jane dark's sugarhigh!

Most Botched Headline In Recent Memory

Perhaps they feared that calling the piece "iGod" would confuse Rastafarians.

[click here for archives re Digital Music Player, Judeo-Christianity of]

More News On Concealed Steroids

For all you amateur cartographers, my brief survey of noted Times opinionista Thomas L. Friedman's volume The World Is Flat is posted (click passage below); please note that, for some computers, the online version is missing the word "ubersteroid" twice in the penultimate graf. The passage in question should read:

"And now the icing on the cake," the book moons, "the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." Leapin' ubersteroids...

I blame the Germans. Frickin' umlauts.

Obviousness Is Next To Common Sense

Axiom: "Common sense" is always a prohibition against further thought.

Corrollary: Prohibitions against thinking sometimes take the form of "common sense."

Secret agenda: Concerning prohibitions against "utopian" thinking.

Onset

My friend Stephen thinks you can deduce a lot about bloggers' romantic lives from the waxing and waning of their content. I wish it were that sweet. Autumn approacheth on scholastic springs, and one feels the rhythm of many a poblog ticking down a bit, as other clocks take tempo. That's the depressing truth/dirty secret of most such venues, this one included: we all freewheelin' outlaws, but not. I believe such blogs are meant (at least in part) to be a departure from the managed discourses of professional academia, are nonetheless (is nonetheless, like and yet, one of the propositional integuments indicating dialectics?) managed, albeit passively, by the material realities of academia. More "work," less of the "free writing" that spaces such as these, despite everything, seem at least relatively to provide. There's no outside to the administered life, though that's no argument for not smashing your head againt the boundary: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, as many believe was said by Gramsci, though apparently it was Romain Rolland. Pessimism of the syllabus, optimism of the blog? If "the metaphysical subject does not belong to the world but is a boundary of the world," as Bertrand Russell summarized a couple of Wittgenstein's propositions, the argument for expansivity becomes even stronger, the form of a contemplatable rather than mystical religion. Hmm, is that last clause simply the ideal formulation of the concept science? Perhaps so, in the sense of the "single science."

This academic year, though we are saddled with more duties than ever, we at the reference desk hope to keep sugarhigh! as a going concern, with occasional notes on the usual things that ongoingly concern us: music, poetics, movies, politics. "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity," (Bertrand on Ludwig again) is what I should have said to Erin when she kept asking what Benjamin's theory was, in last year's Arcades course. This is obvious in relation to, say, immanent critique or negative dialectics; less so, and thus more important to keep in mind, in regard to history.

Toxicology

I luv most manythings that have to do with Jessica Hopper and feminism, and as long as it doesn't commit me to passing within hearing range of the irrepressible-yet-hideously-awful Smoosh, I superheart Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls — East Coast, West Coast, what have you.

So about this question I want to ask: I am totally sincere in asking you to suspend yr expectation that I am being sarcastic, sardonic, ironic, or "snarky" (as those who'd rather not make the fine distinctions say, theses days). It's something I am actually curious about, so much so that I am throwing open the dread Comments Box on this one, against my usual oh, just go start yr own blog policy.

My question regards this passage, the conclusion of the recent article on the Willie Mae Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls in the paper of records:
When a group of counselors performed a garage-punk cover of Britney Spears' hit "Toxic," complete with a cello screeching the queasy hook, a guitarist, Maria Cincotta, asked: "Do you think Britney Spears wrote that? I doubt it." She continued: "See, now you've already written your own songs. You're already better than Britney Spears!"

Before my main question, I have what you might call a study question: does this mean that the girls are already as good as Cathy Dennis, who wrote "Toxic" (and "Can't Get You Out Of Mu Head," and "Too Many Walls," which she sang)? And, in general, when folks are toting out their kit bag of tar to smear it on folks who don't write their own songs, why do they so rarely pause over the folks who wrote these songs that they generally admire but need, at the same time, to discredit? (and by the way, if that contradictory impulse isn't a perfectly useful description of the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie in consumer capitalism...doesn't matter, skip ahead).

Okay, that was a little sardonic. But I repeat: this question is sincere, and I am curious, and it poses an interesting problem for my own analysis of pop music. So, to the point: Is the identity politics ideology of "self-empowerment" co-extensive with "rockism"? Does the celebration of doing it yourself — the faith that assuming authorship of your own life is a political necessity — guarantee an aesthetic commitment to authority, originality, personal expressivity that defines the music of the white male Boomer, the one identity group that doesn't need a politics? Is this ironic? What might be some ways out of this trap?

"...or using a position of responsibility such as teacher, community or youth leader"

One can scarcely help but note that, according to new "ground rules for Britain to ban or deport foreign militants accused of fomenting hatred, violence and extremism," were Pat Robertson to reside currently in Albion, he would be sent, as they say, packing.

Better Than Expected But Not So Good

Better Than Expected. Rather Good, Actually

Just Like Her Other Records But Still Better Than Expected, Mysteriously

Duly Noted at the Matinée

...of the film Red Eye, which is, after all, mostly set on an overnight flight: on the desk behind the dad's phone, placed to display the spine clearly, a copy of Sleeping on the Wing.

Analogic

Remember them? How they released a 5-song EP that was just incredibly exciting, charged, and seemd to promise a dark, shiny future, kinda new? How it was an art project that shook, or maybe a shaker rifted with art smarts, woman-powered without playing on babelicity, and how for every downtown hipster, Luscious Jackson was the name on our domestic beer-infused lips, and the hope in our hearts? And then the full-length came out, and it was pretty good, and there was so much momentum and so much desire that we all pretended it was excellent, but we also knew that it wasn't, really, but we kept our sense of being let down to ourselves, and whooped and big-upped, hoped they would realize our dreams on the next record, but that was even less mind-blowing and we still liked them fine but sometime between last call and the wake-up show we let our vivid enthusiasm slip away in the New York night like so much steam, and let imaginations move on to the next magnetic object?

Ladies and gentlemen: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

French Weigh In (Lyric Poetry Before Auschwitz)

The meaning of poetry...ends in its opposite, a feeling of hatred for poetry. Georges Bataille, “Etre Oreste” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 3:220

There is only one man who has the right to be an anarchist, me, the Poet, because I alone create a product that society does not want, in exchange for which society does not give me enough to live on. Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell, 1999) p.213

The text therefore signifies an experience of heterogeneous contradiction rather than a practice which, by contrast, is always social. The proof may be seen in Mallarmé’s refusal to consider the possibility of a political activity that would be simultaneous to textual activity, whatever his well-founded reasons for criticizing anarchist or social commitment. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University, 1984) p. 195

Poetry must have for its object practical truth. It expresses the relation between the first principles and the secondary truths of life. Everything remains in its place. The mission of poetry is difficult. It is not concerned with political events, with the way a people is governed, makes no allusion to historical periods, regicide, coups d'etat, court intrigues. It does not think of those struggles which, exceptionally, man has with himself and his passions. It discovers the laws by which political theory exists, universal peace, the refutations of Machiavelli, the cornets of which the work of Proudhon consists, the psychology of mankind. A poet must be more useful than any other citizen of his tribe. His work is the code of diplomats, legislators, and teachers of youth. Compte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, Paul Knight, tr. (London: Penguin Books, 1978) p. 271

Literature has always been the most explicit realization of the signifying subject’s condition. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p.82

...in order to close the gap created by our lack of interest in what lies outside the realm of aesthetics.—Everything can be summed up in Aesthetics and Political Economy. Mallarmé, “La musique et les lettres,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p.656

Though poetry may trample on the established order, it is no substitute for it. When disgust with a powerless liberty thoroughly commits the poet to political action, he abandons poetry. But he immediately assumes responsibility for the order to come: he asserts the direction of activity, the major attitude. When we see him we cannot help being aware that poetic existence, in which we once saw the possibility of sovereign attitude, is really a minor attitude. It becomes no more than a child’s attitude, a gratuitous game. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, Alastair Hamilton, tr. (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973) pp.23-24

A student could acquire a considerable amount of literary knowledge by saying the opposite of what the poets of this century have said. He would replace their affirmations with negations. If it is ridiculous to attack first principles, it is even more ridiculous to defend them against the same attacks. I will not defend them. Compte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, p.269

Vive la ré-!. Ravachol, his sentence divided by the guillotine.

Art Becomes Practice

Israeli settlers adopt post-Pollock strategies to represent the unthinkability of the coherent social order (or "lyric nation-state"), chanting "an AbEx does not expel an AbEx."

"You call that resistance?" said one bystander. "My six-year old could do that."

Second Hand

Two brothers deeply attached to one another had a strange habit. They marked the nature of the day's events with pebbles, a white one for each happy moment and a black one for each moment of misfortune or displeasure. But when, at the end of the day, they compared the contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the other only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man famed for his wisdom. "You don't talk to one another enough" said the wise man, "Both of you must give the reasons for your choice, and discover its causes". From then on they did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained faithful to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been about thirty there were hardly more than seven or eight. After a short while they went to see the wise man again. Both looked extremely miserable. "Not so long ago," said one, "my jar was filled with pebbles the colour of the night. My despair was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but what these eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable that I cannot go on like this." And the other said: "Every day I piled up white pebbles.. Today there are only seven or eight, but these obsess me to the point that I cannot recall these moments of happiness without immediately wanting to relive them more intensely and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments me". The wise man smiled as he listened to them. "Excellent. Things are shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can, ask yourselves why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses so much passion in you." When the two brothers next saw the wise man it was to say "We asked ourselves the question but we could not find the answer. So we asked the whole village. You can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening. squatting in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part. They say a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value." The old man didn't conceal his pleasure. "Everything is developing as I foresaw. Don't worry. Soon the question will no longer be asked: it has lost its importance, and perhaps one day you will no longer believe you ever asked it." Shortly afterwards the old man's predictions were confirmed in the following way: a great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of a troubled night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the elders and chieftains, impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of the palisade.

— Raoul Vaneigem, from "The Reversal of Perspective"

MetaPo

Over at Cahiers, Josh is hopeful; I look up to him for this. From down here at sugarhigh!, it seems that the Gaza pullout is four parts smoke to three parts mirrors. According to my favorite resource for geopolitics, the numbers in the Strip are:

Population: 1,324,991
note: in addition, there are more than 5,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (July 2004 est.)

Compare this to the West Bank:

Population: 2,311,204
note: in addition, there are about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2004 est.)

I fear it's all too easy to suspect that Gaza, which houses only a tiny number of Israeli settlers (minuscule when counted in ratio to the, uh, settled), is being used as a temporizing tactic; the inter-Israeli sturm und drang makes it seem like a big deal, a historic moment — without the history. This dumbshow will serve to forestall history, to postpone infinitely the far-more-substantial pullout from the West Bank.

The miracle we'll need is, I would suggest, a fundamental change in the United States' geopolitical investments. There'll be no homeland for the Palestinians, and no withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, as long as the US requires a secular client state in the Middle East. As the managed spectacle of Gaza unfurls, it's probably worth recalling that, of the last fourteen vetos in the UN Security Council (dating back to 1995), eleven were used by the United States. Of these eleven binding, non-overrideable vetos, ten concerned Israel. Some resolutions the United States found intolerable:

• on the killing by Israeli forces of several United Nations employees and the destruction of the World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse
• on establishing a UN observer force to protect Palestinian civilians
• on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian-controlled territory and condemning acts of terror against civilians

...and on and on, the hypocrisies and absurdities piling one on the next. The last veto listed above, blocking a condemnation of terror against civilians, came 94 days after September 11th.

The difference between Israel's two factions, between Sharon and "the hardliners," is not between the side that wants to do the right thing and the side that doesn't; this is a Manichaean fantasy (one, I would argue, particularly appealing with United States liberals, for obvious reasons). It's between those prepared to act strategically, and those committed to acting absolutely. What we are seeing isn't the beginning of peace, it's the sacrifice of a knight, maybe a bishop.

I Would Have Guessed

I would have guessed that the first great love song to a robot would have been by David Bowie, or Gary Numan, or Radiohead and Fischerspooner with special guests Shields & Yarnell improvising during the encore jam at Live 8: Kandahar. It turns out it was by Steely Dan, and then only if one allows a fairly idiosyncratic reading of the phrase we got your skinny girl here at the Western World conceived while pondering Yul Brynner's oeuvre and the metal phallus behind the music.

Did someone say metal phallus? By which I mean, wouldn't it make sense that the great song in question would be sung by a woman, with "robot" standing in for a more familiar, less anthropomorphic love machine? Which brings me to "Robotboy" by Robyn, on her album Robyn, which will apparently be made available to the American CD-purchasing public (that is to say, those remaining Americans without computer access, or the ones who are strictly bottoms when it comes to capitalism) in the reasonably near future. Anyway, "Robotboy" turns out to be a ballad, shy piano chords giving way to bleeps and boops beneath the proto-Britney's sigh of a vocal, stately and melancholic in way you don't get from a lot of former Swedish teenpop stars:
yr battery's low, did you crash again?
robotboy do you need a friend?
and at about this time you notice how that drone-syllable in the background is Robyn singing the word "home" over and over, homehomehomehomehome,
hush now boy, please give in,
robotboy, you've reached the end,
hey lil droid, let your x-ray shine
and the na-na-nas drop in and really, it's just heartbreaking, the one you listen to seventeen times in the attic after everyone's gone to bed, just loud enough to wake nobody up so you can have the lonely world all to yourself, as if that was your idea.

First Night Back...

...waking up joltingly and rolling toward the wall in sleepy panic, not the famous not-knowing-where-you-are but something more foundational, absolute confusion, like what is this body you seem to have awoken inside of, what's going on, what kind of thing are you?

Frank

Complaints about Michael Moore are easy to come by. I have my own. I don't care that his movies are manipulative and dishonest; the same can be said for Star Wars and every political speech ever, and given that Mooreflix fall somewhere in the middle, as rhetorical entertainments, "objectivity" is a bullshit criterion. I'm actually more aggravated that Fahrenheit 9/11 was boring. I knew all that shit already, just from reading the papers, and (unlike the cheerfully nutty Bowling For Columbine) it didn't really have an analysis, just obvious squawking. What next, a movie that spends 90 minutes of my life on the revelation that really unhealthy food makes you really unhealthy?

Hey! wait! I've got a new complaint! Michael Moore has done so well by now that he can afford not to make any more profits on his films, ever! I don't know this for a fact, but I'm strangely confident.

Even so, I absolutely and completely appreciate this. As I said, obviously it's easier for Moore to opt for charismatic laissez-faire about his own pocket-thickness than it is for you or I. But one could say the same of Metallica, or Andre Young, or a thousand other millionaires who instead hustle their proxies toward the scriptorium to crank out a few more indictments of children, grandmothers, and the tweeners remaining.

“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that." How hard is that to say?

You can't spell global without blog

America stood out as as an object for admiration, envy, and blame. This created a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al Quaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were.
— The 9/11 Commission Report, p.340

This is the most striking moment in the volume, if for no other reason than how the document otherwise keeps to a self-imposed facticity and diligently does not speculate on psychological conditions; if it wishes us to know, say, of the love between Ziad Jarrah and Aysel Senguen, it mentions only the extarodinarily-timed dates of known visits and phone calls. The passage above leaps from the sea of data, reflecting, as a leaping fish reflects light for just a moment, the possibility that world social relations might have had an impact on decisions made. And one doesn't regret the brevity, or the generality. In their own way, these four sentences, limited as they are by the conditions in which they themselves appear, are insightful. Possibly even "true."

And yet to think this is to realize that the converse is true as well. If the new new world is always bringing the faraway near, not just its images but its powers, this is not to say that "globalism" is necessarily the constant, disturbing experience of such proximity. Globalism, or global power, might equally be described as the power not to be confronted by such things. The seeming distance of Afghanistan in 2001, described above, is exactly the measure of how globalized we are — of a Western citizen's naturalized ability to move from city to city, strength to strength, Hilton to Sofitel lobby, without having to think much about it.

In this regard, the concept of "globalism" is perfectly dialectical, not just one asymmetry but an opposed series of them, pooling into a concept that keeps changing its shape, revealing different contours. "Globalism," that is to say, or "dialectics" or "history," these things are no more or less abstract than are the events tracked by the Commision's report, in so far as each is the stuff of the others.

Hate It or Love It, Dun

My favorite thing about Jim's comic strips is how the particular form of text (proper names included) can't be Googled.

As noted elsewhere a couple years back, when considered at a remove of 17 paces, the proximate metacause for the flourishing of poetry blogs is so that when poets of the Googling class Google themselves, we get that feeling (as foretold by Navin Johnson: The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! My name in print! That really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now.)

For me, this recognition puts difficult context to the rise of the "Works Received" list meme, and the even more gray-flavored "Books Read." I understand the studied neutrality, which keeps the name of the product in circulation without risking a dozen rounds of comment-boxing with someone who has more time and hostility than you...or worse, without chancing the cold shoulder at a party because your casual blog admiration of someone's book was read as faint praise.

On a more abstract level, there's no doubt that, to use Steve's language, it's useful to register, to make a record of this series of moments, this formation always in the midst of forming, which is different from the "history" gestated in the warm bath of boosterism, and etched in vitriol.

And yet. There's a sense of loss at sacrificing on the pyre of safety an integral pleasure: the way the blog is free from the sensible, peer-reviewed consensus of more-official verse culture. This was a substantial part of poetry-blogging's originary thrill. Well, everything's always growing up, even blogs.

What seems more potentially disturbing is a seeming. This post is certainly no demand that poetry blogs must openly, aggressively prefer or not prefer new books that float across their metadesks, but this particular preferring-not-to has a shadow upon it. It isn't Bartleby's passive refusal. It's active; it does something — something in addition to acceding to the Googlogic of valuation based on sheer mention, a logic of sensation and ubiquity.

If one isn't going to take the time or risk to love it or hate it, or to imagine ways of reading the book and letting the book register its world, why mention the book at all? Along with safe publicizing, these lists hazard the appearance of of producing and describing cultural capital, one's own — of registering the amount of information passing through one's very own node, and thus one's proximity to sources. We might like to imagine the blogosphere is rhizomatic, but the world isn't, even the world of small presses; it means something that Jack's "Works Received" list is longer than Jill's, Jill's longer than Jean's. One idea returned to the 'sphere per title mentioned seems like a fair innoculation against this apparition of doubt — hardly enough to tax the time or insight of even the humblest blogger. As for "Books Read" — cool. Wudjathink?

What Would Lisa Do

So, um, what's up with Rachel Sweet?

When invisible people are downloading songs from my computer, I check what songs have been sought; when it's an odd choice, say "2541," I browse their collection in return. Isn't technology wonderful? And I don't even have that robot named after a famous nightclub that does your sweeping.

This is how I was reminded of the existence of "Who Does Lisa Like?" Perhaps you have been holding it in your short-term cache, but I hadn't thought pon it since maybe 1871. Every single little thing she does is magic, especially the fact that her nonsense syllables, "oh ta ta ta," replace the line "ooh it's all right," and immediately suggest it isn't, really, as the song shifts toward a sort of tsssk-ing judgement right there in Akron's Firestone parking lot, killing time with local gossip.

It's not live for today, it's this is all we got. "Nothing's important if that ain't important, so don't change the subject," she says before the last verse: "people are starving in India, fighting in Baghdad...but we don't care. We'd ask herself but it's none of our business, besides, we don't dare." Cut to the chorus, with its perverse urgency, how the empty night fills up with the concern closest to hand, without a religious commitment to the local, overburdened with absurd interest, excessive affect, panic guitars, whatever has some power against vacancy...

Update: we still don't know who Lisa likes. But did the car tires and Baghdad seem so obviously intertwined back then, such an obvious haunting? And hadn't we better get some new stuff not to care about?

New Download

Hello everyone, and especially everyone who has participated in various recent discussions related to, responsive to, ancillary to the relation between contemporary poetics and political economy. One of the much-bruited and occasionally-read documents is "Camp Messianism," by Chris Nealon; the drag has been, one might need 12 bucks to read it. But it is now available for download as a PDF by clicking on the link to the right.

And, what the hell: if you want an article that's available on JSTOR or Project Muse but don't have complimentary access to these databases, just let me know and I'll post it.

Don't tell anyone.