Book Report

2010-05-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Appropriation: Documents Of Contemporary Art. Edited by David Evans. The MIT Press 2009.

26. AUTHORS: One should 'know a few authors': no need to know their names.

26. Now Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' show windows.

26. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.

27. One can imagine a time when the painters who no longer mix their own colors will find it infantile and unworthy to apply the paint themselves and will no longer consider the personal touch, which today still constitutes the value of their canvases, to possess anything more than the documentary interest of a manuscript or autograph. One can imagine a time when painters will no longer even have their colour applied by others and will no longer draw. Collage offers us a foretaste of this time. It is certain that writing is moving in the same direction.

27. An electric lamp becomes for Picabia a young girl.

35. Minor detournement is the detournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed.

35. Deceptive detournement, which is also termed premonitory proposition detournement is, in contrast, the detournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from a new context.

35. For example, in a metagraph [poem-collage] relating to the Spanish Civil War the phrase with the most distinctly revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick ad: 'Pretty lips are red'. In another metagraph ('The Death of J.H'), 125 classified ads of bars for sale express a suicide more strikingly than the newspaper articles that recount it.

36. It is a real means of proletariat artistic education, the first step towards a literary communism.

36. Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters, records or radio broadcasts, the two principal applications of detourned prose are metagraphic writings and, to a lesser degree, the adroit perversion of the classical novel form.

37. . . . , which envisaged a pinball machine arranged in a such a way that the play of the lights and more or less predictable trajectories of the balls would form a metagraphic-spatial composition entitled Thermal sensations and desires of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after sunset in November.

38. . . . , at the counter of a truck-stop bar, for example, with one of the truck-drivers saying seriously to another: 'Ethics was in the books of the philosophers; we have introduced it into the governing of nations'.

38. If detournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: detournements on this level would really make it beautiful.

38. Titles themselves . . . are a basic element of detournement. This follows from two general observations: that all titles are interchangeable and that they have a determinant importance in several genres.

39. Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations, the ultimate goal of all our activity, it will be open to everyone to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them.

2009-08-01T19:08:00.001-07:00

Excerpts from Flights Of Angels: My Life With The Angels Of Light. Adrian Brooks. Arsenal Pulp Press 2008.

15. . . . I could see props and huge masks: a carriage with prancing horses, plague monsters, a brilliant red starfish, giant rats, and icebergs.

18. Ours was no mere avant-garde; avant-garde implies social connectedness or possible future integration, like Andy Warhol's scene in New York. We were Underground, in a wholly different and distinct secret society that had not been tied to, absorbed, or even glimpsed by the mainstream.

18. My ball gown was pale blue lace and pink satin spangled with silver stars and violet velvet bows. Birdcage-like contraptions thrust my skirt to a horizontal width of six feet. My neck was sheathed in rhinestones, a virtual pillar of "diamonds." Amethyst drops dangled from my bodice and, as the Countess Flushette, I sported a toilet on my head.

21. "You know how to separate the men from the boys in San Francisco?" he'd crow: "With a crowbar!"

22. John was a tall, radiant black ecologist with flashing eyes who'd given up talking and who wrote on a pad of paper to communicate, if words were necessary. As a personal ecological statement, he'd also given up riding in a car and, for years, walked everywhere he went, no matter how far.

24. "New York is red."

29. At eight, I blithely informed classmates at Friends Central School that, when I grow up, I wanted to be a peacock.

39. "What kind of socks do you wear . . . ? Oh . . . White? That's nice. Always white? Oh. Cotton or wool too? Oh fabulous. Sweat socks . . . uh-huh . . . What about short ones? Oh, well, how tall? The kind you fold over? Do any have a stripe at the top? Thick stripes? What color? Oh . . . blue . . . oh, that's great. Are those the sweat socks or the other kind? Do they all match? Oh. Do you ever wear one sock with a stripe and one without . . . ?"

57. Chicken-breasted Irving Rosenthal was a bearded and diminutive Byzantine padding about the periphery of the scene. A figure in his own right, as editor of the Big Table Review at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he'd publish a seminal issue that featured excerpts of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which he edited, and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Later, after appearing in Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, Irving penned a stylish novel, Sheeper, in which he famously attacked women, ordering them to cease reading epicene prose that be summed up as a boiled testicle impaled on a Faberge hatpin.

2009-04-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

Excerpts From Dandy In The Underworld. Sebastian Horsley. Harper Perennial 2007.

26. True longing must always be directed to something unattainable.

32. Style is when they're running you out of town and you make it look as if you're leading the parade.

37. All that matters is a sense of style in dying--one must go out glamorously . . . As a rule she lived on booze and pills and never got out of bed except for funerals.

40. . . . where there is a conflict between illusion and reality, reality should be requested to give in gracefully.

40. Years later, she came to visit me in a drugs clinic. I was lying in bed withdrawing savagely from crack and heroin. I was looking and feeling fit only for the undertaker. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a blazing Technicolor explosion which I took to be a fruit cart. It was Mother. She waltzed in clad toe to crown in velvet and silk and perched on the end of the bed. 'Have I failed you as a mother, Sylvester?' 'It's Sebastian, Mother.'

51. Stepfather decided that our relationship was 'unhealthy' and 'antisocial'. Remarks were made about our sexuality. Steve was banished for ever from the home. All this did was inflame our love: there is always a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. I spent my days in a silent rage throwing darts dipped in red paint at photographs of Stepfather. As all teenagers know, impotent hatred is the most horrible of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.

51. Like many people who have nothing to do, I was resentful of any claims on my time . . .

2009-01-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

Excerpts From October Files 2: Andy Warhol. Edited By Annette Michelson. Essays By Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Annette Michelson, and Rosalind E. Krauss. The MIT Press 2001.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: To be suspended between high art's haughty isolation (in transcendence, in resistance, in critical negativity) and the universally pervasive mass cultural debris of corporate domination constitutes the founding dialectic within the modern artist's role.

Rosalind H. Williams: Democratic consumers sought to make consumption more equal and participatory. They wanted to rescue everyday consumption from banality by raising it to the level of a political and social statement.

John Cage: Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it . . . ).

Barbara Rose: I find his images offensive; I am annoyed to have to see in a gallery what I'm forced to look at in the supermarket. I go to the gallery to get away from the supermarket, not to repeat the experience.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Warhol thus groups together those photographic conventions that implement the collective scopic compulsions: looking at the Other (in endless envy at fame and fortune as much as in sadistic secrecy at catastrophe) and the perpetually vanishing Self (in futile tokens and substitutes).

Andy Warhol: The people that you know they want to do things and they never do things and they disappear so quickly, and then they're killed or something like that you know, nobody knows about them so I thought well maybe I'll do a painting about a person which you don't know about or something like that.

Yves Klein: All of these blue propositions, all alike in appearance, were recognized by the public as quite different from one another. The amateur passed from one to another, as he liked and penetrated, in a state of instantaneous contemplation, into the worlds of the blue. . . . The most sensational observation was that of the "buyers." Each selected out of the . . . pictures the one that was his, and each paid the asking price. The prices were all different of course.

Thierry De Duve: Warhol may be the one person who has understood, consciously or not I don't know, that to be a star is to be a blank screen.

2009-01-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

Excerpts From Frisk. Dennis Cooper. Grove Press 1991.

7. I wish I could just sort of temporarily die. Guys could move me around, whatever. I wouldn't have a first name, just a surface. Like pillows. They don't have individual names. They don't mean anything, but people sleep with them. I think I'd feel a lot happier, though I despise that word, 'happy.'

8. There was a Rorschach blot of sweat on the sheet where his crotch had been pressing. Henry looked down at it, thought he saw a satanic silhouette.

10. He slapped a hand over his mouth, opened his eyes so wide Julian had to think about the fact that they were balls. The balls sort of pleaded with Julian. "What?" he responded, not totally interested.

12. In the dirt below one was a puddle of purplish vomit, shaped exactly like Texas.

20. I splayed my hands on Henry's ass and pressed down, like he was lying in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.

35. There were still some bruises and cuts on his face, but since punks wore their physical damage like fashion accessories, he didn't particularly stand out.

36. He said his name was Finn. I had him spell it. He said he got that nickname because when he was younger he'd either resembled or acted like Huckleberry Finn. I said it was obviously "acted like" since his namesake was just a character in a book. But Finn said his copy had illustrations.

40. I grew obsessed for a year, following it through the media, researching Joe's life via friends, filling in blanks with my own fantasies. I even spent several months trying to channel the info I'd gathered into an artsy murder-mystery novel, some salvageable fragments of which are interspersed through the following section.

53. Now I'm at that part of the fantasy that always fucks me over. I want him, specifically his skin, because skin's the only thing that's available. But I've had enough sex in my life with enough guys to recognize how little skin can explain about anyone. So I start getting into this rage about how stingy skin is. I mean, skin's biggest reward, which is sperm, I guess, is only great because it's a message from somewhere inside a great body. But it's totally primitive. Take gold. Would gold be worth anything if there were a more complex, beautiful, similar substance around? I've got a choice. Either I can pretend I'm a psychic or palm reader and tell myself I understand some cute guy if his sperm leaves his body when I'm in his presence, or, as I find myself doing more often these days, I can actually imagine myself inside the skins I admire. I'm pretty sure if I tore some guy open I'd know him as well as anyone could, because I'd have what he consists of right there in my hands, mouth, wherever. Not that I'd know what I'd do with that stuff. Probably something insane.

72. Sometimes the armpit hairs stand in a skinny brown stalk, with Terrence's lips as its flower. Then the hairs will come to a point and twist slightly at the tip like chocolate ice cream or smoke. They spread out to resemble a big, dirty dandelion. The troll mashes them down, they're wheat pasta steaming in a white bowl.

79. The latter, Heiner, smooths down his calf hairs, which are so dense his legs appear permanently filthy.

88. You can get used to anything. Then you stop feeling, you just respond, your brain reduces the world to . . . whatever . . .

94. What's weird is he didn't fight back. He just accepted death. Every single time I've killed a Dutch boy this happens. It must be part of the problem that makes them so cold and unknowable in general. They're like rabbits, at least in the sense that when a rabbit gets scared it freezes up. You can threaten to kick it, it won't move.

94. They kill guys because it's a kick, whereas for me it's religious or something.

2008-08-22T01:44:00.000-07:00

Excerpts From Nazi Literature In The Americas. Roberto Bolano. Translated by Chris Andrews. New Directions Books 2008 (1996).

88. (6). Meanwhile Edelmira and her children were presented to Adolph Hitler, who held Luz and said, "She certainly is a wonderful little girl." Photos were taken. The future Fuhrer of the Reich made a great impression on the Argentinean poet. Before leaving, she presented him with several of her own books and a deluxe edition of Martin Fierro. Hitler thanked her warmly, beseeching her to translate one of her poems into German on the spot, a task which, with the help of Carozzone, she managed to accomplish. Hitler was clearly delighted. The lines were resounding and looked to the future. In high spirits, Edelmira asked for the Fuhrer's advice: which would be the most appropriate school for her sons? He recommended a Swiss boarding school, but added that the best school was life itself. By the end of the audience, Edelmira and Carozzone were committed Hitlerites.

88. (16). This suicide, which seems at first an open and shut case, is investigated by a Scotland Yard detective with a passion for spiritualism, and by one of the dead man's sons. The investigation takes more than fifteen years and serves as a pretext for introducing a gallery of characters, including a young French neo-royalist and a young German Nazi, who are allowed to discourse at length and seem to serve as the author's mouthpieces.

88. (19). Throughout her life she treasured the famous photo of her baby self in Hitler's arms.

88. (46). Shortly before his death, in a letter to a friend in Buenos Aires, he foresaw a radiant epoch for the human race, the triumphant dawn of the new golden age, and he wondered whether the Argentinean people would rise to the occasion.

88. (47). As a young man Salvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artists' incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.

He was a soccer player and a Futurist.

88. (55-56). The first letters of each chapter made the acrostic LONG LIVE HITLER. A major scandal broke out. Perez Mason defended himself haughtily: it was a simple coincidence. The censors set to work in earnest, and made a fresh discovery: the first letters of each chapter's second paragraph made up another acrostic--THIS PLACE SUCKS.

88. (58). Perez Mason answered them by publishing a curious novella under the pseudonym Abelard of Rotterdam: an erotic and fiercely anti-USA fantasy, whose protagonists were General Eisenhower and General Patton.

88. (76). Barreda cheated on her with common chorus girls. He had no time for niceties and beat her almost every day. He used to put her down in public, and held her family in contempt, referring to them, in conversations with friends and strangers, as "a bunch of Cristero assholes . . . good for nothing except target practice."

88. (86). . . . and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.

88. (89). He published two books of poetry. The first, Motorists (1965), was a series of twenty-five sonnets, rather unorthodox in their rhythm and form, dealing with subjects dear to the young: motorcycles, doomed love, sexual awakening and the will to purity.

88. (93). Eye-witnesses of dubious reliability have sworn that in the main courtyard, instead of the Chilean colors, a red flag is flown, with a white circle in which a black swastika is inscribed.

88. (94). He had what it takes to fail spectacularly: even his earliest works have a discernible style of their own, an aesthetic direction that he would follow with hardly a deviation until the day he died. Schurholz was an experimental poet.

88. (95-96). The book is called Geometry, and it sets out countless variations on the theme of a barbed-wire fence crossing an almost empty space, sparsely scattered with apparently unrelated verses. The fences seen from the air trace precise and delicate lines. The verses speak--or whisper--of an abstract pain, the sun and headaches.

2008-08-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

More Excerpts From The Naked Civil Servant. Quentin Crisp.

212. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing--still in doubt.

208. It would have been impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. . . . Wishing to go out in a blaze of ignominy, I shall limit my activities to killing a policeman.

203. In everybody the anus is at least as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.

198. I came to the conclusion that beauty was not a girl but an Aryan face seen through Semitic eyes.

193. It is universally agreed that men are neither heterosexual nor homosexual; they are just sexual.

177. There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. I expect the liveliest books are written from a combination of all three motives. I had only the financial one and that may have been part of the cause of my failure.

175. If anyone had asked me where I felt most at home I could have replied, "In the wrong."

172. Until I was forty it had never dawned on me that I was not immortal. I had once said to the Czech's true love, "I can never get it into my head that I shall one day die." She replied, "Neither can I, but I practice like mad."

166. In the last analysis I cannot say that I have ever refrained from taking any course of action on the ground that it was wrong or illegal or immoral.

2008-08-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

Excerpts From The Naked Civil Servant. Quentin Crisp. Plume 1983 (1968).

14. Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. The habit fitted snugly into my well-established world of make-believe.

19. (on Homosexuality) It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly--especially to children.

29. Aloofness is the posture of self-defense, but even people who quite liked me said that I felt superior to the rest of the world. I felt scared and before long I was to have good cause.

36. The world lay all before me--like a trapdoor.

38. On hearing of the death of anyone I have known well, I have usually experienced a slight thrill of pleasure. Another witness to my stupidity or weakness has been silenced.

48. The essence of happiness is its absoluteness. It is automatically the state of being of those who live in the continuous present all over their bodies. No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

52. The attic which they let to me was long enough to lie down in but would not have been wide enough for that purpose and was too low to stand up in.

57. If you ask a homosexual what his newest true love is like, you will never get the answer, "He is wise or kind or brave." He will only say, "It's enormous."