(Robert Walser, dead in the snow. Not sure off the top of my head who this photo is by; I found it here, discussed by J. M. Coetzee here.)
((From Maira Kalman’s blog at The New York Times. Times Select only, sorry.)
Archive for the 'correspondences' Category
Man Ray, Enough Rope, 1944 (currently on show at the VBH Building on Madison Avenue, with the rest of the photos that Man Ray donated to the Venice Biennale)
Eva Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece), 1970 (currently on show at the Jewish Museum)
are these ones from some college:
There’s something about the chains of logic evident in these little narratives that I love: the weird defeatism which reminds me so much of the little stories of Robert Walser, like this one:
The Robber
A pretty woman loved a robber. She was rich, gave parties. Of him it can be supposed that he lived in a hut.
She wore loafers as well as high-heel shoes, and she thought well of him because he was brave, and fair match for hundreds. What an interesting affair.
She had a cage full of lions and tigers and tubs full of snakes. What had he got? Countless sins on his conscience. But at least he wasn’t dull. That decided it.
His overcoat was threadbare enough, it’s true, but she went about with unbelievable chic.
They met partly in the mountains, partly at the railway station. He consigned all his loot to her by bank draft.
Sometimes he’d visit her, and on such occasions he wore an impeccable suit. His behavior was always very polite.
He read Stendhal, she read Nietzsche. This is no place for explanations, even if requests come in for an entire year.
She never permitted intimacies. Their relations remained platonic, and rightly so, for otherwise she’d have lost his spirit of enterprise.
He was a Napoleon! And she? A Catherine the Great, perhaps? Not in the least.
She was the proprietor of a grocery who had three children, and our robber was a decent, reasonable young man, who was in love with the little woman, came into her little shop now and then and chatted with her.
The tigers and lions, the polished bootees, dazzling parties, the impeccable suits, the hundreds he was a fair match for, the relationship full of sacrifice, the whistlings, signals, and shaggy hair, are figures of fantasy.
The person who hatched them now glances at the dial and things it is time to get up from his desk and go for a little walk.
(October 1921: Das Tage-Buch. SW 18.)
(p.32 in Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose: writings 1912–1932, trans. Christopher Middleton.)
Raymond Roussel, author of L’Étoile au front.
Marcel Duchamp’s tonsure de 1919.
The color’s pretty ferociously botched on this (good job, MoMA): František Kupka’s Study in Verticals (The Cathedral), pastel on colored paper, 1912. In MoMA’s current drawing show.
Kukpa, Reminiscence of a Cathedral, oil on canvas, 1922–23. At the diacritically-challenged Art Institute of Chicago, turned up while looking for a better version of the MoMA drawing.
Stereolab, “Enivrez-Vous” (3:51, 5.1Mb), from Peng!, 1992.
Baudelaire’s“Enivrez-vous” (1869), in translation by, hmmm, Aleister Crowley:
One must always be drunk.
Everything lies in that; it is the only question worth considering. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce – but with what?
With wine, poetry, art? As you will; but intoxicate yourself.
And if sometimes upon the steps of a palace, or upon the green grass of a moat, or in the sad solitude of your own room, you awake – intoxication already diminished or disappeared – ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that groans, of all that rolls, of all that sings, of all that speaks – ask, what time is it? And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer you, “It is time to intoxicate yourself.” In order to escape from the slavish martyrdom of time, intoxicate yourself; unceasingly intoxicate yourself; with wine, or poetry, or art – as you will.
Dead Can Dance, “Anywhere Out Of The World” (5:05, 7Mb), from Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun, 1987.
Baudelaire’s “N’importe où hors du monde”, translated by Francis Scarfe:
Anywhere out of the World
This life is a hospital, in which the sick are all obsessed with the desire for a change of bed. One would like to suffer in front of the stove; another imagines he would recover, were he near the window.
It seems to me that I would always feel well wherever I don’t happen to be, and this question of a change of domicile is one which Iam forever discussing with my soul.
“Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think of living in Lisbon? it must be warm there, you would soon be as merry as a lizard. It’s a town on the waterfront; they say it’s built of marble, and that its inhabitants have such a horror of plants that they uproot all the trees. There’s a landscape after your taste – a landscape made entirely of light and mineral, with water to reflect them.”
My soul offers no reply.
“Since you are so fond of rest and quiet, so long as you have some movement to watch, would you like to go and live in Holland, that land which fills one with bliss? perhaps you will find plenty to interest you in that country whose image you have often admired in art galleries. What about Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships berthed right beside the houses?”
My soul remains silent.
“Perhaps you would find Batavia more to your liking? There, incidently, we would find the spirit of Europe wedded to tropical beauty.”
Not a word. – Can my soul be dead?
“Have you reached such a state of torpor that you enjoy your suffering? If so, then let us escape to those countries which are the counterparts of death. I have exactly what you are looking for, my poor soul! We’ll pack our bags for Torneo. Let’s go even farther – to the extreme end of the Baltic – or even farther from life, if you like – let’s set up house at the North Pole! There the sun only obliquely skims the earth, and the slow alternation of light and dark cuts out variety and enhances the monotony, which is half of Nothingness itself. There we can take long baths of darkness, while for our entertainment the Aurora Borealis will offer us its rosy sheaves from time to time, like reflections of a firework-display in Hell.”
At last my soul erupts and cries out, in its wisdom: “Anywhere! – so long as it is out of this world!”
Marcel Duchamp’s cover for André Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946):
The cover of the first American edition of Michel Butor’s Mobile (1963), designed by Janet Halverson:
(I would have a better image of that, but there doesn’t seem to be one on the Internet and thieves stole the scanner cable, so the phone & Photoshop will have to do. Alas.)
One would imagine that someone would have similarly made a splendid cover for Kafka’s Amerika of the Statue of Liberty holding a sword aloft, but the closest one I can find is the New Directions cover by Gilda Kuhlman:
But the best cover for Amerika that I could find is the poster for this French theatrical version of the novel, which captures more of the novel’s spirit:
(representative still from Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó)
(Anselm Kiefer’s Böhmen liegt am Meer)
“Bohemia Lies by the Sea”
Are these houses green, I once more enter a house.
Are these bridges safe, to walk I have good ground.
All loving effort lost for ever, I lose it happily.
lf not I myself then someone else as good as I.
lf here a word adjoins to me, I let it join.
If Bohemia lies still on the sea, I believe the seas.
And if I believe in the sea, I still can hope for land.
lf it’s I myself it’s everyone just as much as I.
I have no wishes any more. I wish to run aground.
Aground – towards the sea, to find Bohemia.
Wrecked, I wake up peacefully.
I have grounded my belief and shall be lost no longer.
Come here, you from Bohemia, sailors, whores, and ships
without a staying. Won’t you be Bohemians, you Illyrians, Veronese
Venetians. Play those comedies to make us laugh
Before we cry. Go wrong a hundred times
as I went wrong and always failed examinations,
yet I passed them all, each and every time.
Passed them like Bohemia which one fine day
was relieved down to the sea and now lies on the shore.
Still I adjoin to a word and to another country,
and ever more adjoin to all there is however slightly,
Come from Bohemia here, a vagrant, who has nothing, whom nothing keeps,
gifted with vision to see from the sea-struggle land of my choice.
(Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. Peter Filkins)
(Gerhard Richter, Mailand: Dom, 1964)
(Gerhard Richter, Domplatz - Mailand, 1968)
(from Google Earth)
requisite poem:
“Milan Cathedral”
Through light green haze, a rolling sea
Over gardens where redundance flows,
The fat old plain of Lombardy,
The White Cathedral shows.
Of Art the miracles
Its tribe of pinnacles
Gleam like to ice-peaks snowed; and higher,
Erect upon each airy spire
In concourse without end,
Statues of saints over saints ascend
Like multitudinous forks of fire.
What motive was the master-builder’s here?
Why these synodic hierarchies given,
Sublimely ranked in marble sessions clear,
Except to signify the host of heaven.
(Herman Melville, from Timoleon, 1891)