Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lists

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Francois Lachance

“The Studio (Homage to Alice Neel)” by Alicia Ostriker appears in The Crack in Everything and has one stanza begin with a listing of colours: “Pallette knife jabs, carnation, ochre, viridian.” The next stanza also begins with a listing but … Continue reading →

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Novels, Films, Time Sense

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Susan Sontag in “A note on novels and films” collected in Against Interpretation remarks The cinema has its own methods and logic of representation, which one does not exhaust by saying that they are primarily visual. The cinema presents us … Continue reading →

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The Corruptibility of Images

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Recently, I sat in on a photojournalism class. Out of the discussion of images from a conflict zone and the process of editing and the delicate art of captioning, I began to wonder about how images work. It is evident … Continue reading →

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Names and Memorialization

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Marilyn Hacker. “Tectonic Shifts Alicia Ostriker’s The Crack in Everything” collected in Unauthorized Voices. One section of “The Mastectomy Poems” has an epigraph — referring to “ordinary women” — from a poem by Lucille Clifton. Not at all parenthetically, Clifton … Continue reading →

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Again After Basho

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Francois Lachance

My earlier glonk noise on Basho’s famous frog-pond poem has some twins composed in 2001 and here reproduced for your aural pleasure: I pond, old old pond frog leaping in in ripple sound II rippling sounds from frog splash a … Continue reading →

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Fiction and Contracts

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Francois Lachance

The measure of metaphor… and the madness of theatre. The centre of the phenomenon of act A counting as act B is not the existence of rules and conventions, also not the existence of intentions, but rather the acquisition of … Continue reading →

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The Eucharist of Reading

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I suggest to a friend exploring questions of time and identity that they might find this brief summary of Ricoeur by Caroline Bassett useful Ricoeur’s narrative dialectics, in which narrative is at once read as an active and ongoing emplotment … Continue reading →

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Jug Jug

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I am puzzled by one of the stories Martin Buber collects in Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) Once the Baal Shem said to his disciples: “Just as the strength of … Continue reading →

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Oratorical Machines

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Edward Said could be considered in some ways a theorist of social media: While it is true and even discouraging that all the main outlets are, however, controlled by the most powerful interests and consequently by the very antagonists one … Continue reading →

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Broken Acrostic

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Audre Lorde invites the reader to contemplate some unfinished business in the concluding lines of “Legacy — Hers” collected in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. Poems 1987-1992. A dying word becomes a task. your last word to me was          wonderful and … Continue reading →

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