Date: Mon Jun 19 10:44:17 1995
From: Tom Blancato <tblancato-AT-envirolink.org>
Subject: Re: Daydream



Fido, 

I'll try to give a longer response later, but your identification of *one* 
hyphen with "a million" is what I meant by the "hysterical method". Indeed, it 
happens all the time. FPSP means "I, you" (first person, second person). I 
say, don't shoot the possibility down. Generally bad business for creative 
work. You may be right, but the thing to do, it seems to me, is to find out 
how you, in this particular case, may be wrong.


fido writes:
>Tom, I am still not clear on FPSP-[Heidegger], and something in your last 
>post made it even more confusing. Do you mean PNPN-[Heidegger] as in 
>proper name? Or do you mean [I][you]-[Heidegger]?
>
>SUBSTANTIVELY, I think a listname with a million hyphens or a million 
>initials (an acronym) is a dud. Sorry, it's the 90's. I want it in prose.
>
>I wonder what positions you feel have evaporated from conversation? We
>seem, here, to be having an exchange of shifters I/you, one thing you
>seemed to be interested in (and, incidentally, one thing that some people
>have been engaging with from the beginning of spoons, off and on). Sometimes 
>this is good; sometimes this is not good, as when one [you] gets delegated
>specific material authority--a situation which, it seems to me, this list
>is meant to question to some extent.
>
>For my part, I keep bringing up historical time in the form of 
>spoon-history because we don't need to reinvent the wheel--it's a bit 
>boring, actually. There is a set of experiences in that history, perhaps 
>not located in any one individual or archive, that has substance and 
>bearing on this list right here, why this list is, why we can send posts 
>like these to this list, etc.
>
>For example, early on it became clear to me that the most effective posts 
>--in terms of readable, digestible, respondable toable--stayed within a 2- 
>or at most 3-page limit. There was a discussion about post-length and it 
>seemed that this was a generalizable perception (obviously with some 
>variation). This may seem boring, but I'd put it to you that these kinds 
>of phenomenological details (and here I'd include the thing about 
>listnames) have everything to do with your positions.
>
>Perhaps there is some confusion because this /seems/ to be a schizo list: 
>is it practical, like will something specific in the form of new lists 
>come from it? or is it woolly? I don't see these as distinct from one 
>another necessarily, but I'd like to see the wasted spaces--seminar-##, 
>or those PN lists which are dead in the water--either weeded out or put 
>to some use before spoons even THINKS about metastasizing into a version 
>of exactly what smothered Kent Palmer's project in the first place.
>
>-f

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************************************************************************

"It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of 
dominion that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or, 
rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity."  -- Hannah Arendt

Crises of the Republic; lying in politics, civil disobedience on violence, 
thoughts on politics, and revolution. Hannah Arendt [1st ed.] New York, 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [1972] pages 142-143

Tom Blancato
tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
521 Main Street
PO Box 495
Harmony PA 16037
412-453-0211



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