JSTOR, frail Angel

From here:

Register & Read (Coming soon!) 

Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. Register & Read follows the release of the Early Journal Content as the next step in our efforts to find sustainable* ways to extend access to JSTOR, specifically to those not affiliated with participating institutions.
How will it work?

• Find an article that’s part of Register & Read, click on a “Get Access” option. 

•  

• Register for a free MyJSTOR account, or log into your account if you already have one.

• Add the content to your shelf to read the full-text online. After 14 days, you may remove it and add new items to your shelf.

• PDF versions of some articles will also be available for purchase and download. If you purchase articles from your shelf, the PDF versions may be stored and accessed in your MyJSTOR account at any time.

At launch, Register & Read will include approximately 70 journals from more than 30 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago). We plan to add more titles at a later date. See a list of the titles and publishers. Register & Read is a beta program, and we expect to adjust aspects of the program as needed. This may include both functionality and the available content.
If you would like to be notified of the launch of Register & Read, you may follow us on Twitter or Facebook.   

*"Sustainable" here has to include the sense: "supporting the salaried philanthropic lifestyle to which we good people at JSTOR have become accustomed."

Renting knowledge: Zizek

Zizek

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect ? based on collective knowledge and social co-operation ? has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. more...

Roy - the supranational elite

You know these borders -- now it's becoming difficult to even use words like America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan -- because you have the elites in all these countries that have actually seceded into a country of their own, and then you have the rest, you know, so what does one mean when one says "America" or "India," you know, I don't know what we mean by that...

19:28

Graeber on mathematics and violence

^QTHE WHITE REVIEW ― Your latest book is called Debt. One of the arguments you make is that the reason the idea of debt has so much power is because no one has any idea what it actually is. Did you get any closer to understanding what debt is?

^ADAVID GRAEBER ― Yes. Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force. The problem is that through a genuinely perverse historical alchemy, we’ve come to see such acts of violence as the very essence of morality.

^QTHE WHITE REVIEW ― Do you see this reflected in the current economic climate?

^ADAVID GRAEBER ― I think that’s the situation that we see around us today, and I’m surprised that people are not more outraged by this direct assault on every fabric of their lives. It’s an assault on the very idea of community, and an assault on the commitments that we make to each other through the medium of government. Why is it that a promise made by a politician to the people that elected them―to provide free education for instance―has a less moral standing than the promise that politician has made to a banker? It seems insane. But it’s simply assumed nowadays.

Interview in The White Review.

