READING INSTRUCTION. The first part of this post is about the dreary environment of reading about books. The second part which you can scroll down to I LURCHED... for my homage to Simon and Arasse
4-----The fundamental problem with book review sections in
newspapers, magazines, e-journals and blogs is that they all cater to the
“news” aspect. They report on the new
books and only occasionally do they venture into the past.
5------Whenever any of these publications do venture into the
past the very fact of the past nearly always vitiates the piece: who wants to
read about what has happened, is not
new, is not happening right now?
7-------The vast majority of these publications cater to the supposed
present moment--- whatever that might be?--- and for those with both national
and international aspirations do what major newspapers do today: they focus on the doings of the biggest and
routinely thought to be the most powerful countries. 5 people killed in a bank robbery in New York
City would outweigh in a newspaper editor’s mind of say a major newspaper in
the US 500 people drowned in the sinking of a ferry in the South China Sea.
8------none of this is news, really, and week after week in
the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal and any other major publication
you care to mention the reviewed books
are in the vast majority of cases published by the two or possibly four largest
publishers in the world so in truth: as The New York Review of Books was once
always known: The New York Review of Us.
6-------occasionally one of these large publications will have
a special section set aside for smaller or so-called independent publishers but
one always has the feeling this is their sop to the “special needs lobby and
one is supposed to take note of these books with a small grain of salt: these
are books from the not really real publishers:
publishers who as they say lunch and have cocktail parties--- the sure characteristics
of a “real” publisher.
SO if I
lurched and quoted as I am about to do a few lines from Claude Simon’s THE
FLANDERS ROAD: “…like a drop of water
separating itself from a roof or rather dividing, part of itself still attached
to the edge of the gutter (the phenomenon occurring as follows: the drop
stretching, becoming pear-shaped under its own weight, distorting itself, then
pinching itself in two the lower… (p.24):
INSTANT MARGINALITY.
9----- and of course the question why are you reading a novel
published in 1961? And even though Simon
did receive the Nobel Prize, surely you should be reading the current winner in
that sweepstakes though you remember Isaac Singer being asked what he thought
of Simon replied, is it a boy or a girl?... which allowed everyone reading the
New York Times to know Simon was probably not that important and in fact when I
did ask to review a Simon novel a little later for the Washington Post was
told, I guess we dropped the ball on that one…
9---- or why aren’t you writing about the new Pynchon novel
which is even on the best seller list and I reply I did try and didn’t get much
beyond someone walking down a hallway of some sort of building on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan and I was thinking, should I say anything real about
Pynchon because wouldn’t it be nice for him to read my books and I did like V
though that doesn’t really count much with many people these days. Though it is for sale via Walmart’s website
and for your information they also have the novels of William Gaddis and the
Letters of William Gaddis though they believe the books have been published by
WW Norton and not as in reality Dalkey Archive, though for now Norton is DA’s
distributor.
(I detoured
to WalMart because this morning I was reading that they are aiming for sales of
half a trillion dollars per year and the boss there was saying, “We know who
every person in the world is and we know every product in the world, and we’ll
connect them.” Sadly, they can’t connect
any of those people to GOING TO PATCHOGUE or THE CORPSE DREAM OF N> PETKOV and
they raised the price of the 20oz bottle of Coke in their vending machines to
$1.50)
78------ the delusional nature of this prose writing on a
Thursday morning, now mostly gone.
60----- TAKE A CLOSER
LOOK by Daniel Arasse is the most beautiful book this year. Arasse, now dead, was art professor in France
and in this book he shows in a wonderful sensuous witty and thoughtful prose:
how to look at a painting in front of us.
He reminded me of THE ART OF ARTS by Anita Albus who did the same some
years ago and in her text provided me with a full hour in front of The Madonna
of Chancellor Rolin in the Louvre and even then I had yet to exhaust the
seeing.
Of course I
am echoing Pound in the ABC OF READING where he discusses the method of Louis
Agassiz’s method the looking at what is in front of you. As in reading and looking : it has to start
with what is in front of you and then you can go elsewhere, but it is all in
the timing of when to go elsewhere.
