Activity as volumetric thinker

Looking up at the heavens she howled and cried until she grew hoarse, but even after her voice had given out, her whole body continued to shake. If only she could become a sculpture. Though she had produced many drawings and prints, she had know that she was meant to be a sculptor since her youth. And now, the only way to escape this pain was to become a sculpture herself.

— from 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

1. Can I call myself an artist? Yes. Apparently I am emerging. Some of my sculptures are on display at the Montreal Art Center and Museum, June 8-22.

Women sculptors have often been single figures, whose very activity as volumetric thinkers caused consternation. (Penelope Curtis)

2. What am I trying to prove? And I am certain I am trying to prove something. I am, however, not sure if it is to the world or to myself, or to someone else. This is a partial proof that anyone can be an artist. If I can do it, surely anyone can. Or at least anyone who takes the time to respond to a call for submissions, prepare a portfolio and a statement. Anyone who can manage the logistics of exhibiting one's work. Alternatively it is proof that I have some artistic talent. Can both hypotheses be true?

3. Having the goal of exhibition has shaped my time. There are deadlines. Paint must dry. These past months have been exceptionally stress-laden, for life reasons, yet I made a commitment to participate in a group exhibit — an added pressure, but also a distraction from life, even a handy excuse.

4. Would these sculptures have turned out differently without a looming end date? Minimally. In some cases, a decision was forced. I no longer had the luxury of procrastination. But the right decisions were made, of this I am confident. 

5. Some finishing detail was rushed. As I browse work in galleries, I notice the precision I didn't make time for — a sanded contour, a crisper edge, a neater mounting. Such detail can be a differentiator between competent work and confident work. While parts of the process are meditative and slow down time, I need to relearn patience, I need to take more time.

6. How do I title a sculpture? A title can change everything. It gives the viewer a framework, it sets a tone. An artwork must announce itself to the world. It takes a stance. It makes a statement. It tells a story. Sometimes it's an untitled story about nothing in particular.

7. I play a game with myself when I visit galleries and museums: I look at an artwork cold, understand something about it, identify how it makes me feel; then I read the little white label at its side, for its title, year, materials, maybe some other context. And then I look again. This game makes me feel like both a winner and a loser simultaneously, that I am some clever purist exercising her cumulative knowledge and insight but also never fully appreciating what an artist might be trying to say. Is the failing mine or the artist's, I wonder.

8. They say a picture's worth a thousand words. What is a sculpture worth then? Why do we title artworks with words? An artwork can generate a feeling; but a title can help the artwork tell a story. Sometimes I think the title should be able to stand on its own, without the artwork.

9. I read artist statements and laugh at their empty wordiness. I have collected many sample over the years. Enough to fill a book.

10. How do I price a sculpture? Unlike a canvas, I cannot charge by square inch. I can calculate time and materials, but what of found materials? Do I count the time involved for mould-making on top of the time to make the clay original? If I reuse the mould, should I adjust the price? 

11. What is my artwork worth to me? What do I want for it? At this point, mostly I want someone to take it off my hands. I'm not in this for the money. I like the idea of barter pricing, because some things are more useful to me than money. One sculpture is priced at "Removal and disposal of two old hot water tanks from the artist's cellar basement, accessed via trap door and steep step ladder." Another costs "Air duct and dryer vent cleaning in the artist's condo, which may include the removal of animal remains and other debris." But it's only because I'm financially comfortable that I can entertain alternative economic structures.

12. Curatorial philosophies and logistics are confounding me. How do I choose what to display? How many pieces? How do I display them? Painters must choose how to frame their paintings; sculptors must stage their work, in three dimensions. I put my work on a pedestal. Should these platforms conform to each other to forge (a perhaps artificial) cohesiveness of the sculptures, or should they play to each piece's distinctiveness?

13. Where do I find such pedestals? Do I make them, modify them? How do I transport them? How much time have I devoted to the material that supports the art, beyond making the art itself?

