Two paragraphs at 2paragraphs.com
First two paragraphs of The Strangers, which begin, “At night when I can’t sleep and at noon in the streets I don’t know who I am and could be anybody.“
A LOVE MADE OUT OF NOTHING & ZOHARA’S JOURNEY by barbara honigmann
two sad, beautiful novellas. a subtle lyricism that reminded sometimes of early handke, sometimes of the edgy desperation portrayed so well by elena ferrante. at yet other times what was brought to mind — even though honigmann here risks sentiment much more — was sebald’s sacred, dry handling of the stories of refugees and immigrants. what stands out however is an emotional and graceful prose that embodies outsider and diaspora life, its various defeats and small, bittersweet triumphs.
A LOVE MADE OUT OF NOTHING tells a story similar to honigmann’s biography. here, an adult daughter of a german jewish father and a bulgarian jewish mother self-exiles herself from east berlin to a lonely paris.
one of the more incredible bits is when she discovers her father’s diary entries from 1946, when he returns to germany. an almost casual description of the situation he then found himself in: “Someone asks us if we’re Italian. They no longer remember what Jews look like” (71)
the second novella ZOHARA’S JOURNEY is more straight-forward, in a way, and becomes, by its end, a semi-adventure story (before a final collapse). another great portrait, it speaks of a sephardic jewish refugee from algeria living in france with her six kids — a woman cruelly trapped by fate and her crooked, confidence-man husband.
i hope there’s more of her soon in english.
pick it up from the publisher or at your library or at an indie bookstore near you.
ODES & fragments by Alan Davies
the latest book from ellipsis press is by alan davies. more info plus an excerpt here.
ODES & fragments by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.
Praise for Alan Davies
The kind of skill with handling language that can’t be rushed or faked, and that I only hear in the work of writers who have really practiced for a long time.
—Craig DworkinAlan Davies’s poems have such great sound and are open and situated and fearless in their response to what happens internally and in the big often ugly outside. A startling writer and very precise on whatever path he sets for himself.
—Carla HarrymanDavies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene.
—Ron SillimanDavies’s belief in radical self-reflexivity has led him, in the course of his writing career, from a virtually opaque formalism to a continuity of text and life-world that is anything but aesthetic construction.
—Barrett Watten[Davies] has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which ‘no one is absent anymore’…. how writing and reading matters, not just for its comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking.
— Juliana SpahrALAN DAVIES IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE POET WHO HAS EVER HAD SEX. The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies’s work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about.
—Steve Zultanski
read an excerpt here.
buy it directly from ellipsis press or through spd or amazon.
Review of THE STRANGERS in the Review of Contemporary Fiction
Norman Lock writes about The Strangers in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction:
To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled. Lim’s knowledge of economic theory, political science, art history and practice, the minutiae and mechanisms of businesses large and small is sweeping. His verbal constructions exhibit lyrical and playful strains, indignation and sensuality, and a genuinely hip, idiomatic flair. Lim’s ambition to relate “grand narratives”—to tessellate them within a mysterious, comprehensive verbal construction and, in so doing, to recreate in his fictional universe the entire world and its archetypical figures—makes his novel an uncommon artifact. The Strangers in its complex self-referential, multi-layered structure, anecdotal mass, and restless inventiveness demands and rewards more than one reading.
Read the whole review here.
VAULT by david rose
convincing and moving portrayals of quiet, selfless valor told with a great textured, muscular writing:
“Towns flattened for miles, those civilians unable to flee living as troglodytes in cellars half-flooded with rain and sewage, making hopscotch forays to find crusts or cabbage leaves in the rubbled gutters” (p. 33).
this novel on the surface is occupied primarily with two physical activities: being a sniper (during the second world war) and racing bicycles. but rose’s beautifully rendered description of these two (at times sinister) occupations make us touch our animal side — and by that we’re uncannily opened up to profound moral and philosophical quandaries.
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here’s an interview revealing, among other interesting bits, a sebald-related origin story.
pick it up at the library or through the publisher.
REVENGE FANTASIES OF THE POLITICALLY DISPOSSESSED by jacob wren
different things get you: some sections romantic and conceptually smart, others filled with a carefully self-doubting and insightful political analysis. but the aspect that i most admired was an honesty and willingness for risk that’s hard to pinpoint but which was very moving.
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get it from the library or order from amazon
A new novel forthcoming from Black Square Editions!
The Strangers by Eugene Lim
Praise for The Strangers
What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication.
–Harry Mathews
THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.
–Susan Daitch
Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.
–Lydia Davis
Five Fiction Reviews: Dimock, Saer, Murong, Lispector, Mellis
I reviewed five fiction titles for the latest (and sadly, the last) issue of Harp & Altar: NONE OF THIS IS REAL by Miranda Mellis; A BREATH OF LIFE by Clarice Lispector; LEAVE ME ALONE by Murong Xuecun; SCARS by Juan José Saer; and GEORGE ANDERSON by Peter Dimock.
“None of This Is Real… manages to speak precisely to that helplessness and guilt permeating the simultaneity of the climate-changed, apocalypse-always zeitgeist and the rapturous technowonderful singularity as advertised on your hand-holding device.”
Read the reviews here.
