Julia Cooper
The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy
[A] baby is not in fact a piece of immortality, but rather another piece of mortality.
Multiplication is not continuation.
And so for day 2521
07.11.2013
Edward Carson
Look here Look Away Look Again
We are led to be mindful of space and what traverses space.
“”Some Assembly Required”
to mind is bird,
a networking of neurons
airborne
And to over hear echoes …
“Towards The Rainbow”
why oh why on the way to somewhere over the way up high or even higher still looking [...] away sometimes hoping for something like a beautiful music relentless as why oh why oh
To take flight. To displace.
“The Migratory Bird”
thought begins and then travels on to arrive at another place connected and like-minded
And so we are as oriented by white space as by words.
And so for day 2520
06.11.2013
What is around and what is within …
Vingt Fois
Le sens de la nuit. Qui appartient à Camomille comme une félicité dans son ventre d’amoureuse d’elle et de son corps, des extases douces qui se dilatent et dilatent sous sa peau, intérieures et jeunes fougères. Verte vie d’herbe en dedans du corps pendant que la fête remue autour. On va se reconnaître dans toutes les directions. A suivre: les mots, fols hélicoptères, bourdonnantes convictions.
Nicole Brossard French Kiss
Twenty Times
The sense of night. A night that belongs to Camomille like the joy in her belly at being her own lover and her body’s, tender ecstasies that swell and cause to swell beneath her skin like young unfolding ferns. Green herbaceous life inside her body while all around is revelry. At every turn we’ll recognize ourselves. To be continued: words, whirling helicopters, throbbing convictions.
Translated by Patricia Claxton in French Kiss Or: A Pang’s Progress
At every turn — directions and words — to be continued continues.
And so for day 2519
05.11.2013
I find anachronism to be a charming trope. I am particularly drawn to the markers of temporal irregularities.
Julia Cooper in The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy describes how news spread of the death of President Lincoln.
Not that the public mourning of President Lincoln wasn’t aided and influenced by the period’s technology: the development of the railroad and the arrival of telephone lines literally connected the news of Lincoln’s death to the American population. People and news were travelling faster than ever […]
Lincoln dies in 1865; telephone patent granted in 1876. “Telephone” is of course an accidental: “telegraph” is meant.
After spotting this passage in Cooper, I had to search for “Lincoln and telephone”. And was rewarded by an image of the President holding a smartphone and poised to take a selfie, all rendered in the appropriate past-marking sepia tone.
Please don’t say this was “photoshopped.” There was no Photoshop back then.
The caption found with this doctored image delivered a double dose of anachronism: “Please don’t say this was ‘photoshopped.’ There was no Photoshop back then.”
Almost like tomatoes appearing in a Euro-Medieval recipe…
And so for day 2517
03.11.2013
A cobbling of quotation:
There we are again: the ethical question of how to render “experience itself.” Lyricism becomes associated with the moral failings of a belles lettres tradition of dressed-up writing, one that makes the words shimmer, shudder, and tremble but cannot capture the experience it describes. So is literary lyricism’s moral failing the same as that of a scientific language equally inadequate to the task of transmitting the experience itself? Better, it seems, to play the humble artisan whose attitude toward his work is strictly utilitarian: “I think one needs to have an artisanal sense of this, just as one should do a good job making a shoe, so one should do a good job making a book.”
p. 239
Lynne Huffer. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory.
A list of meditations on Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes:
Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art
Shapiro: The Still Life as a Personal Object
Derrida: Vérité en peinture
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Kickin it on down the road …
And so for day 2516
02.11.2013
Introduction James Beard’s American Cookery
It should be apparent that this not a book of regional cookery, it is not a collection of family recipes, it is not primarily a critique of American cuisine. It is simply a record of good eating in this country with some of its lore. To compile it I have used a large number of published books and manuscript cookbooks in my possession or at my disposal. What interests me is how the quality of cooking in this country can be followed from a period of simplicity and function to one of goodness and bounty, then to an age of elaboration and excess, back again to functional (and for the most part, mediocre) eating. Finally, we hope, we are now in another epoch of gastronomic excellence.
This was published in 1972.
And so for day 2515
01.11.2013
From Holloway, Robert MacFarlane on revisiting a spot visited once before with his now deceased friend.
That long & happy day passed in exploration, tree-climbing, walking, talking, lounging. I had not gone in search of Roger’s shade, but I found him there nonetheless, glimpsed startlingly clearly at the turn of a corner or the edge of a tree-line. Actual memory traces existed in the stumps of the holly saplings we had cut as staffs, our bald-marks still visible in the wood. He knowth hym by the traces & by his denne and by the soole.
I now understand it certainly to be the case, though I have long imagined it to be true, that stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as person might of a path.
That bit in Middle English is not modernized nor a citation provided so off we go to trod the paths of dictionaries.
denne = den, lair
soole = a wallowing place for a boar
Robert E. Lewis, ed. Middle English Dictionary yields
He knoweth a grete boor .. bi þe traces, and bi his denne, and bi þe soile [vr. soole]
The origins are French.
Some wit has called “la souille” “le jacuzzi des sangliers”.
But back to MacFarlane. The line comes from a manual composed by Edward, Second Duke of York, The Master Game. This intertextual sidetrack is in keeping with a remark earlier in Holloway
This book is about a holloway & its shades, & a clear map of the holloway’s finding is not contained within it.
And so for day 2514
31.10.2013
Billy-Ray Belcourt brings us to a space through which to exercise solidarity with those imagining and making happen “a life without misery” in carefully having the state agents circled by the “reserve” and the history makers.
The reserve, by way of decades of the mismanagement of biological life on the part of numerous state agents, is a place where making life without misery is an arduous task.
https://canadianart.ca/features/settler-structures-bad-feeling/
Settler Structures of Bad Feeling, Canadian Art.
I looked up the etymology of “arduous” – it’s not related to “ardour”.
Somehow, by its bracketing and positioning of adjectives, the sentence offers the opportunity of imagining the making a life as a task of ardour. The work with language places pressure on the present in a subtractive (without misery) and indicative (is a place) fashion. It’s a pressure that points to a future and pressures the reserve (etymologically a holding back).
And so for day 2513
30.10.2013
I have the expression “to give someone grief” in the back of my mind as I re-read this passage. That “someone” being the powers that be.
Judith Butler
“Global Violence, Sexual Politics”
Kessler Lecture in Queer Ideas
To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics is not to be resigned to a simple passivity or powerlessness. It is, rather, to allow oneself to extrapolate from our own experience of vulnerability to that experience that others undergo, others whom we may well be able to protect from violence.
To grieve is also a recourse under collective agreements to redress from wrongs.
And so for day 2512
29.10.2013