trestle

2010-02-28T09:26:00.000-08:00

...a story at Collagist

...an excerpt at Everyday Genius from the Menchov Project , which is more or less complete or certainly abandoned, as least for now...

...these pieces posted a while ago, I got to admit my incompetence with weblogging, and I really don't know if I'm going to get any better, ah well...

...

baby talk

franco ballerini

2010-02-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

1964 - 2010

2010-02-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

Interview with J.A.Tyler in elimae where we discuss his new novella Inconceivable Wilson. Wilson brings a very studied, repetitive and rhythmic style. I’m always thinking as I read a book whether I want to reread the book, and this book urges a second reading. It’s got a lot going on.
…

tree fine tings:

Kim Chinquee @ Wigleaf. The odd opening opens you into an awkward nostalgia and then crushes you before you have a chance to blink. Then closes with ponderous time and distance. Roughly one hundred perfect words.

In Redivider, an essay by Jeff Porter on the use of subjunctive mood (in english).

These poems by Cris Costa in Action, Yes.

…

don’t know what we’re going to do now…

...

any frontier, any hemisphere

…

…includes freeze dried bloodworms for maximum palatability.

multisimulintrumentalism

2010-02-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

1

2

3

?

losing more than I get

2010-01-31T18:03:00.000-08:00

The indiscreet scribblers of our times, who among their laborious nothings, insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors, with a design, by that means, to illustrate their own writings, do quite contrary; for this infinite dissimilitude of ornaments renders the complexion of their own compositions so sallow and deformed, that they lose much more than they get.
-Michel de Montaigne

...

I done a lot of things,
I know is wrong.
-Joe Strummer

tspeneag

2010-01-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

under which his eyeballs quiver like little animals startled in the darkness of their burrow it's hot it smells of earth and hay and he feels safe there among the sheep puts an arm on the fleece of the one to his right hears the regular breathing of the one behind him the ewe is not asleep turns her mouth to his ear and gives out sounds that she's been struggling to articulate for some time he begins to understand them or at least imagines that he does and then he answers her tells of various wonders the animal is uneasy as if sensing some danger he agrees with her but explains that nothing can be done that there would be no point in trying to ward it off and the ewe sighs and tickles his ear with her mouth what would she like him to do after all he's not going to start running scared into the big wide world he just has to wait for what's written to arrive but she loses her temper and he can scarcely understand the guttural sounds that emerge from the animal's throat you don't have a mother she probably says that's right he answers but maybe he misunderstood it'll be like a party he explains to her patiently like a wedding you see yes a wedding the moon and the sun will appear together in the sky and thousands of torches will light up and at the ends of the earth herds of mists will float up the hills and sheep bells and trumpets will sound the fir trees will bend to the ground and all the forest will rustle it'll be a magnificent wedding the ewe listened with its mouth wide open maybe it had even fallen asleep
--from The Necessary Marriage by Dumitru Tsepeneag

tsepeneag

2010-01-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

he can't get to sleep keeps tossing from side to side the wall stinks of urine and he's afraid of the slugs that creep around the room all night and even climb onto the bed he's sure of this in the morning when he discovers their foaming silver streaks on the floor or one of them is actually holed up in a corner and then he fetches the saltcellar from the kitchen and draws out his revenge for as long as possible the slug seems to be hibernating and doesn't sense the danger only after he sprinkles the first grains of salt on it does the gastropod realize that in an external world already hostile because of the light spreading like a pool of water an even greater danger lies in wait for it and the teacher in his briefs smiles a smile of satisfaction and drops more of the deadly powder onto the slimy little body which tries in vain to move away its trail is no longer silvery a pink fluid oozes from its body as it climbs the damp wall in silent despair followed by the man's hand wielding the salt cellar
--from The Necessary Marriage by Dumitru Tsepeneag

annotated oh-nine

2010-01-24T08:09:00.000-08:00

I know 2010 started a long time ago but I am running at least three weeks behind so far this year.

The Necessary Marriage by Dumitru Tsepeneag. I've read this three times and it's more and more each time. The meaning of the word inscrutable always escapes me and this book is inscrutable. What this fugal text sounds/reads like in the original must be amazing with the vowel harmonics loaded into hungarian.

Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt. I don't know why more people aren't reading Laird Hunt. He's written four amazing novels and imho is one of the most talented u.s.an writers writing, I wonder if he just reads too continental for usan tastes.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez, which I've mentioned before for its singular voice and really provocative thoughts about what a language is.

The Country Where No One Dies by Ornela Vorpsi. The sexuality in this book is intense, not as in sex scenes, but in the way these abject communist characters regard and revile and commit the body, which is often their sole possession. One of my goals is to get my italian on and read this in the original.

what else ...

I read or reread several Bernhard books but loved Lime Works. It's not his best book but you can see Bernhard really starting to embrace the bizarre exaggeration and repetition. I read Extinction and while it seemed a little uncut I could spend a lot of time thinking about that novel thinking about its forerunners. Extinction has some brilliant moments where Bernhard brings a style that illustrates itself even as it comments on its own qualities and maybe becomes something like critifiction.

I also read for the first time early Ondaatje and Coming Through Slaughter is a masterpiece.

I really liked Hunger by Elise Blackwell, especially interesting in that the book is printed with an afterword that discusses its possible flaws. So it's sort of a really good failed novel (in that the main character is unrealized for all those readers who demand such a thing) with a discussion of its failure.

I saw Ionesco's Exit the King in NYC and then Bald Soprano in SFO, the former was one of the most amazing performances I've seen in my life and the second was intimate and hilarious.

I read Austerlitz and then reread Rings of Saturn and while I am not particularly cholic it took weeks for my spleen to get back to normal. If only Sebald could have ...

So many books piled up for me right now but this year I am planning on doing a lot of rereading. Right now I am with Rabelais who is probably the greatest reading pleasure I have ever had. I'm also going back to my other wicked pleasures Swift and the Bible. Plus lots and lots of spanish...

flak jackets on the merry go round

2010-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

long hiatus from posting here, and here's my unnecessary explanation: I was traveling a lot the last two months, plus I've been really busy pounding sand at the sand factory where I'm employed, and not to mention the holy days that passed my by ...

I have notes going back awhile that I'd like to post here, when I can find the time, the unfortunate recapitulations of my misreadings

...

sleeping fish 8 arrived and has an excerpt from my (unfinished) menchov novel ... SF8 has some some really unique pieces, as you would expect, and as for me, being part of a Gary Lutz and Derek White endeavor gets me a little more self-actualized tho there's still a long way to go of course

in SF8, there are a couple selections from Lito's Dictionary of Hues, a project I've been familiar with for a long time, and it's great to see a portion of it in print ... Lito's dictionary is one of those sui generis imaginings ...

....

for xmas I was traveling in texas for a week and then mexico for ten days with aforementioned Lito, a big trip for me, the longest trip I've taken in over five years, lots of memorable moments like the old one-toothed man from san geromino we met outside zacatecas who was carrying an old laundry bag filled with crucifixes made out of agave. Let me show you my daily tragedy, he said, opening the bag. I'll probably write up more of this trip, especially the sidesplitting antics of dr porto, and his polyglottal musings...

...

I've got carnitas simmering all day today

...

