a pause for station identification

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skimming blogs, i came face to face with the following verities:

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

& elsewhere:

Back in 1979/80 I remember talking with the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf after CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard had been published. This guy reported to me that to date they had sold a combined grand total of around a thousand copies of all three Bernhard books they had published, GARGOYLES, THE LIME WORKS AND CORRECTIONS.

which reminded me of this from i believe the last, or one of the last, published stories of gilbert sorrentino:

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

but all that simply reiterating what, in 1941, edward dahlberg wrote in CAN THESE BONES LIVE:

“There has been no more clinkered land for the artist to live in than America. All artists, everywhere, are pariahs. However, some counties gravel them the more, and so hinder their fates that their lives, like the three throats of Cerberus, are brutishly peeled…”

dahlberg was talking about melville.

________________________

and… later that same day i come across this nice dose of schadenfreude for the trades–but it too is bitter tasting. E.g. Roth might’ve been optimistic:

“Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.”

[but what that article doesn’t mention in its death-of-publishing prognosticating, is the renaissance of small presses, doing all the important work once done by the james laughlin’s and the barney rosset’s of yester-millennium. literary history of the 21st century probably will mention knopf and random house less, and maybe even FSG less, than that of the independents–both the more “established” like dalkey, fc2, green integer, and soft skull and the new and scrappy like calamari, dzanc, les figues, starcherone and clear cut.] [that is: publishing is dead; long live publishing; et cetera.]

three by ann quin

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a fascinating but subtly disappointing book, ann quin’s THREE is a formally radical novel. arguably more daring in form than her contemporary b. s. johnson–with whom she’s often lumped partly because they committed suicide in the same year–she’s here also more cagey and unfortunately more predictable.

the style innovations are daring. the book consists of several modes: a line-breaking poem-like stream of consciousness; a fast-cutting, alternating POV style that reminded me of donald breckenridge’s 6/2/95; and, reminiscent of both sarraute and gaddis, a skillful use of dialogue alone to reveal character.

and yet this book, which focuses on the bizarre love triangle of one airless bourgeois marriage and an interloping free-spirit femme fatale, somehow rang hollow. maybe because it was unclear how much of it was a critique of the malaise of middle-class marriage and how much of it was a self-pitying confessional narrative from that state. or: somehow it’s central content–which did seem central, not auxiliary–crippled the serious play of its language games. so i was left with a dull feeling, a disappointment at unfulfilled potential.

course i could be wrong. and the destabilized, unreliable narrative and narrators might have hidden reward which alluded me. plan to try her BERG soon down the line. despite what disappointed–another review called its style a “muted lyricism”–it’s definitely worth checking out.

a good overview of her work.

and, from an interview quoted here:

“Form interests me, and the merging of content and form. I want to get away from the traditional form. . . . I write straight onto my typewriter, one thousand words an hour but half will in the end be cut out. When I write the first creating parts of my book I can go on for three hours without a stop. When revising I can work up to seven hours, with breaks.”

buy from dalkey or find at your local library.

three novellas by thomas bernhard

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maybe not the bernhard book to start with, but very useful to see the young old master’s development–and the early, shocking bang of his talent.

AMRAS–originally published in 1963–shows the large ambitions of his theme and iconoclasm are already in place, driving the writing. this one literally breaks down. it begins coherently though darkly with the assessment by the sons of a family’s partially failed suicide pact (the parents were successful) and then becomes beautifully and infuriatingly fragmented. as if to document the approach to death or insanity…  if anything this earlier novella is more sincerely nihilistic than the later bernhard in that when bernhard arrives at his later method, at least there’s the minimal solace of continuous (albeit repetitive) form. and the dark jokes seem to have punchlines and don’t just break off into menacing silence like they do here. on the other hand, the devastation seems more complete and impressive in the (later) long, relentless, incantatory voice without the–in comparison–cheaper gimmickry of the fragmentation here.

on its structural self-decimation, brian evenson’s excellent, brief intro has this particularly good insight:
“[C]ollapsing into fragmentation… [AMRAS] opts for the modernist solution of using a formal collapse. GARGOYLES, on the other hand, offers a voice that tears itself apart from within while leaving the edifice of monologue intact. We have the sense that, like Becket’s Unnamable, Prince Sarau [in GARGOYLES] is probably only getting started” (ix).

PLAYING WATTEN i think is the most memorable of the three, maybe only because it has the most concrete central metaphor: four citizens travel to an inn–which is tucked into a treacherously disorienting wood–in order to play a card game (the eponymous WATTEN). dense, repetitive (and here, the repetition is boring in a way the later bernhard somehow manages to avoid), but also beautiful and (already) devastating. an early–maybe the first?–version of his unparagraphed style.

WALKING is at times (too) straight-forwardly didactic, so that bernhard’s fiction gets almost turgid (at least for me) carrying the freight of its philosophical rhetoric. but if it’s didactic, it’s also ambitious, marching uninhibitedly through its themes: the misery of existence; the baseness of the (austrian) state; madness; language, thinking itself.
the translation throughout seems incredible, almost transparent. WALKING in particular, with its dependence on abstractions and its recursive structures, would seem mind-bogglingly difficult to translate.

find used or find at your local library

marsupial: our mother for the time being by derek white

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though dubbed elsewhere the first lynchian novel, MARSUPIAL reminded me most often of cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH, where an unflappable main character nods straight-faced through a bizarre and constantly morphing scenery. witty and — due to its sense of nostalgia for a just-left dream or a long-left city — oddly melancholic. a relatively simple story line anchors the book: a young man comes to Paris to work as a stand-in for his actor-brother during an arty-ish B-movie shoot. on top of that simple narrative’s foundation is built a complex, shifting and dreamy mis-en-scene perhaps as obsessively art-directed as one by richard foreman. white’s repeating concerns include: crayfish biomorphism of all kinds, lacanian fascination/alienation from our own bodies, mothers, brothers, sibling rivalry, paranoia, and the french. an obsessively rendered dreamworld that leaves a long-lingering aftertaste of heartache, MARSUPIAL is a fascinating read.

should be said too: derek white, the DIY master who runs calamari press, has done himself one better on this book’s design, which is graced with a beautifully gritty cover (and from which, his name is defiantly absent) and which also has his trademark collages interspersed throughout.

buy it from calamari press

guide by dennis cooper

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after getting through this drug-blurred, blood-oily, post-sex sense-deracinating–i decided that DC is not so much a sadist or even really, fundamentally, a provocateur. that that’s not his primary impulse, but rather it’s indeed some kind of exploration of the ecstatic–in all its forms. and the ecstasy-explorer is searching out taboo and murder and drug-experience not out of a negative motivation, not for rage or violence against society, but much more basically out of a movement toward the transcendent.

that’s prolly too reductively dichotomous… another way: i wouldn’t think of his project as wish-fulfillment and certainly utopian isn’t the first adjective that crosses the mind–but that’s just what the DC character claims: “Then I remember what I do when I’m not stoned. You know, write novels that are essentially long, involved wishes for offbeat utopian worlds that I can’t realistically enter” (65), which might in fact be one way to conceptualize this novel of kiddie-porn snuff films and HIV-infected rent boys and rape of all kinds.

…part of how GUIDE functions as (a kind of) wish fulfillment fiction is by maintaining an aura of non-fiction. (the fantasy is best for the narrator when it seems real / the fantasy is possible for the narrator because it isn’t real.) and one very impressive thing about GUIDE is how its subtle structure effectively conflates reportage with fiction. as well, almost lost due to the virtuosic handling of its extreme materials is the sensitivity cooper has for tone-shifts, his beautifully efficient characterization, and the ability for just setting up and moving us almost breezily through his complicated apartment-scapes.

should say too: the feeling while reading it is pretty intense. “edgy” and “risky” seem too corporatized a language to describe it. i finished it maybe twenty minutes ago, and i still feel like it’s a little hard to breathe. a gut-punch of a book.

from this interview:

Q: How did you protect the kids?
DC: Well, I used my late, beloved friend George Miles as the model for all the major young male characters in the cycle because he’s the one person I would have protected at all costs. I think the way this protection panned out is that when most of the violence happens, the story becomes unrealistic and fantasy-like, as though it might or might not really be happening. Also, the young characters are always the most sympathetic. So I didn’t manage to completely protect them, but the books (and I hope my readers) always care about them.

and on method:

Q: Kathy Acker published first drafts of things, wrote at the point of orgasm in order to hit on something true, but you polish and refine. Would you ever go down the automatic, exquisite corpse sort of route?

DC: It wouldn’t work, because my first drafts are crap for the most part. I try to let myself go all out at first, then go back and rip apart what I’ve written then rebuild it, then shred it again, and so on. My real voice isn’t exact or careful at all, and I spend much, much more time refining my prose than writing it. On rare occasions, a piece will come out nearly perfect the first time, but almost never.

find it at a library or find it used

BOB, or MAN on BOAT by Peter Markus

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one thing about lists, as sorrentino and warhol and now markus have taught us, is that they need never end (or begin), that they point endlessly.

we trust an incantation—that repetitive chanting—in part because of its self-impoverished language. thus markus’ song, in this moving, incantatory novel, is not maximal or prolific; he gets away with only talking about fish and mud and brothers and fathers and sons because he talks only of them, doesn’t talk about them for long (though he projects length), and talks only about them in an unadorned (thus almost religious) way. not that this is his only or always method, but the care and focus of the output imbues the work with an unerring integrity.

plus the careful rhythm, perfect as a heartbeat:
“Bob is sitting on his boat.
Bob’s baits are not in the river’s water.
Bob is, at the moment, just sitting there staring out across the river at what I do not know.
Maybe this is Bob thinking.
What is Bob thinking about?
Fish.
His fish.
What if Bob never finds the fish that he is fishing for?
Is this what Bob is thinking?” (p.69)

“Been fishing.
Gone fishing.
Going fishing.
Be back when.
Be back whenever.
Be like Bob.
Go fish.
Fish after dark.
Fish in the dark.
Fish through the dark.
Be alive.
Be like Bob.
Be a fish.
Fish on.
Live fish.
Live to fish.
Bob lives.
In a boat.
On a river.
A man.
A fish.
Bob” (p. 115).

a book, in case it wasn’t clear, about men who fish.

buy directly from dzanc books or find at your local library.

Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown

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despite all the homages and collaborations (the latter dubbed here her CoLabs) and her obvious interconnected-ness to her poetry community, Brown is a very singular, sonically super-powered poet.

the book charts the poet moving from a natural lyric with a consummate, perfect touch to a far-out experimentalism of sound (in a museme) which then seems to settle into (or temporarily rests, taking on the appearance for the moment of mastered maturity), in daybook, something teasingly wise and emotional.

early you get poems like the “Pledge” :

“I pledge allergy to the flail of the United States of Amigo
And to the reputation for which it stands,
one national park, under godmother, indivisible,
with lice and kabob for allegiance” (p. 36).

and then the defense/offense of her method in “To Jennifer M.,” :

“What’s with these people
boys or girls who tamp down
the lyric impulse, the heart
waiting in line, barefoot &
illegal. Old-fashioned emotion
is relegated to a loud radio
void sometimes, but Frank O’Hara
has faith in you & me even
though or because we’re girls” (p 67).

throughout you’ve also the talent for aphorism, as in:
“If we all looked alike
How would we fall in love?” (p. 120)

the “museme” pieces i don’t love, but it’s hard not to like things like this a little:
“O Oil Loci
I Loll, I Coo,
I coil olio.

Lo, O ill ici,
Cool C.O.
Col. Clio” (p.81)

by book’s end it seems a synthesis between the museme experiments and a natural lyric has been made, e.g. here’s the first bit of “Summery”:
“An undone tropic fell too lush
A canyon climb a bird a thrush
A tea before the ending hitch
The sprite from hell said smoke the bitch

I wandered lonely in the midst
of poets conversing not quite kids
and many lovers ex and all
chasing through the water

Fall

As leaf to leave to lavish to laugh
A gape gaffed taped onto dinner mapped
I batter the dough of those who wert
pommeled to structures suturing work” (p.171)

what she does (at least in part) is fulfill (or re-make or invent entirely independently) o’hara’s notion of personism. of which the great dada baby said:

“has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself)… It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.”

but in the end brown is making her own way while working the old questions:

“Reinvent love.
Can we reinvent love.
Why reinvent love.
Crush as a way of knowing.
Is it the only way of knowing.
It is a good way of knowing” p.179.

so, yea & verily, i think polyverse crushes, crushed me. do, if yer able, give it a whirl.

_______________________________

click here and scroll down for henry hill’s beautiful impossible-yet-possible portrait of the poet.

the poet Interviewed by C. Bernstein on his show Close Listening

_______________________________

buy it used or find it at your local library.

one! hundred! demons! by Lynda Barry

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maybe after you read it should you give it to someone? you should! you should! why not share: demons + zen art therapy + the dialog of your childhood rendered perfect-like.

Barry talking about her work: “We think that we need to have an experience in order to write about it… Actually we’re writing in order to have an experience.”

her meditating monkeys.

fun-fact: lynda barry’s quarter filipina!

fun-fact: she dated ira glass!

Buy it used or find it at a library.

Amulet by Roberto Bolano

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bolano’s characters are some of the most beautiful. they miraculously avoid sentimentality while achieving a too-beautiful-to-speak-of romanticism — though reducing them so is an error, that quality he gets really does tear me up…

his characters remind me of the vow of poverty monastics make. it isn’t a negative vow–at least not for the nun. it is in fact a positive one, one that moves the renunciate closer to the divine. bolano’s poets and losers and mothers are an equal type. and one way to describe his natural, moving, ecstatic and elegiac style is to say that it simultaneously shows the mundane and profoundly human while it recognizes and manifests the divine (or maybe better said: the cosmic).

AMULET is a slowly shifting machine, moving from a narrative built first on a natural and sad and graceful character development into a kind of modernized persephone-in-hell myth then into a creepy symbolic tale (though for what is hard to say) and finally into a long description of an icy, abstract landscape.

i probably didn’t do a good job assigning the sections descriptions–and i missed a few–but there are distinct parts to this novel. and bolano gently leads the reader (and virgil and dante are explicitly mentioned) through these passages, a series of subtle changes. the book is one long song describing the horror story (that the narrator proclaims will not appear to be a horror story, but is, nonetheless) of living through history–in this case latin america’s revolutionary 60s and 70s.

here’s one paragraph, within which bolano seems to convey succinctly and impossibly some of the tumult of that era. a phone call is made asking about arturo (a boy who has gone from mexico to chile in 1973 to ‘take part in the revolution’) (and where he barely escapes execution):

“One night, at a party in Colonia Anzures, propped on my elbows in a sea of tequila, watching a group of friends trying to break open a pinata in the garden, it occurred to me that it was an ideal time to call Arturo’s place. His sister answered the phone. Merry Christmas, I said. Merry Christmas, she replied sleepily. Then she asked where I was. With some friends. What’s with Arturo? He’s coming back to Mexico next month. When exactly? We don’t know. I’d like to go to the airport, I said. Then for a while we said nothing and listened to the party noises coming from the patio. Are you feeling OK, his sister asked. I’m feeling strange. Well that’s normal for you. Not all that normal; most of the time I feel perfectly well. Arturo’s sister was quiet for a bit, then she said that actually she was feeling pretty strange herself. Why’s that? I asked. It was a purely rhetorical question. To tell the truth, both of us had plenty reasons to be feeling strange. I can’t remember what she said in reply. We wished each other a merry Christmas again and hung up.” p.76.

find used or find in a library

The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn

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the intro namechecks both melville and giorgio de chirico and the book indeed is an odd combination of nautical metaphysics and surrealism’s insidiously creepy emptying out.

an intense mystery story, not unlike the slow build-up of a bela tarr movie. in places it moves at a wild pace like a murder story’s final confrontation or a chase scene; other times it lingers endlessly over each character’s neurotics and guilt and anxiety–everyone in it an active raskolnikov. (and maybe the book is one long crime and punishment minus the denouement–just accusations and guilt.)

i did find myself a little struck by tedium midway through, waiting as the horror story set up itself–but then man, did i get walloped by the ending. it certainly leaves an impression…

and other than this overall, final and somewhat crushing impression, which is weighty and mysteriously achieved, the sentence-by-sentence style is what i think’s also most memorable about it. (even so, it’s a sum greater than its parts.) but here’s but one early example:

“We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man–this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible–the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight” (p. 32).

found thankfully through will schofield’s blog.


try to buy used or find at a library

Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang

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a fearless work of intense integration, a continuous curve over infinite sums of personal and national history, the poem felt to me written with the urgency of the refugee in flight — but sculpted methodically, like a life-sentenced prisoner painstakingly making his case.

“the science of fiction” (p. 107).

what does it mean for the accented speaker to write non-accented english?

…especially, in the case of this book, which is not a narrative of “passing” (though, yes, one of immigration), where there is a smooth and awesomely fluent bricolage of multiple languages (accented english, the queen’s english, mandarin, political commentary, advertising language, bank language, ping pong tournament chatroom language, and certainly not least: physics and number theory language) into one unified language: the language of the poem

–which, in this case (“the world is everything that is the bookcase” is one of many lovely embedded puns), is a long-breath lyric of defiance and alienation and apologia.

from the rigid, exacting sentences of logic propositions and mathematical proofs, the poet makes confession and agony. how does he do it?

“…this rain never ends this ride has not and will never have an arrival this storm is in the room is the room this room is the black body radiating omnidirectionally at such a temperature that the maximum emission is at the wavelength of yellow this yellow room overlooks and pours into the moaning moat of the capital to find the Gaussian curvature of white heads of the decapitated geese the Green’s function and the false projection of the moon” (p. 130).

i don’t know how it is done, but at one point the poet does reveal his ambition:

“I have been secretly investigating the technical viability of and devising methodologies for, in the true literal sense of poetics, direct writing, which is maskless, therefore mask-related-error-free, sequential thus slow in throughput, and targeting only application-specific readers, who are numbered and whose reading patterns behave too erratically to justify the expense of mask production” (p.61).

