Minneapolis Convention Center | April 9, 2015

Episode 100: Literary Arts Institute 18th Anniversary Reading

(Kim Anno, Anne Carson, Mark Conway, Marie Howe, Claudia Rankine) To celebrate a dozen and a half years of serving rural audiences in Central Minnesota and the Twin Cities metro, this reading features three writers who have helped create and extend the reach of the LAI through their own luminous work. One writer will read from the newest book printed in the LAI's book arts studio and reflect with the book artist on the collaborative process of combining text and image.

Published Date: October 21, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Kim Ano, Ann Carson, Mark Conway, Marie Howe, and Claudia Rankin. You'll now hear a w p Board of Trustees member David j Rothman provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:34):

Good afternoon, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this wonderful event. My name is David j Rothman. I sit on the board of a w P representing the Southwest region. I have a little script here as I start off this event and it says, the welcome should be short and friendly, but that's easy because that's what I am. So just a little housekeeping. We do this so that the organizer doesn't have to say such ordinary things as Please turn off your phasers and your communicators. No flash photography please. Because there's copyright and we don't want people getting distracted by it. There will be a signing table afterwards, and so give people a few minutes to get out there. Don't mob them at the podium because then they can't get to the table and sign all those books. So first of all, I'd like to thank you all for being here.

Speaker 2 (00:01:26):

This organization, a W p, is now the ultimate literary power in the universe and I think we should use it. It's really an extraordinary gathering. Tell the world we are doing something here. I think that very few other organizations can do and everyone knows we certainly need that advocacy in today's climate. I would like to recognize and thank the College of St. Benedict for their support of our conference as a major sponsor. And now I am pleased to introduce Mark Conway, the director of the College of St. Benedict Literary Arts Institute. Thank you all for coming.

Speaker 3 (00:02:11):

Thank you David, and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming out. I do have to come clean though. The 18th anniversary is not that big of a deal. It just happened that a w P was going to be here in Minneapolis. We're just to the north of here, so we called it the 18th anniversary, hoping that the selection committee might think it's a big deal to us now that we can vote and drink in Minnesota. So if any of you brought presents, we'll still accept them, but we don't expect them. Actually, it was a shoo-in. I thought that we would get selected to have this reading with the extraordinary group of writers who have agreed to be part of this. We've worked with these folks over the years and we're really, really pleased to be able to have them come and demonstrate some of what we do at the Literary Arts Institute.

Speaker 3 (00:02:59):

So just a word about who we are. We're part of the College of St. Benedict, which is a women's liberal arts school about 70 miles north and west of here. We partner with St. John's University, which is a men's college. We have a unique relationship these days. We are small liberal arts schools, still committed to the core values of the liberal arts. So reading and writing is absolutely essential to all of our students and to our faculty. We have a wonderful faculty writers across the discipline. We have a number of alumni here who are writers, graduate students, and a number of our students are here too, which is great. So the l a I was a way to extend and expand some of the commitment that our communities have to books and it was also a way to introduce students, give them more opportunities to encounter writers to meet publishing.

Speaker 3 (00:03:50):

We have a long relationship with Gray Wolf Press that we're really proud of, really pleased with, and also we really work hard to invite our community in to take part of our literary events both here in the Twin Cities where we link up with Gray Wolf. Most of our writers come, we do an event here, and then St. Joseph is where we are. This is probably all best seen through the voices of the writers who are here with us. So let me turn to that. I'm just going to introduce all four people right at the offset and it's a great, great pleasure to first of all introduce Marie. How Marie has been to St. Ben's many, many times over the years. In fact has first started to come before there was even a literary arts institute. So she's really been part of building this thing that we call the l a I think of Marie's subjects, one of them particular being presence that she writes about those moments, extraordinary moments that are charged with intensity.

Speaker 3 (00:04:53):

But she also writes about those moments that are missed, that the speaker in the poems comes to her life, belated harried, wanting to find that kind of fullness and is not able to. And so she's, I think meditates and writes about presence in a way that I think is really wonderful for us. All. The irony is she's the most present of people that I know. She comes to campus, the students flock to her. She's so open, she's so there, so available, but is aware of those times when she's not. And I think that's her writing reflects that. So she was at St. Ben's a year ago in March, did a conversation with Krista Tippett. It's still available, her show on Bean. It's a wonderful hour, so I recommend that to you. So Marie will read first. Our second reader is actually the most recent visitor to the college that's Claudia Rankin.

Speaker 3 (00:05:52):

Each year of the college sponsors a book with Gray Wolf Press, and we named this award after an important teacher at the college sister Maryella Gable, and this year we were honored to be able to be part of citizen in American Lyric. Claudia Brave the Minnesota weather to come to St. Ben's in February just before her historic dual nomination by the National Book Critic Circle Award Committee and eventually winning the award for poetry. Her book has rightfully gained a great deal of attention and also it continues to be distressingly timely as events in Charleston demonstrate this week with the police officers charged with murdering Walter L. Scott. So the book is a hard minded look at what it means to be a citizen in today's America, particularly around the issues of race. I'm surprised by the reception at the college, not that it was important to students who are most conscious of racial inequalities and other issues related to that.

Speaker 3 (00:06:52):

They knew the book and were really excited, but it also opened up dialogue with students who were unaware before that. And there's something at the center of that book that allows people from across the spectrum to speak about what has been really a taboo subject I think. And so it's extraordinary book a great achievement and we're really pleased to be part of that book and to be part of Claudia's being here today. And then the last two people will speak together or in some sort of sequence. We've done two letter press artist books with Anne Carson, the writer and Kim Ano as the illuminator of these letterpress books. They're very different. Come to our table 8 0 4, right next to Graywolf. They'll be showing images of our most recent book that we worked together on. We printed it at the college. Our alumna, Anna Boyer was the printer.

Speaker 3 (00:07:45):

Kim was out in California creating these really lush, beautiful photo gra images and Anne was collaborating from Ann Arbor in New York. I don't recommend it necessarily as a way to make a book, but it was great fun. And Kim just reminded me that we actually never even phoned each other. We did all by email. We had done a previous book called The Mirror of Simple Souls and that also was created in our book Art Studio. It's a very different book and I'd love to show you copies of that. So with that, you'll get a much better sense of what we're up to by hearing the writers. It's a huge pleasure to now ask Marie how to come to the podium.

Speaker 4 (00:08:33):

Hi everybody. Oh, thank you. Hi everybody. Mark, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. Mark Conway is an extraordinary poet in his own right and a great, great soul on the planet and what you have done, mark, what you've created is so beautiful. Thank you for inviting me. I'm honored to be here with these two powerful women, four, three powerful women. I just met Kim. Kim, you're very powerful. All the poems I'm going to read today are from a new book, which is tentatively called Magdalene, the seven Devils and all of them are spoken in the voice of Mary Magdalene. You remember Mary Magdalene? Yay. She has fans in the room. Good. I'm a fan of hers too. I think of Mary as an ordinary woman like us. I think of hers living throughout time throughout the centuries. She's here today sitting among us.

Speaker 4 (00:09:36):

There's probably several dozen Mary's here. A woman who's sensual, spiritual, bewildered, lost, found, searching, dealing with trying to integrate herself into someone who feels whole. So here's the first poem and Mary is talking about men on men, their bodies. One penis was very large and thick, so when he put it inside me, I really did say Wow. One penis was uncircumcised and I loved to grip the shaft and pull it down so the head popped out like a little man. One penis was curved so I had to move in a different way. One penis was so friendly, I was never afraid of it. One penis was so slender I was startled. One penis was blunt and short like a little pig. One penis couldn't harden until he stuffed it soft inside me. One penis came as soon as I started to move. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 4 (00:10:47):

He said, I have a problem, but I didn't care. I loved that boy. One penis pressed against me hard almost every morning, but I got out of bed as if I hadn't heard a word. It had said one penis was so dear to me. I kissed it and kissed it even after I knew it had been with someone else. One penis I never saw, but my hand came to know it from the outside of his jeans. One penis loved the inside of my mouth so much it sang it. Sputtered one had a name. One was a little mouse. One he explained to me had very, very tiny crabs so we couldn't have sex for a while. One was orthodox and wouldn't touch blood. One had a mole, a hard little dot just under the rim. One penis was extremely patient without making a big deal about it. One penis had a great sense of humor. One penis had herpes, but I didn't know that word yet. One was a battering ram. One was a drunk staggering. A lou, a bully. One slept inside me comfortably at home. I asked Billy Collins one day if he thought that exploded men, man, and he said, no

Speaker 4 (00:12:19):

Thorns. I pressed them through my hair into my head, pressed them into my waistband and later into my palms, a secret intimacy among those thorns and me. A love from who or to whom it mattered less than that it was and that it was was the evidence of love. And so a comfort in the small pain they brought. One of the things we do know about the Mary and the gospels was that she was possessed by seven devils. And here's Mary talking about those seven devils.

Speaker 4 (00:13:08):

The first was that I was very busy. The second I was different from you, whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that. The third, I worried the fourth envy disguised as compassion. The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid. The aphid disgusted me, but I wouldn't stop thinking about it. The mosquito too. Its face and the ant. Its bifurcated body. Okay? The first was that I was so busy the second that I might make the wrong choice because I had decided to take that plane that day, that flight before noon. So it was to arrive early and I shouldn't have wanted that. The third was that if I walked past a certain place on the street, the house would blow up. The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with the thin layer of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

Speaker 4 (00:14:15):

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living. The sixth. If I touched my right arm, I had to touch my left arm and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I'd first touch the right, then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again. So it would be even the seventh. I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn't stand it. I wanted to sieve a mask. I hate this word, a cheesecloth to breathe through that would trap it. Whatever was inside everyone else that entered me when I breathed in. No, that was the first one. The second was that I was so busy I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this? The third was that I couldn't eat food if I really saw it distinct separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Speaker 4 (00:15:16):

Okay? The first was that I could never get to the end of the list. The second was that the laundry was never finally done. The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did and that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them than what was love. The fourth was that I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong to anyone. The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn't know. The sixth was that I projected onto others. What I myself was feeling. The seventh, well the seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying. The sound she made her mouth wrenched to the right and cupped open so as to take in as much air. The gurgling sound so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it and that I couldn't stop hearing it years later grocery shopping crossing the street. No, not the sound. It was her body's hunger finally evident what our mother had hidden all her life. From months I dreamt of knuckle bones and roots, the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like broken teeth by what grew underneath the underneath. That was the first devil. He was always with me and I didn't then I didn't think you if I told you would understand any of this.

Speaker 4 (00:16:58):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:17:02):

Here's a poem about Moses and Jesus. When Yahweh agreed at last to let the people hear his voice, it said that he allowed each person to hear what each could bear. To the very brimm of that and no more afterwards the people said, please, Moses, from now on you listen. We don't want to hear it. You do the talking and listening. Now being with Jesus was a little like that as though he were a book too difficult to read. So I thought I had to become more than I was, more than I'd been. But that wasn't it. Something had to go, something had to be let go of. I had so often been afraid to walk the road not knowing what might be ahead. It wasn't that I saw something new or saw suddenly into him. Not that not ever, but that the room itself, whatever room we might be standing in became apparent and the things in the room, a table, a cup, a meowing cat assumed a clarity without a past.

Speaker 4 (00:18:35):

One of the gnostic Gospels of course, have given us so many wonderful new versions of old stories and one of the quotes I've discovered from Jesus goes like this, when you make the two one, when you make the inside like the outside and the outside, like the inside and the above, like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same so the male not be male nor the female female, then you will enter the kingdom of heaven. So here are two poems where Magdalene's trying to understand that female, female, male female, and this one's called the Anima alone.

Speaker 4 (00:19:31):

She's like that woman left when the man has gone to war managing the farm and the children and the cooking, cleaning, canning and killing, scraping, salting. She takes her children into her arms at night, but she's exhausted. I'm sorry. Her little girl says when she drops the berries on the kitchen floor, I'm sorry. She says, when she spills the milk and looks too closely at her mother's face, how are you mama? How did you sleep? What did you dream? Questions children need and ask their mother When the man is there, don't keep saying you're sorry. She says to the girl, I'm sorry, the girl says, I'll try not to say it again and here's a dream she has, which is the dream of integration.

Speaker 4 (00:20:34):

I wanted to make love with them both at the same time. To place my hand there where his body extended into her body to where her body received his body to feel the shaft of him entering her and pulling out and pushing in. That excited me, almost unbearably, but I couldn't get to them. Wandering through the hotel halls, up this corridor, down that corridor, mute with desire. I woke trembling writing this. I'm trembling now and I'll finish with a very short poem of Magdalene talking about Jesus again. I what would you have me say? That I loved him. I loved him. That I knew him. No one could begin to imagine what he would do from one minute to the next. I knew him as well as someone might know him. That's what I told myself. I loved him. My loving knew him, not me. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:22:11):

Good afternoon. I'd like to thank Mark Conway and St. Ben's and it's an honor to be reading with the women that I'm reading with. I want to start by reading a piece for Walter Lamar. Scott,

Speaker 5 (00:22:34):

My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison, they have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things like wait on my birthday they say my name. They will never forget that we are named. What is that memory? The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind. It looked like we rescued ourselves. Were rescued than there are these days. Each day of our adult lives. They will never forget our way through. These brothers, each brother, my brother, my dear brother, my dearest brothers. Dear heart, your hearts are broken. This is not a secret though. There are secrets and as yet, I do not understand how my own sorrow has turned into my brother's hearts. The hearts of my brothers are broken. If I knew another way to be, I would call up a brother.

Speaker 5 (00:23:53):

I would hear myself saying, my brother, dear brother, my dearest brothers dear heart. On the tip of a tongue, one no following, another is another path. Another dawn where the pink sky is the bloodshot of struck, of sleepless, of sorry, of senseless, shush. Those years of and before me and my brothers. The years of passage, plantation migration of Jim Crow, segregation of poverty, inner cities profiling of one in three, two jobs. Boy, hey boy. Each a felony accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots, our limbs, the TRO lights through and when we open our mouth to speak blossoms. Oh blossoms, no place coming out brother. Dear brother, that kind of blue the sky is a silence of brothers. All the days leading up to my call. If I called, I'd say goodbye before I broke the goodbye.

Speaker 5 (00:25:11):

I say goodbye before anyone can hang up. Don't hang up. My brother hangs up though. He's there. I keep talking. The talk keeps him there. The sky is blue, kind of blue. The day is hot. Is it cold? Are you cold? It does get cool. Is it cool? Are you cool? My brother is completed by sky. The sky is his silence. Eventually he says it is raining. It is raining down. It was raining. It stopped raining. It is raining down. He won't hang up. He's there. He's there. But he's hung up though. He's there. Goodbye. I say I break the goodbye. I say goodbye before anyone can hang up. Don't hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though, the waiting might be the call of goodbyes.

Speaker 5 (00:26:07):

This image is of the lynching of Thomas Schiff and Abram Smith and it's the image that follows that piece in the book. I wanted to point it out today because one of the things I realized is that image was taken in Marian, Indiana. So it occurred to me that Indiana was preparing itself for a long time for what it did recently on the train, the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available and in fact there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No. She would rather stand all the way to union station. The space next to the man is the pause. In a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman's fear, a fear she shares you let her have it. The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do for him.

Speaker 5 (00:27:31):

You imagine it is more like breath than wonder. He has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought. When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man, he's gazing out the window into what looks like darkness. You sit next to the man on the train bus in the plane waiting room anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to adjacent to alongside you don't speak unless you're spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you. Where he goes, the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station, you would simply be a person in the seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat where why the space won't lose its meaning.

Speaker 5 (00:28:44):

You imagine if the man spoke to you, he would say, it's okay. I'm okay. You don't need to sit here, you don't need to sit. And you sit and look past him into the darkness. The train is moving through a tunnel. All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect. So what does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do? The soft gray, green of the cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. Your shoulder to shoulder those standing, you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who. You erase that thought and it might be too late for that. It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust anything beyond the man, the window, the tile tunnel. Its slick darkness. Occasionally a white light flickers by like a displaced sound from across the aisle tracks room harbor world. A woman as a man in the Rosa ahead. If he would mind switching seats, she wishes to sit with her daughter or son you hear but you don't hear, you can't see. It's then the man next to you turns to you and as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you'll tell them we are traveling as a family

Speaker 5 (00:30:29):

And I will end with this. The waters and bottles, it makes me very happy. Some years there exists of wanting to escape you floating above your certain ache. Still the ache coexist. Call that the imminent you. You are you. Even before you grow into understanding, you are not anyone worthless, not worth you even as your own weight insists you here fighting off the weight of non-existence and still this life parts your lids. You see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave. I they he, she we. You turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait, the patience is in the living time opens out to you the opening between you and you occupied, zoned for an encounter given the histories of you and you and always. Who is this you, the start of you each day a presence already. Hey, you slipping down, burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day.

Speaker 5 (00:32:20):

The outside comes in. Then you hey, you overheard in the moonlight, overcome in the moonlight. Soon you're sitting around publicly listening. When you hear this, what happens to you doesn't belong to you. Only half concerns you. He's speaking of the Legionnaires in Claire, Denise film Reva. And you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze. The world out there insisting on this only that this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you. Only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. And still a world begins. Its furious erasure. Who do you think you are saying I to me, you Nothing. You nobody. You. A body in the world drowns in it. Hey, you all your favorite history won't instill inside, won't turn. A body conscious won't make that look in the eyes. Say yes though there is nothing to solve.

Speaker 5 (00:33:47):

Even as each moment is an answer, don't say I if it means so. Little holds the little forming no one. You are not sick, you're injured, you ache for the rest of life. How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living and where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body. Even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here is pulse strumming Shut out, shut in, shut up. You cannot say a body translates it's you, you there. Hey you even as it loses the location of its mouth when you lay your body in, the body entered as if skin and bone were public places. When you lay your body in, the body entered as if you are the ground you walk on. You know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you.

Speaker 5 (00:35:11):

You slow all existence down with your call detectable only as sky. The knight's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle to the sun, ready already to let go. Your hand wait with me though the waiting wait up my take until nothing whatsoever was done to be left. Not alone. The only wish to call you out. To call out you. Who shouted you, you shouted. You. You the murmur in the air. You sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you go nowhere. Be no one but you first. Nobody notices. Only you've known. You're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad. It's just this. You're injured. Everything shaded, everything darkened, everything. Shadowed is the stripped, is the struck, is the trace, is the aftertaste. I they he, she we. You were to concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done. The worst injury is feeling you don't belong. So much to you. Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 (00:37:24):

Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. Thank you for letting me read with these dignifying people. I'll say two factual things. First before all the stuff I made up, I mean first Kim Ano and I made a book. As Mark mentioned, it has text and images. So I'm going to read the text first and then Kim, I believe will talk a little about the images and the making of the book and the images I think will show behind me. Second thing, I wrote this text originally as a coping mechanism for the experience of withdrawal after finishing Proust, which is a sentence you'll only laugh at if you have not read Proust because, because those of you who have know that afterwards it's a desert. There is nothing else like that. But one thing I've found to fill the yawning gap of life after Proust is research into Prussian things. And that can take you on for at least a year and a half. So that's the origin of this. The Albertine workout. It's in 59 paragraphs. One albertine. The name is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy. Two Albertan's name occurs 2,363 times in Prust novel more than any other character.

Speaker 6 (00:39:14):

Three Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Prust novel. Four. On a good 19% of these pages, she is asleep. Five. Albertine is believed by some critics including Andre Jeed to be a disguised version of Proust's chauffeur Alfred a Agostinelli. This is called the transposition theory. Six Albertine constitutes a romantic psychosexual and moral obsession for the narrator of the novel, mainly throughout volume five of Proust seven volume in the Playa edition work. Seven volume five is called Lapier in French and the captive in English. It was declared by Roger Shaak, a world expert on Proust in his award-winning 1974 study to be the one volume of the novel, which a time pressed reader may safely and entirely skip. Eight. The problems of albertine are from the narrator's point of view, A lying B lesbianism. And from Albertan's point of view, a being imprisoned in the narrator's house. Nine. Her bad taste in music, although several times remarked on is not a problem. 10. Albertine does not call the narrator by his name personally anywhere in the novel, nor does anyone else. The narrator hints that his first name might be the same first name as that of the author of the novel. That is Marcel. Let's go with that.

Speaker 6 (00:41:13):

11. Albertine denies she is a lesbian when Marcel questions her 12. Her friends are all lesbians. 13. Her denials fascinate him. 14. Her friends fascinate him too, especially by their contrast with his friends who are gay but closeted. Her friends parade themselves at the beach and kiss in restaurants. 15. Despite intense and desiduous questioning, Marcel cannot discover what exactly it is that women do. Together this palpitating specificity of female pleasure as he calls it. 16 Albertine says she does not know. 17. Once Albertine has been imprisoned by Marcel in his house, his feelings change. It was her freedom that first attracted him the way the wind billowed in her garments. This attraction is now replaced by a feeling of boredom. She becomes, as he says, a heavy slave. 18. This is predictable given Marcel's theory of desire, which equates possession of another person with erasure of the otherness of her mind while at the same time positing otherness as what makes another person desirable. 19. And in point of fact, how can he possess her mind if she is a lesbian? 20. His fascination continues. 21. Albertine is a girl in a flat sports cap pushing her bicycle across the beach. When Marcel first sees her, he keeps going back to this image.

Speaker 6 (00:43:13):

22. Albertine has no family profession or prospects. She is soon installed in Marcel's house. There she has a separate bedroom. He emphasizes that she is nonetheless an obedient person. See above on Albertine as heavy slave. 23. Albertan's face is sweet and beautiful from the front, but from the side has a hook nosed aspect that fills Marcel with horror. He would take her face in his hands and reposition it. 24. The state of Albertine that most pleases Marcel is albertine asleep. 25. By falling asleep she becomes a plant. He says 26 plants do not actually sleep, nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia. 27 A sometimes in her sleep, Albertine throws off her kimono and lies naked. 27 B sometimes. Then Marcel possesses her 27 C. Albertine appears not to wake up 28. Marcel appears to think he is the master of such moments. 29. Perhaps he is at this point. Parenthetically, several observations could be made about the similarity between Albertine and Ophelia Hamlet's. Ophelia, starting from the sexual life of plants which Prust and Shakespeare equally enjoy using as a language of female desire. Albertine Ophelia embodies for her lover, blooming girlhood, but also castration, casualty, threat and pure obstacle

Speaker 6 (00:45:19):

Albertine. Ophelia is condemned for a voracious sexual appetite whose expression is denied her. Ophelia takes sexual appetite into the river and drowns it amid water. Plants albertine distorts hers into the false consciousness of a sleep plant. In both scenarios, the man appears to be in control of the script, yet he keeps getting himself tangled up in the wiles of the woman. On the other hand, who is bluffing, whom is hard to say. 30 Albertan's laugh has the color and smell of a geranium 31. Marcel gives albertine the idea that he intends to marry her, but he does not. She bores him. 32. Albertan's eyes are blue and saucy. Her hair is like crinkly black Violets. 33. Albert's behavior in Marcel's household is that of a domestic animal which enters any door. It finds open or comes to lie beside its master on the bed making a place for itself. Marcel has to train Albertine not to come into his room until he rings for her 34. Marcel gradually manages to separate Albertine from all her friends whom he regards as evil influences 35. Marcel never says the word lesbian to Albertine. He says the kind of woman I object to,

Speaker 6 (00:47:07):

36 Albertine denies she knows any such women. Marcel assumes she is lying

Speaker 7 (00:47:15):

37

Speaker 6 (00:47:18):

At first. Albertine has no individuality. Indeed, Marcel cannot distinguish her from her girlfriends or remember their names or decide which to pursue. They form a freeze in his mind, pushing their bicycles across the beach with the blue waves breaking behind them. 38. This pictorial multiplicity of albertine evolves gradually into a plastic and moral multiplicity. Albertine is not a solid object. She is unknowable. When Marcel brings his face close to hers to kiss, she is 10 different albertine In succession 39, 1 night, Albertine goes dancing with a girlfriend at the casino 40. When questioned about this, she lies 41. Albertine is not a natural liar. 42 Albertine lies so much and so badly that Marcel is drawn into the game. He lies to 43. Marcel's. Jealousy, impotence, and desire are all exasperated to their highest pitch by the game. 44. Who is bluffing, whom is hard to say? See above on Hamlet 45. Near the end of volume five, Albertine finally runs away, vanishing into the night and leaving the window open. Marcel fusses and fumes and writes her a letter in which he claims he had just decided to buy her a yacht and a Rolls-Royce when she disappeared. Now he will have to cancel these orders. The yacht had a price tag of 27,000 francs and was to be engraved at the PR with her favorite stanza of a poem by Mallor May

Speaker 6 (00:49:24):

46. Albert's death in a writing accident on page 6 42 of volume five does not emancipate Marcel from jealousy. It removes only one of the innumerable albertine he would have to forget. The jealous lover cannot rest until he is able to touch all the points in space and time ever occupied by the beloved. 47. There is no right or wrong in prot says Samuel Beckett and I believe him. The bluffing, however remains a gray area. 48. Let's return to the transposition theory. 49.

Speaker 6 (00:50:13):

On May 30th, 1914, French newspapers reported that Alfred de Agostinelli, a student aviator, fell from his machine into the Mediterranean sea near on tib and was drowned. Ag agostinelli you recall, was the chauffeur whom prust in letters to friends admitted he not only loved but adored. Prust had bought Alfred his airplane, which cost 27,000 francs and had had it engraved on the fuselage with a stanza of mallarme. Prust also paid for Alfred's flying lessons and registered him at the flying school under the name Marcel Swan. The flying school was in Monaco in order to spy on Alfred. While he was there, Proust sent another favorite manser whose name was Albert 50. Compare and contrast, Albertan's sudden fictional death by runaway horse with Alfred, a agostinelli sudden real life death by runaway plane poignantly both unfortunate beloveds managed to speak to his or her lover from the wild blue yonder. A agostinelli before setting out for his final flight had written a long letter, which Proust was heartbroken to receive the day after the plane crash transposed to the novel. This exit scene becomes one of the weirdest in fiction. 51 several weeks after accepting the news that Albertine has been thrown from her horse and killed. Marcel gets a telegram,

Speaker 6 (00:52:06):

