I read a lot of books in 2010 and here I am briefly going to say things about my favorites. I don’t think any of these came out in 2010, sorry? I will include the titles, my notes upon initially reading the book, and some brief notes made fresh.

SpoilAr alert: I say things are “fucking amazing” a lot. There are a lot of books briefly mentioned in here. It is overwhelming. It is also Christmas today.

TOP FIVE

Ettore Sottsass Metaphors

Initial reading, 08/12/2010:
I have spent this summer thinking about objects and structures, and how installations can approach this abstracted [ontology] and structures I’ve been thinking of–what end they can serve–how I can construct them.

Now, having seen this work of Sottsass’s, I basically know how I can come to terms with all of it, since this book demonstrates many of the ideas I’ve been thinking of, and does so in a really terrific way. The titular interplay (the imposition of language on structures and objects and scenes) roots the objects into larger ideas, abstractions of concepts, and then when photographed, these because sort of distanced signifiers in a really exciting way.

Second reading, 11/09/2010:
This is still absolutely glorious, and I want all of the ideas to live in my head and never ever leave. It is imperative that I look further into Sottsass.

When I need to feel excited about having ideas and things that can be done I read books on architecture, conceptual art, earthworks, etc. This basically combines all those things and makes me want to start writing, immediately, every time I do so much as think about it. Sottsass takes space, empty lost space, and fills it up with the most beautiful ideas, it’s really no wonder that he achieved so much success in the world of design. This book, even as a book, is something wonderful to hold, it’s large but the binding is perfect (it’s from SKIRA, which is a publisher you recognize if you read in the realm that I do), and it’s just really fucking beautiful.

One of the metaphors is entitled “IN MANY ROOMS MURDERS ARE DECIDED” and the image, black and white, features an odd sort of landing strip (perhaps the visual indicator of a grave, depth lacking depth), surrounded by four wooden poles on boxes, the boxes painted white with winding black lines, atop each pole a bundle of leaves and a flag, string surrounding the poles to structurally space a room. I get so excited.

Mercury – Anna Kavan

As [one of my friends] said, this is basically a conglomeration of Kavan’s Ice (perhaps even an alternate narrative of it) and late-70s Robbe-Grillet, which means two things: 1) that i’m totally fucking into it, and 2) [that it] further strengthens the ideas I’ve had that classify Kavan & Robbe-Grillet as similar (if I were a PhD student in lit studies I would probably make that my dissertation, or something, who knows).

But the whole narrative floats by in a fugue state, situations are repeated both intertextually with Ice and as incidents that had already been dreamed of or remembered within the diegesis of the book itself. Kavan is so cold in her writing and I absolutely love it.

I have been reading Anna Kavan for only two years, I think, having finished something like 4 or 5 of her books, but that number will only grow because she is completely wonderful and astounding. Mercury seems to be a “minor” text of a “minor” author, but it’s really this incredible fever dream of violent sexuality and absence. She writes books like Robbe-Grillet except, maybe, better. She was addicted to heroin and kept it a secret. She destroys worlds as she builds them.

Mezza Voce – Anne-Marie Albiach

Mostly, I feel, regarding this book, I just need to express enthusiasm. The way I respond to poetry is similar to how I respond to experimental films & videos: I have an incredibly difficult time articulating my response, and, generally, this is because my interaction with the text (if it’s really something fantastic), is [purely] an experience.

With Albiach this is very particular, intentional, as it is with most écriture. She even says, at one point: “retract. // the practice of pronominal / fiction // or / represent // horizons / «cataclysms»” (there is, of course, much more white space for the text to perform within on the actual page). And this is worth noting: while I have some idea that the white space of the page is very important as a performative space in much of French écriture, Albiach, in my somewhat-limited experience, really uses the space in a way that commits to something beyond pacing.

Of course, what makes this stand above everything is something entirely subjective: the fact that while reading this, I reacted. Affective text made me pause, stop, chew my lunch slower. I was not experiencing an emotion vicariously, rather, the text was an experience in its own right, to a major degree.

I spent a lot of time this year reading & researching écriture (which eventually I will make a post specifically about), of which Anne-Marie Albiach is, perhaps, one of the best. My entire perception of poetry was destroyed by my encounters with these French authors this year, to the point where anything different is hard to swallow. Albiach takes the book as the book and turns it into the book as an experience. The narrative of the page, literally, there is not something at the level of the sentence, there is something at the level of the book, and that, I think, is some serious next level shit.