Object-sculpture is by it nature materially and spatially assertive, so a sculptor needs logistical and material support as well as the endorsement of others who believe in the undertaking. (Clare Lilley)

14. Here's a smattering of books I've read in recent months (rather, almost years), either directly or tangentially about art and artists, that have shaped some of my art thinking, bringing me to where I am now.

• Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, published on the occasion of the Arts Council Collection Exhibition
• Old in Art School, A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Painter
• Like a Sky Inside, by Jakuta Alikavazovic
• Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel
• The Deceptions, by Jill Bialosky
• Tell Me I'm an Artist, by Chelsea Martin
• Sirens and Muses, by Antonia Angress
• The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake
• The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson
• 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

15. Why do writers have so much to say about art?

16. There is so much more I want to say about these books, but I'm not sure I remember what. I read differently now. I regret not blogging, not documenting my response, not writing my way through my opinions. 

17. I've been messing around, playing with art, toying with the idea of art school; if not a degreed program, then workshops in exotic places. What do I hope to accomplish with school? More proof, validation? (Of what?) More importantly, what do I hope to learn?

18. I don't even know how to properly clean a paint brush.

19. I have been making things out of clay and, for the most part, casting them. I want to learn about different casting materials. How do I even begin to go about casting bronze? Where do I get some bronze? Can the things I do with clay be adapted for ceramics? How do different types of clay feel, or behave differently? I have trouble finding answers in books or on the internet. I suspect the answers may come from people, possibly school. I want to experiment with materials, to find the material best suited to the story I want to tell.

20. Perhaps I want to prove that art is easier than literature. The price of admission is lower. It's easy to show my work at the little gallery down the street. People actually stop and look. It's less simple to publish a book. There is no little publisher around the corner. There aren't many people who will casually spend 20 minutes with my writing and spend a few hundred or thousand dollars on it.

21. Perhaps this exercise in art was a warm-up. Or merely a procrastination tactic.

Exhibitions are not the end point of a process. Exhibitions start things, and they begin processes of change and reassessment. They don't close a chapter but open it. (Joy Sleeman)

Gaping holes in the body of her argument, 2024; clay, acrylic. On the beach at Benitses, she came apart at the seams, 2022; plaster, acrylic. 
The body is a construct, the body is a triangle, 2023; hydrostone. Jeremy is a delicate flower, 2024; clay, plaster, acrylic.

The air itself is one vast library

What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motion which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.

— from The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, by Charles Babbage.

This quotation serves as a springboard for appreciating the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. The exhibit Unstable Presence is showing at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) until September 9.

In Vicious Circular Breathing, for example, the participant steps into a glass box and breathes, breathing in the air breathed by previous participants. The breath is represented by bellows which, via respiration tubes, inflate and deflate a number of brown paper bags.

Other works are more purely sound-based. You can step inside a sphere and here all of Bach's works at the same time. In another room voices are "translated" into light and layered on top of each other.

I am reminded of a couple of Wim Wenders' films — the angels that perceive everything at once (Wings of Desire); sound that is removed from its context, distilled (Lisbon Story).

All of which stands to complement my reading of Rilke...

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Disembodiment

The Particles of Existence exhibition at Phi Centre wants you to discover the universe at a non-human scale. Chalkroom is the star of the show.

Chalkroom is an immersive installation created by multimedia artist Laurie Anderson and mixed media artist Hsin-Chien Huang.



Anderson discusses the work:

The reason it's "Chalkroom" is it has a certain tactility and it's a made-by-hand kind of thing — it's the opposite of what virtual reality usually is, which is distant and very synthetic. So this is gritty and drippy, and filled with dust and dirt.

I plan on going back to experience the other "rooms" of Chalkroom to find some of the other stories hidden within. On at Phi Centre until August 18.

About
Faena Aleph
New York Times
Open Culture

I'm a tree that grows hearts

"One day, I found a big book buried deep in the ground. I opened it, but all the pages were blank. Then to my surprise, it started writing itself."



Björk Digital offers 5 virtual reality experiences, a musicological education space, and a cinematic screening of a curated program of music videos.

It should be no surprise that Bachelorette, a metafictional book-themed video, of a song with lyrics written by Icelandic poet Sjón, is among my favourites.

You don't have to be a fan of Björk's music to appreciate the show, but it helps. I for one hear a very hopeful and positive tone in her songs, even when they're imbued with melancholy.

The highlight of the exhibit is definitely the virtual reality aspect, through which you're guided in a set order. But I would happily spend more time in the wider exhibition space; the video program itself runs for about 2 hours and the hands-on learning app is fascinating — also immersive in their way. The context pushes you to view the music through different lenses — from mathematical to spiritual.

Björk Digital is on view in Old Montreal until November 12.

Choice: a possible future of storytelling

Multiple Choice, by Alejandro Zambra, is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, something more, and something else entirely. It consists of 90 thought experiments, creating one big meta thought experiment about narrative. It is structured in the form of a standardized test (complete with a sheet on which you can mark your responses), 5 sections that cover skills like word choice, sentence order, and reading comprehension.

For example, for the following exercise, mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text.

31. Relatives

1. You group them into two lists: the ones you love and the ones you don't.
2. You group them into two lists: the ones who shouldn't be alive and the ones who shouldn't be dead.
3. You group them according to the degree of trust they inspired in you as a child.
4. For a moment you think you discover something important, something that has been hanging over you for years.
5. You group them into two lists: the living and the dead.

A) 1-3-4-5-2
B) 5-2-1-3-4
C) 1-3-5-2-4
D) 3-4-5-2-1
E) 1-2-3-4-5

(I answered B. Or maybe A.) Wouldn't you love to discuss this question with your family? The conversational tangents it inspires!

I'd like to present some of these exercises to my team of editors, so we could debate the subtleties in meaning between, for example, "but," "yet," and "notwithstanding," what order of facts and opinions conveys the most effective emphasis, which sentences aren't essential to moving the narrative forward.

It was a perfect read for me, the perfect time and place, serving to slow me down. In this way the book was much like poetry. Read a page, think about it, let it sink in, reconsider it. It's a short book, but it demands a lot of breathing space. It has served to make me feel really smart, and also really stupid. That's a good thing.

I rather wish that more books would not merely invite but forcibly ask me to pause and reflect on what I read.

Multiple Choice failed completely to make an impression upon people I know, some off whom are actual readers. It's as if by physically pressing the book upon them, forcing them to cast their eyes across a sample "question," was like making them sit an actual exam. One person was outraged that there was no answer key. What do you mean there are no answers!

As the author responds in one Q&A (This Week in Fiction: Alejandro Zambra):

I think that this story and the book as a whole argue against the illusion of a single right answer. But it’s also a book about the wish for that answer, the naïve or visceral desire for there to be a truth. In “Multiple Choice,” I was interested in the question of how those structures mark you: the rhetoric of options, distractor questions, the true and the false—that whole complex and crude game, deeply ideological, of exclusions and inclusions.

Excerpts
Reading Comprehension: Text No. 1 [excerpt]
Reading Comprehension: Text No. 3

Reviews
Liminoid Magazine
The Rumpus

The Future of Storytelling
Quite coincidentally I recently visited the exhibit Embodied Narrative: Sensory Stories of the Digital Age. I see Multiple Choice easily slipping in alongside these experiences, curated by Future of StoryTelling (FoST), and all foretelling the future of storytelling.

All highlighted the significance of context: how context predominantly figures in shaping an experience for a "reader." For example:

Experiencing the last 4 minutes of JFK's life through sound and smell ("Famous Deaths") only becomes art because we know how it ends, and we're aware of its historical significance. I mean, on its own, in isolation of context, it stands as an aesthetic juxtaposition of audio and olfactory cues — but I could guess at the smells only because I could line up the accompanying sounds with footage I've previously seen. What a person brings to the experience in terms of their knowledge and expectations is what makes it a meaningful narrative. The mortuary fridge you're rolled into enhances the anticipation of death.

A video game that consists of a police database which the user can query ("Her Story") has no structure; it's driven entirely by the user's interests. When I first sat down at the terminal, I was at a loss; it felt a little bit like work. If this is a police database, I've been cast in the role of investigating officer. Where to start? I reasoned, a police database must have something about murder in it, so that was my first keyword search, which delivered some video footage, which soon had me asking, who's Hannah? and, what baby? Every session will yield a different story.

Blindness experienced through a VR headset ("Notes on Blindness") might seem like a contradiction in terms, but the flashes of light begin to take shape according to sound prompts. The experience is inspired by and complemented with the audio recordings of John Hull, a theologian who with a scientist's precision documented his experience of going blind. (The associated film, by contrast, I have no interest in seeing — the trailer leads me to expect an overly sentimental drama that emotionally manipulates its audience, playing on themes of loneliness vs connection rather than on the cognitive aspects of blindness that are so much more interesting to me.) The most poetic of the chapters in this VR experience dealt with rain and with wind. He describes the rain as a blanket that gives things shape and dimension (think: the sound of rain on metal vs glass, on the roof vs the window, in tight alleys vs open fields). Wind is the equivalent of a sighted person's clear and sunny day, bringing one's surroundings to life.



A short film unfolds according to decisions the audience makes via mobile devices ("Late Shift"). A choose-your-own-adventure movie, only you're not watching alone; the direction of the narrative is based on majority votes. Some of the decisions are straightforward yes-no scenarios, but others ask you to take a more philosophical perspective (selfish or selfless?), thereby defining character and moral context. And some questions frustratingly don't offer as an option your preferred course of action. One unsettling aspect is that the story doesn't always go the way you want it to go. You wonder who your neighbour is, do they believe what you believe, what is their motivation.

Of these examples, I feel that Death and Blindness don't entirely fit the storytelling mould — they don't tell a story so much as share an experience. Zambra's book would be a perfect conceptual fit for this exhibition, but perhaps, being print-based, it would be considered too traditional.

Becoming animal

In Vancouver a little while ago we peeked in on the exhibit Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, which explores works "through the lens of recent philosophical ideas, questioning and breaking down old borders between the human and the non-human."

For me it expressed some ideas about our relationship to nature, and how strong a force our environment is in shaping us and our technology, but it also coalesced some ideas that were germinating in me after having travelled from Montreal to Vancouver by train, and venturing north by car and by ferry to the gateway to the Great Bear Rainforest. (Curator's talk: "...based on mapping... travelling through the landscape, and when you do that, the landscape begins to saturate you and you become the landscape." (We are becoming landscape.))

Notably, the exhibit included works by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, to whose work I'm glad to be introduced, and Emily Carr, for whom I have fresh appreciation now that I've seen the northwest landscape she strove to express.

(I must admit, I was a bit horrified to be confronting some sexual/erotic pieces in the company of both my daughter and my mother. To her credit, my mother was able to take away some insight into and appreciation of technique within the context of my brother's artwork, the whole purpose of our journey west being to scatter his ashes. (He is becoming landscape.))

One overtly bookish component of the exhibit was Marina Roy's "Thumb Sketches."

The work consists of a series of paperbacks of literary classics from the Western cannon, flayed to show Roy's ink paintings on the edges. They are scatological and lightly pornographic, but quite funny — visual responses to or subtexts of the particular novel.

In a statement on her website, Roy writes:

In the pile-up of language and spectacle which constitutes our amnesiac present, one role for art is to create a clearing within our petrified landscape, and, through a reordering all this new and obsolete stuff, through bricolage and play, construct new meanings, new conceptions of reality, shot through with historical memory, utopian aspirations, and pleasure.

Cross-disciplinary in scope, my artwork investigates the intersection between materials, history, language, and ideology. It is my hope that the work addresses the need for a post-humanist perspective, counter to the dictates of humanistic hubris and its entrapment within binary power dynamics. Art can act as a bridge between culture and nature, ethics and drive.

I'm a big fan of this intersection of language and art, and will be hunting down her book about the letter X.

Three library things

The Library at Night
A virtual exploration of the great libraries of the world, inspired by Alberto Manguel's essay.

Step into a recreation of Manguel's own library. "The library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle."

Exhibition at the Grande Bibliothèque (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec) until August 28, 2016. (I'll review it when I see it, but sadly that may not be for a while.)

Fallout 4
Disclaimer: I've never played Fallout, but I've logged several hours watching other people play Fallout.

In the latest installment, players can return overdue library books, strewn about the wasteland, for valuable tokens.

"There's certainly no harm in including a library in an imagined dystopian future — if anything, it's a great reminder that overwhelming violence can destroy valuable culture and knowledge."

The Library
A short film about the romance of books.

"It still carries a magical feeling for me, this special kind of sanctuary full of knowledge, full of stories, all covered in a sense of quiet respect and revery." (via)

Interzone

Last week I went to Interzone. David Cronenberg: Evolution, an exhibition exploring the filmmaker's oeuvre, is on at TIFF until January 19.

Seeing as my brother's a film buff, and an enthusiast of Cronenberg in particular, this seemed like an appropriate event to make a present of over the holidays. My sister joined us (she drove).

While I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of Cronenberg — I've seen his work from The Fly through Crash, and a smattering of more recent movies — Naked Lunch is one of my favourite films of all time (perhaps because it affirms that art is shit).

You don't need to be a film geek to appreciate this exhibit, though there were plenty on the premises. You don't need to know anything about Cronenberg going in; you will know plenty when you come out. It would help at least to like movies, and be open to exploring one of the twisted minds that creates them.

The minutiae of film-making

Multiple drafts, discarded drafts, deleted scenes. Promotional material. Comment cards from focus group screenings (of Videodrome, "awful").

The periodicals strewn across coffee tables. The letterhead notepads on desks. Those horrid surgical instruments from Dead Ringers. The Telepod. Labels on pill bottles, labels on bus spray. Storyboards, designs, mock-ups. Loads of props and costumes.

Film clips on monitors throughout the exhibit give context, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and commentary.

Here's a picture of my brother sidling up to a Mugwump.

One employee (at least, I think he was an employees) approached us to share anecdotes of Cronenberg's early days of filmmaking in Montreal. When he found a suitable apartment complex for his film location, he rewrote the characters of the neighbours to match the actual residents. The employee was brimming with enthusiasm for this method, as if he'd just learned of it and was dying to share.

Cronenberg on Cronenberg
Three short films were being screened on a loop just outside the main exhibition space. They are framed as being an autobiographical commentary.

Camera (2000), created as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival, features an older man being filmed by a group of kids who've found a camera, and sharing his internal monologue while he experiences it. He comments that we think of a camera as recording a moment, but rather it records the death of a moment.

At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007), commissioned by Cannes Film Festival for its 60th anniversary, is hilarious, in a very dark way (as if that really needs to be qualified). Reality-TV style, the title character, played by Cronenberg, prepares to shoot himself, while the annoying commentators natter on about Jews and Hollywood.

The Nest was made expressly for this exhibition. It's weird in a way that's precariously balanced between funny and uncomfortable. This is a recording of a woman's presurgery consultation filmed from the perspective of the doctor, as if he has a camera strapped to his head. Her top is bare; she wants to have her left breast cut open in order to remove the nest of insects she hears rustling around in there. The "doctor" — who denies being a psychiatrist, she thought she'd be meeting a psychiatrist — is hesitant about the procedure and wonders about consulting with an entomologist, although he makes some pretty precise observations for someone who claims not to know anything about bugs. Also, the consultation takes place in what is obviously a dingy garage, complete with air pump, paint cans, gardening tools, and a pile of old fluorescent tubes.

