[-empyre-] this month, the first week

Wed Oct 3 06:43:41 EST 2012

Hi Ana,

I read both below and have a practical question - is the original post, 
from which the excerpt is taken, available in archives anywhere?

The second piece is beautiful and dark and poetic, and oddly undercut, 
visually, by one of the symptoms of power and how it's deployed online - I 
mean the words which are doubly underlined and clickable, something you 
didn't do, but something that was done to the text, bringing up 
advertisements that had no relation to what you were writing. It's as if 
the writing itself became a marker of exile from a kind of integrity, 
undercut by capital - that isn't the case, of course, but I found it 
disturbing.

I think both point not only to the contexting of pain, but to its politics 
- it's been written about, widely here, that torture doesn't work, that 
this is why it should be discontinued. But I know, myself, that I'm a 
coward in this regard, and I can't see why it would work, which makes it 
all the more horrifying. When we - my friends and I - found out that Bush 
etc. was applying torture routinely (we had always suspected it, in a 
clandestine way), it spelled the end of a kind of innocence  about "good" 
Americans, that I, at least, had been brought up with. I imagine now 
something very different, a world of torture, and wonder how we, how 
anyone or anything, can live with that.

Thank you -

Alan

On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote:

> Yes I read Elaine Scarry as well, didn't know Friedrich's work, will
> look for it. Sadly my book was written in Swedish, at that time
> Swedish was my first language, the language I spoke daily, now I am
> back in Uruguay and I am translating with a friend's help my book into
> Spanish. With luck the book will be published in Spanish here next
> year. But I don't have any conections with a publisher house to
> translate it into English, you could be my agent, Alan! :)
>
> This links are related to the book,
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/
>
> and this other, http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-new-country/
>
> (The last one was part of an anthology published some years ago by
> Serpent's Tail, called the Garden of the Alphabet, we were ten or
> twelve storytellers, one from each country, I was Sweden's chosen
> contribution).
>
> Cheers
> Ana
>
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Ana,
>>
>> Is your book available, and has it been translated? Would very much like to
>> see it.
>>
>> I remember working through Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, and Ernst
>> Friedrich's War Against War (KKrieg dem Kriege), among other texts, while at
>> Eyebeam. I also read a number of Buddhist texts on suffering, but they were
>> personally les helpful.
>>
>> Thanks, Alan
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Alan and good luck in your month here!
>>> Interesting in reading about Monika's work, I was very concerned with
>>> these topics when I wrote my book about torture and violence and
>>> history. As maybe many or you know since my earlier participation in
>>> -empyre I was a political prisoner in Uruguay when I was very young. I
>>> was tortured, waterboarded and so on, but could not cope with these
>>> memories until now, four years ago I wrote. And when I was writing I
>>> was in physical pain, my body remembered things I had deleted or
>>> forgotten. To be able to write the book I read many books written
>>> about pain and evil, body and memory, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, etc
>>> etc.
>>> I am sad I was not aware about Monika's work at that time!
>>> Ana
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi - Monika Weiss, Sandy Baldwin, and myself are on together for the
>>>> first
>>>> week. I've been fascinated by Monika's work for years, and earlier this
>>>> year
>>>> we performed together, in dual performances, at Eyebeam in New York,
>>>> while I
>>>> was a resident there. Her work is concerned with anguish, memory,
>>>> violence,
>>>> cultural debris, and related concerns. It is multi-media, involving
>>>> performance, installation, video, and sound. She writes
>>>>
>>>> "The transdisciplinary work of Monika Weiss examines relationships
>>>> between
>>>> body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as
>>>> traditionally
>>>> performed in response to war. Her current work considers aspects of
>>>> public
>>>> memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space
>>>> of a
>>>> City."
>>>>
>>>> We're asking her to begin the week; later, Sandy and I will also post, in
>>>> sections, a text we wrote together on pain, avatars, and virtuality.
>>>>
>>>> I just want to say a few words here, in relation to my own interest in
>>>> the
>>>> topic. The internet, inscreasingly dominated by social media, is a safe
>>>> place for many people; at the same time, it is a Kristevan "clean and
>>>> proper
>>>> body" that hides or bypasses pain and suffering - not through content,
>>>> but
>>>> through the nature of the online media themselves. I think this has
>>>> troubling psychological repercussions,  Levinas, say, on one said, and
>>>> Baudrillard on the other. Alterity, the presence of the other, disappears
>>>> into pixels, and simulacra, all the way down, take over.
>>>>
>>>> So how do we feel, convey, or act in relation to, pain, suffering, and
>>>> death, online? How can we deal with the political beyond petition? How
>>>> can
>>>> we situate ourselves in a world of images and the imaginary?
>>>>
>>>> Sandy and I both moderate email lists, but we're a bit unused to this
>>>> format
>>>> - if it's a bit rough at the beginning, bear with us!
>>>>
>>>> We'll begin with Monika, and later, intersperse the discussion with the
>>>> text
>>>> we wrote back and forth. Because we're beginning October 2, we'll
>>>> continue
>>>> for the next seven or eight days; our weeks aren't exact.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for reading,
>>>>
>>>> Alan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
>>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/
>>> http://maraya.tumblr.com/
>>> http://www.twitter.com/caravia158
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
>>> http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/
>>>
>>> cell Sweden +4670-3213370
>>> cell Uruguay +598-99470758
>>>
>>>
>>> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth
>>> with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you
>>> will always long to return.
>>> ? Leonardo da Vinci
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ==
>> blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog)
>> email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
>> web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
>> music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
>> current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt
>> ==
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> -- 
> http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/
> http://maraya.tumblr.com/
> http://www.twitter.com/caravia158
> http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
> http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
> http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/
>
> cell Sweden +4670-3213370
> cell Uruguay +598-99470758
>
>
> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth
> with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you
> will always long to return.
> ? Leonardo da Vinci
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>

==
blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog)
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt
==