Wanting a hit.

Yeah, you wanted the time.
But maybe I can't do time.
Shit, we both know that's an awful line,
but it doesn't make it wrong.

— LCD Soundsystem

DADASCOPE

A

Dadascope was leather. I mean nobody agreed it on its meaning.

HANS RICHTER

Whether or not they understood the content or the meaning of Dadascope, that's a different story. . . What the artist does and what the public takes from what he does is always a different story. Not just in the instant that the story is told, but also in the way the story is read fifty years later.

A

Fifty years. Is that the windspan, the wingspam, the spamwidth?

RICHTER

There is no story, there is no psychological implication except what the spectator puts in the images, but it is not purely accidental but rather a poetry of images built with and on associations (Nothing's ever tough enough. . . until we hit the road) the film takes the liberty of playing on the scale of possibilities of the cinema, freedom for which Dadaism always bet and to which it continues to give medium.

(the reader imagines touching his lovely scalp)

Dadascope is not conceived of at all as chaos, but as freewheeling poetry; and, as such it is in my opinion the best film-making I have done. But the poetry is so free that in several instances the sensations or analogies cannot be established at all. It is just as much chance which directs the flow of images as I do. But the fact remains that it is my chance, that it is my own borderline— the line where chance and conscious or creative direction cross or parallel each other. It's my chance because I realize it as chance. Another might not even realize it, or look at it, or feel or hear it.

LCD

No dirty bus and early flight. No seven days and forty nights.

ORTIZ MORALES

Dadascope is “a multilingual collection of Dada poetry, sound poems, and prose, along with Richter's choice of images and sounds typical of the Dada movement (objects and sculpture, especially by Man Ray; paintings, theater, performances and even chess games)” intended to “generate a new filmic style” that Richter called CINEMATIC POETRY and which he defined as “externalized internal events” for which the essential poetic element is “montage that creates metaphors.”

A

[Note to self, quote Morales on ‘the essential poetic element is montage that creates metaphors.’ See if constellates.]

MINOTAUR

RICHTER

In 1953/54, I wrote a scenario for Minotaur, a film I never made, but it is a major work as far as I am concerned. It is autobio-graphical. When I met Fellini for the first time, he told me, “Everything an artist does is autobiographical.” And that is right, to a greater or lesser degree. And Theseus in my Minotaur is to a greater degree.

The scenario started really from the same desire as the last episode of Dreams: the Labyrinth as an expression of the unforeseen ways in life you had to take, unforeseen obstacles you had to overcome. One goes through life worrying, but not so much that it inhibits action, one just goes forward. This going forward, trying out the right way, a life pattern, that is what I wanted to express in this film. It is the story of a man who is Everyman, but who becomes a hero when he does not suppress the voice of the innocents calling him for help. That's the essence. And in telling the story, I remember as a boy protecting the weak ones in school, and it is, in retrospect, also connected with the Hitler times, this incredible feeling of loneliness but still being forced to do something for one's co-human beings and not being able to do anything. This induced me to write the story.... You can't tell stories without telling stories you have lived through.

I should have made this film. That I couldn't do it is just one of those paradoxical, inhuman things that happen.

Final page of Hans Richter's film script for Minotaur, 1953

RICHTER:

Variations of ∞ the 8:
The infinite line returning to its origins (or returning into its origins?)
The labyrinth of my film script Minotaur
Where entrance and exit meet has kept me fascinated for the last twenty years in films and painting.

. . .

“The original source of this realization was a curious German DVD from the 90's with no information about the editor, publisher or the place of edition…”

OBJECT X

Object X is “a compilation of Dadaist poems and texts declaimed by their own authors and made by Hans Richter in 1957 and premiered in 1961. Participating Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Haussmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,Walter Mehrig, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters (on a 1932 recording), Tristan Tzara, and Wladimir Vogel. Also included is a posthumous participation by Theo van Doesburg, recited by his widow Nelly.”

“since he held that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a).”

*

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan), Chapter VIII, Footnote 1, from The Third Policeman
Hans Richter, Dadascope (1961)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (Live at Austin City Limits)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (This Is Happening, 2010)
Ortiz Morales, “Music for Audiovisuals” (Superior Conservatory of Music of Malaga, 2006-2007)

Eternals return.

The world is all that is the case. […] There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

In his journals, Georg Simmel stared at Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and then, quietly, refused the implied sameness: 

The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, but understood as the premise of the eternal recurrence. But the result, the actual repetition at some point of the identical, is not the same— for the wheel has an infinitely large radius; only once an infinite amount of time has elapsed – that is, never – can it reach the same point again. And yet it is a wheel that turns, which, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.

Elsewhere, Paul Valery’s Mon Faust: “Only the ineffable is of any importance!”

Even a Somewhere sounds solid in comparison.

Reviewing notebooks again. Trying to catch up on the things I haven’t finished. Finding old words staring at new ones. Lured by the queer sensibility of metaphors that draw on the mystical via negationis [way of negation], or what Hans Blumbenberg calls “those self-portrayals of the elementary perplexity that riddles every theology: having to speak of God incessantly without presuming to dare say anything about him.”

+

How Blumenberg squares Cusa in “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality”:

Nicholas of Cusa made this perplexity a speculative means of representing his coincidentia oppositorum [unity of opposites]. He invented the explosive metaphor of the circle whose radius approaches infinity and thus produces a circumference with an infinitely small curvature so that the circle's arc coincides with its tangent. Here, the intentionality of intuition is over-expanded in order that its futility be expressed in itself, so that the anticipation [Vorgriff] performs the retraction of the trespass [Übergriff].

+

How metaphors offer us access to ways of thinking that are limited by the nature of our relation to a source, or a source text.

+

How translation theory figurates the constellatory potential of language in relation to the absent original, where “original” designates a mythical unitary language demolished with the towel of Babel.

+

How the god of the gaps may occasionally partake in this longing for originary wholeness.

+

And (I want to argue) poetry works against such regressive nostalgia when it employs the conditional.

+

And George Lichtenberg, lamenting something like a deus absconditus in the trunk of the tree. . .

"Like images on photosensitive film projected from memory by the eye..."

“Yes, at one time, I did think that I’d found my niche in my words but then, how shall I put it? Words made their presence felt through their difference. […] It was as though, all of a sudden, I could only express myself through silence in that space left vacant by their difference.”

“What difference?”

“Something fundamentally incompatible between man and his words, something that keeps them at a distance.”

 — Edmond Jabès

“There are many ways of taking notes,” I said to myself in June 2023.

It is said that Francisco de Goya went out at night frequently while Napoleon’s troops ravaged Spain and put flesh on the word, “atrocity.” A gardener named Isidro often accompanied the artist on his nightwalks through Quinta del Sordo. One night, as Goya sketched the stacked corpses along a hillside, Isidro asked why he felt the need to depict such barbarities. Without looking up from the bodies, Goya replied, “In order to acquire the taste for saying for ever and ever to men that they should not be barbarians.”

“If we imagine for a moment that our enemies were to get wind of what we are doing and try to use it as propaganda, it would do them no good at all, for the very good reason that no one would believe them,” wrote the Reichskommissar for the East in a June 1943 letter to his peers in Berlin.

“This transformation of an experience into language, this possibility of a relationship between our sensibility and a world that reduces it to nothing, can today be seen as the most perfect example in French contemporary writing of what literature can be,” Georges Perec wrote in his study of Robert Antelme’s The Human Space, a book which revisited Antelme’s experiences after being deported to Buchenwald, Gandersheim and Dachau.

The commitment to express the inexpressible is central to modern literature.

“There are many ways of trying to say rootless things,” I said to someone else in June 2024.

The words of a given language limit our horizon.

The words are unsuitable to the task of speech.

The writer feels unsuitable to the labor of saying.

The writer has felt this way since lifting the first piece of scorched wood to draw upon the walls of the man-cave.

“In the beginning, men and animals and even stones were gods. Everything happened without a name and without a law,” said Bia to Kratos, as written by Cesar Pavese.

Consider a colony of protozoans leading their obscure lives in a pond.

Consider the “extras” flashing through the car window of a poem by Broda.

The bowl that the deceased used to wash must be placed outside with its mouth to the ground and it cannot be used until the dead is buried.

Consider the mouth of the bowl being washed out with soap like a 1950’s sitcom.

What notes have been taken by the photograph of a child with soap in its mouth and a bowl in the margins?

*

Charles Mingus, “II B.S.”
Edmond Jabès, El, ou le dernier livre (Gallimard, 1973)
Francisco de Goya, The Disasters of War Portfolio
Robert Antelme, Essais et témoignages, introduced by Daniel Dobbels (Gallimard, 1996)

Vulgarizations.

“[An] example (is] that of the application of 'above' and 'below' to the earth. . .. I see well enough that I am on top; the earth is surely beneath me! (And don't smile at this example. We are indeed all taught at school that it is stupid to talk like that. But it is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.)”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Pierre Bonnard’s The Conversation — a sketch or an unfinished working draft, I think

Language is marked by falls, by stalls between faltering and falling.

Translation theory originates in our irrevocable banishment from Eden.

All literary theory, interpretation, and critique follows from that seminal withdrawal.

What follows a fall is Commentary.

Taking translation theory as the originary for any discussion of language and textual interpretation, one can imagine why New Criticism fares badly when applied to texts that didn’t originate in English. New Criticism touches so little in translation. Imperiousness, in general, makes for limited readings.

Times have changed but those who need God’s language to be an unchanging law, preserved by the elect, continue their war against those who favor open access and multiplicity.

Some have said that the first “mass market translation” involved carrying the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek at some point in the 3rd century BCE. Eventually, this Greek translation became more authoritative than its Hebrew source. Fast forward to 384 AD, when Eusebius Hieronymus (later Saint Jerome) created a new translation of the scriptures in Latin. Eschewing the official Greek, Hieronymus’ translation relied entirely on the Hebrew and Aramaic source text. The rage of the bishops followed. A furious Augustine of Hippo lambasted Hieronymus for dividing the faithful from within. For Augustine, this creation of an alternate sacred document would gnaw through the intestines of the Church. 

History shuddered. Lava poured from the mouth of Etna. The Vulgate opened the doors to disaster by making the gospels accessible to speakers of Latin languages. More vulgarities were sure to follow. In 1522, Martin Luther published the New Testament in German. William Tyndale followed suit with an English version. Alas, in 1536, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, executed by strangulation, then burned at the stake. Burning his bones assured that Tyndale would not be permitted to rest in eternity. Sir Thomas More had expressed concern over Tyndale's English translation, but he missed Tyndale’s execution due to his own. More was beheaded on charges of treason three months prior. 

The fall is a singular event yet also a season.

In Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifestation, Mark Polizotti takes translated texts as a form of collaboration. Language is not a clear end-point marked by a destination but a route with spaces, evocations, new roads, and rest stops dropped the route which alters what one receives or picks up while reading. For him, this complexity is a liberation: the translator is free to give up on equivalence and focus on encountering the text.

The translator “performs” the translation on paper. 

Polizotti notes that an earlier meaning of translation referred to the act of transferring a holy relic from one place to another, or “else to carry a saintly figure to heaven without the intermediary of death.” 

[At this point, a leaf falls next to my foot, as if to inaugurate the seasons of boots. I begrudge the beauty of all small things that seek to obscure what is true of winter, namely, the light’s early leavetaking.]

Recent Mormon schismatics lean on a concept of “translated bodies” involving the denial of corporeal death repackaged into a product for the cult of eschatology. Unlike Polizotti’s translation theory, these bodies have been “translated” by God across mediums. They are translated for the purpose of the end-times: time’s end is simultaneously a present and a desired destination to them.

This is why Lori and Chad Vallow support contemporary translation theories that obsess over the literal translation. The divinely-translated take themselves literally, and place their faith in the text to render language immaculate in the flesh.

These two have convinced me that I never want to visit Hawaii.

"It is just a short step from this to plastic form."

Paul Klee, Little Castle in the Air (Luftschlösschen)

Thinking of Ann Lauterbach’s “Elegy, or To Begin Again”— with its wonderful serial form, its repetitions, its figurations of dead faces — the soft rendering of Seurat’s Child in White, and the sound of its “absent agitations” . . .

Ann Lauterbach.

Detail from Paul Klee’s Schützerin (Protectress), (1932)

GARY INDIANA’S PENGUINS

Gary Indiana’s penguins keep wandering through my head, as do the zoo-keepers in “yellow smocks” — which I share, for the pleasure of the “blowy” and the “shirring” and the “way of penguins"“:

Last month I went to the zoo in Edinburgh to visit the penguins. The day was so blowy the treetops thrashed in the wind with a shirring sound like crashing surf. Finally rain thin as needles fell and the zoo closed the park. I only had time to see the giant sloths and pink flamingos and a leathery aquatic mammal I don't know the name of moving swiftly back and forth under the inky water of his pond.

The penguins were diving and feeding, feeding and diving.

The zookeepers, in yellow smocks and blue galoshes, hand-fed them whole, dead fish. They snapped the fish up as if pulling them from a vending machine. We love penguins, but that is one-sided. No penguins will talk to you. No penguins will even look at you unless you are close enough to be a threat. Why should they? Unless you are holding a dead fish, no penguin has any reason to go near you. That is the way of penguins, and it always will be.

