storier-blog

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“Never say die. We’ll get along!”

--Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times

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The days slowly getting shorter, the herbs hung drying as the woods turned golden. Everything changes on the prairies at the end of summer, all coming to ripeness, and the thunderheads charging in the magnetic moisture of the vast skies. The autumnal dances are the best medicine against the threat of winter, isolation again, dangers. The barns were turned into dance halls before the winter hay was cut. The women raised their long skirts and danced toward hell in schottisches, round dances, and square dances. The rafters rang with the music of the old fiddlers and the harmonica players.

When the golden leaves stacked Persian carpets on the ground and the cornfields were bare, we saw again the great hunched land naked, sometimes fall plowed or planted in winter wheat. Slowly the curve seemed to rise out of the glut of summer, and the earth document was visible script, readable in the human tenderness of risk and ruin.

The owl rides the meadow at his hunt hour. The fox clears out the pheasants and the partridges in the cornfield. Jupiter rests above Antares, and the fall moon hooks itself into the prairie sod. A dark wind flows down from Mandan as the Indians slowly move out of the summer campground to go back to the reservation. Aries, buck of the sky, leaps to the outer rim and mates with earth. Root and seed turn into flesh. We turn back to each other in the dark together, in the short days, in the dangerous cold, on the rim of a perpetual wilderness.

--Meridel Le Sueur, “The Ancient People and the Newly Come,” Growing up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods

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A certain regime of ownership, a certain order, a certain ideology -- remains at a deeper level. Now a remarkable phenomenon occurs in the matter of naming this regime: as an economic fact, the bourgeoisie is named without any difficulty: capitalism is openly professed. As a political fact, the bourgeoisie has some difficulty in acknowledging itself: there are no ‘bourgeois’ parties in the Chamber. As an ideological fact, it completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real exnominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. ‘Bourgeois’, ‘petit-bourgeois’, ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’ are the locus of an unceasing hemorrhage: meaning flows out of them until their very name becomes unnecessary.

--Roland Barthes, Mythologies

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Barthes explains: “Truth to tell, the best weapon against” ideology is to ideologize in its turn, and to produce an “artificial” ideology. Because ideology “robs” one of something, why not rob ideology?

--Chela Sandoval, Methodology of Emancipation the Oppressed

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History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.

--Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious

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Part human, part animal, capable of presenting himself as one or the other at any moment, a creature of vision dominated by appetites, he stares out at us from the dripping limestone walls of Trois Fréres, a Paleolithic image of ourselves. That cave painting may be the closest anyone has come to trapping him in time and space. He lives best in the ephemeral world of words. There, though some of his exploits assume familiar patterns, he survives clothed in culture-specific features, running under a number of aliases: Hermes, Prometheus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas, Melville’s confidence men, Mann’s Felix Krull, Ellison’s Rinehart, Bellow’s Augie March. 

“Coyote was going along,” the stories usually begin . . .

--Andrew Wiget, “His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster and the Literature of Possibility,” Redefining American Literary History

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Ain't it the land of opportoonity? --John Dos Passos, _Manhattan Transfer_

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TRAIN RIDE

Clocks stall at Union Station.

Red lights flash and time becomes distance.

People sing and roll luggage to the cars.

That is the boarding call.

A conductor in blue coat and cap says, “Just look at this river right now.”

“I know,” I say, “I can see it from my side. Just think of all that rain.”

In the flooded dog park, water brims over and makes soft mud.

“No weekend in Cali for me this ride,” he says. “We’re turning back at Reno before the floods. And shit, I got some friends in L.A. too.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s all right. Nothing. We’ll only stay a day in Nevada and then turn back to Chicago. I get some extra hours then. No time and half. No, but it’s still something.”  

The noise of metal wheels and couplings bending over tracks fills the cars when diners pass through automatic doors.

Near Fort Morgan after sunset, a conductor says, “I’d like to get a cup of coffee in my hand.”

A dude in the lounge goes to get his djembe for this drummer right here from Salt Lake City. He says, “Yeah, go get your drum. I can show you some tricks.”

Somebody asks, “How can I get Wi-Fi?”

The drummer laughs, “You have to stand like this (reaching up like a mountain climber) and face the North Star to get it on! Get yourself a bud heavy from the cafe.”

And they talk of cities from Norfolk to Houston

And I woke up high over Albuquerque

On a jet to the Promised Land

The prairie gets quiet, and soon, only railroad crossing bells and silos, lit orange at night, trace the land.

Past Hastings, I read Ecclesiastes and turn to look again at wisdom and madness. What can he do who comes after all those kings?

I am in Lincoln before sunrise.

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I found a large rock overlooking the gorge and took a nap while Dad walked farther down the trail. He was visiting me in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the spring of 2010. He walked south along the eastern rim with the Linville River running its course a thousand feet below.

We drove that morning for about two and a half hours over curved mountains roads. About halfway into the trip, we passed an abandoned gem mine and dad asked me if I was sure if I knew where I was going. I said that I did.

This was the third time I had been to the gorge and the last ten miles of gravel road put the car through spiraling pirouettes down lanes marked increasingly vague. Cell phones do not get service and navigators need detailed notes or a map deep in the forest.

When I awoke on the rock cliff, he returned from his walk and said that he was glad to have come to this place.

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Emulating the presence of absent bodies and forces is literally what our linguistic skills evolved for. An advanced extension of inarticulate communal singing, language is believed to have developed due to a dramatic increase in the size of social groups. Once the mean social group size surpassed a certain number of individuals, the distant ancestors of humans were no longer capable of maintaining a proportionally advantageous number of allies by the bodily act of grooming alone. Producing articulate sounds instead, they acquired an ability to manage their social relations without having to physically attend to one individual at a time. Thus ... language, rather than having evolved from abstract, that is, highly conceptual, visual gestures (as suggested in previous research), came into being in order to replace the preconceptual action of touching.

--Anežka Kuzmičová, “The Words and Worlds of Literary Narrative,” Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative

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We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country.

The first project was, to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because, in reality, all things imaginable are but nouns.

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.

--Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

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after “Rainer Mimmo (Bird)” by Mary Catania Murphy

candles on the table

collared shoulder to the bell tower

eyes on flames and chin to blue flowers

“and now let us welcome another year

full of the things that have never been”

blue and white candles

the bird is not a turkey

the bird is blue

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SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER? gather round the water where bright limbs shine re do current tides go crystal sands touch light sky do re

gather round the water yes moon yes O re fa go walk down to angels silver sand banks do re

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“The state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.”

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It is difficult to steer a firm course between systematic thinking and essayism. --Henri Lefebvre, _Critique of Everyday Life_

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Since Michel Leiris’s early essay of 1950, “L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme” (but why so late?), anthropology has had to reckon with historical determination and political conflict in its midst. A rapid decade, from 1950 to 1960, saw the end of empire become a widely accepted project, if not an accomplished fact... Imperial relations, formal and informal, were no longer the accepted rules of the game--to be reformed piecemeal, or ironically distanced in various ways. Enduring power inequalities had clearly constrained ethnographic practice. The “situation” was felt earliest in France, largely because of the Vietnamese and Algerian conflicts and through the writings of an ethnographically aware group of black intellectuals and poets, the négritude movement of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, René Ménil, and Léon Damas...

In popular imagery the ethnographer has shifted from a sympathetic, authoritative observer (best incarnated, perhaps, by Margaret Mead) to the unflattering figure portrayed by Vine Deloria in Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). Indeed, the negative portrait has sometimes hardened into caricature--the ambitious social scientist making off with tribal lore and giving nothing in return, imposing crude portraits on subtle people, or (most recently) serving as dupe for sophisticated informants. Such portraits are about as realistic as the earlier heroic versions of participant-observation. Ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations. But its function within these relations is complex, often ambivalent, potentially counter-hegemonic.

Different rules of the game for ethnography are now emerging in many parts of the world...

--Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus

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from Andrew Ross’s Creditocracy (2013):

Here are some of the more obvious areas where employers have been taking advantage of the worst employment market (and the weakest jobs recovery) since the 1930s. In each case, the violations of fair labor standards are magnified by an underlying condition of indebtedness:

In the realm of digital work, the establishment of free online media content as an industrial norm; extensive data mining from social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter . . .; e-lance programs . . .; crowdsourcing as an industrial principle . . . The more interesting and challenging a conceptual task is, the more likely it will be done for free by those willing to donate their time.

Internships are no longer a rite of passage into the professional service sector; they have become near-obligatory in almost every white-collar or no-collar niche of the economy. In many cases, they are becoming a terminal limbo, not unlike the time spent by some graduate students in teaching . . . In the last few years, unpaid internships have become the norm, especially for women, and according to one 2011 estimate, cumulatively provide a $2 billion subsidy to employers in the U.S. alone.

Wage theft has become a massive source of free labor for employers who routinely violate wages and hours laws, either by denying employees backpay, refusing to pay overtime, pocketing tips, paying below the minimum wage, or by demanding off-the-clock hours. . . . The multitude of check cashers, pawners, payday lenders, and other sharks in the poverty business are committing a form of wage theft from people who are denied the full fruits of their labor because they cannot be members of a mainstream bank.

The pressure of import prices and recessionary drops in consumer demand has led employers to seek out sharply discounted prison labor in ever greater quantities . . . an estimated one million inmates are now tasked at sub-minimum wages.

Student debt itself, as I have suggested, is a form of precocious wage theft, but avoidance of it also has a significant labor impact. A sizable portion of the academic curriculum has long been taught by graduate employees, looking for alternatives to the debt-financing of their studies. But campuses are now increasingly run on the back of their cheap undergraduate workforce. . . . In college towns, a variety of employers will take advantage of this desperation by treating the student body as a reserve army of cheap, temporary labor.

Last, but not least, contestant volunteering has transformed many sectors of the entertainment industries into an amateur talent show, with jackpot riches for a few winners and peanuts for everybody else. The talent show/reality TV model has now become an industry standard . . . Young people have accepted that this is the way of the world, and that they can only get ahead by offering their self-fashioned labor in advance and gratis, in hopes of being noticed and favored. (153-160)