misc book thread

Started by jenkins, August 13, 2013, 02:18:30 PM

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jenkins



situations have developed such that this book is in my hands now. or rather it is in my hands when I am not typing this. I was, admittedly, worried when going into it that it would decrease my appreciation for the author. because I am such a fan of the documentary. but reading this is paying off because of her interest in narrative mechanics. she is aware of what a story needs to feel alive, and thus reading this reminds me too

jenkins

Quote from: jenkins on April 28, 2021, 03:41:53 PM


situations have developed such that this book is in my hands now. or rather it is in my hands when I am not typing this. I was, admittedly, worried when going into it that it would decrease my appreciation for the author. because I am such a fan of the documentary. but reading this is paying off because of her interest in narrative mechanics. she is aware of what a story needs to feel alive, and thus reading this reminds me too

it is in its own way a manifestation of the flight forward writing style, in which the emerging reality of a narrative is dictated by the terms of the writer. reality is up to the writer. flight forward is Aira's term for this but the book doesn't mimic the writing style of Aira, so all I can say for sure is it keeps you on its toes and is fun to read

I rewatched the similarly titled documentary and it held up nicely

jenkins

it was cool to hang out with her. she calls her cat a nice person so it's like

jenkins

"isolarii are island books—singular worlds, encapsulated. Together, they assemble disparate writers, artists, filmmakers and architects to help us navigate the world anew."

QuoteFROM THE EDITORS

The humanism of the past five hundred years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach is needed to re-enchant the world and establish the commonality of all life on Earth. This is not just the task of politics and philosophy. It requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful. That is, the preservation not just of environments, but myth, irrationality, autonomy, and joy—whether by direct or poetic means. New islands—of thought, literature, art—are already emerging. They are the necessary minimum for this re-beginning. We find these points of orientation, mapping a scattered community that spans continents and disciplines. To represent a world of many worlds, not a globe.

Our books revive the extinct genre of the same name—the 'island books' that emerged at the start of the Renaissance. Bound together were poems, stories, and artworks—each a supposed island, a space that held a singular idea. Although this spatial form of literature was eclipsed by the novel, it continued to inspire writers from Thomas More to Georges Perec. As the historian George Tolias writes, isolarii "seem to reflect an 'underground' geographical culture...that flourished in the experimental and tolerant climate of the Renaissance but has now slipped out of our grasp."

Six hundred years after the first isolarii were published, we take up this genre-bending format to navigate the turbulence of our times. Each book is a ready-to-hand island. Together, they are a growing archipelago. Islands from which to view the world anew.

jenkins

I'm finally in on John Ashbery, who I haven't been delaying so much as just now is when he happened for me. he's the David Lynch of poetry, in terms of you can't pin him down and no one can pass him. another way to say that is you can't pass him by duplicating him. Lynch follows Buñuel, though Lynch is nothing like Buñuel. to be a true original is the hardest thing of all. to break the form is the biggest deal, artistically speaking. in poetry Ashbery follows Eliot

jenkins



it's cool. this is actually the first book of his I've read. so I can't compare it to his others, I could only compare it to his movie (which I liked). like the movie, it's deadpan melodrama. the casual extremity appeals to me, since it reaches inside of being human, and I support his preference for troubled types, whom he forgives, while taking shots at cultural perspectives

WorldForgot

The Marbled Swarm, of Cooper's, iz ill. Great architecture to its depravity. A gothic building sort of texture. Gotta read this one.

Robyn

Got these today (but no OUATIH because it was out of stock)


WorldForgot

Witch by Jen Silverman iz a neat, lyrical dance of a play. Arias and a revolving-door (or russian roulette?) sort of structure of bidding toward the future with our soul. A turn on The Witch of Edmonton by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford but totally it's own in voice and form.

(i really wanna read that de palma & susan lehman)

WorldForgot

Quote from: wilder on May 30, 2021, 03:30:09 AM
I never thought my cinephile adventures would take me here, but most mainstream movies are no longer showing me something I'm uncomfortable to see, and if a movie can't hurt me why would I watch it?

This post of wilder's bounces around my mind daily. Re-reading I re-found this from John Hawkes' Whistlejacket:

QuoteIt is the photographer who counts and not his model. The mind of the photographer. Without time to think, without self-consciousness, without time for this choice or that, in time so brief it belongs only to photography itself, the person with the camera concentrates like no one else. He sees the picture before he takes it, he knows what it will look like before he sees the finished print. He sees what no ordinary person sees. Convention prohibits speaking intimately to strangers of the opposite sex and yet there are those, no matter how few, who are able to say anything they wish to strangers. Sudden intimate speech and behavior is a rare gift. And the photographer, or the kind of photographer I have in mind, intrudes into convention in the same way except with sight, not speech, though sometimes both.

WorldForgot

Conversation in the book thread led to me finding this, collected short stories and poems:
Charles Bukowski manuscript database

PinkTeeth

Holy Shit.

Per another , I decide to pick up a copy of Pauline Kael's "When The Lights Go Down" and actually found a first edition hardcover on ebay, SIGNED by the legend herself...  :shock:

$33. Incredible. Except that I now have to buy another copy, cuz there's no way I'm taking this one into the bathroom...
Holy shit.
New Name, Same Typos.

WorldForgot

PinkTeeth, it's once you do take it into the bathroom that your shits shall be holy.
(good get!)

Robyn

Quote from: PinkTeeth on August 10, 2021, 03:38:22 PM
Holy Shit.

Per another , I decide to pick up a copy of Pauline Kael's "When The Lights Go Down" and actually found a first edition hardcover on ebay, SIGNED by the legend herself...  :shock:

$33. Incredible. Except that I now have to buy another copy, cuz there's no way I'm taking this one into the bathroom...
Holy shit.

It inspired me to get a copy myself, but they seem to be out of print. There's one called 5000 reviews something something that I'll probably get instead

My own personal favorite film critic is Manny Farber who is extremly entertaning and don't give a shit about "fine art" or other peoples opinions

WorldForgot



Inspired by wilder's theory in the shoutbox, I wanted to share two texts that relate to 'image' and 'reality' as well as our interfacing with the image versus our interfacing with physical space. Actually, I don't think I disagree altogether with wilder that the internet has changed the construction of TV/Film. But rather, I note it more in the content than in the design. While it's true that a lot of movies and television are unexciting in their blocking and motion, or representation of space, I think there is a disinterest in this sort of construction currently because so much of what's depicted is Lore-Based Fandom.

As long as Peter Parker #2 steps through the portal, fans will cheer, it doesn't much matter how the shot is composed. As long as the reference hits. But maybe we're describing the same thing. And because music videos and art-house cinema aren't beholden to having to communicate the information of 'fan moments' they can instead communicate through bodies and emotion.

But as for the devolution of memory from spatial-rich experience to flattened-image, I'm not so certain. Paintings are 2D. Photographs are 2D. A production's effort to proper lensing, composition, and arrangement of bodies so as to simulate a lived experience versus just "spelling out" the moment rests on their vision, imagination, and exercised craft.

QuoteNorman Rockwell's "Triple Self-Portrait" (1960) presents a dazzling array of various interfaces. It is, at root, a mediation on the interface itself. The portrait of the artist appears in the image, only redoubled and multiplied a few times over. But the illustration is not a perfect system of representation.

I'm going to transcribe from these texts at length, as much for myself as for anyone else. Both texts are very insightful, but they're written academically, and so a tad overlong if not dense. But they are worth the read if the visual 'medium' interests you, and it's evolving relation to our reality. Both texts also concern themselves hella with the "social" aspects that produce our images. Galloway has a funny bit about the Obama inauguration rehearsal.

Jacques Ranciere's "The Future of the Image" which interrogates production, construction, and meaning. It's essentially five essays. I wonder what correlations we can draw from "The Surface of Design" alongside our own feeling of the digital interfaces that rule our lives.

Quote from:  Ranciere...the fragmentation of bodies and shots is itself an ambivalent procedure. Deleuze sees in it the infinitization of the interval that disorients the spaces and separates the images. But we could also see the fragmentation as doing the inverse, as intensifying the coordination between the visual and the dramatic: we seize with our hands, no need then to represent the whole body; we walk with our feet, no need to show our heads. The fragmented shot is also an economic means of bringing into sharp focus what is essential in the action, what classical theories of painting used to call the pregnant moment of the story.

Ranciere's "unpresentable" iz taken into the digital realm within Alexander Galloway's "The Interface Effect". Both compilations of essays first have to build the spine of the argument through the 'operations.' And so Ranciere with our associations of what's within the image as opposed to what's communicated by them and Galloway by the 'function' of user-interface as opposed what's built there in.

Quote from: Galloway"What is software," Chun writes "if not the very effort of making exomsething explicit, or making something intangible visible, while at the same time rendering the visible (such as the machine) invisible?" [...]

Indeed any understanding of contemporary visual mediation that ignores software does so at its own paril, in an age when cinema has become synonymous with Final Cut Pro, photography with Photoshop, writing with Microsoft Word, and on and on.

Both books imply that a 2D plane will always allow for 3D manifestation and beyond, that in-fact the metaphysical can be represented in UX/UI and cinema, so long as it relates more to 'experience' than to service.

Quote from: GallowayLike the "intraface" of Chapter 1, the polyptch is a network that allows for multiple kinds of cross-talk to take place entirely within the interface. But visual simultaneity is also paired with a specific form of narrative construction which likewise privileges the complex synchrony of an ongoing swarm of characters in a web of interaction. This is the visual and narratological equivalent of graph theory and social netowrk theory. Robert Altman is the primary if not first auteur for this technique, aesthetically repurposing in his style the growing importance of interpersonal, "grassroots" networks in the new social movements of the 1970s. Thus the ambient interconnectedness of story and character in Nashville (1975) or later in Short Cuts (1993) exists as sublimation of the growing globaism in which "we're all connected" even if we don't entirely realize how, why, or what for. Short Cuts is, in this sense a friends-of-friends network in which characters are nodes and their various actions and interplays constitute propagating links and gateways to other nodes.

(Certainly one might also look earlier to Anthony Mann's lyrical work in Winchester '73 (1950), a film essentially structured around the networked flows of commodity logistics: one specific commodity, a rifle, gains the status of a character within the film, and the hopscotch exchange of that commodity through various networked liasons structures the movement and flow of the narrative overall.)

Altman gives some hitorical context, then, to the growing emphasis today on serendiptity and concurrency in narrative media (not to mention the use of ensemble casts rather than single lead actors): two things happening to happen in the same time or place, which may or may not overlap or "link." Today the Altman touch has gone mainstream, essentially becoming a new dominant, as seen in millennial films like Babel (2006), Code Unknown (2000), Crash (2004), Magnolia (1999), Syriana (2005) or Traffic (2000), all of which devolve into a narrative construction of pure rhizomatic imbrication. In these films a number of relatively autonomous, yet ultimately interconnected, subnarratives proceed in parallel, often interconnecting for logical reasons or for reasons of happenstance. The thick latticework of relationships is of course not without precedent. 24's itieration owes as much to the soap opera as it does to Altman or Paul tHomas Anderson. And in the 1990s directors like Quentin Tarantino and Krzysztof Kieslowski paved the way for the millennial films. Regardless, this unique brand of narrative and visual simultaneity is one of the newly identifiable formal techniques in the control society.

Lost in the serendipity of interconnection, these films also ground themselves in moments of totality, those extraordinary events that unite the entire network under a global-single entrainment. This too is binary: either the social network is a raw assemblage of entirely uncoupled and discontinuous mini worlds, or through a phase shift the network unifies into a single presence. The network forces a logic of binary decision: either a flood, or an idle connection; either pandemic or standby mode. In Magnolia the totalizing event is a song sung in unison followed by a plague of frogs that unities globally, across space and subnet; in Short Cuts it is an earthquake that cuts an orthogonal swath across all stories and characters. In 24 the global-single even ist expressed most clearly in the nuclear bomb explosion in season two, but each season has its singular exceptional event, whather it be an assassination attempt, the infection of patient zero, or something else.