Civil War in Corcyra

The Peloponnesian War 3.82-83

(82) So savage was the factional strife that broke out - and it seemed all the worse in that it was the first to occur. Later on, indeed, all of Hellas (so to speak) was thrown into turmoil, there being discord everywhere, with the representatives of the demos (i.e. the extreme democratic factions) wanting to bring in the Athenians to support their cause, while the oligarchic factions looked to the Spartans. In peacetime they would have had no excuse nor would they have been prepared to summon them for help, but in the midst of a war, the summoning of outside aid readily offered those on both sides who desired a change in the status quo alliances that promised harm for their opponents and, at the same time, benefit for themselves. (2) Many harsh events befell the various cities due to the ensuing factional strife - things which always occur in such times and always will occur, so long as human nature (physis) remains the same, although with varying degrees of violence, perhaps, and differing in form, according as variations in circumstances should arise. For in peacetime, and amid prosperous circumstances, both cities and individuals possess more noble dispositions, because they have not fallen into the overpowering constraints imposed by harsher times. But war, which destroys the easy routines of people's daily lives, is a violent schoolmaster, and assimilates the dispositions of most people to the prevailing circumstances. (3) So then, affairs in the cities were being torn apart by faction, and those struggles that occurred in the latter stages of the war - through news, I suppose, of what had occurred earlier in other cities - pushed to greater lengths the extravagance with which new plots were devised, both in the inventiveness of the various attempts at revolt and in the unheard-of nature of the subsequent acts of retaliation. (4) And people altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds: irrational daring came to be considered the "manly courage of one loyal to his party"; prudent delay was thought a fair-seeming cowardice; a moderate attitude was deemed a mere shield for lack of virility, and a reasoned understanding with regard to all sides of an issue meant that one was indolent and of no use for anything. Rash enthusiasm for one's cause was deemed the part of a true man; to attempt to employ reason in plotting a safe course of action, a specious excuse for desertion. (5) One who displayed violent anger was "eternally faithful," whereas any who spoke against such a person was viewed with suspicion. One who laid a scheme and was successful was "wise," while anyone who suspected and ferreted out such a plot beforehand was considered still cleverer. Any who planned beforehand in order that no such measures should be necessary was a "subverter of the party" and was accused of being intimidated by the opposition. In general, the one who beat another at performing some act of villainy beforehand was praised, as was one who urged another on to such a deed which the latter, originally, had no intention of performing. (6) Indeed, even kinship came to represent a less intimate bond than that of party faction, since the latter implied a greater willingness to engage in violent acts of daring without demur. For such unions were formed, not with a view to profiting from the established laws, but with a view toward political advantage contrary to such laws. And their mutual oaths they cemented, not by means of religious sanction, but by sharing in some common crime. (7) Fair proposals offered by the opposing faction were accepted by the party enjoying the superior position in a guarded fashion, not in a truly generous spirit. More concern was placed on exacting vengeance from someone else than on not suffering a wrong yourself in the first place. And if ever oaths of reconciliation did come about, having been exchanged in the face of some temporary difficulty, they remained in force only so long as the parties possessed no resources from any other source. The one who was quicker to seize the opportunity for some daring outrage, if ever he saw his opponent off his guard, took more pleasure in taking vengeance in this way than if he had done so openly, considering this method to be safer and thinking that, by getting the upper hand through deceit, he had won in addition the prize for cleverness. And indeed, most people accept more readily being called clever, when they are knaves, than being called fools when they are honest: the latter they take shame in, whereas they preen themselves on the former. (8) The cause of all of these things was the pursuit of political power, motivated by greed and ambition. And out of these factors arose the fanatical enthusiasm of individuals now fully disposed to pursue political vendettas. For the leading men on both sides in each city, employing fine-sounding phrases and advocating either equality before the law for the masses (in the case of the democrats) or the moderate rule of the best men (in the case of the oligarchs) made a show of serving the common good but in fact engaged in competition for personal advancement. Competing in every possible fashion to get the better of their opponents, they went to the farthest extremes of daring and executed even greater acts of vengeance, not limiting themselves by the demands of justice or the interests of the city, but only by their whims at any particular moment. In their efforts to gain power either through the use of trumped up lawsuits or by force, they were always ready to pursue the political vendetta of the moment. The result was that neither side was wont to pay any regard to personal integrity: those who succeeded in accomplishing some act of malice under cover of some fine phrase were the ones to gain general approval. By contrast, those citizens who chose the middle course of moderation perished at the hands of both factions, either for their failure to join in the struggle or due to envy at the fact that they were surviving amid the general chaos. 

(83) Thus moral degeneration of every type took hold throughout Hellas due to factional strife, and simplicity of character ― with which a concern for honor is intimately connected ― became an object of mockery and disappeared. People were ranged against one another in opposite ideological camps, with the result that distrust and suspicion became rampant. (2) For there was no means that could hope to bring an end to the strife ― no speech that could be trusted as reliable, no oath that evoked any dread should it be broken. Everyone, when they had the upper hand, reckoned that there was no hope of any security by means of promises or oaths, and so concentrated on taking precautions not to suffer any injury rather than daring to trust anyone. (3) And, for the most part, those of more limited intelligence were the ones to survive: in their fear regarding their own deficiencies and their opponents' cleverness, lest they might be defeated in debate (e.g. in a political trial) or be forestalled in laying some plot by their opponents' cunning, they turned to action right away with a boldness born of desperation. (4) Their opponents, overconfident in their assurance that they could anticipate the plots of their less intelligent antagonists, and feeling that they could attain their ends by cunning rather than by force, tended to be caught off guard and so perished.  (Italics mine)

More JSTOR jokerama

Re JSTOR cartel, fake scarcity, bullshit economy, etc.:

via techdirt:

Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field

from the let's-just-do-it dept

The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online?

There are many open access business models that are being tried, and one of the most obvious ones is to charge authors a publication fee ? in fact, many traditional academic journals do that as well as making readers pay a subscription fee. In practise, the fee is usually paid by the author's funding institution as part of their overall support for research.

A per-article publication fee is the approach adopted by one of the leading open access publishers, Public Library of Science (PLoS). Its announcement earlier this year that revenue now covers its operating costs is an important data point in establishing the viability of the open access approach.

Meanwhile, on the traditional publishing side, Heather Morrison has been analysing the profits of the major academic publisher Elsevier (disclosure: I worked in one of Reed-Elsevier's divisions a few decades ago) on her splendidly-named blog "The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics":

If the total profit from Elsevier and Lexis-Nexis is added together and converted to U.S. dollars, the total is $2,075m. Divided by the estimated worldwide scholarly article output of 1.5 million articles per year (Bj?rk et al, 2008), this comes out to $1,383 U.S.

That figure is very close to the $1350 article fee charged by PLoS for its biggest title, PLoS ONE, which means:

the profits of this one company alone could fund a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system, at a rate of $1,383 U.S. per article.

A comment on a post on another blog with a fantastic name - "Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week" (what is it about open access advocates and their blogs?) - pointed out that this calculation was incorrect, and that the actual figure was more like $730 per article. But adding in the profits of another major academic publisher, Springer, would bring the overall profit per article published back up to the PLoS ONE level.

But those are just details; what really matters is the fact that collectively the top two or maybe three publishers take out of the academic world enough profits to pay for every research article in every discipline to be made freely available online for everyone to access using PLoS's publishing fee approach.

As Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week's Mike Taylor explains, that would mean:

Dentists would be able to keep up with the relevant literature. Small businesseswould be able to make plans with full information. The Climate Code Foundationwould have a sounder and more up-to-date scientific basis for its work. Patient groups would be able to understand their diseases and give informed consent for treatment. Medical charities, amateur palaeontologists, ornithologists and so many more would have access to the information they need. Researchers in third-world countries could have the information they need to cope with life-threatening issues of health, food and water.

We can have all that for our $2.075 billion per year. Or we can keep giving it to Elsevier’s [+Springer's] shareholders. Giving it, remember: not buying something with it. Don’t forget, this is not the money that Elsevier absorbs as its costs: salaries, rent, connectivity, what have you. This is their profit. It’s pure profit. This is the money that is taken out of the system.

So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.

It's an intriguing thought: to provide global access to all current academic research we just need to flip from one system ? the present one, where a few giant corporations make billions of dollars a year ? to one where open access publishers break even, and where academic institutions save money. So what are we waiting for?

Feel free to post this article in full anywhere you please...

The root of work, enslavement and robotics

orphan

c.1300, from L.L. orphanus "parentless child" (cf. O.Fr. orfeno, It. orfano), from Gk. orphanos "orphaned," lit. "deprived," from orphos "bereft," from PIE *orbho- "bereft of father," also "deprived of free status," from base *orbh- "to change allegiance, to pass from one status to another" (cf. Hittite harb- "change allegiance," L. orbus "bereft," Skt. arbhah "weak, child," Arm. orb "orphan," O.Ir. orbe "heir," O.C.S. rabu "slave," rabota "servitude" (cf. robot), Goth. arbja, Ger. erbe, O.E. ierfa "heir," O.H.G. arabeit, Ger. Arbeit "work," O.Fris. arbed, O.E. earfo? "hardship, suffering, trouble"). The verb is attested from 1814. Related: Orphaned; orphaning.

US figures out how to have a General Strike

Corporate USia thought it had rendered the General Strike harmless, moot, because instead of unions enabling workers to own their labor, corporations figured out how to own their workers. ows is the only way corporate USia could have a general strike.

Inverted Totalitarianism

Chris Hedges

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics ? and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

I relate.

Black on White collarcriminalsinusia

William K. Black, author, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L; Industry Democracy Now.

Well, I mean just what we say in the law: fraud is when you use deceit to steal something from someone. And so, the essence of fraud is, I get you to trust me, and then I betray that trust for gain. And as a result, there’s no more effective acid against destroying trust than fraud, particularly at the elite levels. And when you destroy trust, you destroy economies, families, democracies.