You think me dead, but I'm alive and long to see you affectionately Albertine. Marcel agonizes for days about this news and debates with himself whether he could possibly resume relations with her, only to realize that the signature on the telegram has been misread by the telegraph operator. The telegram is not from Albertine at all, but from another long lost girlfriend whose name Gil Barrett shares its central letters with Albertine. 52. One only loves that which one does not entirely possess, says Marcel. 53. There are four ways Albertine is able to avoid becoming entirely possessed in volume five by sleeping, by lying, by being a lesbian, and by being dead. 54, only the first three of these can she bluff. 55. Prust was still correcting a type script of lap pri on his deathbed November, 1922. He was fine tuning the character of Albertine and working into her speech. Certain phrases from Alfred Ellis, final letter 56. It is always tricky the question whether to read an author's work in light of his life or not. 57. Granted the transposition theory is a graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism. In the case of Proust, it is also irresistible. Here is one final spark to be struck from rubbing Alfred against Albertine as it were. Let's consider the stanza of poetry that Prust had inscribed on the fuselage of Alfred's plane. The same verse that Marcel promises to engrave on the prow of Albertan's yacht from her favorite poem. He says, it is four verses of malor may about a swan that finds itself frozen into the ice of a lake in winter.

Speaker 6 (00:54:27):

Swans are of course migratory birds. This one, for some reason failed to fly off with its fellow swans when the time came. What a weird and lonely shadow to cast on these two love affairs. The fictional and the real. What a desperate analogy to offer of the lover's final wintry paranoia of possession, as Hamlet says, to Ophelia accurately but ruthlessly, you should not have believed me. 58. Here is the stanza of Malor. May in English. A swan of olden times remembers that it is he the one magnificent, but without hope of setting himself free for he failed to sing of a region for living when Baron Winter burned all around him with on we 59, everything. Indeed. He's at least double. Page 360 2, the end. I am introducing Kim Ano, who's the artist with whom I worked on the book.

Speaker 8 (00:56:10):

Thank.

Speaker 8 (00:56:16):

I'll just say quickly that with the decline of millions of publishing companies and small booksellers and the kind of loss of all of that has really impacted me as an artist and as a reader. And so in response to that, my thought about making art books, books that are revered and loved every inch of them, their spine or lack of spine, their proportion of their page, the handset type, the hand cranked images. Each of these images are made by photogra vera process, which is copper plates with gelatin and then hand inked and hand cranked through the press 800 times. So it's really like the slow food thing. It's the slow print thing, which makes it a very unique book and expensive to make and expensive to buy. And so what does that mean? Well, I really hope that these books get into as many special collections libraries as possible.

Speaker 8 (00:57:33):

And if anyone knows anyone that wants one, that'd be awesome. We have little handouts about that. I also want to say that the images, Anne and I really talked deep together and I really like working together. Anne teaches me a lot of things. She's kind of a mentor in different ways, intellectual mentor, and I've done some projects with her. I got to sing with Anne's project one time that was really exciting. We've made opera together and some other things. This book, we decided that we really didn't want to illustrate the book. It wasn't really going to work if the images were too explanatory about the text, but really kind of smashed on the text and kind of to the side of the text and with the text. And there are things that are influenced certainly by the text. The man's suit, the sky, the fall from the sky, the fall from the horse.

Speaker 8 (00:58:35):

Many of the things that are repeated are cuts and folds and cuts and folds, to me are evocative of psychological problems. You tape, you cut, you fold. And so I used my scanner a lot and then worked on the color. And then the other thing was the transgender subtext was also of personal interest to me. I have a family that has trans cousins and it's very personal to me. So we decided to think about the fussing of male and female attributes. And so the branded images is the image of Alfred with an anonymous woman's face. So I guess that's, it uses the tenets of abstraction and the notion of letting the viewer fill in the rest. We certainly have the text and so your mind is part of the process. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:59:51):

Well thank you to the artists who have spent this afternoon with us. Thank you so much. And for coming to St. Ben's. Come again. Thank you all for coming. There's a book table right outside, so the writers will be there to sign their books. We also have broad sides that have been printed by folks at St. Ben's. Rachel Mellis has been overseeing some of that. So come and look. We have one of Claudia's Marie's one of Anne's Kim will be there with the books. So we're at 8 0 2. Thanks again for coming.

Speaker 9 (01:00:29):

Thank you for tuning into the A W P podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.

 


No Comments