PAUL KLEE IN HIS NOTEBOOKS

The story of a “nice walk” and getting drenched in yellow:

Yesterday afternoon I took a nice walk. The scene was drenched in a sulfur yellow, only the water was a turquoise blue—blue to deepest ultramarine. The sap colors the meadows in yellow, carmine, and violet. I walked about in the river bed, and since I was wearing boots, I was able to wade through the water in many places. I found the most beautiful polished stones.

I took along a few washed-out tiles. It is just a short step from this to plastic form.

Suddenly I was surprised by extremely dense fog and I hastened back in the direction of the air base, since I am not well acquainted with this region even in clear daylight. I took a familiar path; and soon got into the vicinity of Langweid and strolled on toward the left, below the highway to Stettenhofen, where the fog grew lighter; the Lech was at some distance. The soil's tender, warm tones came through. I went to the old familiar inn and had two helpings of hors d'oeuvres and immediately felt quite warm again.

*

Ann Lauterbach, “Elegy, or To Begin Again” (Conjunctions, 2008)
Gary Indiana, I Can Give You Anything But Love
Nick Cave, “Helpless”
Paul Klee, Instrument for a New Music (1914)
Paul Klee, Little Castle in the Air (Luftschlösschen)
Paul Klee, Schützerin (1932)

Paul Klee, Instrument for a New Music (1914)

Contempt for poetry.

CRITIQUE AND CRITIQUE

Evergreen on the literary criticism scene: Davenport, Steiner, Canetti, Leiris, and Gass.

Gass, for example, plays for the vastest stakes: the world entire in a sentence. His writing is lit from within by unremitting love for language. The study of affinities is inseparable from the writing which exhibited what it admired without pandering to the usual anxiety of influence. Take, for example, the sharpened little sentences Gass deployed to describe the French author, Colette: “Colette has the cat's gaze. Unhurried contemplation is her forte. Hunger cannot give us such precision.” Note the space he refuses between words. Note how Gass uses syntax to create resonant areas within a sentence. How closely is the nailed to the noun?

Dead on arrival: the sort of review that oozes contempt for language and poetry. “UGH. THE THING IS NOT THE THING” so much as the smugness of its loathing. What does the following paragraph illuminate?

Batter my heart, three-person’d Critic! Personal amusement (or obsession) is more than fine, but is it a book? Surely ‘literary criticism’ has already been substantially ‘defamiliarized’ in this day and age? How many writers have not already drawn our attention to poetry’s ‘participation in the contemporary information economy’? Does poetry even exist? Am I a camera? 

This paragraph is merely a self-portrait, a paean to personal fear of flaccidity. One is struck by how little the self-portrait risks of the self. The author would have us believe that he is speaking about a book. Thus, he directs our attention to its brushstrokes, its focal points, its angles of light— and he hates the artist’s style, despises the artist’s subject, takes personal offense at the artist’s decision to exhibit something that he finds reprehensible. “The stupidity of the pious, whose judgment could never be compared with those of the God they adored with all their heart: This was the second thing that scared me,” wrote Orhan Pamuk.

The Surrealist "Truth" Game.

“It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.”

– Phillipe Audouin

At its best, Surrealism is played for love of the game. The eye isn’t on the outcome (since no outcome is definitive) so much the process.

Theoretically, the games began with Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a book that influenced everyone from Michel Leiris to Louis Aragon. Roger Caillois took it further in Man, Play, and Games, where he stipulated the conditions for a game as follows: A game must be free (or not obligatory), separate (circumscribed in time and space), uncertain (the result is not predetermined), unproductive (no goods are produced), governed by rules, and associated with make-believe.

The surrealist “experiments with objects” also fall under this game-like structure. I’m sharing this one from The Book of Surrealist Games because I can’t imagine a more delightful use of a piece of pink velvet—- and maybe we should all be determining the irrational characteristics of objects at a time when realism’s impetus for description misses so many dialectical possibilities.

En fin:

13 things I learned from books this week.

1

According to Javier Marias, when Henry James and Oscar Wilde met, James mentioned that he was missing London, at which point Wilde glanced at him with scorn and disgust. “Really! You care for places?,” Wilde huffed, and then added: “The world is my home!” From then on, James referred to Wilde as "an unclean beast" or "a fatuous fool" or "a tenth-rate cad." On the other hand, James’ “enthusiasm for Maupassant knew no bounds, again thanks to a single visit the French short-story writer had received him for lunch in the society of a lady who was not only naked, but wearing a mask.” It is a fact that Henry James died at the age of seventy-two, after a long illness. Before dying, in a fit of delirium, James dictated two letters to his “brother,” Joseph Bonaparte, urging him to accept the throne of Spain. At one point, James fell to the floor. Convinced that he was dying, James later said he heard a voice which was not his own in the room, and this voice said: “So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing!”

2

The mythos of nationalism continues to create us. According to the U. S. Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of Happiness” is one of the “inalienable rights” of man. Robert Calasso draws this to our attention in his book,The Unnameable, if only to point out that the exceptional. . . isn’t. This “magical word is also used in another text,” namely, the Catechism of a Revolutionary, drawn up by Sergey Nechayev. Article 22 reads of the Catechism reads: “The Society has no aim other than the complete liberation and happiness of the masses.”

Calasso argues that the secular world is looking for theories to satisfy the hole left by myth and meaning. He quotes Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad: “The Gospel is the last and marvelous expression of Greek genius, just as the Iliad is its first.” If "Greece and the Gospels were two independent and non-discordant revelations,” this recognition was achieved by Weil’s metaphor of looking at a cubic box:

There is no viewpoint from which the box has the appearance of a cube: one always sees only a few sides, the corners do not seem right angles, the sides do not seem equal. No one has ever seen, no one will ever see a cube. For like reasons, no one has ever touched nor will ever touch a cube. If one moves around the box, an infinite variety of apparent forms is generated. None of these is the cubic form. 

At the same time, we know that the cubic form constitutes the unity of all those changeable forms and “also their truth,” added Weil, who considered this to be a divine gift, so that “enclosed in our very sensibility is a revelation.” From this revelation one could move on to understand all the others. But, “for the secular world the cubic box does not exist," Calasso maintains. Bummer.

3

I walked Radu and thought about these two lines by McKenzie Wark, from her letter to Cybele — “Something is absent, offered to you, perchance. A hole made in a poem; a poem made whole by a cut.”

4

Rambling through my K-related notebooks again, where I found a passage from a book by Paul Zweig that I think speaks best for itself, without my clumsy paraphrasing and pithy summations. Zweig, then:

Paul Zweig, excerpted fromThe Heresy of Self-Love

5

Greil Marcus opens What Nails It with an essay titled after the father who died before he was born. “Greil Gerstley,” it reads, the “echo of an absent memory” evokes the man he never met, the soldier lost in a Pacific typhoon when his ship went down. This particular absence calls up the ghosts of all epics and shipwrecks, all odysseys and heroes and adventurers located beneath ad infinitum of “whatever comes” — and opening into the risk of oblivion. The waves and crests of Melville’s Moby Dick fill the background. In a later essay from the same book, Marcus mentions how powerfully that Melville’s novel affected him, and how reading it gives an ocean we cannot imagine, a context so betrothed to the unpredictable power of the natural elements that it can only be taken as an opposite of what we experience in our controlled, highly-commoditized lives.

6

Autumn 1940. Lisbon— according to Roberto Calasso— who quotes Arthur Koestler:

“And more suicides: Otto Pohl, Socialist veteran, Austrian ex-Consul in Moscow, ex-Editor of the Moskauer Rundschau, Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbor in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, and one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles, together with H., the day before my departure, and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some 'stuff' in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful; only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, sixty-two tablets of a sedative, procured in Berlin during the week which followed the burning of the Reichstag. He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the thirty-one tablets left him would be enough. It was enough. A week after my departure he made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain, a man of fifty-five, with heart disease. At Port Bou, the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead." 

I keep staring at the letter “H.” and thinking about Marseilles.

7

Returning to Joanna Walsh’s My Life as a Godard Movie to think about this term she uses as a scaffold— motion parallax, meaning how the world moves with you when seen through the window of a train. The speaker loves riding the rails of her imaginings, running her nimble thoughts over an object and then creating a response. Like many writers, I recognize myself in that particular fissure. 

Walsh quotes Kierkegaard’s Repetition— “Does he love the girl or is she just another thing that moves him?” — but the quote could just as well apply to the speaker as to the Him of her book. And her book is about beauty, about the desiring gaze that defines the Godard's female protagonists. In turn, Godard builds his aesthetic from the appearances of his stunning heroines, Walsh sees "a resistance in Godard's women … in the way they look at Godard's men" so uncomprehendingly. That "moment of resistance" in their gaze is what Walsh takes to be "his study of their hesitation . . . the kind of interest that holds its object at a distance." Walsh appreciates this recognition from Godard. She backtracks, acknowledging that he does use some green in his films: he uses sea-green and eau-de-nil and "a green that is almost black." She uses the color of paint, her medium,  to describe his colors. she refuses in a sense to Grant his frame. "Godard plots are driven by desire.. Love is their by-product; beauty is their currency." But the women do not look as if they desire the men: "they prefer her to be desired without desiring." "Ethics are the aesthetics of the future," Bruno says. Godard showed Walsh the beauty and power of saying “J'hesite.”

8

True to New Narrative’s celebration of gossip, Rob Halpern drops a lovely morsel of blab in his introduction to Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist, originally published in 1985 — but with the thrill of a forthcoming NYRB reprint due out this year. As blab would have it, the character named Martin “is the confirmed nomen à clef of Fredric Jameson . . .  whose article ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ was first published in 1984, the year before Jack.” At one point in Jack, Bob (a.k.a. the narrator who goes by “Robert” on the cover page, where he plays author) writes: “If there was a Red Queen, she would have been Martin, a famous art historian and Marxist critic who really wielded some French majesty.” Of course the juiciest blab gets tucked into footnotes, which is why I read them with gusto. And Halpern’s footnote number 5 doesn’t disappoint: he nods to the role played by Fredric Jameson in the San Francisco Bay Area circles where New Narrative emerged during the late 1970’s, and mentions Jameson’s presence in Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds, where he appears undisguised as “Fred . . . the captain of our destinies and true Teddy Roosevelt of our souls.” Coincidentally, Boone's essay “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara” appeared beside Jameson's "Reification and Utopia" in the first issue of Social Text in 1979.

In a note appended to the novel, Gluck locates the text in “art of collage” before offering an inventory of sources. Halpern hones in two of these sources to frame the intertextual references, adding that the title of the book comes from the “art criticism” of Denis Diderot and “the novelesque dialogue” deployed in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, where gossip and rumor create possibility. Gluck’s Jack, of course, is the modernist—his cool distance repulsed by intimacy and sentimentalism, eager to prove itself in abstraction. And Bob represents himself, which is to say: the postmodernist impulse of play, experimentation, and self-abnegation.

9

“Power of absence,” — as noted by Paul Valery in his Cahiers from 1929.

 “We have to be in a desert. For he whom we must love is absent.” — replies Simone Weil.

10

Autumn 1940, according to Roberto Calasso— who notes that “Bertolt Brecht was writing The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, where Hitler is presented as a gangster trying to take control of the cauliflower racket.” Calasso continues:

Young Viereck couldn't know it, but in the introduction to Metapolitics he was already perfectly reiterating Brecht and many who would follow him: “The common question is: are the men on top, Hitler particularly, as sincere as the masses below or only cynical gangsters laughing at their own stolen ideas? But the very question is too heavy-footed, too lacking in psychological awareness, to answer either positively or negatively. Here the real question is not either-or. Both the 'either' and the 'or' combine; that combination is a logical impossibility but a psychological fact. In other words, most successful frauds are sincere; most demagogues are honestly intoxicated by their own dishonest and cynical appeals.”

11

Samuel Beckett: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I realized my stupidity. Only then did I start to write what I felt.”

12

McKenzie Wark to Cybele again . . . “There’s so many of their myths where the cut balls give rise to monsters. As if that could only be a bad thing. You and girls like me, Cybele, we love monsters. They’re modern. They demonstrate the ways the world could become otherwise. They’re the sign of fresh things. This is your world in all the ways it comes and cums.” — and my heart in the cumberbund.

13

Ah well. . . C’est comme ca, la vie. “Realism is a corruption of reality,” wrote Wallace Stevens in Opus Posthumous.

*

Anne Carson, Plainwater
Bruce Boone, Century of Clouds
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
Greil Marcus, What Nails It (Yale University Press)
Jeff Noh, “Harold Brodkey’s Paper Attachments”
Joanna Walsh, My Life as a Godard Movie (Transit Books)
McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso)
Nadine Shaw, “Ville morose”
Paul Valery, Cahiers
Paul Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love (Basic Books)
Robert Gluck, Jack the Modernist (NYRB Classics)
Roberto Calasso, The Unnameable Present (translated by Richard Dixon)

Egon Schiele’s 1911 painting of a “poet” — and it goes without saying that Schiele is the model for his imaginings and self-objectifications

O camera.

---

“camera”

. . . comes from the Latin phrase camera obscura, which means “dark chamber.” Used to describe the original devices used for projecting an image, which were essentially dark rooms with a small hole that allowed light to enter and project an upside-down image on the opposite wall.

1 /

K. walks along the lake as he decides how to keep moving. The god who claimed to make his followers fishers of men has erred: the man on the boat catches no fish. Instead he pulls up a rosewood dresser filled with the words of a stranger. A stranger that feels strangely like him. This is the repetition: we recover ourselves across time, in various lakes and texts, in the book inside a book discussed by Hilarius Bookbinder who happens upon Stages on Life’s Way inside an old bureau. The bookbinder becomes a publisher when he decides to print a three-part text, written by three different authors, each of whom he forgot to return their bound texts. His sense of duty drives him to publish the books, and all three are bound together by nothing except the uncanny accident of their going unnoticed across time. Hilarius is thus cast into the role of pseudo-editor by accident and happenstance. It would take a poet or a god to divine meaning from this.

2 /

3 /

It has been called a sequel to Either/Or, which was published two years earlier.

It was the last of K.’s works to be published under the veil of pseudonymity.

It is “the richest of all I have written, but it is difficult to understand,” K. said of “‘Guilty?’/’Not Guilty?’” — the unhappy love reconfigured as a diary drawn from the depths.

4 /

“It is a valuable find, and I feel that I am under obligation to advertise it,” Kierkegaard writes in “Advertisement,” the prefatory note to the “Guilty/Not Guilty” section.

And “Guilty/Not Guilty” is truly the Eden of his either/or. K renders this “passion narrative” in the form of an epistolary diary: a series of letters by Quidham to himself concerning the subject of a broken engagement. Quidham’s Diary ravages the genre-boundary between the private diary and the public text, for the entries retrace the same days and bumble over the same streets in the same year where the speaker keeps running into himself whenever he sees “Her.” Or whenever she is recollected.

5 /

The motto of Quidham's Diary is inscribed on the following page: Periisem nisi periisem. Kierkegaard culled the phrase from his own diaries, which would later be published posthumously as Journals— a title that downplays the role he imagined for thinking-as-writing.

“cameră”

        (n.) “room” or “chamber” in Romanian

November 1794.

After completing his university studies in philosophy, Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She was twelve years old when the coup de foudre occurred. Unlike Dante, Novalis went after his Beatrice in the flesh. The two were betrothed when she was thirteen. A few months after their betrothal, Sophie became deathly ill. She died at the age of 15 years, and this event was the world — and its end – to Georg. 

The ideal of Sophie died along with the person, and became the basis of his lyrical turn. Hymns to the Night was published in 1800. Georg had become a poet. But he had also become “Novalis,” this character marked by the creation of a “new beginning” — a man who could no longer exist entirely as Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg, the husband of Sophie.

Summer 1798.

In the year following Sophie’s death, Novalis imagined writing about Goethe as a natural scientist, drawing his literary work into the whole of his life. Novalis journaled about Goethe’s journals within his own, writing in the company of his ghosts. And so Novalis wrote . . .  “Journals are actually the first books to be written in common. Writing in company is an interesting symptom giving us an inkling of a great development in authorship. Perhaps one day people will write, think and act as a mass. Entire communities, even nations, will undertake One Work.”

The end of the singular “public” which has been displaced by the possibility of a conversation with the world. But what meaning can the private or personal have for this conception of the public? Reality would be displaced from the agora to the interior chambers of the heart and mind, as experienced subjectively. 

Novalis stares at her portrait and tries to reconcile the image he sees with the human he knew. Reality, he thinks, can only exist in the fragmented, partial knowledge of all participating authors. The need to write the book justifies its existence; no other justification is needed.

Midnight (the time of metaphor)

Novalis is alone with his grief. The desire to understand Sophie, the longing to share the mutual understanding that characterized the romantic ideal of his time, is gone. The only reality Novalis has is his own. Ironically, it is only through the Other – the beloved, the absent, the Sophie – that Novalis realizes his “infinite.” The concept of infinity becomes the space of true speech. And an impossibility arises, for Novalis depends on Sophie to reach the ideal but, due to the accidents of human life, he will never understand her completely.

At the risk of repeating one’s self . . . 

Sophie dies. Novalis stares at death — gives us death as a “specter haunting man’s entire history, his highest cultural achievements.” Jacques Derrida paces the room that will become a “camera” – an eternal chamber that holds the hauntology of here, the ghost is me. Sophie cannot “be” dead. Not literally.

Novalis forges a complicity between time and displeasure in life’s end. “Time originates with displeasure. Thus, all displeasures [are] so long and all joy so short… displeasures are finite like time. Everything finite originates out of displeasure.”

Death becomes the ultimate apocalypse, the culmination of our finiteness, the conclusion to any reality we know. Death makes a void of life’s meaning. Time fucks us up entirely.

. . . but I will not degrade my soul
by learning to know her . . .

Thus does the speaker of Quidham’s Diary vow to keep himself pure at heart.

Every answer begins with anxiety. As does the question it begs. 

November 2025

Constantin and Virgilius think that recollection, an idea central to Platonic epistemology, seems complementary to repetition. “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, where a genuine repetition is recollected forward,” says Constantin. 

In a different camera, Johannes de Silentio, the author of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, draws on Aristotle’s idea of recognition, a moment in theatre when tragedy is realized, in order to offer his own view of recognition as presupposing and dispelling some “prior hiddenness.” But Johannes de Silentio, Constantin, and Vigilius never discuss recognition, recollection, and repetition in relation to one another . . . which is too bad. I mean, if recognition presupposes the condition of hiddenness, then it would precede recollection and repetition, since both recollection and repetition must presuppose some form of recognition in order to occur. The thing that stays hidden without ever being recognized can’t be meaningfully recollected nor can it be meaningfully repeated.

Say Novalis needs a lens to put Sophie’s death in perspective —

lens 1

— the incredible lightness of being that Novalis experienced while in Her presence negated the despair that time unfolds on an Us. The ‘solution’ to the existential crisis lies in the reflection. Reflecting allows us to escape our finiteness by encountering the “absolute joy” that remains “eternal – outside all time.” We turn “displeasure into joy, and with it time into eternity,” Novalis whispered to his Reflection.

lens 2

When Constantin Constantius returns to Berlin in order to replay or reexperience his time in the former lodges next to Gendarmenmarkt, he is mining for repetition. And this repetition – the replay of fond images —  is the technical marvel accomplished by the family movie, or even the cinema film watched with a first love. There is a loop into Krapp’s Last Tape…though what Beckett reveals is the subject’s failure to recognize the prior selves. To recognize is a way of claiming: it is recognition that precedes both recollection and repetition. (K avoids this, I think.)

lens 3

It is strange to lose the only thing I’ve never lost before— not since the age of 18, when I wore a bob. It is eerie to watch my hair fall out in clumps without explanation. The discomfort of humans in white coats allows me to abandon the confused woman and step forward to reassure the professionals: “Surely it will be fine.” “Just do what you know.” “How will this medication affect my insomnia?” “I understand that diagnosis is a betting game.” “I know you are doing your best.” “I know you regret how the prescription from four weeks prior only caused more hair to fall from my head.” “I’ll be damned if the sun isn’t extraordinary, even though it visits us less. . .”

lens 4

In his journals from the early 1850’s, K meditates on the forgiveness of sin in relation to how we perceive life’s accidents. He argues for an “altered view” that what God shows us isn’t the “punishment” but rather mercy, so no bad things are an “expression of God’s wrath” but rather a thing of suffering, to be born with God, who knows suffering through Christ. And now, K takes this further, saying that “Punishment is not the pain in itself” since the same identical pain or suffering happens to others as “mere accident.” Instead, “punishment is the idea that this particular suffering is punishment. When this idea is removed, so too, really, is the punishment.”

Socrates never sought to prove the immortality of the soul. Instead, he simply lived as if immortality were a fact about the cosmos. In this sense, says K, if there is no such thing as immortality — if the as if that governed his choices proves to be false —  “I still do not regret my choice; for this is the only thing that concerns me.” The choice. The decision. The commitment. A little Pascalian wager with his back against the wall.

lens 5

HE: What drew you to K?

ME: I recognized my own fear of commitment in him.

HE: Oh? But he is deeply committed!

ME: Committed to the thing he can neither see nor prove. Committed to uncertainty.

HE: False. Kierkegaard is committed to certainty. He knows what he knows by faith.

ME: Maybe. But who knows what the conditions of such knowing might be?

HE: You know what you are . . . or when someone says this, you think ‘a writer’.

ME: In our world, this breaks down into various categories, and each has its corresponding affect. I create texts, but what does that make me to you?

HE: A writer.

ME: Johannes de Silentio identifies as a ‘freelancer’ in Fear and Trembling.. . . I identify with K’s decision here, this choice to name the self as a freelancer in order to expand the field of thought. Don’t you think contemporary thought is drained by genre and brand?

HE: K calls himself ‘a kind of poet’ . . . in his journals, in his texts, in his discourses. Kierkegaard was a poet to himself.

ME: I think many philosophers are poets are heart. But taking K at his word, his books refused the given boxes. Prefaces, Either/Or, Postscript: all situate themselves uncomfortably in relation to communicative function because destructive of the text. The countergenre. A creature that offers itself apophatically by insisting on what it is not. He calls Fear and Trembling “a dialectical lyric” but it is also a mix of exegesis, fabulism, social commentary, farce, and dialectical study.  He says his Prefaces are “like tuning a guitar, like talking with a child, like spitting out of the window” and I hear him say, look, anything can happen, and everything that does may be an accident. Postscript, the text titled after the P.S., which is the paratext that names itself as an addendum to the original. It tells us that it is a “postscript to crumbs of philosophy,” the son of its father text. The subtitle calls it a “mimic-pathetic– dialectic compilation–an existential contribution,” a promise to break the cherished molds of thought and classification. K. never tells us where to land. He guts the immediate life at stake: he lays the “I” on the line and then, in the final pages, reminds us to leave this useless text, to abandon its author and his musings  just as he urged readers to leave Prefaces, that work of “a light-hearted-do-nothing.”

HE: (sighs) Losing your hair is most noticeable to you, A. Other people have to look closely to see what you’re hiding . . .

ME: I’d rather not. Look, I think what continues to provoke me in K is his obsession with finding a justified exception to the ethical.

HE: Sometimes I think take his subjectivity too far. He was going for an absolute, after all.

ME: But an absolute couldn’t absolve him of going for it. The self is disclosed in the reading, the labor of interpretation. There is no system that K wants to create. No temple or ideology. No comfortable institution that would enable the flourishing of police, or their cousins, the pastors.

HE: “I fear no one as I fear myself. Woe unto me in case I were to discover that there had been one deceitful word in my mouth, one single word whereby I had sought to persuade her —”

ME: Ha ha. God’s money in those worries. And maybe that is connected to what I was thinking, namely, how K refuses to tender the coin of the realm —

HE: And that coin is what?

ME: Respectability. Same game, different costumes.

HE: You mean flaying himself on the page in order to make sure that no part is left pure. I’m assuming. His refusal to offer an out.

ME: (nods) This refusal forces us into anxiety about our own choices–his dread becomes our own, the possible life, the one we could have lived if life and work was a thing we wanted to take seriously. Which is to say: existentially. As if eternity is at stake. One must choose.

I have the courage, I think, to doubt everything, to fight, I think, against everything. But the courage to recognize nothing, to possess nothing: that I lack. Most people complain that life is too prosaic, that life is not at all like those novels where lovers are lucky, as for me, I complain that life is not like those novels where one has hardened fathers to fight against, virgins' bedrooms to force open, convent walls to leap over. I have only the pale Figures of the night, stubborn and bloodless, to battle with, and I am the one who gives them life and being.

— Kierkegaard, in a journal entry several years before the Corsair affair

[What does it mean to exist as non-existent? I mean: what is the text Mallarme imagined?]

*

As a child, Flaubert had come to know the story of Anthony in the puppet theatre, later seeing the painting by Brueghel the Younger in the Balbi collection in Genoa. It is clear to him, however, that only the word can deliver what the picture cannot: it alone can leave the rivalry between the world and the book as open as is required.

No painter could show what Flaubert has the Queen of Sheba say to the hermit: “I am not a woman, I am a world.” That the saint uses the book to resist the throng of figures could have been shown iconically; only verbal mastery could intimate that it is the world itself and as a whole that seduces him in every phantasm of vices and mortal sins, against which the book must hold the balance. The spiteful threat with which the phantasmal Queen of Sheba departs the scene is that of the restored desert—Lichtenberg's empty space— penetrating the subject in the only way the loss of the world can be suffered: as boredom. What are the temptations the anchorite must withstand compared with the emptiness they leave behind— unless the book on the wooden desk in the middle of the saint's mud hut could be his world, just as the author's book should be the world of the reader?

— Hans Blumenberg, The Readability of the World

Again

“. . . now is supposed to be objective. And if one uses one's own person maieutically it is taken to be in the manner of Andersen. All this was needed to throw light on my position in the development. Objectivity is taken to be higher than subjectivity. Quite the contrary; that is to say, an objectivity which takes shape in a corresponding subjectivity, that is the goal. The System was something inhuman to which no person could correspond either as author or executor.”

— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

IF.1

if she could stay with me and live in a little cupboard
if I could convince her that I was a scoundrel
if I work even harder
if that way had not been used
if that was what I wanted
if she had neither relatives nor friends
if she had understood me at the time
if she understands
if she or I must first be dead
if I fail in this

“[In the margin]”

[In the margin] She took out a small note on which there was. something written by me which she was accustomed to carrying in her breast; she took it out and quietly tore it into small pieces and said: So, after all, you have also played a terrible game with me.

[In the margin] She said: Only that it won't be too late when you regret it - she meant death. I had to make a cruel joke about that and asked whether she meant I should come like Wilhelm in Lenore.

[In the margin] To extricate myself from the relationship as a cad, an arch-cad if possible, was the only way to get her afloat and on course for a marriage. But it was also a piece of recherché gallantry. With my light hand I could have got out of it much more cheaply. The notion that behavior of this kind is chivalrous has been enlarged upon by the young man in Constantin Constantius and I agree with him. So we parted.

[In the margin: It's true, the day I picked up all my things from her I wrote a letter to the Councillor which was returned unopened.] I spent the nights crying in my bed, but in the daytime was my usual self, even more flippant and witty than called for. My brother told me he would go to the family and prove to them that I was no cad. I said: If you do that I'll blow your brains out. The best proof of how deeply concerned I was.

[In the margin:] The Seducer's Diary was definitely intended for her sake, to repulse her - and I know what agonies I endured when it was published, because the idea was like my own goal, to arouse everybody's indignation against me, something that misfired completely, especially as far as the public is concerned, which received me jubilantly, something that has helped to aggravate my scorn of the public - but so far as anyone was put in mind of 'her', it was also altogether the most recherché gallantry imaginable.

To reduplicate is to be what one says. [...]

IF.2

if I wanted to recount how ingenious I have been in fooling people about my life
if it is no longer true
if the dialectic turns away
if these great riches of thought still latent in my soul
if I were just a little less faithful
if it had been possible
if I should ever repeat it as author

IF.3

if in creating man God himself lost a little of his power
if that should tempt him
if he were all there was
if everything had to do with him
if it is a madman, what else is it but madness to fasten one's attention uninterruptedly upon him
if it needs to be emphasized again and again that it is the highest
if my aloneness were no higher than marriage but something much lower
if you want to
if it comes to that
if it comes
if that can be done
if no one

if I should ever repeat it
as author

list in volatile sway

1. Suppose I had married her. Let us assume it. What then? 

2. Just as a woman who is not happy in her house sits long by the window, so the soul of a melancholic sits by the eye to look for diversions. Another form of melancholy is the one that closes the eye altogether, so as to have darkness all around.

3. This girl had to be very costly to me, or I had to make myself very costly for her religiously.

4. How true, therefore, the remark I have often made concerning myself, that like S. who saved her life by telling fairytales, I save my life, or keep myself alive, by writing.

5. There is- and this is both the good and the bad in me - something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship with me. 

6. It is so second nature for me to hide what is best in inwardness.

7. I once put up with being regarded as a scoundrel, notwithstanding I am not exactly that. So let me also put up with seeming to be an oddity as an author, notwithstanding that is not exactly what I am.

8. After her engagement to Schlegel, she met me on the street, greeted me in as friendly and ingratiating a manner as possible. I did not understand her, for at that time I knew nothing of the engagement. I just looked questioningly at her and shook my head. No doubt she thought I knew about it and sought my approval. [...]

9. Then I have been continually vexed by doubts concerning the publishing of my finished products.

10. I had a tall palisander commode made when I lived in the second-floor apartment at Norregade. It was made to my own design, prompted in turn by something my beloved said in her anguish.

11.  O ye fools!

12. Never was the book as serious as at that time. Just that fact is the true expression of the fear.

13. Had the author himself looked serious, the fear would have been less.

14. The reduplication is what is monstrous in the fear.
    

(something inside me, indeed . . . )

it was prevented / and I didn't go / ahead and publish / The Point of View of My Activity as an Author /
(something inside me, indeed, was always against it) / the book itself / is true / but material like that /
can only be published after my death / in the way of stressing that / I am a penitent / on the subject /
of my sin and guilt / my inner wretchedness / I must be careful with / this thought of dying / the belief /
that I am going to die in half a year / then / I live / to be eighty-two / (something inside me, indeed /
was always. . . ) / material

completed / put in its desk / sealed and marked / 'To be opened / after my death' /

(something inside me, indeed, was always against it)

My relation to her. 24 Aug. 1849. Something literary …

Yet I can't risk writing anything down about my relation to her. I bear the responsibility
for all her later life, and so even now any direct communication could cause boundless confusion.

IF. 4

if the world’s nonsense was the only outside danger
if I had a friend to whom I said, “How annoying”
if I were able to travel without becoming productive
if what Miss Dencker told me is true
if that helps make the thought clearer
if only it were she who broke with me
if it were she herself who took the bold step of being the one who requests it
if one considers the relationship between masculinity and femininity and not a particular silly girl
if only I could win

IF.5

if you insist on reasons
if I’d read that first, I would not have been able to write it

IF. 6

if the place and context here did not require a signature
if this is a mistake
if the particular individual
if the universal says everything
if the universal is the demand
if the universal is the rule
if human science refuses
if they fight
if you step aside for it
if it would also take the trouble to understand itself

IF.7

if vanished from the world
if no trace at all is left
if it understands itself and its limits
if it does not
if in respect of love a because seems a minus
if I could easily do all this so gently for her that there was no danger
if anything is to help me
if only one persists in one’s calculations
if one does it in another way
if one just calculates correctly
if I could
if I did everything to try and minimize the affront
if people have an emotional conception of me as something out of the ordinary

IF.8

if I should need a new pseudonym in the future
if I dared to become reconciled with her
if she so desires
if she received from me any assurance
if she found out how things really were
if he is able to build the tower that high
if possible like a voice in the clouds
if she really does wish it
if she believed you
if she takes it that lightly

IF.9

if at times it has appeased my anger to be like an epigram for my contemporaries
if one gets him to act against his convictions
if you do that I’ll blow your brains out
if she could bear the rest
if only she might stay with me
if we didn’t meet

IF.10

if one uses one's own person maieutically 
if we should happen at the moment of contact to exchange identities
if in all innocence and purely intellectually
if I’d wanted it
if that was what i wanted

*

All text is excerpted directly from Kierkegaard’s Journals, including the “if” inventories.

Notebooks: horses, Perec, K, and the nightmare.

I journeyed to Fredensborg with two absolutely incredible horses—when they were supposed to stand, they fell down; when they were supposed to get up, they needed support; when they went slowly, they limped; but when they set off in a fast trot, they were the best runners.

— Soren Kierkegaard in his notebooks, at some point between 1840-1842

— Regine again.

Regine, whose favorite hero was Joan of Arc.

Regine, whose beloved could not imagine a heroine as flesh.

K, who made her his Beatrice, despite Regine’s protestations. The rose plant passed back and forth between them in early letters.

In Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard reprinted the note he sent to Regine when returning her engagement ring in 1841:

“Above all, forget the one who writes this; forgive a man who, even if he was capable of something, was nevertheless incapable of making a girl happy.”

Allegedly. The refrain in a word that nestles; a sinuation that nests.

In an essay titled “Love and Freedom of the Other,” Svetlana Boym considered the symbolic function played by Kierkegaard’s ring, and his references to it. “From a conventional symbol of union, the ring becomes a mysterious hieroglyph that finds its reflection in lovers' syntax (parenthesis) and body language (embrace),” wrote Boym. “In The Seducers Diary, it is Cordelia who breaks the engagement even though Kierkegaard believes that he has led her to it.” Boym continues exploring this “lovers’ syntax” by naming “the space around the wall” as “the space of their love in this world”: “Once they escaped and met near the cave, they were doomed to misunderstanding. He saw her bloodied clothes and rushed to kill himself, she followed him to the grave. Public disclosure threatens the authenticity of their love. The wall is neither merely an obstacle nor a synthesis, it is the space of the lovers' paradox, of the tragedy of the love experience.”

In K’s Repetition, there is that critical moment when the narrator looks at the young lover and says:

“Nothing could draw him out of the melancholy longing by which he was not so much coming closer to this beloved as forsaking her. His mistake was incurable, and his mistake was this: that he stood at the end instead of at the beginning.”

[This last bit appears in K’s sermon on the lilies as well, and had I more time or a heart less sooted, I’d comb through my notes and find it. . . .]

I’ve been chasing a thread — a confusion between the postman’s trumpet and the spyglass — through K. for months, trying to fasten it to my reading of Vigdis Hjorth, whose books I consumed in a tantrum of reading earlier this year. Who knows what may never come of it?

Michael Wood: “I have sought to remain loyal to this hesitation, whose other name, I believe, it’s not indecision or undecidability, but patience.”

K and I go way back.

And also [Again] through almost every book I’ve written— including My Heresies, with its tribute to the rosewood dresser. Despair has its creative moments and unexpected promises, as with the moment when a despairing Regine told Soren that she could stay out of his way and live in his cupboard, as a part of his furniture.

Let it be known that K was a man of his word to the end! After ending their engagement, Soren granted Regine’s wish by building a special Shrine for her in his home. As he put it:

“I had a rosewood pedestal made. It was constructed after my own design, and after the occasion of a word of hers. She said that she would thank me all her life if I would let her stay with me, that she would even live in a little cupboard. With this in mind it was constructed without shelves. In it everything is carefully preserved, everything that reminds me of her, everything that can remind me of her. Here also can be found a copy of each of the pseudonymous works for her; always they were reserved only to Vellum copies, one for her and one for me.”

[Again] being the condition of the postscript as a paratext, or an addendum to the apparatus of the letter.

[Again] being the addition to a letter K sent to Regine at some point in 1836, as recorded in his notebook. I quote:

Die stehn allhier im kalten Wind
Und singen schön und geigen:
Ob nicht ein süssuertraumtes* Kind
Am Fenster sich wollt' zeigen?

Your S.K.

Postscript: When you have forgotten everything that lies between, I would only ask you to read the salutation and the signature, for as I myself have become aware, it has the power to calm or to excite as have but few incantations.

Piedestal (Danish) a pedestal-like cupboard. Kierkegaard had such a cupboard, custom made, in which he kept letters etc. related to Regine. See also “palisander.”

One of the provisional titles for Fear and Trembling was a neologism by K, who foraged Mellemhverandre (meaning literally "between each other”) from the Danish word mellemuarende (something between two persons, a "between-being"). Mellemhverandre is found in "From the Papers of One Still Living” and The Concept of Irony.

And a poem by Georges Perec, as translated by Jacob Bromberg —

I forgot to mention the nightmare! (I’ll come back to it when the days are a bit less hectic.)

Morton Feldman on "Coptic Light"

Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Paolo and Francesca"

Mallarme's Hecate

Gospodinov again.

 The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce […]It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness.

— Teddie Adorno and Max Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment

The major nearly burst out laughing from joy. But nothing on this earth lasts for a long time, and thus even joy is not as vivid the second moment as it is the first; the third moment, it becomes still weaker, and finally it merges unnoticeably with the normal state of one's soul, just as a circle created on the water by a falling pebble finally merges with the smooth surface.

— Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

The Physics of Sorrow

Reading Georgi Gospodinov is like licking a balkan madeleine, and remembering the chaos of sweetness. My madeleine isn’t as pure or elegant as Proust’s — the scent of babas lingers in the aftertaste — and this is what draws me to Gospondinov. He writes the patchwork of self-mutilations that characterize the balkans. There, for example, the usual nationalist kitsch of the background. And the stories told by grandparents that don't stop in the real but unwind into the unwitting surreality. And family tree with branches lopped off by borders. And missing uncles and secrets and promiscuous silences. There is the balkan urge to hop fences and chat up the shepherds. 

One who comes from the balkans is never far from the carnival of their memories, and the loneliness of the language that carries them. A minor language cannot be dominant in the way that French or German or Russian is dominant. Against the academic impulse to be outraged by terms like "balkanization", I am tempted to embrace them, to celebrate the uncivilized hyper-awareness of fragmentation. (Peace to those who find “balkan” offensive: there isn’t really a good term to describe a part of the world that has been cut, divided, conquered, bombed, and refigured into various political constructions, many of which include large ethnic and religious minorities.)

In Gospodinov, memory is communicated by the elders who mix history with superstition, a goulash of the fantastic served up with absurdity. Absurdity is the bread that makes sense of the arbitrary shifts in power and borders. "My grandfather in me cannot decide," the speaker says,  as he rambles through his grandfather's memories. "So that's where I got the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me."

Inheritance is fabulist: it comes in mixed registers and varying dictions. “According to my grandfather's memory, he didn't go in here,"  the speaker says of the room at the local fair exhibiting the caged boy. "But now I'm at the Fair of this memory,  I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in.”

The speaker refuses his grandfather's silence about the horror he may have witnessed. Instead, he insists on imagining it further. There are many ways to deal with silences, but Gospodinov prefers to treat them mythically, to mark the way through the past as a labyrinth through which the mind elects to continue moving.  This gesture is is particularly breathtaking given the fear of seeing the unsightly, the skeletons in the closet, the war records and the Shoah, the nationalism that punishes refugees. 

There, at the Fair, in that "iron cage about five or six paces long,"  with its stool and mattress set next to its smattering of hay and bucket of water, the world is divided openly: "One corner for the human, one for the beast." The speaker isn't shocked by the fact that the Minotaur "looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering."  The familiarity of his boyishness is uncanny. "There is a sorrow in him which no animal possesses," Gospodinov writes of the freakish half bull, half-human. The man who monitors the cage "(his master and guardian)" narrates the Minotaur's origins and journey, explaining how he wound up here, in a cage, on exhibit in a Bulgarian town. The "owner" unfurls the legends that account for the Minotaur's existence. (Someone will always tell you who you are, and who you are determines what you are allowed to be.)

The freak in the cage does not speak. His hybridity is defamed by the powerful owners of language. And the story is told again, " a story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine"  so that some events happen in a recognizable present while others occur in an "immemorial past." In this story that "winds like a maze", the speaker knows he can never entirely "retrace its steps"— but to walk them again, to imagine them, is to insist on the "magic of that tale."

"The more inconceivable it looks, the more you believe it," Gospodinov says of the tale, or the space in which the ancient Greek myth meets the present. The balkans are not Proust's Paris with its heroic monuments and bourgeois aristocracy. In this land, the words of a grandfather lock up the sun at night and "drive the stars out into the sky" like sheep to pasture. In the balkans, language is magic and multiple. As in Proust, Gospodinov's madeleine evokes the child self. But Proust's childhood is relatively secure—his attachment to his mother speaks to a fear of abandonment but this fear has a different valence—it is particular to France, to his lifestyle. In Gospodinov, the madeleine is not recalled for the pleasure it brought but for the anxiety. 

The Minotaur is the abandoned boy, the child left behind: this is the story that the speaker chases through every side passage and corridor in his relatives' memories.

The Minotaur does not speak for himself. Like a defenseless infant or an animal, he is narrated by others' fear of him, he is defined by their discomfort with his hybridity. Here, to be hybrid is to be born into betrayal; the inability to be simply human or animal, the inheritance of living in a halved self, makes him unable to belong. No one can recognize the Minotaur as "one of them." The Minotaur is hamstrung by unrecognizability. 

Gospodinov also provides an aural madeleine. Whereas Proust extolled the church bells, Gospodinov locates memory in a sound that could be an animal or a human, a sound that straddles the divide of meaning and cannot ultimately declare itself as partaking of one world. (I thought of Birdsall's "earwitness" as the speaker mentioned the sound "Moommy?") . . . "The first cry, it’s not even a cry, it ends in a question mark." The sound emerges when the child is lost near the mill and he realizes his mother and sisters have vanished. The child, who happens to be the speaker's grandfather, doesn't know the word "abandon" yet. But "the absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary," the absence of the word loads the sound and lengthens it into a sound memory that he will later recognize in the mood of the cow.

"Mooomy . . . Moooooommy. . . "

The open ellipses are paired. There is a repetitive evocation of absence, and the sense in which the child reads everything into it — and, himself into every story of those who have been abandoned.

If Proust's secret was that he could long for the past so faithfully that it provided him an escape hatch from the entanglements of the present, Gospodinov's secret is that he "can get inside other people's memories." But what he finds there is always himself, or a version of himself.

The final sentence?

“We was.”

(It should be noted that translator Angela Vogel mentioned Jennifer Croft's brilliant translation of Olga Toharczuk's Flights as an inspiring reference for her while translating The Physics of Sorrow.)

Adorno jamming.

Time Shelter

In an interview, Gospodinov mentioned thatTime Shelter was the first book written in Bulgarian to be nominated for the Booker Prize. He wrote it from a growing anxiety, a palpable awareness that something "had gone awry in the clockworks of time. Brexit was on the horizon. "I come from a system that sold a 'bright future' under communism… the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a' bright past'. I know via my own skin that both checks bounce, they are backed by nothing." The novel probes the ways humans inhabit a "deficit of meaning and future.”

The past may not be innocent, but the past makes up for this in cleverness. The past is a "discrete monster" that haunts the clinic and the European referendum. The vehicle for this narration is Gaustine, the imaginary, vision-laden friend who first came to the author fifteen years ago as a character who imagined creating "clinics of the past” in order to invent a sort of "protected time for people losing their memory.”

This relationship to the self as a memory museum permeates G’s writing from the start. His early short fiction, "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," is about two people meeting in an airport lounge after inventing an entire past to exist between them. 

Since the temporality of Time Shelter shifts abruptly across decades of the twentieth century, Gospodinov used idioms and slang particular to eras in order to effect this motion. He hails his translator, Angela Vogel, for her creativity in translating not just the idioms but also the contextual layers of the multiple stories. Another challenge existed at the level of detail, in  finding a way to translate for example the "nationalist kitsch" of various countries. Vogel also managed to translate the intertwined voices of Gaustine and the narrator without effecting a structural and grammatical shift by adding quotation marks. This is an acrobatic move, a talent that preserves the original direct speech, and an example of translation at its best. 

The title,Time Shelter, is a neologism that plays on bomb shelters and tornado shelters—any spaces constructed by humans to protect themselves in the event of a catastrophe. To be protected from time is also to protect a particular view of time that becomes reified. 

After mentioning an "unbelievable laughter," Gospodinov turns abruptly to recollect the memory of reading German archival newspapers and finding a photo in one paper of an elder fellow at Frankfurt University in 1952. 

This fellow, Horkheimer, is holding a carnival with a paper ball dangling from its tip. And perhaps Horkheimer's awkward grin anticipates a viewer who is also an interlocutor, namely, Theodor Adorno. For there is a goofiness implicated in Horkheimer's thrall, in the physical fact of his participation of festive mass behavior and Gospodinov immediately posits Adorno's judgmental gaze. Horkheimer must be wondering whether his friend will see him, Gospodinov muses—and I wonder, separately, and in tandem, if this is because we are never performing the self more intensely than when imagining what the friend might think of us. 

"All the graveyards smell like roses," says Gospodinov.

Onwards, says Max!

*

Cory Oldweiler on Time Shelter for LARB
Georgi Gospodinov as a guest David Naimon’s “Between the Covers” podcast
Georgi Gospodinov. The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel
Gospodinov’s Booker Prize interview
The Cure, “The Same Deep Water As You”

Canetti's earwitness.

You name a city and you’ve already been there.

— Elias Canetti’s “fun-runner”

My grandfather in me cannot decide. So that's where I got the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me.

— Georgi Gospodinov

1

When I finished reading Georgi Gospodinov's novel, The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel, I was sitting on a bench near the Piggly Wiggly. The world of the book had ended, replaced by a random procession of humans entering and exiting the store, carrying plastic bags or brown paper bags or multi-colored reusable bags. I thought about lists, and how each person had come with a list of things they needed; each one had “something” in mind when they arrived at the store. 

On the walk home, carrying Gospodinov in my head for the duration of five city blocks, I considered the importance of lists in his novel.

2

List, as a noun, refers to “a number of connected items or names written or printed consecutively, typically one below the other.” 

To list, as a verb, is to create the noun form of this word, list. 

Synonyms for “list” include catalog, inventory, record, register, roll, file, index, directory, listing, listicle, checklist, tally, docket, ticket, enumeration.

In an anthology of Roland Barthes' writing edited by Susan Sontag, one finds two lists by Barthes, two inventories of likes and dislikes:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

And what does Barthes dislike? 

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

The list form underscores an implicit connection between the things that come to mind (or the things we think about) and noticeability, or the act of discovering our preferences. We notice what we like and what we dislike. Oddly, making a list of our preferences assumes that the unnoticed exists, and the unnoticed remains in the margins with the unremarkable. The noticed, and the noticeable, speaks to the biases inherent in the act of seeing; it also calls  the discourses of visibility into play.

3

Barthes’ lists use the construction “don't like” rather than “dislike.” This may be a question of translation that allows to consider the difference between claims of not liking vis a vis claims of actively disliking.

Speaking of lists, the table of contents for Elias Canetti’s Earwitness: Fifty Characters reads like a list . . .

Blending literary criticism, social psychology and parabolic swagger, Canetti’s fifty short portraits borrow their style from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus as well as that of seventeenth century English essayists. Word play, of course, doubles as punctuation; sarcasm dances through stereotypes; irony reigns in Canetti’s fabulist satirization of psychological and sociological categories. “The Corpse Skulker” delights in death; “The Fun Runner” consumes pleasure on a scoreboard with no capacity to savor; “The Defective” remains sure of themselves thanks to an inferiority complex. Some have wondered how much the writer, which is to say, the author himself, might have been implicated in the Canetti’s portrait of “The Earwitness” (which I share in its totality below):

The Earwitness

The earwitness makes no effort to look, but he hears all the better. He comes, halts, huddles unnoticed in a corner, peers into a book or a display, hears whatever is to be heard, and moves away untouched and absent. One would think he was not there for he is such an expert at vanishing. He is already somewhere else, he is already listening again, he knows all the places where there is something to be heard, stows it nicely away, and forgets nothing.

He forgets nothing, one has to watch the earwitness when it is time for him to come out with everything. At such a time, he is another man, he is twice as large and four inches taller. How does he do it, does he have special high shoes for blurting things out? Could he possibly pad himself with pillows to make his words seem heavier and weightier? He does nothing else, he says it very precisely, some people wish they had held their tongues. All those modern gadgets are superfluous: his ear is better and more faithful than any gadget, nothing is erased, nothing is blocked, no matter how bad it is, lies, curses, four-letter words, all kinds of indecencies, invectives from remote and little-known languages, he accurately registers even things he does not understand and delivers them unaltered if people wish him to do so.

The earwitness cannot be corrupted by anybody. When it comes to this useful gift, which he alone has, he would take no heed of wife, child, or brother. Whatever he has heard, he has heard, and even the Good Lord is helpless to change it. But he also has human sides, and just as others have their holidays, on which they rest from work, he sometimes, albeit seldom, claps blinders on his ears and refrains from storing up the hearable things. This happens quite simply, he makes himself no-ticeable, he looks people in the eye, the things they say in these circumstances are quite unimportant and do not suffice to spell their doom. When he has taken off his secret ears, he is a friendly person, everyone trusts him, everyone likes to have a drink with him, harmless phrases are exchanged. At such times, people have no inkling that they are speaking with the executioner himself. It is not to be believed how innocent people are when no one is eavesdropping.

- Elias Canetti (t. by Joachim Neugroschel)

4

As a form, the LIST gestures towards infinitude — for how can a list be considered complete? Even granting the list's location in time and space, one cannot help thinking that the list might look different if the list-maker had spent a few more minutes wandering through his own mind. This tension between the list's efficiency, or its capacity to draw forth and enumerate, and its false relation to finitude makes it a wonderful thought device. 

“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis,” Umberto Eco wrote. In an essay subtitled “the poetry of the archive,” David Levi Strauss noted how Eco's "wondrous hypotyposis . . . points to the work of lists as sketches, outlines, or patterns.” Tracing the word’s etymology, he adds: “The Greek hupotuposis derives from tipos, ‘an impression, form, or type.’ When lists become compendious, they list toward the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis, ‘by which a matter [is] vividly sketched in words.’”

The “list-lust” may be central to the craft, as Strauss writes in this eminently-quotable passage:

Strauss credits this engagement with Golub's lists as speculating forth “a new form of imagism—list imagism, or, as Leon might have it, 'jittery image-jism'.” The sonics of Strauss’ neologism, “jittery image-jism,” plays into the motion and tenuousness of the list form.

[Aside to self: represent the materials of a textual list non-textually in order to reveal their plasticity.]

Excerpt from one of Leon Golub’s lists, as quoted by David Levi Strauss.

5

Like Elias Canetti, Georgi Gospodinov was born in Bulgaria.

Unlike Canetti (who wrote in German), Gospidinov writes in Bulgarian.

I mention this because Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981, an event that some critics have interpreted as a win for the Bulgarians, an interpretation which strikes me as strange and yet perhaps much more common for winners that hail from Eastern or Central Europe. When Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in 2009, it was a win for the German language more than a win for Romania or a nation-state. Given the entanglement of translation, publishers, profit, power, with the distance between major languages and minor languages, it might make more sense to qualify the Nobel with a mention of the writer’s language rather than their ‘nationality’. After all, nation-states die or are born continuously. There is no end to the parsing and confusion of awards attached to countries that no exist.

(As I have said elsewhere, it is my hope that Gospodinov receives international recognition for his extraordinary books. It is my humble opinion that the Nobel Committee might consider awarding a prize to literature written in the Bulgarian language.)

Coincidentally, in a friskier tenor, Susan Sontag regaled Canetti’s work in review essay published in the New York Review of Books in the year just prior to Canetti’s Nobel 1981 win. She praised Canetti’s particular sense of the grotesque and drew a connection between his early projected work and the monomania of Earwitness:

More on Gospodinov soon . . .

In the interim, I leave you with a little wit, a little exclamatory, and a little blasphemy as written by Canetti in one his portraits:

“The damage-fresh man has a wry face and a nasal twang. He cares little for people and seeks proof. He knows people only if something goes awry for them.”

— Elias Canetti

*

Carolyn Birsdall. “Earwitnessing: Sound Memories of the Nazi Period.” Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, edited by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 169–81.
David Levi Strauss. “Inventory/ Fallen Figures &  Heads: Leon Golub's Lists.” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 13, Spring 2004.
Elias Canetti. Earwitness: Fifty Characters. translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: The Seaburry Press, 1979.
Frank Tonkiss, “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory, and the City.” The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Black, Berg Press Sensory Formation Series, pp. 303-309.
Georgi Gospodinov. The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel.
Susan Sontag, “The Mind as Passion: On Elias Canetti” (New York Review of Books, September 25th, 1980)
Steve Reich, “I. Strings (With Winds and Brass)” fromThe Four Sections, performed by London Symphony Orchestra.

My tattered old copy mit a sunflower face discovered on a nightwalk this week.

Jean Follain.

We measure depth
as a fathom of waters
as a keeper of otters
as a fear of disorder
as a phantom of operas

An exclamation point in the shape of a question mark
against the earth and your flesh
against the canopy

[Rene Char, “Continuous Truth” tr. by Nancy Carlson; Hannah Aizenmann, “As a Father of Daughters”; ibid.; ibid.; ibid.; Alberto Rios, “Seahorse in the Desert”; Christopher DeWeese, “If You Hide Long Enough, Sometimes You'll Forget You're Riding”; Rajiv Mohabir, “Leela”]

The Gust of Ghost-forsaken Places

Last week, I returned to my notes on Samuel Beckett, and thought about his relationship to the memorial, and to memorialization. Despite having lived through two extraordinary wars, Beckett rarely addressed the memorial form directly in his work. But there a poem — and a radio play — and a place.

Saint-Lô

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc

Samuel Beckett

“Ghost-forsaken” clings to “sink”: Beckett committed the site of Saint-Lô to the poem’s memory. But he also returned to it quietly in 1946, withThe Capital of the Ruins, an unproduced radio play he created for Radio Erin. And we don’t know where he stood or what he kissed when giving the following words to a play that got buried: “Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war and casual laborers attracted by the relative food-plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continue, two years after the liberation, to clear away the debris, literally by hand.”

The Gust of Wind

Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.

Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance.

When Follain says the horses have vanished, one can almost hear the absence of hoof-breaths on the hardened dirt roads, the odor of new chemicals replacing the scent of summer-warmed manure, a vanishing sensorium of rhythms and temporalities attuned to their own being. Follain’s poetry offers the rawness and complex vitality of these “remembered landscapes,” in Seguin’s phrasing, without the romance of the pastoral mode. Spoken in third person plural, the poems cull intimacy out of tenderness for details and actions rather than the expression of first-person feelings. The poems reveal the “simultaneity of remarkable things” — things which vanish and exist in the ordinary, things that disappear and reappear as spirits, things that linger in what Mahmoud Darwish called “the presence of absence.”

Countless poems lauding war’s victory have been written; it is more difficult to remind the reader of what such “victory” involved, and how the history of modern warfare has shaped the mechanized inhumanity of the present. Like Beckett, Follain wrote about the annihilation of Saint-Lô. As Seguin puts it: Follain’s “poems began to appear in journals alongside some of the Sagesse group, and the first of his thirteen books of poems, La Main chaude, was published in 1933. Prose works soon followed, including, in 1935, Paris, a beautiful flânerie of the city he made his home, and several memoirs of his childhood in Canisy and the nearby city of Saint-Lô, which was decimated by Allied bombs in WWII.”

The Gust of Gestures

What happens in Follain’s poems?

Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.

In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:

A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.

The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.

Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:

an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.

Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.

The gesture of the old man’s hand touching the place where a young heart made a promise — vowed love or fidelity to an ideal or authority — lingers like the edges of a memory in the mind of the reader. This simultaneity in staging is what Follain perfected. This simultaneity gives his poems the feel of paintings as eloquent as an allegory by Gustave Courbet.

“Chovanne” is a poem-portrait of French royalist insurgent from the late 18th century. It opens “In the thick of the old world” with all its shadowed brocades and heavy textures of darkness (darkness is a fabric in the years prior to electricity) where a woman removes her “apparel” in order to look closely at her body “in the light.” Light is precious and she is the chovanne, thinking of her grey horse out back, “enclosed” to better serve “history and magic”. Follain moves between the woman’s thoughts (we imagine her smile) and the animal outside, using the shared vitality of heart and lungs to mark the life between them. They have survived, however briefly

and all that sky above them
would be the same for the assemblies.
The same for stupefying wars.

Hopefully, Earthly will introduce a larger segment of English-language readers Follain’s earth-rousing poems.

With goosebumps, I offer this one for the road, an ars poetica as text alongside the absented image of Jean Follain finidng words for the wind that unleafs the trees near the emptied homes and ruined lives of Saint-Lô.

History

As history seems
sad to the world at times 
the heavy dinner gets cold 
the great orator never returns 
his mistress follows her dreams 
later on 
it's the uprooting 
the muffled gunshots
the bells of a grand congress 
on which night falls 
while out in the fields 
of his eternal childhood 
the poet is walking
not wanting to forget a thing.

*

Alexandra Stréliski, “Plus tôt”
Camille Corot, The Gust of Wind (1871)
Jean Follain, Earthly translated by Andrew Seguin (Song Cave)
Leos Janáček, “A Recollection” (performed by András Schiff)
Samuel Beckett,The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (1995)

Assorted readings

We want fire; a little less mutton and a little more genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I stood waiting, a scene from Kafka’s Trial flashed through my mind—with the help of a washerwoman, Josef K. gets to see what is in the judge’s law book: pornographic drawings.

Dimitris Lyacos

Is this not literature pleading guilty?

Georges Bataille after reading Lautréamont

---

/ hatred of poetry no. 9

In the summer of 1912, Franz Kafka and Max Brod took and trip to Weimar and visited the Goethe House and the Goethe-Schiller Archive. According to custom, the guest book lay open beside the front door. As he prepared to sign his own name, Kafka recognized the signature of novelist Thomas Mann. It seems that Kafka studied Mann’s signature and then opened his notepad to re-render the curves and sinews of Mann’s lettering. The notepad includes shorthand descriptions and key words from Kafka’s Weimar excursion, as well as his “forgery” of Mann’s signature— which he promptly crossed out. Kafka’s decision to scribble over the signature may have been a way of expressing his feelings about 1) the failure of the forgery 2) the failure of the man named Thomas Mann 3) the failure of the forger’s whim 4) the failure of the author’s forger 5) the death of the author as Other 6) boredom, contempt, or any human state Alberto Moravia used as a title for one of his novels. Beneath Kafka’s forgery of Mann’s signature sits “as a digital reconstruction of the signature without his cross-out,” as rendered in a book by Reiner Stach. The digital reconstruction opens a different story about authorial death and forgery. According to Stach, Thomas Mann’s signature in “the original” guestbook has never been located.

/ hatred of poetry no. 4

* Point of clarification, with gratitude to James Marcus, who noted on twitter that “Updike's father was a small-town schoolteacher and after his childhood in Shillington the future author lived in a small farmhouse with his parents and grandparents.” Updike came from a stable, loving, supportive family and attended Harvard on full scholarship. “Also, his mother was a writer and so his literary aspirations were respected from the beginning.” The third John may not have needed to pay for college, which is a good thing— a thing that should be the case for all students.

/ hatred of poetry no. 8

Heinrich Marx fumed as he paced across the freshly-swept floors of his home. His son, Karl, had been sucked into the fever of romanticism. He was wasting his life on poetry. Determined to reason with his son, Heinrich agreed that poetry was an art worthy of consumption — memorizing and reciting poems could even elevate a fellow’s social standing among peers — but, for gentleman, poetry could only be a noble side-stint, relegated to moments of leisure. Poetry, said Heinrich, was perfectly cultured activity as long as it remained marginal to a career in law. Among the bourgeoisie, the poet could only be a hobbyist. (Centuries later, Heinrich’s view is shared by most middle-class American professionals.) Nevertheless, despite his father’s harangues, the rankled young poet named Karl persisted in versifying. Perhaps his father’s careerist hectoring drove the son even more deeply into the realm where poetry constitutes rebellion? Perhaps Marxism owes its a splinter of its existence to the chip that bloomed on Karl’s shoulder vis a vis his father? Leaning on the conventions of Heine's Book of Love (1827), Karl Marx wrote romantic poems and titled his books thematically. He gave the Book of Love and the Book of Songs to Jenny von Westphalen. Obviously, she loved it. Perhaps History owes a debt to these love poems that inspired the educated woman to renounce her studies and become a housewife? Obviously, History owes its wives nothing. But on November 10th of 1837, Karl Marx announced to his father that he’d abandoned poetry. No more lyric, Karl said, no more of this “shattering” activity which he had pursued rather vigilantly for the previous five years. Surprising: Marx's condemnation of Paul Proudhon's “poetic images” as unserious fluff-balls that elide the logic of social utility. Unsurprising: to note how the son grows to resemble the father in his puritanical seriousness and practicality. 

/ hatred of poetry no. 63

“What joins me to B. is the impossible, like a void in front of her and me, instead of a secure life together. The lack of a way out, the difficulties recurring in any case, this threat of death between us like Isolde's sword, the desire that goads us to go further than the heart can bear, the need to suffer from an endless laceration, the suspicion even—on B.'s part—that all this will still only lead, haphazardly, to wretchedness, will fall into filth and spinelessness: all this makes every hour a mixture of panic, expectation, audacity, anguish (more rarely, exasperating sensuality), which only action can resolve (but action ...).” Thus reads a paragraph from George Bataille’s The Impossible, a hybrid work written as he filled the notebook that would later be published as Guilty. In 1942, Bataille was writing and reading poetry, including Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell, Emily Bronte's poetry, and Lautréamont’s Maldoror and Poetic.

/ hatred of poetry no. 2

“Mystic hagiographies are writings that challenge the divide between immanence and transcendence and that often include poetry or otherwise heightened poetic language alongside theological reflections.”

/ hatred of poetry no. 19

According to François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond the Grace: “Frederick the Great, when he ascended the throne, had an intrigue with an Italian dancer, La Barbarina—the only woman he ever went near: he was satisfied to play the flute on his wedding night, beneath the window of Princess Elisabeth of Brunswick. Indeed, Frederick had a taste for music and a mania for poetry. The intrigues and epigrams of the two poets, Frederick and Voltaire, disturbed Madame de Pompadour, the Abbé de Bernis, and Louis XV. The Margravine of Bayreuth played a part in all this, as did love such as a poet might feel. Literary gatherings at the king's house, with the dogs on the unclean armchairs; then concerts in front of statues of Antinous; then enormous banquets; then heaps of philosophy; then freedom of the press and strokes of the cane; then a lobster or an eel pie, which put an end to the days of a great old man, who wanted to live: such are the things that private society took up during those days of letters and battles.—” Poetry and pet lobsters: the dream of any self-respecting dandy, as well as the scourge of an respectable bourgeois professional.

/ hatred of poetry no. 2025

24 January 1943:

“In this case it would be necessary—and also possible, easy— for us to make this wound a festival, a strength of the sickness. The poetry that loses the most blood would be the strongest. The saddest dawn? Announcing the joy of the day. Poetry would be the sign announcing the greatest inner lacerations. The human musculature would only be entirely at stake; it would only attain its highest degree of strength and the perfect motion of decision— that which the being is [incomplete sentence]”

/ hatred of poetry no. 117

 "And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them . . .I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature," Socrates said in Plato's Phaedra. Like Socrates, sometimes the poet must compare herself to Typhon and ask what sort of monster am I? Certainly I am more clever than Hesiod's serpent version, who gives himself away with his hundred serpent tail legs and hundred serpent heads. But I am also dumber than Typhon, who can imitate any sound and speak and countless voices including the language of the gods with his many mouths. Typhon's goal was to replace Zeus as the most supreme being in the cosmos. The battle between Typhon and Zeus ended badly for Typhon; Zeus used his thunderbolts and threw him into Mount Etna. But Typhon had the last word by inscribing his rage in the sky. Whenever Typhon thinks long and hard about what Zeus did to him, whenever that fury is fondled and recollected to the point of obsession, Mount Etna rumbles and its volcano spews lava into the sky. Zeus strikes those of us on the earth with a thunderbolt, while Typhon strikes at Zeus from inside the earth with lava and smoke. Both are monstrous. What will my desire to unseat the powers that be cost me? What harm will I revisit upon other humans in fighting this battle? This is what the volcanic mind must ask. But this is also what the hero cannot consider when battling the monster. And maybe this is one indirect way of answering your question about why the poet cannot be a hero.

/ responses to hatred[s] of poetry

Toti O’Brien’s interview with the extraordinary Dimitris Lyacos
May Ray, Adrienne Fidelin and Nusch Eluard (1938)
The hatred of poetry
The art of hating
The hatred
The gender of sound
The unfortunate fate of childhood dolls
The work of fire
The plastic semiotic
The behavior of mirrors on easter island
The phaedra
Eva Hesse, Untitled (1962)
Michael Hamburger, “No Hatred and No Flag”
The conditional
The hairpin curve
The custom of wearing clothes
The absent meow
The scythians
The well-ventilated conscience
The grocer’s cat
The autobiography of death
The privilege button
The art of inhumation
Brisees by Michel Leiris
The illusion of historic time
The palimpsest of the human brain
J. M. W. Turner, Death on Pale Horse (maybe 1825-1830)
Benjamin Fondane’s Philoctetes
The collective afterlife of things
The surreality of community
The postscriptum
Rosa Boshier González’s “Philip Guston Now”
Material in Seurat’s nude study of an old man: “powdered vine charcoal and charcoal with stumping and lifting, on laid paper”

Paul Klee speaking B.

*

François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800 (NYRB Classics) tr. by Alex Andriesse
Georges Bataille, The Impossible (City Lights Books) tr. by Robert Hurley
Georges Bataille, Guilty (Lapis Press) tr. by Bruce Boone
Georges Bataille, Guilty (State University of New York) tr. by Stuart Kendall
Harold Brodkey, Sea Battles on Dry Land (Metropolitan Books)
Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? (New Directions Press)

Two Sundays in 1954, from the diary of Witold Gombrowicz

*

When returning to my notes on Witold Gombrowicz’s magnificent diaries this weekend, I came across an entry in 1954 that is given as two Sundays in a row. Not one Sunday that follows another but one Sunday that becomes many Sundays and then another Sunday that will be in the future. As an aside on chronology and the uses and self-abuses of selfhood in modern prose, I offer Gombrowicz’s two Sundays, excerpted from Gombrowicz’s Diary (as published through Yale University Press’ fantastic Margellos World Republic of Letter Series and translated by Lillian Valee) below.

---

Sunday

The cold wind from the south swept a mass of hot and humid air out of Buenos Aires and now it is blowing at a clip, howling, whistling, buzzing and slamming windows, throwing papers into the air at the intersections and causing real orgies of invisible witches. This pseudoautumn wind grabs me, too, and spurs me on into the past. It has the privilege of evoking the past in me and sometimes 1 submit to it for hours, sitting somewhere on a bench. There, blown through and through, I attempt something that is beyond my power but nevertheless ardently desired: contact with the Witold Gombrowiez from irretrievable epochs. I spend a lot of time reconstructing my past: I diligently establish a chronology and stretch my memory to its limits, looking for myself the way Proust did, but to no avail. The past is bottomless and Proust lies. Nothing, one can do absolutely nothing. Yet the southern wind, in causing certain upheavals in my organism, creates in me a state of almost amorous desire in which, desperately losing my way, I attempt to awaken my old existence in me for just an instant with a grimace.

On avenida Costanera, staring at the waves dashed into the air with relentless fury by the stone masonry of the shore, I, today's Gombrowicz, summoned that distant protoplast of mine in all of his tremulous and youthful vulnerability. Today, the triviality of those events took on (for me who already knew, who was now my own past, the solution to the riddle of that boy) the sanctity of legends about distant beginnings and today I knew the seriousness of that ridiculous suffering, I knew it ex post. I reminded myself, therefore, how one evening he-I went to the neighboring village of Bartodziei to attend a party, where there was a person who transported him– me into raptures and before whom I-he wanted to show off, shine. I-he needed this. Instead I walked into the salon and there, instead of admiration, l was greeted by the pity of aunts, the jokes of cousins, the crass irony of all those local landowners. What had happened? Kaden Bandrowski had “run down” one of my novellas in words that were actually full of indulgence but which categorically denied me any talent. That newspaper had fallen into their hands and they, of course, believed it because, after all, he was a writer and he knew what he was talking about. That evening I did not know where to hide my face.

If he-I was helpless in situations like this, then it was not at all because he was not up to them. On the contrary. These situations were irrefutable because they were unworthy of being refuted— they were too silly and frivolous to take the suffering that they caused seriously. You suffered and, at the same time, were ashamed of your suffering so that you, who at that time could easily handle far more menacing demons, broke down at this juncture, disqualified by your own pain. You poor, poor boy! Why hadn't I been at your side then, why couldn't I have walked into that drawing room and stood right behind you, so that you could have been fortified with the later sense of your life. But I—your fulfillment—I was—I am—a thousand miles and many years away from you and I sat—I sit—here, on the American shore, so bitterly overdue .. and thus, staring at the water that shoots up from behind a stone wall, filled with the distance of the wind speeding from the polar region.

Sunday

Today, years later, when I am a lot calmer, less at the mercy and the lack of mercy of judgments, I think about the basic assumptions of Ferdydurke regarding criticism and I can endorse them without reservation. There are enough innocent works that enter life looking as if they did not know that they would be raped by a thousand idiotic assessments! Enough authors who pretend that this rape, perpetrated on them with superficial judgments, any kind at all, is something that is not capable of affecting them and should not be noticed. A work, even if it is born of the purest contemplation, should be written in such a way as to assure the author an advantage in his game with people. A style that cannot defend itself before human judgment, that surrenders its creator to the ill will of any old imbecile, does not fulfill its most important assignment. Yet defense against these opinions is possible only when we manage a little humility and admit how important they really are to us, even if they do come from an idiot. That is why the defenselessness of art in the face of human judgment is the sad consequence of its pride: ah, I am higher than that, I take into account only the opinions of the wise! This fiction is absurd and the truth, the difficult and tragic truth is that the idiot's opinion is also significant. It also creates us, shapes us from inside out, and has far-reaching practical and vital consequences.

Criticism, however, has yet another aspect. It can be seen from the author's side but it can also be seen from the side of the public and then it takes on even gaudier tones of scandal, mendacity, and deception. How do these things look?

The public desires to be informed by the press about books that appear. This is the source of journalistic criticism, manned by people having contact with literature.

Yet if these people really had something to do in the field of art, if they really were rooted in it, they certainly would not stop at these articles. So, no, these are practically always second- and third-rate literary figures, persons who always maintain merely a loose, rather social, relation with the world of the spirit, persons who are not on the level of the concerns that they write about. This then is the source of the greatest difficulty, which cannot be avoided and from which arises the entire scandal that comprises criticism and its immorality. The question is the following: How can an inferior man criticize a superior man, how can he assess his personality and arrive at the value of his work? How can this take place without becoming absurd?

Never have the critics, at least the Polish ones, ever devoted even a single minute of time to this delicate matter. Mr. X, however, in judging a man of Norwid's class, for example, puts himself in a suicidal, impossible position because in order to judge Norwid, he must be superior to Norwid but he is not. This basic falseness draws out an infinite chain of additional lies, and criticism becomes the living contradiction of all of its loftiest aspirations.

So they want to be judges of art? First they must attain it. They are in its antechamber and they lack access to the spiritual states from which art derives.

They know nothing of its intensity.

So they want to be methodical, professional, objective, just? But they themselves are a triumph of dilettantism, expressing themselves on subjects that they are incapable of mastering. They are an example of the most unlawful usurpation.

Guardians of morality? Morality is based on a hierarchy of values and they themselves sneer at hierarchy. The very fact of their existence is in its essence immoral: there is nothing that they have exhibited and they have no proof that they have a right to this role except that the editor allows them to write. Giving themselves up to immoral work, which consists of articulating cheap, easy, hurried judgments without basis, they want to judge the morality of people who put their life into art.

So they want to judge style? But they themselves are a parody of style, the personification of pretentiousness. They are bad stylists to the degree that they are not offended by the incurable dissonance of that accursed "higher" and "lower." Even omitting the fact that they write quickly and sloppily, this is the dirt of the cheapest publicism. ...

Teachers, educators, spiritual leaders? In reality, they taught the Polish reader this truth about literature: that it is something like a school essay, written in order that the teacher could give it a grade; that creativity is not a play of forces, which do not allow themselves to be completely controlled, not a burst of energy or the work of a spirit that is creating itself but merely an annual literary "production," along with the inseparable reviews, contests, awards, and feuilletons. These are masters of trivialization, artists who transform a keen life into a boring pulp, where everything is more or less equally mediocre and unimportant.

A surplus of parasites produces such fatal effects. To write about literature is easier than writing literature: that's the whole point. If I were in their place, therefore, I would reflect very deeply on how to elude this disgrace whose name is: oversimplification. Their advantages are purely technical. Their voice resounds powerfully not because it is powerful but because they are allowed to speak through the megaphone of the press.

What is the way out of this?

Cast off in fury and pride all the artificial advantages that your situation assures you. Because literary criticism is not the judging of one man by another (who gave you this right?) but the meeting of two personalities on absolutely equal terms.

Therefore: do not judge. Simply describe your reactions. Never write about the author or the work, only about yourself in confrontation with the work or the author. You are allowed to write about yourself.

“The truth about Hamlet is that Shakespeare made him up.” (Witold Gombrowicz) My italics.

Guyotat's Idiocy: Impressions with repetition.

Restraint deepens passion by refusing to give it easy vent.

— Garry Willis, Lincoln of Gettysburg

I take androgyny for granted in everyone.

— Harold Brodkey, “Translating Brando”

NOTE ON “POSITION”

Like Pierre Guyotat in his table-less studio in Passy, I write with my notebook pressed against my knees, the scent of dust in the corners of the hardwoods, transfixed by the sculpted eros of the unswept. This position is ordinary for me: a repetition, a motion that involves returning to a familiar place and position, in order to ascertain what has changed. With my notebook in my lap and the couch behind my back, I reconvene the scene of small details.

Notice— the new dog bone under the gray sofa, the vine strangling the birdfeeder near the window, the virulent green of the man’s pants in the framed drawing, an undated pastel piece that escaped time’s signature. It is this green on my wall that calls to the green parrot in Pierre Guyotat’s Idiocy.

Green pants to the green parrot who recites its repertoire of apartment sounds in the scene where Guyotat helps an elderly woman write the detective novel she has dreamed.

The parrot recites (or cites again,re-citing being another way of re-saying): the elder’s cough, “the creaking floors, the hubbub of voices on the avenue, the paintbrush twirling in its pot, my footsteps” — cut by the flashback of twins’ sexual escapades.

The woman holds her paintbrush, just as she has held it for many years and offers him “her other hand” which he kisses as he has done since “tall enough to do so.” The narrator returns to the woman’s text, which must be set on a particular street “where she passed one night during the interwar years in a taxi taking her home from a Boulevards theater with her husband, also a rentier.” This is the ride the woman wants to continue: to go from there, where a protest halted their taxi near the oysterman she can’t forget. This the scene she returns to sketch, now that her husband cannot prevent her from imagining the mystery, or inventing an amorous intrigue with “his young, half-niece from Brittany.”

The writer types the woman’s words onto paper and a “new phrase” appears, a phrase that ends with a flourish “which delights her.”

“At the heart of love”: he types it.

The parrot repeats the woman’s words but the writer’s ear hears: “the hurt of love, the hurt of love” – and the dance between monosyllabic near-homphones (heart, hurt, heart, hurt) continues as he repeats the conventional act of closure at the end. “The hand re-kissed, the thing half- written, the story interrupted by the murmur of faraway water and “half-light” on the street outside. 

The re-petition. (To petition again.)

The seasons recur (return, recurve) in stories of phosphorus–the mark of early spring when leaves turn dark green and then deepen into purple as they grow deficient in phosphorus, a mineral that isn’t available or active in cold, wet soil. The first signs of warming beneath us involve this darkening of the leaves.  

NOTE ON PARROTS

Mornings inch towards autumn only to be defeated by the dry heat which conquers the front porch by afternoon. This is the weather of the week, a background of sorts. And Guyotat’s heart/hurt — his Kierkegaardian distinction between the said/heard— returns on an afternoon when I find myself studying Auguste Renoir's paintings with one of the teens.

We agree that Renoir makes sumptuous use of black paints . . . BLACK, on his canvas, is a charged enigma, offering itself as a bridge between foreground and background.

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Woman with Parrot (1871)

Amid this orgy of deep blacks, I pause near Woman With Parrot, Renoir’s portrait of Lise Tréhot. She is holding a small green parrot in an elegant room, her pointer finger flush against the bird’s head. The fern to her right is given in a loud green, a rakish, vaguely-decadent green that draws attention away from the yellowish-green of the parrot.

My eye inclines to Renoir’s signature, placed neatly beneath the fern in a small oval on the carpet, as if to remind the viewer that color is a discipline. Color is how Renoir tames the scene. When I remove my glasses, the painting appears as from a distance, forcing me to consider his distribution of color. Forest green fronds on the wall; green patterns set atop grey on the wallpaper. Renoir’s greens draw the eye upwards from the fern to the ceiling. But Renoir’s reds draw the eye downward from the ribbons to the floor, down towards those marooned splotches covering the carpet. A sickly yellowish-green occupies the center, linking the cage to the parrot and the olive undertones of Lise’s skin.

Lise appears in at least 16 of his canvases during the six-year period when she and Renoir were companions. This painting was finished in 1871. In April of the following year, Lise married wealthy architect and never set eyes on Renoir again.

Certainly, he resented this. In a letter dated from March of 1912, Renoir downplayed the significance of this painting. He relegated Lise to a lost sight, a thing no longer given to his seeing. “I’m returning the photographs of the two paintings along with this letter,” Renoir wrote, adding that “The Woman with Parrot must have been done. . . in 1871 at the latest, because after this time I lost sight of the woman who posed for this picture.” Either way, Renoir continues, the paintings “are of no value, especially the Woman with Bird [sic].”

