What are you reading?

[Faust]

sounds as worthless in its solipsism as lacan and co.

[Mail-Moth]

Well, I suppose you can say that

[AKA*NYC]

lolz faust, redact quickly, or at least google jabes, who is regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century, molinier, who was a creepy yet brilliant photographer that everyone on this board should be familiar with, not a writer, and guyotat, who is the last of the great french experimental writers. i for one revere the literature thread above all others on this forum for the consistent quality of the posts. and this has nothing to do with lacan whatsoever. look to your boy zizek for that.

[jumpoff]

[Faust]

lolz faust, redact quickly, or at least google jabes, who is regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century, molinier, who was a creepy yet brilliant photographer that everyone on this board should be familiar with, not a writer, and guyotat, who is the last of the great french experimental writers. i for one revere the literature thread above all others on this forum for the consistent quality of the posts. and this has nothing to do with lacan whatsoever. look to your boy zizek for that.

Who reads poetry anymore? The other is a photographer. And some other guy, whatever.

Zizek is not my boy, that's for sure .

[Mail-Moth]

Who reads poetry anymore?

(cough.)

[Faust]

Except Mail-Moth?

[Servo2000]

I've decided to try and get back into studying spanish again so I've started on grammar studies / some listening tapes dvds etc that I had around from when I was taking it in school and was curious if anyone could suggest some good spanish literature to struggle / study through? I was thinking about re-reading something by Bolano that I've already read in english, maybe.

[galia]

Except Mail-Moth?

I do
admittedly I read more poetry when I was younger but it still happens from time to time

[klangspiel]

^ poetry in the hands of writers like jabes, beckett, rilke, char, celan, mallarme, desnos, ezra pound, wallace stevens, to name only a handful, is a completely different beast altogether. it's like "stitching" (the idea, the technique, the form) in the hands of people like poell and altieri. takes on a different form altogether and becomes a transformed entity in itself. sometimes recognisable. sometimes not. so yes, now go and do some reading, you illiterate phillistines, the whole lot of you

I was thinking about re-reading something by Bolano that I've already read in english, maybe.

bolano is quite excellent. rodrigo fresan is also kinda of that ilk but as a whole i'm not too big on him. anyway, my spanish is spotty at best but if i ever pick up the language again, these are the writers i'd consider re-reading (having in the past only read most of them translated):

borges (but of course), alfonso reyes, arturo uslar-pietri, alejo carpentier, miguel de unamuno, adolfo bioy-casares (co-wrote with borges a number of fantastic books), ramon del valle-inclan, miguel angel asturias, juan jose arreola, francisco ayala, julio cortazar, fernando de rojas, benito galdos, and cervantes - hell, why not? always, always a pleasure to read him :))

books

nice haul of books. please keep them coming. seeing the jose corti publication of luca's work made me smile. reminded me of an old friend who was an ardent collector of publications by small-time niche publishing houses from around the world but mostly europe. she was a completist and archivist of the most impassioned and ferocious kind. one of her absolute favourite publishing houses was jose corti, which she'd praise to the highest of heavens each time we met, even knowing full well that i'm the last person in the world that needed convincing. i think she might have been an acquaintance of julien gracq's once upon a time ago. sadly she passed recently and i'm not sure those who were the beneficiaries of her library know exactly what they have inherited.

re: guyotat. interesting that just the other day a free copy of the recent english translation of coma arrived in the mail. having already read that in another language before, it may just be my favourite of his. it's considerably "tamer" and conventional when compared to his other works, particularly the earlier writings, but still retains and captures the kind of intensity one expects of him. and by intensity, i mean (i) "intense" as in the quality of possessing an exacting and uncompromising vigor or vitality; (ii) "intensity" as in the density of significations and meanings contained in each word, each sentence, each phrase. all tightly woven and interlaced together as a fibrously insidious body of writing -- not in some facile and prosaic sense of having multiple layers of meaning and nuances, or some neat, presumptuously smart, or ironic "in-between-the-lines" narrative; but purely an organic texture just teeming and breathing with fibres of significations; (iii) and finally, the intensity that is the sheer physicality of his signature writing-style - the gnarliness, the tactility, the confronting real-ness or materiality of language itself. it would seem that with coma his overall style is toned down somewhat by comparison to the unrelenting "maximalist" expressions found in, say, eden eden eden and tomb for 500,000 soldiers, but certainly no less, if not even more, disorientating in its quietude and restraint. it bears repeating, no matter how poor this analogy may seem, that the condition of abject silence is often far more confronting and alienating than a cacophony of harsh noises.

that said, i must admit that i avoided his writings for the longest time partly due to the loud critical baggage of prefaces -- "violence", "subversive", "transgressive", "extremist", etc.-- often associated with his work, which is admittedly terribly short-sighted. no different from those who gravitate to his work for that very same reason. i suppose it's like people who choose to or not to watch, say, pasolini's salo due to its controversial notoriety, rather than for what it is. looking beyond the external "braggadacio", i think the fascination i have most with guyotat's writing is less what he writes about than what he does to writing, in the sense of an "écriture" - the being-ness of writing, it's sheer ontology, as it were, and how this addresses the broader limitations and potentialities of writing itself, as a form, as a concrete form. central to this is his intention to achieve a kind of "brute matter" of writing, or what he considers as "matière écrite", through writing itself: to "tease out" or "purge" the materiality of writing with writing. he's obviously not the first within a long history of literary exploits to effectively do such a thing (but maybe the first to properly articulate about it). i can think of - in their many different ways - beckett, lautreamont, michaux, mallarme, proust (to some degree), to name only a few. and this, obviously, also extends beyond the purview of literature. in film: particularly those who work directly on film qua the celluloid qua the materiality of film itself, like brakhage and his scratches and paints on film, or film qua the apparatus of projection qua the materiality of light itself, like eg. some of the work done by the london filmmaker's co-op. in art, there's no shortage of examples: from artists as disparate as dubuffet to rothko to giacometti. poell does something similar as well, in that the "brute matter"-ing of the "medium" of the commingling of body and its assumed "second skin", which produces the materialistic units of his work - the various forms of stitches, seams, techniques, treatments, etc., but above all, the materialisation of distortion itself - the tangibility of the distorted figure and the concretisation of figural distortion - which is as much about francis bacon as it is... pierre guyotat.

[jcotteri]

lolz faust, redact quickly, or at least google jabes, who is regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century, molinier, who was a creepy yet brilliant photographer that everyone on this board should be familiar with, not a writer, and guyotat, who is the last of the great french experimental writers. i for one revere the literature thread above all others on this forum for the consistent quality of the posts. and this has nothing to do with lacan whatsoever. look to your boy zizek for that.

I completely agree with this... This thread is a great resource.. If only I had the time to read half of these books

[leiho]

from Mr Agueev, a curious and absorbing must-have

[Faust]

/\ Was a cult hit for a while. I remember discussing it here with pnod and merz.

[galia]

I didn't dislike it but was a bit underwhelmed at the time. should I re-read it and perhaps revise my judgement?

[Faust]

I didn't dislike it but was a bit underwhelmed at the time. should I re-read it and perhaps revise my judgement?

Isn't this the very definition of a cult hit? A fairly average work that allows a certain group of people to make it their own and get off on its obscurity? That's what seems to permeate this thread and the film thread.