Ongoing immersive narrative

Upon exiting the exhibition space, one is encouraged to visit "the lab." Serious stuff — 3D printers, walls of jars, embryonic pod structures in fluid. The narrative begins with the activities of BMC Labs, a fictional biotech firm that has partnered with David Cronenberg to develop biotech accessories inspired by the intellectual property found in his films.

(The white-coated lab technicians are remarkably straight-faced, but I managed to reduce one to laughter.)

The real adventure is online. Body/Mind/Change uses an "artificial intelligence recommendation engine" to custom-design a POD (Personal On-Demand), a biotech enhancement for implantation into your brain stem.

A series of unsettling questions is used to calibrate your personal pod with a psychological profile on scales of fear, anger, joy, sadness, regret. The experience unearths flashes of memories that you are asked to respond to and to interconnect. My pod's story has now been woven into that of other pods, and the narrative continues. The algorithm also offers suggestions for books to read, personal challenges to undertake, and career choices.



A wholly unique and clever exercise to undertake if you're at all interested in how we construct identity and tell stories: www.bodymindchange.ca.

The world will come to an end amid general applause

The Happy Conflagration
What happens to those who try to warn the present age?

It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke.

"A" in Either/Or, I, p. 30 (SV II 30)

— from The Parables of Kierkegaard, edited by Thomas C Oden.

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Søren Kierkegaard:
Kierkegaard 2013: The program includes art and literary exhibitions in Berlin and Paris, University conferences in Europe and South America, a newly written rock-cabaret about Kierkegaard in Shanghai, and international authors discussing Kierkegaard on stage at The Royal Library in Copenhagen.
The Original Kierkegaard, an exhibition at The Royal Library, National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library.

Windows onto time

I've just seen Uraniborg, an exhibition of the work of Laurent Grasso at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibit is named for Tycho Brahe's island castle-observatory.

According to the museum website,

Grasso continues his exploration of space and temporality as he seeks to create what he calls a "false historical memory." In this in-between place where true and false intermingle, the all-pervading observation of the sky underlies a broader examination of seeing, watching and surveillance, at the same time as it opens up a path to possible worlds.

Please see Canadian Art for a most excellent summary of this conceptual installation.

The exhibit is a marvelous experience — the space is labyrinthine, it's dark, it's full of ambient sound, it feels like a mystery and a discovery. It feels like the videogame Myst — mysterious islands, weird technology, messages from a future past.

It's a perfect fit with the odd manuscripts lately invading my mind. Today I read about Kircher leading his blindfolded biographer into a labyrinth beneath a basilica, and as part of a science experiment. My discovery today of Uraniborg embodied the same spirit.

Simenon redux

It's about this time last year that I caught the Simenon bug, when I read my first roman dur (quite possibly my first Simenon ever, though my memory unreliably wavers around potentially having read a Maigret novel in association with a high school French class). To date I've read eight of them. And this is while exercising restraint. Can you say "addicted"?

I won't list all the ones I've read here as you can easily access them via this blog's index (by author) or by clicking the Simenon tag at the bottom of this post. I will say that my favourite to date is Red Lights.

Most of those I've read have been New York Review Books classics. This publisher has been steadily releasing Simenon titles since 2003. Last month saw the publication of Act of Passion. I don't have a copy yet, but here's how it opens, and here's a bit from Roger Ebert's introduction (I've heard that Ebert claims to have read a hundred-something Simenon books!).

But another small publisher with big ideas has entered the Simenon fray. I read The Train — in the Neversink Library from Melville House — just a few weeks ago. I think it's currently my second favourite — a punch in the gut you never see coming, and subtler than most. Today sees the publication of Melville House's second Simenon title.

I have The President on deck, and I'll tell you all about it soon. It starts like this:

For more than an hour he had been sitting motionless in the old Louis-Philippe armchair, with its almost upright back and shabby black leather upholstery, that he had lugged around with him from one Ministry to another for forty years, till it had become a legend.

They always thought he was asleep when he sat like that with eyelids lowered, raising just one of them from time to time, to reveal a slit of gleaming eyeball.

Thanks, small and independent publishers! Keep them coming!

Some other Simenon-related stuff:

An exhibition — The inaugural exhibition of the recently opened Museé des lettres et manuscrits in Brussels is dedicated to the works of Simenon. (On till February 24, 2012.) (Via.)

A blog — The Man from London takes its name from a 1934 Simenon novel and espouses a great deal of admiration for his work. If you're at all interested in Simenon's output, you'll find browsing through this blog's archives a pleasure. (In doing so just now I'm reminded that Julian Barnes has an essay on Simenon in Something to Declare — a copy of which is somewhere in this house — which I may or may not have ever read long before I became a Simenon fan.)

Through the wardrobe

Yesterday Helena and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Exhibition.

You can't really consider this post a plug, because, well, the exhibit ended yesterday. And on the whole, the exhibit was pretty lame (even the catapult was out of order), and admission prices were outrageously high. Also, this was not about Narnia as an imaginary land, or about the Narnia books (although a small stack of books in various language was on display); make no mistake about it: this exhibition is about the movie.

One space was devoted to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and a smaller room focused on Prince Caspian. Throughout, a great number of monitors played clips from these films.

If the show ever comes to your town, I can't say I recommend seeing it, unless you're a big fan of the movie, or deeply interested in costume and set design, or are deeply bored and don't know what to do with your money.

On the other hand, as far as Helena's concerned (and, yes, me too), it was worth every penny to be able to step through the carved wardrobe doors and brush past a pile of fur coats to step out into a pine forest where snow blew down around us. The moment was magical (even though it came via Disney).

Other highlights included sitting on a replica of the White Witch's throne (just because); touching the ice wall, which was painfully cold (the accompanying plaque was trying to impart something about climate change); and lifting a (safely encased) sword, just as a taste of what hard work it is, going to battle.

Beatitude

for every sweet lump of baby born that women croon over, is one vast rotten meat burning slow worms in graves of this earth

— from Desolation Angels, by Jack Kerouac.

How I came to know Jack
I've never read any Kerouac. That is about to change.

The celebration of the 50th anniversary of On the Road (published in 1957), while I recognize it as an important landmark of American literature, blah, blah, blah, did not inspire me to read it. Nothing about it captured my interest, honestly; which is kind of weird actually, in light of those things that generally do capture my interest. But there you have it: I haven't read Jack.

Then last week, I had to go to New York City, for meetings for work. And it so happens that our New York office is across the street from the New York Public Library. And it so happens that there's an exhibition running there till March 16: Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road. Featuring the scroll on which On the Road was written (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).

I had a few spare minutes at lunch, and it seemed the library would be a worthwhile destination. And it was.

I had time enough to walk through quickly, and be astounded. A notice on Jack's view of sex and celibacy caught my attention, in which I read the above quotation ("every sweet lump of baby born that women croon over"! — isn't it beautiful?! (the idea being that the procreative act is the original source of all our misery on earth, all sweet babies die)) and I was lost, found, swept away, in love, and wanting to know everything about Jack.



What I now know about Jack
He loved Beethoven.
He loved cats.
He loved baseball, and managed fantasy leagues obsessively.
He loved his mother.
Not only did he author a classic — give voice to a generation — with On the Road, he supplied the titles for both Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
He kept a list of other artists' transgressions against the beat gospel (as it was in his view).
He put the beat in beatitude.

Beethoven and cats. That's all I needed to know.

An aside
I went to New York City, and all I got for my boyfriend was this lousy t-shirt. From the library.

I looked for Jack Kerouac at the bookstore on my return to Montreal. I didn't have much success at first. By accident, I stumbled across a locked glass case up against a column and not noticeably related to any one section. I had to ask for access to browse, and had to ask why it was under lock and key. Those titles identified as high potential for theft, the clerk told me. Bukowski, Burroughs, Camus, Philip K Dick, and Kerouac.