May 2013
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Judith Butler's "Violence, Mourning, Politics"...
“I may wish to reconstitute my ‘self’ as if it were there all along, a tacit eho with acumen from the very start; but to do so would be to deny the various forms of rapture and subjection that formed the condition of my emergence as an individuated being and that continue to haunt my adult sense of self with whatever anxiety and longing I may now feel. Individuation is an...
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Judith Butler's "Violence, Mourning, Politics" -...
“When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties...
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Judith Butler's "Violence, Mourning, Politics" -...
“Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter...
March 2013
3 posts
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todf:
Denise Levertov reading Life At War,...
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More Notes from The Queer Art of Failure by Judith...
“To say that we might want to think about memory and forgetting differently is in fact to ask that we start seeing alternatives to the inevitable and seeming organic models we use for marking progress and achievement; it also asks us to notice how and whether change has happened: How do we see change? How do we recognize it? Can we be aware of change without saying that change has ended...
January 2013
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Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
“I discovered that making things meant leaving evidence of life behind when I moved on. Making things was like leaving historical records of my existence behind when I left the room, or building, or neighborhood, the state and possibly the earth… as in mortality, as in death. When I was a kid I discovered that making an object, whether it was a drawing or a story, meant something that...
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November 2012
2 posts
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Notes #1 Robert Evans on School Leadership
“For years now, most of the administrators I’ve met have said they love education, like leading, and can’t imagine doing anything else, but that the quality of life has been deteriorating. Their jobs are, if not eating them up, eating into their lives. They are working harder than ever, longer than ever, dealing with ever greater complexity, sacrificing ever more of their...
October 2012
2 posts
The New Yorker: The Dead Are Real →
What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the…
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Notes #1 from Writing Down the Bones
“This book is about writing. It is also about using writing as your practice, as a way to help you penetrate your life and become sane. What is said here about writing can be applied to running, painting, anything you love and have chosen to work with in your life…
To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life…
When I teach a class, I want the students...
September 2012
39 posts
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Notes #2 from Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
“Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction. It is not, then, that bodies simply have a direction, or that they follow directions, in moving this way or that. Rather, in moving this way, rather than that, and moving in this way again and again, the surfaces of...
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Notes #4 from Joanna Macy
“Living systems evolve in variety, resilience, and intelligence; they do this not by erecting walls of defense and closing off from their environment, but by opening more widely to the currents of matter-energy and information. They integrate and differentiate through constant interaction, spinning more intricate connections and more flexible strategies. For this they require not...
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“I dreamt last night,
oh marvelous error,
that there were honeybees in my...”
– Antonio Machado
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Garrison Keillor Reading Mary Oliver's The Swan
A quick errand run to the bank resulted in an unexpected gift, catching Garrison Keillor reading Mary Oliver’s The Swan on today’s Writer’s Almanac, and which you, too, can listen if you go to Writer’s Almanac site. The line breaks and spacing are gorgeous, but won’t hold up here, so forgive my truncating her lines.
Excerpt from Mary Oliver’s The Swan:
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Time Lapse Installation of Barbara Kruger's... →
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Notes #3 from Joanna Macy
“So this is where we begin — by acknowledging that our times confront us with realities that are painful to face, difficult to take in, and confusing to live with. Our approach is to see this as the starting point of an amazing journey that strengthens us and deepens our aliveness. The purpose of this journey is to find, offer, and receive the gift of Active Hope.
…Active Hope...
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