Monthly Archives: March 2006
similarity
“One stone is like another and a corkscrew is like another corkscrew. The resemblance between stones is natural and involuntary; between manufactured objects it is artificial and deliberate. The fact that all corkscrews are the same is a consequence of their significance: they are objects that have been manufactured for the purpose of drawing corks; the similarity between stones has no inherent significance. At least this is the modern attitude to nature. It hasn’t always been the case. Roger Callois points out that certain Chinese artists selected stones because they found them fascinating and turned them into works of art by the simple act of engraving or painting their name on them. The Japanese also collected stones and, as they were more ascetic, preferred them not to be too beautiful, strange, or unusual; they chose ordinary round stones. To look for stones for their difference and to look for them for their similarity are not separate acts; they both affirm that nature is the creator. To select one stone among a thousand is equivalent to giving it a name. Guided by the principle of analogy, man gives names to nature; each name is a metaphor: Rocky Mountains, Red Sea, Hells Canyon, Eagles Rest. The name – or the signature of the artist – causes the place – or the stone – to enter the world of names, or, in other words, into the sphere of meanings. The act of Duchamp uproots the object from its meaning and makes an empty skin of the name: a bottlerack without bottles. The Chinese artist affirms his identity with nature; Duchamp, his irreducible separation from it. The act of the former is one of elevation or praise; that of the latter, a criticism. For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. The Chinese artist follows this idea to its ultimate conclusion: he selects a stone and signs it. He inscribes his name on a piece of creation and his signature is an act of recognition – Duchamp selects a manufactured object; he inscribes his name as an act of negation and his gesture is a challenge.”
(Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner, pp. 25–26)
the golden age of the blurb
From the dust jacket copy of Edwin Denby’s Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich (1972; reissued as Scream in a Cave):
Ron Padgett says: “Edwin Denby’s Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich is as charming and pleasurable for me to read as an adult as The Hardy Boys series was when I was a boy. He is one of the best writers in America.”
Anne Waldman says: “Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich is a pure, authentic 30’s novel – suspense, humor, melodrama, adventure, what you will. It will make you drag your own cookies. I can’t put it down.”
The only thing better than this is W. H. Auden’s blurb for John Ashbery & James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies (1975):
My! What a pleasant surprise to read a novel in which there is not a single bedroom scene . . . there are, to be sure, some scenes of violence, but the violence is meteorological: the characters can hardly go anywhere without encountering torrential rains. More extraordinary still, though many of them live in suburbia, they all seem, believe it or not, to be happy, and, though sometimes bitchy, actually to like each other . . . A NEST OF NINNIES is a pastoral . . . it took Messrs. Ashbery and Schuyler several years to write. Their patience and artistry have been well rewarded. I am convinced their book is destined to become a minor classic.
locus solus industries 007/008/009
A set of three t-shirts this time out, allowing the wearer to select the appropriate tense of capitalist panic:
Marx & Engels never had so many choices, lucky them.
commodities update
So I received in the mail last Friday two copies of Timoleon from Lulu (previously described here). They are not lovely. Here is what went wrong with them. First, problems with Lulu:
- The spine. Predictably for such a thin book, some of the spine text bleeds onto the front cover. I did follow the Lulu directions precisely and added some room for bleed, but maybe not enough; one odd thing is that the author name & title, which are at the top of the spine, are correctly placed, while the press name, at the bottom, seems to be slightly on the front cover. Maybe the covers were slightly tilted? A bit odd.
- The covers. These are glossy, not matte. Glossy covers look cheap and make the design look like garbage. In addition, there seem to be some bubbles in the gloss; one copy’s slightly worse than the others. The color looks fine, despite being four-color; the separations are okay.
- The binding. This isn’t great, in no small part because it’s a 64-page book. But: the glue’s rather uneven, and there are noticeable extra dollops of glue between the covers and the first and last page.
- Interior paper stock. The covers (and the inside front & back covers, covers 2 & 3) are on bright white stock. This is good. The interiors are distinctly off-white: maybe they’re parchment colored? So the first and the last spread (where you see the inside front cover and the title page, for example) look abysmal. Why would they do this? I don’t know.
Second, design issues that were entirely my fault:
- The copyright page. Why on earth is this in such large type? I don’t know.
- The table of contents. This is also too large, though this isn’t quite as grievous an issue.
- Two-page poems. An aesthetic improvement: when possible, I’ve pulled down the text on the second page so its start position is parallel with the text of the first page.
- Typos. At least one prominent one. Still haven’t effectively proof-read this.
- Messed-up grids. For some reason, everything had been snapping to 0p6 grids when the text was all set to a 1p0 grid. This probably made things more difficult than they needed to be.
So: a second printing has been published on Lulu. Unfortunately: you don’t seem to be able to change the glossy covers or the creme-colored papers, though maybe I’ve missed something?
In addition: new and improved electronic version (PDF, 308kb) with above improvements and exciting new PDF table of contents & hyperlinks etc., which should have been there in the first edition but weren’t for whatever reason.
Also: an electronic version (PDF, 288kb) of Tender Buttons, which for some reason I never got around to putting up.
for once, the times has an interesting editorial page
Today: Madhur Jaffrey and Slavoj Žižek.
stein/duchamp
“I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everybody loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris that when any american arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel. Once Gertrude Stein went to see Braque, just after the war, and going into the studio in which there happened just then to be three young americans, she said to Braque, and how is Marcelle. The three young americans came up to her breathlessly and said, have you seen Marcel. She laughed, and having become accustomed to the inevitableness of the american belief that there was only one Marcel, she explained that Braque’s wife was named Marcelle and it was Marcelle Braque about whom she was enquiring.”
(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 795)
duchamp/stein
“CABANNE: So it’s your moral position, more than your work, which was irritating?
DUCHAMP: There again, I had no position. I’ve been a little like Gertrude Stein. To a certain group, she was considered an interesting writer, with very original things . . .
CABANNE It’s a form of comparison between people of that period. By that, I mean that there are people in every period who aren’t ‘in.’ No one’s bothered by it. Whether I had been in or not, it would have been all the same. It’s only now, forty years later, that we discover things had happened forty years before that might have bothered some people – but they couldn’t have cared less then!”
(Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, p. 17)
dali, not sounding like dali
“In Paris, in the early days, there were 17 people who understood the “readymades” – the very rare readymades by Marcel Duchamp. Nowadays there are 17 million who understand them, and that one day, when all objects that exist are considered readymades, there will be no readymades at all. Then Originality will become the artistic Work, produced convulsively by the artist by hand.”
(Salvador Dali, “L’Échecs, c’est moi”, preface to Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett.)
italian politics & the media
Some odd things happening there: