September 16 - 29, 2008

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

2005, hardcover

27 cards

I've been meaning to read one of Haruki Murakami's books for a few years now. A couple of years ago a co-worker recommended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and, more recently, his memoir that overlaps with running sounds interesting. But it was when Jen recommended Kafka on the Shore and sent me the New Yorker review of the book (Jen reads New Yorkers cover to cover in order, I think she may be up to June right now but I could be wrong) that I decided this was the one to start with.

A meditation on life, Chances are you the reader has not become involved in a murder like part of the storyline, there are moments that may reflect your own grappling with a life lived, or at least that's what this book offered me. Thoughtful insights abound resulting from ordinary life moments as well as a few of the extraordinary variety. And Chip Kidd designed the cover.

Selections:

4- "Distance might not solve anything."

11- map

15- "You know how it is. When kids start playing together and get completely absorbed by whatever they're doing, they don't care about things like that anymore."

18- clouds- angle

21- "In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion."

-"'I think it means,' I say, 'that chance encounters are what keep us going."

30- map

31- diner

31- "Like the clouds floating across the sky, I'm all by myself, totally free."

32- libraries

36- odor of books

-"This is exactly the place I've been looking for forever."

37- "people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half."

-"my point is that it's really hard for people to live their lives alone."

-diner

44- cat and name- "I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn't need it anymore. So it slipped my mind."

46- cats- creatures of habit

54- (Kafka) "I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machines in the story...that's his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine."

68- (apartment) "Seedy, all right, but at least it had the feel of real people living real lives."

83- (no kids) "But it's not a good ideas to make decisions so soon. There's no such thing as absolutes."

94- "Was the sound of birds I was hearing real?"

99- clinging to something- Goethe- "Everything's a metaphor"

102-103- (Schubert) "...works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason- or at least they appeal to certain types of people....You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart- or maybe we should say the work discovers you."

104- "...People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring."

105- "But solitude comes in different varieties..."

122- (pencilled note, Eichmann bio)- "It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: IN dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that when there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann."

127- "...silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear."

141- "...whatever is it you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."

174- "People who look normal and live a normal life- they're the ones you have to watch out for."

175- "The more connections, the deeper the meaning."

-"What matters is that you see things with your own eyes."

-"If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you."

176- "Boundaries between things are disappearing all the time."

182- labyrinth

189- "A theory is a battlefield in your head."

191- diner

203- record player and record- "If possible I'd like to listen to the record to hear how it originally sounded."

-"All like the ruins of some not-so-distant past."

210- (song) "One by one the words find a home in my heart."

225- pirate

-"Artists are those who can evade the verbose."

-"If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem."

232- Bob Dylan

235- "My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime."

236- pickles

238- diner

240- Colonel Sanders

248- bird- branch- wind- "vision shifts"

253- Bergson- "The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."

255- "A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need is to move from reason that observes to reason that acts."

265- "God only exists in people's minds."

-"If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, he isn't."

276- "Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover."

276- painting

278- "All of us are dreaming."

284- "Nakata's like a library without a single book."

292- "People actually prefer not being free."

-Australian Aborigines, fenceless civilization until 17th century

294- "Or maybe I just wanted to keep myself busy, so I set a goal that kept me running around and my mind occupied."

-"If it wasn't for that project, I probably would've withdrawn even further from reality and ended up completely isolated."

299- "the post rain scent in the air"

302- "The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody's got to keep watch, take care of business..."

326- "So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside."

327- "The longer people live, the more they learn to distinguish what's important from what's not."

-"You're in the middle of something wonderful, something so tremendous you may never experience it again. But you can't really understand how wonderful it is. That makes you impatient. And that, in turn, leads you to despair."

332- pickles

334- map- diner

334- "'But what the heck are you looking for?' Hoshino asked after they'd eaten. 'I don't know. But I think-' 'that you'll know it when you see it. And until you see it, you won't know what it is.'"

349- "Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most sublimed thing in the world, he though political power and wealth only served one purpose: to make art possible."

359-360- "War breeds war."

365- "The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless."

365- painting

370- letter- secret

373- "Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?"

377- "Can nothingness increase?"

379- "You changed my life...things look different to me now. ... I've started to see the world through your eyes."

382- pickles

390- Truffant- 400 Blows

392- names- "There's no need to call me, she says. If you need me, I'll be here."

405- hold a book

427 (quiet, power) "People that don't get it never will."

432- "Every one of us is losing something precious to us...Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads- at least that's where I imagine it- there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in the library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while..."

-"People need a place they can belong."

435- time

May 14 - 24, 2008

Fischli and Weiss The Way Things Go

Jeremy Millar

2007, hardcover

Part of Afterall's One Work series

18 cards

Fischli and Weiss are amazing. Joel and Amanda told me all about them this past summer after they say an exhibition of their work in Europe. Then MoCAD had their work Questions in the brilliant Words Fail Me exhibition. Their Manifesto is also a great addition to any wall and life. This spring Joel and Amanda saw Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go again at the Hirshorn and picked up the DVD version of it (available on Netflix even now). This book focuses on The Way Things Go exploring why and how is fascinates in a way that expands this work in exciting directions. The book starts from observation and experience of the work in museum and people's reactions, a rich terrain upon which to build while never reducing the work's "purposeless purposiveness".

Some brief notes from my cards and reading:

-Opens with a Wittgenstein quote

-Der Lauf der Dinge (The Ways Things Go)

2- clapping

-"Even in our ignorance...it was clear that we had watched something great."

3- "...It was a little frightening, being moved like this..."

4- "what makes it popular also makes it good"

-Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 1759

-connection to Fischli and Weiss's 1984 Equilibres

8- "Our traditional means of formal analysis seems unable to deal with works, such as those, that are less concerned with external appearance than with 'internal' conceptual coherence."

9- gravity

10- procede- Raymond Roussel

-Roussel, near-neighbor of the Prousts

11- Duchamp- Roussel- The Large Glass

-Robbe-Grillet

-Foucault

12- "As with Fischli and Weiss, a rigorous play is fundamental to Roussel's practice."

-Parmi Les Noirs, 1935- identical phrases- single letter- different meanings

15- Kierkegaard "Boredom is the root of all evil."

17- change

20- anticipation

-"Everywhere things are transformed into actions, nouns become verbs."

21- illustrations by Wiliam Heath Robinson

-Frederick Winslow Taylor

23- Esperanto

24- Futurists

27- "...it seems to be both an anticipation of the birth of time and memory of its end. But where does that place us?"

28- Archytas of Tarentum- 4th c. BCE- treatise on place

29- Focillon- "'a work of art treats space according to its own needs, defines space and even creates such space as may be necessary to it.'"

32- Henri Bergson- Creative Evolution

-the concrete solution

33- Bergson, time

34- waiting- humor

- Creative Evolution- influence on Marcel Proust

36- interventions

37-38- epic and anti-epic

55- "It becomes a part of time not apart from it."

-Bruno Schulz- "Our creators will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gestures, for one word along, we shall make the effort to bring them to life."

57- Bakhtin- laughter and the epic

59- the Incongruity Tradition

-1981 film, The Least Resistance, rat and bear costumes

60- 1979 sausage series

61- At the Carpet Shop- gherkins

66- Peter Fischli, "Operating on two planes at once is part of our practice."

-Koestler- impersonator

67- Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968

-machines and perfection

70- The Way Things Go- "...objects do no more than they need to, no more than they are able."

-simple object, technology

-familiar and unexpected

-Bergson, Le Rire, 1900

71- automatism and life

73- "Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses."

75- rigidity

-hesitate

76- pause

-timing, comedy

77-78- Kant- "laughter as 'an affection arising from the strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.'"

80- "purposeless purposiveness"

81- seeing how it was made

82- "of the smile rather than the laugh"

-"smile of wonder"

83- "This smile is not ours alone, but sits with quiet benevolence on the faces of the artists too... Just as one can hear the smile in the voice of someone talking over the phone, so one can see it in Fischli and Weiss's artworks."

-"one can produce wonder only if one succeeds"

-place of wonder in their practice

84- St. Augustine

107- Fragen (Questions), relationship to Daston and Park Questiones naturals of Adelard of Bath

87- David Weiss, "There is a reason why the Pyramids are famous. When you go there, no matter how many photographs you've seen of them before, you realize that the Pyramids are unique and that you don't understand them..."

-Heidegger

89- the sublime

-"wondrous"

91

92

April 27 - May 8, 2008

Andy Warhol

Blow Job

Peter Gidal

Afterall Books, 2008

Part of their brilliant One Work series http://www.afterall.org/books_onework.html

11 cards

I think we're really getting into an interesting period of Warhol scholarship and this book is just one step in that direction. Warhol left a lot behind. There is a lot to deal with but in what has been dealt with, much has been overlooked. This type of focused approach to a single work is the best type of contribution to writing on Warhol since differences and minute details are integral to Warhol's practice. He left many clues but many remain to be found or deciphered to the extent of their full complexity. Gidal sets out a careful and thoughtful analysis of Blow Job while offering exciting jumps to connections between the film and Velazquez's Luncheon or Three Men at a Table as well as Duchamp's Large Glass. I love the MCA bookstore in Chicago and I was particularly excited to see that they had this new release.

Select notes/passages of interest:

1- Warhol's classic figment quote

-exploration of duration

-projected speed, flares, edge numbers, time for reel breaks

4- "...his courage in being prepared to act without denying his sexuality was no mean thing, then or now."

5- four agents in the space

7- Gertrude Stein

8- "no less real for not being seen"

-"The real world is appropriated by the film..."

11- "unendurable durations"

12- the paradox

14- Proust

15- "...not about time regained but time lost. 'In search of...' means not that you find it but that you don't."

18- "existing only in its absence"

19- Velazquez

22- "making nothing materially present"

24- mirror

26- Warhol's time

-"The fear of death doesn't need more than a moment."

-shadow

28- shadows "understanding the state of suspended or arrested recognition"

"Warhol's works are emphatically not iconic"

31- real time during the viewing

32- Proust again

-"extreme light can create an absence of image"

36- "We are unable to lose ourselves in the series of acts represented....'realism' of another kind."

37- machine and body

-"In that re-viewing, the repetition becomes a memory."

38- palimpsest

-"the taking up of time, its being filled, is what obliterates it"

40

-"Thus the subject of the film is never just what you 'see.'"

-silkscreens and squeegee marks

41- Warhol titles

45- boredom

46 (Warhol film) "you are left bereft"

59 Henri Bergson (via Bertrand Russell)

60- the subject and where it exists

61- adequateness and language

61-63-discussion of leaders

63- The Chelsea Girls- silent screen, indexical

64- Empire- "the skyscraper can be both itself and an image of a stable structure and fragile evanescence."

-printing of Sleep

-discussion of time and death towards the bottom of the page

65- "'You don't have sex with a name.'"

66- "So what."

69- time held- Suicide silkscreen

71- "In Warhol's films, meaning is, in the end, always determined by production not consumption. And in the beginning too."

73- Duchamp's Large Glass

73-74- concept of Marcel Duchamp

75- stillness

76- uttering a word- "no sooner spoken than unspoken"

78- moments only