Category: Uncategorized (Page 212 of 1067)

____________
Amalia Ulman Dignity 01, 02, 2017
‘This work consists of photographs depicting artist Amalia Ulman presented as a beautiful actress on the red carpet, but with the photoshopped addition of sperm ejaculated onto her face. Ulman, who used to be sex worker herself and is familiar with the codes of the porn industry, plays with aspects of the unreal, with lies and how quickly they can affect us.’

 

____________
Narcissister The Face (Performing male facial features), 2019
‘To activate “The Face,” a petite woman with long dark hair walked into the gallery wearing furry chaps, her derriere exposed. She took a seat on a small ledge just above the mouth, facing the artwork. Her back was covered with an enormous, three-dimensional nose accented with a nose ring, completing the face. Once settled, she tugged at red pulleys, raising the eyelids with a clang, revealing warm blue eyes; other pulleys made the mouth open and close.’

 

____________
Richard Prince New Figures, 2015
collages with photo gravure cut-outs over etching

 

____________
Paul Yore Everything is Fucked, 2014
‘A Melbourne artist accused of using child pornography in an installation said he knew the work was “teetering on the edge” and “borderline uncomfortable”, a court heard. Paul Yore, 26, has pleaded not guilty to creating and possessing child exploitation material over his “Everything is F***ed” piece, which was on display in St Kilda’s Linden Centre for Contemporary Art last year.’

 

____________
Brad Robson WTF!, 2018
painting, oil

 

____________
Lynda Benglis, Stanton Kaye The Amazing Bow Wow, 1976
‘Made with Stanton Kaye, and the only Lynda Benglis video with a discernible plot, The Amazing Bow-Wow follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. Rexina and Babu soon decide to make the dog a sideshow act hoping to earn their fortune. Babu eventually becomes jealous of Rexina’s devotion to the dog and one night attempts to castrate it, accidentally cutting off its tongue. The dog’s head becomes hideous and skeletal, ruining its sideshow career and the profits.’

Watch an excerpt here

 

____________
Cajsa von Zeipel Various, 2014
Styrofoam, Fiberglass, Aqua Resin, Plaster

 

____________
Mark McKnight Various, 2017 – 2020
‘In their portrayal of open-air fetishistic sex, these photographs challenge an idealizing, exemplary image of queer relation as consonant with conventional ideals of straight domesticity, as well as of easy notions of virtue and health. These photographs resist easy readings in all directions; they challenge all our pieties.’

 

____________
Stacy Skolnik mrsblueeyes123.com, 2019
‘For months Skolnik wrote and performed Instagram, posting the sorts of pictures and poems you’d usually only send by direct message, or at least not share to your main, until her account was banned for obscenity. The result is a diary of sexual desire and ambition: nudes covered with kisses and tagged with prominent literary journals; a mouth dripping with cum; the artist posing as a dog while a naked man looks at his laptop. The captions are short poems. While pornography multinationals are moving into the gallery, she’s going in the opposite direction, into the virtual world of thirst traps: “Fuck my image Cut a #hole in your #phone and fuck my image.”’

 

_____________
Marlene Dumas Fingers, 1999
‘At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it’s all about.’ — MD

 

____________
Eduardo Rocca I Love Double Penetration, 2021
‘I received my recent beautiful erotic art piece from lovely Mr. Eudardo! His work is always fabulous and perfect. This is my newest addition of many I have purchased from him. As always, is met beyond my expectations and more!! He delivers!! Seeing 2 cocks aiming at such a little butthole is erotic as Hell!! You can almost imagine cum oozing out of it. 😍 Thank you so very much!!’

 

____________
Darja Bajagić Tanya versus Irena, 2014
‘Tanya vs. Irene is a compilation of obscene photographs pulled from the sites of Eastern European fetish porn sites. Each slide in the presentation is broken into two to four panels always depicting Tanya or Irene at a different moment in what is assumed to be a pornographic film. The images vary in their indecency. The show begins with Irene and Tanya fully clothed and depicted in varying degrees of patronization. The scene gradually more explicit. Images alternate between close-ups of the females genitalia and the women posed sexually returning the gaze of the viewer.’

 

____________
Maria E. Piñeres Various, 2019
needlepoint

 

____________
Unknown Untitled, 2002
‘Jeju Loveland is conveniently located near Jeju Airport in South Korea, just 10-15 minutes by car. In contrast to most of the attractions, Jeju Loveland, being a sex-themed sculpture park, breaks the traditional taboos regarding sex. It was created in 2002 by several artists and graduates from Hongik University, with a total of 140 installations created within the Loveland.’

 

____________
David Murphy Various, 1989 – 2020
Various media

Serial Killer, 1989

Intercourse With Black Streaks No. 1, 1992

Girls on The Run, 1996

Kill Me No. 1, 2000

Obscured Lovers, 1997

Caught, 2013

Self-Portrait as a Sexually Abused Child, 2020

 

_____________
tag83 Untitled, 2020
‘After I quit, I honestly never thought I’d return to making Minecraft porn. But here I am. To 2020.’

 

_____________
Valentina Nappi Senses, 2022
‘The former porn star Valentina Nappi, during a body art performance, at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum. Naked, she lets the public sniff her, in various parts of the body, to arouse an olfactory experience.’

 

_____________
Celia Hempton Eddie, 2016
Oil on polyester

 

_____________
Anna Uddenberg Savage #s 1 – 5, 2017
Aqua resin on fiberglass, suitcase, acrylic nails, synthetic hair, quilted faux leather, puffed jacket, faux fur, velvet, mesh, crystal, rubber slippers.

 

______________
Sue Coe Rape, Woman Walks into Bar–is raped by 4 men on the pool table–while 20 watch, 1984
Photogravure on Rives BFK off-white wove paper

 

______________
Takis Male magnetic erotic, 1974
bronze, magnet, painted styrofoam, wooden base

 

______________
Hudinilson Jr. Various, 1979 – 1984
‘The eroticized male body is the matrix of Hudinilson Jr.’s work. The artist, whose brief yet prolific career began in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the downfall of Brazil’s military junta, scanned every inch of his own and other men’s bodies with the use of an office copier, assembling hundreds of tidily gridded and fearlessly homoerotic photocopies and collages. Images of bare flesh – from the artist’s own genitalia to Greek torsos and famous actors, torn and cut out of cheap tabloids and gay porn magazines – papered the nicotine-stained walls of his cramped São Paulo studio apartment, where he spent his last 25 years feverishly selecting, cutting and pasting found images.’

 

_____________
Megumi Igarashi Vagina Kayak, 2016
‘A Japanese artist who made a kayak modelled on her vagina has been found guilty of breaking the country’s obscenity laws, in a case that has invited widespread ridicule of attitudes towards images of female genitalia. Megumi Igarashi, who works under the pseudonym Rokudenashiko – or good-for-nothing girl – was arrested in July 2014 after she distributed data that enabled recipients to make 3D prints of her vagina. The 44-year-old was fined 400,000 yen (£2,575), half the penalty demanded by prosecutors, at the Tokyo district court on Monday after she was convicted of distributing “obscene” images. She was cleared of another charge of displaying similar material. Igarashi distributed the data to help raise funds to create a kayak inspired by her genitalia she called “pussy boat”. The judge, Mihoko Tanabe, said that the data, though “flat and inorganic”, realistically portrayed the shape of a vagina and could “sexually arouse viewers”, according to Kyodo News.’

 

_____________
Martin Eder Various, 2018
‘Eder is technically accomplished. He has a 19th-century academic painter’s mastery of the figure and a glossy mirror-like accuracy. His nudes have sickly, shiny skins, as if they’ve been body-painted for a disco then danced until they are soaked in sweat. As far as I can see, Eder’s paintings objectify and sexualise the young. Is there some sophisticated arty defence that I am missing? I don’t believe art should ever be censored. I don’t have to like it, though. And his daubs are callous exercises in brutal pornography that reduce painting to a Photoshop shower of hate.’

 

_____________
Tala Madani Disco Pussy, 2018
oil on linen

 

_____________
Tyza Stewart Various, 2017 – 2019
‘Tyza Stewart’s self-portraits extend from experiences of personhood that feel ungraspable or indefinable. As a young teen, Tyza Stewart was frequently preoccupied with a desire to be a man, and more explicitly, a gay man. More than a precocious curiosity about the differences between the human form and a developing sexuality, Tyza’s sense of self grew with new information about masculinity, homosexuality, gender identity and gender modification.’

 

_____________
Paul McCarthy The Garden, 1992
‘I made a piece, The Garden [1992], with two animatronic men, an older one and a younger one, in a large fake garden, fornicating with nature. They’re self-consumed. They don’t look outside the garden.’ — PM

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Sollers’s first three or four novels are especially good. Yeah, in editing it becomes about the whole thing/film. When you’re shooting, you (or we) shoot the scenes out of order so they’re more about the scenes on their own at the time, if that makes sense. Still no acceptable explanation of the Michael Douglas thing. I hope the seven hairless hedgehogs were friendly at least. Wow. Love giving me three front row seats for the sold out Sparks concert, G. ** tomk, Hi. It’s a goodie. My favorite by him is the novel ‘Event’. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. Fingers stranglingly crossed about that possible job. Tom on Thomas: excellent! Everyone, superb novelist Thomas Kendall has reviewed superb novelist Thomas Moore’s new novel for Lit Reactor, and this is a serious meeting of the minds/talents, so do read it. Day of utter excellence to you too, sir. ** A, I think ‘Suzume’ is still out and about here, but I’d better hurry. Curators are often the means by which you find creators, in my case at least. Still haven’t seen Zac. He’s hold up organising the files of our film so we can start editing. Any day now, hopefully today. ** Misanthrope, If I have a great smile, it’s despite my coffee/cigarette stained teeth, which I suppose I should tidy up one of these days. Oh, fuck, obviously I hope that pain isn’t hernia related. Yeesh. But at least you know the best surgeon. How did that happen? Don’t tell me, you met him, or, wait, the nurse, on Grindr, right? ** Jack Skelley, Yak! Nice, nice, nice. Halloween is a perfect time for everything. Word. Well, except for that stupid Tim Burton makeover of the Haunted Mansion @ Disneyland. Yay, post fodder in process. Yip! Pinecone dildo explosion love, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, his work took a turn for the less interesting at a certain point, but he was always an interesting thinker. His non-fiction remained very pleasurably contentious and readable. He was indeed married to Kristeva. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. Well, I guess I’m doing better than you are. So sorry about the depression. I hope it’s a quickie. ‘Serial Mom’ should take care of that, I reckon. Enjoy. Kathleen Turner is so great in it. She should have won the Oscar for best actress that year. Good, yeah, stay away from artificial tans. You can always tell. It’s the beginning of a day right now, and I’ll try make it great. I hope yours is a huge upper. ** Minet, Hi, Minet. It’s great to see you! I feel pretty much certain that our new film is going to be our best, yeah. I loved ‘Skinamarink’. I still get excited when I think about it. Where would we be without literate stars? I only discovered Rimbaud when I was 15 because Bob Dylan mentioned him in an interview I read. New poems by you! They sound amazing. Wait, did I miss an issue of SCAB while I was filming? Shit, if so. I’ll go find out and rectify that loss if I did. I’d love to read them! And, wow, amazing and congrats about your book! Has it gotten a good reaction? You sound excited. That’s absolutely great news! Lucky Brazil! Take care, me. ** Steve Erickson, And congrats on the laptop. I got a new one not so long ago, and I can leave it unplugged for almost a whole day, as opposed to the old one that ate its battery in about 15 minutes. Maybe you should force yourself to celebrate tomorrow as a kind of reverse masochistic act or something. But, yeah, birthdays get worse every year. But a happy one to you irregardless! I know a few people who are at Cannes, but I don’t think I’ll get reports until it’s over and they’re back here in a week or whatever. ** Darbz, Glad you decided to pony up, comments-wise. I met Trent Reznor once at an art opening a long time ago. He’s very short. I guess everyone really famous is. Or I’m just tall, which I am. I’ll never forgive him for buying the Sharon Tate murder house then tearing it down and building a boring new house in its place and then moving out and selling it about a year later. His name is mud among many Los Angelenos because of that. Huh, I have no mental image of what you look like whatsoever. Maybe you look like this? Or this? Or this? ** Okay. Today: What happens when porn and visual art collide, part 3. See you tomorrow.

