Sunday, April 30, 2006

Boil 1.89

May 1 Slogans:

Resist organised protest!

The Fish!!! The Fish!!!

Join the Surrealist Brigades!

Freedom for Al-Abn-Dachveed!
(Canberra Chapter for the FfA-A-D Sectarian Bear Worshippers)

Organise Resistance. Protest!

File 1.56

In fact, no one has yet tackled the immense task which Mauss insisted was urgently necessary; that is, the compilation of an inventory and description of all the uses to which men have put their bodies throughout history and throughout the world.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, 6.

hyssyttely

of 'vanished psychical states of our childhood'
C. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, 5.



























Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Boil 1.88 Haartz IV lives

Videos of Rube Goldberg type machines. Miyazaki's universe?

(via Scheinriese)

Boil 1.87 Haartz IV lives

"In Wales," he says, "mostly in the rural areas, there was a personage known as the Sin Eater. When someone was dying the Sin Eater would be sent for. The people of the house would prepare a meal and place it on the coffin. According to other versions the meal would be placed on the dead person's body, which must have made for some sloppy eating, one would have thought. In any case, the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum of money. It was believed thtat al the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetime would be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus became absolutely bloated with other people's sins, a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you might say."
M. Atwood, "The Sin Eater", Dancing Girls, 213.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Boil .186

Und es waere eine der interessantesten Studien ueber die Rolle des skatologischen Witzes in der Klostersprache des Mittelalters zu machen.

And still extant is an interesting study on the function of the scatological joke in the monastic language of the middle ages.
W. Benjamin, "Staatsmonopol fuer Pornographie", Gesammelte Schriften IV.I., 457-58.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Spoil 1.73

The English syllabus taught in Australian schools is being dumbed down by "rubbish" post modern literature, Prime Minister John Howard says. Mr Howard today said he questioned some of the decisions made by state government education authorities about literacy promoted to students. "I feel very, very strongly about the criticism that many people are making that we are dumbing down the English syllabus," Mr Howard told ABC radio in Brisbane. "I think there's evidence of that in different parts of the country ... when the, what I might call the traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary, as appears to be the case in some syllabus." Mr Howard said authorities seemed too willing to succumb to political correctness at the expense of quality traditional literature. "I share the views of many people about the so-called post modernism ... I just wish that independent education authority didn't succumb on occasions to the political correctness that it appears to succumb to," he said. "We all understand that it's necessary to be able to be literate and coherent in the English language, we understand that it's necessary to be numerate and we also understand that there's high-quality literature and there's rubbish. "We need a curriculum that encourages an understanding of the high-quality literature and not the rubbish."

(in Theage)

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Spoil 1.72

The outskirts of Sudbury, nickel-smelting capital of the world. Can we show you around? they said. I'd like to see the slag heaps, and the places where the vegetation has all been scorched off. Oh, haha, they said. It's growing back, they raised the stacks. It's turning into quite a, you know, civilized place. I used to like it, I said, it looked like the moon. There's something to be said for a place where absolutely nothing grows. Bald. Dead. Clean as a bone. Know what I mean? Furtive glances at one another, young beardy faces, one pipesmokes, they write footnotes, on their way up, why do we always get stuck with the visiting poet? Last one threw up on the car rug. Just wait till we get tenure.
M. Atwood, "Lives of the Poets", Dancing Girls, 183-84.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Spoil 1.71

Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in their choice of diction. In their novels, there is usually a lady or a gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree: the lover has a manly breast; minds are redolent of various things; hearts are hollow; events are utilized; friends are consigned to the tomb; infancy is an engaging period; the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is a melancholy boon [...] There is a striking resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for instance, as that "Vice can too often borrow the language of virtue;" that "Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be accpeted, for clamour and pretension cannot impose upon those too well read in human nature to be easily deceived;" and that, "In oder to forgive, we must have been injured." There is, doubtless, a class of reader to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent. The colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be heard every day. Angry young gentlemen exclaim "'Tis ever thus, methinks." [...]
We are getting used to these things now, just as we are used to eclipses of the moon, which no longer set us howling and beating tin kettles.

George Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists". Westminster Review 66 (Oct 1856): 442-61.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Spoil 1.70

"Public" Transport Snafus:
PRIVATISATION of Melbourne's public transport has cost taxpayers $1.2 billion more than if the system had remained in public hands, according to a analysis by transport experts. [...]

Mr Kennett (!!!) said the Government should examine free public transport as part of the review.

Senior lecturer in transport planning at Melbourne University, Dr Paul Mees, RMIT University's Associate Professor Michael Buxton, John Stone from Swinburne University, and Dr Patrick Moriarty from Monash University, prepared the analysis. It will be released tomorrow. "The experiment has failed spectacularly … subsidies have increased, services have not improved, inappropriate rolling stock has been purchased … the regulator has been 'captured' by those he is supposed to be regulating, there is no real planning for the future," they say.

(in theage)

Friday, April 07, 2006

weihnachten, bald!

"Weil Papa Volker und mir dabei half, die Carrerabahn aufzubauen, fing Mama an zu weinen. "Ich hab geglaubt, wenigstens an Heiligabend wär mal Sense mit der verdammten Scheißbastelei!" rief sie und lief raus und schloß sich im Elternschlafzimmer ein.
Da ging auch Papa und verschwand im Keller."

Gerhard Henschel Kindheitsroman S. 202.

unterschichtenmodelle 0.1

"Working poor sind nur die drastischsten Unterschichtsmodelle für ein allgemeines Phänomen: niemand, ich wiederhole: niemand in unserer Gesellschaft kann ein menschenwürdiges Dasein fristen durch das, was in der großen Erzählung Arbeit heißt. Zur gleichen Zeit aber wächst der politische und materielle und moralische Druck. [...] Daß viele Menschen in der Erzählung Arbeit gelebt habe und versuchen, immer noch in ihr zu leben, obwohl sie sich in eine Groteske verwandelt, hat eine warme, ja eine wärmende Innenseite. Es ist schön, einen Menschen in seiner Arbeit glücklich zu sehen. [...] Neben vielem anderen nämlich kann nicht nur Kunst (frei nach Karl Valentin) viel Arbeit sein, es kann auch umgekehrt im glücklichen Fall auch Arbeit zu Kunst werden."
Georg Seeßlen Die Arbeit, ein Märchen in: Literatur Konkret 2005, S. 6

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Boil 1.85

What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly - "Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him whereever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
V. Nabokov, "Signs and Symbols". Collected Stories, 599.

(text online)

Sunday, April 02, 2006

dann sind mir die Augen und Ohren von einem zu allen Sinnen gleichmaessig dringenden Sausen erfuellt.

then my eyes and ears are filled with a roaring sound which overwhelms all my senses at once.

Kafka, "Ein Landarzt"

(kafka.org)

Saturday, April 01, 2006

File 1.55 Natur, gen.

April 1. Gasheater: ON. Run, you fools!

File 1.55 Natur, dt.

After 1945, 12 million Germans were driven out of lands they had often inhabited for centuries. ‘Slavdom’, in the shape of the revived Polish state, advanced to the Oder. Most of the expellees from what was now Polish territory were dumped, almost penniless, in what was to become West Germany, where (with government encouragement) they often soothed their loss with sour fantasies of return. As Blackbourn shows, they also preserved in their well-subsidised expellee culture a version of the ‘sustaining myth’, the belief that the German relationship to the earth and nature existed on a plane of synthesis inaccessible to other races. ‘The refugee writers who tended the flame still wanted it both ways,’ Blackbourn comments. ‘Germans had a special feeling for nature, but they also had a special talent for shaping the land.’
Neal Ascherson, "Imagined Soil", in TLS April 6 2006.