Ecosystem as Entities in Communication

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Francois Lachance

The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web
The New Yorker
Robert Macfarlane

The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources-sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus-between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net.

And so we grow in a further appreciation of fungi…

And so for day 2481
28.09.2013

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Praxis Parabasis

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Alice Burdick
Simple Master
“Light Daily Shifts”

I can’t work for you
because I’m lost in your theory.
It was a bad idea to start
and made awful by practice.

Dear reader, is one to identify with the speaking I or the addressed you?

And so for day 2480
27.09.2013

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Printing Money: Credit Where Credit is Due

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Francois Lachance

This blurb is so enticing.

Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care
by Scott Ferguson

Human being is born and remains dependent, yet everywhere she is abandoned. Today, so many yearn to be free from the governing center, but they are more reliant upon its care than they know. Traditionally, critique has answered care’s entanglements by insisting that money enslaves and the aesthetic saves. Yet neoliberal fecklessness has revealed the impotence of this dialectic, requiring us to set the historical relation between money and aesthetics on more capacious foundations. For this, critical theory must desert the Marxist image of money as a private, finite, and alienable quantum of value. Instead, it should embrace the heterodoxy of Modern Monetary Theory, for which money is a boundless public center that can be made to support all.

It wasn’t so much the move from the finite to the boundless which can be read as a move from the restricted to the generous. It was the harkening back to care (à la Heidegger?) that for me led to a consideration of the history of critique generated by queer and feminist theory where desire is theorized as plural (and yes, desire is not the same as care) and imagine other economies. Money. Meaning. Margins. Which gives rise to which?

And so for day 2479
26.09.2013

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A View of Mesopotamian Ceramics

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Sir Leonard Woolley
Ur

Ur - Sir Leonard Woolley - 1946 - cover

Cover – Ur – Sir Leonard Woolley – 1946

In describing what is illustrated before us, Sir Leonard stresses the serial nature of ceramic production. From his comments on Plate 1 Pottery of the Al ‘Ubaid Period, we learn of his astonishment of the craftsmanship of the work not-produced on a wheel:

The pottery is astonishingly good, and the walls are sometimes of almost egg-shell thinness. The body clay was covered with a light slip or wash of white, and the painted decoration was applied before firing. […] Later on the use of stone or metal for luxury vessels killed pottery-making as an art, and the dull mass-produced wares of the potters of the historic ages have no merit other than utility.

I like the convergence of history and aesthetics in such a compact space. Awakens the imagination to seek out those more utilitarian pots and to judge their merit.

And so for day 2478
25.09.2013

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My Body Is Like A Home

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Alice Burdick
Holler
“Body house”

[after extending an analogy between ears and eyes as windows and mouth as door, this ends the poem]

Her body is a house,
and she’s home
for now.

And with the end of the poem she is gone, for now.

And so for day 2477
24.09.2013

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Manner and Matter

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Charles Taylor
The Malaise of Modernity (CBC Massey Lectures)

[A]n important subjectivation has taken place in post-Romantic art. But it is clearly a subjectivation of manner. It concerns how the poet has access to whatever he or she is pointing us to. It by no means follows that there has to be a subjectivation of matter, that is, that post-Romantic poetry must be in some sense exclusively an expression of self. This is a common view, which seems to be given some credence by well-known phrases like Wordsworth’s description of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.”

[…]

The confusion of matter and manner is easy to make, just because modern poetry cannot be the exploration of an “objective” order in the classical sense of a publicly accessible domain of references. And the confusion lies not only with commentators. It is easy enough to conclude that the decline of the classical order leaves only the self to celebrate, and its powers. The slide to subjectivism, and its blend of authenticity with self-determining freedom, is all too readily open. A great deal of modern art just turns on the celebration of human powers and feelings. The Futurists again come to mind as examples.

But some of the very greatest twentieth-century writers are not subjectivist in this sense. Their agenda is not the self, but something beyond. Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Mann, and others are among them. Their example shows that the inescapable rooting of poetic language in personal sensibility doesn’t have to mean that the poet no longer explores an order beyond the self.

That concentration on the how gets to a what however fleeting.

And so for day 2476
23.09.2013

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I Hope It’s Toast

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Alice Burdick
Simple Master
“Remembrance Day”

I can’t help but read a pun on the name Kurt Weil in this passage.

Large music comes from books, vile or Oklahoma. Cows fly in movies
and dust heaps up mountains. If you like that sound, you can get it.
Net it from the air, siphon it into empty bottles and save it for a rainy day.
Have you heard of jazz? I like its movements, balance of speeds:
feels like stepping out the door into space. A scattering
that unifies dissonance and volume into a thick paste to spread on bread.

I like how the imaginative sweep settles on a quotidian image like spreading bread with something good to eat.

And so for day 2475
22.09.2013

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Slow Start Superb Finish

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Familiar to anyone who has diced vegetables for mirepoix or simply sweated sliced onions…

battuto e soffritto

Battuto, literally ‘beaten’, in a culinary context means chopped so fine as to appear pounded. A battuto, consisting traditionally of chopped pork fat and/or pancetta, onion, garlic, parsley, celery and carrot, is the starting point for most Italian recipes for sauces, meat dishes and soups. The traditional lardo – pork fat – is now often replaced by lighter types of fat, olive oil being the most popular. […]

Soffritto means ‘underfried’: the battuto is subjected to a slow, careful underfrying, as a result of which ‘a cook achieves part of that unmistakable taste which can be identified as Italian,’ as Marcella Hazan so aptly puts it.

From Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes : The Best of Anna Del Conte

And so for day 2474
21.09.2013

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Who Needs Pictures?

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Francois Lachance

A touching anecdote, vivid for anyone who has lain a head on a loved one’s breast:

My earliest reading memory

When no one knew I was deaf, my dad used to read Goodnight Moon and Happy Birthday Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to me. He had this very deep voice and he would lie on the bed and I would lie on his chest and I’d feel the story through the vibrations in his body.

From interview with Raymond Antrobus

And so for day 2473
20.09.2013

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Translation – What It Was – What It Does

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Francois Lachance

Kate Briggs
This Little Art
p. 323

[A]gain her translations were both well-received and commercially successful. Horton concedes that by our current standards, ‘the line between empathetic identification, idiosyncratic assimilation and problematic appropriation’ in her approach can seem ‘truly thin’. Yet, as Horton also shows, her practice of extensively excising and adding (in keeping with her own vision of the whole and her concern for her English-speaking readership) was common among her contemporaries. Which is precisely the point that Venuti makes in his letter to the TLS: standards for what makes a good translation, for what the work of translations involves, and for how the translator should think and feel are historically and culturally determined and — they change. In Thomas Mann in English, David Horton takes this seriously. With its detailed discussions of the specific context in which Lowe-Porter was translating, its effort to research and understand her particular approach to her work and the pressures that were put upon her, in its refusal to laugh a bit more at her position and the translations she spent over twenty years of her lifetime writing, considering them instead as carefully written whole but un-autonomous things, written herself but not altogether by herself (in solitude, perhaps, but never exactly alone). Horton’s book reads to me like an exercise in tact.

Horton = David Horton author of Thomas Mann in English
Lowe-Porter = Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter translator of Thomas Mann
Venuti = Lawrence Venuti respondent to Timothy Buck in the Times Literary Supplement
Kate Briggs = translator and assessor

And so for day 2472
19.09.2013

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