Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

Maddie Crum reviews Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

aepyornis-subfossil-shell-fragments

Satin Island
by Tom McCarthy
Knopf, $24.00
Published Feb. 17, 2015

“Last year Tom McCarthy wrote thoughtfully and passionately against the merits of Realism — that is, the mode of writing that prefers to describe events straightforwardly, under the pretense that such a style conveys truth more accurately than, say, stories about magicians or time travel. He dismisses the latest crop of Realists lauded by critics, namely Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose My Struggle is said to weave the epic and the quotidian together in the space of a single paragraph. Instead, McCarthy praises writers such as William S. Burroughs, whose photography keenly shows the approach he takes in his writing. Burroughs cuts up photos of city streets and reassembles them, forming fragmented images and explaining, “Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.”

Read her review on the Huffington Post.

#195 #196 #200 by Willard

Thinking again about Joseph Cornell’s boxes and my assemblages–especially the ones where I used window frames–mine are, with one exception, always looking out from a confined, ambiguous space, while the viewer/voyeur looks into Cornells’ nexted boxes. My dreams are often like that–I will be in a buiding of hallways and winding stairs searching for a way out, or climbing a hill or dune trying to make it an open body of water that seems to recede in the distance as I advance.

#195 From the Window Once in Fields Rose the Earth

#195   When Once from Fields Rose the Earth 61c63cm. roofing paper, red string, acrylic on cardboard, bathroom window frame

#196

#196 Imaginary Landscap. 57x72cm Acrylic on composition board

#200

#200 66x61cm Acrylic on composition board (lost in the Ox

Orphans in the Storm

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Journal, February 17, 2015
I should go retire soon. Up early tomorrow, figure drawing at Fleisher’s. One of those days when I don’t want to let go. That feeling that I haven’t done enough. That the day isn’t finished–but I’ve run out of time and too tired to do anything more. Read till I get sleepy? The best I can manage.
I got in drawing time. I finished a painting. Finished readiing a book Went shopping. Posted on my blog… why does it feel like, not enough? Not enough. Not enough. Never enough?
It comes back to me… a young child, wanting to go on playing even when I was falling asleep on my feet. Only now I’m not particularly sleepy–but I think it comes from the same place. Playing… but what is the power of that play?
It’s been a long time since I’ve taken as much pleasure in a book as I did with Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda. I feel such a kinship with Joseph Cornell–though I share little of his traumatic alienation. It’s the way Josipovici, through Helena, speaks of how he made his boxes—it touches me so.
Makes me think again, another dimension of what it means to be ‘recognized.’ One makes art out of oneself—to please oneself—and no one else. There’s no other way to do it, not and stay honest. But there’s an emptiness at the end that’s inescapable. What one makes as an artist–once completed, as much as that ever happens, no longer belongs to you. An artist is a person is compelled–obsessed would not be too strong a work–with creating orphans.
There was that, too, in Josipovici’s novel, wasn’t there? How did he get so many layers, so right? The orphans in Chechnya, who Helena’s sister was committed to caring for–an impossible task. Survivors of such trauma–they were feral, wild things. Untamable and violent. Who would ever want them? Accept them for what they are. So like the work of the artist, Joseph Cornell, she reflected. So like us all.
Found things. Take them up, put them together, because no one else will. And then—let them go. To be lost again. But bearing your imprint… indecipherable code inscribed.
Who will ever know how to read it?

We Who Might Be Beautiful Together

Poem Tree WIP 2

Novemember 28, 2010

I took a walk to visit Poem Tree. The wind was blowing ribbons and poem cards this way and that. I leaned Spirit Stick against the bench and untangled some of the ribbons from the branches. They love to dance in the wind. They love to dance so much they forget themselves & get tied in knots. I know how that feels.

A woman came by and noticed Spirit Stick. This is beautiful, she said, where did you get it? On the street, I said. A piece here, a piece there. And things people give me.

Oh, you made it! she said. (this happens more than you might imagine… as though one could find this in a store)

It is beautiful. I think so too.

The things it’s made of don’t seem like much by themselves. A bit of colored ribbon, packing tape, aluminum can tabs, plastic rings… most of them found on the street. Things people have dropped, tossed aside. I pick them up from the sidewalk, from muddy puddles by the curb, on parking lots. I see something… a bit of color, something that shines in the sun, and I think — oh, this will be nice to add to Spirit Stick. I’ll find a place for it, and it will become part of Spirit Stick.

Like a line in a poem.

Most of them, not much in themselves, a few stand out. Like the bit of a bracelet I found on the subway platform. If you look for it, you can single it out. Oh, this is pretty–where did you find it?

But the pretty things are no more or less important than the aluminum tabs I took from cans in the trash, or bits of string from a muddy puddle. A pigeon feather. They all come together, become something else, something more. & yet are no less what they are in themselves.

Like the words of a poem. Like the assemblages I would begin to make when came to live at the Ox.

I think the best poems… the poems I love, are like that. And works of art. Made of things others have tossed aside. Thought useless. Walked past without seeing.

Useless.

But in just this resides their beauty–which has no use we can readily assign. A poet, an artist… sees this lost, abandoned thing… ‘you are like me, he thinks, and I am like you … and she loves it for what it is, and gives it a home. With other homeless things.

A Spirit Stick.

A Poem Tree.

A poem.

An assemblage.

And they rejoice and dance in wind or rain. In the mind of someone passing by. We are beautiful together! they say…

… and they are… and so might we all, be beautiful together. Lost things waiting to be found

Waking Dreams: Life of the Imagination

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Journal. Book 65, p. 8894-96

“…dream with the dreamer, but never forget that the dreamer will wake up in a world devoid of dreams.” Helena’s meditation on Cornell’s fascination with Houdini. Hotel Andromeda, 113

That is how it is. Every morning. Enfolded in dreams in slee, resisting waking until forced by my body’s needs. I stand in the shower still half dreaming. Almost hallucination. Things—what they are, and what they are in dreams. The unwelcome, forced, hurried interlude of  dressing, washing dishes, breakfast. This sets the rhythm for the day.

Going to a demonstration, attending a street medic meeting—this too, another kind of dream-time, & when it’s not, when I sense it won’t & cannot be that, I balk, I stay home. It’s a terrible thing to be awake in this world…nothing but awake, no dream to sustain you.

The waking dream, the sleeper’s dream, are compliments. For me. They are.

Both: activism and art, are my ways of dreaming the world, another world, something more than what the terrible IS of the world. For one, a way of dreaming with the world, for the other, bringing my dream to the world. Either without the other… a descent into madness.

When it’s cold Poetry will warm your soul and make you angry and change the world.

c-cold

I was going to a poetry thing outside the Masonic Temple but woke up all snuffly and its way hard to blow one’s nose when its this cold and I didn’t want people to see a poet with icicles dangling from their nostrils so I decided to stay home and drink hot chocolate but if you see poets outside the Masonic Temple stop and listen to them and take their handouts which will be poems and not invitations to the next demonstration though I was going to put invitations like that on the back of my poem-handouts because this is a fucked up country in a fucked up world and we have to keep coming out to the streets and shouting and chanting and making people so angry they will be almost as angry as we are and will wake up and join us and change this world which is what poetry is all about waking people up and imagining a better world so if you see poets outside the Masonic Temple north of City Hall here in cold cold cold Philadelphia stop and listen and take their handouts and then invite them someplace warm and non-corporate and buy them hot chocolate because they are very brave and dedicated poets and I love them very much and am sorry that I woke up snuffly — I wish I could be with them.