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This great issue of Harp & Altar also has: poetry and fiction by Tom Andes, Jessica Baran, Leopoldine Core, Ian Dreiblatt, Matthew Klane, Linnea Ogden, Jennifer Pilch, Michael Rerick, Jason Snyder, Donna Stonecipher, Sally Van Doren, and Tom Whalen; Jesse Lichtenstein on The Arcadia Project; Bianca Stone on Farrah Field; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Adam Stolorow.
Interview with Peter Dimock
An interview I did with Peter Dimock appears in the latest issue of Bookslut.
Peter Dimock’s latest novel George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is written as a letter to the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a lawyer who drafted and signed one of the Bush era’s infamous Torture Memos. While it’s true that a handful of soldiers who participated in the beatings, rape, vicious strappado hangings, and other savage abuses at Abu Ghraib were charged and convicted, the masterminds of the legal reasoning that allowed the torture, now euphemistically branded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” of prisoners-of-war have never been held accountable.
Dimock’s slim fiction rages against this and a host of state sins while also deftly functioning as a sorrowful, secular confession for an entitled race and class. It does this in an altogether unique style, which one reviewer described as coming from a “speaker who may be in some kind of rapture, or who is ironic, or who is mad, or who is all three.” I met the author, a long-serving editor in the New York publishing world, at a restaurant near his home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Both of your books are stylistic gambles. The purpose and direction of that style is not immediately recognizable. We don’t know why you’re making these stylistic choices. In your author’s note you write that the success of your ambition will “rest upon the reader’s response to [your] invention of a form… no matter how estranged or estranging the results may seem at first.” While writing, how aware are you of your gamble? Did it seem like a gamble? And how did you reconcile yourself to this risk?
My experience is the history I have lived through. I was born in 1950. And so I was eighteen in 1968. That’s a moment. I was draftable at the height of the Vietnam War. So I have a particular relationship to that time, like everyone who lived through that period. But I remember being overwhelmed — I still am — by the sense that we don’t have a language adequate to the history we’re actually living. I was brought up and trained — I had all the best education and the best positions from which to assume an intellectual role either as an academic or a literary critic — but always felt I never could actually assume any such role in good faith. I feel strongly that — with the exception of contemporary literature, I’m thinking of Morrison, Marquez, Pynchon, and Bishop — we have not as a culture yet truly grappled with the inadequacy of the language we have available to us for the history we are living. I think we are crippled by this lack of a language.
Read the whole interview here:
Upcoming reading on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 @ 7 pm | Double Take IV
http://apexart.org/events/double-take-4.php
I’ll be reading on Tuesday, March 5th with John Yau, Rick Moody, Tim Davis, Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis. Please come!
Double Take IV
Tuesday, March 5: 7 pm
Three pairs of authors write original pieces about shared experiences.organized by
Albert MobilioFeaturing:
Rick Moody & Tim Davis on the dinner where they met.
John Yau & Eugene Lim on remembering the Robert Creeley memorial.
Charles Bernstein & Elizabeth Willis on the obvious.
Watch videos from the previous Double Take program.
Charles Bernstein‘s new collection of poems, Recalculating, will be out this Spring from the University of Chicago Press, which also published hisAttack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tim Davis is an artist, writer, and musician. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan, Whitney, Guggenheim, Walker, Hirshhorn, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and many other museums. He is the author of My Life in Policits (Aperture), and The New Antiquity (Damiani). Having written song lyrics for years for the band Cuddle Magic, he is currently at work on his first album of original songs, which will be accompanied by a set of music videos entitled “It’s OK to Hate Yourself.” He teaches Photography at Bard College.
Eugene Lim is an editor at small for Harp & Altar and is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press. His fiction has appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly, EXPLORINGFictions, The Brooklyn Rail, sleepingfish, No Colony and elsewhere. His first novel, Fog & Car, was named a finalist in Blatt Magazine’s 2007 Novel of Novels competition. His second novel The Strangers is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Queens, NY.
Rick Moody is the author of five novels–including The Ice Story and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death—three collections of stories, a memoir entitled The Black Veil, and, most recently, a collection of essays On Celestial Music. He is a music columnist at The Rumpus, and he also plays in and writes songs for The Wingdale Community Singers. He teaches at NYU and Yale.
John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism. Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets (Lavan Award), The American Poetry Review (Jerome Shestack Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Elizabeth Willis‘s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), won the PEN New England Prize for Poetry and is just out in paperback. Her other books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow. She teaches at Wesleyan University.
Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s,Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, andTouch Wood. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is an editor of Bookforum.
Please join us.
All events are free and open to the public.apexart‘s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., The William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
apexart
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org
Directions: A, C, E, N, R, W, Q, J, M, Z, 6 to Canal or 1 to Franklin.
New short story by Tom Whalen called “The Exam”
Take the test!
Calling all PhD students, English professors, the slackjawed, public-library-lurkers, the learned and the unlearned: here’s a high-stakes entrance examination for your exexexmatriculation. Take “The Exam” by Tom Whalen in the Brooklyn Rail.
