heddalee

Q: The Bush administration has insisted that the global "war of terror" is not a crusade, not religious war. Yet, there have been some recent disclosures... that make it clear that the U.S. has, at Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib, been using torture techniques specifically designed to violate the detainees' cultural and religious values... for example, women interrogators using sexually explicit or S&M clothing, pretending to touch prisoners with menstrual blood and then withholding water so that the detainee cannot clean themself. They are using Islamic culture as a weapon, using a person's Islamic culture as a sensibility that can be tortured. Here we have a form of religious war, but in this case waged by the West.

Angela Davis: First of all, I would say that I am always suspicious when culture is deployed as a strategy or an answer, because culture is so much more complicated. The apparent cultural explanation of these forms of torture reveals a very trivial notion of culture. Why is it assumed that a non-Muslim man approached by a female interrogator dressed as a dominatrix, attempting to smear menstrual blood on him, would react any differently from a Muslim man? These assumptions about culture are themselves racist.

When critics of the tortures carried out under the auspices of the Bush administration cavalierly assume that the tortures are simply exploiting the fact that Islamic culture is inherently more sexist than what we call western culture, the critics themselves participate in this violence. These misunderstandings of culture are thus very effective as weapons in the war against terror.

Culture is not static, it is alive; it is about everyday practices, it is about change, it is about difference. The assumption that one can know all that is important to know about an individual - a prisoner incarcerated at Abu Ghraib or Guatanamo, for example - if one knows her or his "culture," is itself a racist proposition. It is an indication of the extent to which the U.S. conducts the war on terror, the war for global dominance, with any available weapons. Ideological weapons are often times the most powerful. The notion of culture promoted by the warriors on terror is predicated on the idea that there must be a hierarchy of cultures within which "Islamic culture" is already inferior. To explain the tortures within this pseudo-cultural framework is to define the people who are being tortured as already inferior. So I wonder whether it might be possible to think about your question in a different way - in a way that is critical of what is actually being done to these human beings, to the bodies of the Iraqi prisoners, and in a way that understands that U.S. interrogration methods comment more on U.S. strategies and methods than on the people who are suffer[ing] the torture.

...We may think that we're challenging Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, but we're using the same terms, the same frame. The assumption of cultural inferiority remains. And, in the final analysis, the uncritical acceptance of certain cultural terms works as much to our disadvantage as the arguments justifying torture that we attempt to refute.

...We end up reinforcing the inferiority of the person who is the victim of torture. It is a kind of epistemic violence that coincides with or accompanies the physical violence we think we are contesting. Anti-Arab racism has rendered it very difficult to acknowledge the leafership of those communities that suffered torture in Iraw. The victims of torture have been objectified as a problem liberal U.S. citizens must seek to solve.


from "Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empires, Prisons, and Torture"

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Why does LJ's spellchecker only catch maybe one in nine spelling errors, ignoring even severely egregious ones? 

to keep track of unexpected tax refunds. I worked my taxes over *hard* this year, I mean I did my federal tax forms probably ten times from start to finish trying to wring the best deal possible out of them, and at the end had to grudgingly write out a check to the IRS. And yesterday (ten weeks after the fact) I got some of it back! Enough to go shopping, anyway.

yay!

Science - scientific reasoning - seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind. For look here, the earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, so it still is today, for instance, between Paris and Asnières. Which however does not prevent science from proving that the earth is principally round. Which no one contradicts nowadays.

But not withstanding this they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round, and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present.

--Vincent Van Gogh, June 1888 (quoted in Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages")

"You must know people, " I said, "who try to reduce everything they see, even the most extraordinary things, to a concept, to do away with it by formulating it, so they won't have to experience it any more. They have words for everything. And then, because there aren't really any words for what they're trying to say, what they say is usually an invitation to laugh, a joke, even if they haven't formulated it with this in mind. That's how it is in my play. As soon as somebody says something, if only with a gesture, the character is reduced to a concept and I can't do anything more with him. I've been wondering whether I oughtn't to bring in someone else in every scene, a servant figure to interpret the new situation for the others, a kind of counterfigure to the usual wise observer who comments on the story and keeps the threads together. Because everything this servant says in his comments - and he comments on everything - turns out to be wrong. What he predicts never happens, all his explanations are absurd. He turns up as a deus ex machina where none is needed. Two characters need only look in different directions and he barges in to reconcile them."

