i am not Derek White [nor Jackson Pollock]: IDentity & REinvention in the Roman Fossil Beds ID-entities have been on my mind re[ti]cently | i dentities & RE-INvention of self | being a fish out of water will do that to you | fumbling around in a marketplace of foreign language & ritual & putting new food items into your body | IDentity [in GENiEral] is a fleShed idEA compos[t]ed of millions of idEAl ions amalGAMETEd from the acCUMulation of prior GENErations || the way in which IDentity is shaped by language was the topic of this recent article in WSJ | for example it says that Spanish & Japanese speakers don't REMember the aGents of accidental events in the way that English speakers do | sometimes when i'm walking or riding my bike & some Roman asshole in a car or motorino cuts me off or qualcosa i get frustrated because i want to say something but i don't know what or how & even if i did then i better be able to respond to their retort which here ends up being a long back & forth tennis volleying of insults bottlenecking any traffic behind | but then again what's the point? Romans have been set in their ways for 1000s of years—a bitch session placing blame in broken Italian is not gonna change anything || more than this though [what the article doesn't mention] are the associations that language triggers—all the etymological baggage lingering beneath the strings of letters or phrases | when you are acCustomed to your mother tongue you wear it like second skin & often don't stop to really look at a word or sentence | & when you learn a new language you often see things lurking that native speakers overlook in the day-to-day || i've had a few conversations here with Romans about how fossilized Italians are | «fossilizzato» they say | dogs that you can't teach new tricks | my talk of opening a taco stand here is met with derisive laughter | «Romans have no interest in eating anything but Roman food»—i've heard them say over & over | even eating food from other regions of Italy is a stretch | but i wonder if it's them saying this over & over that reinforces these tastes | it's something they are programmed to say out of stubborn pride but if you stuffed a taco in their mouth maybe they'd shut up for a second & actually swallow | it goes way beyond tacos | most Italians don't believe they can do aNYthing | not that believing you can do anything is necessarily a good trait to have—in the past switching off [not expressing] a gene for «believing you can do anything» could save your apathetic ass during times of strife | but now is different i think | Roberto Benigni's sidekick at the beginning of La Vita è Bella taught him to heed Schopenhauer's ideas of free-will & he does | it doesn't save his ass in the end but it enables him to hang on long enough to pass on this recessive gene to his son Giosué | that was 1997—now Giosué should be grown up with IDeas of his own || [video removed] the rich tradition of film aside—there doesn't seem to be much of a culture of DIY or outsider art here & it's not that anyone's stopping you from doing these things it's just that people think you need to be qualified in some way or have the proper credentials from some accredited institution | the only thing keeping Italians from trying anything new is this thinking that they can't | or maybe that's me being a simpleminded & naïve outsider weaned on Schopenhauer | from my outsider p.o.v. this fossilized turf is a fertile breeding ground for REinvention ||
& although the language he uses is fairly straight-forward narrative he often alludes to more than what's on the surFACE which given the CIRcumstances [hanging around writer- & movie-types in LA] is appropriate | e.g. this in the hot tub with some hotshot film critic:
...making your head sPin into a recursive black hole of self-referential identity loss—a bubbling hoTTUB whose bubbles are «quotation marks» & then they all pop leaving an aftermath of chlorinated & botoxed STAGnation || speaking of hot tubs did you know taking a sauna could be a competitive sport? | that is until Vladimir Ladyzhenskiy got the lifetime achievement Darwin award & ruined it for the rest of us | & in case you're wondering about the «quotation marks» i've been using lately that's the way they roll here & i like it | i saw them in a newspaper when we were visiting Rome last December & it stuck | grammar & punctuation are trivial things to fixate on & for that matter the same can be said of language—these are just letters strung together into words & words strung together into sentences & sentences strung together into i don't know what | [here] it is language trying to express what it is other attempts at language induced in me [whoever that is] when it's easier to just quote the source:
get it? Haskell does | i'm not John Haskell but sometimes the whole point of reading is to not be yourself & get absorbed in someone else's head for a spell | i also read Haskell's I Am Not Jackson Pollock which is a collection of stories that continue his obsession with identity & celebrities—not limited to: { Jackson Pollock | Janet Leigh | Ganesha | Joan of Arc | Aristotle | Bashō | Keats | Laika the dog | you name it } | he draws from & rehashes old movies & books & historical records in Marksonian fashion—mining them for their subtextual implications | it's a contemplative circus sideshow complete with Topsy the killer Coney Island elephant | time after time in his collection we encounter artists that lose themselves for their art whether it be actors or painters or poets || «The Faces of Joan of Arc» is not so much about Joan of Arc as it is about Renée Falconetti's role as Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc & what Falconetti did to get into character—the pain she inflicted on herself to get an idea of how Joan of Arc felt || [video removed] & now i know how Morissey felt when he sung «now i know how Joan of Arc felt» & i'm wondering if the song is really about Falconetti?
though i didn't realize he says walkman—that changes everything considering Falconetti died in 1946 & Joan of Arc died well before that so perhaps he is talking about Milla Jovovich in Luc Besson's 1999 Joan of Arc remake [The Messenger] || i think it's safe to say Morissey had a thing for dead celebrities & historical figures | the Bigmouth single had a photograph of James Dean on the cover | & before The Smiths were formed Morissey wrote a book called James Dean Is Not Dead || sometimes i am overwhelmed by how short life is | you could spend a lifetime digesting the works of one other human being—yet alone the cumulative sum || using known historical figures in your fiction might be a crutch but it's also convenient—why bother to develop fictional characters when there's so many ones out there in the public domain that people can relate too already? | rather than wasting pages developing characters Haskell digs deeper into what we already know | in «Narrow Road» he proclaims that «The poet has no identity.» or rather Haskell has Keats say this [to his true love Fanny Brawne] as a justification as to why for Keats true love [the realization of] is unobtainable & if Fanny were to kiss him she'd only discover he wasn't her prince after all or at least this was his fear | again—people not being who you think they are or even who they think they are—you starting to see a pattern here?
anyhow i had a drink with Haskell then we got dinner in Piazza Farnese | John [or Jack Haskell—the narrator in Out of My Skin] was here for some sort of artist residency up in Umbria & he wanted to see some of Rome before he went back to Brooklyn | we talked about his books some & he he told me that American Purgatorio was the one i should've read | unfortunately i didn't bring that one with me | some others met us after including some guy who spoke 8 languages & looked exactly like the French actor Dominique Pinon & more & more Romans & mojitos wedged themselves between me & Jack/John & then he hopped on his rented motorino & was off & that's the last i saw of him | i didn't take any photos to document the event though i did capture this shot of the stylin' NY Tyrant who was visiting a few days before: Giancarlo Ditrapano could be considered a celebrity in his own right | someone should write a book about him | or his bulldog | though he already writes about himself not needing to be something other than what he is [channeling the spirit of Ignatius T. Reilly] || the only stuff i can read & write these days is narrative fiction | it is the only believable form though it is only interesting if you lie or your life is interesting enough | Gian is one of those that doesn't need to lie to be interesting | problem is he is too busy living to write about it | i myself need to lie | i am not a NY Tyrant |
things get stranger & the pace picks up as the narrator is accompanied by a suspicious yet emotionless business associate [Zhang Xiangzhi] who is always polite but doesn't let the narrator in on the secret | & the narrator doesn't bother to ask questions | his interests lie more in a girl Qi Li whom he almost has an affair with in the bathroom of a train bound for Beijing but they are interrupted by his cell phone ringing [with his girlfriend Marie on the other end back in Paris] || in the second half of the book he is trying to make it to the island of Elba of all places [the island Napoleon was exiled to off the coast of Italy—that i'm now inspired to visit] in time for Marie's father's funeral & to reconcile the growing distance between them || whereas in Out of my Skin the escape mechanism is impersonation—the escape mechanism in Running Away is [as the title would suggest] travel | the jet-lagged narrator loses himself by going to China & allowing himself to be sucked into a mysterious underworld that is so foreign to him that he forgets who he is | here's a sentence from the moment he is snapped out of it:
when i read Toussaint's book j was traveling in Kenya & Ethiopia so maybe i was susceptible to the otherwise cheap emotion of his writing | i am not Jean-Philippe Toussaint | i am not Kevin Bacon's stand-in |
Italy could use some bands like this | the time is ripe for it | & while we're talking about the Avengers & shedding Amerikanism there's this other number where Penelope twists JFK's words around: «ask not what you can do for your country / but what your country's been doing to you»: & whenever i think of the strung-together word combination «i will not» i will forever think of PJ Harvey [Pig Will Not] | she owns it: but i am not PJ Harvey | & i also made a new series of collages [i guess you could call them that—2 of them i already showed above] while dwelling on these concepts of IDentity & REinvention & what [i am] not | materials & elements used include: { charcoal | ink | watercolors | scotch tape | barcodes | found postcards & letters | stencils | dead Kindle rubbings | 1 dead fetal bird | chicken foot prints | my fingerprints | credit card frottage | a hex wrench [also used to fix flat tires] | discarded food packaging | photos from various natural history museums | photos from Ellis Island | tinfoil | residual text from: { chapter 5 of my own \∀/RK Côd∃X | Codice Tributario dell'Africa Italiana | Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One by Nietzsche } } click on the images to see in more detail | if you're interested in purchasing any they are $150 [includes INTL shipping] | more on my new «art» page [although i am not an «artist»] | you could say these are what i am at the moment | or not || |