Lovecraft marks a particular shift in the history of Gothic writing, which formalizes the reader'... more Lovecraft marks a particular shift in the history of Gothic writing, which formalizes the reader's encounter with absolute otherness. His shifting of emphasis from uncanny supernaturalism to "non-supernatural cosmic art" also marks the emergence of racial anxieties nakedly manifest in his work. Terminally ill-at-ease with the new immigrant realities of the 20th-century city, Lovecraft crafted a world in which an ancient unknowable race of monsters pushes at the boundaries of the known world, and upsets the very fabric of reality.
Our panelists David Bering-Porter (The New School) and Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington) will discuss this fraught legacy in which these stories of absolute otherness emblematize the anxiety over racial and ethnic difference, yet still continue to be widely appropriated and extended in the world of the "Lovecraft mythos."
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
A reading and discussion with Judith Goldman.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, a... more A reading and discussion with Judith Goldman.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, agon is a work of broken genres that explores “weaponization” as a totalizing trope implicating poetic materialism with the unconventional, inventive violences emerging from post-9/11 war profiteering, torture practices, and neoliberal corrosion of the commons. In this oppressive ambience of “toxic implicature,” even our critique is bound to the spectacle of weaponization. Correspondingly, Goldman attempts an object-oriented response to ambient aggressivity, less to find an impossible “outside” to this annihilative field of relations, and more to test points of resistance to infinite regress of unbearable agonisms.
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Translational Granularity examines the relation of translation to transmission, and considers the... more Translational Granularity examines the relation of translation to transmission, and considers the ways in which mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility of a translation that goes beyond alphabetism, into the realms of image and noise. The granularity of a text, a form of utter specificity, is both a sign of its existential untranslatability and an indication of the totality of mutation. Central to this argument is a discussion of W. G. Sebald’s use of Xeroxed images, notably a cryptic use of a copied page from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, describing Baldanders—an imaginary being of constant transformation. The author ultimately argues that translational materiality neither requires a dogmatic postmodernism, nor a return to presumably “humanist” bromides about fidelity to a text’s meaning. Rather, an embrace of the errors, imperfection, and glitch inherent in a text’s transmission and reproducibility allows for a kind of superfidelity to the constantly shifting ground of translation.
Interview with Joe Milutis about his translation and commentary of Roland Barthes' _all except yo... more Interview with Joe Milutis about his translation and commentary of Roland Barthes' _all except you_. Conducted by Neil Badmington.
This is a component of "The Quiddities," a multimedia essay published as part of the eleventh iss... more This is a component of "The Quiddities," a multimedia essay published as part of the eleventh issue of Triple Canopy in April 2011. To read the essay, go to https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the_quiddities. In the digital essay, “this” is discussed as a piece of literary minutiae that confounds the digital. A history of Shakespeare Concordances is accompanied by media performances of “this” pronoun, with thoughts on misdirection and attention in Michael Snow, Ron Silliman, and algorithmic conceptualism. The parabook included here, originally linked to the digital essay, arrays mentions of "this" in the poems of Silliman available online. It also includes an afterword by the author.
A discussion of the following books that expand the very notion of the idea of the "book":
Rache... more A discussion of the following books that expand the very notion of the idea of the "book": Rachel Blau DuPlessis, _Poesis_ Louis Scutenaire, _For Balthazar_ Jennifer Scappettone, _The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump_ Originally published in 3:AM Magazine, August 2019 Scappettone section is an excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_.
Judith Goldman's poetic research into the trope of "weaponization," read through new materialist ... more Judith Goldman's poetic research into the trope of "weaponization," read through new materialist theory. Excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_. Originally published in 3AM Magazine, June 2021.
