Peace in Bosnia Herzegovina (Allen Ginsberg, 1993)

General Mother Teresa
Emperor Dalai Lama XIV
Chief of Staff Thich Nhat Hanh
Army Chaplain John Paul II

followed by the shades of Ghandi
Sakharov, Sartre & his uncle
Albert Schweitzer

went to the bombed out streets
talked to Moslem Bosnians in
the burnt out grocery stores

parlayed with Croatian & Serbian Generals & Parliament

asked them to quit shooting & firing
artillery from the mountainside

overlooking villages
emptied of grandmothers --

So now there was quiet -- a few fires
smoldered in back alleys

a few corpses stank in wet fields
-- But who owns these houses? The
cinema theatres with broken doors?

Who owns that grocery store, that City Hall,
that windowless school with broken
rooftiles?

Who owns these little apartments, now
all worshippers of Allah

pray in towns besieged 100 miles away
overcrowded in tenements & tents, with
UN portosans at the crossroads?

Who owns these abandoned alleys &
drugstores with shattered bottle shards over
the sidewalk & inside the door?

Who'll be the judge, attorney, file
legal briefs,

bankruptcy papers, affidavits of ownership,
deeds, old tax receipts?

Who'll council who lives where in the rubble,
who'll sleep in what brokenwalled hut

in the full moonlight when spring clouds
pass over the face
of the man in the moon at the end of May?

May 6, 1993, 3AM

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),

poet, icon, prophet

it is the moral authority of abstinence over greed that keeps austerity alive as a viable alternative

(1) does decreasing government spending in times of Great Recession renew economic growth?

(2) the dismal track record of austerity policies over the course of their long history: from Aristotle to Margaret Thatcher, no argument against spending has ever successfully refuted the Keynesian logic of anti-cyclical government stimulus.

(3) austerity’s long life is due to its moral and political underpinnings – not to economic justification. The moral authority of abstinence over greed has kept austerity alive in public discourse despite empirical shortcomings.

On Florian Schui, _Austerity: the Great Failure_ (Yale UP, 2013).

Nancy on the "just meaning" of the ex-istant

"For [Jean-Luc] Nancy, sense is there, like the world, 'just like that', as he puts it. This 'just like that' means that existence is ungrounded, that we are 'just' open to existence and to the world. The 'just' is of course the whole problem. At a time when every 'us' is under suspicion and we allegedly live in a 'crisis of sense', the evidence of 'we' and/or 'sense' is so to speak no 'common sense'. For Nancy, this so-called crisis makes clear that we are, that existence is nothing but sense: 'One must think against the times, or despite the times, since it is still the time of the crisis' (Nancy, 1997a: 15). In other words, that there is sense and that we are there is the radical consequence of the unfolded space that the 'global' world is to us today."

Ignaas Devisch, "The Sense of Being(-)With Jean-Luc Nancy," _Culture Machine,_ Vol 8 (2006). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/36/44

But: Doesn't Nancy's assertion that we' re "just open" to meaning entail some kind of non-dualist system ala Berkeley (esse est perciipi) or perhaps Derrida (there's nothing outside language) positing reference sans refererer?

phatic

Florida

Lost & profound

definiendum, witt-knit, v definians, 1. to knit an abject so as to resemble the figure of Witt, the pduct of which is referred to as _a_ witt-knitt; 2. to knit in such a manner as to be consistend with that of Witt.

T

Everyday apocalypse Sky and sea Like upper And lower jaw Between them Men with anatomic posters In the company of skinned cats and phoenix witches Collecting small flames to nourish their spawn in lanterns Though this lantern is one in which we From Tor Ulven, _shaded by the first bird (1977)

WHo is afraid of the anti-egalitarians?

...or reading Nietzsche backward Thesis 1: Nietzsche was anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, and these were not minor abberations in his thought but deeply rooted and closely connected to his other beliefs. Thesis 2: Nietzsche was right that egalitarianism would entail a "limitless process of levelling" (Bull, "Leveling Out"). The egalitarian ideals of the French revolution would have "required elimination of all substantive social advantages, generating equality betond mere formal conferral of rights" such as is prevalent under liberal political regimes. Nobody is seriously against equality today. What we usually hear is that the disadvantaged should be brought up to the level of those of privilege. This is what we should think of as a process of LEVELLING UP. Thesis 3: Nietzsche was wrong in concluding that because of this levelling process, one should adopt a stance AGAINST egalitarianism. Thesis 4: In reading Nietzsche like a loser (ie. the audience Nietzsche did not write for), it is possible to, instead, EMBRACE the levelling process, but also to acknowledge that a process of levelling up is not, will never be, sufficient. What is recquired is -- CONTRA Nietzsche -- a process of levelling DOWN: We should welcome a "regime in which each individual, without exclusion or exception, will have equal access to property, but no property rights, eiher individual or collective, because property as such will not exist" (Malcolm Bull, /Anti-Nietzsche/, 2011, p157). Thesis 5: This is a notion we should refer to not as anti-egalitarianism (qua Nietzsche) but EXTRA-egalitarianism. Yrs, T Fjeld Sendt fra Yahoo Mail på Android

On various plants

Natinal poet Jon Fosse has written on translations of Borges - or reinscriptions, rather- into Swedish and Norwegian. What would be preferred rendering of /La rosa profunda/? The eteernal rose? The deep rose?

Borges might have claimed all his work to be translations/reinnscriptions.

What a day to chase

@m_phatic