Books are not themselves symbols

Al Filreis

Ken Krug has painted a series of book-and-thing still lives. A simple and yet — to me, anyway — endlessly pleasurable juxtaposition. Ken takes a favorite book and then quasi-intuitively reaches for the object that “catches my eye,” as he puts it. Ken is a brainy guy — always reading and always intellectualizing — but for his paintings, at least these, he suspends the way he thinks about the book and sets the object with/against it in the spirit of an alternative (opposite) mode. For Durrell’s Alexandra Quartet it’s a pair of sunglasses. For Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a single Adidas sneaker. Borges with a Mets cap. Spiegelman’s Maus gets accompanied by a salt shaker and a pepper shaker (this is the painting I myself own). Kafka’s Complete Stories and a can of Campbell’s tomato soup (not a nod to Warhol). Krazy Kat gets painted with an iPod. And Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren poses with a cell phone. Krug does these in one sitting, working oil paint on board only with a palette knife.

Book with object does not mean book as object. The object tends to defer to the book, challenging any easy categorical assignment. Ken Krug, it seems, is not opposed to the hegemony of reading, even when its representation is objective, even though, rendered in these works, it bears depictive qualities — color, shape. The book is desymbolized in order, paradoxically, so that its value as a repository of ideas and aesthetics can be reclaimed from the world of things.

The painting of Van Gogh’s Complete Letters and a wristwatch is not meant as a temptation to interpret (O, Time!), but it is that. Resist the symbol-making impulse!

March 29, 2009

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.