DC's

* (restored)

 

_______________

… furniture

 

_________________

… blur

‘You could say that Iraqi artist Halim Al Karim is an interrupted being. You wouldn’t blame him, after all he was forced to spend three years living alone in a hole in the ground covered by rocks since he opposed Saddam’s regime during the Gulf war.

‘Throughout that time his only interaction with the outside world was through a Bedouin woman who brought him food and water on occasion and thus kept him alive.

‘Al-Karim has since emigrated to America and is currently living in Dubai. He says: “My works are concerned with ongoing and unresolved issues, especially as they relate to violence. The main challenge for me is to identify and stay clear of the historical and contemporary elements of brainwashing. The out of focus images, imply an uncertainty of context, time and place. These techniques, which have become the hallmark of my work, are means to overcome the effects of politics of deception and, in turn, transform me and the camera into a single entity, seeking a greater truth”.’

 

______________

… Central Park

‘You won’t find it on any official maps, or find sign posts to show you the way. Tens of millions of visitors come to enjoy Central Park every year, but very few know that hidden away in the middle of the park is a mysterious cave. It’s so ancient it predates Central Park itself! The cave has been the site of murder, suicide, assaults, and secret trysts. In the late 19th century it was even the home of a runway school girl for a while.

‘Whilst much of Central Park was sculpted into picturesque lawns, tree-lined avenues and lakes, Olmstead and Vaux deliberately created some wilder, more overgrown places; chiefly that maze of hills, winding steps, and lush, thick undergrowth they called the Ramble; “a wild garden away from the carriage drives and bridal paths.” And lurking in the midst of this idyllic reverie is the hidden cave – to find it requires keen eyes.

‘The cave was sealed up in 1934, leaving only the entrance, sealed with bricks. For this secret hideaway was not just an ‘Eldorado of pleasures’ but the sight of many nefarious crimes. Assaults and deaths were common here in the obscure cave.’

 

_______________

… homes

 

_________________

… games

‘Where is the secret room in Nicholas’ weird adventure 2? Keep clicking on the drawing in the shop and he will give it to you and DON’T PRESS THE RED BUTTON then play until you find a castle not the one with the gate put the drawing in the shredder and there you have it!!:)

Once i told the tavern owner that i wont pay the 50 GP for another week and he attacked me, so i couldn’t buy his teleport rune to the tavern, and it happened to me with other merchants. There are several secret solutions. The best one is to kill his wife and cast the oblivion spell on him, but then you see her dead body in the market every day.’

 

‘The Monkey People can be found on the first playable level of Halo 3. If you follow these instructions you can spot them hiding in the jungle, and then … nothing. You can’t kill them, but if you shoot them they actually bleed (only real characters do that). Note that they all look exactly the same only in different sizes, which suggests that they might be the product of genetic experiments or excessive inbreeding. For all we know, the monkeys might keep decreasing in size right down to a subatomic level. A lone Monkey Man can be found in a different, much harder to reach part of the level (it’s actually outside the game map and you can only get there by killing yourself and respawning in the right place).’

 

‘lluminati is a standalone card game that has ominous secret societies competing with each other to control the world through sinister means, including legal, illegal, and even mystical. This is not funny but a sad truth. Please give your heart to Jesus.’

 

‘I remember there used to be a mod for 1.6 that basically allowed co-op play for half-life and had a ton of maps made by a very strange individual that had nothing to do with much of anything? It’s had to explain but it was like dropping LSD made of old internet memes and 1.6 coding. Colored lights everywhere, weird music, things that just made no sense at all, so on. If you found the ‘red’ map and followed it, you’d find hidden tunnels behind walls leading to some sort of burial chamber, with plots of bone-filled dirt in the walls. Dark rooms full of barely audible whispering. Things would almost always get more abstract as you went on, meaning eventually you’d be in some sort of void. From what I’ve read, only 8 players ever found that void in the game, and 6 of them later committed suicide. Coincidence?’

 

_________________

… the desert

‘Art does not always want to be seen – at least, not easily. Since the 1960s, some of the most memorable works of art have been hidden in remote places, or knowable only through photographs.

‘The latest such elusive treasure is a swimming pool created in the Mojave desert by Austrian artist Alfredo Barsuglia. The pool is full of clean blue water, whose appeal under the fierce sun in the middle of the desert must surely be amplified hundreds of times, set in a white, modern structure with pool-cleaning equipment supplied so you can leave it as you found it. You are also asked to bring water to replenish the pool.’

 

________________

… portraits

‘The first photographic images in the late 1820s had to be exposed for hours in order to capture them on film. Improvements in the technology led to this exposure time being drastically cut down to minutes, then seconds, throughout the 19th century. But in the meantime, the long exposures gave us a few unmistakable Victorian photography conventions, such as the stiff postures and unsmiling faces of people trying to remain perfectly still while their photograph was being taken.

‘Seems children were just as squirmy then as they are today, because another amusing convention developed: photographs containing hidden mothers trying to keep their little ones still enough for a non-blurry picture. These fantastic portraits of children all contain their mother and one father, disguised as chairs or camoflauged under decorative throws behind them.’

 

_____________

… Melrose Place

‘Conceptual artworks were secretly used as props on primetime television series Melrose Place. The artists worked with the show’s scriptwriters to ensure that the artworks had relevance to the plot, even though the audience had no idea of their existence.

‘The pieces were specially designed by art collective the GALA Committee. The group was led by Mel Chin, who gathered fellow artists along with faculty and students from the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts under the GALA Committee umbrella.

‘So when Courtney Thorne-Smith’s character, Alison, works from her couch while pregnant, the quilt she is under is stitched with a pattern of the chemical structure for the abortion drug RU 486. The drug was illegal in the US at the time.

‘Some of the interventions included material that evaded the censors at the Federal Communications Commission, like a set of bed sheets printed with graphics of unrolled condoms – images of which were banned from public broadcast.

‘Motivated by the idea that network television could prove a more powerful site for public artwork than a physical place, they pitched the idea to the Melrose Place producers, who agreed to the unconventional product placements.

‘The artists were not paid by Spelling Entertainment; instead, the project was independently funded by arts institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Grand Arts in Kansas City and The Rockefeller Foundation.’

Reconstruction of the Melrose Place bar location Shooters

75 unique bottles behind the Shooters bar detail the health and social issues relating to alcohol consumption throughout history.

An emblem of the African continent replaces the white circle on an Africa Is the Eight-Ball, a reference to the ubiquity of racism.

The Target Audience dartboard reflects the target audience of Melrose Place, women aged 18 to 49.

 

_____________

… a boulder

‘Swiss studio Bureau A has concealed a wooden cabin inside an artificial rock and transported it to a remote site in the Swiss Alps.’

 

______________

… candles

‘This spectacular vary of high finish candles are some things fully new and exciting. Along with award winning packaging and eleven divine fragrances, every candles with jewelry hidden inside additionally contains an additional special hidden surprise. Revealed from the wax because the candle burns could be a hidden treasure, a spectacular ring. There are over 50 different styles of rings that range in value from $25 – $7,500. Every candle is carefully hand-crafted in New Zealand and are a fabulous gift that will be always be treasured.’

 

______________

… Minecraft

‘Marcuss Persson, better known to the gaming community as Notch, is the man who created a world one block at a time, and an indie empire to go along with it, in the cultural phenomenon that is Minecraft. During a conversation between Notch and SpyParty’s Chris Hecker at GDC 2012, Persson teased there’s still some undiscovered secret in Minecraft, though no additional details were provided on what it might be. With how rabid and dedicated the Minecraft fan base is, I find it very surprising that any stone would be left unturned. When you consider the millions who play this game and all the time logged, this secret has to be buried very deep in the game. I wonder if it is some sort of uber secret recipe or dungeon. According to some Notch has hinted elsewhere it is a hidden recipe, according to others Notch has stated it is NOT a recipe. One big hint is that it “may or may not have something to do with time”. Notch said that the secret rare item was more rare than wearable cloaks that only Mojang employees could obtain, which, considering said cloaks are unobtainable by regular players, made the secret rare item pretty darn rare indeed. Lots of people think that it might have something to do with the new phases of the moon. Personally, I think whatever it is will rather be triggered by a certain player’s action or by a special seed for the world generation. It won’t be anything huge I’m assuming, but hopefully they prove me wrong with a HUGE idea! I dont care how big or small it is, I will love it all!’

‘Do people really think this is it? LIES. Notch is Swedish retard. I thought it would be a rainbow sheep. Notch tweeted that we can all stop looking for the secret now, since it was “very minor”. He also pointed out that he never said it was a big secret, but the internet over-hyped it. LIES, LIES. That is the stupidest bull shit I ever heard. That being the big secret is just fake in all kind of ways. I’m a member of a secret Minecraft society so exclusive it makes the Illuminati look like a Costco, so I should know. Maybe that so-called big secret is a secret message? One day we will have mince rafts. Whatever a mince raft is.’

 

_______________

… Milan’s manholes

 

___________________

… text

‘We often talk about “hidden text,” but in reality what is hidden text? Hidden text is also known as “invisible text” or “fake text.” Hidden text is often used for spamming the search engines. But many smart search engines, such as Google can detect the use of hidden text. To give a simple definition, hidden text is text on a Web page which is visible to search engine spiders but not visible to human visitors.

‘You should not use hidden text to get high ranking in search engines. Search engines can detect certain forms of hidden text algorithmically and when they do they will automatically drop the offending site from their index. By hiding keywords in hidden text, you may be able to trick the search engines for a limited amount of time. Anything that hides text from a browser, but is still in the body of the document, will be indexed by the search engine spiders. But the use of hidden text can cause search engines to permanently ban your website.

‘Some years ago, search engine optimization consisted of putting a group of phrases together with as many repetitions as possible to make up a keyword tag and, if necessary, putting the same text in a hidden form at the bottom of the pages. This was a very easy method of getting visitors, but some people overused this approach, to the point of abusing the system. Because of this abuse, search engines took action to stop this kind of search spam. The effect of this is that the actual keyword tag is virtually useless now.

‘The most successful form of hidden text is not so much hidden as ignored. This is text placed between comment tags like this . Comment tags are actually intended to be used as an aid to whoever is editing the source code at a later date and as such comments are not of course displayed in the browser. There are methods to make this text ‘readable’ or at least detectable in browsers, but they are illegal, and best of luck finding and learning them. But, to give an example, while it may not look much from the highlighting, the coder has managed to hide over four thousand words, sixteen pages of keyword rich hidden text in a single body of text. This must be approaching a world record and here is a small sample:’

Kenneth Goldsmith ‘HIDDEN TEXT / HIDDEN CODE’

 

_________________

… Fight Club

1. ‘The Tyler flashes. Before Tyler officially enters the Narrator’s life when they’re sitting together on the plane, he appears six times in the film. Once he’s riding a moving walkway at the airport (that appearance isn’t included on this list, since it’s not hidden). Four of those times, Tyler appears as a subliminal flash that occurs when the Narrator has a moment of frustration or anger during his insomnia daze. These, of course, create the foundation for Tyler.

2. ‘Tyler as a waiter. The fifth time Tyler appears? When the Narrator is in the middle of his early traveling montage and he’s watching TV in his hotel room. A group of waiters on screen all say “Welcome.” If you look carefully, Brad Pitt is in the front row of waiters, on the far right.

3. ‘No incoming calls. This is a quick, subtle hint early on that Tyler isn’t real. When the Narrator’s condo blows up, he calls Tyler from a payphone, with no answer. Then, a few seconds later, the phone rings. As the Narrator goes to answer it, the camera zooms in on some text on the payphone that reads, “No incoming calls accepted.” In other words — Tyler could not have called him back, because this phone cannot ring.

4. ‘White boxers. During the course of the movie, Tyler and the Narrator intentionally dress in opposite ways — Tyler is flamboyant, the Narrator is corporate and buttoned-down. The only place they’re identical: Their boxers. When the Narrator is ordering IKEA furniture at the beginning of the movie, he’s in plaid boxers. As soon as he moves into Tyler’s house, he begins wearing white boxers… the same exact ones Tyler wears as he bikes around the house.

5. ‘Seven Years in Tibet. This was a little inside joke of production design. When the Narrator is sending Marla out of town, there’s a marquee in the background for the movie “Seven Years in Tibet”. A movie that starred Brad Pitt.’

(continued)

 

_______________

… embroidery

‘Vintage photographs without a doubt carry with them something from the past but to Maurizio Anzeri, his work is not about preserving or celebrating the past. “I don’t want to be nostalgic. When I work on them, to me they become very present. The catch is that at some point these photographs were to some people really important and suddenly they ended up in a box,” he says. When confronted with his portraits it’s as if Maurizio wanted to create a passage for the character to escape from their present form. You can see that a part of them is still there and the other part has become something else. “I think that what makes them work is that the image and the embroidery at the top feed each other,” he explains. He has no intention to cover or to erase. “It’s about feeding another dimension,” he says. For Maurizio, the physicality of puncturing a needle in the actual image “is an action of penetration”. “I have been told many times that one of the characteristics of my work is to cover when there is nothing to cover. And I like that and it’s not even hidden the fact that there is nothing to cover,” he explains.’

 

_______________

… your face

‘The expression of a given face at a specific time is conveyed by a composite of signals from several sources of facial appearance. These sources include the general shape, orientation (pose), and position of the head, the shapes and positions of facial features (e.g., eyes, mouth), coloration and condition of the skin, shapes of wrinkles, folds, and lines, and so forth. Some of these sources are relatively fixed; others, more changeable. The most important source of change in facial expression is the set of muscular movements produced by facial muscles, which provide the most substantial changes in facial appearance over short time durations and contribute most to nonverbal communication by the face. Other shorter term origins that may contribute to expressions are blood flow and glandular secretions. As a generalization, muscular activity contributes expressive variation on a background of more slowly changing or static expressive sources. These latter sources include the sizes, positions, and shapes of fleshy tissues, hair, teeth, cartilage, and bones.

‘Corresponding to the several sources of expressive information in the face are the many nonverbal communication messages that the face can provide. Some of these messages are validly related to characteristics of the person behind the face, some are fabrications of the viewer unrelated to the real person, and others lie somewhere between these two extremes. Much of the research on the face is centered on discovering the messages that fit into these different categories. Another perspective on the range of facial messages is to consider objective description, such as a list of physical anatomical measurements, as an anchor for veridical information, and ever more abstract generalizations or inferences about characteristics more remote from these specific observations becoming increasingly difficult to verify.

‘A further difficulty for interpreting the face is that the appearances produced by one source of facial information can interact with another, producing a mixture, as mentioned above, that can hide, mask, or interfere with the messages conveyed by each source. The structure of facial nonverbal communication is complex.

‘The facial muscles are like elastic sheets that are stretched in layers over the cranium, facial bones, the openings they form, and the cartilage, fat, and other tissues of the head. These are the muscles of facial expression, acting singly and in combination. The diagram below shows a simplified view of how the facial muscles are actually arranged. Move the mouse cursor over the list of facial muscles and click on a facial muscle of interest to see more information. Most of the muscles have a short video that illustrates the appearances that are produced when the muscle acts. Innervation and blood supply are also indicated.’

[inner/outer frontalis] [corrugator] [procerus] [depressor supercilli] [inner/outer orbicularis oculi] [nasalis] [depressor_septi] [levator_labii] [buccinator] [caninus] [risorius] [zygomatic_major] [zygomatic_minor] [depressor_labii] [orbicularis_oris] [masseter] [triangularis] [mentalis] [platysma] [levator of the upper eyelid] [incisive muscle of the lips] [other facial/head muscles]

 

________________

… Justin Bieber

*

p.s. Hey. ** Joe, Hey, Joe. Obviously great to see you! Oh good, Ponge is great. Take care ’til soon. xo. ** sam jenks, Greetings, sam. No, we’ve been working on UK screenings for months, but it has proven to be difficult. We haven’t found venues there that have been interested yet. A bit surprising and strange, but that’s been the situation. But I was working on two London possibilities yesterday. We’re determined to screen the film there, and we will somehow. Hopefully good news before too long. Thank you for asking and wanting. ** _Black_Acrylic, He’s terrific. We remain just sort of chilly and often wet over here. It’s getting pretty old, I must say. ** Steeqhen, Thanks for the rec. I’ll watch for it. Resting scares and bores me for the very reason you mention. Plus I don’t seem constitutionally able to do it. Thanks about the Triskel. ** Laura, Hi! I didn’t fully follow your thoughts on Ponge, but they were very interesting. The script and I are chasing each other. Hopefully I’ll wind up on top. Yes, I read that the powers that be don’t want to let ‘Adolescence’ be a singular, good thing but intend to drag it out thinking more money can be made and more critical acclaim accrued. ** James Bennett, Yes, I guess there must be Gevais superfans out there, but what a strange idea. I don’t know that Jim Dodge book, but there’s a kind of Agota Kristof thing in her writing that excites me to no end. Luck with the excitement plus hassle. xo, me. ** kenley, Yeah, the people I interacted with in TO, if an outsider can call it that, were pretty warm-ish and not foreign seeming to an LA guy. Not sure if I can pinpoint exactly why. A vibe, as, yes, we LA types like to say. I remember Vancouver feeling and kind of looking SoCal-like, but I don’t remember the people. It was, like, ages ago. Luck galore escaping application hell as needed. Aw, thanks, about ‘Closer’. ** Carsten, Oh, no, I was probably thinking of the French self-styled environmental activists who tried to get his Pompidou explosion/event canceled. Haha, yes, and yet some of the most serious, daring artists I know are huge sports fans. I used to be very into baseball when I lived in LA, so I’m kind of in that camp a teeny bit, although I haven’t gone whole hog over soccer/football over here. But I do think it’s a beautiful sport. I can’t remember that Schnabel film, but, boy, problems not withstanding, he is an infinitely better filmmaker than he is a visual artist even so. Nice quote there, and, yeah, fragrantly applicable to Ponge. ** HaRpEr //, Stephen M. is a sweetie. I curated an art show years ago in NYC and titled it ‘Brighten the Corners’ without asking and he wrote me a thank you note. ‘Self-indulgence’ is one of lazy, skittish thinkers’ favorites, yeah. ‘Pretentious’ too. Kay Gabriel is such a smarty. I’m sorry to hear about the confrontation. Curious because yesterday I randomly had to listen to ‘Nude as the News’, but it was to pump me up. ** darbz (⊙ 0⊙ ), I always feel sympathetic towards bus drivers for some reason, and when they pull shit like that, I tell myself they probably deserve the little joy they get from being cruel. A friend who’s loose with their Criterion password is a friend indeed, except over here where there is no Criterion, but even then the givers are well meaning friends. ** Uday, Um, I don’t have a specific memory, but, given that I love Ponge, it’s certainly very possible that I propped that book here in some earlier context or other, yes. I’ll look for your email, thanks. ** Nicholas., Hi, pal plus period. I don’t know who Tim Dillon, but I’ll find out. My up has been pretty predictable aka film stuff and Paris highlights when possible. Dinner: one of my usuals: Capellini pasta with a combo of tomato and mushroom sauce smeared with two forms of grated cheese, and too much of it in last night’s case. Keep keeping on, mister. ** Right. Today I’ve restored a really, really old post that looks and seems really, really old, and I’m counting on that dated quality giving it a certain charm. See you tomorrow.

 

Michel Ciment: Do you like poets like Francis Ponge? Your films remind one of him, and his Le parti pris des choses.
Robert Bresson: Yes. I no longer see Ponge, unfortunately, as he has moved to the south. He wrote me some remarkable letters about my films and about cinema. I like his fondness for objects, for inanimate things.

‘Francis Ponge has been called “the poet of things” because simple objects like a plant, a shell, a cigarette, a pebble, or a piece of soap are the subjects of his prose poems. For Ponge, all objects “yearn to express themselves, and they mutely await the coming of the word so that they may reveal the hidden depths of their being,” as Richard Stamelman explained it in Books Abroad. David Gascoyne, a contributor to Reference Guide to World Literature, declared: “To transmute commonplace objects by a process of replacing inattention with contemplation was Ponge’s way of heeding Ezra Pound‘s edict: ‘Make it new.’ His ever-renewed attempts to celebrate objects of everyday experience in a language enlightened by puns and complex words, with onomatopoeia, and the calligrammatic, were not a restless search for novelty but rather a way of transcending ‘modernity’ and restoring a Wordsworthian appreciation of the simple things in life: slate, the Seine, asparagus, and tables.”

‘Throughout his forty-five year writing career, Ponge was faithful to his unique approach to poetic subject. Speaking of the poet’s collected works, Sarah N. Lawall in Contemporary Literature found that “what Ponge has to say remains quite consistent, and his collected works juxtapose texts from 1921 to 1967 without any contradiction whatsoever. He still goes to the ‘mute world’ of things for his peculiar dialectic, and he still celebrates the creative power of speech.” Lawall found, too, that Ponge’s work served as an “example of systematically individual perception and expression in a world threatened by group morality and intellectual totalitarianism.”

‘Michael Benedikt, writing in The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, concluded that Ponge’s poems are “as ‘objective’ as objects in the world themselves.” Robert W. Greene, in his book Six French Poets of Our Time: A Critical and Historical Study, argued that in many of his poems, Ponge tries “to create a verbal machine that will have as much local intricacy as its counterpart in the world of objects.” Stamelman went even further in analyzing this relationship. “In Ponge’s poetry,” he wrote, “the text refers to itself and to itself alone… The only thing the text ‘represents’ is its own surging into being through language, its own act of expression. Ultimately, the text signifies itself.”

‘Ponge’s prose poems follow no set formula. They develop instead in a seemingly spontaneous manner, following a meandering path to their completion. “Ponge may be the first poet,” James Merrill wrote in the New York Review of Books, “ever to expose so openly the machinery of a poem, to present his revisions, blind alleys, critical asides, and accidental felicities as part of a text perfected, as it were, without ‘finish’”. Greene acknowledged that Ponge’s “texts hardly conform to most conceptions of what poems, even prose poems, are or should be. They contain puns, false starts, repetitions, agendas, recapitulations, syllogistic overtones, a heavy ideological content, and other features that one normally associates with prose—and the prose of argumentation at that—rather than with poetry.”

‘Ponge spent the last thirty years of his life as a recluse at his country home, Mas des Vergers. He suffered from frequent bouts with nervous exhaustion and numerous psychosomatic illnesses. He continued to write, however, and the work he was involved with at the time of his death was published posthumously in 1981. Entitled La Table, it “reflects what was Ponge’s undying, and increasingly obsessional, quest for le mot juste,” mused Gascoyne. “Its final sentence reads: “O Table, ma console et ma consolatrice, table qui me console, ou je me consolide.” For Ponge, his final subject was his writing table, which had in fact by then become his entire world.”’ — Poetry Foundation

 

____
Extras

Francis Ponge et les surréalistes

“Le Pain” lu par Francis Ponge en 1962

la destruction des quartier Francis Ponge & Gaston Bachelard

Francis PONGE – Vers Francis Ponge (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1965)

 

_____
Further

Francis Ponge’s ‘Preface to a Bestiary’
FP’s ‘Soap’ @ Stanford University Press
Tom McCarthy on Francis Ponge
FP @ The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog
‘Francis Ponge: Siding with things’
‘The Prefix of Prefixes:
Francis Ponge’s ‘Le Pré’ and La Fabrique du ’Pré’
Francis Ponge’s ‘l’Orange’ (bilingual)
Francis Ponge’s ‘Bread’
‘on Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge
‘L’OBJET EN POESIE AU 20ème SIECLE : confrontation de quelques textes de Francis Ponge’
‘L’œuvre insupportable de Francis Ponge’
‘Commentaire hypertextuel du l’eau de Francis Ponge.
FP @ Writers No One Reads
‘THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: FRANCIS PONGE’S THE VOICE OF THINGS’
An appeciation of FP @ Lacanian Studies
Buy ‘Unfinished Ode to Mud’ @ CB Editions

 

____________
My Creative Effort
by Francis Ponge

 

THURSDAY 18 DECEMBER 1947

No doubt I am not very intelligent: in any case ideas are not my strong point. I’ve always been disappointed by them. The most well-founded opinions, the most harmonious philosophical systems (the best constituted) have always seemed to me utterly fragile, caused a certain revulsion, a sense of the emptiness at the heart of things, a painful feeling of inconsistency. I do not feel in the least assured of the propositions that I sometimes have occasion to put forth in the course of a discussion. The opposing arguments almost always appear just as valid; let’s say, for the sake of exactness, neither more nor less valid. I am easily convinced, easily put down. And when I say I am convinced: it is, if not of some truth, at least of the fragility of my own opinion. Furthermore, the value of ideas appears to me most often in inverse proportion to the enthusiasm with which they are expressed. A tone of conviction (and even of sincerity) is adopted, it seems to me, as much in order to convince oneself as to convince one’s interlocutor, and even more, perhaps, to replace conviction. To replace, so to speak, the truth which is absent from the propositions put forth. This is something I feel very strongly.

Hence, ideas as such seem to me to be the thing I am least capable of, and they are of little interest to me. You will no doubt object that this in itself is an idea (an opinion), but: ideas, opinions seem to me controlled in each individual by something completely other than free will, or judgment. Nothing appears to me more subjective, more epiphenomenal. I really cannot understand why people boast of them. I would find it unbearable should someone try to impose them on us. Wanting to give one’s opinion as objectively valid, or in the absolute, seems to me as absurd as to state, for example, that curly blonde hair is truer than sleek black hair, the song of the nightingale closer to the truth than the neighing of a horse. (On the other hand I am quite given to formulation and may even have a certain gift in this direction. “This is what you mean . . .” and generally the speaker agrees with my formulation. Is this a writer’s gift? Perhaps.)

It is somewhat different for what I shall call observations; or shall we say experimental ideas. It has always seemed desirable to me to agree, if not about opinions, at least about well-established facts, and if this still seems pretentious, at least on some solid definitions.

It was perhaps natural that with such a disposition (disgust for ideas, a taste for definitions) I should devote myself to recording and defining the objects of the world around us, and particularly those which constitute the familiar universe of our society, in our time. And why, it will be objected, do something over which has been done several times already, and firmly established in dictionaries and encyclopedias?—But, I shall reply, why and wherefore is it that several dictionaries and encyclopedias co-exist in a given language, and for the same objects their definitions fail to correspond? Why, above all, why do they seem more concerned with the definition of words than with the definition of things? Where do I get this impression, which is all in all quite preposterous? What causes the difference, this inconceivable gap between the definition of a word and the description of the thing designated by the word? Why is it that dictionary definitions seem so lamentably lacking in concreteness, and that descriptions (in novels and poems, for example) seem so incomplete (or too particular and detailed, on the contrary), so arbitrary, so random? Could one not imagine a sort of writing (new) which, situating itself more or less between the two genres (definition and description), would take from the first its infallibility, its indubitability, its brevity also, from the second its respect for the sensory aspect of things …

 

SATURDAY 27 DECEMBER 1947

If ideas disappoint me, don’t agree with me, it is because I too willingly agree with them, since that’s what they want, what they are made for. Ideas demand my assent, insist on it and it’s too easy for me to give in: this gift, this agreeableness, gives me no pleasure, but rather a certain revulsion, nausea. Objects, landscapes, events, people around give me a great deal of pleasure on the other hand. They convince me. By the very fact they don’t need to. Their presence, their obvious solidity, their thickness, their three dimensions, their palpability, indubitability, their existence of which I am far more certain than of my own, their: “that’s not something you invent (but discover)” side, their: “it’s beautiful because I couldn’t have invented it, I would have been quite incapable of inventing it” side, all that is my sole reason to exist, my pretext, so to speak; and the variety of things is in reality what makes me what I am. That’s what I want to say: their variety makes me, gives me permission to exist in silence even. As the place around which they exist. But in relation to a single one of them, in relation to each one of them in particular, if I consider only one of them, I disappear: it annihilates me. And, if it is only my pretext, my raison d’être, if it is therefore necessary that I exist, from it, it will only be, it can only be by a certain creation of my own with it as subject.

What creation? The text.

And, to start off, how do I imagine it, how could I have imagined it, how do I conceive of it?

Through works of art (literary).

(cont.)

 

_____
Things

Francis Ponge and Jacques Derrida, 1975

‘Le Galet’ by Francis Ponge & Man Ray

Ponge & Jean Fautrier

Francis Ponge, Andre Malraux, Paul Valery

Pierre Reverdy, Andre Breton, Francis Ponge

Simone DeBeauvoir, Francis Ponge, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus

 

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Book

Francis Ponge Unfinished Ode to Mud
CB Editions

‘A bilingual French/English edition of new translations of prose poems by a writer praised by Italo Calvino as “a peerless master . . . I believe that he may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powderfine dust of words” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium).

‘Still radical, the poems of Francis Ponge seek to give the things of the world their due. Impatient with the usual baggage of literary description, Ponge attends to a pebble, a washpot, an eiderdown, a platter of fish, with lyrical precision; playing with sounds, rhythms and associations of words, he creates wholly new objects – “but which may be more touching, if possible, than natural objects, because human” (‘My Creative Method’).’ — CB Editions

 

Excerpts

Rain

The rain, in the courtyard where I watch it fall, comes down at very different speeds. In the centre, it is a fine discontinuous curtain (or mesh), falling implacably but relatively slowly, a drizzle, a never-ending languid precipitation, an intense dose of pure meteor. Not far from the right and left walls heavier drops fall more noisily, separately. Here they seem to be about the size of a grain of wheat, there of a pea, elsewhere nearly a marble. On the moulding, on the window ledges, the rain runs horizontally while on the undersides of these same obstacles it is suspended, plump as a humbug. It streams across the entire surface of a little zinc roof the peephole looks down on, in a thin moiré sheet due to the different currents set in motion by the imperceptible undulations and bumps in the roofing. From the adjoining gutter, where it runs with the restraint of a brook in a nearly level bed, it suddenly plunges in a perfectly vertical, coarsely braided stream to the ground, where it splatters and springs up again flashing like needles.

Each of its forms has a particular speed; each responds with a particular sound. The whole lives as intensely as a complicated mechanism, as precise as it is chancy, a clockwork whose spring is the weight of a given mass of precipitate vapour.

The chiming of the vertical streams on the ground, the gurgling of the gutters, the tiny gong beats multiply and resound all at once in a concert without monotony, not without delicacy.

When the spring is unwound, certain gears continue to function for a while, gradually slowing down, until the whole mechanism grinds to a halt. Then, if the sun comes out, everything is erased, the brilliant apparatus evaporates: it has rained.

 

The Young Mother

A few days after childbirth, the woman’s beauty is transformed.

Her face, often bent over her chest, grows slightly longer.

Her eyes, attentively peering down at a nearby object, occasionally look up, faintly distracted. Their gaze is filled with confidence, but seeking continuation. Her arms and hands bend together in a crescent, mutually sustaining. Her legs, grown thin and weakened, are gladly seated, knees drawn up high. The distended belly, livid, still very tender; the abdomen readjusts to rest, to nights under covers.

…But soon up and about, the tall body maneuvers through the bunting hung out conveniently high and low, which squares of wash, which from time to time are grasped by a free hand, are crinkled, tested knowledgeably, then folded or hung out again depending on the verdict.

 

The End of Autumn

In the end autumn is nothing but cold tea. All kinds of dead leaves macerate in the rain. No fermentation or distillation of alcohol: only spring will show the effect of compresses applied to a wooden leg.

The last returns are a mess. All the doors of the polling booths bang open and shut. Into the bin! Into the bin! Nature shreds her manuscripts, demolishes her library, furiously knocks down her final fruits.

Then she pushes herself up from her desk. At once she appears immense. Hair undone, head in the mist. Her arms hanging loose, delightfully she inhales the icy, thought-refreshing wind. Days are short, night falls quickly, comedy is uncalled for.

Up in the air among the other stars, the earth looks serious again. Its lit-up part is narrower, infiltrated with valleys of shadow. Its shoes, like those of a tramp, soak up water and make music.

In this frog pond, this salubrious amphibiguity, everything grows strong again, leaps from stone to stone and changes bog. Freshets multiply.

This is what you call a good clean-up, disrespectful of convention! Dressed in nothing, drenched to the bone.

And it goes on, and on, takes ages to dry out. Three months of salutary reflection in this state; without vascular incident, with neither peignoir nor horsehair mitt. Her strong constitution is up to it.

Then, when the little buds start to point again, they know what they are up to, what it’s all about – and if they peek out with precaution, swollen and ruddy, it is on good grounds.

But thereby hangs another tale, which may depend on but hasn’t the same smell as the black ruler I’m going to use to draw the line under this one.

 

The Blackberries

On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.

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Black, rose and khaki together on the bunch, they are more like the sight of a rogue family at its different ages than a strong temptation to picking.

In view of the disproportion of seeds to pulp birds don’t think much of them, so little remains once from beak to anus they’ve been traversed.

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But the poet in the course of his professional promenade takes the seed to task: ‘So,’ he tells himself, ‘the patient efforts of a fragile flower on a rebarbative tangle of brambles are by and large successful. Without much else to recommend them – ripe, indeed they are ripe – done, like my poem.’

 

The Crate

Midway from a cage to a dungeon, the French language has crate, a simple slatted case devoted to the transport of such fruits as at the least shortness of breath are bound to give up the ghost.

Knocked together so that once it is no longer needed it can be effortlessly crushed, it is not used twice. Which makes it even less durable than the melting or cloudlike produce within.

Then, at the corner of every street leading to the marketplace, it gleams with the modest sparkle of deal. Still spanking new and a little startled to find itself in the street in such an awkward position, cast off once and for all, this object is on the whole one of the most appealing – on whose destiny, however, there’s little point in dwelling.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Carsten, Hey. To answer your question accurately, I would need to do some research. I will say that I think it’s ridiculous and sadly telling that there are big fireworks displays virtually every night either at a sports event or music concert or an amusement park or elsewhere and very people have a problem with that, but when someone does something innovative and artistic with fireworks on rare occasions, people want to shut him down. I’ve heard very mixed things about the film of ‘Chronology of Water’, No one I know thinks it’s remotely as good as the novel. I hope your weekend ruled. ** Steve, Thanks. Her later works are odd, relative to her early works. I think ‘The Jester and the Queen’ is by far my favorite of the ones I’ve seen. My weekend … a lot of script work, coffee with a visiting curator from NY, my biweekly zoom film/book club, for which I had to watch ‘Train Dreams’, which seemed like the cinematographer wanted to make a Terrence Malick film but only half paid attention, and the director and writer wanted to make an episode of The Waltons but they took too many quaaludes. I found it unbearable. So that was my Sat/Sun in a nutshell. You finished your LP! Everyone, two big treats from Steve today. (1) He has dropped his new album HAVING A BLAST AT YOUR HUMILIATION RITUAL here, and (2) his latest “Radio Not Radio” episode featuring DJ Skaytah, Danpapa GTA, J. Cordova, De Schurrman, Iga, DJ Anderson do Paraiso, xavisphone, Kenjox & Natozie, Shadow Wizard Money Gang, Kavari, Grace Jones, the Revolutionaries, Ghost Dubs, Shackleton, Surface Access, Harriet Tubman & Georgia Anne Muldrow, Robert Grawi, Shane Parish, Hans Reichel, Tashi Dorji, Bjorn Meyer, Rachel Beetz, Aram Guleyzan, Redrose and Krone & Time is out. ** Bill, Ha, I assume he must doing quite alright. Marie Loisier did a doc on The Residents? She’s tireless. I’ll sink in if I can find it. Thanks. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Wolf Hole’ is interesting, much less wild than ‘Daisies’. ‘The Jester and the Queen’ is a bit more like ‘Daisies’. ** James Bennett, Hi. Is there a Gervais film prop market? Wouldn’t think so? Curious find. You’re really on the way, aren’t you? Book/film club was good. I like everything about ‘Magician’, how it’s fairytale-like like but disturbing, and maybe mostly the prose, which is crazy good. Ciao back! ** Alice, Ah, too bad about the no cinema job, but maybe it’s fate in the good way. Five Guys, wow. And what does that entail? You sound fully into what you’re working on in an engaged, confident way. You seem primed to nail it. Great about ‘Your Blues’. I think it might be all-time favorite album. Same to your week with bells on. ** Steeqhen, You’re on a roll. I haven’t seen any of those. ‘It Was Just An Accident’ is on my agenda. Yeah, we don’t qualify for that festival. Sad, oh well. We would love to show the film in Cork if you don’t making a query with that venue. Thanks. ** darbz (⊙ 0⊙ ), Hi! From the library no less! Interesting that schools still assign Salinger. That’s good, I guess. ‘Psychotic art’: sort of a nice title. Makes you want to read it. Might make you want to hate it afterwards. Sounds fun. You mean the photo of the wall? Yes, I saw it. I wanted to lie underneath it and gaze up and drift into some mental ether. No longer a crush? Well, that’s intriguing. Don’t be reluctant to be newsy about that. ** Jeff J, Hey, Jeff. As I said somewhere above, ‘The Jester and the Queen’ by my favorite of her later films. A bit of her wildness creeping back in there. Crazy amazing about the big Dorsky crowd and the reaction. Wow. You’re doing the Lord’s work there, sir. What’s next? ** HaRpEr //, Hi. My weekend was pretty good. Vain is a term that speaks to the imperfection of its user’s mental acuity. Or so says a guy who uses the word ‘great’ every ten seconds, which is a much worse offender. I don’t think you need permission to use a phrase from a lyric as a title? I’ve done it multiple times, and no artist or lawyer has ever piped up. ** Laura, Hi. I don’t know what a whole lot of my favorite films or books or art are about. If I can’t tell, that’s usually a plus. The script is hard work but going well, I think. Hm, I don’t think anything about the script writing is annoying me exactly. I’m enjoying the chasing. I suspect the blog is especial lycomfortable because you can’t see me squinting at the screen and then typing. You really did model. Wow. Thank you about ‘Closer’. Well, I did think of ‘Closer’ and ‘Period’ as bookends, so there was communing. I’m not yet zonked, but give me a few hours. ** Uday, ‘Daisies’ is a lot of fun. You’ll see one of these days. You can’t beat friendship indeed. No, I don’t care about Bad Bunny/NFL, but I see that it made Trump lose his shit, so I presume it did its job. Wingman … that means help you steer or … ? I know the word, but I don’t know what the ‘wing’ part is about. Oh, wait, I guess you just defined it. Nah, I’m not looking. I’m good. Thank you though. ** kenley, Howdy! My weekend was alright. I think I laid out its layout to Steve up above. That’s interesting: when Zac and I were in Toronto, I found myself very charmed by and comfortable with the people I met and talked to there. It’s like the LA of Canada? Happiest Monday on earth. ** Right. Do you know Francis Ponge? He’s wonderful, and the book up there is one of this best, I think. Maybe have at it? See you tomorrow.