* (restored)

Pop Life Art: Celebrity Artists

Itty Bitty Art by Celebrities

Celebrity art @ eBay

Célébrités Galleries

Julien’s Auctions

Celebrity Art Book List

 

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‘When I’m painting the picture, I’m really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don’t get any thrill out of laying it out.’

Frank Sinatra

 

_____________

‘when i look at my visual work it’s easy for me to see their creator as a confused, inconsistent hobbyist or, at worst, a painter and decorator who owns a few art books.’

Graham Coxon

 

________________

‘You can’t see my work in person unless you come to my house.’

Juliana Hatfield

 

_______________

‘I used to paint, but that was years ago.’

Arnold Schoenberg

 

_______________

‘With painting I will come onto something. It could take months and go – oh shit! That is how you do that! Probably if I had studied it would have been in lesson one.’

John Lurie

 

__________________

‘I have a very specific style that I’m going for’

Issei Sagawa

 

________________

‘I’m really just thinking about the painting at the moment. I’m too distracted by art to seriously think about music at the moment.’

Paul Simonon

 

________________

‘What I love, and this sketch was done in August, is the wonderful shadows. They, alone, made my painting finger itch, so I sat out in a field on three consecutive days at exactly the same time of day, being examined by some rather inquisitive Highland cows.’

Prince Charles

 

______________

‘I come from painting. I painted until I was 30, but I burned almost all of them. As a painter, I would have made a masterpiece.’

Serge Gainsbourg

 

_______________

‘I’ve stopped using the Internet, basically. I text, but I’ve whittled that down. I’m trying to just revert to a landline. I’m painting things rather taking their photographs. I don’t want to live in computer time. The Internet doesn’t care if we’ve had enough.’

Anohni

 

_________________

‘The watercolor has affinities with the sonnet, or the haiku, rather than the jeremiad. It captures the flux and essence, the flavor and perfume, rather than the substance. Ambience, that is what the watercolor renders par excellence.’

Henry Miller

 

________________

‘It takes my breath away to gaze into that chaos and fragmentation of imagery and realize that within that frame lies the universe of the soul and imagination.’

Tina Louise

 

_______________

‘Even when I was a little kid, I could draw a picture of Mickey Mouse that looked perfect.’

Kurt Cobain

 

________________

‘If there were no paintings in the world, mine would be very important.’

Leonard Cohen

 

_____________

‘The correlation between acting and painting is limited, but still useful. The art of acting is first observing people, and then acting out that observation. But when you are watching, for example, an old man and see how his hand is trembling, that is something you can’t draw. But you can draw his posture.’

Armin Mueller-Stahl

 

______________

‘WITH THE TITLE OF MOST DECORATED HEAVY METAL BASS GUITARIST OF ALL TIME INTACT, MY PURPOSE HAS SHIFTED FROM MAKING CRAZY AND COLORFUL MUSIC, TO MAKING CRAZY AND COLORFUL PAINTINGS.’

Jason Newsted

 

______________

‘My art teacher Phillip, who did the Grateful Dead weird skeleton playing backwards, violin with the red sunglasses, very Jimi Hendrix, very strange, he said, ‘you cannot make a mistake in art, so even if you think you’ve made the worst mistake in the world’ — like a big hole in the paper — ‘you just sit down, take a deep breath, and realize that you cannot make a mistake, even if you cannot fix what happened, you can tell everybody that it’s exactly what you wanted.’

Stevie Nicks

 

_______________

‘My drawings, paintings and carvings attempt to reflect my deep love for the environment and view of life that I was so fortunate to have grown up with.’

Don S. Davis

 

________________

‘I … yeah, have started … painting.’

Dee Dee Ramone

 

_______________

‘I’m not afraid of mistakes, there aren’t any.’

Miles Davis

 

________________

‘I wear my Picasso hat and Matisse shorts and my Arnold Schwarzenegger tank top and I paint.’

Tony Curtis

 

_________________

‘At this time in my evolution, painting is the way “it” wants to take shape. I create with the help of that massive system of energy that permeates everything and allows it to be distributed for free. As a conduit, I am occasionally quite clear – but as a beginner, the results can be technically raw.’

Grace Slick

 

______________

‘I study at the Art Students League of New York and with private instructors.’

Tony Bennett

 

_______________

‘I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.’

David Bowie

 

_______________

‘It wasn’t until I was about 23 that I could stand to look at what I’d painted. But my worst rejections come from myself. I find that if I like a painting well enough to hang it on the wall, I really don’t care what people think.’

Eve Plumb

 

________________

‘In order to be totally spontaneous, you can’t be too obsessed with accuracy, but if you’re inaccurate in a drawing or painting, it will look fake, and when you act, it will sound fake. You have to find miraculously some proper balance between the two, but there’s no formula.’

Peter Falk

 

________________

‘What I love to do is paint people’s faces, y’know, their eyes. Because you want to find the emotion, see what’s going on behind their eyes.’

Johnny Depp

 

________________

‘My idea of paradise is that period just before the sun rises and I’m at home painting or writing songs and everything is flowing. I pray that the sun won’t rise so I can paint and write for ever. That’s my ideal time.’

Pete Doherty

 

________________

‘It is the same thing whether I’m painting or acting. The common denominator is in the movement. I don’t dance but I paint in the air. Or I don’t paint, but I dance on the paper.’

Juliette Binoche

 

__________________

‘I was definitely first interested in art. I always wanted to be an artist, since I was like five or something. I was really into Michelangelo. I wanted to be a sculptor. I used to make things out of clay. So, I guess boys is sort of…even though I think he was gay. I don’t know.’

Kim Gordon

 

__________________

‘Looking at my paintings, you probably wouldn’t think they were by a film director. But you might guess that they were by, well, a European intellectual – someone sensitive, serious and at odds with the world around him. At odds, in fact, with our world.’

Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

__________________

‘I think about what I’m going to paint when I’m in bed — I’m going to paint a canvas bright red, and I don’t know what I’m going to put on it. (Laughs) Well, but you see, that’s the way you get started. I’ve been having such great luck with painting canvases solid black, and then I put one pink tulip on that black canvas, and they sell like hotcakes.’

Phyllis Diller

 

________________

‘If you have a one-hour lunch break during shooting… you know it is better to have a nap if your body is very tired but in my case, I spent my time painting. If I do so, my head can rest better.’

Viggo Mortensen

 

_________________

‘My first painting was a sketch of myself, and I called it When I Became Human I Had to Die’.

Bruno Schleinstein
—-

_________________

‘This is the first time I’ve seen the painting upright. Physically, it was a tremendous challenge working on sections of it while hanging from scaffolding and with all the emotional ups and downs.’

Jim Carrey

 

_______________

‘People expect me to paint psychedelic images of fools on hills, paperback writers and bands on the run and so on. What I actually like to paint are guys with boners.’

Paul McCartney

 

________________

‘I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.’

John Mellencamp

 

______________

‘I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.’

Vincent Gallo

 

_______________

‘There are those who claim to be psychiatrists and analyze my paintings from that perspective, while others are unimpressed with the painting by itself.’

Marilyn Manson

_____________

‘I hope to pursue a career in digital art/animation, with a focus on texture and matte painting. To that end, I have studied computer science alongside my artistic training as to become well-versed in both the programming and art aspects of computer graphics.’

Lucy Liu

 

_______________

‘I am not a Christian artist, I am an artist.’

Johnny Cash

 

________________

‘I have a whole house which is just for her arts and crafts. I bought the next door neighbor’s house. I go and spend all day down there.’

Rosie O’Donnell

 

________________

‘I love to paint and draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that.’

Michael Jackson

 

______________

‘Um, I painted the cast of “Seinfeld” in the nude?’

Macaulay Culkin

 

______________

‘I guess I would say my paintings are unstoppable and true to the shit.’

George Clinton

 

______________

‘I started with photographs, then I started thinking that photographs didn’t really go anywhere — they’re just photographs.’

Neil Young

 

_______________

‘I just finished another WARHOL… Can’t wait for the show!’

Chris Brown

 

_______________

‘Yeah, I’m serious about painting. What kinda … ? Fuck off!’

