The Loneliness of George Bush, 2006

Although at a certain level, I think the ‘Bushisms’ calendar is really petty and mean, I have to say that the Monday 29 May (Memorial Day) quotation was noteworthy:

Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.

January 14, 2001

Five years later, it seems that he hasn’t been able to sort this out…




Photo Caption: The Loneliness of George Bush, 2006


Reading has taken that professional turn that it sometimes does. I’m scrambling to finish a paper and I’m reading some wonderful, wondrous texts of animal husbandry. I’m reading fast and highlighting often. I know more than I used to know about many things. A few examples:

the character of a Ploughman
the good effects of Industry
how highland workers are ‘like the swallows’
a proposed tax to punish farmers who fail to supply an adequate number of cottages for labourers
farmers as fathers
picturesque vs. positive beauty


I’ve also read an excerpt from Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon and it’s helpful for me to think about his idea of the ‘head without a face’ which seems to encapsulate the situation of the domesticated farm animal (or at least that’s what I’m going to say). It also reminds me of the vegetarian mantra – “I don’t eat anything with a face”. Can the ‘head without a face’ be the meat-eaters justification? This is not Deleuze’s perspective. He’s interested in the intimacy of the head-meat relationship as it’s represented in Bacon’s work and the movement of head-to-meat in several paintings. He talks about the de-localizing force of meat, the meat of the mouth, the scream and the mouth as the hole through which the entire body escapes…

A Cloud I Made (perhaps) and a Sign

The OED word of the day is 'isohel'

Noun: (Meteorology) a line on a map connecting points having the same duration of sunshine. A line of equal or constant solar radiation on a graph, plot, or map; an isopleth of solar radiation.



I use my umbrella everyday this spring
it's very very green
these lines are hard to draw
why map such connections
when somebody's home in the kitchen making clouds?

Making a Cloud
Materials
1 empty 2-liter plastic bottle (with cap, labels removed)
water
matches
Procedure
1. Place a very small volume of water into the 2-L bottle.
2. Cap the bottle tightly and shake the bottle to accelerate the evaporation of some of the water inside.
3. Compress the air inside the bottle by squeezing the sizes.
4. Release the pressure on the sides of the bottle and observe any cloud formation inside.
5. Open the cap of the bottle.
6. Light a match, extinguish the match, and attempt to draw some of the smoke into the open end of the bottle.
7. Cap the bottle tightly and compress the air inside by squeezing the sides.
8. Release the pressure on the sides of the bottle and observe any cloud formation.

For D&G
desire is an intransitive life force
under pressure to become
a desire-for-something

they seek to free desire from this pressure-to-become
in the concept of 'becoming'.

Sprawl Convoy

Or, More Saturday Reading

I know I shouldn't do it while I'm driving.
But I was perplexed and coasting very slowly
trying to read the scene in front of me.











Mildly disturbing to know that he was going exactly where I was going.













the behemoth of the anti-farm.

Page Turners

Several things:

My friend/next door office neighbour left Friday for a 2-month hiatus from work. She was feted and wined and dined all week by friends here. She came into my office at the end of the day on Friday and said, "Here: you can look after this while I'm gone" and she gave me her desk calendar entitled George W. Bushisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg (not sure if that's a fake author's name or not - I didn't really know that calendars had authors but...the author's name seems apt). She gave me the box for the calendar too and said I should put the old pages into the box to reuse as scrap paper.

So for Friday May 12:
"One of my hardest parts of my job is to console the family members who have lost their life."
Saturday & Sunday May 13/14:
"So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well."
Monday May 15:
"The best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."

(My only comment is that I'm really glad that no one is going around writing down everything I say.)

I don't know if I actually like this calendar. But it's a page turner...It's a ripper...

As is Ivanhoe. No wonder that guy spoke so highly of it...Indeed, it may be better than the Bible (at least in the sense that it's fast-paced and fairly predictable - I mean, I know who the Disinherited Knight really is, don't you?). I'm certainly getting through the book quickly. (And it's a good thing too since I just got my hold from the library. It's called Seven Types of Ambiguity by Eliot Perlman and it's a thicky - much larger than I expected it to be in these spare, ironic times - or maybe spare, ironic was so five-years ago - not sure). For now, though, Ivanhoe has everything: there are beautiful women (Rowena, Rebecca, Alicia - one to be crowned Queen of Love and Beauty), dangerous and mysterious knights, a 'pretender' to the throne, ethnic tensions (Norman, Saxon, Jewish), money, sport and horses. Not to mention, disguise. I wasn't particularly scared when Gurth had his 'nocturnal adventures' and "found himself in a deep lane, running between two banks overgrown with hazel and holly, while here and there a dwarf oak flung its arms altogether across the path". I knew he'd get captured by robbers. I knew the trees wouldn't talk. I hoped that he'd get to keep some of his money because he'd talked about 'buying his freedom' at the end of the previous chapter and I'm all for that. And he did despite the 'profession' of the robbers. I like how each chapter is a little nugget. By the end of the robbery chapter, Gurth, back with the Disinherited Knight, "laid himself across the opening of the tent, so that no one could enter without awakening him". On the facing page, it's already morning and the tournament is about to begin again.