In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” regarding the comparison of the rolling of the balls in the game of nine-pins to “rumbling peals of thunder,” why is it impossible to state definitively which comes first, the nine-pins or nature? Offer three refutations to Sedgwick’s (“homosexual panic”) and Morrison’s (Afro-centric) remarks on “The Beast in the Jungle.” How often did your parent(s), guardian(s), institution(s) read aloud to you before the age of five? three? one? On a scale of one to ten, with one being “calm” and ten “psychotic,” how nervous are you? Do you see the exam as a challenge or a threat, considering that if you do not pass, you will not be allowed to hold a teaching position in this country? Compare your anxiety to that of two of the following: Ichabod Crane, Young Goodman Brown, the narrator of “The Black Cat.” Hurry. The exam has barely begun, and already you’re falling behind. Perhaps the consequences of your failing are even more severe than you’ve imagined.
Read the rest of “The Exam” in
. . .
Tom Whalen’s novel THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is available now directly from Ellipsis Press, from Small Press Distribution, and from Amazon.
Whalen will read at Unnameable bookstore on Thursday March 21, 2013.
THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS by Tom Whalen
I’m very proud to have worked on this book, the latest Ellipsis Press title. Tom Whalen has written an incredibly beautiful and surprising novel, a sly allegory about power and bureaucracy that has a narrator with that saintly and cuckoo mix to whom Jakob von Gunten might be close cousin.
“The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence. But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination. To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. ” —Norman Lock
Some more info, including an excerpt, here.
Available for order from SPD or from Ellipsis Press or from Amazon.
If you’re a reviewer and want an reader’s copy, please email me at: eugene at ellipsispress.com.
An excerpt from THE STRANGERS
I’m happy to have a piece of fiction in the latest issue of The Brooklyn Rail. “Spooky Action at a Distance” is excerpted from a forthcoming novel called THE STRANGERS (Black Square Editions) about several sets of odd twins. Here’s how it starts:
It’s when the cop is punching my face that I make the decision. I decide to go look for my sister. My whole life I’d indulged in a stupid thrill, a very risky habit. In the middle of the night I’d sneak through the town and deface posters of the beloved president. Sometimes just a mustache over his beloved pudgy face. I kept it scatological or primitive. For fifteen years I’d done this and never got caught.
The cop is working me over pretty good. I’ve never taken a punch before. I worry about my brain and whether he’ll bust something inside me and I’ll die slowly as things that aren’t supposed to meet mix inside my sloshy guts. I’m a wet animal and I’m weeping like a child and very ashamed that I am and I’m scared.
THE SON MASTER by peter seaton
at work this week i was given seaton’s THE SON MASTER by a teenager who told me i’d become enlightened upon reading any page. and so i was.
peter seaton was a prose artist who, along with using subtle stepping stones of sound, mimicked and subverted common narrative strategies so that we had the shape, if not the exclusivity, of quotidian thought. (distant relatives might include rob stephenson’s recent PASSES THROUGH or the more abstract stories of Robert Creeley, e.g. those in “Presences: a text for Marisol“).
here’s a paragraph (which is a pleasure to type out):
Until the lean years of the revolution it’s usually the other way around — a man steals an idea circulating as a plan. Say there was slander, it was worked out in the parallel twenties. All the players left the country suddenly saying so you were hearing the actual sound. To prove dreamily I was a child, I think, the most truthful one. And the war, I don’t know, at the same time I like it very much. It’s easy to look at. The most popular saying or appropriate interest called the custodial style used to call it a search in an ancient city or a landscape clearing up and a woman walks by and says there’s some anniversary movement created by a hope monument made of brick and the bricks broke through and were just put back. And if you don’t dig around inside it wears off quickly, take that to the others sleeping at night and falling apart (p 47).
seaton died in 2010. nathanial otting has a great collection of links on seaton here, which includes a moving tribute by michael gottleib (who, by the bye, recently published a simply titled, lovely and bittersweet memoir and essay of the nyc poetry scene in the 70s).
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w/ seaton reading parts of THE SON MASTER
nick piombino remembrance of the their student years at CCNY and subsequent friendship
3 seaton books scanned and available via craig dworkin’s eclipse site
NEVER ANY END TO PARIS by enrique vila-matas
witty and elegant, what makes enrique vila-matas’s NEVER ANY END TO PARIS something more than a (witty and elegant) memoir of his literary apprentice years is the transformational yet thin veneer of fiction that coats this ingenious novel. the book follows a spanish writer (with a more than passing resemblance to vila-matas) who recalls — in a lecture spoken during a three-day symposium on irony — how in the mid-1970s he had moved as a young man from barcelona to paris to work on his first novel in a garret apartment rented from no less a personality than marguerite duras.
in paris the young writer lives off an allowance from his father and nurses his despair with a hilarious and familiar tenderness. along the way he bumps into a host of literary notables (e.g. perec, barthes, beckett), but the writer who haunts him the most is the Ghost of Paris Past: ernest hemingway. specifically it’s the hemingway of A MOVEABLE FEAST who recalled his own years in the City of Light as “very poor and very happy” — so unlike our irony man who, looking backward, can only say he was “very poor and very unhappy.”
papa hemingway seems to enthrall our narrator’s imagination not only due to the virile charisma of his exploits and writing but perhaps more importantly because of the clear limits his talent impotently struggled to overcome. he quotes julien gracq who wrote hemingway “knows he will never bore us; he puts marks on paper as naturally as others walk down stairs. His mere presence bewitches us; then we go outside to smoke and stop thinking about him.”
this assessment on hemingway leads to a division of the world into two types of writers: the ordered and bourgeois manner of a writer like thomas mann versus the chaotic disordered hurricane of talent à la rimbaud. while aging is the historical force that implodes this dialectic (our narrator realizes with a glance at his obsessively ordered writing desk that he has become what in his youth he had once disdained) there remains a potent yearning for the virtuosic chaos of a poet like the young rimbaud. it’s this bittersweet longing for an imperfect past that gives the novel its emotion; and it’s the advantage of hindsight that allows it its wit.
