THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO THE SCIENCE TEACHERS
OF AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS
(from Kenneth Gangemi’s Corroboree.)
Category Archives: commonplace
glitch manifesto
“To the already turgid field of small press publications add:
GLITCH
Glitch—noun— a natural phenomenon
which cannot be explained
by current scientific theories.
A few comments.
We make the history, chorology, mythology of the continent. All of us. Whatever pretensions motivate this magazine, I hope they can be summed up in this quotation from Pound, Canto XCVI—
If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.
Detail. Spans of attention. The periodicity of insight measuring the continent, the culture, the conditions of life. And each work of art a klystron not a kludge.
The editorial perspective revolves, suggests a center. We respond to exemplary activity— Walt Whitman dressing wounds, Louis Agassiz observing the nature of a glacier, Ezra Pound incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s asylum, or Lorine Niedecker in Wisconsin. Such activity suggests the editorial stance.
A little more. A magazine is a front. In two sense. Military. Meteorological. The small press can be more than an alternative to big publishing houses. It can serve as an orientation within confusion. Certain lines must be drawn, contours made discernible, tactical strategies followed with the aims high, aims to overcome the here-and-now of the markets. Force the big publishing houses to turn to us for direction, if they will not market our work. The stance can be political, cultural, even ephemeral. A certain group of people is periodically defined by a system of high or low pressure. And whether the result is a mild April shower or a raging hurricane, the point is that there is something happening which we can respond to—
A PRECIPITATION:”
(From Glitch 1, edited by Paul McDonough and Jane McGriff; undated, but probably 1978? There doesn’t seem to be much on the internet about this little magazine, which seems to have lasted until issue 4/5, published in 1981.)
when to keep something hidden
“No, he realized, it was not a conversation it would be wise to have with a bishop. He thought about going to another faith, Catholicism perhaps, and confessing, but at least with his own Church he knew when to keep something hidden. In another religion, there would be no context. He could get himself into serious trouble.”
(Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain, p. 75.)
disclosure
“. . . since in America curiosity counts as a social grace. Tina was highly evasive in answering me, since in Europe satisfying curiosity of my sort counts as a betrayal. Americans serve themselves and their friends up as stories, laced with pathos and spiced with scandal, the dish piping hot on demand. A European discloses himself, if that word can be used to suggest a series of locks opening and shutting, the whole slow and cautious. For an American a confidence is an ice-breaker and we describe our grandmother’s suicide with the same desire to appear amiable that a European employs in commenting on the unseasonably warm weather. We forget what we’ve told to whom, whereas Europeans tremble and go pale when they decide to reveal something personal. In Europe an avowal counts as a precious sign of commitment; in America it maounts to nothing more than a how-do-you-do.”
(Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony, p. 87.)
duchamp/roussel/chess
“In [Percy] Rainford’s original photography, Duchamp is seated at a desk, seen in profile with his face slightly overlapping a chessboard propped up against the wall. The chesmen are attached (glued?) to the board to illustrate the endgame developed by French avant-garde poet and playwright Raymond Roussel, who is considered one of Duchamp’s most important influences. [Frederick] Kiesler’s understanding of the importance of Roussel’s work for Duchamp’s creative process is evidenced by the inscription he added on the reverse of fold-out pages, ‘Marcel D.—born 1887—artiste-inventeur‘ and ‘R. Roussel—born 1877—artiste-inventeur,’ with symbols of the black and white kings positioned respictively nevxt to each name. While Kiesler, who was a keen chess player and frequent opponent of Duchamp, was surely familiar with his friend’s feelings about Roussel, Linda Henderson has suggested that the architect’s clear parallel between these two revolutionaries was drawn ‘undoubtedly with Duchamp’s help.’ At the far end of the flap on the left side of Kiesler’s triptych, the phrase ‘Fous, Cavaliers et Rois‘ (‘Fools, Knights and Kings’) is printed, along with small drawings of a jester and a knight. This was an appropriate use of chess characters on Kiesler’s part to summarize the multi-dimensional careers of Duchamp and Roussel.”
(Bradley Bailey, “Passionate Pastimes,” in Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, p. 77)
chess beats art: the end of the blindman
“We do not have a record of any games played by Duchamp during these early years in New York, but, in Rongwrong, a magazine he edited that came out in only a single issue, he published the transcription of a game played between his friends Henri-Pierre Roché and Francis Picabia. The stakes were high: if Roché won, Picabia would have to stop publishing 391, a journal that had come out in four prior issues; if Picabia won, Roché would have to cease the publication of The Blindman, a review that had appeared only twice. After thirty-four moves in an unorthodox but interesting game, Roché resigned, and Blindman ceased publication.”
(Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, p. 10.)
dissimulation
“It seems to me that all of these attitudes, however different their sources, testify to the ‘closed’ nature of our reactions to the world around us or to our fellows. But our mechanisms of defense and self-preservation are not enough, and therefore we make use of dissimulation, which is almost habitual with us. It does not increase our passivity; on the contrary, it demands an active inventiveness and must reshape itself from one moment to another. We tell lies for the mere pleasure of it, like all imaginative people, but we also tell lies to hide ourselves and to protect ourselves from intruders. Lying plays a decisive role in our daily lives, our politics, our love-affairs and our friendships, and since we attempt to deceive ourselves as well as others, our lies are brilliant and fertile, not like the gross inventions of other peoples. Lying is a tragic game in which we risk a part of our very selves. Hence it is pointless to denounce it.
The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-create, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretense is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbors, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be. . . .”
(Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp, pp. 40–1.)
what is a designer?
“The designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him by the society in which he lives, because he knows his job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.”
(Bruno Munari, Design as Art, trans. Patrick Creagh, p. 32.)
cf. Apollinaire on Duchamp:
“Just as a work by Cimabue was paraded through the streets, our century has seen Blériot’s airplane, bearing the weight of humanity, of thousands of years of endeavour, and of necessary art triumphantly paraded through Paris to the Arts-et-Métiers museum. It will perhaps fall to an artist as free of aesthetic considerations and as concerned with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People.”
(The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read, p. 75.)
problems with pictures of horses
“Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive (there’s a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen. Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.”
(Finnegans Wake, pp. 111–2.)
the life of flaubert
“FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (1821–1880), French novelist, was born at Rouen on the 12th of December 1821. . . . . Flaubert in his youth ‘was like a young Greek,’ full of vigour of body and a certain shy grace, enthusiastic, intensely individual, and apparently without any species of ambition. . . . . Returning to Paris, he wasted his time in sombre dreams, living on his patrimony. . . . . The personal character of Flaubert offered various peculiarities. He was shy, and yet extremely sensitive and arrogant; he passed from silence to an indignant and noisy flow of language. The same inconsistencies marked his physical nature; he had the build of a guardsman, with a magnificent Viking head, but his health was uncertain from childhood, and he was neurotic to the last degree. This ruddy giant was secretly gnawn by misanthropy and disgust of life.”
(Edmund Gosse, LL.D., in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, vol. X, p. 483.)