And why I prefered (and still do) thinking about art and music and such, is because when I really get deep into thinking about Devil's Island (because I'd read the first English translation in 1969 or was it 1970), even my typewriter begins to stutter and doubletalk in fear and anger, I end up sounding like Professor Erwin Corey walking among the ghosts ... ('pa-pa-pa-pa-papillion! papa-ooh-mau-mau sheebadahobbadasheebadahobbadasheebadahobbada")

He finally returned to France, visiting Paris in conjunction with the publication of his memoir Papillon (1969). The book sold over 1.5 million copies in France,[3] prompting a French minister to attribute "the moral decline of France" to miniskirts and Papillon.[4]


(She said "en France c'est un sujet tabou!")

(And my mind plays tricks on me, because I vividly recall reading that book in Richmond in 1969, but I didn't live in Richmond in 1969, so maybe it was just a magazine article in 1967 in some journal translated into English, a excerpted chapter, a preview of the book and other coming attractions).   

And that french prisoner's denim shirt I used to wear for quite a long while .... I'd bought that at an army navy store, there were tons of them on the rack where I was, at least 50 of them.  Those shirts were likely for people imprisoned by the french navy as the shirt had a french navy swabbie cut but without the little cloth rain shield, that's how they sewed them up, as some industrialist in France probably had got a contract for new prison wear, just to give civilian prisoners an even harder time than French naval prisoners while they stood in the rain, and the remainders were shipped off to Devil's Island, and now they'd closed those out because they were closing down the prison facility.    It all comes together sometimes in a really weird line. 

My Hopes Shattered Like Thin Glass

Oh hell.  I got an email from Margaret today.  Over the past few years, I've wasted some precious time carrying on thinking occasionally about the Ezra and Cora Williams connection, and have mighty cosmological thoughts even as recently as yesterday when I saw a spiderweb in the early morning sun stretched out from the tile roof to the wrought iron patio gate, and tried to work in string theory (which is on the verge of being discounted, too) because the way the light reflected on the filament yesterday and there were small bits of dew that could make the string vibrate a bit and shift and propel a small particle object, you see.  and when spiders weave a web, they pluck the string to evenly distribute the sticky stuff.  but the sticky stuff can go out elsewhere, too, small particles ... into the universe.

She wrote to me in response to my email below:

How interesting to think of the vortagraph in terms of Vermeer's mirror. I don't think there is a link here, but I could be wrong. Vermeer's use is fascinating. As for 5th dimension, even though Ouspensky had a high profile in Pound's time, and Madame Blavatsky was still a revered name, I don't recall Pound dwelling on the 4th and 5th dimensions. Time as the fourth, was always in his mind, as well as George Antheil's. But neither went out on a limb to speak of dimensions or other ways of knowing the universe. Pound did say time is not chronological and treated it that way in his writing.
Much love,
Margaret

On 9/1/2013 1:33 PM, barbara flaska wrote:

Here's a great article in today's latimes on a new Telluride movie:

times on tim:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-telluride-vermeer-20130901,0,3401953.story

Vermeer as Conceptual predecessor to Pound's vortograph?

Didn't Vermeer do a self portrait the same way Pound et al tried with vortograph, even with a similar stance staring into the mirror (camera)?

And Pound's was shattered to show a move to the 4th dimension ... to indicate time ....

am i old hat here?

anyway, I hope you are well.  we are holding our own here, I am peddling french wines now, and xxxxx has closed out the La Costa crash pad.

she's trying to get the house clean before November .... (I told her, why bother with housekeeping, after 3 years it doesn't get much worse .... a joke stolen from a naked civil servant

 (Nevermind that other in between stuff about poetry and art, although that's where I should really be living, and probably should have been living all along, this is kind of the nitty gritty I was driving at, but the math was far too complex for me then and even later on and most especially in 1988, because I couldn't get past my thoughts about sub-nuclear foam.

*In 1993 the physicist IGerard 't Hooft put forward the holographic principle, which explains that the information about an extra dimension is visible as a curvature in a spacetime with one fewer dimension. For example, holograms are three-dimensional pictures placed on a two-dimensional surface, which gives the image a curvature when the observer moves. Similarly, in general relativity, the fourth dimension is manifested in observable three dimensions as the curvature path of a moving infinitesimal (test) particle. Hooft has speculated that the fifth dimension is really the spacetime fabric.

Peter Loves Sandy

Peter was drawn to Sandy, for a variety of reasons, she was lovely!http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/SandyArcher.jpg&imgrefurl=https://missionlocal.org/2011/03/the-san-francisco-mime-troupe-commemorates-actress-sandy-archer-1938-2010/&h=1047&w=1900&sz=146&tbnid=1lfnvd1bhaJoEM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=163&zoom=1&usg=__4cCsG7-ObnDGPiwdIoml2vGJ0KQ=&docid=UAWsnpHWJnNKPM&sa=X&ei=U20jUvOPAs_YigLF-YCABQ&ved=0CCwQ9QEwAA

BUB the SPACE DOG

The treasures and artifacts not only existed in the Library at Williams College, but they were scattered throughout the Grand House.  The plastic flying saucer models, when not in use to guide the way of the saucers spinning about the universe while the space men were looking for a friendly place to make contact, would be installed in a line in a top cupboard shelf, and you'd have to pull a small ladder to get one down or stand on your tip toes if you were taller.

But in the drawer in the kitchen, the old wooden utensil drawer with a turned glass knob, was an envelope.  Dr. Hopkins and I had been talking to someone, and they had mentioned something about a dog.  And I asked, "Dr Hopkins has a dog?" because I'd never seen one in his house.  But it turned he had a dog that was in the kitchen utensil drawer.  And I said to Dr. Hopkins, "You have a dog here?"  And he nodded, and said "Bub."  (Bub?  I wondered?)  And Dr. Hopkins lead me into the kitchen and showed me where Bub lived.  Which was a kitchen drawer.  Well, this was interesting to me, because the dog was in an envelope, and Dr Hopkins slid out a little card holding a piece of black fur glued to it.  And he held it up to me and said "Bub."  Then he put it away.  Well, it took me awhile, but I did discover that Bub was a REAL DOG ONCE and HAD GONE INTO FLYING SAUCERS with his owner, who was a contactee, as well.  That guy whose name I forget now used to lecture about his trip into flying saucers somewhere far in the South and sell a little piece of fur from his dog Bub to the onlookers for a small bit of change.  And Dr. Hopkins had one of those, and THAT has been lost now to history because he'd been foreclosed upon and had to get rid of all his personal possessions, or maybe Larry Leon found it and threw it out for the garbage men after the estate sale.  But he's one of the contactees who was a visitor on the estate when Dr Hopkins held his flying saucer conventions as part of the Understanding Movement at the Claremont Hotel. 

When BUB made his trip into space, it was years before Laika actually went up, so we were still ahead of the Russians back then in space research in conceptual terms even though everything had a carnival atmosphere wrapped around it.   

And the wimmins knew, we really knew that although Sandy was an attractive woman and Peter an attractive man, the only reason he was really truly drawn to her was so he could get to the power behind the throne and in displacing Ronnie as the love of Sandy's life, he with her help could assume complete and total control of the Mime Troupe much more quickly.  And it was OBVIOUS! 

He loved her passionately, he says now, a love that was never requited. 

And he even kind of tried that with me once, and I was a nobody with that early Los Olivos thing.  Way back then!  I was talking about a musician I'd had a crush on when I saw a kid (Peter would give me an encouraging smile) and how I'd actually ended up dating him eventually (Peter drew closer to me pretending interest in my story, and Peter was an attractive guy then and I was beginning to succumb to his wiles), and but after a few outings with him, all I ended up liking about that guy was the color of his car (which was kind of turquoise) so I'd describe to Peter how I'd actually liked the color of the guy's car (and Peter drew closer to me) and I would break the spell: "So he has a cool little turquoise sportscar to fart around the freeways in ... just fart fart fart right down the autobahn und ausweys ... " and Peter would pull back and turn his attention to another.

I was a nobody back then with that early Los Olivos thing, as were we all.  But Sandy and I both spurned Peter's advances.

It wouldn't be a real draft card that the little puppet cut up.  OH NO!  He was too gentle and kind to ever go to a war and do those kinds of things.  He held up a big cardboard draft card and another puppet would come in with a pair of scissors from the side curtain and cut it up, just slice through it sometimes.  And that other little puppet was gentle, too, you see, he was small and gentle and if he had been a real person cutting up a draft card, he would have been beaten with sticks and taken off to jail.  But if the little gentle puppets did it in spite of being afraid of the consequences, (and the draft card and scissors would shake sometimes to indicate that fear), that means we could do it, too.  Othertimes, it would be a jagged snip, snip, snip as a different script revised to meet current events and new theatrical situations rolled out onstage.