hi, this from Pat Laurence, seems right on key, and I should bring back the Monet AND the Boccioni for anyone not here before: whatever image anyone wants to bring will turn out to be relevant, THAT is the point of Elasticity! and this goes right along with the unstable point Chris is bringing up — at some juncture we may want to put together (nice word) some of these ideas we all have! Bring up anything you believe we might all enjoy reading, and Sandra can send it on:

see you later, m.a.

forum Poets Together!(https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/poets-together/forum/):

Random thoughts.

Intrigued last week by seeing Monet’s mystical Gare St. Lazare, the Semaphores, and the signs in it that do and don’t signify: the elusive, blank, round railroad signs; the fog of impressionism; the sound of a train in the scene. I think of how the signs–visual images (do we see the back or the front?)–are blank, open, anything, any directions, any languages can be written upon them. And each would be different. Reminding me of Saussure: the relation between the sign and the signifier not fixed across time and language. And yet if one of the signs is red that may be fixed? Or does red not signal across cultures? I think of the train whistle that you can almost hear in the scene as an auditory semaphore that signals an approaching or nearby train. Does this sound travel across time and language? I think of two semaphore’s in Bowen’s novel, The Heat of the Day: the servant, Matchett, puts Portia on a train to the seaside, and “waved several times after it in a mystic semaphore, her fabric gloved hand”; Louie, the working class girl whose husband is away in the war is described as signalling “unmarriedness” in the semaphore of the click of her heels on a lonely street; high heels today still a signal.?

Mary Ann Caws

hi, this from Pat Laurence, seems right on key, and I should bring back the Monet AND the Boccioni for anyone not here before: whatever image anyone wants to bring will turn out to be relevant, THAT is the point of Elasticity! and this goes right along with the unstable point Chris is bringing up — at some juncture we may want to put together (nice word) some of these ideas we all have! Bring up anything you believe we might all enjoy reading, and Sandra can send it on:

see you later, m.a.

forum Poets Together!(https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/poets-together/forum/):

Random thoughts.

Intrigued last week by seeing Monet’s mystical Gare St. Lazare, the Semaphores, and the signs in it that do and don’t signify: the elusive, blank, round railroad signs; the fog of impressionism; the sound of a train in the scene. I think of how the signs–visual images (do we see the back or the front?)–are blank, open, anything, any directions, any languages can be written upon them. And each would be different. Reminding me of Saussure: the relation between the sign and the signifier not fixed across time and language. And yet if one of the signs is red that may be fixed? Or does red not signal across cultures? I think of the train whistle that you can almost hear in the scene as an auditory semaphore that signals an approaching or nearby train. Does this sound travel across time and language? I think of two semaphore’s in Bowen’s novel, The Heat of the Day: the servant, Matchett, puts Portia on a train to the seaside, and “waved several times after it in a mystic semaphore, her fabric gloved hand”; Louie, the working class girl whose husband is away in the war is described as signalling “unmarriedness” in the semaphore of the click of her heels on a lonely street; high heels today still a signal.?

Mary Ann Caws