Yearly Archives: 2009

Introducing Gaston Burssens (1896 – 1965)

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Fabula rasa (1945) by Gaston Burssens (this edition 1964)

I am not much of a fiction reader, nor have I ever been much of a poetry reader. My favorite literature is books about books. Literary criticism or literary theory.

I make exceptions.

The best work I read last year was Michaux’s Plume[1] which happens to be a work of prose poetry, a genre which can be traced most readily to Baudelaire and Poe. A genre which is plotless but nevertheless more concrete than pure poetry.

Saturday I bought the work above. It is worth its price for the introductory notes alone.

Literary critic Paul de Wispelaere reviewed it in the chapter “De groteske wereld en de wereld van de groteske,” in his collection Het Perzische Tapijt (1966). In this essay de Wispelaere juxtaposes Fabula Rasa with the paraprose of Gust Gils, another Flemish writer who wrote in the tradition of the literary grotesque. Fabula Rasa’s Belgian-French counterpart is Plume by Henri Michaux.

While researching this post I also stumbled upon prose by Flanders’ cult poet par excellence Paul Van Ostaijen: De bende van de stronk (The stump gang, 1932, grotesques). I will want a copy of that.

Edgar Allan Poe @200

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet @200

A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848, first published 1880

A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848,

first published 1880

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, and one of the leaders of the American Romanticism. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. During his lifetime he was more popular in France (thanks to the translations of Baudelaire) than in his native country. After his premature death at the age of 40 he became internationally renowned. The Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo derived his pseudonym of his name. He came to the attention of 20th century audiences via the low-budget film adaptations by Roger Corman starring Vincent Price.

If you only want to read one story by Poe, read “Loss of Breath.”

“Loss of Breath: A Tale Neither in nor Out of “Blackwood” (1832) is a short story by Poe, first published on June 9 or November 10 1832. It concerns a man who suspects that his wife has stolen his breath.

David Ketterer describes the story as: “A surrealistic fantasy in which the idea that death involves not loss of life but merely loss of breath is combined with a whimsical but, for biographers of Poe’s psyche, revealing equation between loss of breath and loss of sexual potency on the narrator’s wedding night”.[1]

“Behold me then safely ensconced in my private boudoir, a fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility—alive, with the qualifications of the dead—dead, with the propensities of the living—an anomaly on the face of the earth—being very calm, yet breathless.”

…

“The purchaser took me to his apartments and commenced operations immediately. Having cut off my ears, however, he discovered signs of animation. He now rang the bell, and sent for a neighboring apothecary with whom to consult in the emergency. In case of his suspicions with regard to my existence proving ultimately correct, he, in the meantime, made an incision in my stomach, and removed several of my viscera for private dissection. “

The Romantic Image

I went to the city yesterday and bought:

Did not buy Sarenco : le triptyque du cinéma mobile, 1983-1987[4]: Félix Guattari, Eugenio Miccini, Luigi Serravalli and The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy‎[5] by J. L. Styan, 1968.

The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode

The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode

The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode

The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode

The Romantic Image (1957) is a book on the “image” in Romantic poetry by Frank Kermode.

In its preface Kermode says he is indebted to Romantic Agony by Italian critic Mario Praz, The Romantic Soul and the Dream by Swiss critic Albert Béguin, The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams and The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895 by A. G. Lehmann.

Kermode looks at two assumptions of relevance to modern poetry and criticism: first, “the image is the `primary pigment’ of poetry,” and, second, “the poet, who uses it is by that very fact differentiated from other men, and seriously at odds with the society in which he must live.” He calls these ideas “thoroughly Romantic,” and maintains that they remain fundamental for twentieth century writers and critics.
P.S. the cover of my edition has Odilon Redon’s “Orpheus”.

American comedian Andy Kaufman @60

Andy Kaufman performs Mighty Mouse

Click to view, hilarious!

In one of his first television appearances (on the premiere of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, October 11, 1975), Andy Kaufman lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse theme song (but only to the words “Here I come to save the day!”)

Andy Kaufman

Andy Kaufman (1949 – 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist who refrained from telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood; instead, he was a practitioner of anti-humor or dada absurdist performance art, referring to himself instead as a “song and dance man.”

Jim Carrey played Kaufman in Miloš Forman‘s 1999 film, Man on the Moon.

Outside of the United States he is best-known as Latka Gravas in the Taxi television sitcom.

RIP American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009)

RIP Andrew Wyeth, 91, American painter

christina's world by rachelstyle

Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American figurative painter. He was one of the best-known of 20th century American art, referred to as the “Painter of the People” due to his popularity with the public, although he shares that title with Norman Rockwell. One of the best-known images in 20th century American art is Christina’s World (1948).

In the DVD extras to the film Tideland, an adaptation of Mitch Cullin‘s novel Tideland, director Terry Gilliam cites Christina’s World as an inspiration in setting the backdrop and mood for the movie. The same extras claim that Mitch Cullin was also inspired by this same painting.

Nighthawks(1942) by Edward Hopper

Wyeth is similar to Edward Hopper. Sholem Stein described Christina’s World as “Nighthawks for country folk”.

Art’s birthday, or, when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water

One Million Years B.C. (1967) – Don Chaffey [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Tomorrow is art’s birthday.

Filliou first proposed “Art’s Birthday” in 1963. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on January 17th to be precise, Art was born. Filliou says it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9-O81GThI]

Robert Filliou

For the origins of art see Georges Bataille‘s Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art, One Million Years BC, cave painting and primitive art.

Avant-garde and kitsch in the early 21st century

Today is Clement Greenberg‘s centennial

Crying Boy (?) – Bruno Amadio

Best-known for his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) he is more of an author to acknowledge rather than to admire. His above mentioned Avant-Garde and Kitsch is one of the first texts to one finds when one researches the two extremeties of the artistic experience: avant-garde and kitsch. Two terms coined during the industrial revolution, the first in Paris, the second in Berlin.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch does not deliver. Much more interesting and related reading are The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 1936), Notes on Camp (Susan Sontag, 1964) and The Aporias of the Avant-Garde (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1962). The intimate connection between avant-garde and popular culture was first celebrated in the 1990 exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.

I have a separate entry on death of the avant-garde.

Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit

Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night predates Malevich’s, Black Square on a White Field by 31 years.

As a term avant-garde was replaced by experimental in the 1960s.

Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994) was an American art critic closely associated with the abstract art movement in the United States. In particular, he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and had close ties with the painter Jackson Pollock. He is the author of Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Such was Greenberg’s influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the “kings of cultureburg”, alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.

He introduces his essay by juxtaposing forms of popular culture and high art:

“ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such different things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest — what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted — does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?”[1]

In the fourth paragraph he starts his defense of the avant-garde vs Alexandrianism (academicism).

“It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we — some of us — have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: — avant-garde culture. ”

Greenberg is a flawed writer. He uses scare quotes as clarification more than 30 times in this text.

His assessment of kitsch is shortsighted. He explicitly equates academic art with kitsch and vice versa. He is right to connote kitsch with the industrial revolution. Possibly he read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written three years earlier, which has the same kitsch/industrial revolution analysis but with much less of the judgementalness.

See also: cultural pessimism and elitism

Art’s Birthday

Fogos Copacabana 2009 - Fireworks over Copacabana 2009 by augusto.froehlich

Click for credits

The highbrow world is excited by “Art’s Birthday” which will take place in two days on January 17. “Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.

The lowbrow world already celebrated art’s birthday at midnight December 31 with the various fireworks. Talk about sumptuary excess. And synchronicity. Think about how many mouths can be fed with what went up the air. For entertainment. And yet I totally understand. I enjoy fireworks and consider them a primeval art.

I’ve previously posted[1] about sumptuary excess, expenditure and the general economy.

Filliou is co-responsible for: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966) – Daniel Spoerri, Roland Topor
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Death by bisection or dismemberment (excluding decapitation)

The final frontier in cinephilia is silent cinema.

I just discovered Ménilmontant.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoO2hLUMgG0&]

Opening scene of Ménilmontant (no intertitles, a flurry of quick close-up shots depicting an axe murder)

Ménilmontant (1926) is a silent film by Russian film director Dimitri Kirsanoff. His best-known work, it takes its name from the Paris neighborhood of the same name. The film is a silent, but does not contain any intertitles. It begins with a flurry of quick close-up shots depicting the axe murder (see death by bisection or dismemberment (excluding decapitation)) of the parents of the protagonists, two girls. As young women, they are portrayed by Nadia Sibirskaïa, Kirsanoff’s first wife, and Yolande Beaulieu; their mutual love interest is played by Guy Belmont. The film uses many other techniques that were relatively new at the time, including double exposure.

RIP Patrick McGoohan (1928 – 2009)

RIP Patrick McGoohan, 80, American-born Irish actor (The Prisoner, Braveheart)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-X5Hgbc688&]

The Prisoner

Patrick Joseph McGoohan (March 19, 1928 – January 13, 2009) was an Irish American actor who rose to fame in the British film and TV industry by starring in the 1960s television series Danger Man, cult classic The Prisoner and Mel Gibson‘s epic Braveheart. McGoohan wrote and directed several episodes of The Prisoner himself. He also had a part in David Cronenberg’s paranoiac Scanners as Dr. Paul Ruth, psychopharmacist.