* * *
is the book a lecture or a novel? the book asks itself this question repeatedly and while no doubt existing as a kind of conflation of the two, collage is the name that might most tellingly reveals its structure. like benjamin’s collection on 19th century parisian arcades or the late novels of david markson, vila-matas is determined to make a work of literature through quotation. and while in an extreme sense all acts of fiction are collages, here the items chosen – from autobiography and memory, from literary history and anecdote, from criticism and gossip – are arranged less for the illusion of plot or even movement but rather in order to present a portrait of the artist as a young man. or, more specifically, the portrait given is of the artist as an older man looking back at himself as a younger one. it serves vila-matas’s purposes to portray his younger (fictional) self as a struggling poseur and plagiarizer of stances, so he puts his most learned lines in the mouth of his chief foil and best friend raúl escari. and on the very notion of unity in the novel he has escari say the key truth: “[I]t’s not a question of unity or a degree of tolerance for digression. It’s a more profound or complex matter than it appears to be. The paragraphs should be connected to each other. Nothing more and nothing less.”
the third in a series of translations of vila-matas into english by new directions (a fourth, DUBLINESQUE, is just out), all with a meta-literary premise, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS seems to me the most successful so far. in part this is because of the graceful translation by anne mclean, which allows the humor to come across intact, but as well it is because vila-matas’s irony works particularly well in this fictional autobiography—because it seems here so sincere. our narrator admits as much: “Everything I’ve said about irony is not at all ironic. The fact is, after all, art is the only method we have of pronouncing certain truths. And I can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity.”
pick it up from the publisher or the library
THE HERMIT by eugène ionesco
a bit plodding but in reality wonderfully so. like that wise, avuncular speech that gets tedious at times but which you nonetheless love hearing.
ionesco’s only novel tells of an everyman who is decidedly not an artist or a saint but one who nonetheless is struck forcibly with the great question of his own existence. as this narrator faces the familiar but unsolvable koans, a deep and growing sense of recognition and pity (for the narrator and for ourselves) arises:
I have never recovered from my initial surprise at making contact with the world, a feeling of surprise and wonderment that cannot be dismissed. We are told to free ourselves from the feeling of astonishment and move on to other things. But in that case, on what basis can we found any knowledge or morality? There is no way that basis can be ignorance, and yet we are swimming in ignorance; our point of departure, our foundation, is nothing but the void. How can we build on nothing? (57)
All we are, perhaps, is knots, ephemeral intersections of energies, forces, various and contradictory tendencies which only death unties. And yet these forces, these energetic events are ourselves; we are built, we are produced, we are acted upon, but also we make ourselves, we act and we act upon ourselves. Oh, if only I had some philosophical talent! All the things I’d understand! I’d understand the same things I know now, but I could explain them to myself better, and I’d also be able to explain it better to others and exchange ideas. (65)
one of the bits i liked the best is when the narrator actually does confront a scholar, a philosopher, who tells him his questions are quite ordinary, that there isn’t anything at all new to them… to which our isolato replies:
“Of course,” I answered, “I’m sure you’re aware of these problems; you’ve read a lot, you have a great fount of knowledge. But for me these questions are crucial, they take me and shake me. For you, they’re only cultural. You don’t wake up every morning with fear and trembling, asking yourself what the answers are, then telling yourself there aren’t any. But you know that everyone has asked himself these same questions. And you also know that no one has ever come up with any answers, because there aren’t any. The only difference is that for you the whole thing is files and catalogues… Despair has been domesticated; people have turned it into literature, into works of art. That doesn’t help me” (87-88).
[later on (actually the passing of time in the book is beautifully done, and years pass almost imperceptibly differently from hours), a civil war breaks out. and here the book could be argued to have a reactionary or anti-revolutionary point of view. for it has little faith in any progress of state. unfortunately this seems an increasingly convincing cynicism.]
the pseudonymous Meng-hu has a great review on the book here, which acknowledges the work’s tardy appearance “in the sequence of existential literature” and speaks well of its narrator’s identifiable mental illness and alcohol-fueled escapism.
roy kuhlman — famous for his grove beckett book covers — designed this one. translated by the maverick publisher and editor richard seaver.
pick it up from your local library.
wanna see joanna read a poem?
Click below to see poems read by Lewis Warsh, Lisa Jarnot, Joanna Sondheim and more… And give your $upport to the great-looking, new magazine: Staging Ground.
