Any Old Tuesday 4

Dear Void,

Again, the Rain. We’re all on high alert here on the eastern seaboard of Australia. The general mood is being described as ‘flood-weary,’ since it’s only been a month since the major flooding and it looks like we’re in for more. There’s water seeping down the sandstone walls under my wood-paned windows here in the HDR studio but otherwise we are safe and dry.

* * * *

Here’s a quick overview of my reading to date. I talk about reading in almost every post. So far in 2022 I’ve read or scrutinised*:

Marjorie Perloff’s “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight.” 2009

An abridged eighteenth century English translation from the French of Novels, Tales and Stories, by Margaret de Valois, of Navarre, 1725

Lisa Robertson’s ‘Time in the Codex’ in Nilling : Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias, 2012.

Michael Taussig’s chapter on ‘Mimetic Excess’ in Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown., 2020. 

JL Austin’s first lecture in How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962).

* See here my method of scrutinising text

* * * *

I’m working on a new piece that is based on a form I created during my Master’s: a biopsy poem that takes as its basis small cut fragments from reproductions of the manuscript. What is left after the cut is a collection of textual whisps, letters and marks struggling to utter coherently, though often still able to relay their phonemes, suggestions of where they’ve come from. Then I suture those fragments to lines from other text which act as a sort of brace, and together they create a new scaffolded cento. 

Just as Howe’s language games with the titles written on her mother’s bookmarks and which come materially from Yeats’ utterances regarded directly for their intrinsic references, so the seemingly ‘incompatible intrinsic relations’ (Howe, 59) of the assemblage of quotes can be regarded for their intrinsic references to their function as new textual support of old text.

That’s my thinking around it as at this moment.

ln the patriarchal ideology through which the woman may take voice of her own [stet]

as implied by the scene of Erotes, one with a whip, chasing a youth, presumably the owner of the vase and of the grave

propagandam : quemadmodum & Moses fecit cum pertot dies in montis secessu moratus esset

ennobles her own nobility by her learning, wit, and virtues, accompanying her consort.

“I ask pardon for scribbling in yr Laps Book. The Author is so disengenious, etc.” 

vous n'aurez de moi que ces quatre lignes aujourd’hui* 

"All Scriblers poor, who write to eat    “

*you will only have these four lines from me today.

Work-in-progress: Untitled (2022) manuscript biopsy sutured to other text including an article on Susan Howe, a book on urns and imagery, Bacon’s De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, Dallaway’s ‘shabby’ 1803 edition of Lady Mary’s letters, a Sotheby’s auction catalogue 1928, The Complete Letters of Rabutin-Bussy, Harrowby MS 81 (Wortley MS VIII).

Au revoir, Void. Stay dry.

Jx