Past Oral

Posted on January 5, 2007 by Francois Lachance

How is an atheist to read Philip Silver’s translation from Felix Martinez-Bonati’s Fictive Discourse and the Structure of Literature? Sincerely. Descriptively. Observe:

Just as there is a reduction or ellipsis of the basic narrative structure, there is also a kind of overextension of the logical privilege. Reading some works (pastoral novels, for example), we feel that not only the basic narrator but also the characters speak the unrestricted truth (in the double sense of being sincere and of describing the fact to perfection), even when they are not assuming the function of the basic narrator. What could be called the principle of angelicality (since each character becomes a mouthpiece of the godlike narrator) pervades such works, flattening the logical differentiations of the image of speech.

“Reduction” or “ellipsis”? To answer the question, transcode as a shrinking or a silence.

Shrug shoulders, squint and shrink the god factor: “mouthpiece of the […] narrator”. Transform the angelicality angle. Before that happens focus on

a mouthpiece

and overextend “mouth” to “body”.

A character becomes a body of the narrator. Avatars notwithstanding, “a body of the narrator” need not be read in an reproductive sense. It can assume a delegative form such in the case of parliamentary committees being bodies of the deliberative form that is a legislative assembly and an assembly can itself be a body of a sovereign will.

Bodies are produced. The bodies produce “of” are not always if ever produced “for”. That is not an open question.

The overextension needs to be extend. Plural eyes see multiplication.

There lurks in the pastoral the grotesque. Just as there is a monological drive to a Burroughs cut up technique, there is also a reduction of the replication. The body instances (whole bodies or parts) no matter how numerous are caught up in the spirit of a single narration where it becomes difficult if not impossible to reconstruct the narrator as a single entity. Pastoral like folk tale belongs to and issues from no one in particular.

The head of ∀ in question turns topsy turvy. How many pins can an angel dance upon?

What counts as a character? Does a character speak? What is this speaking? What does it mean to have an image of this speaking? Ponder the intersection of engraving [see etymology of character] and charades [origin unknown]. When the mute becomes a mouthpiece amazing constructions can be seen when the engraved is allowed to be silent.

The truth shall set you free to ask questions. The half truth like some kinds of ellipsis will privilege logic.

And so for day 22
05.01.2007

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Untitle

Posted on January 4, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Jean Smith in Everyday Mind collects a number of reflections including this deliciously ironic passage from Jon Kabat-Zinn Wherever You Go, There You Are

A student once said: “When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am a buddha, nobody is upset at all.”

Substituting “gay” for “Buddhist” in the semantics at play in the student’s statement the intended target of chauvinism becomes suspect. GAYIST? BUDDHIST!!! Really! Ah, the politics of flaunting it.

Revisiting the statement: parents and friends also contributed to being driven crazy and if anyone is not unsettled or upset or kept a wee bit off balance, where’s the buddha nature?

However in the context of the play of becoming and being the statement takes on a certain resonance. When a person is coming out they drive people including themselves crazy; when they are out nobody including them is upset at all: they are so far out they are in.

Nice reversible slogan for the first century of the new millennium: Be out. Be in.

Keeps people in touch with the collective side of enlightenment.

And so for day 21
04.01.2007

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Found…

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Francois Lachance

… poetry in Robert Silverberg The Stochastic Man, these lines pages apart and yet necessarily connected by their improbability:

pale petrol nostalgia
penguins in the veldt

The first line is slightly modified from its near copy found in the text. A smidgin of a proposition has been lifted out in the transposition. Otherwise it may have sealed the suggested enjambement and ruined its balance with the hinted caesura. If it were not removed the “of” would cause the reader to loose the delicate tension between two readings: one showing to the one side the pale petrol penguins and to the other the veldt as nostalgia; the other, the nostalgia penguins at play in the veldt and ready to be ignited.

