Vitro Nasu

Le monde du silence: Opening shot - Jacques-Yves Cousteau & Louis Malle, 1957

Tao Lin underwater hamster (Reader of Depressing Books Blog)
Gas-powered ocean sunfish -alligator hybrid
Network card’s raft ride to freedom realizing it’s fucked

Literature is inside of life

Tao Lin has developed his own unmistakable and unique style by utilizing a contagiously honest way of writing. Marcelo Ballvé discusses Bed and Eeeee eee eeee with the author.

Exactly What I Want -

I want three friends within a 40 mile radius; one 5 miles, one 10 miles, one 30 miles, two females and one male. The male should talk very slowly and laugh at almost everything I say. I want to send one of the females mixed CDs very often and her send me mixed CDs very often but rarely see her in real life. The other female I want to see in the daytime sometimes for lunch. -more here)

Under the Sea Google fun

Click to enlarge

Nathan Viola, Illinois (Winners via)

Previous post Diver here.

The above is a found video experiment inspired by Raymond Queneau.
Raymond Queneau was born on February 21, 1903 in Le Havre.

Although Queneau’s novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

Readng Raymond Queneau by Barbara Wright

Darkly interview on Queneau

Ouilipo <> <> <> Zazie dans le Metro (Directed by Louis Malle)
“Under the Net” Iris Murdoch’s first novel was dedicated to R. Queneau.

Iris Murdoch’s first published novel, Under the Net, presents the picaresque adventures of Jake Donaghue, a feckless failed artist who guides the reader on pub crawls through London’s City district and Paris’s Left Bank while he searches for love and meaning in his life. The novel is dedicated to French novelist Raymond Queneau, and Murdoch has admitted his and Samuel Beckett’s influence in this work: “I was copying them as hard as I could!”

Queneau spent much of his life working for French publisher Gallimard, where he began as a reader in 1938, rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956.

More on Feb 21 birthday writers

Anais Nin was born on the same day, Feb 21, 1903.
Here on youtube you can hear her voice, talking about Miller and Durrell.

Two American writers were born on Feb 21, 1962 Chuck Palahniuk and David Foster Wallace.

<><><><><><> Palm tree trunks

Marjorie Perloff
The Palm at the End of the Mind:
Thomas Hines’s Wilshire, Ed Ruscha’s Sunset, Robbert Flick’s Pico

This piece is about 13 printed pages long.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

— Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being”[1]

Ed Ruscha talks about the magic of Intaglio (etching) process here on video.

Iceberg and Palm tree by Mark Dion Crash by Jim Dine and this from John Baldessari

First winter rain by Matsuo Basho

First winter rain–
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

Rain Rain Rain
Three Monoprints by Fung Lin Hall

The Rain by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent–
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Marjorie Perloff on Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics.

Roberto Bolaño

Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey (New Yorker Fiction Nov 26, 2007 - my introduction to his work and I intend to read more.)

Vagabonds:Roberto Bolaño and his fractured masterpiece by Daniel Zalewski from the New Yorker.

Bolaño began submitting short stories to state-sponsored contests around Spain; when a story won prize money, he would retitle it and submit it to another competition, which it would also win. (Similar mischief is detailed in his darkly witty story “Sensini.”) When he was thirty-eight, Bolaño learned that his liver was severely compromised, and he began writing with unrelenting concentration; starting in 1996, he published one or more books a year.

Obit from Guardian Chilean creator of ‘infrarealism’

Another one

Bolaño wasn’t shy about revealing that he lived a hard life in his wanderings. His nutrition, dental care, and smoking habit were bad enough that he lost nearly all his teeth on the way, and he joked he left them scattered throughout Latin America the same way Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs in the forest.

Pagina Official (Multimedia page in Spanish)

Comparison to Borges from here.

Another Borges and Bolano

Bolano on youtube (Spanish only)
This Spanish page has great Photos

Self Portrait at Twenty Years

I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don’t know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don’t, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death’s cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.

—Roberto Bolaño
(translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy)

(Image source)

For Iris Chang
Alan Sondheim

If this were a suicide note, I would leave you my all. You would hear my voice in it, you would speak me as I have spoken to you, for the last time, and the words, the words would resonate in familiar tones uniquely my own. You would hear the silence after the speaking, and you would hear nothing else, nothing from me, but these words, over and over again. You might speak, but I would not hear. You might reach out to me, but I would not be there. I would not have known your new day, or the way you would read these lines, or even the smallest, simplest word, you might say, upon their completion. Such sadness, such anger, would not be mine, would not be of me, would not be anywhere. (Read more here.)

