Tiffany, "The Natural Philosophy of Toys" (Maillardet)

[Dave Monroe]

... yeah, those Yeats poems, that should have been a clue.  Just haven't
had the time to follow all too closely.  I actually met Daniel Tiffany a
few years ago.  He teaches at USC (the University of Southern
California, that is, vs., say, The University of South Carolina), but
his wife is apparently from town, an they were here visiting the
in-laws.

Ran into him at the local university library.  One of those Reese's
Peanut Butter Cup ad moments.  I had the only copy in town--he'd
apparently been to the nearby bookstore just after I hit it--of some
collection of essays on objectivity, whilst he had the special issue of
Representations I was going to xerox in its entirety anyway.  So we
traded for the weekend.

And we were both packing W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory, except his
was signed, had been given to him by Mitchell, who'd apparently been his
mentor (and might very nearly have been mine, were it not for mistakenly
assumed family responsibilities ...) at The University of Chicago.
Should have kept in touch, but ...

Anyway, I bought Toy Medium right off the new book shelf at another
store, a quick flip through yielding Leibniz, automata, Kleist,
meteorology, meteors, fireworks, radiation (his particular fascination
when I met him seemed to be the nonlenticular optics involved in
radiography), you name it, I was, and remain, into it.  Didn't even
realize it was by him, though, 'til I was long out of the store ...

Also got lucky and scored his Radio Corpse: Imagism and the
Cryptaesthetic of ezra Pound (which he was in the process of publishing
when I met him) at a powell's in Chicago for six bucks minus twenty
percent (vs. the fifty or so smackers Harvard UP wanted at the time).
Haven't much thumbed through it yet, esp. as I'm not all too familiar
with Pound (though I do recall an echo of his "In the Station of the
Metro" or whatever in V., though where at ...?), but radiation on the
other hand ...

Hope to post a bit more from TM, do think it's highly sugestive here, at
least, automata, gravity, grace, tropes, mathematics, birds, pneumatics,
you name it.  Do also see Otto Mayr's Authority, Liberty and Automatic
Machinery (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989?), which I'll post from
as well as soon as I remember to haul it along.  Automata, philosophy
and politics ...