Greg Evason
The Red Blind
Toronto: The Pink Dog Press, 1991
Speak the spank of language of childhood in a whisper or a scream.
For more on this extraordinary book
https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/2013/05/27/magnifying-portions-or-reading-the-red-blind/
And so for day 2720
25.05.2014
Donald F. Theall “Transformations of the Book in Joyce’s Dream Vision of Digiculture”
HJS Vol. 4 Issue 2 (2003-04)
http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v3/theall4.html
Simultaneously Joyce associates the very nature of the manuscript and book with a fluidity. At various moments in the Wake he affiliates it: with illustration and ornamentation (e.g., the Book of Kells); with electrification and codification (“morse-erse wordybook”); with popular visual and auditory presentation (“comicsongbook”); and finally as a “gazebocroticon.” His fascination with the mechanics of the book is complemented by his awareness of its potentiality for metamorphoses. The ultimate comedy of such metamorphoses is Belinda the Hen, pecking up the letter (i.e., manuscript) from a dung heap (111.5ff), which is later simultaneously transformed into a multiplicity of media–newsreels, nursery rhymes, dreams, a diary, a wireless transmission of music (“bostoons”):
__ This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel.
__ My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck up bostoons. (489.35-490.1)
Elsewhere in The Medium is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan, Theall parses the portmanteau word thus
… a tetradomational gazebocroticon,” emphasizing its four part structure borrowed … forth as a “gazebocroticon” (gaze / book / rote (memorization) / wrote / icon)
But what if we split it into gazebo-croticon
A multilingual gloss…
Crotte (Larouse Dictionnaire Français-Anglais)
Crotte f. Dung, dropping (excrément). || Mud, dirt (boue). || CULIN. Chocolate. || AVIAT., POP. Bomb.
I can’t help be hearing in Joyce’s gazebocroticon an echo of Basilikon Doron.
A true “royal gift”. All “boc rot” — book rot — crotte indeed. The Joyce I read is highly scatalogical. There is no missing the whiff.
And so for day 2719
24.05.2014
Linda Bierds
in Flight
from The Profile Makers (1997)
from “Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty”
[The concluding stanza in the voice of DW]
Once, I was told of a sharp-shinned hawk
who pursued the reflection of its fleeing prey
through three striations of greenhouse glass
the arrow of its body cracking first into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchsias. it lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass
on the brick-work floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.
glass-petal-feather-blood
It is not just the arresting image that captivates. It is its protean dynamism that races through the scene: we are not sure upon where our gaze should land. There is no rest. Even death resists stasis.
We observers have passed through and continue passing. We are sustained only in passing.
And so for day 2718
23.05.2014
Sarah West, nature art therapist and good soul sketched this “little professor” or “wizard” bear meant to represent yours truly.
Other examples of her art can be found at Rooted Imaginings.
http://www.rootedimaginings.com/
Note the room in rooted imaginings for the nomadic….
I asked her on her blog if there is room for the “nomadic heart” in “rooted imaginings”.
Her reply:
There’s absolutely room for the “nomadic heart” in “rooted imaginings.” I feel that one’s act of being rooted applies to so much more than simply staying in one place. If anything, I’ve found the groundedness, strength and surety that comes from rootedness enables me to move about a bit more freely in this world.
BTW we both love tweed. It travels well.
To see how brilliant her caricature is look at how I might have grown into it…
https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/2012/11/01/continuously-coming-out/
And so for day 2717
22.05.2014
Watched the opening episode of 19-2 and thought about Adam 12 and behold there appeared a toy police car replica of the Adam 12.
I don’t think Adam 12 was quite as psychological as 19-2. But not quite Hawaii-5-0 in action. I wonder if there is a cop show spectrum [typology] somewhere on the WWW.
Wikipedia has the beginnings of a genre listing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_television_dramas
A colleague reminded me: “Hey Barney Miller was cool too”
Now I wonder if there is a list of cop shows that reference cop shows…
And so for day 2716
21.05.2014
I am currently reading (have currently read) A Hacker’s Manifesto by McKenzie Wark who is much inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. From my reading I note two sentences (order inverted by me) from section 060 …
The virtuality of the experience of knowledge is the joy that the
hacker expresses through the hack. The virtuality of everyday life is the
joy of the producing classes.
[this is something else from somewhere else, a marker of joy]
The snowdrops have appeared and the tulips are pushing up. I hope spring
is springing nicely for you too.
