Walter Benjamin.

''It only recently dawned on me who she was. I remember arranging an interview with Ben W an interview re Zappa and he used her email account.''

Where is that? I like his arguments on Zappa (very loopy) (though i haven't heard much). Got a link?

I have only read "The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by WB - is it his greatest hit?

Mark- nath gave me the link and i read it. nice attacks on the 'wire canon'. very nice.

I mean is it all bad? have you heard it all (theres a lot out there)?

I'm looking at the interview now. this is good: "Frank Zappa's music is a litmus test for snobbery."

You a snob, mark s?

you on the other hand are a good deal bettah at taking more than you dish out: he gets super-mimpy

By the way I hope you are telling me i have 'theories', they are just 'observations' OK. they are gathered from listening to recs.

i find theories work better if you never listen to records

theories on music can't hold up really from person to person anyway, that's why there are endless arguments hence ILM. the point is not to be right or wrong but to have fun arguing.

i don't get albs for free, except my friend john w just sent me two mego releases he found he had to of, which wz nice of him

Nice to know not all journos get recs, that they actually have to buy them.

2. Beatrice H = dull, I reckon

3. TE's WB did a lot for me, when a callow yoof. Can you tell? I fear so.

4. EL's book != an intro: it was meant as a BIG PROPER CONTROVERSIAL BOOK but then marketed as intro by shameless publishers --> please don't blame author for that

why don't you hear them?

I'd like to think that I agree with Tim H on this issue. Whether that's true, only he can tell us.

Beatrice H = much more up my street than E L, as if you couldn't have guessed. Currently just started looking at Peter Fenves _Arresting Language_ which looks v. good.

To be honest, I'm more than a bit sceptical about Benjamin at the moment. What's left of the book project is an essay I have been meaning to write entitled 'Forget Benjamin'...

would it be crass of me to say that I'm only interested in benjamin methodologically? (this doesn't preclude having to understand his not-explicitly-methodological writing.) I'm not even sure if it makes sense to claim that I could profit from that kind of interest without having to take or leave his substantive views on modernity, history, art, whatever.

however i think it makes plenty sense to claim you can profit from that alone.

i think it depends on which sorts of theorists we're talking about (& as alex who is way more well-read than i) pointed out benjamin can be read as many sorts. like i see the approach making most sense for cult-flaneurism and maybe historiography (theses on the philosophy is a methodological text). the materialist aesthetics stuff seems more promising as something to build on, tear through, but somehow leverage the foundations. ditto politics. lit-crit could go either say.

all of which alex pretty much said above.

when i use theorists usually i find that asking "what do they promise, or do i want them to promise, and what do they actually delivier?" is a good question and another good one is "what tools are missing from what they're saying" and another is "hmm this one sentence is really suggestive".

the thing which is funny tho is that you keep looking for methodology from people who already seem to share a common methodological ethic with you. more interesting maybe to look at someone utterly difft. and ask about *their* methodology and its utility? kant seems the frigginobvious example.

I have some hunches. some of it has to do with thinking that 'theory' is not really so distant or separate from 'practice', so that in order to just stick to practice I can't help getting my hands dirty in theory, even if it's only for the purpose of challenging theory, displacing it, revealing it, whatever. (most succinctly, see wittgenstein's remark that goes like 'a cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar', or the often-abused now-soundbite about philosophers (and non-philosophers too, when they start talking certain ways) being deceived by language.)

another hunch is that it's partly professional and personal vanity, cowardice, laziness, other things: I'm more interested in gathering these common threads together in order to pretty up for philosophers what I have to say not just for internal reasons, but because I want to be a professor and they make it hard to be one without doing that sort of thing. this actually sometimes feels like the more urgent need. I'm not happy with this, in many ways, because my wanting to be a professor and have a nice job where I get to have lots of freedom and talk to lots of smart people and teach young people can be in many ways at odds with my philosophical and methodological inclinations, especially given the institutional characters of universities.

not that any of this eliminates the possibility that looking at someone utterly different would help me out here. despite my inclinations toward the anti-theoretical, by my own lights it would do me a lot of good to understand those different methodologies as well. (don't think that I'm not doing this, either - but it goes more slowly, and I don't talk about it as much.) it may not be as proximal for my shorter term (i.e. life-security) goals, but perhaps it is, at the very least, in a know-your-enemy sense.

I might say that I enjoy coming to others looking for the bits where they make no promises, or promise as little as possible, because THOSE parts seem easier to re-use, paradoxically, than the promises, which immediately invite breaking.

my kant is poor but interestingly enough, lots of people take wittgenstein to be doing SOMETHING kantian. that's sort of a truism in the literature regarding the tractatus (i.e. maybe true maybe not but it's treated as true, probably shapes a lot of the reception of the work), and then a marginal-because-the-playing-field-is-sort-of-plural view regarding the later work. I've been very tempted lately by some reading to regard the later work as kantian (some sort of continuation of the 'limits of expression / limits of thought / conditions of possibility of meaning' deal from the tractatus), but that view tends to bring along with it a PROMISE of something, not quite the safeguarding of ethical and aesthetic value that the tractatus promises, and that certainly gives me pause. since it takes quite a bit of reading (interpreting) to get that, though, I'm still looking around to see if I really feel compelled into thinking it.

(this partially hinges on whether or not it's a shallow reading to think that wittgenstein couldn't possibly be promising anything, or doing something like it, if he's taken to have some integrity.)

re "work of art in the age of" i was playing with this idea of a new sort of "aura" way back on some ilm film/music thread that basically aksed the relationship of the mistique created by omnipresence of image (popstar) to the mistique created by inaccessablity (the old sort).

i didn't get very far except to note it and tbat wb hadn't forseen it, and that exploring its aesthetic/democratic ramifications along benjamin's lines might be fruitful.

(i'd guess but i'm always rubbish at this, for some reason)

i want benjamin to be a gemini but that's just latent (anti-de)territorialism: i assume he's water not air

Wasn't WB one of those (many?) who say they are 'born under the sign of Saturn'? I'm not sure what that *literally* means, if anything.

As far as I can remember, TE's birthday is 13 February (1943). I am quite impressed by my ability to remember this.

One Way Street

(WB, not Go West)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515KAB2KMGL._SS500_.jpg

ha

(new penguin cover)

BRILLIANT!

that is pretty good.

Ah man, I long back to those intellectual days. :-(

lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETQ0urHjSIk

Hahaha, that is great.

Fresh Figs (Walter Benjamin, from “Food”. Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1930.)

No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it.

Gourmandizing means above all else to devour one thing to the last crumb.

There is no doubt that it enters more deeply into what you eat than mere enjoyment. For example, when you bite into mortadella as if it were bread, or bury your face in a melon as if it were a pillow, or gorge yourself on caviar out of crackling paper, or, when confronted with the sight of a round Edam cheese, find that the existence of every other food simply vanishes from your mind.

- How did I first learn all this?

It happened just before I had to make a very difficult decision. A letter had to be posted or torn up. I had carried it around in my pocket for two days, but had not given it a thought for some hours. I then took the noisy narrow-gauge railway up to Secondigliano through the sun-parched landscape. The village lay in still solemnity in the weekday peace and quiet. The only traces of the excitement of the previous Sunday were the poles on which Catherine wheels and rockets had been ignited. Now they stood there bare. Some of them still displayed a sign halfway up with the figure of a saint from Naples or an animal. Women sat in the open barns husking corn.

I was walking along in a daze, when I noticed a cart with figs standing in the shade. It was sheer idleness that made me go up to them, sheer extravagance that I bought half a pound for a few soldi. The woman gave me a generous measure. But when the black, blue, bright green, violet, and brown fruit lay in the bowl of the scales, it turned out that she had no paper to wrap them in. The housewives of Secondigliano bring their baskets with them, and she was unprepared for globetrotters. For my part, I was ashamed to abandon the fruit.

So I left her with figs stuffed in my trouser pockets and in my jacket, figs in both of my outstretched hands, and figs in my mouth. I couldn’t stop eating them and was forced to get rid of the mass of plump fruits as quickly as possible. But that could not be described as eating; it was more like a bath, so powerful was the smell of resin that penetrated all my belongings, clung to my hands and impregnated the air through which I carried my burden. And then, after satiety and revulsion – the final bends in the path – had been surmounted, came the ultimate mountain peak of taste. A vista over an unsuspected landscape fo the palate spread out before my eyes – an insipid, undifferentiated, greenish flood of greed that could distinguish nothing but the stringy, fibrous waves of the flesh of the open fruit, the utter transformation of enjoyment into habit, of habit into vice.

A hatred of those figs welled up inside me; I was desperate to finish them, to liberate myself, to rid myself of all this overripe, bursting fruit. I ate to destroy it. Biting had rediscovered its most ancient purpose. When I pulled the last fig from the depths of my pocket, the letter was stuck to it. Its fate was sealed; it, too, had to succumb to the great purification. I took it and tore it into a thousand pieces.

Great piece: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2283-walter-benjamin-the-refugee-and-migrant-by-esther-leslie

Terrific interview with Esther on her career as a scholar and various conceptions of Benjami. Learn much whenever I read anything by her: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3550-for-a-marxist-poetics-of-science-an-interview-with-esther-leslie

Thta's great, thanks for sharing.