a chatterer and a thief

“Marcel Duchamp was quick to recognize that the artist moves from the margins of society to the centre. He always resisted becoming ‘bëte comme un peintre’ – ‘stupid like a painter’ – and understood art as an attempt to school his intellect. For Duchamp, the artist is highly integrated into society, so that, after his or her emancipation from the commission and the patron, he or she is positively obliged to pursue the education and expansion of his intellect. Quite rightly, Duchamp insisted on being more than just a chatterer and a thief in an artist’s smock, because he saw himself confronted with a society that pursued the exploitative logic of capitalism and therefore dwelled in intellectual homelessness.”

(Florian Waldvogel, from “Each One Teach One”, p. 22 in Dexter Sinister’s Notes for an Art School.)

various things

  • Scottish indie label Chemikal Underground present Ballads of the Book, a collection with lyrics by Scottish poets, including Alasdair Gray (who also provides the artwork) & Edwin Morgan.
  • Late notice: there’s a Circumference-sponsored reading of Slovenian poetry tonight at Columbia. Slovenian and American poets Aleš Debeljak, Brain Henry, Tomaž Šalamun, and Andrew Zawacki will read their poetry and discuss translation. Tuesday 6 March, 7:30 pm, Columbia University School of the Arts, 2960 Broadway at 116th St, Dodge Hall, Room 413.
  • Also: there’s a Circumference 5 launch reading in Amherst this Sunday. Jonathan Bolton reads Czech, Elliott Colla reads Arabic, Krista Ingebretson reads Spanish, and Dara Wier reads some of her homophonic translations. Sunday 11 March, 3 pm, Jones Library, 43 Amity St, 3rd floor, Amherst, Massachusetts.
  • Scanned issues of German magazine Simplicissimus (1896–1944) in PDF format, noted here.

a blessing in disguise

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you”
You must come to me, all golden and place
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

(John Ashbery, from Rivers and Mountains, 1967. Recording from 1966 here from Giorno Poetry Systems’s Biting off the Tongue of a Corpse, 1975.)

learning to see

“In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action to the audience. ‘Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,’ he would declaim. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!’

It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography (as in Méliès’s films), the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality of what we saw.”

(Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, p. 32–33.)