Princeton
University Press obviously had a great deal of rerspsct for its author and his
text. The dust jacket white with clean
type and one lone snail at the very bottom edger… the whole book is in that snail and at the
center of his book is The Snail’s Gaze
centered as the painting is upon the snail at the bottom of Francesco del
Cossa’s The Annunciation.
I have no
real competency in writing about art, some might say. I never sat in those slide driven classes
where students saw thousands of slides as a professor droned on about his or
her audience’s visual stupidity.
But I did
see for myself in Leipzig in 1965 Rembrandt’s Man with a Golden Helmet and
remembered the depth of the gold paint on the helmet which is not visible in
prints. Of course I discovered when I
went to Google, as we all do, this
painting is no longer thought to be by Rembrandt and is not now in Leipzig
though for me it will always be so and you can read this in JUST LIKE THAT in
the first of the two parts of that book which describes a beginning and the end
of the so-called 60’s of the last century but I also saw in London at a later
date Poussin’s
Which shaped another book NOTHING DOING…
And then
there is the looking at John Wesley’s works and Michael Madore’s work and Andy
Warhol’s Shadows and later, Walter De
Maria Broken Kilometer… and the photocopier art of Pati Hill and the work of
Martin Ramirez…
But::::: TAKE A CLOSER LOOK. I will give you the openings of each of
Arasse’s essays. If they do not catch
you…
CARA
GIULIA, You may find this rather long
letter surprising, even a bit irritating. I hope you won’t be angry, but have to write to you As I told you somewhat brusquely, I cannot
understand how you sometimes look at painting in such a way that you don’t see
what painter and painting are showing you.
THE
SNAIL’S GAZE. I know where this is
headed. You’re going to tell me yet
again that I’m going too far--- that I’m having a good time, but that I am also
over interpreting. It’s true, there’s
nothing I like more than having a good time.
PAINT
IT BLACK. At first, when he saw Bruegel’s
The Adoration of the Magi at the National
Gallery in London, he identified what he already knew. As always. In the end it became tiresome. He couldn’t manage to be surprised by
anything anymore. He had looked so much
and learned so well how to identify, classify situate that he did it all very quickly
without pleasure, simply as a narcissistic confirmation of his knowledge. A place for every painter and every painter
in his place. His knowledge resembled a
caretaker’s knowledge of his cemetery.
MARY
MAGDALENE’S “FLEECE.” Frankly, there
would be no point in saying that Mary Magdalene wasn’t a real blonde.
THE
WOMEN IN THE CHEST. “A pinup?”/ “yup,
that’s what she is. Pure and simple.”/ “well
it depends on what you mean by that.”/ “it’s simple: a beautiful , naked woman…
or rather, an image of one…”
THE
EYES OF THE MASTER. Las Meninas! Oh, no, not again.
For pity’s sake! Enough
already! Everything's been said about
it. Everything! Or nothing?
What’s the difference, enough is definitely enough!
In Flanders
Road I am reading about a voice trying to decide if someone has been killed or
has he allowed himself to be killed and then lurching back and back into the
past and and and… when you go to Amazon you find out that Simon is badly
published and not by any of the so-called real publishers so why bother, really,
and you are reading him in English when he wrote in French and in French he is
equally unknown…
Well I could
be writing about Robert Pinget?
But I am
reading THE FLANDERS ROAD… the imperceptible breathing of a woman beside him, and after a while he made
out the second rectangle of the wardrobe mirror reflecting the dim light from
the window--- the eternally empty wardrobe of hotel rooms with two or three
hangers dangling inside, the wardrobe itself (with its triangular pediment
framed by two pineapples) made of that urine- yellow wood with reddish veins
which is apparently used only for this kind of furniture doomed never to hold anything
except its own dusty void, the dusty coffin of the reflected ghosts of thousands
of lovers, thousands of naked furious and clammy bodies, thousands of embraces absorbed,
mingled in the glaucous depths of the
cold unalterable and virginal mirror---, and he remembering (p.42)
And I am sure you know that Claude Simon was both a painter and a photographer. Sadly, the available evidence is so expensive but I must remmeber that Anne-Marie Dumortier sent me a copy of this book before we became estranged.http://www.amazon.com/Claude-Simon-Photographies-Collection-Photo-cinema/dp/2869411812/ref=la_B001HCVZIQ_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382124555&sr=1-2
