eugene

squid scribomania

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buon viaggio signore mari!

two titans of DIY industry, derek of calamari and adam of publishing genius, recently posted about the nature of small press economies here and here. thinking about accounting may be my least favorite activity, but one’s relationship to the means (and costs) of production are — if these accounts are typical examples — never far from a small publisher’s mind:

i guess i’m just TIREd of THinking about all these businessy things | at some point you just have to do what you do naturally & if people buy it great & if they don’t fuck ’em | as a consumer you can spend all the time in the world contemplating the footprint of every piece of fruit you buy at your local market but at the end of the day what sells it [for repeat customers anyway] & makes it all worth it is the TASTE of the fruit itself | i’d rather concentrate my efforts on making tasty book & art objects that are true to their nature [with no additives or artIFIcial flavors] & not worry about the ugly business of marketing & selling the fruit | maybe that makes me a bad «publisher» i don’t know | this whole circle-jerk business of people promoting & selling themselves or their wares or their «friends» is what really gets me down about this book business | it’d behoove me to buy into all it but honestly i don’t see how most people live with themselves | i’d rather fail gracefully than succeed using such tactics | even measuring «success» by the number of BOOKs sold doesn’t make sense to me | Justin Taylor & his HTMLGiant entourage are imploring everyone to buy his new book so it will make the NY Times Bestseller list | that seems about a silly a reason to buy a book as i can think of | they say it will be good for him & the comMunity of independent presses & writers or some such thing but ¿will it really make us better writers? ¿will it really make for better LITerature? it’s a filthy business this trying to wag the dog with it’s tail.

The rest of derek’s post here.

i tend to agree with him but on the other hand, in terms of us versus them or dichotomies of complicity versus subversion — i’ve always taken this wisdom from creeley to heart:

Something lost in trying to kick against the pricks unless the vision, call it, is complete, and secures itself in its own inviolability. Blake says, I am Socrates. John said that in the act of non-adaptation to the demands of an economic system may lie a commitment to the system’s forms far more destructive an involvement than any simple-minded conformity. But such a long and dull sentence it had to seem.

From Creeley’s THE ISLAND.

for what it’s worth, i think ellipsis may look to getting non-profit status some nearfuture day. at least i keep debating that move… even while i dislike the idea of a non-self-sustaining operation and of trying to find handouts, here’s why i think i’ll do it: i don’t necessarily think acts of self-promotion like taylor’s are inherently base (though i admit it turns me off), but i think it’s a tendency or talent (or gluttony) unrelated to that of writing (or if it is related, it seems more negatively correlated than anything else.)

if you are the shepherd of someone else’s book into the world however, some kind of promotion seems to be part of the responsibility. or not. in any case the ellipsis press advertising and distribution plan — such as it is, what a laugh — has been to put up notice in a minimum number of places. enough so that if you were a seeking reader not of an escapist ride but of literary art  (of which i estimate there are about 1,000-5,000 such seekers extant in the u s of a), you’d be able to find ellipsis titles. determining that minimum placement hasn’t been easy, might be a higher bar than i realized, and could require more funds than i’m willing to fork over (thus the non-profit deliberating).  …which reminds me once again of this quote from Scott Walker formerly of Graywolf (which might seem like self-back-patting but is frankly more like a self-warning) :

Starting a small publishing company takes an angel’s combination of idealism, passion, unreasonableness, innocence, naiveté and blind obedience to an inner voice telling you to go heart- and head-long into something utterly likely to fail. It would in fact be a kindness if the venture failed, because success requires so much time and intellectual and emotional energy that it squeezes to death every last healthy impulse you had to start with.

Adriane Tomine New Yorker Cover

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PS from a profile of greywolf here:

[Graywolf Press director and publisher Fiona McCrae] delights in the opportunity to snatch up books a major publisher might ignore and says a Graywolf book can succeed by selling only a few thousand copies. “When we’re not having to pay enormous overhead or debt for an acquisition or that kind of thing, the numbers we need for a book to do well are much smaller. From Faber I learned, rightly or wrongly, that it’s not that books never make money, but that it takes time. Years after it was published, T.S. Eliot’s [Old Possum’s Book of Practical] Cats was bringing in significant revenue. I saw the way publishing and art intersect. The market goes for something that’s done well before, but the most difficult thing is something that hasn’t done well before. When you’ve got this nonprofit structure, you can stick more with the art side. If it’s working artistically, we’ll make the numbers work.”

read the rest of the greywolf press profile at: http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/628801

more sermon for the choir

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samuel delany in a nice interview in the latest LOCUS:

“As my agent … says, this is the worst time for American writing in general, that anyone has ever seen. One of the ‘Serious Young Writers’ showed me a rejection letter from a major publisher that said, ‘Your book is much too well-written for us to publish.’ Those were the words! Literary publishing has changed entirely in the last 25 years.”

“When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, ‘What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.’ They want nothing to do with ‘good writing.’ These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they’re willing to say, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not what we’re interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.’

“This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It’s not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we’re talking about ‘commercial’ versus ‘art’ publishing, we’re using a leftover vocabulary. We’re still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses.”

Read more excerpts from the interview here. Full interview in the March 2010 issue.

NOT BLESSED by harold abramowitz

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a story told twenty-eight times (once each for all the days of february), harold abramowitz’s project of memoir as only one memory infinitely repeating and retold is interesting… but even more interesting, more mysterious — and certainly constructing a delicate and beautiful linguistic hermitage — are each chapter’s introductory flourishes of direct address. these seem to situate the text’s ambitions but end up just dancing (which could amount to the same thing) and demonstrate a rare control somewhat reminiscent of blanchot. here are a few examples:

And it is high time I made myself more clear. Forgive me for having been, thus far, obscure. In fact, I did not mean to lie. In fact, I meant to do the opposite. I mean always to tell the truth. It’s just that your line of questioning has been excellent and has allowed me an opportunity to reflect on the past, to remember that there are many different ways of viewing the past. Indeed, I have come to realize, yet again, that certain principles need constant restating in order to be understood. For instance, in violation of the law. Or how certain acts of indecency were, at first, construed. Hence, the page turns. The story continues. If even only in outline. Why, the mere mention of it causes me to shudder. But if one carefully studies the footnotes. And every word was an act, or rather, a movement towards persuasion. Rather put together, don’t you think? But let me put it to you still more clearly… (p. 36)

And the question quickly came to haunt him. The color of his umbrella against the sky. Or, its outline, so to speak. Or even a potion, or a serum, or some other kind of cure. In fact, a fixation on creating something perfect. A perfect day. The memory of which was just out of reach. It was spring and it was raining. The mockingbird sang. A beautiful day, nonetheless. There was an electricity in the air that reminded him of the time before the war. Flags and banners. The platform. Trucks in the streets with loudspeakers. He had managed to get everything he’d wanted then. And there was a buzz in the air. One question remained, however. And things were very different from that point on… (p. 70).

Eventually every mystery is solved. But without narration. And without a specific voice to guide the reader. However, without noise, without air and sound, there is no one left. No one. Eventually he was able to repeat everything he knew. And every irrelevancy was recorded. And the point was that between irrelevancies various truths could be discovered. The mystery would be solved. He had to get back to his house at some point… (p. 76).

buy it from the publisher or from spd or check it out of your local library.

a history lesson

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from yoshihiro tatsumi’s memoir A DRIFTING LIFE:

drifting life

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yoshihiro tatsumi, an innovator and long-heralded master of manga, draws a very moving doorstop (800+ pages) which entertwines his own history with the story of manga’s birth and the post-war development of japan. appreciateive for its many lessons, i was particularly happy to read the above, which was the most convincing argument i’ve seen in a while to say that certain changes in technology wouldn’t necessarily make obsolete older ones…

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PW interview with tatsumi:

PWCW: You owned and ran a used-books store for 18 years. Sometimes people would come looking for you, the founder of gekiga, but you would hide in the back.

YT: There were times when people used to come to the store, asking to meet me, but I would hide in the back. My wife would tell them “He’s not here.” Sometimes, I wouldn’t make it [to the back] in time and they would catch me and ask “Are you Mr. Tatsumi?” and I would tell them “No, that’s my brother.”

PWCW: Why did you want to hide?

YT: I was embarrassed. I liked thinking of myself as a successful manga artist, but running the book shop meant that I wasn’t. I was a very proud cartoonist and the thought of being the “comic book artist who doesn’t make enough money and has to run a bookstore” was embarrassing.

2666 by roberto bolaño

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after reading SAVAGE DETECTIVES — whose psychotropic magics utterly redistricted my limbic system — i’d decided to take my bolaño in little bits and had stayed away from 2666, saving it up i think.

just now i’ve finished it. and, while it wasn’t the same experience as SAVAGE DETECTIVES (which, relatively speaking, is more suffused with intoxicating romantic ideas) 2666 indeed was another complete deracination. rather than romantic epic, this work — the primary effort of the last five years of bolaño’s life — is a fearless, everything-risking tome on violence, history, sex, death and (the banality of) evil. after finishing it i feel changed in only a way, at least it seems to me, a novel can change you.

one important aspect of the book maybe to mention is its tedium. the book can be tedious. or, better said, it risks tedium to make a point about time and evil. especially this is true for a 300 page section called THE PART ABOUT THE CRIMES, which makes a fiction from the real violent deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — a mass murder given the grim name feminicidios.

an achievement only possible by a very great writer is this slowly unfolding effect, precisely built on tedium and our too-easy habituation to our race’s various evils. the reader is allowed, finally, to comprehend her or his habituation — with no small amount of horror.

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and two quotes from early and late in the book that might serve as self-descriptions of his method:

“On the front flap, the reader was informed that the testamento geometrico was really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’…” (186)

“The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely” (887).

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also of potential interest: the translator has some “Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666” here, which has this fine witticism:

“Proposition: Part I of 2666 as satirical sequel to The Savage Detectives. The visceral realists, young idealists, have grown up to become professors of literature, still seekers but no longer idealistic, writing scholarly papers instead of poetry and feuding with academic rivals instead of opposing schools of poets.”

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roberto-bolano-at-paula-chico

also: marcela valdes has a great long piece on 2666 in the nation. of particular interest is her description of bolaño’s relationship to the journalist and writer gonzález rodríguez, who took on the life-risking task of investigating the juárez murders. bolaño seems to have based much of his novel on details from rodríguez. there’s, for instance, a person who seems to be the partial basis for klaus haas named abdul latif sharif — and it is at a press conference held by sharif (eerily similar to ones in the book) that rodríguez comes to a pivotal conclusion about the case:

That day González Rodríguez watched a tall, middle-aged man with green eyes talk to some thirty reporters. Sharif Sharif barely spoke Spanish–he’d lived in Mexico for less than a year–so he gave his presentation in English while a bilingual reporter translated. What he said sounded like a soap opera. According to Sharif Sharif, the femicides were being committed by a pair of rich Mexican cousins, one who lived in Juárez and the other just over the border in El Paso. He told a love story involving one of the cousins and a poor, beautiful girl from Juárez. The press corps was annoyed–they exchanged glances, cracked jokes. González Rodríguez felt pretty skeptical himself, but the critic in him was intrigued by Sharif Sharif’s style. Rather than pound his chest and declare his innocence, the suspect calmly recounted his ninety-minute tale. He seemed to believe that if he provided an alternate explanation for the murders, the charges against him would be dropped.

At the end of the session, González Rodríguez introduced himself to a local reporter. In a park near the prison, the two chatted about the strange presentation. A mother and her daughter approached them.

Are you journalists? the mother asked.

Yes, they answered.

Then we want to tell you something we think that you should know.

The 14-year-old girl beside her wore a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. She told the reporters that the Juárez chief of police had forced her to accuse The Rebels. The chief, she said, had taken her by the hair and banged her against a wall until she agreed to say exactly what he told her.

For González Rodríguez, perspective suddenly shifted. Old facts (the nightclub sweep, the escalating charges against Sharif Sharif) glittered in a new light: the police were beating witnesses. “This,” he thought, “is the undercurrent.”

Read the full article, which includes more background material and a nice portrait of bolaño and rodríguez’s friendship, here.

Harp & Altar #7

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From Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

‘It’s on the edge of a canyon,’ the realtor said, raising his eyebrows when I offered to buy the home without having looked at it first.

‘Fine,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure exactly what the realtor meant. Then I didn’t say anything for a long time because I was thinking of Fra Keeler’s death. And it seemed the realtor wanted to repeat what he had just said, his eyebrows even more tense. ‘Some things aren’t worth looking into,’ I said, and the realtor’s eyebrows slackened a bit. Then I asked, ‘Where are the papers?’ ‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘I’d like to sign them,’ I said, and he pushed them across the table with his middle finger. What an ugly finger, I remember thinking while I signed the papers, and then I got up and I left.

We are said to die of one thing on paper, but it is entirely of something different that we die, I thought as I left the realtor’s office. And it is dangerous to take the discrepancy between the two for granted, what one actually dies of and what one is said to have died of on paper; there is hardly ever a correspondence. And I’m thinking now that some people’s deaths need to be thoroughly investigated. I’m more than certain that I thought this then too, as I left the realtor’s office, but the thought wasn’t as highly illuminated in my head. I’m thinking now, it isn’t every day one comes across a death that is especially timely and magnificent, for example Fra Keeler’s death. And then, one really has to wonder, one has to begin to think, to retrace the mental footsteps of the deceased person, e.g. Fra Keeler, since the chance that such a timely death would remain unexplained on paper is that much more significant.

More at http://harpandaltar.com

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Harp & Altar #7 is now available — with poetry and fiction by Cynthia Arrieu-King, Ana Božičević, Matthew Klane, Michael O’Brien, Alejandra Pizarnik translated by Jason Stumpf, Brett Price, Jared White, Edmond Caldwell, Susan Daitch, Luca Dipierro, Craig Foltz, A.D. Jameson, Matthew Kirkpatrick, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Also: Farrah Field on Julia Cohen; Patrick Morrissey on Joshua Harmon and Rob Schlegel; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Brandon Downing.

The Harp & Altar Anthology

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The Harp & Altar Anthology

More info here.

ISBN 978-0-9637536-4-9

Poetry & Fiction | 336 pages | $17
Edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim

The Harp & Altar Anthology ($17 + shipping):
Pubdate: June 1, 2010.
Pre-Order today! Book ships upon publication.

Collecting the ground-breaking poetry and fiction from the first six issues of the online journal Harp & Altar.  With writing by Roberta Allen • Stephanie Anderson • Jason Bacasa • Andrea Baker • Jessica Baran • Jessica Baron • Shane Book • Donald Breckenridge • Michael Carlson • Joshua Cohen • Julia Cohen • Adam Clay • Lynn Crawford • Oisín Curran • Claire Donato • Farrah Field • Corey Frost • David Goldstein • Andrew Grace • Kate Greenstreet • Sarah Gridley • Emily Gropp • Evelyn Hampton • Jennifer Hayashida • Stefania Heim • Lily Hoang • Joanna Howard • Dan Hoy • Thomas Kane • Steve Katz • Karla Kelsey • Joanna Klink • Jennifer Kronovet • Norman Lock • Jill Magi • Justin Marks • Peter Markus • Eugene Marten • Stephen-Paul Martin • Zachary Mason • Miranda Mellis • Sara Michas-Martin • Patrick Morrissey • Ryan Murphy • Eileen Myles • Bryson Newhart • Linnea Ogden • Cameron Paterson • Johannah Rodgers • Joanna Ruocco • Elizabeth Sanger • Rob Schlegel • Zachary Schomburg • Kate Schreyer • Andrei Sen-Senkov • Brandon Shimoda • Peter Jay Shippy • Joanna Sondheim • Mathias Svalina • Bronwen Tate • G.C. Waldrep • Derek White • Jared White • Joshua Marie Wilkinson • Paul Winner • David Wirthlin • Michael Zeiss • Leni Zumas

PLATFORM by jia zhangke

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yesterday i saw PLATFORM. which, with PICKPOCKET, make up the stunning first two thirds of the “hometown trilogy” by jia zhangke. for some reason, maybe because he’s found relatively secure funding in his latest films (and not had to work outside china’s constrained studio system), these first two are, for me, much richer than his more recent work. both star the nerdy, nebbish beauty of wang hongwei–who plays an odd, shangxi-province version of bizarro woody allen. i think i could watch wang hongwei smoke and eat noodles for hours.

like his recent films, PLATFORM and PICKPOCKET detail china’s transformation from a closed society of state-run industry into its current brand of particular capitalism.  for the sixth generation this change has resulted in a stunning slowmotion whiplash. jia zhangke was actually present at this particular screening, which took place because of a MOMA retrospective. at the Q&A after the screening someone asked the director whether he thought of himself more akin to the blockbuster and arguably escapist films of zhang yimou or the more openly critical, political-protest films of li yang. jia zhangke gave an interesting reply, saying he didn’t necessarily agree with such dichotomous labels, that reality was larger than such simple opposites. i asked a poet friend — who was also in attendance and who had himself left china shortly after ’89 tiananmen — whether he thought jia’s response was more true or more politically coy — and my friend seemed to think it was a sincere answer.

in any case, i spent today thinking a great deal about PLATFORM’s last scene. i don’t think it will give anything away to say it’s a strange, mostly static composition. i’d seen PICKPOCKET a while back (which also has a terrific ending) and while i think it’s easy to say PICKPOCKET’s the better film, i was taken with how beautiful PLATFORM’s story was, a love story really, about two couples in a theater troupe through the 1980s. this last scene is a mysterious one, which doesn’t add particularly to your factual knowledge of the characters, but does have a very strange magic in its blocking and in its actions that burns in the brain (at least in mine) a permanent portrait of this non-couple and non-family.

the film’s precise depiction of the changing material conditions of the youth of shanxi province make for me a kind of mind-shattering comparison with the material state of the west in the 80s… definitely one to try.

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[somewhat relatedly, tonight — through tragic happenstance — i was forced to watch the very end of SEPTEMBER ISSUE — a documentary about vogue magazine. it made me ill. maybe i’m a fool, but to see those two movies back to back made me speak into the apartment air, involuntarily: we live in an insane world where the ones in power are insane people who do insane things.]

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profile and interview with jia zhangke by stephen teo at senses of cinema:

ST: Why do you want to return to that stage of primevalism? Cinema has developed for a hundred years.

JZ: Because after a hundred years, the human life force in cinema is becoming less and less. The cinema is subjected more and more to industrial standards. I think cinema should contain human flavour and the flavour of the auteur. That’s why I didn’t want something easy and smooth. I want a movie that has an accent. For example, I can’t speak standard English, I have a Chinese accent. The cinema is the same. I have my own Jia Zhangke accent. I may be too garrulous, or too vague. My camera may be shaky or it jerks too much but that’s the emotion I feel on the set. That’s the kind of movie I want to make. Pouring your life force into the movie, not conforming to a cold industrial standard. That’s why I rejected the use of certain supplementary film techniques such as steadicam or even the track – though I used a bit of that in Platform. I don’t want my cameramen to use these supplementary techniques. Because I want my camera to come into direct contact with the subject.

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JZ: I use a lot of long shots. If the audience can see things in there, that’s good, if they can’t, so be it. I don’t want to impose too many things onto the audience… I don’t want to impose a message onto the audience. I want to give them a mood and within that mood, you can see things that you want, or you can’t see things. My films are rather challenging for the audience. They are not very clearly stated to the extent where the audience can see clearly the objects they want to see – this pen or this watch. If they don’t notice it, they don’t notice it. It’s not that I am being indifferent. Through all these, I am imparting a director’s attitude, how he sees the world and the cinema. What I mean to say is that it’s only an attitude because you can never be absolutely objective. When you need somebody to look at something, it’s no longer objective. There is no absolute objectivity, there is attitude, and through this attitude, there is an ideal.


the book as fortress

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cover of FEED by m.t. anderson

ereaders already are, or will soon enough become, visually engaging; they are in many ways already more convenient than their analog counterparts — from their hypertexuality to their capacity for instant distribution. however — other than the more apparent rebuttals (worse reading resolutions, less hardiness in bathtubs and backpacks, culture placed on permanent electronic life support), i think the less obvious, more subtle rejoinder is unfortunately the important one. as maryanne wolf argues below, we’re not directly wired to be readers. our instincts to follow distractions and follow titillating, quick bits of visual information (e.g. those involved in stalking that saber-toothed dinner) can overcome (perhaps more often in developing brains) our capacity for deep contemplation (e.g. our ability to consider: some day i too will cease to exist like this saber-toothed dinner i’m gnawing on and so i wonder what this means about the value of my own life and also if this would taste better with ketchup).

what the book does then is protect us from the flashing baubles and shiny lights of the beautiful internet vaudeville: that latest email, “friend” request, tweet, jezebel/craigslist/nytimes update… dwelling in the carnival for so long, we tend to forget that there’s another option possible: meadows free of noise.

or if the pastoral gags you: then the book as fortress, a portable monastery keeping aflame the capacity for contemplation in our current digital dark age:

Beyond Decoding Words at: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/

 

…In brief, this brain learns to access and integrate within 300 milliseconds a vast array of visual, semantic, sound (or phonological), and conceptual processes, which allows us to decode and begin to comprehend a word. At that point, for most of us our circuit is automatic enough to allocate an additional precious 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading: our own thoughts that go beyond the text.

This is what Proust called the heart of reading — when we go beyond the author’s wisdom and enter the beginning of our own.

I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.

For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

the rest at : http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/#maryanne

or, similarly Nicholas Carr here:

The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging the kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning…Our attention is scattered by all the distractions and interruptions that pour through our computers and digital networks. The result, a raft of psychological and neurological studies show, is cursory reading, weak comprehension and shallow learning.

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OMG

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A good interview with Carr here:

Nicholas Carr — author of last July’sAtlanticcover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection. He began developing his theory when he realized that, after years of online information gathering, he had trouble reading a book or a magazine. As he puts it, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. . . . I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

full interview here:

Reaction to Carr’s article on the EDGE.org here and the reaction in general summarized here.

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and as related postscript…

“Are We Doomed?” read the headline to an article in New Scientist, a British magazine that last year took a long look at complexity. (Spoiler alert: maybe.) There is a lot of end-of-days talk when it comes to this subject. You will find a strain of it in the work of Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and the author of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” In the book, Mr. Tainter examines three ancient civilizations, including the Roman Empire, and explains how complexity drove them to ruin, essentially by bankrupting them.

Does he look at the complexity of the problems facing the United States and see doom? Possibly.

“Complexity creeps up on you,” he said in an interview. “It grows in ways, each of which seems reasonable at the time. It seemed reasonable at the time that we went into Afghanistan. It’s the cumulative costs that makes a society insolvent. Everything the Roman emperors did was a reasonable response in the situation that they found themselves in. It was the cumulative impact that did them in.”

Mr. Tainter isn’t peddling the nostalgic charms of simplicity, which is wise because there aren’t a lot of people who would buy it. Unless the subject is TV remote controls, most Americans have a fondness for complexity, or at least for ideas and objects that are hard to understand. In part that is because we assume complicated products come from sharp, impressive minds, and in part it’s because we understand that complexity is a fancy word for progress.

Read the rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/weekinreview/02segal.html

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[since i’d like to put similar links in one place, i’m just going to add to this post… 1/15/12]

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from a NYTimes article called “The Rise of the New Groupthink” by Susan Cain (which seems to be precis for her forthcoming Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking):

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

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Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.

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another recent piece in the times, pico iyer’s essay, points the same direction:

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

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also, internet, i give you this: a twenty minute “power-nap” soundtrack which i repurpose as general white noise generator: so when you need to work in a noisy place, use it. 

