Jacket 21 — February 2003 | # 21 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
Noah E. Gordon reviewsA Test of Solitude, by Emmanuel Hocquardtrans. Rosmarie Waldrop Providence: Burning Deck 2000, USD$10, paperback Hourglass Transcripts, by Susan GevirtzBurning Deck 2001, USD$10, 70 pages |
A Test of Solitude, by Emmanuel Hocquard
In his Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein writes, ‘Sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience.’ It is precisely this tenuous border — that of language or logic’s dialectical relationship with experience or the re-creation of it — upon which Hocquard’s test is played, further emphasizing Wittgenstein’s notions of the language-game. |
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This book — I undertake to write it for you — will be the simplest possible. Take it for what it means to be: a real picture book drawn directly from circumstance. And if there are some echoes of philosophy mixed in with the discreet sentiments of the writer it is because, for the author of these pages, philosophy can also be done in pictures. |
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Playing at once with Spicer’s dictum, ‘I would like to make poems out of real objects,’ and Stein’s (whom Hocquard evokes by name along with a cavalcade of others: Oppen, Dickens, Reznikoff, etc.) grammatical distaste for nouns, Hocquard writes, ‘Objects are grammatical reference points./ Are the kind of object grammar needs in order/ to fabricate perspectives. Gardens in the French/ style.’ Hourglass Transcripts, by Susan Gevirtz
Through its half-vocalizations, interruptions and fragmentary multi-taskings, Susan Gevirtz’s Hourglass Transcripts embodies the inability — and thus the failure — of language’s attempt to ground or (re)create experience without rupturing all claims to complete authenticity. Such a project engenders a locus ‘half way between written tides and diatribes,’ with its insistence on ‘stripmining the superfluous,’ while, ‘cradling protecting walking around a thing/ that had happened.’ phone perforations "so our errors" err
At times Gevirtz’s self-reflectivity hinders her project’s success, (‘reversible sentences the phantom of a concept and/ the like/ this writing/ like writing then’) as one feels lead through the book’s various chambers rather than allowed to explore on one’s own. The occasional combination of her direct engagement with language and that of the solid, sustained image offers an interesting respite during such exploration (‘In the second insistance of and at arrive one carrying the other/ on a stretcher the way a live ant carries a dead ant’s body’). |
Jacket 21 — February 2003
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