#Pictofiction

[amatlcomix]

[eyegiene]

Riverside gig in a few weeks!

[sinematicbodies]

Bill and Chatster … mostly Chatster talk the Mystic Pad, the lived palimpsest

You said:

Thx. Tell me more about this “mystic pad” Derrida keeps referencing in ARCHIVE FEVER

ChatGPT said:

Ah, the "Mystic Pad"—Derrida's riff on Freud's Wunderblock—is one of the most resonant tropes in Archive Fever, and also a key cipher for understanding Derrida’s late reflections on writing, memory, and the hauntology of the archive.

Here’s the core of it:

1. Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad (Wunderblock):

In a short 1925 essay, Freud describes a children's toy—a wax tablet covered by a thin, transparent sheet. You write on the surface, the writing appears, but you can lift the sheet and "erase" it, leaving the wax below imprinted with a trace.

Freud uses it as a metaphor for the unconscious:

The surface = consciousness, receptive and ephemeral.

The wax base = unconscious, holding the durable trace.

2. Derrida’s Mystic Pad (in Archive Fever):

Derrida seizes on this as a figure for how the archive functions—not just to store, but to structure memory, trauma, and repression.

The archive is not just where we keep traces, but how we experience the trace as always already split between inscription and erasure.

And so:

The Mystic Pad is the archive’s model: a prosthesis of memory that depends on simultaneous preservation and loss.

Why it matters:

Derrida uses the Mystic Pad to:

undermine the illusion of archival completeness or truth;

explore how trauma is archived (never directly, always encrypted);

and to show how the materiality of writing—its substrates, prostheses, media—is not external to memory but constitutive of it.

He also suggests that the Mystic Pad is an archontic technology—one of the tools of the archon, the authority who guards the archive, but who also interprets, misreads, or decides what counts as memory.

In short:

The Mystic Pad is a ghost-machine.

It teaches us that all archives are already spectral, already marked by absence, repression, glitch.

And it anticipates digitality: memory as a layered interface, where nothing is ever truly deleted.

[eyegiene]

Via https://pin.it/6nSZaqQiO

[sinematicbodies]

Dead ghosts!

[bonnettsbooks]

The Comics Code Authority* was formed in 1954 to keep comics "clean" of gore, violence, & sex. #ECComics was hit hard. 1955 #PictoFiction was a heavily illustrated story, not a comic, in mag form. No *CCA needed! 11/1/22 Open 6:30-9p Mask recommended. No open containers, please. (at Bonnett's Book Store) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkbkJlMPmDC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[eyegiene]

An extraordinary performer … read my thoughts on the “scandal” associated with Paul Reubens here ➡️ https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ijcs/article/id/29503/

[pulp-life]

Shock Illustrated The Needle #pictofiction

[roboticeroticelectric]

Remarkable “self-portrait.”

[pulp-life]

Shock Adult Crime Stories Illustrated #pictofiction #reading (at Perry Heights, Ohio)

[pulp-life]

Confessions Adult Romance Illustrated Picto-Fiction #pictofiction (at Perry Heights, Ohio)

[pulp-life]

EC Picto-Fiction Confessions Illustrated My Tragic Affair 1956 #pictofiction (at Perry Heights, Ohio)

[roboticeroticelectric]

“Comix” you can listen to 👂🏽

Thelonious Monk, b. October 10, 1917 / 2024

(image: Thelonious Monk, Monk's Mood, New York, NY, ca. 1956-1957)

[eyegiene]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kszLwBaC4Sw

DAVID BOWIE Blackstar (2015)

[confessionsofatextmexhoarder]

TV’s Lynda Carter, #mextasy Hall of Fame! Mexican American / Chicana superstar!

[confessionsofatextmexhoarder]

Yet another moment in the history of Mexican stereotypes! Randall had mad talent though his cartography skill set was not high.

Bill Randall - "South of the Border" - October 1949 Date Book Calendar Illustration - Kemper-Thomas Calendar Co. - American Pin-up Calendar Collection