‘Stan Brakhage’s great subject was light itself, its infinite varieties seen as manifestations of unbounded and unrestricted energy and its concretization into objects representing the trapping of that energy, and his great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by using that which was uniquely cinematic — by organizing light in the time and space of the projected image — in a way that would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry, painting, and music that most inspired him. The subtleties of his work, the intricacy with which he used composition and color and texture and rhythm, resulted in films that virtually demand multiple viewings. The best known and most important of avant-garde filmmakers, he was also in my estimation among the half-dozen greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium — and, as I believe time will establish, one of the very greatest artists of the 20th century in any medium. …’ (read the rest) — Fred Camper, Senses of Cinema

‘Stan Brakhage has left the world a legacy larger than we’ll ever be likely to get a handle on. With a body of work as large as his, one might find it difficult and ultimately pointless to try and reign it all in beneath a single umbrella. But there is a sheltering concept under which his vast array of films enjoys a bond: Brakhage wanted the world to learn to see again. He wanted us to rid ourselves of the shackles imposed on us by the rules of Renaissance perspective, to abandon the search for ever greater levels of visual acuity, definition, clarity and detail, and to re-embrace those parts of our experience that we have learned to let go unnoticed, or consider to be flawed by the standards of High Definition culture. As P. Adams Sitney notes, “When [Brakhage] decided to become a filmmaker he threw away his eyeglasses” (Sitney 1979:149). That about sums it up.’ (read the rest) — Randolf Jordan, Off Screen

‘Those who consider cinema a narrative art form, and believe that films should have a beginning, a middle and an end – in that order – will have problems with the work of Stan Brakhage. His films were difficult also for those not willing to shed the conventionalised illusion, imposed by rules of perspective, compositional logic and “lenses grounded to achieve 19th-century compositional perspective”. For Brakhage, the goal of cinema was the liberation of the eye itself, the creation of an act of seeing, previously unimagined and undefined by conventions of representation, an eye as natural and unprejudiced as that of a cat, a bee or an infant. There were few filmmakers – film director is too limiting a description – who went so far to train audiences to see differently.’ (rest the rest) — Ronald Bergen, The Guardian

 

 

Brakhage on Brakhage

This is to introduce myself. I am young and I believe in magic. I am learning how to cast spells. My profession is transforming. I am what is known as “an artist.” Three years ago I made a discovery which caused me dis-ease at the time: neither the society in which I had grown up nor my society of that moment, my college, knew what to do with me. They were wary of me. — Dartmouth, 1955

I am devoting my life to what is inappropriately called “The Experimental Film,” in America, because I am an artist and, as such, am convinced that freedom of personal expression (that which is called “experiment” by those who don’t understand it) is the natural beginning of any art, and because I love film and am excited above everything else by the possibilities inherent in film as a means of aesthetic expression. — in answer to a questionnaire, 1957

I would say I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration. I began to feel that all history, all life, all that I would have as material with which to work, would have to come from the inside of me out rather than as some form imposed from the outside in. I had the concept of everything radiating out of me, and that the more personal or egocentric I would become, the deeper I would reach and the more I could touch these universal concerns which would involve all man. — interview with P. Adams Sitney, Metaphors On Vision, 1963

OF NECESSITY I BECOME INSTRUMENT FOR THE PASSAGE OF INNER VISION, THRU ALL MY SENSIBILITIES, INTO ITS EXTERNAL FORM. My most active part in this process is to increase all my sensibilities (so that all films arise out of some total area of being or full life) AND, at the given moment of possible creation to act only out of necessity. In other words, I am principally concerned with revelation. — letter to Sitney, 1963

 

 

Brakhage resources

Complete filmography
Descriptions of all Stan Brakhage films
Stan Brakhage on the Web
Stan Brakhage @ Wikipedia
Filmed Interview with Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage @ the Criterion Collection
Obituary @ Indiewire
Stan Brakhage’s Sound Recordings

 

15 films

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971)
‘In this third part of The Pittsburgh Trilogy (following “Eyes” and “Deus Ex”) Stan Brakhage photographed autopsy — a term which comes from the Greek, meaning: “The act of seeing with one’s own eyes.” “… Stan Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.”‘ — Hollis Frampton

 

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991)
‘The primary “Molten Horror” is TV–though there are other horrors metaphored in the film. Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light.’ — Light Cone

 

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
‘Like a lot of Brakhage’s work, Window Water Baby Moving celebrates the natural processes of life with a mix of poetic and plainspoken imagery. The film starts with the image of Jane’s full belly as she reclines in a bathtub. Then comes a sequence focused on the birth. We see the literal emergence, in extreme close-up, of his newborn daughter. The film does all of this without music or sound of any kind, which makes the experience both confrontational and strangely serene.’ — Paul Harrill

Watch the film here

 

Sirius Remembered (1959)
‘I was coming to terms with decay with a dead thing and the decay if the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast our of probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my source of inspiration for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of song.’ — S.B.

 

The Dante Quartet (1987)
‘This hand-painted film work 6 years in-the-making (37 in the studying of the Divine Comedy ) demonstrates the earthly conditions of Hell, Purgatory, (to Transition), and Heaven (or existence is song, which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from Hell (HELL SPIT FLEXION) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states, Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm. and 35mm., these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm. and 16mm.’ — Filmmakers Coop

 

Dog Star Man (1964)
‘One of the most spectacular things I have ever seen: the sole effect of being severely waterboarded by the forces of the Universe, from the origin of space and time to the crowded modernity. A tremendous juxtaposition of the visions of a man that has towards superior forces, towards transendence and towards our inherent spiritual perpetuity, contemplating the vastness of existence and the beginning of humankind and its continuation through procreation. I must also highlight that this colossus predates Kubrick’s odyssey by six years and there is an overwhelmingly substantial amount of traces that would be seen in Kubrick’s more than legendary achievement. In the meantime, this is the transition between Dadaism and impressionism through a lens that experiments with the line between animation created by optical effects and live-action subjective artistic appreciation. It is not strictly Surrealism, but the dream of an artist that flows with its own essence. A monumental achievement.’ — Edgar Cochran

 

Mothlight (1963)
‘As Brakhage explains in the remarks on this (and other films in the set) that he recorded in 2002, mere months before he passed away from cancer the following year, Mothlight was a product of intense angst that he was feeling at the time, as his consuming passion for making films that were utterly non-commercial, obscure and perplexing to most viewers was costing him dearly in his personal life. One night as he was watching moths and other insects swoop to their doom into an irresistible flame, he drew the mental connection between their self-destructive but uncontrollable instincts and his own drive to express himself in ways that didn’t help provide for his family’s needs and often invited scorn or rejection from people too quick to dismiss the courageous, beautiful short films that he was creating out of a pure love for the medium. Though he had internalized that negative feedback to the point of considering himself a failure and contemplating suicide, Brakhage somehow persevered in his craft. Gathering up the remnants – wings, antennae, legs, and other components – of dead moths along with grasses, leaves, stems, petals and various flaky bits no longer easily identifiable, Brakhage found an artistic way to redeem their annihilation, giving these anonymous ephemeral life forms a form of cultural immortality. In the process, he created a visual phenomenon that challenges viewers to regard the natural world from a different perspective as the shapes, textures and colors explode across the screen, dazzling our eye and exposing us to new patterns of organization that would never have occurred to us if these elements had not been embedded on film in such a unique arrangement.’ — Criterion Reflections

 

Black Ice (1994)
‘I lost sight due a blow on the head from slipping on black ice (leading to eye surgery, eventually); and now (because of artificially thinned blood) most steps I take outdoors all winter are made in frightful awareness of black ice. These “meditations” have finally produced this hand-painted, step-printed film.’ — S.B.

 

Water for Maya (2000)
‘As the blur of colours and textures explode and disperse, a second layer of images reveals itself, gradually, over the course of the film. A ghost story – non-narrative, but a story all the same – moving beneath the surface. This spectral play of shadows, where the glimpsed faces become almost explicit, is where the real power of the film rests. Not simply as a tribute to the American filmmaker Maya Derren, as hinted at by the film’s title, but as a truly sensory cinematic experience. In this remarkable montage, every frame has the power of a Pollock or a Kandinsky. On screen for less than the normal time that it might take for our eyes to register its form, but still vivid, vital; a series of images open to interpretation. The accumulative effect of these images when viewed against one another in a quick succession, creates something that is difficult to define, and even more difficult to express in words. It is something that can only be felt through the process of viewing.’ — lights in the dusk

 

Star Garden (1974)
‘The “star”, as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At “high noon” (of the narrative) it can be imagined as if in back of the screen, and then to shift its imagined light-source gradually back thru aftertones and imaginings of the “stars” of the film till it achieves a one-to-one relationship with the moon again. This “sun” of the mind’s eye of every viewer does not necessarily correspond with the off-screen “pictured sun” of the film; but anyone who plays this game of illumination will surely see the film in its most completely conscious light.’ — Letterboxd

 

I… Dreaming (1988)
‘This is a setting-to-film of a collage of Stephen Foster phrases by compose Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to loss of love in the popular torch song mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and it posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the psychology of waiting.’ — Film-makers Coop

 

The Dark Tower (1999)
‘This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with streaks of light and vibrantly colored forms. There appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower– An imposing silhouette against the backdrop of the flaring sky.’ — Letterboxd

 

Songs 1-14 (1964-65)
‘During a 1964 visit to New York City, Brakhage’s 16mm film equipment was stolen. Unable to afford the cost of replacing the equipment, Brakhage instead opted to buy cheaper 8mm film equipment, which at the time was being marketed to amateurs to use for home movies. The Songs were Brakhage’s first works in the medium.’ — Wiki

 

The Stars are Beautiful (1974)
‘We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, such as “The stars are a flock of hummingbirds,” contrast with images and sounds of real children.’ — Letterboxd

 

Interviewed

You’ve been involved with film for over 40 years — as a maker, thinker, writer and academic. Has your sense of film as film changed?

In one sense it hasn’t changed: from the beginning I had a feeling for film as vision. I didn’t think it was related to literature or theatre at all, nor had it anything to do with Renaissance perspective. I was staggling the time against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of ‘picture — by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don’t even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that. So I had certain instinctual feelings about film even before I made one.

What do you mean by ‘vision, and how is it related to film?

For me vision is what you see, to the least extent related to picture. It is just seeing — it is a very simple word — and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can’t see. Children can — they have a much wider range of visual awareness — because their eyes haven’t been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic. Every semester I start out by telling my students that they have to see in order to experience film and that seeing is not just looking at pictures. This simple idea seems to be the hardest to get through to people.

But is it really so simple? In your films, to see without picturing is a composite of many visual processes, only one of which is open-eye vision, or what we call normal everyday vision.

Open-eye vision is what we are directly conscious of, but there’s much more going on that we ignore. Seeing includes open-eye, peripheral and hypnagogic vision, along with moving visual thinking, dream vision and memory feedback — in short, whatever affects the eyes, the brain and the nervous system. I believe that all these have a right to be called seeing since they enable us to inherit the spectrum of on optic and nervous system.

Can you define them?

Hypnagogic vision is what you see through your eyes closed — at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It’s optic feedback: the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced — your visual memories — into the optic nerve endings. It’s also called closed-eye vision. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs deeper in the synapsing of the brain. It’s a streaming of shapes that are not nameable — a vast visual ‘song of the cells expressing their internal life.

Peripheral vision is what you don’t pay close attenion to during the day and which surfaces at night in your dreams. And memory feedback consists of the editings of your remembrance. It’s like a highly edited movie made from the real.

How is film predisposed to embody these?

Over the years, I have come to believe that every machine people invent is nothing more than an extension of their innards. The base rhythm of film — 24 frames per second — is sort of centred in its pulse to our brain waves. If you start a film at 8 frames per second and with a variable speed motor slowly raise it to 32, you put the audience in the first stage of hypnosis.

