BERNEVAL

Anti-Agon

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Francois Lachance

From Asobi: The Sensibilities at Play by Yoshida Mitsukuni
published in 1987 from two places and partners (Tokyo: Cosmo Public Relations Corp. Hiroshima: Mazda Motor Corporation)

Gambling emerged as a form of play in which the players gave themselves up entirely to the almighty power of chance. The lure of gambling lies in the apparent promise that all men have an equal chance of good fortune; talent, skill, and experience count for nothing. The promise, of course, is not necessarily fulfilled, for only a fortunate few win, while the majority are destined for disappointment. Despite the high risk, people cannot resist the thought that chance might miraculously favor them, and the excitement of expectation can make them feel intensely the sensation of being alive. Even if briefly, it has the power to overshadow all the hardships that are man’s lot in life.

Note: the democratizing power of lottery and the invigourating aspects of contemplating good luck.

And so for day 151
14.05.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Game | Leave a comment

Treeworks

Posted on May 13, 2007 by Francois Lachance

The metaphor works its way through time in Wanda Campbell’s poem “Family Tree” from Haw [Thorn]

my father’s family is as clear

as the sap his father

squeezed from the trees

each sweet spring

his mother only four

at her mother’s sickroom door

kids farmed out after the funeral

like maple keys in the wind

Squeezing a living; the living squeezed.

And so for day 150
13.05.2007

Posted in Metaphor, Poetry | Leave a comment

Inspired

Posted on May 12, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Spammers collect email addresses. The more bogus email addresses they collect, the less clean data they have to ply their trade.

From the poetic prose of Patti Smith:

in the wall is a hole. duchamp thumbprint pin light fraction. an iris opening. gradually we see the whole thing. everything opens unfolds like a breugal. it’s a holiday…

a breugal — no capital B — it’s in my lexicon and perhaps someday in the common lexicon a small bagel and a big hole —— a breugal

perfect name for an upstream tech anti-spammer device. findme@breaugal.com

And so for day 149
12.05.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Healing, rant | Leave a comment

Impermanence

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Francois Lachance

It is worth sometimes to revisit the passages copied out for placement in a gathering of commonplaces. For example this snippet from the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Cities of the Plain “The Heart’s Intermissions” seems a tad melancholic:

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and reality has destroyed.

I wonder why I had selected the quotation with that terminus in mind, why I had dwelt upon the link between arbitrariness and destruction, as if necessity were otherwise.

The paragraph continues:

There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures of our memory rather than to those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires that led us forth upon our journey.

Proust’s narrator is refecting upon a second arrival at Balbec; I as a reader am stationary, a point vis-a-vis the panorama of the narration. The journey is not mine and hence easy to see afresh and remember the difference between destruction and annihilation. Those destroyed memories are still there however much their valence shifted, however much their correspondence is belied. Their destruction is out of time just as the after-image is through time.

And so for day 148
11.05.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Imagination, Temporality | Leave a comment

Bright beginnings

Posted on May 10, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Sentiments have their destiny.

Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly translated by Douglas Ainslie.
It’s the opening sentence to Dandyism

Just one destiny. Perhaps multiple destinations.

And so for day 147
10.05.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Aphorism | Leave a comment

Approaches

Posted on May 9, 2007 by Francois Lachance

A fictional account of reading James

At the Metropolitan Museum sunlight had cleared the apartment towers and was gracing the upper steps by the museum entrance. In the 1970s I’d sat on those steps with Pimm. We’d discovered early on that we could not do museums together. He couldn’t stand before a painting or a Greek vase for more than a few moments. While I lingered, he was always drifting on, seeking the next room. He needed people and events — if not actual motion, then talk, or plot. Novels could satisfy him, but not potboilers. He had an ongoing affair with Henry James. A maroon hardcover of The Ambassadors sat for years by his chair in the living room. Every so often he’d pick it up and re-enter. On other nights he’d be out on the prowl, seeking James’s deeply buried subtexts. Later on, when he couldn’t read (or prowl) I read the book aloud to him, and I often felt I got the rhythms wrong, lost the nuance of those sinuous, gathering sentences. But he didn’t complain. Just lay there with his brow knitting now and then.

from Drina Bridge by Jim Bartley

And so for day 146
09.05.2007

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Whitecaps

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Francois Lachance

tsk

tusk

great

gust

And so for day 145
08.05.2007

Posted in Poetry | Leave a comment

Reverse Transcript Ease

Posted on May 7, 2007 by Francois Lachance

DNA is “and” backwards.

lortnoc is “control” bkwds

sounds like a lord of night

And so for day 144
07.05.2007

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Trapdoor

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Barbara Godard in the introduction to Tessera Volume 9 observes

This position for the feminine as the spoken subject, rather than the subject of enunciation or subject of the utterance, poses difficulties for the woman writer.

The French version differs slightly

Cette position pour le féminin comme le sujet parlé, plutôt que comme le sujet de l’énonciation ou le sujet de l’énoncé, consitute une impasse pour l’écrivaine.

It is the claim in an earlier passage that jars

le sujet de l’énonciation est toujours excessif par rapport au sujet de l’énoncé.

the subject of the enunciation always exceeds the subject of the utterance.

The classic passage on three subjects is found in Kaja Silverman The Subject of Semiotics

[…] to distinguish between the the speaking subject (i.e. the agency of the discourse); the subject of speech (i.e. the discursive element); and the spoken subject (i.e. the subject produced through discourse). The first and third subjects may or may not coincide. The linguistic example tends to obscure the last of these categories since it projects a protagonist who functions simultaneously as speaking and spoken subjects.

Impasse and excess. Coincidence.

A speaking subject and a subject of speech can be localised. A spoken subject has other coordinates.

A translating subject, a storyteller. A translated subject, a story told. A translation subject, a virtual teller and told.

And so for day 143
06.05.2007

Posted in Introductions, Translations | Leave a comment

Tag

Posted on May 5, 2007 by Francois Lachance

On lag, from Humanist

action in computing. A step by step method can be halted. There is always a lag. Obviously hardware response time and control of peripheral devices is a case in point. There is also some space to think about lag in the reiterative nature of steps. the social shape of lagging is a marker for the tolerance for contemplation as a valued form of action.

From elsewhere, on animation

animation is not about movement it’s about synchronisation it’s a game of I believe I think I believe.

Thinking lag, animating animation.

And so for day 142
05.05.2007