Acousmatic sound art production has as its goal a transformation of recognizable recorded sound s... more Acousmatic sound art production has as its goal a transformation of recognizable recorded sound samples into new relations, effectively hiding the origin of the raw material so as to focus on an experience of pure sound. The author defines the "live" as the "life" from which these samples are pulled, and considers the ways in which the biography of the sample troubles acousmatic art. From special issue Why Live? ed. Nicolas Collins
PDF pamphlet originally published as culmination of Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental tr... more PDF pamphlet originally published as culmination of Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental translation in Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/commentary/bright-arrogance-1-0
Radio art, modernist performance, psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett, Futurism, Gregory Whitehead, An... more Radio art, modernist performance, psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett, Futurism, Gregory Whitehead, Antonin Artaud
For this portfolio on experimental translation, we started by placing a sheaf of contemporary and... more For this portfolio on experimental translation, we started by placing a sheaf of contemporary and impious translations of Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondances" next to a similarly wild bunch of versions and remixes of a segment of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre." Truth be told, this conjunction was an aleatory happening, a function of a short deadline rather than intentional editorial craft. But this aleatory principle, this chance montage, allowed for precisely the kind of exploration and connectivity that flourishes in experimental translation, opening energies to which all-too-strict and controlled performances are sometimes blind. Because, in fact, even without the translations you are about to read, a reflection on the poetics of Rimbaud and Baudelaire leads one to think about why anyone would want to practice translation against itself. In her 1981 book The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloff pitted Baudelaire against Rimbaud for the heart and soul of contemporary poetics. In Perloff's account, Baudelaire stands for the Symbolist avant-garde, which attended to the meaning-effects of a poem in a way that, while unprecedented, still offered the possibility that its mysterious images and weird conjunctions could be deciphered. Rimbaud, in contrast, inaugurates the "other scene" of contemporary poetics, trafficking in indeterminate and undecidable signification-the pure play of surfaces evident in the work of John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, and David Antin (Perloff's examples), and providing a counter-tradition to the more Eliotic tendencies in twentieth-century poetry. The move from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, then, is the movement not only from Symbolism to anti-Symbolism, but also from a cosmos of coherent meaning to a world of more ambiguous consistencies. Translation proper is a consummately symbolic procedure. The search for what-means-what goes on even when approaching the most indeterminate texts. Injecting indeterminacy into translation, then, unsettles all symbolic contracts, and shows how deep these contracts run. Experimental translation makes the indeterminacy of Rimbaud indeterminate, and turns Baudelaire on his head. One hopes that language itself becomes strange, pointing to more absolute conjunctions of meaning-the vertical correspondences that Arthur Symons (one of the first theorists of Symbolism) described as Symbolism's mystic or utopian aim.
Reflection on transmission arts written for a special issue Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwav... more Reflection on transmission arts written for a special issue Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (31:3)
Essay. Multimedia art and Afrofuturism in the work of Art Jones, Reggie Woolery, and others.
Fro... more Essay. Multimedia art and Afrofuturism in the work of Art Jones, Reggie Woolery, and others.
From special issue on Digitality & the Memory of Cinema, ed. Tim Murray
Discussion of translation and eroticism, the legacy of Plato's theories of transmission and trans... more Discussion of translation and eroticism, the legacy of Plato's theories of transmission and transmissability, in the work of Jean Delville, Pierre Louÿs, Hsia Yü, among others. Delivered for the UW MFA's Fall Convergence on Experimental Translation, October 2020
Lecture notes for a talk given at the MagicEarthMotherTongue Symposium, Western Washington Univer... more Lecture notes for a talk given at the MagicEarthMotherTongue Symposium, Western Washington University, Bellingham, October 2021.
Talk on Internet Poetry, with particular attention to the Internet Poetry Tumblr, in the context ... more Talk on Internet Poetry, with particular attention to the Internet Poetry Tumblr, in the context of evolution of online platforms for image-text work and Jean-Jacques Lecercle's theory of the "remainder."
Delivered at North American Poetry 2000-2020: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics Conference
Lovecraft marks a particular shift in the history of Gothic writing, which formalizes the reader'... more Lovecraft marks a particular shift in the history of Gothic writing, which formalizes the reader's encounter with absolute otherness. His shifting of emphasis from uncanny supernaturalism to "non-supernatural cosmic art" also marks the emergence of racial anxieties nakedly manifest in his work. Terminally ill-at-ease with the new immigrant realities of the 20th-century city, Lovecraft crafted a world in which an ancient unknowable race of monsters pushes at the boundaries of the known world, and upsets the very fabric of reality.
Our panelists David Bering-Porter (The New School) and Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington) will discuss this fraught legacy in which these stories of absolute otherness emblematize the anxiety over racial and ethnic difference, yet still continue to be widely appropriated and extended in the world of the "Lovecraft mythos."
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
A reading and discussion with Judith Goldman.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, a... more A reading and discussion with Judith Goldman.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, agon is a work of broken genres that explores “weaponization” as a totalizing trope implicating poetic materialism with the unconventional, inventive violences emerging from post-9/11 war profiteering, torture practices, and neoliberal corrosion of the commons. In this oppressive ambience of “toxic implicature,” even our critique is bound to the spectacle of weaponization. Correspondingly, Goldman attempts an object-oriented response to ambient aggressivity, less to find an impossible “outside” to this annihilative field of relations, and more to test points of resistance to infinite regress of unbearable agonisms.
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Translational Granularity examines the relation of translation to transmission, and considers the... more Translational Granularity examines the relation of translation to transmission, and considers the ways in which mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility of a translation that goes beyond alphabetism, into the realms of image and noise. The granularity of a text, a form of utter specificity, is both a sign of its existential untranslatability and an indication of the totality of mutation. Central to this argument is a discussion of W. G. Sebald’s use of Xeroxed images, notably a cryptic use of a copied page from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, describing Baldanders—an imaginary being of constant transformation. The author ultimately argues that translational materiality neither requires a dogmatic postmodernism, nor a return to presumably “humanist” bromides about fidelity to a text’s meaning. Rather, an embrace of the errors, imperfection, and glitch inherent in a text’s transmission and reproducibility allows for a kind of superfidelity to the constantly shifting ground of translation.
Interview with Joe Milutis about his translation and commentary of Roland Barthes' _all except yo... more Interview with Joe Milutis about his translation and commentary of Roland Barthes' _all except you_. Conducted by Neil Badmington.
This is a component of "The Quiddities," a multimedia essay published as part of the eleventh iss... more This is a component of "The Quiddities," a multimedia essay published as part of the eleventh issue of Triple Canopy in April 2011. To read the essay, go to https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the_quiddities. In the digital essay, “this” is discussed as a piece of literary minutiae that confounds the digital. A history of Shakespeare Concordances is accompanied by media performances of “this” pronoun, with thoughts on misdirection and attention in Michael Snow, Ron Silliman, and algorithmic conceptualism. The parabook included here, originally linked to the digital essay, arrays mentions of "this" in the poems of Silliman available online. It also includes an afterword by the author.
A discussion of the following books that expand the very notion of the idea of the "book":
Rache... more A discussion of the following books that expand the very notion of the idea of the "book": Rachel Blau DuPlessis, _Poesis_ Louis Scutenaire, _For Balthazar_ Jennifer Scappettone, _The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump_ Originally published in 3:AM Magazine, August 2019 Scappettone section is an excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_.
Judith Goldman's poetic research into the trope of "weaponization," read through new materialist ... more Judith Goldman's poetic research into the trope of "weaponization," read through new materialist theory. Excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_. Originally published in 3AM Magazine, June 2021.
Acousmatic sound art production has as its goal a transformation of recognizable recorded sound s... more Acousmatic sound art production has as its goal a transformation of recognizable recorded sound samples into new relations, effectively hiding the origin of the raw material so as to focus on an experience of pure sound. The author defines the "live" as the "life" from which these samples are pulled, and considers the ways in which the biography of the sample troubles acousmatic art. From special issue Why Live? ed. Nicolas Collins
PDF pamphlet originally published as culmination of Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental tr... more PDF pamphlet originally published as culmination of Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental translation in Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/commentary/bright-arrogance-1-0
Radio art, modernist performance, psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett, Futurism, Gregory Whitehead, An... more Radio art, modernist performance, psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett, Futurism, Gregory Whitehead, Antonin Artaud
For this portfolio on experimental translation, we started by placing a sheaf of contemporary and... more For this portfolio on experimental translation, we started by placing a sheaf of contemporary and impious translations of Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondances" next to a similarly wild bunch of versions and remixes of a segment of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre." Truth be told, this conjunction was an aleatory happening, a function of a short deadline rather than intentional editorial craft. But this aleatory principle, this chance montage, allowed for precisely the kind of exploration and connectivity that flourishes in experimental translation, opening energies to which all-too-strict and controlled performances are sometimes blind. Because, in fact, even without the translations you are about to read, a reflection on the poetics of Rimbaud and Baudelaire leads one to think about why anyone would want to practice translation against itself. In her 1981 book The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloff pitted Baudelaire against Rimbaud for the heart and soul of contemporary poetics. In Perloff's account, Baudelaire stands for the Symbolist avant-garde, which attended to the meaning-effects of a poem in a way that, while unprecedented, still offered the possibility that its mysterious images and weird conjunctions could be deciphered. Rimbaud, in contrast, inaugurates the "other scene" of contemporary poetics, trafficking in indeterminate and undecidable signification-the pure play of surfaces evident in the work of John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, and David Antin (Perloff's examples), and providing a counter-tradition to the more Eliotic tendencies in twentieth-century poetry. The move from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, then, is the movement not only from Symbolism to anti-Symbolism, but also from a cosmos of coherent meaning to a world of more ambiguous consistencies. Translation proper is a consummately symbolic procedure. The search for what-means-what goes on even when approaching the most indeterminate texts. Injecting indeterminacy into translation, then, unsettles all symbolic contracts, and shows how deep these contracts run. Experimental translation makes the indeterminacy of Rimbaud indeterminate, and turns Baudelaire on his head. One hopes that language itself becomes strange, pointing to more absolute conjunctions of meaning-the vertical correspondences that Arthur Symons (one of the first theorists of Symbolism) described as Symbolism's mystic or utopian aim.
Reflection on transmission arts written for a special issue Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwav... more Reflection on transmission arts written for a special issue Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves (31:3)
Essay. Multimedia art and Afrofuturism in the work of Art Jones, Reggie Woolery, and others.
Fro... more Essay. Multimedia art and Afrofuturism in the work of Art Jones, Reggie Woolery, and others.
From special issue on Digitality & the Memory of Cinema, ed. Tim Murray
Discussion of translation and eroticism, the legacy of Plato's theories of transmission and trans... more Discussion of translation and eroticism, the legacy of Plato's theories of transmission and transmissability, in the work of Jean Delville, Pierre Louÿs, Hsia Yü, among others. Delivered for the UW MFA's Fall Convergence on Experimental Translation, October 2020
Lecture notes for a talk given at the MagicEarthMotherTongue Symposium, Western Washington Univer... more Lecture notes for a talk given at the MagicEarthMotherTongue Symposium, Western Washington University, Bellingham, October 2021.
Talk on Internet Poetry, with particular attention to the Internet Poetry Tumblr, in the context ... more Talk on Internet Poetry, with particular attention to the Internet Poetry Tumblr, in the context of evolution of online platforms for image-text work and Jean-Jacques Lecercle's theory of the "remainder."
Delivered at North American Poetry 2000-2020: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics Conference
One relatively unexamined aspect of experimental literature in the 21st century has been the emer... more One relatively unexamined aspect of experimental literature in the 21st century has been the emergence of the PDF format as a venue for expanded image-text books. Far from being simply etexts, these online-only books tend to strain the hospitality of the book. They are pretexts for providing experiences that, intentionally or not, challenge typical forms of reading attention. Much of literary culture seems to privilege the culture of the "slow" and immersive aspects of reading, however these PDFs explode dichotomies between a "slow" (and more beneficial) literary culture and a "fast" (and distracted) internet image culture. Using a thumbnail history of the "cooking show" as a parallel example, I will discuss the ways in which these myths of readerly attention are perhaps incomplete without taking into account the various mediumspecific affordances that PDF and online literary experimentalism exploit.
Talk delivered to LARCA, Frontieres du Litteraire, University Paris Cité, May 16, 2023
A mediumistic ethnographic fiction about abandoned bikes in Greenpoint, NYC. An example of a lon... more A mediumistic ethnographic fiction about abandoned bikes in Greenpoint, NYC. An example of a long-standing interest in the ways photography and writing can be tools for creative urbanism and everyday life studies (as can be seen in my “The Idea of South,” “New Jersey as an Impossible Object,” and “The Woonasquatucket Primitive”)
Part Two of Failure, A Writer's Life
_Failure, A Writer's Life_ is a catalogue of literary mon... more Part Two of Failure, A Writer's Life
_Failure, A Writer's Life_ is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.
Part Two included here, contains the following sections:
Jill Price
Henri Bergson
(film)
Richard Owen Cambridge
Oulipo
Bruce Ivins
Cthulhu
Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignette... more Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.
Part One, "Ungreat Books" included here, contains the following sections:
William Gold (The Guinness Book's "Least Successful Writer"),
Marguerite Duras
André Breton
(photography)
Charles Fort
Roland Barthes’s consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an ... more Roland Barthes’s consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 — is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes’s oeuvre to be translated into English.
all except you continues Barthes’s inquiries into image–text relations, specifically the indiscernible horizon where writing meets drawing, one becoming the other. In his attempt to blur these registers, he produces less a critique than a translation, an attempt to merge author and artist, to see himself and his desire in the work of Steinberg, using the resources of structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. The impertinence of his critique mimics the deformations of Steinberg’s drawings that are “sassy, deformed by the look on high, stretched, excessively crunched.” We become suspicious that Barthes is writing more into Steinberg than Steinberg holds, or even that Steinberg is an alibi for some other aim that is withheld.
Joe Milutis’s translation takes the opportunity of a running commentary, in the form of translator’s notes, to amplify Barthes’s impertinent reading and authorial one-upmanship by speculating on the presumed failures and detoured transferences of the text. Since Barthes is less concerned with writing about art than writing through it, Milutis’s “double session” perhaps provides the most faithful translation of the Barthesian eros in his write-through of the write-through.
