BERNEVAL

One can find various versions of Loreena McKennitt’s “The Lady of Shalott” from her 1991 album The Visit which runs at 11:05. Shorter versions are found in recordings of live concerts.

Curious comparers will find that McKennitt’s version is shorter than the poem upon which is is based: Alfred Tennyson‘s 1842 poem which is itself shorter than 1833 version.

I recently heard the song again and was quite taken by McKennitt’s performance: it provides the listener with time to absorb lyrics and the music flows on like the tranquil river leading to Camelot. There is something inexorable in the intertwining of voice and strings leading to Lancelot’s musing a little space and for this reader/listener to a slower re-reading and a great appreciation for the prunning.

And so for day 1602
03.05.2011

A comment on bourgeois realism?

If language is generated out of conventions, those conventions are simply tactics. They are methods of allowing a reproduction of the world. They do not cause problems. They are not material. They are naturalistic.

Bruce Andrews “Constitution / Writing, Politics, Language, The Body”
in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis

What opens up for me here is a way of thinking not in terms of “allowing” reproduction but of “inducing” reproduction. And not only of the world as it is but as it might become.

As well, tactics call for strategies.

The political dimension of writing isn’t just based on the idea of challenging specific problems or mobilizing specific groups to challenge specific problems; it’s based on the notion of a systemic grasp — not of language described as a fixed system but of language as a kind of agenda or system of capabilities and uses.

“Total Equals What: Poetics & Praxis”

“And reception is by bodies” – a turn of the page again to reproduction in its expansive sense.

And so for day 1601
02.05.2011

A 1914 pamphlet, “PLAYGROUNDS: One of Canada’s Great Needs” billed as a “Call to service for the children of the future” authored by J.J. Kelso, Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario.

The pamphlet urges the founding of playground associations and calls for active participation of the officers (as opposed to being mere figureheads).

People should be selected for office who are really interested and willing to exert themselves to make the movement a success. Too often men are elected to office in such societies because of their prominence, and without any expectation that they will be more than figureheads. Enthusiasm can only be sustained by frequent meetings and zealous, active service.

As a fitting prelude to involvement, I like the frontispiece which encourages a snow-ball fight.

No contest she’s a winner.

And so for day 1597
28.04.2011

Bruce Andrews in an interview with Jeff Derksen and Kevin Davies

Explanation and prescription. My sense of praxis is prescriptive, and it’s based on the idea of explanation. The notion is that any explanation has embedded within it a particular prescription for how to change things, and that that very often has to be teased out of the explanation. And in the same way any prescription for change, and therefore I think any praxis carries with it, has embedded within it, an explanation, or a mapping, to use a more currently fashionable term, of the social terrain that someone is interested in changing. So those things parallel exactly my study of American foreign policy. I wanted that change, I wanted to think about how it could be changed, and the only way I could answer that question was to see why it was the way it is.

in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis

And so for day 1596
27.04.2011

A beacon project by Alfredo Jaar

“Lights in the city”
1999
Montreal

Approximately a hundred thousand watts of red lights have been installed in the Cupola of the Marché Bonsecours, a landmark monument in the old Montreal.

Detonating devices have been placed in the Accueil Bonneau, la Maison Eugénie Bernier and la Maison Paul Grégoire, homeless shelters located within 500 yards of the Cupola. Every time a homeless person enters any of these shelters, they are free to push the buttons and the red light will flash in the Cupola.

Not the first time Jaar engages on the Canadian scene: See 1992 “Je me souviens” in Alfredo Jaar : the fire this time : public interventions 1979-2005 — a photographic installation in a restaurant about the Vietnamese boat people. See also http://plepuc.org/en/artwork/je-me-souviens.

And so for day 1594
25.04.2011