http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian - "Keeping up with the Kardashians"
1. Do you watch reality TV?
–If yes, which shows and why?
–If no, how come?
2. Why do you think reality TV is so popular today?
3. What do you think reality TV reflects about our society?
4. Are there connections between realism in contemporary literature
and realism on TV?
5. Does realism on TV seem “more real” or “less real” or “different real”
than realism in contemporary literature?
Kate Durbin has posted images from Andrea Quinlan’s copy of The Polished You, which Kate produced for Vanessa Place’s Factory Series, which Vanessa describes as her version of Warhol’s practice of having “art-workers” help him create his paintings.
You can read more about the Factory Series here. And you can check out the whole series at Ood Press.
Plus, you, too, can appropriate the text created by Kate created by Vanessa created by Nancy Taylor, by purchasing a copy of The Polished You. After making it your own, you can scan the images of your copy and send them to Kate and she’ll post them.
I love this project for a bunch of reasons, not least of which are the many questions it raises about authorship, ownership, consumption, production, participation, and whether or not the idea of appropriation is merely the evil connotation of personalization.
This is a man being so much other than.
How the love falls out of him, replaced by beads, by water, by nails, by cardboard.
Bent on a curb, blowing kisses to dead lips in that window above, a voice calling out a name, her not looking down at the wreckage.
A man when there is none left.
This is a love poem, a love poem that doesn’t want to be, a love poem about shattering open, about groping for what is left when there is nothing left, when subsistence isn’t enough, when we are damaged and the memories of what was, are all that is.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day & the forthcoming publication of J.A. Tyler’s second book, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed (now available for pre-order from Fugue State Press) publisher James Chapman has kindly offered to give away a free advanced copy of the book to one lucky HTMLGIANT reader who shares their shittiest love story in the comment thread to this post. The contest is open between now and Valentine’s day. On the 14th, J.A. Tyler will select the winning comment/story.
Danielle Dutton, from an interview at BOMBLOG:
Anne K. Yoder: Culturally, are people more open to experimental approaches in other art forms?
Danielle Dutton: On a very basic level, my best guess is that writing asks something different of its reader than listening asks of the listener. Same goes for looking at a painting, even one that might perplex or upset us. To read, to connect words in a difficult syntax, like Stein’s, or make sense of seemingly simple sentences within a maddening paragraph, like Beckett’s, or piece together a narrative that doesn’t seem to add up in a familiar way, like Gladman’s or Woolf’s, the reader has to pay close attention, has to work. I’m not saying that experimental writing is all slog slog slog, that it isn’t rewarding or entertaining, because obviously I think a lot of it is, but that we’ve been trained to think that language itself should work in one way, should be clear, and linear, and should instantly reveal meaning, so when writing confounds those expectations it’s perhaps easy to feel cheated by it, or to chalk it up as wrong, bad, pretentious. I’ve had students who were very open to talking about cubist paintings, for example, but who became furious over Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. We’re taught to read, after all, and perhaps more importantly we’re taught to write (the subject-verb agreement, the five-paragraph essay, the rhyming stanza), whereas no one actually teaches us a particular way to hear or look, and rarely to compose or paint, which maybe, ultimately, means we’re more open when we listen and look. Maybe?
At The Marcel Duchamp Studies online journal, Francis M. Naumann begins his volatile evisceration of Wayne Andersen’s Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah (Geneva: Éditions Fabriart, 2010) with:
This book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who believes that Marcel Duchamp was an important and influential figure in the history of modern art in the early years of the 20th century.
And ends with:
I find myself in an equally complex dilemma in writing this review, for allowing its publication can only serve to draw more attention to a book that presents no legitimate justification for its existence.
Between those two phrases, Naumann pretty much chops the book to shreds for being uninformed, unauthorized, prudish, self-published, you name it. Except, in the one and only passage he quotes from the book, Naumann fails to accuse Anderson of flagrant misogyny, despite the utter repulsiveness of the quote:
Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes raw & aggressive pocket-sized titles in limited-editions. Readers will have exactly three months from the first day of sales to purchase one of 150 available copies. Once all 150 copies are ordered or when we reach three months of sales, whichever comes first, that title will immediately print & ship. There will be no subsequent editions & only e-galleys will be available for reviewers. Titles will also not be revealed until their sales period opens, though we are willing to give you a peek of the first:
“It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly. In the hall where the hall rolls bathroom-toward near the mirror and our donkey, a bit of trouble, of seeing himself clearly. Nevermind that. He dabs drips which are of a muskier something. The mezzo-soprano sang, then bang, ended, the audience sang, off with their pointed hats.”
XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX by XXXXX XXXXXX, coming very soon.
Hieronymus Bosch - Garden of Earthly Delights (1503)
Like Joshua Corey & others, I’m bewitched by Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of “the necropastoral.” (read her posts at Montevidayo) I fear I have little to contribute, but much to wonder about. My inclination is to assume I’m misunderstanding what she means by the term, even after reading her definition:
[the ‘necropastoral’ is] a term which denaturalizes the pastoral by focusing on its always/already unnatural qualities. In its classical form, the pastoral is a kind of membrane on the urban, an artificial, counterfeit, impossible, anachronistic version of an alternative world that is actually the urban’s double, contiguous, and thus both contaminatory and ripe for contamination, a membrane which, famously, Death (and Art) can easily traverse (Hence, Et in Arcadia Ego). [here]
But since I’ve never let misunderstanding stop me from asking questions, or engaging in conversation, I thought I would share some thoughts (more bricolage of ideas than exposition) provoked by the evocation of “the necropastoral.”
In part one, I proposed that one way we might begin to think about experimental literature is in terms of open and closed texts, using Lyn Hejinian’s essay “The Rejection of Closure” as the jumping off point.
In part two, I used Brian Evenson’s remarks about the suffocating influence of “Aristotelian notions that still dominate most thinking about fiction in writing workshops today…Discussions of setting, plot, character, theme, and so on,” as an opening for thinking about the origin of convention, i.e. the counterpoint to works of experimental literature.
This time around, I want to use Ben Marcus’s recent interview to make some remarks about the differences between reading practices and writing practices in order to show how those two roles impact the creation and reception of experimental literature.
The use of the tango music seems a clear nod in the direction of Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928). Like its surrealist predecessor, The Color of Love is an assault on the norms of vision. It is explicit; it shows too much.
A few years ago I had the privilege of studying avant-garde/experimental cinema with Ron Green at Ohio State. He introduced me to a lot of amazing and unsettling work. One of the most uncomfortable films I recall experiencing in that period was a voyeuristic film called “Martina’s Playhouse” by Peggy Ahwesh. I won’t go into detail about it, other than to say that it was my one and only experience with Ahwesh’s work until last week when I watched “The Color of Love.” I’ll give you a link to where you can watch this film at the end of this post. Beware, though, it is (arguably) a work of pornography.
