DC's

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘Owen Land, formerly known as George Landow, was a really really great filmmaker. His films are like no others. I first saw Landow’s early standard-8mm films (which may be no longer extant — is that right?) such as Are Era and Not a Case of Lateral Displacement at an open screening in New York in the summer of 1964 or 1965. Open screenings, even back then, tended to have many films that weren’t so interesting. Landow’s not only engaged me, but seemed both great, and unlike anything I had seen before. One seemed to be long takes of a wound. Are Era was shot off TV, very rapidly cut (in camera I assume), showing a TV head both right side up and upside down. Still in my teens, I had only recently discovered cinema, and had never heard of Landow before that screening. “Structural film” had not yet been so named, so the statement from the gallery that Land’s “debut” was a “critique of structural film” is not right, as a “genre” that has not yet been named is not exactly ready for its “critique.”

‘It’s true that Land was not the most sociably adept of people. But one would not expect that from his films. If you understand his films, you understand that communication in them is always paradoxical. His fascination with palindromes (and he and I exchanged a few ordinal palindromes at times) was only a bare surface indication of his films’ profound inwardness, an inwardness that was not one of psychological interiority, as in Brakhage, but of irreconcilable paradox. Land was fascinated with cinema’s artificiality, and his use of film imagery was profoundly hermetic; it always feels as if his film images are spiraling inward, collapsing in on themselves.

‘He was not necessarily the friendliest instructor for young filmmakers interested in “self-expression.” He wasn’t very patient with long, self-indulgent, emotionally-laden “personal” films. I once saw him advise a student, correctly in my view, that the student did not have the distance needed to deal with the family footage he was trying to fashion into a film. But those who so easily make personal voiceover pieces today (in which a voiceover narrates autobiographical details on the sound track which the images illustrate) might have something to learn from really studying Landow’s deeply hermetic art, an art I find true in some deep way to the truths of images either on film or seen with the eye: Do we really know what any image might mean, or how it might “feel”?

‘There is much humor in Land’s work, and one genuine belly-laugh for those who had had their fill of the academic use of Hollis Frampton’s (admittedly wonderful) (nostalgia) to illustrate “structural” film: The film within Land’s Wide Angle Saxon titled Regrettable Redding Condescension, credited to someone named “Al Rutcurts” (remember Land’s love of palindromes), which was indeed a “critique” of “structural film.”

‘I wish “experimental” cinema had more true originals such as Land, filmmakers who find a new and original use for cinema, a new type of film grammar, which, of course, can also lead to a new type of thinking. In my view, the “project” of “experimental” film at its best has always been that of forging new types of consciousness, new was of conceiving of the world, new ways of being in the world.’ — Fred Camper

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Owen Land @ IMDb
‘Owen Land (1944-2011)’ @ LUX
The Films of Owen Land @ Harvard Film Archive
Owen Land @ Office Baroque Gallery
Book: Mark Webber ‘Two Films by Owen Land’
Owen Land @ mubi
‘Avant-gardist Owen Land Comes Out of the Shadows’

 

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Documentary

‘“So, how’s that avant-garde film you’re working on going?” Hopefully, that question will be met with a fun, answer like “Oh great, it’s a really interesting project.” However, director Ben Lazarus has documented the resentful feelings of the disgruntled crew who worked on Owen Land‘s Dialogues, which was filmed in Los Angeles. In the Land of Owen, which features footage not in the original film, is a documentary of the aftermath of a film production gone haywire. Word of warning: This video is NSFW as it contains lots of nudity.

‘There is no actual footage of Land directing in In the Land of Owen. There are a couple of still pictures of him where he doesn’t look very well and some of the interviewees talk about him being ill and having had a stroke. But without actual footage of him directing and no direct interview with him, it’s tough to determine exactly how the production of Dialogues descended into complete chaos.

‘Many of the crew members and actors refer to Land as if he was a tyrannical crank on set, including being verbally abusive, but details of the abuse are not given. Some crew members are still incredibly hostile and bitter, while others kind of laugh off the flakier aspects of Land’s personality and behavior. One shocking revelation is that the first director of photography on the film has withheld over half of the footage shot of Dialogues due to non-payment.

‘One recurring topic of the documentary is that everyone on the crew was not only completely baffled by what Land was shooting, but that was a source of frustration. I don’t know if that’s because this was an L.A. crew or if the crew just generally wasn’t into avant-garde and underground filmmaking. The clips that were withheld from Dialogues and that appear in this documentary make it look like a fun film. And I totally don’t agree with the one actor’s assessment that making a film “irritating” is a goal of a lot of experimental filmmakers. That sounds like the reaction of somebody who just expects all films to have clear narratives.

‘There aren’t many “making of” documentaries about avant-garde films. Hearing about the tribulations of making Dialogues in In the Land of Owen is really pretty fascinating; and it’s a very well put together and entertaining documentary by Lazarus.’ — Underground Film Journal

 

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Interview 2009

 

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Obituary

 

‘A question that one should never ask an experimental film-maker is: “What is your film about?” George Landow, who has died unexpectedly aged 67, would probably have responded: “It’s about eight minutes.” Along with many other “structural” American film directors in the 1960s and 1970s, Landow – who changed his name to the semi-anagram Owen Land in 1977 – rejected linear narrative, giving primacy to the shape and essence of film. “I didn’t want to make films that were narrative. I found the whole traditional narrative approach was really non-visual,” he commented.

‘Landow trained to be a painter. This is demonstrated in the self-explanatory title of Landow’s Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1966). What he called “the dirtiest film ever made” consists of four identical images of a blinking woman, off-centre, made to appear as a loop without a beginning and end, giving prominence to the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the 16mm film, components that audiences do not normally see. Landow used “found footage”, in this case a Kodak colour test, throughout his oeuvre, where film itself is the subject matter.

‘Landow later parodied his early experimental films and those of his mentors, Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, with jokey titles such as On the Marriage Broker Joke As Cited By Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious Or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1977–79). This features two actors dressed as pandas who discuss film in a false-perspective room patterned with checks and polka dots. “What is a ‘structural film’?” asks one. “That’s easy, everybody knows what a structural film is,” comes the reply. “It’s when engineers design an aeroplane, or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will soon fall apart. The film shows where all the stresses are.” The pandas then suggest strategies for marketing Japanese salted plums illustrated by a Japanese publicity film created to look like found footage.

‘Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970), in the form of an educational film that is part of a woman’s dreams, uses colour footage of an auditorium of people who are about to watch a film, a mock television commercial about rice, text from a speed-reading manual, and the director himself running, with the superimposed words, “This is a film about you … not about its maker.” In New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976), a middle-aged man attempts to carry out a test full of seemingly meaningless instructions before entering transcendence through a woman’s shoe.

‘Dialogues, his valedictory film, was based on his own bizarre and comic sexual encounters with women and his relationship with his contemporaries, including a mocking portrait of Maya Deren, the avant-garde film-maker. He was given a retrospective at the Rotterdam film festival in 2005. This programme then moved to the Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 2009, his work was presented at the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Kunst-Werke, Berlin.

‘This was the last film Landow made before becoming Owen Land and leaving the underground film scene for more than three decades. He reappeared with his last film, Dialogues (2009). Little is known of his movements in between. He spent a year in Japan and taught film at US universities throughout the 1970s, and settled in Los Angeles in 2006. Landow died as mysteriously as he had lived. His death was announced a month after his body was found in his Los Angeles apartment.’ — Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

 

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9 of Owen Land’s 17 films

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Film In Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1965-66)
‘This film takes the view that certain defining characteristics of the medium, such as those mentioned in the title, are visually “worthy”. For this reason it is especially recommended.’ — Lux

‘The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements lines the beautiful whites, and reds and blacks… The kinetic and visual experienced produced by Landow’s film is even more difficult to describe… There is humour in it (the blink); there is clear Mozart -(Mondrian)- like sense of form … ‘ — Jonas Mekas

 

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The Evil Faerie (1966)
‘The Evil Faerie is a movie starring Steven M. Zinc. It is directed by Owen Land. It is one minute in length.’ — mrr

 

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Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)
‘His remarkable faculty is as maker of images … the images he photographs are among the most radical, super-real and haunting images the cinema has ever given us.’ — P. Adams Sitney

 

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Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968)
‘This film had already been in my mind for a very long time, this type of film. I wanted to do a film which dealt with drawings which somehow had a life of their own, which existed in the same space as real objects and yet still had their own two-dimensional space. I wanted a kind of imagery that didn’t refer to anything in our visual vocabulary, and also was so non-objective that it didn’t refer to anything.’ — George Landow (aka Owen Land)

Watch the film here

 

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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
‘Two kinds of material are used: 1) Material in the tradition of the “psycho-drama” or “personal film”; 2) Material of the sort used in industrial, educational, or advertising film. Questions are raised about the necessity of using acceptably “artistic” material to make a work of art, as well as about the relationships between “personal” and “impersonal” works. “One of the ways that REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION works is in the degree of filmic distance which each image has in the film. Distance here refers to the degree of awareness on the part of the viewer that the image he is watching is a film image, rather than ‘reality.’ [Land’s] film does not try to build up an illusion of reality, to combine the images together with the kind of spatial or rhythmic continuity that would suggest that one is watching ‘real’ people or objects. It works rather toward the opposite end, to make one aware of the unreality, the created and mechanical nature, of film.’ — Fred Camper

 

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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)
‘A rapturous audiovisual mix that `deliberately seeks a hidden order in randomness.’ The film combines the face of a woman in ecstatic, contemplative prayer with shots of an animal rights activist, and a scantily clad model advertising Russian cars at the International Auto Show in New York.’ — IFFR

 

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A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California (1974)
‘”As an experience, it’s mind-boggling.” –Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times. “Because all footage is sound sync, this screening process hones our responses, until we see more in (Land’s) 3-frame sequences than we would in hour-long doses of ‘normal’ time. Like the study of signs, this study of seconds yields a knowledge of people and truth inaccessible to more common observation.” — B. Ruby Rich

Watch the film here

 

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New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976)
‘A reworking of an earlier film, Institutional Quality, in which the same test was given. In the earlier film the person taking the test was not seen, and the film viewer in effect became the test taker. The newer version concerns itself with the effects of the test on the test taker. An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of the test – a test containing meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-follow directions – by entering into the imagination. In this case it is specifically the imagination of the filmmaker, in which the test taker encounters images from previous Land films …. The test taker is “initiated” into this world by passing through a shoe (the shoe of “the woman who has dropped something”) which has lost its normal spatial proportions, just as taking the test has caused the test taker to lose his sense of proportion. As he moves through the images in the filmmaker’s mind, the test taker is in a trance-like state, and is carried along by some unseen force …. At the end of the film the test taker is back at his desk, still following directions. His “escape” was only temporary, and thus not a true escape at all.’ — Canyon Cinema

 

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On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1977)
‘ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE … turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics …. Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud’s own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock.’ — P. Adams Sitney

Watch the film here

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. One thing I especially like about that loose generation of women UK writers like Murdoch is how they make you realise how rich a stuffy tone and style can be. There was a point where I learned a lot from that for my own writing, from Compton-Burnett especially. I don’t know, but my friends who love Proust say his work is some kind of lifelong commitment, so your staggering methodology makes sense. Big up, and have a rich day. ** gregoryedwin, Whoa! Hi, man! How amazing to find you here. How are you? What are up to? No pressure to say, but just to say I’m wondering. Yes, it’s a real blow about Michael. He’s left a large hole in the world both as a friend and as the Bookworm. And yes, about the constellating. Let’s try. Anyway, wow, really lovely to see you, my friend! ** Dominik, Hi!!! I guess even speedy people need their pit stops. Oh, interesting. Anything you’ve found in your research that’s especially instructive? Nothing I’ve read or seen about ‘Heated Rivalry’ has made me even remotely interested. Love never thought he would ever say this but he is really over winter, G. ** Carsten, Yes, I’m ‘friends’ with Jost on FB. I’m a great admirer of his films and of how he makes his art and lives. I too am quite concerned about his recent health scare and really hoping he’s going to be okay. I don’t think death deserves him yet. ** _Black_Acrylic, I wouldn’t let the Language tag intimidate you. The writers who were tagged in that way are really all over the place in their writing and at least over time have fully transcended that initial locked description. And, yes, ‘My Life’ is an excellent entry in any case. ** Steeqhen, Cigarettes and coffee for me. And maybe Melatonin. Sorry about your need to withdraw from that person, but I feel pretty sure your instincts must be correct. No Pancake Day here, or in the US, I don’t think. I wish I’d known. But I guess I can declare today Pancake Day, what’s stopping me. Thanks ever so much for your ministrations on behalf of the film. ** Thom, I would say it’s pretty killer, yes. What exciting thoughts you’re having about your short story. And the premise is beautiful. I love hearing about writers’ mental machinations whilst trying to ace a tricky formal or stylistic move. Big process junkie here. I’d ask you how you’re thinking you’ll do that, but I know as someone who has that kind of ambition for my writing, that it’s hard if not impossible to describe. But feel free to try, if you like. Two jobs and writing, that’s … well, it’s great that you can think so fully about your writing with those brackets. Thank you a lot for letting me in on that. ** kenley, I’ll even eat horrid frozen microwave mozzarella sticks with a satisfied smile. Stephen’s great. He lives in Paris. New Sunn0))) album coming any minute now. I have to say that theater or conventional theater/plays is really not a genre I enjoy very much at all. Performance art and avant-garde theater stuff I’m totally down for. But plays with all that acting and need to suspend belief via sets and light and stuff, nah. Or rarely. I can’t really think of a play I really like. Well, Beckett is great. ‘Three Penny Opera’ is incredible. Let me know if it ends up exciting you or something. ** HaRpEr //, ‘My Life’ is really, really good. Worth the read. I used to use poetry to explore my emotions, not my fiction very much. Except for ‘I Wished’ obviously. I wonder if the reason I stopped writing poetry is because my heart is dead or something. The publishing world is vast and contains venues and editorial tastes of all kinds. I wouldn’t let yourself lock that arena down as an impossibility if you can. It can just be complicated and time consuming to negotiate. ** Laura, Hey, Laura. Even if you never end up getting the lil award, you’ll still get it before I do. Curious pseudonym. Very hopeful, nice. I haven’t said yes to the reading. I don’t like doing readings very much so I might decline. Still thinking. As I sort of said to Ben up above, I personally think at this point in time it’s more valuable to think of the writers who were lumped together under the Language title as just writers because their work has dispersed to the degree that I don’t think that seeing them as examples of that tag’s definition is useful or fair to their work. I mean from Hejinian to Bernstein to Howe to Armantrout to … on and on, there are all kinds of things going on there. But I have a hard time with generalisations in general. Well, script happiness is reserved for, first, if Zac is okay with it, and, two, if a producer is okay wth it. The happiness is incremental. ** Okay. I’ve brought back an old Day about the exciting and enigmatic experiential filmmaker Owen Land, and I hope you will give it a shot. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. Her poetry is characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday. She is the author of many poetry collections, including My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), and her landmark work My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). A native Californian, she teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

‘Like most Language writing, Hejinian’s work enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated. While Language writing is stylistically diverse and, as a movement, difficult to reduce to a particular style, most writers in this group are concerned with writing in non-standardized, often non-narrative forms. Language writing is community-centered and often takes as its subject progressive politics and social theory. Hejinian’s work, for example, is committed to exploring the political ramifications of the ways that language is typically used. Her work differs, however, from the traditional, identity-affirming, political poetry of most left-wing writers as much as it does from main-stream poets. The poet Juliana Spahr has written of Hejinian, “It is easier to trace the influence of language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphoristic statement that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ or to apply Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ‘making strange’ to Hejinian’s poetry than it is to relate her work to the contemporary poetry usually anthologized in the Norton or Heath anthologies of American literature.”

‘Although Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and antirealist, Hejinian’s work does not reject these modes. Her long “novels” My Life (2002) and Oxata (1991) unabashedly draw on her own experiences and are in some ways recognizably autobiographical. Rather, Hejinian’s work insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent the confessional or the real. Her work, repeatedly concerned with biography or autobiography, explores the relationship between alternative writing practices and the subjectivity that these genres often obscure. The alternative form that Hejinian uses most frequently is what has come to be called the “new sentence,” a form of prose poem composed mainly of sentences that have no clear transitions. The gap created by a text that moves from subject to subject invites the reader to participate, to bring his or her own reading to the text.

‘Crucial to understanding Hejinian’s work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading. Spahr noted, “Her work is deliberately unsettling in its unpredictability, its diversions from conventions, the way it is out of control.” In her essay “The Rejection of Closure,” published in The Language of Iniquiry (2002), a selection of her theoretical writings, Hejinian develops a theory of an “open text” that defines both her earlier work and her current work. “An open text,” she writes, “is open to the world and particularly to the reader….[It] invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.” To provoke the reader’s participation, the open text engages in a series of disruptive techniques that expose the reader to the possibilities of meaning that he or she brings to the text.

‘Hejinian’s commitment to the Language movement and its techniques is evident throughout her work. Her first book-length collection, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978), investigates the confessional systems of memory and the difficulties of portraying these systems without smoothing over the questions they raise. An example of Hejinian’s “open text” is the autobiographical My Life. Spahr regarded My Life as “currently the most important of Hejinian’s work,” noting that it has attracted much scholarly attention. Poet and critic Lisa Samuels, in a similar vein, has advocated the inclusion of My Life in the academic “canon.” This work, through its attention to alternative and multiple ways of telling, refuses to invoke the transparent language conventions that typically compose autobiography.

‘On a trip to Leningrad with her husband, Hejinian met a variety of contemporary poets who would provide the inspiration for Leningrad (1991). It is a typical Language movement text, even written collaboratively, as is common in the movement. The four poets in this collection alternate voices and discuss various ways post-glasnost society forces them to confront their own politics of encounter. Hejinian’s engagement with Russian poets and poetics has profoundly influenced her work. Her years-long collaboration with the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko has resulted in a theater piece, film script, and translations of each into the other’s language. It also led to Oxata (1991), a work that displays Hejinian’s interest in form, prose and the self-disclosures of language. Based loosely on Aleksandr Pushkin’s long poem, Eugene Onegin, the work shows, in Marjorie Perloff’s estimation, how “the long poems of our time … cannot be pigeonholed.”

‘A prolific writer, Hejinian’s work since Oxata has been various and wide-ranging. Her long “autobiographical” poem, My Life, has been twice reprinted and updated. Originally 38 stanzas of 38 lines—Hejinian’s age at the time of initial publication—the work is now 45 stanzas of 45 lines. Her long poem Happily (2000) met with great acclaim and was included in a collection of her essays, The Language of Inquiry (2002). Selecting from over 25 years of work, the book offers an illuminating glimpse of Hejinian’s influences and preoccupations, especially the centrality of Gertrude Stein to her development as a writer and thinker. Reviewing the book for the Boston Review, Brian Kim Stefans alleged that by “extending the frame of the ‘poet’s essay’ beyond issues of form and tradition and into an open-ended philosophical dialogue that engages with one in the very act of reading a book, alone at home or in a crowded cafe.” Hejinian’s continued interest in notions of the “experimental” is evident in some of her most recent work, including Saga/Circus (2009). Again in the Boston Review, Joyelle McSweeney noted how the two long poems of the book “make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an alert and damaging wit.” McSweeney concluded, “the possibilities within Hejinian’s ouevre are inexhaustible, [h]er working and reworking of writing’s generic and epistemological potentials and capabilities is unending. In this life’s work, each falling short produces a conceptual distance into which writing can move.”

‘Since the 1970s, when Hejinian began writing, many of the techniques and interests of Language writing have moved from the margins to the fore of American poetry; Hejinian and her fellow Language poets such as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Rae Armantrout have also found employment in academia as professors and visiting writers, complicating the “oppositional” stance of much of their early work. Discussing the newly-anthologized status of language writing with Craig Dworkin in an interview originally published in Idiom #3, Hejinian noted “Both the big Messerli anthology and the Norton have the overt ambition to define and historicize a lot of activity, and they’re going to do that. They are going to be, for a long time now, the avenue through which people come to understand and be exposed to this work. That may be good for your generation: there it is, that’s history, now we can get on with what we’re doing. But for me, the big challenge is to remember that this story is not adequate, that it’s not the whole story, that these books don’t feel like what it really was—they don’t really show it.”’ — Poetry Foundation

 

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Further

Lyn Hejinian @ Wikipedia
Lyn Hejinian @ PennSound
Lyn Hejinian Imagines Life on Mars
‘Ten Remarkable Interpretations’, by Lyn Hejinian
“Things Predicted Are Always Restricted”: Lyn Hejinian’s Anti-Sonnets
‘Dreaming Something Else’, by Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian: Everything is Imminent in Anything
AERIAL 10 & LYN HEJINIAN: POETICS OF INQUIRY
Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement
Living (1983–85) by Lyn Hejinian
Encoding and Representing Repetition in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
Linguistic Innovativeness & Mnemonic Textuality in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Writing is an Aid to Memory
Eight justifications for canonizing Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
Microreview: Lyn Hejinian, My Life and My Life in the Nineties
The Mnemonics of Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
The poetics of presentation: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life project
Objectivist Form and Feminist Materialism in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘My Life’
Buy ‘My Life’

 

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Extras

Lyn Hejinian: Poetic Beginnings

Lunch Poems: Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian in conversation with Kate Fagan – 9 July 2014

REINVENTING THE WORKSHOP with Lyn Hejinian

 

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Interview
from Jacket2

 

Filreis: There’s a beautiful passage in your book The Fatalist in which you get to say something that may or may not have to do with your My Life project — you notice I didn’t say may or may not have to do with “your life” —

Hejinian: That would be confusing for all of us.

Filreis: I’m missing the context of the whole when I quote this, but we can go back to it if we need to.

Hejinian: Isn’t every explanation like every autobiography (in which the author shows how everything in life ultimately holds together or how everything in life’s ultimately holding together is the life) sentimental?

Filreis: So isn’t every explanation like every autobiography — parentheses sentimental? And then: For that I want a large format and I don’t want my face anywhere on it.

Hejinian: You got that right.

Filreis: I don’t want my face anywhere on it. It’s not just a political catastrophe we are living through.

So, I have two questions about that fantastic passage. And we know better than to ask of a Lyn Hejinian piece of writing that uses newish sentences and juxtaposes things — especially given the context, you know, the way you composed this thing — then to jam those two things together, but in a way that is my question.

It’s not just a political catastrophe we are living through, which rhetorically implies it is a political catastrophe, but there are other catastrophes. So my question is: Beyond the political catastrophe we are living through, what other catastrophes are we living through? And what, if anything, does that have to do with this problem of explanation and autobiography in the desire to have your picture on the book My Life?

Hejinian: That’s a very good question, and almost impossible to answer adequately.

I was using the term political in a relatively narrow sense when writing that comment. In some ways, I think, one can use the term political to describe anything that affects humans, anything that affects living creatures. The ecological disaster that is underway now, I think, is a political disaster of a kind.

It certainly is being furthered by politicians. For example, those who won’t sign the Kyoto Accords, which is just the tiny beginning of acknowledging that there is a disaster underway.

But I also think there is a link to the word “sentimental” in that. I was playing on two sides of the term sentimental. One is the pejorative sense of “sentimental,” which I think informs the current climate that is always suggesting that what humans most want when they’re troubled is closure. That closure is going to resolve things. That we get over things once we have closure. And I am resentful of, and deeply troubled by, the impulse or the notion that we should all be getting over everything instead of actually living through it and maintaining ourselves in relationship to it.

So, in that sense it’s merely sentimental to try and get everything to cohere and then “have closure,” whereby everything is neatly fixed and fits together: the jigsaw puzzle is squared up, no pieces are missing, and you can put it back in the box and achieve closure.