Colors and pictures on paper. Juvenilia.

“Pray do not get too excited over such daubs,” Renoir advises his correspondent.

The bright red of Lise’s necktie align with the gash of red ruffles pouring from back of her black dress, lending a dignity and respectability to the scene at this precise moment when she refuses our interest, electing, instead, to offer herself entirely to the bird in her hand. Aloof— but not really pensive so much as eager to withhold her attention from the painter? One wonders what thoughts whisk through the decidedly-hidden interior.

According to the Guggenheim Museum, genre paintings of the 1860s and 1870’s often featured “richly dressed young women” who were assumed to be “lorette, or high-class courtesans.” In these genre paintings, “the parrot and the gilded birdcage are sometimes interpreted as erotic symbols.” The way Renoir leans into this genre might have upset Lise as she sought to varnish her reputation for a marriage into the ruling classes.

The Guggenheim also mentions that the subject of woman holding parrot “appears in works from the 1860s by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas,” a statement clearly worded as an encouragement to share one of my favorite parrot-themed portraits, namely Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot.

Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot (1866)

The woman in this painting hides nothing from the parrot. Like Renoir’s woman, her interest is given entirely to the bird on her hand — but the expression is one of fascination rather than disdain. Her fingers are spread open, resembling the gesture of a statue I saw last week in New Orleans: a posture of the hand that beckons winged things. And the parrot complies. In Courbet’s painting, the walls are tent-like, set to sway and curve like the fabrics beneath the nude: the distance between inside and outside is permeable, as illustrated by the slight crack in the wall — with its chlorophyll-warmed greens — that enabled the parrot to enter. Courbet’s parrot is an expected guest who visits and delights the woman. Renoir’s parrot is a caged creature intended to please the residents of the cultivated bourgeois interior. I could riff on this forever . . .

NOTE ON THE BOOK, ITSELF

Pierre Guyotat in an interview from 1985

My diversion into Guyotat’s green ignores one of the primary themes in his work, namely, his experience in Algeria, where he discovered his own solidarity with the anticolonialist struggle of Algerians. HisTomb for 500,000 Soldiers (1967) was based on these experiences and scandalized the French reading public with its depictions of war, servitude, and sexuality. Idiocy traces a similar space: its most riveting parts occur later in the book, in a testament of the atrocities he witnessed as a French soldier in the Algerian war. Guyotat details his own arrest for inciting desertion as well as his three-month imprisonment in a hole in the ground. Where mystics sought solitary confinement as a means to apotheosis, Guyotat learns nothing from the hole. He is not transfigured or redeemed.

When Edmund White called Guyotat “one of the few geniuses of our day,” he was not lying. Idiocy’s searing condemnation of colonialism and militarized violence implicates its speaker. In refusing social constructions of personal innocence, Guyotat writes against himself, against his culture and the cult of ‘decent men’. His sentences wind through the mind like those of a Proust who dared pledge his fides to a queer icon of Saint Sebastian.

I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sound of pain, towards that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. never know how blue blueness could be.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

*

Claude Debussy, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien: Fragments Symphoniques (1911)
Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot (1866)
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Woman with Parrot (1871)
Pierre Guyotat, IDIOCY, tr. by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB Classics, 2025)
“Pierre Guyotat Reading Matter Pt. 1” a feature from CABINET

Fondation Azzedine Alaia, from the catalog titled Pierre Guyotat, la matière de nos œuvres

Harold Brodkey on Walter Winchell.

Harold Brodkey (Source: Alto de la Luna)

Take “order” as the arrangement of sensible things that permits repetition, ritual, and recognition. Then go for a walk with Radu, head tingling with recent readings. Enter Harold Brodkey’s 1995 essay, “The Last Word on Walter Winchell” — and my urge to excerpt abundantly, if only to imagine talking to other humans about it.

Brodkey begins in his feelings, as usual, regardless of what you might prefer. For Brodkey writes in the world that is Brodkey, for the page of his own reckonings. Love him or hate him, at least he doesn’t prevaricate a feigned neutrality or emotional disconnection.

Biographers claimed that Winchell invented the modern gossip column, perhaps as a way of defending their interest in him, but Brodkey disagrees. Journalism as gossip predates Winchell “by at least half a century.” Winchell merely revived a “dying form” and “made it commercially viable” among a mass audience.

It’s no shiner to say Winchell looked fantastic in the bootstraps department. Raised in Manhattan, he left school after the sixth grade. Although Brodkey was raised in a smaller town, he and Winchell were both socialized by a similar American conception of masculinity and nuclear family. Respectability and new money had altered the social terrain. “The rich, the people who mattered, were (with some exceptions) arrivistes, newcomers to power since the Civil War,” wrote Brodkey, emphasizing their inclinations to be “genteel.” The performance and display of “gentility was a constant issue,” and the fiction of the time attested to “this hypocrisy.” Media entered the market fray. “Newspapers were power and blackmail: they printed scandal, often unsubstantiated.”

Perhaps the myth of the American gentleman has always been nostalgic. “America was not gentlemanly except as a quality of longing,” wrote Brodkey, before segueing into a description of early alienation that confronted him when he moved from a small town into a larger city:

Angling into this sociology of small-town abandonment, Brodkey concentrates on the sense of scale; how considerations of scale shaped Winchell’s persona, or provided the terrain for his reactions and self-makings. “The thing about going back in history is that it is difficult to keep your sense of scale”:

Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Winchell “kept this sense of a party through much of his working life” — and the sense of party may have influenced his style, or what Brodkey calls his “swiftness and nastiness and outspokenness.” Style, here, is prophetic and smug in its clapbacks and near-aphorisms. It draws on common language and sounds personal, easygoing, honest as a televangelist. This isn’t why Brodkey traces Winchell’s style back to “Bible, with its air of truth.” What he borrows from the Bible is a certain pithiness: “Winchell's idea of a story was Jezebel in five lines.” He never used “schooled rhetoric” and “his riffs depended on rhythm, brevity, and mocking parody, in ways reminiscent of song lyrics and vaudeville.”

Walter Winchell.

In the absence of authoritative institutions, Winchell’s instincts presumed the market would drive values. Decades later, Pop would be disavowable king around which American culture could be constructed. To quote Brodkey, “Not simply because his work was entertainment but because in a country with so many ethnic divisions and a maddening variety of manners of speech, show-biz vernacular was the only common language.” If Winchell was anything, he was “show biz, was a placeless American, someone who could not be kept down on the farm after he'd seen Paree.” He stayed conversant with trends and presented himself as an afficianado of immediacy and instants.

Perhaps this caused a sense of giddiness in his respectability-battered audience?

“Winchell's constructed persona was based on his being truant, on his autonomy, and it granted us, the citizen audience, our autonomy,” said Brodkey. The man didn’t bother with ancestors or history or “dead men's and women's greatness” or even “memories of greatness.” Instead, Winchell “was absolutely topical. Now. Our lives.” The popularity of his work depended on how he played to “his two lifelong interests . . . sexual reality and conspiracies.”

Content aside, Winchell’s performance had polish. He knew his audience. He met them in their loneliness. “His métier was the folksy deconstruction of officaldom and of lies about class differences.” He finessed headlines and didn’t bother with telling “the ‘truth’ except in a sportive or arch manner, and even then he didn't do it because he was truthful by nature.” He kept his eyes focused on the lies of others. He took so many notes on those lies and contradictions that J. Edgar Hoover assigned agents to listen to Winchell and reap details.

As a medium, radio foregrounded voice and vocalization. Winchell’s voice ranged an “octave higher than usual” when he was on the air. His “verbal style” celebrated “childishness” and the patina of innocence required for shock. According to his biographer, “Winchell liked to broadcast with his pants undone.” According to Winchell, radio “added to his already terrible nervousness, his stage fright, and helped increase the urgency and drama of his voice on his broadcasts.”

Beginning in 1933, Winchell dedicated his broadcasts to opposing the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. He wrote frequently about the activities of pro-Nazi groups and funneled this information to a very-grateful Herbert Hoover at the FBI. By 1934, Hoover had even assigned FBI agents as a personal protection force for Winchell, since — in Hoover’s words — Winchell “has been very active in the anti-Nazi movement and feels there may be some efforts to cause him harm or embarrassment.” Protection rackets proliferated, and Winchell received protection from The Mob for several years (though Brodkey doesn’t mention what this cost him).

The next passage deserves quotation in full, if not for its grist with fragile masculinity and fascism, a topic that Brodkey never tired of challenging in his fiction:

Brodkey also takes issue with the biographer’s depiction of Winchell’s relationship to Roosevelt (i.e. Winchell started stumping for Roosevelt’s policies because they shared a similar sense of judgement, and not because he was fawning for significance) as well as his relationship Judaism (i.e. Winchell wasn’t deeply indebted to his ethnicity or religious belief for a sense of identity). With a note that he might be projecting a bit, I give you Brodkey’s words on this:

In this directed, ceaseless opposition, Winchell altered the stakes of activist journalism. Policies were not distinct from their consequences on the speaker.

The pleasure of Brodkey’s hard-nosed sentimentalism surges through his irreverent description of the self-styled Great Men — Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, etc.

Speaking of gender, Brodkey loved pontificating from his androgyny platform. No literati did more to elevate the humbug, totally- average androgyne than Brodkey. Take the way he marveled at the newness of Marlon Brando's “questionable morality and the questionable morality of his art, its graffiti quality, its shitting-on-you wildness… “ and described Brando's eyes as “clever, androgynous, hauntingly threatening eyes, somehow also soft and weak, satyr / American-storm-trooper eyes (though they are less famous than his profile).”  This is only to provide context for Brodkey’s survey of the “huge, androgynous vanity” of the Yalta bros . . .*

After the war ended and the troops came home, American triumphalism leaned into the profits made by weapons manufacturers. It was a rich man’s war, which is simply to acknowledge that modern warfare tends to expand the ruling classes to include men who get rich from war. In a sidelong manner, Brodkey suggests that Americanism didn’t properly exist until the War created it. All that nostalgia for the 1950’s among MAGA-heads gives credence to longing for a sense of community that was manufactured by media and the culture industry.

In Brodkey’s words:

And then, “we” — by which Brodkey means the Americans — “tried to go back in time.”

Women got shipped back into kitchens—”and into waist cinchers” (which are back, by the way). Tradwifes were more than fifty years away, but the seeds for the domestification of wifey had been planted and women’s magazines would sow the profits. Lawnmowers entered the national lexicon and “the country made suburban noises.”

Behind June Cleaver’s smile brewed resentment. Brodkey traces the rise of xenophobia and McCarthyism to our war-generated obsession with personal safety and greed. The “Roosevelt legacy was so complex and generated so much power and aroused so much ego that moral cowardice and personal safety and corruption and self-doubt and unlimited greed became national characteristics and national virtues.” No one knew how to behave in the newly-minted context. Women clearly weren’t stupid but they acted dissatisfied. Pastors and churches began plotting the Culture Wars that would define the 1960’s (and later make Evangelicals the most faithful voters and supporters of Trumpism). Social change scared the average Joe. “It felt as if this were a country consisting entirely of recent converts, and everyone went on tiptoe,” wrote Brodkey, noting that “McCarthyism came first,” and defining McCarthyism as “an attack on the upper-caste white Protestants that Roosevelt distrusted” and then on Hollywood folks and theatre people before finally becoming “a move toward a popular coup.”

Unsurprisingly to pesso-optimists like me, Winchell swiftly pledged his troth to McCarthy “and publicly attacked Truman and Stevenson, calling them ‘un-American’.”

Like any abstraction based in smug superiority, Americanism is whatever the corporations and politicians desire to emphasize safety against the internal enemy. Brodkey says Winchell later abandoned McCarthy, but I’m more intrigued by his claim that McCarthy spoke for the veterans:

Brodkey ends on a note of demystification (or perhaps remystifying the Everyman as American). “Winchell had a Job aspect and a Noah aspect and a bit of Lot's wife in him, too. He railed at fate, he fought it, and he won for a while and, of course, he lost in the end. And it broke him. It is practically everyone's story.”

As for safety, it always lacks an endgame. Pandering continues. A politician’s vow to offer safety to their constituents is also a promise to build more prisons, more bombs, more carceral spaces, and more violent deportations of underprivileged persons. Investors and the corporate leaders are listening. The “new social reality” shares much with the old social reality of American capitalism: the rich get richer.

*

Denis Donoghue, “Harold Brodkey: A Proustian Progress” (Vanity Fair, March 1985)
Harold Brodkey, “The Last Word on Walter Winchell” (1995)

Hesitation and found poems in Ben Lerner.

We mixed in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything we were experiencing and could not recognize. We watched it change color there and come to the boil. That is, we invented this too. The doll was so utterly devoid of imagination that what we imagined for it was inexhaustible. For hours, for weeks on end, we must have been content to lay the first fine silk of our hearts in folds around this immobile mannequin, but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls”

. . . but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

*

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls” (Paris Review blog)
The Replacements, “Sadly Beautiful” (2008 Remaster)