November 14 - December 17, 2008

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
1957, paperback

Until now I've never read any of Virginia Woolf's books, but luckily the exhibition A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections is changing that. Woolf is an amazing writer and what she wrote in first part of the 20th century bears just as much relevance and importance in the 21st. Woolf's thinking aloud through her writing allows the reader to gain from the path she walks. I find her to be an exemplary companion, I just need to find more quiet corners to spend with her writing so I don't become the skimmer of surfaces she mentions.

Some excerpts:
4- "a woman must have money and a room of her own is she is to write fiction"
13-14- "It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs more in time to it along the road."
-"But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment."
15- "My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me?"
18- "a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
24- "I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work."
35- "What effect had poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?"
27- "Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
30- (footnote 1- Dr. Johnson) "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves."
31-32- "Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
34- "When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself."
36- "mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action"
53- "...to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it...Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them...Naturally it will not pay for what it does not want."
54- "If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived."
57- "The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."
68-69- "For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."
70- (Mrs. Nightingale) "Women never had a half hour...that they can call their own."
79- "Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
80- "Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes."
83- "She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression. Among these new novels one might find an answer to several such questions."
93- "Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the every changing and turning world of gloves and shows and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudomarble."
94-95- "Be truthful, one would say, and the result if bound the be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched."
97- "that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths."
101- "Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives."
110 - "so long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters..."
115- "...much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves."
117- "A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have."
-"...for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh"
118- "...to work, even in poverty and obscurity is worth while"

November 25 - December 6, 2008

Reena Spaulings
A novel by Bernadette Corporation
paperback, 2004

I have wanted to read this book from the moment I learned of it (you can read the 1st three chapters here). Somehow I never ordered online, but finally it found me. The last copy at the MoCAD bookstore, it was in stock due to the Bernadette Corporation being in the intelligent and captivating exhibition Business as Usual. Reena Spaulings is a fictional character in her 20s (but isn't she all of us), a museum guard, a fashion model, a novel, and subsequently an art gallery and an art dealer. She's not one thing, she's many. And she's rarely still, though despite the fast pace the reader still is able to get inside her head. sometimes.

Some excerpts:
Preface- "If you look at a city, there's no way to see it. One person can never see a city."
-"It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It's an everyday group hallucination."
-author
3- Reena
4- "She is not happy, not sad, not nothing."
-secrets
-Nobody ever talks in the way it would blow her brains out. Plus she has no desire to interfere with the flows that brought these streams of people, words."
-bangs
7- "Reena could be a Manet, one of these thinking pictures you can't see through, no matter how long you stare at them."
12- "I am often surprised, not to say a little embarrassed, at how blown-away I can be by the street's beauty after a day in the museum."
15- "A body is a living, breathing image that thinks while exposing itself to others."
16- "What if nothing belonged to anybody?"
31- Manet, Young Lady in 1866
34- "The illusion unravels like in a Warhol, leaving something that's not an illusion."
-"Here is observing for those who can no longer see. Or, for those who can't really look into another person's eyes."
53
55- "We move through a city that produces boys and girls and extends itself through them."
57- "...thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the stage by our monuments and monumental buildings."
61- "I think how can we make a beautiful brushstroke with our existence?"
63- "an economy of essences"
65- "his shirts were always blank"
73- (war) "Anyway, there's no point in discussing such things if we can't find a way of talking about them that's as outrageous as the things themselves."
-dandy- "existence consists in the wearing of clothes"
-abstract painting- "opening a blank space in the texture of institutionally recognized meaning. Few artists leave that void empty for long."
76- hands
78- "It's as if an envelop is falling over this place, sealing us up inside."
-"I feel loads of unspoken words showering down on me. Shooting star sentences that will never be translated."
79- "She's an open book but every turned page presents another cover."
82- "New York is an entire library of books about everything and everybody. Reading here is work, and behind every book-filled room is another room of books and the reading never ends."
-"The city is an open structure that works by calibrating every relationship to its programmed expansion and destruction."
-"The city needs Reena and folds her into its architectures..."
-(NYC) 12 million reader-authors
-"There is no New York story, only an endless effort to make us forget that narration is war..."
-Reena's lighting system
84- "Bedrooms are the site of intimacy. What is more intimate, when shared, than boredom."
85- "Boredom like stupidity contains its own treasures."
93-94- "Was Reena pursuing her desires, or was she inventing them anew with each ring of the cash register."
94- "Its exclusivity lay entirely in the mis-relationship between what it had cost and what it actually was. The price here stood in for any and ever other quality."
95-96- 99 cent store
98- "Shopping together is like traveling: an elaborate way of making the couple visible to itself."
99- "'I'm surprised how much birds sing.'"
133- Voltaire- "That which needs an explanation is not worth an explanation!"
136- "...Capitalism, Empire, whatever...there's a general context that not only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the time, there is no situation."
-"That the desert of these times isn't perceived is only one more proof of the desert."
137- "To live in the world means: to begin with the situation, not to deny it. To give consistency to a situation. To make it real, tangible. Reality is not capitalist."
143- Zizek
154- "Funny how individuality makes you generic."
154-155- "Here is an intellectual body of pure capability, but one that is also open, looking to be determined from outside, ready to re-write everything, to co-write, to be written on..."
158- "Better to eat candy like Andy."
165- "People want to be someone. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one."
174- "Everything emblematic of a being-alive that once was, is not available in a variety of prices and quality."
188- "I wanted to go out and see people and talk about everything I saw."
190- "Nothing ever ends until you let it go."
-"Only the impossible is worth the effort."
200- "because in New York we were sweating the evil they would be photocopying in three years time."
201- "You see? Your love is circular. There is nothing like it. It makes us forget how to change."
202- "I'm trying to wangle my way out of obligations because I need long hours to do nothing, which I consider to be a big part of my work now."
-back cover

