Kit Robinson on Larry Eigner

In Eigner, the desire to know anchors itself in the discrete particular, recording sense data in an empiricism derived from Williams, Pound, and Olson, then stretches itself by a series of shifts of attention, to create an arching figure for knowledge. The shapes those figures take are products of an insistent, restless movement on the one hand, and on the other a refusal to compromise the harvest of the moment by subordinating it to any totalizing statement. Thus the dialectical movement of the poems is made possible by an openness to embrace the manifest, contingent phenomena of temporal existence and a willingness of mind to release its hold at any point. The truth of the mortality of the subject is thus built into its appropriation of the world.

more from EPC

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Journalists cheat death in Georgia

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes

GETTING A HOLD

The foreign objects are related to the accent
adopted on moving to the coast or the slang she picked up later
slung across the countertop or the glassy essence she was
drinking from a transparent object she got in a pawnshop
which defines what it’s like to hold a cup.

Or water running through one’s hands.

She meant to bring him some as well
and an invitation to an occasion she couldn’t name
like “getting hold of yourself” is wrapping a hand around
or a way of phrasing a song too fast to catch the words.

more from Martha Ronk in Jacket

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Who got Georgia into this?

Moscow will stop pummeling Georgia when it decides the Georgians have truly been punished enough. And this being the real world, punishment will rain down on the pawns — but those who egged them on (to score political points, seek power or gain profit) will, of course, face no punishment at all.

Rosa Brooks at the LA times

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All one sentence

If China becomes as the US is today in world-power terms – which it will: get the Mandarin textbooks out folks – yet keeps its current regime and outlook, US history will look like a legend of saints. That is why the pressure has to be kept up on China to reform its political institutions and human rights record – systematically one of the worst in the world: experto crede, I had years’ worth of attendance at the UN Commission and Sub-Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, lobbying on China matters, and know the litany of charges by heart – because we or our children are going to be very influenced by decisions made in Beijing.

more from the Guardian

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The Front-Runner’s Fall

by Joshua Green

Two things struck me right away.  The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning.  It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea ll along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinksy, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters).  The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men.  Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House.  But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution.  Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

More from The Atlantic Monthly

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A Midrashic Chain : Deixis

Taking all this into consideration I still, like you, see the line break as the one thing that separates poetry from prose if we take the line break to be an enforced segmentivity that does not follow the laws of grammar and syntax. Thus the new sentence would be poetic in the same way that a pentameter would be; both should not end where they do and how they do within the normative rules of rational grammar and rational syntax. With nonrational poetry being defined by what it has that’s extra, what it holds over in remainder, the semantic break at its heart.   Lyn  [Hejinian] at the Exmouth conference suggested that absence within nonrational poetics was a dead end, but in this way absence is the very thing in excess of presence that sets poetry free from rationality while retaining materiality. A gap is as much of a mark, as much of a thing, within the segment, as the mark.

more from William Watkin and Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the new Jacket

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Offshore Drilling and Energy Conservation: The Relative Impact on Gas Prices

Senater McCain recently proposed opening up environmentally sensitive offshore zones to drilling in response to the recent jump in oil and gas prices. He argues that increased offshore production will reduce dependence on foreign oil, in addition to lowering gas prices.

However, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects that Senator McCain’s proposal would have no impact in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil can be extracted from the currently protected offshore areas. The EIA projects that production will reach 200,000 barrels a day (0.2 percent of projected world production) at peack production in close to tenty years. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.

more from the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Global Pharmacy/Global Warming

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralizing (Moralitat) from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices (Sittlichkeit).  But it finds its definitive form in Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture.  In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment.  We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.  The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.
-Frederic Jameson, from Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

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