“I don’t want to be a personality or to have an ideology. I see no sense in doing anything different. I never do see any sense. I think that one always does what is being done anyway (even when making something new), and that one is always making something new. To have an ideology means having laws and guidelines; it means killing those who have different laws and guidelines. What is the good of that?”

from The Daily Practice of Painting by Gerhard Richter

The direction in my life right now that I’m trying to I guess proceed with in the business is gradually from being the little boy, from the younger, you know, brother, trying to get to be the older brother or the only brother.

And who doesn’t feel that? Me, certainly. Why did Tao Lin start Muumuu House? Older brother. Year of the Liquidator? Older brother.

At what point did you decide you wanted to be the “older brother”? (And I apologize for the maleness of the metaphor. I would like sisters to answer, too.) Have you decided yet?

In her essay “Points of Pressure,” Caroline Bergvall writes:

For many bicultural artists and writers, the processes of identity and of writing acquisition go hand in hand with aspects of cultural belonging and the way this articulates their lived body and speaking voice. When the writer’s cultural and social body accommodates two or three languages and/or cultures, their inscriptive narratives and poetics are necessarily at a break from a monolingual textual body-type and a nationally defined writing culture. It is often accompanied by a propensity towards open-forms and mixed genres, remains dubious and questioning of defining terms, can be resistant of exile or immigrant narratives and their inward longing for a traditionalist past where identities are firmly locked in place, rather than in play.

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25. From which we learn that (a) making correct predictions about the technology future is easy, and (b) writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it’s easy to say they were right.

25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it’s natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.

26. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it’s a topic like education. It’s that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don’t go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don’t go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes.   But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.

Read on.

People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn themselves into beasts; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves.
– Montaigne, Essays (1580)

I smiled when I read “the man,” because it was written so long ago. Seems like “the man” has been bringing us down since the 16th century, the most current manifestation being Comcast (host of my internet, cable, and landline) without whom I would only exist in vivo, and how lame is that?

“It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness.”

– Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena

I suspect by “letters” he means, generically, the written word, though he could also be referring to letters, the medium with which he is writing to Milena — or, and this is my fancy, he could mean the letters which make up words themselves, thus dramatically altering exactly what is “[in]between the lines” and their respective “corroborations,” a funny yet telling invocation which hints at some complicity, as if writing is a shameful lie. His “intercourse with ghosts,” short of necrophilia, simply tells of a man who replaced love with words. (One should see desire in the pulp of paper.) Think about Kafka long enough, and you enter a dark tunnel. Don’t think about him, and your world too perfect, untouched.

It has even been suggested that I spent six years writing my last novel in order to create a demand that cannot be filled. Basic Black With Pearls has had rave reviews and has been bought by William Morrow Company in New York. Success and 60 cents will get me a ride on the subway. No one can find a copy of my novel in the bookstores.

First published age 45.

Did, but did not enjoy, raising rabbits for food.

94 is way bonus years.

All the literary forms were men’s, all the philosophies were men’s philosophies. … I had to translate these forms into the female

Achieved?

Pointed out that gardens might be an answer to God Money (or that fleas do tricks for food).

RIP Helen. To be avant and overshadowed by a spouse. Push back? Harder? But it happens. But let’s pause.

I drank martini after martini while they “workshopped” their poems.

We extend the language.

We take our gin warm and neat.

I am writing this on a cocktail table in dim light.

My voice had a terrifying whiskey tone.

Speaking in public, be quite drunk, be manic, be very well prepared.

Planting words in you like a grass seed.

Let me sleep in your bed.

If someone burns out your eye I will take your socket and use it for an ashtray.

Fool!

You do drink me.

I sounded a bit drunk—but those things do happen.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.

-Yves Tanguy, 1954 (via this John Ashbery article)

Baudelaire says: All art is prostitution.

Discuss.

McCaffery: Do you recall the germinating idea for The Dead Father?

Barthelme: A matter of having a father and being a father.

McCaffery: In some basic sense the book deals with the notion that we’re all dragging around behind us the corpses of our fathers, as well as the past in general.

Barthelme: Worse: Dragging these ahead of us. I have several younger brothers, among them my brother Frederick, who is also a writer. After The Dead Father came out, he telephoned and said, “I’m working on a new novel.” I said, “What’s it called?” and he said, “The Dead Brother.” You have to admire the generational wit there.

Featured is a painting by my brother. Ever feel like you are, inevitably, always in a shadow? Or do you feel inspired by a talented sibling?

young salter: fighter pilot and ladies' man. what's your day job?

There is the knowledge of the senses that includes carnal happiness, and a greater knowledge that comes from intellect and reason. In the life we admire, one succeeds the other but does not dislodge it.

–James Salter, There and Then

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P.G. Wodehouse

“I just read in this morning’s paper that [P.G.] Wodehouse says that they give him $104,000 for doing nothing at Hollywood they keep him there but they do not use what they ask him to do.”

– Gertrude Stein, from a letter to playwright Thorthon Wilder (1936)

—

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

– P.G. Wodehouse

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“Reading remains inseparable from… labial mimeticism and its vocal activity – there are texts that should only be murmured or whispered, others that we ought to be able to shout or beat time to.” -Georges Perec

(I only put up the photo because it’s irresistible!)

For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.

- Rebecca West, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism”

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea — cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.”

- Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

From a CBC Interview, 1966

Leonard Cohen: I thought I would change my name and get a tattoo.

Interviewer: Where?

Leonard Cohen: There’s this place on St. Lawrence Boulevard.

I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many.

- Montaigne, “Of Books”

quoted in Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom

I want to point out that responding to depiction and illustration often involves something apart from the formal characteristics of painting. It’s often a distraction. On the other hand, purely formal characteristics exercise the senses as do string quartets, piano concertos, Dixieland. Because of this the representation I’m interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

—Kenneth Noland, 1924 – 2010