--

"Finally I went to a cafeteria. You walked in through an open door hung with glass beads, there were no formalities, you just plunked something edible on your tray and picked up your utensils and paper napkin in passing: this, I felt, was the right place for me. And when I went to the cash desk and the woman didn't look at me but only counted the plates on my tray, I was at peace with the world again. Forgotten the dining ceremonies which had been becoming a need for me. And not looking at the cashier but only at the check she had put down on my tray, I blindly passed her the money. Then I sat down at a table and without a care in the world ate a chicken leg with french fries and catchup.

                     My Ship Comes In

What will they do with their grievances
    when they've gone?
They have no need of them so
    they come back for mine
and take them in the places that I dream
    knowing I don't recognize my benefactors.

They crowd around me as my hair falls out.

Their forgivenesses are rock roses
    descending to the black river
    where the final boat
    is loaded with things I never did.

Is it true, God, you and I co-operate the world?

Bless them, bless them where they've gone.

Is it true, God, dreams tell us something of your mind?

Bless us, bless us where we choose to go.

Boxes full of moments that arrested us
    are put aboard the boat,
    my treasures which I intend to pass
    with your permission, God,
    through customs between the worlds.

I plan to live there resting and alert
    to the few who brush aside the veil
    yet fail to see nothing looks different.

                        Profanity

The pleasure of saying thank you
is outweighed only by welcomes
we don't hear or see because
they're so numinously everywhere.

This so distracted the Greeks
they put gods where they could see them
and even painted on their faces
so fixed they were on form.

Arabs thought this containment
a profanity so profound
they bore the zero out of India
to spin the cosmos in its circuit.

The treasure of saying thank you
is the magic it sets in motion
and all we have to do is know
we're the gods we're arguing about.

--
Both poems are by Algerian-born poet and author Djelloul Marbrook, born in 1934. These poems are in the collection "Far From Algiers," published in 2007. His thoughtful and wide-ranging blog is here, wherein he calls dandelions "the elves of the sun."

In other news, my new bike - named Pallas Athena (for now?) - is a beaut. I'm glad I don't live in California. I walked almost twenty miles in the last two days. Canned cheese is disgusting.
 

In other, non-kitten-related news, I finished everything I wanted to at work; had a really, um, interesting "chance encounter" on the bus, and bought a bike:

http://www.bikepedia.com/QuickBike/BikeSpecs.aspx?Year=2008&Brand=Bianchi&Model=Volpe&Type=bike

Also, I spent time with my cat; ate cheddar atop Rye Krisps®, and happened upon a beautiful building that I'm excited to photograph. It  is just a shell, no roof, and some rusted metal fixtures hanging off the walls; smashed windows all around. Abandoned industrial buildings remind me of going to college in NJ and living in Trenton, which at the time was a thoroughly decayed former industrial city & current slum. I walked through a neighborhood of long-unused industrial buildings, all smashed up, grafitti'd and defiled, on my way to school. It was eerie, almost completely silent, and after awhile, felt very comfortable to be in. There was one business left on the edge of the area -a junk shoppe, where I bought a wooden bird statue. The statue creeped everyone out when I had it in my home, since no matter where you were in relation to it, it seemed to be staring at you. Eventually I took it to Maryland and gave it to my friend Mikey, who promptly gave it away to escape its voodoo magic. 

At the time I lived with Andy DePeppe and a rotating third roommate (including a guy who never ever slept there and lived in Atlantic City, and a guy from Jersey City who greeted everyone by saying "Yo, snapperhead!") in a house owned by Lucy Mao. It was a house of much youthful drama, much, much.  We did have a cat show up one day and refuse to leave; we fed her and she moved in. She was white and too pretty, but she kept getting skinnier and skinnier.  Finally, after four weeks of living there (I named her Aquarius), she gave birth to four adorable kittens. I only remember the names of two of them, Leader Kitty and Moo Kitty, though they all got new names after Jason and Chrissy (who already had a twenty-plus pound orangey behemoth named Oliver in their small apartment) took them all of my hands, and found new homes for them, because I was moving back to my parents' house for awhile.

Aquarius had fun chasing and catching the giant cockroaches that roamed that house. Lucy Mao, by the way, lived upstairs and acted like a hardass, but more or less let us make a hellhole out of the first floor. I won't recount any of the drama that went on in Lucy Mao's home, I'll just note that I remember a picnic with Mikey and Steve Notaro in the backyard where Mikey told Steve she'd gotten an empty bag (a small purse) from her mother for her birthday, and Steve then asked her what was in it. Incredibly, this exchange was recorded on cassette and later transferred to CD, and I still have the recording, eighteen years later. Also at Lucy Mao's, Steve taught us how to play Wiz, a stoner game that involves responding to an invisible ball and passing it along to other players in various ways.

Back in 2009, my coworkers and I went out to lunch and intrepidly ordered a dish called "Evil Curry with Wggplant," which severely burned our mouths in tasty ways. I also spent some time reading "Snail," a book by Richard Miller that is an over-the-top homage to Kurt Vonnegut. Kilgore Trout is even a character in the book. It's the story of a retired German colonel who is given a potion that restores him to sixteen years of age, for ever, by the Wandering Jew. He then becomes a player in the war between Jehovah and Athena for control of the universe. Naturally, there are a lot of snails in the book. He even has sex with a giant snail. I've read it a few times, and it's one of those books that really are completely readable because they're deliciously senseless.

I don't get to pick up my bike until tomorrow. I'm really excited to ride it.
 

This really is the cutest thing I've seen in a while!







Supercuteness.

ROME—More than 40 artists, including U2, Death Cab for Cutie, Rihanna, and Rage Against the Machine, performed at six simultaneous concerts across the globe Saturday as part of a new benefit show to wish the world's desperately impoverished the best of luck. The $200-a-ticket event raised more than $80 million, which will be put toward thousands of good-luck cards and balloons for developing countries and a fund for future charity performances. "I hope you will all join me in extending a hand of friendship to the have-nots, shaking their hand once, and walking away," Al Gore said in a special message via satellite. "You've had it pretty bad, and it's not likely to get better. May God help you all. See ya!" Producer Quincy Jones also brought all the participating artists together to record an all-star track that will be made available to the poor through iTunes.

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nota bene: I didn't write this. I just wish I had.

With their flowing blonde hair, hourglass figures and slender, toned legs, they could easily pass for twins. Both look fabulous in their matching polka dot dresses and, as Janet and Jane Cunliffe happily recount, potential boyfriends often struggle to tell them apart.

Hardly surprising, as both weigh in at 8st and, save for a couple of inches in height (at 5ft 6in, Jane is two inches taller) and different eye colours (Jane's are brown, Janet's are blue) they are virtually identical.

But Janet and Jane are not twins. They aren't even sisters. They are mother and daughter. And, in what many will see as a depressing indictment of today's youth-obsessed society, Janet confesses to having spent more than £10,000 on plastic surgery in a desperate effort to bridge the 22-year age gap between herself and her daughter.

More here... and with pictures!

I think she looks her age, even with all the work she's done. And the daughter, oy.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 58.

The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Hal Sedgwick, said.

Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend,” she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other.

Several of her essays became lightning rods for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism and gay studies — most notoriously “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1989. In it, Ms. Sedgwick argued that Austen’s descriptions of the restless Marianne Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility” should be understood in relation to contemporary thought on the evils of “self-abuse.”

Such subtexts, she insisted, are woven throughout literary texts, and the job of criticism is to ferret them out, especially the repressed themes of same-sex love.

“It’s about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them,” she told The New York Times in 1998, explaining the function of queer theory. “It’s about how you can’t understand relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between them.”

From the late 1970s to the late ’80s, Ms. Sedgwick taught at Hamilton College, Boston University and Amherst while developing a critical approach focusing on hidden social codes and submerged plots in familiar writers. Her essay on “Our Mutual Friend” was included in the influential collection “Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire” (1985).

