"Monsieur de Pontchâteau had at first collected miniatures, before he became infatuated with books. From the moment he began to enjoy reading them, he lived for them alone. He was always ready with this phrase from The Imitation of Christ:

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro (I have sought rest throughout the whole world and found it nowhere, except in a corner with a book).

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To live in the corner—in angulo—of the world.

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In the angle mort—the blind spot—where the visible is no longer visible to sight.
      In the dead zone where the two human rhythms (first the cardiac, then the pulmonary) embrace and around which they generate sonic ecstasy and, perhaps, music—and, from music, time."

The above is taken from The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard by way of the blog site Isolda di Rifuti.

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The graphic above is the cover of the new-to-come FORT!/da? book, a generation of the 'two human rhythms' around which the book has been generated one might say. Frankly, few will worry about the textual content (by that I mean they will generally decry the persistence of what looks like anything but the time of music, much less its ecstatic component).  However, for me they are inextricably connected: music, time ecstasis, text since my first introductions to what was once called the avant guard was through often very poetically written reviews and manifestos, especially of the Next Wave in jazz as it was once called; and in a very real sense had a hand in creating the excitement of the music.

Here is a short excerpt from one of the opening essays:

 

Excuses, Excuses

Robert Cheatham

As always with FORT!/da? Books there is no justification or exoneration for what follows. Which hardly matters since there will be few readers so we can relax. Perhaps some remuneration for the few readers’ difficulties can be had with this quote (further along mind you), the source of which I have completely forgotten: (This forgetfulness could be said to be the way of im/possibility of all events, improvised no less that all others: all attempts at clarity inevitably raise a haze from all the stomping around. Nevertheless it is a hope that we all honor, that we will get more out of a situation rather than less, that we will see farther rather than closer, an ophtomalogical conundrum that is not necessarily allayed with a prosthetic, whether glasses, language, or delay pedal. Improvisation often lays those fears of hopelessness to the side, and says just play it as it lays. Or maybe as it doesn’t lay.  Or maybe it says to just fuck the system of remunerative allegories that most life now rests on.)  With improv there is the hope to have a (here’s the quote) “‘free relation’ to these parts of ourselves and our world, such that the unmovable density they once comprised becomes pliable and navigable.” But do they become unmoveable and airy because we just forget about them? Then the obstacles maybe don’t just go away but, like a black hole absorbing all light that approaches it, the density just drops to a different, lower register if you will, yet still providing an invisible pulsive/tractor beam. Astute philosophically inclined readers will recognize this as the hermeneutic circle. Like the roach hotel, you enter into the circle at birth and you don’t really ever come out. That’s the story anyway. But who knows? Maybe the Real does find a way to break into the circle. Maybe the sacred machines we are busy building can move beyond. It could even be said that the modern systems of recording have, while retaining the past, are also a way to ‘fuhgeddaboutit,’ to form a reverse cocoon. And of yes: If one is looking for a tabular registration of 1) memories or 2) a dictionary of improvisational gestures--well, better to just put the book down and slowly walk away.

"A thoroughgoing materialism needn't deny that the object has been
made by someone but must nevertheless treat it as if it had been made
by no one." Walter Benn Michaels

Resistance is the one thing that a physical book has to offer, along with all the blemishes, scars, creases and general accidentality that material inertia brings in its wake. To be sure, the resistance that physicality holds up via the book is a quixotic one. At times it seems like a deeply held conservatism and then at times just as equally radical. (Michaels' book The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History throws a dish on that fornicating interlocked couple of dogs and points out that both must of necessity lead to the field of force). Nevertheless. It has been my observation of late that a physical book locks out some distractions and locks down attention to it's attenuated page (growing more so the older I get). For one who likes reading on a tablet, it feels like being put into lock down and forced to move at a slower pace. (I must say that I never liked those speed reading programs---would never do for those like me who like to read certain sentences over and over again, linger over a word set or the framing of an idea, or just pausing for a wool-gathering couple of minutes when I seem to be just enveloped in a sort of processing fog. There is a stasis involved in long form reading, an affect that has been completely retooled for the hypertext bad infinity of the net where the main aspect is speed and movement, never lingering, or only lingering long enough to marshal resources for the next responding post.)

Of course there is the possibility of endless regress here, winding ever backward until we come to chisel carving our symbols and signs on rocks. (But then Michaels' point seems to be that is precisely where a 'thoroughgoing materialism' winds up, as marks which move farther and farther from any sort of transportable/reproducible meaning via a singular interpretation; or rather, more precisely, that meaning moves off of a subject and into the surrounding and supporting objects/environment in a widening gyre of circles and decompositions. As was often said in the Sixties drug trips, set and setting make all the difference between a good trip and a bad one...except that here it is up for grabs what even is going on, trip or something else. In these regions even the terminology used to describe the event is under suspicion...or at least up for grabs. For sure, materiality is no assurance of certainty.) But then again, under an electronic regime WHAT exactly is 'materiality'?? I risk at this point covering the same ground as did poststructuralist thought...which we indeed never left but in fact are just now fully coming into its tattered presence, with all the whole-ness which that entails.
Things never looked so bright.

Don't worry, I'm getting to the actual 'book stuff' soon....what is there to be in a hurry about?

It perhaps risks absurdity to 'publish' anything now. I say that because the world is in a vortex of publishing of one sort or another, with the majority opinion being that the luminescent specter of the net is an all consuming beast, turning all that is solid into the virtual air of one and zero.
Nevertheless.
I have an addiction to the book, its heft, its paginated materiality. Perhaps it is a melancholic stupifaction on my part since I have a tablet, use it constantly and have more books on it than I will ever be able to read in this lifetime. In fact in many ways it makes reading an easier experience and opens up a new region of possibilities, perhaps even causing a new diffraction of knowledge production/reality ala Mcluhan. (After all, the precursor, in some respects, to F!/d? was/is PERFORATIONS, an online journal of Public Domain, Inc devoted specifically to the effects of the new technologicalization of the word, the luminous expansiveness that hyperlinks and the net seemed to offer.)  Ok, even granted that, I still love the physical book, if nothing else as an icon of the necessity of the materiality of knowledge production, the idea that it is created in an actual physical material place and carries that placement as a haunting, somehow, impossibly, of that place. I like the clutter they create, the sense of an impediment in a way. I suppose that I am indefatigably Benjaminian in that way.

My previous personal blog, ...close to impenetrable, has carried the load of announcements about upcoming books and newly released books. This present blog will take over from there. Besides FORT!/da? material I will discover like endeavors that I have come across and find of interest.

But first things first: what is FORT!/da? all about.  The Derrida quote that acts as a guide post above has its say...but also the introduction to the very first issue of PERFORATIONS laid much of the ground work for what was to follow so there is no point in repeating that. Suffice it to say that since that first issue came out (first in paper, then ported to the net around 1993 or so, the concept of the uncanny, a governing motif in much of FORT!/da? productions in one way or another, has become a massive thought form writ[h]ing within the nests of nets. The topic of the uncanny has become trending in the last few years because modernity does sift the sublime (large forms at a distance) , shifting the involution of the sublime to the suffocating nearness of the uncanny. (e.g., see here and here and here and here). The force of the academic actually gets it's charge from the demotic (not to say even the daemonic), as the powers of computer aided imagery of cinema becomes capable of generating virtually flawless simulacrums. The uncanny IS the main motif of modernity, the slant in the fort/da around which much of the culture swings, a wing festering on the thorn of techné.