Flaubert… where you from and what you on?

“Paris will become a winter garden; espaliered fruit trees on the boulevard. The Seine filtered and warm – an abundance of fake gemstones – a profusion of gilding – the houses lit up – the light will be stored, for there are bodies that have this property, such as sugar, the flesh of certain molluscs and Bologna phosphorus. The fronts of the houses will be made to be daubed with this phosphorescent substance, and their radiance will light the streets.”

Visions of a lovely biotech future Paris from Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished draft of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the novel he was working on when he died in 1880. I suspect he may have had more than one sip of the laudanum on the night he wrote this. If it was the 1980s instead of the 1880s I’d say Ecstasy. It has that kind of E’d up I LOVE YOU SO MUCH MAN demented glowstick exuberance.

Photo by Alistair Gentry.

Dress like a Tartar

A selection from a folder on my hard drive that I’ve not touched for ten years, containing numerous pictures of archaic costume from around the world. What a shame it is that these are archaic; what a shame that the most boring and generic items of Western apparel have almost entirely become the whole world’s de facto uniform. And how beautiful and diverse a globally connected world could be if it meant we all had access to a massively expanded potential wardrobe of practical modern items derived from these local clothes that were still in wear during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth in some cases. You probably wouldn’t want to go for the full Malay actress or Kalmuck gentleman, but there’s shoes, dresses, coats and even hats here– although nobody really knows how to wear hats nowadays, at least not without looking like a complete tool– that would be much more appealing than the sea of branded trainers, sloppy leisurewear and ill-fitting two piece suits that are seen on the streets of most towns and cities in the world now. Not to mention a much more creative and much less colonialist way to celebrate our global and national heritages than Steamfuckingpunk. There must be something we can do to put a stop to Steampunk.

As with everything I’ve been posting under the HD detritus tag, I don’t know where these come from, not the original book and not the online source. My descriptions are based on the file names and/or whatever I can decipher by squinting at the original German captions. These costumes are all of the nineteenth century and some are clearly based on photographs, so the engravings can’t be any earlier than about 1840.

Crimean Tartars.

Ancestors of 2053’s Sexbots

Aibo: “No, master, I don’t have any ports big enough for that.”

I’d forgotten that around the turn of the 21st century somebody at Sony seriously posited these barely functional, limping, chirping real world-embodied Tamagochis as a high-end pet. Sony stopped making them in 2006. I last looked at these images on my hard drive in 2002.

Latte: “Are you Sarah Connor?”

Macaron: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Wei Wu Wei-Action Without Action

"... balance between the object's permanence and impermanence." (Photography ©Alistair Gentry)

“It does not have wabi, Paul said, nor could it ever. But- He touched the pin with his nail. Robert, this object has wu.

I believe you are right, Childan said, trying to recall what wu was; it was not a Japanese word- it was Chinese. Wisdom, he decided. Or comprehension. Anyhow, it was highly good

The hands of the artificer, Paul said, had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of some medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artefact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained…“

“...to have no historicity, and also no artistic, aesthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value- that is a marvel…“

“…here, an artificer has put wu into the object, rather than merely witnessed the wu inherent in it... an entire new world is pointed to, by this.“

From ‘The Man in the High Castle‘ by Philip K. Dick, 1962.

I recently re-read this book, one of my favourites among PKD’s prodigious catalogue of intensely intelligent, thought provoking and, yes, readable works. A fine example of how a great book keeps on giving you more every time you return is the fact that I’d never before been struck by the philosophy of art expressed by the character quoted above.  The novel takes place in the early Sixties in California, but after it’s been bombed and then occupied by the Japanese following an Axis triumph over the Allied powers during WWII. The Nazis occupy the Eastern seaboard of the country formerly known as the USA, and of course they have subjugated Russia and Western Europe, completing the Holocaust and moving on to repeat it in Africa. Robert Childan is a dealer in the authentic memorabilia associated with the now dead Western consumerist culture, which enjoys huge popularity with the Japanese conquerors who are now the cultural and political elite of Asia and the Pacific.