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1.
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)
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2. In brief
‘Little is known about Maurice Blanchot except that he wrote an odd style of fiction. His novels are not really novels, his stories barely stories. His prose is very French in that it can be almost mathematical, yet it simultaneously evokes the most intense feelings of loss, misunderstanding, joy, and death. Just as the Marquis de Sade calmly and carefully enumerated the most horrific details of elaborate tortures, Blanchot carefully flushes out the minutiae of psycho-emotional existence.
‘While central in de Sade, the flesh is conspicuously absent from Blanchot’s short and pithy tales, or “rÈcits,” as he called them. His books are virtually bereft of physical descriptions; the reader rarely knows the appearance of a character, the color of the room, the smells that linger. Rather, Blanchot concentrates on the effects — always multiple, never predictable — of people living, sometimes interacting with each other, often alone.
‘While Blanchot’s books don’t seem to involve much action, in fact they contain nothing but movement. Every moment, every glance, every mutter sends ripples throughout a situation: the repercussions of a whisper are known in the heavens. The sun setting, a knock on a door, the way a wave falls on the beach — in these stories, the most subtle machinations of the world are intensely experienced. Classical motivation and typical plot-drivers are absent in Blanchot’s works, and in their place we find pure event; Blanchot wrote in a realm where bodies are secondary to the things that happen to them.
‘And the greatest thing that can happen to bodies, at least according to Blanchot, is death. Death lingers in his nouns, is carried by his verbs, can be found lurking in his commas and periods and parentheses. His books are ghostly — neither dead nor alive, neither bodily nor heavenly.’ — artandculture.com
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3. My two cents
‘If you put a gun to my head — not that you would — and asked me whom I’d consider the greatest writer of the 20th century — not that asking my opinion is worth risking a police encounter — I’d say, ‘Put the gun down. Maurice Blanchot.’ He’s my favorite fiction writer and my favorite writer of what some people call philosophy and others tag as language theory. Death Sentence is my favorite novel of all time. To me, Blanchot is to the written text as Bresson is to the captured image, which is to say not so much the greatest at his chosen medium — obviously a ridiculous proposition — as he is an artist as singular, ruthless, pure, and infested with belief in the abilities of language as anyone who has ever tried their hand at writing. He might also be the writer who most warrants the words ‘not everyone’s cup of tea.’ Many find his work impossibly dense and cold. To quote from his unusually excellent Wikipedia entry, ‘It is difficult yet imperative to note the particular experience of reading Blanchot: his grip on the reader and his ability to mix anguish, philosophical thought, an imagination of death, and a narrative where everything seems to almost happen is often particularly discomforting.’ To me, his work’s ‘discomfort’ is the formula for ecstacy. His work is one of the impossibly high standards against which I try to assess my own writing, which leaves me perpetually unsatisfied and disappointed with my efforts, which in turn causes me to keep working hard for whatever good it does.’ — DC, ’06
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Maurice Blanchot’s house
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4. Resources
Maurice Blanchot: ReadySteadyBook Site
Espace Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot et ses contemporains
Maurice Blanchot and the events of May 1968
Maurice Blanchot @ Studio Cleo
Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice
Maurice Blanchot’s obituary @ The Guardian
Jean-Luc Nancy on Maurice Blanchot
Etat Present: Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: A Meta-Poetic View
Maurice Blanchot, The Absent Voice
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5. from Death Sentence
She had fallen asleep, her face wet with tears. Far from being spoiled by it, her youth seemed dazzling: only the very young and healthy can bear such a flood of tears that way; her youth made such an extraordinary impression on me that I completely forgot her illness, her awakening and the danger she was still in. A little later, however, her expression changed. Almost under my eyes, the tears had dried and the tear stains had disappeared; she became severe, and her slightly raised lips showed the contraction of her jaw and her tightly clenched teeth, and gave her a rather mean and suspicious look: her hand moved in mine to free itself, I wanted to release it, but she seized me again right away with a savage quickness in which there was nothing human. When the nurse came to talk to me–in a low voice and about nothing important–J. immediately awoke and said in a cold way, “I have my secrets with her too.” She went back to sleep at once.
…As I listened without pause to her slight breathing, faced by the silence of the night, I felt extremely helpless and miserable just because of the miracle that I had brought about. Then for the first time, I had a thought that came back to me later and in the end won out. While I was still in that state of mind–it must have been about three o’clock–J. woke up without moving at all–that is, she looked at me. That look was very human: I don’t mean affectionate or kind, since it was neither; but it wasn’t cold or marked by the forces of this night. It seemed to understand me profoundly; that is why I found it terribly friendly, though it was at the same time terribly sad. “Well,” she said, “you’ve made a fine mess of things.” She looked at me again without smiling at all, as she might have smiled, as I afterwards hoped she had, but I think my expression did not invite a smile. Besides, that look did not last very long.
Even though her eyelids were lowered, I am convinced that from then on she lay awake; she lay awake because the danger was too great, or for some other reason; but she purposefully kept herself at the edge of consciousness, manifesting a calm, and an alertness in that calm, that was very unlike her tension of a short time before. What proved to me that she was not asleep–though she was unaware of what went on around her because something else held her interest–was that a little later she remembered what had happened nearly an hour before: the nurse, not sure whether or not she was asleep, had leaned over her and suggested she have another shot, a suggestion which she did not seem to be at all aware of. But a little later she said to the nurse, “No, no shot this evening,” and repeated insistently, “No more shots.” Words, which I have all the time in the world to remember now. Then she turned slightly towards the nurse and said in a tranquil tone, “Now then, take a good look at death,” and pointed her finger at me. She said this in a very tranquil and almost friendly way, but without smiling.
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6. Regards from the high and mighty
LYDIA DAVIS: ‘I wanted to meet Blanchot very much. I felt a very close connection to him, and he wrote me very flattering, very humble letters, in terms of the leeway I had with translating his work. -These are your works, these translations are yours to make,- and so on. Part of that was just French formality and politeness. But part of it, in his case, was really genuine. So I felt this connection with him, but he really never saw anyone anymore, not even people who had known him for decades. But I thought he might make an exception just because I’d been translating his work. So I wrote him a note when I was going to Paris, saying I would be there on such-and-such a day and was staying at this hotel, and wanted to call him. I said I knew he rarely met anybody, but was hoping he would make an exception and so on. And I wrote it in plenty of time. But I went there and didn’t hear anything from him and went back to England where I was staying. And once I was safely back in England, I received a letter from him there, saying that he was sorry, but he never met anybody. But I was amused at the way he carefully made sure it all stayed on English territory, and not in Paris. But I’m quite sympathetic to that.’
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI: ‘The linguist Maurice Blanchot is interested in enunciation where the subject of the enunciation is not required as the necessary condition. Blanchot gives the examples of the use of the words ‘ONE’ and ‘HE’ which in no way take the place of a subject, but instead do away with any subject. The HE does not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first two person; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations.’ (from A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: ‘The fantastic one humanizes, is with the ideal purity of its essence, happens what was. It is undressed of his artifices: without nothing in the hands, nor in the pockets; we recognize that the track on the beach, not of the súcubos is ours, nor of the ghosts, nor of the sources that cry, is of the men and the creator of the fantastic proclamation that is identified with the fantastic object. The fantastic one is not, for the contemporary man, more than a way between one hundred to reenviar its own image.’ (from Sartre’s review of Blanchot’s ‘The Most High’)
GEORGES BATAILLE: ‘I asked MB (Maurice Blanchot) to read a passage from the book I was carrying around with me and he read it aloud (nobody, to my knowledge, reads with a more hard-edged simplicity, with a more passionate grandeur than he. I was too drunk and no longer remember the exact passage. He himself had drunk as much as I had. It would be a mistake to think that such a reading given by men intoxicated with drink is but a provocative paradox…. I believe we are united in this, that we are both open, defenceless – through temptation – to forces of destruction, but not like the reckless, rather like children whom a cowardly naivete never abandons.’
SAMUEL BECKETT: ‘Besides Blanchot‘s essays on Beckett‘s post-World War II trilogy and the novel How It Is, and his tribute to Beckett after Beckett‘s death, no other criticisms apparently exist by either man that refer to the other‘s work; nor did the two writers communicate through letters. Nonetheless, a writerly correspondence does surely exist between the two artists. Blanchot‘s advocacy of the writer‘s hemiplegic self-forgetting, -exile, -dispossession which drives a vagrant, aporetic writing conspires with Beckett‘s: a writing poised in stark contrast to the dialectical hypostasis of logocentrism, a writing of nonrelational passivity, without aim or result, a writing of bad conscience at the threshold of the il y a, akin to the condemned prisoner‘s —I have nothing to say.’ (from Curt Willits, The Blanchot/Beckett Correspondence)
MICHEL FOUCAULT: ‘If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of “I speak” then in principle nothing can limit it—not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues. (from ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside”)
JACQUES DERRIDA: ‘Life can only be light from the moment that it stays dead-living while being freed, that is to say, released from itself. A life without life, an experience of lightness, an instance of “without,” a logic without logic of the “X without X,” or of the “not” or of the “except,” of the “being without being,” etc. In “A Primitive Scene,” we could read: “To live without living, like dying without death: writing returns us to these enigmatic propositions.”
—-‘The proof that we have here, with this testimony and reference to an event, the logical and textual matrix of Blanchot’s entire corpus, so to speak, is that this lightness of “without,” the thinking of the “X without X” comes to sign, consign or countersign the experience of the neuter as ne uter, neither-nor by bringing it together. This experience draws to itself and endures, in its very passion, the thinking as well as the writing of Blanchot, between literature and the right to death. Neither…nor: in this way the witness translates the untranslatable demourance….The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition — neither this nor that, neither happiness nor unhappiness.’ (Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 88-90).
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7. If I were you, I’d start here …
Death Sentence (Station Hill Press; $12.95)
This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: “A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II,” is the story of the narrator’s relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. “Though more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism,” writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books,” and John Updike in The New Yorker: “Blanchot’s prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.” Translated by Lydia Davis
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Station Hill; $29.95)
The Blanchot Reader brings together a substantial collection of critical and philosophical writings (The Gaze of Orpheus) and the only edition in print in English of his major works of fiction (Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, Vicious Circles, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes and the one who was standing apart from me). General readers and students alike will seek out these essential works by the writer Susan Sontag calls “an unimpeachably major voice in modern French literature.” Translated by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton
The Space of Literature (University of Nebraska Press; $23.95)
The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot’s thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot’s discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.
The Most High (University of Nebraska Press; $18.00)
“The Most High‘s somewhat hallucinatory parables clearly have their precedent in Kafka. But if the novel bears a resemblance to The Trial, it portrays a trial whose stakes are reversed. . . . Blanchot’s work is of a cold absurdity. If Sorge [the book’s protagonist] has any ‘significance,’ it is that he is not even insignificant, not even the anti-hero of modernism, but rather an absolute nonhero—the only role possible in a posthistorical society.” —Review of Contemporary Literature.
The Writing of the Disaster (University of Nebraska Press; $18.95)
Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century — world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust—grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?
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8. On writing
‘To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.’
‘Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe .. is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.’
‘Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into an artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons is heard.’
‘Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those who most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e. using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach. It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. […] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre – in a word, literature.’
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9. Misc
Nowhere Without No: A Tribute to Maurice Blanchot
A brief, excellent book of works written in memory of MB. Includes the speech Derrida gave at Blanchot’s cremation, pieces by Blanchot’s two major English translators Lydia Davis and Charlotte Mandell, poet Jacques Dupin, and others. Read about it here.
‘The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to say too much. Such is the silence brought by death perhaps. The latter also means the distance between the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the reader’s mind.’ — Spike Magazine
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Noli Me Legere … To Maurice Blanchot (SIRR CD 018)
A compilation of sound art/music inspired by Blanchot’s work, featuring Brandon LaBelle, Toshisa Tsunoda, Paolo Raposo, Julien Ottavi, o.a. Read about the album and/or order it here.
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Download a free pdf of Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Last Man’ @ Ubuweb
‘A dense, dream-like exploration of the extreme limits of this mystery, written some ten years prior to the Death of the Author, (though unpublished in English until thirty years later) Maurice Blanchot’s The Last Man (Le Dernier Homme, 1957) could be considered a narrative follow-up to The Space of Literature (L’Espace littéraire, 1955) or a fictional companion to the critical essays composing The Book to Come (Le Livre à venir, 1959). One can imagine an infinite conversation between these works: drifting wearily across abyssal alterities—the echo, in advance, of what has not been said and will never be said. But this sumptuous récit alone demands the reader’s full attention—marvelously, Blanchot writes what cannot be written without losing it as un-writable by writing it (Hans-Yost Frey, YFS, 1998). Narrating at the threshold of this impossible writing, The Last Man weaves a blurring of several prosopopetic characters towards a radical revision of the subject and the text. The prose itself never crystallizes into an unambiguous statement—Blanchot’s trangressive philosophy peculiar in the tantalizingly pleasurable suspension of the never-fulfilled promise of understanding.’ — Ubuweb
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Pure War/The Madness of the Day. Theatre piece created and performed by The Alchemical Theatre in NYC, 1985 in their squatted theatre space on 13th St in the East Village. Pure War was based on the writings of Paul Virilio and Maurice Blanchot. It was a collective creation directed by Carlo Altomare who also wrote the music.
