An Iranian woman in support of Mousavi (more here). It reminds me of the painting which has become stock imagery in my brain when facing struggle. Also, it’s on the cover of a Melvin’s record.

This is an ode to my lunch date and study buddy.  You’re not the only one around here cooling out on a bev, sister.

The thing about Keats was his death wish.  It’s complicated.

The poet was different from everyone else.  He had a gift.  His purpose, compulsion even, was to embody this gift.  He could see in ways that others could not, and then take the blind by their hands and lead them nearer to knowing the sublime.  The sublime of course would be a poet’s natural habitat, but an isolated one.  There was no one who might sense the world in the way they would.  If love was experiencing beauty in sync with another, when you’re born a poet, it’s understood to be something you’ll never know.  You will always be the scribe or the witness or the translator.

At least, this is how the Romantics thought of it.

But the curse of being human is need, right?  Some people are at peace with what they must take, but others aren’t.  Keats was not.  This makes sense when you think about the poet as a medium, something divine.  Divinity exists above the frankness of biology.  Was ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ Fanny Brawn or was she the burden of language?

I don’t know, but who does.

The point is, negative capability is something to be willfully not understood.  Does everybody have thoughts that form first in language?  Just some of us?  If a poet’s purpose is to articulate mimesis through lyric, does he exist when he’s got nothing to say?

I find it almost unilaterally horrifying that there are kids getting paid by the state to get “good grades.”

Not to get all ~*red scare*~ around here, but these desperate-housewives-cum-inner-city-chancellors by way of whatever suburban PTA meeting need to smooth their feathers out and take a step back. The public schooling system is broken. Irreparably. It’s of no use to sink deeper inside it.  It could only reinforce this grossly cynical reduction of “learning” to this mechanized process which seems to turn out with growing efficiency entire student bodies who will have an ever-increasing distance from real models of education independent of the  inhumanity that will always drive institutions of economy, students with an even further diminished sense of education as something one commands, not consumes.

How do these experimental, ostensibly negligible shifts in method/perception reverberate over time? In what ways might the broader application of programs like this, fueled by the desperation for any short term success, reorient how we define our highest ambitions for education?  Does it have the power to funnel our shrinking number of cultural narratives of “success” into a singular, streamline vision of subordination? Could it some day even encroach on how we define “genius,” bridling it with an eagerness to please external authority? I like to play “worst case scenario,” but there are so few benefits here that I can see unfolding in the long term, it seems wildly negligent to forget the future all around.

To say it plain, grades are not an education. Rewarding “good” (read: obedient, sedated, passive) classroom behavior, memorization, test taking skills—these speak nothing to one’s intellect or curiosity–and were to ask me personally, I’d wonder if they’re not evidence of the actual absence of said qualities.

That’s to say nothing of how a “paid A policy” quite boldly lays waste to lingering romanticism of the public school system (and perhaps the American Dream). The cash levied for these “good grades” is sourced straight from state or federal funding. That’s a convenient way to disarm any defense of our current model as something designed without the specific or eventual intent of deadening a student’s inborn hunger and curiosity (likely unrecognizable to those eventually turned from its ranks).

Substituting monetary incentives measured by meaningless yardsticks of “success” is in no way an education. It wasn’t until I flunked hard out of college that I could even begin to understand the rewards of learning from outside an institutionalized setting, or until I had enough distance from the expectations of others to figure out how to begin. That I was able to exhume the bloodless remains of my will to learn after a solid thirteen years scheming jailbreaks from every classroom I was thrown in (2nd grade: bite the white tip off a candy corn, present in palm as a lost tooth), I see that as a testament to both some sound parental priorities and the virtues of being one naturally stubborn motherfucker.

Think about almost any college kid you know. Then get back to me if you’re still itching to defend the US educational system as anything more than numbingly remedial, an antidote to the infinite possibility children are able to easily recognize in themselves and the world. That is, until we start slipping them some wild $20s to persuede them to forget.

(ps tired, writing all day, difficulty ordering words, amused by irony)

But for now, check out everyone’s favorite ladykiller in the NY Times. Double trouble: there’s a killer lady getting quoted elsewhere in the Times, talking about how the worst thing in the world is decidedly not a fat ass.

See? My friends are up to rad shit. Just imagine all the hijinx that’ll never make it to the leisure section.

From over the last few days, a few passages to make us think:

But I think we also can consider alternative paradigms of activism that are not based on self-interest. Myself, I realise, am involved in social activism not primarily because I’m fighting for my rights and I want this and I want that, but because I feel an obligation to my ancestors and my descendants. And that’s, I think, a profoundly non-Western approach. It’s not because I want something for me or I think that everybody should have this or that but because I feel that I owe it to my great grandchildren and I owe it to my great grandparents that I fight for social justice, that I fight for gender justice and I fight against heterosexism and the destruction of the environment. And I don’t know if that’s a common sort of motivation for white people. I get the impression from my context that it isn’t. That it’s motivated more by self-interests and I think that was a problem in the white feminist movement, you know, white middle-class women wanting better pay, better working conditions, better health care access etc, rather than seeing their fate in common with working-class women, women of colour and non-heterosexual women.
- Victor Lewis

From an old interview with Zizek,

BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there’s something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling structures?

Zizek: Absolutely. And I’m not bluffing here; I’m talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it’s not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn’t be articulated. Which is why I’m deeply distrustful of this “let’s just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion.” I’m more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

From our favorite, I Cite,

Interpassivity [is] the way that an object does something for us, enabling us to remain passive…For the past several months, 24/7 news media has repeated that the American people are outraged (imagine typical Jon Stewart mash up of relevant samples).

My hypothesis: blame Glen Beck and Keith Oberman. Blame Counterpunch and whatever right wing net-based publication you want. These folks are outraged for us. They are outraged in our stead, enabling us to retain our general passivity. Extreme media, in other words, doesn’t stir us up: it stirs for us.

Of course, I posted this way back in September, but isn’t it funny/heartbreaking to watch it all over again?  Like wine, the romanticism of cinema becomes so much more pungent given just a little age.

Barbie just got Ken’s name tattooed on her ass.

What’s amazing is that Barbie has been cultivated as a “woman” who is so fucking fabulous, with a CV so epic it might rival the bible in length, that her joi de vivre was never understood to be that tagalong eunuch she had on the side.  Ken was a perk (without much to perk), but never the point–yet when she gets tattooed, she volunteers to mark her body not with something awesome that means something/nothing to her, but a cattle brand.

I liked Barbies as a kid.  She had dignity.  And lots and lots of sex, because kids are perverts.  I still doubt this will be the cause of so much psychological ruin among little girls, but as women, it’s uncomfortable to know that in some panicked corporate office somewhere, yet one more band of Men’s Warehouse motherfuckers sat around and decided the only way to imagine “sexy” is by signaling “submission.”  Not just when those plastic pelvises are banging up against one another, but all the time, in whatever she does, under whatever tiny clothing she’s been snapped into.

Sounds like one boring bitch, if you ask me.

There are a few upsides to depression. For example, should you read embarrassing trend pieces with headlines like, “Why Single Women Need To Shut Up,” you are awash in a tidal of gratitude. No need to read it all the way through like myself and the ladies at Shakesville did, it can easily be reduced to single sentences like, “I’m so afraid of the ocean of lack inside of me that I can’t stand to be by myself,” or “Because I hate myself and other women, I’m 99% sure everyone else does too.”

At least I am not that. That is what I am thinking. “Love is the ultimate narcissism,” eh? At least it is when you love like that.

If your happiness is hinged on another person, you will always be disappointed. If your solitude is consumed by longing for another, just a body, just anybody, you can’t face yourself. If you refuse the possibility that someone may exist or be whole without somebody else to hold their hand, you need to take a vacation. To the ends of the earth.

