ERASURE by percival everett
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
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.
________________________
[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
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
____________________________
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
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.
JERUSALEM by gonçalo tavares
there’s one character in JERUSALEM who writes a long tome on violence and it’s fun (but who knows if truthful) to think of it as commentary on vollman’s RISING UP AND RISING DOWN. here, the eight volume doorstop study on atrocity is published to at first great acclaim for its magnitude and ambition, then very quickly rebutted and disgraced, and then finally utterly forgotten…
the bookback tells us JERUSALEM, along with his other novels, are part of a series Tavares calls THE KINGDOM so it may not be a stretch to say the author hopes for an ultimate integration of his works — a synthesis similar to that hoped for by a character in JERUSALEM who, with broken mind, tries to make of his eavesdropping a whole:
Ernst Spengler used to listen to people talking on the street and try to make sense of their words without tuning in to any one conversation in particular — joining something that a man with a tie was saying to a colleague to whatever a nearby adolescent was saying to two friends. Ernst wanted to keep himself from getting too interested in the details of these individual lives; he wanted to link or weave the entire city’s conversations together, so that it would seem to speak with a single voice, seem to speak a simple command… (178)
for better or worse, tavares does get “too interested” in the details of his characters’ lives — and their discrete narratives rise to take over so that they cannot stay continuous, and so cannot be the whole integrating command that might have proved the beginning of a truly new language.
JERUSALEM is however a very quick-moving, if grim, portraiture of several lives. indeed it’s eventually revealed that the book’s central concern is with the inmates (and their freeside counterparts) of a mental hospital–and that its theme is each of the various meanings of: institutionalized insanity.
maybe best bit in the book: “Back in bed, Kaas picked up his watch. He pretended it was some terrible peephole. You could look through it and catch time itself at work” (78).
JERUSALEM’s provenance is given, in its final words, as “From the Notebooks of Goncalo M. Tavares” — and it’s almost too clear that this is indeed the case. some bare outline, anchored tentatively around madness and violence, gives direction to increasingly detailed character sketches, is finally overcome by them and propelled, despite itself, to a typical, if sinister, conclusion. the result is a very readable hodgepodge of dark characters and situations whose organic method of composition seemed disappointingly evident.
perhaps arguably most representative bit in the book (because it wishes to comment upon or make something new of history and madness but merely highlights it): “A concentration-camp survivor had said: ‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ Theodor underlined the sentence” (124).
despite some of the above, the struggle and the ambition make it definitely worth a whirl. pick it up from dalkey archive press.
SHADOWS IN PARADISE by erich maria remarque
a very good book stumbled upon randomly while browsing the german language section in the library (will that be possible with ebooks? real browsing that is, not crowd-sourced gutless “pushed” content. but i digress…) SHADOWS IN PARADISE is the final (posthumously published) novel by the author of the anti-war blockbuster ALL IS QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT… a tumultuous bio, remarque survived two world wars, his lovers included marlene dietrich, greta garbo and paulette goddard, he was an avid and knowledgeable art collector, a NYC night owl, and reputed author of very fine cocktail recipes.
remarque’s NYC is thus a strange, glamorous combination of night-clubbing and WWII refugee purgatory. the two worlds collide through our man Ross–the book’s narrator–who has survived the concentration camps, fits in (though he’s a goy) with the jewish refugees, comes to court a fashion model, and ends up as an assistant for an art dealer to the super-rich.
some of the most delicious bits in fact deal with this art dealer character whose pretentious slimeball antics seem utterly unevolved in their parasitic kin of today:
I looked at this fashion plate of a man. His suits and shoes were from London, his shirts from Paris. His nails were nicely manicured and he smelled of French cologne. I saw him and listened to him as though he were sitting behind a glass pane; he seemed to live in a muffled world–a world of bandits and cutthroats. I was sure, but fashionable, well-groomed bandits and cutthroats… it suddenly struck me, all he really understood about his art works was their prices, because if he really loved them he wouldn’t sell them. And by selling them he was enabled to live a life of luxury unknown to the painters who had made it possible… And yet by buying their works for a song, dealers had often saved poor artists from going hungry. Everything about this business was so ambiguous, so misty and unclear (65).
i love reading about old new york, all that’s changed and all that hasn’t. this one is written in a great natural storytelling style — good on art and war and death and relationships. remarque seemed thought of as a hemmingway derivative — and some of the subject matter might be, along with its macho costume, but remarque’s style is more natural — and, for my dollar, more funny. nonetheless a tragic book equally artificial and true. an odd glamor — the kind that can’t take itself seriously due to the war but one also that resents that fact. true to the horror of it with almost no mention of the war’s details. neither art not biography but a kind of romantic epic built somehow from sober reportage.
Find it at your local library.
marlene dietrich & erich maria remarque
Interview with Norman Lock at The Collagist with Matt Bell
A great interview with Norman Lock, author of the recent SHADOWPLAY (Ellipsis Press). Here are two bits:
Life apart from the page has become difficult – this, I know to be the result of self-consciousness, which in my case is a flinching from the assault of consciousness on a sensibility insufficiently armed against its painful disclosures. I’m sure this is true for many other sensitive people; I’m just one who has happened to make self-consciousness a subject of fiction.
and another bit:
To say that I am a writer and am interested in stories is not the tautology it might appear. At least for one who was once suspicious of stories. I came of age when language was foregrounded and stories were mere plots and to be despised. Even before language was preeminent, characterization was everything; the psychological work of fiction, this was the ideal to which a young writer with very little experience of world literature – with no experience at all of anti-naturalistic forms – aspired. My mistrust of stories may have been a misunderstanding of what fiction is; even psychological fiction tells stories – yes? I may have confused story with plot, or perhaps not. Do we not seem to prefer “fiction” and “narrative” to “story” in our description of what we do? In our minds don’t we make a distinction between literary fiction and mere stories, which are what general readers seek in the best-sellers we disdain? (Perhaps writers younger than I are today suspicious even of the literary.)
Read the rest of the interview at: http://thecollagist.com/wordpress/?p=371
Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Gary Lutz read for Ellipsis Press
Come celebrate the launch of new Ellipsis Press titles. I’ll be hosting a reading with Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and special guest–Gary Lutz.
A hypnotic tale of artistic obsession, Norman Lock’s SHADOWPLAY tells the story of a Javanese shadow-puppet master. “Wise up and get all you can of Lock,” says Gordon Lish, “His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this “genius”) of his utterance.” Joanna Ruocco’s THE MOTHERING COVEN is a “work of wonder” says Carole Maso, a singular act of prose daring. Also reading will be short story master Gary Lutz.
Book party for Shadowplay & The Mothering Coven.
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 4-7PM
at Barbès | DIRECTIONS: 376 9th St, Brooklyn, NY
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Bryce stops outside the little room beneath the stairs. She slips a pixie stix beneath the door. Something furry slides out.
“A Rattenkönig,” gasps Bryce. She looks around to see if anyone could have heard her. How could she think it was a Rattenkönig? It is a sheet of fake mustaches. Bryce thinks of all the hair she’s swept into the dustbin in her lifetime and feels ill.
“They are beautiful,” says Bryce. She recognizes one of the mustaches. The young man from the pinochle deck. Of course.
“More slings and arrows,” sighs Bryce. She sticks the mustache to her palm, where her heart line used to be. It tickles.
From THE MOTHERING COVEN
Image: Rattenkönig by Katharina Fritsch
Q & A with Gary Lutz
“I’m more fond of the colon. I think the colon is an undervalued punctuational device. And I’m extremely obsessed with the hyphen, which is the most difficult to master of the punctuation marks.”
vid thanks to jess row.
From A NOTEBOOK THAT NEVER WAS by Fernando Pessoa
beautiful bits of recovered pessoa in the latest Poetry magazine. here’s a bitty bit:
Believing in nothing firmly and therefore accepting as equally valid, in principle (which is as far as they go), all opinions, and considering that a theory is worth only as much as the theorist, an emotion as much as the emotion’s expresser, I could never take seriously the literary dogma that consists in the use of a personality. Personality is a form of belief and, like all belief, impossible for the reasoner.
It’s a short step from believing in outer truth to believing in inner truth, from accepting a concept of the world as true to accepting a concept of our self as true. I don’t affirm that everything is fluid, since that would be an affirmation, but to our understanding everything is indeed fluid, and the truth, unfolding for us into various truths, disappears, since it cannot be multiple.
and
How often, in the age-old trajectory of the worlds, a stray comet must have brought an Earth to its end! A catastrophe so utterly material will determine the fate of countless mental and spiritual projects. Death spies on us, like a sister of the spirit, and Destiny . . . . . .
