No Eye is Uncontaminated

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Man in Love – My Struggle: Book 2: 383

When I was outdoors, walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Snow was snow, trees were trees. It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning. Monet had an exceptional eye for light on the snow, which Thaulow, perhaps the most technically gifted Norwegian painter ever, also had, it was a feast for the eyes, the closeness of the moment was so great that the value of what gave rise to it increased exponentially, an old tumbledown cabin by a river or a pier at a holiday resort suddenly became priceless, the paintings were charged with the feeling that they were here at the same time as us, in this intense here and now, and that we would soon be gone from them, but with regard to the snow, it was as if the other side of this cultivation of the moment became visible, the animation of this and its light so obviously ignored something, namely the lifelessness, the emptiness, the non-charged and the neutral, which were the first features to strike you when you entered a forest in winter, and in the picture, which was connected with perpetuity and death, the moment was unable to hold its ground. Caspar David Friedrich knew this, but this wasn’t what he painted, only his idea of it. This was the problem with all representation, of course, for no eye is uncontaminated, no gaze is blank, nothing is seen the way it is.

Book That Destroys Itself While Being Read

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Alison Flood, “Artists Create Book That Turns Black As It is Read,” The Guardian 8 September 2014

It’s not how one would usually want to read: artist Camille Leproust and collaborator Andres Ayerbe have created a book printed on thermal paper, which heats and slowly blackens as it is read, giving the reader around four hours to finish before the text fades completely into black.

Leproust’s project will be part of an exhibition opening later this month at the London Art Book Fair. Nine artists have been commissioned to investigate “the future possibilities of the book as a printed object” and to “push the boundaries of how books can be experienced”. Her art work, in which the poem Anastylosis by Alissa Valles will disappear into blackness, will sit alongside a version of TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock which the poet is unlikely to have ever foreseen.

…Leproust said that her own artwork stems from discussions “about the value of the book as an object in itself regardless of its contents, how the very activity of reading transforms it: how the marks and traces of our engagement with the book render the mass-produced object something unique and personal”.

“From this conceptual groundwork we came up with the idea of a book that destroys itself while being read — an effect achieved with a combination of thermal paper and heat,” she said. “While there were a variety of inks and chemicals that we could have used to make the text disappear, we really liked the aesthetics and some of the conceptual implications of having the book slowly burn out.” …

Haunted Memories

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Barry Hannah, “Why I Write,” Oxford American 20

It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise. …I forget almost nothing. Even when I was drunk I recalled too much, and hence was forced to relive events in an agony of shame. Friends and confederates are often astounded by what I remember of certain afternoons an age ago — weather, dress, music, mots.

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.