In progress

 Not finished with this yet. A kind of work in progress :

 

 

one of those free feelings

the whole smell of the

desk—empty unhurried

space—old varnish

ole

a walk a day back

exposed a big foam rubber

mattress—one

torn corner half gone

a giant something

breakfast toast

if you’ve ever

slept rough

any kind of weather

Virginia Woolf exhibition, London

Woolf Exhibition

            And then there is “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Frances Spalding. The exhibition catalogue had already been gifted us by a friend, but because of the dates for our London trip, we wouldn’t receive it till we returned home. So the show’s careful planning, the choices made for it, were discovered firsthand, except for some comments by previous viewers which we discovered beforehand, online and off.

            The conscientious organization of the material is welcome given the very full life it attempts to put on display. Then—more than life it is a question of lives, a question of visions plural. For Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell (both nées Stephen) were the prime movers of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, so that any reference to them quickly generates views of their extensive circles. Born in 1882, Woolf’s is one of those remarkable lives that link the Victorian age with the Modernist. Think postmodernist is also modernist—the Bloomsbury group of artists is also postmodernistic.

            In terms of poetry, in terms of vision, “Painting and writing have much to tell each other,” Virginia Woolf tells painting and writing. It isn’t exactly that such a connection was previously unknown. But I think the realist aspects of her fiction grow out of ideas like this. Art and science have much to tell each other, she might easily have said, given the highly allusive nature of her texts. Her references are like those I wrote about here in regard to Julio Cortázar’s “The lines of the hand” (5 March 2014). For that matter, Cortázar’s fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges translated Woolf’s Orlando into Spanish. The growing Woolfian palimpsest.

“Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision” shows the chronological development of Woolf’s art, her life, her vision, as they first touch those hazy lines between modernism/postmodernism. The National Portrait Gallery website includes a recording of Frances Spalding talking through parts of it—well worth the time, oh yes.

"New and future literatures"

The "new and future literatures" Alan Sondheim speaks of in “Introduction: Codework” in the September/October 2001 issue of  American Book Review variously impact e-poetry. It is a truism that e-poetry can be defined as poetry written in (programming) code. But poetry first circulated on paper and later published on electronic supports can also be termed e-poetry. When we define e-poetry in the first manner, we are using the word code “in a narrower sense [to mean] a translation from natural language to an artificial, strictly defined one” (Sondheim, ABR, 1). But a quick example of the second kind of e-poetry is Julio Cortázar’s “The Lines of the Hand” (as well as myriad other texts). Sondheim uses a tree metaphor as a rough classification for codework. Thus, there are “multi-media and hypertextual works” rather like leaves or flowers, he notes, and these “may playfully utilize programming terminology” without “refer[ring] to specific programs” (ABR, 1). However, work where “the language becomes increasingly unreadable at times” are analogous to “tendrils and branchings of the tree, half surface and half root” (ABR, 1). The works in this category, then, are “works in which submerged code has modified the surface language—with the possible representation of the code as well” (ABR, 1). It is obviously slippery ground we are on, for if natural language is also code, it would seem that even on a level of expertise that goes as deep as Sondheim’s, terms like code and codework are sometimes interchangeable. However, his third classification, the roots of the tree, involves “works in which the submerged code is emergent contents [and] both a deconstruction of the surface and of the dichotomy between the surface and the depth” (ABR, 1). In this third category, the programming language may actually run a program. So it’s important to distinguish between imperative programming (Sondheim’s first classification) and object-oriented programming (Sondheim’s third and, sometimes, second classifications). I think it’s good to return to Sondheim’s article today and to share his enthusiasm for codework’s movements around “vast uncharted domains [of] new and future literatures—domains that recognize the vast changes that have occurred in human/machine interaction—changes that affect the very notions of community and communality” (ABR, 2). The article, abbreviated here as ABR, is available online.

"The Lines of the Hand"

Julio Cortázar’s “The Lines of the Hand”

In a conversation with friends the other night thoughts about inspiration and writing came up. We talked a little about how you can force yourself to write when you don’t want to—that is, when you don’t feel particularly inspired. Also about inspiration-directed activities that go along with writing, among which are the usually mentioned reading, correcting proofs, planning new work, recitals. Several days later, which is to say today, I found myself thinking back on what we said, and also on Cortázar’s short-short story or flash fiction piece “Las lineas de la mano.” This piece can be found on the internet, in the original Spanish and in translation, and also in adaptation as a video. But in terms both of narrative and of stylistics, I think a good deal can be gained from re-reading (or re-viewing) what Cortázar presents. It’s tempting to publish the story here, and I somehow doubt there would be any difficulty with copyright, but I think it’s best just to note a few ideas for the time being. I’ve already said most of what I want to say about it in relation to inspiration. So in the space I have left, I’d just note something Cortázar has done very well, obvious yet not so obvious: It is the allusion to François Boucher’s Nude on a Sofa. It seems obvious that the eighteenth-century reference is planned. What I wonder is: Where do planning and inspiration meet? In sum, I hope others enjoy the piece as much as I do.