Death is our being subject to something outside us, and we, at each moment of our lives, are but reflections and a consequence of what surrounds us.
Death lurks in our every living act. Dead we’re born, dead we live, and already dead we enter death. Composed of cells living off their disintegration, we’re made of death.
the haunting and heartbreaking rest at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237752
THE TAQWACORES by michael muhammad knight
in this interview author knight says he’s continued to identify as muslim because he’d “rather be in the mosque urinating out than outside the mosque urinating in.” and that delicate preference gives the book its permission and power to radically deal with islam.
it’s done through the lens of punk rock (or, as the book likes to spell it: punk rawk!) wherein your humble narrator is a nerdy engineering student reporting on the (d)evolving escapades of a muslim punk house–where the living room goes, for example on friday night, from ju’mah to all-ages show almost before you can say oi!
knights uses the two religious questions — what is punk? and what is islam? — to riotous and appropriately scandalous effect. the cast list could make you think it’s just easy mashup — burqua-clad riot grrrls, mohawked imams, liwaticore — but knight handles all of it with a soft-touch authenticity, all the more remarkable for the fact that the taqwacore punk scene came AFTER he wrote the book. details on that here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html
here’s a bit early on where the book’s hero tries to sort out the mess:
“Bro, listen,” said Jehangir. “They were Muslims, man, but not your uncles. They need a deen that’s not your uncle’s deen. Iman, think about it like that, iman! It’s supposed to be all about having no fear of death, right? And we got that part down, we’ve done that and we have plenty of Muslims who aren’t afraid to die. Mash’Allah–but now Muslims are afraid to fuckin’ live! They fear life, yakee, more than they fear shaytans or shirk or fitna or bid’a or kafr or qiyamah or the torments in the grave, they fear Life… You got all these poor kids who think they’re inferior because they don’t get their two Fajr in, their four Zuhr, four Asr… they don’t have beards, they don’t wear hejab, maybe they went to their fuckin’ high school proms and the only masjid around was regular horsehit-horseshit-takbir-masjid and they had to pretend like they were doing everything right…well I say fuck that and this whole house says fuck that — even Umar, you think Umar can go in a regular masjid with all his stupid tattoos and dumb straghtedge bands? Even Umar, bro, as much as he tries to Wahabbi-hard-ass his way around here, he’s still one of us. He’s still fuckin’ taqwacore — ” (41)
who woulda thought you could still write a punk novel? granted it’s not a punk novel like kathy acker or mark amerika’s THE KAFKA CHRONICLES. it’s not in other words a novel iconoclastic in form. but it does try to be iconoclastic in content — and knight’s take on islam does seem pretty radical.
a genius raconteur, he obviously cares about this world and its characters enough to make them seem real, to make the scene seem possible. the book succeeds because that care gives it a sweetness and integrity that’s very charismatic — plus the book has a real outrageousness that’s both rare and powerful. give it a whirl.
buy the book. find it at the library.
ON THE WINDING STAIR by Joanna Howard
barely trembling still lives a la duchamp’s ÉTANT DONNÉS, howard’s genre games hint at motion–sea wrecks, cowboys at chase, revolutionaries and kidnappings, gypsies and sailors, violence and unleashed victorian sexuality–but these tales remain defiantly frozen, artificial and perfected. the accumulating effect is occasionally claustrophobic and often a mesmerized enthrallment.
i dug “The Scent of Apples” for its rich tapestry of place and character, the gorgeous baroque style. also, “She Came from the East,” which was a snappy, dark comedic act. in fact what was surprising, throughout the book, was how the tight and detailed language opened up at times to, danced to the rhythm of, jokes.
one other to mention, because it seemed a distillation and symbol of her method, the opener: “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” whose climax of flickering poses uncannily animates the parched landscape around it.
buy it from the publisher or find it at your local library.
hey, what’s behind that door?
Ellipsis Press will be at TWO bookfests in Brooklyn this weekend.
…
Ellipsis Press and Harp & Altar at the
3rd Annual Boog City Festival.
Saturday & Sunday, September 12th and 13th, 2009
at Unnameable Books | 600 Vanderbilt Ave. in Brooklyn
Books–including new titles by Joanna Ruocco and Norman Lock–will be on sale.
Harp & Altar contributor and new Ellipsis Press editor Corey Frost will be reading at 1:40PM on Saturday.
Also hear further astonishments by these other Harp & Altar contributors:
Jill Magi will be reading at 12:30 on Saturday.
