The Goalie's Anxiety

Barbed Wire Road Trip

2009-07-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Lyn and I have been working on our joint project, an interdisciplinary look at barbed wire in three contemporary literary works and at the nineteenth- and twentieth-century origins for the literary usage. She's mostly the expert on historical research, and I'm mostly responsible for the literary aspects. But it took both of us to drive through west-central Utah and east-central Nevada the last couple of days in search of images and ideas for the paper.

Near Oak City, Utah, just east of Delta, we found the "Fool Creek Flat" sign, welded together out of steel pipe, steel chain, cut steel plate, and steel barbed wire. It rises up next to the barbed-wire fence that is ubiquitous in the west, and that, in this case, has gathered a second rank of defense -- a knee-high layer of thorny tumbleweed (my legs will bear the scratches for the next week).

The sign signifies, at least as we read it, a Western cowboy toughness that tends to the scratchy.

If you're going to graze cattle and horses over wide swatches of ground, there's no real option but barbed wire. And if you're going to have roads through the country, the Nevada Department of Transportation will have to line them with barbed wire.

One of the benefits of research that requires traveling is that there are unexpected sights. After a long, wet, cool spring, the high mountain valleys east of Ely, Nevada, are brilliant with yellow composites and blue lupine and larkspur tucked in and around the sagebrush.

It's not easy to keep a wire fence taut, but you can tighten it by inserting a lever between two strands of the wire and twisting. A steel come-along helps with the dangly gate.

A barbed wire fence can also function as a gallery, as it does here at "Major's Place" on Highway 6 between Ely and Great Basin National Park. The fence flaunts a row of deer and pronghorn antlers, with the bighorn sheep skull in the center. Although we're trying to make sense of the disturbing practice of displaying killed coyotes on fences, this array at Major's Place seems at least partially an aesthetic exercise, and not just a statement of violent power.

Peter Handke's Best Book?

2009-06-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

Welches empfinden Sie als das beste Buch von Handke? Okay, blöde Frage. Die besten drei!

Which book do you think is Handke's best? Okay, stupid question. The best three!

This challenge is from the Peter Handke translator and psychoanalyst Michael Roloff, sent to several of us who like to converse about the work of the Austrian author whose novel title (in Roloff's translation) is the title of my blog.

Michael suggested we think about the best book of the various periods and genres.

The German literary critic and blogger Lothar Struck wrote that he thinks the recent Moravian Night is one of the best books, if not the best book. "Almost any other writer would receive the Nobel Prize for that book alone."

Michael responded to that assessment: "Wonderful, of course, I shall read it at least three times before writing on it. The bastard has become better and better and deeper and deeper."

I've hesitated to join the conversation, and only this morning realized why. I've got a complicated and sometimes troubled and always thankful and deeply personal and often quirky relationship with these books. I don't know if I can do this. But I'd like to find a way.

So my divisions and choices and equivocations are as follows:

1. The group that Suhrkamp Verlag published in paperback. I love to see the colors and uniform size on my shelf: See a photo of some of them above. I've arranged my books in various ways over the years, but keep coming back to color and size and publisher as a reasonable and aesthetic way to make words and things correspond. My favorite of this rainbow of books may be The Goalie's Anxiety. When Joseph Bloch finds that his map doesn't exactly correspond to the landscape, he and I breath deep sighs of relief. The authorities may not be able to find us after all.

2. The essays and play about the former Yugoslavia have shaped me and my thinking, have measured and cut and sanded my thoughts after providing possible blueprints. They affect me so much, in part, because I worked (am working) hard to translate them, and translation is, perhaps, the most intensive kind of reading. Because people comment on these Yugoslavia books, especially, without having read them, they have been controversial. Language is critical as we move toward or away from war. That's Peter's point. Journalists and politicians and commentators don't like to be reminded that they are sloppy with language. So they attack the messenger. And finally, these books remind me of the trip my friend Zarko and I took with Peter along the Drina River. It was one of the defining weeks of my life.

3. The big novels, written after criticism that Peter couldn't write big novels. Peter showed me a letter from Robert Straus, the American publisher, to Siegfried Unseld, Peter's German publisher, that opened with the sentence: "We've got a big problem. His name is Peter Handke." Straus' problem, of course, was that Peter had started to write a new kind of novel. And it wasn't selling. Selling lots of copies isn't one of my criteria, however, and each of these novels has given me hours of sanity and careful form and slow perception in a precipitous and unperceptive world. For my favorite of these, see my final entry.

4. Translations. Peter has made a lot of literature accessible to German readers through his translations from Greek, French, English, and Slovenian. Although I can read the English, I love his translation of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. I told Peter that I laughed when I came to the scene where Autolycus was selling ballads and found that one of them was Dylan's "Stuck in Mobile singing the Memphis blues." Yes, he said, I allowed myself that. Peter's little German/Croatian dictionary (he had added "Serbian" to the title so it accurately reflected the dual nature of the language) was well worn. I'd love to see the shelf of his dictionaries. Perhaps they would be my favorites of all his works.

5. Although I can't read them, Zarko Radakovic's translations of Peter's work have to fit in here somewhere. I first heard of Peter Handke in conversation with Zarko in Tuebingen, Germany. Zarko is an active and even bold translator. He sees his work with Peter's works as part of his larger creative project, which includes performance art, jazz criticism, novels, creative biography (Julija Knifer), and thematic editing. For instance, at the back of his translation of Peter's Kindergeschichte, Zarko presents a separate section featuring texts and works of art about childhood by the likes of Michael Hamburger, Braco Dimitrijevic, Ilma Rakusa, Tomaz Salamun, David Albahari, Martin Kippenberger, and yours truly. From Peter Handke's German to Serbo-Croatian. From Peter Handke's childhood to our own experiences. A fine textual textile.

6. This interweaving of texts makes it productively difficult to decide where to quit expanding the discussion of which of Peter's books have influenced me the most. Zarko's and my books: the first following a character from Peter's Repetition into Slovenia, and the second an account of our trip with Peter up the Drina River in the former Yugoslavia, would never have been written if we hadn't been reading Peter Handke.

7. Peter has written a lot of notes in the notebooks he carries everywhere with him, words and drawings to help him remember what he has seen. He also has reviewed the work of other writers, teaching me in the process that while it makes good sense to write about how a work works on the reviewer, its never even interesting to pronounce judgments on works of art.

8. And there are Peter's plays and poetry. Although it's not in this photo, but rather in the rainbow one, I'll choose the early Kaspar as especially important for me, a riff on Herder's claim that we don't speak language but that it speaks us. Kaspar, by the way, was wonderfully translated by Michael. The much later play, Voyage by Dugout, whose premiere I saw in Vienna, left me, as I stumbled out of the theater, with a fierce resolve to return often to Peter's work as a powerful antidote to what ails me (and the worlds I live in).

9. Peter wrote a children's book, which I include here as an excuse to reproduce my friend Thomas Deichmann's photo of Peter and his daughter Leocadie.

10. And finally, because I don't know which of Peter's works is the best, because I can't know, because I'm not smart enough to figure that out, I have to say that the book I like the best is the one I've worked hardest on, the one I've spent the most time with, the one that bears my marks, the one that I've written about critically ("Postmetaphysical Metaphysics") and personally (Zarko's and my Repetitions) -- Peter's novel Die Wiederholung / Repetition.

barbed wire

2009-06-16T19:01:00.000-07:00

Not much difference, we're finding out as we work on our "barbed and dangerous" article, between what we do with animals and with the human animal, although the human picture, of Bosnians in Trnopolje, is problematic, as my friend Thomas Deichmann has pointed out, because it's the ITN crew that is in the area enclosed by barbed wire, and the emaciated men have been called up to the fence for the TV footage. But that's another story.

Coyote near Lipan, Texas, Photo by Ken Kuhl

Tenure and Academic Freedom

2009-05-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

One of the comments on my post about ending the university as we know it, written by an old friend who is an academic librarian in South Carolina, brushes past my glib assumption that ending tenure is a silly idea and argues that tenure isn't necessary, that it lulls professors into early retirement, that a competitive market would be more productive, and that "historically it's done a lousy job of protecting radically outspoken critics from within the academy."

If we're talking about really radical critics (most recently, for instance, Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado), I guess I would agree. But that's not the end of the story. The fact that BYU, my former employer, did not fire me over the 11 years during which I was a more and more outspoken critic, I attribute entirely to the fact that I had tenure. And in my work with the American Association of University Professor over two decades, most of it having to do with challenging administrative decisions that failed to provide due process or to share governance with faculty members, having tenure always put us on more firm footing vis a vis the administrator, serving as a lever in our negotiations, reminding the "administration" that their position at a university is only one of several, and certainly not the most important or essential one.

End the University as We Know It?

2009-05-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

Mark Taylor's recent essay in the New York Times raises a dizzying and sometimes ditzy (abolish tenure as well as specialized dissertations???) set of issues. At one point he suggests turning disciplinary graduate and undergraduate programs into interdisciplinary groups:

The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

So far so good. Project-driven collaborative work makes good sense from the undergraduate classroom to the interdisciplinary evaluations that go on each morning in the local hospital. We named our Integrated Studies journal "Intersections" with precisely this in mind: multiple perspectives and approaches converge to create unexpected solutions.

What Mr. Taylor forgets is that perspectives and approaches come from disciplinary training. For his Water project, as he notes, he'll need trained hydrologists, legal experts, political scientists, and so on. Where will these people come from if the Department of Earth Studies and the law school have been abolished?

In our Program in Integrated Studies, we struggle with this conundrum every day. As our senior theses demonstrate again and again (at least the best of them), coming at a single problem from the perspectives of two different disciplines proves very fruitful. But our worst theses also prove that coming at a single problem without good tools learned in disparate disciplines is an exercise in futility.

Traveling and Writing

2009-04-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

Good News!

Next spring (2010), Jan Wellington (English) and I will offer a class on Traveling and Writing. Jan told me about an online journal called the Literary Traveler that had published a fine piece of hers about Oscar Wilde traveling in the Wild West. I sent them something I had written about following a Peter Handke character into Slovenia, and today they published it as their feature article.

See it HERE.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Photo and Stories

2009-04-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

For provocative, funny, and disturbing examples of interdisciplinary collaboration between a photographer (John Sellekaers) and a writer (Brian Evenson), take a look at Wag's Review HERE.

Paragon and Paradox: Brian Evenson's "Last Days"

2009-03-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Brian Evenson writes with a scalpel, paints with a fine camel-hair brush, composes novels like haikus.

Brian's words and sentences and images and plots are paragons -- Greek parakonan, to sharpen -- of the writer's craft, so precisely honed that his readers put their fingers at risk.

Like his earlier work, Brian's new novel Last Days (Underland Press, February 2009), has a dangerous edge; and here too the danger is oddly comforting, the sharpness as welcome as the rasp of the Scotch brought to protagonist Kline by multiple-amputee Gous: "Kline screwed the cap off the bottle and drank. It was good Scotch, or at least good enough. He took another mouthful then pushed the bottle over to Gous, who, using his forearms like chopsticks, managed to get it to his mouth."

Kline wakes up from the whiskey to a horrific revelation, but like all detectives who populate stories of this sort, he doggedly follows clues and combats evil until he solves (or kills or burns down) the crime.

So, if the crime is solved, the prose perfect, the Brotherhood of Mutilation cut off, where's the paradox?

It's on page 46.

There, after Kline is ushered ritualistically ("What is wanted? . . . Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we") into the presence of Borchert, whose multiple amputations qualify him as second in the brotherhood's hierarchy: "He was missing an arm and a leg, his robe cut away and left open at shoulder and hip to reveal the planed surfaces, hardly stumps at all. The other arm and leg were intact, though the hand was missing all but two of its fingers, the foot all but the big toe. Both ears, too, had been cut off, leaving only a hole and a shiny patch of flesh on either side of the head. One eyelid was open, revealing a piercing eye, the other closed but deflated, the eye under it clearly absent," Borchert wants to see Kline's amputation, the hand severed and "self-cauterized" before Kline shot the "gentleman with the cleaver" through the eye.

And here the paradox: "Kline went closer. He held his missing hand out; Borchert took it deftly between his remaining fingers and thumb and pulled it forward until it was only inches from his face, his eyes dilating."

His eyes?

Is Brian human after all? He wouldn't be the first writer to lose control. Tolstoy famously has the sun rise twice on the same day in War and Peace. And Peter Handke, describing Van Morrison's song "Coney Island"

(. . . Heading towards coney island/I look at the side of your face)

in his "Essay on the Successful Day," transposes Coney Island from Ireland to Brooklyn. It happens.

Brian's one-eyed man's eyes dilate. It's a mistake. Or perhaps it's a mistake Brian meant to make. Not a mistake at all. If it's the latter, then what is meant? Are there indications it might be meant?

The conversation continues until Borchert, who threatens to have Kline killed "for the good of the faith" unless Kline does what he asks, requires him to amputate one of his fingers with a cleaver, after which Borchert presses his new fingertip down onto a hot burner: "The flesh hissed, the blood hissing too, the air quickly filling with a smell that seemed to Kline like the smell of his own burning flesh. Now, he thought, it is time for Borchert to pick up the gun and shoot me through the eye. When Borchert took his finger away, Kline could still hear it hissing a little. And then Borchert turned to face him, his face wreathed in ecstasy, his eyes dilated wide."

Again, both of the one-eyed man's eyes dilate. This time it's in the context of Kline's ongoing identification with the person whose eye is exacted for an offense, as the biblical injunction that acts as the book's epigraph requires. When he kills, he kills himself. When he burns, he himself catches fire: "His shoes and legs and shirt were aflame. He tried to beat himself out. . . ."

He tried to beat himself out. He cut off Borchert's finger and became the man he shot. The detective who solves the crime becomes the crime.

Eyes?

Yes.

You can trust this writer, especially when he makes mistakes.

Cloud, mountain, moon

2009-02-08T08:19:00.000-08:00

This blague

2009-01-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

This blague is a French/English joke.

barbed wire borders

2009-01-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

Lyn and I are teaching a course on borderlands, using the US/Mexico borderlands as our primary example. Last week we read Gloria Anzaldua's book "Borderlands/La Frontera," and came across this poem (just a part reproduced here):

I press my hand to the steel curtain--

chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire--

rippling from the sea where Tijuana touches San Diego

unrolling over mountains

and plains

and deserts,

this "Tortilla Curtain" turning into el rio Grande

flowing down to the flatlands

of the Magic Valley of South Texas

its mouth emptying into the Gulf.

1,950 mile-long open wound

dividing a pueblo, a culture,

running down the length of my body,

staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me splits me

me raja me raja

This is my home

this thin edge of

barbwire.

We're all split, separated, divided, defined, limited, ordered by the boundaries we live on, by the borders that run, barbed and dangerous, through our psyches and our physical circumstances.

Anzaldua gets here at something Lyn and I are trying to think through for a paper we'll deliver at the next meeting of the Western Historical Society. A couple of paragraphs from our proposal:

Amy Irvine, in her memoire Trespass (North Point Press, 2008), tells of coming on a shocking scene in southern Utah: “Strung across the fence is a dead coyote. Blood drips from a fresh wound, blooms like a red Oriental poppy in the snow. . . . We climb over the fence and then lift the coyote off the barbed wire.”

Near the end of her 1998 story “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx writes: “In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack’s ashes go. ‘Tell you what, we got a family plot and he’s goin in it. . . .’ Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie. . . .”

And finally, also in 1998, Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a rail fence, and left to die outside Laramie. Laramie residents denied that their town is a homophobic place. We live and let live here, they kept saying, a western mantra that rings true until you bring homosexuals into the equation.

Barbed wire is a sometimes vicious alternative to the open range Proulx and Irvine offer in contrast. Our paper will explore the living and letting live, the fencing in and the fencing out, the practice of stringing up trophies as threats, and the depictions of such practices that can either reinforce them or unmask them.

[photo of a pronghorn leg caught in barbed wire by Ben Abbott]

East and West of Depression

2009-01-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Wild breakfast

2009-01-10T08:14:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning. We're sitting in bed drinking coffee, enjoying the first sunlight on Provo Peak. Something floats down outside the window. Then a feather rocks gently down the same path. A puff of down follows. More feathers, singly and in bursts.

A fat and happy kestrel.

Translation of the blurb advertising Vampiri + Razumni recnik

2008-12-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

The new novel by the most famous tandem of Serbian-American literature, a four-handed intimate artistic witness to the worlds we no longer belong to and to which we never belonged, to being foreign, and to the power of creative friendship in the work of interpreting a real and historical space that we understand less and less the closer we are. Undertake an exploratory journey through the para-regions of the literature of Peter Handke, through the labyrinths of translated originals and of original translations, through the realms of thought whose borders are the Rocky Mountains, Visegrad, Cologne, and Belgrade; allow this two-seater without steering to show you these borders in a way only you can experience!

The Actual Book, Virtually

2008-11-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

Vampires -- A Reasonable Dictionary

2008-11-13T20:11:00.000-08:00

u prodaji, broširani povez, 222 strane, 21 cm, latinica
Tiraž: 1000
UDK: 821.163.41-94
Beograd 2008.
1. izdanje
ISBN 978-86-7979-244-0

JUST PUBLISHED!

Vampiri - Razumni rečnik

Autor: Radaković Žarko; Abot Skot;

Cena: 600.00 din.

Ovaj naslov možete nabaviti:
Izdavac: Stubovi kulture ; Internet: knjizara.com

Novi roman najčuvenijeg tandema srpsko-američke književnosti, u četiri ruke ispisano artističko i intimno svedočanstvo o svetovima kojima više ne pripadamo i o svetovima čiji deo nikada nismo bili, o stranstvovanju koje se odlikuje svežinom pogleda i dubinom razumevanja, i o snazi kreativnog prijateljstva na poslu osvajanja i interpretiranja stvarnosnih i istorijskih prostora koje utoliko manje istinski razumevamo ukoliko su nam bliži. Po?ite u istraživačku šetnju paraprostorima Handkeove literature, lavirintima prevedenih originala i originalnih prevoda, duhovnim prostranstvima oivičenim Stenovitim planinama i Višegradom, Kelnom i Beogradom; dozvolite ovom književnom dvojcu bez kormilara da vam ih pokažu na način kako su ih jedino oni mogli doživeti!

November 13, 2008 Looking northeast, then southwest

2008-11-13T19:24:00.000-08:00

November 6, 2008 Looking south and then west

2008-11-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

Integrated Studies Course: Spring 2009

2008-11-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

"Once In A Blue Moon" Makes a Political Statement

2008-11-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

Elderberry Mead

2008-10-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago (five years? ten? time flies!), when Sam Rushforth and I were riding the Great Western Trail every day and writing about the rides for Catalyst Magazine, we watched a bush of elderberrys grow ripe next to the trail just inside Provo Canyon. The day we were planning to pick them they disappeared -- food for a ground squirrel that had been watching them even more carefully than we.

We were interested because the year before we had brought a load of them down to the city in our shirtfronts and with the LDS food-storage honey Sam and Nancy had been hording for decades, brewed a savory mead, the bitter elderberries a perfect match for the sweet honey.

This morning, Blue and I came down off the mountain where we had been hiking and ran across more elderberries, and I brought them home to eat with yogurt and with fond memories.

