Welcome back.
It's there's time and if anyone wants
to stay for questions or remarks,
I'd be happy to go on a little while,
As long as we have [INAUDIBLE] for a few minutes.
Otherwise you can just step in.
Sure, that's great.
[INAUDIBLE]
So, let's see [INAUDIBLE].
So, I'm thinking of Pessoa.
You said something [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
Something about him being almost [INAUDIBLE]
outside of this inability to have a love affair, what
is [INAUDIBLE].
Well, he was already there.
He spent his life really determinedly
drinking himself into oblivion.
Dying--
So, you say alcoholism?
Alcoholism, depression-- severe depression.
I mean, these are things we all have, so--
But in terms of--
[LAUGHTER]
But in terms of these multiple characters,
I mean, it sounds like--
He created an encompassing world for himself that was the--
I don't remember [INAUDIBLE],, but it was the only, finally--
real tangible reality that had--
was produced from a tremendous amount of texts.
He gave his life over to these texts
that he was hardly ever publishing.
So in some ways, with crucial differences,
he was much like some of those [INAUDIBLE] artists who--
the painting that Ashbery uses on Girls on the Run,
what's the name of that?
Darger
Yeah, Darger.
There's not too much distance, but of course, Pessoa's project
has an artistic logic that is not psychotic,
and Darger's is much more marginally disordered.
I mean I'm not good at making those decisions, exactly.
But you can feel sort of on the edge of that,
pushing the art to the edge of that.
Yeah, the edge is different that [INAUDIBLE]..
Absolutely.
I entirely-- I agree entirely, yes.
And thank God.
[LAUGHTER]
But also it's interesting, for example,
when I was reading that text of Césaire,
I was thinking how much Artaud was in that text.
And again, the edge is different from flow.
I mean, Artaud at points plunged.
And it makes some of his late texts manifestly different from
Césaire, was not plunging but was accessing that flow.
Pessoa was accessing, Darger was plunging, I think.
What about the audience?
It sounds so self-involved.
Is there a parallel to, say, outsider art?
Well, we were just talking about.
There's a-- parallel but with a vast difference.
I mean his persona is an extremely sophisticated,
extremely literal man.
He wrote also in English.
He knew French, English, Spanish, et cetera, poetry.
He was fully educated and fairly functional in the world.
He kept a job, where some outsiders also keep a job.
So his -- outsider art tends to be preliteral--
semi-preliteral.
And he isn't at all.
And so that's an important distinction.
And yet, mining a little bit of [INAUDIBLE]..
Also it doesn't have the characteristics of a certain
[INAUDIBLE] at all.
It's extremely sophisticated in its projection
of this latter day symbolist, and what
have you, [INAUDIBLE] voice, and things like that.