It’s Proust month! For the past seven years, I have read a volume of Proust every January, which means I am now on the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Time Regained (also translated as Finding Time Again). I invite others to join me, reading whatever volume they happen to be on, or even want to read. I like the idea of an out-of-synch reading group, a somewhat anarchic institution, without regard to any individual chronology, where everyone reads from the same book at the same time every year, but without definite knowledge of each other or even where in the tome other readers are, a kind of open secret. Secondly, the project of reading one volume a year of a künstlerroman about memory, well, lends itself to the book’s major themes. One’s own experience of reading becomes rather Proustian. I’ve vowed to continue reareading a volume every year as long as I’m able to read. And there’s something about this calendar-based structure that works so well with the book. Without having finished the seventh volume, I’m already excited to begin Swann’s Way again next January.
About the blog:
The online presence of author and critic Aaron Peck.
About the author:
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific (in collaboration with artists Adam Harrison and Dominic Osterried).
Excerpts from a novel-in-progress, The Bad Arts, have appeared in The Capilano Review, Joyland, Matrix Magazine, and West Coast Line.
Reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Artforum, Art Agenda, Art Papers, bookforum.com, Canadian Art, Foam, Fillip, La Fabrica's Matador, and 01 Magazine, and he has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs.
In 2012, he was invited to participate as a "writer-in-residence" at Documenta 13.
He also teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design where, in 2011, he won the Ian Wallace Excellence In Teaching Award. He lives in Vancouver, BC.
Buy his books here:
The first one is most easily ordered through your local bookstore, if you live in Canada, or, from elsewhere, online via amazon's Canadian site, amazon.ca:
http://www.amazon.ca/Bewilderments-Bernard-Willis-Aaron-Peck/dp/189714122X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223600178&sr=8-1
http://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/40
Follow on Twitter for links to reviews and articles: http://twitter.com/peck_aaron Any of Them
Watching this video again for the first time since probably 1993, I was surprised by how awesomely weird it is. I mean, even before the “Buggin Out” section starts, they’re playing with the frame of the camera. Example: they’re filmed walking along the East River interspersed with a shot of Q-Tip rapping over top of a miniature cut-out of the NYC skyline. Oh and it ends with some a cappella freestyling.
I’ve interviewed my longtime friend — and recently, publisher — Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio for 01 Magazine. I conducted it back in June, before his book tour, so it refers to something that’s already happened.
Novelist Teju Cole is using his twitter page to write faits divers, a la Félix Fénéon, based on Lagos newspapers. Cole calls them “small fates,” or “remixed” news reports. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a Fénéon-inspired twitter feed, but it’s definitely the most pointed and nuanced.
A while ago on this page, which I normally use as an archive of events, etc., relating to my various literary endeavors, I made a comment about not being the biggest fan of Tony Judt. At the time, it seemed everyone from Momus to the NYRB was fawning over him. I brushed him off, finding the numerous excerpts from his autobiography in NYRB tedious. Man was I wrong! The setup: I’ve been in a reading group with my friends Peter and Meredith for about five years. We call ourselves the “Spinoza Club” as a result of reading Ethics our the first year together. We read mostly tomes: Origins of Totalitarianism, Pursuit of the Millennium, or Dark Back of Time. The books we decide to read arise during dinner conversation. We get together to eat dinner, something that used to happen monthly, and we begin talking about what we’re currently reading. That leads us to other topics, and finally someone says (quite often Peter), we should read “_______”. His most recent suggestion — which he had, in fact, already started himself! — was Judt’s Postwar, an eight hundred page history of postwar Europe. As I always like taking the opportunity to change my mind, I thought that would be great. I’m about a hundred pages in and — wow — I’m enjoying it so much I felt not the need to say I like it publicly (because I wouldn’t bother with that), but to say that I like it so much I have to take back whatever unsubstantiated public dismissal I made earlier. Ha! So far I’d put it up there with books like Origins, Pursuit and Robert Caro’s Power Broker as necessary sociohistorical books.
Ha! Both my publishers in an unlikely (legal) collaboration. I wonder whose copy it is — and what happened to the original cover of this Pedlar Press edition. Too much beach, I hope. Must ask Keith or Kathy at PS Vancouver about this…
Here’s something that surprised us at PS Vancouver’s UNIT/PITT storefront residency yesterday — a request to re-bind an original (and inscribed!) Pedlar Press edition of Aaron Peck’s The Bewilderments Of Bernard Willis. Thanks to Stephanie for bringing it in.
Pictures from my reading at the final What the Heck Fest in Anacortes, Washington, courtesy of Kalin Harvey. I read in the Croatian Cultural Center instead of Causland Park, because of weather. To Bad Catholics played afterward, and they were awesome. The final image is of Matthew Stadler and I at the Publication Studio table. Calvin Johnson listened with rapt attention!
I love that by default the nomenclature of What the Heck’s website has listed me as a “band.” I’ll be reading from Letters to the Pacific in Causland Park tomorrow, just after Nick Krgovich’s side-project To Bad Catholics play.
