It has taken me a time to settle on a name. Am I settled? I do not know? I hope so. I should heed the following interaction in Marge Piercy’s A Woman on the Edge of Time as the protagonist learns that people have the opportunity to change their names throughout life :
“You change your name any time you want to?”
“If you do it too often, nobody remembers your name,” Barbarossa said solemnly in his schoolmaster’s manner. “Sometimes youths do that the first years after naming.”
A friend and fellow MA student had mentioned they felt How to Make a Lamella sounded too much like a work shop. I liked that it was sort of nonsense, and that it is possibly a speculative fiction title, fragments of which are folded into the manifesting project. But I took their point. They suggested a number for alternatives which I played around with but in the last few days I think the :// prior to the word, does what is required [Actually it should be after…somewhere along the line, I switched this and have decided to revert… which means a lot of deleting and replacing]. And nothing else is needed. So, I have settled on that: ://Lamella. [LAMELLA://]
Next, I may need to decide on L or l. Perhaps it can wait. Perhaps not.
Marge Piercy also writes in A Woman on the Edgar of Time, first published in 1976, about, “A weakness that remains in our language.” That is probably an under statement, given it seems almost – if not entirely – impossible to discuss the limits and impositions of language without being scuppered by language as you do.
The other thing I am having immense trouble with is the splitting of research/practice. This whole exercise is based around an attempt to dissolve the line which divides the two into separate domains. Yet, so far, it looks as if I have literally positioned one over there as the practice with hints of what might be perceived as research, and one over here with hints of what might be perceived as practice. I am not sure at the moment how to resolve this. And will sit with it for a while before I make any decisions. Let’s hope it is not an impasse. But it may well be.
Other than that, it’s coming along…
You can see the latest iteration of Lamella:// here.
Piercy, M. (2019) Woman on the edge of time. London: Del Rey.