LECTIO IX: Beyond Novelty, Into The Uncanny
LECTIO X: Shame and the Texture of the Flesh
LECTIO XI: Artaud as Arrogance Without Ego
LECTIO XII: When Nothing is Real

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LECTIO IX: BEYOND NOVELTY, INTO THE UNCANNY

Between being unemployed and now, employed but still broke from being unemployed, I’ve found myself spending a large amount of time on the internet. This manifests in regularly browsing tumblr, having 30-50 articles and essays open in tabs at any given time, constantly posting to both facebook and twitter, and crawling through youtube. This is a similar to experience to my life before I moved to the west coast; at my old job I had little responsibility and could entertain my working hours doing basically the same thing I’m doing now; the difference being that before I was getting paid for it. The other primary difference is that when I was online constantly at work I couldn’t participate in the efforts of anything involving sound. Now that I can, I find myself watching videos on youtube with much more regularity than ever before.

Oddly enough, or possibly because my external hard-drive is not constantly plugged into my computer due to not having a desk, most of the youtube videos I end up watching are music videos. I don’t always watch them, I often just use youtube as a sort of poor-man’s Spotify and use it to listen to whatever song it is I want to be hearing while I read something. Sometimes I pay attention though, and sometimes I find something spectacular.

This video is incredible. The youtube comments, it should come as no surprise, are either harmoniously reverent (likely coming from those who identify with “furry culture” themselves) or frustratingly angry, dismissive, belittling, irreverent, condescending, etc. The latter is, it could be said, the official position that ‘the internet’ as a whole has taken towards the internet’s first self-perpetuated fetish, the furry.

In my rather unlimited pantheon of perversity, I don’t find the consideration of “furries” itself worth dismissing, but often the subculture associated with the fetish maintains a sort of naive wo/man-child perspective/response/presentation of their interests. Or, more often, a sort of fandom lifestyle associated with a million different things that I, quite frankly, couldn’t give a shit about (from videogames to terrible anime, etc). I find the general perspective of internet culture, as a whole, sorely disappointing and myopic.

This video, for instance, strikes a particular tone that is hardly matched in many youtube videos aiming for a sense of unease. The video is not perfect, and the brief scenes near the end that feature WinFoxi & two “out of costume” humans breaks the spell the diegesis holds, but ultimately I’m willing to dismiss perfection in favor of atmosphere. While it would, ultimately, be easy to dismiss the video, to laugh at it, to make fun of how “retarded” people are, I think really it’s best to take the video at face-value and ignore the “reality” that the creator of the original clips, harvested and set to a beautiful pop-song, lives within.

The video is a brilliant example of the power of combinatory affect. On its own, the remix of W.I.T.’s “Hold Me, Touch Me” is a pretty great down-tempo, sexy pop song. It carries the tone that make bands like The Knife so striking; electro-dance that’s not inherently optimistic, a willingness to allow both space and minor chords to permeate the track. The footage chosen by youtube user Dennie88 seems to (perhaps unwittingly) complement this; WinFoxi is awkward in her fursuit, her movements are slightly off; we know she is human but she is not quite operating, physically, in the way we are accustomed to seeing humans move. Around a minute and a half into the video, when WinFoxi sits on the couch and the flower pot falls, there is more than a beat that’s skipped before she slowly, uncomfortably, turns her head and sees what has happened. She pulls the flowers out of the vase, holds them in her paw, and stares into the camera before a quick cut finds us, as viewers, seeing WinFoxi in the same position, this time without flower pots behind her.

The architecture of the house itself that the footage was shot in is rootedly spare; somewhat antiquated wallpapers, a remarkable absence of any evidence that the rooms are rooms that anyone lives in, anonymous looking prints of anonymous landscape paintings on a few of the walls. WinFoxi jumping up and down on the bed almost robotically, the soulless expression of the bear-mask staring, without wavering, into the camera.

The aesthetics of fetishism are fascinating to me because what turns some people on ends up making other people fully uncomfortable, even divorced from a sexual context. There is a power in this, because it considers the fetish in terms of a zone of affect instead of a particular sexual fascination. This is zone ripe for exploration: the universe of the fetish decontextualized.

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LECTIO X: SHAME AND THE TEXTURE OF THE FLESH

Critics are, apparently, raving about the new Steve McQueen film, Shame. It would be a farce to consider my initial interest in seeing the film as anything beyond the fragment “Michael Fassbender naked.” Upon seeing it tonight I will concede that it’s an interesting film; I’d be hard pressed to agree that it’s “provocative” or “compelling,” as the critics that are using those adjectives seem hung-up on its human drama element. Artistic desperation within the guise of sexual decadence is always something those with a relatively present, yet not “popular,” voice like to insist is inherently powerful.

However, for me at least, the narrative of the film is almost a moot point, and I wonder if director McQueen doesn’t agree with this himself. Coming from a more video-art based background, his film seems to be more of an aesthetic feast, paying lip service to the idea that cinema is not inherently a narrative form, but rather one of sight, of movement.

I was reminded, while watching the film, of a quote from Martine Beugnet’s book Cinema and Sensation:

It’s not perfect, and it seems like McQueen is still holding on to antiquated story-devices like “psychology” and cliché narrative turns to continue to Oscar-bait his audience, but there are moments where what matters more are the haptic images on the screen. There is very little dialog in the movie, a move that I always find beautiful, and there are long scenes with relatively banal action, punctuated by Brandon’s (Fassbender’s) explosively entropic sexuality.

It was refreshing, one could say, to see a relatively acclaimed and noted film willing to go at least as far in this direction as Shame does. It’s certainly not as beautifully prescient as Dieutre’s Leçons de ténèbres, and absolutely not as next-level as any of Grandrieux’s masterworks, but there are signs that maybe cinema is finally pushing itself towards Artaud’s third cinema.

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LECTIO XI: ARTAUD AS ARROGANCE WITHOUT EGO

As I find myself once again re-reading Antonin Artaud’s letters to and from Jacques Rivière, I can’t help but want to consider the implications of a spurned submitter sending the type of letters to a potential editor in our current literary zeitgeist. Artaud spurns Rivière’s rejection, ostensibly tells him that his rejection is ridiculous. Often editors of small presses & literary mags will lament the angry responses they get from authors whose work they have decided not to publish, considering it an arrogant move, a futile sense of entitlement.

Had Rivière taken that stance, who knows what would have happened to the entire body of work that Artaud produced in his tortured life. Artaud’s insistence, his detailed explanations of his unstable mental state, are what end up leading to his first notable publications; of his first introduction to a larger world of letters. Artaud’s stubbornness, his belief in his own work, is why we now know him as the genius he was.

As an editor, I guess I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never received an embittered response from a rejected writer. I’m not sure how I would deal with it if I did. It’s unlikely that I would take the Rivière route of actually dialoging and engaging in the angry person’s words; realistically I’d probably just ignore it and never respond. No skin off my ass. But, because, perhaps, I can’t help but invent dramatic parallels between the culture I’m obsessed with and the reality of the future, I do wonder if someone who was Artaud in a past life is suffering this same challenge, writing brilliance and then getting his work regularly rejected, writing letters to editors who refuse to humor him or her. Is this the dream of the insisted brilliance every writer thinks they have? Are we too saturated at this point to consider this? The outsider artist, in a traditional sense, cannot exist while alive. Henry Darger is brilliant precisely within the enigma of his life; his absolute disinterest in his work existing for anyone other than his self. Artaud wanted his voice in the world, but he understood that it wasn’t for himself. This is wherein the difference can be found.

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LECTIO XII: WHEN NOTHING IS REAL

Reality hovers. I don’t mean that reality is absent, rather, there can be a presence of nothing. I can walk down a dark industrial street at night while Drake plays on my headphones and not realize I’ve already walked the four blocks to where I need to turn. Sit on the front porch and chain-smoke until you’re so chilled by a dry air that you’re violently shaking.

The people all around you, signifiers of relationships, parts of a whole, how can you exist unfragmented in the 21st century, why would you even want to. Compartmentalize your life so it can start to make sense. But it doesn’t. Does it matter how many people you and your significant other take home to get naked with? In the morning everyone else is gone. Nobody came so there was no emotional connection. Is come a true sign of passion?

The moon eclipsed. A tarot reading that insists your hermitage is necessary, a required contingency of your life’s trajectory. The cards don’t lie, they always say. Sitting on the green cloth while you all sit on the bed. You feel comfortable and warm. Everything makes sense.

Write a note in your diary in jest and find out a month later that you’ve accurately written your future. Understand that this is a hard talent to hold, that it’s been happening for over a year and you still haven’t mastered it. Stare into space, come into a paper tissue, never fall asleep before three am. Sleep until noon. Always keep Notepad open on your desktop because otherwise you forget everything.

Balance isolation with couplehood with the society life. Find yourself, remember that.

(Text taken from I’m Full of Byars: James Lee Byars – A Homage, p. 144)

So I would like to offer up the term gulogulo. It’s a clunky word, I know, but so is the greasy sect it describes. It can easily be modified to wield as an adjective, e.g., “I just saw some gulogulous assclown punch a flower child in the face.” Gulogulo evokes the tyranny of the Gulag, the brutality of a masculinized Caligula, the monstrosity of the half-man, half-snake G.I. Joe villain Globulus (who gets his name from globule, a particle, often of fat, or, in astronomy, “a small dark cloud of gas and dust seen against a brighter background”); but most importantly it is a compound version of gulo gulo, a fun way to say wolverine. Gulo is latin for glutton, and in many parts of Europe wolverines are commonly known as gluttons — like fierce-ass war pigs.

What-a-dick

There is even a German board game called “Gulo Gulo,” wherein:

Each player is a Gulo, or wolverine, trying to rescue a baby Gulo who got caught by the swamp vulture whose eggs it was trying to steal. Unfortunately for the baby Gulo, all the adult Gulos are distracted by all the delicious swamp vulture eggs, and it has to wait very, very patiently as the adults constantly trip the very, very sensitive “egg alarm” rigged by the vulture to scare off the pesky Gulos.

In this game you are apparently playing as the villainous nature of corporate greed, gulogulocity. And the vulture, whom we can think of as the 99%, is doing its job to protect the eggs. For me this game is symbolic of the media’s basic view of the situation: they see as clearly as anyone what is going on, but they are placed in a position that forces them to see gulogulodom as an unfortunate but necessary function of the world. From their view, if the gulo doesn’t win, where will they get their eggs?

The essential mechanic of the game is to try to pull an egg of a particular color and move to a tile of that color on the linear path toward the bowl, and the little stack of tiles hiding the baby Gulo tile. If you set off the alarm, or knock any eggs out of the bowl, your Gulo is sent back to the previous tile of the attempted color. If there’s no such tile, then back to the start he goes!

I don’t think we will ever see the end of gulogulocity (as in G.I. Joe, Cobra always comes back for more), nor can we go back to the way things were before these gulogulous individuals gained power. The gulogulo is really nothing new; it has always been around. But it took way too long for the egg alarm to go off. And now we have to deal with a ferocious bunch of gulogulos, the claws of which manifest as the long arm of the law. No, I’m sorry to say, gulogulo is here to stay. But at least now we know more about it, at least now we are aware that it exists, because you can’t skim off the fat you can’t see.

I DECLARE WAR ON REALISM, I DECLARE WAR ON A WORN-OUT JOY, I DECLARE WAR ON EVERYTHING.

SOMETIMES YOU GET DRUNK EVERY NIGHT FOR TWO WEEKS, SOMETIMES YOU MAKE OUT WITH A DUDE IN A CAB AND THEN YOU END UP DOING DRUGS AND PULLING YOUR DICK OUT IN A BAR YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO BEFORE, SOMETIMES YOU BUY MORE WHISKEY AND GO BACK TO YOUR PLACE WHERE YOU FUCK AROUND WITH THE DUDE IN YOUR LOFT WHILE YOUR ROOMMATE’S FRIEND SNORES ON THE COUCH BENEATH YOU, SOMETIMES YOU DON’T GO HOME FOR 36 HOURS, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET THAT YOU HAVE THINGS TO DO OTHER THAN GOING TO WORK AND GETTING DRUNK & LAID, SOMETIMES YOU REALIZE YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO MANIFEST THE FUTURE SIMPLY BY MAKING THE DECLARATION, SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT POP MUSICK IS A FUTURE THAT WE’RE ALL AFRAID OF, AND THE POP MUSIC THE LITERATI ARE NOT AFRAID OF IS ONLY FALSE, SOMETIMES WE ALL KNOW THAT THE WORLD IS ALREADY OVER AND FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT, HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS THING CALLED CAPITALISM? IT’S STUPID. THERE’S A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TELL YOU WHY IT’S STUPID, MAYBE YOU SHOULD LISTEN, SOMETIMES YOU KNOW THERE’S FINALLY A CLASS WAR GOING ON AND LIFE STARTS TO MAKE SENSE FOR THE FIRST TIME, SOMETIMES YOU WAKE UP NEXT TO SOMEBODY AND YOU DON’T REMEMBER THEIR NAME, SOMETIMES YOUR BEST FRIENDS SEND YOU THE BEST TEXT MESSAGES YOU’VE EVER READ IN YOUR LIFE, EVERYTHING IS SURPRISING, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN AND YOU FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON’T DO ANYTHING, SOMETIMES YOU TRY TO MAKE PANCAKES AND YOU USE BAKING SODA INSTEAD OF BAKING POWDER AND THEY TASTE LIKE POISON, SOMETIMES YOU READ NICK LAND ESSAYS ON THE BUS AND YOU ACTUALLY LAUGH OUT LOUD, SOMETIMES YOU KEEP FORGETTING TO DOWNLOAD A PDF OF NIETSZCHE’S BIRTH OF TRAGEDY SO YOU CAN PUT IT ON YOUR PHONE TO READ WHILE YOU DRINK ALONE AT THE BAR, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET ABOUT LITERATURE COMPLETELY BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO BUSY FUCKING WITH SOME CONCEPTUAL EXPERIMENT THAT ASSUAGES YOU OF ALL MORALITY OR GUILT, SOMETIMES THIS MAKES MORE SENSE THAN ANYTHING YOU’VE WRITTEN OR READ, EVER.

LADY GAGA IS A FACADE.

LIFE IS ONLY FLOATING. FAME IS IRRELEVANT. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING. MOMENTUM AS CONTRAST TO REALITY. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WE CAN GO ANYWHERE WE WANT TO. THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO DIE BEFORE WE CAN REST.

Darrell’s talk was fantastic, of course, a personal narrative lauding his relationship with books, with art, how these things are working, with people. The distance between D-L’s performative aura and his mode-of-everyday-being always catches me off guard, but it’s good, it’s professional. Darrell’s story was lovely, of course. Stories I had heard part of before, stories that featured the artist Jennifer Locke who I was sitting next to, who hugs me every time she sees me, stories about Raymond Carver, stories about Stockton, CA. Well, one story, really, with all of these.

Colter was second, and there was a sort of beautiful disorientation to it. There was no performative aspect here, there was basically only stuttering and a power-point presentation of some of his own work. However there was a winding sense of thought that, due perhaps to how much more space was left open, found me thinking more about ideas that are, perhaps, tangential to the work. The space also left my wanting the talk to be a discussion, but I kept my mouth shut.

At one point a work was presented that was a drawing of a cell-phone photo that Colter’s boyfriend had sent him of a snapshot from Bas Jan Ader’s “I’m Searchin’,” part of Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous. At the specific revelatory moment of sentimentality, I fell completely in love and fugued into the daydream of a conceptual artist boyfriend who couldn’t watch I’m Too Sad To Tell You without crying himself. How it would be a perfect combination of his praxis to my theory. A fit. My day dream ended, of course, and I remembered how mostly I actually think relationships are terrible and how nothing in the world can ever fit into my headland. But, then, just as I was returning to earth, Felix Gonzales-Torres’s words arrived:

Again and again I can’t help but find myself thrust into this theory of a constructed reality: beyond theory, an active construction of reality. This is what everything I ever think about leads to: if you’re unhappy in the world, make a new world. This is what I mean when I say I don’t understand depression, even if I could say that I’ve found myself depressed: I have to remove the stasis and thrust myself into confusion until I find myself making something new. Destroy the world, it’s not worth it, then make a new one.

I mean this literally of course. I’m not speaking in the abstract here.

“It’s exactly the same thing but it’s better because it’s right now.” This sentiment is the answer, this is how reality metes with a constructed reality: It’s exactly the same thing but it’s better because it’s right now. I ended the world by quitting my job and moving across the country with absolutely no plan. I currently inhabit the reality I constructed. This destroyed my ego and gave me a new one. I no longer fear the first-person pronoun when I write about thought. I love my body, I love its presence, and it will always be here. I can’t imagine removing the self.

But the self is not the point. I mentioned an insistent egotism in my last post, an idea that I can only write for myself. That anyone can only write for themself. This is true. Of course it is. But this truth is not a scapegoat. It’s not an excuse. I am my art but I am not my art but I am my art but I am not a person I am an event. Fuck this word subjectivity I’m too busy doing what God could never both finishing. You know, I’m making reality here.

After the artist talk I went to the bar with the artists and the curators and some friends. I drank two whiskey-sodas, half of the beer D-L had no desire to finish, and then, out of curiosity of novelty, I drank two “Sofias,” the Sofia Coppola “champagne in a can.” The first one that came was delivered to me already poured in a glass. The can was absent, I was crushed. But the drink was good, so I ordered another, this time insisting that I needed the drink to come in the can.

I live in a world where champagne in a can exists and that makes life great.

Because life is great I ended up not having to pay for my drinks, life won again, and I stumbled back to the house where I’m currently crashing on the couch to find my roommates preparing (i.e. putting their costumes together) to go out. Their energy gave me a second wind, despite the fact that I had woken up at 6am to go to my shitty seasonal retail job. I put on a costume and drank some vodka mixed with Redbull & Orangina and was ready to go. I hopped on a bike and we screamed and laughed on the way to a lesbian bar where I knew I had no chance of getting laid. Drank more because it’s Halloween and life is exciting. Stopped to get nachos on the way home, fell asleep on my couch and woke up 8 hours later to sunlight streaming through the window.

All excerpted text from Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr

The necessity of a canon, in my opinion, is a moot point. Jonathan Rosenbaum, an American film-critic than many people who write & think about cinema often hold up as a pinnacle of contemporary (American) film-criticism (one who I only find interesting at best, but that’s better than not being interesting at all, right?), has a book called Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, which posits the idea that “canons of great films are more necessary than ever, given that film culture today is dominated by advertising executives, sixty-second film reviewers, and other players in the Hollywood publicity machine who champion mediocre films at the expense of genuinely imaginative and challenging works.” The sentiment here is fine, and I’ll be honest, I haven’t read the book, most in art and in life I am far more interested in a heterogeneous existence than a homogenized one– I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is obligated to acknowledge that Citizen Kane is “the greatest film of all time” (wrong), or even a world where everyone is institutionally obligated to at least admit that it’s a great film, whether one likes it or not.

Frankly, we all still live in Plato’s cave, there are no absolutes: all we have, personally, is experience and subjectivity. For a second let’s forget this idea that there are objective standards in art (the principles & elements of design, for instance). Yesterday (and tomorrow) on Dennis Cooper’s blog, fans & regulars in the blog’s comment section are having lists of their favorite books posted. I love lists. I was immediately sad that I neglected that send a list in to Dennis to have posted. Then I thought, “oh, I’ll just do it on HTMLGiant and link to the posts at Dennis’s,” which is more or less what I’m doing.

But when I considered it, I really started to question why exactly I felt such a strong urge to publicize a list of my favorite books. A list, in it’s pure form, offers little other than a vague window into its creator’s interests, which ultimately reveals nothing about the person who made it. Maybe it offers a cohesive picture of some sort of genre or system of moves or aesthetics, but the list on it’s own, without any context, is just a list. It’s something easy, they’re fun to make, they’re fun to read, but if one were to encounter a list of, say, 50 books that they’ve never heard of, the list would cease to mean anything other than “this is a list of 50 books I’ve never heard of.”

The late-great Raymond Durgnat, another film-critic, wrote a book called Film & Feelings. It’s another book I’ve never read (although this one I have far more interest in reading than Rosenbaum’s book on canons), but I’ve always loved the title. I don’t, ultimately, know Durgnat’s thesis so I’m not going to appropriate it and drop it here, but suffice to say, the more I think about criticism, of art in general, the more I’m inclined to consider the idea that the only way criticism accomplishes anything at all is when the criticism, instead of attempting to position whether the work of art at stake is either “good” or “bad,” or even “successful” or “not-successful,” I think I’m ultimately more interested in reading criticism that approaches its entrance via the experience of the work, the interaction with the work.

Because of everything above, I have decided to present a number of my favorite books (this is a lit-blog after all), a personal canon if you which to call it as such, within the context not of how the books operate on their own accord, but rather how the books have operated within my own personal history: my experience with the books. I think it’s important to note that I think there’s a major difference between saying something like “I like this book because I was really sad when I read it and I could totally relate to this” and attempting to talk about a work of art in the way I’ve vaguely describing above– I’m still not entirely in favor of lazy empathetic readings (which I’ve said before basically everywhere)– there is almost nothing more offensive to me than a response to a work of art that is limited to “I like this because I can relate to it.” I feel like maybe that’s a good starting point, but ultimately that’s only the way you are encountering the work, and there’s no reason for me as a person reading/listening to your “criticism” to, well, care that you can relate to something. Consider a potential conversation:

“I just really love [book]. Like, I felt like I was reading a book about myself, and that was really comfortable.”
“Dude me too, like, I could just really relate to it, that book is amazing.”
“Yeah bro, it’s the best.”

See what I mean? That shit doesn’t go anywhere. I don’t mean to say it’s not a valid reaction, but I question why it’s a reaction that I (here being the audience of a criticism) should be interested in. Circle-jerks get boring, everyone knows how to get themselves off better than someone else.

As personal canons go, I refuse to set any constraints other than to build until I feel whole. A canon is an arbitrary matter, and setting a specific number of titles to build into a canon seems a factor that could lead to a less than enthusiastic choice. Either you have to knock something off to fit something else on, or you have to come up with lesser works to fill holes. This post is only movement, not shape.

But more to the point, here’s my attempt at a “personal canon,” explicated via the experience of the books divorced from a purely empathetic reading.

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THE CORE, THE HEART, THE HEAD

The Complete Works of Georges Bataille

I have not read the complete works of Georges Bataille. I would estimate that I’ve read something like 50% of his work that’s been translated into English, which overall seems to be about 2/3rds of his work as a whole. However, Georges Bataille is dead and I am not, and the influence of Bataille over my entire existence means that this fact is important: as an aesthete, the experience of the new drives me; if I were to finish reading all of Bataille’s work at 25 years old, I would feel disappointed that there were nothing left awaiting me. So I have slowed down.

My first encounter with Bataille was at age 13, discovering, through some unguided & rhizomatic float through the internet, a PDF of the quintessential novella, The Story of the Eye at Supervert. The guiding factors that lead me were undoubtedly some combinatory effort of porn and perversity and the headiness of life itself. Being a teenager is very confusing.

Finding Bataille’s work cemented something for me that has become a cornerstone of my presence in the world: subject matter that lies outside of the realm of morality is often a more direct route towards the impossible questions of life: why am I alive? What does death mean? What does it mean when I come? Bataille’s work probes the impossible, and there is nothing else I am more interested in doing. Some people have Christianity, I have the history of French literature and theory as derived from Bataille’s failed system of non-knowledge. If literature is about life we have to realize that, ostensibly, life is fucked & impossible. If literature is about life we need to realize that life is droll and surpassable. If literature is about life as it stands literature is not about life, it’s about stasis, and I need to always be moving.

I entered my first sexual relationship when I was 18, which was tangential to the time that I read the texts that were eventually collected under the heading of The Impossible. Three texts are in this book, published by City Lights: Dianus, A Story of Rats, and The Orestia. Formally there is an immediate prescience in the heterogeneity of the text: A Story of Rats is narrative fiction, Dianus is arguably a “philosophical essay on poetry,” and The Orestia is poetry. Three disparate forms uniting into a cohesive ideogical whole. The combination made everything stronger, and the fragmented refusal to submit to a single genre or form while probing an idea became the only method I understood in terms of navigating reality.

My first sexual relationship, as most tend to go, was fucked. I experienced an honest desperation trying to mete my body’s desires with a socialized engagement. Quoting from memory (so this might be a little off, my copy of the book is sadly not with me at the moment), the book opens with the following lines:

Incredible nervous state. Trepidation beyond despair. To be this much in love is to be sick, and I love to be sick.

People talk about religious ecstasy, a moment when they “see the light” and accept a Christian God’s guidance. This was my light. A negation perhaps, but in three short sentences I had an ally in my confusion. I felt like literature could be beautiful, and I could be too. Moving further into Bataille’s crazed expression I found more and more that explained to me everything I ever wanted explained. I see nothing negative about this experience, as the work carries me when I need to. An obsession, perhaps, born from darkness, used as the guiding light. Tony Duvert once said that homosexuals don’t read Bataille, but I don’t think Duvert was reading Bataille hard enough. Bataille is often, despite statements of his own to the contrary, assigned a fascism in his words. Perhaps this is detritus of those who read and feel Nietzsche. Am I trying to throw myself into a lineage? Maybe. But when I want to feel and I want to understand, Bataille is the cradle that holds my cold body.

The earth loves cold dead bodies.

The Complete Works of Antonin Artaud

Artaud screams, his work screams, his scrunched face howling in ecstatic pain, shouting, his is the plague, he is the theater, he is the progenitor of what are can (and should, in my world) be. The Theater and Its Double opens up a door to a world of art that refuses what art currently exists as in a contemporary, capitalist locus. The theoretical writings on art display such a focus that it’s impossible to not understand.

My reading of Artaud has been vague and scattered. Approached undoubtedly out of second-hand knowledge of the work, a tangency to the author I had already carried as figure-heads, I came to Artaud more recently that most of my prophets. Away from the theoretical writings, lucid in their perfection, Artaud’s “poetic work” (a terrible descriptive term, but necessary I think) is a display of how once can transgress the page and become the work. Glossolalia amidst screams. “I am not dead, but I am separated.”

To read Artaud is to understand the body as text, the paper itself carrying not just words, but a man. There is no representation, there is only a directness. Artaud is not read, he is experienced.

THE REST OF MY BODY AS WORDS ON A PAGE

Ettore Sottsass Metaphors ed. Milco Carboni

Sottsass was an Italian designer & architect whose most prominent work comes from the great decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. He was at the head of the now infamous MEMPHIS group, which is having somewhat of a resurgence as early to mid 80s aesthetics find a place in the contemporary consciousness, and frankly I’m ok with that, because it’s lovely. Virtually everything he designed, whether a room or a bed or a typewriter, is absolutely amazing: his design skills inspire awe.

For someone rooted in an industry based & maintained by capitalism and wealth, Sottsass also maintained the role of a visionary and dreamer. He wanted good design for everyone, and instead of falling into the socialist homogenization of living spaces like many other leftist designer/architects before him, he considered beauty a natural right that everyone was privy to.

In 1995, he said the following about living spaces:

I can’t for the life of me remember my initial encounter with Sottsass, but it’s ended up being an important relationship that I’ve cultivated. METAPHORS is a more poetic, experimental set of works carried out by Sottsass, it’s not design work per se, but rather explorations of ideas surrounding space and how humans interact with it. Mostly taking place in the desert, Sottsass sets up signifiers of buildings and environments using cardboard boxes, poles, string, and other ‘disposable’ materials, captioning each image with what could be considered truisms (one of my favorites being “IN SOME ROOMS MURDERS ARE COMMITTED”).

The images are beautiful: black and white, grainy, other-worldy almost, and it’s inside of these images that my head immediately finds narratives, inside of these images where I can enter a zone of space isolated from the terror of existence.

Mercury by Anna Kavan

My first encounter with Anna Kavan came via an image found trawling through a friend’s flicker page. There is a lovely group of really wonderful women I have met online via my obsession with the 60s & 70s films of the fantastique, and “Oola” is one acquaintance I was particularly bewitched by. She seemed to have impeccable taste and a wonderfully exciting life (from what I could see of it online), so the combination of my experience with the owner of the book and the cover of the book itself, I immediately requested the book from inter-library-loan (at the time, Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka was out of print).

Reading the book I felt a wonderful disorientation; Kavan was writing in a style that was somewhat indicative of my favorite period of Robbe-Grillet’s work, but she was doing it with entirely different subject matter. The fantastique in Kavan’s universe is how impossible reality is. Kavan was a covert heroin user throughout her whole life, and I get the impression she was eternally sad– I am attracted to eternally sad artists (and eternally sad hot dudes, but that’s another post).

While I loved & continue to love the stories found in Julia and the Bazooka, I was absolutely blown away when I read Mercury. The book is arguably the “B-side” to Kavan’s somewhat more notorious novel, Ice, which is also a fantastic read. Taking somewhat of the same narrative, but replacing the point of view from the male protagonist in Ice and taking the eternal female-victim and putting her in the first person position, the story becomes even more fucked and fantastique– there is sadness, sexual degradation, and a pulling away, a coldness. There is maybe even a potential, barely avoided sacrifice to an ancient demon-monster. The universe of Kavan’s novel is simultaneously unreal and irreal, and it’s the combination that presents the idea that the world is the end of the world (as Dan Hoy would say), that reality is nothing but.

There are slippages in narrative, perhaps a lazy way would be to say that structurally the narrative progresses via dream logic– critics, speaking about Robbe-Grillet’s work, have adapted the term that Robbe-Grillet used himself, “slippages,” or “slidings.” The amazing thing about Kavan is that her slippages are even more successful than Robbe-Grillet’s; they’re heavier, darker, more fluid. It’s not just a structural tool for Kavan, rather it’s her own drug-addled reality carried to narrative. And I can feel these slippages.

A friend recently stated something so obvious to me lately that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before– when you’re five years old a year is a fifth of everything you’ve experienced so far; a year as an eternity. When you’re 30 a year is only a thirthieth of your life, a much smaller percentage of course– this explanation of the relativity of time seems amazing to me; and Kavan’s work moves through a relativity translated through language, and it’s beautiful.

The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn

Because of my understanding of the world and the way things filter into visibility, I remain forever convinced that the best that human beings have had to offer often becomes buried, hidden, forgotten. Because of this conviction I spend time seeking out what could be termed obscure or forgotten art; long out of print books, lost movies, etc. They hold secrets that, for some reason or other, have often slipped into the dark recesses of culture, abandoned because they couldn’t force themselves into the day for whatever reason. Jahnn is a criminally under-recognized author who, especially in the English speaking world, has slipped through the cracks.

A German author who also restored and built organs, Jahnn was described as a homosexual who wrote one of the most dark & unsettling works of literature ever written. That sort of description literally screams my name, as I am a queer who prefers “dark and unsettling” works of art. The Ship is ridiculously out of print and unattainable (I don’t even own a copy and it’s, obviously by its inclusion here, one of my favorite works of literature ever), but there are two or three copies circulating in the American library system, so I once again called on the trusty inter-library-loan and tore through my copy.

The narrative is somewhat obtuse; Jahnn will drop his primary narrative thread in order to interject smaller narratives that do nothing other than to establish an ultimate sense of dread. when someone like Tao Lin calls something “bleak” it seems like a bright sun-shiny day compared to the heaviness of Jahnn’s book. The interjection of irrelevent narratives into a larger narrative to strengthen the tone of affect is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in literature, and the closest examples I can come up with are found in the films of Philippe Grandrieux (another here), more than half a century after Jahnn’s work was written.

When I was fifteen years old I decided, to myself, that the best possible world would find me losing my virginity on a boat. While this didn’t happen, since that declaration I have been unendingly fascinated by water, by these vessels that carry bodies and materials over water, but the life that could be found on a boat. As the title would indicate, the narrative of Jahnn’s book takes place entirely on a boat. The narrative introduces many mysteries that are never solved, there is a resoundingly oppressive atmosphere of dread, there is nothing but terror. The totality is beautiful; this is true horror.

Mezza Voce by Anne-Marie Albiach

My discovery of French écriture (which is I guess what only I call this sort of “poetry-as-text-as-writing-whatever” ‘group’ of French poets writing at the same time & in the same sort of stylistic moves [though of course very varied]) came within my excessive hunting. I had gotten wind of the fact that Maurice Roche (another criminally underrecognized author who is largely unavailable in English) had a text available in the “New French Fiction” issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction from 1989. I immediately left my desk and work and ran through the periodicals, grabbing the bound volume that contained that issue. I read the Roche immediately, loved it, and began flipping through the rest of the material.

A lot of the names were already known and loved by me, but there was a new one that, based on formal experimentation alone, I immediately obsessed over: Mathieu Benezet. The included story (or fragment? I guess I’m unsure) is amazing, and so I immediately started to find more work by him in English. Naturally, as is what often happens to me, there was absolutely nothing available, except for a single poem from a short-lived literary mag from the 80s that, once I managed to track down, ended up being ultimately disappointing and nothing like the text I had encountered in RoCF.

However, I was on a new trail. The issue of RoCF included a section in which the authors included named their influences, and Benezet’s included an entire group of writers that he was indebted to; the only two I was familiar with being Roche (the source of this journey) &, of course, Mallarmé. The list included most of the poets that I shortly became obsessed with, including Anne-Marie Albiach.

Albiach’s work here, specifically in Mezza Voce, really takes on the book as a whole, allowing for the white space of the page to operate as a performative stage, a place for language to operate. By the time I read this work I was familiar with a lot of the moves used by these poets, but in this book the work as a whole coalesces into an affected zone of mood in a far more articulated style, and it’s for that reason that this book is here, it is for that reason that this book has pushed me harder and harder towards conceptualizes books as BOOKS, and not just as stories.

This was something I knew I wanted to do, but I had rarely encountered it in a way that really excited me. Even looking at as many artists’ books as I could get my hands on, I would rarely find something that felt simultaneously necessary as a book AND exciting as a book. This fit the bill, proving it could be done; showing me that my textual quest can end well.

The Cage by Martin-Vaughn James

I love comix. I read as many as I can get my hands on. I hate super-heroes, any sort of traditional comic narrative. At first I found this limiting, as it wasn’t so easy for me to find the stuff I loved out of a medium that I already knew I loved, but as with anything, when you look deeper, there’s a lot of shit to be found.

“Indie comics,” of course, seem to be the first steps away from considering comics as exclusively a medium for super-heroes & power-fantasies. This was my first escape; this is how I found out that the medium was endless. Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Chris Ware– these are good comic authors to read, and they served an interesting entrance, but ultimately their subject matter is less interesting to me than the “text only” books I was reading.

I found the closest parallel to my literary tastes in euro-comix, specifically the work of Guido Crepax and the dream team of Schuiten & Peeters (who write the extremely amazing Cités Fantastiques books). Reading about Schuiten & Peeters one day, I encountered a mention of Martin Vaughn-James & his book The Cage; the comparison was found in the architectural detail, and as a huge architect nerd this put the book on my to read list. Once it arrived at the library I was literally blown away.

The Cage is one of the most impressive and intelligent works of the comic genre I’ve yet to encounter; extremely obtuse & heavy, but not in any sort of vague “hippie” way that it’s zeitgeist would often lend itself to. Vaughn-James worked within the realm of Canadian experimental literature (the book, now super out of print & one of my prized possessions, was published by Coach House in the early 70s), and it seems that Vaughn-James was friends with bpNichol & the like. This makes sense, as the work carries a textual accompaniment that denies any sort of subjectivity at all; while the book is entirely narrative, it lacks any characters. It is entirely movement and space, and it is beautiful and mysterious.

A successful example of a narrative work completely lacking characters was something I was always interested in proving possible, as my own ideas about narrative tend to avoid psychologizing and the inclusion of characters as anything other than conduits for events and ideas. This book proves that you don’t even need characters to have events and ideas, you only need, let’s call it, movement, spaces, zones.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I will be the first person to admit that I am a Robbe-Grillet fanboy. My trifecta of perfection used to be identified as Bataille, Robbe-Grillet & Dennis Cooper, but now it’s a lot more fluid. I saw Last Year at Marienbad in high school almost by accident; I had heard it mentioned in relation to the euro-horror genre films I was obsessed over and was expecting something with a lot more (explicit) sex and violence. What I found was, of course, something entirely different, but entirely perfect nonetheless. I fell in love.

I started reading Robbe-Grillet’s books a year later; Jealousy & In the Labyrinth first, in the combined mass-market paperback edition Grove Press had put out in the 60s. I apparently had ordered the book while drunk one night, living in in the dorms, and then completely forgot about it. I hadn’t quite connected the idea of Robbe-Grillet as author with Last Year at Marienbad. The day before I had to move home from the dorms for christmas break, the book arrived. I read it and enjoyed it but wasn’t totally sold yet. I understood the book was doing some amazing things, but it wasn’t until I got further into Robbe-Grillet’s films & his later works of fictions that my obsession grew into true lust.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle and the novel immediately preceding it, Topology of a Phantom City share a kinship; they are almost brothers as novels. Both novels are intertextually assembled from various work Robbe-Grillet had written in other contexts, and brought together perfectly, and despite my fetish for ruins and architecture, Recollections wins out as my favorite due to the tableau that occur throughout. Robbe-Grillet, in some circles, is known for writing particularly “deconstructed” detective novels–this is partially true, but also missing the point. Robbe-Grillet’s play with genres (mystery, pornography) are more structural experiments that happen to coattail with his obsessions (being sadomasochism & young girls). Recollections is often accused of misogyny, and if you’re dealing entirely with the novel on the surface, that’s impossible to excuse, but I think Robbe-Grillet operates similar to, say, the pink films of Hisayasu Sato, or even Duchamp’s final work of art, Etant Donnes. The subject matter is always a conduit to a larger idea that overwhelms what’s on the surface. The surface is a diversion. This contrast, the mode of operating has influenced my thought in such a heavy manner that sometimes I find it impossible to privilege the surface over the structure of anything.

The Doll by Hans Bellmer

There has been a surprisingly lack of books about artists, or artist monographs on this list so far, which I think is ultimately problematic (I read as many art related books as I do books of fiction), but as I stated at the start that this post is experimental in nature and I’m not enforcing any structural constraint upon it, I’ll let it go.

However, it would be impossible for me to do this without mentioning this book.

In the past, I often had a hard time remembering that I had a body. I spent most of my time living in my head. Tired of this, I began tattooing myself with signifiers of larger, important ideas onto my body, perhaps in an attempt to refuse the duality explicated by my lifestyle. The first tattoo, of course, was a Bataille tattoo. This was necessary, planned. The second tattoo was a diagram from this book.

There’s, perhaps, a particular irony in committing, to my body, a diagram from Bellmer’s The Doll, as much of the primary concerns of Bellmer’s have to do with the body and desire: I assigned this to my own body, a self-contained loop perhaps. Bellmer’s writings, which might seem unhinged to some, convinced me that writing desire and sexuality divorced from the context of any sort of normative sexual experience is fruitful to larger ideas regardless of whether or not you are alienating a potential audience. We must probe ourselves, and our own obsessions are the only things we can count on to carry us to the larger ideas. Obsession could probably be considered an overwhelmingly present “theme” throughout the books on this list, and that makes perfect sense as I am an inherently obsessive person.

Period by Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper was, without a doubt, my first literary love. Oddly enough, I came to his work through Todd Verow’s film adaptation of his second novel, Frisk; a film which is often considered a terrible piece of shit, especially by those dedicated to Cooper’s work. For me, I’ll always have an appreciation for the film, primarily because if it weren’t for being a young perv watching every gay movie he could get his hands on and seeing this film, my literary history would have potentially taken an entirely different route (but also because Parker Posey is in the film and she’s amazing).

Dennis’s work was the first time I ever encountered ideas about the desperation and longing, the love and intimacy that’s present within desire; how complicated everything really is, and how something so terrible can be ultimately poignant and filled with beauty. The George Miles cycle is a paean to a personal icon, and how perfect is that? Period is the book most in-line with my personal aesthetics– it’s dark, contains haunted houses and black metal, is probably Dennis’s most visually experimental book, and ultimately is filled to the core with feeling. I hate sentimentality, and filtered through his empty characters, Dennis’s emotional core is never sentimental, it’s only ever acute and desperate, but ultimately honest.

Sex is a driving force behind life, desire that is, sex being a pure conduit of desire, all of this is life. Dennis’s texts show that, and for me I can’t think of a better way to interpret how impossible the world is.

Raimund Abraham: Unbuilt ed. by N. Miller

I read a lot of books about architecture and architects, despite having little to no interest in studying to become a practicing architect myself. I briefly considered it, when I was still considering graduate school, but realized that the narrative potentiality of space is different & perhaps only a minute part of what goes into literally building a building. Regardless, I keep reading.

Abraham was a chance encounter. A random tumblr had posted an image of his which lead back to Lebbeus Woods’s blog, which had a post on Abraham (it’s worth noting that Woods is a brilliant architect himself). Another quick & immediate search had the book on it’s way to my hands.

And what a book it is. Collecting almost all of the projects Abraham ever conceived of, the monograph presents the visionary work, mostly houses. Abraham is part of a group of architects who rarely have works built, rather they develop theories of architecture based on narrative & simple plans for buildings (I’ve heard them called “paper architects”)– pure imagination (see also Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Douglas Darden, Will Insley). As someone with an obsession with spaces, and houses in particular, I find little more joy than in simply looking at these plans and sketches, throwing myself into the experience of the space.

The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism by Nick Land

Nick Land is a cornerstone of particular modes of contemporary philosophy, mostly of those related to Urbanomic & the journal Collapse (Urbanomic published the recent collection of Land’s collected articles). For someone who has achieved deistic status by a few, he’s hated & despised and viewed as evil and pure-capitalist-fascism by others. Similar to Bataille. And this, of course, is ostensibly Land’s reading/appropriation of Bataille.

Land is pushed by many as purely typical of a 90s nihilist malaise that we’ve moved past, or something, but anybody who says that clearly isn’t paying close enough attention. Taking science & Bataille, Land looks towards the future, and the future looks bleak. I need to read this 100 more times before I understand it, but it set my specifically on the path of philosophy reading that I’ve been doing for a few years, and that’s important because to ignore the current state of my headland would be to ignore the fact that I am still alive.

LECTIO V: Forget This Memory–Édouard Levé’s Suicide

LECTIO VI: Torture Porn is Capital– Reality & “Solitary”

LECTIO VII: Guy Bourdin’s Spread Legs

LECTIO VIII: The Cinematic Space of Lust

* * * *

LECTIO V: FORGET THIS MEMORY–ÉDOUARD LEVÉ’S SUICIDE

In the constant interstices of urban nomadism, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything but travelling. Pummeling towards something: maybe death, maybe the future, maybe in moments of sentimental jouissance, “life,” whatever. By “you” I mean “I,” of course, let’s not get confused quite yet. Life seems like you’re moving forward and then your best friend dies: space is filled with static, it’s OK. I mean, you know, it’s OK.

When I was employed I sat at my office desk and read Édouard Levé’s “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue,” an excerpt from the author’s soon-to-be-available-in-English Autoportrait (linked recently by Sean Lovelace), four times. Twice in a row. You could read the excerpt and say “this is a list” or you could read the excerpt and say “this is the only thing that makes sense right now.” Knowing I was soon to move, I resisted ordering Suicide, the authors’ only currently available title. A month into my travels-as-life, I said fuck it & ordered the book, having it shipped to the friends’ house I was currently crashing at.