HARD RAIN FALLING by don carpenter
who knew macho came in so many delicate colors? evidently don carpenter did. and displayed the entire spectrum in his great brutal HARD RAIN FALLING. with a palpable adherence to some unsaid code of defiant honesty, carpenter’s first novel anchors itself in a historically determined idea of manhood that dates itself much less than one might at first assume.
three very different eras in one man’s life: a raging early hoodlum boyhood of poolhalls and not-so-petty crimes; then stints at prison including one tremendous tear of writing and existential fury describing a solitary confinement episode and also, later, a very moving and tragic love story between inmates at san quentin… the book perhaps should have ended there but gives us a final portrait of the ex-con as a young father… this bit, while burning not quite as hot, also has its philosophical rewards. this last domestic section may also only seem a letdown because by then you’ve become accustomed to the explosive miracles carpenter seems to be pulling off scene after extended scene.
usually i dislike books where i’m constantly wondering what happens next because i feel manipulated, as if i’m on some kind of ride. i wondered what came next here, but i didn’t mind.
when he took his life at the age of 64 don carpenter was at work on a final book called FRIDAYS AT ENRICO’s about his particular san franciscio literary scene. he was good friends with evan connell, anne lamott, and richard brautigan. the obits report that carpenter was badly effected by his friend brautigan’s suicide. here’s a memorial written by carpenter about their friendship.
here’s an interview with NYRB editor edwin frank about how the reprint came about — mostly it seems from the support of george pelecanos.
and here’s pelecanos reading from HARD RAIN FALLING.
pick it up from the library or from the publisher.
TWO SERIOUS LADIES by jane bowles
a lightning strike, a revelation. populated by persons afflicted — the two serious ladies of its title most so — by some hilarious strain of nutty. each too acquiring a certain kind of self-proclaimed but not entirely inaccurate sainthood. “saint” a title to use advisedly, but there is something of the seeker and holy fool about these characters. an air of privilege perfumes our ladies but their disavowal of it through the casual violation or even destruction of propriety makes it seem the transgressions and non sequiturs are actually the fastidious following of a much higher order. my edition has an awful cover and a great intro by lorna sage who reveals parenthetically that Christina Goering was “named after Jesus Christ and Hitler’s aviation minister”(!) …published in 1943 TWO SERIOUS LADIES can be thought of as a proto-beat novel — only in the sense that it too seems a response and protesting statement to the bourgeois strictures from which it arises — but otherwise a total sui generis. it’s madcap, movingly in touch with despair, structurally profound, and in the best sense foolishly holy.
(neither here nor there but for some reason while reading it i was frequently reminded of dead pan philosophy professor ray johnson.)
great article by stacey d’erasmo on jane bowles in OUT which has this bit:
“It’s possible,” Koestenbaum tells me, “that I worship Jane Bowles a little less than I did five or ten years ago. Self destructiveness isn’t as easily idealized as you get older.” It’s true. The loneliness of Bowles that seemed grand to me at 20 now seems like a question that was never answered.
THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY by michel houellebecq
houellebecq is a supreme market analyst, not shying away from drawing a trendline even if it’s more based on cynicism than data:
They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a question for them in the course of a weekend to get plastered or totally shit-faced; it was already — but they were still young enough to laugh about it — the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its middle-to-upper classes in middle age. They got used to the theatrical tone adopted by waiters in high-star establishments as they announced the composition of the amuse-bouches and other appetizers; and also that elastic and declamatory way in which they exclaimed: “Excellente continuation, messieurs, dames!” each time they brought the next course (58).”
inhaled it and enjoyed it thoroughly, but not his best (though maybe his most consciously ambitious). somehow it didn’t appear to have the energy to finish what it started. the houellebecq character seemed to exist simply to settle scores and mock his own public image — but after those tasks were (often, it’s true, hilariously) done there ironically was a painful lack of development for this rather essential, important character. and the (d)evolution into police procedural i think was in some ways, even if premeditated and even if enjoyable, shark jumping.
there are even moments of unfortunate false notes and unexpected sentimentality, for example when the main character tries to find meaning in his life so waxes nostalgic for the one that got away:
The word passion suddenly crossed Jed’s mind, and all of a sudden he found himself ten years previously, during his last weekend with Olga… Night was falling, and the temperature ideally mild. Olga seemed deep in contemplation of her pressed lobster. She had said nothing for at least a minute when she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes, and asked: “Do you know why you’re attractive to women?… It’s very simple: it’s because you have an intense look in your eyes. A passionate look… If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive” (106-7).
[this is houellebecq writing?!]
and/but there’s plenty to love… here’s a favorite stand-alone bit. typical in its wry cultural observation, it ends with a quietly explosive insight:
The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters. Jed opted for the Husqvarna, a water from the center of Norway, which sparkled discreetly. It was extremely pure — although, in reality, no more than the others. All these mineral waters distinguished themselves only by the sparkling, a slightly different texture in the mouth; none of them were salty or ferruginous; the basic point of Norwegian mineral waters seemed to be moderation. Subtle hedonists, these Norwegians, thought Jed as he bought his Husqvarna; it was pleasant, he thought again, that so many different forms of purity could exist (80).
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bits from the paris review interview here.
