BERNEVAL

Philip K. Dick Ubik (New York: Vintage Books 1969 reprint 1991 page 132) has a particular take on Plato

But why hadn’t the TV set reverted instead to formless metals and plastics? those, after all, were its constituents; it had been constructed out of them, not out of an earlier radio. Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of Plato’s ideal objects, the universals which, in each class, were real. The form TV set had been a template imposed as a successor to other templates, like the procession of frames in a movie sequence. Prior forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately — and against ordinary experience — vanished. The man contains — not the boy — but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.

The ordinary experience of boys with movie frames admits splicing and montage. How like a template is a frame? The simile invites a bit of thinking about how a succession differs from a procession. Both do possess a quality of entities following one after the other. Yet one has room for more. The boy is not contained by the man. The boy traverses the man. The long ago may be only a frame away or even awaiting just off screen. A man is traversed and because of that is unlike a succession. The container leaks.

And so for day 241
12.08.2007

Here is a wonderful passage about the value of practice and about the care of craft. Hermione to Harry in “The Wandmaker” chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Oh yes, if you are any wizard at all you will be able to channel your magic through almost any instrument. The best results, however, must always come where there is the strongest affinity between wizard and wand. These connections are complex. An initial attraction, and then a mutual quest for experience, the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand.

Respect for one’s tools is coupled with respect for one’s bodily reactions to those tools and this coupling forms the basis not only for magic but also for a growing knowledge of the affordances offered by a given technology and its deployment. The gentle imperative of respect becomes a call to be attentive to interaction and feedback.

And so for day 240
11.08.2007

Jochen Schulte-Sasse “Afterward” to Jay Caplan. Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Geneology of the Beholder.

The mechanical arts in particlar [sic] were soon to be excluded from the realm of the so-called beautiful arts because their skills turned out to be commercially exploitable in the course of the industrial revolution. For one of the structuring principles of the institutionalization of a separate aesthetic realm was the resistance of those arts delimited as “beautiful” to commercial utilization. As Martin Fontius has pointed out, the development of a generalized notion of art and the emergence of a new discipline — aesthetics — dealing with art in general coincide not just accidentally with the emergence of technology as a science and institutionalized discipline: “the monopolization of the concept of technic on the one hand corresponded to an aestheticization of the concept of art on the other.”

How like an institution is a marketplace?

And so for day 235
06.08.2007

Geoffrey O’Brien. The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading.

He measures his life by sentences and chapters. He comes to feel that just as any moment of life contains the whole of it, any of these books is the whole library, any sentence the whole book. This realization affords him enormous relief. To allow himself to be lost in this reading is his salvation.

I like how the prose shifts from a contemplation of a moment containing a life to a part being a larger whole.

And so for day 234
05.08.2007

Kevin Connolly Happyland. The title poem in this collection is a set of nine parts is about the East Tremont fires in New York and one of the pieces recalls Triangle Shirtwaist fire that happened “79 years to the day” before the fire that is the subject of “Happyland”. There is smart use of the white space dividing the stanzas to form effects such as this

March 25, 1911:
the day the angels fell

nine floors into heaven.

There are no further lines to the page end. That is where the words stop.

To echo Oscar Wilde on page turning, sometimes halting is the appropriate response and page conditions can contribute to that response.

And so for day 233
04.08.2007