BERNEVAL

“Technocracy’s Children” Chapter I of Theodore Rosack’s The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition a portion of which was first published in The Nation in 1968 brings to the fore a very important keyword: maldistribution

Because we have an economy of cybernated abundance that does not need their labor, that is rapidly severing the tie between work and wages, that suffers from hard-core poverty due to maldistribution, not scarcity. From this point of view, why is the voluntary dropping-out of the hip young any more “parasitic” than the enforced dropping-out of impoverished ghetto dwellers?

Rosack goes on to ask the pertinent question:

The economy can do abundantly without all this labor. How better, then to spend our affluence than on those minimal goods and services that will support leisure for as many of us as possible?

“Maldistribution” is a keyword that sets in train a very important set of questions.

And so for day 210
12.07.2007

February 2007 The Walrus Kay Armatage “Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar”

The publishers do a disservice to the argument and the facts put forth by asserting in the table of contents that the article is about “Why Gertrude Stein hated commas”. She didn’t. She was indifferent to them.

And, as the Poetry and Grammar lecture which Armatage draws upon indicates, she, that is Stein, used them, that is commas, to great effect. My favourite Stein comma passage is from A Novel of Thank You.

She find it just as easy she find it just as easy, she finds it just as easy.

There in that context is the theme of ease in relation to the mark of punctuation, a theme ever so similar to the comma remarks in Poetry and Grammar.

And so, as Armatage leaves readers with a question and a set of observations:

I don’t feel as strongly about commas as Stein did, and who can, really? And there’s the dreaded question mark.

I leave you with a question: can one have a strong feeling of indifference? Yes, I suppose, if one is a very strong anyone.

And so for day 209
11.07.2007

R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory (1990) p. 168

Indeed, to understand one such collection may make the others tenuous: their boundaries, to use one of Derrida’s images, may begin to tremble. The tenuousness and uncertainty of boundaries are, always and already, implicit in the notion of a collection.

The tenuousness is not a question of completion.

What I gather is what I have gathered including the wish for the collectible which is not yet collected. What I have gathered contains a history of accessions. The wish and the history are not always accessible.

And so for day 208
10.07.2007

Patricia Meyer Spacks from Boredom

Examining them [literary and cultural works] under the rubric of boredom reveals surprising connections among them and uncovers unpredictable animating energies.

A story of research and discovery is recapitulated in those unpredictable animating energies uncovered.

And so for day 206
08.07.2007

Julia Kristeva in The Samurai translated by Barbara Bray rewards the reader who remembers to note the flowers. Observe first the father-in-law of a character named Olga:

Jean de Montlaur loved gardening after Gérard had done the heavy work: trimming the drooping rose bushes; watering the earth around the daisies in order to inhale the spicy scent they gave off when their thirst was slaked; cutting stems of mallows and hollyhocks for Olga to remove the blossoms and float them — like fishes suddenly set free — in the large porcelain bowls in the drawing room.

And pages and pages later, without floral description, is the description of the post-humous grandchild, Olga’s son, at play in the Luxembourg gardens and oblivious to the statuary:

Alex saw nothing of this gallery of sovereigns, which intrigued only his mother: it was the smell of the petunias — an almost imperceptible mixture of milk and honey, with an afterthought of poppy — that intoxicated and enticed him. Suddenly he let go of the stroller he was pushing along all by himself and plunged across the grass toward the flower beds to pick some of the dark pink and purple trumpets.

“Come here, Alex — it’s not allowed!”

Olga tried to catch him, but her son had already managed to grab a handful of what he wanted before starting back and falling down on the gravel. His knees were scraped, but his eye was triumphant.

Presiding over the antics of the child is the effigy of another Laure. The last statue to occupy the mother’s attention before the son’s dash for the petunias harkens of an overdetermination:

Nearby the royal series gives way to Laure de Noves, most mysterious of women, ancestress of the Marquis de Sade, with the serene grace of a woman who knows she is loved, a page of Petrarch inevitably in her hand, a lyrical eye bent on the dead leaves.

Alex saw nothing of the gallery of sovereigns. Not just the royals but the sovereigns, the other subjects. He is his own person.

And so for day 205
07.07.2007

—<–@

Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A talk-rock album “Thorns of the Flower Children” begins thus:

Once upon a time, about a generation ago, right after the thirteen-thousand-seven-hundred-and-sixty-fourth demonstration against the war in Vietnam, young people started to congregate in an area of San Francisco known as the Haight-Ashbury. They were sick of being programmed by an educational system void of excitement, creativity and sensuality.

Good beginning for myth making. The accompanying illustration places the thorns in a crown and a necklace on a figure with waves and waves of hair. There is a way of thinking of the thorns less as adornment and more as progeny.

@–>—

And so for day 203
05.07.2007