"The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture."
--Jacques Lacan
I've been working away at Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism for about 10 months. It's been a long slog but worth the time and effort. Less than 300 pages to go (it's a 1038 page book)!
The Lacan bit quoted above is something Zizek returns to again and again in Less Than Nothing. I've been thinking about it a lot. One is always already in the frame one has created.
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I'm at another sticking point--or perhaps better said, point of hesitation--in the novel. I'm at the point of introducing menace into the book and am trying to figure out what that might mean for a couple of key figures.
Appearances is "about" projections, ventriloquized thoughts, hypnosis,collective dreaming, shadows, the Virtual and the Real.
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Read the Auster/Coetzee letters over the weekend. Recommend it. Correspondence on this scale has become a very rare thing.
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I keep pacing, looking for the UPS truck. Charles Bernstein's new book Recalculating should be arriving soon. I'm anxious to read it.
Charles was the first poet I interviewed, back in the day. And probably the most philosophically disposed poet I've ever met. He and David Bromige are paired in my mind as the two greatest performers of poetry I have encountered.
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just finished first read of Oliver Sacks book Hallucinations....great chapter on epilipsy (?) and of course his own drug use which like a lot of us was to excess...and meaningful...and menecing as well. It's a good book but expensive...library perhaps. and i second the thought about bromige. havent heard bernstein read in person.
ReplyDeleteI was fortunate enough to read with David at San Francisco State and to have him read here in Ohio twice. I've heard Charles read here and in NYC a couple of times. Both of their voices are very important to me.
ReplyDeleteDavid was a terrific mimic, a master of voices, really. Charles was and is a kind of poetic-philosophical vaudevillian that I can only marvel at. Both always managed to make me smile and reconsider everything I know.