* (restored)

 

‘There were absences in my life which were a comfort, then were a presence that ruined me.’ — Robert Pinget

‘Robert Pinget exhibited in his first works a gratuitous fantasy taking the form of comic parodies and allegories. One finds everything from Ubuesque inventions to shaggy dog stories, the sort of thing that would delight critics bent on liquidating the conventional novel. They have jubilantly hailed Pinget as one who has turned the old novel inside out, destroyed its characters, language, and plot. However that may be, in 1958, with Le Fiston (Monsieur Levert), Pinget definitely joined the ranks of the new novelists. Leaving off his loony antics, he tells the story of a man working every night on a letter to his son. We soon lose all foothold in reality as we enter the troubled universe of this father whose son has gone away. When did he actually leave, when is he coming back, will he ever return? We cannot trust the father’s account, for it is obviously all mixed up, yet it is our only source of information. We try to infer what the facts of the story are but our view is so hampered by the obscurity and confusion of his vision that we give up and just listen with hypnotized attention.

‘Pinget’s work joins the others, particularly Butor’s and Ollier’s, as the account of a futile attempt to capture reality and make sense of experience.

‘In a novel like Ulysses, the prose must slide about slip out of place all the time turn up at the edges you catch your feet in them, because Ulysses is a most deliberate study of the vagaries and peculiar associations of human thought. But M. Pinget’s novel [The Inquisitory] is only a deliberate struggle—maintained with incredible stamina—to ride a one-wheeled bicycle for 399 miles. It is hardly surprising, then, that the total effect is immensely involved, generally unreadable, and appallingly boring.

‘Last summer Robert Pinget took part in the colloquies devoted to the new novel at Cérisy-la Salle. Yet his work differs from that of such authors as Michel Butor and Robbe-Grillet, practitioners of the new-novel technique. Pinget’s way is far more personal. His search consists mainly in discovering the right tone (tonality or voice) of his novels’ narrators. Only after this initial task has been accomplished can he (author-narrator) really be himself and so express the feelings, ideas and atmosphere of his contemporaries and the world in which they live. Pinget is not interested in the symbolism involved or in the psychology of his characters or even in the themes or deeper meanings of their discourses which are never clearly delineated, certainly not in Fable.

‘Pinget’s Fable is his most lyrical work, save for Graal Flibuste (1956). The reader is ushered into a fantasy-filled domain of heteroclite colors, disparate images ranging from sun-drenched delphiniums to heads rotting on the ground. The medley of inner rhythms which emerges from his sentence structure encourages the reader to feel his way or to intuit his path into Pinget’s maze-like volume.

‘In the massive novel L’Inquisitoire (1962) Pinget fuses his work as a dramatist and as a novelist: it is in the form of questions and answers, a long and mysterious examination and cross-examination. Here the Theatre of the Absurd coalesces with the nouveau roman.

‘The French nouveau roman has a pronounced self-destructive urge. It puts the novel on trial, denies its own innocence, exposes the novelist himself as the chief suspect, incriminates him in his inadequate and self-contradictory evidence, and condemns the two of them together to a life sentence of fruitless forced labors.

‘Passacaille … is a fascinating piece of testimony. One cannot be sure of the events which it is struggling to piece together. All is supposition and hypothesis…. The reader hovers on the fringe of what might have been, or is due to be, an event, but an event which never takes shape to form a reassuring anecdote. At no point does a literary overseer emerge to establish some logic, make links, or provide explanatory commentary.

‘The characters involved are equally nebulous. People appear and disappear as if they had no proper existence…. Characters between whom one cannot see the connection loom into focus and fade away, their role strangely undetermined. Substitutions are made, gratuitously, it seems—at one moment the teacher could be a sorcerer, then the woman with the goats; at one moment it is the postman in the ditch, then the delivery man—and one suspects that these different figures might be one and the same, so much do they overlap and intermingle. A person called Rodolphe becomes Edouard and Edmond, perhaps by an accident of memory, but one wonders in the end if he ever existed, or at least in what form and under what name. The characters are, in fact, curiously “verbal.” One cannot even be sure of the voice that speaks or the pen that writes. Is there a centralizing narrative mind at all and who is performing the literary task?… Characterization becomes a kind of “space to let,” a central vacuum to be tried by anybody. Various persons, some known by name, others unknown, float towards it. But no one fits or seems to find it livable.

‘It has been suggested that the nouveau roman is the detective novel taken seriously. If by “taken seriously” one means not glibly wrapped up in a false but convincing story form, then Passacaille is a kind of detective novel. It has many of the features of the “whodunit,” but with the one outstanding question: what is it, and who is who?

‘The writer’s great stumbling blocks are time and words. These are, paradoxically, the two elements that prevent a story from materializing. If one could solve the question of the clock—one could possibly solve everything. At one moment the clock’s hands mark the time, at another some malicious person has moved them round, at another they have disappeared from the clock face completely.

‘Words are no less intractable—they are redundant fragments without an owner or a theme, whirling round to make their own provisional patterns.

‘All the things which make a novel—a story, a character, a time sequence, and a control over words and their progression—are missing from Passacaille. But perhaps, in damning itself as a novel, it resurrects itself as a form of poetry…. Certainly, the great themes of poetry (time and memory, nature and the seasons, solitude and death) seep through the verbal fissures. Little touches of human emotion, all the more poignant because of their spasmodic appearance in a framework of absence and erosion, remind one of Reverdy’s world. Pinget’s technique, which juxtaposes images but states nothing, creates a play of suggestion. Above all, the work has the densely patterned structure of a poem, within which repetitions act as refrains, changes of tempo set up waves of rhythm, and words, no longer subservient to plot or ideas, enjoy the greatest creative autonomy. The prose poem has gained respectability as a “genre.” Passacaille could well be a major development in a poem-novel.

‘[Since Pinget’s] first book, a collection of stories entitled Entre Fantoine et Agapa, Pinget’s fiction has explored an imaginary provincial region between Fantoine and Agapa, a Gallic Yoknapatawpha County—an “absurd suburb of reality,” in Robbe-Grillet’s phrase. Certainly The Inquisitory, which won the Prix des Critiques, abounds with circumstantial information. Thirty pages are devoted to a description, shop by shop, of the main square of the village of Sirancy; the street geography of the town of Agapa is exhaustively examined; eleven pages call the roll of furnishings in the drawing room of a château, which is eventually inventoried from cellar to attic; and an attentive reader with pencil in hand could probably draw, from the various textual indications, a map of the entire region. Now, such feats of particularization demand more patience than passion from writer and reader alike, but the end result is the kind of trustworthiness absent, for different reasons, from both [Robbe-Grillet’s] La Maison de Rendez-Vous and [Genet’s] Miracle of the Rose. The Inquisitory is of the three by far the best novel, if by novel we understand an imitation of reality rather than a spurning of it.

