"we might have confused in the past two entirely different meanings of the word
“correspondence”: the first seems to rely on a resemblance between two elements
(signs on the map and territory, or, more philosophically words and worlds); while
the second emphasizes the establishment of some relevance that allows a navigator to
align several successive sign posts along a trajectory. While the first meaning implies what
William James called a salto mortale between two, and only two, end points through a
huge gap, the second defines what James called a deambulation between many
successive stepping stones in order to achieve the miracle of reference by making
sure that there are as little gap as possible between two successive links (James,
1907). Both are depending on correspondence, but one engages the mapping
impulse into an impasse (ironically recorded by Borges’ fable: is the map similar to
the territory?) while the other allows to move away from it and deploy the whole
chain of production that has always been associated with map making —as we
recognized above.
To make clear the difference between the two meanings, we are going to call
the first one the mimetic interpretation, and the second the navigational
interpretation of maps."
Bruno Latour et al.

peppi

Peppi Dlinnyichulok povest-skazka by Lungina L. Lindgren A.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I heart Peppi, or Pippi, if you like. When I was in elementary school, the Soviet television version came out (1982) and to watch the premiere, i would have had to miss school. (That makes no sense to me, but is true. Perhaps, it was a case of one of those silly occasions, when a weekend was declared to begin on Friday, and all the Soviet citizenry had to put in a day of work on a Sunday following. Or maybe the anti-authoritarian streak in Peppi was deemed slightly dangerous: not quite dangerous enough to prohibit, but suspicious enough for the censorious television programmer not to grant it the primest spot.
Somehow I convinced my mother to let me stay home that day. At the time, I was just becoming friends with a prettiest girl in my class. ( at least that's how I remember her). Things weren't going well with my then girlfriend Olya, and I was eager to cultivate Oksana, who was the 'starosta' of our class (something like an honorary student, perfect grades, neatest demeanor and costuming, a model of disciplined young pioneer, who was responsible for reminding the other nine year olds to behave and to study). I lived in the old part of Baku, and every morning Oksana would come by my house, and i would take her to school always by a different route, through a different winding little alleyway, except on the day of Peppi the Movie. As I tried, leaning out the window, to blame the elaborate hoarseness of my voice on yesterday's ice cream (oh, how different from those other occasions when the real cough, initiator of a bronchitis, had to be concealed from the parents: "No,no, just choking on my saliva"), Oksana stomped her feet, and shouting like one who is being betrayed: "Liar! You just want to watch Peppi!", she raced away. That romance withered. Peppi is a zealous mistress and brooks no opposition.

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Istorii iz moei sobstvennoi zhizni by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The first part, describing her childhood in the 1930s and 40s is amazing. Moody, bizarre, scandalous, terrible, touching, gripping. The rest of the book is very informative, but has a different tone.She is forever in my personal museum, (excuse me, memory palace, with refreshments, flirting, light jazz, fountains, and all, although she is also guarding some pretty wicked trap doors in there) for having helped Yury Norstein with the script for "Tale of Tales'. I like her short stories quite a bit, although I know her more recent fairy tales better than her older, more naturalistic stories. But it may be that she is most important as the playwright of 'Cinzano'. I reserve judgment until i find a volume of her drama.

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died in June

David Markson
Arie "Lova" Eliav

died

May 2010
Leslie Scalapino
Peter Orlovsky
Paul Brown's cat
Dennis Hopper
Gary Coleman
Louise Bourgeois

Dmitry Gorchev - "Alcohol"

Dmitry Gorchev is a writer who mostly published in the net. He died recently. I translated this piece called "Alcohol" using Google translator and edited it a bit.

--

How wonderful is a drunken man! When he lies with his pants down on the pavement near the entrance to the railway station, any passer by will surely feel a sense of pride. Pride for himself, not for the drunken man, but so what? Who is more free in this world - he who comes home from his hateful work, who with regularity pulls its rigid strap, bears his splintery cross, and pays his exorbitant rent, or the one who, knowing no worries, freely sprawls in a stinking pool?

Suppose that he is despised, dirty, driven away from any employment, lonely and not much to look at. Yet it was he who took Bastille, and the Winter Palace, wrote the opera 'Khovanshchina', the epic 'Moscow to End of the Line', and the poem 'Golden grove had said its piece''. While the teetotalers gave the world Hitler and Chikatillo.

Here's a drunken man wading knee-deep through the see like he was on dry ground; while everybody else has long been drowned, he is on his way somewhere in the underwater City of Kitezh looking for beer.

There he goes on foot to the sky, but he stumbled and fell, straight at the enemy bunker. And the enemy chokes on his own bullets, then twisted out and turned into a policeman. And our hero came to under a shivering lightbulb of the law.

Drunken man is always pursued. Demons with eagles' heads hunt him relentlessly, they lie in wait for him while he, barely dragging his feet, is returning from his nightwatch. They press him to the ground and drag him to their hell. There they torture him till morning to make him reveal a Classified Information, but to this day not one prisoner revealed it, and that is why we are all still alive. Shaking with anger, the demons chase the hero out from Hell, back under the cold and hateful (to them) morning sun. Who among you, the sober ones, ever in your life had seen a sky over a detox center? Not one, because it is not for you that this sky was moved there directly from the lost paradise.

A sober man is a liar and pragmatic. He will sell the Motherland and slaughter a child, if it is profitable for him, and will deftly cover up the traces. A drunk will do the same in a fit of inspiration, quite unselfishly, and when sobered up, will be horrified. When two drunken men are kissing, it does not mean that they are ready to get married - it just means that they genuinely love and respect each other. Can a sober man with all his heart love the first passerby, having known him only half an hour? Never.

But it is in the time of profound hangover that the drunken man becomes completely beautiful.

A superficial hangover brings with it only nausea and headache, which are quite accessible even to those who do not drink at all. But the profound hangover is accompanied by an equally profound comprehension of the fragility of the surrounding world. A hungover man gently puts his foot on the pavement, knowing that beneath its thin layer lies a bottomless pit that leads to nowhere. He heroically focuses his gaze and thus keeps from disintegration and disappearance the city which surrounds him, this city populated by unsuspecting old men, women and children. The leaden sky is pressing down on his shoulders, and under his feet the cracks slither. And alone in all the world he sees and carefully carries all this, taking care to not drop and accidentally break it.

And so: will anybody raise a monument to our quiet hero? Hang on his breast a round medal? Pour him a mug of beer, at least? No one. Bastards.

"Our duty to music is to invent it"

"...why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far: to be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope."

"Who ever desires what is not gone? No one, The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it."

Anne Carson

"Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,

which show like grief itself , but are not so...

...so your sweet majesty,

Looking awry at upon your lord's departure,

Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail."

Shakespeare

"Desire...evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other's being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request"

Jacques Lacan

"...fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness."

"The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed...through fantasy, we learn how to desire."

Slavoj Zizek

"...you should never cease to be aware that all aspects of the learning you have acquired, and will acquire, are possible because of their relationship with negation - with that which is not, or which appears not to be. The most impressive thing about man, perhaps the only thing thing that excuses him of all his idiocy and brutality, is the fact that he has invented the concept of that which does not exist."

"...invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside the system from a position firmly ensconced in system."

Glenn Gould

It would be subreptitious of me not to admit that I lifted the Lacan quote from the same Carson text, and Shakespeare's words, obviously, from Zizek.