In a conference given in 1966, Michel Foucault conceptualized the human body as the point zéro du monde, literally the starting point of the world. Quintessentially, from its lines or through its depth, a body lays out the universe and determines, even politically, one’s connection to his environment.

Although physical, as any frontier it is an agent of inclusion or banishment. Ultimately, a ravaged body sentences its owner to a form of social exile.

My friend Antoine Catala told me about a museum in Paris that somehow classified some of these exiles. It collects casts of skin diseases.

Located within the walls of the Hospital Saint-Louis, the Musée des maladies de peaux owns 4807 pieces predominantly manufactured by Jules Baretta between 1884 and 1913.

Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique, Radio feature: France Culture, 1966
French, no subtitles (sorry).

“She tied off the left sleeve of her coat, moved out of the apartment and into the hallway, missing the forearm already but resolved to leaving it… A single forearm was well-worth the escape.”

Again, it is such a shame that so many good books have to bear such ugly covers on their surface.

I suspect that Rae Bryant’s The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals might really be worth reading from the beginning to the end, but I’m not completely sure about it.

I mean, abrasive is a surface. Only apply abrasives to another surface, superface. Ugly becomes superugly.

Wanna give it a try anyway? It’s here.

Thank you Carson Salter.

Apparently, Dari loves the Fernsehturm even more than I do.

The word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word “barroco” and refers to a “rough or imperfect pearl”. Like most periodic or stylistic designations, was invented by later critics rather than practitioners of the arts in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It is a French transliteration of the Portuguese phrase “pérola barroca”, which means “irregular pearl”, and natural pearls that deviate from the usual, regular forms so they do not have an axis of rotation are known as “baroque pearls”.