Category: Uncategorized (Page 774 of 1103)

* (restored)

 

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… inside furniture

 

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… inside 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.’

 

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… inside 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.’ — Luke Spencer

 

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… inside homes

 

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inside 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?

 

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… inside 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.

 

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… inside 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.’ — retronaut

 

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… inside 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.’ — Rima Sabina Aouf

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.

 

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… inside 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.’ — dezeen

 

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… inside 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.’ — wattpad

 

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… inside 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!’ — wethegamerz

‘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.’ — gamerant

 

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… inside some of Milan’s manholes

 

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… inside 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’

 

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… inside 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)

 

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… inside 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.

 

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… inside Disney parks

‘Steven Barrett searches for tiny Mickey Mouse patterns hidden in everyday spots throughout Disney theme parks. From the Magic Kingdom to Epcot to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, there are three little circles — a head and the two mouse ears — hidden in carpet patterns, tiles, wallpaper and even in the gift shops. Barrett, has mapped out nearly 3,000 of these hidden characters, and more are being discovered and confirmed every day via tips from fellow hidden Mickey hunters that come through his website and through his discussions with park employees, known as cast members.

‘Barrett personally verifies every Mickey tip he receives. But not every hidden Mickey is legitimate. “Sometimes it’s wishful thinking; sometimes it’s more of a decorate Mickey,” he says. Only about one in every four pans out. If one is questionable, Barrett asks his online followers to vote. “The story goes that hidden Mickeys started at Epcot,” Barrett says. “When Epcot was being built, Walt Disney management did not want characters in Epcot. They wanted to keep them in the Magic Kingdom. So, the imaginers began hiding Mickeys in Epcot attractions.” From there, they have expanded to the other parks, restaurants and hotels in Florida, California and around the world.’ — abcnews

 

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… inside 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.’ — Data Face

[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]

 

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… inside Justin Bieber

*

p.s. Hey. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Well, yes, you’re absolutely right about the success of strange shows as opposed to standard fare types. That basically proven fact dawning on ARTE’s powers-that-be is our only hope. ** Nik, Yeah, the Bresson connection was a surprise to me too, and, right, makes total sense. Almost (maybe) on the TV script. One more revision based on Gisele’s feedback on Saturday then it will go to ARTE and make or break us. But even if ARTE green lights the thing, no question it’ll be with qualifiers that will force us back into script work again. Kill me. My novel does not have a home yet. Oh, cool, that I lead you to Dr. Gene Scott. A total pity that his earlier shows are dead. Lucky me was in SoCal at the time, and his show aired multiple times a day. Thanks a lot for coming in. Well, I have work and meetings this week, and Friday is my birthday although I don’t know if or how I’ll mark that dreaded occasion, and … maybe see some art. I’m way behind. How’s your week looking? ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed! ** Sypha, Hi. Glad to see you back, natch. I think of you as someone who pretty much always gets sick at the end of the year. Zac’s like that too. As soon as Xmas shows up, he’s down with the flu like clockwork. May your aftereffects de-linger. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you like it. Interesting: that LeGuin inspired exhibit. I’ve never read her. SciFi is the huge hole in my reading history. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Terrible thing to say but the idea of a mature Kesha is like conceptual nails on my conceptual chalkboard. Great news about the new Quietus gig! Terrible about TinyMixTape’s probable demise. It’s a big resource for me, and that seeming death will leave a very tenable hole in online music coverage. Ugh. ** James, Very happy birthday! And mine is in mere days. Very cool that Queen Mob saw the light re: your novel! Sweet! No news on my novel’s destiny yet. No fun on my end re: that. Much love in return! ** Misanthrope, Snow! I don’t think we’re going to get any yet again this year. Very grim. As I’ve said up above, there is still no news on where my novel will be housed. If it doesn’t land somewhere soon, I will be jumping off the Eiffel Tower. So if you see in the very outermost margins of the news that an obscure novelist jumped off the Eiffel Tower, it was me, and that’s why. ** rigby, Happy New Year to you, dear Rigby, old pal! I need a reboot too. Let’s find a good spa somewhere. Love, me. ** Right. You get another restoration today. A big, thick one. Do your things with it, please. 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

 

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Extras

Francis Ponge et les surréalistes

“Le Pain” lu par Francis Ponge en 1962

la destruction des quartier Francis Ponge & Gaston Bachelard

Francis Ponge – L’huître…

Francis PONGE – Vers Francis Ponge (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1965)

 

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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

 

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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.)

 

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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. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. I too am not as versed re: graphic novels and so on as I think I should be. I never read comic books as a kid, and I think that’s the way in to the ‘grown up’ variant form for a lot of people? I had a post about the ‘Stalags’ here years ago. Maybe I should restore it. I’ll check. Glad to hear you’re on the mend. Lubitsch and July are certainly a curious combination. Huh, I see, about your dilemma about being an artist. I was always 100% determined to be an artist whatever it took from a young age, so I guess I never asked myself big questions about what that would mean about me. I definitely wish you luck with the interview! Lots and lots of luck! Yes, the French putting their bodies where their political passions are is joyous to behold as a fellow USA dude. The French don’t think kvetching on social media is the action, thank god. ** David Ehrenstein, Fotonovels actually date from the early 1940s. Thank you for the Fellini goodies. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks for the pointers to the tabloid fotonovel things. Oh, no, what a drag that they didn’t get your application. That’s happened to me before. Yeah, concentrate on the possible bright side. No doubt there is a big one. ** Tosh Berman, Yes, Legs McNeil was responsible for the punk fotonovels via his magazine Punk. There were a few pages from one of them in the post somewhere. Really glad you liked the post. ** Dominik, Welcome home and back! I don’t know that film ‘Utoya: July 22’. I wonder if I can find it somewhere. I’ll try. You feel refreshed and raring to go from your trip, I hope? The TV script: Zac and I finished what is supposed to be the final version two days ago. Now Gisele is reading it, and we’ll meet with her on Saturday to get her input and then make the changes she wants. Then it will go to our producers and then on to ARTE, and we’re supposed to get a green light or a no but mid-March. I’m not feeling hugely hopeful because ARTE wanted us to do severe normalising of the script, and we refused to make it as normal and boring as they asked, so now we’ll see if we managed to do just enough to get through or not. Hard to tell. I’m meeting with the gallery on Thursday to talk about how it would happen, but, yes, barring a problem, the show will open on the 23rd. Still no concrete news on my novel. Maybe it will never get published. I’m good, good enough, yeah. Worried about the novel and the TV series project, but generally okay. And you? What’s this week holding for you? Big love, me. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Your first comment did register. Seems to be the weird problem people have here, i.e. not seeing their comments show up. Still don’t know why. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Ladj Ly’s much talked about (at least over here) film LES MISERABLES here. The French right wing media isn’t taken seriously by most people over here, and its bullshit just kind disappears into a far right wing hole. Haven’t heard the new Poppy. Early Kesha, huh. That’s a curious thing to write about. ** Wolf, L-l-l-l-oupppp! I would surely like to know your faves if you end up getting into doing the list thing. I agree with you re: the dilemma. Probably both, yep. I figure we’re built the way we’re built. A toilet can’t vacuum the floor and vice versa. And fighting can take many forms. I guess for me, when I type I want to type out my imagination and not use typing to give my thumbs up or down about things that need actual action to be effected, and when I act, I want to be able to believe that something changes because of that, even very tinily. Or something. What’s on your plate, pal? ** NLK, Hi, happy 2020 to you! Yeah, I think that’s right. I guess fotonovels originated in Italy in, like, 1943 or something. Shit, I read the backstory but I can’t remember. Huh, re: my gif novels, that’s interesting, yeah, maybe, yeah. Huh. I do know ‘Cover to Cover’. I agree, it’s fantastic! There’s a kind of fotonovel-like book of Godard’s ‘The Image Book’, but I haven’t seen it, but I hear it’s a fascinating iteration of the film. Good to see you! Excited to see what you come up with this year too! ** Bill, Thanks to TimothyT whoever and wherever they are. Oh, so, I guess you’re either on a plane or touching down back west at this very second. Hopes that your back left you alone and that your inflight films made it feel like 90 minutes. Ha ha. ** Misanthrope, Yes, let’s both take on this year with joyful expressions and lots of barreling ahead! ** Okay. Do you guys know/like/not know/like Ponge? See you tomorrow.