An artist is someone who has reconciled herself to the fact that life is too interesting. This is why austerity is an anti-artistic impulse, and is not interesting.
Author: Nada Gordon
skirt artist
entertainer
ESL teacher
poet
There are no “good” flarfeurs; we are all baaaaaaad. As hell. Yeah momma!
More from Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style:
Humor is of the opinion that where there is a solution there is no humor.
….
Humor is the negative condition of poetry, which perhaps is ambiguous but which means that in order for there to be poetry humor must first get rid of antipoetry, and suddenly a spool of thread takes on the life of humor. And so, if you are a poet, you make a pretty woman with it, or the rippling of the water in the singing coral. Humor is the sine qua non of poetry, that is what I am saying in a roundabout way.
….
Literary images are in fact the vehicles of humor, and by proportional reciprocity, humor is what gives an image its force. Compare two images taken at random and you will be reduced to dust. Which also explains the way they age, for humor is assigned to an image only for a short time, and as soon as it has remounted its motorcycle, the wall begins to crumble. This is the basis of the idea of poetic novelty, about which there has recently been so much commotion. And rightly so. The neighbors complained; they are pains in the ass, we will not go back to our tired-out metaphors, we will not slip into the shoes of habit. We want to hear a catapultic language, one that will make the ceiling cave in and the earth tremble. Poetry is by nature stormy, and every image should produce a cataclysm. Let it burn! The thermogenic cotton of the poem.
And what if it amuses me to speak about syntax? Does this mean that the reader’s shoulders should shake convulsively? Take some bromide. I have for several years impressed upon your admiration pages and pages in which faults of syntax abound. Not error, but faults. Still, you admire. Therefore I am lecturing you on syntax. Simpleminded like the ass and stupid like the thistle, you did not notice with what livid fearlessness I trample under foot the black foliage of all that is sacred. Syntax? Systematically. One might wonder what bizarre advantage i stand to gain by this incomprehensible trampling. One might wonder. Not a single answer arises from the gulf. The birds that circle above the abyss in which the previously mentioned stomping is perpetually perpetrated with portentous perseverance do not let a single cry drop into this abyss. They are used to it. I, however, trample. And syntax gets trampled. That is the difference between syntax and me. I do not trample syntax for the simple pleasure of trampling it or even for the simple pleasure of trampling in general. In the first place, I derive very little pleasure from my feet and the pleasure I do derive from them comes only rarely from trampling. I trample syntax because it must be trampled. Like grapes. You see my point. Faulty or defective sentences, misbehaving parts, forgetting what has been said and no foresight of what is to come, lack of agreement, disregarding rules, run-on sentences, inaccurate expressions, steering wheels out of kilter, clauses out of whack, confusion of tenses figures of speech in which a preposition is replaced by a conjunction without shifting gears, any and all procedures similar and analogous to the old prank where you set fire to the newspaper your neighbor is reading without his realizing it, mistaking the intransitive for the transitive and vice versa, conjugating with etre when the correct auxiliary verb is avoir, putting one’s elbows on the table, making verbs reflexible at the drop of a hat and then breaking the mirror, not wiping one’s feet, such is my character.
~Louis Aragon
from Treatise on Style
trans. Alyson Waters
(picked up last night at Unnameable Books, the coolest bookstore in B’klyn, at a party for Nick Piombino celebrating the publication of his beautiful new book, Fait Accompli, published by Heretical Texts)
(All photos in this post taken by Toni Simon)
Aline Kominsky Crumb writes:
I was raised on a kind of Jewish fatalistic humor, like the stand-up comics of the 1950s, and the storytelling in my family, where you make fun of yourself, to make other people laugh. You exaggerate in a certain way, and it’s all to make a philosophical point, and also to get people to relax and respond to you.
Declaration
Let me not mince words: I am the true king of Flarf, the king of kings, the king
of all the world, whose kingdom redefines power and glory so that they are now seen in the reading series, on the blogs, and in the listservs as the true King (and Queen) of Carnival.
I am the Jewish Messiah, the lord of all the earth, and to me every knee should bend. The others — Gary, Kasey, Michael, Anne, Drew, Katie and all the rest — have their Flarf-given authority, but only as the parodies they are of the true King.
But by now the deep irony of my whole passion is clear. I am now being insufficiently saluted by mockers. I have been anointed by a strange woman, for no one shall set a person upon this throne but a strange woman, and that strange woman is none other than myself, the true king. I will rise, I will prosper, be high and exalted. I believed when the thunder and earthquake came they knew that what they did angered me and that they knew in their hearts that I am the true king.
Hail Nada!
I am The true King of Vitamins
the True King of Sports Drinks.
the True KING of Late Night Entertainment.
The Alpha – The Omega – The Eternal – The Invincible – The Almighty – The Lamb – The Bright and Morning Star!
the true king of search
the True King of Buttons
the true King of Allthetime
My masterful texts make the true King human so that ordinary people can make the radical real. I am come that you may get a life. ‘Other flatfish may share the name but Dover remains the true king of sole’
Can U Believe It
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found abecedarian poem:
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Tried the Zenzero at Bigelow’s today. Most disappointing. I don’t pick up the ginger at all. On me it just smells like talcum powder.
So it’s Coco, after all.
Perfume recommendations, anyone?
Nothing fruity, please.
Otohime 