Joanna Sondheim will be reading at around 12:30PM on Sunday.
Eileen Myles will be speaking on a panel at 2:45PM on Sunday.
See full schedule at: http://welcometoboogcity.com/bc59.pdf
. . .
Ellipsis Press will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival
at Brooklyn Borough Hall.
Brooklyn Book Festival Directions
THE MOTHERING COVEN by joanna ruocco
NEW FROM ELLIPSIS PRESS!
i’ll dare to call this first novel joycean for its daredevil wordplay. i mean sick. somehow with none of the ego-fluffing look-at-me posturing, it combines the virtuosic vocabulary of a george perec with the referential knowledge of a PHd student in Pagan Studies all written with a style all her own but as iconoclastic and rhythmic as david markson. hopeful and smart. and all brand new. and you should most definitely try it.
“Ruocco’s Coven is an engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon, reminiscent of the works of such writers as Ronald Firbank or Coleman Dowell. It toys with language and knowledge somewhat like the emerald-eyed black cat in the book toys with a large bird. Batting it about playfully. Coaxing something new out of it.”
—Robert Coover
“Deliriously imagined, The Mothering Coven is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!”
—Carole Maso
SHADOWPLAY by Norman Lock
NEW FROM ELLIPSIS PRESS!
an uncanny tale of the limits and power of story telling, SHADOWPLAY also works with a mesmerizing and subtle structure where the story repeats and folds into itself over and over again. among lock’s best work, it continues the self-conscious fascination and manipulation of the theme of “other” that appeared in works like A HISTORY OF THE IMAGINATION and LAND OF THE SNOW MEN. here however lock’s uproarious and dark-humored wit has been replaced with a different mode: that of a parable or fable. the alienation, vanity, occasional triumph, and seemingly inevitable destruction of the story-teller are almost classically illustrated in this compact and powerful tale.
“Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening.”
—R.M. Berry
“[Lock’s] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen.”
—Gary Lutz
THE JOURNALIST by harry mathews
here’s a fantastic long interview with the great novelist harry mathews… in it [this interview with harry mathews that now seems to have disappeared from the internet] i learned a few things, some a little shocking. not so surprising: harry mathews loves robert walser. who can resist? some nice bits about cage, merce cunningham, and john ashbery too. but the sentence that hit home was that mathews perceives his 1994 masterpiece, THE JOURNALIST, a “flop.”
HM: It was a total flop.
HUO: Why?
HM: I don’t know. I think it’s a terrific book myself. [Laughs]
i stopped reading and had to pace the room. though sadly such a thing is almost expected, it struck me hard how isolated readers and writers of advanced fiction are that a groundbreaker of the novel form such as THE JOURNALIST could be so ill-used. or that its author should not be well rewarded with if not lucre (unlikely) then at least some deserved renown.
a subtle novel THE JOURNALIST is, like his CIGARETTES, conceptual. meaning its value is at the very least only partially related to the emotional revelations of its plot and characters. written in an elegant prose style that goes down devilishly smoothly, THE JOURNALIST concerns the documentary activities of a european executive who is insidiously but most certainly losing his shit.
the details of a bourgeois’s daily life–his affairs and wines and suits–may prejudice some readers against, however THE JOURNALIST in part transcends and in part satirizes its class environs through its gradually unfolding structure–an experiment of epistemology that continually and progressively asks: what is identity? what can we know? what can we record? and how is a fact changed by our observing of it?
and about that style. despite, or because of, the conceptual emphasis of this work–mathews’ narrator records with a refined wit and sensual language that makes for absolutely compulsive reading. sly tongue-in-cheek jokes, casual anecdotes, life stories (a classic mathews tale, that of Zoltan the waiter, on page 49-54), wardrobes, masturbation, drugs are all accounted in this light-touch, masterful prose.
also robustly recorded: the narrator’s dreamlife. the one thing oulipians may do best of all–better than the surrealists who worshiped it also (see the interview for HM’s views on the surrealists)–is confront and engage the subconscious.
the general plot: a man tries harder and harder to document his own life, going batty in the process as language and its chores proliferate and separate him from reality. it’s also a profound allegory on the writing life–its obsessions and its limitations and unique possibilities.
in this recent forum on the future of fiction, one writer proclaims the future will be “conceptualism.” if so, conceptual writing is also the novel’s recent and deep past. (i remember a j. hoberman review of early 20th century cinema where he said something like: in the beginning–it was all experimental.) …in that same forum another writer says something i really dug:
A hope, not a prediction: I’d love to see fiction that concentrates on the things fiction does uniquely well—chief among these the inhabiting of thought, the mapping of consciousness—rather than chasing vainly after more popular art forms. I like film and TV, too…but what’s the point of a fiction that envies and emulates them, and thus dooms itself to being second-rate visual culture rather than first-rate verbal culture?
—Michael Griffith
the mapping of consciousness in fiction–the possibilities and paths of thought–are areas in which harry mathews has been expertly at play since his 1962’s THE CONVERSIONS. reward yourself and try him.
buy THE JOURNALIST from dalkey or find it at your local library
Harp & Altar #6 now available!
Harp & Altar announces the release of its sixth issue
It was a nice two-syllable name. Hart Crane. Even one. He was the son of a candy-maker, the one who invented life-savers. Hart Crane drowned, so that was pretty strange. I read everything he wrote which was only White Buildings and The Bridge which I found a little impossible. And then the fat biography and his letters. I had never read anyone’s letters before. I was 27. It was good being a journalist or whatever I was now because I could do all the reading that was too much in college because now I was getting paid to know. I could see in my reading that Hart was trying to write the great long American poem and I think it was beyond him. Not because he wasn’t great, but the long poem idea seems a little stretched thin and who needs it, really. But Hart kept finding patrons and getting grants. He was like a comic ingenue. He winds up completely isolated on an tropical island in a hurricane or else getting thrown out of Mexico on his Guggenheim he was such a drunk. Meanwhile, writing writing the bridge. Why has no one ever made this film. He was a very familiar man. I felt I knew him. A prematurely white-haired fag, shy-faced and handsome. Wearing one of those Russian sailor shirts he was always leaning against a tree or posing in a group, distractedly touching his own face. He seemed to be gazing into another world. My father looked that way in our family pictures. I figured it meant you were gay. There’s one of me when I was thirteen sitting with all of my friends and I was doing it. Looking right through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture seem to be actually in the world. They’re stopping the balloon from floating off.
-Eileen Myles, from “hart!”
Also: poetry by Kate Greenstreet, Jennifer Hayashida, Karla Kelsey, Justin Marks, Patrick Morrissey, Rob Schlegel, and Andrei Sen-Senkov, translated by Zachary Schomburg; prose by Roberta Allen, Stephen-Paul Martin, Joanna Ruocco, and David Wirthlin; Jared White on Brandon Shimoda and Michael Zeiss on Kafka; an excerpt from Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan; and Michael Newton’s gallery reviews.
taking a break…
taking a break from blogging and reviewing… a year of this seems good enough time to have tried it… might come back later…
portrat of gilbert sorrentino by christopher sorrentino
go over to the granta site to see a photo of gilbert sorrentino at eighteen along with a remembrance by his son, christopher sorrentino. a rather amazing shot of a babyfaced teen who grew up to be one of the more ferocious writers of last century’s america.
Norman Lock interview and new website
came across this interview with norman lock–who has a new book out called THE KING OF SWEDEN (ravenna press).
here’s lock on the simultaneously marginalized yet therefore critical status of small presses [which reminded me of this stephen-paul martin interview where is made the case that small presses need to be an alternative network to, and not simply a minor league version of, mainstream publishing].
interviewed by john olson in 2007 for CRANKY magazine:
Norman Lock: Many there were who deplored the condition of the American theatrical establishment in the 1960s for its hostility to originality of structure, voice, and language. Some simply went on deploring it while others created Off-Broadway and an authentic regional theater. In the ’70s, Off-Broadway was becoming nearly as ossified as the Broadway it had replaced. The result was an Off-Off-Broadway and studio theaters that welcomed the exceptional.
Liberality of mind and spirit is succeeded always by the reactionary, which yields, in turn, to an alternative. There is nothing surprising in this. I am happy that there are alternative presses, such as FC2, Ravenna Press, Triple Press, and Calamari Press, to seriously entertain the fiction that I wish to make, as well as independent magazines to publish our stories. When I think of Joyce and Beckett and Michaux, I am cheered and glad to be in their company — not that I have their talent, but I share their banishment to the margin… What constitutes a “sufficiency”? That very much depends on the quality of readers. A handmade book that Deron Bauman made for me in 2000 during his short-lived elimae books venture was read by less than 50 people, but among them were Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Dawn Raffel, Faruk Ulay, Cooper Renner, Kathryn Rantala, and Guy Davenport. They form, for me, a sufficiency of readers.
To acknowledge such a limitation is to accept a reduced role for the writer. I do not believe that what I write can change the world or the people in it. I don’t believe that anything written by a contemporary literary artist has that power over a mass audience. There are some who believe they can restructure consciousness using language and narratives that defy convention. But their visionary writing will scarcely be read by the people most in need of a transformed consciousness. The only work that has power to engage a mass audience is sentimental (which is a lie) or pornographic (which is also a lie, though perhaps a more entertaining one). We can rue this. We can set down the causes to mainstream publishing or to a degeneration in popular taste and appreciation that have little to do with literacy. But we can and should seek out our own margin and make our literature there.
and on print versus digital publishing:
NL: This idea of art as a “making,” as a thing made—it speaks immediately to my disinclination toward online publication. I have a prejudice against it, which may be common for those of my generation; I do not trust it—do not entirely trust technology, for the obvious reasons. Electricity is evanescent; paper and ink give to the thing made permanence, which is, I am aware, illusory. And yet, perhaps not: We have old books, incunabula, writing set down on manuscripts, paper, parchment, stone tablets. It survives because of its autonomous life; it is not attached to an exterior life-support system, whose plug can be pulled. (I suspect one day it will.)
link to the whole interview available at lorman lock’s (new) website here.
“the sweethearts” by mario benedetti in the brooklyn rail
there’s a very lovely story in this month’s rail by uruguayan novelist mario benedetti. from 1958, there’s the slightest mustiness to it–or maybe some rearguard yearning–but that to me made it all the more dee-lish…
…Solitude is a precarious substitute for friendship. I didn’t have many friends. The Aramburu twins, the son of Vieytes the pharmacist, Tito Lagomarsino, and my cousins, Alberto and Washington Cardona, came to the house often because our mothers maintained an old relationship filled with habits held in common, the exchange of gossip, and shared fellowship. Just like today, we talk about professionals from the same graduating class, in 1924 the women from a main province felt they were friends since their first meeting on only one historical level: their first communion. To say, for example, “Elvira, Teresa, and I received our first communion together,” signified, plainly and simply, that the three of them were united by an almost indestructible bond, and if on occasion, because of an unforeseen hazard, which could take the form of a sudden trip or a subduing passion, a friend from first communion were to separate from the group, her rude attitude would be immediately added to the list of the most incredible betrayals.
The fact that our mothers were friends and lavished kisses on each other every time they saw each other in the plaza, in Club Uruguay, in the Gutiérrez Department Stores, and in the plush semi-darkness of their days spent entertaining visitors, wasn’t enough to decree pleasant coexistence among the most illustrious of their offspring. Any of us who accompanied their mother during one of their weekly visits would automatically be allowed to go downstairs to play with the children of the lady of the house after uttering a respectful: “I’m fine, and you, Doña Encarnación?” Most of the time, playing meant pelting each other with stones from tree to tree, or, on better occasions, we ended up punching each other and rolling around on the ground tearing our pockets and ultimately fraying our lapels. If I didn’t fight with more frequency, it was because I was afraid María Julia would find out. In spite of her freckles, María Julia contemplated the world with a smile of smug understanding, and the strange thing was that that understanding also included the trappings of adults.
read the story at: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/fiction/the-sweethearts
HÔTEL SPLENDID by marie redonnet and SPLENDIDE-HÔTEL by gilbert sorrentino
these two take their title from the first poem of rimbaud’s ILLUMINATIONS [“And the Hôtel-Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.”]
HÔTEL SPLENDID is one of marie redonnet’s trilogy of death — the others are FOREVER VALLEY and ROSE MELLIE ROSE. i haven’t read the last, but like FOREVER VALLEY, HÔTEL SPLENDID is a thin book packed with modern anxiety in an oddly proto-modern setting. this time we’re in a rustic hotel set amidst a sucking, sulfuric swamp. less effective for me i think than FOREVER VALLEY (possibly because the hotel is a more familiar device and thus more in danger of being used as a cliche) HÔTEL SPLENDID was still impressive for its accumulative feeling of anxiety. its main character’s desperate attempt to keep up the rotting, leaking building as well as attend to her sisters ailments and hostilities, was perfect allegory for the burden of all our constant anxieties: bourgeois real estate phobias, hypochondria and contagion paranoia, and the melancholy in seeing the flesh’s various evidence of its encroaching age.
