Long ago I had written longhand along the front of a file folder the following aphorism:
Reject Perfectionism – Strive for Excellence
Found the folder again and took a moment to ponder how well I may have followed my own advice. And smiled.
And so for day 2581
06.01.2014
Ben Lerner from The Lichtenberg Figures
A history of the medium fishtailing into a very postmodern consideration of discourse.
Beauty cannot account for how the sparkplug works.
But if the sparkplug doesn’t work, it is more beautiful.
If I display a sparkplug, it is sculpture.
A sparkplug sculpture may be a real sparkplug,
but the sculpture refers to other sculptures, while the sparkplug refers
to an engine cylinder.
The word “sparkplug” is an altogether different matter.
Don’t those quotation marks look like sparkplugs?
And so for day 2580
05.01.2014
There is a trove of treasures on the National Film Board site including a short film by Alison Reiko Loader.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/showa_shinzan/
Showa Shinzan
The description:
This animated film tells the story of a young Japanese girl’s relationship with her grandfather, a postmaster and amateur geologist. When the neighboring Mount Usu erupts during World War II, he records its activity. As he witnesses the birth of a new mountain named Showa Shinzan, he transcends the misery and folly of war that surrounds them and teaches his granddaughter a valuable lesson about life. Evoking the tradition of Bunraku puppetry, this animated film is based on actual events.
The secret is to make the repeated gesture of observation into an unfolding story whereby slowly the grandchild comes to understand the patience of recording a natural phenomenon.
And this is captured beautifully by the final words of the film:
Mountains are sleeping giants. They bear the passage of time beyond human comprehension. But if you are fated to see the birth of a mountain, you are blessed.
We have vicariously witnessed the birth of a mountain and a gem of a film. Doubly blessed.
And so for day 2579
04.01.2014
I thought there were pronounced distinctly differently (long e for descent; short i for dissent) until I read this accidental in a text by Andrew Steves.
Nonconformist publishers can be put at a considerable competitive disadvantage if their choice to exercise descent [sic] and develop alternative approaches is interpreted by a funding agency, jury or mega-retailer as unprofessional or retrograde, but they might be spared the indignities of engaging in activities which could turn out to be both financially and culturally ruinous.
Andrew Steves. “The Fetish for Picture Jackets” Smoke Proofs: Essays on Literary Publishing, Printing & Typography.
I like the cognitive pull between the two homonyms. Descent carrying on a heritage and dissent deviating from some custom. As singular as the cover where “smoke proof” is pluralized only through sharing the last letter of the author’s name.
And so for day 2578
03.01.2014
Listening to a performance of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer I delight in hearing this lovely enumeration and had to share the pleasure with mine eyes:
I first took them down Feather-bed Lane, where we stuck fast in the mud. I then rattled them crack over the stones of Up-and-down Hill. I then introduced them to the gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath; and from that, with a circumbendibus, I fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the bottom of the garden.
The place names suit such an arduous roundabout trip.
The enumeration is the gem in this smart setting…
TONY. Left them! Why where should I leave them but where I found them?
HASTINGS. This is a riddle.
TONY. Riddle me this then. What’s that goes round the house, and round the house, and never touches the house?
HASTINGS. I’m still astray.
TONY. Why, that’s it, mon. I have led them astray. By jingo, there’s not a pond or a slough within five miles of the place but they can tell the taste of.
HASTINGS. Ha! ha! ha! I understand: you took them in a round, while they supposed themselves going forward, and so you have at last brought them home again.
TONY. You shall hear. I first took them down Feather-bed Lane, where we stuck fast in the mud. I then rattled them crack over the stones of Up-and-down Hill. I then introduced them to the gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath; and from that, with a circumbendibus, I fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the bottom of the garden.
HASTINGS. But no accident, I hope?
TONY. No, no. Only mother is confoundedly frightened. She thinks herself forty miles off. She’s sick of the journey; and the cattle can scarce crawl. So if your own horses be ready, you may whip off with cousin, and I’ll be bound that no soul here can budge a foot to follow you.
Nary a word astray.
And so for day 2577
02.01.2014
Treasures of and for the Self…
A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
On Transience
By Sigmund Freud
Translation by James Strachey
Reminds me of the respect for ruin…
The Haida people have decided to let the totem poles of SGang Gwaay decay naturally. Other than cleaning out debris and brush which might grow on them, the[re] are no efforts to preserve them as they believe that totem poles have a natural life like a human. It is estimated that the totem poles may only be around for another 10 years.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/totems-of-haida-gwaii
… these words too will be gone.
And so for day 2576
01.01.2014
The allusion here is to the secret life of plants and the roots/routes of tree talk.
On trees communicating with each other see
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
An analogy between the human world of relations and trees in the city] concludes “Boxed In” by Mónica de la Torre.
Concrete blocks these social beings’ access to fungal networks,
prevents their roots from interconnecting.
Are you a reluctant loner like the specimens that surround us here today?
I hope you understand I don’t mean to ruin the relationship.
Mónica de la Torre
“Boxed In”
The Paris Review
Reading these concluding lines, I stumble, the “concrete blocks” are first read as a noun in apposition to “social beings” – the two appear equivalent until the word “access” retroactively triggers the verb “blocks”. The line is experienced as a loop. And the eye glances back up to the beginning of the poem “Heads up, false friends use familiarity as camouflage.”
Concrete blocks are the separators. The trees are the separated.
This meditation leads one to recall another approach to situations of separation and immersion…
Coccia proposes drawing a very similar lesson from the plant world: that life, by its very nature, means an immersion in and mixing with the outer world. “Imagine being made of the same substance as the world that surrounds you; being of the same nature as music—a series of vibrations of the air, like a jellyfish, which is no more than a thickening of water.” As we act on the world and it acts on us, both are changed. Thus, the very idea of an environment that is separate from the self “should be rejected,” Coccia argues, because just as the world is an environment for living beings, so “the living being is an environment for the world.”
Rachel Riederer review of Emanuele Coccia’s book, The Life of Plants in The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/emanuele-coccia-the-life-of-plants-review-book/
| forest | see | tree |
| tree | seed | forest |
And so for day 2575
31.12.2013
The poem is built around a catalogue. And ends with an endorsement of self-naming. Which produces a retroactive double entendre cascade.
Britteney Black Rose Kapri’s appliance-laden poem “Pansexual” in Black Queer Hoe
yes, i do like pans and pots and slow cookers and woks and crock-pots and rice makers and panini presses and waffle irons and blenders when i am feeling dangerous. […] and cast-iron skillets god damn do i love me a good cast-iron skillet. and microwaves and griddles and plates. and whatever the fuck my partner wants to call themselves.
If I were designing a curriculum I would love to pair this poem with Cory Doctorow’s story from Radicalized — “Unauthorized Bread” – where self-determination is also about the freedom to cook. In the novella, a refugee, Salima, confronts the software controlling installed in her kitchen appliances…
A well-equipped kitchen and a free mind.
And so for day 2574
30.12.2013
“Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions”
Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Vol. 26, No. 1
Norms generate not sovereignties, but overdetermined relationalities.
[N]ormativity is a structure of proliferations: some of these normative
proliferations duplicate already existing terms, some twist those terms or minimize or amplify or warp them. None of them definitively breaks with the systematicity that they are; nor are they events that are predetermined and therefore knowable in advance. To think statistically again: norms are stochastic. Norms generate not sovereignties, but overdetermined relationalities. So, to stand against one part of a normative system would be to stand, comically, against oneself.[…]
It is this rich field of dependencies, differentiations, clashes, and engenderings that queer antinormative arguments misunderstand. And this misunderstanding has distinct consequences: it asphyxiates the relationality that is at the heart of normativity. Antinormativity is antinormative, then, in a way that it presumable does not intend: it urns systemic play (differentiations, comparisons, valuations, attenuations, skirmishes) into unforgiving rules and regulations and so converts the complexity of moving athwart into the much more anodyne notion of moving against.
Athwart: such a nicely perverted, twisted and infrequent word.
And so for day 2573
29.12.2013
Is it a wonder I like whitespace that surrounds a poem?
A first-person remark commenting on an article on introverts and leadership:
I like to think that leadership is grounded in listening. I need to get quiet to listen well. And need some additional quiet to think.
I note how quiet is not equal to silence. There is stuff happening in quiet. Noise lingers – just enough to make concentration possible – like a burbling stream or the sound of wind in the tree branches or the humming white noise of the office.
Quiet involves grabbing a ground note and letting it play in the spaces of the mind.
And so for day 2572
28.12.2013