But on the other side, I think that the term “sentimental” or “sentimentality,” in the eighteenth-century usage, is extremely interesting and dynamic and actually appears in what ends up as postmodern irony. Think, for example, of the work of Laurence Sterne — that would be maybe the most familiar writer, although if you are crazy about Diderot, you can look at some of Diderot’s writings also. It is very fragmentary and witty at the very point where lots of gaps occur, in, for example, Sterne’s novella or novel, A Sentimental Journey. That title, by the way, has been used repeatedly by modernist and then postmodern writers as an homage to Laurence Sterne, and precisely, I think, because of how sentiment works in it. For example, Victor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist poet, wrote a book called A Sentimental Journey and the Bay-area Language School poet Kit Robinson wrote a long work called A Sentimental Journey, just to name two instances. In A Sentimental Journey, whenever anything occurs in which it is impossible to say anything about it, Sterne breaks off, and he breaks off often for very hilarious reasons: an orgasmic moment, or at the glimpse of an ankle, or the thought of a glass of wine! The ruptures or disjunctions are markers of feelings which are beyond speech, and markers of strong sensibility or sentimentality therefore, but not in a maudlin or easy way.

Another example is Langston Hughes’s two-volume autobiographical work: The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. As you know if you are familiar with those books, they are written in vignettes, and very short vignettes. And between those vignettes is where the sentiment lies, where the deep emotion lies. He never speaks of homophobia, of racism, or of the difficulties of his life as a left-wing African American gay poet, but you feel it in the book, in those gaps. And they are also very ironic gaps. Irony arises when you say one thing and mean another, which is to say that you don’t say something — and it’s the not saying that is sentimental in the positive sense.

So, I am not sure how I said that in that sentence.

Filreis: No, it’s fantastic. So, the larger catastrophe is our failure to understand the latter sense of sentiment —

Hejinian: And to keep filling in the gaps with blather, drivel that is sentimental in the vulgar sense —

Filreis: So the picture on the faux-autobiography, on the autobiography, is a way of trying to do a “been there, done that, got it” thing.

So, do you remember to whom you were addressing or who is the addressee of that statement?

Hejinian: I don’t remember.

Filreis: Okay.

Hejinian: I really don’t. I’m not hedging here.

 

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Book

Lyn Hejinian My Life
Green Integer Books

‘Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman’s fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here) the publication Library Journal described the book as one that “is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work.”‘ — Green Integer

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Excerpt

A name trimmed with colored ribbons

They are seated in the shadows husking corn, shelling peas. Houses of wood set in the ground. I try to find the spot at which the pattern on the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy, quartz. They wade in brackish water. The leaves outside the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them, making it impossible to look past them, and though holes were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as portholes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This simply means that the imagination is more restless than the body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for example, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then, one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do. Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, nearly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it seems even more incomplete when we were there in person. Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rapturous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns, frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a message of happiness by which we were called into the room, as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons.

*

 

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called “sea glass,” bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one’s tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don’t mind, or I won’t mind, where the verb “to care” might multiply. The pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the hidden airport. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early.

