Month: February 2020 (Page 2 of 12)

 

‘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. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, My pleasure. Joe was very shy in public, much less so when not. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Good to see you. Well, you’ve been plenty busy and productive, so time well spent away. I need to get the AS bundle. I keep forgetting to order it. Aces about the new stories. What is ‘the Pleasant vein’? As simple as it sounds? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I was surprised to find that online, I must admit. Oh, great, big congrats about the X-R-A-Y acceptance. Congrats to them mostly. Wonderful! Such a good context/mag. Yay! ** Steve Erickson, They’ve done short videos, but they’re not online. I saw one in a museum show. I thought their thing worked better in stills. Ah, yes, it sounds like panic is setting in over there. Here, strangely, everything seems completely normal. I haven’t noticed any change in anything. We’ll see, though. I’m not on instagram, so, no, I don’t follow that page. I’ll go see how much I can check out before the pop-up ‘you don’t belong here’ thing stops me. So what does your doctor suggest? Tough it out, or … ? ** Bill, Me either. Re: cotton candy. It has become something that seems far, far better viewed than tasted. You’re right, I’m not surprised you’re into those, although I hadn’t predicted you would be in advance. Thanks about the TV thing. It’s a seriously cursed project, and pretty has been for years. Bon day! ** Okay. Today I’m spotlighting a great, recent-ish but total classic novel/prose book by the inimitable Lyn Hejinian. Hope you enjoy. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

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Satan’s God

 

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‘This is a 57-page long novella about Elvis Presley shooting the film Fun in Acapulco in Mexico. A translator is hired to ensure that Elvis pronounces his few handful of Spanish lines in a proper Castillian accent. But when a drunk American and Elvis insult the local “white mafia” leader, and a translation is necessary, the protagonist soon finds himself on the hunted. The story is kind of Marías-lite, but the opening sentence is a typical sinewy sentence from one of Spain’s greatest living writers.’ — Peter McLachlin, TERITW

No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with deliberation, determination, dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score. It isn’t that someone has it in for you and stands at the ready to pounce should you cross his path or give him the chance; it isn’t that someone has sworn revenge and waits, waits, does no more than wait and therefore remains passive, or schemes in preparation for his blows, which as long as they’re machinations cannot be blows, we think the blows will fall but they may not, the enemy may drop dead of a heart attack before he sets to work in earnest, before he truly applies himself to harming us, destroying us. Or he may forget, calm down, something may distract him and he may forget, and if we don’t happen to cross his path again we may be able to get away; vengeance is extremely wearying and hatred tends to evaporate, it’s a fragile, ephemeral feeling, impermanent, fleeting, so difficult to maintain that it quickly gives way to rancor or resentment which are more bearable, easier to retrieve, much less virulent and somehow less pressing, while hatred is always in a tearing hurry, always urgent: I want him now, I want him dead, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, a carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end. (cont.)

 

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Bachelot/Caron

 

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‘Myrian Solar’s Q-Literary Museum is a multidisciplinary webmuseum of immaterial Literature that brings together the geometric, chemical and quantum physical aspects of parallel worlds. With a literary and curatorial audio-visual programming of its contents it invites the visitor to make a trip by the space-time through texts of representation that turn their collections into unique in the present literary panorama. The museum is organized like a fractal with different nodes for the diffusion of a new literary thematic one and for the informal learning that is complemented with a bilingual educative program and an interactive platform of thematic research open to the contribution of the users, at the same time as it provides resources for the researchers in experimental Literature.’ — archimuse.com

 

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‘For his ongoing series begun in 2003 and titled “ONS” (short for one-night stand), artist Jan-Holger Mauss collects black-and-white images from post-1945 gay porn magazines. Using a special eraser, he then delicately effaces the nude model on each page while leaving the background. The result is a scene emptied of figures, with traces of an intervention detected in vaguely metamorphosing organic forms emerging from rockscapes and waterfalls, or as halations appearing among props or furniture.’ — Art in America

 

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‘Sam Hengel drew crude sketches depicting scenes of violence and warfare, but police say none of them help explain why the 15-year-old held his high school classmates hostage at gunpoint for six hours on Nov. 29 before fatally shooting himself when a SWAT team swarmed the classroom. The police report included an undated drawing with Hengel’s name on it. The sketch showed a helicopter dropping a bomb on a square labeled ‘city’ while a stick figure on the ground fires a grenade at the bomb. Bullets from the helicopter split another figure in half, and a paratrooper fires into trees. Elsewhere one stick figure pushes another off a steep hill. Skorik told AP he didn’t think there was any link between the drawing and the hostage incident.’ — Kansas City Star

 

