Marcus Speh's Blog, page 7

You’ve Been Recognized, Sucker

Your biometric image, scanned this morning while you dreamt of perfect love
The alternative title for this post was “You’ve been identified, idiot!”, which seemed too harsh in the end. There’s that eye AGAIN! Pencil, my eye, glue, iPad, stencil, modified advertisement, red and black felt pen –  © 2012 Marcus Speh; read more at rsn, “The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology“, by Naomi Wolf; the modified German text above means: “strategies for a smart awkward planet” and “how can software fuel a car man”.

sky high

A spontaneous, unplanned little controlled drawing is like a dream memory, which is why I can never be mad at myself for its form, content, text or as associations. Please be seated, stretch out your feet comfortably, raise your head up to the ceiling, and watch whatever drama is playing on your internal stage right now. As I’m writing this I’m watching construction workers making a maximum of noise in the neighborhood. I presume that at least some of their motivation is to wake up the bourgeoisie from its undeserved early morning slumber. I concur.

The Blue Rider

Hey man, you want to know how my day went? I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you good. I hacked into this man’s head. He was white as a church candlestick. I shoved my purple power source into his eardrums and played solo with his band of graybeard sorry–ass views, which went all in the same direction: all he cared about was attention. He didn’t care who gave him attention, attention was his needle, his addiction. He’d have sold the muscle of his heart for fame. He’d sold out to the daredevil of distinction, the owl of renown owned him. She’s Athena’s bird, almost not a bird but an institution, an eminence of the air, foul fowl. The goddess herself claims to do all for knowledge but in truth she is a slut. Anyhow, there I was, enjoying myself madly inside this jock’s mind. I was piloting around, screwing him up. I even told him what to say, and when I said to his girlfriend “fuck off, bitch”, out of nowhere, her mouth fell open like the draw bridge to the enemy’s castle, and I felt I’d said something that he’d wished to say for a long time, and even though I didn’t know why it was so satisfying to him that these words finally came out of his cake hole, the pleasure it gave him was fully visceral and depleted him daintily. What a dork! When I left, I left my candy wrappers and my riot robbers behind. I knew he was going to have a hard time being good and successful again, but he’d be hard in no time, and he’d take no shit for shit. On his next day in the office, he’d slobber mouth his boss, he’d put the blonde receptionist’s hand with its silver painted sharp three inch nails on his  hip, he’d snicker like a goat, and then he’d throw his beautifully honed corporate body off the building, thinking unique, marvelous, solemn thoughts all the way down to the cinnamon cement. Man, I reckon it’s bitter to feel better than anyone else around you. There’s only one door left in the end, with no light on the other side.

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The Blue Rider by Franz Marc (1912) that gave the expressionist movement its name.

Will A Good Book Sell Without Promotion?

Long response to a writer friend, who complimented me on my ability to promote myself and thereby contributing to the possible success of my debut collection (not to come out before November):

«… On the promotion thing: I know what you’re saying, and it gives me pleasure to promote others whose work is worthy of promotion like your own work. However, even though I’m continually striving to rid myself of excess non-writing work and baggage (alas much of it paying well), it seems as if I have less time to write, not more. What I’m saying I suppose is that contrary to what you might expect, I will not go out of my way to promote this book. Part of me wishes simply hopes that anything worth reading will magically promote itself. Actually I believe that. Most of the promoting is really, at least for me, a way of calming myself down, trying to fend off the possibility of not succeeding, which is only all too real, of course. …»

Image: Gulliver talking to two Houyhnhnms. His book of travel stories, “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships“, sold itself despite its title and words like “Houyhnhnm” and “Glubbdubdrib”…

«The book became popular as soon as it was published (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”); since then, it has never been out of print.»

(Source: Wikipedia)

In fact, I have already begun my slow retreat from the marketing frontier: there will be no more articles or stories on any of my many outposts. This site is it. It’s the heart, the hub and the harbor. It’s the mother ship that has cut off all its extra rafts and little boats with or without motor. There will be stories from the book for sure, since there’s a total of 80 stories to choose from, and I hope to find the time to create a book trailer. I shall do this for fun though, because I’ve always liked book trailers (see this site - for a wealth of ideas not all “best”, or this cool stop motion trailer, or Riley Michael Parker’s trailer). At the moment I’m thinking about a mixture of animation and collage.

