i wrote a post on the velveteen rabbit and velve-teens over at montevidayo (caption from source): Riva London stars as the velveteen rabbit in Ballet Theatre San Luis Obispo’s holiday production.PHOTO BY BARRY GOYETTE (Source: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2784)
summer reading list part 1.
THE EXQUISITE, COFFIN-LIKE SENTENCES OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ WILL ALWAYS HAUNT ME. THE APHORISTIC DEATHS OF CIORAN. THE FLORIDITY OF HORROR IN THE ACCIDENTS AND PROPHECIES OF PAUL VIRILIO. THE MOTILE AND RESTLESS SORROW OF JEAN RHYS, WHO GETS IT EXACTLY RIGHT. THE LORD’S PRAYER IN FRANNIE AND ZOOEY. THE ALEPH OF BORGES. THE MADDENING PERFECTION IN THE LOGIC OF SIMONE WEIL. I ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE AS THOUGH I WERE ALREADY DEAD. I DON’T KNOW WHY. AND THAT PART OF ME THAT WANTS TO DIE IS CROSSED WITH THE PART OF ME THAT IS WAY BEYOND ME, THAT WANTS TO LIVE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE. AND AT THE CENTER OF THAT CROSS, AT THE CENTER OF THAT X, IS THE POEM I WRITE, WHATEVER IT IS. - Ariana
Recently I was part of a symposium honoring Bernadette Mayer and one of the presenters said, and I quote, “There is too much writing in the world!” I challenged that position as elitist, and furthermore there is TOO MUCH WAR in the world, but never too much poetry! The world needs everyone understanding our creative viscera NOW, not later but NOW! There are nearly seven billion people on the planet at the time we’re having this conversation Thom, but soon there will be nine billion. We NEED to find the way to permission, to unlock the imagination. Real change requires real thinking. The definition of art is always annoying to me. It needs LESS definition, borders that are not brick but something more porous, like pudding, yes, I prefer art with pudding borders, and you have a delicious snack as you eat your way out of it. -CA
I just finished reading Ghosts by C Aira and I need to read it again because it’s thick and I’ve only been able to drink thin soups because my brain has a cold and it has had a cold since last semester. I will be writing a few sentences about it w/ people over at Montevidayo. My left foot is numb and I have to write 25 pages of a screenplay today that has been deemed too much mumbo jumbo, and has scary amounts of fluids in it but doesn’t have a “thing” so as to say it is malformed. I saw the worst movie I’ve ever seen yesterday and it was Analyze That because I have to do a presentation on it this week (I did not choose the movie, just like I did not choose to be born) and so. That is why I am here, writing about my crusty navel. If you are in a bad mood for too long, it is no longer effective or worth it to relish the evil.
I wrote this for the 7th of April and in response to my friend Paul’s poem in which he becomes a toad.
In an effort to bloat and galvanize my memory glands, I’m going to take notes while I read. I am currently reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”.
Do you know that she was buddies with the late Paul Thek? Paul Thek is great. He makes sculptures of flesh encased in glass. And he paints. He also made some artifacts of the Pied Piper.
L introduced me to him, I think, and I fell in love with the meat man. Susan was also in love with him. It was a tumultuous, repressed kind of vibration that went on between them, with lots of affection and lots of fight. This book I’m reading is dedicated to Paul, whom she once asked to marry, and to have a child with. He complied too late. Eventually he died of AIDS, estranged. Paul used to say, “I’m against interpretation”, when annoyed by art critics. Criticism is boring, but boring can be rewarding.
Su says: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
Sometimes, I guess. Allegory and narrative/illustrative things seem eager for interpretation/explication. It is made to speak to, against, or from ideology. The stuff (like crazy modern stuff or avant garde) that is difficult to explain are what Su calls “flight from interpretation”, stuff that is born on the run. But this is somehow done through transparency. The less symbolic, the more flighty. The goal of criticism should be to show “how it is what it is” and not “what it means”.
“In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Su says content is an illusion.
I don’t feel a great distance between hermeneutics and erotics. Speaking of erotics eventually turns into a kind of hermeneutics or interpretation because it is about the relation between you and the object, you have to put words to sensations, name them, pattern them. It would be more consistent to not speak at all, if I want to leave the object as what it is. You can say it exists as what it is before I see it or before I say something about it, or you can say there is no such thing as “what it is”. This seems redundant to me. Perhaps she means something similar to the way Elizabeth Grosz speaks of art as the production of sensations, affects, and intensities rather than concepts or problems. The issue then, is subjectivity. Being subjected to art includes both planes, being jolted out of one (sense) or the other (concepts/language). You are the content, in other words.
One useful thing I got from this essay is Cocteu’s quote: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” The style is the message, the medium is the massage.
I am also reading “Ordinary Sun” by M. Henricksen.
“
… She felt like flesh. She wasn’t hanging.
‘All answers are hells.’
“
Read a nice interview at HTMLg with Johannes Gorranson. I’m looking forward to reading his unsustainable new book. Made me think about some things. I share his discomfort with the label “experimental”, which has very strange connotations, (dismissive, I would say), as if this kind of writing has a hypothesis. I guess I kind of like that idea, but people don’t usually realize that many experiments are done for the sake of experiment, not for the sake of its hypothesis or result. Mostly, it’s uncomfortable because it is, as he says, a huge word that says very little. Other than that, the experimental/avant-garde is also no longer possible. The linear idea of progress and new-ness is, on this day and age, backwards. Arriere-garde, however, is relevant. Or derriere-garde, I like to think. Lucas sees the lyric poet as the power bottom.
And the plague of literature (“too much shit is being published”) I think is a very unique plague in that it is extremely proliferative but not quite massively contagious, maybe because capitalism has built-in containment cells and plumbing, which we even build ourselves out of guilt and reflexivity (art is useless) to flush the shit out of sight. You almost have to want to be sick to get sick, because some work is required to actually expose yourself to the gaping wound of “experimental” writing. Poetry especially is already seen by many to be an archaic art, yet I believe it has never been richer, like a huge, dark compost pit. I doubt that there has ever been a time when so many different aesthetics are given their own chance at incubation. There are hundreds of small presses and micro presses. Most people do not know or care about their existence. Being both dead and alive at once is anachronistic (oh yes, I read McSweeney’s The Necropastoral in the bath the other day). You are at once within time and without, historical in more than one sense.
Genre has also become a dirty word because it acts as a container.
Carinna Finn (who has a blog I love) says “…perhaps so many people insist on defining genre in singular, palatable terms because the contagion of multiplicity poses a threat to what James notes above as “the constraining humanist need for ‘voice.” “The Voice,” attached to a body which has a lifespan, can be easily made safe via an act of canonization, like J says — classics are dead. I wonder, then if one can take a sort of fossilized genre and bring it back into a state of becoming through decay, radioactivity.”
I was once told that capitalism is at once the most revolutionary (forward) and anti-revolutionary (backwards) system because it allows for the bacterial/exponential production of “revolutionary” ideas and simultaneously, because it enables so many revolutions/overthrowings, it entails that each has an extremely short lifespan. One always makes way for the next copy. Capitalist existence is a very insectal, vermin, microbial existence.
This year is supposed to be the biggest year for mosquitoes yet. In the spirit of the plague, I have “published” myself on lulu as an experiment in futility and fertility:
I have a paper due tomorrow and a lot of things to do as a function in sosighety. We all know what this means. Yes, it is time to go on the internet and not do the work. It is time to spew into a friendly void the digital bolus soaked in invisible bile from the shallow depths of my soul.
Mmhm, the gravity of my thoughts must affect smaller bodies. A tiny blip of an insight here, with The Lost Lunar Baedeker before me, a relic from my lazy venture as an undergraduate lit major, poorly appreciated by my slightly less acute mind, now jazzed and re-mixed with new enthusiasm and perspective…
Ok, I’ll stop with the stilted fun. But I do remember disliking the work of Mina Loy, and resenting having to write a term paper about her poetry. Now I kiss her dead feet. Now I am re-reading it and am amazed yet not surprised by this woman’s incredible poetic precociousness. Everyone of the Now Party is concerned with feminine excess and Deleuzian concepts of art. I’m reading “Parturition” and this little poem from decades ago already enacts/expresses the idea of territorialization and positive psychosis (in relation to motherhood and the female body). “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain / Exceeding its boundaries in every direction… Something in the delirium of night-hours / Confuses while intensifying sensibility / Blurring spatial contours / So aiding elusion of the circumscribed / That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast / Comes from so far away / And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth / Is no part of myself / There is climax in sensibility / When pain surpassing itself / Becomes Exotic…”
Ars poetica hooray. Joyelle McSweeney says some interesting things about motherhood and the “future” of poetry here: http://exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.com/2009/12/future-of-poetry-by-joyelle-mcsweeney.html
I have been hearing a lot about membranes and chaos, media and architecture, rhythm and vibration… the questions that all these things are hung on is what does it mean to become other? Art is intensifying, making a perimeter or territory around/within chaos. In other words, frame-making. It requires life. Grosz says it is haunted by the animal, by the primal love-call, carnal consummation. Deleuze says it is situated in the body but is not to be confused with sensation itself. He talks about the desiring-machine. The obvious outcome is reproduction. And that is a complicated word.
In “Parturition”, “Impression of a cat / With blind kittens / Among her legs / Same undulating life-stir / I am that cat / Rises from the sub-conscious / Impression of small animal carcass / Covered with blue-bottles / –Epicurean– / And through the insects / Waves that same undulation of living / Death / Life / I am knowing / All about / Unfolding…“
Juxtapose that with McSweeney’s:
“5. The present tense, rejecting posterity and art’s endurance, insists on the artifice of creation and proposes children not as units of the future but as vulnerable portals between death and life. Children are death in life, their numeration and nomination the place where text happens.
In his late Fragmentations, the cuntphobic Antonin Artaud renders himself an ultra mother, without lineage: “Out of the motherless cunt I shall make an obscure, total, obtuse and absolute soul.” Artaud’s vision is of daughters whose bodies are a portal on violence and death—a portal which makes the body present and which becomes a kind if infinite catalog, life and death’s indeterminate co-extension:
“I saw the meningeal syphilis of my daughter Catherine’s legs, and the 2 hideous sweet-potatoes of the vats of her inflated kneecaps, I saw the onions of her toes blistered like her sex [...] I saw a skullburst like Annie of the ‘holy’ throat, and I saw her blood’s crown of intestinal thorns flowing from her on the days she wasn’t menstruating…
[Trans. David Rattray]” (McSweeney)
What kind of framing is motherhood? McSweeney said that becoming a mother made her goth. What kind of territorialization occurs during labor? Why is poetry obsessed with infanticide?
From this article, Aase Berg on Motherhood: “The mother’s relationship to the baby is the root of language, madness and complexity. None of the great serious works would have seen the light of day without the tracks that were inscribed in the early mother-and-child relationships. Life is based on the irrational and noisy language of this little crazy symbiosis.
The symbiosis is a positive psychosis between the mother and child (or father and child in the few instances where the dads dare to take time off to raise the kids). It’s a lesson in love. The world is no longer simply one devouring infant, it grows into an infant through interactions. In order for love to develop, there has to be distance. To feel love is only possible if one realizes that the symbiosis consists of two people. Love is an automatic split into you and me. You + me = we. If one is involved in the traditional, patriarchal psychosis there is no we, I am the world. In the great, self-righteous male despair there is no we, just one bloated I that swallows everything that moves…” (Berg)
Poetry of the “future” seems to sense that the body has been poisoned. What if the body really does recognize the fetus as an other, a foreign body, a parasite? Too much recognition is murder. In poetries of excess, reproduction is not a miracle of life but a complicated miscarriage, a gothic love story. Perhaps this can be read as a rebellion against the necessary history of natural fertilization, against love-childs, the products of great, self-righteous male despair that is the tradition of Poetry.
“
Without melancholy, without guilt
I want to get rid of Kanoko in Tokyo
Congratulations
Congratulations on your destruction
Congratulations on your destruction
Teruko-chan
Congratulations on your abortion…
” (Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko)
In my epic adventures as pro-procrastinator, I have seen quite a few (or started) films of late. Ones of note include Eraserhead and Ghost… the latter of which I had to stop watching because it made me cringe inside out… but I finally figured out who Patrick Swayze was, which made an apples to apples game in which he was the perfect answer to “clammy” make beautiful sense… and I was also able to figure out how I feel about David Lynch. It’s love.
Two quotes that cemented this love:
“I’m obsessed with textures. We’re surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of other textures. One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair-Hair just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful”
“I’m really interested in textures … For instance, I once had this dead cat. A vet gave it to me. I took it home. It was a real experience. I got all set up for it in the basement. And I dissected it. I examined all its parts, the membranes, the air, the skin, and there are so many textures which may be pretty gross on one side but when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they are totally beautiful. There’s something in nature, especially when nature starts decomposing, that brings out these textures. For a long time I loved looking at that.”
Texture is probably what I care about most aesthetically. If words have textures, if language has texture, then I am more interested in texture than form/content, though of course all of them are related and inextricable from each other. Sometimes I want to lick my books and my fingers get excited when I read. I guess what I mean when I say texture is ambiguous… but like, when Fanny Howe says, out of nowhere, “…the sea at last lies over this place / and registers expressly…”, the sea she is talking about isn’t actually the sea. I don’t know shit about semiotics, but there is some major sliding between signs going on here, or some intense oscillation between signifier and the abstraction it creates. It’s not non-sense, but it’s definitely not normal-sense. The word sea without its normal context is naked. Whatever is sieved from my sea connotations is left and fleetly grappled with by my passing over it with my touchy eyes. A sea that lies. It can only be registered as a sub-text or thought-texture. And then Fanny Howe says, “…I know evolution is done developing / Its laws of mathematics must be correct / In my created head I don’t exist…” and “the mist / is fixed…” and this camouflaging of the self or dissolving or whatever one calls it I imagine to be like a blending or blinding into texture.
http://sp.dictionary.com/dictstatic/d/g/speaker.swf [teks-cher] 
Show IPAnoun, verb, -tured, -tur·ing.
Eraserhead unravels like a poem to me. There is so much layering of imagery and clotting of symbols and mating/weaving of textures. The tapestry is a mood.
Here is a nice bit of writing about it: http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/papers/jdl.html
I was very taken by the brain-stem thing, or plant/intestine hybrid thing that is littered throughout the movie.
Here is an non-grotesque piece of fabric art by Seiko Kato that reminded me of the little worm stems:
I’ve been thinking about butterflies, poop, and poetry, and I feel like a crazy person because I think everything is connected. The word “fold” has been very important to me lately. I’m excited to read “The Fold” at some point though my pile of books is looking rather Everest…
In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze argues that Leibniz’s writings constitute the grounding elements of a Baroque philosophy and of theories for analyzing contemporary arts and science. A model for expression in contemporary aesthetics, the concept of the monad is viewed in terms of folds of space, movement, and time. Similarly, the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. According to Deleuze, Leibniz also anticipates contemporary views of event and history as multifaceted combinations of signs in motion and of the “modern” subject as nomadic, always in the process of becoming. -University of Minnesota (yay!) press
On another digressive note, a friend and I were talking about the non-membrane between thinking and sensing. I like being like a kid that makes up words by crashing them together. Sense + Think = Sink. Or like, in the awesome Look Around You series…
I like the idea of sinking into texture.
Some random in-bed doodling that connects this to the previous post about sucking.
Finally, some nice texture from my very own window:
This post from Montevidayo about Let the Right One In made me think about seams. The post made nice links between anachronism/seams-in-time and the seams in Eli’s vampire-child body.
I really loved this movie when I saw it. It has a great color palette.
I find Eli’s body interesting because of its displaced sexuality… she can never go through puberty. Joyelle says “Eli’s removal from reproductive futurism is signified by the removal of her genitalia, which leaves a visible seam in her body, just as anachronism is a visible seam at which would-be separate time periods come into contact.” As a female who never menstruates, and instead must consume the blood of others to survive, she is the opposite of “reproductive futurism”. I am fascinated by the way her body invites/causes seams to break in other bodies. A seam that breeds other seams. Oxymoronic reproductive infertility / productive failure. Eli is death/drive, the period without periods, seam that is bled into rather than out.
Reminds me of this:
the Healing of St. Thomas by Anish Kapoor (I’m obsessed with AK)…
ANISH KAPOOR: Exactly, and to bring colour into space. I think, if I might be so bold as to dare to put myself in that lineage, I’m interested in the idea that form in a sense turns itself inside out, that the inside and the outside are equivalent to each other, that we don’t just enclose. The form is continually in a warp, and continually turning itself inside out. Now I have a feeling that’s a very contemporary idea about form.
JOHN TUSA: I’m interested you mentioned phallic because I get the impression sometimes that when people look at your works, the one thing that they feel they can’t quite mention in their English way is that of course they are womb-like. Womb-like is the easy bit. Vaginal and things like that.
ANISH KAPOOR: Anti-phallic, the opposite of Brancusi. Inward. Downwards.
JOHN TUSA: Downwards!
ANISH KAPOOR: If one took a platonic model, one might say the back of the cave, away from light towards darkness.
JOHN TUSA: But you actually penetrate to the back of the cave, and penetrate is the word.
ANISH KAPOOR: Rather than the front of the cave, which is light and forward and out towards the open world.
I would call Let the Right One In an “anti-phallic” film. It is anti-linear, implosive, anti-seminal. It draws, rather than penetrates. The seam is an opening and a closing. I’m not done thinking about this, but I’m going to go to bed now and leave this post with the following lines from Gertrude Stein which can be found in the beginning of Reines’ “The Cow”:
Sucking is dangerous. The danger of sucking.
I am interested in all that suck.
here.
http://elimae.com/2010/12/Papyrus.html
also I am in some things that are physical and can be purchased:
issue 5 of weave^
&
…
Someone awesome asked what I have been reading. Here are some things I have or am reading that I like from recent weeks…
Chelsey Minnis “Poemland”
Ariana Reines (all sorts of stuff)
S. Zizek “Violence”
Delueze & Guattari “1000 Plateaus”
Alice Notley “Descent of Alette”
“Poets on Teaching” Marie Wilkinson
James Brown “Unlikely”
Heidegger (various articles)
…
I feel like I should have read more but I am like one of those vacuum fish that suck up a lot of pebble and spit it out and sometimes actually swallows things. I have lost my ability to read most fiction and most poetry and am in a strange place. Mostly I am misunderstanding theory and reading modules on different ideas that kill other ideas… My brain is war-torn.
crazy sunset the other day…
He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge. The Sagrada Familia was as familiar to him as a barn to a farmer, the ‘new towns’ of France and England, cathedrals, voussoirs, cornices, quoins. He knew that Sullivan was the son of a dancing master, Breuer a doctor in Hungary. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams… one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea. We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives…
[ . . . ] “There are things in the desert which cannot be hidden,” Arnaud said. “A camel, smoke, and… you know something? We see too many movies.”
“On the rocks?” Viri asked.
“They kill the imagination. You’ve heard of blind storytellers. It’s in darkness that myths are born. The cinema can’t do that. Did I tell you about the girl I took to lunch? She was really okay. You know, in a sense it’s that way with her. She can never dance. That’s why the real grace, the real music is in her.”
-Light Years / J Salter
I think it sees abysses, but then again I see whatever I think about, so maybe it’s not meant to be about that. I think that these are true, the things he says. I have this theory that people seek 2 different things, happiness and freedom, and these are opposing forces. Freedom consists of “what life admires”, that is, assuming that life is already comfortable (not talking about survival). You can’t really have happiness and freedom in the same place. Whenever I do something out of want for freedom, or achieve some kind of freedom, my life is unhappy. As it is now. Fortunate, appreciated, and not happy.
Another thought. I think that in some ways, the desire to be famous is not so different from the desire to be known thoroughly by a single person. One wants one’s behavior to be accounted for, to be anticipated. A thousand eyes is the same as two. For example, I say I don’t want to be famous. The idea is horrible to me. But sometimes I care about how you see me. Even when you don’t see me. I live like I am being watched. So that is like wanting to be famous/mythological. The difference is intensity and density.
I like that destiny is density.