redonnet’s work is particularly virtuosic with time. time contracts and leaps in her writing. within a paragraph, between sentences, we can oddly jump weeks and then linger for pages on a single incident only to pass through a night in a phrase’s brief flourish. the effect is somewhat like reading an irregular diary — quickpenned and intense during moments of drama but languishing for long trials or spurted into with a feverish insight. and yet also her writing undercuts this diary-like inconsistency with its repeating, inescapable and unchanging obsessions. maybe a better comparison than diary is the fever dream, which moves forward in jumpcuts and then traps you in over-hot, looping nightmare scenes.
sorrentino’s SPLENDIDE-HÔTEL is a beautiful artwork of prose, constructed with just the slightest bits of conceit and image: the idea of rimbaud’s hotel and an alphabet primer (and maybe doc williams’ wheel barrow). from these he plays riffs on his favorite themes: the necessary artifice of literary work, our ceaseless acts of corruption, a paradoxically unsentimental nostalgia for mid-century america. i always thought SPLENDIDE-HÔTEL was ever-so-slightly marred by its occasional interluding poems which, even in his parodic modes, necessarily fall short in comparison to his dazzling sentences. nonetheless sorrentino delivers some of his best work here. the paragraphs are a wonder of shifting and connected precise perceptions; he’s enormously funny — a pitch black humor; and the sentences that have that old world panache so one can’t help but think: they don’t make them like that anymore…
here’s a bit:
B-b-b-b-b. The sound an idiot makes. I remember Jo-Jo, ah, a perfect idiot name. A Mongoloid, shuffling down the street on the arm of his grey and faded Irish mother, punching himself in the face. Yet we all stand now as idiots in the face of the mass devastation of feeling that abounds. A culture that can give no sustenance, and yet the remedies are for still more “useful skills.” Useful skills, and the heart dies, the imagination crippled so that mere boys are become mass murderers or drift blindly into a sterile adulthood. The young, the young! In a stupendous rage of nonbelief–faced with a spurious culture, the art that can give life sullied or made unavailable. What art there is is cheap and false, dedicated to a quick assay of the superficial. Don’t believe for a moment that art is a decoration or an emblem. It is what life there is left, though ill-used, ill-used. The young crying for nourishment, and they are given the cynical products of the most fickle market. “Look at what passes for the new,” the poet says. Put a handle on it and sell it, cotton candy: to be gone in a moment and leave no memory other than the memory of sickening sweetness (p. 9).
and now a word from our sponsor…
from friday’s nytimes:
People are flocking to libraries after forsaking Barnes & Noble or ditching their HBO service and subscriptions to Netflix, library officials said, because libraries’ books, DVDs and CDs have a significant advantage: They are free.
an interjected no-duh here is unwarranted but can’t be helped.
…There is an incongruity in libraries’ providing such a wealth of free services because libraries themselves are vulnerable to the economy. Towns and school districts have started to make cuts, and library hours and employees are frequent targets.
In Maplewood, Jane Kennedy, the library director, is grappling with a 10 percent cut to her budget, reducing it to $1.7 million, and she lamented that she is contemplating layoffs, payless furloughs and shorter hours.
“People need us more than ever, and we’re not going to be there for them,” she said, noting that circulation had climbed 8 percent from 2007 to 2008, to 235,285 items. “People count on us and we want to do more, not less.”
…“People are reawakening to all the things the library has to offer, and unfortunately this is because of the economic downturn,” said Arlene Sahraie, the library services director for the Bergen County network. “There’s a saying among librarians that libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/nyregion/new-jersey/15librarynj.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
ranganathan would be proud.
psychogeography of calamari
the ever generous derek the flâneur–or maybe better: derek le flambeur–has a walkabout nyc and, while he’s at it, says some nice words on FOG & CAR’s W and Z bozon exchanges:
I received a card shuffler once as a gift—one of the most memorable gifts I ever received. For weeks before, my father let me visit the present, which he had caged in a box in darkness so I could hear and smell it, but not open it. I think there was a sign on it that said “do not touch until Xmas.” Actually I lie, this wasn’t the card shuffler gift. This was another memorable gift—a piggy bank in which you’d put a coin in a slot and a hand would reach up and grab the coin and pull it down into the bank, which was made to look like a coffin. I am not sure why I’m telling you this, or what it has to do with Fog & Car.
On the plane here I watched some movies, most not worth mentioning besides Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I did see some program on Andy Warhol though, and they were talking about his movies, the ones where he would put a camera on people, unscripted, without guidance, and then leave the room. They’d leave the camera on them for hours, until something had to give. Somebody commentating on it was saying something about how Warhol dances this fine line between what’s exciting and boring. And how this is sexual or some such thing. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, except to say that maybe Fog & Car skates this same fine line. Through rout reiteration, Lim pushes boring to the extreme that it becomes exciting. How does Lim do this? To quote his character, “the normal always let my mind go the farthest, always the immediate physical world was navigable without thinking, so that thinking would head elsewhere, deep into its own self-contained jungle.”
In a sense, this is what particles do: bore and excite.
i’ll be reading with eugene marten this thursday 3/12 at mcnally jackson books
March 12, 2009 7PM
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince St. (b/t Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY
http://mcnallyjackson.com/index.php/component/option,com_events/Itemid,30/agid,233/day,12/month,03/task,view_detail/year,2009/
McNally Jackson’s Indie Press Series honors the work of small, independent publishers. Brooklyn-based Ellipsis Press was founded in 2007 by author Johannah Rodgers and Harp & Altar fiction editor Eugene Lim. Lim’s Fog & Car begins with the alternating voices of Mr Fog and Ms Car, recently divorced, and becomes an exercise in narrative experimentation and a meditation on loneliness. Gary Lutz calls it “a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut.” Marten’s Waste is told by the night janitor of a high-rise office building; Sam Lipsyte calls it “an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction” and Gordon Lish raves “one for history and a half.
“pools” by gary lutz
calamari press publisher derek white shot some footage at the recent EVER release party. here’s the incomparable gary lutz reading from “pools,” from his chapbook PARTIAL LIST OF PEOPLE TO BLEACH. At Word Books in Brooklyn on Mar 5, 2009.
EVER by blake butler
like johannes görannson’s DEAR RA, blake butler’s eerie EVER’s a howl — a generational cri de coeur, but instead of the anthemic us-ness there’s left now only solitary i’s peeping sometimes wildly sometimes mutely about. and replacing the ruined reputed best minds of the last boom are self-alienated observers of the intractable and indomitable structures, which serve only to reinforce their own alienation.
[At first our local leaders tried to zone around the madness, to block off damaged sects with panes of glass, but the error swung so often, the glass just magnified the problem — the shatter echoed in the ground (p 8).
i thought of renee gladman’s JUICE a lot while reading EVER. if the content and concerns are quite different nonetheless the prose in both can be seen as lines of poetry laid end to end, where the all important function of the line break has now been transferred to the puckering pocket between sentences. EVER even has a fairly palpable scansion — more often than not bricks of anapests and iambs are mortared together with commas or prepositions. but it is never predictable, and its stunningly-sculpted sentences shimmer and gloat like the surfaces of donald judd shapes in geometric progression.
its gore and nightmare may be reminiscent of creepier lynchian jump cuts but the deadened sadness of its voice suggests something perhaps more dedicated to hopelessness. definingly unredeemed, EVER’s punked emily dickinson updates are fun for the hole family.
consume from the publisher or buy from SPD
trickle up economics
reading the report of the frankfurt bookfair in the latest harper’s made me feel like crying, laughing and puking all at once — until i threw it aside with a fuck-this-noise dismissal. one day (maybe quite soon) even the global corporate publishing emperors will realize they’re in their skivvies… two days later, geeking out on a strangely inspiring article on netbooks in wired magazine, this idea was reinforced as was oddly re-affirmed my faith in the rise of small presses, when i read the following rule of thumb demonstrated in recent techworld history: “In THE INNOVATOR’S DILEMMA, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models.”
______________________________
[and a similar burn baby burn sentiment here from from joshua harmon.]
NO COLONY volume 2
speaking of golden parachutes, bonuses, and toxic assets — i’ve a story in the latest NO COLONY called “Executives’ Song.” i’ve actually not yet got a copy in my paws, but I hear it’ll be available at AWP. writings from blake butler, bryson newhart, christian peet, future ellipsis press author joanna ruocco — and many a sweet-lie-talking other. more info at:
http://blakebutler.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-colony-002.html