Bara genom att läsa den här essän om Rebecca May Johnsons bok Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen får jag lust att laga mat, och läsa om matlagning, och skriva om matlagning.
The book emerged while Johnson was working on a PhD dissertation on German poet Barbara Köhler’s rewriting of the Odyssey, a process that led her to understand cooking as a cousin of translation. She uses the idea of reception—how texts are read and reimagined—to argue for a more serious consideration of the recipe form: “My ‘reception’ of the recipe—my intervention into the tradition of recipe reception—is to translate text into food. Each time I cook the recipe I produce a new translation of the text.” Just as translation has long been undervalued by critical and academic establishments, the recipe is “a form of knowledge that is often denied the status of knowledge.”
“Mother Sauce” av Marian Bull hos n+1, 15 juni 2023
Ett av de mer udda bokinköpen jag gjort är den 11:e volymen av den stora utgåvan av Pepys dagbok, bestående av indexet till de tio föregående volymerna. Inspirerad av den här artikeln:
When I was researching my doctorate, I read page by page through the whole of Robert Latham and William Matthews’s edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. The diary itself, which covers almost ten years in the 1660s, is of course extraordinary, one of the greatest autobiographical texts ever written. But that edition, in eleven volumes published between 1970 and 1983, is also a magnificent feat of modern scholarship, and the index—the eleventh volume—is simply amazing. Every person, event, subject, or object is there. Any question you might ever ask about the contents of the text is easily answered. I recently wrote a piece on Pepys and slavery, something that was at the forefront of no one’s mind forty years ago, but even on that subject the index’s categorizations and cross-references turned out to be invaluable.
What’s equally remarkable is the format of the many longer entries. In other indexes to large editions, the entries for the central characters often degenerate simply into long lists of subheadings, each followed by an offputtingly long run of page numbers. But in this case each entry is constructed as a little narrative that is a pleasure to read through in its own right. I’ve never been able to open the volume without being distracted by reading about something I wasn’t looking for. It’s such fun to use that it rather spoils you for the run-of-the-mill indexes of other scholarly editions, which can be rather a slog to work with.
The editorial manipulation of Heidegger’s texts was intended to deflect critical attention from the fraught nexus between the “History of Being” (Seinsgeschichte) and the “Politics of Being” (Seinspolitik) in his oeuvre. As a result, the public has for decades been presented with a misleading, politically sanitized image of Heidegger’s Denken, a bowdlerized version in which traces of his profascist political allegiances have been extensively airbrushed.
De sedan en tid uppdagade passagerna i manuskript och anteckningsböcker gör att Heideggers verk naturligtvis måste läsa i ljuset av dem, men Wolin konstaterar också att det sannolikt är omöjligt att “korrigera”, eller ge ut igen, alla utgåvor i översättning (däribland svenska):
As far as the numerous foreign-language editions of Heidegger’s works are concerned, from a publishing standpoint, it is essentially too late—too cumbersome and too expensive—to implement the requisite corrections and emendations. Consequently, for the foreseeable future, generations of students encountering Heidegger’s work for the first time will be exposed to editorially doctored, politically cleansed versions of his thought. These significantly flawed editions have, meretriciously, become the de facto standard editions.
Här några saker som jag tydligen hoardat av någon anledning men inte uppmärksammat själv. De är alla värda en href. Det är ett urval från Pinboard under november 2022:
Ett begrepp: Pentimento: “In painting, a pentimento (Italian for ‘repentance’; from the verb pentirsi, meaning ‘to repent’; plural pentimenti) is ‘the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over’.” (Jag tror möjligen att jag hade läst något om Jan van Eycks Arnolfini-porträtt och hur det målas om/över, vilket också finns med som exempel.)
Och apropå lager av mening: Liza Dalys bidrag till förra årets National Novel Generation Month är så sinnrikt! A Letter Groove: “Given a URL of an IIIF manifest pointing at a series of scanned book pages, produce a new book that cuts out words revealing the pages beneath. (IIIF is an API and data format for describing image sequences for use in academia and research, and can be applied to individual documents, maps, books, or ephemera.)”
Ella Webb: “Series of mountain sections, stratigraphies, axonometric projections of geological phenomena are carefully arranged to compose pages of charts. The resulting diagrams don’t correspond anymore to any specific information, but make sense only because of their visual value.”
“Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture.
