Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Source.

A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack (1968)

Source.

Logan's Run

Script
Novel Triology

Japanese Gas Attack Safety Posters (1938)

Source. Thanks, Retronaut.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Text of 1932)

In full.

See Also: Leo Strauss: Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
The State of Emergency - Giorgio Agamben

Infographics for a Crisis

Henry Blodget, a disgraced trader, came out with these succinct infographics, summarizing, for presumably the American business community, what had prepared the climate for Occupy Wall Street.

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection - Julia Kristeva

In full.

Louis Ferdinand Celine Online (In translation)

Trifles for a Massacre

Stalker (1979)

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Transcript (in English).

c/f Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 | Open Culture
c/f Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture

Silent Hill 1

Silent Hill is an exercise in video game story-telling with deeper effects of psychological immersion, as generously demonstrated by this devout gamer. A wonderful catalog of uncanny effects. For the background on this game, Wikipedia has a good summary.

For transcripts of the dramatized sections of the video game, fans have obliged with the below.
Silent Hill 1 Transcript
Silent Hill 2 Full Game Script
Silent Hill 3 Full Game Script

Silent Hill also has its own Wiki.

Rest of Walk-through.
Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill 4

Paul Valery's The Crisis of the Mind (1919)

Lengthy excerpt.

Frank Lima's Sacttered Vignettes

Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes.

One of the few contemporary poems I stumbled across in my adult life and felt it contained a world within that I could inhabit, Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes remains for me one of the most magical sustained invocations of language (English).

Elsewhere in this quixotic library and toy store, I have collected material of those who address misery by making an aesthetic object of consumption out of it. That is, while enjoyable, often, the trap. One cannot possess meaninglessness (the ultimate ghost of upheaval and trauma) by turning it into a product, buying and consuming it. Meaninglessness is more elusive than, say, delicious candy. In meaninglessness (death, violence, despair), the hunger is not sated by eating more of the same.

The groping towards any space of serenity in this relationship between observer, meaning and world, one that retains not only the images of trauma, violence and beauty but also the meaninglessness of those very things which make our time here storied, would require one to communicate or build something actually transformative.

This is not easy. Misery has stubbornly resisted prognostication and prescriptions, as in Marx, or magical solutions, as in Fascism. Often it hovers just outside the purview of Liberalism, the phantom limits of its ability to act. The nostalgia of religious fanaticism can only hold it at bay for so long. Ignoring it does not dispel it.

Frank Lima, so despairing, so ritually beautiful in his figures, so uncomplicatedly attuned to myth and the ceremonial gestures of magic, in a matter of a few pages, manages to cover a continental scourge of difficult and ambivalent territory. The miracle in these vignettes is how he never drops out of poetic voice. He takes things that are already meaningless (failed lives, the sad household objects that are the props for traditional magic) and uses them to help communicate the ultimate things, which are generally resistant to meaning (violence, ultimate taboos, spirit). Somehow the ineffable--by sheer conjuration of this sensitive but semantically perilous alchemy--manages to pass through.

For More on Frank Lima:
Here is an interview.

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.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil

What I find, perhaps, the most haunting criticism of Hannah Arendt's compelling characterization of evil within modernity is the charge that, Arendt having mostly observed the trial of Eichmann before he is to testify, the philosophical writer was not present to witness the more forceful aspects of his personality, exhibited during his defense.

For one, in reading parts of the transcripts, Eichmann's attempts to mystify his own accountability by drawing such an elaborate, labyrinthine picture of Nazi bureaucracy might easily be construed as an active strategy of a lively, even megalomaniacal mind engaged in the business of the will and survival (Nazi themes). This would hardly suit the portrait of the blase spirit of bureaucratic automaton giving platitudes after the defeat of his leaders. Even his deference to superiors in the immediate courtroom has a manipulative aspect.

That is not a criticism of Arendt's basic premise: but a way of reading this *accepted* account (accepted at least in the post-war West) that draws her themes in a sharper, more critical relief. This is, after all, one of the few completely secular accounts of the existence of evil, outside of theology, or at least outside of a theology with an active, living God.

One should not forget that the Holocaust was the first fully globally visible attempt, on the part of a fully technologically modernized state, to bring all the instruments of bureaucratic rationalization and scientific advance to bear upon the systematic extermination of a peoples. In that, that it happened, does not subtract from the violence and atrocities committed and currently being committed on other human populations.

Most of Eichmann in Jerusalem (with a page irritatingly withdrawn here or there) is available online at google books.

The transcripts from Eichmann's trials are available in full online.

Original articles Arendt wrote for the New Yorker, covering the Eichmann trial: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five are available from the New Yorker's archives.

Sharon Olds: A Selection of Poems Online

1954 A Week Later Crab Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942 May 1968 One Year Primitive Take the I Out The Borders The Clasp The Daughter Goes To Camp The End The Mortal One The Sash The Space Heater The Unborn The Victims 35/10 Beyond Harm Bible Study: 71 B.C.E. Chamber Thicket

First Thanksgiving Heaven to Be His Stillness I Could Not Tell I Go Back to May 1937 Leaving the Island Mrs. Krikorian My Father's Diary My Son the Man Rite of Passage Still Life in Landscape The Month of June: 13 1/2 The Promise The Wedding Vow Toth Farry True Love Wonder as Wander I Go Back to May 1937 High School Senior

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

This American Life's The Giant Pool of Money

The Giant Pool of Money.

Originally an on-air radio broadcast, this transcript of This American Life is the best information I have found to explain the origins of our current global financial crisis.

Helpfully, the episode's producers neither assume one to be proficient in the lingual kung fu of high finance, nor posit a master daemon of capitalism as the cause of all woe, previous to considering evidence, group behaviors and testimonials.

It can also be streamed online.

Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism

Insofar as I know, still the most reaching analysis of the Terror against Terror climate of modern global politics.

Among the last things he wrote before his death, Jean Baudrillard's essay: The Spirit of Terrorism.

Myths over Miami

I'm pretty sure what stories have grown up around the spirits and the gods have very little to do with literature.

This article, Myths over Miami by Lynda Edwards, is the closest example I have found to what a literal update of mythology and religion would look like in our culture, between cracks of pale light on the shadowy side of the post-millennium. These childish tales, from brightly chewed up wads of numerous indigenous belief systems indiscreetly and promiscuously borrowed from, mashed together with a child's happy lack of inhibition, combined with a sophisticated take on capitalism as the murder or suicide (murder-suicide) of god are by turns breathtaking, heartbreaking and harrowing.

There is no god but the explanation is theological. And extremely sad. The belief system is also living. Poly-genesis is, here, the result of a secret compact between naive belief systems, folk culture, the heroic (demonic) culture of gangbanging, a repressive system of immigration, a punitive system of homeless shelters and the anti-master dialectic of Judeo-Christianity. These are exactly the sort of stories that achieve genesis by successions of children whispering in rooms (children whispering in rooms being the origins of all magic). Different from various fundamentalisms, the universe these myths describe is recognizably ours, if wretched. Evil is assigned a symbolism of strictly literal and materialistic objects. Transcendence, overcoming is deferred.

The woman who collected these stories is a poet.

c/f How a 1997 New Times Feature on Homeless Kids' Folklore Exploded the Internet