nobel prize speech.

Kann es sein,

daß die Frage nach dem Taschentuch

seit jeher gar nicht das Taschentuch meint,

sondern die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen.

read herta müller’s nobel prize speech here.

the photo shows my favourite sculpture from the rodin museum in philadelphia.

*insert insane amount of expletives here*.

sunday’s lack of concentration, anxiety bursts, political angst and perfect lunchtime left me feeling sad. not a kind of immersed sadness but a self-reflecting sadness that can switch into anger and longing every 12.4 seconds. i thought about this for a bit, as i do, while clearing the table and deciding against destroying other people’s property. i decided to map the exact thing i was feeling by recourse to utube. yes, you heard right, utube is a useful technology to get anger vented off. use utube irresponsibly. hellyeh.

i went clicking through rage against the machine to patti smith to faraquet to nick cave to the prodigy to basement jaxx, but none of this really hit it.

i thought about it some more and SKA PUNK emerged in my head. magic. i think i need to attend some really really loud drunken ska punk night.

i then thought about the mighty mighty bosstones, but they sound way too happy. streetlight manifesto are more into the right direction, and so did choking victim, and, of course, operation ivy. that lovely mixture of pisstake and anger and goodtime. yes.

i think part of my music taste has never evolved a single bit in the last decade or so and still loves da punk 3-chord-simplicity-rage too much. she’ll never change at this age!

*insert insane amount of expletives and skapunkchords here*.

feeling slightly better now.

for 2010, less thesis writing and more singing. definitely.

antonio negri.

Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.

read the whole essay here.

grace.

Woke up to a milky white Bucharest bloc view. My headache was gone. Reason for rejoicing. This means I will actually get some work done today. Slightly comatose because of the splitting migraine, I watched a film last night. It did keep my interest and I must recommend it. The Soloist. I went into it not knowing the first thing about it, and was pleased that it appeared to be about Beethoven, whose work I adore. However, it was much more than that. A brilliant tale about contemporary America:  an allegory of intervention and containment on one level, a moving story of friendship on the other. It was based on a book and so appears to be a ‘true story’ even though, as you probably know if you read this weblog, all stories are true somehow, if only to themselves (and to me, hehe). The man who wrote it and who is the narrator of the film, is Steve Lopez, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times who is chasing stories dispassionately. His idea of consent is rather limited and he is a self-righteous self-labelled do-gooder, although as the spectator you find him rather mediocre and very un-godlike. He is the typical journalist out for a thrill, turning off when he senses that in journalistic terms the story doesn’t flow. So when he gets interested in this person Nathaniel Ayers at first, he is in the same mode. He just wants a story, and he rings up Julliard School to see whether Nathaniel is deluded or not, and whether he had been telling the truth to him in order to judge this man. But then, of course, amid some truly spectacular visions of music, grace and madness and ranting and flags in curious contexts, amid how people live next to each other without ever engaging, things get more complicated. The cinematography is stunning, and I think I’d have to watch it again to make sense of all of Nathaniel’s rants and visionary talk and of all the subtleties of the script. So if you just watch one film this week, make it this one. And surrender.

baby baby baby.

i found this back today and loved it as much as i did when i first read it. perhaps. i’m not gonna think about that statment too long, so as to avoid it being broken. it’s autumn, it makes me wonder about the past and the future.

it’s by Friederike Roth.

Wir beide

Draussen bei den stillen, den schönen
Lippenblütlern, ach dieses Wort
(weisst du noch die alte Mühle?)
hab ich von dir, Lippenblütler
sagen gelernt. Du hast
was weiss ich
erzählt von blassen von ins Traurigzart
getauchten Farben.

Ich hab nicht zugehört.
Bloss deine Lippen mir
die weichen angesehen
so dünnhäutig damals so zart
ach, wie denn
verschwindet warum
so eine Lippenkleinigkeit?

Geh nicht fort.
Ich find dir den Ort.

Geschichten hast du erzählt
von Wolken vom herabgefallenen Monday
vom alleinigen Wind
und von der Kraft der Wörter der Töne der Farben.

Dann waren
wie denn verschwinden warum
eingezogen die Lippen ein Schnitt.

Hier steh ich. Hier
neben dir
erloschenem Bündel aus Narben.

Beide lachen wir
Lange schon nicht mehr über die Kraft
der Farben.

träume und erkenntnistheorie.

Gib mir noch eine kleine Weile Zeit: ich will die Dinge so wie keine lieben…

Rilke says hello…

miranda (w.h. auden)

My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,
As the poor and sad are real to the good king,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree,
Turned a somersault and ran away waving;
My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.

The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body
Melted into light as water leaves a spring,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me,
Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running:
My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.

He kissed me awake, and no one was sorry;
The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

So to remember our changing garden, we
Are linked as children in a circle dancing:
My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,
And the high, green hill sits always by the sea.

	-- W. H. Auden

names. patronymes.

came across the following which i had no idea about:

Dans la plupart des civilisations antiques, un seul nom, qui n’était pas héréditaire, servait à désigner l’individu.

Les Romains utilisaient un système de trois noms : le prénom, le gentilice (nom du groupe de familles) et le cognonem (surnom, devenu nom de famille). Deux seulement, en général, pour les gens du peuple. Ce système s’est étendu sur tout l’Empire et notamment la Gaule.

Les Barbares mettent le système à bas. Les populations ne portent plus désormais qu’un nom qui ne se transmet pas.

Problème : il y a trop d’homonymes. On ajoute alors au nom un surnom. Ces surnoms sont généralement issus de la profession exercée, Meyer pour le meunier par exemple, ou d’un sobriquet lié à l’apparence (Leroux, Lagrandeur), au lieu de vie ou d’origine (Dulac), à un trait de caractère (Loiseau, Lamy), ou au rang social (Lemaître). Ces surnoms ont été peu à peu transmis aux enfants et ainsi pérennisés.

Au XV e siècle, l’on commence à fixer les noms de famille. En 1474, Louis XI interdit de changer de nom sans une autorisation royale.

En 1539, François Ier promulgue l’ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêt. Celle-ci rend obligatoire la tenue de registres d’état-civil. Le but : trouver de la «chair à canon» pour les batailles à mener au nom du Roi. La tache est confiée aux curés. Etape suivante : la Révolution française. La tenue de l’état-civil passe désormais dans les attributions de l’État et se fait à la mairie de chaque commune.

La loi du 6 fructidor de l’an II (23 août 1794) interdit de porter d’autre nom et prénoms que ceux inscrits à l’état-civil, sauf autorisation du Conseil d’Etat. En 1870, l’apparition du livret de famille fige définitivement l’orthographe de tous les patronymes.

Certains, malsonnants, sont lourds à porter : Assassin, Baise, Bordel,Cosnard, Fayot, Garce, Gaudiche, Groslard, Lapine, Maquereau,Monsallot, Nique, Putin, Simplet, Soulard, Tapin. Il est désormais possible de les modifier devant les tribunaux.

Les noms les plus portés en France sont en fait des prénoms : Martin, Bernard, Dubois, Thomas, Robert, Richard… Le moins porté : Lancellotti.

also on jewish family names here and european family names here, here on russian names…

sellout.

Gras, auseinandergeschrieben.

Die Steine, weiss, mit dem Schatten der Halme:

Lies nicht mehr – schau!

Schau nicht mehr – geh!

(Celan)

I’m worried I will sell out too late, too soon, too little, too much. I’m afraid I didn’t do enough to make it different. I’m wondering where I am going and whether I can make the right decisions.

Back to patterns that make me the stressed hamster in the wheel.

natural form.

“Orchardists have never tried growing fruit trees in their natural form. To begin with, most have never even given any thought as to what the natural form is. Of course pomologists will deny this, saying that they are working with the natural form of fruit trees and looking for ways to improve on this. But it is clear that they have not really looked in earnest at the natural form. Not a single book or report has been published which discusses pruning based on such basic factors as the phyllotaxy of a citrus tree, or which explains that a divergence of so much gives such-and -such a natural form with primary and secondary scaffold branches of X degrees.

“Many have a vague idea of the natural form as something akin to the shape of a neglected tree. But there is a world of difference between the two..” (pg. 209)

this is from fukuoka. made me wonder about ‘natural form’.