The Whole Ethic of Sleepless Evidence
September 24, 2011, 9:44 pm
Filed under:
Affect Theory,
Attachment,
Belonging,
Craziness,
Detachment theory,
Encounters,
Mood,
Ordinariness,
poetry,
potentiality,
queerness,
sexuality,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
C.D. Wright,
Louie,
Louie C.K.,
ordinariness,
poetry,
sexuality,
violence#2 in the series.
I spent most of the summer reading the kind of fierce poetry that moves fearlessly into barely inhabitable breathing space three beats beyond the object that was supposed to anchor attention. A poetics of associology whose noise world sits me down in disbelief at the rare freedom of other people’s minds. Not because attention gets things right (any more than attachment guarantees love), and not because there’s always in operation productive energy that can never be tamed but because—in these poems, and for me–revolt requires curiosity, a tipping over on a verge.
I can’t remember how I heard of C. D. Wright; this book written from within incarcerated space seems to have migrated onto my desk from a lateral impulse I must have had once. People who liked this also liked. It’s been in a pile of revealed intention that I’ve been reading up and down.
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit is one version of the commons: C.D. Wright includes it as a kind of acid irony. After all, the next line, si bleu, si calme, isn’t available as realism to the incarcerated–or the manumitted for now who swerve around aggressively while looking down at their feet, or anyone with a stomach overfull of the indigestible. I read this book and my brain clicked around over it all summer: glory hole, dream hole, peephole. Continue reading →
The Failure to Fail to Thrive is Life
September 6, 2011, 11:44 am
Filed under:
affect,
Affect Theory,
ambivalence,
Attachment,
Craziness,
Mood,
non-sovereignty,
Ordinariness,
Politics,
supervalent_thought,
Theory of this Blog,
writing | Tags:
aesthetics,
affect_theory,
dissociation,
poetry,
suicideI. Kathryne Lindberg
Awhile ago a student killed himself and all I could do was take his parents to dinner—it was a nice dinner. Later a friend offed himself and all I could do was take his “next of kin” to lunch and to miss him. Then over a year ago, a lovely, lost while alive ex-student whose people I don’t know killed herself and all I could do was to email mutual friends and protect the loved ones who don’t know me from me for fear of a stranger’s extending a wound, which isn’t worth it. Then my friend seems to have left her car a shell on a bridge with the keys still in it. She vaporized, although her daily friends reported that in recent sightings she was exuberant. A bipolar friend of mine calls us academics all extroverted introverts. Exuberant was the name of my first blog, which was a failure. In sum: a mood is neither anchor nor plot. (. . .)
II. The Nervous System
Supervalent Thought has been, among other things, a project that tries to reintroduce dissociation as a mix of psychoanalytic, formal, affective, and performative modalities of detachment from the scene and sense of expressive continuity between outsides and insides, spaces that, like public and private, are effects rather than causes, differentially produced, and existing in projected perceptions of origin and event. I wanted no longer to presume some naturalized feedback loop between inside and outside, as has been endemic to affect theory, missing the spray of things. Continue reading →
. . . . . . . Supervalent Thought 