Jan Zwicky Bachelard

Jan Zwicky's Gaston Bachelard epigram* is from his Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l'espace 1957 ISBN 2-13-054444-4.)

The original, page 30, is this: [ scribd ]

Chacun devrait alors dire ses routes, ses carrefours, ses bancs. Chacun devrait dresser le cadastre de ses campagnes perdues.

Why 'then', "alors" ? Le chemin.  Page 29:

Et quel bel objet dynamique qu'un sentier !

cp: his La formation de l'esprit scientifique: ... and the Pléiade volume by Jean Piaget, Logique et connaissance scientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1967 with Hermann Weyl's Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science.

v.  La flamme d'une chandelle

In our day,the Saskatchewan chemistry textbook opened with a qualitative task: describe a flame. Forty years later, work in catastrophes, chaos, attractors and fractals brings us to an account of the typical isolated flame, steady, flickering, steady.

See also: Bachelard preface to Jean Cavaillès Sur la logique et la théorie de la science
cf Georges Canguilhem,
La Connaissance de la vie
Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie: ... 
Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès
Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences 
cf Michel Leiris' "Judith", J.H. Van den Berg

* Robinson's Crossing, 2004, Brick Books (Shibboleth: can you say CC? But as to that other inscription, what would Ivan Illich have made of her use of Canada Council funding for support of her books of poetry? Did Arne Naess avail himself of CC? Consistency, that anarchical hobgoblin. On the use of the internet to sustain poets in subsistence economies, see the earliest proposed use of M.I.T. Curl web pages as pay-per-page and the possible survival of the penny as the web fractional penny.  millipenny ??)

The Bachelard in English as cited is:

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. 

[ which continues with]
Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul ...

The uncredited translator was M. Jolas

Note Bachelard on Bergson M&M in Sec VIII on the Intro.

The epigram is followed in the text of Bachelard by a quotation from a poem of Jean Wahl

Art McKay's "Effulgent Image"

Naomi Jackson Groves said of Art McKay's Effulgent Image that it

has the mesmeric magnificence of some far-off sun a billion years of age

Was it Comte who was certain we would never observe the surface of a star other than our sun?

From the CPU heatsinks problem, here is an idea for ensuring that the fuzzy star is at its best when viewed through a Newtonian telescope: a fan.

see: astronomical interferometer, interferometry, angular resolution, diffraction limit,Wm Herschel,aperture masking interferometry,speckle interferometry

Arthur Fortescue McKay's technique, quote:

 [...] in 1997, Dr. David Howard described the painter’s  technique  as relatively simple. First, a layer of white  latex  paint was placed on  masonite  board. Then, using a scraper, McKay would create a rough geometric  shape  with a  series  of concentric lines or circles. Three dimensional  texture  was kept to a minimum [...]as any ridges of paint would be sanded or tapped down to maintain the two dimensionality of the geometric designs. The latex would be allowed to dry overnight before proceeding to the most important stage of paint application. (In many paintings a layer of another  colour  of enamel paint would be applied to create  colour  variation),” Howard notes. “The next day McKay would pour a layer of Northstar Stovepipe Enamel paint over the latex and then would scrape the  surface  again, very hard, from the centre outwards to the edge of the circle, square or rectangle being represented. The scouring of the  surface  reveals both the  latex  and residual enamel paint creating a materially flat image with extraordinary visual depth. (Howard, 2006)

Publishers Weekly PWxyz blog's most beautiful book of 2011

The 2011 most beautiful book of the year from the PWxyz blog of Publishers Weekly is the Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire box set from Ginkgo Press.

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/?p=7346

which set comes complete with faux long-hand note cards.

Mine is on order through my local bookseller, Westminster Books of Fredericton.

Note: a small ginkgo tree can be found growing in town on the east side of University Ave. not far from Charlotte Street near a weeping copper beech.  Ginkgo are common in Memphis and were planted at one time near the entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Please find below an image of an Eocene fossil of Ginkgo biloba from MacAbee, B.C.

Note the cleft found in most Ginkgo leaves below:

[ images from Wikimedia Commons ]

Romeo Savoie

I arrived at Ingrid Mueller'a Gallery in time to see the packing blanket about the Jean Rooney electric night over and along the Dublin Liffey.

For a while I sat filling note cards before Romeo Savoie's layered diptych, Fan IV. The the pair that form a companion diptych for me: two multi-media on paper, one with flowing black strands, almost a complex Kanji on a fond of rose and yellow with a grey-green, almost carrés, on a dull red, almost the pastel aurora of Fan IV, but there a palette knife left only edges of ochre  — and next to it, the "action" of whites and white-grays, a red stippling on grey.  Nearby, on a table, stood the small "untitled diptych" in a black frame two six-by-eight inch canvas panels, each dominated by white brush strikes, the inverse of Kanji, one over reds, one over a yellow stencilled beginning of an alphabet. The latter, a Kanji morphing from white to black through Möbius twining, twists from black to white.

The great Philip Iverson portrait of Elie Wiesel was not available in the gallery.  I did not ask to see the carmine and emerald piece.

Fan IV may be dripping stove paint from what appears embossed gold but what is, on canvas, an overlaid piece, divided, occupied by arachnoid figures, mirror of a figure. (See: Mirrors of Gold.)  The great blinded Zeiss Teleskop of the Sternwarte of Zürich has no gold mirror.

Fan IV may be dripping stove paint but a palette knife was at work, as was such a tool in Art McKay's Effulgent Image, also seen here.

Facebook blocks Blogger post from Blogspot and Google

Facebook just refused to post a goo.gl short link to my previous post on Elizabeth Smart and Rilke.

Facebook rejected this Blogger address as SPAM whether posted as public or "friends".

Is this the beginning of an assault on blogspot.com by Facebook?  An attack on Google?

Or a malicious "flag" raised by someone I stopped following recently?

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In a curious moment in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart echoes Rilke as
“ Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?”

The Rilke text has Schriee which gives cry out or scream — schriller Schrei would be shriek.

But here a curiosity: the Rilke echos schreibe or write which has curious twist in English where shrive, confess, is from the same verb but for the written assignment of a penance.  And then there is the scrivener.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?

A closer reading might be:

For who, were I to cry out, would hear me from the ranks of the angels?

For who — as in  So who — not For whom.

Do we cry out, if there is no one whose attention we might attract?  Do we not then scream?

Did the author choose this variant with care? Her title is not "At" but rather "By" — attentive or arbitrary?

cf: Psalm 137 and its mistranslations.

kizuna as the "2011" kanji

絆

きずな

Bond, tie

Compare: fetters ?
セツ   or  シツ  ?

shackles = ashikase or 足枷

See:  愛  Ai suru.  Note: indigo = Ai  あい  or  藍

Cf:  amae  甘え  as psychological dependence and reliance upon another or others: あまえ and the parent-child bond.

v: The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi, M.D.
v: The Japanese mind: understanding contemporary Japanese culture by Roger J. Davies, Osamu Ikeno

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol005.001/smith-nomi.html

To see the above, your browser must allow UNICODE utf-8 character encoding as a VIEW option.