- And so desire to progress, to become better poets, to eradicate a disease, to become better people, to perfect that which is perpetually imperfect.
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We stumble – We fall – We fail –
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Author Archives: Sigrun
Meandering Narratives
I call his books novels, partly, I think, because I want to claim him for fiction, and partly because that seems the most inclusive term for their mélange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture, military fortifications, riffs on the lives of Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova, Conrad, Swinburne…Whatnot.
Encyclopedic.
Defying classification, Sebald’s books take the shape of his consciousness. That is what makes them great.
I call them novels because what unifies them is the narrator’s distilled voice—melancholy, resonant as a voice in a tunnel, witty—the effluvia of their author’s inner life. And against all odds, from the accounts of exile and decay, the voice wrests a magical exhilaration. In the face of decline, Sebald offers writerly passion. It is gorgeous; it yields aesthetic bliss.
Waterland
Yoko Ono
Have I ever told you how much I love the art of Yoko Ono? I am used to think of her as a visual performance artist, but she is also a great conceptual writer, just have a look at this:
Dance Report – on hiding
Dance Report – on facing
Yoko Ono moved from Japan to the USA with her family in the 1940s, and soon became a leading voice in New York’s most interesting artist circles, which worked with happenings, sound art, poetry and film. Alongside colleagues including George Maciunas, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and others, Yoko Ono developed totally new modes of expression that questioned the artworld’s increasingly commercial preoccupations, and which left heroic high modernism behind.
She will be exhibiting at Moderna Museet in Stockholm this summer
A Line Made by Walking
Richard Long A Line Made by Walking, (1967)
Richard Long (1945) is an English sculptor, photographer and painter
Man’s path through life is not casual and fragmentary, but follows a sequence in which each point is always connected up with the previous one in an infinite process.The land art movement arose at the end of the Sixties in America and Britain. The artists’ intent was to interact with and sometimes modify the landscape. Photographic documentation of these works was fundamental: often they were made in inaccessible places and could in time be destroyed or altered by natural action.
Richard Long works on his own, in silence; his journey is not one of conquest, but reminds us more of the slow progress of a pilgrim in search of some kind of epiphany.
apropos Foremothers
The core problem of lacking foremothers might simply be this: it’s even more difficult for a woman than for a man to say:
i want to become a writer
i want to become an artist
i want -
i can?
Believing in creative powers, believing them to be strong enough to be taken seriously; becoming an artist, accepting a life outside the money driven society – is difficult for everyone & anyone. Lacking a tradition, a canon, a history for such an unusual choice – makes it even harder.
To write one has to believe. Listen to Matthew Zapruder:
I agree with (again) Wallace Stevens (almost always a good policy) when he writes, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” that the role of the poet is to help people live their lives. It sounds very grandiose, but really what he means is just to deepen experience, to protect ourselves against the constant encroachment of what he calls “the pressure of the real,” that is the mundane and the terrifying and the distracting and the monetary pressures that make us feel like automatons.
i can – can i?
You will never know if you never try …
“no walk, no work”
I’d like to carve out a place for my own writing in-between literature and visual arts. Erasure poetry, which I have posted on lately, is such an in-between art form. Some call it conceptual writing, which might be a good term, but to me it’s also problematic, because today conceptual art is almost drowned in theorizing – and I don’t want to do theory (any more): I want to make literature as art!
Today my ongoing investigation into form led me to Hamish Fulton (who have the most beautiful webpage).
Based in Canterbury, Kent, Hamish Fulton has made walking the basis of his practice for the past three decades, producing photography, text and sketches that evolve from the experience of solo and group walks in the landscape. Fulton’s art focuses on an engagement with the environment and the self through the experience of walking. He describes himself as a ‘walking’ artist, resisting the limitations of the terms ‘land artist’, ‘performance artist’ or ‘sculptor’.
Fulton does not approach nature as landscape, in the traditional sense of a still image, but as physical experience. He is not walking through a scenery, he is incorporated into it. While land-artsits chooses to rearrange the landscape, Fulton prefers that the landscape imposes itself on him.
Walking, for Fulton, is about transforming one’s state of mind:
I see walking as my form of meditation,” he says. “If we were going into the mountains and there was no trail, then we wouldn’t be able to think very much, because we would be paying attention to not breaking an ankle or falling over. Then walking becomes meditative. You stop the endless thinking mind. And that’s a good thing – because every now and then you want to stop going down the same neural pathways. Then you have other perceptions.
I didn’t start out as a political artist,” he says, “but when you are walking in 2011, you can’t avoid politics. If someone were to ask me what my work was about today, I might say justice, instead of the role of the land
Men are all brothers … ?!
Yesterday I read a bit about Oulipo. While reading I discovered this beautifully arranged picture of a part of the group, but couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t any women around … (I am, after all, on a quest for literary foremothers).
In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes: ”we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.”
Definitely the Opera hinted to this party of men not being a case of accident, but more of a cultural tendency, or – to be honest: a classic case of historical phallocentrism. A concept Derrida can tell us more about, as he also can about friendship.
The following text is snatched from a great paper by Joanne Winning
Derrida recounts the three models of friendship proposed by Aristotle:
- the higher friendship’ which is ‘based on virtue’ and which has ‘nothing to do with politics. It is a friendship between two virtuous men’;
- ‘friendship grounded on utility and usefulness, and this is political friendship’;
- ‘On the lower level, friendship grounded on pleasure’.
These different concepts of friendship, Derrida argues, move across different registers. Some are political and some are not. Derrida notes, as he works through the Aristotelian models, that ‘political friendship’ is fundamentally inflected by gender. It is, to quote from him directly, ‘a phallocentric, or phallogocentric, concept’. From an Aristolean construction onwards, the parameters of friendship and friendship bonds exclude women and the notion of female friendship.
Whilst Derrida himself doesn’t cite the example of the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, we might well use him as an example. In his essay ‘On Friendship’, Montaigne argues: ‘the normal capacity of women is, in fact, unequal to the demands of that communion and intercourse on which the sacred bond is fed; their souls do not seem firm enough to bear the strain of so hard and lasting a tie’.
Derrida argues that the canonical model of friendship is archetypally ‘a friendship between two young men’. Such a canonical model, Derrida notes immediately, excludes several possible permutations: ‘first of all friendship between a man and a woman, or between women, so women are totally excluded from this model of friendship: woman as the friend of a man or women as friends between themselves’.
Derrida identifies the guiding principle that underlies the model of canonical friendship as ‘brotherhood’ or ‘fraternity’. Such a principle finds its roots in various dominant cultural discourses; Derrida identifies it in Greece, as well as Christian ideology in which ‘Men are all brothers because they are sons of God’.
“we think back through our mothers if we are women”!
from The Street of Crocodiles . . . to the Tree of Codes
For years I had wanted to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book. It was hardly an original idea: it’s a technique that has been practised for as long as there has been writing, perhaps most brilliantly by Tom Phillips in his magnum opus, A Humument. But the same idea in a different time is a different idea, and on the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that cannot forget it has a body.
Interviewer: I don’t think this book would translate well to an iPad. Do you have an iPad?
JSF: No. I have nothing against it. I love the notion that “this is a book that remembers it has a body.” When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
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Workshop of Potential Literature*
Who has not felt, in reading a text—whatever its quality—the need to improve it through a little judicious retouching?
* Workshop of Potential Literature = Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle = Oulipo
Meeting of the Oulipo in the garden of François Le Lionnais, 1975
(I recognize Italo Calvino (who’s work I love!) in the picture & Georges Perec (who I think I will like, but who’s books I have to re-read)). It sure looks like a fun party – but tell me, if you happen to know: didn’t these men have any female friends???