Pappret “Perceptual grouping explains similarities in constellations across cultures” (PDF) känns spekulativt, alltså intressant. Här undersöks orsaken till att olika “kulturer” genom tiderna och över jorden har haft en tendens att grupperna stjärnor (asterism, ett nytt begrepp) på ett liknande sätt.
Man hittade lådor med nedteckningar från Hegels tidiga föreläsningar i ett arkiv i Tyskland (Daily Nous; The Guardian). Tom Whyman (bra namn på en filosof) funderar: “And so if I’d discovered the new Hegel, I’m not really sure I’d have told anyone … If Hegel still has anything relevant to tell us, and in my view he probably does, I think it might be better if there was less of him.”
Ett annat begrepp: “Fenologi (från grekiskans phainesthai, komma i dagen, bli synlig), botanisk och zoologisk term för läran om de periodiska företeelsernas uppträdande inom växt- och djurriket, dvs. hur naturen förändras över årstiderna.” (Från Jen Lowes “phenological signs“).
Bartosz Ciechanowskis illustrerande förklaringar noterades – en om ljud, en om klockor. Senare kom en om cykeln.
“Gullah (also called Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English, and Geechee) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called “Geechees” within the community), an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.”
“Renaissance paintings are often as crowded with people as a car would be in one of China’s 46 subway systems today. Yet neither in the time of Jesus nor in the time of Masaccio was either the Middle East or Europe densely populated. Life would have been agrarian, with plants and animals everywhere humans went. But these frescoes were not painted to show life as it was. They were simplified models whose purpose was to teach the stories and values.”
It’s not that ideas come in universities, and we apply them in industry. It’s much more nonlinear and complex than that. My own research later in soft matter, for example—my first big bite of a new puzzle—had to do with what happens if you take these long-chain molecules and branch them into tree-like or cone-like structures. After all, we’ve learned that part of their key physics is that two strings can’t cross each other in three dimensions. That was a fundamental interaction, what we’d call a topological interaction. So it became obvious to ask, what happens when one changes the topology of the molecules themselves? And the answer is whole new emergent properties leap out, and that was fun to explore for quite a few years, in collaboration with chemists and engineers and computer scientists and industrial scientists, too. So that gives you an idea of soft matter, and the latest thing that’s happening is, of course, that we are made, life is made, of soft materials. So you’ll now find myself and other soft-matter physicists engaging more and more with biologists and together exploring how the physics of biological cells and biological matter works.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Om betydelsen av sinnen:
Fascinatingly, one really important property, which later became a real key to its physical physics, is that when you stretch rubber, it gets warm. And if you take a stretched rubber at room temperature and you relax it, it cools. So there’s strange thermodynamics going on. It’s called the Gough effect, after a man named John Gough who lived in the Lake District. And, very interestingly, he was blind from birth, so he had to develop his other senses, his non-sighted senses, in his exploration of the science that he loved, and I think it’s really a wonderful thing that he discovered an effect that other people completely missed because it’s a very subtle change of temperature. Anyone can detect it. Just stretch a rubber band on your lower lip, which is sensitive to temperature. This is what he would do. So the Gough effect goes back to the nineteenth century.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Om “hur det får lugna ner sig lite”:
And all that quantum-mechanical stuff had to calm down for a few decades before people went back in the sixties to say, “Well, now we know a bit more mathematics than this. What was this fascinating program on complex fluids that that was going on before we all got excited about quantum mechanics?” That’s slightly tongue in cheek, but only a bit. That’s the potted history.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Jag är alltid på jakt efter beskrivningar av vardagliga skrivsätt och metoder hos författare. Kathy Acker verkar ha haft en speciell relation till sina anteckningsböcker. Det här kommer från biografin över Kathy Acker, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, av Jason McBride:
In lined, spiral-bound notebooks of various sizes, in handwriting that is loopy and almost childlike, Acker chronicles the ups and downs of her relationship with Neufeld, other sexual affairs, her half-hearted attempts at employment, gossip about writers, her own fragile mental and physical state, her dreams, her cats, books she’s reading, her thoughts on writing, compositional methods, memory, and representation. Even when broke, she usually used, as she would for the rest of her life, a Montblanc fountain pen. For the most part, these entries are rapid, raw, and intimate, a punctuation-free stream of consciousness, where one event or thought suddenly gives way to another, and subjects and subjectivities shift without warning or signpost. Seemingly factual events butt up against, or run headlong into, fantasy and dream. As in her later writing, friends, lovers, and colleagues appear frequently, their names unchanged.
