Ocagraph

An ergonomically designed training tool to be held between both palms and operated by all ten digits. The device is printed with the twenty six letters of the alphabet, which are spaced around its surface in such a way that each finger is within reach of two letters, and each thumb four.

With practice, words can be spelled out on the device at speed using a minimal set of gestures, and once letter positions are familiar the interlocutor can dispense with the training tool and enunciate in the air without it. The gestures of spelling – forward and backward movements of the fingers; forward, backward, left and right movements of the thumbs – are differentiated from ordinary everyday gesticulations by the steady distance maintained between the two palms, which recalls the width of the original tool.

With the palms held in place there lacks only interpretation and response from an equally practised second interlocutor.

Paper Locks

I’ve got a paper cut-out book about locks, and this afternoon I cut out all of the parts. Together all the parts would make three separate mechanisms: a warded lock, a cylinder lock and a combination lock. The idea of the book is to demonstrate some of principles of these devices, which are easier to understand in three-dimensional working models than in diagrams or plans.

I don’t want to make the models though, I want to leave the book with its pieces out.

Cooking in a Bedsitter

I bought a second-hand book on Saturday called Cooking in a Bedsitter. (The plan was to mark it up like Language in the Modern World but it isn’t quite suited after all.) I don’t live in a bedsitter now, but I used to, and I used to relish the solitariness and the makeshiftness of everything. It was one room, and in the corner of it was a sink with one working tap (the hot tap, which only ran cold) and a very bad immersion heater above it which ran either cold or steamingly, hand-scaldingly hot. Next to the sink on a knee-high table was an unhappy baby belling, and next to that on the floor an indifferent fridge.

LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION

Today I am marking up a 1961 Pelican paperback of a book called Language in the Modern World, which was reprinted for about a decade before it presumably went out of date.

It’s very slow marking it up, I’ve been working on it since about half past ten and I’ve only done nine and a bit pages so far. I have to read slowly and mark with pencil almost every single word with its relative importance in the sentence and any significant relations it has with other nearby words. There are only a limited number of marks I can really make if I want to keep track of them without drawing attention away from the words. I make small or word-sized circles, single underscores, double underscores, zigzag underscores, horizontal crossing out, square brackets, round brackets, rectangles around words, double underscores at an angle, curved and straight lines, and arrows.

Ekphrasis in Grammar

On page 126 of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is the following sentence:

He happened at the time to be in the oak-wainscoted study of the old family summer residence; through a lavender cascade of hysteria he observed that his wife had once again chosen to be subject of this clause, itself the direct object of his observation.

It’s profoundly funny to slice through a sentence into the fact that it’s there. It’s embarrassing for the sentence and it’s embarrassing for the stuff that the sentence is talking about. They both sort of spin around in the middle of what they were doing, caught red handed, and look at you, and there’s no point either of them trying to act natural any more. All three of you know what’s been going on.

Making Things About Things

I write a diary every day, usually in biro, always in some kind of a hardcover A5 book. I’ve been writing them since 1995 with about ten books each year, so now I’ve got shelves of them. They take up quite a lot of space, and as physical things they’re very important to me. If there were a fire in the house I’d throw them out the window first and jump after them. I stick things in, I monitor my handwriting for mood, I put new covers on them, I shelve them, I browse their spines, I leaf through them.

Rather than writing about what’s happened every day, the important thing is that there’s something there to mark my participation in each day, or my presence during it. The days in the books have to bear witness to the living days. When I was working with Nick the other day trying to treat things like words and vice versa, I started to wonder how I could produce a diary by making daily things instead of writing them.

The Distribution of the Sensible

I’m reading a book at the moment by Rancière called The Politics of Aesthetics. I’ve been having to write whole paragraphs out again somewhere else before I could start shaking the ideas clear of the words. It’s a library book, and the words I’m trying to read from the page are in stubborn allegiance to an unknown previous reader, and they won’t come unstuck from the paper.

The pages are more than annotated. They’re marked up. It looks like they’ve been prepared for assembly like the flat plan of a paper model. There are no pencil marks in the margins, only among the printed words. And the marks themselves are never words, just shapes, brackets, lines, operating like braces and pulleys. They look like they’re trying to help the sentences along, pushing the words out into palpable, physical relationships with one another.

Purpose of Political Change

(click text to enlarge)

under standing between

My father phoned from the car while I was on the bus to tell me about an old friend he’d met today. His friend has begun to paint religious icons, using traditional methods in every measure. To paint an icon is something like prayer, she said; the bringing together of the marks, the gathering of the image in anticipation of the prayers to be said before it, asks for a certain preparation of mind. The iconographers are only people, and the people praying are only people too, but there is an understanding between them.

Indeterminacy

from John Cage – Indeterminacy