Harp & Altar #9
Harp & Altar #9 now up! I’ve stepped down as Fiction Editor and want to send many thanks to Keith Newton for the opportunity to work on this great magazine. The new issue has poetry and fiction by Amaranth Borsuk, Tina Brown Celona, Oisín Curran, Kate Dougherty, Farrah Field, Kevin Holden, Gregory Howard, Paul Killebrew, Noelle Kocot, Aubrie Marrin, Jenny Nichols, and Sampson Starkweather. http://www.harpandaltar.com/
One advantage of trading mothers would be that you could have sex with her, your mother who was not really your mother but somebody else’s mother that you had traded with. I imagine this might appeal to some people. It might be an exciting idea to them. On the other hand, it would be equally true that someone, specifically the person you had traded with, could be having sex with your mother, your real mother that you traded away. I understand that this would be upsetting to some people. Although not to others.
from “On Trading Mothers” by Jenny Nichols
I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND by bohumil hrabal
reminded me of walser — maybe a more worldy walser. as if instead of retreating to the madhouse, hrabal was sentenced to the purgatory of the diplomatic corps — forced propriety despite the absurd or horrific swirls of history around him. but, like walser, he recognizes the poetic gesture… poetic or romantic despite or because of the old world sexism and classism rampant (and rampant still) just before the second world war, the ripened-to-rot but still shiny weimar-type decadence… without mentioning it to spoil it, the first chapter has one of the more romantic scenes i’ve read in many a year.
the movement from charming and bawdy to dark satire and political farce to apocalyptic dream and finally into prayerful meditation — all that transition done quietly, even feigning modesty, yet this quiet hiding a great ambition. the transitions’ build-up and execution reflective of not only the change of an individual but of nation-states.
here’s a scene to wet yer whistle:
“I saw Zdenëk, the headwaiter at the Hotel Tichota, who enjoyed having a good time so much when he was off work that to get it he’d spend all the money he had with him, which was always several thousand. Then I saw his uncle, a military bandmaster now retired, who split wood on his little plot of land in the forest where he had a cottage overgrown with flowers and wild vines. This uncle had been a bandmaster at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still wore his uniform when he split wood, because he had written two polkas and several waltzes that still got played all the time, although no one remembered who the composer was and everyone thought he’d died a long time ago. Zdenëk and I, as we were riding along in a rented buggy on one of our days off, heard the sound of a military brass band playing one of his uncle’s waltzes, and Zdenëk stood up and signaled the driver to stop, then went over to the band and had a little talk with the bandmaster. He offered to give him all the money he had, four thousand crowns, for the soldiers to buy themselves beer, if they would do what he asked. Buses were waiting, and the whole band was getting ready to climb aboard to go to a band tattoo, so we left the buggy there and got on the first bus with them. After an hour’s drive we stopped in a forest, and soon a hundred and twenty uniformed musicians with their shiny instruments were advancing slowly down a road through the woods. Then they turned onto a footpath lined with thick bushes and pine trees that towered overhead, and Zdenëk signaled them to stop and slipped through some loose planks in a fence, disappeared into the bushes for a few moments, then came back and told them his plan. When he gave the sign, the soldiers climbed one by one through the hole in the fence into the bushes while Zdenëk, like a soldier at the front, directed them to take positions around the tiny house. They could hear the sound of an ax striking wood, and the entire band silently surrounded the chopping block and an old man in an ancient Austrian bandleader’s uniform. When Zdenëk gave the signal, the bandmaster flung his golden ceremonial baton in the air, gave a loud command, and out of the bushes rose a glistening array of brass instruments and the band began to play a clamorous polka by Zdenëk’s uncle. The old bandleader stood transfixed over the piece of wood he had just split, while the band moved forward a couple of steps, still up to their waists in pine and oak shrubs. Only the bandmaster stood in the greenery up to his knees, swinging his golden baton while the band played the polka and their instruments flashed in the sunlight. The old bandleader slowly looked around with a heavenly expression on his face, and when they finished the polka the band started right in on one of his concert waltzes, and the old bandleader sat down, put his ax across his knees, and began to cry. The bandmaster came up and touched his shoulder, the old man looked up, and the bandmaster handed him the golden baton. Now the old man got to his feet and, as he told us afterward, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven with a military band all around him, and he thought they must play military music in heaven and that God Himself was conducting the band and was now turning His own baton over to him. So the old man conducted his own pieces, and when he’d finished, Zdenëk stepped out of the bushes, shook hands with his uncle, and wished him good health. Half an hour later the band climbed back into their buses and as they were driving away they played Zdenëk a farewell ceremonial fanfare. Zdenëk stood there filled with emotion and bowed and thanked them, and finally the buses, and with them the fanfares, faded down the road through the woods, lashed by beech branches and shrubs” (159-61).
find it at the library or from the publisher or pick it up from an independent bookstore.
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three profiles on the bohemian’s bohemian:
james wood at the london review of books.
adam thirwell at the guardian.
mats larsson at Art Bin.
favorites of twenty eleven
in no particular but starting it off: giancarlo’s glamour-soaked narcissus tale as lit journal advertisement… hans rickheit’s SQUIRREL MACHINE is a great gross-out dream… the beautiful ephemera of luca’s DAS DING #3… saying goodbye and anticipating saying goodbye to merce… the tumult of a chinese lifetime told in incredible locked down, long take that is wang bing’s FENGMING… the state of the disunion address of teju cole’s OPEN CITY… catching up with lewis warsh’s A FREE MAN (1991) and its inverse mirror A PLACE IN THE SUN (2010). they’re what social realism could admirably be — if those words meant something different… monica youn’s love song of j alfred IGNATZ (“and the fading//echo of the detox/mantras://helpless helpless/helpless helpless“)… speaking of which, 1st volume of beckett’s letters, which include the quip “T. Eliot is toilet spelt backwards” and untaken advice from his brother in the form of the question “Why can’t you write the way people want?” …and, a year late, but RIP barry hannah you lunatic god.