‘Not that Pinget is old-fashioned; he has put himself to school with Robbe-Grillet and Beckett. The novel’s premise is a Beckettian stripped situation: an infinitely garrulous old château servant is being quizzed by an infinitely curious investigator. Both are nameless. Punctuation marks are abjured. A shadowy secretary is in the room, typing up all three hundred and ninety-nine pages of meandering testimony. The object of the investigation—the disappearance of the château secretary—is never clarified. The dialogue, initially full to bursting of visual measurement and quidditas, ebbs into a fatigued exchange, laconic and baffled.

‘All this circumstantiality protests against circumstantiality, both as an adjunct of the novel and as the illusory stuff of life…. The investigator is in a sense the all too ideal reader, asking again and again, “Go on.”… And the answerer … is the aboriginal storyteller, whose enterprise is essentially one of understanding.

‘Pinget’s very avant-garde novel of the absurd incorporates the full French novelistic tradition. Like Proust, he has a curé who dabbles in the etymology of place names; like Balzac, he avidly traces the fortunes of little provincial shops through all the ups and downs that gossip traces. The number of anecdotes, of miniature novels, caught in his nets of description cannot be counted; presumably some are expanded elsewhere in Pinget’s oeuvre…. [By] the novel’s end this district, into which enough historical allusion has been insinuated to render it an analogue of France, serves as a model of the world, with all human possibilities somewhere touched upon…. Pinget’s work … seems not only highly accomplished but thoroughly masculine, quite without the eunuchoid air of distress with which too much modern fiction confronts its bride the world.’ — John Updike

 

____
The gang

(l. to r.) The ‘Nouveau Roman’ writers, 1959: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Mauriac, Jérôme Lindon, Robert Pinget, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Ollier, and (not pictured)  Marguerite Duras.

 

_____
Further

Robert Pinget Website
Robert Pinget @ Red Dust Books
Robert Pinget @ Les Editions de Minuit
‘Reading Robert Pinget’
‘Fable’ @ goodreads
‘Pinget’s Fable, récit: An Allegory in the Style of the New, New Novel’
‘Fable’ reviewed @ International Fiction Review’
from Robert Pinget’s journals
‘Using a computer-generated concordance to analyze and document stylistic devices in Robert Pinget’s fable’
‘As I read Robert Pinget …’
‘L’autoréflexion critique de Robert Pinget et de ses personnages-écrivains’
‘La problématique bibliothèque de Robert Pinget’
‘L’ambivalence de Robert Pinget’
‘L’Hypothèse de Robert Pinget ou la littérature émet des doutes’
Buy ‘Fable’

 

___
Extras

Interview de Robert PINGET

Autour de Pinget

Interview de Robert PINGET

 

___
Fans

“One of the most important novelists of the last ten years.” — Samuel Beckett

“If we can imagine a Faulkner who began with the combative intellectual playfulness of Queneau or Jarry‚ or a Sound and the Fury that ends with everyone dissolved in Benjy’s idiocy‚ we start to taste Pinget.” — John Updike‚ The New Yorker

“Brilliant and obsessive, a splendid performance by a writer insufficiently well-known in this country.” — Donald Barthelme

“It can and should be claimed for Pinget that he has produced a sequence of some twenty books over the past three decades‚ all of which observe the kind of stringent laws of discourse and development that we associate with the Beckett oeuvre. . . . But the comparison with Beckett should not be allowed to mask the fact that this is a wholly original and distinctive achievement.” — Stephen Bann, London Review of Books

“Robert Pinget responds to language as though he lived in it. He has an unprecedented way of isolating segments of unreliable information into compact masses of fugitive meaning.” — Dan Graham

 

_________
from Pinget Queer
by David Ruffel

 

This article proposes a rereading of Robert Pinget’s work as seen through the prism of his homosexuality, a proposal that will sound at once both obvious and surprising.

For readers of Pinget it will indeed be obvious. One might, of course, hypothesize the existence of radical “hetero-readers” who have yet to discover the sexuality of books that they nonetheless know inside out. For such readers, then, let us mention by way of introduction the explicit nature of homoeroticism in Fable (1971)1 and Passacaille (1969), the play of transvestism and transsexualism in Baga (1958) and Architruc (1961), and the aristocratic homosexuality of the “gentlemen” in L’Inquisitoire (1962), as well as the more or less explicit homosexuality of all the “masters” and writer characters that the work evokes, the sexualization of the figure of the young boy and the social obsession with pedophilia in a work such as Le Libera (1968), and finally, the question that becomes central in Robert Pinget’s late work, namely that of overcoming his own death, through the fantasized and initiatory transmission from uncle to nephew and from master to young man. For gay and lesbian readers, Robert Pinget’s work is naturally inscribed in the corpus of homosexual literature. For Dennis Cooper, for example, “Pinget was the only gay member of the Nouveau Roman. Pinget was very significant for my work, and his 1971 novel Fable ranks high in my list of top ten favorite novels.” The connection between Pinget and Cooper (and, of course, Tony Duvert) is moreover explicit on many levels, and one might mention, among other things, that Robert Pinget was a reader of William S. Burroughs’s novels.

This article’s proposed reading is nonetheless surprising when formulated in the field of academic (and journalistic) criticism, since Robert Pinget’s work has barely once been read in this way in the sixty years of its existence and reception. Major academic historians such as Madeleine Renouard and Jean-Claude Lieber have made allusions to the homosexuality of individual characters and isolated passages, while the English researcher John Phillips has analyzed the “displaced eroticism” of Fable (1971), but that is about as far as it goes. The relative neglect of Robert Pinget’s work in the last fifteen years has meant that, to the best of my knowledge, it has slipped through the cracks of any rereading by Anglo-American queer or gay studies. Instead, the 1990s and 2000s saw a wealth of metaphysical and religious material being written about his work. As a result, Robert Pinget’s texts have remained “in the closet” for sixty years.

This article intends to bring them out, but before doing so, let us first examine the reasons for this silence. This strange situation is due, first and foremost, to academic criticism, particularly in France but in other countries as well, in which it is more a question of silence than of ignorance. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown, the order of the “closet” that defines the conditions of homosexuality in the twentieth century does not consist in completely hiding one’s homosexuality or in remaining entirely ignorant of that of others. Rather, it introduces uncertainty “in the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit,” or in this case, between that which one knows but does not want to know, that which one does not want to know and does not say, and that which one says without really saying it. Thus, Robert Pinget’s critics knew of his homosexuality without knowing it, read it in his texts without reading it, and did not know how nor wish to tap into it. This disinterest brings us back to the theoretical context of the 1960s and 1970s and to the context of poststructuralism and textualism that eschewed any references to the author, as well as a (French) universalism that was wary of any differentialism.

(cont.)

 

___
Book

Robert Pinget Fable
Red Dust

‘Pinget’s novels (The Libera Me Domine, Passacaglia) have a sometimes unreadable density and a difficult illogic to them: they are unclassifiable and not about anything in particular (“”The initiate finds himself in the age of passion and lacking any sense of discrimination””). But in this slender–61 pages–book, and in Pinget’s others, a certain authority operates throughout, an authority that slowly reveals itself as unquestionable. At first, the “”fable”” here is totally befuddling. A village (when? where?) appears to have been overrun and decimated by a catastrophe; what remains is occasionally depredated by a cannibal band. A lone traveler, Maille (sometimes he’s called Miette), sleeps at night in the hay of a barn and by day investigates the scene. Flares, sudden and fantastic ones without warning, break out within the prose: bitter denunciation, blasphemy, fatalism, copulating angels, a gypsy, a “”sedentary man,”” a slovenly and licentious poetess-witch, a circumcised Jesus. The words “”I never loved you”” ring out repeatedly and dolorously–God’s? The “”fable”” begins to seem half a suggestion that we truly occupy only our humiliation–and half a parable about a “”blind Narcissus”” (the artist? Jesus?) who is “”tempted”” by the Bible: “”Suddenly he stops seeing everything as consecurive, painfully linked together until its relentless end, and begins to see it as a suspended event, open dwelling-places where he can go from one to the other, he finds himself in each one, his place will not be taken from him by the tribulations to come, the accidental no longer triumphs.”” These might be taken as a good set of instructions on how to read this book, with its succeeding yet independent metaphors. But, whatever the work may mean, when the traveler Mallle returns to Pinget’s central location–the country village of Fantoine, where all stories, legible or not, dead or alive, are known and accepted–the touch is one of gentle fatalism. . . and very moving. Extremely difficult work, but quite haunting and provocative.’ — Kirkus Reviews

____
Excerpt

Looking for somewhere to spend the night he stopped at an abandoned barn, went in, made a hole in the hay and fell asleep in it, his knapsack under his head.
—But someone had seen him in the moonlight, a belated traveler.
—There are times of initial despair which alternate with others when the soul is liberated but little by little the alternation stops and that’s when the head begins to rot.
—Did he think about it before he fell asleep or did he only count the beams in the roof.
—And that other belated person.
—The town had evaporated as a result of a cataclysm, nothing was left but the dross.
—The people were camping in little groups in the ruins or making their way into the fields.
—This future to be dissolved.
—A man called Miaille or whatever but the time isn’t ripe.
—Poppies in the morning were reddening in the oats.
—So the night is over.
—He goes off to the blazing meadow and he says poppies for the children, fading nosegays, far away years, far away and pleasant.
—He takes some cheese out of his knapsack and a bottle of wine.
—Naked men with leather belts come out of the river and make their way towards the corpse lying on the bank. They carve it up with the knives hanging from their belts and start to devour it. Their leader has reserved the phallus for himself and he makes short work of it before starting on the groin.
—Or those clusters of delphiniums when June starts yellowing in the fields.
—A little kitchen garden full of aromatic herbs.
—It seems he didn’t go straight to sleep, but counted the beams in the roof, attaching the day’s images to them, the poppies, the naked men, the ruins of the town.
—The corpse on the river bank was that of a boy with white skin and blue hair, as beautiful as ivory and ultramarine.
—But the men attacked it again, carved it up again, devoured it all but its head which they hung from the leader’s saddle. They went off at a gallop.
—And he saw the people coming up behind and all the golden landscape, his beard was covered with poppies, his eyes were open.
—It was the images of the night that made his head heavy now, all the pleasant years, far away and pleasant, like a ton of vomited sugar or a stinking defecation.
—The past to be dissolved likewise.
—Little by little the alternation stops.
—Very little landscape, some yellow on the plain, a few trees, the time is still not ripe.
—This present which made him speak, not to know any more what it’s composed of.
—I can see that rotting, bleeding head attached to the saddle.
—And always the groups of exiles picnicking, tins of food, greasy papers, pallid faces, they go off then stop then go off again.
—The town still smoking.
—A house that was ours he said and here I am among the exiles eating dry bread and weeping endlessly from one stop to another, from one night to another, untl the day when this possession will be no more than a photo in my pocket between my passport and a postcard.
—And no longer see.
—And only just hear.
—Just a muffled, inarticulate lament, perceive it piecemeal then lose it then pick up its harmonics again on the threadbare old string of the instrument eviscerated by the barbarians.
—Lament, lament again, the poppies are fading and the photo is yellowing in his pocket, it was put there yesterday, centuries of avalanches, of clashes, of mortal wounds.
—This Miaille 1 or whatever his name is who found himself alone in the barn which he later recognized, he found his way back there by instinct, he weeps until morning and then until the following night, he can’t bring himself to leave the place, an old conformist, time has done its work, made into the past what even yesterday was still the unique present.
—He went the rounds of the barn again, and the stable and the farm buildings, still carrying his knapsack for fear that the other man, the moonlight observer, might come and take it from him.
—It contains neither wine nor cheese but letters, letters, diary notes, laundry bills, eating-house bills, notes written in haste, goes the rounds of the farm buildings, pulls up a nettle here, replaces a stone there, mortal wound, the merciless sun dissolves all that remained of a tenderness in which no one recognizes himself any more.
—A little kitchen garden full of aromatic herbs.
—When June starts yellowing in the fields, the delphiniums, unless they are his tears, turn blue, the sky is reflected in them.
—When June brought the table back under the arbor, the midday and evening aperitif, old conformist, yesterday’s old tenderness in which neither furtive kisses nor hours spent by the fireside recognize themselves any more.
—And why is it that that town, those ruins, why is it that those exiles in the fields who speak another tongue, only perceive it piecemeal — never spoken that language — why is it that they come back like someone else’s obsession, that of the man in the moonlight or of the person who is absent.
—There were absences in my life which were a comfort he said, then there was a presence that ruined me.
—Still going the rounds of the farm buildings, he pulls up a nettle here, replaces a stone there, when all of a sudden everything crumbles and the voice comes to him out of the ruins, he recognizes its timbre and its harmonics on that threadbare old string of the eviscerated instrument, he runs, it was a mirage, the sun was setting just as he was waking out of a nightmare, step by step going the rounds of the kitchen garden, the aromatic herbs of death, there is no possible time any more.
—A blue cluster in which the phallus flowered, a white and pink rod, balls the color of Virginia tobacco.
—One single mouthful the leader made of it before starting on the groin where the flesh is so tender, blood was dripping down his hairy chest and down his stomach.
—These sorts of public images.
—To get a taste of other secrets as bitter as gall in the shadow of the years to be dissolved, this death accompanied by the aromatic herbs of the little garden overrun and invaded by the image and then by its own shadow and then by the never-ending darkness, the delphiniums and the corpse merge into a single faded sheaf that you can only just make out in the moonlight.
—Then he lay down in the grass, he tried to go to sleep but the oppressively hot sun made him get up again and sit down under the nearby elm tree, he could see two people dressed in white robes walking along the road, one had his arm round the other’s shoulder, he believed he could hear them composing a difficult letter, first learning it by heart, the one correcting the other, the other inspiring the one, and with a common voice repeating the phrase dragged up out of the fathomless depths of their consciousnesses, they disappeared into the wood.
—Where the only thing that might happen would be an attack by savages but an attack so thoroughly confused with the agonies of the nightmare that the recipient, the reader purified by the lost years, would grasp nothing of it but a vague grief transcribed in puerile terms, no symbols and even fewer reminiscences.
—From his knapsack he once again extracts the so-called fatal letter and in rereading it discovers nothing but an adventure transcribed in the wretched, vulgar wording of a popular almanac, some charlatan must have dictated it, some rupture in time must have appropriated it and concealed it in the depths of its crevice like a secret that has no connection with the intangible peace that is his own and was such in his immemorial future.
—Likewise to be dissolved.
—To be dissolved and sown in the surrounding fields like the ashes of a Narcissus in one of those naive prints, a caricature for the use of concierges, those females who guard nothing but the imaginary.
—The voice in the ruins, then, was double, dictating the letter that was in love with itself, reverberating over and beyond the herb garden on to the road like the steps of the people walking along it which simulate a language, such effrontery, but what’s impossible about it in the circumstances in which only the person weeping in the grass turns over in his memory the poisoned phrase.
—Two figures in white robes, their long hair plaited with oats and cornflowers, they went into the wood for their evening copulation, long ecstasy repeated until morning when their genitals separated in the dew.
—Come out of the wood as the sun is crossing the clearing and shake themselves in the poppies and then lick each other, their morning ablutions, then from the hollow of a tree pull out some honeycomb, their first meal.
—But another atmosphere, that of a tormented conscience which only accepts controlled images, distorted in the direction of possible salvation, an old chimera when candor used to triumph on Easter mornings, the initiate finds himself back in the age of passions and lacking any sense of discrimination.
—This obscure navigation between senses and reason which so far as we are concerned is no more than unadmitted duty, a rigidity that is even more unpracticed than it is sterile.
—A blackbird whistled three notes.
—There would be no more elm trees or farm buildings, there would be nothing but a room in the town smoking under its ruins, spared by a miracle in reverse, a deceptive refuge, a charnel house, death had been there from the first day and had gone unnoticed thanks to the neighboring premises not yet affected by the cataclysm, a sort of routine that aped life had become established.
—It has to be accepted as it is, now, death in the midst of the ruins, going the fantastic rounds of a cemetery in which the only things that move are chimeras, the picnickers are sitting on the graves having their snacks before moving on to the next cemetery, that’s the way they go about in the country that was once theirs, leaving behind them here and there those who can no longer follow, they get put under a slab with a flower in their hands, they’ve earned their rest.
—The confused mass of possibilities before he yielded to what had to emerge, but what it was he didn’t know, even though he had a presentiment of something serious’he could no more than barely calculate its weight, tons of tears and vomit, maybe some connection with the destruction of the town and the hastily-erected cemeteries as if from the very first day, that of its foundation, this city had not been menaced, madness to have built it within reach of the lava but the good weather had caused irresponsibility to triumph, years of sun and unruly and somewhat affected joy, they’d got the better of reason.
—Looking for somewhere to spend the night he stopped at an abandoned barn, went in and suddenly in spite of the darkness recognized a certain layout, unchanged proportions which made him rediscover the echo of his steps on the mud floor then in the hay where he made a hole not to sleep in, sleep forsakes unhappiness, but to think about those lost years.
—As for the belated traveler he was none other than that Miaille of bygone years, with blue eyes and blond beard, years of waiting, years of nothingness.
—Watched himself stumbling in the darkness, soul adrift, hole in the hay like the lowest stable lad, he recognizes the echo of his footsteps on the mud floor.
—As for the belated traveler he was none other than a foreigner, they’d commented on his accent at the bistro, from then on kept out of the way and prowled about at night in the moonlight.
—That hope to be dissolved.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, I know, right? You’re obviously welcome. That does make sense to me, yes. I have a basic problem with conventionally made films, and ‘Challengers’ seems to be one, so it’s easy to put it on the wait list. A lot, and I mean a lot of the slave guys on those sites have being a ‘good boy’, whatever they mean by that, among their biggest dreams. I guess goodness seems really kinky when you’re not. How do you manifest your furry aspect? I mean is it private or do you commingle whence furried with your fursona kin? ** Adem Berbic, Well, I guess ‘sounds’ was the key word there, haha. Awesome, yes, just hit me up with your schedule and coordinates when the time comes. Time-release hugs back atcha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I thought so too, well, obviously. I haven’t yet checked the local gig agenda. There’s gotta be something. Pancakes do get old at a certain point, sadly, although happily for one’s waistline. That Kissenger kiss was highly convincing, thank you. Love going way back in time and making God listen to the first Ramones album before He creates the universe, G. ** David Ehrenstein, No NY Times access for lowly me, but I think I see the point. That’s wild about the ‘Funeral’/’Ran’ crossover. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey! I’m in a big rush today because I have an imminent meeting across Paris, but, for now, I loved the new PT episode top to bottom, and I say more in detail tomorrow. The Daniel O’Sullivan ending was inspired. Oh, yeah, people seemed to be very into ‘The Bear’ when it first popped up. And how is it? ** Lucas, Hi! No, I totally get the taxing, exhausting thing even in theory, or in memory of my own school days. Probably it’ll just become second nature or a habit you can just kind of tolerate soon? I guess good old patience is the virtue that needs to step up at the moment? I’m sorry, pal. Don’t let it screw with everything else. Okay, I’ll have a look/think. I have to scramble because we have a big hopefully positive film meeting shortly, but I will. I hope your today is a whole lot better. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi, Tyler. Torture … that’s definitely not good. Wow, you didn’t even prepare for your comedy act, you just let it fly and improvised? That’s exciting. I feel like stand up comedy could be so much more than most people seem to want it to be. Andy Kaufman, etc. ** Bill, Hi. I did a Strandbeest post ages ago. I wonder if he’s gotten his beests to be more, I don’t know, versatile. You keep happening upon these books that I’ve never heard of. What’s your method of finding seekable books? I’ll look into that one. Thanks! ** Steve, Curious to hear about the possible film series if it gels, obviously. What do I know, but I have a hard time getting with the idea that AI could develop consciousness and a complex emotional life, etc., so it’s hard to imagine its art being any more deep or vast than, oh, Jeff Koons or that sort of thing, but, yeah, who knows. Glad the podcast paid dividends. ** PL, Good, then hi P again. Glad you dug the array. Right, I saw a video of the Trump animatronic, and it is kind of lumpy below the neck. Great, I will go look at the new additions to your portfolio. I have a meeting in, eek, a few minutes, so I’ll do that later. Everyone, You have the golden opportunity to go check out some new works by the honorable and talented galore PL, and you can do that right here. Until the near future, my friend. ** Justin D, Yeah, right? Ouch: your imagined machine combo, but also oooh. I’m happy ‘DiV’ worked out for you. All hail short novels. As I only speak one language fluently, I don’t know, but as someone who’s been translated, I think it’s wholly possible to translate the essence and general effect of a work, but I don’t it’s possible to translate the work’s outfit. My day was mellow, this and that, nothing worth much of a sentence. But today might be. How was yours? ** Måns BT, Hey! Probably that feeling will go away, or at least it’ll evolve interestingly into something more beneficial? ‘It Came From Kuchar’ is really fun, yeah. Agreement. Zac and I have a big meeting this morning intended to begin to start solving the film problems, and it could just make things worse, but we’re hoping it will start clearing the way forward at least. I’m with you on ‘Tenet’. For me Nolan’s films are just a lot of technically proficient bluster and razzle dazzle layered with the superficial appearance of ‘meaning’ and so on. Except maybe for ‘Memento’, but I haven’t watched since it came out, and it might have devolved by now. So, yeah. The whole ‘new Kubrick’ hype about him is maddeningly inattentive and dumb. ** Diesel Clementine, That was very epic and sad and other things. If I wasn’t borderline already late for an appointment this morning, I’d speak more intricately about it. Thank you. ** ellie, Hi! College is now in bed and sleeping or falling asleep and you can tiptoe away without a care in the world? Yay, if so. Awesome about the Acker piece, and, of course, the potential party. Nice! Thanks for the linked to add. Everyone, A late and very worthy addition to the machine shebang yesterday from ellie is here. Greatest day! ** Okay. I’ve restored an old post that spotlights one of my very, very favorite novels. It would probably be in my top five all-time favorite novels if I had a concrete top five. And Robert Pinget is the most inexplicably least known and read of the great Nouveau Roman authors, so there’s that reason to check it out too. And etc., etc. See you tomorrow.

