We have settled in to L'astaque1 and begun working on the autumn season focusing on trees in Norrtälje painted in whatever way seems right. The exhibition petered out but we did in fact gain two sales, one to granne2 Elisabeth who now has ten of ours and the 'honey man' who lives down the road who now has two. Had this boon occurred on the opening week of the exhibition we may well have delayed our journey but it is too late to turn back and face the stramash; our goal now is a wilful ignorance, and a concerted campaign to remove our attention from the marketplace. This is all the more necessary I feel after having absorbed a information reel provided by The Netflix Service called The Social Dilemma about the wildly disturbing behaviours and practices of the giant internet and social media companies regards the addictiveness of the technology they peddle and its disastrous effect on people. The work has more impact also because it largely features testimony from the people that created the stuff in the first place and who now confess their part and their loss of control. Quite simply they paint a picture worse than the sum of all fears. Luckily I have the pleasure of not ever having indulged in social media but now I feel less smug about this as it seems that my abstinence simply makes me useless and dispensable to the AI Borg and as such perhaps first up against the wall! (Like a dog.)3
Taking our attention away has of course meant that we have placed it on other things such as our reading but before we get to that we must tell of our discovery of some very important Van Gogh news: some swinging dick has discovered the exact location of his last painting, which has apparently been confirmed as the Tree Roots double square! Wouter van der Veen his name is. A Van Gogh researcher who while casually ordering his documents during the French lockdown noticed a postcard of a street in Auvers and spotted a similarity of the tree roots to the Tree Roots. He spins the yarn out in a very worthy free publication of his discovery and it has been given the Amsterdam stamp of approval, so that's that. Amazing! Now one can stand and look and think and of course this will have sent the world of Van Gogh studies into a fresh cycle of debate and reconsideration. The discovery seems to pour more water onto the fire started by the murder theory of Naifeh and Smith4 which ruffled the feathers so, the reason being that the new discovery of the tree roots location has shed more light on the timescale of Van Gogh's movements that day which according to Van Der Veen leaves little time the proposed skirmish with René Secrétan.
We are doing some reading but I must say that we actually began Don Quixote in April and started Infinite Jest in August but little progress has been made. My habit of spreading attention over three or four books at the same time often means that none of them get finished. I actually began Infinite Jest in Torpoint actually. We have Pale Fire on hand and Ducks Newburyport is on route but delivery times have been effected by the pandemic so who knows when it might arrive.
Currently the Don is being taken by Sancho and a gaggle of others back to his town in the guise of some fantastic chivalrous mission cooked up his companions who placate and appease to accrue some 'boon' or other. There is comedy, cruelty, farce and great cleverness in the plot it seems to me but the inner novellas of various characters do drag on a bit and take us away from the fate of the Don. I love the translators notes which I cannot help imagining as part of Cervantes cunning, but they're not.
Infinite Jest has been begun (again) and it baffles and frustrates as one imagines Foster Wallace intended but we like it. The man is piercing if nothing else and at present the narrative is swirling around in a mist of sorts but something is happening with regards to an addictive movie or 'cartridge'. Written in the 90's, it is set in the near future which is indicated most deliciously by certain features of distorted Capitalism my favourite being the corporate sponsorship of each year which sees numerical dating replaced by product branding: 'Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland', for example or, 'Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment', or even 'Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/ InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile'!!
It should be confirmed that we are no well read folk. We no not have literature deep in the blood as many do, we have only our interest in authorship games relevant to our own Doing. The playing with the 'who's' and 'why's' has been the game on in contemporary art for many decades and certainly the disguising of authorship and the form and structures of a 'work' has been the job of postmodernism at least and all the way up to at least Occupy but we are mainly interested in the creative possibilities of fractured individual authorship more so than their subversive potential in 2020. In any case our chosen books each meddle with and complicate authorship in different ways and at different times so that is the logic of our selection and I am quite certain that a better read person than us could suggest many more examples. If there is a goal we want to hone in on in this reading set it is perhaps to have a basis to think about how these authorship issues may continue today in the genre of 'autofiction' which I think I mentioned we wondered if we ourselves were doing.
On the march,
John
1 John's name for a reclusive phychological state that he has entered. See Work 43.
2 Swedish for neighbour.
3 The last words of Joseph K.