11/28/14

Susana Medina - a naughtily cerebral novel about our relationship with objects, filled with ruminations on sexuality, money, and Luis Buñuel





Susana Medina, Philosophical Toys, Bilingual edition, Araña Editorial, 2012, Trans. by Rosie Marteau with the author... And Anne McLean. // Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.


www.susanamedina.net/Home.html            
www.susanamedina.net/Red_Tales/Red_Tales.html


video: Buñuel's Philosophical Toys

Nina, a young drifter from Spain, finds that the strangest of stories is hiding in her father's loft in Almería: there she finds ninety-five pairs of shoes, and this discovery propels her into a series of adventures, inquiries, and reflections on the material world. Was her father a pervert? What's the difference between fetishism and consumerism, anyway? Philosophical Toys is a naughtily cerebral novel about our relationship with objects, filled with ruminations on sexuality, money, and Luis Buñuel.


‘A shockingly beautiful innovative voice in which the sublime and laughter are perfectly matched’ Andrew Gallix


‘This collection will come as a total shock to mummy porn fans – E. L. James meets J. G. Ballard! Makes both writing and BDSM dangerous once again. Eat your heart out literary establishment’ Stewart Home

‘Medina writes unglossy fables of strangeness and curiosity in those penumbral regions of the earth visited between memory and conjecture. The sharp and cunning constructions are like the relics out of Borges’s library, bones of unborn stories that honour fate and run beyond prediction. Each is a perfectly wrought performance, presenting not so much strange sights or unknown spectacles but instead elegant mementos of sensual moments we too often pass over either in impertinent silence or baffled fear. Medina unearths the small beauties that we like to rebury. Her stories are exquisite reminders of our weird informal freedoms and the zealousness of an inflamed, sexy imagination. This is a book of wonders’ - Richard Marshall

‘A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise’ - Will Self


‘The everyday worlds of these stories are glamorous & disturbing, compelling & reckless; they are neural maps of consumer surfaces & psychological uncertainties, their inner landscapes demand our attention’ - Steve Finbow

‘Medina's writing is both intriguing and involving, probing the margins of narrative as it does, yet still carrying a strong emotional charge. Her subject matter lies in London's demi-monde, and is compelling and often dramatic. This collection will stay with me’ - Peter Carty


‘Her personal profile reveals a writer but most of all a writing. A singular writing, a unique voice that leads us through a labyrinth that is dark and yet under a luminous sky’ - J. A. Masoliver Ródenas,


‘A tremendously restless vision which relentlessly traverses genres and styles’ - Ruben H y Mónica Bergos

‘A cult and thoroughbred writer’ - Marisol Oviaño


Philosophical Toys, chapters 1-3, 'The sex-appeal of the inorganic', 'Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter' &  'My mother’s resurrection' 


Philosophical Toys, chapters 4-6 'A cellar in a loft', 'The paradise of forgetfulness' & 'The snowing dream' 

Philosophical Toys, chapters 7-8 'Leather-bound stories' & 'The penis nightmare'

Philosophical Toys, chapters 9-11 'The dehumanisation of artists', 'The museum of relevant moments' & 'Anything strang' 

Philosophical Toys, chapters 12-14 'The money kindergarten', 'A headless, small plastic elephant' & 'Zia Carla's letter'

Philosophical Toys, chapters 15-17 'Fast-forward, rewind', 'Childhood trance interlude' & 'Pearl, Snow and the insistence of the fetish' 

Philosophical Toys, chapters 18-19 'Anima blandula days' & 'A

Philosophical Toys, chapters 20-21 'Mortality sucks' & 'The cloning passion, a sort of footnote'

Philosophical Toys, chapter 22 'The ubiquitous lullaby'

Spinning Days of Night (in The White Review)



Susana Medina, Red Tales, Trans. by Rosie Marteau with the author and Anne McLean. Araña Editorial, 2012.


Red Tales (Araña Editorial, 2012, translated by Rosie Marteau with the author and Anne McLean), a collection of eight explosive short stories by the Spanish-English writer Susana Medina, takes the reader through a whirling range of styles, textures, voices, centuries and geographical places. Her writing enters physical spaces and human consciousnesses revelling in the places between experience and understanding.
One of the shortest stories in this collection, ‘The Darkened Rooms’, begins with the sentence 