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Created to provide a “novel way of transferring a kiss through interactive digital media,” the Kissenger works by first capturing the pressure patterns you create with your lips before recreating it, with the help of actuators, on your other half’s globular kissing assistant. The Kissenger can also facilitate two other modes of interaction as well: human-to-robot kissing and human-to-virtual character physical/virtual kissing.

 

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On November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Time traveller 0 and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveller from the year 2036. One of the first things he did was post pictures of his time machine and its operations manual. As the weeks went by, more and more people began questioning him about why he was here, the physics of time travel and his thoughts about our time. He also posted on other forums including the now non-existent Art Bell site. In his posts John Titor entertained, angered, frightened and even belittled those who engaged him in conversation. On March 21, 2001, John Titor told us he would be leaving our and returning to 2036. After that, he was never heard from again. Speculation and investigation about who John Titor was and why he was online continues to this day.

 

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some dronesounds realised with the weird sound gegerator (built by subtle noise maker) combined with the rainbowmachine by earthquaker devices and the echopark delay by line6.

 

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The Chopper

 

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The Lucid Dream Machine gives you the ability to take control of the action in your dreams without waking up, it’s like your awake inside your dreams and fully aware of the fact that your actually dreaming. The machine works by flashing two red LEDs in your closed eyelids while your sleeping, these make your eyes receive light, and send the information to the brain making it alert but not affecting your sleep, you gain consciousness and wake up in a dream. Once you hit that point you can do whatever you want. You have free access to the natural reserves of Adrenaline and Melamine which your body holds “people often take heavy drugs like “Methamphetamine” to unlock these magic potions”.

 

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Cat Mew was a mouse scaring machine that made cat noises. It was introduced in 1943 and was moderately successful for a period of 8 months before its novelty wore off.

 

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Disney Imagineers reveal their most sophisticated audio animatronic to date, the new Abraham Lincoln for Disneyland’s revised “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” attraction. The old Lincoln figure had 6 functions in the face, but this new one includes 19. Lincoln’s mouth is now able to form vowels such as “O”.

