neighborhood watch

a person leaves the house he lives in and notices another person standing on the drivers side of a van parked in front of the house to the east of  his, talking to someone inside of it. about five minutes earlier the person by the van had knocked on the door of the first persons house asking for directions  and giving him a puzzled whats going on here look when directed to the street he asked for, as though that was not the answer he expected.

 as the first person passes the van on the passengers side he recognizes the third person inside the van, who notices him looking, as the neighbor from the house to the west of his, the first person looks over his shoulder at the balcony above the porch of the westside house where he often saw the third person standing, watching the neighborhood, and wonders to himself if this is why he gets so many people knocking on the door and asking for directions to nearby streets.

several months after this incident the neighbor from the house to the west moves and the first person begins to notice a varied collection of strange people, seemingly standing in wait for him at various places, on the subway, in office tower halls, and cafes, along the path of his daily wanderings around the city.

not what you say--who says it

some one is asking me what i am reading, its a book about a theory called monogenisis of the languages of the world and how they all are maybe decended from a single language, nostratic, that was spoken  in one place at one time, and then spread out like the branches of a tree to the rest of the worlds population. "ohnooooo" thit grimaced "that is so racist, please dont believe in that sort of stuff." thit said and went back to chopping vegetables in the kitchen. it was like this so often with this person that i didnt say any thing more and continued reading to my self and laughing at how prejudiced some people who claim to be broad-minded and "im an intellectual!" are when an idea that does not fit their politically-correct guidelines of intellectualism  is mentioned.

about a year later the same person  had been to a party and had talked to some lesbian of colour, from some country of the third world, who told thit a wonderful counter-culture theory she was studying about how all the languages of the world are decended from one original language that spread from the place it was invented, and this explained the incredible similaritys in all the languages of the world. "oh it was sooooogood to talk to someone with the courage to study things that go against the narrow-minded theories of the mainstream." thit said with that politically-correct smile on thit's face and went back to chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

i sat there laughing to my self wondering why it is when a white, male, gay, canadian had been reading about the same theory it was something, somehow misguided and in need of correction, but when! ...

classical moulding

concert hall designed by arthur erickson using the form of a cavetto moulding for the  exterior curtain wall.

shape of unintentional provocation

not an interpretation of a beckett play at vectorbelly.

'' my aim here will be to examine the respects in which the augustine paradox imitates the "shape" of waiting for godot, is in fact a perfect working modle of the play's structural dialectic. ... put simply, the essay is an examination of the ways shape matters in godot. ... i am not concearned with the poetry in the language, or with an interpretation of the play but with the structure of its intelligibility. in fact, if we were to condense godot to a graphic illustration of itself, it might resemble a highly "sucessful" rorschach blot. i have in mind the simple wonder of the blots appeal: like found art, it is unintentionally provocative. ... i am hardly implying that beckett, or any playwright, could be unintentionally provocative with any sucess. what i mean is that the shapes and subshapes in godot behave as if they were.''

bert o. states, shape of paradox: an essay on waiting for godot.

christopher alexander--function follows ornament follows beauty follows centres

flower nails at notcot.

''i have found again and again--without counter example--that our ability to see the field of centers in a thing, and to produce the centers which are indicated geometrically, tends to produce an object which works better. ... form follows function! but if we look at the examples i have given, it seems very unlikely that this is what took place when they were made. ... example after examples suggest emphatically that this is what came first: making the centers beautiful was the driving force. ...

'' the geometry that occurs in the 14th-century nail produces life that has both functional and ornamental qualities to an extraordinary extent. ... it also works incredibly well because of its size and the thickness of the head, it has a very long life and great strength, lasting in some cases 600 years--something that a 20th-century nail could almost never do. is it a coincidence that the 14th-century nail works so well both as an ornament, and  as a functioning long lived nail? what is the connection between the ornament and function in the nail?''

christopher alexander; the nature of order, bk-i.

baudrillaird--cool memories

''fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. each fragment enjoys an equal distinction, the most banal one finds its exceptional reader. each, in its turn, has its hour of glory.

''of course, each fragment could become a book. but the point is that it will not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line. it is also a matter of laziness; one has no right to waste time to no good end, anymore than to exploit oneself to no good end. and a matter, too, of compression of words, which have done so much work already.

''another promise of fragment, is that they alone will survive the catastrophe, the destruction of meaning and language. like the flies in the plane crash which are the only survivors because they are ultralight. like the flotsam in poe's maelstrom. the lightest items sink the most slowly into the abyss. it is these one must hang on to.''

jean baudrillard, fragments-cool memories iii, 1991-95; english by emily agar.

barthes--incidents

''incidents is the writing down, the collection, of what barthes saw and heard in morocco. for the most part in tangiers and rabat, then in the south, in 1968 and 1969. ... the text is the written account of meetings--incidents--that could of woven the fabric of a novel. without the support of people; also with practically no continuous thread to the story, which would necessarily force a 'message'. into it: the 'novelistic', in essence, is fragmentary. ...

''this is clear when roland barthes par roland barthes twice alludes to this text; under the heading 'projeto de livres' [ book projects ]: 'incidents [ mini-texts; wrinkles, haikus, everything that falls, like a leaf ]; and under the title 'qu'est ce que ca vent dire?' [ what does that mean ]: 'a non-book could be conceived; one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning; it would be exactly a book of haikus?' ...

''one may note that here, in fact, the genre is constantly emphasized by a particular attention to surprise, to a break in continuity, to the incongruous. the incident is there: the one thing that falls outside all codeification.''

roland barthes, incidents; english by teresa lavender fagan, from the publishers notes of francois wahl.