How Long Is the Present by Fredman Stephen; Antin David;

Author:Fredman, Stephen; Antin, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2014-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

ive called this talk

tuning

and you probably have no very good idea of what im going to talk about and it gave me a certain freedom from expectation as it gave it to you for it is part of my generosity and self indulgence simultaneously that what i will take for myself i will allow to others which seems only fair

now i gave a title to this piece long before coming here and if the title i gave was not intended to offer you a very precise image of what i was going to do and if you see me fiddling with this tape recorder its mainly because i have no very precise image of what im going to say though i have a considerable notion of the terrain into which i tend to move and the only way im going to find out whether it was worth doing or not is when i hear what ive got which has been my way of entrapping myself and the reason ive chosen to entrap myself rather than to prepare in advance a precise set of utterances has been that i felt myself ive written things before this in the natural vacuum that is the artificial hermetic closet that literature has been in for some time and the problem for me is in the closet confronting a typewriter and no person so that for me literature defined as literature has no urgency it has no need of address there are too many things no there are not too many things there are only a few things you may want to talk about but there are too many ways you could talk about them and no urgency in which way you choose to talk about them there are too many ways to proceed too many possibilities for making well crafted objects none of which seem particularly necessary

i dont think im unique in feeling the absence of urgency in constructing a literary object its in fact i think a fairly recent aberration the existence of literature conceived in a tight framework there is some sense of urgency out there a passing police car they have an audience they have an audience and a need and they may respond to it badly but they have their sense of urgency the most exotic example i can think of and the most striking example i can think of which i have thought about recently and which is not something i want to spend a great deal of time thinking about here is a kind of post napoleonic commitment to producing an amazingly important object balzac say

i dont really want to talk about balzac except that hes an example of incredible arrogance and ambition with nothing to say a man goes into a closet in order to say it a half baked kid decides to be a great writer to be like napoleon to take over the empire of letters what would he do? whatever was going to be

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