‘CANCELLED DUE TO LACK OF DIRECT EXPERIENCE’.
Its seemingly rambling and yet ever-so-sharp sentences paint a tragic picture of that prelapsarian time before AIDS, when men had sex ‘happily condom-less’. Our female narrator muses, Orlando-like, on what it would be like to live in a man’s body, reminding us of the fluidity and randomness of gender and its attendant experiences. Medina pretends to withhold the story from her readers and in doing so gives us more than a story. he offers up emotions, ideas and propositions with a wit and playfulness that can be seen throughout her work.
The opening story, ‘The Ironic Grey Hair’ (its title alone made me want to pick up this collection), is the tale of Lula, an academic, whose thwarted late-night attempt to get into a London fetish club while carrying an air pistol echoes the danger and exhilaration of sex itself. Will she get in, will she not? Eventually Lula ends up on the pavement, her pistol confiscated by a bouncer, nursing one friend’s injured head while her other accomplice has sex with a tranny in the back seat of a car. It is hilariously funny and surreal and yet seems to contain within its latex boundaries so much about life that is true: in our inexorable journey towards death we are confronted with the mundane truth about life, here embodied in a grey pubic hair that features in Lula’s reckless dreams. It is in essence a story about the way that life itself feels real because of its inherent fleetingness. The last lines of the story, physically disappearing from the page as they get smaller and smaller, read like an echo: 
‘tomorrow’s another day. Or the day after that. Or the next day. Or the next day. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next…’
Lula is young enough to feel she still has time, and old enough to see the preciousness of life. She hovers between knowing about nothingness and knowing that she will eventually become part of it.
This existential nothingness is embodied in Medina’s final story, ‘The Space of the Tangible Hallucination’, in which Ella, the object of the narrator’s love, tries to erase her existence by burning her possessions and painting every surface of her house in ‘hyperbrilliant white paint’. In doing so, Ella also erases the narrator’s existence from her life. In one beautifully described scene, 
‘Ella holds a tear now transformed into saliva that slides down her throat as if she were crying on the inside’.
Our skin tries to keep out what might harm or even kill us, but in these stories boundaries, be they walls or membranes, often fail. Medina’s stories are meditations on the fluidity of life.
The character in ‘The Stranger’s Maid’ fantasises about wearing 
‘a full body condom when she goes out so she doesn’t catch anything because you can also catch invisible diseases’.
The porous quality of physical borders is also reflected in the mental states of Medina’s characters. Elle, the ‘dykette’ in ‘The Space of the Tangible Hallucination’, morphs into a knight whose one desire is to save the object of his/her desire. ‘I am, above all, a true gentleman,’ she proclaims.
But Medina’s power to transform characters from one state to another is not absolute. The mother of the central character from ‘The Stranger’s Maid’ states, 
‘If men could have abortions, the clinics would be full. Since men can’t have abortions, they invented society and culture.’
There are limits, after all, to our ability to transcend our biology. Elle experiences another type of transformation when the object of her love begins to disgust her: 
‘I suddenly detest her determination … I detest the way she combs her long red hair with her head leant to one side, her blue-tinged skin, her grey eyes, the way she holds her tea cup. I detest her sudden lows that obliterate everything and how she applies hyperbrilliant white paint to the wooden floor. I detest her skill and everything I loved about her before, I now detest.’
Love and hate, male and female, tears and saliva: everything crosses boundaries despite our best attempts to shore up distinct demarcations between states.
‘The Farewell Letter’ is probably the most poetic story in the collection. It is an epistolary meditation on love and loss and the ability to be transformed by passion. The unnamed narrator has been shattered into myriad selves like colours from a prism by a love she both desperately wants and yet simultaneously rejects. Sex and filth and death converge here when the narrator describes a one-night stand in a hotel in Mexico with a man she meets on the motorway: 
‘And I think of the hundreds and hundreds of bodies that have passed through this room, the hundreds and hundreds of bodies that have passed through my own body, realising now that I’m a hotel, a hotel room complete with a bathroom where they’ve all deposited their shit, their implausible embraces, their rehearsed words, repeating my name in a bed where they’ve all left their fluids, their pubic hairs and their mange … I’m going to start charging from now on, sick of all these bodies, so many bodies dying all over me as if I were a graveyard.’
This woman must come to accept her fragmented self rather than reconcile its parts, and we last see her wandering ‘peacefully about the abysses of the tangible.’ This is pure Medina, this acceptance that life’s problems cannot be fixed but instead must be turned into intense lived or chronicled experience.
What Medina’s stories do is to examine the mess of life, its filth, its passion, its fleeting moments of beauty and pain and love and loss. She places everything before us, like the lover in her story ‘Where Butterflies Flutter Creating Chemical Turbulence’, who tells the man whose body she craves: 
‘our juices on the palate, in the throat, between the gums, a kiss is a world: your sweat: I want to eat you, fuck you and leave you prostrate for days: sore, exhausted, deprived of movement: I want to bite you until it hurts. And I want to see you bleeding.’
The cannibalistic elements here are the logical end of a desire that takes one beyond lust towards consuming the other so it becomes one’s self.  I am reminded of The Taste of a Man, Slavenca Drakulic’s dark tale of a man-eating woman.
These formally inventive tales add up to an unflinching and visceral collection of stories which fragment and coalesce in surprising ways: Borges as written by Poppy Z Brite and Virginia Woolf. Susana Medina’s stories have an alchemical quality, throwing together disparate elements to create tender and terrifying reminders of what it is to be human: the danger and thrill of our appetites and the limits of our reason. -




Susana Medina, Souvenirs of the Accident
A collection of aphorisms, ballads and poems
Translations by Peter Cooke, Jonathan Dunne & Susana Medina

Medinations 

kamikaze knots 
The encounter   


Susana Medina’s writing is not autobiographical and nevertheless autobiography is what establishes the nexus between the personal and the generational, between the individual and the collective. Her personal profile reveals a writer but most of all a writing. A singular writing, which is marked, like her life, by uprooting. It might be said that there is a process that stems from the personalization to dissolve itself in participation, which in turn returns, at once desolate and triumphant, to the personal. This could explain the obsessive way she revolves around a plurality of ‘I’s in Cuentos Rojos / Red Stories. This dissolution of the first person doesn’t necessarily lead to an encounter. We get the feeling that everything she’s telling us (in her prose and in her poems) are experiences that have already happened, of which nothing remains other than the voice of the narrator. We listen to her voice in a labyrinth of flights and losses.
    That would explain the coexistence of familiarity (the reader’s empathy with her writing) and estrangement in her texts. An estrangement that comes from this living loss as a present moment made of images and words we know no longer exist. An estrangement due also to Susana Medina’s special relationship to the world and the culture of her time, for which she simultaneously feels fascination and disgust. A peculiar uprootedness that consists not so much in not having roots but in having roots in various places. Not in creating a unique space, a centre that gives us an illusion of reality and that we invent to calm our existence, but different centres that express the need to search for a unity that goes beyond the limits established by normality and norms. Uprootedness and estrangement mean here non-conformity and a denial of conventional reality, this wall behind which the true and worrying reality hides.
    Susana Medina’s very upbringing expresses this estrangement, and the peculiarity of her uprootedness. Born in England, her childhood and adolescence, so present in her work, were spent in Valencia. Back in London, she studied Italian and Art History. She writes in Spanish and English alike and to her interest in art must be added her recent incursion into cinema. Keeping her distance from the literary world and the pressure to publish, she has nevertheless contributed to various radical magazines, which reflects another aspect of Susana Medina: her vehement independence. 
    To the uprootedness, estrangement and independence must be added upheaval. There is a clear rejection of the contemporary world and at the same time a suicidal fascination. All her writing is a search for traces and the meaning of traces and an escape from society’s conventions. A conflictive relationship with people and a primitive relationship with things comes as no surprise: attraction and rejection, search and misencounters, the ascent to the universal and planetary and the attraction of the abyss, all within the sphere of the labyrinth and the fetish. The same life is, in Susana Medina’s writing, a space and in this space images come to life that a voice, a narration, recuperates from the emptiness of loss and abandon.
    These obsessions explain the unifying character of her writing as a unique and incessant project, thus the continuous re-elaborations of the various subtexts of a single text that can be shuffled like a deck of cards. Souvenirs of the Accident is a very clear example of this incessant simultaneity, of these continuous surprises that nevertheless are, or seem to be, familiar to us. This book is a re-elaboration of initially independent texts written at different stages as distinct projects, but their charm lies precisely in this unique voice that leads us through a labyrinth that is dark and yet under a luminous sky: the expressive naturalness, the narrative will, the humour, an audacity that rejects experimentalism and an erudite undertone that rejects pretension, all give clarity to this writing. 
    Each part of the book is conceived in a very distinct way and with very distinct modes of expression, a series of obsessions that fashion the narrative voice’s world. ‘Souvenirs of the Accident’ could be considered as the beginning of a long prologue that leads to an epilogue. They are poems in free verse whose rhythm is marked by oscillations of different registers, especially the narrative and reflexive, as well as by a structure that sketches out or gives body to the poem’s voice. Here Susana Medina identifies with the ‘nirvana’ writers of the nineties who found their greatest exponent in Ray Loriga and who go back to Mariano Antolín Rato to express a metaphysics, an integrating conscience that overcomes the tyranny of preceptive reason and of disintegrating science. To this apocalyptic vision is added the emptiness and solitude of the ‘protagonist’ (if we accept these texts as a narration). Violence, fear, vertigo before the inexplicable, lead to madness and catastrophe but also to freedom.
    There is intensity of sentiment but no sentimentality. To this wounded world Susana Medina opposes the stimulus of memory, of dreams and fantasy, the acceptance of ugliness, the drawing near to things and to the body in a suggestive androgynous sexuality that expresses her rejection of conventions. Her poetry is conceived as a metamorphosis, as a continuous process of transformation that distances itself from superficial reality to penetrate more profound labyrinths of reality. In this sense, ‘La rosa alucinada’ is a key poem to understand the nature of hallucination and madness in a painful and at the same time liberating process. ‘Líos kamikaze’ turns out to be the prose epilogue, which at the same time brings us closer to ‘Poema 66’. First, second and third persons dissolve in the encounter of bodies, in the rites of violence, in the acceptance of death and in the aspiration to be as light as a sigh. It is also an erotic poem, insofar as sexual freedom brings us closer to eroticism. 
   ‘Medinations’, in a play on words that goes further than a simple anecdotal pirouette, is a collection of aphorisms where, again, the narrative character of the voice creates a sensation of development, that is, of unity, in a writing that is precisely the search for a greater unity beyond violence and catastrophe. Here many of the things posed in the earlier two parts or ‘books’ become explicit around ‘contemporary evil,’ ‘the patina of fear,’ ‘the appearance of truth,’ the power of the norm, destructive, creative and utopian impulses, intuition or transmutation.
    This, in its turn, constitutes a prologue to ‘Poem 66’, where the second part or ‘Epilogues’ are on a level with a reading or interpretation in prose of the long poem dedicated to Lolita. An interpretation that underlines the ambiguous nature of a clearly autobiographical character contaminated by the resonance of Nabokov’s character. The sentimental education of a twelve-year-old girl is perfectly integrated into the whole of the book and gives it a more personal tone. The verses (their measure, their evolution) arise from the demands of the narration to become the steps of a staircase, a spiral, a feline, an escape, the evolution of luminous and painful instants of puberty. Where there was a hallucinated rose now there are ‘hallucinated apples.’ Lolita/Susana experiences the violence of the family milieu and the violence of society in the sixties in a sort of chronicle that lasts up to the present. Lolita is a girl wounded by physical violence, didactic violence and psychological violence and can only find her salvation, her ‘ascent’ into the abyss.
    Souvenirs of the Accident is a book of rare lucidity, made of images that aspire to reconstruct a world and create a world in the midst of chaos. A book written in several directions because ‘to be coherent art must fire in every direction.’ And one that, nevertheless, beyond the complexity and the richness of suggestion, seduces by way of the originality of its images, with its humour, its nonconformity with nothing gratuitous about it, its capacity to give voice and body to personal experiences and those of a generation. An unusual book that, barely a few pages in, defends itself on its own, without any need of its presenter’s clumsy babbling. - J.A Masoliver Ródenas

Susana Medina, Midweek Diary (pdf) excerpt

Borgesland: An Interview With Susana Medina


“What has interested me most is that with the Internet people have access to one’s work immediately, I love the immediacy of it. On the other hand, I can put work in English, Spanish, essays, etc. If I publish in England, I can’t publish work in Spanish, if I publish in Spain I can’t publish work in English. I can share a world that would not fit in a conventional publication. Also, digital printing can help artistic independence because it makes it flexible and it lowers the price of production.”

