Spectral Hours Ghost Days

Jill Walker Rettberg.
Blogging

To really understand blogs, you need to read them over time. Following a blog is like getting to know someone, or like watching a television series. [...] A blog consists of more than words and images. It cannot be read simply for its writing, but is the sum of writing, layout, connections and links and the pace of publication.

Time Stamp Fiction

In short, it helps to consider timestamps as cueing devices. Timestamps begin to make sense in a series. [...]

The book Kari recommends has some very suggestive divisions. _Revolution in Time_ is divided into three parts : Finding Time, Keeping Time, Making Time. This threesome might also provide an analogy for the psychosocial aspects of those timestamps you are studying in relation to the practice of blogging. Initially they assist the blog writer (and readers) in marking the phases of an intentional practice of recurring composition. Blogging once a day in the morning or in the evening etc. The ritual becomes incorported hence finding time — the hour of the timestamp is key. Keeping Time — the timestamp helps organize the archive and retrieve entries. The day and month of the timestamp are key. Making Time — timestamps become labels for a number of traversals through a blog [...]

Accessions

Blog entries are often time stamped and dated. It is assumed by many readers that the displayed time stamp corresponds to event of composition. However the resourceful author could be publishing from a store of pre-written texts. As well, time stamps can be fudged for a variety of purposes. [...] If accounting is to telling, could collecting be to accessing? In a sense blogging is a redistributive activity. By playing with the partitions, the user, be they writer, reader or viewer, affect the nature of redistributive activity. [...] Gives new expression to the phrase "blogging on borrowed time."

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/jardin/html/invertTEIblog.htm#user111

Blog as TARDIS

Any room can become a time machine. A lesson taught to us by reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.

First series of never ending looks future-wards 1, 2, 3, ...
Then as I child I learnt of integers and the doubleness of lines ... -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...
And then the numbers between 3.2, 3.3, ... 4.0

Each day then has many more than 24 hours.
It has mine, yours and theirs.
There are hours within hours.
Work. Series. Work.
Stories.

And so for day 383
31.12.07 23:59
01.01.08 00:01

Signs Signs Signs

Inspired by Words in the Wild at lexigraphi.ca here are some intriguing examples of Toronto signage and in once case graffiti.

I like the name of the shop and the round gear-wheel motif of the Bikes on Wheels sign.

Night club for vampires? BITE overhanging the entrance

A new take on getting close: "Pedestrians Must Adhere To Traffic Personnel"

A banner for a lounge with literary allusions (No one writes to the Colonel)

A dentist in the market under a rainbow sign of united smiles

Doughnuts with graphic flare

Wallful of Frankfurter fun

Skull and Bones coffee in an appropriately named Grindhouse

A bit flared by the light coming through the trees on this side street which boasts a unisex hair design under the moniker of Hairsay

Lilliput Hats for all sizes and styles

For a different head trip, head to Head 2 Head

The stylized K of Hooked, the fish shop, catches the eye

On a fence in a park, this ode to the Maple Tree

Transcription = "My maple tree / Is neat to climb, / And there's a special / Branch of mine / Where I can perch / And not be seen, / And watch the world / Go by, and dream."

Back to the coffee theme with the Moonbean

If you know your Latin, you will connect image and word for the Mosca Boutique

The juxtaposition of a Dollarama sign with the graffito on the next building brings to mind filthy lucre. Got to love the spelling: PHILTH

Poetry, a jazz cafe, deserves two shots. One for the mural and one for the name.

Rasta Pasta for Jamaican and Italian fare

Book and record store whose name is inspired by lyrics by Fifth Column: She Said Boom!

Industrial drinking? at Thirsty & Miserable, Purveyors of Fine Ales

Vicki'z at ease with possessive marks

Some are gone some still there. Signs everywhere.

And so for day 382
31.12.2007

The Company They Keep

On the hunt for Queer Art in Public Space (Outside Galleries) in Toronto.

Andy Fabo in response to a query about queer art in public spaces referenced Douglas Coupland's Monument to the War of 1812 (2008) in Toronto, which enlarges toy soldiers to monumental scale. It certainly can be given a camp reading.

Next on the list is perhaps obvious. The statue of Alexander Wood (unveiled in 2005) sculpted by Del Newbigging (1934-2012).

A whole parkette is devoted to Frances Loring & Florence Wyle. It features four works, including a bust of Loring by Wyle, and one of Wyle by Loring. The The Girls live on in the lesbian imagination of Toronto and Canada.

And the Public Studio team of Tamira Sawatzky & Elle Flanders launch in June 2014 Full Spectrum, a three-dimensional wall mural for World Pride 2014.

Full Spectrum is a three-dimensional mural that changes depending on the angle from which it is viewed. It incorporates a spectrum of colours on one side referencing both the LGBT community rainbow as well as the full spectrum that is visible to the human eye. Viewed from the opposite end, Full Spectrum becomes a midnight blue with reflective elements, representing the candlelight vigils held in the memory of members of the LGBT community who died from AIDS in the city in the 1980s.

Sometimes the celebratory and commemorative take on a permanent form such as the AIDS Memorial. Sometimes the interventions have been of an ephemeral in situ pop-up nature (one thinks of General Idea's AIDS poster referencing Robert Indiana's LOVE which at once time blanketed the city).

The lines between commercial art, agit-prop and street art blur when one considers the Valentine's Day display in 2011 at Holt Renfrew. Pucker Up was its theme.

Not just Toronto. Consider the 2003 window display at Riverwalk Comme Ça store in Kitakyushu that featured according to the accompanying text representations of families with same sex parents (documented by Ed Pas). As ever much depends upon the reading and context building.

And so for day 381
30.12.2007

Resetting Three Pieces by Robert Kroetsch

These three passage from two separate articles from Robert Kroetsch's The Lovely Treachery of Words tell a story about story telling and the English-Canadian experience.

First from "The Exploding Porcupine"

That contribution [Ondaatje's] is story. But story of a special sort. For if the ceremonies of death are diminished, if we are, in some strange way, archaeologists, grave-robbers, then we must make of that violent act a new kind of story. A story that honours the mystery.

Then from "Learning the Hero from Northrup Frye"

It was Frye who articulated (in every sense) my suspicion that no story can be told only once, that a story to be a story at all must be a retelling of itself, and, at the same time, a retelling of a story that it can no longer be, because of that very retelling. At the impossible centre of this maze of story is the impossible story that once and forever decentres all story into periphery.

And again from "Learning the Hero from Northrup Frye" where Kroetsch contrasts the situations where the American begins in rupture; the Canadian starting ever again in continuity

But at its best, this same unrevolutionary predicament, this absence that destroys the metaphor of birth and its attendant narrative, frees us from the appalling ignorance celebrated by that birth, celebrates instead our life-inspiring decadence. Coming always to the end, we are free, always, to salvage ourselves, not by severance, but by the lovely treachery of words.

A new kind of story deserves a new type of decadence and both turn round the decentring centre. Paradox as productive. Strange expansion from the diminishing of ceremony.

And so for day 380
29.12.2007

Tergiversation

John Ashbery in "The Bungalows" in The Double Dream of Spring announces

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording
A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And it so happens he ends the poem thus

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

And this is how we breathe life into poetry, by our pauses.

And so for day 379
28.12.2007

Gratitude & Attitude

It was part of a work-related self-esteem workshop. We were asked to write down five things we are grateful for in life. I tend to resist being social-worked but once I wrote the first the others came swiftly.

my lover
our house
our garden
our 30 something years of memories
years ahead

Then we shared. Ah, coming out all over again. (Not sure everyone in our little group knew or wanted to know.)

Coming out again and again. Every mention is like a little bit of flaunting. So be it. It is a struggle to be unselfconscious. Sometimes delivery is smooth. Sometimes there's an edge.

Regardless, I am brought to meditate upon questions of style and the accommodations of another generation.

W.H. Auden begins "Dichtung and Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem) with the following observation and wish:

Expecting your arrival tomorrow, I find myself thinking I love You: then comes the thought: — I should like to write a poem which would express exactly what I mean when I think these words.

He continues with a self-directed demand:

of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that it be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me.

For me pronouns matter. He-to-he. Or is it words like "lover"? Marking a relationship as sexual and passionate. Definitely claiming our own terms.

And so for day 378
27.12.2007

Image Machine Book

No pagination. No one expects a graphic novel to be quoted. Pagination would ruin the layout and design.

Coach House Books is reissuing The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James.

