Geoff > Recent Status Updates

Enter Panurge.

Long live all good Pantagruelists.

An hour early / but happy birthday David Foster Wallace

First chapter done aaaaaand a new Leon Forrest fan is born. Holy hell dude can write.

Don't know if you guys were looking for some ambient music to play behind your reading today, but if so I made a 38-minute piece of generative music last night. It's not too demanding, just put it on and go about your lives! Happy Friday!
https://soundcloud.com/geoff-wilt/div...

So my Vintage International 1990 paperback of Ulysses - compatriot through many many years and reads, is finally falling apart from wear and tear and age, and like all old mates it must depart sooner or later... Question is what newer edition is a good one? I don't really need annotations at this point, I'm going for build and beauty. Thanks.

The new record is out for mastering. Digital format should be available by March, I hope! I think it's the best stuff I've done yet, hope you guys give it a listen... until then there's stuff over at Soundcloud.
https://soundcloud.com/geoff-wilt

Been reading random chapters from The Pale King these past few days - really deserves a full reread along with IJ. Kinda wishing DFW was still around as a voice in these dark days.

I'm really not reading this anymore. Sorry Pynchy. I'll stay lay down dollars that you are probably the greatest living American novelist - but I just can't bring myself to care about V at all.

Attention Swiss Goodreaders! If the US still permits its citizens free travel by spring, I might be spending some time in Switzerland in May. I'm considering bringing a synth rig if I can pick up some shows. Any of you readers know any small arts/experimental/electronic show spaces in Berne, Lucerne, Zurich I could contact? Thanks!

It never ceases to amaze me, and hearten me, how much of the world the arts redeem. They can't save anything, but they do have the power to redeem.

Nijinsky as Nietzsche's "god that can dance"

Oh hey, it almost slipped my mind because, you know, the world is disintegrating before our very eyes, but today is James Joyce's birthday. Happy birthday, Jamesy! I'm going to read some Wake - a language as of yet untainted by these times.

High society in the Belle Époque was so f-in weird. You can only really see them as some kind of zoological species.

This chapter on Cocteau and Proust's early relationship - very very good - Proust already two years deep in writing A la recherche, Cocteau the young darling of the art world - Proust's ironic chastisement of Cocteau's airy desire to be the center of that Society which he was already inscribing as the "kingdom of nothing" in his great book. Proust's letters to C are as densely written as his novel.

No doubt some critics will have issue with Arnaud's extravagances and partisanship in favor of Cocteau, but man I am enjoying this - Arnaud's thought and prose is downright elegant, and young Cocteau is endlessly fascinating.

Don't forget, I'm always making music, cuz dark times need light. Lotsa stuff over at the stuff place:
https://soundcloud.com/geoff-wilt

Something I did today:
https://soundcloud.com/geoff-wilt/dee...

This book is such perfect escapism - I'm back in the Belle Époque with the homosexual aesthete class, the decadent artists and theater crowd, Proust's salons and the enacting of strange cultural rituals, artifice in the service of enlightenment, life as a grand bizarre staging of extreme pleasures and petty snobberies, and the impending Dreyfus affair, WWI looming obliquely...

These early pages are outstandingly written/translated. I adore novels of early childhood, and the language here is certainly novelesque. No dry recitation of facts - Arnaud can craft prose!

You know what I'm gonna do this entire weekend? Read my immense Cocteau biography, read some gawdammit FICTION and NOT THINK ABOUT POLITICS! Tuning out. Just this weekend.

Got sucked in and read the intro - Arnaud is clearly a partisan on the side of "Cocteau is a genius and his detractors are fools" but the man can write - lovely and passionate so far...

This is laborious, and not exactly in a good way all the time. Often when I'm reading it I'm thinking "he sure did this a lot better in Against The Day"

Day one of Trump's presidency - march on the White House. Day two - wake up, make coffee, start reading Gramsci.

RIP William Onyeabor

https://youtu.be/k51cnVcbUAo

Listening to Boulez conduct Varese's Ionisation on headphones while watching them erect Trump's inaugural parade route, in a light rain nonetheless - feels strange to say the least.

She hangs on the western wall

Two head-nodders for ya recorded today, verily. Listen, if you feel it.
https://soundcloud.com/geoff-wilt/set...

RIP Nat Hentoff

Can one of you nice, kind, no doubt physically attractive, beautiful Goodreads librarians please add this book to the database so's I can review it? Merci.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/386335...

Looking for more artists working in the field of extreme repetition. All mediums. Thanks!