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‘Journalist Neil Strauss, who has coauthored books with the band members of Mötley Crüe (The Dirt) and porn superstar Jenna Jameson (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star) now offers a terrific look at the dysfunctional livelihoods of stardom, a theme based on his many interviews for various publications. Strauss went back to his original interview tapes and notes in search of moments—mostly unpublished—that reveal “the truth or essence of each person, story, or experience.”‘ — PW

1. Courtney Love

The Scene: Courtney Love’s house in Los Angeles. The time is very late. The moment is when she leaps off her bed and suddenly says…

Courtney Love: Say hi to Kurt …

[She walks to a dresser, pulls open a drawer, and removes a square-shaped tin. She removes the lid, revealing a plastic bag full of white ashes. A faint smell of jasmine emanates from the tin.]

Too bad you don’t do coke. Otherwise I’d suggest taking a metal straw to it.

2. Snoop Dogg

The Scene: Snoop Dogg’s home outside Los Angeles, shortly after the murders of Tupac and Biggie Smalls—and just after Snoop left Death Row Records.

Snoop Dogg: I want you to hear a few songs first.

[Presses PLAY on a DAT machine, and leaves the room while 13 songs he’s just finished recording blare from the studio speakers. As soon as the last song ends, he bursts back through the door.]

Well, did you tape some of it?

Of course not.

You should have.

What?!

Didn’t we talk yesterday about taping pieces of the album and leaking them on the Internet?

Yeah, but most rappers try to avoid leaking their music, because then no one will buy it when it comes out.

Fuck it, just bootleg that motherfucker. Come on, man. I’ll give you the ones you want.

[He plays three songs, and watches diligently to make sure I record them.]

Cool. Can we use your wheels? I gotta go get Pampers.

3. Chuck Berry

The Scene: Sitting in the St. Louis restaurant and club Blueberry Hill, Berry, known for avoiding reporters, has his longest interview in decades. At the end, he suggests staying in touch via telephone and fax, then suddenly grows concerned.

Berry: Yeah, let me ask one question. Don’t laugh at this because it’s not laughable, and I’m not . . . Yes, I am serious. You’re not funny, are you?

No, I’m not.

Well, that’s what I want to hear. I mean, I’ve talked to funny guys. Like do you know Little Richard?

Not personally.

Anyway, he’s for real. I know because I’ve been asked for . . . He came on to me once, you know. And it just doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t believe it! And he believes it. By that, I mean he doesn’t deny it. Anyway, when I ask you that, it’s only because you said, “We’ll talk,” you know …

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead

 

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‘Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello crafted something extraordinary with his short Cindy: The Doll Is Mine, an ode to three of my favorite things: Asia Argento, Blonde Redhead and, especially, Cindy Sherman. As Sherman, Argento plays the dual role of the artist and the model. As the artist, her hair’s cropped short, and she wears a loose, button-down shirt; as the model, she dons a blonde wig and a dress better suited for a poupée. As Cindy the artist arranges Cindy the model around the room, nowhere seems appropriate for what she’s looking for. At one point Cindy the artist asks Cindy the model to stand more feminine, more curvy and seductive. However, it turns out that what’s missing are tears, which Cindy the artist asks, very reluctantly, of her model. Aside from the specifics of the artist though, Cindy: The Doll Is Mine is like an abridged version of Catherine Breillat’s Sex Is Comedy, both fascinating looks into the strife in the process of creating art.’ — Fin de Cinema

 

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‘A lifelong fisherman who studied ichthyology as an undergrad, the Japanese artist Iori Tomita uses marine life he receives from fellow fishermen to create what he calls New World Transparent Specimens—sea creatures that have been transformed into DayGlo shells of their former selves. He first saw a sample of a fish that had been turned transparent at a university lecture six years ago, and since then he has used the same preservation technique to make thousands of hypercolored cadavers, which he sells at the Tokyu Hands department store.

‘To produce the specimens, Tomita first removes the scales and skin of fish that have been preserved in formaldehyde. Next he soaks the creatures in a stain that dyes the cartilage blue. Tomita uses a digestive enzyme called trypsin, along with a host of other chemicals, to break down the proteins and muscles, halting the process just at the moment they become transparent but before they lose their form. The bones are then stained with red dye, and the brilliant beast is preserved in a jar of glycerin. The extensive production takes five months to a year.’ — Wired

 

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Art

Looking through a book of drawings by Holbein I realize several moments of truth. A nose (a line) so nose-like. So line-like. And then I think to myself ‘so what?’ It’s not going to solve any of my problems. And then I realize that at the very moment of appreciation I had no problems. Then I decide this is a pretty profound thought. And that I ought to write it down. This is what I have just done. But it doesn’t sound so profound anymore. That’s art for you.

