Performativizing Papyrocentricity #70

Papyrocentric Performativity Presents…

Fish, Not FrogDizionario Italiano: Dizionario della Lingua Contemporanea (Vallardi 2017)

Headstrong, Heroic and Hellbent on Glory – The Brigadier Gerard stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Art of DarknessArt-Bandit: Interrogating the Outlaw Aesthetics of Über-Maverick Gay Atelierista John Coulthart, Dr Joan Jay Jefferson (Visceral Visions i.a.w. University of Salford Press 2022)

Fuller FrontalDeviant. Devious. Depraved.: The Sickening, Slimy and Sizzlingly Septic Story of Noxiously Nasty Necrophile Nonce David Fuller, David Kerekes, with an introduction by David Slater (Visceral Visions 2022)

Submarine SkinkUnderwater Adventure, Willard Price (1955)

Pair’s FairThe Dark Hours, Michael Connelly (2021)

Front Row for the Axl ShowNothin’ But a Good Time: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal, Justin Quirk (Unbound 2020)

Posturing ProctoglossistHumour, Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press 2019)


Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR

Flit Lit

From the arts-sports [like ice-dance] I took heart [about my possible triviality]. They proved that creativity is indivisible. The skaters, the divers and the gymnasts reminded me that what I read in books, saw in pictures and heard in music had all started in a fundamental human compulsion to give dynamism shape. […] There are moments in Shakespeare when he sets three or four ideas all travelling at once through each other’s trajectories. He couldn’t have been thinking of Bach, who wasn’t born yet. But he might well have been thinking of a juggler he stopped to watch on the way to work. — from “Souls on Ice: Torvill and Dean”, Postscript (ii), in Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James, Picador 2001.

El Sabor de Salvador

“Más es menos” is Spanish for “more is less”. And you can certainly see “más es menos” at work in the paintings of that greatest of Spaniards, Salvador Dalí. The more technically skilled and detailed his art became, the less powerful and interesting it was. Compare Sleep, from 1937…

Le Sommeil (Sleep), 1937

…with Still Life — Fast Moving from 1956:

Still Life — Fast Moving,1956

Eggs for Eyes #2

White bird-eggs of various species
(click for larger image)


Elsewhere other-accessible…

Eggs for Eyes — colored eggs of various species

More Mythical Mathicality

In a prev-previous post, I looked at this interesting fractal image on the front cover of a Ray Bradbury book:

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric (1969)

It seems obvious that the image is created from photographs: only the body of the centaur is drawn by hand. And here’s my attempt at extending the fractality of the image:

Further fractality for the centaur

Elsewhere other-accessible

Mythical Mathical — Man-Horse! — the pre-previous post about the fractal centaur

Mythical Mathical — Man-Horse!

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric (1969), published by Corgi in 1972

That’s a striking cover — and more than that. The blog where I found the cover says this: “This very odd cover clearly features a heavily rouged glam rock centaur with a rather natty feather-cut hairstyle flexing his biceps, his forearms transmogrifying into miniature bicep flexing glam rock figures. I think I’m slowly losing the plot here.” Losing the plot? No, losing the mathematicality in the mythical. The artist has started to make the centaur into a fractal. Or rather, the artist has started to make more explicit what is already there in the human body. As I wrote in “Fingering the Frigit”:

Fingers are fractal. Where a tree has a trunk, branches and twigs, a human being has a torso, arms and fingers. And human beings move in fractal ways. We use our legs to move large distances, then reach out with our arms over smaller distances, then move our fingers over smaller distances still. We’re fractal beings, inside and out, brains and blood-vessels, fingers and toes.