Wednesday, 15 June 2011

For Sale: Childhood Home of William S. Burroughs

If you can imagine it, William S. Burroughs was once a child right here in St. Louis. His grandfather, also named William S. Burroughs, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company which presumably did pretty well if the Burroughs house at 4664 Pershing Place is any indication. And now it can be yours! (Actually, it's been on the market since November. Daily RFT is not as punctilious about checking Central West End real estate listings as we maybe should be.) "Oh, my God, it just exudes charm," gushes Vicki Armor, the listing agent. "All the houses in the Central West End have something special. This one has a wood-paneled living room and leaded glass windows, and the backyard has beautiful brick. It's a perfect house for entertaining." In addition, the house has five bedrooms, four bathrooms and three working fireplaces. (And no, Armor doesn't know which bedroom was Burroughs'.)
So what's the problem? Are potential buyers put off by the $587,900 asking price? Or that it's nearly 100 years old? Are they afraid the place is haunted by the spirit of the boy who would grow up to write Junkie and Naked Lunch, become a guiding spirit of the Beat and hippie generations and have all sorts of exotic adventures, including accidentally killing his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell"?
Actually, it's much more prosaic than that, says Armor. "There's no garage. And the house is landlocked, so there's no way to put a garage in. That's the one thing that's making it hard to sell."
The Burroughs family sold the house and moved to Ladue when William was in high school (John Burroughs, no relation). In later years, when the writer returned to St. Louis, he would be far more nostalgic for the old skid row on Market Street downtown than he was for tree-lined Pershing Place.
Although the house lacks two fancy plaques announcing it as a Historical Site like the ones on T.S. Eliot's childhood home on nearby Westminster Place -- or even one fancy plaque -- it still garners a fair amount of attention. Armor says the current owner, Jackie Millstone, has spotted passerby stopping to stare and point. Recently she arrived home to find a crew from HGTV filming on the sidewalk. But Armor's not sure if the attention is because of the house's famous former inhabitant or if it's just because it's a really nice house. She's inclined to think the latter.
"Jackie's got literature on Burroughs and one of his books out on the coffee table," she says. "She puts it out to show to people who come to look at the house. Some people don't even know who he is. But some raise their eyebrows and say, 'Oh, really?'"
Aimee Levitt @'Riverfront Times'

LulzSec hacks US Senate's web site

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Unofficial Nakba study kit a hit with teachers

When Shira (not her real name ), a history teacher at a junior high school in the center of the country, mentioned "nakba" in a class three years ago, none of her students had any idea what it referred to.
Today, she says, the word just surfaces naturally among the students. They know about it and talk about it. According to her, the reason is clear - Amendment 40 to the Budget Foundations Law, more commonly known as the "Nakba Law."

Shira is one of around 100 teachers and educators who teach the Nakba ("catastrophe" - the Palestinians' term for the loss of their land to Israel in 1948 ) to their students with the help of a unique study kit called "How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?"
The kit was developed by Zochrot, a small Tel Aviv-based organization seeking to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel.
Zochrot is distributing the kit to teachers at a time when the Nakba is recurring in headlines as a subject that is not to be touched - especially not in schools. But over the last two years Zochrot has distributed 300 copies of the study kit.
It covers pre- and post-1948 Palestinian settlements; Israeli and Palestinian recollections of the conquest and destruction of villages; and the refugees' flight and their expulsion. The kit did not receive the ministry's approval and most of the teachers using it conceal their source.
Eitan Bronstein, the founder of Zochrot, stresses that the kit's goal is not to present the Palestinian narrative. "For me, the Nakba is part of our history," he says, "just as it is part of Palestinian history."
'Dafna,' a history and citizenship teacher in northern Israel, uses a section of the kit that presents three competing theories on events in the village of Ein Azael (along the eastern slopes of the Carmel ).
Students are asked to present the different versions of events and discuss them.
In the Palestinian narrative, the emphasis is on "Zionist gangs" that bombed the triangle of villages Aghzam, Jaba and Ein Azael, in violation of the cease-fire. On the other side, there is a passage from the book "The War of Independence," printed by the IDF, whereby the villages were attacked after their residents fired on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road, thereby effectively blocking it.
"This opened up our eyes, because the contradictions between the different versions were really crazy. Nowhere [before] did I hear the Palestinian narrative," says Michal, an 11th-grade student in Dafna's class. She adds: "It was very interesting to see not just the Israel side, and to go beyond the point of view that we learn in Israel - that we are heroes and they are always trying to oppress us."
Both Dafna and Shira were concerned about being interviewed using their full names, for fear of sanctions from the Education Ministry. The ministry said: "Teachers are not permitted to teach content, in any subject, that was not approved by the relevant professionals at the Education Ministry."
Asaf Shtull-Trauring @'Haaretz'

PJCrowley Philip J. Crowley

It's odd that #Obama thinks @RepWeiner should resign, but not #Assad. Sending lewd tweets violates public service, but not killing people?

Wu Lyf - Spitting Blood

HerrB - you need this for those 'late' nights :)

Werner Herzog reads 'Go the Fuck to Sleep' bedtime audiobook

The Future of Non-War

Hackers break into Senate computers

Mark Fisher in conversation with Michael Schapira

Full Stop travels to the U.K. and the world of politics today to speak with blogger, teacher and author Mark Fisher about the mordant pleasures of cultural critique. Fisher has been running his blog, k-punk, since 2003, where he writes about politics, philosophy, literature, music, and cybernetics. In his recent book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher explores “some of the affective, psychological and political consequences of the deeply entrenched belief that there is no alternative to capitalism.” And what’s more, he’s a man of discerning taste, as evidenced by the fact that he made a point of finding time during his first trip to New York City to head out to Coney Island and pick up a Warriors shirt for his young child. Pay attention to one of the more insightful voices out there today!
Can you describe in broad strokes where Capitalist Realism came from?
There were a number of threads running through my blog, and one of them had to do with politics. Not politics in some distant sense, but politics particularly in relation to my working life, which through a lot of the early years of the blog was as a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at a further education college. (Ed. note: a further education college is similar to a community college in the U.S., but most students would be 16 to 19 years old.)
One of the stories that came into the blog a bit and sits behind Capitalist Realism is the story of recovery from depression, which was a large trajectory of my life in that last decade. Having done a doctorate in philosophy and literature, I was mentally destroyed in lots of ways and felt pretty useless and unemployable. Very burnt out, I found it very difficult to read any serious work. It was teaching and blogging that actually rehabilitated me. Teaching sort of re-engaged me in the world. When you are doing postgraduate research you can feel very disconnected from the world and your work can feel very pointless. But with teenagers you really have to front up because they won’t let you get away with much nonsense; they will interrupt you every 90 seconds, etc. It was difficult, but it was also an excellent grounding and initiation back into the world.
Alongside that I started blogging. Blogging was a bit like when Zizek says that you can’t sit down and think that you’re going to write a book. You have to think that you’re just going to write a few paragraphs, and then the paragraphs will build up and build up and suddenly a book forms. In the same way, blogging for me started off as not being that serious. The dead heavy weight of scholarly responsibility can interject and cause you think that you can’t possibly write on anything unless you looked at every possible source, which is of course impossible, but nevertheless you still feel the guilt and weight that goes along with that. The blog didn’t really have that. It was just a different space. I didn’t have that weight and responsibility and maybe I could just try out some ideas.
Your rehabilitation from depression seemed to be coextensive with a growing realization of the problems racking higher education and public services in the wake of New Labour. Can you describe the political context of your book a bit for American readers?
What I started to notice very strongly in my working life were the changes that had happened over this period. In lots of ways, Capitalist Realism is really a study of what it was like to work in public services under Blairism and New Labour. We could assume that the neoliberal right would push the interests of business, but we couldn’t necessarily assume that a notionally left-wing party would be doing this as well. There is a certain novelty about that, or rather we take it for granted now, but we ought not to in lots of ways.
What I was experiencing firsthand under New Labour was the imposition of a whole battery of new measures, particularly to do with self-surveillance. For example, [as teachers] we had to fill in 50-60 page long logbooks with “strategies for improvement,” bullet pointed, etc. The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things. Everyone is second-guessing what they think the bureaucratic authorities might want to see. The bureaucratic authorities themselves, when they emerge – these would typically be the Inspectorate, employed by the government to come and check up on colleges – wouldn’t necessarily know either what exactly was required. These people were always interpreting this set of bureaucratic criteria that are slightly Talmudic. It would be one thing to have a set of clear and determinate demands that you could meet. But it is another thing to have this vague legalese, which is capable of multiple interpretations, and which is also guaranteed to maximize the anxiety of everyone who is involved.
It was really the encounter with these kinds of procedures that was one of the main starting points for the work that went into Capitalist Realism. Beginning in a raging exasperation, in writing the book I was able to see these kinds of things as systemic as opposed to just affecting me...

Continue reading

Michael Schapira @'Full Stop'

Grievous Angel - Lickle Friction

Iain Sinclair: Secret Writing

Shortly before her untimely death 1997, novelist Kathy Acker interviewed Iain Sinclair in London. It is, to our knowledge, the last article written by Acker, which reveals her fascination in the magical potential of abstract fiction.

WALKING
The precision. I remember the excitement of reading White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – my first Iain Sinclair experience – though I don’t remember where and when. And yet every word of Sinclair’s, herein lies his style, is always positing when and where. “There is an interesting condition of the stomach,” begins White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, “where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus...” This is Sinclair territory, be it of the body, the emotions, the soul or the environs, the city. Craggy, deeply fissured or painful. Remember: fissures in the earth lead to the underworld, sinister and magic.
Sinclair territory is one in which the word both describes and is what is described. Say “cicatrix” out loud and that sound is the ulcer, the hole in the earth; the sound “musculature,” rolling you from one location to the other and so denying fissure, is the unbroken or “replaced” earth.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane, a contemporary book-dealer in London, not only has an ulcer, but is defined by it. Here is an example of how Sinclair hears rhythm and uses it to create. Listen to this description of Nicholas Lane: “To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.” There are four sentences. The second would mirror the perfect balance of the first if its predicate wasn’t a little too long. The third sentence is long and imbalanced; note the dependent clause. Lengthening sound and imbalance grow and explode, in the last sentence, into a spark, a phrase, not even a full sentence, but, like the first sentence, perfectly balanced.
Mind you, I am not speaking about formal structure. I’m speaking about vision. In these four sentences, Sinclair is describing an ulcerated landscape. Balance in the body of the bookseller, of the landscape, occurs when the mind is separated from its body. Sinclair has cut into both the living being of Nicholas Lane and of London and opened them to our sight. We experience sound: we see. A visionary is he or she who makes vision happen.
When I was a child, I read my first ‘adult’ authors, Dickens and Blake. The pages of their books exploded open in my mind a visionary landscape called London. “Under the grass stain, the altar. I dreamed a new dream, meadows of fire.” – White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw.
Listen further to the language of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: “Nights all up in that tower room, windows blinded, looking out all across the roofs; not nobody on the streets, was there? Little drink, fag, like, if I wanted, go out on the parapets, I do; go where I like, walk, Flower and Dean, Thrawl, Heneage, Chicksand, walk cross the river if I wanted, nobody else, not never touched the ground.” Walking prose. To walk is to travel; to travel is to see. The eye, the I cannot stay still because in their beings neither the eye nor the I is still. What is movement? It is language itself. Connection. “No man is an island.”
There are two kinds of hedonists. Those who separate body and mind and so turn affairs of the body into matters of dead meat. Then, there are those who equate pleasure and wisdom. Sinclair goes for the latter type of hedonism. In Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair finally does exactly as he likes, gets rid of made-up plot, that old bourgeois contrivance so beloved by the publishing industry. Goes for what is intrinsic, in pleasure, language and movement. Rhythm. Writers are musicians who work in the crossovers between image and sound and meaning. That crossover named language. Let the literary be concerned only with its own grave.
He began in poetry. Lud Heat, 1975; Suicide Bridge, 1979. The novels started in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. “When I wrote White Chappell,” Sinclair says, “as I had previously done poems and short stories: writing by hand on big pads of paper. I was scared of not being able to read my own handwriting so on the old typewriter I had back in those days I would type everything up quickly, crudely, not making any changes. Then I would rewrite the whole on a totally different machine, a golfball typewriter. After that I sometimes rewrote the last version by hand. I noted the changes in this text and then typed it all out. Each level of change was based on a different technology.”
We’re sitting in the pub next to the premises of his current publisher, Granta. The pub is upmarket, with posh food and a view of the canal that runs through what is currently one of the trendiest sections in London. Handbags here cost at least 200 pounds a shot. The canal below us is full of trash. “My writing totally changed,” Sinclair continues, “when I began Lights Out For The Territory. For the first time I was writing from the beginning on a word processor.”
Sinclair is talking only about how he writes, not what he writes. Very un-Anglo-Saxon. Imagine book reviews that have no interest in recounting the plots of the novels they’re criticizing. The whole literary industry might collapse. Forget that. Now I’m equating process art and walking. Iain based Lights Out For The Territory on various walks of his through London. “Did you write as you walked?” I ask the tall, slightly sinister-looking ex-used-book dealer.
“I made notes. I scribbled notes. I wrote letters to the machine.” He reconsiders. Things aren’t that simple. “It’s more like possession. You see, all the writing I’ve done is a kind of possession. You prepare yourself for the state of possession by research or by walks or by... whatever... by reading. It may take a long time and it may take no time.”
Sinclair begins talking so fast I can barely keep up with him. This is his music. “I had been planning the material for White Chappell since the early or mid-’70s. I kicked it around in my head for 15 years! Changing it and changing it. Then, when it was time to write it down – whoomf! – I wrote incredibly fast. In the next two novels, Downriver and Radon Daughters, I set out to do something completely different. Six stories that were connected up to sites. To let through the voices of the victims.” One of the characters in White Chappell is Jack the Ripper. “I felt that White Chappell had been too phallocentric. This time I wanted woman and place to come through.”
I’m wondering if women and site are connected and if so, how? But I can’t find the space to break into Sinclair’s language.
“I went to look for the first site, the one where a pleasure boat named The Princess Alice had gone down. Practically everyone on it had drowned. I wanted to write about a woman who had survived, though her children didn’t, and then a few years later she was one of the victims of Jack the Ripper. I went to the wrong site and blundered into another whole series of stories....”
Walking is a listening method. Sinclair walks to listen to the stories that have been and so are in the city. He’s searching for buried treasure. He’s hunting down London’s identity.
“There were these stories waiting to be told. In the long run, actual walking isn’t necessary because it’s all walking.” It refers to writing. Everything does in the world of creation. It and they. “They are all journeys. Journeys aren’t necessarily walks.” Sinclair is fascinated by London’s conduits: trains and the river. By James Joyce: in Dubliners and of course in Finnegan’s Wake Joyce gave him possibilities for mapping, for exposing this city. Every map is a narrative. A story or series of stories are revealing themselves.
To be able to go on this treasure hunt the writer must prepare himself, herself through training. “It’s shamanistic in a way.... For a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something. More important is learning how to move into areas of force, of information and energy in which there are stories that need to be released.”
Later on Sinclair will say to me, “You fall into structures that are magical, potent, and if you get them perfect, it makes things change in the world...”