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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.]
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
what a book! a bible! a MOBY DICK! at the same time, an epic bore. a droning monologue of fatigue and sickness…
THE MOST HIGH is an awesome failure — in the sense that PIERRE is a failure or that kafka is. that is to say, not at all — except in the sense that a pure ambition to representative truth must fall abysmally short.
blanchot might’ve given a snort at the idea that his project had anything to do with representing truth. this sorrentino review (in the NYTimes–evidently such a thing was possible but a scant two decades ago) of a number of blanchot’s translations from station hill press argues that blanchot above all believed in the paradoxical lie of language, its inherent corruption and artificiality.
nonetheless this novel, published in 1948, seems to want to capture a certain philosophical hell particular to its post-war era, which nonetheless uncannily resonates with our current moment. in its political theory it has antecedent in CANDIDE’s horrific picaresque within the best of all possible worlds; the translator’s preface mentions the work’s cousins in camus’ THE PLAGUE and orwell’s 1984; and in its use of the state as self-created disease it has intellectual descendants in, among others, saramago’s BLINDNESS and naomi klein’s SHOCK DOCTRINE.
but there’s no use trying to reduce it. the story of a civil servant, henry sorge, and his descent into a bureaucratic hell and plague defies summary. the same end-of-history ideas that spawned contemporary neoconservatism and arguably our current atrocious wars of imperialism are shown here (in 1948!) to be an ideological prison of hypocrisy and inescapable doubletalk. as well and importantly, it’s an indictment of our tacit complicity in these daily repressions and horrors.
…nothing’s higher than the law. Really, all offenses are plots against the law: you’d like to disobey it, but since that isn’t possible, you have to rebel against its legitimacy. A long time ago you could steal and leave it at that; now you’re committing through the theft an infinitely more serious crime, the most terrible of all and, besides, a crime that can’t be carried out, that fails. Of that crime there remains, precisely, only an insignificant trace — the theft (41).
(i should also say that i’ve tried blanchot many times over the past decade and just couldn’t get through it. to me, THOMAS THE OBSCURE was. and i seem to have absolutely no stomach for the straight-up theory (though friends have said THE WRITING OF THE DISASTER is also a must.) i only mention this to say THE MOST HIGH i found much more readable. even though it has a fractured structure, dialogues or situations more than plot, seems to shift fundamental style each chapter, and has looooong blocks of abstruse monologue-ing — i was drawn in by the continuity of its purpose… and maybe i’m still untrained and the others in fact do await my arrival like sanctuaries in time. nice to think.)
another quote, along the same theme:
For the State will know how to use your insubordination, and not only will it take advantage of it, but you, in opposition and revolt, will be its delegate and representative as fully as you would have been in your office, following the law. The only change is that you want change and there won’t be any. What you’d like to call destruction of the State will always appear to you really as service to the State. What you’ll do to escape the law will still be the force of the law for you. And when the State decides to annihilate you, you’ll know that this annihilation doesn’t sanction your error, doesn’t give you, before history, the vain arrogance of men in revolt, but rather that it makes you one of these modest and correct servants on the dust of whom rests the good of all — and your good as well (137).
if you’ve some time, you really should check it out.
buy from the publisher or find used or find at the library.
in an earlier post i’d lamented the lack of wikipedia entry for steven moore, one of our most perceptive critics. now one’s been created (though for some reason isn’t findable via a search on the wikipedia site yet) by victoria harding, tireless keeper of these literary sites. on the wikipedia entry you’ll learn the gossipy fact that moore left dalkey due to irreconcilable differences with the publisher. i dunno what the issues in the break up were, but it’s unfortunate because dalkey did and does do incredible work–especially in translation–but its coverage and support of american fiction seem to have faltered since his departure. mr. moore i learned was the one who brought david markson to dalkey as well as carole maso and rikki ducornet. he re/dis-covered felipe alfau and was an early champion of david foster wallace. in fact reading through the quick summary one realizes that he’s been quietly in the center of serious american literary activity for more than two decades. point your browser therefore and sing the unsung if but to yourself at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Moore_(US_author))
too bad it’s not available via the web, but dave hickey has a witty, pretty great essay in the current Art in America. smart on recent artworld history, criticism in general, and the relationship of artworks to the marketplace. of course these days that last category is practically non-existent for literary works, i.e. there is no marketplace for it — but not the (current) point. (and anyway maybe we should be glad for it.) i don’t care particularly about the monetary value of a work, but hickey argues maybe i should — because “the quality of an art object is directly proportional to the quantity of something that it gives to someone who belongs to some constituency of interest.” i had to read that sentence a couple of times, but if i read him generously as not saying that the best artworks are those that serve the lowest common denominator, then i think hickey’s saying not just that the value of art is socially defined — but that since it is you’re well-served to be environmentally-conscious of your particular art world’s biosphere… maybe i muddled that gloss — but the essay is worth picking up at the library or newsstand, the Feb 09 issue of Art in America, s’got a peyton on the cover… here’s a bit:
It’s not easy to revel in the twilight of one’s own relevance, but, these days, I look around and happily admit that no piece of art criticism written by me or anyone else contributed a whiff of pheromone to the fragrant panache that sustained the art world for nearly two decades as a market in luxury goods. Quality box office was quite sufficient to maintain your Ferraris, your ugly paintings and boring videos as objects of status and delectation. The fact that your Ferraris were less likely to be honored by a museum exhibition, a super gala and a spread in Town & Country made your luxury art all the more attractive as a social instrumentality, especially if you factored in the elevated levels of self-esteem derived from swanning around Sotheby’s waving your little paddle…
At first, some of cognoscenti reveled in this loss of transparency [in knowing the value of works of art]. It meant we knew and you didn’t. We got bargains. Occasionally, we could actually pass off good works of art as trendy objects. Eventually, though, many of my friends and colleagues who knew good from bad stopped caring, and after a decade or so of not caring, they didn’t know anymore, and, for a professional in the arts, the inability to tell good art from bad is a terminal condition. It’s no joke. Some works of art are demonstrably better than others, and, ultimately, it matters, because bad art disappears before our eyes. If you look and can’t see anything, there’s nothing there. It’s elevator music, hospital furniture, AM radio. There is, in fact, so much of this high-priced confetti in Chelsea these days that one must fear that the best galleries with the most honest prices will be the first to be undeservedly wiped out.
What I am suggesting is that the art world is going through its own version of the Wall Street meltdown. When things were moving fast on the Street, and money was being made, the complicated, time-consuming task of assessing the real value of complex financial instruments became an easy corner to cut, so it was cut. Then one morning, the markets opened and nobody knew what anything was worth…
All I can say is hold and pray, and, henceforth, apply the formula quality is quantity. The quality of an art object is directly proportional to the quantity of something that it gives to someone who belongs to some constituency of interest. Critics, scholars, collectors, dealers, curators, and decorators expect different things in different measures. The works of art that deliver the most stuff to the most people and serve the most complex consituences for the longest time are the very best ones. Period.
_________________________
…and a little bit from the believer interview that made me chuckle:
DH: Anyway, the art world is way too big right now. The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?
Come by and hear some great writers of unconventional fiction chosen by the editors of Harp & Altar and the Mad Hatters’ Review.
Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in the current issue of Harp & Altar is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.
Tim Horvath, whose fiction appears in the current issue of MHR, won the 2006 Raymond Carver Short Story Award and the ‘06 prize of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. His stories are out or forthcoming in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Fiction, Web Conjunctions, SleepingFish, Sein und Werden, and elsewhere. He teaches a class for Grub Street Writers in Boston centered on the application of findings from brain science to writing and literature. His novella Circulation, called “a glittering narrative performance” by David Huddle, will be released as a short book by Sunnyoutside Press in January 2009. He is currently working on a novel in which one or more (it is unclear which) microscopic counter-novels fester in the interstices of the typeface and must be eradicated lest the infra-structure come crashing down.
Joanna Howard is the author of Frights of Fancy, a collection of short prose forthcoming from Boa Editions. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters and Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. A chapbook In the Colorless Round, with artwork by novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, is available from Noemi Press. Her “Seascape” appeared in Harp & Altar #2.
Mary Mackey, with poems forthcoming in MHR Issue 11, is a poet and novelist who lives in Berkeley, California. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Breaking The Fever (Marsh Hawk Press); one experimental novella, Immersion; and fourteen novels, including A Grand Passion(Simon & Schuster), The Year the Horses Came (HarperCollins), The Notorious Mrs. Winston(Putnam/Berkley Books), and The Widow’s War (Putnam/Berkley Books–in press for Fall 2009). Mackey’s works have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. She has lectured at Harvard and the Smithsonian, is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. A member of the Writers Guild of America, West, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning feature film Silence. More information about her can be found at www.marymackey.com. and at www.marshhawkpress.org
this slim volume’s a revelation. an understated experimental novel. its perfection has something to do with this pared-down style, where the details are few but exquisite. at first it seems like a quaint country narrative, it then soon reveals itself to be something more–perhaps an allegorical tale. but in the end, while maintaining some of the aspects of allegory, none of FOREVER VALLEY’s symbols map completely to ideas or reality as much as they manage to point uncannily back at themselves.
Interviewer: Reading the triptych, one sometimes catches a glimpse of something like a rigorous structure…
Redonnet: What you call structure or composition is indeed a determining factor. Each book adheres to a rigorous structure, at the same time mathematical, architectural, and musical, which transforms itself from book to book: the elements multiply, the combinatorial system grows richer, space and thus mobility becomes more important, the story grows more complex. This structure is part of the language that I invented for myself in order to write, a language built from a lexical and syntactic emptiness that I had to impose on language. Maybe this very idea of structure takes the place of that lost rhetoric, becoming a means of generating another language, and thus another history.
!
and elsewhere about images and cinema’s relationship to writing:
The reader creates the film of the story as he or she reads, a private cinema. This requires a release of the imagination if the book is not to remain forever closed to the reader… [T]he fact that the image is born of the power of language alone means that it is not only an image, but also a thought that creates meaning.
I would like that to be my revenge as a writer, at a time when we are entering into a culture of the all-powerful image, which threatens to kill literature: to invent a language that would be capable, by liberating the vital forces of imagination and thought, of resisting the images– seductive, manipulative, stultifying, alienating — that invade us from all sides.
part of a triptych, the other two are: HOTEL SPLENDID and ROSE MELIE ROSE
a sly and outrageous book that i don’t know why isn’t getting more attention or wasn’t on any of the mainstream best of 08 lists. it may be provincial to say but i’ll read a hundred beatty’s before i read a book about friggin cricket.
a strange curse to be the smartest comedian in the room. my two pfennigs: paul beatty is the funniest american writer alive. a riff master, there‘s so much comic bravado packed into this one i had to keep putting it down to walk around the room, big grin on my face. comedians are a dangerous breed, sacrificing a lot for the punch line but needing the vinegar of truth to make it sting.
on race — SLUMBERLAND’s sub- supra- and ur- text — beatty’s not 100% right, but who is. and beatty’s usually nudging us to surprising recognitions. on the other hand, when he’s less honest or more cheap, we get: just gags or cheap shock and awe tactics.
structurally and language-wise, the book, which thankfully shows beatty recovered from the sophomore slump of TUFF, is whipsmart and quick-footed but not groundbreaking. it starts out irregular — a black american DJ in 1989 berlin — and turns quickly comic book-y irreal. or maybe: para-paranormal. the DJ is in berlin searching for a quasi-legendary jazz musician who was last heard on the soundtrack of a bestiality porn flick, specifically one where a man fucks a chicken (the man in the blue vid turns out to be a prognosticating stasi agent). the jazz musician — dubbed the schwa because his sound, “like the inderterminate vowel is unstressed, upside-down, and backward” — eventually reveals himself at the eponymous slumberland bar to perform a percussive tour de force using only a beat up copy of a faulkner paperback.
it weakens just a bit in the middle when the berlin wall falls and the narrative stalls discussing african east german experience with an oddly overly-academic sociology angle. characters are introduced to make points but not so we really need them. but that’s okay. DJ darky — our lead protag — has enough character to spare. (also, it’s impressive but a little tiring to read convincingly about all the various musical ecstasies, which happens alot) …but before too long the book re-finds its pace and hilariously works itself up to its plot crescendo of an ending.
a cliché and prolly a gratuitous aside: i think your contemporary comedian is one of the most tragic of beasts. absolutely self-willed to be impervious, there’s no possibility of intimacy. perhaps this is the point of the book — inescapable loneliness — and maybe i’m wrong, but the thing that seems to prevent SLUMBERLAND from sounding the real depths it seems capable of is its glibness.
but then. maybe glibness is the wrong word. the book seems to be fighting itself sometimes to exhaustion — jacob and the angel type combat — trying to become. and i felt very sympathetic in its struggle to be conflicting things at once. and maybe its glibness is in fact a method.
speaking about the one thing that saved him (“albeit it saved me for the sake of destruction”), i.e. his work, kertesz writes,
“In those years I recognized my life for what it was: as a fact on the one hand and as a spiritual form on the other, or, more precisely, the spiritual form of the survival instinct that no longer can survive, doesn’t want to survive, and probably is no longer capable of survival, but one that still and because of it all demands its own, that is to say, its own formation like a rounded glass-hard object so that it could continue to exist, no matter why, no matter for whom–for everyone and no one…” (94).
echoing bernhard — whom kertesz has translated — this great and dark autobiographical monologue is one of negation and destruction, which nonetheless (hopelessly) creates. it tells impossible truths with a brazen and an often almost obscene courage, or another way: he writes with a courage so courageous it becomes obscene.
also, to mention: some reviews i read somewhere favored the wilkinson translation over the wilson’s. because of this i picked up both to compare (after starting with the wilson’s)… even if kertesz himself seems to prefer the wilkinson (perhaps because this more recent, post nobel-winning translation is being done by a larger house), the wilson’s was to me the far better translation, much more readable, and one that seemed to capture the book’s bravura and darkness and humor with much more panache. of course i don’t speak hungarian so maybe i’m wrong, but a little research has at least this agreeing opinion from joshua cohen:
Kertész’s early novels exist in two English translations: Tim Wilkinson, a British expatriate in Budapest and translator of both fictions under review, retranslated two books for Knopf that had earlier been translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson and published by Northwestern University Press in the days before the author’s laureate and fame. Kertész himself is said to approve of Wilkinson’s translations, or at least to disapprove of the Wilsons’, telling The Journal News: “I really tried to protest against the first translations, but I found complete rejection. The publisher was not willing to do new translations…”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of those of us who care about translation — this is a case of an author having to be saved from himself, or from his enthusiasm at being retranslated, at interest being breathed anew into his work. “Fateless” by the Wilsons is every word as effective as Wilkinson’s “Fatelessness,” and “Kaddish” I would reread in the Northwestern translation (titled “Kaddish for a Child Not Born”)…
If Wilkinson is a good translator, he’s a middling writer. He knows Hungarian, he must, but he hasn’t much art in his native English, which is paramount for a prose as spare as Kertész’s, in which every word, every comma, counts.
from www.forward.com/articles/13167/
harp & altar #5 has new poetry, fiction, and essays for your recurrent, sweet, sad days… including new fiction from joshua cohen, evelyn hampton, lily hoang, peter markus, bryson newhart and some re(-dis)covered robert walser translations. also: poetry by stephanie anderson, jessica baron, julia cohen, claire donato, elizabeth sanger, peter jay shippy, and g.c. waldrep; patrick morrissey on john taggart and matthew henriksen on anywhere; michael newton’s gallery reviews; and artwork by a.l. steiner + robbinschilds…
Robert Walser
From “Oskar”
He began this strange behavior at a very early age by going his own way and finding such evident pleasure in being alone. In later years he recalled very clearly that nobody had made him aware of such things. All by itself the strange need to be alone and apart had appeared, and was there… Even though it was winter, he would have no heating. He did not want any comforts. Everything around him had to be rough, inhospitable, and miserable. He wanted to bear and endure some thing, and ordered himself to do so. And that, nobody had told him either. All alone he had the idea that it would be good for him to order himself to bear hardship and malice in a friendly and good-hearted manner. He considered himself to be at a kind of upper-level school. He went to university there, as a weird and wild student…Bryson Newhart
from “Paterfamilias”
After compulsory relocation to Hornville, Misery’s family lived in a skyscraper made of living flesh. The building’s eyes served as windows that were barely transparent, and although it was said that the heavens were out there, no one could see them. The people who lived in the building wore internal helmets injected into their ears by the doorman, who was also a skilled surgeon. On any given day, one was either deaf to the world, or everything was painfully amplified, but it was worth it. The human head was indestructible. When people died, the government shot their heads into the sun…
Evelyn Hampton
From “Discomfort”
While I am talking with him I am also walking, and I’ve lost track of where I am by the time our conversation pauses. Curtains get in the way, obstructing light as clutter obstructs movement. He is not someone I have ever been comfortable with—I can’t recall his name—so I am more aware of my body while I’m walking and intonation while I’m talking than I am when with a familiar person, whose ways of judging me won’t surprise me. It doesn’t help that he’s a back-patter and an arm-grabber, likes to touch while conversing…
the latest issue of lamination colony has a list of various writers’ “sacred texts.” my own fanboy gushes are accounted there, along with lists from blake butler, lily hoang, michael kimball, peter markus, matt bell and many a well-traveled other:
simone de beauvoir on violette leduc’s LA BATARDE:
It is said that the unknown writer no longer exists; anyone, or almost anyone, can get his books published. That is exactly the trouble: mediocrity flourishes; the good seed is choked by the tares. Successs depends, most of the time, on a stroke of luck. And yet even bad luck has its causes. Violette Leduc does not try to please; she doesn’t please; in fact, she alarms people. The titles of her book–L’Asphyxie, L’Affamee, Ravages–are the reverse of cheerful. Leafing through them, you glimpse a world full of sound and fury, where love often bears the name of hate, where a passion for life bursts forth in cries of despair; a world laid waste by loneliness which, seen from afar, looks arid. It is not in fact.
