Current projects

Resolutions for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and hopefully for later on as well

Currently I'm working on
- A long piece on Stanislaw Szukalski, trying to get my hands on every resource I can find; it would have fitted the old Maybe Quarterly format but since it suffered a premature death I think I'll put it here.
- A study based on the book 'Les Apocalypses' by Robert Garcet, of the already discussed Eben-Ezer tower, in French; said study I would like to send to the Carnets du 'Collège de 'Pataphysique, who wouldn't accept it as usually;
- I could do the same with the above Szukalski piece above when finished and adapt to a shorter bit in French, as far as I'm aware of not a lot has been written on him in this language - maybe someone like Yves Frémion who has been collecting wacko's for ages can prove me wrong, I'll have to research it;
- The very same I could adapt to dutch and would fit well on my Dutch 'pataphysical blog. Speaking of which, the Eburonic Chapter of 'Pataphysical Research han't been doing a lot this last half year.
- A collection of quotes from Alfred Jarry's "La chandelle verte" (Le Castor Astral Editeur), in French which I bought in Paris last summer during the MLA meeting. I might put it here as well, just for the few (English-speakinbg or otherwise) people who'd 'get' it.
- A traduction of RAW's Prometheus Rising in Dutch… It's horribly hard to do it justice, trying not to give a different, culturally biased meaning to Bob's very exact words. Feels like I'll be burned to the stake by the spanish Inquisition if I imply (or was it infer?) different meanings. No idea what I'll do with it, I intended if I ever manage to finish it as a gift for people I like who don't read English very well. Thinking of it, I once attempted a traduction of Tim Leary's Neurologic as well more than a year ago and stopped halfway. I just cannot write in Dutch, it always feels as if the soft bends in the phrases contain bones which suddenly crumble under the bite of a second read… Or maybe I just cannot write at all, at all, but my restrained knowledge of the English tongue helps my ego get away with it.
- An extended Gravity Rainbow's reader, featuring my favourite passages, in the form of a dictionary.
- I'm reading Edward De Bono's "Lateral Thinking" (which I bought for half a zilch in India) and I'm writing down the ideas. It's not a very good way of dealing with these ideas but I find myself too tired after hard day's work to keep them inbetween two readings. I might do something with all these note one day too.
- I have been dreaming of producing a titanesque work for ages now, about furnisculpture and sculptifurniture. Ever since I finished my degree in interior design in a previous life (a bit more than 20 years ago), I have been fascinated by the subject and the thin line between symbology (art) and usability (design). A thin book by Siah Armajani is still after all those years one of my favourites. There have been some essays on the subject, but as I collected a large database of examples (from Don Judd to Eberhard Bosslet) I really would like to do something big with it and my ideas about it. One day. Maybe another twenty years from now.
- I'm still distilling my notebooks from my youth 'till a few years back. Untill now it resulted in a few funny snippets on my French blog, but there's still lots and lots of stuff to work on.
- I started to work on an English impression of the dutch book by Marcus Landas "Brugge - een Corpus Hermeticum". I stopped halfway through for information overload.

Then I definitely want to do some of the MLA course this year. Maybe Lon Milo DuQuette's "Initation" (February 2-March 22)", or Erik Davis' "Gnosis now!"(February 23-April 5), or Antero Alli's absolutely brilliant "Angel Tech" (March 16-May 10) yet again, or Philip H. Farber's "Words & World" (April 6 - May 21), or (definitely!!!) Eric Wagner's (gaba gaba one of us) "Chapel Perilous" (May 18-July 12).
Speaking of which, I've been working at my job about 11 hours every weekday these last few weeks. Job at which (a formation school for adults providing courses on any subject imaginable) I intend to attend some evening courses this year. And I still have to get working an a gigantic website I started years ago. And there are so many books lying around I haven't read yet…
Uh, no, I don't think I wanna terminate all my karma in this life, I think I'll come back several times to get t the above done… for starters.

Francois Caradec (1924-2008)

Death of an ex-Satrap

On November the 13th, 2008 the Regent François Caradec died at the age of 84. He counts as the only member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique who was once elevated to the mighty rang of Provéditeur, the highest level of administration inside the Collège, and one day just decided to give up his title to become a simple Regent again.

He was one of the most prolific members of the OuLiPo and until recently was a heard regularly with his typical parisian 'gouaille' on the French radio show "Des Papous dans la Tête".

He was a world specialist on French litterature from the the turn of the 19th-20th century, the roaring 'Belle Epoque'. He wrote several books about the wacky French humorists of the period, often precursors of latter Dada, and the first comic artists like Christophe Colomb and Rodolphe Töpffer. One famous photobook with Robert Doisneau showed Paris as they lived it ("La compagnie des zincs"). He wrote books on Alphonse Allais, the pétomane, Alfred Jarry, Lautréamont, parisian slang, Raymond Roussel, popular art, parodies,... And on lots of strange subjects, as a guide on mysterious Paris and a dictionary of body language.



He was a grandmaster of literary hoaxes, long before Luther Blissett. His presence in the early years of the Collège was essential.

The first book I read from him was the account of the life and death of his dog, "Nous deux mon chien". Anyone who ever lost a four-footed friend would relate to this beautiful text on love in which he avoided emotionality (which he vehemently hated) and still was able to move this reader deeply.

He had such a long life between books, hoaxes and bistrots, yet his way of writing and talking gave the impression he was still fairly young. Young-hearted, anyway, he certainly was. Paris will never be the same.

Adieu monsieuye Caradec, tu nous manqueras.

Read more:

• on the art of pranks blog
  
• On Jahsonic
  
• Bibliography (in french)
  
• Obit by Patrice Delbourg (in French)
  

Un chien n'est vraiment plus que lorsque son odeur a disparu de vos vêtements, et que le chien qui passe ne se retourne plus pour vous renifler.
"A dog is really gone when his odor has disappeared from your clothes, and no dog turns his head anymore to sniff you." (from 'Nous deux mon chien', 1983)

Locus cumulonimbus

How far does the cry go?


Hoffa, does the car go?


A fur d'escargots?

The litterary technique of using alliterated sentences throughout the text, often used by Bob Wilson and occasonally by Thomas Pynchon, was first theorized upon by proto-dada (and patacessor extraordinaire) Raymond Roussel in his small text "Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres" ("How I came to write some of my books"). In there the solitary excentric millionaire clarifies some of his compositional techniques. Phonetic mutation was one of them: the first, inocuous, phrase got mutated into another, with the some sounds but a different meaning, appearing as the last sentence, and the novel wrote itself between them. Roussel was a main influence on surrealism. All of his texts use the same homophonic constraint; in his biography of Roussel, François Caradec compares them to the snake that bites its own tail. The French writer's collective OuLiPo adapted this technique ("Homophonies approximatives"), adding the constraint of extra phrases in the body of the text.

How far does the cry go?

The visible landscapes of a tempest, showing only the lightning, have been the subject of examination using stratospherical cameras. New bodies of light have been discovered above the clouds. One of them was named a "Red Sprite", a 40 km high and broad jellyfish of electrical discharge with a red head and blue tentacles, hovering above some cumulonimbi during lightning.



Large and short-lived, they might be the result of a shortcut between the ionosphere and the earth surface, probably happening during a so-called 'streamer', the event just before a lightning where the earth surface acts as a cathode, attracting electrodes from the surrounding gas molecules, an upwards cahin reaction of chaotic ionization until a bridge is formed with the clouds, acting as an anode, and lightning flashes down the prepared canal.
Then you'd have the gigantic "Elves", a halo appearing at a height of 90km lasting only microseconds, growing at the speed of light, probably an effect of the electromagnetic pulse caused by the lightning underneath. Finally, the "Blue Jets", first discovered by Nasa, cones of blue light towering above a tempest climbing to a height of 40 km at 100km per second, their blue colour a result of the ionization of the surrounding nitrogen molecules. Fairly recently a team of Taiwanese meteorologists discovered "Gigantic jets", a 30.000 cubic km. carrot with a half a second lifetime.



In 1940 Nicola Tesla was precisely experimenting with lightning in Colorado Springs. His life-long goal had been to make wireless transport of energy possible. Already a prototype car had been produced for the excentric inventor, for which the energy source was produced by a huge coal-based factory. A fair amount of work and energy for such small results, and the factory had to remain active day and night to keep the engine running during Tesla's many travels.


The start of World War 2 had at first a devastating result on the energy industry, unable to keep up with the demands of the growing weapons industry. Through the amendation of the Neutrality Act, Cash and Carry purchases had been enabled with the allied forces. One day the entire country was immobilized, since no fuel was available for transport. The transport business was on the verge of collapse. A general strike was the result; Tesla's factory stood in the spotlights as the workers were only rewarded a measle fee. Young Jimmy Hoffa, not yet the leader of the Teamsters back then but a rising star nonetheless, gave several enthrilling speeches, one of them symbolically at the Colorado Springs factory. After a standing ovation, he wanted to leave for his next appointment, but his car was out of gas.

Tesla, fulminating from the crowd, sneered the historical words:

Hoffa, does the car go?

Hoffa obviously wasn't pleased. He vehemently insulted Tesla, comparing him to various body parts, and left on foot.

