Faking it
20th century Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren (d. 1947) painted Vermeers and others so convincingly, he duped buyers, including Netherlands officials, an estimated $30 mil (adjusted for today) dollars; most notable of his doings was selling one to Hermann Göring, for which he was arrested by the Dutch government under charges of “collaboration” with the Nazi party, and taken to trial. Ironically, his defense to charges against selling Dutch cultural property (i.e. Vermeer) to the Nazis was that Göring’s recent acquisition had been a forgery, hence not cultural property. Two wrongs, it seems, does make a right. Fortunately, Göring was at Nuremberg at the time and had bigger worries. At the last day of the ruling, even though charges had been dropped, the painter had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital, at which he had another fatal one three days later. This may have been ringing around in William Gaddis’ mind when he wrote The Recognitions (1955), in which one Wyatt Gwyon realizes he can make more money forging Dutch masters than making originals. Gaddis’ indictment of what would be postmodernism worried itself in a classical context. Under this Faustian pact (the novel, a much shorter version, was initially conceived as a parody of Goethe’s Faust), he slowly loses his identity and completely disappears in the middle of the novel. Gaddis — smart, bitter, both repulsed and smitten by his society, obsessed with documenting its minutiæ — may have found a descendent in Larry David, whose relatively conceptually vigorous and poplulace-friendly shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm seem to me the funnier and perhaps existentially more dire version of a Sartrean “No Exit,” the former collaborators endlessly shouting at one another inside a room, free to simply leave, but never doing so (same goes for The Real Housewives series) — enter empowered and feminist-y Elaine Benes, loosely based off Richard Yates’ daughter Monica, who, in a twist which writes itself, Larry David once dated. When fiction is authenticated by real life, people are appeased, as if what we really wanted all along was the truth. Per the 65th episode in which Elaine brags about never having an orgasm with Jerry, we can only wonder who that inspiration was. A morose pessimist jackhammers his way to ecstasy in under two minutes, and a woman accompanies it with a forgery. Two wrongs, again it seems, does make a right.
Writing on Fashion on Writing: A Plug
Zachary German and Adam Humphreys (who is making a film about Zachary German) have created a “gentleman’s casual clothing line” called Goldfarb and Goldfarb. The brand seems to specialize in humorous, self-nullifying statements printed in simple black Helvetica against white t-shirts—statements which are attributed on the t-shirt to “a t-shirt.”
According to the site’s “regarding” page, Goldfarb and Goldfarb “is an extension of Zachary German and Adam Humphreys’ decades long friendship and aims toward furthering their understanding of their own motives as well as those of the people they love.”
Here are some j-pegs:
Matt Mullins: Interview
For example, Matt Mullins and Three Ways of the Saw (Atticus Books). The “jagged” school. Certainly Eugene Martin (this book amazing, BTW). Sometimes XTX, Mary Miller, sometimes KGM. Certainly Jamie Iredell. A Hubert Shelby Jr./Iceberg Slim/Patti Smith continuum. Lipstick on the edge of a knife, balls clanking. Thrown/thrown down bottle of flungward. Slash. Krash. You wake up to vomit and your breath smells like burning tires, wonder, jamboree and regret.
Matt Mullins lives in a three-room apartment in a quiet business section of downtown Indiana. His apartment, located in a fifties-futuristic building in sight of four pawn shops and a hat store (That’s not really a hat store, Matt told me), is comfortably unimposing, though it does testify to his days as a traveling musician: souvenirs from Kalamazoo, Mexico, the Eastern Shore, the steppes of Kansas; a bookcase lined with personally inscribed records by Kiri Te Kanawa, DMX, Matt Salesses, Ginsberg (spoken word), Dee Dee Ramone; an entryway in which vintage amplifiers and various guitar cases are stacked shoulder high, as if headlining festival tours of indefinite length were perpetually in the offing.
Our first meeting took place in the summer of 2011. I arrived at his door in the early afternoon, but it was not his door, it was a small bar. There was an elderly woman behind the bar who looked exactly like a cross between a nocturnal monkey and Anthony Perkins. I had a shot of vodka and a very cold beer then asked, “Does Matt Mullins live around here?”
Night-monkey Perkins nodded to the ceiling. “Upstairs.”
I found Matt Mullins newly awakened, his thick brown hair tousled and pale blue eyes slightly bleary; he was obviously surprised that anyone would come to call at that hour of the day. As he finished his breakfast (a Pop-Tart and a grapefruit) and lighted up his first cigarette, his thin, somewhat wiry frame relaxed noticeably. He became increasingly jovial.
“There’s a bar below this apartment, can you believe that?”
“There is?” I said.
“Yes. Let’s go down and have a look.”