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Maurice Blanchot’s astrological chart
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‘When I kill myself, maybe it is ‘I’ that actually commits the killing but it is not ‘I’ that dies and it is not ‘my death’ either – the death I provoked – that I experience, but the death I rejected, neglected, and that is this negligence itself, a perpetual escape and unaccomplishment.’ (L’Espace litteraire)
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s so true, isn’t it? Yes, ‘Inside’, the ultimate scissors-employing film. Nick’s too hard on himself, which is admirable. Anyway, hero, yes! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Pop Tarts are good with a little scoop of ice cream nearby. My weekend was good, saw a visiting friend, saw a mostly very good film, and so on. Glad your weekend with your friend was dreamy sounding. The pound coin really reveals its superiority when it’s in your palm. The weight, the size, how you want to pop in your mouth and chew it but know you shouldn’t … I don’t know, something very satisfying going on there. There must be hundreds of bands called Gore, no? And they must all be at least kind of a little bit good. Love telling his head ‘Do not develop into the head cold that I strongly suspect you are slowly springing on me’, G. ** Poecilia, I’m so real it’s positively banal, so do say hi. Okay, I’ll let your fiction live in my imagination. But do know that I wrote a series of stories based on Hans Christian Anderson fairytales where all the characters were employees of Scandinavian theme parks for a project that has never been finished. So I do have sympathy. ** Carsten, No sooner had I read your comment than my news feeds filled with stories of that black out. I’m actually okay with 12 hour flights if I slap on a nicotine patch of the highest strength, which I think is 21 mg or whatever, plus chew gum plus zone out with in-flight movies and eat frequently. It’s not a perfect solution, but I always make it. No, I’ve avoided Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’. I actually don’t like his films, but I haven’t seen the two you mentioned. My friend Ira who was Burroughs’ agent for a long time said it’s like an advertisement for perfume. So I don’t know. If you like it, let me know and I might reconsider my boycott. ** James Bennett, That was my suspicion: Spanish meatiness. ‘City of Quartz’ is pretty great in my memory. Oh, you should go to LA when you can. Totally singular place. Nothing like it. Just make sure you either get very good, knowledgeable advice about how to negotiate the place or know someone there who can steward you around. It’s a mess, but a wonderful mess. Yes, let’s hang when you come here. I should be around, I think, unless I’m briefly away at a film festival or something. Cool. Tot siens! ** Steeqhen, My guess is it would shatter, or your teeth would? You can send your diss. whenever you like, but, yeah, you might as well wait until you’re finished because, given my slowness, I won’t get to read it straight off in any case. Thank you ever so much about my work. I’m very honored to have you as my reader, truth. ** Daniel, Hi, Daniel! Yes, I will be here. Let’s meet up. Just let me know when you’re free and when’s good. Very cool. ** Diesel Clementine, Hey there. Welcome back to both of us. The film goes well, just working to give it a good future life. No word on a London screening yet, but there will be one somewhere at some point. Congrats on the job. I personally think being an amateur artist/mopper/human is a goal in life. I’ve heard of that ‘Solemates’ book and maybe even about that event. If you want do a presentation here at anytime, I would only be very thrilled. Awesome about your pamphlet! As I’m not in Glasgow I’ll go feast my eyes link-wise. Everyone, Here’s Diesel Clementine with a hot tip: ‘I released BLU-V, the little short story pamphlet with the Blue Raspberry Flavoured Rent Boy. If anyone’s in Glasgow, jump in to Category Is to grab a copy for 2.50. I thought the blog would enjoy it, so I scanned it and uploaded it to Internet Archive for yous to have a wee vada- here. Hit that post-haste. Thank you, D. ** jay, Hi, j-man or j-person, whichever feels good. Wow, after 3 pm today you’ll be the future’s bitch. Yay. I hope whoever or whatever is receiving your submission is suitably submissive. Big congrats! Me, I’m good. I think Zac and I just squared away a theater release for ‘Room Temperature’ in France for later this year, which would/will be a huge thing for us. So, yeah, I’m good. And you? How does it feel? ** Tyler Ookami, I have Firefox as my backup browser when Safari goes weird, and it is one shitty, primitive browser, I must say. Gotcha, restaurant/take away place. I don’t know ‘krautburgers’, and, from your description, I’m not even going to google it frankly. I too haven’t watched ‘Tokyo Gore Police’ in a long time. I did do a Yoshihiro Nishimura Day on the blog about five years ago. ** PL, Hi, PL. I’m good, and you? ‘In the Dark’, cool, I’ll do a YouTube search, thanks. Tarot cards, yeah, that makes sense vis-à-vis your talent in my mind’s eye. Nice. Brazilian films … hm, I don’t know. Maybe not so many. I mean, you know, ‘Pixote’, duh. I’ve seen a film or two by Flavia Furtado that I liked. And some Walter Salles films. I’ll have to check, I might be spacing out. Recommendations? That drawing is wonderful. How is it a flop? You’re too hard on yourself, pal. Everyone, a lovely drawing by PL based on an escorts pic is here. ** HaRpEr, A bunch of locals are in the midst of heavy deadlines. I guess it’s that time of year. Glad you met yours. Your read on the Labour government makes depressing sense and is obviously excessively familiar to American me. Thank you for putting my stuff in a bracket with Blake’s. You managed to see ‘A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking’, very cool. Taylor Mead was godlike. Still is, I guess. He wrote a really wonderful book in the late 60s called ‘Taylor Mead on Amphetamine and in Europe’ if you ever get the chance to read it. ** Steve, It’s rough: the bull torturing. Avoid in that case. Interestingly directed film though. Most of it. The Fakir Musafar documentary was co-produced by one of ‘Room Temperature’s’ co-producers, Luka Fisher. Everyone, Go read Steve’s thoughts on the queer film contingent at the great and recently concluded Prismatic Ground Film Festival here. Hugs and good luck with that heavy phone call. ** Nicholas., Yum is a good reaction. Well, I did completely forget about the sigil for, like, 15 years until I accidentally found a note that re-filled me in, so it had a long time to work. Get some sleep or a nap or whatever is appropriate. ** catachrestic, Thanks, pal. I don’t think I know Claude Shannon, but, if that’s the case, I will find him and deposit him in my bank to some degree. Tastefulness is something that one needs to grasp and then fiddle with somewhat aggressively yet with intricacy, I guess I would say? ** Okay. I decided to do a kind of solo, general post about my very favorite writer Mr. Maurice Blanchot. Do with it what you will. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hi Dennis, thank you and means a lot. Genuinely. I think now the goal is to attempt to keep it in front of people and sharing in interesting ways without annoying people, yes? A bar/club space here just reached out and will let us use their space for an event so we are trying to put something together with them early next month. I also like the idea of an auction and have definitely donated enough of my stuff over the years for other people’s. Maybe something online in the meantime and then something in person further down the line? awwww Blanchot! I was just going to quote and then realised it was actually Ponge.