The US is Unconstitutional

"I'm Joe, I'll be your economic manager"

I'm not a worshiper of Larry Lessig, but do listen because he's got a lot more law knowledge than I have, etc.

His new book -- Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It-- makes a point that needs to be heard and not immediately ground into teabags: The idea of the good framers of the US was to defend the people from undue power, money and influence -- the Constitution says folks in Congress are barred from accepting gifts from kings, foreign sovereign powers, etc.

Alas, they did not envision the new kings of Wall Street and Finance.

The frame has been subverted, Lessig describes, as Congress people now spend most of their time sucking up to the .5% who fund Congressional campaigns -- this is mostly corporate wealth, sucked from consumer-taxpayers.

That makes nearly every human being in the US the other 99.5%.

So while we were watching Friends, or playing Wii, an actual coup a la X Files was taking place. Thugs with money reached around the defenses of the people and powned Congress and D.C.

As a dear friend put it a few years ago, "The pigs won."

We now enjoy a representational system that represents .5% of the "people." And, if representation means anything at all*, this suggests that the actual people have been left undefended against undue power, money, and influence. This would appear to be unconstitutional.

Because corporations have become the uncrowned sovereigns, economic planners, and socialist-too-big-to-not-bail-outs of the US. I'd wager that the only difference between the corporate state that is now US, and the totalitarian state of Stalinist Russia, is that our totalitarians are distributed behind a bunch of screens of economy-planners that say EXXON, MOBILE, Bank of America, Citibank, and American Express.

Nice work, "Dickie" -

"Dick" Fuld, Lehman Bro.

Express this: The current US political system is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has abetted this metamorphosis. Media has missed it only entirely. OccupyWallSt has not.

Another Lessig interview.

*The opposite of representation is the casino -- unsullied chance. This is the preferred system of Wall St., Las Vegas, and the Mob.

Graeber: Debt, the sovereign, peasants and amargi

via Occupyweb

delanceyplace.com 10/14/11 - kings forgive loans

In today's excerpt - in ancient city-states such as Babylon, Sumeria and Judaea, rulers found it necessary to cancel all consumer debt from time to time to keep peasants from becoming permanent debt-peons and thus to keep society from being torn apart - a phenomenon all the more interesting from the perspective of our debt-laden 21st century:

"Mesopotamian city-states were dominated by vast Temples: gigantic, complex industrial institutions often staffed by thousands - including everyone from shepherds and barge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical administrators, [and these Temples owned many of the assets of the city-state]. ...

"We don't know precisely when and how interest-bearing loans originated, since they appear to predate writing. Most likely, Temple administrators invented the idea as a way of financing the caravan trade. This trade was crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants - some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries - who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way for the Temples to take their share of the resulting profits.

"However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread. Before long, we find not only commercial loans, but also consumer loans - usury in the classical sense of the term. By C2400 BC it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain, sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly, followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's household - or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves. In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.

"The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: 'clean slates,' as economic historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

"In Sumeria, these were called 'declarations of freedom.' - and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for 'freedom' in any known human language, literally means 'return to mother' - since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do. ...

"Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

"The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian- style 'clean slate' edict - having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled 'in the Sabbath year' (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt."

Author: David Graeber
Title: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Publisher: Melville House
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
Pages: 64-65, 81-82

author:	David Graeber
title:	Debt: The First 5,000 Years
publisher:	Melville House
date:	Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
pages:	64-65, 81-82
tags:
Should you click through our site to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds from your purchase will benefit a children's literacy project. Delanceyplace is a not-for-profit organization.

Pulled from Delancey Place, which has an odd habit of disappearing its excellent selections. This is from David Graeber - haven't yet read it, but it seems like it might be, uh, relevant. He's an anthropologist (Rick Scott says Florida needs no more of them). Graeber is busy, among other ways, suspending the ivied wall between academia and the world.

widget

#occupywallst

It's not about articulating demands - that comes much later, after a new sort of cultural form actually stabilizes - this takes time. At the moment, we don't know what this is. But we can hope.

Why here, why now - one possible reason:

What the Germans lack:

4 ...