What happend to Iris Chang

Paula Kamen digs deep into the ambitious life and tragic death of her most successful friend.

Related link “Nightmare in Nanking” by Sue De Pasquale

Iris Chang’s homepage

Google Eagle looking for prey

A poem by Alan Sondheim

when i talk with incompletion
sometimes there comes a notion
that someone owns completion
an imaginary notion

asking campers riddled questions
is riddling walls of the camps
someone who no longer questions
is no longer roll-called in the camps

grey stained red and sutured mouths
no one ever gets out of here
bodies are nothing but mouths
the rest no longer here

obscene half in obscene half out
this is the primal scene
it never happened or worked out
just repetitious scene

arrows fly like cursors hasten
better get out of the way
space itself seems to hasten
time imprisoned one way

time has no time to rupture time
space is only residue
of time confined to confine time
time is residue

Raymond Radiguet who was born 104 years ago on June 18, influenced both Jean Cocteau and Yukio Mishima.

As Rimbaud had done years before, Raymond Radiguet made his breakthrough as a writer in his adolescence. Radiguet wrote the book before he was nineteen and by twenty he was dead.

Mishima was attracted to the novels and the personality of Raymond Radiguet. Mishima was facinated with youth, and especialy with youthful death. (Donald Keene - Five Modern Japanese Novelits)
Mishima wrote a short novel called The Death of Radiguet”.

Drawing by Pablo Picasso (enlarge) and painting by Modgiliani (enlarge).

Max Jacob introduced Radiguet to Jean Cocteau.

Do not accuse fate. Do not speak of injustice. He belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close. (Jean Cocteau, more here)

He was hard and of a brutal force, alternately passionate and indifferent, as Cocteau said, it needed “a diamond to scratch his heart.” (via)

A drawing by Jean Cocteau

Smoking a cigarette “At the Age of Fifteen”, another drawing by Jean Cocteau from Flickr.

Homophobic Hemingway accused Radiguet of using sexuality to advance his career. (Wiki)

In 1918 he met the 15-year-old poet Raymond Radiguet. The two collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got the youth exempted from military service. In admiration of Radiguet’s great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend’s works in his artistic circle and also arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to garner the “Nouveau Monde” literary prize for the novel.

Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle in an adaptation of Radiguet’s novel, Devil in the flesh. (1947)

(France was slowly overcoming a murderous war, its veterans were revered, the adultry of a soldier’s wife was intolerable. via.)

The novel is described as,

an extraordinary mixture of perception and brutality, tenderness and heartlessness. (via)

I have never been a dreamer. What appears dream to others more credulous than I seems to me to be as real as cheese to a cat – in spite of the glass that covers it. Yet the glass does exist.
When the glass breaks, the cat takes advantage, even if it is his master who breaks it and cuts his hand in the process.
– The Devil in the Flesh

His second and last novel Count D’Orgel, reviewed by Waggish.

Seven years of patience
while the persimmon tree
incubates her fruit. Also
“deep… dark… tomb”

In his poem “The Persimmons,” Gary Snyder goes “deep in the dark of a tomb” and emerges with a persimmon ripe to the bottom… one of a group… that might have been drawn by Mu Ch’i.” Here the poem rises beyond space-time to the realm of the spirit. (source)

Bonnard Onion
Slideshow here for more digital images of Red Onion Set. (Six red onion images instead of six persimmons.)

The red onion after being photographed a number of times got chopped up eventually, joined in a crowd of tomatoes, bell pepper and couscous. This little onion led an exemplary life; giving nourishment, intellectual and aesthetic stimulation to an undeserving greedy, murderous humanoid.
(Thanks to you little red onion I finally decided to use Flickr my account of which was left unused for so many years. )

Read this wonderful interview given by Louise Bourgeois.
Life’s Lessons (via Modern Kicks)

I like portraiture, especially the works of Bacon, Bonnard, Kokoschka, Messerschmitt and Soutine.

My work is a form of psychoanalysis. It is a way of coming to grips with my anxiety and fears. It is an attempt to be a better person.

My work deals with problems that are pre-gender. For example, jealousy is not male or female. I do not believe that there is a feminist aesthetic.

I am glad when people respond to the work. But this has nothing to do with my motivation and need to work. The only thing that interests me is the piece I am working on now.

Happy Birthday Raphael Nadal. I will wait for your match with Federer in French Open 2007. He has a blog!!!!

