There is a hint of haute etiquette in certain groupings. For instance the radicals for earth, scholar, work, jade and life resemble each other.
Scholar squiggles are to castings as scholar wiggles are to aeration.
Work of the earth, life of the scholar.
And so for day 31
14.01.2007
It is said that to promise out of hope fails only if one performs out of fear.
No fowl is foul.
No foul is fallow.
Please take flight without fright: swim, glide, slide away, advance retreat.
And so for day 30
13.01.2007
In i-Apple land, Keyboard Viewer helps one slide into better typing. It provides a nifty kiss hiss of feedback. Typing one’s name is especially revealing for the spacing and rhythms it may hold in the hand.
A QWERTY user looking for a minor bit of hunt and peck fun can switch the keyboard to Canadian French – CSA (and try to spot the single key location of c cedilla). Dvorak is available for those willing to develop dexterity with another layout.
The Character Palette even offers Braille dot patterns (which is not the same as a Braille input device) and so one can practice “seeing” Braille. Thank you Unicode.
Those channelling the ghost of Ezra Pound can relish the fact the digit zero is transliterated to an ideograph containing the radical for “rain” and cry for joy in this our post-Babel Apple-i land.
And so for day 29
12.01.2007
Splitting non signals safely (ther ei spowe rcoming a tyo uwhe nyou attempt to spindle noise) involves or invokes a certain type of hearing. The phonetic weaves its way into the phonological by the royal road of loan words. There is for example the coming of the “ing” sound into French via such borrowings le parking.
Doing a little bit of a U Turn, one can imagine the mandarin mutations of pronunciation that greet the Greek letter Upsilon in the name of the collective “Groupe Mu”. Graphological distinctions assists in the migration of sounds.
What sounds will travel via Unicode and the representation of a plethora of diacritical marks that it permits? And what of txtng? English “you” shortened to “u” and then translated to French “vs” for “vous” — and by back translation there is a recollection of the days of typesetting where a “u” and “v” were interchangeable : “vs” is “us”.
“M3” is a thousand sigmas reversed. How then shall the numerologists work?
There is power coming at you when you spindle noise and spin a platter.
And so for day 28
11.01.2007
Windows over under windows are like hijab, nikab and burqa. and so too boys’ hoodies.
And so for day 27
10.01.2007
Lines from Susan Sontag’s “Under the Sign of Saturn” collected in Under the Sign of Saturn gather together in a paragraph about the collapsing of time (which is not the same as “time collapsed”):
Benjamin regards everything he chooses to recall in his past as prophetic of the future, because the work of memory (reading oneself backward, he called it) collapses time. There is no chronological ordering of his reminiscences, for which he disavows the name of autobiography, because time is irrelevant. (“Autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life,” he writes in Berlin Chronicle. “Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”) Benjamin, the translator of Proust, wrote fragments of an opus that could be called A la recherche des espace perdus. Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux. Benjamin is not trying to recover his past but to understand it: to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitory structures.
Sontag’s “perdus” when translated into English one could call the lost the unknown gives spaces in which to get lost à la Benjamim.
And so for day 26
09.01.2007
Larry Klein from one of the cards included in the circular box set from Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now
As we began the process of selecting the songs for this record, Joni came up with the idea of having the record trace the arc of a modern romantic relationship. I thought that this idea was innovative, exciting and especially appropriate considering that the focal point of her work has been an inquiry into the nature of modern love. The album would be a programmatic suite documenting a relationship from initial flirtation through optimistic consummation, metamorphosing into disillusionment, ironic despair, and finally resolving in the philosophical overview of acceptance and the probability of the cycle repeating itself.
The ever so improbable beauty of cycle repetition.
The results have surpassed our expectations. In singing these songs, I believe that Joni has achieved something quite extraordinary in that she has truly sung them as if, as Nietzsche would say, she had written them in her own blood.
Believe.
The dialogue of the dead with the living …
You’re My Thrill
At Last
Comes Love
You’ve Changed
Answer Me, My Love
A Case of You
Don’t Go to Strangers
Sometimes I’m Happy
Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me
Stormy Weather
I Wish I Were In Love Again
Both Sides Now
A play list. “I really don’t know ‘love’ at all.” So much more. So very much more.
And so for day 25
08.01.2007
The words for an advertisement for an automobile very large upon the side of a building take on a special glow when the reader recalls the cars-on-ice montage as seen on the big screen in the cinema and the warmth of the freakish winter weather and one impishly imagines the luxury vehicles plunging through on a lake crossing:
Perfect Moments
Imperfect Conditions
Perfect conditions lead to imperfect moments.
But a moment is a condition.
How can one arrive at such readings more regularly? Recall Robert Aitken, a great student of Basho, in “The Search for Mind” collected in The Mind of Clover:
Realizing that greed, hatred, and ignorance aren’t there is a deeper way to resolve them than merely seeking to forget them by looking on the bright side.
O the nuances of a deeper way to resolve! “Looking on” as distinguished from “looking at.”
And so for day 24
07.01.2007
Meredith Monk “The Tale” recorded in a 2:47 version on Dolmen Music challenges transcription. It is difficult to do justice to these two lines [?] among the others without reference to the vocables that surround their annunciation. There is no substitute for listening in situ to these lines [?] here transcribed in the order they appear minus material before between and after.
I still have my allergies.
I still have my philosophy.
Hearing them again evokes an other text by an other author remembering the sheer joy of sound reverberation inside skull and through the body as a whole.
Breath Control
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
The child mumble-hummed the cadences of speech with a mouthful of wet crunch. The precision was admired by the adult. A closed mouth. Using one’s head to resonate round food lumps. So precise an understanding that could distinguish between talk and directed sound from the presumption of articulation.
“Nice control of the epiglottis.”
“What’s an epiglottis?”
A piece of cereal spilled out and clung to the lip. A hand raised to push it back in and wipe the spread of an impish grin as curiousness leapt out.
“A trap that prevents you from choking.”
Now in the re-reading reversing, a choke that prevents a trapping, sometimes seems a more suitable reply.
And so for day 23
06.01.2007