“I am a desert talking to myself,” Violette Leduc wrote to me once. I have encountered beauties beyong reckoning in deserts. And whoever speaks to us from the depths of his loneliness speaks to us of ourselves…”
the book doesn’t really begin until the plane trip back home–but a great red herring of an opener had me unprepared for that fact. i thought i was getting into a woman-on-the-run picaresque (like jaimy gordon’s great SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING) but instead slowly realized i was reading a devastating and much more static portraiture of a unique drunk–a depressed mother whose deep-but-unorthodox vision of childhood ripens to rot after she quasi-survives exiting her own.
often beautiful, uneven, and heroically unresolving, THE CHANGELING is indeed a pagan meditation on childhood, with a radical, almost menacing take on its state of innocence: “…obviously it was improper for her to think that a child could offer her any salvation whatsoever. Little children were too innocent to provide salvation. Indeed, little children were always leading their elders right into the teeth of death” (211).
its plot is so organically arisen that it’s hard to call it contrived. it seems more an accident or an inevitability developing naturally from williams’ initial tragic characterization and observations. we meander, but mostly stall. or sink. scene changes are abrupt — by blackout or harsh cut. i think its lack of momentum works particularly well as it dovetails thematically with the aching stillness of pearl’s depression:
“Are you coming with me, Pearl?” Miriam asked.
“Oh goodness,” Pearl said. “It’s too early in the day yet for me to make decisions.” She laughed as though she had been joking (199).
but pearl is an observant drunk–and what gives THE CHANGELING its stature is the frankness of its observations and the back-door way its sentences get at truths:
One of the children farted.
“That was Tracker,” yelped Franny. “Tracker let the Devil out!”
Tracker leapt up, his arms flailing, but Franny danced nimbly out of his range. She was a humorous, coquettish child. She did a cartwheel out of sheer, mocking joy.
Tracker took several steps after her, but it was a movement apparently without threat, for he squatted on the ground abruptly and assumed a peaceful, far-away look… He flopped on his back in the grass.
Tracker was rowdy and probably cruel, but what could Pearl do about that? Sam was an ever-increasing influence on all of them but what could Pearl do about that? She herself was a weak and evil woman. She was evil because she was unbalanced, she mistook appearance for reality, and she was empty as a sucked egg (133).
when william gass was working on THE TUNNEL–which took him twenty-six years to finish–i remember some wag quipping in some interview : yeah, and wouldn’t it be great if, when it came out, it was like, 120 pages. (and i remember thinking, “shit yeah! that would be great!”)
and also carol maso making a joke about how these boys kept writing their “Thousand-page novels, tens and tens of vollmanns—I mean volumes.“
these big, ambitious doorstops, in and out of fashion–usually written (and i’m betting usually read) by men (though i noted with interest vanessa place’s 600+ page recent entry into the race)… a galaxy of books created eons ago by maybe an imploding melville somehow i think still revolving around a sun probably named bellow, though now with a newly identified farout planet named bolano.
generally i’m not so into them. they manage their arcana and pyrotechnics with either gimmicks or, worse, plotty plots–big canvass, ensemble pieces where we need either to keep flipping back to some family tree or hand-drawn map or to some cleverly necessary endnote page. and there’s also a suspicion of greediness, certainly self-aggrandizing is wondered about, in the so demonstrated over-sized ambition. maso may indeed be right that these vanities among vanities are particularly vain. and, loud as they try to be, just saber rattlings, whistlings in the dark…
still i admired the hell out of THE LOST SCRAPBOOK partly because it does manage to balance its length with extreme readability and a decent amount of narrative velocity. it also more importantly isn’t particularly plot driven, and it’s run less by a machinery of gimmick than by an original technique of narrative splicing–a kind of collage work done in series, rather than in space. or another way: dara works a parataxis of narratives rather than that of phrases or sentences.
THE EASY CHAIN operates in similar fashion and, like THE LOST SCRAPBOOK, is a political novel, one made of principally two things: ideas–witty analysis of our inept and corrupt culture–and yarns. dara’s specialty is in fact the yarn, the almost wholesome tale, ending with a zinger or even a moral. on their own they would be nice bits of entertainment, strung together in series they make something else, at best it makes a convincing group portraiture of our rattled time… it’s a strange accomplishment, and the only one i could think to relate it to was the reaction had after watching linklater’s WAKING LIFE, where a series of undergraduate-y philosophical discussions, in aggregate, has the larger wallop of showing that we are a species of similar concerns, with similar self-designed thought experiments, and indeed similar fantasies.
it is a slightly lopsided novel–though i don’t think it’s at all the half loaf that one review had it. the first half has a better-defined gambit, which then disintegrates it’s not quite clear how effectively… its lead is a character who happens to be extremely charismatic. that’s his super-power–given without an origin story. and in the first half of the book we get to watch him wield this power against wealthier chicago. Lincoln “vaulted to the top of the city’s social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune.” the second half of the novel then significantly drops the story of Lincoln, concerning itself only obliquely with him and his unexplained reversal. this half has some admittedly outrageous and not-always-successful gambits, including odd punctuation to denote voice stresses, a poor attempt at some kind of echo-affected poetry, and what i think was a long narrative from the POV of a piece of dust. i’m not sure. it gets a little wacky.
but there are really fantastic parts throughout, setpieces, yarns mostly, unsmug moral tales that show us both the hypocrisies and possibilities for hope in our consumerist endtimes. a fantastic one near the end about how a hippie food joint gets taken over and saved by a “one man Information Counterrevolution,” that is: a man of silence (324). another hilarious story concerns a pair of unsavvy buddhists trying to go into business (to practice right livelihood) and getting all kinds of screwed.
other idea riffs are almost equally engaging as his stories. a few eloquent rants about our advertising-based culture where dara defines terms–the “skonk” and “conicons”–needed to make it run; one extremely prescient bit about how markets reward response, not value (187); and here is dara on how progress has us lose sight of fundamental values, the big picture, in our driven chase to get granular:
“In the libraries, he had also seen the affinity between progress and reduction. Day after day, in one library after another, he had noticed the cadenzas of rapt attention played to minutiae, as larger concerns grew foggy with neglect. Increasing acuity of perception driving wider blindness, evident & necessary visions falling on eyes without feeling. It was evolutionary: to continue, to flourish & prosper, whittle yourself to the barest functional minimum, then pass this on. Again, reason has produced its flipside, history has worked its dull revenge” (429). *
someone give steven moore a wikipedia entry! michael dirda has one.
steven moore–one of our most insightful critics, who was senior editor at the review of contemporary fiction and dalkey–is writing a book about the history of the novel. i’ll read it before i read anything by james wood. moore’s famously championed gaddis–but also vollman, ronald firbank, felipe alfau, william gass, carol maso and many others.
me, i seem these days to like my books short and elegantly collapsed from drug-overuse. not moore: “I quickly gravitated to huge novels like The Recognitions, The Sot-Weed Factor, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, novels you could lose yourself in for weeks, and study for a lifetime. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I also like Wagner’s and Glass’ operas.) I do like some writers known for short novels—Firbank, Spackman, Markson, Ducornet—but generally I like ’em big and brainy.”
i swear i saw that he had a webpage of his own, but i can’t find it any more. [found it–thanks to victoria harding.] stumbled across this interview which has the above quote and where he also reveals this about his upcoming history:
hear friggin hear.
___________________________
moore’s latest review: on 2666
tom leclair has a mixed review of THE EASY CHAIN in the newest BOOKFORUM. revealing also that aurora is indeed dara and partners (as well as the fact that dara’s had publishing troubles–which, go figure, but still)… i’m halfway through the novel and also feel a little mixed about this definitely political (like gaddis is political) work. a novel of ideas not exactly as consistently executed as THE LOST SCRAPBOOK, THE EASY CHAIN better covers some of the same ground as victor pelevin’s HOMO ZAPIENS trippy take on our age of consumption and advertising. still, a ferocious accomplishment. the bigger-than-the-sum-of-its-parts aggregating wallop that, for instance, WAKING LIFE, achieves with its serial undergraduate philosophizing–THE EASY CHAIN also manages. a thought experiment perpetual motion machine… maybe i’ll try to say that better when i finish… much admired in the meantime is the “self assertion” of Dara to do it his/her own way.
A Time for Prose, a special event sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center Poetics Group, will address the present of avant-garde prose, along with essential related questions: why experimental prose seems eternally suspended between narrative and language, between affect and the social, between history and the present. Montreal novelist and essayist Gail Scott will present “The Sutured Subject,” followed by responses from New York writers Douglas A. Martin and Rachel Levitsky. The conversation will address the influences on contemporary prose of such writers as Victor Shklovsky, Kathy Acker, Renée Gladman, Taylor Brady, the New Narrative group (Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian), and the Language poets.
Friday, November 14th, 6 pm – 8 pm
The CUNY Graduate Center.
365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th Street, New York NY
Room 9206
Biographical Information
Gail Scott is the author of five works of fiction, including My Paris, which was named one of the top ten Canadian novels of 1999 by Quill and Quire and was published in the US by Dalkey Archive Press (2003). Her essays, in English and French, are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and la théorie, un dimanche. She is a co-founder of Narrativity, an online journal of contemporary experimental narrative, and she also co-edited — along with Robert Glück, Mary Burger, and Camille Roy — Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, 2004). Gail Scott teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal but is currently living in New York while she completes a novel and works on a new collection of stories. Her essay “The Sutured Subject” will appear in the fall issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Rachel Levitsky is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and Under the Sun, her first full length volume, published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She also writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Levitsky founded Belladonna, a publisher and series of events, in August 1999. She teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Douglas A. Martin is a poet, novelist and short story writer whose first full-length prose work, Outline of My Lover, was selected as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement. His most recent books are Your Body Figured, which consists of three novellas, and In the Time of Assignments, a collection of poetry. Martin is currently a visiting professor at Wesleyan University.
julien gracq’s second novel was called UN BEAU TENEBREUX and, according to this, was written in two spurts: in 1940 and 1942. it was published in 1945 and brought out in english in 1950 by new directions with this beautiful, word-less cover. gracq, who died in 2007 was considered at the time of his death the “last of the great universal writers”.
a somewhat plodding story about a ubermensch-wannabe who corrupts a crowd of european archetypes summering at a beachside resort, this novel is probably not the one that makes gracq’s reputation. but despite its flawed structure and some truly awful melodramatic scenes, there are still stunning examples of an elaborate, beautiful style studded with breath-catching insights.
here’s this gem on victor hugo’s taking issue with dante on his architecture of hell: “whereas Dante imagined the circles of his Inferno as gradually decreasing their spirals as they descended, like conical pits of ant-lions, towards the final well ‘where Satan weeps with six eyes’, Hugo, with a strange inversion of this image, sent his circles down in ever-widening spirals, to leave the imagination in a maelstrom, a vertigo, a vast mist-enveloped dissolution into the darkness” (p. 54).
can you grok it?!
discovered on will schofield‘s great list of neglected books.
“Literature was the last of all the arts to make its appearance. It will be the first to disappear.”
some more great gracq quotes can be found in thomas mcgonigle’s review of gracq’s READING, WRITING here.
find THE DARK STRANGER at a library.
bolano poems in the latest issue of POETRY. good examples of a novelist’s poems (which seem less, in general, to me, than a poet’s novels) (which begs the question of the difference between the two practitioners) (beg beg) (“all a compact a words,” the poet and novelist robert creeley said about the difference, which he said didn’t exist)… in any case, the poems are somewhat soggily romantic, maybe not as successfully rid of sentimentality as his prose. here’s a taste:
and Dario whispers that he loves the French poets.
Poets that only he and Mario and I know of.
Boys from the then unimaginable city of Paris with eyes bloodshot from suicide.
He loves them so much!
In the way I loved the streets of Mexico in 1968.
I was fifteen years old and then I’d just arrived.
I was a fifteen-year-old emigrant but the first thing they tell me, the streets of Mexico
is that, there, we’re all emigrants, emigrants of the Spirit.
Ah, the beautiful, the never over-considered, the terrible
Mexican streets hanging in the abyss
while the rest of the world’s cities
are drowning in uniformity and silence…
from “Visit to the Convalescent,” translated by Laura Healy
__________________________
…it does make you wonder if maybe it was less a matter of aesthetic principle and more a kind of pragmatic resignation that there’s not a single line of poetry in THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. hmmm…
__________________________
and/but: in a related, much-broken story, let’s hope 2666 live up to its hype and its admittedly good looks.
__________________________
…i’m now 66th in line at NYPL for 2666. I wonder which version i’ll get.
woah, just stumbled onto this. evan dara wrote a great book called THE LOST SCRAPBOOK in nineteen ninety friggin five that got a blip of attention, won the FC2 contest that year (and might be the only place you’ll ever see a richard powers blurb) — and then dara hasn’t been heard of since. now, here’s his second, called THE EASY CHAIN, and i haven’t heard boo about it anywhere. (a lack of publicity i can’t help admire.) out from aurora press–which seems to be a new outift too, which only publishes (so far!) evan dara. alright. you got me. i’m interested.
…okay i found an early review which says:
“Dara’s play with perspective, however, is the novel’s great success. Time, like the narration, is very fluid. We can begin at a cocktail party and float almost magically into Lincoln’s childhood, age with him, then drift through these meetings. It’s interesting and cerebral and only occasionally distracting. Various other characters are allowed to go on about their personal philosophies and beliefs. These asides, as I’ve already mentioned, are fragmenting the story in a manner not unlike early Pynchon, but very unlike Pynchon because our hero—such as he is— is present, listening to these people—of the reader, but out of the reader’s awareness.”
the female gaze. lydia sits at a bar and describes what she sees and imagines, most often: herself, other women. (how’s that for a plot!) a book of portraits, maybe a self-portrait, or maybe a book about portraiture–the ambiguity intentional and often successful as a statement about our success in ever describing completely an identity.
this book’s project as defined by its narrator:
“Lydia (having trouble focusing) returns to her portrait: anecdotal fragments organized–but not too rigorously–with a little space around them to open possibilities” (167).
what saves the book from disintegrating into just fragmentary observations is scott’s fearless and idiosyncratic style. the writing’s syncopated and richly arch music reveals a persistent conflict between empathy and judgment, between a wish to define and a desire to stay open.
some of the best parts of the book come during a chapter whose content is the most traditional: the story of a springtime love affair. besides the quickly flaming and guttering of an april love, the chapter reveals rather strikingly the conflicts within the narrator: anecdotal versus analytical modes; english versus french (“You hate the way being with her makes you think so much in English, you lose the capacity for immediate abstraction that comes with speaking French”); a willingness to be self-critical or vulnerable versus a need to be defiant and judging.
and: the beauty of the writing. scott’s a singular, fierce and unapologetic stylist. at its most courageous it can invoke and then overcome sentimentality. here’s a passage again about that april love affair–a straightforward description of the sweet and deadly swiftness of it:
“Still April. You step outside. The sky is so blue you sense the infinity of dancing air. Around you the jonquils are laughing. Granted, this image is slightly sentimental. You can’t help it, she’s getting you so drunk with the caresses of her big hands, you feel like a giant. You rock your warm crotch against the cold cement, hoping that, with all that affection, she won’t be pressuring you for commitment.
The truth is, already you feel a little trapped. Because of that day she, sitting on the brown sofa in the living-room of that tacky hotel apartment she temporarily rented, knees up to chin, talking on the phone to her lover from Alberta, suddenly declared: ‘I’m in love, Betty.’ You didn’t intend to listen. You couldn’t believe she was putting her main relationship in jeopardy: by no means had you said anything about commitment. Yet, grudgingly, you wondered what makes these young dykes so courageous. Always taking chances. The way she kissed you in that bar, until both of you were floating. Definitely, no fear of flying” (108-9).
find at a library or buy from small press distribution
