May 08, 2005

This weekend, Anarchism Now conference at UCSC. Nice talk by John Holloway.

Read Guy Debord's Panegyric last week. I assume it is a parodic memoir? Either that or totally pretentious and insane. Not sure I know enough to figure out which but it made me laugh a lot. Has very little information in it that is not quotation. The first sentence is so full of possibility: "All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles." Then the next paragraph begins with either the parody or the meglomania... "Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method: 'In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that is often very difficult.'" Etc.

Today skimmed quickly through Chana Kronfeld's On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamic. Cynthia loaned it to me because she thought it was similar to work I am trying to do. It is. And it was helpful. About Jewish modernism and its internationalism. I confess I skipped some of the readings of individual poets/poems.

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