 

‘At the most elementary level, language behaves like gears and teeth locking and moving forward. A word has meaning, the reader decodes the word’s meaning, and then reads the next word. Other elements like punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, and quotation marks further assist the reader in how the text will be interpreted. H by Philippe Sollers has none of these prompts.

‘In standard reading practice, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and ink on the page becomes narrative. It is such a common practice, we think nothing of it when reading the daily newspaper, a bestseller, or a website. H throws this relationship into flux. The text flows, the words flooding the page, with no period or paragraph break in sight. Written in 1973, Sollers wrote this avant-garde text in the middle of a personal ideological crisis. The former Maoist and founder of Tel Quel abandoned his Leftist ideology and converted to Catholicism. This crisis took place after he witnessed the violent excesses of Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution.

‘The challenge for the reader is parsing this ideological conversion story amid the word-flood that fills page after page. H reads like an amalgamation of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses, Lucky’s nonsensical monologue from Waiting for Godot, and the disintegration of identity from the last pages of The Unnameable. Sollers thrusts the reader into a strange linguistic borderland, straddling sense and nonsense.

‘During this literary engagement, the reader and the author toggle between collaboration and antagonism. In the non-blurb blurb on the back cover, Sollers explains that ‘Beyond the automatism, a calculation is at play, keeping watch, criticising, departing at once from all the points of history. This calculation is uttered by masses in the discontinuous unity of its sections. It adjusts, strikes, whispers, shouts, marks, deletes, tallies, signals the moving absence which is nevertheless addressed, talked to, with all the background language.He goes on, saying, “That’s it, then, relax, it’s clear. Stay with the meaning, it’s simple. They are two, here, in the night. Tempo.” The two being author and reader.

Part of the joy and the challenge presented by H is finding one’s groove with the text. The “discontinuous unity” will at first confront the reader, attacking her sensibilities in the vain attempt to discover a linear narrative or intellectual through-line. But as more and more words get consumed by the reader, a relaxation sets in. A kind of numbness or hypnosis pacifies the reader. Then, as if by some alchemical reaction, sentences and phrases start appearing. These phantom sentences begin to create fragments of narrative.

‘But even these nebulous narrative fragments appear and disappear with a frustrating randomness. The text will build into an extended set-piece and the, just as suddenly, evaporate in a mishmash of random words or nonsense terms.

‘The ephemeral narratives take on different forms, different tonal registers. Everything from high- to low-culture is evoked. A confessional narrative as Sollers struggles with the empty promises of Maoism. This might become a more formal meditation, a historical genealogy of the Left since Karl Marx, only to turn into a nonsensical dadaist inventory of words. The inventory might mutate into a long pornographic tableau, penetrations and vulgarity. And so on. For 172 pages.

‘Regular notions of reading practice become moot when confronting a text like this. I myself began reading it, had other reviewing duties, and then returned to the text after a long absence. It felt like dipping into a lake after a long winter. At first it was strange and alienating, then I got back into the groove of things. Because of the text’s avant-garde nature, I didn’t need to remember characters or plot. The verbal static began to take on new forms.

‘Sollers also created a text that avoid a uniform interpretation. Because there are no paragraph breaks or punctuation, any reader can separate where a sentence or phrase begins or ends. As with Finnegans Wake or The Cantos, despite any authorial premeditation in execution, a certain amount of ambiguity develops. The way I read H will differ than how another person reads H. Equus Press kept academic machinery to a minimum, only italicizing words that were in English in the original French version. Sollers drops in Chinese, German, Italian, Latin, and other languages. Citations explaining these foreign phrases would slow down the reader and impose an interpretive framework. I just went with the flow, letting the sight and sounds of those foreign tongues echo off the unending textual flood. If you really want to know what these words mean, there’s always Google Translate. For me, it didn’t seem necessary.’ — The Driftless Review

 

___
Further

Philippe Sollers Site
PS @ Wikipedia
#philippesollers hashtag on Instagram
Philippe Sollers : “It’s called strategy, my dear friend”
Philippe Sollers’ “Nombres:” Structure and Sources
PHILIPPE SOLLERS: interview and photography by OLIVIER ZAHM
The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual
‘What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?’
DVD: ‘Jean-Luc Godard / Philippe Sollers: The Conversation’
‘The Body Comes Out of the Voice’
‘Loving Kristeva: a Memoir’, by Phillipe Sollers
David Platzer on Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers @ goodreads
Nodality or Plot Displaced: The Dynamics of Sollers’s H
Polysemantic Brush Strokes of Garden Green under Gray Clouds of Synchronicity

 

____
Extras

Philippe Sollers – Interview (1988)

Julia Kristeva & Philippe Sollers – Du mariage considéré comme un des beaux-arts

Philippe Sollers : Enfance et jeunesse d’un écrivain français

Philippe Sollers “Le Nouveau”

 

______
Interview

 

David Hayman: Can you summarize the developments that led up to the sort of fiction now called the New-New Novel?
Philippe Sollers: The last 50 years produced three important literary movements in France beginning with the Surrealist period between 1920 and 1930. Then Existentialism dominated the post-WW II period, and during the decade of thesixties, we had the so-called Nouveau roman. These three movements werevery differendy constituted. We could say that Surrealism popularized, explicated, and publicized the big break (coupure) which occurred at the end of the 19th century with Mallarme and Lautreamont. I believe that the essential elements of the crisis we are still living through derive from those experiments on language in literature. Surrealism simply took note of the remarkable literary events of that period. The Surrealists discovered and publicized Lautr?amont, who would not have been read and perhaps not even published without Breton and Aragon in 1920. It was they who copied down the poems at the Bibliotheque Nationale. So you see they performed a belated exhumation under rather strange circumstances. Almost 50 years after Lautreamont wrote Les Chants de Maldoror the Surrealists made their discovery and extrapolated their theory using what they thought they understood of psychoanalysis, of language, of automatic writing, etc. There you have one of the areas of inquiry (problematiques).

Sartre’s work derives in a sense from Surrealism. He became famous during a time of upheaval, the Second World War. Recognizing the irrationalistic limits of Surrealism, he tried to relocate the problem of literature within a conceptual field which is, in my view, more consistent with 19th-century Naturalism. He turned against the Surrealists’ irrationalistic inflation while espousing a more realistic or naturalistic conception which he called the literature of engagement (litterature engage) or evidential literature (la litt?rature du t?moignage). His movement was regressive after Surrealism but, more importandy, it lacked or rather overlooked what are for us extremely decisive experiments, those carried out under th? inspiration of Surrealism by people like Artaud and Bataille. Clearly, if we consider the problematics developed by Sartre at that moment, we see that he wanted to bypass Mallarme, to avoid in-depth interpretations of poetic language, and above all to limit the possible influence of Artaud or Bataille. Or at any rate, he failed to recognize how fundamental their experiments were. I believe that it was a rather hollow, empty moment, but we can justify it in the light of the disruption caused by the Second World War, and above all by the already perceptible displacement of the European cultural scene toward the United States . . . toward a decentralization of world history, an unfocusing. (I should of course have spoken of the other movements of the twenties, Futurism, Dada, etc. But this is just a schematic overview.)