We never did get to the interview that day. But there were other days.
Ad as friend
That Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967) is considered an abstract expressionist is odd, considering his paintings don’t drip, splatter, or explode the way his peers Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning’s paintings did. Of peers, we may follow our way back to Malevich (quote, “I felt only the night within me”) and the Russian Suprematists during the first world war. As Stalin grew in power, the Russian avant garde’s anti-state realism inaugurated much of art’s underlining antagonism today. Ad found himself in the final stages of modernity. Warhol was already making the rounds, and times were a’changing…every 15 minutes or so. Dressed like a dad waiting at the mall, he Tetrises his studio with essentially the same painting, filling up the patches in his quest for night during daytime. A philistine might call it bunk, then go on to watch Judge Judy, as if then, the world made sense again.
432 tongues breaking wind like bread & butter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnPix6cunzo
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ILUAAF if i have to
Tonight White Castle expects about 6,400 people during its candlelight dinner event (they take reservations). Love writing? Love to be writing or to have written? You date a short story, marry a novel, so what’s a poem? Will we watch more or less porn today? (It smells like more.) It’s easier just to watch TV. TV is closer to reality anyway; it’s truer than the book. (The insanity of TV is the insanity of human life.) Liars of the heart. I wrote today might just mean a check to your garbageman or lord or where some say we lost our romance, our thumbs (oh those ghost phones): LH6, NSA, RUH? I read that book means you’ve heard of the title. It all a circle jerk in here, isn’t it? In the beginning was the word, but what type of love was that? Ah, the seduction of eloquence. I read for plot. Do you? No, but in 1990 David Letterman, in an odd reversal of his usual policy, paid Miss USSR to appear on his show. And then what happened? (The fee was four cartons of Marlboros.) I don’t know but it was lyrical to have her in the Green Room and ever put bananas in your coffee filter and made the coffee (why not?) so I pray to the big brassy lie of books.
First love is pretty great until you meet your second love at a bar one night. A man spends $1.60 today for every dollar a woman spends. Love reading a book or to have read a book? The insanity of reading is the synapses lifting 2D to 3D—you believe this shit? Or, why do we write/read books at all? Because, as you well know from your own clip-clopping, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way-if, indeed, they do so at all-or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary flesh-sacks with larger vocabularies. Sadly, my second wife caused me either horror or horripilation during love (her kisses decalcomania). Or, can we bring more love around here? Time kills it all, your passion, your dachshund and/or funny hamster, and then the stacks of books you’ll never read. (Words are clocks) I mean can we stop with all this literature and art stuck in the self-reflective light of the here and now, a lonely place inhabited by the solipsistic me. Also can I get some greasy fries? I mean big ol’ gas station gloopy tater wedges? If no, then GYPO. And beer me. Then shut out the light and let’s get to writing.
How I Turned My Life Upside Down to Move to Bangladesh and Became Embroiled in an International Fiasco
Update 3/1/13: A former colleague who still teaches at the Asian University for Women reports that the new Vice Chancellor “has put AUW back on the path” that it was on when I enthusiastically joined the faculty. This is wonderful news. Kamal Ahmad is no longer involved in the daily running of the school, and Ashok Keshari is no longer employed by the university. These factors, along with the Vice Chancellor’s very secure position of leadership, lead me to believe that AUW is now able to fulfill its promise of becoming a leading liberal arts university for women in Asia. I have the highest hopes for the future of its students and faculty.
It was definitely an adventure.
This is what I tell people when I don’t have the inner resources necessary to describe what really happened in Bangladesh. Or when I don’t have the time.
Sometimes, I elaborate slightly on the experience of leaving everything behind to teach writing seminars at a small college called The Asian University for Women, with plans to stay at least two years, maybe more, working with some of the brightest students (from 12 different countries) whom I have ever encountered — only to be so emotionally ravaged by the (in my mind, illegitimate) administration of Kamal Ahmad and Ashok Keshari that I left after only one semester (though it felt like much longer), unable to cope with the stress-induced hair loss and the nightly crying jags, knowing that every minute I spent in the classroom was vitally worthwhile but also knowing I would crack if I stayed any longer. I might elaborate like this:
A week after I arrived in Bangladesh, before I’d even recovered from jetlag, my boss, the provost, an academic of international repute who made the school the great place it was, was terminated and barred from re-entering the country. New faculty orientation was cancelled because her replacement, Ashok Keshari, could not be bothered to return to campus early. Two weeks later, the founder, Kamal Ahmad, who had carried out the coup against her, offered me a 20% raise and promotion to a position above the eminently worthy faculty member who interviewed and recruited me (including an incredible Bengali cooking lesson) and became a fast friend, and who was not offered the promotion even though she already was responsible for half of the job description. Clearly, the offer to me was based not on merit, but on Kamal Ahmad’s suspicion that he could manipulate me because I was new and unversed, and, possibly, that he could set me up to take the fall for something. So I declined, against the urging of colleagues who thought I could stand up to Kamal Ahmad from that position. At around the same time, I along with several other faculty members had to take it upon ourselves to organize class registration because every administrator with enough institutional knowledge to do so had resigned in protest.
But no matter how much I elaborate, never have I really felt able to convey what is happening at the Asian University for Women under Kamal Ahmad and Ashok Keshari.
For there is a violence within words, one that can only be felt and absorbed, that narratives can’t expose. One that facts and documents carefully skirt.
Yet I will keep trying, probably forever. With that in mind, I provide below two emails. Before you laugh at the awkward phrasing of the first, remember that Ashok Keshari is in a position of real authority over approximately five hundred young women. What might seem silly in its idiomatic bizarreness seems less so when you consider that Ashok Keshari’s decisions have actual consequences for actual, wonderful people.
Reconsidering Existential Texts in a Mario Broian Context
The Fall of Man’s vector is of course down, a direction consistent with our tiered notion of heaven and hell, the latter’s visceral intuition made more compelling by natural physical laws, that is, the acceleration of gravity precluded by the surface on which its falling object lands. Though we never hear Mario land some 60 ft. below, breaking all his bones and liquifying his internal organs, his final breaths squeaking through paralysis. He simply dies — or rather, his death is commemorated by his very reincarnation — before he actually dies, before we hear his cries. One could offer, however, that the pit never ends, towards the core of the earth it falls until upward again and out the other side. Camus’ last novel (a) The Fall, claimed by Sartre to be “perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood” of his books, amounts to a long-winded dramatic confession that one Clamence tells to a stranger, presumably at a bar or cafe. READ MORE >
Pull Up!
I was watching a small child play indoor soccer and honestly it had its moments but I was feeling that inevitable weight, boredom. I mean the kid was falling down, sort of tumbling, and I just wasn’t feeling that, so I walked about a block in a type of cold, hard rain (like smoke on the sidewalks) and across two streets and into the library. I selected a novel by James Salter. It was one of those old yellowing hardbacks that smell like my grandmother’s hallway where she used to keep a bottom drawer of ‘toys’ for when the kids dropped by. (The toys were a wooden block, a rock, an ancient, battered lunchbox, and one leather shoe.) I love those types of books. And it was about rock climbing and lyrical and plot-driven, as is often the way with Salter and, you know, reading is odd, some odd, inevitable chain—this book leads to this book leads to—and I started thinking about fighter pilots (Salter was one) and way leads to way and I finished Salter’s wonderful little novel and got online and bought Once a Fighter Pilot…by Jerry W. Cook. This was a mistake.
You ever been in a conversation where the person finds out you write (Oh Jesus, here we go…) and they cough up some variation of, “Yeh I’m going to write a book when I get the time.” Hmmm…that sort of gives me mixed feelings. I first think, Fuck off. But that’s just a harsh thing that kicks in. I relax and think, “Go right ahead” in this sort of drawl-type thinking, still a tinge of acid. One time over beers my recently retired dad, a dedicated and experienced organic gardener, said “I should write a book about my life as an organic gardener.” I answered, “Good idea. Bring me the first three pages tomorrow.” He did not. Another response I feel is, “Just because you have material doesn’t mean you have a book.” Or I might think, “When you get the time, why not try brain surgery, too?” I have other responses but I’m rambling and I wanted to get to my point: not everyone should write a book.
I should have known. There were warning signs:
Disrupting the learning of writing
I am going to write some numbered paragraphs and then I am going to ask for your input. The numbers are there to create the illusion of motion and clarity of purpose. I am thinking out loud.
1. I was homeschooled. There are many ways to do this. I lived in Indiana, where you don’t even have to register your children with the state as being homeschooled (so that the school system first discovered I existed when I signed up for the draft). Some parents hire tutors for their children. Other parents send them to school for some courses (usually the technical ones they aren’t qualified to teach, and those with lab components) and keep them home for others. Some of them use this opportunity to control all cultural consumption by the child so that the child will have no choice to be religious and clean-mouthed and good, as well as probably emotionally crippled and totally incapable of making friends or otherwise enjoying life.
2. For my part, I was allowed to study pretty much whatever I wanted in pretty much whatever way I wanted, meaning that my math is poor but I did spend quite a lot of time reading and writing. I am used to teaching myself by following the examples of the things and people I respect and admire. (As to the questions of my emotional health and facility with personal interactions, well, I’ll let you be the judge.) READ MORE >