[Wark’s text continues…]
The hacker class is only enriched by the discovery of the knowledge latent in the experience of everyday working life, which can be abstracted from its commodified form and expressed in its virtuality. [our emphasis]
reduplication of “joy” reduplication of “spring”
a garden is always poised in its virtuality to offer discovery and offer joy
I don’t think that there is an “enrichment” happening in the sense of commodity accumulation. The enrichment is like enriched classes for the gifted. An immediate sensuality of body and mind. See Jean-François Lyotard Des dispositifs pulsionnels “L’important est l’énergie en tant qu’elle est métamorphose, métamorphosante et métamorphosée […]”
The hack: the hacked, the hacking : the hackable.
And so for day 2715
20.05.2014
Fresh asparagus and crab soup (Súp măng tây cua)
Loaded with asparagus and crab, this soup is elegant looking and delicately flavored. Vietnamese consider it special-occasion fare because it features asparagus, a pricey ingredient introduced by the French as an imported canned good. In Vietnamese, asparagus is măng tây, literally “French bamboo,” an apt name as both asparagus and bamboo shoots grow quickly.
Resourceful Viet cooks often maximize the asparagus flavor by adding the spears and their canning liquid to the soup. But the taste is nonetheless rather flat, and canned asparagus is mushy. To achieve a strong asparagus flavor, I use fresh asparagus to prepare the soup.
from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors by Andrea Nguyen
I can vouch for the use of fresh.
And so for day 2714
19.05.2014
Trying to keep in mind both calendar and time zones may be mind bending.
As one commentator wrote at jill/txt in response to “patterns thankfully disrupted” dated Friday: March 12, 2004 and trying to explain his pluralization of “calendars”.
Let us take the example of the Armistice – November 11 at 11 o’clock. An
occasion marked according to local time. It becomes possible through the
technologies of presence to imagine the marking of a world experience
through a series of 12 before and 12 after. Television is alleged to have
reduced attention spans. The Internet, expanded? Folded in each hour is a
day. Ditto for the minute. Ditto for the second. A calendar is like a map.
And just as maps have insets, calendars in the 21st century might have
“moments” expressed in local time and “windows” expressed in global time.The punctual is given duration in memory.
It is easy to recall Jill awake in Norway and Elouise awake in the U.S.A. at the same moment but in a different window. This is not new. The time at the Greewich Meridian has served as the window marker. What may become renewed is the habit to quote local time and standard time in exchanges.
Blogging itself can be seen as psychologically attractive because of its potential to give duration to the punctual. It was not just the appearance of software that helped blogging catch on (it was possible to upload and update sites daily before blogware came on the scene). The global village wanted to reinstitute the vigil as a practice of relay.
There is a book I have been meaning to read. Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise. Maybe it is time.
And so for day 2713
18.05.2014
Noodlephant
Written by Jacob Kramer
Illustrated by K-Fai Steele
Published by Enchanted Lion Books
You will be enchanted by the creativity that goes into the pasta making and the endearing civil disobedience. After being dragged through kangaroo court, jailed in a zoo, our protagonist invents a machine that turns anything into pasta … even a book of laws.
But to truly appreciate the pun you have to pronounce the resulting dish in the American fashion suitable to that litigious nation.
But in any event, it looks delish on the page. So does the cover.
And so for day 2712
17.05.2014
Soraya Peerbaye
Tell: poems for a girlhood
A suite of poems about the murder of Reena Virk.
Gorge refers to the waterway where her body was found. The poet also makes it reverberate with the maternal tongue throughout but with particular emphasis in the section called “À pleine gorge”. The section opens with “Gorge Waterway” which opens “The word that in my mother tongue means throat — / gorge — here, // a glacier-carved passage; the sea, brash, / moving inland, toward” and the throat comes to the fore in the poem that gives its name to the section (“À pleine gorge”).
As though they wanted to gorge her most of all.
[…]
Throated, having a throat of a specified characteristic. Bruant à gorge noire, black-throated sparrow,
gorgebleu à miroir, bluethroat flycatcher.Rire, pleurer, chanter à pleine gorge. Full-throated laughter, cry,
song.
We are left in the last poem of the book to ponder “gorgeous” in a passage about finding the appropriate commemoration.
I want to lay down flowers, but it feels intrusive;
instead I walk across the bridge and count my steps.
Downstream, a cormorant dives; I follow it
in mind, a pendant yanked, bubbles a strand of pearls
loosened and scattered. Gorgeous, from the Old French
for throat, for a stone that adorns the throat.
And something catches… à la gorge.
And so for day 2711
16.05.2014
