Spurious

It allowed me personally to advance where there is no longer any path, to separate myself from the world of psychology and analysis, and understand that feelings and existences can be felt deeply only in a place where, in the words of the Upanishads, there is neither water, light, air, spatial infinity or rational infinity, nor a total absence of all things, neither this world nor another.

Blanchot, on writing Thomas the Obscure. From a letter to Jean Paulhan dated 27 May 1940. (Via)

When speech becomes prophecy, it is not the future that is given, but the present that is withdrawn, alongside any possibility of firm, stable, durable presence. Even the Eternal City and the indestructable Temple are suddenly - unbelievably - destroyed. It is like the wilderness once again, and speech too is a wilderness, a voice needing the wilderness in order that it may cry out, and continually reviving in us dread, understanding, and the memory of wilderness.

from Blanchot, The Book to Come

Has the time come for me to face the questions of my books?

As if I should, at least as far as they are concerned, accept responsibility for writing them,

when it seems to me that I am not responsible at all, when on the contrary in my innermost thoughts I would accuse them for having swapped my life for another that I have difficulty in living

but perhaps they are calling me to account precisely for the existence I owe to them.

In which case, through me, it is my own books that question my books.

from Edmund Jabes, The Book of Questions, Aely

<I'll put a permanent copy of this review up here, since it disappeared from the site recently ...>

Dogma by Lars Iyer
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication Date: February 2012
ISBN: 978-1612190464
Paperback, $14.95

The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer. Dogma is the second novel in a trilogy that began with Iyer’s first novel Spurious. It is the story of two Kafka-obsessed windbag British intellectuals, W. and Lars, on a mission to devise and hawk an odd, spartan meta-philosophy they call Dogma. W. is a hardheaded and hyperbolic Jewish professor who spends much of his time devising eloquent ways to insult his colleague Lars, a slovenly and depressed Danish Hindu with an inexplicable obsession with the mysterious Texas blues musician Jandek. The two are unabashedly referential, pulling inspiration from (and speaking constantly of) numerous avant-garde artists and directors: Dogma is a reference to filmmaker Lars Von Trier’s manifesto Dogme95. W. seems to be constantly projecting Werner Herzog’s film Strozsek on a wall in his house. They quote Bataille, Pascal, Leibniz, Rosenzweig, and Cohen. Dogma is hilarious and bleak and loaded with illuminating, brilliant passages, and Iyer’s rapid-fire staccato prose is well-suited to the task. For those who like their dark, difficult books to be funny.

From Hey Small Press.

I hear the somber roar of two distinct sounds.

The weeping of Life and the laughter of Death. How eloquent they are!…

But why does Life weep? Why does Death laugh?

Renzo Novatore, Spiritual Perversity (1920) (via)

Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening.

from Blanchot's The Unavowable Community (via)

We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in the world as it is. We need an ethic or faith, which makes fools laugh: it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.

 

Deleuze, from Cinema 2 (via)

I feel the value of my work is determined very precisely by the audience. What does entertainment mean, anyway, and what's the difference between that and art? I would say the main difference is that art isn't necessarily funded by the consumer, but entertainment always is. In that way, entertaininment is a million times more important to me than art, and being an entertainer is more important to me than being an artist. The relationship with the audience is so direct, while the government or rich collectors are going to pay for something that is art rather than the person who is actually going to have a relationship with the piiece. That's what most important to me about what I do. I think of eterntainment as being very serious and impoirtant, from Laurel and Hardy upward. It has to do with emotions of release, giving up or extreme hilarity and absurdity.

Will Oldham, interviewed in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

According to Krasznahorkai, the deepest loss is the loss of a culture of poverty – the ability to "sing wonderful songs when we are poor". Now, he says, "… we only have people who don't have money … everybody wants to be rich, everybody has only one dream, but people, do we really have one dream – I ask – is this the only aim in this shit, to have much more money?"

There's nowhere left beyond the reach of the market, he continues, "… no empty spaces with possibilities, only stupid spaces, spaces in which you can't do anything other than wait to return from this space …" There are perhaps theorists who could explain why this has happened, he adds, but after these explanations "… everything goes on – why? I see you, and I ask you – why?"

Krasnahorkai, interviewed

So yeah, singing as a way of expressing or escaping or expelling unbearable events: if you have a thinking brain, which some of us are cursed with, you have to have something, and it could be singing and it could be alcohol, but it's progressive rather than regressive - you don't get better by drinking.

The idea of ending each day in song implies a kind of ritual too.

Yeah, a ritual and a connection, 'cause even if you sing by yourself you are using things that have been given to you. The idea of singing is that it's communication from the past into the present and right on through to the future.

Will Oldham, interviewed, in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy