Stuff What I'm Reading and That

Inspiring Stuff #10

Space Invader Keys

With / antojeda.com

Inspiring Stuff #9

Adorno on Hobbies





"I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them." -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

Inspiring Stuff #8

Anne Carson: "The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered, flawed and tattered.

CARSON

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

Text stolen from this interview in the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

Inspiring Stuff #7

Cannon Magazine: No. 2

I stumbled upon Cannon magazine yesterday afternoon in the LRB bookshop.

Edited by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, it is filled with poetry, letters, quotations, observations, and an editors note that runs throughout the magazine as a series of Bernardo Soares-esque diary entries.

It is printed on yellow paper. The front cover shows an abstract spillage of some sort. The back cover seems to be a photo of a man gluing grey office carpet tiles to a floor.

The spine carries a quotation from Wallace Stevens:

"It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible."

Inspiring Stuff #6

The Surreal Object: Sketched thoughts on Poetry, Duchamp, and Things 

I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.

In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.

Man Ray

...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.

I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:

European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)

American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.

Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.

Marcel Duchamp

But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.

Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.

My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:

1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet

The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.

I like both.

 Salvador Dali / Alberto Giocometti

Inspiring Stuff #5

Jacques Brel

"... Even if it's dangerous... Even if it's impossible... Especially if it's impossible."