Lars Iyer's Blog, page 60

[In his photographs] He was a mountain of a man, very big, dark and handsome, square-jawed, earnest for the camera, somewhat imperious. A seer, a prophet, frowning as though accusing the viewer of levity in the midst of the general catastrophe.

Since I was working on my dissertaion, we talked about academe; we agreed that the university was covered in dust.

Of his friend Camus, to whom the wartime journal Leaves of Hypnos was dedicated, Char said, Camus knew that words could demoralize. He realised after the war that The Stranger had had a demoralizing effect. That's why he wrote The Plague. We were friends because both of us recognized that writing imposes duties, it does not grant rights.

We talked about the brutality of the Luberon, the mountainous region where he was a Resistance fighter during the war. We talked about meteors, snakes, insomnia. When he couldn't sleep, he used his nights to illustrate, by candlelight, the book he was about to publish, The Talismanic Night that Shone in its Circle. [...]

Yet even during that warmest of encounters, my friendship with Rene Char felt as fragile as a goldfinch. [...]

And he had another bone to pick with critics. The trouble is, he said, that critics want to find a plot in poetry. But poetry has no plot, no continuous development like a novel. Poems are inscriptions made here and there, on scattered rocks (he was standing, miming this). [...]

As Helen Vendler once remarked to me, 'One feels Char writes with absolute candour, but in a secret language'.

from Nancy Kline, Meeting Rene Char

Contemporary politics is a devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities [only to reoffer them in] definitively nullified form.

Agamben, Means Without End

Appearances notwithstanding, the spectacular-democratic world organization now emerging runs the risk of being the worst tyranny human history has ever seen  and against which resistance and dissent will be ever more difficult - all the more so as, now more clearly than ever, this organisation will have as its task to see to the survival of humanity in an uninhabitable world.

Agamben, in his introduction to Debord's Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle

I will be a guest of Frank Hanover's on the Words on Top Radio Broadcast on UCC radio this Wednesday at some point between 2.00 and 3.00 PM. Click the 'Listen live' button.

If people were once able to pursue their mode of living in an organic and unselfconscious manner, in today's cultural hegemony it takes a lot of persistence and resistance to hold one's ground. If for the frivolous life in postmodernity nothing really matters, for the form of life in the coming community everything always matters.

David Kishik

If people were once able to pursue their more of living in an organic and unselfconscious manner, in today's cultural hegemony it takes a lot of persistence and resistance to hold one's ground. If for the frivolous life in postmodernity nothing really matters, for the form of life in the coming community everything always matters.

David Kishik

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times - noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring - belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetry for rusty cars. 

Calvino

David Kishik, with a question for academics:

I have a question for you:

What is the proportion between the time you spend, on the one hand, reading and thinking and writing in your field, and the time you spend, on the other hand, selling yourself by writing proposals and applications, shmoozing with colleagues and professors, and so forth?

And I have another question:

Did you know that the most cold-blooded corporations spend on advertisement anywhere between about %1 of their revenues (in the retail business) and about %7 (for companies selling packaged goods)?

This is just an educated guess, but I have a feeling that, on average, successful academics spend a much bigger chunk of their intellectual resources on self-promotion than what good capitalists spend on marketing their wares.

For a man can never be in death in a worse sense than where death itself is without death.

Augustine, City of God (Cambridge, p.558)