stomaselli

Reframing art

David Shields on originality (what else) in The White Review.

Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Darwin, Edison, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. E.g., the commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorised by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything, a commercially successful parody of the commonplace book, was published in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the pre-existing.

The anti-canon

Influx Press have a nice feature on their blog, The Anti-Canon, a “collection of short essays focusing on writers less well known, positioned outside of the literary mainstream or simply deserving of more attention”. A little like Writers No One Reads, another series after our own hearts. The brilliant Daniil Kharms makes Influx’s list.

A few months before 36 year old outlaw writer Daniil Kharms starves to death in a psychiatric prison in 1942, a German bomb hits a block of flats during the siege of Leningrad. One side of the block is destroyed. On the other side, windows implode. Inside one of those shattered apartments. Kharms’ second wife, Marina Malich and philosopher Yakuc Drukin frantically gather up his papers and notebooks. These fragments floating through the bomb blasted air are his collected works. They’re what’s left of him.

Wanted: reviewer for Iosi Havilio

We’re looking someone to review Paradises by Iosi Havilio (published by And Other Stories), for gorse online. We can’t pay a fortune, but there is a small fee for reviews. If interested, please get in touch: info[at]gorse[dot]ie. We have a reviewer.

From an interview with Iosi Havilio:

Do you believe in Ricardo’s Piglia’s assertion that “All great literature is political”?

Of course, either by action or by omission. In fact I believe that the best political literature is the one that doesn’t speak of politics. Just as the best love stories don’t need to speak about sentiments.

The story

We’re working away on the first print issue of gorse, and we’ll announce its contents (and ways you can support us) very, very soon. We think, though, it’ll do no harm to give you a taster of what we’ve got in so far: interviews with Evan Lavender-Smith and Adam Thirlwell, essays on Houellebecq and how ancient Modernism is, fiction from Desmond Hogan, Julie Reverb and Matthew Jakubowski, and poems by S.J. Fowler. We’ve also lined up an interview with a young Irish artist; essays on writing about horror for a living, on running through Paris, on Cartier-Bresson’s artist portraits, on the films of Nic Roeg; fiction from an Irish artist and writer based in Berlin; and a comic by a very talented illustrator living in Paris. We’re pretty excited and hope you are too.

Oulipian Melville

An engaging essay in Appendix Journal, ‘The Curse of Coherence: Cold War CIA Funding for Oulipo’s Confidence-Man’, puts forward the idea that Herman Melville‘s The Con-fidence Man was given the Oulipian N+7 treatment.

I chanced upon the intimation of American author Harry Mathews’s involvement in a CIA-funded Oulipian translation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was researching Mathews’s novel Cigarettes. Fragmentary data suggested a covert narrative: that CIA operatives, working with the expatriate American novelist, hired members of the French experimental writing coterie to translate Melville’s novel in the early 1970s as part of a larger project of cultural influence. If the history suggested here proves true, it will demand critical re-assessment of Mathews’s work, that of the Oulipo, and possibly even that of the so-called New York School poets, with whom Mathews has always been closely connected.