(Un)built – Raimund Abraham

Abraham is amazing. His imaginary houses remind me a bit of a couple of Emilio Ambasz’s buildings (House for Lovers in particular), except they’re even more… metaphysical? Ambasz’s structures are poetic, while Abraham’s are both poetic and conceptual, which for my tastes edges him a bit higher up in terms of “most awesome architects ever.” The essays aren’t mind-blowing, but they are solid and provide a context for many of Abraham’s most perplexing buildings. I can’t even really articulate right now how brilliant this guy’s work is.

When I say, in my notes, “I can’t even really articulate [...] how brilliant this guy’s work is,” that’s basically how I still feel. I am, literally, obsessed with architects who spends all of their time designing impossible(ly beautiful) houses, and Raimund Abraham has designed some of the most heart-wrenchingly astounding unbuilt houses I have ever seen.

Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry – ed. Stacy Doris, Philip Foss, Emmanuel Hocquard

This is, perhaps, the most coherent & successful écriture “compilation” that I’ve yet encountered. Some great work by authors I was not familiar with yet, and some fucking stellar lines from Collobert, Giroux, and particularly, oh my god, particularly Alain Veinstein, who’s short work that’s included is not in the in-print Burning Deck collection but is astounding.

Yeah, more of this écriture shit, maybe actually tied with Sub/Stance issue 7/8 (or whatever, the issue on French poetry) in terms of collecting and displaying the fucking gems of this “genre.” The things I highlight above are the best of course (Alain Veinstein’s slim collection from Burning Deck probably would have held this 5th spot if it weren’t for the fact that I liked his “poem” in this collection even more). An entire, short, Collobert text that is not available anywhere else completely, I don’t even know guys, it’s not hyperbole, like fries my brain to the point where I am screaming WHAT WHAT WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING HERE on the page, me jumping up and down just feeling it. Here, the PDF is online, how about instead of reading my ramblings on it, you just read it yourself:

CLICK ME DUH

THE REST

For these I will only post my initial reactions, I think

Notebooks, 1956-1978 – Danielle Collobert

Enviable sad desperate lifestyle — but, stylistically interesting, approaches the realm of her poetry, which slays always — reminds me of Alix’s Journal, but sadder, even more desperate — writing & death.

Kasmir – Jon Leon

Jon Leon at his densest, literally, in what one could call a novella, or a short story, or something, but you know what, fuck it, let’s forget about genre or titles or words that classify, because I think this is maybe the cornerstone of Leon’s work, I think this is the precipice. The book builds with an intensity, fractures near the end; it’d be too easy to just say that “everything falls apart” because it doesn’t, it just builds and sort of explodes into the impossible, there is death of [ ] but it doesn’t even fucking matter.

Jannis Kounellis – R.H. Fuchs

This is, perhaps, the most engaging catalogue I’ve ever read. There is little direct info on Kounellis in here other than some biographical information that trickles into Fuchs’s text. Mostly it is Fuchs speaking of his engagement with Kounellis’s art. Fuchs seems to have been Kounellis’s personal friend, and as such, there is insight into Kounellis’s mostly impenetrable body of work that I doubt is available elsewhere.

Alix’s Journal – Alix Cléo Roubaud

Fantastic. I have a bourgeois tendency to overly self-identify with fractured artistic women. Is this weird? It’s not necessary, but as an asthmatic who smokes and goes through periods of depression related to a complete lack of mastery in any medium, I could grok this hard.

Alix’s photographs are completely beautiful, and her poetic fragments are just as good as much of the poetry being written at the same time. Her ideas on photography are also very developed & strong, certain things that are very helpful to something I’m working on now.

The syntax Alix uses also successfully creates a very personal space for her diaristic commentary to grow inside of. It shapes it in a way that makes it exclusively hers.

I also talked about Alix’s Journal here.

Night of Lead – Hans Henny Jahnn

Jahnn’s jaunt into an endless night of darkness is both sensual & utterly bleak, a nightmare trip that ends with a confrontation of the younger Self who is called Other, and the death of the Self, the end of night. Jahnn is an amazing author, and his writing fucking cuts hard– I’d almost compare him to filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux in terms of a narrative surrounded by pure affect, and Jahnn did this 50 years ago. As this is a segment of a larger novel, I would, of course, LOVE to read the who…moreJahnn’s jaunt into an endless night of darkness is both sensual & utterly bleak, a nightmare trip that ends with a confrontation of the younger Self who is called Other, and the death of the Self, the end of night. Jahnn is an amazing author, and his writing fucking cuts hard– I’d almost compare him to filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux in terms of a narrative surrounded by pure affect, and Jahnn did this 50 years ago. As this is a segment of a larger novel, I would, of course, LOVE to read the whole thing.

Night of Lead is also briefly mentioned here.

Seven Controlled Vocabularies… – Tan Lin
My only commentary I have recorded anywhere on this is the post I made a while ago.

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie – Agota Kristof

I managed to blow through all 460 or so pages of this book within 24 hours, but instead of feeling concerned I wasn’t reading close enough, I really feel much more enraptured with the narrative that’s here, and closer to how the three books interact than I would be otherwise.

THE NOTEBOOK, in it’s directness & cruelty is, perhaps, my favorite of the three (though I would insist that the three are most successful as a whole), and presents such objective statements (and such statements are even clarified as such) that the icy-cold’s narrative space is suddenly disrupted at the end.

THE PROOF is first to suggest that our first book was perhaps not “reality,” even in the sense of diegetic reality, which in it’s own right is sort of an obvious but incredibly powerful (in this case) “post-modern” method that it’s shocking and amazing at the same time.

THE THIRD LIE manages to split itself in two, a necessary function, when the characters have been doubling each other throughout the entire trilogy. And a stunning conclusion, perhaps, that is both sad and terrible, but utterly apt.

Kassandra and the Wolf – Margarita Karapanou

This was basically perfect. Certainly one of the best books of fiction that I’ve read recently. Karapanou’s words and fragments are so incredibly affective and twisted, there’s some sort of inherent poetry due to the fact that she’s tapped into the void and turned it into a child’s life.

From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader

This is fucking killer, Jabès is amazing. His presence on the page, within the page, the book, everything. Also interesting is the fact that, despite the fact this reader holds excerpts from, what, like 13 books? It feels like a cohesive whole. I am very curious about Jabès now.

“To write, Jabès observes, ‘is to accept, or better yet, to seek a permanent confrontation with dead.’ Never is writing a victory over nothingness; to the contrary, it is ‘an exploiting of nothingnes…moreThis is fucking killer, Jabès is amazing. His presence on the page, within the page, the book, everything. Also interesting is the fact that, despite the fact this reader holds excerpts from, what, like 13 books? It feels like a cohesive whole. I am very curious about Jabès now.

“To write, Jabès observes, ‘is to accept, or better yet, to seek a permanent confrontation with dead.’ Never is writing a victory over nothingness; to the contrary, it is ‘an exploiting of nothingness through the word.’” (xi)

“The book is a labyrinth. You think you are leaving and only get deeper. You have no chance of running off. For that, you must destroy the work. You cannot make up your mind to do that. I notice your anxiety mounting. Slowly but surely. Wall after wall. Who awaits you at the end? Nobody. Who will leaf through you, decipher, love you? No doubt, nobody. You are alone in the night, alone in the world. Your solitude is the solitude of death. Another step. Somebody will perhaps come and pierce the wall, will find a way out for you. Alas. Nobody ventures here. The book bears your name. Your name clenched like a fist clenched on a sword.” (89-90)

“‘Invisible door. All houses are restored to the air. Did you know that emptiness is a sequence of doors l it by yesterday’s light?’” (138)

House of Cards – Peter Eisenman

Eisenman is fucking mind blowing. What he is after, at least in his first six “Houses” (and apparently in House X and House 11a as well), is the zero degree of architecture. This is interesting to me as I am pretty obsessively interested in the zero degree of writing, and to a lesser extent of art in general (and experience, of course, I imagine the impossible is at the zero degree), and had never even considered what the zero degree of architecture would be (though I do have, scribbled in my notebook “hypertext fiction degree zero? web design degree zero?”). Luckily, in his praxis, Eisenman sets out to do that himself.

I also wrote about this (somewhat) extensively at my personal blog.

Fur – Liliane Giraudon

The first few stories in here just kind of floated past my subconscious when I read them, but as soon as I hit “The Complex” (I think that’s the title? Book’s at home, I’m bad with titles, will check when I get there) I became so fully engrossed that I could barely pause between stories. Giraudon writes with a very strange tone– it’s distanced, but emotional and hyper-present at the same time, detached but descriptive, enigmatic but banal. For some reason I kept thinking of apocryphal author Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta’s collection The Eyes, but probably only because it was another totally alien short story collection that sucked me in slowly.

I think I need to read this again, and soon, at least some of the stories, because it’s so alien but beautiful, really great.

