I think alot of people have had negative experiences with people of a
particular race or think they have.
Personally, I've never had a straight dope deal with a black person in my life,
and I've tried many times.
Every single time I've ever tried to buy weed or hash off a black person
they've been dishonest.
It's not racism, it's a fact. I don't hold it against them.
Racism is part of a massively complex vectoring of Realpolitik. Whatever "I"
"think" about it seems
highly irrellevant. Racism exists. I try to gently steer people away from it,
to offer alternatives
and basically to be compassionate toward their state of confusion for the concept of
"race" is
nothing but a form of "confusion," a confusion of morphologies, a confusion of perceptions, a
confusion of polarities, etc, etc..
I particularly like Armand Marie Leroi's Book _Mutants: On Genetic Variety and
the Human Body_
and Leonard Cassuto's _The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American
Literature_
While some of us roll and grunt in labia, others must roll and grunt in
monsters. :)
Scumbag = Filth:
everything is filthy in nature
George Bataille is the filthiest of all
he has that Catholic aura loved by Lacan
they shared women together
a woman shared them or was it, no it wasn't
Sartre and Beauvoir, what a beautiful sight
Rita Heyworth the lady from Shanghai
could only speak something else when no one looked
everyone looked at Rita Heyworth, so what
does this have to do with filth? nothing except
what just about anything else "had to do with etc.
nothing's clean anywhere, not a speck in place
or rather specks on specks, what a spectacle!
nature's what is filthy, isn't it now?
thx,
Lanny
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.WVU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: A Carved Ivory Figure of a Roman Actor Wearing the Traditonal
Tragic Costume and Mask.
I totally agree with you, but I still find Vlad a scumbag; I'm really sick
of anti-semitism, racism, blah blah and I can't get over it.
- Alan - this is wonderful to the extent btw you might write a novel out
of it or a daily grind or something, I wonder if blog would work for you
of this? - Alan
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Maria Damon wrote:
hey this stuff is great!
At 12:59 AM -0700 8/23/06, phanero wrote:
Let's see if I can do this confessionalism thing, since it seems to be
rather outre'
among who-what-who-rang-you rang? aawwwhh.
Fact: My landscapist and horticulturist is nearly finished installing about
a 35ft run of black, timber, and crook-stem bamboo along the fence-line
with my northern neighbors.
Fact: We got a really good deal, because her supplier is like this totally
wigged out hippie
Oregon stoner bamboo dude (mid 30's) whose business is to go and harvest
big patches of bamboo
that have gotten away from their owners and who want it removed. He repots
it or replants
it rurally and sells it for less than half of even a wholesale nursery
price. For 2 Grand I have
an instant stand of Bamboo whose average mean height is about 9 ft tall and
well over 50 individuals.
Fact: Today when I went to mail out Alan's book on the Weathermen, I
stopped at a new Asian
Bubble-Tea shop to get an iced Americano triple Shot and browse at my
favorite Antique/Slash
junq shop 2 doors down. I picked up Everett F. Bleiler's _The Checklist of
Fantastic Literature_,
and _Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the
Rio Grande_ by
Marc Simmons which has a wonderful photograph of a trio of Mexican witches
from 1895.
This book will dovetail nicely into a new cluster of Ethnographic
witchcraft
texts I am slowly collecting. Nowhere near as large as my Head-hunting
collection, but I'm
not even really trying at this point.
Fact: One of the laborers today was a student of Chinese. He was 22. The
other laborer
is a well-known local guitarist named Darren but I don't know the name of
his band.
He helped me move my old 36" television into the basement and would not
accept
the $20 I offered him because I have so few male friends and there's never
really
any context for me to ask for physical assistance with moving stuff. I
thought that was
pretty nice of him. At one point during the day we all had a long talk
about the film
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404551/
which is essentially about the cover-up of the realities of life in the
Congo
during Leopold II's reign etc, which is where Conrad got his Heart of
Darkness
story from. What was odd, Is that I saw another documentary about the
problem
with the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria who had the same African Historian in
it
but who isn't listed at all on the IMDB web-page which sort of pisses me
off.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0416-24.htm
In the movie, a longish section is about how the children take the
styrofoam boxes
and melt them down along the shores to sniff the "glue".. This makes them
sleep
very deeply, so many people go and find the sleeping children in order to
sodomize
their sleeping bodies. The same narrator does both films or at least I'm
pretty sure
it was the same guy. The Nile Perch film was so depressing I had to turn it
off.
It was that bad. South Indians are completely exploiting this area to the
ruination
if the environment etc. I say that, because that's a prominent feature in
the film, though
I'm sure there's more complexity to it if I could have stood to watch it
more, but actually
seeing little kids huddled around little kettles of melting styrofoam just
about made me
gag so I turned it off.
Yesterday Grace was telling me about a friend of hers, another Californian
Native American
who was actually a special type of Apache shaman, one of the gender
ambiguous types.
She was describing his clothing which I found very interesting. I guess he
also had some chemical
issues and died.
