It’s holiday season.

Postcard from Paul Éluard’s collection.

Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour
by Georges Perec

For Italo Calvino

We’re camping near Ajaccio. Lovely weather. We eat well. I’ve got sunburnt. Fondest love.

We’re touring around Malta. Lovely weather. We share our meals with some very correct English people. Back around the 10th.

We’re cruising off the Yukatan. Ideal weather. Everything just right. I caught a baby shark, 30 kilos! Love.

We’re at the Hôtel Zircone. It’s very warm. We eat so well! I’ve got sunburnt. Kissy-wissies.

We’re travelling through Greece. Gorgeous siestas beside the sea. Have met loads of very friendly people. We think of you often.

On holiday in Denmark. Weather good. Very beautiful beaches. Danish girls are quite something! Back on the 6th.

A big hello from Ipanema. Extraordinarily beautiful. Fiesta under the coconut trees! I have to be back on the 5th, alas.

We’re in the heart of the Black Forest. Seasonal weather. Splendid excursions. A bit of fly fishing. Love.

We’re really covering the Everglades. Well worth the trip. Sublime. I’m getting to be a champion water-skier. Love.

We’re visiting Florida. Sublime weather. Heavenly hamburgers. A bit homesick all the same. Love.

A letter from Djerba. Superb weather. Couscous I love you. I’m as red as a crayfish. Home at the end of August.

We’re travelling through the Lake District. Très romantique, but no risk of getting sunburnt. Home on the 19th.

We’re travelling round the Peloponnese. Sun strong. I have a big hat, we’re very happy. Hugs and kisses.

We’re playing at being explorers on the Atlantic Coast. Long sunbathing sessions. We eat just like the hogs we are. A thousand regards.

Extract, from Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Spiders and Pseudoscorpions

Mark Dion, Systema Metropolis, 2007, Species Gallery (from the Handbook accompanying the exhibition currently on view at the Natural History Museum, London).

The giant spider that dwells in our gas meter made me think of how many arthropods must live in the house without me ever noticing them. The fact that my eight-legged housemate has never been witnessed making her way upstairs to my bedroom - remember that the average person swallows and inhales up to eight spiders during their lifetime while asleep - seems infinitely reassuring to me, so I just let her fiddle about and watch her scare British Gas members of staff.

American artist Mark Dion, for his latest exhibition commemorating the Linnaeus tercentenary, collected insect specimens at four different sites in London with a team of Museum staff, identified them, classified them and put them on display in the gallery.

Among the species they found was the reddish two-eyed chelifer (roncus lubricus), a pseudoscorpion which is only 2-3.5 mm long but still highly venomous. Although I’m aware that a creature that size won’t do me any harm, I find the idea that I live with scorpions slightly disturbing. But isn’t it also kind of cool? Pseudoscorpions?

Dion believes that “[t]he objective of the best art and science is not to strip nature of wonder but to enhance it.” Without any doubt, he can pride himself of having saved a Mancunian spider’s life, for had I not seen the exhibition, the aspect of wonder and poetry in a spider that is no pseudospider would have been completely lost on me.

Project to Reform Habitations

Meret Oppenheim, Table with Bird’s Legs, 1939.

I. - HABITATION. House: 1. Houses in sky and earth. Emotional decoration. - 2. Expression of the facade; meaning of the terraces. - 3. Exterior of the house, that is to say feathers. - 4. Plan of the habitations, mirror to recognize oneself. - 5. Locks, professional secret. Furniture: 6. Living chairs, hangings of caresses, beds of captive birds. - 7. Different kinds of chairs, their decoration bloody. - 8. Chairs with animal feet. - 9. Negresse chairs. - 10. Armchairs. - 11. Boxing armchairs. - 12. Folding and water stools. - 13. Deaf and dumb beds. - 14. Sleepiness beds with windbag dreams. Tables: 15. Their shape, ornament, material, significant. - 16. Moral tables. - 17. Cinema-tables with suggestive views. - 18. Radiant tables for love. Gardens: 19. General description. - 20. Water features. - 21. Human trees touching the strollers. - 22. Boxtrees in iron wire. - 23. Caustic plants. - 24. Electrifying plants. - 25. Talking plants. - 26. Benches with springs. - 27. Kiosks of hair.

Louis Aragon, Projet de réforme des habitations, 1920, quoted in Ghislaine Wood (ed.), Surreal Things.

The Collector (IV)

Conway Library London (from Candida Höfer, Libraries).

The final time they made love, seven months before she killed herself and he married someone else, the Gypsy girl asked my grandfather how he arranged his books.

[...]

Where do you keep your books? she asked.
In my room.
Where in your room?
On shelves.
How are your books arranged?
Why do you care?
Because I want to know.

[...]

My grandfather and the Gypsy girl made love for seven years, at least twice every week. They had confessed every secret; explained, to the best of their abilities, the workings of their bodies, each to the other; been forceful and passive, greedy and giving, wordy and silent.

How do you arrange your books? she asked as they lay naked on a bed of pebbles and hard soil.
I told you, they’re in my bedroom on shelves.
I wonder if you can imagine your life without me.
Sure I can imagine it, but I don’t like to.
It’s not pleasant, is it?
Why are you doing this?
It was just something I was wondering.

[...]

They made love for the last time, unaware that the next seven months would pass without any words between them. [...] For seven months they would ignore each other anywhere and always, sure they could be complete strangers, but were proven wrong when he returned home one afternoon from work only to pass her on her way out of his house. [...]

Your books are arranged by the color of their spines, she said. How stupid.

From Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.

Rather more disturbing…

Salvador Dalí, Téléphone-Homard, 1938.

You think Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, the Surrealist icon par excellence - a thousand times reproduced, its potential to surprise and unsettle inevitably fading - is boring? You’re absolutely right. Compared to the other telephone versions Dalí envisioned, it’s deadly boring.

Dalí had ideas for other telephones, such as an Aphrodisiac Telephone that would be mounted on the back of a live turtle; the Edgar Allan Poe Telephone would have been rather more disturbing, covered with the black noses of black dogs and, inside the receiver, a dead rat wrapped in black thread and a black stocking - the whole thing drenched in Indian ink; the Böcklin Telephone, to be installed in a cypress tree, would have been decorated with an allegorical depiction of death engraved in silver. A final bizarre proposal was for a sable-covered telephone for the boudoir of a siren, with ermine to protect the nails.

Quoted from Ghislaine Wood (ed.), Surreal Things, catalogue to the Surrealism and Design exhibition at the V&A in London. Hurry - tomorrow is the last opportunity to catch it.

The Collector (III)

Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden (from Candida Höfer, Libraries).

When Koçu realised that he would not live to finish the Encyclopaedia, he told Semavi Eyice that he was going to take his entire collection, a lifetime of scavenging, and burn it in his garden. Only a true collector would consider such a gesture, which calls to mind the novelist Bruce Chatwin, who for part of his life worked at Sotheby’s, and whose hero, Utz, destroys his own porcelain collection in a moment of rage. Koçu did not, in the end, let anger get the better of him [...] Unable to synthesise the sad story of the past into a text or enshrine it in a museum, Koçu spent his last years in an apartment piled high with mountains of paper.

He was powerless because - just like those pure collectors who rate things not according to market value but rather subjective value - he was sentimentally attached to the stories he spent so many years digging out of newspapers, libraries and Ottoman documents. A happy collector (usually this is a ‘Western’ gentleman) is someone who - regardless of the origins of his quest - is able to bring order to his assembled objects, to classify them in such a way that the relationship between different objects is clear and the logic of his system transparent. But in Koçu’s Istanbul there was no museum comprising a single collection. Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopaedia is not so much a museum as one of those curiosity chests that were so popular amongst European princes and artists between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. To turn the pages of the Istanbul Encyclopaedia is like looking into the window of one of those cabinets: even as you marvel at the seashells, animal bones and mineral samples, you can’t help smiling at its quaintness.

From Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, chapter 18 (Reşat Ekrem Koçu’s Collection of Facts and Curiosities: The Istanbul Encyclopaedia).

More Linnaeus, less doubt.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) in Lapp costume.

In Uppsala last year, we didn’t make it to the Linnaean Garden, but honouring Linnaeus’s 300th birthday this year, I decided to make the “father of modern taxonomy” (he came up with the two-part Latin name for living organisms, the binomial nomenclature that is still in use today) the “godfather” of my thesis, for the following reason:

With a kind of get-things-done attitude, Linnaeus pushed ahead with Aristotelian logic under his arm, beating back the tendrils of taxonomic confusion.

(quoted from Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums)

It’s exactly the attitude you need for academic writing - don’t worry about things you haven’t read or things you’ve read but forgotten or lost in your chaos of notes, books and photocopied articles, or about the quality of your writing - just pretend there’s a system and push ahead.

Il pleut.

It’s Raining

it is raining women’s voices as if they were dead even in memory
you also are raining down marvellous encounters of my life o little drops
and these rearing clouds are beginning to whinny a whole world of auricular towns
listen to it rain while regret and disdain weep an old fashioned music
listen to the fall of all the perpendiculars of your existence

From Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Oliver Bernard.

The McSweeney’s Book of Lists

Doing research on idiosyncratic lists and taxonomies earlier this week, I came across McSweeney’s, well, list of lists. It’s also available in book form (Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists). Here’s a small selection (do I need to mention that doing research, in this case, means googling up…):

Four Simple Steps to Becoming More Decisive

Thomas Hobbes’s “State of Nature” Adjectives That Befit My Hangover

We Have Ways to Make You Talk

Clint Eastwood Film or Gay Porn?

Actual Titles of Victorian Periodicals

Words Never Used in the Titles of Remotely Good Films

Variants of Walking, As Defined By The United States Department of Agriculture

IKEA Product or Lord of the Rings Character?

Complete List of Creatures in a Land Called Honah Lee

Secret Canadian Superweapons in Development

Dialects of the Common Bumblebee

The Bezoar and the Magical Antique Shop

Bezoar or cow’s hairball, Minnesota Historical Veterinary Museum
(included in Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Curiosities for the Weisman Art Museum, 2000).

Sifting through my reading notes scattered about in four notebooks and countless word files today, I came across the following entry:

HP uses a bezoar as an antidote to a poison that threatens to kill his best friend RW (bezoars (hair balls from stomach of ruminants) much treasured by owners of cabinets of curiosities for magical/healing powers).

Voldemort collects trophies (such as objects formerly owned by the founders of Hogwarts’s four houses), and to bring them into his possession, he plunders an old witch’s wunderkammer-like collection:

“…the elf scurried out of the room, which was so crammed with objects that it was difficult to see how anybody could navigate their way across it without knocking over at least a dozen things: there were cabinets full of little lacquered boxes, cases full of gold-embossed books, shelves of orbs and celestial globes and many flourishing pot plants in brass containers: in fact, the room looked like a cross between a magical antique shop and a conservatory.”

(chapters 18+20, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

What a timely reading note find, since tomorrow will mark the nationwide release of the fifth Harry Potter movie! Uhm, and just in case anyone was wondering: I don’t think I’ll actually use this in my thesis.