The Ice Palace – Tarjei Vesaas

Reminds slightly, you could say, of Anna Kavan. Peter Owens has said that this is his favorite book he published, and I am very glad it was published. Vesaas creates a narrative space in a way that is similar (though admittedly far more relenting) to the way Philippe Grandrieux constructs his cinematic nightmares. A narrative runs through, perspectives change from first to second to third person without warning (a key to the creation of glissements, but there are no real slidings here, not in…moreReminds slightly, you could say, of Anna Kavan. Peter Owens has said that this is his favorite book he published, and I am very glad it was published. Vesaas creates a narrative space in a way that is similar (though admittedly far more relenting) to the way Philippe Grandrieux constructs his cinematic nightmares. A narrative runs through, perspectives change from first to second to third person without warning (a key to the creation of glissements, but there are no real slidings here, not in the Kavan/Robbe-Grillet way). It’s all so very beautiful as well. The titular ice palace is a specter haunting Siss, and the untold words of Unn create the tension that we ride for over a hundred pages. The book is a narrative space a reader enters and feels. Ideal. Really, really wonderful.

The Arab Apocalypse – Etel Adnan

The book is incredible, violent in it’s approach, Adnan’s marks all over the pages, obtuse hieroglyphs of the sun, a burning, a direction. The sun the sun the sun is everywhere in here and that is perfect. I’m not even sure exactly what it was going but I know that I loved it and that I want to lose myself into the space of the page. My reading was distracted, but even distracted I could hold the weight here.

Between the Two – Todd Hido

Of the three I’ve read so far, I think this is the Hido work that works best for me. There is a sense of performativity in the work here, in how it’s selected. I should clarify when I say [performativity] that I [am] not think[ing] of, say, Gregory Crewdson, rather, it seems to me that Hido’s is an object-oriented performativity, he lets spaces act out enigmatic narratives. The empty spaces reveal a mood in a method similar to the portraits of the “models” (perhaps I have some predisposed bias or archetype going here, but it’s hard for me not to read most of these women as sex workers, mainly due to significant signifiers such as close and pose).

As usual in Hido’s work, it is the light which creates a precise emotional atmosphere, and here there is, it seems to me, more of a careful arrangement of the order of the images, adding up to a narrative atmosphere that carries the viewer through the 76 pages of the monograph.

Pim & Francie: “The Golden Bear Days” – Al Columbia

This is absolutely glorious. This is also, potentially, the first comic artist who’s work I’ve seen that actual generate the atmosphere of terror based on sequence and drawing alone. Which, perhaps, is why I specifically liked this book so much: while it proposes itself as a “collection of unfinished work,” reading it as a finished narrative makes it, in my opinion, much more interesting, allowing it to work on different, more exciting levels than it would have if it were just a “normal comic.” The mixture of unfinished images with fully finished images, repetition, narrative holes, makes it much more sinister as a story, because there is always something unknown. One page will find the titular characters scared for their lives, while in the next Pim will be torturing goldfish as Francie prepares to go into the haunted forest alone. Really amazing stuff.

The Book of Lazarus – Richard Grossman

What’s amazing about this book is how it works. Other reviews on Goodreads complain that the “bulk of the story is established in the first half of the book,” when really that’s hardly true. All the “narrative” section of this book does is establish the larger frame work that everything else fits into.

Each section of this book, wildly different from the last (aside from the ‘maxims’ and ‘martyrs’ that punctuate the whole book), move in and out of each other to create a larger idea, concept, than what the paltry 100 pages of narrative could every bring (which, perhaps an unwillingness to engage with the book-as-idea rather than book-as-100-page-narrative-plus-ephemera is why the book has such low ratings here).

The ‘martyrs’ that punctuate the entire book are presented as photographs next to a 5×7 index card with a magic marker scrawl describing how the man or woman was killed trying to save someone else. Again and again throughout this book, we see evidence of men and women who lose everything trying to save someone else. This sense of sacrifice, this martydom lies in direct contrast to the incident of violence that lies at the core of the book (the incident that brings all of the parts to where they are in terms of narrative and idea). It is perhaps worth pointing out that this is Grossman’s “purgatory” in terms of his trilogy. This is not hell, this is not heaven. This is a static place.

And in the narrative, all art static, for the most part. Characters are staying still and not moving, afraid, and eventually dead. Everybody is either angry or has given up.

There’s an amazing sense of artificiality in the ‘narrative’ section of the book (i.e. ‘bad dialogue’), but I think that’s almost intentional on Grossman’s part, as it highlights the fact that “this is fake, this is not the final product, this is a part of the whole,” because if we accept the narrative section as the whole the entire ideology of the book is over looked.

The political counter-culture maxims that punctuate the book in tangent with the ‘martyrs’ are often pretty incredible.

The constant stream of ideology help to open up the political headspace of the characters we are moving through.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book as a whole is the 70-page long sentence that I’m sure is the target of many dissatisfied reader’s complaint. For me the sentence is magic, and admittedly drug-tinged, but more in an Altered States (Ken Russell’s film) kinda way than a over-compensating Hunter S. Thompson kind of way. The formal situation of a 70 page sentence forces an urgency: as a reader you have nowhere to rest. This moves things quickly in an echo of what the section’s narrator is “experiencing.”

There are other minor sections that expand the narrative’s scope and affect in pretty wild ways, but they are ostensibly minor sections so I will not comment much on them.

The book as a whole ends with a poem from the titular Lazarus, who haunts the back of every section in the book. It’s certainly not an ending that “hits you hard,” but I think if Grossman had resorted to the ending-as-epiphany it would demean the entire structure of the book. This way the ending is subtle and sad, the reflections in a damaged mind of a life lived in pain when all he was after was love.

The Squirrel Machine – Hans Rickheit

I was amazed by Rickheit’s Chloe and even more by his Chrome Fetus comics, but this manages to outdo all of them. It’s completely wonderful and really fucking just incredible. There is pure joy in Rickheit’s art work (I would say at least half of the panels in the book are devoid of text). I love this, so much that I can’t really develop anything articulate to say about it.

Leaves of Hypnos – René Char

“The color black contains the impossible alive. Its mental field is the seat of all the unexpected, of all paroxysms. Its prestige escorts poets and prepares men of action.”

I feel like this text could engage with Bataille’s Guilty. They both address the second world war, and they are both concerned with a limit, an existence, and the void (Bataille being one of my primary interests, it’s worth pointing out that, according to biographical information, Char and Bataille were friends. This is apparent, I think, in Char’s writing.)

This is aphorism as poetry. I can feel the impossible in these words, but there is a more tangible strain present here than in Bataille (and it is in the arms of Bataille that I have to approach this book). It is beautiful, but there is the terrible war that runs beneath it, that lifts the words to the elevated position in which they sit.

Also, the Mushinsha-Grossman edition of this book is completely beautiful.

“Lucidity is the wound nearest the sun.”

Sweet Sweat – Justine Frank

This is really incredible. I love reading art theory & I love reading about artists who wrote smut, & I love when apocryphal things dovetail with the reality of specific subcultures that are also awesome on their own. The pornographic novel at the heart of this book is amazing in it’s own right, revisiting tropes that can be found in many classics from Sade to Bataille to Bernard Noel’s Castle of the Communion to Andre Pieyre de Mandiargue’s Portrait of an Englishman in his Chateau. There’s a rich tradition and Roee has inserted his fictional artist’s fictional novel immediately inside of it, and it’s fantastic.

Sarah Kane: Complete Plays

These are astoundingly good plays, this is an author I seriously wish I would have discovered earlier on in my career as a reader. These plays convey an incredibly amount of emotion, yet abstract it to a degree that it becomes even more powerful, and the progression from play to play, as Kane developed as a writer, is so incredible to see.

Ice – Anna Kavan

Kavan’s detachment works to such an amazing point here: there is a disaster going on, but instead of fretting, a man looks for a woman, for no real given reason other than whim. And the narrative, one of the best examples of Robbe-Grillet’s “glissements,” moving from one narrative thread to another with invisible transitions, and by this i mean you get from narrative strand A to narrative strand B without even noticing you moved, it’s incredible. The overwhelming ice, Kavan in novel length is still as affecting as Kavan in short story length.

Formless: A User’s Guide – Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind Krauss

This is really a fantastic piece of work, and there are two immediate reasons:

01) The application of Bataille’s ideas (mostly ideas found in his Documents period) to works of art really, for me at least, helped to illuminate concepts that weren’t as clear to me before. It expanded my realm of thought in terms of Bataille scholarship and lead to a few moments of epiphany that were very much needed to put me back on track regarding my own work with Bataille.

02) The sort of recontextualizing that Krauss & Bois forced me to do here made me reconsider art as a whole, another thing that was sorely needed in my life (blah blah blah bourgeois self-identification I know), and really helped to extend my own reading of modernism, as the readings here make more sense to me than Greenberg & followers (ugh). Also reintroduced the magical prose of Krauss, who writes strong words and ideas in a very comprehensive manner.

I used to be hesitant towards October magazine because I had never read it and I knew vague details about the split over Robert Morris/Lynda Benglis debacle, and that gave me some sort of weird impression that October was bound to be more conservative (another thing I never bothered to verify). Of course, it turns out that October seems to just be a lot more theory based and significantly less commercial, which is something I can jive with.

I dogeared & bookmarked & highlighted a lot from this book that I need to revisit, so I’ll add some more commentary after I go through the marked parts a few more times.

THE END

or whatever
what were your favorite books you read this year

Tags: favorites of 2010, heavy like a death in the family, x-mas present to you