Category Archives: Uncategorized

Coda Code

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Aaron Shurin. Unbound: A Book of AIDS. References at one point Proust and a passage where one character muses upon the melancholy overtones of saying “you look as young as ever”. And this sensitivity is evident in Shurin’s own glosses: … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Eros Voice Echo

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Francois Lachance

D.A. Miller in Bringing Out Roland Barthes has but two bottom of the page notes. Although pages apart they can be read in unison. The second is a longish quotation reporting on the quality of Barthes’s voice. Guy Scarpetta, having … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Trance and Chance

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Francois Lachance

What arrested my attention was how the growing distance between gesture and its spoken description leads to a performable piece. Let’s let Bill T. Jones explain as he has with Peggy Gillespie in Last Night on Earth. I began to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Arson

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Francois Lachance

After some two hundred pages, the reader who has read the introduction is rewarded by the anticipated description of destruction by fire. Bonus: the protagonist sets aside the implements of a would-be suicide and out of sight of the burning … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Vinyl

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Francois Lachance

This is a bit more than nostalgia for a past technology. My dad had listened to vinyl long after the invention (and intervention, if you asked him) of CDs. He told me once that it all came down to sound … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Metaphysics of Possibility

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Francois Lachance

In revisiting her Earthsea world, Ursula K. LeGuin invites the reader to ponder how notions such as equality hang on the vision one has of the afterlife. This passage for me is peculiarly compelling with its echoes of Lucretius. “I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Island Apostrophes

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Madeline Miller (Song of Achilles) led me to read Mark Merlis (An Arrow’s Flight) which led me to Sophocles Philoctetes where I came across the beginning of an incantation: Caverns and headlands, dens of wild creatures you jutting broken crags, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Word of the Day

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Alison Bechdel in Fun House has a pane which I thought was a typescript of a term paper with a floating text box obscuring part of the text of the “term paper”, said floating text box encapsulates a tender remark … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Fantasy Machines

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Just what will replace the telephone book as a stimulus? Whenever I’m asked what book I would take with me to a desert island, I reply, “The phone book: with all those characters, I could invent an infinite number of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Laying Tracks Seizing Spaces

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Francois Lachance

There is something akin to a mixture of imaginative labour in seizing through an almost casual and chance-like operation, the perfect occasion in Leonard Lawlor’s book on Derrida and Ricoeur. It is there in the summarizing he does at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment