WALKING THROUGH GALLERIES

One way or another, the entire past, whether recognizable or unrecognizable, stands between   me and the present world.  
                   ---PAUL VALERY CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS 3/ p.369




FROM WALKING THROUGH CHELSEA, N.Y. ART GALLERIES on 12 April, 2017.

I saw only one work of art: a painting by LAMAR PETERSON  at Fredericks Freiser          of course it needs no words.

NOTHING ELSE REMAINS EXCEPT THESE words gathered from the handouts pretending or seriously explaining the stuff in the 12 galleries I walked through


--replicated, altered and spread

--luminous green surveillance images

--nothing on the scanner bed

--an ongoing series of sculptural objects

--image dispositions that are wrought

--an iconic Los Angeles-based artist

--activates the negative space and narrates the scene

--explores the boundary

--reverence and inscrutability

--with forebears as disparate

--Los Angeles based artist

--implied challege to the doctrine of painting

--houses, computers, spaceship interiors

--assimilating the ironies and contradictions

--address how digital technology is changing

--playful take on action painting

--computer-animated stars of the 1995 film

--faces appearing like ghostly

--Drawing on the range

--a sputter and an utterance

--frenetic visual culture--

--during the post-Reagan malaise of the early 1990s

--dancing expressionist rifts on classicist techniques

--Great White Male pantheon

--subconscious manipulations

--seemingly contradictory conceit

--careful attention to ancestry

--volcanic stone is a recurring

--long beloved by artists and architects

--explore the complexities of political anxiety

--dialogue around  the contentious state of global

--also engages and subverts the quotidian

--World-renowned  sculptor

--eye of

--on an ongoing basis

--explores and illuminates

--conformity and isolation 

--conflicts and complications

--twin roles of the observer

--knowing savaging

--for further information

RENATA ADLER'S NOVELS: unfinished praise

Leopardi the greatest Italian poet in succession to Dante, Petrarch, writes: "There are two truths which most men will never believe: one, that they know nothing, and the other that they are nothing. And there is a third, which proceeds from the second---- that there is nothing to hope for after death." And true to that he was able to write about his own "work": "I never achieved any real work. I have made attempts..." and Finally, "if I were a poet..."

By now most people are familiar with the line from  E. M. Cioran that  each book is a postpone suicide.  He was referring to his own books and of course we want that quality in any book we read so I think that while I would hope my own writing might postpone my suicide, I also am aware reading certain books postpone suicide and that is how I remember originally reading both SAPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK by Renata Adler, both published in hardcover by Knopf in the late 70s and early 80s of the last century. 

Both books are fragmented and have a wonderfully cold distant narrator who assumes the reader is widely read, has seen many movies, listens to music and has traveled. 

Now republished by New York Review Books I am pleased that the books have not dated and still remain the sort of novel I think of as being right in the center of what everyone should read but so rarely find, in particular from American writers published by American publishers. 

The uniqueness of form in the Adler books is what has always held me and I of late have realized that this form comes--- if such can be written--- from Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAY, published as far back as 1970  and while I am sure it is as they say a stretch, I  also seem to detect the voice of Mike Hammer as transcribed by Mickey Spillane in I, THE JURY and VENGEANCE IS MINE.   Didion’s novel was always viewed as flawed because of its Hollywood setting but that is what makes it special as only Nathaniel West has done  justice to that seductive place…. Everything else about Hollywood excepting only the Hollywood pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald who of course you remember Cioran mentioning that it was with THE CRACK-UP  “in which he (Fitzgerald) describes his failure, his only great success.”

From the opening of SPEEDBOAT:  No one died that year. Nobody prospered.  There were no births or marriages.

From PITCH DARK:  We were running flat out.  The opening was dazzling.  The ending was dazzling.  It was like a steeplechase composed entirely of hurdles.  But that would not be a steeplechase at all.  It would be more like a steep steep climb.

From PLAY IT AS IT LAYS:  What makes Iago evil? Some people ask.  I never ask.

Adler presciently refused, I am told, to allow her novels to appear in paper in the much hyped Vintage Contemporaries  back then so that they could nestle next to  Jay McInerney’s  novels which were the flavor of the month as had been shortly before,  The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas… and I refuse to mention the title of another extinct novel by another once-upon-a-time famous writer John Irving.  McInerney’s novels are today mentioned but not really read… they are tied to their moment and when the moment goes…: at least he has married well a number of times and lives in great comfort which is a fitting purgatory: you remember, he’s the guy who once was…

SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK have survived because they are written in the moment for that one really existing flesh and blood reader, as Osip Mandelstam mentioned, who lives two hundred years in the future.

There have been no more novels from Adler.  She fell into the law and has written books after getting a law degree.  The heart sinks.  How much more interesting she would have been to be around if she had taken up mathematics as did Paul Valery?  The law is designed for those who want to give the appearance of thinking but really simply want something of…. do I dare use the word relevance… a sad human failing.

Maybe I am mistaken about Adler’s work after these two novels.  Maybe there will be the notebooks as Valery devoted his life to and her thinking of the law, though I doubt it as there is a uniqueness to Valery who writes for instance in volume 4 of the English version of his CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS: 

Crime = the mask falling away.  Social life covers everything in a plaster-cast, and allows only those movements that preserve this artificial character.  Violence of those movement that smash the mask.

                                                OR

Criminals would not be punished if the judge were forced to imagine in the extreme the circumstances in which they had been put and which drove them to commit a crime.  The judge accords criminals a freedom that he himself has, not being what they are, and thus condemns them as not being what they are. 

                                                                   

ONLY THE DEAD ARE IN BROOKLYN but READ BEIJING COMA

58

I go to Brooklyn to visit the dead. That is when I was younger and we would go into Brooklyn to go to funerals. On the wall of a room in a great aunt's house was a tinted photograph of a relative who had lost his arm at Gettysburg.

53

I was telling a clerk in a bookstore that is getting ready to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn---after asking, Why? The lease is up.--- that I well know the trivial reasons why people move to Brooklyn but my parents fled that place in the winter of 46/47.
---You sound like it is war torn zone...

(I was in the bookstore to look for THE ORPHIC VOICE by Elizabeth Sewell which I had read about in an article by Mark Scroggins on Ronald Johnson.

Earlier that day in The Strand I bought a little book by her on Paul Valery which has a suggestive opening which reveals how far we have come from what writing about books was all about:

Magic mirror on the wall,/Who is the fairest one of all?
There are some people who cannot pass a looking-glass without a slight disturbance in their imagination...

Sewell will go on to write about mirrors as a way into Valery...)



54

To live in New York City is to live in Manhattan.

58

Going to Brooklyn by subway is coming up the stairs to the provinces.

64

In the newspapers there is talk of writers living in Brooklyn, a literary community in Brooklyn and a community of writers living in Brooklyn or we are a community of writers in Brooklyn... you get the drift of the dreariness: anyone uttering phrases like these is of the dead, or rather dead of ear, dead to history.

Imagine Joyce or Proust saying something along the lines: I am a member of the Paris community of writers or I am part of the community of writers in Paris...

60

Of course these writers--- usually "successful" whatever that might mean--- and we know what it usually means: I got a lot of money for something of an accident and then there are the hangers on, the servants of accident.

62

But Brooklyn: a thin population of white people who could live anywhere--- and a couple so-called successful Black folk and all the rest who do not look like them and who are waiting, waiting... patiently being studied by the Bagatelles pour un massacre

63

So go to Brooklyn to visit the dead and dying.

94

A momentary fit.

34

Ezra Pound would demand: and by what standards do you dismiss books written by people who live in Brooklyn?

Arbitrary to be sure.

Does anyone read books written by people who claim to live in Canada?

