#i love.... he..... boym..........

[loneberry]

“While the moon silently inches across the black sky, I have to admit—as so many have before me—that life has slipped past me like a thief slips out of the bedroom of a woman whose necklace he has stolen. It used to be that when I looked in the mirror, it was all ahead of me, it was all just beginning. But then one day it all seemed behind me. I looked in the mirror of the Harvard Dudley House bathroom, realizing that the mirror, like the rest of the bathroom, looked exactly as it had twenty-eight years ago when I first applied lipstick in front of it. It was I who had changed: the bone structure was the same, as was the hair, but the face that looked back felt alien, disturbingly wilted (beyond being fixable with lipstick).

Svetlana Boym, who was a member of my dissertation committee, and who defended my insane decision to try to reinvent the soul at the height of poststructuralism (my first public rebellion), recently died. She wrote a famous book: Death in Quotation Marks. And then she died: no more quotation marks. The demise of postmodern irony. Barbara Johnson, also on my dissertation committee, died years ago. The demise of so much that remains inarticulable (because that’s how BJ was: the ultimate enigmatic signifier, a true Derridean, the target of a thousand crushes, and someone I loved but also disappointed by not becoming a deconstructionist).

These formidable women were not much older than I am now when they died. Standing in the Dudley House bathroom, I thought of them and I thought about the recent words of a colleague of mine: ‘The academy will kill you, especially if you’re a woman.’ I know that the academy is not a Congolese cobalt mine. Still, I thought that it was uncanny that everything about the bathroom looked the same but that these two powerful women, both of whom probably used that bathroom, were gone.”

--Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

.

.

It still shocks me. Mari Ruti is dead. Yet she is still so alive on the page, with the same scintillating aliveness as when I was in her classroom as a graduate student at Harvard 8 years ago, a couple of years before her cancer diagnosis. Then, it appeared to me that she had her whole life ahead of her, that she was at the height of her powers, not on the way out. Could not help but cry reading the conclusion to Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings, when she returns to Harvard and stares into the Dudley House mirror while contemplating her two dead mentors, who both died around the same age she would die. It seems...she sensed the same fate lurking around the corner, even though I'm almost positive she wrote this before the cancer diagnosis.

Now I will return to Harvard--just as Mari returned--and she will be added to my list of powerful women mentors who have died--alongside Cris Hassold, my undergraduate advisor who died during the pandemic. "These two powerful women...gone."

The bones. You said the bones of your face were still the same. Are they--now?

#mari ruti #theory #literature #Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings #death #psychoanalysis #critical theory #mentors #teachers #feminism #melancholia #philosophy

[derelict-heirs]

tagged by: wifey (@mcousland​) did in spirit 😊 tagging: go wild loveys im here for laughs

&. basics

↳ name: “aeca” // aitiaeca isaios (eskandari) ↳ age: 19 ↳ race: air gensai ↳ gender: male ↳ pronouns: he/they ↳ home: zephyra // omaire ↳ sexuality: gay ↳ special abilities: pact magic; eldritch powers; weavers, jewellers, glassblowers, and thieves tools

&. associations

↳ color(s): hues of blue and purple, white, gold ↳ animal(s): doves and other birds ↳ themes / words: family, loyalty, worth, peace ↳ season: spring

&. background + family ↳ birthplace: hothrian keep ↳ titles and jobs: lost prince of zephyra ↳ family: cirros (father), zareena eskandari (mother), leyla eskandari (grandmother), hasan eskandari (first cousin, once removed), insiya eskandari (grand-aunt), daara eskandari (grand-uncle), parvati (first cousin, once removed), siôr (brother by bond)

&. personality + morals

↳ personality traits: sincere, respectful, soft-hearted, affectionate, loyal // self-conscious, naïve, envious, greedy, temperamental ↳ fears: claustrophobia, lack of agency and security, abandonment, isolation, being unworthy, easily cast aside ↳ liked traits in others: loyalty, respect, level-headedness, forgiveness, creativity ↳ disliked traits in others: aggression, disrespect, disloyal, callous, arrogance

&. interest + favourites

↳ favourite foods: fresh fruits and berries, particularly blueberries and olives; fish, clams, oysters, and other seafoods; soups ↳ favourite weather: rain and thunderstorms, cloudy days ↳ favourite animals: birds, particularly doves, budgies, finches ↳ hobbies / interests: singing, playing the lyre, and composing music; painting and drawing; weaving and knitting; jewelling; trade and merchant crafts; gardening with emma

&. other relationships ↳ current romantic partner(s): none, finnegan ↳ closest friends: siôr, emma, lucien, emrys, taureb, janna, artem

#verse; dnd #dnd campaign; aelwynne academy #oc; aeca #my craft; graphics #had to wait to post this cause i didn't know if aeca was gonna end up having a moment with finn or not LO L #i love.... he..... boym..........

[twistwall3]

Dziecko 9 Miesiąc - Rozwój Fizyczny, Pielęgnacja

So I devised a rhythmic framework for placing and alternating these materials, and I think in the end the focus is on the rhythm of the dynamic changes and the colours of the field recordings. It is probably because you avoid emphasizing the parameter of rhythm. J.B.: Believe it or not, he is probably my best friend (laugh). J.B.: Fremdarbeit - I love that piece, it really does have layers… Am I right, or do you sometimes feel that the other layers become more important for you? When it comes to Matthew’s pieces (especially the Lecture pieces) they are a little bit more earnest. 1-5 are a bit different from the other pieces because of this „meta” layer. We didn’t want to play this kind of music. At the beginning we felt that we would just try to fill a hole, actually putting on the music in the UK that we didn’t hear anybody else playing. The piece was made using processed electronics and at the time I didn’t have the equipment or know-how to put these electronics in i concert situation, so I simply transcribed them as best as I could for the instruments. Such as using dynamics as a rhythmic element in no.

Do you see any parallel between these sorts of compositions and contemporary music pieces such as Johannes Kreidler’s Fremdarbeit, or the Lecture about Listening to Music by Matthew? For me creating such large, stable timbral planes suggests a nostalgic feeling. J.B.: It’s very, very nostalgic. J.B.: The things that are most important for me are the perceptual things that happen when you see and hear things, especially when you see and hear things together. I want to show people the world and for them to have an interesting perceptual experience when they hear and see the thing that I have made. It is the resemblances between the electronic part and the instrumental part that joins them together. 5. Do you often change the context of musical elements in your works? Transcription is quite closely related to other aspects of my practice because it’s about taking something from one context and putting it into another, copying it, however imperfectly. But I don’t know whether I would like to make something like that again. Do you know the book by Svetlana Boym? J.B.: I don’t know whether it is in terms of sound. J.B.: That piece is quite old (it is from 2011). The idea is to take the electronic processing of sound and imagine it as a sort of science fiction universe in which sound would behave in various ways.

A.G.: While listening to your Artificial Environments I felt that it is a composition about composing, a sort of a meta-composition. Is it an ironic work or do you feel that contemporary music needs this sort of commentary? What led you to the decision of starting a new music ensemble? Specjalizację OCTAVA ensemble ma jednak muzyka XVI i XVII wieku. Jednak nauczyciel może w pewnym czasie sprawdzić czy zadanie zostało przeprowadzone - np poprosi aby zrobic zdjęcie informacje i wysłać nauczycielowi! Jednak przeciętnie rower trenuje mięśnie wolnokurczliwe, czyli mięśnie czerwone, są one zbudowane z włókien wielkich w mioglobinę - stąd ich czerwony kolor. Potomstwo z zmian, zrodzone przez ludzi nie mających dobra rozrodu, uważało być neutralizowane, czyli pozbawiane życia. Powoduje toż na bliższe poznanie kolejnego języka przez programistów mających teraz wydarzenie w działaniu aplikacji. Gdy w 1979 roku wojska radzieckie najechały Afganistan, w obronie kraju stanęły wspierane przez Okresy Zjednoczone grupy miejscowych partyzantów zwanych mudżahedinami. Both are about sound and listening.

He wants to combine thinking about music and listening to it at the same time. Because the UK music scene, the establishment, and the people who get all the money are very conservative. During kartkówka has changed a little bit, although there are some people who have been there since the beginning, the clarinet player Vicky Wright, the piano player Mark Knoop, another piano player Roderick Chadwick and the guitar player Tom Pauwels. Certainly there is a big cross-over in the things we are interested in. A.G.: You’re interested in transcribing musical soundscape, what are the sources of that interest? A.G.: In her book she also examines the feeling of nostalgia in i few post-communist cities. She talks about two kinds of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. So Matthew is now doing it with two of the other members (musicians). I just help with the website and with writing some of the applications right now. It’s turning up in everything A do now, it is just everywhere. It’s not quite what I want to express.

