Category: Smorgasblog

Favorite posts from the blogosphere.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In praise of silent transformations

The Myriad Things:

What I love about this idea of “silent” transformation is its gentleness, its freedom from drama. It does not hysterically shriek that time is passing and that we need to do something before it is too late: instead it quietly solicits our attentiveness, asking us to look to the subtle and labile nature of the multiple changes that are already in process. [François] Jullien spends a good deal of time talking about what he calls—against Badiou—the ‘mythology’ of the event. There is a certain strain within continental philosophy that is obsessed with the idea of the ‘event’ as a break with the existing order of things, a kind of rupture that is necessary for something new to happen: because without some kind of break in the order of things, so the story goes, there could be nothing of newness in the world. Events of this kind—events that seem to be a break with the existing order of things—could be called noisy transformations: like the events of the nightly news, they monopolise our attention, so that we don’t notice those quieter transformations that are happening all the time. And I can’t help wondering if the very drama of these noisy transformations blinds us to the fact that even these events are not really such a break in the order of things at all (hence Jullien’s ‘mythology’ of the event): instead—but only if we ignore the noisiness and the drama and look a bit more patiently and calmly—we can see, in retrospect, that the seeds of these transformations had been growing for a long time.

(Be sure to read the comments thread as well as the post.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Archives and the origins of creativity

Rick Prelinger, On the Virtues of Preexisting Material:

My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical, and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth. You can’t judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that’s true for the present as well.

[…]

A couple of years ago I was walking down the street with a professor who was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies students interested in archives, but they didn’t care. I asked why, and she said “I guess they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die.” This was a big a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.

Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists—the idea that we can touch and appropriate records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Inaugural poet as useful idiot

Craig Santos Perez (Kenyon Review blog):

Why banish poets from the empire if empire can use poets towards its own ends? Use poets to wash over the empire’s crimes, use poets to feign respect for humanity, use poets to poeticize the ideology of empire. Blanco’s poem, “One Today”, is a poem of American exceptionalism and immigrant exceptionalism—of “one empire” built by many settlers on native lands. There it is, Mr. President, sitting there, for USE.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Where boundaries blur

The Storialist:

In the wild spots where few or

no people live, the places blow
about, blurred. The desert shifts

some of its cells. Water lifts a little,
sinks. No pine needles fall, then,

a pine needle falls, four more. Here
no one knows what truth is escaping.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dim-witted gods and the importance of poetry

God of Wednesday:

I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri [Sturluson] himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?

It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The map-maker’s colors

Connaissances:

Compared to the colours of flags which are brash in their symbolism, the map-makers colours are indeed more delicate. They reflect the precarious and unstable nature of countries and borders as defined by the changing character of those states. In some ways these delicate colours contradict the bold and simple ones of flags, challenging those who stick their flags in a new region of the map, by that means trying to claim it.