By Ruben H and Monica Bergos

3:AM: In the poem ‘To Return to Iceland’ in Souvenirs from the Accident (2004), the reader can make out your intimate relation with Jorge Luis Borges, the author with whom, in a way, you have shared the last few years during the elaboration of your doctoral thesis.
SM: There is this poem where Borges said: ‘I did not know how to be happy’. Borges speaks about his life and in particular, his emotional life. His emotional life was disastrous. I read this poem when I was quite young. It led me to a rather early choice. To say, well, on the one hand there is writing, and on the other, there is life. And I want to live! Nevertheless life itself has somehow led me to reconcile myself with that imaginary world in which Borges took refuge, an imaginary world that transcends and transforms reality. ‘Blindness is not darkness, but another form of solitude’ said Borges. I believe that Borges, with whose work I have indeed shared a few years of my life, did not find happiness in his relationships with the opposite sex, although he absolutely found literary happiness. That type of happiness exists. It is something rather personal, but I suppose that I wrote that poem when I became profoundly deaf after an illness that lasted three years, during which I didn’t know what was going to happen. ‘To Return to Iceland’ arose from that experience.
3:AM: To return to Souvenirs from the Accident, in ‘Poem 66′, a horrifying and historical poem that transports us to that rancid atmosphere of Franco’s Spain, you speak of a Spanish Lolita that commits suicide?
SM: Lolita commits suicide, yes. Here we bring in the subject of ‘political correctness’. From a ‘politically correct’ feminist point of view, Lolita would be read as woman battered by circumstances who hasn’t been strong enough to survive. But that’s life. Suddenly someone can’t bear things any more and commits suicide. Is that politically correct? The case is that it happens.
3:AM: On some occasions, you have talked about writing as ‘an energy, as pulse, as rebellion’. What do you mean by this?
SM: Not necessarily rebellion in the political sense. A literary work might produce an effect that has to do with magic, with something that communicates forms that are not completely conscious. Like music, in a way. How is music translated? Can you speak about sociological music? That’s why I mentioned writing as pulse, that is to say, words can produce pleasure in an almost bodily way and this is an aesthetic pleasure that has to do with sound, with images, with how writing flows. I believe that energy in itself can be rebellious in the sense that there are types of energy that are not promoted. For example, formal experiments. As a young reader, when I read I never asked myself whether my favourite writers sold a lot of books or not. In his time, Borges hardly sold any books and later on an entire industry has been built around Borges. These are paradoxes of the market. It all echoes a brutal mercantile system.
3:AM: That ‘brutal system’ of the market of which you speak, does it evolve nowadays positively or negatively?
SM: It’s a rather complex subject. With the appearance of the Internet the truth is that I am very excited. Because people can put there whatever they want, so a very different hierarchy is created from the one concocted by the mass media or the mammoth publishing groups.
3:AM: Then, you feel comfortable in cyberspace?
SM: Yes, absolutely! What has interested me most is that with the Internet people have access to one’s work immediately, I love the immediacy of it. On the other hand, I can put work in English, Spanish, essays, etc. If I publish in England, I can’t publish work in Spanish, if I publish in Spain I can’t publish work in English. I can share a world that would not fit in a conventional publication. Also, digital printing can help artistic independence because it makes it flexible and it lowers the price of production. In this respect, I am thinking of re-editing Red Tales in digital printing.
3:AM: The subject of language often appears in conferences and interviews by Susana Medina.
SM: For me, living here, in England and writing for so long in Spanish has been problematic, since many people I knew simply could not read my work. And the Spanish people I used to know, didn’t read all that much, whilst English people who read, could only read in their own language. Now that has changed. To start writing in English has helped me to be in touch with people who are here and can read me in English.
3:AM: It could be said that transgression is very present in your work. How has your literary trajectory evolved around that concept?
SM: Well, I began in a rather transgressive way, because what interested me was a series of things that could not be said, could not be done, that don’t come out for economic reasons. Mainly I was interested in how they are said. Why can I not use this form, and why can I not experiment at a formal level if I want to? That phase appears in Chunks of One, Red Tales, Souvenirs of the Accident and Philosophical Toys and it is a way of saying what isn’t normally said.
3:AM: Let’s speak about your current projects. Slumberville is a novel that you have been writing for a long time and it seems that you want to continue with it.
SM: Slumberville is about dreams. It is most challenging to write about dreams, they are highly private affairs and they are ungraspable. I have transformed this into a kind of town or geographic zone. Dreams interest me very much, since they can even challenge your daily integrity. Actually Slumberville is written in Spanish although the title is in English. It’s forever unfinished. I have spent many years changing it, introducing modifications and I love it because it has rather amusing bits, rather strange, that I’d like to keep.
3:AM: This aspect of dreams, connects in a way with surrealism and the surrealism of Bunuel, another one of your artistic references.
SM: The surrealist movement is a movement circumscribed to a certain time and it doesn’t have the monopoly on dreams or irrational reality, which have always existed, before and after surrealism. What interests me in Bunuel is that he explores a series of themes that are not usually explored, or were not explored at his time. I have worked on the examples of fetishism in Bunuel. In a way, Philosophical Toys has a connection to this. It deals with our strange relation with objects. We like them but simultaneously we are critical of them. Humans create objects, therefore objects frequently have a strong human component. For example, that clock (she points at an old clock embedded in a box with two half-open doors, which is in a shelf next to where we are speaking), that clock is caught in a box as if on the verge of coming out, but it doesn’t come out because it’s trapped. It freezes an instant, because a second later it could be coming out… it’s like an egg about to hatch (…) My generation has a weakness for toys, for tiny things. I have many friends who buy toys for themselves and are forty years old. This generates in me an ambivalent reaction: on the one hand, I think that it’s positive to keep childhood within oneself and not to become too serious, something that seems sad to me… I believe that it’s important to keep a relationship with your inner fool, with childishness, with something pure. On the other hand, consumerism exploits this weakness. You might think that to be puerile is something subversive, but at the same time consumerism even encourages a type of infantile mentality. In short, you think that you have decided freely, that you want to be puerile so that a part of you doesn’t die, but those that sell products have decided that they are going to promote that attitude, precisely because thanks to you and others who have made that ‘subversive’ decision, a range of products now sells… (laughter).


| On the Museum of Optography, Derek Ogbourne




| Hallucinating spaces, or the Aleph 


| Borgesland's contents
Exploded Sheep or the Senselessness of War
| Creation, tradition and something extra
Will the 21st century start, please? … Musings on being a judge for Women’s Erotic Art Competition … run by Jo Wonder

Poemas humanos: dystopia, utopia and the pulverised body

| Un chien andalou or mind the gaps
| An altar to Artaud
| Adepts, magicians, tourists of the sublime and not really

| ana: towards a polymorphous confession

| A Dystopian Colombia

| Buñuel´s Philosophical Toys (Script for 24 min film)

| Physical Matters, on Derek Ogbourne, Gymnasion

| A quizzical maze of erudite laughter


Susan Medina and Derek Ogbourne’s Leather Bound Stories.


Is mistranslation possible? Translation requires intent to achieve fidelity to an original. If a translator intends to mistranslate in order to achieve fidelity to an original, albeit by other means, then it seems to fulfill the requirement of translation. Mistranslation is therefore translation by other means. If it doesn’t attempt to achieve fidelity then it doesn’t seem to even intend to be a translation. It therefore is no mistranslation. A failed translation may intend to achieve fidelity but by failing is not a kind of translation but an absence of translation. It is comparable to failures in other objects where, for example, I say a failed poem is not a bad poem but no poem at all. A failed poem is, at best, merely verse.

