of making many books, and blogs, there is no end

I believe I have repeated myself sufficiently about my longtime fascination with “history that didn’t happen,” as I have labeled the folder of digital images on my computer desktop. (My extensive collection not only of souvenirs but of entire program schedules from events of all sorts that were fated to be other than the printed ephemera would indicate.)

I didn’t comment back when it was a news item, but I was delighted to see two of my current interests converge in the information that of course official Super Bowl jerseys are prepared as though both teams had won, in order to have the appropriate regalia ready at the moment of victory. Each year, the clothing reflecting the event that didn’t happen is then quickly and securely packed off to the secondhand marts of Africa, under conditions that somehow ensure the objects cannot be re-purchased and sold on eBay.

I wonder if, in spite of the blockage of channels of resale, advertisements have appeared in west or east African newspapers offering healthy prices for these items that were meant to disappear from more than extremely local visibility. And if, as with so many other items of trade, this has already spawned attempts at counterfeiting.

I wonder too, though not very often, how many coded and fragmentary acceptance, victory or concession speeches are drafted each year by those responsible for maintaining the image of public figures, just in case the less probable event happens. Hundreds, I would think. A few of them possibly of sufficient literary value that we can regret the fact that they are instantly shredded and the files securely deleted as soon as the actual outcome becomes evident.

Most of us do far less preplanning for our own peregrinations through the garden of forking paths. So the souvenirs sometimes lack poignancy even for ourselves; the sheer quantity of early to mid-90s guidebooks to the Czech Republic on my bookshelves, acquired for the trip to Prague, to curate the show that, as it happened, never happened. (The last of the planned but never made trips to Prague, as it turned out.)

or, as the Pope said to Michelangelo in the movie,

"When will you make an end?"

And the answer for us, alas, unlike Michelangelo, is seldom "When I have finished."

I was trying to remember whether pataphysics was defined as real solutions to imaginary problems or imaginary solutions to real problems, but on looking it up I find that Alfred Jarry declared it "the science of imaginary solutions." He said nothing about there being or not being any sorts of problems to which the solutions might be linked, and indeed, a science of solutions of any sort would not, by definition, be a science of problems, only of solutions.

Anyway, a friends-only post recently proposed one or several imaginary solutions to the real problems posed in and by this blog, but since we are in search of the real (we think), we shall pass that over henceforward in silence and get on to books to be reviewed, if possible, at some time close to their publication dates.

Which I believe amazon.com lists as April 1 for a good many titles, come to think of it. Well, no, I see that May Day appears to be the new mythic date of choice for one and May Eve for the other.

May be as it seems, or not.

In any case, I have received a review copy of a book on younger contemporary Japanese artists who are obsessed, as is well known, by manga and anime and the figures that inhabit them. And that book raises quite a different set of questions from the ones raised by the Juxtapoz generation in the States. Update eventually on counterforces.blogspot.com, I hope, though the Juxtapoz post is on joculum.