From the desk of M – – – – – –

                                   flocculated
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
pear?
 
me = pruned
  graff or grapht “A cut promotes new growth”
where the offcuts
 

sestining (un)sustainable paternity: a (s)patter(n) poem
 

An (only partly) purloined letter: Do I dare to peel a pear?,
purports this strophe’s catastrophic apostrophe: le nom or “non” du père
In Paris, perforce, peristalsis reverses parental parcel, a perplex not to par
With a paradigm dispermitting purge. A perjury to pare
The nonpareil, internal paternal metaphor. Per
That persecutory perpetrator, Pa. Pair

 
William Makepeace Thackeray, “Caricatures and Lithography.” The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh, Vol.II (1840). Everyone who was at Paris a few years since must recollect the famous “poire” which was chalked upon all the walls of the city, and which bore so ludicrous a resemblance to Louis Philippe. The poire became an object of prosecution, and M. Philipon appeared before a jury, to answer for the crime of inciting to contempt against the King’s person […] Philipon, for defence, produced a sheet of paper, and drew a poire, a real large Burgundy pear; in the lower parts round and capacious, narrower near the stalk, and crowned with two or three careless leaves. “There was no treason at least in that,” he said to the jury; “could any one object to such a harmless botanical representation?”
 
      piriform
 
Bertolt Brecht, To those born later //To those born after// To posterity // To those who follow in our wake //To Future
      Generations
 
What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime
 
Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime

perogative’s perch with despair: how many scissors to a pair?
Meanwhile: prune or snick the purblind heir apparent ere the pear
falls far. A hyper leper packs a parataxis axis, but one parole aloud per
purchase, in pure chase of persona’s purse, mon père.
Parity’s purity, and purity spurs too sparse to spare.
It parses, I’ve said, sub-par.

Louis Benoit, Jardinier [Louis Sebastian Peytel], Physiologie de la poire (1832). Nous y voilà rentrés, bien certainement, car la poire a toutes sortes d’affinités, selon nous, avec ceux qui la cultivent et avec ceux qui la mangent. Une Physiologie complète de la poire doit donc être augmentee […] d’une rapide monographie des
Poirivores et des Poiricoles, des gens obséquieux que soignent le fruit, et des gens gloutons qui le savourent à belles dents.

A prefect perfects paternosters at Proper Pauper’s Park at par.
Wear a parka. Partner with paregoric or Percocet, a pair
of pastoral tacos al pastor. Parsimony has a parricidal participle to pare
or, How to Patrol Patronage in Poetry. Partridge, check. One per pear
tree, Parmigianino, mon semblable, mon père !!
Lecture the lecteur from the lectern: One cat per purr, one parrot per-

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. everything is a root, too
 
Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (1857). Selected Letters, Francis Steegmuller, trans. (1954). An artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.
 
Alireza Taheri, “Of Fathers and Sons: From the Name/No of the Father to the Paradoxes of Paternity.” (nd) If the operation of the Name-of-the-Father cannot be reduced to an observable paternal act then how does this “spiritual truth” of the father emerge?
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. I sighed; but my father kindly forbore to question me further
 
U.P. Hedrick, The Pears of New York. Report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station for the Year 1921. Theophrastus distinguishes between wild and cultivated pears […] He speaks of the propagation of pears from seeds, roots, and cuttings and makes plain that plants grown from seed “lose the character of their kind and produce a degenerate kind.” Grafting is described. […] Root-pruning, girdling the stems, and driving iron pegs in the trunk and other methods of “punishing” trees are said to hasten the bearing time.
 
me = pollarded
 
What kind of times are these, when To talk about trees is almost a crime
What times are these, in which A conversation about trees is almost a crime

mute (or trap), trop parboiled to a hoarse whisper: in patois, on patios, on parterre. Pay per
view, view the paper, one super supper per soir. One Papal Bull per suit. Pursuit is par
for the course. Père
Ubu—Ubu Père; sinking Sun King, King Poire, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like a pair.
Their looks went peradventure. How can we tell the pear tree from the pear?
Is it a paradigm? A dime a pair? Does Pericles percolate? Is this paragon pertinent? Or permanent?
    Can we pare

 
Evelyn, Silva Bk I, Ch III. I have of late tried the graffing of Oaks, but as yet with slender success. Ruellius indeed affirms it will take the Pear and other fruit.
 
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The Paternal Metaphor: A Lacanian Theory of Language” (1992). Separation from the primordial Other, the first extension of infantile libido occurs in a series of cuts that gives rise to desires which support fantasies that, in turn, inform blind drive. As we go through multiple identificatory fusions, we become subjects of the drive Lacan described as a collage.
 
Robert Sharrock, An Improvement to the Art of Gardening: or, an Exact History of Plants (1694). Ch V, Num 2. What Plants take on different kinds. I am not convinced by experience that Pears upon White-thorn are worse in their fruit […] however I advise that such as shall for want of Pear, use Thorn-stocks, that they graft very low, for otherwise the Thorn not growing proportionately to the graft, will cause the graft to decay, being never able to grow thereon, unto the bigness usual in Pear-trees.
 
         hotchpotch
       farrago
 
Evelyn, Silva Bk I, Ch XVI. “The Quick-Beam.” The Quick-Beam, Ornus, or […] Fraxinus Bubula […] is a species of Wild Ash. […] It delights to be both in mountains and woods, and to fix itself in good light grounds. Virgil affirms it will unite with the Pear.

down the parson’s parsley? Snip-snip his parsnip? And mightn’t we whittle whilst we pare?—
Perché?/¿por qué?/pourquoi pas the peregrination? “No Parking,” not for a parsec, per
The Management. Need a pass per annum, per party. See how the perennial crab apple’ll practice cactus pear,
unless you care to spar
with the au pair,
O Père!

Joseph Beaumont, Psyche, or Love’s mystery, in XXIV. cantos: displaying the intercourse betwixt Christ, and the soul (1702). Canto XII, 113. In vain it is to tell these Wranglers, how / Jesus could graft cold Stones into the Stock / of Abraham, and made dead Pebles grow / Fresh lively Jews
 
Derrida, Dissemination. One ought to explore systematically not only what appears to be a simple etymological coincidence uniting the graft and the graph (both from graphion: writing implement, stylus), but also the analogy between the forms of textual grafting and so-called vegetal grafting, or even, more and more commonly today, animal grafting.
 
Hedrick, Pears of New York. Thus, Pliny says: […] “A load of apples or pears, however small, is singularly fatiguing to beasts of burden; the best plan to counteract this, they say, is to give the animals some to eat, or at least to show them the fruit before starting.”
 
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. I ought not to leave the relics of my work

Père, père!, prone on the cold parquet, it’s not permafrost!, but a juste milieu, Père—
sperm’s permanent press less perpendicular than a perishable purport to pare
sans peur, a permalink to parry. So persists the parochial pair,
père et fils, superlative parallax, perduring parergon. If a decent per
cent scent Shakespeare pass through the Parthenon’s peristyle below par,
does the spatio-temper of this protasis bear on the parturition of a pear?

Derrida, Dissemination. To write means to graft. […] Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory.

Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958). Bruce Fink, trans. (2006). But above all if we consider that the act of hearing is not the same when it aims at the coherence of the verbal chain—namely, its overdetermination at each instant by the deferred action [après-coup] of its sequence, and the suspension at each instant of its value upon the advent of a meaning that is always susceptible to postponement [renvoi]—

M Shelley, Fr*******n. After having formed this determination, and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging y materials, I began.
 
     scribshreds  This book, dog-ears
      loose stitching   Just leave it

Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

What kind of times are these, when To talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
 
“A Letter from John Zephaniah Holwel, Esq; F.R.S. to John Campbel, Esq; F.R.S. giving an Account of a new Species of Oak.” (1772). About seven years past, Mr. Lucombe sowed a parcel of acorns, saved from a tree of his own growth, of the iron or wainscot species; when they came up, he observed one amongst them that kept his leaves throughout the winter; struck with the phaenomenon, he cherished, and paid particular attention to it, and propagated, by grafting, some thousands from it

 life by a thousand cuts
       mots fléchés
 
Derrida, Dissemination. there is […] an infinite number of booklets enclosing and fitting inside other booklets, which are only able to issue forth by grafting

Andrew Murphy, “‘Came errour here by mysse of man’: Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence” (1999). This was, of course, Richard Tottel, (in)famous for his Songes and Sonnettes, which had provided a collection of heavily emended poems by Wyatt, Surrey, and others, including Heywood’s father, John. Heywood fils’s experience with the printer is no happier than Heywood père’s may have been, as he reports:

To printers hands I gaue the worke:
by whome I had suche wrong,
That though my selfe perusde their prooues
the fyrst tyme, yet ere long
When I was gone, they wolde agayne
the print therof renewe,
Corrupted all: in suche a sorte,
that scant a sentence trewe
Now flythe abroade as I it wrote.

M Shelley, Fr*******n. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbands of wood.
 
Ragland-Sullivan, “The Paternal Metaphor.” Such a theory has diverse ramifications. Slavoj Žižek, for example, takes the Name-of-the-Father or paternal metaphor to be the dead symbolic father as the father of dead letters. Beyond the idea that language is the language of dead tongues, Jacques-Allain Miller follows Lacan’s re-reading of Freud to equate jouissance—affect concentrated in the body—with the dead father as the omnipresence of the death drive in the burning coals of dead letters of desire and jouissance.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. “Alas! my father,” said I, “how little do you know me
 
What kind of times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many atrocities!
 
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
 
Leo Ferrari, “The Pear Theft in Augustine’s ‘Confessions” (1970). Less obvious, however, is the explanation of why the Tree of Sin in the Confessions is a pear-tree. […] the pear-tree is virtually absent from the Bible […] It can be argued (in a manner to which we trust, the great Augustine would not object), that inasmuch as sin is a turning away from the word of God, so too, it is best concerned about a tree which does not find expression in the word of God.
 
P. B. Shelley, “Remarks on Some of the Statues in the Gallery of Florence.” (1819) The works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in verse and prose: now first brought together with many pieces not before published. H. Buxton Forman, ed. (1880) This, perhaps, is the finest personification of Venus, the Deity of superficial desire, in all antique statuary. Her pointed and pear-like bosom ever virgin—the virgin Mary might have this beauty, but alas!
 
Saint Augustine, Confessions. J. G. Pilkington, trans. (1891). Bk II, Ch 4. There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night […] and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted.
 
Shelley, “Remarks on Some of the Statues in the Gallery of Florence.” The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, ed. (1847). Her pointed and pear-like person, ever virgin, and her attitude modesty itself.
 
Barbara Johnson, Translator’s introduction. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. graft without a body proper
 
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958). It must be admitted that the Name-of-the-Father redoubles in the Other’s place the very signifier of the symbolic ternary, insofar as it constitutes the law of the signifier. […] The effects of the prestige that are at stake in all this […] boil down to the rivalry between the two parents in the subject’s imaginary. […] this question […] is precisely the question with which the real children, who are the parents (in this sense, there are no other children in the family but the parents), try to mask the mystery of their union, or their disunion as the case may be.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses
 
Edward Bysshe, The art of English poetry: containing, I. Rules for making verses.II. A dictionary of rhymes. III. A collection of the most natural, agreeable, and noble thoughts, viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions, and Characters, of Persons and Things; that are to be found in the best English Poets (1702).
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
Juliet Fleming, Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida (2016). push against the borders of the cut

 
 
 
 
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. My joints more supple
 
The edges of the slips do not show wear
Sorted his slips into bags […] the The disadvantage of doing this was that while the slips
were in the bags, they were not easily retrievable.

[envoi!] Does an imperiled periwinkle wrinkle percale? Does one père per
son perjure the ark’s pair? Pardon me, person, but is my particular parthenogenesis on par,
or without peer? Are partition’s partisans spared how to pare a pear?

What times are these, where
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it includes silence about so many atrocities
 
“What times are these, when / to speak of trees is almost a crime / because it passes in silence over such infamy!”

“What times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence on so many wrongs?”

Robinson, The Frankenstein Notebooks. This second insert was written on six leaves that MWS may have used as late as April 1817 when she entered “Correct F.” in her Marlow Journal. […] Because these six leaves of laid paper have the same dimensions, light-blue tint, and watermark that are evidenced in Notebook A and because they exhibit sufficient physical characteristics (identical sewing holes; matching torn edges; pleats at the inner edges of all six leaves, caused either directly by the sewing-thread or by adjacent crumpling), they were most likely three bifolia taken from an unused (the ?last) quire in Notebook A.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. I learned from your papers that you were my father, my creator

me = couture, Morcellated morcelé

Fleming, Cultural Graphology. Sign-sewing—[…] cutting and sewing must be thought together and with the proviso that one does not necessarily come before the other. “Take into account the overlap-effects [effets de recoupe],” says Derrida, where “recoupe” means cut again and reimburse or rebalance, “and you will see that the tissue ceaselessly reforms itself around the incision [entaille]” (The Truth in Painting). “La couture et la recoupe”—sewing and deducting— the seam cuts and the cut seams.
 
can tomus refer in this case to a bundle
of slips tied up with string or even put into a box?
Rearranging information
Put back together, […] evidently by pasting
pasted slips overlap other slips or the sides of the
pages, and a few have had further slips stuck to them
[“slices of paper”] [“small peeces of paper”]
Necessary to untie and retie the bundle
This page self-consuming, skip [skip this slip!]
“slip cancels”

pearapraxes – Fehlleistungen [misperformances] – slips

M Shelley, Fr*******n. You are my creator, but I am your master;–obey!
 
Benoit, Jarnidier, Physiologie de la poire. Les procureurs du Roi sont carnivores et poirivores tout-à-la-fois. Ils mangent indifféremment de la chair de Bergamotte et de la chair humaine. Après les hauts fontionnaires poirivores […] viennent les mangeurs en sous orders, les grageurs subalterns, les dévorans au petit-pied. […] A ce menu peuple de gloutons le pouvoir jette les pelures, les épluchures de la poire, les trognons à-demi rongés, tout ce dont enfin les délicats et les dégoûtés ne veulent pas. De cette facon tous les appétits sont saisfaits, depuis les plus scrupeleux jusqu’aux plus grossiers. –Il faut bien que tout le monde vive, comme disait le bon Roi.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. Such were the lessons of my father

Petrey, “Pears in History.” Besides banning pears outright, zealous officials went after every object that might look like something that could in the right light remind somebody of a pear.
 
M Shelley, Fr*******n. Sometimes, indeed, he left marks in writing on the barks of the trees, or cut in stone
 
What kind of times are these when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds!

“What an age this is, when to speak of trees is almost a crime, because it is a kind of silence about so many misdeeds.”

M Shelley, Fr*******n. These feelings dictated my answer to my father