The Liberal
>Invisibilized Realities
>
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
In the September issue of the The Believer there is an interview with Robyn Nagle, the athropologist-in-residence for the New York City Sanitation Department. Nagel is trying to build support for a Museum of Trash in the city, but such an idea is not easy to persuade in a city that is often overwhelmed with its trash and simply wishes it to be taken away. Nagle notes that everything we see is eventually trash, and yet we love to ignore this reality–or rather “invisibilize” it–thus making our response to trash a complex cognitive act: “it’s cognitive in that exact way: that it is quite highly visible, and constant, and invisibilized. So from the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? Nagle’s ideas prompted me to think about all the ways we might enact this cognitive process in other parts of our lives, and how writers and artists provoke us to see those realities we invisibilize each day.
At Cerise Press, writer Sun Yung Shin goes searching for the word adoptee (that doesn’t exist in English), as she tries to recover memories she never had: “It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange, it refers to the choice of the adopter, it defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by the will of the adopter. The mother or father or parents do not have any word related to adopt attached to them.”
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
Edward Schwarzchild meditates on writing and art at The Rumpus, moving between a number of fragmented memories that each seem to connect to the writer Nick Flynn: “When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.””
Spotlighting the influence of Western, liberal philosophies on Iranian intellectuals and activists, and the problems of the Left in Europe and North America to recognize this, is the subject of Danny Postel’s essay in The Liberal: ““There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language”, reports Vali Nasr, “and these have gone into multiple printings”. Abdollah Momeni, the leader of Iran’s most prominent student-activist group (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), claims Habermas as his chief inspiration. The speeches and writings of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, are peppered with references to Kant, John Stuart Mill and Albert Camus.”
In exploring the hidden, and not so hidden, sexual pleasures of malls, Molly Young dissects the experience of shopping at Hollister at The Believer: “The employees are selected for their insane good looks and friendliness, which creates the disorienting customer experience of receiving attention from people way out of your league over and over again. You can’t avoid having a sexual experience at Hollister, even if it’s just to stare at a greeter’s bullet-hard nipples. Hollister’s strategy may not be subtle, but it is clever. By literalizing the mall’s sexual promise in actual naked flesh, the brand makes it unnecessary for shoppers to wander elsewhere.”
 |
| horaciosalinas.net |
Oscar Paul Medina at The Hydra Magazine writes on the influences of Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” on contemporary music: “For Russolo, noise carries a two-fold meaning: the discordant atonality of machines and also natural non-traditional sounds. Animals, cars, waterfalls, jet engines, trains — the cacophony of coitus and the shrieking of a child crying — all these fall within the rubric of noise.”
Reflecting on the pleasures and limits of walking through nature with his ipod Simmons B. Buntin, editor of terrain.org, considers our current conflicts around listening and experience: “I accepted the digital music player with a mixture of anticipation and regret. As with my adoption of any new technology, I knew it would change my habits and relationship with the wider world. Though I design websites and work on computers all day, I’m always wary of new gadgets. It’s not that I’m old-fashioned; instead, there’s something about losing a connection to the visceral world, an unwillingness to substitute virtual for actual.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
altimoniere 