Monthly Archives: September 2014

Negating Everything That Causes Us to be Dead While Alive

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Mark Leyner, “The Art of Fiction N° 219” by Sam Lipsyte The Paris Review 204 (Spring 2013)

Bro, we’re living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world — high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it’s important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I’ve memorized this line from André Breton’s magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud — “I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive.” Given the state of things, that’s what we need to be doing, all the time — negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.

Postcards From Another Planet

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My 2008 Guardian piece on spam lit is referenced and quoted here:

Dan Piepenbring, “Postcards From Another Planet,” The Paris Review (website) 3 September 2014
spamlit

…And in 2008, the Guardian ran a piece on spam lit and its practitioners, especially Ben Myers and Lee Ranaldo, both of whom have published volumes of work derived from spam:

These instances of found poetry—often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty—seemed, in Myers’s words, like “scriptures from the future” or “postcards from another planet.” Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.

A Monument to Obscure and Inhuman Forces

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Brian Dillon, “Objects in This Mirror,” Objects in This Mirror: Essays

Smithson made his trip to Passaic at a time when his interventions in the landscape were mostly of a relatively modest nature. He had already exhibited several “non-sites” drawn from New Jersey: wooden or metal containers housing rocks from the numerous quarries around Paterson, to the north of Passaic. Each container is a discrete displacement of the terrain: a reminder that all art and technology rely on such materia prima, and at the same time a suggestion that the earth itself is a sort of artwork (though not in any theological sense): a monument to obscure and inhuman forces.

We Already See So Much

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Susan Sontag, “Walser’s Voice,” Preface, Selected Stories by Robert Walser

…In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small — as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament: he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed; and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive’s appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.

The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination. I’m ordinary — that is, nobody — declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don’t want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success — the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productive writer, who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an anti-romantic one, of the artist’s activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”…

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Shawn Huelle, “Peripateticism in Robert Walser,” 3:AM Magazine 12 August 2014

Smallness plays a large role in Walser’s textual perambulations. In fact, W. G. Sebald refers to Walser as a “clairvoyant of the small.” This smallness can be made even smaller.

Walking, among other things, is also an act of self-effacement: while out on a walk, one begins to lose oneself in one’s surroundings. Walter Benjamin notices this in Walser’s writing: “Everything seems lost; a surge of words gushes forth in which each sentence only has the task of obliterating the previous one” (emphasis added).

…Or, as Walser himself puts it [The Walk, 1917]:

[The walker] must bring with him no sort of sentimentally sensitive self-love or quickness to take offense. Unselfish and unegoistic, he must let his careful eye wander and stroll where it will; only he must be continuously able in the contemplation and observation of things to efface himself. . . . If he does not, then he walks only half attentive, with only half his spirit, and that is worth nothing. . . . He must be able to bow down and sink into the deepest and smallest everyday thing, and it is probable that he can.