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No Sympathy, Please

By Kenneth Goldsmith

Thank you for the outpouring of sympathetic notes regarding my relegation to the Siberia of academia. But quite frankly, I’m happy where I am. I prefer the coolness and distance of academia. I feel comfortable with its glacial tempo, its seriousness, its studiousness, and the dryness of its protocols. I prefer the long shelf-life of the academic book to the person-to-person immediacy of the reading or slam.
I’m interested in less emotion, not more. The idea of a “warm” literary festival or even worse, a “cozy” residency turns my stomach. The last thing I want is to meet my readership in the flesh. I prefer email to hugs, culture to nature, air-conditioning to gentle breezes, fluorescent lighting to tropical sunsets, theft to originality, falsification to truth, the manufactured to the hand-crafted, Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron, and value artifice more than life itself.
“To only speak with the words of others, that’s what I’d like. That’s what freedom must be.” (“Ne parler qu’avec les mots des autres, c’est ce que je voudrais. Ce doit tre ca la liberté.”) – Raphael Rubinstein

2007-05-25

Comments (4)

  • On May 26, 2007 at 8:22 am kwame dawes wrote:

    Bobby Bonds?…
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  • On May 26, 2007 at 10:43 am Kenneth Goldsmith wrote:

    Gotchya, Kwame. Thanks!
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  • On May 29, 2007 at 9:43 am Das Krapital wrote:

    Where does “F for Fake” stand in your list of 20th C. art objects? If you know it well enough to talk about it, I’d like to hear your thoughts; as well, since it’s hard to find (or was, perhaps Criterion has taken it on), any way you can get it on ubu?
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  • On May 29, 2007 at 10:03 am Kenneth Goldsmith wrote:

    Das–
    I’ve only glanced at F is for Fake and found it pretty great, but haven’t had a chance to really spend time with it. It’s available on Netflix, which means it is in print, which means we can’t host it on Ubu. But there’s an amazing documentary piece on Welles on UbuWeb called “The One Man Band” from 95:
    http://www.ubu.com/film/welles.html
    made up of shards of his old films. Very sick stuff.
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Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Friday, May 25th, 2007 by Kenneth Goldsmith.

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