graeme mitchell

This is a recording of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as prevalent today as it was when he originally read it I believe.

audio: William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Delivered, Dec 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

photo: William Faulkner, Hollywood, CA, 1942. ©Alfred Eriss/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

If you drive fast straight east from Portland for approximately 3 hours you’ll pass within about 9 miles of this place. It’s the kind of place that conjures absolutely nothing in the imagination. It’s a desert of sorts.

“Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucination of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death. -DE SELBY”

Epigraph from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

photo: Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: A Road to a Prison, Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008

Dubbed part of the holy trinity of modern Irish lit - alongside Joyce and Beckett - Flann O’Brien’s (born Brian O’Nolan) piece of mastery At Swim-Two-Birds is a must must must (etc) read for one and all. Joyce and Beckett had super smart senses of funny, but O’Brien is of the laugh-your-guts-sore sorts. To the extent that I’d suggest to read him in private. No kidding. Further differences may be generalized as such: I recognize Joyce as one of the acmes of modernism, while Beckett I think is a key to a bridge between modernism and post-modernism, but of the three, O’Brien has his foot the furthest into the post-modern sensibility with his cobbled-meta-fiction and light yet somehow still dark humor that would later become so predominant with the late-post-mod-literature-of-exhaustion satirical writers like Barth, Vonnegut, and suchlike…

So, read O’Brien.

Oh, nearly forgot, the initial inspiration for this post was that when I read At Swim-Two-Birds Joseph Koudelka’s (w/ Magnum) work came to mind, this very special indeed image especially,

photo: “Czechoslovakia, 1960.” ©Joseph Koudelka/Magnum, 2008.

As usual this post begins in a bookstore, where I came upon Sally Mann’s beautiful and instantly classic book, Immediate Family. This book and I have crossed paths a number of times before, but up until now while looking at it I’d never thought of Caddy from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Now I can’t seem to separate them. If you know that Faulkner once wrote, to paraphrase, that the entire story of The Sound and the Fury arose from imagining the sight of a girl in dirty underwear climbing a tree, then the parallel may make sense to you too. That Mann and Faulkner’s works are both so intrinsically tied to the South and the gothicism of the South is also an obvious similarity.

Anyway, if you’ve not taken up either of these books, I suggest to.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

On a separate note, it’s well known too that the title of The Sound and the Fury came from the Old Bards, Macbeth. I’ve always adored the passage, which is a soliloquy of Macbeth’s (and also a friendly reminder to read more Shakespeare):

text: Macbeth, Act V, Scene V. By William Shakespeare.

It’s incredible for me to think of Nadar doing this kind of work, taking these kind of portraits, that in sensibility feel so modern, over 150 years ago. I try and imagine him in Paris during the peak of Romanticism, mixing with and photographing the likes of Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and living during this pique of beauty and aesthetic. Somehow this must come through in his portraits, yes? Maybe in the sense of the theatrical, b/c I’d guess, despite the admirable earnestness of their ideals, the Romantics might have been guilty of theatrics. Just as so many artists are. Regardless, there’s a sense that not only did Nadar know exactly what he was doing, but he also captured a certain spirit of a time and idea - which is something, considering he was working with photography in it’s infantile stages…though I guess the opposite line of thought could be true: that maybe such work is easier borne if uninhibited from the history of what’s come before… It doesn’t really matter. Just see that, as far as portraiture goes, there is a lot to learn from Nadar. (Mind you, I really know nothing about him historically, nor much about photographs history, so…)

photo: Eugene Pelletan, 1855-1859, by Nadar.

photo: Pierrot Laughing, 1855, by Nadar.

To close, the Baudelaire poem, Au Lecteur, or To the Reader:

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.

On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.

The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.

Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.

Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

-Charles Baudelaire
Translated by: William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Portraits have been keeping me up at night. You could say I’m obsessed. The thing I want to say is that taking a portrait is easy, so easy, but to take a great portrait - and I mean great - may be one of the most challenging things to do in photography. What is a great portrait? I’ve no idea; there are no rules; I figure it just is. But I don’t want to belabor all of this. So for fun I thought I’d combine two of my favorite things, Literature, or writers rather, and portraits…

First, Joyce by Abbott. The other day I read (I forget where) the perfect description of Joyce, calling him, the Einstein of Literature. Perfect b/c Joyce, like Einstein was a genius: a brilliant, creative mind. When you read Ulysses, you are shared the thoughts of someone who’s ability to think and use language is well beyond normal. And then when you read Finnegan’s Wake, you experience that same thing but you watch it run away from you and normal comprehension. Then you see this portrait, and you see how fragile that genius must have been. Joyce looks like he knows something we all don’t, and that thing he knows is sad…maddening even.

photo: James Joyce by Bernice Abbott, 1926.

Then two from H.C. Bresson. These speak for themselves. The Matisse (not a writer, I know, still…) portrait I think is absolutely wonderful, but, overall what strikes me as interesting about these Bresson portraits is that he was working with a sensibility that is standard convention in todays celebrity portraiture. That is: the fostering of a concept of the person. Yes, the figures Bresson was working with were famous, but it seems to me that Bresson worked to further the ethos of this public persona through his images. The painter with his birds. Camus the, uh, renegade intellectual looking, well, renegadish. Maybe what I’m seeing is obvious, but it strikes me as something I wish to applaud Bresson for: he understood the power of simplification…stereotypes if you will.

photo: Henri Matisse, Vence, France, 1944 by H.C. Bresson.

photo: Albert Camus by H.C. Bresson, 1947.

And of course Avedon… Beckett I suspect was probably one of the hardest people ever to photograph. His hyper-awareness of the situation and all levels of what was happening would probably inhibit him from any sort of action, paralyze him even. You could imagine he was a calculating man, in a good way, in a smart as hell way. Where, on the other hand, you have Pound, who would probably be easier to photograph, to say to least. Though, the fragility of his state of being might break my heart, watching him out on the fringe, precarious.

photo: Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979. ©Richard Avedon.

photo: Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.

And finally, Pynchon. The recluse. This I assume is from a old high school yearbook…?

photo: Thomas Pynchon, source unknown.

I’m moving again this week, back into Manhattan, and things have been busy on top of that and probably will remain to be until after Aug. So it may be slow going on the ol’blog here. I do have some new NYC Journal work, but my scanner broke, so that’ll have to wait.

For now I’ll post Beckett’s last poem, “What is the Word.”

WHAT IS THE WORD
Samuel Beckett
for Joe Chaikin

folly
folly for to -
for to -
what is the word -
folly from this -
all this -
folly from all this -
given -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this -
this -
what is the word -
this this -
this this here -
all this this here -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this this here -
for to -
what is the word -
see -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse -
what -
what is the word -
and where -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where -
where -
what is the word -
there -
over there -
away over there -
afar -
afar away over there -
afaint -
afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
seeing all this -
all this this -
all this this here -
folly for to see what -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
afaint afar away over there what -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -

what is the word

This poem was found on Avedon’s bathroom mirror after he died - now, this is not meant frivolously, but anytime a poem is taped to a mirror, it inherently becomes something touching and something more b/c it’s glimpsing two people, an author and reader, in a manner becoming a mirror itself. And this poem, well, this poem is moving in that it was Beckett’s last, and after a lifetime of writing, of trying to say what he needed to say through language, the poem shows him at the edge of language’s knowledge, peering into the unutterable, feeling it but unable to speak it, and still searching for more words, for that right word, and this search amounts to “folly.” It’s a beautiful poem of struggle and humility and art, and I think I can see what Avedon saw in it. (On top of Avedon, I suspect Wittgenstein would have taped this poem up someplace too.)

(More on Avedon and Beckett here.)

After the mention of Gaddis in the last post I wanted to offer this sentence in addition, from Carepenter’s Gothic. This is beautiful writing, the sort of sentence that one can read over and over…the simple act of reading it aloud makes life itself more beautiful…

From the terrace, where she came out minutes later, the sun still held the yellowing heights of the maple tree on the lower lawn’s descent to a lattice fence threatening collapse under a summer exuberance of wild grape already gone a sodden yellow, brown spotted, green veined full as hands in its leaves’ lower reaches toward the fruitless torment of a wild cherry tree, limbs like the scabrous barked trunk itself wrenched, twisted, dead where one of them sported wens the size of a man’s head, cysts the size of a fist, a graceless Laocoon of a tree whose leaves where it showed them were shot through with bursts neither yellow nor not, whose branches were already careers for bittersweet just paling yellow, for the Virginia creeper in a vermilion haste to be gone.

-Carpenters Gothic. ©William Gaddis, 1985. Viking Penguin Edition. Page 36.

And a Matisse,

Landscape at Collioure. Henri Matisse, 1905

The incessant media on what art is selling for unsettles me. Not b/c of the dollar amounts. Gawd, not at all. I think this stuff is priceless. But b/c what it does is perpetuates the, most often, inane myth of the celebrity artist and, more profoundly, the not inane at all mechanisms of Foucault’s “author function.” Not that there’s anything wrong with these two things if you’re also talking about the work, but when discussion of the work is completely overlooked…

Think. What if all art, all literature, all music was stripped of it’s maker, as though it existed in an ideal of formalism, w/o context or name, and it became entirely its form and the event of experiencing it? Would this change how it affects? Only a hypothetical, since…well the idea of anonymity intrigues me greatly, but so does putting food on my plate…someday I hope I can join Pynchon on an island somewhere, be neighbors and never know it.

As I’m reading JR right now, this is a fitting Gaddis quote:

I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.

