reading looking smelling thinking

Currently reading or recently have read:

Sunny Wednesday by Noelle Kocot
Helsinki by Peter Richards
Livingdying by Cid Corman
Poem Stripped of Artifice by Mark Lamoureux
My Body and I by René Crevel

And very much feeling
the vibe of Ursula von Rydingsvard's exhibit at the DeCordova, which I've visited twice to see (each time with toddler in tow, so I need to go again I think).

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bowl with Fingers, 2007–2008
cedar

These sculptures are intoxicating -- the smell of the cedar and the organic forms initially remind me a bit of Bataille's idea of the informe*, which he used to describe the way ideas in the abstract escape formal limits (though it has obvious material & formal reference points). I think in a way scent actually touches the idea of the informe more than the forms of the sculptures themselves, which oddly, through repetition, become rather formal. But the scent of the cedar puts these pieces in a more primitive realm, non-visual, formless, airy, so that I feel myself at an intersection of form and formlessness. They evoke "a life of sensations," formless in that the experience of sensation escapes the rigorous limits of categories.

*". . . un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce qu'il désigne n'a ses droits dans aucun (sic) sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l'univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n'a pas d'autre but: il s'agit de donner un redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirmer que l' univers ne ressemble à rien et n'est qu' informe revient à dire que l'univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat." Georges Bataille: "Informe." Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 382. (Radical Art)