DC's

 

‘For nearly two decades, Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino has been making entirely abstract films. For him, it seems, abstraction is less of an aesthetic mode and more of a philosophy, a way of creating a space for the viewer to engage with his sonic-visual material as they see fit, Some viewers may choose to actively participate in reading and shaping the meaning of the images he presents, while others will be more interested in passively receiving them and enjoying them on a sensorial or emotional level. What is important, is that in either case, the viewer feels involved.

‘As he writes on his website, “what fascinates me most about film expression is the potential for what is presented on the screen to collide with each individual viewer’s emotional landscape, and the new ‘image’ created inside the viewer’s mind resulting from this collision.” For Makino, abstraction offers a space for imagination, free from the limitation posed by direct representation, free from the imposition of applied or linear meaning. Abstraction offers freedom, and once experienced, freedom is hard to give up.

‘Most of his many films assume a somewhat similar form. He collects a mass of recorded material that he shoots himself—its origin kept a secret that only he and his collaborators are allowed in on, as is what he was thinking about when shooting it, what it might mean—and then edits its together, layering masses upon masses of individual images together to make a new plane of abstract “hybrid images.” He then adds an accompanying soundtrack, provided by a musician (Jim O’Rourke, Cal Lyall, or Carl Stone, for instance) or that he produces himself. The films are usually densely textured, colorful, and complex in appearance—big, dramatic cinematic canvases that have a real sense of scale and grandeur.

‘Since 2012 (2013)—in which a mix of celluloid and digital film sources are blended into a stormy, scratchy canvas that dilates alongside a dense drone—he has been experimenting with performance, and from Space Noise 3D (2014), with expanded elements too, using 3D glasses with one lens cut out to change the effects that his film produce, and the experience the audience has. Though each work is fundamentally similar, he continues to find ways to experiment and to further expand upon the ways the films are produced and presented.

‘In a Q&A at a screening some years back, he explained his style succinctly. “Most filmmakers make cinema with one or two layers,” he said, before pausing then laughing. “I am making one thousand layer cinema.” While avoiding revealing too many of his secrets—like any self-respecting magician of moving images should—in the below interview Makino explains some of what goes into making “one thousand layer cinema,” focusing on his latest work, Memento Stella. Having premiered it as a film at International Film Festival Rotterdam in January, he is now traveling the world with it, presenting the work in the form of a performance, most recently at Sheffield Doc/Fest and Filmadrid.’ — Matt Turner

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Takashi Makino @ IMDb
Takashi Makino @ Lightcone
Makino Takashi @ Experimental Cinema
“I HAVE A BIG INTEREST FOR THE IMAGE OF DREAMS AND IMAGINATION”
DVD: Makino Takashi Film Works Vol. 1 With Jim O’Rourke
Makino Takashi: Entering a Noisy Cosmos
TAKASHI MAKINO / INTERVIEW
TAKASHI MAKINO – THIS LONG CENTURY
Le cinéma comme art abstrait : Takashi Makino
Hallucinatory and experiential, Takashi creates abstract cinematic worlds
My film looks like something very noisy and abstract, but actually, everything in it comes from our own world
Interview: Takashi Makino @ Film Comment
I saw a green horizon in the dark
Guest in Focus: Takashi Makino
Takashi Makino’s 2012 by Marianne Shaneen
LA REINCARNAZIONE DI STAN BRAKHAGE NEL CINEMA DI TAKASHI MAKINO
VIS SPOTLIGHT FEATURE: TAKASHI MAKINO

 

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Extras

TOWARD THE TACTILE VISIONS Trailer

Entrevista Takashi Makino

Workshop_for Hallucination and documenta 14

 

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Interview
from MUBI

 

NOTEBOOK: Maybe you could start by describing how you go about making a film in general, and how what you do results in what we see?

TAKASHI MAKINO: I’ve made around 40 short films before. Memento Stella is the longest one. Each time I have an idea, or a background story, and then make an abstract film from it. My main purpose with filmmaking is to create a situation in which the audience and my film can collaborate with each other, and find a space for imagination. This is why I take an abstract approach every time. For me, abstraction is a very creative format to take, as you can see many different things within one single screen. I like facilitating this creative relationship between the viewer and the screen.

Up to around 2004, I only used celluloid materials, 16mm film and Super 8, but after that I used both of those, as well as digital materials.

NOTEBOOK: Why did you change?

MAKINO: I studied film in University in Japan, but I had no knowledge about video. In 2002, I started working for a company, the oldest Japanese development lab and post-production house. I was part of the first team that was using the HD telecine machine. Working there, I realized that I could use both materials, and that by fusing analogue film with digital video, I could make more work, and better work. When I used only film, I was experiencing technical limitations. If I wanted to shoot something over 100 times, with film, it just doesn’t work. But if I shot on film and edited digitally, I could do almost anything.

For me understanding this was very useful.

After 2015, I switched to a completely digital process. I could try many more things and experiment further. Recently, I’ve been interested in utilizing more lens work, and not just the camera’s sensor. By doing this I think I can make more creative, softer images, images that resemble film but that are achieved by using a completely digital toolset.

NOTEBOOK: Do you feel like you are trying to get back to the feel of celluloid film then, when you say about trying to recreate the look or the texture?

MAKINO: I really like the material—and the materiality—of film, but I feel if we use completely digital equipment, it will improve our knowledge of the gear. If you use a 4K sensor, and a flat GoPro lens, for instance, you can achieve a high resolution while countering the flatness of the digital image, and create something much more interesting. I like to make images that have a rich depth to them, and I think that lens work has been very helpful for achieving this: a richer depth, and a richer contrast.

NOTEBOOK: Within that, a rich image means more things for the viewer to find maybe. You touched on this a bit before, but is the viewer’s perception something that you are interested in exploring, how people see things differently? I’ve been watching Rainer Kohlberger’s films recently, and he is very interested in this, how his audience sees his work in different ways. I was wondering whether it was something you had in common?

MAKINO: His work is very hallucinatory. Our work is similar visually, but the biggest difference is that he creates every image with a computer. Even his computer he made completely by himself. All of my images come from the real world. They’re organic captures. But both of our images sometimes look similar, so we have an interest in each other.

NOTEBOOK: Related to this, I wanted to ask about your collaborations. Sometimes you work with a musician, such as Jim O’Rourke, and sometimes you make the music yourself. What decides this, and when you collaborate how does the relationship between image and sound come together?

MAKINO: Every time I make the image first. After I’ve completed the image, I start thinking about music. If I feel like I can make the right music myself, I do that. But If I think it’s going to be too difficult and I can’t make a soundtrack for the film, I start thinking about who might be the right person for the project. I’ve collaborated with Jim O’Rourke many times, eight times in fact. His soundtracks are very creative, because he doesn’t just follow the images. Sometimes he ignores the images entirely, which creates a different dynamism altogether.

When I collaborate with a musician, I always explain everything about the film. I tell them all the details behind my thinking, what images I’ve recorded, and why I’ve made the film. Sometimes I write a graphic score for them also. But I ask them to not just follow the image, because that’s not so interesting. I want a relationship, not just a soundtrack.

The other reason I collaborate with musicians is that I need a new view on my images. When I’m editing I’ve seen everything several hundred times, and everything is repeating and repeating, and I start to hear the sound in my head. I really enjoy the moment when I receive the soundtrack, to see if it matches with my expectation or not. Sometimes I don’t accept their vision at first, but I like having something I can’t control, and after watching my images with their sound several times, I usually see what they are thinking, and remember that I have to trust them or it won’t work.

NOTEBOOK: Do you ever worry that the music might affect the mood of the viewer too much? Music can be very emotionally manipulative, and with abstract imagery, it could influence the tone.

MAKINO: Recently, I haven’t made this mistake. I used to make it often though. It was very difficult to explain my feelings about the films, and this clear communication of the idea is key. If I ask them to make a super strong sound, and they make a really heavy soundtrack, the supplied file can’t be played in a cinema. Sound-mixing for film soundtracks is completely different than for normal music. I always check if the musician I’m working has experience making soundtracks, and If I work with someone who hasn’t had experience mixing soundtracks, I use a sound engineer.

NOTEBOOK: I wanted to ask about your performance-based work. You’ve also made a 3D film. What do these extra elements bring to your work, and what is it like to share the space with the people that are viewing your images?

MAKINO: For 2012 and also Space Noise, I used the Pulfrich effect. This way of making a 3D effect is very creative because it doesn’t happen in front of our eyes, but in our brain. That effect is almost 100 years old, discovered in Munich by a physicist called Carl Pulfrich. Each frame of my film has a different shape, and it’s also changing very quickly because I had to make it at 30 frames per second, because at 22, 24 or 25, it’s too slow. I tried the Pulfrich effect on it, and I found that if you hide one eye, the image turns to one side, but if you cover the other eye, it turns the other way. Each viewer can select how to watch my work, left eye, right eye, or without the glasses at all. This way, everyone can see several different films from a single screen.

NOTEBOOK: Would you make a film in virtual reality?

MAKINO: Yeah, I tried once. A 360 VR film, but the resolution wasn’t high enough for my work. Resolution is very important to me. It affects the canvas. If the canvas is large I can do many things, but if it’s smaller, I’m much more limited. I was told I could do a 4K VR image, but when I tried it, you can only see a portion of the 4K image, which isn’t the same. The resolution was too poor, and the frame rate wasn’t high enough, so I stopped making it.

NOTEBOOK: Maybe if the technology improves, Space Noise VR could still happen?

MAKINO: I like seeing my work in the cinema. Surround sound helps you to feel the depth of the space, and I like the sense of freedom the room has. VR is like a prison from which you cannot escape. I don’t know the future, but it’s not right for me at the moment.

NOTEBOOK: Do you feel like there is anything specifically Japanese about your work?

MAKINO: Rei [Hayama, Takashi Makino’s partner, and an artist and filmmaker also screening in Sheffield’s New/Japan strand] and I often talk about this. I am Japanese and I live in Japan. I cannot escape from myself. My purpose with filmmaking is that I want to make art which can go beyond borders and beyond races, countries and languages. I think that art can do that. I make films for this reason. I don’t care about “Japanese-ness” as such, however I think that my work is very strict, and sometimes too long, and I am often thinking about what it means to receive so much information at once. When we are overwhelmed by an abundance of information we turn towards nothing. All of these things are very Japanese.

NOTEBOOK: When somebody watches your films, do you want them to try to think about them, and try to work out what it means and what is happening? Or are you happy for them to be less active, and just let themselves be hit by the images, and have more of an immersive experience perhaps?

MAKINO: I don’t want to say anything specific to the audience. If I say something strongly, it is too much. Every way is okay for me.

 

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11 of Takashi Makino’s 30 films

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No is E (2006)
‘With the aid of a layered construction of the image, Makino has managed to capture the different reflections of light on the surface of water. The acoustic-noise-like music and the dancing particles of light move like swarms of microorganisms and in this way slowly cover the entire screen. With No is E, Makino won the Shuji Terayama Prize at the Image Forum Festival 2007 in Japan.’ — 25 FPS

the entirety

 

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Tranquil (2007)
‘“The rain” and “white noise” , “the outside of water” , “the inside of water” , everything become to together and drifting. A dark dark film in rain forest inspired by a music term to “Tranquil”.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Still in Cosmos (2009)
‘I do not think that the word “chaos” means “confusion” or “disarray”, rather I believe it refers to a state in which the name or location of “objects” remains unknown. For instance, if a bird escapes from its cage, the world it discovers outside will appear to be chaos, but if it joins with a flock of other birds, it will gradually learn to apply “names” to various places – a safe place, a dangerous place, etc., thereby creating cosmos (order). When watching a film, the viewers all sit down in the same darkness and receive the same light and sound but each sees a different dream. I believe that this symbolizes a reversion to their initial state, that when they look at total chaos through newborn eyes, they give birth to a new cosmos. I sincerely hope that the violent chaos that exists in Still in Cosmos will give rise to the same number of new cosmoses as there are viewers.’ — Takashi Makino

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

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2012 (2013)
‘Takashi Makino’s thirty-minute film 2012 drenches the audience with sounds of prolonged resonant scraped string textures and images of shimmering blue clouds of drifting particles. Panes of swirling atoms, scratched lines, and densely patterned fields rotate and pan in different directions, inducing an expansive sensory meditation on the nature of perception.

‘Drawn into whirling eddies of what could be microscopic realms of film grain, plasma cells, or subatomic particles, I’m then transported into cosmic immensities of galaxies, nebulae. I seem endowed with new sensory abilities—am I seeing sound? Is this how an insect sees?

‘2012’s shifting planes evoke tectonic plates, archeological strata, in a cinematic and sonic reverie of not-quite-remembered dream images, of personal and collective memory spanning multiple temporalities. This disorientation grants moments of recognition: glimpses of what might be leaves, sun-dappled water, sounds of birds, children, wind—but defamiliarized, as if seen upon returning to Earth after a long sojourn.’ — Marianne Shaneen, BOMB

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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Space Noise 3D (2014)
‘[Space Noise] is a performance in which the double 25 FPS award winner confronts high-resolution video images and 16mm live projection. A duel between the all-dominant immaculate digital and the irregular organic material dissolves in multiple layers of chaos. Enormous quantities of light movements from film loops capture the screen in thousands of pixels of digital projection and create new images in constant change and enhancement. The sound accompanying them live only repeats and spreads the noise, developing images by whirling speed. Noise, located on the tape as a constituent part of the film, becomes the aim of Makino’s quest – Noise-Image. This quest for a new film experience intensifies with additional effects – a smoke curtain reveals the fullness of the light beams’ rainbow spectrum, while a neutral single-eye ND filter creates a three-dimensional illusion.’ — 25 FPS

Excerpt

In performance (Excerpt)

Interview with Takashi Makino (Space Noise 3D)

 

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Phantom Nebula (2014)
‘Layering 10,000 film and video images, Phantom Nebula reveals changing forms that resemble both cosmic bodies and organic matter. Makino invites the audience to contemplate the similarities between cells and stars in this immersive film and sound performance.’ — M:ST Festival

Excerpt

 

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w/ Floris Vanhoof Labyrinth (2017)
at Les Ateliers Claus – Brussels, Belgium – 2017-05-04

Excerpt

 

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At the Horizon (2017)
‘An audiovisual snow storm in front of a black ground, a white horizontal line that divides the image, grid planes, unfolding and folding dimensions. Set to atonal, techno, and orchestral sounds; an abstract (non-)world beyond comprehension, a visual experience that one must intuitively sense. Lost in space and time – the big bang of consciousness.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

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Memento Stella (2018)
‘In his latest venture Japanese artist Takashi Makino adopts a consistent process of creative intervention and adjustment in order to cleanse his shots until they become unrecognizable. Even though the images are devoid of any reference points, the piece brings to life something essential: some kind of elementary matter which gives rise to all living and non-living things – in a manner similar to Mark Rothko’s renowned black canvases. Memento Stella is a remarkable film with a compelling hallucinogenic rhythm that allows us to experience fundamental existential issues of consciousness and being. The accompanying electroacoustic soundtrack was written by Dutch avant-garde pianist Reinier van Houdt.’ — Hubert Poul

Trailer

Memento Stella Cinechamber Trailer

 

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w/ Cal Lyall Paracollider (2019)
Immersive Audiovisual Noise Spatialization Project

Excerpt

 

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w/ Liz Harris (Grouper) Live at The Lab (2019)
‘Under the name Nivhek, Liz Harris (Grouper) maps richly detailed inner worlds where enigmatic vibrations and voices glide dimly in and out of the void accompanied by a conducive video projection by Takashi Makino.’ –TheLabSF

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Yeah, but I reworked and expanded it a lot. No, just short self-contained fictions. I don’t think I want to dissect the novels. Happy practically weekend. ** Adem Berbic, I’ve never been able to successfully meditate. My brain is too overactive. But I guess it works. Lynch, etc. Your launch is, like, really soon, no? Is it on the 20th? Can imagine it’s hard to escape thinking about it. I like the jib of those sentences you’re writing, naturally. ** Bill, Yes, it’s curiously quicksand-y. Yeah, they showed ‘Old Persons Home’ at the Pinault. It’s even better in person. Those two are pretty always pretty exciting artistically so far. ** Tosh Berman, I found Lutz through Benjamin Weissman. He had Lutz read at Beyond Baroque during his tenure. I’m in too, like Flynn. Or like Flint rather. ** Uday, Dude that shirt is nuts! Amazing. Unbelievable. You’re nuts. Thank you!!! Xing Xing, no. I just googled said monkey, and I do feel a rabbit hole coming on. One-armed monkey? Where are you? ** Steeqhen, I think if I saw ‘Fairyland’, I just be, like, ‘No, he didn’t, no, he wasn’t’ the whole time. I read that about Doctor Who, and of course I immediately thought of you since you’re the only Dr. Who person I know as far as I know. Sorry/congratulations? ** _Black_Acrylic, It certainly should be a word. The World Cup already started? I’m so out of it. Go Scotland! ** DonW, Hey. I’ve only seen ‘Loony Porn’ and ‘Do Not Expect…’. So far. Word on the street or rather amongst the judgemental film buff set isn’t very poz about ‘Fjord’. I will google The Merry Cemetery. How could I not? Mm, I would say the French look askance at non-French things but they reserve ‘down’ for special cases like apparently Romania? ** Matthew Doyle, Well, hello, Mr. Doyle. Happy summer’s dawn. Okay, I need to watch ‘Obsession’ obviously. I’ll see if it’s still in theaters or whether I have go minor online criminal to watch it. Thanks. Very nice of you to think of me. You good? I look forward to seeing you come Halloween if not before. All the best! xo. ** Laura, You made it! And you actually seem pretty much like the you I know. Good sign, surely. For some reason Garielle reminds of Jane Hathaway from the old ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ TV show, but I can’t explain why. Oh, very cool about ‘You Are Cursed’. Did she write it fast? Wow. I hope you feel as generally rarin’ to go as your prose does ultra-soon, pal. ** HaRpEr //, If that collection happens, and it’s still only a possibility, I would certainly have control over the contents or I wouldn’t do it. I made a suggested ToC already. Dorothy Parker <-> Lutz … that makes my brain prickly. In the good way, obvs. Very cool, ‘Left Hand’ is a serious keeper formally among its many virtues. Great characterisation, as always. ** laura w, That sounds intense: the ocd bouts. When I lived in NYC, I had a friend who had ocd but it was constant on some level 24/7. Like we’d be walking down the street, and we’d need to stop because he needed to count the windows in a building we’d just passed about 50 times before we could continue. But he was a brilliant writer and editor. I think he finally got a med that lowered the ocd to a more doable level. I couldn’t listen to Nick Drake for years because the real George was obsessed with his work. But then Gisele Vienne used a song by him — ‘Black Dog’ — in one of the theater pieces we made together, so I had to get over the block. I think I’ll probably have to die before Grove bundles the Cycle into a single book. They’d make less money that way, and that’s why they haven’t. Lutz is very worth reading, and I feel pretty sure you’ll agree. ** nat, Hi. You should go on that buying spree if you want my opinion. And if, you know, you have the bucks available. You have been busy. I need to get busier, or busier with useful things at least. Very excellent news about ‘Nosebleed Days’! I’m cheerleader central over here if you need conceptual nudges. ** Okay. How about you zone out meticulously with the films of Takashi Makino today? See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk. Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from otherwhere through the speakers of the television set or the radio, and were easily, tinnily, ignorable as something alien, something not germane to the forlornities of life within the house, and readily shut off or shut out. Under our roof, there was more divulgence and expressiveness to be made out in the closing or opening of doors, in footfalls, in coughs and stomach growlings and other bodily ballyhoo, than in statements exchanged in occasional conversation. Words seemed to be a last resort: you had recourse to speech only if everything else failed. From early on, it seemed to me that the forming and the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities—and more by-products of those activities than the reason for them. When words did come hazarding out of a mouth, they did not lastingly change anything about the mouth they were coming out of or the face that hosted the mouth. They often seemed to have been put in there by some force exterior to the person speaking, and they died out in the air. They were not something I could possess or store up. Words certainly weren’t inside me.

‘A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

‘I thus spent about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life not having much of anything to do with language. I am told that once in a while I spoke up. I am told that I had a friend at some point, and this friend often corrected my pronunciations, which tended to be overliteral, and deviant in their distribution of stresses. Any word I spoke, often as not, sounded like two words of similar length that had crashed into each other. Word after word emerged from my mouth as a mumbled mongrel. I was often asked to repeat things, and the repeated version came forth as a skeptical variant of the first one and was usually offered at a much lower volume. When a preposition was called for in a statement, I often chose an unfitting one. If a classmate asked me, “When is band practice?” I would be likely to answer, “At fifth period.” I did not have many listeners, and I did not listen to myself. Things I spoke came out sounding instantly disowned.

‘Childhood in my generation, an unpivotal generation, wasn’t necessarily a witnessed phenomenon. Large portions of my day went unobserved by anyone else, even in classrooms. Anybody glimpsing me for an instant might have described me as a kid with his nose stuck in a book, but nobody would have noticed that I wasn’t reading. I had started to gravitate toward books only because a book was a kind of steadying accessory, a prop, something to grip, a simple occupation for my hands. (Much later, I was relieved to learn that librarians refer to the books and other printed matter in their collections as “holdings.”) And at some point I started to enjoy having a book open before me and beholding the comfortingly justified lineups and amassments of words. I liked seeing words on parade on the pages, but I never got in step with them, I never entered into the processions. I doubt that it often even occurred to me to read the books, although I know I knew how. Instead, I liked how anything small (a pretzel crumb, perhaps) that fell into the gutter of the book—that troughlike place where facing pages meet—stayed in there and was preserved. A book was, for me, an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking into itself whatever was dropped into it. An opened book even seemed to me an invitation to practice hygiene over it—to peel off the rim of a fingernail, say, and let the thing find its way down onto a page. The book became a repository of the body’s off-trickles, extrusions, biological rubbish and remains; it became a reliquary of sorts. I was thuswise now archiving chance fragments, sometimes choice fragments, of my life. I was putting things into the books instead of withdrawing their offered contents. As usual, I had things backward.

‘Worse, the reading we were doing in school was almost always reading done sleepily aloud, our lessons consisting of listening to the chapters of a textbook, my classmates and I taking our compulsory turns at droning through a double-columned page or two; and I, for one, never paid much mind to what was being read. The words on the page seemed to have little utility other than as mere prompts or often misleading cues for the sluggard sounds we were expected to produce. The words on the page did not seem to have solid enough a presence to exist independently of the sounds. I had no sense that a book read in silence and in private could offer me something. I can’t remember reading anything with much comprehension until eighth grade, when, studying for a science test for once, I decided to try making my way quietly through the chapter from start to finish—it was a chapter about magnets—and found myself forced to form the sounds of the words in my head as I read. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn’t retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language—this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround. But this discovery was of no help to me in English class, because when we had to write, I could never call up any of the brassy and racketing words I had read, and fell back on the thin, flat, default vocabulary of my life at home, words spoken because no others were known or available. Even when I started reading vocabulary-improvement books, I never seemed capable of importing into my sentences any of the vivid specimens from the lists I had now begun to memorize. My writing was dividered from the arrayed opulences in the vocabulary books. Language remained beyond me. My distance from language continued even through college, even through graduate school. The words I loved were in a different part of me, not accessible to the part of me that was required to make statements on paper.

‘It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

‘And as I encountered any such sentence, the question I would ask myself in marvelment was: how did this thing come to be what it now is? This was when I started gazing into sentence after sentence and began to discover that there was nothing arbitrary or unwitting or fluky about the shape any sentence had taken and the sound it was releasing into the world.’ — Garielle Lutz

 

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Further

Garielle Lutz @ Wikipedia
‘Eminence’, by Garielle Lutz
‘For Food’, by Garielle Lutz
‘Contractions’, by Garielle Lutz
‘Devotions’, by Garielle Lutz
‘Esprit de l’Elevator’, by Garielle Lutz
‘Street Map of the Continent’, by Garielle Lutz
‘SMTWTFS’, by Garielle Lutz
‘THIS IS NOT A BILL’, by Garielle Lutz
‘Fatal Agreement’
Blake Butler interviews Garielle Lutz @ VICE
‘Garielle Lutz by Derek White’
‘THIS IS NICE OF YOU. Introduction by Ben Segal’
‘newly fraught and alien’
‘KEVIN SAMPSELL IN CONVERSATION WITH GARIELLE LUTZ’
‘YOU HAVE ARMS TO BAR YOURSELF FROM PEOPLE: GARIELLE LUTZ AND I LOOKED ALIVE’
‘Wrapping My Head Around Garielle Lutz’
‘American prose aspiring to be poetry’
Garielle Lutz on ‘Divorcer’
Buy ‘The Gotham Grammarian’

 

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Extras

Obscure Clearly: George Salis Interviews Garielle Lutz

Episode 3: Garielle Lutz

60 Writers/60 Places: Garielle Lutz Trailer

Garielle Lutz interview and reading with Meg Tuite

Garielle Lutz reading excerpt from “Pulls”

Notes

‘We went to Brooklyn for a reading .. Garielle Lutz, John Haskell & some others at Unnameable books. … We met Garielle Lutz after at some Mexican place full of day of the dead kitsch. It seems every time we meet Garielle we eat Mexican food in tacky dives .. & they get tortilla soup. For the most part, we hate readings. But it’s always a pleasure to hear Lutz read. And Haskell is an engaging reader as well. After Lutz read, we stole the pages he used to read from (don’t worry Garielle, we’ll return them!). Here’s one page [below] to give you the idea. The text becomes a sort of script for the performance .. with certain words & phrases marked as cues, reminders. And with Lutz we’re not just getting a straight-up reading of the story, but an ever-morphing medley of sorts .. even though they were reading “The Driving Dress,” the binder-clipped on paragraph is from the story “Middleton” (both pieces of which appear in Divorcer). As they were reading the spliced part, we sort of realized something was funny because «(I preferred brochures of things over the things brochured.)» is one of our favorite lines .. that we remember being in another story.’ — 5cense.com

 

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Interview
by Justin Taylor

 

I’m curious about Gordon Lish, who seems to be a figure of great controversy. I’ve met people who hate him with a truly rare vitriol, but I’m never quite sure why, and then of course there are those who love him. I know that you place yourself in this camp. What does he do that inspires such sharp differences of opinion and flares of emotion?

Garielle Lutz: He was a magisterial presence in the classroom. At the core of his teaching was the necessity of achieving an intimacy between words that involves something more than simply a cohabitation based on obeying the laws of syntax and grammar and semantics and a kind of prose prosody. He was the most exacting teacher I have ever encountered, and also the most generous. Some of the students who enrolled in his classes were probably not prepared for the syllable-by-syllable scrutiny of their sentences that Gordon’s teaching entailed. They might have been seeking little more than validation of their talent. But Gordon was never easily pleased. So some went away in bitterness and a few, I guess, in fury.

How did you first find out about him?

GL: When I was nosing about in bookstores in the mid-eighties, I was eventually struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded from the page and poked out at me. There was Barry Hannah’s Ray, for instance, and also his Captain Maximus, written in a kind of brawling, roughhouse aphoristicity, and there was the lovely neurotic one-liner-ish lyricism of Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live. The sentences in those books had a discernible topography, an unignorable spectacularity of contour and relief that was entirely unlike the depthlessness or bodilessness of the sentences I was seeing almost everywhere else. I eventually came to learn that all of the books I had been admiring had been edited by Gordon Lish. When I found out who he was, and where he was (ensconced at Knopf, in New York City, but venturing, come summertime, in a freelance professorial capacity to the Midwest and elsewhere), I jumped at the chance to study under him. I took his class for five straight summers in Bloomington, Indiana, and then once in Chicago.

Where were you coming to him from? Actually, this is a good opportunity to ask for the Abbreviated Autobiography of Lutz — other than knowing that you’re from Pennsylvania, and that you still in Pennsylvania, I don’t know really anything about you. Moved a lot? Summer camp? Cartoon featured on cake at 10th birthday? Undergrad? Grad? Origins of lifelong love affair with literature?

GL: I was not a reader as a kid. I usually had my nose stuck in a book, but I wasn’t actually reading. My behavior with books consisted of just staring into the things. I know I eventually turned the page and confronted another sheetful of arranged and settled and stilled language, but I wasn’t absorbing the sense. In eighth grade, there was a mandatory vision test in the office of the school nurse. She shrieked at me that I should have been wearing glasses for years. I’d had no idea. I must have simply assumed that the world was a blurry place. It had never occurred to me that what I was seeing wasn’t the way things actually looked. What I saw when I got my first glasses was different but not necessarily an improvement. I wasn’t sold on the virtue of ordinary clarity. Other than that, I don’t have the makings of an autobiography. I might have been in a Saturday-morning bowling league at some point. I think I got ousted for not showing up to throw the ball. I drummed rather primly in public-school marching units and orchestras, and intemperately in a chummy garage band. It was my parents’ garage. This was toward the end of the age of reel-to-reel tape recorders. We were working on a song cycle called Crap. The summer before I went off to college, I bought an issue of Harper’s magazine. I tried to read it, but too many of the words were unfamiliar to me. So I bought Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and read that instead. Words in isolation, not batched together to form thoughts, began to appeal to me. That is when I began develop a sense of the physicality, the materiality, the dimensionality, the inorganicity of words — words as things, as matter. The objecthood of words impressed itself upon me. But I felt like a latecomer to language.

I assume this feeling has abated since then. Your stories are linguistic marvels, almost word sculptures, but also case-studies in proper usage, a point frequently missed, or ignored, by your critics. I went and looked at the original Publishers Weekly assault on Stories in the Worst Way, and the most striking thing about it is not that they didn’t like it, but that they called it unoriginal. That’s beyond a taste-call; it’s simply incorrect.

GL: Stories in the Worst Way definitely took a beating, but if I had been assigned to review it, I probably would’ve panned it myself. It’s not the kind of book that’s asking for any wide welcome.

What then, if anything, is the book asking for?

GL: Probably nothing. Maybe “ask” isn’t the word. Maybe the book motions vaguely and uningratiatingly toward a certain kind of reader, someone who finds the world amply underintelligible but can’t put much trust, or find much satisfaction, in the explanations and affirmations of the undepressed.

Reading that review, it felt to me like Stories got caught up in the knee-jerk anti-Pomo backlash that was going on, which is funny because I’m not sure that your work falls in line with the trends of that era.

GL: I’ve never seen myself as part of any school or pack or coterie, or any trend, any movement or drift. I’ve never made an effort to understand postmodernism. I remember that in an interview somewhere, Barry Hannah remarked that postmodernism was too much like homework. What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don’t know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores seem to lack language entirely.

I’ve read explanations you’ve given elsewhere about how the individual sentences are constructed, and I think your notion of characters “less as figures in case histories than as upcroppings of language, as syntactic commotions coming suddenly to a head” is an intriguing one, but there are recurring concerns in the writing that I’d like you to talk about. I’m thinking especially about gender and sexuality. It’s interesting to me that you’ve never really been identified as a queer writer, since your characters tend to be bisexual, anti-monogamists. If they weren’t so neurotic I’d be tempted to call them sexual revolutionaries.

