And I dipped into Badiou’s book on Deleuze — a Dutch translation was published last year: (Alain Badiou, Deleuze. Het geroep van het zijn, Klement/Pelckmans, Kampen/Kapellen, 2006)

I enjoy reading the clear sentences of Badiou — much more than I like to read the prose of Deleuze, to be honest. I also enjoy the way he structures his argument. Because it is crystal-clear. But I do not agree with Badiou.

Maybe I do agree with his (re-)interpretation of Deleuze, it makes sense, Badiou has a point in the first 40 pages, but that point doesn’t strike me as very problematic for Deleuze. It might be very problematic to firm believers in the free-for-all -everything-goes Deleuze. But I do not agree with Badiou’s, well, strictness? Platonism? believe?

Maybe Badiou is the philosophical “Enemy” — the one who you’d love to believe, to be a believer of the truth, of the event that took place in the past, or that will happen in the future… for the exhiliration of being a believer, because the believe in that truth pays for all the hard work and dreariness in the present…

I know I am rambling here — not making a philosophical argument. I know I am too much influenced by biographical detail here (Badiou as a Maoist). (There is, I imagine, an exhiliration in believing that Mao was bringing Truth and Revolution — millions believed it, experienced that exhiliration).

Badiou’s politics do not per se discredit Badiou’s philosophy. (Hmm, am I sure of that?) My problem is that Badiou believes in a Truth that is blinding human beings. He wants to, does believe in that Truth. I’m not so sure we need such a believe. Not even philosophically.

I’m not sure.

And then, I’m stuck on page 48. Wondering if I should read a whole book by Badiou on Deleuze, a book that according to others is basically an assassination attempt. (See for instance Steven Shaviro in a review on Hallward’s book on Deleuze http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=567. It’s not more than a remark btw.).

I haven’t done any ‘real reading work’ these past weeks. ATD is still unfinished — didn’t have the energy/perserverance/right state of mind to continue that dream.

But I did devour two novels in between:

Marjolijn Februari: De literaire kring
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle

Both recommended highly. Intelligent. Witty. Serious.

Back in 1983 / 1984 the poet bp Nichols wrote a dozen programmed kinetic poems for the Apple II. They are revived, by Jim Andrews and others, in different formats: http://vispo.com/bp.

It’s also a good example of the problematics concerning the conservation of digital art…

Oftewel de terugkeer van de literaire SF – en nog wel in het Nederlands. Omar Munoz Cremers’ SF roman is verkrijgbaar via Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/content/674262. Zie ook http://omc-par-omc.blogspot.com/2007/02/46-droomstof.html.

Eerst nog 200 pagina’s ATD….

“But the mechanics understood each other. At the end of the summer, it would be these hardheaded tinkers with their lopsided-healed fractures, scars, and singed-off eyebrows, chronically short-tempered before Creation’s irreducible cussedness, who’d come out of these time-traveler’s clambakes with any practical kind of momentum, and when the professors had all gone back to their bookshelves and protégés and intriguings after this or that Latinate token of prestige, it’d be the engineers who’d figure out how to keep in touch, what telegraphers and motor expressmen to trust, not to mention sheriffs who wouldn’t ask too many questions, Italian firework artists who’d come in and cover for them when the townsfolk grew suspicious of night horizons, where to find the discontinued part, the exotic ore, the local utility somewhere on Earth able to generate them current with the exact phase or frequency or sometimes simple purity that would meet their increasingly inscrutable needs.” (ATD, p. 457/8)

[Roswell & Merle in front of a blackboard full of mathematical equations]

“Way I figure, all’s we need to do’s translate this here into hardware, then solder it all up, and we’re in business.”
“Or in trouble”
“By the way, who’s the practical one here and who’s the crazy dreamer, again? I keep forgetting.” (ATD 459)

“So”, the professor has gone on to explain, “if one acccepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Icelandic spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude.” (ATD p. 250).

“Wernfer, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material – and flows of power as well, expressed for example in massive troop movements, now and in futurity – he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkei, or railworthiness, each and every accomodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation…” (ATD p. 242)

For more on this see for instance Matterarts The Invention of Communication…

“As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease , transmitted, in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” the they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.” (ATD p. 223)

Hmmm, remember Slothrop, paranoia & anti-paranoia in GR…?

Here’s a wonderful description of one reader (& Pynchonwiki-member) and his reading set-up, with laptop + paper notebook: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/?p=47.

I am reading ATD at stretches of about 10 pages & then make notes in a simple text-editor, plus go through some googling for references.

“Suppose it were happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”
(…)
“Sir, that is disgusting.”
“Not literally then … but we do use another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience … each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step — human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood — a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”