CRAL – Centre de Recherches sur les arts et le langage
Séminaires « Recherches contemporaines en narratologie »
At 48 minutes in, Daniel Ferrer proposes that the notion of implied author (from Wayne Booth) be set alongside a passage from Paul Valéry about how the author in the process of composing makes a series of choices out of an aleatory flow. Ferrer invites us to consider that the chance operations of reception are inscribed in the moment of genesis: in the decisions made by an author who from that moment is subject to change as much as the text they are constructing.
She spent many hours with me in the dark, in her bedroom, listening to me lie. Somehow she knew that most writers became writers after having spent their childhood lying. Or perhaps she didn’t know that at all. She was extremely tolerant of my lies. She was interested where my lies could take her.
And so we travel to a consideration of the relation to the reader — are we less interested in where the lies lead as in where they have come from? A detour — The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde — “If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.”
like my father i was intensely awkward around the unwell.
he had a single pair of shoes — saddle brown leather.
he handled these as carefully
as neolithic skulls.
That is the beginning of a poem after a story by Schulz and now this biographical note on Schulz:
En juin 1911 se déroulent les élections municipales de Drohobycz, qui resteront dans l’histoire comme les élections « sanglantes » car des émeutes ont lieu en raison d’élections truquées. Bruno Schulz observe l’agitation populaire depuis l’embrasure de sa fenêtre. C’est alors qu’il décide de devenir écrivain.
Knowing this turning point from Schulz’s life, it is “window” that I hear sub-vocally in the terminal word “unwell” of Blakemore.
which I always want to call the Fractal Baudelaire
It’s a novel. It’s about subject positions.
p. 85
If I repeat the word girl very often, it’s for those who, like me, prefer the short monosyllable, its percussive force. I wonder if in repeating I might exhaust the designation that fixed me, flood it with lugubrious excess it named, and so convert the diminutive syllable to a terrain of the possible. Maybe this would be grace. Maybe. Would it be grace to aesthetically yield to the mystic obscenity of the word girl? She is allegorical, her body both lost and grotesquely multiple. She is estranged in a ruinous nostalgia for decorated immobility, enclosure, muteness. I want to force the category to produce, monstrously, a subjectivity outside subjection.
It’s about the literature and loitering.
p. 91
In reading I continuously discovered the extent my own incomprehension; it was so varied and complicated that it became my wealth.
The fragment that hooks — if I close to disappeared.
p. 74
If I was a monstrous slut, if I close to disappeared, if I confused aesthetics with the feeling of bodily risk, if I mistook ideology for sensation, anger for bravery, if I belatedly evaded an ambivalent erasure, I was in very good company.
Apparition again.
p. 93
This image would not be a means of appearing to a social given; rather, it would be the self-given permission to not disappear to oneself. When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?
In short — I was hooked on the grammar of “if I close to disappeared” — sensing an ellipsis and not knowing how quite to reconstruct the fulness. And so the theme of
(in)visibility captured my attention and I found it inflected by a gendered lens.
John Akomfrah and Janna Levin in conversation as part of Longplayer Assembly. Towards the end of their conversation they exchange thoughts and words about jazz and improvisation and conversation and ways of being in the world that go meta and become a sort of awareness of the improvisational qualities of this and all conversation. It’s magic.
Their remarks about jazz begin at 22 minutes.
A freestyle transcription follows.
JL:
Jazz by rights should be awful.
[…]
JA
I am very influenced. Influenced sounds like I am trying to transpose what they do into our field. It’s not that at all. It is just that when you are — a word that came up a lot in our last conversation was proximity — when you have this proximity to something, there is a way in which its aura and glow leaves a sort of imprint on your soul, really, you know. And jazz has definitely done that. Especially its examples, what I call its charismatic examples. The sense in which it says that in the process of trying to do something, elisions and ellipses, accidents and chance encounters, that all of these can be woven into a sort symbolic order, form. Right? Things don’t loose their discordant —
JL
Their shape…
JA
Yes, loose their shape, just because they have been forced into this unity.
JL
It’s literally like conversation.
JA
It’s a kind of ongoing conversation.
JL
Like what we’re doing.
[They both laugh.]
JA
Indeed.
JL
That is why it is so strong.
JA
We do that by being absolutely, intensely, listening to each other to sense where the moments and gaps might appear in order to say something. Right?
JL
Yeah. And also — I had my intention to do this but this — I just want to respond to it instead. Right? That is the whole improvisation. You don’t go there having prepped what your bass slapping solo is going to be. You might do that in case it’s a bad set. But if it’s a good set, somebody is going to do something that is going to make you think in that moment — how do I want to respond to this moment. And that is exactly what this wonderful experience is to meet you. I could not prepare this conversation.
JA
You know, if anyone wants to know what makes the music we clearly both love important — one of the sessions I really recommend is the Miles Davis Group 1964 playing at The Plugged Nickel. […] across five evenings they basically play the same stuff. But. And this is the major but: every night the same standards are played and yet they never sound the same. They have an aura of sameness but actually deep listening your realize Herbie Hancock doesn’t play the same chords in that track at that time as he did yesterday or the other … And it’s this fantastic interplay — of embrace of the uncertain — which I just love about it —
JL
And also the fearlessness. Just the fearlessness of making a mistake. The fearlessness of improvising. It is so brave. And basically as human beings that is what we are asked to do all the time. […] What we really love is improvising. That’s thrilling. You know?
JA
I think there are very few metaphors or examples that lead us into some deep insight into what we are and why we are. And improv at its best for me offers one of the greatest examples of who we are and what we are. Because, because, it’s about affecting a kind of position vis-a-vis another human being, another sentient being, which is as influenced by what they are doing as it is by just the moment that is happening, the environment in which it is happening […] these things matter and every great improvisatory moment is a kind of affirmation, if you will, of what it is to be a human being.
