Category Archives: Literature

Anatomy of a soundtrack: the Brothers’ Quay “Stille Nacht III 0

Lis­ten­ing to the sound­track from the Broth­ers’ Quay Stille Nacht III (Tales from Vienna Woods), the first thing we notice is that it’s not a sound­track by Leszek Jankowski, who has com­posed the music for many of the Quays’ best-known films. Rather, it is a sound col­lage appar­ently cre­ated by the Quays them­selves, as the cred­its at the end of the film are fictitious.

Reading “A Humument” – the characters 0

It is tempt­ing, given the nature of A Humu­ment, to read the tex­tual ele­ments of the work as so many unre­lated orac­u­lar or apho­ris­tic state­ments. To do so, how­ever, is to deny the nar­ra­tive qual­i­ties of the work and ignore the fact that a story is being told.

Windmills of the mind 0

“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” is a (fic­tional) schol­arly homage to a (equally fic­tional) early-20th cen­tury French neo-Symbolist poet whose crown­ing lit­er­ary achieve­ment was to write, some 300 years after the fact and for no appar­ent rea­son, Don Quixote.

Notes on the loop 0

The loop fas­ci­nates, whether as idea, object, or aes­thetic device. It spurs the mind on, sends it spin­ning, causes it to won­der: will this ever end? Tech­ni­cally, it shouldn’t, because the loop = infin­ity (whose sym­bol – ∞ – is itself a loop).

Reading “A Humument” – framing devices 0

A Humu­ment fea­tures a num­ber of fram­ing devices that, in addi­tion to what­ever nar­ra­tive role they may play, fur­ther empha­size the self-reflexive char­ac­ter of the book. Unsur­pris­ingly per­haps given the nature of this work, among the most com­mon are the (book) page, the paint­ing, and the window.

Framing Devices gallery 0

This gallery con­tains con­tains selected pages from A Humu­ment by Tom Phillips.

Reading “A Humument,” pp. 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, & 11 0

Over the course of the open­ing pages A Humu­ment is given many descrip­tive monikers, and each of them sheds a bit of light on the sundry qual­i­ties the book pos­sesses, the method with which it was cre­ated, and its dual nature as both an inter­tex­tual and inter­me­dia work.

Reading “A Humument,” page 1 0

The first page of Tom Phillips’ A Humu­ment is emblem­atic of the entire work. Tex­tu­ally and graph­i­cally it touches on some of the book’s cen­tral con­cerns and pro­vides clues to cer­tain of its mysteries.

Leopards in the Temple 0

Kafka’s para­ble of leop­ards in the tem­ple has always struck me as a per­fect alle­gory of the avant-garde in that it points out the tru­ism that in art the trans­gres­sive is ulti­mately absorbed into the canon.