Steven Tyler

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** CAUTIVOS, Thanks. Oh, the idea of a ‘best’ film is so ridiculous, but I thought it was exciting that ‘Dielman’ got the top slot. That provoked people, which is good. I think it’s a great film. I recommend it. ** tomk, Hi, Tom. A welcoming 2023 to you too. Yeah, I thought of you being in Peru while reading about the chaos there. Glad you made it in and out whole. Well, I would hope so about Daitch, but, yes, yay! Dude, I so know the jet lag hell. I hope your hours and the UK’s sync up ASAP. Your brain’s not completely gone, just so you know. ** Bill, Cool. It’s possible I had the zoomba thing here before. Maybe in the ‘Cocaine’ post? Happy to have added some successfully itchy content to trump your period in the dark. ** Misanthrope, Like I said, I know zip, but I think the Rams left LA for quite a while or something? I remember reading all this stuff about how weird it was that LA didn’t have a football team. Anyway, whatev’. I hope your work jumped into your doability, whatever that means. ** Nick., Hey, N! I think determining you’ll do things and having ideas in mind is probably all you need. Well, unresolved crushes do have a way of sort dying out eventually, which can be quite the saving grace. Mm, I can’t reminder George’s snake’s name. Damn, it’s on the veritable tip of my tongue, but it won’t materialise. Resting in the dark sounds really nice. Envy. Mine? Bunch of stuff: Met with one of our film’s producers, met with this amazing photographer who’s going to be our ‘set photographer’, met on Zoom with our production designer, and worked on some fiction in between. Kind of the opposite of resting in the dark. Hence my envy. Dream superpower … mm, at the moment I would choose the really boring, practical superpower of being able to snap my fingers and thusly raise the rest of the money we need to make our film. (My brain and life are really locked down by that project). Overall, … maybe I’d like to be CureMan who could cure anyone of anything bad, including death. What about you? Tell me, and then let’s get a Marvel franchise going or something. No, I don’t think I’ve had any paranormal intervention in myself that I can remember. Let me think … no, I don’t think so. Have you felt clairvoyant at any point? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Exactly re: ‘DR’. I grew to like ‘Try’. Grove Press thought ‘Evol’ was too un-commercial. I think at that point they still thought I could have some kind of crossover into the mainstream or something. They did it again with ‘Guide’, which I wanted to call ‘Nurse’. But now I think ‘Guide’ is better. I just had to look up Fiverr. I’d never heard of it before. Huh, interesting. I like the idea of ‘gay advice’, ha ha. It’s so mysterious. Love creating a spare room in your apartment whereupon your favorite member of your favorite band asks you if they can use it as their painting studio, G. ** Minet, Hi, Minet! Good to see you! I’m doing okay, busy like it sounds like you’ve been too. Oh, yeah, the AI thing. I know a few really talented artists who are experimenting with it excitingly. What you’re doing does sound amazing. Your instagram is public? I’ll try. Every time I try to go instagram it throws me out. Cool. I’ll go look. And/or you could send the to me: [email protected]. Thank you! You sound really inspired, that’s awesome. And you using the words Trecartin and Efteling make me as excited as I could be. Great! Hugs, etc. right back to you. ** Steve Erickson, Yes. Everyone, Bertolucci’s sublime film ‘The Conformist’ has been restored and re-released, and Mr. Erickson has some thoughts about that, which I recommend you read. Here. I’m not sure if ‘Close’ is playing here. I think I will avoid it, if so. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Surprising that some press hasn’t reissued her books. Surely that’s in the offing. Yeah, agreed that the ending of ‘EO’ is a big let down, but I liked the rest enough to shoot the overall some slack. I think I’m going to LA the weekend of the 14th. I’ll lock that down in the next day or so. The prep is moving forward and rather exhausting, but that’s the deal. The funding aspect remains immensely stressful and scary, but we have to get there, and we will. Look forward to Part 2. Everyone, recently I hooked you up with part 1 of a conversation between the superb writers Jeff Jackson and Meghan Lamb re: their lives as both writers and songwriters. Here’s part 2. Eat it up. ** Robert, Glad you liked Rafman. There’ll be a bunch of his stuff up here tomorrow. I’m good, just a little too busy right now, but for good reasons, thanks. Experimental writers who are women have been historically overlooked and hard to suss out, so, no, it’s any fault of yours, no worries. There are a lot amazing ones. Off the immediate top of my head, Renee Gladman, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose, … I could go on, but there are some to start. ** Nick Hudson, Thanks, pal. Gdańsk! Amazing you get to be in these fabled places, as downsided as the visit may be. The last film I watched in 202 was the King Crimson documentary. The first film I saw in 2023 was ‘Tar’, which I did not like. Big up, and safe travels home. ** John Newton, Hi, John. Sorry, I’m very behind on email at the moment. I think I wrote ‘The School Wimp’ when I was teenager, and I don’t remember at all who it was about, or if it was about a real person. Mm, no, I think I first read Mallard in my 20s, if I remember. I met Hannah Weiner extremely briefly at a reading, but it was just a hello. I still have the ‘More’ soundtrack on vinyl somewhere. ‘Jakob von Gunten’: very nice! ** malcolm, Hi, pal. I totally get and could easily (if inaccurately) imagine that reverie you went through. Yum. And color me weird, but I immediately wanted to stand hypnotised and bemused (possible combination?) over your couch as you were in that repetition mode. Thank you for the EP. I’ll go get it. Yeep! Happiest day, I hope. ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah! Yeah, I think I’m kind of a nice guy, it’s weird. This blog is on GoDaddy, and I’ll remember to be very careful with them, yikes! All the more reason for you and your collaborators to start that much needed site. There are some quite good lit/art sites/mags out there that are very non-institutionalised, if you get the jones to try again. I could name names. Once when I was a teen I thought I saw a ghost in my parents’ kitchen, but, in retrospect, I think I was just really stoned and having eyes-related trippiness. Oh, and one time about 15 years or so ago I was sitting in my mom’s house, and this young guy who had been staying in her pool house killed himself, and there was a briefcase of his papers and stuff leaning against a wall, and I was looking at it and thinking how weird./sad it was that he killed himself, and the briefcase just kind of flew up in the air and fell over. It was one of the weirdest, most inexplicable things ever. So maybe that counts? If that was a ghost, it was really confusing, so I’m not sure if I can recommend an encounter, ha ha. How was your today? ** ShadeoutMapes:3, Hi! Ah, gotcha, you’re out of school for the duration. That really does sound extremely unfairly drastic. But, yeah, I guess use it to make stuff as much as you can. When I lived in Amsterdam in the mid-80s, I was really isolated, but I used that to write my first novel ‘Closer’, so it can be boon and painful the same time. Ha ha, I get it, about your theater teacher. You guys can’t meet up for a coffee or something? Gosh, I don’t remember what camera I would have used to take those pix of George. It could have been one of these really cheap cameras they used to sell, I think mostly for kids, called a Brownie camera? I think a lot of that quality you mentioned just came from how the photos aged really. You weren’t too lengthy, just so you know. I hope your day today is really, really not dull. ** Right. I was talking on here with Tosh Berman, and he mentioned actors who make art on the side, and that reminded me of this goofy old post I made about celebrities who are also painters, and I decided to restore it for better or worse. You decide. See you tomorrow.

 

‘In August of 1972, Hannah Weiner, an accomplished and highly politicized performance artist and poet, began to receive a remarkable form of “dictation.” Printed words of all sizes bombarded Weiner; she saw these words in the air, on every available surface, on people, on the page before she wrote them, and on her forehead from within. Weiner called her “psychic” ability to see words “clairvoyance.” She developed a mode of poetic writing, “clair-style,” that incorporated words and phrases clairvoyantly seen, eventually composing through these seen elements exclusively. In such groundbreaking works as Clairvoyant Journal (1978), LITTLE BOOKS/INDIANS (1980), Sixteen (1983), Spoke (1984), and silent teachers remembered sequel (1994), Weiner did not so much experiment with existing literary models to document the experience of clairvoyance as she created a number of startlingly raw and enormously complex poetic forms, becoming a heroic figure at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan and in the bicoastal school of Language writing.

‘Weiner let no representation of herself circulate that did not take her status as a clairvoyant into account, as, for instance, her introduction to Nijole’s House (1981) demonstrates: “ALL WORDS BELIEVE IT SEEN / I ams a clairvoyant”).2 To read Weiner’s poetry is thus to confront her claim to clairvoyance, which makes the critical reception of her work an incredibly complicated matter: her emphatic experiential claims and the terms on which she makes them at once legitimate her poetry a priori as testimony and overtly perform as a persuasive strategy within what are extremely self-consciously literary works. Either set of terms requires that we read clairvoyance other than as a symptom of schizophrenia, an illness with which Weiner had been diagnosed.

‘I want to suggest, however, that in naming the phenomena by which words were given to her to be seen “clairvoyance,” Weiner alerts us to the peculiar status of her texts without allowing us to medicalize and dismiss them. For her poetry, arriving from elsewhere in ordinary language, can only become deviant if we decide to make it so from the outset. Indeed, Weiner creates not only an enabling, but a strikingly innovative and important position from which to write: she engages the occultations entailed by linguistic abstraction and signals that she is enabled to do so through a banalized version of the occult. However nonvolitional, clairvoyance is a technique for estranging the normalcy that mystifies us. And Weiner’s tactic of reverse discourse, one that appears to trade the blindness of a delegitimized epistemological position for the insight of an idealized and rarefied psychic state, also opens onto paradoxes of reading and writing that her radical, language-centered poetics confronts.

‘As testimony, clairvoyance does not avow the transparency of its medium, but rather makes the coercion of mediation evident. Openly declaring her solicitation of belief through a trope only figuratively removed beyond belief, Weiner exposes belief itself as the strange but mundane sine qua non of reading. Her strategy illuminates writing’s demands on us as it gainsays a credibility it has already hooked in the very act of soliciting credibility. Straining against the transcendental quality of language even as she points to it as a foregone conclusion, Weiner not only disrupts the normative transparency of what is to be read but also erodes the normative rationality of the figure who reads.

‘For Weiner emphasized that she was not the frictionless vehicle for messages from another scene, but rather the recipient of language that formally and thematically implicated its resistance to meaning. This seen language also revealed that the very recognition of language as such subjects us to a meaning that can neither be averred nor denied. An exteriorized, nonintentional form of writing, the seen words not only provided a unique means of encountering language as an indeterminate, opaque materiality that we ourselves enliven with belief, but also as a form of mediation that announced itself as being curiously existentially indefinite, both there and not there. Thus, even as she anchored these phenomena in her cognitive experience, clairvoyance was for Weiner not a traffic with the spirit, but a near miss with the letter. Reflexively signifying on clairvoyance as “quaint phrase” or sedimented term, Weiner turned this familiar figure of heightened vision against itself.

‘In fact, the reversals of Weiner’s discursive practice take place on a number of levels, constantly spoiling assumptions about and built into language, yet conscious that our escape from these assumptions is comprised and compromised by language itself. In taking the unusual dictation of clairvoyance, Weiner inverts the apostrophe of lyric poetry and externalizes poetic agency, locating it in mediation. Seeing words clairvoyantly illustrates the mediating tension in language that plays out in syntactical structures, disciplinary mechanisms that echo institutional relationships. Further, rather than performing as a privileged, gendered proximity to authentic knowledge or as a vitiation of a gendered position of knowledge, as it has done traditionally, clairvoyance instead functions as a reflexive figure about figures of knowledge. Weiner dissects a grammar of epistemology that presupposes and incorporates differences as differentials in power.

‘Vigilant in denaturalizing her technology of representation, Weiner turns clairvoyance to political use, rendering structural and thus necessarily social inequities historically specific. As the singular witness to clairvoyant phenomena, she is poignantly aware that her testimony can only appear in a recognizable and overdetermined form. For Weiner, this hyper-attentiveness to overdetermination resonates most strongly with the political predicament of Native Americans, whose difficulties in achieving adequate political representation demonstrate the limitations of politics and the need for an ethical relation to difference. Weiner was an ardent proponent of the American Indian Movement, but she found, in a sense parallel to her own situation, that to be a witness for is also to be a witness against: simply to use an officially recognized language is already to be implicated in the structures of power, to exploit alterity as it is rendered recognizable. Weiner puts the paralogical or oblique insight she gains from clairvoyance to work in her nonclairvoyant writings as well, commenting on the deep and seemingly unavoidable violence in any representational framework.’ — Judith Goldman

 

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Further

Hannah Seiner @ electronic poetry center
Audio: Hannah Weiner readings @ PENNSOUND
Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner
Charles Bernstein on Hannah Weiner
Avant-Garde Journalism: Hannah Weiner’s Early and Clairvoyant Journals
Hannah Weiner: In beloved memory
Witness Hannah Weiner
The landscape of Hannah Weiner’s late work
About What: Hannah Weiner
Hannah Weiner @ goodreads
Hannah Weiner and Basic English
Hannah Weiner and Rammellzee
HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE
Spectral Conversions: James Merrill and Hannah Weiner
Playtime with Jacques Tati and Hannah Weiner
“You can transcend this stupid bad girl reality”: A study of Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style”
What Hannah Weiner Means to Me
“‘Suddenly Everything Went Blue’: Late Style in Hannah Weiner’s The Book of Revelations”
Read ‘Clairvoyant Journal’ free online here

 

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Hannah Weiner on Public Access Poetry 12-29-77

‘From 1977 to 1978 a group of poets were given a broadcasting spot on the New York cable television station where they launched an avant-garde TV format presenting contemporary poets and poetry. The show Public Access Poetry (PAP) aired once a week for half an hour and showcased the then mostly unknown poets of the trendy New York downtown scene, such as Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Jim Brodem or Charles Bernstein. When Hannah Weiner was invited she performed entries of the 1974 Clairvoyant Journal together with Sharon Mattlin and Peggy De Coursey. Likewise, the recording of the New Wilderness Audiographic Series of Cassettes 1978 was performed with three voices. This first explicit audio art label in the USA specialized on compilations and editions of cross-genre sound recordings, such as experimental and traditional music, poetry, stories and sound art.’ — Kunsthalle Zürich

‘The situation of the voices, and the interruption and overlay, is quite clear if you hear the tapenade by New Wilderness Audiographics wherein Sharon Mattlin is a wonderful CAPITALS and bosses me around endlessly. (…) Peggy (De Coursey) and Regina (Beck) both sound as if they were scolding me. We worked it so that the voices came fast after each other, occasionally speaking unison and overlapping, and occasionally one of us would ad-lib comment.‘ — Hannah Weiner

 

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Extras

Hannah Weiner: A Film by Phill Niblock (1974)

Rock-A-Bye Rock Lobster

Rita Gonzalez Reads Hannah Weiner

Performing Hannah Weiner’s Code Poem “RJ Romeo & Juliet”

 

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Hannah Weiner @ Kunsthalle Zürich
Feb 21, 2015 – May 17, 2015

‘This show, curated by young Basel curator Franziska Glozer, portrays the in every sense extraordinary poetry of American writer Hannah Weiner (1928 –1997). Her writing centers on the word in all its variations as it describes, laughs, interrupts, commands and desires to be expressed without drawing a breath.’ — Mutual Art

 

_________
Interviewed by Charles Bernstein
from LINEbreak

 

Hannah, what first got you interested in writing poetry? I think your early work also included performance work; when did you actually start writing poems?

I didn’t start writing poems until my middle thirties. It was something that . . . writing was something I wanted to do as a child. And I won a medal for it in junior high school. But I just couldn’t hang in with writing novels or something. And twenty years went by. And one vacation I just decided to write. And a friend said not to care whether you write novels or short stories or essays or poetry, just write. And I wrote on a legal pad for, oh, ten or twelve pages, and then suddenly I saw I was writing poetry. And that shocked me. And then I went to take classes, mostly at the New School. And I found I couldn’t write New York School poetry. In fact, I can’t.

Who were the classes at the New School with?

Oh, Kenneth Koch, and I believe Bill Berkson.

Bill Berkson. So two poets associated with the New York School.

Yes. And there was a course with Louise Bogan at NYU.

Louise Bogan!

Previously to that, yes.

That’s a great thing to think about, you with Louise Bogan. You seem—

Well, she bored me to tears. [Laughs.]

And I was going to quit poetry entirely, but I had a scholarship to the New School and I went into Kenneth’s class and he . . . Although I didn’t write his kind of poetry, he was a very inspiring teacher. He was just full of it.

I do think the Clairvoyant Journal is a performance work as much as it is a poem. It’s a diary, as much as it is an essay. It’s a work that’s hard to characterize. Could you talk a little about what you had in mind when you started to do that work?

The Clairvoyant Journal? Well, I started to see words in August 1972. And I saw them for a year and they were all over the place, coming out of my hair and my toenails, and god-knows- what. And I nally got the message in the Village Voice . . . at a Satchidananda retreat, to see him. And I wrote a note, or two notes, to him, and he put the big words on my forehead.

So are you saying that the Clairvoyant Journal was partly dictated, in the Jack Spicer sense? That you were recording things, that you were seeing outside you, with your own interventions mixed in?

Well the Clairvoyant Journal has three voices. The capital words, which give instructions, the italics, which make comments, and the ordinary type, which is me just trying to get through the day. And it was a quite wild thing to type.

There is a little bit of a quality I can hear in your contemporary Frank O’Hara. For example, “It’s 6:12 in New York,” and the mentioning of the proper names of friends or people that you know.

Yes, I know . . .

But, also . . .

I cheat in language. [Laughs.]

There’s the lack of a kind of anecdote or anecdotal force that you have in some of O’Hara, or in some of his immediate associates. You have a much fatter tone. This seems to be—if Louise Bogan was here—I imagine she would say that there was a lack of literary quality [in this poem].

Oh, for heaven’s sakes don’t mention her! She bored me to tears.

Because there’s no beginning, middle, or end. It just continues on. And also there’s a lot of very ordinary material. A lot of things that might be considered trivial, where nothing is happening.

Oh yes, it’s a very . . . it’s just a journal. When I became clairvoyant I just started keeping a journal of everything that was happening.

What interested you about the kinds of diaristic materials that would normally be excluded from poetry, that you’ve put in? The things that most people would edit out. Lots of the Clairvoyant Journal consists of things that in a conventional poetic and literary context would be edited out.

It came from conceptual art, when there was an idea in the late 60s and early 70s to document everything. Or to make docu- ments of things. And so that’s what I did. And then I edited out. For example, The Fast, I edited out forty- ve pages from a thou- sand handwritten ones. And there’s another book following that that’s coming out soon.

If the Clairvoyant Journal is based on a diary or a journal, one thing that’s different about it is that it’s not just one single voice, and actually it explodes the narrative by having 3 contrasting voices, and the subject of that narrative is one who is being bombarded by different kinds of information. Are you ever embarrassed by what you write about in the journal, by the openness of it? Not the openness in the sense that you’re revealing kind of scandalous things, but just the openness to the triviality of thought, to the shifting of thought.

Oh, Charles, I don’t have time to be embarrassed! I’m always seeing words! Or hearing voices, or whichever form the clairvoy- ance takes.

Embarrassment could be understood as being kind of a male concern within literature, which women writers have often pointed to. Certainly working within the diaristic tradition, or working with journals or diaries, can be associated with taking a form that’s associated with women. Do you think of your work as being feminist work, in that sense?

No, I really don’t. I don’t really believe it’s either one sex or the other. It’s a daily journal, and it’s gone slightly screwy, and is under control when you read it, with three voices, or when you see it, because of the three different typefaces.

So you don’t feel some association or alliance with some of the feminists of your generation?

Oh, I did at the time. Yes, indeed. But that was earlier in the 70s. This was written in ‘74, and published in ‘78.

Because really you’ve turned a kind of writing or a kind of thought which would be often disparaged as being women’s writing, or female writing, and you’ve made it the center of a very radical literary experiment.

Oh. [Sighs.] Well, I don’t know Charles. I bought a typewriter. And I looked at the words all over the place, and said you have three choices: caps, italics, and regular type, and that settled it, that’s all. The words settled down to three voices.

Do you think of your work in terms of a tradition of the avant garde, of experimentalism?

Yes, I’ve always felt that the best thing . . . I mean, how can you not be avant garde if you’re the only person in the world who sees words?

[Laughs.] But I thought we all see words, in some sense.

No, it isn’t the same at all! If you saw words in color across the living room, twelve or twenty feet long, “OBEY CHARLEMAGNE” or something, or saw them every time you moved, you’d realize that it’s really visual, and at the beginning it was in color. The color has disappeared. And at the moment I don’t see words on my forehead. It’s a little tiring for me now.

Well do you think such a project goes beyond poetry then? Or is it what poetry could be?

I’m really a silent teacher and that’s what I didn’t discover until I wrote Spoke.

What does it mean to be a silent teacher?

What?

What does it mean to be a silent teacher?

A silent teacher is one who trains other people to teach others who work subliminally and they give instructions.

Is that something that comes through in your writing? Or hap- pens to readers when they’re reading your writing?

Well the Clairvoyant Journal is, if you read it that way, a book of instructions. I don’t say so. There are a lot of things I haven’t made really clear, and I have to in the next book or two or . . .

