Estate Sales

We Are Still Married: stories and letters by Garrison Keillor has a piece called "Estate" which is about a stint as a writer of obituaries and a frequenter of estate sales. He speaks of an editor:

But I managed to convince him that large beds of beautiful zinnias were one of the deceased's accomplishments in life and should be noted in her obituary. He wouldn't let me mention another woman's rhubarb cake. "Recipes don't belong in an obit. Too disrespectful," he said. But he did once let me say, "An employee of the Northern Pacific for thirty-seven years, Mr. Johnson was well known for his skill as an electrician and for taking good care of his tools.

Which statement provides the segue to a description of estate sales:

I thought of my obit-writing days the other evening, after I'd spent the afternoon going around to estate sales. Like the obit trade, they might have been depressing — the homes of the deceased opened up for the sale of stuff the survivors didn't want, and hundreds of us strangers tramping through the rooms looking for bargains — but they were not. Not to me, anyway. I found them very satisfying. I went to three houses, all small and jammed with stuff [...]

And turns the perspective upon himself

I'm a saver myself, and to my considerable collection I added a little bit of each of theirs [...] Going to estate sales, a person is struck by the fact that possessions survive us. [...] I'll hang on to them, they are so dear, but when I'm dead they should be sold to strangers at rock-bottom prices. People who may not be born yet should come by my house and snatch them up as the wonderful bargains they will be. That's why I took good care of them — to extend their usefulness beyond the unimaginable day when I'm no longer here.

And now to make the point explicit: blogging is like running an estate sale.

And so for day 504
30.04.2008

Roaming Conclusions

In the final section "Conclusions" of the anthology of selections and commentary entitled Texts and Pretexts (1932) Aldous Huxley invites us to consider last thoughts

Or if we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. People will accept certain theological statements about life and the world, will elect to perform certain rites and to follow certain rules of conduct, not because they imagine the statements to be true or the rules and rites to be divinely dictated, but simply because they have discovered experimentally that to live in a certain ritual rhythm, under certain ethical restraints, and as if certain metaphysical doctrines were true, is to live nobly, with style. Every art has its conventions which every artist must accept. The greatest, the most important of the arts is living.

I find it conducive to philosophical musings to juxtapose the above with an excerpt from the Henry Vaughan poem collected under the heading of "Amor Fati"

   Man hath still either toys or care :
But hath no root, nor to one place is tied,
But ever restless and irregular,
   About this earth doth run and ride.
He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where ;
   He says it is so far,
That he has quite forgot how to go there.

Religion as toy for the homeless? Being at home in the world is to be without religion?

And so for day 503
29.04.2008

The Written Self and Writing

Two paragraphs from Sylvia Ashton-Warner Teacher presented in reverse order:

You never want to say that it's good or bad. That's got nothing to do with it. You've got no right at all to criticise the content of another's mind. a child doesn't make his own mind. It's just there. Your job is to see what's in it. Your only allowable comment is one of natural interest in what he is writing. As in conversation. And I never mark their books in any way never cross out anything beyond helping them rub out a mistake, never put a tick or a stamp on it and never complain of bad writing. Do we complain of a friend's writing in a strongly-felt letter? The attention is on the content.

Yet there are times when one cannot start. He's just not in the mood. You can't always say an important thing because it is the time to say it. Sometimes he will say candidly, "I don't want to write," and that's just what you get him to write: "i don't want to write." From there you ask, "Why?" and here comes an account of some grievance or objection which, after all, just as well as any other idea, delivers his mind of what is on it, practises his composition, and wraps him up in what is of interest to himself.

Such methods can also be applied to adults struggling with writer's block.

And so for day 502
28.04.2008

The Written and the Writing Self

Quentin Crisp ends The Naked Civil Servant with cheeky yet profound meditation on the sense of an ending.

[...] an autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing — still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble toward my grave confused and hurt and hungry. ...

Time for a spot of tea and a nibble.

And so for day 501
27.04.2008

Numbing and Splitting

Susan Buck-Morss "Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered" October 62 (Fall 1992).

We are — by a long detour — back to Benjamin's concerns at the end of the Artwork essay: the crisis in cognitive experience caused by the alienation of the senses that makes it possible for humanity to view its own destruction with enjoyment.

How we think is connected to how we feel (perceive) and how we imagine.

This gains some purchase on the reader because earlier in the essay Buck-Morss comments on a passage in Husserl:

This separation of the elements of synaesthetic experience would have been inconceivable in a text by Kant. Husserl's description is a technical observation, in which the bodily experience is split from the cognitive one, and the experience of agency is, again, split from both of these.

Agent, body and observer. Their relations argues Buck-Morss are influenced by the social distribution of the technologies of anaesthesia.

And so for day 500
26.04.2008

Surprises

Edmund White concludes his memoir My Lives with a rich evocation of friendship whose final words are

Being predictable is one unforgivable sin in a friend.

And he has so nicely arranged the book so that strangers and friends can read the chapters in any sequence they desire and so participate in the pleasurable surprises that acquaintance with this volume brings.

And so for day 499
25.04.200

Lawn Parties

In A Good Heart and A Light Hand (1968), Ruth L. Gaskins writes about lawn parties in the introduction 'A Negro Welcome'

These lawn parties weren't big affairs, and I doubt whether they added much to the church treasury, but they certainly did liven up a hot summer night in the city. Very often you wouldn't know that one was going on until friend ran by and shouted, "Get a dime and come on over to Ebenezer Baptist." You wouldn't stop to put your shoes on, because you were going to be on the lawn of the church. If you were going inside, you'd not only have to put on shoes, but your best dress and hat and gloves as well. Negroes save their best clothes for church, not for parties. Those were nice nights, but they've given way to movies, amusement parks and night clubs; all the things that weren't open to us then.

And so for day 498
24.04.2008

Literacy Promotion

A newspaper clipping explaining "When the button on the blank foolscap-like poster is pushed, a voice explains there are no words on the ad because 'five million adult Canadians would not be able to read them.'"



The message from the ABC Literaray Foundation plugs the "Look Under Learn" section of the Yellow Pages.

And so for day 497
23.04.2008

Contiguous Files

File F is located close to File G. And this closeness allows me to read these passages close together.

Jane Flax. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (1990)

[p. 217] "In Foucault's work the aesthetic is connected with subjectivity in his idea of replacing the technologies of self with the ideal of making one's own life a work of art. Yet paradoxically, despite his criticism of Derrida's mystification of writing, Foucault does not ask himself the question "What forms of life make such a notion possible?" about this own aesthetic ideal. Such a constant remaking of the self presupposes a socially isolated and individualistic view of the self. It precludes the possibility of enduring attachments or responsibilities to another in which the other can rely on one's stability and "continuity of being." [our emphasis. Why does Flax make this link between individualism and change of the self?]

Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990) ed. by Sarah Harasym.

p. 27 "The Post-modern Condition: The End of Politics?"

Questioning a text to get a companion

"Since we are not looking for a perfect analysis, but we are looking for the mark of vulnerability which makes a great text not an authority generating a perfect narrative, but our own companion, as it were, so we can share our own vulnerabilities with those texts and move. It seems to me that those are the places where we would begin to question."

p. 29 "The Post-modern Condition: The End of Politics?"

who you choose to address might connect to who you want to be

"It seems to me that what I was saying was not that you should consider all other subjects. I was saying that you might want to entertain the notion that you cannot consider all other subjects and that you should look at your own subjective investment in the narrative that is being produced. You see, that is something that I will continue to repeat, it is not an invitation to be benevolent towards others."

So back to Flax, who asks at the conclusion of her book [p. 236] "Does all knowledge necessarily inflict violence on things, ourselves and other persons?" with an answer: it does if you reduce aesthetic interactions to presuppositions of individualism.

And so for day 496
22.04.2008

Thesis Report

Things mutate while they are being written, especially big pieces. I found a copy of a "report" to file that documents what I was trying to accomplish in the argumentation of a key passage in my dissertation where I move from critique to speculation and build a model. In some ways it is better and more accessible than the thesis (in part perhaps through the use of first person singular)...

Another way to pose questions is to posit axioms. For example, to claim the play of the senses is connected to questioning or the maintenance of the interrogative mood. The central question is not how to keep questioning open but how do perception and questioning connect.

I come to the conclusion that the material practice of translation is the key for imagining a sensorium that is more than merely receptive, one that is interactive in regards to its modalities and its environment. The stumbling block in imagining such a sensorium has been the means of translating from one modality to another. Verbal language seemed to be the best candidate. However it privileged sight and hearing, the distance senses, over those of closer contact: smell, touch, and taste.

So I began again. In re-evaluating the closer contact senses, especially their action under conditions of distress or extreme pleasure, I realized that the sensorium not only is a receiver but also a dispatcher of information. The senses are not only receptors. The senses also transmit. the senses in operation provide events for interpretation. The blinking of eyes, the cocking of an ear, the flicker of a tongue, all signal.

The human senses produce events. They preserve the trace of something happening at a certain time. Events can be connected.

The transformation of discrete somatic signals into sequence explains cross-modal encoding. The pathways between sensation and narration are particularly evident in non-linguistic narrative. I am thinking here of the anthropological studies of Nancy Munn on Walbiri iconographic practices; the films of Kay Armatage, especially Storytelling; the examples collected by Jerome Rothenberg in Shaking the Pumpkin and Technicians of the Sacred. A case for the separation of narration from verbal language is also made on neurophysiological grounds. Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind offers the conjecture that "sensitivity to narrative, including the ability to communicate what has happened in a series of episodes, seems more closely tied to the pragmatic functions of language (and thus proves more fragile in cases of right-hemisphere disease) than to core syntactic, phonological, and semantic functions" (89).

and so it goes on to tell a story and to get on with the telling...

And so for day 495
21.04.2008