On puddings, suns and other circles
This month's desk movements include fountains shaped like genitals, candy-apple-red sports cars, and plums in the pudding.
Hoi!
You’re reading Easy Puddings, a newsletter named after a Bernadette Mayer poem from The Golden Book of Words (1978). She opens: “I think I will never see / easy puddings in a tree.”
With this line, she flips Joyce Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree” on its head, trading his divine (dare I say, pompous?) poetics for the small, the strange, and the strenuous.
Poems as puddings. I like that image. Writing doesn’t grow on trees—not even easy writing. Easy Puddings is about what goes into making things, borrowing things, mixing things; about reading, writing, and other desk movements.
I chopped the e-mail up into three parts: 1) things I thought about at my desk, 2) things others have thought about at their desks and 3) a diptych as dessert. Easy.
From my desk
Words that found their way onto the page.
As an introduction to the screening of Chris Marker’s essay film Sans Soleil (1983) at Museum De Pont, I wrote and read On Sunless and Sun-babies. It was an attempt to connect Marker’s strange film to Tino Sehgal’s constructed situation Thisyouiiyou (2023-2025), which is still on show at De Pont. The screening was curated by the lovely team at Pop Up Cinema.
On Sunless and Sun-babies was not an easy pudding. Both artists try to escape the realm of words, using collage and choreography as ways to say things without saying them. If anything, their works are about what happens when we stop seeing things; in those sunless spaces where a lived moment becomes memory.
After spending time in both art pieces, I learned that such spaces can be filled with things that quicken the heart. They prompted me to write about ball gowns, sun flowers, penis-shaped fountains, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Sounds fun? → Read the full essay here.
From other desks
Words that reached me from other rooms.
John Updike wrote, “Writing is a thoroughly shady affair.” Trapped in some shady affairs of my own making, I decided to chase sun tales across the many open tabs and pages I live in. I stumbled upon Aesop’s fable The Marriage of the Sun, about frogs lamenting the arrival of a second sun—something I had never considered before, but now do. I opened Bruno Munari’s Drawing the Sun, while scribbling some of my own in the margins. I think he would have liked them. I read an old interview with David Hockney about his move from the UK to LA: "I'm a bit like van Gogh. He's a northerner who went to the sun. He thought there was more joy in the sun, and I tend to think that as well." He was dressed in gold cuffed corduroys, a yellow cardigan, and a yellow shirt while driving his candy-apple-red Mercedes sports car. He isn’t the only painter who loves yellow. While reading the biography of J.M.W. Turner, I learned that the self-proclaimed painter of light used to show up to parties wearing yellow stockings. As a fellow northerner, my closet is devoid of yellow stockings, corduroys, shirts, and cardigans; maybe this is a problem. Or maybe I’m in need of a candy-apple-red sports car to join the chase. I don’t have one, so I opened a Reddit thread instead to look at a scenic photo of Jersey Shore’s Vinny and Pauly. This reminded me: always watch the sunset with a friend. It might last a lifetime.
Diptych
Two images that found each other across my desktop.
Thank you for reading! As always, the plums are in the pudding, I hope you found some.
Oh, and speaking of plums, the fourth issue of Transcript (the magazine I made with Daniël van der Winden) is out now, and you can order it (and other issues) here!
Groetjes,
Iris