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http://b-bear.stumbleupon.com/review/33132024/

Wed, 27 May 2009 06:36:44 -0700

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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart?
It is too heavy. It will always show.

Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again.
He was well aware that to live on Earth
a man must follow its fashions,
and hearts were no longer worn.

Jean Cocteau, The Miscreant

MEMORY, come hither
And tune your merry notes;
And while upon the wind
Your music floats
I'll pore upon the stream
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.

I'll drink of the clear stream
And hear the linnet's song,
And there I'll lie and dream
The day along:
And, when night comes, I'll go
To places fit for woe
Walking along the darken'd valley
With silent Melancholy.

William Blake

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Pour Mon Ange.

http://www.usyd.edu.au/museums/pdfs_docs/Sigmund_Freuds_Collection_Catalogue.pdf

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:19:03 -0700

Sigmund Freud collected a wall of phalluses. I want one.

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=psar.035.0151.fig005.jpg

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:18:53 -0700

Ouch! Straight through the heart. Our projections onto animals - be they the ones that divide friends and enemies - become us.

http://b-bear.stumbleupon.com/review/33120587/

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:18:31 -0700

You may have guessed from the previous font post that I have chosen the sans-serif for my thesis. Now I need to drop you a little note to say: I need to be on more intimate terms with that font. (That font and my girlfriend, my dogs and our house.)

I wish I could say, as some bloggers would, that I am taking a sabbatical. Traditionally, a sabbatical is a break from work - however, for me blogging is a pure meditative pleasure, and I take a break from it in order to work harder on my thesis at university. My free time is evaporating, and white fire is burning me.

White fire is what the old Jews in their Midrashim called the blank spaces on the pages of their holy scrolls. For them the Torah was written by God with black fire upon white fire, and because there was so much white fire on the holy page, it was God's wish that his creation was continued; the white spaces needed to be filled up with more black ink. Thus the inspired rabbis justified their own creativity in commentaries on the Torah; the Oral Torah became dignified as a supplement to the Written Torah.

When I say I am being burnt by white fire, then I am referring to the blank pages of my thesis - they're the white fiery spaces waiting to be written and that are haunting my dreams. For some time now I have been meditating over those pages, dreaming of a perfect set of letters, the best spell to open every door there is.

Of course, part of becoming a mature student is to realise that not every door can open at your command, and it's worth being happy with creating a key that makes others happy in its use - even if it can only suggest a WAY OUT of the prison in which we keep ideas.

And for now the meditating must come to an end, and the torturous realisation must continue. It's a pleasure to be with people meditating, learning, and getting to know others in that charmed way that breaks the spell, but now I must return to settle down on the surface and fill up the page with those traces that burn away the evanescence. It's time to take up the black fire.

Which is a lengthy and ungodly way of saying: I got heaps of work to do.

See you when I can see my desk again.

Postscript. This is perhaps the only emoticon that expresses what I am feeling right now:

Font - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:36 -0700

The new black - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:27 -0700

The new black is X is the new Y.

W e b l o g -- Charles Bernstein

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:19 -0700

Graphic Witness: visual arts & social commentary [Frans Masereel]

Mon, 25 May 2009 06:01:08 -0700

The Idea [Die Idee], first published 1920, has been republished by The Redstone Press, 1986 and reprinted 1991. The small, 1991 boxed edition contains two (out of a total of eight) original novels by Masereel, all of them "told in woodcuts." These two are titled The Idea and Story Without Words. The cover of the box cites Thomas Mann's response to them "'...so compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas that one never tires of looking at them.'"

"An Idea springs from the mind of the Thinker and goes out into the world. She is naked, female, radiant, a pocket Venus embodying all ideals, and she finds herself in the mean streets of a twentieth century city -- among politicians and fat cats, torturers and striptease audiences, who take the Idea and use it for their own ends, or reject and try to destroy it..." [from a review in The Independent]

The first image in the book: the "Thinker" is blocked, as though his thoughts were caught in a web.

In the second image, the Idea strikes, with the force of lightning. [Next] we first meet the Idea as she springs from his now web-cleared brain.

The Thinker demonstrates his love for the Idea, and sad to let her go, sends her out into the world (in an envelope). But this beautiful Idea is not well received. People try to change the Idea, (rather than let the Idea change them); they attempt to clothe her, to tone down her alluring charms. Inspired by the Idea, one person is arrested and ultimately shot by a firing squad, but of course the Idea cannot die so easily.

After unsuccessfully offering herself to people in the countryside, the small town and the big city, the Idea attracts the attention of a scientist, who tries to confine her -- however, Ideas must be free. She flees and finds refuge at a book publisher. The books and materials that contain the Idea are burned, but as ever, the Idea is not destroyed.

{ftp sent to me by the clever and generous filippi. Unless we are caught in the University system, we are arguably no longer faced with these difficulties that beset the Idea in Die Idee. That is, unless one wants to freshen up the story and think of the internet as a place that catches your ideas in the web. But puns are a bad Idea!}

http://b-bear.stumbleupon.com/review/33061418/

Sun, 24 May 2009 11:28:57 -0700

for the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent*

Sigmund Freud: Conflict &Culture (Library of Congress Exhibition)

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:37:58 -0700

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.

Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents
1930