Medina and Ogbourne’s project is considered in the light of this peculiar ontology. So the mysteriousness of Medina and Ogbourne’s collaboration twitches a half-life likeness, inheriting its form from the uncanny dolls of Bellmer. It operates between the unacceptable options open for the possibility of the very existence of mistranslation. Rilke’s dolls fetishised lifelessness as death to prove a distinction: ‘We pulled our dolls along behind the bars of our crib, dragged them into the heavy folds of illness. They appeared in dreams and were tied up in the disasters of feverish nights. They did not make any effort of their own; they were lying at the edge of childhood sleep, maybe filled with rudimentary thoughts of falling off, and they let themselves be dreamed. Just as they were accustomed to be lived tirelessly through someone else’s power during the day’. This is the atmosphere of Portishead’s wooden-hearted doll music ‘Nobody loves me’ and ‘Only You’ gurning as a soundtrack to Carlos Nine’s ‘Coloured Relief 2‘ picture reinterpreted by American artist Anna Gaskell, animated by Svankmajer. Its popular contemporary form is found in the monstrous ruins of dead girls in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water. Its trash form are the lifeless repeating gestures of commonplace porn and strip-show performances.

Medina/Ogbourne can also be fused with Oshii Mamoru, creator of the animation classic Ghost in the Shell 2, who writes:’There are no human beings in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The characters are all human-shaped dolls’. Here the German unheimlich is mistranslated to bukimina in Japanese and to uncanny in English. The obsession is for ningyo, which means ‘human shaped figure’. Dolls, puppets, automata, androids and cyborgs are ningyo. Hartmann Schedel made a woodcut of a ningyo with his ‘Blemmyae’ in Liber chronicarum (Die Schedelsche Weltchronik), Das Buch der Croniken und Geschiten von Hartmann Schedel in 1493. The form is human except that there is no head and the face is in the chest. The ability of these figures to speak not only to the horrific, but also the sublime, is captured in the last lines of Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty character. The powerful existential android in the Ridley Scott Bladerunner film contemplates his own death and as such seems to transcend his machine limits; ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.’
Medina opens chapter one of her novel Philosophical Toys, ‘The sex-appeal of the inorganic’, with the lines; ‘Nina, my name is Nina, the same as my mother. It comes from the Italian, from ‘Antonina’, but in Catalan ‘nina’ means ‘doll’. But it is not only my name. I talk of small things because they have been a recurrent cipher at the centre of my life. Also, those years, the years I am writing about, toys had become ubiquitous, my friends kept giving me small toys as presents, kitsch gadgets, playful objects, I gave them similar trinkets and then I felt, I started to sense, that these trashy toys were relevant players in the hypnotic ritual of post-industrial life.’ It reminds me of Hans Bellmer writing in ‘Memories of the Doll Theme’ where he links the construction of the doll with sadistic fantasies of assaults on the body and the powers of ‘pulp writers, magicians and confectioners’.

It also is linked in Bellmer with a belief in the supernatural powers of prayer, mistranslated here as a similar kind of hypnotic ritual of post-industrial life. Bellmer’s pilgrimage to Colmar to the altarpiece for the contemplation of diseased patients at the Hospital Order of St Anthony in the company of his sick wife was not a matter of aesthetics but resistance to Nazi oppression using techniques of better magic and a mystic uncanny that lay out of reach of political fascists.

Medina’s parents fetishised the shoe. Freud explains the general phenomenon in his 1927 essay on the subject. He thinks the foot or shoe ‘owes its attraction as a fetish… to the circumstances that the inquisitive boy used to peer up the woman’s legs towards her genitals …’ and ‘… the underlinen so often adapted as a fetish reproduces the scene of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic’. Bellmer’s 1934 Die Puppe ‘… presents the doll’s detached legs, nestled in a white eyelet undergarment from which a rose emerges. Beneath the flower, as if in a defensive response to what it symbolizes (the female genitals), Bellmer has positioned a woman’s high-heel shoe, with the rigid heel protruding outward toward the viewer’ according to Sue Taylor. Taylor sees the Bellmer doll as instantiating the Freudian thesis.

Medina takes to this scene in the mode of Angela Carter and all those fantastic girls dallying in their bloody chambers. She finds her pleasures in the fascination of ‘… traumas, pathologies, compulsions, the blurring of boundaries, negative pleasures. We explored these in our lives, in our work. Repetition, desire, destruction, that’s what we were into, disagreeable objects, the beauty of the abject, transmuting shit into gold.’ The trim metaphysical gestures and summarised plots contained in Medina’s work re-render the marvelousness of fairy stories. It is an act of rehabilitation of wonder from childhood, a girl’s eye view that takes pleasure and power from these objects and memories from the past. The luminescent Marina Warner would feel most at home here.

The film Leather Bound Stories mistranslates this earlier novel of hers. Her ouevre in turn mistranslates that of Borges. It is Borges’s notion of mistranslation at work throughout, which involves the strangeness of mirroring, dopplegängers, zombies and replicants. In the essay ‘About William Beckford’s Vathek’, Borges says; ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’. The double is prototypically uncanny, as in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, as in Gogol and in Poe. Borges’s Ficciones place the uncanniness of mistranslation at the heart of his aesthetic discoveries. So Medina displaces Borges as Borges once displaced Joyce.

She errs to conjoin with Borges’s lineage, one that strays and meanders through mistranslations of Argentine history identified by Sergio Waisman in ‘Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses; A Foundational (Mis-) Translation’ as ‘other texts and declarations by the Literary Salon of 1837; the avant-garde projects of journals like Proa and Martín Fierro’s Sur and Victoria Ocampo’s cultural importation machine; the moment of the translation of Ferdydurke by Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires (from Polish through French into an Argentine Spanish with multiple collaborators in 1947); perhaps the whole of Borges’s œuvre, as well as much of Julio Cortázar’s and Manuel Puig’s; and, if we jump to contemporary fiction, the machine at the center of Ricardo Piglia’s 1992 novel The Absent City, or the importance of translation in issues of identity and sexuality in Sylvia Molloy’s latest novel, El común olvido (2002).’

The childhood memory becomes a version of the infinite library, a defence of plagiarism, a recognition of her own precursors and the reflexive jewel of an intricate life. She displays a panoptican view that fetishises the fetish of parents. She conjoins with another riddling fetishist, Buñuel, playing with ‘… the music box from The Criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, the wedding dress in Viridiana, the female heads of hair nailed to a cross in L’Age d’or’ and the shoe fetishist in Diary of a Chambermaid. ‘Playing’ suggests the make-believe element of the work but also signals its slightly suggestive threat, where playing becomes toying. Sinister inequalities of power also swirl into the mix, in the form of the corrosive sexuality of the too young for the too old.

