Precision Proofing

Billy Bragg "Rotting on Remand" on Workers Playtime 1988

I said there is no justice
As they led me out of the door
And the judge said, "This isn't a court of justice son
This a court of law."

Interesting that the liner to the CD elides the "is" in "This a court of law" but it pops up again in the lyrics available all over the World Wide Web. The missing copula is indeed pronounced on the sound track. I kind of relish the magistrate swallowing a word. But it would spoil the beat. And that would not be doing justice to the song.

And so for day 1458
10.12.2010

Feline Escapades

The Peripheral. William Gibson.

Voice being piped from within. A bone voice.

It made dragging your fingernails across a chalkboard seem like stroking a kitten.

A kitten with claws of course. And this test run of a cognitive bundle implant that produces art world jargon.

West's oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn't about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.

Designed to make you want to scratch — and fitting for describing an artist who gets tattoos and collects flayed epidermis to exhibit the narratives captured by those very tattoos. Quite the coup to produce the discursive inflections of a neoprimitivist curator with just the right dose of bafflement and believability.

I have been quoting these in reverse order from their appearance in the novel. All the better to sharpen a set of claws on this take on periodization and historical awareness.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

Of course the character listening to this states having no idea how anything could be otherwise. The kitten has grown into a Cheshire cat.

And so for day 1457
09.12.2010

Reader as Camera

George Steiner expresses with beautiful precision "At their finest, the criteria of orality and the cinematographic fuse perfectly" in his review of Christopher Logue's War Music [Times Literary Supplement 15 February 2002]. The directions emerge from the action.

[Achilles has just made his speech about withdrawing his forces.]

Silence.

Reverse the shot.

Go close.

Hear Agamemnon […]

That first "silence" could be a description of the reaction to the speech of Achilles. It comes to assume the force of an injunction to be quiet on set as the directions unfold.

The deliciousness of the passage is underscored by the fact that what is being exchanged are shots albeit verbal.

And so for day 1456
08.12.2010

Go Little Book

Zines are even more ephemeral than chapbooks. I wonder how this from Jes Walsh made its way from Berlin to Toronto. Jes uses Etsy to get product out — this may be a route for these small [approximated 4 inches by 5 1/2 inches ] creations to have reached our shores.

One even comes with a seed packet taped in with instructions to plan indoors Mar-Jul accompanied by a wish of Good Luck!

Myra Phan proves more illusive. Some online presence relating to OCAD. The URL artfully inscribed by hand on a small piece of tape on the cover her zine sketchbook is now defunct. The WayBackMachine at the Internet Archive records a posting from Dec 10 (2008) presenting and promising "Another anatomically incorrect drawing: I’m going to make a series of them and bind them all together". Myra's zine comes with a strip of paper wrapping round the covers providing the only words to accompanying photoreproduced sketches inside.

drawing has taught me that rewards come after
persistency and patience.

repetition has taught me to appreciate
the most subtle differences in everything.

The fate of small books let loose into the world has inspired poets since at least Martial to apostrophize and wish them well. One of my favourites is Byron at the end of Canto 1 of Don Juan quoting Southey [and satirizing him by the way].

'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters—go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.'

Little books have a long history. See the online exhibition Go, Little Book: Portable Medieval Manuscripts from the Beinecke Library which nicely puts hands in the picture to give a sense of scale.

And so for day 1455
07.12.2010

Global Joke

Play on an expression figée nets an interesting double take.

GAME VS. REAL

There are typos
all over the word.

Jason Christie. Canada Post. (Snare Books, 2006)

And so for day 1454
06.12.2010

Deictic Delights

It's a typographic joy with all its whitespace and judicious mix of fonts.

Sparrow 66
Black Sparrow Press, March 1978

It features a poem by Gerard Malanga "This Will Kill That". As with many paratextual matters, not sure if the frontispiece is meant to be part of the poem. It can certainly stand alone.

The triangle, hemicircle and the square remind me of the three base shapes of kindergarten gifts. [See Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman: sphere, cylinder, cube].

The last page turns from architecture to mirrors. Floating on the page are two simple but forceful lines:

This will kill that.
You are that.

Challenging to evade the threat. Not however impossible. Casuistry to the rescue.

The "you" is part of the "that" if one takes as referent of "that" to be the two lines on the page. The day will arrive when this is indeed the case. And on that day "this" will die. Of course the dead this may be made more lethal by its dying.

And so for day 1453
05.12.2010

GMO Enviro

Next entry will be devoted to translation as trafficking

This is the next entry.

In her Translator's Preface, Catherine Porter indicates that Avital Ronell had a hand in revising the English-language draft. She "frequently made small changes in the language." I thought these were limited to her part in the interviews collected in Fighting Theory. Turns out that she also tampered with the rendering of the interventions by Anne Dufourmantelle.

It took me a long time to understand why such prohibitions were established, for genetically modified plants, for example. Beyond the fact that they are tampered with (but everything is tampered with, and this has been true for a very long time — in antiquity plants were already being tampered with), why does this cause such anxiety all of a sudden? I finally understood that, if transgenic corn is planted in ordinary soil, the harvest is twice as resistant, and it's certain that no disease will attack it, but the seeds don't reproduce themselves, and the next crop has to be started from newly purchased seed. The plant exhausts the soil and doesn't reproduce itself. Something may be gained, but at what price? When one begins to think about it philosophically, it seems completely terrifying.

"Tampered" is a strange, somewhat mutant, rendering for "trafiquer" which means to trade in. Commerce is the target. Its short-sightedness particularly.

Il m'a fallu longtemps avant de comprendre pourquoi, par exemple pour les plantes transgéniques, de telles interdictions étaient posées. Outre le fait qu'elles soient trafiquées (mais on trafique tout et depuis très longtemps, depuis l'Antiquité on trafique les plantes), pourquoi tout à coup cela soulève une telle angoisse? J'ai fini par comprendre que, si on plante du maïs transgénique dans une terre normale, la récolte est deux fois plus résistante, on est sûr qu'aucune maladie ne l'attaquera, mais les graines ne se reproduisent pas, et on est obligé de tout replanter. La plante épuise le sol et ne se reproduit pas. Si on y gagne quelque chose, c'est à quel prix? Quand on se met à y penser philosophiquement, cela semble tout à fait effrayant.

"Effrayant" also means "dreadful" which in its etymology is indeed close to "terrifying" but also connotes an aesthetic reaction as in "extremely bad, unpleasant, or ugly".

And so for day 1452
04.12.2010

Moon Sun Owl Crowing

Avital Ronell first brought this Wordsworth poem to my attention in a conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle (Fighting Theory].

[T]his corrosive "thing" that was not legible before and then abruptly emerges or is provoked out of its hiding place. Wordsworth's texts on idiocy are a perfect example. In his time, these were marginal texts that distressed his friend Coleridge, the eminent drug addict. The later, the great philosophical erectus, tried to convince Wordsworth not to write such indigestible texts; he said that such writing was pure regression, and he was sincerely horrified by poems like "Idiot Boy," the one of which Wordsworth was fondest and which those around him found altogether disgraceful. […] However, one day, something in them is going to become readable, for all sorts of reasons and historical availabilities. And Wordsworth for his part adored his own poem on idiocy, though we don't know why. He could never let it go; he never regretted having written it. Worse still, he chose to publish it.

The Idiot Boy ends with in the voice of boy himself relating what he heard and saw after spending the night outdoors amid owls and moonlight. The addressee is the boy's mother.

(His very words I give to you,)
"The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold!"
— Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel's story,

Inversion. At play. Nocturnal transmissions. Daylight images. What's the potential for corrosion? Finding poetry?

And so for day 1451
03.12.2010

Auden on Audacity

From one experience, an astute set of observations on college life.

AJA: I didn't know that you had taught a Bennington

WHA: Yes, for one term, while someone else was away on a Guggenheim fellowship. Bennington is positively a brothel, you know. Around eleven o'clock one night I heard a knock on my door. A girl came in and simply refused to leave — insisted on staying the night. Oh, they're nice girls, all right. But they talk. The next morning they rush to the telephone and tell everyone all about their night. It used to be that people were more reluctant to tell than to do. Now it's the other way round.

At this point I rose to take leave.

From The Table Talk of W.H. Auden by Alan Ansen.

And so for day 1450
02.12.2010

after life traces

Four Ages of Man: The Classical Myths by Jay Macpherson is a tour through Greek and Roman mythology for high school students. The last chapter is devoted to "The Passing and Afterlife of the Gods" and ends thus — almost as an invitation to study nursery rhymes.

The Pied Piper who can draw rats by his piping is ony one of many magical musicians whose gifts recall those of Orpheus. Psyche's task of sorting a heap of seeds occurs in many familiar stories, and she herself and her mysterious lover meet us again in the tale of Beauty and the Beast. And where was it that we first met Endymion, the sleeping shepherd?

Little boy blue, come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under the haystack, fast asleep.
Will you wake him? No, not I;
For if I do, he's sure to cry.

The disposition of the lines is a bit different in the example collected by Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book illustrated by Joan Hassall.

With a magnifying glass one can make our the cow on the right in the corn (grain) and on the left foreground the sheep and behind on the left the little boy asleep near a haystack.

Jay Macpherson chose an illustration that proves her point about longevity and transmutation of stories.

In her notes she explains: "The sleeping shepherd (illustration): this is actually a French mediaeval illustration to the tale of Hermes and Argus. Both are dressed as peasants, and Hermes plays, instead of the classical shepherd's pipe, a simple form of bagpipe." These two different visual treatments of the same poem remind me of emblem books where there is also much borrowing and lasting life.

And so for day 1449
01.12.2010