Vlad came over today, and he started a long diatribe against the Jews. He
has a very Czech way
of looking at things, and I tried to point him in the direction of Israeli
nation bad like more or less
most nations, and "Jew" more or less variable.. He seem to agree with this,
though he held deep
reservations about the basic character of the average jew: "They are not
craftsman, they build nothing,
They are scumbag.." I can't help but love the way he calls folks he
doesn't like "scumbags"..
Vlad is a mailman, and one hell of a craftsman in a sense.
Today I finally found a decent Medusa Bust. She looks confused, sad,
anxious, and tragic.
She's sitting next to my cheapo chinese lamp in front of the printer on my
scandinavian cherrywood
faux veneer desk.
The Fetishist and the Iconoclast are like two sides of a coin, but the
funny thing is,
they are also both their own other. The fetishist is an iconoclast of the
image of the iconoclast,
and the Iconoclast's Iconoclasm is a fetish. Go figure.
This is basically why I think art and poetry are sort of bullshit. I mean I
get stuff
out of it, but really, any leaf is as good as a rembrandt or better, and
listening to my
Mom talk (or anybody really) is just as interesting as Shakespeare at least
to me.
I know there are perils with the radical democratization and flattening of
affect of 'culture',
but the radical flattening of affect seems infinitely safer than setting
loose all kinds of polarizations. those polarizations are what I have
identified as Burrough's calling
Virus B-23 a "topping forest fire." This doesn't mean I don't have
"tastes," but it does
allow those tastes to be rooted in a "pragmatism of affect-zero" which is
all very un-Japanese
I suppose. The motion of contraries in the world is a well known structure.
Blake goes into
this among others.. Its all quite strange.
Just like tonight. I see absolutely no reason to look at Bataille the way
Alan does. He has
a negative tropism towards a Catholic vibe, whereas I kind of dig the whole
image fetishism
complex. In my world I always move toward Hybridity and sarcasm. I make fun
of stuff.
I make fun of myself. I make fun everything. Put Bataille on the Cross, Cut
his head off.
Take his cut off head and put it into Hasidic Drag, Punk Hasidic Drag, Punk
Hasidic Drag Queen Head of Bataille.
I absolutely cannot take human consciousness seriously. Its ridiculous.
This is a species
who absolutely cannot get their social organization settled in any
meaningful sense.
It absolutely makes me think of Bataille's headless Acephale, not because I
SUPPORT THE HEADLESS IMAGE OF MINDLESS HUMANITY but
because humanity is fucking stupid beyond anyone's understanding.
Humanity's
absolute and hideous stupidity confounds all reason.
Take a recent conference on spirituality. A wonderful sensitive writer, you
could tell, was speaking on OPB (public radio) about this uplifting coming
together of the
spiritual traditions and suddenly this maniac starts foaming at the mouth
about some
obscure Christian dogma and saying we'll go to hell for forgiving the
Muslim or some
such, very poor characterization on my part. Now this woman was an expert
on fundamentalism.
She's a PAID expert. And what did she say about this. She said she was
struck dumb.
She was, get this, STRUCK DUMB, by this man's stupidity and err well let's
say
the "impasse" of his structural reality.
Exactly. I won't lie and say I've read every word of it, But Avital
Ronell's book called
Stupidity is one of the most provocative books on the subject I know of,
except
maybe Erasmus Praise of Folly. I guess my point in all this, is that in my
self and in my work
and in my life. I have experienced nothing but a continuous feeling of
monstrous stupidity
in myself, in my environment, in everything. Whenever I think something is
great it turns
out to be shit, and when I think something is shit it turns out to be
great, and things like that.
I have no sense whatsoever of what I should be doing or why, and I feel
absolutely no reason
to feel this way. In this sense, I feel I have achieved a greater level of
innocence and purity
than most. I don't believe anything. At this point I feel more or less as
simply a victim
of a vast cosmic signal system. Like a bubble whose job is to be mangled
beyond recognition
and then to dissolve. I have no desire to see my name continue, to have a
legacy, and I
have no "art resume." I don't fault people who want to make their life and
culture into
a kind of solitonic force, but I see absolutely no use for it in my case
because I'm very stupid (I'm sure you agree).
In this sense I guess you could say I am of the Cynic school. I have read
Peter Slotjerdyk's _Critique of Cynical Reason_ and in fact I did read
every page.
I hope all of you realize how monstrously stupid I am.
Thanks. Such a sad old Medusa bust. It looks pretty good though.
I think I'll paint in the eyes like a Daruma..
Ooh A Daruma-medusa, walking upside down on the snakes like an octupus..
sort of like the THING.. great flick..
There were two boys at the junq shop today. (They had skateboards, so I
instantly liked them.)
We put a top hat on one and a cape and he spontaneously became Mr. Hyde. It
was pretty cute, really, slashing his fake sword cane around. WOW! Some
cool African Jazz playing ZOMBIA ZOMBIA.. wish I knew who that was...
I wish I could be a snobby Grammar person or whatever, But I like Lon
Chaney better
than a Dangling Participle or whatever, and I think wearing a Turban is
cooler than Syntax.
Leo Marx wrote the Machine in the Garden.
I live it.
blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com - for URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see
http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], -
general directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org
Trace at: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk - search "Alan Sondheim"