The link between reading and erotic fetish is made explicit when she writes in her essay ‘Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys’ about Montiel; ‘The old man in the film, old Montiel, “old boots and shoes” is the nickname his neighbour gives him, is, according to his daughter, a man of refinement. He calls all his chambermaids “Marie”, regardless of their names, as if all of them were interchangeable, all the same. He asks the chambermaid to read a passage from Against Nature by Huysmans, a bit where the whole of society is condemned. The chambermaid reads. He enjoys her voice. She reads beautifully. He enjoys that. The beauty of a voice, as if her voice was detached from her body. He then makes her try a pair of old boots, fondles them, fondles her leg, makes her walk.’ This is further elaborated to link the sexual fetish of shoes to reading on through finally to death where ‘he dies hugging the little boots’.

Fetish-death as separation is discussed as the theme of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz of 1955 which features a ‘memory where death, the erotic, separation and magical omnipotence are inextricably linked’. The film features Lavinia and her sister, ‘her inanimate double, a mannequin … an exquisite corpse in the surrealist game’. Medina rereads the foot fetish from her own female perspective, so the game becomes the ‘denial of death, the ritual of sense, the overwhelming importance of female masquerade, the fetish as intimately related to class distinction through the power of culture to transcend natural reality’.

Medina and Ogbourne’s film suspends objects before us that work as stories in themselves. In this, we are confronted with a new species of fetish. A meta-fetish is a fetish of a fetish. The sophisticated narrative that spookily winds together the images duplicates the object’s stories. What is suggested is a perfect match. The strangeness of the film becomes an effect of this indiscernibility of object and narration. The voice acts like a shadow of the objects, a strange one that is an exact fit, which covers the objects in a perfect match. The voice makes the objects disappear. The meta-fetish cancels the original fetish. And we recall, a shadow is an absence caused by an object blocking the light source.

Medina parks her shadow-narrative as a means of making the objects disappear. There is no room for the objects. Yet the objects take up the whole space. The perversity of the film is that in obliterating sight of the objects we wonder what space is left for the voice. If the match is exact then not only the objects become squeezed out of view. There is no room either for the voice. Just as a shadow cannot exist within a solid object, nor can the narrative survive within its objects. This reminds us of Beckett’s struggle with minimal visibles, the attempt to write through to the other side of language by reducing objects to the minimum requirement for representation, as if maybe from three objects we can subtract to two, to one and then unproblematically to zero. Beckett’s failure to reach zero points to a constraint lurking in the background. Perhaps the mathematical operation ‘subtract one’ finds its limit of application as it approaches the metaphysics of an empty universe.

Is the film what is left after the occlusion of both narrative and object? Are we watching and listening to the film as an abstraction of a film, just as someone might stare at the place where the equator is, a logical limit between hemispheres that can only be an abstraction. Medina is an expert in the art of such impossible limits. She knows it is impossible to see an abstraction, for what would cause the eye to see? ‘Abstracts,’ as the philosopher Roy Sorenson reminds us, ‘ cannot sustain the causal relations needed for visibility’.
The narrative takes up all the space of the fetishised objects in the film. There is only room for an abstract layer shimmering weirdly between the two. That can’t be what we are seeing. We ask what is it, this strangely compelling film? It strikes us as being similar to an abstract. But it is no covering that reveals what lies beneath. It is abstract and so there is no functional dependence on whatever lies beneath.
There is a temptation to think that perhaps we ‘fill in’ for what is being hidden, but this would mean that what we see is caused by what would have caused us to see the stories or the objects. But fifteen years ago the philosopher McLaughlin rightly pointed out that ‘we do not actually see an object by virtue of the fact that it would cause us to have the same type of experience’.
Medina is fascinated by memory. Perhaps then the film is an act of memory. What we see is what we think lies hidden in its occluded objects and narratives, which would suggest that we are drawing on memory of having seen the objects once, free of the narrative. But someone without memories of the objects would still see the film. So seeing the film can’t be so reliant on these memories. Many who have seen the trailer for the film will not necessarily have read Medina’s Borgean novel on which the film is based, and yet they see it just as they see other films.
What is hidden in the objects, the narrative and the film? Even if hidden, we are tempted to say we know what lies inside the film, but we just can’t see it. The idea of something being contained inside an object that exactly resembles what lies within it reminds us of a Russian Doll scenario. But the abstract surface means that, unlike a Russian Doll, there is nothing on the outside for us to see. The analogy breaks down.
Perhaps the film works like an after-image caused by a camera flash. Austen Clarke writes about how such flashes disable the eye, where photons bleach out photopigments and cause a temporary blindness. Similarly, where the optic nerve connects to the retina there is perpetual blindness. The reason we don’t see a perpetual blindspot is that the brain actively fills it in on the basis of its surroundings. Is the film then a kind of blindness that is filled in by the activity of our automatic gestalt imagination, the very mechanism that allows us to see any series of still images as a movie? There seems too much similarity between seeing an ordinary film and seeing this one. One feature that makes the active filling-in blindspot theory seem suspect is that the film is public. Our blindspots are subjective, private, interior events.


