:: baburnama ::

from Thackston's preface:

"Babur writes in his native tongue,  a language that had little or no literary pretensions, and his style is devoid of the sumptuous Persianate artifice and literary contrivance, with its penchant for rhyming synonym and seemingly endless parallel constructions, that characterize the Chaghatay prose of Sultan-Husayn Mirza and Ali-Sher Nawa'i."

"...bearing in mind that it is impossible to reproduce in English, with its centuries of literature, the ambiance of a book written in a language with few, if any, literary antecedents, like Chaghatay."

v. woolf on reality . . .

"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech -- and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us."

v.woolf :: a room of one's own

"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading -- I like reading books in the bulk."

*

"I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; 'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being."

"The indifference of the world which Keats and and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?"

*

"Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars."

"As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom."

*

"She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience -- she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world. Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. But there were many more influences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression a buried suffering smoldering beneath her passion, a rancor which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain."

"It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others."

*

"Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked."

"But - here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other - the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter 'I' all is shapeless as mist."

*

"By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dig deep into the stream."

"Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves."

*

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."

*

omg, so cute & cool

and if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones....

contemporary tibetan art/ists!

nortse

tsering nyandak

tenzin jigme

sonam dolma

poetry of gendun chopel.

selections, trans. by don lopez

In the youth of past, unseen today, there is no aging.
The maiden of the future, still unarrived, lives a human life, ever young.
The meeting of those two in the house of thoughts produced in the present:
This is the seed of all histories in the voices of migrators in the three realms.

དེ་རིང་མི་མཐོང་འདས་པའི་དཞོན་ནུ་ནམ་ཡང་རྒ་བ་ཡོད་མིན་ཏེ།།
ད་དུང་མ་སླེབས་ཕྱིས་ཀྱི་ན་ཆུང་རྟག་ཏུ་དར་མི་ཚེ་ལ་གནས།།
ད་ལྟ་སྐྱེས་པའི་རྟོག་པའི་ཁྱིམ་ན་དེ་གཉིས་ལྷན་ཅིག་འཛོམས་པ་འདི།།
ཁམས་གསུམ་འདྲོ་བའི་སྐད་དུ་བྲིས་པཻ་ལོ་རྒྱུས་ཀུན་གྱི་ས་བོན་ཉིད།།

First kiss the arms and under the arms
Then slowly kiss the belly.
Becoming more intoxicated, kiss the thighs and vulva;
Draw the streams of the channels into the sea.

ཐོག་མར་དཔུང་པ་དེ་ནས་མཐན་ཁུང་དང་།།
དེ་ནས་དལ་གྱིས་ལྟེ་བར་འོ་བྱེད་ཅིང་།།
ལྷག་པར་མྱོས་ནས་བྲལ་དང་བཧ་ག་སྟེ།།
ཡུར་བའི་ཆུ་ཕྲན་མཚོ་ལ་དྲངས་པར་བྱ།།

Seeing this thread of the lightning of language
Connecting strings of body, speech, and knowledge,
The light from the minds of humans of like nature
Creates the sole stream radiating to each other.
With the great familiarity of a long-staying guest
In the snowy realm of Tibet, my borrowed homeland,
I will gather into one place and record
All the scattered ancient terms and latter-day expressions.

རིགས་མཐུན་མི་ཡི་འདྲོ་མའི་སེམས་ཀྱི་འོད།།
ཕན་ཚུན་འཕྲོ་བའི་རྒྱུན་ལམ་ཉག་གཅིག་དེ།།
ལུས་ངག་རྣམ་རིག་སྲད་བུ་ཟུང་འབྲེལ་བའི།།
ཐ་སྙད་གློག་གི་སྐུད་པ་འདིར་མཐོང་ནས།།
གཡར་པོའི་ཕ་ཡུལ་གངས་ཅན་བོད་ལྗོངས་སུ།།
རྒྱུན་རིང་གནས་པཻ་མགྲོན་ལ་རྒྱུས་ཆེ་པའི།།
གནའ་བོའི་བརྡ་དང་ཕྱིས་ཀྱི་ཐ་སྙད་ཀུན།།
ཐོར་བུ་སྡེབ་ཏུ་བསྡུས་ཏེ་བྲི་བར་བྱ།།

(((roland barthes))) :::the death of the author ::::::::::s/z

"...writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing."

*

"What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text."

"The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages."

*

"It is precisely because I forget that I read."

*

"To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor."

*

"...but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanishing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive."

*

:::la persona gramatical:::

sublime.

revolt!!! liberation philology!!!

"Sukhavati or bust!"

...or, hasta la victoria siempre!

from "The Life of Milarepa"

A rock crag with no on around is your father's house;
A friendless and lonely abode, the diety's home.
Mind riding mind is a tireless steed;
Your body, a wilderness hermitage, a temple.
Unwavering virtue is the best of all medicines.

ibrahim maalouf

dom la nena

Why should I think that heaven is my home....

....when I am a gypsy and I only want to roam?

sunny

trailer:


full film here:
http://www.njoytube.com/sunny-2011-movies-english-subtitle-multi-subtitle-video_41db2f93b.html

elizabeth catlett mora

Elizabeth Catlett, 1949, Mariana Yampolsky

*

"I have always wanted my art to service my people -- to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life."

Organizada Negra, 1947, Lithograph

Target, 1970, bronze

Central America Says No, 1986, Linograph

Homage to the Panthers, 1970, Linocut

*

"I arrived in Mexico City one night and the next evening I went to the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). I got dizzy from the altitude so we all went to a café. I met my future husband that night. There were a lot of us, all artists. Leopoldo Mendez, Pablo Higgins, Francisco 'Pancho' Mora. Pablo said, 'You should teach Pancho English, and he can teach you Spanish.' He never learned English."

"Mexico City was a calm, beautiful place. Not like it is now. It was a sunshiny, green, lovely city, where everything moved slowly. I realized this one day I was standing on a corner talking to a friend and waiting for a bus. When the bus came, I said, 'I've got to go.' But the friend said, 'Don't worry, another bus will come along.'"

Alfabetizando, c. 1950, Lithograph

"I had to meet with five professors. One of them said, 'Why did you apply? You can't get the job. You are a foreigner and a woman.'

A week or so later I was sick in bed. There was a phone call for us at the store next door. Pancho went to get it and then he came upstairs. 'Give me your hand. Now I am shaking the hand of a professor of the National University.'"

*

Elizabeth Catlett at work in her studio, c. 1983

There is a Woman in Every Color

Female Torso, 1988, Black Marble

Singing Their Songs, 1992, Lithograph

"I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful."

I Have Given the World My Songs, 1947, Linocut

Cartas, 1986, Lithograph

(((brooke candy)))

gioconda belli :: la mujer habitada

Felipe wouldn't come today. She felt it in the leaves, in the air. She trusted her intuition, her ability to read what might be in the weight of the atmosphere, the way the flowers moved and the direction of the wind.

Felipe wouldn't come today, and it was better that way, she thought. She was tired.

The stars twinkled in the distance like roguish eyes opening and closing the holes in the universe. "I'm alone," she thought, looking at the immense abyss of darkness. "I'm alone and nobody can tell me for certain if what I am doing is right or wrong." This was the amazing thing about running one's own life, she thought: that chiarascuro substance shifting in time whose individual duration was a chance like everything else.

***

Now she will not leave the earth like flowers that perish without a trace. Omens are hidden in the night, and she moves among them, at last unsheathing her obsidian, her oak. Little remains now of that dormant woman whom the scent of my blossoms wakened from the heavy sleep of indolence. Slowly Lavinia has touched her depths, reaching the place where lie the noble sentiments the gods give to humans before sending them t live on earth and sow corn. My presence has been a knife to carve away indifference. But hidden within her were the sensations which now flourish and that some day will intone chants that will never die.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

!LUCE!

Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring. And she is not listened to, unless proper meaning (meaning of the proper) is lost. Whence the resistances to that voice that overflows the "subject." Which the "subject" then congeals, freezes, in its categories until it paralyzes the voice in its flow.

"And there you have it, Gentlemen, that is why your daughters are dumb." Even if they chatter, proliferate phythically in works that only signify their aphasia, or the mimetic underside of your desire. And interpreting them where they exhibit only their muteness means subjecting them to a language that exiles them at an ever increasing distance from what perhaps they would have said to you, were already whispering to you. If only your ears were not so formless, so clogged with meaning(s), that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already heard.

Outside of this volume already circumscribed by the signification articulated in (the father's) discourse nothing is: awoman. Zone of silence.

*

Re-semblance cannot do without red blood.

Mother-matter-nature must go on forever nourishing speculation.

But this re-source is also rejected as the waste-product of reflection, 

cast outside as what resists it:

as madness.

*

*

What remains, then, would be the pleasure of speaking of love.

A pleasure already, and still, enjoyed by the ancient soul.

A pleasure the science of which psychoanalytic theory would elaborate.

For an over-pleasure?

But of what? Of whom?

And between whom and whom?

*

One way [to "reopen" the figures of philosophical discourse, to make them "render up" and give back what they owe the feminine] is to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced, whatever it may say about these conditions in discourse. For example the "matter" from which the speaking subject draws nourishment in order to produce itself, to reproduce itself; the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its framing in space-time, its geometric organization, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their dialogues, indeed, their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself. All these are interventions on the scene; they ensure its coherence so long as they remain uninterpreted. Thus they have to be reenacted, in each figure of discourse, in order to shake discourse away from its mooring in the value of "presence." For each philosopher, beginning with those whose names define some age in the history of philosophy, we have to point out how the break with material contiguity is made, how the system is put together, how the specular economy works.

land rights & the geography of soul

(((timeliness)))

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2013-06-04/googles-eric-schmidt-and-jared-cohen

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2012-10-10/cecile-richards-inforums-21st-century-visionary-award

'playing the blues is like being black twice'

once more with feeling:

International Boundaries Are Not Authoritative

Awesome.

"General Map of Railways, Islamic Republic of Iran & Its Transit Corridors"

http://web.archive.org/web/20040113090232/http://www.irirw.com/erailinfo/maps/mainmap.htm

"Fuck everybody. Amen."

::Synecdoche, new york::

searching for sugarman

duras : the lover

He lit a cigarette and gave it to me. And very quietly, close to my lips, he talked to me.

And I talked to him too, very quietly.

Because he doesn't know for himself, I say it for him, in his stead. Because he doesn't know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him.

*

*

The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I've already written, more or less -- I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I'm doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays if often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it.

*

*

Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love.

*

i love london : i love yosemite : i love life

woolf :: "craftsmanship" :: bbc

I LOVE KALX

los norte americanos:

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

In the sea of Iwami,
By the cape of Kara,
There amid the stones under sea
Grows the deep-sea miru weed;
There along the rocky strand
Grows the sleek sea tangle.

Like the swaying sea tangle,
Unresisting would she lie beside me --
My wife whom I love with a love
Deep as the miru-growing ocean.
But few are the nights
We two have lain together.

Away I have come, parting from her
Even as the creeping vines do part.
My heart aches within me;
I turn back to gaze --
But because of the yellow leaves
Of Watari Hill,
Flying and fluttering in the air,
I cannot see plainly
My wife waving her sleeve to me.
Now as the moon, sailing through the cloud-rift
Above the mountain of Yakami,
Disappears, leaving me full of regret,
So vanishes my love out of sight;
Now sinks at last the sun,
Coursing down the western sky.

I thought myself a strong man,
But the sleeves of my garment
Are wetted through with tears.


ENVOYS
My black steed
Galloping fast,
Away have I come,
Leaving under distant skies
The dwelling place of my love.

Oh, yellow leaves
Falling on the autumn hill,
Cease a while
To fly and flutter in the air,
That I may see my love's dwelling place!

intimacy:

"Rirette felt a great emptiness in her head, because she was so tired, she looked at the port, all sticky in the glass, like a liquid caramel and a voice in her repeated, "Happiness, happiness," and it was a beautifully grave and tender world."

what is wrong with groovin?

vibrazioni dal canapaio

it's so hard to tell who's going to love you the best.

::: the loss of nostalgia's referent :::

dead men don't smoke marijuana :)

those deep purplyblackblues...

mo' miles, mo' miel

"The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text.

Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized.

One might wonder what use 'opening up possibilities' finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is 'impossible,' illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question." -jb

PARIS IS BURNING!

judy.

"But perhaps there is now another difficulty after a generation of feminist writing which tried, with varying degrees of success, to bring the feminine body into writing, to write the feminine proximately or directly, sometimes without even the hint of a preposition or marker of linguistic distance between the writing and the written. It may be only a question of learning how to read those troubled translations, but some of us nevertheless found ourselves returning to pillage the Logos for its useful remains."

- Bodies that Matter, ix