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"We had no luck with the weather and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. They even spoiled Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them."(from 'Hotel Waldhaus')
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"The thousands and hundreds of thousands of words that we keep trotting out, recognizable by their revolting truth which is revolting falsehood, and inversely by their revolting falsehood which is revolting truth, in all languages, in all situations, the words that we don't hesitate to speak, to write and to remain silent about, that which speaks, words which are made of nothing and which are worth nothing, as we know and as we ignore, the words that we hang on to because we become crazed by impotence and are made desperate by madness, words only infect and don't know, efface and deteriorate, cause shame, falsify, cripple, darken and obscure; in one's mouth and on paper they do violence through those who do violence to them; both words and those who do them violence are shameless; the state of mind of words and of those who do them violence is impotent, happy, catastrophic."(from a speech, 1970)
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"Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, I can’t do that. They are all great. A firmament. But one still has a lot of energy: something is still simmering. That’s a soup, which will never be done. One stirs and stirs and stirs. I have the feeling that what I’m doing is worth doing, otherwise I couldn’t do it."(from an interview, 1986)
----
A visit to Thomas Bernhard's house (1:43)
"This city of my fathers is in reality a terminal disease which its inhabitants acquire through heredity or contagion. If they fail to leave at the right moment, they sooner or later either commit suicide, directly or indirectly, or perish slowly and wretchedly on this lethal soil with its archiepiscopal architecture and its mindless blend of National Socialism and Catholicism. Anyone who is familiar with the city knows it to be a cemetery of fantasy and desire, beautiful on the surface but horrifying underneath." ('Gathering Evidence')
----
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"Newspapers were the greatest wonders of the world, they knew everything, and only through them did the universe become animated for their readers, the ability to picture everything was only preserved by newspapers. [. . .] "Of course, you have to know how to go about reading them," said the painter, "you mustn't just gobble them up, and you mustn't take them too seriously either, but remember they are miraculous." [. . .] "The dirt which people hold against newspapers is just the dirt of the people themselves, and not the dirt of the newspapers, you understand! The newspapers do well to hold up a mirror to people that shows them as they are--which is to say, revolting."('Frost')
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"What I said and what he said, everything I did and everything I thought and what he did, pretended to do, what I pretended to do and what he thought, it was all this stereotype, this stereotyped idea of the inadequacy, poverty, frailty, inferiority, deathly weariness of human existence, and I instantly had the impression that a sick man had entered my house, that I was dealing with a sick man, with someone in need of help. Whatever I said was spoken to a sick man, Doctor, and what I heard, Doctor, came from the lips of a sick man, from an extremely submissive, morbid brain which is filled with the most fantastic but embarrassingly derailed notions that in themselves reveal him for what he is. . . . The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless."('Gargoyles')
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“We mustn't let ourselves go so far as to suspect something remarkable, something mysterious or significant in everything and behind everything. Everything is what it is, that's all."('Correction')
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"A prize is invariably only awarded by incompetent people who want to piss on your head and who do copiously piss on your head if you accept their prize."('Wittgenstein's Nephew')
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'Das War Thomas Bernhard (German documentary on Bernhard's life and work)
Thomas Bernhard: Drei Tage. Ein Porträt von Ferry Radax (1970)
"I never in my life freed myself by writing. If I had done that nothing would be left. And what would I do with the freedom I gained? I’m not in favour of liberation, of relief. The cemetery, maybe that’s it. But, no, I don't believe in that either, because there would be nothing then."(from an interview, 1986)
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Thomas Bernhard on Martin Heidegger
from 'Old Masters'
'Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the wartime and postwar generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime.
'I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep.
'I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain..... a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cow-pats drop on it....
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'Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else.'
