August 26-27, 2008

n+1 Pamphlet Series #2

What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions

2007, paperback

14 cards

I was looking for another book when this and other treasures found me. Six books and three days later I found the book I was looking for in a place I never would have visited otherwise, but that's how the best living comes about. I've always held n+1 the magazine in high regard, but the quality and ideas shared within these two discussions are to be appreciated by any reader or anyone who teaches college students. The initial impetus for the conversations was reflection upon what writers and professors in their 30s mostly wish they would have read as undergraduates, as well as what they wish they hadn't and what they read too late. College freshmen can even get a free copy of this pamphlet by writing the email address on the back cover. It includes lists as well as discussions. Some of my reading this year was reflected in these discussions. I fully agree with the importance of reading Emerson, whom I have just begun to read this year. This is one of many of exquisite statements made, "No book is for you, until it is." Adding to the discussion on page 79, luckily I discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 17, if not 16.

Some selections:

-3- "Books we should have read earlier"- "For me, one thinker I should have read earlier is Foucault."

5- forming a self from reading

7- "books as enthusiasms"- "books that you are lucky enough to find when you are ready to find them."

11- "And what you can't do is ask a school to schedule your enthusiasms, exactly."

12-13- (students) "They pick up teachers and fall in love with them and then abandon them, throw them away like bits of trash or crumpled up paper. But this is what you have to do as a student....And the process is similar when you fall in love, and you want to read the books that the person you fall in love with most likes."

-"reading fiction is all about the tension between the book and you, and the book has to make you want to keep going. If it's assigned to you on a reading list, that tension disappears. So you're not really understanding the book, you're just reading it."

14- "poetry was the most important thing to happen to me in college"

15- periodicals club

18- "What I found that I couldn't very easily do was to sit at home and read Kant's Critique of Judgment, though I tried, and also I had no one to talk to about it."

20- "So books can speak to the world around you, but how are you going to get them to do this for you?"

21- "C.A. Bayly's Birth of the Modern World, which I don't agree with, but at least he'll give you a map. And hopefully then you'll start questioning that map..."

23- "The landscape of the future is completely blank."

27- "Because you're learning, you're being exposed to great things and discovering some sort of enthusiasm in yourself."

28- "...because time is limited in our lives...books that were read instead of other books"

32- "No book is for you, until it is."

-"I'm glad that I didn't encounter the Frankfurt School earlier because I know that I would have been doomed to be a Frankfurt School epigone."

60-61- Kierkegaard's Either/Or

63- "I went to graduate school to make up for undergrad."

64- "Nobody can get a proper undergraduate education. You'll never know in advance what that education should be. Regret is the feeling you have when you finally realize what the education is that you want. Right? And you're always going to come to that after it's too late."

66- Proust

67- "You move through your mistakes toward the absolute...Proust is another great author for regret- the purpose of all this retrospection is to redeem your regrets in whatever ways are possible."

68- "The world is not a text!"

71-72- "The books that one reads tend to take on a sort of naturalness within one's life, so they seem to come to you when you want them, and when you're ready for them. And so for me, the fact that we're on the verge of total civilizational collapse...next 50 or 60 or 70 at most years- makes me regret the lateness with which I've figured that out."

73- (being dazzled by a boy) "...part of what dazzled me was certainly my sense the he knew about things that I did not."

-"I didn't know at the time that you could have a crush on someone who seemed to embody things that you wanted to be yourself."

76- "...almost everyone in academia feels like an outsider, nobody knows what's going on. Academia's an empty vessel, but the ones who don't realize it end up going all the way and end up in charge."

78- "I could have discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 16, as opposed to 26, and you might say this is a minor matter, but it's a matter of style."

79- "What would have changed?"

-"I wouldn't have been such a stupid idiot, I think, and such a romantic and such a moralist. And maybe I wouldn't have married so early."

81- VU song "Sunday Morning"- theme of this symposium- "You wake up, it's Sunday, what have you done with your life, or week."

-"...Sunday's for doing nothing. But actually you know, Sunday is the day to move on from your regrets."