& last but definitely not least: hat’s off to the erstwhile and ever OWS People’s Library, which rallied the troops and served as symbol in a way yer kindle download will never.
…
New story called “Booster Rockets” in latest FENCE
i’m happy to have a new story called “Booster Rockets” in the latest issue of FENCE magazine. here’s how it starts:
I was coming from a haircut and I was upset. I had just spent a lot of money on the haircut but I didn’t have a lot of money. It’s not because I’m vain but looking good is important to me. Anyway I was walking across Washington Square Park and I was not happy. I was pissed off. I wasn’t crying or raving or anything like that, just cranky, because I’d taken a chance on a new hair cutter and just then I thought she’d fucked it all up, not done what I wanted her to do, what I’d told her to do. A little bit later, a few days later or even the very next day, I realized it was actually a very nice haircut, that I liked what she’d done, and I kept going back to her for several more years…
AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSTING A PLACE IN PARIS by georges perec
i’ve a review of this perec gem in Jacket2. an issue devoted to the stroll. edited by corey frost and louis bury.
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris was written by Georges Perec during a gray Parisian weekend in October 1974. The stated intention was to “describe … that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” A nonambulatory flâneur, Perec sets himself up at a cafe in Place Saint-Sulpice to do as his directive epigraph of Life: A User’s Manualorders us to do also: “Look with all your eyes, look.”
https://jacket2.org/reviews/detour-more-traditional-paths-composition
THE PARADISE BIRD TATTOO (or, attempted double-suicide) by choukitsu kurumatani
what would happen to raskolnikov if he hadn’t killed the old woman? kurumatani seems to ask that question in this grim tale about a young japanese man who decides to opt as far out of life as he can. if not wholly unique in tone and content, a very good book on a great theme: the isolato in both the noir-y tradition of philip marlowe and the devastatingly pure refusnik ‘tude of bartleby. like his literary predecessors, our man here is an individual who rejects the prescribed ambitions of life, judging them as ultimately disappointing and petty.
reminiscent of recent down-and-out memoirs like TRAVELS WITH LIZBETH or GRAND CENTRAL WINTER this contemporary take on the autobiographical watashi shosetsu genre, or “I-novel,” is grimly poetic and sweatily spiritual. like the tales of the marginalized burakumin of nakagami but less macho, more philosophical — something akin to the depressed soul of perec’s A MAN ASLEEP except ikushima’s no student and he has no rent money.
I was about to visit somebody I had never met. A complete stranger. My only hope was to talk this stranger into giving me a job so that I could keep on living. I had lost everything, thrown everything away. I had already been made to understand, all too well, that I was a loser. Whoever I was about to meet was probably used to being tough toward people as unworldly as me. No matter; whether it turned out to be some guy I couldn’t get anywhere with, or a woman with a heart of stone, I had no other choice; I was at the end of my rope (10).
pick it up at the library or your local independent bookstore.
a review of kurumatani and keizo hino in the quarterly conversation here.
watch the trailer of the movie based on it (in japanese) here:
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[found this one browsing a bookstore’s shelves, that encounter with chance and fuzzy curating now increasingly rare and endangered. but how else to find that book not clamoring by tweet and hype but just by consistent work on the page? o well.]
MAKING LOVE by jean-philippe toussaint
your poor fabulously wealthy man of leisure slash hipster is nursing a dying love affair while his highly sensitive instrument notes, in languorous and voluptuous detail, the grime and dazzle of his worldly world.
We took shelter inside for a moment, passing abruptly from the bluish gloom of the night to the violent and timeless white blaze of overhead fluorescent lights. I glanced casually at the only two clients in the store, a young man in an orange turtleneck and a small rasta cap who was leafing through a magazine in front of the newspaper rack, and a salaryman of indeterminate age, with wet shoes and a damp forehead, who was doubtfully considering the almost empty shelves in the refrigerated section, occasionally selecting some plastic-wrapped tray filled with stringy black seaweed or sliced mushrooms, bringing it closer to his eyes and raising his glasses to read something on the label, the product’s packaging date or place of origin, then replacing the plastic tray where he had found it. Marie was in front of the baked goods shelf, looking rather apathetically at the packages of cookies, moving arbitrarily from one shelf to another, lingering at the displays of instant soups and colorful cellophane bags of noodles. She carried her damp coat in the crook of one arm, and wearing her sunglasses again because of the excessive glare in the store, she strolled, yawning, by the shelves, watched indifferently by the dejected cashiers, who followed the nonchalant progress of her splendid starry-night silhouette sailing up and down vacant aisles (47).
as satirical of the decadent consumerist life as DEMONLOVER or LOST IN TRANSLATION or ENTER THE VOID, that is: barely or not at all…
but even if the trite subject is only mitigated slightly and rather shamelessly with a thin glaze of self awareness, toussaint transcends the shallowness with his sumptuous, gloriously paced, and perfectly elegant style. he’s at some of his best here; MAKING LOVE was a bestseller in france and the first of his, by The New Press, to be translated into english. rarer to find than the dalkey archive translations but if you’re a fan absolutely worth the tracking down.
buy it from the publisher or find it in the library or from an independent bookstore.
