On an unseasonably warm November night in Manhattan on our way to get ice cream, we stumbled upon what appeared to be a vintage shop, brightly lit display window and all. As we began to walk in, a man sitting out front warned us that we were welcome to explore, but nothing inside was for sale. Our interests piqued, we began to browse through the collections the man out front had built throughout his life. This is a story of a man and his home...

Ark Codex ±0 is an authorless book object of art & text inked on pre-existing book pages & reformulated to induce an abstracted retelling of Noah’s fabled tale.

Ark Codex ±0 speaks for itself—a self-organizing & self-contained archeological archive of language for the sake of language, an artifact collaged of image & text mined from unspecified or unknown origins; deconstructed, replicated, reappropriated, cut up, traced, erased, distressed, deterritorialized, rubbed, stained, repurposed, then reconsituted & expressed in a feedback loop driven by the same chance operations that guide natural selection. To define the meaning or intent of the assemblage that is Ark Codex ±0 would extinguish the very nature it sets out to describe or inscribe (which, in any event, is only an architected articulation of the very ark (vessel, book object, apocalyptic seed bank) that it is).

More at calamaripress.com

My attempts to define modernism either drift into its origins or become unsatisfactorily reductive, so I’ll borrow T. J. Clark’s framing of modernism as ‘a distinctive patterning of mental and technical possibilities’. It’s almost easier to define modernism in negative terms, as what it is against. For example, in literature: a reaction to narrative, to needless artifice. I like Gabriel Josipovici’s suggestion that modernism is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. I’m also fully behind Tom McCarthy’s conception that ‘modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond.’

Even in the context of an article predicated upon – and attempting to come to terms with – how difficult it is to define, can we really say modernism is "a reaction to narrative, to needless artifice"? I don't think we can... Regardless, Anthony Brown and David Winters have a fascinating conversation over on 3:AM working through these definitional problems in a thought-provoking piece. Nice idea doing this as a dialogue: the form is anti-didactic from the get-go and allows both authors to open the problem out knowing full well they'll never close it down. It bears a full response. Am working on it. And countless other things!

Edouard Levé began as painter, became a conceptual photographer and then a writer inspired by the constrained writing of the OuLiPo, and Suicide's solemn insouciance does resemble an object in a white walled gallery. Only through the occasional window – an episode in which the friend explores Bordeaux, an anecdote about him climbing the wall of a graveyard – does the narrative warm to its genre. Otherwise the novel relies on the gravity of suicide to draw the reader through weightless disclosure. This is less a failing than the very challenge set by Suicide: what, after all, gives meaning to a life?

Excellent piece by Mr Mitchelmore over on This Space about Edouard Levé's Suicide.

I have always tended to work obsessively on one topic at a time to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t consider this a virtue. For the past 6 months, that topic has been ancient tragedy: its nature, its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation. This is why my cultural ingestion has been a little Cyclopean of late, with one or two exceptions, like belatedly watching all five seasons of The Wire for hours at a time over the holidays. Of course, I turned that into a Greek tragedy too...

Simon Critchley's current reading over on The Believer...

The Modernist Journals Project is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. With magazines at its core, the MJP also offers a range of genres that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for periodical study...

Unfolded, Anne Carson’s book length poem Nox is nearly 1000 inches long – or wide, to be exact.

An accordion-fold book housed in a clamshell box, Nox is a single collage-like poem composed of dictionary entries, snapshots, scraps of paper, postage stamps, written memories, and other texts  in which we see Carson as she copes with the death of her brother, as she tries to comprehend “the smell of nothing,” “the muteness,” and the meaning of memories scattered across a lifetime.  Just as the physical book unfolds and then collapses back into itself, the unifying structure of Nox is the unfolding and collapsing of a short poem by the Roman poet Catullus.  Nox opens with the poem – known as Poem 101 – in Latin.  As you turn each page or further unfold the book (whichever way you choose to read Nox), you are confronted with the individual dictionary entries for every Latin word in Catullus’ poem.   As the dictionary entries mount up and you realize that Carson is working toward an English translation of the poem, these entries induce a kind of literary vertigo.  Each Latin word has multiple definitions that can be wildly different from each other, if not seemingly contradictory.  The net effect is to make the reader reel from the endless English permutations possible from sixty-three Latin words.

Via sebald.wordpress.com, and one of my current reads...

Speaking of autonomism, and as an example of what post-populist media can achieve ... here's Federico Campagna giving an absolutely enthralling history of Italian workerism/ autonomism on Resonance FM, and here's a grab-bag of autonomist-related resources and links produced by the ever-excellent DSG.

Via k-punk.

Nabokov, in a digression in his book on Gogol, shows ... how [poshlust] breeds in literature. It is (I quote) ‘especially vigorous and vicious when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics are considered . . . to belong to the very highest level of art, thought or emotion.’ He’s thinking of the kind of novels that get reviewed as (he quotes) ‘stirring, profound and beautiful’. The book may be ‘a perfectly honest and sincere (as the saying goes) attempt on the author’s part to write something he felt strongly about’, and may have been written without any commercial motive – but ‘the trouble is that sincerity, honesty and even kindness of heart cannot prevent the demon of poshlust from possessing himself of an author’s typewriter when the man lacks genius . . . The dreadful thing about poshlust is that one finds it so difficult to explain to people why a particular book which seems chock-full of noble emotion and compassion . . . is far, far worse than the kind of literature which everyone admits is cheap.’ (More...)

sonofabook on Nabokov's poshlust ("cheap, sham, tawdry")...

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases (more...)

A Scrupulous Fidelity, On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser by Douglas Glover