jack's seclusion.

Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria - Langston Hughes

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:52:25 -0400

Fine living … a la carte?
Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!

LISTEN HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the
new Waldorf-Astoria:

“All the luxuries of private home… .”
Now, won’t that be charming when the last flop-house
has turned you down this winter?
Furthermore:
“It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
world… .” It cost twenty-eight million dollars. The fa-
mous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting.
Alexandre Gastaud is chef. It will be a distinguished
background for society.
So when you’ve no place else to go, homeless and hungry
ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags—
(Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good
enough?)

ROOMERS
Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers—
sleepers in charity’s flop-houses where God pulls a
long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.
They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at the menu, will
you:

GUMBO CREOLE
CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE
BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF
SMALL ONIONS IN CREAM
WATERCRESS SALAD
PEACH MELBA

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.
(Or haven’t you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bit-
ter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
warm, anyway. You’ve got nothing else to do.

EVICTED FAMILIES
All you families put out in the street:
Apartments in the towers are only $10,000 a year.
(Three rooms and two baths.) Move in there until
times get good, and you can do better. $10,000 and $1.00
are about the same to you, aren’t they?
Who cares about money with a wife and kids homeless, and
nobody in the family working? Wouldn’t a duplex
high above the street be grand, with a view of the rich-
est city in the world at your nose?
“A lease, if you prefer, or an arrangement terminable at will.”

NEGROES
Oh, Lawd. I done forgot Harlem!
Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street——
they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a
mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There’s dancing
after supper in a big warm room. It’s cold as hell
on Lenox Avenue. All you’ve had all day is a cup of
coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat’s a ragged banner on
your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just
crazy about Paul R0beson! Maybe they’ll like you, too,
black mob from Harlme. Drop in at the Waldorf this
afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a
lot of darkie color——free for nothing! Ask the Junior
Leaguers to sing a spiritual for you. They probably
know ‘em better than you do——and their lips won’t be
so chapped with cold after they step out of their closed
cars in the undercover driveways.
Hallelujah! Undercover driveways!
Ma soul’s a witness for de Waldorf-Astoria!
(A thousand nigger section-hands keep the roadbeds smooth,
so investments in railroads pay ladies with diamond
necklaces staring at Sert murals.)
Thank God A-mighty!
(And a million niggers bend their backs on rubber planta-
tions, for rich behinds to ride on thick tires to the
Theatre Guild tonight.)
Ma soul’s a witness!
(And here we stand, shivering in the cold, in Harlem.)
Glory be to God——
De Waldorf-Astoria’s open!

EVERYBODY
So get proud and rare back; everybody! The new Waldorf-Astoria’s
open!
(Special siding for private cars from the railroad yards.)
You ain’t been there yet?
(A thousand miles of carpet and a million bathrooms.)
Whats the matter?
You haven’t seen the ads in the papers? Didn’t you get a card?
Don’t you know they specialize in American cooking?
Ankle on down to 49th Street at Park Avenue. Get up
off that subway bench tonight with the evening POST
for cover! Come on out o’ that flop-house! Stop shivering
your guts out all day on street corners under the El.
Jesus, ain’t you tired yet?

CHRISTMAS CARD
Hail Mary, Mother of God!
the new Christ child of the Revolution’s about to be
born.
(Kick hard, red baby, in the bitter womb of the mob.)
Somebody, put an ad in Vanity Fair quick!
Call Oscar of the Waldorf——for Christ’s sake!!
It’s almost Christmas, and that little girl——turned whore
because her belly was too hungry to stand it anymore——
wants a nice clean bed for the Immaculate Conception.
Listen, Mary, Mother of God, wrap your new born babe in
the red flag of Revolution: the Waldorf-Astoria’s the
best manger we’ve got. For reservations: Telephone EL.
5-3000.

Caterpillar crawled Tiny little thing Antlered the branch shook Along with the wind Pop called it...

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:09:55 -0400

Caterpillar crawled
Tiny little thing

Antlered the branch shook
Along with the wind

Pop called it natural
Ma called it sin

slantedshanty: Frank O’Hara

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:32:18 -0400

slantedshanty:

Frank O’Hara

"The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:24:56 -0400

“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology,
the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual veriﬁability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that
ethnicity.”

- http://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/butler-undoing_gender.pdf

"The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that desire is always a desire for..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:18:00 -0400

“The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that
desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially
viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses
a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized
as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the
very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that
deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status,
producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human.”

- http://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/butler-undoing_gender.pdf

"If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:16:23 -0400

“If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in
part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for
that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice
of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not
“do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another,
even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender
appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own.
But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author
(and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).”

