A confluence of clever retorts in a conversation about patience and seeding…
transparent in all our moves
so transparent as to be invisible
And so for day 2661
27.03.2014
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Influence
Representations of Possibilities
In post-war Japan, Cecilia Chiang is trying to adjust to a new life.
I was on my way back one afternoon from buying some fish for dinner — fish was in no short supply and was the one thing I knew how to choose and cook. I stopped to observe a fire raging in a building not far from the Chinese Mission. It was a frightening scene, I stood, transfixed, along with a small crowd of onlookers, watching as firefighters were passing huge buckets of sand and water hand-to-hand to extinguish the flames. What amazed me, and I continued to think about for days, was that all the firefighters were women. There wasn’t a man among them.
Everywhere I went after that, I began to be aware of women directing traffic, climbing telephone poles to repair the wires, digging ditches, and framing houses. In post-war Tokyo, where women outnumbered men ten to one, they not only kept the city running, but were rebuilding it. Suddenly, I knew I needed to pull myself together and stop feeling so frightened and sorry for myself. If these women could be strong, so could I.
From her memoir/cookbook, The Seventh Daughter
And so for day 2660
26.03.2014
ASCII Art
From 1994, from a friend, an example of the long lost art of ASCII drawing and the days of large signature blocks…
Stumbled upon this on a Nietzsche list I subscribe to. Thought you might be interested. > > ...George > > __,,,,_ > , _ ___.--'''`--''// ,-_ `-. > \`"' ' || \\ \ \\/ / // / ,- `,_ > /'` \ || Y | \|/ / // / -.,__ `-, > /@"\ \ \\ | | ||/ // | \/ \ `-._`-,_., > / _.-. .-\,___| _-| / \ \/|_/ | `-._._) > `-' f/ | / __/ \__ / |__/ \ > `-' | -| \__ \ |-' | > __/ /__,-' ) ,' _|' > (((__.-'((___..-'((__,' > > ====================================================================== > Giorgo Pappas Programming Technology Lab > Departement of Computer Science > gpappas@vub.ac.be Vrije Universiteit Brussel > > http://prog.vub.ac.be:8080/~gpappas > ======================================================================
And so for day 2659
25.03.2014
Posted in Ephemera
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The Cup Runneth Over
Charles Bernstein
“The swerve of verse: Lucretius’ ‘Of Things’ Nature’ and the necessity of poetic form”
https://jacket2.org/commentary/lucretius
Lucretius’s own explanation for choosing verse is that it is the spoonful of sugar that makes the truth of the real go down:
For as with children, when the doctors try
To give them loathsome wormwood, first they smear
Sweet yellow honey on the goblet’s rim,
[…]With the delicious honey of the Muses;
So in this way perchance my poetry
Can hold your mind, while you attempt to grasp
The great design and pattern of its making.[Ronald Melville, translation]
It is a figure that Bernstein picks up again later:
For Epicurians, religion is the poison cup rimmed with honey that dispels fear of death at the cost of the appreciation of life as it is.
The displacement is telling. The turn to mortality is also a turn to morality. Bernstein continues: “Of Things’s Nature dispels not fear but unnecessary fears, and that is a bitter bill [sic] to swallow. The virtue of its verse is that it embodies reason, directing, in rime, your eyes on thing’s nature?” His clumsy renaming of the book De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) makes it seem stranger, more remote and daunting. Bernstein goes well beyond his remit. He set out to demonstrate that the verse “is there to ensnare, to pull readers into an aesthetic/conceptual experience that cannot be put into prose.” A fair point that is tangled into multiplying questions about reason’s appeal.
Does Lucretius offer a bait and switch: my songs can be as sweet as your myths –– but no bull? Can truth ever be beautiful as superstition? Does truth need to put on luring make-up just to get noticed at the party? Does reason rim us with perverse pleasure? Or is Lurcetius [sic] just tipping us off to how it works?
He has us scurrying for the definition of the verb to rim in both its slang and sports acceptance. Perverse pleasure indeed. Full to the brim and over.
And so for day 2658
24.03.2014
Posted in Poetry
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Three Howlers
English As She Is Spoke: Selections from The New Guide of the Conversation, in Portuguese and English, in Two Parts, José Da Fonseca & Pedro Carolino, edited by Paul Collines (McSweeney’s Books, 2002) [Originally published in Paris in 1855]
[Carolino] had a serious problem: he didn’t know any English.
Even worse, he didn’t own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What he did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook and a French-to-English dictionary. The bizarre linguistic train wreck that ensued […] became celebrated as a bizarre masterpiece of unintentional humour […]
Three of my favourite:
Está crivádo dê dividas.
He is drowned of debts.
[He is riddled with debts.]
* * *
Sínto rumôr.
I understand some noise.
[I hear rumour.]
* * *
Tómo ôu bêbo ún câldo tôdas ás manhãs.
I take a broth all morning.
[I drink broth every morning.]
And so for day 2657
23.03.2014
Priming the Pump
On the literary mindset. I wonder if there may not be a “placebo” effect.
Koopman and Hakemulder note the possibility of prompting:
A simple solution for many of the methodological problems involved here, is using an instruction variable, leading one group of participants to believe they will be reading a fictional text, while the other group, reading the same text, thinks it is a “true story” (cf. Zwaan 1993, whose instruction to respondents reading a newspaper text that they were reading a “literary” text lead to slower reading, deeper processing, and better recall for text surface structure).
Emy Koopman and Frank Hakemulder “Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework” Journal of Literary Theory 9(1):79-111.
Could it be that future reading attitudes are conditioned by schooling? Approach is as important as content and style.
And so for day 2656
22.03.2014
Posted in Reading
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Delirious Othering Details
Critics have noted the play in Nicole Brossard’s Amantes of délire and de lire.
JE N’ARRÊTE PAS DE LIRE
EN CE JUIN DES AMANTES
There is an echo elsewhere in Amantes in a quotation from Italian in “ma continent”
“Non smettete di delirare, questo è il
momento de l’utopia”
In situ….
ma continent
[…]
my continent of spaces of reason and
(of love) like a history of space
where we can speak concretely
about allegiance and caresses in silence
a form of reverberation / i cut across
cities without simulating nature because
i’m so civilized before the sea
at flood tide, persistent / i read
“The whole sea goes toward the city”
and also in your language
“Non smettete di delirare, questo è il
momento de l’utopia”my continent multiplied by those who have signed:
Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Natalie
Barney, Michèle Causse, Marie-Claire Blais, Jovette
Marchessault, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Collette and
Virgina, the other drowned ones, Cristina Perri Rossi,
Louky Bersianik, Pol Pelletier, Maryvonne so attentive,
Monique Wittig, Sande Zeig, Anna d’Argentine, Kate
Millett, Jeanne d’Arc Jutras, Marie Lafleur, Jane Rule,
Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks
to write: the real/the skin clairvoyant
pupil essential in the unfolding
of my consciousness and expression: my double
a singular mobility and the continent
indeed a joy[…]
Notice the italicization of “expression” as it appears in Amantes, and in where Barbara Goddard’s translation as it appears in the Lesbiantics Issues of Fireweed 13 (1982) the word is italicized but the 1987 Guernica Editions Lovhers renders the word in plain typeface; the most recent version in Mobility of Light* (2009) restores the italicization.
Further details to notice in the textual transmission:
in Lovhers the “i” is in lower case after the slash and no space
“reverberation/i cut across”
in Fireweed the “i” is in majuscules and there is a space
“reverberation/ I cut across”
in Mobility of Light there is space before and after and minuscules
“a form of reverberation / i cut across”
*Mobility of light : the poetry of Nicole Brossard : a bilingual publication / selected with an introduction by Louise H. Forsyth ; and an afterword by Nicole Brossard.
Details that make us attentive to the “I read” which in English can be taken either as a present or past tense depending on how the words on the page are vocalized. The French gave us “J’ai lu / «Toute la mer va vers la ville»” — I have read. Which of course becomes funny in translation since the English words are given to convey a phrase read in French (and set off by quotation marks). But the Italian remains untranslated. Shouldn’t the French too?
at flood tide, persistent / i have read
“Toute la mer va vers la ville”
and also in your language
“Non smettete di delirare, questo è il
momento de l’utopia”
But why? Both are quotations. The French is from “Le Port” by Émile Verhaeren in Les Villes tentaculaires. The Italian is from Antonio Porta. Here again details arise — the difference marked by “r” or “t” — I have found two quotations of the Porta: which differ in the number of “you”
Non smettere (negative imperative second person singular)
Non smettete (negative imperative 2nd person plural)
I cannot immediately verify the Porta quotation which one source says appears in Antonio Porta, Tutte le poesie, p.147 (No copy is held in a library near me).