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Frederick Wiseman. ** Thom, Hi. Yeah, Michael was a phenomenon. And, yes, I think I had one of those speechless ‘you got it’ moments on every show I did with him. Thank you a lot about ‘Period’. Totally agreed about ‘The Consumer’. I wonder he didn’t seem to continue writing or at least publish if he has. Lovely day to you. ** jay, I’ve never seen a de Bruyckere in the flesh (as it were). I can imagine. Murdoch, for sure. Most of that generation of female British writers were really quite dark, and it is wild to think they were prominent and widely read. What happened?! I’m good, and you sound so. ** kenley, Awesome about the warm welcome. Ultimately much better than attaining witch status. I do like diner food, breakfast or otherwise. And, yes, there is a place here that’s even called Breakfast in America. I go there fairly often. They have very solid mozzarella sticks, which aren’t easy to find here. And iced tea, also an extreme rarity in France sadly. My week? A place here is showing a bunch of films by one my two all-time favorite filmmakers Hollis Frampton, and I’m excitedly going to that. My friend Stephen O’Malley (of Sunn0)))) are a couple of other musicians are performing a concert of Alvin Lucier’s music at a church here, and I’m going to that. I’m being photographed for a magazine. I’m going to see Gisele Vienne’s newest theater piece. And the usual setting up ‘RT’ screenings. So all of that at least. What are you going to be up to? ** darbz (⊙ 0⊙ ), Michael and I were very old friends. Yeah, it’s really sad. I think I do remember about the silicone figure you were into making, yes. ‘Stray’ is a terrific word. I mean even ‘The Stray’ is a good title. I’ll peel my eyes for your art and goth dreads. The second story in ‘Flunker’ is an outtake from ‘I Wished’, so yes. I don’t remember exactly about his dad and his medication, but his dad was a bad guy. A longevity spell would be most welcome! Thank you, my friend. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m really meticulous too, but I’m speedy at the same for some reason. I think I figured out that scene’s setting, and I really like it, but I’m going to give a couple of days just to be sure. So I guess I’m not that speedy, haha. Love butching it up, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Resilient Debbie! ** Steeqhen, I’m so glad I don’t drink alcohol anymore. I don’t even miss it. I do miss drugs. I guess I’ve always assumed that dead look is just because of lack of blood flow and internal warmth. Well, and material decay. I’ve lived through a number of these satanic panic phases, and they always peter out, and it just seems like tiresome, predictable noise to me. Thanks about the Triskel! ** nίκα мавроди, That wouldn’t surprise me. ** Hugo, Michael was great to talk with, yes, very unsurprisingly. Haha, the Dahmer/Silverblatt dream. Michael would have been most amused. ** Bill, To the MoCA gala? Mm, no. Never was invited and certainly wasn’t going to pay the massive entry fee. I read Kitamura’s ‘Japanese for Travellers’, which was interesting, but I think that’s it. I’ll look for ‘Audition’, thanks. Nothing to do with the film of the same name, I feel safe in assuming? ** Carsten, Yeah, it’s really sad about Michael. He’d been in bad shape for quite a while, and this was expected, but it’s very tragic and wrong. Oh, acceptance -> publishing. People always say it takes about a year, and that makes sense in my experience, but I think there’s a fair amount of flexibility there. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh! I’m so happy to see you here. Yes, amazing that you got to see Michael. And from Jeff’s description of the visit, I felt reassured, albeit through the sadness. I hope you’re feeling and doing much better as the days flow. I’m thinking about you a lot and of course keeping up through your substack. Much love to you, maestro. ** Nick Toti, Well, hey there, Nick! And what timing! I hope the Slamdance screening goes really well. And I’ll hit that link pronto. Everyone, Mega-excellent filmmaker Nick Toti has a brand new 80-second short film called, apropos of yesterday’s post, ‘Dead Grandma’, that he co-directed and that you can watch right here. ** Steve, Hi. Michael had been incapable of email and phone calls for a while, so, no, I hadn’t talked with him in some time, but I kept up through people who were in LA and seeing him. I hope the medication does its magic. I kind of assumed the new Morrissey would be very subpar, so … ** HaRpEr //, You got me. They just talk about the supposedly incredible orgasms they can have without any input from their penises, but they aren’t very specific about them. Feverish followed by pickiness can work, obviously. That’s how I write a lot of the time. People who say that Michael was the greatest reader on earth are absolutely right to my knowledge. ** Jeff J, Hi. Of course I thought of you when I heard the news. So great that you got to see him, and I’m really grateful that you described it and him to me. Yeah, on the hand, we all knew this was inevitable, but it’s still very hard to wrap my mind around. Ugh. Thanks, man. ** Uday, You know I’m of the opinion that friendship is the best, outcome and otherwise. So … congrats again? Beautiful thing with your roommate. Its beauty totally came across. ** Laura, Don’t know about Libera’s gran, but I would assume she signed off, I don’t know why. The Gisele piece is filmed, yes, but it’s not public at least at this point. It’s still being performed once in a while. The title ‘TIHYWD’ was actually a derivation of the title of a Scott Walker song. Someone just asked me to do a reading of my poetry, and I need to go look at them before I decide because I haven’t looked at them in years. No, you didn’t tell me about your thwarted Rimbaud status. Wow, interesting. Can’t do the vision thing anymore, eh? You’re like Bob Dylan. The script might be finished, but Zac is away for a week, so I’ll keep going over it in minute detail to make sure before he gets back. <3! ** James, Thank you, James, and much love back to you. ** Right. Today the blog spotlights a great book by the sadly late and very wonderful writer Lyn Hejinian. Highly recommended, needless to say. See you tomorrow.