(sorry for using the list as an archive: my computer
is not printing nor saving tonight..double-odd, so one
is fully dispensed from  reading the bore that
follows, also in the light that its topic is a factual
state of maladie: regards and excuses...) Ermi




Malattia”


Estremo scenario. L' infermiera biancamente
s’avvicina al mio letto.
Scrutina le mie varie ferite. Per esempio,
quella sul mio polso sinistro. Il ruscelletto di
sangue brunito
che un tempo fluiva lungo le mie vene verso la valle
del cuore.
Il mondo, cara benefattrice, il mondo
è fango. E così il resto.
Anche da qui, i suoi vestimenti sembrano sexy,
(perfino)da questa severa soglia.
Ed io, nelle mie membrane assottigliate, nei mie
pensieri di traliccio |( o se si vuole, nelle mie
follie)  ben vedo il mondo come morbo,
malattia, di cui non esiste ancora terapia.


Erminia Passannanti





“Disease”

The ultimate scenario. The nurse whitely approaches my
bed.
She scrutinizes my several wounds. For instance,
the one on my left wrist. The rivulet of darkened
blood which
once flowed down my veins towards the valley of the
heart.
The world, my advocate, the world
is mud. And so it is the rest.
Also from here, her garments appear quite sexy,
(even) from this severe threshold.
And I, in my thinning membranes, my ticking thoughts,
(or if you want, my insanities)
I firmly see the world as a malaise,
a disease, not cure has been yet found for.



Erminia Passannanti, 12. 1. 2002






--- Candice Ward <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I don't want to get sidetracked from science poetry
> to Sokal--Jeremy's "why
> Lucretius? Why now?" questions are more interesting
> and fruitful to me (I'll
> get back to you on that, Jeremy!)--but I do want to
> point out that Peter's
> quoting from the later book by Sokal and his
> coauthor (whose name I've
> forgotten), while my own reference was to what Sokal
> did and said at the
> time of the original hoax, an act of bad faith if
> ever there was. Since
> then, Sokal has proved that bad faith can be a good
> career move, but he
> hasn't put a dent in science studies because the
> scholars and theorists from
> both the sciences and the humanities who work in
> that important area are
> simply smarter and better-informed scientifically as
> well as
> crit-theoretically. And they are doing serious,
> sophisticated work
> together--in good faith.
>
> The editors of _Social Text_ (which is published by
> Duke, so I was there
> when all this was going down) weren't "lazy ignorant
> and smug" (IMHO), but
> they weren't savvy either. While Sokal acted
> knowingly in bad faith, they
> took a good-faith risk on him as a hopelessly
> confused physicist who--they
> thought--was genuinely trying to engage with the
> theory he so obviously
> didn't understand. I think they acted in the spirit
> Peter and I have been
> sensing when they bent over backwards to try to help
> this clown bring his
> article into something more than laughable shape.
> But when he refused to
> make the revisions they'd requested (in a good-faith
> effort to make him look
> less idiotic), they should have rejected the article
> even if they still had
> no suspicions of Sokal's bad-faith-motivated
> actions. It was extremely poor
> editorial judgment to publish his goofball article,
> as they themselves
> realized when the balloon went up, but poor
> editorial judgment isn't a moral
> issue, while bad faith certainly is. If we assume
> that integrity or the lack
> thereof goes all the way down, then a scientist who
> would do what Sokal did
> is a disgrace to and a menace in his own field, not
> a threat to anyone
> else's.
>
> If he's publishing quotes out of context like the
> Baudrillard one in order
> to ridicule what he still doesn't understand (the
> now large literature on
> event theory, for instance), then he's acting in the
> same scholarly bad
> faith way that he did when he perpetrated the
> _Social Text_ hoax. And, with
> all due respect, Peter, I think you implicitly
> endorse that bad faith when
> you do the same to Baudrillard here by repeating a
> quote out of its context
> of serious, fairly smart work (I'm not gung-ho
> Baudrillard myself) in order
> to say that it's funny. It's only funny out of
> context and to those who,
> knowing nothing of the event-theory work to which
> Baudrillard is gesturing
> by analogy with such terms as "multiple
> refractivity" and the
> "non-Euclidean" space of war, read those terms only
> in their literal senses.
> The same sort of shoddy number could be done on one
> of your poems, Peter, if
> some critic quoted a line in isolation and in a
> bad-faith effort to smear
> your work.
>
> But--jumping off my soapbox now--I also want to say
> that I loved the
> strategy of your post, footnotes included (footnotes
> especially), and
> thought it both sincere and savvy!
>
> Candice
>
>
>
> on 1/11/02 5:51 PM, domfox at
> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > Re Sokal, I am a great lover and sometime
> practitioner of theory-bollocks of
> > all varieties, and I personally love what he did
> to Social Text who bloody
> > deserved it for being lazy ignorant and smug,
> although I don't love him
> > because he is also lazy ignorant and smug. The
> Baudrillard quote *is* funny,
> > and Baudrillard himself is funny, and it isn't
> just a joke but it is also a
> > joke. I don't think Kristeva was joking, but who
> knows? I like it that they
> > couldn't find anything to pin on Derrida. And the
> background politics is
> > sucky, because it makes your good faith as one who
> wills the social good
> > dependant on your metaphysics, whereas in fact you
> can believe in bloody
> > fairies and still be a solid pacifist and union
> organizer (or whatever your
> > version of willing the social good entails) - the
> irritating thing about
> > political questions is that they are quite askew
> from questions of technical
> > or intellectual competance, and even stupid and
> deluded individuals can be
> > politically decent, just as some of the cleverest
> bastards that there ain't
> > half been have also been right-wing arseholes of
> the first order. I dislike
> > it that this is the case, but what can you do?
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Peter Howard" <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 10:15 PM
> > Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe
> >
> >
> >> I'm very glad my comments were useful, Gerald.
> >>
> >> Candice, I'll be more than happy to take a look
> at your poem whenever
> >> it's ready to be looked at. But don't expect too
> much - it's a long time
> >> since I studied physics properly, so my knowledge
> is somewhat rusty. I
> >> bet you know more about neutrinos than I do at
> the moment.
> >>
> >> As for good stuff, the book I was most recently
> impressed by was Neil
> >> Rollinson's "Spanish Fly", which contains several
> poems that use
> >> scientific imagery effectively and accurately.
> Mario Petrucci and Danny
> >> Abse both know what they're talking about when
> they use science. The
> >> grand-daddy of science poets is Miroslav Holub,
> of course, but you
> >> probably knew that.
> >>
> >> But I was meaning more that there seem to be
> fewer scientific blunders
> >> in poems that aren't principally scientific in
> intent, but stumble
> >> across some science along the way. I playfully
> have a "S.T. Coleridge
> >> Horned Moon Award" [1] that I mentally present to
> poems that drop a
> >> scientific clanger, and I seem to be dishing it
> out less frequently of
> >> late. Poets seem to be more careful and/or better
> informed these days.
> >>
> >> As for Sokal, I don't agree that:
> >>
> >>> his
> >>> _Social Text_ hoax began with his own inability
> to penetrate the language
> > of
> >>> critical theory and his assumption on the basis
> of his own limitations
> > there
> >>> that it wasn't comprehensible or substantive at
> all.
> >>
> >> He specifically says: "We are not attacking
> philosophy, the humanities
> >> or the social sciences *in general*; on the
> contrary, we feel that these
> >> fields are of the utmost importance..." His main
> target isn't the
> >> language of critical theory per se, but those
> occasions when it imports
> >> the language of physics or mathematics and
> doesn't use it properly. You
> >> might argue that critical theory has a perfect
> right to appropriate
> >> physics or maths language and use it for its own
> purposes; after all,
> >> those two disciplines are particularly noted for
> pinching
=== message truncated ===


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