So it’s really a perceptual, experiential kind of work. But I haven’t really gone back there again to that super-meta approach. For me they’re brilliant, there are a lot of technical things happening inside them. I wanted to make something else from them. There are plenty of them in history, when the musical plot corresponds so profoundly with the musical material (from de Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement to Grisey’s L'icone paradoxale). Is there wypracowanie about the city? Would sprawdzian consider your music nostalgic? A.G.: Your music is somehow timeless, spatial, static. A.G.: Let’s stay around notion of meta-composition pieces. A.G.: I would like to talk a little bit more about those pieces. Like Matthew I’m oraz little bit more earnest. We have more in common than people might imagine. I think we were the first people to play Peter Ablinger, Simon Steen-Andersen, Alexander Schubert and Trond Reinholdtsen in the UK.

#sprawdzian #kartkowka #rozprawka #wypracowanie #szkola

[jared-hirsch]

Diaries (Give Woolf a Chance)

2 April 2019

I am here, he thinks, and he thinks to the tune of counting. One, one, two, two, three - the metal clanks by him as he releases a breath from the depths of his stomach (doctor’s orders) – three. He collects himself, his belongings, for he is always with his belongings and so many of them at any given point for no valid reason, brushes himself and continues to walk toward that silver vessel as though he was any other commuter who had stood waiting as he sat against the blue tile wall, pressing his back into the edges as he counted. One, one, two, two, three, and then with some delay another three as he did away with his need for numbers.

He caresses a novel, Virginia Woolf (of course), and opens to the folded page. How fitting he should read Woolf – Virginia as he calls her – in this place, place of counting, of fear, of loathing, and of baseness. Fear, such a funny thing, a trivial thing, a concept, an illusion that we digest and swallow and take-in as nourishment such that the villi of our small intestine drink it in and produce sensations and tribulations that shatter and cut through reality, or illusion. Fear, it is fear that stops me. Impossible to be fearful here, though, amongst the scattered masses and the restless bodies that try to find stillness as slight angles of misfortune or carelessness migrate the train car this way and push her that. Such a morbidity in stillness, a fear in stillness, a fear in morbidity, it is all one, we are all one, we are all still and fearful.

Oh shut up! He was always one to intervene in his own thoughts, to challenge himself, to criticize the pedestal of narcissism he knew he perched himself upon, to always remind him that all the knowledge that he has ever acquired, that all of the knowledge he could ever acquire, has lead him into circular arguments that finalize themselves, that crash, upon the fact that to know everything is to know nothing, and to know nothing, of course, is then to know everything, and that regardless of the mechanisms of this book or that, the contents of this thought or that, he was, we all are, utterly doomed in the pursuit of truth, of reason, of logic, of science, of Gods, of men, of all things and things that are non-things. Virginia (for he called her Virginia in his narcissism), Virginia! Dear, dear – there’s no use in knowing Greek. I know of Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, and Sappho (dear Sappho) and I know of nothing at all. Nothing at all! I know merely of the 1-train approaching 65th street and I know nothing at all.

It is 7 AM, and the city is alive, and the sun is bright.

3 April 2019 – 4 April 2019

It was around midnight, maybe, impossible to make hours in the night without some ticking time-bomb; did the sundial still function when the sun set below the horizon or was night equally mysterious to the cultures of old? the darkness encroached, as darkness does, as they say it does, and he lit up a cigarette and smoked it because it offered him a fleeting pleasure, a seal upon the night, and his body, to affirm that the night passed, that it is passing, that it will pass, and that the sun will rise tomorrow to inch between his blinds, to remind him of the continuity, to invite him to the park, to the water, to the island, to anywhere. To move. To move, what a frightful thing, as he moved the flame through his fingers turning fire to smoke, smoke to ash, ash to material satisfaction.

Something about that room, of faces, names, bodies that should offer him some solace tonight or any other; unfound satisfaction, to move, want, desire, anything in the darkness. Nothing for me here, he thought, nothing more here, contented with the liberation that this bestowed upon his being, liberation in the chains between ten square city blocks that made him Prometheus, Odysseus, or Sisyphus, some hero he read about years before that loomed in the back of his queer mind, pulling him in this direction or that to be, simply be, and be content in his being without satisfaction, like the faces and names and bodies and hopelessness, despair itself. Hopelessness! In the dark, broken by the red amber stinging his skin around midnight, skin that remains hopeful, dry, material, hopeful in its material nature; hopeful, hopeful, I am hopeful, he thinks, ashing his torch upon the cement. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself! Tar scatters atop tar, the tarred and feathered moving toward home, two arms, two legs, pavement, and the like.

It is midnight, and the city is alive, and the moon is bright.