GL: It would pain me to be labelled a queer writer, because the classification would be missing the point. The people in my stories suffer attraction to other people, and each person is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb, eclipsing whoever it was that came before. To these people, differentiations of gender, of orientation, don’t even register. They’re just looking for somebody to ride out some sadness on, at least for a while.

But there’s something inherently radical in that lack of discrimination, both in the characters who are riding out their sadnesses sans regard for differentiations, and in the writer who writes them that way. People love — perhaps prefer — to talk about the way you construct sentences, but I’m at least as interested in why you choose to tell these stories as I am in how you go about telling them. This non-registration of differentiations is a fundament of your work, it seems to me, and I’m curious if this is a personal/philosophical decision or an aesthetic one.

GL: My characters seem to have involuntarily disimagined the differences between the sexes or between the standard categories of affection, but they cut me in on their hearts only so far before sinking back into the sentences and typography they spirited forward from. They rarely point to anything definite in my life or manage any likeness to people whose passages in life I might have been a party to.

Do you think the degree to which they cut you in has changed? I Looked Alive seems like a denser, more involved book to me than Stories. The pieces seem longer, and more narrative-driven.

GL: I’m not sure why my stories have gotten longer. Maybe it’s because I write only one at a time now, so they’re grabbier, and they swell out more.

I know you do other stuff besides write, too. I read somewhere that you teach.

GL: I teach classes in business writing and compositon at an outlying branch of a huge institution.

David Gates edited this anthology of stories about peoples’ jobs, called Labor Days, and in his introduction he talks quite a bit about the problem of writing “the job,” even though it is where most people spend most of their time. A lot of your work is set in offices, which are figured as terribly abstract spaces, marked by even more terrible moments of specificity that happen within their walls. How do you manage the balance, if it even is balance?

GL: There’s no balance, no poise or proportion. I had my job before I started writing my stories. I can’t speak for myself, but a job does things to a person, deducts a person pretty brutally from life. Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can’t do much about how drawers fill up.

I noticed that both times I saw you give readings you read stories divided into numbered sections… maybe I’m shooting in the dark here, but it felt like it might indicate more than mere coincidence.

GL: At readings, I’ve taken to numerating the segments of a story so a listener has some sense of where lines had to be drawn on the page, but the numbers aren’t part of what the reader encounters.

What are you working on now and what, if anything, might there be for readers to look forward to in the nearish future?

GL: I’m trying to write a third book of stories.

I remember you mentioning in the Believer interview about consciously avoiding brand-names and other markers of culture and era. I think a writer’s desire to be unfettered by the stuff of his day makes sense to me in an instinctual way, but I’d like to just hear your take on it.

GL: I would hate to know exactly where and when my stories are set, in what suburbial latitudes those dark days keep coming. My characters seem bent on piecing themselves out of any big picture, and I have to honor their wish. I don’t know which is finally sicker — specifics or
engulfing abstractions.

I’m not sure that can be answered, but one effect the abstractions have on me, as your interviewer, is they make me want to hound you for concrete detail. I want minutiae. I want you to name names. What are the albums you’d take to the desert island if they sent you? The books and films? What are your brand allegiances when buying cereal, personal computers, and shirts? Did you ever go to a Grateful Dead show? What kind of car do you drive?

GL: My desert-island playlist would be all songs, not albums, and would have to start with “A Sister’s Social Agony” (Camera Obscura [the one from Scotland]), “New Haven Comet” (Luna), “Over Time” (Lucinda Williams), “Nothing Came Out” (the Moldy Peaches), “So Stark (Like a Skyscraper)” and “Here” (Pavement), “Hello Halo” (Parker and Lily), “Name Etched in Home-Room Chair” (Alsace Lorraine), “An Ocean Apart” (Julie Delpy), “Past, Present, and Future” (the Shangri-Las), “Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh” (Bright Eyes), “Tears Are in Your Eyes” (Yo La Tengo), “It’s Getting Late” (Galaxie 500), “These Days” (Nico), “By the Cathedral” (Keren Ann), “Marion Barfs” (from the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack), “You You You You You” (the 6ths), “Lie in the Sound” (Trespassers William), “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Thank God” (the Softies), “I Wanna Die” (Adam Green), “Bobby, King of Boys Town” (Cass McCombs), “I Was Born” (the Magnetic Fields), “Is It Wicked Not to Care?” (Belle and Sebastian), “I Have Forgiven Jesus” (Morrissey [Live at Earls Court version]), and “I Know It’s Over” (the Smiths [Rank version]). Books? Were I deprived of the contemporaries I admire, I would ask first for Salinger (especially Seymour: An Introduction), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s three adult novels, and all of E. M. Cioran. A few months ago, I was watching lots of movies over and over, and they were mostly Eric Rohmer movies, especially The Aviator’s Wife, Summer, A Summer’s Tale, and A Tale of Winter. I haven’t eaten cereal in a couple of decades, and when I did eat it, I ate it dry and unbowled — Alpha-Bits was one I favored. All of my computers except my current one, a Gateway laptop, were hand-me-downs. (I wrote my first book on an Amstrad word processor, a British contraption, something Sears once sold.) My haberdashery comes largely from the “50% Off” and “75% Off” racks at Target. I saw the Grateful Dead only once, at a grassy amphitheater outside Pittsburgh, in June of 1991 or 1992. They stank that night, and somebody smashed my windshield, but I was a fan. I drive a 1993 Saturn, but only because my previous car suddenly caught fire (people were honking horns, rolling down windows, shouting, “Hey, buddy!”), and when I managed to make it to the closest garage, the guy said, “This car is shot,” so I walked from there to a used-car lot — it wasn’t very far — and committed myself rapidly to a sedan. I remember the salesman saying, “I owe you an apology.”

I’m also curious about your abiding interest in the human arm.

GL: As far as arms go, I think they’re the one part of the body that tends to get short shrift in fiction, even though they’re the place where the trouble between people usually gets it start.

 

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Book

Garielle Lutz The Gotham Grammarian
Calamari Press

 

‘The most brilliant writers occasionally stumble with grammar and punctuation, and the rest of us can learn from their missteps. The Gotham Grammarian is a book of rules and guidelines for anyone who believes that correctness and precision still matter. The book discusses the ninety-five errors that most often go undetected by stellar writers, as well as by editors, copy editors, and proofreaders.’ — Calamari Press

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Excerpt
from Sleeping Fish

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Hey. But envy is one of the biggest lies, isn’t it? It’s so illogical, and there’s so much presumption involved. Oh, I don’t know, what do I know? I think I saw your new poster in my feed yesterday, so I guess you’re post-that. It has lots of gravitational pull. That’s why they call them wishes. ** jay, I so love Tobias Bradford’s work. I think Zac and I are going to ask him if we can put one of his works in our next film or else make a documentary about him or something. If I was a visual artist, I think I’d be him. Yeah, I couldn’t bring myself to just be practical and call the title Kinetic. Hm, I guess if the addiction is a physical one like with drugs or something, it might come with shittyness. Maybe addiction was the wrong word. Maybe I meant obsession. Obsession can go all kinds of ways, I think? That guy’s bio would have been a good pull quote to use as the title of my next escorts post. Not bad, indeed. What did the sunshine over you today shine on? ** _Black_Acrylic, Awesome, I’m so happy you like that work so much! ** politekid, I’ve never read a word by Margaret Atwood, well, except for that quote, but it’s a pretty solid quote. As is yours re: imbibing enough shitty art to be able pat yourself on the back. Dude, there is a lot of shitty art out there. I was informed that your book will arrive speedily, and I am mega-excited. The experimental music event was a concert by Stephen O’Malley, Kali Malone, and Lucy Railton performed within an installation of Anthony McCall’s light projections. It was very good. The theater piece tonight is a new piece by Jonathan Capedeville, maybe best known for his performances in Gisele’s work, ‘Jerk’ in particular. It’s called ‘Dainas’, and I don’t know much about it yet. I think I’m too tall for The Sensory Deprivation Skull, but it looks inviting. The blog as grave digger, nice! Have a day that is both highly compressed and infinitely expansive. Come on, you can do it. ** Steve, Oh, boy, ugh, on that heat. They say we’re going back up next week. In person? Let me check … I saw Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s ‘Old Persons Home’ and Rebecca Horn’s ‘Untitled’ and Hans Haacke’s ‘Blue Sail’ and William Forsythe’s ‘Black Flags’. I’ll go find the Helma Sanders-Brahms’s films, thanks. I don’t think I’ve seen anything by her. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. If the book happens, it will be selected not collected. Yeah, it would be the ‘best’ from my short fiction books ‘Wrong’. ‘Ugly Man’, and ‘Flunker’ with a new thing or two that I’d need to write. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read Elizabeth Bowen. Maybe not. Hm, maybe I’ll do a quick skim of one of her books the next time I’m at the English language bookstore and see if the prose grabs. ** laura w, Hi. Parc Asterix has what seems like hundreds of mascots. But not in an obnoxious way. ‘Gold’ was originally for ‘I Wished’ too, yes, but I very heavily rewrote and reworked and expanded that one to make it stand and function on its own. I’m not against writing a memoir because I want to be mysterious, I don’t think, the idea just doesn’t interest me, and I don’t think non-fiction is a form I’m good at or suited to really. I only like to invent things, or try to. I hope the ocd stint passes really quickly. Does it just sort of rise out of nowhere unexpectedly? My week is more shiny than sparkly so far, which is maybe better. I wish you similar shininess. ** DonW, Hi. I need to watch more Radu. Noted. I’ll see what I can find that’s still new to me. You make Romania sounds so much more tempting than it was before you brought it up. I think the French kind of look down their noses at Romania, or that’s the vibe I get. Not sure why. Oh, that’s Thomas Brinkman’s music in the trailer. Yes, it is supposed to do that. In the scene where we use it, one of the characters tries to dance to it And he does pretty well considering. Take care, you too. ** Uday, Precisely. I haven’t looked at that poem in many decades, so maybe it’s okay. My poetry seems like a construction site or something to me now. No, wait, I want to see that shirt! Pretty please? With sugar or its natural equivalent on top? ** Right. I haven’t featured the great Garielle Lutz on the blog in quite a while, so I switched on the spotlight that once fell and now falls again on one of their more curious books. See you tomorrow.