Kansas City
Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas
City opened yesterday. I grew up a few blocks away. In April, I made a
video of the Walter De Maria pool lighting the parking lot below.
Posted by Claire at 10:17 AM 0 comments
Labels: Kansas City, museums, video
Friday, June 8, 2007
Sharon Osmond, Jasper Bernes, Elizabeth Marie Young, Kristen Yawitz
Xantippe Reading Saturday Night at Pegasus Books. More info here. Go
see Sharon Osmond. She is amazing.
My last day of school.
Finishing Great Jones Street I found pages written by one who had lost
language. A fictional drug possibly developed by the government to
take language away from those who cause trouble. See Saturday, June
2nd.
Posted by Claire at 7:27 AM 1 comments
Labels: correspondences, readings
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Great Jones Street 2
Savoring the end of Great Jones Street. It wants to be a really bad
movie in my head. I want to read the DeLillo plays.
Good sentence: "I picked up the telephone and listened to the dial
tone, music of a dead universe."
Now most of us don't even hear it.
"A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another.
The touring clown doubly self-effaced."
The narrator, the rock star experiencing privacy, frequently fades
into the background while speaking in his own voice. We get the meta
DeLillo narrator talking our ear off, then a little bit of Bucky
Wunderlick jumps in to remind us who he is:
"They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast
dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the
tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovingly at our spires,
mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots,
pigeon lofts and chimneys.
"I turned south on Broadway."
Wunderlick interjects with his "I" then a new paragraph begins,
similar to that above. I love those moments. We're steered through the
story with sentences borrowed from reality. Diction changes from
matter-of-fact to wildly repetitive, invented slang, real slang. A
character's thought can take up a page. The response to it may be one
word. This is how the rhythm balances itself.
Posted by Claire at 12:32 PM 0 comments
Labels: reading
Monday, June 4, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
Posted by Claire at 3:29 PM 0 comments
Labels: news
Saturday, June 2, 2007
It is the human that is the alien
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
-from Wallace Stevens, "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
This reminds me of Josh telling me that in The Pervert's Guide to
Cinema Slavoj Zizek says language is alien to us. We shove it in our
youngsters' ears, otherwise it wouldn't be in their throats. And if
you know people who are naturally nonverbal, you get to see that
language is not the only way to be human. Which is kind of insane
after you spend years writing and reading poetry. One of my nonverbal
students leaned over and puked on the floor next to his desk and then
he said "Health Services," two words I have never heard him say. He
prefers not to talk. Language is purely functional for him. He can
express his needs. He can "play" with one meaningless phrase, like the
name of a radio station, repeating it for months without making any
syntactical substitutions or changing intonation. Through him I've
learned there is thinking without thought. There's spatial thinking,
desire thinking, movement planning...My thinking of how to relate to
one who doesn't have language is observational, experimental,
repetitive, at its best I guess it's wordless. Stevens poem hopes that
god is nonverbal and that he cannot hear us. Our speech makes us
alien. It's great to be alien sometimes. Sometimes we can be our
animal selves silent with the natural world. But once we're infected
with speech, we can't get rid of it. We could try to take it from our
children. I don't think we should.
Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
as those are: as light, for all its motion, is,
As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,
A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
Posted by Claire at 12:10 PM 3 comments
Labels: alien, human, Stevens
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