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also, if you need a break, this can be used in conjunction or alternatively with the above: the “desk sleeping bag” http://www.studio-kg.com/ostrich/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION by gilbert sorrentino

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shortly after his great, brutal novel RED THE FIEND came out, i wrote what amounted to a fan letter to gilbert sorrentino, whom i’d had as a teacher. he was kind and always responded to my (shamefully hopeful) letters. in this response, he wrote that if his work had any common theme, it was an ever abiding and complete sense of loss.

it should be noted too that sorrentino was of course suspicious of the very conceit of a “common theme,” and would sometimes demonstrate its feebleness by arguing that a writer had only one or two ideas, really. the implication being that these ideas were not the key ingredient. beckett, for example, he would say sardonically, thought the world was bleak.

and now we have his last, posthumously-published novel — THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION — the hint of which was given in a piece published in the spring 07 issue of GOLDEN HANDCUFF REVIEW. that short piece openly announces its autobiography (so much that perhaps we’re obligated to question it) containing admissions like the below short excerpt.

what struck me as i read this last novel was sorrentino’s clear understanding that while he was here (and perhaps throughout his career) dealing with absolutely common, almost bathetic episodes of human misery, each familiar trope nonetheless is relieved (variably, here, certainly–but at times transcendentally) of its mundane moorings and wrestled into artifice.

to me, this transformation is something of great mystery. the furious ravings of a cuckold or drunk, nostalgia, even the confessions of desperate or envious or dying writers are made into something else: something somehow simultaneously witty, inexplicably sad, and determinedly fake. the latter out of a sense of integrity, the moral that art is not a transparent glass through which we can see reality, but an opaque, additional reality (to which, perhaps, we might compare our own).

from GOLDEN HANDCUFF REVIEW:

He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do — even when, he smiled ruefully — even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.

And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire — all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.

He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his last book, that he had given up or lost — it made little difference — the ability and the desire to write another word…

He sat at his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out” — lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed, damned, if you will, to write on, and on and on, blundering through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.

buy it from the publisher. find it at your local library.

info for an event on 2/20/10 in celebration of the book’s publishing. with reading by walter abish, david markson, susan daitch and others here.

a reminiscence i wrote on sorrentino for the brooklyn rail here.

mlp {first year} anthology

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i’ve a story in an anthology put out by mudluscious press, collecting its first year of excellent chapbooks. includes ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, & michael martone.

pick it up from mlp.

Sleepingfish 8

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I’ve a bit in the new Sleepingfish — edited by Derek White & Gary Lutz — along with Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto, Adam Weinstein, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, Eduardo Recife, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Émilie Notéris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Cooper Renner, Christine Schutt, M. T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess & Ali Aktan Aşkın.

Buy it from Calamari Press.

the economics of writing

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i haven’t read stephen elliot (whose memoir-ish latest is the much-praised THE ADDERALL DIARIES) though i just might after stumbling on this essay about why he writes. in it, he discusses MFA programs, publishing, process, and the economics of being a writer:

I realized that to continue as a writer I had to adjust certain expectations. My books have never sold in huge numbers and probably never will. But I can make enough while only writing what I want to write… I’m 37 years old and I can live off $30,000 a year, which is about what I make. It’s not a lot for San Francisco, but it’s enough. I try to do the best work I’m capable of, which is not the same as making the most money.

I’m at an age where my nonwriter friends are buying property, having babies, and moving ahead in their careers, while I live in a rent-controlled apartment with my young hipster roommate. I still go through heavy bouts of depression; it’s my nature. But I wouldn’t choose a different life. Time spent focusing on art is a privilege and a gift. The writing doesn’t make me happy, but it makes me happier, and it makes everything else easier to take.

…It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

Read the rest at The Rumpus at: http://therumpus.net/2009/08/why-i-write-2/

THE COLORIST by susan daitch

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one definition of a novel, say, is that which honestly tries to organize the chaos of thought into a semi-satisfactory, semi-consistent semantic machine of about eighty-thousand words. this definition might help us understand a book that’s mainly digressive in structure or one that fails to draw a moral conclusion.

only the simple and the pedantic want an art that purports to teach you something. or, as robert creeley said it: “Had I lived some years ago, I think I would have been a moralist, ie, one who lays down, so to speak, rules of behavior with no small amount of self-satisfaction. But the writer isn’t allowed that function anymore, or no man can take the job on very happily, being aware (as he must be) of what precisely that will make him.”

a big [sic] to the genderizing, but you get the point.

one is drawn to susan daitch’s magnificent novel because a reader can feel, can sense, the writer thinking as she writes. both to the reader and herself, the author is unpredictable and surprising. she is gratifyingly clever; she is free.

i think, because of this freedom, the book is capable of mysterious and beautiful passages that are wonderfully unanchored and yet, which in accretion, create a trusted, consistent experience… passages like the following which describes a uniquely modern state of desire, a ghost of love — a momentary and unpassionate desire:

She looked at a photograph of an attractive young man, not an advertisement, but almost. It was something passed by quickly, flipping through the pages of a book or a magazine. Laurel was drawn to the picture, although she didn’t turn back to it. She put the volume down and left the store. Even if the man himself stood near her in the store, she would have left. That kind of pursuit, whether she was its object or the pursuer, seemed unfathomable to her. It was something she was no longer capable of, she’d lost the language. As engaging or as easy as he or any random person looked, she knew she’d only feel embarrassed about it later (200).

i re-read this book after about fifteen years and i think it feels even fresher than when i first came to it… susan daitch’s fantastic novel tells the tale of julie greene and her boyfriend, eamonn, a weegee-admiring photographer. julie is a colorist, one who colors comic book panels for a living — specifically a comic book about electra, a heroine who can make duplicates of herself.

electra’s doubles, the comic book industry, eamonn’s photography — all allow a focused but continued and varied meditation on the artifice of representation, its constantly shifting mimetic, mythic and mystic functions. this meditation meanders and digresses while slyly and courageously never coming to a conclusion.

late in the book, Daitch writes:

Electra’s world had turned into a house of mirrors. She reflected or mimicked every situation she found herself in. I considered this condition a kind of disease, one which had lain dormant for years: she’d probably caught it in space. The first symptoms were awkward polyphonic parrotings of other people. Residents of Allen Street avoided Electra because she copied them involuntarily. She would instantly look and sound like each random passerby in turn. Her reflexivity reached such proportions that Electra was, for all intents and purposes, invisible. She had no control over herself. People saw themselves in her, which was confusing to both parties, or she blended in with buildings. It was an anti-solipsistic condition, and it explained why Eamonn’s photographs of her were blank. In the early stages of the disease, the camera was more sensitive to invisibility and mimicry than the naked eye (212).

daitch’s style is never ostentatious, almost modest. and yet, using subtle juxtapositions and transitions, this work creates all kinds of new holes of indeterminacy, weird and new thoughts.

an opposing but related definition to the above for the novel might nonetheless also be true: the novel as a totem — a symbol to ourselves that the ineffable unfolding of the world cannot (and should not) be made into a reductive narrative. the novel then can only exist as a fractal, unresolvable piece of the whole. THE COLORIST is thus a brave type of paradoxical work — a powerful and almost impossible novel that attempts to organize the unknowable and yet also one that refuses to do so.

buy it used or find it at your local library.