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Right sole print of my book-to-be-published showing a great degree of complexity

A good book might not “sell” without promotion in the sense of making its author rich, but I do think it will come through, it will eventually find its readers. The book (more than its author) achieves this by tapping into a field of aesthetics that has not been described by physics or another science before. (Or if it has, please let me know.) This field is a result of everything that matters to the people who live at the time of publication. Perhaps it’s this complexity of being intertwined with the lives of so many that makes it impossible to describe. The book, the good book, is both a sensor and a sense maker. It’ll pick up the likes and dislikes of its readers, and it’ll help them make sense of their time.

You may ask now: what about the bad book? What about the grayish prose of Fifty Shades of Gray, what about dandy Dan Brown? I don’t really have an answer for you. I’ve got enough to do with thinking about good books and conceiving of new, better books. Clearly these bad books are also expressing something about our time and about their readers, but it’s unlikely to be something very complex, life enriching or interesting. And that’s what I’m interested in.

Perhaps a bad book is like a sensor that sends faulty signals, a badly built device, just good enough to be used at all. Engineering knows all about that: but people will use bad bridges anyway if they stand in the right place. Every bad book should cause an avalanche of good books to replace it, to get rid of the bad taste on the discerning reader’s tongue.

What do you think?

Artificial London Eyes

The Queen has come home with us. She won’t stop waving while there’s light: there’s a little solar panel in her hand bag. Her wave reminds me of Stalin’s wave, which was the party piece of a teacher I had once: he was an ardent anti-communist so naturally we had a passionate relationship. This teacher who was very lively, would make his face freeze in a Gulag grimace and, his head trembling slightly, entertain us by waving with his hand saying “Well done, Comrades.” This short boring video comes with a barely audible R&B soul track, an absurd riff on the royals. I wish I’d had a bagpipe (or how about a bagpipe orchestra, I wonder how that’d sound, end-of-the-world like?) instead to accompany the quietude of this Victorian wave at the beginning of the 21st century.

Didn’t see much of the Olympics this year, apart from the opening ceremony, which seems to have taken all the energy from the games themselves. I’ve rarely seen such a transgressive spectacle in which a nation tries to salvage everything that they have ever brought to the global party, including the Fantastic Five: Mr. Bean (clearly the highlight of it all), your Majesty the Queen seeming sleepy, smug Kenneth Branagh speaking Caliban’s lines, James Bond still bloody from his last postcolonial adventure, and to top it all off Tim Berners-Lee looking rather lost in front of a 20th century tabletop computing monster. We liked the fireworks!

I lost heart a little, I don’t even know why, when I saw many of the athletes, happy shiny people, enter the arena for the first time waving not their hands, but their digital recording equipment instead. There hasn’t been such a clear demonstration of the obsession of our age with simulating our lives for posterity and for friends at a distance.

They are looking at themselves and at us through the artificial eyes of their cameras while we look at them looking at us through similar artificial eyes so that later, forever and elsewhere, anywhere, others again can look at them looking at us looking at them.

Still there is no event that brings the world together like the Olympics. Can’t watch the closing ceremony, alas, but I’ll catch the highlights later on YouTube…rooting for Berlin 2024/2028…

the ILK mash-ups

You already know that I enjoy making marks. Earlier this year after two of my texts were published in the then fairly new online ILK, I applied my iPen to  photos that I had made last winter in Berlin’s Central Park, Tiergarten. Each photo uses a line from the work of a fellow poet of issue two. I find the mash-up created thus strangely attractive, and I hope I’m not deluded as the meta–maker, like a butterfly collector who believes himself to make beautiful things only because he hunts, kills and displays nature’s art. I also hope that the co-creators, the original poets, have no hurt feelings because of my artistic appropriation. The whole collection is here (on Picasa), or you can view it also at B(o)lloggs. Great poetry, by the way.

Curiosity

Mars in first color image sent back by Curiosity. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (via CNET)

Two Martians, let’s call them Big and Bug, are standing around the rover. Big kicks the machine. Why are you doing that, says Bug. The heat shield almost hit my ex-wife, says Big. But she’s been dead and dusty for years, says Bug. Well, says the other, that’s no reason to put up with the earth men sending us their garbage. It’s not garbage, says Bug, they’re trying. At least they’re still trying, it’s more than you can say about us. Look, he says, it’s called “Curiosity”. They are curious! What are we doing?  We just stare at the desert and wait. For some reason he feels defensive of the humans and the little robots. We do watch TV, says Big. Yeah, says Bug, where does the TV come from? Earth! I don’t think it’s right we don’t even throw them a bone. We were curious once, says Big, and look where it got us. At this point the rover makes a rattling noise. It turns one of its arms towards Big. We must go, says Bug. It will be 14 minutes until they can see this. All right, says his friend. They open the rover and replace its electronic brain by something that looks like a red stone. Peekaboo, says Bug to the camera, and makes the peekaboo gesture as he has seen it on TV. But they’ll never see it.

This one’s for Ray Bradbury. Curiosity, the latest rover from Earth, has landed on Mars. Terribly exciting news—see NASA’s mission pages for updates. No second chances here, millions of miles away from home: signal transmission from there takes 14 minutes…if only we could trust our own eyes.

chutzpah

Look what I discovered today among heaps of manipulative information. I wonder if this image created itself at random. It has got an accidental beauty to it. This kind of imagery cannot be conceived of. It’s like a visual rustle, a murmur of paper, felt pen and prejudice. In any case, while  I refuse all responsibility for this piece of found art, I’ll accept suggestions for the title.

There is just something special about making art, making anything, in the real world, without the help of digital tools: the roughness of the paper, the smell of the glue, the ruse required to move the pieces into their proper position, the irreversibility of it all, the thought “what if?” that has to be preserved for another attempt at mastering things, physical things connected with a myriad of other physical things, just as digital things are connected with one another, but not across the invisible divide: pixel or permanent, but never both.

Source: images from Der Spiegel 32/2012; paper, ink, felt pen, chutzpah. See also: Peter Watson, “The German Genius” (guardian review).

missing flower of evil

Charles Baudelaire looking as grim as I feel without my coffee

The sudden disappearance of my coffee shop where they also roasted and ground the coffee that I drank at home while writing has thrown me into a deep crisis of identity. At the same time it’s getting colder. Summer this year seems over before it has properly begun. During the day I stroll through libraries and bookshops searching for good crime stories keeping my eyes open for murders and victims. I find out that most popular contemporary form of crime story is called the “pathology thriller”. It has got nothing to do with Van Dine’s 20 rules or Chandler’s 10 commandments on how to write good mystery. Mysteries are thin on the ground in these thrillers, because they’re written to thrill only. Plot and character serve as a thin veneer covering blood trails. The only point of this literature seems to be the celebration of death in one way or another. I must be missing the point.

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“The Flower Oracle”

I feel like a lover, who is looking for a particular, but common flower, a very elementary thing: after all it’s a flower. A thing of natural beauty. How hard can it be to find it? It’s not been rare before. However, all florists tell me: nobody else wants this flower anymore. And when I asked them don’t you find it beautiful? They respond: beauty is not the point of the flower. And when I insist and want to know what is the point of a bouquet if you can’t pick the flower, they ignore me. Their main justification is that now they sell more flowers than before. They have in fact replaced the flower by something else, which is alien to me. Perhaps an invasion has occurred and all the flowers have been replaced by something else that is ugly and functional.

Such are the thoughts that come up when I traverse the shops looking for good crime literature. Wasn’t Les Fleurs du Mal the title of a collection of poems by Baudelaire? Am I perhaps looking for that flower of evil? But I can’t find it. I feel though that a mere blood bath is no substitute.

flowers of evil

Charles Baudelaire looking as grim as I feel without my coffee

The sudden disappearance of my coffee shop where they also roasted and ground the coffee that I drank at home while writing has thrown me into a deep crisis of identity. At the same time it’s getting colder. Summer this year seems over before it has properly begun. During the day I stroll through libraries and bookshops searching for good crime stories keeping my eyes open for murders and victims. I find out that most popular contemporary form of crime story is called the “pathology thriller”. It has got nothing to do with Van Dine’s 20 rules or Chandler’s 10 commandments on how to write good mystery. Mysteries are thin on the ground in these thrillers, because they’re written to thrill only. Plot and character serve as a thin veneer covering blood trails. The only point of this literature seems to be the celebration of death in one way or another. I must be missing the point.

[image error]

“The Flower Oracle”

I feel like a lover, who is looking for a particular, but common flower, a very elementary thing: after all it’s a flower. A thing of natural beauty. How hard can it be to find it? It’s not been rare before. However, all florists tell me: nobody else wants this flower anymore. And when I asked them don’t you find it beautiful? They respond: beauty is not the point of the flower. And when I insist and want to know what is the point of a bouquet if you can’t pick the flower, they ignore me. Their main justification is that now they sell more flowers than before. They have in fact replaced the flower by something else, which is alien to me. Perhaps an invasion has occurred and all the flowers have been replaced by something else that is ugly and functional.

Such are the thoughts that come up when I traverse the shops looking for good crime literature. Wasn’t Les Fleurs du Mal the title of a collection of poems by Baudelaire? Am I perhaps looking for that flower of evil? But I can’t find it. I feel though that a mere blood bath is no substitute.