________________

an interview

and do a search for “wang” in this pdf for the uncommon poet bio

get it from a local library or buy from SPD

Repetition by Peter Handke

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here’s how handke describes the leavetaking from his father of a young man about to go off on a long tramp for the summer:

With sagging knees, dangling arms, and gout-gnarled fingers, which at that moment impersonated furious clenched fists, the frail, aging man, much smaller than I, stood by the wayside Cross and shouted at me: ‘All right, go to the dogs like your brother, like our whole family! None of us has ever amounted to anything, and you won’t either. You won’t even get to be a good gambler like me.’ Yet, just then, he had embraced me for the first time in my life…

easily categorized as a bildungsroman–but what is formed is various: a young man on a long searching summer, a family mutilated by war, or even a whole continent–europe–which exists as a flux of languages and landscapes and only intermittently succeeds in being a unified concept.

handke’s REPETITION is murky–and great. the language, while beautiful and careful, attempts deep or multiple refractions–symbols or resonances that are extended and embroidered and almost lost metaphors.

it’s strange and almost tediously complex to describe this book’s instinctive method. handke, for example, writes a long and devastating description of the brother’s orchard, before and after ruin–and you are swept away by, included in, the care and detail of an orchard farmer’s plans as well as the following relentless organic destruction of them, all the while aware of some underlying and alluded-to familial and national heartbreak.

the middle section’s entire plot is not unfairly summarized thus: a guy reads a foreign language dictionary. and handke makes this story, no joke, mesmerizing.

in an admittedly reductive and probably dumb way i began thinking, while reading this, that handke is the bridge between bernhard and sebald. that the monolithic and misanthropic monologue of bernhard, which eventually becomes the sad and careful and even sweet obsession with the lost swirls of history that is sebald, has to go through the step of handke–a rich but darkly-glassed casting about for comprehension of fundamentals like existence and identity.

pretty rad book.

buy used or get it at a library.

[learned here that REPETITION is a re-do of Handke’s first novel THE HORNETS (Die Horniseen, 1966), which is a text Handke’s stated he “wanted to re-write some day.”]

ZEROVILLE by steve erickson

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his plots have a comic-book-ness to them — if those comic books are the darkest and wildest of early era vertigo’s or have the zaniness of first comics’ AMERICAN FLAGG and BADGER… plots filled with the boyish wish fulfillment of sex and romantic alienation and isolating intelligence, all suffused with a self consciousness and self-regard about said wish fulfillment. ZEROVILLE’s (seemingly) effortless epic goes on and on, doesn’t let up for a moment, up to and including its spine-shivering finish. and vikar is as complete and unique a character as you’ll find.

erickson, who’s been called a science fiction writer excepting the science, takes us from cbgb’s to the whisky, from franco to reagan, from bogart to belmondo–and hits almost too perfectly, too nonchalantly or exactingly fan-boyishly, every cool reference in between.

this is mean to say, but erickson is so good it is a kind of praise: he’s been posing as an artist for so long the pose has become so natural he might in fact be one.

except. he writes his own judgment into the book. vikar and zazie know what art is: “no movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.” and they know art is at first necessarily ugly–before it can be recognized as sublime: “Once Cassavetes told me about seeing A Place in the Sun when it came out. He hated it so much that he went back and saw it the next day and then every day for a week, until he realized he loved it.” and vikar knows movies are out of time and in all time: “fuck continuity.” …but erickson, while talking the talk, fails to walk it. ZEROVILLE, epic accomplishment and enormously fun read and rebel sexblast that it is, is very comfortable. and continuous. it fails to risk its coolness for terror and transcendence, fails to risk its storytelling for true mindfuck.

that meanly and pettily said, the book is a thrillride which i swallowed whole–in one dreamy day and night–and one which i loved inhabiting and thinking about. a ride i’m more than happy to have taken. erickson is the funnest of the contenders… a beautiful world if we could all fall short in such a hot-shit way.

erickson on ZEROVILLE: from a bookslut inteview:

It took me four months to write Zeroville, which is very unusual, I’ve never written anything even remotely that quick. I had planned to put off writing it for a year until I had a sabbatical from teaching, but the story was coming so fast, so many scenes filled my head, that I knew I better not wait. I almost feel I can’t taken credit for it — it was like the cosmos were saying, Here, you worked hard on all those other ones, so we’re giving you this one. It’s a freebie.

also on experimental fiction:

You know, I hear the word “experiment” and reach for my revolver. I don’t think of myself as an experimental writer. Experimental writing is about the experiment, and experiments per se usually are for their own sake. My interest is in whatever serves the larger story or characters. The numbers in Zeroville were a kind of Godardian conceit and just came to me, in the same way that Kristin “swimming” through Our Ecstatic Days came to me at the moment she goes down through the hole at the bottom of the lake that’s flooded L.A., and that she believes has come to take her small son from her.

find used or find in your nearest library

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

... / By

heeded a thankfully persistent whisper of walser walser walser and fell hard. i’d heard the gossipy parts: how kafka dug him, how he lived his final years in a madhouse, how he died on a long walk in the snow, how he wrote in a pencilled hand so small that people thought it was a secret code but it wasn’t–it was just very very small.

i’d tried THE ASSISTANT, which is recently translated but earlier walser and could see the charm, but i was prejudiced against how its proto-modern style took too long to move things along (a similar feeling i got from zweig’s BEWARE OF PITY)… and so was wholly unprepared at how JAKOB VON GUNTEN broke me down and hollowed me out. it’s at times so shockingly beautiful i was, despite myself, moved to tears. not tears of empathy for some character caught in a melodramatic clutch–but tears for the friggin beauty of the writing. the dude writes like an angel–wherein modesty is one of the highest virtues, with pure charm, and with a scrambled semantic nonetheless crystal clear, which must be the emblem only of seraphim.

walser writes with the freshness and immediacy of a journal entry, but also with a constant self-consciousness that makes the entry have the permanence and art of a poem. christopher middleton’s translator’s intro is a good brief. here’s coetzee: “In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox.” and elsewhere in the same review coetzee quotes walter benjamin who describes walser’s characters as like those from a fairy tale but after the fairy tale has ended.

[this book is a dream diary of a boys’ school and i kept thinking it was an unintended translation of hui neng’s platform sutra… or, it reminded me of the orphanage scenes in edward dahlberg’s BECAUSE I WAS FLESH… and i heard jakob as the flipside to mush tate’s equally pure sermons that extolled with the hypnotic, “think you’re in school, think you’re much, know you’re living…“]

[also suffering through a very real school’s very hectic end-of-the-year traffic jam, i was all too happy to read about this ideal school (where the teachers are all gone or asleep.)]

o i forgot to mention: it’s very very funny…

buy directly from the publisher or buy used or find in a library

“avant practices can legitimately …constitute an alternative network”

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stumbled onto this Stephen-Paul Martin interview where he makes this opposition: experimental fiction as legitimate alternative network to the corporate publishing world… or experimental fiction as a minor league system for that corporate publishing world:

from: http://www.longhousepoetry.com/kirpalgordon2006.html

SPM: I think the main claim to significance that avant practices can legitimately make is that they constitute an alternative network, as opposed to the small press scene, which functions more as the minor leagues for mainstream publishing. However, when avanties start to function as narcissistic egos desperate for recognition and power, the whole idea of an alternative network collapses.

KPG: So if the middle-browing, standardizing, bureaucratic process of “professionalizing” our poets, radical critics & experimental writers has insured them middle class salaries in our universities at the risk of betraying their roots, where is our sense of community now?

SPM: I hope you are not thinking of the downtown scene in New York City during the late Seventies and early Eighties because money—and the future—were so little on everyone’s mind.

KPG: I’m thinking of your non-fiction book, Open Form and the Feminine Imagination. published in 1988. You helped coax us into a variety of texts that were difficult to enter. You demonstrated how writers as diverse as Susan How[e] & Clarence Major, for example, were speaking to our condition, only requiring us to develop alternative interpretive skills, an act of transcending/seeing through limits that are culturally imposed. I’m wondering where that kind of encouragement has gone. I’m also remembering the impact of Central Park. I got bombarded by so many new ideas, challenging perceptions, contrasting styles & approaches. It was a beautiful thing. Put more plainly, has a lack of tenure & adequate health insurance, coupled with bourgeois fantasies of fortune & fame, compromised the avant garde?

SPM: Compromised in the sense of turning it into its opposite, my answer is, “At least to some extent.” Letting the text unfold (as writers and readers) may be the only real community we will ever have. Exchanges between people are the ultimate value of literature. Yes, there’s the undeniable value of the energies we invest in creating the work and reading it carefully. But then what happens? I think most writers, perhaps without fully acknowledging it to themselves, see their work in a career context: Where can the work get them in terms of jobs and recognition? This is the mainstream approach, with the work seen as a way to assimilate into the dominant culture. But when the work is seen mainly as a trigger for discussion, it pulls the writer and reader away from the condition of semi-consciousness encouraged by mass communication and into the shared contemplation of ideas that exist only because the intensity of the interaction creates them. It’s precisely this kind of dialogue that cannot be appropriated by capitalist culture. It helps us stop worrying about how “great” the work is and puts the focus on the depth of feeling and imagination the work can generate and encourage.

more at: http://www.longhousepoetry.com/kirpalgordon2006.html

The Possibility of Music by Stephen-Paul Martin

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for family, went to san francisco over the weekend–very happy to see the used book stores in the mission still there. ten years since i last saw them: abandoned planet, dog eared, phoenix, modern times. i buy almost everything online now, so few used bookstores left in NYC (adam’s unnameable books one of a few lovely exceptions). what fun to browse seven or eight cases of used books…

i found this one there. i’d seen it on the FC2 site but never bothered because, frankly, the cover art was ugly (or better(?) said: the cover was sending the incorrect market signal to its presumed target consumer)… this book shoud have this cover, some cutiepie wink wink smartypants cover–not this overly literal and overly busy collage.

point’s not to bash the designer though but to take a moment to lament the death of browsing–cuz at modern times bookstore i actually picked it up, read a few pages, and fell quickly for stephen-paul martin’s hilarious, risky, and meandering storytelling.

though called stories there is a narrator which is similar enough in voice throughout to achieve the continuity of a novel. the tales are interconnected by repeating image/phrase touchstones–a technique i like alot when done well and which fits perfectly with the book’s philosophy of mystical coincidence and witty skepticism.

it avoids plot while maintaining all the fun and development of storytelling. it also ends with a questionably successful story that nonetheless i enjoyed tremendously for the huge emotional gamble it takes to tell a “non-ironic love story.”

i think i’ve said the above too clinically. the book’s a lot of fun… like the wit and depth of reading a david antin talk without the spaces. if you liked lynn crawford’s SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE or the dry humor of harry mathews’ CIGARETTES or JOURNALIST, try this one.

buy from FC2 or buy from a used bookstore or find it at a library

Walserian Waltzes by Gad Hollander

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very cool book i stumbled onto in a bookstore (is that stumbling a fading pastime?)… at a slim but just-right ninety-two pages, it’s got the heft of something three times as big… this sounds like a power tool review all of a sudden…

if the title throws you off with its awkward ballroom alliteration, try to ignore it–an inaccurate indicator of what’s inside… the walserian part refers to robert walser, the swiss novelist whose biography and fiction hollander empties and then refills and then empties again with significance of his own design.

hollander has a great sentence style, both lyrical and pleasingly complex. the book is made up of short sections, and they vary from essayistic meditations on madness to very beautiful borgesian ontological fables to headspinning prose blocks that live on the borderline of comprehensibility a la the fiction of maurice blanchot… in fact the book’s personality disorder at times reminded me of a real favorite– coleman dowell’s ISLAND PEOPLE–another book that deals explicitly with insanity.

for me it required a certain silence to read it in. there’s little action to move things along, and what action there is is figurative, metaphorical. but one hopes it’s wise to be thankful for something that takes and rewards a little concentration. despite it being made up of sections, they do feel ‘sequenced’ so that the whole feels like a complete work rather than a collection, ending also with a bravura flourish.

from early on:
“Robert had a thought and sat down. The thought had recurred throughout his life, assuming an abstract shape, and now, at the moment of his death, was no different. Though it helped to map the limits of his life, it had nothing to do with his death. Aware of its last rite in his brain, Robert sat down in the company of his thought. It happened in the mountains, in winter, when the mountains are are covered with snow. It was a thought he had always known, a shadowy trace moving inside his head like a sandwich-board figure without a message. It clung inside him as he sat down, as if to guide him on his final journey” (page 15).

buy from spd

Players by Don Delillo

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more than any of his others, PLAYERS pushes dialogue to meaninglessness, an experiment in how far afield our hip and close-quartered patois can go, how completely empty of sense. a combination of zen cases, wiseguy assholisms, and andy kaufman-rejected punchlines, delillo tirelessly (but we may tire) explores the idea of city people talking endless shit.

but this arguably slightest of delillos still’s got its morsels, not the least of which is its famous 1977 prophecy of terrorism’s intimate relationship with the world trade center.

it reminded me–maybe because of their equally still plots, maybe because of their protagonists’ essential isolation, maybe cuz i think of the two as his most experimental–of THE BODY ARTIST. there the characters were modern ascetics, holy people of personal art. here our players are devout cynics. …it was the first time it ever really registered with me (to make a generalization) the essentially religious nature of finance people, their worship not of money but the flow of it through specific, ritualized channels. in this book that appeared to me for the first time, not as some weak extended metaphor, of god as money, but a real truth: a worship–an ongoing worship–of a deified system.

it has very few pleasures, is nihilistic in its intentions. its characters are the worst of us, the emptiest and thus the worst. the enjoyment you do get is from his gravel-made, manly poetic word play. …but that’s enough for me…

and even delillo’s minor novels are pretty good. this one followed by the also-minor RUNNING DOG, then his best (so says I) THE NAMES. strikes me in two different ways: 1) it shows how consistent he actually is and somewhat opposingly that 2) within an authorial life, there’s more fortune than progress. of the latter, here’s a quote from a delillo interview that i always loved:

from: INTRODUCING DON DELILLO:
“I think one of the things I’ve learned from experience is that it isn’t enough to want to get back to work. The other thing I’ve learned is that no amount of experience can prevent you from making a major mistake. I think it can help you avoid the small mistakes. But the potential for a completely misconceived book still exists.”

 

Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories by Pamela Ryder

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About the Crime of the Century! The Lindbergh Baby kidnapping! Aren’t you interested in the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping?!?

extremely beautiful and attentive writing in this short story collection (billed as “a novel in stories”) sometimes stilted due to the iconic nature of its subject, written around the kidnapping and murder of the then Most Famous Couple’s firstborn.

[which, maybe today, would be the equivalent of shiloh pitt. pause to imagine the parallel sound and fury.]

precise and sustained attention to detail. the opening chapter has the layered density of absalom absalom. what’s most cool is the atmosphere achieved of depression-era america. it’s in her verb choice. not just the repeating of archaic brand names and gone places, but those acts and habits that people used to do and now do no longer…

but part of the challenge i think of writing this type of historical novel is getting away from the textbook narrative. it’s the somewhat contradictory act of hanging your book on the peg of history but making a reader forget that this is capital H History and rendering a more lowercase h personal history… so i liked the stories best that dealt with the more minor characters–the maid, the wife of the kidnapper bruno hauptmann character–where there was room for the author to move outside the iconic. in these chapters Ryder allowed herself to imagine interior lives, pasts, and the narrative gets more momentum going. in fact the real pleasure of the book for me was simply in fully entering german-american immigrant life in 1930s nyc. in contrast, in the chapters devoted to lindbergh and his wife, the two are somewhat reduced to their roles of action hero and socialite, and we’re left, somewhat stalled, at the surface of history.

(plus, since roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA i’m sort of ruined, unable to really see lucky lindy as anything more than a fascist antisemite, a george W prototype–and this aspect of the guy interestingly comes up zilch in the book.)

still, an enormous care is taken with the writing, always elegant, never purple and truly gorgeous at times. one to watch.

Consume directly from FC2.

Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe

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didn’t finish it. but it did make me think a bit about johnson and the life of an experimental novelist… and, like pound sd to williams: “you don’t have to finish everything–don’t tell people i said so.”

skimmed though. and did check the index and read all the entries where beckett comes up. (he comes off rather well.)

one of the main conflicts in the book, introduced in full self-awareness in an early chapter, is coe’s conflict, his torturedness even, about the traps and hypocrisies of writing a literary biography. as well, and this is simplifying it a bit, but it felt like coe was also conflicted about his own method and proclivities as a novelist and the more transgressive tradition that b.s. johnson represents. it’s almost as if coe doesn’t want to admit the avant-garde, when it succeeds, is the only game in town. (or maybe better said: the advanced guard, when it survives, gets farther into the interior.) he has a hard time reconciling this fact with the more regular enjoyments he gets out of traditional narratives. it’s a real dilemma and somewhat enjoyable/educating/painful to watch it get worked out as he writes his book.

he has a nice digression, near the end, when he hesitates before writing about johnson’s death. very human and sad and dignifying.

because of the bio i took another look at ALBERT ANGELO and i thought a few things… i think i remembered johnson as a major minor writer… but then, thinking about that categorization, i thought it a weasley and probably wrongheaded bureaucratic-minded ranking… or–if it stands–that i *like* major minors. something about their failures and/or their often slightly off but great ambitions… anyway, looking at albert angelo, i remembered what i liked about it: the idea of the artist-as-a-young-man, someone hopeful but uncertain how to see his daily humiliations–as stations of the cross or the amassing proof of his ultimate unworthiness. the contender slogging through his days. …also, his portrayal of a school seemed, fifty years after and taking place in a foreign nation, very familiar to me.

(there’s a nice review by kermode, in the london review of book, of the bio and johnson. in his review, kermode has a terrific digression about literary risk-takers like johnson: “Many have argued that a book’s defiance of contemporary opinion and convention is itself an index of virtue, that some element of ‘estrangement’ or ‘defamiliarisation’ is a preservative, and that too easy a compliance with accepted norms is bound to result in oblivion. Literary transgressiveness, often reflecting radical social and political opposition, can thus be taken as a justification for rescue work. It may be, as Roman Jakobson believed, that its virtue lies in its power to protect us from ‘automatisation, from the rust threatening our formulae of love and hatred, of revolt and renunciation, of faith and negation’. Since the transgressive has this value it will be worth much effort to recover lost examples of it.”)

i love johnson for–this crystallized in the bio–his us versus them combative position. he called the majority of his contemporary novelists philistines for being mired in the techniques of the 19th century novel despite the examples of joyce and beckett. what can i say, even though this is kinduva schoolboy dichotomy of the barbarians and the keepers-of-the-flame, i sorta believe it. don’t tell anyone i said so.

…also i love him for his typographical rapscallionisms. prolly my favorite one is: in HOUSE MOTHER NORMAL, which takes place in an old folks’ home, he represents the senile with…blank pages! another, in albert angelo, he cut holes through several recto pages so a reader could, literally, see into the future. a human and very funny writer that b.s.

consume.

Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman

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who’s aiming higher than Renee Gladman? her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction–and its osmotic border with poetry–can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing.

i knew her mainly from reading JUICE, a strong, sustained meditation where she stretched the connections that mended sentences’ semantic gaps to their limit… this latest, NEWCOMER CAN’T SWIM, is a collection of “installations” and i found myself taking a shine to some more than others. i liked those with a stronger narrative momentum than those that constellate various portraits or scenes (but it’s pretty radical stuff and i may be too poorly equipped to apprehend some of these seriously new approaches.) …in any case i thought “Untitled, Woman on Ground” was awesome, heartbreaking, and completely new. it might be a breakup story, it might be a story about rubbernecking around an accident. it repeats a theme of the book–the various ways we fail to communicate or only communicate in desperate and blunted ways. another favorite was “kingdom in three panels,” especially louie’s dog-mind…

some came up short nonetheless, where i both emotionally and intellectually couldn’t connect. but i did think what she’s going for is some incredible place that requires real inspiration each time. and it’s pretty hard to hit that every outing. people get blamed for that much ambition, and i’m not sure wrongly–but when she connects the transport’s pretty phenom.

consume directly from kelsey st press.

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

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why sebald, with his perfectly balanced but unsexy sentences, achieves literary fame is a mystery to me. his world is slow to enter; its drama takes place by the revelation and connection of events told obliquely and without fanfare; his destroyed characters are almost entirely absent, save for the fractured shells that are the proof of their devastation… but somehow the world embraced him (beginning right before his eerily sebaldian death). crazy!

i too love him. i think he writes this incredible realism–despite the fact that these are constructed allegories (of? maybe historical processes). ‘all history is biography’ is one aphorism sebald takes up in this collection of emigrants destroyed by world war ii, but his biography isn’t the bulldozing narrative of false causes and effects, of specious psychological motivations. rather sebald’s biographies are documentations of the paradoxically essential detritus of these historical lives.

the photographs i think aren’t as much as they appear to be, just that their interruptions are a somewhat novel reminder of the falsifications of history. conceptually interesting, but i don’t think they’re why we read sebald. we read him for those sentences. how balanced and dignified they are! what beautiful ways his nested images flow into each other! how noble to choose the details that he chooses! how these sentences sag, like Ambros himself, under the depressive, massive weight of history–of existence!–but, again like Ambros, how they are duty-bound to stand as handsomely and as refined as their formidable talents allow.

passages i loved: finding dr selwyn in the garden, counting blades, the description of the tennis court. the idea of the perfect german country school teacher in paul bereyter, how he’d look through the windows, how music brought him to tears–and how he hid them. a sweltering lower east side summer where everyone slept out on the tenement balconies. max ferber’s studio. god, that studio! the heartbreaking description of a german-jewish family going about its high holy days’ rituals, hopelessly ignorant of how history would annihilate this scene in one short lifetime.

here’s sebald on america, more accurate and succinct than de tocqueville: “So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Niniveh–I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned” (p. 105).

consume.

Mopus by Oisin Curran

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one of the best, genuinely experimental novels i’ve read in a long time… a daring and ambitious book, successful in its narrative high-wire act, oddly grounded in the current moment of apocalypse-always while circumventing completely the self-aggrandizing disaster movie poses. a consistent and non-sugary feeling of nostalgia, of remembrance of time just and long lost, sustained throughout.

structurally, this book’s the shit. or, to say it differently, it’s got beautiful answers to the novel’s problems of character and plot. why have we spent time playing with mobius strips and contemplating klein bottles? because their strange topologies are not only uncanny in their impossible possibility–but because they are metaphors for (or doorways to) the collapsed multi-possibilities of each particular existence. curran has composed an equivalent in prose, where doubles and ghosts and doppelgangers and recursive loops and variations on themes are all used to profound effect.

it’s a bit unsettling to not know where you are, which happens a fair amount, especially in the beginning, but the book slowly unfolds itself… and then refolds upon itself over and over… great books are worth reading again, but this one almost requires the second time through.

a close relative to two similarly slim, similarly cult-classic-y, dense episodic novels: david ohle’s MOTORMAN and jaimy gordon’s SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO… but while i love those two books, MOPUS’ style, for better or worse, is less aggressive and confrontational than MOTORMAN’s and less pyrotechnic look-at-me than SHAMP. MOPUS is more straight-up lyrical, with rich and graceful passages describing place and nature. one downside: while in the midst of the book’s whirlwind, the characters’ emotional lives are rendered fairly straightforwardly, more surface-level observations and depictions than the deeper interiors one might expect…

but pretty damn great book. oh, and: after donald harington’s WITH and way better than auster’s silly TIMBUKTU–it’s got the best description of dog-mind i’ve ever.

consume directly from counterpath press.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

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underneath the cleverness and the copulating mirrors and the labyrinth architecture–of which there’s admirably much–there’s a melancholic source to all these odyssey-reflecting tales (victor of last year’s penultimate starcherone fiction contest). all its revelations–the gods’ winner’s blues, the existential angst of the ancients, the mundane provenance of legends–are told with a wistful and appropriately epic heaviness.

how he wrings from the original more and more and more… and yet the world isn’t exactly enlarged or reduced… i don’t know exactly how to describe it, but the accomplishment is something like adding (seemingly) infinite perspectives to an unchanging object… calvino’s invisible cities and queneau’s exercises in style are close kin.

its main accomplishment? how it shows us we are, even within our mortal limits, inexhaustible. its main drawback? for me, that it goes on a touch too long and lets the (illusion of) inexhastible-ness falter at the end. but that’s a quibble. try it mikey you might like it.

[somewhat expanded version of the above published here.]

Consume directly from Starcherone Press.

Partial List of People to Bleach by Gary Lutz

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unlike the poetry-prose amalgams of someone like renee gladman, who is arguably equally as painstaking with her sentences, lutz writes a kind of extreme non-poetic prose. while gladman can approach the sentence with habits associated with contemporary poetry–e.g. ashbery-like slippages between clauses, shifting subjectivity, broken signifiers–a lutz sentence is extremely parseable. and unlike a prose-writer like diane williams (whose stories are also made up of, at least grammatically, generally traditional sentences), lutz isn’t a master of indeterminacy and suggestiveness… what i think makes lutz unique (and so attractive to imitators) is his taking of sentences’ normative grammar and subverting and transcending (but not breaking) its rules. the singular result is a clearly identifiable style that is simultaneously emotionally clamped and devastating.

the size of this chapbook was also for me just the right amount of lutz. he’s pretty intense to be with for much longer. but maybe one can evolve to him. i kept wondering what a lutz novel would be like.

or maybe the story collections are what a novel would be like. for in each story, there’s just enough plot to ground the language–usually we’re dealing with aborted love and/or aging. characterization is also minimal, at least the broad strokes kind. instead we have recordings of instances of personality–too far in close up to make a character–or a kind of everyperson abjectness. so that, maybe the novel would just be this, a carefully sustained and perfectly familiar heartache, rendered in deviously straitjacketed prose that would go impossibly on and on.

consume.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

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i just finished the first section… what a book! this is the hottest book i’ve read in a long time. very very sexy. whatever your orientation, i think this book would steam you up… to be a young thing around town! …and the writing is so natural… he makes it seem so easy. so far it reminds in a way of frederick ted castle’s ANTICIPATION, not too similar except that fast fast momentum of being young and everything happening at once, the gush to speak. the immediately-recognizable genius *and* likeability of someone like brautigan, though with a much longer, more sustained development. sprawling like a wong-kar-wai film (and i think i think that not just cuz 2666 sounds like 2046) but the coolness and the beautiful men and women, the youth-cult and moral wideness to speak credibly and generously while also truthfully about pimps and crime and prostitution and drugs, the ability to flow the whole mix all together. the underlying (glamourous) sadness. but really he stands alone and apart from all these, unique.

the idea of poetry in it, like how bunuel would speak about the surrealists as being governed by an invincible and strict moral code. an unstateable moral code but one governed by the laws of poetry!

let’s see how section two goes…
___________________

…now reporting from the middle of the middle. i thought that the middle would sprawl too much, but it doesn’t. a long but comfortable narrative, once you’re in it. slowly the story of ulises and arturo becomes revealed. an amazing (and actually: sweet) bit of autobiographical fiction.

constantly reflective about literature, how to live a life of one, its mechanics, the people, the gossip, the magazines, the rejections, the attitude.

to wet yer whistle, to remind you of how yours was once wet… here’s a bit i liked, from p. 184, from the POV of an older professor-type:

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. …the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search for Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain ( a paradigm of calm, serene complete literature, in my humble opinion)… Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall.”

________________________

finished it. man–what a book! bradford morrow says, truly, about coleman dowell’s ISLAND PEOPLE, “The kind of novel that can change a reader’s life,”–and this one too! fantastic! it changed my life!

consume.

The Last Novel by David Markson

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this is a little strange: i saw markson read a month ago at the 92nd Y. i’ve loved him for a long time, partly out of a romanticized notion that these books portray of the long-suffering and isolated genius. i was a little surprised to see not someone who was particularly cranky, but someone almost describable as cheery… something struck me: that the protag of these books is definitely a character, perhaps an exaggeration (vonnegut evidently called up markson after the last one, concerned about markson’s ‘mental condition’) but definitely something markson *uses* (as he may also don, of course, some role when reading out in the public) — but my sense was that these characters are more just that, characters, than works of autobiographical fiction. …on the other hand, the *rest* of the book is intensely autobiographical, the detritus and gems — the graph, the mark — of a reading life. so i discovered that markson is both more and less artificial than i had assumed…

i also realized *how much* he is editing and sequencing, even more than i’d thought — they gave out a page of his heavily marked up manuscript — to create his music(al) of the artist’s life.

(i also had the thought, easily wrong and maybe silly to mention, that markson was not, had not been, at least in this last decade, critically or socially or financially ignored. at least not as much as i’d assumed. but that invitations to the right parties and publications (though maybe not grants) had indeed come his way, and that maybe out of stubbornness but more out of some form of integrity, he had refused them. and done so in some kind of shoulder-shrugging automatic way–kind of like how bunuel describes the morality of the surrealist, i.e. impossible to describe but very judging and very exact.)

reading THE LAST NOVEL has all kinds of pleasures: the stumbling on the familiar, the echoes of course, feelings of smugness and admiration for what respectively you knew and what markson knows, the terrible (and yet somehow expectedly so) difficulties of being an artist and of aging both. it goes by fast and can be happily reread.

(here’s something: i’d once thought up a personal category of experience i dubbed the ‘trivially profound’ and had placed there things like sunsets and mountains, those experiences of the ineffable that are deep but with which you can do nothing. those experiences just are, almost impossible to even comment upon. then i realized maybe the word ‘trivially’ was both redundant and misleading. all profundity is un-useable in this way — thus perhaps trivial, but still of course vital, foundational, basic… markson’s work might be like this for me.) (what, of course, auden means too when he says poetry makes nothing happen.)

he said he had vowed after the last one not to do another–but did somehow anyway… that he had one more, at least, in him.

consume.

In Sicily by Elio Vittorini

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a beautiful and opaque book… both more and less than it impresses to be… more, because it *is* a fugue–vittorini actually thought of it more as an opera, but in any case: a beautiful music of characters and basic desires and hopes. less, because its mystery is partly the result of some functional opacity–to hide from fascist censors–so its mystery is somewhat generated by utility rather than an inherent and natural profound ineffable-ness. the result may look the same so it’s eye of the beholder stuff whether that makes a diff to you. …except for the fact that the allegory has no clear signified, a very beautiful allegorical novel.

consume. 

Simply Separate People by Lynn Crawford

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i absolutely loved this one… the sentences seem thought thinking in this one, clever but not ostentatious. character is created by language rather than by event. though, that said, there might, if not for events and circumstance, be only one character. but i loved that character. she was smart and curious and acknowledging of pain and conscious of privledge. an unexpected sincere pleasure.

consume via amazon.

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