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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)

Bashing Surrealism

I'm cross-posting this comment here. It's in response to a post Josef Horáček’s made on Montevidayo, probably the most consistently provocative, weird, hilarious, frustrating, interesting poetry-culture-critique blogs I know of.

Here's the original post.

Here's my response:

I’m three days late to the party and now the discussion seems almost over, but I was really irked by the original post and have to chime in. As I see it, the problem with Josef’s post is that he’s only talking about one strand of surrealism, that of the 1924 manifesto (where Breton defines the movement primarily as psychic automatism). Not only do Breton’s definitions of surrealism mutate with each of his polemics, but the practice itself mutates with each offshoot group that wiggles away from Parisian surrealism. Surrealism is this every evolving freak show that’s hardly limited to automatic writing—by the 1930s Breton even admitted automatic writing was a failure (see his essay “The Automatic Message”). Then, to condemn surrealism as a sexist cult of feminine beauty is simplistic—there is certainly a pervasive hetro-normatively glorification of the female body, but this is only a fraction of the surrealist pursuit (probably the most well known because, well, boobs get publicity). But what about these touch points: collage, juxtapositional imagery, the absurd, black humor, paranoiac critical / frottage imagery, dream narrative, objective chance, convulsive beauty, etc.? All of these practices, along with automatism and the simultaneous valorization and interrogation of love & desire, flow in and out of the ever-mutating nexus of activity called “surrealism.” You’re condemning one rivulet of an unwieldy river.

Or consider this passage from Arcane 17, which, in 1945, seems utterly prophetic: “The time has come to valorize woman’s ideas at the expense of those of man, whose failure has come to a rather stormy consummation in our time. In particular, it is the artist’s task… to give the greatest priority to everything that comes from the feminine system of the world, as opposed to the masculine, and, even better, to appropriate to his own jealousy defended use everything which distinguishes woman from man with respect to appreciation and volition.” Okay, we can condemn Breton for operating on a simple masculine-feminine duality, but at least he’s tipping the scale in another direction.

Josef also calls Surrealism’s relationship to Marxism arbitrary. I’d say it was ambivalent, but Breton was attracted to Marxism because of the dialectic. One of the most consistent aims of Breton’s notion of surrealism was to overcome the constraints of binary thinking. “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” (2nd manifesto) It’s Marx through the Hegelian dialectic that interested Breton – not to mention an utter scorn for the social order of his day (thus the flirtation with communism & anarchy). This “opposition to opposites” fits very well with Johannes emphasis on the kitsch problem—surrealism constantly and emphatically overwhelms the tidy distinctions between high and low art (not to mention genres, etc).

As for Perloff’s new book, I haven’t read it yet. But I think that if she really does expel surrealism from venerable canon of the historical avant-garde, a surrealist would say “splendid–get us out of here, away from these stinking artists!”– the last thing surrealism wanted (and this is sad in the end) was to be academically historicized and locked up in museums and libraries along with all the other literary and art movements. Art was only a means to an end for surrealism.

Sorry to be all long-winded and quote-happy, but I think there’s been too much thoughtless (or at least groundless) bashing here.

Bookshelf

I've got my nose in too many books right now. These are them:

Andrew Motion's Keats
Brad Leining's We Are Doomed: Dispatches from the City of the Future
Dean Young's Fall Higher
Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor
John Yau's Paradiso Diaspora

that inn(en)ervation of the heart

"Poetry is a magnetic innervation of the heart, which the being of Gérard Nerval kept all his life a cavern, one of the principle transmitting caverns of a void where all poetry is remade."

I have always loved this sentence which comes from a letter Artaud drafted but never sent to Georges LeBreton. I realized recently, however, that I've always misread "innervation" as "enervation."

Briefly, the OED tells us that innervation is "The action or process of innervating; the fact of being innervated; supply of nerve-force from a nerve-centre to some organ or part by means of nerves; stimulation of some organ by its nerves. Also, the supply of nerve fibres to, or disposition of nerve fibres within, an organ or part."

Meanwhile, a search for the the verb "enervate" pulls up several meanings--including obsolete usages to describe the literal cutting of tendons from animals. Here's the more common meaning, though, and one that plays nicely off Artaud's line: " To weaken mentally or morally; to destroy the capacity of (a person, a community, etc.) for vigorous effort of intellect or will. Said esp. of the effects of luxury or sloth. Also, to destroy or impair the vigour of (sentiments, expressions, etc.)."

If Artaud had meant enervate, would he have been channeling Baudelaire? Or rather, am I channeling Baudelaire in my misreading?

Reading at Outpost 186

Tomorrow night (3/24) I'll be reading at Outpost 186 in Cambridge (Inman Square) with James Shea and Sandra Lim as part of the Small Animal Project series. YOU SHOULD COME.

Urban Downhill Bike Race

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

Reading at Le Poisson Rouge

No that's not in France, it's in New York City. I'll be reading there as part of the InDigest 1207 Series this Sunday evening (3/20) at 7 PM with Jena Osman, Laird Hunt, & Melissa Broder. Details here (note my hilariously outdated bio--not my doing!). Swim on over if you can.

Do you wish to be right?

Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual resolved on practicing what was earlier called philosophy, than to wish, in discussion, and one might almost say in argumentation, to be right. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of that spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
-Adorno, Minima Moralia

Consenus Reality

I do not advocate unquestioned consensus reality.

What's in your brain?

un monstre montre son cerveau de verre calciné
voilà la vérité qui s'échappe au salut cordial

a monster shows his calcined glass brain
the truth that eludes cordial greetings

-Tzara, "Cinéma Calendrier du Cœur Abstrait Maisons"

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

A monocle can do so many things for you. Provide focus. Magnify objects. Isolate an eye. Make the other eye feel left out. Flex your brow muscles. Make the monocled eye feel inferior. Create an image of distinction. Frighten away the creditors. Convey thoughtfulness. Serve as a model space craft. Glimmer. Start a fire. Mirror the face. Excuse a squint. Aid the brow's furrowing. Skew the face.

First Circle

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
-Emerson, "Circles"