INTROIBO AD ALTARE VOS (1)

Relinquish myself to thee, upon thy throne,

Ancient of olde upon me, piercing skin,

Yours, ours, mine; they scream,

In corporeal sacrifice to thy lorde, (5)

Shattered upon, spattered upon,

Thine Holy alter, salt within wound,

Broken of absolution - again (here I am).

5 April 2019

“The everyday tells us a story of modernity in which major historical cataclysms are superseded by ordinary chores, the arts of working and making things. In a way, the everyday is anticatastrophic, an antidote to the historical narrative of death, disaster and apocalypse. The everyday does not seem to have a beginning or an end. In everyday life we do not write novels but notes or diary entries that are always frustratingly or euphorically anticlimactic. In diaries, the dramas of our lives never end—as in the innumerable tv soap operas in which one denouement only leads to another narrative possibility and puts off the ending. Or diaries are full of incidents and lack accidents; they have narrative potential and few completed stories. The everyday is a kind of labyrinth of common places without monsters, without a hero, and without an artist- maker trapped in his own creation.” — Svetlana Boym, Common Places

Everything is bright with sordid colors; orange, yellow, brown feckles, black floor; an atrocious schema, tracing the patterns he reads in the dirt to the silver pole beneath the stagnant concrete and up, up, up to, toward, Heaven. Pleasures of the corporeal are elusive at this moment, as the train plummets toward the southernmost tip of Manhattan; our existence shaped by the numbers that tick and blink, blink, blink and evolve above me, describing two spirits that lie counter to one another for the betterment of each. Is it like this in the East? The East is so lovely, without our inherent perversions that one attaches themselves too; grease, mud, scorn, silence, the things that make us whole.

A rather obtuse gentleman whipped his foot and apologized with a smile, returned to him as though this encounter took place in the East. It was this smile, this beam of hope, this gift of God himself, this inability to seize or wince at mere inconvenience, that assured him that he would reach the gates of St. Peter, speak with him in tongues and be beckoned toward Aquinas himself to sit, to smoke, to share a coffee, to ask questions and receive answers, to live; this silly smile, this slight angle, this promise of sainthood.

_______________________________________________________________________

[brites]

Could I get the entire Shiratorizawa team sick? I love mass Illnesses and your blog~

#shh I didn't forget kawanishi I swear #sick #sickness #vomiting #puking #shirabu kenjirou #tendou satori #semi eita #yamagata hayato #ushijima wakatoshi

[vasilinaorlova]

excerpt from the letter to C.C. 2/2/2017

“I've just finished the first reading and revisions of the article. I'd suggest if you have time at all, look at my comments on the margins tomorrow. I fly to San Francisco the early morning on Friday. If we could talk just a little bit tomorrow, that'd be wonderful, well, if not, it is ready to be presented, its rawness notwithstanding. For some reason when I copied the text into a Word document, your notes disappeared in my version of the file, but they are still on google.drive; I agree with every one of them. I want to refer here to only one of your notes. You wrote "I love this section.  It will need more points of reference to be sustained, of course," I took this fragment out of the text altogether by now: (referring to village prose) "it seems quite safe to claim it at this point—did not obtain the status of the literary Russian language, it was too cumbersome and folkloric, unsuited to talk about new technology or anything new, for that matter."   It is something that indeed deserves to be elaborated. I talked to you about this briefly in the corridor: it too easily assumes that the literature's task is to give speakers a language for talking about new technologies. I think this thought, in all its weirdness, is onto something, but you are right, it needs to be substantiated. Perhaps literature gives the language of modernity to modernity. This is a thesis around which one can work. The new version of the article is in the attachment. But please the last thought. Since the article is now called "Everyday life, Geoengineering and the Industrial Spectacle in Soviet Siberia" (ah by the way we did not pay attention to the promising word "spectacle" at all--something to tackle as well, but now I want to make another point): there is a word byt used in the text. Svetlana Boym had a nice take on what is byt and what it means and why it can't be translated into English as "everydayness." I am sending you a draft for my SALSA UT presentation this year. There is a piece on byt in there, that is perhaps the beginning of the future project, or it can fit this current article somehow, because byt is what is essentially was built by the Communist workers in the course of the "century projects"'s construction. I am copying the byt section in the body of the email (below). Untranslatable Words: Byt As Svetlana Boym points out, Roman Jacobson deemed the Russian word “byt,” which occasionally is translated as “everydayness,” untranslatable (Boym, 2012). “Byt” is the housekeeping circle of routines, a habitual way of maintaining these routines. Social practices are embedded in “byt,” the habits are called “bytovie,” meaning they are used in everyday settings. Curiously, despite being a non-dividable part of sustaining one’s livelihood, “byt” in Russian has a strong connection to a somewhat lowly efforts, often was used by Revolutionaries poets in connection to “bourgeois,” “burshuazniy byt.” Analyzing Mayakosvky's works, Jacobson points out a number of examples when “byt” is constructed as something that one has to transgress and surpass, by which one is daunted: ““Motionless byt.” “Everything stands as it has been for ages. Byt is like a horse that can’t be spurred and stands still.” “Slits of byt are filled with fat and coagulate, quiet and wide.” “The swamp of byt is covered over with slime and weeds.” “Old little byt is moldy”.” The list goes on (Jakobson, 1985; cursive is Jakobson’s). “Byt” belong to the earthly concerns, as opposed to “bytie,” which refers to the deep life of the human subject, occupying themselves with the life of a spirit. Unlike “poshlost,” “byt” did not receive circulation in English as such. The word accounts for the peculiarity and specificity of Russian mentality as opposed to the broadly “Western,” more precisely American dream constructs, the heart of which is acquiring one’s own house and building the smoothly running “byt,” to which Russian intelligentsia expressed its despise. The Communist dream is about surpassing the private models of individual success, refused and sacrificed for the sake of the advance of the collective. “Byt” as a heroic struggle with everydayness, was meant to be overcame: women freed from their domestic obligations of caring for children and maintaining the household, and men freed from their share of menial work, all for the sake of collective work with the aid of technology. Food, already prepared and served, would arrive to the apartments on the conveyer belt or in the tiny lift, robots would clean the house, machines would wash dishes and clothes. These luminous Communist cities of the future coincided in many respects what Capitalist societies envisioned, but they bore distinguishing features. During the first “five-year plans” (“pyatiletka”), the Soviet administration was inspired by the ideas of building urban spaces from scratch, because old cities, and therefore connected to them social practices of maintaining of “byt,” were rooted so deeply into the previous concepts of how urban infrastructure should work, was impossible “neither to reconstruct them, nor change” (Meerovich, 2012). The number of decisions to which “urbanists” and “disurbanists” partook in 1930 on the meeting of Orgburo TSK VKP (Organisational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), was titled “About the reconstruction of byt” (“O perestroike byta”) (Meerovich, 2012). “Byt,” therefore, meant the whole organization of the social practices in the urban spaces of the future. “Urbanists” were fascinated by the idea of houses-communae, with “wholly communalized byt” (“polnostju obobshchestvlenniy byt”), as opposed to the “disurbanist” idea of personal living as a module-based and mobile individual small houses, the extremity of which was represented by the vision of the “sleeping cabins” with the space as little as 5-7 square meters. The justification beyond the idea of sleeping cabin (curiously coming to life and acquiring a sense of a fashionable living in the overpopulated big cities in the beginning of the twenty first centuries), was that the Soviet citizen, engaged into the productive life of the Soviet society, where everyone would have access to whatever social tools he would like to explore for the best use of his creative potential, would be so busy, that the only need of his, unsatisfied by the new communal practices, would be a need of getting some rest at night. Therefore, the debates around what is a truly Communist “byt,” had direct socioeconomic consequences. And to be sure, new cities were built in abundance exactly as they were meant to be, from scratch. They took forms and shapes that now look pretty gruesome for the observer, that of the agglomeration of typical tenement houses around a job-providing, “city-constructing” enterprise, a fabric or a manufacture. With the advent of Capitalism and the collapse of the Socialist planned-based mode of production, many of those cities became “irradiated ghost towns,” abandoned “iconographies of communism” (Rann, 2014). Thus Utopian ideas of “byt” turned into “nebytie” (“no-being”) of ruins, and those which did not, stand as the monuments for themselves. “Microrayons” (mini-neighborhoods) are still being build, replicating the rows of typical houses all over post Soviet spaces, but now these post-inductrial construction does not have an idea of a better “byt” beyond them: “A typical Moscow sleeping district: the endless rows of identical tower blocks and identical flats suggesting identical lives for their inhabitants.” (Fedorova, 2015). The notion of “byt” in this broader sense, as a complex way of living which should politically align with certain ideas and ideals, now has the air of being slightly outdated, but it is still widely used in narrower senses of “the mundane.” In particular, there is a brunch of law regulating “bytovie prestuplenia” (“domestic violence / domestic crime”), the crimes emerging in the fabric of everydayness itself, so to speak; “bytovaya teckhnika” (“household appliances”); “bytovaya travma” (“trauma received in the course of usual work”), and such. The usages of the word and therefore its very meanings have shifted dramatically since the Soviet times.

#work #byt #letters