jane dark's sugarhigh!

Spectres of DNC

From the NYT review of Traitor:

Samir, the son of an American mother and a Sudanese father, is an observant Muslim and a veteran of the Army Special Forces, a highly trained warrior whose allegiances are, at first and for a gratifyingly long time afterward, decidedly ambiguous.

He is, in other words, an elegantly conceived and suavely played construct, a theoretical being born out of a very real political conflict. Samir, enigmatic and quiet though he is, has less in common with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne than he does with some of the cold-war specters dreamed up by John le Carré in his prime. Samir’s doubleness is built into his biography, and whatever choice he makes is likely to constitute some form of betrayal.

Emphasis ours. Is Tony Scott really that stoned? If it were us, and we were presented with a charismatic dark-skinned lead who was "enigmatic and quiet," whose allegiances were in doubt, who had to deal with a Muslim threat but was himself a kind of Muslim threat, who had an American mother and a Kenyan Sudanese father...umm, isn't this sounding like wikipedia entry for a certain presidential candidate? Doesn't the film seem exactly like the dramatization of all the hysterias around the Democratic nominee (racial, religious, political) for the purposes of thus counter-dramatizing him as an action hero? File under: critics not doing jobs.

"the new phone books are here"/"it's all happening"

Both Stephanie Young's Picture Palace and Kevin Killian's Action Kylie have arrived from their Canadian hibernation and are now available through Small Press Distribution. Now there is more good poetry in the world. Stay tuned for a special announcement about a release party and reading coming this fall!

increasingly shorter sunday, or: good question

"It’s ridiculous. How fast can you go before the world record can’t be broke? How fast can the human being go before there’s no more going fast?"

Mahmoud Darwish

...has died, almost 26 years to the day after August 6, 1982: the day which provides the setting for Memory For Forgetfulness, written amidst the Israeli siege of Beirut. The book is sometimes presented as prose poems, which seems an ambivalent judgment; it may simply be "memoir," but is regardless more poetic than most books of poetry published in its century.

Somewhat vexingly, the book is also more poetic and more compelling than the vast body of Darwish's poems, often fascinating and internationally renowned, but not without a somewhat parched symbolic character. A constructivist historian who wished above all things to be a poet — turning down a post in Arafat's cabinet (after a conversation about Malraux) — Darwish's work and his life raise the most essential questions about the role of the artist in the midst of historical disaster, questions to which we would hazard no answers, having none.

most symptomatic sentence ever?

Perfectly intelligent persons are pleased to take Bruce Sterling seriously. It's actually a fine time to be Bruce Sterling or someone like him, as the celebratory abjecting of high culture, and its companion modernism-is-so-over rhetoric, revel in the inverted world wherein genre fiction is more suggestive and vital than Great Books (for a minute we called this Cultural Studies, but now it's just one of the corridors in the English Dept). But the thing is, said youngish English prof tends to feel a little guilty about this transaction's incoherence, wherein they profit by being the smartypants critic explicating the significance of the non-smartypants author, a process which really calls into question the abjecting of smartypants-ness intrinsic to their abandonment of the modernist project, avant-gardes, High Culture, experimental literature, etc.

In short, it's discomfiting to pose as the cultural elite of populism.

So a genre fiction writer who is thoughtful about his genre, and particularly about its social bases, and who is even a little scholarly but not in a scholarly way, well, it's a real relief for a certain kind of academic to be reassured that his (usually his) intellectual spirit is not reviled but shared amongst hoi polloi.

Which is all well and good but Bruce Sterling is sort of a dope. In his essay on "The Life and Death of Media" (the speech version of which can be found here) he walks through the Dead Media Project, expounding on why it's important to recall and grasp all the, well, dead media. Here's his rising peroration at the end:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me implore your pity and understanding for dead media. If you're really electronic frontier people, then in all justice, you ought to eat what you are killing. Let's try to see the greater sense of tragedy and majesty in this whirlwind we're creating. Perhaps this realization will free us from the hypnotism of our own PR. I dare not suggest that it will make us better artists -- but at least it may help establish where we are and what is coming. Somehow, it might help us survive. It might even help us prevail.

What remains entirely unclear is what exactly we are supposed to "prevail" against or over. Live media spinning out of control? Ourselves? "Our own PR"? WTF?

Let me simply propose that there is currently no real thought without an account of living antagonisms and of where value comes from. This is not a transcendental claim; one could imagine an era not organized by dynamics of antagonism and value accumulation. Indeed, such imaginings are another horizon of real thought, equally dependent on understanding antagonism and value as what must be overcome. Which leads me to a sentence or two from Sterling's talk that comes just a few paragraphs earlier, as the addresses the rate of innovation and obsolescence:

We can examine it whenever we like, and the frantic pace is entirely our own fault. What's our hurry anyway? When you look at it from another angle, there's an unexpected delicious thrill in the thought that individual human beings can now survive whole generations of media.

This is a potentially interesting inquiry, except for the suggestion that the pace of the making, selling, and replacing of stuff — you call it media, I call it "the economy" — can be mellowed out through some mental reattunement, like if everyone just breathed. I believe we used to call this idealism. Still no explanation of where the antagonism might lie, what role value might play — in short, no reading of why this process he decries might be the way it is. What the crisis is. And still no clue about what kind of prevailing we're looking at. And that's when the great sentence arrives, a sentence which requires no analysis, a sentence that ends in an exclamation point as symptomatic as a slip on the tongue, a sentence in the late midst of this talk from 1995, given to the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art (italics ours; we are trying to point out all subtle-like that this Symposium started in 1989):

It's like outliving the Soviet Union once every week!