Is there a performative aspect to . . .

Or three books, really. I have three books that will take me god knows how long.

 

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Book

Hannah Weiner Clairvoyant Journal
Angel Hair Books

‘With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.’ — les presses du reel

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** CAUTIVOS, Thanks. If I see a Haslett novel in a book store I’ll just rifle through it and see if the prose excites me at all. I can usually tell pretty quickly. I’ll look for the Bernard Quiriny book, thank you. I have a really busy day ahead, how was yours? ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘DR’ seems important because it gave a lot of people courage, and even though the mainstream isn’t of interest to me at all, it is the entrance for most people into much more interesting ideas and places, I guess. It’s like if people like Radiohead, maybe that leads them to look for music further afield that is genuinely experimental. Or something. ‘Dracula’, yes, I keep meaning to. I just typed it into my little reminder doc. It’s hard to believe ‘Killing Time’ actually works, but I guess it does. Very cool, yeah. Hard to choose — thank you for offering, love — but maybe the Rug one for some reason and maybe the knife throwing one? Love going back in time and convincing Grove Press to let me use his name backwards (‘Evol’) as the title of my novel ‘Try’ which was the  title  I originally wanted but which they refused to let me use, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I actually saw that one in person, and it’s even better ‘in the flesh’. I don’t know Lily Savage. I’m on it, thanks to you. Oh, man, I hope the antibiotics have kicked in and are doing their magic. How are you feeling today? ** Misanthrope, Some friends and I did go see an American football game live once out of curiosity a long time ago when the Rams were LA’s team, but we gave up and left after about 45 minutes. Tsitsipas: I’ll peel my eyes for him. 2023 is hot. Let’s gangbang it. ** Jack Skelley, Goodness, what a completely curious dream. Man, I have no clue what that means. Dreams and me, we’re like ships in the night. Seems positive though. Makes me want to get a pipe cleaner/hair transplant in time for our Saturday confab. I guess me wanting to do that means I’m secretly a big attention hog? ** David Ehrenstein, The link didn’t work, but I vaguely remember some sort of motorised something in ‘Holy Motors’, so I’ll concentrate on that. ** malcolm, Hey. That NYE of yours sounds nice. I just watched the documentary about King Crimson and ate some dark chocolate and zzzzz. That is some crazy synchronicity. And yeah, those have to be road signs on the right track. I would love to hear that Dudley Benson EP if it’s no trouble. I like sweet pop, especially when it’s awesome and obscure at the same time. My dad had this brief period of being really into rock polishing, and he had this rock polishing machine in our basement, and I used to go down there and get stoned and sit and watch it tremble and revolve and rattle for hours. Rock your today, and see you in the/my AM! ** Robert, Hi, Robert. Wow, those videos look extremely fun. I am in fact going to line them up and watch them in full after I finish a few meetings I have to do this morning. Wow, thank you. I’m not sure, and it’s a different-ish sort of thing, but you might like the videos of this artist Jon Rafman who I’m showcasing here on Friday. I feel freaked out just trying not to imagine that operating table scenario. But I like being freaked out, no worries. Thanks! Stuff good with you du jour? ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah. I’m glad you came back. You’re a fiction writer, awesome! Me too. Is there anything anywhere I could read? The website project sounds exciting. There’s definitely a need for it. I’ll be all over it when you finish it if that’s any kind of encouragement. I’m big on collaborating too. Finding a conducive collaborator is pretty special. When I feel that connection, I try to make myself jump at the chance. It’s especially rewarding if you’re often writing fiction on your lonesome, you know? I totally agree this year is going to make the previous ones seem puny. Have an inspiring Wednesday! ** ShadeoutMapes:O, Hey! I’m sorry about you missing out on the school day. Are you going to miss the whole semester? You’re a theater kid, cool. Like how? Or I guess I mean are you an onstage guy or a behind the scenes guy or both or other? I haven’t seen ‘The Whale’, but, yeah, I hope Brendan Frasier gets the Oscar ‘cos … yeah. I’ll go find your email. Cool. Stay in your good mood. It’s radiating and infectious. ** Okay. Do y’all know the writer Hannah Weiner? If not, how and why she wrote makes for a pretty unique and interesting story, and the work is super worthy too. Have a look. See you tomorrow.