a mound of space

Robert Walser

Writing and making art while under the confluence

A satellite photo graphic with text labeling the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers and two confluences, one at the mouth of the Illinois River and the other at the mouth of the Missouri River.

Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City.

This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.

I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.

He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as  professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In “The Chatter of the Soul,” he elaborates: (more…)

 


Parallel marginalia: Wölfli and Walser

adolf wolfli robert walser composite

Sam “Golden Rule” Jones writes and publishes several excellent blogs, including, Wandering with Robert Walser, “A project dedicated to Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956)”, a great writer I only recently discovered.

The fact that Robert Walser was Swiss, ended up in an insane asylum, and wrote stories and articles in a fantastically small microscript handwriting, put me in mind of Adolf Wölfli. Above is a side-by-side comparison of a famous Wölfli drawing (beating Warhol to Campbell’s Soup by four decades or so) with in image of Walser’s (described below) that I cribbed from Sam’s Flickr set of Walser images (apologies).

Here is Sam’s description of the Walser image: (more…)

 


Jay Jurisich A Mound of Space

Jay Jurisich