Janet Malcolm’s collages

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Janet Malcolm, “Crater” (from The Emily Dickinson series)

I really enjoyed Ian Frazier’s introduction to Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photograph and Memory. (Sometimes I think one could have a pretty rich reading life just reading book introductions and ebook sample chapters.) Of particular interest was his mention of Malcolm’s collage practice, which some say she started in earnest after her piece “Forty-One False Starts,” about artist David Salle. (In that piece they talk a bit about collage, and she even brings some of her collages for him to critique, asking him, “Why are your collages art and mine not?”)

Frazier writes about her bookmark collages:

She also loved assembling bookmarks, her favorite kind of collage. I have fifty or seventy bookmarks she made and sent me. I use her bookmarks in most books I read, which means that now I can’t find them all. In some future century, one or two of Janet’s bookmarks will fall out from between a book’s pages in the shop of an antique-book dealer and amaze their re-discoverer. The bookmark collages bring together papers from her father’s psychiatric practice, Chinese communist propaganda leaflets, Soviet hotel DO NOT DISTURB signs, strange newspaper clippings, World War II ration stamps, Muybridge motion-capture photo sequences, reproductions of classic paintings, her grade-school report cards… she color-xeroxed the components and reduced them to bookmark size and fit them together… she had a knack for choosing which ephemera to save.

Filed under: writers who collage

Copy a poem and pick it apart

Thursday, July 15, 2021

When I don’t know what to write in my diary I copy a poem by hand or with the typewriter. (I like copying prose by hand, but I like typing out poems so I can see how the lines play out cleanly on the page.)

After I’ve copied the poem, I get out my paper dictionary, and I pick the poem apart, word by word, looking up all the words I don’t know, but especially the words I sort of know, or think I know, as these words are sometimes the trickiest. You’re rarely aware of all a word’s various meanings or its origins. A word you think you know is often a word you don’t really know at all.

This activity almost always gives me something new to write about — in this case, the idea of “stealing near,” or getting close to something, stealthily.

Copying is how we learn.

Pretend I’m dead

Sunday, July 4, 2021

Yesterday I was reading the introduction to Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, a book pieced together from two trunks full of writing he left behind after he died. It was also Kafka’s birthday, and because I don’t really believe in coincidence, I started thinking about other writers who left behind trunks full of writing, writers like Emily Dickinson, etc.

Years ago, I read Marian Bantjes’ suggestion for students who want to interview designers for school projects: “Pretend we’re dead.” I stole it for my own contact page: “Pretend I’m dead.”

It occurs to me that “Pretend I’m dead” could also be a compositional method. I hate writing books so much I have goofy fantasies about faking my own death (the COVID era seems like the perfect time to do it — who would know?) and publishing books posthumously.

“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already,” Stewart Brand once suggested to his friend, Brian Eno, “and all you have to do now is find it?”

Why not pretend you’re dead and start piecing together a posthumous volume?

Might be a way to get started, at least…

* * * Update 7/12/2021 * * *

A reader sent me a funny parenting version of “Pretend I’m dead.”

Mom gets a call from her adult daughter, who’s in a panic about a trivial situation. “What should I do, Mom?!?”

Mom says, “Calm down. Now, pretend I’m dead. What would you do?”

Another reader said she wished people could read their obituaries before they were dead, which reminded me of the Better Things episode, “Eulogy” (S02E06): “Sam, feeling unappreciated, encourages her children and closest friends to pretend that she’s dead and speak at her pretend funeral so that she may hear how they really feel about her.”

What can be lost when we share what we love

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

“There’s nothing about fame that I’ve ever seen that is healthy… it’s very hard to survive.”
—Shep Gordon

When I read Kevin Alexander’s “I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It,” a story about naming a #1 burger joint only to see it quickly shuttered, I immediately thought of “The Broccoli Tree: A Parable,” described as “some thoughts on what can be lost, and what can’t be, when we share what we love.”

To share something is to risk losing it, especially in a world where sharing occurs at tremendous scale and where everyone seems to want to be noticed, even if only for cutting down a beloved tree. […] And the truth is, if we horde and hide what we love, we can still lose it. Only then, we’re alone in the loss.

I think about The Broccoli Tree all the time, now, especially when it comes to fame. Emily Dickinson wrote some terrific poems asking why anybody would want it:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Kay Ryan has a poem called “Lime Light” that goes:

One can’t work
by lime light.

A bowlful
right at
one’s elbow

produces no
more than
a baleful
glow against
the kitchen table.

The fruit purveyor’s
whole unstable
pyramid

doesn’t equal
what daylight did.

Food critic Helen Rosner points out — along with the ethical pitfalls of the burger piece (turns out the owner was already in deep trouble before the list) — that some restaurant owners actively dodge any such list hype to avoid Instagram tourists, etc.:

Kenny Shopsin, the late proprietor of Manhattan’s idiosyncratic Shopsin’s restaurant, was famous for giving false information to guidebooks in order to keep ‘review trotters’ away from his door.

They know what Emily D knew:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Fevered egos

Saturday, July 7, 2018

“I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you are / in case you don’t know”
—Lou Reed

I taped this photo of Kanye West and Donald Trump on my copy of Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy, because the two fall neatly into the Bill Hicks’ category of Fevered Egos That Are Tainting Our Collective Unconscious and Making Us Pay A Higher Psychic Price Than We Can Imagine.

I take these two very personally, for an absurd reason: they are, like me, both Geminis, and I look at them in disgust and I think, “This is why I read books and listen to Prince (the best Gemini) all day.”

I realized a long time ago that the qualities I truly despise in other people are the qualities that I myself possess and have tried my best to suppress. (“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part yourself,” says the character Pistorius in Herman Hesse’s novel, Demian. “What isn’t part ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”)

The president, of course, is completely irredeemable, and not worth thinking about too much. His election was like watching one of those X-Files episodes where a mutant monster emerges from the toxic runoff of our civilization.

He’s old and evil and ugly and like Vigo in Ghostbusters 2, it took a river of poisonous mood slime to put him in the position to potentially end the world.

Kanye, on the other hand, has actually contributed something decent to his country. He is, no matter what you think of him, an artist. And he’s made some amazing music that I love listening to. (I have fond, vivid memories of cruising Maui to Watch The Throne and painting my garage while blasting Yeezus.) That he’s given us such good music and said such stupid things makes him even more maddening.

But, as Carl Jung wrote in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

What can we learn from these two?

1. Don’t believe in genius.

Kanye and The President both believe deeply in the idea of individual genius.

“Name one genius who ain’t crazy,” Kanye raps on The Life of Pablo. Jayson Greene wrote a good piece over at Pitchfork called “Kanye West and Why the Myth of ‘Geniu s’ Must Die”:

Kanye has placed himself in a lineage of unconquerable men: Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, Michael Jordan, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein. This idea has fueled him and absolved him in the past, but it is killing him now.

As for the President, in the words of Dana Goldstein, he is “obsessed with two of the most dangerous concepts in education history”: genius and I.Q. He thinks of himself as a “Very Stable Genius,” and is always talking about his I.Q., which is “sorry losers and haters…one of the highest.” So, in his mind, there are very talented and special individuals, the smart winners, and everybody else, the dummies, the losers.

It also seems very important to him to keep up this fantasy of his own genius, and in doing so he seems to have discovered the exact recipe for remaining a horrible person forever, which he shared with the people of Wisconsin in 2016: “Always be around unsuccessful people, because everybody will respect you.”

It’s true: if you want to never grow or change or gather any sort of wisdom or perspective on life, you should surround yourself with people who are not only not as good as you, but who worship and defer to you.

The “Yes Men,” of course, are the kiss-of-death for many a would-be genius. Creative people need somebody around telling them how dumb they’re being.

Take, for example, George Lucas, who made his best movies while married to film editor Marcia Lucas. Several people have pointed to their divorce as the point at which his work took a dive. Here’s Mark Hamill (a.k.a. Luke Skywalker) on her crucial role:

[George is] in his own world. He’s like William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes, he’s created his own world and he can live in it all the time. You really see that in his films, he’s completely cut off from the rest of world. You can see a huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married. I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little “kiss for luck” before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in the first film: “Oh, I don’t like it, people laugh in the previews,” and she said, “George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected”–and her influence was such that if she wanted to keep it, it was in. When the little mouse robot comes up when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it. She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong. Now he’s so exalted that no one tells him anything.

(Kanye has Kim, which seems to help a little bit. He also collaborates a lot, which, again, is all a matter of who you surround yourself with.)

The antidote to the Bad Idea of Genius is, in my opinion, Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius,” or the collective form of genius. Genius is an ego-system, and scenius is an eco-system.

Here’s Questlove, a student of Prince, laying it out (quoted in Steal Like An Artist):

the only mofos in my circle are people that I CAN LEARN FROM. i believe THAT is the first and foremost rule to a successful life.
you are going to be as educated and successful as the 10 most
frequented people you call/text on your phone

2. Read a freaking book.

“I am not a fan of books,” Kanye said in 2009. “I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.”

Shocker! The President doesn’t read books, either.

(Unfortunately, this proud non-reading doesn’t stop them from writing their own books.)

My friend Matt Thomas, who is a scholar of both egos, says: “Kanye would have been that kid in college who didn’t always do the reading but had a really high participation grade because he always debated people in class and did alternate assignments.”

It strikes me over and over, reading old books, how the past is just one gigantic subtweet of these fevered egos.

Here’s Emily Dickinson: