Archive for doubt
July 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, life, melbourne, money, people
it is exactly the sort of day when you have every right to be miserable and/or worried. what with the petrol prices and the drought and the interest rates and the cost of housing and drug queen roberta williams turns cover girl.
my appointment with the dental hygienist in outer western mongolia is actually with the aptly named dr.goldberg who’s talent is not cleaning teeth but wearing a worried expression after he has looked in your mouth and poked around a bit. he tries to sell me thirty thousand dollars worth of dental work.
all of a sudden it is a bad day. not that i wasn’t expecting it, nor was i fooled by its auspicious beginning.
it starts raining. i have a bad coffee in a cafe. for no apparent reason they prop the door open with a brick and the cold air streams in. an old, old lady is munching on a sandwich. she looks worried too. she hides the uneaten half of her sandwich in a serviette.
but it is the meaninglessness of my activities and their inconsequential nature which is the cause of my misery today.
April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
September 20, 2007 at 7:45 pm · tag/s : art, death, doubt, image
on 22 july 1944, 150 new prisoners arrived at auschwitz as members of the SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) ate blueberries. 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the others were taken to the gas chambers.
in the mid-nineties christian boltanski exhibited photographs of “ordinary“ ss officers which appeared in contemporary german magazines. there was something disconcerting about seeing these images of nazis in uniform with their wives and children, or juxtaposed with innocent magazine illustrations.
now the holocaust memorial museum in washington has published online the photograph album of karl hoecker adjutant to richard baer who took over from rudolf hoess as commandant of auschwitz in the last year of the camp’s operation. the album was donated by a us lieutenant who found it in frankfurt in 1946 and took it home with him.
it is chilling indeed to see these photographs of the men and women who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, enjoying themselves. like the one below, which shows josef mengele and the current and former commanders of auschwitz baer and hoess relaxing during a break at solahutte, the ss retreat near auschwitz.
September 7, 2007 at 12:57 pm · tag/s : doubt, life, people, reading, strange, thinking
as a kind of ex-cyberpunk i should be a science fiction fan, but i am just not … something about being unwilling to suspend my disbelief. however william gibson explains why science fiction is about the present, and his observations on the strange kind of reality we live in this recent interview in the washington post make for a great read.
A taste :
“…EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement…”
via boingboing
May 26, 2007 at 6:53 am · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt
once the furnaces were kindled, the main fuel relied on was human fat so an effective burn depended on intelligent selection as well as artful stacking.
inga clendinnen - reading the holocaust 83
May 12, 2007 at 6:41 am · tag/s : blog, computers, doubt, strange, web
for some reason sometimes when i ask google something it thinks i am a virus, and once it is in this loop, it stays there. this precipitates a significant identity crisis. in fact it has an alarming general effect on how i feel about myself and my place in the world - worst of all : there is no box i can tick to indicate that i am not in fact a virus or a spyware application … i am real! dammit and i want to google something. now. please?
also : they don’t know how to spell “receive” and yes i would be available for employment as a proof reader at google in manhattan - but i don’t come cheap.
March 11, 2007 at 6:23 am · tag/s : doubt, reading, thinking
the quest for global interpretations and grand narratives is always a mistaken one, assuming a shapeliness in human affairs and a simplicity in human motivation never encountered in muddy actuality. nowadays no one much hankers for the panoramic view of where we all were and where we are all going, once offered by marxism or whiggism, or the more obscure and even less testable stories and metaphors psychoanalysts offer to explain our darker private obsessions. large theories may generate good questions but they produce poor answers. the historian’s task is to discover what happened in some actual past situations-what conflicting or confused intention produced what outcomes-not to produce large truths. the most enlightening historical generalisations tend to be those that hover sufficiently close to the ground to illuminate the contours and dynamics of intention and action in circumscribed circumstances. (21-22)
for what it’s worth, the budding psychoanalyst in me thinks that a psycho-therapist/analyst’s task would be not unlike that of the historian, which clendinnen so eloquently outlines above.
March 4, 2007 at 6:06 am · tag/s : doubt, pain, people, reading
A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful - If This Is A Man (1947)
reading primo levi’s survival in auschwitz (originally pulished in 1947 as if this is a man) - the amazing thing about reading levi is that, despite the fact that he is describing the most unimaginable horrors, he is not depressing - this is because of the humiltity of the man : he expects nothing, he does not waste time complaining about his situation, and he is not surprised or dismayed by people’s selfishness and cruelty.
and eventually, he always finds himself in a situation where another human being is kind to him, or to someone else. he describes these superhuman acts of selflessness with wonderful acuity yet simplicity. thus you always put the book down with a feeling of hope and wonder for what human beings are capable of, even in the midst of terrible suffering.
nevertheless, survivial in auschwitz is not the sort of book that you can pick up and read at anytime of the night or day. you need to be in a certain frame of mind for it. moments of reprieve, on the other hand, is a book by levi where he collects the stories of some of the men that helped him in his darkest hours. recommended for those times of doubt when you have lost all hope for the human race.
January 6, 2007 at 7:49 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, film, people
when in new york* i.j.oog reads … the brooklyn rail - and you can even read it in wagga wagga : the current issue of this not-for-profit free monthly magazine features a great interview with albert maysles, who made the controversial documentary gimme shelter, talking about his work :
A true documentary is shot with no control. You might even call it the uncontrolled cinema.
yeah but no but yeah - as jean-luc godard told maysles in 1963 :
the eye behind the camera should be the eye of the poet. Because if the poet wasn’t there, it would be just a camera.
The Brooklyn Rail - Uncontrolled Cinema: Albert Maysles
* even if he never leaves manhattan :)
December 26, 2006 at 8:57 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, people, research, strange
according to the sydney morning herald recent research in the czech republic seems to explain a few things that have puzzled me for many many many many years : apparently about 40% of the world’s population is infected with a common parasite which makes women sexier and men dumber - it also increases your risk of having a car accident and being eaten by a cat … or something …
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