I was going to write something about how militarized some parts of mexico are but now's not the time, anyway what do I know but that's why I put up the flak jacket title which is a quote from joe strummer.

...

I've been reading Montaigne's essays and getting blown away. I know I read some of this years ago, but now I am appreciating the counter enlightenment trend in his writing, the slef-doubt, the provisionalisms, and even this admonition to all the haters out there:

Compassion and bewailing seem to imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment. I do not think that we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us so much malice as folly; we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are vile and mean. And therefore Diogenes, who passed away his time in rolling himself in his tub, and made nothing of the great Alexander esteeming us no better than flies, or bladders puffed up with wind, was a sharper and more penetrating, and, consequently in my opinion, a juster judge than Timon, surnamed the Man-hater; for what a man hates he lays to heart.

2009-11-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

I have a piece at Abjective right now, a sort of homage to my financial advisor, and I have another at Cafe Irreal, an excerpt from a longer project. The longer project concerns the adventures of an applied linguistics professor, Ivan Menchov, and if this project has a theme song it might be this phonological number:

Also, speaking of Cafe Irreal, if you have a chance to read G.S. Evans's translation of Michal Ajvaz, it's well worth your time especially if you are a fan of Calvino and Invisible Cities.

2009-11-08T19:05:00.000-08:00

Bernhard and the beauty of negating symmetry:

While I myself had hardly any rapport with my father, and my father, conversely, had really never sought any rapport with me, Roithamer had the best rapport with my father, and it was the same with the Roithamers, Roithamer himself had never entered into any rapport with his father and his father, conversely, had never sought any rapport with his son, yet I had an excellent rapport with Roithamer's father, as Roithamer had with my father, and also with my mother, though I found it very hard to communicate with my own mother, yet I always communicated very well with Roithamer's mother.

from Correction

tricked

2009-11-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

highlights from last night's trick or treating with the toddler posse:

--creepy old man neighbor passing out cans of caffeine free diet coke to all the little kids

--creepy old lady neighbor turning off all her lights and making an X with a hoe and rake before her door

but all was well again when:

--generous bachelor neighbor opened his door and gave us glasses of whiskey

interview with laird hunt

2009-11-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

I had the enlightening pleasure of meeting and interviewing Laird Hunt.

hap'py hallowe'en

2009-10-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

kamby bolongo mean river redux

2009-10-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

My review of Robert Lopez's Kamby Bolongo Mean River now at the Quarterly Conversation.

itchin, scratchin, laughin

2009-10-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

going back a few weeks, shorter pieces and parts that have itched a scratch:

this by Susan Steinberg (amazing writer)

pretty much the entire Summer 2009 issue of Puerto Del Sol

this by Edward Mullany

this by Keith Nathan Brown, who also has a curious essay in the aforementioned Puerto Del Sol.

and then this...

kamby bolongo mean river by robert lopez

2009-09-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Spent Sunday afternoon reading Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez which made it a memorable day. The book is still going in my head, it's really good, its own vision realized, nearly perfect. I read a few of the reviews about the book and the comparisons to Beckett and Markson are apt but when I think about Kamby Bolongo along with Part of the World (Lopez's first novel) it seems Lopez is working in his own place now (or he was already doing this but now it's evident). There is a continuum of imagination between these books that is devastating and true, a quietly comic voice grasping at a tragedy just out of reach. Whereas the alienated narrator of Part of the World lives and struggles in a social context, the narrator of Kamby Bolongo is confined to a cell struggling with the most basic acts of communication. Perhaps most telling to me was the KBMR narrator's chalk drawings upon the walls of his cell; here is the narrative within the narrative, an evolutionary step backwards, stick-figure expressions of an existence. Even as this super-masturbator narrator recounts his story in the text, he is also inscribing some sort of prehistoric account on the walls of his cell-cave, all his anxious interpretations of an incomprehensible world. This novel is so understated, and there is much so going on with Kamby Bolongo, much more than this quick take. I'll also add that above all the pleasure in Lopez's novels is the human humor; a feel for the tragicomic rendered subtlety, which is something I am not aware of many American writers doing very well today. I considered quoting a particularly funny passage (the mother says some hilarious shit), but you have to know the tone of the prose to get the full effect which is why you should read this book.

scorched -9-9-9

2009-09-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

I received my copy of Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas today and yes indeed the holy hellions have been working on this one. It's a jawdropper. I've read several of these pieces in their lit journal incarnations, so I had some idea of the outrageousness I'd be dealing with, but the book design was unexpectedly spectacular. Skulls off to Blake and Featherproof...wow.

dumitru tsepeneag

2009-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

I really don't have time right now to be writing book reports but I did want to post a quick note about Dumitru Tsepeneag. I read Vain Art of Fugue and loved it. VAF is a novel of mischance, a narrative that starts, falters, starts again, falters again, restarts, fades, starts again, slips away, tries once more, etc. Yes, it does get a little tiresome in places, perhaps just a a few too many mis-iterations of the conceit, but the fugal confusion is welcomed by me, and the writing is very good. I then read Tsepeneag's Pigeon Post and wasn't as thrilled. It's a notebook of a novel, and the overtly reflexive asides are really interesting but the mock storylines are dull. It reminded me of Malone Dies without the wicked Irish wit. Then I read Tespeneag's The Necessary Marriage and got blown away. This novel has all the conceptual fugal confusion of VAF but it also has fugal artistry at the sentence level and the structure and pacing of this narrative is amazing. Mysterious and lyrical and compelling and symphonic. Also a compelling story (a country schoolhouse, teachers, and sheep) with lots of sexual intrigue in a headlong hypotaxic style that drives toward conclusive indeterminacy. It doesn't get much better than that. Patrick Camiller translated Vain Art of Fugue and The Necessary Marriage from the Romanian and a note of thanks to him for these remarkable texts.

Every night when we say our prayers we remember to thank the Lord for Dalkey Archive.

café life

2009-08-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

My two and a half-year old is now able to ride his bike the mile or so to the coffee shop and we have a post-ride routine of coffee and croissants with croissants being one of his favorite foods. Last weekend we got to the coffee shop and son was looking for a chocolate croissant. They had plain croissants and lots of scones and muffins but the only thing with chocolate topping was a lone chocolate-raspberry scone. Son points at it and says there's a chocolate croissant. Ah, I say, that’s a scone, I say. That's what I want, he says, pointing at the scone, nodding his head at the chocolate scone. So the lady waiting before us who is privy to our discussion gets her turn and she asks the barista if there any more chocolate croissants, and of course there are not, so she quietly says I’ll have that scone while pointing to the you-know-what. It is hilarious to watch this lady try to quietly procure the scone and of course when son realizes what’s going on he indiscretely says I was going to get that scone. I'm sympathetic but of course I explain She was next in line so she got it and order a croissant which gets him happily diverted. Son takes plain croissant to table and sits right next to our lady of the scone who’s sitting with her husband and college-age daughter. I sit down with my coffee and son's milk and he looks over at the lady and then he looks at me and I say She got it and shrug my shoulders and he says She got it! and then starts laughing. I start laughing too, and the lady looks over and son says She got it! while pointing at the scone and laughing and then we were all laughing at the lady who got the scone.