The disposition of the pages is important not only to the images but also to the flow of the words... For example, this greets the reader. I quote from the left-side of a two page layout:

erupting yet again against that featureless facade ... repeating all its infinite convulsions slowly, as if each tiny splash had been halted in its course, pinned down, examined and dissected ...

and the imaginative space occupied by this observation seems to continue on the right-side, almost as if by way of an answer...

its flight meticulously recorded in the hope that, when assembled, these fluctuating observations would somehow serve to reconstruct and ultimately illuminate that thing whose very nature defied examination ...

One almost thinks that what is being described is the object at hand: oneiric layers captured in codex form. Later one comes across this pair. Again beginning with the left-side of a two page spread (though there is no reason to begin with the left except custom).

... wooden framework skilfully constructed with a craftmanship almost excessively meticulous considering the brutality of its purpose ... all joints precisely dove-tailed (where nails would suffice), reinforced with polished metal plates (square, as always) (themselves engraced with labyrinthine patterns) and all its surfaces lacquered like a gleaming brittle sheath ...

And again an almost answer from the right side.

less an actual machine than an odd and enigmatic abstraction, totally unnatural, its utility obscured and isolated from the encroaching vegetation ...

Abstract machine?

And so for day 377
26.12.2007

Intestinal Intertextuality

A whole chapter of Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton is devoted to a description of Dublin. This bit might remind you of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The Irish style of defecation would be regular and efficient, brief in duration to avoid anal eroticism; children would be taught to regulate their bowels like Gaels, not shit as Sassenachs.

For some reason, I thought of the scene at the conclusion of Chapter Four of Ulysses where Bloom is relieving himself in the privy while reading. And as Eagleton continues the description of Dublin and its inhabitants, we get the wink:

Each morning Finbar would watch one of his neighbours in Eccles Street, a jowlish shabby-genteel Jew much berated by his blowsy wife, set off in bowler hat and stiff white collar to circle the city as some kind of commercial agent, before returning each evening to be insulted again.

All this in passing ...

And so for day 376
25.12.2007

Delicate Declining

Getting turned down in literary fashion...

At Andrebrook Alice at last found a friend who shared her intellectual and artistic passions. She and Janet sometimes stayed up all night together, talking and painting. One night they got illicitly drunk and Janet let Alice put an arm around her. But when Alice tried to kiss her, she pushed her away and wrote on a scrap of paper, "No, no, go not to Lethe, neither drink ..."

It was years before Alice read Keats and recognized the quote, but the words haunted her. [She made a watercolour incorporating the words.]

Interesting to note that the word "drink" doesn't appear in Keats Ode on Melancholy though it is implied in all the references to sipping and imbibing. What makes this misquotation interesting in the context of a pass and its refusal is the word that "drink" occludes — "twist". And the sentence continues on the next line in which reference is made to the poisonous wolfsbane (aconite or monkshood) ...

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
        Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

For more on Alice's adventures and her writing career, see Julie Phillips, James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

And so for day 375
24.12.2007

Trigger Words

Seamus Heaney devotes one of his Oxford lectures (The Redress of Poetry) to Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It is an honest assessment of the poem's aesthetic merits and faults. However one sentence glistens for me.

Wilde's own public humiliation is recalled with great economy in his invocation of the 'black dock's dreadful pen', and his preference for 'the holy night' over 'the shameful day' maintains a defence of the homoerotic life in face of the world's total rejection.

On the surface this appears as a simple description of parti pris but the gorgeousness in which the observation is couched must perforce lead the reader to side with Wilde. There is something generous here especially for those fighting the world's rejection. So much pivots on seeing that word "homoerotic" in print, in an Oxford lecture.

I am not alone in experiencing Heaney's generous spirit. Witness the American poet Henri Cole's as he records another moment of surprise

Over the years, I took many things he said under advisement. When I published my fourth collection of poetry, The Visible Man, I was worried it would be narrowly defined by its gay content, but Seamus objected, using the word “arena” — the arena of human emotion, he called it — which is where all good poems must operate, rather than catering to special interests. I didn’t expect this from the son of an Irish cattle dealer.

Cole's piece about his friendship with Heaney first appeared in Death by Pad Thai: And Other Unforgettable Meals. A later version appeared in the New Republic as a tribute.

And so for day 374
23.12.2007