En arribar la primavera

dolça melangia a mitja tarda — 

    sospira el cel i d'ell rellisca

   sobre l'herba un tebi bes del sol ardent.

 el pi mateix, com un amant hostatge,

   per força de fortuna amb l'altre retrobat, 

     no creu encara la seua sort,

      plaent regal que li és dat. 

Desire

 This post on reddit ("Is it just me or is building the actual PC more exciting than actually using it?") reminded me of Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos. Both of these point out something funny about how desire functions in us: we relish in the desiring itself, and delaying fulfilment turns out to be pleasurable, even more so than fulfilment itself. Games like PC Building Simulator are another example: it's not really about using the finished product (spending time playing games on your newly built computer) but rather the process itself of picking parts, assembling them, inspecting and enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of a Kustom Komputer with an elegant case, liquid cooling, fancy LEDs and a transparent side plate. From this lens, Anger's short film shows the exact same psychological process of desiring, focusing on the process and the expectation of acquiring one's object of desire rather than the final act, the a priori "actual goal" of driving the car one is building and taking care of.

More: interpassivity, Lacan's canned laughter, etc. Think about this!

What Lacan calls objet petit a is the agent of this curving: the unfathomable X on account of which, when we confront the object of our desire, more satisfaction is provided by dancing around it than by making straight for it.

—Zizek, How to Read Lacan (2006)

Hysteria

What the hysteric expects from the subject supposed to know is to provide the solution that will resolve the hysterical deadlock, the final answer to 'Who am I? What do I really want?' This is the trap the analyst has to avoid: although, in the course of the treatment, he occupies the place of the one who is supposed to know, his entire strategy is to undermine this place and to make the patient aware that there is no guarantee for one's desire in the big Other.

—Zizek, Slavoj. How to read Lacan.

Música (II)

• Beethoven, Sonata per violí i piano, No. 5 ("Primavera")
• Mozart, ''Vespres solemnes de confessor''
• Mozart, Requiem
• Beethoven, Waldstein sonata, No. 21 en Do (Claudio Arrau)
• Ravel, Tzigane

Música (I)

• Monteverdi,  'Tempro la cetra', madrigal (7ème livre)
• Mozart, Quartet de Corda No. 14 "Primavera", K. 387 (Quartet Gerhard)
• Mozart, Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major K. 447
• Dowland 'Semper Dowland, semper dolens', pavana, P 9
• Ravel, Piano Concert in G major

Fantasia

     És fruit amarg el de la fantasia.
Hores tan somniades que ja em sembleu record,
jo tot, ànima i cos, us he de viure un dia,
abans que els meus sentits s'apaguin en la mort.

—Màrius Torres, Tarda i vespre
Novembre de 1941

Hyman Minksy

At first, Minsky thought that this policy of brinkmanship might work, after a fashion,by periodically reminding market participants about uncertainty and so causing a return to more conservative financing structures (Minsky, 1969b). What actually happened, however, was almost the opposite. Market participants took the lesson that speculative finance could be sustained provided one was prepared to hold on until the Fed stepped in, as it inevitably would. As a consequence, crisis intervention only ensured that each successive push to fragility went even closer to the brink, with ever greater swings of interest rates and ever more ingenious mechanisms for stretching liquidity.

-- The vision of Hyman P. Minsky, Perry Mehrling

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 39 (1999) 129-158