Friday, April 25, 2003

 
“One of the last practitioners of poetry in the lu-shih style was Tan—Dà, the poet and patriot who ran a newspaper during French colonial rule in the 1930s. When informed that a more enlightened colonial administration had lifted censorship, Tan—Dà lamented that a direct telling of the news would be too easy.”



—John Balaban, “Translating Vietnamese Poetry,” in Manoa 11:2.
posted by Open Mouth 11:54 PM

Thursday, April 24, 2003

 
Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino: “The urgings of a lover are not quenched by beholding or touching any particular body, for it is not this or that body that he desires but the splendor of the celestial majesty shining through bodies, a splendor that fills him with wonder. That is the reason why lovers do not know what they desire, what they seek: because they do not know God.”



Is this what the Greeks mean by charis?



In El Libro dell’amore, ed. Sandra Niccoli (Florence: Olschki Editore, 1987) 34, as quoted by J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 (New York: Viking, 2001) 27.
posted by Open Mouth 6:06 PM

 
Slavoj Zizek describes the pivotal use of sound in the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): “The soundtrack gives us the basic perspective, the ‘map’ of the situation, and guarantees its continuity, while the images are reduced to isolated fragments that float freely in the universal medium of the sound aquarium. It would be difficult to invent a better metaphor for psychosis” (40).

Besides this tidbit, Zizek's brilliant Lacanian analysis of pop culture holds no
posted by Open Mouth 3:58 AM

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

 
My guiding principle these days: learning to love you more, learning to not abandon desire to history.

I've been spending my days with a ridiculously dated book, an archetype of dystopian novels: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, translated by Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin Books, 1993 [1924]). Uber-Number D-503 factually records his days as an homage to the OneState. He appreciates his OneState-regulated lifestyle of assigned Sex Days, living by the clock, surveillance by embedded Guardians. Happy under unity and uniformity with all other Numbers until he falls in lov-- (the word is never spelled out) with the revolutionary, liberated leader I-330, D-503 is touchingly present in an absurdly unbelievable context--a cartoon who reaches out beyond his environment to touch heart, restrict breath.

His silly platitudes that nevertheless grip heart in asthmatic rhythm: "Laughter comes in different colors. It's only the distant echo of an explosion inside you. It might come in holiday colors--red, blue, golden rockets. Or it might be the bits of a human body flying out" (213)," D-503 observes while jealously crushing underfoot the evidence of I-330's sex days with another Number.

I see the engineer turn into a poet; I follow him. D-503's play on words takes on the phantasmagoric aspects of Surrealist dreams, in which objects wake up alive, growing tails: "I saw a smile slip out of his eyes, slide down his face, and, with a flick of its tail, take a seat on the right side of his mouth." (161) Lyricism of the beating heart and the bursting imagination.

The revolution comes, along with instability, chance, change, freedom, choice, revelation. We hope. We have a different future.

But in the end, the revolution remains spectral as D-503 is forcefully (but perhaps willingly?) lobotomized into a machine, giving away his lover I-330 to the gas chamber. In here, air is taken out rather than forced into her. Then, as before, certainty and reason reign supreme. As I-330 told D-503, " 'Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading....' "(156).
posted by Open Mouth 1:27 AM

Monday, April 21, 2003

 
What are the conditions of impossible speech for a lover? Also known as, why can't the lover speak? Maybe when she's lost A Lover's Discourse--and it wasn't even her property to begin with. New York Public Library, disown me now...
posted by Open Mouth 3:46 AM