86- reading in a vacuum- useful framework

87- "your education shifts from this sheer accumulation of stuff, to a posing to yourself of certain fundamental questions, and then in certain ways life becomes very easy thereafter."

89- "many of our ideas about the world still seem to come from the field of classical economics- earth's resources are finite (not seemingly abundant as in classical times)

90- "Emerson instead of Nietzsche"

101- Emerson's Circles

114- advice to young people- keep a journal- read seriously- think about everything that happens

118- courage- remain open to things and serious about them

August 10 - 13, 2008

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs*

*A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman

2003, hardcover

15 cards

Lately I've been mentioning to people that I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's books. Everyone seems to have read this book, if not his others. I was wondering why I missed out on this slice of pop culture. I think I know now. By the time it came out in paperback, every weekend I was driving to Detroit and sleeping on the couches of friends and going to shows; at the time I was the only person living in East Lansing in their mid-twenties who was not married or not enamoured with sports bars. It would be amazing if I ever lived in the same city as my friends. While I bought a lot of books I didn't read too many of them. I think it's good I didn't read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because I might not have read the other two Klosterman books I read before this. I might have, but I might not have. He's great at discussing the minute details that form the core existence of people my age (most of us watched Saved by the Bell, have some conscious of Sims, listened to bands like R.E.M. and Billy Joel and the Dixie Chicks, saw Reality Bites, etc.) but as he's written more, he's gotten better at it. The track on cereal is first rate and full of acute observations (that's right- all those creatures wanted to steal cereal- what is up with that?) The front pages includes a CD and the stories song titles and play times. Klosterman draws a distinction between a mix tape and a mix cd, placing the mix tape in a higher category. This book is an enjoyable mix cd, the other two are mix tapes.

Selections:

-(life)- "...nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even it we don't realize it..."

-"...I am alone. And that everyone is alone. I guess I am not a morning person."

-"an evening book"

-"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer" (low culture vs. Kant or Wittgenstein)

1- "No woman will ever satisfy me....But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either."

3- (movies) "We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love."

-assessment of Coldplay

4- "...perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy."

-"They think everything will work out perfectly in the end..."

-"The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy."

6- footnote- Jordan Catalano from MSCL not being able to read

9- (When Harry Met Sally) "it gave a lot of desperate people hope."

-"Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives."

13- (SIMS) "There is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed."

15- "Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict."

16- quotes Talking Heads lyrics

-"video technology cages imagination"

19- "I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What the Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive."

36- definition of postmodern

41- (Big Brother not having music) "...without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

44- (Billy Joel, important songs, loneliness) "And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's "lonely lonely," like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder."

-"Black Sabbath is the most underrated band in rock history."

45- "Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody."

65- Black Sabbath

70- humorousity

70- Rivers Cuomo- "the Cubism didactic-hobo-core three-piece"

102- "This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It's an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves. Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music."

104- (cars- the IROC and Chevy Cavalier make their first appearance- because of my car it seems I fall into the Celtics fan category but it does have 2 doors, not 4)

119- Sylvester Graham!!!! [former resident of the building that houses Sylvester's in Northampton]

120- "Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what's cool."

121- "They're the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary."

-"premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it."

122- corduroy

124- "The desire to be cool is- ultimately- the desire to be rescued. It's the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society."

125- 3 questions [#1- No, #2 No, #3A]

127- mix tapes vs. mix cds

128- Saved by the Bell- "people born between 1970 and 1977 [you're wrong here- 1978 factors in too]

130- "I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program."

-"universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation..." [yes!]

131- diner

133- "Important things are inevitably cliche."

138- Angela, My So Called Life- "But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn't like anyone but herself; she didn't reflect any archetype. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important." [but this is why she was so great]

140- "Life is chock full of lies, but the biggest lie is math."

-50-50

147- Reality Bites- Gen Xers- cynical optimists [I owned this soundtrack on tape]

-"This is why Ryder has to pick Hawke."

-"She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence."

156- (films) "What is Reality?"

