Of Time and Space and Art

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Robert Wilson’s CIVIL warS : Drawings, Models, and Documentation
“Selected Storyboard Drawings and Descriptive Texts for the CIVIL warS”
Act IIC Knee Play 6

Doors open very slowly to reveal two large cliffs.
Between cliffs, a small boat carrying a giraffe to China (14th C.) and Admiral Perry to Japan (19th C.)

So very much like Stein’s plays and operas. And yet so different because of the drawings. They supply orientation. For example the giraffe is rendered in profile. There is a crescent moon in the drawing. The descriptive text is partial. The drawing is partial.

And so for day 400
17.01.2008

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Finger Pieces

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Francois Lachance

There is a recent entry in Berneval that slyly substitutes the word “finders” for “fingers”.

finders lightly running down a spine

It can appear to be a simple error or the work of the unconscious on the resources of language. Whatever, decontextualized, the phrase enters into a field of connotations wonderful to find.

And so for day 399
16.01.2008

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Relocated Poem

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Francois Lachance

It has been found written on a small piece of notepaper filling the page. There is seems anchored to the space of the paper; here it floats away

boy back

down feather-dust down
an articulate cascade
cat-archly column

It’s dated 19/7/98. It evokes finders lightly running down a spine. Handwriting like vertebrae.

Boy Back - scan of handwritten poem

Boy Back – scan of handwritten poem

Ten years on, I notice it needs a syllable or two. Delicately placed to turn nouns into adjectives.

boy back

down feather-dusted down
an articulate cascade
cat-archly columnar

And so for day 398
15.01.2008

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Hi Pro

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Kim Williams in the eponymous cookbook and commentary has a recipe for “Hi Pro Chili” which, notwithstanding the claim of it being an April Fool’s recipe, gives a convincing method for preparing earthworms for a high protein addition. Purged with a two day cornmeal diet, the worms are boiled then dried, then added to the chilli.

I believe the result would resemble granules of texturized vegetable protein.

And so for day 397
14.01.2008

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Sensing, Recording, Imagining

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Francois Lachance

David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives invites a rethinking of the situation of the imagination:

There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought.

And of the other senses? They too snip and paste from the continuum.

And so for day 396
13.01.2008

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Where Laboratory meets Library

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Jennifer Bennett in Our gardens, ourselves : reflections on an ancient art quotes Elizabeth Lawrence to the effect that

I cannot help it if I have to use my own well-designed garden as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a garden.

The quotation is plucked somewhere from Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins. It reverberates for me with a notion that I have held for a long time that a garden is a library (a kind of DNA bank). Whether the library comes equipped with scanners or limits users to note taking in pencil, the old work of quotation and annotation has a familiar gardening feel.

And so for day 395
12.01.2008

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a Skip and a Beat

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Francois Lachance

In a piece collected in Close to the Knives David Wojnarowicz writes:

Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

In case any readers might want to take this aphoristic slice of quotation as a license to mind trip, here is the fuller context:

[…] I play games with the road to shake myself up, at times squeezing my eyelids closed so that I drive quarter-mile stretches without sight and it becomes a fight to open my eyes before the side of the road overtakes me. The body that holds the wheel understands the danger that mounts by the moment and the second body smiles in the dark interior of the first. When the eyes finally open, they reveal nothing new about the world except a slight shift in landscape proving that increased mortality teaches me nothing. There’s no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence. No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

Nothing new is revealed. But something is revealed. A touch of vertigo helps rebalance bodies.

And so for day 394
11.01.2008

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From Blackboard to Book and Beyond

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Francois Lachance

D.F. McKenzie. in text first published in 1984 and collected in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts proposes:

Only as its memory systems have grown has the computer changed its nature from blackboard to book. It has at long last become literate and qualified to join other textual systems. In time, I suppose, as it now learns to speak, it will constitute an oral archive as well.

Note how this evolution is not expressed in the idiom of reversal fondly cultivated by McLuhanesque formulations.

And so for day 393
10.01.2008

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Key as poem

Posted on January 9, 2008 by Francois Lachance

From The Observer’s Book of Furniture by John Woodforde, a bit of found poetry. It’s the key to the wood grains illustrated on the endpapers.

Woodgrain Legend

Woodgrain Legend to illustrations on endpapers

And so for day 392
09.01.2008

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Chain ditty

Posted on January 8, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Frank Zappa “Packard Goose” has a segment sung by the character, Mary from the bus.

Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best.

Hits the right note!

And so for day 391
08.01.2008

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