5en5e5

Posted on March 25, 2007 by Francois Lachance

A hand for memory…

Mapped to the hand according to distance from object of perception (length of digit as bar in graph)

thumb = touch

index = smell

middle = sight

ring = hearing

pinky = taste

we depart from the classical gradation [sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste] and inhabit a basic universe of mechanical arts. Experience how touch reaches out for the others. How difficult it is for taste and sight to “touch” with hearing in the way and how simply their interaction becomes when each meets at the thumb.

The classical gradation laid out degrees of incorporation. The hand map to the senses enlightens the play of embodiment. Codes a set of mudras.

I like to think of 101 as binary for decimal five and the number of many an introductory course.

And so for day 101
25.03.2007

Posted in Perception | Tagged | Leave a comment

Throes

Posted on March 24, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Paul Goodman somewhere observed:

Since people’s personalities are very much their verbal patterns, communication feels like physical aggression or seduction.

It is tempting to transcode this into the language of push and pull but that “or” is not exclusive. Ouch. Yum.

And so for day 100
24.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Displacements

Posted on March 23, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Lines gleaned from Paul Monette’s 1987 introduction to Love Alone, a collection of elegies in honour of his lover Roger Horowitz

if only a fragment remained in the future, to fade in the sulfurous rain, it would say how much I loved and how terrible was the calamity

we will not be bowed down or erased by this

pity us not

and then translated with a reading of “calumny” for “calamity”

si seulement la trace d’un geste parvient à évader l’érosion sous les pluies acides, elle indiquerait la grandeur de cet amour et la terrible calomnie …

nous subirons ni abaissements ni suppressions

soyez sans pitié

Notice the migration of the theme of resistance and its inscription in a survival of suppression figured as an escape from erosion.

And so for day 99
23.03.2007

Posted in Introductions, Translations | Tagged | Leave a comment

Timing

Posted on March 22, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Gay Bilson in Plenty: Digressions on Food recalling the closing of a restaurant after 18 years of operating it. Her reaction to a “gesture”

The timing was perfect and we were taken by surprise, but I was faking it. Oh, the tears were there all right, but it was more that the moment seemed to ask for them. Milan Kundera has suggested that watching oneself cry, as I was, might be a definition of kitsch. In Immortality he writes, ‘As soon as we want to feel, feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling . . . This is not to say that a person who imitates feeling does not feel.’

It is worth pausing to consider the vector. An act of will leads to imitation. As well, worth pondering the agency of the willing and the sensing. The what is what changes. The person feels. The person wills. The person remains. The actions are unchanged. That which is held between the person and the action is mutable.

The recalled scene and its mise-en-scene sets the stage for some comparative musings about menu planning and the order of courses — contrasting a Euro-influenced dinner with an Asian feast: one ending with sweets; the other, broth. One with a main course, the other with all laid out at once.

Am I not me using chopsticks? With a fork in hand I think differently, I suppose. Eating with our fingers gives relish to our words.

And so for day 98
22.03.2007

Posted in Food Writing | Leave a comment

Read Carefully

Posted on March 21, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Rick Bebout in a passage from Promiscuous Affections about the passing of Michael Wade

All the fear we have of the dying comes, I think, from the idea that we need arcane and mysterious skills when in fact we need simple, natural ones, and the sureness that we can use them.

“fear of the dying” not “fear of death”

His statement comes at the end of describing the calm care and touching of the still-warm but gone.

And so for day 97
21.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

While waiting

Posted on March 20, 2007 by Francois Lachance

A friend now lives part of the year in Portugal and so on a whim I picked a small pocket bilingual dictionary. Opening the little book at random I found a word that set me adrift.

In Portuguese godo means “pebble”. It also means “Goth”. I was reminded of Beckett’s novels where there are some waiting (and licking) games with pebbles. And I wonder what relation there might be with the title of a play. None likely. But the waiting is permitting an attending to other intertexts: Waiting for the Barbarians and “a kind of solution”.

Like the pills one swallows on a daily basis.

And so for day 96
20.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reporting

Posted on March 19, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Metafiction impells verification.

Fiction that incorporates truth value testing is like running an experiment.

Such writing plays with the sometimes subtle difference between supposition and description.

Ascriptions that are particular:

The cat on the mat.

“The cat on the mat” he said.

To get at the truth of the statement the passage is through the teller.

And so for day 95
19.03.2007

Posted in Storytelling | Leave a comment

Trajectories and types

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Thanks to Anne Galloway (Purse Lips Square Jaw) I was brought to thinking about a drive to neologistic invention less as a competition between creators for the supremacy of their creations and more as a dizzying display of diversity.

Equally useful is to consider the distinction between play (paidia) and game (ludus). One could read [X] as a player in a competitive game (glory for the neologism that sticks) or an invoker of vertigo and simulation to bridge the va-et-vient between free play and structured game.

Useful to remember the four categories of game (agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx) that Callois proposes and figure upon their recombinant possiblities. Sometimes there is only an imitation of a competition.

And so for day 94
18.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Typologies and trajectories

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Francois Lachance

There are connected but different ways to approach discussing the effects of media, ways that make explicit as possible what media are:

  • media as prop
  • media as stage
  • media as puppet

Relays for fetish, space and mask. Note the order: an object exterior to the self but within reach; a circumscribed area; a barrier and screen that both hides and projects. An evolution is implied here. An object is imbued with power; a space is drawn to channel the imbued power; retransmission occurs.

Regeneration implies a materiality of practices.

And so for day 93
17.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Varying

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Francois Lachance

“Being Among Words” Interview with Denis Donoghue in The Pure Good of Theory Blackwell, 1992 p. 96

The only real justification for literature is that it provides us with ways of imagining what it would be like to be different. That’s the basis of sympathies and recognitions. You could say, of course, can’t we be sympathetic simply by virtue of the fact that we are human, that we are born and that we will die. But that is too abstract. One of the great things about literature is that the different moods and recognitions are given a kind of notional validity in the poems.

My comment: including ways we differently perceive and come to understand sameness. I always have difficulty in fathoming the “too abstract” for does it not pass through the extractable before taking a form to be communicated? The difficult part of living is the constant sifting. No, not the sifting but giving validity to the sifting. Not what passes through. Not what remains. But to the activity of sifting: playing with the extractable with all the resources of abstraction. A concentration so pure that it is open to distraction.

And so for day 92
16.03.2007

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment