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Craig Dworkin's NO MEDIUM -- Reading Past Erasure

10/27/2014

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No Medium by Craig Dworkin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 220 pp. $16.97.

Craig Dworkin’s first criticism book, back in 2003, was Reading the Illegible, and focused on literary works that appropriated, rearranged or otherwise altered the texts of other writers. This new book – which, according to Amazon is going to be reissued in paperback next February – could have been titled “Reading the Absences.” Here Dworkin discusses book-format works that contain extensive lacunae – books that have a title, an author and sometimes preliminary pages but whose remaining pages are deliberately blank; books that have commentaries in their margins but whose principal text, the one commented upon, has been deliberately erased; books in which everything has been erased except its footnote numbers and the footnotes themselves; books in which only the footnotes have been created; books which reprint a vanished text and on various pages offer footnotes that explain some of the circumstances of the vanishing, or which print such a text along with its not-vanished indexes or bibliographic references; books which reproduce well-known works of visual art as the single colour produced when their colours have been digitized and averaged; books of photographs which have been altered by blackout and erasure; books and other works that have effectively vanished through being translated into other languages and media. So to some extent, then, No Medium extends Dworkin’s discussions in Reading the Illegible.

    Erasures obliterate, but they also reveal; omissions within a system permit other elements to appear
    all the more clearly. (9)

Dworkin’s critical approach here is mostly that of a bibliographer – he accumulates, classifies, describes, and compares, without evaluating, the writing and art practices of numbers of people whose work could benefit from a cataloguer’s help to reach a wider audience. Though American himself, his interests are mainly transnational, with many of the artists he focuses on being from western Europe and Japan, and many of the US ones being influenced by or working with non-US artists.  This is an unusual approach, and a rather welcome one I would say, in US counter-hegemonic literary commentary.


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The Extreme Art Deco Ceramics of Robert Lallemant

10/14/2014

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Robert Lallemant: Céramiste et Décorateur d’une Génération Incertaine, by Jacqueline du Pasquier.  Paris: Somogy, 2014. 152 pp. 32 Euros.

This is the first extended study of the work of the revolutionary French Art Deco ceramicist Robert Lallemant (1902-1954), who flourished in Paris between 1925 and 1933 before mostly abandoning ceramics for furniture design, interior decorating, architecture, travel and photography. Lallemant has been somewhat overlooked by French art history, partly because he was a successful artist-businessman, and partly also because of the brevity of his career, the originality of his designs, and his friendship with Maréchal Philippe Pétain, ‘Head of State’ of the collaborationist Vichy government during the Second World War. Du Pasquier, who has published numerous books on French art ceramics and glassware, particularly those of the Bordeaux region, devotes almost a third of the book to Lallemant’s two years – 1943-44 – as “Special adviser to the civil office of the Head of the State” or “Artistic Advisor to the Maréchal” – ostensibly to show the non-political nature of his devotion to the aging general.

Lallemant’s sister-in-law, Aline Montcocol, was the wife of Pétain’s close friend and personal physician, Bernard Ménétrel, who became his chief of staff during the Vichy period. After the war Pétain was convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and died in prison in 1951, age 95, having had his sentence commuted. Ménétrel was also tried but released in disgrace with the case against him declared unproven, and died shortly after in an automobile crash. His widow subsequently became president of a controversial ultra-nationalist association ("
L'Association pour défendre la mémoire du maréchal Pétain" or "ADMP") founded to rehabilitate Pétain’s memory. Lallemant himself, who had joined the French navy when war was declared, had moved his wife and children to the relative security of


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Lisa Robertson's CINEMA OF THE PRESENT

10/1/2014

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Cinema of the Present by Lisa Robertson. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2014. 112 pp. $17.95.

“Cinema of the Present” would be an appropriate title for many recent conceptual poetry books, including Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself, with its assemblage of approximate 1000 on-line expressions of self-doubt, which I looked at here last week. Would Fitterman’s be an adequate title for the Robertson? – not quite, but close. But change his “hate” to “doubt” and we’d be there. Robertson’s title, however, makes a much larger claim to profundity and cultural relevance than does Fitterman’s, or than, say, Peter Jaeger’s also similar subjectivity-mapping long conceptual poem The Persons.


In a generally helpful discussion of Cinema of the Present, reviewer Alex Crowley in Publishers Weekly writes, rather paradoxically, that it “defies review,” – that it “instead demand[s] engagement, conversation, and multiple rereads,” and that [i]t may not be a great place to start for newcomers to Robertson’s work.”  That her poetry is pleasurably incomprehensible seems to be becoming a standard view of Robertson – most of the online bookstores offering the book quote a New York Times review of her 2009 Magenta Soul Whip that “Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy” – a quotation that also appears on her publisher’s website. Though to some it may recall Swinburne, it’s probably a powerful marketing tag, since most readers of traditional poetry by far prefer enjoyment to explanation. Moreover Cinema of the Present isn’t all that far from traditional poetry (while still far from Swinburne) – much of it can be read as disguised lyricism or confessionalism, or even as forming a disguised romantic ode. In such a reading it may be not at all difficult for newcomers.

Crowley also describes Robertson not as Canadian but as “Canadian-born” and “living in France.” Perhaps being Canadian is not an especially attractive attribute to Publishers Weekly readers, who tend to be connected to US publishing and bookselling – better to have that citizenship in doubt. Perhaps he hopes that “Canadian-born”


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    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

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