about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the problem we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of this…
but to the australian aborigine an aranda say among the aranda there is i take it a different way of looking at all this or at least a different way of talking about what we have just been looking at for in aranda in the vernacular aranda system as it existed in the 19th century there were according to the people familiar with them four or actually five fundamental color terms two blacks white red and one other term for all the rest one black was purka used of charcoal and the other was urupulla which included brown and a fair range of greys white was churungura red tutuka and the other was tierga the sky was tierga a green leaf was tierga and…
i had an image we were talking about celebrating birthdays and people wanted to know if i wanted a birthday party and i said i dont know if i want a birthday party because birthdays are a little bit like being in a falling elevator and celebrating at every floor you fall and then i thought about this again and i realized id only thought about this since i got to be thirty because when i was a real little guy i always thought of getting older as an ascension you know how you have a different image of getting older when youre a kid how you cant wait i remember i was sitting…
now of all the philosophers i know the only one who tried to make a case for the meaning of experience is john dewey actually tried to think it through although his most thorough thinking through took place in a very special situation to describe the experience of art which was not an activity he was very knowledgeable about but he was knowledgeable about human activity and he proposed that art making was very much like any other form of human activity and that at its center is the experience it provides you with in order to describe this he had to work out his idea of what an experience was and this turned out to be…
i walk over and i look at the roulette table while she stands there silently watching i look at the numbers the numbers are strange 3 π ε α δ σ i pick ε somehow thinking its the natural log e so i pick ε hands a transcendental number the ball goes round and round her hands again my croupier claps her and it stops on ε she claps and an elderly gentleman in a tuxedo without a tie comes out of a back room carrying what looks like a violin case comes in takes out an old violin and starts to play he plays he in this odd broken way for moments he plays brilliantly a paganini caprice which you shouldnt…
now lets take a pair of words like « generous » and « thrifty » say we could probably find an axis that ran through them unfortunately we could find many more than one axis but lets take an axis an axis is a good word it suggests so much a kind of space through with it runs a kind of semantic globe domain ? hyperspace ? anyway lets call it an axis […] but what could that mean that a word could lie closer to the same axis than another it could mean that we will have to find only pure opposites or antonyms lying at ends of feature axes and that all the words in…
“Prose” is the name for a kind of notational style. It’s a way of making language look responsible. You’ve got justified margins, capital letters to begin graphemic strings which, when they are concluded by periods, are called sentences, indented sentences that mark off blocks of sentences that you call paragraphs. This notational apparatus is intended to add probity to that wildly irresponsible, occasionally illuminating and usually playful system called language. Novels may be written in “prose;” but in the beginning no books were written in prose, they were printed in prose, because “prose” conveys an illusion of a commonsensical logical…
I think it is clear that the relation of poetry to truth, which is a question of domain, not of medium, haunts all great Romantic art, which had rejected the more modest role of existing “to divert and to amuse.” Poets like Wordsworth launched a powerful claim to truth through a complicated poetic argument that adjusted mind to nature in the medium of the image, while poets like Keats split “truth” from “value” and lined up poetry on the side of “value,” giving this new domain of truthless value the name Imagination. David Antin Some Questions about Modernism 2006 http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Antin-David_Some-Q-Modernism.html…
Probably this is one of the main reasons that 60s modernism dispensed with all notions of “composition, ” because of the deadly way in which “arrangement ” smothers any interest in the presented object in favor of a banal pleasure based on recurrence phenomena or else treats it to the red carpet presentation of a “little king.” They reasoned quite correctly that if there are pieces there is arrangement, and all arrangements, no matter how “random,” are apprehended as some kind of order, because randomness is conceivable but not perceivable. Personally I share this distaste for ideas of arrangement and…
there are stories without narratives in every newspaper in the country a hurricane swung inland and hit the coast of florida once there was a peaceful town called tallahassee and now its in ruins […] and as i see it a story is all about plot a story is the representation of a series of events and parts of events that result in a significant transformation its a logical form but a narrative is a representation of the confrontation of somebody who wants something with the threat and or promise of a transformation that he or she struggles to bring about or prevent or both these are two different cognitive modalities addressed to the problems posed…
j’ai donné son titre à cette pièce [« accorder », tuning, ndm] bien avant de venir ici et si le titre que je lui ai donné n’était pas censé vous donner une image très précise de ce que j’allais faire et si vous me voyez tripoter ce magnétophone c’est surtout parce que je n’ai pas d’image très précise de ce que je vais dire même si j’ai une très bonne connaissance du terrain sur lequel en général je me déplace et que la seule façon pour moi de voir si cela vlait le coup de le faire ou non c’est d’entendre ce que j’ai de quelle façon je me suis…
to realize how funny it was you first have to remember that ronald reagan was governor of california nixon was in the white house and h.r. haldeman nixons chief of staff was on the board of trustees that the disneys had set up for cal arts while marcuse was the darling of the new left or of its youth movement in spite of the fact that he was really an elderly german intellectual whose radically revisionist marxian ideas of the liberational possibilities of the sexual revolution were invariably expressed in the pedantic prose of the hegelian dialectic so he must have looked to the southern california right wing like a combination of bakunin…
je me souviens j’étais assis sur les marches à l’entrée d’une maison avec une poignée d’autres gamins et nous devions avoir entre trois et cinq ans tous assis sur des marches à brooklyn à tenirune réunion et on essaie de déterminer quel âge on aimerait avoir parce qu’on n’est jamais content d’avoir trois quatre ou cinq ans c’est une mauvaise période qui voudrait avoir entre trois et cinq ans ? (…) nous sommes assis à tenir cette réunion sur l’âge et un gamin dit oh comme j’aimerais avoir treize ans ça avait vraiment l’air d’être un âge d’homme puissant je pense que tous les gamins étaient des garçons mais je nesuis même pas sûr…
héraclite a fait observer qu’on ne saurait entrer deux fois dans le même fleuve voilà qui avait pour moibeaucoup de sens parce que cela semblait confirmer une conclusion à laquelle j’étais arrivé il y a longtemps que l’expérience vous prépare à ce qui n’arrivera jamais plus mais comment cela cadre-t-ilave cle sarcasme de cratyle qui a suivi on ne peut entrer une seule fois dans le même fleuve c’est toujours bien d’avoir un élève intelligent pour vous pousser plus loin et c’est ce que le sarcasme de cratyle semble faire le fleuve change si vite que le temps d’y entrer c’est déjà un fleuve différent mais à la réflexion la remarque…
quand nous parlons d’expérience nous imaginons que la mémoire a une valeur positive mais le terme de mémoire ne fait qu’amplifier le problème les gens quand ils parlent de mémoire imaginent vaguement une sorte de coffre de stockage neural peut-être comme un classeur tout comme ils se représentent le système de stockage d’un ordinateur où chaque souvenir a une place assignée dans un dossier distinct dans un tiroir particulier de ce classeur imaginaire le problème c’est que personne n’a jamais été en mesure de trouver ces coffres même si lorsque j’étais étudiant un grand psychologue physiologiste qui s’appelait donald hebb a suggéré que la mémoire qui embarrassait depuis…
clichés are the commonplaces by which we begin a discourse there is no way to put down cliché in the beginning because if there was nothing in common in the utterances with which we addressed each other thered be no way that we could understand what we were saying in some sense there is no adequate theory of how we understand what we say to each other one of the most depressing things about the present attempts at knowledge is the array of formal machines we have for explaining how we know what we say and how poorly they explain it David Antin tuning tuning New directions 1984 eng…