In 1988, Stanley Fish, who was transforming the English department at Duke University into a center of the new trends in criticism, recruited Ms. Sedgwick to Durham, N.C., where she taught for the next 10 years. While there, she published “Tendencies” (1993), “Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction” (1997) and her best-known work, “Epistemology of the Closet” (1990), which argued that Western culture could be understood only by critically dissecting the socially constructed concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

In 1991, Ms. Sedgwick discovered that she had breast cancer. After treatment, the disease recurred in 1996, and she began turning her critical attention to social definitions of illness. In the book “A Dialogue on Love” (1999), she used conversations with her therapist, whom she saw while she was recovering from the effects of chemotherapy, to address her feelings about death, depression and sexual identity after having a mastectomy.

She continued to produce literary and social criticism, notably in the book “Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity” (2003), an attempt to link queer theory to the emotions. At her death, she was working on “Proust and the Little Queer Gods.”

 

 

 

Today, after I stepped out of the Big Town Hero on Sandy Boulevard and headed over to my bike to unlock it, a gentleman (mid-40s?) came up by me. Looking in my direction but not making eye contact, he softly said "Nice" - and as he walked past, he very gently tapped my forearm with my fist, and then kept on his way.

What the...

Afterwards, I finally got to stop into Portland's reborn best zine/independent publications shop, Microcosm Publishing... and now I'm at PRA, hosting Hopscotch Radio (in its fifth year!).

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Update: he used his fist to tap me, not mine.

me, standing on porch, reading "the strange career of jim crow"
my roommate's girlfriend walks up

hi, hi, blah blah

"what are you reading?"

show her the title. "it's about, well, jim crow."

 "cool. interesting character," she says with a smile. she walks
 inside the house.

----

she's... twentytwo, i think?

That's from homostrology.com - here's the rest of the entry for gay (male) Aquarians:

When it comes to Aquarian relatioships, the good news is that you might just be the friendliest sign on the zodiac. The bad news is that you might just be the friendliest sign of the zodiac. You'll strike up a conversation and weasel a phone number out of any hottie, anywhere: cute baristas, receptionists and chance acquaintances of all homotypes are prey to your smooth talking skills.

When you take out a date, you show him a fantastic time if he's up for cocktails, dinner, bar, club and after hours. And if he's ready for your innumerable stop and chats along the way. Watch your date's reaction: is he loving how popular you are or checking his watch with the intense look of a man about to flee? Some people might think it a bit rude to spread the love around like you do, but can you help being so damn charming?

Aquarius can't afford to take a jealous lover if he ever wants to go to the bathroom alone again. It might be a nice gesture to ease his anxiety with a little PDA, even if it hurts a little. It's not that you're cold: when you're with somebody you like, he'll be the most fascinating creature you've met in months, except for every other crush you've taken out that weekend.

You'll impress him with your stamina, but you're uncomfortable with those moments that can make a real connection. You need to buck up and accept that if you want in his pants, you might just have to suffer through a dinner at his house followed by a private screening of [insert gay movie here]. Take an antihistamine if sap makes you break out in hives. And if you decide to seal the deal with a romantic dinner au restaurant, for God's sake don't let him catch you staring at the waiter's ass.

When it comes to men you see something to take home and love in everybody; and that's a good thing, right? But watch out, Aquarius. Your greatest strength in love is your ability to accept a person completely for who they are, even if that means letting go. But you can all too frequently use letting go as an excuse to be selfish and detached from your lover, letting them stray from your heart and your bedroom.


I'm not sure what to say about the rest of this. I think the last two sentences sound sort of like me, but the rest of it... not so much. But really, a smooth jazz nightmare? I hope there's not anyone in the world who has ever thought of me in terms even remotely similar to that.

andr00 just told me that on BBC Radio, an announcer described Groundhog Day as "an American holiday in which the same thing happens over and over again."

click to make bigger, do I need to say that? I couldn't decide...

I love everything about this performance.

Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore

Gore then delivered the first of seven consecutive State of the Union addresses.

"Throughout the entirety of his 2000 campaign, never once did Gore mention the tragedy of 9/11, or our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. "Does he not care about our national security?"

Gore admitted that making good on his campaign promises in the next six to eight weeks might be difficult. The president noted his pledge to provide affordable health care to every single child in the U.S. by 2004 as "specifically in need of possible amending."

Bush's Eyelid Accidentally Nailed To Wall

Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks

The president was dragged down 175th Street for 26 blocks and through four stoplights, leaving a trail of blood more than a mile long.

Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone

Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm


There you go. No need to read the news! The rest of it is completely depressing, anyway.