...

then yesterday when I told him we were going to the coffee shop for a surprise midweek visit, son starts into this sweet song as we walked along the sidewalk:

don't worry
don't worry
don't worry
we're going to get a coffee
that's a good idea

new books

2009-08-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Since I rejoined the world of books a few years ago after a long absence, I'm starting to feel like I have a notion of what's going on, relatively speaking. At least I made it back before the end of the novel.

Here are some new books coming out later this year that I am looking forward to:

Dumitri Tsepenag, The Necessary Marriage
Laird Hunt, Ray of the Star
Gert Jonke, The System of Vienna
Robert Lopez, Kamby Bolongo Mean River
Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas

If you know of other presumably good books coming soon, send me a note, I'm not that adept staying in the current.

I'm also looking for recent comic novels, the sadly funny stuff. Robert Lopez's Part of the World had this tone. I know there are some haha funny books out there but that's not what I'm talking about. I thought about maybe getting high when I read but it's really hard to find weed in Boulder.

laird hunt's Indiana, Indiana

2009-07-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

A slim novel but it's broody and expansive and echoes back into epic pasts and so reads like a larger work. I read it once, then waited a couple a weeks and read it again. It's really, really good. I will return to again it for the beautiful writing and the sweet melancholy the novel evokes. Storywise, Indiana, Indiana is about the interrupted marriage of two mentally unstable adults, and their subsequent decades of devoted separation. The novel is composed in an fragmented, elegiac style similar to early Ondaatje (who is mentioned by the Hunt in the afterword).

For me this is a mythically allusive text, but the allusions are subtly hinted and typically linger just beyond the text. These mythic textures lend an epic quality to the struggle of the well-meaning manchild Noah and his schizophrenic wife Opal, who are trying to live as man and wife and possibly find a life in the Indiana countryside. With the patient guidance of Noah's father Virgil, Noah and Opal are chosen to be with one another because of their sympathetic disabilities, and as a chosen couple they possibly have the burden of founding something new, possibly a new Rome in the Indiana countryside. If that is their burden, it soon becomes impossible when Opal is institutionalized for her own protection.

There is a slow meditation on time throughout this book that builds through the clock imagery (strong echoes to Sound of Fury) and the spatial motion of the characters and anecdotes and dream sequences. Here's one of my favorites that I'd like to quote at length not just to illustrate the meditation on time but also to sample the drifting elegy that is at the heart of the style of the novel:

Here is another [dream]. Once upon a time there was a farmer who one night had this dream and the next morning fell into a folly. The dream was this: He was walking, blindfolded and waist-deep, in his own field, through a channel of smooth, rich, powder-soft dirt which gave less resistance against his legs than water. He walked and walked, following that channel and wondering where he could be going because the channel kept requiring him to curve and turn and sometimes even go back on himself. He walked, as I say, and walked and sometimes he was sure he was where he had already been and sometimes he was tortured by the thought that he wasn't and sometimes, not so very far off in the distance, he heard soft, muttering voices, that sounded to him, when he thought about it, much like his own. And then he woke. And that might have been the end of it, one strange dream among others, except that in his passage that morning from bed to bathroom he walked, as it occurred, between two mirrors, one hung opposite the other, one of them new and having been hung there--a hook being unavailable--out of convenience, the previous afternoon, so that in one mirror was the image of the other, and in the other, the image of the one, and in that one, also, its own image, as in the other, and so on, so that the farmer, who was still to some degree stepping through the soft cool dirt of his dream, and now found himself strung between two mirrors, and the effect they created of his repeated image being pulled away from him into the walls, felt himself caught, stopped, he said afterwards, somewhere between dismay and delight, so that when his wife stirred, almost an hour later, woken, she said afterwards, by the sound of the cows complaining, "that was how I found him, that was how I found him," she said.

There is the possibility that Noah perceives across time, as if he glimpses all time in a single space, which gives him his prophetic powers, and which suggests his semi-divine or immortal qualities. But his prophetic powers cannot help him get Opal back, no matter how hard he tries to barter his powers toward that singular aim, and for the most part he drifts aimlessly about the Indiana countryside for the remaining decades of his life. A remarkable five-page meditation on rain includes this repetitiously dazzling passage about Noah walking and remembering the land:

on across the cemetery where Virgil and Ruby were buried the stones all around theirs yawed and Noah yawed a little as he stood first ruined hands in pockets then ruined hands removed form pockets to cover his face or almost cover his face then his eyes open and his ruined hands at his sides and the rain raining cold and the freshly turned earth turned freshly for one then for the other then Opal only that was in another cemetery and when he looked up there was no rain it was early winter this winter and in place of the rain there were stars and wind then cold wind and snow

The story of Noah's hands and how they become ruined arrives in delicate pieces throughout the novel. The metaphor of damaged hands is powerful in this novel, a farmer's hands being his tactile conduit to the world, and the imagery resonates into the other characters and culminates in a moment of perfect sadness toward the end of the novel where Opal writes to Noah about a visitor:

He was so nice and brought me lilies and after a while put his hand on mine. Gently Like. I looked at his fingers and thought about it and said I was sorry and he said it was all right but I just went ahead and looked at his fingers and said I was sorry until I had said it a hundred times.

I'm not a big reader for character development per se, but the secondary characters in this novel really come alive quickly, in particular the old minister and the saw player (and there a couple other) are so immediate and right for the text that their two-page appearance lingers long after. The picaresque section with Shanks toward the end is also exceptional.

It's been awhile since I've read Sound and Fury, but the correspondence is certainly there, the imagery of time, Benji and Noah, and there is the title which is also a nod to Faulkner. It would be an interesting comparative read. Stylistically, the novel often reads like a subdued Faulkner or a Cormac McCarthy who had spent some time reading the new testament instead of just the old one, and I make those comparisons shaking my head a little cause this book is written in such a different style than Hunt's The Impossibly or The Exquisite, which bookend Indiana, Indiana. His stylistic range is impressive.

The references to prior wars and the names of the generations written in the family bible, the underworld and the presence of Virgil (who seems to work for both a Dante-esque mystical failure and an Aeneid-esque historical failure) all set an epic stage for the novel. The mythical and otherwordly textures of the novel seem to couch the idea of an epic manque: the founding of Indiana (or the American heartland) by a damaged people destined only for oblivion. The novel at one point floats the idea of an alternative Ark and a Noah who after the flood never makes it to land and so fades out of time along with the promise of creation renewed. Even without mythic echoes, the story of Noah and Opal alone makes a sad and wondrous novel that is brilliantly written.

bernhard's car

2009-07-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

As soon as Bernhard's voice at last begins to recede into the shallows of my mind (widespread shallows there), here he comes driving around town in a shitty little car. I thought he was dead or still in Switzerland or Luxembourg or wherever he used to live.

Tonight I was riding my bike home from work, I was riding quickly, going along as fast as I could because a storm was approaching. I approached the stoplight and heard the car behind rushing to get ahead of me, but I was riding quickly, going along as fast as I could, as I said, a storm was approaching. So I held my position and the car had to yield but still pulled very close to me so I turned to glare at the driver as I often do in situations such as these. And there he is, Thomas Bernhard with a creepy little grin on his face. He's laughing at me. And I am doing a half-assed track stand dressed in lycra with a ridiculous helmet on my head. He's right, and I know he's right. He has the upper hand, sitting in his shitty little car with a shitty smirk on his face, he knows I want to be the one driving the shitty little car, I want to be the one with a shitty smirk on my face staring contemptuously at the lycra-clad commuters. And then the light turns green, and his shitty little car sputters off. And all the way home it's raining Bernhard inside my mind. Bernhard!

from inside the text I touched the text

2009-07-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Notes on reading Blake Butler’s Ever.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the book is its attempt to carve an idiom out of the language for the narrator’s voice; an idiom composed of reworked syntax, dominant with consonant, onomatopoeic diction. In the narrator’s voice, this idiom comes alive in the way the words seem rightly awkward, stumbling against one another, a voice struggling with an unmastered language that as text becomes language masterfully expressed. The text is aware of itself as a text, and there are a couple awkward moments of overt reflexivity, but the reflexivity is primarily sublimated in the strange idiom given to the narrator, which is the real achievement of this novella.

Ever tells the story of an unnamed woman in a questionably empty house abiding the apocalyptic events that have come to her region. The house and the narrator have been (so far) spared from the phenomenal yawnings and foldings and crackings that are otherwise swallowing houses and daycare centers and disappearing people and turning the neighborhood into a sunless fungal wasteland. Her respite might have something to do with her mother’s interventions (and here we hear the punked rhythm of the voice):

Mother swore among her final claps of cleaner English how our home had been protected. That through her green knees and praising pages, the shrines she’d installed in every bedroom, the blood breakfast, the grief she’d spilled into my father, the black nettle switch my legs had took the brunt of…

But the narrator is alone now, and while inside the house, she navigates the ever-changing configuration of rooms peering out windows at the ongoing disaster, finding reminders of her past hanging on the walls or hidden in the moldy crust that’s overcome the house. She begins to listen to her own voice played back on a failing cassette player. But the house continues to deform and press upon her.

Ever recounts the narrator’s doomed days in her dilapidating house, but it is also the tale of a voice succumbing to the disaster of language, the tale of a voice overcome by the texts and voices that seek to infest it. The house itself is a text: “I pulled the knob with both arms buzzing…turning the page in a massive book.” And the narrator struggles against the impending disaster in various ways including prayer and repetition, which in the earlier pages of the text posits some measure of self (albeit failed and failing) against the text of the house:

I hadn’t meant to speak in repetition; and yet did so out of something in me wanting. By the fifth instance the words slurred slightly, skewed from my original intention – and yet I did not pause or cause correction. I spoke into the room and felt it fill.

But the house has an opposing intention. While taking a bath, the narrator floats a book which soon sponges and pulps with water till “…it swelled also in me, cloned in my colon, head, intestines – the text on the battered pages made so large now swimming in me…” (Also here in the bath scene is a good example of where the elaborate book design by Derek White of Calamari Press fuses into the text, becoming and not overtaking.)

And as the textual threat continues to overwhelm here, she tries to shout out her the infestation: "I’d gotten crud all on my skirt – black thick motor crud clogged in my fingers, hair. I felt it want to flex around me. It slithered up my thigh. Only by rolling in the light and holding my eyes shut and fists clasped and shouting out every word I thought I knew, I kept the crud and what it wanted out of my inside..."

She cannot escape the text, anymore than she can escape the rooms in which she is paradoxically trapped:

    I crossed the room halfway again.
       I crossed the room halfway again.
          I crossed the room halfway again.

And as she sits like Krapp listening to the sound of her own voice from an earlier time, we begin to hear with her the familiar sentences that let her know the house is a text from which it is impossible to escape.

Note on layout: The bracketed text suggests recursive structure and the text recurs in form and content, although any structure imposed by the brackets is hard to follow from page to page. I came to think of the brackets as an object-oriented argument gone completely awry, the deranged computations of a rogue engineer, which overall befits and compliments the narrative. However, looking at it closely from page to page the indentions do show a formal organization, but it’s really not possible to follow it while reading.

Looking forward now to Blake’s Scorch Atlas, coming out in a few months, I think, where I anticipate he’ll grab at some new idiomatic ground.

happy father's day

2009-06-21T18:58:00.001-07:00

Some fathers strut but most do not, except inside; some fathers pose on horseback, but most do not, except in the eighteenth century; some fathers fall off the horse they mount but most do not; some fathers, after falling off the horse, shoot the horse, but most do not; some fathers fear horses but most fear, instead, women; some fathers masturbate because they fear women; some fathers sleep with hired women because they fear women who are free; some fathers never sleep at all, but are endlessly awake, staring at their futures, which are behind them.

--Donald Barthelme, Manual for Sons

menchov

2009-05-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

banville in paris review

2009-05-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

John Banville in the latest Paris Review with an Art of Fiction interview. What I find interesting is the way Banville resists the nudge toward some sort of confession of sentiment concerning his characters. He says that after reading Beckett and Joyce, he came

"to discover that linguistic beauty could be pursued as an end in itself. Beauty is a word that we haven't mentioned yet, but it's crucial to me. It's what I'm after constantly. Beauty is an almost nonhuman pursuit. Readers ask me, Why are you always telling us about the weather and how things look? I say, Because how things look and the beauty of how things look is just as important to me as the people who are in the foreground. I don't see human beings as essential to the universe. Human beings in my work are figures in a landscape, and the landscape is just as important as the figures."

Out of this interview I get the idea that the confinement of language to the realm of human drama as something of a travesty. The world is so much greater than the world of the human, and the world of language is so much greater than a function of human drama. Think of paintings or installations where the human element is incidental or tangential to the whole, and the artist has spent as much and possibly more time creating the trees or the shadows or the clocks or the clouds or the other indeterminate forms.

In this quoted passage and elsewhere in the interview, he's answering charges that his novels are cold and distanced from human experience, and I don't necessarily think that's so, but his "high style" as I've seen it called, does clothe his narrators in thick wefts of wry and lively language, which really doesn't seem to be very popular these days. Personally, I love his highly stylized prose, but many readers/writers do not respond to the style, feeling that stylized prose is cold and distancing, or distracting, or dishonest. Many readers want to look straight through the language as if it were glass box inside which the drama is unfolding, and nothing wrong with that. I think good readers respond to any style when the text itself approaches its own excellence.

Also with Banville, the idea of language as play, comic and possibly absurd, that any account of the human drama no matter how tragic always has the ludic element because it's couched in language, which means that at some level it's a joke. Perhaps also somewhere here a remnant of resistance and a winking contempt for the occupier's language, something really seen in Synge and Flann O'Brien, and Joyce, and no doubt in other writers I don't know.

This quote also was reassuring to me:

"I am inclined to think that the value of a philosopher's thought is always reflected in his style--mind you, where does that leave Kant and Hegel?"

Belinda Mckeon did the interview and has written more about her conversations with other writers at her site. She is herself a playwright and MFA candidate at Columbia and curating festivals in Dublin (no rest for the wicked).

