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| Michel Foucault on dandyism |
| 11.28.04 (8:06 pm) [edit] |
The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on “vulgar, earthy, vile nature”; on man’s indispensable revolt against himself; on the “doctrine of elegance” which imposes “upon its ambitious and humble disciples” a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art.
- from his essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1978)
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| Obliquity |
| 11.12.04 (6:11 am) [edit] |
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I've been very interested in the idea of the "oracular" lately. I'll pick up some books on the Delphic oracle, maybe dig up any primary sources I can find to see what the Greeks themselves said. You could say that a prophecy is a statement that people relate to their own lives and experiences. Under pressure of desire, cause and effect relationships become much muddier. Some anthropologists might say that the definition of magic is the confluence of cause and effect relationships under the influence of desire (i.e. you stubbed your toe on the chair-leg and attribute cause and effect relationships because of certain desires that you have). If literary criticism is the practice of interpreting, then oracles are supposed to have access to something beyond the ordinary, whether chewing on bay leaves or having a direct line to God. We'll read all sorts of things into the gaps in our information on a writer's access (and life), which is why it's better not to lay out things explicitly. Speaking of explicitness, at least three people have described my writing as "oblique." It's always difficult to characterize one's own writing because how it's different from what you don't write, and by definition you can't see past the limits of what you know. So when the word "oblique" pops up a few times, it's a gift from those who can see me more clearly than I can. So can I use the word "oblique" to understand not only my writing, but myself as a person? Am I an "oblique" person? What does it mean to be oblique? What does it mean to be oblique? What does it mean to embody "obliqueness"? In this way, if several people give us a word to understand ourselves, then it's a gift from those who may see us in ways we can't see about ourselves. This adjective tells us how our writing relates to our lives: an adjective about our art tells us how we work in non-art domains. This adjective shows how our aesthetics are already part of our lives.
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| You are my prosthetic limb |
| 11.07.04 (1:30 pm) [edit] |
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I've been increasingly systematizing my writing process. We might call it the "technologies of writing," 'technology' in the Greek sense of techne, the means by which something is done and, in this case, the ways in which I shape and condition the way I write. The way that third parties participate in my writing is crucial: I depend upon people, whether other writers in workshop or artists like my best friend. The networks that I create between myself and others are, therefore, part of these enabling technologies. They are like prosthetic limbs, extending the reach of what I can do as an artist. These limbs are entire systems of writers, critics, libraries, publishers, etc.
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| In Search of Organized Time |
| 11.01.04 (4:46 am) [edit] |
I brought my most recent poem to the Avol's Bookstore morning workshop, which is based on the form of a heart, atria, ventricles and all. Doctors Jessie and Jeannie were on hand for the operation. I bought a copy of Gray's Anatomy to commemorate the occasion.
I'm rather in flux with whom I'm spending the majority of my time. It's great to make work part of the social scene; my friends use work as a chance to be in the same spaces. It's like watching TV with friends: you spend time with them without having to foreground talking. The Six Feet Under club (or SFU for us secret handshakers) has been slow of late, what with school obligations. But we managed to squeeze in an episode a few days ago.
Speaking of time organization, I was just talking to a colleague yesterday about it. As a result of studying for both my Ph.D. qualifying exams and being in an extremely structured creative writing class, I tried to structuring my poetry production in a very systematic way, with specific days for writing, revision, revision, and final revision. A poem these days is alive for the span of a week and no longer. Inspiration, as a result, is extremely bounded and systematized. It's turned out to be a very successful system for me (it's helped me avoid the post-book slump that seems to be almost a cliché among writers), and I'm now trying to import it back to my school habits and it seems to be working well with my academic writing. Since I picked organization-schemes as my monomaniacal hobby last year, I've had a lot of fun talking to people about their systems.
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