More copies, slow reading and 'I read fate's flukes'

Dear Void,

I’m thinking that the artist’s book (that I make for my Doctoral project) is a well-found container. Aye, me hearties! She will be seaworthy. She will be equipped and supplied with references to other text and to her own inner workings. She will float. My, she’ll be yar! 

* * * *

Again, for those who like their information quantitative then please know that I still have 40% of Perloff’s ‘Statistical Traffic’ to scrutinise. I’ve wrung out all the intimacy from it, if it were intimate to begin with. This methodology—of scrutinising text, rewording and writing-through—muddies up the location of agency that is found in thinking and reading. Sometimes I forget who thought what when. Was that thought mine? By the end of the day, I feel so indifferent to the words. I speak with indifference; I write with indifference. I’ve simply been proceeding along a route made possible by text and only text (and some pictures).

* * * *

There’s more mise en abyme to be had (see here for an earlier post with some photos of a print of photographic lithographs of a facsimile of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura) in Susan Howe’s The Midnight when I find myself looking at a photocopy of a printed page with a photo of a postcard of a painting of an author (Robert Louis Stevenson). 

And the motif of infinitely recurring sequences makes itself known once more. It’s difficult to account for their differences, each iteration has collapsed into the latest object, a flat page on my desk. (And now a digital image on your screen).

* * * *

Howe doesn’t give explanation of the references and allusions contained in the picture, and if you didn’t go searching you wouldn’t know what the references were, or you might even have missed an allusion that linked one notion to another. Perloff does this too when her own “analogies pass like lightening” and I found myself needing to look up all her references to Yeats and his mentions of names and places that she is so familiar with, having written in depth on his work before. My need to go searching for further detail, simply put to practical test her thesis that straight up documentary or factual information can be retrieved via internet search, far more than can be presented in a single book. So what use are books now? Can we answer that question? I hope so.

* * * *

Some more associative contemplations prompted by my scrutinisings:

Only all relationships of life made literary can give correct notion of the extent of the process of recasting forms in the face of change (I think I stole this from Walter Benjamin though. O well!)

Are the barriers between disciplines supposed to be more porous now?

The neatness of a similitude, of a connection between people, named in text.

I read fate’s flukes! (did I steal this from Nilling?)

See the post On Acting Upon Other Things for earlier contemplations.

Thank you for listening, Void.

Jx

Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York: New Directions Books, 2003.

Perloff, Marjorie. “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight.” Boundary 2 36, no. 3 (2009): 205–228. 

Robertson, Lisa. Nilling : Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias. 1st ed. Toronto, Ont: BookThug, 2012.