the public incinerator. What art and what artists would survive the holocaust? And how’s this for an angle, B.J.? Now this ART grabs you by the balls, see? It hits you in the stomach and dampens your eyes. So the artist gets behind his picture like Punch and Judy and reaches right out through it and grabs a critic by his lapels or slugs him in the guts and sprays him with tear gas. Lots of ways you can slant this. Dead cows in the grass. Dogs leap out of a picture. Vernissage guests savagely clubbed’ by picture cops. It finally gets so that pictures of dangerous animals, electric chairs, riots, fires, and explosions have the gallery to themselves. Will cows in the grass make a comeback? A critic was gored yesterday. Another drowned in a Monet river and a Bacon exhibition has given rise to unfavorable mutations ...
What has happened here? Art has become literal and returned to its magical function of making it happen, after a long exile in the realms of imagination where its appetite for happenings has become inordinate. Now suddenly art makes its lethal eruption into the so-called real world. Writing and painting were in the beginning and the word was written image. Now painters paint a future before it is written, having outstripped the retarded twin, writing, and left it back there with the ABC’s. Will writing catch up?
A writer who writes a book about a virgin soil epidemic, impregnating his pages with the virus described .. . this book about Poland in a typhus epidemic has typhus lice concealed in the bindings, to be released as book-of-the-month-club ladies turn the pages. Mektoub. It is written. Others have radioactive pages dusted lightly with botulism. The reader is no longer safely reading about sharks while she belches out chocolate fumes; on the page is a powerful shark attractant. Others scorn such crude tricks and rely on the powers of magic — potent spells and curses, often firmed by human sacrifice, flutter from these pestilent pages.
‘Beauty kills. Beauty is the murderer,’ in the words of Gregory Corso, and painting is reunited with its stupid brother, writing, in books done entirely in pictographs. And by now all books are scented with the appropriate odors and readers are provided with scent bottles for renewal... Musky Ozone, Rain on Horseflesh, Empty Locker Rooms... Finally comes the Master of the Empty Page, which can only be by initiates ...
LA CHUTE DU MOT. .. what survives the literalization of art is the timeless ever-changing world of magic caught in the painter’s brash, or the writer’s words, bits of vivid and vanishing detail in space any number of painters can dance on the end of a brash, and the writer makes a soundless bow and disappears into the alphabet.
Hemingway
In writing the old-style novel, there was a more or less clear-cut technology and aim. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had plot, it had chapters that maintained suspense, one chapter ending with a suspense situation which led to another chapter on a different character, then back to the suspense situation, building to a climax. The aim was basically to entertain the readers and to sell books. Critics still criticize authors for not writing novels of this sort, even when the novelist is not attempting to do so. Now painting and writing are split into schools and movements. The technology and aim of one movement may be quite different from those of another — if you are doing mobiles, the silkscreen technology of Pop Art is of no use.
Now consider some writers who have said something about the technology of writing. Other writers may not say anything directly, but their concepts of aim and technology may be implicit in the work that is done. I have previously mentioned Graham Greene; he is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. ‘Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.’ This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk
What has happened here? Art has become literal and returned to its magical function of making it happen, after a long exile in the realms of imagination where its appetite for happenings has become inordinate. Now suddenly art makes its lethal eruption into the so-called real world. Writing and painting were in the beginning and the word was written image. Now painters paint a future before it is written, having outstripped the retarded twin, writing, and left it back there with the ABC’s. Will writing catch up?
A writer who writes a book about a virgin soil epidemic, impregnating his pages with the virus described .. . this book about Poland in a typhus epidemic has typhus lice concealed in the bindings, to be released as book-of-the-month-club ladies turn the pages. Mektoub. It is written. Others have radioactive pages dusted lightly with botulism. The reader is no longer safely reading about sharks while she belches out chocolate fumes; on the page is a powerful shark attractant. Others scorn such crude tricks and rely on the powers of magic — potent spells and curses, often firmed by human sacrifice, flutter from these pestilent pages.
‘Beauty kills. Beauty is the murderer,’ in the words of Gregory Corso, and painting is reunited with its stupid brother, writing, in books done entirely in pictographs. And by now all books are scented with the appropriate odors and readers are provided with scent bottles for renewal... Musky Ozone, Rain on Horseflesh, Empty Locker Rooms... Finally comes the Master of the Empty Page, which can only be by initiates ...
LA CHUTE DU MOT. .. what survives the literalization of art is the timeless ever-changing world of magic caught in the painter’s brash, or the writer’s words, bits of vivid and vanishing detail in space any number of painters can dance on the end of a brash, and the writer makes a soundless bow and disappears into the alphabet.
Hemingway
In writing the old-style novel, there was a more or less clear-cut technology and aim. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had plot, it had chapters that maintained suspense, one chapter ending with a suspense situation which led to another chapter on a different character, then back to the suspense situation, building to a climax. The aim was basically to entertain the readers and to sell books. Critics still criticize authors for not writing novels of this sort, even when the novelist is not attempting to do so. Now painting and writing are split into schools and movements. The technology and aim of one movement may be quite different from those of another — if you are doing mobiles, the silkscreen technology of Pop Art is of no use.
Now consider some writers who have said something about the technology of writing. Other writers may not say anything directly, but their concepts of aim and technology may be implicit in the work that is done. I have previously mentioned Graham Greene; he is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. ‘Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.’ This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk
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