BIRI 2013 #3 Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson

January 20, 2013

Books I Read In 2013

Art Objects

Jeanette Winterson

Knopf

1996

I got this book because I wanted to continue thinking about art criticism. Perhaps more deeply. The first essay, "Art Objects," was good for deepening my thinking about the art object (and how art objects). The rest of the book was a whole other beast.

"Art is intimacy, lover's talk, and yet it is a public declaration."

This grappling between the most intimate and the most public.

"There are plenty of Last Days signposts to persuade us that nothing is worth doing and that each one of us lives in a private nightmare occasionally relieved by temporary pleasure. / Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream, it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities of the past and future in the whorl of now."

This idea that art should do more than provide us with a window into our private nightmares.

"Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit and of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living."

But this documentation could also open us to dimensions of the spirit that normally lie out of reach of each of our own particular small worlds.

"I do not think it is possible (or moral) to write a book that is made to affect others without being affected oneself."

This is the question.

"It is to poets that I turn for the lessons I need and the lesson seems to be to use a variety of moood and tone to make way for those intenser moments where the writer and the word are working at maximum tautness."

This turning to poets.

In this book, Jeannette Winterson is given to grand pronouncements, large declarations. Much more so than I would have expected. Somehow, I thought her ambitions would be smaller, more contained. I was wrong. I learned something about her, I guess.

BIRI 2013 #1: Green-Wood by Allison Cobb

January 07, 2013

Books I Read In 2013
#1

Green-Wood
Allison Cobb
Factory School
2010

Something about the way trees talk or don't talk. About how graves talk or don't talk. About how poetry talks or doesn't talk. "Shards of poetry glint from the prose like the pieces of metal — commemorative “dog tags” offered to soldiers, their bodies returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom for burial — that lie beside some of the graves." The poetry pierces out, like the first mention of gayness on page 124 of the book (it ends on page 131). Reproduction and the failures of reproduction. A moment when Walter Benjamin suggests that women did not walk erect, that they only learned to walk on two feet in order to have face-to-face intercourse. The way Benjamin fades. A way of thinking about history and the body, the body within history. The "I" piercing through the frame of the text as well, through the repeated fragments: saying no to poetry and still making it. Allowing poetry to filter through a bit. A sense with this book that I could read it again and again and find something brilliant again and again. Or open it to any page and read one sentence and it would be brilliant: "where light makes us, even / us, its face." How to gather things up in the face of death and war launched in the name of that death. How to listen to trees, or at least channel them through the books surrounding us. Also, the birds: faraway birds in Papua New Guinea recovered through colonial, Linnaean botanical expeditions and birds closer to home in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 600,000 bodies feeding the trees and the land. The poetics of etymology: "Paradise comes from ancient Iran, a compound of pairi- "around" + diz "to make or form (a wall)."

Several different manuscripts happening in this book at once. A treatise on a cemetery. An exploration of trees and birds. A foray into Thoreau, Emerson, Benjamin. The history of Cleaveland. An investigation of private space, colonialism. An attempt to have a child. These fragments create a latticework; one string wandering away and then another suddenly showing back up to pick up where we left off. The latticework or the weave in the narrative. The mixing of poetic line and prose sentence. The use of the three asterisks to mark the sections off from one another. The way lists of objects appear and re-appear.