“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.’ (Man Ray, in his essay ‘To Be Continued, Unnoticed’ (1948).

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Recent research has shown that nonsense sharpens the intellect and verse broadens the mind. But at the same time several people have recently been lamenting that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are one cause of the decline of the ability and/or tendency to read (fat) novels. In one way this is probably true (my reading behaviour, at least, has changed noticeably over the past few years, from more deep-reading to more skimming and reading bits and pieces). However, I think that a certain hard and fast opposition is often assumed between these kinds of reading that is unnecessary and should probably be re-thought.

I used to immerse myself in fat novels, so I sympathize when Don Share writes that he is ‘tired of mini-reflections’ and protests them by reaffirming his love for the weighty novel/book (having for example read all of Dr. Johnson). However, I think that Twittering and big books need not be mutually exclusive:

1. if you really want you can read Tweets as a story (haven’t been following it, but I think Vanessa Place is even Tweeting a story of some kind (although that does sort of defeat the whole purpose doesn’t it?), and someone, I believe it was Darren Wershler compiled a poem from Tweets, or were they Facebook status updates?). And of course, it is in the minute, the fragmentary, that bigger histories wait to be unveiled, and which can be the genesis of lengthy monographs – as Tara Brabazon points out:

I am drawn to the monographs that take small ideas, moments, events or objects and use them to understand major issues of our time: war, terrorism, social injustice, intellectual despair or collective loss. Something seemingly insignificant – a song, an organisation, a law – reflects large contextual concerns. The resultant projects are applicable and extraordinary, transforming fragments and filaments of culture into the building blocks of social challenge and change.

2. Conversely, there is nothing to say that big fat tomes of books must be read from cover to cover, page 1 to page 1000. Many people approach books as objects of fetish. I used to hardly open a book so as not to crack the spine. After I had finished a book it would look newer than before it had been read. And I am still inclined to worship books, but after working in an antique bookstore (where they throw out one cubic ton of books per months), I learnt to also handle books somewhat less spastically as precious objects and to treat them more as objects of use. It was also at this bookstore that I started experimenting with different ways of reading, like reading only the first page or sentence/paragraph of each of the many different books that would pass my hands each day (from Manga comics, to regional history, self-help books, philosophy, poetry, gardening, porn, etc).

Anselm Berrigan writes similarly of his reading habits, also mentioning that he likes to read his books in varying order:

Anyway I like to read books of poems in any order I can make work. Often enough that’s one to back, but that can be a bore, a pain, an order that is simultaneously important and out of the question unless we’re dealing with one long shot, some epic or some unquartered thing.

But where he gives in with the epic, saying these he does read linearly, I say why stop there? Of course, they are obviously meant to be read from beginning to end, but even an epic poem/novel allows for multiple approaches. A book need not be written like the labyrinthine House of Leaves (filled with black blocks in the pages, footnotes within footnotes, and a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside) to read it as such.

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Curtis Faville recently wrote something surprisingly similar about what he call skip-reading as a creative act:

As a voracious reader of many disciplines, I’ve had to limit my coverage of most of the work I sample. I rarely read a novel end-to-end, and prefer shorter works–poems, essays, short stories–because I can skip around, sample taste, and derive vivid impressions of style, drift, form, without having to invest hours and hours, or days and weeks, methodically and laboriously devouring long works. Few long books (texts) justify such laborious expenditures of time.

This is great, although he too prefers to synchronize books with reading method, where I feel that any book could be skip-read, or read transversally. But where Curtis Faville also developed a method for utilizing skip-reading for chance methods of writing, I would like to emphasize the affective part of the reading and the possibility of transposing that experience directly on to some other activity.

I just wanted to make the point that reading methods, styles, and affectations can overlap and need not be restricted to the medium they most obviously appear to be most suited. Academics are constantly skimming through vast numbers of books in search of particular information. But it can be perfectly valid to read a philosophy book in such a way; not to find a particular footnote or paragraph, but simply to be affected by it in a certain way, to allow the book to affect you in a way that you might then go on to express in any number of other ways.

Philip Roth thinks the novel will disappear in the foreseeable future.

His friend Paul Auster respectfully disagrees.

I think I do too. But that doesn’t mean there is only one way of reading them.

In 1969 Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt made ‘Eastcoast/Westcoast’ a collaborative film in which they humorously assume and thereby comment on the stereotypical positions of art at the time.

Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid back Californian driven by feelings and instinct. Their deadpan exchange ironically lays bare the limitations and contradictions of both sides in the debate.

Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman have now pirated this film in a discussion of the bi-coastal reception of their Notes on Conceptualisms. Place takes on the role of the intellectual (although she lives in LA), and Fitterman does the airhead, laidback bit (although he lives in NYC). The interpretation stays close to the original, including the opening, in which Holt/Place checks if the camera is recording, and a friend (Kim Rosenfield in the pirated version) who butts in with questions/comments. I must say Place is a lot more convincing in the intellectual conceptual artist role than Nancy Holt.

The new joy
Only slightly packaged
Out sooon!

Update: great piece here on ‘what is a constellation’

(Thanks to Shane Anderson for the pictures of Dickinson’s poems, below. He also reported on Susan Howe’s talk).

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Last Tuesday Susan Howe (1937) gave a fascinating lecture at the American Academy (which overlooks Wannsee lake, where the famous conference took place). Her topic was Emily Dickinson. Howe talked about the tremendous difference between the fragments of Dickinson’s original writing – on pieces of paper and envelope – and the way they have since been presented in print as neat, tidy, safe poems.

Howe showed that the original poems have been radically changed, ‘manhandled into print’ as she said (with a pun on the fact that two white men were responsible for Dickinson’s legacy). 1. extreme editing choices have been made (in the publishing of Dickinson’s poetry) that leave out many of the words in the original, for a long time without any mention of these deletions even in the form of notes; 2. the form of the poems was radically altered, sometimes even changing line-breaks, but more importantly, giving the poems a tidy look and according to Howe perpetuating the myth of Dickinson as an ‘afraid-of-the-forest spinster’. (Although near the end of her talk Howe said half jokingly that she did not consider Dickinson’s books violations of the original, since she (Howe) is a writer herself).

I and clearly many others in the audience, were indeed very taken aback at the difference between the two versions of the poems that were shown. I had not even the beginning of an idea that Dickinson had written in such experimental, playful form. Although some present did not see the significance of the difference, for me, seeing examples of original fragments completely changed how I will think about these poems.

In some pictures the text is clearly written according to patterns; writing runs both horizontally and vertically along a paper, the well-known dashes are seen, but in one case there are also crosses, like plus signs (unfortunately no pictures of that one). In yet another example the small piece of paper has a triangular shape which seems to have influenced the poem’s language, or perhaps the other way around), and there are also pictures (of which one is a stamp, but one is a (Dickinson’s?) drawing of a gravestone).

Of course we simply cannot say anything, or at least not much about Dickinson’s intention with the forms of these fragments, since hardly any (was it six poems?) of her work was published during her lifetime. But regardless of the poet’s own intention these fragments nevertheless present poems of which many more elements are in mutual interaction than the printed versions of those same poems. A poem can always be seen as a constellation (assemblage, collection) of various elements – language, the qualities of language, the way it is laid out on the page,  the page itself, etc. However, in the original fragments, more elements are brought into open connection with one another – the poem becomes more ‘holographic’.

The poems, as Howe points out, become characterized by a hybridity of disparate elements, blurring for example the boundaries between visual and verbal art. They inhabit what Howe calls a space of inbetweenness, and what could also be called transversality, a network of disparate elements. Transversality thus allows for a much more inclusive consideration of a poem (or any other object of analysis) than a reading that only looks at the language on the page. Simply anything can be included and the photos of Dickinson’s original fragments make clear that they indeed merit such a transversal approach. Not only language, but the spatial organization of the text and the paper, the plusses and dashes, other visual elements, Dickinson’s handwriting.

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The pictures and description in themselves are not so spectacular of course, what is amazing is that they are so very different from the printed poems and that they do not at all fit the image that has been constructed of Dickinson. However, the distributive style of writing immediately point forward to Olson’s page-as-field, which is a term Susan Howe also used in her talk (as Howe also remarks, quoting someone (I don’t recall who): she was ‘out of her time, in her time’). It is also similar to some of Susan Howe’s own poetry, like this section from ‘Thorow’ (in Singularities, 1990):

Other examples abound: there is Ezra Pound, the endless experiments of the Language poets, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, and going back, Apollinaire’s concrete poetry, Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’. It is this last example that Louis Armand evokes in his essay ‘Towards a Techno-Poetic Method’ (Solicitations, 331), in which he describes a method of transversality, whereby the poem is read as a constellation-event, rather than a linear sequence of words:

a flattening out of depth-of-field in the simultaneous vision of the page and the typographics of visual intensity, such that the mimesis of linear evolution of a meaning is broken apart, replaced by a generalised transversality, wherein, as Mallarmé writes, ‘NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION’.

So the poem is no longer merely referring to a supposed external reality, but becomes an event in itself, an occasion of experience, a block of intensity. Armand thus reads Mallarmé’s poem not only as a description of contingency, but as performative of contingency in its appearing. In other words, as the famous throw of the dice that is mentioned in the poem: ‘A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE…NOT EVEN WHEN CAST IN ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES’ (Solicitations, 334).

And Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the only constant is contingency:

…the term contingency refers back to the Latin contingere, meaning ‘to touch, to befall’, which is to say, that which ahppens, but which happens enough to happen to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens – something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything , even the improbable, is predictable. (After Finitude, 108)

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I believe this poem was on the triangle:

One note from one Bird
Is better than a Million Word–
A scabbard has – but one sword

He stares blankly into space.
‘Space’ hides between apostrophes.

He imagines that he screams louder than he can
then he screams as loudly as he can, he thinks.

He breathes as if there is only a movement of air
where he sits.  There are apostrophes everywhere.

In between the brackets a fire crackles, objects move
this stupid tail flicks, a child outside screams something –

joy or rage or pain. Something that differs from something.
As if all at once happens together again. He turns thoughts

in his head – around the axis that is infinitely not there.
Black patches on his leather chair, his mind, his skin.

With thinking eyes, glass beads: he is death.
With only pulse, indifferent horror: he is unnamed.

Rats live longer when they are always a little hungry. She was a human animal. She was kept in an otherwise empty white room. It had no windows and the walls were indistinguishable from the floor and ceiling. She was kept there because she did not choose to stay there. She did not know how she had gotten there. It is uncertain if she was kept there, sometimes she felt like she might leave. She was given precisely such an amount to eat that she was always a little hungry. Even when she got used to the feeling, the feeling was still there. She lived to be very old, more than 50% older than the average female human animal.

Abandoned experiment, this, but dumping it here anyway. Together with ‘Knot I‘ (all the sentences in a newspaper containing the pronoun ‘I’) and ‘Names I‘ (all the sentences in Beckett’s Unnameable starting with ‘I’) ‘i’ was supposed to be one part of an ‘I’-engulfing triptych. It uses (nearly) all of the words in a German/English dictionary that only have the long /ai/ as the vowel sound.

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Pyrite-lined smiles sidle by sight. Slice night like twilight knives. Fine lie pried by shires. Riot site, ripe strife, vile fights, slime climbs. Tire fires, timed right, rise thrice, like wild pyres. Sigh quiet cry, fright. Strive sidle by dire site. Find trifle plight like mine quite trite. Smile while child cries. I grind nine pipes, dive, tires, find flightline stripes, triumph! Ride bike like life-line. Glide miles, smile riot bye-bye.

High like fly kite, I slide my stride. Wired by spiced pipe. My scribe titled Christ dials, Skypes divine shite, types live. Writes signs like rhyme, rhymes life like dice. I wire my hype. ‘Psyche!’ chimes Christ. I rise, wipe pride by side, type, ‘right, right.’ I bite bile, tired by tight tie. Lice fly by like lies. I strike my side, pry spine; ripe lice bites. I eye fine find.

Try my vice, buy my vial; ripe, vile wine like vine. I sigh my mind white while I slice chives, brine, rye, thyme, pie, spice. Wild child chimes trite rhymes, cites sites like rime, shire, prize, dice! Quite pyrite rhymes my child. By quiet light lies wise climb. Dire cries glide high – rise like quires – rise bright-eyed guys’ ire. Flies fly by, time wide flight. Kind guys find fire, hide by dry shrines. Fined tithe by snide Christ-like guy.

Tight bind. Guys jibe while trying mild chide, thrice tri-vice. Jive-like hive slights Christ. Guys rive time like snipes, skive life by scythes. Blight piled lyres, smite die, pry dimes. Pile hi-fi high like might.

As part of a series of literary portraits of European countries Dutch critic Margot Dijkgraaf writes a broad survey of Dutch literature of the past 50 years. Something about a ‘profound Holland’ and the new Dutch.

The liberal, atheist era has come to end in the Netherlands and contemporary Dutch literature reflects that, writes critic Margot Dijkgraaf. The new need for security is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction, free of references to contemporary life, evokes the “profound Holland” overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose representations of male disintegration blankly refuse any such reassurances. But there is a parallel strand of current Dutch literature that sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles and identities into the Dutch literary repertoire.

Very joyful and also promising looking trailer of a documentary by Stephen Silha and Eric Slade about poet, experimental filmmaker, and gay rights activist Richard Broughton (1913-1999).

Broughton, ‘Crazy old men are essential to society because young men need role models.’ (He forgot to mention old women and young women. But I apart from that, nice).

Oh yes and, ‘Follow your own weird’.

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Why is it that some names continue to be susceptible to misspelling? And I mean not only by journalists or so, but by people who are familiar with the names they’re misspelling. Is it ‘name dislexia’?

What to think of the often misspelled John Ashbery (Ashberry by many, for example in a recent poetics listserv mail, and in the table of contents of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice, ok, so that was probably just a typo).

Then there is Charles Olsen

Frederic Jameson

Illiad

What else? I dunno. Maybe literary scholars have a blind spot where it is most obvious, like the purloined letter, or an aleatory point in the eye of the storm