Culture and the state ― one should not deceive one-self about this ― are antagonists: "Kultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Toti

If #ows is an actual cultural birth-thing,it would be absurd to present the newborn with a demand that it present a list of demands. #bloomberg #ows

WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

I put forward at once ― lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily ― the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see ― accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will" ― to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion ― almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things ― in short, the famous modern "objectivity" ― is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. @#$@#$

Natural history

A third kind, again, is remarkable for the skill which it displays in its operations. These spin a large web, and the abdomen suffices to supply the material for so extensive a work, whether it is that, at stated periods the excrements are largely secreted in the abdomen, as Democritus thinks, or that the creature has in itself a certain faculty of secreting² a peculiar sort of woolly substance. How steadily does it work with its claws, how beautifully rounded and how equal are the threads as it forms its web, while it employs the weight of its body as an equipoise! It begins at the middle to weave its web, and then extends it by adding the threads in rings around, like a warp upon the woof: forming the meshes at equal intervals, but continually enlarging them as the web increases in breadth, it finally unites them all by an indissoluble knot. With what wondrous art does it conceal the snares that lie in wait for its prey in its checkered nettings! How little, too, would it seem that there is any such trap laid in the compactness of its web and the tenacious texture of the woof, which would appear of itself to be finished and arranged by the exercise of the very highest art! How loose, too, is the body of the web as it yields to the blasts, and how readily does it catch all objects which come in its way! You would fancy that it had left, quite exhausted, the thrums of the upper portion of its net unfinished where they are spread across; it is with the greatest difficulty that they are to be perceived, and yet the moment that an object touches them, like the lines of the hunter's net, they throw it into the body of the web. With what architectural skill, too, is its hole arched over, and how well defended by a nap of extra thickness against the cold! How carefully, too, it retires into a corner, and appears intent upon anything but what it really is, all the while that it is so carefully shut up from view, that it is impossible to perceive whether there is anything within or not! And then too, how extraordinary the strength of the web! When is the wind ever known to break it, or what accumulation of dust is able to weigh it down?

tertium eorundem genus erudita operatione conspicuum. orditur telas tantique operis materiae uterus ipsius sufficit, sive ita corrupta alvi natura stato tempore, ut democrito placet, sive est quaedam intus lanigera fertilitas: tam moderato ungue, tam tereti filo et tam aequali deducit stamina, ipso se pondere usus. texere a medio incipit, circinato orbe subtemina adnectens, maculasque paribus semper intervallis, sed subinde crescentibus ex angusto dilatans indissolubili nodo inplicat. quanta arte celat pedicas a scutulato rete grassantes! quam non ad hoc videtur pertinere crebratae pexitas telae et quadam politurae arte ipsa per se tenax ratio tramae! quam laxus ad flatus ac non respuenda quae veniant sinus! derelicta lasso praetendi summa parte arbitrere licia: at illa difficile cernuntur atque, ut in plagis, lineae offensae praecipitant in sinum. specus ipse qua concamaratur architectura! et contra frigora quanto villosior! quam remotus a medio aliudque agenti similis, inclusus vero sic, ut sit necne intus aliquis cerni non possit! age firmitas, quando rumpentibus ventis, qua pulverum mole degravante!

Pliny the Elder

ταυροκαθ?ψια

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--

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Hungarian Squat

After 31 years, it's great to encounter, again, some fragments of The Squat Theatre. There's some history, archival stuff, and images there, and more, I hope, to come.

Some images from Baltimore -- didn't know they'd been there. Staged funeral in advance of Peter Halasz's 2006 death.

Death and Media

Don't normally recycle old posts, but in light of the 9/11 anniversary observation going on in the media, this one seemed worth resurrecting:

FRIDAY, APRIL 08, 2005

eternal life will not be televised

papolatrie - the help of ritual - bigness, inflation, costumes, dirge, convenient fixity of death.

Probably nothing more and less like news than death. It's factoidal, verifiable, and opens media elan to savor a perfectly controlled routine. It's control over the news, not the news, that we want. Not news, but a sort of mechanized Big Gulp O' the Thrill and the Chill of Memento Mori, the frisson of horror slowed to images of a gelid crawl of thousands of the assembled, moving in medievalesque slo-mo, the hyperbolic elongation of the photo-op.

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