- http://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/butler-undoing_gender.pdf

"The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways. Totalitarian..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:45:27 -0400

“The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways. Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is not, ‘Do your duty, I don’t care whether you like it or not,’ but: ‘You must do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it.’ (This is how totalitarian democracy works: it is not enough for the people to follow their leader, they must love him.) Duty becomes pleasure. Second, there is the obverse paradox of pleasure becoming duty in a ‘permissive’ society. Subjects experience the need to ‘have a good time’, to enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and, consequently, feel guilty for failing to be happy. The superego controls the zone in which these two opposites overlap – in which the command to enjoy doing your duty coincides with the duty to enjoy yourself.”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"A good illustration of the way the ‘totalitarian’ master operates is provided by the logo on the..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:43:54 -0400

“A good illustration of the way the ‘totalitarian’ master operates is provided by the logo on the wrapper around German fat-free salami. ‘Du darfst!’ it says – ‘You may!’ The new fundamentalisms are not a reaction against the anxiety of excessive freedom that accompanies liberal late capitalism; they do not provide strong prohibitions in a society awash with permissiveness. The cliché about ‘escaping from freedom’ into a totalitarian haven is profoundly misleading. Nor is an explanation found in the standard Freudo-Marxian thesis according to which the libidinal foundation of totalitarian (fascist) regimes is the ‘authoritarian personality’ – i.e. someone who finds satisfaction in compulsive obedience. Although, on the surface, the totalitarian master also issues stern orders compelling us to renounce pleasure and to sacrifice ourselves in some higher cause, his effective injunction, discernible between the lines, is a call to unconstrained transgression. Far from imposing on us a firm set of standards to be complied with, the totalitarian master suspends (moral) punishment. His secret injunction is: ‘You may.’ He tells us that the prohibitions which regulate social life and guarantee a minimum of decency are worthless, just a device to keep the common people at bay – we, on the other hand, are free to let ourselves go, to kill, rape, plunder, but only insofar as we follow the master. (The Frankfurt School discerned this key feature of totalitarianism in its theory of repressive desublimation.) Obedience to the master allows you to transgress everyday moral rules: all the dirty things you were dreaming of, everything you had to renounce when you subordinated yourself to the traditional, patriarchal, symbolic Law you are now allowed to indulge in without punishment, just as you may eat fat-free salami without any risk to your health.”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"But New Age wisdom, too, relies on the superego imperative: ‘It is your duty to achieve full..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:29:22 -0400

“But New Age wisdom, too, relies on the superego imperative: ‘It is your duty to achieve full self-realisation and self-fulfilment, because you can.’ Isn’t this why we often feel that we are being terrorised by the New Age language of liberation?”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"For psychoanalysis, the perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:48:12 -0400

“For psychoanalysis, the perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity: not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure but a life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own, a life in which performance of the ritual destined to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction.”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:47:23 -0400

“In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"What psychoanalysis properly concerns itself with are the unexpected consequences of the..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:45:12 -0400

“What psychoanalysis properly concerns itself with are the unexpected consequences of the disintegration of the structures that have traditionally regulated libidinal life. Why does the decline of paternal authority and fixed social and gender roles generate new guilts and anxieties, instead of opening up a brave new world in which we can enjoy shifting and reshaping our multiple identities?”

- Slavoj Žižek · ‘You May!’: the post-modern superego · LRB 18 March 1999

"The task of all of these movements seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:48:47 -0400

“The task of all of these movements seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself.”

- Undoing Gender, Judith Butler

"As a result, the ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:44:22 -0400

“As a result, the ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavours to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them.”

- Undoing Gender, Judith Butler

"Contrary to orthodox Marxist praxis, which solely seeks to implement an unchangeable and narrow idea..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:16:50 -0400

“Contrary to orthodox Marxist praxis, which solely seeks to implement an unchangeable and narrow idea of “communism” into practice, critical theorists held that praxis and theory, following the dialectical method, should be interdependent and should mutually influence each other.”

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"For their part, Frankfurt School theorists quickly came to realize that a dialectical method could..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:16:24 -0400

“For their part, Frankfurt School theorists quickly came to realize that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself—that is to say, if they adopted a self-correcting method—a dialectical method that would enable them to correct previous false dialectical interpretations. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the dogmatic historicism and materialism of orthodox Marxism.[30] Indeed, the material tensions and class struggles of which Marx spoke were no longer seen by Frankfurt School theorists as having the same revolutionary potential within contemporary Western societies—an observation which indicated that Marx’s dialectical interpretations and predictions were either incomplete or incorrect.”

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"rather based their work on the epistemological base of Karl Marx’s work, which presented..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:13:50 -0400

“rather based their work on the epistemological base of Karl Marx’s work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. They thus emphasized that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. Critique, in this Marxian sense, meant taking the ideology of a society – e.g. the belief in individual freedom or free market under capitalism – and critiquing it by comparing it with the social reality of that very society – e.g. social inequality and exploitation. The methodology on which Frankfurt School theorists grounded this critique came to be what had before been established by Hegel and Marx, namely the dialectical method.”

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Whereas traditional theory can only mirror and explain reality as it presently is, critical..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:12:11 -0400

“Whereas traditional theory can only mirror and explain reality as it presently is, critical theory’s purpose is to change it; in Horkheimer’s words the goal of critical theory is “the emancipation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them””

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Horkheimer maintained that critical theory should be directed at the totality of society in its..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:11:56 -0400

“Horkheimer maintained that critical theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), just as it should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology. While critical theory must at all times be self-critical, Horkheimer insisted that a theory is only critical if it is explanatory. Critical theory must therefore combine practical and normative thinking in order to “explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify actors to change it, and provide clear norms for criticism and practical goals for the future.””

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"What critical theory attempts to do is to place itself outside of philosophical strictures and the..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:04:58 -0400

“What critical theory attempts to do is to place itself outside of philosophical strictures and the confines of existing structures. However, as a way of thinking and “recovering” humanity’s self-knowledge, critical theory often looks to Marxism for its methods and tools”

- Frankfurt School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia