Friday, November 10, 2006

the safe love house

With the impuls (actually rather a push over the horse) of the regular references to black ink, from sections set in the tatoo shop employing our hero Johnny Truant , "censoring" has become my point of entry into the house of leaves. I am tempted consequently to leave the book in an oven for a couple hours, reducing it to a charcoaled monument to censorship. In spite of the black rectangular walls, shrinking and growing for the sake of whole-sale psychoanalysis, I am not thrilled to let Danielewsky's story become part of my own decent into the one most artisanal tool for censorship: the blotting out, blacking over, such as everyone, sometime, has surely been led to imagine, practiced by burocracies the likes of the old soviet regime: words crossed out on postcards sent by critical tourists.
It's a case of bad timing also, best-seller-cult very much doesn't like me at the moment, as I have just paced my reading rythm to philosphy, from pamflet-like political essays by Hanna Arendt (About Violence) or more recent work by several Flemish academic authors (4 essays collected under 1 title, Populisme), passing through Sloterdijk, ending up in the very rational expositions of Habermas (Marxism as criticism). Instead of write I would prefer to meet and talk over the selfsimilar lack of intrest I find in the senseless passageways of House of Leaves. Leave no written trace, thus keeping further abay any literary pretentions lapping on the tarred sands shoring Danielevski's effort. So we would strike a casual conversation and you would hear my voice hoarse from growling and screaming in professional endulgement, fitting my mood in response to the imposed reading. In truth the profession that caused my vocal chords to screach, was exercised at Walibi last weekend, and consisted of the live entertainment of guests in the walk-through haunted-house opened for the occasion of Haloween. A coincidence that makes all the more ambigous any accusations pointing out that I am criticising a book that I have not finished, a book that itself is a self inflating parody on critical literary analysis, and an MTV "the real life"intrusion on readership.
On my own path I picked up the theme of censorship to form a counterpoint with the concept of failure. I have taken this quite litterally in a solo that I made and performed in Tel-Aviv, pretending in front of the audience, to finally give up my attempts to communicate with them through dance, and in stead decide to have a talk with the spectators, which consequently failes also, since I turn it into a monologue from the start,...
Now I see an opportunity to just hold on to both these themes, since I am surely capable also to fail performing to music, interacting with painters, etc. since in non of these I have any meaningfull experience. I dance to music because I like it, and from there on a program runs my dance. I have never thought about deconstructing my interaction with music, at the I have most read some analysis of a musical score, imagined how I would like the music to sound if I had a composer to make music to my own piece,... Thus I fall into the strategy invented by Pop-art, taking failure to its historical climax.
I am reasured by the little peek I got into the previous process of echo, from which I remember that you also started of with a text, only to relinquish it at the first table rehearsal. Therefor, if the above seems to express any cold-feet feeling about starting to work together, let it pass as another parallel with the story of Johnny Truant who finds it harder and harder to even leave his home. This is the ambiguity of reading The House of Leaves", the ambiguous force of reproduction so beautifully set free by Andy Warhol.
well it all is summed up in an anagram: with the lettres of "of leaves" you can also spell "safe love"
Might this be continued.

3 comments:

echochamber said...

One of the ways of misleading censorship on the internet (used in for example China) is to "invent" a new way of writing words, in other words: to spell words wrongly so the computer doesn't detect them and therefore allows it...
But that's also the case here, for example when you see how spamdetectors work... they word Pron instead of porn for example...

echochamber said...

a text is not simply a tool or an instrument, it is rather explosive, dangerous, volatile...
it's the product of the intermingling of old and new, a complexity of internal coherences or consistencies and external referents, of intension and extension, of tresholds and becomings

a text could be like a little bomb that when it doesn't explode in your face it scatters thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments without necessarily destroying them (cause even if you burn it into ashes you still have the ashes and you still had to go into the action of burning it, didn't your body remember that? ;-) )

ideally it produces unexpected intensities, peculiar sites of indifference, new connections with other objects and thus generate affective, conceptual... transformations that problematize, challenge and move beyond...

what would you do with censorship?
Can you tell us more about that?
I mean: do we censor the house of leaves? or do you censor the house of leaves on the blog? and how would you do that?
how would you censor that?
and what is echo and censorship? can an echo be seen as censorship? but also as a way to overcome censorship than?
and and and
we want more!

echochamber said...

You may cook..burn..spit..Ignore the book. it's just a conduate,pathway or diversion perhaps.
They say enlightenment sits on the other side.
follow the yellow brick road.