But then, during the fifties and sixties (we might speak half-seriously of a Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), with the New Novel, there is an apparent return to literary experimentation, to the problem of language in literature. To my mind, this is a rather feeble and didactic phenomenon, a movement which harks back to but fails to take into account the experiments of Mallarme and Lautreamont and above all the decisive and fundamental linguistic experiments of Joyce. The Nouveau roman came to rather academic conclusions about the most noteworthy experiments with language in the 19th and 20th centuries. Take, for example, the case of Joyce. Within the French context, a context still xenophobic and nationalistic, the major movements almost completely overlooked Joyce. Breton, you know, condemns Joyce, saying that in the end he returns to the arbitrary, but really he had no right to say that.

DH: You know Joyce had similarly unkind things to say about the Surrealists …
PS: Yes, of course the feeling was mutual. But what counts is that the appearance of a phenomenon as important as Joyce collides in France with two other phenomena. First, there was that critical censor, the NRF,* with its neoclassical and bourgeois conception of literature: Gide, Valery, etc. . . . Proust! I am alluding to a conception or rather to a syntax, to a way of writing sentences, making them unfold, a conception anchored in French classical rhetoric. So, there was no chance of really understanding Joyce’s contribution in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But there was also what we could call the Surrealist refusal, the failure to understand that Joyce goes beyond the problematics of automatic writing, of the marvelous or of the simple occult, that is, beyond the domain of Surrealism. And we can see that Existentialism could hardly have been aware of the great new continent opened by Joyce since it harked directly back to 19th-century Naturalism. The space-time, the Einsteinian side of Joyce, was not perceived by Sartre in its modernity, as a seismic shudder within language itself. The same goes, I think, for the Nouveau roman. Even if there is a sort of modernity within the problematics of language, we can’t think of the Nouveau roman (excluding Beckett, who is himself a post-Joycean) as truly aware of Joyce’s contribution.

DH: Let’s talk about the problems of the novel to which you referred earlier.
PS: It seems to me that for a century now language has been undergoing a revolution. For one thing, we are increasingly aware that there can no longer be purely national languages. The isolation of different languages and of different nations each with its language is being severely tested. We see a sort of intercultural movement of which I think a writer like Joyce is the deepest sort of exemplar. He grasped the situation radically, understanding that we were entering a new world of which he tried to write the gospel, at once ironic and serious. Which means he understood that the definition of the human subject through his language and in history was entering an unprecedented phase of transmutation. We would save a good deal of futile talk if we were to accept Joyce’s project as fundamental; for I think Joyce understood that we were beginning to reshape the relations between man and language and history. That’s the central issue. People still perceive the problem of literature in 19th-century terms.

Repeatedly, we’ve seen literary errors committed, great errors, occasionally tragic ones (like . . . Socialist Realism). Such errors are a function of metaphysical suppositions dating from the last century. They’re still fixed by ideology despite the progress made by the sciences, despite historical growth, despite the shocks experienced by our species, even, I’d say (and this is the strangest fact), despite the revolutions that have occurred within the other arts. Traditionally, we stick to archaic literary ideologies even while painting and music are in full cataclysmic bloom. All of this suggests that what happens in the spoken language, a language made up of words, syllables, phonemes, etc., is something very dangerous. That’s why it is so carefully regulated, changes are so brutally suppressed. As opposed to what happens simply visually or audibly, that which is charged with significance in language is watched over, subjected to limitations . . .

DH: Perhaps we can return once more to history, to contemporary history and particularly the history of the Tel Quel group and of novelists who do not belong to the group but who nevertheless are doing something similar to what you are doing.
PS: People talk only about the literary aspects of Tel Quel, though Tel Quel, as you know, has a number of other sides. It’s a sort of dialectical machine. According to its subtide, it treats literature, philosophy, science, politics. There is a whole dynamic history to be written some day, not now, since we are still in process. The point is that these several aspects interrelate. The originality of the review, like that of certain others which have the same concerns, lies in the awareness that we must put literature within a general context of development, a context at once historical, political and philosophical. Further, we must locate literary practice at the very center of these several disciplines, these several realities. At the end of the 20th century we are abandoning the idea that literature has to be written by “maudit,” an individual set apart and seemingly enclosed by his creative concerns, one who can see the outside only through certain very narrow apertures. I am perhaps a bit naive, but I feel we must not encourage the belief in the outcast creator, in the necessary tragedy of literary creation. It is precisely in this area that we must leave Romanticism behind.

To get back to literature, I think there have been a great many things of rather unequal value done in the past five or six years, but these works constitute a creative study whose prime concern is to X-ray our culture as it has existed these 2,000 years. Clearly, what we have is an attempt to achieve in literature an enormous anamnesis. There you have the project that was already preoccupying Joyce. That is, we are abandoning the rather cramped vision of those who preached Naturalism, psychological fiction, description of a limited social milieu within a given historical period. Of course, this sort of writing is still being done. It still sells, if you will. But in fact it is dead. The publications of the Tel Quel group attempt to approximate a language which could be prodigiously retroactive, one which would have the analytic capacity to penetrate the history of humanity viewed as a sort of great myth. I think this project prolongs and subsumes that of Mallarme, Joyce, etc. It is an attempt to unify history through the unnumbered strata of civilizations, cultures and languages

DH: But you aren’t trying to fix or fossilize them.
PS: Quite the contrary, we’re trying to analyze them, that is, in a sense to dissolve them, to dissolve the frontiers, the compartments,

 

___
Book

Philippe Sollers H
Equus Press

‘Philippe Sollers’ groundbreaking 1973 novel, H, was inspired by the May 1968 Paris student/worker uprising, and, in its own right, performs a revolt against much that’s been (and still is) taken for granted in the belles lettres.

‘Described as “a music that is inscribed in language, becoming the object of its own reasoning” (Julia Kristeva) and as an “unpunctuated wall of words, an extremely active […] mass of language” (David Hayman), H does away with plot, character and setting–and, on the typographical level, with punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph breaks–in order to attempt what Sollers himself called “an external polylogue.”

‘The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a plethora of ventriloquized voices where “words turn round and come back, producing a material fullness of pleasures” and “everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies” (Roland Barthes). It is this fulness of H, this “suffocation” it produces, that might be, with Barthes, termed its “beauty.”

‘Accommodating a vast range of tonalities, attitudes, modes, and ideologies, H makes a case in point of how a literary work should function according to Sollers: “A work exists by itself only potentially, and its actualization (or production) depends on its readings and on the moments at which these readings actively take place.”’ — Equus Press

Excerpt

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, once you settle on the right take to use, you, or I should say I, basically forget about the more individually exciting one. It just goes into storage. Strange, but yeah. You just think about the film as a whole basically. I guess you can tell love that I’d like Donner Party, and merci, but it’s hard to choose. Love explaining to me why Michael Douglas deserved the Cannes Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement award, G. ** A, Hi. No, I’ve never been especially interested in Madonna’s music. I was kind of interested for a while in seeing what lengths she would go to next to stay notorious. Yes, ‘Suzume’ is playing here, and I definitely want to see it. Sure, a Welcome post, yes. Just send me the appropriate stuff when the time becomes right. I actually find Letterboxd reviews pretty useful, at least for blog post making. Zac and I are around and here for the near-duration, so just let us know when and how you want to arrange things. We should know better what the post costs are going to be in a week or so. Thanks! ** Jack Skelley, Jackpan! Great news about Kim’s award, and about your convo with her obviously. Hook me/us up when … Uh, I think the soonest I’ll get back to LA is Halloween. I’ll be in the editing room until then, pretty sure. Re: missing FOKAPALOOZA, drat. I hope it goes without saying that I’d be chuffed to do a ‘welcome to the world post’ for FOKA if you want. Speaking of, I just got my copy in the mail yesterday! Love like a bristling pinecone, me. ** Misanthrope, Me too, obvs. Cool. I seem to have had pretty good luck with dentists, and with car mechanics too, actually. Must be my million dollar smile. ** David Ehrenstein, I’m with you on the scale model excellence, but not on the movie itself. ** Bill, The DbT guy makes them individually by hand, which doesn’t help punters like us, but semi-explains the cost, I guess. Oh, I so wish I knew what the story is on the Addams Family Dark Ride-ette. I looked and looked when I found those pix, and I found zip about it. I’ve read something by Matthew Cheney, but I can’t remember what. Huh. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you’re right! ** M., Greetings, M. Hm, no, I don’t think I ever think about being that small. I’m quite tall, so maybe that’s why? Not that I think about even bigger either. When I was a little kid I had a recurring nightmare about a sentient apartment building that had legs and was walking around looking for people to crush including me, but I was normal sized in the dream. Close though, maybe? ** Nick., Hey, Nick.! Belated very happy birthday to you, sir! Glad you had a blast. Everything has felt kind of unreal to me since I stopped shooting our film, which is weird because this is real and that kind of wasn’t. I’m good. A guy I’ve been friends with for quite a while revealed to me the other day that he’s FtM trans, and I’d had no idea that’s the case. That was unexpected, and cool. I never met Keith Haring, so, sadly, no stories. I think I saw him in the distance at an art gallery opening once, but that’s it. I did meet and have a strange encounter with Jean-Michel Basquiat once, but that’s not the same thing. Enjoy the chain. Sorry I can’t embellish it, but it probably is pretty self-embellished. Good to see you. ** Darbz, Hey, hey! Bored with a stomach ache, hugs. Sync! No real incentive for going to Japan other than just wanting to go there. I wouldn’t say Tokyo is pretty, really, well, in parts it is, but it’s pretty wild looking and acting. Definitely go there when you get the chance. Definitely. I’m happy the weird rehab place is doable and maybe even a pleasure sort of. You sound good. I don’t know if my grandmother was an imperfect taxidermist or if this just happens in taxidermy in general, but all of the taxidermy animals she gave our family eventually rotted away. Every single one. So, no, they no longer exist sadly. Oh, I was super excited when she gave them to us. Like I may have said, I was really into making Haunted Houses in our basement, and they were the big stars of it. She was really nice. I honestly think she’s probably why I decided to become an artist. Hm, I don’t think I have any strong opinion about stuffed animals. I’m cool with them. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think I had any when I was a kid, just taxidermy animals. I want to have something in which I can hide my secret stash and carry around with me. I’m going to give that some thought. Big up today! ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty alright today so far. I’ll avoid ‘EfT’ like the plague, thank you. Actually, you picked my favorite Efteling ride: Droomvlucht. It’s amazing. One of the best rides anywhere ever. Are you acquiring a tan the old fashioned way, or are you lying prone under artificial light? One time when I was in high school I wanted to be tan for my first day back at school after summer vacation, and I sat under a tanning light to tan myself, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I put the light too close to my face, and the next day at school my face starting blowing up like a balloon and blistering, and I had to be taken to a hospital. So don’t do that. Day of days to you! ** Okay. Philippe Sollers died last week, and I was reminded of how great his early novels are, including the one I’m spotlighting today. Have a gander. See you tomorrow.