 

A Sign of the Times

‘A sign of the times’ are posters plastered up all over West Broadway announcing a new magazine called ‘No Magazine’. (Can hardly wait for the first issue!) Seriously though — and aside from finding it all a bit silly — it’s kind of sweet too — don’t you think? — that we can care so much, as to try so hard, irregardless of…but then why bother?

 

Poem

Sometimes

everything

seems

so

oh, I don’t know.

 

Imaginary Still Life No. 5

I close my eyes. I see a charming nosegay of violets in an ordinary drinking glass. That’s all.

 

1970

1970

is a good year

if for no other reason

than just because

I’m tired of complaining.

 

Joe Brainard

 

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I can’t go to sleep

 

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‘Laura Brothers (b. 1982) resides in the forested portion of New York State. Her work is born-on and bound-to the computer. Its primary venue is the internet, a space where one may wade through a sea of cultural referents to ultimately reach a false sense of nostalgia. Although her work has been referred to as “digital hallucinations,” she parallels her imagery to re-polished pop songs under the guise of ephemeral landscapes.’ — transmodernfestival.org

Laura Brothers

 

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‘Ken Russell’s In Search of the English Folksong, was actually made in 1997, making Ken bizarrely ahead of the pack — just him and the dude in Current 93 at that point, eh? No ancient footage from mid-Sixties folk cellars like Les Cousins and Bunjie’s, or Communist Party singalongs from the Fifties… instead it’s the performers as they are now (well, ’97, but you catch my drift) … June Tabor doing a wonderfully haunting unaccompanied story-song “The King of Rome” in the grounds of a stately home, the Albion Band marred a bit by some nasty modern keyboards, Carthy/Waterson harmonising in a graveyard, Donovan singing “Nirvana”, Fairport Convention doing a sort of video I guess and cavorting around a thatched cottage, the Cropedy Festival (including Osibisa!)…. and then lots of stuff that doesn’t fit at all (this being a wonderfully eccentric take on what constitutes folk song, goofily presented by the ruddy-faced Russell).’ — Simon Reynolds

 

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Steve Talkowski

 

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A History of White People

white people were paid well

not to witness

the fact that they were white

you know the theory

white isn’t a color

but color’s unlimited absence

white goes with anything

that’s why it seemed fair that white people

conquered the world

they were the real invisible men

cause they could perch on top of a country

and say they weren’t there

they could move through its neighborhoods

like mysterious aliens

with this difference:

in ufological lore

aliens often infiltrate a world

without its inhabitants knowing about it

but when white people invaded

everyone could see them

but themselves

 

The Martyrs

last night we rented a documentary

on the life of Jean Seberg

that pointed out the parallels

in her artistic career

with Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda

later

a PBS special

on the life of Liz Taylor

followed by an episode of Biography

on the career of Jack Lemmon

unseen narrators

told the tales of these lives

in the form of voice-overs

behind stills and film clips

we were led to believe these stars

were representative

that they ventriloquized

our own concerns

that they were stand-ins

for democracy

each

we were told

suffered greatly

 

Jerome Sala

 

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Aernout Mik

 

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‘If using restaurant staff as punching bags sounds like a good anger management tactic to you, check out the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar and Restaurant in Nanjing City, China where customers pay a fee to beat up staff, scream and break glasses. The staff, which dons protective gear, will dress up to resemble the person you’d really like to physically assault. The bar is said to be especially popular with Chinese women who work in the service industry.’ — Sydney Morning Herald

 

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‘Cotton candy was first recorded around the 1900’s. At that time, spun sugar was an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor and was not generally available to the average person. Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by William Morrison and John C. Wharton and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World’s Fair as “Fairy Floss” with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at the then-high 25¢, half the cost of admission to the fair. Fairy floss was renamed to “cotton candy” in the 1920s. Typical machines used to make cotton candy include a spinning head enclosing a small “sugar reserve” bowl into which a charge of granulated, colored sugar (or separate sugar and food coloring) is poured. Heaters near the rim of the head melt the sugar, which is squeezed out through tiny holes by centrifugal force. Precolored sugar packaged specially for the process is milled with melting characteristics and a crystal size optimized for the head and heated holes. The molten sugar solidifies in the air and is caught in a larger bowl which totally surrounds the spinning head. Left to operate for a period, the cottonlike product builds up on the inside walls of the larger bowl, at which point the machine operator twirls a stick, cone, or their hands around the rim of the large catching bowl, gathering the sugar strands into portions which are served on stick or cone, or in plastic bags.’ — rainbowcottoncandy.com

 

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‘comme on le sait pas de cheval, pas de chevalier. mais ce qui passe quand le chevalier n’a pas de château? il simplement chevauche.’