Hi!!
Thank you for this post – especially for the “If I were you, I’d start here…” section! I’ve been circling Blanchot for such a long time, but I haven’t read anything by him yet.
Pop-Tarts with ice cream – noted!
I’ll have to ask my brother if he has a pound coin. It’s possible. Maybe even likely. He’s kind of a hoarder and has pretty much everything.
A quick Google search revealed at least five bands called Gore, which makes me suspect there are a ton more out there, haha.
Oh no! I hope your baby head cold doesn’t get the chance to grow up! How are you?
Love going to the hairdresser and getting a Freddy Newandyke–style haircut, Od.
Hm. Attempt, like, 4 at NOT having my comment swallowed by the void. As much as I want to wordpuke it’d be a waste if this comment doesn’t get through either, argh. Testing, testing.
Jamie. You are a very cruel person , severing contact and blocking me. All I did was what you asked …..I left you alone for a couple weeks so you could concentrate on studying and not have to worry about replying to my emails. After all the hours we spent reading and writing to one another, I’ve ended up being just another random guy on the internet to you , whom you can play your mind games with . Just like all those other guys in my life, you ended up using me then tossing me aside. And what makes that even worse is that I told you about those guys, and you’ve become one of them . I expected better of you, especially after sharing so much about my intimate life in our messages . We aren’t just words on a screen , you know. These people you interact with are real, with actual feelings .
If I upset you by waiting so long to write back, all you had to do was reach out and ask me what was going on . Rather than refusing to talk . And leaving me no choice but to use Dennis’ blog post . Yes, I should have told you that I was going to wait a while before replying . But I’ve apologized for that, and your refusing to accept my apology is just mean .
‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’ , indeed . Take that as my last quote, buddy .
So, guess this is it. I won’t bother you any more . Good luck with the rest of your life . I hope others end up treating you better than you’ve treated me . Karma can be a bitch, even if you don’t believe in it .
Life is nothing if not predictable .
Sigh .
Dennis, We ended up sleeping in abominably late over the weekend and didn’t see the Minecraft movie. Plus, David was so fucking high, there’s no way we could’ve taken him. Maybe another time.
And then I went into the office yesterday. Bleh. Got a lot of work done, though. Would’ve gotten as much or more done at home, of course. Then got home and fell out so early and almost woke up late today. Just dreamed and dreamed and dreamed all night. I feel okay now.
Blanchot is someone I’ve been circling for a long time, and this post is a good reminder for me to get on board that particular train.
Leeds United played their final home game of the season last night and it ended up being a 4-0 win, including this tidy goal from Wilfried Gnonto. Looking forward to next season’s life in the Premier League!
Hey Dennis,
Blanchot is one of those names I’ve seen for years, a lot recently, but I’ve never read (Just quickly reading about him I’m getting a bit antsy that I didn’t find a way to include him in this dissertation, but god 8k words is a relatively small amount for how much could be said). Obviously he’s good considering you’re posting about him, but where would I start?
Ya I think I’ll send you it once it’s finished, instead of you having two different versions by the time you get around to it! The weather is beautiful here, which is a shame because I do not have the time to be enjoying it, nor do I feel beautiful — not in a self-pitying “woe is me” way, just that I feel like a greasy slug figure; there’s actually a doctor who alien from one of the newer episodes that fits that mold, I’ll include it in the post!
Reworking my second chapter now; i definitely took on a large task with speaking about five of your novels and the nature of the taboo or the transgressive, maybe i didn’t necessarily need to speak on Rimbaud or Sade, but I think that it adds a lot to the dissertation by speaking of them and their influence and importance as a backdrop for your work. I’ve ended up reading so many interviews of yours that I can really tell when someone is a good interviewer (Gluck) versus someone who is just regurgitating the same questions. I feel like I’ve seen you been asked the same stuff over and over, and there was one where they seemed to just have no clue!! Maybe I’ll interview you whenever I see you next, but ask you questions that are more interesting, like Disneyland and music and shit.
I was talking with my friends about this but I find the rise in onlyfans/softcore porn guys who are straight and don’t pretend not to be showing off their asses for content. Like it’s lucrative, and frankly the world is better off if a guy with a nice ass wants to flaunt it, but it’s the way that these guys either do gym content or tiktok videos, are noticed for their big ass, and then pivot into softcore porn. I’m sure there’s probably theories that could be made about that being an example of sexual freedom or that it’s a form of sexual trafficking or whatever other stuff, but for me I just find it erotically humourous to see a hot guy with a girlfriend making ass porn…
I’ve been listening to so much music as there’s nothing else i can have as background noise that will keep me focused. I tried having some gameplay playing in the background— a Pikmin 1 speedrun — which kind of worked; it was strangely relaxing hearing the cacophony of pikmin noises, but i’m not bothered to seek out that specific niche when i should be working. My roster has been Boards of Canada’s first two albums, Selected Ambient Works by Aphex Twin, Perverts by Ethel Cain, Psychocandy because of one interview where you mentioned it when speaking about Closer and i do love that album, Jessica Pratt’s last two albums, Beat by Bowery Electric, and then randomly yesterday Haim’s three new songs on repeat.
I’ll quit the ramblings here because it’s just me trying to avoid working, but I’ll talk tomorrow!!
Actually quick question that will end up being inconsequential, but I remember reading somewhere you referring to The Marbled Swarm as your first ‘Sadean’ novel, which I incorporated into my dissertation but did not actually cite, and now I’m fearing I made that up in my head. If you remember saying it, please let me know where if you remember, perhaps it was even here, otherwise I can just disregard that bit!
Haha I think I found the source and it was actually the interviewer saying they considered TMS as your first Sadean novel
I use Firefox because it’s the fastest for me but I have a lousy laptop. Honestly think Chrome is the very worst. I have a Bigcartel now for people who are interested in buying original artworks from me: https://tylerookami.bigcartel.com/
I don’t eat meat so that’s probably a factor but even the smell of krautburgers is bad and, yeah, don’t look up pictures because it does look rather like biting into a roll of bread filled with sickly shits. I was actually doing internet research trying to figure out how they came to be since it is effectively an Americanized fast food version of a “cabbage roll” and it really does seem that people associate it with being a Colorado-specific thing. If you grew up mainline protestant here (and, like, a good 70ish percent of people who were raised religious did), you definitely have memories of them being sold as a fundraiser by churches. There is a fast food chain called Runza that specializes in them that is limited only to Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado and my mother likes to mock them for choosing a name that is indicative of diarrhea hahaha.
I think Nishimura is really good. He is more a sculptor who makes films to show off his work than a director in a conventional sense. I like artists of other mediums using movies as a means to an end, though.
I watched Ti West’s X last night, it was frustrating but I kind of warmed up to it by the final act. I have always avoided his stuff because it looks really fanboyish and self-consciously retro. That was really true of the film but it was pretty amusing just because of its premise (an old woman who kills pornographers because she’s upset about losing her sexual virility). God, the dialogue is just so on the nose as are the 70s movie and music references (Don’t Fear the Reaper in a retro slasher homage is really hard not to physically cringe at) but I’m almost embarrassed how much it won me over just by creating suspense and having funny gore scenarios.
I also got to go to the revamped Casa Bonita recently. It’s really quite nice since it was purchased by Parker and Stone, about on the level with the better themed dining areas at Disney parks. It really does feel like it always did except that things work and it isn’t insanely grubby. Probably the biggest change is the food not being completely awful. In my childhood, it had the nickname “Caca Barfita” because the food was so bad. Now they have actual tacos, burritos, etc. instead of what was basically 7-11 type “Mexican” stuff (taquitos etc.) but even worse than 7-11. It is probably the best theme park type thing in Colorado these days though I still haven’t been to Glenwood Caverns.
Just to clarify, Prismatic Ground hasn’t begun yet. The festival opens tomorrow. In case any readers here want to check them out, they’ll be streaming 10 shorts on their website.
I just spoke to the hospital. My mother’s condition has not changed. They are gonna try to call the funeral home again today and ask them to contact me as soon as possible.
I’ve finally arrived as a film critic! Yesterday, I received a press release about a porn series called “Jerk Buddies.” It’s a celebration of straight men who happen to love giving each other hand jobs.
Charli XCX is starring in Takashi Miike’s next film!
Hey Dennis,
How’s things? Another year spinning past at lighting speed. Look’s like the film premiere/screenings went well state side. Did you guy’s enjoy
yourselves? Must have been a great feeling after all the time spent working on it. Sense of completion? Or are you ready to roll on to the next project, ready for a change?
The release date for my poetry book “The Sky was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled” is confirmed –20 May. Ocean Vuong’s new novel comes out on the 15, and I saw that Thomas’ new book is coming out too, so looks like mine is birthing in good company. Also, the trailer of that audio drama I wrote a while back has just been released, which is ultra-cool as it’s the first time I’m hearing anything from it too. I can now say that it’s a Doctor Who related project put together by The Doctor Who Dramas, who have been producing fan produced episodes since 1982. The link to the trailer’s here if you want to check it out: https://youtu.be/KGTQk9aKVCE?si=wEUX3Qp2h0yf_BnM . I don’t know when the final thing is going to be released.
Other than that, I’ve been working on the chapter for the systemic therapy book, and related stuff around that.
I’m going to be in Paris end of June for a weekend if you’re about.
Love and hugs
Dom x
Hey Dennis!
Just wanted to say the people at Zita contacted you through mail today, but they wrote it in Swedish for some reason, so I thought I should translate it for you:
Hi Dennis, My name is Signe and I work at Zitabiografen in Stockholm. I heard from our fantastic member Måns (cc:d) here, that he has suggested a special screening of your and Zac Farley’s film Room Temperature here at the cinema – a fantastic idea! If I understand correctly, you are also interested in coming to the screening for an introductory/follow-up conversation…? I was wondering when it would be suitable for all of us to arrange such a screening, how does it look for you in the coming future? Maybe at the end of May, beginning of June? All the best, Signe Lindstedt
Blanchot—it’s been a while. I read Death Sentence on your recommendation shortly after meeting you in Paris as a kid. That combination, of meeting a major writer in person (big deal for me at the time) & then reading his chief inspiration made a hell of an impact. I’d say Apollinaire, Tzara, Péret & Céline were probably my main Frenchmen throughout my 20s, but I always admired Blanchot’s razor-sharp purity.
Good to know, re. Queer. The positive responses I’ve read were all from critics, who I’ll politely assume probably don’t know their Burroughs very well. What stuck though were mentions of a trippy ayahuasca sequence. I’ve always shared Burroughs’ love for Mexico & its pagan past, so that’s another factor. But yeah, I haven’t seen Guadagnino’s big successes, but really dug Bones & All—less for the boring love story—but rather for the grungy wasteland iconography of cannibals on the run. Anyway, if I do end up seeing Queer, I’ll surely report. My favorite recent film was a doc: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. A jazz-soaked ode to Lumumba & a spirited fuck-you to the pigs who took him out.
Re. ethnopoetics day: is there a rough word- or page count I should go by? The post is meant as a general introduction, but I think I’m adding far too many poems. I’ll happily keep going if it’s up to me, but it’s probably wise to rein me in.
Awk , such a sight for sore eyes- opening the blog post-shift while I waited for a burger from a halal/Palestine-supporting McDonald’s copy. Made banana splits tonight for my friends while they played resident evil (I’m a screamer when I play horror games). And gosh, yes, I’d love to do a presentation – idk what I’d do it on, but I’ll have a think! (you maybe beat me to the punch on macabre perfumes). Also, my boss photocopying my passport reminded me – I got my passport – yippee ! Excited to explore the world !
Anyway, thanks for sharing the pamphlet and having a wee gander !
Oh ! Also ! PL ! That illustration is to die for ! Absolutely divine ! Love your stuff !
Ah, so good to be done with all my work, yeah! Today was mostly spent in my bed, very consciously doing absolutely nothing. And I have all of tomorrow off too, which is pretty rare for me – there may be an 8-hour visual novel session on the cards, depending on my mood.
Huge congratulations to you and Zac on that screening in France, that’s so exciting! I’m incredibly excited to see RT whenever it arrives in the UK, given how positive the feedback has been. Did either of your other films have this kind of impact? Anyway, cya tomorrow, lots of love from here – along with some siphoned off concentration I no longer need.
P.S. HaRpEr, that piece of writing is really, really so interesting. I totally love the way you created these super dissociated, confused fixed camera-type setpieces that are retroactively explored with a different viewpoint. I also loved the interjections by the secondary voice, they were so different in style I initially assumed they must have been snippets from another piece of work I was unfamiliar with. Is the rest of the novel being worked on at all, or is what you’ve done so far just a one-off snippet?
Oh wow, thanks so much! I love how you talk about it. ‘Camera type setpieces’ is so so flattering so thank you. Yes, I’m keeping working on it. It will be a finished book eventually. My process for it is in brief, intense spurts so I don’t think it will take too long (whatever that means). Not that I’m rushing it, that’s just my process for this particular thing, all of it was written like that. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted.
Hey! Maurice! This is a really wonderful, lovingly made post. You may know, but I’ve been absorbing Blanchot this and last year and studying the ins and outs of the neutered voice like a detective going insane trying to get to the bottom of the case. But I don’t really want to reach the bottom of Blanchot’s theory and get to a point where I feel I ‘understand’ it all, because I love his ambiguity, and that his theoretical writings could be applied to just about anything in countless different ways. So I think there’s definitely a semi sacred/spiritual approach to reading Blanchot where you don’t want to utter any of it aloud because an attempt to explain it doesn’t really do what’s in your head justice – for me anyway.
‘Death Sentence’ is my favourite of his fiction stuff that I’ve read, and ‘The Space of Literature’ of his theoretical stuff – though ‘The Writing of the Disaster’ has some of my favourite lines and passages. I really want to read ‘The Most High’, that’s probably the next stop for me.
Also, a dumb and trivial thing to say, but the young Blanchot was an extremely beautiful man. He looks too delicate for life or something. A curious figure for sure, I’ve always wondered how that image of him reclining with the bust came into being, given his reputation as a recluse and all. Haha I like the idea of him holding his liquor better than Bataille from that anecdote.
I put ‘A Coupla White Faggots…’ in my YouTube watch later list a couple of months ago and remembered it was there. Someone discreetly put it on YouTube somehow, no idea how they got it. Also, that Taylor Mead book looks like my thing. And wow! It’s in print.
It’s just like me to become a ball of anxiety AFTER my main assignments are due in. I think it’s because it’s hit me that if I don’t manage to get a job in a book store or something and save up for some money to get a room further into the city after I move out of here in September then I’m truly fucked. I’m really worried that I’m going to have a repeat of last summer when my so-called socially progressive flatmates swindled me out of my deposit and sucked up to the landlord. I know it’s not good to bask in these kinds of thoughts, but you may have realised that I’m a drama queen by nature, and ranting about this kind of thing is the only thing that can make me feel okay about it all. Dennis, you seem like such a chilled out guy, how do you do it?! Were you always this way? Asking for a friend.
Finding out about Blanchot through your work was a high point in my journey through the arts, up there with the time my teenage Radiohead fandom led me to Autechre. My favorite of his novels remains The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, but I should reread Death Sentence soon, and I’ve always had a special fondness for the talking cat in Thomas the Obscure. I appreciate the remarkable collection of photos of Blanchot here, a few of which are new to me, and Bataille’s anecdote about getting drunk with him fills me envy.
Have you ever checked out Blanchot’s Political Writings, 1953-1993? That’s been my most recent foray into his bibliography, and it’s quite a stunner so far. While I’m sure you’ve heard that he was the anonymous author of the “Manifesto of the 121” against the Algerian War back in 1960, I had never realized just how interested he was in politics throughout his writing life. Given the image of him I’d developed from his novels and literary criticism, there was something just really jarring at first about seeing that he had thoughts on, like, the moon landing and the Berlin Wall. But as I grew acclimated to this new-to-me side of him, there turned out to be a lot of really compelling writing here. For instance, as a literary portrait of a public figure, I’d rank his essay on Charles de Gaulle, “The Essential Perversion,” up there with Marx’s finest passages on Louis Bonaparte “The Class War in France” and “The 18th Brumaire.” Conceptually, too, his effort to conceive communism beyond a Marxist framework produced some fascinating results, which I’m still digesting.
Anyway, yes, it’s very much true about Claude Shannon, the so-called “Father of the Information Age.” Prior to developing the concept of digital communication, he made a major breakthrough in his master’s thesis that laid the foundation for digital circuit design, and went on to develop some of the earliest experiments with AI, including a thing called Theseus, where a 1950s computer would learn to guide a magnetic mouse through a maze with rearrangeable metal walls. (Claude, the AI, is named in tribute to him.)
I found out about him only very recently, cause I’m on a specific hunt to find and learn about the foundational figures of what will hopefully become my new field, and I was surprised he hadn’t come up before, given the impact he’s had. But then, our culture seems to place a greater priority on the people who monetize something – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs – than the innovators who originally came up with the ideas. If you’re interested, this is a good, brief introduction to his life and work. Oddly, I think there’s an interesting parallel to your work, and the literary tradition you’re a part of more broadly, insofar as one of his core interests was the limits of communication and language.
*Marx’s finest passages on Louis Bonaparte in “The Class War in France” and “The 18th Brumaire.”
wonder if i’ll get in this comment before you post the today’s post. hey dennis.
missed a few day; including that juicy barth day, and juicy in another way gore day. barth day made me pick up both sot-weed and the federman book, part of me wonder if that was a stealth day for double or nothing. i got a wicked cold, and they started rebuilding the entrance to my apartment building, so i hear constant ringing. grr. so it goes.
new situation happened with a friend group. a friend secretly confessed to me that she has been basically romantically involved with an ai based on her two exes. which to note, her exes is two different people, first one is an abusive ‘bad boy’ and the other one is a total puppy. they’re both hot guys so… uh.. yeah. from the screenshots i’ve read, the weird fusion of them doesn’t seem like either one of them, but i’m still reeling from the whole ‘ai based on two people’. she and the ai has sent like 150k words to each other. wild!
oh just to clarify with the script situation, it all happened during the break, so the script was practically finished before the director pulled out. it’s in script format, though i don’t care to get into the whole ‘you can only write it like this or’ nonsense, if people working on it understands me, that’s good enough. though i’m still trying to figure out what to do with it, i guess just shelve it and see if any other friends becomes a director, and i retool it to their neurosises and obsessions.
tried doing some repairs to my heater –which just to note is an electrical porttable one –, but like outside of the bare essentials. i’m dum dum on tech repair, friend says it would be cheaper to get a new one. but it’s not been annoying me the last week, so maybe the weather just got fixed instead.
i think that should be all, probably by the time i think of anything else, there probably will be a new post.
testing