I spend the zone of time considering the impossible. Am I suicidal in my reticence to accept existence? My friend who died did not commit suicide per se, yet his death was a trajectory that he was pushing towards. The void was the pleasure of extreme sex for him. For the dead man in Suicide, we can assume only that the void is static. Escape from life. Is this an extremity?

I cannot consider suicide without reconsidering subjectivity. Personhood. We are bodies and minds and there is either duality or there isn’t (depending on what set of ideas you subscribe to), but, and probably this is where we can find the outside, maybe there are more options. Because I believe in ghosts there is no binary of existing vs. not existing. The inbetween.

When I come back from smoking a cigarette and confidently say, “I’ve been meaning to casually ask you if you’d be interested in tying me up sometime,” am I suicidal? My death drive has been distorted into something that neither exists nor doesn’t exist: rather, it cannot exist. Suicide for utopia. It’s easier to find yourself in the room when there’s no one else in there.

Consider suicide outside of depression. This is where it becomes impossible. Consider the suicide of a man who is literally & physically alone, not existentially, not in terms of inter-personal relationships, not in terms of empathy. Nobody loses. I don’t want to die because there are still things I am looking for. What happens when I find them?

It might just be easiest to melt into the earth. Our world will collapse. The whole thing.

There is an intertextual bit of biography that reviewers are incapable of missing when discussing Levé’s Suicide: 10 days after he gave his editor the manuscript for Suicide, Levé killed himself. I am in love with Levé because he understood something, though I’m not sure what. You have to understand, I am not interested in romanticizing death. Death is not part of the question. Death is not what’s at stake. Life is.

A collective loneliness is the problem, we must become comfortable alone.

* * * *

LECTIO VI: TORTURE PORN IS CAPITAL–REALITY & “SOLITARY”

When I get a head-cold the only way I can escape from the constant awareness that I have a physical body is to throw myself into passivity, primarily by that I mean television. Dismayed to discovered that I was actually caught up with the available streaming episodes of the current season of Project Runway, I started chatting with a friend about reality television. We discussed an interest in a reality TV show built around the concept of making the contestants cry.

Yeah.

But then she revealed that there is a show that almost does this: a brilliant slice of reality-based programming known as SOLITARY. The show finds itself located at some epicenter of capital between the Saw franchise, “Fear Factor,” the Cube trilogy and blatant exploitation. The concept positions 9 contestants in, as the title would indicate, solitary confinement. To an extent– each contestant has communication with “Val,” the robotic overlord that runs the game. The contestants are filmed within their pod through a series of two-way mirrors. Conceptually, this is fucking brilliant.

The game is an exercise in sensory deprivation at first, as our contestants are fucked with by Val, who refuses to let them sleep more then two hours at a time and provides only the bare-minimum of food. A half hour into the first episode I wondered if I was hallucinating, if I had fugued a fever-dream onto my laptop screen. Once the contestants are genuinely uncomfortable, the game begins.

Contestants are put through a series of what could arguably be defined as either “exercises in torture” or “fucked up psychological experiments.” Sleep deprivation is amped up the added obstacle of having to remember a constantly changing numerical code which shuts off an alarm, contestants have to eat various food until either they give up or vomit, contestants must spin in chairs, contestants must endure aural assault, contestants must lie upon a bed of muted nails until they can no longer take the pain and irritation, contestants must sit in a small box as the walls close in.

Between the literal challenges (“treatments” in the game’s lexicon), robotic Val attempts to probe the psychology of the contestants in order to, I don’t know, moralize or fuck with them or act as therapist. This element is somewhat superfluous and annoying, as all of the contestants lack any sort of probable depth. This is not a problem to me in terms of “contestant as character,” but the amount of time spent proselytizing and playing amateur psychologist causes a real eye-roll.

What’s interesting to me about this show is the following: I loved watching this. There is an ultimate futility when we consider the fact that aside from the winner of the ‘game’ getting rewarded $50,000, the show’s production values seem relatively upscale, which speaks of the fact that a relatively insane amount of money went in to producing this show. Capitalism is completely fucked.

* * * *

LECTIO VII: GUY BOURDIN’S SPREAD LEGS

Yesterday I went to SFMOMA with a friend. We were attempting to see Adam Pendleton & Deerhoof’s “re-imagining” of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, but it turns out we had our dates wrong and that doesn’t happen until next week. Unfortunately we didn’t realize this until we had already bought our tickets and wandered inside. Fortunately it was late enough in the evening that our entrance had been half the cost it would have been earlier in the day. So we just wandered the collections.

I am, often, a quiet person in most social situations. However, if I am at an art museum that features an impressive collection of late-modern & contemporary art, I talk a lot. I’m often bitchy, often really excited, always focused and slightly manic. I say things like, “God, neither Johns nor Rauschenberg made anything interesting before they started fucking.” I talk mad shit about representational landscapes. I complain about how boring contemporary photography can be. The point is: it’s likely that you don’t want to go to an art museum with me.

Some things shut me up though. Certain parts of the long history of Western art are holy to me. Obviously. Art really is more important than basically anything else to me, and of course what I include under the umbrella of the term “art” is certainly not limited to traditionally considered visual art. Right now at the SFMOMA there’s a beautiful Julie Mehretu up on the top floor. The hyper graphic nature of her work is enveloping. I said to my companion: “This is the only kind of representation I want in the world.”

My degree is in photography. Despite my obsession with finding and devouring art, I could probably list the photographers I truly admire on a single hand. My obsession with the image–specifically the photographic image–finds me even harder to please than normal within this realm. However, those five or so photographers I love beyond dearly.

In my limited experience at the SFMOMA, it seems that the second or third floor is generally dedicated to one or two photography shows, which is nice, because it draws in more contemporary work and really provides a lot to look at. Because I’m so hard to please, I need a very large pool to be looking through before I find satisfaction.

Ah, but then I turn the corner, and I’m greeted with something akin to holiness. That is, there are three giant Guy Bourdin prints on the wall. Bourdin is one of the chosen few in my canon, he is the master of the image, he knows narrative and mood and beauty, mystery.

Guy Bourdin is my favorite photographer. I have seen something like 4 large prints of his work now, all in San Francisco. I have read, cover to cover, all of the monographs available on his work. He is a hero. He is a god. However, staring at three prints on a wall, I realize that there’s an imperfection in this arrangement: throughout his life, Bourdin never exhibited his own work. He worked exclusively for fashion magazines. He invented the creative syntax of the two-page spread. He understood turning a page– he understood the way the book works. His images, beautiful on their own, function best within the context of the book. He understood that his medium was not only the camera, his medium was the fashion magazine.

This lesson of Bourdin’s is an important lesson to remember.

* * * *

LECTIO VIII: THE CINEMATIC SPACE OF LUST

At the bar last night, Elvira from Fassbinder’s In a Year With 13 Moons showed up. Blonde, younger, slimmer. I love San Francisco. This is summer time.

I watch Fassbinder’s Querelle and realize there will never be a more fully realized zone of lust on the screen. There is nothing outside of Fassbinder’s diegesis, everything is present, beautiful, and packed with desire. Watching Querelle is like orgasming for almost two hours. My eyes see colors and my heart beats.

I go home with a guy after a party at a different bar. We are naked in bed watching Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Before we start fucking I turn away from the screen, look at the guy, and say, “I had completely forgotten how intense this movie is.” Our cinematic desire grabs to turn the TV off. In darkness new images flicker on eyelids.

The space of cinema is lust. Our bodies are not signifiers on a screen but narrative can still be found. Images are everything. Life.

Speech may be a function of Logos, where rational compositions serve as cultural appropriation, or speech may serve a revolutionary, contestatory role by internally rupturing the structures of Logos at the very points of its own contradictions; screams and laughter may be reactive phenomena, resulting from the neurotic exigencies of life, or they may serve serve as rebellious eruptions of corporeal energy, heterogeneous outbursts of expropriation, where Logos is disrupted by the libido; silence may be the zero-degree noiselessness of death, where life itself is betrayed, or silence may be that moment where sovereignty is elliptically expressed as incommunicable inner experience.

LECTIO I: Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl

LECTIO II: Horror vs. The Patriarchy

LECTIO III: Joe Wenderoth pushes the surface

LECTIO IV: The Dionysian Excess of Living

* * * *

LECTIO I: KATE ZAMBRENO’S GREEN GIRL

Recently, I have become an alien. I have left the zone of complacency I’ve existed in for the last 7 years. I threw away or sold 75% of my belongings, put all of my books but ~30 into storage, and moved from a small town in northern Illinois to California. Upon moving I had neither job nor living situation lined up. As of being here a month I am still crashing on floors and unemployed (a footnote here could soften the blow of these words by indicating that I move into a sublet next month & have work coming soon, but that undermines the punch, no?).

I hop on trains and buses and ride to a location chosen for an arbitrary reason. I walk up and down hills and try to figure out how streets connect. I look at the ground, watch my own feet. I often avoid eye-contact. I drink regularly. I spent the seven years I spent in the last town I lived in becoming a loner, developing the necessary facilities to spend as much time as possible alone, and this would generally allow me the time I needed to read, write, work on shit, whatever. I was social when I needed to be, and whenever I wanted to be. I had the balance down.

But then I ran away from mediocrity.

In Green Girl, it is not mediocrity that our protagonist, Ruth, is running away from, but rather the past. There are parallels. I read most of Green Girl either alone on public transportation or alone in restaurants. This seemed important. It seemed like this was the best way to experience this. Blurbs are praising the novel as something that [the blurbers] wished they had when they were teen girls, but I’m glad I had it now, years far from being a teenager and an entirely different gender.

Living in a major city for the first time introduces a new set of neuroses. At least, it has to me. I’ve become acutely aware that, despite my intense aesthetic bent, I am incapable of dressing myself to any suitable means. I hate my limited wardrobe. I have no money to spend on any new clothes. As Ruth pines for new dresses, as Ruth admires the beauty of others, I can’t help, despite my general insistence to read as far away from empathy as possible, but feel what it is she’s feeling. The text is echoing life and I am echoing the text. All of this is part of what it means to move forward. Living in a city I want to be invisible. Living in a city I want the beautiful people to see me, to think I am beautiful too. But I am outside of the text, and as the text itself reminds us regularly, the outside of the text is what is in control of the text itself. Kate Zambreno as author as director as God knows that there is cruelty and that we, we who exist outside of the text, we are watching, we can see the cruelty.

And in this cruelty we are silent. And in this cruelty we are silent.

When I think about relating to Ruth .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. and that’s how I know the text is working.

But not outside. Outside is the world, and we green girls & boys know that the world is exciting if we can figure out a way to tap into it. We understand that there is always something Other, we wait for our permanence to break through the curvature, we wait for the sun to shine and for life to go at a pace that isn’t punctuated with nights spent drinking alone in a tiny, cluttered bedroom, watching men and women perform on a screen.

Green girls and boys believe in love even though they know it is impossible.

As a homosexual recently transplanted from a world of pure heterosexuality into what could arguably be read as a queer utopia, social dynamics have been reconfigured into some sort of system that roots itself squarely outside of any sort of understanding I might have. I am simultaneously naive & jaded. I have no idea how to get laid.

Ruth comments upon her life as a permanent exile. Part of this is a desired refusal: she insists that she is neither tourist nor ex-pat, she floats through the world like a ghost. Baudelaire wrote poems praising the excess of the new, but for Ruth not even the new makes sense. Stuck in some haunted & idealized memory she cannot escape her own headland. Everything is simultaneously outside & inside. This is the text. This is the world as it reveals itself to us. There is no magic here.

* * * *

LECTIO II: HORROR VS. THE PATRIARCHY

I have spent most of my life watching horror films despite the fact that the horror of existence becomes exhausting. Rewatching Insidious with some friends the other night, I reached a conclusion that struck me as both entirely obvious yet often ignored. There is a dominant horror film “culture,” this being readers of Fangoria, people who worship Eli Roth, bros with VHS copies of Faces of Death, etc., that colors horror film culture as a very masculine venture. However, if you reconsider what would probably be the second largest ‘culture’ of horror-film fans, you’ll find, most often, queers of all genders & non-heteronormative women. The largest aversion to horror films seem to be found within the realm of what could quaintly (& arguably condescendingly) be considered the “midwestern house-wife” demographic, conservative Christian mothers, etc. My brilliant (& retarded, in the literal definition of the word) conclusion arrived when I realized the number of horror movies I could think of that directly challenge the power of the male figure-head in a familial relationship.

This is almost an archetype– in Insidious, the father figure is resistant, powerless, and absent (until the end when he arguably “saves the day” but, and perhaps this was developmental to my thought process re: endings in general, in horror movies endings are almost always less important than what fills the remainder of the motion picture’s run-time, they are the vapid happy endings that nobody believes for even a second). The male figure head is challenged, repeatedly; he is revealed as weak, he is revealed as broken, useless. This is, of course, directly challenging a patriarchal world where father knows best and father saves the day.

Every horror movie finale is ironic, in one way or another.

Often, it is only an outsider or a higher power (“God,” consider The Exorcist) that can solve the problem that the patriarch has carried (there are variants of course, but there is some regularity here–also I am, for the sake of not wanting this to go on for too long right now excepting the idea of God as ultimate patriarch). In the last two weeks I’ve watched the following contemporary horror films: The Last Exorcism, The Roommate, When a Stranger Calls (the 2006 remake), Insidious, and The Uninvited (a remake of the Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters). In none of these films is there a comforting, stable patriarch. There are, generally, only people alone. Horror is true realism. Watching horror is taking notes. Consider these brief & half-baked ideas as notes on notes for further notes.

We are all fucked.

* * * *

LECTIO III: JOE WENDEROTH FLOATS ON THE SURFACE

I am crashing on Reynard Seifert’s floor right now, and upon hearing his unending praise, I picked up and read Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s yesterday. Again, mostly on public transportation, but I also read a large chunk of it plastered to an orange-upholstered arm chair. I have been told that, basically, this book was a “big deal” upon its publication, but since I didn’t even know what a small press was until 2006 it’s not really a surprise that I hadn’t read this, right?

I’m sure that as a book it was discussed often upon publication, but we’re 11 years out from that so who cares. We’re much further into the 21st century now, and as trends in literature have developed, I almost feel like I can call Letters To Wendy’s wholly indicative of the decade (if not the first quarter of the century) that its publication launched.

On the surface there are somewhere around 360 “letters” written on comment cards directed to the Wendy’s fast-food chain that our “I” frequents. And by “frequents” I mean “eats at pretty much daily.” But the prescience lies, I think, in the idea that the “I” is isolated, alone, living primarily in an ennui-tinged headland. This is a common thread found in literature, especially HTMLGiant & Vice Magazine favorites such as Tao Lin & the other Muumuu House roster, in addition to much of the Pop Serial scene that Tao and his ilk have inspired.

But I think there’s something present in Wenderoth’s text that the other mentioned texts lack; there’s something that drives it harder, that finds it more affecting: there’s a level of desperation, obsession, insistence. The “I” of our story is revealed without any sort of psychologizing, there is nothing but surface, the surface of the letters that he (and it is indeed a he as “he” dips his erect cock into a Frosty, pulling up and down, displacing the contents of the cup onto the bathroom floor) writes. But he, this “I,” is sad and alone. While he is sad and alone he thinks about things. This is where there is a difference. Hyper-contemporary ennui places itself at a level that refuses thought, any reflection fails to travel beyond the realm of absence:

Wenderoth’s “I” is manic, not afraid of the id that controls his desires. There is a level of intellectual discourse present within the ‘headland’ of the “I” that serves only to progress ideas, often semantically. While the character goes nowhere, the language & ideas of the text do:

If we read literature to make ourselves feel less alone in the world, why do we find further solace in empty signifiers that show, blatantly, what it is that we are? Misery loves company but the company is terrible at conversation. There’s nothing praiseworthy about standing still forever, even if you’re David Blaine and you’re doing it on top of a 100 foot pole.

* * * *

LECTIO IV: THE DIONYSIAN EXCESS OF LIVING

Have you ever been to an orgy? I haven’t, really, but I guess I sort of have, if you consider a room full of people fucking (although not necessarily fucking together) at a sex party an orgy, which I guess you could. The weird thing about public sex is that it turns out if you’re as inundated with pornography as I am, there’s little difference between watching sex happen in a room in front of you (or on the street, etc) and watching sex on a screen. I mean, as long as you’re just watching. I imagine the participatory aspects are worlds apart, duh.

The point is that this imagery becomes oddly banalized in certain situations: i.e. I’m not going to start jerking off at the Dore Alley street-fair (although I guess I basically could if I wanted to, considering the dude standing next to me at one point was) so the imagery gets filed away for later, or really just becomes a kind of visual noise– if it’s yr steaz then you can appreciate it, but if not it’s like google ads; you forget they’re there.

And the orgy of a sex party is generally placated to a different room, so if you’re not fucking you don’t spend too much time in the room (as one of the rules is to not “linger” in the sex rooms too long if you’re not fucking, I guess the idea being that you might make someone uncomfortable; although if you’re having public sex I thought part of the appeal was that people were watching, who knows).

But anyway; Dionysian excess plays a major role in the development of both Nietzsche’s & Bataille’s anti-philosophies. I’ve always found this interesting– I should note that I have read far more Bataille than Nietzsche, but it seems that Bataille’s excess far surpasses (and is far more dynamic, heterogeneous & interesting) than a simple orgy which, it would seem, epitomizes Dionysian excess. Consider the scenes in the infamous Caligula, Malcom McDowell eating pussy while tits flap in the background and boys make out with boys– the soundtrack tells us this is decadence, but if a light flute replaced the warring minor chords we could find ourselves traipsing through the pleasure dome of purity.

Syliva Bourdon‘s orgies seem more fun, she makes sure to appeal to all of the senses, treating the event more as a plotted performance than simple middle-class libido overload. You must start with the feast, because according to Bourdon, love is a feast. Orgy as gesamptkunstwerk seems more up my alley than the reality of the orgy. Everything is relative but really I just want everything to be art.

I think that this adherence to the surface, at least in terms of language, is good, positive, because it removes an additional level of signification, which brings us, as a reader, closer to the experience the language itself is hiding, carrying, revealing. Though often, in the creation of atmosphere, metaphor can be adequately used to help evoke a mood, I feel like there are often more interesting ways to do this (and I suppose that here, by “interesting,” I mean “heterogeneous, diverse, wildly more creative”).

What I’d like to establish, before I dive into the meat of this post, is that I feel like there is a wide range of literary tools available that create modes of writing that exist outside of a binary between “concrete details” and “metaphor,” at least in terms of the way language is working, whether it be in the creation of narrative, the creation of affect, or simply that of emotion.

What I’m saying is, basically, this sort of internet-culture based movement towards flat, emotionally blatant poetry and fiction really speaks to me more in the favor of self-indulgence and laziness than any sort of wildly revolutationary tact (and I feel like I can lay this claim without using the word “rhetoric” in every other sentence, as it seems like many proponents of the ‘style’ are prone to doing).

The first thing that warrants being established, in my view, is to determine what exactly I mean by ‘objective’ or ‘concrete’ writing, especially as established as both “contemporary” and “language based.” First of all, I want to distinguish a distance between what I’m talking about and the historical idea of “Concrete Poetry,” which, while possibly sharing a similar ‘point-of-departure’ in terms of ideas, in practice is a remarkably different beast. I am talking about stories & poems that are written in what, as I suppose named by “haters” in the comment section here on HTMLGIANT, could be considered “muumuu-style” writing, referring of course to the writers associated with Muumuu house. The post-Eeeee Eee Eeee fiction of Tao Lin, Brandon Scott Gorrell’s poetry book, Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, everything written by Jordon Castro ever, portions of Poncho Peligroso’s manuscript The Romantic, and so on.¹

I am invested in ideas of “innovative” and “experimental” and (fill in the blank with whatever term you prefer to use for “progressive writing”–and by that I mean writing that pushes itself forward as an art-form, not necessarily in a well-defined narrative arc, but rather as something exploratory that avoids becoming stale) writing. This, alone, finds me taking issue with the aforementioned mode of writing. I say this because to me, this “objectivity” has already been explored in fiction. Arguably this “objectivity” is what the new novelists of France in the 50s & 60s were generally known to be exploring (it is possible to argue that this is not what the nouveau romanciers were actually doing, and you would be right, but there is a level of this that is definitely present within said moves). The difference here, of course, is that while Robbe-Grillet, for instance, was exploring an objective & highly articulated in terms of description realm of fiction, he was specifically an anti-realist writer. Robbe-Grillet was turning attention to material detail and using it to construct (literally in some cases) an artificial world for his violent sexual fantasies to play out it.

Take, for instance, Robbe-Grillet’s short story “The Secret Room”, from his collection Snapshots. Within the story, Robbe-Grillet pays specific attention to describing, with a somewhat intense attention to detail, the architecture of the titular room. Everything about the room, and everything within the room is described to a T. This, arguably, is a grasp at “objectivity,” in the sense that there is little provided in the realm of subjective response or any sort of psychology of character. The tension, and what it is that makes the “objectivity” interesting here, lies in the fact that the scene that Robbe-Grillet has presented is a scene of sexualized violence. There’s contrast between the clean detailed oriented nature of the story & what seems to have happened within the described space. This avoids not only romanticizing what could arguably be considered the ‘subject matter,’ but also avoids psychologizing the subject matter at all. Within the level of the text itself, there is no judgment passed. We have to move to an extra-textual level, literally judging Robbe-Grillet as the author himself, if we want to assume any judgment whatsoever.

In contrast, the aforementioned authors & poets seem to have a tendency to borrow this “objectivity,” though they remove the tension by using it inside of a world completely divorced from the fantastic; namely, a ‘realist’ world. Let’s consider the Tao Lin story “We Will Drink our Coffee and Complete our Novels and Lay in Sunlight and Sit in Darkness”. This story displays an obsession with detail that is similarly present in Robbe-Grillet’s story, although there’s a real obvious difference. Lin’s language here, really just a list of concrete details that could be perceived as funny (“poetry about llamas”), is perfectly suited for the subject of the story. The subject here seems to be, basically, a realistic, “relatable,” romantic reverie. As readers we assume that the “you” of the story is not literally us-as-readers, but rather a specific “other” that Lin is addressing. Where Robbe-Grillet’s story opens up a space of mystery & intrigue via concrete details, Lin’s story denies any sort of depth in favor of being “cute.”

What’s interesting to me is that, arguably, both Lin & Robbe-Grillet are using concrete details in order to turn personal fantasies into literature. Aside from the ethical difference in these fantasies (sexual murder is illegal, kissing a girl in a supermarket at 3am is not), it’s interesting to me to speculate as to the motivations each author holds. Both are, of course, selfish in their own right, seeing as they are both presenting fantasies tied to sexual desire (Robbe-Grillet’s being purely lust, “primal” if you will, Lin’s being what I could see being described more as a “fulfilling relationship,” which I suppose ultimately relates to lust as well). Lin’s story is more immediately easier to relate to, at least in terms of a hegemonic approach to desire, especially within the age-group the story is targeted at. Both stories will seem ridiculous to certain people if approached as paeans to desire: Robbe-Grillet’s interest in sexual-violence will be alien to someone averse to sadism, and Lin’s interest in twee midnight ‘adventures’ is going to seem ridiculous to someone without any interest in…well, twee midnight ‘adventures’ I guess.

Tao’s story is arguably “more fun” to read. However, before writing this entry the last time I had read “The Secret Room” was four years ago, and I remembered it precisely. I read Tao’s story a couple months ago and literally had no memory of what it was about until re-reading it (I picked it based on the fact that the Pop Serial website is new & I knew Tao had a story in there). Is this entirely subjective on my part? Am I prone to remembering the Robbe-Grillet story over the Lin story purely out of the fact that, personally, sexual sadism is more exciting than a twee midnight adventure? Well, yes, but I think the point is generally that “good writing should transcend its subject matter” or something.

I have no interest in saying what is good and what is bad literature, but what bothers me about a lot of the recent wave of “internet writing” is how fun it is versus how much I find myself invested in it. This is of course still entirely subjective I guess, I mean I’m sure there are other people that find themselves far more invested in it than me, but, really, I think this is ultimately symptomatic of all art that relies almost exclusively on the ability of the audience to relate to it instead of probing anything deeper. I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of this shit tastes like candy. It is pop, of course, but it’s an antiquated idea of pop. If you look at actual pop today, there’s a lot more going on than a saccharine sweetness.

There is an implied goal in pop music, of course, to be as widely accessible as possible, to appeal to the largest number of people, to make the most money possible. Pop music as a genre has eschewed specifically addressing these mandates (to some degree there has been a systemic indoctrination of the general public via the media to the point where these “things” no longer even need to be addressed, they are just presumed via the larger system that late-capitalism is operating under, but that’s not specifically my point here), instead working as a new route of subversion (though I will be the first to say that subversion on its own isn’t enough to be interesting). What I’m saying is that pop-music has more depth lately than pop literature. Contemporary, late-capitalist pop music has a lot more depth than 80s pop music. There’s an entire journal related to addressing Lady Gaga. The relative locus of popular culture has been taken up by all sorts of members of the intelligentsia, from the contributors of Montevidayo to (everyone’s favorite diva) Zizek himself.

So here I am: I enjoy something, but it almost specifically refuses any further thought. What’s there to do about this? Should I deny any interest in this sort of writing based on the absence it leads to me finding myself within? I’ve found most of my attempts to engage further with this kind of work futile, with rare exceptions that already find themselves denying the confines of what the “concrete emo” style seems to hold.
I refuse to insist that it’s “not literature,” or that it’s something that’s “not worth reading,” because there is pleasure to be found in it, whether or not the pleasure holds, or even affects to any large degree.

I almost feel like right now, as a stylistic trend, this ‘mode’ of writing is operating almost specifically as networking. Writers will write in this style until they have more friends, or connections, and then move on into writing something that surpasses the pop. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. Who knows.

FOOTNOTES:
(1) I should note that I have no interest in approaching this subject from a “shit-talking” perspective, which is often how discussions surrounding these authors end up.