Uploads
Videos by Joe Milutis
Our panelists David Bering-Porter (The New School) and Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington) will discuss this fraught legacy in which these stories of absolute otherness emblematize the anxiety over racial and ethnic difference, yet still continue to be widely appropriated and extended in the world of the "Lovecraft mythos."
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, agon is a work of broken genres that explores “weaponization” as a totalizing trope implicating poetic materialism with the unconventional, inventive violences emerging from post-9/11 war profiteering, torture practices, and neoliberal corrosion of the commons. In this oppressive ambience of “toxic implicature,” even our critique is bound to the spectacle of weaponization. Correspondingly, Goldman attempts an object-oriented response to ambient aggressivity, less to find an impossible “outside” to this annihilative field of relations, and more to test points of resistance to infinite regress of unbearable agonisms.
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Papers by Joe Milutis
Originally Published in Amodern issue on Translation-Machination
https://amodern.net/issues/amodern-8-translation-machination/
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, _Poesis_
Louis Scutenaire, _For Balthazar_
Jennifer Scappettone, _The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump_
Originally published in 3:AM Magazine, August 2019
Scappettone section is an excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_.
Originally published in 3AM Magazine, June 2021.
From special issue Why Live? ed. Nicolas Collins
https://jacket2.org/commentary/bright-arrogance-1-0
From special issue on Digitality & the Memory of Cinema, ed. Tim Murray
Conference Presentations by Joe Milutis
Talks by Joe Milutis
Delivered at North American Poetry 2000-2020: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics Conference
Our panelists David Bering-Porter (The New School) and Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington) will discuss this fraught legacy in which these stories of absolute otherness emblematize the anxiety over racial and ethnic difference, yet still continue to be widely appropriated and extended in the world of the "Lovecraft mythos."
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Part conceptual poetry, part critical essay, agon is a work of broken genres that explores “weaponization” as a totalizing trope implicating poetic materialism with the unconventional, inventive violences emerging from post-9/11 war profiteering, torture practices, and neoliberal corrosion of the commons. In this oppressive ambience of “toxic implicature,” even our critique is bound to the spectacle of weaponization. Correspondingly, Goldman attempts an object-oriented response to ambient aggressivity, less to find an impossible “outside” to this annihilative field of relations, and more to test points of resistance to infinite regress of unbearable agonisms.
A Convergence Zone event, as part of the MFA seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis.
Originally Published in Amodern issue on Translation-Machination
https://amodern.net/issues/amodern-8-translation-machination/
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, _Poesis_
Louis Scutenaire, _For Balthazar_
Jennifer Scappettone, _The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes and Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump_
Originally published in 3:AM Magazine, August 2019
Scappettone section is an excerpt from unpublished manuscript _New Gothic Materialisms: Notes on the Speculative Onto-Story_.
Originally published in 3AM Magazine, June 2021.
From special issue Why Live? ed. Nicolas Collins
https://jacket2.org/commentary/bright-arrogance-1-0
From special issue on Digitality & the Memory of Cinema, ed. Tim Murray
Delivered at North American Poetry 2000-2020: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics Conference
Talk delivered to LARCA, Frontieres du Litteraire, University Paris Cité, May 16, 2023
_Failure, A Writer's Life_ is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.
Part Two included here, contains the following sections:
Jill Price
Henri Bergson
(film)
Richard Owen Cambridge
Oulipo
Bruce Ivins
Cthulhu
(with endnotes)
Original published by Zer0 Books
Part One, "Ungreat Books" included here, contains the following sections:
William Gold (The Guinness Book's "Least Successful Writer"),
Marguerite Duras
André Breton
(photography)
Charles Fort
(with endnotes)
Original published by Zer0 Books
all except you continues Barthes’s inquiries into image–text relations, specifically the indiscernible horizon where writing meets drawing, one becoming the other. In his attempt to blur these registers, he produces less a critique than a translation, an attempt to merge author and artist, to see himself and his desire in the work of Steinberg, using the resources of structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. The impertinence of his critique mimics the deformations of Steinberg’s drawings that are “sassy, deformed by the look on high, stretched, excessively crunched.” We become suspicious that Barthes is writing more into Steinberg than Steinberg holds, or even that Steinberg is an alibi for some other aim that is withheld.
Joe Milutis’s translation takes the opportunity of a running commentary, in the form of translator’s notes, to amplify Barthes’s impertinent reading and authorial one-upmanship by speculating on the presumed failures and detoured transferences of the text. Since Barthes is less concerned with writing about art than writing through it, Milutis’s “double session” perhaps provides the most faithful translation of the Barthesian eros in his write-through of the write-through.
Originally published by punctum books
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/all-except-you/