Ogbourne works to create doubt about this. He bombards us with data that destabilizes our beliefs about what is public and what is private. He presents us with a museum of optography, images held in the retina at the moment of death. The project is both a conjurer’s trick and investigation, a unanimous ghost story and Gestalt testing room. A whole encyclopedia and exhibition of this phenomenon creates doubt even though we don’t believe our own eyes when looking at them. It is possible to stop someone knowing by presenting them with things they believe are false. Disbelief can erase knowledge if knowledge isn’t analysed in terms of belief. In a flood of falsehood the knower is inclined to start doubting the facts she once knew. Confidence eroded, she falls back into a suspended state of true belief that isn’t knowledge any more.
Ogbourne’s hoax plays a serious game and dismantles the easy confidence of his targeted scientific discourse. The unease his work creates embarrasses science. He emphasises the surrealist imagination that placed the eye at its sacrilegious, scandalous heart. He disturbs lineages by showing how the photographic investigations of pioneers like Muybridge with his running horses and wrestling nudes collude with those of artists such as Max Ernst and Bataille. He works to manage a haunted space; 145 retinal drawings, historical drawings of eye diseases, the taped voice of German optographist Alexandridis discussing what optograms are with Salvador Dali, the weird documentary Medina describes as a surrealist ‘quest to uncover the truth and constant fascination behind the myth of optography, beginning with the seventeenth century, when a Jesuit astronomer called Christopher Schiener observed an image laid bare on the retina of a frog. It then travels to the town of Heidelberg (a recurrent topos for optography) where Wilhelm Kühne made the first and most successful visually identifiable optograms recorded as drawings in the late 1870s and also obtained the only known human optogram from a condemned young man who had killed his two children, Edhard Reif. We learn that the arbitrary shape that looms large at the entrance of the Museum of Optography is presumably the last thing Edhard Reif saw as he was beheaded. In the documentary, this human optogram spins, pulsates and flashes on the screen creating afterimages and reminding us that the last thing we might see could be a meaningless abstraction that leaves us in suspense for eternity. An interview with Dr. Alexandridis, who made a series of optograms in 1975 for the German police, tells us about the process of obtaining retinal images. The documentary ends with a life-affirming sequence, as a couple of rabbits hop around a landscape covered in snow’. If Ogbourne’s film works on Medina, here Medina reverses the pattern. Neither tames the other so the collaboration is fertile in both directions, a marriage of merging weirds.
Unlike Borges, Joyce and Milton, the three blind giants of literature, there is nothing wrong with our eyes. The mystery of the Ogbourne/Medina film survives knowing how it has been constructed. But this leads to a further suspicion. Perhaps then the whole mystery is bogus, another of Ogbourne’s tricks. The solution to the mystery is that there is no mystery. There is no ghost. But the attempt to understand the mysteriousness can’t be dissolved through identifying some self-referencing absence. This is genuine ghost terrain, more Susan Hill’s ‘Woman in Black’ than Wilkie Collins’s ‘Woman in White’.
By denying that there is any space between the objects in the film and the narrative, we have described the edge in between as being an abstract. But perhaps the analogy with shadows requires that the penumbra of shadows be factored into the described scenario. A penumbra of a shadow is light pollution at the edge of a shadow. A shadow is strictly the exclusion of all light, the umbra, but perhaps we need an expansionist reading of shadow to include the penumbra within the scope of what we mean by shadow.
But there is no room for anything analogous to a penumbra. The objects and the narrative are an exact match. The meta-fetish is perfect. Medina/Ogbourne have suspended us between unacceptable alternatives. The strangeness is the beauty of the calibration. And there is unutterable strangeness in both her novel and in the film.
The strangeness is unappreciated if wrong inferences are drawn. There are parallels when discussing hearing silence or seeing darkness. When Fred Dretske says that people can ‘non-epistemically’ hear silence or see darkness he is claiming that we can believe without believing what is being perceived. But when we hear silence or see darkness we don’t rely on reflective awareness on silence or darkness. Roy Sorensen points out that turning off a radio can be enough to wake us from a dreamless sleep and this requires no reflective awareness. We unreflectively hear silence.
Someone accepting Dretske’s argument would miss the eeriness of the Medina/Ogbourne film. The film dedicates itself to energies that exist beyond physical attributes. Wittgenstein pointed out that we don’t need eyes or ears to see or hear. We can introspect our sensations. In sleep we may detect absence of sensation. Austen Clarke wrote his ‘Theory of Sentience’ to point out that when we no longer perceive we introspect to detect absence. For how else could absence of perception be detected if a person is senseless?
Medina’s film might report experience without sensation. This would allow the possibility of knowing what death is like. Is the film Parmenidean, working its weird beauty as a way of understanding sleep as a brother of death? ‘For according as the hot or the cold predominates, the understanding varies, that being better and purer which derives from the hot . . . . But that he [Parmenides] also attributes sensation to the opposite element in its own right is clear from his saying that a dead man will not perceive light and heat and sound because of the loss of fire, but that he will perceive cold and silence and the other opposites. And in general, all being has some share of thought.’ (Theophrastus De Sensu 3-4, Robinson 1968, 124)
But this is not right. The dead experience nothing. And perception of darkness, silence, cold and so forth are perceptions of absence, not perceptions of what is. As Sorensen makes clear, ‘absences are not at the low end of a hierarchy of being’. But silence is a most negative sensation. Nothing is sensed and no sensation represents the absence, contrasting it with pitch blackness where, although nothing is sensed there is a sensation of the absence taking the form of a colour, black.

