Friday, March 31, 2006

Linkages

Harry Gilonis notes that most of the obituaries for Ian Hamilton Finlay were "crass" or "even in a veiled way vindictive," but points out this notable exception by Tom Lubbock in The Independent.
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The Cultural Society website has a wonderful new update online (click on "texts"), including poems by Pam Rehm, Peter O'Leary, Joel Bettridge, Michael Heller, Norman Finkelstein, Derek Coyle, Graham Foust, and Sam Ward. Also my own oblique homage to the master of low-budget downtown shock-porn, Richard Kern.
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Incoming:
Peter O'Leary, Depth Theology (U of Georgia P, 2006)
Susan Gevirtz, Black Box Cutaway (Kelsey St., 1999)
Susan Gevirtz, Hourglass Transcripts (Burning Deck, 2001)
James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006)
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Finished Müller-Doohm's Adorno biography, with reluctance – the perennial problem with biographies is that one always knows how they will end. This from Adorno to Helmut Heißenbüttel in 1968, responding to attacks on how he had handled Walter Benjamin's legacy:
While on the one hand I wanted to defend Benjamin's metaphysical impulses against himself, I wished also to defend dialectical materialism against him, since he seemed to me to have a mistaken idea of it. And this misunderstanding was not just his alone, but was shared by Brecht. I fancy that I have a very precise knowledge of Marx, as indeed you implicitly concede. This means that I could not fail to see that, while Benjamin felt committed to Marxism, he had missed the point of the essential contents of Marxist theory. God knows how highly I think of Brecht, but his ignorance of Marxism ... was indescribable. Neither had made a serious study of Marx, but ... they had swallowed him like a pill. This was what struck me as being so dubious; their view of Marx was heteronomous and irrational, in contrast to materialist dialectics as a theory.

2 comments:

Norman Finkelstein said...

...so what's so bad about a little heteronymity?

Mark Scroggins said...

Erm..., that's "heteronomous" (mit "o"), rather than heteronymous (mit "y")...