I will never quite look at a cursor the same way again:
[…]
The arrow-headed cursor points
Into space, but glides like a shark between
Sandbar and reef
[…]
From Mark Ford’s “Inside” in Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001).
Gives new meaning to surfing the net.
And so for day 1742
20.09.2011
Basil Johnston. Ojibway Heritage
Of the animal beings, the dog was endowed with the least exceptional powers. He was less fleet than the fox; he was weaker than the wolf; he was less cunning than the mink. Compared to the fisher, the dog was a poor swimmer; beside the deer, the dog was awkward. Less gifted than his brothers, the dog had nothing to offer. He could not serve. Nevertheless, he felt constrained to do something. In his despondency, he pledged to give his love. Others could serve according to their natures and capacities; he to his.
This passage about the dog is embedded in the story of the first humans.
In the first year, the animal beings nourished and nurtured the infants and the spirit woman
[… section about what each animal gives, followed by the dog section quoted above which continues thus …]
Consequently, the dog settled down by the side of the bed in which the sleeping infants lay, alternately sitting or lying down. He gazed into their eyes, placed his head near their feet, or played to amuse them. The babies smiled. From that time on the dog never left the side of man.
I am of the persuasion that the passage derives its strength from the clincher: “The babies smiled.”
For some reason, there comes to mind the shortest verse in the King James Bible: “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35).
The succinct phrase, however, does not tell us how long the keening nor the duration of the smiling.
And so for day 1741
19.09.2011
Jonathan Ball. Ex Machina. BookThug, 2009.
Like Cortázar’s Hopscotch, each section is numbered and, unlike the novel, each line offers a path to read on, a sort of hyperlink in print.
[50]
The poem is not written by machines. [36]
It is the root, the cause of machines. [17]
As the book does not birth the poem, but is its vessel in the world. [15]
Clothing the Word in flesh, so that it might finally die. [63]
One can with diligence assemble a poem out of the references.
| The poem is not written by machines. | [36]
The machine spawns new machines. [05] Improvements are necessary. Conceived and carried. [40] (while in secret new machines produce new needs) [11] (offering themselves to answer to the problems they pose) [41] |
| It is the root, the cause of machines. | [17]
The machine that will never think. [04] The machine we believe will never think. [26] The machine that, thinking, chooses, suicide. [37] |
| As the book does not birth the poem, but is its vessel in the world. | [15]
“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology […] is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.” [34] “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.” [27] “The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.” [26] Steel and your warming sex. [62] |
| Clothing the Word in flesh, so that it might finally die. | [63]
My spine is broken. [01] My ribs are splayed open like wings. [64] |
And if one continues the resulting fan reduces the initial set of lines to a point. That’s the point.
And so for day 1740
18.09.2011
In The Physiology of Taste, after extolling the ne plus ultra concoction of chocolate (cocoa, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla), Brillat-Savarin goes on to enumerate other “adjuncts”.
It is to this small number of substances that taste and experience have reduced the numerous ingredients which had been successively tried as adjuncts to cocoa, such as pepper, pimento, aniseed, ginger, aciola, and others.
Translated by Anne Drayton
“Aciola” is given as “aciole” in the French of the 1825 Physiologie du goût. Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé remarks that “aciole” does not appear in the standard dictionaries. It appears to be a coinage of Brillat-Savarin from the Latin aciola, a variation of acucula or acicula according to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae as cited by the Trésor.
The Trésor nicely translates the Latin back into French as “cerfeuil”. Of the many plants that carry this name, one should note the “cerfeuil musqué” or Myrrhis odorata (sweet cicely) whose seeds like those of anise would be agreeable added to cocoa.
And so for day 1739
17.09.2011
On John Ashbery
Like Wallace Stevens, whom he cites as a precedent, Ashbery favors picturesque titles that bear a quizzical relation to the lines that follow. If his poems were paintings, these titles would amount to an invisible extra color.
THE PLEASURES OF POETRY
By David Lehman
Published: December 16, 1984
New York Times Magazine
And so for day 1738
16.09.2011
A simple poem about the encounter with gentle beasts, gorgeous ponies, ends with amazing bravura…
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
conclusion to “A Blessing” by James Wright
from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46481
So much depends on those line endings that break… those line breaks that prolong the ending…
And so for day 1737
15.09.2011
It’s a formula you discover perhaps after the third or fourth iteration because it is done with variations in the syntax and what appears to be a storyline because of the play of pronouns (I, we, he). The formula is a tad more complex than the generation of a list (perfected by countless meme-seeders) and blends in well with the pronoun play.
Place / mixed up names / movie.
Here be some three stanzas torn out of context.
On the outskirts of Moscow we failed to distinguish clearly between Charles and Burl Ives;
Our punishment was to sit through Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II, twice.I met a man in New York who couldn’t tell the difference between George
And Zbigniew Herbert: his favourite film was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari, which he insisted we see together.In Cardiff I confounded Edward, Dylan, and R.S. Thomas;
To get over my embarrassment I went to a performance of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.
from “Early to Bed, Early to Rise” by Mark Ford in Soft Sift.
And so for day 1736
14.09.2011
A tricolon and a snatch more…
To entertain successfully one must create with the imagination of a playwright, plan with the skill of a director, and perform with the instincts of an actor. And, as any showman will tell you, there is no greater reward than pleasing your audience.
James A. Beard from the final lines of his introduction to James Beard’s Menus for Entertaining. Trust his prose. Trust his recipes.
And so for day 1735
13.09.2011
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996)
Volume 1 – Looking Forward Looking Back
Part Three: Building the Foundation of a Renewed Relationship
Chapter 15 – Rekindling the Fire in the subsection “Words Are Not Enough”
The perception of the world as ever changing, ever requiring the human being to be alert to the requirements of proper relations, means that views from every vantage point are valuable in making decisions. While older persons are generally thought to be wiser by virtue of their longer experience, the perceptions of children and young people are not discounted. The roles of teacher and learner in an Aboriginal world can be interchangeable, depending on the context.
Quite apart from the who, I am brought to consider in ever changing world two elements: mobilizable knowledge and transferable skill. One of course is a product and can be captured in artefacts, songs and performances. The other is learnt by observation and by doing and by refining technique. Each belongs together: we learn from people and things. Views from every vantage point. It means in non-Aboriginal culture being able to read in the widest sense of the meaning of the word.
In trying to distinguish word-bound learning/teaching from experiential learning/teaching, RCAP gives a characterization of a Western view of language and learning/teaching that is partial. The paragraph preceding the one above about older persons and children invokes the land as context different from word-bound journeys
The need to walk on the land in order to know it is a different approach to knowledge than the one-dimensional, literate approach to knowing. Persons schooled in a literate culture are accustomed to having all the context they need to understand a communication embedded in the text before them. This is partly what is meant by ‘clear writing’, which is urged upon children as soon as they begin communicating practical or academic content. Persons taught to use all their senses — to absorb every clue to interpreting a complex, dynamic reality — may well smile at the illusion that words alone, stripped of complementary sound and colour and texture, can convey meaning adequately.
But words have colour, timbre, accent, nuance. They call out to the senses.
Where I defended theory here I seek to explicate the literate approach as being complex and learnt from hours and years of observation as to the workings of language and its environments. Clarity in writing is no mean accomplishment and certainly ranks with being able to identify medicines or gut a fish.
A word about “context”. It is like a bundle we bring to our encounters. It is a mobilized knowledge and it is tested by the transferable skills we bring, the questions we ask. Persons schooled in a literate culture are accustomed to doing research to establish which context fits.
There is intrinsic worth in walking the land. In interpreting a text. Challenging cognitive separatism.
And so for day 1734
12.09.2011
I once experienced a group learning session that ended with an attentive silence which the teacher disrupted by an over eager closure. It spoilt the mood. It did get me thinking about how and where silence is appreciated.
Months later I came across the notion of joint attention and thought there is something to here about group interaction and the place of silence. The most basic form of joint attention is shared gaze.
What I recall the group experiencing was less a “shared gaze” and more a communal awareness of the environment which was highly conditioned by the group’s listening.
What I noticed may be becoming rarer …
Social ecologies of listening are in transition. Spaces and practices of shared listening (the cinema, the street, the market, the bus) are vying for space with the apparatus of individual attention economies and emerging mores of containment and control (the earphones, the mall, the metro). Urban subjectivities are shape-shifting in the uneven fabric that global modernity weaves across new and changing city spaces.
From the fascinating Delhi Listening Group
… or simply as rare as it ever was and needing time and opportunity to emerge. Occasions and structures do arise for shared listening. And sometimes what is needed is being attuned and relishing the sound-filled space (even in the quietest moments) — and growing comfortable and not rushing in to fill group silence — recognizing forms of plenitude.
And so for day 1733
11.09.2011
