Eddie’s Comments (group member since Sep 17, 2012)

Eddie’s comments from the Completists' Club group.

I came across this interesting little film the other day, directed by Alain Resnais (very recently deceased) on commission - he made these arty documentaries before he got into feature films. The reason I'm posting it here is that the text is by Queneau, with a translation I found online attached below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdQYMs...

“O time, suspend your bowl, O plastic
Where are you from? Who are you? And what explains
Your rare qualities? So what are you doing?
Where are you from? Starting from an object
Find his ancestors! To reverse occurs
His exemplary history. Here first the mold.
Including the matrix, be mysterious,
It generates the bowl or whatever you want.
But the mold is itself included in a press
Which injects the dough and line the room,
It therefore has the great advantage
To have the finished object without further processing.
The mold is expensive! this is a drawback.
But it can be reused on other continents.
Vacuum forming is another way
To obtain objects by simple aspiration.
At the earlier stage, skillfully arranged,
The material is warmed extruded plate.
To enter the nozzle it was the piston
And heating mantle - or heating mantle
Which were provided - What? Polystyrene
Vivace and turbulent hurrying and crumbles.
And granulated swarm on the vibrating screen
Swarmed all happy a beautiful color.
Before granule had been rush
Bands of all colors, tints, shades, tones.
These rods were, following a die
A pudding that endless screw agglomerates.
And what gave rise to the agglutination?
Colorful beads anyway.
Colorful and how? There is homogeneous
The pigment is mixed with polystyrene.
But before he took the product would dry
And rotationally, Product stumbled.
That’s when our polystyrene born.
Polymer product easier styrene.
Polymerization: this word, as everyone knows,
Means the achievement of a high complex
Molecular weight. And a otoclave,
Elementary to think concave machine
The molecules thus clinging and binding
Beads were formed. Yes, but - before?
Styrene was a colorless liquid
Somewhat explosive, not odorless.
And look good! this is the only opportunity
For you to see the liquid in question.
Styrene is produced in large quantities
From ethylbenzene overheated.
Be a catalyst as it is called
Oxide or zinc or magnesium.
The styrene was extracted once benzoin
From the styrax, shrub Indonesia.
Pipe pipe and we go,
Through the desert pipes,
To the first products to abstract material
Circulating endless and effective secret.
Washed and distilled and then redistilled
And there are not exercises in style:
Ethylbenzene can - and should break even
If the temperature reaches some degree.
We must now ask from which
These essential products: ethylene and benzene.
They extract oil, a magical liquid
Found Bordeaux to the heart of Africa.
They also extract oil and coal
To each other and each one and the other are good.
Turning coal into gas is combusted
And then gives birth to these hydrocarbons.
We could start on the new tracks
And find out why the other one and there.
Oil come from masses of fish?
We do not really know or where the coal is.
Oil come from plankton in labor?
Controversial issue … obscure origins …
And petroleum and coal were going up in smoke
When the chemist came who had the happy idea
Make these solid clouds and make
Countless objects utilitarian purpose.
New materials in these dark residue
Are transformed. It is unknown
Still awaiting a similar work
To make other documentaries about”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Not the complete stories, but I think it's mostly complete. Out of print but I just saw a VG 1st edition on Amazon for ~ $18.

He has certainly been prolific, and has had his hand in lots of projects. That pub. date for his biblio is definitely premature.

I have never even seen a copy of Locus Solus.

Do you know when he was editor of Art in America?

I have some copies of Modern Painters in which essays of his appeared. I like his writings on art and culture nearly as much as his poetry. He always sends me into new pastures...

I just thought the phrase "fart sex shit in my head" was humorous and evocative of some kind of dirty sickness, but, seriously, I kept thinking about it all night and how Joyce sublimated that craziness into something that people still found offensive, but then I thought that maybe the reading public, or rather the people who deemed it offensive, knew that fecal-mania was coded into Ulysses.

And, Aloha, I watched 2G1C a while ago...

Joyce's fart sex shit was in my head all night! Thanks for posting the excerpts! I'd never come across them before. I count myself lucky that I have never linked excrement and eroticism in my private life.

