J. H. Prynne

[luka]

i'm shocked and appalled. i feel like i've been punched in the guts.

 

[sus]

the 10:04 project is nothing if not trying to be both ironic and serious simultaneously, both self-deprecatory and deluded with grandeur

 

[sus]

If I'd known I was walking into a forum full of phillistines...

 

[version]

Did he go through a writing program? I can't shake the feeling this is the stuff people complain about when they go on about semi-biographical, "workshopped" stuff in the New Yorker.

 

[sus]

I dunno what to say, either you read that first page and are breathless or you aren't

 

[luka]

i don't know what to say. im stunned. i didn't know standards had fallen that far. i was living in a bubble.

 

[version]

I'd be breathless if I had to read it aloud.

 

[luka]

i've read better resturaunt reviews on trip advisor.

 

[sus]

the 10:04 project is nothing if not trying to be both ironic and serious simultaneously, both self-deprecatory and deluded with grandeur

We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely. I was saying these things out loud to the agent, who was inhaling and exhaling smoke, and we were laughing.

 

[sus]

it's amusing b/c this is literally a description of @luka's psyche as he himself owned up to earlier on this very board

 

[sus]

grandiloquent and taking the piss all at once; able to appreciate the beauty of the literary/lyrical turns and the poetic gestures even as you're also "blowing smoke" and "laughing"

 

[luka]

i bet i phrased it better than that!

 

[version]

It reads awkwardly to me. The way he uses I am instead of I'm slows it down and makes it clunkier than it needs to be.

 

[sus]

it's a steady, even tempo, best sense of rhythm I've come across since Jane Austen

talk about control.

@version listen to him read it

 

[version]

I think Luka's right about the lack of energy too. It feels lifeless and sterile to me. Like a medical facility.

 

[version]

Listening, but bear in mind I don't like to hear anyone other than Burroughs read their work. I don't like hearing stuff read aloud at all.

 

[constant escape]

This is part of his larger project of defamiliarization, in the Russian formalist sense, so that something so overworn as a good cry can be seen anew, in different light.

Not very familiar with Russian formalism, but defamiliarization was a key concept there? Were they producing literature, or just analyzing it, or both?

Anyway, defamiliarization almost necessitates sounding pretentious, no? You are expressing away from you, rather than in on your center. That self-distancing might come across as pretending to be someone/something you aren't, I suppose.

I'd be interested in what his (or anyone's) reasoning for this would be. I've got my reasons.

 

[sus]

I think Luka's right about the lack of energy too. It feels lifeless and sterile to me. Like a medical facility.

You're staring right into my soul, baby

 

[constant escape]

It feels lifeless and sterile to me. Like a medical facility.

This, from where I'm standing, is the (almost?) necessary outcome of such a technique, no? Like you're uninvolved in your own body, your own soul, even.

 

[sus]

Not very familiar with Russian formalism, but defamiliarization was a key concept there? Were they producing literature, or just analyzing it, or both?

yeah russian formalism (shklovsky specifically) is where defamiliarization originates

I mean, Heidegger sorta reinvents it a bit later but

e.g. take "lacrimal event" in place of crying (as I posted abt above)

Russian formalists both produced and analyzed; Jakobson and Shklovsky are your key players (Shklovsky e.g. wrote The Zoo, which is a semi-fictional book of love letters)