‘Digital alchemy. Jacques Perconte is a modern alchemist, a master magician of the image. The pixel, that underwhelming element of measure of the digital image, becomes a whole palette of possibilities, a fine brush or a plank vibration, technology in the realm of plastic arts, binary poetry, romantic anarchism, a feverish hallucination of distorted images; always the eye, deceived by the underlying magic of what it sees. A universe behind a universe, like the machinations of algorithms always pulsating to discover the true reality of light: in what we see lies a hidden veil, a fantasy of representations. Manet, Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, the canvas, or Perconte and the computer.

‘Already a pioneer of internet art, Perconte has spent a lifetime discovering the hidden art in the interstices of the digital image. His endless series of works, for installation and cinema, have sprawled hours and hours of meditative journeys through the nature of image, and the image of nature. Like a benevolent creator, Perconte takes and gives back. From nature, its more beautiful images, from technology, the return of a representation in the heights of the greatest painters. It’s a reciprocal coexistence, a habitat where nature is praised with a gift, an offering for the gods. While glitch art has already been vastly explored (Burks, Brizz) and it’s currently been used (Murata, Silberstein) in cinema and video art today, nobody uses this “manifestation of the error” to such metaphysical depths: the primal cause of a certain source of reality, the creation of image itself.

‘His latest “Radical Love Study” series, consists so far in two works: Or / Our, Budapest (2018), and Or / Or, Hawick (2018) , both properly scored by Perconte himself. Or / Our Budapest, just three minutes long, escalates from a visual and sound drone into the high tension of drama, where the golden spaces of sky are briefly interrupted by paths of birds which draw impressionist emphasis in the image, an image that breathes in flux, like a living organism of a gold idol, slowly approaching the ignition of the visual field, a path of lava that overflows inside the the matrix of the earth. In his own words, the image slowly approaches the ultimate light, the seventh sphere where absolute love is reached, a-la-Dante. The music fuses Stars of the Lid via Fuck Buttons through the drone works of La Monte Young, a soundtrack for the manifestation of expectation, for the entrance to the gates of heaven. Or / Or, Hawick immediately Klimt-ian in its intention, awakes from the golden afternoon from a sky in Hawick, Scotland, while it breaks apart like a nebula, like the apparition of a cosmic phenomena inside earth. A bird, a small black dot, is the vessel drifting away from the primal pulse of the universe, as other flying ghosts appear and rip apart the space, again, in white interstices. The score, intensely spiritual, repeats itself, like a mantra, taking a breath to allow the image to then weave a colorful cloth of digital colors, an abstraction that gets near the essence of digital image, or just simply the image, the eye, the eternal patterns of what we call reality.

‘Perconte latest acts of love are, I dare say, deeply religious in its presence of the spiritual, the closest thing an artist has been for a while to, whatever you want to call it, whatever you believe in, god.’ — José Sarmiento Hinojosa, desistfilm

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jacques Perconte Site
Jacques Perconte @ Vimeo
Jacques Percent @ Galerie Charlot
Jacques Percent @ Twitter
RECODING VISUALIZATION IN THE TIME OF WEB: THE CASE OF I LOVE YOU BY JACQUES PERCONTE
A Look At Jacques Perconte’s Digital Impressionism
JACQUES PERCONTE’S MANIPULATIONS
JACQUES PERCONTE – THE INTERVIEW
L’Ultime Debussy avec Jacques Perconte
Jacques Percent @ Light Cone
Jacques Perconte @ IMDb
« Mes images, c’est de la magie déterminée »
Jacques Perconte: Explorateur de la plasticité de l’image
FAUST: Ode numérique de Jacques Perconte
Jacques Perconte : impression, pixel levant
JACQUES PERCONTE, D’EST EN OUEST
JACQUES PERCONTE FILMS & VIDÉOS

 

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Extras

Jacques Perconte – Bref

Entretien avec Jacques Perconte

Jacques Perconte

 

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Interview

 

Your works can sometimes refer to the impressionists. Can this be explained by your relationship to nature?
I do not try to tell nature in my work. I try to bring her back to sublimate her. […] The image is the traces, from one end of nature, from the body, from the form. There is an imbalance that occurs, which is very strong, between something that belongs to a past, that was filmed, as a kind of document. And something that is real, which is the distortion of the image, and its explosion. At no time do I have the will to destroy – even if I use it in my vocabulary – to insult, mistreat the images, to find them vulgar. On the contrary. I want to sublimate them, show that we can see them in an incredible way. And this is where I am very close to Impressionnism, or even, before Impressionism, to Turner; for I feel as close to Turner as to Monet, perhaps more to Turner himself. […] My problems are similar, and in fact we have techniques that can be very close, because I use the technique to express light, color and shapes. […] The difference is that I’m turning away, not him. One of our similarities is that they affirm the materiality of the painting. And I affirm the materiality of digital, digital. They touch me immensely because they show me images that assert themselves as images, and not images that assert themselves as nature, that want us to believe that things are there.

Transmission plays a key role in the formation of your images …
I transmit an energy, sensations, very abstract things but which concern expressions and feelings. My film Impressions (2012) poses this question of relation to aesthetic experience in a general way. And I do not want to show images as political times because they destroy other images or manifest a political stance that would be revolutionary by making noise. I am convinced that to transform things you must not just make noise. That is to say that noise is what we try to eliminate in general. The computer laws are based on the attempt to eliminate noise. So, make noise is to produce what we will try to eliminate. It must be found how signal and noise can be indissociable. And above all, to make only noise, it is to remain in the marginality. I do not want to stay in the margins. I want my images to be popular, accessible. I realized that in a projection, in 2002 I think, where 3-4 of my films were broadcast afterwards in a movie theater and people took full advantage of it. It was super violent, it was black (laughs), it was terrible. I saw people, adults who wanted to escape. I thought I did not want to do that. And from there I stopped doing everything I did to look at the landscape. I do not want to show destruction, neither pop nor cynicism. I do not want to manifest something that is free because it destroys, that it refuses. I do not want to separate people from each other. There are very good intentions behind it.

The hard part is not working with digital material?
No it’s the easiest! It’s super easy, but it’s long. The hard part is to film properly. That does not mean that it is planned that one films, but it means to give enough time to a meteorological phenomenon for example. To say “here, we do not see anything, but there may be something”. This is the case in one of my films for the cinema, which is free distribution, completely free, which is called Chuva (2012). During this shoot, we arrive in Madeira, we settle in the hotel. The horizon begins to scramble a little bit, it will start raining, so I take my camera and I put it on the balcony. I unpack my luggage, all that. I look from time to time and I see that it is very black. I tell myself it does not matter. I let the camera spin. And after that, when I saw that, the camera had done everything she could to try to film that thing. To affirm what was happening. There were a lot of potential things in the picture, and I made a sublime movie with that. It’s not because we do not see, that the camera is not going to do something. And even when she can not, she opens doors to wonderful things. This is just an example, but I learned a lot from cameras.

How has your relationship evolved with this digital material, which is still evolving?
It is a constant return trip. In the 90s I had a digital camera, one of the first, so I had paid a fortune. He was doing catastrophic photos. Until the day I wondered why I was trying to make him take pictures like a film camera. I started going where he could do funny things, a little special. It’s always going into a relationship with the device and doing things that are going to be unique, since its way of diverting things is unique. And I test. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not work. But I do it a lot. Yesterday, I was on Hortillonnages [in Amiens] by boat, we slipped on the water. At one point, we go to a rather dark place and then at the end there was the sun which was very strong. I could have decided to close my optics to bring in less light and not burn the image when I was going to get in the sun. But I left the thing open. And because I left it open when we arrived just then, where the image was starting to be completely burned, there is a heron that flew away. It was super beautiful. If I had filmed it normally, we would have had a picture of heron flies completely natural. While there, we have something incredible. I have a very strong relationship with the making of the image / things.

What is the idea behind all this, that you want to convey to the viewer?
I have this story of a collector who bought me a generative piece on the Ardèche, which is very hyper realistic. Often he gets in front of him, looks at her and then for 10, 15, 20 minutes, this piece produces very abstract images, imbued with great strength, but it does not come. And he gets up, and when he gets up it changes. He realizes then, that there is no show. The room does not give itself. So this is the question of letting go, compared to the desire to have a result, the desire that something happens. And he loves it, because a special relationship is rich and as in nature, the surprises are wonderful … There is a series that I have been doing for a few years on the Alps, which is very calm. Whenever I show it in the gallery, people do not see it, because there is not much that happens. But when they spend more time in the room, they realize the plastic power she has, which is completely incredible.

Where did you get this desire to work on the relationship of the viewer with the work?
When I started doing video gallery exhibitions – at the beginning of my collaboration with Galerie Charlot actually – there was really this very strong story for me, to know what was going on for me when I am here. I built these images, all these generative pieces in the perspective that we have something open, that does not produce a show. It’s not immediate. These are works with which we will engage a relationship. Sometimes plasticity is so concentrated that you can not see anything. We are always discovering because we have never seen. I want to give things where there is an aesthetic power that will be built as the relationship develops.

Does this awareness come from what you learned by filming the landscape?
Yes, surely, but also the way I have been doing for ten years with yoga, with spirituality. And all the reflection I can make on society, on the teaching I can give, which is really related to this issue of presence. The presence that means not waiting, not thinking about what just happened and what will happen next. I do not like immediacy and works that end right away. Those that do not require that we build a loop, round trip, to discover it, whether it is something rich. There is something in my work related to inefficient parts. For the generative parts there is something very important is that they are parts in tension. We are witnessing the dysfunction. The parts I sell have a program that watches that it does not crash (laughs). And if it crashes, it raises. We are in the manifestation of the accident.

So it’s a very organic process?
It is the result that is organic. It’s mathematical. The machine does not realize that it is doing badly. I’m always amazed not to crash during the concerts, where I bug videos extremely virulent. I’m always amazed that it works, because it should not, it’s something that is not controlled at all. I am in diversion, mastered plastically and technically, but not in the manner of an engineer. It’s like I’m holding someone above the void knowing his point of balance. And so I push it hard, and I know how far I can push. It’s a bit like performance

We always come to the question of limits …
Yes, and I am convinced that the plastic force comes from there. As when we see things that are at the edge of the visible, we can barely see. Sometimes there are incredible sides that manifest themselves at that moment. I’m comfortable with this side of pushing things. The plasticity of my images comes from this very strong energy that pushes the images out of themselves.

 

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18 of Jacques Perconte’s 230 works

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Coma Serrat (2023)
‘When, from Calce, I began to venture out onto the lower slopes of the Roussillon plains, I was immediately struck by this unexpected encounter with unfamiliar landscapes. So all I did was welcome the wind-driven light and enjoy the long, undulating vistas. The tramontana was blowing hard, and from its swirls came a profound silence. From this dizzying embrace came calm. And an invisible plane was formed that linked everything I could see and feel to everything that was happening inside me in the simplest of unities. This trip was my first glimpse of a country that dazzled me. Coma Serrat is a film that tells the story of that encounter and shows some of those moments. There were so many of them. Every time I arrived somewhere, I exposed myself to time. I stopped wanting, and I opened my heart wide, without expecting anything, to let time breathe its movements and make the image vibrate in its depths. The aridity, the brutality, these flammable forces were a wonderful gift.’ — JP

the entire film

 

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Avant l’effondrement du Mont Blanc (2020)
‘Mountains are falling, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And even if we have the means to rise to their height to admire them, to surpass those inaccessible peaks where many explorers lost their lives trying to gain the privilege of overcoming them, the mountains will continue to fall as they continue to rise. If Mount Blanc falls, it also increases.’ — JP

the entire film

 

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Salammbô (2022)
‘Salammbô est un jeu alchimique entre mes images, la musique d’Othman Louati vibrante dans la trompette de Noé Nillni et le texte de Gustave Flaubert porté par la voix de Julien Ribeill.’ — JP

the entire film

 

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OR / OR, HAWICK: RADICAL LOVE STUDY (2018)
‘In the Klimt’s gold brought to the melting point by a flaming afternoon sky above Hawick, in the south of Scotland, one bird is crossing the sky. From one end of the horizon to the other, its flight defies space and time, to the extent of making them bend and overlap into each other. The journey to the light is to waive the appearences to embrace a mystical dimension where all become love-light-gold. This infinite flux evolves into harmony of existence and unity of life, where all colors join together, kiss and blend.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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OR / OUR, BUDAPEST: RADICAL LOVE STUDY (2018)
‘Quenched in the Klimt’s gold, the aurora upon Budapest shines of thousand fires. The tiny birds seam to be flying from the firmament and dancing. Immensity and calmness enter indeed in resonance with the fluxes of the Earth. Our entrails, as pulled by the forces of the underground lavas, remind us of the power of patience. The quest for light, the quest for love can begin in the vibrations of this letter of incandescente images, fanned with emotions.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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BOIS DE LA BELLE GOUTTE: VOSGES (2018)
‘A walk one morning in November 2016 down Champdray where I was at the first residence for Faust. It was a hunting morning, I heard them in the distance. It was cold, but the sun was hot. And the strong one still in her autumn clothes let her greens, her yellows, her browns and her reds shine in an incredible calm. I knew that in a short time I would have to turn back because of the shots. But my footsteps took me far enough into the forest, it was wonderful. I met a fox, but it was so fast that I only saw it and the magic made it happen at a time when I was not filming. I walked slowly cracking the dead wood under my feet, crossing the puddles with joy to slide along the forest, so wonderful.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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JAPA (QUATRIÈME): JAPAS (2018)
‘“What is a mantra? Mantra is two words: Man and tra. Man means mind. Tra means the heat of life. Rameans sun. So, mantra is a powerful combination of words which, if recited, takes the vibratory effect of each of your molecules into the Infinity of the Cosmos. That is called ‘Mantra.’” 
Yogi Bhajan 4/22/97’ — JP

Teaser

 

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FONTE: MADEIRA (2017)
‘This is the third performance around the landscapes of Madeira. After having begun this return to the audiovisual performance with Dépaysages in 2012 on the improvisations of Jean-Jacques Birgé, Vincent Segal and Antonin Tri-Huang, then dug the subject with Jeff Mills in Extension Sauvage in 2013, it is with Julien Ribeill, that the adventure continues late 2017. Madeira is in a way the synthesis of all the visual adventures – films, generative videos, performances – developed for four years. To work with Julien for that, is to go looking for new magic vibrations in the images, it is to move the adventure more inside, to find these colors and these still hidden inspirations. More than a perspective of creation, it is an introspection, the moment of a return to the source.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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FRAGMENT WALL: VDIÉOS MUSICALES (2017)
‘Here Fragment Wall, a stroll in poetic and glowing forest, beautifully put in image by the visual artist and director Jacques Perconte which sublimates the already very moving music of the talented Eskimo. And when we switch, around 4 minutes 45, the tension is striking, literally and figuratively, the music of Eskimo starts to dribble, to dribble, oozing beauty, and I succumb.’ — Matthieu Dufour

Teaser

 

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L’ÉCUME DU PHARE: HAUTE NORMANDIE (2016)
‘It is at the end of the dike, in Fecamp down the lighthouse, that I like to settle watching the coming and going of the waves. The sea flows towards the beach. She raises herself against the wall to return and push the foam on the return of her path, while the next wave already digs his. It never stops. It calms down. That intensifies. Through my eyes, slipping inside me, I forget the time and I look, I think of nothing. The foam occupies my heart, and the wind protects me from the rest. There, at the foot of the lighthouse, I meditate ….’ — JP

Teaser

 

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L’OR NOIR: LANDES (2016)
‘Obviously at work to create a terrible sensation when the ocean thickens and becomes black, the water turns into potash, acid, and then into oil. Heavy, the froths fall more and more strong until a magical breakthrough of light tears the image and installs the day after night. The sun shines the rough surface of the waves. And by dint of light, the water burns and becomes gold. But we barely walk, and we know that we risk drowning if we do not keep our heads well above the waves. Which is not always easy.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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LE QUARTE ALPI: LES ALPES (2015)
‘I film almost all the time when I’m on a boat, train or plane. I am ready to capture the magic of the lights of a light after the storm or the crushing sun of a summer afternoon. I watch the colors vibrate. I filmed all my trips over the Alps and it was not until October 2013 that I had the chance to see them completely clear and bathed in the cold light of a powerful winter sun.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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CONCHES: PAYSAGES POITEVINS (2015)
‘Conches is a naturalistic journey towards abstraction, playing with the reflection of the Automne sky on the water of Garenne Canal (South-West of France). Through reverse engineering and expert manipulation of the encoding and storage technologies of digital video, Jacques Perconte crafts magical landscapes as colorful fairytales. Following the current, the whole landscape is transformed pixel by pixel at the rhythm of the compression’s vibrations. The trees surrounding the canals change their colors, everything merge and sometimes disappear. On the quiet water, the image enchants us and reveals the environment as if we could see its inner side composing shapes and shades.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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ETTRICK: SCOTTISH BORDERS (2015)
‘Made over the course of several visits to the Scottish Borders by the French artist filmmaker Jacques Perconte, the film interrogates the Scottish borders unique heritage: sheep farming, fabrics, the woolen mill tradition and our unique landscapes are all rendered in an impressionistic arc of colour and movement. The path we drive leads to the heart of the Ettrick Forest, a dive into a textile world. A land where man, machinery and nature deal with a complex relationship that draws their future. Slipping through poetry, between the brutality of matter and the sublime landscape, we experience a penetrating vision that embodies the stability of our deep desire to live in peace. Spectators are aware of the impotence of our movements, and we know that nature will find its way.

‘This visually captivating observational documentary of Scotland offers not only images of the rugged landscape, meadows, extensive forests and windmills, but also a detailed study of the meticulous handiwork completed at the local textile mill. Through exploring the nature of the digital record that captures the shape of the landscape, the film identifies images that reflect local everyday life. The physical movement through the area is also a journey into the imagery, which gradually disintegrates into particles of colour and shifting surfaces, subsequently reassembling back into the contours that change as a result of weather and time. Through the emphasis placed on colours and flow in calm compositions, the symbols of the traditional life in the region are revealed.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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HYPERSOLEILS: HAUTE NORMANDIE (2014)
‘Musician Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the band AIR, and filmmaker Jacques Perconte, who works with Jeff Mills, an artist known for his colors and landscapes, who sculpts with his digital palette. Together, they created especially for the opening of the festival, a dialogue between improvisation and high-speed chase. Normandy’s wooded countryside, magnified for the occasion, turns into a thousand suns rise and dazzle us.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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MISTRAL, RIBIÈRA: MISTRAU E AIGO DOUÇO (2014)
‘The infinity of a landscape out of the ordinary, a descent by canoe from the gorges of Ardeche. The image is housed in a stone vault in a sacred place.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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COLORAMA: KHZ (2014)
‘Directed during a series of experiments with Vidal Bini, Caroline Allaire (dancers and choreographers) and Nicolas Clauss at the spinning in 2014. This film-fragment remained as a precious stone born from the crystallization of the intensity of this research around the performance and the image.’ — JP

Teaser

 

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EXTENSION SAUVAGE: MADEIRA (2013)
‘Performance created with Jeff Mills for the Wild Extension Festival in 2013.
Played alternately with Jeff Mills (electronica), Hélène Breshand (harp), Eddie Ladoire (electronica), Yann Péchin (guitar), Julien Ribeill (guitar) and Éric Maria Couturier (cello).’

Teaser

 

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IMPRESSIONS: HAUTE NORMANDIE (2012)
‘A film about the magic power of nature. A journey to the heart of impressionistic Normandy. A colorfull stroll in search of light and time.’ — JP

Teaser

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. I understand that that the already very vexing Cloudflare/verification app has become even more problematic in the last few days. I guess that explains the fewer number of comments of late. Obviously, this is intolerable, and I’m so very sorry. I am contacting my hosting site today to demand that they either debug the app or remove it from my blog. Clearly there’s something they can do. I will do my very best. Again, I’m so sorry for the hassles for those of you who are being affected. ** kier, Hi, k. Well, at least you managed to come away with a great book haul. Thomas is back in the UK, but I’ll text him your howdy, and I know he’ll wave fondly at you from afar. It’s weird because I love and believe that Warhol quote — ‘People are so great, you can’t take a bad picture’ — but, at the same time, yes, there is an ocean of dreary, arty-farty cookie cutter photographs out there being presented as art. That sounds like an excellent plan, i.e. how you’ll use the residency. Cool gallery. You never know about us maybe getting up there. I mean both Zac and I are serious winter and snow fans, and Paris is increasingly bereft of snow and even actually cold temperatures, so … Tell your magpies my pigeons are cruising them warmly and lustily them from my window sills. ‘Puss’ is kiss? How curious. The French say ‘bisous’ as you no doubt know, and it rarely seems like they actually mean it. The Dutch say ‘kis’, which wonderfully minimal on the outside but hopefully fraught with passion, so I’ll airdrop you a bunch of those. ** jay, Well, I’m happy you managed to sneak in for second. Let me see what I can do to reopen the floodgates. ** Dominik, Hi!!! History suggests that fascists always crash and burn in the end. Their charisma is short term, even if that shortness can feel like forever. The question is whether, in this case, Americans and the rest of the world to some degree have the will to fight back. That’s what I’m unsure of. There’s a lot of understandable despair to sober up from. Here’s hoping about Tobias. Things with ‘Room Temperature’ are looking up, but I can’t really talk about why at the very moment. Soon though. Love putting melted cheese on almost everything, G. ** Lucas, Good! About your exam! Surely they’ll be wowed by whatever you did. If not, they’re just total losers. My weekend? Still lots and lots of emails to catch up on. Going to a book fair kind of thing today. I have my biweekly Zoom book/film club tomorrow where we’ll talk about Gary Indiana on the writing side and a Kurosawa film on the movie side. Eat stuff, smoke the usual, bundle up and traipse about. Etc. You? I’ve never read ‘Birth of the Clinic’. Tell me how it is. I don’t think you mentioned it before, but I could be spacing maybe. Poem/email response will arrive as soon as I buckle down. I’m waiting for Zac’s feedback on the film script so I can move forward. He needs a nudge. I’m dying to work on it. Well, traversing the haunted houses definitely helped inspire the longing to make one. We went with a bunch of artist friends, so it was more about hyping them up and convincing them that we could do one ourselves. You have the best weekend of recent memory, pal. ** Steeqhen, Hi, Steeqhen! Great to meet you! Well, yes, I’d love to be updated about your dissertation, and thank you a million for doing that. And if you have questions or whatever, I’m very happy to try to tell anything you might want to know. Or not. Whatever’s best. Have a sweet weekend! ** Okay. This weekend I am asking you to drift away blissfully and brainily, if you so choose, into the beautiful films of Jacques Perconte. Sound like a plan? See you on Monday.

 

‘If you’re going to name a book after units of time, you’d better have something to say on the subject, and in “A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer,” Christine Schutt certainly does. Whether or not readers will find her voice comforting is another matter.

‘Although the title of her new collection of stories contains the word “summer,” this isn’t a beach book. There’s not much romance here; instead, there are plenty of love’s rank leftovers, moldy resentments turning to slush in the heart’s refrigerator. There aren’t any spies either; in fact, some of the characters could have used the services of a good private detective before their relationships began to turn brown and curly around the edges. And while there’s a desert island, the story that’s set on it ends with a stranded mom making sexual overtures to her own son in explicit language.

‘Then again, the mother’s profanity seems to be less an indication of an itchy libido and more a sign of sheer chew-your-own-liver desperation, a quality she shares with half a dozen other characters who are young enough to know they want more out of life and old enough to have figured out they’re not going to get it.

Consider, for example, the woman who has one son in rehab and another who seems to be headed there. She remembers when they were small and she “had lifted the wisps of hair from off their baby scalps, marked as the moon, with their stitched plates of bone yet visible” — though as she thinks of her boys’ tiny heads, she also remembers “how often she had thought to break them.”

‘And there’s the woman who’s rich and has a beautiful house and is married to a “flawless man.” Yet crazy thoughts still flash across her mind like lightning in a monster movie. (The story’s final line asks, “Shouldn’t she be afraid?”)

‘And then there’s the woman who stays with a sadist mainly because he promises trust funds for her daughters. “I stuck it out carelessly,” she says to herself, “and heard time clang past.”

‘At least time makes a noise in that story. Often here it’s silent and unchanging, especially when Schutt focuses on her younger characters. “I’m bored or I’m lonely,” one college kid says. “I’m something. I don’t know which.” In Schutt’s stories, the young lead lives that are dishwater dull, and since they see no end to them, that just makes those lives even duller. The young seem old here; their awful sex is more a result of nerves than longing, and too much of it just leads to a “mucousy consequence.” There are only a few really old characters, one of whom actually seems almost happy, perhaps because her goal is “to live each day as well as we can,” like her hero, Thoreau.

‘If you’re going to have one character complain to another that Virginia Woolf’s novels are “all chorus and no plot,” you’d better supply lots of plot yourself, and Schutt does. But most of the action takes place between her characters’ ears — or at least between the ears of those old enough to have some kind of inner reality. Mentally and physically, Schutt’s young people lead humdrum existences, but if her slightly older characters don’t have much going on in the real world, at least their thoughts sizzle and pop. And the really old? Well, that one old lady is trying.

‘But if Schutt’s right, long before time wrinkles your skin and turns your hair white, it’ll drive you crazy.’ — David Kirby, NYT

 

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Further

Christine Schutt Site
stories to take you out of your comfort zone
Podcast: Christine Schutt on Bookworm
Oh, the Obvious
Christine Schutt @ goodreads
The Book That Made Me A Reader: Christine Schutt
TINGE Magazine | An Interview with Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt: Learning What You Do Well
Pure writer, pure prose, pure pleasure
the garden of earthly delights: christine schutt’s pure hollywood
‘The Blood Jet’, by Christine Schutt
Curled Up With a Good Book–An interview with Christine Schutt
“YOU SAW THE WORST”
Christine Schutt Remembers Writing Her First Stories
Christine Schutt on the importance of word choice and the element of surprise
‘The Dot Sisters’, by Christine Schutt
Buy ‘A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer’

 

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2 readings & 1 lecture

 

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Interview

 

DEB OLIN UNFERTH: It’s impossible for me to ignore the sound of your sentences. Sometimes I feel as if the entire thrust of the story is based on an exploration of a set of phonemes, or as if you allow sound to determine the direction of the sentence and the story, the content even. Is that true? How do you do that? Why do you do that?

CHRISTINE SCHUTT: I was taught to read poetry this way in high school: to consider the sounds the poet was making and how those sounds could inform us of what the poem was about. “Snake,” a D. H. Lawrence poem, was the lesson at the time, and it made a big impression on me. Sound has its own weather, and I respond to it. One night I saw these preposterously large cherry blossoms outside our bedroom window. This happens every spring, of course, the blossoms, but on this night they seemed lit up from below and floating, an absurd efflorescence, and the sentence in response to what I saw and felt about the spring show came out like this: “The preposterous blossoms, candy pink and stupidly profuse, were in the night light strangely come as from another planet.” So many p’s—the stupidness of it all. That sentence has a mood; it was my mood at the time. Absurd efflorescence makes a different sound, has a different mood, different weather; in a story such a phrase would direct me. I am generally uncertain of purpose and have few opinions, no ideas. But sound.

I read poetry this way: I hear meaning long before I decode it. As a writer, I find that sound can give me meaning, narrative direction. Produce a sentence with any sound and respond to it.

DOU: Do you think your interest in narrative is primarily sound and secondarily story? What I mean is, do you feel more like you have a noise to make than a story to tell? And was it always that way for you or did your idea of narrative shift at some point? (It must have been long ago, if it did, since your first book shows a lot of interest in sound.) I guess I’m asking how you became the writer you are.

CS: I like story; I want story. I have characters but they are dimly perceived and what they will do is a mystery to me. I once wrote a version of a John Cheever story in which an attractive young couple who would seem to possess all are yet unhappily married, and then a greater sorrow befalls them while on vacation. This story, “The Hedges,” is the only story I have ever written with a plot and the luxury of knowing the plot beforehand; all the others have come forward on sounds and sensations, memories and exaggerations.

DOU: Cheever’s stories have a sort of old-fashioned wordiness. Backgrounds are explained. Backdrops are drawn. It is so unlike the spare style of so many of our contemporaries. His work is very sad and feels, to me, urgent, even. I feel like he was writing to save his life. Many of your stories feel that way too. Was that what it was like when you wrote your first book of stories, Nightwork? I remember you told me once that during that time you felt that if you could write one sentence a day you would stay alive. What was that about? Why would writing a sentence save you? Did it feel the same way to write your later books or did the experience change? Do you believe fiction can save or change lives? And I love the way you said, “I hear meaning long before I decode it.” What on earth does that mean? I know what you are saying, I think. But how does a sound contain meaning? What does meaning mean in this case?

CS: “An awe came on the trinket.” What does that mean? When you first encounter Dickinson you have to decode a lot, but a way to enjoy her in the beginning is to enjoy the sounds she makes and often from these you can extract meaning. I trust in the ear to detect feeling before struggling over why the voice sounds so. I should also add that I am charmed by symmetrical sentences and catalog sentences and sentences with bunched-up groups of adjectives that sound great and look great on the page: “lurid, rapid, garish, grouped.” Robert Lowell is famous for gathering adjectives that are visually pleasing as well as full of sound and apt. His late wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, was also deft when it came to adjectives. She wrote prose, of course, but Hardwick’s sentences are as worked as a poet’s. I happen to be teaching her very great novel, Sleepless Nights, and so have it here before me. Hardwick has a gift for catalog sentences: “Old English wallpaper, carpets, Venetian mirrors, decorated vases, marble mantelpieces, buzzers under the rug around the dining-room table, needlepoint seats: Alex was making an inventory of Sarah’s Philadelphia house before her mother died.” Simply to write this sentence—forget the labor of over a hundred pages of them—must have been a strain, but finishing only one such sentence was surely bracing.

I’m trying to clarify whatever it was I said to you about the lifesaving properties of a sentence a day. Certainly the idea of its sufficiency has consoled. There is a Ray Carver story, “Why Don’t You Dance,” that explains how I felt when I was writing Nightwork. You know the story: a man has arranged all of the furniture from inside his house on the front lawn; everything on the lawn looks just as it did inside—bed, bedside tables. “His side, her side.” A boy and a girl come along and think it’s a yard sale. The crucial sentences are toward the end when the man, having sold the young couple some of the furniture, dances in his driveway with the girl. “They thought they’d seen everything over here,” he says, and she answers, “but they haven’t seen this.” Then, in the story’s only tender moment, the girl whispers, “You must be desperate or something.” Well, I felt that man’s kind of desperation when I was writing Nightwork. I was beyond caring what other people thought of me. The first story in the book, about a daughter’s failed seduction of her father, was one I had tried to write since graduate school. Now, when it seemed I was ready to put everything out on the lawn, when I had hit on how to, I was beset by difficult, crowded days; often there was only time to write one sentence. Most of Nightwork was written, as have been so many books, when everyone else was asleep. When was Hardwick writing Sleepless Nights, I wonder?

DOU: I find I can’t help but ask you to talk a little bit about working with Gordon Lish. Could you describe one class you had with him, one specific event—or two or three—that you feel might illuminate what it was like to work with him for those of us who never had the chance to?

CS: Those classes! They fell apart when Gordon’s wife died in the early ’90s and he left Knopf and lost funding for The Quarterly, but for two years the classes were held in my apartment. My apartment is very small, less than a thousand square feet, and yet we packed in upward of twenty-six adults when classes started in the fall of 1988. People sat on the floor or out of sight in the hallway or in the kitchen; some sat at Gordon’s feet; some were brave enough to sit near on the sofa although how could anyone approach him without fear of catching fire—he was a performer, a high priest, a sermonizer. Quoting James Joyce—“I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”—he implored us to carry our stories aloft, to expect the marketplace’s jeers, and to write heedless of the marketplace, to resist its corrupting calculations and safeguard our work. It was all very high-minded and grand, and I found it inspiring. Once a week I heard new fiction or advances on new fiction from such writers as Katherine Arnoldi, Noy Holland, Sheila Kohler, Sam Michel, Yannick Murphy, Dawn Raffel, Victoria Redel, Pam Ryder, Lily Tuck, Rick Whitaker, and Diane Williams. Amy Hempel, Ben Marcus, Mark Richard, and Kate Walbert made appearances from time to time. Dana Spiotta worked at The Quarterly. Gary Lutz was talked about, and so were Will Eno and Timothy Liu. Quite simply a lot of what Gordon said about writing made immediate and complete sense to me, and my own interest in poetry, in sound, my arduous effort to compose so much as a sentence, meant I shared his aesthetic: a delight in language and an ambition to make something uncanny.

I value no one’s opinion more than Gordon’s when it comes to assessment of fiction and while in his class I took notes I have profited from reading again. I try to live by many of his phrases: Stay open for business. Be Emersonian: say what no one else has the courage to say and you will be embraced. Reveal what you would keep secret. You will stay awake when writing such a story; you will also write very, very carefully with so much at stake. Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind you when writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them. To be in Gordon’s company when he was talking about fiction was to be in full-out writer mode. Let the performance be insane!

DOU: Can you explain what you mean by “look behind you when writing, not ahead”?

CS: He meant this quite literally as a means of composition. Query the preceding sentence for what might most profitably be used in composing the next sentence. He contended that with this method no writer could ever again be legitimately blocked. The sentence that follows is always in response to the sentence that came before.

DOU: Does writing still have the initial urgency that it had when you were writing your first book? If yes, how do you think you manage to maintain that urgency? If not, what has replaced it to drive you to write—since you are more prolific now than at any other time in your life (or so it seems to me)?

CS: The constant has not been a sense of urgency, but the terrors felt with every composition: no you cannot; no you will not; no you should not. To be balked at every turn in the effort with never and no makes for slow composition, and it dismays me not to have more gift stories, more sentences that rise up alchemical and deserved. Composing for me is largely a dispiriting venture, and the urgency and flushed condition ascribed to the experience may be something I’ve imagined after the fact of publication, a fictive sentiment necessary to sustain myself as a writer.

 

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Book

Christine Schutt A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer
Northwestern University Press

‘The title of Christine Schutt’s second collection strikes the theme of swiftly passing time that runs through each of the stories. In “The Life of the Palm and the Breast” a woman watches her half-grown children running through the house and wonders: Whose boys are these? Whose life is this? The title story tells of a grandfather who has lived long enough to see his daughter’s struggles echoed in his granddaughter and how her unhappiness leads him to unexpectedly feel the weight of his years. In “Darkest of All” a mother’s relationship with her sons is wreaked by a repeated cycle of drugs and abusive relationships, the years pass and the pain-and its chosen remedy-remains the same. The narrator in “Winterreise” evokes Thoreau and strives to be heroic in the face of her longtime friend’s imminent death, a harsh reminder of the time that is allotted to each of us.

‘Schutt’s indomitable, original talent is once again on full display in each of these deeply informed, intensely realized stories. Many of the narratives take place in a space as small as a house, where the doors are many and what is hidden behind these thin domestic barriers tends towards violence, abusive sex, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments that also reveal how the characters are often hopeful, even optimistic. With a style that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, she exposes the terrible intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives.’ — Northwestern University Press

Excerpt

DARKEST OF ALL

The years, she saw, fell heavily as books: the missing husband pinging a racket against the chuff of his hand, her charmed sister at the rental’s beach, the raging Jean herself. In a coil of towel, the little boy named Jack was powdered free of sand. She tended to him then-absent, curious, easeful-and he calmed under the warmth of her hand. Now Jack’s body was his own and not a thing she felt branched of, her hands growing out of; mother and son, they had even smelled the same once, when Jack’s teeth were growing in. Now she did not get close enough-did not want to get close enough-to smell him. Jack’s skin was given over to the wild fluctuations of his age, which meant it was one day clear and smooth, and the next erupted, and still later newly healed and probably sore. Now the boy smoked.

It was what he asked for first with the smoke of something smoked down clouding around his head: “Did you remember cigarettes?” Yes, yes, her soft assent. “But what I need,” Jack said, “are socks.” Snack foods, paper, stamps: the listlessly articulated list from every visit grew as the corridors grew, or so it seemed to Jean as she walked through the swabbed facility with its smell of Lysol and fish!

“Stamps,” Jack said, “are what I really need. I want to write to friends.”

Jack said, “I wrote myself here,” and he showed Jean what he did every night on the edge of the table, which was a deeply scarred table, full of dates and initials, profanations, codes, and there on the edge, his knife-worked JACK. Jack said, “I want people to know I’ve been here and that I was okay. I had friends. Fuck,” he said, “I’ve made a lot of friends,” and so he had. An odd assortment said hello or made motions to speak to Jack each time they bumped past.

Jean said to Jack, “So what do you do with your friends?”

“They’re not all friends,” he said. “Some of them”-and he pointed to a boy with an old black face and voluptuously muscled body-“that guy,” Jack said, “already has a kid. He’s been in jail. And the fat girl bit a girl for trying to comb her hair. I don’t talk to that crazy. Nobody does. There were stitches. That’s how bad it was.”

How bad it was Jean told her sister. Jean called the place the facility, eschewing its bucolic name and using Jack’s slang when she was angry. Then she called the facility a dry-out place, a place for rehab on the cheap. A motel it had been or a conference center, the facility had past lives in the same way as did its staff. First name only, confessing only their abuse, the pallid staff wore cushioned shoes and shuffled small steps. Their talk, too, was small and coughed out with erasures from whatever they saw looking back-not that, not that-but ahead, the home contract, the dickered pact, the rules to school the house against the wily abuser. “Addiction,” the staff said, “we’ve been there-and been there. Relapse is common with friends still using.” The staff twitched matches, frantically serene.

Jean told her sister, “These are the guys helping Jack with his homework. These are the people meant to be his friends.”

But Jean’s sister, being her sister, and wiser, Jean’s sister said, “This is where Jack should be.”

The hours at the facility were blocked and named: group, individual, free. “I’m climbing steps,” Jack said, smiling. “I’m making progress here, Mother. You’d be proud!”

Jack. She was used to the shard of his name since he shortened it. His hair color, too, had changed, was leaden and beaten by the last school’s cap, the same he wore through the meeting.

“Jack!” she said.

“What?” he asked.

Mother, son, counselor, here they were again, the weekend group in consultation: family was the name on the schedule.

Who was getting better? she wondered. Who was sick?

Jean asked her wiser sister, “Am I?”

“Are you?” she asked back.

* * *

Yes, it was all too common a story-Jean knew, she admitted as much-a woman on her own and what she had to do because of the children. Because of them she had to ask the missing husband for what he did not have that yet was needed.

“Look at what I’ve had to do for money,” Jean said, home again, on the couch with the quiet son, Ned. The men she had let wander into the apartment. Think of them! And she did-and didn’t he? “Don’t you think of them sometimes?”

Ned said, “I was very young, Mother.”

It was Jack, years older, who had said he remembered a man who shook her upside down for quarters.

“Oh,” Jean moaned as Ned was getting to and scratching some unreachable places. “Oh, I hope you don’t remember,” she said. Then, “Yes! That feels good!” she said, and said again, “That feels good!” and Jean let her towel drop in a way that made her wonder since there wasn’t a man to put lotion on her back should she ask her son to do it.

Jean, at the facility, said to the counselor, “Ask Jack what he did with my bank card. I bet he didn’t tell you.” Freely spending with the purpose to be caught, it seemed, Jack had bought what in the moment moved him, leaving waxy, bunched receipts between the sheets for her to find of what he had signed for with abandon, largely. Felonious boy, that Jack! Skulking the facility, as she had seen him, butting what he passed-doors, walls, wheeled racks hung with visiting coats-Jack scared Jean a little, and she came home tired.

And Ned was tired! Tired from scratching. Tired from the yawn of Saturday, from homework, from art class, from girls. From streets and apartments, cigarettes, beers-from more girls. On almost any Sunday, late in the morning and cragged in a gray sheet, the boy slept in his room, which was also gray. Thin light, lingering smoke. Something there was about Ned gray, too: the pale skin of his outstretched leg, blue-black hair in a cuff at his ankle. Only his foot, the heel of it, was full of color-not old pavement to be razored -Ned’s foot was young. It invited petting, touching to say, Wake up. “Wake up,” she said, looking at the covered boy because she did not want to see what was on the bedside table, although Jean saw it clearly: the cigarettes first, the ashy spill around the glasses, orange juice pips on the rim of the old-fashioned. Haywire spirals yanked out of notebooks, Post-its curling on the tops of papers: See me! one of them said. Jean was looking at the screen-dead computer. The drawers, too, she saw but did not open. She knew enough about Ned. She knew he drank and smoked, carried condoms, broken jewelry. She knew he liked to kiss; he liked the girls. Girls, girls, girls, girls. Their voices ribboned out from faces closely pressed against the cradle of the phone-babies still, most often shy. “Is Ned there?” they asked.

“I’m sorry,” Jean said-and said-“he’s still asleep.”

Lifted in the wind, the blinds banged their music on the sill; it was a sound of diminutive breakage-of saucers, of cups-in a rhythm like the rising and falling of a chest, like breathing, a boy’s, his. Tiptoed and unsteady, she silenced the phone next to his bed. She put the ringer on off-and why not? The callers for Ned would call back, so let him sleep, she thought, another hour. Let him grow in his twisted sheets! Bent, crooked, an impression of bones he was, a tent of bones, a sudden arm slung above his head and the black tuft of hair there as startling as his sex.

Think of something else, think of the Sunday papers. Consider this fall’s color on girls stood back-to-back, with their skinny arms crossed, as girls crossed them, coyly. The girls who visited Ned stood at the door coyly, toed in and stooped with baby backpacks on their backs, asking from behind ragged bangs, “Is Ned home?”

“Yes,” she had to say, “but still asleep.”

And Jack? Jack was now so tipped against the sun-the bright shard of his name again-that just to speak of Jack hurt Jean’s eyes; and she did not want to think about the place where she had been or what Jack was doing there or what he would be doing there at night in the facility.

“Not knowing where he sleeps is fine by me,” Jean admitted, but only to Ned. To Ned she complained. Now when she sat on the couch, still red from washing off the facility, she said, “Jack makes me believe he has paid for whatever it is we are doing to him. Does that make sense?” She said, “Please, my back.”

Ned said, “You never made Jack do this.”

Sometimes Ned used a comb on her back. He made tracks and designs with the comb. He wrote his name and asked, “So what did I write then?”

She sat on the couch, tickled by the comb tracking through the lotion, and she said to Ned, “I can’t help myself sometimes. When I am in family I say terrible things….” And she told the boy what things she had said about a man who was yet the father-and she knew that, yet she would speak. She wanted to tell Ned everything. Now, every weekend, it seemed, she came home parched and queasy, calling out to Ned, “Are you here? Anybody home? Yes? No? Who else?”

Once a girl with rainbow hair lay unbuttoned on Ned’s bed. The girl was quick to sit up, and she smiled at Jean, but the distraction of the girl’s hair, knotted and skyward from however the girl had been with him, was such that all Jean saw was the girl’s hair and those parts erect from tugging. Just look at the girl’s stubby nipples! So this was Ned’s idea of pretty, Jean thought, and wondered, Was the girl disappointed in her? Was she drab to the girl? For that was how she felt.

“Is this your mother?” from the girl in a girl’s voice, just a whisper.

“Yes.”

This was the mother breaking open gelcaps and licking up sleep or the opposite of sleep, extreme wakefulness, speed. This was the mother using scissors between her legs, staying ready, staying hairless, should someone want to lick her.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Agreed, yeah, and I’m certainly glad that I’m living over here, or mostly, at least. But so many of my friends are over there, and there are the repercussions we’ll feel, ugh. I guess we’ll figure it out, right? So happy you liked TB’s stuff. I’m smitten with it. And having him contribute to our possible haunted house would be more than dreamy, so maybe we will try to track him down. Love making me start answering my month+ of mostly unopened emails today, urgh, G. ** kier Hey! Yeah, right? He’s a real find. Cool, so glad you’re into it. Big congrats on the successful money application, whatever its size. I’ll look into Louis Schou-Hansen. Those photos are really promising, especially the middle one. So wish I could be there for your show. Never say never. How are you going to use the residency? Are you going to make work for the show there and then, or … ? ‘Red Rooms’ … I don’t think I know it, no. But I will now somehow. Thanks, pal. My day? Hm, Thomas Moore is visiting, and I met up with him and Zac and Michael Salerno and our pal Ange, ‘Room Temperature’ star, at the Pompidou to see a show by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It was mostly kind of wanky, I thought. I like his films, but his videos mostly seemed like forgettable dribs and drabs. Ange, Zac, and I ate falafel at the world famous L’As. Then Zac and I went to Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, mostly to see a talk by Gisele and Estelle Hanania about their new, huge book of photos of Gisele’s recent pieces. As far as Paris Photo, boy, there are a lot of really uninteresting photos being made these days, basically. That was most of my day. It was a-ok. Did you get up anything groovy du jour? ** Lucas, Howdy, L. Oops, the German exam. Do you feel like you wrote it passably? I hope? Excellent wordage about Beckett. Yeah, totally gotcha, and your invigoration about your writing is inspiring. I need to find a way to use that inspiration. No, sorry, eek, I haven’t read your poem yet. I’m literally a month or more behind on email-related things, but I’m going to start chipping away at that backlog today if it’s the last thing I do. And your poem will get priority, of course. I can feel your positivity burbling in me already, thank you. And I send you a bunch of my burbles, if that helps. ** Måns BT, Hej Mans!! Gröna Lund’s haunted houses are fun enough, but you really need to go to LA one Halloween and see the real deal. I’ll be your guide. I will, about Bob Hund. They’re still awaiting me. Great, great, about your school comrades. And Spain, presumably when it’s not even boiling hot. Your film club plans sound ace and wise, of course. Wish I could sneak in. Paris’s weather is in that kind of sublime phase where it’s chilly but not freezing yet. Maybe like what Stockholm has hanging over it right now. And the gray skies make the beauty of Paris’s buildings pop, I’m not sure why. And the Xmas decorations have started coming out, and Paris at Xmas is Paris at its visual peak maybe. May your day provide abundantly. Hugs, Dennis. ** Justin D, Hi, J. I’m doing my best to keep the blog escapist yet challenging, so, cool. I’ll overhear that Cosmopaark song once I”m out of here. Thanks! And they’re French! I should know them already, but … Keep rising above, my friend, as I will as well. ** Diego Luis Sanromán, Hi, Diego. I did get your email, I’m just really, really behind due to a week of jet lag and election mental fallout. I’ll try my very best to respond today. Thank you for your patience. ** Okay. I take considerable pleasure from Christine Schutt’s very precise but slightly off kilter sentences, and I thought I would see if her writing hits any kind of mark for you all. See you tomorrow.