----
Liam Gillick 25/5 2013 WWTBD -- What Would Thomas Bernhard Do
Resources
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Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands. He died in 1989 at home in Ohlsdorf near Gmunden, Upper Austria, where he had moved in 1965. In his last will, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, okay. I thought you might be referring one obvious candidate. Or one of two obvious candidates. But yes. Nice that Baraka's poetry has been gathered selectively and published! I have to get that. Did you ever know him? I met him once a long time ago. He was very warm and intense. ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Oh, wow, thank you for explaining that. That's very interesting about the character of Korean contemporary language and its non-disposal to the kind of thing I do. Language parsing is so interesting. There has been interest in Seoul re: bringing Gisele's work there. In fact, it might even be that she did a piece there, but I think it was 'Showroom Dummies' which pre-dates my involvement with Gisele's work and which has no text, now that I think about it. Anyway, that's extremely interesting, and thank you very much. There's very interesting experimental electronic and noise music being made in S. Korea. But music is a very different language. ** Keaton, I hardly ever eat cabbage for some reason, but it's cool when I have. Oh, in soup, yeah, I do that. I think I'm cheerful but I don't know if I laugh a lot. I'll have to ask somebody. Mucho love boomerang. ** Kier, Hi! I didn't end up seeing Zac yesterday, so I'll ask him about the the Kier name-derivation today. Still haven't bumped into anyone who also saw the sheep, but I know I wasn't hallucinating. Dentist, ugh, but for cleaning, yeah, not so bad. I don't think I've ever had my teeth cleaned by a dentist. Yikes. I do like tea, yes! I have a total thing for iced tea. Unsweetened. But I like hot tea too. Zac and I have tea breaks when we edit. My favorite is brown rice tea. I think it's Japanese. My day: Zac needed more time to learn the sound editing thing, which I guess is pretty complicated, so he did that yesterday, and we delayed the mutual scene editing until today. So I tried to catch up on other stuff, and was only mildly and randomly successful. The thing with the producers, which I probably shouldn't have even mentioned, but which I was angry about it, isn't fatal or anything. Just depressing and annoying and something that's good/ bad/ important to know re: our future dealings with them. It's too long a story to go into, and I would probably get in big trouble if I aired that shit publicly. It'll be fine ultimately, I think. Anyway, yesterday there was some getting outside opinions and support from people involved in some way with the film about that mess, and we feel better. My birthday is on Saturday, ugh, triple ugh, but plans were made to spend it with Zac, Kiddiepunk, and Oscar B at CDG airport because the latter two will be stopping over here on their way home from Australia to London. So, I guess we'll do something to mark the occasion in that context, but I don't know what. It was cold out. I did some metro traveling and walking just to get out, period, and to run some errands and stuff. I bought some extremely good-seeming pastries at Sadaharu Aoki, the Japanese-French patisserie that is my ultra-favorite, for us to use as fuel and encouragement during our editing today. The one on the left and this one and some of these and these and some of these. That was nice, and the underground voyage was nice-ish. Otherwise, just work. Dutiful, but not sufficiently focused, and boring to detail. Blah. Back to editing today. How about you? ** Steevee, Is it common for editors to want a second draft, or I guess I mean as opposed to just wanting first draft tweaks? ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. I think it'll work out okay ultimately. Okay, I'm not going to utter an excited 'Tomorrow!' then, ha ha. I'll just wait and be among the surprised. Best of luck nailing that. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Thanks! Your holidays sound to have been pretty okay. You did more to note the occasion than I did, so it sounds crazy busy even, ha ha. Super very exciting about the novel. I love your plan. Oh, man, so exciting! Thanks about the editing. Yeah, hopefully we'll have the film finished, or finished pre-post-production in a week or slightly more. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Coolness. Um, they're going to handle the film regardless of whether they like or even remotely understand it. I mean, as far as I know. So far the editing to 'final' form has been really great and exciting, yeah. A breakthrough with the first section! That's potentially very awesome! I think I did a Guibert-related post a long, long time ago. Good idea to do a new one, yeah, I'll do that. My personal favorite of his is 'The Compassion Protocol', but I think it's very out of print? I mean, you might want to start with the obvious candidate 'To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life'. It's great, and probably the best way into his stuff maybe. ** Gary gray, Hi. Thanks. There was this different kind of tightness to the posts I was making 7 years ago. Strange. Oh, it's for PS4? I'll probably never get to play it then. That's the one system that nobody I know has. I'll read up on the game though, because, obviously, it's an extremely intriguing sounding thing. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Hopefully, seemingly. Tokyo layover! Oh, I miss Tokyo. So, are you finally, finally home? ** Misanthrope, I only know little bits of Sarah Silverman. Sound/image bites, etc. She always seems very funny to me, but that's all I know. Yeah, Mulisch is the big living Dutch writer, I think, at this point. Or at least the biggest who is published and known outside of Holland. Whoa, complicated, and weird as hell about the cops, ... schooling, meth head, ... all that stuff. Oh, Lord. Can it or any of it be neutralized in the bud? ** Slatted light Hey! Denn0))), is, I fear, I trust, I'm proud to say, likely to stand as the great name derivation/ offshoot moment regarding me. The film is ours. They can't make us do anything to it that we don't want to do. All they can do is handle it poorly and unenthusiastically at worst. I was just reading about the new Houellebecq yesterday. Maybe I'm wrong, but this feels like his most transparent publicity angle yet. I'm going to read more. He seemed like he's all over the place in his stance based on my initial investigation. That's interesting about Renaud Camus. I didn't know that. That's weird because he's published here by my publisher Editions POL, and they are super not right-leaning or neocon or anything like that. Au contraire. I'll ask POL about that. Among people I've talked to here, there's a feeling that 'Tricks' was kind of his most interesting book by far. They usually mention a couple more that are fairly interesting. I've never met him, and he isn't much discussed here, but, yeah, I'll see what I can find out. That's very interesting. I'm not really turned off by genre writing, or not that much. I think I just haven't gotten into it because I'm always drawn most to fiction that at least tries to do a radical reinvention of the novel form, or rather I really like writers who try to do that from scratch rather than as an off-play from some preexisting form that ends up operating behind the scenes. But then again I love Robbe-Grillet, obviously, who used the detective novel as a template a lot. I also am not very interested in plot- and character-based fiction, and genre fiction almost always has those things as the dominant factor. That said, I do think what you asked -- Can the generic be made compelling without being experimental? -- is quite possible. I like the sublime, and I'm very drawn to that, and I like the idea of the generic reaching the sublime through non-interference and obsessive attention to what causes the generic. It's beautiful. Anyway, I mostly readfiction in some deep way to get fed as a writer, and I don't see genre as food for my particular thing. However, as I type that, I remember how much I loved and studied S.E. Hinton's novels way back when, and I guess they're 'genre'? I hope you do more than toy with that type of writing. That's a head-exploding prospect right there! Great day to you! ** Right. Here's an old, long hidden Thomas Bernhard post from many ages ago. Hope you like it. See you tomorrow.
"We had no luck with the weather and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. They even spoiled Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them."(from 'Hotel Waldhaus')
"The thousands and hundreds of thousands of words that we keep trotting out, recognizable by their revolting truth which is revolting falsehood, and inversely by their revolting falsehood which is revolting truth, in all languages, in all situations, the words that we don't hesitate to speak, to write and to remain silent about, that which speaks, words which are made of nothing and which are worth nothing, as we know and as we ignore, the words that we hang on to because we become crazed by impotence and are made desperate by madness, words only infect and don't know, efface and deteriorate, cause shame, falsify, cripple, darken and obscure; in one's mouth and on paper they do violence through those who do violence to them; both words and those who do them violence are shameless; the state of mind of words and of those who do them violence is impotent, happy, catastrophic."(from a speech, 1970)
"Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, I can’t do that. They are all great. A firmament. But one still has a lot of energy: something is still simmering. That’s a soup, which will never be done. One stirs and stirs and stirs. I have the feeling that what I’m doing is worth doing, otherwise I couldn’t do it."(from an interview, 1986)
----
A visit to Thomas Bernhard's house (1:43)
"This city of my fathers is in reality a terminal disease which its inhabitants acquire through heredity or contagion. If they fail to leave at the right moment, they sooner or later either commit suicide, directly or indirectly, or perish slowly and wretchedly on this lethal soil with its archiepiscopal architecture and its mindless blend of National Socialism and Catholicism. Anyone who is familiar with the city knows it to be a cemetery of fantasy and desire, beautiful on the surface but horrifying underneath." ('Gathering Evidence')
----
Thomas Bernhard's Novels
On the Mountain (1959)
Frost (1963)
"Newspapers were the greatest wonders of the world, they knew everything, and only through them did the universe become animated for their readers, the ability to picture everything was only preserved by newspapers. [. . .] "Of course, you have to know how to go about reading them," said the painter, "you mustn't just gobble them up, and you mustn't take them too seriously either, but remember they are miraculous." [. . .] "The dirt which people hold against newspapers is just the dirt of the people themselves, and not the dirt of the newspapers, you understand! The newspapers do well to hold up a mirror to people that shows them as they are--which is to say, revolting."('Frost')
Gargoyles (1967)
"What I said and what he said, everything I did and everything I thought and what he did, pretended to do, what I pretended to do and what he thought, it was all this stereotype, this stereotyped idea of the inadequacy, poverty, frailty, inferiority, deathly weariness of human existence, and I instantly had the impression that a sick man had entered my house, that I was dealing with a sick man, with someone in need of help. Whatever I said was spoken to a sick man, Doctor, and what I heard, Doctor, came from the lips of a sick man, from an extremely submissive, morbid brain which is filled with the most fantastic but embarrassingly derailed notions that in themselves reveal him for what he is. . . . The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless."('Gargoyles')
The Lime Works (1970)
Correction (1975)
“We mustn't let ourselves go so far as to suspect something remarkable, something mysterious or significant in everything and behind everything. Everything is what it is, that's all."('Correction')
Yes (1978)
The Cheap-Eaters (1980)
Concrete (1982)
Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982)
"A prize is invariably only awarded by incompetent people who want to piss on your head and who do copiously piss on your head if you accept their prize."('Wittgenstein's Nephew')
The Loser (1983)
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"Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation.
"Even Glenn Gould, our friend and the most im-- portant piano virtuoso of the century, only made it to the age of fifty-one, I thought to myself as I entered the inn.
"Now of course he didn't kill himself like Wertheimer, but died, as they say, a natural death.
"Four and a half months in New York and always the Goldberg Variations and the Art of the Fugue, four and a half months of Klavierexerzitien, as Glenn Gould always said only in German, I thought."('The Loser') (read more)
The Woodcutters (1984)
"While Jeannie always had her Virginia Woolf madness and hence suffered from a kind of Viennese Virginia Woolf disease, Schreker always had the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein madness and suffered from the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein disease. At the beginning of the sixties both of them quite suddenly turned their literary madnesses and their literary diseases, which in the fifties had no doubt been quite genuine madnesses and quite genuine diseases, into a pose, a purpose-built literary pose, a multipurpose literary pose, in order to make themselves attractive to openhanded politicians, thus unscrupulously killing off whatever literature they had inside them for the sake of a venal existence as recipients of state patronage." ('The Woodcutters')
Old Masters (1985)
"...what depresses me so excessively is the fact that such a receptive person as my wife was should die with all that enormous knowledge which I conveyed to her, that she should have taken that enormous knowledge into death with her, that is the worst enormity, an enormity far worse than the fact that she is dead, he said. We force and we stuff every- thing within us into such a person and then that person leaves us, dies on us, forever, he said. Added to it is the suddenness of it, the fact that we did not foresee the death of that person, not for one moment did I foresee the death of my wife, I looked upon her just as if she had eternal life, never thought of her death, he said, just as if she really lived with my knowledge right into infinity as an infinity, he said. Really a precipitate death, he said. We take such a person for eternity, that is the mistake. Had I known she was going to die on me I should have acted entirely differently, as it was I did not know she was going to die on me and before me, so I acted utterly senselessly, just as though she existed infinitely unto infinity, whereas she was not made for infinity at all but for finiteness, like all of us. Only if we love a person with such unbridled love as I loved my wife do we in fact believe that person will live forever and into infinity."('Old Masters')
Extinction (1986)
"German is essentially an ugly language, which not only grinds all thought into the ground, as I've already said, but actually falsifies everything with its ponderousness. It's quite incapable of expressing a simple truth as such. By its very nature it falsifies everything. It's a crude language, devoid of musicality, and if it weren't my mother tongue I wouldn't speak it, I told Gambetti. How precisely French expresses everything! And even Russian, even English, to say nothing of Italian and Spanish, which are so easy on the ear, while German, in spite of being my mother tongue, always sounds alien and ghastly! To a musical and mathematical person like you or me, Gambetti, the German language is excruciating. It grates on us whenever we hear it, it's never beautiful, only awkward and lumpy, even when used as a vehicle of high art. The German language is completely antimusical, I told Gambetti, thoroughly common and vulgar, and that's why our literature seems common and vulgar. German writers have always had only the most primitive instrument to play on, I told Gambetti, and this has made everything a hundred times harder for them."('Extinction')
The Voice Imitator (1997)
"The mayors of Pisa and Venice had agreed to scandalize visitors to their cities, who had for centuries been equally charmed by Venice and Pisa, by secretly and overnight having the tower of Pisa moved to Venice and the campanile of Venice moved to Pisa and set up there. They could not, however, keep their plan a secret, and on the very night on which they were going to have the tower of Pisa moved to Venice and the campanile of Venice moved to Pisa they were committed to the lunatic asylum, the mayor of Pisa in the nature of things to the lunatic asylum in Venice and the mayor of Venice to the lunatic asylum in Pisa. The Italian authorities were able handle the affair in complete confidentiality."('The Voice Imitator') (more excerpts here)
Three Novellas (2003)
"Whereas, before Karrer went mad, I used to go walking with Oehler only on Wednesdays, now I go walking--now that Karrer has gone mad--with Oehler on Monday as well. Because Karrer used to go walking with me on Monday, you go walking on Monday with me as well, now that Karrer no longer goes walking with me on Monday, says Oehler, after Karrer had gone mad and had immediately gone into Steinhof. And without hesitation I said to Oehler, good, let's go walking on Monday as well. Whereas on Wednesday we always walk in one direction (in the eastern one), on Mondays we go walking in the western direction, strikingly enough we walk far more quickly on Monday than on Wednesday, probably, I think, Oehler always walked more quickly with Karrer than he did with me, because on Wednesday he walks much more slowly and on Monday much more quickly. You see, says Oehler, it's a habit of mine to walk more quickly on Monday and more slowly on Wednesday because I always walked more quickly with Karrer (that is on Monday) than I did with you (on Wednesday). Because, after Karrer went mad, you now go walking with me not only on Wednesday but also on Monday, there is no need for me to alter my habit of going walking on Monday and on Wednesday, says Oehler, of course, because you go walking with me on Wednesday and Monday you have probably had to alter your habit and, actually, in what is probably for you an incredible fashion, says Oehler." (from'Walking' in 'Three Novellas') (read more)
----'Das War Thomas Bernhard (German documentary on Bernhard's life and work)
Thomas Bernhard: Drei Tage. Ein Porträt von Ferry Radax (1970)
"I never in my life freed myself by writing. If I had done that nothing would be left. And what would I do with the freedom I gained? I’m not in favour of liberation, of relief. The cemetery, maybe that’s it. But, no, I don't believe in that either, because there would be nothing then."(from an interview, 1986)
P. 310 of Thomas Bernhard's Extinction
in manuscript
in print
----
Thomas Bernhard on Martin Heideggerfrom 'Old Masters'
'Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the wartime and postwar generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime.
'I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep.
'I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain..... a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cow-pats drop on it....
'Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else.'----
Liam Gillick 25/5 2013 WWTBD -- What Would Thomas Bernhard Do
Resources
"You won’t find books here. I don’t know anybody who reads less than I do. And I only deal with people who hardly read anything. Books are spooky, strangling."
The Thomas Bernhard Resource (in English)
Thomas Bernhard Official Website (in German)
The Thomas Bernhard Archive (in German)
Thomas Bernhard Official Website (in German)
The Thomas Bernhard Archive (in German)
Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands. He died in 1989 at home in Ohlsdorf near Gmunden, Upper Austria, where he had moved in 1965. In his last will, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, okay. I thought you might be referring one obvious candidate. Or one of two obvious candidates. But yes. Nice that Baraka's poetry has been gathered selectively and published! I have to get that. Did you ever know him? I met him once a long time ago. He was very warm and intense. ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Oh, wow, thank you for explaining that. That's very interesting about the character of Korean contemporary language and its non-disposal to the kind of thing I do. Language parsing is so interesting. There has been interest in Seoul re: bringing Gisele's work there. In fact, it might even be that she did a piece there, but I think it was 'Showroom Dummies' which pre-dates my involvement with Gisele's work and which has no text, now that I think about it. Anyway, that's extremely interesting, and thank you very much. There's very interesting experimental electronic and noise music being made in S. Korea. But music is a very different language. ** Keaton, I hardly ever eat cabbage for some reason, but it's cool when I have. Oh, in soup, yeah, I do that. I think I'm cheerful but I don't know if I laugh a lot. I'll have to ask somebody. Mucho love boomerang. ** Kier, Hi! I didn't end up seeing Zac yesterday, so I'll ask him about the the Kier name-derivation today. Still haven't bumped into anyone who also saw the sheep, but I know I wasn't hallucinating. Dentist, ugh, but for cleaning, yeah, not so bad. I don't think I've ever had my teeth cleaned by a dentist. Yikes. I do like tea, yes! I have a total thing for iced tea. Unsweetened. But I like hot tea too. Zac and I have tea breaks when we edit. My favorite is brown rice tea. I think it's Japanese. My day: Zac needed more time to learn the sound editing thing, which I guess is pretty complicated, so he did that yesterday, and we delayed the mutual scene editing until today. So I tried to catch up on other stuff, and was only mildly and randomly successful. The thing with the producers, which I probably shouldn't have even mentioned, but which I was angry about it, isn't fatal or anything. Just depressing and annoying and something that's good/ bad/ important to know re: our future dealings with them. It's too long a story to go into, and I would probably get in big trouble if I aired that shit publicly. It'll be fine ultimately, I think. Anyway, yesterday there was some getting outside opinions and support from people involved in some way with the film about that mess, and we feel better. My birthday is on Saturday, ugh, triple ugh, but plans were made to spend it with Zac, Kiddiepunk, and Oscar B at CDG airport because the latter two will be stopping over here on their way home from Australia to London. So, I guess we'll do something to mark the occasion in that context, but I don't know what. It was cold out. I did some metro traveling and walking just to get out, period, and to run some errands and stuff. I bought some extremely good-seeming pastries at Sadaharu Aoki, the Japanese-French patisserie that is my ultra-favorite, for us to use as fuel and encouragement during our editing today. The one on the left and this one and some of these and these and some of these. That was nice, and the underground voyage was nice-ish. Otherwise, just work. Dutiful, but not sufficiently focused, and boring to detail. Blah. Back to editing today. How about you? ** Steevee, Is it common for editors to want a second draft, or I guess I mean as opposed to just wanting first draft tweaks? ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. I think it'll work out okay ultimately. Okay, I'm not going to utter an excited 'Tomorrow!' then, ha ha. I'll just wait and be among the surprised. Best of luck nailing that. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Thanks! Your holidays sound to have been pretty okay. You did more to note the occasion than I did, so it sounds crazy busy even, ha ha. Super very exciting about the novel. I love your plan. Oh, man, so exciting! Thanks about the editing. Yeah, hopefully we'll have the film finished, or finished pre-post-production in a week or slightly more. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Coolness. Um, they're going to handle the film regardless of whether they like or even remotely understand it. I mean, as far as I know. So far the editing to 'final' form has been really great and exciting, yeah. A breakthrough with the first section! That's potentially very awesome! I think I did a Guibert-related post a long, long time ago. Good idea to do a new one, yeah, I'll do that. My personal favorite of his is 'The Compassion Protocol', but I think it's very out of print? I mean, you might want to start with the obvious candidate 'To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life'. It's great, and probably the best way into his stuff maybe. ** Gary gray, Hi. Thanks. There was this different kind of tightness to the posts I was making 7 years ago. Strange. Oh, it's for PS4? I'll probably never get to play it then. That's the one system that nobody I know has. I'll read up on the game though, because, obviously, it's an extremely intriguing sounding thing. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Hopefully, seemingly. Tokyo layover! Oh, I miss Tokyo. So, are you finally, finally home? ** Misanthrope, I only know little bits of Sarah Silverman. Sound/image bites, etc. She always seems very funny to me, but that's all I know. Yeah, Mulisch is the big living Dutch writer, I think, at this point. Or at least the biggest who is published and known outside of Holland. Whoa, complicated, and weird as hell about the cops, ... schooling, meth head, ... all that stuff. Oh, Lord. Can it or any of it be neutralized in the bud? ** Slatted light Hey! Denn0))), is, I fear, I trust, I'm proud to say, likely to stand as the great name derivation/ offshoot moment regarding me. The film is ours. They can't make us do anything to it that we don't want to do. All they can do is handle it poorly and unenthusiastically at worst. I was just reading about the new Houellebecq yesterday. Maybe I'm wrong, but this feels like his most transparent publicity angle yet. I'm going to read more. He seemed like he's all over the place in his stance based on my initial investigation. That's interesting about Renaud Camus. I didn't know that. That's weird because he's published here by my publisher Editions POL, and they are super not right-leaning or neocon or anything like that. Au contraire. I'll ask POL about that. Among people I've talked to here, there's a feeling that 'Tricks' was kind of his most interesting book by far. They usually mention a couple more that are fairly interesting. I've never met him, and he isn't much discussed here, but, yeah, I'll see what I can find out. That's very interesting. I'm not really turned off by genre writing, or not that much. I think I just haven't gotten into it because I'm always drawn most to fiction that at least tries to do a radical reinvention of the novel form, or rather I really like writers who try to do that from scratch rather than as an off-play from some preexisting form that ends up operating behind the scenes. But then again I love Robbe-Grillet, obviously, who used the detective novel as a template a lot. I also am not very interested in plot- and character-based fiction, and genre fiction almost always has those things as the dominant factor. That said, I do think what you asked -- Can the generic be made compelling without being experimental? -- is quite possible. I like the sublime, and I'm very drawn to that, and I like the idea of the generic reaching the sublime through non-interference and obsessive attention to what causes the generic. It's beautiful. Anyway, I mostly readfiction in some deep way to get fed as a writer, and I don't see genre as food for my particular thing. However, as I type that, I remember how much I loved and studied S.E. Hinton's novels way back when, and I guess they're 'genre'? I hope you do more than toy with that type of writing. That's a head-exploding prospect right there! Great day to you! ** Right. Here's an old, long hidden Thomas Bernhard post from many ages ago. Hope you like it. See you tomorrow.