Buggeryville

The Scream has begun. I missed the first night's event, but last night there was an opening for a visual poem art show and an event celebrating the catalogue poem. You can check out the visual poetry over at Type on Queen for the duration of the festival. But the catalogue event is now over, lost to time.

As soon as I saw that there was a catalogue poem event, I wondered why I hadn't been invited to participate, but soon enough I was -- Bill Kennedy, who organized the event (and is the artistic director of the Scream in general), invited me in. The event was a choir of list-readers wandering throughout the bookstore, starting with a single voice, building up to a raucous cacophony of enumeration before settling back down to that same voice -- my voice, as it turns out, reading sections from the oldest list in Western Lit, the catalogue of ships from Book 2 of the Iliad.

I also read sections from Georges Perec's catalogue of all the foods he ate in 1974, Rabelais's list of types of fools from Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Valerie Solanas's list of acceptable and unacceptable men from the SCUM Manifesto. I didn't manage to sneak in Roussel's list of 200-odd things which are similar to each other but of quite different sizes (from New Impressions of Africa) or Cole Porter's list of topmost things (from "You're The Top") or Craig Conley's list of meanings of the word "x" or any of a great number of other excellent lists I brought along. Ah well, next time! Meanwhile other people read from Chistopher Dewdney, Kenneth Goldsmith, The Joy of Cooking, the phone book, and too many other things for me to remember or list here... It was a big chaotic listy mess, and a nice way to start the Scream.

I woke up too late for me to catch today's walking tour of dead Toronto bookstores, which is probably for the best as it would only leave me heartbroken. But tonight there will be some live poetry editing and then a few people (including me) will be reading a poem each before a screening of Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps I'll see you there!

So last Saturday I participated in this event, which, in theory, was making some connections between the life and work of Raymond Roussel (and in particular his novel Locus Solus) and the Watermill Center, Robert Wilson's monumental mansion-cum-gallery-cum-residency in Southampton.

The novel features a group of people coming to the estate of the learned scientist Martial Canterel. Canterel takes them on a tour of the assorted ineffably strange oddities and marvels he's collected or invented, after which he tells them the narrative of their provenence, which often involves several parenthetically inserted subnarratives. At the end, the guests all sit down for a meal.

Watermill, which is filled Balinese statues and tortured modernist chairs and an endless supply of urns and vases, seemed like an obvious place to recreate a suitably Rousselian tour around the marvels of Watermill and the various performances, activities, and tableaux that the other collaborators were going to create. At first, I was going to be writing the narratives behind the various experiences our tour, using Roussel's story-generating method. (Roussel would create two nearly-homonymic phrases and then write a story that would get from one phrase to another; "la règle de l'art", the rule for making art, becoming "la règle de lard", the ruler for measuring things made out of bacon.)

Well, for various reasons, this idea got nixed.

The tour ended up being self-guided, with guests invited to go from one room of Watermill to the next, where they would be able to do, see, or hear a variety of things related to Roussel or Watermill or, perhaps, neither. And I wound up mostly reading a few sections from Locus Solus (in the English translation), while other collaborators performed music or showed videos or invited guests to draw on transparencies. It all ended with a twelve course tasting meal.

So, for about two hours on Saturday, I read sections of Locus Solus. One guest actually stopped to listen to me read for a good twenty minutes, hearing almost the entire story of the giant diamond filled with the heavily oxygenated aqua-micans, the long-haired dancer swimming in the water, and the shaved Siamese cat who would put its head in a funnel which then touched the brain of the skinless and boneless head of the French Revolutionary orator Danton and brought him somewhat back to life to move his eyes and lips vigorously, as if trying to recreate his famous speeches.

Locus Solus: It is an odd book.

I feel as though I should say a bit more about Roussel and his methods and his life, but I'm not sure I have anything to say which his various commentators -- most notably Foucault, in his book on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth -- haven't already said. But, maybe.

I do recommend picking a few sections of Locus Solus out and reading them aloud a dozen times, as it will make all sorts of interesting details in the work much clearer.

There is a new pdf zine thingy thing thing called würm and I was asked to submit a poem for it and so there it is. It's one I read at my last reading in Portland. Nico Vassilakis has one in there too. Karri Kokko has one that looks similar to mine but it is also quite different. Lots of visual poetry, but not just. Lots of other people in it too. Why not download it, print it out, read it, draw on it, détourne it, whatever the kids are doing these days.

Meanwhile I am participating in a project to bring Raymond Roussel to Robert Wilson's Watermill. He should arrive June 20th. So if you're in the Hamptons, you might want to come see what that could mean. Perhaps I will talk more about Raymond Roussel here soon. He is quite the fellow.