ISSUE 15 | APR 2012
THE ELEMENTS
Hannah Coolidge
On Learning a Trade
jobs don’t usually make people happy - anxious or bored or depressed sometimes - succeed at something that’s not yours - trellises and birdbaths and simple kinetics - running a bead or pounding washers in half - stings a little no matter how it’s said - if you can’t produce you must be sick? - dearer than any lump of cash
Élan Reisner
The Sabbath’s Recreation
rabbinic hermeneutics - the absolute perfection of the text - « He rested on the seventh day » - the erasure, rather than the solution - « like a man striking the hammer » - « Mortal man, who does not know his minutes » - the repetition of cessation - « a king who made a bridal chamber » - « If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds »
Cat Pierro
Inside Out
plot the lips’ journey - for a boy to critique a girl - against self-involvement - not able to be sick - open the dictionaries and the maps - typically the size of a pebble - fluid near the disturbance - 10 meters in diameter - stony, iron, and stony-iron - gaps in the bands of color - devoid of reader subjectivity
Bret Schneider
Notes on Dilation, Radiance
promising to appear - an implacably subjective syntax - radiance through hermetic iteration - one gap blinking at another - differences that fall far afield - a second natural world - it shouldn’t even be read - of the flaneur as a « bulwark against progress » - hieroglyphic existence in a bureaucratic world - the existence of ‘literature’ or thought through words
Emily Balsamo
The Lonely World of Vladimir Propp
The Morphology of the Folktale - an end in itself - scientific analysis relating to narrative structure - « Hero leaves home » - what his favorite book was about - gigantic charts to codify literature - « Toward a Structure of Reality Shows » - procedure is king
Philip Engel
The Dangers of Self-Reference
the standard liar’s paradox - illegitimate totalities - psychohistory is not a fatalistic science - incompleteness and inconsistency - arithmoquining - true but unprovable
Chiara Scully
Afterthought on “Innocence”