Staged

More of these things: drawing motivated by scene descriptions in early modern plays. These come from The Betrothal, by Maurice Maeterlinck: something about a curtain, a door with a "formidable lock," and caverns leading to a miser's den. These pages are part of a work in progress. Will I ever include text from these plays? I'm not sure about that yet.

Directives

 

 Sketchbook with text from August Strindberg. Drawings distracted observations from our front porch.
 

Commonplace Highlights: Mary Ann Caws, Apollinaire

 

 

 

Caws, Mary Ann. Metapoetics of the Passage: Architextures in Surrealism and After. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Commonplace Highlights: Jean Luc Nancy

 

Steve Stelling, Commonplace Highlights (Nancy’s Monstrous Openings)

 

A few years ago I put together a commonplace book.  The quotations and excerpts I collected are unified around my interests in critical theory (so-called!) and perception. So there’s that. I’ve also got a surplus of orphaned drawings that haven’t been adopted by any of my own words. Pages like theseare the results of grafting these things together with an eye toward their associative potential.  In a way, I suppose these are my “process” drawings; this is my thought process. If I were to make an aesthetics textbook, this is how I'd want it to look.

The Incomplete

This is my adaptation of a prose poem by Michel Fardoulis LaGarange
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The Incomplete

During that time we went to the poorly lighted back room of a bookstore. There, we labored to decipher ancient inscriptions on the eroded walls.

By doing so we hoped to enrich or supplement the knowledge we had already gained from conventional books.

The wall's writing referred only to the rudiments of archaic reading. There was a notably absence of long passages.

In that feeble light, however, the ongoing relationship between ourselves and the studious atmosphere of the room was enough to revive volumes of words, spelled by erased letters.

Up a Storm: Books and Travel

Department of Classics

There is an aesthetic appeal to playing academic dress-up that I have a hard time saying no to.

Carpe Libris

Like a lot of people who buy used books, I’ve managed to accumulate quite a few that feature the former owners' names.  Most often, people write their names on the endpapers. Sometimes a name will be stamped, printed on an address-style label, or will be featured on a decorative bookplate.  Below is a list of titles with the names of people who, at one time, owned a book that I now possess. (I'll update this list with new acquisitions as needed.) 

 This post is kind of a public announcement and acknowledgement to the former owners (or their ghosts). Obviously this is not as serious as the obligatory adoption notices you'll find in the classified section of a newspaper, but that practice keeps coming to mind. Anyway, I’m grateful that these works are part of my collection, and I’m happy I have some common interests with a slew of specific strangers, however remote.

John Ashbery, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Albert Tsugawa

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Robert W. Paisley

Bergson/Merdith, Comedy, Caroline Trapp

Yves Bonnefoy, Early Poems, Pour Elisa from Gareth

Yves Bonnefoy, Poems 1959 to 1975, Harry M. Sartain (?)

Henri Bosco, Farm Theotime, To Violet from Elizabeth

Dino Buzzati, Tartar Steppe, The Smiths

Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, Marc

Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, Graham Shearing 89

Robert Creeley, Selected Poems, To Debbie from Steven

e.e. cummings, Collected Poems, Rosemary F. Levehter

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Cruso, Allen C. Kaetzky

William Faulkner, The Hamlet, Suzanne

Gustav Flaubert, Temptation of S. Anthony, James D. O’brien

James, G. Frazer, Golden Bough, George W. Waters

Hamlin Garland, Main Traveled Roads, Peter S. Marlee (?)

J. W. Goethe, Elective Affinities, Max Jones

William Golding, The Spire, Amy Simons

Julian Green, The Dark Journey, Sadie Katz New York City

Martin Heidegger, Language, Thought, and Poetry, Elmore J. De Grange

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, Juania Lee Davis

Franz Kafka, Amerika, Richard B. Vowels Vice Council of the United States

Franz Kafka, The Trial,  Phelps/a. Rehner/T. Bozik/M. Carlsen

D. H. Lawrence, Pansies, Clint Harvic

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, R.K.

D. H. Lawrence, Viking Portable, Jim McDowell

Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, G. Marloy Gaspar (?)

Stephane Mallarme, Poems of Mallarme, I. Cearrs 1955 (?)

Herman Melville, Confidence Man, Danny C. Gunnels

Herman Melville, Israel Potter, Edwin T. Moul

Herman Melville, Mardi, Eva Felicite Middlebury

Herman Melville, Selected Writings, Robert W. Sauder

W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Christine Versor (?)

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, Brian C. Riley

Benjamin Peret, From the Hidden Storehouse, Jim Tnivgham (?)

St. John Perse, Eclogues, Robert Strew (?)

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Mary E. Schawrtz

Ezra Pound, Selected Cantos, di Piro 775 5125

Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, Mike Timmins

Ranier Maria Rilke, Stories of God, Manny Theiner

Jules Supervielle, Selected Writings, To Tim from Robert

Nathanial West, Miss Lonely Hearts and Day of the Locust, Amy Slavin