BERNEVAL

A.S. Byatt in a fiction piece in an October issue of The New Yorker writes about a female character metamorphosed into a stone woman:

That evening she understood that she might be wrong about her immediate fate […] the bread knife slipped and sliced her stone hand, between finger and thumb. She felt pain, which surprised her, and saw a spurt of hot blood from the wound whose depth she could not gauge. She watched the thick liquid run down the back of her hand, onto the bread, onto the table. It was ruddy-gold, dripping in long glassy strings, and where it touched the bread the bread went up in smoke, and where […] Her veins were full of molten lava.

I like how the commonplace in this passage is transformed by a simple conceit.

And so for day 530
26.05.2008

A little piece of text given line breaks and some boxes. [Our addition of interlinked “boxes”.]

Plumb Design Vision with boxes by Francois

By design, we mean more than graphic design; we mean the development of a comprehensive structure by which people access information. This includes all of the elements that make up an online environment, from color and typography, to the object-oriented code that integrates with a database. When all of these elements work in concert, we achieve a degree of communication that goes beyond word and image, a communication in which visitors learn from the process of seeking.

http://wwww.plumbdesign.com/services/design.html
Accessed 7/27/99

And so for day 526
22.05.2008

But a small excerpt from a travel piece built around enumeration, Anaïs Nin “The Labyrinthine City of Fez” in the section “Enchanted Places” in In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other essays

After color and the graceful sway of robes, the flares, the stance, the swing of loose clothes, come the odors. One stand is devoted to sandalwood from Indonesia and the Philippines. It lies in huge round baskets and is sold by weight, for it is a precious luxury wood for burning as incense. The walls of the cubicle are lined with small bottles containing the essence of flowers — jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, and the rose water that is used to perfume guests. In the same baskets lie the henna leaves that the women distill and use on their hair and hands and feet. For the affluent, the henna comes in liquid form. And there is, too, the famous khohl, the dust from antimony that gives the women such a soft, iridescent, smoky radiance around the eyes.

The smell of fruit, the smell of perfumes, and the smell of leather intermingle with the smell of wet wool hanging outside the shops to dry — gold bedspreads hanging like flags in the breeze, sheep’s-wool rugs, the favored cherry-red wool blankets, and rose carpets, like fields of daisies, lilies, apple blossoms.

She goes on to state that Fez is the city where one rediscovers the meaning of the word “azure” by contemplating the sky. A nice break after the riot of sensation and always at hand to provide surcease to the palate.

And so for day 524
20.05.2008

Anaïs Nin in a 1971 interview in Vogue collected in In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other essays talks about the origins of her famous diary.

I began the diary at the age of eleven on the ship coming to America, separated from my father, to describe to him this strange land and entice him to come. It would enable him to follow our lives. The diary was begun to bring someone back. My mother didn’t let me mail it; and it became private, a house of the spirit, a laboratory. It became a refuge, a sanctuary.

It begins with the wished for presence of an interlocutor. In a sense speech for the other predates dialogue for the self.

And so for day 522
18.05.2008