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Vienna Postcard 2 — February 17, 2004
Much as Vienna is a city that leans heavily on its past — especially in its Baroque & Mozartian epochs — such that it can feel like a changeless place, even morbidly so (This, I feel, is the feeling Freud so momentously autopsied, revealing swarms of thriving, if perverse, bacterial life in the corpse of […]
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Vienna Postcard 1 — February 6, 2004
Transatlantic travel with a toddler is an active solicitation of agony, like willingly exposing yourself to the flu. You’re always preparing for the worst possible situation to occur in the most strenuous conditions, while at the same time knowing you’ll basically get through it. Last summer, when we made this trip for the first time, […]
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Here There Be Agitators
Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, by Rosemarie Waldrop. Wesleyan University Press, 2003. $17.95. State of Siege [El Sitio de los Sitios], by Juan Goytisolo. City Lights Books, 2002. $13.95. 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, by Stewart Home. Canongate Books, 2003. $13.00. Obsession, like theory, requires an object. Through detritus and […]
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“Kontakion”: A Note to the Reader
An Icon of the Mouth so far consists of two parts: Garment & Raiment; & The Fire Balsam. A third & concluding part, tentatively entitled Aural Figures, is currently underway. Based speculatively on the life of iconographer & saint Andrei Rublev, The Fire Balsam consists of an introductory sermon on what little is known about […]
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A Fragmentary Poetics (Part Two)
Part One of this essay appeared in last month’s update. Click here to read Part One.— Z. I’ve read a lot about the poetics of the fragment, the poetics of the ruin. Most of the work in English deals with the Romantics, who loved plopping themselves down among the overgrown, broken walls of some medieval […]
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Mockingbird & Icon
I. Mockingbird Mimus polyglottos. An American passerine song-bird. “The many-tongued mime.” The Mimid family to which the mockingbird belongs includes thrashers — longbilled, California, & brown among them — & the gray catbird whose call is an incontestable meow. Adult mockingbirds have distinctive white patches amid dark gray wing feathers, topside & underside. When they […]
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A Fragmentary Poetics (Part One)
Due to the length of this essay (& perhaps more to the limitations & strains of this medium), it will appear in two parts, the latter of which will be posted next update. — Z. I am a slow learner. My education — and it is still ongoing — has consisted of missed opportunities, hasty […]
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Notes on Norman Finkelstein’s Columns (Track Volume II)
Columns, Norman Finkelstein. Spuyten Duyvil (ISBN# 1-881471-73-X);144 pages. $10.00 In 1938, Gershom Scholem came to New York City from Jerusalem to the Jewish Institute of Religion to deliver the Strook lectures. He was forty years old. Upon his return to Jerusalem, his friend Walter Benjamin urged him to expand these lectures and publish them immediately. […]
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Aspects of Poetics (Part Two)
This piece was originally presented as a talk to the Chicago Poetics Seminar. Part One appeared in last month’s update. Click here to read Part One. Bloch’s “the unfated,” Musil’s “anticipatory scent,” these are suggestive rather than prescriptive terms. How might they help in thinking through a new poetics? As David Kellogg reminds us in […]