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OPEN CITY by teju cole
using a realist, pseudo-autobiographical style very reminiscent of sebald, the main character, Julius, wanders through an up-to-date and recognizable NYC, an accomplishment in itself, observing the marathoners and skyscrapers at columbus circle, the twin towers intact in the queens museum’s diorama, conversations with cabdrivers infused with political subtext, bedbugs — and uses that general observation to describe, repeatedly and profoundly, the immigrant’s situation. maybe in fact the novel is the first since sebald to successfully tackle our moment of simultaneous globalization and alienation without resorting to parody or genre plot or any other distancing device. and for all the meandering of its narrative, this roaming belies a close-hewed line, and the book is not really a flâneur’s accounting at all but a meditative monologue on history told to the slow-hearbeat pace of a stroll’s footfall.
Farouq turned to me and said, It’s very busy, as you can see. Not only for all the people making New Year greetings but also for a lot of people calling home for the Eid. He gestured to the computer monitor behind him, and on it was a log of the calls ongoing in all twelve booths: Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany. It looked like fiction, that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places. It’s been like this for the past two days, Farouq said, and this is one of the things I enjoy about working here. It’s a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me (112).
the lesson here seems to be that there is less and less frequently a typical immigration story than that each immigrant has a unique tale as bizarre as it is wholly probable. and each of these, in julius’s necessarily passing view, only half reveals its tangled provenance through scars and tics and layers of peeling disguise. cole shows again and again people who have been caught and hurled by history into their odd displaced places: a liberian in immigration prison, a dying english professor who had been in a japanese internment camp, rwandan dance clubbers, arab-european cafe leftists. these individuals are not always victims of history but are — in their singularity, in their movements unreplicated by nations of others — perhaps more uniquely aware of how history has determined their lives. and as cole’s novel superbly illustrates (and as globalization intensifies) there will arguably be fewer and fewer citizens of states and more and more castaway members of diasporas.
for these latter, in OPEN CITY, the question of belonging and authenticity as well as the proper and appropriate methods of political speech and protest are never far from mind. one of the most memorable characters in this regard is farouq — who with his somewhat naive leftism plays foil to our ever-so-increasingly unreliable (and occasionally reactionary-ish) narrator. farouq is an employee at an internet cafe in brussels and from that vantage freely comments on global politics… one of the book’s best provocations in fact is that it is a NYC book confronting the transforming moment zero of 9/11 by archly recounting a bar debate of arab intellectuals posturing resistance in brussels(!) …if it wasn’t so possible, it would be perfect satire.
Farouq’s face — all of a sudden, it seemed, but I must have been subconsciously working on the problem — resolved itself, and I saw a startling resemblance: he was the very image of Robert De Niro, specifically in De Niro’s role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II… A famous Italian-American actor thirty years ago and an unknown Moroccan political philosopher in the present, but it was the same face. What a marvel that life repeated itself in these trivial ways, and it was something I noticed only because he hadn’t shaved for a day or two…
What was the meaning of De Niro’s smile? He, De Niro, smiled, but one had no idea what he was smiling about. Perhaps this is why, when I first met Farouq, I had been taken aback. I had subconsciously overinterpreted his smile, connecting his face to another’s, reading it as a face to be liked but feared. I had read his face as that of the young De Niro, as a charming psychopath, for this most trivial of reasons. And it was this face, not as inscrutable as I had once feared, that spoke now: For us, America is a version of Al-Qaeda. The statement was so general as to be without meaning. It had no power, and he said it without conviction. I did not need to contest it, and Khalil added nothing to it. “America is a version of Al-Qaeda.” It floated up with the smoke, and died. It might have meant more, weeks back, when the one speaking was still an unknown quanity. Now he had overplayed his hand, and I sensed a shift in the argument, a shift in my favor” (121-122).
. . .
near novel’s end julius observes a woman davening and comments on prayer. his definition of it could easily also apply to the novel in general but especially to OPEN CITY itself — an elegant, brainy, careful, and finally hopeful meditation:
I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones (215).
. . .
a link to an interview with cole on PBS’ artbeat. here’s a bit:
TEJU COLE: We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader. But of course, I’m not the first person to think about this. This is actually a problem that the Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe solved pretty well. So part of my thinking was going back a little bit to re-inventing that particular wheel, which only seems innovative because most novels that are written today are being written on Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, 19th century novel.
another more expansive interview here.
pick it up from your local independent bookstore or the library.
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SUICIDE by edouard levé
not purely fiction but located somewhere between death porn, a bipolar’s daybook, and a conceptual suicide note, levé’s novel — which is inseparable from its author’s biography — seems less a treatise on suicide than a portrait of an elegant but somehow dull faculty. (or dulled? the translator’s afterword calls levé’s aesthetic habitually “austere.”) the narrator notes moments of the pedestrian sublime or accounts for days with gestures toward the philosophical, but somehow never does his sense flare into the poignancy it seems to, despite itself, strive for. the unrelenting dark gray of depression’s long term palette, however, the book does seem to get just right.