B writes, of my recent post the Theory Cadre in Snowdonia, “Mike, although a picture is mentioned, there’s no picture here.”
Yes, B, there is a picture. But the Theory Cadre, unwilling to give away anything of itself even in such a deliberately revelatory document, has encoded it as text. Another way to look at this is that while the image exists, but is not present, “AE Fenell” does not, & yet is.
Another correspondent asks the more difficult question, “Mr Harrison, is there a Theory Cadre at all ?”
Evidence suggests that any answer to such a question must be arrived at obliquely. Perhaps the shortest answer would be to say that while there may be a Theory Cadre, there is certainly an AE Fennel.
In 1979 someone calling herself “Alicia Feignall” addressed the guests at the Ambiente Hotel from this location in the old kitchen garden.
8 Comments
July 3, 2009 at 11:52 am
“Theory Cadre” rearranged is “Do Treachery”
July 3, 2009 at 1:58 pm
“Thy Rare Code”
July 3, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Reached Tyro
Yet Hardcore
Hey! Redactor
Coy threader
Rectory Head
Coyer Hatred
Thready core
Trochee yard
Earthy credo
Earthy coder
Chord eatery
many, many more
July 3, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Silly. It’s obviously ‘The Cord Year’ (three words, think about it, never a mere two), clearly (relatively speaking) referring to that reverenced and tumultuous year of the inverse astral calendar when the Cadre was first invoked.
As if you didn’t know…
July 3, 2009 at 10:44 pm
if it comes to that:
née an elf
cf Hugo Dyson, during the early meetings of the Inklings
or mike harrison: “the trouble with imaginary fiction is that the buggers all imagine the same things” (from memory)
July 4, 2009 at 12:01 pm
A Fearnall replies–
Some of the Hotel’s historians–who, as tradition demands, work in the kitchen complex–believe that Dyson was a, if not the, founder member of the Cadre. Pivoting their argument on the very anagram of which McKie has reminded us, they suggest that he may also have been the representative of an even more shadowy group. In this argument, Dyson’s very existence is seen as the sole geographical evidence of deeper, geomorphological structures–a protrusion into the visible of the ideological bedrock upon which the Hotel itself stands.
The anagrammatical method depends so much on how the data are chosen. But all major suggestions here, I feel, have their merits. If I favour the Tallbouy interpretation, that is, of course, only an opinion. As DH Gouyson himself has forcefully put it, “In the face of the Cadre’s many self-representations, everyone is as equal as they are unequal to the challenge those masks represent.”)
July 4, 2009 at 9:10 pm
(Almost) according to sometime member Loris Gréaud, “We have no official Theory Cadre today, and this is both exciting and scary.”
Worth reading the whole thing: http://www.friezefoundation.org/images/commissions/Loris_Greaud_interview.pdf
July 6, 2009 at 8:53 am
If the context is art criticism, then mine’s definitely the best.
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