I am still struck by the irony of rendering anonymous the two male poets quoted in this paean to lesbian writers. The gesture seems hyper subversive.
N’arrêtez pas le délire, c’est le
moment de l’utopie
The addressee which introduces the Italian from Porta is singular marked by a second person singular possessive pronoun (ta langue) which opens up into possible plural in English (your tongue). Can we appeal to Japanese? The opening stanza of the poem “ma continent” contains a play on the Japanese word mâ which is in French the first person possessive pronoun in the feminine gender. Note that the pronoun accords with the gender of the object and not that of the grammatical subject hence “ma continent” which plays with the Japanese term for “space”. What of “ta” in Japanese? 他 (rōmaji ta) : another, other, some other.
Autre.
And so for day 2655
21.03.2014
Posted in Poetry, Translations
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For Instance & The Role of the Teacher
A discussion of computers and the transformation of education and what happens in and beyond the classroom touches upon the role of the teacher.
Mon, October 21, 1996
Humanist: 10.0351 forwards Meme 2.13 (Seymour Papert interviewed by David S. Bennahum)
Excerpt…
MEME 2.13
In this issue:
o School’s Out? A conversation with Seymour Papert.
[…]
DB: But isn’t there a role for teachers in telling truth, especially in history. History can be seen as a mass of interpretation, and the teacher is essential, more than in math or science, in pointing in the right direction. For instance the moral consequences of a war, or of genocide. If you go on the Net searching for answers you could stumble across information whose purpose was not truth but a political agenda. How then could you filter? Who would be the trusted authority? For instance if you had to research the Nazi Holocaust and you came across a White Supremacist site that denied the existence of the Holocaust, how could a kid know this was an outright lie?
SP: I am not advocating spontaneous uncontrolled learning. I think as a society we have an obligation to pass on values. I think this is an important function. I am sure there will be professionals dealing with kids who will do this. But that is a very different function from the traditional teaching function. This future teacher is acting like an advisor, maybe more like a faculty advisor in a university.
DB: So these people are still with us. We might call them advisors or coaches, but not teachers.
SP: Teacher has this other function. When you think of a religious teacher — Buddha was a teacher. He was not a teacher in terms of giving assignments or grading papers. He was a teacher in the sense that defended ideas and cultivated them, and set an example for people. That is more like the role model of teacher I am thinking of for kids today.
No pressure.
And so for day 2654
20.03.2014
Being About To …
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has enlarged the circle of dialogue stemming from a session at the meeting of the Modern Language Association. She has opened up to comments her presentation on the “Being Human, Seeming Human” panel.
https://kfitz.info/becoming-human/
At the end she asks some questions about the direction of design and nature of humanity:
For what definitions of “human” are we building human-seeming agents, and why? If our models for the human mistakenly substitute intelligence for humanity, what becomes of emotion, of kindness, of generosity, of empathy? How do those absences in models for the human pave the way for similar absences in actual human interactions? And how does the consequence-free inhumane treatment of conversational agents encourage the continued disintegration of the possibilities for real sociality online?
I was reminded of Willard McCarty’s frequent invitations on Humanist to consider thinking about the relations to computing machines in terms other than that of servant and master.
Juxtaposing these strands in my mind, I was led to speculate:
But doesn’t our future humanness depend upon being about to “animate” the world of artefacts in a fashion similar to how we are learning to view natural habitats as offering ecological services? By “animate” I do not mean to ensoul. I mean to treat the object or subject before us as a carrier of history and worthy of some attention. Ironically to improve human-computer interaction, we on the human side may have to be kinder to things.
[…]
The machine is a playmate in this ongoing game of micro-theatre. How? By offering moments of serendipity enabling us to live our lives with sprezzatura — grace in all the details and kindness to all.
Words here launched into further chance encounters…
And so for day 2653
19.03.2014
Reaching from a hand covered with digits of a very high prime number to a donkey ride on the moon
Virtual Reality Experience, To The Moon
What one carries away from the coda is the voice of the artist:
You know the reason I really love the stars?
It’s that we cannot hurt them.
Even if the attention flows to the other VR elements such as the stars turning to fireworks, one is hooked by that line of not hurting them. And the voice/text continues:
We can’t burn them.
We can’t melt them or make them overflow.
Or blow them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them.
We are reaching for them.
Words nicely available to prompt memory via a little flyer that one can bring away as a souvenir of fifteen extraordinary minutes.
And so for day 2652
18.03.2014
Posted in Uncategorized
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