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February 12, 2008

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J. Erik Potter

Head over to Open Mic Night at www.successful-blog.com tonight after 7pm CST. Fat Tire beer will be flowing. . .

phil

"The rules are simple — be nice. Do be nice. :)" I prefer beer flowing riotously from the cask Rabelais has broached for us.

Jeff Trexler

Beer? Though I risk betraying my German ancestors, I have to say in vino veritas.

phil

Jeff, thanks, blogged the link.

Jeff Trexler

Glad you liked it! It's one of my favorites. Years ago I memorized & wrote translations of a number of Blok's poems, with the notion of submitting a proposal for a new English translation of his selected works. Then I started practicing law and, alas, set it aside. Maybe someday . . .

herecomesnobody

I'm currently enaged in a refusal to work, which means I can drink a lot of beer and read a lot of books instead of collaborating with monied interests in the furtherance of a subjectivization aimed in "my" general direction. I borrowed Bakhtin's "Rabelais and His World" from the public library yesterday. It wasn't on the shelf, it had to be retrieved from storage. One of the reference librarians warned me that the odds it could found were remote. When the intern sent to retrieve it returned with the copy, the librarians exclaimed with wonderment. One said the book had been on hand for 40 years and no one had ever borrowed it. "Please promise me you will check out this book," she said, which I presume meant that doing so would preserve it - for another few decades perhaps - from sale or destruction, and from a complete exile from immediate public access in this vicinity (you can buy out of print copies on Amazon, but they don't arrive in five minutes, yet).

phil

Mr. Nobody, welcome to the carnival. Bakhtin himself when paper was scarce under Stalin, used some of his manuscripts to roll his cigarettes, so he would appreciate your preserving a copy from destruction.

Gerry

You should probably keep it to preserve it. Tell the librarian to drop you a note if anyone else calls for it. Offer them a quarter for it.

phil

Sad, isn't it? Bahktin is perhaps one of the three most influential critics and theoriests of the 20th century, and the one from whom we can learn most, perhaps, as we enter our own dark time under surveillance. My sense is that he wrote partly in code. "Weapons of the weak." Carnival was presented as coming up from "the people," a good Communist concept. But in reality, Bakhtin was writing about the subversion of life-denying hierarchy by the energies of the body, and the pleasures of conviviality, and the dissolving power of laughter (comic, satiric, boisterous). Bakhtin would have wanted his own Otafuku, the Shinto goddess of drink and laughter. I and conviviality. I don't know if he ever wrote about Falstaff, but Falstaff is of that tradition too, I think, a lord of misrule who speaks for the flesh and what makes us all human, King and Pauper alike.

Ambitious Bruces

Pissed as a family fart.

phil

Works better probably over a glass of beer than a cup of morning coffee, but Monty Python is indeed sorely missed.

Ambitious Bruces

Yeah. I actually lost my sense of humor the other day. I couldn't will it back. So I stopped trying, just paused. Not hilarious, but OK.

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