Re(coup)eration

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Frenchtown: a drama about Shanghai, P.R.C. by Lawrence Jeffery. It is also about India.

Bloody India… I’ve been everywhere everyone thinks they want to go: China, India, Africa, the Middle East — Afghanistan, for fuck’s sake. The only place that scares me is India. I broke my back in Bombay. A few years later I got stuck in a bad monsoon. I picked up pneumonia. I almost died in Calcutta. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was like being in the mountains. The air seemed so thin. Couldn’t get enough of it in my lungs… All those other places nothing ever happened… Something about India… You don’t visit India.. You survive it…

This to me is a marvellous soliloquy and thematically sets up the question of what will happen in China? Oddly the estranged father outs the son in the middle of an exchange about adopting a boy — the queerness making the adoption impossible but of equal weight is the existence of the Chinese boy’s Chinese father and the fact that the man wanting to adopt the child is a foreigner. The “queerness” is almost an after-thought to explain belatedly the estrangement of father and son. It’s an awkward outing. Done in haste. At a moment of leave taking. The scene reads almost like a broken back: disjointed articulations. And that is its appeal — a set piece unsettled by its setting. A piece of bad luck akin to surviving India.

And so for day 951
21.07.2009

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Embrace

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Mutsuo Takahashi. Poems of a Penisist. Translated by Hiroaki Sato (1975; reprinted by University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The volume opens with a poem “Dove” which establishes a to and fro between the speaker and the one we take to be the love interest. Here is a little of their exchange from the middle of the poem:

I like its eyes, he said and touched them
I like its beak too, I said and touched it.

The back and forth is resolved in the last stanza by an image of release and embrace:

I love you, he said and let the dove go
It’s gone, I murmured
In his arms

The murmuring seems to cover both the reported speech and the reporting and thus bring the past into the present. There is a lingering at work.

And so for day 950
20.07.2009

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Copy, Paste, Paste

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Francois Lachance

From HyperMnemonics – MetaMimetics some thoughts about the features of the text editor software Emacs.

One of the joys of working with Emacs is the buffer. The user can select and paste from many blocks of copied or cut text. Every time the user copies or cuts a region, the block is added to the buffer without wiping out the previous block. It’s a compositor’s dream.

One of the other joys of working with Emacs is the terminology: mark, point, kill-region, copy-region, yank from the kill ring. Text editing sounds like a playground game of dodge ball.

I like the symmetry: select a block to be copied or cut; select from copied or cut blocks. Emacs is a generous replicator. With other applications and platforms, I have achieved similar results using multiple windows to create and access scrapbooks. Still there is a difference. Select, copy and paste [using multiple windows and a wordprocessor or text editor] is not select and paste [using Emacs].

And we go on to think about language and practice:

Yes, memory management needs account for the difference. But the language makes one wonder. Does the ellision of selection [i.e. copy] in the common holophrastic expression (cut-and-paste) reflect a view of of the user as one-block-at-a-time reader? It may not just be memory management that is at work when one considers the metaphors that shape a user’s understanding of what they do.

Intriguing how the ability to practice and compare different ways of writing serves remembering disjecta.

One wonders how the economy of gesture impacts the modes of thought as one is writing…

And so for day 949
19.07.2009

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Details and Demons

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Granularity can drive one wild.

Especially in the world of markup.

Consider
<c> for character
<w> for word

Example….. “what it might be to hug the clouds”

<c>…</c>
<w><c>w</c><c>h</c><c>a</c><c>t</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>i</c><c>t</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>m</c><c>i</c><c>g</c><c>h</c><c>t</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>b</c><c>e</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>t</c><c>o</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>h</c>u<c>g</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w>t<c>h</c><c>e</c></w>
<c> </c>
<w><c>c</c><c>l</c><c>o</c><c>u</c><c>d</c><c>s</c></w>

******
Is that ellipsis counted as one character or three?

And so for day 948
18.07.2009

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Self and Selves

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Excerpt from a comment entry to George Williams’s blog Thanks for Not Being a Zombie (December 10, 2005)

I like how questions about the constructions of personna and of audience converge on the thematics of authenticity. But constructions are perpetually entangled in the empirical whereas authenticity seems to belong to the a priori.

To replay some Kantian distinctions: there is a gradation of imperatives (and reasons to blog) the rules of skill in the (speak or write to be heard); the counsels of prudence (speak or write the truth) and the commands [laws] of morality (speak/write the truth to “you”). The act of blogging starts from within language and moves through an adjudication of statements [yes, there is “truth” in fiction] to an asymptote where the writing reaches out to the future reader only dimly imagined by the writer. The dearest of readers, not belonging to the audience, may never reply to the call: “Alternately, dear reader, you could let me know which items you would like to hear more about, allowing me to focus on topics of interest to this blog’s audience:” or the dearest reader may reply and the reply never reach the writer who too becomes asymptotic, a receeding point, only approached but never intersected.

Blogging is like writing past oneself to one self: there’s in that spacing, a moment for imagination to reach reason.

In rereading this I am less impressed by the tortuous path to the statement about “writing past oneself to one self” as by the succinctness of the movement from “oneself” (an almost egocentric moment) to the singular pointedness of “one self”. Space makes all the difference.

And so for day 947
17.07.2009

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Of Positioning

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Francois Lachance

A segment preserved from a much larger piece now destroyed.

belong blown
OF ambiguity
of: coming from as a messager
of: belonging to longing to be

desire as possesion of position

deposit_i_on

desire as possession of position - longing to be

deposit(i(on))

I like how the visual (the first “of” in a box and the subsequent instances of “of” simply set off by a colon) mimics an unpacking which is what is being rehearsed at a linguistic level. Also intriguing is the use of red for one line (“desire as possesion [sic] of position”) and its re-use in a circling (“i/on”) — all contributing to a de-positioning

And so for day 946
16.07.2009

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Picture Exact Description

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Steve McCaffery “Tenderizing Buttons” Open Letter Second Series. No. 6 (Fall 1973) p. 101 – – – – The subject is Gertrude Stein or more specifically her writing and the flow is sometimes broken by spacing and other times by periods here we go in media res

picture the thing through the belief is there you get the author’s moments        apparently to hit on some connexion between exact description (certainly) and verbal spontaneity as the paradoxically most exact description is the most verbally autonomous. was-events become is-events to write with words as if the words did have no history.

And open to a remix

was-events become is-events to write with words as if the words did have no history through the belief there you get the author’s moments. picture the thing        the most verbally autonomous verbal spontaneity as the paradoxically most exact description is apparently to hit on some connexion between exact description (certainly) and.

events were becoming being events

And so for day 945
15.07.2009

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For An Autistic Child

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

These lines written for an autistic grandchild also convey a universal condition of behaviour issuing from pre-linguistic grounds. The gesture is simple. The child

snatches a cracker biscuit, shaking off
the smoked fish, and then smiles suddenly
as if amused by some mischievous thought
growing out of a landscape I can’t reach,
the unknown pathways lying under speech.

Elaine Feinstein “Christmas Day in Willesden Green” in Cities.

And so for day 944
14.07.2009

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No Waver No Wobble

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Francois Lachance

David McFadden on Stompin’ Tom Connors. “What I See in Tom’s Boot” in Open Letter Second Series. No. 5 (Summer 1973) p. 40.

It’s a thing that’s often overlooked, especially by people who have heard him only on records, but Tom stomps real good. He never misses a stomp. He never wavers, wobbles or loses balance even for a second. It’s insane. And all the time he’s doing (relatively) intricate things on the guitar, remembering all the words, digesting his dinner, keeping in mind all the things a famous person has to keep in mind, & singing.

It’s a cheeky homage. I like the slang for “glorious” — “it’s insane” which nowadays might be rendered “sick”.

And so for day 943
13.07.2009

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Proximities

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I have spent months brooding over some four lines of poetry. I initially thought that the rhyme paint/faint was too strong until I realized that it was the sound within a line (the relation of “wilt” and “faint”) that was to my ear off — I would be happier in brining the “t” sounds closer together. And so here are the lines from Tulips by A.E. Stallings

These tulips make me want to paint:
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

I would adjust the syntax: “And do not so much wilt as faint” but that leaves me without the sharpness of “do not wilt” and falling away of the assonant “so much as faint”. I hesitate. It is like second guessing the artist with the brush. Like rearranging a bouquet.

And so for day 942
12.07.2009

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