Category Archives: absurd

A book about nothing, or, in praise of plotlessness and the antinovel

I’m rereading Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant, a book which is brilliant in its lateral connections, arguing amongst other things that the Industrial Revolution in England goes hand in hand with the legal use of opium as recreational drug.

Speaking of opium, I’ve published a photo of an oozing, exuding, secreting and leaking poppy seed head.

But that’s not what I wanted to show you.

On page 47 in Writing on Drugs is Flaubert and he is cited stating his desire to write ‘a book about nothing‘ (‘un livre sur rien’), in other words a plotless novel, an antinovel as it were.

“What strikes me as beautiful, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing, a book with no external tie, which would support itself by its internal force of style, a book which would have hardly any subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that can be so.” (Flaubert, Letters 170).

Amazing.

Did Flaubert fulfil his ambition?

Maybe he did. The closest he came to writing about nothing was in his Bouvard et Pécuchet and Dictionary of Received Ideas.

In praise of uncertainty

Of all the works I re-examined while reading Hans Holländer‘s Hieronymus Bosch: Weltbilder und Traumwerk, the detail of The Last Judgment (Bosch triptych fragment) is the one that caught my attention most. Just look at this delightful brightly coloured critter!

Ultimately, I find it very satisfying that nothing of the work of Bosch can be said with certainty.

So: in praise of uncertainty!

The Cut-Ups is World Cinema Classic #108

The Cut-Ups is World Cinema Classic #108

The Cut-Ups

Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello.
Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes? Hello!
– Look at that picture – Yes, hello.
Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes? Hello!
Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello.
Yes? Hello! Yes, hello.- does it seem
to be persisting? – Yes? Hello!
Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! – Good!
– Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! – Thank
you – Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes,
hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes?
Hello! Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes,
hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes?
Hello! – Look at that picture – Yes,
hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes?
Hello! – Does it seem to be persisting?
– Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes, hello.
Yes? Hello!Yes, hello. Yes? Hello! Yes,
hello. Yes? Hello! – Good! – Yes, hello.
Yes? Hello! Yes, hello. Yes? Hello!
– Thank you!

The Cut-Ups[1] is an experimental film by British filmmaker Antony Balch and American writer William Burroughs, which opened in London in 1967. It was the second time Balch and Burroughs had collaborated after their earlier Towers Open Fire. The Cut-Ups was part of an abandoned project called Guerrilla Conditions meant as a documentary on Burroughs and filmed throughout 1961-1965.

The film contains 19 minutes of someone saying “Yes, Hello?”, “Look at that picture,” “Does it seem to be persisting?,” and “Good. Thank you,” accompanied by a repetition five or six basic film clips shot in New York City and featuring Brion Gysin.

Inspired by Burroughs’ and Gysin’s technique of cutting up text and rearranging it in random order, Balch had an editor cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and impose no control over its reassembly. The film opened at Oxford Street’s Cinephone cinema and had a disturbing reaction. Many audience members claimed the film made them ill, others demanded their money back, while some just stumbled out of the cinema ranting “its disgusting”.

Included in The Cut-Ups are shots of Burroughs acting out scenes from his book Naked Lunch. The idea of bringing Naked Lunch to the big-screen was Balch’s dream project. First developed in 1964, a script was completed in the early 1970s which would have adapted the book as a musical. Personal differences between Balch and the film’s would-be leading man Mick Jagger caused the project’s collapse.

For an indepth description of the films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Antony Balch, see brightlightsfilm [1] by Rob Bridgett.

Bosch’s “hill woman” is Icon of Erotic Art #45

Bosch (from the Triptych of The Temptation of St. Anthony)

Bosch (from the Triptych of The Temptation of St. Anthony)

On my latest visit[1] to the KMSKB, I took some detailed photos of Bosch‘s The Temptation of St. Anthony (Bosch). The one shown above is from the left panel. I’ve chosen the rather bawdy depiction of a woman seated on all fours, with here belly and genital area being a whole in a hill. Depicting women as landscapes has been celebrated in several somatopia.

Somatopia is a term coined by Darby Lewes to denote texts composed of, or designed for the human body. Example include Merryland (1740) and Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684).

An early novel, A New Description of Merryland. Containing a Topographical, Geographical and Natural History of that Country[2] (1740), “a fruitful and delicious country,” by Thomas Stretzer, depicted the female body as a landscape that men explore, till, and plow. For example, he writes: “Her valleys are like Eden, her hills like Lebanon, she is a paradise of pleasure and a garden of delight.” Sometimes, the metaphor of female form = landscape changes, but the objectification of the female body remains intact; only the image is changed, as when, for example, in another passage, the novel’s narrator, Roger Pheuquewell, describes the uterus (“Utrs,” as the author simply contracts vowels without graphical indication) as resembling “one of our common pint bottles, with the neck downwards.” It is remarkable, he says, for expanding infinitely, the more it is filled, and contracting when there is no crop to hold. Similarly, in Charles Cotton‘s Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684), the female body is an island farmed by men.

Bosch’s “hill woman” shown above, and the genre of sexual somatopia is icon of erotic art #45.

RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)

RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)[1]

via www.tate.org.uk RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 - 2009) Fig.3 Stanley Chapman Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965enlarge

via www.tate.org.uk

Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965

Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. His interests included theatre and pataphysics. He was involved with founding the National Theatre of London, was a member of Oulipo of the year 1960, founder of the Outrapo and a member also of the French Collège de ‘Pataphysique, president the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with “admiring stupefaction” by Raymond Queneau.

Charles Fourier’s Hierarchy of Cuckoldry (1924)

Charles Fourier: Hiérarchie du cocuage – Les presses du réel (book) Hiérarchie du cocuage by Charles Fourier (1924).

Charles Fourier‘s Hiérarchie du cocuage (1924)

“… let us first establish a hierarchy of cuckoldry and introduce into this serious debate the beacon of analytic method, which the philosophers regard as the path to truth. ”

“Among cuckolds, it is possible to distinguish nine degrees of cuckoldry, both among men and women, for women are cuckolded far more often than men; indeed if the husband has horns as tall as a stag’s antlers, the wife’s may be said to be as high as the branches of a tree.” —The theory of the four movements [1]

I stumbled upon this work via the excellent Anton Constandse Eros – de waan der zinnen (1977). The hierarchy of cuckoldry is part of a defense of free love.

The Last Days of Emma Blank by Alex van Warmerdam

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFGrA1KCfEo]

The Last Days of Emma Blank[1] by Alex van Warmerdam

Chances are slim that you come across this film if you live outside of Europe or even Dutch-speaking countries, but if you see this film playing near you, don’t miss it. Warmerdam is the best director of The Netherlands and has been for some time now. His palmares includes Abel (1986), The Northerners (1992), Little Tony (1998), Grimm (2003)  and Waiter (2006).

The Last Days of Emma Blank (Dutch original: De Laatste dagen van Emma Blank) is a Dutch film by Alex van Warmerdam released in May 2009. The film is co-produced with La Parti Productions in Belgium and is the story of Emma Blank, a rich woman who is incurably ill and who is living her last days. She is surrounded by personnel who patiently await her death, which takes longer that originally envisioned.

Christophe Bruno’s Dadameter

Via Bright Stupid Confetti[1] comes Christophe Bruno‘s Dadameter

bright stupid confetti: packets of future transmission See Dadameter

The Dadamap

Christophe Bruno (born July 1, 1964) is a French artist. He began his artistic activity in 2001, influenced by the net.art movement. His thesis is that through the web, and especially through the ability to search and monitor it thoroughly by means of Google, we are heading towards a global text that among other things enables a new form of textual, semantic capitalism, which he explores in his work. His artworks include Iterature, Logo.Hallucination, The Google Adwords Happening and many other pieces.

The Dadameter is an art project by French artist Christophe Bruno first presented in 2008. It was inspired by the work of french writer Raymond Roussel use of homophony described in How I Wrote Certain of My Books.

In the words of the Bruno “the project is a satire about the recent transmutation of language into a global market ruled by Google et al. and uses the most up-to-date technologies of control to draw cartographies of language at large scale.”

It was co-produced by the Rencontres Paris-Berlin-Madrid 2008 for contemporary art and new cinema and programmed by Valeriu Lacatusu.

The result of the project is the so-called Dadamap[2][3] in which each pixel corresponds to one couple of words. The project started from “a lexicon of several thousands of words which correspond to about 800,000 couples (as many pixels then), and we looked for homophonic correlations, as in billard / pillard [see Roussel], or for semantic correlations.”

The procedure provides three measurements for each couple of words corresponding to homophony (the Damerau-Levenshtein distance), Google Similarity (or semantic relatedness) and thirdly equivocation (to which extent a word has a univocal meaning or at the contrary is polysemic or equivocal).

The Dadamap is a topographical map resembling an ocean floor, it features green for wasteland, light blue for utilitarianism, blue for mainstream, deep blue for boredom and brown for homophony[4]. There is an equivocation separation line which roughly splits the map into two, or maybe that is a rift. From left to right, the map contains the following lemmata: OuLiPo, Roussel, Dada, rap, Tecktonik, 911, pop, Warhol, Fluxus, Duchamp, Jarry, Baudrillard, reality TV, spam, neen, bling-bling, net.art, Debord, Burroughs, Mallarmé, spam, Hapax, Googlewhacks, epiphanies, infotainment, Joyce, Nouveau Réalisme, Sarkoland, recycling, Deleuze and Google.

Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings

Poggio

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini
I have a definite fondness for crude humour of the Middle Ages. The history of the genre was first documented in Italian scholar Poggio‘s Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales.

There is a presumably American 1930 private edition titled Facetia Erotica. Its full text can be found here.

It features such stories as Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings.

Poggio: Facetia Erotica, Title Page Poggio ‘s Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales is his best known work: it is available in several English translations. There is a public domain 1930 edition titled Facetia Erotica. It features such stories as Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings.

Facetiae, here published as Facetia Erotica. (source)

A peasant of our district, a stupid devil, who was utterly ignorant in matters of sex, got married. Thus it happened one night that his wife turned her back to him in bed, so that her buttocks rested in his lap. He had his weapon ready and landed by chance right in the goal. Marveling at his success, he inquired of his wife if she had two openings. And when she answered in the affirmative, he cried: “Hoho! I am content with but one; the second is entirely superfluous.” Upon which the sly woman, who was secretly consorting with the local priest, replied: “Then we can give the second away to charity. Let us grant it to the church and our priest.” The peasant, thinking to be relieved of an unnecessary burden, agreed [read the rest].