He walked and walked and walked and walked, and suddenly little Jimmy stood at the edge of a wonderful magickal forest. All was soft and woolly in there: he saw woolly trees, woolly birds, woolly rocks, yes even the grass was furry. Little Jimmy jumped up and down, exhilarated by the sight. Suddenly he stopped: at his feet in the furry grass, he saw small snails, naked and shivering. Little Jimmy took one of the little snails softly in his hand and asked "What happened to you, little snail? Everything here is woolly, but you are naked as a hooker's butt at 4 in the morning". Softly, the snail explained to him how an evil witch named Meret Oppenheim had entered the wood and had stolen their fur to create strange and apostatic art objects. Jimmy put down the snail and left the wood, flabbergasted. Suddenly he giggled and said to himself:

"A fur d'escargots??????"

In 1925, Raymond Roussel decided to travel through Europe in his customized Rolls. In there he had a salon with a double bed, a bathtub, his office, a bar and a kitchen.

Derisanamcope, November the 13th

It was the Torino scale.

Matching the Poisson Equation with the madness of the crowds, no statistical oddity here.

But as the scale quantifies the risks, from 0 (the Alfred E. Neumann level) over 8 (Tunguska, 1908. 1.000 square kilometres gone in a flash, but Nikolaï's tiara would only start to shiver years later, when the collective consciousness would reappear at the coast of Odessa, and the Clinamen would make one very confused marine call out the enemy with the yiel of 'Comrade!'), to 10, the fruit of the loom of impacts, Chixculub, 65 million years ago, where in Velikovsky's vision the collective consciousness of the large saurians had suffered a deadly blow at the bow of a hat. Torino might as well quantify the fear of collective mankind, since the selling technique defines the flavours of danger. In the past, level 6 used to hit the news, now only the astronomers in their little cubicles are informed.

Ballistics really, that's all there is to it. But the target itself moves, and the bullet can match its size. To critters living on the meteor, we are firing at them. God does not play dice, what about a game of pool?

The astronomers' calculus, from their Crays supercomputers or Turing machines like prayer wheels (but no compassionate Om Mani Padme Hum here) offers useful sigils or yantras, making the objects go away, shrinking in scale or disappearing beyond the horizon of our awareness. Like a transcendental meditation, to influence the Gauss glockenspiel. Words and numbers is all we need to grab and mutate der Welt, an Aristotelian truth transmitted through Hermes the pseudo-Trismegistos to modern day marketing techniques.

If it's not in my book OR if it doesn't compute

1. It doesn't exist
   
2. It doesn't apply
   
   
3. None of the above.
   
   

Aye, the good olde verb, Kav resonating from the Ayin Sof Aur above, which had its part in the downfall of the very large saurians - What? The contemporary symphony of five thousand types of frogs was also heard 65 million years ago when the fat lady sang - What? So the big ones became ex-dinosaurs, and the little ones kept populating the ponds with virtually no change in their genetical signature. Aeons before that, the same types of frogs were singing away when Pangea (in the long cyclical traditional break-up of supercontinents Vaalbara, Ur, Kenorland, Columbia, Rodinia and Pannotia) split in half into Laurasia and Gondwana - What?

All the time earth was reprocessed, they produced the same metaphysical sound, studied extensively by Jean-Pierre Brisset, the one sound trying desperately to make sense out of their green little senses, the very froggy je ne sais "Quoi?", making the formula sound and clear. In search for the question to life, the universe and everything, resonating through the globe, producing magnifying shockwaves of question marks, first splitting the known universe in half, hodge-podge, craving for meaning through duality; later on, the dinosaur holocaust. Every question pregnant of others. Concerto Interrogatio. Some even claim to have witnessed rains of frogs falling from the supersargasso sea, and usually consider it a bad omen.

We might feel grateful to the legions of astronomers, bending variables into safe guesses, our Giant's Courseway of unknowns, as a wall against the pipidae's lament.

Derisanamcope, 11th november - deep into Gravity's Rainbow

Maybe print edition

Maybe Print has reached the shelves. I just received a package of 100 minted copies.


Contributions by Bogus, Bobby, Minja, Fly Agaric, Frater K:. (bless his soul), Zenpunkist, Propaganda, The Purple Gooroo, Quackenbush, yours truly and many others.

Want some? Just ask.

Grasshopper

Just watched "The day of the locust" by John Schlessinger. In this 1975 movie based on the book by Nathanael West, Donald Sutherland appears looking like Adolf Hitler and introduces himself: "… Simpson. Homer Simpson".

The tower of Eben-Ezer

Robert Garcet built a tower inspired by the rapture. Situated at the border between Flanders and Wallony in Eben-Emael, the 'tower of the apocalyps' or of Eben-Ezer is a marvel made of brimstone.
Words cannot describe this masterpiece.
A presentation with 80+ photos can be viewed here.