The math of Noah’s Ark

Over the course of last summer I read Philipp Blom‘s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (2010), a book about the petite histoire of the D’Holbach’s Coterie.

One of its most memorable passages describes Abbé Mallet’s entry on Noah’s Ark which cites Bishop John Wilkins’s mathematical breakdown of the food needed on Noah’s Ark. Fascinating.

Also, Wicked Company notes more. It notes how the alphabetical order in the Encyclopédie was regarded as a heresy in itself (just as it had been in Bayle‘s Historical and Critical Dictionary), since according to contemporaries, God should be the measure of things, not something mundane as the alphabet. It also notes how in the diagram “Figurative system of human knowledge“[1], also known as the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert, theology is but a subclassification of both philosophy and reason, and not a source of knowledge in and of itself.

By the way, there is another fascinating diagram based on the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert, called ‘Essai d’une distribution généalogique des Sciences et des Arts principaux‘[2], representing a more narrative genealogical distribution in the shape of a very large cactus-like plant of which the leaves are filled with text.

Image sourced at the wonderful Il Giornale Nuovo.

A summary of Roland Topor’s ‘Joko’s Anniversary’

Much like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Joko of Roland Topor’s novel/play Joko’s Anniversary is the breadwinner of a family. Gregor Samsa is a travelling salesman, Joko works at the ‘Reservoir’ and his family consists of a mother, a father (who collects advertisements and is invalid) and two sisters.

“the old fellow got nimbly to his feet and leapt back on his shoulders”

One day, en route to work, Joko is jumped by a man who wants to piggyback Joko as if he were a taxi. This is his first encounter with seven otherworldly characters who are visiting his town for a convention. Joko and his colleagues at the Reservoir start to transport Wanda, Sir Barnett, Pozzi, Professor Krank, Pan Ton, Gunnar Ader and Doctor Fersen around the city and they are handsomely rewarded for their carrying services with gold coins.

One afternoon, while Joko is being straddled by Sir Barnett, he faints and falls. When he wakes up he finds that he has ‘fused‘ with Sir Barnett at his back, as if they were glued together. Their skins have been grafted together where they touch when piggybacking. Joko takes Sir Barnett home to his room. One by one, Wanda, Pozzi, Professor Krank, Pan Ton, Gunnar Ader and Doctor Fersen come to his room and they all fuse to the body of Joko. Meanwhile, Joko, is being maltreated by his ‘parasites‘ and they proceed by killing his two sisters, his mother and father. Before they die however, his mother and father succeed in killing all of the seven parasites with an axe.

When Joko wakes up he finds that the seven have disappeared and that his wounds have healed. However, it appears that the creatures have found a place inside his body. He is the host to the seven bodies who each in turn commit terrible atrocities when being in control of his body. Joko decides to kill himself, without success however and while he and his body survive, the parasites inside him die and start to spread a stench after a week or so. Exactly one year after the parasites’ death, a bus of tourists stops in front of Joko’s door, saying in unison: “Congratulations Joko!”

We who cannot

Last weekend, I bought Joko’s Anniversary (1969) by Roland Topor.

Reading the opening pages, it dawned on me that Topor’s novel starts where Baudelaire’s “To Every Man His Chimera” (1869) left off, exactly one hundred years earlier.

A good illustration with regards to Joko’s misfortunes: “You who cannot” (1799) by Francisco Goya, published hundred seventy years earlier.

Münchhausen, Nietzsche and the swamp of nothingness

Gustave Doré‘s caricature of Münchhausen [1] is one of the illustrations from Les Aventures du Baron de Münchausen (1862), translated by Théophile Gautier, fils.

It depicts the baron with a periwig, the socle of the bust bears the words “Mendace veritas,” Latin for “in falsehood, truth.”

It served as an inspiration to Terry Gilliam‘s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to style John Neville as the baron [2].

To my surprise, the heroic feat in yesterday’s Tumblr post[3], Baron Münchhausen pulls himself out of a mire by his own hair, is mentioned in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

“The desire for “freedom of will,” […] the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, […] involves nothing less than […] to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. (sich selbst aus dem Sumpf des Nichts an den Haaren ins Dasein zu ziehn).”

An encapsulation of queerness and otherness

For years I mistakenly thought that one of my fave visuals, Toulouse-Lautrec Wearing Jane Avril’s Feathered Hat and Boa (ca. 1892, above) was by Nadar.

Today, I learnt that it is in fact by Maurice Guibert.

In the process of finding that out, I discovered two fine blogs. The first The Esoteric Curiosa, the second the enigmatic ACravan.

Lautrec dressed in drag encapsulates queerness and otherness, better than any other photograph.

I’ve previously posted a photo of Lautrec, the delightfully scatological Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie in 1898[1].

Stolen kisses

Stolen kisses from Cinema Paradiso

The enigmatic and highly original blogger “Ombres Blanches” is back with a series of posts on surrealist cinema, French surrealism and all the things “Ombres Blanches” is into.

Illustration: deleted kiss scenes from the film Cinema Paradiso (click to see a partial list of indentified fragments) mentioned by Ombres Blanches. The collage gives a whole new meaning to the concept of the stolen kiss.

You can see it as a film scene here.

Face and hand variations

Face and hand details of three classic Western art reclining female nudes.

Closed eyes, a frank gaze that makes eye contact and indifferent boredom, respectively.

The first two ladies have their hands in their “fleurs de son jardin,” in their flower garden, to cite Swinburne‘s words, suggesting masturbation; the third girl is not touching her flowers.

From left to right: Giorgione’s Venus, Titian’s Venus and Manet’s Venus.

A book about nothing, or, in praise of plotlessness and the antinovel

I’m rereading Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant, a book which is brilliant in its lateral connections, arguing amongst other things that the Industrial Revolution in England goes hand in hand with the legal use of opium as recreational drug.

Speaking of opium, I’ve published a photo of an oozing, exuding, secreting and leaking poppy seed head.

But that’s not what I wanted to show you.

On page 47 in Writing on Drugs is Flaubert and he is cited stating his desire to write ‘a book about nothing‘ (‘un livre sur rien’), in other words a plotless novel, an antinovel as it were.

“What strikes me as beautiful, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing, a book with no external tie, which would support itself by its internal force of style, a book which would have hardly any subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that can be so.” (Flaubert, Letters 170).

Amazing.

Did Flaubert fulfil his ambition?

Maybe he did. The closest he came to writing about nothing was in his Bouvard et Pécuchet and Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Kings and philosophers shit – and so do ladies

“Kings and philosophers shit – and so do ladies” (Montaigne (1533-1592) in his Essays)

Der kleine Narr illustrates the first draft of the translation of my “Satirical pornography and pornographic satire, the caveman is agitated” chapter in The History of Erotica.

Mind the turd.

The sinister silence of the Laocoön marble

Laocoon marble: a depiction.

Surprise! David Toop in Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (see prev. post [1]) does not refer to the Laocoon marble. Granted, Toop mentions The Scream by Munch, which is the direct heir to the Laocoon.

The Laocoon is central to the ekphrasis concept, and the ekphrasis concept should be central to the “Act of silence” and “Art of silence” chapters in Sinister Resonance.

In fact, the whole area of writing about music is an act of ekphrastic transposition, some have even found completely nonsensical, testimony to this is the famous maxim “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

PS: I was glad to see that Toop cites Victor Stoichita, an author who writes about the self-reflexivity of painting in the same way that Toop writes about sound culture.

PPS: Jahsonic loves the work of David Toop, who is part of his canon, so any criticism you read in this post is non-existent.