All by your self.

A fucking Billy Collins poem has more intellectual complexity than these people.

by Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.

Addiction to perfection, as Marian Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation. Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden. Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective or soiled.

What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? That is a good question for garden makers.

No matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
           -Rilke

(from Iron John, by Robert Bly)

I really miss the thrill of discovery, and get very little pleasure out of finding new music now that the internet has happened. In my younger years, this was basically my life’s mission. Now I am one of those people who reads nonfiction and listens to either talk radio or the same Elvis Costello record 4,000 times in a row. That’s not really true at all, but I feel like it is.

Anyway, here’s a mix of tracks I’ve been listening to. 8tracks is rad.

(via siik, who has a track on this mix)

This is what they serve The Thing That Only Eats Hippies now that he’s getting arthritis and the hippies are scattered all over the suburbs, framing computer print-outs which read “certified yoga teacher” and hiring brown people to seed their lawns with species they’ll refer to as ‘the cadillac of grasses.’

I never imagined ground gristle and nitrites piped into intestinal casing could so felicitously embody the Plutonic ideal, and yet there it is. Formally, these are gorgeous. Unfortch, if formalism cuts it for you, then you’re either a sociopath or Clem Greenburg reanimated. Probably both.

At many times I feel like I cant just be myself because I feel that my real self is just an embarrassment to people and disrespectful. For instance when I am having a great time I usually will show it by being loud and wild. When we go bowling when I am doing really good. Getting strikes and spare. I like to put my hands in the air. Do a silly dance and shout things like oh yeah I get a strike. I really don’t know what I say but I just get exited and I end up saying it loud where other people can here me. When my fiancé kind of gets annoyed by it and tells me to quiet down it just frustrates me and kind of ruins the fun for me. I guess we just have different ways of having fun. I just think I am an embarrassment and I feel like im not fun to be around. I don’t feel like I am funny but don’t think other people think I am funny. I want people to think I am funny and fun to be around. I want people not to be board around me. I want to have great interesting conversations with people mostly I want to have all of this with my fiancé.

– from here

Every time I write something serious, I get embarrassed. I’m like, “Why so serious?”

Then I think, I’m really not very serious at all. Everybody who knows me knows this. See? I just made a rape joke! Zing!

Then I’m like, wait, no I am being serious, getting raped sucks. I don’t want it to happen to anyone, ever. Why doesn’t anybody take anything seriously anymore? Why isn’t anybody ever angry anymore? Why is everything a goddamn joke?

Then I go over the argument I’m always having with myself about how everybody knows that activists are boring, and that Air America failed because all of us just want to listen to nihilists. Nihlists don’t actually care what they’re saying because they don’t love the world. Rush Limbough, for example. He does not love the world. This makes for reckless and irreverent entertainment, which is entertaining. If I wanted to worship something, I’d go to church.

Do I love the world?
Why? Is it because I have to?
Do I think I’m better than someone who does not? (Yes.)
Isn’t thinking about any of this an insult to actual living?

Why can’t I be cute and quiet and enjoy things like gardening? Why can’t I just think, “Oh, that’s sad,” when I hear something sad? Why will I eviscerate a thing just to find relief in some small illusion (delusion) of control?

Do you see what I’m saying here? Here is a funny picture to lighten the mood, because as soon as I stop writing and you stop reading, this matter should no longer be on our minds.

What is it about people who compulsively seek guidance from any external authority that makes them all such dicks?

Coming from Afghanistan: “In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home.“

How much easier would it be to maintain the illusion of control over your life/wife if you could explain to her exactly why you’ve been raping her minimum four times a week?  “I really wish I didn’t make your pussy dry as a field of poppies,” you could tell her.  “And I totally want to devote the time to honoring your human dignity and all, but you’ve got to understand, I’ve got all these fucking quotas to meet around here!  Literally! (hey-o!)  So I’m sorry baby, but I can’t do nothing ’bout it!  Your hands are tied!”  This way, when she’s sponging off the son you have sired in the bathtub, she will not drown him in a moment of traumatized psychosis, having just recognized the face of her constant terror in his chubby blushing baby cheeks.  Bureaucracy ain’t got no face, so cha-ching!  Now you’ll definitely live on forever, at least in name, which is what counts, right?  Right?

Right.  I’m being glib.  But if there’s one single thing I have learned in my time on this earth, it is that men who hate women, who need to exert force and control over them, are really only scared to (of) death.  Conveniently, anyone who cherishes the ephemeral eternal over the unglamorous humane is the same.  They are not unrelated.  Maybe now is the time to extend my apologies to all of you very nice and empathic God-fearing folk.

I will not even bother to address any argument in the vein of, “LIKE, WHAT GIVES US THE RIGHT TO DECIDE THAT LEGALIZING CHILD BRIDES AND MARITAL RAPE IN ONE FELL SWOOP IS ACTUALLY A BAD THING?”, but I will tell you I have a really difficult time believing that anybody truly, deeply, madly believes.  Faith is theatre, a mask for fear, even in the context of radical Islamo-fundamentalism, where some are willing to die for these beliefs; they will die so long as it means they will not die, they will die so long as it means they will have never had to live.  By that I mean of course that living, if you are to ask me, means facing the enormity of possibility, pain and danger included.

Zizek had a memorable op-ed in the NYT a few years ago called, “How China Got Religion.“  It illuminates something about why Karzai et al. would help “rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections” when it isn’t something he believes in himself.  The op-ed (in true Slavoj form) deliberately provokes defensiveness from its audience by not bothering with a decisive conclusion, but instead issuing a challenge.  He asks,

Perhaps we find [this all] so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

The truth is, none of this has ever been about God.  Not the Crusades nor the Trade Center.  The playing field has always been strictly relegated to the middle kingdom: religion is culture, and culture isn’t sacred.  But maybe that is an answer to the argument I wouldn’t bother with; the audacity to declare “the truth” is in fact easily balanced with the understanding that empirically, no such singular thing exists.  You only have to withstand the possibility of being wrong, and be willing to accept the consequences should that be the case (let’s save wrong against whom? for another time).

It’s not a gamble for a coward.  But when you know something, when you know!  it!   Know it with your own two hands!  Know it like you know the contours of your own face!  Know it like you know continuing to allow government-endorsed violence against women is one of our deepest, most hideous shames!  Those moments of impassioned belief do not come from a book.  They come from the pit of your chest, and they should never be ignored or tampered down.  They come from making God human, accountable, fragile.  It is not the erasure of belief, because baby I believe.  We’re only giving the holy ghost a little flesh.

One last pearl from Zizek:  “the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.”

Besides being to blame for any suffering endured throughout all of human history, Britain is totally embarrassing because they’re totally obsessed with Beth Ditto like, still. To give you an idea of how uncool that is, I’m turning 25 next month and I was getting bored by, “Oh my God, you look just like that girl from the Gossip!” when I was still in high school.

Case in point, headline published March 28th, 2009: The Beth Ditto effect: are fat girls finally trendy?

Knee-slapping premise for an article, but it’s actually not bad.

For the record, I could not look any less like Beth Ditto. What people were responding to was that I probably “should” have been tenting myself in caftans, but I, like Beth Ditto one might imagine, am pretty over giving a shit if there’s a soft crease of thigh fat hanging out from my hot pants. I’ve noticed this sort of thing happening any time two or more girls who don’t loathe every cubic inch of their flesh are gathered in one place. Inevitably, “Are you guys sisters!?”

And I guess we are, in a way. Uncle Karl, you are not invited into our sorority. I’m sure you’re super bummed.