Betraying Gestures #42

fiction gestures, with insistence and fairness.

This morning I read a little book I bought during a few days spent in Berlin. It practically fits in the palm of my hand. It’s by Enrique Vila-Matas, a Catalonian writer who, many years ago, initiated me into a form of fiction that has since become what I look for in books. The narrative is very close to the act of writing and reading; not flattening it into a self-referential gesture, but operating in an inhabited-by-words world — one that has its own grammar, for rewriting and rereading it into a slightly different form. It is fair to say I wouldn’t be here writing Betraying Gestures if I hadn’t been an avid reader of Vila-Matas. I was so fixated on him that it wouldn’t surprise me if I had, at the time, tattooed something of him. When I was really into Jenny Holzer, I tattooed one of her sentences. I was young, and now I might have different ways of coping with fascination, or they might just be less intense, more pondered — comes with the years. If I were to have tattooed something from Vila-Matas, though, it would probably have been Portatif. Portability is one of Vila-Matas’s recurring subjects. It is the protagonist of A Brief Story of Portable Literature, if a concept can be a character. The book historiographizes a secret group of artists, the Shandys, who, in the early 20th century, gathered around practices of portability. Needless to say, they didn’t in fact exist, except in Vila-Matas’s making of them. Though moving mostly across the European continent, they meet in a city in West Africa, at the estuary of the Niger River. Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, among others, would peregrinate to this African town because of its name: Port Atif. I don’t so much speak of or read Vila-Matas anymore. But this little stunt of

the Shandys — of encountering meaning and textuality in the name of a city — was a regular part of my repertoire. It wasn’t hard to get me to tell the story I now had to leaf through the book to confirm if I remembered it right. Since then, I’ve moved on to find what I first came in touch with in Vila-Matas in other voices. However, as I move — obviously taking Betraying Gestures with me — to Catalonia (I’m currently in Barcelona, where I will be for the next ten months), upon meeting Vila-Matas’s publication titled Insistence as a Fine Art during my extraneous train trip with stopovers in Berlin and Brussels, I could not not buy it. Even though these little books by Hanuman Books are so expensive for what they are — nothing like Hanuman in the ’80s, when they were printed in India on the same presses used for prayer books, then shipped to New York to be sold at Chelsea Hotel, which is, to be fair, a story my partner told me before the press was relaunched, now printing in the UK. I had Vila-Matas and his proposed form of insistence through classical paintings with me today while wandering the streets of Barcelona, idyllically hopping from café to café. I was reading another book, Fair – The Life Art of Translation. It is by Jen Calleja. It unfolds from a fictional fair that dwells on the polysemy of the word fair, from art and book fairs to funfairs, and fairness. Between Calleja’s work and life practice as a literary translator from German to English, she grudgingly writes on the underappreciated task and profession of the translator. She fabulates her fair as a space informed by the contemporary literary scene (its unfairness, transactionality, elitism…), which she, with irony, moves towards and against. Worldmaking, one could say — a term I resist because of its implied separation from the world it derives from. I want to think of the writing of a circumstance that is informed by and constructed from what is outside, and in turn also informs and constructs it (though the same one saying worldmaking could say that worldmaking contemplates this interplay). Writing something into existence is a way to put it that I feel more comfortable with. It is what Vila-Matas and Calleja do, and what this newsletter proposes to be and do. But that is not the sole reason for bringing those two into play. Their works on insistence and translation could be enough for me to evoke them in this text. I’m re-editing In-flight, a founding project for Betraying Gestures. It is a collection of pages ripped from books, bound by the fact that each bears a scene set in flight. It is, before it is a publishing project, a reading project. I have circulated facsimiles of the original ripped pages in art book fairs and the originals in exhibition spaces. Now, I’m re-editing it — again, as the facsimiles, which now add up to fourteen. This time, however, I do not want them as individual, loose pages I’ve called flyers, but as the collection. And I want the facsimiles to have the bits of interest underlined. And a text! I wrote a text that positions In-flight in relation to translation, fiction, publishing, movement, and writing. Trying to explain the scope of my collection has already put me in a tight spot. It is so enmeshed with Betraying Gestures that I wanted an essay to address it — that reasons my insistence on it. The same need for reasoning applies now: as my posting here has grown sparse, I feel compelled to write why I do sit down to do so when I do. Mounting up the serendipitous events — or readings, in this case — that prompt me to seat myself and write a new text for Betraying Gestures. Serendipity is a Vila-Matasian idea, and this time I am doing it in his territory: Catalonia. Coming here convinced me of purchasing his book I’m now under the spell of. Insistence–repetition–reiteration brings Vila-Matas to write about Cézanne and his more than eighty paintings of a hill. It reminds me of my friend Jana’s fascination with another writer, one who dedicated his lifetime to writing, describing a hill. It defies Cézanne’s role, as put by Vila-Matas, as the most insistent of artists — though there might be a differentiation between artist and writer, a differentiation which I, trying to articulate, have decided to pose by buying a printer. Throughout these years insisting on Betraying Gestures — a project that complexes writing and publishing — I’ve counted on a number of printers: my friend’s (and also writer for Betraying Gestures) Marina Dubia’s; my mom’s; the one from the Art Academy in Copenhagen I no longer go to. With my new printer I will be printing my insistence on the project of In-flight. I’m also going to print with it the book of Dog-ears that I’ve been writing with Jana. It comprises a series of texts on dog-ears. A dog-ear is the fold we make on books, either to mark the page we stopped on or to be able to go back to a specific passage. It registers reading as gestures from the outside to its inside, and it speaks to what I do with In-flight. The writer who insisted on writing about a hill throughout his lifetime figures in one of Dog-ears’ texts.