CDs. I need to get them back since I’ll be gone when it’s time to renew them online. And when I return, the fall semester will already be in its second week.

Today, the CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports on assassination plots, secret drug testing, and spying on Americans. That’s nothing: you should see the secret reports I keep on the government.

What’s in heavy rotation on my iPod this week: “North American Scum” by LCD Soundsystem, “Everyman Everywoman” by Yoko Ono w/ Blow Up, “Hammering in My Head” by Garbage, “Girlfriend is Better” by Talking Heads, “Bump!” by Nylon Room, and “Guilt is a Useless Emotion (Mac Quayle Vocal Mix)” by New Order. Maybe I should write a book about it.

"conversant on existentialism"

After hearing about yesterday's NPR article "For Shakira, an Emotional Homecoming Show," I imagined an encounter between Shakira, Beyonce, and French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Shakira: (Twisting Beyonce's hair into braids.) You know those lyrics from "Hips Don't Lie"? It goes, "Oh boy, I can see your body moving / Half animal, half man / I don't, don't really know what I'm doing / But you seem to have a plan / My will and self restraint / Have come to fail now, fail now / See, I am doing what I can, but I can't so you know / That's a bit too hard to explain."

Beyonce: (Giggling.) Yeah, I remember.

Shakira: I was really trying to articulate Sartrean nausea in the face of overwhelming freedom.

Beyonce: Yeah, I got that.

Shakira: God, Beyonce, you're so smart! Your friendship is like the unavowable gift Derrida writes about: it unhinges the narrative contingencies of pure spirit and opens the word into the openness of being.

Beyonce: (Twirling her own hair.) Uh-huh.

Shakira: It's like what you sing in "Irreplaceable." It reminds me so much of Rilke's first Duino Elegy. (Taking the text from the nightstand, she reads from the original German. Then she paraphrases into English.) "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror."

Beyonce: For sure!

Sartre recedes in disgust. Derrida turns in his grave. And Rilke wishes a rock would fall on Shakira's head. (Actually, we all wish a rock would fall on Shakira.... But really a rock should fall on Juan Forero, the idiot NPR reporter who wrote such drivel.)

Bringing Sexy (and Consumption) Back

Who would've thought that TB could be so fuggin' sexy?!?! This photo from the AP (or perhaps it was Jeff Koons or even Pierre et Gilles) does more to glamorize the disease than any lackluster nineteenth-century painting or even Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. I wish I was coughing up blood with both of them....

AI Faves

Here are a few of my favorite works at the Art Institute.
Launch in external player

Memory of Loss

The dead will always outnumber the living.

One of my favorite works at the Art Institute was Chagall’s 1938 White Crucifixion. In it Chagall chooses to depict the crucifixion of Jesus (the “King of the Jews”), including this scene as the crux of a long history of pogroms against the Chosen—a history with its own chiasmus at the Cross, that damnable and lamentable inversion from Chosen to chastised, from blessed to bereaved. And somehow we good Christians (and post-1948, Judeo-Christians (if such a hyphenated beast/bestial identity exists; and why not Judeo-Christiano-Muslim?)) only remember the last 2000 years of victimhood and not the prior 5000 of gloating victors against all the other desert peoples (with their own desert gods). History will teach us nothing, for even the Palestinians (these new Philistines) will rise up and slaughter new innocents. It reminds me of a recent headline: “army battles militants,” and yet the unasked question still heard in the depths of language: who more militant than the military? And you too do not exist … nor I. Auch du und du. I’m reminded too of all those Japanese I befriended and loved whose fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers probably shot at my own grandfather, filling his mortal body with shrapnel and environmental detritus so that even weeks before his death metal was still winnowing its way from beneath his skin more than sixty years after the ceasefire. And when will this fire finally cease? And who will burn for more? And whose father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather was absent—absent in the way of a missing limb or a lastborn son—due to a shot fired from my grandfather’s rifle? How the missing trace their absence(s) down through the generations so that in my clinging I cling only to that which absences itself, that missing part, that lifeline of longing. Each near-death experience (and I know such a hyphenated beast exists) brings me closer to the death that awaits only me in its mortal vastness, in its singularity and solitude, for only that one death will make it all better by making us one.

Against the wind

By the time I arrived in Chicago I was exhausted from several nights of little and low-quality sleep. So after a short nap, we headed to the Art Institute. I could only manage about 90 minutes of browsing before returning to the hotel for the evening.

The walk between our hotel and the Art Institute (which proved to be our main haunt this trip) had lots to interest us: public art, amazing architecture, parks and gardens, as well as coffee shops.

Friday morning we ate our breakfast at Café Descartes before heading back to the Art Institute for another go at their world-class collection. We left around noon to Macy’s to meet Mark, who took the train down from Milwaukee. After lunch, we returned to the AI where I photographed some of my favorite pieces.

There’s nothing like comparing a new city to the one where you’ve been living for far too long. The entire time we kept commenting on how accessible everything in Chicago is. There is no way Dallas would ever have one-tenth the amount of public art/space of Chicago even if it did ever flood the Trinity River and create a downtown lake. In one park, we saw a sign in 7 languages reading “restaurant and café”! My hometown would instead pretend that Hispanics are not a majority and that “Mexican” is not an acceptable language for public use. Oh how sad and mundane my little hometown is! And pathetic. The only plus I could see about Dallas is its highway system: no city driving required. But that does account for the fact that you can’t walk anywhere and that there’s no public art/space if you do. I’d gladly trade in any number of the I.M. Pei buildings that dot the skyline for one classy, early 20th-century skyscraper and a decent café to get to by foot.

Invitation/Reading

I'll be reading some of my new translations of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry as well as some of my own writings tomorrow evening (Thursday, March 29) at South Side on Lamar as part of WordSpace's Writers in the Universities program. It begins at 7:00pm at Opening Bell Coffee. If you are around, please come out and support us.

Preview

Here we are at the lull before the final maelstrom. I’ve already taught the past two weekends (17 hours; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), and I have one more weekend to go. But this last mega-session for the mini-semester is my favorite, beginning with Symbolism and working our way up to the current year. I spend 1/3 of the term on the last 100 years after cramming in everything from the Big Bang and the evolution of humankind up to the year 1900. During the first two weekends, I give them the bases for everything they think and believe, and in the last few hours I take it all away. Plus I get to talk about Le Pétomane and Cloaca. You know your college tuition money is well spent when the professor talks about shitting and farting! When my introduction to the humanities course ends Sunday I’ll have an entire week to work ahead for my own classes. I hope to finish the required readings by the end of the month so I can devote all of April to writing my two term papers and finishing my translation projects.

Next three performances I plan to attend: Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck; Rickie Lee Jones at the Lakewood Theater; and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.

Alright, that’s enough for now. I have to go clean up cat vomit. (Yes, this entry did revolve around shit, puke, and flatulence. Good times.)