Another long interview with Banville well worth noting here is the one at Elegant Variation. (Part I is at the bottom of the post, Part II is in the middle, and Part II on top.) As revealed in the interview, Savlas knows Banville's books, and their conversation takes some interesting diversions to Banville's early work, including Nightspawn, which was huge for me when I read it years ago.

gourevitch in paris review

2009-05-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

Peculiar that Paris Review is publishing fiction by Gourevitch, the editor of the Paris Review. I've overheard/overread several grumbling conversations about this, and I can understand how the decision to devote a few precious pages of one's own journal to one's own writing could be controversial, especially for the Paris Review, with its ponderous past looming behind each issue, but I don't think they would actually do that. I think what happened in this issue must have been an honest mistake. I'll bet that the courier showed up for the final proofs, which Gourevitch was still working on, and as he frantically gathered up the pages on his desk, a few of his own accidentally slipped into the mix. Fortunately, the short piece was pretty good, so they've been able to pass it off as an intentional inclusion.

coop renner villanelle

2009-05-23T17:45:00.001-07:00

Cooper Renner has a villanelle in Keyhole 6, a true villanelle, it's wonderful. I've been a fan of Coop's poetry, in part because it's often formally styled, with lots of classical references, and for long time ago that's the sort of poetry I consumed, tho not so much anymore. Check out the opening of the villanelle, especially the first four lines:

It is the cause, it is the cause, he said.
I am not drunk, but sozzled on words.
They sizzle on the stones inside my head

And stink like men who wear their clothes to bed
(Or mark their underthings with crayon turds.)
It is the cause, it is the curse, he said.

an hendy hap

2009-05-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

Icham for wowyng al for-wake,
Wery so water in wore;
Lest eny reve me my make
Ichabbe y-yerned yore.
Betere is tholien whyle sore
Then mournen evermore.
Geynest under gore,
Herkne to my roun—
An hendy hap...

Anonymous, c. 1300

untitled post

2009-05-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Most of these notes are things that posted a few weeks ago, I just can't seem to handle the 21st century pace, but I try to catch up when I can.

Elizabeth Ellen's piece Bright with Yellow at elimae a little while back. I've read this several times and its unnerving power gets stronger and stronger.

Honeybee by Debbie Ann Ice at Wigleaf is like a Faulkner novel condensed to a single page. Very nice piece.

Kudos to Ravi for thinking of Recommended Reading. When I read interviews I pay close attention to what writers are reading or have read, and this cuts right to the chase.

Looking forward to this emerging collection of essays on contemporary american fiction. It's a project by Dan Green of the The Reading Experience.

the impossibly by laird hunt

2009-05-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Really liked this book and I have very little idea of what it was about, which is exactly why I liked it. A wonderful obfuscation, a complete wtf, it's sort of an inside-out noir but it has its own extra qualities to make it its own sort of novel.

Looking around all the internets and reading the comments of other readers, I see Barthelme and Robbe-Grillet comparisons, and I see the latter but not much of the former, I was thinking Third Policeman while reading the book, and also the early Beckett of Murphy and Pricks and Kicks. LH gets a really nice comic and wry narrative voice going, and I really enjoyed the style, which I thought was solidly pitched.

But something about The Impossibly appeals to my taste for willful confusion, the narrative walks a fine line teetering above incomprehensibility. It almost makes sense but it doesn't, which is precisely the mind of the book I like to crawl into.

I also liked LH's The Exquisite quite a bit when I read it a year or so ago. He lives near me, I think. I may have to see if he wants to come over and have some pickled herring and crackers.

beckett bridge

2009-05-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

The new Samuel Beckett bridge now downriver from the James Joyce bridge.

I don't remember the Liffey ever appearing in Beckett's work, although I think I remember the River Suck, which is, from what I have seen of it, a very nice river.

notes: dear everybody by michael kimball

2009-05-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'd read several excerpts of Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball and was familiar with the conceit and looked forward to reading the book. I thought it would be a sadly comic story with some formal inventiveness (it was) but in the first third of the novel I started thinking, hey, this book has weight, and I was caught a little offguard by the levity, which Kimball really pours into the text. I think this thought first arrived with one of those quick glimpses of the father that are so devastating. The novel really builds into something special. The emotional weight is not overt, you don't see it, you just slowly feel it adding up; the epistolary form is so effective for this cause it strips away all the usual authorial evidence, and in Kimball's careful hands the epistolary form really gets to a special place. The assemblage of textual evidence of Jonathan's dissolution feels like a personal discovery. You don't feel as if there is a story being told, it's as if you are uncovering the story and telling it to yourself. I think that's where Kimball really succeeds, he pieces this novel together in just the right way so you don't really know that he pieced together this novel in just the right way. Of course he wrote all these pieces, and he wrote them so transparently that the specter of the novelist doesn't shadow the page. There are so many wonderfully written pieces in this book that seem to have authentically come from the characters within.

And for all the potential failure of the conceit - a booklength suicide letter - it completely succeeds. There's no saccharine sentimentality, the sentiment that is there is serious and heartfelt. I get a strong sense of honesty in Kimball's writing, he is able to think in honest terms, write honest words. He can write without getting in the way, like many writers do, asserting themselves, ironizing themselves. You can see this also in the postcard project he is writing, where he speaks with all these people, writes their beautiful and sometimes sad lives in laconic, transparent prose.

Another thought about epistolary novels...I think readers respond to the letter moreso than other forms. I think perhaps letters seem more authentic even when they are known to be fiction. The authority of the letter goes deep in the collective memory, back to the bible, to those special pleadings of Paul and Timothy, John and Jude. Or letters from religious authority or letters from legal authority, read aloud in the public square. I suppose all texts are letters of one sort or the other, a message from one station to another, but I'm thinking more the history of formal letters and informal letters. Something about letters.

notes: the bathroom by alain toussaint

2009-05-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

This seemed to fall short of any mark it might have set for itself, not that it really set much of a mark. I can see how this might be popular with navel gazers, but I found the ideas weak and the humor dull. Maybe later Toussaint gets more interesting, and the fact that Dalkey brings out his books suggests to me that I am missing something.

a miraculous rabbit

2009-05-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

today riding my cross bike down a farm road on the way to work I was nearly taken out by humping rabbits. as I passed they both leaped into the air with tremendous intent. I don't know the specifics of their relationship or if they had any reason to feel ashamed or threatened by my uncovering of their sin; to me they simply appeared to be two little thumpers humping, and I would have forgone any judgment except that they cast the suspicion on themselves. Alright, to the miracle: the first rabbit jumped right in front of my handlebars, about three feet in the air, then out of sight, but the other rabbit jumped much higher, as high as my helmeted head, and then reversed direction in mid-air, and this is not possible, according to my education, but yet sure enough the rabbit was soaring straight for my neck -- some five feet in the air -- but then twisted and turned back.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the rabbit jump through the barb wire into the alfalfa, but then I had to hang on cause the road is deeply rutted and I caught a pedal and almost went down. Not to mention the twenty mph cross wind.

yes, I do like this commute route: suburbs, farmland, suburbs, shitty office park.

...

it's been a long time since I've thrown out some words here but mow I'm finally hitting an eddy I am thinking I will catch myself back up with some notes on lots of recent reading and the various entertainments I've been consuming.

absence attributed to long hours at the salt mine, travels to another region, and several weeks of extremely focused writing, something like 50k words worth.

...

I say something, he said, I thought, and I'm saying something completely different, thus I've spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn't help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought, for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought.

