Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement in the criminal case against the feminist punk group Pussy Riot:
During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my…
Maybe my first reblog of all time?
That terrible part in a documentary: reaching the part when their death is done looming and arrives.
(Basquiat et Haring)
“They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight.” -Bolano: 2666
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“I’m free: free like a runaway African// cause I’m free// and I swear I ain’t never coming back again cause I’m free.” -Aaron Smartz: Gotta be Free
The audacity/ability to call yourself something(artist, musician, scholar, etc) must be terribly empowering.
I say audacity because I can’t imagine doing it. I call it ability because I still can’t.
Today, I feel light.
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Today, an older woman pulled over to ask directions to the Dover courthouse. She was only one parking lot off the mark. Her charge, probably a grandson, sunk deep into his seat. He had a trace of blonde mustache hairs, though no mustache, uncombed chin length hair, a thin silver necklace, and a black t-shirt with white writing on it, presumably a band t-shirt. We looked into one another’s eyes and I think this caused his increasingly horizontal posture. I imagine he was more ashamed of what he had done in that moment that had been yet. Something tells me it was worse with me than it will be in the courtroom.
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Today, a lady was crossing the Cocheco on the same bridge as me, and on the same side. She stopped and looked out over the edge, mumbling. I figured on a blue tooth. As we crossed paths I started to say good morning. I stopped; she was crying.
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Today, I had a good conversation with the owner of the bookstore down the street about ESP records. I think this made me appreciate him more. For him, he learned to appreciate me years back(8, 9?) when I came in and asked for books by Nelson Algren.
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And today, I feel light.
Kurt Godel as ouroboros. Long rainy day in NH, can you tell?
Also from After the Last Intellectuals
“Unless, of course, that machinery accidentally re-creates some of the constitutive elements of the old cultural order: a body of surplus intellectuals who are not very well integrated into the system. Who have (for example) full access to the range of questions and ideas debated within scholarly networks but cannot find full-time employment in academic institutions—the products, but also the victims, of a system of higher education that is ever more dependent on a parttime labor force.
A group of writers and of thinkers—and even, who knows? of eloquent yellers—who enjoy no economic security and occupy low rungs on the status ladder, without much reason to think this will change. Such people, finding themselves excluded, might in time start wanting to “exclude the excluders.” Then the tenor of intellectual discourse might change, and public life with it; and a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension.”
I mean, try your local coffee shop for the over educated folks working outside academic institutions. Though I’ll agree that it is a bit tough to keep up with modern scholarship without unfettered access to jstor and the like.
“At this point, one can almost hear a chorus of ten thousand graduate students reciting, “But difficult ideas require complex language! Anything else is mere journalism!” Be that as it may, Jacoby insisted on the vernacular as a necessary corrective to the tendency of intellectual discourse to ossify, thereby excluding readers. The example of scholastic Latin came to mind. The turn to common language “characterizes modern culture since the Renaissance,” wrote Jacoby. “The adoption of the vernacular was not always simple or peaceful, for it meant that groups excluded from religious and scientific controversy could now enter the fray.””
-After the Last Intellectuals by Scott McLemee
Heavily dependent on possibility of classes(chemistry! ye gods) and alcohol and running and hiking but the main idea is a book of fiction a weak with supplemental readings in non-fiction and plays/poetry.
Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia
Lewis Hyde - The Gift
Russell Jacoby - The Last Intellectuals
Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory
Joan Didion - Run River Run
Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach, others
Paul Auster - NY Triology
Larry Levis
Plato’s Republic
Jennifer Egan - Visit from the Goon Squad
William Vollmann - TBA
Some plays TBA (probably Shakespeare, Johnson’s The Alchemist, Ionosco? Albee?)
Some more poetry?
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”
―...
Join us, or Omar gon’ come at you
Michael K. Williams for Marriage Equality
#hoopsofportland
Eliasmith, C., Stewart, T., Choo, X., Bekolay, T., DeWolf, T., Tang, Y., & Rasmussen, D. (2012). A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning...
F. Scott Fitzgerald in drag.
