days spent indoors

from B.H. Fairchild, "The Doppler Effect" in Local Knowledge (1991)

When I would go into bars in those days

the hard round faces would turn

to speak something like loneliness

but deeper, the rain spilling into gutters

or the sound of a car pulling away

in a moment of sleeplessness just before dawn,

the Doppler effect, I would have said shrewdly then,

of faces diminishing into the distance

even as they spoke. Their children

were doing well, somewhere, and their wives

were somewhere, too, and we were here

with those bright euphoric flowers

unfolding slowly in our eyes

and the sun which we had not seen for days

nuzzling our fingertips and licking

our elbows. Oh, it was all there, 

and there again the same, our heads nodding,

hands resting lightly upon the mahogany sheen

of the bar. Then one of us would leave

and the door would turn to a yellow square

so sudden and full of fire

that our eyes would daze and we would

stare into the long mirrors for hours

and speak shrewdly of that pulling away,

that going toward something.

spaces of appearance

from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1957)

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. . . . It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

The space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them -- like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity… -- do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.

handouts

from Evelyn Waugh, "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers" in Georgian Stories (1926)

A public house in the slums. Adam leans against the settee and pays for innumerable pints of beer for armies of ragged men. Ernest is engrossed in a heated altercation about birth control with a beggar whom he has just defeated at "darts."

Another public house: Ernest, beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes. Adam finds a bottle of gin in his pocket and attempts to give it to a man; his wife interposes; eventually the bottle falls to the floor and is broken.

Adam and Ernest in a taxi; they drive from college to college, being refused admission. Fade out.

riot's indoor sister

from Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997)

"This way, Gentlemen," Mr. Chantry helpfully steering the Surveyors to the Alley and thro' a back Entry in the Coffee-House, where they find Tumult easily out-roaring what prevails outside. With its own fuliginous Weather, at once public and private, created of smoke billowing from Pipes, Hearths, and Stoves, the Room would provide an extraordinary sight, were any able to see, in this Combination, peculiar and precise, of unceasing Talk and low Visibility, that makes Riot's indoor Sister, Conspiracy, not only possible, but resultful as well. One may be inches from a neighbor, yet both blurr'd past recognizing,-- thus may Advice grow reckless and Prophecy extreme, given the astonishing volume of words moving about in here, not only aloud but upon Paper as well, Paper being waved in the air, poked at repeatedly for emphasis, held up as Shielding against uncongenial remarks. Here and there in the Nebulosity, lone Lamps may be made out, at undefin'd Distances, snugly Halo'd,-- Servant-Boys moving to and fro, House-Cats in warm currents of flesh running invisibly before them, each Boy vigorously working his small Bellows to clear a Path thro' the Smoke, meantime calling out Names true and taken.

the revolutionary spirit(s)

from Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars (1926)

(PETER and FLUTHER enter tumultuously. They are hot, and full and hasty with the things they have seen and heard. Emotion is bubbling up in them, so that when they drink, and when they speak, they drink and speak with the fullness of emotional passion [...])

PETER (hurriedly to the BARMAN). Two more, Tom!...(To FLUTHER) Th' memory of all th' things that was done, an' all th' things that was suffered be th' people, was boomin' in me brain....Every nerve in me body was quiverin' to do somethin' desperate!

FLUTHER. Jammed as I was in th' crowd, I listed to th' speeches pattherin' on th' people's head, like rain fallin' on th' corn; every derogatory thought went out o' me mind, an' I said to meself, "You can die now, Fluther, for you've seen the shadow-dhreams of th' past leppin' to life in th' bodies of livin' men that show, if we were without a thitther o' courage for centuries, we're vice versa now!" Looka here. (He stretches out his arm under PETER'S face and rolls up his sleeve.) The blood was BOILIN' in me veins!

on academic witing

from Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2003)

Should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue? When the charge of bad writing comes from journalists, it is hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly humanistic disciplines is involved.