Archive Fever: Mysterious Erasure at Amphibious Andromeda

Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite websites, Amphibious Andromeda from photographer Ricardo Bloch. For 589 consecutive days Bloch published a new photo each day from his studio in Paris, accompanied by an image sliver (an enigmatic associative footnote), followed by a short sound clip. Ingenious for its sound/image combinations, and for letting those media speak for themselves, I find this site remarkably beautiful and intelligent in its conception and daily execution.

On Wednesday March 4th Bloch discontinued posting daily new releases, with this message:

AA will remain online as a nearly unmanageable archive of fun and thoughtful image/sound combinations, but it won't any longer contain a new releases section. On the other hand, the images made for Amphibious Andromeda will be collected, in strict chronological order, in a series of inexpensive limited-edition books. AmphibiousAndromedaBook1 will be available in mid-April.

To help finance the publication of the books, all of the photographs in Amphibious Andromeda can now be purchased as 40x50 cm signed photographic prints, for a reasonable price. Send me an email if you want further information. http://ricardobloch.com / aa (at) ricardobloch (dot) com

At the top of the page is a continuously ticking widget or gadget that reads "I've been alive/22806 Days 19 hrs 33 min 4 sec" (that's what it says as I am writing just now). So AA has a heartbeat, that of its creator. And despite the adjustment my life requires to no longer have a new daily AA fix ("one day at a time"), I am so grateful that it's still there and the clock is still ticking. I've been going back to explore it from the beginning.

But then something alarming happened, beyond the control of the blogger, under the auspices of Blogger behind the curtain somewhere:

A few days after I decided to stop Amphibious Andromeda, a most serendipitous technical mishap happened and all of the sounds disappeared. Bizarre! I am now methodically replacing them one by one, front to back. So please bear with me.

Bloch's choice of the word serendipitous for this trés bizarre random calamity made me run to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, exploring the definition again:

Adj. 1. serendipitous - lucky in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries
lucky - having or bringing good fortune; "my lucky day"; "a lucky man"

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."

I first learned of the mysterious sound erasures on AA when reading Eric Prenowitz's translation of Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, a book in which Derrida anticipates the effects and pervasive impact of electronic media (especially what he calls "E-mail") in transforming the private and public space of humanity. (Ironically, and outrageously, Derrida's own archive was subject to a feverish lawsuit with the University of California Irvine; an account written by Thomas Bartlett, for the Chronicle of Higher Education, draws on details of Derrida's illness and death, demonstrating his thesis about the erasure of privacy.)

Because Archive Fever is reproduced and translated from a lecture in London on June 5, 1994, during an international colloquium entitled "Memory: The Question of Archives," it only anticipates our brave new world of web logging, facebook, and twitter. Derrida would have had a great deal to say about all of that, as well as the spontaneous erasure of the sound clips at Amphibious Andromeda. I keep trying to imagine just what he would say, as I try to imagine the human being now patiently reconstructing the full effects of his sound archive...where, serendipitously, the widget is still ticking.

25 Random Things: F-Words

Another of my 25 random things, as I work through the alphabet, a second post for the letter "f". (God bless the alphabet(s), by the way!) A few important f-words:

Fresh and free-range: I like my ideas and enthusiasms much like my food – fresh and free-range. I've never been able to constrain my wide-ranging interests, try as I have at times to delimit them. Hence this website, where I roam among them, drawing connections and following their lead. Thanks for indulging me, dear Ideal Readers!

Feminist: Yes, without a doubt. Beyond the waves of 1st, 2nd or post-feminist demarcations, I know that my life has been improved immensely by the efforts of our feminist forebears, women who brought us the vote, choice, more job security, and the freedom to speak out on domestic, personal, and political issues. The best men are unapologetic feminists, too. The wonderful free-range tree of life here ("Woman with Fan") is by feminist artist Susan Bee.

Fragrance: The people who I think deserve at least one shot at Keith Olbermann's "Worst People in the World" award are those who add synthetic fragrance to everything under the sun, including body care and household cleaning products. I'll be ranting about this again, as time goes by. Essential oils, good. Fragrance, deadly.

Far-flung family and friends: a fascinating trope. I'm very connected to my free-range far-flung family and friends, even though we often lack sufficient face time.

Frankenstein: No f-word list is complete without him, patron saint of the Other.

facebook: And finally, I guess I really ought to add facebook, as I'm a relatively new facebook afficionado. I resisted for a long time, and then capitulated when my friend Lisa assured me that "Facebook is all about fun and jack-assery." Whew, who knew? Just don't fling me any Lil' Green Patches – even I know they won't really save the world.

France: Ah, and France. Home of my favorite philosophes, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. For a magnificent glimpse of daily life in Paris, visit the web log of photographer Ricardo Bloch, Amphibious Andromeda.

Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society

In honor of (yesterday's) St. Patrick's Day, I want to lift a jar to Declan Kiberd, Irish literary scholar extraordinaire. Kiberd is the author of definitive books on Irish literature, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism, Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics and The Irish Writer and the World. (He's also annotated and written the introduction to the Modern Classics edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.) He has all the drama, pathos, contestatory intrigues, and language-in-several-languages of nearly every Irish writer in his head, and can recite text and verse from hundreds of sources, in the grand Celtic story-telling tradition. He's a meticulous, respectful critic, able to locate writers in their historical moment and its aftermath. Beyond that (as it says on the Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society facebook page) he's an "all-round solid man." (I know he would get a chuckle out of that – if he read facebook!)

I first met Declan in the summer of 1984, when I attended the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. I arrived there after a 6-week International Semiotic and Structural Studies Institute Summer School in Toronto (that's another story), listening to lectures by thinkers as diverse as Howard Gardner, Paul Ricouer, Fred Jameson, and Jacques Derrida. Suddenly I was in Sligo, staying at a modest b&b near the sea (the only guest of an elderly couple), sitting alone at an opening lecture on the topic of "Anglo-Irish Attitudes" (later to become an influential Field Day pamphlet). Declan Kiberd was on stage, speaking at a podium with such passion and fervor that he simply released his notes to the floor when finished with a page – they floated down around him, to be gathered up at the end to the sound of resounding applause.

I looked to my left to say something in amazement to the small red-haired woman who happened to sit beside me; she giggled and said "Oh yes, he's my brother, he can get very worked up on the topic! He's mad, quite mad!" We stole Declan away afterwards for a quiet fish and chips lunch, where I learned that his 2nd daughter, Amy, had just recently been born in Dublin; he was missing his wife Beth, daughter Lucy, and the baby. He warned me to "Pace yourself!" during the Yeats Summer School, which does, indeed, become very intense. (Imagine a seminar with poetry critic Helen Vendler, followed by drinks at a crowded pub, and then céilidh dancing and ballad singing, with Seamus Heaney in company, at the St. Columbanus Club into the wee hours: it was amazing good craic!)

We became friends and there is much more to say, except that it's been far too long since I've seen the Kiberds. The entire Kiberd family is remarkable, and when I taught in Ireland in 1987, Declan's parents, sister Marguerite, and brother Damien were the anchors of my experience. (Declan, Beth and the girls were in Santa Barbara that year, alas, importing Irish literature to the land of sports cars and surf boards.)

No email for Declan Kiberd, something I do find appropriate, for some reason. I can see his distinctive handwriting in green ink on long yellow ledger papers, swiftly preparing book after book. With love and admiration in the aftermath of St. Patrick's Day, I want to join all of the others in the Declan Kiberd Appreciation Society (electronic and no) whose lives and minds have been touched by the brilliance, kindness, humor, and passionate generosity of this exceptional man. Here's a shout!