What in the hell …

Continuing to think about this body history stuff again. (more…)

Back to body history. Somebody I know asked me talk about use of the body as category of historical thought, upsides and downsides. Here’s a start, just some jottings. (more…)

Either inability to concentrate or simple boredom or perhaps a voracious intellect (ha)

Latest:

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I really felt middle-aged then. I wanted to write a story where something otherworldly happened, whether wonderful or terrible didn’t matter much to me, I just craved a sense that something unexpected might punctuate someone’s time. I failed. I sat staring blankly at all the empty space in front of me, chewed a finger nail then another. I wrote typed a word then backspaced over it, then another, another. No magic here.

I remembered a remark by Borges (and remembered that Borges references induce twinges in respectable readers in a way rivaled only by unnecessary self-awareness) about how he couldn’t write fiction at first. To get started he wrote reviews of books that didn’t exist. I decided I liked the idea of a first person piece from the perspective of someone who wanted to write a story and couldn’t. In the story the protagonist would sit missing a loved one away visiting family, sit in a too small bed in messy bedroom strewn with books and dirty laundry, lit by a too dim lamp, sit wearing an arm sling and a neck brace because of an injury too banal to narrate, sit typing on a laptop radiating an almost painful amount of heat from the bottom side, sit typing fitfully with little enthusiasm and less success until a rush of energy would swell in response to something like a setting and would wash through the fingertips which would hammer out one long run on sentence, a sentence never to reach real completion but only to come to a stop anti-climactically just before an equally unsatisfying ending.

The above is the last attempt at fiction writing I ever made. I fell asleep typing and dreamed of an angel weeping as she read over my shoulder. She kept repeating “this is His perfect creation? this is what he sent his son to die for?” Between sobs she stammered that she thought it particularly bad the way it presented an ambiguous religious image then just sort of stopped. She made me promise to save it as a reminder any time I felt an unsavory urge to rub words together. And to do this on the morning of Easter, for shame.

Adam asked me why I haven’t posted these columns here that I’ve written for the Industrial Worker. I didn’t have a real answer so here they are. All these appeared in the Workers Power column. (more…)

The National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in 1933. It included this section:

SEC. 7. (a) Every code of fair competition, agreement, and license approved, prescribed, or issued under this title shall contain the following conditions: (1) That employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection;

This is where the concerted activities protections come from under the National Labor Relations Act (aka the Wagner Act, passed in 1935). I’ve wondered for a while where that language came from and why. I still do. Knowing it came into the NLRA through the NIRA doesn’t answer much at all.

Fucking hell. I think I pinched a nerve. It hurts a LOT. Doctor appointment 9am tomorrow. Stupid frail corporeality. If only I were a brain in a vat, or a pin-headed angel. Fucking fucking fuck.

So I’m pretty sure I never actually wrote a post with my notes on Nietzsche and now it’s been so long that I don’t remember any of them, it’s almost like I didn’t read that stuff. I might like that, I’m not sure… if I wait long enough it’s like I get piece of my brain back.

Anyhoo, here’s the gist. Whatever Nietzsche may or may not have meant, whatever could or could not be made of his work, here is something which should not be argued and which I’m pretty sure Nietzsche did not argue: “there is no truth.” An assertion like that is stupid, false, and a performative contradiction.

The better point is that whether or not something is true is not the only question that matters. That is itself true and point that matters, at least some of the time.