18.00 – 20.45. 21 graden, zuidenwind en zwaarbewolkt. Fijn fietsen na een weekend zonder ritje. Reed de Loorberg a 19 tot 20 km/u op, even snel als jongen met geschoren benen, de snelste van een groep die me achterop kwam.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – Mesch – Libbeek – Mheer – Banholt – Schilberg – Slenaken – Loorberg – Gieveld – Teuven – Opsinnich (half) – Remersdael – Veurs – St. Martensvoeren – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne.

Hmm, favoriete klims in de afdaling: Schilberg, Gieveld. Volgende keer andersom.

Next weekend = Jan van Eyck Book Weekend. With a.o. a Tomorrow Book Projects Workshop; Stuart Bailey’s Manifesta print-on-demand shop, Gerhard Rühm (really!!), lots of Fluxus and Concrete Poetry books on display, and more;

and then of course, on sunday, 15.00 hrs. the presentation of Ubiscribe PoD 0.9.0, the publication we (Jouke, Sandra, Claudia, Inga & me) have been working on in the past 2 weeks — starting with putting content (text, images) into our wiki, ending, temporarily, with a paper publication. (In the wiki one can find already new stuff added). I just send some last corrections to Jouke. Tomorrow morning the pdf will be at the printers. Launch & learn is the term we’ve devised for this kind of ultra-quick production. It’s like learning to understand again/anew what editing is, what ‘editorial labor’ entails.

Programme for 20/21th May: http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_bookish_weekend.html.

Werk-ethos: dat ik de neiging heb om me te verontschuldigen dat ik een dag vrijaf neem voor een lange fietstocht — zeker in een omgeving als de Jan van Eyck en met vrienden die al hun tijd in het atelier lijken door te brengen. Ik nam vrijaf, zei verontschuldigend dat ik tot 1 uur ‘s nachts had doorgewerkt (werk afgemaakt, zodat ik zou kunnen fietsen). Ik kon pas om 8 uur ‘s avonds weer echt door met werk (wachten op het doorskypen van correcties).

Hoogzomer. Felle zon, geen wolkje in de hemel. 26 graden. Weinig wind (juist een beetje voor de afkoeling). 11.00 – 17.00. Besloot richting Aken en dan naar het Hertogenwoud te rijden (het rondje La Redoute moet nog even wachten). Tussen Aken en Raeren ken ik de namen en de ligging van de dorpen niet, ik moest vaak op de kaart kijken. In het Hertogenwoud volgde ik deels de fietsknooppunten: genieten. (Sinds ik hier voor het eerst kwam, een jaar of 12 geleden, hou ik van dit landschap, dit bos). Vanaf Eupen de grote molen erop gegooid en met wind in de rug langs de grote, drukke weg geraasd, om snel terug te zijn.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – St. Martensvoeren – De Plank – Teuven – Opsinnich – Sippenaeken – Gemmenich – Drielandenpunt – ra. bos in – ra. dalen (onverhard) – Chappelle – Kelmis – Hergenrath – Astenet – Walhorn – Neudorf / Raeren – ri. Hydro aluminium – Vennkreuz – Steinley Venn – Stausee Eupen – Eupen – (46 – ri. 28 – 52 – 53 – 54 – 55 – 41 – 40) – Welkenraedt – Henri-Chapelle – Veursbos – St. Martensvoeren – Moelingen – Lanaye – Kanne.

Daarna tot kwart voor vier ‘s ochtends gewerkt.

Funny. Amazon sends me one of those e-mails ‘Recommended for You”. Out of the 8 books they recommend me, I already own 6, and I have read 7. I have published reviews or articles about 3, and blogged about 2 others. The books are Infinite Jest, The Age of Wire and String, The Rifles, Europe Central, State of Exception, Homo Sacer and the Open. DFW, Vollmann, Agamben. The only book I do not own is Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems — and that one is, yes, high on my have-to-read list.

Apparently the software knows my taste quite well. But is this good recommendation? (Of course, the reason is that the software doesn’t know what I’ve bought at Atheneum in Amsterdam. And I think I prefer to get an e-mail that makes me smile, above eagerly awaiting what the software figures out I might like. Hmm, do I?)

Started reading through The Rustle of Language, collected shorter essays of Roland Barthes from the period 1966 – 1980. Some of these I’ve read before, a few I’ve read many times — like From Work to Text. I particularly like Barthes when breaking free of it, the structuralism of his earlier work is still present.

Having read 80 pages up till now, I’m struck by 2 things: 1. the ‘beauty’ of Barthes writing — even when glues together too many subordinate clause in one sentence, 2. how clearly al lot of what he writes fits in, well, the Zeitgeist. However ‘timeless’ and ‘abstract’ his theorizing of reading and writing may be, reading through these essays again, it becomes apparent how much it was also grounded in, let say, the ‘spirit’ of the times, and how much his ideas are tied to issues that seem to’ve been topical at the time.

Anyway, some by now ‘classic’ quotes:

‘(…) the Paradox of the reader: it is commonly admitted that to read is to decode: letters, words, meanings, structures, and this is incontestable; but by accumulating decodings (since reading is by right infinite), by removing the safety catch of meaning, by putting reading into freewheeling (which is its structural vocation), the reader is caught up in a dialectical reversal: finally he does not decode, he overcodes; he does not decipher, he produces, he accumulates languages, he lets himself be infinitely and tirelessly traversed by them: he is that traversal.’ On Reading, p. 42

‘Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flies, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49

‘The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, infelcted by Enlish empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of th “human person”.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49/50

‘(…) linguistics furnishes the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument, showing that the speech-act in its entirety is an “empty” process, which functions perfectly without its being necessary to “fill” it with the person of the interlocutors: linguistically the author is nothing but the one who writes, just as I is nothing but the one who says I: language knows a “subject”, not a “person”, and this subject, empty outside of the very speech-act which defines it, suffices to “hold” language, i.e., to exhaust it.’ The Death of the Author, p. 51

‘(T)he modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text: he is not furnished with a being which precedes or exceeds his writing, he is not the subject of which his book would be the predicate. (…) (W)riting can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observation, of representation, of “painting” (…) but instead (…) a performative.’ The Death of the Author, p. 52

‘Once the Author is distanced, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an Author to a text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing.’ The Death of the Author, p. 53

All quotes from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (transl. Richard Howard), University of California Press, Berkeley &c., 1989 (1986/1984).

& when I said that Barthes’ theory is tied to topical issues of the sixties, I mean for instance that his ‘death of the author’ also has to be seen in the perspective of the struggle against a certain kind of literary criticism, a way of teaching literature that was very much ‘under fire’ then. As long as Barthes’ theory is applied to literature and to writing as such, I have always found it very inspiring and to the point. As soon as one tries to apply it to political or legal speech, problems arise. I’d say.

Eigenlijk stond een zware dag eindredactie op het programma. Maar Jouke was nog niet klaar met de vormgeving (de ubiscribe-publicatie wordt een ubi-pil), dus besloot ik in de middag eindelijk mn kans te gaan: een rondje naar de Baraque Michel moest kunnen. Vreemd weer: warm, erg warm, soms benauwd, dan weer een verfissende wind; wolkenvorming & een voorspelling van buien en onweer. Boven Spa zag ik donkere wolken, maar op de Hoge Venen scheen onverwacht de zon. Het was er kurkdroog — ben ik er ooit geweest dat het er niet regende? If so, dan was het vandaag voor het eerst. 14.00 – 20.00. Eerst oostenwind, later zuidwestelijk.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Warsage – Mortroux – Val Dieu – Froidthier – Clermont – Bilstain – Limbourg – de klassieke route dus – Goe – Hevremont – Jalhay – Mont Rigi – omgekeerd – ri. Limbourg – ra. ri Hembach – fietsrouteknooppunt 38 – 39 – 35 – Membach – Baelen – Heggen – Welkenraedt – Lontzen – Montzen – Hombourg – Teuven – De Plank – St. Martensvoeren – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne

(En ja, tijd voor nieuwe scans).

3 out of these 4 function as a summary…

“The categories of modality are not founded on the subject, as Kant maintains, nor are they derived from it; rather, the subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact.” p. 147

“The modern meaning of the term “author” appears relatively late. In Latin, auctor originally designates the person who intervenes in the case of a minor (…) in order to grant him the valid title that he requires.” p. 148

“To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make live and to let die is, instead the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power. In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the other tow, a formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: not longer either to make die or to make live but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.” p. 155

“Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human — survival.” p. 156

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III, Zone Books, NY, 2002.

