OK so now my address book is getting spammed by Shelfari

Not easy to avoid inviting everyone you know even if you know they don't want to know or want to read what you read. Not so good and that you seem like one of those annoying people who spam all their friends. So far OK finding books to add but no perfect. Something other than relevancy is at work if the book is not currently available (or maybe not available on Amazon). For example, an author search for Steve Abbot puts a bunch of authors with Steve and or Abbott in their name ahead of many of his older books when he is clearly the closest author match for his own name. I have not done any review writing or other adding comments or notes and am too new along with my Shelfari friends to have a good feel for how much worthwhile reading I will discover this way.

Jennifer Blowdryer is a Stealth Marketer for Amazon!

OK so maybe my favorite puck rocker/writer/performer/personality isn't really a stealth marketer for Amazon but she did get me to sign up for Shelfari which as you can see from the link is by Amazon. I guess it should be no surprise that Amazon would own a site for listing your books and recommending books to others. No wonder the buy the book option takes you there. Still apart from the rather aggressive hand over your address book and we'll invite all your friends effort to add folks to the site so far it is kind of fun adding books. And Miss Blowdryer has often steered me well in the book department. If it works out, I'll ad my little book list here.

Off to my office to work now. (That other kind of work that pays for everything else I do.)

Experiments from Dodie Bellamy's Workshop

I've been meaning to put up some of the experiments from Dodie's workshop for a while and am now finally getting to it. I will continue to update these as I did back through my emails and find old ones. I will also put up new ones from the fall workshop.

Dodie's Original Description of the Workshop

Most weeks students will be assigned a short take-home writing
experiment which they will share with the class the following week.
Assignments will range from cut ups to exploring bodily sensations.
Assignments are geared towards the class dynamic, so they may
eventually drop away or they may continue for the duration of the
class.

Some of the Assignments by Email Received Date

Nov 21, 2006 4:00 PM

Write your earliest memory/memories.  You may do whatever you want
with this, but things to consider:  what was your relationship to
language back then and thus your relationship to perception?  Does
the memory have words or is it purely sensual?  How does the memory
come to you?  In clarity, flashes, blurry bits?  Do you tap into an
earlier form of thinking?  How solid is reality?

Jan 31, 2007 12:42 AM

Slow down time.  Take an event that happens very quickly and extend
the moment for one to two pages, double spaced.  Bring copies for all.

Feb 7, 2007 12:40 AM

raw data of sense experience

I've attached the exercise again as a Word file, in case you misplace
the handout.

from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

Definition of qualia:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers
over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem
to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases,
I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective
character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each
state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the
term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively
accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.


Examples of qualia:

(1) Perceptual experiences, for example, experiences of the sort
involved in seeing green, hearing loud trumpets, tasting liquorice,
smelling the sea air, handling a piece of fur. (2) Bodily sensations,
for example, feeling a twinge of pain, feeling an itch, feeling
hungry, having a stomach ache, feeling hot, feeling dizzy. Think here
also of experiences such as those present during orgasm or while
running flat-out. (3) Felt reactions or passions or emotions, for
example, feeling delight, lust, fear, love, feeling grief, jealousy,
regret. (4) Felt moods, for example, feeling elated, depressed, calm,
bored, tense, miserable.

A tale about qualia:

The literature on qualia is filled with thought-experiments of one
sort or another. Perhaps the most famous of these is the case of
Mary, the brilliant color scientist. Mary, so the story goes (Jackson
1982), is imprisoned in a black and white room. Never having been
permitted to leave it, she acquires information about the world
outside from the black and white books her captors have made
available to her, from the black and white television sets attached
to external cameras, and from the black and white monitor screens
hooked up to banks of computers. As time passes, Mary acquires more
and more information about the physical aspects of color and color
vision. (For a real life case of a visual scientist (Knut Nordby) who
is an achromotope, see Sacks 1996, Chapter 1.) Eventually, Mary
becomes the world's leading authority on these matters. Indeed she
comes to know all the physical facts pertinent to everyday colors and
color vision.

Still, she wonders to herself: What do people in the outside world
experience when they see the various colors? What is it like for them
to see red or green? One day her captors release her. She is free at
last to see things with their real colors (and free too to scrub off
the awful black and white paint that covers her body). She steps
outside her room into a garden full of flowers. "So, that is what it
is like to experience red," she exclaims, as she sees a red rose.
"And that," she adds, looking down at the grass, "is what it is like
to experience green."

Mary here seems to make some important discoveries. She seems to find
out things she did not know before. How can that be, if, as seems
possible, at least in principle, she has all the physical information
there is to have about color and color vision -- if she knows all the
pertinent physical facts?

One possible explanation is that that there is a realm of subjective,
phenomenal qualities associated with color, qualities the intrinsic
nature of which Mary comes to discover upon her release, as she
herself undergoes the various new color experiences. Before she left
her room, she only knew the objective, physical basis of those
subjective qualities, their causes and effects, and various relations
of similarity and difference. She had no knowledge of the subjective
qualities in themselves.

Attached Assignment

From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze

by Katharine Wolfe

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=382

In the Critique of Pure Reason, as Daniel W. Smith explains, the form given to the phenomenal through reflection of the transcendental is what Kant calls the "object = x."[8] This is an empty form that only receives qualitative specifications when related to a multiplicity of phenomenal qualia held together through mental operations. White, thin, and sheet-like bark, dark-black knots, and a thin trunk, for example, are synthesized together mentally to form the object known as a birch tree. Moreover, Kant claims it is such a synthesis that allows the various qualitative impressions had of the birch tree, the sun, one's own hand, and more to be shared between the various faculties. It is because of this synthesis that the same qualia present themselves when, for example, I imagine a birch tree as when I conceptualize one. Pushing Kant's claim further, it might be posited that this synthesis is also what allows each of our various senses to present the same object to us such that when I put my hand to the white sheet-like bark of the tree, the feel of the bark indicates it is a birch tree I am touching, just as the visual appearance of its knots and leaves likewise indicates.

-------------

Perception's requisite of a sensible unit of measure, encountered in the aesthetic comprehension of the beautiful, sets up a path to the sublime. This two-way relation between the mental faculty of imagination and the sensible world opens sense experience to constant variation as new units of measure emerge. Thus the constancy of a shared sensory world is called into question. In a sensible world of constant variation, what could be constantly the same not only everywhere and for everyone but even for our own senses and faculties? Here, the sublime comes crashing in. The sublime is a mode of aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being overturned. Indeed, an experience of the variation of a sensible measure is only a minor form of such loss. It can happen not only that sensible units of measure vary in accordance with the phenomena but, moreover, that for a particular phenomenon there is no commensurable measure. Further still, insofar as it is a sensible unit of measure that is necessary for the synthesis of empirical parts in accordance with an object-form, an experience of the sublime is one in which there is no synthesis. The parts cannot be counted, and a form cannot be produced.

----------------

According to Deleuze, it is from these ashes that arises the new kind of relationality indicative of James' radical empiricism. Whereas a traditional empiricism understands the empirical as the domain of discrete parts, at the heart of James' philosophy is the contention that relations are not derivations of a mental operation upon the raw data of sense experience, as Kant asserts by way of his account of syntheses. Rather, relations are themselves immediately sensed. Indeed, they are only sensed. Brian Massumi captures this insight in James: "relationality… registers materially in the activity of the body before it registers consciously" and thus "we do not run because we are afraid, but we are afraid because we run."[31] Immediately sensed relations, then, are of a world wherein, to follow the terms Rancière takes from Flaubert, the pearls not only individuate themselves but string themselves together.

Indeed, the pearls only individuate themselves in this very relationality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is helpful here. He offers as exemplary the phenomenon of two contrasting colors appearing side by side, each intensifying each other and generating their value in this, such that, as Claudel writes,"a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more red."[32] Deleuze himself offers just the image Rancière employs to crystallize his reservations about the political potential in Deleuze's philosophy; the image of a wall composed of 'loose, uncemented stones.' Such an image emphasizes the import of interrelations to the being of the phenomena, yet these interrelations do not form a whole fusing parts into a proper and immutable place. Rather, they form a whole world of individuations existing only in relation with others.

-----------------

A wall of "loose, uncemented stones," in contrast, is a whole world outside this domain insofar as to divide these stones from their relations is to alter their nature. This world is the world of the percipiendum, that which must be perceived. Just as yellow and blue vanish from sight upon reaching a critical point of proximity with one another, changing in nature to produce green, relations of critical proximity produce every discrete element available to perception. 'Imperceptible' individuations constitute the perceived, and the perceived here forces itself upon our body just like a color so bright one cannot turn one's eyes from it.

September 17th 2007

Again--here is our assignment. It's based on our very interesting
discussion we had at our last session. Kevin's theory that all great
writing is reacting against something. Masha's discussion of writing
against various popular lesbian modes. This will be a two part
assignment. Here's the first part. Think of some writing that you
hate/dislike/that bugs you and write a page or two as much as
possible *in the mode* of what you dislike. The point is to explore
what you dislike from the inside. I'll give the second part of the
assignment on the 25th.

Writing Against/Writing Toward (Last Workshop of the Summer-Tuesday 9/11/07)

Last night's final workshop wrapped up with a discussion of writing against or in opposition to other writing. Sparked by Masha's expressed discomfort with writing that seemed to offer her no place in its specific landscape and her written reaction to it, the conversation spanned techniques and strategies such as appropriation and collage and motivation writing against something else. Kevin suggested that no good writing or art came without being against something else.

As the conversation moved to specific discussions of what some members of the workshop wrote against, I found myself wondering what I wrote against or if I even wrote against anything. It seemed to me that my absent career and near complete non-publication argued for a strong anti-something aesthetic but against what exactly, success? Or did I write toward the past in a misguided study and pursuit of the elusive New Narrative?

And then in my pun to Stephen suggesting he inappropriate instead of appropriate I realized what it is I write against. I write against imposed limits on ideas, forms, content in writing. I write against the coy allegedly edgy experimenters who are oh so daring while risking nothing. It is the real risk, the danger suggested in New Narrative of putting the self, the body, biography into story without the safety of plausible deniability that drives me. It is this impulse that I write toward and the writing that is safe, contained and otherwise un-bloody that I write against.

And an elegant evening was had by all...

A most musical and manic weak. Mama Mia with La Blowdryer who brought me the most delightful gift from her sojourn to Mexico and then an only in San Francisco opening night at the Opera. The season is certainly in full swing with lots more excitement to come and many more hard choices to make. Had to miss Kevin Killian's new play to attend the opera and will no doubt face more difficult choices to come.

Tonight is the end of Dodie Bellamy's summer workshop but despite dire warnings of no more to come (an oft repeated threat I think) the fall workshop begins in two weeks. The fall figs are in at the farmers market. The corn is past its peak if Sunday's sample is to be believed but the dry farmed heirloom tomatoes and luscious stone fruits are still filling the stands. Hard to really believe that we have an off season here but it will come eventually. Until then happy eating.

And so what does this have to do with New Narrative and Experimental Writing? Perhaps it is the personal in the composition. I am reading Steve Abbott's View Askew and delighting in the descriptions of visits to Stonestown Shopping center as performance and thinking about the way for a time the New Narrative crowd seemed to blur the borders of being and creating. (At least in the stories written down).

So Mama Mia was fun but not nearly the supercharged music and dance fest Missy Blowdryer and I wanted it to be. After nearly being sucked into the sticky floored all you can eat buffet at China Moon we found a delightful if not so very spicy Thai restaurant, Lalas, at the foot of McAllistar. Jennifer, suffering a bit from a family inflicted vacation cold, led me through the delights and travails of her Mexican adventure which seemed much more authentic than my not so long ago Spa fest courtesy of my boyfriends company. After dinner we were ready for a rollicking sensory sensation as the ads for Mama Mia seemed to promise.

Alas, perched up in the balcony we had to peer down at a good half an hour of plot building exposition with not so much singing and dancing. The music and dancing picks up as the show continues and does finally hit its stride with the big wedding party. But it is a longtime coming and the odd straight humor and weird quasi morality play plot had both of us longing for something a little queer or kinky. (If you're reading this JB, I owe you a dinner for this one.)

Now the opera was something else all together. Tough for the performance on stage to compete with the show before, during or after in the audience. Lots of green and blue gowns which I read the next day are the color institutes colors for this year. The luxurious silky mossy olivey green being driven by the Eco green trend and the liquid luxuriously light wet turquoisey blue driven by something else. The guest of a corporate sponsor (can't say who here), I attended a reception at city hall before (complete with Samson and Delilah themed dancers and lots of champagne) and a fancy dinner afterward. This was apparently the young trendy crowd as opposed to the old dowagers across the street.

Personally I loved the opera though I do agree with some of the criticism of Samson. I was saying all evening it was a very Cecile B. Demille sort of production and then the next day so it was described in the reviews. More on this an perhaps some edits to this post soon but off to the office now.