Promiscuous Parlance

2002-08-16T10:39:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I mentioned Blacks in London and the postcolonial sate. Wow, I just happened upon this very cool, fierce site with intellectual essays galore!

2002-08-16T10:13:00.000-04:00

Once I had a librarian with one arm, no lie. Librarians are very important people, gatekeepers of information, in my life. Public, free access is vital. Love a librarian today and spport them in their struggle against the forces of darkness that are trying to nose around your patron record to see if you are involved in unAmerican activities. Also, check out this blog.

2002-08-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

Omelet's edited post from Mr.Wiggin's blog comments 9ish am Thursday, August 15, 2002
(background noise in my head:"Sympathy for the Devil", Cowboy Bebop, and women's studies classes)

no, a person's background shouldn't devalue art, but in our imperfect world, it has an effect. it's just some people get to enjoy things innocent of their context.

well, i think that given the choices out there, you really have a large number of people(especially men) who have done creepy or violent things but are rewarded for it, or tolerated, because they are artists or considered "great" in some way.

on one hand, when someone is pitching their work for a grant (or a patron back in Picasso's day), when art is deemed provisionally positive, all the social benefits might be emphasized--like "oh this awakens my sense of wonder" or "oh this speaks to dark human urges never expressed quite this way" or "this will shake them up"

i think as people who enjoy art, or the public, or the elite who sit on partially publicly funded galleries, whomever, we should care some about the context, about the biography, because we have to weigh (viewing, reviewing, publishing, exhibiting, whatever,) that person's art against other options out there.

Wiley I think you have a good point--if people *seek out* a wonderfully twisted bunch of stories like yours, they are a small (lucky) community. I think that because a lot of times people enjoy things because of the things that they associate with them, not knowing that someone is a rapist or whatnot *robs* some of the potential meaning from their art.

Hell, we all have the right to *choose* the most violent, twisted shit we can dream of... but if you find the context of many acclaimed works of art is all connected to a nexus of ideas, and that those ideas permeate society,... you could feel a sense of wonder about that or you could feel galvanized into action against, or you could feel depressed etc.

the recurrent urge to shock the bourgeousie out of stale comfort, and to get unpopular, hateful views out there, is often a cool one that shouldn't be censored. i think that there are other forces ar work that can choose to ignore, deplore, devour, and/or admire this kind of work--you know, people click on the link or they don't , they buy the book or don't, they take it as an example or don't, they see it as harmful and prevent kids from seeing it ,etc.

i think the issue goes back to definitions of art. it's easier to define art as stuff we like, but i think that art is about drawing our attention to things, and seeing them anew, whether it's bloody tampon on a canvas or jism in a jar or a nazi mural. we don't have to like it, but it's art.

...[H]ow do you define art?

2002-08-14T15:13:00.000-04:00

repost:
Geoff Ryman, whose writing intrigues me (The Warrior Who Carried Life, Unconquered countries : four novellas, Was, Lust, or No Harm Done), also wrote a web-text called 253 that he then re-issued as a "print-remix" (a.k.a. "book" ). He proposed a more interactive sequel, "Another One Along in A Minute", where-in folks would write-in with characterizations/vignettes bounded by the seconds... or in his words, "Another One along in a Minute pays tribute to stalled time by describing each character in 300 words, one for each second of time."

_____

Thea Michaels, animated 27-year old African-American with warm cinnamon rolls of skin and alien pin. Hair in gravity-defying licorice twists . Little-known writer of two children's books featuring haunted 19th century potato sacks. Secret eater of aforementioned roots, raw.

She hums a Tori Amos tune off key, untucks her Guardian, resettles the fat of her thighs on the worn upholstery. While pretending to read, she eyes the Londoner across the dry, wooden floor. He---no, she (?)--- is all clear skin and mischievous elven grin, unpensioned. Moss green eyes scan the latest Jeanette Winterson at a believable pace. What an intelligent face.

These British people are a trip. She's from Kentucky, and gets asked about four things: chicken, New York, California, and racism. KFC in the States is good, but it's got nothing on her Momma's home-fried, or the church ladies' river baptism fare. Too bad about that whole genetic mutation thing though: three-breasted chickens ? She's been to NYC once. What a contrast that raucous subway was to the chilled grey silence hanging like tube dust between her and these folks.

California is still an incremental dream, as it was, unvisited, in the States. Racists? Well, she hopes the entity across the way is more than the antithesis. Postcolonial politics. Dancing in Brixton with working-class Brits, the jungle moving the house, she felt a hope for something completely different for all them, orphans and heirs of the bloody Atlantic trade .

Raising a pirate eyebrow, she braves a glance at the closed, freckled face across the way, and blurts. "Pardon, do you know how to get to Charing Cross Station?" The car audibly bristles
at the eruption. A soft green gaze shifts up. "I'm popping off there myself. I'll show you. Hi-ya, I'm Cam."

P.S. I found out about two new books, Air , and V.A.O. , that he has coming out soon, and also about his teaching at Clarion workshops! It's exciting to know that a favorite author is still going strong. Now, I am waiting on , Octavia Butler , Nicola Griffith , Jewelle Gomez , Alison Bechdel and Margaret Atwood and ...

2002-08-14T13:38:00.000-04:00

2002-08-13T14:54:00.000-04:00

Omelet comments from a comment thread on Mr.Wiggins' Land of the Dead News section about the Salon.com article featuring outsider artist/ highly disturbed individual Henry Darger:

. . . re: psycho art guy: guess we can't lock someone up for thought crimes (unless, unless, unless) . . .

i mean, for me, the question is whether the art is worth the gruesome and disturbing bits. a tired example is the christian bible. it's full of ugliness, but lots of people subscribe to a linear channel in the flow of the narrative, and so see a happy ending. maybe this guy's work is not about happy endings.

i'd hate it if he were a murderer and child-raper, but i guess i would also hate a general who writes his memoirs of killing lots of people. the only difference is that the guy whose huge narrative is given over to the little girls with penises acted as an individual and was only rewarded by a larger community posthumously (if i read correctly). the general writing memoirs of war acts as an individual and then is backed-up by a larger community that benefits or thinks it benefits from mass killing.

wiley,with your own writing, with its disturbing images, do you fear people mistaking that piece of you for the whole? do you fear people miss a big thing that fiction can do is both hold up a mirror to reality *and *shape it? does "good" art need to fit some structure of morality or political action--by that, i mean, the secular, intellectual trend that allows something harmful, disturbing, "negative" to be "good" because of the "lesson" or emotional work it forces its viewers to do?

2002-08-13T11:30:00.000-04:00

a controversial name that doesn't reclaim anything but does stick its pierced tongue out at the distrust from both the monosexual camps...ATM is a thin mag, but sometimes has cool stuff

2002-08-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

2002-08-08T16:13:00.000-04:00

Amit Chaudhuri in "The Old Masters", Real Time

:... You can't choose your colleagues in the office; he hadn't grasped the significance of this until a few months ago. And to pretend you were friends--that, too, was a fiction you couldn't bring yourself to wholly believe in, but couldn't entirely dispense with, either; you did "things" together, sometimes outside office hours, you visited each other's houses--he'd been to Ranjit's place in New Alipore only a day before yesterday--got to know each other's wives and children, the kind of food the wife, affectionately called "grihini", cooked, and yet you made a pact to keep all that was true and most important about yourself from the colleague; in case the desirable boundary between private life and secret nightmare and employment ceased to exist. Meanwhile your real friends, those mythological beings, who by now had embarked on lives and careers of their own, fell obligingly by the wayside; they became things to you put inside a closet and meant to recover, someday, in the future. In other words, you were alone, with your family, and your destiny.

This author has many intriguing short stories, but that passage I just quoted tugged at my stomach, so I had to write it down. You know, it really captures the thrust of business, in the form of a priesthood of capital, to the center of so many lives.

Recently I spoke to a freelance-writer (who shall remain nameless) about his day job. He spoke of a clarifying late-night interaction with some people of different classes in which he saw his life ordered around the cultivation of relationships more than increases in billable hours. It was not unlike the concept of the "point" to Cyrano in A.L. Kennedy's So I am Glad . There are epiphanies, completions of patterns, provisional keys to mysterious chambers of our inner selves.

2002-08-01T15:47:00.000-04:00

Wow, it is kinda cool when I get cited in someone else's college paper in American Studies. I swear, I didn't even know this person's paper existed until I did a vanity-Google.

2002-08-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

Can you say, historical implications?

2002-08-01T10:36:00.000-04:00

See this classic race-as-santa-claus analogy, #133 in the Salom.com Politics thread on Cornel West and Race Matters.

2002-08-01T10:30:00.000-04:00

Send CharlyZ an icepack!
Stay tuned for a return to more promiscuous parlance...

2002-07-31T09:11:00.000-04:00

CharlyZ's new Salon.com blog Driver 8 is fast becoming one to watch. Clever pop culture dissection is his forte. See it.

2002-07-26T14:26:00.000-04:00

Signal vs. Noise is one cool, well-designed site. It hardly seems in the same realm as newbie/novice/greenhorns like Your Tireless Author.

2002-07-26T09:52:00.000-04:00

Whoa, talk about things happening for a [good] reason! I found a cooooool site because I was noodling around salon.com, then I added that to my other blog, and when I looked over at the newly refreshed blogs list, I saw wise woman, and what do you know, she's apparently in the same web ring!

2002-07-26T09:51:00.000-04:00

2002-07-18T17:02:00.000-04:00

I just might have fixed the indentation problem I had-- I guess I was screwing up my tables. Ah, learning HTML: THE HARD WAY. I'm sure conservatives would be proud of the way I've pulled myself up by the boot tags, so to speak. [gag] My old Quaker Friends [redundant?] and Earlhamites would be proud of how I networked and considered others as part of my community [sigh: see My Life as an Omelet], cheese segments

2002-07-18T14:03:00.000-04:00

OH DRAMA

The things I do for an audience of two! For a while there, I lazed in marital bliss with my blog. Of course I had to go and mess with a good thing, so now the blankety blank blog and I don't get along.

Woe is me!

Now, when I try to open template or view web page, it just searches and loads for ever...

Will even this weak entreaty to the unused portions of my brain be shot into the Great Void, ever unanswered?
[signal thriller horns]

2002-07-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry Folks:
I'm still working out the synapses, so now the blog template is screwed--again. Feel free to comment and sign the guestbook as I continue the process of fixing the order or things.

Thanks

2002-07-16T09:33:00.000-04:00

2002-07-12T16:01:00.000-04:00

LONG LIVE ALLITERATION
A trippy gathering of ochre and ink,
murky sunsets and pleasure is
Wiley Wiggins !

Waking Life was well worth the time, and I didn't even connect the star (wiley wiggins)
back to my viewing of _Dazed and Confused_.
Stumbling upon his site was flying into a silky, subtly crafted web
spun from himself, ever gripped, held close to the jaws of the spider,
cold seeping through limbs, faced with the cluster of hard brown eyes
. . . and then not eaten.

2002-07-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

These are a few of my favorite things...
cold mango lassis and red hot samosas.
world peace and greenpeace and common neuroses
cobalt blue glasses and parties with Singhs,
these are a few of my favorite things!

2002-07-11T16:53:00.000-04:00

I like Blogger.

I also like Jeanette Winterson.

2002-07-11T15:57:00.000-04:00

Persistent Query

The relationship between belief and understanding is a persistent query for me. How much do I have to believe the underlying principles of, say, free market economy/capitalism/globalization to understand them?

If I don't *already* agree that these are positive forces and/or that the basic function of human worth is (x), can I ever understand them?

2002-07-11T15:09:00.000-04:00

*Tying the knots, loosening the chains, or A doggerel verse*

Marriage, law, and family:
Okay, here's the thing--a patrilineal culture is what Raaadnovich
claims, so that's why he don't advocate
switchin da names.
I think that in my case, though my Mom disagrees,
if I were to partner, I'd do what I please.

See, marriage, and giving away a bride to a guy, are intimately
bound to cash, land, and the Guy in the Sky.

Christianity isn't the only recent religion that winds up with
men making marriage decisions. *Basically*, if a guy can follow
the path of his seed, then follows the legal and
financial--hence, deeds.

Since I think that we are not "merely" mammals confined to
biology, just like the camels, I advocate for a lineage of some
other sort. However, since I am still in our society, compromise
is a last resort.

If I found a person who also found me,
and we wanted the law and the world to agree
to let us trade [in] property and authorize death
and adopt more to ourselves and whatever is left
that married hets [do] now enjoy,
then I wouldn't like to take the name, whether girl or boy.

in short: MAKE UP A NEW NAME THAT GLORIFIES BOTH

Religion (or lack there of) as the glue that holds the hairpiece of america on:

Religion and big business and the boy scouts of america don't stop people from psychotic episodes, evil doing, et cetera.

Religion is not separate from culture and class-- how else could the Klan and the Congress last? Both have claimed righteousness, both lack compassion. Jefferson had religion as he owned slaves
and said all men should be free. The man hunting down doctors who are willing to perform abortion had religion. The ministers and militiamen and wife and husband and childbeaters have religion.

In short: religion is one of the most divisive things around--or the bitter reminder that each of us is alone. Spirituality, however, can be a beautiful element weaving through religion. Hell, I don't know y'all-- it all comes down to people like me who think they are always right.

McVeigh thought he was right until the end, if we believe the media when it reported that he had "Invictus" as his final statement. Can we ever know, finally, who's right? I myself try to go on all
the info I have, knowing that I'll never have enough.

2002-07-11T14:45:00.000-04:00

Geoff Ryman, whose writing intrigues me (The Warrior Who Carried Life, Unconquered countries : four novellas, Was, Lust, or No Harm Done), also wrote a web-text called 253 that he then re-issued as a "print-remix" (a.k.a. "book" ). He proposed a more interactive sequel, "Another One Along in A Minute", where-in folks would write-in with characterizations/vignettes bounded by the seconds... or in his words, "Another One along in a Minute pays tribute to stalled time by describing each character in 300 words, one for each second of time."

_____
Thea Michaels, animated 27-year old African-American with warm cinnamon rolls of skin and alien pin. Hair in gravity-defying licorice twists. Little-known writer of two children's books featuring haunted 19th century potato sacks. Secret eater of aforementioned roots, raw.

She hums a Tori Amos tune off key, untucks her Guardian, resettles the fat of her thighs on the worn upholstery. While pretending to read, she eyes the Londoner across the dry, wooden floor. He---no, she (?)--- is all clear skin and mischievous elven grin, unpensioned. Moss green eyes scan the latest Jeanette Winterson at a believable pace. What an intelligent face.

These British people are a trip. She's from Kentucky, and gets asked about four things: chicken, New York, California, and racism. KFC in the States is good, but it's got nothing on her Momma's home-fried, or the church ladies' river baptism fare. Too bad about that whole genetic mutation thing though: three-breasted chickens ? She's been to NYC once. What a contrast that raucous subway was to the chilled grey silence hanging like tube dust between her and these folks.

California is still an incremental dream, as it was, unvisited, in the States. Racists? Well, she hopes the entity across the way is more than the antithesis. Post-colonial politics. Dancing in Brixton with working-class Brits, the jungle moving the house, she felt a hope for something completely different for all them, orphans and heirs of the bloody Atlantic trade.

Raising a pirate eyebrow, she braves a glance at the closed, freckled face across the way, and blurts. "Pardon, do you know how to get to Charing Cross Station?" The car audibly bristles
at the eruption. A soft green gaze shifts up. "I'm popping off there myself. I'll show you. Hi-ya, I'm Cam."

2002-07-11T14:29:00.000-04:00

Wow!
long time no blog
complete opaque-aliciousness

2002-03-20T11:12:00.001-05:00

picaresque
\Pic`a*resque"\, a. [F., fr. Sp. picaro rogue.] Applied to that class of literature in which the principal personage is the Spanish picaro, meaning a rascal, a knave, a rogue, an adventurer.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

picaresque
adj : involving clever rogues or adventurers especially as in a type of fiction; "picaresque novels"; "waifs of the picaresque tradition"; "a picaresque hero"
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University

2002-03-20T11:12:00.000-05:00

pic·a·resque Pronunciation Key (pk-rsk, pk-)
adj.
1. Of or involving clever rogues or adventurers.
2. Of or relating to a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society.

2002-03-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

Candide was a picaresque character-- rough rogue tumbling around the world and getting into adventures for our benefit. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Rita Mae Brown's _Rubyfruit Jungle) was a picaresque novel, with the lesbian leaping around the country on adventures for our benefit...