this page is the final print, music added

“Because a novel – these words – is shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added. But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then be me, me all alone as I submit to the weight, the atmospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this bug lummox I didn’t really know, myself. It was as though I’d been forced into solitary confinement with a stranger who had unaccountable tastes, aversions, rhythms.”

(Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, pp. 176–7.)

may 11–may 13

Books

  • Paul Metcalf, Mountaineers Are Always Free
  • John Ruskin, Præterita (and Dilecta)
  • Erik Anderson Reece, A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport
  • Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Films

  • Gold Diggers of 1935, directed by Busby Berkeley
  • Gasherbrum – Der leuchtende Berg (The Dark Glow of the Mountains), dir. Werner Herzog
  • Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten (Ballad of the Little Soldier), dir. Werner Herzog
  • Massnahmen gegen Fanatiker (Precautions against Fanatics), dir. Werner Herzog

Exhibits

  • “D.I.Y.”, Maya Stendhal Gallery
  • “Black & White”, Stellan Holm Gallery
  • “Alice Neel: Selected Works”, David Zwirner
  • “Charles Ray: Ink Line, Moving Wire, Spinning Spot”, Matthew Marks
  • “Momus with Aki Sasamoto: Love is the End of Art”, Zack Feuer Gallery

oh ruskin

“225. In blaming myself, as often I have done, and may have occasion to do again, for my want of affection to other people, I must also express continually, as I think back about it, more and more wonder that ever anybody had any affection for me. I thought they might as well have got fond of a camera-lucida or an ivory foot-rule: all my faculty was merely in showing that such and such things were so; I was no orator, no actor, no painter but in a minute and generally invisible manner and I couldn’t bear being interrupted in anything I was about.

Nevertheless, some sensible grown-up people did get to like me! – the best of them with a protective feeling that I wanted guidance no less than sympathy; and the higher religious souls, hoping to lead me to the golden gates.”

(John Ruskin, Præterita, Volume II, Chapter XII, p. 405 in the Everyman’s edition.)

the civil and jovial character of the piglings so nurtured

“162. I must not, however, anticipate of this eventful history so far as to discuss at present any manner of the resemblance in my fate, or work, or home companionship to those of St Anthony of Padua; but may record, as immediately significant, the delight which both my mother and I took in the possession of a really practical pigstye in our Danish farmyard, (the coach-house and stables being to us of no importance in comparison); the success with which my mother directed the nurture, and fattening, of the piglings; the civil and jovial character of the piglings so nurtured, indicated especially by their habit of standing in a row on their hind-legs to look over the fence, whenever my mother came into the yard: and conclusively by the satisfaction with which even our most refined friends would accept a present of pork – or it might be, alas! sometimes of sucking pig – from Denmark Hill.”

(John Ruskin, Præterita, Volume II, Chapter VIII, p. 346 in the Everyman’s edition.)

the perils of biography

“When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ theory of history, so called after Pascal’s remark in the Pensées: ‘Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would have changed.’ The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.

Despite this injunction, a remarkable amount of the history of science has been written through the medium of biographies of ‘great’ scientists to whose brilliant discoveries we owe our understanding of the material world, and this historical methodology has reinforced the common notion that history is made by outstanding individuals. No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as ‘Newton’s Laws,’ the general regularities of simple inheritance as ‘Mendelism,’ and the science of biological evolution as ‘Darwinism.’ Even the famous history of science written by the Marxist J.D. Bernal is a recounting of the discoveries and inventions of individuals.

It would be wrong to say that biography is the sole, or even principal, present pathway into an understanding of the history of science. Certainly since Robert Merton’s founding of modern studies of the sociology of science in his 1938 work on seventeenth-century English science, the social milieu in which the problems of science arise and the institutional structure of scientific investigation have been central to our understanding of the history of scientific work. There are, however, occasions on which there are orgies of idolatrous celebrations of the lives of famous men, when the Suetonian ideal of history as biography overwhelms us. For Darwinians, 2009 is such a year.”

(Richard Lewontin, from “Why Darwin?” in the NYRB.)

may 1–may 6

Books

  • Josh Glenn, ed., Hermenaut 15: Fake Authenticity
  • Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life, trans. Taro Nettleton
  • Robert Creeley, Words
  • Dick Higgins, Legends & Fishnets
  • Damion Searls, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
  • Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor
  • Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch

Exhibits

  • “Nicolas Carone, Abstraction/Figuration: works on paper”, Lohin Geduld Gallery

Films

  • Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

what are legends a clarification

[display_podcast]

(Dick Higgins, pp. 11–17 in Legends & Fishnets; this piece written Autumn 1959, first published in 1960 by Bern Porter as a pamphlet. Back cover copy:

Must a story consist only of what is told? Or can it also lie in the language? Or in the interplay among the ideas and images embodied in the words?

In Legends & Fishnets Dick Higgins sets out to use a whole bevy of unorthodox means of narrative. The legending idea is simply that the image of a person or thing can be reverberated in the mind to ad to its statue – the man or woman may be small, but the shadow can be huge. These stories are told in terms of the shadows and afterimages of the subject. Higgins’s interest in this process is not a recent one – some of the stories were begun as early at 1957, and they were written off and on until 1970. The use of assemblages of participles (and its implicit avoidance of the verb to be) produces a strongly visual effect, heightened by very concrete language. The principle at work is William Carlos Williams’s formula “No idea but in things!” more than some development out of Gertrude Stein’s concept of the continuous present, which these pieces superficially resemble in some ways, and to which Higgins feels sympathetic but unrelated. This the reader will discover when he comes up against Higgins’s emphasis on moral principle (in the lineage of Emerson) and interest in all stages of the time process, not just the present as with Stein.

These stories cover a full range of expression – from the farcical (“Sandals and Stars”) to the comic (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”) to the nostalgic (“Ivor a Legend”) to the lyrical (“Women, like horses”) and more. If the expression is heightened by the form, then the form is justified. And it is here, on this assumption, that Higgins has hung his hat.

Legends & Fishnets was published by Unpublished Editions in 1976; one notes that Higgins was republishing Gertrude Stein’s work from 1966 to 1973.)

april 26–april 30

Books

  • Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), Natural History: a selection, ed. & trans. John F. Healy
  • Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
  • Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

Films

  • Anvil! The Story of Anvil, directed by Sacha Gervasi
  • Dames, dir. Ray Enright