bird gifts

Yes, 'tis the season already, but winter holiday shopping is for the birds you say?  Well, birds are a nice idea, but not real birds - leave them alone!  

One way to look at it, blowing money on yourself and loved ones can relieve stress and depression.  

Here are my 12 picks, all doable.  So, spread the wealth.

apakstudio.com/apak/

etsy.com/listing/167273657/tree-of-life-limited-edition-print

Apak (Aaron & Ayumi Piland) limited edition print.  Original painting Tree of Life, 2009.  

Artwork of equal whimsy and wisdom.  The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad timelessly tells us "Da-da-da! (damyata, datta, dayadhvam)  Be self-controlled!  Give!  Be compassionate!"

abbeville.com/bookpage.asp?ISBN=9781558591288

Most recent edition of John James Audubon's The Birds of America, 1827-1839.

metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/486757

Canberra

nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=89748

Los Angeles

collections.lacma.org/node/213720

New York

moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81033

moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81503

Pasadena

nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_artist.php?name=Brancusi,+Constantin&resultnum=1

Philadelphia

philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51057.html

philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51114.html

Seattle

seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=10852

Venezia

guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/669

Constantin Brâncuși's Bird in Space, 1923.

A day spent together at the museum, well worth the price of admission.  It's one of the most pleasurable casual adventures.  For me, modern sculpture reached its zenith with Brâncuși.

Also check out Galerie de l'Atelier Brancusi: 
centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.id=FR_R-b48bd4ab504cd917caf7a9559e7370f5&param.idSource=FR_E-b48bd4ab504cd917caf7a9559e7370f5

cavallini.com/p-notebooks-notebooksets.php

Cavallini & Co. notebook set, 2013.

vitra.com/en-us/product/eames-house-bird

Charles & Ray Eames House Bird, c. 1910.

gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Livres-d-Art/Une-semaine-de-bonte

Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté, 1934.

I suggest the editions by Gallimard or DuMont Buchverlag, but Dover's is pretty good.  And above all, the Jeanne Bucher original 5 volumes.  

djeco.com

Katsumi Komagata/Christel Sadde Mobile Birds, 2009.

There's also a white version.

lladro.com/figurines/01010077-MAGIC_FOREST_RING/

Lladró Magic Forest Ring, 2007.

Wearable sculpture in the round ... and not as overburdened as a lot of that haute couture nonsense haha.

muji.com / muji.net
muji.eu/pages/online.asp?Sec=6&Sub=28&PID=6303

muji.us/store/cuckoo-clock-white.html

MUJI cuckoo clock, 2012.

hmhco.com/shop/books/Little-Birds/9780156029049

Anaïs Nin's Little Birds, 1979.

If you've been nice, you can be a li'l naughty.

Music by Bird.

There's a lot of debate about which recordings are best.  Several disc box sets are available.  Also see cmgww.com/music/parker/about/music.html

Another great selection would be any of Olivier Messiaen's oiseaux works, there are several.  Info here: oliviermessiaen.org/messiaen2index.htm

(original source unknown)

A gift that keeps on giving, for life.

Myself, I have an Aztec bird motif on my shoulder.

shopdecoylab.com/product/it-s-my-forest

Decoylab It's My Forest clock, 2010.

An extra item, because it's really neat!

check 'em out

I can't help constantly listening to this song ...

UK/European and North American tours: missfrankierose.com

And an oldie but a goodie, the band's still around.

WEEK-END Fest, Stadthalle Köln Mülheim 14.12.2013: weekendfest.de/

Art Made From Books, paper art

chroniclebooks.com/titles/art-made-from-books.html

Nice book on the subject.  I also suggest Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists, Timeless Craft:

chroniclebooks.com/titles/paper-cutting.html

loftwork.com/portfolios/oonoyusuke

One of my book art favorites, Yusuke Oono's 360°Book.  I dislike Disney, but I like the concept and the execution. 

eckmanfineart.com

Impressive cast paper sculpture, Prairie Edge Hunt by Allen & Patty Eckman.

A great short.  Animation by Brothers Quay, music by Olga Neuwirth.

SupaKitch & Koralie.  Also see metroplastique.tumblr.com.

Codex Seraphinianus, new edition

rizzolibookstore.com/title/codex-seraphinianus-deluxe/

rizzolibookstore.com/title/codex-seraphinianus/

Some of you might've ordered it before its release on October 29.  I got my hands on 2 copies of the Deluxe Edition.  This is a reminder to get it while you can.   

See here for some good pics of what you get: chancepress.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/new-codex-seraphinianus-deluxe-edition-photo-gallery/

Please note: Rizzoli's description states "Deluxe numbered, limited edition of 300 w/signed print" and the edition number's 600, but this is correct.  There are only 300 copies for U.S. distribution.

Lou Reed R.I.P.

Like losing an important piece of poetic truth ...

Wakefield Press

Marcel Schwob's The Book of Monelle, one of my fondest books, is available from Wakefield Press: wakefieldpress.com/schwob_monelle.html

          

     

  

                                                

                   

        

Other titles in their catalogue, by series:

Imagining Science

Pataphysical Essays, by René Daumal

The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy, by Charles Fourier

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, by Georges Perec

The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, by Paul Scheerbart

The Library of Cruelty

The Conductor & Other Tales, by Jean Ferry (forthcoming)

The High Life, by Jean-Pierre Martinet

The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, by Benjamin Péret

Lesabendio: An Asteroid Novel, by Paul Scheerbart

The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob

Wakefield Handbooks

Treatise on Elegant Living, by Honoré de Balzac

The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments, by Pierre Louÿs

A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer, by Pierre Mac Orlan (forthcoming)

Forthcoming

Death to Art and Other Writings, by Vasilisk Gnedov
Pybrac, by Pierre Louÿs

These small, affordable books are indeed elegantly designed. 

What was I thinking?!?

Originally emailed on 10.17.2001

Notre Temps Est Venu/Our Time has Come, mixed media on canvas, 2010.  Erik Bulatov.  

 

 

anyway, history in itself (as contingency, real possibility, etc.) is not rational, though it is not made any more rational in interpretative thinking (as in empirical/positive science, most historiography).  for me (a hegelian), there is a co-productivity of thinking and history (subject-object), thus conceptually comprehensive cognition of historical development as opposed to the record of historical succession (some i'm sure are put off by the dialectic of reason, often equated with "progress").  in this sense, too, there is a logic to counter-revolution and retrogression in historical development.  otherwise, you have what by now is a naive historicism (most in the right and the left despite ideological differences) or the usual relativism and conjectural judgment of what-ifs (although things are up for grabs in the game).  i would even say contra almost all that there is a rationality to counter-revolution, that this is the "negative" with which we must necessarily tarry - modern history is replete with examples if not the stupid present situation...one shouldn't merely get stuck on semantical representation.  if dialectics is development (historical or otherwise) thru contradiction/otherness, if revolution is the movement of absolute negativity, then i dunno why adherents of dialectical thinking leave out the so-called bad things (or is it Ding-an-sich, the beyond in various ways of revolutionary consciousness?).  alas, i think there is only a handful of honest revolutionaries contra those who want some ethical-practical solution (which is exactly bourgeois intellectual intuition and the flip side of socialist utopia) and sometimes in the name of some self-styled philosophy.  there is the further consideration, not only "being against" but "being for," the new society in-and-for-itself if you will - well, this still can't happen without a relentless self-critique in philosophy, which is quite lacking...revolutionary essence still needs to realize its concept.

Louie Bluie's Whorehouse Bible

I wish a fine publisher would put out a facsimile of Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong's Whorehouse Bible (6:22). 

I love this documentary. Terry Zwigoff also directed Crumb (1995), poster art by Robert Crumb.

100 favorites, literature

The Librarian, oil on canvas, 1566.  Giuseppe Arcimboldo.  Skoklosters slott, Skokloster.

skoklostersslott.se/en/node/108

Lucian (c. 125-180) / A True History
Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185) / The Improvement of Human Reason
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (1554)
Denis Diderot / The Indiscreet Jewels (1748)
Voltaire / Candide (1759)
Laurence Sterne / The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767)
Xavier de Maistre / Voyage Around My Room (1794)
Friedrich Hölderlin / Hyperion (1797, 1799)
Novalis (1772-1801) / Heinrich von Ofterdingen
Mary Shelley / The Last Man (1826)
Nikolai Gogol / Dead Souls (1842)
Emily Brontë / Wuthering Heights (1847)
Herman Melville / Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
Lewis Carroll / Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1867)
Comte de Lautréamont / Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-1869)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / The Idiot (1869)
Joris-Karl Huysmans / Against Nature (1884)
Mark Twain / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Knut Hamsum / Hunger (1890)
Léon Genonceaux / The Tutu: Morals of the Fin de Siècle (1891)
Marcel Schwob / The Book of Monelle (1894)
Arthur Schnitzler / Lieutenant Gustl (1900)
Joseph Conrad / Heart of Darkness (1902)
Frank Wedekind / Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (1903)
Félix Fénéon / Novels in Three Lines (1906)
Robert Walser / Jakob von Gunten (1909)
Rainer Maria Rilke / The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
Alfred Jarry / Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)
Franz Kafka / The Metamorphosis (1912)
Octave Mirbeau / Dingo (1913)
Marcel Proust / In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927)
Miguel de Unamuno / Mist (1914)
Hermann Hesse / Demian (1919)
André Breton, Philippe Soupault / The Magnetic Fields (1920)
Maurice Dekobra / The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1925)
Jack Black / You Can't Win (1926)
Emilio Lascano Tegui / On Elegance While Sleeping (1926)
Louis Aragon / Irene's Cunt (1928)
Alfred Döblin / Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
William Faulkner / As I Lay Dying (1930)
Henry Miller / Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) / The Book of Disquiet
Dezső Kosztolányi / Kornél Esti (1936)
Witold Gombrowicz / Ferdydurke (1937)
Adolfo Bioy Casares / The Invention of Morel (1940)
Maurice Blanchot / Thomas the Obscure (1941)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry / The Little Prince (1943)
Jorge Luis Borges / Ficciones (1944)
Gherasim Luca / The Passive Vampire (1945)
Raymond Queneau / Exercises in Style (1947)
Boris Vian / Foam of the Daze (1947)
Osamu Dazai / No Longer Human (1948)
J.D. Salinger / The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
René Daumal / Mount Analogue (1952)
Vladimir Nabokov / Lolita (1955)
Pier Paolo Pasolini / The Ragazzi (1955)
Jean de Berg / The Image (1956)
William S. Burroughs / Naked Lunch (1959)
Flannery O'Conner / The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
Alexander Trocchi / Cain's Book (1960)
Julio Cortázar / Hopscotch (1963)
Konrad Bayer / The Head of Vitus Bering (1965)
Pierre Klossowski / The Baphomet (1965)
Jerzy Kosinski / The Painted Bird (1965)
Richard Brautigan / Trout Fishing in America (1967)
Mikhail Bulgakov / The Master and Margarita (1967)
Michel Tournier / Friday (1967)
Venedikt Erofeev / Moscow to the End of the Line (1969)
Chester Himes / Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Pierre Guyotat / Eden, Eden, Eden (1970)
Unica Zürn / Dark Spring (1970)
Henri Michaux / Miserable Miracle (1972)
Alexander Kluge / Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973)
Walter Abish / Alphabetical Africa (1974)
Grisélidis Réal / Black is a Color (1974)
Isabelle Eberhardt / The Oblivion Seekers (1975)
Peter Weiss / The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975)
Bohumil Hrabal / Too Loud a Solitude (1976)
Jean-Patrick Manchette / Fatale (1977)
Gabriel García Márquez / Innocent Eréndira (1978)
Georges Perec / Life: A User's Manuel (1978)
Italo Calvino / If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979)
Max Frisch / Man in the Holocene (1979)
Umberto Eco / The Name of the Rose (1980)
Thomas Bernhard / Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982)
Charles Bukowski / Ham on Rye (1982)
Kathy Acker / Blood and Guts in High School (1984)
Alasdair Gray / 1982, Janine (1984)
László Krasznahorkai / The Melancholy of Resistance (1989)
Herta Müller / The Land of Green Plums (1994)
William H. Gass / The Tunnel (1995)
Juan Goytisolo / State of Siege (1995)
Antonio Tabucchi / The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (1997)
Orhan Pamuk / My Name Is Red (1998)
Leonid Tsypkin / Summer in Baden-Baden (2001)
Édouard Levé / Oeuvres (2002)
José Manuel Prieto / Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (2003)
Horacio Castellanos Moya / Senselessness (2004)
Victor Pelevin / The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2005)
Mikhail Shishkin / Maidenhair (2005)

notes on novel writing

Angelus Novus (inverted), oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 1920.  Paul Klee.  The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

www.imj.org.il/imagine/collections/item.asp?itemNum=199799

... I have this theory of throwaway art, art that's done very casually and even randomly, with minimal effort, but only because it expresses a carefree genius of some kind, thus it's just an everyday affair, no big deal, without consequence, so it can be easily tossed out without any remorse or given away for free as it were.  But for these reasons, such art is the greatest achievement, naturally effervescent to an infinite degree.  Perhaps in some ideal society in some parallel universe, this will be the case.  Present society spends way too much time preserving too many things, and this propertizing logic being rather rigid can hinder much-worshipped "progress."  People do hold on to rather boring binarisms, and they can't see that the profound finds its best expression in the superficial.  Moreover, such logic is just plain paranoid of playfulness. 

Tragicomic tales are the best ones I think, have the most potential for all-around wisdom.  Straight dramatization of what happened is what's unconvincing, although it can be employed at certain times for irony and hilarity.  Most (meta)narratives employ omniscient commentary, usually to describe the mis-en-scène of the story and to describe the psychological actions of the characters.  Metacommentary comments on but also decenters the commentary, thus it can ironically and parodically remark on the self-certainty and conditionality of the commentary AND itself.  This doubtful or self-doubting "deconstruction" can be very funny but also be earnest if not be more true to the psychological and mental vicissitudes of the person, to a certain stream-of-consciousness, more "authentic" because in real life we do contradict ourselves and we do wander as well as wonder about all sorts of things in a more or less random fashion (a classic of this kind is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), and at the same time we do fixate on things too, which again can be playfully exposed in metacommentary.  Metacommentary can take the form of recursion, that is, the novel can be about the writing of the novel.  And the recursionist novel can perhaps take the form of an epistolary novel, that is, a novel in the form of letters or other kinds of correspondence (chats, emails, IMs, etc.).  Usually, this is done chronologically, but it's ok to jump forwards and backwards in time, which is much more like how memory works, or how it doesn't "work" and succumbs to fantasy and sometimes willful forgetting.  Metacommentary doesn't necessarily have to take these forms (as embryonically employed in Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles). The metacommentary can take the form of a very self-conscious albeit very subjectivistic mental "journal" or "memoir" (Edouard Levé notably does this neatly).  It can be written as if it were being thought or imagined extemporaneously at that very moment (I'm reminded of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Venedikt Erofeev's Moskow-Petushki).  Like cinéma vérité, it's littérature vérité.  It's also a kind of phenomenology, but one that's neither eidetic or apodictic, and rather given to solipsism and soliloquy.  Drawings, notes, photos, etc. can be included as well as random ephemera (e.g. Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School).   For me, the original inspiration for metacommentary is Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Rousseau's autobiographical writings - but with the ludic qualities of something like Voltaire's Candide.  Novels usually have a linear narrative, but I wonder if there's some way to use hypertext, again to non-linearly and discursively play on the associations and disassociations of emotions, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, thoughts, memory, fantasy, dreams, the ineffable even.  Perhaps all this can only be effectively done in a first-person narrative, and a confused one at that.  

Regarding dialogue, whether from the vantage point of the first-person narrative or a more "objective" one, a more standard one, metacommentary might come in handy to provide a context of all the dialogic(al) happenings, external and internal.  In a way, it's the opposite of polyphony and all the other good stuff Mikhail Bakhtin theorized.  Metacommentary contextualizes the hubristic pretensions of representing dialogical truth in some way.  Rather than being toward the other, the self only recognizes itself as other.  Some people might call this good old-fashioned existentialism, but oh well, perhaps existentialism didn't recognize its own narcissism thus also awaken to what I'll call a voluptuous vulnerability, or ultimately, a primary innocence even.   

Regarding profanity in literature, I neither like nor dislike it.  Usually, profanity in particular, colloquial speech and patois in general, they're employed unconvincingly in books - that's my main gripe.  And usually, the profanity's for the purposes of "realism."  However, only a few writers manage to pull that off, such as Charles Bukowski.  Writers have enough problems getting so-called regular speech down convincingly.  I think profanity just like disturbing images can be used effectively to shock as it were.  Sometimes, profanity can be used in a "cartoony" way, to caricaturize people or situations (William S. Burroughs and Chester Himes do this well), and thus to ironize them.  The best policy perhaps is to try doing a certain caricaturized realism if you will, which most likely requires profanity if only for the reason that most people do use it at some point in everyday life, and those that don't are living in literature, and only literature of an aseptic kind.  But moreover, even in everyday life, when people use profanity, they're usually assuming some kind of role, even to themselves.  When used amongst each other thus showing mutual trust or comfortability or also hostility, they're for that time suspending their usual existence of more or less insignificance.  Even when using profanity privately, e.g. "Shit!" or whatnot after making a mistake, the person's assuming a role, dividing the self and suspending identity.  This is the interesting thing about profanity, that it produces significance while suspending identity.  Often, through profanity, a person isn't so much honestly expressing "personality" but rather impersonating a (socio-symbolic) persona, usually the persona of another person.  Profanity does create a fantasy space-time par excellence, conflating the Imaginary and the Symbolic, other and Other.  So, when people cuss, they aren't really "keepin' it real" as they used to say. They aren't expressing themselves genuinely so much as they're proffering an appeal of some kind.  Otherwise, why even couch the usually mute circulation of stable "knowledge" in terms of profanity?  Another example is when a person utters whether aloud or inwardly in a time of exasperation "Fuck me!" or "I'm fucked!" - it's an appeal distanced and distancing from what the self is in "reality."  To provoke is also to appeal.  Of course, this counter-intuitive knowledge is pointless for many people mired in a certain natural consciousness.  Perhaps profanity is unavoidable to convey a certain realism, justified by the story or characters.  Even when speech acts are rather pathetically pedestrian and uninspired, some of them can be utilized for funny or touching ends.  For some situations, I wonder if they occasion something akin to Derrida's Glas ... that is, two or multiple intertextual columns that play off each other. 

That said, I think that nothing beats a certain clean and crisp writing, unadorned writing.  Kenzaburō Ōe is a master of such writing.  Elfriede Jelinek's works are excellent, sometimes spare, and unsparing of human folly.  I like lovely writing as much as the next person (I wish I could write like Hermann Hesse), from classics to Magic Realism and beyond, but there's too much of it out there - and thus, too little of it really, too little that challenges certain sentimentalisms reacting to (post)modernist posthistoire.  Also, I admire avant-garde and experimental literature, from Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror to the various surrealisms notably and cut-up etc., but it's not the most accessible stuff.  I may abstain from pedantically demonstrating theory in literary works, but I'm not against certain theoretical strategies to build the literary architecture, as long as the process disappears in the resultant product.  It must appear to be a monad.  The work must appear to be effortless.  I'm not against "difficult" literature, but it's exemplified in deceptively simple works.  I think the challenge is to make something very readable, short and snappy ...