UHF

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Francois Lachance

A prolonged meditation on various psychic states is what marks the short story by Brian Vickers entitled “The Coded Sun Game” and published in Quark 3 edited by Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker. The piece reads in part like a cross between Burroughs and Joyce. For example:

0: Zero or Omega / the auto-wrecking lot has auto-wrecked itself — “It’s high time” — A neon sky contains his blue jeans and broken teeth, but I laugh: my shirt has unique red symbols painted by the priestess, not the son — He who gets hurt — My walls shake with seismic withdrawal thunder, Ultra-Hysteric Freakuency […]

What I find intriguing are the changes in pronoun that refocus the reader’s distance from the speaker or narrator — one is never quite sure if the first person will hold, indeed, one attempts to ride the channel surfing anticipating the next shift.

And so for day 440
26.02.2008

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Text Tiles

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Francois Lachance

This poem began as a ghazal and morphed into this

Life Fabrics

the threadbare crotch
the bruized leather
wrench destiny

I have travelled too far
to write epic
even my homo heroes and their heroes
cannot tapestry fill

Not enough
scraps
shredded to rag pulp

I have bolts of cloth not yet turned
to tatters by moth boy eyes

I like spelling “bruise” with a “z” — it captures the hurt. I also like how the poem implies there is a long way to go to reach the necessary nakedness to undertake a great undertaking.

And so for day 439
25.02.2008

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Audible Colour

Posted on February 24, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Fadeout by Joseph Hansen in the Dave Brandstetter mystery series exhibits like the other novels in the series a knack for the characterization of space. The descriptions of setting are remarkable for how they concisely capture activities.

For instance this pet shop is vividly memorable because of a slight crossing of the avian and the botanical

Birds surrounded her in shiny cages. Canaries, parakeets, finches. Noisy flowers.

The turn of phrase would be merely a nice touch in passing if it were not for a subtle reprise about a page later:

They went into the shop again. Hard, bright surfaces under glaring fluorescents. Bouquets of loud plastic flowers. A bubbling green fish tank.

It is almost as if the textual reprise invites the reader to turn down the volume and heighten the colour.

And so for day 438
24.02.2008

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Time Re-manipulated

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Thud! by Terry Pratchett is a humourous romp which swings with verve into aphorisms that strike one as allusions to Proustian themes.

How the sense of smell serves memory:

She prowled onwards in a world of color; smells overlaid one another, drifting and persisting. The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

And the use of stimulants reminds one of moments in Proust’s life story that describe the use of stimulants to improve breathing and resulting in insomnia. Here is Pratchett again:

Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.

It is fun to find these nuggets embedded in an engaging story. Even if they are not labelled as Proustian, they make us pause and admire the finesse with which perception intercepts memory.

And so for day 437
23.02.2008

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Re-entranced

Posted on February 22, 2008 by Francois Lachance

As an afterwards to Alice A. Parker’s remarks on translation to the effect that “Translation, like writing, opens up a quantum field of inquiry […]” I place this passage from Li Tongxuan Entry into the Realm of Reality as translated by Thomas Cleary

Once Sudhana had entered the building, the door then reclosed. Opening means the disappearance of delusion and the appearance of knowledge. Reclosing means that in knowledge there is no inside or outside, no exiting or entering, no delusion or enlightenment. This means wholly returning to the source.

I quote this not to suggest that there exists a mystical guide for doing the work of translation. Rather I cite the passage as an antidote to the common misapprehension that translation is solely the carrying over of a meaning from on situation to another. Translation can be viewed as building another route to a source. It is a way back to an after before or a now.

The building is forever in a state of being built even as it crumbles into ruin. Entering into the building is like tracing a translation: being there on the way to being there.

And so for day 436
22.02.2008

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Entranced

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Alice A. Parker in the entry on Nicole Brossard in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and their Works from Antiquity to the Present edited by Claude J. Summers writes

Translation, like writing, opens up a quantum field of inquiry into words, syntax, grammar, and the production of meaning.

I like to think of the translating text and the translated text as the givens in actuality and the translation as that which hovers between them in virtuality. It’s a dimension accessible only through comparison, constant comparison, of target and source. To translate is to read bilingually.

It is reading that I associate with opening up a field. Writing for me is a task in the service of materializing a selection. Writing is a kind of closure. For some people writing is a form of reading. To translate, to write, to read. Different modalities of a play with form in the service of what matters? Not surprising when one considers that the opening of a field is connected to the setting of boundaries, a type of n-closure.

And so for day 435
21.02.2008

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Wrapper

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Drinking coffee, I found an interesting rendering for the cuff that supports the cup and protects the hand from the heat. In English it is called an “insulating sleeve”. In the French one reads about “cette gaine isolante” which back translated refers to a girdle.

Somehow thinking in French makes the cup wide and in English tall and long. And in which language would I be prone to blow upon the beverage to cool it?

And so for day 434
20.02.2008

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Transforming Form

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Came across a creative writing course outline from the early 90s (Transforming Form: Creative Writing from a Gay & Lesbian Perspectives). I proposed that “Through a series of directed readings and structured exercises, participants will integrate an awareness of anticipated reader(s) into critical responses to their own work and that of their peers.”

Weeks three, four and five are oddly telling at this distance in time:

Week 3
Travelogue or Mystery (Class Choice)
What differences count? Here and There. Seeing differently? There and Here.

Week 4
Sexually Explicit Writing
Audre Lorde excerpt from Zami
Robin Metcalfe, “The Shirt” Mandate 1983
Killing the cliche; unleashing fantasy; realism and sexual representation.

Week 5
Marking Passages/Testimonials
An examination of obituaries and tributes selected […]

I am struck all these years later by the route from mystery and travel through the sexually explicit to mourning and remembrance. Was a time that to express grief was as radical an act as to talk sex.

I smile at the final week:

Week 10
Borders
Joanna Russ The Female Man
Samuel Delany Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Science fiction; utopias; writing for the open audience

I now imagine that writing for the open might be like setting a trip wire for one person, me. The audience, revisiting old aspirations, familiar territory grown novel once again, is transported, marvelling at what could be done. Setting a trip wire for unknown special effects.

As far as trip wires go, the thinnest is sometimes toughest.

I burnt the syllabus. All that I have left is what is recorded here.

And so for day 433
19.02.2008

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Time Machine Brain: dancing dendrites

Posted on February 18, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Paul Bouissac in “Three Mini-reviews: Focus on the Brain” quotes from Donald Pfaff Brain Arousal and Information Theory: Neural and Genetic Mechanisms

Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the same time, brain activity can be tuned to become an ideal observer of the environment, due to an organized system of rhythms.

I like to juxtapose this with the words from Adam Anderson as quoted by Jenny Lass in a piece of scientific journalism “Meditation can change brain function, psychology study says. Findings appear in December issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience”

“The prefrontal cortex allows us to mentally time travel. It’s an amazing capacity,” he [Anderson] explained “but it can have some side effects.” The ability to learn from the past and predict the future is useful but it can also cause us to worry about what has already happened or what is yet to come.

Rhythm. Modulation. Meditation. “Training your brain to switch off its default desire to ruminate […]”

And so for day 432
18.02.2008

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Tree Destiny (winter haiku)

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Francois Lachance

A rift on a line from Matthew 7:17-20 and pondering the fate of being consigned to the fire

pan dendron agathon
the parable of every good tree ends
in dry crackle of winter

Parable improbable. Haiku for winter thoughts.

And so for day 431
17.02.2008

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