So the natural pulse of film is a pulse of Film is a corollary to the brain’s reception of everyday ordinary vision. Then film grain approximates the first stage of hypnagogic vision, which occurs at a pulse within the range of film’s possibilities of projection. Also, during editing, film comes close to the way you remember. And finally, if you cut fast enough, you can reflect within 24 frames per second the saccadic movements of the eyes, which people aren’t ordinadly aware of, but which are an intrinsic part of seeing.

So virtually all your experiments were aimed at developing this relationship between film and seeing?

My cutting has always tried to be true to the eyes, to the nervous system and to memory, and to capture these processes, which happen very rapidly. At one point I felt my montage — inspired by Griffith and Eisenstein — had to evolve to do justice to memory recall, so I began to use the single frame to suggest what the mind can do during a flashback. Then I began to use superimpositions because these occur constantly in the saccadic movements of the eyes and in memory feedback and input.

I’ve done as many as seven superimpositions at one time — in Christ Mass Sex Dance (1990) — and I wish I could do more because there are more in vision itself. Then I shot out of focus to capture peripheral vision, which is always unfocused, or used flares to give a sense of the body when it has an overload in feedback and literally flares — something you can see with your eyes open.

In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares — it’s really the nervous system’s ecstasy — in oranges and yellows and whites. I had noticed that when film flares out at the end of a colour roll, you get those same colours, and I put them in because they are intrinsic to human vision as well.

But of all these possible seeings, the hypnagogic has been the most important to you.

Yes. I sometimes like just to sit and watch my closed eyes sparking, or the streamings of my mind. They’re the best movies in town! But the flow is so rapid that to document it would call for a camera that would run 1,000 frames per second. All I can do on film is to grasp a little piece of it and then make a corollary. So my films don’t reflect what I see when I close my eyes — only a symbol of that. The extent to which I accept that is the extent to which I can be true to what film can do.

Since closed-eye vision is largely unfilmable, then, you had to find other means of representing it, and painting directly on to film became one way to do this.

At the birth of my first child, I was acutely conscious of my hypnagogic vision whenever I blinked my eyes. But it didn’t appear in the film I made of that birth — Window Water Baby Moving (1959) — so for the birth of my second child, which occurs in Part 2 of Dog Star Man and of my third in Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), I painted on film to include what I had seen. I became very excited when I realised that my closed-eye vision resembled the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters I admired so much — all very Pollock-like and Rothko-like.

Did you sense that they were also doing the same thing — recording their optic feedback?

When I was living in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, I became an avid gallery-goer. I discovered Turner, who is probably still the most pervasive influence on me because of his representations of light. I was also strongly drawn to the abstact Expressionists — Pollock, Rothko, Kline — because of their interior vision. None of these so-called abstract painters — going back to Kandinsky and earlier — had made any reference to painting consciously out of their closed-eye vision, but I became certain that unconsciously many of them had. To me, they were all engaged in making icons of inner picturisation, literally mapping modes of non-verbal, non-symbolic, non-numerical thought. So I got interested in consciously and unconsciously attempting to represent this.

But it wasn’t enough to paint. To find as close a corollary to hypnagogic vision as possible, you had physically to manipulate the surface of the film strip.

I tried a number of different things, including iron filings under magnets! I would bake film before and after photographing to bring out certain chemical changes in the grain so that it would correspond to certain stages of hypnagogic vision. I once even herded brine shrimp into a pack to capture the quality of their movements. And I worked with household chemicals and dyes, and placed coloured powders under vibrators and magnets. The making of The Text of Light (1974), which involved shooting through a glass ashtray, was another way of capturing certain forms of both closed- and open-eye envisionment of light.

And you would scratch on film and write on it.

Words appear on film throughout my work. By scratching them I try to be true to the way words vibrate and jiggle when they appear in closed-eye vision — which doesn’t happen very often. Also, by scratching them I can at least make them more intrinsic to what film is — they become carriers of light. Photographed words relate more to memory recall or just to the open-eyed present.

Hand-painted sections appear in your work as early as Prelude (1962), the first part of Dog Star Man but in the past few years you’ve been making films such as The Dante Quartet and Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991) that are wholly hand-painted. You even claim this is all you want to do now.

I now believe that film is much more predisposed to what you can do with Paint and scratches than with anything else. My hand-painted films are my favourites — I look at them again and again and they always feel like film not as if they’re referring to something else.

Do you see your work within a specific tradition of hand-painted film?

I’ve always felt drawn to the hand-painted films of Méliès, which are an extraordinary phenomenon in their own right and I’ve felt a kinship with film-makers such as Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, Oscar Fischinger and Len Lye, who even batiked on film with his fingers. One of my main inspirations has been Marie Menken, and Harry Smith is often in my mind as I work. Many of them didn’t paint on film but their work has a hands-on quality that I admire.

What do you mostly work with?

Acrylics — mostly translucent acrylics — and India inks and a variety of dyes that are variously mixed with or not with acrylics. I have also made whole films with Magic Markers. I use brushes at times, but basically it’s paint on fingers, a different colour on each finger. Usually I prepare the film first with chemicals, so that the paint can dry and form patterns, then during the drying process I use chemicals again to create organic shapes and forms. Finally, I go over it a frame at a time to stitch these patterns into a unifed whole. If you watch me do it it looks as though I’m playing the piano – it’s very quick; very deft — but people forget that I have to paint 24 frames to get a second’s worth of film. I have hand-painted films like Eye Myth (1972), which is 9 seconds long, as well as Interpolations (1992) which runs for 12 minutes — the longest hand-painted film I have ever made.

You’ve painted on all kinds of film stock including 65mm Imax film. You also paint directly on footage you’ve found or shot yourself. What part of vision does that approximate?

Let me say first that painting on Imax was very exciting — it was as if an easel painter had been given a wall, it was such a large space to work with. The model for painting on photographed film was closed-eye vision mixing with open-eye vision. Not very many people can see that and it took me a long time before I could do both — see what I was looking at and also watch the nervous system’s immediate shape-and-color reaction to it.

So what is the new hand-painted work going to be?

What’s new is that I don’t have anything else as reference other than what the film itself is showing me. Every time fi1m reflects something that’s nameable, it limits what it can do. If I can make films that refer to things that can’t be lived through, then I feel that I’m giving film a chance to be in the fullest possible sense, and that makes me feel good. Now I really just want to fool around with paint on film, hoping to do so in such an open way that whatever is deep inside me, past all prejudice and even all learning, can come out along my arms to my fingertips, and with the help of these smudges and dyes sing a song like birds on a normal day.

(more)

 

In person

Legendary Epics Yarns and Fables: Part 2: Stan Brakhage (USA 1969)

Stan Brakhage exits the cinema and enters the Light of Day

Stan Brakhage phone call re: Phil Solomon’s “CLEPSYDRA” (1992)

Robert Creeley: on Stan Brakhage

 

Select frame enlargements

Anticipation of the Night. 1958.
16mm; 40 minutes; color; silent

‘The daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promisory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.’

 

“…” Reel 2. 1998
16mm; 16 minutes; color; silent

‘Brakhage’s new series of scratch-and-stain films, known as (…) or ellipses, are, among other things, a visual analogue to Abstract Expressionism. The onrushing imagery and the spatial conundrums it creates evoke not only Pollock but also the work of Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, and even Mark Rothko – that is Pollock et al., at 24 frames per second. Eschewing the camera, Brakhage scrapes away the film emulsion to create a thicket (or sometimes a spider’s web) of white lines and rich, chemical colors. Some segments of the original footage appear to have been printed on negative stock or perhaps solarized – so that the blue and pink lines are inscribed on a white field. In any case, (…) is a cosmos. Rich without being ingratiating, the effect is one of rhythmic conflagration.’

 

The Dead. 1960.
16mm; 11 minutes; color; silent

‘Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn’t live in it. The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. THE DEAD became my first work, in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive.’ — S.B.

 

Mothlight. 1963.
16mm; 3 minutes; color; silent

‘Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.” – Jonas Mekas “MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being.’ – Ken Kelman

 

The Dante Quartet. 1987.
16mm or 35mm; 6 minutes; color; silent

‘This hand-painted work six years in-the-making (37 in the studying of The Divine Comedy) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition) and “Heaven” (or “existence is song,” which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” (HELL SPIT FLEXION) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnagogic vision created by those emotional states. Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of Western Cine.’

 

Murder Psalm. 1980.
16mm; 18 minutes; color; silent

‘“… unparalleled debauchery, when man turns into a filthy, cowardly, cruel, vicious reptile. That’s what we need! And what’s more, a little ‘fresh blood’ that we may grow accustomed to it ….” (Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, Part II, Chapter VIII) “In my novel The Devils I attempted to depict the complex and heterogenous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime.”’ — Dostoyevsky’s The Diary of a Writer

See many more Brakhage frame enlargements

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Steve, Hi. I will say that your report on ‘L’Amour’ does jibe with my memory of it. I was hoping age would help. Training session, live, interacting … that’s super exciting. I used to dj at the college station in university, and it was so much fun. Great, Steve. Excited to hear about that once it’s underway. Weekend … tonight is Nuit Blanche. From looking at the program, it looks as crappy as NB has sadly been for about the last decade, but there’s one atmospheric looking thing that might be worth a visit, and a dj is doing some kind of multi-media rave thing up the street, so I guess I’ll hear it at least. Otherwise, script work and seeing Jonathan Capedeville and Jean Luc Verna — veteran Gisele Vienne performers — do some kind of ‘sinister drag’ performance tomorrow. So, like that. Enjoy yours. ** Misanthrope, We’re both troopers, so no doubt. I vaguely remember Joe mentioning his encounter with Mr. White, and those being the first words out of Ed’s mouth is no surprise whatsoever, haha. Enjoy all the zzz’s which will hopefully be plentiful. ** _Black_Acrylic, Pleasure. She did swim there as well as step away and dry herself off and do something related but brand new. ** Bernard Welt, No, I did not know that phrase prior to this. If I can find an appropriate moment to mispronounce it, I will. I’ll alert Carsten to your note should he have missed it. My understanding of human biology is rote at best, but I am surprised that a gall bladder, which I thought was lodged way down in the body somewhere, would theatricalise itself in the upper body. Anyway, ouch, and glad you’re as verbally in one piece as ever. Are daydreams like the grandchildren of dreams having acid flashbacks or are they more like Elvis impersonators? I do know about those seashells. It is possible to live in France without having to know about those things if one chooses, but I don’t know any French people who don’t know about those things. The Mark Simpson thing is refreshing to some degree, yes. I don’t think Ed actively constructed and promoted his ‘the great gay writer’ image, although he was certainly comfortable there just as he was perfectly happy to go along with the Violet Quill nonsense because he knew very well that he was the best of those writers. He did once tell me how clever he thought I was to have found a ‘gimmick’ as a writer, which did make me wonder about him though. Nice that Gay Pride finds you acceptable. That speaks well of it. ** Alice, Hi! Such a fine reading of Kathy’s work. She would be so pleased even if she didn’t let you know that. Very interesting: your confrontation with repressed thoughts encouraging your writing. That was certainly and obviously true for me when I decided I had to be a writer. ‘I’m interested in the power of sparse moments where you’ve seen an obscured individual under their terms’: That’s beautiful. I feel like I completely relate to that. That interest is very much present the films I’m making with Zac. You just helped me vis-a-vis my future screening Q&As, thank you. Thoughts related to Candy Darling? Have you read Cindy Carr’s bio. It’s very good. Candy was always my favorite Warhol superstar. She’s really genius in ‘Women in Revolt’, I think. I don’t know if my thoughts about her are coagulated enough to allow a surface report. I think, like with most good things, she interests me because my ruminations re: her haven’t ceased being ongoing. I don’t know if that’s interesting. Nice to hear back from you too. I hope your weekend is very fruitful. ** Carsten, Bernard said some things to you if you didn’t read his comment. Nice Ellington line. I’d never heard that before. Good, you have a fine attitude towards submissions. Keep it close. Zac and I didn’t know most of the people we cast except through word of mouth in some cases. But all of the main cast of ‘RT’ who we didn’t previously know have become very good friends, so it can be an excellent friend making device. ** Hugo, Good idea. I generally avoid doorstoppers unless I really feel like I need to get a particular one in my brain, which is a rarity. So, yeah. And I haven’t read Proust, and I never will. That’s my vow. Well, yeah, I’m a writer who thinks words are completely incapable of conveying thought, and I think that giant challenge is what compels me to write, strangely and maybe not so strangely. The good thing about being a writer is that it does somehow open other arts to you, at least in collaborative situations, i.e. the films I’m primarily interested in making these days. So you can have the old cake and eat it too thing. In my experience, it’s a very rare fiction writer who went through a writing program at university whose work wasn’t permanently normalised by the experience even when they try to experiment. Thanks for the direct link. A white supremacist, eek. Alright, good to know. Anything special in the offing for you this weekend, or decent even if not special? ** julian, Hey. I know what you mean about translated work, but if I hadn’t read 99% translated work when I was young and aspiring to write, I would be a dullard. Great if her novel can help you with yours. That’s the ultimate reason to read, obviously. If you’re a writer reading, I mean. I don’t think I ever read fiction without looking to learn something as a writer. Is that what Folie a Deux means? I’ve always wondered. I quit smoking weed when I was 17 because I had an extreme LSD freak out, and I couldn’t smoke weed after that without triggering terrifying flashbacks. There are other ways to get sufficiently altered. ** pancakeIan, Sarraute was kind of the inventor of the Nouveau Roman movement, which, yes, Pinget was part of. That might be where the LA Disney contingent was meant to go. I’ll ask my friend when I see her on my next LA trip. I think the mass relocation got cancelled because, yes, many, many people said they would quit in that case, and I think it had something to do with the whole De Santis vs. Disney thing too. Even in Montana? That is a surprise. I guess it’s pretty there? ** HaRpEr //, Sarraute is ridiculously o.o.p. in English except for a couple of her later, more ‘readable’ books. Gotcha about the allure of the dramatic. I grew up with an extremely crazy alcoholic ‘schizo’ mother, and I think I was lucky in the sense that I was compelled to always try to find a way to feel chilled and survive emotionally from a really young age. Not that it works like a charm by any means. But I instinctively seek a doable and sane way forward at the worst of times. Comradeship is a total lifesaver. They’re out there, and there’s always some way to find them, but I don’t know how. ** Uday, But people who grew up in small towns and move to big cities are often the most hungry and wide-eyed people I know. Shit, ugh, about the harassment. Good luck thinking it out. That always works for me. Well, not always. I will keep my guard up today, and thank you for prioritising that necessary quality. ** Okay. This weekend you have the opportunity to spend your blog time with the very great experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and come away bettered as human beings in some sense if I have done my job correctly. We’ll see. See you on Monday.

 

‘With the exception of the early Tropismes, all of Nathalie Sarraute’s books are now available in English. Thanks are due to her publisher and to Maria Jolas who, to quote Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, has put her work “into English of such verisimilitude that it seems merely orchestrated in another key.” Novels are rarely masterpieces, and this is as it should be; it is even rarer to find a translation that is perfect, and this, perhaps, is not as it should or could be.

‘When Nathalie Sarraute published her first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown, in 1948, Sartre, in an Introduction, placed her with such authors of “entirely negative works” as Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and the Gide of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, and called the whole genre “anti-novel.” In the Fifties, the anti-novel became the New Novel and Sarraute its originator. All these classifications are somewhat artificial and, if applied to Mme. Sarraute, difficult to account for. She has herself pointed out her ancestors, Dostoevsky (especially the Notes from Underground) and Kafka in whom she sees Dostoevsky’s legitimate heir. But this much is true: She wrote at least her first pair of novels, the Portrait and Martereau (1953), against the assumptions of the classical novel of the nineteenth century, where author and reader move in a common world of well-known entities and where easily identifiable characters can be understood through the qualities and possessions bestowed upon them. “Since then,” she writes in her book of essays, The Age of Suspicion, “[this character] has lost everything; his ancestors, his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garret with a variety of objects, down to the tiniest gewgaw, his sources of income and his estates, his clothes, his body, his face…his personality and, frequently, even his name.” Man as such is or has become unknown so that it matters little to the novelist whom he chooses as his “hero” and less into what kind of surrounding he puts him. And since “the character occupied the place of honor between reader and novelist,” since he was “the object of their common devotion,” this arbitrariness of choice indicates a serious break-down in communication.

‘In order to recover some of this lost common ground, Nathalie Sarraute very ingeniously took the nineteenth-century novel, supposedly the common cultural heritage of author and reader, as her point of departure and began by choosing her “characters” from this richly populated world. She fished them right out of Balzac and Stendhal, stripped them of all those secondary qualities—customs, morals, possessions—by which they could be dated, and retained only those bare essentials by which we remember them: avarice—the stingy father living with his homely, penny-pinching spinster daughter, the plot turning about her numerous illnesses, fancied or real, as in Portrait; hatred and boredom—the closely-knit family unit which still survives in France, the “dark entirely closed world” of mother, father, daughter, and nephew in Martereau, where the plot turns about the “stranger” who swindles the father out of the money he had wanted to save from the income tax collector; even the hero of the later work, The Planetarium, personified ambition (the plot is a familiar one describing his ruthless “rise in social space”).

‘Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self. This inner life—what she calls “the psychological”—is no less hidden from “the surface world” of appearances than the physiological life process that goes on in the inner organs beneath the skin of bodily appearance. Neither shows itself of its own accord. And just as the physiological process announces itself naturally only through the symptoms of a disease (the tiny pimple, to use her own image, which is the sign of the plague), but needs a special instrument—the surgical knife or X rays—to become visible, so these psychological movements cause the outbreak of symptoms only in case of great disaster and need the novelist’s magnifying lenses of suspicion to be explored. To choose the intimacy of family life, this “semidarkness” behind closed curtains with its Strindbergian overtones, as a laboratory for this kind of psychological vivi-section, instead of the couch, was a sheer stroke of genius, for here “the fluctuating frontier that [ordinarily] separates conversation from sub-conversation” breaks down most frequently so that the inner life of the self can explode onto the surface in what is commonly called “scenes.” No doubt these scenes are the only distraction in the infinite boredom of a world entirely bent upon itself, and yet they also constitute the life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going “eternally round and round,” where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached. Behind the lies and the pretenses, there is nothing but the vibrations of an ever-present irritation—a “chaos in which a thousand possibilities clash,” a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.’ — Hannah Arendt

 

_____
Further

Nathalie Sarraute @ Wikipedia
NS @ goodreads
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
Lessons with Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute interviewed
Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process
Her novels broke with fictional realism, examining human behaviour at its most secretive
THE USE OF SPEECH BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE
Nathalie Sarraute and England
On Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms and why we write
Being Beside One’s Self
Nathalie Sarraute Fiction and Theory
A propos de Nathalie Sarraute
L’objet lumineux dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et l’anti-roman
Le dialogue selon Nathalie Sarraute
Fiction et révélation : Vous les entendez ? De Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et la violence du texte
Eloge de NATHALIE SARRAUTE: Apprendre à dire l’indicible
Buy ‘Portrait of a Man Unknown’
‘PoaMU’ @ Internet Archive

 

_____
Extras

Nathalie Sarraute et le Nouveau roman en 1969

Nathalie Sarraute – pour un oui, pour un non

Un siècle d’écrivain 1995 Nathalie Sarraute

INVITEE : SARRAUTE

Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence

 

_______
Interview
from The Paris Review

You wrote your first novel at the age of twelve, then nothing until you were thirty-two. Why?

NATHALIE SARRAUTE: My mother wrote all the time, and to parrot her I wrote a “novel” full of all the platitudes I had read in love stories at the time. I showed it to a friend of my mother who said, Before writing novels one should learn to spell! Psychologists would see in that episode a typical childhood trauma. Actually, I think I did not write until much later because I had nothing to say.

At the lycée I liked writing essays because the subjects were imposed from outside. It made me realize how pleasant it was writing well turned-out sentences in a classical style—one was on equal terms with the classics, safe in their company. Whereas in my own writing I jump into a void, without any protection. I stumble and stammer, without anything to reassure me.

The traditional novel, with its plot and characters, etcetera, didn’t interest me. I had received the shock of Proust in 1924, the revelation of a whole mental universe, and I thought that after Proust one could not go back to the Balzacian novel. Then I read Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etcetera . . . I thought Mrs. Dalloway was a masterpiece; Joyce’s interior monologue was a revelation. In fact, there was a whole literature that I thought changed all that was done before. But as I said, I myself didn’t write because I had nothing to say then.

You started writing Tropisms when you were thirty-two; it is a short book of twenty-four pieces, yet it took you seven years.

SARRAUTE: It took five years, which is still long. Then I spent two years trying to find a publisher for it. Finally a very good publisher, Robert Lafont, who had discovered Céline and Queneau took it. He published it in the same collection as Queneau.

How did you arrive at the form for those first short texts?

SARRAUTE: The first one came out just how it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.

And why did you choose the name Tropisms?

SARRAUTE: It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.

How did you know what they were at the time, these tropisms? How did you know when you’d found one?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t always know, I might discover it in the writing. I didn’t try to define them, they just came out like that.

The tropisms often seem to work through a poetic sensibility.

SARRAUTE: I’ve always thought that there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry? Or Francis Ponge? It’s written in prose, and yet it’s poetry, because it’s the sensation that is carried across by way of the language.

With the tropisms, did you feel that it was fiction, did you wonder what to call it?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t pose myself such questions, really. I knew it seemed impossible to me to write in the traditional forms. They seemed to have no access to what we experienced. If we en- closed that in characters, personalities, a plot, we were overlooking everything that our senses were perceiving, which is what interested me. One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it. That’s what I tried to do in Tropisms.

Did you sense at the time that that was the direction your work would go?

SARRAUTE: I felt that a path was opening before me, a path that excited me. As if I’d found my own terrain, upon which I could move forward, where no one had gone prior to me. Where I was in charge.

Were you already wondering how to use that in other contexts such as a novel?

SARRAUTE: Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And afterwards, it was so difficult finding these texts; each time it was like starting a new book all over again; so I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace, as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all the tropisms that develop inside of them. That’s how I wrote Portrait of a Man Unknown.

In effect, one could say that all or most tropisms we might find in people could also be found in a single person.

SARRAUTE: Absolutely. I’m convinced that everyone has it all in himself, at that level. On the exterior level of action, I don’t for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The tropisms would seem to enter the domain of the social sciences as well.

SARRAUTE: Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. My work used to be entirely closed to people. For a long time people didn’t get inside there; they couldn’t manage to really penetrate these books.

Why do you think that is?

SARRAUTE: Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, or who is who. I speak right away of the essential things, and that’s very difficult. In addition, people have the habit of looking for the framework of the traditional novel—characters, plots—and they don’t find it; they’re lost.

That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.

SARRAUTE: There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings. If one takes an interest in what I do, one follows a sort of movement of dramatic actions that takes place at the level of the tropisms and of the dialogue. It’s a different dramatic action than that of the traditional novel.

You’ve said that you prefer a relatively continuous reading of your books. But all reading is a somewhat fragmentary experience. With a traditional novel, when one picks it up again to continue reading, there are the characters and the plot to situate oneself, to discover where one has left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?

SARRAUTE: I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, or know what he’s looking for, what he sees. I have no idea. I never think of him when I’m writing. Otherwise, I’d be writing things that suit him and please him. And for years he didn’t like it, he wasn’t interested.

