Arte dello squallore, arte parassita, della mortificazione. Superficie della desolazione, superficie ottusa.
Un’arte repulsiva che non rappresenta niente. Arte repressa, come i paesi dove non c’è arte. Arte che toglie, arte che schiaccia, arte livida, arte squallida, uno squallore che è solo dell’arte. Squallore delle cose senz’arte, arte che asporta, arte che rende duro l’occhio e il pensiero.
Un’arte immobile, vischiosa, sfiancata.
Grigiume, nerume che va nel giallume.
Massa di idee tritate, di oggetti triturati, di significati maciullati, macerati, ammollati e compressi.

from Michelangelo Pistoletto's Poetica dura (drawn to my attention by Mithridates in an email)

sweetness & light

Mithridates Agonistes.

disparition

He tried to show what it was like to read a book and what the thinking mind looked like in the act of writing.

He wrote compellingly about effort, about difficulty, about struggle, about failure, about incoherency, about instability, tension, waste, self-consciousness, incompleteness, process . . .


Mithridates on the critic Richard Poirier, who has just died.

Bloggrrrrrrrrr

Back in the dawn of time a young writer started a blog under the pseudonym Mithridates. I actually know who he is (we had already exchanged e-mails), but in my blog I took care not to blow his cover. Time passed time passed time passed and I suddenly noticed that Mith's posts on his blog were now being posted under the name Mifune. Since I was linking to the blog the potential for confusion was large. I enquired, and was told that Blogger was to blame: he had tried to relaunch the blog and been forced to assume a new identity. OK, OK, OK.... the blog has apparently been rerelaunched. Inspired by the wars between Britannia Pizza & Pasta and Britannia Pizza & Chicken, he is now operating under the new name of Mithirdates. And he has posted various clips from YouTube, including several of Mishima and one of the late, great Frank O'Hara, here.

abeetz

The blogger formerly known as Mithridates, formerly resident in Brooklyn, toughs it out in the culinary desert that is Chicago and describes the adventures of a younger self as a torcher of pizza, here

Native Son

I don't know anyone who has read Gilbert Sorrentino.

This is not exactly true.

A college professor introduced me to Sorrentino's work when I was a sophomore.

I was always looking for avant-garde fiction. I liked fiction that was formally interesting. I didn't want Richard Ford stories, middle age men going through divorce, amorphous stories about boring middle class life, etc. I didn't want clogged, embarrassing, senseless Updikean prose, with his "newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva." I wanted a sophisticated novelist for once. An intelligent novelist.

Sorrentino's right up your alley, my prof says.

I read Aberration of Starlight, Red the Fiend, The Imaginative Quality of Actual Things, Mulligan Stew, and Blue Pastoral over Christmas break.

...

Mithridates, who is, like Sorrentino, from Bay Ridge, speaks of a writer visiting GS in Bay Ridge and goes on (I am dropping the italics to preserve the italics of the original)

But the moving thing had to do with his being from Bay Ridge. I thought native son? How did I not pick up on this until now? How did I not know he was from Bay Ridge? The heartbreaking thing isn't what this writer says about Bay Ridge, but simply that Sorrentino was from Bay Ridge at all. Because Bay Ridge is my hometown. I used to bowl at Leemark Lanes (which became Mark Lanes and then went out of business). I eat regularly at Bridgeview - natives drop the Diner - most recently with George. I went to high school there, lived there for twenty-three years. (Not the diner, although, OK, sure: I went to high school at Bridgeview Diner and lived there for twenty-three years.)

I wondered what it was about being from Bay Ridge that makes Sorrentino's artistic needs so similar to my own:

In his 1983 literary credo "Genetic Coding," Sorrentino states, "my own artistic necessities . . . are: an obsessive concern with formal structure, a dislike of the replication of experience, a love of digression and embroidery, a great pleasure in false or ambiguous information, a desire to invent problems that only the invention of new forms can solve, and a joy in making mountains out of molehills." Elsewhere he refers to "the joyous heresy that will not go away . . . that heresy [that] simply states: form determines content."

Was it the faux marble and silver mirrors that gave me the same artistic needs as Sorrentino?

[the whole post here]

here we go gathering nuts and may

I'm getting to the point where I'd rather castrate myself than talk to H. We work together at the tutoring center...

Mithridates brings sweetness and light to his fellow man.

mith antagonizes

I thought: I need to start buying cool art magazines so I look more attractive to people on trains.
I thought: But 7 pounds? That's roughly, what, 400 dollars about?
I thought: No one will ever think you're anybody if you're commuting with a beat-up library copy of Kate Hamburger's The Logic of Literature (by my lights an unjustly neglected classic of phenomenological literary theory).
I thought: Why don't you just read it in the station and put it back on the shelf?
I thought: How do you expect to be discovered if you're always exuding this image of nerdiness, second-handedness, a ragman picking through shelves and putting things back? This isn't about expanding your knowledge; it's about showing pizazz.
I thought: OK, let's compromise. We'll buy the magazine, read it -- very publicly -- and then see if we can return it.
I thought: This is pathetic, I'm not talking to you anymore.


here

Someone is WRONG

Mithridates on Fredric Jameson on pornography, The Godfather, Jaws, how much time have you got? (And this is just Part I)

SGTD

I got an e-mail a few days ago from Mithridates. He said if Tender Only to One was what he thought it was it should go public because it might help people who were close to the edge.

Also an e-mail from someone whose son had read The Last Samurai many times many years ago.

Also an e-mail from Hassan Abudu, who in the midst of jobhunting has grappled with PHP and MYSQL and produced a map for the website where readers can mark their location.

Also many e-mails from Mark Greif of n+1, who is seeing Your Name Here through the last stages before the magazine goes to print.

Among others.

So I have been discussing vexed questions by e-mail. Is it kosher to talk about bad things people do when one is fresh from a psychiatric ward, I say, citing the example of X. Mith: Yes, you should definitely use this. ...  Check with Rawls; I'm sure of it!!! It's in the chapter called "Fuck Him": Rawls uses Grotius in a really
interesting way there....

And what would be good headings for the map app, says Hassan. What would make speech bubbles less lame? What would make the forms look good? And what about a shopping cart for the website?

I was not sure this was such a good idea; there are more stories, yes, but they are on hard drives on three or four laptops, or a pile of plastic folders somewhere, and they would have to be cleaned up, and in short this looked like a good way not to finish a book.

I then remembered the website I had asked my first webdesigner to use as a model 3 years ago. Haunch of Venison. I thought, Yes, maybe we could pirate the design of the HOV website for the map page. So I had a look, and I suddenly realised that if I could have a shopping basket like the HOV shopping basket it would be worth digging up 5 stories to have something to put in it. I passed this on to HA, who writes:


laaaaaaaa ilaha illallah...  You know, when I first read you'd consider digging through terabytes of data and kilograms of paper to get 5 short stories together just so you could have an online store like this HoV thing, you had me wondering what sort of shopping basket could be that cool, I mean, it's just a freaking shopping basket, anyway, it's also just a webpage, how bad could it be.  Sweet Jesus and Mary Poppins  I will never doubt again. Next time I will show Faith! Holy fucking cow, where on earth did you find that thing? How am I also going to fully communicate the full scale and magnitude of my awe, and of course my newfound respect for web designers who take pride in their work, I mean, who'd ever think to do that to a freaking *shopping basket*, canonically the shittiest part of any website?!  OK, now I see where the bar has been all along, I see I'm going to have to step it up a notch now. *stretches fingers*
Which may sound irrelevant, or anyway irrelevant to thoughts of suicide, but the thing is, I've spent the last 12 years working on books where the look of the page was essential to the narrative. (I can't stand to look at the Greek and Japanese in The Last Samurai; I remember the way this was meant to look on the page, I think of the designers who fought successfully to achieve something amateurish, I don't want to think about it.)   I told agents: I want to work with an editor who's interested in design, who'll let me work with a designer, who's interested in the technical side, and they all said: You're never gonna get that, you're wasting your time, you'll go barmy if you try, no editor is interested in that, you'll drive yourself mad.  My website was supposed to achieve all the things I was told No Publisher Will Allow in books, so I hired a designer in Berlin 3 years ago and asked for something like the Haunch of Venison site, only with Jim Rose's kanji stroke diagrams, and No Webdesigner Will Allow.

Spolsky's criterion for good hires is Smart, Gets Things Done. It's strange to stumble across people who are SGTD not by sending out manuscripts, not by recruitment, not by paying people, but just by swapping e-mails with people who happened to read a book. If I'd been dealing with people like Mith and Hassan for the last 12 years I would have spent the time writing and publishing books, what larks. Meanwhile Hassan is full of ideas:

Oh, but I have reworked the database design so that a social networking book
exchange webapp should just fall into place naturally. ... What I changed: the user data we'll now be able to store when I'm done are: name, password, town, country, picture, books you own, books you desire, and an message section where you can send and receive messages. Anything else come to mind?

I could say more, much more, but I am meeting someone in Rosenthalerplatz in 15 minutes, so I am already late.  The beta of the map app is here:

http://www.helendewitt.com/secondhand/newusers.php

All the best writers write at 3.21 am

Unaccustomed to public speaking, Mithridates rashly offers to speak at an academic conference,

Having no idea that conference papers generally require time, effort. Prior excogitation, pen-to-paper, that sort of thing: ideas, in short, Eden-new to our man. Thinking You just go up there. Thinking You just go up there and you talk and then you stop talking and you sit down again, 's all.

discovers his mistake

Well, inaugural conference commences, first round of talks goes by, day before our hero's coming out, and he's bathroom-bound, trying mightily (and failing the same) to prevent achy innards from spilling onto the linoleum.

Thinking Sweet suffering Iesus. I'll be whipped howling from the village by these people. Laugh in my face, berate me for wasting their time.

Craven guts feebly cradled, jellied legs ajitter.

Friends provide any succor?

Hey, M., I say, what's your spiel for domani's powwow?

M. says: I'm talking about eunuch narratives. Hacked and chiselled at the thing for two months. Think it's about ready. Rerererevisions tonight of course. And you too I guess?

He's assured it'll be worth his nickel.

Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick.

and writes a Marksonian post on a) the agony and b) the ecstasy of hearing David Markson talk at the Strand. All here

Phallicity of the Ruling Classes

These are the penises I saw today.

Small, nestled in turtleneck of skin atop testicles like a mother bird guarding speckled eggs.
Uncircumcised, gray-haired, patient, wise.
Wagging, confident, querulous.
Purple.
An admirably glossy-headed & thickly venous truncheon beneath military crewcut.

...on Mithridates' Night Hauling