161- forgetting stuff- "The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality."

167- "...The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.'"

167- but not "old country"

173- "Tastee Freezes are iconic structures in the rural Midwest, because they say something about your hometown; they irrefutably prove your community does not have enough of a population to sustain a Dairy Queen." [Williamston did have a Dairy Queen when I lived there]

175- "lyrics do matter"

176-177- Bob Dylan and Liz Phair cds

178- Johnny Cash- coffee

183- Esprit t-shirts

185- Gacy and mail

194- (list of people who died in the Oklahoma City bombing] "...that virtually everyone's life is only remembered for one thing."

-"I think this is what motivates people to have children...."

211- acquaintance" "'There's one thing worse than talking to a person who knows about nothing,'" he said, 'an that's talking to someone who knows about nothing except music.'"

219- "dying is always original"

229- "As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven't done anything terrible yet."

230- Kierkegaardian leap

May 14 - 24, 2008

Fischli and Weiss The Way Things Go

Jeremy Millar

2007, hardcover

Part of Afterall's One Work series

18 cards

Fischli and Weiss are amazing. Joel and Amanda told me all about them this past summer after they say an exhibition of their work in Europe. Then MoCAD had their work Questions in the brilliant Words Fail Me exhibition. Their Manifesto is also a great addition to any wall and life. This spring Joel and Amanda saw Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go again at the Hirshorn and picked up the DVD version of it (available on Netflix even now). This book focuses on The Way Things Go exploring why and how is fascinates in a way that expands this work in exciting directions. The book starts from observation and experience of the work in museum and people's reactions, a rich terrain upon which to build while never reducing the work's "purposeless purposiveness".

Some brief notes from my cards and reading:

-Opens with a Wittgenstein quote

-Der Lauf der Dinge (The Ways Things Go)

2- clapping

-"Even in our ignorance...it was clear that we had watched something great."

3- "...It was a little frightening, being moved like this..."

4- "what makes it popular also makes it good"

-Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 1759

-connection to Fischli and Weiss's 1984 Equilibres

8- "Our traditional means of formal analysis seems unable to deal with works, such as those, that are less concerned with external appearance than with 'internal' conceptual coherence."

9- gravity

10- procede- Raymond Roussel

-Roussel, near-neighbor of the Prousts

11- Duchamp- Roussel- The Large Glass

-Robbe-Grillet

-Foucault

12- "As with Fischli and Weiss, a rigorous play is fundamental to Roussel's practice."

-Parmi Les Noirs, 1935- identical phrases- single letter- different meanings

15- Kierkegaard "Boredom is the root of all evil."

17- change

20- anticipation

-"Everywhere things are transformed into actions, nouns become verbs."

21- illustrations by Wiliam Heath Robinson

-Frederick Winslow Taylor

23- Esperanto

24- Futurists

27- "...it seems to be both an anticipation of the birth of time and memory of its end. But where does that place us?"

28- Archytas of Tarentum- 4th c. BCE- treatise on place

29- Focillon- "'a work of art treats space according to its own needs, defines space and even creates such space as may be necessary to it.'"

32- Henri Bergson- Creative Evolution

-the concrete solution

33- Bergson, time

34- waiting- humor

- Creative Evolution- influence on Marcel Proust

36- interventions

37-38- epic and anti-epic

55- "It becomes a part of time not apart from it."

-Bruno Schulz- "Our creators will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gestures, for one word along, we shall make the effort to bring them to life."

57- Bakhtin- laughter and the epic

59- the Incongruity Tradition

-1981 film, The Least Resistance, rat and bear costumes

60- 1979 sausage series

61- At the Carpet Shop- gherkins

66- Peter Fischli, "Operating on two planes at once is part of our practice."

-Koestler- impersonator

67- Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968

-machines and perfection

70- The Way Things Go- "...objects do no more than they need to, no more than they are able."

-simple object, technology

-familiar and unexpected

-Bergson, Le Rire, 1900

71- automatism and life

73- "Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses."

