I am struck by the high value of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of one’s room opens daily….I often think that the highest destination at which a work can aim is to take on that function in someone’s life. And it seems to me that it will do it more readily if it is summary, effaced, close to formless, and if it presents nothing but facts in their purity, and no formal ideas at all.

– Paul Sietsema, Anticultural Positions 16mm film, 2009

Paul Sietsema, Anticultural Positions, 16mm (2009)

I recently encountered Sietsema’s work while in New York and found it stunning.  I have written about it in another context in connection with his deep attention to the tactility of paper.  Sietsema seems profoundly aware of the time of writing surfaces, of surface in general.  His film Figure 3 is a beautiful montage of fissures and lines within various found paginal objects.  The page represents itself through the depiction of its own worn contours.

I have not yet seen Anticultural Positions, but it is supposed to be a film of stills of the working surfaces used to make Figure 3.  It is a representation of the outside of film within a film, interspersed by a great number of blank stills.  It is intensely aware of what we cannot see, either in itself or the film it attempts to represent by way of negation.

Like Sietsema’s beautiful movie of the rough textures of his working spaces, the Bad Ideas Blog was supposed to bring into view the effaced facts of one’s work.  In place of universals, it was to show us process, variation, contingency, that things can always come out differently, the multpilicity of “simple permanent facts.”  Its aim was to lay bare the dressing and decorum of writerly life, to efface the face of books and, perhaps, to reveal some truth.

It has failed to do so.

I don’t really feel like speculating why, the reasons are either too banal or too hurtful.  It may be just too personal to experience or generate our workspaces at a communal level.  Or maybe it isn’t a bad idea at all but an untimely one or perhaps just a late one.  In any case, I have decided to cease work on it for now.  I will leave it mostly empty as a monument to itself: the failed cartography of the beyond of books, that beyond the bibliographic map of our ideas lies uncharted territory, still. I appreciate the support of those who ventured contributions.

I am still asking myself what would happen if we turned our books inside out, if we showed the cracks in our tables.