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

austerlitz

2009-02-22T14:03:00.000-08:00

Austerlitz as a momentary consciousness in a slowly dying universe, perhaps a remnant of some astral denigration, or a fleck of a doomed planet caught in the "gravitational force of oblivion". But there is consciousness, just enough to experience profound confusion and a powerful sense of loss, enough to continually catch glimpses of sympathetic coevals on their own way to destruction.

And Sebald the narrator one of these kindred souls who through uncanny circumstance is able to hold his own wreck close enough to the wreck of Austerlitz to make a documentary account of his dissolution and then break away at the end where we see Austerlitz continue his sad drift.

The gravity of oblivion, a prepossession with drift and loss, all thoughts shot through with an awareness of entropic drift, and this is our experience within time, but there is also the rebuke of time as a linear process, the idea that all time is always present and it too shuffles with matter through a decay. Or maybe time exists apart and it won't be destroyed, but will remain as an empty container, evacuated of all that had once filled it up.

Austerlitz talks about "a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with time". He is seeking equilibrium in spite of the process of history, which he comes to understand is impossible, but when at last he submits to and seeks out history, it breaks him down, but he continues anyway. What else can he do, either way, the abyss is waiting for him.

sebald

2009-02-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

I've got several thoughts I want to flush/flesh/flux out, but the most curious part of reading Sebald is that looking back I can't really remember the books. The details of any single book escape me (as in who did what or went where why and how). And this in spite of the fact that I read these books very carefully, and I have a stack of notecards where I took my peculiar and haphazard notes, and all four of these books I read closely and patiently, and with savor. But if I want to go back to these books, I have to leaf through my notes or the text, and then it all comes back. Other books I typically remember very specifically, but with Sebald it is as if there is a running amnesia (for me), as if these novel-length meditations on destruction and oblivion are simultaneously destroying and annihilating any impressions they make.

There is something vertiginous about Sebald's style, a dry and melancholic and non-laconic narrative style that should be offputting but it sucks me in and I cannot let go.

The couple people I recommended Sebald to didn't like him at all. I can understand that, and probably I didn’t explain that while these are novels, all those Aristotelian buttons aren’t getting pressed here.

elimae

2009-02-21T14:42:00.000-08:00

I've got a piece in elimaethat I wrote as a way to sort of exorcise or exercise the Sebald voice in my head, but what is most interesting to me about the February edition of elimae (the Claire Barwise piece is special, and there's great work by many others, too) is that K. M. Weaver has a fine piece titled "December 22, 2006" which is the day our son was born, which strikes me as a peculiarly sebaldian sort of coincidence.

austerlitz

2009-02-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could not longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day's work, then as soon as I had glanced at the page the next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it all seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step. Like a tightrope walker who had forgotten to put one foot in front of another, all I felt was the swaying of the peculiar structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths. Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases.

...

It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system. I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds the disintegration of personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.

--W. G. Sebald

2009-02-06T05:01:00.000-08:00

It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.
-- John Keats

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
-- John Lydon

geometric regional novel

2009-02-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

--We can walk across the village.
--Yes, let’s walk across the village square.
--Other then the well in the center, the village square is empty.

No, that’s not true, because there are benches set up along the edges, their back turned toward the walls.
We had hidden in the blacksmith’s shop, cheeks pressed up against the walls; no one saw us and you said
--let’s walk across the village square.
--No, let’s not walk across the village square,
I retorted, because all at once I saw people sitting on the benches as if suddenly put there, two on each bench.

--Gert Jonke, Geometric Regional Novel

I love this book, it’s just the right pitch of absurd, not over the top, and it has a constant quiet rancor against conventionality and form, kind of like grown-up punk. The blurb compares it to later Beckett, but late Beckett is so stripped down and somewhat humorless and this book is comic, it’s more like later Beckett with the add-in of early Beckett humor.

It’s fascinating to me how Jonke pulls off this multivocal narrative, a hybrid text of first and second-person narrators, government signs and forms, mumbling villagers, schoolteachers and priests that for me brings alive the idea of Bakhtin heteroglossia, and yet the destructured narrative lets the voices move around within the text without the firm control of a narrator or authorial hand. The narrative does have a center of sorts, a pair of unidentified voices who engage in an almost childlike dialog about walking across the village square, which for a number of reported reasons they can't do until the end of the book. One of these voices is a first person narrator who launches into ridiculous tableau descriptions of the village and its types: schoolteacher, mayor, priest, blacksmith. The narrator switches between obtuse technicality and absurd folklore, usually in an avuncular, pedantic, and chiding voice (even telling the reader at one point “but that’s an error on your part”). And yet the narrative is always slipping away from this first-person narrator while the other voices find their way into the text, some of them reinforcing the provincial conformity (warning signs, school lessons, priestly admonitions) and others completely subverting or negating the text. An example of how this narrative is working is the second chapter/section where this first-person narrator addresses the reader and explains how to come into the village and what should be done with an aggressive bull on the outskirts. After a hilarious account of how the bull is killed by a hiker then roasted for the villagers the text shifts into an italicized and unattributed second-person narrative that negates detail by detail everything the first-person narrator just said.

The novel plays on the idea of the provincial village as a place of natural order and harmony. A Brigadoon. But over the course of the novel you see how the village is completely at odds with nature and terrified of anything outside itself. The trees in the village maliciously assault the roofs of the houses and so the villagers have them cut down. They tear them up by the roots. A stranger passing through scares them all into their houses and a flood ensues. An enormous flocks of birds descends on the village to eat the mortar holding the brick of the houses together. The forests are closed due to threat of black men and laws are passed to cut down every tree and vanquish all hiding spaces. There is a strong undercurrent of scorn against safety and safe living and provincial smugness.

I’m pretty sure there is correspondence between this novel and a musical composition, that Jonke is scoring this novel as much as he is writing it. (I think that especially goes for Homage to Czerny.) No doubt it would be interesting to dig into this if you had your German and some musical composition background. But even without those you can really appreciate some of the formal accomplishment. Jonke does some interesting thing to give the narrative given spatial form, breaking lines and slowing down or emphasizing certain words by spacing out the letters. Like a balloon with writing on it, when it inflates the letters enlarge and the spaces between them grow, so it’s almost as if the page has topography and maybe Jonke is trying to work a spatial effect that is probably aural as well but not knowing German or having the German text that’s just guess, although he does some other textual work that pushes the narrative space as though something musical is happening. There are several phrases and cascading lines that repeat within the text like leitmotifs.

The translator Johannes W. Vazulik in the afterword mentions that Jonke writes “giant word clusters” but these don’t get translated as such and so we don’t really get the sense of this. There is a short Jonke essay on Alban Berg in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and in this translation (Vincent Kling) the giant word clusters describing the music are left intact so we get a sort of crazed ekphrasis:

…a magisterially unbridled scrupulousness of soundfeelingharmonicarchitectureemotionalstructureinventivenessladendramaticism, going above and beyond that certain stunningly fascinating hopelessly bliss-inducing unhappy despairyearningconcentratedchordupsurge as well as that certain rewarding anguished piercing but frighteningly euphoria-laden longingdespairingsinging…

One other thought I had is the novel is like a miniature puppet theater, with the village square the dramatic stage on which tableaus are arranged. The two narrators want to enter into the dramatic space of their novel but for whatever reason they cannot be seen inside their own work. Not sure if this makes sense, but it’s an interesting angle of reflexivity. There is also the curious last page of the novel with its suggestion that the whole village be wrapped up in paper and thrown over your shoulder or aside and make a turn into another region.

everything that rises

2009-02-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

this weekend spent some time chaining the furniture to the walls cause the Seanasaurus seems intent on building a nest in the ceiling.

memphis

2009-01-29T08:05:00.000-08:00

I went there on business.

more Girard

2009-01-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

In the concluding chapter of Violence and the Sacred, Girard writes:

I have a certain confidence in language -- contrary to some modern thinkers who, at the very moment when truth becomes accessible in language, declare that language is incapable of expressing truth. This absolute distrust of language, in a period of mythic dilapidation like our own, may well serve the same purpose as the excessive confidence that prevailed before the dilapidation, when no decisive truth was in sight.

