"In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. The people will feel hopeless and depressed and panicked, because they can't deal with the post-growth economy and they will miss our dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be to attend to these people and to take care of their trauma showing them the way to pursue the happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion. Capitalism will not disappear from the global landscape, but it will lose its pervasive, paradigmatic role in our semiotization, it will become one of the possible forms of social organization. Communism will never be the principle of a new totalization, but one of the possible forms of autonomy from capitalist rule."

(More Bifo. Thanks to my friends)

"Virtual is a reality whose tangible physicality has been eliminated. Frigid Thought can well be recognized in the network world, where the relation to the other is artificially euphoric but substantially desexualized as well."

............................SAVE THE DATE.............................

Labor Day 2010/ Convocation

Please join us in the Bay Area this Labor Day 2010 for a unique collaborative event.

Partly as a response to the form of the academic conference, in which invitees share the common condition of working in the academy, we are organizing a gathering in which poets who survive by other means are able to present in a formal structure that encourages conversation about poetics and social life.

The topic for this first convocation is therefore LABOR, and we have invited a number of poets and writers to prepare short presentations around how they earn a living.

Because issues of labor and money are integral to so many of our lives as artists, we are hoping that gathering as presenters and participants will highlight the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves. Because we are not employed by the University, the occasions for speaking in and with a group concerned with poetics and politics in a formal way are rare. But we think this gathering will be a positive model for thinking cooperatively in the future.

Specific locations and exact times remain TBD, however the overall structure of the event looks like this: Sunday afternoon and leading into evening, we'll gather in the East Bay to hear the presentations. Afterwards, we'll have drinks and socially process the material from that day's event. On Monday (late) morning, we'll all convene again to have brunch. At brunch, the presenters along with the audience will have an open, informal, but hopefully rigorous conversation about issues and ideas raised in the performances of Sunday.

We would especially like to encourage attendance by as many of you from outside the Bay Area as might be interested in participating. Because we understand that out-of-pocket travel can be quite expensive and difficult, we will do everything we can to try and help find accommodation and defray the cost of meals. And the weather is usually quite perfect here around Labor Day, if that’s any more persuasive.

This event is open to everyone, and we hope to see as many of you here as possible. This is also something to share with others. Travel will be easier if done in pairs or small groups, and absolutely no one is discouraged from participating.

We'll also look into the possibility of Skype or other forms of broadcast, in order to include as many as might wish to engage.

Times, locations, and a list of presenters shortly forthcoming.

We hope to see you there!

David Brazil, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Alli Warren

Valie Export, Ontological Leap, 1974

yes always though you said it first
you the quicksand and sand and grass
as I wave toward you freely
the ego-ridden sea
there is a light there that neither
of us will obscure
rubbing it all white
saving ships from fucking up on the rocks

[etc, repeat]

On the train coming home this evening I saw a near-blind lawyer I used to work for. He was reading a paperback novel. In order to read the paperback novel, just as I remember he would do in order to read the brief, the letter, the offshore hedge fund circular, he had the book held up so close to his face the pages practically touched the left lens of his eyeglasses. I only saw him as I was crossing the car to get to the open doors. I thought he saw me, that we had that exchange you have with people you once knew, slightly but very regularly, where you recognize, look away, and remember later who they were. But he couldn't have seen me, he can't see. He probably never knew what I looked like then. Did we note each other in the car anyway? Yesterday, no, Wednesday, the man sitting in front of me in the carshare looked so familiar, from where did I know him? Is it from the cafe? Have we had a conversation? I know his face, his beard, his hat, his style, everything.  I couldn't place him. Later, that evening, I was standing in the staff reception entrance of the museum, talking with some new writers for Open Space, and out he came, this fellow: a colleague.

I'm not negotiating a crisis, but I'm negotiating something. Once upon a time---  I'd wake up every morning with pangs of guilt, anxiety, shame, it always circulated around the cigarette, that I'd smoked too much, too many, too long, that I smoked at all, that I was a smoker. When I quit, for several months even, I woke up every morning without that feeling, or with a set of comforting replacement feelings: relief that I hadn't smoked, also pride. But those feelings wore off as I gradually lost the addiction, and they were replaced by the surfacing of all the other anxieties or negotiations that were not about smoking but were about living. I don't have something I call those feelings; maybe I should call them 'morning feeling'. Recently they are mid-life-crisis style anxieties: where am I now, where will I be, what do I do next, with whom, where, I'm going to die, etc.

The 'I'm going to die' thing is a funny one. I was always going to die. From 8 or 9 until 40 I was sure I would die in my 39th year. Lo, I turned 40 and that was a very odd day. I call that a birthday. Who was I before that, besides a person who was sure she would die? One plans differently or not at all when one does not expect to continue to live.

Who reads this blog? Where should I invest my creative energy? What should come next anyway? I've finished up having made mistakes of the kind you make when you're half-alive and unhappy. In a way it seems like there aren't any other life mistakes to make, except for the failure to aim towards whatever's truest in the heart, give that kind of  a clear path. Maybe it's a good idea to consider what they've always meant by 'nest egg'. What gets stored up for 'the future'? What was I doing up til now? Leslie and Judith asked me along with some others to write about "The Future." I had quite a terrible time with that. This blog post must be about Leslie. We talked about Paradise after that. I recall reading somewhere about people under extreme duress, and how time collapses or explodes into an infinite present in order to tolerate the intolerable constant presence of threat, of trauma, I read this in relation to a study of prisoners at Auschwitz, why am I recalling this now? I recall being in a graduate seminar with Stacy, and sitting in the half dark---why were the lights in the classroom out?---talking about this extreme duress and my own experience of -- I can not remember now what was so pertinent about my own experience of time to have so earnestly tried to articulate it then.