Even after several books you weren’t discouraged?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. I was always supported, all the same, from the start. With Portrait of a Man Unknown, I was supported by Sartre. At the time Sartre was the only person who was doing something about literature; he had a review. My husband was also tremendously supportive, from the very start. He was a marvelous reader for me; he always encouraged me a great deal. That was a lot. It suffices to have one reader, who realizes what you want to do. So it was a great solitude, if you like, but deep down inside it wasn’t solitude. Sartre was impassioned by Portrait of a Man Unknown. So that was very encouraging. Then when Martereau was done, Marcel Arland was very excited and had it published with Gallimard. He was editing the Nouvelle Revue Française at the time. I always had a few enthusiastic readers. When Tropisms came out, I received an enthusiastic letter from Max Jacob, who at the time was very admired as a poet. I can’t say it was a total solitude.

Did Sartre or others try to claim you as an existentialist?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. He said, I had better write a preface for it, otherwise you won’t find a publisher, because he had become very famous by then. But despite his preface nobody wanted the book, and in the end a small publisher took it. It had only one little notice and was ignored. Later Sartre told me, If you persist in writing like this you’ll sacrifice your life.

Simone de Beauvoir, while she didn’t mind Sartre being surrounded by, or even having affairs with pretty actresses and secretaries, was said to be terribly jealous of women of superior intelligence who got close to him, and she broke your friendship. Is that true?

SARRAUTE: It is true that she separated us completely. But I heard that she couldn’t bear Sartre having an intellectual relationship with anyone, male or female. She caused the break with Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Camus . . . She wanted to be the only one.

But I liked Sartre very much. He had an attentiveness that denoted generosity, and I think he was warm. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was cold and distant, and as they were very close it colored his attitudes too, sometimes. He listened marvelously.

That might explain why some women were seduced by him, despite his physique.

SARRAUTE: I don’t know, as I certainly wasn’t one of them! I liked him as a friend, but found him physically one of the most repulsive men I had ever seen—it was terrible! The physical aspect of a man was always very important to me.

What about your own feminism?

SARRAUTE: I militated for the women’s vote in 1935. I have always been a feminist in so far as I want equal rights for women. But the idea of “women’s writing” shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous. Our brains are not different, but until now women were less educated, so they produced fewer works of art. People always compare women to each other. I was once asked at a conference what was the similarity between Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. I said that there was an enormous similarity: they were both called Marguerite! Otherwise there is not an iota of connection between them.

Some people have seen a feminist bias in your work.

SARRAUTE: Imagine! But I hardly ever think of gender when I write about my characters. I often prefer he to she because he is neutral but she is only female. In The Planetarium there is an old woman who is anxious because a door-handle has been badly put on her door. Well, a young man wrote to me and that “this old lady is me!” He explained that he had just been married and moved to a new apartment, and that he was just as worked-up about some details as my character. You can imagine how pleased I was!

Some time ago I received a doctoral thesis whose subject was woman’s condition in my novels! I was flabbergasted! But if I had wanted to discuss woman’s condition I wouldn’t have written the sort of books I have. Woman’s condition is the last thing on my mind when I write.

To return to tropisms, do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in that domain?

SARRAUTE: I don’t feel I have any imitators. I think it’s a domain that is too much my own.

Would it be possible to use the tropisms in a more traditional novel?

SARRAUTE: I don’t see how. What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all. What could that bring to the description of a character?

As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.

SARRAUTE: He disintegrates before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.

 

___
Book

Nathalie Sarraute Portrait of a Man Unknown
George Braziller

‘Sarraute’s first novel was turned down by Gallimard, despite a preface by Sartre, in which he used the word anti-roman (anti-novel). This is a pretty accurate description. The characters are not named and the plot is at best sketchy. Sarraute has said that the novel is an updating of Balzac‘s Eugénie Grandet, a novel about tight-fistedness and how it is passed from father to daughter. In Sarraute’s novel, an unnamed narrator tells the story of an also unnamed father and daughter, who are also miserly. Initially he struggles to tell the story. He is a writer and trying, like many writers, to do something new, to get away from the Balzacian approach to writing. However, when he is advised to stick to the conventional method which, of course, also involves naming his characters, the narrator considers this approach sensible. However, he then sees the Portrait of a Man Unknown in an art gallery. He has known this painting before. It is hidden in the worst lit part of the gallery and, of course, is a portrait of an unknown man by an unknown artist. This painting resonates with meaning for him, despite the outlines of the picture being vague. He then feels that he can describe the father and daughter, without having to fully portray them à la Balzac, in his own way. And this is what he does, watching them carefully, from afar or from close up. He spends his time following them and watching them but he is unable to get that sense of them that he seeks. In the end, the daughter introduces him to her fiancé, giving him a name (Louis Dumontet) and a description. He realises that the new ways have not worked and he is back to the old, traditional Balzacian novel. Can the new ways work? Sarraute asks.’ — The Modern Novel

Excerpt

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hopefully Mizu was looking in. Last I checked, French MUBI isn’t showing the ‘Twin Peaks’ marathon. French MUBI has a history of being very persnickety. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for ‘Shifty’. ** scunnard, Great, groovy, let me know whenever. Thanks, pal. ** Hugo, Yes, the game looks very up my alley. Even film editing/post-production is gruelling compared to novel writing, and with game building … I can’t even imagine. That is quite a dream. Sadly, as I’ve said, I almost never ever remember mine. They flee the second I become conscious. Well, yeah, he clearly wanted it to be read, but published? That seems like a stretch. Your thinking about words is real ‘writer thinking’, I think. I guess non-writers can aspire to diligent, meticulous expression too though. Thank you about ‘God Jr.’ I’m proud of it. I don’t … think I know that Emily Youcis video, but I will certainly check. Thanks. I like that squib from your poem. I admire it. Its costuming and rhythm are very impressive. I hope the totality pans out. Needless to say, ‘In Youth is PLeasure’ -> ‘Lord of the Flies’ meets ‘Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers’ causes the (my) mind to reel in the ecstatic sense. If you can pull that off, wow. Heavy encouragement. The second novel also sounds very promising. That’s exciting stuff and news. Thank you for my percolating. ** Carsten, Congrats on the submission. As always, keep part of yourself braced by the fact of how subjective and political the editorial selection can be, just in case. But great! Hopefully they’re wise. A well connected friend of mine who’s done TV and film work and who is in the LA art scene was our casting director. We told her what we were looking for vis-a-vis the characters, and she sent out feelers to people thought might be right. She sent us the info and pix of those who interested in trying out, and, if we liked someone, and if we didn’t already know them, we had them film a short video of themselves answering a set of questions. If we liked that, we met with them, talked, had them read a little dialogue. We were specifically looking in the LA art world for people. Almost every performer in the film apart from the extras are either artists, art students, art world scenesters, or the children of artists. That was our method. ** Bill, Oh, that is a coincidence. Ed could be very nice. He could also be very catty and backhanded, which no one is talking about right now for understandable reasons. We’re solidifying the SF visit right now. I should know early next week. But I hope to get to see you. Should be wholly possible. ** Steve, We go to LA on the 15th for a few jet-lag recovery days then up to SF. That’s fantastic news about your radio show! Holy shit, that’s great and exciting! Will you change the show in any way for the new context? ** Misanthrope, Good: your doctor lock-in. I gave in and am seeing a doc for my toe shit on Tuesday. I keep forgetting that now that I’m a legal, visa-toting Parisian I have French health insurance, i.e. free doctor visits, so I don’t have that excuse anymore. May we both stay at least 90% alive until we see the professionals. ** pancakeIan, Her writing is really terrific. And she’s wonderful in the Waters films too, of course. Of course I know Angelo Badalamenti from his Lynch scores. Amazing composer. Amazing that you knew him. RIP. I took a google peek at Celebration, and, yes, I get you. I have a friend in LA who’s a higher-up person in Disney’s publications division, and, for a few years Disney was going to force and her a ton of other Disney employees to move to Florida and live in some ‘magical’ community to be built for them, and she was horrified and going to quit, but then they changed their minds. Actually, the rent prices here are lower than in Los Angeles as well as in New York and London and probably a lot of other big cities. Not that it’s cheap to live here, mind you. ** Darbz 🎃, Pumpkin! Halloween is only months, albeit too many of them, away! Good thinking re: the bat SFX. Hm, maybe we’ll pop a few bats into our new film, come to think of it. Gosh, obviously I would love the Louis Wain post if finishing it becomes a pleasure for you. Of course you can include your collage! All the better. You can make the post however you like. Thanks!!! No, I only ever played a primitive normal piano when I was a kid. My parents had a Grand Piano in the house, so I did practice on that. Yeah, my weird pedo piano teacher. She was very strange. Um, my only recent awkward conversation was on instagram with some guy who was trying to pressure me to make a film with him, but I don’t know if that counts. I don’t think I have too many awkward conversations only because I usually just ask questions and listen if it’s not a good friend. No, your grammar made utter sense to me, but you know I aspire to read and write in strange grammar, so I’m not the best judge? ** julian, Hi, j. I like ghost stories too. I can get very addicted to those ghost investigation reality TV shows if I’m not careful. Oh, a friend was staying overnight at my house. We went downstairs in the middle of the night to eat because we had the munchies. There was this porthole window in the door between the kitchen and the kind of ‘pantry’ room in our house, and, when we were going back upstairs, which necessitated walking through the party to the stairs, we both saw this figurative smoke/fog thing walking around in the pantry through the porthole window, and it seemed to approach the window and look at us, and we freaked out and spent the rest of the night acting weird in the kitchen. Never saw it or anything like it again. And we were, let’s just say, very baked. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. I understand. I hope the negative phase passes. I don’t know what to suggest you can do to break it. I know with me, bad periods will just abruptly end for the tiniest, most casual reason that doesn’t seem like it would make any difference, which I guess makes me think I just psych myself into negativity and that the world itself is ultimately not significantly less good or bad than it usually is during those dark periods. I don’t know why. I don’t know. Strange stuff and so awful when you’re in them. As may not surprise you or anyone around here, I get complaints somewhat regularly about the p.s. being a single dense paragraph and not broken up for easier readability. But I like that challenge. But then I guess I would. Anyway, kind of a meh criticism you had there, but sorry. ** Steeqhen, Important to remember how pleasurable typing can be. I can’t remember how Pikmin 2 ends. Well, actually now I do thanks to you. I think I rarely totally finish games. I play until I know it’s about to end, and where I can guess how it’s going to end, and I bail at that point. Same with most novels, actually. I don’t know The Civil Wars. I know Joy Williams, if it’s the same JW, because when I search for the writer Joy Williams, the recording artist Joy Williams comes up and hogs the search results. ** Alice, Hi, Alice! It’s really good to meet you. Thank you for entering. I would need to give your question a degree of time and thought that rushing through the p.s. doesn’t allow me in order to give it a considered and worthy answer. But I will say, briefly, that I think I agree with that statement, yes. I think my work is infused with empathy at its core, and that’s crucial to me, although I’m not sure so many people seem to realise that about my work. I can completely relate to your thinking/feeling as you develop your novel. That rings entirely true to me. That’s a beautiful quote by Kathy. Long story short, yes, I do feel similarly to what I understand of how you describe your attitude and thoughts about your own writing. I would even say that self-knowledge is very important and maybe even necessary? I’m sorry not to speak more lengthily. It’s very interesting to be inspired to be thinking about it. Thank you. If there’s anything else you want to talk about, I’ll do my best, and it would be a pleasure. Anything else you can say about your novel? ** Uday, Ashbery is my favorite writer in the English language, so yeah. Luckily I got to know him and become kind of friends with him. Lita Ford, wow. I too have never understood people’s desire to live outside big cities. I don’t even understand the desire to get a ‘summer home’ in the country or to ‘retire’ to some supposedly idyllic place. I just can’t relate to that dream at all. ** Okay. I haven’t spotlit a book by the great Nathalie Sarraute in a long time, and today I have spotlit her first novel, which is generally thought to be the book that inspired and started the Nouveau Roman movement. So, a pretty key book. Have a look and think, and I’ll see you tomorrow.