Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Houdini

Source.

A COMPLETE EXPOSE' OF THE MODUS
OPERANDI OF FIRE EATERS, HEAT
RESISTERS, POISON EATERS, VENOMOUS
REPTILE DEFIERS, SWORD SWALLOWERS,
HUMAN OSTRICHES, STRONG MEN, ETC.

BY

HOUDINI

AUTHOR OF "THE UNMASKING OF ROBERT HOUDIN," ETC.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO MY LIFE'S HELPMATE,
WHO STARVED AND STARRED WITH ME
DURING THE YEARS WE SPENT
AMONG "MIRACLE MONGERS"
My Wife

c/f - The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin

Anticlerical Poems

Preste, Ne Monke, Ne Yit Chanoun
Of Thes Frer Mynours
Thou That Sellest the Worde of God
Allas, What Schul We Freris Do
Freers, Freers, Wo Ye Be
The Wycliffite Bible: From the Prologue
The Lanterne of Light: Prologue and Chapters 3-5
Lo, He that Can Be Cristes Clerc

Radical Evil as a Freudian Category - Slavoj Zizek (2007)

Source.

On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou (2001)

Source.

Studies On Hysteria - Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer

Source.

Midway and Carnival Stories

Araby by James Joyce.

Spurs by Tod Robbins (inspiration for Todd Browning's "Freaks").

Source.

You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You by John Updike.

Scripts from Carnivale
Carnivàle: After the Ball is Over
Carnivàle: Black Blizzard
Carnivàle: Milfay
Carnivàle: Tipton

Pulps
Circus Fists by Robert E Howard
A Half Interest in Hell by Emile Tempperman
A Fray Down South in Dixie by Thomas Thursday
It's Great to Be Great! by Thomas Thursday
That Terrible Wrestler by Thomas Thursday
The Big-Time Heart by W. Wonderly

A User’s Guide to Détournement - Guy Debord, Gil J Wolman (1956)

Source.

Chapter 4 from Rabelais and his World: Banquet Imagery in Rabelais

Source.

On Google books, with a few pages (like two) annoyingly omitted.

How Should a Person Be, Teenager Hamlet and Don’t Go to School: MFA, Oct. 14, 2010

Granted, it is a bit much to be cataloging articles that include the mention of one's own projects. But it was bound to happen: my theoretical concerns have a lot to do with what's happening in a space beyond these reassuringly (to me) static, impersonal texts. Carl Wilson's most excellent article on being "life-sampled." Of critical interest: relationships as units of exchange.

Source.

"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."

Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.

They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.

The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.

There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.

More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.

That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.

So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

An excerpt.

Heidegger Online (in English Translation)

"Heraclitus" [1966-1967] - Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's seminar on Heraclitus.

"Letter on "Humanism" [1949] - Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's famous essay in English translation.

"Nietzsche's Word, "God is Dead." - Martin Heidegger
Complete text of Martin Heidegger's essay on Nietzsche's announcement that "God is dead" (cf. The Gay Science).

"Parmenides" [1942-1943] - Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's course on Parmenides.

"Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" - Martin Heidegger

Natural Science and Metaphysics - Martin Heidegger
An essay by Martin Heidegger on the dispositions underlying metaphysics (Aristotle), and modern natural science (Newton, Descartes).

"Nietzsche's Word: GOD IS DEAD" [Holzwege] - Martin Heidegger
A second translation of this important work.

The Self Assertion of the German University 1933 - Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger's [in]famous "Rectoratsrede" or "Rector's inaugural address", given in 1933. A careful reading of this speech is essential for anyone trying to understand the early philosophy of Heidegger, and why he eventually withdrew from politics.

Davos 1929, Confrontation with Cassirer re Kant - Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer
A written transcript of the the Heidegger-Cassirer debate in Davos, Switzerland in 1929 regarding the question of Kant and "neo-Kantianism."

Der Spiegel Interview 1966 (English translation): - Martin Heidegger (interview 1966)
This is the famous "Der Spiegel Interview" from 1966 in which Heidegger discusses the current crisis of nihilism and his rejection of some kind of fusion of East and West. A return to, and a resuscitation of the Western Tradition is here anticipated as essential. Heidegger also here gives some further information which may help one to think about his motives in 1933 and thereafter.

Scitzophrenia - Testimonials, etc.

List of characteristics on Wikipedia:
Hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking.

Testimonials 1.

Article Describing a Simulation

Aug. 29, 2002 -- The textbook description of schizophrenia is a listing of symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior. But what does schizophrenia really feel like? NPR's Joanne Silberner reports on a virtual reality experience that simulates common symptoms of the mental illness.

Janssen Pharmaceutica, a company that makes a drug treatment for schizophrenia, has created a multimedia simulation that it says lets a participant see the world through the eyes and ears of a person with schizophrenic illness. Janssen created the simulation as an education tool for doctors and others who want a more visceral understanding of the illness.

Silberner, who experienced the simulation, says it works this way: "For five to 10 minutes, someone wanting to know what it feels like to have untreated schizophrenia puts on goggles and headphones, and sees and hears a range of hallucinations. You can choose your virtual reality -- what happens on a trip to the doctor's office, or on a ride on a city bus." In the program she experienced, a caseworker takes the schizophrenia patient to a grocery store with a pharmacy in the back, to refill a prescription.

To create the virtual reality project, technical director Stephen Streibig consulted a group of people with schizophrenia, including Daniel Frey, 26. Frey describes what he and Silberner experienced in the program: "When you first walk into the pharmacy, you're walking through the aisles and there are people staring at you, just staring at you from every aisle. And there's one instance where there is a woman sort of protecting her children from you when you walk through the aisle.

"This, of course, is really a delusion, it's part of the schizophrenic thinking, that everyone is looking at you and paying attention to you and is afraid of you."

Silberner describes more of the simulated hallucinations: "People in the produce aisle disappear, and no one else notices -- were they ever really there? From a TV monitor, a man in a commercial yells directly at you. The label on a bottle of pills turns into a skull and crossbones."

Hearing voices is a nearly universal symptom of schizophrenia, and the simulation reproduces that in a way that Frey says is very authentic, and Silberner says is alarming: "The voices jump around you -- they're in front, now behind, now to your left, now on your right. They're persistent, impossible to ignore or filter out."

Dr. Sam Keith, medical advisor on the virtual reality project, is a veteran psychiatrist who's heard thousands of patients describe schizophrenic episodes. Still, after trying the simulation, Keith said, "When it's real, it's different -- it's very frightening, it's very scary."

Streibig said that's precisely the effect he hoped to achieve: After years of the illness being misdiagnosed, mismanaged and stigmatized, he says, "People should understand what it's like to go through this."

Even though schizophrenia patient Frey consulted on the project, he found the simulation too disturbing to sit all the way through. When Silberner tells him she was terrified by the experience, Frey responds, "Yeah, you ought to be. Imagine not being able to take off the goggles, the helmet."

Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord (1967)

In full, at Marxist.org.

Oedepis Rex

Oedepis Rex by Sophocles.

Original 1937 Time review for Cocteau's adaption (including set descriptions, etc.).

Christian Bérard, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1932
Mural for Jean Cocteau’s flat, Paris

This play is perhaps the hardest-to-look at, harshest, eeriest dramatizations of Fate as well as one of the clearest articulations of it and the earliest. One looks into crime and the despair of the world, and through the maze of accusations, despair, evidence and hunches, at the end of the journey, one finds oneself. In this, the plot is almost dream-like.

For Freud, this play is the statement of the primal taboo and its punishment: a man kills his father to bed his mother. In how Sophocles describes fate we see, also, something like what for Freud would become the unconscious: this terrible crime is committed while hidden from Oedipus' (the perpetrator's) concious knowledge. And yet one can read Freud through Sophocles as well: one looks too hard at Freud's theory, and one sees only Freud. The theory dies and withers away.

Unlike in Freud, Sophocles' Fate is also a trap of external riddles and prophecies. Everything is laid bare in advance. The struggle to cheat Fate's inexorable bureaucracy is often the fulfillment of its miseries. What we call plot, though in meticulous evidence here as each move by Oedipus furthers the revelation of his guilt, leading to his ultimate punishment, is less to uncover what is true, but to be drowned in truth, destroyed by it. The tendrils of fate and plot affix to Oedipus like strands of quicksand to a drowning man. One does not, with knowledge, cheat death.

Greek drama keeps close to a religious, ceremonial practice. One senses in the elevated, poetic invocations and liturgical recitations of the chorus that this crime is ritualistically reenacted to address similar, uncanny signs of doom in the present. In this, the fate of Oedipus also resembles agrarian ceremonies where the fertility god is ritually sacrificed to appease the dying fields.

The Atomic Cafe

c/f The Atomic Bombers Speak

On the Concept of History - Walter Benjamin (1940)

Available online, in full.

One feels few writers have appeared besides Benjamin to have such a sensitivity for the breadth and quality of issues that needed to be addressed by Marxism for any Marxist-influenced thought to continue to have any legitimacy, beyond the inert barbarism of force, proletariat in name only, of Stalinism and its successors.

Paradoxically, the realpolitik of Marxism, always Marx's professed aims of his "theory" (not to interpret the world, but to change it), was the aspect of Marxism that stopped it dead in its tracks. The actual Marxist (-Leninist) state became incapable of interpreting the course of events in any way other than to paroxysm in knee-jerk, farcical enactments of its own party line, whether those solutions rang true or untrue before the tactical dictates of time: a petrified totalitarianism. As a result, its economy parodied liberalism (i.e. Napoleon) at its most appallingly imperialistic (having no example of economy of its own, only a critique), and the barbarity of its anti-humanism reached fiats of slaughter only debatably second to that of Fascism.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

The immediate problem that put Benjamin so far outside the purview of (and even hope for detection from) his Western Marxist contemporaries was that he recognized some sort of engagement needed to happen between Historicity and myth. When History was continuously being rewritten to suit the aims of the powerful, one could not, as dialectical Marxism seemed to rely on, posit simply that, on the on hand, the bourgeoisie conceptualization of time was ahistoric, and, on the other hand, an absolutely unequivocal discipline of Historicity existed.

Compounded with this problem was Marxist intellectuals own cupidity in relying on prognostication: that a salvation in the form of the total revolution would resolve "contradiction." Rather than perform the tortuous gymnastics needed to deny that myth, a literary trope even, was being invoked in these claims, or to dismiss the yearning inherit in the discipline of history, or worse (from a Marxist lens), to disavow history in favor of a transcendental, out-of-time conception of timeless fate (as in Heidegger), Benjamin begins to give an account of Historicity, expressly sensitive to myth, that includes the avowal of the mythic themes invoked in any accessing of the past, part and parcel of the writing of any history.

He begins to address the actual theological and mythic underpinnings of the writing of history, not to find the project out as an absurdity, but to flesh out its serious aims, those necessary to our cognitive and humane survival. He writes an actual myth, a myth that posits body and public before the forces of its actual gods, who are, in fact, non-deities: progress, labour, organization, power (capital) and the future.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

That is, he revisits Marx to save what is salvageable in Marx but needing articulation in the light of the  present--the present, which is always a surprise. Not accidentally, then, one of the themes that take relief in this concept of a cumulative, progressive (not transcendent, timeless) history is: garbage. But the dustbin of history (Marx's phrase) is not, precisely, just oblivion. It is the storage of ruins by which, in a process akin to the archaeological dig, we may yet illuminate our way to the future. It is, then, a myth for the progressive. At that, it is only marginally an optimistic one.

Perhaps its most serious philosophical critique lies in the sketch of a world of facts-- a view given articulation in the 20th century famously by Wittgenstein--rather than one of base materials. This is where Liberalism consistently outpaces radicals, in political terms: is it a fact, does it yield real world feedback capable of being reduplicated in real time? Or is it a theory, strictly surface interpretation, in the mode of detail-oriented, world-renouncing monks? A question I am really not equipped to deal with but recognize it is there; and for radicals: The Begging Question.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

Objections aside, this is the climate and background I imagine to have been part of the writing of this mesmerizing, intellectually fervid document. To my mind, it is to seek in a history grounded in base materials (history's trash) our fate, but interpreted backwards through history's long train of wrecks.

The Office - Jokes

Funnies at IBMD.

More funnies at Wikiquotes.

Quotes from the UK original of the TV series, The Office. The false conscience of the liberal workplace, pathetic jobbers, morons without futures, truly loathsome bosses in omnipresent cubicle farms . . . hilarious. The American version, sadly, seems to shy away from the obvious satirical target for a show called "The Office." It is certainly less narrow-eyed, ruthlessly bleak.

Excerpts:

David
Under "Strengths"... you've just put "accounts."

Keith
Yeah.

David
That's your job though, that's, that's just—

Keith
Mmm. [nods]

David
No, Keith. What. I was sort of looking for your skills within your job. So is there anything else you could have put there?

Keith
[shrugs]

David
Nope. Okay. Umm... Under "Weaknesses" you've put eczema.

*

David
Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them. 

The Wire Bible

The "Bible" (concept, proposal) for the appallingly well-written TV series, The Wire.

Dadaist Manifesto on Feeble and Bitter Love

Source. A recreation of the image/text manifesto online.

Dogma 95: The Vow of Chastity

Source.

The Vow of Chastity

I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95:

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).

3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).

4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.

6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

8. Genre movies are not acceptable.

9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.

10. The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY
 

Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
On behalf of DOGMA 95, Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg