To Promise a Promise

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Mark Truscott is an accomplished poet who in minimalist terms reminds us of just how friable everyday experience can be. It escapes. Consider this sequence from “LIFESTYLES” in Said Like Reeds or Things.

To consider and the majority
are involuntary

To glance and the surface
is flavourless

To count and the credit
is insoluble

The succession of infinitives offer a hint of some transitive completeness to come and what follows crumbles. A rare talent to pull it off and keep the reader interested.

And so for day 740
22.12.2008

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Rhetoric of Refutation

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Francois Lachance

There is a certain pleasure in reading Hilary Putnam that is unrelated to the unfolding of the argument. It is found in the little asides that connive to bring the reader into the game. Take for instance the sly stab:

[…] but a mere restatement of a fact in a special jargon cannot claim to be an explanation of that fact.

And latter there is a full and vigourous use of hyphen to dare a challenge:

[…] is to say that we-know-not-what does we-know-not-what when we-know-not-what has happened!

And the most companionable merriment:

If I have taken Jaegwon Kim as my opponent of choice throughout these lectures (this is perhaps needless to say — but let me say it once again, nevertheless!), it is for two reasons: because his presentation of the arguments I have been discussing is the one I have found by far the most challenging and because of my admiration for his philosophical intelligence and the purity of his philosophical motivation. The only thing that could, indeed, make my admiration for Jaegwon Kim even greater would be for him now to concede that my view is the right one!

In among the final words is a type of exhortation (without exclamation!): “Many things deserve our wonder, but the formulation of an intelligible question requires more than wonder.” All the quotations from Putnam are drawn from The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World.

And so for day 739
21.12.2008

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Transduction and Assemblages

Posted on December 20, 2008 by Francois Lachance

I’ve quoted this before but my commentary there remains rather lapidary (“Will to do. Makes do.”) and so here again is Adrian Mackenzie. “Transduction: invention, innovation and collective life” (2003)

Technological change is consistently and emphatically represented in the form of new artefacts or objects, rather than practices, arrangements and ensembles. The focus is usually fixed on new and highly commodified objects such as digital new media or biotechnologies, rather than the process or events which permit certain objects to materialize or solidify and not others.

This may be less and less true as we move into emergence of networked culture. And even less true in the spaces where time stamps are manipulated and the long tail inhabited to produce odd déjà-vu moments of fictive prediction and spaces that escape trending.

And so for day 738
20.12.2008

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Gather ye Poesies

Posted on December 19, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Terry Pratchett has invented a most marvellous entity call L-Space. Its properties are magical and of course textual.

Even big collections of ordinary books distort space and time, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full sized human to enter. (from Discworld Companion)

I found myself reflecting upon this construction when I came upon Susan Drodge’s review of several books of poetry (Canadian Literature 165 (2000) pp. 122-125). I had come there looking for commentary on Mary di Michelle’s Debriefing the Rose and found, among other offerings, a peek at the poetry of Liliane Welch from Dream Museum (Sono Nis Press) and the following lines from the poem “Afternoon at Namurs”

She was still young,
in her late twenties
when she put on weight.
Did she simply open
the doors of her mind
to the melodies of cakes?

What a lovely question. I can now dream of petits fours and madeleines… and imagine that I am opening my mind

And so for day 737
19.12.2008

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Descriptions as Constructions

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Francois Lachance

William Gass. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life.

— but strictly speaking style cannot be, itself, a kind of vision, the notion is very misleading, for we do not have before us some real forest which we might feel ourselves free to render in any number of different ways; we have only the words which make up this one. There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions.

By a neat trick of succession, the author makes us reflect upon what it means to perceive the world. It never is unmediated.

And so for day 736
18.12.2008

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Violin Lust

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Joseph Curtin. “Stradivari’s Varnish: A Memoir” in Brick 74 (Winter 2004) enumerates a number of reactions

The sheer physical beauty of a great Italian violin excites all sorts of desires in all kinds of people. Violinists want to play them, museums to lock them in climate-controlled display cases, dealers to sell them for fabulous sums, collectors to acquire them for undisclosed sums, and violin makers to build copies that will fool all the above.

And the hero of this story is the fool-maker.

And so for day 735
17.12.2008

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Eat Your Vegetables

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Daring you to call this a category mistake.

A chicken is like a pig because it’s not a cow.

A statement worthy of a committed carnivore.

And so for day 734
16.12.2008

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A Job Well Done

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Edmund White’s The Burning Library contains “Nabokov: Beyond Parody”. It is a literary essay well worth an extensive visit (for the particular relation plot and language have with one another).

The function of mythology in Nabokov is not (as it is in Joyce’s Ulysses) to limit the neural sprawl of a stream of consciousness. Nor is it to provide a ready-made plot (as in the neoclassical drama of Anouilh or Giraudoux). Nor is it to lend false dignity to an otherwise dreary tale, as in the plays of Archibald MacLeish or Eugene O’Neill. In Nabokov the vocabulary of religion, fairy tales, and myths is the only one adequate to his sense of the beauty and mystery of the sensual, of love, of childhood, of nature, of art, of people when they are noble. It is this language that metamorphoses the comic bedroom scene in Lolita into a glimpse of paradise. [quotation from the novel] Nabokov’s novels are not of this world, but of a better one. He has kept the romantic novel alive by introducing into it a new tension — the struggle between obsessive or demented characters and a-seraphic rhetoric. Given his inspired style, no wonder Nabokov chose to write about not the species nor the variety but the mutant individual. Only such a subject gives his radiant language something to do, to overcome — a job to perform.

And well done too White’s felicitous enumerations — the pile-up is joyous. I am intrigued as to what an “a-seraphic rhetoric” might be. Heavenly angel-less prose?

And so for day 733
15.12.2008

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Islamic Ghandis

Posted on December 14, 2008 by Francois Lachance

The venue for this was a posting to the McLuhan discussion list (Sept. 24, 2001). Very much in the vein of a McLuhanesque probe.

Do you know of anyone who can verify reports that Islamic pacifists are calling for the withdrawal of Arab capital from Western banks in order to cut funds to terrorists?

Islam forbids usury. At one time Christianity did too.

Do you know of any academic paper discussing Islamic banking and the IMF?

Do you know anyone who can verify reports of Islamic and other pacifists lining up at police stations and consulates around the world to ask for the disclosure of the financial connections of terrorist suspects?

“It may seem like another lifetime, but it’s actually only a year ago that the conservative business magazine The Economist published an editorial saying that the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is Third World poverty.” Linda McQuaig, National Post Sept. 24/01

The discourse of policy makers and politicians may yet turn to income inequality and its drag on the world economy.

And so for day 732
14.12.2008

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Catch Up Determinism

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Francois Lachance

The narrator in Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko muses on the nature of grand narrative:

No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the white man whether the Indians did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.

The question is who gets to tell the complete history — no teller I know has that kind of grasp. But what of a history woven from many tellings?

On re-reading, I note that it is “things European” that are slated to disappear. Not persons. And so I am made to recall The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and the presence of a similar trope at play. See especially the concluding chapter “The Million-Year Picnic”. But that too is a partial history and whole fiction.

And so for day 731
13.12.2008

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