reading
us look up/there red dwells
Thinking about reading, being a good reader, this matter interrupted me while reading Jose Felipe Alvergue’s us look up/there red dwells (on P-QUEUE). Maybe because the writing is commanding; even where most gentle, Jose’s writing commands close and pleasuring attention. As the words, set up, falling down, look for the reader insistently, with skill, so reading them stirs and even excavates the mind and body. Pleasure? Numerous mixed categories of it: sexual, spiritual, etc. The Martin Kippenberger show at MOCA–his architectural paintings–the same quality, some observation–common, recurringly seductive–pain, beauty, and those of the artist, of his eye, or of his entrance into English, or so I am beguiled; no one else writes like Jose Felipe Alvergue. So when I look, or when I read, I think of the person Martin, of the person Jose. I wonder, because tatters of the artist’s absence, redolent, is it permissible to see Martin or Jose intimately? And yet that is my pleasure, intimidated as I am to say so, confess a haze, an illusion.
Yesterday on “An American Bookworm in Paris,” Michael Silverblatt interviewed a few French novelists–three frenchmen. Perhaps it was Gregoire Bouillier with whom the host spoke about philosophy. Bouillier says that he understands perhaps 10% of Hegel or Heidegger, and yet the reading is pleasure, the deepest of them all, the pleasures of the mind and spirit–reading.
Reading for la-lit has brought the quality of my readership to my attention, carrying with it a standard array of questions: to read attentively, is this it? to take pleasure, this? to find meaning? To ask the right question. This last, the question that the literature we have read for the show most variously and often asks. Our last show–Vincent Dachy, Tribulations of a Westerner in a Western World. Both Matt and I felt the problem the book, with its slideshow pretext and incongruant, tiny photos by the author, was placing before us: somehow its contents and their style of presentation asked us to resist the temptation to interpret, to make something of the book or to draw something out of the book; and that is also a pleasure–edifying, maybe, for its kung-fu like sweeping of weight off the reader’s surface. Maybe even sweeping the reading off, or shooing the reader away.
There are those which sharpen intellect or please boredom, like Dachy, and those which stir and spin, freshen the blood, beginning in the chest, like Alvergue. Sometimes one can hardly continue reading, for it is too sweet, the sweetness of blood’s motion, which is perceived momentarily more pristinely in the reader’s arms, maybe, or head, or legs or groin. All those letters falling down the cover, grouping together, de-parting. The writer’s enjoyment in arranging, or, within, in plunging, then recording not only each physical item, a glass, a shard, a third of a crucifix, but also its place in the shifting, or its shifting–the moment of its shift from this to that, and all touched almost imperceptibly, and so sharpening the perception.
