November 23, 2009
Our weather channel with literary forecasts continues to grow over at youtube.com. View all 8 forecasts and counting speculation here
November 23, 2009
B 0003
Day two with Georges (Bataille) has proved mighty fruitful. We’ve covered piety, obsession with death, bull fighting, Charles, Robert, Catholicism, split second and steady and lasting obligation, mothers, nerves, odious utterance, transgression… et en plus.
It’s rather like the most sitting down with the most comprehensive menu ever handed to you and finding endless first choices and be able to afford to choose every one of them.
November 22, 2009
Pastoral
This piece got me brain thumping. In relation to how the Pastoral might be played with …. and juggled or inverted.
Jonathan Raban in NYRB on Dorothea Lange
Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a “puzzling form” and a “queer business” in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied “a beautiful relation between the rich and poor” by making “simple people express strong feelings…in learned and fashionable language.” From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare’s complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.
November 22, 2009
B 0002
Georges, Georges. Beckett did mention you, but it took me a while to find you. I am having to strictly limited my consumption to L’Abbe C in between vital bouts of hoovering and household chores because I could happily suspend all daily activities including breathing and delight only in this prose.
Mr Bataille has already solved 2 and a half of my problems. This will be a vital acquaintanceship.
I love these chance encounters I have with the shelves @ VPL. I met DM Fraser this way. I only found Mr Bataille today because Angela Carter had disappeared down the back of her shelf (2 copies imagine) and a diligent man was furrowing around out the back trying to locate her, so I ambled up shelf and on the down low shelf an orange book flicked through and some sentences caught my eye and I went from there to his fiction, and to desk and afternoon bliss.
I resent the challenges of access to resources that I want to read, but every time such a challenge presents there are rewards beyond the drag of the initial challenge. It’s a petrol of urgency for the written word.
If i have a thought and I need a book to consider that thought against, I want that book now precisely when I have that thought. Often I may not have the book. It may require a bedraggled cold tramp in the rain (not always successful) to obtain it, but in that tramp there’s something else to trip on. Somehow the lack of instant access (whether it be printed book or online journals) makes the final encounter that much more appreciated or richer. Especially in the matter of journal articles because a hunger has been created by the abstract. There’s also crushing disappointment if it turns out to be a dry table of figures and one paragraph of some bunk that doesn’t live up to the abstract. Today that were not the case! It was blue, it was bound, it was compelling.
November 21, 2009
B 0001
I am placing all my faith in George Bataille for the next five day period. On va voir what he drums up.
November 21, 2009
Map.
Caught sight of this paragraph or description that may inform on what I was getting at earlier in investigating the way the brain has changed in relation to narrative and how we interact with it. The distinction between physical archive and user generated content in particular. Or it may not. I can’t tell you right now because have to wait for it to be uploaded to the MAP Commission section of this magazine. There are however other interesting interludes in this mag to meet and listen to, such as this amiable eccentric encounter. Or in honour of weary, pulsating heads that carry on Craig Mullholland’s Peer to Peer (excerpt)
MAP Commission by Gintaras Didžiapetris takes a more direct approach by exploring oral culture’s relationship to ethnography. the creation of a narrative structure is not perhaps solely compelling, but the way in which the aesthetic enterprise of narrative has been atomised, undermined and reinterpreted by numerous artist practices in recent years does, nonetheless, warrant some timely attention. the resurfacing of narratives within performance appears to have particular resonance in the work of Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Spartacus Chetwynd and Mark Leckey. Subtly, the constant unfolding of narrative presents new paths to navigate the distance between the physical archive and user-generated content.
November 21, 2009
Colony
Was watching a video piece (The video documentary Colony (2006) by Cinema Suitcase) ce soir firstly sans audio and secondly with audio. In listening and watching I also moved closer to the screen on the second innings.
Earlier in the soiree my son was watching a Scooby Doo episode with audio and subsequently without. The second innings was on a substansially bigger screen. He rejected the first because it kept hopping, and preferred it soundless rather than hopping.
There may be much to be said for watching things twice: first no sound and second add sound. Unless it’s Scooby Doo which the opposite appears to satisfy. I say this because once I heard the piece, I saw another piece, that added to the first piece I’d watched.
Sometimes I get very confused watching documentaries and films therefore if I watched them in two incarnations I wonder if the confusion would lessen. I think it’s because one’s own imaginative narratives invade the actual narrative and one can become quite convinced the imaginative narrative is the actual narrative until you stands outside on the pavement in the rain and compares notes with the person sat next to you throughout it. It’s never uninteresting since a whole other has emerged. Just requires a bit of explication. Or not if you are more inspired by the other. Or your other person on the pavement may offer the suggestion that what you thought you saw was more interesting than what you actually saw. Or dismay can set in at what you may have missed if it cannot easily be recouped in another sitting. What lies between what’s said and what’s heard being of course it’s very own colony.
November 20, 2009
Construction of reconstructing
The construction of this fascinated me more than the actual content. But the ambition that a novel would be only an auditory world that we encounter in an interface — and we choose the sequence in which we want to hear it, if we so desire — was most alluring. (Or that it could be the primary introduction, a priming of and for the reader to continue to encounter the book in some other or later incarnation)
It offers possibilities that the static page cannot. For one thing the winding sentence may sit better in this form. The winding sentence heard and understood by the author but unable to perfectly translate its rhythm on rereading or reinterpreting. (That said whole new rhythms arrive instead, just as valid, if they’re embraced)
Maybe it is the hopping, wavering numbers on this particular page but there’s much more sense of floating in some kind of galaxy and planet loafing rather than the demands of stone to stone jump with no room or allowance for an ankle to slip and right itself and in that righting be amazed by the feel of muscles it never knew it had.
November 20, 2009
The Radio Collector – a slide show What useful skills. I’d love to be able to fix my old radios.