November 3 - 19, 2008

A Coney Island of the Mind
Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
New Directions Paperback

While I've been to City Lights I've never read any of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. I came across this volume since it was the selection for the reading group accompanying the complex and marvelous exhibition Circa 1958. I didn't make it to the discussion group, but I'm glad to have spent some time with Ferlinghetti's fantastically visual and stunning poems.

Some excerpts/phrases:
9- "under cement skies"
-"bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness"
10- "...more maimed citizens in painted cards and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America"
11- "...elephants in bathtubs floated past us out to sea strumming bent mandolins..."
14- "And lost teacups full of our ashes floated by"
17- "where no birds sang"
33- "Frightened by the sound of my own voice and by the sound of birds singing on hot wires"
35- "The pennycandy store beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality"
36- "At a certain age her heart put about searching the lost shores And heard the green birds singing from the other side of silence."
38- "painting moustaches on statues"
44- Proust
49- "and I am waiting for someone to really discover America"
49-50
52- "and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence"
57- "I'm going where turtles win"
58- "Lost the war without killing anybody."
-"The end has just begun. I want to announce it. Run don't walk to the nearest exit."
62- "Home is where one starts from."
63- "and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promise Land where every coin is marked In God We Trust but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves."
64- "I have ridden superhighways and believes the billboard's promises"
-"I am in line for a top job. I may be moving on to Detroit."
66- "I have seen giraffes in jungle jims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world."
82- "#6 Truth is not the secret of a few"
-museums, constipated
83- "Fortune has its cookies to give out"
85- "'We think differently at night' she told me once"
90- El- third story world
91- "and of that lost book I had with its blue cover and its white inside where a pencilhand had written HORSEMAN, PASS BY!"

How to give a book and so much more

Recently I was thinking about sewing re-usable book wrapping bags since I always give people books for holidays. Lisa Anne Auerbach has an even better idea- The Hanukah Book Club- going through your bookshelf and giving some of the books you have to your loved ones since the books will be new to them! This idea developed out of a conversation between her mom and grandmother. As Auerbach writes, "She wrapped up eight used books for everyone and that was that. We loved it. No consumer frenzy. Better, more thoughtful presents. Super fun and no shopping."

Here's the tract the she wrote about The Hanukah Book Club too.
It begins: "Down with Christian Capitalist Consumer Christmas! Enough already with the gifts.
We call an unceremonious end to toasters, flatscreens, cashmere, ice buckets and the like. We giggle and gloat at the funeral of Christmas shopping, and we dance on the grave of unrepentant consumerism. It’s boring and wasteful. The mall is a desperate place. It’s loud and unfulfilling. We have to shake ourselves so we don’t turn into zombies...."
and continues:
"The decision between extravagant and practical is over. Cereal bowls or spa treatment? Socks or gold-tipped knitting needles? A year’s supply of garbage bags or a counter-hogging espresso machine? Are gifts about us or about them? Do we think we’re a better person if we’re spending more money? Or do we think our family will love us more if we show up with eight more useless offerings? ... We might not know what our purpose is as human beings on this planet, but certainly it is not to keep corporate America afloat in our dollars."

Absolutely brilliant.

Buy Books from Bookstores

"Literacy is the cornerstone of any great society. When we stop reading -- and by extension, buying books, discussing art, participating in the life of the mind -- everything else crumbles."

by diana abu jaber on Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter

Full story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97873655

October 19 - November 1, 2008

The Wordy Shipmates
Sarah Vowell
2008, hardcover
14 cards

This is a book about the Puritans, the Separatists and the Non-Separatists, but since it is written by Sarah Vowell it is so much more than that. Vowell positions what took place in the early days of the United States alongside the current wars the United States wages. With her humor and cynicism and wading through history to dredge up the good stuff, her approach also demonstrates how one can fuse one's practice, with one's beliefs in ways that inform the current state of affairs rather than just recount. And the book starts with a drawing by Marcel Dzama. With the recent election we might not be Ronald Regan anymore (p. 62), but we'll see.

Since it is the month of the holiday known as Thanksgiving I point your attention to the following statement: "Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What if we didn't deserve it?" (p. 198) Maybe this year it should have been November 5.

Some excerpts:
1- "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed."
6- Middle East
-"Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife."
-"(Martin) Luther's point was that, according to scripture, salvation is not a bake sale..."
7- "Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves."
9- "hot Protestants" (Puritans)
11- The Humble Request, 1630- "Nothing uppity about us, Your Majesty, we're just hobos in the woods."
-Winthrop: "We shall be as a city upon a hill."
12- wrote their own books
-Ralph Waldo Emerson- "The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man."
13- "The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary."
14- Reverend Thomas Shepard Jr. to his son: "So I say to you read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it."
15- John Adams- "Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties..."
16- David McCullough
20- "check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago."
21- General Cornwallis [so that's why that road name near me comes from]
23- the Great Migration 1629-40
24-25- Massachusetts Bay Colony's official seal [Dzama's drawing]- "Indian says, 'Come over and help us!'"
-"The worldview behind that motto- we're here to help, whether you want our help or not- is the Massachusetts Puritans' most enduring bequest to the future United States. And like everything the Puritans believes, it is derived from scripture."
26- 1801 inaugural address by Thomas Jefferson argues for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations- entangling alliances with none."
30- germs- "The kingdom of death extended from Chile to Newfoundland..."- map at the National Museum of the American Indian
-Squanto- "spoke English because he had learned it in Europe after he was kidnapped by sailors. By the time he made his way back to America, everyone he knew was dead."
34- text at the museum next to the map- "That initial explosion of death is one of the greatest tragedies in human history because it was unintended and unavoidable, and even inevitable. But what happened in its wake was not."
45- MLK Jr. 1957- "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you 'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'"
54- John Adams- "The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed for the common good."
56- surveillance
59- Dolly Parton
-Winthrop's sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with."
-"And looking into the ways the sermon, or at least that one phrase in it [city on a hill] was used, throws open the American divide between action and words, between what we say we believe versus what we actually do."
62- "In the USA, we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues."
-"City on a hill, though- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizen of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we are Ronald Regan."
65- Reagan: "...and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here..."
69- Abu Ghraib
74- regularly scheduled voting
81- blank pages
82- ferkins- kilderkin
86- state house, Boston- "one of the oldest upholstered chairs made in New England."
91- plaques in Boston
108- "A cross, to a Puritan, is not a symbol of Christ- it is a symbol of the pope."
112- pamphlet fight!
118- Vacation Bible school- "It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier..."
119- lessons "be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in..."
127- "Williams's greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety."
128- "...Winthrop is Peter Seeger...Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport..."
129- Williams "a man who devotes his life to keeping government out of the church- not the other way around."
148- "...Rhode Island was purchased by love."
150- "Williams, like Melville, is a tad too excited, too lonely, too longwinded, too strange."
-Melville- paper mill- "endless supply of paper on which 'I should write a thousand-a million-billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you!"
157- "I'm an indoorsy urban woman..."
159- "most useful, or at least the most telling" Algonquin phrases Williams translates: "We understand no each other." "You trouble me."
171- pirate
196- Foxwoods
197- dioramas
198- "When's Thanksgiving?"
-"might be June 15, 1637"
-"Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What is we didn't deserve it?"
236-237- (magazine subscription card) "she is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss) or man hating harpy (Ms.)."
238- plaque text
239- "To get to his city you see her name."
248- JFK: "For of those to whom much is given, much is required."

My own private Alexandria

Paul Chan reads texts to you.