THE OUTSIDERS
Have you been to/do you know about the American Visionary Art Museum? It’s in Baltimore. It features art by outsider artists. In cavalier/casual conversation one might say “art by the insane.” (edit: To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that everyone whose art is exhibited at AVAM was actually insane.) I went there once, a while ago. It came up in conversation the other day–I had forgotten. They have Darger stuff in their permanent collection, I believe. If you’re anywhere near there, go there.
some sort of god or tendril
And then think about whether it changes your appreciation of the art if you are told that the people who made it were in some cases mentally unbalanced. (How different is that from MoMA or LACMA?) Is it fucked-up/exploitative to be kind of especially interested in art created by the psychological disturbed? Is that different from collecting the clown paintings of John Wayne Gacy? Hey look, here’s a picture of Gacy with Rosalynn Carter.
image by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
Length Matters
On several recent occasions, writers have apologized for sending me “long” stories as if we were exchanging contraband in the form of stories longer than 500 words. To give you a sense of how sad this length sensitivity has gotten, a grand writer apologized for sending me a 3,500 word story. Call me crazy, but a 3,500 word story is not a long story. It is a short short story.
I’ve also heard people complain about the length of Joshua Cohen’s Witz, which at 800 pages is certainly longer than the average book, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, at more than 1,000 pages, as if the length of these books was an insurmountable obstacle.
OMFG It’s Friday Already
What I’ve learned from my wicked awesome intern, Dave, is that other countries have weird commercials. Here are a couple:
In the creepy category:
“This Is An Enormous Amount of Eyes”
I have been stark-raving-obsessed with Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. I’ve spent hours at MoMA; I’ve interacted with the interactive website; I’ve scrolled through the Flikr; I’ve learned about other obsessives; I’ve read essays and reviews; I’ve watched this nifty video; And yeah, I’ve seen that blog that is just the pictures of people crying. (Love that one.) I know Ken has posted links to it twice since it’s been going on, but I’m posting them again, at risk of redundancy, because to me (and many others) this was a huge moment in art history and I think anyone who is alive and creating things right now should know about it.
Memorial Day was the last day for the exhibit and now Marina has given a pretty interesting exit interview to the WSJ blog Speakeasy. It’s full of such non-native-English-speaker sentences like, They made a lot of interesting drawings of how I pee. I didn’t even have urge. and This is an enormous amount of eyes. The interview also refers to an earlier statement she has made that “nobody ever changes when they do things they like.”
I am not sure if I entirely agree with that but it does raise some interesting questions. I know a lot of writers who say they hate writing, but they do it anyway. I don’t know how to react when someone tells me this. Are they masochists or do they feel like they can’t do anything else? I often find writing really difficult and trying, but I almost always like it. So will I never change or grow as a writer because I enjoy it so much? READ MORE >
Things & Stuff
There’s a deep and abiding chasm, I think, between materialism and consumerism. It has to do with the how and the why. And also, with shame. I have a fierce attachment to my things, and I’m frequently consumed by a desire for more things. I have walked into shops and trembled. I consider myself a materialist. I am also a consumer, vulnerable to marketing tactics, but when I give in to them, I feel embarrassed. There are certain objects that mean a lot to me, but probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. These objects are reifications of my experience, evidence that I exist: how would I or anyone know that I went to the bazaar, figuratively speaking, if I didn’t bring back the miniature tin kettle and cup and saucer, figuratively speaking, to prove it?
I like knowing that Walter Benjamin collected so many books, but didn’t read many of them. The collecting is greater than the book.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Please keep her always drunk.
I don’t do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
I’m through with the whole works.
An unbroken night of sleep is rare.
Oh, misty-minded.
Four be the things I’d have been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Sobriety? A basis for jokes.
Ballin in the library.
She’s probably on her way to get a bottle of bad gin.
I’m not down to my last two bits.
A deep human need to complain.
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
And down a beer.
FEAR THAT MAKES THE HEART BEAT FAST
mother of tears
I had a vivid nightmare—it involved a member of my nuclear family turned into a little person with a suction cup mouth. The mouth had tiny teeth around the inner rim. The family member was coming to hurt me and grab me with its little hands. I thought Why did he ever buy the new mouth? because I knew that installing that on his face was what had changed everything. And I had to go up a narrow tower staircase and close a trap door behind me.
I woke up raining sweat. I was literally vibrating. The feeling of authentic fear was also a kind of exhilaration. Related to the feeling of having escaped.
(Is there a word, perhaps a German word, for the vertigo one feels when waking up from a dream and realizing it wasn’t real? That is, the terrible disappointment of waking from a dream of finding millions of gold doubloons buried just under the dirt of your back yard and realizing you’re still broke—or the glorious relief of waking from a nightmare of losing limbs or being humiliated, only to realize it never happened—or the guilty rush of waking from a dream of murder to think: Whoa… I got away with it. Because I’ve had all of those.)
I realized I hadn’t had that feeling in a long time—hadn’t had a nightmare that felt so real it scared me. I saw my heart beating fast through the skin of my chest. People pay money for that feeling. Then I realized I hadn’t been scared, genuinely scared like with a quickened heart rate, by a book or a film in recent memory.
Do you lose that susceptibility as you age (and read/watch more)? Because I know it happened to me more often as a young reader. Off the top of my head I tried to make a list of Shit that Actually Scared Me:
Reading (&) the Body
Courtesy of Penelope Illustration
I’m re-reading a little Peter Brooks in column A and in column B thinking a lot about reading and the body, reading as consumption, reading while eating, reading while shitting, reading while smoking, the frenetic idleness of reading finding its counterpoint in various bodily acts/needs/processes.
From Brooks’s Reading for the Plot:
Speaking reductively, without nuance, one might say that on the one hand narrative tends toward a thematics of the desired, potentially possessable body, and on the other toward a readerly experience of consuming, a having that, in an era of triumphant capitalism, is bound to take on commercial forms, giving to the commerce in narrative understandings a specifically commercial tinge.
What do you do when you read? Or do you just read?