How to Colour

As part of their North American tour, and as a continuation of the party, my friends Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler came to Brown University. I love her book The Weather, especially, and also the new book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, from Clear Cut Press.

The essays, particularly, have these gorgeous sentences that combine the pleasure of extravagant claims and delicately researched texts, the drift and sway of a particular history of the subject of lyric poetry. Just as her books of poetry deranged or diffused or distracted the lyric subject, so her essays also alter our notion of the essayist. In these essays, written under the mysteriously plural pseudonym "The Office for Soft Architecture," we are never quite sure who or how many are writing.

The reading that informs Lisa’s work often reaches back to Goethe, or to John Clare, to Ruskin, to Samuel Johnson, or to more contemporary writers like Violette le Duc or Lorrine Niedecker. Because she is not an academic, she’s under no compulsion to read these writers responsibly, or to "do" them, as academics say. Her writing is responsive to numerous texts, to numerous histories, and at the same time gloriously irresponsible. It displays an astonishing erudition whose aim is not to astonish, a supple intelligence, an ability to let sense drift and eddy across gorgeous surfaces.

From "How to Color," in Occasional Work, by Lisa Robertson:

"We can't always tell the difference between sentiment and emotion. They marble. The fungal puce bordering the sweating window pane, the flapping cobalt tarp on the leaking condo, the intense turquoise of low-rent trim in our neighbourhood: the surface of the city indexes conditions of contamination, accident and subordination. We always dream in colour. This is part of the history of surfaces.

"When Walter Benjamin visited the house of Goethe in a dream, the corridor was whitewashed. We'll stroll down that pale hallway, and apply to its purity a narrative maquillage."

I bought the new Proust, the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way. I am trying not to try to read Proust; as Matthew Stadler reminds us, making Proust into calisthenics kind of misses the point.

So but anyway, last summer I read about half of Swann's Way, got stranded somewhere in "Swann in Love". Already, I like Lydia Davis's translation a lot better.

Davis: "The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things."

Moncrief: "The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to feel--such melancholy things."

I don't have the original, and if I did, I couldn't judge, since I barely know French well enough to order a coffee.

I know that Proust-for-edification, Proust-for-betterment is not the point, but I am intrigued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's remark (in Dialogue on Love?) that she has seen how the reading of Proust makes people smarter. (Not cultural-literacy smart, as in yes-I've-read-Proust. I think her point was that Marcel's subtle and nuanced appreciation of the varieties of people somehow made readers... uh, smarter.)

French film festival

The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.

I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.

Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.

Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.