noted

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  • A good piece at Design Observer (most interesting there in a long time, I think) by Martha Scotford about the publication and design of Ulysses. Most interesting slide: an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature where Random House explained “How to Enjoy James Joyce’s Great Novel Ulysses“.
  • Three stories by Robert Walser, translated by Damion Searls, as part of Vice‘s fiction issue (there’s a lot of other worthwhile content there too). And it’s been noted elsewhere, but the Christine Burgin Gallery has information about the forthcoming English edition of Walser’s microscripts.
  • Scott Bryan Wilson is publishing chapbooks under a familiar name.
  • A new story by Gabriel Josipovici at Litro.

december 16–december 20

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Books

Films

  • Gods and Monsters, directed by Bill Condon
  • My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, dir. Werner Herzog
  • Ricky, dir. François Ozon
  • Red-Headed Woman, dir. Jack Conway
  • Waterloo Bridge, dir. James Whale
  • La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman), dir. Lucrecia Martel
  • La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Exhibits

  • “Francis Picabia: Funny Guy,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery
  • “Fairfield Porter: Paintings,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery
  • “Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades,” McCaffrey Fine Art
  • “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009,” Marian Goodman Gallery
  • “Paul McCarthy: White Snow,” Hauser & Wirth
  • “Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures,” Gagosian
  • “Jörg Immendorff: Maoist Paintings – The Early Seventies,” Michael Werner Gallery

december 6–december 10

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Books

Films

  • Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), directed by Pedro Almodóvar
  • ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), dir. Pedro Almodóvar
  • The Impatient Maiden, dir. James Whale
  • Sinners in Paradise, dir. James Whale
  • By Candlelight, dir. James Whale

Exhibits

  • “Gabriel Orozco,” MoMA

the lack of common measure between the desires of individuals and the means to satisfy them

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“The character in A Man Asleep, by way of contrast, appears to have ‘read’ too much. To be precise, he reaches the end of his tether somewhere on page 112 on Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lectures on the Industrial Society. Whilst the contents of page 112 of that book might well induce sleepiness when read in a stuffy garret on a hot day in May, that page is otherwise quite unexceptional. But perhaps we are not reading the same book. The Eighteen Lectures was published in 1963. It consists of actual lectures for first-year sociology students at the Sorbonne, first delivered in 1955–56. The first ‘edition’ was a cyclostyled volume (‘polycop’), distributed by the Centre de Documentation Universitaire, on page 112 of which the eye is caught by the isolated middle paragraph that concludes with the statement ‘It is poverty that humanity, as a whole, still suffers from today. Poverty, defined simply by the lack of common measure between the desires of individuals and the means to satisfy them.’ That is where Things begins.”

(Andrew Leak, “Phago-citations: Barthes, Perec, and the Transformation of Literature,” p. 133 in in George Perec issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring 2009.)

december 2–december 5

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Books

Films

  • Zazie dans le métro, directed by Louis Malle
  • ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (What Have I Done to Deserve This?), dir. Pedro Almodóvar
  • Kika, dir. Pedro Almodóvar
  • Nosotros, los pobres, dir. Ismael Rodríguez
  • The Invisible Man, dir. James Whale
  • Up in the Air, dir. Jason Reitman

Exhibits

  • “Walton Ford: New Work,” Paul Kasmin Gallery
  • “Kaz Oshiro: Setting Sun,” Yvon Lambert
  • “Robert Ryman,” Yvon Lambert
  • “Drawn Together: Chiharu Shiota/GEGO,” Goff + Rosenthal
  • “Perlstein/Held: Five Decades,” Betty Cunningham Gallery
  • “Dan Fischer: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” Derek Eller Gallery
  • “Paul Chan: Sade for Sade’’s Sake,” Greene Naftali
  • “Wallace Berman: 1927–1976,” Nicole Klagsbrun
  • “Lynda Benglis: New Work,” Chiem & Read
  • “Jiří Kolář: The Poetics of Silence,” Pavel Zoubok
  • “Richard Serra: Blind Spot/Open Ended,” Gagosian
  • “Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa,” Barbara Gladstone Gallery
  • “George Maciunas: 7 Paintings from the 1950s and Graphic Works,” Maya Stendhal Gallery
  • “Spazialismo,” Bitforms
  • “Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions,” David Zwirner

the true cause of the collapse

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“The true cause of the collapse of the Colossus, a cause that even today threatens so many other famous monuments with extinction, was pointed out by Ennio Flaiano in his Diario notturno. ‘It is generally believed that the Colossus of Rhodes collapsed in an earthquake. This is not the whole story. The Colossus of Rhodes collapsed owing to the verbiage that tourists, in addition to their names, scratched into the pedestal and which, increasing over the centuries in number and vulgarity, undermined its resistance. The earthquake achieved only that little that remained to be done.’ ”

(Aldo Buzzi, p. 13 in The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets, trans. Guido Waldman.)

quotation

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“Marcel Bénabou & Bruno Marcenac . . . Apart from the Flaubertian attitude towards your characters, and sentence rhythms constantly reminiscent of Sentimental Education, there are whole sentences lifted from Flaubert into Things, like collages.

Georges Perec That’s quite right, and I stand by that. I used Flaubert on three leves: first, the three-part sentence rhythm, which had become a kind of personal tic; second, I borrowed some exemplary figures from Flaubert, ready-made elements, a bit like Tarot cards – the journey by boat, the demonstration, the auction, for instance. . . . And third, there are sentences copied over, purely and simply pasted in.

MB & BM What is that really about?

GP I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that for some time now, in fact since the surrealists, we are moving towards a kind of art that could be called ‘citational,’ and which permits a certain progress, since the point where our predecessors finished up becomes our own point of departure. It’s a device I like a lot, that I like to play with. At any rate, it helped me a great deal. At one point I was utterly stuck, and the act of choosing a model in that way, or inserting cuttings, so to speak, into my material, got me over my block. For me, collage is like a grid, a promise, and a condition of discovery. Of course, my ambition isn’t to rewrite Don Quixote like Borges’s Pierre Ménard, but I would for instance like to rewrite my favorite Melville story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” It’s a text I wanted to write; but since it’s impossible to write a text that already exists, I wanted to rewrite it – not to pastiche it, but to make a new Bartleby – well, the same one actually, but a bit more . . . as if it were me who’d done it. It’s an idea that seems to me invaluable for literary creation, much more promising than the mere business of writing well that Tel Quel and other reviews of that kind go on about. It’s a desire to place yourself in a line that acknowledges all the literature of the past. So you bring your personal museum to life, you reactivate your literary reserves. Anyway, Flaubert is not my only model, not the only thing I’ve collaged. There are less obvious models, Nizan and The Conspiracy, Antelme and The Human Race.”

(From an interview with Georges Perec in Paris, December 1965, published in English as “George Perec Owns Up: An Interview,” pp. 27–28 of the spring 2009 Review of Contemporary Fiction.)

november 26–december 1

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Books

  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (trans. Robert Fitzgerald & Dudley Fitts)
  • Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
  • Sophocles, Antigone (trans. Robert Fitzgerald & Dudley Fitts)
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
  • Julio Cortázar, We Love Glenda So Much, and Other Tales (trans. Gregory Rabassa)
  • Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual

Films

  • Les amants (The Lovers), directed by Louis Malle
  • ゆきゆきて、神軍 (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On), dir. Kazuo Hara

Exhibits

  • “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” Onassis Cultural Center
  • “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 B.C.,” Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU