Slow Learner

Death penalty case puts racism on trial in North Carolina

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 08:33:04 -0500

Death penalty case puts racism on trial in North Carolina: By Kate Dailey (via BBC News) Photo:...

via believermag: I have always tended to work obsessively on...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:57:24 -0500

I have always tended to work obsessively on one topic at a time to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t consider this a virtue. For the past 6 months, that topic has been ancient tragedy: its nature, its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation. This is why my cultural ingestion has been a little Cyclopean of late, with one or two exceptions, like belatedly watching all five seasons of The Wire for hours at a time over the holidays. Of course, I turned that into a Greek tragedy too. The book I’ve read most in the last months is A Lexicon, Abridged from Liddel and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Clarendon Press, 1980), which I bought in 1983 and which meant I couldn’t afford to go to the pub for two weeks. - Simon Critchley

1. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet: the most brilliant and detailed account of ancient tragedy, which the authors understand as an aesthetic invention, whose subject is not the tragic hero, but the city itself. The tragic hero is a problem, not the solution to any problem. Tragedy is the rendering spectacular of the political situation of the city.

2. Aristotle on Comedy, Richard Janko: for all you fans of speculative philology out there. Was there a second book to Aristotle’s Poetics? It would appear so. Why was it lost? Was it because it was unseemly for ‘The Philosopher’, as Umberto Eco put it in The Name of the Rose, to be seen to dignify laughter with a theory? We don’t know. But the questions raised are fascinating: if tragic catharsis proceeds through pity and fear, then how might comic catharsis work? In the words of the obscure Byzantine text, Tractatus Coislinianus, comedy ‘has laughter for its mother’. The latter tractate also contains a wonderful discussion of the comic effect of diminutives, where the example given is ‘Socratiddles’.

3. Six Tragedies, Seneca: forget his vapid, Hollywoodized (viz. Gladiator) Stoicism, the imperial self-help dogma of the First Century, his theatre is intensely gruesome and makes Tarantino look tepid. Seneca’s world is dark, paranoid, intense and claustrophobic; a world where forgiveness and redemption are impossible and where monstrous passions consume individuals. ‘What can reason do? Passion, passion rules’, say Phaedra. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a world where blind Tiresias disembowels an Ox and Theseus tries to rebuild his son’s smashed body from its dismembered parts, ‘What can this be, so ugly? I do not know what part it is, but I know it belongs to you’.

4. Grief Lessons, Euripides, trans. Anne Carson. There is an unpleasantness about Euripides and a relentlessness that differentiates him from the other tragedians. Where Aeschylus looks at the story of the House of Atreus and sees a story of familial violence leading through bloodshed to the legitimate political order of Athens, Euripides looks at the same story and sees ‘smeared makeup’. After all her kids have been slaughtered, Hekabe finds out that destiny will transform her into a dog. Imagine an afterlife of dog biscuits.

5. Frames of War, Judith Butler. I share a passion for the moral ambiguity of Greek tragedy with Judith Butler and we are teaching a course together at the New School on the subject. My admiration for her work – its rigor, its honesty, its relentless self-questioning - increases with the years. The frame for tragedy is war and its centre is the experience of grief. The centre of Judith’s book is grief as a political category, of who counts (and who doesn’t) as a grievable population. Whatever we call what happened in North Africa last winter, at its centre is the politics of grief, for example in Benghazi this February, when guns were turned on mourners at a funeral in for people murdered at a protest.

6. Fanged Nuomena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Nick Land, eds. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay.

Nick and I were students together during the wild years at Essex University in the late 1980s. He had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With Nick - and rightly so - philosophy infected every area of life and sheer vitality of life reverberated in his thinking. I heard some of the texts in this book as talks and many of the others I read in draft. I’m really delighted that they are being published because I see this book as a kind of righteous revenge. Nick was dismissed by professional philosophers because they simply didn’t want to think and preferred their turgid academic complacency. Although Nick and I ended up - for stupid reasons that are best forgotten - as public enemies, I always privately admired him for his unwavering desire to take thought to its absolute limit and then see how much harder one could push. I wish I’d pushed harder.

Read Jill Stauffer’s interview with Critchley from our August 2003 issue

Why Lana Del Rey Scares Rock's Boys Club

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:58:33 -0500

Why Lana Del Rey Scares Rock's Boys Club: by Liz Phair (via The Wall Street Journal) Photo:...

Total Incarceration

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:02:02 -0500

Total Incarceration: In American prisons scattered across the various countries of the world, but...

In December 2011, leaders from around the world gathered at the...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:59:00 -0500

In December 2011, leaders from around the world gathered at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Doha, a forum meant to encourage dialogue between cultures and people.

The host nation, Qatar, asked Vangelis, the Greek composer, to create the music for the event, which also marked the inauguration of Doha’s cultural village and Greek-style amphitheatre. The event brought together celebrated artists from around the world and his music was written to formulate a message of hope.

Vangelis, one of the world’s most celebrated creators of electronic music and the Oscar-winning composer of the music for Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, came to a Middle East in the midst of upheaval at a time of financial crisis in his own country.

Al Jazeera’s Tony Harris met the composer to talk about the role of music in our times.

“What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty, because beauty is harmony which comes from chaos. But we invest in chaos, because chaos is much more profitable than peace …. Beauty is a kind of safety vault for people. And music as well. I don’t think music is beautiful today, music is just a way to advertise other things because music is very powerful as a force and then through music we can advertise anything we want …. When music becomes a product … something is wrong about that.

…To be interested in education, art, science culture, for me this is the key against the crisis today …. The banking crisis is not as important as the culture crisis. So when you deal with culture I think you can manage the rest easier. All the rest, all the misery comes because we don’t have beauty, you know, the quality of life. And quality of life is not money, quality of life is something else.”

Vangelis

(via Al Jazeera)

Sharon Van Etten was once an aspiring songwriter in Tennessee, but she had no idea how the music...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:09:32 -0500

Sharon Van Etten was once an aspiring songwriter in Tennessee, but she had no idea how the music...

A Glimpse Behind Bars: Juveniles In The Justice System

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:51:19 -0500

by Dana Farrington (via NPR) Photo: Richard Ross/Juvenile In Justice This 10-year-old, R.,...

miauniverse: M.I.A - BAD GIRLS

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:02:43 -0500

miauniverse:

M.I.A - BAD GIRLS

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012: The Szymborska Poem Above My Desk

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:30:12 -0500

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012: The Szymborska Poem Above My Desk: by Dana Stevens (via Slate) For...

Why do we believe? (by DMCMAGIC)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:59:54 -0500

Why do we believe?

(by DMCMAGIC)

sometimesagreatnotion: gloriaj: M. Ward,The First Time I Ran...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:56:23 -0500

sometimesagreatnotion:

gloriaj:

M. Ward,The First Time I Ran Away

There’s something about M. Ward’s music that makes me want to curl up in a blanket on a snowy day and watch hummingbirds through a window. It’s sweet without being cloying and patient. (Can music be patient? I think so.) Anyway, I love this song and I am eagerly anticipating his new album, A Wasteland Companion, that comes out in April.

Wow, this is beautiful. April can’t get here soon enough.

Jenny Owen Youngs: YOUR APARTMENT (by jennyowenyoungs)

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:51:21 -0500

Jenny Owen Youngs: YOUR APARTMENT (by jennyowenyoungs)

nervousacid: The Jealous Sound are not the type of band that...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:11:36 -0500

nervousacid:

The Jealous Sound are not the type of band that get Best New Musics or ubiquitous thinkpiece subjectification, which is to say that when their new album, A Gentle Reminder, comes out today, chances are you will not have heard about it unless you’ve already been paying careful attention. These are the records that are hardest to write about because they’re not instantly polarizing — like that other record that’s coming out today — or even particularly heady; it’s music with the potential to make you feel inarticulate. But thinking about this record makes me think about this thing Joan Didion wrote about lifting the unfussy title to George Orwell’s “Why I Write” for an essay of her own: “I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you.”

There’s a modest refrain in this song where Blair Shehan sings, “I can’t do this on my own,” and it’s just inexplicably affecting. Like so many of the songs on this record, “Change You” sums up in a no-nonsense way all he has to tell us. Shehan thrives in such unembellished sentiment — he, virtuoso of the downstroke pick and palm-muted guitar riff — but not without leaving behind the dismal premonition that so many of the records that will quite possibly go on to eclipse this one are teeming with the kind of nonsense this album plainly rejects. This is the kind of record that changes lives, unbeknownst to everyone.

"Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the..."

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:09:01 -0500

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It...

Raise the Crime Rate

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:48:02 -0500

Raise the Crime Rate: by Christopher Glazek (via n+1) Is it true that living in America has become...

Photo

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:59:33 -0500

2yellows: Bob Dylan - Not Dark Yet I’ve been down on the bottom...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:51:16 -0500

2yellows:

Bob Dylan - Not Dark Yet

I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

By Jon Schober and Mark Wheat Poliça had already recorded its...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:36:00 -0500

By Jon Schober and Mark Wheat

Poliça had already recorded its first full-length album before making its live debut locally. So the mystery behind the band after its inaugural show in September 2011 was already remarkably large — especially considering the musicians’ previous projects, which include Roma di Luna, Bon Iver and Gayngs.

Featuring Channy Leaneagh, Chris Bierden, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu, Poliça has already attracted widespread interest across the country. On the heels of a recent tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — and a record produced by Ryan Olson (Gayngs, Digitata) and mixed by Jim Eno of Spoon — the band has proven that releasing only a handful of tracks as a teaser can stand in for a big press push.

Poliça’s debut, Give You the Ghost, comes out Feb. 14, but the group has already released it on iTunes. The band’s song “Wandering Star” was recently featured on The Current’s latest compilation, Local Current, Vol. 2, alongside Doomtree, Nightmoves, Howler and more.

Setlist

“Wandering Star”
“The Maker”

Credits

Video by Nate Ryan; audio by Michael DeMark.

(via NPR)

curiositycounts: A world map of perceived political corruption,...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:42:11 -0500

curiositycounts:

A world map of perceived political corruption, part of Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

House of the Rising Sun (by LaurenOC12)

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:01:14 -0500

House of the Rising Sun (by LaurenOC12)