35

The late George Garrett told a story of being hired by the Ford Foundation the year they decided to give grants to writers. The foundation was swamped with thousands and thousands of applications. George and another person were hired to screen these piles in a weekend. Two guys and the director. The director announced: toss out all the male applicants for the first two hours. George thought to himself: well, he's the director and he must know what he is doing so they did it for the two hours and now had a much reduced pile of applicants in front of him. The director then said as you open the applications toss out all the women and anyone over 65.

You get the drift. The piles as the two days went on became manageable and the money was gotten rid of.

What I learned from that experience, George said, it would have been fairer to toss all the applications down the stairs and the ones that happened to reach the bottom would get the money.

THE LESSON: when you read an author blurb glowing with grants--- how do you think about the guy who just won the lottery?


27

A literary standard by which I slur the writers who admit to living in Brooklyn.

I have been reading the recently published BEIJING COMA by Ma Jian. (FSG) The novel tries to describe all of the recent history of China through the imagined life of a man who has been in a coma since the massacre at Tiananmen Square and as he gradually comes back to the world he relives his and his family's existence in China and by implication the whole modern history of China. The man's father was sent to a re-education camp for 22 years..."My father had long since severed his ties with his elder brother...during the reform movement in the early 1950s, when Mao ordered land to be redistributed to the poor and classified landowners as the enemy of the people, my grandfather, who owned two fields and three cows, was branded an 'evil tyrant'. My father's brother was forced to bury him alive. Had he refused, he himself would have been executed."

By comparison Brooklyn writers to a man or to a woman seem trivial.

I have spared you the taste of the dirt in the grandfather's mouth...

And don't mention Paul Auster and and and... not even his publisher reads Paul Auster's new books.

PAUL VALERY, ARNO SCHMIDT, JULIAN RIOS, ANDREY PLATANOV, JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL KNOWLEDGE

41

PaulValery, Arno Schmidt and Julian Rios have created three great literary monuments that are inconceivable in these United States of America.

I was in the library last night to pay again homage to two of those monuments: the CAHIERS of Paul Valery and ZETTELS TRAUM by Arno Schmidt.

Paul Valery wrote something every morning of his life. After his death 29 volumes of a facsimile edition of these jottings was published. 26,600 pages.

Valery himself never fully organized these jotting but recognized that they did fall into certain areas. He believed that it was very hard to draw distinctions between philosophy, literature, art, science and mathematics and that any civilized man would of necessity be interested in everything.

To make a long story short, Valery eventually came up with 215 sub-classifications under which this massive mountain of writing could be organized.

But the monument is on the shelves in the form of those 29 volumes, each approx 900 pages, measuring 8 x 11 inches...

In more recent years a Pléiade edition has appeared in which those pages are transcribed and arranged into broadly based categories. Those two books comprise 3248 pages... and are serving as the basis of the English language version that is slowly making itself available from Peter Land Editions. Two volumes have been published and a third is coming out as I am typing or is possibly on its way here right now.

"I have a unitary mind in a thousand pieces (p62) from the section Ego in volume one of the Lang edition.

Valery would have taken to the bog. There can be no doubt about it. But there is one little disadvantage to the bog: if you hit the wrong key, words, sentences, sections disappear never to be... in those printed volumes there is a strange permanence that no electronic media can equal.

An earlier version of these words got lost. There is a sadness that falls down upon me. These are not the inspired words of that previous version. They come from afar.

42

A reader can begin to read PAUL VALERY with his short book MONSIEUR TESTE. Valery "speaks" or "writes" in/of the "character" of Monsieur Teste. Everything is called into question.

43

In that lost bit of the bog I had been writing about John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge and about having to repatriate my academic book collection, my folders of student essays, long lists of long gone students, and my collection of wall clippings. One such clipping quoted Andrey Platanov's thought that a writer should know, "what God is thinking about."

