BERNEVAL

It’s got a good index. Good if you are mindful of names. Look up Cage and you find the reference to the section you had browsed and made you buy the book and lug it home (it’s a big tome). However about a month later the memory has been rearranged and you want to use place (Toronto, Ryerson) to find the section. No luck. So we go to the activity “chess” and leaf through the “hits”.

Whatever the move, we are lucky to retrieve from Arturo Schwarz (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp) an account of the evening orchestrated by John Cage in which Duchamp plays a prominent part.

Among his [Duchamp’s] last public chess performances, the ones in Amsterdam, Pasadena, and Toronto ought to be recalled.[…] Finally, on February 5, 1968, Marcel and Teeny performed in Toronto in an event organized by the composer John Cage at the Ryerson Polytechnic High School Auditorium. Other performers, in addition to the Duchamps and John Cage, included David Tudor, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and Lowell Cross. At Cage’s suggestion, a special chessboard had been made by Lowell Cross. Each square of the chessboard had a built-in photoelectric cell. The moves made on this board controlled the outputs to eight amplifiers and loudspeakers, with each move generating a different sound. The performance consisted in one and a half games of chess. The first, between Duchamp and Cage, in which Duchamp gave the composer a Knight as advantage, was nevertheless won by Duchamp. The second game, between Teeny Duchamp and Cage, was left unfinished at the performance (it was completed the following morning after breakfast and ended with Teeny’s victory). Even though the outcome of this collective work called Reunion may have been of the greatest theoretical interest, the audience thought differently. They were left in the dark, and not only metaphorically — they couldn’t even follow the moves of the game — and they silently abandoned the hall in the course of the evening. Thus, when the lights were turned on at midnight, at the end of the performance, which had started at 8:30 P.M., the chess players realized that they had been performing for an empty hall. Fortunately, Columbia Records recorded the resulting sounds and everyone was paid musician’s union scale wages. In a letter to the author, John Cage explained his intentions: “Musically speaking Reunion is an instance of a number of people working together practically but anarchically.”

Found a competing version of the end of the evening thanks to an article by Adam Bunch in Spacing: Out in the audience someone shouted: “Encore!” An example of Canadian irony? Adam Bunch’s article first appeared as a blog entry (with reference links) on The Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog.

And so for day 1389
02.10.2010

Banksy. Wall and Piece (2006).

Last bit of “Advice painting with stencils”

The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Fame is a by-product of doing something else. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Time to invent fibre-conscious menus.

And so for day 1388
01.10.2010

The dope on lesbians on dope.

Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.

Among the different varieties of known herbs[,] the lazy herb is much appreciated by the lesbian peoples who practice an intensive idleness. “It gives an exquisite somnolence, a bliss, a state of well-being. The shapes seen by the eyes mix and appear like mists of colors. The sounds soften and prolong. The lazy herb gives consciousness without consciousness” (Sseu Tchouan, Book of Idleness, China, Glorious Age).

We cross-reference this entry with the one for “sleep” given the hint of somnolence. Worth a peek before nodding off in embrace…

Physical time is no longer mechanically divided into sleeping and waking hours since the companion lovers sleep at any moment. To sleep has therefore changed its meaning. This explains how one companion lover may say to another “I sleep you.” To sleep someone means both to sleep beside her and to sleep the love of her. Sleeping someone takes precedence over many other activities. It is often called “an exercise of total idleness, the highest delight” (Sseu Tchouan, Book of Idleness, China, Glorious Age).

Sleep it!

Dreaming and metabolizing a language, ingesting herbs, luxuriating in idleness. Where the verb to sleep takes a direct object most often a lover shifting shape and colour.

And so for day 1386
29.09.2010

A quick reminder from Foucault’s History of Sexuality and a bit of emphasis : “Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

Brilliant study by Emily Eells of Proust’s English readings and the drafts to La Recherche. Here is the lay of the land:

The two mainstays of the following discussion of Proust’s work — homoeroticism and Victorian culture — become entangled in a form of sexuality which I propose to call Anglosexuality. His 30-page narrative essay — Sodome et Gomorrhe I — presents homosexuality as a kind of inter or third sex, the man-woman or woman-man combining the masculine and the feminine. Male and female homosexualities are confused in what Proust prefers to call inversion, a notion which complies with Foucault’s definition of homosexuality in The History of Sexuality. Foucault dates its emergence as during the nineteenth century […] This book does not intend to engage in the current critical debate about the classification of Proustian sexuality into fixed categories such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality and the physical practices which they involve. It posits that Proust’s work creates an ambiguous third sex, whose very ambiguity defies definition and whose subtly understated associations with British culture justify the choice of the term ‘Anglosexuality’. Anglosexuality fuses and confuses the eroticism and aestheticization of same-sex desire. It is a form of sex and sensitivity which is closer to psychological androgyny than biological hermaphroditism. It is more of an aesthetic stance than a physical sexuality; as Mario Praz wrote: “The Androgyne is the artistic sex par excellence.” [ref. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 320]

Emily Eells
Proust’s Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture (2002)

And so for day 1384
27.09.2010

Basket I

Chrystos signed the lines in “Ceremony For Completing A Poetry Reading” gathered in Not Vanishing, lines that point to an undoing, lines that point to the not being able to go home until the everything has been taken, the container too. Hands empty then fullness. Handless.

There’s a never going home built into the unempty occupied by the first person place.

Basket II

Adrienne Rich sending off a coda of concluding imagery at the end of “Transcendental Etude” collected in Dream of a Common Language

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
[…]

Absently not absent-mindedly. And no mention of basket in “[s]uch a composition [that] has nothing to do with eternity”.

For both, the telling as important as the depicted dispossession for travel. For either, no accounting for the ends of manufacture.

Basket III

Basket the name of a dog recorded by Gertrude Stein to be remembered by.

Words winnowed by the filtering attractor of names. Name, word, keepsakes. Tokens. Carrier objects. Tactful reminders that temporal does not merely mean in time. A holding without hands. For the trio.

And so for day 1383
26.09.2010