from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
Denisa Nenova has invited Cliff Wright and me to join her for an artists’ discussion at Borders Bookshop on Charing Cross Road this evening.
Denisa is performing her new work Voicing the Silence, I’m presenting my text work Palomar Translations, and Cliff will demonstrate the way he teaches people to draw by seeing rather than thinking. In showing these three practices together we want to begin a discussion about pulling language away and keeping the stuff that’s left over.
It might be helpful to frame my ideas about things going off the ends of themselves through Blanchot’s treatment of the interrogative form in his essay The Most Profound Question, in The Infinite Conversation (1969).
The nature of a question is to be incomplete: it demands something else, namely an answer. Blanchot argues that while the question is incomplete as speech, it is not incomplete as a question: “on the contrary, it is speech that is accomplished by having declared itself incomplete” (p. 12). He continues:
“Through the question we give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet, or to have it as desire. The question is the desire of thought.” (p. 12)
Today I am marking up a 1961 Pelican paperback of a book called Language in the Modern World, which was reprinted for about a decade before it presumably went out of date.
It’s very slow marking it up, I’ve been working on it since about half past ten and I’ve only done nine and a bit pages so far. I have to read slowly and mark with pencil almost every single word with its relative importance in the sentence and any significant relations it has with other nearby words. There are only a limited number of marks I can really make if I want to keep track of them without drawing attention away from the words. I make small or word-sized circles, single underscores, double underscores, zigzag underscores, horizontal crossing out, square brackets, round brackets, rectangles around words, double underscores at an angle, curved and straight lines, and arrows. Read the rest of this entry »
On page 126 of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is the following sentence:
He happened at the time to be in the oak-wainscoted study of the old family summer residence; through a lavender cascade of hysteria he observed that his wife had once again chosen to be subject of this clause, itself the direct object of his observation.
It’s profoundly funny to slice through a sentence into the fact that it’s there. It’s embarrassing for the sentence and it’s embarrassing for the stuff that the sentence is talking about. They both sort of spin around in the middle of what they were doing, caught red handed, and look at you, and there’s no point either of them trying to act natural any more. All three of you know what’s been going on. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m reading a book at the moment by Rancière called The Politics of Aesthetics. I’ve been having to write whole paragraphs out again somewhere else before I could start shaking the ideas clear of the words. It’s a library book, and the words I’m trying to read from the page are in stubborn allegiance to an unknown previous reader, and they won’t come unstuck from the paper.
The pages are more than annotated. They’re marked up. It looks like they’ve been prepared for assembly like the flat plan of a paper model. There are no pencil marks in the margins, only among the printed words. And the marks themselves are never words, just shapes, brackets, lines, operating like braces and pulleys. They look like they’re trying to help the sentences along, pushing the words out into palpable, physical relationships with one another.
Cressida sent me a link to a short fiction text About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s a list of imaginary and impossible typefaces that variously affect and react to the words as or after they are written, with letters shrinking or growing to accommodate depth of meaning, words continually refreshing into their own synonyms or antonyms, or sentences rearranging when parents die before their offspring, or when the birds with a word tattooed on each wing reconfigure in flight or scatter into trees.
Today Anton and I whistled to one another one note at a time.
It was difficult to whistle any kind of melody because we couldn’t control what came before or after any note, but we still made our own careful choices of pitch and length and volume. We were in dressing gowns, and the whistling was louder than the noise of traffic on the road outside.
from Haegeman, L (1994) “Government and Binding Theory” (2nd edition), Oxford: Blackwell Read the rest of this entry »