 

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Roxy Paine ‘Scumak No. 2’ (2000), aluminum, computer, conveyor, electronics, extruder, stainless steel, polyethylene, teflon, 890 x 73 x 276 inches

 

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Employees searched for 62-year-old Jose Melena after he went missing during an early morning shift at Bumble Bee Foods. He had been performing maintenance in a 35-foot long oven at the plant when a co-worker filled the pressure cooker with more than five tonnes of canned tuna and switched it on. The colleague mistakenly believed Melena was in the bathroom – but he was locked inside the machine, which reached a temperature of 132C. His body was only found two hours later when the oven was turned off and opened.

 

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Are you ready to take your sexual experience to a new level? Fucking machines are the next generation in sex toys. These virtual lovers offer you complete control over your sensations and give you access to total sexual gratification on demand. Fucking machines are gaining so much popularity because of how well they satisfy your most carnal desires. Men are able to redefine their sexual experience and get the ass fucking of their lifetime and as much pleasure as they desire for as long as they want it.

 

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Smoke ring machine

 

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Scientist Rhawn Joseph sues NASA, alleges it’s failing to investigate alien life on Mars. Rhawn Joseph is suing the space agency after it released photos last week unexplained showing machine parts on Mars. Joseph claims NASA is failing to investigate alien life and wants the rover to go back and snap more photos of the mysterious machinery. According to NASA, they’re just rocks. But Joseph, a key writer with the online Journal of Cosmology, says the “rocks” are “clearly machine parts, and, in one case, a helmet obviously worn at one time by a worker with these machines.” He has now filed a lawsuit in a California court to make NASA examine it more closely. “The refusal to take close up photos from various angles …to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable” his suit adds.

 

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The K’nex Pinball has been created by instructables user Alocke, and includes a numb rod different routes for the balls to take including some excellent lifts which have been created to transport the balls from certain locations within the pinball machine.

 

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A javascript counter automates the On Kawara time-based “Date paintings” from his Today series. The script begins on January 4, 1966, the date of Kawara’s first painting, and counts upward toward the actual date checked in the operating system clock. The CSS code produces the look of the paintings, using futura bold typography on a black background. The project will be completed on the date of On Kawara’s death, at which time a new variable will be added to the code to make the counter end (reset) on that day.

 

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Artist Rebecca Horn writes of the Peacock Machine, “sparked by the cries of the courting male peacocks, a machine in the center of the eight-sided temple begins to stir and spreads its long metal feelers fan-like into the room, in deep concentration, startled as it brushes against the wall, soothed by the sound of the golden waterfall, the opened semicircular fan dips down to the floor protectively closing off the room”.

 

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Walking Head is a pneumatically driven robot by the Australian performance artist Stelarc. It has six legs and awaits the spectators in a small gallery and performs a brief choreography when someone stands directly in front of him.

 

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Hope, Arkansas — A seven-year-old boy was killed while on the Sizzler, a ride at the Easter Week 2007 carnival in the southern Arkansas town of Hope. Allegedly the boy and his mother were late arriving at the ride, and a miscommunication prevented their chair from locking properly before the ride was started. The boy and his mother both fell out shortly after the Sizzler began it’s run, and the boy was struck in the head not once, but twice. “[The operator] tried to stop it, but it was spinning so fast the boy was falling out of the chair, and the mother is trying to get him, but he is too heavy,” the boys uncle told the Hope Star. “When he was on the floor (ground), he stood up, and the chair hit him.” The boy stood again only to be struck in the head once more. He was quickly transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead from “traumatic brain injury.”

 

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Henk van Kuijk, director of Dutch industrial company Vanku, evidently decided that squatting/ kneeling and shoving the bricks into place on the ground was just a little too slow, so he invented the Tiger Stone paving machine. The road-wide device is fed loose bricks, and lays them out onto the road as it slowly moves along. A quick going-over with a tamper, and you’ve got an instant brick road.

 

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Felix Thorn creates musical sculptures. With a background in fine arts and sculpture, an overriding love of electronic, breakcore and experimental music, and an intensely creative spirit, Felix builds machines that embody aspects of the mechanical and digital, creating music which is both acoustic and synthesized, as well as visually and aurally interesting. Not to mention beautiful. Musical pieces are created with Apple’s Logic Studio and sometimes Bidule (made by Canadian-based commercial software company Plogue Arts and Technology) and the sculptures are scavanged from a variety of sources and musical instruments (eg: an old piano, guitars, drums, an old shoe polisher brush, a towel rack…). Thorn also incorporates LED lights into his sculptures that flash on and off in time with various beats. Parts of Felix’s Machines frequently break, or come undone and this is all part of the natural process. (Sometimes double-sided tape can be a robot’s best friend) Thorn, who was born in 1985 and lives in southeast London, UK, continually builds new robots, adds to and revises his existing machines, and is apparently in the process of developing a method of incorporating wind instrument sounds into his mechanical orchestra.

 

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This 1932 Italian petrol-engine powered horse had mechanical steel pipe legs. It was said to be able to traverse relatively rough terrain. However it is hard to imagine the 5-horsepower motor supporting much in the way of speed. Observers report it more closely resembled a grasshopper than a horse. The creator, Alzetta planned to create a higher horsepower model, but it does not seem that this ever came to pass.

 

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Mark Pauline presents a video of a SRL show in San Francisco entitled A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom (1984). Filmed and edited by Leslie Gladsjø, the video depicts scenes from the Apocalypse. The show begins with an effigy of Jesus riding into the arena on a rocket propelled go-cart. There is a large machine with a canon that acts as a flamethrower and other various machines that attack each other as well as the other props in the show. The cast of props includes a giant flying saucer with a flaming eyeball at its center, a giant clown face, and a life-size depiction of The Last Supper that is eventually set aflame. The show concludes with the total destruction and graceful collapse of all the machines.

 

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Shiri – Japanese for buttocks – has three main parts: a silicon skin, a pair of actuators and a microphone. The actuators serve as Shiri’s muscles while the microphone senses how the skin is touched. Stroke it and it will clench its cheeks; spank it and it will quiver. Inventor Nobuhiro Takahashi says he invented Shiri because he’s aware that humans don’t just communicate verbally; we also have physical reactions or expressions. Takahashi also said that Shiri is a great starting point because our butts have large muscles and thus make more visible movements.

 

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During an illusion where magician David Copperfield attempts to walk through the rotating blades of a 12-foot high industrial fan, the fan and its platform were being rotated by one of David’s illusion technicians. Just prior to David himself walking through the fan, [the assistant] was accidentally pulled into the vortex of the moving fan blades. Audience members watched in horror as the assistant was sucked into the fan, before another staff member rushed to turn it off. An audience member said: ‘One of the assistants dropped to the floor. The curtain came down partially. Blood was everywhere, and the other assistants dragged the victim back. Then the curtain closed all the way.’

 

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Chain making machine, chicken wire making machine, Spongebob Squarepants toy molding machine, log cutting machine, pipe forming machine, pretzel making machine, ice cream sandwich making machine, Pop Tart making machine, bottle recycling machine.

 

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Cabaret Mechanical Theater started life as a slightly odd crafts shop called Cabaret in Falmouth, Cornwall. It was opened in 1979 by Sue Jackson and sold Peter Markey’s simple wooden toys alongside knitwear and ceramics. With the arrival of Paul Spooner, it wasn’t long before the mechanical pieces started displacing the other crafts.

 

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These are the first pictures of the two teenage boys seriously injured after their carriage on a spinning fairground ride broke off and flipped over. Danny Keogh and Conor Baker, both 16, were on the spinning Mega Bounce Frog ride at Billy Bates Fairground in Leicester when the terrifying accident happened on Saturday evening. One boy was catapulted into the air, while the other was crushed under the weight of the car.

 

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In 1897, crossing the Atlantic Ocean by steam ship was a lengthy and, in bad weather, stomach-churning proposition. In the days before over-the-counter Dramamine, engineers like Frederick Augustus Knapp believed a “roller boat” – a vessel capable of driving on top of the waves – was the answer to passengers’ woes. His cigar-shaped vessel, 34 metres long, 7 metres tall, was essentially a cylinder inside a cylinder; a stationary passenger cabin around which a giant paddle revolved. The ship was welded together at Polson Iron Works, a shipbuilding company in Toronto, located south of the Esplanade between Frederick and Sherbourne streets. In trials Knapp’s Roller Boat never managed to travel above a crawl, well short of the 200 km/h predicted by its owner. After a brief stint as a ferry, the roller boat was buried under Lake Shore Blvd. by infill. It’s still down there, apparently.

 

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Mr. Machine is a once popular children’s mechanical toy originally manufactured by the Ideal Toy Company in 1960. Mr. Machine was a robot-like mechanical man wearing a top hat. The body had a giant windup key at the back. When the toy was wound up it would “walk”, swinging its arms and repeatedly ringing a bell mounted on its front; and after every few steps emit a mechanical “Ah!”, as if it were speaking. The toy stood about 18 inches tall (roughly 46 cm).

 

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Accident

 

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Artist Tim Hawkinson combines his face and facial expressions in a mechanized sculpture, Emoter, included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. “It’s something that emotes and it’s motorized and it is an emoter. So why not call it Emotor?”

 

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These are creepy messages. They all came from a number that was from a Verizon landline in thorndale, Tx. They all tried calling the number Bach and it was disconnected (in each case the calls had been made within an hour before they tried to call it) None of them know anybody in Thorndale, Tx.

 

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I’m an Animatronic Designer or Creature FX artist. I do movie FX in the traditional way, it’s all in camera. The way they used to do it in the movies my generation grew up with. I started out as a Model Maker at a company called Artem. After a couple of years there, I started to focus more and more on Animatronics, learning from the freelance people that worked there of and on. That allowed me to further my skills and get recognized by my colleagues. This proved more important than tailoring my portfolio. — Gustav Hoegen

 

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This is from the 1960’s. It’s a vintage hard plastic Hong Kong import practical joke. Overall, the outhouse measures 5-½ inches high. An outhouse by other names is a privy, etc. It’s where hillbillies in our own US of A used to use prior to having running water in the home — it is generally in REAL LIFE made of wood, but this little mechanical toy is made of plastic — am sure some camps out in the middle of nowhere, etc., still have outhouses… It is ever so cute, so tempting to NOT unlatch that door to see cute silly smirking little boy — reminds me like a billiken is doing, although we KNOW what it LOOKS like he is doing…but wait!! You go to unlatch the door, he turns around towards you and pees at you! Mischievous or what?

 

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Steam Machine Music is a homebuilt mechanical instrument by Morten Riis made mostly from vintage Meccano parts. The instrument is driven by a steam engine that provides the whole instrument with energy. The sound material is generated using two music boxes that are programmable with perforated paper strips, a small Zither – a stringed instrument played with Meccano pulley wheels thus generating continuous drones instead of the normal plucking of the strings. Furthermore a dynamo that generates alternating current, which drives a small Lego engine which output is feed directly to a mixing desk generating a continuous tone which frequency is depended of the speed of the steam engine. Additionally a “drum” machine is incorporated which is built with Meccano parts that can be programmed to consist of up to four simple rhythm patterns; and the most important sound generating part is the sound of the machine itself, the rhythmic patterns and pulsating drones of the steam engine, the squeaking of the gear trains and the rattling of the whole structure is all important parts of the sonic experience. The instability of the entire mechanism is extremely noticeable, and displays and reflects the physicality of the machine to an extreme degree. Everything is imminently about to go wrong, a cogwheel that jams, a screw that loosens itself, a chain falling of, water running out, the loss of steam pressure, gas running out. One could state that this is physical mechanical glitch music, but in contrast to its digital counterpart, Steam Machine Music questions the whole practice and conceptualizing of machine music in a historical perspective that points to the fact that machines always have been malfunctioning, they have always broke down, there has always been a ‘real’ physical mechanism that challenged the predetermined functionality of the machine.

 

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Turn your kitchen into an IHOP with the ChefStack automatic pancake machine. For the list price of $3,500, it can spit out perfectly shaped pancakes at the rate of 200 per hour.

 

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The Darwin-Coxe Machine, circa 1900-1920s, in which the insane were swung until quiet. It was located at The Narrenturm, a home for mental patients in Vienna, Austria.

 

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The Marble Machine is powered by hand, and works by raising steel marbles through the machine into multiple feeder tubes, where they are then released from height via programmable release gates, falling and striking a musical instrument below. Instruments played by marbles striking them include a vibraphone, bass guitar, cymbal, and emulated kick drum, high hat and snare drum sounds using contact microphones. The music score is stored on two programmable wheels that utilise Lego Technic beams and stud connectors to trigger armatures to release the marbles.