Medina’s objects are quintessences of brevity — to the point of hovering between unacceptable options — and the film’s condensing and squeezing gives the Borgean idea of narrative another daring twist. Borges defined his writing as a project working out a relationship to Joyce’s Ulysses. In the preface to his first collection of short stories ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ he writes, ‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them’.
Borges wrote in a press article of 1941 about a short story not quite completed when he published that first collection. This story, ‘Funes, His memory’, is about a man whose mind is incapable of forgetting things and so is stuffed full of irrelevant details such as the shape of clouds at sunrise on April 30, 1882. Borges concludes that Funes is a monster and that “a consecutive straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words of Ulysses would require similar monsters”. In 1925 Borges was the first South American to translate Ulysses. He only did the last page. He always said that he never actually read Ulysses. His fictions about imaginary novels that contained all stories in them are characterised by Andres Perez Simon as a brilliant process that organised a mythical translation to a polemical defence of censorship. Andres Perez Simon suggests it all wound out of Borges’s reflections on Ulysses. The great novel of the plenum, the novel of everything, including all stories and the whole universe, but contained in a single day, a single city, is the Aleph of literature that transfixed and galvanized Borges’s writing.
Borges’s fiction of the ‘Aleph’ is an account of an object that like the Joycean novel offers perception of the plenum, as well as expanding and reforming English. The translator of Joyce is charged with a similar duty by Borges. So we read Borges commenting on a particular translation and translator’s efforts; ‘The aim of this note is not to accuse Mr. Salas Subirat of incapacity…but to denounce the incapacity, for certain ends, of all Neo-Latin languages, and especially, of Spanish. Joyce expands and reforms the English language; his translator has the duty of taking similar licences’. Beatriz Sarlo thought, in 1999, that ‘Borges’s translation of the last pages of Molly Bloom’s monologue is, without doubt, the best translation of Joyce ever achieved in Spanish’. Borges delighted in the ‘delicate music’ of Ulysses, comparing it as being in places equal to Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne.
Medina takes notice of this delicacy and the requirement to temper her energies in accordance with Borgean stylistic felicity. The film’s phantasmagoria is intense with light impossibility. It works as an abbreviated note presenting a picture that includes all and every picture that doesn’t picture itself. In this lies the dark madness of ‘The Aleph’ and Ulysses where it is claimed everything can be depicted. There never can be a picture that depicts all and only those pictures that don’t depict themselves. Ulysses and ‘The Aleph’ are self-contradictory objects.
Unless a dialetheistician, and therefore Australian, we don’t think contradictions can exist. Unless we are paraconsistent logicians (again making us more than likely Australian) we also think they are false. Borges’s intriguing paradoxical fictions inseminate this idea by asking us to believe in the Aleph. David Hume thought it impossible to believe in the possibility of a mountain without a valley. He thought the difficulty of a completely different nature to believing in unicorns. Borges imagines the Coin of Odin as a coin with only one side to challenge Hume.
The Australian dialetheist and paraconsistent philosopher Graham Priest believes in the existence of contradictions and wrote a story called ‘Sylvan’s Box’ about an empty box with something in it. He intends this to be read as a straight contradiction. Like Borges he writes convincingly of the possibility of characters believing in such an inconsistent object. The fact that we can believe in characters believing an inconsistent object existing is enough to show that we can believe in inconsistencies.
Medina likens this to a kind of hallucinating. Sorensen thinks it is a commonplace because he thinks it is a natural feature of thinking. He thinks everybody believes contradictory beliefs. Haskell Fain and A.Phillips Griffiths are gullibilists who think ‘There is no proposition so transparent in its falsehood that all of mankind could see through it. There is no proposition so compactly true that no one could miss it. The most trivial of tautologies can be believed false; the most blatant of contradictions can be believed true. Even the most venerable proposition ‘I exist’ — which, Descartes claimed is ‘necessarily true each time I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it — can be falsely believed to be false. For what is to prevent some lunatic from believing that he does not exist’.
The strange wonder of the work infiltrates classical logic but for it to maintain its strangeness it mustn’t replace it. The effect requires the tension. There is a history to classical logic. It was invented in the early twentieth century and tends to be thought of as the only game in town. It is therefore what deviant logics tend to oppose. As pointed out, deviant logic has found fertile ground in Australia, being labeled humorously ‘wallaby logic’. Mainland Europe and Critical Theory departments everywhere have variants of Hegelianism and Marxism as their favoured brand of deviation. Even in the UK Michael Dummett has been a giant figure arguing for deviance in terms of Intuitionism. In the USA the pervasive influence of Quine is cited as a reason for the difficulty of getting deviant logic off the ground there. What is the big issue? Classic logic is committed to contradictions implying that everything follows. A contradiction is an explosion into triviality.
The paraconsistent logician denies the conclusion. She thinks that it is possible to have a proposition that is both true and false. A dialetheist is an extreme paraconsistent logician and thinks that true contradictions exist. They have examples to suggest why they are right. They claim that Calculus theories of Leibniz and Newton initially involved contradictory theories about infinitesimals. The solution was to just assume that infintesimal values were zero at some point and not at others. The explosion to triviality need not happen. The literary fictions of Beckett may be explorations of this embedded contradiction.
Borges enjoys the paradox of self-reference and Cantor’s exploration of the infinite as helpful ways of understanding the power of literature. Zeno and Kafka are bedfellows. A dialetheistic approach allows for semantic overexpressiveness. The self-referencing liar paradox confronts someone asserting: ‘I am lying’. Graham Priest thinks truths are in the world rather than in semantic theory and that the world can make the assertion true, even though contradictory. He wrote the short story “Sylvan’s Box’ in memory of the paraconsistent philosopher Richard Sylvan who died in Canberra. It was a story that was to help him get his head round inconsistent reality. Yet I think the strangeness of such metafiction is lost if the classical reflex isn’t set up first. I tend to think without the tension in the conflict the strangeness is tamed and the weird becomes domesticated. I tend to think the Hegelians have somewhat done this, and Theorists too. They don’t seem shocked, moved or awed by the weirdness coming through. Me, I’m like a kid in the Wonka factory with this stuff, and I think Medina and Ogbourne are too, just staggering around in a daze.
Medina’s work may be understood in terms of Borges’s condensed theory of originality and translation found in his essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ where he writes: ‘To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H — for there can only be drafts. The concept of the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion’. For Borges, and on my reading, for Medina/Ogbourne also, there is no definitive text, merely drafts.
There is flexibility in this stance, however. Borges also wrote; ‘I only know that any modification would be sacrilegious and that I cannot conceive of any other beginning for the Quixote. . . . The Quixote, due to my congenital practice of Spanish, is a uniform monument, with no other variations except those provided by the publisher, the bookbinder, and the typesetter’. Here, he seems rather insistent on taking the Cervantes text as a final version. His story ‘Pierre Menard’ suggests he treated the text as a sacred text.
As an aside, I note that in the new paperback of Borges, On Writing, edited by Suzanne Jill Levine et al, which offers, according to Martin Schifino’s recent review in the TLS, ‘ten new translations and represents twenty-eight pieces from Weinberger’s selection’ we find that ‘the first sentence of Don Quijote is misquoted in an essay that starts with a word-by-word analysis of that sentence’. Is Schifino right to accuse the copyeditor of failure rather than acknowledge a surprising version of Borges’s theory of mistranslation at work?
Ogbourne and Medina’s wonderfully delicate but zesty film is a Borgean cabinet of wonders that seems to work like Ricardo Piglia’s translation machine in his The Absent City novel we mentioned in passing earlier ,where: ‘At first they had tried to make a machine that could translate texts. [...] One afternoon they fed it Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ and asked it to translate it. Three hours later the teletype began to print the final version. The story was stretched out and modified to such a degree that it was unrecognizable. It was now called ‘Stephen Stevenson’. That was the first story. [...] We had wanted a machine that could translate; we got a machine that transforms stories. [...] It takes what is available and transforms what appears to be lost into something else. That is life’.

Magic. - Richard Marshall

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