Na een paar dagen in Amsterdam, en een familie-weekendje op de Holterberg ‘s ochtends terug naar Maastricht. Zomerdagen en niet een keer gefietst. ‘s Middags stap ik, moe, toch op de fiets voor een rondje. Op tevee zie ik dat het in Wallonie pijpestelen regent — het Giropeleton rijdt door vies weer. In Kanne is het nog mooi, maar de donkere wolken hangen in de verte. Daarom keer ik bij Haccourt al om. Toch blijft het droog.

Kanne – St. Pierre – Halembaye – Haccourt – kanaal – Kanne

When I found the blog, approximately 3 months ago, I thought, probably for the first time in my life on the internet: “I’m not going to tell anyone. This will go down when too many people know. This cannot last long.” It lasted longer than expected.

I had often thought about converting my collection of jazz and improvised music to mp3. My collection consists mainly out of (about 700) audio cassettes and around 100 LPs. I did convert a few tapes, then decided it really took too much time.

This blog made it possible to collect in one go all the hard-bop and free jazz as mp3s, that I own on cassette or LP. All the Coltrane’s, Ornette’s, Cecil Taylor’s that I know by heart, and yes, also the ones I’d never heard.

The blog operated on the brink, I’d say. There was no reason to doubt the good intentions of the six posters. They uploaded vinyl-rips of long out of print LPs, music that was never released on CD. They made hard to get CDs available. They uploaded everything ever recorded by Andrew Hill, to share the love for the music. I enjoyed it, downloaded as long as it lasted, was surprised again and again that most uploaded files were downloaded only like 40 times over a period of a few weeks. Only once in a while I encountered a file that was downloaded 300 times (that would be a Miles Davis, or mainstream bop). Sometimes I downloaded a file that had not even been downloaded by someone else (that would be European free jazz). But, they did upload really a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot: like basically everything of John Coltrane (I think I only did not see Expression and, funny enough, Live at Birdland).

The blog made me greedy. I put myself in the absurd position of downloading music and not listening to it. Saving for later. Knowing that audio cassettes last longer than harddisks. Knowing that the sound quality of most of my audio cassettes is superior to that of the mp3 files. It goes without saying that — also since I already ‘owned’ much of this music — there’s no chance that I would ever buy one of the CDs. It’s partly hoarding, partly downloading out of curiosity, to listen to once, maybe twice. Anyway, I already wrote about this issue in Metropolis M: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/luisteren.html.

And then, two days ago, the blog went down. “The trolls found it”. Someone complained. The blog was hijacked, files deleted. Exactly what was bound to happen. What they knew was going to happen.

I have to give a talk on mp3-blogs on the SLSA conference in Amsterdam in june. So I think I will come back to this ‘case’.

And indeed, I will not tell where it continues. Not where the bots are listening too.

So the spammers have found this blog. This weekend I received 200 spam-messages in the comments. To keep the stresslevels of both me and the server low, Peet turned on the well-known little application that checks if you’re human and are able to read in a humanly way when leaving a comment. I’m sorry I have to do that.

Is it a coincidence that the spam began immediately after I blogged Blogonomics, and linked web-log.nl? I don’t think so. In a lot of senses it so predictable. (So bloggers using blogsoftware who until now did not have to fight comment-spam: do not link to commercial stuff…).

And yes, the comment-spam is in some way intelligent. It understand that I also use Dutch (if I remember well there was a bit of Dutch in the spam). It understands that I blog “intellectual” stuff (“Man your blog is so cognitive”). But I can spot the spam: URLs ending with .pl cannot be trusted without thinking twice. Sorry Poland.

The fight against spam can only be seen in terms of war.

How can blogs primarily be seen and conceptualized as conversations, when the comments-functionality is always on the brink of being destroyed by spammers? (When leaving a comment I prefer not to type over a few dancing letters or numbers; when managing my blog I prefer not to have to spend minutes or more on fighting spam).

And, now that we’re on this topic: at the moment I do have quite a problem with spam. It seems that some people do not receive my mail when it’s send from my normal mail-adress (that I have been using since 1997). Very annoying. (So: if you have send me mail and did not receive a reply, it is possible that I did write a reply that ended up in the spambox of your mail).

This happened to me as well when organizing Sonic Acts: every day I had to wade through the spambox to find the mails of Kim Cascone and Greg Kurcewicz.