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a nice interview with daitch by KCRW’s silverblatt (which takes place in 1990 and has great background from daitch — and also includes a historical bit …as silverblatt also interviews knopf editor robin desser, then an editor at vintage contemporaries, who speaks, it’s almost quaint, about the reasons a book would come out as a “paperback original”) :

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw900724susan_daitch

TIME OUT NEW YORK calls THE MOTHERING COVEN one of the best of 2009

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BEST OF 2009

This book, ostensibly about a group of women missing one of their own, is delightfully strange, both in the way the plot progresses and the way Ruocco plays with language…

congratulations to joanna ruocco for penning this stunning debut. on only its fourth outing, a nice feather too in the cap for Ellipsis Press. won’t you consider picking up a copy of our first four titles at a special year-end sale?

…

DR NOOKINDLE or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

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on the radio yesterday i heard someone quote debussy:

At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer… Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disc at his will. Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible.

Written under the subtitle: ON REMOVING THE MYSTIQUE OF MUSIC

most days i so agree with claude’s pov, but ah well… my new favorite album only uses synth drums… que sera sera:

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KINGS AND QUEEN by desplechin

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not that you should care about the motivations of your humble correspondent, but breaking once the vow to myself never to blog about movies seems to have opened the floodgates as i now feel a sick need to write about arnaud desplechin. just re-watched his enormous KINGS AND QUEEN — the DVD of which has some incredible extras, including interviews with desplechin and others with the films’ incredible actors.

in the desplechin interview we learn one method that makes possible the density and overflowing of theme and idea and joke in the movie. desplechin had been reading truffaut who wrote to his scriptwriter once, “How can you imagine I will make a scene of four minutes to say one idea?” desplechin decided to make a motto (and one-up) his idol, by placing above his writing desk the following: “Each minute we have to be sure that we show five different ideas.”

the interview also reveals desplechin’s frankly weird idea of the specific possibility of cinema–one it turns out related to a very gendered idea of the psychology of romance. it came out of his re-watching VERTIGO.

I thought I was not a fan of VERTIGO. I thought that I preferred MARNIE. But when I saw the real film that Hitchcock wanted to make, I was crying and crying and crying… I thought the film was saying something, an awful truth about manhood, which would be that each time you love a woman, there is another hidden woman who died before, and that you haven’t been able to stop that. … It doesn’t have to be a particular woman, but there is this idea that as soon as you start your love life, there is a woman who died before and that you will mourn all your life. And all the women you will meet, they will be pale copies of this dead woman. …And I think cinema [in particular] …is able to describe that sort of feeling …which is typically …bizarre…quite abstract and concrete… I think that on the opposite side for a woman… I think that each woman has killed a man before the man she is loving now.

i’m really not sure about all of that. maybe it’s important, maybe not — but what a film! overspilling with gesture and idea and tragedy. totally artificial and yet utterly connecting with human experience. a completely new type of extraordinary epic built out of artificially and continuously contradicting characters’ psychologies.

ALEXANDRA by Alexander Sokurov

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saw sokurov’s latest, THE SUN, recently — and didn’t care for it so much… the super-controlled palette and dim lighting effects couldn’t win me over past the overused stillness and the poor casting. the latter had the very unfortunate effect of ruining the movie’s most important scene: a confrontation between emperor hirohito and general macarthur shortly after japan’s surrender. (hirohito was tic-ishly great, but the guy playing macarthur…)

however, seeing it did remind me of a movie i saw not so long ago, which was a very powerful comment on war and peace and on one’s ability to comprehend the abstract conduct of nations. it was sokurov’s ALEXANDRA, featuring the consummate babushka galina vishnevskaya (opera singer and rostropovich’s widow). a mother amidst the soldiers in an unnamed battleground, an enormous amount of commentary and tragedy is gracefully churned up by that seemingly simple juxtaposition.

one maybe for your queue.

A is for Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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the amazing “joe” shows how we delight in light in his new short PHANTOMS OF NABUA here. turn down the lights to see it in full glory. thanks to paolo javier for showing it to me. not so long ago i was lucky to catch a rare screening of his campy spectacle THE ADVENTURE OF IRON PUSSY. if you’ve caught the mystical and beautiful SYNDROMES & A CENTURY you should try to seek this one out for, um, contrast.

his shorts in general are exacting compositions even while they showcase a very impish, light sense of humor. his ANTHEM is a glorious tour of a gymnasium, the best game of around-the-world you’ve ever.

the superhero in his own words:

THE TANNERS by robert walser

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simon says!

not the burst of perfect and heart-crumpling song that was JAKOB VON GUNTEN, THE TANNERS is more a patchwork of monologues, but both share the same saint’s heart and the ability to lay out all the observable open secrets of our every day.

some writers, you enter their house in faith and give yourself up to in awe — despite some weaker establishing shots, the occasional hastiness (or more frequently here, the overlong lingering). the heart of the miracle is everywhere apparent nonetheless. and anyway, you were converted by their best moment — and that was more than enough… and THE TANNERS does compensate the faithful, not in least ways by being lovely autobiography — even predictive autobiography:

And he’d frozen to death here, without a doubt, and he must have been lying here on the path for a while… Sebastian must have sunk to the ground here with an immense, no longer endurable weariness… How noble a grave he chose for himself… What splendid peace: reposing and growing stiff beneath fir branches in the snow. You couldn’t have chosen anything better. People tend to inflict harm on the eccentric — and this is what you were — and then laugh at their pain. Give my greetings to the dear, silent dead beneath the earth and don’t get too badly scorched in the eternal fires of nonexistence. You are elsewhere (154-5).

other compensations include a defense of the poet’s otherwise failures: “And never be so swift to look in scorn upon someone who is failing or appears lethargic or inactive. How quickly his sunshine, his poems can arise from these long, dull dreams!” (109); the helplessness and foolishness of loving art too much: “No sensible man allows himself to be made a fool of by any one thing, tormented and tricked for so long” (78); the agonies of teaching: “But when I’m teaching, I think of other things, things more distant and greater than their little souls” (188); comments on religion: “Religion here has too little sky, it smells too little of the soil” (282); and on misfortune: “Let me tell you, I’m a friend of misfortune, a very intimate friend” (258).

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& of possible further interest, another walser site which reveals some of the source material :

Between 1936 and 1955, Carl Seelig, who would become known as a biographer of Albert Einstein, took nearly fifty long walks with his friend the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Seelig would meet Walser at the train station at Herisau in eastern Switzerland or at the sanitarium where Walser had been since the early 1930s, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Seelig’s notes of their walks and conversations have appeared in German as Wanderungen mit Robert Walser and in French translation, but the book has never appeared in English. http://sebald.wordpress.com/category/carl-seelig/

seelig’s notes have been translated into english by bob skinner on this nice site with a good search feature, so that a search for “Geschwister Tanner” reveals the following anecdote:

Our conversation touched on Geschwister Tanner, of which Robert said: “I wrote it in Berlin in three or four weeks, essentially without corrections. Bruno Cassirer cut out a few sections he found boring, like the one where Simon found the clerk’s manuscript in the oven. That appeared later in the journal Marz, where Hermann Hesse was an editor. My praiseworthy medical director, Dr. Hinrichsen, who saw himself as an important writer, said once that the beginning was good, but the rest was impossible. He said it as though he would have gagged if he’d been forced to read the whole thing.” Robert laughed heartily at his own description.

hey, who wants to get laid off from this condensery?!

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the new cat and the old(er) cat just want to eat the other’s food. J in bed with the flu. morning coffee and puttering around, picking books off the shelf. and while dreading thinking about actually doing the accounting for the press, flip through a book and realize — both happy and sad — how many have done some time at that hallowed pity party:

SONNET WELCOME

To the 1981-82
Poetry season
At the Ear Inn
What a mess is everything
In this world we live in
François Marie Charles Fourier said in 1800
This planet should be sent to a lunatic asylum
But it’s not poetry’s fault
For being so concerned
With love beauty sex and ideas, money
All the preoccupations of the philosophers, thieves
& prostitutes, I myself make no image
When I say anything including saying
Let’s get on with our non-paying work as always

–Bernadette Mayer from Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press)

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oh but relatedly and un, here’s one for the wall-lookers, one i can’t seem to get out of my mind:

By Han Shan

Human beings live in dirt,
like bugs in a filthy bowl.
All day long crawling around and around,
never getting over the edge.

Even spiritual masters can’t make it,
wracking their brains for schemes and plans.
The months and the years, a running river:
Then there’s the day you wake up old.

–translated by J.P. Seaton

cats

i did it. i put up a photo of my cats on my blog.

donald harington 1935 – 2009

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though donald harington should be a household name, instead he was called “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist.” he was a bawdy, hilarious, immediately accessible, and erudite writer who wore his intelligence very lightly. yet he wrote sprawling, delightfully self-conscious novels whose structural experimentation arose naturally, very organically and — almost as if on a whim — expanded our idea of what the novel could do. he almost always wrote about a fictional town in the ozarks, so was trapped in a regionalist ghetto, but his books if given the chance absolutely transcended that unfortunate label.

nytimes obit | guardian obit | washington post obit | harington’s website

“Donald Harington isn’t an unknown writer,” novelist and critic Fred Chappell once wrote. “He’s an undiscovered continent.”

try any of his books, but so far, i’ve loved his WITH a whole lot… get it from toby press or from your local library.

the artist-reader: nabokov with trilling discussing LOLITA

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stumbled on this… am not much of a nabokov fan for some reason, but dug hearing him talk (and watching him lean and pick up a teacup) here:

“I don’t wish to touch hearts and I don’t even want to effect minds very much. What I want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader…”

(the best part actually is trilling’s nervous laugh and the back-and-forth on his (rather silly) theory in part two.)

ERASURE by percival everett

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ERASURE was published eight years ago, in 2001, before the J.T. Leroy hoax was outed and before the eerily echoing current debate over the film PRECIOUS. it’s hard to discuss the novel without talking about its elaborate plot and book-within-a-book structure. here’s PW’s gloss:

Thelonius “Monk” Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called “ghetto prose” that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We’s Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh. Ellison quickly finds himself with a six-figure advance from a major house, a multimillion-dollar offer for the movie rights and a monster bestseller on his hands. …Ellison becomes a judge for a major book award and My Pafology (title changed to Fuck) gets nominated, forcing the author to come to terms with his perverse literary joke.

i once heard a writer complain how difficult it is to write satire these days — when the satire and the satiree both show up on the letterman show, mug at each other’s jokes, and then laugh together all the way to the bank. that is, there’s a complicity in most so-called satirical entertainment with the essential mode and delivery methods of what is being satirized.

ERASURE isn’t like this. its satire stings because it’s generous and complicated enough to shame and indict all of us for the creation and maintenance of a market-driven intellectual life, a literary culture that rewards sensation and provocation over art, and an unquestioned and reductive — even internalized — racist ideology.

for a more in-depth overview of some of everett’s source material, check out this review by bernard bell, which, while analyzing well what the book does, also ends itself with a sly (if i’m reading it right) criticism of the protaganist’s (and maybe the author’s) vantage of privledge:

“Contrary to the popularity in the academies of anti-essentialist arguments by postmodern critics, the authority, authenticity, and agency of the identities of most African Americans emanate most distinctively and innovatively from the particularity of our historical struggle against slavery and its legacy of antiblack racism in the United States.”

what ellison the character argues in ERASURE is that blackness is, must be, wide enough to include his own subjectivity. however, forces both within and without this novel refuse to cooperate, assigning the black identity only to a particular (romanticized and fetishized) “inner-city,” “gritty,” and “ghetto” experience. everett screams foul at such a distortion. ishmael reed agrees, having written a few years before this article on the scapegoat idea of a “black pathology” (a phrase which everett uses to name his street lit parody). reed writes: “The only difference between white pathology and black pathology is that white pathology is underreported.”

but all the above discussion aside for a moment, let’s acknowledge too that, while freighted with heavy consequence and while trying to make real points and to hit its targets hard – ERASURE is a pleasure to read, mostly for its patient, uproarious but never overwrought nor sensational prose. what a touch it is to be all in one book: deadly serious, furious, and howlingly funny.

find it in the library or buy it from your local independent bookstore.

THE BLOND BOX by toby olson

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A BOX IN A VALISE IN A BOOK

Reverentially using readymades from Marcel Duchamp’s life and work, Olson has constructed a depthless novel, as irreducible and mysterious a work of art as, say, Étant donnés, which the book reproduces in a striking frontispiece. THE BLOND BOX, like Duchamp’s work, oddly tempts parsing, seeming to leave clues to a more pointed narrative everywhere, one about a murder, even.

Due to a scissors-like nexus of chance and predetermination, in 1949, on a dark and stormy night, several characters end up in Courbet, Arizona (the origin of this world, no doubt) — at the Last Chance Saloon. One is El Malabarista — “The Juggler” — an endearing drunk who sings for his supper, famed in the region for his magnificently tasteful piano playing. Currently El Malabarista is working as an accompanist for a troupe of sex performers on tour in the southwest. The group’s specialty is a nuptial fuckfest starring the well-endowed El Soltero — “The Bachelor.”

The night of the novel’s opening — delayed in time by the text’s various artifices — still echoes in 1969, when Dick DeLay, the author of a pulpy science fiction series, and Sandy Redcap, his diabetic yet indefatigable research assistant, contrive a plot uncannily mirroring the events of two decades past.

The narrative is decidedly non-madcap, despite the setup. And though such a structure tends toward convergence — of the past and present, or the real and fantastic — when resolution does occur, Olson masterfully presents a congress more of proximity than resonance. Olson manages a detached elegance throughout, despite the work’s accreting insanity, loping through his interlocking chapters with genteel commas and novelistic observations, which, only upon final inspection, reveal a worldview of impressive flatness.

Buy it from FC2 or find it at your local library.

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[this review originally appeared in the December 2003 issue of Boog City archived here: http://welcometoboogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc12.pdf]

I’ll be reading at Poetry Project on 12/14/09 with Justin Sirois

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R.B.Kitaj, For Love (Creeley)

R.B.Kitaj, For Love (Creeley)


on the difference between prose and poetry, i always liked it that robert creeley, in a preface to his collected fiction, lumped them as: “all a compact of words, surely.” another poet friend once told me the difference was: line breaks. in any case a blur, a strange boundary, sometimes a rubicon beach.

which is mentioned only as preface for invitation to a night of readings by me and Justin Sirois on monday, december 14, 2009 at 8PM at the poetry project at st. marks church.

more info here: http://poetryproject.org/program-calendar/eugene-lim-justin-sirois.html

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justin sirois blogs at secondarysound.blogspot.com and  is founder and codirector of Narrow House, an experimental writing publishing collective. He received Maryland State Art Council grants for poetry in 2003 and 2007. His books include Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books) and MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius). Currently, Justin is trying to find a publisher for his first novel written in collaboration with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy about displaced Iraqis living in Fallujah in April of ’04. He also is a designer for Edge Books.

jessa crispin of bookslut on book reviews

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don’t always agree with her, but i dig jessa crispin a mighty amount. shaaaaarp. honest. plus — see below quip on sam tanenhaus — she makes me chuckle.

I think I was supposed to do a write-up of the Princeton panel I was on about the future of criticism, although if you want a rundown of what actually happened, Peter Stothard’s account is the best place to go.

Whenever these conversations come up, however, I start to wonder about certain words thrown about. “Authority.” “Culture.” “Gatekeepers.” All lovely things, thanks. I am not an anarchist, and yes, the Internet scares me as much as it does you, despite the proliferation of pictures of kittens and ducklings. But I drop out of the conversation when I figure out who is writing the definitions of those words. The New York Times is a gatekeeper, absolutely. And for someone who has so much control over the conversation, you’d think Sam Tanenhaus would be less defensive, and less likely to look like he might leap over the table and rip out the throat of the man who called the Review “middlebrow,” but whatever. If you look at the statistics of what they’re letting inside the gates, though, you see mostly books published by Random House, a very small handful of translated fiction, a disproportionate number of white men. (Yes, Galleycat, call me a kneejerk feminist again, I don’t really care.)

Even now when The Death of Culture is discussed, the definition of “culture” has to be watched. Only certain types of books and publications are counted as “reading,” according to those studies on the downfall of reading. Not that there isn’t a real issue going on — I am quite aware that everyone is in survival mode. Bookslut is kept going now on a month to month basis due to advertising issues and the like. For the first time in my life I have had to think thoughts about the “weakness of the dollar.” But the reason I have a hard time with these conversations about the decline of the review, and the death of authority, is because so many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They’re rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don’t get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It’s hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn’t care much for them to begin with.

I should maybe state that I don’t think of myself as a critic, nor do I have aspirations to become one. As such, I feel free to ignore the wider culture at large, rather than suffer through a William Vollmann book just because his books contribute to the larger cultural conversation. I, and this website, exist outside of all of that, and happily so. I think briefly I thought I might try it on the inside, so I got myself elected to the board of the NBCC. I resigned five months later. Bookslut may have its own value (like I said, it goes month to month) but respectability is not where it is.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this now. It’s something that’s been on my mind the whole year. (And maybe I’ll be a chickenshit and leave this up for about fifteen minutes before deleting it.) I have officially used up all of my sincerity for the day, and the sun is actually out in Berlin today, so that concludes my official write-up of the Princeton panel on the death of criticism.

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