Schools We'd Like to Be Remanded To

Es gibt nur eine einzige Stunde, und die wiederholt sich immer. "Wie hat der Knabe sich zu benehmen?" Um diese Frage herum dreht sich im Grunde genommen der ganze Unterricht. Kenntnisse werden uns keine beigebracht. Es fehlt eben, wie ich schon sagte, an Lehrkraeften, dass heisst, die Herrn Erzieher und Lehrer schlafen, oder sie sind tot, oder nur scheintot, oder sie sind versteinert, gleichviel, jedenfalls hat man gar nichts von ihnen.
--Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten.

Afterlife

This blog is still dead.

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Blog posts I've read lately, while waiting for The Last Day at Work:

Bombs and Shields. Like the now-defunct Riot Porn blog, but with better editing. The focus of the blog post is that a "prison burns," while the newswire story raises the alarm about "undocumented aliens escaping."

Institute for Conjunctural Research: Especially this post on blind seething murderous life.

Lenin's Tomb pointed out this torture story that isn't a stunt in Vanity Fair.

And this series of posts from In the Hall of Mirrors, on being in a hospital in Germany.

Still More Kluge

[Kluge erzählt] von seinem jüngsten Vorhaben: "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx verfilmen. Sergej Eisenstein, der sowjetische Filmpionier, hatte vor 80 Jahren dieselbe Idee. Wo er scheiterte, wollen sich nun Tom Tykwer, Durs Grünbein, Peter Sloterdijk, Alexander Kluge und andere zusammentun, um eine 420-minütige Filmfassung des dreibändigen Werks zu erstellen. Arbeitstitel: "Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike." Antike deshalb, weil Marx, sagt Kluge, "einer fernen Zeit" angehöre. Gleichwohl sei er unverrückbar wie ein Gestirn und deshalb Orientierungspunkt für die Navigation in der modernen Welt.

Even more here, though actually nothing further about the Capital-film.

Kluge's 1970 Der Grosse Verhau was already a film of part of Capital.

Four Angry Men

"Reform Circus" is one of the extras on Disc 4 of Alexander Kluge's collected films. On a TV show called "Ende Offen" in 1970, Kluge is asked "What good is art?"

The producer comes onto the set; he splutters with resentment at the smarter, more articulate Kluge ("You just keep going on and on!"). All talk shows today are nothing but a "verbal shouting match (verbale Schaukampf)" as Kluge complained this episode of Ende Offen had become. So the show isn't remarkable for its lack of decorum, nor for its meta levels (the broadcast gets interrupted by its producer precisely at the moment the guests are critiquing the institution of television), nor for WDR's decision to broadcast the whole thing, including the interruption and the black screen and the argument about the interruption. It's something else.

Dramatically, the show works a little like "12 Angry Men"--it's riveting and not a little heartbreaking to watch Kluge try to explain himself in a forum that has no patience for him, for interlocutors who won't or can't listen.

Like Ende Offen's duller guests, I have also seethed inwardly while my betters showed me up in a seminar or a reading group, but often it's precisely those exasperating, long-winded people with whom I can create intensity of expression. ("You just go on and on!" is uttered only when intensity has failed.)

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I sat down to write a post that would link Kluge's parable forms with Shaviro's blog post on indexical, typical singular characters. Kluge's characters are indexical, but they're nothing like Dickensian. Kluge writes indexical life histories, in a way that has nothing to do, either, with the "'plausible' backstories and motivations" that dominate screenwriting today (both for film and television). But I didn't get that far.

(I find Kluge's miniature or parable form more in his written stories, not so much in the film versions. Jameson wrote briefly about this aspect of the stories in this October article I don't have permission to view on the web--about how abruptly Kluge's fiction shifts from historical to biographical time.)

Jubilee

Not only did I get my tax rebate, or whatever they're calling it, the IRS informed me this week that it has dropped its case against me concerning my 2006 taxes. ("Case" makes the proceeding sound far grander and Kafka-esque than it was, since it all happened by mail. A "postal shakedown," maybe.)

In the resultant burst of consumer confidence, I bought
"Collapse IV." Which looks very good, despite the fact that it contains no fiction by Antoine Volodine. I guess Volodine wouldn't have fit. He's not so much "concept horror," or even horror, more quasi-Blanchotien apocalypticism in decaying, vaguely Russian or Chinese cities.

Via Lutz Bassmann and Claro, I found that Dennis Cooper's blog has an interview with Brian Evenson.

The company from which I purchase my employee health insurance sent me a letter. The letter's writer, "X___," who identifies himself as a "data capture specialist," uses only uppercase letters. He informs me of a "PRE-EXISTING CONDITION" clause in my insurance; I can avoid its being invoked only by complying with some extremely complicated (nearly impossible) demands, among which are:

2. HAS _____ _____ BEEN SEEN BY ANY PHYSICIANS OR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS BETWEEN 1/1/2007 AND 1/1/2008?
YES__ NO___

3. IF YOUR ANSWER TO 2 IS YES, PLEASE PROVIDE THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF ALL THE PHYSICIANS AND/OR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS:

Here the data capture specialist has helpfully provided me with three blank lines on which to write those names and addresses.

Let me see here, X___, I'm just checking my records... I'm pretty sure I saw a Dr. Go Fuck Yourself sometime in the past year.

It's like that joke, "If you're a psychic, how come you didn't know I was gonna call you?" If you're a data capture specialist, how come you don't know that every doctor or "health care professional" I've seen in the last year has made me sign a HIPPA form concerning "patient privacy" which allows insurance companies access to my medical records? Capture your own data, fuckwit.

Unless you just sent me this ALL-UPPERCASE TWO-PAGE LIST OF DEMANDS so I'd give up and pay for my medical care by myself. What is next, X__, my data capture specialist? A message written with letters cut from different magazines?

Spurious's taxi driver was right, America's a third-world country. And IT was correct in writing, "There is something very vertiginous about the US, as if one false step will send you spiraling into a dark void of poverty and social isolation with little hope of getting back on track." The false step happens and the dark void opens while you have a job, while you have health insurance, not when or if you lose them.

Call this post my entry in Infinite Thought's "down with existing society" competition, and let the post's narrowness and fearful self-absorption say what they will about existing society.

Dead

This blog is dead.

Still, nothing is so furiously alive as a dead web site, as Matthew Stadler remarks somewhere, or words to that effect: I thought the words were here but maybe not.

Even before this blog died, a lot of its posts were about agreeing with other blog-posts. Now this blog agrees with Matt Briggs that this is an interview worth reading, especially on writing as a social act.

Degrees of Servitude

From "Repress U," by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, in The Nation. Nearly all the measures described in the article--security cameras in the classrooms, certificates of study in "homeland security"--are ones I saw firsthand at the university I briefly attended. I had thought such measures were peculiar to that place. There must still be some variation in how servile particular universities are.

Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."