75- rigidity

-hesitate

76- pause

-timing, comedy

77-78- Kant- "laughter as 'an affection arising from the strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.'"

80- "purposeless purposiveness"

81- seeing how it was made

82- "of the smile rather than the laugh"

-"smile of wonder"

83- "This smile is not ours alone, but sits with quiet benevolence on the faces of the artists too... Just as one can hear the smile in the voice of someone talking over the phone, so one can see it in Fischli and Weiss's artworks."

-"one can produce wonder only if one succeeds"

-place of wonder in their practice

84- St. Augustine

107- Fragen (Questions), relationship to Daston and Park Questiones naturals of Adelard of Bath

87- David Weiss, "There is a reason why the Pyramids are famous. When you go there, no matter how many photographs you've seen of them before, you realize that the Pyramids are unique and that you don't understand them..."

-Heidegger

89- the sublime

-"wondrous"

91

92

February 16 - March 8

Wanderlust

A history of walking

Rebecca Solnit

2000, hardcover

54 cards

I read Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the suggestion of Claire. It was a wonderful meandering, thinking, reflecting book that merged intellectual ideas about solitude with punk rock and so much more. When I came across the title of this book, the R.E.M. song Wanderlust (followed by Pilgrimage and We Walk as I read the book) came to mind as well as the German word it is. The best discoveries often come from wandering or browsing and this book was all one could hope it to be. I have a list of many more books to read as a result. Solnit wonderfully merges art, architectural and intellectual history into her discussion while keeping in mind pop culture, experience, activism and reflection. I have only lived in a few where walking for most everything was possible and I hope to return to places like that again. I knew I hated treadmills and gyms but I thank Solnit allowing me to understand the roots of both and the greater cultural implications of both.

Highlights from the cards:

p. 4 "The history of walking is everyone's history... a desk is no place to think on a large scale."

p. 5 "...thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something that is closest to doing nothing is walking."

p. 6 "...it is both means and end"

p. 7 "Think of the ruin as a souvenir from the canceled end of the world."

p. 8 "It was a revelation to me, the way this act of walking...could articulate political meaning..."

-Thoreau's essay Walking

p. 9 "the sense of place that can only be gained on foot"

-people living "in a series of interiors...On foot everything stays connected."

p. 10- "It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value."

p. 10-11 erosion of public space

p. 11- "The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you."

p. 13- "When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back."

"Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains."

p. 20-21- Rousseau "Reveries of a Solitary Walker"

p. 23-25- Kierkegaard

p. 24- "Kierkegaard's great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them..."

p. 27 mentions George Orwell's statement "The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion."

p. 33- John Napier "Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe."

"walking begins as delayed falling"

p. 55-57- The Peace Pilgrim

p. 58- "a pilgrimage makes an appeal while a march makes a demand."

"Nonviolence means that activists are asking their oppressors for change rather than forcing it."

p. 67-68- quote at the bottom of the page- "An active line on a a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake." Paul Klee, Allegorizing Drawing

p. 68 "A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape..."

p. 69- moral of mazes

p. 70- Marianne Moore

-children's books

-"...sometimes the map is the territory."

p. 71- labyrinth- 1 route

p. 72- "Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to travel the route of the absent."

p. 88- ha ha ditch

p. 90- French gardens and English gardens

p. 95- guidebooks- what to see, some how to see

p. 96- picturesque- William Gilpin

p. 106- "The poem is also a kind of atlas of the making of a poet"

p. 119- William Hazlitt, 1821, On Going on a Journey, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey, but I like to go by myself,"

-"solitude is better on a walk because 'you cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others.'"

p. 124- "You must be complex to want simplicity"

-Bedouins

p. 143- "What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history, though it often becomes visible as literature."

p. 149 "...the consequence of the theory that nature is supposed to make you happy is that those most desperately in search of happiness tend to show up there."

p. 158- when walking becomes marching

p. 160- rambling

-"walking is classless" (access to the land another issue)

p. 162- "Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning."

-"Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property."

p. 167- "Walking has become one of the forces that has made the modern world- often by serving as a counterprinciples to economics."

p. 171- "Cities have always offered anonymity, variety and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune teller's, only to know that one might."

-"A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination."

p. 174- Sierra Club dictum, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints."

p. 175- "Streets are the space left over between buildings."

p. 176- "the ideal city is organized around citizenship- around participation in public life."

-most American cities and towns organized around consumption and production

-"Walking is only the beginning of citizenship, but through it the citizen knows his or her city and fellow citizens and truly inhabits the city rather than a small privatized part thereof."

-"Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one's life."

-Jane Jacobs

-"To me, the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."

p. 186- Patti Smith, when asked about how she prepares for performances, "I would roam the streets for a few hours."

p. 187- Virginia Woolf, "How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured."

p. 191- Alan Ginsburg

p. 192- Frank O'Hara, about whose work reveals as Solnit says "Cities are forever sprawling lists."

-David Wojnarowicz, Close to Knives, "He writes in a collage of memories, encounters, dreams, fantasies and outbursts..."

p. 197-198- Walter Benjamin- "...Paris taught me this art of straying." The Arcades Project

p. 199-200 the flaneur

p. 202 Proust

-Baudelaire- "The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else...Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality."

p. 204 Haussmann

p. 205- what upset people most was what he obliterated, which was "the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations"

p. 206- Benjamin on Louis Aragon's book, so exhilarating, "evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down."

-Benjamin and Franz Hessel has worked on a translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

p. 210 "Parisian writers always gave the street addresses of their characters"

p. 211 Hannah Arendt "...so one inhabits a city by strolling thought it without aim or purpose"

p. 212- Guy DeBord- Psychogeography and Theory of Derive (drifting)

-Greil Marcus

p. 213 "map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaces by an imaginary city."

p. 213 De Certeau- "A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities."

-"frightening possibility...post pedestrian city...risks becoming a dead language"

p. 216 Joseph Beuys "Everyone an artist."

-"This is the highest ideal of democracy- that everyone can participate in making their own life and the life of the community- and the street is democracy's greatest arena."

p. 218- "But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public."

-"Paris is the great city of walkers. And it is the great city of revolution."

p. 229 and 230

p. 230- "A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illuminating the darkness of our old arrangements so that we will never see them quite the same way again."

-Reclaim the streets

p. 231 "Stop the car, Free the city"

p. 232- walking and courtship

p. 233-234 women and walking

-"women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport"

p. 249- 1970s census- majority of Americans suburban

p. 250- suburban home only a place of consumption

p. 251- suburb product of the Industrial Revolution

p. 255- "Political engagement may be one of the things suburbs have zoned out."

p. 260 "The body has ceased to be a utilitarian entity for many Americans, but it is still a recreational one."

-treadmill- "meant to rationalize prisoners' psyches"

p. 263- "The everyday acts of the farm had been reprised as empty gestures"

p. 264- treadmill most perverse- "simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared"

"disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all"

-the modern treadmill consumes power (originally could be used to power things)

p. 267 "The disembodiment of everyday life I have been tracing is a majority experience."

-Walking as art, 1960s

p. 269- Lucy Lippard- sculpture- Carol Andre, "My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road."

p. 270- Richard Long, artist from England, Line Made by Walking, 1967

p. 271- Long, "A walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone and that is another space too."

p. 272- Stanley Brouwn

p. 278- Las Vegas- new outpost of pedestrian life

p. 278-279- quote at the bottom of the page- Ivan Illich, "The world has become inaccessible because we drive there."

p. 283- Michael Sorkin and theme parks

p. 286- Vegas reinventing the garden and the city

-privatization

-"But the world gets better at the same time it gets worse."

p. 289 Red Rocks

-fight for free space, fight for free time

"Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true crime titillations, and celebrity crises."

p. 291- "The constellation called walking has a history...but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

p. 288-291- bottom of the page- Yoko Ono, Map Piece, 1961

p. 284-287- bottom of the page- A.R. Ammons "A poem is a walk"

p. 325-326 Sources for Foot Quotings