Both lines are used to characterize the same depicted relationship. Laying them out in this fashion here underscores the point iterated throughout the novel about frame of mind affecting perception and thereby the ability to act out of neither fear nor self-pity nor doubt. Silverberg does not explicitly connect the elements of the listing but the fashion in which the narration steps through the story underscores that All are linked by an “of” of boxes within boxes. Mind, perception, action. Fear, self-pity, doubt.

The “of” belongs there in the novel just as it does not belong here in the non-novel. There it serves to remind the careful reader that it is not nostalgia directly but a derivative that supplies the relationship:

What powered our relationship was the thinnest of fuels, the pale petrol of nostalgia, that and such little momentum as remembered passion can supply.

Nostalgia, like a veldt, is too vast to provide refuge on a human scale. It too is too small not to be a home a way for home.

Silverberg’s narrator may not have fully learnt the lesson (or is wise enough to allow the implied reader to project a koan). At the close of novel, he articulates a moment of writing in which the quotations from Monod and Einstein, quotations about chance and necessity, are set up as a choice.

I write this in early December, with the true beginning of the twenty-first century and the start of a new century just a few weeks away. […] One of these statements is wrong. I think I know which one.

The reader remains ignorant if the implied reader is meant to be sensitive to the reinscription of doubt. Or to leap into faith.

And so for day 20
03.01.2007

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Bas-relief

Posted on January 2, 2007 by Francois Lachance

A break from channelling a William Blake ghost espousing Gandhi’s philosophy in a media jam mode. A gem of juxtaposition found in book billed as by Kimberley Reynolds with Richard Seddon. In the Illustrated Dictionary of Art Terms: A Handbook for the Artist and Art Lover the entry for “Putto” is followed immediately by the very brief “Putty Rubber” entry which cordially offers a cross-reference (“See ERASERS”):

[…] Artists often find the non-abrasive, ‘kneaded rubber’ (also know as a ‘putty’ or ‘plastic rubber’) eraser particularly useful as it can be shaped to a fine point and used to lift out pencil, chalk or charcoal marks without smudging […]

What a nice definition to appropriate for satire: that which shaped to a fine fine point is used to remove marks without smudging. Of course in some schools of the art the smudging is as endearing as putti.

Lucid dreaming project inspired by Sixties psychedelica: putti swirling round an image of Gandhi hand tinted by Blake. The Renaissance dialogue of the dead revisited through posters and animation.

And so for day 19
02.01.2007

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Kairos

Posted on January 1, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Newspaper headlines blast. “[Insert Name] hangs.” Weird prolongation. Grammar could be kinder to the State Ideological Apparatus. Avoiding prurient humour attached to the simple past form of the verb is easy. Some of the papers get in one word both tense and agency accurate: [Insert Name] executed.

Aware that the demonized escapes to haunt some writer will connect the looting of antiquities, the sacking of a city, the bombing of shrines, to the martyr defiled. Defiance to the end? With time it will be read differently this refusal of a hood. It is now. After all, the blindfold is for the benefit of the firing squad not the executed.

But he was evil. Human enough.

A film will soon be released Letters from Iwo Jima. Already the longing is there for honour liberally granted. Some sixty years and millions of conversations. How many human years will it take this time?

There may even be novels of historical reconstruction, novels that follow a trial conducted in an international court of law where the death penalty is not an option. Not an option: uninevitable. Indeed never a possibility.

Someone should translate Buffy Ste Marie’s “Universal Soldier” into Arabic lingua franca and arrange for it a driving disco beat. And some producer should make singing and staging it like the compulsory sets in gymnastics, a mandatory part of those massive musical competitions. Japan would do it. Europe too. Can America?

The ice is thin all over the world. Might be worth breaking it more often in the proper places.

Someone is going to make that movie about that meeting at Reykjavik. And an other will begin the saga for a miniseries further back and turn to a President that granted, in the name of justice, pardon to another. And some will make lists of clemency and suspended judgement. Marcos. Pinochet. Etc. And look to South Africa’s example. It has begun with Stephen Frears The Queen.

History will not judge the executioner harshly and will reserve no mercy for the ones who delivered the condemned man into his hands at such an enormous cost. They too will write their official versions. They better get good grammarians to look after more than those dangling participles.

And so for day 18
01.01.2007

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Playing

Posted on December 31, 2006 by Francois Lachance

Revisiting the claims put forth under the name McKenzie Wark in A Hacker Manifesto there is an opportunity to rethink the expressive power of insemination and resituate diddling practices. Paragraph 257:

This expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the state, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence. It spreads the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life.

Permeate is not the same as penetrate. For safety’s sake, children, please remember: long fuses and short wicks. Slow burn and minimal lap up. Less tolerance for toxic situations and absolute commitment to non-violence. Little shocks and sparks in a permeated atmosphere make big bangs fast.

There are plenty of seeds to go around everyday every hour.

And so for day 17
31.12.2006

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Working

Posted on December 30, 2006 by Francois Lachance

Sometimes a sentence serves as a hook, point of friction to rub over while taking note of the smoother surround.

Take for instance a segment in a McKenzie Wark signed text. An excerpt from Paragraph 212 of A Hacker Manifesto is grandly eloquent and ready to rip for mind bending:

Hacking brings into existence the multiplicity of all codes, be they natural or social, programmed or poetic, logical or analogical, anal or oral, aural or visual.

Gingerly re-reading the very sharpness of the statement becomes clear. It is not claimed here that Hacking brings into existence codes or any code for that matter. The generative power of Hacking is to bring into existence the multiplicity. The sentence that expresses this statement goes on to list by means of contrasting pairs a number of codes. The listing serves the very useful purpose of reminding readers that existence / non-existence is itself coded.

The point of arrest is expressed in the following sentence which draws upon the classic figure of the dancer and the dance.

But it is the act of hacking that composes, at one and the same time, the hacker and the hack.

Draws upon but does not ape. The act of hacking composes. This can be taken to indicate an act that uses materials at hand, pre-existing stuff, to explore rearrangements of the material stuff and formulate an expression for the repetition of the arrangements. In this rich sense of the activity, composing aims at the algorithm.

The act of hacking in that it is an act of composition is a recombinant site. As a recombinant site, the act of hacking can be described as a moment of doubling and splitting. The coding (which is not to be confused with the code) goes into both hack and the hacker (and of course the “act of hacking” is not to be confused with “Hacking”).

Hacking recognizes no artificial scarcity, no official licence, no credentialing police force other than that composed by the gift relation among hackers themselves.

A composed artificial scarcity is recognized. Recognition is not endorsement.

To restore the integrity of Paragraph 212, return to the first sentence:

What a politics of information can affirm is the virtuality of expression. The inexhaustible surplus of expression is that aspect of information upon which the class interest of hackers depends.

and reskew the relations between “inexhaustible surplus of expression” and “information”. Is the surplus merely an aspect? In the spirit of Hacking cannot the interests of a class rest upon minimal expression of a maxima of information? That which is most portable is likely to cover a very large domain.

And so for day 16
30.12.2006

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Ardour

Posted on December 29, 2006 by Francois Lachance

Adriana Hunter marvellously translates Catherine Millet’s candour as recorded in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and is particularly adept as conveying the play of pronoun reference:

[…] an ability to program the body independently of physical reactions. A body and the mind attached to it do not live in the same temporal sphere, and their reactions to the same external stimuli are not always synchronized. That is how we hear a shattering piece of news without batting an eyelid or, conversely, can carry on crying even after we have taken on board the fact that everything possible has been done to console us. If I set the assembly-line of pleasure in motion inside me, even if my body encounters some discomforts, they will not be enough to stop it. In other words, I will become aware of the discomfort only after the fact, after I seem to have reached a peak of pleasure, and in the aftermath you really don’t care about the discomfort; you forget it before you have noticed it.

There is an admirable capture of the delicate shifts in tone as the prose moves from an impersonal observation on human nature through an inviting and inclusive “we” and yet again turns to the very personal statement about the procurement of erotic pleasure and concludes with a gentle turn away from a very voyeuristic instance to the force of the “you” that is “one” or “anyone”.

It is all like blowing out a candle and lingering to smell the smoke.

And so for day 15
29.12.2006

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Reciprocity

Posted on December 28, 2006 by Francois Lachance

In contrasting spectacle with carnival, Susan Stewart in On Longing exposes the psycho-dynamics of the spectacular:

[T]he viewer of the spectacle is absolutely aware of the distance between self and spectacle. The spectacle functions to avoid contamination: “Stand back, ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see will shock and amaze you.” And at the same time, the spectacle assumes a singular direction. In contrast to the reciprocal gaze of carnival and festival, the spectacle assumes that the object is blinded; only the audience sees.

In exposing a rather willful assumption, Stewart invites readers to dwell upon how that particular blindness is constructed not out of distance per se but rather out of how the directions crossing any distance are imagined. In short, viewer-readers are implicitly asked to consider that their own acts of looking and reading are open to observation by others. Every voyeur, as opposed to every spy, is a wee bit of an exhibitionist. And conversely good festival requires a smidgen of voyeurism on the part of the performers.

Watch what happens when this lens is applied to reading Laura Hatcher’s opening sentences in “Full Frontal Beauty” in Spacing (Winter 2006)

Front yards are private spaces, but very public displays of personality. If you have a front yard, you have a visible way to insert yourself into the urban landscape.

The “yourself” bifurcates. Those that have no front yards have other visible ways (and invisible ones too) to insert themselves. In a more fundamental way the figure of the yardless questions, for some readers, the collapse between personality and self. Where’s the distance? The vital distance.

The elephant in the room is the elephant on the page. One of the properties described has in a smallish front yard a big fibreglass elephant. The resident and caretaker of the elephant reports

[…] strangers have left notes at the base of the elephant, and other times he has found offerings of jewellery and flowers. People feel a personal, or even spiritual, connection with the space he has created.

You got to love the pronoun reference ambiguity: the elephant and the resident co-create. And the description of the depositing of respectful traces of passing indicates that “insertion” may not be the dominant mode of spatial relations in the urban landscape. Not being in public but of the public.

Differently attuned to the evidence of reciprocity, it is not so difficult to avoid making a monument synonymous with a spectacle. Monuments can function as mirrors; spectacles, never.

And so for day 14
28.12.2006

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Recognitions

Posted on December 27, 2006 by Francois Lachance

Thich Nhat Hanh in Understanding Our Mind writes “Every time a negative formation is recognized it looses some of its strength.” Edmund White in the Afterward to Our Paris: Sketches from Memory describes Hubert Sorin’s Mémoires dessinées with perhaps an unintended touch of misrecognition and a most welcome shot of strength in a brief memoir recollecting in part the ailing body of the now dead lover:

The figures, no longer his petits bonhommes, were now drawn with a hieratic sophistication, as though Aubrey Beardsley had gone pharaonic. The words, which switched blithely in mid-sentence from English to French, revealed a sensitivity to social nuance which reminds us that in French malicieux means “sly” and malin means “clever”; the evil, or mal, in each word is the necessary spice for the savory dish. Hubert’s expectations of his readers were absurdly demanding — but no higher than those of most contemporary poets, I suppose.

“Mal” also means pain and there is a sustenance in recognizing suffering, our own and that of others. Suffering occurs very much in the present tense despite being reported at times in a sort of retrospective anticipation. It is felt now. Listen and recognize:

Despite the sometimes catty sound of this book [Our Paris, words by White, drawings by Sorin], I hope at least a few readers will recognize that its subtext is love. Hubert loved me with unwavering devotion. […] I loved him, too, in my cold, stinting, confused way.

“Pain” is bread. There’s something special in the breaking and something homeopathic in the crusts. Crusts: croûte. Not crumbs, les miettes. Interesting however how the crumb is the soft inner portion of the bread, la mie. Dry bread crumbles, scatters like a phalanx. Leaving grit ever so much like drying tears.

And so for day 13
27.12.2006

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