Detical

A transposition of letters. An accident. Detical. A hand-made hook which leads me to recall many years ago in my adolescence a slogan that adorned a billboard in Kapuskasing. The slogan "Keep Kap Klean" resisted translation or so it was said. Nevertheless it would be quite the trick to capture the combined effects of alliteration, monosyllables and unorthodox spelling in French. Decades later I have tried and my attempt floats about the letter "p" instead of the "k" and mutes the imperative into a pointing towards an ideal.

Kap: propre sans pareil

And so for day 239
10.08.2007

Freedom, a non-destination non-determinative view

Xavier Tilliette Merleau-Ponty ou la mesure de l'homme in the series Philosophes de tous les temps.

I like to place this remark about perception awakened being akin to sending science in a dizzying spin

Réveiller la perception, c'est étourdir la science

with a passage several dozen pages later

Si la contingence extermine le rêve de destination bienheureuse, elle abonde de la richesse du monde, elle assure à la vie humaine le sérieux de la liberté.

Contingency as a mode of salvation, as perpetual process. Keeps perception sharp to be on the look out for the haphazard, the accidental.

And so for day 238
09.08.2007

Situated Reading of Situations

Susan Stewart. On Longing

[T]he distance between the situation of reading and the situation of the depiction is bridged by description, the use of a field of familiar signs [...] Thus, whenever we speak of the context of reading, we see at work a doubling which undermines the authority of both the reading situation and the situation or locus of the depiction: the read is not in either world, but rather moves between them, and thereby moves between varieties of partial and transcendent vision.

And from where I read this I imagine you skipping through three situations: that of your reading, that of the rendering of what you are reading, that of the depiction brought to mind. In your hand a magnifying glass.

And so for day 237
08.08.2007

Logo Imaginings

The logo of the American Academy of Bookbinding reminds me of the animal caricature of the wise old owl. Four squares brought into formation to form a larger square. The bottom two have a white circle on black ground (the wide eyes of the wise old owl). The top two have an isoceles triangle in black on a white ground (the feathered tufts of a horned owl). The abstraction of the feature of an owl may be a fanciful reading of a fetching design. For white read red in the colour version.

And so for day 236
07.08.2007

Aestheticizing Techniques of Commerce

Jochen Schulte-Sasse "Afterward" to Jay Caplan. Framed Narratives: Diderot's Geneology of the Beholder.

The mechanical arts in particlar [sic] were soon to be excluded from the realm of the so-called beautiful arts because their skills turned out to be commercially exploitable in the course of the industrial revolution. For one of the structuring principles of the institutionalization of a separate aesthetic realm was the resistance of those arts delimited as "beautiful" to commercial utilization. As Martin Fontius has pointed out, the development of a generalized notion of art and the emergence of a new discipline — aesthetics — dealing with art in general coincide not just accidentally with the emergence of technology as a science and institutionalized discipline: "the monopolization of the concept of technic on the one hand corresponded to an aestheticization of the concept of art on the other."

How like an institution is a marketplace?

And so for day 235
06.08.2007

A Rationale for Slow Reading

Geoffrey O'Brien. The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading.

He measures his life by sentences and chapters. He comes to feel that just as any moment of life contains the whole of it, any of these books is the whole library, any sentence the whole book. This realization affords him enormous relief. To allow himself to be lost in this reading is his salvation.

I like how the prose shifts from a contemplation of a moment containing a life to a part being a larger whole.

And so for day 234
05.08.2007

Page Leaping

Kevin Connolly Happyland. The title poem in this collection is a set of nine parts is about the East Tremont fires in New York and one of the pieces recalls Triangle Shirtwaist fire that happened "79 years to the day" before the fire that is the subject of "Happyland". There is smart use of the white space dividing the stanzas to form effects such as this

March 25, 1911:
the day the angels fell

nine floors into heaven.

There are no further lines to the page end. That is where the words stop.

To echo Oscar Wilde on page turning, sometimes halting is the appropriate response and page conditions can contribute to that response.

And so for day 233
04.08.2007

Page Turning

As Appendix B to More Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis there is "A Reminiscence of 1898 by Wilfred Hugh Chesson" in which Wilde comments on the impact of page size on the experience of reading.

"I do not approve of the shape of the Pseudonym Library [published by Unwin]," he said. "It is too narrow. It is unjust to a good style to print it on a tiny page. Imagine turning Pater over rapidly. It is violence." [The editor kindly supplies the dimensions: "Its pages measured 6 3/4 inches down and 3 1/2 inches across."]

At first blush this seems to be about speed. Upon further consideration it is about page-centricism.

And so for day 232
03.08.2007

Rehearsing Analogies

Sometime ago I used to have the following reflection as part of my signature block for email messages.

Wondering if...

mnemonic is to analytic
as
mimetic is to synthetic

Of course the underlying premise is that the discrete blocks of memory are assembled in the flow of mimesis. Mimesis is about verisimilitude. It's not about reproduction or replication. It's about look-alike rendering. This reminds me of what I say about animation: "animation is not about movement it’s about synchronisation."

And so for day 231
02.08.2007

Tooting Tubers

The late Ingmar Bergman has a wonderful scene in Fanny and Alexander where a candle is blown out by a fart and then the screen goes black. In honour of that memory, this passage from Ridie Wilson Ghezzi's introduction to the section "Nanabush Stories from the Ojibwe" in the collection edited by Brian Swann Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America

Whereas "Nanabush Eats the Artichokes" is highly entertaining, due to Nanabush's misunderstanding of the nature of the noise following close behind him, and would be even more hilarious if performed orally, it also plays the typical role of the creation myth as the item in question is an artichoke. It is difficult to tell from either the translation or the narrative in the original Ojibwe whether the narrator was referring to an actual artichoke or to some form of raw vegetable in general.

It is certainly possible for the Ojibwe to have known about artichokes. The regular artichoke, native to Italy, would have been introduced by the French long before this narrative was collected. The Ojibwe word translated as "artichoke" here is referred to in other sources as a descriptor meaning "raw." [...] Whatever vegetable was originally intended here, it is clear that the story refers to a vegetable that, when eaten, produces a great deal of flatulence!

I suspect the the vegetable in question is the Jerusalem artichoke which raw or cooked can cause flatulence. It is native to North America and likely known to the Ojibway.

And so for day 230
01.08.2007