I like the little stories in the comments to the clip.

Your friend, now delirious-from-lack-of-sleep, has

( GOT SOME VERY IMPORTANT NEWS! )

Google's splash image for today is making me v. happy.

...is still not done, even with last night's dream that I ran into the new dean of Graduate Studies (who also led my proseminar, so many eons ago) in a
hallway while holding the nearly completed diss, waved the pages at
him, and said in my best sing-song, neener-neener voice, "I'm gonna
finish the conclusion toda-ay!"

In other news, I got an awesome postcard today depicting the fiery apocalyptic death of the SLC Mormon temple by asteroid. Ça me réchauffe!

I always forget about wood s lot, and then I run across it while searching for something else. [I was on the hunt for references to "Gattungswesen" (species-being) in Marx.] The entry posted on my birthday had this photo, by Ray DeCarava, who apparently died the day before:



I find the photo consoling, as if the space between ran with friendly ghosts, with the familiar glances of the absent. Reminds me of the unexpectedly fresh wind that would blow up the staircase of the BNF metro stop.

And today's entry has this quote from Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists --Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
- Tristes Tropiques of 1955

Getting some awesome birthday presents, such as a trumpet player practicing Norwegian Wood under the Soquel Street bridge near San Lorenzo Park this afternoon. A first edition of VDLA's L'amour supreme, the gift of which boggles my mind. My sister singing into my answering machine this morning. And then there's this:

NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.

The traces of the star they found indicate that "the progenitor star appears to belong to the second or third generation of stars, rather than the first generation." We've come a long way since Edison's tasimeter.

Astronomers were in the right place at the right time to witness and capture this event thanks to the text message they received from NASA's Swift satellite: astronomer flash-mob ftw! I would love it if this somehow got worked into an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.

Research into gamma-ray bursts like this one "...brings us close to that magical point of first light," says Volker Bromm, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. "We don't have to get much farther to catch the earliest stars."

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is also in the news, having just released a video of its first year of imaging gamma-ray activity. It's kind of beautiful, and mundane, and not at all what popular astronomy of the late 19th C imagined would be captured: the history of everything that has ever happened, somehow inscribed on the arriving light in a way yet to be deciphered (most certainly decipherable at some point).



Neato, huh? Anyway, back to GRB 090423.

The comment thread on Discover's 80beats blog raises an interesting question regarding the calculation of the event's age and location: what about inflation magnitude? Someone else on another blog asks a similar question: how are these calculations correct if that inflation rate "would put this object moving away from us at beyond the speed of light after it was 4 to 6 billion years old"? What is the speed of space, as it were?

This thread over at physicsforums.com gives something of an answer (that the question is nonsense, since "expansion of space" is a "property of a particular coordinate system" and not a force) (I don't understand it either). It has something to do with scalar systems, local vs global, the former being one in which we can look back 13 billion years and see this star's death, still within our cosmological horizon, the latter being one without horizon, one of eternal inflation. Apparently this question confuses laypeople and physicists alike, and I won't get close to untangling it in this post, but I found this particular partial answer quite consonant with the cosmological imaginary of Villiers's moment:

"...when when space does expand at this rate [at the speed of light], none of the force carriers from any particle will be able to reach another particle: no gravity, no light, no atoms, just lonely particles." ( Cut for dissertational blather )

It's going to be really weird to have a life that isn't consumed with this stuff. I imagine I will feel a little adrift! Yesterday the guy I've been trading chapters with asked if he could come to my filing party. Yes of course! I said. TBH such a thing hadn't entered my mind. I thought maybe I would try to get to Utah for Thxgvng, see my nephews and nieces. A filing party it will be, then. Except I have about three people I could invite, outside of my adviser and that guy. In the last five years I have become a tremendously isolated person. Maybe I'll shed that along with the dissertation-30. If I do have any kind of filing party, I will take all my diss-related recycling (old drafts, copies of articles I now have as PDFs), make a human form sitting in the lotus position and then burn it ritually. It will be the highlight — instead of cake, immolation. :D

16 days til I need to have the whole thing revised. A little less than a third left to revise. Yesterday I wrote some really fun sentences. ( Boring unless you know me! )

Sowana En Passante.

No one will understand.

Phantasmagorias of Spirit?

Pedantic!

La Machine à Foi.

Also pedantic! And too clever by half.

Aura and the Occulted Crowd in L'Eve future.

*shrugs*

EDIT (oh and apologies in advance for taking on the locutional style of the fuckin show): Just to be clear, it's not about the kiss, though that's sweet. It's about how her narration of dream-Charlie's remonstration peters out briefly, that turn aside, index finger brought to a briefly circumspect expression in and around the mouth:

"'And you, ...with the presence of mind to continue the fuckin round when I was too fuckin stupid? And you said you would ‘row, row, row’ and I said ‘row, row, row your boat’ and we had this … '"

This lingering moment of self-indulgence and self-congratulation opens the way for the booming big Moral of the Story ("Now!, Charlie says to me...."). That weird little moue, that's the punctum of the whole scene for me: if only it were the real Charlie acknowledging her superior sophistication in organizing the entertainment and distraction of a child in sore need of it, the moment seems to say. If only Charlie would say that IRL.

We smile, it's funny. Because it ain't Charlie, we smile to see her notice as she collects herself to recommence, and she appears comical/ridiculous thereby. Foible, is the word for what she performs in that pause. It's a means to experience her shame, the guts of her drunkenness and shame in all their outsizedness, homeopathically, as it were, in a little funny dose.

The other side of it, though (the pinch), is what it implies: if only this weren't a dream, if only it weren't all at base self-congratulation and -abnegation, if only there really were other people. Because if it really had been Charlie, if that really happened, then she could take seriously the exhortation to not fuckin only remember the middle of the fuckin dream. Take seriously the exhortation to trust that shame passes and there is good to be done and felt.

In a work that is at its most basic level about the wonder of meeting the other and finding him/her/it to be delightsome (so many scenes of delighted making of acquaintance - Charlie is especially good at this - so many radiant arrests of time at the moment of recognition), Jane is allegory for the fear of being met. And in her the show avers the basic instability and fragility of that wonder.

all_unnecessary would totally watch Joss Whedon's May 68 in Space (or whatever he'd call it).

Lots of protesting all over the state today. And tonight there's a group of students and staff occupying the UCSC Grad Student Commons. Me, I'm finding it to be ten pm already and I'm still at my fucking desk. Writing about crowds, and in particular Benjamin on the revolutionary crowd.

So I'm paying my dissertation filing fee and turning in forms either tomorrow or Monday, and I'm having second thoughts about the title that will appear on the forms. It's been Aura and the Automaton for quite a while now, and as I rewrite the introduction and think about the whole project, it's seeming to not quite express what I'm saying anymore. The CROWD is missing. So what about this: The Automaton of the Crowd. Bleah, awkward (though it does get the Poe/Baudelaire reference in there). The Crowded Automaton. Waiter, there's a mixed metaphor in my soup. The Crowd in the Machine?

Gah.

In other news, I found yet another candidate for epigraphy:

"Now then, my good friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. – But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."

"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."

"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."

Kleist, On the Puppet Theater

Can I get away with collect in the following translation?

To he who reads this diary and invents a machine that can reunite disaggregated presences, I will beseech: collect us, Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of charity.

The Invention of Morel, 103, translation modified (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003

Al hombre que, basándose en este informe, invente una máquina capaz de reunir las presencias disgregadas, haré una súplica: búsquenos a Faustine y a mí, hágame entrar en el cielo de la conciencia de Faustine. Será un acto piadoso.

La invención de Morel, 91 (New York: Penguin, 1996)

Also: was made to have by my ucs a dream in which Larry Levis (aka My Boyfriend) chastised me for trying to deflect/placate during an awkward moment: "Don't turn to me like that!" We then went to the kitchen to deal with the deer carcass defrosting on the table.

Charles mort ou vif was one of the first films about soixante-huit I ever encountered, and it's still my favorite (with Les amants réguliers a distant second). How to get [un-non]plussed, it'd be called if it were a self-help book. The head of a Swiss watch factory throws it all over:

Under an assumed name he sets off on his own. But before long he is befriended, almost adopted, by an unconventional young couple, a sign painter [Paul] and his mistress [Adeline], who live in frugal contentment someplace in the contemporary landscape where urban sprawl merges into urban junk heap. There, Charles [now known as Carlo] is followed by his daughter [Marianne], a student revolutionary, who loves him, and hunted by his son, who does not.

I love that the daughter's name is Marianne. I also marvel at what a long way baby we've come that in the 1970 review Adeline is Paul's "mistress." The film quotes and quotes and quotes. The clip I posted the other day, with Charles's critique of the automobile, is from Henri Lefebvre, whose writing Carlo recites at the film's end.

Here's the quiet heart of the film, où germe l'ouragan. Paul has been memorizing, at the behest of Carlo's daughter, various quotes and slogans of May 68, one per day that he must recite, as a wry kind of anarcho-marxist hazing ritual. In this scene, Carlo will not get out of bed. Paul insists. Eventually hijinks ensue. (I've got a rough transcription after the cut.)



( THE CUT )

My ex's parents were pals with the woman and the big bearded guy. He remembers seeing them at parties when he was little.



From just after my favorite moment in the film. I need to get this movie on DVD!

For you classifiers out there, check this site out: the film's entry on the Internet Movie Cars Database. :D

I want pear cider. Or beer fait chez les moins!

In other news, this is dragging on, this revising. Everything must be completed by the end of October (the latest one committee member can have it in time for me to make any FINAL FINAL revisions. Must file by the first week of December. As the fangirls say, laskdfjal;skdjfl;asjdf!!eleven!q!1 (And I'm sick of aura.) ( There's a list of my epigraphs, but you have to wade through a lot more whinging to get to it. )

Is it just me, or have the RSS feeds gone from constipated to diarrhetic? All of the sudden I have five Dinosaur Comics and a week's worth of Leninology to read.

*is stupid today*

RE my 9/11 post. ( cut for flash embed, but you should CLICK HERE NOW ANYWAY. )

There is a very loudly, insistently, sharply chirping bird outside my window. I must kill it.

Ok, sat myself down to the completion of revisions of ch 1, and moi je m'en fou. Can't get it up, as it is crudely (yet accurately!) put.

Also: it is disheartening to realize that all the damn arguments have already been made. Twenty-five years ago! Remind me again why I'm bothering?

Bleah.

I was moving out, that day. Didn't have a television, saw it all unfold over the internet. I saw no video of the towers falling until, like, 2007 - and that was out at some public place, I was half through the however-many-seconds it took for them to fall before I realized what I was watching.

No more planes flying that day, that's what I remember most: sitting with my friends on a lawn on Westcliff Drive, staring up into a silent sky. An actually silent sky. I said, "It will never again be this quiet." The reality of souls lost that morning I don't think has ever really hit me, I was too far away (still am, and will always be), though I get flashes of it. What I grieved for was the death of the possibility for anything to happen by the usual means (peaceful protest, calling yr congressperson, etc.). Something frightening was coming, and did.


Taken at the SF Federal Building during the protests on the eve of the Iraq war.

I remember humanities people up on campus arguing about what it should be called: the disaster, the attacks, other things that seemed to the conversants to lend too much gravitas to the lives lost and not enough to the socio-historical conditions that produced it, the symbolic weight of it, a comparative impulse that looked back at US military agression through what really were "the ages": the events, it was finally decided, in the Derridean sense (I don't think I'd heard of Badiou yet). Later came the ironic redeployments of pre-events WTC memorabilia ["WTC: as close to heaven as some people will ever get," read the 80s-era poster one friend found on the internet and sent me], but at that moment I knew that irony was dangerous (I removed the peace hand american flag sticker from my car that day).

This morning, I'm struck by this: sf writer (and famous ex-mormon) William Shunn's online survivor registry. Elsewhere, they are reading aloud the names of the dead. Here is a record of those who survived reaching out to friends and relatives, saying "I'm OK." Here is a record of what it felt like, when, as Shunn says "to feel the world changing around us."

There's something moving about that registry, and about the walls covered with photos and messages that sprang up in the days and weeks following, something complicated. They both first started out as urgent messages regarding the safety of loved ones, but the physical, meat-space walls have since ossified, as it were, into monuments (such that I can't find images of those early days online, just marble and bronze). Shunn's site retains something of that sense of time unfolding: "I am not hurt, I love you GP" reads one message. A Yahrzeit wall for the living. A sense of the storm irresistibly propelling us into the future.

Working my way through BTVS, and softening up somewhat on the issue of Angel's whinging. The Prom episode! Even with her ridiculous award (a raver toy umbrella??), things grow more subtle ("We're not close friends..."). I loved the reversal, in Angel's dream wedding: as they walk out into the sunlight, it's Buffy who burns, and he's helpless to stop it - an elegant metaphor for mortality and time. Poor kids.

Also: had an inspirational flash last night w/r/t the red-headed stepchild I like to call Chapter 5. Big flash, riled up, did not sleep at my usual depth, dreams (Spike and Angel fighting over me, except they're both my dad! Thanks unconscious!).

Anyway. Still working on it. ( Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! )

spikeal phelps
Originally uploaded by Rakka

It is salutary to occasionally read Baudelaire aloud in a booming voice to an empty room.

Eight days ago, the critical superstar Barbara Johnson passed away, and this is the only obit on the web I can find. Apparently she died of cerebellar ataxia, with which she was diagnosed in 2001, a "rare degenerative condition with effects similar to multiple sclerosis that made it difficult for her to speak and walk." FlashPoints is publishing what I think is her last work, Moses and Multiculturalism, later this year.

The only other recent thing I could find is this quote on patience:

“Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.”
-- Barbara Johnson, Harvard Professor and Literary Critic

Too tired to comment on this, but I do recommend reading this friend-of-a-friend's entry on the recent film (both the f and f-o-f are from Cape Town).

Will come back to it, watch this space!

It occurs to me that I have actually forgotten more about L’Ève future than all y'all will ever know.

Please to be recommending to your under- or uninsured friends the website NeedyMeds.org. I spent the morning there, and I think I've got my shit covered once my insurance runs out later this month. It really is a godsend.

Via the awesome Drawn and Quarterly. Elsewhere on that blog page: photograph of someone's Marlys tattoo.

This is post worthy, but also ( cut-worthy )

Got comments back today from committee member, whooah. Much praise, and helpful complaining. Spent the day at the library working, and il faisait friggin chaud up there. Banana Belt, I think it's called, that little bit of elevation that's a hot sandwich. Barreled down campus to the accompaniment of "Assault on the Colony." I am a nerd. Ew.

Anyway. Good day, cos I got to vote NO CONFIDENCE in UC President Yudof as well.

Dance Break!

Just a quick note to recommend this underappreciated film, which is available on Netflix's instant watch. And for those of you who've seen it, here's the old man's poem that finishes the film. ( Under the Cut )

If you manage to come across In the Loop, please go see it. Here's a link to the trailer, which doesn't give you even a whiff of the sh*tstorm of swearing that is most of what comes out of Malcolm Tucker's mouth. "The script," a reviewer relates, "comes at you like a block entry for The Oxford Dictionary for Weapons-Grade Invective." It really is hilarious.



Malcom Tucker(  who swears up a swearing storm )