For anyone who remembers losing a mitten on a winter day…
Sylvia Legris
Nerve Squall
You know this climate like the shape of your hand inside your mitt
I like the push from exterior (climate) to “inside your mitt”. There is an expansive cosiness to this startling line. And a sneaking nostalgia for lost cold.
And so for day 2901
21.11.2014
Christian Salmon
Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind
Drawing on the work of David Boje (1991 study of storytelling performance in an office-supply firm), Salmon observes:
People tell their stories in fragments and are constantly interrupted by colleagues who add elements drawn from their own experiences. The outcome is a collective form of narration. It is polyphonic but it is also discontinuous and made up of interwoven fragments, of histories that are talked about and swapped. They can sometimes be contradictory, but the company becomes a storytelling organization whose stories can be listened to, regulated, and, of course, controlled.
The appeal to control (in an organizational setting) is undermined by the dialogic nature of the flow of fragments. I think the allusion to Bakhtin (polyphony) rules out monologic control. Not its possibility but its actuality.
And if we reread carefully it is the company’s own stories that can be controlled. Which is different from the people telling their stories. That there are two sets of stories in this paragraph can sometimes be overlooked. Interesting to note that it all pivots on the sometimes contradictory.
And so for day 2900
20.11.2014
Interactions in Education: A Conversation with Brenda Laurel
By Robert Cavalier
05/30/03
RC: What was the main contribution of Aristotle’s writings to your own understanding of HCI?
BL: Specifically, it was Aristotle’s definition of theater as a representation of action where characters are seen as patterns of choice—that’s almost exactly what we have in a computer game.
Worth emphasizing:
“Aristotle’s definition of theater as a representation of action where characters are seen as patterns of choice” — beyond to click or not to click is the simple decision to continue or not. To read, to listen, to watch. There is always the potential of turning away. You are your own character.
And so for day 2899
19.11.2014
Unabashed plug for great work
“Lulu follows a woman coming to terms with saying goodbye and having the courage to move on and start over.”
At the beginning of this piece the poem “Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep”, by Mary Elizabeth Frye, is recited by Russell Binns, a UK voice-over actor. [Thanks to audience services of the National Ballet of Canada for responding to a query.]
Shots of driving down a country road with the poem is recited over the music of Kevin Lau. After this intro the choreography is set to Max Richter “November”.
Lulu
Choreography: Guillaume Côté
Dancer: Heather Ogden
Director: Ben Shirinian
I like how the anaphora of the poem sets up the gestural vocabulary of the dance.
And so for day 2898
18.11.2014
Me in 1996
“Storing and Sorting”
The human senses, whatever their number and relations, produce events. Events can be connected. This production of events can be experienced, can be induced, can be guided. Memory plays a major role in this process. Attention can be alternatively devoted to percept and to the act of perception. The possibilities for metacommentary are connected to the possibilities for memory. Cognitively this allows humans to preserve the trace of something happening at a certain time. Events connected in a series of episodes lead to narratives. The transformation of discrete somatic signals into sequences begins to explain cross-modal encoding.
The key phrase “Attention can be alternatively devoted to percept and to the act of perception.” resonates with reading this some 20+ years later …
S.E. Gontarski Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze
In his one and only film, commissioned by his American publisher, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, and called simply, generically, Film (originally The Eyes), Beckett acknowledgedly explored Berkeley’s Immaterialist or Idealist dictum, principal [sic] #3, esse est percipi, as something of a disappearing act, a pursuit of immaterialism if not a performance of dematerialization, but Beckett kept part of Berkeley’s dictum under erasure. Tellingly, Berkeley’s full phrase includes the parenthetical extension ‘(aut percipere), so that esse est percipi, that ‘being is being perceived’, has the added tenet of ‘(or perceiving)’.
Told and telling.
And so for day 2897
17.11.2014
Rosanna Warren
Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters
About:
p. 301
redefining fiction as an art not so much of plot as of voice
p. 309
what it meant to write a modern poem: not an explosive device, but a cadenced enchantment carrying the older art into new space
p. 389
Everything is morally metamorphic.
From:
p. 527
through attention, you’ll enlarge the precious sensibility that is your fortune and your patient future. … Consider yourself a speck of the cosmos.
p. 530
Poetry is an invented dream
And so for day 2896
16.11.2014
Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director at Coach House Books, has been kind to me.
I had borrowed from the Toronto Public Library Sylvia Legris’s Nerve Squall.
The copy (first edition from 2005) has in the Sources section a note about the front epigraph which is said to be taken from Derek Jarman’s Chroma. But in this copy (edition? printing?) there does not appear a front epigraph. A tantalizing hint.
Alana was so kind to check and report:
Hello again!
I had to come in to the office today, so I took a look.
Very strange — my copy of the book has the epigraph on an unpaginated page that would be page 7. It’s set low on the page, and is very short (“Colour sings in the grey.”), but it’s there.
Is your 7th page blank? That would be very odd! Can you check which printing it is? I’m looking at the third. Maybe it went missing in a different print run? No one has mentioned it before.
Thanks!
Alana.
Bonus — Google’s optical character recognition software picks up a bit of broken type — the “a” in Chroma — and renders it as “u” in Chromu
There is no end to the marvellous meanderings of signifiers – lost and found.
Thanks again to Alana Wilcox for bringing the epigraph and its colour to make the grey sing.
And so for day 2895
15.11.2014
Around the corner from Proust’s madeleine
The ultimate nursery food is beef tea; I have not had it since I was a child, and although I could easily have brewed myself a batch, I never have yet. I am afraid that my childhood will overwhelm me with the first sip or that I will be compelled to sit down at once and write a novel in many volumes. I am not afraid it will not be as delicious as I remember it. It will. Now that I have a child of my own I know the day is coming when I will make beef tea for her, and I am certainly not above insisting that she share it with her mother.
Laurie Colwin
“Nursery Food”
Home Cooking
And so for day 2894
14.11.2014
Rethreading (tumbling paragraphs) from a set of comments arising from observing undertheorizing the posited “vulnerability” of the single reader:
With the demise of the grand narratives, we find writers as well as readers. Barthes at the end of Criticism and Truth invokes four functions: scriptor: who copies without adding anything; compilator: who adds nothing of their own; commentator: who makes a personal contribution to the copied text only to render it intelligible; auctor: who gives their own ideas, always justifying their views with reference to other authorities. Such a model assumes less a vulnerable reader and more an engaged writer of however tiny the narrative, small the world, or simple the game.
Mediating relations with cultural products can be imagined in productive terms rather than mere consumerism (I have in mind the 3Cs of constructivist pedagogy: collaborate, create, communicate, and such examples a fan fiction, meme elaboration, discussion threads). Note that such approaches posit a set of participants; the reader is always multiple.
If I may be so bold, I would venture that narration is the mechanism that allows for the traversals and switches between narratives, worlds and games. No matter how small, simple or tiny. https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/2014/09/16/3n-plus/
And so for day 2893
13.11.2014
I like how Willard McCarty captures some of the weathering of the fences and peeling paint; they would make fine wallpaper in a digital setting.
What I also find touching here is the vulnerability of the images: they are themselves impermanent marks of impermanence. The platform housing them could disappear or the account holder might choose to no longer sheltering them. And yet they might get copied, unattributed and dispersed.
And so for day 2892
12.11.2014