I was also writing that the powers to be have decided that those who do not hold a sinecure in the form of lifelong tenure are to no longer have an office in which to meet students, gather our few wits about us, to organize ourselves for the teaching. I am sure they know what they are doing and it will be of a great benefit to the students and the college as a whole. It will allow us to arrive each day with our offices on our backs in the form of tightly bound bundles which will contain the tools of our vocation. I will miss that office that I have occupied with a few colleagues for these 19 years but one must move with the times... I will remember one of those clippings of a photograph of Celine standing near the gate of his house in Meudon and under which was a slip of a quote from some interview he must have given, WASH YOUR HANDS.
Like a heteronym of FERNANDO PESSOA I will set up my office at a far table in the student cafeteria...

44

I will come to Arno Schmidt some other day. His ZETTELS TRAUM is an even greater monument...

45

But to the living. This morning as every morning Julian Rios looked down from the front window of his house in Saint-Martin-la-Garenne at those trees midst the Seine that Monet had discovered in paint.

LARVA is Rios's great book and is available in English. To say it is a novel like FINNEGANS WAKE, like ZETTELS TRAUM...

but again all of that is for another day. Unlike them, it comes with a fold-out map, a pictorial section and index.

Julian Rios signed a copy for me: TOM LE MOT

MONTH OF THE DEAD, PAUL VALERY, ANTHONY BURGESS, CHURCHILL

93

As November wears on the memory: of having just finished up working on the dish washing line in the cafeteria at Beloit College and hearing the news that the President had been shot. JFK. That night I walked alone to the library while many students went to the chapel. I simply then and still to this day do not really understand how people could be so moved.

Yeah, I know in a intellectual way why people are moved but...

I was thinking, as I remember it now: one less politician.

A few years ago in EAT AT JOE'S a pizza joint on Second Avenue in Manhattan between Fifth and Fourth Street a guy was saying: they should dig up JFK and shoot him again and that goes for his brother too.

245

Writers I have known who are now dead: Chad Walsh, W.H. Auden, Bink Noll, Kenneth Rexroth, Stephen Spender, Patrick Kavanagh, John Jordan, Francis Stuart, Jakov Lind, Hannah Green, Michael Hartnett, Edward Dahlberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Higgins, Frank MacShane, Richard M. Elman, Julian Green, Malcolm Cowley, John Currier, Liam O'Flaherty, Anthony Burgess, Nina Berberova, Philip Hobsbaum, Tillie Olson, Kay Boyle...

And there are those who should be dead....

or are dead but don't know it

749

Do not search for truth-- But seek to develop those forces which make and unmake truths.
---Paul Valery

56

In Clair Wills' very good book THAT NEUTRAL IRELAND, a broad, clearly written description of Ireland during World War Two there is a delicious moment when she is describing a popular quiz program QUESTION TIME and the host asks a contestant for the name of the world's best known teller of fairy-tales. The expected answer was of course Hans Christian Anderson but that was skipped over in favor of "Winston Churchill."

56a

Anthony Burgess once told me the reason Churchill got tossed out of office as fast as he did in spite of his so-called heroic role during WW2 was because it was the first election when the many veterans of the British army could vote and everyone of them hated Churchill because of the cigars he was always photographed smoking. The ordinary soldiers had to make do with roll-your-owns or Woodbines and here this fuckin bastard had been puffing cigar smoke into your face every day of the war...

IMRE KERTESZ, HUNGARIAN WRITERS, PAUL VALERY

56

T.E.D. KLEIN, the much under-rated horror writer, sent me in a packet of clippings an article by Steve Wasserman from the Columbia Journalism Review. It contains what I will from now on take as a solemn injunction shadowing the fragments of this bog:

The predicament facing newspapers... is the sea change in the culture of literacy itself, the degree to which our overwhelmingly fast and visually furious culture renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant, hollowing out the habits of attention indispensable for absorbing long-form narrative and the following of sustained argument.

87

SO, while this swamp might have the appearance of being a collection of random thoughts it is no more fragmented than the NOTEBOOKS of PAUL VALERY or that grand collection of fragments embodied in the arbitrary 15 volumes of the THE COLLECTED WORKS IN ENGLISH published some time ago in the Bollingen series by Princeton University Press.

