Monday, March 11, 2013

"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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2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. I 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.

    David 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.

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