January 13, 2012

Swapping apartments with my landlord either in February or March, as her son is or isn't rolling back into town and she'll need the bigger (my current) apartment. The other apartment is a-okay but a bit further south (read: I saw a donkey drawn cart when I saw the place) but loads cheaper and nearish enough to the subway to make it a good move.

So this means that I've started packing. I already have about 8-10 boxes ready to go. I haven't started the real packing; I've just put most of my books into boxes. When I came here 3 years ago, everything I owned fit into two suitcases. Now, I need at least two maybe three bookcases. As I don't read a lot of fiction, it's harder to pawn my books to the local ex-pat coffee shops, donating to the libraries here is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the used bookstores pay less than the going rate for paper for books.

But there are much worse problems to have.

January 11, 2012

New Jack City (1991), Mario Van Peebles.
Boyz n the Hood (1991), John Singleton.

While watching these films on my day off the other day, I thought that it might have been fun to have been a Critical Theory/Film Studies professor in the early-to-mid 90s. I was trying to imagine the syllabus for a course called "New Jack Theory" that was something of an intro to theory and the mechanics of critical discourse.

Take the opening scene of New Jack City: A white man in a suit is being held over the rail of the Brooklyn Bridge by the henchman of Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes). The (Wall Street?) suit takes a header into the East River. If you screened Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) beforehand, you could discuss power dynamics, race representation, audience expectation, cultural production (and financing thereof), etc . . . .

December 19, 2011

"You can change the frame but you can't change the content." -- Ai Weiwei

29 November 2011

Happy to announce the arrival of SAGINAW no.1, featuring work by Erika Staiti, Geof Huth, Matthew Lusk, Chad Lietz, and K. Silem Mohammad.

If you're not on the SAGINAW mailing list and would like a copy, send an email with your postal address to unionherald@gmail.com.

November 19, 2011

Eric Bentley, "Introduction", in Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Intro, 1952; Signet Classics, 1980).

"Above all, Six Characters was not experimental. No first-rate art is. Experiments belong to science: The scientist decides on a hypothesis and then tests it, knowing that many tests will fail, but that he might make a breakthrough someday. That is not how artists work, and the 'experimental forms' of, say Conrad or Faulkner are really quite unexperimental: They evolved from the authors' original sense of narrative. And so, while Six Characters was something that came to his mind quickly, as in a vision, Pirandello had been working toward it for years . . . (ix).

November 13, 2011

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937; repr. Dover, 2004)

This week's subway read resonates all over the place: with what's happening in Beijing, what's happening in Oakland (America in general), and the failure of the Eurozone. A lot of Trotsky's animus comes from bureaucratic mismanagement and the cooking of the books that is necessitated by said mismanagement. Sure, he had Stalin in his sights, but it doesn't take much to use his rubrics, extrapolate a smidge, and analyze current situations.

October 28, 2011

I'm thinking about Baudelaire and drink. I'm thinking about Jim Carroll and junk. I'm thinking about Tristan Tzara and WWI.

Why are you a poet?

October 26, 2011

The problem with most living rooms is that they have a TV in them.

October 13, 2011

Finally made my way to the National Library of China. Spent the better part of a day in a leather arm chair overlooking the rest of the library reading from their foreign journals section.

October 13, 2011

A current events quiz by the Pew Foundation.