Craft Notes
On Vandalism, Ownership, Masturbation, and I/O
In April I visited the Cy Twombly museum in Houston. The door was open and there was no one at the desk. I walked around the series of rooms that form a rough circle by myself for twenty minutes before I saw or heard anybody else. I felt like at many points I could have done anything I wanted in those rooms to myself or to the paintings. I didn’t do anything but look.
In 2007, at another exhibition of work by Cy Twombly, a woman named Rindy Sam kissed 1 panel of the triptych titled Phaedrus, a set of all white canvas, getting red lipstick all over it, altering the white. She was arrested and tried in court.
The prosecution, calling it “A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism”, while admitting that Sam is “visibly not conscious of what she has done”, asked that she be fined 4500€, compelled to an assorted penalty, and to attend citizenship classes. The art work, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay 1,000€ to the painting’s owner, 500€ to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and 1€ to the painter.
While I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, I also looked at a lot of paintings and installations. There was Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 14, where homeboy climbed using an apparatus to suspend himself and draw under strained conditions while dressed as General MacArthur.
I did not notice at the time how the light coming through the windows into the room made as much of its own mess as Cremaster-dude did. That mess revealed itself only as preserved there in the above picture. After the picture, it continued to alter its influx on the room’s pattern and its color while the exhibited piece itself stays still.
After I looked at that I went into the men’s room and went into a stall. Someone had shit all around the rim of the seat and left an enormous bloody discoloration liquid in the bowl unflushed. I pissed on it and left it there. Usually I have a Sharpie marker in my pocket that I use to write on my hands with to remember things, a flesh desk, but I had left it in my other pants. I really wanted to write a title on the stall wall and mark and name and date it. Maybe it’s still there. Maybe some other people have pissed on top of it.
Later we walked around outside behind where the Barney thing was and sat on some blocks while Kristin smoked. I couldn’t tell if the installation in the smokeyard behind us was supposed to be good art or not or just a thing that was there because there was no sign and it looked pretty weak as an object I should need to see or think about or remember. And yet here I am talking about it anyway. It still shows up in my head.
For Drawing Restraint 15, Barney got on a boat and drew with fish flesh and fish blood.
The image just above this was stolen from the internet and uploaded to the servers here. I don’t know who took the picture or who owns the site the picture came from. Ostensibly they could write and ask us to take it down. If we didn’t take it down they could maybe sue us if they actually had the rights but litigation costs are so high it’s usually just a fear move on the internet when people try to say “take this down or I’ll sue you.” We’ve already had at least half a dozen instances of this happening and so far there have been no summons appearing at any of our doors. You also are looking at the image and can see it and it will be there even if in a few weeks somehow we take it down.
I wonder how many people have forgotten about Morganna the Kissing Bandit these days. She had a 60″ chest and got famous for running out into baseball games and kissing dudes. The first one she kissed was appropriately Pete Rose, the future “ineligible” baseball player, who afterward said weird shit about her and then supposedly went to a bar with some roses and tried to, or successfully did, fuck her. She kissed more than 40 players from several sports including hockey, and franchise owners, umps, a mascot. She always kissed them on the cheek. “It’s more sanitary than the lips, and that way their wives don’t get upset. Besides, who wants tobacco stains all over your teeth?”
Later she ended up in Playboy, though she claimed to think of herself as a comedienne, and not a sex star. Her naked body, likewise, is less sexy, unless it’s your type, and more something unusual to look at both for how it’s just like yours and not at all.
I didn’t insert the image of the naked body here unlike the other photos because for some reason a body of such nature has restrictions for viewing, whereas the image of the Barney things, which to me are way more “inspiring of dirty thoughts,” as pertains to the definition of pornography, than something that passes us in the street everyday, if under cover.
It’s funny how the nature of a day changes when you masturbate or have sex to begin it versus when you do not do that or when you wait until the end of the day. I can often see in my writing after a day I have cleared myself before doing anything else as being much less edgy, perhaps enveloped or even disarmed. This could work for or against you, depending.
“Morning wood” is common for dudes, like you are being asked to either assuage the urge via self friction and thus begin the day somewhat deflated, at a remove, or alternatively, to wait for it to go back down on its own time, an arrow pointing off of your body around the room to lead you forward until it is pointing again straight down and you put on pants. Eventually it returns.
Recently I’ve liked to think of writing as vandalism. All those people recently calling attention to what they consider the novel’s death has been something I’ve started to respond to more attentively, each time realizing that ultimately it’s a preaching to the choir. The bored want to hear the more bored say they are bored and thus the thing itself must be dying, though usually, if you step back to the source of their own art, you can see why they are bored. The not bored don’t need to be told the bored are boring because they already know there are always places you can look to find the walls discolored or waiting to be altered or admired or otherwise reamed.
If I can make myself laugh in fear or power or feel like I am attacking myself inside a sentence that is probably when I feel the best.
Kathy Acker famously would get a dildo and put it inside her and write while on the verge or in the midst of orgasm, which in reading, in my body, seems to highlight or assault her output’s vision often right in the midst of the page. I don’t find it hot as I do find it a gesture of opening a mode intent on aggrandizing the self within the self. Calling the fuckself to come fuck the front self funny and get the spill all over the white.
These bored and boring novel-dead people and other people are bored because they have forgot about destruction and only want to create and create and create. They have forgotten the meat around the center in favor of pulling out the center and calling it a name.
If your novel is dead, kill your novel. Bury it, bring it flowers. Treat it like the dead you would respect, like it’s your mother. You would not write an article in the Guardian about your mother being dead and James Wood says and tra-la-la.
I will visit my own dead.
For me, even not having ejaculated or masturbated while writing much lately (though as a child I would sometimes write porn text games on my computer in BASIC that I could get off to, then delete), getting into that space is a forum much like being in a gallery by oneself. I don’t think I write for other people, but I also don’t write for me. I write maybe for the people in me that aren’t people more than they are Morgannas and they are people who shit in bathrooms and leave it. Or people who would call themselves a god enough that they would mark a room in such a way that it would call to be demarcated with a placard for posterity, or however long the building lasts. It’s equally a vain and godwanting move, and the anterior, a kill-self and kill-god desire that in me broils blood all bigtime while I am sitting perfectly still. I don’t respond to art often except to look at it, and yet how much of that time can I remember and feel in my face and arms when I am typing.
Right now there are three almost empty glasses on my desk. Two of them contain a half an inch of water. One has just enough to coffee to wet the bottom perimeter of the container, so you can see the gleam that remembers it was there, and it puddles in the corner when I lift it up to verify it still does stink.
Tags: Cy Twombly, Drawing Restraint, Matthew Barney, Morganna the Kissing Bandit
“I will visit my own dead” is a sweet sentence.
Funny this is mentioned today. I’ve known about the Kathy Acker/dildo thing for a long while now and never tried it. Naturally plenty of masturbation occurs while writing (it takes place at the computer mostly, of course) but never had I tried the dildo thing.
I tried it earlier this afternoon.
I got like a line or sentence in and got distracted.
Maybe it requires practice?
I don’t think this info is too personal. Honestly, has anyone else tried the dildo/writing combo? tips?
I’ve lost my vodka sprite in my own room.
Calling the fuckself to come fuck the front self funny and get the spill all over the white.
I tried the Kathy Acker method for the first time earlier this afternoon. I’ve masturbated a lot while writing, naturally, it occurs alone and mainly at the computer, but never the dildo/writing combo. I didn’t get very far at all, a line or sentence, maybe.
This info is not too personal…has anyone else tried this combination? Any tips or suggestions?
I’ve lost my vodka in my own room.
There are traces and permutations of the ‘death of’ a lot of things in the ‘death of the novel.’ I think those who cry death of the novel are those who believe the novel to be, based on their past experience, an intensive and altering experience. Funny though, because most of those altering experiences come when you are most open to the idea of being altered, or not even aware that an altered state exists. Yet another example of a flaw in the thinking.
Also, most criers, and I’d say a lot of us here in this community (myself included) are living without a strong notion of obscenity. Nothing feels obscene to me. All is justified under the auspices of freedom, which self-propagates in such a way as to maybe be the most obscene idea or power that comes to mind. Not that an artwork has to be obscene to alter, but I’d say all the powerful encounters with art that I’ve had reside in the place of being moved by something you can’t handle, or don’t want to handle, or know that you must handle in order to keep moving. A mystery, now. A mystery and a presentation of power, but intensive and not explicit: this is the truly obscene, the obscene that works as itself and in itself.
Part of me wants to decry the Acker-esque mode of performative work, shifting yourself physically into a better or more addled/interesting state, because it is still a performance that shits and sits on a page that gets bound and sold or passed into hands from boxes. In the way that escalating sexual novelty and experimentation most likely leads to more and more novel practice, I see this as an admission of defeat for the form of art already. But the other part of me thinks that this is what’s necessary to shock out of whatever proclaimed plateau that exists/doesn’t exist in art.
Writing, or making art, to identify and assuage different ideas and beings inside you: yes. It’s in the presentation that it gets tricky. I dunno about Barney, but it seems like some artists operate with a total blank re: the post-birth stage. ‘Put it in a gallery, do what you want, as long as you pay me/do this/set me up to do this.’ Some do that, care for basic comfort and security to continue making art and eating from it, some don’t at all. It all relies on sharing though, or else it would be a journal. But there is such a massive pressure here, in the grandest scale art making worlds, to ‘do something with it.’ Which is why the sharpied thing in the bathroom blood stall is most likely to remain obscene.
Oh, wait.
Better: nothing feels obscene to me in the realm of art. There are things outside, nothing I can identify in my head now, but I’m sure if I see/smell, etc. Remove the primal touch, and put it in the gallery box, and it all dies.
“They have forgotten the meat around the center in favor of pulling out the center and calling it a name.”
–yes. this stuff is very good.
There’s a lot to be said, too, for the anonymous. If you want to smell out the obscene or next like a truffle pig, find a mask.
Arson needs a comeback.
i like these thoughts.
more often there should be anonymous books and anonymous creations, which is why street art was mysterious for a minute and now is mostly fart.
i think it’s hard for a lot of people who realize they have a conduit to stay true to that initial feeling of childishness mixed with the adult that seems to come out of the art that feels more primal or ready in these ways. you get a pass and then you are suddenly subject to a different set of inhibitors or ideas about what will happen to what you make after it is made.
ultimately, it would nice to live in a vacuum, of course. but i admire barney for how he seems to have kept it real, even given all that money and power and fame and whatever else. he seems still alive.
I like this.
“In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay 1,000€ to the painting’s owner, 500€ to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and 1€ to the painter.”
The world is crazy
Love Twombly. The guy with the fish sort of sucks though. He is actually imitating Hokusai, who painted a blue ribbon on paper, dipped a roosters legs in red paint and had him run over the surface, calling it “maple leaves floating in a stream”. But he didn’t kill the rooster.
Being cruel does not make an artist good.
Many of the ideas in this post make me think of Bataille and excess.
I feel like writing when I wake up is a form of masturbation, albeit, similar to one of those masturbatory sessions when I can’t fantasize about the right thing or get into a good groove or find the right spot. So I never really reach a climax, only feel waves of pleasure that never really culminate. Its just one of those things I need to do so that I can get up later and make breakfast.
Actual masturbation makes me feel less tense, sex increases tension. In a good way.
Is feeling that the novel is dead always a sign of boredom (concerning ones own writing)? Or boredom of “novels” in general? Ideas related to the death of this or that (the novel, the subject, whatever) seem to be more or less defense mechanisms and self-preservation.
I feel like the “obscene” has become boring, or maybe I think the obsene functions in part through boredom, now. I don’t mean that as a moralizing or aesthetic judgement at all, just – the obscene works on different levels. And maybe the truly obscene is never boring, maybe what counts as obscene changes and adapts.
Thanks for writing this Blake. It’s great.
THANK YOU FOR THIS BLAKE IT’S BEEN A LONG DAY
“I will visit my own dead” is a sweet sentence.
Funny this is mentioned today. I’ve known about the Kathy Acker/dildo thing for a long while now and never tried it. Naturally plenty of masturbation occurs while writing (it takes place at the computer mostly, of course) but never had I tried the dildo thing.
I tried it earlier this afternoon.
I got like a line or sentence in and got distracted.
Maybe it requires practice?
I don’t think this info is too personal. Honestly, has anyone else tried the dildo/writing combo? tips?
I’ve lost my vodka sprite in my own room.
Calling the fuckself to come fuck the front self funny and get the spill all over the white.
I tried the Kathy Acker method for the first time earlier this afternoon. I’ve masturbated a lot while writing, naturally, it occurs alone and mainly at the computer, but never the dildo/writing combo. I didn’t get very far at all, a line or sentence, maybe.
This info is not too personal…has anyone else tried this combination? Any tips or suggestions?
I’ve lost my vodka in my own room.
There are traces and permutations of the ‘death of’ a lot of things in the ‘death of the novel.’ I think those who cry death of the novel are those who believe the novel to be, based on their past experience, an intensive and altering experience. Funny though, because most of those altering experiences come when you are most open to the idea of being altered, or not even aware that an altered state exists. Yet another example of a flaw in the thinking.
Also, most criers, and I’d say a lot of us here in this community (myself included) are living without a strong notion of obscenity. Nothing feels obscene to me. All is justified under the auspices of freedom, which self-propagates in such a way as to maybe be the most obscene idea or power that comes to mind. Not that an artwork has to be obscene to alter, but I’d say all the powerful encounters with art that I’ve had reside in the place of being moved by something you can’t handle, or don’t want to handle, or know that you must handle in order to keep moving. A mystery, now. A mystery and a presentation of power, but intensive and not explicit: this is the truly obscene, the obscene that works as itself and in itself.
Part of me wants to decry the Acker-esque mode of performative work, shifting yourself physically into a better or more addled/interesting state, because it is still a performance that shits and sits on a page that gets bound and sold or passed into hands from boxes. In the way that escalating sexual novelty and experimentation most likely leads to more and more novel practice, I see this as an admission of defeat for the form of art already. But the other part of me thinks that this is what’s necessary to shock out of whatever proclaimed plateau that exists/doesn’t exist in art.
Writing, or making art, to identify and assuage different ideas and beings inside you: yes. It’s in the presentation that it gets tricky. I dunno about Barney, but it seems like some artists operate with a total blank re: the post-birth stage. ‘Put it in a gallery, do what you want, as long as you pay me/do this/set me up to do this.’ Some do that, care for basic comfort and security to continue making art and eating from it, some don’t at all. It all relies on sharing though, or else it would be a journal. But there is such a massive pressure here, in the grandest scale art making worlds, to ‘do something with it.’ Which is why the sharpied thing in the bathroom blood stall is most likely to remain obscene.
Oh, wait.
Better: nothing feels obscene to me in the realm of art. There are things outside, nothing I can identify in my head now, but I’m sure if I see/smell, etc. Remove the primal touch, and put it in the gallery box, and it all dies.
“They have forgotten the meat around the center in favor of pulling out the center and calling it a name.”
–yes. this stuff is very good.
There’s a lot to be said, too, for the anonymous. If you want to smell out the obscene or next like a truffle pig, find a mask.
Arson needs a comeback.
i think i agree that the “obscene” has become boring in its own right, in a different way than the people who are bored with novels like their own that have no rereading value, are simply stories and do not demand more attention outside their linear structure. tropes for the obscene become obvious and thereby just as whitewashed as anything else, which is why the shock of invention for me comes from new collision and not any particular set of images or ideas. one of the most obscene things i’ve read recently involved the description of jalapeno peppers in a mouth. the way it was worded made me ill still.
funny too on the masturbating w/o climax: sometimes that can be a specific tool to get to those weird modes of agitation that bust the language, w/o necessarily culmination, but more circling toward an eventual, perhaps much later, orgasm.
thanks kristen.
i like these thoughts.
more often there should be anonymous books and anonymous creations, which is why street art was mysterious for a minute and now is mostly fart.
i think it’s hard for a lot of people who realize they have a conduit to stay true to that initial feeling of childishness mixed with the adult that seems to come out of the art that feels more primal or ready in these ways. you get a pass and then you are suddenly subject to a different set of inhibitors or ideas about what will happen to what you make after it is made.
ultimately, it would nice to live in a vacuum, of course. but i admire barney for how he seems to have kept it real, even given all that money and power and fame and whatever else. he seems still alive.
I like this.
“In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay 1,000€ to the painting’s owner, 500€ to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and 1€ to the painter.”
The world is crazy
I wonder if this is also somewhat true of intentionality and lack of intentionality—that they’re most often boring in their own rights. We have a cat we call Twombly who uses one of our wooden crates as a scratching post. The resultant markings are reminiscent of some of Cy Twombly’s pencil drawings (which we respect). The other day one of the other cats who live with us vomited at the base of the crate. Perhaps I should have found a sharpie and titled their collaboration and not cleaned up the cat vomit. Would it have had any less intentionality by being feline produced than human produced (such as a shitty/bloodied bathroom stall)? I honestly don’t know. But I sometimes worry (pre- or post-coital—such timing doesn’t seem to affect my fretting) that both intentionality and unintentionality are overrated—that only context is underrated. But it’s Sunday night and I dislike my weekly job. So maybe my relativism is too stultifying, smothering, suffocating—either more intentionality or less intentionality would have been the better choice.
Love Twombly. The guy with the fish sort of sucks though. He is actually imitating Hokusai, who painted a blue ribbon on paper, dipped a roosters legs in red paint and had him run over the surface, calling it “maple leaves floating in a stream”. But he didn’t kill the rooster.
Being cruel does not make an artist good.
Many of the ideas in this post make me think of Bataille and excess.
I feel like writing when I wake up is a form of masturbation, albeit, similar to one of those masturbatory sessions when I can’t fantasize about the right thing or get into a good groove or find the right spot. So I never really reach a climax, only feel waves of pleasure that never really culminate. Its just one of those things I need to do so that I can get up later and make breakfast.
Actual masturbation makes me feel less tense, sex increases tension. In a good way.
Is feeling that the novel is dead always a sign of boredom (concerning ones own writing)? Or boredom of “novels” in general? Ideas related to the death of this or that (the novel, the subject, whatever) seem to be more or less defense mechanisms and self-preservation.
I feel like the “obscene” has become boring, or maybe I think the obsene functions in part through boredom, now. I don’t mean that as a moralizing or aesthetic judgement at all, just – the obscene works on different levels. And maybe the truly obscene is never boring, maybe what counts as obscene changes and adapts.
Thanks for writing this Blake. It’s great.
THANK YOU FOR THIS BLAKE IT’S BEEN A LONG DAY
i think i agree that the “obscene” has become boring in its own right, in a different way than the people who are bored with novels like their own that have no rereading value, are simply stories and do not demand more attention outside their linear structure. tropes for the obscene become obvious and thereby just as whitewashed as anything else, which is why the shock of invention for me comes from new collision and not any particular set of images or ideas. one of the most obscene things i’ve read recently involved the description of jalapeno peppers in a mouth. the way it was worded made me ill still.
funny too on the masturbating w/o climax: sometimes that can be a specific tool to get to those weird modes of agitation that bust the language, w/o necessarily culmination, but more circling toward an eventual, perhaps much later, orgasm.
thanks kristen.
I wonder if this is also somewhat true of intentionality and lack of intentionality—that they’re most often boring in their own rights. We have a cat we call Twombly who uses one of our wooden crates as a scratching post. The resultant markings are reminiscent of some of Cy Twombly’s pencil drawings (which we respect). The other day one of the other cats who live with us vomited at the base of the crate. Perhaps I should have found a sharpie and titled their collaboration and not cleaned up the cat vomit. Would it have had any less intentionality by being feline produced than human produced (such as a shitty/bloodied bathroom stall)? I honestly don’t know. But I sometimes worry (pre- or post-coital—such timing doesn’t seem to affect my fretting) that both intentionality and unintentionality are overrated—that only context is underrated. But it’s Sunday night and I dislike my weekly job. So maybe my relativism is too stultifying, smothering, suffocating—either more intentionality or less intentionality would have been the better choice.
slept on this one. still good.
thinking about destruction instead of creation–i print out all my stories and revise with a scissors. i want to see my stories cut into pieces, mutilated. makes me feel like i’m finally getting down to business.
thinking about the above and obscenity. for me there’s a question of comfort in all of this, right, not just what is obscene but what disturbs. for me the question always goes back to the greeks, what did the old greeks feel, can we still feel it. i think we have some potential still even though our skin has died much.
today i’m readying for Weds class on Oedipus. sophomores in my classes are still greatly disturbed by Oedipus. not because god crushed this man but because of the implied incest. when we watch a film version they hoot and whistle during the sex. but during discussion they squirm when i say, ‘why is this so terrible? there are worse things than sleeping with your mother.’ but they can taste it, their mother, and just thinking about her taste makes them strange. some semesters we read joyce carol oates’ ‘where are you going, where have you been?’ and they are still angry and horrified and disgusted by the implication of the murder and rape of a young girl when they arrive to class. they all agree to show the rape and murder would ruin their horror. we read ‘a tell tale heart’ and they have not been terrified but when i tell them, ‘at any point, the person you think you love could stand in your doorway as you sleep, thinking about murdering you’ and they beg me to stop talking. today they will take a test on a story by blake butler and some of them will not forgive me for days because it will make them uncomfortable and strange.
sometimes i think saul bellow was right when he said william s burroughs was made ridiculous by the holocaust (or something like that) but read any random page by burroughs to any random people in the mall. i’ve read pages to people in graduate school and they get green.
“sometimes i think saul bellow was right when he said william s burroughs was made ridiculous by the holocaust”
Bellow’s politics were made acceptable by the holocaust while Burroughs’ were made relevant. X-number of wars later, Burroughs is still relevant.
i like this. i’ll carry it around w/ me.
i think my feelings toward the bellow quote tend with my feelings when i’m wandering a shaky part of town in the night and i hear malicious voices or there’s a sudden movement from an alleyway. of my fear i always ask myself, ‘could a story do this?’ because i doubt art. but my next thought is ‘how can i make a story do this’ because i believe in art.
a woman kisses a twombly. i once saw a japanese tourist poke a goya in the chicago art institute. the sacrosanct skin ruptured, filthied up with a grubby human paw. hack at the pedestal, ruddy the flesh with fresh blood. museums house artifacts, relics of culture, petrified monoliths, scars of specificity. museums are mausoleums, corpses line the walls. poke one to see if it is still warm. “If your novel is dead, kill your novel.” barney took a piss on the house of the dead, swinging back and forth in the turret with the harness caught in his ass, making little marks, chipping at the white. now the drawing restraint is also an artifact, the performance is past, and we cannot reach across to poke where barney’s charcoal punctured — but the light can, and the light makes it something else. barney took a piss on the museum, the light took a piss on barney — (“how the light coming through the windows into the room made as much of its own mess”) — what will take a piss on the light? a composed photograph in which blake butler observes at the periphery, having just taken a piss on a shit? did you piss on my photograph by using it here without asking, blake? shall i threaten to sue? we, us, you, me, barney, light, the wall, the toilet, then, now: we all stand in a circle and bare our teeth at one another, whether to smile to laugh to rage to fuck. the point is to make the teeth naked, to pull the mouth to the primal aggressive posture. this is how we stay alive, how we keep our art beating with blood: the artifact ricochets in the toothglare; we alter it, destroy it, fuck it, rape it, eat it, shit it out, birth it, sculpt it, and over again. the cycle is sordid but necessary for our forms of making to persist, for the phoenix to rise. and it’s true; often the real beauty squats in the violent act of cruel honesty or effort both generative and destructive, the moment of agitation with the not-now-but-later-orgasm, the unsettling snag of red lipwax on the clean canvas, the writer riding her fake dick for a word, the athlete-artist’s scribbling on the white wall’s sweep. from SFMOMA curator Benjamin Weil: “‘Drawing Restraint’ (is) predicated by a moment of focused and creative energy being the result of a physical constraint.”
you have to hold it down to get it to writhe. jesus christ, is all art just masturbation made luminous.
This is badass.
Esp like the part abt if you masturbate or have sex in the morning vs. the evening and how that changes the text.
For a while after you read at Quickies last fall, I would go in the bathroom at the Innertown Pub and think, Blake Butler probably peed in here, I wonder if he wrote on the wall.
nice, blake. that the novel-dead people are bored of their novels sounds right. just that it seems that’s everyone, one part of all our heads. i’m reminded what a nice building sfmoma is. thanks.
slept on this one. still good.
thinking about destruction instead of creation–i print out all my stories and revise with a scissors. i want to see my stories cut into pieces, mutilated. makes me feel like i’m finally getting down to business.
thinking about the above and obscenity. for me there’s a question of comfort in all of this, right, not just what is obscene but what disturbs. for me the question always goes back to the greeks, what did the old greeks feel, can we still feel it. i think we have some potential still even though our skin has died much.
today i’m readying for Weds class on Oedipus. sophomores in my classes are still greatly disturbed by Oedipus. not because god crushed this man but because of the implied incest. when we watch a film version they hoot and whistle during the sex. but during discussion they squirm when i say, ‘why is this so terrible? there are worse things than sleeping with your mother.’ but they can taste it, their mother, and just thinking about her taste makes them strange. some semesters we read joyce carol oates’ ‘where are you going, where have you been?’ and they are still angry and horrified and disgusted by the implication of the murder and rape of a young girl when they arrive to class. they all agree to show the rape and murder would ruin their horror. we read ‘a tell tale heart’ and they have not been terrified but when i tell them, ‘at any point, the person you think you love could stand in your doorway as you sleep, thinking about murdering you’ and they beg me to stop talking. today they will take a test on a story by blake butler and some of them will not forgive me for days because it will make them uncomfortable and strange.
sometimes i think saul bellow was right when he said william s burroughs was made ridiculous by the holocaust (or something like that) but read any random page by burroughs to any random people in the mall. i’ve read pages to people in graduate school and they get green.
People who argue that the novel is dead often seem people who are scared that it might not be dead, that it might be undead, that a bunch of illegitimate writers are out writing zombie novels.
Johannes
burroughs becomes probably more relevant than ever each time there is a disaster, which is every day.
i’d like to be the fuckin wild boys.
Jack Off Journal, the journal that publishes films of writer actually, at last, jacking off in public, with their flesh.
‘The Soft Machine’ is incredible, absolutely incredible.
Near the end of the Paris Commune some communards tried to set Notre Dame on fire, but they were stopped by a group of artists.
“sometimes i think saul bellow was right when he said william s burroughs was made ridiculous by the holocaust”
Bellow’s politics were made acceptable by the holocaust while Burroughs’ were made relevant. X-number of wars later, Burroughs is still relevant.
“i think my feelings toward the bellow quote tend with my feelings when i’m wandering a shaky part of town in the night and i hear malicious voices or there’s a sudden movement from an alleyway.”
Ever read the essay written by the black grad student who deliberately followed Bellow through the dark one night to scare the shit out of him? Not, perhaps, a constructive gambit but surely a fun one. No one would have tried that with WSB, eh? There’s some kind of writerly workshop-aphorism in there (laugh)…
WSB: great writer… possibly repulsive pal. It scares me to wonder how much he *wasn’t* making up. There is nothing of the Lie about him… but maybe he gives that impression because his skull was always so obvious.
i like this. i’ll carry it around w/ me.
i think my feelings toward the bellow quote tend with my feelings when i’m wandering a shaky part of town in the night and i hear malicious voices or there’s a sudden movement from an alleyway. of my fear i always ask myself, ‘could a story do this?’ because i doubt art. but my next thought is ‘how can i make a story do this’ because i believe in art.
a woman kisses a twombly. i once saw a japanese tourist poke a goya in the chicago art institute. the sacrosanct skin ruptured, filthied up with a grubby human paw. hack at the pedestal, ruddy the flesh with fresh blood. museums house artifacts, relics of culture, petrified monoliths, scars of specificity. museums are mausoleums, corpses line the walls. poke one to see if it is still warm. “If your novel is dead, kill your novel.” barney took a piss on the house of the dead, swinging back and forth in the turret with the harness caught in his ass, making little marks, chipping at the white. now the drawing restraint is also an artifact, the performance is past, and we cannot reach across to poke where barney’s charcoal punctured — but the light can, and the light makes it something else. barney took a piss on the museum, the light took a piss on barney — (“how the light coming through the windows into the room made as much of its own mess”) — what will take a piss on the light? a composed photograph in which blake butler observes at the periphery, having just taken a piss on a shit? did you piss on my photograph by using it here without asking, blake? shall i threaten to sue? we, us, you, me, barney, light, the wall, the toilet, then, now: we all stand in a circle and bare our teeth at one another, whether to smile to laugh to rage to fuck. the point is to make the teeth naked, to pull the mouth to the primal aggressive posture. this is how we stay alive, how we keep our art beating with blood: the artifact ricochets in the toothglare; we alter it, destroy it, fuck it, rape it, eat it, shit it out, birth it, sculpt it, and over again. the cycle is sordid but necessary for our forms of making to persist, for the phoenix to rise. and it’s true; often the real beauty squats in the violent act of cruel honesty or effort both generative and destructive, the moment of agitation with the not-now-but-later-orgasm, the unsettling snag of red lipwax on the clean canvas, the writer riding her fake dick for a word, the athlete-artist’s scribbling on the white wall’s sweep. from SFMOMA curator Benjamin Weil: “‘Drawing Restraint’ (is) predicated by a moment of focused and creative energy being the result of a physical constraint.”
you have to hold it down to get it to writhe. jesus christ, is all art just masturbation made luminous.
This is badass.
Esp like the part abt if you masturbate or have sex in the morning vs. the evening and how that changes the text.
For a while after you read at Quickies last fall, I would go in the bathroom at the Innertown Pub and think, Blake Butler probably peed in here, I wonder if he wrote on the wall.
nice, blake. that the novel-dead people are bored of their novels sounds right. just that it seems that’s everyone, one part of all our heads. i’m reminded what a nice building sfmoma is. thanks.
really? moma is one of the ugliest buildings in downtown sf.
i was there this weekend and noticed the markings underneath the platform on the top floor. i imagined it – barney’s piece – to be the writing of a maintenance worker trying to do some simple arithmatic (i saw numbers and equation signs) while his equipment scratched up the area around it. then i wondered why no one had painted over it yet.
at the juan miro museum in barcelona, in one of the last rooms, there’s a triptych of all-white panels with a sole black squiggly line painted across. sitting next to three other visitors, i stared really hard at the panels, closed my eyes, and dreamt that miro had mixed his man-milk with the white paint. mysteries are usually veiled in white, i thought, and lines are the solutions.
He shot his wife in the head. So…
haha. The architect of the Moma is from where I was living in Switzerland. Total prick. He screwed up more beautiful old builigs than I care to remember.
People who argue that the novel is dead often seem people who are scared that it might not be dead, that it might be undead, that a bunch of illegitimate writers are out writing zombie novels.
Johannes
burroughs becomes probably more relevant than ever each time there is a disaster, which is every day.
i’d like to be the fuckin wild boys.
Jack Off Journal, the journal that publishes films of writer actually, at last, jacking off in public, with their flesh.
I like the parallel strain of WSB-mythology that argues he was an assassin for the CIA (!)… how neatly this camp theory lines up with his key tropes and obsessions. I don’t buy it but I value that narrative as Folk Art.
I also think a strange cultural diff between some American readers and some German readers (I cite those two because I have the most experience with these groups, with English readers being a distant third) is that more Americans seem to *want to like* their favorite writers as *people*… or, to be more specific… need to think of their favorite writers as *good people*. Whereas a lot of the Germans I know are more likely to trust the authority (nice rich word) of a writer who is also a scoundrel.
Eg: I remember being young and trying to process the fact that Ginsberg was an active campaigner for NAMBLA. I considered “Howl” to be heroic and NAMBLA *not* (ahem) and my literary computer short-circuited over the paradox. Nowadays I just think: good poem… wouldn’t want to meet him.
That said: if WSB really *were* revealed to have been a CIA hitman, I’d be disappointed… because his imagination wouldn’t seem quite as powerful and profound and unprecedented a tool in that light. Because what blows my mind is how consistent (and self-assured) the voice is. Every time he looked through that porthole, he saw the same landscape! And that’s what blows my mind about WSB.
‘The Soft Machine’ is incredible, absolutely incredible.
Near the end of the Paris Commune some communards tried to set Notre Dame on fire, but they were stopped by a group of artists.
“i think my feelings toward the bellow quote tend with my feelings when i’m wandering a shaky part of town in the night and i hear malicious voices or there’s a sudden movement from an alleyway.”
Ever read the essay written by the black grad student who deliberately followed Bellow through the dark one night to scare the shit out of him? Not, perhaps, a constructive gambit but surely a fun one. No one would have tried that with WSB, eh? There’s some kind of writerly workshop-aphorism in there (laugh)…
WSB: great writer… possibly repulsive pal. It scares me to wonder how much he *wasn’t* making up. There is nothing of the Lie about him… but maybe he gives that impression because his skull was always so obvious.
i like it. though i haven’t seen it in a while.
To be honest, it is the best thing Botta has done. His European work is truly horrible. Well – he did 2 good buildings in Switzerland. But most of what he does isn’t good. Especially his “restorations”.
communards
One of the most unpleasant people I ever met was Gregory Corso. Also possibly the best poet.
Brendan:
My best friend’s creation myth involves his ambitious then-GF blowing PO (I’ll just use his initials, to avoid legal complications, but you’ll know who I mean)… who was, surprise, bisexual… which caused this friend to storm off, in tears, right out of the country, to live in a pension in Spain and wear hair shirts, etc. Meanwhile, his then-ex GF’s career as a poetess (and, eventually, a bestselling memoirist) was thoroughly launched. The lesson remains the same, kids! You want to *get* ahead…?
PO was a good friend of my mom’s. Lovely guy. He was bi? I thought he only slept with men. I’m shocked. If it is the PO I am thinking of, he died not long ago, so I don’t think there could be any legal complications.
I think most of the best of the Beats didn’t really do too well.
My posts go at the top, not at the bottom…why?
lotta love in this thread
This was nice and I thought of something while reading. I’m not going to share. It’s not intelligent.
really? moma is one of the ugliest buildings in downtown sf.
i was there this weekend and noticed the markings underneath the platform on the top floor. i imagined it – barney’s piece – to be the writing of a maintenance worker trying to do some simple arithmatic (i saw numbers and equation signs) while his equipment scratched up the area around it. then i wondered why no one had painted over it yet.
at the juan miro museum in barcelona, in one of the last rooms, there’s a triptych of all-white panels with a sole black squiggly line painted across. sitting next to three other visitors, i stared really hard at the panels, closed my eyes, and dreamt that miro had mixed his man-milk with the white paint. mysteries are usually veiled in white, i thought, and lines are the solutions.
He shot his wife in the head. So…
haha. The architect of the Moma is from where I was living in Switzerland. Total prick. He screwed up more beautiful old builigs than I care to remember.
I like the parallel strain of WSB-mythology that argues he was an assassin for the CIA (!)… how neatly this camp theory lines up with his key tropes and obsessions. I don’t buy it but I value that narrative as Folk Art.
I also think a strange cultural diff between some American readers and some German readers (I cite those two because I have the most experience with these groups, with English readers being a distant third) is that more Americans seem to *want to like* their favorite writers as *people*… or, to be more specific… need to think of their favorite writers as *good people*. Whereas a lot of the Germans I know are more likely to trust the authority (nice rich word) of a writer who is also a scoundrel.
Eg: I remember being young and trying to process the fact that Ginsberg was an active campaigner for NAMBLA. I considered “Howl” to be heroic and NAMBLA *not* (ahem) and my literary computer short-circuited over the paradox. Nowadays I just think: good poem… wouldn’t want to meet him.
That said: if WSB really *were* revealed to have been a CIA hitman, I’d be disappointed… because his imagination wouldn’t seem quite as powerful and profound and unprecedented a tool in that light. Because what blows my mind is how consistent (and self-assured) the voice is. Every time he looked through that porthole, he saw the same landscape! And that’s what blows my mind about WSB.
i like it. though i haven’t seen it in a while.
To be honest, it is the best thing Botta has done. His European work is truly horrible. Well – he did 2 good buildings in Switzerland. But most of what he does isn’t good. Especially his “restorations”.
communards
One of the most unpleasant people I ever met was Gregory Corso. Also possibly the best poet.
Brendan:
My best friend’s creation myth involves his ambitious then-GF blowing PO (I’ll just use his initials, to avoid legal complications, but you’ll know who I mean)… who was, surprise, bisexual… which caused this friend to storm off, in tears, right out of the country, to live in a pension in Spain and wear hair shirts, etc. Meanwhile, his then-ex GF’s career as a poetess (and, eventually, a bestselling memoirist) was thoroughly launched. The lesson remains the same, kids! You want to *get* ahead…?
PO was a good friend of my mom’s. Lovely guy. He was bi? I thought he only slept with men. I’m shocked. If it is the PO I am thinking of, he died not long ago, so I don’t think there could be any legal complications.
I think most of the best of the Beats didn’t really do too well.
My posts go at the top, not at the bottom…why?
lotta love in this thread
This was nice and I thought of something while reading. I’m not going to share. It’s not intelligent.
Awesome.
“My posts go at the top, not at the bottom…why?”
They start at the top and go to the bottom, weirdly. I, too, was once disconcerted by this effect.
Yes, PO is dead and bi. Actually, I’m afraid of litigiousness from the heroine of our story… I’m using initials because of Google.
Awesome.
Do you like Rothko, Blake? Houston is home to the Rothko Chapel as well
Oh, good post btw
Excellent post, Blake. One of my favourite ever here.
“My posts go at the top, not at the bottom…why?”
They start at the top and go to the bottom, weirdly. I, too, was once disconcerted by this effect.
Yes, PO is dead and bi. Actually, I’m afraid of litigiousness from the heroine of our story… I’m using initials because of Google.
The Rothko Chapel is one of my favorite things ever. I’m not religious but I’d worship anything there.
I really, really like this post. A lot.
I’ve been there several times. What do you like about it?
Do you like Rothko, Blake? Houston is home to the Rothko Chapel as well
Oh, good post btw
adam, thanks, i do indeed like rothko, and have been to the chapel. it is quite a nice place. i wish i lived near it, i think i have some thoughts about it i will write about soon.
thanks guys
Excellent post, Blake. One of my favourite ever here.
Oh, ok. PO wouldn’t have sued anyone anyhow I don’t think. A few of the other “beats” would though :)
Hey Blake–
An engaging post, thank you for this. I feel as though, and without leaving this thought stricken to linguistics, that quite often there is no tracing to a time in which novels were spoken of as alive; for instance, were novels more alive because those creating them were alive in the public (i.e. Mailer, Capote …) or because readers were alive? This is not to say we need a tracing either, rather this is a fundamental ailment inappropriately vetted via the spoilage in semantics. I have much trouble with those declaring the novel is dead because somehow that means the reader is dead, cannot put life into the act of holding and taking something in or is actually expecting a presence of life that is complete non-life, or is parading with a predisposition which is to somehow know what it is that makes the novel alive and well, which is why destruction is as much creation as creation. I can feel some other thoughts brewing on this yet I don’t want to delve into the novel-is-dead debate, rather comment lightly on how it was/is alive and if the reader is the one who will always make a novel alive. For, and as not to subscribe to any particular school of thought, is not the sending off of one’s own work the death of it as well, in which its arrival in another’s lap, face, pouch, ass, is thus the place for revival, some life, the life that may or may not happen depending on a reader?
-Tyler
thanks Tyler, i totally agree with you on the reader bringing their own life, and that distinction of bringing them alive in public, where the to-be-naysayers could see it for it’s every inch, and thereby feel to have understood it or verified it enough that they can interact, whereas now they seem in fear. perhaps that tendency for the reader to need to bring the life gets fluxed in ego as these people move into works they feel less capable of touching to their own life. which is why, as a reader myself, i am often most entranced with things the least my life, that are eternal puzzles, and that seems to be leaking more and more into works that feel successful, while the ones being called dead are either misunderstood, or, from a sales end, being called dead because more people want the obfuscation now and the guys who talk about it feel their egos being shaken?
Blake–
I do think that the reader-bringing-life gets thorny because of ego as well, in that allotting one’s self a place of gusto in the commune that is a person and a text, that there is too much personage around the arrival at the text, as well as with what may have been said about the work that the reader is attempting, knowingly or not, to be in line with. For instance, all the factors present or fat in the ethers of one’s approach to a text are flecks of life and thus the novel is alive until opened, perhaps; and, when opened, sometimes the shaken ego must alert the same crowd that allowed the flecks of life (through the grungy undergarments of PR) that this work itself is dead. This is a fear thing as well, and as Johannes comments perhaps the novel as undead is the thought, maybe even the core of the fear, a feeling (feeling vs. thought?).
Yet what I think you are saying about what you as a reader are entranced by is more relevant than a discussion on what is “dead,” as this novel-as-dead discussion is somewhat hedged in the same dull corner of critical impasse so long affiliated with those who would at once esteem Gaddis and Barthelme and a second later fail to elucidate what they were themselves enlivened by, thus rejecting the stuff they fear makes them so alive that they must then call it dead. Eternal puzzles are precisely that, eternal and puzzling; and puzzling, at least for thought, perhaps not emotion (everyone sucks on emotional clarity; see cinema see song see sea) is as alive as we can get, writer or reader. If not puzzling then why go outside the self for something else? What is even more wild, about how great it might just be that the novels that feel successful, as opposed to those that “are,” is that there is some communicative awe or form of what is alive, maybe an unacknowledged (acknowledging it too much would be campy, sycophantic?) interconnectedness and that itself is enough evidence that nothing is dead, except maybe everything, everyone?
p:s: Probably no better time to discuss this topic than on Cormac McCarthy’s birthday right? Talk about a writer who makes people terribly alive by constantly referencing the death and dying of every inch of our lives.
The Rothko Chapel is one of my favorite things ever. I’m not religious but I’d worship anything there.
I really, really like this post. A lot.
I’ve been there several times. What do you like about it?
yes and yes. and yes on mccarthy, i’ve taken yr inspiration here to share. thanks Tyler.
adam, thanks, i do indeed like rothko, and have been to the chapel. it is quite a nice place. i wish i lived near it, i think i have some thoughts about it i will write about soon.
thanks guys
Oh, ok. PO wouldn’t have sued anyone anyhow I don’t think. A few of the other “beats” would though :)
Hey Blake–
An engaging post, thank you for this. I feel as though, and without leaving this thought stricken to linguistics, that quite often there is no tracing to a time in which novels were spoken of as alive; for instance, were novels more alive because those creating them were alive in the public (i.e. Mailer, Capote …) or because readers were alive? This is not to say we need a tracing either, rather this is a fundamental ailment inappropriately vetted via the spoilage in semantics. I have much trouble with those declaring the novel is dead because somehow that means the reader is dead, cannot put life into the act of holding and taking something in or is actually expecting a presence of life that is complete non-life, or is parading with a predisposition which is to somehow know what it is that makes the novel alive and well, which is why destruction is as much creation as creation. I can feel some other thoughts brewing on this yet I don’t want to delve into the novel-is-dead debate, rather comment lightly on how it was/is alive and if the reader is the one who will always make a novel alive. For, and as not to subscribe to any particular school of thought, is not the sending off of one’s own work the death of it as well, in which its arrival in another’s lap, face, pouch, ass, is thus the place for revival, some life, the life that may or may not happen depending on a reader?
-Tyler
thanks Tyler, i totally agree with you on the reader bringing their own life, and that distinction of bringing them alive in public, where the to-be-naysayers could see it for it’s every inch, and thereby feel to have understood it or verified it enough that they can interact, whereas now they seem in fear. perhaps that tendency for the reader to need to bring the life gets fluxed in ego as these people move into works they feel less capable of touching to their own life. which is why, as a reader myself, i am often most entranced with things the least my life, that are eternal puzzles, and that seems to be leaking more and more into works that feel successful, while the ones being called dead are either misunderstood, or, from a sales end, being called dead because more people want the obfuscation now and the guys who talk about it feel their egos being shaken?
Blake–
I do think that the reader-bringing-life gets thorny because of ego as well, in that allotting one’s self a place of gusto in the commune that is a person and a text, that there is too much personage around the arrival at the text, as well as with what may have been said about the work that the reader is attempting, knowingly or not, to be in line with. For instance, all the factors present or fat in the ethers of one’s approach to a text are flecks of life and thus the novel is alive until opened, perhaps; and, when opened, sometimes the shaken ego must alert the same crowd that allowed the flecks of life (through the grungy undergarments of PR) that this work itself is dead. This is a fear thing as well, and as Johannes comments perhaps the novel as undead is the thought, maybe even the core of the fear, a feeling (feeling vs. thought?).
Yet what I think you are saying about what you as a reader are entranced by is more relevant than a discussion on what is “dead,” as this novel-as-dead discussion is somewhat hedged in the same dull corner of critical impasse so long affiliated with those who would at once esteem Gaddis and Barthelme and a second later fail to elucidate what they were themselves enlivened by, thus rejecting the stuff they fear makes them so alive that they must then call it dead. Eternal puzzles are precisely that, eternal and puzzling; and puzzling, at least for thought, perhaps not emotion (everyone sucks on emotional clarity; see cinema see song see sea) is as alive as we can get, writer or reader. If not puzzling then why go outside the self for something else? What is even more wild, about how great it might just be that the novels that feel successful, as opposed to those that “are,” is that there is some communicative awe or form of what is alive, maybe an unacknowledged (acknowledging it too much would be campy, sycophantic?) interconnectedness and that itself is enough evidence that nothing is dead, except maybe everything, everyone?
p:s: Probably no better time to discuss this topic than on Cormac McCarthy’s birthday right? Talk about a writer who makes people terribly alive by constantly referencing the death and dying of every inch of our lives.
yes and yes. and yes on mccarthy, i’ve taken yr inspiration here to share. thanks Tyler.
[…] over at HTMLGIANT, Blake Butler posted about Matthew Barney’s drawing restraints. The only thing I really know […]