Happy Birthday Alain Resnais on his 85th birthday.
His new film “Private Fears In Public Places” trailer here.
He made this film last year when he was 84 years old!

Enjoy the visual poem captured on youtube.

(previous post - Hiroshima Mon Amour, Futon and Cropped Hair)

In 1957 French avantgarde filmmaker Alain Resnais set himself the difficult task to make a film about the uncertainty of knowledge. Together with Marguerite Duras, he developped a script which was to tell “a story so banal” that it could counter the weight of the unnamable human tragedy in Hiroshima. The original script even proposed introducing the film with footage of the mushroom cloud. The premise was thus to make a film about the formalization of experience in the media and its contradiction with personal memories. At the same time, his film shows the arbitrariness of visual signs and their semantic interrelations. His film is as much a film about Hiroshima and the volatility of knowledge, as it is a reflection on the medium itself. (In the Maze, Christoph Raetzsch)

Lit bloggers are celebrating Allen’s birthday today.
America (text)

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
America on youtube.

Ballad of the Skeltons directed by Gus Van Sant

Allen Ginsberg’s Top Ten Movies

Allen Ginsberg’s neighborhood video shop, Kim’s Video, asked him for his top 10 list of movies, and this is the list he gave them:

Orpheus (Orphée), Jean Cocteau, 1950
Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un poet), Jean Cocteau, 1930
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis), Marcel Carné,1945
The Flower Thief, Ron Rice, 1960
Pepe Le Moko, Julien Duvivier, 1930
The Battleship Potempkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), Sergei Eisenstein, 1925
Pull My Daisy, Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1968
Heaven and Earth Magic, Harry Smith, 1962
Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné, 1938
The Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion), Jean Renoir, 1937 (via)

Note: Delphine Seyrig was in Pull My Daisy and two of Resnais films Muriel and Last Year at Marienbad.

Terayama Shuji - Experimental Image World (7 Volume Collection): Poet, playright, theatre director, filmmaker, essayist, agitator and lover of all things anarchistic, chaotic, and truthful, TERAYAMA SHUJI (1936-1983) is one of Japan’s most revered and respected artists.

See his films at Ubuweb here. (Vol 3, 4 and 6 recommended.)

Remembering Home

On the 10th December, 1935
I was born an imperfect dead man
Years will follow years and one day I know
I shall become a perfect dead man
When that day comes
I will think of the
Cherry tree

Not long before he died, Shuji Terayama wrote this poem, which may have been his last. The translation is by Paul Schmidt and Kazuko Oshima.

Born 69 years ago today, who was Shuji Terayama?

The french wiki name who Terayama was influenced by.

Ses œuvres, souvent expérimentales et crues, témoignent d’un activisme artistique aux influences multiples, d’Antonin Artaud ou Bertolt Brecht à Federico Fellini et Lautréamont.

Excerpt from The Missionary and the Libertine
Love and War in East and West
By IAN BURUMA

Japan, on the other hand, as I saw it in Terayama’s theater, was utterly fantastic, yet closer to the world I knew and lived in. The actors wore the same clothes as we did, listened to the same music, smoked the same drugs. But at the same time their world seemed more exotic than the China I read about in the People’s Daily. This was partly because of Terayama’s style: he mixed Western and Japanese imagery in a way that made both West and East look bizarre and marvelous. His Japan was like a great, colorful souk, or like a costume party in which the guests tried on this costume and then that—old, new, Japanese, Chinese, European. They did so playfully, freely, following only the whims of their imagination. Everything in Terayama’s theater was opposed to dogma, orthodoxy and puritanism. He made Japan look sexy If Mao’s version of “Asiatic despotism” appealed to religious puritans, Terayama’s Japan was the modern version of a sensual Orient that has attracted libertines and appalled missionaries for centuries. Read more here.

See his poetic postcards sent from all over the world.

Terayama as Doll(figurine)-photo art by Kimiaki

A painted wall
A digital montage of Trader’s Joe’s bathroom wall.

Poets are celebrating Frank O’Hara’s 80’s birthday, first from Ron Silliman, and here.

Let’s be frank about it, his birthday was March 27, 1926.
His birth certificate was found twenty-five years after his death, recorded at Maryland General Hospital. (Page 14, City Poet; The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch).

(Frank’s birthday was mentioned once before. Refresh yourself with his poem and Bill DeKooning’ s painting.)

Brice Marden on Charlie Rose (an hour interview)

William S. Burroughs - Thanksgiving Prayer (now on youtube)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Goose and a potato heart