Orally Muptumblr

"To say that knowledge is the main good produced by the ‘educational factory’ or..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 19:53:12 +0800

“To say that knowledge is the main good produced by the ‘educational factory’ or ‘knowledge corporation’ that the university has now become would be misleading if we did not elaborate on the connection between bodies, tongues, and minds…Precisely because the university produces people as much as knowledge, it is becoming a key site for the governmental and biopolitical technologies of population management. Much like the factory of yesteryear, today’s ‘educational factory’ is a key site for the reproduction and reorganization of society according to the needs of capital.”

- Jon Solomon, “The Financialization of Knowledge and the Biopolitical Management of Geocultural Areas During the Transition from Industrial to Cognitive Capitalism” (2013)

I was going to write about The Great Gatsby and then I got derailed.

Notre Musique - Jean Luc Godard (by icsprks)

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:28:11 +0800

Notre Musique - Jean Luc Godard (by icsprks)

"Goodness is fire. When we’re closer to it, we feel warmth. This is love. That’s why finding favorite..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:19:17 +0800

“Goodness is fire. When we’re closer to it, we feel warmth. This is love. That’s why finding favorite people to be with, a favorite place to be, or a favorite thing to do, is important. It funnels all the joy we get from being in a big world of great stuff into one thing we can understand, like a family, a home, or a passion. It gives laser-beam focus to our love.”

- Spencer Tweedy: Curbing my enthusiasm

"There’s something to be said, I suppose, about curating oneself. At our core we are a collection of..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:32:00 +0800

“There’s something to be said, I suppose, about curating oneself. At our core we are a collection of what we hold dear. Along the way we discard that which we do not need, or what drags us down, or what we are simply done with.”

- Ned Hepburn, “The OK Gatsby”, The Worst (2013).

Humanity, how fucking dare you fuck with this koala!

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:19:47 +0800

Humanity, how fucking dare you fuck with this koala!

"It was to the nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:50:00 +0800

“It was to the nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupé.”Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?” she demanded…

“This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise,” he answered, with a dreamy irony, “and may want us to think about the people who are not merely carried through this street in a coupé, but have to spend their whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except in a hearse…Should we be as patient as they are with their discomfort? I don’t believe there’s steam heat or an elevator in the whole block. Seven rooms and a bath would be more than the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with. They wouldn’t know what to do with the bath anyway.””

- William Dean Howells (1965). A Hazard of New Fortunes. pp. 56-57.

"His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than at the..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:29:48 +0800

“His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with larger means and larger leisure. His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he had renounces; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together. That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them.”

- William Dean Howells. A Hazard of New Fortunes. NYC: Signet, 1965 p. 22.

"The spirit of social reform, based on new forms of industrial manufacturing and consumption, was..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:09:20 +0800

“The spirit of social reform, based on new forms of industrial manufacturing and consumption, was translated into the first master plans for housing developments, and these concepts for urban planning became schema that were used strategically for very different social groups, having in common only their use as a tool for governing life and the living being. As spatial organization and urban planning served to strategically control and mobilize a population, and appropriate its territory, so did it also claim to shelter this same population.”

- Marion Van Osten, “Architecture without Architects: Another Anarchist Approach” e-flux (2013)

LOOKATTHISFUCKINGCORGIPUPPPY! Yeah, internet, I know...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:17:15 +0800

LOOKATTHISFUCKINGCORGIPUPPPY! Yeah, internet, I know you’re jealous.

rigor samsa

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:50:38 +0800

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

"Nations have a way of creating their own cages. The promise of mobility found its limits in the..."

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 18:44:02 +0800

“Nations have a way of creating their own cages. The promise of mobility found its limits in the fiskal tax (of around $100) imposed on anyone hoping to leave the country. It found its limits in the longtime domination of national airwaves by a government monopoly, by an ingrained regime of self-monitoring and censorship. And it found its limits in an unstable local economy unable to fulfill its promise of progress.”

- Brent Luvaas, “Dislocating Sounds: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop”

I need to stop worrying and just believe that things will work...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:54:02 +0800

I need to stop worrying and just believe that things will work themselves out. In a few weeks, I can add another continent to the list of places I’ve left my footprints in. I have a multiple-entry visa that I didn’t ask for, and I plan to put it to good use this year. I got my own place, clean my own floors, and wash my own dishes now. I lost my grandmother and from time to time the grief and longing make themselves felt, but even that’s okay. I had a toenail pulled the other day and have compromised my mobility, but with enough bed rest and enough antibiotics, it’s all good in the hood. Where we stop is where we stay. I take comfort in my capacity to cook, clean up, and transport myself to where I need to be. And I love my friends, but I know I don’t need to cling to them to affirm their presence.

For reals this time. Happy Valentine’s day, everyone! This...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:11:08 +0800

For reals this time. Happy Valentine’s day, everyone! This has been a great week.

misterpeace: Raphael Saadiq - “Good Man” How great is this...

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 18:07:49 +0800

misterpeace:

Raphael Saadiq - “Good Man”

How great is this song.

Photo

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 01:36:27 +0800

Dorothea Tanning, "Birthday" (1942)

Diane Arbus, Self-portrait (1945)

doubleghost: This is me dancing my heart out while my kids...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:15:40 +0800

doubleghost:

This is me dancing my heart out while my kids ignore me and watch TV.

Kids today: they really don’t know what they’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

So what happens is you enter the cosmic fun room and...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:52:00 +0800

So what happens is you enter the cosmic fun room and everything’s covered in dayglo acrylic and lit up with a blacklight. Kind of like this.

"We pray today, O God, for our friends, the animals, especially for animals who are suffering; for..."

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 21:25:48 +0800

“We pray today, O God, for our friends, the animals, especially for animals who are suffering; for animals that are over-worked, under-fed, and cruelly treated; for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for any that are lost or deserted or hungry; for all that must be put to death. We pray for them all; and for those who deal with them, we hope for a heart of compassion, gentle hands, and kindly words. We would be true friends to animals.”

- Albert Schweitzer via Yvonne Georgina Puig

"My sense of the scale of the world, and its speed, changed that night, and I carry the memory with..."

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 23:57:38 +0800

“My sense of the scale of the world, and its speed, changed that night, and I carry the memory with me today the way some people carry amulets or worry stones: a reminder that there is always an Iceland to return to, a place where, in an unexplored city in the wee hours just south of the Arctic Circle, strangers are dancing and the seemingly impossible isn’t. I was twenty-two, but I think of this as when my twenties actually began.”

- Nathan Heller, “Semi-charmed Life: The Twenty-somethings are All Right” The New Yorker

I spent a year alone listening to Middle Cyclone. When I...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:37:00 +0800

I spent a year alone listening to Middle Cyclone. When I finally met another girl—a redhead, coincidentally—it didn’t work out. We dated for a few months and then one day she said, “It’s like you don’t even like me.” I thought about it, and, though I liked her just fine, her point stood: What I am giving you is not equal to what you are giving me.

It was then that I noticed that I had fully developed the partitioning and distribution of my qualities both good—I will listen to you and I will make you laugh—and bad—I will talk endlessly about inconsequential things and I will eventually let you down. Everyone gets a little, occasionally in the form of too much: faux-bravado as satire, exaggeration for comic effect, casual conversation at unnecessary volumes.

Like any other pre-constructed thing, personality or otherwise, this idea is designed around an approximation of damage and its impact.

I listened to Middle Cyclone on repeat, dozens of times. I realized that I will always keep the majority of myself for myself.

I can’t give up actin’ tough,

it’s all that I’m made of.

Can’t scrape together quite enough

to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.

* * *

I am confused, incessantly, by how to balance desire with respect. Often, the best I’m able to do is one or the other. This is the opposite of balance, and thoroughly bad. When I say that I can’t balance those two elements, desire and respect, I don’t mean to say that I turn into an abuser when caught up in a state of yearning or a militant second-waver when I want nothing. All I mean is that I cannot tame the animal I am: I either just am or am not that animal. It took writing a heroic crown of sonnets—a task of formal poetry akin to waterboarding as therapy—about a fabricated relationship with Neko to make me understand that about myself. Neko, as presented on Middle Cyclone, is the sort of women worth both respecting and desiring: impetuous, loud, wrong, afraid, honest, incomplete, and terribly—truthfully—human.

…It’s made me understand that nobody deserves to feel threatened, that the world itself is a natural threat and needs no help. On the street, in their homes, alone, in public or in any other configuration of place, women deal with different problems, and the problems of theirs that are the same as mine—a man—are dealt with from a different angle.

I won’t claim to understand the anomalies exclusive to females, and though Middle Cyclonehasn’t fixed very many of my personality flaws, it’s opened up a gateway of empathy. I respect fear. Mine, yours, his, hers. I am as feral as anything that breathes.

Ryan Werner, “Albums of Our Lives: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone”