The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

July 27, 2010


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:43:40
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Oppose the War Funding - National Call-in Days

Oppose the War Funding - National Call-in Days

Grassroots Opposition to War Funding Reaches Boiling
Point!

National Call-In Days July 26-28

The House of Representatives will be voting again this
week on the White House request for $33.5 billion of
new funding for the war in Afghanistan.

United for Peace and Justice is
joining together with Peace Action, CODEPINK, Friends
Committee on National Legislation, Peace and Justice
Resource Center, Campaign for Peace and Democracy,
Historians Against the War, Just Foreign Policy,
Progressive Democrats of America and US Labor Against
the War in calling upon Congressional Representatives
to vote against  the White House request for $33.5
billion in new  funds for the war in Afghanistan.

Congressional Switchboard: 1-888-493-5443 toll-free (We
are counting calls)

Three weeks ago, 162 members of the House supported an
Amendment calling for a time-table for withdrawal.
100 members of the House supported an amendment offered
by Rep. Barbara Lee limiting the use of the funds for
security and to actually begin the withdrawal of
troops.

Now the House is being asked to approve funding without
a time-table or any plan for withdrawal.  Nine years
into the war, the Administration lacks clear goals, a
coherent strategy or any "exit plan."  Meanwhile
soldiers and civilians keep dying and so far $321
billion dollars have been being squandered in an
irrational enterprise.  We need to insist that elected
officials act responsibly by refusing to fund this war
without end.

Most commonly asked question: "Why should I bother?
They don't listen anyway?" Members of Congress are
listening. That's why these amendments received so many
votes. That's the reason growing numbers are willing to
speak out in opposition. The more "No" votes we achieve
this week--the closer we come to bringing this tragic
war to a close...

Phone

Call the Congressional Switchboard:1-888-493-5443 early
this week and after you hang up please forward this
message to your friends.

Members of Congress will be back in their districts
during August. Many will be campaigning for
re-election. This is a valuable time to partner with
local domestic needs groups fighting against cut-backs.
  Conduct vigils, send delegations or engage in direct
action around a shared desire to fund our communities,
not endless war. In the Fall Congress will be asked to
approve another $160 billion war funding for FY2011.
Let's make them feel the heat NOW!

Help us continue to do this critical work: Make a
donation to UFPJ today.

UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE www.unitedforpeace.org |
212-868-5545 PO Box 607; Times Square Station; New
York, NY 10108

===

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Cliffs in West Jordan, Utah

You might find a mormon cricket hiding but you'd have to go into the weed
forests across the street for the mantis. You might find that it's better
to speed towards dissolution, corrosion, than attempt to decry obstinately
the forces of rampant subversion. For nothing operates but development and
the church and that leaves the rest of in a nowhere with names like
Branding Iron Lane. http://www.alansondheim.org/cliffs.jpg

The cliff slope guarantees that runoff from the western slopes won't be
absorbed by the retainer ponds, oddly positioned on the other side of the
houses and basements - so there's flooding. You might dig a channel along
the cliff base, but then you might have to contend with the natural order
of a stream. No HOA (home owners' association) would stand for it.

the promised land

which isn't in the valley but in the valley in the minutes
for an instant i saw it, in other words i was witness
then it disappeared forever, shall i add it to virtual worlds
are virtual worlds promised lands, are there many
are there many or are there one

http://www.alansondheim.org/glory1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/glory2.jpg

Michael Current, co-founder of Cybermind and Fiction-of-Philosophy, which 
became Wryting-L, he died on Thursday or Friday

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 02:48:15
From: Michael Current <mcurrent@picard.infonet.net>
To: ALAN SONDHEIM <sondheim@panix.com>, sondheim@newschool.edu
Subject: A little something. . .
Resent-Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 21:10:47 -0400 (EDT)
Resent-From: Alan***Sondheim <root@clara.julu.net>
Resent-To: sondheim@panix.com

I wrote this while sitting at the cafe tonight, much to my surprise.
Comments?  Please be gentle, this is not something I am used to/
comfortable with.

CARE OF THE BODY


A stranger writes to me of the body.  Of his concern for the body.
Answering my e-mail, he tells me he is skeptical of e-mail, concerned
about the detachment of thought and affect from the fleshbonesandblood.
An ethical matter, a concern that we will abandon our environment, that
our being-in-the-world will be replaced by being-in/being-with/being-
one-with/becoming-with the machine. . . .

Tracing back through endless stacks of mail headers, we find the
stranger at his home, on a quiet street in a Midwestern college town,
around midnight.  He is reading my message, addressed not to him but
to a multiple that includes him, that he intersects.  There is soft
jazz in the headphones from a beat-up old cassette deck as he reads,
sitting, naked, in a chair in the corner of his bedroom, books on
every side, the screen propped to the proper height by a pile of books
and a couple of dusty old manuscripts.

He is reading, deleting, saving, replying; _harvesting_ the list which
grows, in fits and starts, but grows, in its non-organic medium.  His
hands move on the keyboard, and sometimes, unconsiously, during the
reading of a long message, they slip from the keyboard to the pile of
books to his left side, books long unread.  Sometimes, unconsciously,
he caresses the books.  Sometimes, too, unconsciously, his hand slips
from the stack of books into his lap, unto his semi-erect penis which,
from time to time, unconsciously, he also caresses. . . .

Reading my post he feels concern.  He needs to speak to me.  He wonders
if I cannot see the irony of discussing embodiment by e-mail.  He wonders
what I look like, what I am doing at that very moment, and what would
happen if we were to meet in the flesh.

He must reach out to me, touch me with his concern.  His hands linger in
his lap as he pounders the words, stroking himself.  Then they move to
the keyboard and he begins to type, sharing with a disembodied stranger -
who has not, in any case, addressed _him_ exactly - his concern about
the abandonment of the body.  Carefully, he composes clear, direct,
generous sentences, filling them with more than he dare say or even
acknowledge he is thinking about.  We must not abandon the body.

Finishing the message, he hits the key sequence that will send it off
to me, feeling satisfied that he has pointed out the danger he sees,
and something else, too, has been communicated, something that should
not be brought to the level of thought. . . .  He hits a switch and
powers down the computer, stands and turns out the lights.  A sudden
breeze through the window makes him aware, for a moment, of his body,
and he muses, absently, for a moment, at how he has managed to become
erect during the hour he has spent carefully reading, deleting,
filing, replying. . . .

He crawls into bed, mind wandering from the pleasant sensation of cool
sheets on his cock, balls, nipples to vague, tangential thoughts about
my message, his reply - for a moment imagining himself speaking to me,
his words convincing, compelling - and about Marx, Sartre, Immanuel
Wallerstein. . .thoughts of pleasure and the lack of it rising and
receeding in Kondratiev waves across the longue duree of his life.  At
some point he is asleep, dreaming.

Fifteen, he is on the beach, with Wendy, his hands reaching and reaching
for the clasp that holds on her bikini top.  A couple of weeks ago, he is
peering out the window for a second and then a third time at the smooth,
well-formed chest of the tanned boy who is mowing the lawn, feeling all
the different kinds of difference that seperate the boy's body from his
own.  Last night, he is in my bedroom, watching me read the reply he has
written, pleased to see that I, too, am at home, alone, naked in my
bedroom before my terminal reading the text of his desire.  His mind is
touching mine.  Dreaming of me, he wakes to find his chest sticky, his
hand on his slowly receeding erection.  We wipes his hand on the sheets
and turns over, feeling, for a moment, as he falls back into sleep -
something like. . .concerned.  "We must not abandon the body," he
murmurs. . . .

In the corner, the computer listens for his breathing to steady, then
switches itself on and dials, disks spinning with anticipation.

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