Years apart and somehow tied to the same topos.
Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.
from lyrics to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes by Stephen Stills.
He befouled where he was with where he had been.
from description of the character called Cutter in The Iron Council by China Miéville.
And so for day 590
25.07.2008
The joys of celebrating the petty criminal. John M. Ford. A Star Trek novel #36 How much for just the planet? (Simon and Schuster, 1987)
“What is he?”
“What am I?” the shopkeeper said, a dangerous edge in his voice.
“He’s a fence. Everything here is stolen.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” the shopkeeper said. “For a moment I thought you were going to accuse me of being a pawnbroker.”
Barks and bites.
And so for day 589
24.07.2008
This description of Jip from Richard Frost’s Brain and Body is marked by keen observation of being unable to find “the here and now embedded in and explained by what immediately preceded it”.
The more I learn about him, the more I think this was his biggest problem, the inability to build up experience. As Suzanne said, he could pick things up, but it took endless repetition and aeons of time. As long as a situation lasted things were all right, the here and now embedded in and explained by what immediately preceded it. But gaps of more than ten minutes his malfunctioning memory couldn’t bridge. It prevented him from perceiving any continuity besides that offered by continuous time itself. Likewise, if he had learned something, he couldn’t transfer it to a different context. If he wanted to make tea, he went to the kitchen, which by definition meant his kitchen. He couldn’t make tea in Kasper’s kitchen, unable as he was to apply the original skill taught to by his ergotherapist as a more general level. The same went for events. If they didn’t form part of the routine they were merely incidents to him, snapshots, which in his mind were not connected and in most cases didn’t endure. to put it another way: there was no flow. Imagine seeing your days in a strobe light with a low frequency, and you’ll get the idea.
What disrupts the flow here is the lack of connections. What disrupts the flow in other cases is an overabundance of connections. No flow and overflow can both reduce the chances of forming meaningful experience.
And so for day 588
23.07.2008
Just as “laughing out loud” got reprocessed as “lots of love”, RTFM when transmuted by the euphemism machine gives “Remember to Find Manual”
Find it before you read it!
And so for day 587
22.07.2008
Roo Borson in Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida invites the reader to meditate upon the place and the passage of time and the limits of the recuperative abilities of literature.
Oishida still exists on the map. I would someday like to go there. Whether it would be the same Oishida Basho knew is another question. Nonetheless I would like to walk the streets and see for myself. There are places one cannot go except in literature, but then again there is a version of time which literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from. In that version, Basho’s Oishida no longer exists — but fortunately, poetry keeps intervening, poetry and its obsession with the “qualities” of things, the huts of the fisherman on the beach, the little coloured clams, and so on.
In my reading I keep circling back to the sentence that registers if not a moment of failure then a type of tension: “There are places one cannot go except in literature, but then again there is a version of time which literature, and all ordinary human commerce, keeps us from.” Words get in the way as much as they facilitate travel.
And so for day 586
21.07.2008
Line from Robert Kelly A California Journal (1969).
memory has its onion for the eye
A line so good almost makes one cry.
And so for day 585
20.07.2008
Brian Stock, “Language and Cultural History” in New Literary History v. 18 (Spring 1987), 657-70.
However in a written as opposed to a spoken text, the author is no longer physically present, and the audience, being abstract, is potentially universal.
Note the collapse of the author function into that of enonciator or scriptor. Something happens to the notion of audience and its link to presence in oral culture…
Is there not an implicit contract: “I tell you this in the hopes you will tell others”; “I give this to you to read. Share it.” The injunction of the passing on, conserving of the message.
The contract is extra-textual but not extra-discursive. The author can be at some remove from the enonciator or the scriptor — regardless if we are in an oral or a written culture.
Stock has been providing the readers with a summary of Paul Ricoeur’s position as set forth in Interpretation Theory and it is telling that just before the passage quoted above Stock observes that “Intentionality is never completely erased, nor is the text ever completely autonomous.” Stock leaves an opening to think through the dislocations (and conjunctions) between author and performer. In essence, the spoken text as equally as the written text implies a theatre. [And theatre implies contracts as well as contact.]
And so for day 584
19.07.2008
I’ve visited Richard Boston in the foreward to The Guardian Country Diary Drawings by Clifford Harper (2003, Agraphia Press) and focused on the acquiring a “narrative quality”. Here is the passage given more fully
The Country Diary drawings are intended to be seen one at a time, as they appear in the daily paper — and on newsprint, not art paper. By collecting them together they acquire (for me, at least) a narrative quality. They are also changed on seeing them on a different kind of paper, and not surrounded by columns of type but framed on a blank wall or as here in a book. The context makes a huge difference […]
And so I muse that the single object, the one picture, can itself provide a narrative effect. Simple questions arise: how did it come to be; how will it be disposed? A collection of one doesn’t have the same potential of narration by series as does a collection of more than one. Its story telling relies on the experience and marshalling of the involute (which is to be distinguished from the self-reflexive).
We can scarcely navigate the world without a sense of history kicking in.
And so for day 583
18.07.2008
Came across a note suggesting a piece of research. That is, whether the multiple protagonists (whose names all begin with “J”) who populate The Female Man by Joanna Russ might in small part be connected to the “Jane” hero of a Robert Heinlen short story entitled “— All You Zombies —”. Not having the Heinlein at hand, I did a search and found a lovely synopsis through Wikipedia
“‘—All You Zombies—'” chronicles a young man (later revealed to be intersex) taken back in time and tricked into impregnating his younger, female self (before he underwent a sex change); he thus turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is both his own mother and father. As the story unfolds, all the major characters are revealed to be the same person, at different stages of her/his life.
Also found that:
“All You Zombies” is the title of a chapter in the John Varley novel Millennium, a time-travel story which uses the titles of famous time-travel stories as chapter titles.
A direct link between Heinlein and Russ may be a stretch, still the parallels are worth exploring.
And so for day 582
17.07.2008
Max Brand The False Rider (a western novel) describes a safecracker or lock picker and the tools of the trade …
He did not need most of those tools for the delicate task which was in his hands now, but he had laid out a great portion of them around him. They inspired him with the recollection of many another knotty problem in the past which, he, unaided had solved.
A similar case could be made with the cook or chef in relation to a batterie de cuisine: a set of unused tools is useful because of having been inspiration.
And so for day 581
16.07.2008