-from his Nation Book Awards acceptance speech for JR in April of 1976

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963.

Mark Rothko, White Center, 1950, Private Collection

One thing I envy about writers is that complete, brilliant endings are possible with their work. Photographers don’t have this opportunity, or good ones most often don’t I think. Photographs are vortices, snippets, transitory wisps…photographs may inspire reveries of endings but not supply them. Whereas writers, writers can spin the sort of ending that is like a divine arm sweeping out in a broad gesture of finality. These are the sort of ending that are nearly guilty of bathos b/c they’re usually the last honest moment where the authors’ earned, after much intelligent constraint, the right to let their form touch upon the sentimental, but they’d never be accused of any affront b/c the ending will moreover function as the final pique to the truths that the writer had built with all the pages that came before. This is all assuming it’s a good ending.

Two of the greatest endings in Literature are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final page to The Great Gatsby, and the other is the final paragraphs of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” from Dubliners.

First, Fitzgerald’s picture

photo: no credit info avail, found here

and his final page of Gatsby (quoted from this full text source):

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Then there is Joyce’s portrait (which I think is perfect):

photo: no credit info available, found here

and finally his closing page of “The Dead” (quoted from this full text source).

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Here are two quieting readings by Sylvia Plath of her poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”, which I hope you take a moment for. Don’t watch the videos, or continue with anything else for that matter, close your eyes, wipe your mind, and listen openly.

DbClay is an accessories company, and at the helm of it is my friend, Garett. Because I want to be honest about my respect for how much heart these guys put into their work and lives, I need to point out that the wallets are all a front. Beyond that shiny fashion world veneer dbclay is, in my estimation, more of a creative think tank appropriating the fringes of art, content, technology, design, and dreams - then incorporating such into an architecture accessible to all…but you really need to drink, uhm, say 6 rounds of Rainers at Shanghais with these guys to appreciate this. Don’t fret; Rainers are only like $1 at the Shanghei (a small entry fee to pow-wow in a place haunted with struggle). Now, mind you, I take pride in not offering props gratuitously, even to friends, but I admire those striving for something, those setting their alarm to prompt the beginning of something great, and that’s the kind of people at dbclay.

The first pic here is going to be in dbclay’s next line. The rest are from the same trip I took spring of 2002, back when I was in love and still believed in color…

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2002

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2002

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2002

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2002

(p.s. Garett, about our discussion on exploring writers, when I said you should read Kafka, that I think he’d interest you, well it just occurred to me in writing this post that Borges maybe would suit you too. He is the kind of writer you read at night before taking a long walk on streets with the company of only your shadow and the out of tune noises of the night, the noises of life slowing forgetting the days fortunes and misfortunes, like the creaks of an old house settling it’s foundation. Indeed, Borges inspires reveries. Kafka…Kafka I think is more weekend morning sort of writer. You’ll need a day to unwind your mind after he twists and snaps it like a kitchen towel.)

Coney Island is like an old resilient Dostoevsky character, bestowed with that solitary sadness that comes with the territory of prolonged sufferings and a sheer volume of years amassed. It was lonely last time I visited there, except for the small remnants of some, uh, ritual that had taken place before, probably the day before from the looks of it. It was a memory I encountered the wake of. I imagined it had been a wedding, b/c that’s the only sense I could make from rose buds, tamale wrappers and a Virgin Mary hankerchief…but, wedding or not, it all bore little optimism b/c of it’s succinct fading…left was slight remnants, barely visible, almost invisible, giant in their smallness. Times certain and inevitable erosion of everything was, on the other hand, something that was entirely visible and certain and exact. That a chord was struck is blatant, but for some reason the remnants, the entire place made me think of a sentence, which I’m only able to paraphrase, from William T. Vollman’s novel Europe Central. It went something like this, “when we believed enough in books to burn them.” That this line came to mind made no sense, except, I guess, b/c I was for a moment aware of history and what we can believe in. (-and, yeah, if you haven’t read Vollman, do so tonight, b/c he can write…in the Gaddis, Pynchon, D.F. Wallace camp of really-heavy-thick-smart-books.)

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007


photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

I’ve been in PDX and won’t return to NYC until the New Year. It’s been a much needed reprieve. I look forward to getting home, but until I do I’m afraid this tiny bleep on the internet’s radar is going to continue to go neglected.

In the interim, for some company, here’s T.S. Eliot reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Such a brilliant poem, and Eliot was a wonderful reader, so mull over it, and if it doesn’t inspire insight or ideas then you probably need to listen again. Really, listen:

Graham Smith has an essay on his father with accompanying photographs called “Albert Smith” in Granta 95: Loved Ones. I believe it is still in bookstores as of now. It brought a lump to my throat, and I’d offer that to any it didn’t do likewise is w/o a heart.

It’s not online, unfortunately, but here’s info. The picture on the issue’s cover, below, is one from the essay.