No rest for the reader...

Reading D and G page 37

Double-Double, Triple-Triple and the 4x4

I moved to a new office space recently. I’m out of my ‘unit’ where there was a mini-fridge and a microwave and a kettle and even a toaster (which I admit, I never used – though I like toast very much, it is, for me, an intimate food you eat when you’re half-asleep and half-dressed: it just doesn’t strike me as office fare). So, equipped only with a little kettle, I’ve started drinking my coffee black. I never really put much into it before (just a blush of cream, no sugar) but now it’s just black. And this, apparently, is very unusual. I already knew this with regard to the ‘blush of cream’ which I often find hard to describe to the drive-thru box. Once I got a coffee that was half a cup of cream & half coffee because I asked for ‘half a cream’. The ‘a’ was lost in the noise of traffic and the traffic of the drive-thru work-space. But even in person I’ve had trouble with it – some Tim Hortons workers can’t seem to bypass the ‘cream machine’ which does not seem to have a ‘half a cream’ setting. Others do just fine and I get my perfect coffee. Perplexed, I have to ask though: could anyone really drink a cup that’s half filled with cream and half coffee?

I got the partial answer to this perplexing question when I was in Waterloo last week. Those trips fill me with some sense of dread. It’s not the drive which is tame exhilaration at a number of levels. It’s not seeing my mother - I look forward to that quite tenderly. It’s the town itself. My poor senses are little acclimatized to the affluent suburbs. I don’t know where I am there. I go to the mall sometimes. I see people driving Jaguars and shopping at Zellers. I go to the park skirted by monster-home-courts curved to follow the river. I go to a restaurant or more accurately, I go to a chain that serves food. Last week, I went to Williams Coffee Pub intending to read D&G. Instead I eavesdropped on a job interview, a business meeting, wrote a proposal and worked to avoid the pointed stares of an affluent middle-aged-looking-to-have-an-affair-man. I did talk to the woman working at the counter. She struck me as old-school Waterloo and when I asked for my ‘half a cream’, she openly expressed her own perplexity. “How am I going to do that”? , she said looking at the cream machine. She experimented giving me a small cream from the cream machine in a large coffee mug. She placed the coffee cup between us on the counter and we examined it together. “How’s that?” I was pleased. It looked just right. And then she asked me if I always drink it that way. She said, “I couldn’t do that. I have to put lots of cream and sugar in. I don’t really like coffee very much”.

Why didn’t I read D&G that day? Indeed, when given the rare opportunity to read, why do I ever choose not to read? Is it that I don’t really like reading very much, that I always have to put lots of cream and sugar in? I don’t think so. I think it’s more to do with intimacy – maybe reading like eating toast is something you do half-asleep and half-dressed. Yet I am a public reader and I watched people read The Outsider by Albert Camus, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, In the Twilight of Western Thought by Herman Dooyeweerd, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kriesman and Hal Straus on various buses and in restaurants this week. I am one of those restaurant readers (reading on the bus makes me feel nauseous). It just needs to look and feel and taste right - like the coffee. And the temperature matters too. Definitely not lukewarm.

Liar/Lair Lair/Liar

I pulled ‘lair’ from my brainstorming bag a while back but mistakenly typed it as ‘liar’ and then quickly corrected it. The two are obviously related in terms of deceptiveness and hiding truths. I guess lies constitute appropriate hiding places too. But are there good lairs and good liars or even necessary lairs/liars? What lies do I hide in my lair? Or when does lair become liar? When does ones identity become that of ‘the liar’? What’s the tipping point?

Obviously this is a big part of DQ where we simultaneously know and don’t know who the author is, where there is a false version of the story which DQ himself feels he must work against – it hovers over him like (dare I say) a b a d o m e n. So he goes to Barcelona instead of Saragossa just because the false version has him go to Saragossa and he doesn’t want to do what the false storyteller claims he does. The story has gotten ahead him of somehow yet he still feels he can alter the course of events ‘after the fact’ because ‘the fact’ is a fabrication, a lie. And he does. Yet it is in Barcelona that he is undone. Do we cheer for the underdog then? Do we wish that DQ had gone to Saragossa as the story said? And is the person who can confidently say that Cervantes is the author of DQ the one who has not read it? (or ‘redit’? – does it mean ‘reward’?)

They asked him whither he meant to direct his steps. He replied, to Saragossa, to take part in the harness jousts which were held in that city every year. Don Juan told him that the new history described how Don Quixote, let him be who he might, took part there in a tilting at the ring, utterly devoid of invention, poor in mottoes, very poor in costume, though rich in sillinesses.
"For that very reason," said Don Quixote, "I will not set foot in Saragossa; and by that means I shall expose to the world the lie of this new history writer, and people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he speaks of."
"You will do quite right," said Don Jeronimo; "and there are other jousts at Barcelona in which Senor Don Quixote may display his prowess."

Was it better for him (and for you and for me) to be laughed at in Saragossa than to go to Barcelona and be tricked and defeated and have the story wind down to its end?


These are clearly some of the questions that Borges picks up on in his “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. The question of authorship that Cervantes throws into disarray is at the centre of all of this. Should Borges really be trying to tie things down? Or is that what he's really discussing in the story? How many authors of the Quixote are there wandering with us through the spring rains with the lilacs shining/unable to disguise their show and their scent? How many quotations from an author constitute authorship here on the blog? Can I cobble together a construction of Borges and Cervantes and Scott (where everyone, it seems, is ‘in disguise’) and the copyright holder of the Brainstorming Ball and the OED and blithely identify this text as one of my own making? Are we wandering readers ever wandering alone? D&G might say that we’re not wandering at all that we are just part of a rhizomic-pack-in-process, an assemblage, a multiplicitity of readers and words and real men and men-of-our-dreams.

CODA

All the sad young men/sitting in the bars/knowing neon lights/missing all the stars.

Camouflage or 'Vestis Virum Redit'

I started taking a Latin workshop today - sort of a refresher. I feel out of my depth already as I look at the texts we're reading and see only bits of things I can kind of understand. As someone else said today, it's not so much the vocabulary it's the grammar - putting it all together. It's not even at the stage where we're 'keeping things whole'. I'm questioning my motivation but I'll go along for the ride...

I can remember a few aphorisms from Latin and the one I'm thinking of now is 'vestis virum redit' (clothes make the man). Hold that thought while I digress…

I had a productive weekend with D&G not in the sense that I read a lot or that I read on Saturday. I got as far as Pam's in Jackson Square - a very good reading location for me. I got the book out onto the table beside my coffee cup and then my friend ML came along and I talked to him. He was supposed to be shopping at the market and I was supposed to be reading but we did talk briefly about D&G and I said that I was feeling very good about them recently. They are helping me out and getting more and more intertwined with things like yoga and dance and reflective writing. I like the chapter I’m reading now called “1914: One or several wolves?” They talk about multiplicities, masses, packs, assemblages: “Keep everything in sight at the same time,” they encourage. The writing is exciting, energetic, full of potential. My wounded identity draws nearer. I’m listening.

I photographed some boys-I-just-met last week. This is one of the ways that they chose to be photographed:





Are they hiding or revealing?

In Ivanhoe, all of the characters seem to be defined by their clothes and there are detailed descriptions of what they are wearing as they gather for that initial dinner at Cedric the Saxon's place. Rowena has just entered the room...

I also went (this past weekend after I shot the photo of the boys) to see an art exhibition by Amy Creighton called “Camouflage”. AM (another person with the same initials as mine) asked me if I noticed that all of the models in the photos had their faces averted from the camera and we decided after consulting briefly with the artist that the shots constituted a kind of anti-portraiture where the viewer loses the privilege of staring into the face of the portrayed. Is this a rebellion, an attempt to frustrate habit? Or simply what the review of the show says - that we gather material from the media and construct our identity from that. For various reasons, the portraits remind me of my visits to the dermatologist. They have a completely different character to them. There's medicalized content, the desire to change but not the loneliness and longing of that real wait in the closed-door room before the doctor comes in. I can't avert my face. Is not showing your face a form of revelation or is it a form of self-betrayal? And what does it mean to show your face?

Sigmoid; Or, Thrown for a bit of a curve

The first few pages of Ivanhoe have been excruciating. I can’t stand the preamble. I want to get to the amble and after a few pages I do, and now I’m wandering with Gurth and Wamba. Do they in anyway resemble DQ & Sancho? Well, yes, on first impression! Is this the real truth of all stories? Is everything a coincidence?

Yesterday, I was looking for a poem about sheep. This is in connection with some work I’m doing on a conference paper about breeding. I spent almost the entire day in my office reading book excerpts from from a fantastic e-resource called “Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. One of the books I read was a ‘necrology’ – something I hadn’t encountered before:

(ne•crol•o•gy (nə-krŏl'ə-jē, nĕ-)
n., pl. -gies.
1. A list of people who have died, especially in the recent past or during a specific period.
2. An obituary.
nec'ro•log'ic (nĕk'rə-lŏj'ĭk) or nec'ro•log'i•cal adj.
ne•crol'o•gist n.)

What it actually consisted of was a series of fairly lengthy biographies of ‘neglected’ personages who had died in 1797-8. The guy I wanted to read about was duly praised by the anonymous biographer:

Would to heaven that many of those immortal heroes, on whose memory we lavish such high flown eulogiums, had possessed half the virtues, and been degraded by as few vices, as this breeder of cattle!

In my search for sheep poems, I also turned to my shelf full of those anthologies that publishers have sent me. I pulled out one of the Longman volumes because they’re separated into historical periods and I wanted to narrow my search to early-modern poetry. The book is floppy with very thin paper and cover (I guess to make it more light weight and sensual). Inadvertently, the book flipped itself open to the lengthy excerpt from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote. But what was even more interesting to me is that the book which is set up for teaching and learning prints the early-modern text but then follows-up with a ‘resonance’ text to “provide additional context for key works through source readings or responses from a different century or culture." The ‘resonance’ for DQ is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’” -- a story that I’ve read before but totally forgot about! It’s a short text and I HIGHLY recommend that you read it now so that I can, with peace of mind talk about it more!!!