 

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A 6-year-old boy died after undergoing an MRI exam at a New York-area hospital when the machine’s powerful magnetic field jerked a metal oxygen tank across the room, crushing the child’s head. The force of the device’s 10-ton magnet is about 30,000 times as powerful as Earth’s magnetic field, and 200 times stronger than a common refrigerator magnet. The routine imaging procedure was performed after Colombini underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor last week. Westchester Medical Center officials said he was under sedation at the time of the deadly accident.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. They must be expensive. Not entirely sure about the Spiderman fetish. I’m not very versed in that franchise. I assume there’s some kind of ‘good guy’ being defeated by the ‘bad guy’ power trip thing going on. There was something about ‘Challengers’ that warded me off, and it sounds like that was a good call. Cool about the 4chan thing, I guess, but only one?! Haha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Dominik and Dominique, it has a nice ring to it. Not too much to ask, no. I haven’t seen a live gig in ages. I wonder who’s coming. I’ll check. My gratitude about the cooler weather is still in the newly de-virginized realm. Assuming you’ve woken from your nap by now, welcome back! Love turning your kitchen into an IHOP, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hm, interesting Ballardian point. ‘Red Desert’s’ fog is still the gold standard. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. My PV voyage got tragically delayed one more day aka today. (My fucked up ear was acting up yesterday, and I daren’t miss the stereoscopic effects). Yeah, sucks about the opera. Scott Walker was going to do the music for it. But then he got too sick, and that was one of the reasons why it crashed. ** Lucas, Hi. School would be so nice if it wasn’t so much work. Theoretically nice, at least. But I’m glad it seems okay so far, and ace on the seeming new friend. It’s telling that judgy people never seem to judge themselves. Oh, god, P.E., school’s greatest nightmare. At my high school, they let students who didn’t want to participate sit along a wall and read books for the hour and get a guaranteed D grade aka a passing but very shitty grade. Maybe they’d let you do that? I think there are a number of online lit zines that also publish art. I think SCAB does, for instance? I can have a look if you want. ** Tyler Ookami, Hey! Glad you came back. Except for the karaoke skills (although I did sing for a couple of bands) and the drum kit (I played guitar) and the comedian interest (for me it was acting, I took acting classes), you sound not unlike the young me. How do you try the stand up comedian thing? Are there, like, open mic things or … ? There’s all kinds of promise and pleasure happening in you. ** Adem Berbic, Adem, old chum. Jeez, it’s been ages. So great to see you! London sounds a lot more lively than Paris where everything kind of stopped dead in respect (?) for the Olympics, but we’re awakening. Ad Vat … no, I don’t think I’ve read that person. I’ll check around. Do the Zoom book club thing. It’s fun. I swear by mine. Yes, both Zac and I should be here then. We’re going to the States, but not until the beginning of October. How great! I can’t wait to see you guys! Hugs and love right back to you and the assembled! ** Diesel Clementine, Oh, now you’re ‘ie’. Weren’t you ‘ei’ before, or am I spacing out? I don’t know about the memory thing, I was just thinking aloud. I just thought if you made the memory yourself it would stick better and longer than if you received the memory by proxy, but I don’t know. If I see the ‘Alien’, it’ll either be in 4DX or in the worst manifestation possible on a plane flight’s little, tiny screen. That’s how blockbusters should be treated. Maybe. The opera was really kind of complicated and hard to describe in a nutshell. Let’s see … there would have been a hotel onstage, a fully built hotel, furnished in great detail inside and out, but the audience would only see the facade, and they would hear the opera happening inside the hotel with complex spacialaization tech that would allow them to hear where inside the hotel things were happening and sometimes they’d see bits of things happening through a window or something. And stuff like that. But more complicated. No, I haven’t looked at it yet. I’m really slow. I will. You weren’t meandering, and I’m glad you sent it. ** Uday, Hi. You know, I know ultra-little about opera. I’ve hardly seen any. The opera thing was Gisele’s and Dominique’s idea as they’re both really into opera. And they liked that I didn’t know how operas work. LA! My hometown! I’ve seen both the ‘LA Plays Itself’ doc and the Halsted film. How long is your layover? I hope you managed to get out of LAX and see things. Where next? ** Harper, Odd, the comments. I know nothing about imgur either. Strange, but certainly good, about your grandma’s fake request. Awesome that you found your way into Joy Williams! I think she’s my favorite living American fiction writer. Great call: your analysis of her dialogue. She’s a wonder. I’m so glad you like her work. ‘Concise and confusing at the same time’: the absolute ultimate. ** PL, Hi, P, if I may call you that. Oh, sure, there are bestiality guys on those sites. Not a ton. And mostly it’s slaves saying ‘I’ll even do bestiality, that’s how submissive I am’. There are furries there, for sure. Honestly, the only reason there haven’t been many here is because their profile texts generally aren’t so interesting and are overly to the point and are usually kind of all the same. They mostly seem to just want to ‘rawr’ at each other and cuddle. I’m mostly looking for odd and oddly written profile texts when I search there. Oh, yeah, like the Lion King-like furries. There are a lot of those. I like the guys who want to be dolphins, but dolphins aren’t furry, so I don’t know if they count. I’m not on Twitter, but the Suolaxier thing looks interesting at the tiny peek that Twitter allows non-Twitter people to take sometimes. My take on furries … I don’t know, it’s cool, it’s fascinating. I have friends who are furries, and I do want to sit down and query them heavily about furrydom one of these days. I’m happy and grateful that the slave posts have input into your work. That’s really the ultimate compliment that the blog’s stuff can get for me, so thank you for saying so. I’ll check out the Marcell Jankovics short after I’m out of here. Thank you! Always a pleasure to get to talk with you too. ** nat, Cool, glad her work entered you. Yes, no need for prim and proper behavior around me, obviously. Although prim and proper is full of interest as well. Me too: I like creating word-based things from video games. And I made a video game with Zac and the musician Puce Mary, but it’s not finished yet. Egoyan’s fall down isn’t all that slow, if I’m remembering right. Right, visiting friends are always asking me to recommend an old fashioned French cuisine restaurant, and I don’t know squat about them, and no one I know here ever eats at them. Whenever I happen to walk by one, there’s never any actual French person eating there who’s under, like, 70 years old. Later gator. ** Right. What’s today’s post about again … oh, right, machines. See you tomorrow.