UN RÉDUCTION DE PERCEVAL LE GALLOIS

 

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‘Sohei Nishino’s extraordinary photographic dioramas, monumental in size, map out the artist’s personal impressions of the world’s major cities in several thousand intimate details. Nishino’s collages are not precise geographic recreations, but an imperfect mix of landmarks and iconic features conceived from his personal ‘re-experiencing’ of a city.

‘When photographing a city, Nishino walks the entire city on foot for a month, wandering the streets and recording from every possible angle. In total he uses over 300 rolls of black and white film and took over 10,000 pictures. In the following three months Nishino selects some 4,000 of these photographs, hand printed in his own dark room, which he then meticulously pieces together with scissors and glue in his Tokyo studio. The result was an aerial view of the city, which was then reshot as a completed collage to produce a final image in photographic form.

‘This lengthy and painstaking process, all done by hand, only allows for the creation of three maps per year. Nishino’s re-imagination of a city presents a convincing record despite its geographical inaccuracies, a map embodying the intricacies of a city through the eyes and recollection of an outsider.’ — Art Daily

San Francisco

Amsterdam

Berlin

London

Paris

 

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Bargain Hunt

Suppose you found a bargain so incredible
you stood there stunned for a moment
unable to believe that this thing could be
for sale at such a low price: that is what happens
when you are born, and as the years go by
the price goes up and up until, near the end
of your life, it is so high that you lie there
stunned forever.

 

Bluebird

You can’t expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from the picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he’s much older
now, can’t carry those
bottles ‘neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don’t think I’m
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.

 

Ron Padgett

 

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*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed. I believe your book is how I originally discovered his films if I’m not mistaken. ** Keaton, Whoa, Mr. K! Wait, you’re coming to Paris? Should we not shatter the glass wall and have a coffee at the very least? How about it? Give me a poke or shout or something if you’d like to. No protests of late, but we’re always on the cusp. Some art around, yeah, it’s true. Hit me up. Ha ha, thank you for the gift. That’s so obviously ripped off from PGL. I think we have a case. I’ll get out lawyers on it stat. ** Corey Heiferman, Seems possible they’d have Owen Land over there on VHS, if his stuff was ever on VHS. Okay, sorry, I clearly was cloudy and jumping to the wrong conclusions, but I think I understand now. Ah, well, my half-kidding about interns was tonally off. Nice. That there are recruitables. Uh, I’m not classically a note taker. I keep a calendar/agenda to remind me what I’m locked into doing and when and remember what I did and when. And I carry a little notebook and pen everywhere in case I get a good idea or see or hear something I want to coopt. But not, like, notes on what I’ve read or seen anything. My memory’s pretty good and detailed for some weird reason. So far. ** Steve Erickson, You’re probably right. I keep waiting for the France outbreak since it’s tearing around in northern Italy, but so far we just have scattered sickos. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, he seems like he was very enigmatic. Which, as you said, is a good thing. At least from this afar. Your friend’s MRI things are very cool. If I wore extras, I’d order something. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. I saw I guess on FB that you’re showing a Land film the other day, but the timing was coincidental since that post has been locked in place for weeks. What an amazing line-up there, needless to say. Land/Brakhage/Sharits = wow. If I were at all nearby, I would be there lickety-split. How amazing if the crowd gets into your program. That would be so heartening and inspiring to hear. Let me know. Me? Sending off the materials and instructions for my new GIF novel to Kiddiepunk today, so I’ve been finishing that. New film grant applying and fundraising and trying to figure out wealthy people to hit up for donations. The TV series is on serious life support. Extremely long story very short, the powers that be really like Episodes 1 and 3, which are the ones we went furthest re: normalising, and they hate Episode 2, which is our favorite and the one we’ve doggedly tried to protect. So a big meeting soon to find out if we’re willing to normalise it, and to what extent we would need to normalise it, or not. If we don’t, the series is dead. It’s very fucked. So we’re in this dilemma re: do we surrender? And they have over a barrel since we’ve been working on this for five years and really don’t want to have wasted all that work and time — the next option would be turning it into a feature film which would mean hugely more work, again totally on spec, which Zac and I really, really don’t want to do — while really not wanting to give up. It’s just misery central 24/7/365 with that fucking project. Otherwise, all is okay. Dying to get my new novel a US home and hoping that’ll be decided and over ASAP. How are you? New novel work? Or other things? ** Okay. Today I resurrect another one of the old Varioso posts consisting of things that interested me but not enough to devote an entire post to them, and there’s a lot of cool stuff up there if you’re willing to scroll around and dig in. I hope you will. See you tomorrow.