The reader can enter it at any moment, move back and forth as they might also do in HOPSCOTCH by JULIO CORAZAR and I might as well mention: books by five other authors will fall from the shelf as required: E.M. CIORAN, MAURICE BLANCHOT, ROBERTO CALASSO, MAX STIRNER, LOUIS FERDINAND CELINE.

35

The most disappointing book of the early part of this coming year will be IMRE KERTESZ's DETECTIVE STORY. (Knopf, January 2008) Set in a mythical, possibly South American country it concerns itself with being the confession of former police interrogator. Much is made about protecting and supporting the "Homeland." And what ideology is present is distinctly of a fascist authoritarianism.

When questioned a woman at Knopf said it was being done at the suggestion of Kertesz's German publisher and the writer himself. Published originally in Hungarian in 1977 it could then have hardly concerned itself with the more obvious experience of the Communist dictatorship in Hungary itself.

So a little anti-American opportunism trumps Knopf's wise and thoughtful publication of two previous Kertesz novels in new translations, FATELESS AND KADDISH FOR AN UNBORN CHILD which were part of a trilogy. Of course the very title of the third book of the trilogy FAILURE might have posed some problems... but at least readers would now know why Kertesz is an interesting and important writer and the debate could really be had as to why Hungary has within its borders three writers--- Kertesz, Peter Esterhazy and Peter Nadas--- who tower over every single living American writer in the audacity of their accomplishments--- authors of books that refuse to repeat the dreary exhausted forms of what passes for innovative fiction in this country. If I was younger and had a gift for languages as did James Joyce learning Norwegian so he could read IBSEN, I would try to learn Hungarian... but I have no gift for languages and so I must endure this insult...

Readers can find these authors at www.hungarianquarterly.com and fortunately many books by Esterhazy and Nadas have already been translated. I have to always mention these three authors together as I find it impossible to rank them... I think of them as a complete tiny far away country. You too can get a visa at your bookshop.

UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, PAUL VALERY, THE PAST

In the front hall of John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY were two young men recruiting for the Marine Corps officer's training program. I asked if this was the PLC course. They said it was and that I might be a little too young for it. I said, I had been once very favorably disposed to that course.

I am sure they did not know what to make of this man walking away.

In a letter (January 25, 1963) home from Beloit College I wrote to my parents back in Patchogue:
USMC. I'm going to Rockford to take the test as this will be my last chance and I want to take the training this summer the first half... Last night and most of the day it hovered around -10. Today it is a little warmer but not much

A second letter (February 1, 1963) I wrote:
I am giving up the USMC deal. It was so cold and sluggish that it is almost impossible to get to that center in Rockford that is like a corpse and as cold as Arctic. As a result I'll work this summer if I cant get an invitation to bum around the country which would be ideal.

From PAUL VALERY Note and Digression to THE METHOD OF LEONARDO:

To reread, then; to reread after having forgotten-- to reread oneself, without a hint of tenderness, or fatherly feeling; coldly and with critical acumen and in a mood terribly conducive to ridicule and contempt, with an alien gaze, and a destructive eye-- is to recast one's work, or feel that it should be recast, into a very different mold.

*

The personality is composed of memories, habits, inclinations responses...

*

In each of our individual lives, at the depth where treasures are buried, there is the fundamental permanence of a consciousness that depends on nothing

*

Nothing is so strange as lucidity at grips with inadequacy.

*

I knew that the works are always falsifications or contrivances; fortunately the author is never the man. The life of one is never the life of the other; no matter how many details we accumulate on the life of Racine, they will not teach us the art of writing his verse.

*

Nor is the life of author ever the life of the man he is

*

I was yearning for a splendid theme. How little that amounts to, on the page!

*

... it is ignoble to write from enthuiasm alone. Enthusiasm is not a state of mind for a writer.