Wednesday, June 04, 2003

 
Of course, Schwartz carries an incredible an amount of reading in his notes:



Emprire of Chance

The Great Formosan Impostor

Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France

Memoirs of a Tattooist

Louise Odes Neaderland, Life-Sense / License (NY: Bone Hollow Arrts, 1983)

Sexual Visions

Fetishism as Cultural Discourse

Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors, 4th ed. (Chicago, 1909)

The merchant's Record and Show Window

L. Frank Baum, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (chicago, 1900)

The Dream of the Moving Statue

The War Magician

The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print (L, 1943)

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

Lichtenberg/Lichtenberg Reader

posted by Open Mouth 3:07 PM

 
Hillel Schwartz laces The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles with so many detailed facts that should one pull on them any tighter, the weave of the story he tells would wrinkle. In fact, he notates his footnotes only at the end of paragraphs or else the story would be a wasteland of footnotes numbering to five digits--based as it is upon "some 16,000 notecards handcopied from manuscript and printed sources" (217). No bibliography, but 153 pages of footnotes for 373 pages of manuscript.



"We must reconstruct, not abandon, an ideal of authenticity in our lives. Whatever we come up with, authenticity can no longer be rooted in singularity, in what the Greeks called the idion, or private person...The impostors, 'evil' twins, puppets, 'apes,' tricksters, fackes, and plagiarists who appear in this book may be agents provocateurs to a more coherent, less derelict sense of ourselves. They may call us away from the despair of uniqueness toward more compassionate lives" (17). And call more compassionate selves toward the despair of community?



"Haven't we too been crying out for 'more life'? Our self-portraits now neither anchor nor extend us because we are no longer sure of our selves as originals, no longer sure of what it means to be inspirited. The more uncertain we have become of what colossus could possibly anchor our selves, of what miniature could without moral danger extend our selves, the more we have demanded correctness and the more we have finished in dissemblance" (140). Schwartz continues: "We look misguidedly to our creations to find our animation and learn our fortune. Only in a culture of the copy do we assign such motive force to the Original. What we intend by 'Original' these days is that which speaks to us in a nunmediated way, an experience we seem to believe we have lost between ourselves, human to human" (141). As though that was the lost aura Benjamin had spoken.



To be continued from page 234.



Random facts:

Although I often hear of the Vietnam War as the first mediated war, in which TV brought the war into private homes, Schwarz makes a case that ever since the first and second World Wars, the way people see war and non-war have been affected by wartime technology. So much so that he suggests that "postwar painting and architecture seem often to have been intended to be seen from above, by aerial photographers, or from far away, through telescopic or microscopic magnification" (205).



" 'Control' was also the term first given to sprit guides or mediums" (392), unsourced sentence in footnote 40 to "Chapter One: Vanishing Twins."
posted by Open Mouth 2:54 PM

Sunday, June 01, 2003

 
"Justice is not a zero-sum game in which the rights of victims and
offenders are antithetical, and the lives of one group must be
sacrificed in order to achieve justice for others. This dangerous
argument implies that there aren't enough human and civil rights for
everyone, that if someone else's rights and human dignity are
affirmed, 'my' rights and dignity are necessarily diminished. This
kind of thinking takes us down a slippery ethical and spiritual
slope, leading us to a place where we are willing to accept the
mistreatment of some in an attempt to create safety for ourselves.
If our own actions are to possess ethical integrity, then we must
work to ensure that no one is expendable. This is the hardest task
of all, because it brings us face to face with our own inclination to
render others 'disposable.' "



From Kay Whitlock, Special Representative for LGBT Programs at American Friends Service Committee/Community
Relations Unit, in an email dated 7 June 2002 regarding AFSC's Position on Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act, sent out via Mano a Mano's listserv.



posted by Open Mouth 8:31 PM