While this is not something that resonates with me, what I find interesting is that Girard is writing this in 1972 and really swimming against the contemporary current. I do think that's pretty cool, although that's not saying I want to mimick him. For me, his thoughts on reciprocal violence, sacrifice, and phylogenesis are very significant. His critiques of Freud are convincing and welcome but I thought he maybe came across a little plodding and pleading. No doubt he thinks his idea is the revolution of the ages, as he goes to great pains (and some painful writing) to show. He takes a number of opportunities to put a bitch slap on the Freud, and another begrudging one to Bataille. I loved what he says about Frazer, not because I have anything against the author or The Golden Bough, but who wouldn't be happy with an encomium like this:

His writing amounts to a fanatical and superstitious dismissal of all the fanaticism and superstition he had spent the better part of his life studying.

That's how you do it. Reminds me of Molloy studying the bees:

Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.

more Jonke

2009-01-25T12:14:00.000-08:00

Because the memory of you can never stop, I heard Waldstein say, and my thoughts of you can never be taken from me, a life without you would gradually cause me to disappear into myself, till nothing is left. You have so often, I heard Johanna reply, seen only a reflection of yourself when you've looked at me, so you never noticed that I've often looked back at you out of myself through the mirror image that you impose on me, without your ever meeting my gaze.

I will always hope that you'll come back to me someday, I heard Waldstein say.

My life when I was around you, I heard Johanna reply, was only a thin protective skin you wore to keep out an environment you considered unbearable. You took advantage of my existence in order to experience your happiness through me, a happiness that I was afraid to shatter because you spread yourself out wider and wider inside me, where there was nothing else but you.

No, I heard Waldstein say, trying to move Johanna's metaphor onto more sympathetic territory, I had already lost myself in you, so completely fallen in love with you, that soon you will no longer be able to find anything more of me in you, nor anywhere else.

--from Homage to Czerny

What's interesting to me here is a pair of characters suddenly speaking so poetically and with aching despair about a relationship we know nothing about and nor will we learn anything later. They are voices in a tableau. It's an aspect of Robbe-Grillet that I like, the lover relationships that are completely desperate and unhinged and we have no idea why.

This post reminded me of Mark Tansey and his painting, Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight.

untitled

2009-01-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

a recent untitled work by one of my favorite artists...

2009-01-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

Then they all, we all, stood around that pathetic puddle of water in a peculiar unity, staring spellbound into the liquid, and in our paralysis were swiftly slowy captivated by an immeasurably clear intoxication of sound, an incalcuably violent kind of tenderness that consigned us and all our failures and mutual hatreds to oblivion. Slowly the music got quieter and quieter, disappearing, sinking deeper and deeper into the water, from whose surface the last notes blew hastily away, and soon all that could be perceived was a barely audible, not even humming, but a sort of long drawn-out murmuring, and finally complete quiet, and only in the mind did a melancholy echo persist, bent with the painful longing that had got stuck in the calm of that summer night.

Gert Jonke
Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique

2009-01-19T09:46:00.000-08:00

...and have a semantically concentrated day.

2009-01-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to its excess resources.
-Bataille

2009-01-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

Hobart sent out a "sneak peak" chapbook from Mary Miller and some related lagniappe. A cool shenanigan on their behalf. Mary Miller is someone whose work I've recently admired in a number of places. She's really onto something, a wry and laconic voice in short fictions with emotional pull. Narratives where sentences like this one move effortlessly along:

You again, the doorman says, not unfriendly, and I say, it's me, and then I walk straight back to the bathroom.

This one should be added to the DSM:

The city is full of them: sad white boys who imagine their sadness bankable. I encourage the ones I know to get on antidepressants, to take up running.

There's a brief mention in the chapbook about breasts getting bigger which seques me to a new eyeshot by Darby Larson, which I really, really like. The echoes of the eternal return and virgin birth in this one really notch this one up for me.

the decayed garment

2009-01-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Climbing the stairwell to work today, I realized the shirt I am wearing is the same one that I wore to an interview in 1999, when I was assigned my previous job. Viz, this shirt is 10 years old. It's a pedestrian office worker shirt, 60 cotton/40 polyester, and indicates to the world that I am probably a loser. In the fashion sense, it seems there's something very wrong with a decade garment, but I'm alright with that. At the same time, the fact that I have a shirt 10 years old means that I must be of a certain age where shit like this happens, and that's not something to feel so good about. Anyway, it's still a good fit, so the scales tip to the good.

screwed

2009-01-04T15:38:00.001-08:00

I have been running outdoors year-round for years, 25-30 miles a week but sometimes more sometimes less. I have sufficient coordination that while I have stumbled over rocks and tumbled in the snow, I’ve never shit the bed, so to speak. Saturday after Thanksgiving, I went out for a quick run before brunch with our visiting in-laws and not far from the house slipped on ice -- as invisible as any I have never seen. I came down hard on my elbow and bounced into a snow drift. I looked to the glowering sky to see which fist of which god had struck, but divinities conceal quickly, as you no doubt know.

I gently, inquisitively touched my elbow through my shirt and felt for that familiar funnybone prominence and it wasn’t there. After a few steps, I started to black out, but I took a knee and some deep breaths and then was alright to walk back to my house, pack some clothes and books (with one arm), and ask my wife if she could drive me to the hospital. Less than six hours later I was in surgery getting my olecranon screwed back together with seven screws and a titanium plate.

After sending x-ray images of the screws and plate in my arm to a friend, he congratulated me on turning cyborg. That seems like a stretch, cause bits of titanium lack necessary intelligence, or circuitry, but it got me wondering if there is another basic term for a person with metal implants, something like vir ex machina. Later, while morbidly researching structural implants, I was looking at these, and suddenly the nerves in my elbow began to sing in a frightening way, a yearning pulsating ache that triggered more alarm than pain, as if all those screws and that plate were crying out to their kin, and I have no idea what they were trying to communicate -- did they want to come out and go home, were they shouting encouragement as in just wait till you get your human, it’s really wonderful to be inside. Truthfully, I did hope they were expressing some sort of satisfaction, I want to be a good host. Even later, riding the bus, I wondered who else had intelligent metal inside their bodies and what sort of subdermal communications might ensue.

I started running again last week after the doc okayed it, which is helping to dispel this persistent lardish aura that’s been hovering around me. For a while I couldn’t write anything about this, it’s embarrassing, seems foolish, or maybe it’s victim stigma, a bad happenstance being something to conceal. Anyway, it’s almost history now.

books

2008-12-30T18:23:00.000-08:00

Notes on some of the books I’ve read this year. I hope next year to write notes about books I read, so this is a start.

Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard. I’m only a third of the way into this, but it’s probably going to be the most important book I read this year. Heard/read about Girard for a while but couldn’t really accept so much importance attached to mimesis (still don’t entirely) but I read (most of) Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, and it was compelling but not mindshucking. But with Violence and the Sacred he is really crushing my thoughts. Essentially: the prevention of reciprocal violence at the core of all social organization and practice, and his arguments are very lucid and his rereading of classic tragedy is key. I still think there is something primary missing about the fall from immanence/separation anxiety, but maybe he’ll come to that. (I'll also add that I am spurred by the thought that his thesis absolves dominant narratives and I know where he is going but I'm alright, don't worry, A--, or E-- or even H--.) As I read this book, many other texts really open up and clarify through this lens. McCarthy in particular (Blood Meridian and Crossing) and also Coetzee (Waiting for Barbarians and Michael K), but also Beckett’s paired dialogs, the stichomythia of Godot and Endgame, which for Girard might exemplify faltered and failed movements.

Correction, Thomas Bernhard. A relentless and contagious stampede into insanity. I can’t imagine how Bernhard could sit through the writing of this book without—well, I don’t want to get on that topic. I haven’t read Old Masters or Loser yet, but this is perhaps the most intense narrative I’ve ever read. When I was younger I was something of a germanophobe, but if I could go back I would study German if only so I could read Bernhard and Sebald (also Rilke and Kafka).

Rings of Saturn. W. G. Sebald. I also read Vertigo and Emigrants. Everyone says, Oh, Sebald is so sublime. And it’s true. It’s really difficult to put words to what Sebald does with a narrative. Merwin’s blurb is really good: With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W.G. Sebald’s writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that makes his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory.

Tortoise, Jim Lewelling. This book really did it for me, a deft execution of reflexive narrative with a compelling emotional misadventure at it core.

Fog and Car, Eugene Lim. One of the most formally interesting books I’ve read in a while. The way the narrative syncretizes with the characters and then veers away from the established arc while still sort of maintaining a novel cohesion is very cool.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino. I put this last because it’s embarrassing that I have only now come to read this book. Anyway, this little book is everything, it’s the world. It should be included as a book of the bible, maybe between Wisdom and Sirach.

Anxious Pleasures, Lance Olsen. I really liked where he took this narrative, the additive layers to the reference text (Metamorphosis) spun out into original threads. Of course, he’s getting a leg up from Kafka, but still. I also read Girl Imagined by Chance which I thought had some fine writing and could have been a really interesting narrative but it sort of rutted in what seemed like an uninteresting and unoriginal complaint about children.

Other books that stayed with me for whatever reason:

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

The Levitationist, Brandon Hobson

The Exquisite, Laird Hunt

Like Life, Lorrie Moore

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

There are others I am forgetting, and if and when I think of them I’ll update. For a smartly annotated list of lots of contemporary work, see Blake Butler's post here.

the woman from italy

2008-12-23T18:00:00.000-08:00

Reading about the beloved Cathars and coming acros this entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia (emphasis mine):

"The contact of Christianity with the Oriental mind and Oriental religions had produced several sects (Gnostics, Manichæans, Paulicians, Bogomilae) whose doctrines were akin to the tenets of the Albigenses. But the historical connection between the new heretics and their predecessors cannot be clearly traced. In France, where they were probably introduced by a woman from Italy, the Neo-Manichæan doctrines were secretly diffused for several years before they appeared, almost simultaneously, near Toulouse and at the Synod of Orléans (1022). "

No further explanation about this woman, apparently just some wandering donna italiana with a head full of heresy. Most of the content in the encyclopedia appears to be from 1907. A memorable example of a mendacious authority writing history.

it was all good till my face turned blue

2008-12-20T04:15:00.000-08:00

It does sometimes happen that hypocrites steal into heavenly communities, hypocrites trained in hiding their inner nature and arranging their outward appearance in the benevolent form they present in public, thereby misleading angels of light. However, they cannot stay round very long. They begin to feel inner discomfort and torment, their faces start to turn blue, and they almost faint.

Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell

hiatus over

2008-12-19T13:06:00.001-08:00

I found them. It is true. The love is fierce.

hiatus

2008-12-19T05:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a confidante told me: The people that love me love me fiercely.

I am going in search of these people.

The Fog Won't Lift

2008-12-17T18:36:00.000-08:00

Running on the end of a year in which I have read so much....an endless parade of pages filled with words and words and words and I know so much less than I did at the start of the year, as if the infill overkilled and through a hole everything sluiced out including all those things I thought I knew before the unknowing, so now there is just a level field, quasipopulous anonymous, and while this is a wonderful turn of events (a semi-desireable process that seems to be partially working) it's odd and I end not so much feeling stupid...just witless, forgetful, unknowledgeable...probably why I have been drawn back to Beckett, especially the earlier works..."we may reason on to our heart's content, the fog won't lift."

trains

2008-12-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, walking in the little downtown when a train came through and a man in a card shop hurried out and pumped his arm. The freight engineer responded in kind, blasting the horn. I waited and watched with the man, a birdlike shopkeeper, pointy nose, pitched forward head, long thin limbs, skinnier and taller than me. How he loved trains, he said. He rode them back in Europe, he said. Now, when his English mother-in-law opened this shop where he works, he was delighted to have the train so close. I talked about how I also loved the trains, about how wonderful it was traveling in Europe on trains. Also my son's fascination with them. Man's greatest invention, he said. After electricity, he said. But when you think of all that we've accomplished in the last two thousand years, he said. He was excited, viscerally, he loved progress, he liked to watch Modern Marvels. A shopkeeper in his wife's mother's shop who regarded his fellow species with a genuine amazement. I envied him for his genuine enthusiasm. He wasn't a machine head, or a sports fan, just a tweaked nerdy shopkeeper who seemed to have no grudges with the world. It's hard to understand. And there I am standing in the middle of a business day with a broken elbow looking for an address like some sort of economic reject, disabled and aloof, discussing all the wondrous deeds of my industrious species.

2008-12-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

...there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock, but I shall not come back to tell you about it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns.
-Italo Calvino

2008-12-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

A magic little piece by Molly Gaudry at Abjective. I really like the use of repetition, how it layers the emotive movement in the piece.

...also wanted to note this strangely cool piece in the October elimae by Martin Reed.

recent reading

2008-12-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to make time to post some of memorable recent reading and I'll start with Brandon Hobson's piece in the November elimae. The Little Door. At first reading, I wasn’t sure if this was partially historical or completely fictional but was drawn into the narrative with that sort of vertiginous feeling that I get with Borges and Sebald. A very well-crafted and cohesive piece.

I had Hobson's short novel The Levitationist on a list of book to check out, and after reading the elimae piece I ordered the book, and I read it yesterday and then again in part today, and it's a novel I might describe as a parade of interconnected tableaus, most of the scenes magical and fabulous, some of them disturbing and violent, but there is a dramatic pull throughout that makes this book compelling and much better than similar pieces of a sort of restrained surrealism I’ve recently read. A cool idea that lingers after the text is the idea of the risk of imaginative affinities.

2008-10-22T04:57:00.001-07:00