*sta- Understanding the Standing Metaphor

2008-10-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

Early in our class on "Language, most dangerous of possessions" (Hölderlin), we read Rousseau and Herder, two eighteenth-century writers who were disgusted with what they saw as the arbitrary and abstracted conventions of French and German civilization. One of their contentions was that civilized and civilizing language develops in its citizens increasing distance from the body.

Writing in the early twentieth century, the German poet Rilke said that he wanted to read the entire historical dictionary started a century earlier by the Grimm brothers (of fairy tale fame). That would take him back to the origins of words, to the "word kernels," to the metaphorical roots that are lost with time and use.

There are advantages to abstraction, I guess, to shifting meanings and new contexts, to abstract thinking.

But every time I want to understand an idea better, I turn first to the underlying metaphors, reach for the Grimm's dictionary or to the OED, and more often than I would have ever thought possible, the root of an important word comes from our sense for ourselves as upright, standing beings. For years I've been trying to sort out this one root, and here's a bit of what I've come up with:

It is at least as old as the Sphinx’s riddle:

What being, with only one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is weakest when it has the most?

Man, Oedipus answered, because he crawls on all fours as an infant, stands firmly on his two feet in his youth, and leans upon a staff in his old age. [Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955) 10.]

We call ourselves wise (homo sapiens) and argue that our language differentiates us from other species of animals. But even more substantially, we define ourselves by our ancestors’ revolutionary achievement of a standing posture (homo erectus). We became human, in one sense, because we stood up. In another sense, we are who we are because of what that physical act has been made to stand for. Reflecting the substantial nature of that original erection, our languages and cultures constantly, insistently, even obstinately establish superstitions and understandings related to the constituative circumstances of our existence by systematic reference to our station and stature as standing beings, as static and ecstatic beings whose destiny is to cause things to stand. As these words based on the *stā root illustrate, metaphors of standing determine our conceptions of time and space; they shape our understanding of existence and ecstacy; they are the tools and the subject of philosophy and painting, poetry and fiction, sculpture and law, history and psychology, anthropology and linguistics, archaelogy and teleology. Wherever, in short, humans have payed scientific or artistic attention to our status as human beings, we have done so through metaphors of standing.

And what is reflected and/or established in language is equally the case visually. Take this ancient Greek statue of a powerfully standing woman/goddess, her erect strength heightened by wings:

Or think about depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, which emphasize the destruction of his ability to stand (and about pictures of the resurrection, which show him upright again, no longer tied to the earth; the German word for resurrection, "Auferstehung," means "standing up again).

Or smile at Niki de St. Phalle's sculpture, with it's evocation of paradoxical lightness.

Homo erectus, indeed. In fact and metaphorically. Imagine our vocabulary if we were four-legged beings.

Families and Weddings

2008-09-27T21:33:00.001-07:00

I'm just back from Connecticut, where my son Tom married his partner in life and in jazz, Kelsey Merrow. Here's a picture of my seven children: Joe, Maren, Tom, Nate, Ben, Sam, and Tim. They look great; and the photo reminds me that as I battle my various personal demons, and as they battle theirs, we're family.

Photos and Identity

2008-09-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

For a book coming out in Belgrade in late October, the editor of Stubovi Kulture asked for a photograph of me to pair with a photo he had of my co-author Zarko Radakovic. I sent him several photos, each worse than the last; and after the email with attachments had been sent, I was left wondering, again, about photos and identity.

Today in Alex's and my class on language, we discussed a section of Michel Foucault's book "The Order of Things" in which he noted that a mirror image is a natural sign. It made sense in his context, but in the context of these photos, which one is a representation of the natural "me"?

None of them, of course, even touches who I am. They get at my grey hair and aging skin and show me in different poses. But I am as much psychological turmoil as I am a physical body and only a physiognomist with the Swiss pastor Lavater's insight could pair the two.

Repetition

2008-09-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Related views.

Same night.

Same camera.

The pleasures of repetition.