BERNEVAL

We are always in the the land of lost letters…

https://kfitz.info/connections/

Dear Kathleen

If I may intrude on the party… and offer some disjointed observations.

I see a telos in creating gateways for conversations. And I see some retrospective stances in a gluttony for connectivity and combatting ephemerality (wanting it all and wanting it all to be forever). Is there a role for forgetting and recovering the forgotten in the cultural practices of intellectual work?

Blogging offered the permalink to assist in citational practice. And so addressed the connecting to. As well, the reader could see who had linked and thus revealing a web of relations. Plus one could search the blog … and find other connections.

You may remember “web rings” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring as a collective attempt to deal with the short comings of search engines.

Search engines … ah, the balancing act between precision and sensitivity … it would be great to be able to turn off and on the search algorithm’s use of one’s previously used keywords to have the option between “fresh” searches and “conditioned” searches.

The problem may be twofold: how to tag and link in the vast sea of digital decay; how to trace tagging. Tools to make connections and tools to excavate them.

Almost like documenting graffiti.

Which we know from Pompeii can last.

And the walls themselves may at last crumble…

Always in the ruins, it’s a scramble: Gluttony for Connectivity, Combatting Ephemerality, Gateways to Conversations. Which comes first? Which last?

And so for day 2311
11.04.2013

André Alexis in My Vagina has a footnote that runs across the fold to occupy the space of two pages roughly in the centre of the essay. In this extended note, Alexis repeats the claim that in Latin the names for the clitoris were so vulgar that not even Martial or Catullus ever refer to landica. Wikipedia seems to be the crib for Alexis’s note. But it is worth remarking that deductions are based on extant sources. What survives may not reveal the whole picture. Consider that the Wikipedia entry reporting the indecency of the term for clitoris references the work of J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary and, for me, alerts us to a possible disjunction between linguistic form and discursive function:

The function of the clitoris (landica) was “well understood”. In classical Latin, landica was a highly indecorous obscenity found in graffiti and the Priapea; the clitoris was usually referred to with a metaphor, such as Juvenal’s crista (“crest”).

We see that frankness does not always frequent frequency. And frequency itself is open to interpretation.

And so for day 2303
03.04.2013

The comparison with Christ operates through negation.

Like Christ, Goldin’s friends became her superstars, but a great many of them died, and they won’t be coming back. The photos she took are not an ersatz resurrection; they are the proof of disappearance. She was not in search of the perfect moment, the final photo that would be something like the return of the son of God, but a picture that would never be more than the one before the last, the one that reminds us that taking that other one is impossible and infinite. […] The photographic series do not produce a museum version of love. Instead, they are the figures of endless work.

Martine Delvaux. Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa.

And so for day 2302
02.04.2013