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How rare that my brain suddenly remembers something from years past that I want to remember. I was doing a spooky little pencil drawing, and I started thinking, hmm... pencil... spooky... drawing... OH YEAH! 1991... randomly walking into an art gallery in New York for the first time and there's...
(The above link is to a gallery catalog just because it's easier to see the pictures there, but do follow along to her own site. Also this, though it's awfully small. She is the best.)
Philip Berrigan, who practiced direct action against weapons of mass destruction in the Plowshares movement, has died.
obituary by his family & colleagues
his most recent offense and the reason
his statement after the conviction
interview during his last prison term
interview a few weeks ago
about Plowshares
Dervala Hanley writes of a vivid encounter in an impoverished village school in Burma. Amid the general lack of everything but some lovingly improvised materials, the schools display a sign in English:
Our Mission is to Create a Learning Society to Equip Knowledge Workers for the Information Age
This is followed by a nice moment of mutual confusion about the meaning of poverty. Read more here.
In case you're one of the few people who read the rest of this site: I've taken down the big book review pages and that serial story that I hadn't worked on in ages. It just always made me awfully tired to see such mountains of stale ambition hanging around. I'll do something with them one day.
Here are some things I was happy to read.
Ron Sullivan on good intentions, humor deficiency, and gardens.
Dervala Hanley on being a tourist in Cambodia.
Geoff Ryman on the difference between creating Queen Elizabeth's web site and creating literature.
Jason Shiga's charming weblog about being a cartoonist and a nervous boy.
In the process of drastically reducing my book collection and packing things away, I keep finding things that I picked up years ago, bursting with curiosity, and then never read. Some of these are easy to let go, but a lot of them seem to demand that I internalize them before I move on. It's like that scene in Blue where Julie is cleaning out her purse and finds a huge lollipop that's been in there for a long time, since before her big accident. She stares at it for a second and then unwraps it and starts grimly chomping it up as fast as possible.
So, after hurrying through a couple of mysteries and whatnot, what I've pulled off the shelf now is Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
As you may know, Reich was a student of Freud who's now known as an colorful crackpot (or, in California, a genius) who believed sexual life-energy could cure cancer, change the weather, etc. He was also a crusading anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist, and he thought dangerous politics were a side effect of unconscious contradictions in society; so far, this book makes a pretty good case for that. But it's also disorganized, repetitive, and self-righteous, and in general it gives the impression of someone who found it very easy to convince himself he had "proved" things. I think this is partly due to the way he went back and revised the book in the '40s to get rid of some Communist bits and put in more orgone theory; this results in some strange choices such as always saying "sex-economic" when he means "revolutionary." And I'm not sure I trust his retrospective view of the progressive movement in Germany, when he claims that he managed to turn an audience of 1,000 lower-middle-class Christians away from the Church just by explaining that sexual taboos were reactionary. (Of course I may be biased because he believes that not only religion, but fairy tales and detective stories and really anything "irrational," are nothing but fascist bullshit getting in the way of "mental hygiene." For a guy who said he was all about release, he's got pretty strict ideas about where people should find comfort.)
The main theme of the book still seems true: when people grow up cramped and dishonest and afraid of pleasure, they're likely to support horrible leaders without understanding why.
Anyway, besides being an interesting and frustrating read, it's a good copy to have found, because it came with a whole lot of handwritten margin notes by a mysterious Irish woman who was apparently reading it in Seattle some time in the last 30 years. Besides trying to apply Reich to her surroundings and enthusiastically underlining about 50% of the book, she was also gathering thoughts for a study of an Irish revolutionary about whom she had mixed feelings.
There are a lot of pages where this reader's notes are more interesting than Reich's writing, and certainly more practical. Among my favorites:
"Liberalism lays stress upon its ethics for the purpose of holding in suppression the 'monster in man'": You can visibly see this in the deadness + lack of spontaneity in certain political groups. The unattractiveness + rigidity of facial expression.
"Hitler speaks of his mother with great sentimentality": As do most Irish men. But do they love the real person or the myth.
"Employees of aristocratic families ... often appear as caricatures of the people whom they serve": My aunt Louise.
"A touch of dishonesty is part of the very existence of private merchandising": Remember the termites.
There is no day more empty than the day following an election for the average vol. worker. What do you have???
_____ was very creative in having his divorced wife on faculty in the dept. A sign of contradiction + food for thought.
I have often thought I got the worst of both worlds growing up Catholic-Irish + Jansenist. In the Church as a youth to the point of scrupulosity. Out of it as a mother when at least I would have been "glorified."
I still have trouble w. abortion for myself. He could be wrong about this. Maybe because he's a man.
To say good-bye to mysticism. I am resistant. Who is it that said "Walk softly. I have only my dreams?" Does it really do so much damage?
Beauty of Irene's face at Mass. But it doesn't work for everyone. Didn't for my mom.
My gut instinct against passivity in males is not sexist!
Sadism: "She doesn't know where she stands w. me. That's the way it should be!"
"We have to designate as non-work that activity that is detrimental to the life process": Would running a bar be non-work?
Thanks, whoever you are. I hope you figured out what you were trying to figure out, and I hope you wrote all over a lot of books.
Spending all my damn time on the computer. Mostly filing stuff for the Open Directory, like this. These hobbies are a way to escape from drawing, I guess. When I want to escape from the hobbies, I go and pack away more books in boxes. 15 days left in New York. Oh yeah, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everyone, and I mean everyone.
The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck is an incredibly good idea. (Thanks to Ampersand for this link.)
And I really needed a good idea too, after I had accidentally watched "MAD TV" and saw one of their desperate attempts at parody, a cartoon where the Peanuts characters were all black ghetto kids—the "joke" being that they were all, like, really vile and stupid. I'm not all that easily offended but that was just... lazy, sad and lame.
(Speaking of Ivan Brunetti and sadness, I had to go back and read his James Thurber homage to see if it was as great as I remember (background information here and here). Yeah!
Something good that has nothing to do with computers or cartoons: Decasia, Bill Morrison's indescribable montage of half-melted old movie film. I sat around a big TV with some friends watching it on the Sundance Channel, fully involved, and we weren't even high.