action pants

attempt #3? Me, Fede, and the asparagus tree...can you spot my action pants? See the citation below for my kierkegaardian inspiration for the name of this blog

A quick catch up

The Pakistani peacekeepers (my neighbors), have been practicing the bagpipes and marching drums; a church nearly moved into my neighborhood, but after nearly 48 hours of Pentecostal enthusiasm, they seem to have disappeared—though at one point, sometime around day break, they began to sing proper Congolese melodies, haunting beautiful and soft; Rwandair published an article on Gustav the crocodile, complete with pictures; I was caught (again) on the wrong side of some sort of security incident in town, and rather than be evacuated by the extraction team, I had to spend the night in perhaps the nicest hotel of my life; I went to Cape Town and Came back….



I’ve only just noticed that I haven’t really kept up with this blog, I suppose I’ve been too busy living my life to write about it post-hoc. Nevertheless, I’m writing now and all I really have to say is that, as usual, so much has happened, so many strange and wonderful encounters, so many frustrations, so much more than I could possibly get into a brief comment about ‘my life’.






For now then, let it be known that I’m leaving the heart of Darkness, and heading back to Vancouver. I’m putting together a number of ‘top ten’ lists, an exercise in thinking and reflecting about the positive aspects of the last year—cynicism is easy, and lately me and my colleagues have tended to be particularly critical—so top ten lists and some serious thought about what I’m leaving here, what I’m taking away, and why, in 5 years, I could come back and find that nothing has changed…

For those of you who I have somehow managed to exclude from my contact list (my accident of course!) and might be in the pacific north west early summer, I plan to be back in the ‘couve hopefully by the end of may, ish allah.

Please, also, read the zizke quote in the entry below…it captures something I thought it particularly striking…


Pics--Cape Good hope, Cape Good hope again, and an the sun rising over Glen Cairn.

Fun times with Slavoj Zizek

In Autumn 1992, after I had delivered a lecture on Hitchcock at an American campus, a member of the public asked me indignantly: How can you talk about such a trifling subject when you ex-country is dying in flames? My answer was: How is it that you in the USA can talk about Hitchcock? There is nothing traumatic in me behaving as befits a victim and testifying to the horrible events in my country—such behaviour cannot but arouse compassion and a false feeling of guilt that is the negative of a narcissistic satisfaction – that is, of my audience’s awareness that are all right while things are going badly for me. But I vioate a silent prohibition the moment I start to behave like them and talk about Hitchcock, not about the horrors of war in ex-Yugoslavia…This experience of mine tells us a lot about what is really unbearable to the Western gaze in the present Balkan conflict. Suffice it to recall a typical report from besieged Sarajevo: reporters compete with each other on who will find a more repulsive scene—lacerated children’s bodies, raped women, starved prisoners: all this is good fodder for hungry western eyes. However, the media are far more sparing of words apropros of how the residents of Sarajevo desperately endeavour to maintain the appearance of normal life. The tragedy of Sarjevo is epitomized in an elderly clerk who takes a walk to his office every day as usual, but has to quicken his pace at a certain crossroads because of a Serbian sniper lurks on a nearby hill; in a disco that operates ‘normally’, although one can hear explosions in the background; in a young woman who forces her way through ruins to the court in order to obtain a divorce so that she can start to live with her lover; in the issue of the Bosnian cinema monthly that appeared in Sarajevo in spring 1993 and published essays on Scorsese and Almodovar…

The unbearable is not the difference. The unbearable is the fact that in a sense there is no difference: there are no exotic bloodthirsty ‘balkanians’ in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us. The moment we take full not of this fact, the frontier that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ is exposed in all its arbitrariness, and we are forced to renounce the safe distance of external observers: as in a Moebius band, the part and the whole coincide, so that it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a ‘true’ peace and the residents of Sarajevo who pretend as far as possible that they are living in peace—we are forced to admit that in a sense we also imitate peace, live in a the fiction of peace. Sarajevo is not an island, an exception within the sea of normality; on the contrary, this alleged normality is itself an island of fictions within the common warfare. This is what we try to elude by stigmatizing the victim—that is, by locating the victim in the blemished domain between the two deaths: as if the victim were a pariah, a kind of living dead confined to the sacred fantasy-space.

Slavoj Zizek—The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality.

About brainbeats and action pants

Blogger has changed something, and it seems serious!
So here's an attempt to load not only a picture, but a picture of both my action pants AND the Asparagus tree--which is still alive, has flowered, spawned new asparagus trees, but has begun to lilt at a precarious angle...

as for the "brain beats", below is a prescient little quip from Soren Kierkegaard's diaries.
Up Next, Slavoj Zizek and my misadventures in cape town and beyond
C


Of all the sciences physical science is decidedly the most insipid, and I find it amusing to reflect how, with the passing of time, that becomes trite which once called forth amazement, for such is the invariable lot of the discoveries inherent in ‘the bad infinity’. Just remember what a stir it made when the Stethoscope was introduced. Soon we shall have reached the point where every barber will use it and, when shaving you , will ask: would you like to be stethoscoped, Sir? Then someone will invent an instrument for listening to the beats of the brain. That will make a tremendous stir until, in 50 years, every barber can do it. Then in a barbershop, when one has had a haircut and a shave and has been stethoscoped (for by the it will be very common) the barber will ask: Perhaps you would also like me to listen to you brain-beats?

Soren Kierkegaard, 1846