Colin Wilson almost always turns me on, and I love how he continues to explore the realms of the occult, but good luck being a CW completist! I've probably read 20 of his books, or maybe more, but I'd never aspire to reading them all, and in some ways there's no need to as he repeats himself so much. His early novel Ritual in the Dark is pretty damn good. The only novel I thought was pretty bad was The Personality Surgeon. I mean the writing was as solid and competent as ever, but the ideas were spread too thin.

I'd like to read all of Queneau too. I've read 4 or 5 of his novels. The only one I didn't like too much was Odile. The others I loved. I too have read a finite portion of his Gazillion Poems, and all of EyeSeas (which I thought was just ok).

M&D is probably my favorite, and the one I most look forward to rereading. In part I'm attracted to it because it features Philadelphia prominently (where I now live), and as I grew up in Delaware, bounded on two sides by the Mason Dixon line, that part has a personal appeal as well; but I also like how he infused it with an emotional maturity without sacrificing his silliness.

I certainly didn't mean he was "easy" at the reading level! GR is one of the harder books to comprehend! I just meant easy at the completist level, since he has relatively few books.

Though I should say I have never been able to make it very far through the long piece, The Dawn in Erewhon, which anchors Tatlin!; but I still enjoy trying, and I'm determined to make it through that and everything else at some point. Just one of the joys of completism: to look forward to something you know you probably won't even like.

I still don't completely understand how he organizes some of his works, which is one reason why I keep on reading him. There's some esoteric stuff going on like analogy and correspondence, and there's some stuff relating to harmonies derived from Fourier, and there's some straight-up collage stuff, but much of it just goes right over my head, and I'm cool with that - I don't even necessarily want to understand completely what's behind it. In Eclogues he was still incorporating visual works into his pieces, which he considered as integral to the whole as the words, but apparently publishers tired of the extra expense and trouble of including the visual works, so eventually he dropped that aspect. Glad you're getting something out of him, Eric! Tatlin! is one of his best.

Da Vinci's Bicycle is a great place to start with his fiction.

Read The Geography of the Imagination, Tom! That's where I started with him, and where others I've talked to did also. The title alone is hard to resist.

You know, MJ, he bores me at times too, and I don't even try to follow him down all his obsessive intellectual byways, but I like how he organizes his essays and his fictions, and he's introduced me to so many people, and supplemented what I knew of others I had already read, that I am a confirmed aspiring Davenport completist. He's like the professor I never had...

Oh yeah! I read that years ago. I'll add it. Wikipedia didn't have his art writings either.

I have such a long history with Ashbery I can't even tell if I like him any more. I own nearly all of his books, and have read each numerous times. Granted, he's been repeating himself for years, but his erudite yet playful sensibility appeals to me so much I just keep on reading him, even though now all I see are his faults. Sounds like a marriage to me. He's now in his mid 80's and still cranking out his playfully elusive poems.

Poetry collections

Turandot and Other Poems (1953)
Some Trees (1956)
The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
Rivers and Mountains (1966)
The Double Dream of Spring (1970)
Three Poems (1972)
The Vermont Notebook (1975)
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)
Houseboat Days (1977)
As We Know (1979)
Shadow Train (1981)
A Wave (1984)
April Galleons (1987)
Flow Chart (1991)
Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
And the Stars Were Shining (1994)
Can You Hear, Bird? (1995)
Wakefulness (1998)
Girls on the Run (1999)
Your Name Here (2000)
As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001)
Chinese Whispers (2002)
Where Shall I Wander (2005)
A Worldly Country (2007)
Planisphere (2009)
Quick Question (forthcoming, Dec. 2012)

Collections, Prose, and Translations

Three Plays
A Nest of Ninnies, novel (with James Schuyler)
The Ice Storm (1987)
Other Traditions, 6 long essays on 6 other poets (2000)[1]
100 Multiple-Choice Questions (2000) (reprint of 1970 experimental pamphlet)
Selected Prose 1953-2003 (2005)
Martory, Pierre The Landscapist Ashbery (Tr.) Carcanet Press (2008)
Collected Poems 1956-87 (Carcanet Press) (2010), ed. Mark Ford
Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987
Rimbaud, Arthur Illuminations Ashbery (Tr.) W. W. Norton & Company (2011)

Not sure if anyone else has broached this topic, but Davenport presents an interesting example in that I would consider his translations as part of his oeuvre, so to be a strict Davenport completist one would have to read them. Even without them, though, he's a daunting example, but well worth the work.

I've read almost all his fiction, some of his translations, most of the essays, and a few of the fugitive pieces.

Fiction

Tatlin!: Six Stories (1974)
Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories (1979)
Eclogues: Eight Stories (1981)
Apples and Pears and Other Stories (1984)
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories (1987)
The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers (1990)
The Lark (1993)
A Table of Green Fields: Ten Stories (1993)
The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories (1996)
The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (2003)

Translations

Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (1964)
Sappho: Songs and Fragments (1965)
Herakleitos and Diogenes (1979)
The Mimes of Herondas (1981)
Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians (1983)
Anakreon (1991)
Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets (1980) (adds Alkman to Carmina Archilochi and Sappho: Songs and Fragments)
The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus (1996) (with Benjamin Urrutia)
7 Greeks (1995) (revises and collects the texts—but none of Davenport's drawings—from Carmina Archilochi, Sappho: Songs and Fragments, Herakleitos and Diogenes, The Mimes of Herondas, Anakreon, and Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman)

Poetry

Cydonia Florentia (1966)
Flowers and Leaves: Poema vel Sonata, Carmina Autumni Primaeque Veris Transformationem (1966)
The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (1982)
Goldfinch Thistle Star (1983)

Fugitive pieces

Davenport wrote introductions or contributions to many books:

Jack Sharpless's Presences of Mind
Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies
Will McBride's Coming of Age
Paul Cadmus's The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989)
Charles Burchfield's Charles Burchfield's Seasons
Simon Dinnerstein's Paintings and Drawings
Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, and God
Jonathan Williams's Palpable Elysium, Ear in Bartram's Tree, Elite/Elate Poems, and tribute to Edward Dahlberg
Lenard D. Moore's Forever Home
Paul Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume 1
Jonathan Greene's tribute to Jonathan Williams, JW/50
Daniel Haberman's Lug of Days to Come
Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
James Laughlin's Man in the Wall
Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote
Ralph Eugene Meatyard's Father Louie and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Aperture's monographs on Eudora Welty's and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs
The University of Virginia's small monograph on Lafcadio Hearn, The Art of Lafcadio Hearn (1983)
Charles L. Rubin's collection Junk Food (1980)
Elizabeth Turner Hutton's Americans in Paris (1921–31): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, and Alexander Calder
Riva Castleman's Art of the Forties
Ronald Johnson's Ark: The Foundations and Valley of Many-Colored Grasses
O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings and Selected Stories (which he also edited)
Davenport's own selection of Louis Agassiz's scientific writings, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz.

Some of these pieces were included in Davenport's collections of essays.
Commentary and essays

The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (1963)
Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Iliad (1967)
Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Odyssey (1967)
The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. (1981)
Cities on Hills: A Study of I – XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos (1983)
Charles Burchfield's Seasons (1994)
The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989)
Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays (1987)
A Balthus Notebook (1989)
The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (1996)
Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (1998)

Letters

A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964–1968, ed. Thomas Meyer (2004). Selected correspondence with Jonathan Williams
Fragments from a Correspondence, ed. Nicholas Kilmer (2006, 89–129)
Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, ed. W. C. Bamberger (2007)

Thanks for the link, btw. I love Waters in his mostly serious mode.

Have you read any Welch, Mike? If not I'd like to hear your take on In Youth is Pleasure. Waters is obviously a huge fan.

Very interesting! I'd like to know the source. Maybe Role Models? I still want to read that. There is definitely a lot of subtle perversion in Welch - like licking objects to get even closer to them, and suggested pedophilia - and then the gay connection, of course, so I can see how Waters would like him.

I think A Last Sheaf and Dumb Instrument are essentially duplicates, and I Left my Grandfather's House is included in The Complete Short Stories, so as far as I know there are only 6 entries in his completist oeuvre.